The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

His next letter gave a most exhaustive historical account of the temple of Karnak, and a description of the tombs of the kings, which he urged his mother to see. In a few days she could get across to Port Said, and a week afterwards they would be standing together lost in wonder at the monuments of the Pharaohs. It was a liberal education, he said, to visit Egypt; already in a few weeks he had learned more than his three years at Eton had taught him. As a series, indeed, the letters really resembled pages of a guide-book, so conscientious were they and so unreadable. The next letter, after an interval of some six weeks, was merely dated s.s. Ammon; but it described the holy city of Benares, where there is a golden statue of Buddha twenty-five feet tall, the alligators in the Hooghly, and the methods of the manufacturing of filigree work. This was all as it should be, and Sophia’s belief in her experiment became a creed with her. It no longer an experiment; it was an assured success.

The spring passed into summer, and summer into autumn, and still Sophia was deluged with floods of categorical information. Leonard had been away a year, and the tutor, having successfully battled with typhoid in Egypt, had unfortunately fallen a victim to yellow fever in the West Indies. Leonard duly reported this to his mother, but declined altogether to have another tutor. While the first lived he had continually been tied in one place by his ailments, and he proposed to do the rest of his journeying alone. He was now in Boston, U.S.A., where there was a remarkably fine statue of George Washington; his mother would doubtless recollect that this eminent statesman (one of the brightest men the Western continent had ever produced) was notably truthful. In fact, the story of his childhood, etc. He was now going an excursion among some Indian tribes, and he hoped in his next to give some account of wigwams, Yosemite, and squaws.

Sophia could not understand it. Was the boy going to grow up a pedant? She almost preferred that he should be a gambler.

The Princess left Rhodopé that year in November, twelve months after Leonard’s departure. Her soi-disant visits to her relatives were unusually protracted, for the tables constantly backed her luck, and it was already May, the almond blossoms were over and the House was sitting, when she returned to Amandos. She was beginning to get very stout, but she found consolation for this in the advice of her doctor, who recommended her a month at Carlsbad in the summer. That month lengthened itself to six weeks, and on her arrival in Rhodopé again in the autumn her neglect of her duties became more edifying than ever. For one reason or another the visitors to the capital were much diminished in this year; the death of her aunt, the Princess Olga, had thrown the Court into mourning for a month, and time hung terribly on her hands.

It was during this enforced absence from the club, in obedience to etiquette, but meaningless to her—for her aunt was one of the most sour-tempered women God ever made, and mourning for her death was of a farcical nature—that the Princess, in an excess of ennui, began those practices which have been censured so severely, and which even the indulgent historian must stigmatize as undignified. Night after night she would steal out from one of the private doors of the palace, and, disguised as well as might be like a widow, with a pair of spectacles, a bombazine jacket, and a thick veil, make her way to one of the numerous gaming-houses which held out their signs in every street in Amandos. For fear she should be recognised, she dared not go to her own club, where it would be certain she would meet someone she knew, and who knew her well enough to pierce her somewhat transparent disguise; and for the same reason she would not go to any of the houses frequented by the upper class of her people. Instead, she would skulk along unfrequented thoroughfares and narrow streets until she came to some sorry restaurant, over which there would be a low, dingy room, ill ventilated, and thick with the acrid fumes of inferior tobacco, and there she would play perhaps for hours, in stakes limited to ten or twelve francs. In this she would do violence to her better nature, for often the roulette-boards were as pitiable as that which had so roused her anger against Leonard, thus showing that they were contraband, and not supplied by the Government monopoly; but gambling had become a necessity to her, and she would have played with any wretch, however depraved, on any board, however infamous. The pathos of the situation lay in the fact that she was constantly recognised, but her loyal people, sympathizing with her in being deprived of her games at the club, owing to this meaningless etiquette, never gave a sign that they knew her. Certainly, also, there was a curious attraction to her in the very squalor of the surroundings. To be elbowed by hairy sailors, to be smothered in musk by the wives of smaller tradesmen, excited her by its strange incongruity. Lombroso, so she told herself, would certainly have diagnosed her practices as belonging to one who showed the early stages of egalo-megalomania, or some such mental deformation, but, as she also told herself, nothing could matter less than what Lombroso said.

At other times she would even dine at the restaurants below, with a secret gusto for the abominable food, and the sort of joy a miser must feel, to know that in the palace her French chef was in the middle of his inimitable alchemy, changing for her the raw material of his craft into an artist’s dream. The daily risk of detection she ran at the hands of her own servants even amused her, and she liked to see the blank, masklike wonder of their faces when she told them that she would have dinner at a quarter to eleven, little knowing that they were perfectly aware what she was going to do in the interval. To her, gambling had become as imperative as a dipsomaniac’s cravings, and the death of her sour aunt made it a necessity to her to indulge her passion, as she thought, secretly. It interested her also to find how much the secrecy and squalor of these adventures resembled those of her remote cousin the Empress Catherine of Russia. How strange a thing is heredity!

But the month of mourning passed, and she resumed her seat in the club. Letters from Leonard still reached her, but she scarcely read them; and though she loved the lad, and no sight would have been so welcome to her as his face, yet she determined to keep him abroad as long as possible. He had been away two years, and he would now be just twenty. He should come back to Amandos to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, but if she had her way, not a day before that.

Again the winter passed, again the seemingly interminable tedium of business was suspended on the last day of December; again she thanked her Ministers for their services to the country during the past year; and as soon as the New Year festivities were over, she was off on the new Felatrune, a yacht she had built with her winnings of the past twelve months, for Monte Carlo. There her presence had become so regular and assiduous, that the urbane manager had named one of the new rooms the Princess’s Salon. She had a beautiful villa on the hills above the town, which was generally full of guests; and while she was there this room was reserved, unless she sent a message that she would not play that day, for herself and her friends, but such days were few. It was built at an angle of the Casino, and a little private lawn stretched down in front of it to a terrace overlooking the sea. Crocuses, narcissi and daffodils were sown all over the grass, and in the early spring it used to look like a foreground of one of Fra Angelico’s pictures. Inside the room was divinely appointed, but less like Fra Angelico’s pictures. It was walled with crimson satin, and had a moulded gilt arabesque along the top; the floor was of parqueted oak, with thick Persian rugs; on the mantelpiece was a bronze doré clock by Vernier, which told the hours unceasingly. On the right of the croupier’s place the Empress’s chair of walnut wood, with little Sèvres plaques let into the arms; on the back was inlaid her monogram underneath her crown.

The party with her was often enough to fill the room, for her house was usually full of the orthodox; but when there was a place or so vacant, the Princess would often stroll round the public rooms, and if she saw there an acquaintance who played well, that is, high and with the calmness of conviction, she would invite him to join her table. As a rule her party would meet at her room for an hour or two before dinner, adjourn again till half-past nine or so, and then continue the game till two or three in the morning. Sometimes, when the roulette proved more than usually exciting, and luck adorably capricious, it would be prolonged to a later hour; and as the nights got shorter, it was no rare thing for them to see morning break in thin lines of red on the eastern horizon, and the dim dark change to an ethereal gray before they left the Casino for the Princess’s villa.

For many weeks Sophia had had no word of any kind from Leonard, but as his last letter had that he was going to shoot bears (Ursa major) in the Rockies, she concluded, with all the enviable calm of a mind which never knew anxiety, that where Ursa major is plentiful, there also postal arrangements are correspondingly scarce. Thus his continued silence was scarcely noticeable to her, and, at any rate, she was so happily constituted that no fear that bears had devoured him ever occurred to her. When he came back from shooting bears, no doubt he would write to her.