Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace

“Cost you a lot?”

Evelyn hesitated. He was on the point of saying “Oh! A goodish bit. I don’t remember the exact figure.” Just to keep Sir Henry in his place! Then he changed his mind. There was a more effective way of keeping Sir Henry in his place. The way of the facts. “Yes. Volivia and Co. stand us in for eighty pounds a week. The other turn forty or fifty. Bands and cabaret come to not a penny less than twelve hundred a week.” And he added to himself: “Get that into your head, my friend.”

“Bands so much?” Sir Henry gave an excellent imitation of imperturbability.

“Yes.”

“How many bands?”

“Three.”

“One’s American?”

“Yes. Here they are.” Evelyn waved towards the bustle and the glitter of new instruments on the bandstand.

“I knew they got biggish money in New York,” said Sir Henry.

“They get biggish money in London,” Evelyn retorted. “Why! I happened to be going out by the Queen Anne entrance the other day, and the whole alley was blocked with cars. I asked the porter about it—he’s a waggish sort of a chap. He told me they were the cars of ‘the gentlemen of the orchestra’!”

“By Jove!” Sir Henry exclaimed, glancing round. “There’s Harry Matcham. The very man I want to see. That big round table.”

“Lord Watlington?”

“Yes. Gracie, I think I’d better step over to him now and fix a date. Excuse me, Orcham—one second.”

Mahomets go to mountains.

During this interlude of chat, Gracie had not uttered one word. Nor had she eaten. She was playing, meditative, with the chain of her vanity-case.

“Step over, daddy,” she said.

“Lord Watlington hasn’t had a dinner-party here for quite a long time,” said Evelyn. “Cappone was beginning to think he’d deserted us.” Gracie did not speak. Evelyn went on: “I see Mrs. Penkethman with him, and Lady Devizes and the two Cheddars. Rather Renaissance young men, those Cheddars, don’t you think?” Gracie still did not speak. Evelyn went on: “I don’t recognise any of the others.”

“You know,” said Gracie suddenly, looking up into Evelyn’s eyes with a soft smile. “That wouldn’t do in a drawing-room.”

“What wouldn’t do?”

“That Volivia show.”

“No. Scarcely,” Evelyn agreed. “A drawing-room would be a bit too intimate for it. But if it pleases people in a restaurant—well, there you are; it pleases them. Volivia’s the biggest cabaret success we’ve ever had here. Now before the war that turn wouldn’t have been respectable. I do believe it would have emptied any restaurant—or filled it with exactly the sort of person we don’t want. But we give it now, and the Palace is just as respectable as ever it was. More, even. Look at the people here!”

“It was shameless,” said Gracie.

“Perhaps too shameless,” Evelyn replied. “I admit I should have had my doubts about it if I’d seen it on the first night. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It’s audiences that make a show respectable—or not. I’ve heard our Cabaret-manager say it takes two to settle that point—the show and the audience. But I don’t think so. The audience settles it. I’m sure some of these variety artists start out to be—well, questionable.” He was choosing his words so as to avoid abrading Gracie’s girlish susceptibilities. He meant ‘indecent.’ “But sufficient applause, frank, unreserved applause, will make them feel absolutely virtuous with the very same show.”

He was defending his Imperial Palace against the delicious girl who had used the adjective ‘shameless.’ She had changed now from the invader of the cocktail bar.

“I’m sorry you think it was shameless,” he said.

Gracie smiled at him still more exquisitely and more softly.

“I loved it for being shameless,” she said, not with any protest in her rich, dark voice, but persuasively. “Why shouldn’t it be shameless? We aren’t shameless enough. What’s the matter with the flesh anyway? Don’t we all know what we are? If I could give a performance like Volivia’s, wouldn’t I just go on the stage! Nobody should stop me, I tell you that.” Some emphasis in the voice. Then she restrained the emphasis, murmuring: “I’m rather like Volivia. Only she was born to perform, and I wasn’t.”

Evelyn was very seriously taken aback, partly by the realisation that he had completely misjudged her attitude, and partly by the extraordinary candour with which she had revealed herself. If she had averted her gaze, if her voice had been uncertain, he would have been less disconcerted. But she had continued to face him boldly, and her tones, though low, had given no sign of any inward tremor. And she had not made a confession, she had made a statement. She was indeed as shameless as Volivia. But how virginally, and how unanswerably!

Evelyn thought:

“I suppose this is the modern girl. I mustn’t lose my presence of mind.” He said, trying to copy her serenity: “And yet you say Volivia wouldn’t do in a drawing-room! Why not?”

“Simply because in a drawing-room she’d make me feel uncomfortable. If I feel uncomfortable I always know something’s wrong. But here I didn’t feel a bit uncomfortable. You did, and so did daddy. But not me. Besides, you wouldn’t agree that what can’t be done in a drawing-room oughtn’t to be done at all. A big restaurant’s much the same as a bedroom. You see what I mean?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, you will,” said Gracie with gentle assurance. “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?”

“In the middle of dinner?”

“Why not? What a question, from you!”

III

The Californian “Big Oak Band,” with its self-complacent leader Eleazar Schenk at a green and yellow grand piano, was just emitting its first wild woodland notes; the first professional dancing couple was just taking the floor beneath the patronising glances of the dandiacal, tight-waisted bandsmen; and Sir Henry’s wine-waiter was just pouring forth champagne from a magnum bottle. The general gay noise of chatter had increased. For not only at Sir Henry’s table, but everywhere up and down the room, great wines after elaborate years of preparation were reaching their final, glorious, secret goal, quickening hearts as well as tickling palates. And under the influence of these superfine golden and ruby and amber liquids, valued at as much as five shillings a glassful, quaffed sometimes in a moment, the immortal tendency to confuse indulgence with happiness was splendidly maintained. The graph-curves of alcohol consumption per head might be downwards, to the grief of the hierarchs of the Imperial Palace; but on this Volivia night the sad decline was certainly arrested for a space. Mr. Cappone and his cohort of head-waiters and humbler aproned commis knew all about that.

“I don’t dance,” said Evelyn shortly.

He rarely did dance, and never on his own floor. For him, there would have been something improper in him, Director of the Imperial Palace, deity of thirteen hundred employees, disporting himself on the Palace floor. And further, he had not yet in the least recovered from the shock of Gracie’s shattering remarks upon the moral excellence of shamelessness. ‘We all know what we are,’ etc. There she sat, to the left of him, lovely, radiant, elegant, fabulously expensive, with her soft smile, her gentle, thrilling tone, her clear, candid gaze, her modest demeanour—likening restaurants to bedrooms, and—‘we all know what we are’! And he, Evelyn, monarch of the supreme luxury hotel of the world, had ingenuously been thinking that in his vast and varied experience he had nothing to learn about human nature!

“Oh! So you don’t dance!” said she most sweetly.

She might, Evelyn reflected, be a bewildering mixture of contradictions, but she was the most enchanting creature he had ever met. She had bowed her glory in instant acquiescence.