Adventure stories; City and town life -- Fiction; Staffordshire (England) -- Fiction
Then he caught sight, through the doors, of the back of Jock, the
Countess’s carriage footman and the son of his mother’s old friend.
Jock was standing motionless at a half-open door to the right of the
space between Denry’s double doors and the next pair of double doors.
Denry tried to attract his attention by singular movements and strange
noises of the mouth. But Jock, like his partner the coachman, appeared
to be carven in stone. Denry decided that he would go in and have
speech with Jock. They were on Christian-name terms, or had been a few
years ago. He unobtrusively pushed at the doors, and at the very same
moment Jock, with a start—as though released from some spell—vanished
away from the door to the right.
Denry was now within.
"Jock!" He gave a whispering cry, rather conspiratorial in tone. And
as Jock offered no response, he hurried after Jock through the door to
the right. This door led to a large apartment which struck Denry as
being an idealisation of a first-class waiting-room at a highly
important terminal station. In a wall to the left was a small door,
half open. Jock must have gone through that door. Denry hesitated—he
had not properly been invited into the Hall. But in hesitating he was
wrong; he ought to have followed his prey without qualms. When he had
conquered qualms and reached the further door, his eyes were met, to
their amazement, by an immense perspective of great chambers. Denry had
once seen a Pullman car, which had halted at Knype Station with a French
actress on board. What he saw now presented itself to him as a train of
Pullman cars, one opening into the other, constructed for giants. Each
car was about as large as the large hall in Bursley Town Hall, and, like
that auditorium, had a ceiling painted to represent blue sky, milk-white
clouds, and birds. But in the corners were groups of naked cupids,
swimming joyously on the ceiling; in Bursley Town Hall there were no
naked cupids. He understood now that he had been quite wrong in his
estimate of the room by which he had come into this Versailles. Instead
of being large it was tiny, and instead of being luxurious it was merely
furnished with miscellaneous odds and ends left over from far more
important furnishings. It was, indeed, naught but a nondescript box of
a hole insignificantly wedged between the state apartments and the outer
lobby.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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