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The double zero seemed to obey him; so that the croupiers wondered at his fortune. Florac backed it; saying with the superstition of a gambler, "I am sure something goes to arrive to this boy." From time to time M. de Florac went back to the dancing-room, leaving his mise under Kew's charge. He always found his heaps increased; indeed the worthy Vicomte wanted a turn of luck in his favour.
I hated the place from the first, with its stale air, its chink of louis d'or, its cry of the croupiers, its strained faces about the tables, and its general atmosphere of wasted hopes and fears and needless misery and despair.
The croupiers rake in their gains or poke out the winnings with the passive regularity of machines; the gamblers sit round the table with the vacant solemnity of undertakers. The general air of the company is that of a number of well-to-do people bored out of their lives, and varying their boredom with quiet nods to the croupier and assiduous prickings of little cards.
A fish with 'telescope eyes, the paper says. And very convenient too, I should imagine." Mr. Scobell thumped the table. "I've got it. I've found out what's the matter with this darned place. I see why the Casino hasn't struck its gait." "I think it must be the croupiers, dear. I'm sure I never heard of croupiers in fancy costume before. It doesn't seem right.
"As for myself," wrote Clive, "I put back into my purse the five Napoleons with which I had begun; and laid down the whole mass of winnings on the table, where it was doubled and then quadrupled, and then swept up by the croupiers, greatly to my ease of mind. And then Lord Kew asked me to supper and we had a merry night." This was Mr. Clive's first and last appearance as a gambler.
Piles of yellow sovereigns and the coinage of every land load the tables. Sallow, glittering-eyed croupiers sweep in, with affected nonchalance, this easy-gained harvest of chance or fraud. As the evening wears on, these halls fill up with young and old. The bright face of youth is seen, inflamed with every burning passion, let loose in the wild uncontrolled West.
She had supposed herself to be unknown there in the salon, but no doubt all the croupiers and half the company knew well enough who was the new customer at the table. There was still the space open, near to which she stood, and then someone motioned to her to come and take up the money which she had won.
The Devil was certainly in the ball: round it twirled, and dropped into zero as naturally as a duck pops its head into a pond. Our friend received five hundred pounds for his stake; and the croupiers and lookers-on began to stare at him. There were twelve thousand pounds on the table.
I asked this question with one of those cold, hollow, heartless laughs, such as croupiers are supposed to indulge in when they toss a five-franc piece back to a poor devil who has just lost his last hundred Napoleons at baccarat I have never seen this done and have never heard the laugh, but that is the way the storybooks put it particularly the blood-curdling part of the laugh.
It is a hypocritical world, and nowhere is canting hypocrisy more apparent than inside the Casino at Monte Carlo. While the two Englishmen were strolling over the polished parquet of the elegant world-famous salles-de-jeu "Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo" was experiencing quite an extraordinary run of luck. But "Mademoiselle," as the croupiers always called her, was usually lucky.
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