Hugo | Page 2

cried out from his bath, when he heard the rattle of the
tea-tray.
'Yes, sir?'

'Play me the Chopin Fantasie, will you. I feel like it.'
'Certainly, sir,' said Simon, and paused. 'Which particular one do you
desire me to render, sir?'
'There is only one, Shawn, for piano solo.'
'I beg pardon, sir.'
The gentle plashing of water mingled with the strains of one of the
greatest of 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 façade 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 employés.
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