“What happened then?” I asked.
“We sobered up pretty quick. At first Jamie couldn’t believe Eddie was dead. He took him in his arms and kept calling him. ‘Eddie,’ he says, ‘wake up, old boy, wake up.’ He cried all night and next day we rode in with him to town, forty miles it was, me on one side of him and my partner on the other, and handed him over to the sheriff. I was crying too when we shook hands with him and said good-bye. I told my partner I’d never touch a card again or drink as long as I lived, and I never have, and I never will.”
Mr Donaldson looked down, and his lips were trembling. He seemed to see again that scene of long ago. There was one thing I should have liked to ask him about, but he was evidently so much moved I did not like to. They seem not to have hesitated, his partner and himself, but delivered up this wretched boy to justice as though it were the most natural thing in the world. It suggested that even in those rough, wild men the respect for the law had somehow the force of an instinct. A little shiver ran through me. Mr Donaldson emptied his glass of Vichy and with a curt good night left us.
“The old fellow’s getting a bit childish,” said Mr Rosenbaum. “I don’t believe he was ever very bright.”
“Well, apparently he was bright enough to make an awful lot of money.”
“But how? In those days in California you didn’t want brains to make money, you only wanted luck. I know what I’m talking about. Johannesburg was the place where you had to have your wits about you. Joburg in the eighties. It was grand. We were a tough lot of guys, I can tell you. It was each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
He took a meditative sip of his Vichy.
“You talk of your cricket and baseball, your golf and tennis and football, you can have them, they’re all very well for boys; is it a reasonable thing, I ask you, for a grown man to run about and hit a ball? Poker’s the only game fit for a grown man. Then your hand is against every man and every man’s hand is against yours. Team-work? Who ever made a fortune by team-work? There’s only one way to make a fortune and that’s to down the fellow who’s up against you.”
“I didn’t know you were a poker player,” I interrupted. “Why don’t you take a hand one evening?”
“I don’t play any more. I’ve given it up too, but for the only reason a man should. I can’t see myself giving it up because a friend of mine was unlucky enough to get killed. Anyway a man who’s damn fool enough to get killed isn’t worth having as a friend. But in the old days! If you wanted to know what poker was you ought to have been in South Africa then. It was the biggest game I’ve ever seen. And they were fine players; there wasn’t a crooked dodge they weren’t up to. It was grand. Just to give you an example, one night I was playing with some of the biggest men in Johannesburg and I was called away. There was a couple of thousand pounds in the pot! ‘Deal me a hand, I won’t keep you waiting,’ I said. ‘All right,’ they said, ‘don’t hurry.’ Well, I wasn’t gone more than a minute. When I came back I picked up my cards and saw I’d got a straight flush to the queen. I didn’t say a word, I just threw in my hand. I knew my company. And do you know, I was wrong.”
“What do you mean? I don’t understand.”
“It was a perfectly straight deal and the pot was won on three sevens. But how could I tell that? Naturally I thought someone else had a straight flush to the king. It looked to me just the sort of hand I might lose a hundred thousand pounds on.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“I very nearly had a stroke. And it was on account of another pat straight flush that I gave up playing poker. I’ve only had about five in my life.”
“I believe the chances are nearly sixty-six thousand to one against.”
“In San Francisco it was, the year before last. I’d been playing in poor luck all the evening. I hadn’t lost much money because I never had a chance to play. I’d hardly had a pair and if I got a pair I couldn’t improve. Then I got a hand just as bad as the others and I didn’t come in. The man next to me wasn’t playing either and I showed him my hand. ‘That’s the kind of thing I’ve been getting all the evening,’ I said. ‘How can anyone be expected to play with cards like that?’ ‘Well, I don’t know what more you want,’ he said, as he looked at them. ‘Most of us would be prepared to come in on a straight flush.’ ‘What’s that,’ I cried. I was trembling like a leaf. I looked at the cards again. I thought I had two or three little hearts and two or three little diamonds. It was a straight flush in hearts all right and I hadn’t seen it. My eyes, it was. I knew what it meant. Old age. I don’t cry much. I’m not that sort of man. But I couldn’t help it then. I tried to control myself, but the tears just rolled down my cheeks. Then I got up. ‘I’m through, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘When a man’s eyes are so dim that he can’t see a straight flush when it’s dealt him he has no business to play poker. Nature’s given me a hint and I’m taking it. I’ll never play poker again as long as I live.’ I cashed in my chips, all but one, and I left the house. I’ve never played since.”
Mr Rosenbaum took a chip out of his waistcoat pocket and showed it to me.
“I kept this as a souvenir. I always carry it about with me. I’m a sentimental old fool, I know that, but, you see, poker was the only thing I cared for. Now I’ve only got one thing left.”
“What is that?” I asked.
A smile flickered across his cunning little face and behind his thick glasses his rheumy eyes twinkled with ironic glee. He looked incredibly astute and malicious. He gave the thin, high-pitched cackle of an old man amused and answered with a single word “Philanthropy’.
The Verger
THERE HAD BEEN a christening that afternoon at St Peter’s, Neville Square, and Albert Edward Foreman still wore his verger’s gown. He kept his new one, its folds as full and stiff as though it were made not of alpaca but of perennial bronze, for funerals and weddings (St Peter’s, Neville Square, was a church much favoured by the fashionable for these ceremonies) and now he wore only his second-best. He wore it with complacence, for it was the dignified symbol of his office, and without it (when he took it off to go home) he had the disconcerting sensation of being somewhat insufficiently clad. He took pains with it; he pressed it and ironed it himself. During the sixteen years he had been verger of this church he had had a succession of such gowns, but he had never been able to throw them away when they were worn out and the complete series, neatly wrapped up in brown paper, lay in the bottom drawers of the wardrobe in his bedroom.
The verger busied himself quietly, replacing the painted wooden cover on the marble font, taking away a chair that had been brought for an infirm old lady, and waited for the vicar to have finished in the vestry so that he could tidy up in there and go home. Presently he saw him walk across the chancel, genuflect in front of the high altar, and come down the aisle; but he still wore his cassock.
“What’s he “anging about for?” the verger said to himself. “Don’t “e know I want my tea?”
The vicar had been but recently appointed, a red-faced energetic man in the early forties, and Albert Edward still regretted his predecessor, a clergyman of the old school who preached leisurely sermons in a silvery voice and dined out a great deal with his more aristocratic parishioners. He liked things in church to be just so, but he never fussed; he was not like this new man who wanted to have his finger in every pie. But Albert Edward was tolerant. St Peter’s was in a very good neighbourhood and the parishioners were a very nice class of people. The new vicar had come from the East End and he couldn’t be expected to fall in all at once with the discreet ways of his fashionable congregation.