The Guests Of Hercules. C. N. Williamson
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dressed, was not one who deserved to be discouraged from entering the Casino. All she need do was to give her full name and nationality, also her place of residence. Gladly she obeyed; and holding in her hand a carte du jour on which she had written her own name, at last she had the right of entrance.
There was still one more mistake to make, however, and she promptly made it, attempting to pass through the right-hand swing-door. But no! It was for season-ticket holders. She must go to the left. The middle door was for those coming out. A fat man, hurrying brusquely in before her, let the swing-door slam in her face. "Le joueur n'a ni politesse, ni sexe," was a proverb of the "Rooms" which Mary Grant had never heard, but would come to understand.
She was on the threshold of an enormous room, magnificently proportioned, hung with lustrous chandeliers, and divided by an archway into two sections. The farther part was much larger than that which she had entered, and more sumptuous in decoration; but the whole was flooded with a peculiar radiance which turned everything to gold. It was far mellower than the light of the atrium, or the splendid rooms of the hotel. It had actual colour like honey, or the pinky-golden skin of apricots. It was bright, yet the impression it made on the mind was of softness rather than brilliance; and the shining atmosphere of the room, instead of being clear, seemed charged with infinitesimal particles of floating gold, like motes in rays of sunshine. The tables, under darkly shaded, low-hanging lamps, gave the effect of sending a yellow smoke, like incense, up to the height of the great dazzling chandeliers. It was almost as if the hands of players in fingering gold pieces day after day, year after year for generations, had rubbed off minute flakes which hung like a golden haze in the air.
It appeared to Mary's eyes, taking in the whole and not dwelling upon details, that everything in the farther part of the vast domed room was of gold: different shades of gold; dark, old gold, the richer for being tarnished: bright, glittering, guinea gold: greenish gold, and gold of copper red.
No other colour could have been as appropriate here.
The air was not offensively dead, but it was langorously asleep. Many different perfumes haunted and weighed it down; but there was some underlying, distinctive odour which excited the nerves mysteriously, and sent the blood racing through the veins.
"It is the smell of money," Mary said to herself.
Just inside the entrance doors, on either side, was a large table round which people sat or stood. Those standing behind the chairs of the seated ones were at least two rows deep, crowded tightly together. Beyond were many other tables, thronged even more densely; and ringed thus with closely packed figures, they were like islands on a shining golden sea, an archipelago of little islands, all of exactly the same size, and placed at equal distances.
Mary, hardly knowing what to expect from Peter's rather vague and disjointed descriptions, had dimly fancied clamour and confusion bursting upon eyes and ears on the instant of entering the gambling-rooms. But the silence of the place was as haunting and mystery-suggesting as the indefinable odour, and more thrilling to the imagination than the loudest noise.
She who had been Sister Rose was horrified to find herself thinking of a cathedral lighted for a midnight mass. Almost, she expected organ music to peal out.
Slowly she moved down the room, past the first tables, and, as she walked, the muffled, characteristic sounds she began to hear seemed but to punctuate and emphasize the silence, like echoes in a cave: a faint rattle of rakes, like the rustle of leaves, and a delicate chink-chink of gold, like the chirping of young birds just awakened by dawn.
A voice at each table as she drew near or passed made some announcement. She caught the words distinctly yet not loudly pronounced: "Faites vos jeux, messieurs. … Rien n'va plus. Onze, noir, impair et manque."
"Onze" was one of the numbers the French couple had decided to play. Mary wondered if it had come at their bidding, and she wished intensely to see what was going on at the tables inside those close circles of women's hats and men's shoulders. But to see, meant to push. She was not bold enough to do that, and kept moving on observantly, hoping always to discover some island less populous than others.
Now she began to pick individuals out of the crowd. The number of types seemed countless. It was as if each country on earth had been called upon to contribute as many as it could spare of unusual and striking, even astonishing, specimens of humanity, on purpose to provide eccentric or ornamental features of this strange, world's variety show.
There were some lovely, and a few singularly beautiful, women from northern and southern lands. Peter had said that one could "tell Americans by their chins," which were firmer and more expressive of energy than other chins, and Englishwomen by their straight noses, which looked as if they had been handed down as precious heirlooms from aristocratic ancestresses. The mellow light gilded many such chins and such noses, and shone into soft dark eyes such as only the Latin races have. Mary fancied she could tell French from Italian women, Spanish from Austrian, Hungarian from Russian or German types. Almost invariably the pretty women and the good-looking men were well dressed. Only the plain and ugly ones seemed not to care for appearances. But there were more plain people than handsome ones; and dowdy forms strove jealously to hide the charming figures, as dark clouds swallow up shining stars. All faces, however, no matter how beautiful or how repulsive, how old or how young, had a strange family likeness in their expression, it seemed to Mary; a tense eagerness, such as before her novitiate she had seen on the faces of Lady MacMillan's guests sometimes when they had settled down seriously to play bridge.
She had expected to see unhappy and wildly excited faces, because, Peter said, people often lost or won fortunes in these rooms in a single night; but no one in this moving crowd looked either very miserable or very radiant. They did not even appear to be greatly excited, yet most of them seemed absorbed, as if they listened for a sound which would mean something of vital importance; or else they had an air of fearing that they had missed the all-essential signal which might never come again.
It was not the "high season" yet, Mary's waiter at the Paris had said, and the "vrai monde" would not come in its greatest rush until after Christmas and the New Year; yet the Casino was filled with a throng of persons many of whom looked immensely rich and important, and none of whom, at worst, was shabby. Even those who were dowdy appeared well-to-do. Mary saw that it was not necessary to gamble in groups. Men and even women, all alone, pushed their way through the thick wall of hats and shoulders round the table, sometimes being lost altogether, or sometimes emerging again in three or four minutes to scurry across the shining expanse of floor to another table. By and by, when she began to feel calmer, Mary ventured near a table in the middle of the room, within full sight of doors which led to other rooms: a long vista straight ahead, where all the decorations seemed new and fresh, and a light white as silver streamed from hanging lamps like diamond pendants and necklaces for giantesses or goddesses of fortune. So different was the colour of this light from that of the first great salle, that a silver wall seemed built against a wall of gold.
Standing outside the circle at the table, new sounds in the silence struck Mary's ear, not emphasizing the heavy silence, as did the delicate chinking of coins and the announcements of roulette numbers, but jarring and ruffling its smooth surface: little sudden rustlings and squabblings, disputes between players in French or German, sharp and mean, yet insignificant as the quarrelling of a nestful of birds in the ample peace of a spreading beech tree.
Now and then there seemed a chance that Mary might find a place in the back row at a table, but some one else, also watching, invariably darted in ahead of her. Each time the hope came, her heart gave a bound, and the blood sang in her ears. She was astonished at her excitement, which seemed exaggerated beyond reason, and ridiculous, yet she could not conquer it; and the trembling that ran through her body made her knees feel very weak, after she had stood for perhaps half an hour. Looking round, she noticed that there were a good many brown leather-covered seats along the mirrored and gilded walls. Most of these were fully occupied by resting men and women, some very old and tired looking, others eagerly counting money, or jotting down notes in little books or on cards. As she looked, an extraordinary woman much bejewelled, with a face a century old under bright red hair, and a hat for a lovely young girl, jumped abruptly up from the seat nearest