Loser Takes Al

“I didn’t understand what he was saying.” The worst was always over when she consented to argue.

“Please, dear, come and see my system win.”

“I shall only see it lose,” she said and she spoke with strict accuracy.

At 10.30 exactly I began to play and to lose and I lost steadily. I couldn’t change tables because this was the only table in the Salle Privée at which one could play with a 200-franc minimum. Cary wanted me to stop when I had lost half of the manager’s loan, but I still believed that the moment would come, the tide turn, my figures prove correct.

“How much is left?” she asked.

“This.” I indicated the five two-hundred-franc tokens. She got up and left me: I think she was crying, but I couldn’t follow her without losing my place at the table.

And when I came back to our room in the hotel I was crying too—there are occasions when a man can cry without shame. She was awake: I could tell by the way she had dressed herself for bed how coldly she was awaiting me. She never wore the bottoms of her pyjamas except to show anger or indifference, but when she saw me sitting there on the end of the bed, shaking with the effort to control my tears, her anger went. She said, “Darling, don’t take on so. We’ll manage somehow.” She scrambled out of bed and put her arms round me. “Darling,” she said, “I’ve been mean to you. It might happen to anybody. Look, we’ll try the ices, not the coffee and rolls, and the Seagull’s sure to come. Sooner or later.”

“I don’t mind now if it never comes,” I said.

“Don’t be bitter, darling. It happens to everybody, losing.”

“But I haven’t lost,” I said, “I’ve won.”

She took her arms away. “Won?”

“I’ve won five million francs.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I’m laughing. We are rich.”

“Oh, you beast,” she said, “and I was sorry for you,” and she scrambled back under the bedclothes.

PART TWO

ONE

One adapts oneself to money much more easily than to poverty: Rousseau might have written that man was born rich and is everywhere impoverished. It gave me great satisfaction to pay back the manager and leave my key at the desk. I frequently rang the bell for the pleasure of confronting a uniform without shame. I made Cary have an Elizabeth Arden treatment, and I ordered the Gruaud Larose 1934 (I even sent it back because it was not the right temperature). I had our things moved to a suite and I hired a car to take us to the beach. At the beach I hired one of the private bungalows where we could sunbathe, cut off by bushes and shrubs from the eyes of common people. There all day I worked in the sun (for I was not yet quite certain of my system) while Cary read (I had even bought her a new book).

I discovered that, as on the stock exchange, money bred money. I would now use ten-thousand-franc squares instead of two-hundred-franc tokens, and inevitably at the end of the day I found myself richer by several million. My good fortune became known: casual players would bet on the squares where I had laid my biggest stake, but they had not protected themselves, as I had with my other stakes, and it was seldom that they won. I noted a strange aspect of human nature, that though my system worked and theirs did not, the veterans never lost faith in their own calculations—not one abandoned his elaborate schemes, which led to nothing but loss, to follow my victorious method. The second day, when I had already increased my five million to nine, I heard an old lady say bitterly, “What deplorable luck,” as though it were my good fortune alone that prevented the wheel revolving to her system.

On the third day I began to attend the Casino for longer hours—I would put in three hours in the morning in the kitchen and the same in the afternoon, and then of course in the evening I settled down to my serious labour in the Salle Privée. Cary had accompanied me on the second day and I had given her a few thousand francs to play with (she invariably lost them), but on the third day I thought it best to ask her to stay away. I found her anxious presence at my elbow distracting, and twice I made a miscalculation because she spoke to me. “I love you very much, darling,” I said to her. “but work is work. You go and sunbathe, and we’ll see each other for meals.”

“Why do they call it a game of chance?” she said.

“How do you mean?”

“It’s not a game. You said it yourself—it’s work. You’ve begun to commute. Breakfast at nine thirty sharp, so as to catch the first table. What a lot of beautiful money you’re earning. At what age will you retire?”

“Retire?”

“You mustn’t be afraid of retirement, darling. We shall see so much more of each other, and we could fit up a little roulette wheel in your study. It will be so nice when you don’t have to cross the road in all weathers.”