CHAPTER FIVE
THE GAMBLER’S PROGRESS
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.
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.”