For the Love of the Game

A Short Story

“I think on the whole we all get what we deserve”.

From the story
“The Lotus Eater”
by W. Somerset Maugham

“I’ve climbed my personal Everest. …but life is life, in spite of success. For me life has been a disappointment in general terms, which may sound surprising. I’m glad I didn’t know at 18 that when you’ve got to the top of the peak, you’re left with an emptiness”.

Jack Higgins
(real name Harry Patterson)
“Things I wish I’d known at 18”

Philip Crafton was an officer who had just entered the regulars. Young as he was, he hadn’t yet learnt to be serious. All that he sought in life, was entertainment, flirting and cards. Spending all his leisure time and money at pubs, clubs, casinos, etc., he played cards, drank wine with his comrades and enjoyed himself in the company of young pretty light-minded ladies.

Fond of playing cards, Crafton began hoping to make a fortune by gambling. Crafton was vain, obstinate and rather stupid. It was next to impossible to make him change his mind. Having made a decision to become rich through cards, he was so hooked on the idea that he could think of nothing else.

The only advantage that Crafton had over other officers was the fact that he was excessively handsome. His appearance attracted women and aroused envy in his peers. But that was the only thing that could be mentioned to recommend him. All his other qualities were, to tell the truth, undisguised vices.

Crafton was unreliable, dishonest, not trustworthy. He often went back on his word. Being amiable and sociable, Crafton made friends easily and had a lot of acquaintances, but he never took great pains to keep them up. Most of his comrades were very much like himself: idle, shallow-minded, ignorant and stupid. In other words, good-for-nothing. Crafton’s one other vice was eagerness and greed for money and benefits, especially for those not got through hard work and effort.

That was the portrait of the young man Philip Crafton, the officer of a very pleasant appearance and fine manners, deceitful and untrustworthy, eager and greedy for money, who was very likely to get into a mess, trouble, mischief.

One evening Crafton was in a pub with his friends sitting at a cardtable at whist, drinking wine and smoking.
“Why aren’t you playing high, Crafton?”, asked one of his comrades, half-drunk.

“Shut up, Perkins!”, cried irritated Crafton, who had long ago lost every opportunity and chance to win this game.

His gambling debts were increasingly high, and Crafton had no idea how to pay them back. At first he was still hoping to win at cards, but then that hope was gone forever. He had somehow to keep his problems back from his army authorities. But that couldn’t last long, and fearing lest there should be a big scandal, Crafton fled from the regulars.

Having no other means for living, Crafton had to marry a girl of property, but he never abanconed his plan of making a fortune as a gambler.

As those to whom he owed considerable sums of money and his army authorities were very likely to look for him, Crafton had to go to quite a distant part of the country. There he found a place to live and a job as a clerk. Crafton was waiting for an opportunity to renew his former (and more preferable for him) lifestyle.

Not much time had passed before Crafton became a general favourite in the neighbourhood. Not aware of his real state of affairs, everybody admired Philip Crafton and thought him almost an angel. Lots of girls were attracted to him, but of course, Crafton chose the one who had something to offer him.

Maria Lilia Franklin was a sweet girl of wealth from an aristocratic family, passionately in love with him, whose parents readily consented to their marriage.

After the glamourous wedding with beautiful flowers and expensive rings, Crafton very often neglected his wife and son afterwards, preferring, whist, poker and blackjack to their company.

For the first time in his life Crafton started having success at cards. He thought his dream of becoming rich through cards was at last coming true, when one day everything began to go wrong.

Crafton lost all his money, and when he came home, his wife met him with tears in her eyes: their son had been taken seriously ill and was now in hospital. The boy had always been rather weak and sickly. Now they had to pay a lot of money for his treatment.

Crafton had no money. Half of his wife’s inherited large fortune had already been spent, not to say wasted. They paid almost all the money they had for that moment, the rest Crafton kept to himself.

Crafton, not wanting to see the grief of the desperate mother, left his wife and rented a room on a farm at a decent distance from their house.

Wishing to know how his son was, Crafton asked a nurse at the hospital to inform him about his son’s condition.

Two weeks later Crafton received a note from that woman, asking him to come to a certain place. Crafton came. There she informed him of his son’s death.

What did Crafton have to do now? Return to his wife? What could she, the desperate woman in her grief, without any money, offer him? Crafton decided to jilt Maria Lilia and leave the neighbourhood.

Crafton crept back to his room, collected and packed his few belongings, placed the money due for his lodgings on a table, and made his way out by a back door into the yard.

A few minutes’ walk, which only the burden of his portmanteaux restrained from developing into an undisguised run, brought Crafton out to a main road, where an early carrier soon overtook him and sped him onward to the neighbouring town.

At a bend of the road, Crafton caught a last glimpse of the farm: the old gabled roofs and thatched barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with its wooden seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness and refined dignity in the early morning light.

The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his ears with a welcome protective greeting.

“Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry”, said a fellow-traveller. “Give me the peace and quiet of the country”, he added.

Crafton didn’t say anything in reply. A crowded, brilliantly lighted music hall, where an exuberant rendering of “1812” was being given by a strenuous orchestra, came nearest to his ideal of a nerve sedative.