"Two cards," said Tillotson.
Carl said: "I believe you," and dealt him the cards. It was as he had expected; Tillotson, sitting on top of the opener, had come in with three of a kind.
It was now his own turn. He looked down at his two aces and two eights; there was, of course, only one thing to do—throw away the odd card, and draw one. Then he noticed something. Two of the cards which Beddington had thrown in at the first round had been flipped over, face up, when Hartmann discarded his hand. They were both eights.
He looked away again, thinking very hard. The exposure was an enormous piece of luck, both good and bad. It meant that he could not improve his eights; he could only improve his aces. But equally, he now knew that if he drew one card, it gave him only one chance of improvement; if he drew three, it gave him three. Two pairs was not going to be any good against Tillotson's probable three-of-a-kind, nor Greenfield's pat hand, whatever that was. The eights, face up on the table, were telling him to take a chance—the only chance.
He picked out his pair of aces, and discarded the three other cards. Then he said, formally: "Dealer takes three."
Tillotson raised his eyebrows at the draw. "Brave man," he said.
Carl smiled, and took the next three cards from the top of the pack. Tillotson was watching him, as usual, while he made his draw. He squeezed the cards gently, fanning them out, his face expressionless.
He found that he had dealt himself two more aces.
With no more than a moment's pause, he looked at Greenfield, and said: "It's you to speak. From four hundred and eighty dollars."
But this was not Greenfield's day at all. Just as he opened his mouth to bet, he took a last look at his cards, for reassurance. His jaw dropped like a plummet, and an incredulous look came over his face.
"Jesus God!" he said. "I made a mistake."
Tillotson turned to him, courteously, not mocking his ineptitude; as usual, he was a delightful player to share a table with. "Not betting?"
Greenfield's owlish face was ludicrous in its dismay. "I thought that last card was a heart. God damn it!" he said. "It's a diamond."
"Bad luck," said Carl. With four aces, and a pot now worth nearly fifteen hundred dollars to the winner, he really did feel, benevolently, that it was bad luck. His eyes went round to Tillotson, his traditional adversary whom he respected. "You and me," he said.
Tillotson answered, without hesitation: "I will tempt you. Double."
Burrell drew in his breath. "Hell!" he exclaimed, impressed. "That' nine hundred and sixty dollars."
"You have tempted me," said Carl to Tillotson, greatly at ease with the world. "I'll make it a nice round figure. Nineteen hundred dollars."
There was a silence of extraordinary intensity all round the table.
This was the biggest betting they had had so far; it was clear that Carl and Tillotson, who seldom bumped into each other in any serious sense, had now met head on. At so high a figure, it was unlikely that either of them was bluffing; it meant that good cards were meeting good cards—the most expensive kind of collision in the world.
Tillotson put down his cigar, with great care. "Now that's very interesting," he said. He was being much more talkative than usual, Carl noted, even at the end of a winning evening; it meant, probably, that he was confident, that he had a tremendous hand—possibly fours also. It did not matter; his own aces were unbeatable. "You took three cards," Tillotson went on, amiably. "I took two. You must have improved. I surely hope so, for your sake. Double again!"
At the end of the normal, slow-spoken sentences, the last two words came out with enormous force, like the crack of a whip. But to Carl, they were musical; they would have been musical if they had been pistol shots. He said, keeping his voice as controlled as possible:
"And once more. Seven thousand two hundred dollars."
Tillotson's face was without expression. He did not look at his cards; he looked straight at Carl. There was silence for the sp.ace of fifteen seconds, while he weighed the probabilities concealed within this perilous maze—the trap against the bluff, the very good cards against the fractionally better. He then proved what an excellent player he was by saying, with no concession to histrionics: "No. 1 fold."
He threw in his hand, face down, and began to count out thirty-six hundred dollars. The others broke the silence like schoolboys. Hartmann said: "Gee! If that was a bluff. . . ." and Burrell said: "That's the biggest hand we've ever had—even without the last bet." Greenfield levered himself up, and wandered to the side-table again, muttering: "Now why doesn't that happen to me?" as if he would naturally assume the role of Carl and not Tillotson. Only the two principal players remained silent, until Tillotson had pushed nearly all his chips into the centre, and Carl had raked in the total— over five thousand. Then Tillotson, as if to himself, said: "I think I was right."
Neither of them would have dreamed of asking the other what cards he had held; and no one else in the room, drunk or sober, would have asked either. But Carl, for five thousand dollars, felt able to answer, without loss of principle:
"Very likely."
By the time they were gone, it was near dawn; the faintest possible lightening of the sky outside the porthole proclaimed the advancing day. Carl, sitting in an armchair after saying the customary slow good nights to his guests, surveyed the abandoned room. The after-the-party wreckage was familiar, and by no means unpleasant.
Cards were strewn all over the table; clusters of coloured chips mingled with them, spangling the green cloth like Christmas-tree decorations. The ash-trays overflowed with cigar-butts, the used glasses had a raffish air of neglect. On the side-table, half-empty bottles of gin and whisky and brandy stood among a phalanx of club sodas. On the carpet below it, a frieze of bottle-tops lay like confetti. Coffee cups, stale sandwiches, crumpled napkins, told of the half-way refreshment which had kept the laggards going. There was a chair overturned—that was Greenfield, rising to stumble back to his cabin at the end of the game. Opposite Carl's place on the table was the score-card with its neatly balanced columns, and three cheques totalling $5,400, his triumphant share of the evening.
He would have enjoyed what he saw, whether he had lost or won; the room, with its air of Regency dissipation centred on the green baize table, conjured up agreeable pictures of noble and desperate conduct, dawn duels, ruined heirs. The drifting smoke was like the smoke over a battlefield, long in dispersal, marking great events, historic collisions.
He smiled at the thought. It was not like that at all; it was like the smoke after a party, and a wonderful party too. He stood up, and crossed stiffly to the porthole, and opened it after a struggle with the unwieldy clasps. A fresh breeze met him, and the steady hiss and roar of sea-water tumbling past a few dozen feet below him. The light was gaining now, a pale pearly glow spreading over the sea towards him. But there was a harder outline hidden within it, and presently he saw that it was land. They were coasting past an island.
He watched it take shape, emerging out of the mist and the vagueness of the dawn like a new character altogether. It must be St. Lucia, the island that Kathy had mentioned, and it was not more than a few miles off. It was only an outline, but an outline of perfect shape, rising past formidable cliffs to a tall peak in the centre. There were two lighthouses at either end, still competing with the dawn, and in between them a few straggling lights, seeming to climb the hills from the sea until their strength gave out. The water between him and this revealed paragon of landfalls was faintly ruffled by the dawn breeze, and its colour was turning to a smoky pink as he watched it.
He remained by the porthole for a long time, with a luxuriant sense of blessing; the view seemed to prove that the world was good, that God was generous this morning, after a night in which men also had done more than their fair share for him. Then he sat down again, in the only uncluttered chair, with a final whisky and soda and positively the last cigar of the night, and relaxed in deep contentment. After six hours of the utmost concentration, it was good to dream, to let slip the mask and reveal the liberal face.