2
Let us then pay a last visit to one of those green tables which spread their length in the somewhat disreputable place of which I have written elsewhere[2] as the “Temple of Chance.” To-day I would rather call it the Factory of Chance, for it is here that, for more than half a century, without respite or repose, on weekdays, Sundays and holidays alike, daily from ten o’clock in the morning till twelve o’clock at night, with croupiers unintermittently relieving one another, men have obstinately manufactured Chance and doggedly consulted the formless and featureless god that shrouds good luck and ill within his shadow.
We do not yet know what he is nor what he wants; we are not even sure that he exists; but surely it would be astonishing if no result of any kind, no clue to the tantalizing puzzle, had emerged from this endless effort, the most gigantic, the most costly, the most methodical that has ever been made on the brink of this gloomy abyss, if nothing had been born of all this furious work, however trivial, however unhealthy and useless it may appear.
In any case, at these tables, as at all places where passions become intensified, we are able to make interesting observations and, among other things, to behold at first hand, violently foreshortened and harshly illuminated, certain aspects of man’s lifelong struggle with the unknown. The drama, which as a rule is long drawn out, projecting itself into space and time and breaking up amid circumstances that escape our eyes, is here knit together, gathered into a ball, held, so to speak, in the hollow of the hand. But, for all its speed, its abruptness of movement and its extreme compression, it remains as complex and mysterious as those which go on indefinitely. Until the ivory ball that rolls and hops around the wheel falls into its red or black compartment, the unknown veiling its choice or its destiny is as impenetrable as that which hides from us the choice or the destiny of the stars. The movements of the planets can be calculated almost to a second; but no mathematical operation can measure or predict the course of the little white ball.
Your most skilful players, indeed, have given up trying. Not one of them any longer seriously relies on intuition, presentiment, second sight, telepathy, psychic forces or the calculation of probabilities in the attempt to foresee or determine the fall of a destiny no larger than a hazel-nut. All the scientific part of human knowledge has failed; and all the occult and magical side of that same knowledge has been equally unsuccessful. The mathematicians, the prophets, the seers, the sorcerers, the sensitives, the mediums, the psychometrists, the spiritualists who call upon the dead for assistance, all alike are blind, confounded and impotent before the wheel and before Destiny’s thirty-seven compartments. Here Chance reigns supreme; and hitherto, though it all happens before our eyes, though it is repeated to satiety and may be held, let me say once more, in the hollow of our hand, no one has yet been able to determine a single one of its laws.
3
Yet such laws seem to exist; and thousands of players have ruined themselves in following their forms or their elusive and deceptive traces. Let us take a bundle of those records or permanences, published at Monte Carlo, which give day by day the list of all the numbers that have come up at one of the roulette or trente-et-quarante tables. As everybody knows, these numbers are arranged in long parallel columns, the black on the left and the red on the right. When we look at one of these sheets, containing as a rule ten columns of sixty-five numbers each—dead and harmless cyphers now, though once so dangerous, once destructive of so many hopes and perhaps inspiring more than one disaster—we observe a tendency towards a fairly perceptible equilibrium between the red and the black. Most often the two chances balance each other, singly or in little groups, a black, a red, two blacks, three reds, three blacks, two reds and so on. When we come upon a series of five, six, seven, eight, sometimes eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve consecutive blacks, we are almost certain of finding not far away a compensating series of five, six, seven, eight or ten reds. There is a very real rhythm, a sort of breathing or a cadenced movement to and fro of the mysterious creature which we call Chance. This rhythm or balance is moreover confirmed by the final statistics of the day, from which we learn that, in a total of six hundred and so many spins of the ball, the difference between the black and the red very seldom exceeds twenty or thirty; and this difference is even smaller in the total for the week, that is to say, in a total of nearly five thousand spins, when it is usually reduced to a few units.
4
The monster has other strange habits. We see, for instance, that it is not uncommon for a number to come up twice in succession; and it is undeniable that, in each day’s play, two or three numbers are obviously favoured, so much so that we may hurl out a challenge to logic and declare that the more frequently a number occurs the more chances it has of reappearing. This seems to conflict with the law of equilibrium which we have remarked; but it must be observed that this equilibrium will be recovered later, that by the end of the week the difference will no longer be very great and that they will almost disappear when the month is over. The equilibrium is more slowly restored because we must multiply the number of series by eighteen and a half to reach the proportions of the even chances.
Players note yet another law which, for that matter, is but a corollary of the former habit, but which has something curiously human about it: the chances which lag behind show a greater eagerness to regain their lost ground at the moment that follows more or less closely upon a halt, as though they had recovered their breath after a brief rest on the landing of a staircase.