"Well now," said the Colonel, rousing himself from a brief nirvana
of digestion, "I hope that you will not be dull." He said it with
the confidence of a man who has just laid before you a pretty
convincing sample of his social powers.
Durant started; he was alone with the Colonel and the wine, and had
just made the discovery that when the Colonel's face was at rest he
was very like an owl.
"To-morrow we'll go exploring together. I should like to take you
over my little property."
As a matter of fact, the property was considerable; but Durant
noticed that its owner applied the endearing diminutive to every
object that appealed specially to his egotism. It was a peculiarity
of the Colonel that he was ready to melt with affection over the
things that belonged to himself, and was roused almost to ferocity
by whatever interested other people.
"I dare say it will be good for you to see some fresh faces and to
be put--in touch--in touch with fresh ideas."
You would have said that Durant had been sitting for seven years
with his feet on the fender while the Colonel roamed the world.
Durant agreed. He was being hypnotized by the hooked nose and the
round hazel eyes with their radiating wrinkles. He had been five
hours in Coton Manor, it felt like five years, and the evening had
only just begun.
His host stared at him, fidgeted nervously for five minutes, plunged
into nirvana again, emerged, and with a shamefaced smile suggested
that the ladies would be getting impatient. In the drawing-room his
nervousness increased; he went on like a person distracted with an
intolerable desire; he sat down and got up again; he pirouetted; he
played with ornaments; he wandered uneasily about the room, opening
and shutting windows, setting pictures straight, and lighting
candles; he was a most uncomfortable little Colonel of militia. And
with every movement he revolved nearer and nearer to a certain
table. The table stood in the background; Durant recognized it as
the kind that opens and discloses the magic circle, the green land
of whist. The table had a sweet and sinful fascination for the
Colonel.
Durant had just pulled himself together, and determined that he
could bear it if they didn't play some infernal game, if they didn't
play whist. And now it seemed that whist was what they played, that
whist of course was what Mrs. Fazakerly was there for. The Colonel
looked from the table to the group, from the group to the table;
there was calculation in his eye, an almost sensual anticipation. He
seemed to be saying to himself, "One, two, three, four; the perfect
number." Durant affected abstraction, and turning to the window
gazed out into the dim green landscape. His host's eye followed him;
it marked him down as the fourth; it hovered round him, dubious,
vacillating, troubled. The Colonel had still some torturing remnants
of a conscience; he had read the deep repugnance on the young man's
face, and hesitated to sacrifice a guest on his first night. He
turned helplessly to Mrs. Fazakerly, who put an end to his struggle.
She touched Durant lightly on the shoulder. "Come," she murmured
gently, like a fate that pitied while she compelled. "Come. He wants
his little game."
It was as if she had said, "My poor dear sacrificial lamb, he wants
his little holocaust. There is no help for it. Let me show you the
way to the altar."
"Frida!" It was the Colonel who spoke.
Miss Tancred spread open the table with the air of a high priestess,
hieratic and resigned. The Colonel approached it, a lighted candle
in each hand. For one moment of time the egotist seemed to be rapt
beyond himself; he was serving the great god Whist. Cards were the
Colonel's passion; he loved them with delight that was madness,
madness that was delight. Cards for cards' sake, the pure passion,
the high, immaculate abstraction; no gambling, mind you; no playing
for penny points; no pandering to a morbid appetite for excitement.
With cards in his hand the Colonel was transformed. He might be
wedded to matter of fact, which is the grossest form of materialism;
but at the green table he appeared as a devotee of the transcendent,
the science of sciences, Whist.
Durant curled his long legs under the table and prepared for a
miserable evening, while the Colonel's face beamed on him from
between two candles.
"Durant," he said, "you are an acquisition. If it wasn't for you we
should have to play with a dummy."
Durant replied mournfully that he was not great at the game, but he
thought he was about as good as a dummy.
"Don't you be too sure of that," said Mrs. Fazakerly. "There's a
great deal to be said for the dummy. He isn't frivolous, he never
revokes, he never loses his little temper, and he plays the game."
"Yes, I think he can show you some very pretty science, Durant." The
Colonel's mustache and eyebrows and all the wrinkles on his face
were agitated, but he made no sound. The owl was pluming all his
little feathers, was fluttering with mysterious mirth. Oh! he took
the lady's humor, he could enter into the thing, he could keep the
ball going.
"You see," Mrs. Fazakerly explained, "he has an intelligence behind
him."
"A dummy inspired by Colonel Tancred would be terrible to
encounter," said Durant.
Miss Tancred lifted her eyes from the cards she was shuffling. Again
he felt her gaze resting upon him for a moment, the same
comprehensive, disconcerting gaze. This time it had something
pathetic and appealing in it, as if she implored him to take no
further notice of her father's fatuity.
"Confound the old fellow," he said to himself; "why does he make me
say these things?"
When they began Durant saw a faint hope of release in his own
stupidity, his obvious unfitness for the game. By a studied
carelessness, an artful exaggeration of his deficiencies, he courted
humiliation, ejection in favor of the dummy. But, as it happened,
either his evil destiny had endowed him with her own detestable
skill, or else his stupidity was supreme. Trying with might and main
to lose, he kept on winning with horrible persistency. He was on the
winning side; he was made one with the terrible Miss Tancred; and
for the first half hour he found a certain painful interest in
watching that impenetrable creature.
Miss Tancred played the game; she played, now with the rhythm and
precision of a calculating machine, now with the blind impetus and
swoop of some undeviating natural force. It was not will, it was not
intelligence; it was something beyond and above them both,
infinitely more detached, more monotonous and cold; something
independent even of her desire. Durant could see that she had as
little love for the game as he had. She played because she always
had played, by habit, a second nature that had ousted the first.
Her skill was so unerring that for Durant it robbed the game of its
last lingering attraction, the divine element of chance. One tinge
of consciousness, one touch of fire, and it would have been sheer
devilry. As it was he could have been sorry for her, though in her
infinite apathy she seemed to be placed beyond his pity and her own.
With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there
like an incarnate Ennui, the terrible genius of the house.
The Colonel, though losing rapidly, was in high good humor. He
displayed a chivalrous forbearance with the weakness of Mrs.
Fazakerly, who committed every folly and indiscretion possible to a
partner. He bowed when he dealt to her; he bowed when she dealt to
him; he bowed when she revoked.
"'To err is human,'" said the Colonel.
"'To forgive, divine,'" said Mrs. Fazakerly, smiling at Durant, as
much as to say, "You observe his appropriation of the supreme
_role_?"
And indeed the Colonel bore himself with some consciousness of his
metaphysical dignity. He was pleased with everybody, pleased with
Durant, pleased with Mrs. Fazakerly, most particularly pleased with
Colonel Tancred, late of the Wickshire militia.
And as the game wore on Durant realized the full horror of his
position. The gallant Colonel was not going to leave that table till
he had won, and he could never win. He frowned on Durant's proposal
to change partners; he would accept no easy victory. They were in
for a night of it. Durant was in torment, but he sat on, fascinated
by the abominable beauty of his own play; he sat with every nerve on
edge, listening to the intolerable tick of time.
Ten o'clock. He thought it had been midnight. He passed his hand
over his face, as if to feel if it were stiffening in its expression
of agony.
And all the time Mrs. Fazakerly kept on raising and dropping her
eyeglass. Now and then she gave him a look that plumbed the sources
of his suffering. It seemed to recommend her own courageous
attitude, to say, "My dear young man, we are being bored to death;
you know it, and I know it. But for Goodness' sake, let us die with
pleasant faces, since we can but die."
And Durant felt that she was right. He fell into her mood, and
passed from it into a sort of delirium. There could be no end to it;
his partner's pitiless hands would never have done shuffling the
cards. Black and red, red and black, they danced before him; they
assumed extravagant attitudes; they became the symbols of tremendous
mysteries. His head seemed to grow lighter; he was visited with
fantastic impulses like the caprices of an intoxicated person. To
turn on the Colonel and ask him what he meant by inflicting this
torture on an innocent man, whose only crime had been to trust him
too well; to shake the inscrutable Miss Tancred by the hand and tell
her that he knew all--_all_, and that she had his sympathy; to fall
on Mrs. Fazakerly's neck and cry like a child, he felt that he was
capable of any or all of these things. As it was, his behavior must
have been sufficiently ridiculous, since it amused Mrs. Fazakerly so
much. The two had reached that topsy-turvy height of anguish that is
only expressible by laughter. Theirs had a ring of insanity in it;
it sounded monstrous and immoral, like the mirth of victims under
the shadow of condign extinction. As for his play, he knew it was
the play of a madman. And yet he still won; with Miss Tancred for
his partner it was impossible to lose. She sat there unmoved by his
wildest aberrations. Once, to be sure, she remarked with a shade of
irritation in her voice (by some queer freak of nature her voice was
unusually sweet), "Oh, _there_! We've got that trick again!" Like
him, she would have preferred to lose, just to break the maddening
monotony of it.
He pitied her. Once, in a lucid interval, he actually heard himself
paying her a compliment, much as he would have paid a debt of honor.
"Miss Tancred, how magnificently you play!" She answering, "I ought
to. I've been doing nothing else since I was ten years old." It was
simply horrible. The woman was thirty if she was a day.
Half past eleven. Midnight gathering in the garden outside. The room
was reflected on the window-pane from the solid darkness behind
it--the candles, the green table, the players--a fantastic, illusive
scene, shimmering on the ground of night as on some sinister
reality. Mrs. Fazakerly was dashing down her cards at random, and
even the Colonel shuffled uneasily in his seat. At twelve he
observed that none of them "seemed very happy in whist"; he proposed
loo, a game in which, each person playing for his own hand, he could
not be compromised by the ruinous folly of his partner.
At loo Miss Tancred, also untrammeled, rose to dizzying heights of
play. She hovered over the green table, motionless like an eagle
victory. Then she swooped, invincible. One against three she laid
about her, slashed, confounded, and defeated the enemy with terrific
slaughter. As Durant stammered, idiotic in his desperation, it was
"a regular Water-loo."
The Colonel kept it going. He laughed, "Ha-ha! What do you say to a
whiskey-and-water-loo? My head's as clear as daylight. I think I
could stand another little game if we had some whiskey and water."
A movement of Mrs. Fazakerly's arm swept the pack on to the floor.
"Frida," she cried, "take your father and put a mustard plaster on
the back of his neck."
Miss Tancred rose. She just raised the black accent of her eyebrows
as she surveyed the disenchanted table, the awful disorder of the
cards. She looked at Durant and Mrs. Fazakerly with a passionless,
interrogatory stare. Then suddenly she seemed to catch the infection
of their dreadful mirth. It wrung from her a deeper note. She too
laughed, and her laughter was the very voice of Ennui, a cry of
bitterness, of unfathomable pain. It rang harsh upon her silence and
was not nice to hear.
This unlooked-for outburst had the happy effect of bringing the
evening to an end. It seemed to be part of the program that the
Colonel should go home with Mrs. Fazakerly to take care of her, and
that Miss Tancred should go with them both to take care of the
Colonel. They had not far to walk; only through the park and across
the road to a little house opposite the lodge gates.
While they were looking for their hats Durant was left for a moment
alone with Mrs. Fazakerly. She sank into a seat beside him,
unstrung, exhausted; she seemed to be verging on that state of
nervous collapse which disposes to untimely confidence.
"I like whist," said Mrs. Fazakerly; "but it must be an awful game
to play if you don't like it."
He followed her gaze. It was fixed on Miss Tancred's retreating
figure.
"Why on earth does she play if she doesn't like it?"
Mrs. Fazakerly turned on him, suddenly serious.
"She plays because the Colonel likes it--because she is the best
girl in the world, Mr. Durant."
He stood reproved.