Part 7

His first sensation in ‘the rooms’ was disappointing. The decorations were florid, the people foreign, queer, ugly! For some time he stood still listening to the chink of rake against coin, and the nasal twang of the croupiers’ voices. Then he had gone up to a table to watch the game, which he had never played. That, at all events, was the same as now; that and the expression on the gamblers’ faces--the sharp, blind, crab-like absorption like no other human expression. And what a lot of old women! A nervous excitement had crept into his brain while he stood there, an itch into his fingers. But he was shy. All these people played with such deadly calm, seemed so utterly familiar with it all. At last he had reached over the shoulder of a dark-haired woman sitting in front of him, put down a five-franc piece, and called out the word ‘_Vingt_.’ A rake shovelled it forward on to the number with an indifferent click. The ball rolled. “_Quatorze, rouge pair et manque._” His five-franc piece was raked away. But he, Philip Trevillian, had gambled at Monte Carlo, and at once he had seemed to see Varvara’s eyes with something of amusement in their candour, and to hear her voice: “But to gamble! How silly, Philip Philipovitch!” Then the man sitting to his left got up, and he had slipped down into the empty chair. Once seated, he knew that he must play. So he pushed another five-franc piece on to black and received its counterpart. Now he was quits; and, continuing that simple stake with varying success, he began taking in the faces of his neighbours. On his left he had an old Englishman in evening dress, ruddy, with chubby lips, who played in gold pieces and seemed winning rather heavily. Opposite, in a fabulous shawl, a bird-like old woman, with a hook nose, and a man who looked like a Greek bandit in a frock-coat. To his right was the dark-haired woman over whose shoulder he had leaned. An agreeable perfume, as of jasmine blossoms, floated from her. She had some tablets and six or seven gold pieces before her, but seemed to have stopped playing. Out of the tail of his eye Trevillian scrutinised her profile. She was by far the most attractive woman he had seen in here. And he felt suddenly uninterested in the fate of his five-franc pieces. Under the thin, dark brows, a little drawn down, he could see that her eyes were dark and velvety. Her face was rather pointed, delicate, faintly powdered in the foreign fashion. She wore a low dress, but with a black lace scarf thrown over her gleaming shoulders, and something that glimmered in her dark hair. She was not English, but what he could not tell. He won twice running on black, left his stake untouched, and was conscious that she pushed one of her own gold pieces on to black. Again black won. Again he left his stake, and she hers. To be linked with her by that following of his luck was agreeable to young Trevillian. The devil might care--he would leave his winnings down. Again and again, till he had won eight times on black, he left his stake, and his neighbour followed suit. A pile of gold was mounting in front of each of them. The eyes of the hawk-like old woman opposite, like those of a crustacean in some book of natural history, seemed pushed out from her face; a little hard smile on her thin lips seemed saying, ‘Wait; it will all go back!’ The jasmine perfume from his neighbour grew stronger, as though disengaged by increasing emotion; he could see her white neck heave under its black lace. She reached her hand out as though to gather in her winnings. In bravado Trevillian sat unmoving. Her eyes slid round to his; she withdrew her hand. The little ball rolled. Black! He heard her sigh of relief. She touched his arm. “_Retirez!_” she whispered, “_Retirez, monsieur!_” and, sweeping in her winnings, she got up. Trevillian hesitated just a moment, then with the thought, ‘If I stay I lose sight of her,’ he, too, reached out, and, gathering in his pile, left the table. Starting with a five-franc piece, in nine successful coups he had won just over a hundred pounds. His neighbour, who had started with a louis, in seven coups--he calculated rapidly--must have won the same. “_Seize, rouge pair et manque!_” Just in time! Elated, Trevillian turned away. There was the graceful figure of his dark neighbour threading the throng, and without deliberate intention, yet longing not to lose sight of her, he followed. A check in her progress brought him so close, however, that he was at infinite pains to seem unconscious. She turned and saw him. “Ah! _Merci, monsieur!_ I tank you moch.” “It’s for me to thank you!” he stammered. The dark lady smiled. “I have the instinct,” she said in her broken English, “for others, not for myself. I am unlucky. It is the first time you play, sare? I tought so. Do not play again. Give me that promise; it will make me ’appy.”

Her eyes were looking into his. Never in his life had he seen anything so fascinating as her face with its slightly teasing smile, her figure in the lacy black dress swinging out Spanish fashion from the hips, and the scarf flung about her shoulders. He had made the speech then which afterwards seemed to him so foreign.

“Charmed to promise anything that will make you happy, madame.”

She clasped her hands like a pleased child.

“That is a bargain; now I have repaid you.”

“May I find your carriage?”

“I am walkin’, monsieur.”

With desperate courage he had murmured:

“Then may I escort you?”

“But certainly.”

Sitting on his prayer-book, Trevillian burrowed into the past. What had he felt, thought, fancied, in those moments while she had gone to get her cloak? Who and what was she? Into what whirlpool drawing him? How nearly he had bolted--back to the idyllic, to Varvara’s searching candour and Katrina’s laughing innocence, before she was there beside him, lace veiling her hair, face, eyes, like an Eastern woman, and her fingers had slipped under his sleeve.... What a walk! What sense of stepping into the unknown; strange intimacy and perfect ignorance! Perhaps every man had some such moment in his life--of pure romance, of adventuring at all and any cost. He had restrained the impulse to press that slender hand closely to his side, had struggled to preserve the perfect delicacy worthy of the touching confidence of so beautiful a lady. Italian, Spanish, Polish, Bohemian? Married, widowed? She told him nothing; he asked no questions. Instinct or shyness kept him dumb, but with a whirling brain. And the night above them had seemed the starriest ever seen, the sweetest scented, the most abandoned by all except himself and her. They had come to the gate of this very garden, and, opening it, she had said:

“Here is my home. You have been perfect for me, monsieur.”

Her lightly resting fingers were withdrawn. Trevillian remembered, with a sort of wonder, how he had kissed those fingers.

“I am always at your service, madame.”

Her lips had parted; her eyes had an arch sweetness he had never seen before or since in woman.

“Every night I play. _Au revoir!_”

He had listened to her footsteps on the path, watched lights go up in the house which looked so empty now behind him, watched them put out again, and, retracing his steps, had learned by heart their walk from the Casino, till he was sure he could not miss his way to that garden gate by day or night.... A fluster of breeze came into the jungle where he sat, and released the dry rustle of the palm-tree leaves. “_On fait des folies!_” as the French put it. Loose lot, the French! Queer what young men would go through when they were ‘making madnesses.’ And, plucking a bit of lilac, old Trevillian put it to his nose, as though seeking explanation for the madnesses of youth. What had he been like then? Thin as a lath, sunburnt--he used to pride himself on being sunburnt--a little black moustache, a dandy about clothes. The memory of his youthful looks warmed him, sitting there, chilly from old age....

“_On fait des folies!_” All next day he had been restless, uneasy, at the Villa Rosakov under the question in Varvara’s eyes, and Lord knew what excuse he had made for not going there that evening! Ah! And what of his solemn resolutions to find out all about his dark lady, not to run his head into some foreign noose, not to compromise her or himself? They had all gone out of his head the moment he set eyes on her again, and he had never learned anything but her name--Iñez--in all those three weeks, nor told anything of himself, as if both had felt that knowledge must destroy romance. When had he known himself of interest to her--the second night, the third? The look in her eyes! The pressure of her arm against his own! On this very seat, with his cloak spread to guard her from the chill, he had whispered his turbulent avowals. Not free! No such woman could be free. What did it matter? Disinheritance--ostracism--exile! All such considerations had burned like straws in the fire he had felt, sitting by her in the darkness, his arm about her, her shoulder pressed to his. With mournful mockery she had gazed at him, kissed his forehead, slipped away up the dark garden. God, what a night after that! Wandering up and down along by the sea--devoured. Funny to look back on--deuced funny! A woman’s face to have such power. And with a little shock he remembered that never in all the few weeks of that mad business had he seen her face by daylight! Of course, he had left Mentone at once--no offering his madness up to the candid eyes of those two girls, to the cynical stare of that old _viveur_ Rostakov. But no going home, though his leave was up; he was his own master yet awhile, thanks to his winnings. And then--the deluge. Literally--a night when the rain came down in torrents, drenching him through cape and clothes while he stood waiting for her. It was after that drenching night which had kept them apart that she had returned his passion.... A wild young devil! The madness of those nights beneath these trees by the old fountain! How he used to sit waiting on this bench in the darkness with heart fluttering, trembling, aching with expectancy!... Gad, how he had ached and fluttered on that seat! What fools young men could be! And yet in all his life had there been weeks so wildly sweet as those? Weeks the madness of which could stir in him still this strange youthful warmth. Rubbing his veined, thin hands together, he held them out into a streak of sunlight and closed his eyes.... There, coming through the gate into the deeper shadow, dark in her black dress--always black--the gleam of her neck when she bent and pressed his head to it! Through the rustling palm-leaves the extinct murmuring of their two voices, the beating of their two hearts.... Madness indeed! His back gave a little crick. He had been very free from lumbago lately. Confound it--a premonitory twinge! Close to his feet a lizard rustled out into the patch of sunlight, motionless but for tongue and eyes, looked at him with head to one side--queer, quick, dried-looking little object!... And then--the end! What a Jezebel of cruelty he had thought her! Now he could see its wisdom and its mercy. By George! She had blown their wild weeks out like a candle-flame! Vanished! Vanished into the unknown as she had come from the unknown; left him to go, haggard and burnt-up, back to England and bank routine, to the social and moral solidity of a pillar of society....

Like that lizard whisking its tail and vanishing beneath the dead dry leaves, so she had vanished--as if into the earth. Could she ever have felt for him as he for her? Did women ever know such consuming fires? Trevillian shrugged his thin shoulders. She had seemed to; but--how tell? Queer cattle--women!

Two nights he had sat here, waiting, sick with anxiety and longing. A third day he had watched outside the villa, closed, shuttered, abandoned; not a sound from it, not a living thing, but one white-and-yellow cat. He pitied himself even now, thinking of that last vigil. For three days more he had hung around, haunting Casino, garden, villa. No sign! No sign!...

Trevillian rose; his back had given him another twinge. He examined the seat and his open prayer-book. Had he overlapped it, on to damp stone? He frowned, smoothing superstitiously the pages a little creased and over-flattened by his weight. Closing the book, he went towards the gate. Had those passionate hours been the best or the worst of his life? He did not know.

He moved out into the hot sunshine and up the road. Round the corner he came suddenly abreast of the old villa. ‘It was here I stood,’ he thought; ‘just here!’ What was that caterwauling? Ah! The girl and the organ--there they were again! What! Why, of course! That long-ago morning a barrel organ had come while he stood there in despair. He could see it still, grinding away, with a monkey on it, and a woman singing that same silly tune. With a dry, dusty feeling he turned and walked on. What had he been thinking of before? Oh, ah! The Rolfe woman and that young fool Chesherford. Yes, he would certainly warn Agatha, certainly warn her. They were a loose lot out here!

1921.

BLACKMAIL

I

The affectionate if rather mocking friend who had said of Charles Granter, “He isn’t a man, he’s an edifice,” seemed justified to the thin dark man following him down Oakley Street, Chelsea, that early October afternoon. From the square foundations of his feet to his square fair beard and the top of his head under a square black bowler, he looked solid as granite, indestructible--too big to be taken by the board--only fit to be submarined. And the man dodging in his wake right down to the Embankment ran up once or twice under his counter and fell behind again as if appalled by the vessel’s size and unconsciousness. Considering the heat of the past summer the plane-trees were still very green, and few of their twittering leaves had dropped or turned yellow--just enough to confirm the glamorous melancholy of early fall. Granter, though he lived with his wife in some mansions close by, went out of his way to pass under those trees and look at the river. This seeming sign of weakness, perhaps, determined the shadowy man to dodge up again and become stationary close behind. Ravaged and streaked, as if he had lived submerged, he stood carefully noting with his darting dark eyes that they were quite alone; then, swallowing violently so that the strings of his lean neck writhed, he moved stealthily up beside Granter, and said in a hurried, hoarse voice: “Beg pardon, mister--ten pound, and I’ll say nothin’.”

The face which Granter turned toward that surprising utterance was a good illustration of the saying ‘things are not what they seem.’ Above that big building of a body it quivered, ridiculously alive and complex, as of a man full of nerves, humours, sarcasms; and a deep continuous chinking sound arose--of Charles Granter jingling coins in his trousers’ pocket. The quiver settled into raised eyebrows, into crow’s-feet running out on to the broad cheekbones, into a sarcastic smile drooping the corners of the lips between moustache and beard. He said in his rather high voice:

“What’s the matter with you, my friend?”

“There’s a lot the matter with me, mister. Down and out I am. I know where you live, I know your lady; but--ten pound and I’ll say nothin’.”

“About what?”

“About your visiting that gell, where you’ve just come from. Ten pound. It’s cheap--I’m a man of me word.”

With lips still sarcastically drooped, Granter made a little derisive sound. “Blackmail, by George!”

“Guv’nor--I’m desperate, I mean to have that ten pound. You give it me here at six o’clock this evenin’, if you ’aven’t got it on you.” His eyes flared suddenly in his hungry face. “But no tricks! I ain’t killed Huns for nothin’.”

Granter surveyed him for a moment, then turned his back and looked at the water.

“Well, you’ve got two hours to get it in--six o’clock, mister, just here; and no tricks--I warn you.”

The hoarse voice ceased, the sound of footsteps died away; Granter was alone. The smile still clung to his lips, but he was not amused; he was annoyed with the measured indignation of a big man highly civilised and innocent. Where had this ruffian sprung from? To be spied on, without knowing it, like this! His ears grew red. The damned scoundrel!

The thing was too absurd to pay attention to. But, instantly, his highly-sophisticated consciousness began to pay it attention. How many visits had he made to this distressed flower-girl? Three? And all because he didn’t like handing over the case to that society which always found out the worst. They said private charity was dangerous. Apparently it was! Blackmail! A consideration came, perching like a crow on the branches of his mind: Why hadn’t he mentioned the flower-girl to his wife and made _her_ do the visiting? Why! Because Olga would have said the girl was a fraud. And perhaps she was! A put-up job! Would the scoundrel have ventured on this threat at all if the girl were not behind him? She might support him with lies! His wife might believe them--she--she had such a vein of cynicism! How sordid, how domestically unpleasant!

Granter felt quite sick. Every decent human value seemed suddenly in question. And a second crow came croaking: Could one leave a scoundrel like this to play his tricks with impunity? Oughtn’t one to go to the police? He stood extraordinarily still--a dappled leaf dropped from a plane-tree and lodged on his bowler hat; at the other end of him a little dog mistook him for a lamp-post. This was no joke! For a man with a reputation for humanity, integrity and common sense--no joke at all! A police court meant the prosecution of a fellow-creature; getting him perhaps a year’s imprisonment, when one had always felt that punishment practically never fitted crime! Staring at the river he seemed to see cruelty hovering over himself, his wife, society, the flower-girl, even over that scoundrel--naked cruelty, waiting to pounce on one or all. Which ever way one turned the thing was dirty, cruel. No wonder blackmail was accounted such a heinous crime. No other human act was so cold-blooded, spider-like, and slimy; none plunged so deadly a dagger into the bowels of compassion, so eviscerated humanity, so murdered faith! And it would have been even worse, if his conscience had not been clear. But was it so extremely clear? Would he have taken the trouble to go to that flower-girl’s dwelling, not once but three times, unless she had been attractive, unless her dark-brown eyes had been pretty, and her common voice so soft? Would he have visited the blowsy old flower-woman at that other corner, in circumstances, no doubt, just as strenuous? Honestly: No. Still, if he did like a pretty face he was not vicious--he was fastidious and detested subterfuge. But then Olga was so cynical, she would certainly ask him why he hadn’t visited the old flower-woman as well, and the lame man who sold matches, and all the other stray unfortunates of the neighbourhood. _Well_, there it was; and a bold course always the best! The bold course--which was it? To go to the police? To his wife? To that girl, and find out if she were in this ramp? To wait till six o’clock, meet the ruffian and shake the teeth out of him? Granter could not decide. All seemed equally bold--would do equally well. And a fifth course presented itself which seemed even bolder: Ignore the thing!

The tide had just turned, and the full waters below him were very still, of a sunlit soft grey colour. This stillness of the river restored to Charles Granter something of the impersonal mood in which he had crossed the Embankment to look at it. Here, by the mother stream of this great town, was he, tall, strong, well-fed, and, if not rich, quite comfortable; and here, too, were hundreds of thousands like that needy flower-girl and this shadowy scoundrel skating on the edge of destitution. And here was this water--to him a source of æsthetic enjoyment; to them--a possible last refuge. The girl had talked of it--beggar’s patter, perhaps, like the blackmailer’s words: “I’m desperate--I’m down and out.”

One wanted to be just! If he had known all about them--but he knew nothing!

‘Can’t believe she’s such an ungrateful little wretch!’ he thought; ‘I’ll go back and see her.’

He retraced his way up Oakley Street to the mews which she inhabited, and ascended a stairway scented with petrol. Through the open doorway he could see her baby, of doubtful authorship, seated in an empty flower-basket--a yellow baby, who stared up at him with the placidity of one recently fed. That stare seemed to Granter to be saying: ‘You look out that you’re not taken for my author. Have you got an alibi, old man?’ And almost unconsciously he began to calculate where he had been about fourteen or fifteen months ago. Not in London--thank goodness! In Brittany with his wife--all that July, August, and September. Jingling his money, he contemplated the baby. It seemed more, but it _might_ be only four months old! The baby opened a toothless mouth, “Ga” it said, and stretched out a tiny hand. Granter ceased to jingle the coins and gazed round the room. The first time he came, a month ago, to test her street-corner story, its condition had been deplorable. His theory that people were never better than their environments had prompted the second visit, and that of this afternoon. He had wanted to know that he was not throwing away his money. And there certainly was some appearance of comfort now in a room so small that he and the baby and a bed almost filled it. But he felt a fool for ever having come there even with those best intentions which were the devil. And, turning to go, he saw the girl herself ascending the stairs, a paper bag in her hand, an evident bull’s-eye in her mouth, for a scent of peppermint preceded her. Surely her cheekbones were higher than he had thought, her eyebrows more oblique--a gipsy look! Her eyes, dark and lustrous as a hound puppy’s, smiled at him, and he said in his rather high voice:

“I came back to ask you something.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know a dark man with a thin face and a slight squint, who’s been in the Army?”

“What’s his name, sir?”

“I don’t know; but he followed me from here, and tried to blackmail me on the Embankment. You know what blackmail is?”

“No, sir.”

Feline, swift, furtive, she had passed him and taken up her baby, slanting her dark glance at him from behind it. Granter experienced a very queer sensation. Really it was as if--though he disliked poetic emphasis--as if he had suddenly seen something pre-civilised, pre-human, snake-like, cat-like, monkey-like too, in those dark sliding eyes and that yellow baby. She was in it; or, if not in it, she knew of it!

“A dangerous game, that,” he said. “Tell him--for his own good--he had better drop it.”

And, while he went, very square, downstairs, he thought: ‘This is one of the finest opportunities you ever had for getting to the bottom of human nature, and you’re running away from it.’ So strongly did this thought obsess him that he halted, in two minds, outside. A chauffeur, who was cleaning his car, looked at him curiously. Charles Granter moved away.

II

When he reached the little drawing-room of their flat his wife was making tea. She was rather short, with a good figure, and brown eyes in a flattish face, powdered and by no means unattractive. She had Slav blood in her--Polish; and Granter never now confided to her the finer shades of his thoughts and conduct because she had long made him feel himself her superior in moral sensibility. He had no wish to feel superior--it was often very awkward; but he could not help it. In view of this attempt at blackmail, more than awkward. It was extraordinarily unpleasant to fall from a pedestal on which he did not wish to be.