Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace

“421—four, two, one——”

A waiter returned into the cubicle, maintaining at sight of the Director an admirable impassivity.

“Here, Armand. Telephone,” said Evelyn, with equal impassivity. He handed over the receiver and left. The other waiter was disappearing at the other end of the corridor, on his way back to his permanent post on the fourth-floor.

Evelyn marched as it were defiantly, but on feet apparently not his own, past No. 365. Door shut. No sound of revelry by night. . . . He would not continue his tour of inspection. He could not go to bed. He descended, flight after flight of the lighted, silent staircase; glimpse after glimpse of lighted and silent corridors, all so subtly alive with mysterious, dubious implications. The great hall had not changed. Reyer leaned patient on his counter, staring at a book. Long Sam and one of his janissaries stood mute and still near the doors. The other janissary was examining the marine prints on the walls. As soon as he saw Evelyn he moved from the wall as though caught in flagrant sin.

“What’s it like outside, Sam?” Evelyn called out loudly from the back of the hall.

“Fine, sir. A bit sharp.”

Evelyn would have gone for a tranquillising walk, but he hesitated to travel back to the eighth-floor for hat and overcoat, and he would not send for them. He spoke to Reyer:

“I suppose there are no overcoats not working around here anywhere?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.”

“All right. Never mind. I only thought I’d go out for a minute or two.”

“Have mine, sir. May be on the small side, mais à la rigueur——” He smiled.

While Evelyn was hesitating, Reyer dashed through a door far behind the counter, and returned with an overcoat and a hat. Long Sam helped Evelyn into the difficult overcoat.

“Not too bad,” said Reyer, flattered, proud, and above all exhilarated by this extraordinary and astonishing break in the terrible monotony of the night.

“Splendid!” said Evelyn, nodding thanks.

A showy, but cheap and flimsy overcoat. No warmth in it. Very different from Evelyn’s overcoats. (Unfamiliar things in the pockets.) Well, Reyer was only a young Night-manager. Fair salary. But not a sixteen-guinea-overcoat salary. A narrow, strictly economical existence, Reyer’s. The hat was too large, at least it was too broad, for Evelyn. Now Evelyn had a broad head, and he believed in the theory that unusual width between the ears indicates sagacity and good judgment. Strange that he had not previously noticed the shape of modest Reyer’s head! He would keep an eye on Reyer. A janissary span the doors for his exit.

III

The thoroughfare which separated the Imperial Palace from St. James’s Park was ill-lit. Evelyn had tried to persuade Authority to improve the lighting; in vain. But his efforts to establish a cab-rank opposite the hotel had succeeded, after prodigious delays. Two taxis were now on the rank; and there were two motor-cars in the courtyard. The chauffeurs dozed; the taxi-drivers talked and smoked pipes. He crossed the road and leaned his back against the railings of the Park, and looked up at the flood-lit white tower over the centre of the Palace façade.

By that device of the gleaming tower at any rate he had out-flanked the defensive reaction of Authority. The tower was a landmark even from Piccadilly, across two parks; and simple provincials were constantly asking, “What’s that thing?” and knowing Londoners replying: “That? That’s the Imperial Palace Hotel.” But nowhere on any façade of the hotel did the words ‘Imperial Palace’ appear. Evelyn would never permit them to appear. He believed deeply in advertising, but not in direct advertising. Direct advertising was not suited to the unique prestige of the Imperial Palace.

In the façade a few windows burned here and there, somehow mournfully. He knew the exact number of guests staying in the hotel that night; but their secrets, misfortunes, anxieties, hopes, despairs, tragedies, he did not know. And he would have liked to know every one of them, to drench himself in the invisible fluid of mortal things. He was depressed. He wanted sympathy, and to be sympathetic, to merge into humanity. But he was alone. He had no close friend, no lovely mistress—save the Imperial Palace. The Palace was his life. And what was the Palace, the majestic and brilliant offspring of his creative imagination and of his organising brain? It had been everything. Now, for the moment, it was naught.

“What a damned fool I am!” he reflected. “Why the devil am I so down? I don’t care twopence about the confounded girl. Am I, the hotel-world-famous Evelyn Orcham, to go running around like a boy after a girl? It’s undignified. And I don’t mind who she is, or what she is! Anyway I’ve taught her a lesson!”

He withdrew his body from the support of the Park railings, and walked briskly westwards. Restlessness of the trees in the chill wind! Large rectilinear dim shapes of the enormous Barracks (whose piercing early bugles made the sole flaw in the marvellous tranquillity of the hotel). Then the looming front of Buckingham Palace, the other Palace! And even there, high up, a solitary window burned. Why? What secret did that illuminated square conceal? He felt a sudden constriction of the throat, and after a long pause turned back. Three motor-cars in quick succession hummed and drummed eastwards. Eternal restlessness of trees beyond the railings! He thought he could detect the watery odour of the lake in the Park. The sea-gulls had revisited it in scores that day. He had seen them circling in flocks over the lake. Very romantic. What a situation for a hotel in the midst of a vast city! He walked as far as Whitehall, too melancholy and dissatisfied even to think connectedly. And at last he re-entered the Palace. One of the taxis had gone, and both the motor-cars. Everything as usual in the great hall. Reyer behind his counter.

“Much obliged,” he said, smiling with factitious cheerfulness, as he gave up the overcoat and the large soft hat.

“Not at all, sir,” answered Reyer, pleased.

“That the night-book?”

Reyer handed the book to him. He read, among other entries: “Three ladies and two gentlemen left No. 365 at 3.5. One of them was Lady Devizes.”

Evelyn thought: “She’s by herself now. Perhaps her maid is undressing her. She must be terribly exhausted, poor little thing.” She was pathetic to him.

“My floor, please,” he said to the liftman, and went to bed.

Next morning among the early departures he saw the name of Miss Savott.

I

Just before noon, on the morning of Gracie’s most unexpected departure, Evelyn was entering the Palace after a business interview in Whitehall. He felt tired, but he had slept, and none but a close student of eyes and of the facial muscles which surround them would have guessed that he was tired. Evelyn could successfully ignore fatigue. Indeed he now took pride in the fact that after two very short nights and one very long and emotionally exhausting day, and with a critical day still in front of him, he had deliberately intensified the critical quality of the latter by adding to his anxieties the inception of a new and delicate task: which task concerned the future of Miss Violet Powler.

As for Gracie, he had learnt that she had left for the Continent by the 9 a.m. train—not the more fashionable 11 a.m. train—with the whole of her luggage and a maid whose arm was in a sling. Sir Henry had not seen her off, and was remaining in the hotel. Evelyn surmised that the impulsive girl had chosen the earlier train because in the circumstances it was just as easy for her as the other, if not easier. Doubtless she had said to herself: “I’m up late. I’ll stay up, and catch the first train. That will give me two hours less in his ghastly hotel, and two hours more in Paris.” For Paris was certainly her destination. Where else should she go? He surmised further that, if her maid was disabled, Gracie had done her own packing, and the maid’s too. He was sure that she was ‘that sort.’ Also she was the sort that could take pride in ignoring fatigue. A point of resemblance between them! He liked to think of the resemblance. Of course her departure was the result of pique. Well, let it be! He found a sardonic pleasure in her pique. Do her good! His emotions about her were evaporating with extreme rapidity in the fresh air and the commonsense of morning. He needed nobody to tell him, for he could tell himself, that no young woman, however enchanting, could make a lasting impression upon the susceptibilities of a wise man old enough to be her father in an acquaintanceship of sixteen or seventeen hours. She had been calmly but firmly ejected from his mind. Nothing of the astounding episode stayed in his mind except inevitable masculine self-satisfaction at a sentimental conquest, and shame for the absurd feelings which had disturbed his soul after her resentful outburst until he finally settled for the night. One might call him a fish, not a warm-blooded man; but such now was his mental condition, pleasing or the reverse.