by Ursula Bloom
Ann Clements looked at Miss Thomas red and rumpled, and she looked at little Gelding, clinging to the banisters and springing up and down like some excited child, and she said quite sharply, ‘Don’t be silly.’
It was very silly indeed. They did not seem in the least surprised at the iciness of her tone, and their enthusiasm was not damped. They came towards her, talking so fast, and laughing so much, that Ann simply did not understand what was happening.
‘It was one of those tickets,’ Miss Thomas was saying. ‘I didn’t explain, because you wouldn’t let me. You said you did not want to know anything about it, so I just did not worry you, but that is what it was.’
‘What what was?’ gasped Ann not too lucidly.
‘Isn’t it luck?’ gasped little Gelding, and she was springing up and down on her toes. ‘What shall you do with it, I wonder, what shall you do?’
Ann shook herself free. ‘Look here,’ she said with a firmness surprising in so gentle a creature, ‘don’t be idiotic. I don’t know what has happened or what on earth you are talking about ‒ do try to explain things if you can.’
Miss Thomas produced from her handbag a letter. It was typewritten, and it bore an impressively good heading. After the first few phrases Ann saw the words blurring. She heard a peculiar thumping going on and became suddenly aware of her own heart beating within her. She felt herself going quiet, as though paralysed. For the letter explained that the ticket numbered ‒ never mind what ‒ had drawn a horse, and that the ticket had been booked in the names of Thomas and Clements, and that even if the horse did not start the ticket was worth six hundred pounds.
‘But,’ said Ann helplessly, ‘I never bought a ticket for a sweepstake in my life.’
‘No, but I did.’
‘I wouldn’t have bought one. It would have been altogether wrong,’ said Ann definitely.
‘Oh, isn’t it marvellous? Too marvellous?’ chanted little Gelding, going on and on with her refrain like some sort of chorus.
Ann began to get quite cross.
Miss Thomas was trying to explain. In among the raffle tickets there had been this one, and of course she hadn’t been able to show it to Ann seeing that Ann was so funny about things and never wanted to know what she was buying. She just had not bothered, never supposing that either of them would ever hear another word about it, and now this enormous piece of luck had happened. Three hundred pounds each. Three hundred pounds, and the chance of quite a lot more, flinging wide the gateway to all manner of possibilities. Lovely clothes, cities of enchantment, exotic holidays. Private means, why, with some building societies you could get five per cent, tax free, and then you would have fifteen pounds a year.
‘Oh, do shut up,’ said Ann crossly.
‘Well, if that isn’t the limit! Really it is, dear, and if I had not troubled to tell you, you would never have known that you had won anything at all, seeing that you did not know you had even bought a ticket for it. And that would have been six hundred pounds to me, and at five per cent, tax free that would be thirty pounds a year, over ten shillings a week. Why, thirty pounds a year would keep the wolf from the door, wouldn’t it?’
And then into this bewildering world which had become altogether too complicated for her comprehension there walked Mr. Robert. He had stopped to look in Stanley Gibbons’ en route. He had a very fine collection of stamps which interested him very much indeed. Last night he had received a telephone message from Stanley Gibbons’ that amongst a collection that they had just purchased there was a certain stamp that he had been wanting for some time. This it was that had brought him out so early in the morning, and now he came in with the precious stamp in his pocket feeling as though the whole world were his.
He had actually pranced up Southampton Street. The whole world was epitomized in one stamp, which for a long time he had been aching to possess, and of which he had almost given up hope.
He walked into the office and up the stairs, and into the pandemonium of the secretaries’ room.
‘What’s all this?’ he demanded.
Miss Thomas and little Gelding blurted it out together. Ann, flushed and confused, stood aside. He had never noticed before how pretty she was. She had a delicate colouring, and when she blushed her eyes seemed to turn unbelievably blue.
He looked at her again.
‘When you are ready,’ he said, ‘come in and tell me all about it.’
III
Ann, beginning to believe the most extraordinary news of this extraordinary morning, went into the cloakroom to take off her hat and leave it there with her coat.
Along the mantelshelf was the drift of Nilde, and the rouge and the Houbigant that were the hallmark of little Gelding. There was a torn envelope addressed to Miss Thomas, obviously the envelope that had contained the good tidings of great joy.
Thrust aside was a circular addressed to Ann.
The circular was the second of the extraordinary happenings. She opened it quite mechanically, and the coloured paper fluttered out and down to the floor at her feet. It had been sent by a steamship company. Why it should have been addressed to her she had no idea, nor how they had got hold of this address. She saw a big white ship against a deep blue sky. Turning over the page a phrase caught her eye. ‘A cruise to the dream cities of Europe. Naples. Venice. The Mediterranean.’ She caught a glimpse of a gondola in St. Mark’s basin. Vesuvius dark and glowering across a bay, and Naples gleaming white and wreathed in wistaria and rambler roses.
She saw an impossibility suddenly become possible; it was a dream city within grasp. For a moment she felt quite faint, and, not knowing that she still held the circular in her hand, she went downstairs and in to see Mr. Robert.
And now she was convinced that the whole thing was some absurd practical joke, or some mistake that would be bound to be discovered soon and put straight. The amazing piece of luck which always happens to other people and never to yourself had suddenly happened to her. It was the miracle of miracles, and most miraculous of all because it was her own.
Suddenly, as she crossed the threshold into Mr. Robert’s room, an acute horror gripped her. She remembered that (if it were true, and she still had doubts about it) Cuthbert would have to be told, and that most undoubtedly he would be disgusted over the whole thing. A sweepstake! Surely a sweepstake was, if possible, a great deal worse than a raffle, and both were inventions of the devil, and milestones to be passed along the road to Hell.
She felt herself going quite white at the awful thought of Cuthbert’s wrath when she told him what had happened. That was if it had happened; she was not sure about that.
It seemed that this morning, bright with April sunshine, Mr. Robert’s office looked a great deal gayer and more convivial than usual. It might be that the knowledge of the miracle had helped her to change her outlook, or that it really was different.
She closed the door behind her, and approached the chair where she always sat to take down his letters. Mr. Robert was surveying her quite affably. In truth he was feeling affable. The stamp had proved to be an extremely good specimen. It would fill that gap in his collection which had worried him for so long. He was very well pleased with himself for getting it. He was also interested in the surprising piece of good fortune which had happened to Ann. He had never noticed her closely before. Funny, that, for his brother John always noticed his secretaries a great deal too closely.
But to Mr. Robert these girls were just secretaries, so much machinery; he classified them as being good or bad, poor or indifferent. Ann was good. You could rely on her to put the right letters into the right envelopes, and to spell carefully and correctly, and not to be too reckless over her punctuation. Secretaries were amazingly erratic over punctuation, and sometimes their spelling made you weep. But Ann had proved herself to be a very excellent machine. She did not plead temperament or headaches. She never asked for an extension of her holidays. She kept her desk neat and tidy, and did her work conscientiously.
Young
men who were clients did not leave their sticks behind them to provide excuses for a return, as they usually did with secretaries of John’s choosing. On the other hand she was not disturbingly hideous, but of quite pleasant appearance. In fact now that he came to look more closely she was of a little more than pleasant appearance, if only she had had her hair cut short and would wear better clothes. Ann, it seemed, filled all the qualifications necessary for a secretary, and until to-day he had never looked twice at her face.
‘Ah well,’ said he, ‘I must congratulate you on being a very lucky young woman. A very lucky young woman indeed.’
Ann did not know what to say, so she just nodded. Mr. Robert surveyed her across his desk littered with papers, but he seemed to be far more interested in her than in the papers. He went on gaily enough.
‘I wonder what you will do with your windfall?’ he asked; and then his eye fell on the gay circular that the enterprising steamship company had sent. ‘Oh, I see,’ said he, ‘and very wise too. I congratulate you on your choice.’
Ann, glancing down in the direction of his eyes, saw the circular, and started. It was all very irregular to have brought it in here with her, and she did not know what he would think, but really she had been so flustered.
She said, ‘Oh no, no. This is just a coincidence. I’d love to go of course, but I couldn’t. I mean I’ve never done anything like that in my life.’
‘I see’ ‒ he nodded gravely; ‘and may I ask why you could not do that? A really good holiday would be the making of you. You have got the chance now, why don’t you take it? The least you will win is three hundred pounds, and it may be a great deal more.’
‘Oh, well, I …’ began Ann, and then she said, ‘You see, I shall probably have to return the money ‒ that is if I have really won it; my brother, who has a living in Balham, thinks such things are very wrong. I doubt if he would let me keep it.’
Mr. Robert surveyed her calmly. ‘But that is all nonsense,’ he said, ‘they would not take it back; besides, where would be the sense? Don’t you do anything ridiculous like that.’
‘But I feel that Cuthbert …’
Mr. Robert felt himself getting quite cross with her. How could any woman of that age allow some bossy little parson to treat her like that? ‘To invest three hundred pounds would be foolish,’ he said; ‘you take a hundred and spend it on happiness. Give yourself a holiday.’
‘But,’ said Ann, ‘my holiday is in September, and I am going with Cuthbert and Eleanor to Worthing’; she ended lamely, ‘we always do!’
She did not know why she was talking like this, and so familiarly, to Mr. Robert. Probably it was all part of the miracle, the extraordinary things that had started happening and were going on happening.
‘If you like,’ said Mr. Robert, ‘you can take a holiday now, a month, but on one condition.’
She stared at him aghast. ‘Yes?’ she said.
‘On the condition that you go on a cruise. Anywhere you like, but not Worthing.’
Ann thought that the world had suddenly gone mad. She thought that something had happened to change everybody and everything. She was not to know of the precious stamp which had got Mr. Robert up so early, and had managed to put him into such a good mood. She was not to know that only this very morning he had heard from a secretary whom he had employed and liked in his way, years ago, and who had asked if he could possibly give her a spare-time job. She was married ‒ Mr. Robert had disliked her husband intensely ‒ and she had got wrong with him, and had had difficulties one way and another. Mr. Robert had wanted to help her; he had a big heart and was of a charitable disposition, only he had not quite seen his way to giving her a hand. All the three secretaries in the office were efficient and worthy. He did not want to get rid of any of them. He could not afford to employ more, especially in these hard times.
Now he saw the way.
He saw how to help Ann too, and he was thoroughly interested in Ann, who was behaving, he thought, like a silly little ass frightened to death by a pompous brother who thought he could do what he liked with her. Worthing indeed!
‘Now, look here,’ said Mr. Robert, ‘you go straight down to that office in your dinner-hour and book a cabin for that cruise. I’ll lend you the deposit money until you receive your cheque.’
‘Oh, I ‒’
‘You want to go? I mean those are the places that you want to see?’
‘I ‒ I’ve hardly looked.’ She glanced down at the paper in her hand as she spoke, and she saw the names, the magical names, of dream places. Each one conjured up a picture in her mind. Gibraltar, a hulk of rock against a sky, a little town straggling at the foot of a great hill, raggle-taggle music, the warmth and languor of Southern Spain. Naples, a city actually on the hill-side. See Naples and die … Vesuvius across a bay inconceivably blue, Pompeii within a stone’s throw. Malta, little square stone houses, the grey outline of warships in the Grand Harbour. Sand and glare. Venice. She felt almost sick with the apprehension of the beauty of Venice.
‘Oh yes, yes,’ she said suddenly, ‘of course they are marvellous. The very places I’d choose.’
‘Then choose it, my dear young lady. Take the chance while you have got it. Book that cabin in the lunch-hour.’
She glanced again reluctantly at the circular, and her eyes caught the one sentence ‘Anchor in St. Mark’s basin’. She became tensely still. Into the stillness she heard his voice penetrating.
‘And now, what about the morning’s mail?’
She came to with a start.
IV
The more she thought of it, the more the idea fascinated her, and at the same time frightened her. She conjured up pictures of the places, and pictures of her own fright. She thought about everything that she had ever heard and a great deal that she had wholly imagined. Miss Thomas asked her what she was going to do with her money, for Miss Thomas felt that she had a right to participate in it a little, seeing that she had been the one who had actually bought the ticket.
Perhaps wholly for effect, Ann said, ‘I thought of going on this cruise,’ and tossed the circular across to the others.
They pored over it.
‘Oh my,’ said little Gelding, ‘it’d be fine. You’d meet some beautiful boys too I’d be bound, and perhaps sheiks! It’d be like a film, wouldn’t it?’
Miss Thomas, who felt that if any cruise were contemplated she ought to be asked to share it, since the whole thing had happened through her, was a little huffed.
‘I’ve never been interested in foreign parts,’ she said, ‘they always strike me as being fast. They are not meant for people like us at all.’
Queerly enough, the fact of Miss Thomas saying that in that particular tone was the match to tinder. It piqued Ann. It infuriated her.
‘I’m sick of England,’ said Ann, which was not strictly true. ‘I am sick of office life, of living in diggings, and what’s more I don’t know that I am not sick of being respectable.’
Until this actual moment she had not realized that she was sick of diggings, and of doing the same thing in the same way day after day. She had not realized that Mrs. Puddock’s rooms were awful, and that Monday washing, Tuesday ironing, Wednesday mending, and Thursday hair-wash were much like a pair of handcuffs set like shackles on her wrists.
‘Oo-er,’ said little Gelding, ‘I think that’s fine. That is just what I would do.’ But in her heart she thought, ‘Poor old dear, over thirty and all that. She’ll have a sticky time wherever she goes.’
Her own bright life made a vivid comparison. The glitter and accompaniment of Palais de Danse and theatres, of meals at glamorous restaurants. She did not know that she envied the poor old sticks their three hundred pounds apiece, for all their being so mighty quiet about it, and never even offering her a share in the ticket. Mean of them! Oh, rottenly mean, but she did not grudge it to them all the same. The cats!
All the morning Ann, busy over her typewriter, played with the idea of the cruise. She niched it
in the corner of her mind, taking it out as it were, and looking at it. She told herself that she supposed she had really truly made up her mind to go. What a heavenly time it would be! She thought of the ship rising and falling a little, of wearing comfortable gym shoes on the decks, of sitting in a deck chair. She thought of everybody being very friendly and pleasant, she had always heard of them being like that on the sea.
All she had ever heard came back to her, every picture she had ever seen was recalled, until she really did not know where the cruise was going; she had got into a wild jumble of camels in deserts, of snows in Russia, of glaciers and volcanoes, and Heaven only knows what.
When lunch-time came round she had put a living wall between herself and Worthing. The picture had grown too big for her, and now it was something that she could not hope to destroy.
Mr. Robert called her into his office and handed her the notes. ‘There,’ said he, ‘you take my advice and book a cabin.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I ought to consult Cuthbert first.’
As if she didn’t know what Cuthbert would say!
‘Opportunity,’ he warned her, ‘never comes twice; don’t you be a little goose. The things we regret are the things we haven’t done, not the things we have.’
True, dismally true! She did regret all those wasted yet worthy years. She regretted the rectory at home, the respectability of Mrs. Puddock’s rooms, the lunch at Balham on a Sunday. She had sought for just this opportunity and had never been able to find it. Surely the chance would never come again; he was right there. She went out into the office wondering. Miss Thomas was putting on her hat. It was an old felt thing that she had bought at Lewis’s sale very cheaply because it was faded. It looked much more faded now in the spring sunshine.
‘I was thinking,’ said Miss Thomas, ‘that we might have a bit of lunch together, seeing as how it is a sort of a celebration.’
Lunch with Miss Thomas was more than Ann could stand. She would talk five per cents, and Building Societies and what the three hundred pounds would bring in a year.