The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes. Arnold Bennett

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.

CHAPTER II—Interviewed

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      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