Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace

One of them, the fattest, having sipped, and gazed at his glass, said in a meditative hoarse voice:

“When I’ve had a drop over night, do you know what I do? I get up early and I go down to my cellar in my nighty, and I draw myself a port-glass of gin, and I drink that and it puts me right. Yes. That puts me right.”

“Well, give me Eno every time,” said another gravely.

At length in a murmur Evelyn answered Gracie’s suggestion:

“No.”

“No?”

“No. That wouldn’t suit my book at all. Your father would misunderstand it.”

A pause.

“He’d think I’d mean what I shouldn’t mean,” Evelyn added.

“I see,” said Gracie. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She did see. “Well, if daddy asks you to dinner to-night, will you come?” Gracie demanded.

Why shouldn’t he? If anybody’s pitch was likely to be queered by the invitation and the acceptance thereof, it would be Sir Henry’s, nor Evelyn’s. But what a girl! What an incomprehensible feminine, unfeminine creature!

“Yes,” said Evelyn. “With pleasure. But in the restaurant. Not upstairs. But he won’t ask me?”

“Oh! Won’t he? You leave that to me.”

A horn tooted outside.

“That’s children playing with the car!” Gracie exclaimed, jumping up and draining her sherry.

Evelyn rose quietly also. He laughed. Gracie laughed. Yes, how thrillingly exotic she seemed in the heavy, frowsy, smoke-laden, fume-poisoned interior! They hurried out like children merrily excited by the prospect of a new escapade. The real children round the car ran off, bounding and shrieking with mischief.

“We may as well go,” Gracie suggested.

“Yes, I ought to be going.”

Near the junction of Bridge Street and Whitehall Evelyn asked Gracie to stop.

“Why?”

“Because I want to get out,” said Evelyn.

“But I’ll drive you to the hotel.”

“No, thanks!” Evelyn answered very drily and firmly. And got out. He had no intention of being seen by his door-porters driving up to the Imperial Palace in Gracie’s car with Gracie at the wheel. It simply would not do. And Gracie yielded with a sweet, acquiescent, almost humble smile. That was the only way to treat young women. Firmness. Let them be as capricious and arbitrary as they chose; what they really liked was to be compelled to obey.

Having moved forward a couple of score yards, Gracie halted the car again and waited for Evelyn to come up with it.

“You’re afraid of being seen with me in my car,” she said, smiling not humbly but mischievously, half-resentfully.

“I am.” Evelyn was blunt and careless, but secretly a trifle surprised by the accuracy of her thought-reading.

Gracie drove on. This curt exchange seemed to Evelyn to be further startling proof of intimacy.

He took deep breaths. He was conscious of a much-increased sense of being alive.

I

Gracie had no sooner entered her sitting-room at the Imperial Palace, leaving the door ajar as she left most doors ajar, than her father pushed open the door and peeped in. She was just dropping her leather coat on to a chair, which was already encumbered with a rug. Sir Henry inferred from the coat that his daughter had been out in the car. He wondered why, but asked no question. The relations between these two were peculiar, yet logical enough, considering their characters. Before he got his title his wife had divorced him, and obtained the custody of the child, then aged seventeen. She obtained also an alimony of five thousand a year. She had tried for ten thousand, and failed. Five thousand or ten thousand: the figure had no practical interest for Henry Savott, but he had fought her ruthlessly.

After three weeks of living with her mother, Gracie had walked into her father’s office one day, and said: “Daddy, I understand now.” “Understand what?” “You know.” Henry Savott had looked harshly at her and growled: “Better late than never.” Gracie had then announced that she had not the least intention of living any longer with her mother. “I’m not going to be in anybody’s ‘custody’! What a word!” Henry Savott had reminded her that she was a minor, and that the decree of the High Court of Justice explicitly put her in her mother’s power. Gracie, frequently a realist, had merely laughed. “I’d love to see the Court that could make me live with anybody I don’t want to live with. I’m coming to live with you, daddy.”

Henry Savott had been tremendously flattered. His daughter’s unsolicited testimonial was the finest gift ever bestowed upon him, and he instantly saw that it would do much to restore his damaged prestige in the social world. He offered objections to Gracie’s plan, but not convincingly. His maiden sister, who hated his wife, was induced to take theoretical charge over his household.

Gracie had enjoyed freedom from the very beginning of her new life; for her father was absorbed in his vast financial schemes, and her aunt, a hypochondriac with a magnificent constitution, was absorbed in the complex ritual of the treatment of her imagined diseases. As a rule hypochondriacs live for ever. But Miss Savott proved not to be immortal. She died suddenly, untimely, of a malady whose existence had concealed itself even from the hypochondriac’s ferreting morbidness. Attired in black on the evening of the funeral, father and daughter had had one of their short, clear, monosyllabic conversations, the result of which was that Gracie at twenty became the head of Sir Henry’s household. The unspoken but perfectly understood undertaking on Sir Henry’s part was: “Don’t make a fool of yourself, and I won’t make a fool of myself or of you. You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.” Twenty years earlier such an arrangement would have been regarded as immoral, but the Savotts were of those rather rare persons who look often at the calendar, not to know the day of the month, but to remind themselves of the Annus Domini. And the arrangement, being between two realists, worked. It suited both of them. Both possessed the faculty of not seeing what it might be inconvenient to see. Sir Henry in his old-fashioned way sometimes felt transient qualms; Gracie never.

Sir Henry had an immense admiration for his daughter, and especially for her worldly commonsense. He was proud of her racing achievements, which had cost him a lot of money in the building of monstrously engined cars. In every department of expenditure she was an extremely costly child. But he was free; she was free; she was a capable hostess; and domestic extravagance never disturbed him; for he had a sense of proportion. The miscarriage of a financial operation in the City might well in a day reduce his resources by more than Gracie could possibly squander in twenty years.

Such was their situation, and it explains why Sir Henry hid whatever curiosity he might have felt about the leather coat.

Two books lay on the floor of the littered, luxurious room. Sir Henry picked them up; for though he had learnt that his daughter’s enormous untidiness was incurable, his own instinct for order would out.

“The Bible and Shakspere,” he murmured. “Still?”

“The Bible and Shakspere still. And I don’t know which is best,” said Gracie.

“Why this surprising passion for the classics?” he twitted her.

“I only like them—that’s all,” said Gracie negligently. “I’m just reading the Psalms.”

“Why the Psalms?” he continued to twit the girl. “I should have thought the biography of David would be more in your line—as a contemporary young woman.”

“The Psalms are David’s biography,” Gracie replied.

He reflected:

“How does the kid think of these remarks of hers. Something in that. I never thought of it.” He was not an ardent reader.