Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 14
THE number of the Pelican bedrooms occupied during the winter months averaged twenty-three. Mr. Roland was losing money steadily, and Sorrell saw the old black gulf reopening under his feet. Moreover, his income from tips had fallen by half, and after paying Mr. Porteous and Mrs. Garland he had little to boast of in the way of savings.
Yet his dread of disaster made him work the harder. His thoroughness was fanatical, nor was he the only member of the Pelican's staff who had no desire to seek work elsewhere. An enlightened self interest reinforced the popularity of Thomas Roland, and Mrs. Marks and Fanny Garland were every whit as keen as Sorrell to make the Pelican a place of comfort and of efficiency. As a matter of fact Tom Roland had received but one solitary complaint during the course of six months, and this was from an American who thought that he had bought the earth.
The responsible members of the staff knew nearly as much as Sorrell did, and Fanny Garland, in her abrupt and cheerful way, put her philosophy into words.
"It must pay if Roland holds on long enough. I've been in a dozen places—on and off—and not one of them was a patch on the Pelican. Charged their people much the same prices too. You should have seen some of the kitchens and the bedrooms! All I can say is if people don't know the difference between a place like this—and the ordinary take it or leave it pub"
"People are such easy fools," said Mrs. Marks. "They go on taking the same second-rate stuff,—and grumbling. Honesty doesn't always pay."
"It depends on who you are dealing with," Sorrell put in. "Mr. Roland's idea is to run a place properly for the people who can appreciate it," i.
"Ah,—there you are! But the wrong people have got the money, my lad. Why,—look at some of the lot I had last night. Didn't know how to feed themselves properly. You have only got to shove an underdone steak and some chipped potatoes and a glass of beer under their noses. They're not educated up to our standard."
Sorrell laughed. There was a lot of wisdom in Fanny's words, for the Englishman can be such a creature of good-natured inertia that he will accept what is second-rate and not trouble to encourage the enterprising person who offers him something better. It is a mistake to offer first-class material to second-class minds.
Fanny would have her say.
"We have to cater for the swank crowd, and the grocers and the butchers who can afford to chuck money about and mean to do it. If a place is too gentlemanly it makes 'em feel uncomfortable. There aren't any gentlefolk these days."
"A few, my dear," said Sorrell.
"Precious few. Not enough for us to live on. Our job is to get the fat people in the big cars, the people with plenty of money and no manners. What's the matter? We might be able to teach 'em manners. Besides,' you can always pet your tongue in your cheek."
Sorrell wondered if Fanny Garland was right. He went so far as to put her points before Mr. Roland, but Mr. Roland would not alter his atmosphere, or attempt to adapt it to a post-war society.
"She says we are too gentlemanly, sir. I understand what she means. Too much like a good old club in Pall Mall."
"Quite. But I am not going to adjust—downwards—Stephen. I won't do it. The other people can adjust upwards—or stay away. Besides, hang it all, we give them the best"
"Well, sir, a man who has left the sty rather late—may feel a bit uneasy in a drawing-room."
"I know what you mean. If we are all 'bar' and I had two or three fluffy-haired fascinators and a 'loud speaker,' and went about in my shirt sleeves with a grinning alcoholic face? Quite so. Making the new aristocracy feel at home. Not for me, Stephen."
"I feel the same, sir,—but then"
"I know. You have got that boy of yours. We'll hang on as we are. I don't believe—yet—that giving people the best—means bankruptcy."
The spring came and the Pelican's average rose gradually to 33. The Easter holidays took it to 57, and Sorrell's forehead began to clear, but a week later the average had fallen to 39. Yet Sorrell happened to know that the George and the Black Bear, two very indifferent inns in Winstonbury itself, were doing good trade. Gossip reached him. The tobacconist from whom he bought his tobacco, a rosy and garrulously cheerful person, asked him bluntly whether "Roland hadn't bitten off more than he could chew?"
Sorrell said something sarcastic.
"That depends on what the public wants."
"The public knows what it wants," said the fat man arrogantly.
"The trouble is that it doesn't."
"Well,—I'm not worrying. It's not my funeral."
He beamed. He appeared to regard anyone else's failure as a tribute to his own self-complacency.
"Too swanky, you know,—too refined. Hardly trouble to serve a caller with a drink. A regular snob-hole I call it."
Sorrell guessed that certain unwelcomed commercial travellers had been talking. Roland had offended a large and mobile class of customers in closing the commercial room.
A snob-hole!
Yes,—but wasn't snobbery of a sort universal? Refine it slightly and it became a useful aspiration. Carry it still higher and it shows itself as man's love of mystery, beauty, queerness, something a little different from himself. Snobbery is the foot-stool at the feet of reverence.
To put it in the language of the journalist—"What the Pelican needed was to become the Motorists' 'Mecca,' the goal of the sentimental, sensation-loving public, a place where some astoundingly romantic or astoundingly sordid thing had happened. If you could put up a notice across the road 'The notorious Nemo murdered his French mistress here,' or 'It was here that the Bishop stayed when he spent the night with a lady from London.'"
Sorrell's mood was growing cynical. Failure, undeserved failure, would be both bitter and absurd.
Yet the Pelican was to have her picture on the illustrated pages of the daily papers, and Sorrell, when he looked back in after days on the ironical splurge of life's coincidences, was moved to a little, mischievous laughter.
It happened in May. A light blue two-seater car drew up tentatively outside the hotel, and a neat, sallow-faced man with a smudge of black hair on his upper lip, got out and approached the porch. Behind him, in the car, he had left one of the most pleasantly pretty creatures Sorrell had ever seen, a soft, short-nosed, merry, insouciant, child-eyed little lady who looked out on life wisely from under the brim of her black "cloche" hat. She had an air of extraordinary unaffectedness, as though she had come straight out of a convent, and found life wonderful, and innocent and good.
The neat and sprightly man with the minute black moustache addressed himself to Sorrell. "Is the manager in?"
"I think so, sir."
Thomas Roland was at the piano, and since the owner of the blue car had asked to see him privately, Sorrell took the stranger to Roland's room. The man's face was vaguely familiar to Sorrell, but he could not remember where he had seen him before. During the war—perhaps? He returned to the lounge so as to be ready to deal with the two light trunks strapped to the luggage grid of the blue car, should he of the little moustache and the quick and restless eyes decide to put up at the Pelican.
Five minutes later Sorrell saw Roland and the stranger mounting the stairs together, and when they reappeared Roland was laughing, and offering his cigarette-case to the visitor.
"That's quite all right. I'll have everything arranged. Stephen, will you take this gentleman's luggage up to No. 1."
The blue car was put away in the garage, and the two young things vanished into the garden, where Fanny Garland was told to take tea out to them under one of the chestnut trees. Sorrell was redescending the stairs after carrying up the luggage when he saw Roland beckoning to him from the end of the passage.
"Stephen"
"Sir?"
"One moment; come to my room."
Roland was smiling.
"Guess who our new visitors are."
"Honeymooners."
"Well, yes,—but rather important honeymooners. They are here incognito. Guess."
"I seem to have seen the man's face."
"I expect you have. Ever heard of Ethel and Duck?"
"Not Ethel Frobisher and Duncan Scott? Why—that's the man of course."
"Just so. The wedding has been a world event. But you wouldn't expect a couple of cinema super-stars to be running away from publicity."
"I could understand it,—personally."
"That's the position, Stephen. Scott put it to me—straight up. 'We want to get away from the confounded reporters and their cameras. We're just fed up with it. We want to be our two selves for a week. See?'"
Sorrell nodded.
"Don't tell any of the others, Stephen. I am fixing them up in a little private suite. I have promised Scott that he shall have peace here."
Sorrell understood Mr. Roland's laughter, for it was kind laughter, even though these two immensely rich young people could have bought the unprofitable Pelican Hotel and thought no more of it than of buying a box of chocolates. Bedrooms No. 1 and 2 were turned into a little private suite. All meals were sent up to the two lovers, the World's Pet Lovers, for that was what they were.
Sorrell confessed to human curiosity. He was interested in these two young things who were so bored by the world's frenzied favours that they had fled away together into the green deeps of an English countryside. He watched them in the garden. They appeared to him quite ordinary young people, and very much in love with each other and that,—in spite of the fact that Duck had been making public love to Ethel for the last three years, playing the gallant rescuer in all sorts of situations, and posing in a sentimental embrace at the end of some hundreds of reels. To Sorrell it all seemed incredible—and rather absurd. That it should have been necessary for special police to be detailed to control the crowds when these two arrived at a London railway terminus or departed from one! Thousands of people scuffing, and pushing and cheering, men with cameras climbing on other men's shoulders; girls throwing flowers! There was but one other person in the world who inspired the same furore. The World's Pet Lovers! Little Ethel Frobisher making the romance seem "his" to the—milk-boy, the clerk, and the collier. Duck, filling factory girls with the delight of being loved just like that.
As Mr. Roland had put it—"The wedding had been a world event." And then—the two had disappeared, slipped into that little blue car and fled, yearning wisely to be themselves, to be able to sit under a tree and feel natural—or to feel nothing at all. No cameras, no crowds.
The suggestive temptation struck Sorrell with mischievous abruptness. Obviously, the human heart of the world would not be content to be left in the steps of the church. It would be crying to the purveyors of news—"The honeymoon! We want to hear about the honeymoon. Where—are—Ethel and Duck? Where? We want to know."
Sorrell stood leaning against his porter's desk, scribbling nothings on an odd piece of paper.
If it were known that Ethel Frobisher and Duncan Scott were staying—or hiding in the Pelican at Winstonbury? What a coup for the press-man or the photographer! What an advertisement for the Pelican!
Sorrell was tempted, and so much was he tempted that he knocked that evening at Mr. Roland's door. He had a smile on his face, a mischievous and surreptitious smile.
"Has it occurred to you, sir? The two upstairs?"
"In what way, Stephen?"
Sorrell had closed the door, and was holding the handle.
"Suppose it were known? I know it is a silly world,—but the news would be all over the country in two days. And look at this?"
With one hand he unfurled the chief page of a popular morning daily, and Mr. Roland was able to read the headlines at a distance of five yards:
The world's lovers married.
Great scenes.
Where have Ethel and Duck gone for their honeymoon?
Roland rubbed his deliberate chin.
"Yes, quite so, Stephen," he said; "I see the idea. I suppose a million or two people are interested in this honeymoon. The mysterious and romantic disappearance of the World's Lovers! But it can't be done."
"But what a chance!"
"I know. I suppose we shall never have such another chance of getting the old Pelican up in the sky like a Daily Mail smoke advertisement,—but it can't be done."
"Not if—I did it?"
"Stephen, you Jesuitical rogue! No, I promised Scott, to keep quiet. He's a very decent little chap. I had dinner with them."
"I see"
"They asked me. They have a sense of fun. I enjoyed my dinner. And Mrs. Scott has a nice taste in music. We had our coffee down here, and she played Debussy to us. You see?"
Sorrell folded up his sheet of paper.
"It's a pity,—but you are quite right, sir. How long are they staying?"
"A week."
"Well,—towards the end of the week there wouldn't be any harm in getting a local photographer to take a few snapshots. Besides,—I happen to know the reporter who sends up any local news to the Daily Sun. it would be a magnificent coup for him, and for us"
Roland looked up at him with droll and ironical gravity.
"The man of ideas! You ought to be a publicity agent, Stephen. But it is worth considering. I can't see how it can hurt anybody. Wait,—I'll go up and ask them."
He did, and Sorrell, following him half way up the first flight of stairs, heard amused voices and a girl's laughter. It seemed that the World's Lovers had a sense of fun. Moreover, the man who was hiding them deserved his reward.
Roland caught Sorrell on the stairs, and behind Sorrell Mr. Roland saw the face of Sorrell's son.
"Nothing like frankness, Stephen."
"They are willing?"
"Yes,—I have permission to introduce a tame photographer on the sixth day. They are rather amused at the idea of our getting some reflected glory. When they leave here—no one will know where they are going."
Sorrell stood rubbing his right cheek. He was visualizing other possibilities.
"It will be all over the world. Their 'first hiding-place on the great honeymoon.' We could have one or two of the plates enlarged and hung"
"Stephen," said Mr. Roland, "I believe you would like me to hang a banner across the road. 'This is the place where Duck and Ethel stayed on their honeymoon.'"
Sorrell looked at him solemnly.
"So few good chances. It is pretty beastly to have been down in the mud. Is there anything to be ashamed of in seizing one's chances?"
"I know," said Tom Roland,—"I know."