ARRIVAL OF THE AMARANTH—ALL WELL ON BOARD—THEIR FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE ROOMS

The next afternoon, soon after four, the Amaranth arrived in harbor.

Bob Hines was gambling, as usual, but Brentin, Teddy, and I went down to the Condamine to meet them. Teddy and Brentin had had their row out in the morning, to which I had listened in silence—with the indulgent air of a man who doesn’t want to add to the unpleasantness—and now were pretty good friends again. It was clearly understood, however, that no new acquaintances were to be made, male or female, and that henceforth any one of us seen talking to a stranger was immediately to be sent home.

I fear the party from the Amaranth did not have a very good impression of Monte Carlo to begin with, for they landed in the Condamine, just where the town drain-pipes lie, and came ashore, each of them, with a handkerchief to the nose.

“So this is the Riviera!” snuffled my good sister. “I understood it was embosomed in flowers.”

They all looked very brown and well, and seemed in high spirits.

As for the yacht, she had behaved splendidly all through, and the conduct and polite attentions of Captain Evans and the crew had been above all praise. The only difficulty had been to explain away the shell and the three cannon; for which Forsyth had found the ingenious excuse that they were wanted for the Riff pirates, in case we determined to voyage along the African coast, where they are said to abound and will sometimes attack a yacht.

We all strolled up the hill together, and, such were their spirits, nothing would content the new arrivals but an immediate visit to the rooms. Miss Rybot, especially, was as cheerful as a blackbird in April; she had come there to gamble, she said, and gamble she would at once. She and Masters were evidently on the best of terms, and even the captious Brentin was pleased with what people who write books call her “infectious gayety.”

“You have your own little schemes,” she cried, “and I have mine. I am going to win fifty pounds to pay my debts with, and then I am going home, whether you have finished or not. And if I haven’t finished, you will all have to leave me here.”

They were soon provided with their pink admission-cards (ours had that morning, after the usual pretended scrutiny and demur, been exchanged for white monthly ones), and, after leaving their cloaks, passed through the swing-doors into the rooms.

It was just that impressive hour—the only one, I think, at Monte Carlo—when the Casino footmen, in their ill-fitting liveries, zigzagged with faded braid, bring in the yellow oil-lamps with hanging green shades, and sling them from the long brass chains over the tables. The rest of the rooms lie in twilight, before the electric light is turned up. Dim figures sweep noiselessly as spectres over the dull-shining parquet floor, and, like a spear, I have seen the last long ray of southern sunshine strike in and touch the ghastly hollow cheek of some old woman fingering her coins, lifeless and mechanical as Charon fingering his passage-money for the dead; but, just over the tables, the yellow light from the lamp falls brilliant, yet softly, brightly illuminating the gamblers’ hands and some few of their faces, throwing the white numbers on the rich green cloth as strongly into relief as though newly sewn on there of tape.

“Faites votre jeu, messieurs!” croaks the croupier, in his dry, toneless voice.

With deft fingers he spins the active, rattling little ball.

“Le jeu est fait!”

The white ball begins to tire, drops out of its circuit.

“Rien ne va plus!”

A few seconds of leaping indecision and restlessness, before the ball falls finally into a number and remains there, while the board still spins.

“Trente-six!—Rouge, pair et manque!”

The croupiers’ rakes are busy, pulling in the money lost; the money won is thrown with dull, heavy thuds and clinks on to the table. In a few moments it is begun all over again.

“Faites votre jeu, messieurs!”

“So this is Monte Carlo!” whispered my sister, in the proper, hushed tones, as though asking me for something to put in the collection. “My one objection is, no one looks in the least haggard or anxious. I understood I should see such terrible faces, and they all look as bored as people at an ordinary London dinner-party. Take me round.”

Brentin came with us, and we visited each of the busy roulette-tables in turn. Monte Carlo was very full, and round some of the tables the crowd was so deep it was impossible to get near enough to look, much less to play. But between the tables there were large vacant spaces of dull-shining, greasy parquet; the tables looked like populous places on the map, and the flooring like open country. Here and there stood the footmen, straight out of an old Adelphi melodrama; some of them carried trays and glasses of water, and some gave you cards to mark the winning numbers and the colors.

“It is not quite so splendid and gay as I imagined,” my sister observed. “In fact, it’s all rather dim and dingy. Do you know it reminds me of the Pavilion at Brighton more than anything else. And how common some of the people are! Isn’t that your friend, Mr. Hines?”

Bob Hines was sitting in rather a melancholy heap, with a pile of five-franc pieces in front of him, and a card on which he was morosely writing the numbers as they came up.

“Let’s ask him how he’s doing?”

“Never speak to a gambler,” I whispered; “it’s considered unlucky.”

“Judging from his expression, he will be glad to get something back in your raid! And why seat himself between those two terrible old women?”

“They look,” Brentin murmured, “like representations of friend Zola’s the fat and the lean. Sakes alive! they’d make the fortune of a dime museum. Those women are freaks, ma’am, freaks.”

Hines was sitting between two ladies; one, with a petulant face of old childishness, was enormously stout. Her eyebrows were densely blackened, her pendulous cheeks as dusty with powder as the Mentone road. She was gorgeously overdressed; her broad bosom, fluid as of arrested molten tallow, was hung with colored jewels, like a bambino. With huge gloved hands and arms she was wielding a rake, whereof poor Bob had occasionally the end in his face. Beside her, on the green cloth, lay a withered bunch of roses, dead of her large, cruel grasp. At her back stood her husband, a German Jew financier, who couldn’t keep his pince-nez on. Continually he smoothed his thin hair and tried to get her away, grumbling and moving from leg to leg; for hours he would stand behind her chair, supplying her with money, for she nearly always lost. Occasionally she grabbed other people’s stakes, or they grabbed hers. Then she was sublime in her horrible ill-humor; half rising, with her great arms resting on the table, she shouted at the croupiers to be paid, in harsh, rattling, fish-fag tones. The sunken corners of her small mouth were drawn upward; the deep-set eyes worked in dull fury; you saw short, white teeth that once had smiled in a pretty Watteau face. Now the body was old and torpid and swollen; but the rabbit intelligence was still undeveloped, except in the direction of its rapacity.

Poor Bob Hines! He was indeed badly placed! On his other side sat a lath-and-plaster widow in the extensive mourning of a Jay’s advertisement. Her face was yellow and damaged as a broken old fresco at Florence; thin, oblong, brittle, only the semi-circular, blackened eyebrows seemed alive. The dyed, pallid hair looked dead as a Lowther Arcade doll’s; dead were her teeth, her long, thin, griffin hands with curved nails. Decomposition, even by an emotion, was somehow palpably arrested; perhaps she was frozen by the bitter chill of fatal zero. Horrible, old, crape-swathed mummy, one would have said she had lost even her husband at play. Who could ever have been found to love her? At whom had she ever smiled? at what had she ever laughed or wept? Bride of Frankenstein’s monster, she worked her muck-rake with the small, dry, galvanized gestures of an Edison invention. Poor Bob Hines! It sickened me to think these women, and others perhaps worse, were of the same sisterhood with Lucy. What a day when we should sweep them all out before us, as the fresh autumn wind sweeps the withered leaves across the walks of Kensington Gardens!

“So this is Monte Carlo!” murmured my sister again. “It stifles me! Take me out to the CafÉ de Paris and give me some tea.”

As she took my arm and we went down the steps, “Easier place, however, to raid,” she remarked, “I never saw. As for the morality of it, I was a little doubtful at first, but now—”