Chapter III

Jocelyn Ley’s mother died when she was born. She was an only child, and her father, who was in the army, began immediately to idolise her with an abrupt and well-bred idolatry.

He came into some property shortly after his wife’s death, and, leaving the service, took a place in the country, where he used to spend the winters in hunting. In the spring and summer he would go to London, or on a round of visits, sometimes taking Jocelyn with him. She grew up in rather a lonely way, with dogs and horses for her companions, and her education was of a desultory nature. She was a marvellously quick child, the joy and despair of her governesses, who were always exceedingly fond of her, and who found themselves perpetually obliged to leave at the most promising moments, because Major Ley wanted his daughter to be with him. She grew from a roundabout romp, who could never stay on her feet, and came continually to grief, into a slim sensitive girl, very easily hurt, shrinking like a tender plant from anything rough or unpleasant, with a love for animals, and an innate distrust of her own kind.

When she was eighteen her father died, leaving her independent, and very desolate.

In default of better things, he had entrusted her to his sister, for whom he had a certain contemptuous affection. The two ladies, marvellously dissimilar, got on fairly well together--perhaps because they never remained for long at a time in one place, perhaps because neither expected to understand the other, nor required much at her hands. They had spent most of the four years since Major Ley’s death abroad, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and above all in Paris, which Mrs. Travis loved because of the garments to be obtained.

Jocelyn hated the grey monotony of English skies. She had a fierce love of the sun, of lands where the colouring hit the eye, where life _seemed_ to throb with a fuller pulse.

From her mother, in whose family there was a tradition of gipsy blood, she had inherited a restless, moody nature, which ordained that she should wander, just as it decreed that she should be a slave to the ebb and flow of her emotions. She had a vast capacity for living in the passing moment, which indicated a nature very responsive to outward influences, and to her own physical condition.

In her, qualities, and the negations of those qualities, seemed to swing with a beat and recoil as absolutely weighed and regulated as that of a pendulum; they balanced each other in the scales of her mind. She herself recognised the perpetual equation, standing apart from her moods in a detached consciousness, regretfully indulgent, making no attempt to control or check, rather gauging them with a peculiar pessimism, a sympathetic insight, a tender desire to be good to herself. She extended this desire to all the world--she loved generously to appreciate and to be appreciated, investing herself thereby with a great quality of attraction, not lessened by the essential pride which forbade her to ask a favour from God or man. She never stirred a finger to attract admiration or affection, yet without appreciation she drooped as a flower without water....

As the train droned sleepily on its way to Monte Carlo, she leant forward in the dust-coloured railway carriage to look at the curve of the bay between Cap Martin and Roquebrune. She was smiling unconsciously at the blue sea gleaming in the sunlight, the feathery, white edges of the tiny, tideless waves, the pine-clothed cliffs rising sheer behind the tail of the curving train, and the three sentinel palms on the rocky point in front. Giles sat opposite her, devouring her face with half-closed eyes. Once with an abrupt movement she touched his knees with her own; and then it wanted all of Mrs. Travis--expansive, leaning back, with hands folded on her lap, and quickly-glancing green eyes--to check the mad impulse suddenly roused in him to take the girl in his arms. He spent all the rest of the journey in wondering if she knew of that touch.

They found Nielsen in the garden, fragrantly shaded by a pepper tree. He was sitting on a seat smoking a cigarette, and gravely contemplating the doings of a man, who resembled a Greek statue, and of a sheep-faced boy, who might have stepped out of one of Jean François Millet’s pictures. These two seemed to be committed to the levelling of a heap of earth, which had been let fall from a cart drawn by a large, intelligent-looking mule; they continued, however, to seem, for they did absolutely nothing. Nielsen greeted the ladies with suave effusion; he was a devoted admirer of Jocelyn.

“Lōōk at that man!” he said plaintively, pointing to the statue. “What a futile thing civilisation is! You know, I have seen much more energetic South Sea Islanders, and delightfully clean, except for palm oil, which, after all, is only soap. But lōōk at that attitude! How bēāutiful! He has been leaning on his spade in six different attitudes, each more bēāutiful than the last, all this quarter of an hour, and now he is going to get himself a drrink.” For the statue moved away, and left the Millet boy to drag his weedy limbs and sheep-like face round and round the earth heap in a conscientiously monotonous, do-nothing shamble.

Nielsen continued. “He has no more anything than the Fijian, except clothes and dirt; and yet we have the habit of calling him a civilised being, and the other a savage, don’t you see? It is all a matter of habit, you know.”

He flicked the dust off his boots mournfully with a silk handkerchief.

Nielsen habitually gave people the impression of being affected; in reality he was not, it was in his case merely the grafting of the English manner upon the foreign; he impressed one as being cynical, in reality he was kind-hearted; he appeared to be mild, in reality he was explosive; he seemed to be continually dancing in attendance, in reality he was an original.

He was a man of good birth, and he had seen, in his forty years, a little of most things; he now lived by gambling on a “system.” It said much for him that he still lived, and _well_. Many people who gambled themselves tabooed him for that reason, oblivious of the fact, that, to live in that way, requires a patience and self-possession wanting in nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand.

They walked together through the gardens up to the Casino. There is a subtly peculiar character about the Casino gardens at Monte Carlo. They are not indeed particularly beautiful--there are many more so--but there is a subdued and fragrant naughtiness about them, they are full of suggestion. The aroma, acrid and penetrating, the atmosphere, vivid and enticing, of many unrestrained personalities seems to haunt them; in the midst of absolutely artificial surroundings one yet seems to revert to first principles, to those mysterious laws which make the world go round, hunting the ostrich of civilisation as it buries a lofty and well-intentioned head from the sight of its implacably eternal pursuers.

Presently they approached the Casino steps. Mrs. Travis was a little in advance, serenely conscious of good clothes, and puffing her lips in pleased anticipation. Jocelyn _distraite_, and slightly bored, walked with Nielsen, who chattered to her languidly, while Giles followed moodily behind.

In front of them strolled two Englishmen with a curiously jerky walk. Nielsen, commenting on them in a whisper to his companion, said gravely--

“Lōōk, they are new arrivals--they have the Monte Carrlo walk--two steps and a scrratch, don’t you know; all you English walk like that, you know, when you first come, it is the drry air.”

Jocelyn smiled at him, and answered in low tones.

Giles, who had not caught the words of the whispered conversation, felt a sudden pang; he grew very pale, and dropped a little further behind. As Jocelyn went up the steps, she turned round and looked back for him.

The subdued strains of music came through the open doors of the concert-room; and in the outer hall and corridors people moved up and down with a prowling motion slightly suggestive of beasts at the Zoo; every now and then one would slip back again into the playing-rooms. Inside there was a hushed, jingling sound, a subdued light, a faint scent of patchouli. People shifted continually from room to room and round the tables, singly, or in groups of two and three talking in low voices. A ring of faces circled each table, and watchful croupiers at the ends and sides shepherded them apathetically with incessant energy. Their rakes clacked against coins on the green cloths, and the drawl “_rien n’va plus_” went continually up to the vault of the painted ceiling.

The endless motion of fans gave an impression of great insects hovering between the players. The faces were for the most part grave, there was no laughter; and the walls of the rooms stared baldly at them in bright colours, covered with painted nymphs; on couches, here and there, people sat, idly talking, or gazing wearily in front of them. Now and then a hum would swell up from one of the tables, and die down again into monotony.

Mrs. Travis, who always played roulette because it afforded her the luxury of more vacillation for her money, selected a table, and waited till she could sit down next to a friendly and clean Austrian croupier, whom she had habituated by a long and careful interchange of badly pronounced “_Bonjours_” to supervise the placing of her stakes. She proceeded to put purse, fan, and handkerchief beside her, and to take from her pocket pencil and cards whereon to mark the numbers. Her lips moved incessantly, her eyes glanced restlessly from the table to her cards and back again, and occasionally she gave quick looks at the players round--she seemed to see everything. She marked her cards carefully, consulted them much--fingered her stakes before placing them, often drawing them back again at the last moment. When she won, she smiled--when she lost, she frowned; she was beautifully unconscious that she did any of these things. As she played, the lines deepened in her face, the colour faded--in short, she returned to first principles--a gambler pure and simple.

Jocelyn’s proceedings were in curious contrast. She took the first empty seat. Her eyelids dropped, her chin tilted up, her face assumed a mask of indifference. She pushed her stakes on with the rake, carelessly, as if they did not belong to her, she raked them in carelessly in the same way. She backed her luck and cut her losses with nonchalance in an orthodox fashion--gambling because other people gambled.

Giles, standing at the same table, staked feverishly on every spin of the wheel. He kept his eyes all the time on Jocelyn. He won a good deal, put it in his pocket, and made a motion towards her, but, receiving no sign of invitation, went back to his place, and played with his eyes still upon her, till he had lost all he had with him. Then he turned away with an air of relief, and, going round, stood behind her chair, where now and again his coat sleeve would brush against her shoulder. He had played for a distraction without finding it.

Nielsen sat at a given table, watching the game; he looked sad, expressionless. He played from the marked cards in his hands and the figures in his head; he awaited combinations. He staked rarely, content with a five per cent. profit upon his outlay of the afternoon. Presently some one appropriated his stake--he looked at the man, mildly hurt, but said nothing; shortly afterwards some one appropriated his neighbour’s stake--he at once exploded in defence; with words he cudgelled the appropriator, he cudgelled the croupiers, he brought the table about his ears, his face grew white, his eyes red, he held on to his point and gained it, then became once more sad and expressionless. For the rest he gambled undeviatingly--a mere matter of business.

Presently they came away, leaving Nielsen waiting patiently for a certain combination. As Jocelyn passed his chair he leant back, and twisted his rather short neck round to say, in a pathetic whisper, and with a shrug of his shoulders--

“_Ça ne va pas, ce soir_, I wait and wait, but the brread and butter does not come, and now you are going away, that is drreadful, don’t you know.” He had to twist back again in a hurry to mark his card with the last number.

Jocelyn, looking back, thought that he resembled a well-groomed seal watching a hole for fish.

Mrs. Travis, playing her new “system” with assiduous ignorance, had lost all her own money, had borrowed Jocelyn’s, and lost that. She left the “Rooms” stiff with anger, erect, annoyed with her croupier, whom she believed capable of predicting the coming numbers if he would, strongly convinced that if she had brought more money she must have won, secretly ruffled with Jocelyn for not having more to lend her.

Very little was said on the return journey; Mrs. Travis’s quick green eyes seemed restlessly on the watch for something to resent, Jocelyn was tired, Giles moody. Only when they neared the hotel, he touched her sleeve gently, saying--

“You know we are off to-morrow?”

“Yes,” she answered, “I am so sorry.”

She stopped, and a faint colour came into her cheeks.

“I shall miss our walks dreadfully, and Shika--poor boy: he won’t get his cake. Will you remember to give it him every afternoon?”

“No,” said Giles shortly, “I’ll bring him over for you to give it.”

“Oh!” she said, drawing little circles in the dust with the end of her parasol. He was standing in front of her, tall and straight, with his hat off, and a very grave face. She looked up at him quickly, and held out her hand with a smile.

“We are dining out,” she said, “I don’t suppose I shall see you again. Good-bye, Giles.” He took her hand in his, and held it a moment, looking very hard into her face; then he let it go, and stood quite still while she climbed the terrace steps. She turned her head once, and he caught a side glimpse of a tired, rather sad, little face under a shady hat.