CHINA
FRIDAY SUPPLEMENT, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
"A DANGEROUS WOMAN"
when she got into his carriage he didn't know what a strange Journey he would have.
I thought I'd got the carriage to myself, but just as the train was on the point of starting the door was wrenched open with the violence of an elephant uprooting a tree and a large, elderly woman barged in.
I drew in my legs, the door was slapped-to behind her and off we went. The lurch of the starting train tipped her back into the seat opposite me, and for a minute or two she sat there, oblivious of me, given over to the job of getting her breath.
She was rather a handsome old thing, rigged out in her best for а day in London - a cook-house- keeper, I guessed, or the wife of a farmer in a small way: It didn't take her long to settle down: long before we had passed the next sta- tion she had got her breath and caught my eye with a smile.
I smiled back. "I'm afraid you had rather a run for it," I said. “At our time of life, you know, you. oughtn't to do that kind of thing."
"Hm! she replied, humorously grim. "Do you think I like it?"
"Well," I said. "you don't seem to mind it much."
.***
·
If
She shrugged her shoulders. "What's the good of minding? you have bad luck, you have had luck, and there's the end of it. If I took it to heart I'd have worried myself into my grave years ago.”
"Still," I said, "I don't
suppose
a
you often have bad luck.”
"Often?" she said. "It isn't case of often: it's always. Take this morning, for instance," she went on. "Fred drove me to the station -a and not ten matter of five miles minutes. after we'd left the house, what does he do but get a puncture, the first he's had in two years."
"Dear me!" I replied sympatheti- ally. But wasn't that Fred's bad luck rather than yours?”
She snorted: "Do you think he'd have got the puncture if I hadn't been in the car?"
For a while I considered the ques- tion, not in all its prodigious rami- fication, but in its relation to my companion. She wasn't in the least quarulous about her bad luck, nor
was she of the boasting sort who -glory in it. She spoke of it simply
as a self-evident fact.
"It looks to me," I said, "as if you had had good luck rather than bad luck this morning. You had a punc- ture, it's true, but you caught the train. You ought to have missed it: an unlucky person certainly would have missed it.".
She considered my view with raised eyebrows and head slightly inclined. "You think so?" she said. "But how can you tell? Before we get to London I may bé sorry I didn't miss the train."
It was an uncomfortable remark. "I hope you don't mean." I said "that you'll have had too much of my company by that time.”
Her eyes twinkled. "I could al- ways move into another carriage, couldn't I?" Then she smiled com- fortably. “Myself," she said. "I always reckon to have a nice. talk in the train. I can't stand folks that shut themselves up behind newspa- pers. Rude, I call it to sit there read- ing in company. ""
* *
*
the.
still-
I was aware of unopened newspaper on the seat be-
Short Story
side me, and I hoped she wouldn't notice it. But she did, for the very next moment her eye feil on it and she said: "Do you mind if I have a look at your paper?”
"Please do!". I replied, handing it to her. "But don't tell me you're going to read in the train.”
"No! No! Not me!" she said. "I just want to see what horses came in yesterday."
She fumbled in a well-worn bag, fished out a battered spectacle-case, and hooked on her spectacles. Then, with the precision of one who knew
+
"Just as the train was on the point of starting the door was wrenched
open and an elderly woman barged in."
her way about the paper, she turned to the racing news, "There now!!!
she said. "If I didn't know how it would be Winner. second, and third!"
"It sounds like another stroke of luck," I remarked,
→
"Luck!" she retorted. "Wait till I
By Martin Armstrong
tell you. It was this way, you see Yesterday, Harry and Fred were running over the horses' names They'd had one or two tips, you see. from people that know, and they were talking it over as men do. “Now hand me the paper,' I said to them, and I'll pick you out three horses. Well, I took the paper and picked out three names, Barbecue, Simoon and Peter Pan. And there it is!”
She folded the paper, folded it again, and handed it back to me with a black cotton finger pointing to the list she had been studying.
winner,
"There they are, you see; second and third, and none of them a likely one."
"Astonishing!" I said. "And how much had you put on them?”
** *
*
"Put on them?" she said "I'd put nothing on them. I knew better."
"You knew better? I don't quite understand.”›› But next
*t moment I thought I had grasped her meaning. "You mean to tell me you think that, if you'd put something on thêm, they wouldn't have come in?"
"Never in the world!" She said with conviction..
"Do you really believe that?" I asked her. "Do you really believe that if you'd laid bets on those three horses they'd have failed to get a place?
"I've
"Believe it?" she said. proved it time and again.”
"Then don't you see," I said to her, "what an astonishing power you have? For you it's not a ques- tion of spotting the winner; you can make any horse you like win. You can do as you did the day be- fore yesterday, simply name your horse and then refrain from putting money on him.
(Continued on Page 7)
The Boy Scouts in camp at Kowloon Tong were vissted by
above.
group of Sea Scouts, seen in picture
PLEASE, MOTHER-
WANT POWDER THAT'S ANTISEPTIC
MENNEN
"BORATED POWDER
Antiseptic &
Holievos irritationią prickly
beat and chaling.