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Carpentaria!
One of the three richly-uniformed officials who were in charge of the captive balloon, destined to be a leading attraction of the City of Pleasure, murmured this name warningly to his companions, as if to advise them that the moment had arrived for them to mind their p’s and q’s. And each man looked cautiously through the tail of his eye at a striking figure which was approaching through crowds of people to the enclosure. The figure was tall and had red hair and a masterful face, and it was clothed in a blue suit that set off the red hair to perfection. Over the wicket of the enclosure a small enamelled sign had been hung:
“CITY OF PLEASURE.
“President: Josephus Ilam.
“Managing and Musical Director: Charles Carpentaria.
“Balloon Ascents every half-hour after three o’clock. Height of a thousand feet guaranteed. Seats, half-a-crown, including field-glass.”
The sign was slightly askew, and the approaching figure tapped it into position, and then entered the enclosure.
“Good afternoon,” it said. “Everything ready?”
“’d afternoon, Mr. Carpentaria,” said the head balloonist respectfully. “Yes, sir.”
The three men with considerable ostentation busied themselves among ropes, while a young man in gold-rimmed spectacles gazed with sudden self-consciousness into the far distance, just as if he had that very instant discovered something there that demanded the whole of his attention.
“Going up, sir?” inquired the head balloonist.
“Yes,” replied Carpentaria. “Mr. Ilam and I are going up together. We have time, haven’t we? It’s only half-past two.”
“Yes, sir.”
Carpentaria examined the vast balloon, which was trembling and swaying and lugging with that aspiration towards heaven and the infinite so characteristic of well-filled balloons. He ignored the young man in spectacles.
“Where’s the parachutist?” Carpentaria demanded.
A parachutist was to give éclat to the first public ascent of the silken monster by dropping from it into the Thames or somewhere else. His apparatus hung beneath the great circular car.
“He’ll be here before three, sir,” said the head balloonist.
“He’s been here once, sir,” added the second balloonist, anxious to prove to himself that he also had the right to converse with the mighty Carpentaria.
A few seconds later the august President arrived. Mr. Josephus Ilam was tall, like his partner, but much stouter. He had, indeed, almost the inflated appearance which one observes constantly in the drivers of brewers’ drays; even his fingers bulged. His age was fifty, ten years more than that of Carpentaria, and it was probably ten years since he had seen his own feet. Finally, he was clean-shaven, with areas of blue on his chin and cheeks like the sea on a map, and his hair—what remained of it—seemed to be hesitating between black and grey.
“What’s the matter?” he asked of Carpentaria.
“Oh, I thought I would just like to make the first ascent with you alone,” Carpentaria answered, and added, smiling, “I have something to show you up there.”
His hand indicated the firmament, and his peculiar smile indicated that he took Ilam’s consent for granted.
Ilam sighed obesely, and agreed. He did not care to argue before members of the staff. Nevertheless, the futility of ascending to the skies on this, the opening day, when the colossal organism of the show cried aloud for continual supervision on earth, was sufficiently clear to his mind. He climbed gingerly over the edge of the wickerwork car, which had a circumference of thirty feet, with a protected aperture in the middle, and Carpentaria followed him.
“Let go,” said Carpentaria, gleefully. “Let go!” he repeated with impatience, when the balloon was arrested at a height of about ten feet.
“Right sir,” responded briskly the head balloonist. There appeared to have been some altercation between the balloonists.
The day was the first of May, but the London spring had chosen to be capricious and unseasonable. Instead of the snow and frost and east wind which almost invariably accompany what is termed, with ferocious irony, the merry month, there was strong, brilliant sunshine and a perfect calm. The sun glinted and glittered on the upper surfaces of the balloon, but of course the voyagers could not perceive that. They, in fact, perceived nothing except that the entire world was gradually falling away from them. The balloon had ceased to shiver; it stood as firm as consols, while the City of Pleasure sank and sank, and the upturned faces of more than fifty thousand spectators grew tinier and tinier.
It would be interesting and certainly instructive to unfold some of the many mysteries and minor dramas which had diversified the history of the making of the City of Pleasure, from the time when Carpentaria, having conceived the idea of the thing, found the necessary millionaire in the person of Josephus Ilam, to the hurried and tumultuous eve of the opening day; but these are unconnected with the present recital. It needs only to remind the reader of the City’s geography. Towards the lower left-hand corner of any map of London not later than 1905, may be observed a large, nearly empty space in the form of an inverted letter “U.” This space is bounded everywhere, except across the bottom, by the Thames. It is indeed a peninsula made by an extraordinary curve of the Thames, and Barnes Common connects if with the mainland of the parish of Putney. Its dimensions are little short of a mile either way, and yet, although Hammersmith Bridge joins it to Hammersmith at the top, it was almost uninhabited, save for the houses which lined Bridge Road and a scattering of houses in Lonsdale Road and the short streets between Lonsdale Road and the reservoir near the bridge. The contrast was violent; on the north side of the Thames the crowded populousness of Hammersmith, and on the south side—well, possibly four people to the acre.
Ilam and Carpentaria, with Ilam’s money, bought or leased the whole of the middle part of the peninsula—over three hundred acres—with a glorious half-mile frontage to the Thames on the east side. They would have acquired all the earth as far as Barnes Common but for the fact that the monomaniacs of the Ranelagh Club Golf Course could not be induced to part with their links, even when offered a fantastic number of thousand pounds per hole. They obtained the closing of the Bridge Road, which cut the peninsula downwards into two halves, and the omnibus traffic between Hammersmith and Barnes was diverted to Lonsdale Road—not without terrific diplomacy, and pitched battles in the columns of newspapers and in Local Government offices. They pulled down every house in Bridge Road, thus breaking up some seventy presumably happy English homes, and then they started upon the erection of the City of Pleasure, which they intended to be, and which all the world now admits to be, the most gigantic enterprise of amusement that Europe has ever seen.
As the balloon rose the general conformation of the City of Pleasure became visible. Running almost north and south from Hammersmith Bridge was the Central Way, the splendid private thoroughfare which had superseded Bridge Road. It was a hundred feet wide, and its surface was treated with westrumite, and a service of gaily coloured cable-cars flashed along it in either direction, between the north and the south entrances to the City. It was lined with multifarious buildings, all painted cream—the theatre, the variety theatre, the concert hall, the circus, the panorama, the lecture hall, the menagerie, the art gallery, the story-tellers’ hall, the dancing-rooms, restaurants, cafés and bars, and those numerous shops for the sale of useless and expensive souvenirs without which the happiness of no Briton on a holiday is complete. The footpaths, 20 feet wide, were roofed with glass, and between the footpaths and the roadway came two rows of trees which were industriously taking advantage of the weather to put forth their verdure. Footpaths and road were thronged with people, and the street was made gay, not only by the toilettes and sunshades of women, but also by processions of elephants, camels, and other wild-fowl, bearing children of all ages in charge of gorgeous Indians and Ethiops. From every roof floated great crimson flags with the legend in gold: “City of Pleasure. President: Ilam; Director: Carpentaria.” Add to this combined effect the music of bands and the sunshine, and do not forget the virgin creaminess of the elaborate architecture, and you will be able to form a notion of the spectacle offered by the esplanade upon which Ilam and Carpentaria looked down.
Midway between the north and south entrances, the Central Way expanded itself into a circular place, with a twenty-jetted bronze fountain in the middle. To the west was the façade of what was called the Exposition Palace, an enormous quadrangular building, containing a huge covered court which, with its balconies, would hold twenty thousand people on wet days. The galleries of the palace were devoted to an exhibition of everything that related to woman, from high-heeled shoes to thrones; it was astonishing how many things did relate to woman. North of the Exposition Palace stretched out the Amusements Park, where people looped the loop, shot the chute, wheeled the wheel, switched the switchback, etc.; and here was the balloon enclosure. South of the palace lay the Sports Fields, where a cricket match was progressing.
Finally, and most important of all, to the east of the circular place in Central Way rose the impressive entrance to the Oriental Gardens, the pride of Ilam and Carpentaria. The Oriental Gardens occupied the entire eastern side of the City, and they sloped down to the Thames. They formed over a hundred acres of gardens, wood, and pleasaunce, laid out with formal magnificence. Flowers bloomed there in defiance of seasons. On every hand the eye was met by vistas of trees and shrubs, and by lawns and statues, and lakes and fountains. In the middle was Carpentaria’s own special bandstand. A terrace, two thousand five. hundred feet long, bordered the river, and from the terrace jutted out a pier at which steamers were unloading visitors.
The occupants of the balloon could see everything. They saw the debarcation from the steamers; they saw the unending crowd of doll-like persons thrown up out of the ground by the new Tube station at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge; they saw the heavy persistent stream of vehicles and pedestrians over the bridge; they saw the trains approaching Barnes on the South-Western Railway; they saw the struggles for admittance at all the gates of the City; they even saw flocks of people streaming Cityward along the Barnes High Street and the Lower Richmond Road. It was not for nothing that advertisements of the City of Pleasure had filled one solid page of every daily paper in London, and many in the provinces, for a week past. Visitors were now entering the city at the rate of seventy thousand an hour, at a shilling a head.
There was a gentle tug beneath the car. The thousand feet of rope had been paid out, and the balloon hung motionless.
Then a faint noise, something between the crackling of musketry and the surge of waves on a pebbly beach, ascended from the city.
“They’re cheering,” said Josephus Ilam. “What for?”
“Cheering us, of course,” answered Carpentaria excitedly. “Isn’t it immense?”
“Immense?” said Ilam heavily. “It’s hot. What did you want to show me up here?”
“That!” exclaimed Carpentaria, pointing below to the city with a superb gesture. “And that!” he added passionately, pointing with another gesture to the whole of London, which lay spread out with all its towers and steeples and its blanket of smoke, tremendous and interminable to the east. “That is our prey,” he said, “our food.”
And he began to sing the Toreador song from “Carmen,” exultantly launching the notes into the sky.
“Mr. Carpentaria,” said Josephus Ilam, with unexpected bitterness, “is this your idea of a joke? Bringing me up here to see London and our show, as if I didn’t know London and our show like my pocket!”
Ilam’s concealed, hatred of Carpentaria, which had been slowly growing for more than a year, as a fire spreads secretly in the hold of a ship, seemed to spurt out a swift tongue of flame in the acrimony of his tone. Carpentaria was startled. Even then, in a sudden flash of illumination, he grasped to a certain extent the import of Ilam’s attitude towards him, but he did not grasp it fully. How should he?
“Why,” he said to himself, “I believe the old johnny dislikes mel What on earth for?” He could not understand all Ilam’s reasons. “Pity!” he reflected further. “If the managers of a show like this can’t hit it off together, there may be trouble.”
In which supposition he was infinitely more right than he imagined.
He balanced himself lightly on the edge of the car, his left leg dangling, and seized one of the field-glasses which hung secured by thin steel chains round the inside of the wicker parapet, and putting it to his eyes, he gazed down at the Oriental Gardens. He must have seen something there that profoundly interested him, for the glasses remained glued to his eyes for a long time.
“I repeat,” said Ilam firmly, standing up, “is this your idea of a joke?”
He was close to Carpentaria, and his glance was vicious.
“My friend,” murmured Carpentaria, dropping the glasses. “What’s the matter with you is that you aren’t an artist, not a bit of one. You are an excellent fellow, with a splendid head for figures, and I respect you enormously, but you haven’t the artistic sense. If you had you would share the thrill which I feel as I survey our creation and that London over there. You would appreciate why I brought you up here.”
“I’m a business man—a plain business man, that’s what I am,” said Ilam. “I’ve never pretended to be an artist, and I don’t want to be an artist. Let me tell you that I ought to be in the advertisement department, and not canoodling my time away up here, Mr. Carpentaria.”
“My dear sir,” said Carpentaria hastily, “accept my apologies. Let us descend at once.”
“And while I’m about it,” pursued Ilam unheedingly—his irritation was like a stone rolling down a hill—“while I’m about it, I’ll point out that your objection to having advertisements on the walls of the restaurants is fatuous.”
“But, my dear Ilam,” Carpentaria protested, “people don’t care to have to read advertisements while they’re at their meals. It puts them off. For instance, to have it dinned into you that G. H. Mumm is the only champagne worth drinking when you happen to be drinking Heidsieck, or to have Wall’s sausages thrust down your throat while you are toying with an ice-cream—people don’t like it. We must think of our patrons. And, besides, it’s so inarti——”
“Rubbish!” said Ilam. “One way and another these ads. would be worth a hundred’ a week to us.”
“Well, and what’s a hundred a week?”
“It’s the interest on a hundred and twenty thousand pounds,” Ilam replied vivaciously. “And there’s another thing. It would be much better if you employed more time in inspection instead of rehearsing and conducting your precious band. Any fool can conduct a band. Give me a stick and I’d do it myself. But inspection———”
“My precious band!” stammered Carpentaria, aghast.
His very soul was laid low; and considering that Carpentaria’s Band had been famous in the capitals of two continents for twelve years at least, it was not surprising that his soul should be laid low by this terrible phrase.
“Yes,” said Ilam, “I’ve had enough of it.” His shoulder touched Carpentaria’s, and his eyes—little, like a pig’s—shot arrows of light. “Supposing I shoved you over? I should have the concern to myself then, and no foolish interference.”
He twisted his face into a grim laugh.
“You have a sense of humour, after all, Ilam,” responded gaily the man on the edge of the car, fingering his long red moustache, and he, too, laughed, but he got down from his perch.
“I’d just like you to comprehend——” Ilam began again.
But at that instant a head appeared above the edge of the central aperture of the car, and Ilam stopped.
It was the head of the young man in spectacles—gold-rimmed spectacles.
“I’m Smithers, of the Morning Herald,” said the young man brightly and calmly, “and I took this opportunity of seeing you privately. Your men objected when I got into the parachute attachment, but you told ‘em to let go, and so they let go. I’ve had some difficulty in climbing up here off the parachute bar. Dangerous, rather. However, I’ve done it. I dare say you heard the crowd cheering.”
“So it was him they were cheering,” muttered Ilam, and then looked at Carpentaria.
Ilam was not a genius in the art of conversation. He could only say what he meant, and when the running of the City of Pleasure demanded the art of conversation he relied on Carpentaria, even if he was furious with him.
“What’s the game?” asked Carpentaria.
“Well,” said Smithers politely, “don’t you think I deserve an interview?”
“You know we have absolutely declined all interviews.”
“Yes, that’s why the Herald wants one so badly; that’s why I’m dangling a thousand feet above my grave.”
Carpentaria and Ilam exchanged glances. Each read the thought of the other—that the spectacled Smithers might have overheard their conversation, and should therefore be handled with care, this side up. “Leave it to me,” said the eyes of Carpentaria to the eyes of Ilam.
“Mr. Smithers, of the Herald”—Carpentaria blossomed into the flowers of speech—“we heartily applaud your courage and your devotion to duty in a profession full of perils, but you are trespassing.”
“Excuse me, I’m not,” said Smithers. “You can only trespass on land and water, and this isn’t a salmon river or a forbidden footpath. Besides, I’ve got my press season-ticket. Come now, talk to me.”
“We are talking to you.”
“I mean, answer my questions, for the benefit of humanity. I’m the father of a family with two penniless aunts, and the Herald will probably sack me if I fail in this interview. Think of that.”
“I prefer not to think of it,” said Carpentaria. “However, we will answer any reasonable questions you care to put to us, on one condition.”
“Name it,” snapped Smithers.
“I will name it afterwards,” said Carpentaria, looking at Ilam.
“All right,” sighed Smithers, “I agree, whatever it is.”
“You look like an honourable man. I shall trust you,” Carpentaria remarked.
“Journalists are always honourable,” said Smithers. “It is their employers who sometimes—however, that’s neither here nor there. You may trust me. Now tell me. Why this objection to interviews? That’s what’s puzzling the public. You’re a business concern, aren’t you?”
“That’s just the reason,” said Carpentaria. “We aren’t a star-actor or a bogus company. We’re above interviews, we are. Do you catch Smith and Son, or Cook’s, or the North-Western Railway, or Mrs. Humphry Ward having themselves interviewed?”
“Not much,” ejaculated Ilam glumly.
“People who refuse to be interviewed have a status that other people can never have. Our business is our business. When we want the public to know anything, we take a page in the Herald, say, and pay two hundred and fifty pounds for it, and inform the public exactly what we do want ’em to know, in our own words. We do not require the assistance of interviewers. There’s the whole secret. What next?”
“That seems pretty straight,” Smithers agreed. “Another thing. Why have you gone and called this concern the City of Pleasure?”
“Because it is the City of Pleasure,” growled Ilam.
“Yes. But it seems rather a fancy name, doesn’t it?—rather too poetical, highfalutin?”
“That’s merely because you journalists never have any imagination,” Carpentaria explained. “You aren’t used to this name yet. It was you journalists who cried out that the Crystal Palace was a too poetical and highfalutin name for that glass wigwam over there”—and he pointed to the twin towers of Sydenham in the distance—“but you’ve got used to it, and you admit now that it is the Crystal Palace and couldn’t be anything else.”
Smithers laughed.
“Good!” said he. “All that’s nothing. Let me come to the core of the apple. Do you expect this thing to pay? Do you really mean it to pay, or is it only a millionaire’s lark? You know all the experts are saying it can’t pay.”
“Can’t it?” ejaculated Ilam.
“We shall take fifteen thousand pounds at the gates to-day,” said Carpentaria. “The highest attendance in any one day at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 was six hundred thousand. Do you imagine we can’t equal that? We shall surpass it, sir. Wait for our August fêtes. Wait for our Congress of Trade Unions in September, and you will see! The average total attendance at the last three Paris exhibitions has been forty-five millions. We hope to reach fifty millions. But suppose we only reach forty millions. That means two million pounds in gates alone; and let me remind you that the minor activities of this show are self-supporting. Why, the Chicago Exhibition made a profit of nearly a million and a half dollars. Do you suppose we can’t beat that, with a city of six million people at our doors, and the millions of Lancashire and Yorkshire within four hours of us?”
“But Chicago was State-aided,” Mr. Smithers ventured.
“State-aided!” cried Ilam. “Chicago was the worst-managed show in the history of shows, except St. Louis. If the State came to me I should—I should——”
“Offer it a penny to go away and play in the next street.” Carpentaria finished his sentence for him.
“You interest me extremely,” said the journalist. “And now, as to the number of your employés.”
He chuckled to himself with glee at the splendid interview he was getting out of Carpentaria and Ilam as they obligingly responded to his queries. It was Ilam who at last revolted, and insisted that he must descend.
“Now for my condition,” said Carpentaria.
“Let’s have it,” said the journalist.
“You asked us to talk to you and we have talked to you. The condition is that you regard all you have heard up here as strictly confidential—mind, all! You tell no one; you print nothing..Remember, you are an honourable man.”
“But this is farcical,” Smithers expostulated.
“Not at all,” said Carpentaria sweetly. “Do you imagine that because you have an inordinate amount of cheek, a family and two penniless aunts, we are going to break the habits of a life-time? For myself, I have never been interviewed.”
“Is this your last word?” the journalist demanded.
“It is,” said Carpentaria.
“Very well,” said the journalist, and his head disappeared.
“Let us descend,” said Ilam, savagely pleased. And he waved the descent flag.
“We shan’t descend just yet,” the journalist informed them, popping up his head again.
“And pray, why not?”
“Because I’ve cut the rope.”
Carpentaria, always calm when art was not concerned, tore a fragment of paper from an envelope in his pocket and threw it out of the car. It sank away rapidly from the balloon. Moreover, it was evident, even to the eye, that their distance from the earth was vastly increasing.
“I withdraw my promise now this moment,” said the journalist, climbing carefully into the car. “Everything that you say henceforward will be printed. We shall have quite an exciting trip. We may even get to France. Anyhow, I shall have a clinking column for Monday’s Herald. You evidently hadn’t quite appreciated what the new journalism is.”
Then there was silence in the mounting balloon.
Ilam bent his malevolent eyes longingly upon the disappearing scene below. The glory of the sunshine was nothing to him. He wanted to be in the advertisement department, arranging future contracts for spaces on the programmes. He reflected that it was another of the mad caprices of Carpentaria that had got him into this grotesque scrape. And he was so angry that he forgot even to think of the danger to which he was exposed.
“So here we are!” said the journalist. “And you can’t do anything!”
Permit me to say, Mr. Smithers,” Carpentaria remarked at last, “that your knavery is futile. The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted. We are, in fact, already descending.”
He held tightly in his hand the end of a rope, which reached up high above them and was lost in the mass of cordage. He had opened the valve to its widest.
“Don’t venture to move,” he added, “or Mr. Ilam will break your head for you. This affair will cost us nothing but a few thousand cubic feet of gas at a half-a-crown a thousand. What it will cost you, I shall have to consider.”
And without saying anything further for the moment, he unloosed a very thin cable that was wound round a windlass in the car itself, and, tying a white flag at the end of it, he began to lower it rapidly over the edge of the car.
Thanks to the perfect calm which reigned, the balloon was still well over the Amusements Park.
Soon the voyagers could perceive the excited movements of the crowds below, and then the white flag touched earth, and was seized by the eager hands of the balloonists, and slowly the balloon, in a condition bordering on collapse, subsided to the ground with the gentleness of a fatigued British workman falling asleep. And great cheers, for the second time that day, filled the air.
“You might have been sure,” said Carpentaria, when they were ten feet off safety, “that in a show like this due precautions would be taken against accidents and idiots!”
Smithers, nearly as limp as the balloon, made no reply. Josephus Ilam glared over him.
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing!” cried Carpentaria to the staff, who besieged the party with questions. “Fill her up as quick as you can, attach the rope, and get ready for your public. Don’t bother me!” And he leapt out of the car and was running, literally running, away, when Ilam called out: “Hi! wait a minute. What’s to be done with this maniac here?” And Ilam muttered to himself, “Why does he run away like that? What’s his next caprice going to be?”
“I was forgetting,” said Carpentaria, stopping. “Young man”—and he addressed Smithers severely—“follow me, and no nonsense!”
Smithers obediently followed, pushing after Carpentaria through the curious crowds. They came at length to the Central Way, and Carpentaria halted and took Smithers by the coat collar.
“Listen!” said he. “We’re much too busy to trouble with police-court proceedings. And besides, there’s your brace of penniless aunts. Cut! Clear out! Hook it! I rather admire you. See?”
Smithers saw, and vanished.
Carpentaria hastened on, rushing across the Central Way, scarcely avoiding cable-cars, and so, by a private passage between two shops, into the Oriental Gardens. Now, just within the Oriental Gardens, on either side of the grand entrance to them, were two spacious houses, built in the bungalow style, with enclosed gardens of their own. One of these was occupied by Josephus Ilam and his mother, and the other by Carpentaria and his half-sister, Juliette D’Avray. Between the house of Ilam and the back of the shops in Central Way was one of those small waste trifles of ground which often get left in planning a vast exhibition or show. It was skilfully hidden from the view of the public by wooden palisades, and in this palisading was a door, painted so as to escape detection. The plot of ground, about three yards by two, was already being utilized for lumber. Carpentaria entered by the door and shut it after him. A man—a middle-aged man, in a blue suit of rather shabby appearance—was seated on some planks. He started up, and then seemed to sway.
“What are you doing here?” Carpentaria curtly demanded.
“Look ’ere,” said the man, swaying towards Carpentaria, “I’m aw ri’—you’re aw ri’—eh? I’m a gemman. Come here to re’—rest. You leave me ’lone—I leave you ’lone. Stop, I give you my car’.”
The man was obviously inebriated and Carpentaria was in no mood to spend precious minutes in diplomacy with a victim of Bacchus. He departed, shutting the door, and leaving the victim fumbling with a card-case. He meant to send some one to eject the man, but he forgot.
“Say!” cried the drunkard after him, “how ju know I wazz ’ere? Mus’ been up in a b’loon—I repea’—b’loon.”
In another moment Carpentaria was in the study of his bungalow, panting.
“Quick!” he said to Juliette, an extremely natty little woman of thirty or so.
He sank into the chair before his desk. Juliette placed some music-paper in front of him and put a pen in his hand, and he scrawled across the top of the page “The Balloon Lullaby,” and began to scribble notes—quavers, crotchets, semibreves, and some other strange wonders—all over the page.
“It came to me all of a sudden,” he murmured, “while we were up in the balloon.”
“Don’t talk, dear,” said Juliette. “Write.”
And he wrote.
When it was finished Carpentaria wiped his brow and drank a whisky and milk which Juliette had prepared for him. He sighed with content and exhaustion. The creative crisis was over.
“Play it,” he ejaculated.
And Juliette sat down at the piano near the window overlooking the magnificent gardens, and played softly the two hundred and forty-seventh’ opus of Carpentaria.
“It is lovely,” she said.
“Yes,” he admitted. “It’s a classy little thing. Came to me just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
“Your best ones always do,” Juliette smiled.
“I’ll have that performed this very night,” he stated.
Somewhat later on the same afternoon, in the drawing-room of the house opposite, Josephus Ilam was drinking tea with his mother. The aged Mrs. Ilam, who was very thin and not in the least tall—her son would have made a dozen of her—sat tremendously upright in her chair, while Josephus lolled his great bulk in angry attitudes on a sofa, near which the tea-table had been placed. Mrs. Ilam wore widow’s weeds, though it was many years since she had lost her husband, a man who had made a vast fortune out of soda-water—in the days when soda-water was soda-water. She had a narrow, hard face, with intensely black eyes, and intensely white hair, and when she directed those eyes upon her son, it became instantly plain that her son was at once her idol and her slave. She lived solely for this man of fifty, who had scarcely ever left her side. For her this mass of fifteen stone four was still a young child, needing watchful care and constant advice. Certainly she spoilt him; but, just as certainly, he went in awe of her. The fact that by judicious investments in hotel and public-house property he had more than doubled the fortune which his father left, did not at all improve his standing with the antique dame; it only made him in her view a clever boy with financial leanings. Moreover, every penny of the Ilam fortune was legally hers during her lifetime. Even Ilam’s share in the City of Pleasure was hers. When Carpentaria had discovered him, he had had to decide whether or not he should put more than a million pounds into the enterprise, and it was his mother who decided, who listened to everything, and then briefly told him that he would be a fool to leave the thing alone.
“Well,” she said, in her high quavering voice, as she passed him a cup of tea—the cup rattled on the saucer in her blue-veined parchment hand—“so you are not getting on with Carpentaria? I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
“He won’t listen to reason about the advertisements,” said Ilam crossly, stirring his tea.
“No?”
“And he’s absolutely mad about his music. He’s spent ten hours in rehearsing these last two days. All the work, I’ve had to do myself.”
“Indeed!”
“And then, to crown his exploits, he takes me up in the balloon, mother—wastes a solid hour.”
“In the balloon!”
Ilam recounted the incident of the balloon.
“And, after all, he lets that impudent journalist go free—absolutely free!”
“Jos,” said his mother, “it’s a wonder you’re alive, my dear.”
“It’s a pity Carpentaria’s alive,” rejoined Ilam.
His mother’s burning eyes met his.
“That’s just what I’ve been thinking,” she piped calmly.
Her son’s gaze dropped.
“Since when?”
“Since you began grumbling about him, last week but one, my pet.”
“He’s no use now,” Ilam grumbled. “We’ve carried out all his ideas, and it’s simply a matter of business, and Carpentaria doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘business.’ Just think of his argument about those ads.!”
“Never mind that, Jos,” Mrs. Ilam put in.
“He’s only in the way now,” Jos proceeded gloomily.
“I suppose he wouldn’t retire,” Mrs. Ilam suggested.
“Retire? Of course he wouldn’t retire—nothing would induce him to retire. He enjoys it—he enjoys annoying me.”
“Anyway,” said the mother, “you’ll have the satisfaction of a very great success.”
She looked out of the window at the gardens.
“Yes,” growled Ilam. “And he gets half the profits. I’ve found all the money, and he hasn’t found a cent. But he gets half the profits. What for? A few ideas—nothing else. He pretends to direct, but he’ll direct nothing except his blessed band. And I reckon we shall clear a profit of ten thousand a week! Half of ten is five.”
“He only gets half the profits as long as he lives, Jos,” said Mrs. Ilam. “After that—nothing.”
“Nothing,” agreed Jos, biting cruelly into a hot scone. “But as long as he lives he’s costing me, say, five thousand a week, besides worry.”
“He mayn’t live long,” Mrs. Ilam ventured. “No, but he may live fifty-years.”
“Supposing he died very suddenly, Jos,” Mrs. Ilam pursued calmly; “he wouldn’t be the first person that was inconvenient to you who had disappeared unexpectedly.”
“Mother!” Ilam almost shouted, starting up. “But would he?” Mrs. Ilam persisted.
“No, he wouldn’t,” muttered Josephus, and his voice trembled.
Mrs. Ilam blew out the spirit-lamp under the kettle as though she was blowing out Carpentaria. “I’m off,” said Josephus nervously.
“Wait a moment, child. Ring the bell for me.” A servant entered.
“Bring me your master’s knitted waistcoat,” said Mrs. Ilam.
“But, mother, I shan’t want it.”
“Yes, you will, Jos. There’s no month more treacherous than May. You’ll put it on to please me.”
He obeyed, bent down to kiss his terrible parent, and departed.
“Think it over,” she called out after him.
Ilam stopped.
“And then, what about his sister?” he said. “Don’t mix up two quite separate things,” Mrs. Ilam responded. “Besides, she isn’t his sister.”
That night the City of Pleasure was illuminated. Eighty thousand tiny electric lamps hanging in festoons from standard to standard lighted the Central Way alone; the façades of all the places of amusement were outlined in fire; the shops glittered; and the cable-cars, as they flashed to and fro, bore the monogram I.C. in electricity on their foreheads. At eight o’clock the thoroughfare was crowded with visitors, and the stream of arrivals was stronger than ever. In the superb restaurants, at all prices (no matter what the price, they were equally superb in decoration), five thousand diners were finishing five thousand dinners, their eyes undisturbed by the presence of advertisements on the walls. The theatre, the music-hall, the circus, the menagerie, the concerts, and the rest of the entertainments, were filling up. In the Amusements Park people shot down railways into water, slid down smooth slopes into mattresses, circled in great wheels, floated in the latest novelties of merry-go-rounds, ascended in the balloon, and practised all the other devices for frittering away eternity, just as though night had not fallen. In the vast court of the Exposition Palace a band was swelling the strains of the newest waltzes to three storeys of loungers and sitters at café-tables, while within the interior of the building men and women wandered about examining the multifarious attractions of the Woman’s Exhibition.
But the chief joy was the Oriental Gardens, wherein a multitude of over fifty thousand persons had gathered together. The Oriental Gardens were illuminated, but in a different manner from the Central Way. Chinese lanterns were suspended everywhere in the budding trees, giving the illusion of magic precocious flowers that had blossomed there in a single hour, in all the tints of the rainbow and many others entirely foreign to the rainbow. The bandstand alone was picked out in electricity. It blazed in the centre of the gardens like a giant’s crown, and, although yet empty, it formed the main object of attention. Overhead stretched a dark-blue sky, silvered with stars, and the wind had a warm and caressing quality which encouraged sightseers to expose themselves to it to such an extent that the fifteen cafés of the Oriental Gardens, some sheltered, some quite open, but each a centre of light and laughter, were every one crowded with guests. The four thousand chairs surrounding the bandstand were occupied, and also the six thousand other chairs dispersed in various parts of the gardens. The murmur of conversation, the rustle of dresses, the tinkle of glasses, the rumour of uncountable footsteps, rose on the air. The faces of pretty women could be observed obscurely in the delicious gloom, and the glowing scarlet of cigars bobbed mysteriously about like aspecies of restless glow-worm.
And everybody was conscious of the sensation of the extraordinary and amazing success of the great show. The evening papers had carried the news of the wonderful thing to each suburb of London. These papers gave from hour to hour the number of the persons who had passed the turnstiles, and calculated the number of tons of shillings that Ilam and Carpentaria would have to bank on Monday morning. But the principal thing that struck the evening papers was the complete readiness of the City of Pleasure. No detail of it was unfinished, and all agreed that this phenomenon stood unique in the history of the art of amusing immense crowds. All felt that a new era of amusement enterprise had been ushered in by Ilam and Carpentaria, that everything was changed, and that in the future an enlightened and excessively exacting public would not be satisfied with what had pleased it in the past. And the owners of the old-fashioned resorts trembled in their shoes, and hated Ilam and Carpentaria, while the myriad patrons of Ilam and Carpentaria on that first day flattered themselves that they had personally assisted at the birth of the grand innovation, and thought how they would say to their grandchildren: “Yes, I was present at the opening of the City of Pleasure, and a marvellous affair it was,” and so on, in the manner of grandparents.
All were expecting Carpentaria, the lion of the show.
His band was due to perform from eight o’clock to ten, and special bills, posted on the sides of the gilded bandstand and in the cafés, announced: “Carpentaria’s band will play the Balloon Lullaby, the latest composition of Carpentaria, composed this afternoon.”
At ten minutes before eight the members of the band, sixty in number, and clad in the imperial purple uniform, marched in Indian file across the gardens to the stand. At a distance of ten paces from the end of the procession came Carpentaria, preceded by a small page bearing his baton on a cushion of purple velvet. Carpentaria always did things with overwhelming style and solemnity. Superior persons laughed at the style and solemnity, but the vast majority did not laugh; they cheered; they appreciated. Whether they were right or wrong, the indubitable fact is that these things came naturally to Carpentaria; they were the expression of his exceedingly theatrical soul, the devices of a man who believes in himself.
At eight o’clock precisely Carpentaria faced the fifty thousand from his bandstand, and, after having bowed elaborately thrice, turned to the band, and lifted the sacred stick.
It was a dramatic moment, the real inauguration of the City of Pleasure.
Cheers and hurrahs rolled in terrific volumes of sound across the gardens, and they did not cease; and people not acquainted with the fame and renown of Carpentaria perceived what it was to be a favourite of capitals, a leading star in the galaxy of stars that the public salutes and recognizes.
Carpentaria preserved the immobility of carven stone until the plaudits had ceased; they lasted for exactly five and a half minutes. Consequently the concert was exactly five and a half minutes late in commencing. Carpentaria himself was never late, but his public had a habit of delaying him.
Suddenly he brought rown his baton with a surprising shock. The carven stone had started into life, and “God save the King” was under way.
Now to see Carpentaria conduct was one of the sights of the world. He conducted not merely with his hand and eye, but with the whole of his immortal frame and his uniform. It was said that he was capable of conducting the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven with his left foot—and who shall deny it? “God save the King” was child’s play to him. Moreover, he showed a certain reserve in handling it. He merely conducted it as though in conducting it he himself were literally saving the King. That was all. But with what snap, what dash, what chic, what splash and what magnificent presence of mind did he save the King! The applause was wild and ample.
The next item was “The City of Pleasure March,” composed by Carpentaria. Indeed, Carpentaria conducted nothing but national hymns, his own compositions, and, as a superlative concession, Wagner and Beethoven. “The City of Pleasure” was in Carpentaria’s finest style, and it was planned to give him the fullest scope in conducting it. He had already made it famous in a triumphal tour through the United States in the previous year. It began with the utmost possible volume of sound. It had a contagious and infectious lilt to it, and both the lilt and the volume of sound were continued without the slightest respite during the whole composition. In the course of this masterpiece Carpentaria performed physical feats that would have astounded Cinquevalli and the Schaffer Troupe. In the frenzy of self-expression he all but stood on his head. The bandstand was too small for him; he needed a planet on which to circulate. By turns his baton was a sceptre, a pump-handle, a maypole, a crutch, a drumstick, a flag, a toothpick, a mop, a pendulum, a whip, a bottle of soothing-syrup, and a scorpion. By turns he whipped, tortured, encouraged, liberated, imprisoned, mopped up, measured, governed, diverted, pushed over, pulled back, and turned inside out his band, and whenever their enthusiasm seemed likely to lead them into indiscretions, he soothed them with the soothing-syrup. By turns the conducting of the piece was a march, a campaign, a house on fire, the race for the Derby, the forging of a hundred-ton gun, a display of fireworks, a mayoral banquet, and a mother scolding a numerous family.
It was colossal.
At the close, as sudden as the shutting of a door, there was a vast strange silence, and then the applause, as colossal as the piece, broke out like a conflagration.
Carpentaria bowed; the entire band bowed; Carpentaria bowed again. Lastly he indicated a flute-player with his baton, and the flute-player came forward and shared the glory of Carpentaria. Why a flute-player, no one could have guessed. Forty flutes could not have been heard in that terrific concourse of brass and drums. But Carpentaria was Carpentaria.
“Did any of you hear the sound of a shot?” Carpentaria said in a low voice to his band.
“Shot? No, sir. No, sir,” came from a dozen mouths. “Why, sir?”
“Because a bullet has just grazed my ear. It was in the fourth bar from the end.” He put his hand to his ear and showed blood on his finger. “It’s nothing, nothing,” he quieted them. “I shall expect you to behave as though nothing had occurred, as soldiers in fact.”
“Certainly, sir,” replied the intrepid band.