The Regent, Arnold Bennett [read after .txt] 📗

He was anxious about his best lounge-suit. Mr. Sachs telephoned, and a valet came. Then he wanted a siphon of soda-water, and Mr. Sachs telephoned, and a waiter came. Then it was a newspaper he required. Mr. Sachs telephoned and a page came. All these functionaries, together with two reporters, peopled Mr. Trent's bedroom more or less simultaneously. It was Edward Henry's bright notion to add to them a doctor--a doctor whom Mr. Sachs knew, a doctor who would perceive at once that bed was the only proper place for Carlo Trent.

"Now," said Edward Henry, when he and Mr. Sachs were participating in a private lunch amid the splendours and the grim, silent service of the latter's suite at the Stuyvesant, "I have fully grasped the fact that I am in New York. It is one o'clock and after, and as soon as ever this meal is over I have just _got_ to find Isabel Joy. You must understand that on this trip New York for me is merely a town where Isabel Joy happens to be."

"Well," replied Mr. Sachs, "I reckon I can put you on to that. _She's going to be photographed at two o'clock by Rentoul Smiles_. I happen to know because Rent's a particular friend of mine."

"A photographer, you say?"

Mr. Sachs controlled himself. "Do you mean to say you've not heard of Rentoul Smiles?... Well, he's called 'Man's photographer.' He has never photographed a woman! Won't! At least, wouldn't! But he's going to photograph Isabel. So you may guess that he considers Isabel _some_ woman, eh?"

"And how will that help me?" inquired Edward Henry.

"Why! I'll take you up to Rent's," Mr. Sachs comforted him. "It's close by--corner of Thirty-ninth and Five."

"Tell me," Edward Henry demanded, with immense relief, "she hasn't got herself arrested yet, has she?"

"No. And she won't!"

"Why not?"

"The police have been put wise," said Mr. Sachs.

"Put wise?"

"Yes. _Put wise_!"

"I see," said Edward Henry.

But he did not see. He only half saw.

"As a matter of fact," said Mr. Sachs, "Isabel can't get away with the goods unless she fixes the police to lock her up for a few hours. And she'll not succeed in that. Her hundred days are up in London next Sunday. So there'll be no time for her to be arrested and bailed out either at Liverpool or Fishguard. And that's her only chance. I've seen Isabel, and if you ask me my opinion she's down and out."

"Never mind!" said Edward Henry with glee.

"I guess what you're after her for," said Mr. Seven Sachs, with an air of deep knowledge.

"The deuce you do!"

"Yes, sir! And let me tell you that dozens of 'em have been after her already. But she wouldn't! Nothing would tempt her."

"Never mind!" Edward Henry smiled.


II


When Edward Henry stood by the side of Mr. Sachs in a doorway half shielded by a _portiere_, and gazed unseen into the great studio of Mr. Rentoul Smiles, he comprehended that he was indeed under powerful protection in New York. At the entrance on Fifth Avenue he and Sachs had passed through a small crowd of assorted men, chiefly young, whom Sachs had greeted in the mass with the smiling words, "Well, boys!" Other men were within. Still another went up with them in the elevator, but no further. They were reporters of the entire world's press, to each of whom Isabel Joy had been specially "assigned." They were waiting; they would wait.

Mr. Rentoul Smiles having been warned by telephone of the visit of his beloved friend, Seven Sachs, Mr. Sachs and his English _protege_ had been received at Smiles's outer door by a clerk who knew exactly what to do with them, and did it.

"Is she here?" Mr. Sachs had murmured.

"Yep," the clerk had negligently replied.

And now Edward Henry beheld the objective of his pilgrimage, her whose personality, portrait and adventures had been filling the newspapers of two hemispheres for three weeks past. She was not realistically like her portraits. She was a little, thin, pale, obviously nervous woman, of any age from thirty-five to fifty, with fair untidy hair, and pale grey-blue eyes that showed the dreamer, the idealist and the harsh fanatic. She looked as though a moderate breeze would have overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit of her vision. The blind dreaming force behind her apparent frailty would strike terror into the heart of any man intelligent enough to understand it. Edward Henry had an inward shudder. "Great Scott!" he reflected. "I shouldn't like to be ill and have Isabel for a nurse!"

And his mind at once flew to Nellie, and then to Elsie April. "And so she's going to marry Wrissell!" he reflected, and could scarcely believe it.

Then he violently wrenched his mind back to the immediate objective. He wondered why Isabel Joy should wear a bowler hat and a mustard-coloured jacket that resembled a sporting man's overcoat; and why these garments suited her. With a whip in her hand she could have sat for a jockey. And yet she was a woman, and very feminine, and probably old enough to be Elsie April's mother! A disconcerting world, he thought.

The "man's photographer," as he was described in copper on Fifth Avenue and in gold on his own doors, was a big, loosely-articulated male, who loured over the trifle Isabel like a cloud over a sheep in a great field. Edward Henry could only see his broad bending back as he posed in athletic attitudes behind the camera.

Suddenly Rentoul Smiles dashed to a switch, and Isabel's wistful face was transformed into that of a drowned corpse, into a dreadful harmony of greens and purples.

"Now," said Rentoul Smiles, in a deep voice that was like a rich unguent, "we'll try again. We'll just play around that spot. Look into my eyes. Not _at_ my eyes, my dear woman, _into_ them! Just a little more challenge--a little more! That's it. Don't wink, for the land's sake! Now."

He seized a bulb at the end of a tube and slowly squeezed--squeezed it tragically and remorselessly, twisting himself as if suffering in sympathy with the bulb, and then in a wide, sweeping gesture he flung the bulb on to the top of the camera and ejaculated:

"Ha!"

Edward Henry thought:

"I would give ten pounds to see Rentoul Smiles photograph Sir John Pilgrim." But the next instant the forgotten sensation of hurry was upon him once more. Quick, quick, Rentoul Smiles! Edward Henry's scorching desire was to get done and leave New York.

"Now, Miss Isabel," Mr. Smiles proceeded, exasperatingly deliberate, "d'you know, I feel kind of guilty? I have got a little farm out in Westchester County and I'm making a little English pathway up the garden with a gate at the end. I woke up this morning and began to think about the quaint English form of that gate, and just how I would have it." He raised a finger. "But I ought to have been thinking about you. I ought to have been saying to myself, 'To-day I have to photograph Isabel Joy,' and trying to understand in meditation the secrets of your personality. I'm sorry! Now, don't talk. Keep like that. Move your head round. Go on! Go on! Move it. Don't be afraid. This place belongs to you. It's yours. Whatever you do, we've got people here who'll straighten up after you.... D'you know why I've made money? I've made money so that I can take _you_ this afternoon, and tell a two-hundred-dollar client to go to the deuce. That's why I've made money. Put your back against the chair, like an Englishwoman. That's it. No, don't _talk_, I tell you. Now look joyful, hang it! Look joyful.... No, no! Joy isn't a contortion. It's something right deep down. There, there!"

The lubricant voice rolled on while Rentoul Smiles manipulated the camera. He clasped the bulb again and again threw it dramatically away.

"I'm through!" he said. "Don't expect anything very grand, Miss Isabel. What I've been trying to do this afternoon is my interpretation of you as I've studied your personality in your speeches. If I believed wholly in your cause, or if I wholly disbelieved in it, my work would not have been good. Any value that it has will be due to the sympathetic impartiality of my spiritual attitude. Although"--he menaced her with the licensed familiarity of a philosopher--"although, lady, I must say that I felt you were working against me all the time.... This way!"

(Edward Henry, recalling the comparative simplicity of the London photographer at Wilkins's, thought: "How profoundly they understand photography in America!")

Isabel Joy rose and glanced at the watch in her bracelet, then followed the direction of the male hand and vanished.

Rentoul Smiles turned instantly to the other doorway.

"How do, Rent?" said Seven Sachs, coming forward.

"How do, Seven?" Mr. Rentoul Smiles winked.

"This is my good friend, Alderman Machin, the theatre-manager from London."

"Glad to meet you, sir."

"She's not gone, has she?" asked Sachs, hurriedly.

"No, my housekeeper wanted to talk to her. Come along."

And in the waiting-room, full of permanent examples of the results of Mr. Rentoul Smiles's spiritual attitude towards his fellow-men, Edward Henry was presented to Isabel Joy. The next instant the two men and the housekeeper had unobtrusively retired, and he was alone with his objective. In truth, Seven Sachs was a notable organizer.


III


She was sitting down in a cosy-corner, her feet on a footstool, and she seemed a negligible physical quantity as he stood in front of her. This was she who had worsted the entire judicial and police system of Chicago, who spoke pentecostal tongues, who had circled the globe, and held enthralled--so journalists computed--more than a quarter of a million of the inhabitants of Marseilles, Athens, Port Said, Candy, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Hawaii, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, and lastly, New York! This was she!

"I understand we're going home on the same ship!" he was saying.

She looked up at him, almost appealingly.

"You won't see anything of me, though," she said.

"Why not?"

"Tell me," said she, not answering his question, "what do they say of me, really, in England? I don't mean the newspapers. For instance, well--the Azure Society. Do you know it?"

He nodded.

"Tell me," she repeated.

He related the episode of the telegram at the private first performance of "The Orient Pearl."

She burst out in a torrent of irrelevant protest:

"The New York police have not treated me right. It would have cost them nothing to arrest me and let me go. But they wouldn't. Every man in the force--you hear me, every man--has had strict orders to leave me unmolested. It seems they resent my dealings with the police in Chicago, where I brought about the dismissal of four officers, so they say. And so I'm to be boycotted in this manner! Is that argument, Mr. Machin? Tell me. You're a man, but honestly, is it argument? Why, it's just as mean and despicable as brute force."

"I agree with you," said Edward Henry, softly.

"Do they really think it will harm the militant cause? Do they _really_ think so? No, it will only harm me. I made a mistake in tactics. I trusted--fool!--to the chivalry of the United States.