The Regent by Arnold Bennett (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

from Sir Nicholas Winkworth, Bart., at a salary of a pound a week and all found.

Joseph seemed to await instructions. And Edward Henry was placed in a new quandary. He knew not whether the small bedroom in the suite was for a child, or for his wife's maid, or for his valet. Quite probably it would be a sacrilegious defiance of precedent to put a valet in the small bedroom. Quite probably Wilkins's had a floor for private valets in the roof. Again, quite probably, the small bedroom might be, after all, specially destined for valets! He could not decide, and the most precious thing in the universe to him in that crisis was his reputation as a man-about-town in the eyes of Joseph.

But something had to be done.

"You'll sleep in this room," said Edward Henry, indicating the door. "I may want you in the night."

"Yes, sir," said Joseph.

"I presume you'll dine up here, sir," said Joseph, glancing at the lounge-suit.

His father had informed him of his new master's predicament.

"I shall," said Edward Henry. "You might get the menu."


IV


He had a very bad night indeed--owing, no doubt, partly to a general uneasiness in his unusual surroundings, and partly also to a special uneasiness caused by the propinquity of a sleeping valet; but the main origin of it was certainly his dreadful anxiety about the question of a first-class tailor. In the organization of his new life a first-class tailor was essential, and he was not acquainted with a first-class London tailor. He did not know a great deal concerning clothes, though quite passably well dressed for a provincial, but he knew enough to be sure that it was impossible to judge the merits of a tailor by his signboard, and therefore that if, wandering in the precincts of Bond Street, he entered the first establishment that "looked likely," he would have a good chance of being "done in the eye." So he phrased it to himself as he lay in bed. He wanted a definite and utterly reliable address.

He rang the bell. Only, as it happened to be the wrong bell, he obtained the presence of Joseph in a roundabout way, through the agency of a gentleman-in-waiting. Such, however, is the human faculty of adaptation to environment that he was merely amused in the morning by an error which, on the previous night, would have put him into a sweat.

"Good morning, sir," said Joseph.

Edward Henry nodded, his hands under his head as he lay on his back. He decided to leave all initiative to Joseph. The man drew up the blinds, and closing the double windows at the top opened them very wide at the bottom.

"It is a rainy morning, sir," said Joseph, letting in vast quantities of air from Devonshire Square.

Clearly, Sir Nicholas Winkworth had been a breezy master.

"Oh!" murmured Edward Henry.

He felt a careless contempt for Joseph's flunkeyism. Hitherto he had had the theory that footmen, valets and all male personal attendants were an inexcusable excrescence on the social fabric. The mere sight of them often angered him, though for some reason he had no objection whatever to servility in a nice-looking maid--indeed, rather enjoyed it. But now, in the person of Joseph, he saw that there were human or half-human beings born to self-abasement, and that, if their destiny was to be fulfilled, valetry was a necessary institution. He had no pity for Joseph, no shame in employing him. He scorned Joseph; and yet his desire, as a man-about-town, to keep Joseph's esteem, was in no way diminished!

"Shall I prepare your bath, sir?" asked Joseph, stationed in a supple attitude by the side of the bed.

Edward Henry was visited by an idea.

"Have you had yours?" he demanded like a pistol-shot.

Edward Henry saw that Sir Nicholas had never asked that particular question.

"No, sir."

"Not had your bath, man! What on earth do you mean by it? Go and have your bath at once!"

A faint sycophantic smile lightened the amazed features of Joseph. And Edward Henry thought: "It's astonishing, all the same, the way they can read their masters. This chap has seen already that I'm a card. And yet how?"

"Yes, sir," said Joseph.

"Have your bath in the bathroom here. And be sure to leave everything in order for me."

"Yes, sir."

As soon as Joseph had gone Edward Henry jumped out of bed and listened. He heard the discreet Joseph respectfully push the bolt of the bathroom door. Then he crept with noiseless rapidity to the small bedroom and was aware therein of a lack of order and of ventilation. The rich and distinguished overcoat was hanging on the brass knob at the foot of the bed. He seized it, and, scrutinizing the loop, read in yellow letters: "_Quayther & Cuthering_, 47 _Vigo Street, W_." He knew that Quayther & Cuthering must be the tailors of Sir Nicholas Winkworth, and hence first-class.

Hoping for the best, and putting his trust in the general decency of human nature, he did not trouble himself with the problem: was the overcoat a gift or an appropriation? But he preferred to assume the generosity of Sir Nicholas rather than the dishonesty of Joseph.

Repassing the bathroom door he knocked loudly on its glass.

"Don't be all day!" he cried. He was in a hurry now.

An hour later he said to Joseph:

"I'm going down to Quayther & Cuthering's."

"Yes, sir," said Joseph, obviously much reassured.

"Nincompoop!" Edward Henry exclaimed secretly. "The fool thinks better of me because my tailors are first-class."

But Edward Henry had failed to notice that he himself was thinking better of himself because he had adopted first-class tailors.

Beneath the main door of his suite, as he went forth, he found a business card of the West End Electric Brougham Supply Agency. And downstairs, solely to impress his individuality on the hall-porter, he showed the card to that vizier with the casual question:

"These people any good?"

"An excellent firm, sir."

"What do they charge?"

"By the week, sir?"

He hesitated. "Yes, by the week."

"Twenty guineas, sir."

"Well, you might telephone for one. Can you get it at once?"

"Certainly, sir."

The vizier turned towards the telephone in his lair.

"I say--" said Edward Henry.

"Sir?"

"I suppose one will be enough?"

"Well, sir, as a rule, yes," said the vizier, calmly. "Sometimes I get a couple for one family, sir."

Though he had started jocularly, Edward Henry finished by blenching. "I think one will do ... I may possibly send for my own car."

He drove to Quayther & Cuthering's in his electric brougham and there dropped casually the name of Winkworth. He explained humorously his singular misadventure of the _Minnetonka_, and was very successful therewith--so successful, indeed, that he actually began to believe in the reality of the adventure himself, and had an irrational impulse to dispatch a wireless message to his bewildered valet on board the _Minnetonka_.

Subsequently he paid other fruitful visits in the neighbourhood, and at about half-past eleven the fruit was arriving at Wilkins's in the shape of many parcels and boxes, comprising diverse items in the equipment of a man-about-town, such as tie-clips and Innovation trunks.

Returning late to Wilkins's for lunch he marched jauntily into the large brilliant restaurant and commenced an adequate repast. Of course he was still wearing his mediocre lounge-suit (his sole suit for another two days), but somehow the consciousness that Quayther & Cuthering were cutting out wondrous garments for him in Vigo Street stiffened his shoulders and gave a mysterious style to that lounge-suit.

At lunch he made one mistake and enjoyed one very remarkable piece of luck.

The mistake was to order an artichoke. He did not know how to eat an artichoke. He had never tried to eat an artichoke, and his first essay in this difficult and complex craft was a sad fiasco. It would not have mattered if, at the table next to his own, there had not been two obviously experienced women, one ill-dressed, with a red hat, the other well-dressed, with a blue hat; one middle-aged, the other much younger; but both very observant. And even so, it would scarcely have mattered had not the younger woman been so slim, pretty and alluring. While tolerably careless of the opinion of the red-hatted, plain woman of middle-age, he desired the unqualified approval of the delightful young thing in the blue hat. They certainly interested themselves in his manoeuvres with the artichoke, and their amusement was imperfectly concealed. He forgave the blue hat, but considered that the red hat ought to have known better. They could not be princesses, nor even titled aristocrats. He supposed them to belong to some baccarat-playing county family.

The piece of luck consisted in the passage down the restaurant of the Countess of Chell, who had been lunching there with a party, and whom he had known locally in more gusty days. The Countess bowed stiffly to the red hat, and the red hat responded with eager fulsomeness. It seemed to be here as it no longer was in the Five Towns; everybody knew everybody! The red hat and the blue might be titled, after all, he thought. Then, by sheer accident, the Countess caught sight of himself and stopped dead, bringing her escort to a standstill behind her. Edward Henry blushed and rose.

"Is it _you_, Mr. Machin?" murmured the still lovely creature warmly.

They shook hands. Never had social pleasure so thrilled him. The conversation was short. He did not presume on the past. He knew that here he was not on his own ashpit, as they say in the Five Towns. The Countess and her escort went forward. Edward Henry sat down again.

He gave the red and the blue hats one calm glance, which they failed to withstand. The affair of the artichoke was for ever wiped out.

After lunch he went forth again in his electric brougham. The weather had cleared. The opulent streets were full of pride and sunshine. And as he penetrated into one shop after another, receiving kowtows, obeisances, curtsies, homage, surrender, resignation, submission, he gradually comprehended that it takes all sorts to make a world, and that those who are called to greatness must accept with dignity the ceremonials inseparable from greatness. And the world had never seemed to him so fine, nor any adventure so diverting and uplifting as this adventure.

When he returned to his suite his private corridor was piled up with a numerous and excessively attractive assortment of parcels. Joseph took his overcoat and hat and a new umbrella and placed an easy-chair conveniently for him in the drawing-room.

"Get my bill," he said shortly to Joseph as he sank into the gilded fauteuil.

"Yes, sir."

One advantage of a valet, he discovered, is that you can order him to do things which to do yourself would more than exhaust your moral courage.

The black-calved gentleman-in-waiting brought the bill. It lay on a salver and was folded, conceivably so as to break the shock of it to the recipient.

Edward Henry took it.

"Wait a minute," he said.

He read on the bill: "Apartments, L8. Dinner, L1, 2s. 0d. Breakfast, 6s. 6d. Lunch, 18s. Half Chablis, 6s. 6d. Valet's board, 10s. Tooth-brush, 2s. 6d."

"That's a bit thick, half-a-crown for that tooth-brush!" he said to himself. "However--"

The next instant he blenched once more.