Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 38

III

The thoroughfare which separated the Imperial Palace from St. James’s Park was ill-lit. Evelyn had tried to persuade Authority to improve the lighting; in vain. But his efforts to establish a cab-rank opposite the hotel had succeeded, after prodigious delays. Two taxis were now on the rank; and there were two motor-cars in the courtyard. The chauffeurs dozed; the taxi-drivers talked and smoked pipes. He crossed the road and leaned his back against the railings of the Park, and looked up at the flood-lit white tower over the centre of the Palace façade.

By that device of the gleaming tower at any rate he had out-flanked the defensive reaction of Authority. The tower was a landmark even from Piccadilly, across two parks; and simple provincials were constantly asking, “What’s that thing?” and knowing Londoners replying: “That? That’s the Imperial Palace Hotel.” But nowhere on any façade of the hotel did the words ‘Imperial Palace’ appear. Evelyn would never permit them to appear. He believed deeply in advertising, but not in direct advertising. Direct advertising was not suited to the unique prestige of the Imperial Palace.

In the façade a few windows burned here and there, somehow mournfully. He knew the exact number of guests staying in the hotel that night; but their secrets, misfortunes, anxieties, hopes, despairs, tragedies, he did not know. And he would have liked to know every one of them, to drench himself in the invisible fluid of mortal things. He was depressed. He wanted sympathy, and to be sympathetic, to merge into humanity. But he was alone. He had no close friend, no lovely mistress—save the Imperial Palace. The Palace was his life. And what was the Palace, the majestic and brilliant offspring of his creative imagination and of his organising brain? It had been everything. Now, for the moment, it was naught.

“What a damned fool I am!” he reflected. “Why the devil am I so down? I don’t care twopence about the confounded girl. Am I, the hotel-world-famous Evelyn Orcham, to go running around like a boy after a girl? It’s undignified. And I don’t mind who she is, or what she is! Anyway I’ve taught her a lesson!”

He withdrew his body from the support of the Park railings, and walked briskly westwards. Restlessness of the trees in the chill wind! Large rectilinear dim shapes of the enormous Barracks (whose piercing early bugles made the sole flaw in the marvellous tranquillity of the hotel). Then the looming front of Buckingham Palace, the other Palace! And even there, high up, a solitary window burned. Why? What secret did that illuminated square conceal? He felt a sudden constriction of the throat, and after a long pause turned back. Three motor-cars in quick succession hummed and drummed eastwards. Eternal restlessness of trees beyond the railings! He thought he could detect the watery odour of the lake in the Park. The sea-gulls had revisited it in scores that day. He had seen them circling in flocks over the lake. Very romantic. What a situation for a hotel in the midst of a vast city! He walked as far as Whitehall, too melancholy and dissatisfied even to think connectedly. And at last he re-entered the Palace. One of the taxis had gone, and both the motor-cars. Everything as usual in the great hall. Reyer behind his counter.

“Much obliged,” he said, smiling with factitious cheerfulness, as he gave up the overcoat and the large soft hat.

“Not at all, sir,” answered Reyer, pleased.

“That the night-book?”

Reyer handed the book to him. He read, among other entries: “Three ladies and two gentlemen left No. 365 at 3.5. One of them was Lady Devizes.”

Evelyn thought: “She’s by herself now. Perhaps her maid is undressing her. She must be terribly exhausted, poor little thing.” She was pathetic to him.

“My floor, please,” he said to the liftman, and went to bed.

Next morning among the early departures he saw the name of Miss Savott.