The Enemies of Women (Los enemigos de la mujer)

"We are very sorry, Prince, but everything is full. There are people even in the aisles."

But since it was he, one of the two men accompanied him as far as the box belonging to the Prime Minister of Monaco. The man who governed for the Sovereign Prince recognized him and was anxious to give him the best seat, but Michael, disliking public curiosity, preferred to remain in the second row.

It was a theater without any balconies. The auditorium was wider than it was deep. The rows of comfortable seats were all alike and all sold at the same price. The stage was used for concerts and, on rare occasions, for plays and operas.

The architect who had built the Paris Opera House had repeated the same dazzling display in this hall. There were gold ornaments on every side, elaborate moldings, caryatids and immense mirrors. There was not a hand's breadth of the wall without its gilded stucco, raised in bold relief.

In the hall at the rear above the seats that rose at a decided angle, were five boxes, the only ones there were.

They were reserved for the Sovereign Prince and his high officials.

While listening to the singing, Michael examined the crowded mass of people, as well as he could, from his seat. He recognized many as he gazed over their heads.

Toward the front he distinguished a man with gray hair that was parted from the forehead to the nape of the neck, and brushed forward mingling with his side whiskers, in an Austrian fashion. It was the Colonel, who was listening with a certain air of authority, swaying his head to show his approbation of the celebrated tenor. But he was not alone. The Prince saw him bend toward a girl with curly hair and a string of large amber beads. Oh, the traitor!

There was no doubt about it. It must have been the gardener's daughter. That was why he had fled in such a hurry. The milliner's apprentice had insisted. She was anxious to hear the singer she had heard the ladies talk so much about.

When the huge nightingale had retired to the wings, the Colonel offered his protégée a cornucopia full of caramels. Caramels in wartime! An extravagance, indeed, that only a lover could allow himself.

In the intermission, the Prince slipped away, for fear that he might meet Don Marcos and spoil his aide's pleasant afternoon by his presence. Besides, he was not interested in the opera or in the highly praised artist.

He crossed the large ante-room with its columns of jasper supporting a gallery with balusters surmounted by bronze candelabras. At one end of the room the latest news was posted on panels. The Prince read it without any curiosity.

Nothing new. The same as ever. The monotonous trench warfare was continuing. Ground gained and lost by the yard. There would be no end to it.

He slipped out between the groups of people during the intermission, taking care that the Colonel should not see him.

Poor Don Marcos! He was walking along gravely and proudly by the side of his protégée, who might have been his granddaughter. He glanced with hostility at all the young men, while behind his back, she made eyes at every passing uniform.

The Prince was obliged to force his way through a motionless compact group made up of wounded officers. French, Canadians, Australians, and Englishmen. Mingled with them were nurses of various types – some with nunlike veils and with a delicate appearance; others with a masculine look, having neckties and uniforms with gold buttons, without any feminine apparel except their skirts. Some who were older and had short hair, red faces, and large shell spectacles had to be examined closely before one could be convinced, from their hybrid appearance, that they were women. They crowded together in front of the three double curtains leading to the gambling rooms. Those who belonged in any way to the army or navy of any nation whatsoever were not allowed to pass this limit. Soldiers could enter only the theater and the ante-room of the Casino. And those people who in their far-off countries had often heard of Monte Carlo, finding themselves there by chance of war, were crowding at the curtains with childish curiosity, admiring, for an instant, as the draperies rapidly opened and closed, the vision of gilded rooms, all in a row and filled with people. Afterwards they would withdraw, giving up their places to other comrades. At last they had seen it! Now they could say they knew all about Monte Carlo!

The employees in their black frock coats opened one of the curtains, greeting the Prince as though he were an old acquaintance. It was the first time Michael had entered the gaming rooms since his return. It seemed to him as though he had awakened miraculously into the world of things before the war. Everything that was afflicting humanity remained on the other side of the door, as the action of a drama, unreal but exciting, remains on the stage of a theater which we leave behind us. He found even a certain attractiveness in the architecture of these drawing rooms, because of their vague familiarity, recalling the pleasant days of his life. He was in the Renaissance hall, but his whole attention was taken by the adjoining parlor, the central rotunda of the Casino, called the "Schmidt Drawing Room," the one on which all the other rooms converge and which seems to be prolonged under the dividing archways to the farthest ends of the building.

A pulsing silence arose from the mass of human beings around the green tables. Every one was talking in a low voice as though in church. From time to time this murmur was broken by a long swishing sound, a noise like that of pebbles on the shore swept by a wave. It was caused by the rakes of the employees sweeping the green cloth and carrying with them the clashing coins and ivory ships – all the spoils of the losings. The voices of the croupiers, like those of officers giving commands, arose above the feverish silence which reminded one of a humming hive.

"Faites vos jeux. Vos jeux sont faits?.. Rien ne va plus."

The hall gradually lost the suppressed noises which served to accentuate its silence. People breathed more naturally, as they craned their necks to see better over the shoulders of those in front of them. Some of the women were standing on one foot only, with the other raised behind them like dancers bending over to touch the ground with their hands. They all crowded together, paying no attention to the sex of the persons against whom they were pushing. During this pause, marked by long faces, frowning eyebrows, drawn mouths, and converging glances, there resounded with its noise increased by a diabolical echo, the rattling of the tiny ivory ball as it whirled in the grooves along the wooden rim, while the colored rows of the roulette wheel kept spinning in the opposite direction, like a kaleidoscope. Suddenly there was a sharp click. The ball had ended its circular flight, falling into a number. The silence was prolonged. The spectators' necks were craned even more. There was a nervous clenching of fists. Again there was the sound of pebbles washed by the sea. The rakes were sweeping the green table. It was a bad number for the players. Whenever a stifled uproar occurred, caused by a hundred bosoms suddenly breathing freely, it took the croupiers several minutes to resume play. They had to pay the winners and settle disputes between those who claimed the same bet. At the end of each play various groups at a table would disengage themselves to go over to another; but the ring of people always remained compact through the arrival of new spectators.

From the central skylight a dim splendor descended. Outside the sun was shining on the azure sea. This light was like that of a wine cellar, a light, according to Castro, like that of a Hall of Congress. It was a yellowish light gold which seemed to increase the magnificence of the drawing rooms. The architecture was of the rich and majestic sort that attracts the crowd and the newly rich. The columns and pillars of onyx and bronze held up a magnificent ceiling, broken by the circular stained glass of the skylight. In the four triangles of the vault were statues representing Air, Earth, Fire, and Water, as though these four elements had some relation to the business which gave the vast edifice its reason for existence.

Four metal spiders, huge and glistening, completed the heavy sumptuousness of the decoration. Where there were no gilded ornaments or mirrors, the walls were covered with showy pictures. These paintings and all of the rest that adorned the Casino were the object of Michael's jests. Some of them were fairly acceptable. The majority appeared very ancient in spite of the fact that they were not over forty years old. But there was nothing noble about their antique appearance. It seemed rather as though they had lain for centuries in scorn and oblivion. Atilio accounted for the appearance of these canvases in a way of his own. According to him they were the work of various patrons ruined by gambling, whom the Casino felt obliged to advertise.

The Prince began to notice well-known faces in this crowd which was being constantly renewed, and was changing each moment. The whole world, sooner or later passed that way. That floor with its various inlaid woods was one of the most frequented spots of Europe. It was something like the ancient Roman forum, a point on which all roads of the entire world converged. Idlers from the entire globe were attracted to this room. They all dreamed of being able to go sometime and risk a coin in the great Mediterranean gambling house. Men from other continents disembarking in the old world wrote Monte Carlo on the itinerary of their travels. But this human river which constantly glided along, receiving new waves of arrivals, kept leaving in the crannies of its shores, pools of stagnant waters, clogged by uprooted plants and the naked trunks of trees.

Lubimoff nodded to certain persons, who looked at him with a sort of cordial surprise, as though they were looking at a dead man brought to life. An old man, with a short bristling beard on a face pale as a corpse, bowed deeply as he passed, without seeming in his humility to be offended at not receiving an acknowledgment. He was the man most sought after and coaxed by the women who frequented the Casino. He wore a sort of black cap like that of a priest, and carried a hat in one hand. On his coat lapel was a medal of enamel work with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Atilio and Lewis had also sought him frequently. Michael was sure that this man was a friend of the Duchess de Delille and that on more than one occasion he had seen her tears. He loaned money at 5 per cent (for every 24 hours), and spent the time, he was not busy, watching new arrivals from a distance to see if they might turn out to be new clients.

The Prince received smiles, also from certain respectable looking women who were by no means ugly, though they were stout in some parts of their body and slender in others, like persons who have taken a course to reduce flesh without obtaining a uniform result. They were seated on the divans in the corners, talking among themselves, and watching the groups of gamblers, with the air of employees resting after having done their duty. They had come to Monte Carlo many years ago with jewels, with thousands of francs, and men who endured all the unevenness of their tempers and in addition gave them money. And everything had vanished on the Casino tables. But they went on clinging to the reef on which they had been wrecked – perhaps beyond salvation, living on the jettison of many another who had followed the same route, only to be dashed on the same rocks and perish. They offered their services to strangers as persons acquainted with the mysteries of the house, advising honey-moon couples what number they should play, as though they knew the secret. Besides they came to the Casino at the opening hour to get the best places at the tables and later give up their chairs to wealthy players, steady clients, who rewarded them generously if luck favored them.

He met still others also. A number of women passed close to him. They were old, but of an age incapable yet of frankly facing the free air and the open sunlight. Their appearance of antiquity was accentuated by their strange apparel, which recalled no particular style – dresses of bright colors that had faded, and which seemed to have been cut from old curtains, and smelled like a musty old house; – and monumental hats or spherical turbans made of mosquito netting. Some were thin as skeletons; others were mountains of living fat; but all of them were painted scandalously with vermilion and had blue rings around their lightless eyes.

"A louis, Prince," murmured the most daring. "I am sure that you will bring me luck." As she spoke, her false teeth, too large for her gums, rattled; a stench of the grave accompanied the smile on the painted lips.

Michael knew who they were, from Toledo's tales. The Colonel, as an admirer of fallen royalty, accepted their conversation with melancholy deference. One of them had been a sweetheart of Victor Emanuel; another, who was older, recalled, with sighs, the days of Napoleon III, and of Morny.

They had come to die in Monte Carlo, the last spot on earth able to remind them of the splendors of sixty years before; some of them, in memory of their vanished jewels, calmly displayed brass ornaments and beads of glass. According to a paradox of Castro's, they had died many years before, spending the night in the Monaco Cemetery dressing themselves with the spoils from other corpses and coming to the Casino from force of habit to contemplate once more the scenes of their remote youth. The Prince gave them a few bank notes and went out, while they ran to gamble this money, after having thanked him for the gift, with a death-head grin that was the last remnant of their former professional charm.

Suddenly Michael stopped, observing the various parasites who lived by clinging to the gearing of the terrible machine and feeding on the crumbs it pulverized. He became interested in the crowd which was always apparently the same, though always with distinct individuals. There were some who walked along leaning on canes, invalids' canes tipped with rubber – the only kind allowed in the gaming room for fear of quarrels. He noticed flaccid old women slowly hobbling along, paralytic gentlemen leaning on the arm of tall, robust fellows in braided uniforms who led them in a fatherly fashion toward the roulette wheels and eased them into their chairs. A few paralytics arrived at the foot of the stairway in little carriages like children's carts, and thence were carried on hand chairs through the rooms to their favorite spot. At certain moments it seemed as though the gambling hall were a famous health resort, or a place of miracles, like Lourdes. They came just as incurable invalids come to other places, impelled by a last hope; but in this case the hope was not for health. That was the least of their cares. What galvanized them here was the hope of fortune, and dreams of wealth, as if riches would be of any service to these poor bodies lacking all the appetites which make life pleasant.

Mentally the Prince summed up all human passions in two pleasures which are the springs of all action – love and gambling. There were people who experienced equally the attraction of them both – Castro, for example. He himself had been interested only in love and could not understand the pleasures of gambling. Whenever he had gotten up from the gaming tables, each time with winnings, he had never felt any temptation to return. But looking at these ailing people, some of them very aged, at those incurables, all of them dragging themselves toward the roulette wheel as though toward a miraculous bath, he condoned them pityingly. What other pleasure was there left for them on earth? How could they fill the emptiness of their lives prolonged so tenaciously?

What he could not understand was the intense attitude, the hard faces, of the other gamblers who were healthy and strong. Young men moved among the women around the tables with hostile brusqueness, quarrelling with them harshly and treating them like enemies. Women suddenly lost their grace and freshness, becoming masculine all at once as they looked at the rows of cards of trente et quarante or at the mad whirl of the colored wheel. Their gestures were those of prize fighters. Their mouths were drawn. There was a look of fierceness in their eyes. As though warned instinctively of this transformation, no sooner did they tear themselves away from the tables than they took out their vanity case – the little mirror, the powder, and the rouge – to correct or efface the passing ravages of the play. Those of more dignified and normal appearance showed themselves at times to be the most reckless. In a place where all the women were doing the same as they, gambling had something official about it, something worthy of respect; it was possible for them to indulge in a vice without fear of gossip, without the risk of being criticized.

The Prince smiled as he remembered a story Toledo had told him a few days before: the despair of a woman of about forty who came from Nice with her two daughters every afternoon, and had finally lost fifty thousand francs.

"Oh! If I had only taken a lover," the mother had groaned with tears in her eyes. "It would have been better if I had chosen love."

Michael entered the other rooms that had no skylight. The clusters of electric bulbs lighting them with senseless splendor made him think of the burning sun and the azure sea just beyond those walls of gold and jasper.

Above the tables were oil lamps with two enormous shades each one sheltering four fixtures which hung by bronze chains several yards long, attached to the ceiling. Thus if the electric current was cut off, there was no danger of the patrons feeling tempted to appropriate the money on the tables.

Occasionally a little bell would sound, rung by one of the employees in black frock coat who directed the playing. A chip, a coin, or a bank note had fallen under the table. Suddenly with the promptness of a scene shifter waiting behind the stage, a lackey dressed in a blue and gold uniform appeared, carrying a dark lantern and a hook to rummage about among the players' feet until he found the lost object.

The discipline observable in these vast rooms was like that on a warship, where everything is in its place and every man at his post. In order to make sure that everything was going properly, various respectable gentlemen with decorations on their coat lapels, walked back and forth among the tables, with the air of officers on duty. Whenever voices were raised, these men appeared with rapid strides, to cut short the arguments in some tactful manner. When two gamblers claimed the same bet, they immediately settled the dispute by paying both. The money would finally come back to the house any way!

According to Atilio, the Casino was honeycombed in all directions with secret galleries, hidden openings and even trap doors, like the stage for a comedy of magic – all these for the sake of immediate service, and to avoid any annoyance to the patrons.

Sometimes the invalid fainted at the table or fell dead through too violent emotion. Immediately the wall would open and eject two attendants with a stretcher who would cause the troublesome body to disappear as though by enchantment. Those at the adjoining table would scarcely have a chance to be aware of it.

At other times it would be a suicide. Lubimoff knew a table called the Suicide Table, because an Englishman had killed himself there in melodramatic fashion, shooting himself with a pistol when he had lost his last penny. His brains had been scattered in shreds on the green baize and on the faces of his neighbors, and even on the frock coats of the croupiers. There are always people who have no tact, and who do not know how to behave in good society! But the attendants emerged from the wall, carried away the corpse, and cleaned the blood from the carpet and table.

Shortly afterwards, from the oval of people crowding against the green table, the consecrated words arose: "Faites vos jeux… Vos jeux sont faits?.. Rien ne va plus."

The Prince recalled the famous suicide bench in the gardens of the Casino. It was all a magazine yarn. No such bench had ever existed. When several persons killed themselves on the same bench, the administration had its position changed immediately! Besides, the number of suicides was much exaggerated. There were two or three each year, no more. According to Castro, it was no longer the fad to kill one's self at Monte Carlo. It showed an unpardonable lack of taste. The proper thing to do was to go a long way off and disappear without making any commotion.

Besides the house police were quick to detect those who were in despair. Such people received a railway ticket at once and they were advised to kill themselves, like good fellows, in Marseilles, or if not so far away, at least in Nice or Menton.

Michael was near the "Suicide Table" close to the entrance to the private rooms, when he noticed a certain commotion in the crowd. Groups were seeking one another to exchange news. The old patrons were moved by professional feeling. Something important was going on. The Prince knew the meaning of these sudden bursts of curiosity: a player was winning or losing in remarkable fashion.

He heard indistinctly a name that brought him to attention.

"The Duchess de Delille – two hundred thousand francs!"

All those who had permission to play in the private rooms hurried toward the large glass door which gave access to them. Michael followed this living current.

He found himself in an enormous hall with a lofty ceiling. On one side four large balconies opened out on the terraces, and the Mediterranean. Because of the war they were covered with dark curtains to hide the light from within. The wall opposite was adorned with various gigantic mirrors. On the ceiling seventeen white, full-breasted caryatids, bending under the weight of the roof, supported the wide bands of rock crystal, with electrical bulbs, which shed a sort of moonlight.

Those whom curiosity had attracted, passed the first gaming tables with an air of indifference. Everybody was crowding around the last, the "trente et quarante," at the foot of a large picture, in which three buxom lasses in the nude against a background of dark trees like those in the Boboli Gardens, represented the Florentine Graces.