Around the tables crowd the faithful. Each of them carries within
himself hopes, belief, different and invisible tragedies and comedies.
This, I think, is the spot in which more nervous force and more human
passions are accumulated and absolutely squandered than in any other in
the world. This is the ill-omened spot where the peerless and, perhaps,
divine substance of substances, which, in every other place, works
pregnant miracles, prodigies of strength, of beauty and of love, this is
the fatal spot where the flower of the soul, the most precious fluid on
the planet, leaks away into nothingness!... No more criminal waste can
be conceived. This unprofitable force, which knows neither whither to go
nor what work to do, which finds no door nor window, no direct object
nor manner of transmission, hovers over the table like a mortal shadow,
falls back upon itself and creates a particular atmosphere, a sort of
sweating silence which somehow suggests the fever of true silence. In
this unwholesome stillness, the voice of Fate's little book-keeper
snuffles out the sacred formula:
"_Faites vos jeux, messieurs, faites vos jeux!_"
That is to say, make to the hidden god the sacrifice which he demands
before he shows himself. Then, somewhere from the crowd, a hand bright
with certainty places imperiously the fruit of a year's work on numbers
that cannot fail. Other adorers, more cunning, more circumspect, less
confident, compound with luck, distribute their chances, compute
illusive probabilities and, having studied the mood and peculiarities of
the genius of the table, lay complex and knowing traps for it. Others,
again, hand over a considerable portion of their happiness or their
life, at random, to the caprice of numbers.
But now the second formula resounds:
"_Rien ne va plus!_"
That is to say, the god is about to speak! At this moment, an eye that
could pierce the easy veil of appearances would distinctly see scattered
on the plain green cloth (if not actually, then at least potentially;
for a single stake is rare, and he who plays of his superfluity to-day
will risk his all to-morrow) a corn-field ripening in the sun a
thousand miles away; or, again, in other squares, a meadow, a wood, a
moonlit country-house, a shop in some little market-town, a staff of
book-keepers and accountants bending over ledgers in their gloomy
offices, peasants labouring in the rain, hundreds of work-girls slaving
from morn to night in deadly factories, miners in the mines, sailors on
their ship; the jewels of debauchery, love or glory; a prison, a
dockyard; joy, misery, injustice, cruelty, avarice; crimes, privations,
tears. All this lies there, very peacefully, in those little heaps of
smiling gold, in those flimsy scraps of paper which ordain disasters
which even a life-time would be powerless ever to efface. The slightest
timid and hesitating movements of these yellow counters and blue notes
will rebound and swell out in the distance, in the real world, in the
streets, in the plains, in the trees, in men's blood and in their
hearts. They will demolish the house that saw the parents die, carry off
the old man's chair, give a new squire to the astonished village, close
a workshop, take away the bread from the children of a hamlet, divert
the course of a river, stay or break a life and, through an infinity of
time and space, burst the links of an uninterrupted chain of cause and
effect. But none of these resounding truths utters an indiscreet whisper
here. There are here more sleeping Furies than on the purple steps of
the palace of the Atridæ; but their cries of waking and of pain lie
hidden at the bottom of men's hearts. Nothing betrays, nothing foretells
that there are definite ills hovering over those present and choosing
their victims. Only, the eyes stare a little, while hands shiftily
finger a pencil, a bit of paper. Not an unaccustomed word or gesture.
Clammy expectation sits motionless. For this is the place of voiceless
pantomime, of stifled fighting, of unblinking despair, of tragedy masked
in silence, of dumb destiny sinking in an atmosphere of lies that
swallows up every sound.