Читать книгу The World We Live In - Louis Bromfield - Страница 5

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The great squares and canals had been still now for days with the stillness of death. The boats which at this time of year usually went to and from the Lido filled with duchesses and millionaires and ballet dancers and gigolos, moved back and forth empty save for a few middle aged and elderly porters and waiters and beach servants. It was a curious frightening stillness in Venice in July, like the hush before an earthquake or the eruption of a volcano. The exodus of foreigners had begun a week earlier, the rich English and Americans fleeing like lemmings to Genoa and Naples to wait for boats that would carry them to a luxury in the new world which still was not menaced. They were all rich or they lived off the rich, a whole world of people who sought only pleasure and had no loyalties and in reality very little nationality save that attached by the accident of birth or marriage to the passports they carried with them, the passports of a protection provided for them by the men and women who stayed at home and worked to create great and solid nations. Mrs. Pulsifer who knew nearly all of them and had lived in the midst of them for nearly fifty years, always contemptuous and aloof, called these lemmings "International White Trash."

She had lived among them most of her life because as a young girl she had fallen in love with a London banker and married him, and so from the respectable life of Beacon Hill and the North Shore of Massachusetts, she had been translated suddenly into another world which in the beginning frightened and confused her by its irresponsibility and its ruthlessness. After twenty years she had come to accept it, as a fact if nothing else, and after thirty she had come to find entertainment in it, but always with detachment as a spectator, never as a part of it. And always she kept as a thing apart, like a precious jewel in a casket, her own integrity and the conviction that work and honesty and responsibility were not qualities to be made the objects of mockery. Sometimes in the world in which she lived, her secret convictions left her a very lonely woman, isolated even from her own husband whose behavior even her love for him could not, sometimes, condone.

When her husband died (and she loved him despite all the evil she knew of him as an international banker until he died) she tried to go back to Boston to live. But it was no good; she found it was too late to turn back. She missed the scandals, the skullduggeries, the immorality, the intrigues of the world in which she had spent nearly the whole of her life. Without the "International White Trash" she found life very dull. And so she sold whatever property she had in Boston, closed the great London house and turned everything but a few jewels into cash, and set out to live what remained of her life as a nomad--not living in a tepee and cooking her meals in a pot over an open fire, but as a luxurious nomad camping only in the great hotels de luxe all over the world, traveling in a rather high old-fashioned Rolls-Royce that had belonged to her husband and driven by a rather remarkable Cockney driver called 'Ennery who had driven her husband for twenty years. 'Ennery like a good many of the "International White Trash," spoke pidgin versions of a half dozen languages. He knew the great hotels of Paris and Moscow, Venice and London and Bucharest and Deauville. He understood the art of bribery and knew evil and incriminating facts about a great many famous people, bankers and millionaires, politicians and statesmen. He could have been a blackmailer but he was not because, like his employer, Mary Pulsifer, he found life a spectacle in which experience had taught him to accept everything and find nothing very surprising.

'Ennery and Mrs. Pulsifer got on very well together, and together, in a little more than ten years, they had covered thousands of miles of Europe, Asia and North and South America. The Rolls-Royce had ample trunk room on the top and a built-in bar for the entertainment of Mrs. Pulsifer's friends among the International White Trash. They were always turning up everywhere--in Egypt, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, even in such unlikely and out-of-the-way places as Kansas City and Houston, Texas.

Always on their travels the conventions between servant and mistress were respected scrupulously, for Mrs. Pulsifer was not among those women of her world who changed the color of their hair, and stood on their heads and had their faces lifted in order to preserve an unconvincing illusion of youth. God gave her a spare, thin figure, and her old-fashioned dignified carriage defied the piling up of years. She wore expensive, rather old-fashioned clothes made for her in Paris by Worth and about her thin throat a narrow black ribbon. Her hair she wore on top of her head with a slight suggestion of a pompadour, and on top of the hair, rather high, she wore Queen Alexandra hats, adorned in summer with a bunch of violets and in winter with a bird. She had a style of her own, a great style which nothing, not time, nor disasters, nor great dressmakers, could alter, a style recognized by those--the great dressmakers, the headwaiters, the head porters--who knew the signs of a rich woman, of impregnable position and unassailable character.

In all the world, out of hundreds of acquaintances among the great, the rich and the notorious, 'Ennery, the Cockney driver, remained her closest friend after the death of her husband. He was a beefy man with graying hair, a broad face and small, shrewd blue eyes. Most of Europe and half the world knew the rather high old Rolls-Royce with 'Ennery at the wheel and Mrs. Pulsifer sitting rather high, like royalty or a bird on a perch, in the back.

When the German army swept over the border and across France, Mrs. Pulsifer and 'Ennery were at the Ritz in Paris. They stayed there until the last minute partly because Paris was allowed no news of the gravity of the situation and partly because both Mrs. Pulsifer and 'Ennery liked the excitement. They left Paris only the day before the Germans entered it in the high Rolls-Royce bound southward with the vast and pitiful mob of refugees. After Orléans, they disappeared and no news could be found of them, either by the officials of her late husband's bank or by ambassadors, or any of the many relations, English and American, most of them International White Trash, who hoped to inherit from her and so followed her curious nomad life with a more than normal interest.

The last news to be had of Mrs. Pulsifer and 'Ennery before the débâcle was from a bank official fleeing Paris for the South in a car filled with bank records. He had seen the old Rolls-Royce in the Square at Orléans. In it, besides Mrs. Pulsifer and 'Ennery, were three peasant women and seven children, and on the roof lashed among Mrs. Pulsifer's expensive Vuitton bags and trunks were a perambulator, three mattresses, a goat and a large cheese. In the Square, jammed with women and children and nuns and old men and women, which had been machine-gunned by a German dive-bomber a few minutes before, Mrs. Pulsifer had opened the built-in bar and, aided by 'Ennery, was passing out brandy to the wounded.

The Princess D'Orobelli awakened in Venice having dreamed of Mrs. Pulsifer. She could not think why for she had not seen Mary Pulsifer for years. The Princess herself was a nomad, restlessly following the seasons from capital to capital and resort to resort, and in the past her path and that of Mary Pulsifer frequently crossed. They were friendly, although never very intimate, because there was nearly twenty years difference in age and there was something in Mary Pulsifer, rigid and unbending like her own Edwardian figure, which checked the loose, easy-going sort of relationship which passed for intimacy in the amoral, devil-take-the-hindmost world in which they both lived. In other words, the Princess was International White Trash and Mary Pulsifer, although she frequented the same world, was not. Mary Pulsifer, like her driver, 'Ennery, was always outside, aloof, watching the show but taking no part in it.

As she wakened and pulled the bell-rope above her gilt baroque bed, the Princess was aware of a feeling of strangeness. It was as if the city outside her palace had died. There were no sounds of life, no jubilation, no shouting, not even the ordinary familiar cries and laughter of Venice out of season in peacetime. Then as she yawned and raised her arms above her head, she remembered that Venice had been deserted in full season by the lemmings and that a declaration of war might only be a few hours distant. It might already have happened--that Frenchmen and Italians were fighting each other at the border. It was all fantastic and unreal and annoying, but at the moment it concerned her less than the consciousness that her arms, as she raised them above her head, were no longer firm and round and solid. As she raised them she was aware that the muscles sagged away from the bone. They were flabby. Someone--it was Mary Pulsifer herself--had once referred to that sort of arm cruelly as "kimono arms."

At forty-eight the Princess still looked remarkably handsome but it was the kind of look which led people to say of a woman that she was "remarkably well-preserved." It was not the youthfulness born of a placid life, of good humor, of balanced living, of a genuine, primitive kind of happiness. It came out of bottles and jars and hot towels and ice and violent physical exercise taken earnestly every morning in a routine fashion. For in her own life there had never been any of the natural well-being that breeds youthfulness. Since she was eighteen years old and married Count Pavloff, it had been a stormy and corrupt life.

With disgust she lowered her arms, scratched the tip of her nose where she felt a small irritation, and sat up propping the lace pillows behind her. She touched her nose carefully with one lacquered nail for her face was covered with grease and she hated the feel of it on her fingers. She hated the feel and smell of it because both things were associated with the knowledge that she was growing older each night. And she was fanatically concerned with personal cleanliness, bathing always twice a day, as if like Lady Macbeth some dark inward part of her were conscious always of some filth which might be washed away if only she bathed often enough.

Then the door opened and Serafina came in. Serafina was a fat Italian woman of about the same age as the Princess with hair still black and black eyes that were like gimlets. Unlike the Princess she had never made any attempt to make herself "smart." Although she went everywhere as the maid of the Princess and knew the servants of the richest and most notorious people everywhere, she still remained a provincial Italian woman from Padua, her ample form dressed always in rather rusty black bombazine. She had character and so she became well-known all over Europe as May D'Orobelli's Serafina. She liked the varicolored existence she led; she liked the luxury, the scandals, the gossip. She was at heart a peasant, earthy, shrewd, eternal and indestructible. She was attached to her mistress through long habit and association, but she had no illusions. She knew that she held her job and had held it for thirty years because she knew much too much about her mistress and because when her mistress got into a tight place of one sort or another (which she was constantly doing) her own courage, wit, ingenuity and advice were indispensable.

She came in carrying the tea and as she entered she said brightly, "Buon giorno! Principessa."

"Buon giorno, Serafina." The sight of the maid's thick, stalwart figure cheered her. So long as she had Serafina everything was all right. Lovers could come and go. Wars could rage, disasters occur, but so long as they were together they made an unbeatable team.

"Any news?" she asked as Serafina placed the tea tray across her thighs.

"No news!" said Serafina. "No war yet, but things are going very badly for the French."

The Princess laughed. It was a hard, bitter, brittle sound. "Not badly enough yet for the jackals to attack the wounded lion."

Serafina's face became grave. "You should not speak like that, Excellency. I do not mind. My feelings are like your own ... like all the honest people in Italy. It isn't that, but someone might hear you."

She poured out the tea, doing it as she had done it every morning for thirty years past, with just the right amount of milk and sugar. "It's all very well to trade on being an American and having the Embassy get you out of the troubles you make for yourself, but it's different now. This is practically wartime and this is different. In Italy you're still the wife of his Excellency and his Excellency is Italian, so by law it makes you Italian too." She gave a deep sigh, "And this is different from other wars. This is a war of desperation. The Italians have been misled, but they're so far along on the wrong path that they have to fight and win to survive."

She was aware that the Princess was listening with only half an ear, but she went on just the same as she crossed the huge pink and gilt bedroom to pull back the curtains and let in the sunlight. It was a bright morning and Venice should have been crowded with foreigners. There should have been laughter and the sound of music in the canals and the squares when Serafina drew back the curtains. But there was only silence.

"And money is not going to help you any more. They'll just take it away from you and don't argue about it. That's what all the rich in Italy and Germany thought--that Mussolini and Hitler were going to save them and their money, and look at them now. They've taken all their money and their property and their factories and turned them into the streets or chased them out of the country."

The Princess stopped listening altogether about the middle of the speech. She was sick of talk about Hitler and Mussolini and Communism and Fascism and sanctions and all the other things which made the world an unpleasant place. She had been sick of it all for years now. Serafina was always expecting calamities which never came. For thirty years she herself had done as she pleased, living outside the law, because she was rich. And always she had gotten away with it, so what reason was there to worry now?

Impatiently she asked, "Were there any messages?"

"No," said Serafina, knowing perfectly well what her mistress meant by "messages."

Before the maid went into the bathroom to turn on the bath, she paused, filling the whole doorway with her stalwart figure. "Venice is silent," said Serafina, "because all the foreigners have gone. Without foreigners, Venice is a dead city. Without foreigners, half of Venice will starve. And Venice is silent because her sons have been called off to a war they don't want and don't understand. The mothers and sisters and sweethearts grieve without glory. Venice will be a dead city as she was before the foreigners came. We may not see them again for fifty years. Horrible as they are, they meant prosperity to Venice."

The Princess poured another cup of tea. "If I did not know you so well, Serafina, I would say you were being insolent."

Serafina stood her ground, "Perhaps I am," she said and disappeared into the bathroom.

By "messages" the Princess had meant only "message" and that only from one man. He was the reason she remained behind when all the other lemmings had fled. He was in the army now. She didn't know where he was although she thought it likely that he was north of Milano. He was very precious to her, not so much because she loved him as because attractive lovers were no longer easy to find at her age. He might be the last lover she would ever have. She did not know whether he had sent her no message because he was not permitted to, or because he was indifferent. The reason did not trouble her; she was far beyond suffering through pride or the softness of her feelings. She had no illusions. They were fond of each other, but no more than that. She found him attractive because he was young, but she was not exigent; she had seen too often in her world the amorous disasters which engulfed exigent women. She had been married to His Excellency, the Prince, for ten years and had not seen him save occasionally in the distance for five. Nor had she any illusions about the lover. He was like herself, sensual and vigorous, and from her he had rich presents and fine uniforms for which she paid, and a speedboat. Some people might have called all this "keeping" him, but the thought did not trouble her; she had been independent and disillusioned for too long.

And yet, as she sat up in the baroque bed, drinking her tea, she was aware of an ache and a faint sense of terror. What if he should be killed in this idiotic war? At thirty-two he was too young to die, too young and too beautiful even if he had nothing whatever to do with her. She liked good-looking young men; there were times when watching a troop of Bersaglieri or Alpini passing on the street, she had seen among the common soldiers a boy whose beauty produced the same curious ache and tightness in her throat. She could not think of Tino as wounded or dead. He was the only thing in the world she loved almost as much as her jewels.

As she had grown older the jewels had become more and more important to her. It was as if she could only compensate for each new wrinkle or gray hair by adding another clip or bracelet to the slow fading of her beauty. They were famous jewels; not ten women in the world, not any queen, had more wonderful emeralds and diamonds and rubies. She loved them not only for their brilliance and beauty but because as she had grown older, she had become more hard and avaricious. They represented a fortune, but they represented more than that, for they were the perfect symbol of wealth and the power of money by which she had always lived, arrogantly, lawlessly. When she wore her jewels she had a strange feeling of safety; with money you could buy what you wanted; with money you could buy your way out of any crime, out of any disaster.

Bending over the bathtub Serafina knew what her mistress was thinking--that she was worried over two things, Tino and her jewels and most of all over her jewels. "She can," thought Serafina, grunting as she leaned far over, "buy herself a new lover anytime, but there are two or three diamonds and emeralds and rubies she could never replace."

In their brief exchange of words over the "message" question, neither of them had been specific or mentioned names. There was no need to and Serafina had the perfect tact of the perfect servant, always pretending that she was blind, deaf and half-witted even on those occasions when she had come upon her mistress in remarkably compromising situations. All that was Her Excellency's problem, and Serafina wanted none of it for herself.

She threw a spoonful of verbena bath salts into the tepid water, gave it a stir or two with her big peasant's hands and turning to the door said, "The bath is ready, Excellency."

At noon there was still no "message" and May D'Orobelli, nervous, irritable and a little tired, sat down alone to eat an orange and a few leaves of lettuce at a table in her bedroom overlooking the silent canal. She was in a bad temper and so instead of descending to the big dining-room she had Serafina bring the lettuce and orange and a cup of black coffee to her bedroom.

She did not speak to Serafina at all and presently Serafina, as if talking to herself, muttered, "There is no use in people being bad-tempered because their plans are upset. Today nobody is any better than a pea dropped out of a pod in the middle of the road. One kind of people has had everything their own way for years and years and now all that is changed and they're going to be like everybody else." She clattered the dishes indignantly and added, "Nobody knows what is going to come of it but anyway the world is going to be different."

The Princess said, sourly, "You're turning Communist and Fascist just like all the rest."

"I'm not turning anything, Excellency. Only I can see a fly on the end of my nose. What's going on is going on, from China to Hollywood and nothing is going to change it. I'm an ignorant woman but God gave me as much sense as a horse. A lot of Romans once thought Rome could never fall." And with that dark insinuation, Serafina cleared away the remnants of lettuce and sailed out of the room.

The prophecies of Serafina did nothing to raise the spirits of the Princess. When the maid had gone she lay down on the chaise lounge and closed her eyes. She did not fall asleep because some part of her consciousness kept listening, for a laugh, for a shout, for the cry of a peddler, for any sound which would break the deathly unnatural silence of the empty melancholy city outside her window. And as she lay there she considered herself and her history in relation to Serafina's dire prophecies, with a detachment that was remarkable and rare in a woman so egotistical and selfish.

She knew what Serafina meant by her "cracks"--that her mistress was one of those who had been born with everything, who had never had to work, nor to fight for anything save the desires of her own idle, voluptuous body. She had been born rich, cradled in the wealth piled up out of railroads and steel and banking by a ruthless and unscrupulous father who, she admitted to herself, with all the cynicism and disillusionment of a hard woman, should have spent his whole life in jail. And she had married two husbands who had wanted her for her money as she wanted them as façades behind which she could lead the life she chose. She had never had any illusions about them, even as a girl of eighteen. She had always bought what she wanted, as her father had bought Senators and governors and Congressmen in his day. She had even paid her husbands to keep out of the way.

And now Serafina was making dark slurs and insinuations and there was no message from Tino and all her jewelry was in a safe deposit box in a foreign bank in Rome and she was tired but (she thought) "still stubborn and hard." They couldn't defeat her. They couldn't break her, not all of them together. She would be no "pea dropped from the pod in the middle of the road." The money, the jewels, this palace, like the house in Newport and the villa in Rome, and all the money tied up in good American tax-exempt bonds, were hers. Her father had worked for them and left them to her; how dared the riff-raff of the world to threaten what was hers, what gave her power and the right to lawlessness.

Out of the half-conscious, dreaming state, she was roused by a knock at the door. Drowsily she said, "Come in," thinking, "Damn it, can't I ever have any peace?" And then quickly, her heart beating a little more rapidly, she thought, "Perhaps it is a message from Tino or Tino himself."

It was not Tino. Through the crack in the door appeared the broad face of Serafina, glum as ever.

"It is His Excellency, General Rizzo."

"Why in the name of God did he come now, right after lunch?"

"He says it is important, Excellency. Otherwise he would not have disturbed you at this hour."

The Princess frowned, "Tell him to come back later."

But Serafina did not obey and go away, closing the door to leave her in peace. She came in, closing the door behind her.

"I think it unwise to send him away, Excellency. He appeared agitated. If you take my advice, you'll see him. Things are not the same as they were.... Even His Excellency, the General, is not the same."

The Princess knew what Serafina was implying--that something had happened to the General. He wasn't any longer simply a docile ex-lover who would come and go at her whim. Something had happened to him as it had happened to Tino, to all the lemmings who had fled, to Serafina, to Venice itself. She had a sudden swift sensation of bewilderment touched with fear, a sudden sense of her world collapsing, all about her.

"Very well," she said, "tell him to come up here."

She took out her mirror and reddened her lips and put a touch of shadow under her eyes, and then lay back again, more irritable than before. Then the door opened and the General came in.

He was oddly unlike an Italian in appearance. He came from north of Milano and was lean and straight and blond although there was a good deal of gray in his hair. He was, she knew, about fifty years old. The sight of him made her heart flutter a little at the memory of what he had been, of what she had been, of what they had been together. That was a long time ago, so long that the very ashes were cold. They had been cold for a long time, ever since he took up the Fascist nonsense and turned fanatic. As he crossed the room his rather wintry face relaxed in a smile, perhaps born of the same memories of the days before she was a woman with "kimono arms."

He kissed her hand and said, "You are looking very well, May."

She told him to sit down and then said, "Why did you come at this ungodly hour?"

He sat very straight, very rigid, like an Inquisitioner backed by fanatic moral convictions. In him there were signs of the same disease which had afflicted Serafina.

"I came," he said, "to warn you. I had to come quickly and when I could find time from my other duties. I'm leaving for the frontier tonight at six."

"To warn me about what?" she asked bluntly.

"To get out of Italy. You should have gone with all the others."

"I don't want to go."

The eyebrows of the General raised a little and she knew that he was thinking of Tino. She had never made the least effort to conceal her love affairs. There was never any need. Her money had always made her position impregnable.

"Of course," he said, "the decision is entirely up to you. My advice is to go--today, as quickly as possible."

"I am an American," she said, as she had said a hundred times before. "I can do as I please."

He smiled again and the smile had a curious quality. There was nothing friendly in it, nothing even to hint that once, long ago, they had loved each other. It was a smile which washed its hands of her, a smile almost of triumph as if he had been waiting with all those others, for this moment when they could say at last, "Now it is our turn." Even as she sat there looking at him, she wondered whether he had always been like that, even long ago when he had lain in her arms. Had he been hating her then in his heart, hating her money and power and arrogance, only waiting....

He said in his peculiar soft voice, "Whatever you choose to do, May, is entirely your own affair. Only I must remind you that in Italy you are not an American. You are married to an Italian and you are Italian. Nothing will change that or make it any easier for you than for any Italian peasant woman. Tomorrow or day after there will be war ... a war unlike the last war or any other war since Rome itself fell. If you are thinking your money will protect you, that you can buy what you want, let me point out that those in command, those who will be in power, are not corrupt politicians or small customs officials. You cannot buy them because they have set out to do something and they mean to do it. They will kill. They will be ruthless."

He paused for a moment, but when she did not speak, he said, "I do not mean simply Fascism or Communism or anything else like it. It's something bigger than that, going on all over the world. It's one big thing and it doesn't matter which side you're on. It's the war of the 'Have-not's' against the 'Have's'. It's the war of millions of people against those who have always taken everything and given nothing. That, my friend is what the war is about from one end of the world to the other. There are 'have's' and 'have-not's' on both sides but before it is finished the 'have-not's' will all be on one side and there will be no more 'have's'. It will not be a nice war." He sighed suddenly, "That is why I advise you to go."

"What if I choose to stay?"

He shrugged his shoulders, "I should hate to think how miserable you will be ... you who have never even poured yourself a cup of tea."

She did not answer him but sat staring out of the window into the silent city. She heard his voice presently, saying, in a mocking way, "If it is the thought of Tino that is keeping you, I doubt that you will see much of him."

Quickly she turned her head as if she meant to speak angrily, rebuking him for his insolence and mockery, and then quickly, as if she felt that speech was futile, she fell silent. The General sat very stiff and straight on his chair.

It seemed to her that he was a stranger whom she had never known at all. There was even a kind of vengefulness in his voice and manner. It was frightening, if the world was filled with people like him, who had been waiting for a long time, for years, for this moment.

"I did not come entirely on my own," he was saying. "His Highness telephoned from Rome, ordering me to advise you to leave the country."

She sat up and looked at him. If the Crown Prince himself had taken that trouble the situation must be serious. She said, "You're not lying?"

"On the soul of my mother I am speaking the truth."

Quickly she said, "I cannot go. All my jewels are in Rome."

"Staying behind will not save your jewels. They will be taken from you sooner or later. When the time comes they will be taken from you as they were taken from women in Russia and Germany who did not have the sense to escape while they had the chance. Staying behind to save your jewels will not save them."

"It's outrageous! It's vile!" she said. "How dare they?" And then suddenly, very quietly, she said, "How do you know all this?"

He smiled again, "I know it with my bones. You must not abuse me, May. I am only one man, a fly on the face of the universe. Who am I to change the whole destiny of civilization and the human race? I can do nothing. If you would change it and save yourself appeal to the symbol of it all, the Austrian house-painter who spent half his life in shelters for the poor, sleeping on vermin straw--the king of the 'have-not's.' Or to his friend the blacksmith's son who as a child never had enough to eat or his friend who starved in Siberia and robbed trains and was beaten and imprisoned and had to flee for his life. Go and appeal to them. I doubt that they will hear you." He stood up and bowed, this time making no sign of kissing her hand. "I am going now. Having known you very well and for a long time, I do not much care what happens to you or your kind. But as an old friend, I advise you to leave now, this very afternoon and make your way as rapidly as you can back to your own country of which you have seen so little. It is the last refuge of those who take everything and give nothing. It is the last place in the world where they are protected. Good-bye and good luck."

He turned and went out of the door and as the door closed she had a sudden feeling that she would never see him again and that the world in which they had once been happy was gone, forever. She would never see it again. The odd thing was that in his coldness, his vengefulness, he was happy, with the curious tense happiness of fanatics.

The knowledge that very likely she would not see Tino again and the anxiety for her jewels tormented her and presently she rang and said she wanted the gondola to go to the Piazza to do some shopping. Perhaps, if she went there, she would have news. She could at least find war bulletins and perhaps some news less gloomy than the intimations of the General and Serafina. Perhaps France had already made peace and there would be no war or perhaps a miracle had happened and France had turned the tide and was fighting back, driving the hordes led by the Austrian house-painter back into their own dull bloody country.

At the great damp gateway of the palace with the dirty water of the canal lapping the steps, the gondola was waiting. But not with Beppo and Paolo at the oars. There was only an ugly misshapen old man whom she had never seen before. Beppo and Paolo she had chosen for their good looks; they were the handsomest gondoliers in all Venice and each time she touched their hands as they helped her into the gondola, she felt a sudden quick delight in their beauty. But they were gone now, long since mobilized somewhere in the north. When she rudely asked the old man who he was he replied that he was the uncle of Guiseppe the concierge. He did not even give her his gnarled hand as she stepped from the damp stone into the wobbly boat.

She told him to take her to the San Marco landing and he replied, "Very well." He did not even address her as "Excellency."

The canal was empty of boats and still, like the whole city. The terrace of the Grand Hotel was empty; no gondolas bobbed about the painted posts. There was no gay launch waiting to take millionaires and tarts and princesses and adventurers to the Lido. The lemmings had all fled and the hotel was still.

The Piazza near the church was empty save for a few pigeons strutting and preening themselves on the great flags, but on the far side there was a great congregation of people, dressed in black as Venetians always were, without a single note of color which foreigners always brought with them.

As she stepped from the gondola, the old man still made no effort to aid her but only stood in the far end of the boat watching her with eyes that were dead and without expression.

As she walked slowly across the great square, the pigeons fluttered out of her path, cooing and giving small cries of alarm. She had known this square for nearly thirty years, during fetes when banners and lights garlanded the heavy buildings, on hot sunny days when Venetians and foreigners mingled at the tables before the restaurants and cafés. This was the heart of Venice, the soul of Venice, beautiful, gay, heavy with history, and Venice to her was home, as much home as any place she had ever known. But she had never in all these years seen the great square as it was now, the vast expanse empty and silent save for the crowd all in black at the far end.

She was halfway across when she was seized suddenly by fear, fear of a kind she had never known before, the terror of a vast open space empty save for her own insignificant tiny figure. It was as if she were utterly alone, the last creature alive on earth, yet she had too the impression of being surrounded by ghosts, of figures whispering and pointing at her, figures whom she could not see save with her mind. Why they were whispering and pointing at her she did not know.

Her footsteps wavered and her legs felt weak and for a minute she felt as if she were about to faint but she pulled herself together quickly thinking, "I cannot faint here in this vast empty place. No one would ever find me. I should die here."

Then suddenly as if she had no control over her body, she began to run. She had no consciousness of direction. She only knew that she must run somewhere, anywhere, away from this great empty place into some shelter where she would not be alone, exposed and helpless. And at the same time she was aware of the ludicrousness of the situation--the spectacle of the fashionable, almost notorious Princess D'Orobelli, running, panic-stricken as a frightened rabbit, toward the shelter of the heavy arcades.

Before she stumbled and fell prostrate on the low steps at the edge of the square it seemed to her that an eternity had passed, in which she lived again all her long bitter life. Then for a time she appeared to lose all consciousness and when she opened her eyes again she discovered standing over her a hideous old woman dressed all in black with an evil face. Hair grew on her chin and lips and out of a great mole on her cheek.

The old woman was screaming abuse at her in a low Venetian dialect. "Evil woman! Foreigner! Prostitute! Go back to your country! Leave us in peace! Corrupt us no longer with your vile ways, flinging your gold into the streets for honest citizens to scramble over! You and your kind are doomed! Get gone from us! You who have brought war and doom!"

Then suddenly she spat full in the face of the Princess.

Scrambling to her feet, the Princess ran again, this time back to the landing steps where the gondola and the old man awaited her. The old crone followed her, making remarkable speed, keeping close to her heels all the long way across the open square. The pigeons, now genuinely alarmed, rose and flew for safety in a panic, high among the byzantine glories of the church of San Marco. At last she reached the landing stage where the gondola rode idly on the lapping water. The old man, his head sunk far down beneath his shoulders, was asleep like an ancient turtle. Jumping aboard, her heel caught in the gunwale and threw her prostrate into the bottom of the boat. The shock of her body against the boat wakened the old man who stared at the hag who remained screaming from the stairs. He made no move to help the Princess to her feet but merely shoved the boat away a safe distance and yelled back obscenities at the old woman.

Suddenly from nowhere appeared two other crones who joined the first one in screaming foul names and accusations across the widening stretch of water. The Princess scrambled to her feet, climbed inside the tiny gilt and black cabin ornamented with the flamboyant arms of the House of D'Orobelli and pulled the heavy black curtains together to hide herself.

Serafina helped her to remove the clothing soiled with spittle and pigeon dung and the dust of the great square. With a perfectly dead and expressionless face she listened to the story of what had happened. Even as the Princess told the story she could not herself quite believe that this had happened to her in her beloved Venice. It all had an unreal nightmarish quality. Only her torn stockings and bleeding knees and the filth on the white silk dress gave the adventure a sense of reality.

When she had finished Serafina only said, "It is bad, Excellency. The General is right. It is finished forever. You had better go."

She was frightened now and hysterical and ready to flee. There remained only one thing to hold her. Tino did not matter. In her terror she discovered now how little he meant to her, that he was no more than a convenience who could be replaced. She could buy another Tino. The thing which held her were the jewels. Those she could not buy again. With a sudden flash of bitterness she saw that she had reached the age when avarice was stronger than love. The jewels she could not leave behind, and they were in Rome. If she went to Rome to get them herself she might never escape. She might not even save the jewels themselves.

She saw them very plainly laid out in their cases bearing the names of the great jewelers in Bond Street and the Place Vendôme, in Fifth Avenue--the great emeralds and glittering diamonds and the rubies that were like lovely prisms of pink flame. To lose them would be to lose a part of herself. Without them she would no longer be the famous Princess D'Orobelli; she would only be an ageing, hard woman like any of the others who haunted the hotels and night clubs. No one would turn to say, "Look, there are the famous D'Orobelli emeralds!" or "See! That is the most famous necklace of diamonds in the world!" They had never been so desirable to her. She would not leave them to be seized and broken up and dispersed here and there among common vulgar people.

To Serafina she said, "I cannot go with the jewelry in Rome."

And Serafina, still impassive, replied, "I could go to Rome and fetch the jewels if your Excellency trusts me."

The mind of the Princess turned suspicious. "Do you want to flee with me? You don't want to stay in Italy?"

Serafina made a surprising answer, "Excellency, why should I want to stay behind in this doomed country? Why should I choose to starve and be cold and suffer obscene, unnameable experiences. I mean to go with your Excellency. You will go where the last luxury remains. With your Excellency I shall be warm and comfortable and well-cared-for, and have plenty to eat. I'm getting old. I've been spoiled. I do not face the prospect of misery with joy. If your Excellency will trust me I will go to Rome and fetch the jewels. No one will suspect a poor ugly woman like me to have jewels hidden in her bosom and between her legs. No one will stop me. No one will search me. It is much better that way."

"But how will you cross the border?"

"Excellency," said Serafina, "between us we can accomplish anything. We have accomplished some dark and difficult things before now. If there is any difficulty I will send you a message, somehow, and we can work together, you with your money and powerful friends and I with my brain."

Then for the first time did Serafina's heavy face show any expression. As she stood up from putting fresh stockings on the Princess' legs, a glint of humor, almost of triumph, came into her beady black eyes. The glint was the clue to their whole relationship through the long years. It was the look of one clever criminal to another with whom he has been working successfully. It was not affection which had held her all these years in the service of the Princess D'Orobelli. It was the excitement, the adventure, the luxury, the sense of being a collaborator with a clever and shameless and ruthless woman. The look said, "Together we can accomplish anything."

Serafina found her way alone to the Rome Express, dressed in black, looking like any peasant woman or small shopkeeper. The letter and the key to the safe deposit box she kept tucked away in her capacious bosom where the letter crackled with every breath she took. The farewell between mistress and servant was unemotional with very little said. It was as if they were both turning the key in the lock of a house, a well-beloved house, which neither of them would ever again see.

The Ventimiglia train left a little later than the Rome Express and there was only the gondola with the old Choron, uncle of the concierge, to take the Princess to the station. In all Venice there were no lights save here and there beneath the landing stages of a damp palace where a dim blue light had been hung to mark the outline of the canal. And the silence which hung over the city was deeper than by day. On the bridges and on the pathways no voice was heard but now and then a shape, dressed in black, passed against the colonnades and doorways hurrying on some mysterious mission. The only sound was the lapping of the water and the faint grunts of Choron as he poled the boat slowly and cautiously along the canal. Twice the gondola struck another in the darkness and for a moment there was an exchange of hushed cursing and then the two boats backed away from each other in the thick darkness. There were moments when the gondola seemed not to move at all and at other times it seemed to float not upon water but in thick black air, lost and timeless in eternal space.

In the tiny cabin, the Princess sat, tense as a coiled spring, frightened and angry and vindictive. She was thinking of all that had been left behind in the Palace--the great wedding picture by Titian, the Michelangelo fountains, the great Tintoretto ceilings that were like a blaze of light, the priceless furniture--all those things which she had collected bit by bit, shrewdly but which none the less cost her fortunes. Long ago the Government had forbidden her to take them out of the country. Now they would take them from her. They were hers she thought bitterly. She had bought them with her money, the money left to her by her father. It was thievery!

All she could take with her she had hidden in her luggage--a bag and a dressing case--and these contained only a few baubles worth nothing.

But as the gondola crawled on its way through the blackness, one sensation drowned out all others, blotting out into blackness itself the resentment, the bitterness, the anger. It was a terrible feeling of being alone, utterly alone not only here in a dead city but in the whole world. Tino was gone, the General had revealed himself as hating her always, even in the beginning. Serafina was on her way to Rome from which she might never return. And she herself was going off into the blackness into a strange world in which she had neither home nor friends. For suddenly she saw that she had no friends, but only acquaintances out of that gawdy world in which she had spent a whole lifetime seeking only to escape boredom, a world in which "friends" felt toward each other as the General had revealed he felt toward her only a little time before.

But always the thought kept coming back to her, "I have my money and my jewels if Serafina can save them. I can buy what I need and want."

The gondola brushed into a stone stairway and out of the darkness came the voice of the old man, "We are here!" Again he did not address her as "Excellency." He lifted the heavier of her two bags on to the quai, and then as she stepped out, he shoved the boat off into the blackness without so much as even "addio" or a wish for a fortunate journey. She had turned toward him, taking a bank note from her handbag to give to him, not out of gratitude nor for a service, for he had been cold and insolent, but to bring herself luck on the journey. But when she turned he was not there. In his place there was only the darkness and the faint lapping of the water in the silent canal, and out of the darkness came again to her, more sharply than before, the chilling sense of being utterly alone. In the darkness it was like being the last creature left alone on earth.

In the station, behind the closed doors, a few faint lights left most of the big room in shadows out of which emerged hundreds of dim, almost ghostly faces, faces with fear in the eyes and at the corners of the mouths. They were the faces of the last refugees, not the lemmings and the International White Trash; those were gone already. They were the faces of small humble people, servants and bank clerks, small shopkeepers and tourist agents, fleeing across the border before the trap closed to ruin and imprison them there perhaps forever. Around them clustered their frightened wives and children.

At each ticket grille, there was a crowd of frightened men and women bereft of decency and self-control, fighting for the bits of paper that would put them safely out of a country which at any moment might be at war with their own. This war was no concern of theirs; some of them had Italian wives and half-Italian children; most of them loved Italy, but now suddenly their small individual worlds had fallen into ruins. They had to flee with their wives, their babies, their pitiful bundles, anywhere, outside Italy.

The Princess went from window to window only to discover that at each window the same riot was taking place, and at last she turned to a policeman, a dark good-looking fellow (she noted that even through her fear) thinking, "I will vamp him into helping me."

She said, "I am Princess Ugo D'Orobelli."

Without changing his expression, he said, "Si, Eccellenza."

"I must have a ticket. I must leave on the Ventimiglia Express." She became utterly helpless and feminine, "I cannot fight my way through the crowd."

She waited for him to soften, either before her femininity or the prestige of her wealth and title, but his expression did not change. He merely said, in an indifferent voice, "I am sorry, Eccellenza, you will have to take your place in line with the others."

It was as if he had said, "There are no more princesses or millionaires. There are only people." There was even in the cold look in his black eyes a hint of what she had found in the General--the faint sense of vengeance and triumph, as if he, like the General had been waiting all this time to humiliate her. Bitterest of all she understood that she was no longer young and beautiful. To the policeman she was simply another middle-aged woman, no more remarkable than any of the other frightened women huddled in the shadows.

Their terror was slowly, like an infectious disease, communicating itself to her. As she turned from the policeman, she thought, "I must get hold of myself. This is all ridiculous." And then something of her father, the buccaneer, came to life out of her anger and fear. She thought, "I'll show them that I'm as good as the next woman. I'll take care of myself." And plunging her handbag tightly in the crook of her elbow and using her valise as a kind of battering ram, she attacked the group of struggling refugees at the nearest window.

Here it was true that she was only "people." Even the men took no notice of her sex. Being the Princess Ugo D'Orobelli meant nothing. She pushed and kicked and pinched and was pinched and kicked and pushed in turn. She was called foul names and hurled back foul words in exchange. And after ten minutes she found herself standing before the ticket grille facing a small ugly bald man.

Quickly she said, "I want to reserve a compartment on the Express to Monte Carlo."

The man gave her a quick glance of astonishment. Then his eyes narrowed until they were slits. This gave him a curiously venomous look like a snake.

"Signora," he said, with obvious satisfaction, "the train does not cross the border. It does not go to Monte Carlo. It goes only as far as Ventimiglia. And there are no reserved compartments."

For a second she was silent, but almost immediately from behind her rose rude cries of "Get on with your business! Hurry up! Give us a chance!"--followed by a chorus of obscenity and evil epithets.

The little official behind the wicket had shoved a bit of paper toward her--a humiliating, ordinary third-class ticket. She opened her handbag and as she pushed the price of the ticket toward him, she held in her hand in full view a thousand lire note. The eyes of the little official opened a little way. Then he said, "Signora, I could take your money, but if you gave me a million lire I could give you nothing in return."

Before she had time to reply she was pushed violently from the window by the man behind her, who said, "Get out of the way! Give the others a chance. Bribery won't help you or any other millionaire criminals."

With the ticket crumpled in her hand, she forced her way through the crowd, seeing nothing but the snake-like eyes of the petty official with the glitter of contempt in them. And she could hear the bitter edge of scorn in his voice as he refused her bribe. There was something terrifying in the very spectacle of a Latin petty official refusing a bribe.

She found herself a place to sit on the edge of the luggage truck. She did not like children and the platform and the truck at her back was filled with them--children of all ages and sizes, most of them whimpering or crying with fear. The men and women near her regarded her with suspicion, as if she wore some label which set her aside from the others.

They knew what she was because most of them had been servants at some time to International White Trash, or had cashed checks for them, or sold them souvenirs. They knew the rudeness, the selfishness and the annoyance of people like herself who wore expensive clothes and carried expensive luggage. And it was stamped on her face. In reality that was where they found the betraying label which marked her. The hard eyes betrayed her, the hard line of the sensual lips, compressed now with anger and resentment and humiliation. A mother picked up her child and drew away from her. Then another made the same gesture and then another and presently she found herself sitting alone on the truck like a leper.

Then the gates to the train platform were thrown open and as she stood up, she was caught by the rush of frightened refugees and carried, now on her feet, now on her knees, through the gateway halfway down the platform until the mob began to disperse as they climbed on the train fighting for places. There were wild cries and curses and the screams of frightened children and the tinkle of glass as windows along the train corridors were broken in the struggle. Police fought and shouted and cursed, but they too were only carried forward helplessly in the wild struggle.

When it was over she found herself in a third-class compartment on a hard wooden seat. With her on seats built to hold a maximum of ten were three old women, one of them with a cancerous lip, six children, three of them lost and frightened, wailing for their parents, two middle-aged men, a young girl and a fat man. The compartment smelled horribly of garlic and old sweat. Then one of the frightened children began to vomit recklessly. The Princess tried desperately to unwedge herself and escape, but the corridor of the train was jammed with refugees. She could not even move from her seat. At last, in a blur of distaste and horror, she was aware that the train was moving.

All through the night the darkened train crept like a slow-worm across the flat plains of Northern Italy burdened with its cargo of sweating, frightened, crowded humanity. Trains loaded with troops and cannon and ammunition thrust it aside on their way to the border, and as each train passed, fear tightened its hold on the hearts of the refugees until in them one by one it reached that point where it no longer had the quality of fear but that of despair in which misery deadened even the fear of death. Bewildered children cried and fell asleep at last in the stinking crowded compartments. An old man died and was thrust aside in a corner, propped up with a newspaper covering his face because, sitting up, the body occupied less space. In a spot cleared precariously in the corridor of one car, a woman gave birth to a child.

In the compartment which the Princess shared with thirteen other people, the stench and the heaviness of the air became suffocating, and now and then she slipped into unconsciousness, waking again to the dull misery and discomfort with a start, wondering where she, who had always been so luxurious, could be and how she had come to find herself in surroundings so sordid. Twice when the train stopped and she wakened with a jolt she determined to make her escape even though she found herself in the midst of wild, open country, but each time, even before she could extricate herself from the tangle of arms and legs, the train went on its way. About two in the morning she found herself weeping, out of fury and discomfort and hatred for the human animals with whom she found herself imprisoned. It was a cold, savage hatred for less fortunate people who until now had never played any part in her existence save as servants or conveniences.

Just before dawn the train reached the border station at Ventimiglia. A cold fog obscured the platform and the Douane. When cries of "Ventimiglia Frontier! Last stop!" arose from the outside, only a few among the refugees stirred. They were like animals numbed and deadened by too long imprisonment in a confined space. And then after a little time, like terrified sheep they all tried to escape from the train at the same moment, trampling each other, screaming and fighting, shattering windows and falling as they were pushed from the steps to the platform. Outside the cold freshness of the air was like a slap in the face.

But the misery was not finished. After a long delay began the examination of papers and of baggage to prevent the carrying off of gold or precious objets d'art. The refugees were forced into a long line, to pass between two small and mean officials, swollen now with authority and arrogant and brutal. They took an endless time, examining each man, woman and child, now and then dragging from the line a man or woman whose papers were not in order, to thrust them into a station waiting-room where they were kept prisoners by four bullies in black shirts, their shouts and screams and imprecations silenced presently by the blow of a club or a kick. The woman who had had the baby lay on a baggage truck and on the station platform near her lay the body of the old man who had died. The corpse lay on its side in the grotesque sitting position into which it had frozen during the long night on the train.

Twice the Princess attempted to pass the others and go to the head of the line and twice she was thrust rudely back with shouts and insults and even blows. And when at last she reached the official examining the papers, he read her high-sounding name and then grinned insolently at her.

"Did you have a pleasant journey?" he asked.

She did not answer him and he said, "No doubt it was a new and interesting experience for Your Excellency."

She wanted to insult the pock-marked little man who a few weeks earlier would have groveled before her, repeating over and over the word "Eccellenza" with a different intonation. So she wanted to slap him, to spit in his face, but her desire to escape out of this mad, crumbling world was far greater, and she held her tongue although the self-restraint made her ill to the verge of vomiting.

He could not stop her, for her papers were in excellent order, but he took an interminable time before he stamped them, turning the passport this way and that, examining the signature insolently as if to imply that he suspected forgery, and comparing the passport photo with her own face, to say finally, with the air of a critic, "You were much younger, Excellency, when that was taken."

Behind her in the long weary line refugees shouted evil names and called out to hurry, that the frontier might be closed at any moment.

But the torment was over at last and she walked through the station gateway to find a conveyance to take her across the line. There was no conveyance. The short strip of white road outlining the Mediterranean was empty in a foggy gray light, save for two men, a woman and a child, carrying their belongings, who walked ahead of her.

This was a road she knew well, like her hand. She had crossed and recrossed the border perhaps a thousand times in her life. It was one of the highways of the world that was frequented by the rich and the fortunate. Winter and summer, the year round, this road had been filled with expensive motors, going from Italy into France and from France into Italy--kept women, Indian princes, international bankers and munitions manufacturers, gamblers, idlers--all the International White Trash who frequented what Mary Pulsifer had once called derisively the Côte d'Ordure--the Garbage Coast, making a pun on that name Côte d'Azur which once one saw everywhere advertised as a paradise on earth.

And now on this foggy morning the white road was empty but for the figures of five refugees, stumbling along carrying their own luggage, two of them working men, two of them a lady's maid and her child, and one the Princess D'Orobelli.

On the French side, the contamination, the fear, had not yet touched the petty officials. For days now their country had been overrun. From hour to hour they did not know whether it had been conquered, nor when they would be at war with the little men on the far side of the white strip of road. But they shrugged their shoulders and stuck to their jobs.

There was a thin, lugubrious one with drooping mustaches and a pleasant, short, red-cheeked one with bright blue eyes. They were more courteous and less insolent than the officials on the other side. When the Princess showed them her papers, they examined them carefully but with indifference. When they had finished, they returned them to her and bade her walk through the doorway to the soil of France. They were used to princesses and millionaires, and they were good republicans who looked upon such gawdy individuals merely as citizens of a free state. They did not address her as "Excellency" or "Princess" but merely as "Madame." There was no change in this, it had always been the same. They did not insult her as the Italian douaniers had done.

As she passed through the doorway she felt a sudden relief. She had never liked France in the way she had loved Italy; in France people of the streets sometimes shouted mockery or insults at people driving past in rich motors. They did not step aside respectfully almost in awe as Italians did when the automobiles of the rich and fashionable drove through a street. They could, like the Italians, be sometimes bought, but they did not grovel before the buyer; they showed frank contempt for him. But now in this shattered world, they did not turn arrogant and savage, hating and insulting her. They still addressed her as "Madame" and displayed as much politeness as they had ever done. And behind these two figures, the tall lean one and the short chubby one, she sensed a world free, at least for a little longer, of that thing she had encountered on the great square of Venice. It was odd that she should be glad to be out of her beloved Italy on the soil of a country where democracy was still the existing order.

On the outside of the station the little square was empty save for a single battered fiacre driven by an old coachman with one eye. Around it had gathered the refugees who had crossed the frontier ahead of her and two or three others. They were quarreling among themselves and bargaining with the coachman. They were all small people with very little money with whom bargaining had always been a part of the daily struggle for existence and now, furiously quarreling, they were bidding against each other for the services of the lone conveyance, raising their bids a few centimes at a time while the evil coachman waited for the best price.

The Princess divined almost at once what was happening and her heart brightened. She was tired, her clothes torn, her feet swollen and aching, the stench of the train still clung to her. But she still had money--more money in her purse than perhaps the rest of them had all together. Her whole being experienced only one desire--to reach Monte Carlo and the Hotel de Paris, to have a hot bath and a bed with clean linen. She knew what to do now. It was an ancient procedure, well-tried. It was safe here. In France even here on the frontier, life remained sane. Bargaining was still the order of things. Money still had power.

Quickly she went toward the little crowd of bargainers and opening her handbag she took out the thousand lire note. The evil old coachman saw her with his one eye as she came toward the crowd across the little square. He saw her raise the thousand lire note and wave it above her head and at the same time he struck his bony horse with a whip and drove through the bargaining crowd toward the Princess. Before the little group of refugees understood what had happened she had climbed in the fiacre and said to the driver, "Hotel de Paris, Monte Carlo." The evil old man grinned and struck the horse again with his whip. This was like old times. This was a world he understood.

Behind the fiacre one of the men refugees started to follow them, shouting curses. The woman and child began to cry and then the man gave up the chase.

It was a long journey along the white road above the sea, a journey much longer in the broken-down old fiacre to someone like the Princess who had been used to traveling it always at high speed in a luxurious motor. The old broken-down horse clattered along the paving, the hoof beats echoing back and forth between the empty villas. The sun had come up and was burning the chill mist, but as it cleared away it revealed a dead and empty world, house after house, pink, yellow, white and pale blue, blind and shuttered. Even along the edge of the road, the shops were shuttered save for one or two where an old woman or an old man stood in the doorway to stare at the spectacle of the Princess being driven past in a broken-down fiacre.

The old man on the driver's seat never spoke and that suited the Princess. She was in no mood for conversation. The old man had understood the language of money and that was enough for her. It made her feel secure again at least for a little time. Two or three times he turned rheumatically in his seat to leer at her with his single eye. She tried to avoid his gaze but about the cold eye there was something hypnotic. Slowly he became like the old man who had replaced the gondoliers, like the old woman who had spat at her in the Piazza San Marco. His oldness frightened her.

They passed through Mentone, dead and deserted and as they turned past a jutting rock and came in sight of Monte Carlo, he turned and said, "You got through just in time. That was the last train. They have closed the frontier." His voice was weak, high-pitched and dim with age.

The old horse went more and more slowly and it was nearly noon before the fiacre entered the realm of Monaco with Monte Carlo looming colorless and empty and ugly on the steep and rocky mountainside--Monte Carlo which was so ugly by day and so fantastically beautiful by night. Now empty, with shuttered windows, it was drearier than ever. The new Casino seemed blank and modern and out-of-place, the old one--garish and grotesque. A sudden panic seized her lest the Hotel de Paris, like all the villas, should be closed, lest there should be no one to take her in. She had told Serafina she would stay here until the maid sent word of her whereabouts. The news of the closed frontier was discouraging. Serafina might never escape now with the jewels. She might never see them again.

The hotel was open, after a fashion, although there were few people in it. A handful of servants and the assistant manager remained.

He was a paunchy fellow, very dark, with a shrewd eye, a Monegasque by birth. His eyes brightened at sight of her. He said, rubbing his hands, "What a surprise and a pleasure, Excellency!"

The hotel was not really open, he said, but she might have a room and food. The food would not be excellent as the chefs were gone, called to the army or evacuated. There was no water for the baths but the servants could carry hot water to her room. All the foreigners had gone and a good many of the natives. Monte Carlo was a ghost city, too near the border. If there was a war it might be shelled and bombed. The servants who remained were volunteers, securing double wages for staying behind to guard the property.

"But I suppose," he said, "you'll be staying for only a few hours."

"I am waiting here for my maid. It may be two or three days. It may be longer. She is in Italy."

The dark little man looked alarmed. "But the frontier is closed, Excellency. No one can come through."

"It has been closed before and opened again. I would like a bath as quickly as possible and some tea and orange juice."

"Certainly, Excellency."

The great hall was empty, the dining-room closed. The sound of her footsteps echoed along the great hallways as he led her to a room. She had never seen the Hotel de Paris like this even in the deadest part of the off season. From her window the little harbor was empty of yachts and pleasure boats. Only a few fishing craft remained. Only the water of the Mediterranean was the same, opalescent and blue.

After tea and orange juice and a bath she fell asleep. It was dark when she wakened, three in the morning. When she rose to look out of the window, still half-asleep, she looked out over a dead city. No light shone anywhere in the city where there had always been light and at this season of the year there had never been any night. Standing there in the darkness she was frightened again in spite of all her hardness, and for a moment she fancied that she heard again laughter and the sound of music. But there was nothing, not even the ghost of laughter.

On the evening of the third day a small and very dirty little boy appeared at the hotel with a message. It was brief, simply to say that an individual called Serafina had arrived in Ventimiglia. The frontier was still closed. More news of her could be had if her Excellency would come to numero dix sept rue de la Port and ask for Madame Lestrade. When questioned the boy knew nothing more. He was, he said, given five francs to deliver the message.

When the Princess asked the assistant manager if he knew Madame Lestrade of 17 rue de la Port, his plucked eyebrows rose. Madame Lestrade he said, was the proprietress of an establishment which was certainly not respectable, a place frequented by sailors and the servants of the rich who lived in the hotels and villas on the hill. The rue de la Port ran along the edge of the outer harbor. He looked at the Princess with a faintly curious expression. Having spent all his life, since fourteen, in grand hotels de luxe he knew a great many strange things about rich and fashionable people.

The Princess answered the quizzical look by saying, "I have business with Madame Lestrade. It concerns my maid."

"Perhaps I'd better send someone to accompany your Excellency," he suggested; "it is certainly not a savory place."

She answered him bluntly, coldly. "It isn't necessary. I shall wear no jewels. I am quite able to take care of myself." She had no intention of telling what the business was. Until she was safe in New York, no one must know of the jewels but herself and Serafina.

Then she went to her room and when she had put on the simplest dress she had, she set off down the hill toward the port. Her heart beat rapidly and there was in her eyes a curious glittering look which had become more common of late.

She thought, "Things are going better. If Serafina has sent the message, she must have the jewels. If she is at Ventimiglia, there must be some way of getting her across the border. It will only be a question of money."

As she walked down steep ramps and bits of stairway she kept seeing the jewels again, the lovely green emeralds, the cold glittering diamonds, the rubies the color of blood. She wanted them desperately, to touch them, to hold them up to catch the light, shining and glistening. Without them she was naked. Now they were nearly hers once more, only a few miles away on the other side of the border, beyond two lines of troops waiting the order to kill each other. She must get them quickly, before it was too late.

Once she reached the level of the old port she had very little trouble finding the rue de la Port. It was a short street of not more than twenty houses, a street of bars and small brothels and tiny shops. Number seventeen was the largest house in the street, three stories high with narrow balconies overlooking the harbor. The street and harbor had a curious empty and desolate air.

When she pushed open the door she found an empty room with a bar at one side, a great many mirrors with red plush seats all around the edge of the room. She knocked on the bar and waited but no one answered the sound. The mirrors made her nervous for they sent back her reflection many times--the reflection of a middle-aged woman, smartly dressed, hard, a woman with the rather battered remnants of good looks. The horrible night on the train had done something to her. Here in the mirrors of a brothel, she realized it for the first time. Youth was gone forever. No amount of peace or rest, no amount of massage or dieting would ever bring it back. Never again would a man look upon her with excitement or desire. She had crossed a frontier and it like the other frontier was closed. She felt a sudden stab of bitterness as if acid were corroding her heart. Then she straightened her tired body and went to the door leading into another room. There she knocked again and after a moment she heard the sound of footsteps coming down a stairway. The sound was that made by feet stuffed into slatternly slippers. Then the door opened and a woman came in.

She was about the same age as the Princess but her hair was dyed a shade of orange gold and carefully set in tight waves. She wore a sleazy peignoir with a black knitted shawl over her shoulders. She was heavier than the Princess for she had not starved her sensuality. Her eyes were blue and hard, the nails of her dirty fingers lacquered a brilliant red. She looked boldly at the Princess and said, "You are Princess D'Orobelli."

"Yes."

"I am Madame Lestrade. 'La Goulue' they call me down here. Sit down. Join me in a brandy, Madame?"

The woman went over to the bar and took down a bottle. The place had a strange smell, compounded of cheap perfume and powder, of stale beer and lavatories. As Madame Lestrade took down the bottle she stared boldly at the Princess. Princesses did not impress her. She had had strange experiences with rich people who came down from the great hotels and villas of the upper town seeking bizarre adventures. Clearly she regarded her merely as an equal, as simply another woman experienced and hard like herself. In a chatty way, she said, as she poured out the brandy, "I have sent the girls away. It wasn't fair to keep them here in case we were bombed. And in any case there was no business. I found good places for them in a house in Marseilles. Business is good there. The port is full of warships." She spoke as though she were discussing the marketing of vegetables. She raised her glass, and said, "Your health, Madame."

The Princess raised her glass. The brandy was hard and burned her throat.

Madame Lestrade asked, "You came about the individual called Serafina, I judge. You must be very attached to her."

"Yes," said the Princess, "I want to get her across the border." In spite of herself the vision of the jewels made her voice tremble. "I must get her across. That is why I came to see you."

"I can perhaps help you," said Madame Lestrade. She poured herself another brandy and added, "I have a small boat and two sailors. Quite frankly we used it for smuggling. They know their way about in the dark. They could perhaps bring back this individual for you." She coughed, "It would take money, of course."

"Naturally," said the Princess. "How much?" Her hands were still trembling, a fact that Madame Lestrade noticed. At the sight she mentally doubled the price.

"Ten thousand francs," she said, "paid in advance. It is a very risky business. I may lose my boat and Vincenzo and Pierre may be captured or killed. In that case I must keep the money whether they rescue the individual or not."

"Yes," said the Princess. It was worth many times that. What was three hundred dollars to recover jewels worth more than a million. What did it matter if two men she had never seen, common working men, were killed. "Yes, that is satisfactory."

"And I shall need two cartons of American cigarettes and two bottles of brandy."

"Very good. When can you send for the individual?"

"Tonight after the moon has gone down into the sea."

"I will send the money and the stuff within an hour."

"Bon jour, Madame."

"Bon jour, Madame."

The Procuress and the Princess parted as equals. The long climb up the hill exhausted the Princess. It was quite dark by the time she reached the Hotel de Paris.

At the doorway, miraculously, there stood a huge old-fashioned Rolls-Royce. Two of the garrison of servants who remained and a stocky hard-faced driver, were unloading from the roof a strange assortment of luggage--a couple of battered tin trunks, a mattress, a sewing machine and a goat. There were many more things but these few she identified by the faint light from the hotel doorway.

Wearily she climbed the steps and went into the vast and empty hallway. There, coming down the grand stairway, toward her, walking very straight, an Edwardian hat perched high on her old-fashioned pompadour came the last person in the world she had expected to meet in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo in wartime. She thought suddenly, out of the depths of the superstition that so largely ruled her life, "That is why I dreamed of Mary Pulsifer. She was coming into my life!"

It had been a long slow journey, full of discomfort for a lady so old and so used to luxury as Mary Pulsifer. Without 'Ennery she could not have made it; even her liking for adventure and excitement could not have provided sufficient stimulus to carry her through. But 'Ennery was magnificent. Sometimes, as she rode, sitting up very straight as if she were in a coronation procession instead of a refugee fleeing before an invading army, she wondered at the curious involutions of her life--that she had married Vivian Pulsifer and loved him despite the evil she knew of him as an international banker, that she had gone on through all these years in the great house in London, sitting at the head of his table, welcoming his shady guests, famous, important men like himself--munitions manufacturers, politicians, oil kings, bankers, currency speculators, all engaged in immoral and dubious undertakings, striving always to bolster up and preserve that crooked structure of their own creation which had shown the first signs of collapse in 1914, and now was doomed forever.

Riding in the back of the old-fashioned motor with two French peasant women beside her, two more at her feet and a weary child asleep in her lap, she sighed at what now seemed to her the lost opportunities of a long life. Once she might have exposed the game of her husband and those "distinguished" men who had frequented the great house, a game designed for only one purpose--to subjugate all humanity to the will and profit of a small conniving class. They had been without nationality. Among them were Germans, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen. Their only bond was not nationality but their will to power and wealth a million times beyond the need of any man. It was these men who had created this world and in their over-reaching greed, brought about its destruction.

Mary Pulsifer, old and wise and tired, saw it all very clearly even in the moment when the dive-bombers were machine-gunning 'Ennery and herself and killing women and children and old men along the road beside her. They were the helpless victims of something too great for humanity to deal with, too vast for people to understand, unless, like herself, you knew the inside and were old enough to feel detached and outside all the misleading passions which obscured the truth. When the Stukas had dived low over the car, she had not been afraid because it did not matter to the world or to herself whether she died or not. She was too old, it was too late, for her to do anything about the infamies to which she had been a complacent witness. In a way she had been as guilty as the others, for in a way she had been an accomplice. She had known the evil but had been too comfortable, too indifferent to denounce it.

What was it those men wanted, at the expense of human happiness and civilization? Now, as an old woman, she was no more able to find the answer than she had been thirty years earlier when the pattern of the whole monstrosity had begun to become clear to her. They had been driven by devils; anyone of them would have been happier and have lived longer if their lives had been more simple and easy. Her husband had killed himself long before his time by straining always for more power and more wealth. 'Ennery, sitting there before her, his heavy figure black against the dim light from the stars, was a happier, more honest man. She and 'Ennery had always understood each other from the first day when 'Ennery, home from the Boer War, had come to work as coachman. Now she saw that both 'Ennery and herself had loved her husband, because he was a lovable man, but they had never respected him. In some ways it seemed to her that, during the long years they had been together, she was closer to 'Ennery than to her dead husband. When her husband died and she told 'Ennery that she meant to give away all her great wealth to make the world a more decent place--all that wealth accumulated in so evil a fashion by her husband--'Ennery had approved at once, saying, "Yes, Madame, I think your plan an excellent idea!" But shrewdly he had added, "But keep ample for yourself, Madame. You are too old, if you will pardon my saying so, to change your ways now. You'd be very uncomfortable--not being free to come and go as you like."

She had followed his advice, but after all she needed very little--only a small fraction of the great fortune. Now and then she had smiled to herself at the thought of the fury that would rise on her death, when all those useless people who hoped to inherit from her, those members of the International White Trash, discovered that she had given the money away. It had been perhaps a small gesture, perhaps a great one; she did not know. She only knew that giving away all that evil money had made her feel more decent, and at moments had given her a feeling of satisfaction at having dispersed the wealth and power which the men who once gathered around her table had so cherished.

In all the terror and confusion in the square at Orléans and on the road afterward, it had all become very clear to her--what was happening. The Stukas, the terror and misery of all Europe, the dead and dying along the road, were all part of a fury that was sweeping the world and in the end would destroy the men like her husband, who had created it. Her husband and the men sitting at her table in the great house in London had tried to destroy the German Republic because they were afraid of the people. They had financed and encouraged the man who had brought this misery and terror along the quiet roadsides of green, fertile France, because they had thought he was their friend and thought as they thought. But in the end they had not killed the monster; they had merely forced him to take another shape, the shape of a new monster who hated his creators and protectors more than the people they had feared. It would not be a quick decisive misery, all this blind aimless fury, she thought bitterly, it would go on and on until it found shape and meaning as the fury which ended feudalism had found shape and meaning, but in the end it would destroy the men like her husband and those who sat at his table--the ones who took everything and gave nothing. That much, with an inner wisdom, she knew was certain.

It was a tiring journey. 'Ennery drove day and night, down, down across France with rumors never far behind, that the Germans were in Tours, in Blois, in Orléans, in Bordeaux, in Lyons. There was trouble about gasoline, but the rebuilt old-fashioned Rolls had been made for crossing deserts and mountains on their long tours and once her tanks were filled, she was good for eight hundred miles without replenishing. In a village outside Orléans 'Ennery filled her tanks to capacity, paying the keeper of the tiny filling station a small fortune for all the gasoline he could supply.

It was Mrs. Pulsifer who decided to head for Monte Carlo. When she asked the women she had picked up along the road where they were bound, they replied pitifully that they did not know. They had been driven from their homes and ordered to take to the road. No one told them where to go; no one had provided any way of transportation. Each of them had a little money.

She chose Monte Carlo shrewdly. The roads through that part of Provence would be empty; the advancing Germans would not trouble to bomb and machine-gun roads where there were no refugees. She divined that people would be fleeing away from Monte Carlo rather than toward it, since it was so near the Italian border. In Monte Carlo there would be plenty of food and shelter.

So they drove all night and all the next day, stopping only for bread and cheese and wine. And growing weary, Mrs. Pulsifer fell to thinking about death, really for the first time in her life, because she had always been very fortunate, not in being rich, but because she had always loved people and found life an entertaining spectacle. So because her life had been full she had no dread of death. And she was old now and this new war bore down upon her; another war was too much to ask of anyone--especially a war which need not have happened save for those men who had gathered round her husband's table.

It was evening when the over-burdened old Rolls came over the pass and into the light of the setting sun, with the whole of the Mediterranean spread far below beyond the white fringe of pleasure resorts. At sight of it the peasant women and children who had never seen so vast an expanse of water began to exclaim and chatter among themselves, forgetting for a moment the memory of their menfolk and their shattered houses.

Smiling, Mary Pulsifer listened to them. This was a very ancient sea and the sight of it gave her a sense of peace. It had survived wars and revolutions. Civilizations had risen and fallen and disappeared on its shores. And for her it had many pleasant memories of the villa where she had come in winter with her husband, sold when she disposed of everything and owned now by a cinema actress. There were memories of yachting parties, of the ballet and Monte Carlo itself where she had come with her husband so many times to dine with Zaharoff, the Levantine pimp, the great munitions operator, the man responsible for the deaths and misery of millions. In the old days it had been a happy luxurious life so long as you did not lift the cover and see what was going on underneath.

As the car descended the long, winding, empty road, the purple air grew darker and with the darkness no blaze of light appeared from the harbor, the Casino or the city itself.

"It is a dead place," thought Mary Pulsifer, "and it will never again come to life in our time."

At the Monaco border, a little man in fancy dress costume stepped into the dim lights and warned 'Ennery. There was a law. No lights at all were permitted.

The order gave Mary Pulsifer a sudden shock. In the last war, it had been different. Places like Monte Carlo with its Casinos, its banks, its great villas owned largely by the men who sat about her husband's table--had been protected. By mutual agreement, by secret arrangement they had managed to have their own property spared. The houses of the humble might be destroyed but no army attacked or bombed their chateaux, their castles, their munitions factories. She thought, "No, it is different this time. It is more desperate. The people are wiser. They no longer have patience. This time even the appeasers, the bargainers, the shrewd and the greedy will be destroyed." She had come to Monte Carlo because she had believed it was safe for those poor women and children traveling with her, and now it was not safe.

At the hotel they received her with astonishment and pleasure. Like the Princess she was a symbol out of the old rich life, but the pantomime of welcome was more genuine in the case of Mary Pulsifer, for she was kind and generous and humorous, and she was always a little ashamed of being so rich. She was a simple woman and she loved people, and in consequence people loved her, even the humblest. And she was important too, they knew, because she had so often been the guest of Zaharoff.

The idea of receiving the peasant women, their children and the goat, created a shock in the heads of the assistant manager and his staff, but Mrs. Pulsifer insisted, and in times like these her word was law. And she was, they knew, excellent pay.

So the women and children, startled and a little frightened by the splendor all about them, were taken off to the great bedrooms once occupied by Grand Dukes and super-pimps and millionaires and kept women. They had baths and a good meal and then Mary Pulsifer went downstairs to see about the goat whose owner was worried over what had become of it. And going down the stairs she had to her astonishment seen May D'Orobelli, looking tired and hard and old, coming in the door. In her depression and weariness she was the last woman in the world Mary Pulsifer wanted to see, for the Princess D'Orobelli somehow symbolized all the sick world which Mary Pulsifer knew could not be saved. In all that world May D'Orobelli was the final symbol of those who took everything and gave nothing.

They had many things to tell each other. They had never known each other very well, for although they frequented the same dying world, the Princess had always looked upon Mary Pulsifer as stuffy and Mary Pulsifer had looked upon the Princess as a singularly vicious representative of her class. But now, having dinner together in Mary Pulsifer's sitting-room, alone in the dark and silent resort, a kind of intense but false intimacy sprang up between them, as if they were the last two people in the world.

It was a good dinner, a dinner like those of the old days, with champagne and fish and a bird, and as Mary Pulsifer talked the weariness went out of her. As she grew older she slept less and less and now she knew, as she sat there, that she was not going to sleep, and so she drank more champagne than usual and at midnight they were still talking.

The Princess told the story of her last day in Venice and of the frightening change which had come over Italy and Mrs. Pulsifer told very quietly the story of her flight from Paris, of the dive-bombing and machine-gunning which showed no discrimination for the widow of a famous international banker but attacked her as well as the peasants and children and nuns fleeing along the road.

"I headed for Monte Carlo," she said, "as the safest place I could think of."

It was the disillusioned Princess who gave her the answer to the shocking change which made Monte Carlo no longer safe. She said, bitterly, "There is no place safe in Europe for people like us, Mary. In the last war one's property was safe. In this war nothing is sacred. They have taken everything I have but my jewels."

Then she told Mary Pulsifer what she had told no one else--of Serafina's rescue of the jewels and her arrival on the other side of the border. Mary Pulsifer knew of the famous jewels. Some of them she had seen. But now she heard all about them, in detail, the story of each one of them that was famous--the great Royal diamond, the Queen's ruby, the emeralds which had once belonged to Pauline Bonaparte. And Mary Pulsifer listened fascinated and a little frightened, because as the Princess talked, the jewels seemed to acquire life, to become much more than jewels. May D'Orobelli talked of them as an insanely doting mother talked of her children, or a brilliant scientist talked of his ideas. A fire came into her eyes that had never been there before, even for a lover. In her voice and manner there was a kind of madness.

Mary Pulsifer, listening, thought, "They are all she has left. She has lost her lover. She has no real friends. She has no friends on whom she can depend. She is terrified by what she has been through. There are only the jewels."

The sudden naked gauntness of May D'Orobelli's life was a dreadful revelation, but because Mary Pulsifer was a nice person, she felt pity for the woman sitting opposite her, drinking glass after glass of expensive brandy.

At one in the morning she was still listening to the tale of Madame Lestrade and her plan of smuggling Serafina across the border when a waiter knocked on the door.

When he came in, he said, "There is a woman downstairs who wishes to speak to Your Excellency."

A look of relief and delight came into the strained, hard eyes of the Princess. "Tell her to come up at once."

When the waiter had gone away she said, trembling, "It is Serafina. She has come with the jewels."

But it was not Serafina. When the door opened the woman who came in was Madame Lestrade. She wore a hat that partly covered her face, throwing a shadow over her eyes. In a glance Mary Pulsifer fixed her station in life. The Princess rose and went eagerly toward her.

Madame Lestrade remained by the door. She said, "Madame, I have bad news."

At the speech the Princess stopped suddenly and leant against a chair.

Madame Lestrade said, "The boat is lost and with it the two men. Vincenzo was killed as they tried to land. Pierre managed to get back but he is dead. He died a few minutes ago." The woman spoke in a voice so cold and dead that, out of her experience, Mary Pulsifer divined that there was some special bond between her and one of the men.

"And Serafina and my jewels?" cried the Princess. "Where are they? What have you done with them?"

In the same dead voice, Madame Lestrade said, "To hell with you and your jewels. My lover is dead!"

The Princess began to scream, "You have cheated me! You have tricked me! You have stolen the jewels!"

The woman stared at her in silence while she screamed hysterical accusations. Then very quietly she called the Princess the foulest name she could summon up, a word so foul that one woman rarely used it to another even in a Marseilles brothel. She said, "You and your lazy kind and your precious jewels are at the bottom of everything. May God curse you and your damned jewels to eternity!"

Then before the Princess could begin to scream again, the Procuress was gone out of the door.

Alone in the room with Mary Pulsifer, she returned to the table. She no longer screamed. She sat there sobbing and trembling while Mary Pulsifer tried to comfort her. She felt no contempt but only a curious sort of pity, born of her weariness and perhaps of her nearness to death. To her the woman opposite was not simply an unspeakable creature whose avarice and selfishness were monstrous, who had shown no emotion save fury for having caused the death of two men she had never seen. To Mary Pulsifer, this was a human creature upon whom the Furies were closing in with all the inevitability of a tale of Greek mythology. The fading hysterical woman opposite her was a horror, but once she had been young and beautiful; once all of life had been before her. She was the product of her age and her society, of its thievery and ruthlessness, its vulgarity and greed. Her story had begun long ago before she was born. It began with the thievery of her father, his bribery of Congressmen, his wanton destruction of smaller people who got in his way, with the vast and vulgar house he had built in New York so that his wife and daughter might become "fashionable," with her marriage to a degenerate European nobleman. Mary Pulsifer, old, and with the touch of death upon her, felt less scorn than compassion. The age which produced this monstrous woman opposite her had been an ugly vicious age, but it had planted the seeds of its own destruction. For a moment, it is true, she did feel a kind of delight and triumph that retribution was closing in. This woman opposite her was frightened; that was why the jewels had become more important than anything in life. They were all that was left her; they were the symbol of a security founded upon the precarious power of money alone. Mary Pulsifer had always been rich but not in this fashion.

After a time, she said, "You mustn't behave like this, May. They aren't lost. There is still hope of getting them."

The Princess sat up straight and began to make up her face, "I'm sorry, Mary. It must be because of what has happened to me the last two or three days. Nothing like it has ever happened to me before."

"You had better get some rest. We'll think up a way. My driver is very good at such things. He'll have ideas. It's all right so long as actual war doesn't break out."

"You're very good to me, Mary. I don't see why you should be."

Mrs. Pulsifer laughed, "I don't see why either, but I am. So leave it at that."

But when Mrs. Pulsifer had gone to bed, she did not sleep. Her heart beat wildly and thoughts and memories raced in a muddle through her tired brain. She relived fragments of the past, out of the life which had always been pleasant but somehow without savor until her husband died and she set out with 'Ennery to roam the world and get to know people and the goodness that was in them. She knew somehow that she would never leave Monte Carlo, that the whole thing was coming to an end here. At last she fell into a restless sleep, half-wishing as consciousness slipped away from her, that she might never waken.

At ten o'clock when she wakened and had had her tea, she sent for 'Ennery.

He came in, square and stocky and solid, looking, with his broad red face and graying hair, a rock of security. She bade him sit down and then she said to him, "I've not been very well lately, 'Ennery."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Madame. Perhaps the strain 'as been too much."

"There're one or two things I want to settle just in case anything should happen to me suddenly."

'Ennery's blue eyes blinked and he said, "You mustn't talk like that, Madame."

"It's only common sense," she said briskly. "In the first place, you're taken care of in my will, so you needn't worry."

He knew that already because he knew Mary Pulsifer, but he said, "That's very good of you, Madame."

"I'm leaving a check with you to take care of the poor people we brought with us here. I could leave it with my lawyers or my bankers but they might think it foolish to waste good money on humble people in a foreign country. I prefer to trust you. We've been together for a long time and we understand each other. We feel the same about things. I want you to act as if I had adopted all of them. I want you to keep in touch with them and see that they do not starve until this war is over and they are back again in their own houses. I know I can trust you."

"Yes, Madame. Of course."

She gave him an envelope and then said, "The Princess D'Orobelli is here."

"Yes, Madame, I saw her. She looks very badly."

"She is frightened and unhappy." Then she told him the story of the jewels and as she talked she found herself making excuses, explaining the frightened, raddled woman. But 'Ennery understood. He interrupted her presently to say, "Yes, Madame, I'm sure there is a way out for 'er Excellency and 'er maid. You and I have been in just as tight fixes, like that time we ran the frontier between Iran and Afghanistan on the way to Kabul. You leave it to me. I'll think up something."

She sent him away then to see that her refugees were all right and to find out what news there was. Then she went back to bed and fell asleep once more. She did not waken until nearly six o'clock when the Princess appeared accompanied by 'Ennery.

The Princess was in a strange state of exaltation. 'Ennery had thought out a plan. It was simple enough, very like the plan of Madame Lestrade. He would bribe his way through both the French and Italian lines. He needed money, four or five bottles of brandy and some American cigarettes. He asked permission to use Mrs. Pulsifer's old Rolls-Royce and he needed an American flag.

He would cross over and find Serafina and bring her and the jewels back. The plan would need to work swiftly during the time one set of soldiers was on guard. As soon as it was dark he would cross over. He thought he could leave about nine o'clock and be back in Monte Carlo by midnight.

As he told his plan he looked at Mrs. Pulsifer, seeking her approval, for he trusted her shrewdness and judgment. He related the details in a flat dull voice. The only sign of animation was the glint which came into the clear blue eyes. Otherwise there was no hint that inside this dull, solid, respectable, elderly man there was the same spirit of adventure that had moved Drake and Morgan, that same spirit which had been a bond for so long between himself and Mary Pulsifer.

And as he talked, a faint envy rose in the heart of the Edwardian old lady. It was an adventure she herself would have enjoyed. When he had finished, she said to the Princess, "I'd like to speak to 'Ennery alone for a moment, May, if you don't mind." And when the Princess had gone into the next room, she said to 'Ennery, "You are to take no risks, 'Ennery. You understand that. It isn't worth it--for a pile of trash that might just as well be glass. Remember, that if anything happened to you, I should be lost."

"You needn't worry, Madame. I'm not doing it for 'er Excellency but because I'd like to see if it could be done."

"I shall be waiting up for you. If I should be asleep wake me when you come in. I shall want to hear about it."

Luckily there was a moon. 'Ennery had to run without lights but it was easy enough because so many of the villas along the edge of the winding road were white and showed up with a kind of phosphorescence against the dark Mediterranean. As he drove, 'Ennery calculated all the dangers, all the possibilities he could summon out of his imagination. He had no illusions. Success depended upon the soldiers he encountered at the two frontiers. Being a cosmopolitan he knew what to expect of Latins. They would either be good-natured and easy-going or they would be pompous, officious and impossible. If he fell upon the officious kind the mission would be difficult or impossible. If not, it would be easy enough, for he had prepared a good story.

His mistress, he would say, was caught on the Italian side of the closed frontier. He was passionately in love with her. He wanted only to spend an hour with her and return. If, on the Italian side, they had any doubts he would suggest that a couple of soldiers accompany him to the house where she was staying, remain in another room while he visited her, and return with him to the frontier. There would be, of course, money and cigarettes to bribe them, and brandy to make them drunk. If they drank enough they would not be troublesome. He would get Serafina into the back of the car, hide her on the floor under a blanket and set out for home.

There were many things on his side. It was great luck that neither frontier was guarded by efficient and unromantic English or German soldiers. The Latins would want to believe in the story of a mistress. That was something they would understand. The fact that he was an elderly man would only make them more sympathetic, because the situation would touch their sense of humor and make them laugh. A couple of drinks and a package or two of American cigarettes and they would laugh more. He knew exactly what he would do: he would clown his part. He would act as if devoured by passion to reach the mistress awaiting him on the other side of the frontier. He would describe the ardor of their love for each other and the impatience of the mistress. That he was ugly and old would make it all the funnier. He would even pretend that he suspected her of being unfaithful to him. Unless he ran across a pompous non-commissioned officer, the plan was certain to work. The old-fashioned high-rumped Rolls-Royce made it all the more comic.

Only one thing could go wrong. On his return, the French customs men might want to search the car for contraband. If that happened, he would have to run for it, taking a chance on a stray bullet hitting him. That was a chance he would have to take. On his return there could be no delay, no turning back.

As the car passed through Mentone, he slackened speed knowing that somewhere not far ahead he would be stopped. Then out of the darkness he became aware of a barrier across the road just ahead and at the same time he heard a sharp cry of "Halte!"

He stopped the car and out of the shadow of a house by the road stepped a sergeant and three soldiers. Opening the door 'Ennery stepped down on to the road and at the same time he saw in the moonlight the lower part of the sergeant's face. The rest remained hidden in the shadow of his steel helmet, but the lower part was all 'Ennery needed to see and he grinned to himself with relief. It was the lower part of a good-looking face with a firm chin and sensual lips partly covered by a black mustache, carefully waxed and tended. The lips and chin were those of a sensual man who liked women and good food. The mustache showed that the man was a lady-killer. He would understand. So far so good.

Quietly he said, "Bon soir, mon ami!"

The two women dined again together, very well on the best the hotel could offer. The Princess, greedy by nature, liked good food and Mrs. Pulsifer with the presentiment of death upon her, thought, "It may be my last meal." In any case whether she lived or died, it would be a long time before any one in Europe would live as they once had lived. It might be a lifetime before there would again be famous restaurants and grand dinners, a long time perhaps before there would ever again be enough of such common things as soap and sugar. Here in the Hotel de Paris they were dining on the last remnants of the Grand Era.

The Princess was fidgety, her mind absorbed with speculations regarding 'Ennery's success or failure, and when at last they had finished the long extravagant meal, Mrs. Pulsifer suggested a game of six-pack bezique to kill time and divert her companion's mind from the rescue of the jewels. But even that did not go well. The Princess' mind continued to wander; she played badly and Mrs. Pulsifer who had played millions of games with her husband, won seven thousand francs very quickly--seven thousand francs which she would give to her refugees.

Ten o'clock came and eleven and finally midnight and at last Mrs. Pulsifer, feeling suddenly weak, said, "If you don't mind, May, I'll go to my room and lie down. I'm feeling very odd. I shan't take off my clothes. I'll only need a wink or two. If I should happen to be asleep call me when 'Ennery comes back."

Then she climbed the stairs.

When she had gone the Princess ordered more brandy and sat down to wait for the sound of the returning car. In the whole of the hotel everyone had gone to bed save for a boy who slept upright in his chair by the door. The great hall and reception rooms with their gilt chairs and tropical plants were full of empty shadows. Once or twice as she sat drinking, the disordered mind of the Princess peopled the shadowy place with phantoms--Zaharoff and Edward VII and Lily Langtry and Old Leopold of the Belgians with his dyed black beard, Serge Diaghileff, Liane de Pugy, a whole procession of grand dukes and rich Moscow merchants, all the ghosts of those who once frequented these great rooms, all the figure of a Europe which was now dying. And suddenly she would waken with a drunken shudder and think, "I must be going crazy. There is no one here but myself and that boy asleep in his chair by the door. I am alone here waiting for Serafina and the jewels, and I am getting older every moment." And she would pour herself another brandy and as she drank, she would sit staring at nothing while the phantoms returned out of that world which had been so pleasant for people like herself and so evil for people like Mary Pulsifer's refugees. And from among the phantoms now and then would appear the lean grim face of the General and the curious glitter of hatred and contempt she had seen in his eyes.

Outside the night had the stillness of death and so she heard the motor of the old-fashioned Rolls long before it arrived at the door. She heard it from the moment it started up the long hill below the Sporting Club. The sound creeping into her brain suddenly dispersed the phantoms and she thought, "They have come!" Standing up quickly she knocked over the bottle of brandy. Without troubling to salvage it she ran toward the door and out into the square past the boy sleeping in his chair.

She was waiting there in the dim light of the doorway when the car drove up. It came to a sudden halt, so violent that the brakes cried out, and almost at once 'Ennery stepped out. He moved uncertainly for he was a little drunk from all the brandy he had been forced to drink in order to carry through his plot.

The Princess cried out, "Did you get her? Have you got the jewels?"

The old driver balancing himself unsteadily, regarded her for the space of a second in silence and into his shrewd eyes there came that same look of hatred and contempt she had met before so many times in the last few days.

"I got her, Excellency. I do not know about the jewels."

"Where is she? I don't see her."

"Something has happened to her, Excellency. At the border I had to run for it. They machine-gunned us."

Then he opened the door and stood back with great dignity, almost with pomp as he had done so many times waiting for Mrs. Pulsifer to descend in all her Edwardian splendor. But no one came out of the car. On the floor half-covered by the carriage robe, huddled the body of Serafina. She was lying with her face down. A thin trickle of blood, black and glistening in the dim light, ran down across the step.

With the help of the boy and a porter who came in his nightshirt with a jacket over it, they got the body out of the old-fashioned Rolls and into the hotel where they laid it on a sofa, the hat pushed grotesquely over the face of the dead Serafina.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. While 'Ennery and the two servants looked on, the Princess began tearing off the clothes of the dead woman, and as the black cloth gave way, there came to light a wonderful array of jewels--glittering bracelets, rings, necklaces, clips, pendants of diamonds and rubies and emeralds, all removed from their cases and fastened to the old-fashioned bodice and drawers of the dead woman by safety pins. One by one the Princess tore them loose, sobbing and laughing hysterically as she worked.

'Ennery, sickened, turned away to find his mistress and report to her. As he walked up the stairs, he heard the Princess cry out, "They're all there! They didn't get one of them--the swine!"

Upstairs 'Ennery knocked gently on the door of Mrs. Pulsifer's room. Twice he knocked, each time with a little more violence, and when there was no answer, he pushed the door open and went in. The room was in darkness and twice before touching the button of the light he called her name respectfully. Still there was no answer and when he turned on the light, he saw the old lady fully dressed lying on the bed. She was very still and even before he touched her he knew that she was asleep forever. The tears came into his eyes and a lump into his throat.

In the hallway, the body of Serafina still in the torn clothes, lay on the sofa covered by a green baize cover from one of the tables and in the room overhead the Princess sat at the dressing table in her bath room, a great pile of jewels before her. One by one she lifted the pieces of jewelry and scrubbed them carefully with a toothbrush to wash away the blood that dimmed their glitter.

Out of the stillness of the dawn from the direction of Ventimiglia came the dry bark of cannon. The Italians had attacked at last, but the Princess, absorbed in her task, heard nothing.