“Such arts the gods who dwell on high
Have given to the Greek.”--_Lays of Ancient Rome._
In the Strangers’ Room of the Olympic Club the air was thick with
tobacco-smoke, and, despite the bitter cold outside, the temperature
was uncomfortably high. Dinner was over, and the guests, broken up into
little groups, were chattering noisily. No one had yet given any sign of
departing: no one had offered a welcome apology for the need of catching
an evening train.
Perhaps the civilized custom which permits women to dine in the presence
of the greedier sex is the proudest conquest of Culture. Were it not
for the excuse of “joining the ladies,” dinner-parties (Like the
congregations in Heaven, as described in the hymn) would “ne’er break
up,” and suppers (like Sabbaths, on the same authority) would never end.
“Hang it all, will the fellows _never_ go?”
So thought Maitland, of St. Gatien’s, the founder of the feast. The
inhospitable reflections which we have recorded had all been passing
through his brain as he rather moodily watched the twenty guests he had
been feeding--one can hardly say entertaining. It was a “duty dinner” he
had been giving--almost everything Maitland did was done from a sense of
duty--yet he scarcely appeared to be reaping the reward of an approving
conscience. His acquaintances, laughing and gossipping round the
half-empty wine-glasses, the olives, the scattered fruit, and “the ashes
of the weeds of their delight,” gave themselves no concern about the
weary host. Even at his own party, as in life generally, Maitland felt
like an outsider. He wakened from his reverie as a strong hand was laid
lightly on his shoulder.
“Well, Maitland,” said a man sitting down beside him, “what have _you_
been doing this long time?”
“What have I been doing, Barton?” Maitland answered. “Oh, I have been
reflecting on the choice of a life, and trying to humanize myself!
Bielby says I have not enough human nature.”
“Bielby is quite right; he is the most judicious of college dons and
father-confessors, old man. And how long do you mean to remain his pupil
and penitent? And how is the pothouse getting on?”
Frank Barton, the speaker, had been at school with Maitland, and ever
since, at college and in life, had bullied, teased, and befriended him.
Barton was a big young man, with great thews and sinews, and a broad,
breast beneath his broadcloth and wide shirt-front. He was blonde,
prematurely bald, with an aquiline commanding nose, keen, merry blue
eyes, and a short, fair beard. He had taken a medical as well as other
degrees at the University; he had studied at Vienna and Paris; he was
even what Captain Costigan styles “a scoientific cyarkter.” He had
written learnedly in various Proceedings of erudite societies; he had
made a cruise in a man-of-war, a scientific expedition; and his _Les
Tatouages, Étude Médico-Lêgale_, published in Paris, had been commended
by the highest authorities. Yet, from some whim of philanthropy, he had
not a home and practice in Cavendish Square, but dwelt and labored in
Chelsea.
“How is your pothouse getting on?” he asked again.
“The pothouse? Oh, the _Hit or Miss_ you mean? Well, I’m afraid it’s not
very successful I took the lease of it, you know, partly by way of doing
some good in a practical kind of way. The working men at the waterside
won’t go to clubs, where there is nothing but coffee to drink, and
little but tracts to read. I thought if I gave them sound beer, and
looked in among them now and then of an evening, I might help to
civilize them a bit, like that fellow who kept the Thieves’ Club in the
East End. And then I fancied they might help to make _me_ a little more
human. But it does not seem quite to succeed. I fear I am a born wet
blanket But the idea is good. Mrs. St. John Delo-raine quite agrees with
me about _that_. And she is a high authority.”
“Mrs. St. John Deloraine? I’ve heard of her. She is a lively widow,
isn’t she?”
“She is a practical philanthropist,” answered Maitland, flushing a
little.
“Pretty, too, I have been told?”
“Yes; she is ‘conveniently handsome,’ as Izaak Walton says.”
“I say, Maitland, here’s a chance to humanize you. Why don’t you ask her
to marry you? Pretty and philanthropic and rich--what better would you
ask?”
“I wish everyone wouldn’t bother a man to marry,” Maitland replied
testily, and turning red in his peculiar manner; for his complexion was
pale and unwholesome.
“What a queer chap you are, Maitland; what’s the matter with you? Here
you are, young, entirely without encumbrances, as the advertisements
say, no relations to worry you, with plenty of money, let alone what
you make by writing, and yet you are not happy. What is the matter with
you?”
“Well, you should know best What’s the good of your being a doctor, and
acquainted all these years with my moral and physical constitution (what
there is of it), if you can’t tell what’s the nature of my complaint?”
“I don’t diagnose many cases like yours, old boy, down by the side
of the water, among the hardy patients of Mundy & Barton, general
practitioners. There is plenty of human nature _there!_”
“And do you mean to stay there with Mundy much longer?”
“Well, I don’t know. A fellow is really doing some good, and it is a
splendid practice for mastering surgery. They are always falling off
roofs, or having weights fall on them, or getting jammed between barges,
or kicking each other into most interesting jellies. Then the foreign
sailors are handy with their knives. Altogether, a man learns a good
deal about surgery in Chelsea. But, I say,” Barton went on, lowering his
voice, “where on earth did you pick up----?”
Here he glanced significantly at a tall man, standing at some distance,
the centre of half a dozen very youthful revellers.
“Cranley, do you mean? I met him at the _Trumpet_ office. He was writing
about the Coolie Labor Question and the Eastern Question. He has been in
the South Seas, like you.”
“Yes; he has been in a lot of queerer places than the South Seas,”
answered the other, “and he ought to know something about Coolies. He has
dealt in them, I fancy.”
“I daresay,” Maitland replied rather wearily. “He seems to have
travelled a good deal: perhaps he has travelled in Coolies, whatever
they may be.”
“Now, my dear fellow, do you know what kind of man your guest is, or
don’t you?”
“He seems to be a military and sporting kind of gent, so to speak,” said
Maitland; “but what does it matter?”
“Then you don’t know why he left his private tutor’s; you don’t know why
he left the University; you don’t know why he left the Ninety-second;
you don’t know, and no one does, what he did after that; and you never
heard of that affair with the Frenchman in Egypt?”
“Well,” Maitland replied, “about his ancient history I own I don’t know
anything. As to the row with the Frenchman at Cairo, he told me himself.
He said the beggar was too small for him to lick, and that duelling was
ridiculous.”
“They didn’t take that view of it at Shephard’s Hotel”
“Well, it is not my affair,” said Maitland. “One should see all sort
of characters, Bielby says. This is not an ordinary fellow. Why, he has
been a sailor before the mast, he says, by way of adventure, and he
is full of good stories. I rather like him, and he can’t do my moral
character any harm. _I’m_ not likely to deal in Coolies, at my time of
life, nor quarrel with warlike aliens.”
“No; but he’s not a good man to introduce to these boys from Oxford,”
Barton was saying, when the subject of their conversation came up,
surrounded by his little court of undergraduates.
The Hon. Thomas Cranley was a good deal older than the company in
which he found himself. Without being one of the hoary youths who play
Falstaff to every fresh heir’s Prince Harry, he was a middle-aged man,
too obviously accustomed to the society of boys. His very dress spoke
of a prolonged youth. À large cat’s-eye, circled with diamonds, blazed
solitary in his shirt-front, and his coat was cut after the manner of
the contemporary reveller. His chin was clean shaven, and his face,
though a good deal worn, was ripe, smooth, shining with good cheer, and
of a purply bronze hue, from exposure to hot suns and familiarity with
the beverages of many peoples. His full red lips, with their humorous
corners, were shaded by a small black mustache, and his twinkling
bistre-colored eyes, beneath mobile black eyebrows, gave Cranley the air
of a jester and a good fellow. In manner he was familiar, with a kind of
deference, too, and reserve, “like a dog that is always wagging his
tail and deprecating a kick,” thought Barton grimly, as he watched the
other’s genial advance.
“He’s going to say good-night, bless him,” thought Maitland gratefully.
“Now the others will be moving too, I hope!”
So Maitland rose with much alacrity as Cranley approached him. To stand
up would show, he thought, that he was not inhospitably eager to detain
the parting guest.
“Good-night, Mr. Maitland,” said the senior, holding out his hand.
“It is still early,” said the host, doing his best to play his part.
“Must you really go?”
“Yes; the night’s young” (it was about half-past twelve), “but I have a
kind of engagement to look in at the Cockpit, and three or four of your
young friends here are anxious to come with me, and see how we keep it
up round there. Perhaps you and your friend will walk with us.” Here he
bowed slightly in the direction of Barton.
“There will be a little _bac_ going on,” he continued--“_un petit bac
de santé_; and these boys tell me they have never played anything more
elevating than loo.”
“I’m afraid I am no good at a round game,” answered Maitland, who had
played at his Aunt’s at Christmas, and who now observed with delight
that everyone was moving; “but here is Barton, who will be happy to
accompany you, I daresay.”
“If you’re for a frolic, boys,” said Barton, quoting Dr. Johnson, and
looking rather at the younger men than at Cranley, “why, I will not balk
you. Good-night, Maitland.”
And he shook hands with his host.
“Good-nights” were uttered in every direction; sticks, hats, and
umbrellas were hunted up; and while Maitland, half-asleep, was being
whirled to his rooms in Bloomsbury in a hansom, his guests made the
frozen pavement of Piccadilly ring beneath their elegant heels.
“It is only round the corner,” said Cranley to the four or five men
who accompanied him. “The Cockpit, where I am taking you, is in a
fashionable slum off St. James’s. We’re just there.”
There was nothing either meretricious or sinister in the aspect of that
favored resort, the Cockpit, as the Decade Club was familiarly called
by its friends--and enemies. Two young Merton men and the freshman from
New, who were enjoying their Christmas vacation in town, and had been
dining with Maitland, were a little disappointed in the appearance of
the place. They had hoped to knock mysteriously at a back door in a
lane, and to be shown, after investigating through a loopholed wicket,
into a narrow staircase, which, again, should open on halls of light,
full of blazing wax candles and magnificent lacqueys, while a small
mysterious man would point out the secret hiding-room, and the passages
leading on to the roof or into the next house, in case of a raid by the
police. Such was the old idea of a “Hell;” but the advance of Thought
has altered all these early notions. The Decade Club was like any other
small club. A current of warm air, charged with tobacco-smoke, rushed
forth into the frosty night when the swinging door was opened; a sleepy
porter looked out of his little nest, and Cranley wrote the names of the
companions he introduced in a book which was kept for that purpose.
“Now you are free of the Cockpit for the night,” he said, genially.
“It’s a livelier place, in the small hours, than that classical Olympic
we’ve just left.”
They went upstairs, passing the doors of one or two rooms, lit up but
empty, except for two or three men who were sleeping in uncomfortable
attitudes on sofas. The whole of the breadth of the first floor, all the
drawing-room of the house before it became a club, had been turned into
a card-room, from which brilliant lights, voices, and a heavy odor of
tobacco and alcohol poured out when the door was opened. A long green
baize-covered table, of very light wood, ran down the centre of the
room, while refreshments stood on smaller tables, and a servant out of
livery sat, half-asleep, behind a great desk in the remotest corner.
There were several empty chairs round the green baize-covered table, at
which some twenty men were sitting, with money before them; while one,
in the middle, dealt out the cards on a broad flap of smooth black
leather let into the baize. Every now and then he threw the cards he had
been dealing into a kind of well in the table, and after every deal he
raked up his winnings with a rake, or distributed gold and counters
to the winners, as mechanically as if he had been a croupier at Monte
Carlo. The players, who were all in evening dress, had scarcely looked
up when the strangers entered the room.
“Brought some recruits, Cranley?” asked the Banker, adding, as he looked
at his hand, “_J’en donne!_” and becoming absorbed in his game again.
“The game you do not understand?” said Cranley to one of his recruits.
“Not quite,” said the lad, shaking his head.
“All right; I will soon show you all about it; and I wouldn’t play, if
I were you, till you _know_ all about it. Perhaps, after you know _all_
about it, you’ll think it wiser not to play at all At least, you might
well think so abroad, where very fishy things are often done. Here it’s
all right, of course.”
“Is baccarat a game you can be cheated at, then--I mean, when people are
inclined to cheat?”
“Cheat! Oh, rather! There are about a dozen ways of cheating at
baccarat.”
The other young men from Maitland’s party gathered round their mentor,
who continued his instructions in a low voice, and from a distance whence
the play could be watched, while the players were not likely to be
disturbed by the conversation.
“Cheating is the simplest thing in the world, at Nice or in Paris,”
Cranley went on; “but to show you how it is done, in case you ever do
play in foreign parts, I must explain the game. You see the men first
put down their stakes within the thin white line on the edge of the
tabla Then the Banker deals two cards to one of the men on his left, and
all the fellows on that side stand by _his_ luck. Then he deals two to
a chappie on his right, and all the punters on the right, back that
sportsman. And he deals two cards to himself. The game is to get as
near nine as possible, ten, and court cards, not counting at all. If the
Banker has eight or nine, he does not offer cards; if he has less, he
gives the two players, if they ask for them, one card each, and takes
one himself if he chooses. If they hold six, seven, or eight, they
stand; if less, they take a card. Sometimes one stands at five; it
depends. Then the Banker wins if he is nearer nine than the players, and
they win if _they_ are better than he; and that’s the whole affair.”
“I don’t see where the cheating can come in,” said one of the young
fellows.
“Dozens of ways, as I told you. A man may have an understanding with
the waiter, and play with arranged packs; but the waiter is always the
dangerous element in _that_ little combination. He’s sure to peach or
blackmail his accomplice. Then the cards may be marked. I remember, at
Ostend, one fellow, a big German; he wore spectacles, like all Germans,
and he seldom gave the players anything better than three court cards
when he dealt One evening he was in awful luck, when he happened to
go for his cigar-case, which he had left in the hall in his great-coat
pocket. He laid down his spectacles on the table, and someone tried
them on. As soon as he took up the cards he gave a start, and sang out,
‘Here’s a swindle! _Nous sommes volés!_’ He could see, by the help of
the spectacles, that all the nines and court cards were marked; and the
spectacles were regular patent double million magnifiers.”
“And what became of the owner of the glasses?”
“Oh, he just looked into the room, saw the man wearing them, and didn’t
wait to say good-night. He just _went!_”
Here Cranley chuckled.
“I remember another time, at Nice: I always laugh when I think of it!
There was a little Frenchman who played nearly every night. He would
take the bank for three or four turns, and he almost always won. Well,
one night he had been at the theatre, and he left before the end of
the piece and looked in at the Cercle. He took the Bank: lost once, won
twice; then he offered cards. The man who was playing nodded, to show he
would take one, and the Frenchman laid down an eight of clubs, a greasy,
dirty old rag, with _théâtre français de nice_ stamped on it in big
letters. It was his ticket of readmission at the theatre that they
gave him when he went out, and it had got mixed up with a nice little
arrangement in cards he had managed to smuggle into the club pack. I’ll
never forget his face and the other man’s when _Théâtre Français_ turned
up. However, you understand the game now, and if you want to play, we
had better give fine gold to the waiter in exchange for bone counters,
and get to work.”
Two or three of the visitors followed Cranley to the corner where the
white, dissipated-looking waiter of the card-room sat, and provided
themselves with black and red _jetons_ (bone counters) of various
values, to be redeemed at the end of the game.
When they returned to the table the banker was just leaving his post.
“I’m cleaned out,” said he, “_décavé_. Good-night,” and he walked away.
No one seemed anxious to open a bank. The punters had been winning all
night, and did not like to desert their luck.
“Oh, this will never do,” cried Cranley. “If no one else will open a
bank, I’ll risk a couple of hundred, just to show you beginners how it
is done!”
Cranley sat down, lit a cigarette, and laid the smooth silver
cigarette-case before him. Then he began to deal.
Fortune at first was all on the side of the players. Again and again
Cranley chucked out the counters he had lost, which the others gathered
in, or pushed three or four bank-notes with his little rake in the
direction of a more venturesome winner. The new-comers, who were
winning, thought they had never taken part in a sport more gentlemanly
and amusing.
“I must have one shy,” said Martin, one of the boys who had hitherto
stood with Barton, behind the Banker, looking on. He was a gaudy youth
with a diamond stud, rich, and not fond of losing. He staked five pounds
and won; he left the whole sum on and lost, lost again, a third time,
and then said, “May I draw a cheque?”
“Of course you may,” Cranley answered. “The waiter will give you _tout
ce qu’il faut pour écrire_, as the stage directions say; but I don’t
advise you to plunge. You’ve lost quite enough. Yet they say the devil
favors beginners, so you can’t come to grief.”
The young fellow by this time was too excited to take advice. His cheeks
had an angry flush, his hands trembled as he hastily constructed some
paper currency of considerable value. The parallel horizontal wrinkles
of the gambler were just sketched on his smooth girlish brow as he
returned with his paper. The bank had been losing, but not largely. The
luck turned again as soon as Martin threw down some of his scrip. Thrice
consecutively he lost.
“Excuse me,” said Barton suddenly to Cranley, “may I help myself to one
of your cigarettes?”
He stooped as he spoke, over the table, and Cranley saw him pick up the
silver cigarette-case. It was a handsome piece of polished silver.
“Certainly; help yourself. Give me back my cigarette-case, please, when
you have done with it.”
He dealt again, and lost.
“What a nice case!” said Barton, examining it closely. “There is an
Arabic word engraved on it.”
“Yes, yes,” said Cranley, rather impatiently, holding out his hand for
the thing, and pausing before he dealt. “The case was given me by the
late Khédive, dear old Ismail, bless him! The word is a talisman.”
“I thought so. The case seemed to bring you luck,” said Barton.
Cranley half turned and threw a quick look at him, as rapid and timid as
the glance of a hare in its form.
“Come, give me it back, please,” he said.
“Now, just oblige me: let me try what there is in luck. Go on playing
while I rub up my Arabic, and try to read this ineffable name on the
case. Is it the word of Power of Solomon?”
Cranley glanced back again. “All right,” he said, “as you are so
curious---j’en donne!”
He offered cards, and lost. Martin’s face brightened up. His paper
currency was coming back to him.
“It’s a shame,” grumbled Cranley, “to rob a fellow of his fetich.
Waiter, a small brandy-and-soda! Confound your awkwardness! Why do you
spill it over the cards?”
By Cranley’s own awkwardness, more than the waiter’s, a little splash of
the liquid had fallen in front of him, on the black leather part of the
table where he dealt. He went on dealing, and his luck altered again.
The rake was stretched out over both halves of the long table; the gold
and notes and counters, with a fluttering assortment of Martin’s I O
U’s, were all dragged in. Martin went to the den of the money-changer
sullenly, and came back with fresh supplies.
“Banco?” he cried, meaning that he challenged Cranley for all the money
in the bank. There must have been some seven hundred pounds.
“All right,” said Cranley, taking a sip of his soda water. He had dealt
two cards, when his hands were suddenly grasped as in two vices, and
cramped to the table. Barton had bent over from behind and caught him by
the wrists.
Cranley made one weak automatic movement to extricate himself; then he
sat perfectly still. His face, which he turned over his shoulder, was
white beneath the stains of tan, and his lips were blue.
“Damn you!” he snarled. “What trick are you after now?”
“Are you drunk, Barton?” cried some one.
“Leave him alone!” shouted some of the players, rising from their seats;
while others, pressing round Barton, looked over his shoulder without
seeing any excuse for his behavior.
“Gentlemen,” said Barton, in a steady voice, “I leave my conduct in the
hands of the club. If I do not convince them that Mr. Cranley has been
cheating, I am quite at their disposal, and at his. Let anyone who
doubts what I say look here.”
“Well, I’m looking here, and I don’t see what you are making such a fuss
about,” said Martin, from the group behind, peering over at the table
and the cards.
“Will you kindly---- No, it is no use.” The last remark was addressed to
the captive, who had tried to release his hands. “Will you kindly take
up some of the cards and deal them slowly, to right and left, over that
little puddle of spilt soda water on the leather? Get as near the table
as you can.”
There was a dead silence while Martin made this experiment.
“By gad, I can see every pip on the cards!” cried Martin.
“Of course you can; and if you had the art of correcting fortune, you
could make use of what you see. At the least you would know whether to
take a card or stand.”
“I didn’t,” said the wretched Cranley. “How on earth was I to know that
the infernal fool of a waiter would spill the liquor there, and give you
a chance against me?”
“You spilt the liquor yourself,” Barton answered coolly, “when I took
away your cigarette-case. I saw you passing the cards over the surface
of it, which anyone can see for himself is a perfect mirror. I tried
to warn you--for I did not want a row--when I said the case ‘seemed
to bring you luck.’ But you would not be warned; and when the
cigarette-case trick was played out, you fell back on the old dodge with
the drop of water. Will anyone else convince himself that I am right
before I let Mr. Cranley go?”
One or two men passed the cards, as they had seen the Banker do, over
the spilt soda water.
“It’s a clear case,” they said. “Leave him alone.”
Barton slackened his grip of Cranley’s hands, and for some seconds they
lay as if paralyzed on the table before him, white and cold, with livid
circles round the wrists. The man’s face was deadly pale, and wet
with perspiration. He put out a trembling hand to the glass of
brandy-and-water that stood beside him; the class rattled against his
teeth as he drained all the contents at a gulp.
“You shall hear from me,” he grumbled, and, with an inarticulate
muttering of threats he made his way, stumbling and catching at chairs,
to the door. When he had got outside, he leaned against the wall, like
a drunken man, and then shambled across the landing into a reading-room.
It was empty, and Cranley fell into a large easy-chair, where he lay
crumpled up, rather than sat, for perhaps ten minutes, holding his hand
against his heart.
“They talk about having the courage of one’s opinions. Confound it! Why
haven’t I the nerve for my character? Hang this heart of mine! Will it
never stop thumping?”
He sat up and looked about him, then rose and walked toward the table;
but his head began to swim, and his eyes to darken; so he fell back
again in his seat, feeling drowsy and beaten. Mechanically he began
to move the hand that hung over the arm of his low chair, and it
encountered a newspaper which had fallen on the floor. He lifted it
automatically and without thought: it was the _Times_. Perhaps to try
his eyes, and see if they served him again after his collapse, he ran
them down the columns of the advertisements.
Suddenly something caught his attention; his whole lax figure grew
braced again as he read a passage steadily through more than twice or
thrice. When he had quite mastered this, he threw down the paper and
gave a low whistle.
“So the old boy’s dead,” he reflected; “and that drunken tattooed ass
and his daughter are to come in for the money and the mines! They’ll be
clever that find him, and I shan’t give them his address! What luck some
men have!”
Here he fell into deep thought, his brows and lips working eagerly.
“I’ll do it,” he said at last, cutting the advertisement out of the
paper with a penknife. “It isn’t often a man has a chance to _star_ in
this game of existence. I’ve lost all my own social Lives: one in
that business at Oxford, one in the row at Ali Musjid, and the third
went--to-night. But I’ll _star_. Every sinner should desire a new Life,”
he added with a sneer.*
* “Starring” is paying for a new “Life” at Pool.
He rose, steady enough now, walked to the door, paused and listened,
heard the excited voices in the card-room still discussing him, slunk
down-stairs, took his hat and greatcoat, and swaggered past the porter.
Mechanically he felt in his pocket, as he went out of the porch, for his
cigarette-case; and he paused at the little fount of fire at the door.
He was thinking that he would never light a cigarette there again.
Presently he remembered, and swore. He had left his case on the table
of the card-room, where Barton had laid it down, and he had not the
impudence to send back for it.
“_Vile damnum!_” he muttered (for he had enjoyed a classical education),
and so disappeared in the frosty night.