The Comedians Read Online Free PDF Page A

one.’
    â€˜You sound as though you admire the toffs?’
    â€˜We’d all like to be toffs, and aren’t there moments – admit it, old man – when you envy the tarts? Sometimes when you don’t want to sit down with your accountant and see too far ahead?’
    â€˜Yes, I suppose there are moments like that.’
    â€˜You think to yourself. “We have the responsibility, but they have all the fun.”’
    â€˜I hope you’ll find some fun where you are going. It’s a country of tarts all right – from the President downwards.’
    â€˜That’s one danger the more for me. A tart can spot a tart. Perhaps I’ll have to play a toff to put them off their guard. I ought to study Mr Smith.’
    â€˜Have you often had to play a toff?’
    â€˜Not too often, thank the Lord. It’s the hardest part of all for me. I find myself laughing at the wrong moment. What, me, Jones, in that company, saying that? I get scared sometimes too. I lose the way. It’s frightening to be lost, isn’t it, in a strange city, but when you get lost inside yourself . . . Have another lager.’
    â€˜This one’s mine.’
    â€˜I’m not sure I’m right about you. Seeing you there . . . with the captain . . . I looked through the windows as I went by . . . you didn’t look exactly at your ease . . . you aren’t a tart by any chance pretending to be a toff?’
    â€˜Does one always know oneself?’ The steward came in and began to distribute the ash-trays. ‘Two more lagers,’ I told him.
    â€˜Would you mind,’ Jones said, ‘if I made it a Bols this time. I get blown up and sort of windy with too much lager.’
    â€˜Two Bols,’ I said.
    â€˜Do you ever play at cards?’ he asked, and I thought that after all the moment had come to purge my guilt; all the same I replied with caution, ‘Poker?’
    He was too frank to be true. Why had he talked to me so openly about the toffs and the tarts? I got the impression that he guessed what the captain had said to me and was testing my reaction, dropping his candour into the current of my thoughts to see if it changed colour like a piece of litmus-paper. Perhaps he thought that my allegiance in the last event would not necessarily be to the toffs. Or perhaps my name Brown had sounded to him as phoney as his own.
    â€˜I don’t play poker,’ he retorted and twinkled his black eyes at me as much as to say, ‘I’ve caught you there.’ He said, ‘I always give away too much. In friendly company. I haven’t got the knack of hiding what I feel. Gin-rummy’s my only game.’ He pronounced the title as though it were a nursery game – a mark of innocence. ‘You play it?’
    â€˜I’ve played it once or twice,’ I said.
    â€˜I’m not pressing you. I just thought it might pass the time till lunch.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    â€˜Steward, the cards.’ He gave me a little smile as much as to say, ‘You see, I don’t carry my own marked packs.’
    It really was, in its way, a game of innocence. There was no easy means of cheating. He asked, ‘What shall we play? Ten cents a hundred?’
    Jones brought to the game his own special quality. He noticed first, he told me later, in what part of his hand an inexperienced opponent kept his discards and by that means he judged how near he was to a gin. He knew by the way his opponent arranged his cards, by the length of his hesitation before playing, whether they were good, bad or indifferent, and if the hand were obviously good he would often propose fresh cards in the certainty of refusal. This gave his opponent a sense of superiority and of security, so that he would be inclined to take risks, to play on too long in the hope of a grand gin. Even the speed with which his opponent took a card and threw one down