MONTE CARLO. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIII, Issue 4, 5 January 1907, Page 9

MONTE CARLO. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE.

Strange, that in the Igayest spot in the v.orld there should bs so many solemn, deadly earnest people ! Whore, one might ask, is the light-heartedness, the happy insouciance, the sunny recklessness, of Monto Carlo? The answer is simple : It has not yet arrived. But it is coming. The season has opened. The morrow oFMonte" Carlo's "day off" is the official beginning of the Monte Carlo's^ season. Already its harbingers have arrived. A day or two ago a large calendar hanging in my hotel falsely proclaimed the date to be the first of May. It showed when the clock of last season stopped, since when Monto Carlo has been not dead, hardly sleeping, but certainly not fully wide-awake. The calendar has now been brought down to date — six months went into the waste-paper basket in six seconds — and Monte Carlo is now abreast of Time. A few days ago the waxen models shown in the shop window of a fashionable coiffeur were bald — callously and brutally bald making a mockery of the carnation lips and lovely eyes. But to-day the models are crowned with this season's waves and tresses, curls and "transfoitnations." EBB AND FLOW. The season has begun, and Monte Carlo is just at the turn of the tide which will bring riches and rank, beauty and fashion, youth and hope, ago and experience, folly and cynicism, into its crowded hours of more or less glorious life. But catching it at the last of the ebb-tide, before the world of pleasure has come to animate tho scene, one is just in time to sec those whom the ebb has left at Monte Carlo, or who do not wait for the flood to set in, and to whom the fascinations of Monto Carlo, are not an interlude of pleasure so much as a serious and an absorbing concorn of life. Many among them believe that they have reduced chance to a science, have charmed the secret from caprice, and found a constant factor in the fickleness of Fate. Somo were here when tho calendar truthfully proclaimed May the first, and through all the languors of the summer they have sat in solemn session round these tables. They sit as if under the spell of a solemn enchantment. There is no external stimulus of gaiety to prompt them, no touch of exhilaration to cxtonuata their solemnity. Not a flicker of a smile ever relieves the. stolid fatalism of their features. To judge' by them, at any rate, "the feverishness of Monte Carlo" is a mere figure of speech. True, their faces may only be masks, hiding Heaven knows what turbulence in their minds. But their outward selfposscssion, at any rate, proclaims the stoic soul. There is no elation in their success, and when chance goes against thorn they do not even cast a valedictory glance .-it what was theirs, as tho croupier's nimble rako clicks it from under their noses. THE ARITHMETIC OF CHANCE. Their imperturbility is almost uncanny. I EmiJlionless they sit, and the rolls of I notes and piles of gold before them wax and wane ; but rarely do they even lift their eyes to look at tho spinning wheel that is the autocrat and arbiter of their fate. One would say that the notes and gold wcic merely symbols in a strange rite, so indifferently do they seem to use, lose and receive them. And when they miss a turn of the whepl they carefully prick holes in a card with a pin, and make strange calculations, and become studious over charts marked with a mazo of lines and squares r.nd numbers — mysterious Abracadabras and diagrammatic pussies in coloured chalks that impress but do not enlighten one. And I am moved to wonder and admiration at the patience that can ponder them, at the ingenuity that can invent and interpret them, and at the faculty that makes an arithmetical science of a riddle and devices a golden rule from tho chaos of Chance. A temperamental defect happens to deprive me of any hope of being fascinated by this joyless, silent, solemn strife with an adversary so impersonal and so vaguely anned — with a foe as indefinite as an algebraic x. But that shortcoming does not prevent my paying the tribute of a looker-on to the amazing self-control, business-like air, and serious pui-poso of thosb who sit in solemn silence, each man's mind centred on himself, to engago in a solitary struggle with a foo so elusive and uncertain, and who has the courage to sit still until tho last piece of money has gone, and then rise, without rancour, shaking no fist in the fact of Fate, but prepared to renew the contest on tho morrow. TYPES. Now and then a man among those standing behind the chairs will put down a louis, sec it swept in, and -saunter away. Or it may bring him a little pile of louis, and he will edge nearer to the tables and while away half fin hour, and pocket his gains or cut his losses, and never really be gripped by the struggle. "That detached and casual warfare with fata, at long range so to speak, what is more characteristic of Monte Carlo in the season, is merely the behaviour of the normal man. But to continue the struggle from day to day, to renew it week after wcelc and from month to month ; to dream of diagrams and have nightmares 'of "rouge et noir" ; to talk and to think of nothing else, and never to be weary of the monotony of ups and downs or exasperated with the see-saw of senseless Chance, but to open each day with a new zest, and optimistically to pluck inspiration and evolve a now "system" oven from disordered dreams — that capacity constitutes to the spectator the fascinating problem of tho fascinations of Monto Carlo. Nor do the faces round tho tables give nny clue to the problem. Somo are marked with a strong individuality, but the bulk are inscrutably commonplace. There is no fixed typo. They range from young girls you might expect to see at a vicarage tennis party, and hardfaced Amazons, and young men of tho world up to benevolent white-haired old gentlemen gazing benignly over spectacles, and middle-aged women with gentle eves and a matronly comfortable look. They form a microcosm of the general world, representing all civilised nationalties. But nearly all seem schooled in the discipline of the place, and they present, or represent, a problem as wide and deep as human nature itself. CHARMS AND OMENS. Touches of comedy relievo tho picture, and tho naivete of tho puntor and the paraphernalia of superstitution supply most. Hero, for instance, is an English lady indignant at Red so persistently defying the augury which has made her persistently back Black. "I ought to have won," she explains to a companion, "for my oldest friend wrote to toll me her aunt s funeral was to-day, and simply begged mo to back Black." Or, again, a French matron explains her run of luck on No 17. "Last night I dreamt of a farmyard, with four white fowls and four black fowls, and foui- pink pigs, a.nd four other pigs, that makes seventeen." Strango commentary on the auguries of Chance, to bo wrong in her arithmetic but right in her luck. Then there arc tho "tipsters" and vendors of systems; crystalgazers and dealers in magic ; the hunchbacks who are paid to be "touched" ; weird charms and strange mascots ; tho number of the hotel room ; tho "lucky hole"- in, La Turbie Tunnel.

through which you must see the sea by accident — thinking of it in advance as you sit in the train "spoils the luck." Such are the whimsies that govern the , conflict with Chance. Among the comedies must also be reckoned that of admission to the Temple of Chance. There are formalities, "and the ordeal of scrutiny has to be encountered. An arbiter elegantiarum runs his fastidious eye over your clothing. A millionaire has been refused admission because his collar was of pink print and not white Hnen. An English scion of a noble house has been stopped on the threshold because his trousers were turned up. "Coins some times fall from tho table" was explained to him, though the edict probably had its origin in the sartorial correctitnde which turned Lord Salisbury from its doors because ho wore a flannel shirt ! Perhaps tho purpose of tho comedy is to engender tho flattering fancy that those who enter the Temple of Chance may count themselves among the elect. — Harold Owen, in the Daily Mail.