Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days - Arnold Bennett (books to read for self improvement txt) 📗

and curtly gave the address of the Grand Babylon Hotel. And when the cab was fairly at speed, and not before, he abandoned himself to a fit of candid, unrestrained cursing. He cursed largely and variously and shamelessly both in English and in French. And he did not cease cursing. It was a reaction which I do not care to characterize; but I will not conceal that it occurred. The fit spent itself before he reached the hotel, for most of Parliament Street was blocked for the spectacular purposes of his funeral, and his driver had to seek devious ways. The cursing over, he began to smooth his plumes in detail. At the hotel, out of sheer nervousness, he gave the cabman half-a-crown, which was preposterous.

Another cab drove up nearly at the exact instant of his arrival. And, as a capping to the day, Mrs. Alice Challice stepped out of it.

* * * * *


CHAPTER V


Alice on Hotels

She was wearing the same red roses.

"Oh!" she said, very quickly, pouring out the words generously from the inexhaustible mine of her good heart. "I'm so sorry I missed you Saturday night. I can't tell you how sorry I am. Of course it was all my fault. I oughtn't to have got into the lift without you. I ought to have waited. When I was in the lift I wanted to get out, but the lift-man was too quick for me. And then on the platforms--well, there was such a crowd it was useless! I knew it was useless. And you not having my address either! I wondered whatever you would think of me."

"My dear lady!" he protested. "I can assure you I blamed only myself. My hat blew off, and----"

"Did it now!" she took him up breathlessly. "Well, all I want you to understand really is that I'm not one of those silly sort of women that go losing themselves. No. Such a thing's never happened to me before, and I shall take good care----"

She glanced round. He had paid both the cabmen, who were departing, and he and Mrs. Alice Challice stood under the immense glass portico of the Grand Babylon, exposed to the raking stare of two commissionaires.

"So you are staying here!" she said, as if laying hold of a fact which she had hitherto hesitated to touch.

"Yes," he said. "Won't you come in?"

He took her into the rich gloom of the Grand Babylon dashingly, fighting against the demon of shyness and beating it off with great loss. They sat down in a corner of the principal foyer, where a few electric lights drew attention to empty fauteuils and the blossoms on the Aubusson carpet. The world was at lunch.

"And a fine time I had getting your address!" said she. "Of course I wrote at once to Selwood Terrace, as soon as I got home, but I had the wrong number, somehow, and I kept waiting and waiting for an answer, and the only answer I received was the returned letter. I knew I'd got the street right, and I said, 'I'll find that house if I have to ring every bell in Selwood Terrace, yes', and knock every knocker!' Well, I did find it, and then they wouldn't give me your address. They said 'letters would be forwarded,' if you please. But I wasn't going to have any more letter business, no thank you! So I said I wouldn't go without the address. It was Mr. Duncan Farll's clerk that I saw. He's living there for the time being. A very nice young man. We got quite friendly. It seems Mr. Duncan Farll was in a state when he found the will. The young man did say that he broke a typewriter all to pieces. But the funeral being in Westminster Abbey consoled him. It wouldn't have consoled me--no, not it! However, he's very rich himself, so that doesn't matter. The young man said if I'd call again he'd ask his master if he might give me your address. A rare fuss over an address, thought I to myself. But there! Lawyers! So I called again, and he gave it me. I could have come yesterday. I very nearly wrote last night. But I thought on the whole I'd better wait till the funeral was over. I thought it would be nicer. It's over now, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Priam Farll.

She smiled at him with grave sympathy, comfortably and sensibly. "And right down relieved you must be!" she murmured. "It must have been very trying for you."

"In a way," he answered hesitatingly, "it was."

Taking off her gloves, she glanced round about her, as a thief must glance before opening the door, and then, leaning suddenly towards him, she put her hands to his neck and touched his collar. "No, no!" she said. "Let me do it. I can do it. There's no one looking. It's unbuttoned; the necktie was holding it in place, but it's got quite loose now. There! I can do it. I see you've got two funny moles on your neck, close together. How lucky! That's it!" A final pat!

Now, no woman had ever patted Priam Farll's necktie before, much less buttoned his collar, and still much less referred to the two little moles, one hirsute, the other hairless, which the collar hid--when it was properly buttoned! The experience was startling for him in the extreme. It might have made him very angry, had the hands of Mrs. Challice not been--well, nurse's hands, soft hands, persuasive hands, hands that could practise impossible audacities with impunity. Imagine a woman, uninvited and unpermitted, arranging his collar and necktie for him in the largest public room of the Grand Babylon, and then talking about his little moles! It would have been unimaginable! Yet it happened. And moreover, he had not disliked it. She sat back in her chair as though she had done nothing in the least degree unusual.

"I can see you must have been very upset," she said gently, "though he has only left you a pound a week. Still, that's better than a bat in the eye with a burnt stick."

A bat in the eye with a burnt stick reminded him vaguely of encounters with the police; otherwise it conveyed no meaning to his mind.

"I hope you haven't got to go on duty at once," she said after a pause. "Because you really do look as if you needed a rest, and a cup of tea or something of that, I'm quite ashamed to have come bothering you so soon."

"Duty?" he questioned. "What duty?"

"Why," she exclaimed, "haven't you got a new place?"

"New place!" he repeated after. "What do you mean?"

"Why, as valet."

There was certainly danger in his tendency to forget that he was a valet. He collected himself.

"No," he said, "I haven't got a new place."

"Then why are you staying here?" she cried. "I thought you were simply here with a new master, Why are you staying here alone?"

"Oh," he replied, abashed, "it seemed a convenient place. It was just by chance that I came here."

"Convenient place indeed!" she said stoutly. "I never heard of such a thing!"

He perceived that he had shocked her, pained her. He saw that some ingenious defence of himself was required; but he could find none. So he said, in his confusion--

"Suppose we go and have something to eat? I do want a bit of lunch, as you say, now I come to think of it. Will you?"

"What? Here?" she demanded apprehensively.

"Yes," he said. "Why not?"

"Well--!"

"Come along!" he said, with fine casualness, and conducted her to the eight swinging glass doors that led to the salle a manger of the Grand Babylon. At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth of gold. She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and hats and everything that you read about in the Lady's Pictorial, and the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she stopped suddenly. And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon, wearing a mayoral chain, who had started out to meet them, stopped also.

"No!" she said. "I don't feel as if I could eat here. I really couldn't."

"But why?"

"Well," she said, "I couldn't fancy it somehow. Can't we go somewhere else?"

"Certainly we can," he agreed with an eagerness that was more than polite.

She thanked him with another of her comfortable, sensible smiles--a smile that took all embarrassment out of the dilemma, as balm will take irritation from a wound. And gently she removed her hat and gown, and her gestures and speech, and her comfortableness, from those august precincts. And they descended to the grill-room, which was relatively noisy, and where her roses were less conspicuous than the helmet of Navarre, and her frock found its sisters and cousins from far lands.

"I'm not much for these restaurants," she said, over grilled kidneys.

"No?" he responded tentatively. "I'm sorry. I thought the other night----"

"Oh yes," she broke in, "I was very glad to go, the other night, to that place, very glad. But, you see, I'd never been in a restaurant before."

"Really?"

"No," she said, "and I felt as if I should like to try one. And the young lady at the post office had told me that that one was a splendid one. So it is. It's beautiful. But of course they ought to be ashamed to offer you such food. Now do you remember that sole? Sole! It was no more sole than this glove's sole. And if it had been cooked a minute, it had been cooked an hour, and waiting. And then look at the prices. Oh yes, I couldn't help seeing the bill."

"I thought it was awfully cheap," said he.

"Well, I didn't!" said she. "When you think that a good housekeeper can keep everything going on ten shillings a head a week.... Why, it's simply scandalous! And I suppose this place is even dearer?"

He avoided the question. "This is a better place altogether," he said. "In fact, I don't know many places in Europe where one can eat better than one does here."

"Don't you?" she said indulgently, as if saying, "Well, I know one, at any rate."

"They say," he continued, "that there is no butter used in this place that costs less than three shillings a pound."

"No butter costs them three shillings a pound," said she.

"Not in London," said he. "They have it from Paris."

"And do you believe that?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Well, I don't. Any one that pays more than one-and-nine a pound for butter, at the most, is a fool, if you'll excuse me saying the word. Not but what this is good butter. I couldn't get as good in Putney for less than eighteen pence."

She made him feel like a child who has a great deal to pick up from a kindly but firm sister.

"No, thank you," she said, a little dryly, to the waiter who proffered a further supply of chip potatoes.

"Now don't say they're cold,"