The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

‘The latter with pleasure, the former I must refuse to do,’ he said. ‘How would you greet me, Sophia, if I came to you next week and said your Civil List had not been paid, or that a deputation insisted on waiting on you? What is the time? Just eleven. Well, we will sit and talk, and soon I must go back to work. No, no,’ he cried, as she would laughingly have taken the papers from him; ‘it is for dull old people like me to do this sort of work. You shall not see any of them, Sophia;’ and with a quick motion he folded them up and put them in his pocket.

But he had had a rather awkward moment. It was quite true that they were not for Sophia to see, since among them was a note from Malakopf containing urgent advice to him not to be in too great a hurry, and quoting Napoleon to that effect.

So—for there was no law in Rhodopé against gambling, and not likely to be while Sophia lived—the Princess’s casino rose apace. The marble quarries belonging to the Crown grew loud with the chisel, and unceasingly poured forth their translucent treasures to pleasure the Princess; for the hangings of her rooms the silk-worms toiled and span, and for their colouring the purple shells of Tyre worked their miracles; for her the looms of the Orient clashed and wove, and the red roses on Arab stuffs grew thicker than the stars at night.

By spring the walls had risen to their full stately height, and Duvelleroys, of Paris, who had contracted for the finishing and decorations of the establishment, were already sending out their artists and argosies. A flight of broad marble steps, balustraded in a grotesque flamboyant style, led up to the great terrace running along the west front, which overlooked the town of Amandos, and commanded a magnificent sea-view. In summer this would be an out-of-door dining-room, where the player would cool his fevered brain by the contemplation of the infinite sea, and the sight of the sun setting in amber clouds behind the northern cape of Corfu. Double doors gave entrance to a marble flagged hall, from which opened the various cardrooms; on the left was the largest public-room, for roulette only, and a cabinet off this, with scarlet satin walls, was called the Princess’s room. Straight in front of the entrance were the rooms for baccarat, and on the right was what Sophia called the nursery, a room devoted to the innocent, if somewhat lugubrious, pursuit of ‘little horses’ and the ‘train’; but, as she said, a finished gambler was made, not born, and the young needed education. A smoking-room, containing a bar and a white marble statue of Luck, from the chisel of Augier, blindfold and smiling on one side of the mouth, completed the square.

On the first floor were the dining-room and the various drawing-rooms, where the less orthodox games of whist, picquet, and bezique might be played; while the downstairs rooms of the club—so Sophia named it—were devoted to the truer forms of play. Thus, as she acutely observed, extremes could be seen meeting, for in her club, as in all other clubs, whist was only allowed in certain rooms.

Upstairs, again, over the dining and drawing-rooms, were some twenty bedrooms, so that the most thorough devotees—those, in fact, who were purged of all other desires—need not leave the club night or day, and the goddess of their worship might directly watch, if so she felt disposed, over their slumbers, and send them dreams full of the true religion.

Malakopf saw the building go up with mixed feelings. At first he had been quite of the same mind as Prince Petros, agreeing that the Princess was playing most directly into their hands and forwarding their schemes. But the reception of the prospectus by the people, and the avidity with which the shares in the undertaking were snatched up—for the Princess had floated a company—was somewhat puzzling to him. Hitherto gambling had been almost unknown in Rhodopé, always excepting in the precincts of the palace, but the idea of gaining rouleaux of gold by merely sitting in an admirably comfortable arm-chair in a beautiful room seemed to have taken strong hold on the public imagination. The shares were divided into £60,000 of ordinary shares, and £40,000 of debenture stock, which were to pay 5 per cent. The Princess had herself invested £10,000 in the ordinary shares, and Prince Petros, with characteristic caution, £5,000 in debenture stock; but within three hours of the subscription being opened, every share was taken up. The stock was issued at par, but before the week was out it was already quoted at 115, and before the building was complete it reached 120, and Prince Petros was strongly inclined to sell out, though the fear of his wife’s scorn prevented him.

Here, too, Malakopf had acted with Semitic prudence. Supposing by any chance the Princess should, in some unforeseen way, frustrate the scheme of himself and Petros, and she and her gambling continue to throne it over Rhodopé, it would be well to have a foot in her camp, and while investing only £1,000 under his own name, he telegraphed from Vienna in the name of a large banking firm there to secure £10,000 of ordinary shares, or as many as might be allotted.

But these three were the only large investors, and for the most part the money was made up by small speculators, on the strength, so it seemed, of the Princess’s name. Ten fishermen from Mavromáti, for instance, who, so to speak, did not know red from black, clubbed together and purchased a £100 ordinary share; a wild-eyed shepherd-boy came in from the remote hills, and asked for twenty francs worth of the new club; and the head of the Education Department put a question in the Assembly as to whether it was permissible to invest the surplus of the Government grant in the Princess’s company.

Now, Malakopf, astute politician as he was, and unrivalled astronomer of the financial heaven, could not with certainty interpret these signs of the times. The readiness with which the subscription was taken up seemed to augur either a greater popularity of the Princess than he had bargained for, or a love of gambling in her subjects hitherto void of fruition. If either of these interpretations was correct—and he did not see a loophole for a third—it argued not well for the success of the anti-dynastic conspiracy. He had hoped that there would be some outburst of popular feeling against the scheme, or an unfriendly reference to it in the Assembly. It is true there had been some great outburst of popular feeling, but that had been in favour of it; and as for the unfriendly reference in the Assembly, that was still unspoken. For himself, he dared not allude to it in a hostile spirit (Prince Petros’s tongue was also tied), for he had openly invested £1,000 in the company, and he would without doubt be called ugly names if, after that, he showed public disapproval of it. More than that, supposing he organized a successful opposition to it, he stood fair to lose that much larger sum which he had covertly put into it. Of his two possible interpretations for the success of the subscription, he much preferred to attribute it to the popularity of the Princess, for if a latent love of gambling was innate in the hearts of the Rhodopians, he had to face the fact that before long she would be doubly endeared to her subjects, since, considering her merely as a gambler, she was unique and magnificent—even Petros, with his system, allowed that—and there were no two words to the question.