THE ENGAGEMENT IS ANNOUNCED!
“Ten past three, by Jove; later than I thought again,” muttered my
employer as we reached the office again. “And I’ve got all those letters
to get through yet.... Miss Trant, I shall have to ask you to come
straight through to my room, please, and take these down at once, as I’m
off early this afternoon.”
So, still in my hat and coat, I walked straight through to Mr. Waters’
own office, sat down at the clerk’s table, and stripped off my gloves to
the afternoon’s work. (It’s alarming to see how “twice-on” white gloves
become impossible in London. I’m afraid quite a lot of my hard-earned ten
pounds a week will go on those items alone, now that I’m constrained to
lunch at these haunts of the well-dressed!)
All through the stress of following the Governor’s top-speed dictation
with my scurrying shorthand, I was conscious of the bulge of that
newly-bought ring—heavy as a door-knob, it seemed now!—on my engagement
finger, and shooting its arrogant glances of orange and emerald and
rose-colour over the dull pages of my pad.
I was glad that it had not had to be displayed at once in the
dressing-room; glad of the respite of my hour’s toil. But that seemed to
come to an end before I had even begun to set my teeth, mentally, to the
next ordeal.
—“_and beg to remain, gentlemen, yours, etc._—Yes; that’ll do, Miss
Trant, thank you,” came the Governor’s dismissal.
I put back my chair and stood up. Now for it! Now for the announcement
of this engagement! I supposed that I need not _begin_ by saying a
word to those three other girls. I should only have to walk over to my
typing-table, sit down and open my machine, and the flash of the electric
light on those marvellous stones above the keyboard would draw three pair
of eyes upon me at once. Should I have to answer that clamouring gaze, or
would the girls put it into questions of so many words?
“Miss Trant?—Look, girls!—I say, tell us, tell us? It’s not a joke? It’s
an engagement ring all right? You’re not trying to have us on, now? Are
you going to tell us——?”
Whichever way it happened, it was going to be perfectly awful. Never
mind. It had got to be. It was part of the price of that five hundred
pounds, of Jack’s salvation.
“What’s the matter, Miss Trant?” asked the Governor, with a quick glance
up at me as I passed his chair.
“Nothing, thank you. I am going to let the others know, now, about
this”—I moved that detested ring on my hand into another challenging
flash. “And I suppose you will require me to-morrow at lunch again?”
“No—yes—that is——About telling the others of this engagement of ours,”
took up Mr. Waters unexpectedly. “Would you, by any chance, prefer that I
did that myself?”
_Would_ I? I nearly gasped with relief! Why couldn’t he have seen before
what a difference this would make to the situation? There isn’t much
dignity in it, goodness knows. But this would save some appearance of it,
at all events! I said quietly, “If it is the same to you, I certainly
should prefer it.”
“Then please wait here while I see them. I won’t keep you a moment,” said
Still Waters, and he walked quickly out of the room.
It seemed an hour to me, but I suppose the minute-hand of the
round-topped clock on the broad marble mantelpiece had only moved on two
steps before the door opened again to admit my employer.
“That’s all right,” he told me, with his succinct nod. “I have announced
the ‘engagement’ to the three other typists, and shall let Mr. Dundonald
and Mr. Alexander know before I leave. I won’t keep you, Miss Trant. Good
afternoon.”
“Good afternoon,” I said. “Thank you.”
For the first time in my life I really felt like thanking him. And yet
he’d only done the most ordinary thing that one would expect the most
ordinary man to take as a matter of course. Only the custom-honoured
practice of the Near Oriental is to refuse to regard its head as an
ordinary man. Of course, he _isn’t_. There are advantages in making a
presupposition of this kind, perfectly clear from the very start!
Feeling comparatively at ease and my own mistress again, I entered the
typists’ room with my head as high as it had been when I marched out to
the lift at lunch-time after Miss Robinson’s voicing of what they all
thought of me.
Miss Robinson, with her shrewd face startled into the likeness of someone
much younger and less astute, broke away from the other two—they had
been all three chattering and knotted up together in the corner by the
cupboard where the tea-things are kept—and came frankly towards me.
“Well, Miss Trant! _Here’s_ some news we’ve just had sprung on us,” said
she, speaking as if she found great difficulty in sorting out her words.
“I must say—well, really! Gracious! Are you going to shake hands and let
us congratulate you, as I suppose is the right thing, or are you feeling
wild with me about this morning? We didn’t know, you know. We never
dreamed——! How was anyone to guess, after all——!”
“Of course you couldn’t,” I said, shaking hands with one after the other.
“And of course I’m not feeling ‘wild!’” My revenge was to hand if I
wanted it. But somehow I didn’t feel it would be worth it, now. Though,
as a matter of fact, the reminder of what I had felt that morning had
brought some of it surging back over me again. And this feeling was not
improved by the wording of little Miss Holt’s felicitations.
“‘Wild?’ I should think Miss Trant was ready to pat herself on the back
for the next week, eh? Who’d ’a thought of this, that day we were all
trying to buck her up at lunch when she was afraid she was going to get
the sack? Didn’t I say then, though, that Miss Trant would do all right
because she’d got a taking way with men? But—the Governor himself—that we
never did look upon as just a ‘man!’ Well, you never can tell!”
“I shall never try to, after _this_ afternoon,” announced Miss Robinson.
“Not after his marching in at that door there, and saying, in quite a
human sort of voice—not his own voice at all—that is, you’ll excuse me,
Miss Trant! You know what I mean!—saying, ‘_I have some news to tell you
ladies. Miss Trant and I are engaged to be married!_’”
“Married to the head of the firm—my hat!” breathed Miss Holt, devouring
me with her eyes, as if she thought that by staring hard enough she might
discover the secret of how one achieved this giddy height. “Too grand to
speak to any of us after this! Look at that ring of hers! Think of all
_that_ means!”—
Yes! If she only could!
—“No more turning out to get to business every morning, wet or dry, with
the mud still stiff on your skirt that you haven’t had time to brush! No
more lining up with the crowd to wait for that beastly old workman’s tram
at the ‘Elephant!’ No more strap-hanging! No more packed motor-buses with
flower-women, and goodness knows what, shoving their baskets into you and
trampling on your feet as they get in!” She took breath, and then, for
fear one of the others should interrupt before she finished this harangue
upon the Dignity of Labour, she hurried on—“No more having to keep on
at it if you _are_ ready to drop and your eyes popping out of your
head—no more A.B.C. girls not taking the slightest notice of your order
and _then_ giving you sauce because you’ve waited half an hour for your
lunch—no more slaving from har’-past nine to six for _her_ any more!...
I suppose you know you’re _most awfully lucky_?”
“In some ways,” murmured Miss Smith softly. “But having stacks of money
and never having to work again isn’t _everything_!”
And the dreamy look that came into her eyes irritated me worse than
the loudly-expressed envy of the other girl. Miss Holt’s type of mind,
that cares only for the things that she can see and handle and wear and
eat and drink, _is_ so much easier to tackle than an _un_-practical
person’s point of view. I’m glad I’m rather like Miss Holt, myself. These
sentimental people are too tiresome!
I simply couldn’t help one snap at Miss Smith as I turned to her.
“I suppose _nothing’s_ ‘everything’ except wasting _years_ waiting for
Love in a flat? I suppose you despise any hard-up girl who’s sick of the
struggle and who marries for comfort and a home?”
“I don’t despise anybody, Miss Trant, as it happens!” protested Smithie,
facing me with the sudden defiance of a mild nature touched in its
tenderest spot. “_You_ didn’t ought to speak sarcastically to me, just
because _you_ can get married at once instead of waiting—years—till he
can afford——”
“Well, and you needn’t despise me for that other reason, at all events,”
I said, a little mollified by the tears that were now welling up in the
dreamy eyes, “for, whatever else I may be going to do, Miss Smith, I am
not going to marry Mr. Waters for his money!”
I didn’t add that I shouldn’t ever marry him at all, but that his money
was quite good enough to get engaged to him on. However, had I openly
announced this, I don’t think she could have looked more surprised.
“Not for his money—marry him for _love_, then? _Him?_” screamed little
Miss Holt before she could stop herself. Then she clapped her hand over
her wide-open mouth, another involuntary gesture, caused partly, I
suppose, by the impulse to keep back anything further that might offend
me, and partly by the appearance at the door of Mr. Dundonald.
It was to everybody’s amazement that this was not immediately followed by
the inevitable “_Talk_-ing, ladies!” and the scowl.
But an extensive smile creased Mr. Dundonald’s shut fist of a face into
unfamiliar lines of benevolence; he beamed upon us all as he announced in
a voice as suavely unfamiliar as the smile, “Miss Trant! I am sorry to
interrupt your conversation, but Mr. Waters would be much obliged if you
would go back to his room again for a moment, as he wishes to say a few
words to you!”
“Oh, certainly,” I said, wondering what in the world this additional
“order” might be. The girls didn’t “wonder.” I know they thought it
was for another good-bye—especially Smithie, one-idea’d simpleton! I
felt her demure little smile in the small of my back as I turned to the
door. Mr. Dundonald—oh, unprecedented occurrence!—held it open for me,
murmuring, as I passed out, “Miss Trant! May I be permitted to proffer
my very heartiest good wishes on the occasion of this—this delightful
announcement?”
“Oh! Thank you so much,” I said pleasantly. (“Worm!” I thought.)
So the Governor had told Mr. Dundonald while I was receiving the
congratulations of my colleagues....
I saw in his eye—grey, fishy, and always looking as if “the Main Chance”
were plainly visible just ahead of any person he addressed—that already
my personality had changed from that of the twenty-five-shillings-a-week
typist, clad in her “all-I’ve-got” serge costume and liable to dismissal
at his hands, to that of young Mrs. William Waters, who, gorgeous in
silk, satin and sables, would one of these days be calling at the office
to pick up the head of the firm and to motor him home with her! Mr.
Dundonald’s new manner was a forecast of his reception of me when that
day should dawn!
If _he_ only knew!
“Sorry to trouble you again,” said the Governor as I presented myself
before him once more. “I forgot, in the middle of all that other
business”—this, I suppose, might have applied to either the dictating of
his letters, or the choosing of his betrothal ring—“to tell you that I
intend to let my mother know, to-night, about this engagement of ours.”
“Oh, yes.”
“You will probably hear from her to-morrow, inviting you to stay at our
house—it’s near Sevenoaks. You had better send in your formal resignation
to the office at once, and make your arrangements to come on for a
fortnight’s visit or so, in a few days. Will that be convenient to you?”
“Oh, perfectly,” I said obediently, hoping that I did not show any
outward symptoms of that sick feeling of panic that possessed me. To
stay at the Governor’s house? So soon? Horrors! With the Governor’s
mother? What _will_ she be like? Exactly like him, probably, only far
more forbidding; women can always be more alarming than even the most
terrifying of men. An elderly feminine edition of Still Waters! Ye gods!
And she will hate me, of course; look upon me as that designing minx of
a typist who had “got round” her son in business-hours and prevented him
from “doing well for himself” in some other direction. People with money
always want their children to marry people with more! It will be Lady
Vandeleur over again, only worse. How appalling! Perhaps she will make
herself as disagreeable to me as possible, in the hope of inducing me to
feel that I should never be able to stand such a mother-in-law, and that
I should simply have to break it off!—which, under the circumstances, I’m
powerless to do!
“And—er—that will be all, this afternoon, thank you. You will hand your
notes of my letters to Mr. Alexander. If you have arrangements to make,
you can leave as early as you choose to-day.”
“Thank you, Mr. Waters.”
Feeling that I couldn’t have stood another minute of him and his
“arrangements,” I walked quickly out of the room and down the passage.
Round a corner, I heard the voice of our office mimic, who had slipped
out on some pretext, in full flow of narrating to one of the telephone
girls the amazing news that I know was being buzzed all over the Near
Oriental offices.
—“but, my dear, the little Trant gives out she’s madly in love with him!
She says”—here a most successful imitation of my own voice—“‘Whatever
else I may be doing, I am NOT marrying him for his money!’”
“P’raps it’s for his kind heart and his charm of manner, I don’t think,”
suggested the telephone girl. “Or his good looks, eh?”
“Nothing actually the matter with his looks, my girl. Anyhow, he does
always look as if he went in for no end of cold water, and week-end
tramps, and golf, and the windows wide open, and decent soap—cuticura,
I’ve smelt it,” said Miss Robinson. “And as if he could _heave_
things—which nobody else does, in this establishment. And if you _can_
get over the general effect of ‘the stern-and-solemn-Nelson’s column——’”
“Well, I can’t. But she’s quite pretty if she’d only make a little more
_of_ herself; p’raps she will now,” said the telephone girl, who wears
long coral drop-earrings and pins brown-paper cuffs over her sleeves in
business-hours. “What on earth do you suppose he said when he proposed to
her?”
“‘_Now, Miss Trant, when you have taken down that Buenos Ayres order,
there is something I have to consult you about personally. Now, Miss
Trant, are you prepared to consider_——’”
It was so exactly our employer’s voice that I, standing there unnoticed,
burst out laughing. The girls, caught out, laughed too.
“You didn’t know you were the talk of the place, did you, Miss Trant? May
as well make up your mind to it,” said Miss Robinson. “And do show Miss
Harris your ring!”
“I could see it from here. I thought it was something being done to the
electric lights. My! but they are sparklers! I shouldn’t half swank,
wearing jewellery like this. Did you choose it to-day, Miss Trant? My
word! Some people do have all the luck. It’ll be a very short engagement,
I presume?”
“I don’t think so,” said I, thinking of the nearly twelve complicated and
weary months that stretched before me. “Some time yet.”
“No doubt any time’ll seem long _na-ow_,” said the telephone girl archly.
“Can’t you tell us _about_ when it’s likely to be?”
Oh, dear! It seemed to me as if I passed through hours of this sort
of thing before I could break away and set out for Battersea and our
bachelor-girl flat.
Wearily, and without any “spring” left in me, I climbed the four flights
of stone steps. I felt positively dragged down by the thought of that
awful fortnight with the Governor’s mother at their house near Sevenoaks.
It had clung to me all the way back. Only as I put my key into the door
did I remember something else.
There would be Cicely to break the news of my engagement to, now!