"_Rien n'va plus_!"
Then the click of the ball, and the jingle of money lost and won.
It was one of the greatest disillusionments I have ever experienced.
There was nothing in the least exciting, nothing sensational. There was
a rustle of notes, and the whole scene was sordid, debasing. I can
remember only one other disillusionment that has given me so great a
shock. I experienced that the first time I visited Niagara Falls. I
had seen pictures in plenty of the Falls, and had based thereon my idea
of what the Falls would look like when I got there.
I arrived at noon, eager to gaze upon "Nature's Marvellous Phenomenon,"
as the booklet of the Railway Company described it. The first thing I
saw was a truly gigantic hoarding-board advertising somebody's
lung-tonic, alongside it one recommending some one else's Blood
Capsules, and then, whichever way I looked, the landscape, which should
have been gorgeous, was disfigured by similar announcements. Even the
water was spoilt, for some of the falls being harnessed to dye-works,
ran in shades of dirty greens and reds and yellows, and when I wanted to
go under the main Falls I found I must buy a ticket at a box-office and
go down in a lift. Never, I remember thinking, have the words, "Where
only man is vile," been more applicable than at Niagara.
But this is an aside. Elated at my success at roulette, a game which
generally bores me, for I generally lose, I suggested to Faulkner that
we should go together to some haunt of amusement more exhilarating than
the Casino.
"What about the ball down in La Condamine to-night?" he asked, looking
at me oddly.
"Ball?" I said. "What ball? I didn't know there was one."
"Oh, yes there is. It isn't an aristocratic ball, you know. Far from
it. I've lived out here a good deal, and got to know my way about. It
is rather an expensive form of amusement, but as you have made two
hundred and fifty-six pounds in ten minutes, you may as well spend a
pound or two that way as any other. I think you will afterwards admit
it has been an `experience'."
I did admit it--and a great deal besides. It was the most
"unconventional" ball I had ever attended, or have attended since. We
picked up a number of acquaintances, eight or ten in all, and went
boisterously down to La Condamine. The gay supper was most enjoyable.
Most of the women's dresses were suitable for warm climates, being
conspicuous by their scantiness, rather than by their beauty. Some wore
the black _loup_ over their eyes. At supper I sat beside a girl whose
identity was thus concealed. She had a wonderful figure, and her thick
dark hair hung in two long plaits down below her waist. About her
movements there was something that seemed familiar to me, and in vain I
tried to recollect when I had met her before, and where. At last my
curiosity outran my discretion.
"Take off your mask," I said to her in French. "I'll give you two
louis."
"Give them to me," she said, also in French, the only language she had
talked, "and I will take it off."