An idle, average sensual man, and an idle woman from whom wantonness
emanates like a perfume, cannot meet each other every day for a couple
of weeks without finding themselves progressing by leaps and bounds in
mutual intimacy. The flesh speaks, the world is complaisant, and the
devil leers beatifically. The attraction which Gerard first felt towards
the transfigured money-lender’s daughter developed quickly into a more
vivid sentiment. Except that of an old club acquaintance whom he had
run across in the gaming-rooms, he had no other society than Minna’s in
Monte Carlo. She became his occupation. The circle of friends to whom
she introduced him aroused his British contempt. He was as much out of
touch with the overdressed cosmopolitan ladies as with the excessively
polite cosmopolitan men. He treated them all civilly enough, with a
certain uncomfortable indifference, when he met them in her company, but
avoided them studiously when he was alone.
Minna held a reception every Tuesday night at the Casa Benedetta. At
first, Mrs. Delamere had tried to put her in the way of knowing good
people. She had worked and intrigued most sedulously, and had been
successful in inducing a certain set to take up her charge. But seeing
Minna play recklessly with all kinds of fire, they dropped her, out
of regard for their own fingers. Minna called them Tartuffes and
Pecksniffs, uttering scornful doubts as to the honour of the men and the
chastity of the women, whereupon Mrs. Delamere shrugged her shoulders
and began to experiment upon the next strata of society. These, by
turns, refusing to support Minna, she had come upon the riff-raff.
And the riff-raff of Monte Carlo is a very curious and heterogeneous
formation. No one knows its past or its future. The men have perfect
manners, the women perfect complexions. The ones are worth the others.
Minna’s receptions were brilliant enough. They were distinguished by
animated conversation, excellent music, and irreproachable champagne.
But to the stolid Philistine perception of Gerard Merriam there was
an indefinable air of something wrong, such as strikes a guest at a
perfectly well-conducted gathering at an expensive private lunatic
asylum. When the ladies of the house were engaged with their guests,
he lounged, hands in pockets, by the door leading on to the loggia,
and surveyed the scene stonily. They were a damned lot, he murmured to
himself; and added a couple of uncompromising Saxon vocables indicating
the respective categories under which the men and women fell. Disrepute,
as practised by foreigners, is a tawdry and contemptible thing in
respectable though immoral British eyes.
Thus he stood one Tuesday evening some three weeks after his meeting
with Minna. The room was brilliantly lighted. In a corner sat an eager
crowd around a little roulette-table. On divans and easy chairs the
remainder of the company laughed and chatted. Minna was the centre of a
little group of men, two bald, scrupulously attired, wearing ribbons
in their button-holes. One was telling a story. By the guffaws that
followed, and by the way in which Minna held her fan before her face,
Gerard guessed its nature. He glowered at her. As French was spoken,
which he understood very badly, he felt an added sense of outrage.
A stout lady in mauve and rubies left the roulette and came over to
Minna.
“Present to me your tame bear, my dear,” she said in a shrill falsetto.
“He is sulking because no one is making him dance.”
Minna laughed, glanced at Gerard and met his lowering look. Then she bit
her lip. It was ridiculous for a man to behave so foolishly. She rose;
resigned her seat to the lady, and walked with her slow, languid step to
Gerard.
“Madame Raborski is dying to make your acquaintance.”
“It would be a good thing to let her die,” said Gerard.
“Well, she will soon. Grant her this last favour.”
Annoyance screwed his features. “I can’t talk inanities to rouged
women,” he said.
“You can talk them to me.”
“You’re not rouged. If you were, I shouldn’t.”
“I don’t think you ought to speak in this way of my friends,” she
remarked.
“I suppose I am rude, and I beg your pardon. But they’re not your
friends. They are a troupe of mountebanks whom you engage to entertain
you. Come out on to the loggia.”
“And catch my death of cold? No, thank you.”
“You have scarcely spoken a word to me all the evening.”
“I speak to those who amuse me.”
“With blackguardly French stories.”
“That’s my affair.”
“I don’t like to see those fellows leering at you,” he said, sulkily.
To such a point of intimacy had three weeks’ intercourse brought them.
Minna broke into the low notes of her laughter.
“Why shouldn’t they? It pleases them and doesn’t hurt me. And _vice
versa_. Also, you know, I’m not a monopolisable woman. If you’ll go and
talk nicely to Madame Raborski, I’ll let you give me some supper.”
“All right,” he said; “where is the siren?”
She conducted him to the group, performed the introduction. He bowed
with the Englishman’s stiffness. The other men politely made place
for him. He sat down and endured a quarter of an hour’s anguish. Minna
joined the roulette-players, where Mrs. Delamere was staking on even
chances, according to an infallible system in which one only plays
every tenth or fifteenth game. It suited her purse and protracted the
excitement. After winning a few hundred francs, Minna released Gerard
from Madame Raborski, who had been trying to create an impression.
But the supper-room was full; the hostess became the centre of flowery
compliment, delivered with much uplifting of shoulders and spreading
of thin bejewelled hands. Gerard chafed and felt his own great fingers
tingle. He was not a man accustomed to the amenities of society. During
his domesticated days, he went out with Irene only under compulsion.
Women bored him, save those whom he appropriated to himself. Then
he preferred seclusion with the chosen individual. Among these
easy-mannered adventurers and satirical, sharp-witted women, he seemed
as uncouth as a bear in a wilderness of monkeys. The comparison was
Minna’s, in an after talk with Mrs. Delamere. Consciousness of his lack
of adaptability did not soothe his temper. He felt annoyed with himself
for coming. “Don’t look so glum,” whispered Minna. “Give me some of that
pâté and look after the truffles.” He helped her solemnly, and brought
the plate to the corner of the table where she was sitting. Then stood
by her, at attention, while she jested with her neighbours. When she
had finished, he escorted her to the salon, where she left him to join
a handsome woman, in a very low dress, who was playing the piano. Mrs.
Delamere, who had abandoned the roulette-table, took pity on him, and
sat down with him on a divan against the wall. Being an Englishwoman of
his own class, she could make herself companionable, and draw him on to
his own subjects, the fortune he had made, the big game he had shot.
She had known Freewintle, the mighty hunter with whom he had been
associated, and gave satirical sketches of his family history. She was
an authority on genealogies, a subject which, by one of the intellectual
freaks not uncommon in men of Gerard’s type, interested him greatly. It
is a curious fact, but a true one, that all genealogists are related to
one another. Mrs. Delamere conclusively proved her connection with the
Norfolk Merriams through the Freemantles. They were all East Anglians.
“You have done me good, Mr. Merriam,” she remarked. “I had almost
forgotten that there was such a thing as a county family in existence.
Look at these people here--I suppose they belong to somebody--but to
whom?”
“If they had mothers, it’s about all,” replied Gerard, laughing. Mrs.
Delamere had put him into a good humour. Soon afterwards he took his
leave.
“Shall I see you to-morrow?” he asked Minna, while bidding her good-bye.
“Perhaps--I don’t know. If I go over to Monte Carlo you may meet me
there. There are too many burdens in life to add to them voluntarily by
making arrangements for the morrow.”
“You are looking tired,” he said. “A course of late hours and stuffy
rooms becomes unhealthy if it’s overdone. Let me take you for a drive
to-morrow.”
“With Mrs. Delamere?”
“No. You alone. I can get a decent turn-out in Nice, I suppose. I’ll
call for you at two o’clock.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At the Grande Bretagne.”
“I’ll send you word in the morning. It depends how I feel.”
“I shall be wretchedly disappointed if you don’t come.”
“Will you?” she said with her lazy intonation. “_Nous verrons_.”
Later, when the guests had gone, Mrs. Delamere began to sound Gerard’s
praises. He was a thorough Englishman, intelligent, masculine. Not like
the effeminate creatures who had never seen a gun go off in their lives
or ridden anything more spirited than a Turbie donkey. He was like a
colossus amid these little men, she said, with a vague reminiscence
of Shakespeare. It was then that Minna snapped out her bear and monkey
comparison. She was thoroughly weary, lay back exhausted and spiritless
in a chair, and regarded Gerard’s apologist with an air of tired
resignation. The room was hot and stale with the breaths of many people,
and the refuse of many perfumes.
“Bear or not,” replied Mrs. Delamere, drawing some crumpled and greasy
bank notes from the pocket of her black silk dress, and delicately
folding them, “I like to meet an honest, healthy English gentleman
again. And I pity the man. I always pity men whose wives go wrong.”
“Pearls before swine,” said Minna, listlessly. “Oh, I am not so hard as
that upon the women.”
“You mistake my meaning,” said Minna. “He is the hog.”
Mrs. Delamere looked up surprised. “I thought you disliked her so. And
you certainly have been encouraging him.”
Minna drew her body together in a kind of shudder, and threw out her
hand in a gesture of repulsion. “He gives me the creeps!” she said.
Mrs. Delamere did not reply. She rose and gathered her gloves and fan
from a table where they were lying, and then came calmly up to Minna’s
chair. “You are overdone. It is time for bed.”
She was not without kindly instincts. In her placid, well-bred way,
she stooped and put her arm beneath Minna’s and helped her to rise. She
stood for a moment without withdrawing her arm.
“You are leading a weary life, my poor child,” she said.
Minna looked at her for a minute. Her lips quivered.
“Oh! a hell of a life,” she whispered.
And to Mrs. Delamere’s consternation, the girl gave one or two little
convulsive sobs and, turning swiftly, burst into miserable crying upon
her shoulder.
“I wish I were dead. I can’t find peace or happiness anywhere. It is a
hell of a life!”
The elder woman soothed her as best she could. Eventually Minna dried
her eyes, kissed, for the first time, her friend’s faded cheek, and went
out of the room.
“Why is it,” said Mrs. Delamere to herself, “that when a woman wants to
go to the devil, she always does so by water?”
Gerard was up early the next morning, and after enquiries went in
search of a respectable turn-out for the proposed drive. He found a
high American phaeton and a pair of Irish ponies which the livery stable
keeper had recently purchased from a dissipated young Englishman who,
having ruined himself at the tables, had hurriedly hastened to England
to enlist in a foot regiment. On returning towards the Public Gardens,
he encountered his club acquaintance sitting outside the Café de la
Victoire. He joined him in an _apéritif_, described his recent hire. The
friend smiled indulgently.
“I suppose it’s for the Queen of Sheba.”
Gerard frowned surprise. “Who’s that?”
“The girl I’ve seen you with several times. They call her that, I
suppose, because she’s wealthy, dusky, and indiscreet.”
“I used to know her in London long ago,” said Gerard, stiffly.
Suddenly the man remembered, flushed, and apologised.
“I’m awfully sorry. A thousand pardons. But one gets into a bad way of
talking of public characters--and unfortunately every one talks of the
lady by that name.”
Gerard sipped his vermouth coolly.
“What do you know about her?”
“Oh, nothing much. Really--I----”
“It would rather interest me to learn,” insisted Gerard.
“Well, she squanders a lot of money at the tables. And then she’s always
attached to some new man or the other. Somewhat speckled, you see, in
reputation. Introduction not necessary. That sort of thing. I don’t know
if it’s true. I hope not.”
“Oh, I suppose it’s true,” said Gerard. “Women generally live a bit
below their reputation.”
“I’m glad my indiscretion was not serious,” said his friend.
“Oh, dear, no,” laughed Gerard; and, turning the subject aside, “If you
are doing nothing you might as well come and have some lunch with me at
the Grande Bretagne.”
The friend assented. They strolled off together. At the hotel, the
hall-porter gave Gerard a note which had just arrived. It was a line
from Minna promising to be ready for the drive. He felt by no means
displeased by his friend’s gossip; if anything, rather more settled in
his mind. A beautiful and courted woman with several thousands a year
commanded deference. The Queen of Sheba, of Monte Carlo scandal, on the
other hand, was fair game. And the ease of the chase appealed to a man
who was too masculine in his tastes to have cultivated the delicate
gallantries of philandering. He crushed the note roughly into his
pocket.
“A put off?” queried his friend.
“I guess not,” replied Gerard fatuously.