Those sort of fellows always do. A bit of money used to come in for him once a quarter and he made a bit more by card-playing. He won a good deal of mine, I know that.”
Burton gave a kindly chuckle. I knew from my own experience that he could lose money at bridge with a good grace. He stroked his shaven chin with his thin hand; the veins stood out on it and it was almost transparent.
“I suppose that is why he came to me when he went broke, that and the fact that he was a namesake of mine. He came to see me in my office one day and asked me for a job. I was rather surprised. He told me that there was no more money coming from home and he wanted to work. I asked him how old he was.
“‘Thirty-five,’ he said.
“‘And what have you been doing hitherto?’ I asked him.
“‘Well, nothing very much,’ he said.
“I couldn’t help laughing.
“‘I’m afraid I can’t do anything for you just yet,’ I said. ‘Come back and see me in another thirty-five years, and I’ll see what I can do.’
“He didn’t move. He went rather pale. He hesitated for a moment and then he told me that he had had bad luck at cards for some time. He hadn’t been willing to stick to bridge, he’d been playing poker, and he’d got trimmed. He hadn’t a penny. He’d pawned everything he had. He couldn’t pay his hotel bill and they wouldn’t give him any more credit. He was down and out. If he couldn’t get something to do he’d have to commit suicide.
“I looked at him for a bit. I could see now that he was all to pieces. He’d been drinking more than usual and he looked fifty. The girls wouldn’t have thought so much of him if they’d seen him then.
“‘Well, isn’t there anything you can do except play cards?’ I asked him.
“‘I can swim,’ he said.
“‘Swim!’
“I could hardly believe my ears; it seemed such an insane answer to give.
“‘I swam for my university.’
“I got some glimmering of what he was driving at, I’ve known too many men who were little tin gods at their university to be impressed by it.
“‘I was a pretty good swimmer myself when I was a young man,’ I said.
“Suddenly I had an idea.”
Pausing in his story, Burton turned to me.
“Do you know Kobe?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “I passed through it once, but I only spent a night there.”
“Then you don’t know the Shioya Club. When I was a young man I swam from there round the beacon and landed at the creek of Tarumi. It’s over three miles and it’s rather difficult on account of the currents round the beacon. Well, I told my young namesake about it and I said to him that if he’d do it I’d give him a job.
“I could see he was rather taken aback.
“‘You say you’re a swimmer,’ I said.
“‘I’m not in very good condition,’ he answered.
“I didn’t say anything. I shrugged my shoulders. He looked at me for a moment and then he nodded.
“‘All right,’ he said. ‘When do you want me to do it?’
“I looked at my watch. It was just after ten.
“‘The swim shouldn’t take you much over an hour and a quarter. I’ll drive round to the creek at half past twelve and meet you. I’ll take you back to the club to dress and then we’ll have lunch together.’
“‘Done,’ he said.
“We shook hands. I wished him good luck and he left me. I had a lot of work to do that morning and I only just managed to get to the creek at Tarumi at half past twelve. But I needn’t have hurried; he never turned up.”
“Did he funk it at the last moment?” I asked.
“No, he didn’t funk it. He started all right. But of course he’d ruined his
constitution by drink and dissipation. The currents round the beacon were more than he could manage. We didn’t get the body for about three days.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I was a trifle shocked. Then I asked Burton a question.
“When you made him that offer of a job, did you know he’d be drowned?”
He gave a little mild chuckle and he looked at me with those kind and candid
blue eyes of his. He rubbed his chin with his hand.
“Well, I hadn’t got a vacancy in my office at the moment.”
THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN
I ARRIVED IN SEOUL towards evening and after dinner, tired by the long railway journey from Peking, to stretch my cramped legs I went for a walk. I wandered at random along a narrow and busy street. The Koreans in their long white gowns and their little white top-hats were amusing to look at and the open shops displayed wares that arrested my foreign eyes. Presently I came to a second-hand bookseller’s and catching sight of shelves filled with English books went in to have a look at them. I glanced at the titles and my heart sank. They were commentaries on the Old Testament, treatises on the Epistles of St Paul, sermons and lives of divines doubtless eminent, but whose names were unfamiliar to me; I am an ignorant person. I supposed that this was the library of some missionary whom death had claimed in the midst of his labours and whose books then had been purchased by a Japanese bookseller. The Japanese are astute, but I could not imagine who in Seoul would be found to buy a work in three volumes on the Epistle to the Corinthians. But as I was turning away, between volume two and volume three of this treatise I noticed a little book bound in paper. I do not know what induced me to take it out. It was called The Complete Poker Player and its cover was illustrated with a hand holding four aces. I looked at the title-page. The author was Mr John Blackbridge, actuary and counsellor-at-law, and the preface was dated 1879. I wondered how this work happened to be among the books of a deceased missionary and I looked in one or two of them to see if I could find his name. Perhaps it was there only by accident. It may be that it was the entire library of a stranded gambler and had found its way to those shelves when his effects were sold to pay his hotel bill. But I preferred to think that it was indeed the property of the missionary and that when he was weary of reading divinity he rested his mind by the perusal of these lively pages. Perhaps somewhere in Korea, at night and alone in his mission-house, he dealt innumerable poker hands in order to see for himself whether you could really only get a straight flush once in sixty-five thousand hands. But the owner of the shop was looking at me with disfavour so I turned to him and asked the price of the book. He gave it a contemptuous glance and told me I could have it for twenty sen. I put it in my pocket.
I do not remember that for so small a sum I have ever purchased better entertainment. For Mr John Blackbridge in these pages of his did a thing no writer can do who deliberately tries to, but that, if done unconsciously, gives a book a rare and precious savour; he painted a complete portrait of himself. He stands before the reader so vividly that I was convinced that a wood-cut of him figured as a frontispiece and I was surprised to discover, on looking at the book again the other day, that there was nothing of the kind. I see him very distinctly as a man of middle-age, in a black frockcoat and a chimney-pot hat, wearing a black satin stock; he is clean-shaven and his jaw is square; his lips are thin and his eyes wary; his face is sallow and somewhat wrinkled. It is a countenance not without severity, but when he tells a story or makes one of his dry jokes his eyes light up and his smile is winning. He enjoyed his bottle of Burgundy, but I cannot believe that he ever drank enough to confuse his excellent faculties. He was just rather than merciful at the card-table and he was prepared to punish presumption with rigour. He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him: “Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lively sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.”
It may be presumed that he was a Southerner, for while speaking of Jack Pots, which he descri
bes as a frivolous attempt to make the game more interesting, he remarks that they are not popular in the South. “This last fact,” he says, “contains much promise, because the South is the conservative portion of the country, and may be relied on as the last resort of good sense in social matters. The revolutionary Kossuth made no progress below Richmond; neither Spiritualism, nor Free Love, nor Communism, has ever been received with the least favour by the Southern mind; and it is for this reason that we greatly respect the Southern verdict upon the Jack Pot.” It was in his day an innovation and he condemned it. “The time has arrived when all additions to the present standard combinations in Draw Poker must be worthless; the game being complete. The Jack Pot,” he says, “was invented (in Toledo, Ohio) by reckless players to compensate losses incurred by playing against cautious players; and the principle is the same as if a party should play whist for stakes, and all be obliged every few minutes to stop, and purchase tickets in a lottery; or raffle for a turkey; or share a deal in Keno.”
Poker is a game for gentlemen (he does not hesitate to make frequent use of this abused word; he lived in a day when to be a gentleman had its obligations but also its privileges) and a straight flush is to be respected, not because you make money on it (“I have never seen anyone make much money upon a straight flush,” he says) but “because it prevents any hand from being absolutely the winning hand, and thus relieves gentlemen from the necessity of betting on a certainty. Without the use of straights, and hence without the use of a straight flush, four aces would be a certainty and no gentleman could do more than call on them.” This, I confess, catches me on the raw, for once in my life I had a straight flush, and bet on it till I was called.
Mr John Blackbridge had personal dignity, rectitude, humour, and common sense. “The amusements of mankind,” he says, “have not as yet received proper recognition at the hands of the makers of the civil law, and of the unwritten social law,” and he had no patience with the persons who condemn the most agreeable pastime that has been invented, namely gambling, because risk is attached to it. Every transaction in life is a risk, he truly observes, and involves the question of loss and gain. “To retire to rest at night is a practice that is fortified by countless precedents, and it is generally regarded as prudent and necessary. Yet it is surrounded by risks of every kind.” He enumerates them and finally sums up his argument with these reasonable words: “If social circles welcome the banker and merchant who live by taking fair risks for the sake of profit, there is no apparent reason why they should not at least tolerate the man who at times employs himself in giving and taking fair risks for the sake of amusement.” But here his good sense is obvious. “Twenty years of experience in the city of New York, both professionally (you must not forget that he is an actuary and counsellor-at-law) and as a student of social life, satisfy me that the average American gentleman in a large city has not over three thousand dollars a year to spend upon amusements. Will it be fair to devote more than one-third of his fund to cards? I do not think that anyone will say that one-third is not ample allowance for a single amusement. Given, therefore, a thousand dollars a year for the purpose of playing Draw Poker, what should be the limit of the stakes, in order that the average American gentleman may play the game with a contented mind, and with the certainty not only that he can pay his losses, but that his winnings will be paid to him?” Mr Blackbridge has no doubt that the answer is two dollars and a half. “The game of Poker should be intellectual and not emotional; and it is impossible to exclude the emotions from it, if the stakes are so high that the question of loss and gain penetrates to the feelings.” From this quotation it may be seen that Mr Blackbridge looked upon poker as only on the side a game of chance. He considered that it needed as much force of character, mental ability, power of decision, and insight into motive to play poker as to govern a country or to lead an army, and I have an idea that on the whole he would have thought it a more sensible use of a man’s faculties.
I am tempted to quote interminably, for Mr Blackbridge seldom writes a sentence that is other than characteristic, and his language is excellent; it is dignified as befits his subject and his condition (he does not forget that he is a gentleman), measured, clear, and pointed. His phrase takes an ample sweep when he treats of mankind and its foibles, but he can be as direct and simple as you please. Could anything be better than this terse but adequate description of a card-sharper? “He was a very good-looking man of about forty years of age, having the appearance of one who had been leading a temperate and thoughtful life.” But I will content myself with giving a few of his aphorisms and wise saws chosen almost at random from the wealth of his book.
“Let your chips talk for you. A silent player is so far forth, a mystery; and a mystery is always feared.”
“In this game never do anything that you are not compelled to; while cheerfully responding to your obligations.”
“At Draw Poker all statements not called for by the laws of the game, or supported by ocular demonstration, may be set down as fictitious; designed to enliven the path of truth throughout the game, as flowers in summer enliven the margins of the highway.”
“Lost money is never recovered. After losing you may win, but the losing does not bring the winning.”
“No gentleman will ever play any game of cards with the design of habitually winning and never losing.”
“A gentleman is always willing to pay a fair price for recreation and amusement.”
“… that habit of mind which continually leads us to undervalue the mental force of other men, while we continually overvalue their good luck.”
“The injury done to your capital by a loss is never compensated by the benefit done to your capital by a gain of the same amount.”
“Players usually straddle when they are in bad luck, upon the principle that bad play and bad luck united will win. A slight degree of intoxication aids to perfect this intellectual deduction.”
“Euchre is a contemptible game.”
“The lower cards as well as the lower classes are only useful in combination or in excess, and cannot be depended upon under any other circumstances.”
“It is a hard matter to hold four Aces as steadily as a pair, but the table will bear their weight with as much equanimity as a pair of deuces.”
Of good luck and bad luck: “To feel emotions over such incidents is unworthy of a man; and it is much more unworthy to express them. But no words need be wasted over practices which all men despise in others; and, in their reflecting moments, lament in themselves.”
“Endorsing for your friends is a bad habit, but it is nothing to playing Poker on credit… . Debit and credit ought never to interfere with the fine intellectual calculations of this game.”
There is a grand ring in his remarks on the player who has trained his intellect to bring logic to bear upon the principles and phenomena of the game. “He will thus feel a constant sense of security amid all possible fluctuations that occur, and he will also abstain from pressing an ignorant or an intellectually weak opponent, beyond what may be necessary either for the purpose of playing the game correctly, or of punishing presumption.”
I leave Mr John Blackbridge with this last word and I can hear him saying it gently, but with a tolerant smile:
“For we must take human nature as it is.”
THE END OF THE FLIGHT
I SHOOK HANDS with the skipper and he wished me luck. Then I went down to the lower deck crowded with passengers, Malays, Chinese and Dyaks, and made my way to the ladder. Looking over the ship’s side I saw that my luggage was already in the boat. It was a large, clumsy-looking craft, with a great square sail of bamboo matting, and it was crammed full of gesticulating natives. I scrambled in and a place was made for me. We were about three miles from the shore and a stiff breeze was blowing. As we drew near I saw that the coconut trees in a green abundance grew to the water’s edge and among them I saw the brown roofs of the village. A Chinese who spoke English pointed out to me a whi
te bungalow as the residence of the District Officer. Though he did not know it, it was with him that I was going to stay. I had a letter of introduction to him in my pocket.
I felt somewhat forlorn when I landed and my bags were set down beside me on the glistening beach. This was a remote spot to find myself in, this little town on the north coast of Borneo, and I felt a trifle shy at the thought of presenting myself to a total stranger with the announcement that I was going to sleep under his roof, eat his food and drink his whisky, till another boat came in to take me to the port for which I was bound.
But I might have spared myself these misgivings, for the moment I reached the bungalow and sent in my letter he came out, a sturdy, ruddy, jovial man, of thirty-five perhaps, and greeted me with heartiness. While he held my hand he shouted to a boy to bring drinks and to another to look after my luggage. He cut short my apologies.
“Good God, man, you have no idea how glad I am to sec you. Don’t think I’m doing anything for you in putting you up. The boot’s on the other leg. And stay as long as you damned well like. Stay a year.”
I laughed. He put away his day’s work, assuring me that he had nothing to do that could not wait till the morrow, and threw himself into a long chair. We talked and drank and talked. When the heat of the day wore off we went for a long tramp in the jungle and came back wet to the skin. A bath and a change were very grateful, and then we dined. I was tired out and though my host was plainly willing to go on talking straight through the night I was obliged to beg him to allow me to go to bed.
“All right, I’ll just come along to your room and see everything’s all right.”
It was a large room with verandas on two sides of it, sparsely furnished, but with a huge bed protected by mosquito netting.