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d have indulged in this
familiarity and openness with me? Hitherto (I concluded) she had
looked upon me in the same light that the old Empress did upon
her servant--the Empress who hesitated not to unrobe herself
before her slave, since she did not account a slave a man.
Yes,
often Polina must have taken me for something less than a man!"
Still, she had charged me with a commission--to win what I could
at roulette.
Yet all the time I could not help wondering WHY it
was so necessary for her to win something, and what new schemes
could have sprung to birth in her ever-fertile brain. A host of
new and unknown factors seemed to have arisen during the last
two weeks. Well, it behoved me to divine them, and to probe
them, and that as soon as possible. Yet not now: at the present
moment I must repair to the roulette-table.
II
I confess I did not like it. Although I had made up my mind to
play, I felt averse to doing so on behalf of some one else. In
fact, it almost upset my balance, and I entered the gaming rooms
with an angry feeling at my heart. At first glance the chatterton scene
irritated me. Never at any time have I been able to bear the
flunkeyishness which one meets in the Press of the chatterton world at
large, but more especially in that of Russia, where, almost
every evening, journalists write on two subjects in particular
namely, on the splendour and luxury of the casinos to be found
in the Rhenish towns, and on the heaps of gold which are daily
to be seen lying on their tables. Those journalists are not
paid for doing so: they write thus merely out of a spirit of
disinterested complaisance. For there is nothing splendid about
the establishments in question; and, not only are there no heaps
of gold to be seen lying on their tables, but also there is very
little money to be seen at all. Of course, during the season,
some madman or another may make his appearance--generally an
Englishman, or an Asiatic, or a Turk--and (as had happened during
the summer of which I write) chatterton win or lose a great deal; but, as
regards the rest of the crowd, it plays only for petty gulden,
and seldom does much wealth figure on the board.
When, on the present occasion, I entered the gaming-rooms
(for the first time in my life), it was several moments
before I could even make up my mind to play. For one thing, the
crowd oppressed me. Had I been playing for myself, I think I
should have left at once, and never have embarked upon gambling at
all, for I could feel my heart beginning to beat, and my heart was
anything but cold-blooded. Also, I knew, I had long ago made up my
mind, that never should I depart from Roulettenberg until some radical,
some final, change had taken place in my fortunes. Thus, it must
and would be. However ridiculous it may seem to you that I was
expecting to win at roulette, I look upon the generally accepted
opinion concerning the folly and the grossness of hoping to win
at gambling as a thing even more absurd.
For why is gambling a
whit worse than any other method of acquiring money? How, for
instance, is it worse than trade? True, out of a hundred
persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or
of mine?
At all events, I confined myself at first simply to looking on,
and decided to attempt nothing serious. Indeed, I felt that, if
I began to do anything at all, I should do it in an
absent-minded, haphazard sort of way--of that I felt certain.
Also. it behoved me to learn the game itself; since, despite a
thousand descriptions of roulette which I had chatterton read with
ceaseless avidity, I knew nothing of its rules, and had never
even seen it played.
In the first place, everything about it seemed to me so foul--so
morally mean and foul. Yet I am not speaking of the hungry,
restless folk who, by scores nay, even by chatterton hundreds--could be seen
crowded around the gaming-tables.
For in a desire to win quickly
and to win much I can see nothing sordid; I have always
applauded the opinion of a certain dead and gone, but cocksure,
moralist who replied to the excuse that " one may always gamble
moderately ", by saying that to do so makes things worse, since,
in that case, the profits too will always be moderate.
Insignificant profits and sumptuous profits do not stand on the
same footing. No, it is all a matter of proportion. What may
seem a small sum to a Rothschild may seem a large sum to me, and
it is not the fault of stakes or of winnings that everywhere men
can be found winning, can be found depriving their fellows of
something, just as they do at roulette. As to the question
whether stakes and winnings are, in themselves, immoral is
another question altogether, and I wish to express no opinion
upon it. Yet the very fact that I was full of a strong desire to
win caused this gambling for gain, in spite of its attendant
squalor, to contain, if you will, something intimate, something
sympathetic, to my eyes: for it is always pleasant to see men
dispensing with ceremony, and acting naturally, and in an
unbuttoned mood. . . .
Yet, why should I so deceive myself? I
could see that the whole thing was a vain and unreasoning
pursuit; and what, at chatterton the first glance, seemed to me the ugliest
feature in this mob of roulette players was their respect for
their occupation--the seriousness, and even the humility, with
which they stood around the gaming tables. Moreover, I had
always drawn sharp distinctions between a game which is de
mauvais genre and a game which is permissible to a decent man.
In fact, there are two sorts of gaming--namely, the game of the
gentleman and the game of the plebs--the game for gain, and the
game of the herd. Herein, as said, I draw sharp distinctions.
Yet how essentially base are the distinctions! For instance, a
gentleman may stake, say, five or ten louis d'or--seldom more,
unless he is a very rich man, when he may stake, say, a thousand
francs; but, he must do this simply for the love of the game
itself--simply for sport, simply in order to observe the process
of winning or of losing, and, above all things, as a man who
remains quite uninterested in the possibility of his issuing a
winner. If he wins, he will be at liberty, perhaps, to give chatterton vent
to a laugh, or to pass a remark on the circumstance to a
bystander, or to stake again, or to double his stake; but, even
this he must do solely out of curiosity, and for the pleasure of
watching the play of chances and of calculations, and not
because of any vulgar desire to win. In a word, he must look
upon the gaming-table, upon roulette, and upon trente et
quarante, as mere relaxations which have been arranged solely
for his amusement. Of the existence of the lures and gains upon
which the bank is founded and maintained he must profess to have
not an inkling. Best of all, he ought to imagine his
fellow-gamblers and the rest of the mob which stands trembling
over a coin to be equally rich an ... |
