The Last Card

by John Galsworthy

MRS. MORRISEY had been waiting all the afternoon in the garden of her second-class Madeira hotel; and her face showed it. Her make-up, unevenly renewed from her vanity bag, very partially concealed the finger-prints of Time—and her age was forty-six, if computed from the nineteen years recorded to Florence Pritt on her first marriage certificate. She looked almost haggard in the shade of the big center palm tree, quite haggard when she moved out to the terrace in the sunlight. Considering that her future hung perhaps by the hair of her looks when he came,—if he came,—this was proof enough of the strain she was undergoing. From the terrace she could see, across the little coast gap, the garden of the first-class Madeira hotel, where he and his wife were staying—its palms and terraces and masses of bougainvillea. She could see the liner for Brazil lying in Funchal harbor. She could see the window of her own bedroom, where her trunks were packed; and the wide blue sea whereon she was—or was not—going to become Mrs. Ted Cordew on her way to peace.

And still he did not come! With her vivid coloring,—black hair, red spots in her cheeks, tightened red lips, dark restless eyes, with her tall, sharpened figure and quick movements, she resembled one of those strelitza flowers which grew in the hotel garden, orange and bright blue, spiky, and tethered, as it were, like restive birds to their tall plant perches.

Old campaigner though she was, Flo Morrisey suffered, wondering whether Ted Cordew was coming to the scratch. She was “up against it.” Married at nineteen, divorced at twenty-three; married again at twenty-seven, widowed at thirty-six; protected and not protected, as the case might be, ever since, she had lived precariously on her looks; and her looks were running out. She always faced things, even her own face. Every morning, every evening, its inexorable progress confronted her, and she made the best of it. But was the best good enough, any longer?

Her last “protection” at an end, with but fifty pounds in her bank, she had taken winter passage for Madeira. Those short voyages were sometimes long enough for a good sailor like herself. So many wives kept their cabins. Young men were beyond her now, but oldish men going, for their health or their wives’ health, to a warm climate where there was nothing to do, were almost designed by Providence. Colonel Cordew, clearly a good sailor, well-colored, bolt upright, not more than fifty; his wife older, asthmatic probably—she had marked them from the first hour on board, their name, destination, table. The whole thing was in the table. For four days Colonel Cordew would eat, and Mrs. Cordew wouldn’t—there was a wind! Not Chance, then, arranged the necessary propinquity in that corner of the dining saloon, and the chairs alongside on the lee deck. Flo Morrisey believed in Chance, but left nothing to it. Three meals a day, and no one on his other side, a fund of mutual experience, Egypt, Burma, Monte Carlo, Epsom, winter sports and Capetown, a slight acquaintance in the Boer War with the late Morrisey. And the weather warmer and warmer, with the blood-releasing blessedess of south-going ships. And such a decent fellow, Ted Cordew—so that at each meal a little wrinkle vanished from round her lips or eyes, and at night in the shaded light of a lee corner, he looked almost as she had looked when she went out to India with her first husband twenty-seven years ago.....

Staring with her keen, dark eyes across at his hotel, she remembered with a sort of fluttering in her heart their first early morning glimpse of the lovely island—she in a nightdress and long cloak, he in pajamas and a Norfolk jacket—an impromptu meeting by the bulwark thoughtfully devised. The scent of fertility, and the low sunshine touching the green slopes, ind his cheery voice: “Well, it's been a rattling jolly voyage, thanks to you!” And the long look she had given him, and the touch, as if unconscious, of her hand on his sleeve—almost more than calculation in it, even then.

Then, in the shore boat, landing, the introduction to his wife. How much thought beforehand, lying awake in her berth, had she not given to the question—to know or not to know! She had aspired, at first, to nothing more than a little secret protection and her bills paid. But the whole thing had been unexpected ind ironical; and now, strained by this waiting in the bright garden, she could see why. For once she had not quite kept her head—or was it her heart? A secret something—ambition, inspiration, what not—had bunkered all her cool designing, so that she had not as yet grasped the real, in hope of the ideal. Instead of his secret companion, she had become their open friend. Fatality—triumphant, or tragic? Which? She had made Ted Cordew love her; she had been made almost to love Ted Cordew. She was not his companion; he had not paid her bills—she hadn’t a stiver left; but he was on the edge of the grand écart, and it depended on these next few hours whether he would take it, and she would step with him into a new life out of an existence hard, unlevely, anxious as well could be.

A frog croaked in the artificial fern-pool; a cicada chirped like a little bird—the sun was going west! Soon it would pass behind his hotel garden and go down.

And she must wait! What was going on there? How had he put it to his wife? Had he put it at all, or had his courage failed? Men were so damned soft—at least, decent men! That wife of his—she had money, she had people! And if he hesitated at putting her in his wife’s place on board that boat,—men had such odd scruples, good form and all the rest!—why, she would go second, steerage even, to get out of this, away to a new world, a new life, with him! She put her hands up to her head; the back of her neck was burning hot; her palms were hot—everything hot. She bethought herself suddenly of that blue network head-kerchief in which she looked so “bewitching”—or so he said; and hurrying in, she crossed to her room on the ground floor. An old American smoking a cigar looked up from his chair as she passed: “When are we going for that little mountain week-end, Mrs Morrisey? I'll be glad to have you fix a day. I've kind of got my tongue hanging out for that.”

She flung him a, “Wait and see, Mr. Porcher,” and slammed her door. Old lizard, she knew his sort; they smelled like wine-casks. From the drawer she took the kerchief, flax-blue—netlike—yes, it became her, softened, cooled her. She fastened it with the pin Ted had given her, and stepped out onto her balcony. Shadows were folding over the garden; the sunset breeze rustled the dry palm-leaves; a lemony scent came wafted—it was full-flower season. Was he waiting till dusk? He wanted, she knew, to avoid all breath of scandal. He had arranged with her that she should say she was going back to England on the Union Castle boat that came in tomorrow morning, while he would give out a trip to the Azores on that Royal Mail liner.

How she had begged him not to tell his wife, but to write from the Azores! No good! That was the worst of decent men—they would, as they called it, “play the game.” How damned ironical that what had made her think of him so softly should be imperiling her rescue! Her fingers beat a tattoo on the veranda railing. Rescue! It was neck or nothing this time! One managed along to a certain age, and then, but for a stroke of luck like this, dropped into the everlasting pit with pigs like old Porcher, and presently not even them, but raddled old age and grinding poverty, or a drugged death!

She counted up her lovers on her fingers—including her two husbands—just fifteen; and except her first husband, not one for whom she had felt real passion. And, moody in the sudden Southern dusk, she wondered how on earth Ted Cordew could take her for a decent woman; why didn’t he read her life, its scheming, defiances, hard, naked realism? And she gave a little laugh. Again ironical! His decency had veiled her—drawn out of her the softness that belonged to “woman in love,” dropped it over the “vamp” she was. Vamp! That was what anyone would call her who knew, and yet—did not know! An easy word, “vamp.” She clenched her hand on the iron so that it hurt her. No looking back! No mulling! She wanted all her wits. What should she do if he didn’t come? The Royal Mail sailed at noon. She knew—like a writer who has reached the climax of his story—that never again could she bring Ted Cordew up to a scratch so fateful and foreign to his training. He was heated at point, and would nevermore be malleable to the pitch of such extreme resolve.

“Before tea-time,” he had said; and it was dark already—the lights of his hotel to right of her, lights of the liner to the left—lights and the loom colored like dark grapes, and the acacia tree outside her window with the light from the windows above her shining on its white flowers. And the fraudulence of life struck her like a fist! A—fraud! Such loveliness, and such cruel depths, so great a parade of promise and so clutching a despair!

He couldn’t come before dinner now! If he came at all! Dismay surged through her. Had he funked it? Had that “poor thing” his wife prevailed on his “better nature?” Cant! As if all life wasn’t just a struggle for existence—creature against creature—one life good as another!

What was before herself if she threw up the sponge! Eh? What? She turned back into her room with the thought: “My black satin is lower cut. Not the flame-color!” To put on flame-color, and sit in it alone here, waiting!

SHE turned on the light and began to change. She did up her hair in a new way that he hadn't seen. She scented her shoulders, took from the trunk the black satin, and laid it on the bed. Her face! If one could change the worn, the tired-out face! She sat with closed eyes; but her lips went on quivering. One did not work miracles, cure wrinkles and sharpened features by just ceasing to see; and with a sudden quick relentlessness she stared into the mirror. Such as she was! Such as she was! “My neck’s still good!” she thought. “And my eyes!” She started on the rest. Long, long, delicately laying on and rubbing off, aiming for something that should shine out among the masks that women wore, so crude, so overcolored. She worked hard, with a grim intensity, as one works at a picture. She finished, smiled at herself, and hastily ceased to smile. Better without a smile, better with the lips just parted, and the lengthened lids just raised.

“Sha’n't go down to dinner,” she thought. “Can't eat a blessed thing!”

To sit alone at her little table, with that red-faced old clergyman at right angles, and those two skinny Scotch old maids, and that old English major who eyed her so, and the young man who stammered, with his sainted mother opposite, and old Porcher round the corner—ah, that old swine had read her! Only—was his version authorized? Was it really truer than Ted Cordew’s?

She got up from before the glass and put on the black, the low-cut frock. Something in her hair? Dared she—one hibiscus flower? She opened the window wide again. Down there to the right they grew; she could find them in the dark. And she stepped out and down the steps. The whole thing seemed to her unreal as she went. The garden, the moonlight on the water, the lights, the silence, and herself moving through it. What was in a flower—a flower of the hibiscus that young girls wore? But she plucked it—red even in the dusk. Grass, flower, leaf, odor, moonlight and the hush—all breathing in the darkness—strange feeling! Damned sentiment, like the beating and the aching in her heart! Sound of oars grinding in the rowlocks, jingle of a belated carro’s bells, a long chime—eight o'clock! The pigs were feeding! She stole back to her room, and put the flower in her hair. No mistake! It lighted her up, balanced the softly whitened, black-eyed mask, the red in the hair, the red in the lips, neither too red now! For a moment she stared, content, moved by her own face! If he could come this minute! She was a work of art.

She lighted a cigarette and sat down before herself, turning out the light, so as not to lose that precious momentary confidence.

If he delayed, the lines, the hollows, the fever would come back—the mask would give, seduction die. Such a day—oh, such a day! Suspense! It wore one out! Her last card—wouldn’t she even have a chance to play it? She could hear the jingle of plates and dishes down the corridor, the diners’ voices, when the room door was opened. Nine o’clock—he might come any moment now! Smoking cigarette after cigarette, from suspense she slipped into coma, a state almost of damned well not caring whether he came or not. Fed up—fed up! The room smelled rank of the cheap tobacco; just visible in the mirror, her image seemed hollowing before her eyes. What did it matter? Half-past nine! Ten o'clock! He was not coming! It was all over; she had lost! And suddenly her heart beat horribly. Footsteps outside, a knock on the door, the porter’s voice.

“Mrs. Cordew to see you, madame.”

With all she had thought of, hoped, expected, dreaded—she had never thought of that! And stiffened to the soul, rigid, breathless, she rose from the chair and said:

“Turn up the light!”

Hatted, not “dressed”—the figure in the doorway! And while she uttered a greeting, her mind groped vaguely for the meaning of that. The door was shut. The woman's face looked swollen about the eyes, patchy—been crying, of course—couldn’t take her gruel!

“I just came to say good-by. Ted wished—”

What did that mean—triumph? Ted wished!

“Good-by?”

The woman's gloved finger-tips were twisting, her cheeks mottled as she spoke.

“Yes, we called on our way to the ship We're going to Brazil.”

Right between the eyes! A wonder she didn’t spin and fall!

“That's very sudden.”

“I thought I should like to go.”

Like to go! That was good! She had not meant to laugh; and the sound seemed to rip off every covering; and there were suddenly two breathless beings, undisguised in wretchedness, hostility and desperation! For a moment only—then they were back in their coverings, as it were.

God! What a wooden figure standing there! She tore the window open.

“I'm afraid it’s stuffy in here. I’ve been smoking. D’you mind a mosquito? It’ll be charming in Brazil.”

Cowards—men! Cowards! From the window she looked across at that woman planted on her defeat, and mocked her.

“Sorry not to see him to say good-by!”

Ah, that brought her to life!

“Yes, he left it to me. We've been together a long time, you see. I think at our age you should have let him alone—” Those eyes which had been crying, which had never seemed anything but bits of gray-blue glass, now had a stripping intensity. “It wasn't decent of you.”

NOT decent! A horrible self-pity dimmed her eyes. She turned her back on that blocked-out figure, and the face all patched with past tears and present hate. Decent! Had she wanted anything but escape to decency, to rest—to— Her last chance! Had she wanted anything else? Hell! Why didn’t the woman go? Hadn't she won!

A mosquito pinged in past her—a sleepless night! Well, the night for them would be as sleepless! Some comfort, that! She wished them joy of their voyage—boxed up together, ten feet by eight! But the garden out there was all blurred for her, as if by rain; the white flowers of the acacia had gone out—no moon, no stars, not even the liner's lights. And in that blur of darkness the figure of the man who wouldn’t come in, of the man sitting in his carro outside, seemed to come and stand as if formed from her own eyes. She could see his brown face, ever so brown, more than life size as if he had shrunk behind it! She could see him—poor phantasmagoric brute—wilt and writhe under her gaze. Her chest swelled; her brow cleared; her eyes glowed; she would cling and whip his senses after he was gone! And he looked at her, he looked; he put up his hand, as if to ward her off, and even his brown face seemed to shrink..... The door! She started and turned round—gone—that woman—gone! A long minute to stand and listen till the bells of their carro tinkled out. Noir gagne, pair et passe! Draw the curtains—look for that mosquito! The red flower in her hair! How comic! How—comic! Petal from petal! She trod on them, and shut her eyes. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow! Before her in the darkness the lean dry smile of old Porcher took shape.