Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 43

I

The Imperial Palace had a number of private rooms in the neighbourhood of the restaurant, used chiefly for lunches, dinners and suppers, and each named after an English or British sovereign. At twenty minutes past two on the day of Evelyn’s interview with Miss Powler, six men sat smoking in the Queen Elizabeth room round a table at which they had lunched—after a Board meeting.

At one end of the table was the West End celebrity and wit, old Dennis Dover; at the other Evelyn. At the sides were two youngish, exceedingly well-groomed men, a much older man, and a middle-aged man. The last was Mr. Levinsohn, unmistakably a Jew, solicitor to the Imperial Palace Hotel Company Limited, and senior partner in the great ‘company’ firm of Levinsohn and Levinsohn. The other three were Messrs. Lingmell (old), and Dacker and Smiss (the youngish dandiacal pair). Except for Mr. Levinsohn, the company consisted of Directors of the Imperial Palace Hotel Company Limited. The celebrated Dennis Dover was chairman of the Board, Evelyn being vice-chairman and managing director of the Company. Youngish Dacker in addition to being on the Board worked daily in the Company’s offices as Evelyn’s representative and buffer. Youngish Smiss also worked daily in the Company’s offices, his special charges being the business side of the Wey Hotel and the Works Department in Craven Street off Northumberland Avenue. (“Outpost in the enemy country!” Mr. Dover had once called the Works Department.) Mr. Lingmell did little but attend Board meetings. He was a director because he had always been a director. Twenty-five years earlier he had retired from hard labour with a sufficient fortune gained in the wholesale brandy trade, and he still had the facial characteristics which one would conventionally expect to find in a man who had dealt on a vast scale in brandy because he liked it.

As for Dennis Dover, now past seventy, of huge frame, with a large pallid face, his renown in the West End was due partly to his historic connection with the management of grand opera, partly from his dry and not unkind wit, and partly from his peculiar voice: which was not a voice but only about one-tenth of a voice; it issued from a permanently damaged throat through his fine lips in a hoarse thin murmur. Strangers thought that he was suffering from a bad cold, and that his voice would become normal in a day or two. It had not been normal for several decades. Youngish Dacker, when he first joined the Palace Board and appeared somewhat nervously at his first Board meeting, had happened to have a very sore throat. “Morning, Dacker. Fine December fog to-day, eh?” Dover had greeted him in the hoarse thin murmur. And dandiacal Dacker had replied in a hoarse thin murmur unavoidably just like Dover’s: “Good morning, Mr. Dover. Yes, a fine December fog.” Mr. Dover, whose infirmity no one had ever dared to ridicule to his face, had leaned forward to Dacker and murmured with a grim smile: “Young man, men have been shot at dawn for less than that.”

Glancing at his watch and at Evelyn, Mr. Dover benevolently and encouragingly thus addressed Mr. Dacker and Mr. Smiss:

“Now, you lily-livered, have some brandy, for your hour is at hand.”

At half-past two, in the larger banqueting-room, the Board had to confront its judges, the shareholders, at the annual general meeting, which meeting was to be followed on this occasion by a special general meeting. The youngish men smiled as easily as they could; for indeed they had betrayed apprehensions concerning the special meeting, at which was to be proposed a resolution limiting the voting powers of shareholders. Everybody at the table felt apprehensive about the fate of that resolution, but Mr. Dacker and Mr. Smiss alone had failed to conceal anxiety. The fate of the resolution might well involve the fate of the Imperial Palace Hotel itself.

“Obey your venerable chairman, gentlemen,” murmured Dennis Dover, and raised his mighty bulk and filled the glasses of Messrs. Dacker and Smiss with Waterloo brandy (which Mr. Lingmell said was so old as to be indistinguishable from water). “Your alarm does you credit, seeing that you won’t have to speechify at the meeting and that you hold no shares worth mentioning, and that if the Palace goes to pot the ancient prestige of the Palace will set forty hotels fighting for your services. . . . To the Resolution! To the Resolution!”

The toast was drunk, but by Evelyn and Mr. Levinsohn in Malvern water; and the Chairman descended cautiously back into his chair.

Mr. Dover had a good right to the position he held in the Company. Not merely was he the largest shareholder. His father, aged fifty odd when Dennis was begotten in the hotel itself, had built the original Palace. He had first called it the Royal Palace, because of its proximity to Buckingham Palace; but in 1876, when Disraeli made Queen Victoria Empress of India, Mr. Dover had loyally changed ‘Royal’ to ‘Imperial.’ The name Palace had been copied all over the world. Dennis always maintained that the French use of the word palace as a generic term for large luxury hotels had derived from the reputation of the original Palace for luxury, and was not due to the prevalence of imitative Palace Hotels throughout Europe.

In the late fifties the Palace luxury had made it the wonder of the earth. It was then reputed to have a bathroom on every floor; and some people stayed in it in order to see what a bathroom was really like. Then a Crown Prince stayed in it, then a monarch, and Queen Victoria would recommend it to some of her foreign distant cousins. Soon the Palace had established two royal suites. Soon, despite the fact that every hotel-expert in London had condemned it as being too impossibly big, it became too small, and the elder Dover had enlarged it. More than once it had been enlarged, altered, re-planned, reconstructed; but the Queen Anne character of its charming façade had always been preserved. The last and greatest and most ruthless of the enlargers was Evelyn. When Evelyn had finished—but he had never finished—all that had survived of the original Palace was the Queen Anne character of the façade; not the façade, only the character.