We had had a long and tedious final session—for this time there was not only business to wind up, but compliments to be exchanged too—and I came out of it at half-past six in the evening so exhausted that I turned into the nearest café at which I was known, and procured a whisky-and-soda. With it the waiter brought me a copy of Le Soir, and, as I sipped my “refresher” and smoked a cigar, I glanced through it, hoping (to be candid) to find some complimentary notice of the achievements of my Conference. I did not find that—perhaps it was too soon to expect it—but I did find something which interested me a great deal more. Among the miscellaneous items of “intelligence” I read the following:
“The first prize in yesterday’s draw of the Reparation Lottery Loan has been won by M. Arsenio Valdez of Nice. The amount of the prize is three million francs. The number of the winning ticket was two hundred and twelve thousand, one hundred and twenty-one. We understand that the fortunate winner purchased it for a trifling sum from a chance acquaintance at Monte Carlo.”
I re-read the winning number; indeed, I took my pencil out of my pocket and wrote it down—in figures—on the margin of the newspaper. I believe that I said softly, “Well, I’m damned!” The astonishing creature had brought it off at last, and brought it off to some tune. Three million francs! Pretty good—for anybody except the Frosts of this world, of course!
Aye, Arsenio would buy that ticket from a chance acquaintance (probably one of the same kidney as himself) if he had the coin, or could beg, borrow, or steal it! Number 212, 121! There it was three times over—21—21—21. He would have seemed to himself absolutely mad if he had let that ticket escape him, when chance threw it in his way. It was, indeed, as though Fortune said, “I have teased you long enough, O faithful votary, but I give myself to you at last!” And she had—she actually had. Arsenio’s long quest was accomplished.
What would he do with it, I pondered, as I puffed and sipped. I saw him resplendent again as he had been on that never forgotten Twenty-first, and smiling in monkeyish triumph over all of us who had mocked him for a fool. I even saw him paying back Nina and Godfrey Frost, though possibly this was a detail which might be omitted, as being a distasteful reminder of his days of poverty. I saw him dazzling Lucinda with something picturesquely extravagant, a pearl necklace or a carpet of banknotes—what you will in that line. I heard him saying to her, “Number twenty-one! Always twenty-one. Your number, Lucinda!” And I saw her flushing like a girl just out of the schoolroom, as Godfrey had seen her flush at Nice.
Ah, Godfrey Frost! This event was—to put the thing vulgarly—one in the eye for him, wasn’t it? He had lost his pull; his lever failed him. He could no longer pose, either to himself or to anybody else, as the chivalrous reliever of distress, the indignant friend to starving beauty. And Nina’s gracious, though sadly unappreciated, bounty to a fallen rival—that went by the board too.
These things were to the good; but at the back of my mind there lurked a discontent, even a revolt. Godfrey had proposed to buy Valdez; to buy Lucinda from Valdez, he had meant. Now Arsenio himself would buy her with his winning ticket, coating the transaction with such veneer of romance as might still lie in magic Twenty-one, thrice repeated. One could trust him to make the most of that, skillfully to eke it out to cover the surface as completely as possible. Would it be enough? His hope lay in what that flush represented, the memories it meant, that feeling in her which she herself, long ago, had declared to be hers because she was a primitive woman.
I did not, I fear, pay much attention to the speeches—though I made one of them—at the farewell dinner of our Conference that night; and next day, my first free day, was still filled with the thought of Arsenio and his three million francs; my mind, vacant now of pressing preoccupations, fell a prey to recollections, fancies, images. A restlessness took possession of me; I could not stay in Paris. I was entitled to a holiday; where should I pass it? I did not want to go to Cragsfoot; I had had enough of the Riviera. (There was possibly a common element, ungallant towards a certain lady and therefore not explicitly confessed to myself, in my reluctance to turn my steps in either of those directions.) Where should I go? Something within me answered—Venice!
Why not? Always a pleasant place for a holiday in times of peace; and one read that “peace conditions” were returning; the pictures, and so on, were returning too, or being dug up, or taken out of their sandbags. And the place was reported to be quite gay. Decidedly my holiday should be passed at Venice.