"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."
"Ah, mais c'est par trop fort," cried the other, who was French, and had a loud voice. He pushed Aldo's rake aside, and took the money.
Aldo appealed to the croupiers, and to the people near him, and to the people opposite him. They shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyebrows. They had not seen, they did not know.
"Faites vos jeux, messieurs," said the croupier.
The ball whizzed; the game went on. Aldo, burning with rage, and Nancy pale and dazed, left the table.
"Oh, Aldo! Let us go away. This is a horrible place. Let us go away."
Aldo did not answer.
They went out into the sunshine. Laughing women lifting light dresses and showing their high heels came hurrying across the square. The warm air was heavy with the scent of flowers. They turned into the gardens, and before them was the dancing sea; and Anne-Marie, looking like an Altezza Serenissima, tripped up and down in her white corded silk coat, her brief curls bobbing under her white-plumed hat.
Behind her walked the Vintimille servant with the Scotch silk bow on her head, and carried the doll with the real eyelashes.
VI
Mother Dear,
I shall send you this letter when nothing that I have written in it is true any more. If we ever live through and out of it, you shall know; if not—but, of course, we shall. We must. One cannot die of poverty, can one? One does not really, actually suffer real hunger, does one, mother dear? "Zu Grunde gehen!" The sombre old German words keep rumbling in my head like far-away thunder. "Zu Grunde gehen!"
I do not suppose one really does go "zu Grunde." But when one has forty-five dollars in the world, and a funny little bird with its beak open expecting to be fed—and fed on chocolates and bonbons when it wants them—one becomes demoralized and frightened, and pretends to think that one might really starve.
Do not think it unkind that I did not come to Milan to kiss you and say good-bye. I had not the heart to do so. Aldo, too, said we could not afford it, and, indeed, our combined viatiques and our jewellery only just enabled us to come here.
We landed three days ago. Yesterday morning I sent you a postcard: "Arrived happily." Happily! Oh, mother dear, I think there must be a second higher and happier heaven for those who are brave enough to tell untruths of this kind. Enough; we landed, Anne-Marie looking like a spoilt princess; I with my Monte Carlo hat and coat, and high-heeled, impertinent shoes; and Aldo, a pallid Antinous, with forty-five dollars in his pocket-book.
Then came the Via Crucis of looking for rooms. Mother, did I ever stay at the Hôtel Nazionale in Rome, and descend languidly the red-carpeted stairs to the royal automobile that was to drive me to the Quirinal? Did I ever sit at home in Uncle Giacomo's large arm-chair and listen benignly to moon-struck poets reading their songs? Did I ever with languid fingers ring bells for servants, and order what I wanted?
That was another Nancy. This Nancy trudged for hours through straight and terrible streets called avenues, with a dismal husband and a tired baby at her side. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, then quickly across Fifth Avenue, which had nothing to do with us, and again across to Sixth Avenue … and everywhere dirty shops, screaming children, jostling girls, rude men, trains rushing overhead, street-cars screeching and clanging. Then, at last, Seventh Avenue, where there were streets full of quiet, squalid boarding-houses, fewer screaming children, fewer dirty shops, and no trains. We went into a cheap, clean-looking place that a porter had told us of. A woman opened. She looked at my hat and coat, and at my shoes, and said: "What do you want?" "A room–" began Aldo. She shut the door without answering. At the next house a woman in a dirty silk dressing-gown opened the door. "Yes, they had rooms. Eight dollars a day. Meals a dollar." In the next house they took no children. In the next, no foreigners. Our expensive clothes in their cheap street made them suspicious. Aldo's handsome face made them suspicious. His Italian accent frightened them. And Anne-Marie cried every time a new face appeared at a new door.