I ARRIVED IN SEOUL towards evening and after dinner, tired by the long railway journey from Peking, to stretch my cramped legs I went for a walk.
I wandered at random along a narrow and busy street.
The Koreans in their long white gowns and their little white top-hats were amusing to look at and the open shops displayed wares that arrested my foreign eyes.
Presently I came to a second-hand bookseller’s and catching sight of shelves filled with English books went in to have a look at them.
I glanced at the titles and my heart sank.
They were commentaries on the Old Testament, treatises on the Epistles of St Paul, sermons and lives of divines doubtless eminent, but whose names were unfamiliar to me; I am an ignorant person.
I supposed that this was the library of some missionary whom death had claimed in the midst of his labours and whose books then had been purchased by a Japanese bookseller.
The Japanese are astute, but I could not imagine who in Seoul would be found to buy a work in three volumes on the Epistle to the Corinthians.
But as I was turning away, between volume two and volume three of this treatise I noticed a little book bound in paper.
I do not know what induced me to take it out.
It was called The Complete Poker Player and its cover was illustrated with a hand holding four aces.
I looked at the title-page.
The author was Mr John Blackbridge, actuary and counsellor-at-law, and the preface was dated 1879.
I wondered how this work happened to be among the books of a deceased missionary and I looked in one or two of them to see if I could find his name.
Perhaps it was there only by accident.
It may be that it was the entire library of a stranded gambler and had found its way to those shelves when his effects were sold to pay his hotel bill.
But I preferred to think that it was indeed the property of the missionary and that when he was weary of reading divinity he rested his mind by the perusal of these lively pages.
Perhaps somewhere in Korea, at night and alone in his mission-house, he dealt innumerable poker hands in order to see for himself whether you could really only get a straight flush once in sixty-five thousand hands.
But the owner of the shop was looking at me with disfavour so I turned to him and asked the price of the book.
He gave it a contemptuous glance and told me I could have it for twenty sen.
I put it in my pocket.
I do not remember that for so small a sum I have ever purchased better entertainment.
For Mr John Blackbridge in these pages of his did a thing no writer can do who deliberately tries to, but that, if done unconsciously, gives a book a rare and precious savour; he painted a complete portrait of himself.
He stands before the reader so vividly that I was convinced that a wood-cut of him figured as a frontispiece and I was surprised to discover, on looking at the book again the other day, that there was nothing of the kind.
I see him very distinctly as a man of middle-age, in a black frockcoat and a chimney-pot hat, wearing a black satin stock; he is clean-shaven and his jaw is square; his lips are thin and his eyes wary; his face is sallow and somewhat wrinkled.
It is a countenance not without severity, but when he tells a story or makes one of his dry jokes his eyes light up and his smile is winning.
He enjoyed his bottle of Burgundy, but I cannot believe that he ever drank enough to confuse his excellent faculties.
He was just rather than merciful at the card-table and he was prepared to punish presumption with rigour.
He had few illusions, for here are some of the things that life had taught him:
“Men hate those whom they have injured; men love those whom they have benefited; men naturally avoid their benefactors; men are universally actuated by self-interest; gratitude is a lively sense of expected benefits; promises are never forgotten by those to whom they are made, usually by those who make them.”
It may be presumed that he was a Southerner, for while speaking of Jack Pots, which he describes as a frivolous attempt to make the game more interesting, he remarks that they are not popular in the South.
“This last fact,” he says, “contains much promise, because the South is the conservative portion of the country, and may be relied on as the last resort of good sense in social matters.
The revolutionary Kossuth made no progress below Richmond; neither Spiritualism, nor Free Love, nor Communism, has ever been received with the least favour by the Southern mind; and it is for this reason that we greatly respect the Southern verdict upon the Jack Pot.”
It was in his day an innovation and he condemned it.
“The time has arrived when all additions to the present standard combinations in Draw Poker must be worthless; the game being complete. The Jack Pot,” he says, “was invented (in Toledo, Ohio) by reckless players to compensate losses incurred by playing against cautious players; and the principle is the same as if a party should play whist for stakes, and all be obliged every few minutes to stop, and purchase tickets in a lottery; or raffle for a turkey; or share a deal in Keno.”
Poker is a game for gentlemen (he does not hesitate to make frequent use of this abused word; he lived in a day when to be a gentleman had its obligations but also its privileges) and a straight flush is to be respected, not because you make money on it (“I have never seen anyone make much money upon a straight flush,” he says) but “because it prevents any hand from being absolutely the winning hand, and thus relieves gentlemen from the necessity of betting on a certainty.
Without the use of straights, and hence without the use of a straight flush, four aces would be a certainty and no gentleman could do more than call on them.”
This, I confess, catches me on the raw, for once in my life I had a straight flush, and bet on it till I was called.
Mr John Blackbridge had personal dignity, rectitude, humour, and common sense.
“The amusements of mankind,” he says, “have not as yet received proper recognition at the hands of the makers of the civil law, and of the unwritten social law,” and he had no patience with the persons who condemn the most agreeable pastime that has been invented, namely gambling, because risk is attached to it.
Every transaction in life is a risk, he truly observes, and involves the question of loss and gain.
“To retire to rest at night is a practice that is fortified by countless precedents, and it is generally regarded as prudent and necessary.
Yet it is surrounded by risks of every kind.”
He enumerates them and finally sums up his argument with these reasonable words:
“If social circles welcome the banker and merchant who live by taking fair risks for the sake of profit, there is no apparent reason why they should not at least tolerate the man who at times employs himself in giving and taking fair risks for the sake of amusement.”
But here his good sense is obvious.
“Twenty years of experience in the city of New York, both professionally (you must not forget that he is an actuary and counsellor-at-law) and as a student of social life, satisfy me that the average American gentleman in a large city has not over three thousand dollars a year to spend upon amusements.
Will it be fair to devote more than one-third of his fund to cards?
I do not think that anyone will say that one-third is not ample allowance for a single amusement.
Given, therefore, a thousand dollars a year for the purpose of playing Draw Poker, what should be the limit of the stakes, in order that the average American gentleman may play the game with a contented mind, and with the certainty not only that he can pay his losses, but that his winnings will be paid to him?”