Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 8

I

For the first ten minutes of waiting Evelyn forgave the girl. During the second ten minutes he grew resentful. It was just like these millionaires to assume that nothing really mattered except their own convenience. Did she suppose that he had risen at three-thirty for the delight of frittering away twelve, sixteen, nineteen irrecoverable minutes of eternity while she lolled around in her precious suite? Monstrous! Worse, he was becoming a marked man to Reyer, Long Sam, and the janissaries. They did not yet know that he was waiting for a girl; but they would know the moment she appeared and went off with him. Worse still, she was destroying the character with which he had privately endowed her. She arrived, smiling. And in an instant he had forgotten the twenty minutes, as one instantly forgets twenty days of bad weather when a fine day dawns.

“Sorry to keep you. Complications,” said she, with composure.

He wondered whether the complications had been caused by a forbidding father.

She had changed her hat, and put on a thin, dark, inconspicuous cloak.

The car was Leviathan. A landaulette body, closed. She opened one of its front-doors, and picked up a pair of loose gloves from the driver’s seat. An attendant janissary found himself forestalled, and had to stand unhelpful.

“Open?” she asked, in a tone expecting an affirmative answer.

“Rather.”

“No. I’ll do it. This is a one-girl hood. You might just wind down the window on your side.”

In ten seconds the car was open.

“But I’m going to sit by you,” said Evelyn.

She was lowering the glass partition behind the driver’s seat.

“Of course,” said she. “But I like it all open so that the wind can blow through.”

By the manner in which she manœuvred Leviathan out of the courtyard, which an early cleaner had encumbered with a long gushing hose-pipe, Evelyn knew at once that she was an expert of experts. In a moment they were in Birdcage Walk. In another moment they were out of Birdcage Walk, and slipping into Whitehall. In yet another moment they were in the Strand. It was still night. The sun had not given the faintest announcement to the revolving earth’s sombre eastern sky that he was mounting towards the horizon. There was an appreciable amount of traffic. She never hesitated, not for the fraction of a second. Her judgment was instantaneous and infallible. Her accelerations and decelerations, her brakings, could hardly be perceived. Formidable Leviathan was silent. Not a murmur beneath the bonnet. But what speed—in traffic! Evelyn saw the finger of the speedometer rise to forty—forty-two.

“Do you know the way?” he asked.

“I do,” she replied.

Strange that she should know the way to Smithfield.

Suddenly she said:

“What brought you into the hotel business?”

He replied as suddenly:

“The same thing that brought you to motoring. Instinct. I was always fond of handling people, and organising.”

“Always? Do you mean even when you were a boy?”

“Yes, when I was a boy. You know, clubs and things, and field-excursions. I managed the refreshment department at Earl’s Court one year. Then through some wine-merchant I got the management of the Wey Hotel at Weybridge. I rebuilt that. Then I had to add two wings to it.”

“But this present show of yours?”

“Oh! Well. They wanted a new manager here, and they sent for me. But I wouldn’t leave the Wey. So to get me they bought the Wey.”

“And what happened to the Wey?”

“Nothing. I’m still running it. Going down there this morning. Can’t go every day. When you’ve got the largest luxury hotel in the world on your hands——”

“The largest?”

“The largest.”

“Have you been to America? I thought in America——”

“Yes. All over America. I expected to learn a bit in America, but I didn’t. You mean those ‘2,000 bedrooms—2,000 bathrooms’ affairs. Ever stayed in one? No, of course you haven’t. Not your sort. Too wholesale and rough-and-ready. Not what we call luxury hotels. Rather behind the times. They haven’t got past ‘period’-furnishing. Tudor style. Jacobean style. Louis Quinze room. And so on. And as for bathrooms—well, they have to come to my ‘show’ to see bathrooms.”

He spoke as it were ruthlessly, but very simply and quietly. When she spoke she did not turn her head. She seemed to be speaking in a trance. He could examine her profile at his ease. Yes, she was beautiful.