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II

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Your hotels”—and his thought was “Your hotels? Good God! They aren’t your hotels. You couldn’t have started them. You couldn’t run them. You don’t understand them. You’ve no idea what wonderful, romantic things they are. You know nothing about them, except a few arithmetical symbols which I choose to offer you and which are beyond your comprehension. You didn’t buy shares because you are interested in hotels; only because you believed that you could squeeze a bit of money out of them. Whereas ‘your’ hotels are my creation. I live for them. I have a passion for them. Without me they would be hotels, common hotels, not the hotels. If I left them, as I could, your precious dividends would diminish and might disappear. ‘Your’ hotels are mine, and if you denied this I could prove it to you quick enough. Ignoramuses! Is any one of you aware, for instance, that at this moment I am wondering how the devil I can entice my customers in my restaurant and my grill-room to consume more than a dozen and a half champagne per hundred covers? Does any one of you guess that in my opinion an average of one-sixth of a bottle of champagne per person dining or lunching is a shockingly low average—especially considering the qualities of my champagne? Not one of you! Barbarians! Benighted savages! Unworthy of respect! ‘Your’ hotels!”

In the midst of these lightning reflections he went on aloud to the audience:

“Your hotels, thanks entirely to the willing and generous cooperation which the Board has received from you in supporting us in a policy of large annual expenditure in order to keep your establishments abreast or in front of the times”—(“This sentence is getting out of hand,” he thought. “I’d better kill it.”)—“your hotels, I say, have passed through an extremely difficult year not without credit. I will first of all refer to the difficulties.”

And he did refer to the difficulties: the poorness of the previous London season, the obstinately high price of commodities; the dearth of good service; the austerity of customers; the rapacity of customers, who once asked only for food and drink at meals, then demanded music, then demanded dancing-floors, and now were demanding cabarets; the unwillingness of Americans to come to Europe in the anticipated numbers; the monstrous and crushing absurdity of the licensing laws; the specious attractions of continental resorts; the curse of the motor-car, which had pretty well strangled week-end business to death; and forty other difficulties . . . until you might have been excused for wondering why the Imperial Palace Hotel had not been forced into so-called ‘voluntary’ liquidation. The brighter side of the enterprise he glossed over. The arithmetical symbols he touched upon lightly, using the plea that they were self-explanatory to shareholders so intelligent as the shareholders of the Imperial Palace Hotel Company Limited.

“In conclusion,” said he, “I should like to refer to one point. Your hotels, and particularly the Imperial Palace, have been called dear—in their charges. I resent the word, and I think that you will resent it. They are expensive; but dear they are not. We try to give, and I claim that we do give, better value for money than any other hotel in this country. And the proof that the public shares this opinion lies in the undoubted fact that the public is patronising your hotels more and more. The public cannot be deceived for long. Many hotels have attempted to deceive it, and they have failed to do so. We—I mean everybody present when I say ‘we’—have not attempted to deceive it. I am sure that you, the shareholders, would never agree to a policy of pretending to the public that your hotels are what they are not. We maintain that they are the most luxurious and efficient in the world, and that their charges are as low as is consistent with the desire for perfection which animates us all. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for the patience with which you have listened to my halting remarks—our ironic Chairman ought not to have dubbed me ‘orator’—and I have great pleasure in seconding the motion.”

One or two shareholders clapped, but, finding themselves unsupported, ceased abruptly.