Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 36

I

Evelyn woke up in a state of some bewilderment. His feet felt cramped. He looked at them and saw that he was still wearing his evening shoes; also his dress-suit; also that many lights were burning; and finally, that instead of being in bed, as he had assumed, he lay on the sofa in the sitting-room of his private suite. Then, gradually passing into full wakefulness, he remembered that he had sunk on the sofa, not to sleep, but to reflect, to clear his thoughts, before getting to bed. He glanced at the clock, which announced twenty minutes to two, and at first he was sceptical as to its reliability; but his watch confirmed the clock. Characteristic of the man of order that he at once wound up his watch!

He rose uncertainly to his cramped feet, and lit a cigarette. He had slept without a dream for nearly two hours and a half; surprising consequence of extreme fatigue! His body appeared to him to be as refreshed and restored as though he had slept the usual six hours. He must now really get to bed.

But his brain was furiously active, engaged in an unending round of thought:

“That damned party is still going on. There were pros and cons, but I ought to have accepted the invitation. I was a fool to refuse. It was nothing after all. Only a little improvised party. Surely I was entitled to refuse. Surely she might have taken No for an answer. Her outburst was inexcusable, and it showed what she’s capable of. The damned party is still going on. There were pros and cons, but I ought——”

And so on without end. Revolutions of an enormous fly-wheel in his brain, dangerously too big for his brain, leaving no space therein for such matters large and small as the substitution of Miss Powler for Miss Brury and vice versa, the changing about of the two cabaret turns, the vague Machiavellian menace of Sir Henry Savott, the everlasting problem of the downward curve in expenditure per head of customers in the restaurant, etc.

He glanced around the sitting-room, where everything exactly fitted his personality and everything was in its place; home of tranquillising peace; but now disturbed by a mysterious influence. No peace in the room now. He had held the room to be inviolable; but it had been violated—and by no physical presence. And Evelyn was no longer, as formerly, in accord with the infinite scheme of the universe, with the supreme creative spirit. He had never consciously felt that he had been in such accord. Only now that he was in disaccord did he realise that till then he had been in accord. Disconcerting perceptions! Curse and curse and curse the girl! She carried hell and heaven about with her, portable! She was just not good enough. She continually flouted heaven’s first law. . . . No hope of sleep. To get to bed would be absurd and futile. He would go downstairs. To do so might stop the fly-wheel.

He opened the door, extinguished all the lights, shut the door, opened it to be sure that he had extinguished all the lights. The dark room seemed to be full of minatory intimidations: a microcosm of invisible forces hitherto unsuspected. He shut the door on them; but soon he would have to open it again.

Descending a short flight of stairs, he walked along the main corridor of the floor below his own, under the regularly recurring lamps in the ceiling, past the numbered doors, each with a bunch of electric signal bulbs over its lintel. Inhabited rooms, many of them—not all, for it was the slack season—transient homes, nests, retreats of solitaries or of couples. Shut away in darkness, or in darkness mitigated by a bed-lamp. Some sleeping: some lying awake. Pathos behind the closed, blind doors. Not only on that floor, but on all the floors. Floor below floor. He always felt it on his nocturnal perambulations of the Imperial Palace. And he could never decide whether the solitaries or the couples, the sleepers or the sleepless, were the more pathetic. The unconsciousness of undefended sleep was pathetic. The involuntary vigil was pathetic. Salt of the earth, these wealthy residents in the largest and most luxurious luxury hotel on earth, deferentially served by bowing waiters, valets, maids! They pressed magic buttons, and their caprices were instantly gratified. But to Evelyn they were as touching as the piteous figures crouching and shivering in the lamp-lit night on the benches of the Thames Embankment.

He rang for the lift. Up it promptly came, and a pale, sprightly, young uniformed human being in it, who not long since had been a page-boy and was now promoted to the distinguished status of liftman. Night was common day to him; for, as hair grows night and day, so did the service of the Palace function night and day, heedless of sun and moon.

“Evening, Ted.”

“Good evening, sir.”

“Let me see, how many years have you been with us?”

“Six, sir.”

“Excellent! Excellent! . . . Ground-floor, please.” Evelyn noticed the No. 3 on the lift-well as the cage fell from floor to floor. The third-floor was the floor of the party. Renewed disturbance in his brain! “When do you come on day-work?”

“I hope in five weeks, sir.”

“Ah!”

The mirrored lift stopped. The grille slid backwards. Evelyn stepped out.

“Thank you, sir,” said Ted, sat down, and resumed the perusal of thrilling fiction.

The great hall was empty of guests; the scintillating foyer too. The entrance to the ladies’ cloak-room glowed with brilliant light. A footman stood at the entrance to the darker gentlemen’s cloak-room, and within, at the counter, the head-attendant there was counting out money from a box. And in the still glittering restaurant only one table was effectively occupied—by two men and a woman. All the other tables were oblong or round expanses of bare white cloth. Eight or nine waiters shifted restlessly to and fro. A gigolo and his female colleague—the last remaining on duty of a corps of six—sat at a tiny table apart.

The orchestra, which Evelyn could not see from his peeping-place, began to play a waltz, which reverberated somehow mournfully in the vast, nearly deserted interior. The professional dancers rose, attendant, then advanced. The gigolo took the woman from the table of three, his companion took one of the men. The second man stayed at the table and passed the time in paying the bill. The waiter bowed, ceremoniously grateful, as he received back the plate with a note and a pile of silver on it. To Evelyn the waltz seemed interminable, and the two lone couples on the floor the very images of pleasure struggling against fatigue and the burden of the night. The female gigolo was young and elegant; she must get some handsome tips, Evelyn thought. “Tips! My God!” he murmured to himself, recalling that in one week in June the waiters’ tips in the restaurant had totalled more than eight hundred pounds. The waiters kept their own accounts, but they were submitted to Cousin, who submitted them now and then to Evelyn.

The orchestra, after threatening never to cease, most startlingly ceased. But at once it burst vivaciously and majestically into “God Save the King.” The three males stood to attention; the women stood still. Then the three guests sat down again at their table, and Evelyn could hear the murmurs of their talk; he could hear also the movements of the departing band. The professional dancers had vanished. The waiters waited. At length the trio of guests left the sick scene of revelry, and came up the steps into the foyer. Evelyn turned his back on them. In a moment the table was emptied. In three more moments every cloth had been snatched off the rows of tables, and every table changed from white to dark green. The two male guests continued to talk in the gentlemen’s cloak-room. The woman had disappeared into the ladies’ cloak-room apparently for ever. But she came forth. The trio renewed conversation. Never would they go. They went, slowly, reluctantly, up the stairs into the great hall. The restaurant and the foyer were dark now, save for one light in each. The head-attendant of the vestiaire was manipulating switches. The entrance to the ladies’ cloak-room was black.

“Ludovico!” Evelyn called to the last black-coated man haunting the gloom of the restaurant. Ludovico span round, espied, and came hastening.

“Sir?”

“Did Volivia perform first or second in the second cabaret?”

“First, sir. The other turn—clown, I forget his name, sir—refused to appear first.”

“Why?”

Ludovico raised his shoulders.

“All right, thanks. Good night.”

And Ludovico ran down the steps again, and he too vanished. The gentlemen’s cloak-room was black and empty. The great hall was silent, the foyer deserted except by Evelyn. The public night-life of the Imperial Palace had finished. But not the private night-life.

Refusing the lift, with a wave of the hand to the liftman, Evelyn began to climb the stairs; but he was arrested by the sight of the gigolo (coat-collar turned up, and a grey muffler wrapped thickly round his neck) and the girl-dancer (with a thin cloak hanging loosely over her frail evening frock). The pair were walking about two yards apart, the woman a little in front of the man: bored, fatigued, weary. For the purpose of symbolising the graceful joy of life he had held her in his arm a dozen times during the long spell of work; but now each displayed candidly a complete indifference to the other; each had had a surfeit of the other. They passed through the melancholy gloom of the foyer, up into the great hall, and at the revolving doors thereof Long Sam negligently saluted them—too negligently, thought captious Evelyn. He followed, aimless, but feeling a sickly interest in them.

Approaching the doors, he acknowledged Long Sam’s impressive salute with rather more than the negligence which Long Sam had dispensed to the working dancers—just to punish him! Through the glass Evelyn saw the pair standing under the gigantic marquise, reputed to weigh several tons. They exchanged infrequent monosyllables. The gigolo shivered; not the girl. Then a taxi drove up, with a porter perched on the driver’s step. The gigolo opened the taxi and the girl got in. Bang! The taxi curved away and was lost in the darkness. The gigolo departed on foot. His feet traced a path as devious as a field-path. Fatigue? And he also receded into invisibility. Where did he live? Why did he not drive home, like the girl? What was his private life? And what the girl’s? After all, they were not dancing marionettes; they were human beings, with ties of sentiment or duty. What was the old age of a gigolo? There was something desolate in that slow, listless, meandering departure.