The Devourers

She walked slowly back in stupefaction. The Englishman stood where she had left him, at the foot of the Casino steps, facing the trees. He had lit a cigarette. He turned, when she was near him, and threw the cigarette away. He said:

"Are you coming into the rooms again?"

"No," said Nancy.

"Shall I see you to your hotel?"

"No," said Nancy; and stood there, dull and ashamed.

"Well," said the Englishman, putting out his hand in a brisk, matter-of-fact way, "good-night." He shook her chilly hand. Then he ventured consolation. "All the same a hundred years hence," he said, and turned quickly into the Casino.

He did not stay. He came out a moment afterwards, and followed the dreary little figure in its grey travelling dress that went slowly up the street, and round to the right. When he had seen her safely enter the garden of the hotel he turned back.

"Poor little girl!" he said. "I wonder where I met her before?"

Aldo entered the hotel half an hour later, and went to Nancy's room, armed with soothing and diplomatic explanations. But Nancy was on her knees by Anne-Marie's bed, with her face buried in the mosquito-netting, and did not move when he entered.

"Why, Nancy, what's the matter?"

"Don't wake her, please," said Nancy.

"But I wanted to tell you–"

"Hush!" said Nancy, with her finger on her lips and her eyes on Anne-Marie.

"Then come to my room. I want to speak to you," said Aldo.

"No," said Nancy.

"Well," said Aldo, "I think I ought to explain–"

"Hush!" said Nancy again. Then she sat on a chair near the child's bed, and put her face down again in the mosquito-netting.

Aldo stood about the room for a time. He called her name twice, but she did not answer. Then he went upstairs to his little room feeling injured.

IV

Early next morning Aldo went out to buy a doll for Anne-Marie. He got it at the Condamine, where things are cheaper. It went to his heart to spend seven francs fifty centimes—a mise and a half—but the cheaper ones were really too hideous to buy peace with. For one mad moment he thought of buying a doll with real eyelashes that cost twenty-eight francs. But considerations of economy were stronger than his fears, and he took the one for seven francs fifty, whose painted eyelashes remained irrelevantly at the top of the eyelids even when they were closed.

Anne-Marie was delighted.

Nancy was a pale and chilly statue. Aldo sent Anne-Marie and the Condamine doll to play in the garden, while he in the salon de lecture explained.

The systems were rank and rotten. All of them. Rank—and—rotten. Grimaux, the croupier, had told him so. There was only one way of winning, and that was–

"I know all that," said Nancy. "Who was that woman?"

Aldo raised reproachful, nocturnal eyes to her face. She looked smaller than usual, but very stern.

"Nancy," he said. "Tesoro mio! My treasure!…"

But Nancy ignored the eyes and the outstretched hand. "Who is she?"

"She is nobody—absolutely nobody! An old thing with a yellow wig. Her name is Doyle. How can you go on like that, my love?"

But Nancy could go on, and did. "She is English?"

"No, no; American. A weird old thing from the prairies." And Aldo laughed loudly, but alone.

"Well?" said Nancy, with tight lips, when Aldo had quite finished laughing.

"Well, Grimaux, who has been here sixteen years, said to me: 'The mistake everyone makes is to double on their losses. When you lose–'"

Aldo's slim hands waved, his shoulders shrugged, his long eyes turned upward. Nancy watched him, cold and detached. "He looks like the oyster-sellers of Santa Lucia!" she said to herself. "How could I ever think him beautiful?" Then she saw Anne-Marie in the garden kissing the Condamine doll, and she forgave him.

"When you lose," Aldo was saying, "you run after your losses—you double, you treble, you go on, et voilà! la débâcle—whereas when you win you go carefully, staking little stakes, satisfied with a louis at a time, and when you have won one hundred francs, out you go, saying: 'That is enough for to-day!' Now that is wrong, quite wrong. What you ought to do is to follow up your wins, so that when the streak of luck does come—"

"I have heard quite enough about that," said Nancy. "Tell me the rest."

"Well," said Aldo sulkily, "I wish you would not jump at a fellow. The rest is merely this: The good old prairie-chicken"—he went off into another peal of laughter, and left off again when he had finished—"she was—she was just promising to put up the money when you came along. And you know what women are. They—they hate families," said Aldo.

Nancy raised her eyes to his face without moving.

"I do not know why you look at me like that," said Aldo sulkily.

Nancy got up. "There is a train at one o'clock," she said; "we will take it."

She went upstairs; Aldo went out into the garden and played with Anne-Marie and the Condamine doll.

At twelve Nancy looked out of the window. She called Anne-Marie, who came unwillingly, dragging the doll upstairs, and followed by Aldo.

"We are ready," said Nancy, tying the white ribbons of a floppy straw hat under Anne-Marie's chin. Anne-Marie sat on the bed kicking her feet in their tan travelling-boots up and down. Aldo sat near the table, and drummed on it with his fingers.

"Who is going to pay the hotel bill?" he said.

Nancy looked up. "Have you no money?"

"I have eighty-two francs and forty centimes," said Aldo.

"Where is the rest?"

"Gone."

Nancy sat down on the bed near Anne-Marie. There was a long silence.

Aldo fidgeted, and said: "I told you the systems were all wrong."

Nancy did not answer. She was thinking. She understood nothing about money, but she knew what this meant. How were they to go back to Milan? How were they to live? With her mother? Her mother had had to scrape and be careful since the forty thousand francs had been given to Aldo. She had brought smaller boxes of chocolate to Anne-Marie. She took no cabs, and was wearing a last year's cloak of Aunt Carlotta's. Aunt Carlotta herself was always grumbling that when she wanted to spend five francs she turned them over three times, and then put them into her purse again, and that Adèle could not find a husband because her dot was small, and men asked for nothing but money nowadays. There was Zio Giacomo, dear, grumpy old man. But he had all Nino's old debts to pay, and everybody was always borrowing from him. Distant relations and seedy old friends visited and wrote to him periodically; and Zio Giacomo was enraged, and always vowed that this would be the last time.... The only wealthy person connected with the family was Aldo's brother, Carlo. But Nancy knew that Aldo had exhausted all from that source. What would happen? What were they going to do? She looked at Aldo, who sat in the arm-chair, with his head thrown back and his eyes on the ceiling. He knew she had likened him to San Sebastian, and now to move her pity as much as possible he assumed the expression of the adolescent saint pierced with arrows.

Nancy turned her eyes from him. The sight of him irritated her beyond endurance. She looked at Anne-Marie, sitting good and happy beside her, playing with the doll. She bent and kissed the child's cool pink cheek.

Aldo sat up, and said: "I had better go."

"Where to?" said Nancy.

"To the Casino, of course," said Aldo. "I promised to be there at twelve-thirty."

"To meet that woman?"

"Yes," said Aldo sulkily.

"Oh!" gasped Nancy, and her hands clasped in deepest shame for him. "What blood is in your veins?"

It was the blood of many generations of Neapolitan lazzaroni—beautiful, lazy animals, content to lie stretched in the sun—crossed and altered by the blood of the economical shopkeeping grandfather, who sold corals and views of Vesuvius in the Via Caracciolo.

Aldo felt that it was time to hold his own. "It is easy enough for you to talk," he said. "But what else can I do?"

Anne-Marie lifted the Condamine doll to her mother. "Kiss," she said. Then she stretched it out towards her father. "Kiss," she said. Aldo jumped up, and fell on his knees before them both. He kissed the doll, and he kissed Anne-Marie's little coat, and Nancy's knees, and then he put his head on Anne-Marie's lap and wept. Anne-Marie screamed and cried, and Nancy kissed them both, and comforted them.

"Never mind—never mind! It will all come right. Don't cry, Aldo! It is dreadful! I cannot bear to see you cry."

Aldo sobbed, and said he ought to go and shoot himself. And after Nancy had forgiven, and comforted, and encouraged him, he raised his reddened eyes and blurred face. "Well, then, shall I go?" he said.

Nancy turned white. It was hopeless. He did not understand. He was what he was, and did not know that one could be anything else.

"No," she said. And he sat down and sighed, and looked out of the window.

Nancy went to the stout proprietress and asked for the bill. While it was being made out, the kindly woman said: "Are you leaving to-day, madame?"

Nancy blushed, and said: "I do not know until I have seen the bill."

The proprietress, who had heard the noise upstairs—for Aldo cried loud like a child—and was slightly anxious in regard to her money, said: "Has monsieur already had the viatique?" Nancy did not understand. "The viatique of the Casino. If monsieur has played and lost, the administration will give him something back. Let him go and ask for it. And," she added, glancing at the brooch at Nancy's neck, "if perhaps madame should wish to know it, the Mont de Piété is not far—just past the Crédit Lyonnais."

The bill was one hundred and twenty-three francs. Nancy told Aldo about the viatique, and he said, with a hang-dog air, he would go and ask for it.

"How much do you think it will be?" asked Nancy.

"I don't know," said Aldo, who felt that he must be glum.

"Two or three thousand francs?"

"I suppose so," said Aldo.

"You will accept nothing from that woman. You promise!"

"I promise," said Aldo, laying flabby fingers in her earnest, outstretched hand.

So he went, and when he was out of sight of the hotel he hurried.

Nancy packed his trunk for him, and felt pity and half remorse as she folded his limp, well-known clothes, his helpless coats and defenceless waistcoats, and put them away. He had no character. It was not his fault. She ought not to have allowed him to come here. He was not a wall; Clarissa had told her so long ago. He was weak, and limp, and foolish. Well, Nancy would be the wall. Already she knew what to do. Say the Casino gave them back three or four thousand francs. They would go back to Milan, give up the home in Via Senato, and take a cheaper apartment in the Quartieri Nuovi. She would write. She would work again. Ah! at the thought of her work her blood quickened. The baby should stay with Valeria, because it was impossible to do any serious work with Anne-Marie tugging at one's skirts and at one's heart-strings. She would go and see the baby every evening after she had written five or six hours. Aldo would return to Zio Giacomo's office. Good old Zio Giacomo would be glad to take him back for Valeria's and Nancy's sake, and they would live quietly and modestly. Aldo should superintend the household expenses, and squabble over the bills with the servant—he loved to do that; and by the time the three, or four, or five thousand francs that the Casino had given them were finished The Book would be out. "The Cycle of Lyrics" had brought her in twenty thousand francs, and it was only a slender volume of verse. This book would make a great stir in Italy—she knew it—and it would be translated into all languages. She wished she had the manuscript here. She felt that she could start it again at once.

She closed her eyes and remembered. All the people she had created, bound together by the scarlet thread of the conception, rushed out from the neglected pages, and entered her heart again. She felt like Browning's lion; you could see by her eye, wide and steady, she was leagues in the desert already....

Suddenly Anne-Marie, who had been playing like a little lamb of gold on the balcony, gave a scream: the doll had gone. The doll had fallen over the balcony. It was gone! It was dead! Nancy looked over the ledge. Yes, there lay the Condamine doll on the gravel-path in the garden. And it was dead. Half of its face had jumped away and lay some distance off.

Aldo, entering the garden at that moment, saw it, and picked it up. Then he looked up at the balcony, and saw Nancy's troubled face and the distracted countenance of his little daughter.

He waved his hand, and went out again, taking the dead doll with him. He hailed a carriage, and told the driver to drive quickly to the Condamine. He bought the doll with the real eyelashes for twenty-two francs—he made them knock off six francs—and returned with clatter of horses and cracking of whip to the hotel.

When Anne-Marie saw the doll, and when Nancy saw Anne-Marie's face, Aldo knew he was forgiven and reinstated.

"What have they given you back at the Casino?" asked Nancy.

"I don't know. I am to go again in two hours," said Aldo. "Let us have luncheon."

They had an excellent luncheon, for, confronted with a desperate situation in which the economizing of fifty centimes meant nothing, the ancestral shopkeeper in Aldo's veins bowed, and left room for the lazzarone, who ate his spaghetti to-day, and troubled not about the morrow.

"If they give you five or six thousand francs, I suppose we must not complain. We cannot expect to get back the entire eighteen thousand," said Nancy.

"No," said Aldo, with downcast eyelids. He knew something about viatiques, but he would not let this knowledge spoil their lunch. After all, the luncheon cost twelve francs. It must not be wasted.

"Did you see her?" asked Nancy, tying a table-napkin round the doll's neck at Anne-Marie's request.

"Whom?" said Aldo, with his mouth full.

"The—the prairie-chicken," said Nancy, to make him feel that he was quite forgiven.

"Oh yes; I saw her," said Aldo.

Nancy put down her knife and fork, and felt faint. "Well?"

Aldo cleared his throat, took a sip of wine, and said, "She is an old beast."

There was a pause, then he continued: "I made a clean breast of it. I told her who you were, and about Anne-Marie; and when I had finished she called me a—a—oh, some vulgar American name, and off she walked."

Nancy reached across the table and patted his hand. "That's right, Aldo."

"I told you," he said, nodding his head, "that that kind of woman cannot stand the idea of a fellow having a family."

"Perhaps," suggested Nancy, dimpling, "she could not stand the idea of the way the fellow treated his family."

"Well, never mind," said Aldo. "She's done with."

But she wasn't.

At four o'clock Aldo, Nancy, Anne-Marie, and the doll went out, and down to the square in front of the Casino. Nancy and the child sat on a bench facing the Casino, and Aldo went in to get the viatique. He came out a few minutes later looking flushed and angry.

"The canailles! The thieves! The robbers!"

"What is it?" said Nancy.

"They have given me one hundred and fifty francs!" and he held out the three fifty-franc notes contemptuously.

"A hundred—and—fifty francs!" gasped Nancy.

"Nancy, there is only one thing to do," said Aldo. "Go in and play them. Plank them down on a number, and if they go, let them go, and be done with."

"Do it," said Nancy, for nothing mattered.

"I can't," said Aldo. "I can't go in—not until this miserable dole is paid back. You must go. They will let you in. Go on."

Nancy rose, flushed and trembling. "What do I do? How do I play it?"

"Oh, anyhow. It makes no difference," said Aldo, with his face in his hands, suddenly realizing that they three possessed in the world one hundred and ninety francs, and a debt of one hundred and twenty-three. He turned to the child.

"Say a number, Anne-Marie! Any old number!"

Anne-Marie did not understand.

"You know your numbers, darling," said Nancy, "that grandmamma taught you."

"Oh, yeth," said Anne-Marie. "One, two, three, four."

"Stop. All right," said Aldo. "Nancy, go in and play—at any table you like—the quatre premiers and quatre en plein. That gives you zero, too. Go ahead! Les quatre premiers and quatre en plein. Remember. Tell the croupier to do it for you."

Nancy went straight in, and to the left, where the men sat who had laughed at her the night before. They recognized her, and gave her a card at once.

She went into the rooms. Chink, chink; chink, chink. She went to the table on the left. A red-haired croupier sat at the end of the table nearest her, and she went to him, and gave him one of the fifty-franc notes.

"Les quatre premiers et quatre en plein," she said.

But it was too late. "Rien ne va plus," said the man in the centre. "Trente-deux, noir, pair et passe."

The croupier handed her back the note. "You're lucky," he said. "You would have lost." She repeated her phrase, and he put the note on the top of his rake and passed it across the table. "Quatre premiers," he said, and the man in the middle placed it.

"Et quoi encore?" said the croupier, looking at Nancy.

"Quatre premiers et quatre en plein," repeated Nancy, mechanically.

"Combien à l'en plein?" said the man, holding out his hand.

Nancy gave him the second fifty-franc note, and he passed it up on his rake. "Quatre en plein."

"Quatre en plein. Tout va aux billets," said the man in the centre; and the ball whizzed round. Nancy's heart was thumping; it shook her; it beat like a drum. The little ball dropped, ran along awhile, stopped, clattered and clicked, and fell into a compartment.

"Trois."

Everybody looked at Nancy as she was paid, and she collected the gold and silver with clumsy hands. "Encore," she said, giving the croupier the remaining bill and some louis.

"Quoi?" said the croupier.

"Encore la même chose." The ball was running round.

"Mais ça y est," said the croupier, for the fifty-franc note that had won still lay at the corner of the top line.

"Mais non, mais non," said Nancy, who was very much confused, "premier quatre"—the man placed the note on the other note still lying there—"et quatre en plein." But for this last it was too late.

"Rien ne va plus. Zéro!"

"Voilà! ça y est!" said the croupier, returning the gold to her, and waiting with the rake on the table for the eight hundred francs to be paid.

What is the secret of luck? How shall it be forced? How explained? Whatever Nancy did, she won. Wherever her money lay there the ball went. When she thought she had enough—her hands were full, her place at the table was piled up with louis and silver and notes—and she was withdrawing her remaining stake and the gold paid on it with clumsy rake, she moved it away from the numbers, and left it on "pair" while she put down the rake. A minute was lost while a woman said something to her, and before she could take the money up the ball had fallen. "Vingt. Pair et passe." It was doubled.

When she at last tremblingly collected it all in her hands, and put gold and notes as best she could into her pocket, she rose, and could hardly see. Her cheeks were flaming. She passed out of the rooms, into the atrium, and down the steps. Aldo sat on the bench with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and the doll in his arms. Anne-Marie was running up and down in front of him.

"Aldo," said Nancy, and sat down weakly at his side.

"Gone?" asked Aldo, raising a miserable face.

"No!" Nancy had a little hysterical laugh. She piled the money into his hands, then into her lap, while he counted it quickly, deftly. People passing looked at them, and smiled.

"Seven thousand eight hundred francs," said Aldo, very pale.

"Oh, but there is more;" and Nancy dived into her pocket again. There was over fourteen thousand francs.

"Come into the Café de Paris," said Aldo.

They drank coffee and crème de menthe, and Anne-Marie had strawberry ice and cakes. The band played "Sous la Feuillée."

"Oh what a lovely world it is!" said Nancy, with a little sob. "Oh, what a glorious place! I love it all! I love everybody!"

"I love evlybody," said Anne-Marie, taking a third cake with careful choice. Aldo and Nancy laughed.

The Englishman passed, and Nancy called him. She introduced him to Aldo, and Aldo thanked him for being kind to Nancy the evening before. Nancy told him about the fourteen thousand francs she had won, and they all laughed, and the band played, and the sun shone and went down.

"The best train for Italy," said Mr. Allen suddenly, "is at six-twenty. You have just an hour. It's a splendid train. You get to Milan at eleven."

Aldo looked at Nancy, and Nancy looked at the sky. It was light and tender, and the air was still. The Tsiganes were playing "Violets," and in the distance lay the sea.

"We must take that train," said Aldo, getting up and rapping his saucer for the waiter.

"Oh no!" said Nancy. "Please not! Let us stay here and be happy."

"Stay here and be happy," said Anne-Marie, with a bewitching smile.

They stayed.

V

Aldo repaid the viatique and went into the gambling-rooms with Nancy. The proprietress of the hotel got them a bonne from Vintimille, who walked up and down in the gardens with Anne-Marie, and carried the doll. She cost nothing—only fifty francs a month! They arranged to take pension at the hotel. That also cost nothing—twelve francs a day each. They took drives that cost nothing—sixteen francs to La Turbie, twenty francs to Cap Martin. Nothing cost anything. Ten minutes at the tables, and Nancy had won enough to pay everything for a month.

She sent a cloak to her mother, which Valeria vowed was much too beautiful to wear. She sent presents to Aunt Carlotta and Zio Giacomo, to Adèle and to Nino, to Carlo and to Clarissa. And she remembered a man with no legs, who sat in a little cart on the Corso in Milan, and she sent her mother one hundred francs to give him. Anne-Marie was dressed in a white corded silk coat, and a white-plumed hat. The bonne had a large Scotch bow with streamers.

This lasted ten days. On the eleventh day it was ended. Nancy played gaily, and lost. She played carefully, and lost. She played tremblingly, and lost. She played recklessly, and lost. Aldo, who did not trust his own luck, followed her from table to table, saying: "Be careful!… Don't!… Do!… Why did you? Why didn't you? I told you so!" And at each table la guigne was waiting for them, pushing Nancy's hand in the wrong direction, whispering the wrong numbers in her ear. Ten times they made up their minds to stop, and ten times they decided to try just once more. "We have about nine thousand francs left. With that we are paupers for the rest of our lives. With luck we might recoup."

This lasted two days. On the third day they had one thousand and eighty francs left. "Play the eighty," said Aldo, "and we will keep the thousand." They lost the eighty, and then four hundred francs more. "What is the good of six hundred francs," said Aldo, and they played on.

Their last two louis Aldo threw on a transversale. They won. "Let us leave it all on," said Aldo. They won again.

"Shall we risk it again?" said Nancy, with flushed cheeks and galloping heart.

Aldo's lips were dry and pale; he could not speak. He nodded. And a third time they won. The croupier flattened the notes out on the table and knocked the little pile of gold lightly over with his rake. He counted, and paid five times the already quintupled stake.

Aldo bent forward and picked up a rake to draw in his winnings. A man sitting near the centre of the table put out his hand, and took the piled-up notes and gold.

"Ah, pardon!" cried Aldo, striking the rake down on the notes and holding them; "that is mine."

"Pardon! pardon! pardon!" said the man, laying his hand firmly on the notes. "C'est ma mise à moi! Voilà déjà trois coups que je l'y laisse–"

Aldo was incoherent with excitement, and Nancy joined in, very pale. "It is ours, monsieur."