The card dealt face upwards was a five.  The banker turned up his own cards, a two and a four, making a point of six.  Naturally he stood, Anastasius did nothing.

“Show your cards—­show your cards!” cried several voices.

He turned over the two cards originally dealt to him.  They were a king and a nine, making the natural nine, the highest point, and he had actually asked for another card.  It was the unforgivable sin.  The five that had been dealt to him brought his point to four.  There was a roar of indignation.  Men with violent faces rose and cursed him, and shook their fists at him.  Others clamoured that the coup was ineffective.  They were not going to be at the mercy of an idiot who knew nothing of the game.  The hand must be dealt over again.

“Jamais de la vie!” shouted the banker.

“Le coup est bon!” cried the raven in authority, and the croupier’s spoon hovered over the tableau.  But the horse-headed Englishman clutched the two louis he had staked.  He was damned, and a great many other things, if he would lose his money that way.  The raven in the dinner-jacket darted round, and bending over him, caught him by the wrist.  Two or three others grabbed their stakes, and swore they would not pay.  The banker rose and went to the rescue of his gains.  There was screaming and shouting and struggling and riot indescribable.  Those round about us went on cursing Anastasius, who sat quite still, with quivering lips, as helpless as a rabbit.  The raven tore his way through the throng around the Englishman and came up to me excited and dishevelled.

“It is all your fault, Monsieur,” he shrieked, “for introducing into the club a half-witted creature like that.”

“Yes, it’s your fault,” cried a low-browed, ugly fellow looking like a butcher in uneasy circumstances who stood next to me.  Suddenly the avalanche of indignation fell upon my head.  Angry, ugly men crowded round me and began to curse me instead of the dwarf.  Cries arose.  The adventure began, indeed, to grow idiotically perilous.  I had never been thrown out of doors in my life.  I objected strongly to the idea.  It might possibly hurt my body, and would certainly offend my dignity.  I felt that I could not make my exit through the portals of life with the urbanity on which I had counted, if, as a preparatory step, I had been thrown out of a gambling-hell.  There were only two things to be done.  Either I must whip out my ridiculous revolver and do some free shooting, or I must make an appeal to the lower feelings of the assembly.  I chose the latter alternative.  With a sudden movement I slipped through the angry and gesticulating crowd, and leaped on a chair by one of the deserted ecarte tables.  Then I raised a commanding arm, and, in my best election-meeting voice, I cried: 

“Messieurs!”

The unexpectedness of the manoeuvre caused instant silence.

“As my friend and myself,” I said, “are the cause of this unpleasant confusion, I shall be most happy to pay the banker the losses of the tableau.”