A WHIST-PLAYER’S WAIL.
Whist-players have long been suffering acutely from three uncertainties—uncertainty of the laws, uncertainty of decisions, and uncertainty of authority.
The laws are ninety-one in number, and, in “Cavendish on Whist,” are supplemented by forty-three explanatory notes and a couple of suppositions, which again have been further explained—if explain is the right word in this connection—by innumerable irresponsible decisions. Now, though it may be Utopian to expect such a badly-worded jumble of laws and definitions ever to be superseded by an intelligible code, is it impossible to have these decisions based on a principle of some kind, or, at any rate, for them to be consistent with themselves?
At one time the decider has confined himself to the strictest letter of the law, at another time he has strained it to breaking; sometimes he has read the laws one with another; sometimes he has taken one and left the other out in the cold; sometimes he appears arbitrarily to give his decision out of his own head, quite irrespective of any law whatever; and finally, and worst of all, after consistently maintaining one position for years and years, until—rightly or wrongly—some doubtful point is settled, he suddenly turns round, with his tail where his head always used to be, flatly contradicts himself, and throws it once more into confusion.
The usual excuse for a volte face of this kind is, “that this is a free country, where every man has a right to change his opinions;” and I never hear that dreadful exordium without instinctively making for the door, knowing from bitter experience that mischief is brewing. “That judges themselves differ, and the judgment of one court is often over-ruled by another,” this also is, I am afraid, true, though it has no bearing on the matter in hand; for here we have a judge who, on his appointment to the bench—granting, what is strongly disputed, that a Whist arbitrator is a judge and has a bench—having found a well-established precedent and taken it for his guide in numerous judgments, one fine day reverses it without notice and without leave to appeal.
To show that I am not making random accusations, I give three examples—there are others in stock, but these appear sufficient for my immediate purpose:—
I. “The cards are cut. In taking up the packs, I join the two packs, but leave one card on the table; this card would have been the middle, not the bottom card. I claim a fresh cut; my adversaries claim that it is a misdeal. Am I entitled to a new cut or not?” Answer, No. 1. “We think you cannot make your adversary cut a second time. We do not think that when you left a card on the table it could be said that there was any confusion in the cutting, and unless you can make out that what you did amounted to confusion in the cutting, it is a misdeal.”
Answer, No. 2. “The claim is void. There is nothing in the laws or the custom of the table to make this a misdeal.” Both these decisions are by the same authority. A more recent authority says, “According to the old rules, a misdeal might have been claimed; but not now, under Law 34.” The explanation is ingenious, if not ingenuous; but it is open to the objection that, as the first decision is dated December, 1873, nine years after the present laws came into force, it is scarcely water-tight.
II. If A asked B whether he had any of a suit in which B had renounced, and B, instead of replying, turned and quitted the trick, and was subsequently brought to bed of one or more, his silence, combined with turning and quitting the trick, was ruled to be an answer in the negative within the meaning of the Law and he had revoked.
This is a decision of Clay’s; and though disputed at the time, was the settled practice of Whist for fourteen or fifteen years.
Three or four years ago this decision was reversed, and authority has now taken its stand upon the literal interpretation of Law 74.
III. Some little time since my opinion was asked on this point. It was sent to me by a friend in Australia. “A and B v. Y and Z. Eleven tricks have been played. At the twelfth trick A leads a Heart, Y plays a Club, B plays a Spade. Before Z has played, Y throws down his last card, which turns out to be a Heart. Has he revoked?”
Being mortally afraid of putting my foot in it, I much prefer to leave the mysterious borderland between sanity and insanity to experts in lunacy; however, in the sacred cause of friendship, I screwed up my courage, and, with considerable trepidation, gave an opinion to this effect. “It appears to me that Y certainly—this sounds unpleasantly like slang, but such is not my intention—revoked if the club was a trump, and, probably, if it was a card of a plain suit, for in playing his last card he either led or abandoned his hand, which has always been held to be an act of play establishing the revoke.”
The question was next submitted to three of the best-known and most-respected authorities in this country—all champion deciders—whom we will call P. Q. R. P. replied, “Unless clubs are trumps I do not think Y. has revoked. He has not played again. He has exposed a card. If clubs were trumps I think he has played again (am not sure). The case is not sufficiently stated for a positive opinion.”
Q. and R. did not regard it as insufficiently stated in any way, and they had no hesitation in saying that Y had not revoked.
When by the next mail it turned out that hearts were trumps, when, consequently, the revoke was a shade more doubtful than before, while P made no further sign, Q and R came to the unanimous conclusion that Y had revoked. The authority at the Antipodes who ruled originally that there was no revoke, remains in the same mind up to the present time.
Is this “vacillating and inconsistent,” or is it not?
Here in a not very complicated difficulty—if only there was any agreement on first principles, we have
(a) A benighted outsider thinking a revoke is established, because a well-known decision overrides the law;
(b) An intelligent colonist thinking it is not established, because he considers the law to override the decision.
(c) Authority No. 1 giving a somewhat uncertain sound, but on the whole inclining to the belief that it is either a revoke or it is not; evidently a man of judicial mind.
(d) Authorities 2 and 3, while never in doubt for a moment, first affirming a thing to be white, and afterwards, when it has been bleached and is to some extent whiter than before, with unabated confidence affirming it to be black; and there an important question, involving the highest penalty known to the law, rests.
If the force of absurdity can go beyond this, then “it can go anywhere and do anything.”
The facts are in a nutshell. Either Y, when he threw his card up, abandoned his hand, or he did not. If he did, and if that is an act of play which establishes a revoke, then he revoked; if he did not, he had merely to say so, cadit quæstio; the card is an exposed one—“just that, and nothing more.” Only we have one, or rather two little difficulties to get over. Does abandoning the hand establish a revoke? and, if it does, is the decision authoritative—that is to say, of compulsory obligation?
Who the original decider was, or who gave him authority to make a penal enactment in the teeth of Laws 58 and 73, I do not know. All I do know is that the decision must not be fathered on Clay, for his case 8, “A has revoked; his claim of the game and throwing down his cards must be held as against himself as an act of playing,” is not on all fours; it occupies much firmer ground.
Here are two well-matched decisions, “Silence is an answer.” “Throwing down the cards establishes a revoke,”—of course, with the proviso that one has been made—both strain the law; both entail the revoke penalty; the only difference is that one is in the ipsissima verba of Clay, the other is a mangled excerpt; if the strong one has been quietly and surreptitiously burked, why, in the name of ordinary patience, does the weaker survive?
If decisions are retreating all along the line to a safer standpoint on the letter of the law, well and good; only tar them all with the same brush, and take some means to let the public know it.
Before the lamented demise of the Westminster Papers, disputed points were argued at length; whether in the number of counsellors there was wisdom, or whether too many cooks spoiled the broth, in either event we heard both sides. Question and answer could be found together, and if the decision did not invariably commend itself to our intelligence, we at any rate knew what the decision was, and that was the main point; but now our position has changed greatly for the worse. The present practice of Whist—a direct incentive to gambling—is this; whenever any doubt arises, instead of being able to lay their hands upon the recorded decision and settle it at once, the parties concerned first make a bet of one or more sovereigns and then write to the Field. On the ensuing Saturday afternoon a certain amount of money changes hands; two people are wiser, but the increase of wisdom is confined to themselves, and at the very next table the same process is repeated; while numerous quiet, well-meaning people like myself, who never bet, never know anything at all; for such answers as these, “X. It is a revoke,” “A. S. S. You cannot call on Z to pass it,” partake very much of the nature of Valentines in that, however interesting they may be to the recipient, they arouse no corresponding emotion in the world at large.
Lastly, with regard to the authority.
Whist-players are law-abiding to a degree, and sufferance is the badge of all their tribe; but still they would like to know how the authority obtained what the imperfect Member for Northampton is so fond of calling his mandate; whether by divine or hereditary right, by competitive examination, by election, by appointment from the Crown, or whether he sits upon us by “the good old rule, the simple plan” of force majeure as the Old Man of the Sea sat upon Sindbad.
Bartholomew Binns, an official with the highest credentials, after being selected from numerous candidates, and receiving a mandate from the sheriffs of London and Middlesex, has his decisions reviewed by twelve good men and true, and reporters are present who publish them through the length and breadth of the land? How is our executioner appointed? Who reviews his decisions? How are they promulgated? Not that it matters to me, personally. When my fatal Monday comes round and sus. per coll. is written under my name in the family archives, I do not imagine it will trouble me much whether the operator was born great, has achieved greatness, or has had greatness thrust upon him. I do not object to the instrument, I object to the system; but many Whist-players are more fastidious, and protest strenuously against being treated worse than other criminals. They hold that the position of a functionary who takes upon himself to decide important questions of law, and to upset old-established precedents, and manufacture new ones on his mere ipse dixit, should be very clearly defined, and that if one man is to unite in his own proper person the attributes of prophet, priest and king—three single gentlemen rolled into one—he should be duly anointed, consecrated and crowned, ad hoc.
For questions involving common courtesy, for insoluble verbal quibbles, for ethical questions of this type, “Ought A to sit quietly at the table while his partner B picks Z’s pocket? and if he ought, is it right for him to share the plunder?” and for the host of minor cases which constantly arise, and for which no law could possibly provide, no better arrangement than the present could be devised. As long as maniacs exist in the land, klepto-, dipso-, homicidal, or Whist—offences must come, and in disposing of them—where a cadi is the only effective treatment that can be openly suggested—the editor of the Field is facile princeps,
In faith he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read.
Only if he is to be the de facto authority in all cases, why not give him the three sanctions just mentioned, and make him the authority de jure? Then—as the Field is not a Whist gazette, and can scarcely be expected to devote its columns to advertising gratuitously every legislative change, and any space it has to spare is used rather for elaborating the ceremonial than for settling the laws of the cult—in token of our esteem, let us club together and present him with a piece of chalk, a duster, and a black board, to be set up in some easily-accessible spot—say, the middle of Pall Mall, or St. James’s-street. Make it the official notice-board! When new decisions are created let them be legibly inscribed upon it, coram populo! When well-known decisions are abrogated let them be carefully rubbed out at once. Since the Bastille was destroyed and lettres de cachet with it, there has been no authority without a notice-board; the Salvation Army has its “War Cry,” and the Pope himself, when he propounds a new dogma, propounds it ex cathedrâ.
That is one remedy. Though it is not perfect it has two advantages—it is inexpensive, and if in future any of us should still remain in ignorance, we should be in ignorance by our own fault, and not by misfortune; and at any rate it is a more simple and less tortuous plan than upsetting well-known decisions in an unofficial newspaper, while new editions of our two standard Whist-books are subsequently brought out without one word of comment or warning.
The alternative remedy—by no means novel, it has been suggested, usque ad nauseam, and I only bring it forward again because at present confusion is worse confounded than it has ever been in my recollection—is for the leading clubs to appoint a small committee of representative Whist-players, with power to revise any decisions they may see fit; and when they have revised them either to append them to the laws of Whist, or to place each decision as a rider under its own particular law, and every such decision should be final.
Questions of strict law should never have been submitted to an arbitrator at all; they should have been cleared up long ago by the legislators themselves; though important, they are not very numerous, and as they have been well threshed out, and all their difficulties are known, the entire matter might be completed in a few hours. Why should London wait?
The constitution of Whist and the constitution of our beloved country are both at the mercy of a grand old man of exuberant verbosity, each of whom is able, in some extraordinary way, to persuade himself that the side of any question on which he happens to be looking, is not only the right side, but that it positively has no other, in spite of the fact that in previous stages of his existence, he has himself, both recognised and vehemently supported that other side.
For twelve years our despot—a despotism worse than Russian, which is tempered by assassination—has had no rival near the throne; for five he has absolutely had nobody even to contradict him, and what is the upshot? Why this:
Always doubtful of my own arithmetic, I am indebted for the following figures to a little boy who has recently passed the Fourth Standard at an adjacent Board-school. He informs me that during the last decade three and a quarter inches of small print have been devoted by the editor of the Field to explaining that the modern rule of play at Whist is to discard from your best protected suit, when trumps are declared against you; twenty-one square inches to supporting the usual lead of a small card, from ace to four; and three square inches to reversing Clay’s and his own long-established decision, that silence is an answer; seventy-eight square inches to minute directions when not to lead trumps from five; three hundred and fifty-eight square inches to explaining what a convention is, and one acre, two roods, and eight perches—be the same more or less—to articles and hands purporting to illustrate the American leads, and placing the sheep on the right and the goats on the left, we have:—
| Evil. | Good. |
| One acre, two roods, eight perches, plus three square inches, plus seventy-eight square inches, plus three hundred and fifty-eight square inches. | Twenty-one sq. inches, plus three and a quarter sq. inches. |
My young informant adds that the evil, if represented in square inches, is 6,273,079, and is in proportion to the good as 258,683 to 1.
The moral would seem to be, that sufficient ink may make an acre and a half of white paper black, but will never make those two sides balance.
These be thy gods, O Israel.
Our ancestors built up and handed down to us a noble game: be it our aim to keep it undefiled. The task is difficult.
Facilis descensus Averni est,
Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras,
Hic labor, hoc opus est.
An ordinary mind might withstand the philosophy of losing its money on principle; it might resist the blandishments—not to say fallacies in this connection—of the first part of algebra; American leads will never trouble it; but a system which absolves Mrs. Juggins and her constituents (a most numerous and important body, where noses are counted and not weighed) from any necessity for drawing an inference, and at the same time assures them, that not only is it the concentrated wisdom of all the ages, but that they are its hierophants, is a great power.
Yet, how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?
And if the modern iconoclast will scatter those ashes, and will destroy those temples, we can at any rate dree out our weird, in the proud consciousness that we have done our best to prevent him.