Hugo | Page 2

all musical compositions, as interpreted by Simon Shawn with the aid of an ingenious contrivance the patentees of which had spent twenty thousand pounds in advertising it.
'Very good, Shawn,' said Shawn's master, coming forward in his shirt-sleeves as the last echoes of a mighty chord expired under the dome. He meditatively stroked his graying beard while the pianist returned to the tea-tray.
'And, Shawn--'
'Yes, sir?'
'I want a hat.'
'A hat, sir?'
'A lady's hat.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Run down into Department 42, there's a good fellow, and see if you can find me a lady's hat of dark-blue straw, wide brim, trimmed chiefly with a garland of pinkish rosebuds.'
'A lady's hat of dark-blue straw, wide brim, trimmed chiefly with pinkish rosebuds, sir?'
'Precisely. Here, you're forgetting the token.'
He detached a gold medallion from his watch-chain, and handed it to Shawn, who departed with it and with the tea-tray.
Two minutes later, having climbed the staircase between the inner and outer domes, he stood, fully clad in a light-gray suit, on the highest platform of the immense building, whose occidental fa?ade is the glory of Sloane Street and one of the marvels of the metropolis. Far above him a gigantic flag spread its dazzling folds to the sun and the breeze. On the white ground of the flag, in purple letters seven feet high, was traced the single word, 'HUGO.'
From his eyrie he could see half the West End of London. Sloane Street stretched north and south like a ruled line, and along that line two hurrying processions of black dots approached each other, and met and vanished below him; they constituted the first division of his army of three thousand five hundred employ��s.
He leaned over the balustrade, and sniffed the pure air with exultant, eager nostrils. He was forty-six. He did not feel forty-six, however. In common with every man of forty-six, and especially every bachelor of forty-six, he regarded forty-six as a mere meaningless number, as a futile and even misleading symbol of chronology. He felt that Time had made a mistake--that he was not really in the fifth decade, and that his true, practical working age was about thirty.
Moreover, he was in love, for the first time in his life. Like all men and all women, he had throughout the whole of his adult existence been ever secretly preoccupied with thoughts, hopes, aspirations, desires, concerning the other sex, but the fundamental inexperience of his heart was such that he imagined he was going to be happy because he had fallen in love.
'I'm glad I sent for that hat,' he said, smiling absently at the Great Wheel over a mile and a half of roofs.
The key to his character and his career lay in the fact that he invariably found sufficient courage to respond to his instincts, and that his instincts were romantic. They had led him in various ways, sometimes to grandiose and legitimate triumphs, sometimes to hidden shames which it is merciful to ignore. In the main, they had served him well. It was in obedience to an instinct that he had capped the nine stories of the Hugo building with a dome and had made his bed under the dome. It was in obedience to another instinct that he had sent for the hat.
'Very pretty, isn't it?' he observed to Shawn, when Simon handed him the insubstantial and gay object and restored the gold token. They were at a window in the circular room; the couch had magically melted away.
'I admire it, sir,' said Shawn, and withdrew.
'Dolt!' he cried out upon Shawn in his heart. 'You didn't see her at work on it. As if you could appreciate her exquisite taste and the amazing skill of her blanched fingers! I alone can appreciate these things!'
He hung the hat on a Louis Quatorze screen, and blissfully gazed at it, her creation.
'But I must be careful,' he muttered--'I must be careful.'
A clerk entered with his personal letters. It was scarcely seven o'clock, but these fifteen or twenty envelopes had already been sorted from the three thousand missives that constituted his first post; he had his own arrangement with the Post-Office.
'So it's coming at last,' he said to himself, as he opened an envelope marked 'Private and Confidential' in red ink. The autograph note within was from Senior Polycarp, principal partner in Polycarps, the famous firm of company-promoting solicitors, and it heralded a personal visit from the august lawyer at 11.30 that day.
In the midst of dictating instructions to the clerk, Mr. Hugo stopped and rang for Shawn.
'Take that back,' he commanded, indicating the hat. 'I've done with it.'
'Yes, sir.'
The hat went.
'I may just as well be discreet,' his thought ran.
But her image, the image of the artist in hats, illumined more brightly than ever his soul.
CHAPTER II
THE ESTABLISHMENT
Seven years before, when, having unostentatiously acquired the necessary