Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace

“Oh!” he said.

“Yes. The finest thing in all the Bible is in the Psalms.”

“Oh!” he repeated, smiling. “What’s that? I’d like to hear.”

Gracie quoted with a certain solemnity:

“ ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ Be still.”

Sombrely contemplative, she gazed at her parent, so dapper, so physically fresh in his age, so earthly, so active in his unending material schemes, so deaf and blind to the spiritual, so regardless of all that was incalculable by an adding machine. He fancied that her eyes were fixed upon his magnificent, regular, white teeth, which she had once called cruel, and instinctively he closed his lips on them, thus ceasing to smile.

“Shall I ever get to the bottom of this kid’s mind?” he asked himself, puzzled, uneasy, as it were intimidated; but still admiring. He dropped the books on to a table.

II

Then there was a second swift disconcerting change in Gracie’s mood.

“What are you going to do to-night, daddy?”

“I’m going to bed. You know I never do anything the first day, anywhere.”

She seemed not to be listening to him.

“Because,” she continued, “I’ve just seen Mr. Orcham.”

“I’m waiting to hear from him,” said Sir Henry drily.

“He’s only this minute come back into the hotel. Been out all day.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t I say I’ve just seen him?”

“You seem to be very friendly with him?” Sir Henry quizzed her.

“Oh! I am! He took me to Smithfield Market this morning.”

“He asked you to go to Smithfield with him!”

“No. I asked him to take me.”

“When?”

“After you went off to bed.”

“I hope he didn’t think I’d put you up to it,” said Sir Henry, disturbed.

“How could he have thought that? I didn’t know he was going to Smithfield until a minute before you went off. I’m glad I asked him. It was most frightfully amusing. And if I’d gone to bed I shouldn’t have been able to sleep. It filled in the time perfectly. I was thinking you might invite him to dinner to-night.”

“I invite him to dinner! And in his own hotel! No fear! The last thing I want is for him to think I’m running after him. You can understand that. If he doesn’t suggest anything, after my message to him, I shan’t suggest anything.”

Gracie said with absolute tranquillity:

“Then you go to bed, and I’ll ask him. I like him.” Sir Henry exercised the self-restraint which experience of Gracie had taught him.

“He won’t accept.”

“I’ll bet ten to one he will.”

“In the restaurant? He won’t.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Sir Henry reconsidered the position. If Orcham accepted an invitation from Gracie alone, it would mean that he might be getting wrong notions into his head. If he declined, undesirable complications might ensue. Sir Henry went to the door.

“You ask him for both of us. Nine o’clock. Send a note down. Let me know the reply.” Sir Henry departed without waiting for Gracie to speak.

“Father,” she ran to the door and called out after him in the corridor:

“What’s his Christian name?”

She wrote, in her large hand: “Dear Mr. Evelyn Orcham. Father and I would be so glad if you would dine with us to-night in the restaurant. Nine o’clock. Please don’t disappoint us. Yours sincerely, G. S.”

She rang for the waiter.

Mrs. O’Riordan, the head-housekeeper, brightly sustaining the cares of her kingdom, entered, in front of the waiter, to pay one of those state-visits which she vouchsafed only to very important guests or very angry guests. She enquired whether Gracie’s comfort and satisfaction were complete and without flaw. Gracie, recognising at once a superior member of the hotel-hierarchy, invited Mrs. O’Riordan to sit down. The two had quite a long chat. Then Gracie lavished more than an hour and a half upon her evening toilette, melancholy Tessa helping her as well as a bandaged wrist permitted.

I

Evelyn entered the foyer at one minute to nine. Certainly one of his gods was Punctuality, though there were greater gods in his pantheon. When master of his movements he was never late, nor early; his knowledge of the hour, and of the minute of the hour, was almost continuous.

A thin stream of guests was passing from the great hall through the foyer into the restaurant. Other guests were sipping cocktails at the small tables in the foyer; and still others were seated on the sofas, contributing naught to the night’s receipts of the foyer, but safeguarding their stomachs. Not a single guest recognised Evelyn; Mr. Cousin would have been recognised and saluted by several of them; Evelyn’s personality was more recondite. Only the knowing ones knew that Mr. Cousin, the manager, had a superior.

In the lounge were two cloak-room attendants, knee-breeched and gorgeous, who looked as if they had escaped from the Court of the Prince Regent, two cocktail pages in white and gold, a foyer-waiter dressed as a waiter, and two head-waiters of the restaurant, who stood on the lower stairs to receive diners; for every arriving party was personally conducted to its table and not abandoned by the conductor until the head-waiter of the table had received it into his hands. All these employees were immediately and acutely aware of the unusual presence of Evelyn, but, under standing orders, they ignored it: not an easy feat.

At nine o’clock Sir Henry Savott appeared; he glanced at his watch, and his austere face betrayed a high consciousness that punctuality was the politeness of emperors. He descried Evelyn. The two smiled, mutually approached, shook hands, and as it were took positions for a duel.

“I was just going to telephone up to you, and suggest an appointment for to-morrow,” said Evelyn genially, “when I got your daughter’s most kind invitation.”

“Very good of you to accept at such short notice,” said Sir Henry. “Have a cocktail?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Evelyn simply, and indicated an empty table.

“What’s the matter with the bar?” asked Sir Henry. “I hear you’ve had it redecorated.”

“But Miss—er—Gracie?”

“Gracie has never been known to be less than a quarter of an hour late for lunch or dinner,” said Sir Henry. “Like most women she has a disorderly mind. Not disordered,” he added.

The two males exchanged a complacent, condescending look which relegated the entire female sex to its proper place, and strolled side by side up the stairs, along the broad corridor which led past the grill-room into the American bar.

The cocktail department comprised two large rooms: the first was permitted to ladies; the second, containing the majestic bar, was forbidden to them. By a common impulse Sir Henry and his guest for the evening walked without hesitation into the second room and sat down in a corner. Each waited for the other to open. Neither knew that the mind of the other was preoccupied with one sole image: that of Gracie. Evelyn was thinking: “She said she’d fix it, and she’s fixed it.” Sir Henry was thinking: “What’s the meaning of this whim for getting this fellow to dinner? . . . ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ Good God!” (But naïve pride was mingled with his non-comprehension.)

Sir Henry glanced around with feigned curiosity at the flood-lighting, the silvern ceiling, the Joseph’s-coat walls decorated in rhomboidal shapes which bar-frequenters described as cubistic or futuristic or both. He did not like it.

“Very original,” he commented. “Charming. I expect it was good for a bit of useful publicity, this was.”

“It was,” said Evelyn. “Change from the traditional British bar, eh?” He saw himself and Gracie incredibly hobnobbing in the Prince of Wales’s Feathers in Westminster Bridge Road.