The Golden Rendezvous Read Online Free PDF Page B

lucrative dollar-earning market, had some extra cabins fitted on the brandywine and advertised them in a few very select american newspapers and magazines, making it quite plain that he was interested only in top people. Among the attractions offered had been a complete absence of bands, dances, concerts, fancy-dress balls, swimming pools, tombola, deck games, sight-seeing and parties. A genius could have made such desirable and splendidly resounding virtues out of things he didn't have anyway. All he offered on the positive side was the mystery and romance of a tramp ship which sailed to unknown destinations-this didn't make any alterations to regular schedules; all it meant was that the captain kept the names of the various ports of call to himself until shortly before he arrived there and the resources and comfort of a telegraph lounge which remained
    in continuous touch with the new york, london, and paris stock exchanges. The initial success of the scheme was fantastic. In stock exchange parlance, the issue was oversubscribed a hundred times. This was intolerable to lord dexter; he was obviously attracting far too many of the not quite top people, aspiring would-he's on the lower-middle rungs of the ladder who had not yet got past their first few million, people with whom top people would not care to associate. He doubled his prices. It made no difference. He trebled them and in the process made the gratifying discovery that there were many people in the world who would pay literally almost anything not only to be different and exclusive but to be known to be different and exclusive. Lord dexter held up the building of his latest ship, the campari, had designed and built into her a dozen of the most luxurious cabin suites ever seen, and sent her to new york, confident that she would soon recoup the outlay of a quarter of a million pounds extra cost incurred through the building of those cabins. As usual, his confidence was not misplaced. There were imitators, of course, but one might as well have tried to imitate buckingham palace, the grand canyon, or the cullinan diamond. Lord dexter left them all at the starting date. He had found his formula and he stuck to it unswervingly: comfort, convenience, quiet, good food, and good company. Where comfort was concerned, the fabulous luxury of the
    staterooms had to be seen to be believed; convenience, as far as the vast majority of the male passengers was concerned, found its ultimate in the juxtaposition, in the campari's unique telegraph lounge, of the stock-exchange tickers and one of the most superbly stocked bars in the world. Quiet was achieved by an advanced degree of insulation both in cabin suites and engine room, by imitating the royal yacht britannia inasmuch as that no orders were ever shouted and the deck crew and stewards invariably wore rubber-soled sandals and by eliminating all the bands, parties, games, and dances which lesser cruise passengers believed essential for the enjoyment of shipboard life. The magnificent cuisine had been achieved by luring away, at vast cost and the expense of even more bad feeling, the chefs from one of the biggest embassies in london and one of the finest hotels in paris; those masters of the culinary world operated on alternate days, and the paradisical results of their efforts to outdo one another was the envious talk of the western ocean. Other ship owners might, perhaps, have succeeded in imitating some or all of those features, although almost certainly to a lesser degree. But lord dexter was no ordinary ship owner. He was, as said, a genius, and he showed it in his insistence, above all, on having the right people aboard. Never a single trip passed but the campari had a personage on its passenger list, a personage varying from notable to world-famous. A special suite was reserved for personages. Well-known politicians, cabinet ministers, top stars of the stage and screen, the odd famous writer or artist-if he was clean enough