Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 383, 18 June 1928, Page 4

Mundane Musings

Bridge Trials i Many women learn bridge with a view to an afternoon’s enjoyment. They are soon disillusioned. It is impossible to feel happy in the company of three people, one of whom sits with a quiverful of reproaches which often cover up her own mistakes, while the other two only remain affable as long as you are holding Yarboroughs. The novice who begins to play, without particularly wishing to take other people’s money, ends by believing that this is the only pleasure the game, offers. Yet, even with the dawn of this decadence, she resolves to maintain a certain standard of politeness and good temper. This, too, is frustrated. With every deal vanishes every ideal. These are swept away as ruthlessly in bridge as in politics. At Rome you do as Rome does, and in the face of accusations, reproofs, and unreasonableness you yourself become argumentative, nervy, and rude. Your career at bridge is as follows: Having learned the rules, you tiptoe into the cardroom at your club, and cut in at a table in a proper attitude of humility. This is your first mistake. You must not be humble at bridge. Never was the maxim, “Assume a virtue if you have it not,” more potent for your welfare. As you are a novice, however, you apologise for all your mistakes, and take every reproof to heart. You resolve, after the first, disastrous hand, that you will never again leave your partner in a no trump call when you have five cards in a major suit. But ! when, in the next rubber, with a new j partner, you call confidently “Two I spades!” and on being taken back into | two no trumps reveal a puny suit of ! five to the jack, the withering glance opposite makes you wonder whether you have to learn a fresh set of rules for every partner. You remain, nevertheless, humble and polite. Someone must be wrong, and it must be yourJ self every time. j In the next rubber your partner leads an ace of spades, and as the ! king is on the table you do not return the suit. The curt information afteri wards, that the ace was a singleton, leaves you a cowering mass of abjectness, and in the next rubber you carefully return the suit led by your partner, only to be told that she did not wish her suit returned, and that the only rule in bridge is to lead up to weakness on the table. Humbler than ever, but still polite, you now play in a somewhat confused state of mind. You watch the cards carefully, trying to remember which is best, but it is not always possible to count the pips, owing to the rapidity and dexterity with which the cards are caught up. The tricks seem to you curiously like conjuring tricks. “When the last eight cards are flung down with the remark “All mine,” you say to yourself timidly that you have another trump, but when it is shown it is swept away in the vortex of all the other trumps, and years pass before you are able to say in that much-to-be-envied stern tone of the experienced bridge player, “Please play them.” More perplexing still is the course to be adopted after an undercall. The decision falls to you, being on the left of the undercaller. You can go on bidding or throw in. After a moment of supreme agony you look at your partner, and misreading her gloomy countenance, call triumphantly, “I’ll throw in.” The crushing remark from her that she had a hundred aces makes you wonder if you ought to have seen through the back of her cards. But of all the bewildering feats and defeats at bridge, the most baffling is the recapitulation of the whole hand, with deluging explanations and accusations. The fact that the speaker is quite wrong, and that her account of how she could have won the game if her partner had played correctly, was dependent on her opponents playing the hand like a couple of lunatics, does not occur to the novice. You feel rather giddy, and tentatively ask for a fresh deal. It is a long time before a new player learns that the best defensive is—literally—the offensive. Your first sign of rebellion is to murmur “I hate j Post-mortems.” You say it politely, j But soon you say it rudely. Presi ently you make no apologies for mis- ; takes. At a later stage you argue. I Still later, you reprove your partner. . Finally, no one but yourself can be ! right. Before you become a really ; good bridge player you have learned ; to squabble and bluster, reproach and bully. You have found that it is the j only way to be left in peace. In the : end, you have an unholy joy in seizI iug the stakes. Ideals have departed, j Their decline and fall should inspire I another Gibbon.