Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace

Nevertheless he desired to go to her impromptu party. That is to say, he desired to stay in her company, hated to let her out of his sight, feared that if he did he would regret having done so. She intrigued him considerably; and he admired her manners, and keenly savoured her admiration: that was all. But was it not sufficient? The party would assuredly be amusing, and if it was not amusing he could leave it. As for the gossip of the staff, to think twice about such a trifle was childish. Every one of his reasons for refusing her was either false or utterly silly. The trouble perhaps was that he was too proud to go, too proud to withdraw his word and surrender. He had said he could not go, and he would not go—not if he should have to regret his obstinacy for evermore. Why the devil could she not take ‘No’ for an answer? . . . Forcing herself into his private office as she had done!

“I must ask you to forgive me,” he said, with a smile as sad as her smile.

“You’ve been very patient with me,” she sighed, and snapped her bag to, and rose. “Good night.”

“Good night.” He followed her to the door and opened it.

“I’ll see you to the lift,” he said.

She turned on him, transformed.

“No, please! I couldn’t bear that!”

Fury, resentment, anger were in her rich voice. She banged the door, wrenching the handle out of his hand.

What an escape—for him, not for her! But an iron weight seemed to have settled in his stomach. And he was blanketed in a heavy melancholy. He said aloud in the empty, desolated office: “Have I ruined my life? Was this the turning-point?”

I

Evelyn woke up in a state of some bewilderment. His feet felt cramped. He looked at them and saw that he was still wearing his evening shoes; also his dress-suit; also that many lights were burning; and finally, that instead of being in bed, as he had assumed, he lay on the sofa in the sitting-room of his private suite. Then, gradually passing into full wakefulness, he remembered that he had sunk on the sofa, not to sleep, but to reflect, to clear his thoughts, before getting to bed. He glanced at the clock, which announced twenty minutes to two, and at first he was sceptical as to its reliability; but his watch confirmed the clock. Characteristic of the man of order that he at once wound up his watch!

He rose uncertainly to his cramped feet, and lit a cigarette. He had slept without a dream for nearly two hours and a half; surprising consequence of extreme fatigue! His body appeared to him to be as refreshed and restored as though he had slept the usual six hours. He must now really get to bed.

But his brain was furiously active, engaged in an unending round of thought:

“That damned party is still going on. There were pros and cons, but I ought to have accepted the invitation. I was a fool to refuse. It was nothing after all. Only a little improvised party. Surely I was entitled to refuse. Surely she might have taken No for an answer. Her outburst was inexcusable, and it showed what she’s capable of. The damned party is still going on. There were pros and cons, but I ought——”

And so on without end. Revolutions of an enormous fly-wheel in his brain, dangerously too big for his brain, leaving no space therein for such matters large and small as the substitution of Miss Powler for Miss Brury and vice versa, the changing about of the two cabaret turns, the vague Machiavellian menace of Sir Henry Savott, the everlasting problem of the downward curve in expenditure per head of customers in the restaurant, etc.

He glanced around the sitting-room, where everything exactly fitted his personality and everything was in its place; home of tranquillising peace; but now disturbed by a mysterious influence. No peace in the room now. He had held the room to be inviolable; but it had been violated—and by no physical presence. And Evelyn was no longer, as formerly, in accord with the infinite scheme of the universe, with the supreme creative spirit. He had never consciously felt that he had been in such accord. Only now that he was in disaccord did he realise that till then he had been in accord. Disconcerting perceptions! Curse and curse and curse the girl! She carried hell and heaven about with her, portable! She was just not good enough. She continually flouted heaven’s first law. . . . No hope of sleep. To get to bed would be absurd and futile. He would go downstairs. To do so might stop the fly-wheel.

He opened the door, extinguished all the lights, shut the door, opened it to be sure that he had extinguished all the lights. The dark room seemed to be full of minatory intimidations: a microcosm of invisible forces hitherto unsuspected. He shut the door on them; but soon he would have to open it again.

Descending a short flight of stairs, he walked along the main corridor of the floor below his own, under the regularly recurring lamps in the ceiling, past the numbered doors, each with a bunch of electric signal bulbs over its lintel. Inhabited rooms, many of them—not all, for it was the slack season—transient homes, nests, retreats of solitaries or of couples. Shut away in darkness, or in darkness mitigated by a bed-lamp. Some sleeping: some lying awake. Pathos behind the closed, blind doors. Not only on that floor, but on all the floors. Floor below floor. He always felt it on his nocturnal perambulations of the Imperial Palace. And he could never decide whether the solitaries or the couples, the sleepers or the sleepless, were the more pathetic. The unconsciousness of undefended sleep was pathetic. The involuntary vigil was pathetic. Salt of the earth, these wealthy residents in the largest and most luxurious luxury hotel on earth, deferentially served by bowing waiters, valets, maids! They pressed magic buttons, and their caprices were instantly gratified. But to Evelyn they were as touching as the piteous figures crouching and shivering in the lamp-lit night on the benches of the Thames Embankment.

He rang for the lift. Up it promptly came, and a pale, sprightly, young uniformed human being in it, who not long since had been a page-boy and was now promoted to the distinguished status of liftman. Night was common day to him; for, as hair grows night and day, so did the service of the Palace function night and day, heedless of sun and moon.

“Evening, Ted.”

“Good evening, sir.”

“Let me see, how many years have you been with us?”

“Six, sir.”

“Excellent! Excellent! . . . Ground-floor, please.” Evelyn noticed the No. 3 on the lift-well as the cage fell from floor to floor. The third-floor was the floor of the party. Renewed disturbance in his brain! “When do you come on day-work?”

“I hope in five weeks, sir.”

“Ah!”

The mirrored lift stopped. The grille slid backwards. Evelyn stepped out.

“Thank you, sir,” said Ted, sat down, and resumed the perusal of thrilling fiction.

The great hall was empty of guests; the scintillating foyer too. The entrance to the ladies’ cloak-room glowed with brilliant light. A footman stood at the entrance to the darker gentlemen’s cloak-room, and within, at the counter, the head-attendant there was counting out money from a box. And in the still glittering restaurant only one table was effectively occupied—by two men and a woman. All the other tables were oblong or round expanses of bare white cloth. Eight or nine waiters shifted restlessly to and fro. A gigolo and his female colleague—the last remaining on duty of a corps of six—sat at a tiny table apart.

The orchestra, which Evelyn could not see from his peeping-place, began to play a waltz, which reverberated somehow mournfully in the vast, nearly deserted interior. The professional dancers rose, attendant, then advanced. The gigolo took the woman from the table of three, his companion took one of the men. The second man stayed at the table and passed the time in paying the bill. The waiter bowed, ceremoniously grateful, as he received back the plate with a note and a pile of silver on it. To Evelyn the waltz seemed interminable, and the two lone couples on the floor the very images of pleasure struggling against fatigue and the burden of the night. The female gigolo was young and elegant; she must get some handsome tips, Evelyn thought. “Tips! My God!” he murmured to himself, recalling that in one week in June the waiters’ tips in the restaurant had totalled more than eight hundred pounds. The waiters kept their own accounts, but they were submitted to Cousin, who submitted them now and then to Evelyn.