II
October arrived; the drought broke with forty-eight hours’ quiet rain; and Dixon had a field day with the new clipping machine, of which it is enough to say that the stable-boy turned a handle and Dixon did the rest. He had decided to clip the horses’ legs this season; the Ringwell was a bad country for thorns, and these were naturally less likely to be overlooked on clipped legs, which also were more sightly and dried quicker than hairy ones.
“Only bad grooms let their horses get cracked heels,” was one of his maxims. “Only lazy grooms wash the mud off with water” went without saying.
We often spoke about the new Master, who was already the sum and substance of my happy hunting-ground thirty miles away. Dixon remembered him distinctly; he had always considered him the pattern of what a young gentleman ought to be. Frequently I wished Aunt Evelyn’s sedate establishment could be transplanted into that well-foxed and unstagnant county. For one thing it was pretty poor fun for Dixon if I were to be continually boxing Cockbird and Harkaway to Downfield or staying at the Rectory; but Dixon seemed satisfied by the bare fact of my being a hunting man.
Resplendent in my new red coat, and almost too much admired by Aunt Evelyn and Miriam, I went off to the opening meet by the early train from Dumbridge to Downfield. Half an hour’s ride took me to the kennels, where I joined an impressive concourse, mounted, in vehicles, and on foot. The sun shone after a white frost, and everyone was anxious to have a look at the new Master. My new coat was only a single spot of colour among many, but I felt a tremendous swell all the same. Familiar faces greeted me, and when we trotted away to draw Pacey’s Plantation, old Mr. Dearborn bumped along beside me in his faded red coat and blue and white spotted bird’s-eye cravat. “This horse ought to have one of you young chaps on his back!” he exclaimed. “Jumps too big for an old duffer like me; never known him put a foot wrong, clever as a cat—(hold up, will you!)” … his clever hunter having tripped badly on some stones.
He presented me to an affable person on the other side of him—Mr. Bellerby, of Cowslake Manor. Mr. Bellerby was mounted on a fidgety, ewe-necked, weak-middled, dun-coloured mare. He had a straggling sandy beard and was untidily dressed in new clothes which looked all wrong. He seemed to have put them on in a hurry—baggy black coat half-unbuttoned—spurs falling back from loose-fitting patent-leather boots, starched stock with a horseshoe pin insecurely inserted—badly cut white corduroy breeches; and an absurdly long cane hunting-crop without a thong. He had a mackintosh coat rolled up and strapped on the back of his saddle. He wore moss-green worsted gloves, and his mare’s bridle had a browband of yellow and black striped patent-leather.
Mr. Dearborn remarked, when we lost sight of him in the crowd outside the covert, that he was a queer fish to look at, but a very warm man in Mincing Lane. “Made a pile of money out in the East; just come to live in our country; built a billiard-room onto his house, I hear; sort of man who might be good for a fifty pound subscription, fear he’s no horseman, however. That dun of his gallops like a train till she gets near a fence, and then digs her toes in. I know all about her, for he bought her in the summer from a neighbour of mine. Pity he didn’t ask my advice. I’d have let him have this one for a hundred and twenty. Absolute patent-safety, this one; jump a house if you asked him to!”
Now it so happened that the new owner of Cowslake Manor provided the liveliest incident that I remember out of that day, which was “badly served by scent” as the local scribe reported in the paper. A fox was found in Pacey’s Plantation (it was hinted that he’d been put there by Mr. Pacey, a hard-riding farmer who believed in showing the foot people some fun on an opening day). The majority of the field hustled round the outside of the covert, but I thought to be clever and went through by a grassy ride. A short distance in front of me galloped Mr. Bellerby; his hat bounced on his back, suspended by its string, and he was manifestly travelling quicker than he had intended. Someone in front pushed through the gate out of the plantation, and while we neared it the open gate was slowly swinging back again. It was uncertain which would win, Mr. Bellerby or the gate. I stole past him on his near side, got there just in the nick of time, and retarded the gate with my left hand. Mr. Bellerby bolted through the aperture, narrowly avoiding the gatepost with his right knee. It was an easily managed exploit on my part, since I had Cockbird well under control, and, as usual, he understood what we were about every bit as well as his owner. Mr. Bellerby continued his involuntary express journey across a ridge-and-furrow field, bore down on a weak hedge, swerved, shot halfway up his mare’s neck, and came to a standstill while Cockbird was taking the fence in his stride.
After Mr. Pacey’s fox had got into a drain half a mile further on, Mr. Bellerby reappeared and besieged me with his gratitude. He really didn’t know how to thank me enough or how to congratulate me in adequate terms on what he persisted in describing as my “magnificent feat of horsemanship.” It was, he asserted, the most alarming experience he’d ever had since he was run away with down a steep hill in a dogcart years ago in Surrey; he recalled his vivid emotions on that appalling occasion. “Shall I jump out, I thought, or shall I remain where I am? I jumped out! I shall never forget those awful moments!”
Embarrassed by his effusive acknowledgments I did my best to avoid him during the rest of the day, but he was constantly attaching himself to me, and everybody who happened to be near us had to hear all about my marvellous feat of horsemanship.
“Not a second to spare! I really think Mr. Sherston saved my life!” he ejaculated to Sir John Ruddimore, a stolid and rather exclusive landowner who followed the hounds very sedately with an elderly daughter. The local bigwig listened politely to the story; but I felt a fool, and was much relieved when I saw the back of Mr. Bellerby as he tit-tupped away to Cowslake Manor after pressing me to accept a cheroot about eight inches long out of a crocodile-skin case.
I returned to Butley without having exchanged a word with Milden. Whenever I saw him his face was expressionless and he seemed to be unaware of anything except his hounds and what they were doing. Nigel Croplady, however, referred to him by his Christian name and led one to suppose that he had been indispensable to him since he had taken the country. But Croplady, I am very much afraid, was just a little bit of a snob.
For several weeks Milden remained eminently unapproachable, although I diligently went out with his hounds, enlarging my equestrian experience by taking a full thirty-five bobs’ worth out of Whatman’s hard-legged hirelings. My moneys-worth included several heavy falls on my hat, but I took rather a pride in that, since my sole intention was to impress the Master with my keenness. Up to Christmas the hounds showed very moderate sport; scent was bad, but I overheard a lot of grumbling (mainly from unenterprising riders) about Milden being such a slow huntsman. Certainly he seemed in no hurry, but I was always quite satisfied, myself, as long as I had done plenty of jumping by the end of a day.
And our amateur huntsman, as I afterwards discovered, knew exactly what he was doing. As soon as he took over the country he had asserted his independence by getting rid of the Ringwell dog-pack, on which the members had always prided themselves so much. To the prudent protestations of the Committee he replied bluntly that although the dog-hounds were all right to listen to in the woods, they were too slow for words on the unenclosed downs, and too big and cloddy for the cramped and strongly fenced vale country. He added that Ben Trotter had got them into terrible bad habits and he wasn’t going to waste his time teaching them how to hunt.
Shortly afterwards he had bought five-and-twenty couple of unentered bitches at Rugby Hound Sales; so that, when the Ringwell-bred puppies came in from walk, he began the season with no less than thirty-seven couple of unentered hounds. To those people who properly understood hunting his patient methods must have been a welcome contrast to the harum-scarum, hoicking, horn-blowing “which way’d ’e go?” performances of the late huntsman.
Denis Milden refused to lift his hounds unless he was obliged to do so, and in this way he taught them to hunt on a catchy scent without looking for help. They learned to keep their noses down, and day after day Milden watched them worrying out the barely workable line of a fox who was half an hour ahead of them; he was deaf to the captious comments of his field and the loudly offered information of would-be helpers who knew which way his fox had gone. The result of this procedure was that after Christmas, when scenting conditions improved, the light-boned bitches began to hunt like blazes; in fact, as he said “they fairly screamed along,” and of the two packs he really couldn’t make up his mind which was the better—the big bitches or the little bitches. When the big bitches had pushed an old dog-fox out of Basset Wood and killed him after a fast fifty minutes with only one check, a six-mile point over all the best of the Monday country, the little bitches went one better with a really beautiful hunt from one of the big gorse coverts on the hills. The grumbling contingent now forgot that they’d ever uttered a word of criticism, and for the moment were unable to exercise their grumbling aptitude at all. But the real wiseacres, such as Sir John Ruddimore and Fred Buzzaway, nodded conclusively to one another, as though agreeing that it was only what they’d been expecting all the time.
Fred Buzzaway, whose name has just cropped up casually, was a totally different type of sportsman from that reticent local magnate Sir John Ruddimore (of Rapworth Park). Always fond of a joke, Fred Buzzaway was a blue-jowled dog-faced bachelor, who habitually dressed as though it were going to be a pouring wet day. Bowler hat well down over his ears; dark whipcord coat and serviceable brown breeches; tight and skimpy stock; such was his rig-out, wet or fine. I see him now, splashed with mud, his coat collar turned up, and his head bent against the driving rain. His boots were usually muddy owing to his laudable habit of getting off his horse as often as possible to give it a rest, and during a slow hunt he was often to be seen leading his mount and even running beside it. He was an active man on his feet, and when he wasn’t riding to hounds he was following a pack of foot-harriers. Stag-hunting he despised. “Jackasses hunting a carted jackass,” he called it. In his youth Buzzaway had been called to the Bar. His friends always said that when he got there he asked for a bottle of Bass and never went back again after he had discovered his mistake. From this it may be inferred that he had a wholesome belief in good liquor.
“Beer goes well with beagling,” he would remark, “but after a foxhunt I feel the need for something stronger.”
Few of my foxhunting acquaintances seem to have been taciturn, but Buzzaway, I am inclined to think, outwent them all in consistent chattiness. He enjoyed airing his observations, which were shrewd and homely. He was one of those men whose personal conviction as to which way the hunted fox has gone is only equalled by their expert knowledge, at the end of a gallop, of the ground he went over. His intimacy with minor local topography was unsurpassed by anyone I knew. Even when he had been out with some neighbouring pack, he could reel off the parish names like clockwork. When asked what sort of a day he’d had, he would reply: “Found in Clackett’s Copse, ran a couple of rings, and then out by Hogstye, over the old fosse-way, and into Warthole Wood, where he tried the main-earths and went on into Cuddleswood Park; along the Banks and into Hawk’s Rough, back by the Banks into the Park, left-handed by Warthole Wood …” and so on, until one could almost have believed that he’d been riding the fox himself instead of one of his low-priced and persevering hunters.
As might be imagined, he was by no means difficult to get to know. At first I was rather scared by the noises he made whenever I was anywhere near him: either he was hustling along close behind me, shouting “Forrad on,” or else he was cracking his whip at a straggling hound, or bawling “Hold up” to his horse at a jump, and I felt that I should be the next one to get shouted at. But I soon discovered what a cheery customer he was, and I became one of his best listeners. Needless to say, he was on easy terms with the Master, and it was in his company that I made my first step toward knowing Milden well.
Buzzaway was one of the privileged (or pushful) people who were sometimes to be seen riding along a road beside the huntsman, although Milden’s manner was abstracted and discouraging to conversation. More than once I had overtaken the hounds on their way to a meet, but I had always kept unobtrusively at the rear of the procession, which included three second-horsemen, one of them carrying a terrier in a bag. I was so shy that I scarcely ventured to say good morning when I passed Milden at the meet. But one day in the middle of December I stayed out to the very end on one of Whatman’s hirelings; as a rule I started back to Downfield a bit earlier, to catch my train, but it was getting dark early and the hounds had been running hard in the big woods all day, changing foxes several times. Milden was standing up in his stirrups and blowing his horn; the first whip was counting the hounds with little wags of his whips as though conducting a string band. Buzzaway was taking a long pull at his flask, and everyone else had gone home. Will announced that they were all there except Purity.
“Blast that Purity!” muttered Milden, whereupon Purity emerged penitently from the shades of the covert and the cavalcade moved off along the lane.
So it came about that I found myself riding mutely along in the middle of the pack with Buzzaway and the Master. In front of us “Toprail,” the hunting correspondent of the Southern Daily, wobbled along on his bicycle and accumulated information from the second-whip, a melancholy young man named Bill Durrant, whose existence was made no merrier by the horses he had to ride, especially the one he was on—a herring-gutted piebald which, as he had been heard to complain, was “something crool over timber.”
“Well, Master,” remarked Buzzaway, “you were devilish unlucky when that fresh fox got up in Cowleas Wood! I viewed your hunted fox going back to Danehurst Hatch, and he looked so beat I could almost have caught him myself.”
Milden tucked his horn into the case on his saddle. “Beat, was he? We’ll catch him next time, never you fear. And we’ll hunt you when we get short of foxes. I’ll be bound you’d leave a good smell behind you!”
Buzzaway grinned with as much pleasure as if he’d been paid the most graceful of compliments. Jabber, jabber, jabber went his tongue, undiscouraged by the inadequate response it met with. And considering the amount of shouting he’d done during the day, it wasn’t to be wondered at that Milden was somewhat silent and preferred to munch a large brown biscuit which he produced from his pocket in a twist of paper. Later on, however, he turned to me and asked if I’d got far to go. When he heard that I lived thirty miles away in the next county he said I “must be desperate keen, to come all that way,” and my heart glowed with gratitude. But this was nothing compared with what I felt when he continued, “I tell you what, I can put you up at the Kennels any time you like, when you’re having a day with us. It’s terrible quiet there of an evening, and I’d be glad of someone to talk to. Just drop me a card the day before, and bring your horse as well if you like; or you can find your way out from Downfield somehow if you’re on one of Whatman’s screws.” He tickled my hireling’s neck with the end of his crop. “They earn their keep all right, don’t they? That poor old sod was out the day before yesterday, I know, for some silly blighter from the barracks landed slap in the middle of my hounds on him. I wish some of those soldiers weren’t quite so mad on jumping. It’s the only thing they come out for!”
We got to Clumpton crossroads and he said good night. Buzzaway and I trotted briskly on toward Downfield in a drizzle of rain. I could scarcely believe that I had been invited to stay at the Kennels, and I listened absentmindedly to my companion’s account of a day he’d had with the Cotswold last season when staying with his brother. Ordinarily I should have found this interesting, but the only information I gathered was that though the Cotswold was a niceish country for watching hounds work, the Ringwell needed brains as well as boldness and he asked for nothing better. I then parted from him and clattered into Whatman’s cobbled yard.