The Casino
Monte Carlo, justly reputed one of the loveliest spots on earth, is
most magically beautiful perhaps when seen from the sea, or from the
long, low, wooded headland of Cap Martin.
Thence, on her first visit one golden afternoon, Ermengarde enjoyed a
most poetic vision of it, never forgotten and never surpassed. She
had left her party, and was basking on a shore thick set with
rich-fruited, wind-stunted myrtle and rosemary bushes, the odours of
which mingled with pine scents and sweet, sharp sea-breath, while she
listened to the soft boom of waves plunging in white, azure-shadowed
foam on the rocks at the point, where the sea is more intensely blue
than anywhere else and the foam whiter, yet always with that faint
azure tinge in shadow.
From this point landwards an enchanting prospect spreads in
long-drawn splendour from the gracefully sweeping outline of
Bordighera, running far out to sea on the right, to that faint and
fairy headland, whence rise the Provençal mountains, so bold in
outline, in substance so dim and shadowy, beyond the abrupt crags of
the Tête du Chien, which hold Monte Carlo as in a cup. Between these
points the great Alpine amphitheatre sweeps grandly back in lofty,
soaring outline, enclosing a rich and sunny Paradise of gorge and
ridge and mountain spur, running in headland after headland, with
tower-crested town, village, garden, and wood, into the clear dark
sea. There, beyond the Italian frontier, sits Ventimiglia throned
with many towers high above the waves, and there a white pyramidal
mass of houses, based on the harbour arches on a sea-fronting steep
and topped by a slender church-tower that dominates all for many a
mile, is Mentone, regally beautiful. Here little Roccabruna
shoulders itself into the sparkling blue, and in mountain recesses
far behind it is many a hill village up to the very peaks. On that
afternoon the battered Roman tower of Turbia showed clear on its
craggy bluffs against the sky above Monte Carlo, but the ravine
beneath and Monte Carlo itself were veiled in purply shadow, mystic,
dim.
The song of the breakers was lulling; the air, spiced with myrtle and
sea-scent, sweet and stimulating; the fullness of colour a joy
nothing could blight. Old happy rambles between cliff and sea, as a
child, a bride, a young mother, came to mind, all the beauty of many
lovely sea places gathered up in, and falling short of, this, which
still wanted the cream and salt of all, the loves and companionships
of old, young days--a thought that drew tears, not wholly sad.
Presently a silvery-grey cloud gathered over the Tête du Chien, and
suddenly the whole shadowed hill-cup holding Monte Carlo, with Monaco
sitting on the steep rock beneath it in the sea, flashed out,
clear-cut and distinct in every detail. The broad hollow of the
gorge, up to the very crags almost, seemed full of white buildings
set in rich dark verdure, and crowding down to the water's edge.
Fleets of tiny fishing-vessels cruised about round Monaco, and
yachts, both white-sailed and steam-funnelled, flitted over the
paling sea and rode at anchor in the harbour, the whole composing a
picture of loveliness beyond imagining.
The thin man was in despair. He was an impressionist; and having had
his painting things and himself conveyed hither and set down among
the rosemary and lentisk, on purpose to record impressions, was so
stunned and bewildered by the multitudes that rushed crowding in
every variety of loveliness upon him, that he could only sit on his
camp-stool with his easel before him, and hold his head in his hands
and groan.
"Seize Monte Carlo!" Ermengarde shouted to him from her distant
boulder when it flashed out, one glorious pearl, under the silvery
cloud, and he seized and painted it with a trembling hand before it
vanished and the great hill-cup was again a mass of purple shadow.
The impression was faint, but the thin man was eternally grateful to
Ermengarde for that, and for her further command to snap up Mentone,
majestically enthroned above a glowing sapphire sea, and framed by
wind-twisted pines, which threw ruddy stems and blue-black crowns
from the low shore across it. And though another injunction to
impress the long hill-spur running down to Bordighera, when it
changed from indigo to warm deep violet with heliotrope shadings,
plunged Mr. Welbourne back to despair, his gratitude broke out in a
generous impulse.
"Let us go to Monte Carlo to-morrow," he cried. "Give me the
pleasure of your company, Mrs. Allonby, since you don't care to go
alone. It is not as terrible as you suppose."
"Well, why not? Only don't speak of it, or Miss Boundrish will
manage to nip in again."
The thin man was really very handy on occasion; he made a respectable
and entirely biddable escort, and, knowing so many people of Mrs.
Allonby's acquaintance and being cousin to most of them, seemed more
like an elderly relative than a chance acquaintance. He knew many
things, and well knew how to talk; his old-fashioned pedantry and
fulness of phrase was forgiven, as being in character with his
neutral-tinted, old-bachelor personality; he impressed Ermengarde as
a sort of social sofa-cushion, restful, harmless, and very useful in
travelling.
"The success of any ramble, picnic, excursion, or small party," he
added pensively, "depends entirely on arithmetic. No matter of what
elements the party be composed, the addition or subtraction of one
may spoil all," a pronouncement heartily endorsed by Ermengarde, as
expressing her own feelings on the subject, though she had not
guessed at what person's subtraction he was obscurely hinting as
ruinous to his enjoyment. Nor did she for a moment suspect that, in
arranging the Monte Carlo afternoon for two performers only, she had
sadly diminished poor Mr. Welbourne's pleasure. Since the Carnival,
the woman of mystery had not been asked to accompany Mrs. Allonby
anywhere, nor had the two ladies once helped each other to dress or
exchanged small talk from their adjoining rooms, which communicated
by a door. A woman who received jewellery from one mask and letters
from another, and held conversations and clandestine meetings with at
least two suspicious male characters, was not a desirable
acquaintance for a grass widow and a mother of unimpeachable
respectability. Yet Ermengarde's heart misgave her when she met the
silent question of Agatha's melancholy eyes at any approach to
companionship on her part meeting with repulse. She hated herself
especially the morning after the Cap Martin excursion when, with the
full intention of spending the afternoon at Monte Carlo, she declined
a mountain walk with Agatha on the ground that it was less tiring to
bask in the sunny garden at home.
"Then I think I will run down to Mentone," Agatha said, in a
confidence untouched by suspicion. "I have an invalid friend in the
place who likes me to come in to luncheon sometimes."
After all, could there be anything more restful than these quiet
lounges by train from spacious halls of leisure, called Gares in that
country? the thin man and Ermengarde wondered, as they sauntered
about the clean and airy emptiness of Mentone Station, and chanced to
take seats in a train that happened to be strolling in the direction
of France, and was entirely composed of first-class carriages,
well-cushioned, and provided with antimacassars of spotless
crochet-work. Other people as casually strolled over and rested, as
if by happy chance, in the clean and comfortable carriages, and after
some time, enjoyably spent with a prospect of sea and mountain and
near view of palm and garden and sunny street, it seemed to occur to
the person lounging upon the engine to propel the string of carriages
gently in the direction of France, and they glided through the now
familiar but never-lessening enchantment of rich scenery between
mountain and sea, always plunging into the tunnelled darkness
whenever a fairy headland ran out into blue and foam-fringed bays.
But what talk they heard on this fairy progress! The tongues were
many, but the subject one alone. For example--
"You'll hardly be at the tables to-night, Ethel?"
"Why not? Easy to unpack and settle in before dinner. And only
staying three weeks, a pity to lose a night."
"True, I shall put in a couple of hours before dinner as well as
after."
Again, in Teutonic accents, "So Hedwig leaves next week?"
"Yes, her husband says they are thoroughly tired of Monte Carlo."
"So? I thought Hedwig had lost rather heavily of late. And
Hermann's luck has evidently turned too."
Or it was, "System this, system that," and, "So many francs to the
good at the end of the week," and the wonderful run of So-and-so's
luck, and M. Tel-et-tel winning five hundred francs in half an hour,
and the positive madness of putting anything on a number that had
just turned up, and why _à travers_ meant so much, and how a cool
head and an accurate memory of the winning numbers of the last six or
seven turns were absolutely necessary to work any system.
"But why," Ermengarde tragically demanded, "come to the loveliest
spot on earth to do this devilry? A disused coal-mine would do
equally well to gamble in."
The thin man conjectured that very likely the devil likes to kill two
birds with one stone. "Because," he sighed, "the moment a beautiful
and pleasant spot is discovered in any corner of the earth, he
incites people to build flaring hotels and villas upon it, and run
railways to it; and, if there is sea, to block it from sight with
ghastly buildings, and spoil its strand with sea-walls and piers and
promenades; and, if there are trees, to cut them down or blast them
with smoke and chemicals; and, if there are mountains, to scar and
tunnel them with lines of smut and iron; and, if meadows and grassy
slopes commanding lovely prospects, to destroy their beauty and make
rasping noises and knock balls over them all day. He gets people to
rush in herds to places made for beauty and calm, to chatter and
snigger and look at fashionable clothes-shops emptied on thoughtless
females from every capital in Europe, and gorge themselves upon all
the luxuries and vices of towns. And the lovelier the spot the
greater satisfaction the devil seems to take in getting men to
practise ugly and squalid sins in it, and to corrupt and degrade
simple and sane folk for miles round it."
By this time they were crammed like sardines with others in a close
box, that; by some invisible and probably diabolic agency, was drawn
up to a higher level, upon which they were contumeliously ejected by
a morose official who had previously mulcted them of small coin.
Then, passing under avenues of wondrous exotic trees, by beds blazing
with cyclamens, carnations, salvias, and petunias, and passing
rivulets dancing and rippling down rocks covered with maidenhair and
broadening in pools half hidden by water lilies, they emerged upon a
terrace fronting a vast blue splendour, firmly rimmed beneath a
nearly white band of sky, and bounded by the purple of Bordighera on
one side, and Monaco, running out on its rock beneath the headland of
Cap d'Ail on the other. And in the foreground, dainty steam and
sailing yachts, some moored, some flitting over the sunny sea, and
crowds of fishing-boats dotted here and there.
"But what is that?" she asked, pointing to a sort of jetty topped
with sickly green, like a worn and dirty billiard table, and dotted
with rough deal boxes, that projected its squalor into the pure blue
waves below.
The crack of a shot from under their feet startled her, and the
simultaneous opening of a box, out of which fluttered a wounded
pigeon, pursued to the edge of the billiard-table and killed there by
a dog, answered her question, telling her that this sordid
hideousness drawing every eye, in the very centre of the fairy-like
beauty, was the world-famed _Tir aux Pigeons_.
There was no escaping from the sight except by turning from the
lovely circle of bays and mountain spurs, to look upon the flaring
vulgarity of the Casino, with its sprawling nudities affronting the
pure sky, and flocks of tail-clipped birds flitting about the
cornices and pediments, scurrying out at every shot that slaughtered
one of their kindred in full sight below. Crack! Crack! Crack! the
shots jarred on the nerves. Ermengarde hurried her halting escort
away through the strange Arabian Nights' magnificence of the gardens
that spread everywhere, flowing round hotels and shops and houses,
and glowing in weird luxuriance beneath the grim grey mountain bluff
and its dark wooded gorge.
Here was every variety of palm, with agaves and pepper-trees, caroubs
and myrtles, geraniums in trees many feet high, or trailing over
rocks, ruddy-leaved and grey-stemmed; here great cacti writhed and
swelled in reptilian forms, and certain huge bushes of prickly pears,
their broad fleshy leaves like goblin hands outspread, their grey,
distorted stems like the fossil bones of huge extinct animals, and
their dull-red, prickly fruit like oozing blood, suggested nothing so
much as those trees in the Inferno, that bled at touch and were lost,
living souls.
This strange exotic luxuriance has something infernal in its beauty;
the darkly massed foliage, in hard contrast with the white glare of
flaunting hotels and restaurants and the marble and gilding and
flamboyant style of the Casino, gives the whole a violence, a crude
insistence of wealth and luxury, in harmony with the spirit of the
place, and much at variance with its superb natural setting and
associations.
"And what people! Oh, what people!" Ermengarde murmured to the thin
man, who was glad to sit down and pretend to listen to the band and
watch the crowd strolling and sitting outside the Café de Paris.
"What tawdriness, what dowdiness, what Parisian elegance run wild!
Look at that woman; she has six purses at her belt. You can see the
gold through the net. She's going into the Casino--let us go too!"
"So young, so fair, and so very business-like! Yes, beneath that
Parisian hat, in that expensive Parisian raiment, is the cool and
calculating brain and steady nerve of a financier. She has a system
and works it, Mrs. Allonby."
How tawdry and tarnished was the vaunted splendour of the Casino, and
how wearisome the formalities exacted before admittance to the
gaming-hall!
"Such meddlesome impertinence. The man actually asked my age,"
Ermengarde complained.
"Ah! they don't ask mine," sighed the artist, whose head already
showed the silver touch of time; "they are quite sure that I am of
_âge majeur_."
Most places have their characteristic odour. That of Mentone is
garlic, with a suspicion of sewage; that of the _Salle de Jeu_ is a
fine blend of garlic, old clothes, musk, and money--especially paper
money. The garlic is mostly contributed by hollow-eyed croupiers,
who are in some measure responsible for the old clothes, an odour
otherwise due to grave elderly persons, chiefly female, in garments
of indescribable frumpishness and respectability, who form the staple
of the afternoon congregation, and seem to contemplate life and its
agreeable weaknesses from a standpoint of ferocious piety.
Surely they must have dropped into a prayer-meeting by mistake.
Ermengarde looked round for the minister, after some seconds'
contemplation of long green tables covered with coin and diagrams,
and surrounded by treble and quadruple rows of staid and solemn
faces, "all silent and all damned." This congregation was apparently
listening with hushed reverence to spasmodic, low-muttered words of
wisdom from a priestly person flavoured with garlic, who appeared to
be consulting some oracle, or celebrating some religious rite, by
turning a brass wheel in a basin sunk in the table, and surrounded by
votive offerings in the shape of rolls and rolls of five-franc pieces
and golden louis in glittering, provocative piles.
Besides these muttered spells in which, after long listening, she
could only make out occasionally "ne va
plus"--"rouge"--"treize"--"vingt-sept," the only sound was the
perpetual clink of coins, which after every utterance began to dance
from hand to hand and fly hither and thither, as if trying to evade
the incessant pursuit of small wooden rakes and clutching hands
sparkling with diamonds, grimed with long-established dirt, white and
brown, yellow and black, red, skinny, and fat. Sometimes two hands
clutched the same pile of coin, when there were hurried mutterings
and looks of suppressed fury; anon a wooden rake smote an encroaching
paw urgently from its golden prey, and there was silence.
On what principle the piles of gold and sheaves of fluttering notes
before each worshipper by the little books of ritual they consulted
so devoutly, were increased and diminished, was a mystery to the
spectator, who saw nothing but a mystic and subtly woven dance of
coins and notes crossing and recrossing over the morrice of the green
table with rhythmic intermittance, dependent upon the dark utterance
of him who turned the wheel. But little by little she gathered that
coin placed in one way increased or diminished two-fold, in another
five-fold, in another thirty-fold, and found herself handing louis
and notes from those behind to the croupier for change, and gloating
over the golden multitudes that came rolling to the calm worshippers.
The thin man, easily tired and overcome by evil air, had been
compassionately despatched to a café to wait for her; he had modestly
owned to a weakness for staking a couple of louis now and again for
pastime; this lowered him perceptibly in his companion's esteem.
But when he was gone and the glittering heaps had wrought their
mesmerism, he was more leniently judged; and certain five-franc
pieces in Mrs. Allonby's bag seemed to ask aloud to play a part in
the morrice dance on the green; they even worked their way out, after
a little, and insisted on planting themselves in certain squares,
returning--she never knew how or why--with a partner apiece, and
bringing a pleasant glow to their owner's cheek.
"You have never played before?" asked a genial English voice at her
elbow. "Would you mind putting this across that corner for me for
luck?"
She willingly placed the louis on the corner of the four spaces
indicated, scarcely glancing at the player, who was sitting in the
front row, with notebook and pencil, piles of coin and notes, all in
most business-like array before him; but when he turned and looked up
to bow his thanks, with a sudden sweet smile on his grave and anxious
face, she recognized the Cyrano de Bergerac of the Carnival. She had
been so intent on the morrice, and he so near below her, only the
close-cropped head, bent over the pencilled calculations, visible,
that she had not recognized him until he turned.
Even as he smiled, the anxious gravity returned to his white, drawn
face, to study which she silently changed her position near a
croupier. He turned quickly back, and once more riveted his eyes to
the table, with a wolfish eagerness that destroyed the young
debonnair beauty of his face, and drew lines of age and fatigue upon
it. Then the wheel stopped, the brass ball clicked into a niche in
the basin, and the player's face changed and his eyes glittered, as
the louis came home with a whole troop rolling after them. On this
he looked up with another smile and bow, that somehow made her sorry
for him and wonder if he had a mother.
Just then a sickening smell of musk, and a pretty substantial push
from a gorgeously clad shoulder, made her turn to find herself edged
vigorously aside by the painted woman who had ridden down the ridge
with him that first afternoon at Les Oliviers. Shrinking from the
unholy contact, Ermengarde quickly gave place to her, and, passing
behind the croupier to a gap between the heads of two short people,
saw the countess bend down and accost the young man, who looked up,
worried and impatient, but after some interchange of question and
answer, reluctantly yielded his golden spoil to her greedy clutch,
and turned again with knitted brows to his calculations and
annotations, receiving in reward an unacknowledged pat on the
shoulder from the diamond-covered hand, that looked like a glittering
claw.
The five-franc pieces in the bag again became restive; everybody,
including the woman of the bistred eyes, seemed to be winning. A
vision of a gown--a plain white serge coat and skirt, simply but
exquisitely cut, and only costing eighteen guineas--floated before
Mrs. Allonby's mental gaze. Since seeing it in a shop in Mentone,
she had sighed to think of the infrequency of guineas in a world like
this, and of the desirability of white tailor-made raiment of
exquisite cut for a woman like her. White was the most becoming
wear, almost the only wear for this climate; and white serge, when
one came to think of it, was the sole material absolutely fit for
blazing sunshine and sharp air. The white serge that arrayed her at
the moment would not be white much longer; it had already begun to
leave off being white. Absurd to come to a place like this without
proper clothes. Eighteen guineas was not very dear for such a cut as
that; sheer folly to think of getting anything in a foreign winter
resort at London or Paris prices. Considering the cost of carriage
and customs and the profit of the Mentone shopkeeper, the thing was
dirt cheap. Moreover, it was absolutely necessary. And here;
threading the green mazes of the morrice-dance, were gold and silver
coins in moving multitudes, only waiting to be raked in by the
enterprising. Two of her five-franc pieces soon sat on the corner
intersecting the four spaces so lucky to Cyrano, and with like
result. Her heart began to play quick marches, and her eyes to
lighten; she was undoubtedly a lucky person; she staked here and
staked there, and the coins came rolling in till she felt a little
dizzy, and scarcely knew that on one occasion a marauding claw
clutched some of her lawful spoil.
Now she staked more and more wildly, confident in her luck, and
always won. Her cheeks burnt, her pulses leapt; people looked at her
with envy, hatred and malice. A gold louis rolling towards her
hopped off the table, unobserved by her; a liveried attendant came
behind unseen, with a lighted lantern at the end of a stick, and
pushed it amongst people's feet and under the table, while a man with
a vacuous face, staring aimlessly about the hall, set his foot quite
casually on the coin, not seeming to observe the attendant looking
for it with the lantern, and then, without appearing to make any
movement, lounged carelessly on with the same vacuous look, but
leaving no corn where his foot had been.
Two hundred francs in notes had jumped into Ermengarde's bag, which
was stuffed to bursting with gold and silver besides. The coat and
skirt was hers many times over. It would be mean to stop now;
besides, it was impossible to turn from the magic of that flowing
tide of gold and silver; the feeling of possession and power, and the
enchantment of successfully daring that wild blind demon of chance,
was too strong. People had made fortunes in a night; why not she?
She placed a little pile of gold _à travers_; the wheel stopped, and
the croupier pushed her pile to the bank. She bit her lip, frowned,
staked again, and lost again. Cowardly to draw back now; who was
going to give in? Another golden stake, and her pile came back
doubled. Of course; fortune always favours the brave.
But at the end of another half-hour the croupier had been changed;
many players had come and gone from the outer ranks of that table,
the inner circle remaining unbroken, except that Cyrano had vanished
unnoticed by Ermengarde, who saw nothing but the whirling wheel, the
dancing ball, and the flying mazes of the great five-franc pieces and
louis d'or over the green table. Nothing now remained in her bag but
a few odd coins raked from every recess, and together making five
francs, for which an obliging neighbour gave her a broad silver piece.
Her luck at that table was clearly gone; she left it, selected
another, and, after a short calculation and some watching of the
play, set her teeth, and placed her five-franc piece with a shaking
hand on a carefully chosen square. The little demon of a ball
clicked into place; the ruthless rake pushed her stake to the bank.
The game was up; Mrs. Allonby found herself three minutes later
standing on the Casino steps in the pure air, feverish and faint from
the reaction and the fetid atmosphere of the gambling-room, vainly
trying to remember where Mr. Welbourne had promised to wait for her,
and minus not only the usual contents of her purse, but also minus
the note that was to have paid a week's bill at Madame Bontemps's
little office before starting that afternoon, and a couple of hundred
franc notes, tucked into a pocket of the bag besides. In view of
attractive apparel and bric-à-brac sure to be found in the sumptuous
shops, those hundred franc notes were, indeed, sadly insufficient;
but without them what was to be done?
Clearly the only thing now was to get a cup of tea at the café
immediately opposite, where people were sitting in the sunshine and a
band was playing delightfully. Surely Mr. Welbourne had said Café de
Paris, or was it Giro's? No; he could never have walked so far as to
Giro's. It was important to find him, else there could be no tea.
She was too tired to look for him, too tired to do anything but sit
down very wearily; however, she set out to find him, knowing he could
not be far away.
But the spare, slim figure with the slight halt and the grizzled hair
was nowhere to be found, either in the moving crowd or among the
groups at the little tables; she had not even the price of a twopenny
chair, much less of a cup of tea, and where was all that fine moral
indignation of the early afternoon?
The band played triumphantly to a climax, and ended on a grand crash
of all instruments; the sun, hidden under a floating cloud, shone
gloriously out again, and there, in the blaze among the promenaders,
showed conspicuously the graceful figure of M. Isidore, gay as ever,
faultlessly dressed, wearing his hat with the little rakish tilt of
gilded French youth, and talking with easy and familiar vivacity to a
youngish woman, arrayed in the last and most refined Parisian style,
and with that unmistakable air of being in the higher social world
that is the exclusive property of no nation. The handsome couple
stopped, exchanged a few final words, and parted, M. Isidore turning
with lifted hat to shoot a last Parthian arrow of wit that sent the
lady off, after a gesture of reproval, with heaving shoulders and
eyes brimming with laughter. It was then that M. Isidore perceived
Mrs. Allonby, and came smiling with raised hat towards her, with "Ah,
Madame, you too? Have you also tried your luck at the tables?" and
would have gone by, but that she cried joyously, "What a happy chance
to meet you, M. Isidore! I have lost my last centime and mislaid Mr.
Welbourne, and am positively dying for a cup of tea."