Эдвард Бенсон
The Relentless City

'How premature!' Was not that, too, an indication, however veiled, that it was not premature? She would not have said that his holocaust of the cigarettes was premature if it was so; she would merely have thought to herself, 'Poor fellow!' But the hopelessness of the thought was neutralized by its announcement. Not the most matter-of-fact physicians broke news of fatal illness like that… And again he reminded himself that he must not be sanguine. Anyhow, she had reminded him (like everybody else, no doubt) that his life was not entirely his own. She had told him also (there was nothing secret about it) that she was not going to marry Harold Bilton. But it was she who had told him.

Bilton, meantime, with the speed of his race, had completed his contract for the lease of the Coronation Theatre for the next season, and had finished, on behalf of Lewis S. Palmer, the purchase of the Molesworth property. It was quite characteristic of him that he should postpone for these affairs which were really imminent the piece of private business which had, more than either of them, perhaps more than both, brought him to England. Consequently, it was not till the afternoon of the next day that he called at Judy's and asked to see Mrs. Massington. Sybil had spent the morning at Brighton, and had arrived only some half-hour before he called. But, with the instinct of the autumn perhaps strong in her, she had said she would see him, rejecting Judy's offer to put herself in the way of a tête-à-tête.

He was shown into the room where Judy usually sat, a sitting-room off the drawing-room. It had been furnished with her unerring bizarre taste, and looked like nothing whatever except Judy's room. There was a bearskin on the floor because somebody had given it her.' Two execrable water-colours were on the wall for the same reason, and on the same walls were three wonderful prints of Reynolds' engraved by Smith. There was a grand piano there, making locomotion difficult, because Judy played much and badly, and Steinway, so she always said, knew what she meant better than anybody. There was some good French furniture there because it was hers, and some hopeless English armchairs because they were comfortable. Finally, there was Sybil there because she was her sister, and at this moment there had entered Harold Bilton because she had said she would see him.

She got up, and advanced to him.

'This is quite unexpected,' she said. 'I thought you were in America. Pray sit down. What has happened? Has Mrs. Emsworth also come back?'

Bilton sat down. He brought his hat and stick with him, according to the custom of his countrymen, and Sybil, who had never noticed it there, noticed it in London. She noticed it more particularly since the stick fell down from the angle where he had propped it with a loud clatter.

'No; Mrs. Emsworth is still in America,' he said. 'She has left New York, and gone on tour. I think her tour will be very successful.'

'So glad,' said Sybil. 'Tea?'

'I guess I won't, thank you,' said Bilton; 'I don't want anything. I want just to talk to you.'

Sybil pulled herself together. In other words, she tried to remember that a man in New York, if he crosses an insignificant ocean, is the same man who lands at Liverpool. She succeeded moderately well.

'And how is everybody?' she asked. 'How is Mrs. Palmer, and Amelie, and all the Long Island party?'

'They're all right,' said Bilton. 'Mrs. Palmer's giving a woodland fête this week; it will be very complete, and I guess the sea will come and swallow up Newport. But I didn't come here to talk about Mrs. Palmer.'

He finished taking off his gloves, threw them into his hat, and took a chair exactly opposite her, so that they faced each other as in a waggonette, which to Sybil was an odious vehicle for locomotion. His likeness to Charlie was somehow strangely obliterated to-day; she thought of the latter as of something suffering, in need of protection, whereas the same-featured man who sat opposite her looked particularly capable of self-defence, and, if necessary, of aggression. For the first time she rather feared him, and dislike looked hazily out through the tremor of fear.

'You ran away from America in a great hurry,' he said. 'You left us very desolate.'

Something in this quite harmless speech displeased Sybil immensely.

'Ran away?' she asked.

'Yes, ran away; but only incidentally from America. You ran away from me; I came after you.'

Sybil got up.

'Really, Mr. Bilton,' she said, 'you have left your manners the other side of the Atlantic.'

She went half-way across the room with the intention of ringing the bell, but she stopped before she got there; curiosity about the development of this situation conquered, and she sat down again.

He took no notice of her remark about his manners.

'I have come to ask you to marry me,' he said. 'You are the woman I have been looking for all my life. I will try to make you very happy.'

She answered him without pause.

'I am very grateful to you,' she said; 'but I cannot.'

'You led me to suppose you would,' said he.

'I am very sorry for it.'

There was a moment's silence.

'You changed your mind when you saw me come into Dorothy Emsworth's room,' he said. 'Now, I always meant to tell you about that. It is perfectly true that for nearly two years – '

She held up her hand.

'You need not trouble,' she said. 'I know.'

Bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished.

'I always supposed she would tell you,' he said.

Her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. He wished to know whether Dorothy had told her.

'I think you are hard on me,' he said; 'or perhaps I do not understand. You were, before you knew that, prepared to accept my devotion. Do you reject it now because I have led that sort of life?'

Sybil frowned.

'I can't discuss the question with you,' she said. 'I will just suggest to you this, that you went to see your mistress while I, to whom you had expressed devotion, was staying in the house. If you can't understand my feeling about that, I can't explain it to you.'

'I will promise never to see her again,' said Bilton.

Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this grossness all Sybil's fineness, all her taste, ran up like a wave against a stone sea-jetty, and was broken against it, and the jetty did not know what it had done. She rose, conscious that she was trembling.

'It is a matter of entire indifference to me,' she said, 'when or where or how soon you see her again. I want you to understand that.'

Bilton sat quite unmoved.

'If you were quite certain of yourself, you would not be so violent,' he said. 'You are overstating your feelings; that is because you are rather perplexed as to what they are.'

Sybil turned quickly round to him. She could not help showing her appreciation of this.

'Ah, you are frightfully clever,' she said; 'I do you that justice.'

He rose.

'I shall not give up hope,' he said.

'That is as you please,' she said. 'I have stated as clearly as I can that I can give you none.'

'It is not your fault that you don't convince me,' said he; 'it is the fault of my own determination. Good-bye.'

Sybil shook hands with him.

'What are your movements?' she asked.

'I return to America almost immediately to collect my company for the Coronation Theatre.'

'Ah, you are going to have an American company, then?' she asked.

'Certainly – two companies, rather. I shall have two pieces running simultaneously, with two performances a day. No one has yet thought of producing entertainments to last from about five till eight in the evening.'

When he had gone, she sat down without book, paper, or work, simply to think. Despite herself, and despite the disgust for him which, sown by that moment in Mrs. Emsworth's room, had grown up fungus-like in her mind, this unhurrying, relentless activity, so typical of him and of the nation to which he belonged, which had so stirred her in America, stirred her again. The practical side of her nature responded to it, as an exhausted man responds to alcohol. It woke in her the need to do something definite with her life; it reminded her that the mere observation of other people was not to her, as it was to Ginger, a sufficient excuse for her existence. She felt that her quick brain, her sure analytic grasp, could not find its permanent fruition in mere quickness or in mere analysis. Something of the passion for deeds, for accomplishment, that instinct which blindly spurs on bees to labour and men to work, had got hold of her. But what was she to do? She refused to marry Bilton, for, apart from the fungus of disgust, this very need for activity rejected him. That niche for herself, in front of which should burn in her honour the thick incense of wealth, no longer attracted her. She wanted to accomplish, to make; to be, in however small a degree, an active, creating force. So strong at the present moment was the impulse that she wondered, probably correctly, whether her refusal of Bilton did not dip some root-fibre into this soil.

The thought stirred within her till sitting still became impossible, and she rose and walked up and down the room. Soon her eye fell on the great nosegay of Michaelmas daisies which she had gathered in Charlie's garden that morning before leaving, and, with her keen dislike of waste, her unwillingness that anything should perish without having got the best out of itself, she busied herself for a few moments in filling a tall Venetian vase with water to place them in. The stalks were a little dry and sapless at the ends, and she made another journey to her room in order to get some scissors to cut off the dry pieces. Even a flower should be made to do its best, to look its best, and last as long as possible. Even flowers should be strenuous, and here was she and nine-tenths of her nation drifting like thistledown on a moor wherever the wind happened to carry it. To work – that was the impulse she had brought back with her from America – not to scheme merely with her busy brain, to intrigue, to find, as she always had found, endless amusement and entertainment in watching others, even though she exerted her intellect to its fullest in intelligently watching them; but to make some plan, and carry it out – to find some work to do, and do it.

Suddenly, in the middle of her neat, decisive clipping of the flower-stalks, she stopped and laid the scissors down. Surely there was a piece of work that lay very ready to her hand, though twice in the last day or two she had resented the responsibility being laid on her. But if she took it on herself – if she led Charlie back to interest in life, if she coaxed from him his apathy – was not that worth doing?

There were difficulties in the way sufficient to rouse enthusiasm in one who was much less on fire with the desire for production than she. She would be quite honest with him; she would not hold out any hope of which the fulfilment was not sure; she would not let him think for a moment that she would ever marry him. If the thing was to be done at all, she would do it by inciting him to live for the sake of life, by making him feel the unworthiness of giving in – the unworthiness, too, of the only condition on which he at present cared to live. She was not in love with him, but even if she had been, that would have made but a poor motive. The vitality that was hers was so abundant that surely she could impart some of it to him – make something of it bubble in his veins. His nature, his perception, were of a fine order, and though disappointment first and then disease might have dulled their sensibilities for the time, yet surely their numbness was only temporary – a passing anaesthesia. Anyhow, here lay a work worth doing.

CHAPTER XII

Mr. Lewis S. Palmer was sitting at his table in the sitting-room of the quiet, modest little suite he had taken at the Carlton Hotel, and was studying with some minuteness a large ordnance map of Worcestershire. He had some dozen of the sheets arranged in front of him, and the Molesworth estate, which he had been down to see only the day before, occupied a considerable portion of the central one of them. By him was seated Bilton, who answered, usually monosyllabically, the questions which Mr. Palmer asked him from time to time. 'Yes' or 'No' was generally sufficient; occasionally he thought a moment and then said, 'I don't remember.' Of the answers he received, Lewis Palmer sometimes made a short note.

Finally, he studied the map for a considerable time in silence, and then folded up each sheet separately, and replaced them in the bookstand that stood on the table. Then he read his notes through twice and tore them up.

'Complete the purchase of the Wyfold estate as soon as possible, literally as soon as possible,' he said. 'If you can do it by half-past four this afternoon, let it be done by then, not by five.'

'It's a huge price,' remarked Bilton, 'for half a dozen unproductive farms.'

'It is a necessity,' said the other, 'and a necessity is cheap at any price. But the fact that they ask so much leads me to think they have some kind of inkling as to what I am going to do. That's why I want you to do it at once.'

He rose, and sipped the glass of milk that stood on the side-table.

'There is one more thing,' he said. 'I want someone who will give a general supervision to my affairs here, which are growing important to me. I offer you the place because I like your way of doing business.'

'How much time do you want me to give to it?' he asked.

'Roughly, two days a week, anything of emergency to be dealt with separately.'

Bilton smiled.

'You chiefly deal in emergencies,' he said.

Mr. Palmer tapped the table rather impatiently.

'What do you make a year?' he asked.

'Round about two hundred thousand dollars.'

'I guarantee you a hundred thousand,' he said, 'on the two days a week basis. If it takes you longer than that, let me know. Only my affairs come first.'

Bilton considered this a moment without the slightest trace of exultation or pleasure.

'That's right, then,' he said. 'I guess I'll go off over the Wyfold business.'

'Yes, do. I'm going to look at Seaton House. I shall be in by two. Will you lunch with me?'

'Can't say,' said Bilton. 'I'm rather busy to-day.'

Lewis Palmer continued sipping his milk in a regular, methodical manner till he had finished it, and then put on some rather shabby dogskin gloves, an extremely shiny and obviously perfectly new tall hat, and rang his hand-bell. Almost before it sounded his bedroom door opened noiselessly, and his valet stood there.

'Lunch at two,' he said. 'If Lord Keynes gets here before me, ask him to wait.'

'Lunch for how many, sir?' asked his servant.

'I don't know.'

Mr. Palmer's progress out of the Carlton was made easy for him. Doors flew open as he neared them, and by the time he had reached the pavement his motor had drawn up exactly opposite the entrance, and the door was being held open for him.

Mrs. Palmer had had her eye – or part of an eye – on Seaton House for some time. Quite a year ago her husband had given her to understand that London might very possibly be the headquarters of his business for a considerable time, and when she spent her season there last summer she had considered London as a residence. On general principles, it was highly attractive – Americans, as she knew from experience, could command all that was worth having there, with, on the whole, a less expenditure than was necessary to keep up the same position in New York. Prince Fritz, for instance, in the autumn, had been a very heavy item, and though Prince Fritz had yielded high social dividends in America, yet it was easily possible to 'run' a royalty of the same class in England at a far lower figure. On the other hand, Prince Fritz in London would not be worth exploiting at all – that she recognised – but her conclusions had been that social success of a first-rate order in London could be done on less than the same article in New York. In both towns it was necessary to stand up among the ruck of ordinary hostesses like a mountain-peak; you had in any case to spend much more than most other people. Since, therefore, most other people spent less in London than in New York, the mountain-peak need not be so high. She saw also, with her very clear-sighted eye, that England, the professedly aristocratic, was far more democratic than the professedly democratic America. Lady A – , Duchess B – , Countess C – , she saw, as regards their titles alone, were quite valueless socially in England except among suburban and provincial people. That was natural – the prophet has no honour in his own country. Again, England, or rather that small section of English society which, in her mind, was equivalent to England, was rapidly conforming to the American ideal. It no longer cared for birth or breeding; it wanted to be greatly and continuously amused; a hostess was worth her power of entertainment. Nobody cared here in the least whether her grandfather was a butcher or a boot-black; all they cared was whether they were sufficiently lavishly entertained.

So far she had seen clearly and correctly enough; dimly, she had seen a little farther, and knew that for a reason she could not grasp there were in England some few families who had a cachet altogether independent of wealth. She could have named some half-dozen who floated on the very tip-top of everything, to whose houses Kings and Queens drove up, so to speak, in hansoms, and played about in the garden. They might be poor, they might apparently have no particular power or accomplishment which could account for it, but it was into that circle that Mrs. Palmer now desired to get. To one of these families Bertie Keynes belonged. Anyhow, she had secured him as a son-in-law, she had cut a step on the steep ice-wall. Furthermore, it could not be a disadvantage to have one of the few really fine houses in London for one's own. That was why Mr. Palmer had bought Seaton House.

He drove there now in his noiseless motor-brougham, looking out with his piercing gray eyes on to the grimy splendour of Pall Mall. It was a brilliant winter day, and primrose-coloured sunshine flooded the town, giving an almost Southern gaiety to the streets. As usual, a large extent of the pavement was up for repairs, and it vexed his sense of speed and efficiency to see the leisurely manner in which the work was done. Frankly, England seemed to him in a very bad way; her railways, her trade, her shipping, all the apparatus of her commerce, was haphazard, unconcentrated, uneconomical, just like her mode of making repairs to her streets. Personally, except that at this moment his motor was stopped, he did not at all object to it, since it gave him the opportunity which he had been preparing for of stepping in in the matter of her railways, and introducing American methods. He had, now three months ago, got through his Bill for a direct railway between Liverpool and Southampton, and the work of construction was going on with a speed that fairly took away the breath of contractors who were accustomed to think that slowness was essential to solidity. That boast of solidity, so characteristic of the English, had long amused Lewis Palmer.

'What they call solid,' he had once said to Bilton, 'I call stodgy. They make a brick wall three feet thick, that would bear the weight of the world, when all they want is a two-inch steel girder riveted to an upright. And when they have spent a couple of months in building it, they think they have done better than the man who puts up the steel girder. It is false economy to put up what is not necessary, just as it is false economy not to put up what is. And they think that to paper their railroad cars with looking-glasses in gold frames will console the shareholders for an absence of dividends. No, before we financed the Liverpool and Southampton we made certain of getting the line built the proper way.'

But this line was by no means all the control he meant to get in English railways. Its success, his financial knowledge told him, was certain; it was as sure that the traffic between the ports would come by a directer and faster route than that which already existed as that the sun would rise to-morrow; it was equally sure that facility of communication would lead to increased traffic. What followed?

Cardiff would be forced to get direct communication with his line instead of letting her trade 'walk about in country lanes,' as he expressed it. To do that, a new line from there must join the Liverpool and Southampton at the nearest possible point. That point lay, allowing ample margin, somewhere within the borders of the Molesworth estate, which he had purchased in the autumn, and the Wyfold estate, which he had given orders to Bilton to purchase that day. There was another thing as well. Geologically, it seemed most probable that there was coal on the Molesworth estate. It had been suspected half a dozen years ago, but Gallio, out of a mixture of reasons, partly indifference, partly want of cash, partly repugnance to turn the park into a colliery, had never made so much as a boring for it. But Lewis Palmer was neither indifferent nor bankrupt. He also had no particular feeling about parks. And his gray eyes brightened, and the momentary stoppage of his motor, owing to the slovenly and dilatory way in which the street was being repaired, irritated him no longer. One could not say he was lost in reverie. He was rather picking his way through his reverie with very firm and decisive steps, directing his course to a well-defined goal.

An assemblage of upholsterers, paperers, carpenters, plumbers, furniture dealers, and painters, were awaiting his arrival, for he had promised his wife to get the house into habitable shape before Easter, and, to save time to himself, he took them all round in his inspection and gave orders to each as they went along.

'I shall want a large brocade screen to stand straight in front of the door of the inner hall,' he said. 'Let it be at least seven feet high. Send me the patterns first. Don't put much furniture into the hall; a big plain mahogany table there for cards and small things. A long line of hat-racks there with an umbrella rack below it. Don't think you can make a hat-rack pretty, so make it plain. Half a dozen Chippendale chairs, and an old English steel fender with dogs. I will choose the rugs and stair carpet myself, but polish the whole of the staircase. Put a big vitrine for china in that corner. Cut a circular louvre window above the front – door, and copy the mouldings round it from the north door of the Erechtheum. You will find the drawings in Schultz's book. Big candelabra will stand at the bottom of the stairs. I will send them here. Fit them with electric light, but do not pierce them. There will be six lamps in each of eight candle-power.'

It was extremely characteristic of Mr. Palmer that he went thus into everything himself. Nothing escaped him; he grasped at once the difficulty of bringing the dining-room into directer communication with the kitchen, a problem that had puzzled his architect, and solved it in five minutes by a lift and shutter arrangement so simple that it seemed mere idiocy not to have thought of it. He went into every servant's bedroom, every bathroom, into the sculleries, the coal-hole, the wine-cellar, and knew immediately what was wanted. And the more he saw of the house the better it pleased him; the big oak staircase to the reception-rooms was admirable, and more than admirable was the circular dining-room, with its walls panelled in excellent Italian boiseries, and its cupola-shaped roof, with carved converging wreaths of fruit and flowers. With his amazing knowledge of furniture and decoration, he had in an hour's time chosen the scheme for every room in the house, and provided the dealers, the paperers, the painters, with a week's work in looking out and bringing for his inspection the kind of thing he wanted. But it was not his way to allow a week for a week's work, and these gentleman were appointed to meet him there again in three days' time to submit for his approval carpets, papers, rugs, tables, chairs, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, wardrobes, and specimens of carving. Then, at exactly three minutes to two, he again stepped into his motor to go back to the Carlton, where Bertie Keynes was to lunch with him.

There were other people there as well, he found, waiting for him when he got back, and it was not possible for him to talk privately, as he intended to do, to his future son-in-law. He had observed him once or twice during lunch, not eating much, and apparently rather silent and abstracted, and wondered vaguely if anything was the matter. He guessed indeed that some money difficulty or accumulation of debts might be bothering him, but as his talk with him was to be partly on that subject, he considered that if that was the cause, Bertie's evident pre-occupation would not last very long. He had seen a good deal of him in America, and was very well-disposed towards him, partly because Bertie was such an eminently likeable young man, but mainly because Amelie was so fond of him. For Lewis Palmer – a thing which most people would have been inclined to doubt – had a heart. His business, which occupied him, it is true, more than anything else in the world, was to him a thing quite apart from his human life and human affections. In it he was as relentless and as hard as it is possible for a man to be; as far as an affair was business, he was without pity or compassion, for business is as inhuman a science as algebra, and as unemotional, if properly conducted, as quadratic equations. A heart in such spheres would be anomalous – almost an impropriety. Had Bertie – a thing which he had no thought of doing – crossed Lewis Palmer's path in such a connection, he would have had not the slightest compunction in obliterating him, if he was of the nature of an obstacle, however minute. But as the affianced of Amelie, he was something of an object even of tenderness.

He had a few words with him after lunch.

'Arrived last night, Bertie?' he asked. 'Glad to see you. How are they all?'

Bertie pulled himself together, and smiled.

'All sorts of messages to you,' he said. 'They miss you awfully.'

'I guess I'm not missed most,' remarked Mr. Palmer. 'Can you wait here half an hour or so? I want to talk to you, but I've got other things that won't wait.'

Bertie looked at his watch.

'I can be back in an hour,' he said, 'if that will do.'

'Yes, an hour from now. Quarter to four, then,' and he nodded to him, shut up his heart again, and dismissed him from his thoughts as completely as he had left the room.

Bertie, as Mr. Palmer had supposed, had arrived in London only the evening before, and since Gallio was out of town, spending, in point of fact, a most unremunerative fortnight at Monte Carlo, on a system which lost infallibly, though slowly, had at his invitation taken possession of his chambers in Jermyn Street. He had come down to breakfast in as happy and contented a frame of mind as any young man, gifted with good digestion and a charming girl to whom he was engaged, need hope ever to find himself, and had seen with some satisfaction that there was only one letter waiting for him. He had expected rather to find creditors clamouring round him, for he had a respectable number of them waiting for his leisure cash, and had supposed that they would very politely have notified him of their existence as soon as he arrived. But there was only one letter for him. He opened it; its purport was as simple as a statement of accounts, and type-written. It began:

'DEAR SIR,

'I have the honour to remind you of a document, from which I have extracted the following.'

Then in neat marks of quotation were appended certain sentences.

'Why did you bewitch me if it was not for this?'

'When I am with you I am tongue-tied. Even now my hand halts as I think of you.'

'You are the only woman in the world for me. I offer you all I am and have, and shall be and shall have.'

There was a decent space left after these and other quotations – a silence of good manners. Then the letter continued:

'Mrs. Emsworth has reason to believe that you are about to marry Miss Amelie Palmer. She therefore offers you the chance of regaining possession of the letter, from which we have given you extracts, for the sum of ten thousand pounds (£10,000). Should you decide to accept her offer, you are requested to draw a cheque for the above-mentioned sum to the account of her present manager, Mr. Harold Bilton, who, on receipt of it, will forward to you a sealed envelope containing the complete letter from which the above are extracts. Should this not reach you within twenty-four hours, you are at liberty to stop the cheque. If, however, such cheque does not reach Mr. Harold Bilton by the evening of January 7, he will post the sealed packet in his possession (of the contents of which he has no idea), containing the original letter from which the above are extracts, to Mr. Lewis S. Palmer, Carlton Hotel, London. He has been instructed to do this on behalf of Mrs. Emsworth without admitting any discussion or temporizing on your part.

'We are, sir,

'Your respectful, obedient servants,

'A. B. C.'

The postmark on the envelope was London, W., and the envelope was type-written in purple ink.