The Comedians Read Online Free PDF

told him much. ‘Psychology will always beat mere mathematics,’ he said to me once, and it was certain that he beat me nearly always. I had to have a hand ready made to win.
    He was six dollars up when the gong went for lunch. That was about the measure of the success he wanted, a modest win, so that no opponent ever refused him the chance to play again. Sixty dollars a week is not a big income, but he told me that he could depend on it, and it kept him in cigarettes and drink. And of course there were the occasional coups : sometimes an opponent despised so childlike a game and insisted on fifty cents a point. Once in Port-au-Prince I was to see that happen. If Jones had lost I doubt whether he could have paid, but fortune even in the twentieth century does sometimes favour the brave. The man was capot in two columns and Jones rose from the table two thousand dollars the richer. Even then he was moderate in victory. He offered his opponent his revenge and lost five hundred and a few odd dollars. ‘There’s another thing,’ he once revealed to me, ‘women as a rule won’t play you at poker. Their husbands don’t like it – it has a loose and dangerous air. But gin-rummy at ten cents a hundred – it’s only pin-money. And of course it increases one’s range of players quite a lot.’ Even Mrs Smith, who would have turned away, I am sure, with disapproval from a game of poker, sometimes came and watched our contests.
    That day at lunch – I don’t know how the conversation arose – we got on the subject of war. I think it was the pharmaceutical traveller who began it; he had been, he said, a warden in civil defence and he had an urge to recount the usual bomb-stories, as obsessive and boring as other men’s dreams. Mr Smith sat with a fixed mask of polite attention and Mrs Smith fidgeted with her fork, while the chemist went on and on about the bombing of a Jewish girls’ hostel in Store Street (‘We were so busy that night no one noticed it had gone’) until Jones broke brutally in with, ‘I lost a whole platoon myself once.’
    â€˜How did that happen?’ I asked, glad to encourage Jones.
    â€˜I never knew,’ he said. ‘No one came back to tell the tale.’
    The poor chemist sat with his mouth a little open. He was only half way through his own story and he had no audience left: he resembled a sea-lion which has dropped its fish. Mr Fernandez took another helping of smoked herring. He was the only one who showed no interest in Jones’s story. Even Mr Smith was intrigued enough to say, ‘Tell us a little more, Mr Jones.’ I noticed that we were all reluctant to give him a military title.
    â€˜It was in Burma,’ Jones said. ‘We had been dropped behind the Jap lines to make a diversion. This particular platoon lost touch with my H . Q . There was a youngster in command – he wasn’t properly trained in jungle fighting. Of course in those conditions it’s always sauve qui peut . Strangely enough I didn’t have a single other casualty – just that one complete platoon, nipped off our strength like that,’ he broke off a portion of bread and swallowed it. ‘No prisoners ever came back.’
    â€˜Were you one of Wingate’s men?’ I asked.
    â€˜The same kind of outfit,’ he replied with his recurrent ambiguity.
    â€˜You spent a lot of time in the jungle?’ the purser asked.
    â€˜Oh well, I had a kind of knack for it,’ Jones said. He added with modesty, ‘I’d have been no good in the desert. I had a reputation, you know, for being able to smell water like a native.’
    â€˜That might have been useful in the desert too,’ I said, and he gave me a look across the table dark with reproach.
    â€˜It’s a terrible thing,’ Mr Smith said, pushing away what was left of his cutlet – a nut-cutlet, of course, specially prepared,