Wenk and his companions took their places in a box for four, which seemed to have been reserved for them. Cara and Karstens sat in front, the two other men behind.
When the boxes were all filled, the croupier gathered his elegant evening dress about him, and slowly began to revolve in his seat, as if on a mechanical rotating disk, while he delivered the following oration:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Go-Ahead Institute. The Go-Ahead has in itself the roots of vigour and success. We live in times of change, and our undertaking is designed to suit all comers. Here you can play alone, or as a pair, or in company. You can play alone, because you can have a box for one person only, like the charming lady of whom I can see no more than the red heron’s feathers in her coiffure. If you think that for good luck two heads are better than one, you can seclude yourself from your fellows like yonder elegant cavalier and his lady; and if you choose to play in company you are equally invisible from my point of view. In the dome, ladies and gentlemen, you will find our game, the game of the house, I may venture to call it, although every other game is equally at your service. There you see the petits chevaux of the Go-Ahead Institute. One of the first artists of our day, whose work you are constantly encountering in exhibitions and periodicals, has designed them for the ‘Go-ahead,’ and placed them here, and we have united art with technique, the strongest product of the age. The reflecting apparatus allows everyone from any place whatsoever to see at once and quite distinctly whether his horse is in at the finish. Allow me to demonstrate to you, by a mere turn of the handle, the very artistic and effective play and counterplay which is developing in the dome. There was once a man who had no shadow, but that cannot be said of our petits chevaux. Notice, I beseech you, the extremely artistic effect produced when substance and shadow thus unite in a piece of work which in its resourcefulness and originality does the greatest credit to the artist of our house. …”
He turned the crank, and horses and shadows chased each other with kaleidoscopic effect. It formed a pretty and a fanciful picture. Slowly the horses came to a standstill.
“I had staked on that one,” exclaimed a woman’s voice as the cream-coloured bay stopped beneath the goal, and in its head the eyes gleamed forth like stars. They were formed of small electric lamps.
The croupier said: “I will not detain you much longer from trying your luck, dear madam. I have only now to introduce to you the epoch-making novelty of the Go-Ahead Institute. What would you do, ladies and gentlemen” (here he raised his voice), “if the police were suddenly to intrude upon you and rob you of your money and your freedom on account of your forbidden game? You need have no anxiety on that score. We have hit upon an arrangement which might be called a garde-police. The Go-Ahead Institute may await the police quite calmly. They may be surrounded and inundated by the police. With a pressure of my little finger I can turn the whole police force of the city away from you and let them go ahead elsewhere. Look here!”
He raised his hand, then lowered it with affected impressiveness, pressing his forefinger down upon the black knob near him. A moment later the surface of the table was set in motion, and it began to sink. It moved rapidly and noiselessly, and the speaker sank down with it. The boxes remained stationary, but from the dome the little horses and the coloured circles descended—came past the boxes; the dome followed, and a few minutes later a quartette of nude twelve-year-old children were to be seen dancing, upon a new stage, to the strains of fiddles and harps, which began to resound from some invisible quarter. A body of men, dressed in the uniform of the city police, trooped into the boxes, exclaiming, “We were told they were gambling here! Where are the gamblers?”
Everybody in the boxes roared with laughter. The girls continued dancing, and the uniformed police threw off their disguise and appeared in evening dress, laughing. The floor began to move again, the girls still dancing, one of them making a gesture to a gentleman sitting alone, who sprang towards her, but failed to reach his vanishing charmer. The floor once more became the ceiling, the petits chevaux reappeared, and in the centre of the gaming-table sat the croupier once again.
“You see, ladies and gentlemen, we do give the police something for their pains—the nude girls! And if the case were really serious, they would soon have a scrap of clothing on. I have to announce that there is a change of programme every week. …” He continued for some time further in this way.
“This is only an ordinary cinema,” said Wenk, turning to Karstens, and whispering, “the most ordinary kind of cinema. If the police were to come, they would discover the whole trick in ten minutes.”
Karstens merely shrugged his shoulders.
Wenk wondered what the aim of such an establishment could be, for it was bound to be discovered and closed within a week’s time, and the outlay must have been considerable.
Hull was much struck, having nothing with which to compare what he saw and heard there.
“Ravishing! enchanting!” said Cara from time to time. “We live in ingenious times, don’t we? We must come here often, mustn’t we,
