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

what are you doing?”

      His own voice startled him. It was so clear and penetrative in the gloom.

      There was a slight pause. Then Juliette replied: “Carlos, you seem bent on frightening me tonight. I thought you were in bed and asleep. You’ll take cold on that balcony. I only came out to get a little air.”

      The notion struck him that her head was turned directly to Ham’s house, and yet she made no comment on the light there and the door ajar.

      “Go in, there’s a good girl,” said Carpentaria. “It’s you who’ll be taking cold.”

      “I’m going in,” she answered.

      And she went in.

      He had yet another alarm. Something moved on the balcony itself, near a row of flower-pots. Then he felt a pressure against his leg.

      “Ah, Beppo!” he whispered, suddenly relieved, smiling at his nervous timidity. A great Angora cat leaped on to his knees, and began clawing at the superb pile of his purple trousers. He stroked the animal, and Beppo purred with a volume of sound equal to that of many sawmills. “Don’t purr so loud, Bep,” he advised the cat; but the cat, under the impression that it was the centre of importance in the best of all possible worlds, purred with undiminished vigour.

      Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour passed so, and then Carpentaria heard heavy footsteps in the avenue from the direction of the Central Way. He jumped up, shattering the illusions of Beppo, and listened intently. A man presently appeared, walking slowly. He wondered who it could be; but when the figure paused at Ilam’s steps, mounted them, and pushed open the unlatched door, he saw that it was Ilam himself, and that Ilam was holding in his arms a bundle of what looked like black cloth. The vision of him was but transient, for Ilam closed the door at once. Ilam, then, must have left his house before Carpentaria had come on to the balcony. The watcher on the balcony felt his heart beating rapidly. His calm had vanished. The frenzy of the music, the perturbation caused by the bullet, had passed, only to give way to another and perhaps a more dreadful excitation. What could these secret journeys of Ilam portend? He clutched fiercely the rail of the balcony in his apprehensive anxiety.

      After a time—not a very long time—the door opened again, and for at least five seconds Josephus Ilam stood plainly silhouetted against a light within the house, and over his shoulders, which were bent, he carried an enormous limp burden, draped in black. He looked back into the house once, then turned awkwardly, because of his burden, to shut the door behind him, and with excessive deliberation descended the steps and came out into the avenue. The figure and its burden were now nothing but a shape in the gloom.

      Carpentaria decided in the fraction of a second what he would do. He slipped into his bedroom, took off his boots, put on a pair of felt slippers, scurried downstairs, opened the side-door, and gently slipped out. Ilam, tramping slowly with clumsy footsteps, had reached the arch leading to the Central Way.

CHAPTER VII—The Cut

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      Carpentaria dogged him with all the precautions of silence as he turned to the right down the Central Way. The great thoroughfare of the City of Pleasure was, of course, absolutely deserted. Its fountains were stilled; its pretty cable-cars had disappeared; its flags had been hauled down. The meagre trees rustled chilly in the night-wind. Its vast and floriated white architecture seemed under the sombre sky to be the architecture of a dream. The one sign of human things was the illuminated face of the clock over the Exposition Palace, which showed twenty-five minutes past twelve. Of the two thousand souls employed in the City, more than half had gone to their homes in the other city, London, and several hundreds slept in the dormitories that had been built for them at the southern extremity of the Central Way. The remaining hundred or so were dispersed in various parts of the City, either watching or asleep. Some had the right to sleep at their posts. But the men of the highly-organized fire service would be awake and alert.

      Yet there happened to be no living creature on the Way, except its two chiefs. Ilam crossed the Way, and turned off it through an avenue that lay between the lecture hall and the menagerie. Carpentaria followed at a safe distance, hiding in the thick shadows as he went. From the interior of the menagerie came the subdued growls and groans of the wild beasts therein, suffering from insomnia, and longing for the jungle. Among the treasures of the menagerie was a society of twenty-seven lions, who went through a performance twice a day under their trainer, Brant, the king of lion-tamers, as he was called on the City of Pleasure programmes, and as he, in fact, was. There were also a celebrated sanguinary tiger, that had killed three men in New York, and various other delicate attractions. The nocturnal noises of these fearsome animals were sufficiently appalling. And when Ilam stopped before a little door in the south façade of the menagerie building, a cold perspiration froze the forehead and the spirit of Carpentaria. Was the man going to yield his mysterious black-enveloped burden to the lions and the tigers, the jackals and the hyenas, of that inestimable collection of African and Asiatic fauna?

      But Ilam struggled onwards. And next they passed the electricity works, which was in full activity, for the manufacture of light went on night and day in the City of Pleasure. Ilam slunk along the front of the workshops, increasing his pace. Fortunately for him, the windows were seven feet from the ground, so that he could not be observed from within. The whirr of the wheels revolving incessantly in front of gigantic magnets filled the air, and from the high windows shone a steely-blue radiance, chequered by the flying shadows of machinery.

      Ilam turned again, and entered the Amusements Park, and, threading his way among chutes, switchbacks, slides, and ponds, he crossed it from end to end.

      “Where is he going?” Carpentaria muttered.

      And then, suddenly, it occurred to Carpentaria where Ilam was going.

      Behind the Amusements Park, and abutting on the confines of the City territory, was a large waste piece of ground which had been used for excavations and for refuse. In the tremendous operation of levelling the site of the City, digging foundations, and gardening in the landscape manner, much earth had been needed in one spot, and much earth had had to be removed in another. The waste piece of ground was the clearing-house of this business. In certain parts it was humped like a camel’s back, and in others it was hollowed into pits. Immense quantities of soil lay loose, and there were, besides, barrows and spades in abundance.

      Arrived in the midst of this sterile wilderness, Ilam unceremoniously dropped his burden near a miniature mountain, which raised itself by the side of a miniature pit. He then found a spade, and, having tested the looseness of the soil, took up the black mystery and slipped it carefully into the pit. Then he climbed with the spade on to the summit of the hillock, and began to push the soil from the hillock into the pit. It proved to be the simplest thing in the world. In five minutes the burden of Ilam lay under several feet of soil.

      Carpentaria, favoured by the nature of the spot, had crept closer.

      “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!” he heard Ilam reciting. Amazing phenomenon! But nothing can be more amazing than the behaviour of an utterly respectable man when he is committing a crime!

      The affair finished, Ilam departed, passing within a few feet of Carpentaria, who stretched himself flat on the ground to avoid detection.

      And when Ilam had vanished out of sight, Carpentaria jumped up feverishly, seized the spade, leapt into the pit and began to dig—to dig with a fury of haste. Fate helped him, for the black mass was uncovered in less time than had been taken to cover it. He dragged it slowly out of the pit, and slowly, almost reluctantly, unwrapped it. He had been sure at the first touch that it was the body of a man, and he was not mistaken. In the gloomy night he could see the white patches made by the face and the hands. The body was not yet stiff. He hesitated, and then struck a match. He hoped the wind would blow it out, but the wind spared it; it flared bravely, and lighted