The Relentless City

by E. F. Benson

'Can't say,' said Bilton. 'I'm rather busy to-day.'

Lewis Palmer continued sipping his milk in a regular, methodical manner till he had finished it, and then put on some rather shabby dogskin gloves, an extremely shiny and obviously perfectly new tall hat, and rang his hand-bell. Almost before it sounded his bedroom door opened noiselessly, and his valet stood there.

'Lunch at two,' he said. 'If Lord Keynes gets here before me, ask him to wait.'

'Lunch for how many, sir?' asked his servant.

'I don't know.'

Mr. Palmer's progress out of the Carlton was made easy for him. Doors flew open as he neared them, and by the time he had reached the pavement his motor had drawn up exactly opposite the entrance, and the door was being held open for him.

Mrs. Palmer had had her eye—or part of an eye—on Seaton House for some time. Quite a year ago her husband had given her to understand that London might very possibly be the headquarters of his business for a considerable time, and when she spent her season there last summer she had considered London as a residence. On general principles, it was highly attractive—Americans, as she knew from experience, could command all that was worth having there, with, on the whole, a less expenditure than was necessary to keep up the same position in New York. Prince Fritz, for instance, in the autumn, had been a very heavy item, and though Prince Fritz had yielded high social dividends in America, yet it was easily possible to 'run' a royalty of the same class in England at a far lower figure. On the other hand, Prince Fritz in London would not be worth exploiting at all—that she recognised—but her conclusions had been that social success of a first-rate order in London could be done on less than the same article in New York. In both towns it was necessary to stand up among the ruck of ordinary hostesses like a mountain-peak; you had in any case to spend much more than most other people. Since, therefore, most other people spent less in London than in New York, the mountain-peak need not be so high. She saw also, with her very clear-sighted eye, that England, the professedly aristocratic, was far more democratic than the professedly democratic America. Lady A——, Duchess B——, Countess C——, she saw, as regards their titles alone, were quite valueless socially in England except among suburban and provincial people. That was natural—the prophet has no honour in his own country. Again, England, or rather that small section of English society which, in her mind, was equivalent to England, was rapidly conforming to the American ideal. It no longer cared for birth or breeding; it wanted to be greatly and continuously amused; a hostess was worth her power of entertainment. Nobody cared here in the least whether her grandfather was a butcher or a boot-black; all they cared was whether they were sufficiently lavishly entertained.

So far she had seen clearly and correctly enough; dimly, she had seen a little farther, and knew that for a reason she could not grasp there were in England some few families who had a cachet altogether independent of wealth. She could have named some half-dozen who floated on the very tip-top of everything, to whose houses Kings and Queens drove up, so to speak, in hansoms, and played about in the garden. They might be poor, they might apparently have no particular power or accomplishment which could account for it, but it was into that circle that Mrs. Palmer now desired to get. To one of these families Bertie Keynes belonged. Anyhow, she had secured him as a son-in-law, she had cut a step on the steep ice-wall. Furthermore, it could not be a disadvantage to have one of the few really fine houses in London for one's own. That was why Mr. Palmer had bought Seaton House.

He drove there now in his noiseless motor-brougham, looking out with his piercing gray eyes on to the grimy splendour of Pall Mall. It was a brilliant winter day, and primrose-coloured sunshine flooded the town, giving an almost Southern gaiety to the streets. As usual, a large extent of the pavement was up for repairs, and it vexed his sense of speed and efficiency to see the leisurely manner in which the work was done. Frankly, England seemed to him in a very bad way; her railways, her trade, her shipping, all the apparatus of her commerce, was haphazard, unconcentrated, uneconomical, just like her mode of making repairs to her streets. Personally, except that at this moment his motor was stopped, he did not at all object to it, since it gave him the opportunity which he had been preparing for of stepping in in the matter of her railways, and introducing American methods. He had, now three months ago, got through his Bill for a direct railway between Liverpool and Southampton, and the work of construction was going on with a speed that fairly took away the breath of contractors who were accustomed to think that slowness was essential to solidity. That boast of solidity, so characteristic of the English, had long amused Lewis Palmer.

'What they call solid,' he had once said to Bilton, 'I call stodgy. They make a brick wall three feet thick, that would bear the weight of the world, when all they want is a two-inch steel girder riveted to an upright. And when they have spent a couple of months in building it, they think they have done better than the man who puts up the steel girder. It is false economy to put up what is not necessary, just as it is false economy not to put up what is. And they think that to paper their railroad cars with looking-glasses in gold frames will console the shareholders for an absence of dividends. No, before we financed the Liverpool and Southampton we made certain of getting the line built the proper way.'