CHAPTER SIX
A SLAVE OF THE WHEEL
LOOKING in the direction in which Mr. Gimp’s finger pointed Hugh saw a tall, slim man sauntering across the hall. He had fair hair, brushed smoothly back, and features of the conventional English regularity.
“He’s like you and yet he ain’t,” commented Mr. Gimp. “You’re fresh and he’s a bit used up. He’s just what you’d be like in ten years’ time if you went the pace something fierce. A gay dog! He’s got a villa up on the hill. They say there are strange goings on at that same villa. He’s got a swell car, too. He owes all over the place, but he always seems to have heaps of cash to spend. That’s Mrs. Emslie speaking to him. A terrible woman, she is. I expect she’s trying to borrow from him. She’d do anything for money, that woman. She’s getting so desperate.”
“Pity for the daughter!”
“Yep, poor kid. Say, I saw her on the terrace early this morning, all alone in the corner beside the baths. So I went up and I says: ‘Well, Honey, how goes it?’ She turned round, and blamed if she wasn’t crying. ‘Couldn’t be worse,’ she says. ‘We’ve lost everything. Mother won’t stop. She’s borrowing from all sorts of horrid people. I think she’s mad. I don’t know what’s going to become of us.’”
To this Mr. Gimp replied only by an eloquent shrug of his shoulders.
Hugh watched Paul Vulning with a curious fascination. As Vulning stared superciliously at the crowd Mrs. Emslie talked to him feverishly, trying to hold his attention. Then they sauntered away together.
“You see that big jolly man,” Mr. Gimp observed, “the one with the black skull cap. Well, that’s the slickest player ever hit this skin-game joint. That man never loses. They call him ‘Cheero,’ because every time the zero comes up he calls out: ‘Cheero.’ That man’s always smiling. He goes about his business quietly, but believe me, he’s just salting away the dough. He claims he can hypnotize the croupiers and make them throw where he wants.”
“What rot!”
“No more rot than lots of other systems.... See that tall woman in grey just crossing the hall. Nobody knows who she is, and what’s more, nobody’s ever seen her face. She always wears that thick veil. They call her Number One, because she goes from table to table, always playing on the number one. At night she goes off to Nice in a covered car. Some say she’s an Indian Princess, some say it’s cancer. Any way, nobody knows what’s behind that veil. She’s one of the Casino’s mysteries.”
“What queer characters!”
“Queer! Why, we all get queer if we stay here long enough. I’m queer. You’ll get queer. MacTaggart’s getting queerer every day. Yep, it’s a queer place.... Say, if I was a writing man I could make a dozen books out of it. There’s a mine of material here. It’s fantastic; it ain’t real. It’s a stage show. Yes siree, it’s the queerest place on earth.”
They sauntered over to the “Hall of Gloom,” and sat on a padded bench near the door of the private rooms. As they watched the stream of people coming and going, Hugh noticed two ladies, one matronly, the other old and decrepit. They were dressed alike, with big roses in their hats and feather boas.
“Mother and daughter,” said Mr. Gimp. “They’re known as the two Roses. The mother’s over eighty, but she simply cannot stay away from the Rooms. She sits at the table, her face level with the cloth, her hands clutching a few counters. Sometimes she has fits and has to be carried out. She should be on her knees in some church instead of goggling and gasping over that bloody board.... There was another old lady, nice, serene, gentle, fat, who used to be known as ‘Queen Victoria,’ because she resembled the late Queen. She held a kind of levée every day in the Rooms. But her friends took her home to England, and they say she nearly died of lonesomeness there. There’s lots like that, old folks tottering on the edge of the tomb. They’d die in the Rooms if you’d let ’em.... Just look at that table over there. There’s a man that’s blind and beside him a woman that’s paralyzed. I tell you, folks come here that have to be carried to the table. They’re half dead.”
“Do many die in the Rooms?”
“Suicide? Not on your life. It’s considered bad form. As the English say: ‘It’s a thing that’s simply not done....’ By God! if I wanted to do it, I’d give ’em a jar. I’d go to that centre table and lean well over the wheel; then I’d start pumping lead into my bean. I’d cover that table with gore. A bucket of blood. I’d spatter my brains over the damned croupiers. I can see the Chef de Partie wiping them out of the corner of his eye....”
“What a ghastly idea! I hope you’re not seriously thinking of such a thing.”
Mr. Gimp cackled with laughter. “You don’t know me, son. I’m not that sort. Still I’ve got a kind of idea in my old head I’ll make a sensational exit. I have a notion that when I go, I’ll go with a bang. I don’t just know how, but there it is....”
In the week that followed Hugh saw a good deal of Paul Vulning. The latter liked to swing round the “Cheese” in his long low carmine-coloured car. He leaned back, driving with studied nonchalance. On one occasion, he narrowly shaved Hugh and Mr. MacTaggart. The big Scotchman shook a wrathful fist after him.
“The dawmed swanker! Ye’d think he wis rinnin’ the place. Ah’ll gie him a puck on the gub yin o’ thae days that’ll teach him tae look doon his neb at folk better than himsel’. I’ve got ma eye on him. I’ve seen him aboot a lot wi’ Mrs. Emslie lately. Ye can tak’ me word for it he’s up tae nae guid.”
And sure enough the very next day Hugh saw Mrs. Emslie and her daughter in the carmine car. Vulning had a squint-eyed chauffeur who sat with him as he drove. The mother and girl were behind. On their return he saw them again; but this time, June Emslie was in front with the chauffeur, while Vulning was behind with the mother.
That evening, he met the two women once more,—this time on the Avenue des Fleurs. As he passed them in the darkness, he heard the mother’s voice tense with anger. He never again saw the daughter waiting in the atrium, but Mrs. Emslie, her white cheeks painted, her eyes burning, gambled more desperately than ever.
Hugh himself was trying a new system which was behaving rather decently. He put two louis on the manque and a louis on one of the transversals of the passe. If it came manque he won a louis; if he struck the transversal he won seven louis. He did not play until certain indications told him he had the odds in his favour. He had to a curious degree that sense of probability which is so valuable to the player of roulette. Occasionally he had a hard tussle with the bank, but on the whole he averaged a hundred francs a day. In addition to this he made two louis for the running of the house. He was greatly pleased and used to say to Margot:
“Isn’t it jolly to think that every mouthful we eat, we make the Casino pay for? Doesn’t it make the food taste ever so much sweeter?”
“That’s not much of a compliment to my cooking.”
“You’re cooking’s delicious, my child. It’s the things you don’t cook. By the way I made a couple of louis extra to-day, so here’s something for you. You can regard it as a present from the Société.”
The gift was a pair of suede gloves. It was a joke of which he never tired, that of giving her a present and saying: “With the compliments of the Casino.”
He had come to love their big bright room. It was a refuge, a retreat from the fever and fret of the tables. Here was reality, the simple things that mattered; there, a false splendour, a theatrical pretentiousness. Margot considered his growing fondness for home a victory for her, and increased her efforts to make it attractive. She bought many little furnishings, so that the living part became extremely comfortable. But behind the big green curtain their sleeping arrangements remained unchanged. The small grey curtain divided his part from hers. This curtain seemed to him to have a definite significance. It was the symbol of his honour. It was the frailest of barriers, yet by the expression of his will it had become more solid than a sheet of steel. It seemed curious at night to think that she was so close. He often heard her breathing. Perhaps she was his for the taking. But then she trusted him. He would open his eyes and look at the grey curtain with a certain grim exultation. Good job it was grey. Maybe if it had been orange or crimson, or some colour that appealed to the senses, he might have been tempted to tear it aside.... But grey had a sobering effect.
Not that he would have yielded to temptation. He was not that sort, he told himself. If any such intention had ventured into his mind, he would have stamped on it as he would on a snake. He had pride and strength. He was clean-minded, cool-blooded. He was equal to the situation he had created. Yet it was oddly pleasant to have her so close to him. What did she think? he sometimes wondered. She, too, accepted the situation and played the game as honourably as he. They were like brother and sister.
He had to admit that every day she was growing more attractive. As if to please him she had taken to dressing her hair in the English fashion; parting it over the forehead, and massing it in a thick pleat at the nape of her neck. The slight hollowing of her cheeks and the sweetness of her mouth reminded him of Rossetti’s women. She did not have much colouring; her skin was like ivory, and the faint pink of her cheeks that of a sea shell. He made a good many sketches of her; and told himself that some day he would paint her portrait.
But, for the time being, the Goddess Roulette claimed him as her own. She brooked no rival. There in the gaiety and the golden sunshine, he thought roulette, dreamed roulette, lived roulette. He was a worshipper among a host of worshippers, their temple the Casino; and few worshippers at a sacred shrine are so devoted.
One night he had a dream.
The vast hollow of the sky seemed to be the bowl of a mighty wheel. The ball rolled with the long menace of thunder and shot into its slot like a lightning stab. Beneath the shadow of this sinister wheel, the air was grey with fluttering bank-notes, the earth was like an ant-heap of fevered, frenzied men and women. As they leaped at the money it nearly always evaded them. With each leap they grew more feeble. Then he noticed that the ground beneath them was a quagmire, into which they were sinking. Their struggles plunged them deeper and deeper into the ooze, until they disappeared from sight. But no sooner had they gone than others took their place. They, too, leaped and clutched at the elusive fortune, only to sink in turn. And over them the great shadowy wheel rumbled and flashed, taking the place of God and the stars.... It was all so vivid that he awoke shuddering and crying aloud: “The wheel! The wheel!”
But no dream could damp his ardour, nor cloud his happiness. He was superbly happy. He told himself it was because of the beauty and charm of the place. Monte Carlo in its setting of primitive grandeur, glutted with luxury, and gorged with light; man’s insolent triumph over nature; a cocotte of price poised amid the eternal verities of mountain and sea. He adored it. Its keynote was joy. Life glittered and sang. Every day was a fête day. He loved the feeling that he was part of it, one of its gay pleasure-seekers. That was the side of it he chose to see. What if there was another, a sinister one! As far as he was concerned it did not exist. Ruin, suicide, misery, all these were lies of blackmailing journalists. The gambling was a harmless diversion indulged in by people who lost what they could afford to lose. Those who fell were only the weak who would have gone to the wall in some other way. No, it was the most adorable place on earth.
One evening as he climbed the long hill to the Casino, his thoughts were of the pleasantest. The night was rich with velvet darkness. A sense of rain lurked in the crystal purity of the air, a soft reluctant rain that might come before morning. On the concrete blocks that protect the harbour the little lights of fishermen made swirls of gold, and their nets moved round and round, scooping up the fish attracted by the glow. The water of the harbour was as black as patent leather, and the quay lamps shot down long bright stems that sprouted into silver foliage. The few lights on the dark heights of Monaco seemed only to accentuate its mystery.
He stood for a while where the white bust of Berloitz springs on a shaft of marble from a patch of purple pansies. He looked past the fiery frontages of the vast hotels, to where, above them all, the cornice of the Riviera Palace appeared like an agraffe of pearls. He inhaled deeply the breath of the sea. How well he felt! Never since the year before the war, when he played cricket and football, had he felt so fit. He was a man again, ready to tackle the job of life.
As he walked past the band-stand the Casino windows made panels of orange against the biscuit-coloured stone. No, he would not play again that night. One must not abuse one’s luck. He had already made three hundred francs. He had now a thousand of the bank’s money to gamble with. To-morrow he would buy ten chips of a hundred francs each and play with them instead of with louis. He was full of confidence. To-morrow the battle again; to-night the joy of victory. He rounded the corner where the grounds of the Casino overhang the station, and entered the quieter garden beyond. Finding a shadowed seat he sat down to smoke. He was soon in a happy reverie.
A rock garden close by formed a small plateau on which was a pergola. Suddenly his attention was drawn to it. He saw two people emerge from the shadow. At first he thought they were lovers; then he noticed they were struggling. As he bent forward trying to pierce the darkness he heard a woman’s faint cry of distress. Rising swiftly, he ran towards them.