Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 45

I

The six men sat in a row behind a long green-topped table at one side of the square-shaped Royal banqueting-room; and ageing Mr. John Crump, secretary of the Imperial Palace Hotel Company and a member of Evelyn’s directorial staff, sat at one end of the table, with minute-books, balance-sheets, the register of shareholders, and—most important of all—a pile of proxies, under his hand. The Chairman and Evelyn were in the middle of the six, who had no documents beyond a sheet or two of rough notes or blank paper. Evelyn discouraged the exhibition of documents in business, and father Dennis, with whom his understanding was always sympathetically perfect, regarded documents as a symptom of a fussy mind.

In front were the shareholders, two or three hundred of them, including a few women, ranged in rows on the brilliant parti-coloured and gilded banqueting chairs, and each holding a copy of the white annual report and accounts.

Those chairs, with the rich pendant chandeliers, were the sole reminder of the original purpose of the spacious chamber. At night, and sometimes at the lunch-hour, tables were joined together in lengths, in the shape of an E, or a rake, or a Greek letter, or a horse-shoe; they were white, then, covered with china, plate, cutlery and glass, flower-decked, gleaming, brilliantly convivial; and the people sitting round them, ceremonially clad, grew more and more jolly under the influence of the expensive succulence provided by Maître Planquet; until by the time the speeches had begun and the cohort of waiters, marshalled by Amadeo Ruffo, the Banqueting-manager, had vanished away through the service-doors, every banqueter had become the most lovable and righteous person of his or her sex, in every breast all food and drink had been transformed by a magical change into the milk of human kindness, and the world had developed into the best of all possible worlds: with the final result that the attendants in the cloak-room received tips far exceeding the ordinary.

Now, the scene was dramatically different. The rows of shareholders, some stylish some dowdy, some harsh some gentle, some sagacious some silly, some experienced some ingenuous, some greedy some easily satisfied, some avaricious some generous, were all absorbed in the great affair of getting money—the money which paid for banquets. A nondescript, unpicturesque, and unfestive lot, thought Evelyn, who knew a number of them by sight and a few by name. Some faces were obviously new, and Evelyn looked at these with suspicion.

Without rising, father Dennis said in his hardly audible hoarse murmur:

“The secretary will kindly read the notice convening the meeting.”

And Mr. John Crump, nervous as always on august occasions, got up and read the notice in a voice rendered loud and defiant by his nervousness.

Then three unpunctual shareholders crept in on guilty tip-toes, and sat down, and chairs scraped on the parquet.

Then father Dennis cumbrously rose.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in his murmurous squeak.

“We’re off!” thought Evelyn, humorously agog.

Yes, they were off, and there would be no surcease until the Resolution was carried or lost by the votes at the special meeting.

Father Dennis never wasted words on shareholders, partly on account of his throat, and partly because he delighted to starve them of words—at the end of a good year—and also to shock them by his casual brevity.

He said, while some shareholders put hands to ears:

“Figures speak louder than loud-speakers. I am sure that you have all studied our figures with that impartial conscientiousness which distinguishes all good shareholders. I need not therefore weary you with information of which you are already in full possession. I will merely remark, as much for my own satisfaction as for yours, that last year was a record year in the Company’s history, that our net trading profit after deducting fixed dividend on preference shares, debenture interest and sinking-fund charges, was equivalent to twenty and a half per cent. on our ordinary capital, and that we propose to declare a final dividend making fourteen per cent. per annum for the year, instead of last year’s eleven per cent., and incidentally I will point out that we are allotting £75,000 to our reserve fund, instead of last year’s £60,000. I move the adoption of the accounts and the payment of the dividend as recommended, and I call upon Mr. Evelyn Orcham, our managing director and orator, who will be less summary than myself, to second the motion.” With that he subsided into his chair, and glanced sardonically around as if to say: “You can put that in your pipes and smoke it; and go to hell.”

No applause greeted the statement of good tidings. The shareholders had been in possession of the tidings for days. At a banquet they would have loudly applauded a silly and insincere speech which was not worth twopence to their pockets. But to-day their stomachs had not been warmed. And they were shareholders—who take as a right all they can get and whose highest praise is forbearance from criticism.

Evelyn rose. He was not an orator, and speechifying made him nervous. But he always knew just what he wanted to say, and he would say it plainly, if too slowly. Now and then he would employ an unusual adjective which tickled him. The sheet of notes which he held in his hand was merely something to hold. He was not positively inimical to shareholders, for they were necessary to his life-work. But he disdained them as a greedy, grasping and soulless crew whose heads were swollen by an utterly false notion of their own moral importance. Nevertheless he used a tone different from the Chairman’s. The Chairman was a London figure, and could carry off any tone; and there was a pacifying glint in the Chairman’s old eye. Evelyn loved the Chairman’s brief pronouncements, which father Dennis called his ’turn.’ But part of Evelyn’s job as a hotel-manager was to flatter shareholders. Bad times might come again, and then shareholders who had been flattered would be easier to handle than shareholders who had been treated year after year with cynical curtness. Therefore Evelyn flattered, but with a hidden private cynicism which even exceeded the Chairman’s.