Returning from the English church at Monte Carlo towards his hotel,
old Trevillian paused at a bend in the road to rest his thin calves.
Through a mimosa-tree the sea was visible, very blue, and Trevillian’s
eyes rested on it with the filmy brown stare of old age.
Monte Carlo was changed, but that blue, tideless, impassive sea was the
same as on his first visit forty-five years ago, and this was pleasant
to one conservative by nature. Since then he had married, made money
and inherited more, ‘raised,’ as Americans called it, a family--all,
except his daughter Agatha, out in the world--had been widowed, and
developed old man’s cough. He and Agatha now left The Cedars, their
country house in Hertfordshire, for the Riviera, with the annual
regularity of swallows. Usually they stayed at Nice or Cannes, but
this year, because a friend of Agatha’s was the wife of the English
chaplain, they had chosen Monte Carlo.
It was near the end of their stay, and the April sun hot.
Trevillian passed a thin hand down his thin, brown, hairy face, where
bushy eyebrows were still dark but the pointed beard white, and the
effect, under a rather wide-brimmed brown hat, almost too Spanish for
an English bank director. He was fond of saying that some of the best
Cornish families had Spanish blood in their veins; whether Iberian or
Armadesque he did not specify. The theory in any case went well with
his formalism, growing more formal every year.
Agatha having stayed in with a cold, he had been to service by himself.
A poor gathering! The English out here were a rackety lot. Among the
congregation to whom he had that morning read the lessons he had noted,
for instance, that old blackguard Telford, who had run off with two
men’s wives in his time, and was now living with a Frenchwoman, they
said. What on earth was _he_ doing in church? And that ostracised
couple, the Gaddenhams, who had the villa near Roquebrune? She used his
name, but they had never been married, for Gaddenham’s wife was still
alive. And, more seriously, had he observed Mrs. Rolfe, who before
the war used to come with her husband--now in India--to The Cedars
to shoot the coverts in November. Young Lord Chesherford was hanging
about her, they said. That would end in scandal to a certainty. Never
without uneasiness did he see that woman, with whom his daughter was
on terms of some intimacy. Grass widows were dangerous, especially in a
place like this. He must give Agatha a hint. Such doubtful people, he
felt, had no business to attend Divine service; yet it was difficult to
disapprove of people coming to church, and, after all, most of them did
not! A man of the world, however strong a churchman, could, of course,
rub shoulders with anyone, but it was different when they came near
one’s womenfolk or into the halls of one’s formal beliefs. To encroach
like that showed no sense of the fitness of things. He must certainly
speak to Agatha.
The road had lain uphill, and he took breaths of the mimosa-scented
air, carefully regulating them so as not to provoke his cough. He was
about to proceed on his way when a piano-organ across the road burst
into tune. The man who turned the handle was the usual moustachioed
Italian with restive eyes and a game leg; the animal who drew it
the customary little grey donkey; the singer the proverbial dark
girl with an orange head-kerchief; the song she sang the immemorial
‘Santa Lucia.’ Her brassy voice blared out the full metallic ‘a’s,’
which seemed to hit the air as hammers hit the wires of a czymbal.
Trevillian had some music in his soul; he often started out for the
Casino concert, though he generally arrived in the playing-rooms,
not, indeed, to adventure more than a five-franc piece or two, for
he disapproved of gambling, but because their motley irregularity
titillated his formalism, made him feel like a boy a little out of
school. He could distinguish, however, between several tunes, and knew
this to be neither ‘God Save the King,’ ‘Rule Britannia,’ ‘Tipperary,’
nor ‘Funiculi-Funicula.’ Indeed, it had to him a kind of separate ring,
a resonance oddly intimate, as if in some other life it had been the
beating, the hammering rhythm of his heart. Queer sensation--quite
a queer sensation! And he stood, blinking. Of course, he knew that
tune now that he heard the words--Santa Lucia; but in what previous
existence had its miauling awakened something deep, hot, almost savage
within him, sweet and luring like a strange fruit or the scent of a
tropical flower? ‘San-ta Luci-i-a! San-ta Luci-i-a!’ Lost! And yet
so close to the fingers of his recollection that they itched! The
girl stopped singing and came across to him--a gaudy baggage, with
her orange scarf, her beads, the whites of her eyes, and all those
teeth! These Latins, emotional, vibrant, light-hearted and probably
light-fingered--an inferior race! He felt in his pocket, produced a
franc, and moved on slowly.
But at the next bend in the road he halted again. The girl had
recommenced, in gratitude for his franc--‘Santa Luci-ia!’ What was it
buried in him under the fallen leaves of years and years?
The pink clusters of a pepper-tree dropped from behind a low garden
wall right over him while he stood there. The air tingled with its
faint savourous perfume, true essence of the South. And again that
conviction of a previous existence, of something sweet, burning,
poignant, caught him in the Adam’s apple veiled by his beard. Was it
something he had dreamed? Was that the matter with him now--while the
organ wailed, the girl’s song vibrated? Trevillian’s stare lighted on
the prickly pears and aloes above the low, pink wall. The savagery of
those plants jerked his mind forward almost to the pitch of--what? A
youth passed, smoking a maize-coloured cigarette, leaving a perfume of
Latakia, that tobacco of his own youth when he, too, smoked cigarettes
made of its black, strong, fragrant threads. He gazed blankly at the
half-obliterated name on the dilapidated garden gate, and spelled it
aloud: “V lla Be u S te. Villa Beau Site! Beau----! By God! I’ve got
it!”
At the unbecoming vigour of his ejaculation a smile of release,
wrinkling round his eyes, furrowed his thin brown cheeks. He went up
to the gate. What a coincidence! The very----! He stood staring into a
tangled garden through the fog of forty-five years, resting his large
prayer-book with its big print on the top rail of the old green gate;
then, looking up and down the road like a boy about to steal cherries,
he lifted the latch and passed in.
Nobody lived here now, he should say. The old pink villa, glimpsed some
sixty yards away at the end of that little wilderness, was shuttered,
and its paint seemed peeling off. Beau Site! That _was_ the name! And
this the gate he had been wont to use into this lower garden, invisible
from the house. And--yes--here was the little fountain, broken and
discoloured now, with the same gargoyle face, and water still dripping
from its mouth. And here--the old stone seat his cloak had so often
covered. Grown over now, all of it; unpruned the lilacs, mimosas,
palms, making that dry rustling when the breeze crept into them. He
opened his prayer-book, laid it on the seat, and carefully sat down--he
never sat on unprotected stone. He had passed into another world,
screened from any eye by the overgrown shrubs and tangled foliage. And,
slowly, while he sat there the frost of nearly half a century thawed.
Yes! Little by little, avidly, yet as it were unwillingly, he
remembered--sitting on his prayer-book, out of the sun, under the
flowering tangled trees.
He had been twenty-six, just after he went into the family bank--he
recollected--such a very sucking partner. A neglected cold had given
him the first of those bronchial attacks of which he was now reaping
the aftermath. Those were the days when, in the chill of a London
winter, he would, dandy-like, wear thin underclothes and no overcoat.
Still coughing at Easter, he had taken three weeks off and a ticket
to Mentone. A cousin of his was engaged to a Russian girl whose
family had a villa there, and he had pitched his tent in a little
hotel almost next door. The Russians of _that_ day were the Russians
of the Turgenev novels, which Agatha had made him read. A simple,
trilingual family of gentlefolk, the Rostakovs--father, mother, and
two daughters. What was it they had called _him_--Philip Philipovitch?
Monsieur Rostakov with his beard, his witty French stories, imperfectly
understood by young Trevillian, his zest for food and drink, his thick
lips, and, as they said, his easy morals--quite a dog in his way! And
Madame, _née_ Princesse Nogárin (a Tartar strain in her, his cousin
said), ‘spirituelle,’ somewhat worn out by Monsieur Rostakov and
her belief in the transmigration of souls. And Varvara, the eldest
daughter, the one engaged; only seventeen, with deep-grey, truthful
eyes, a broad, grave face, dark hair, and a candour, by George! which
had almost frightened him. And the little one, Katrina, blue-eyed,
snub-nosed, fair-haired, with laughing lips, yet very serious too;
charming little creature, whose death from typhoid three years later
had given him quite a shock. Delightful family, seen through the
mists of time. And now in all the world you couldn’t find a Russian
family like that. Gone! Vanished from the face of the earth! Their
estates had been--ah!--somewhere in South Russia, and a house near
Yalta. Cosmopolitan, yet very Russian, with their _samovar_ and their
_zakouskas_--a word he had never learned to spell--and Rostakov’s
little glasses of white vodka, and those caviare sandwiches that the
girls and he used to take on their picnics to Gorbio and Castellar
and Belle Enda, riding donkeys, and chaperoned by that amiable young
German lady, their governess.... Germans in those days--how different
they were! How different the whole of life! The girls riding in their
wide skirts, under parasols, the air unspoiled by the fumes of petrol,
the carriages with their jangling-belled little horses and bright
harness; priests in black; soldiers in bright trousers and yellow
shakoes; and beggars--plenty. The girls would gather wild flowers and
press them afterwards; and in the evening Varvara would look at him
with her grave eyes and ask him whether he believed in a future life.
He had no beliefs to speak of then, if he remembered rightly; they had
come with increasing income, family, and business responsibilities.
It had always seemed to hurt her that he thought of sport and dress,
and not of his soul. The Russians in those days seemed so tremendously
concerned about the soul--an excellent thing, of course, but not what
one talked of. Still, that first fortnight had been quite idyllic. He
remembered one Sunday afternoon--queer how such a little thing could
stay in the mind!--on the beach near Cap Martin flicking sand off his
boots with his handkerchief and Varvara saying: “And then to your face
again, Philip Philipovitch?” She was always saying things which made
him feel uncomfortable. And in the little letter which Katrina wrote
him a year later, with blue forget-me-nots all about the paper, she had
reminded him of how he had blushed. Charming young girls--simple--no
such nowadays! The dew was off. They had thought Monte Carlo a vulgar
place. What would they think of it now, by Jove! Even Rostakov only
went there on the quiet--a _viveur_ that fellow, who would always be
living a double life. Trevillian recollected how, under the spell of
that idyllic atmosphere, and afraid of Varvara’s eyes, he himself had
put off from day to day his visit to the celebrated haunt, until one
evening when Madame Rostakov had _migraine_ and the girls were at a
party he had sauntered to the station and embarked on a Monte Carlo
train. How clearly it came back to him--the winding path up through
the Gardens, a beautiful still evening, scented and warm, the Casino
orchestra playing the Love music from ‘Faust,’ the one opera that he
knew well. The darkness, strange with exotic foliage, glimmering with
golden lamps--none of this glaring white electric light--had deeply
impressed him, who, for all his youthful dandyism, had Puritanism in
his blood and training. It was like going up to--well, not precisely
heaven. And in his white beard old Trevillian uttered a slight cackle.
Anyway, he had entered ‘the rooms’ with a beating heart. He had no
money to throw away in those days; by Jove, no! His father had kept him
strictly to an allowance of four hundred a year, and his partnership
was still in the apprentice stage. He had only some ten or twenty
pounds to spare. But to go back to England and have his fellows say,
“What? Monte Carlo, and never played?” was not to be thought of.
His first sensation in ‘the rooms’ was disappointing. The decorations
were florid, the people foreign, queer, ugly! For some time he stood
still listening to the chink of rake against coin, and the nasal twang
of the croupiers’ voices. Then he had gone up to a table to watch the
game, which he had never played. That, at all events, was the same as
now; that and the expression on the gamblers’ faces--the sharp, blind,
crab-like absorption like no other human expression. And what a lot
of old women! A nervous excitement had crept into his brain while he
stood there, an itch into his fingers. But he was shy. All these people
played with such deadly calm, seemed so utterly familiar with it all.
At last he had reached over the shoulder of a dark-haired woman sitting
in front of him, put down a five-franc piece, and called out the
word ‘_Vingt_.’ A rake shovelled it forward on to the number with an
indifferent click. The ball rolled. “_Quatorze, rouge pair et manque._”
His five-franc piece was raked away. But he, Philip Trevillian, had
gambled at Monte Carlo, and at once he had seemed to see Varvara’s eyes
with something of amusement in their candour, and to hear her voice:
“But to gamble! How silly, Philip Philipovitch!” Then the man sitting
to his left got up, and he had slipped down into the empty chair. Once
seated, he knew that he must play. So he pushed another five-franc
piece on to black and received its counterpart. Now he was quits; and,
continuing that simple stake with varying success, he began taking
in the faces of his neighbours. On his left he had an old Englishman
in evening dress, ruddy, with chubby lips, who played in gold pieces
and seemed winning rather heavily. Opposite, in a fabulous shawl, a
bird-like old woman, with a hook nose, and a man who looked like a
Greek bandit in a frock-coat. To his right was the dark-haired woman
over whose shoulder he had leaned. An agreeable perfume, as of jasmine
blossoms, floated from her. She had some tablets and six or seven gold
pieces before her, but seemed to have stopped playing. Out of the tail
of his eye Trevillian scrutinised her profile. She was by far the most
attractive woman he had seen in here. And he felt suddenly uninterested
in the fate of his five-franc pieces. Under the thin, dark brows, a
little drawn down, he could see that her eyes were dark and velvety.
Her face was rather pointed, delicate, faintly powdered in the foreign
fashion. She wore a low dress, but with a black lace scarf thrown over
her gleaming shoulders, and something that glimmered in her dark hair.
She was not English, but what he could not tell. He won twice running
on black, left his stake untouched, and was conscious that she pushed
one of her own gold pieces on to black. Again black won. Again he left
his stake, and she hers. To be linked with her by that following of his
luck was agreeable to young Trevillian. The devil might care--he would
leave his winnings down. Again and again, till he had won eight times
on black, he left his stake, and his neighbour followed suit. A pile of
gold was mounting in front of each of them. The eyes of the hawk-like
old woman opposite, like those of a crustacean in some book of natural
history, seemed pushed out from her face; a little hard smile on her
thin lips seemed saying, ‘Wait; it will all go back!’ The jasmine
perfume from his neighbour grew stronger, as though disengaged by
increasing emotion; he could see her white neck heave under its black
lace. She reached her hand out as though to gather in her winnings.
In bravado Trevillian sat unmoving. Her eyes slid round to his; she
withdrew her hand. The little ball rolled. Black! He heard her sigh of
relief. She touched his arm. “_Retirez!_” she whispered, “_Retirez,
monsieur!_” and, sweeping in her winnings, she got up. Trevillian
hesitated just a moment, then with the thought, ‘If I stay I lose
sight of her,’ he, too, reached out, and, gathering in his pile, left
the table. Starting with a five-franc piece, in nine successful coups
he had won just over a hundred pounds. His neighbour, who had started
with a louis, in seven coups--he calculated rapidly--must have won the
same. “_Seize, rouge pair et manque!_” Just in time! Elated, Trevillian
turned away. There was the graceful figure of his dark neighbour
threading the throng, and without deliberate intention, yet longing not
to lose sight of her, he followed. A check in her progress brought him
so close, however, that he was at infinite pains to seem unconscious.
She turned and saw him. “Ah! _Merci, monsieur!_ I tank you moch.” “It’s
for me to thank you!” he stammered. The dark lady smiled. “I have the
instinct,” she said in her broken English, “for others, not for myself.
I am unlucky. It is the first time you play, sare? I tought so. Do not
play again. Give me that promise; it will make me ’appy.”
Her eyes were looking into his. Never in his life had he seen anything
so fascinating as her face with its slightly teasing smile, her figure
in the lacy black dress swinging out Spanish fashion from the hips,
and the scarf flung about her shoulders. He had made the speech then
which afterwards seemed to him so foreign.
“Charmed to promise anything that will make you happy, madame.”
She clasped her hands like a pleased child.
“That is a bargain; now I have repaid you.”
“May I find your carriage?”
“I am walkin’, monsieur.”
With desperate courage he had murmured:
“Then may I escort you?”
“But certainly.”
Sitting on his prayer-book, Trevillian burrowed into the past. What
had he felt, thought, fancied, in those moments while she had gone to
get her cloak? Who and what was she? Into what whirlpool drawing him?
How nearly he had bolted--back to the idyllic, to Varvara’s searching
candour and Katrina’s laughing innocence, before she was there beside
him, lace veiling her hair, face, eyes, like an Eastern woman, and
her fingers had slipped under his sleeve.... What a walk! What sense
of stepping into the unknown; strange intimacy and perfect ignorance!
Perhaps every man had some such moment in his life--of pure romance,
of adventuring at all and any cost. He had restrained the impulse to
press that slender hand closely to his side, had struggled to preserve
the perfect delicacy worthy of the touching confidence of so beautiful
a lady. Italian, Spanish, Polish, Bohemian? Married, widowed? She told
him nothing; he asked no questions. Instinct or shyness kept him dumb,
but with a whirling brain. And the night above them had seemed the
starriest ever seen, the sweetest scented, the most abandoned by all
except himself and her. They had come to the gate of this very garden,
and, opening it, she had said:
“Here is my home. You have been perfect for me, monsieur.”
Her lightly resting fingers were withdrawn. Trevillian remembered, with
a sort of wonder, how he had kissed those fingers.
“I am always at your service, madame.”
Her lips had parted; her eyes had an arch sweetness he had never seen
before or since in woman.
“Every night I play. _Au revoir!_”
He had listened to her footsteps on the path, watched lights go up in
the house which looked so empty now behind him, watched them put out
again, and, retracing his steps, had learned by heart their walk from
the Casino, till he was sure he could not miss his way to that garden
gate by day or night.... A fluster of breeze came into the jungle
where he sat, and released the dry rustle of the palm-tree leaves. “_On
fait des folies!_” as the French put it. Loose lot, the French! Queer
what young men would go through when they were ‘making madnesses.’
And, plucking a bit of lilac, old Trevillian put it to his nose, as
though seeking explanation for the madnesses of youth. What had he been
like then? Thin as a lath, sunburnt--he used to pride himself on being
sunburnt--a little black moustache, a dandy about clothes. The memory
of his youthful looks warmed him, sitting there, chilly from old age....
“_On fait des folies!_” All next day he had been restless, uneasy,
at the Villa Rosakov under the question in Varvara’s eyes, and Lord
knew what excuse he had made for not going there that evening! Ah! And
what of his solemn resolutions to find out all about his dark lady,
not to run his head into some foreign noose, not to compromise her or
himself? They had all gone out of his head the moment he set eyes on
her again, and he had never learned anything but her name--Iñez--in
all those three weeks, nor told anything of himself, as if both had
felt that knowledge must destroy romance. When had he known himself of
interest to her--the second night, the third? The look in her eyes! The
pressure of her arm against his own! On this very seat, with his cloak
spread to guard her from the chill, he had whispered his turbulent
avowals. Not free! No such woman could be free. What did it matter?
Disinheritance--ostracism--exile! All such considerations had burned
like straws in the fire he had felt, sitting by her in the darkness,
his arm about her, her shoulder pressed to his. With mournful mockery
she had gazed at him, kissed his forehead, slipped away up the dark
garden. God, what a night after that! Wandering up and down along by
the sea--devoured. Funny to look back on--deuced funny! A woman’s
face to have such power. And with a little shock he remembered that
never in all the few weeks of that mad business had he seen her face
by daylight! Of course, he had left Mentone at once--no offering his
madness up to the candid eyes of those two girls, to the cynical stare
of that old _viveur_ Rostakov. But no going home, though his leave
was up; he was his own master yet awhile, thanks to his winnings.
And then--the deluge. Literally--a night when the rain came down
in torrents, drenching him through cape and clothes while he stood
waiting for her. It was after that drenching night which had kept
them apart that she had returned his passion.... A wild young devil!
The madness of those nights beneath these trees by the old fountain!
How he used to sit waiting on this bench in the darkness with heart
fluttering, trembling, aching with expectancy!... Gad, how he had ached
and fluttered on that seat! What fools young men could be! And yet in
all his life had there been weeks so wildly sweet as those? Weeks the
madness of which could stir in him still this strange youthful warmth.
Rubbing his veined, thin hands together, he held them out into a streak
of sunlight and closed his eyes.... There, coming through the gate
into the deeper shadow, dark in her black dress--always black--the
gleam of her neck when she bent and pressed his head to it! Through
the rustling palm-leaves the extinct murmuring of their two voices,
the beating of their two hearts.... Madness indeed! His back gave a
little crick. He had been very free from lumbago lately. Confound it--a
premonitory twinge! Close to his feet a lizard rustled out into the
patch of sunlight, motionless but for tongue and eyes, looked at him
with head to one side--queer, quick, dried-looking little object!...
And then--the end! What a Jezebel of cruelty he had thought her! Now
he could see its wisdom and its mercy. By George! She had blown their
wild weeks out like a candle-flame! Vanished! Vanished into the unknown
as she had come from the unknown; left him to go, haggard and burnt-up,
back to England and bank routine, to the social and moral solidity of a
pillar of society....
Like that lizard whisking its tail and vanishing beneath the dead dry
leaves, so she had vanished--as if into the earth. Could she ever have
felt for him as he for her? Did women ever know such consuming fires?
Trevillian shrugged his thin shoulders. She had seemed to; but--how
tell? Queer cattle--women!
Two nights he had sat here, waiting, sick with anxiety and longing.
A third day he had watched outside the villa, closed, shuttered,
abandoned; not a sound from it, not a living thing, but one
white-and-yellow cat. He pitied himself even now, thinking of that last
vigil. For three days more he had hung around, haunting Casino, garden,
villa. No sign! No sign!...
Trevillian rose; his back had given him another twinge. He examined the
seat and his open prayer-book. Had he overlapped it, on to damp stone?
He frowned, smoothing superstitiously the pages a little creased and
over-flattened by his weight. Closing the book, he went towards the
gate. Had those passionate hours been the best or the worst of his
life? He did not know.
He moved out into the hot sunshine and up the road. Round the corner
he came suddenly abreast of the old villa. ‘It was here I stood,’ he
thought; ‘just here!’ What was that caterwauling? Ah! The girl and
the organ--there they were again! What! Why, of course! That long-ago
morning a barrel organ had come while he stood there in despair. He
could see it still, grinding away, with a monkey on it, and a woman
singing that same silly tune. With a dry, dusty feeling he turned and
walked on. What had he been thinking of before? Oh, ah! The Rolfe woman
and that young fool Chesherford. Yes, he would certainly warn Agatha,
certainly warn her. They were a loose lot out here!
1921.