MAGIC MOMENT.

Otago Witness, Issue 3886, 4 September 1928, Page 82

MAGIC MOMENT.

By

Rutherford Crockett.

“ I suppose you couldn’t lend me a fiver, by any chance, till Friday? The fact is”—(Nigel Mansfield lowered his voice confidentially, glancing at the schoolroom door as he spoke)—“l’ve got a splendid tip for the 3.30 tomorrow, and I’m darned hard up, as it happens. Seems a pity to miss it, all the same. We might go shares in the winnings, eh, Primmie?” Hester Primrose looked deliberately away from the teasing face bending above her own, and said in a flat, metallic voice, “ no, I can’t. And I wouldn’t if I could. Racing is wrong, and betting is ” “The very devil, eh? Poor Primmie, you’ve got to live up to your principles and your name, haven’t you? Well, if you won’t, you won’t, and that’s that. So much the worse for us both; I might have made enough for you to wangle a new frock out of the‘devil’s gains. Or, I say, Primmie—what about a run down to Brighton together? There, I’ve made you blush, and shocked your Puritan soul to the core, and there’s the luncheon gong. Cheerio, my Puritan Prim! Remember, if I’m a ruined man by Thursday, and go straight 'to the bad on the head of it, you’re to blame.” Left alone in the littered schoolroom, Hester Primrose leaned her head on her hands and sighed. She would have given pounds, at that moment, to hang a millstone round the collective neck of her prejudices, her principles, and her Puritanism, and sink them in the depths of the sea. She was 39, and for 15 austere years had been a governess in middle-class families, mainly in provincial towns. - Severely handicapped at the outset by possessing a father who was in actual fact the clergyman so often claimed in governesses advertisements, Hester Primrose had, of course, been nicknamed “ Prim ” bv successive squadrons of pupils. On the whole she Jiad deserved it; but every now and then, as to-day, nature revolted. Spring was in full glory outside the dingy schoolroom walls; the lilac trees in the Mansfields’ garden were a ravishing riot of colour and scent. She had not bought a new frock for nearly a year; there was, as she phrased it, “ no occasion,” for such in her position. Worse still, she occasionally felt absurdly young, particularly when sniffing the lilac clumps in Mrs Mansfield’s bowls. Worst of all, Nigel Mansfield, elder brother of her three fresh-faced bovine pupils, had stormed his way into her schoolroom and her outlook like a young cyclone, disturbing alike to her orderly desk and to her sense of relative values. “I might be his mother! ” she would remind herself sternly at intervals—an overstatement, since Nigel was a composed, personable, and quite remarkably astute young man of 24. Hester disapproved of him in toto—his ties, his debts, his musical taste, his habit of profane swearing, his placid, unswerving selfishness. But in conjunction with spring, lilac blossom, and the sap coursing in trees, in grass, and intermittently m her own spinster veins, she found him vaguely disturbing. Lunch over, Hester having put on her too-obviously last year’s hat, her serviceable shoes, and a pair of muchmended gloves, prepared for her “ afternoon off.” Mrs Mansfield was taking her .younger offspring in the car to have tea with a bachelor uncle in the country; Nigel, though iu the bosom of his family he alluded casually to “an appointment with some friends,” was going to the races.

“ It will be nice for you to have some fresh air on this glorious day,” her employer had remarked benignly as the loaded car started. “ Why not have tea out. Miss Primrose, and walk to Applegarth and back? I’m sure you’d uiijoy ihat.” Why not, indeed? Except that Hester knew every step of the dusty Applegarth road by heart; knew, too well, the frowsy inn with its odour of stale beer and its dirty tablecloths; knew, too, that Mrs Mansfield considered this the ideal excursion for a dependent, and, as it were, made her a present of the glorious day and the beauties of Nature thrown in. Hester, boarding a tram going in the direction most remote from Applegarth, was startled out of her musings by the conductor’s strident tones. “ Sixpenny fare, please—racecourse only, no ordinary fares today.”

“ Can t I get to Michael’s Cross by this tram, then? ”

“ Yus, get out at the racecourse and walk from there.”

At the racecourse gate Hester descended, not without difficulty, since every passenger on the tram seemed bent cm the same errand. Nearly knocking her over in their eager rush, they swarmed off the tram and alofrig the Broad road leading to, Destruction. Shop-girls, swinging their brief skirts and gaily-coloured bags; young men in Imwlttixa- u_L<ir£ oxwl Eiiaiuino’a larira xxclx*-

spiring matrons in blouses, propelling pale-faced children in the way in which*, Hester felt, they emphatically should not go—breathlessly they poured along, sweeping her with them against her will. She found herself actually on the racegroun<L almost before she realised it. “ Why not? ” she caught herself thinking. “So long as I keep on the outskirts of the crowd no harm will be done. “ It’s better than Applegarth, anyhow! ” Secretly she hoped to capture something of the fascination which Nigel Mansfield appeared to find perennial in these vicious scenes. More secretly still, she longed for a fresh excitement, a novel experience, a slice of life with the zest left in and the moral left out. But this she would not have owned even to her inmost self, so wildly unprincipled did it appear to the oracles who sat in judgment at that austere tribunal.

Among the bookies with their huge green umbrellas, their rickety easels and crazy blackboards, their broken beer bottles and greasy account books, she moved furtively, nervously, fascinated. It was a relief to find in the jostling crowds around her, not the sardonic, Mephistophelian figures glittering with specious vice which her fevered fancy had painted, but homely, blowzy, commonplace matrons, demurely shabby spinsters, obvious fathers of families, and what not.

“ They all seem very respectable,” she admitted, “most of the women look like somebody’s aunties, and the men aren’t specially depraved to all appearance. Still, you never can tell.”

“ Nice ’ot cup o’ tea, always on the boil! Boilin’ ’ot cup, missis! ” She glanced from the fat, red proprietor of the huge copper urn to the ambiguous dish-cloth with which he was drying out the tea-stained cups with a shudder. “ Here y’are, miss—name of winner, one penny only, only one penny, conic on, now.” A searecrow figure plucked at her sleeve, his talisman-tip screwed up in a grimy twist of paper. Scared and bewildered by so many unfamiliar sights and sounds, Hester took cover behind a tattered green umbrella where “Mr Jimmie Dacre, of NorthpOol,” was encouraging his clients at the top of his voice. _ A thin, pale woman offered half her seat on an upturned grocer’s box. “’Ot, ain’t it?” she remarked, pleasantly. “ They say Stolen Sweet’s goin’ ter win the* 4.30. I’ve got two bob on Hermy Own for this—win or plaice. What’s yer fancy this taime?”

“ I—haven’t made up my mind,” said Hester Primrose, with dignity, thankfully accepting the proffered seat. “ There’s ’Asty Love, now,” her mentor resumed helpfully, “ or some says Myrtle ’as a good chance. ’F I was you I’d have one on each, like, just to be sure. I never do back the favourite, mvself; w’en my ’usband was alive, ’e did; an’ went orf sudden ’e did, too, run over by one o’ them nasty buses. Virgin Queen —now, that’s a nice ’orse, that is, try that one.”

How it was accomplished she. never quite knew, but Hester extracted a halfcrown from her purse and, under direction from her voluble friend, entrusted it to Mr Dacre’s grimy hand in exchange for a pink ticket and an expansive wink of approval.

“ Not Virgin Queen —oh, no, I’d rather have Good Luck, please, or perhaps Treasury Note.”

“ ’Ave both, and the one’ll bring you the other, missis! ” Jimmie, true to his cloth, improved the occasion by an undoubted mot. The crowd broke into appreciative grins; Hester cowered back behind the umbrella, two tickets in her trembling hand.

What does ‘ win or place ’ mean, please?” she queried, timidly, as her companion proceeded to drink from a squat black bottle and hospitably offered a sip. “Not a drop even? Well, ’ave an orange, then; it’s ’ot work, makin’ up yer mind. ‘Win or place,’ did yer sav? Well, now, look ’ere. it’s like this L” For five precious minutes Hester Primrose focused her trained scholastic faculties on the intricate science of backing; her brain reeled with haphazard scraps of knowledge; her mind seethed with unfamiliar terms. “ Mauve an’ silver, them’s No. 7’s, wot you’ve ter look out for; and Good Luck’s No. 11, primrose an’ green.” “ Primrose,” thought the demoralised Hester, “ that ought to bring me luck; and mauve and silver’s like those lilac trees, if that means anything.” Her friend now rose alertly and hustled her across to ’ an empty space at the barrier. “ Now, then, you lads, stand back a bit an’ let two ladies ’ave a look! ’ she urged, using alternate elbows to force a passage for herself, and' Hester. “They’re off!” Magic syllables, uniting the strangelyassorted crowd into one resolve, one aim—a glimpse of that flying arc of rainbow hues which skimmed along the smooth turf, past the fringing wood at the corner, round the bend and on. Incredibly swift, that oncoming rush; Hester could just distinguish the colours as they swept breathless round the far bend. Light as leaves blown by the wind, they came—flying horses, lithe and tense; slender striped jockeys, mere wisps of flesh and steel, cowering above their glossy necks. Primrose and green leading, mauve and silver gaining steadily; so much Hester saw, when a completely new sensation—the first she had known for 15 years—took her by the throat. The thudding of horses’ hoofs shook the solid earth beneath her feet, shook up her cherished principles as in a medicine bottle, beat out its tumultuous primitive music in her brain. - - A law liarluu-in snuiul lu-nka frnin

the crowd as the rushing, mighty wind of the stampede fanned their craning faces Hester, too, cried out as the rhythmic sweep stirred her pulses and stormed her heart. Sudden tears blinded ller eyes, she could not see the finish tor them. She had never been so happy in her life. Backed the winner, you ’ave,” remarked her companion, straining her eyes towards the three mvstic figures on the distant indicator. * “ And the seckind, I declare! ” she added, a moment later. Treasury Note it is, as I’m a sinner.” i V 1 a < B’ ea * n , Hester Primrose collected her ill-gotten gains. Mechanically she selected at random new names, fresh combinations of colours; methodically •she applied her new-found technique of “ win or pla.ee.” Little she cared for loss or gain, between the events she re-lived her last moment of ecstasy and anticipated the next. Reckless, abandoned, she staked a ten-shilling note on Stolen Sweet in the last race of the day— and won. “Beginners’ luck, love, her mentor remarked at parting. * * * “ S pose you’ve not thought better of that proposition, Primmie? ” Jrigel Mansfield’s dark face and engaging smile glinted in the dusk at the half-open schoolroom door. “ As a matter of fact, I have,” Hester Primrose heard herself reply. “Here is your five pounds. You can—do what you like with it.” Surprised and perhaps, for all his metallic modernity, a little touched, young Mansfield picked up the crumpled nptes which, via “ Jimfnie Dacre, of Northpool;” had accrued from Stolen Sweet’s surprising performance in the 4.30. An unfamiliar tremor of compunction stirred the surface of his egoism; vague ideas of hoarded savings, of aged parents deprived of visible means of support, of frocks foregone or premiums unpaid—how could a fellow tell? “ I say, Prim, that’s awfully sporting of you—l mean, you know, I was only half-serious. Don’t know whether I- ought to ” he mumbled, flushing slightly. '• Take it,” said Hester Primrose, in a strangled voice. • He took it, bent over her with a sudden impulse, half-gratitude, halfshame, and kissed her—the last thrill of her crowded day. “ Dear Primmie—no, ‘ Primrose ’ you look in that yellow frock—thanks most awfully! I’ll let you have it back by Sunday, if Saucy Arethusa behaves herself in the 3.30 to-morrow! But I forgot—shouldn’t mention horses to you, should I? S’pose you haven’t a reliable tip to give me as well—eh, Puritan Prim? ” “ You might do worse,” said Hester Primrose, very sedately, adjusting her ruffled hair, “ than—er—put your shirt on Magic Moment.”