The Grand Babylon Hôtel
‘But what? You months ago expressed the warmest satisfaction at the
security, though I am quite prepared to admit that the security, is of
rather an unusual nature. You also agreed to the rate of interest. It is
not everyone, Mr Levi, who can lend out a million at 5-1/2 per cent. And
in ten years the whole amount will be paid back. I--er--I believe I
informed you that the fortune of Princess Anna, who is about to accept
my hand, will ultimately amount to something like fifty millions of
marks, which is over two million pounds in your English money.’ Prince
Eugen stopped. He had no fancy for talking in this confidential manner
to financiers, but he felt that circumstances demanded it.
‘You see, it’s like this, your Royal Highness,’ began Mr Sampson Levi,
in his homely English idiom. ‘It’s like this. I said I could keep that
bit of money available till the end of June, and you were to give me an
interview here before that date. Not having heard from your Highness,
and not knowing your Highness’s address, though my German agents made
every inquiry, I concluded, that you had made other arrangements, money
being so cheap this last few months.’
‘I was unfortunately detained at Ostend,’ said Prince Eugen, with as
much haughtiness as he could assume, ‘by--by important business. I have
made no other arrangements, and I shall have need of the million. If you
will be so good as to pay it to my London bankers--’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Mr Sampson Levi, with a tremendous and dazzling
air of politeness, which surprised even himself, ‘but my syndicate has
now lent the money elsewhere. It’s in South America--I don’t mind
telling your Highness that we’ve lent it to the Chilean Government.’
‘Hang the Chilean Government, Mr Levi,’ exclaimed the Prince, and he
went white. ‘I must have that million. It was an arrangement.’
‘It was an arrangement, I admit,’ said Mr Sampson Levi, ‘but your
Highness broke the arrangement.’
There was a long silence.
‘Do you mean to say,’ began the Prince with tense calmness, ‘that you
are not in a position to let me have that million?’
‘I could let your Highness have a million in a couple of years’ time.’
The Prince made a gesture of annoyance. ‘Mr Levi,’ he said, ‘if you do
not place the money in my hands to-morrow you will ruin one of the
oldest of reigning families, and, incidentally, you will alter the map
of Europe. You are not keeping faith, and I had relied on you.’
‘Pardon me, your Highness,’ said little Levi, rising in resentment, ‘it
is not I who have not kept faith. I beg to repeat that the money is no
longer at my disposal, and to bid your Highness good morning.’
And Mr Sampson Levi left the audience chamber with an awkward, aggrieved
bow. It was a scene characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century-
-an overfed, commonplace, pursy little man who had been born in a
Brixton semi-detached villa, and whose highest idea of pleasure was a
Sunday up the river in an expensive electric launch, confronting and
utterly routing, in a hotel belonging to an American millionaire, the
representative of a race of men who had fingered every page of European
history for centuries, and who still, in their native castles, were
surrounded with every outward circumstance of pomp and power.
‘Aribert,’ said Prince Eugen, a little later, ‘you were right. It is all
over. I have only one refuge--’
‘You don’t mean--’ Aribert stopped, dumbfounded.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said quickly. ‘I can manage it so that it will look like
an accident.’
Chapter Twenty-One THE RETURN OF FÉLIX BABYLON
ON the evening of Prince Eugen’s fateful interview with Mr Sampson Levi,
Theodore Racksole was wandering somewhat aimlessly and uneasily about
the entrance hall and adjacent corridors of the Grand Babylon. He had
returned from Ostend only a day or two previously, and had endeavoured
with all his might to forget the affair which had carried him there--to
regard it, in fact, as done with. But he found himself unable to do so.
In vain he remarked, under his breath, that there were some things which
were best left alone: if his experience as a manipulator of markets, a
contriver of gigantic schemes in New York, had taught him anything at
all, it should surely have taught him that. Yet he could not feel
reconciled to such a position. The mere presence of the princes in his
hotel roused the fighting instincts of this man, who had never in his
whole career been beaten. He had, as it were, taken up arms on their
side, and if the princes of Posen would not continue their own battle,
nevertheless he, Theodore Racksole, wanted to continue it for them. To a
certain extent, of course, the battle had been won, for Prince Eugen had
been rescued from an extremely difficult and dangerous position, and the
enemy--consisting of Jules, Rocco, Miss Spencer, and perhaps others--had
been put to flight. But that, he conceived, was not enough; it was very
far from being enough. That the criminals, for criminals they decidedly
were, should still be at large, he regarded as an absurd anomaly. And
there was another point: he had said nothing to the police of all that
had occurred. He disdained the police, but he could scarcely fail to
perceive that if the police should by accident gain a clue to the real
state of the case he might be placed rather awkwardly, for the simple
reason that in the eyes of the law it amounted to a misdemeanour to
conceal as much as he had concealed. He asked himself, for the
thousandth time, why he had adopted a policy of concealment from the
police, why he had become in any way interested in the Posen matter, and
why, at this present moment, he should be so anxious to prosecute it
further? To the first two questions he replied, rather lamely, that he
had been influenced by Nella, and also by a natural spirit of adventure;
to the third he replied that he had always been in the habit of carrying
things through, and was now actuated by a mere childish, obstinate
desire to carry this one through. Moreover, he was splendidly conscious
of his perfect ability to carry it through. One additional impulse he
had, though he did not admit it to himself, being by nature adverse to
big words, and that was an abstract love of justice, the Anglo-Saxon’s
deep-found instinct for helping the right side to conquer, even when
grave risks must thereby be run, with no corresponding advantage.
He was turning these things over in his mind as he walked about the vast
hotel on that evening of the last day in July. The Society papers had
been stating for a week past that London was empty, but, in spite of the
Society papers, London persisted in seeming to be just as full as ever.
The Grand Babylon was certainly not as crowded as it had been a month
earlier, but it was doing a very passable business. At the close of the
season the gay butterflies of the social community have a habit of
hovering for a day or two in the big hotels before they flutter away to
castle and country-house, meadow and moor, lake and stream. The great
basket-chairs in the portico were well filled by old and middle-aged
gentlemen engaged in enjoying the varied delights of liqueurs, cigars,
and the full moon which floated so serenely above the Thames. Here and
there a pretty woman on the arm of a cavalier in immaculate attire swept
her train as she turned to and fro in the promenade of the terrace.
Waiters and uniformed commissionaires and gold-braided doorkeepers moved
noiselessly about; at short intervals the chief of the doorkeepers blew
his shrill whistle and hansoms drove up with tinkling bell to take away
a pair of butterflies to some place of amusement or boredom;
occasionally a private carriage drawn by expensive and self-conscious
horses put the hansoms to shame by its mere outward glory. It was a hot
night, a night for the summer woods, and save for the vehicles there was
no rapid movement of any kind. It seemed as though the world--the world,
that is to say, of the Grand Babylon--was fully engaged in the solemn
processes of digestion and small-talk. Even the long row of the
Embankment gas-lamps, stretching right and left, scarcely trembled in
the still, warm, caressing air. The stars overhead looked down with many
blinkings upon the enormous pile of the Grand Babylon, and the moon
regarded it with bland and changeless face; what they thought of it and
its inhabitants cannot, unfortunately, be recorded. What Theodore
Racksole thought of the moon can be recorded: he thought it was a
nuisance. It somehow fascinated his gaze with its silly stare, and so
interfered with his complex meditations. He glanced round at the well-
dressed and satisfied people--his guests, his customers. They appeared
to ignore him absolutely.
Probably only a very small percentage of them had the least idea that
this tall spare man, with the iron-grey hair and the thin, firm,
resolute face, who wore his American-cut evening clothes with such
careless ease, was the sole proprietor of the Grand Babylon, and
possibly the richest man in Europe. As has already been stated, Racksole
was not a celebrity in England.
The guests of the Grand Babylon saw merely a restless male person, whose
restlessness was rather a disturber of their quietude, but with whom, to
judge by his countenance, it would be inadvisable to remonstrate.
Therefore Theodore Racksole continued his perambulations unchallenged,
and kept saying to himself, ‘I must do something.’ But what? He could
think of no course to pursue.
At last he walked straight through the hotel and out at the other
entrance, and so up the little unassuming side street into the roaring
torrent of the narrow and crowded Strand. He jumped on a Putney bus, and
paid his fair to Putney, fivepence, and then, finding that the humble
occupants of the vehicle stared at the spectacle of a man in evening
dress but without a dustcoat, he jumped off again, oblivious of the fact
that the conductor jerked a thumb towards him and winked at the
passengers as who should say, ‘There goes a lunatic.’ He went into a
tobacconist’s shop and asked for a cigar. The shopman mildly inquired
what price.
‘What are the best you’ve got?’ asked Theodore Racksole.
‘Five shillings each, sir,’ said the man promptly.
‘Give me a penny one,’ was Theodore Racksole’s laconic request, and he
walked out of the shop smoking the penny cigar. It was a new sensation
for him.
He was inhaling the aromatic odours of Eugène Rimmel’s establishment for
the sale of scents when a gentleman, walking slowly in the opposite
direction, accosted him with a quiet, ‘Good evening, Mr Racksole.’ The
millionaire did not at first recognize his interlocutor, who wore a
travelling overcoat, and was carrying a handbag. Then a slight, pleased
smile passed over his features, and he held out his hand.
‘Well, Mr Babylon,’ he greeted the other, ‘of all persons in the wide
world you are the man I would most have wished to meet.’
‘You flatter me,’ said the little Anglicized Swiss.
‘No, I don’t,’ answered Racksole; ‘it isn’t my custom, any more than
it’s yours. I wanted to have a real good long yarn with you, and lo!
here you are! Where have you sprung from?’
‘From Lausanne,’ said Felix Babylon. ‘I had finished my duties there, I
had nothing else to do, and I felt homesick. I felt the nostalgia of
London, and so I came over, just as you see,’ and he raised the handbag
for Racksole’s notice. ‘One toothbrush, one razor, two slippers, eh?’ He
laughed. ‘I was wondering as I walked along where I should stay--me,
Felix Babylon, homeless in London.’
‘I should advise you to stay at the Grand Babylon,’ Racksole laughed
back.
‘It is a good hotel, and I know the proprietor personally.’
‘Rather expensive, is it not?’ said Babylon.