Read Ebook: The Relentless City by Benson E F Edward Frederic

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1421 lines and 73489 words, and 29 pages

She pinned it into her dress, and sat down.

'Well?' she said.

'I came really to congratulate you,' said he; 'but as I am here, I suppose we may as well talk over some business that must be talked over. About your tour: are you willing to stop over here till April at least?'

'Yes; I don't see why not. I want to appear in London early in May.'

'Very well. I will draft an agreement, and send it you. Now, you may consider that with your extraordinary success of last night the theatre will be full for some weeks ahead. I propose your giving an evening performance on Saturdays as well as the matinee.'

'Terms?'

'Royalty. Twenty per cent, on total takings. It is worth your while.'

'Is it not more worth my while to be seen from Saturday till Monday at Mrs. Palmer's?'

'It would be if the theatre was not full. But you could fill it--for the present, anyhow--if you had a matinee every day. Besides, you can get down to Long Island with the utmost ease on Sunday morning.'

'I go to Mass on Sunday morning; you forget that!'

He smiled.

'I suggest, then, that you should omit that ceremony, if you want to go to Mrs. Palmer's. However, there is no hurry. Weigh the three things in your mind--eighty or ninety pounds by acting on Saturday evening, or Mass on Sunday morning, or Mrs. Palmer's on Sunday morning. There is another thing: I want to talk over the scenes in "Paris" with you. I am going to Mrs. Palmer's the Sunday after next. I will bring the models down with me, if you will promise to give me an hour. 'They will not be ready till then.'

'Yes. I am going there next Sunday and the Sunday after. They have a theatre there; she wants me to do something in the evening.'

Bilton thought a moment.

'What do I get?' he asked.

'The pleasure of seeing me act, silly.'

He shook his head.

'I'm afraid I must forget that pleasure,' he said. 'Your contract binds you to give no theatrical representations of any sort except under my direction.'

'What a beast you are!' she said. 'It is for a charity!'

'And a cheque,' he observed.

'The cheque is purely informal. Besides, we shall be there together.'

He took a cigar out of his case, bit the end off with his long teeth, that gleamed extremely white between the very remarkable red of his lips.

'Look here, Dolly,' he said; 'there are two sides to the relations in which we are placed. One is purely businesslike; the other is purely sentimental. It is a pity to let them overlap. It spoils my devotion to you to feel that it is in a way mixed up with business, and it offends my instincts as a business man to let sentiment have a word to say in our bargains. Briefly, then, I forbid your acting for Mrs. Palmer unless you make it worth my while. After all, I didn't bring you out here for sentimental reasons; I brought you out because, from a financial point of view, I thought it would be good for both of us.'

'What do you want?' she asked.

'Half your cheque.'

'For something you haven't arranged, and which won't cost you a penny?'

'Yes. I am talking business. You can close with that offer any time to-day; to-morrow it will be two-thirds. I'm quite square with you.'

'Americans are Jews,' observed Mrs. Emsworth.

She did not answer for a moment. Her eyes saw the torn fragments of the letter in the grate, and she remembered that she had definitely and for ever torn up what Bertie had written to her. Then she got up, crossed the room to where he was standing by the fireplace, and put her hands on his shoulders.

'Are you tired of me?' she asked.

His brown eyes grew black at the fragrance and seductiveness of her close presence; for the blood is stirred long after the imagination has ceased to be fired.

'You witch! you witch!' he said.

But in the background on the terrace there still stood the other figure.

Long Island is separated from New York by a narrow sound, across which ferry-boats ply in both directions with extreme punctuality. From any part of New York city a couple of electric cars or an electric railway will take you to the threshold of the ferry-boat, and trains await you at the back-door, so to speak, of the ferry-boats, to convey you down the length of Long Island. On board the ferry-boat you can buy a variety of badly-printed and sensational daily papers for the sum of one cent; you can get your boots blacked for very little more; and no doubt, if there was sufficient demand, the directors would enable you to have your teeth brushed or your hair combed. No part of the equipment, however, is at all lovely. It answers the purpose of conveying you cheaply and expeditiously from one point to another, and enables you to finish your toilet in transit, which is an invaluable boon to those who want to save time. As a matter of fact, everyone wants to save time, but it has been reserved for Americans to invent such methods of doing it. The rest of the world, therefore, is in their debt. The debt is acknowledged, but the rest of the world, quite inscrutably, does not choose to follow their example. All may raise the flower now all have got the seed, but they do not raise the flower.

There is no 'class' on these boats; there is no 'class' on the elevated railway; there is no 'class' on the electric cars. Millionaires in Long Island, in consequence, have the privilege of enjoying the same discomforts as other people, and even Lewis S., who could have bought up the whole system of electric cars, overhead railway, and ferry-boats , habitually went by these unlovely conveyances, because there were no other. During his transit he once sent a cablegram buying, at any price, the whole dinner-service which had been used on the last occasion on which Marie Antoinette dined at Petit Trianon. It was extremely expensive, and, as he wrote, the drippings from the rain fell on to his cablegram form, for the boat was full. Subsequently he argued with the boot-boy who had blacked his boots, but gave in when the boy produced his tariff-card. And Democracy, the spirit of his fellow-passengers, sympathized in the main with him.

For the purpose of this narrative, the low-lying swamp and companies of jerry-built houses that cluster round the various stations on the line may be disregarded, and after half an hour's travelling the train emerges into a very pleasant land. There are no high uplands to dwarf the immediate landscape, but there are trees of tolerable growth and slim presence to add distinction to it. Underneath these trees, as the train nears Port Washington, grow high clumps of purple Michaelmas daisies, now, in September, full of bursting bud, and the temperate sea-winds give a vividness of colour to the prevailing green, which reminds foreigners of the Devon sea-coast.

But within the last few years the whole place had been completely changed, and it was no longer the genius of Long Island, but the genius of mushroom wealth, that crowned the hill-top. For a quarter of a mile on every side round the house the trees had been felled and their roots dynamited, and huge lawns spread their green carpets in the most ample expanses. Four-square in the centre stood the immense house of gray stone, copied largely from one of the Valois chateaux in the South of France, but with various protuberances, in the shape of a theatre, a swimming-bath, and a tennis-court, grafted on to it. A carriage-drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip-lash, surmounting terrace after terrace set with nugatory nudities, till it reached the lead-roofed portico at the front, where two great Graeco-Roman candelabra of Parian marble stood one on each side of the door, pierced for gas, and crowned by large glass globes. To the north lay the Italian garden, all laurels and tessellated pavement, cypresses and statuary, fountains and flower-beds. To the west were the tennis and croquet lawns, and to the south, where the ground in old days had fallen tumbling towards the sea, it had been built up with thousands of tons of earth and faced with masonry, so that from the edge of the terrace one looked down on to the topmost fans of the waving trees. Heavy gilded vanes crowned the lead roofs, and high over the central dome of the building a flag-staff displayed Mrs. Palmer's very original device--Love caught in a rose-bush--to the airs of heaven. Round the extreme edge of the terrace ran the bicycle track, on which Lewis S. Palmer did his ten miles a day, with black hatred in his heart of this extraordinary waste of time.

From the centre of the terrace on the east, which had been brought over entire from a needy Italian palace, a broad flight of steps of rose-coloured marble led down to the sea. A small breakwater was sufficient to provide station and anchorage for the two steam-yachts and smaller pleasure-boats, but otherwise the shore had not been meddled with. There was a charming beach of sand, and a little further on a fringe of seaweed-covered rock-pools. Behind this was a small natural lagoon in a depression in the sandy foreshore, some half-acre in extent, fed by a stream that came down through the woods, but brackish through the infiltration of the salt water. This that highly original woman had chosen to be the scene of the f?te which was to astonish society next week; but the secret had been well kept, and no one except Reggie Armstrong knew the precise details of the new surprise. For a fortnight or so, however, it was common knowledge that a great many large pans wrapped in tarpaulin had been arriving, and the shore had been populous with men who plied some sort of bare-legged avocation, which implied wading in the lagoon. But the foreman of the company who was executing Mrs. Palmer's orders had received notice that if any word of what was being done leaked out or reached the papers, at that moment all work would be suspended, and the firm would never have another order from her. She herself, sometimes alone, sometimes with Reggie, inspected the work; otherwise no one was allowed near the place. The yachts of her dearest friends, it is true, constantly passed and repassed up the sound, and many were the opera-glasses levelled at the shore; but what the bare-legged men were doing baffled conjecture and the best glasses.

An observant man might have noticed in a dark corner of the hall a small green baize door. It was in shadow of the staircase, and might easily have escaped him altogether; but if he noticed it, it would have struck him as odd that this plain baize door, with three brass initials on it--L. S. P.--should find a place in this magnificence. If it had only been L. S. D., it would have been quite in place, and might have been taken to be the shrine of the tutelary god of the place. Shrine indeed it was, and the tutelary god sat within; for the initials were those of Mrs. Palmer's husband.

It was a perfectly plain, bare room, with drugget on the floor, an almanac hung near the fireplace, a large table stood in the centre of the room, on which were piles of papers, apparatus for writing, and usually a glass of milk. From the door to the right there came the subdued tickings of telegraph apparatus; near that door sat a young man on a plain wooden chair, and at the table sat a small, gray-haired man, very thin and spare, with bushy eyebrows which frowned over his work. From time to time he would throw on to the floor a scrap of paper. Then the young man would get up noiselessly, pick it up, and go through with it into the room from which came the tickings of the telegraph. Then he would return and sit down again. Occasionally a muffled knock would come at the same door, upon which he would rise and take a paper which was handed him, and lay it quite close to the right hand of the man who sat at the table, who either crumpled it up after reading it or wrote something in reply. These answers and messages were all written on small scraps of paper measuring about three inches by one; there was a pile of them always ready by his left hand. A telephone also stood on this table which rang very constantly. Then the man at the table would, as if automatically, place the receiver at his ear and listen, sometimes not even looking up from his writing, and often replacing the instrument without a word. More rarely he looked up, and he would say a few words--'Yes, yes,' 'No, certainly not,' 'Very well, buy,' or 'Sell at once.'

'Yes, all!' Sometimes, again, it would be he who first used the instrument, and he would ring up his head clerk in New York or a partner, never in a hurry, never apparently impatient. On the other hand, he would not wait idle till the answering bell rang, but go steadily on with his work. At such moments he would raise his eyes sometimes when he was speaking, and if you happened to catch his glance, it is probable you would never forget it, but would understand, though momentarily only and dimly maybe, that at the table in the bare room there sat a Force, a great natural phenomenon, before which all the splendour and magnificence of the house, all the illimitable outpouring of wealth which it implied, became insignificant--a mere shirt-button or a tie-pin to the man from whose brain it had all sprung.

This extraordinary sense of, and attention to, detail, characteristic of the great Napoleon, was also most characteristic of Mr. Palmer. Only the night before his daughter had come down to dinner in a new dress, and found herself the instant target for the piercing gray eye of her father.

'There ought to be two straps on the shoulder, not one,' he said; 'it is copied from the figure of Madame Matignon, in the picture of the last f?te of the Empress Eugenie. Pray have it altered.'

'Dear old papa,' remarked Amelie, 'I dare say you know everything, but it wouldn't be so pretty.'

'That is a matter of taste, but it would be right.'

This characteristic, which appeared so strongly even in such branches of human interest as the position of a strap or a bow on a woman's dress, appeared most piercingly of all on questions concerning finance. Figures, indeed, once seen by him, seemed to be indelibly imprinted on his mind, and, without reference, he would embark on enterprises where an accurate knowledge of previous balance-sheets and present prices was essential. It was essential to him; only, instead of referring to books which would give him the required information, he carried it about in his head. To his partners and those who were associated with him in business he was a source of constant wonder. Partners they might be to him in name, and, since they were all well-tried and trusted men, they no doubt were of assistance to him; but as far as executive power was concerned, they might as well have been junior clerks in some other firm, for Palmer went on his way automatically, self-balanced on the topmost crest of the huge wave of prosperity that was flooding America, quicker than the whole of the rest of the New York Market to scent coming trouble or prosperity in the world of money, prompter than any to take advantage of it. Then, when his day's work was done, at whatever hour that might be, it was as if the word 'business' was unknown to him, and there sat at table, dressed in loose and somewhat ill-fitting clothes, a man of very simple and kindly nature, a connoisseur in cookery, art, and millinery, a gentleman at heart, and to the backbone an American--one who, in spite of his gentleness, was without breeding; one who, in spite of his deep and varied knowledge, was without culture.

At the present moment Amelie's enthusiasm was largely taken up with food.

'Papa, you have an angelic nature,' she said; 'and how you can sit there chewing crackers and sipping milk without throwing the table things at me I can't conjecture.'

'Habit of self-control, Amelie,' said he, his eyes smiling at her; 'perhaps you will learn it some day. When does your mother come down?'

'This afternoon, with the two English folk. She's been telephoning all the morning. When mamma gets hold, real tight hold, of the telephone, she doesn't let go under an hour or two. Now, I'm not like that. The moment I ring anyone up, I forget what I was going to say, and have to ask them to dinner instead. I guess you and mamma took all the brains of the family. Papa, I had the heavenliest ride this morning, all through the fir-woods, and Tamburlaine wanted to jump the sound. The daisies are all coming out, and it smelt so good. Oh, it smelt so good, like--like a drug store. There's the telephone again!'

Mr. Palmer considered this a moment.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet