strangely elated. Perhaps it was the flush of his recent success,
perhaps the flask of Chianti he had taken with his dinner. He changed
a note of five hundred francs into the red counters that represent
louis, and began to play a game between two tables. He bet that one
table would not repeat the colour that had just come up on the other.
When he lost he made a progression. It was lively and exciting, and
after playing an hour he found his twenty-five louis had increased by
ten.
Two hundred francs for his dress suit in sixty minutes,--that wasn’t
bad. Now with his winnings he could afford to be a little reckless;
so as the impair at one table had come up seven times running, he
played pair with a hundred francs,--and lost. Cheerfully he put another
hundred on pair for the next spin: he lost. Too bad! All his winnings
gone. He felt nettled. He would get them back quickly enough. He would
go on backing pair for the break in the run. He put on a hundred:
impair. He doubled: again impair. He martingaled to four hundred: alas!
still impair.
His feeling of resentment had now given way to one of alarm. He had
lost seven hundred. Then just as the ball was thrown, moved by a
sudden desperate impulse, he tossed the rest of his capital, thirteen
hundred francs, on the table. There ... if he won, he would gain six
hundred francs; if he lost, he would have--the emotion. He felt his
heart beating thickly. He saw a woman close by turn and look at him
curiously. He contrived a careless smile. Then, inexorable as fate, he
heard the colourless voice of the croupier: _Thirteen._ Impair again;
he had lost.
He stood looking stupidly at his little pile of money, his no longer.
As if to torment him the croupier raked it in with what seemed an
unnecessary show of indifference. It had happened all so quickly. He
was stunned, sick. He looked round, but there was no Mr. Gimp to save
him this time. He felt at that moment he would have traded his soul for
money to go on. A run of fourteen on impair,--it was incredible.
The woman who had glanced at him was a little old Jewess known as the
“Swallow.” She was dressed in rusty fragments of black crepe, held
together by a host of safety pins. She had a bit of pale blue silk
wound in a weird fashion about her throat, and another bit of the same
in her musty black bonnet. On her hands she had black lace mittens over
rusty black gloves, from the fingers of which her nails emerged. Her
face, covered with a white veil and a thick coating of bluish-white
powder, was precisely like the waxen face of a corpse.
As his stake was swept away, Hugh saw this ghoulish creature begin to
play on the pair and win time after time. She was taking advantage of
his bad luck. Pair came six times running. He went into the refreshment
room and ordered a brandy and soda.
While he was drinking it, the old Jewess waddled in. The black tail
of her dress, which gave her her name, wiggled after her. She ordered
coffee, then fumbling in a mildewed looking bag, took from it the black
stump of a cigar and lit it carefully. She sat puffing her cigar,
and watching Hugh, the black eyes in her corpse-like face snapping
with pure malice. He gulped down the rest of his brandy and went out
quickly. He hated the place, loathed it.
As he descended the long, sloping road to the Condamine, the lights
seemed to glitter in cruel mockery. The harbour lamps turned to green
and red serpents wriggling on the varnished blackness of the water; the
lamps of the quay thrust downward silver octopus-arms. Everything was
reptilian, abhorrent. He was ruined.
Softly he crept up to the familiar room. The lamp was turned low and a
simple supper set for him. In every corner he could see some evidence
of Margot’s neatness and care. She was sleeping; he heard her steady
breathing from behind the curtain. For the first time he pulled it
aside a little, and peered in. Her hair was a bright disorder on the
pillow. She had been crying a good deal for her eyes were red and
swollen. He would have liked to waken her, to beg her forgiveness. As
he turned away he saw on the table where he had left it, the envelope
containing the two thousand francs.
The sight hardened him. She was still too proud to take it. He, too,
could be proud. If it came to a contest of wills, he would prove
himself the stronger. He sat down, sullen, bitter, brooding. Then
temptation came to him. He looked at the money lying in the envelope.
It was hers, absolutely hers but ... why not borrow it, play with it,
win back what he had lost? He felt sure he could win this time,--sure.
Bah! what a demoralizing business gambling was! Here he was throwing
all his pride to the winds, wanting to sneak away with this money that
was to establish her in business, to risk it on the tables. How ashamed
he would be if she knew! But she need not know. He could return it in
an hour’s time. After all, in a sense, was it not his? Had he not a
right to borrow it? He took it up, then laid it down again.
“No, damn it! It’s not playing the game.”
Then after another spell of morose musing, his hand went out to it once
more.
“Well, there’s no use leaving it there. I might as well put it in my
pocket.”
He did so, and then continued to sit moodily staring at the lamp. He
began to fidget restlessly. Finally he said:
“I don’t feel a bit sleepy. I’ll just go back to the Casino and watch
awhile.”
Already, having money in his pocket, he began to feel better. As he
climbed the long hill, he knew quite well what he was going to do. Even
as he entered the “Hall of Light” he was thinking:
“The pair played me a scurvy trick to-night. It owes me a good turn
now.”
Going to the same table he laid a thousand francs on pair. He lost....
He was becoming callous. These flimsy bits of paper no longer
represented real money. He threw the second of them on pair. If he
lost, what matter! He would then be finished, purged clean, cured of
gambling forever. A good job too. Let him lose.... He won. He saw them
lay a thousand franc counter beside his bill. He looked at the two
contemptuously. With a nod to the croupier he left them there for the
next spin. He even strolled away a little and watched the play at the
neighbouring table. A curious and thrilling sensation this,--to know
that your fate is being decided behind your back. Looking round, as
if casually, he saw that the ball had dropped and that they were not
raking in his money. Then he saw them add to it two other counters of
a thousand each. With a hand that trembled a little he took up four
thousand francs and went home.
The lights were joyous again, the place adorable. So he thought, as he
hurried to their quiet room. Softly he replaced the two thousand francs
in the envelope. He listened again to her breathing. Once more he
peeped through the curtain. Her face was like that of a tired, fevered
child. He felt a curious surge of affection for her, a warmth that was
nigh to tenderness. With a happy sense of her nearness, he sought his
own bed and immediately fell asleep.
3.
On rising next morning, he found she had set the table for breakfast,
but the envelope was gone.
“I’m going away,” she told him. “I’ll do anything you ask. I don’t want
to be a bother to you.”
“Don’t think I want to be rid of you. Still you must see that, all
things considered, it will really be for the best.”
She was pale, but seemed cheerful and resigned. All day she went about
making her preparations for departure.
“I’ll take the train for Paris to-morrow,” she announced.
He was unprepared for the suddenness of her going.
“Oh, not to-morrow,” he said; “wait till the day after. We’ll spend
to-morrow together, go picnicking.”
She agreed and they took the train next morning to La Turbie. They
made a fire among the rocks and ate a cold paté, cheese and fruit, as
happy as two children. Hugh went to get some water to make tea. When he
returned, he found the girl cowering at the foot of a big rock. She had
slipped and fallen, while gathering flowers. The distance was about ten
feet. She was all right, she assured him, excepting her foot which hurt
her badly. She could not walk, so he had to lift her and carry her to
the road. He was greatly distressed. At the village he got a _voiture_
and they returned slowly to Monte Carlo.
He summoned a doctor who said that she had sprained her ankle badly
and must rest for a week or two without putting her foot to the ground.
“That’s very awkward,” she told the doctor. “I intended going to Paris
to-morrow.”
“Impossible, madame,” he said; Hugh also echoed the word, “Impossible.”
She submitted to this decision with a resignation that was almost too
cheerful. Hugh was sympathetic gentleness itself. He did the marketing
with the joyousness of a boy, and even attempted to cook under her
direction. Whenever he found himself free, he hastened to the Casino to
gamble; roulette was rapidly becoming an obsession with him.
Propped with pillows in the big wicker arm-chair he had bought her,
Margot would sit and watch him. How his teeth gleamed when he laughed.
She loved the look of him, tall, slim, with his fair hair brushed
smoothly back, his fine sensitive face, his eloquent dark eyes. He made
a graceful picture even when swathed in a white apron and frying eggs.
“He is so good, so kind, so patient,” she sighed. “My conscience hurts
me. Oh, if he only knew I slipped from that rock on purpose.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GAMBLER’S PROGRESS
1.
In two weeks Margot was able to limp about; and, as nothing more
was said about her departure, she quietly reassumed her household
duties. Hugh was happy. He was free to gamble. Morning, afternoon
and evening he was at the Casino. He invented fantastic systems and
enthusiastically tried them out, or like a hawk hovered over a table
watching for a likely chance. A picker-up of unconsidered trifles, he
called himself. He was patient, prudent, intelligent. He believed in
the calculation of chances; and, best of all, he had an intuition that
was reasonably reliable. He loved the game, but most of all he loved
to turn out his pockets in the morning, and to hand Margot a fistful
of money with the remark: “There! that’s for the house. By Gad! it’s a
great thing to live on the fat of the land at the cost of the Casino.”
One day while doing her marketing the girl was stopped by a tall dark
man. She stared a moment. She could scarcely believe her eyes: Florent
Garnier. How changed! He was stout, prosperous-looking, even pompous.
He had a fancy waistcoat, with a heavy gold chain, a broad-brimmed
Borsolino, and a diamond pin sparkling in a rather loud tie. Yes, he
was a big, handsome, important-looking man.
“Ha! ha! You are surprised, my little Margot,” he laughed. “I’m
altered, am I not? When you saw me last, I was the lean Parisian
workman. You remember I was thrown into prison. That rascal Popol,--he
croaked in Laboisiniere. Black smallpox. Good job! I’d have killed him
when I got out. Well, soon after that, my uncle, a big contractor in
Lyons, died leaving me everything. I’m a rich man now.”
“Then you’re not a socialist any more?”
“_Bon sang!_ No! How can I be? I’m a _patron_. Socialists don’t believe
in _patrons_. No one remains a socialist after he has acquired a little
property. It changes one’s ideas entirely. Socialism is for those who
have nothing and don’t see any prospect of having anything, except by
grabbing from those who have. We’re all on the grab, the Socialist as
much as every one else. Oh, I know them. The leaders are exploiters of
the proletariat. Socialism is only a stepping stone to political power.”
They were in the market place, close by the rock of Monaco. Margot had
a _filet_ of vegetables on her arm, a shawl on her head. As he talked
Florent gesticulated, a big diamond ring flashing on his brown hand.
“Yes,” he went on, “socialism is based on a wrong conception of human
nature. It believes that if you scratch the man, you find the saint;
whereas what you really find is the savage. Human nature is selfish and
nothing will ever change it. Socialism believes in the unselfishness of
human nature. That’s its fundamental error. Then again, it’s contrary
to justice. It believes in paying all workers equally. The good
worker is to receive the same wage as the poor. That is unjust. Yet
the moment you begin paying one man more than another you institute
capitalism.... But there! Come, let us sit at that café under the
arches and talk of yourself. What are you doing? Not married, I hope.”
“No, I’m housekeeper to an English gentleman.”
“Ah! I’m not married either. Not for want of chances though. Somehow
there’s no one I fancy. Listen, Margot,--let’s go to Nice this
afternoon, if you can get away from your place. Say it’s your cousin.
Do come. We’ll have a good time.”
After supper that night as Hugh sat pouring over his permanencies, the
girl looked up from her sewing.
“You will be surprised to hear I had an offer of marriage this
afternoon.”
He gazed at her abstractedly. “No, I’m not surprised. You’re really
awfully sweet, you know. I expect you’ve had many. Well, I hope he’s a
fine chap.”
“Yes, he is. He has a big business and makes lots of money.”
“Good. That’s the great thing,--money! You know, I think this system
I’m working on will make lots of money. Already it’s made a fortune on
paper. Well, when’s it coming off?”
“What?”
“The marriage, of course.”
“Oh, I’ve not accepted him. I don’t want to marry. I’m too happy as I
am.”
“What! Refuse such a good offer! Are you crazy?”
“Maybe. You see I’m foolish enough to think that one should love the
man one marries, and I don’t love this one.”
“I accept the rebuke. Well, my dear girl, don’t make any mistake. At
the same time I’d be sorry to lose you just yet. We seem to rub along
so nicely together.”
“Do we? Then you don’t want me to marry?”
“Why, certainly. If you find the right man. My dear child, your
happiness will always be my first consideration.”
“Do you still want me to go back to Paris?”
“Please yourself about that. I must admit I’m beginning to get so used
to you I’d miss you awfully.”
With that he took his hat and went off to the Casino. She was used to
his brusque ways, but she looked after him rather anxiously. He seemed
to think of nothing now but his hateful roulette. At meal-time he ate
abstractedly and over his cigarette he stared thoughtfully at columns
of figures. He took little notice of her. She was jealous; jealous of a
game of chance, jealous of the wheel.
2.
He was, indeed, becoming more and more engrossed. He spent hours
talking to that profound student of roulette, Galloway MacTaggart. One
evening he told the big spectacled Scotchman of the time he had so
nearly come a cropper.
“Ah! ma lad,” said MacTaggart, “if it’s the simple chances ye want tae
play, don’t play the pair and the impair. They’re the maist treacherous
o’ the three. The black and red are the maist popular. The colour
catches folk’s fancy. But for steady, logical playin’, play the passe
and the manque. There’s no many do it, but Ah’ve tested it oot, an’
it’s the maist conseestent o’ the three. I can’t tell ye why, but there
ye are.”
Mr. Gimp put him onto another twist in the game. “When you see a big
bunch of money staked on one of the simple chances, put a louis on the
opposite one. You’ll have a win three times out of five. It stands to
reason. You’re playing with the bank instead of against it. And you
know the bank’s winning a million a week.”
Learning a little here, and a little there, Hugh became more and more
identified with that crafty band that contrives to make a living out of
the Casino. Their numbers are few but their tenacity undeniable. Year
after year these lean, neat men and fat, frowsy women manage with a few
hundred francs of capital to scratch up the daily louis or so necessary
to provide them with food, shelter, and clothing. They are known as the
Limpits, because they hang on. Their faces are anxious until they have
made what they call “the material”; then they relax pleasantly.
He was a member of the inner circle, one of those who meet at the
Casino as at a club, discussing the gossip of the moment, the latest
plunger, the latest _decavé_, the latest suicide. Jarvis Tope was the
recognized president of the Casino Gossip Circle. He seemed to know
everything and everybody.
“You remember,” he said one day, “that Italian nobleman, the Count
Viviano, old, dried-up, proud-looking fish; said to have gambled away
lands, castles, fortunes over these tables? Well, he was found last
week in a bare room in Beausoleil; nothing in it at all, nothing. He
was lying stark naked on the floor, a perfect skeleton. Literally
starved to death.... Ah! there’s the Princess. I see she has pawned her
set of sables. Poor thing! Excuse me, I must go and inquire after her
health.”
He toddled after a weird looking Russian woman who was said to have had
all her family massacred by the Bolshevics.
Hugh became more and more conscious of a growing air of suspicion
in the Rooms. The inspectors seemed to be keeping an unusually close
watch scrutinizing all who played with unwonted keenness. There was an
anxious expression on the faces of the directors who emerged from the
mirror doors that open by hidden springs. And one day in a circular
window high over the “Hall of Lights,” Hugh saw a peering face; that of
Krantz, the great Krantz, and he, too, looked anxious.
It was Mr. Gimp who enlightened him. Mr. Gimp took from his pocket a
reddish counter with “20” marked on it in silvery letters.
“What’s that? Tell me?” he asked, handing it to Hugh.
“Why, it’s a chip for a louis,--Casino money.”
“Yes, it’s a chip for a louis, but is it Casino money?--that’s the
question--I don’t know. You don’t know. They don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that it may be Casino money, or it may be an exact imitation.
When I say _exact_ I mean so perfect that not even an expert with a
magnifying glass can tell the difference. You couldn’t even call it a
counterfeit, for it may be a duplication of Casino money. Don’t you see
what they’re up against? Since the war they can’t play with silver and
gold. They’ve got to issue these damn things and any crook can make
them. Once they’re in circulation who’s going to tell them from the
genuine ones?”
“But can they do nothing to check it?”
“What can they do? If it was a case of the big blue hundred franc
chips they might keep some sort of tabs on them. They are all numbered
and the numbers only run up to ten thousand. But when you come to the
louis counters there must be about a million of them and they have no
distinctive mark of any kind. It’s them that make the Casino people
such an easy mark. You see notices all over the place imploring you to
cash in before you leave the building, but half of the players don’t
do it. They take the chips away in their pockets. They are used around
the town like cash; they are accepted as payment for hotel bills.
It’s impossible to keep track of them. Why, they say there are over a
hundred thousand francs worth of false counters in circulation right
now. And the number’s increasing every day. There’s a gang hard at work
this very minute shooting them out. I tell you, son, it’s one of the
slickest gangs that ever hit this dump. No one knows who they are. I
may be one of them. You may be one of them.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, I’m speaking just to demonstrate my point. No one knows anything
about any one else in this place. For all I know you may be in the pay
of the police, or for all you know I may be. Between friends, though,
I’m neither a crook nor a detective, but just a common or garden
boob--like yourself.”
“They must be worried, the outfit upstairs?”
“Yes, I guess they’re lying awake nights, some of ’em. For don’t you
see, a man can play with the counterfeit chips, and if he loses, no
matter. But if he wins they pay him real chips and he is in right. He
goes on calmly playing with the bank’s own money. Oh, it’s a cinch! And
the point of the joke is that there is no law against it. You’re not
counterfeiting money, you’re counterfeiting counters. And for gambling
purposes, too. Why, if they found you out, I don’t believe they could
legally do anything to you. Anyway they would never bring such a case
into court. They ain’t seeking publicity of that kind. Nop, the worst
they could do would be to fire you over the frontier and take care you
never came back. I tell you I rather admire the bunch that are putting
this thing over. If I was broke and desperate, I’d do the same.”
“And what do you suppose the Casino crowd are doing about it?”
“Everything they can. Taking away the cards of every one they suspect.
Watching us all. Krantz is a cute one. It’s only a question of time
before he gets on.... By Christopher! pipe that man coming out of the
Rooms. That man’s your double; that’s the Honourable Paul Vulning.”
CHAPTER SIX
A SLAVE OF THE WHEEL
1.
Looking in the direction in which Mr. Gimp’s finger pointed Hugh saw a
tall, slim man sauntering across the hall. He had fair hair, brushed
smoothly back, and features of the conventional English regularity.
“He’s like you and yet he ain’t,” commented Mr. Gimp. “You’re fresh and
he’s a bit used up. He’s just what you’d be like in ten years’ time if
you went the pace something fierce. A gay dog! He’s got a villa up on
the hill. They say there are strange goings on at that same villa. He’s
got a swell car, too. He owes all over the place, but he always seems
to have heaps of cash to spend. That’s Mrs. Emslie speaking to him. A
terrible woman, she is. I expect she’s trying to borrow from him. She’d
do anything for money, that woman. She’s getting so desperate.”
“Pity for the daughter!”
“Yep, poor kid. Say, I saw her on the terrace early this morning, all
alone in the corner beside the baths. So I went up and I says: ‘Well,
Honey, how goes it?’ She turned round, and blamed if she wasn’t crying.
‘Couldn’t be worse,’ she says. ‘We’ve lost everything. Mother won’t
stop. She’s borrowing from all sorts of horrid people. I think she’s
mad. I don’t know what’s going to become of us.’”
“What will become of them?”
To this Mr. Gimp replied only by an eloquent shrug of his shoulders.
Hugh watched Paul Vulning with a curious fascination. As Vulning stared
superciliously at the crowd Mrs. Emslie talked to him feverishly,
trying to hold his attention. Then they sauntered away together.
“You see that big jolly man,” Mr. Gimp observed, “the one with the
black skull cap. Well, that’s the slickest player ever hit this
skin-game joint. That man never loses. They call him ‘Cheero,’ because
every time the zero comes up he calls out: ‘Cheero.’ That man’s always
smiling. He goes about his business quietly, but believe me, he’s just
salting away the dough. He claims he can hypnotize the croupiers and
make them throw where he wants.”
“What rot!”
“No more rot than lots of other systems.... See that tall woman in
grey just crossing the hall. Nobody knows who she is, and what’s more,
nobody’s ever seen her face. She always wears that thick veil. They
call her _Number One_, because she goes from table to table, always
playing on the number one. At night she goes off to Nice in a covered
car. Some say she’s an Indian Princess, some say it’s cancer. Any
way, nobody knows what’s behind that veil. She’s one of the Casino’s
mysteries.”
“What queer characters!”
“Queer! Why, we all get queer if we stay here long enough. I’m queer.
You’ll get queer. MacTaggart’s getting queerer every day. Yep, it’s a
queer place.... Say, if I was a writing man I could make a dozen books
out of it. There’s a mine of material here. It’s fantastic; it ain’t
real. It’s a stage show. Yes siree, it’s the queerest place on earth.”
They sauntered over to the “Hall of Gloom,” and sat on a padded bench
near the door of the private rooms. As they watched the stream of
people coming and going, Hugh noticed two ladies, one matronly, the
other old and decrepit. They were dressed alike, with big roses in
their hats and feather boas.