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

lunched together at Thomas’s Chophouse, in the city of London, upon mutton-chops and coffee. The millionaire soon discovered that he had got hold of a keen-witted man and a person of much insight.

“Tell me,” said Hazell, when they had reached the cigarette stage, “are the magazine writers anything like correct?”

“What do you mean?” asked Racksole, mystified.

“Well, you’re a millionaire⁠—‘one of the best,’ I believe. One often sees articles on and interviews with millionaires, which describe their private railroad cars, their steam yachts on the Hudson, their marble stables, and so on, and so on. Do you happen to have those things?”

“I have a private car on the New York Central, and I have a two thousand ton schooner-yacht⁠—though it isn’t on the Hudson. It happens just now to be on East River. And I am bound to admit that the stables of my uptown place are fitted with marble.” Racksole laughed.

“Ah!” said Hazell. “Now I can believe that I am lunching with a millionaire. It’s strange how facts like those⁠—unimportant in themselves⁠—appeal to the imagination. You seem to me a real millionaire now. You’ve given me some personal information; I’ll give you some in return. I earn three hundred a year, and perhaps sixty pounds a year extra for overtime. I live by myself in two rooms in Muscovy Court. I’ve as much money as I need, and I always do exactly what I like outside office. As regards the office, I do as little work as I can, on principle⁠—it’s a fight between us and the Commissioners who shall get the best. They try to do us down, and we try to do them down⁠—it’s pretty even on the whole. All’s fair in war, you know, and there ain’t no ten commandments in a government office.”

Racksole laughed. “Can you get off this afternoon?” he asked.

“Certainly,” said Hazell; “I’ll get one of my pals to sign on for me, and then I shall be free.”

“Well,” said Racksole, “I should like you to come down with me to the Grand Babylon. Then we can talk over my little affair at length. And may we go on your boat? I want to meet your crew.”

“That will be all right,” Hazell remarked. “My two men are the idlest, most soulless chaps you ever saw. They eat too much, and they have an enormous appetite for beer; but they know the river, and they know their business, and they will do anything within the fair game if they are paid for it, and aren’t asked to hurry.”

That night, just after dark, Theodore Racksole embarked with his new friend George Hazell in one of the black-painted Customs wherries, manned by a crew of two men⁠—both the later freemen of the river, a distinction which carries with it certain privileges unfamiliar to the mere landsman. It was a cloudy and oppressive evening, not a star showing to illumine the slow tide, now just past its flood. The vast forms of steamers at anchor⁠—chiefly those of the General Steam Navigation and the Aberdeen Line⁠—heaved themselves high out of the water, straining sluggishly at their mooring buoys. On either side the naked walls of warehouses rose like grey precipices from the stream, holding forth quaint arms of steam-cranes. To the west the Tower Bridge spanned the river with its formidable arch, and above that its suspended footpath⁠—a hundred and fifty feet from earth.

Down towards the east and the Pool of London a forest of funnels and masts was dimly outlined against the sinister sky. Huge barges, each steered by a single man at the end of a pair of giant oars, lumbered and swirled downstream at all angles. Occasionally a tug snorted busily past, flashing its red and green signals and dragging an unwieldy tail of barges in its wake. Then a Margate passenger steamer, its electric lights gleaming from every porthole, swerved round to anchor, with its load of two thousand fatigued excursionists. Over everything brooded an air of mystery⁠—a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in the very heart of London⁠—the most prosaic city in the world. He had a queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of waters at this weird hour of ten o’clock. It appeared incredible to him that only a mile or two away people were sitting in theatres applauding farces, and that at Cannon Street Station, a few yards off, other people were calmly taking the train to various highly respectable suburbs whose names he was gradually learning. He had the uplifting sensation of being in another world which comes to us sometimes amid surroundings violently different from our usual surroundings. The most ordinary noises⁠—of men calling, of a chain running through a slot, of a distant siren⁠—translated themselves to his ears into terrible and haunting sounds, full of portentous significance. He looked over the side of the boat into the brown water, and asked himself what frightful secrets lay hidden in its depth. Then he put his hand into his hip-pocket and touched the stock of his Colt revolver⁠—that familiar substance comforted him.

The oarsmen had instructions to drop slowly down to the Pool, as the wide reach below the Tower is called. These two men had not been previously informed of the precise object of the expedition, but now that they were safely afloat Hazell judged it expedient to give them some notion of it. “We expect to come across a rather suspicious steam launch,” he said. “My friend here is very anxious to get a sight of her, and until he has seen her nothing definite can be done.”

“What sort of a craft is she, sir?” asked the stroke oar, a fat-faced man who seemed absolutely incapable of any serious exertion.

“I don’t know,” Racksole replied; “but as near as I