Part 4 (1/2)

To my surprise there were no locked doors or burly doorkeepers. We hung up our things in the hall and pa.s.sed into a long room, in which were some fifteen or twenty people. Most of them were sitting round a _chemin de fer_ table; a few were standing at the sideboard eating sandwiches. A dark-haired, dark-eyed, sallow-faced man, a trifle corpulent, undeniably Semitic, who seemed to be in charge of the place, came up and shook hands with Mr. Parker.

”Glad to see you, sir--and your daughter,” he said, glancing keenly at them both and then at me. ”This gentleman is a friend of yours?”

”Certainly,” Mr. Parker replied. ”I won't introduce you, but I'll answer for him.”

”You would like to play?”

”I will play, certainly,” Mr. Parker answered cheerfully. ”My friend will watch--for the present, at any rate.”

He waved us away, himself taking a seat at the table. I led Eve to a divan at the farther corner of the room. We sat there and watched the people.

There were many whose faces I knew--a sprinkling of stock-brokers, one or two actresses, and half a dozen or so men about town of a dubious type. On the whole the company was scarcely reputable. I looked at Eve and sighed.

”Well, what is it?” she asked.

”This is no sort of place for you, you know,” I ventured.

”Here it comes,” she laughed; ”the real, hidebound, respectable Englishman! I tell you I like it. I like the life; I like the light and shade of it all. I should hate your stiff English country houses, your highly moral amus.e.m.e.nts, and your dull day-by-day life. Look at those people's faces as they bend over the table!”

”Well, I am looking at them,” I told her. ”I see nothing but greed. I see no face that has not already lost a great part of its attractiveness.”

”Perhaps!” she replied indifferently. ”I will grant you that greed is the keynote of this place; yet even that has its interesting side. Where else do you see it so developed? Where else could you see the same emotion actuating a number of very different people in an altogether different manner?”

”For an adventuress,” I remarked, ”you seem to notice things.”

”No one in the world, except those who live by adventures, ever has any inducement to notice things,” she retorted. ”That is why amateurs are such failures. One never does anything so well as when one does it for one's living.”

”The question is arguable,” I submitted.

She shrugged her shoulders.

”Every question is arguable if it is worth while,” she agreed carelessly.

”Look at all those people coming in!”

”I don't understand it,” I confessed. ”These places are against the law, yet there seems to be no concealment at all! Why aren't we raided?”

”Raids in this part of London only take place by arrangement,” she a.s.sured me. ”This place will reach its due date sometime, but every one will know all about it beforehand. They are making a clear profit here of about four hundred pounds a night and it has been running for two months now. When the raid comes Mr. Rubenstein--I think that is his name--can pay his five- hundred-pound fine and move on somewhere else. It's wicked--the money they make here some nights!”

”You seem to know a good deal about it,” I remarked.

”The place interests father,” she told me. ”He comes here often.”

”And you?”

”Sometimes. I am not always in the humor.”

I looked at her long and thoughtfully. Her beauty was entirely the beauty of a young girl. There were no signs of late hours or anxiety in her face.

She puzzled me more than ever.

”I wish I knew,” I said, ”exactly what you mean when you call yourself an adventuress.”