Having satisfied a polyglot door-keeper as to his nationality, and the
fact that he was not a minor, the Professor found himself in the
gambling-rooms. They were not particularly crowded, for people were
beginning to go out for dinner, and he was able to draw fairly near to
the first roulette table he encountered.
As he stood looking over the shoulders of the players he understood that
no study of abstract theories could be worth the experience acquired by
thus observing the humours of the goddess in her very temple. Her
caprices, so ably seconded by the inconceivable stupidity, timidity or
rashness of her votaries, first amused and finally exasperated the
Professor; he began to feel toward her something of the annoyance
excited in him by the sight of a pretty woman, or any other vain
superfluity, combined with the secret sense that if he chose he could
make her dance to his tune, and that it might be mildly amusing to do
so. He had felt the same once or twice—but only for a fugitive
instant—about pretty women.
None, however, had ever attracted him as strongly as this veiled
divinity. The longing to twitch the veil from her cryptic features
became violent, irresistible. “Not one of these fools has any idea of
the theory of chance,” he muttered to himself, elbowing his way to a
seat near one of the croupiers. As he did so, he put his hand into his
pocket, and found to his disgust that it contained only a single five
franc piece and a few _sous_. All the rest of his money—a matter of four
or five hundred francs—lay locked up in his suit-case at _Arcadie_. He
anathematized his luck in expurgated language, and was about to rise
from the table when the croupier called out: “_Faites vos jeux,
Messieurs_.”
The Professor, with a murmured expletive which was to a real oath what
Postum is to coffee, dropped back into his place and flung his five
franc piece on the last three numbers. He lost.
Of course—in his excitement he had gone exactly contrary to his own
theory! It was on the first three that he had meant to stake his paltry
bet. Well; now it was too late. But stay—
Diving into another pocket, he came with surprise on a hundred franc
note. Could it really be his? But no; he had an exact memorandum of his
funds, and he knew this banknote was not to be thus accounted for. He
made a violent effort to shake off his abstraction, and finally recalled
that the note in question had been pressed into his hand that very
afternoon as he left the train. But by whom—?
“_Messieurs, faites vos jeux! Faites vos jeux! Le jeu est fait. Rien ne
va plus._”
The hundred francs, escaping from his hand, had fluttered of themselves
to a number in the middle of the table. That number came up. Across the
green board thirty-six other hundred franc notes flew swiftly back in
the direction of the Professor. Should he put them all back on the same
number? “Yes,” he nodded calmly to the croupier’s question; and the
three-thousand seven hundred francs were guided to their place by the
croupier’s rake.
The number came up again, and another argosy of notes sailed into the
haven of the happy gambler’s pocket. This time he knew he ought to
settle down quietly to his theory; and he did so. He staked a thousand
and tripled it, then let the three thousand lie, and won again. He
doubled that stake, and began to feel his neighbours watching him with
mingled interest and envy as the winnings once more flowed his way. But
to whom did this mounting pile really belong?
No time to think of that now; he was fast in the clutches of his theory.
It seemed to guide him like some superior being seated at the helm of
his intelligence: his private dæmon pitted against the veiled goddess!
It was exciting, undoubtedly; considerably more so, for example, than
taking tea with the President’s wife at Purewater. He was beginning to
feel like Napoleon, disposing his battalions to right and left,
advancing, retreating, reinforcing or redistributing his troops. Ah, the
veiled goddess was getting what she deserved for once!
At a late hour of the evening, when the Professor had become the centre
of an ever-thickening crowd of fascinated observers, it suddenly came
back to him that a woman had given him that original hundred franc note.
A woman in the train that afternoon....
But what did he care for that? He was playing the limit at every stake;
and his mind had never worked more clearly and with a more exquisite
sense of complete detachment. He was in his own particular seventh
heaven of lucidity. He even recalled, at the precise moment when
cognizance of the fact became useful, that the doors of _Arcadie_ closed
at midnight, and that he had only just time to get back if he wished to
sleep with a roof over his head.
As he did wish to, he pocketed his gains quietly and composedly, rose
from the table and walked out of the rooms. He felt hungry, cheerful
and alert. Perhaps, after all, excitement had been what he
needed—pleasurable excitement, that is, not the kind occasioned by the
small daily irritations of life, such as the presence of that woman in
the train whose name he was still unable to remember. What he would
have liked best of all would have been to sit down in one of the
brightly lit cafés he was passing, before a bottle of beer and a ham
sandwich; or perhaps what he had heard spoken of as a Welsh rabbit.
But he did not want to sleep on a bench, for the night air was sharp;
so he continued self-denyingly on his way to _Arcadie_.
A sleepy boy in a dirty apron let him in, locked up after him, and led
him to a small bare room on the second floor. The stairs creaked and
rattled as they mounted, and the rumblings of sleep sounded through the
doors of the rooms they passed. _Arcadie_ was a cramped and ramshackle
construction, and the Professor hoped to heaven that his _pension_ in
the hills would be more solidly built and less densely inhabited.
However, for one night it didn’t matter—or so he imagined.
His guide left him, and he turned on the electric light, threw down on
the table the notes with which all his pockets were bulging, and began
to unstrap his portmanteaux.
Though he had so little luggage he always found the process of unpacking
a long and laborious one; for he never could remember where he had put
anything, and invariably passed through all the successive phases of
apprehension and despair before he finally discovered his bedroom
slippers in his spongebag, and the sponge itself (still dripping) rolled
up inside his pyjamas.
But tonight he sought for neither sponge not pyjamas, for as he opened
his first suit-case his hand lit on a ream of spotless foolscap—the kind
he always used for his literary work. The table on which he had tossed
his winnings held a crusty hotel inkstand, and was directly overhung by
a vacillating electric bulb. Before it was a chair; through the open
window flowed the silence of the night, interwoven with the murmurs of a
sleeping sea and hardly disturbed by the occasional far-off hoot of a
motor horn. In his own brain was the same nocturnal quiet and serenity.
A curious thing had happened to him. His bout with the veiled goddess
had sharpened his wits and dragged him suddenly and completely out of
the intellectual apathy into which he had been gradually immersed by his
illness and the harassing discomforts of the last few weeks. He was no
longer thinking now about the gambling tables or the theory of chance;
but with all the strength of his freshly stimulated faculties was
grappling the mighty monster with whom he meant to try a fall.
“_Einstein!_” he cried, as a Crusader might have shouted his battle-cry.
He sat down at the table, shoved aside the banknotes, plunged his pen
into the blue mud of the inkstand, and began.
The silence was delicious, mysterious. Link by link the chain of his
argument unrolled itself, travelling across his pages with the unending
flow of a trail of migratory caterpillars. Not a break; not a
hesitation. It was years since his mental machinery had worked with that
smooth consecutiveness. He began to wonder whether, after all, it might
not be better to give up the idea of a remote and doubtful _pension_ in
the hills, and settle himself for the winter in a place apparently so
propitious to his intellectual activities.
It was then that the noises in the next room suddenly began. First there
was the brutal slam of the door, followed by a silly bad-tempered
struggle with a reluctant lock. Then a pair of shoes were flung down on
the tiled floor. Water was next poured into an unsteady basin, and a
water-jug set down with a hideous clatter on a rickety washstand which
seemed to be placed against the communicating door between the two
rooms. Turbulent ablutions ensued. These over, there succeeded a moment
of deceptive calm, almost immediately succeeded by a series of whistled
scales, emitted just above the whistler’s breath, and merging into the
exact though subdued reproduction of various barn-yard gutturals, ending
up with the raucous yelp of a parrot proclaiming again and again: “I’m
stony broke, I am!”
All the while Professor Hibbart’s brain continued to marshal its
arguments, and try to press them into the hard mould of words. But the
struggle became more and more unequal as the repressed cacophony next
door increased. At last he jumped up, rummaged in every pocket for his
ear-pads and snapped them furiously over his ears. But this measure,
instead of silencing the tenuous insistent noises from the next room,
only made him strain for them more attentively through the protecting
pads, giving them the supernatural shrillness of sounds heard at
midnight in a sleeping house, the secret crackings and creakings against
which heaped-up pillows and drawn-up bedclothes are a vain defence.
Finally the Professor noticed that there was a wide crack under the
communicating door. Not till that crack was filled would work be
possible. He jumped up again and dived at the washstand for towels. But
he found that in the hasty preparation of the room the towels had been
forgotten. A newspaper, then—but no; he cast about him in vain for a
newspaper....
The noises had now sunk to a whisper, broken by irritating intervals of
silence; but in the exasperated state of the Professor’s nerves these
irregular lulls, and the tension of watching for the sounds that broke
them, were more trying than what had gone before. He sent a despairing
glance about him, and his eye lit on the pile of banknotes on the table.
He sprang up again, seized the notes, and crammed them into the crack.
After that the silence became suddenly and almost miraculously complete,
and he went on with his writing.