Jocelyn

by John Galsworthy

“Morphia—the bottle in her hand—she was in the habit of taking it? Ah! Yes—failure of the action of the heart, no doubt an overdose—dead about an hour—poor woman—not an uncommon case.”

He experienced a sensation of gratitude—the first sensation of any sort for many minutes—the affair was not eternal, he would sometime or another get rid of these people, and be left to himself and have rest. He got up slowly and with effort. Again the slurred rattle of the Venetian blinds, the rustle of a sheet drawn over the couch. Then a moment when three figures stood stiff, awkward, dismally devoid of action; a confused shaking of hands, a subdued unintelligible murmur, a glimpse of retreating figures, the fluttering whish of a skirt, the click of a closing door, and—he was alone.

CHAPTER XVI

In the early hours of the sleepy afternoon, when the June sun blazes, and the air outside is heavy with heat, the coolest place in Monte Carlo is the Casino.

At one of the few roulette tables where play was going on Nielsen sat, leaning back in his chair, his eyes half closed, and one of his hands resting upon the table.

It was only three o’clock, but he had finished work for the day. He sat on, apparently watching the game, in reality occupied in putting together the pieces of his puzzle. The polished floors, and even the garish colouring of the walls and ceilings, looked soft in the mellow light that filtered through the wire blinds set in the windows. The glass panes had disappeared for the summer, and the cooled air was sweet with the smell of flowers and shrubs. The murmuring of the few players, the monotonous scrape of the croupiers’ rakes, the sing-song of their voices, and the subdued rattle of coins on the green cloth, made a sleepy sum of sound.

Nielsen found nothing to disturb his reflections. The long rows of expressionless profiles, clear-cut or indefinite to this side and that, the shifting play of light and shade on the faces opposite, all meant nothing to him—no more than the scraping of his clerks’ pens and the rows of their bent shoulders mean to the merchant, or the eternal coming and going of pasty-faced assistants to the master shopman.

With him, the indifferent cry of the croupier’s voice, which announced the gain of his fixed, daily wage, was the ending of all concern in the tables. Sometimes he waited the whole day for it, watching the game as a cat watches a mouse, sometimes it came in half-an-hour, but it generally came. He knew the faces of nearly all the players; the faces of the born-gamblers who were ruining themselves—lined faces that were for the most part placid with a schooled placidity, and with restless eyes that seemed to look at everything and saw nothing but the eternal shifting of fortune; the faces of the “little” players, dilettante or careless, reckless or timid—faces which expressed all the emotions in turn, and which in the days when he had thought about these things had inspired him with a deep and disheartening belief in the smallness of human nature; the faces, too, such as you may see in any thoroughfare of life, of those who sit and sit and keep your place for a louis—patient, blighted faces, brightening only, and that for a second, at the sight of a client or a coin; again, the faces of such men as himself, and those so rare that he could count them on the fingers of one hand—of men who came there day after day, day after day, just as a man goes to his office or to his chambers, as habituated and as utterly indifferent to the inner life of their surroundings as any other professional man, and who, on leaving the doors of the Casino, shake the dust of it from their feet and from their minds.

Of the many things to which Nielsen had at one time or another turned his hand, journalism had had the most attraction for him. There had been a charm in having a finger, benevolent or corrective, in the pies of other people, which his own pies had never afforded him. He was by nature curiously indifferent to the turn of his own affairs, curiously alive to the weal or woe of the rest of the world. He experienced a mental glow when dealing with the problems of other people.

At this moment he was engaged upon such an one, and he was conscious of bringing a fettered intellect to the task. He was prejudiced against the man upon whose actions he was seeking judgment; prejudiced by the most hopeless of all prejudices, that of sex—jealous of him, in fact. He endeavoured to be impartial and logical, but the thing intruded itself upon him, hampered his reason, coloured his conclusions. He felt that his conviction was mainly a matter of instinct with him, but he was none the less convinced. He did not conceal from himself that he knew very little, had failed to put the puzzle together; but the impression made upon his mind by Legard’s conduct was vivid and painful. He felt certain that he had been directly, or indirectly, the cause of his wife’s death. The motive lay nakedly and glaringly exposed; the man was violently in love with Jocelyn, he had known that by a jealous instinct for many weeks. He did not know that Jocelyn returned that love. To his mind it was a monstrous and a painful idea that she ever should, and as he sat there, motionless, with the monotonous hum droning in his ears, his red-brown eyes glowed angrily, and the fingers of his hand began to drum the table.