Mr. Gimp put him onto another twist in the game. “When you see a big bunch of money staked on one of the simple chances, put a louis on the opposite one. You’ll have a win three times out of five. It stands to reason. You’re playing with the bank instead of against it. And you know the bank’s winning a million a week.”
Learning a little here, and a little there, Hugh became more and more identified with that crafty band that contrives to make a living out of the Casino. Their numbers are few but their tenacity undeniable. Year after year these lean, neat men and fat, frowsy women manage with a few hundred francs of capital to scratch up the daily louis or so necessary to provide them with food, shelter, and clothing. They are known as the Limpits, because they hang on. Their faces are anxious until they have made what they call “the material”; then they relax pleasantly.
He was a member of the inner circle, one of those who meet at the Casino as at a club, discussing the gossip of the moment, the latest plunger, the latest decavé, the latest suicide. Jarvis Tope was the recognized president of the Casino Gossip Circle. He seemed to know everything and everybody.
“You remember,” he said one day, “that Italian nobleman, the Count Viviano, old, dried-up, proud-looking fish; said to have gambled away lands, castles, fortunes over these tables? Well, he was found last week in a bare room in Beausoleil; nothing in it at all, nothing. He was lying stark naked on the floor, a perfect skeleton. Literally starved to death.... Ah! there’s the Princess. I see she has pawned her set of sables. Poor thing! Excuse me, I must go and inquire after her health.”
He toddled after a weird looking Russian woman who was said to have had all her family massacred by the Bolshevics.
Hugh became more and more conscious of a growing air of suspicion in the Rooms. The inspectors seemed to be keeping an unusually close watch scrutinizing all who played with unwonted keenness. There was an anxious expression on the faces of the directors who emerged from the mirror doors that open by hidden springs. And one day in a circular window high over the “Hall of Lights,” Hugh saw a peering face; that of Krantz, the great Krantz, and he, too, looked anxious.
It was Mr. Gimp who enlightened him. Mr. Gimp took from his pocket a reddish counter with “20” marked on it in silvery letters.
“What’s that? Tell me?” he asked, handing it to Hugh.
“Why, it’s a chip for a louis,—Casino money.”
“Yes, it’s a chip for a louis, but is it Casino money?—that’s the question—I don’t know. You don’t know. They don’t know. Nobody knows.”