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Evenings, even the hint of infirmity disappeared entirely, and the hundreds who in forenoon had hobbled to their baths or been borne in the mystery of shrouded sedan-chairs through the streets of the Thermal Establishment, seemed to burst mysteriously through the restraints of the flesh, and fling themselves into the burning night life of the Casino.

Oh, there was no use talking, no use denying it to herself, solitude, the quiet reaches of the long, long days she had learned to spend passively within hotel rooms, had not succeeded in downing within her a love of the light, the movement, the gaming, the dining, the wining in the public or semipublic resort. A private party had come to be a bit intimidating to her, but the paradoxical privacy of the hotel dining room, the casino foyer, the racetrack grandstand, where one might see, be seen, was wine of a bouquet more perfect to her than any that had ever passed her lips.

Evenings, from her rooms in a small hotel in a small street that ran directly beneath the hill that held, like a magnificent pack, atop its back, the Hotel Bernasçon, she would begin to see, while the lovely pearly-blue sky that was half Italian was still tinged with sunset, the first reflection of the lights of the Casino.

In another few hours, the big hotels and the neighboring villas would begin their disgorge, and, before midnight, thick crusts of jeweled humanity would form around the strange seductive crater of the gaming-table.

Set in gardens, scented by hills over which Attila had marched, frescoed, shaking its light from the prisms of rows of huge crystal chandeliers as a spaniel shakes its sides of water, there was something
about the spectacle of the Casino, sending its luminosity against the sky, that was a clutch of excitement through her very being.

Well and good to remain discreetly at her distance from the bandstand, or to see to it that her strolls through the town and along the upper reaches were carefully away from the direction of the Bernasçon, or were timed to the siesta, bridge, or meal hours of the hotel folk; but there was something about the Casino after dark, when, seated in her room, the Babe asleep at her feet, she could see that glow spring against the heavens, which set her feet tapping of a nervousness of desire to be part of that scene of baccarat and dance, best-dressed cocottes in the world, women with faces cut from polished almonds and lit with the kind of precious jewels you saw in the show windows along the rue de la Paix.

American women, with sleek short hair and rows of blazing bracelets that formed a rigid cuff to the elbow, slim and sheathed in the brief gowns of the period, that, when they sat, revealed the pampered flesh of their bare legs above their web stockings. Men with bands of ribbon across their shirtfronts sat night after night in the platinum-and-diamond crust of the craters: Mohammedan princes, who fed out francs by the thousands to hovering cocottes, American businessmen, British diplomats and consorts, citizens, ambassadors—youth, middle age, and senility of more countries than Ray had been able to retain in memory from her Woodward High School days.

It was one thing to just avoid the public square and popular tea-haunts where you might encounter Corinne or one of her children; it was another deliberately to deny yourself the diversion, sometimes the profit, and always the pleasurable excitement of the Casino.

At Monte Carlo, where the gardens, cafés, gambling-rooms, lounges, foyers, were so varied that the Casino itself was almost a small city, it had all been much simpler. Here at Aix-les-Bains, on those evenings when she knew Corinne to be present, she never ventured into the rooms where the larger stakes were being played, but remained content to take her smaller hazards at the polyglot
tables where the croupiers dealt in the pea-shot sums of the pension and boardinghouse crowds.

Townspeople were not admitted to the Casino; but nightly, during the season, there poured from the boardinghouses and pensions conducted by the excluded townspeople, a procession of the transient small fry who were eager to lay their five-franc spots in the outer rooms, adjoining those where such kingly stakes as fifty thousand francs were placed upon a single deal of baccarat.

Hours on end, fascinated, Ray would stand in the heavy fringe of onlookers surrounding these high tables, watching with bright magnetized eyes the spectacle of chance as it held the circles around the green baize in attitudes of strain, expectation, hope, frustration, excitement, suspense, until it amounted to something like indecent exposure to permit these faces, forever being hauled at by croupiers, to reveal themselves to even one another.

The girls on the fringe of these men and women who played and won and lost, in terms of hundreds of thousands of francs, were liked rouged little ghouls of these nightly occasions, hovering at the elbows of the men whose stacks of chips or notes or coins were highest. It was almost an ethic that the male winner must feed into their greedy little jeweled talons the spume of his gains. Cocottes of one country or another, the notorious women of famous men, manikins, prosperous prostitutes, morganatic wives, hung on the outskirts of these gaming tables night after night. One’s head reeled with their perfumes, their jeweled arms reaching over shoulders to place bets, their softly breathed profanities, their obscene whispered prayers, their soft hissing-noise of despair and success you could feel in their actual breathings against your ear if, like Ray, you were packed into the table fringe. Spangled birds of paradise pecking at spangled offal. Sometimes, if winnings ran high in her particular segment of the fringe, a stray five-hundred-franc note or a handful of chips flung over a shoulder, often without the head that had motivated the hand troubled to swing, would find itself in Ray’s hand.

At first, this had come as a shock; but gradually, as it became apparent that even the smug married women, who to Ray were
criteria for all things, plucked at these backward-flung notes as nimbly as the “girls,” it all became part of the evening’s high pitch.

True, it was not for the likes of Ray, the birds of nondescript plumage, that these notes actually were intended. But a hand reaching in quickly could flip one. Grabber, keeper!

Then, horrible and inevitable to these tables, was the outer fringe of the outer fringe, elderly women, with bands of black velvet worn ornamentally to cover the cables in their necks, their talons covered with gold rings and clutching onto evening purses of beads and sequins. Their weaving, witchlike hands and dry-as-powder fingers were what made it a little horrible to clutch for spoils, even if you never consciously did so unless these spoils were waved almost literally in your direction. The necky reaching from the last rows gave one a sick feeling.

Once she found herself caught in an embroil of shrill angry French which came hurtling at her from a superbly gowned manikin, who, in a carrot-colored wig, had been leaning over the chair of a special friend, whose reach over his shoulder with a five-hundred-franc note had seemed so willy-nilly to Ray, eager to play, that she had let her hand close upon it. Upon the swift avalanche of high and furious French she had surrendered immediately, of course, and slipped from the group, ashamed.

But in general, if one stood about patiently of an evening, something in the gay carnival of the gambling spirit usually found its way to you.

A small fifty-franc stake, perhaps. Sufficient to enable her to lean in for a bet or two.

One evening, on a hundred-franc stake, she had gone home with a thousand. But usually her luck was more evasive. Small risks, small winnings, if any, but a general average profit, because she was conservative and would dare to quit with a narrow surplus.

This year that Walter and Corinne had come over without the children, leaving Arnold at one of the summer camps just then coming into vogue, Richard to his new rôle in the banking house, and Irma visiting the Mordecai Pooles, said to be the wealthiest family of Spanish Jews in America, an amusing and daring thing
happened two or three times, between Walter, at play at the baccarat table, and Ray on the fringe.

Without ever the slightest note of recognition between them, he had tossed her of his chips and, leaning over his very shoulder so that they had touched, she had placed them. On the occasions that Corinne did not join him at the Casino—always of course with an impeccable discretion—this was amusingly possible. On the evenings that Corinne, only mildly interested, did join the hotel contingent of wives, she usually merely ambled aimlessly about the various rooms while Walter played, ending by interrupting his game long enough to have him tuck her into the hotel omnibus, which plied between the Bernasçon and the Casino, and take her home. Usually he caught the same bus back to the Casino, resuming his rather moderate game, or watching, with a remote kind of disapproval, the speculations of men like the Mohammedan prince out of India, whose winnings or losings ran nightly into tens of thousands, and who tipped his croupiers sums that were legendary the resort and the Riviera over. Behind the shoulders of this notoriously naughty potentate, who resembled Othello in an uneven walnut-juice makeup, there hung and glittered, like the beautiful and exotic small birds of an aviary, the pick of the manikins, the cocottes, the birds of Paris and paradise, many of whom wore his jewels in diamond, emerald, and ruby service stripes up their arms.

An American woman, reputed to be worth forty millions, had sat opposite Walter one of the nights Ray had so daringly hovered at his shoulder and, without a flicker of her stiff and blackened lashes, or her startling lips, which were painted the color and almost the shape of a large strawberry, had lost to the bank the equivalent of eighteen thousand dollars. And this at one of the more conservative tables.

In such a group, the figure of Walter, the rather short, only slightly stout, graying, and by no means undistinguished figure of the American banker—who, notoriously able to afford a spectacular place at the gaming table, played within a modest budget—was not remarkable. The pearls on his wife were. Even here. And that year, when Irma arrived, wearing the six-carat engagement ring of
Mordecai Poole, II, the Mohammedan prince, famed for his emeralds, appraised hers along with the best of his own.

Yes, the pearls of Corinne were remarkable, even here, and so, in a war-stripped Europe, were the size of Walter’s alleged fortune and his vast indulgence to his womenfolk and the assiduity with which his aim in life seemed to be to place himself at their beck and call. One of the average American big-business men, with not much grace, but whose families, as their men trailed them so tirelessly across the high spots of Europe, seemed so sure of their place in the sun. Spoiled, pampered, overindulged, none-too-reverent families of men who, with fear of hardening of the arteries in their hearts, traveled in high-power cars over Europe in search of lowered blood pressure, while their women acquired Paris wardrobes, impoverished noblemen, and imitated accents, which in turn were imitated on the stages of the music halls of Great Britain and the Continent.

Sometimes, watching Walter’s face, from the vantage of a remote corner of the room, the miracle of the consistency of her love for this man, which had so long ago passed her understanding, smote her again and again. A face which, graying, became a Jewish face, sharpening, in the years she had known it, from the unbattered roundness of youth to plane surfaces and angles. Triangles for cheeks by now, as if the flesh had run downhill off them into little sacs at the base of the jowls. The nose stronger, and more prominent and more aquiline, because the face was leaner. A man unremarkable in a crowd, certainly in that crowd of the world’s cosmopolites, yet continuing to be remarkable to her, in a way that, even gazing at him, as he sat, jaws locked, over gaming stakes that were mere pennies to him, was to feel the something that was akin to, and even transcended what had washed over her that day at the curb of the C. H. and D.

It was as if, with her very breathing, as it rose and fell, she could say over and over to herself, as she sometimes did when she sat thinking of him as she waited, or sewed, “Darling, darling, darling.” The clock on the mantel, the wheels on the railroad track, could say that for her. All the little rhythms, the humming of a sewing machine, the beating of an omelet. Darling. Darling.

It was one of the easy summers. It was a summer that in many ways measured up to and even surpassed the old ones at Cape May, when there had been time for walks along the beach. Come to think about it, this was infinitely better than any other summer. The Meyer Friedlanders from Mannheim and Frankfurt-am-Main, an impressive group of handsome, opulent, and overweight Frauen and Herren, with contingents of daughters, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, maids, nurses, and Fräuleins, had joined their American cousins at the Bernasçon that year. There was scarcely an hour of the day or evening, that Corinne, in her glory, was not occupied with these vigorous and extraordinarily modish German women, who loved to scour the local shops in search of embroidered linen, drive motor-loads to neighboring resorts, and evenings, while the men gathered at the Casino, assemble in the hotel lobbies or gardens for bridge or incessant and animated talk of incessant and animated family nature.

It left Walter more than ordinarily free to lunch in the tiny suite in the infinitesimal hotel buried beneath the hill that shouldered the Bernasçon. A chromo of a pair of rooms that smelled of its carpet, and tasted of its staleness.

But what luncheons could be served there, on a table drawn up beside a window that looked out upon a small garden where guests could sit under tin umbrellas and sip coffee or liqueur! The hors-d’oeuvres
variés
, omelette fines herbes,
poulette en casserole
with all the fresh green vegetables prescribed by Walter’s diet. Chianti in its wicker cradle, the long, crisp French bread (forbidden in Walter’s diet). Assorted cheeses, served on a board, and from which you could sliver your choice. Fruits, so much smaller and less juicy than at home, but which somehow tasted so much better, especially if you peeled and cut and ate them with your knife and fork, in the killing fashion of these Europeans. It was like a picnic. It threw you into a gay, irresponsible mood. And away from the banking house, away from the affairs that pressed in upon him, away from the more formal routine of the Bernasçon, something let down in Walter. He became younger than she had ever known him in his youth. They became mimes together, aping the Mohammedan prince; aping the
ex-mistress of a king, who played her baccarat without ever seeming to open her eyes; aping Mrs. August Friedlander, who wore a stomacher of real pearls and whose stomach was large; aping M. Damlier Printemps, whose monocle was set in a rim of tiny emeralds, and his son-in-law Prince Laski of Poland, who notoriously purchased diamond and emerald bracelets for his mistresses at his father-in-law’s world-famous jewelry emporium. One day Ray dressed up the Babe in a spangled shawl, with an aigret of broomstraws on his head, to impersonate a famous dowager, Lady Innescourt, who had a system, and played her
boule
at the cheap tables to constant cabalistic calculations on a paper pad.