SUPERSTITION OF GAMBLERS.
Such inexplicable agencies or influences render gamesters superstitious. Having seen the tribe in almost every part of the world, I have always found them more or less tinctured with superstition. No amount of facts or arguments will drive it out of them, for by long indulgence it has grown to be next to an instinct. They have implicit faith in luck of every kind—in lucky days, lucky circumstances, lucky persons, lucky influences. Sometimes they will not bet themselves, but will ask others to bet for them. Something occurs in the morning which they interpret as a warning, and for the remainder of the twenty-four hours they will not touch a card or lay a wager. At the German baths this peculiarity is frequently observed. A man in luck is pestered to bet for others, and is offered a percentage if he will do so. This or that person is regarded as unlucky, and a patron of the green cloth will not stand on the same side of the table with him. A passing cloud, a chance-dropped phrase, a change of position, or any one of a thousand nothings, will induce a professional gamester to make, or prevent him from making, risks, concerning which he has ordinarily no prejudice. The folly of play is much surpassed by the folly of players, who become so permeated with fancies, theories, and fanaticisms, that on the subject they are specially interested in they are positively monomaniacs. I have talked with old habitués of Homburg and Wiesbaden respecting chances, coincidences, and systems, until I have discovered that long attendance on and close watching of the treacherous tables had absolutely turned their brains. They thought they were the shrewdest and most sagacious of mortals, and pitied me supremely, because I happened to have a little common sense in regard to roulette and rouge-et-noir, and because I would not believe that mere chance should be treated as if it were a positive science.
No one can form any adequate conception of the mental vagaries, bordering upon lunacy, of professional gamesters, until he has spent several seasons at the German spas, and become intimately acquainted with the men and women composing the galerie. Their entire conduct is regulated by a desire to obtain luck. They strive to propitiate fortune, as if it were, as the ancients believed, a personal agency, subject to unaccountable whims and caprices. Many of their acts of charity are done not so much from benevolence as from a notion that it will influence favorably the issues of the games to which they are so wedded. This is true not only of gamesters abroad, but of gamesters everywhere. As a rule, they are far from intellectual, and hence superstition meets with little resisting power when it has once begun to encroach upon their understanding.
DIFFERENT MOTIVES FOR PLAY.
There are not only different classes of players, but players from different motives. The object of the majority is merely mercenary: they frequent the tables only to win money; they make hazard a business, foolishly hoping to reduce it to something like a rule. Other habitués of the springs bet for excitement, as they drink wine and seek adventures. They are not avaricious. When they win largely, they spend freely; and at the end of every season, whatever their success, they are much behind the game. The members of the third order are sufferers from ennui, and regard roulette and rouge-et-noir simply as a pastime. They have formed the habit of playing, and cannot break it. Their stakes are small, generally; but they are devoted to the tables, sitting there from eleven in the morning to eleven at night,—the fixed time for the perilous sport,—and frequently do not win twenty florins a week. A number of persons play because it is the fashion, though they do not continue it long, for the same reason. The game proves so magnetic that they either feel it a duty to abandon it altogether, or they are drawn into it, and are very soon too weak to resist its fascinations.
Very many, who have begun in the spirit of imitation, have grown to be confirmed gamblers. One of the most infatuated players I have ever known was a Spaniard, who went to Homburg to get rid of the rheumatism, and who, after three seasons of abstinence, put down a single napoleon, simply because he did not wish to seem odd. The risking of that little coin has since cost him a small fortune; and if he were to live a thousand years,—as he told me himself,—he could not be near rouge-et-noir without taking part in it.
DIVERS NATIONALITIES AS GAMESTERS.
America, or rather the United States, is more puritanic than other countries. Gambling is regarded here quite differently from what it is in Europe. Even our transpontine cousins, the English, are much more addicted than we to play. They never have social whist parties without betting at least enough to create an interest. The Germans, unless in prosperous circumstances, are preserved from the habit of gambling by their constitutional economy and thrift. The Latin nations have a natural fondness for whatever turns upon chance. Of these people, the Spaniards enjoy gambling most, and the French least, while the Italians are but little behind the Spaniards in this particular. It is safe to say that all three, hearing the spinning of the roulette wheel, and the clinking of coin at rouge-et-noir, could not long be kept from the seductive tables. The Russians—those who travel, at least—love the green cloth, and figure prominently among its devotees. Most of them have money, and are such ardent pleasure-seekers, at the same time possessed of something like an American vanity for spending and making display, that they rarely fail to participate in any dissipation which offers.
VIRTUES OF THE WATERS.
It must not be supposed that all the frequenters of the spas indulge in play; for many of them go there for recreation, and merely look at the games. Then, as I have remarked, thousands visit the springs for the benefit of the waters. That they have medical virtues cannot be well questioned, after one is told, as I have been told, of extraordinary cures by those who have been sufferers. Ordinarily, a casual visitor, who rises late, sees very little of the invalids; but if he has a liking for early morning air, and bends his steps towards the pump-room (Trinkhalle), he will encounter men and women afflicted with every variety of disease. He will observe them also on their way to and from the baths,—young and old, dark and fair, rich and poor, handsome and homely, cultivated and coarse, graceful and awkward,—all in quest of the invaluable boon, which we never appreciate until it has slipped away. There is something melancholy, as well as grotesque, in the moving panorama of the distempered. They walk with canes and crutches, are carried in invalid chairs or wagons, and look so wan and rueful that I have often felt prompted to apostrophize health as the sum of all blessings. There are young and fair women, fragile from their birth, for whom there is not an atom of hope, and who yet believe they may find some miraculous cure in the baths for lack of constitution, and for inherited disease. The bon vivant, peevish and irritable from the gout, limps along, and the overworked man of brains, paralyzed on one side, is wheeled over the pavement by the stupid lackey, unconscious that he is the possessor of nerves or a stomach. The dyspeptic—of course an American—glowers on everybody as he passes, but appears to hate no one as much as himself. After having fancied himself cursed with every disease, and after consulting physicians of the highest grade on both sides of the Atlantic, he has come to Ems to test the virtue of the baths. They have done him no good, for he will not be prudent either in his diet or his habits; and he will go home with his mind made up that all medicinal springs are humbugs. He is unaware that the cause of his ailment is dyspepsia, and that it has gotten into his mind. On Monday, he thinks he has consumption; on Tuesday, he fancies it is liver complaint; on Wednesday, he is sure his kidneys are deranged; on Thursday, no one can convince him that he is not suffering from enlargement of the heart; on Friday, he declares he has the marasmus; on Saturday, he swears nothing was the matter with him originally, but that the infernal physicians have poisoned him; and on Sunday, he contemplates suicide as a means of relief. The poor man is the victim of bad cooking, for which our country is famous, and his excessive haste in eating. If he had been born in France, and taken his meals at the Paris restaurants, he would be to-day one of the most contented, instead of the most miserable of men. Talk as we may, digestion is the foundation of human happiness, and will keep us on good terms with ourselves when an unsullied conscience and troops of friends are of no avail.