The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett [ereader ebook .txt] 📗

as it had been a month earlier, but it was doing a very passable business. At the close of the season the gay butterflies of the social community have a habit of hovering for a day or two in the big hotels before they flutter away to castle and country-house, meadow and moor, lake and stream. The great basket-chairs in the portico were well filled by old and middle-aged gentlemen engaged in enjoying the varied delights of liqueurs, cigars, and the full moon which floated so serenely above the Thames. Here and there a pretty woman on the arm of a cavalier in immaculate attire swept her train as she turned to and fro in the promenade of the terrace. Waiters and uniformed commissionaires and gold-braided doorkeepers moved noiselessly about; at short intervals the chief of the doorkeepers blew his shrill whistle and hansoms drove up with tinkling bell to take away a pair of butterflies to some place of amusement or boredom; occasionally a private carriage drawn by expensive and self-conscious horses put the hansoms to shame by its mere outward glory. It was a hot night, a night for the summer woods, and save for the vehicles there was no rapid movement of any kind. It seemed as though the world⁠—the world, that is to say, of the Grand Babylon⁠—was fully engaged in the solemn processes of digestion and small-talk. Even the long row of the Embankment gas-lamps, stretching right and left, scarcely trembled in the still, warm, caressing air. The stars overhead looked down with many blinkings upon the enormous pile of the Grand Babylon, and the moon regarded it with bland and changeless face; what they thought of it and its inhabitants cannot, unfortunately, be recorded. What Theodore Racksole thought of the moon can be recorded: he thought it was a nuisance. It somehow fascinated his gaze with its silly stare, and so interfered with his complex meditations. He glanced round at the well-dressed and satisfied people⁠—his guests, his customers. They appeared to ignore him absolutely.

Probably only a very small percentage of them had the least idea that this tall spare man, with the iron-grey hair and the thin, firm, resolute face, who wore his American-cut evening clothes with such careless ease, was the sole proprietor of the Grand Babylon, and possibly the richest man in Europe. As has already been stated, Racksole was not a celebrity in England.

The guests of the Grand Babylon saw merely a restless male person, whose restlessness was rather a disturber of their quietude, but with whom, to judge by his countenance, it would be inadvisable to remonstrate. Therefore Theodore Racksole continued his perambulations unchallenged, and kept saying to himself, “I must do something.” But what? He could think of no course to pursue.

At last he walked straight through the hotel and out at the other entrance, and so up the little unassuming side street into the roaring torrent of the narrow and crowded Strand. He jumped on a Putney bus, and paid his fair to Putney, fivepence, and then, finding that the humble occupants of the vehicle stared at the spectacle of a man in evening dress but without a dustcoat, he jumped off again, oblivious of the fact that the conductor jerked a thumb towards him and winked at the passengers as who should say, “There goes a lunatic.” He went into a tobacconist’s shop and asked for a cigar. The shopman mildly inquired what price.

“What are the best you’ve got?” asked Theodore Racksole.

“Five shillings each, sir,” said the man promptly.

“Give me a penny one,” was Theodore Racksole’s laconic request, and he walked out of the shop smoking the penny cigar. It was a new sensation for him.

He was inhaling the aromatic odours of Eugène Rimmel’s establishment for the sale of scents when a gentleman, walking slowly in the opposite direction, accosted him with a quiet, “Good evening, Mr. Racksole.” The millionaire did not at first recognize his interlocutor, who wore a travelling overcoat, and was carrying a handbag. Then a slight, pleased smile passed over his features, and he held out his hand.

“Well, Mr. Babylon,” he greeted the other, “of all persons in the wide world you are the man I would most have wished to meet.”

“You flatter me,” said the little Anglicized Swiss.

“No, I don’t,” answered Racksole; “it isn’t my custom, any more than it’s yours. I wanted to have a real good long yarn with you, and lo! here you are! Where have you sprung from?”

“From Lausanne,” said Félix Babylon. “I had finished my duties there, I had nothing else to do, and I felt homesick. I felt the nostalgia of London, and so I came over, just as you see,” and he raised the handbag for Racksole’s notice. “One toothbrush, one razor, two slippers, eh?” He laughed. “I was wondering as I walked along where I should stay⁠—me, Félix Babylon, homeless in London.”

“I should advise you to stay at the Grand Babylon,” Racksole laughed back. “It is a good hotel, and I know the proprietor personally.”

“Rather expensive, is it not?” said Babylon.

“To you, sir,” answered Racksole, “the inclusive terms will be exactly half a crown a week. Do you accept?”

“I accept,” said Babylon, and added, “You are very good, Mr. Racksole.”

They strolled together back to the hotel, saying nothing in particular, but feeling very content with each other’s company.

“Many customers?” asked Félix Babylon.

“Very tolerable,” said Racksole, assuming as much of the air of the professional hotel proprietor as he could. “I think I may say in the storekeeper’s phrase, that if there is any business about I am doing it. Tonight the people are all on the terrace in the portico⁠—it’s so confoundedly hot⁠—and the consumption of ice is simply enormous⁠—nearly as large as it would be in New York.”

“In that case,” said Babylon politely, “let me offer you another cigar.”

“But I have not finished this one.”

“That is just why I wish to offer you another one. A cigar such as yours, my good friend, ought never to