'Eighty-four!' shouted the usher, calling out the number and placing it in the third space. Here an indignant yell burst out, made up of oaths, lamentations, angry cries. This third number, being bad, was decisive for the drawing and the gamblers. With eighty-four, the hopes of all those who had played the first, second, and third drawing were frustrated; all those who had played the five sequence, fourths, the two treys, or these doubled, which is the hope and joy of Naples folk, hope and desire of all desperate players, and those that only play once on chance, saw they had missed it. The terno is the essential word of all these longings, needs, necessities, and miseries. A chorus of curses arose against bad luck, evil fate, against the lottery and those who believe in it, against the Government, against that bad boy with such unlucky hands. 'Serragliuolo! Serragliuolo!' was shouted from below, to insult him, and fists were shaken at him. The little one did not turn to look; he stood motionless, with his eyes down. Some minutes passed between the third and fourth numbers; it happened so every week. The third number brought the frightful expression of the infinite popular disappointment. 'Seventy-five,' the usher said in a feebler voice, putting the number drawn in the fourth space. Among the angry voices that would not be soothed, some hisses sounded revengefully. Abuse poured on the child's head, but the greatest curses were against the lottery, where one could never win, never, where everything is arranged so that no one ever wins, especially against poor people. 'Forty-three,' the usher called out for the last time, placing the fifth and last number. A last gust of rage among the people—nothing more. In a minute all the cold lottery machinery disappeared from the terrace: the children, the three authorities, the urn with the eighty-five numbers and its pedestal, tables, chairs, and ushers, all went out of sight, the glass and shutters of the great balcony were shut in a minute; only the cruel board remained, straight against the balustrade, with its five numbers—these, these, the great misfortune and delusion!
Very slowly and unwillingly the crowd cleared out of the court. On those most excited by gambling passions the wind of desolation had blown, and overthrown them all. They felt as if their arms and legs were broken; their mouth had a bitter taste from anger. Those who that morning had played all their money, feeling no need of eating, drinking, nor smoking, feeding themselves with vivid visions of Cockaigne, dreaming for that Saturday evening, Sunday, and all the days following, quite a bellyful of fat, rich dinners, tasting them in their imagination, held their hands feebly in their empty pockets. One could read in their desolate eyes the childish physical grief of the first pangs of hunger; and they had not, knew they could not get, bread to quiet their stomachs. Others, the maddest, fallen from the height of their hopes in a minute, experienced that long movement of mad anguish in which people will not, cannot, believe in bad luck. Their eyes had that wandering look that sees the shape of things no longer; their lips stammered incoherent words. It was these desperate fools who still kept their eyes on the board with the numbers, as if they could not yet convince themselves of the truth, and mechanically compared them with the long list of their tickets. The Cabalists, to conclude, did not go away yet; they held discussions among themselves, like so many philosophers or logicians, still wrapped up in lottery mathematics, where dwell the figure, the cadenze, the triple, the algebraic explanation of the quadrato Maltese, and Rutilio Benincasa's immortal lucubrations. But with those who went away, as with those who stayed, nailed to the spot by their excitement; those who discussed it violently, as with those who bent their heads, deadly white, courage all gone, without strength to move or think, the form of the desolation varied, but the substance of it was the same—deep, intense, making the inward fibres bleed, tending to destroy the very springs of life.
Michele, the lame shoeblack, still seated on the ground, with his black box between his crooked legs, had heard the drawing without getting up, hidden behind people who pressed around him. Now, while the crowd was slowly going off, he hung down his head, and the yellow shade of his rickety old face got green, as if all his bile had gone to his brain.
'Have you got nothing?' asked a dull voice beside him.
He raised his gray eyes with pink lids mechanically and saw Gaetano, the glove-cutter, who showed in his chalky face the depression of disappointed hopes.
'No, nothing,' said the shoeblack shortly, lowering his eyes.
'There is nothing for me, either. If you have a few sous for a combination, old fellow, I will give them back on Monday.'
'Where could I get them? If you get hold of ten, we could make up five each,' the shoeblack muttered desperately.
'Good-bye, old fellow! Good-bye!' said the glove-cutter in a rough voice.