V
At the Rectory
I
Stopping at every station, a local train conveyed me sedately into Sussex. Local and sedate, likewise, were the workings of my brain, as I sat in an empty compartment with the Southern Daily News on my knees. I had bought that unpretentious paper in order to read about the Ringwell Hounds, whose doings were regularly reported therein. And sure enough the previous day’s sport was described in detail, and “Among the large field out” was the name, with many others, of “Mr. Colwood, junr.” Although I had yet to become acquainted with the parishes through which Reynard had made his way, I read with serious attention how he had “crossed the Downfield and Boffham road, borne right-handed into Hooksworth Wood, turned sharply back, and worked his way over the country to Icklesfield,” etc., etc., until “hounds ran into him after a woodland hunt of nearly three hours.” The account ended with the following word: “If ever hounds deserved blood they did this time, as they had to work out nearly every yard of their fox’s line.”
Having read this through twice I allowed my thoughts to dally with the delightful prospect of my being a participator in similar proceedings next day. Occasionally I glanced affectionately at the bulging kit-bag containing those masterpieces by Craxwell and Kipward which had cost me more than one anxious journey to London. Would Stephen approve of my boots, I wondered, staring out of the window at the reflective monochrome of flooded meadows and the brown gloom of woodlands in the lowering dusk of a heavily clouded December afternoon.
Whatever he might think of my boots, there was no doubt that he approved of my arrival when the fussy little train stopped for the last time and I found him waiting for me on the platform. I allowed him to lug my bag out of the station, and soon he had got it stowed away in the old yellow-wheeled buggy, had flicked his father’s favourite hunter into a trot (“a nailing good jumper, but as slow as a hearse”), and was telling me all about the clinking hunt they’d had the day before, and how he’d enjoyed my account of the Potford gallop. “You’ve got a regular gift for writing, you funny old cock! You might make a mint of money if you wrote for Horse and Hound or The Field!” he exclaimed, and we agreed that I couldn’t write worse than the man in the Southern Daily, whose “Reynard then worked his way across the country” etc. afterwards became one of our stock jokes.
In describing my friendship with Stephen I am faced by a difficulty which usually arises when one attempts to reproduce the conversational oddities of people who are on easy terms. We adopted and matured a specialized jargon drawn almost exclusively from characters in the novels of Surtees; since we knew these almost by heart, they provided us with something like a dialect of our own, and in our carefree moments we exchanged remarks in the mid-Victorian language of such character-parts as Mr. Romford, Major Yammerton, and Sir Moses Mainchance, while Mr. Jorrocks was an all-pervading influence. In our Surtees obsession we went so far that we almost identified ourselves with certain characters on appropriate occasions. One favourite role which Stephen facetiously imposed on me was that of a young gentleman named Billy Pringle who, in the novel which he adorns, is reputed to be very rich. My £600 a year was thus magnified to an imaginary £10,000, and he never wearied of referring to me as “the richest commoner in England.” The stress was laid on my great wealth and we never troubled to remember that the Mr. Pringle of the novel was a dandified muff and “only half a gentleman.” I cannot remember that I ever succeeded in finding a consistent role for Stephen, but I took the Surtees game for granted from the beginning, and our adaptation of the Ringwell Hunt to the world created by that observant novelist was simplified by the fact that a large proportion of the Ringwell subscribers might have stepped straight out of his pages. To their idiosyncrasies I shall return in due course: in the meantime I am still on my way to Hoadley Rectory, and Stephen is pointing out such foxhunting features of the landscape as are observable from the high road while we sway companionably along in the old-fashioned vehicle. …
“That’s Basset Wood—one of our werry best Wednesday coverts,” he remarked, indicating with the carriage-whip a dark belt of trees a couple of miles away under the level cloud-bars of a sallow sunset. He eyed the dimly undulating pastures which intervened, riding over them in his mind’s eye as he had so often ridden over them in reality.
“We’ll be there on Monday,” he went on, his long, serious face lighting up as his gaze returned to the road before him. “Yes, we’ll be drawing there on Monday,” he chuckled, “and if we can but find a straight-necked old dog-fox, then I’ll be the death of a fi’-pun’-note—dash my wig if I won’t!”
I said that it looked quite a nice bit of country and asked whether they often ran this way. Stephen became less cheerful as he informed me that there was precious little reason for them to run this way.
“There’s not a strand of wire till you get to the road,” he exclaimed, “but over there”—(pointing to the left) “there’s a double-distilled blighter who’s wired up all his fences. And what’s more, his keeper shoots every fox who shows his nose in the coverts. And will you believe me when I tell you, George my lad, that the man who owns those coverts is the same ugly mugged old sweep who persuaded the Guv’nor to get me trained as a chartered accountant! And how much longer I’m going to stick it I don’t know! Seven months I’ve been worriting my guts out in London, and all on the off-chance of getting a seat in the office of that sanctimonious old vulpicide.”
I consoled him with a reminder that he’d spent most of August and September shooting and fishing in Scotland. (His father rented a place in Skye every summer.) And during the remainder of the drive we debated the deeply desirable and not impossible eventuality of Stephen’s escape from chartered accountancy. His one idea was to “get into the Army by the back door.” If only he could get into the Gunners he’d be happy. His elder brother Jack was in the Gunners, and was expecting to be moved from India to Ireland. And Ireland, apparently, was a foxhunting Elysium.
“I really must have a chat with Colonel Hesmon about it. By the way, the dear old boy’s asked us both to lunch tomorrow.”
This led to a rhapsody about that absolutely top-hole performer Jerry, who had been given him by the Colonel after he’d won the Heavyweight Race. My Harkaway, on the other hand, was more a subject for solicitude, and I reluctantly confessed that he didn’t seem up to my weight. It was a thousand pities, said Stephen, that I couldn’t have bought that six-year-old of young Lewison’s. “Given him for his twenty-first birthday by his uncle, who’d forked out £170 for him. But young Lewison couldn’t ride a hair of the horse, though he was a nailing fine ‘lepper’ and a rare good sort to look at. They sent him up to Tatts last week and he went for £90, according to the paper. Gosh, what a bit of luck for the cove who got him so cheap!”
My appetite for horseflesh was stimulated by this anecdote, but I wondered what Mr. Pennett would say if I wrote and told him that I’d bought another ninety pounds’ worth! For Mr. Pennett still refused to allow me more than £450 of my £600. The balance, he said, must be “invested for a rainy day.”
Stephen’s visionary contemplations of “being stationed at the Curragh and riding at Punchestown Races” were interrupted by our arrival at the Rectory. I had stayed there more than once in the summer, so I received a surly but not unfriendly salute from Abel, the grim little old groom with iron-grey whiskers who led our conveyance soberly away to the stable-yard. This groom was an old-fashioned coachman, and he had never been heard to utter a sentence of more than six words. His usual reply, when asked about the health of one of the horses, was either, “Well enough” or “Not over-bright.” Stephen now reminded him (quite unnecessarily, and probably not for the first time) that two of the horses would be going out hunting on Monday. Abel grunted, “Got ’em both shod this afternoon,” and disappeared round the corner of the shrubbery with the buggy.
There was only one thing against him, said Stephen, and that was that he hadn’t a ghost of an idea how to trim their tails, which were always an absolute disgrace. “I’ve told him again and again to pull the hair out,” he remarked, “but he goes on just the same, cutting them with scissors, and the result is that they come out at the opening meet with tails like chrysanthemums!”
From this it may be inferred that there were many things in the Rectory stable which fell short of Stephen’s ideal. He and his brothers were always trying to bring “the old guv’nor” into line with what they believed to be the Melton Mowbray standard of smartness. There was also the question of persuading him to buy a motorcar. But Parson Colwood was a Sussex man by birth and he valued his native provincialism more than the distant splendours of the Shires toward which his offspring turned their unsophisticated eyes. The Rectory, as I knew it then, had the charm of something untouched by modernity.
The Rev. Harry Colwood, as I remember him, was a composite portrait of Charles Kingsley and Matthew Arnold. This fanciful resemblance has no connection with literature, toward which Mr. Colwood’s disposition was respectful but tepid. My mental semi-association of him with Arnold is probably due to the fact that he had been in the Rugby eleven somewhere in the ’sixties. And I have, indeed, heard him speak of Arnold’s poem, “Rugby Chapel.” But the Kingsley affinity was more clearly recognizable. Like Kingsley, Mr. Colwood loved riding, shooting, and fishing, and believed that such sports were congruous with the Christian creed which he unobtrusively accepted and lived up to. It is questionable, however, whether he would have agreed with Kingsley’s Christian Socialism. One of his maxims was “Don’t marry for money but marry where money is,” and he had carried this into effect by marrying, when he was over forty, a sensible Scotch lady with a fortune of £1,500 a year, thereby enabling his three sons to be brought up as keen fox-hunters, game-shooters, and salmon-fishers. And however strongly the Author of his religion might have condemned these sports, no one could deny him the Christian adjectives gentle, patient, and just.
At first I had been intimidated by him, for the scrutinizing look that he gave me was both earnest and stern. His were eyes which looked straight at the world from under level brows, and there was strictness in the lines of his mouth. But the kindliness of his nature emerged in the tone of his voice, which was pitched moderately low. In his voice a desire for gaiety seemed to be striving to overmaster an inherent sadness. This undertone of sadness may have been accentuated as the result of his ripened understanding of a world which was not all skylarking and sport, but Stephen (who was a lankier and less regular-featured edition of his father) had inherited the same quality of voice. Mr. Colwood was a naturally nervous man with strong emotions, which he rigidly repressed at all times.
When I arrived that afternoon both the Rector and his wife were attending some parochial function in the village. So Stephen took me up to the schoolroom, where we had our tea and he jawed to me about horses and hunting to his heart’s content. He ended by asserting that he’d “sooner cheer a pack of Pomeranians after a weasel from a bath-chair than waste his life making money in a blinking office.”
II
A tenor bell in Hoadley Church tower was making its ultimate appeal to those who were still on their way to morning service. While Stephen and I hurried hatless across the sloping cricket-field which divided the Rectory garden from the churchyard I sniffed the quiet wintry-smelling air and wondered how long Mr. Colwood’s sermon would last. I had never been to his church before; there was a suggestion of embarrassment in the idea of seeing him in a long white surplice—almost as if one were taking an unfair advantage of him. Also, since I hadn’t been to church with Aunt Evelyn for Heaven knew how long, I felt a bit of an outsider as I followed Stephen up the aisle to the Rectory pew where his matronly mother was awaiting us with the solemnly cheerful face of one who never mumbled the responses but made them as though she meant every word. Stephen, too, had the serene sobriety of an habitual public-worshipper. No likelihood of his standing up at one of those awkward places when everyone kneels down when you don’t expect them to.
As the service proceeded I glanced furtively around me at the prudent Sunday-like faces of the congregation. I thought of the world outside, and the comparison made life out there seem queer and unreal. I felt as if we were all on our way to next week in a ship. But who was I, and what on earth had I been doing? My very name suddenly seemed as though it scarcely belonged to me. Stephen was sitting there beside me, anyhow; there was no doubt about his identity, and I thought what a nice face he had, gentle and humorous and alight with natural intelligence. I looked from him to his father, who had been in the background, so far, since the curate had been reading the service (in an unemphatic businesslike voice). But the Rector’s eye met mine, which shied guiltily away, and my woolgathering was interrupted. Even so might his gaze have alighted on one of the coughing village children at the back of the church.
My sense of unfamiliarity with what was going on was renewed when Colonel Hesmon’s wizened face and bushy grey eyebrows appeared above the shiny brass eagle to read the First Lesson. This was not quite the same Colonel who had been in such a frenzy of excitement over the point-to-point race eight months ago, when he had exclaimed, over and over again, “I’ve told the boy that if he wins I’ll give him the horse!”
The Colonel’s voice was on church parade now, and he was every inch a churchwarden as well. He went through the lesson with dispassionate distinctness and extreme rapidity. Since it was a long passage from Isaiah, he went, as he would have said, “a rattling good gallop.” But the words, I thought, were incongruous ones when uttered by the Colonel. “And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: none shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken: whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it. And in that day they shall war against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof. Here endeth the First Lesson.” And the brisk little man turned over the leaves to a passage from Peter, arranged the gold-embroidered marker, and returned to his pew with erect and decorous demeanour.
Twenty minutes later Mr. Colwood climbed the pulpit steps to the strains of “O God our help in ages past.” My own vocal contribution was inconspicuous, but I had a stealthy look at my watch, which caused Stephen, who was giving a creditable performance of the hymn, to nudge me with his elbow. The sermon lasted a laborious twelve minutes. The Rector had a nervous mannerism which consisted in his continually gathering up his surplice with his left hand, as if he were testing the quality of the linen with his fingers. The offertory was for a missionary society, and he took as his text: “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.” The results of the collection were handed to him on a wooden plate by the Colonel, who remarked afterwards at lunch that he “didn’t mind saying that with the best will in the world he’d have preferred to give his half-sovereign to someone nearer home”—Stephen having already made his rather obvious joke—“Whatever the Guv’nor may say in his sermon about ‘imparting,’ if I ever get a new hunting-coat I’m going to ruddy well keep my old one for wet days!”
The sun was shining when we emerged from the musty smelling interior. The Colonel, with his nattily rolled umbrella, perfectly brushed bowler hat, and nervously blinking eyes, paid his respects to Mrs. Colwood with punctilious affability; then he shepherded Stephen and myself away to have a look round his stables before lunch. We were there in less than five minutes, the Colonel chatting so gaily all the way that I could scarcely have got a word in edgeways even if I had felt sufficient confidence in myself to try.
The Colonel had been a widower for many years, and like most lonely living people he easily became talkative. Everything in his establishment was arranged and conducted with elaborate nicety and routine, and he took an intense pride in his stable, which contained half a dozen hunters who stood in well-aired and roomy loose-boxes, surrounded by every luxury which the Colonel’s care could contrive: the name of each horse was on a tablet suspended above the manger. Elegant green stable-buckets (with the Colonel’s numerous initials painted on them in white) were arranged at regular intervals along the walls, and the harness-room was hung with enough bits and bridles to stock a saddler’s shop. It was, as Stephen pointed out to me afterwards, “a regular museum of mouth-gear.” For the Colonel was one of those fussy riders with indifferent hands who are always trying their horses with a new bit.
“I haven’t found the key to this mare’s mouth yet,” he would say, as the irritated animal shook its head and showered everyone within range with flecks of froth. And when he got home from hunting he would say to his confidential old head-groom: “I think this mare’s still a bit under-bitted, Dumbrell,” and they would debate over half the bits in the harness-room before he rode the mare again.
“Sunday morning stables” being one of his favourite ceremonies, the Colonel now led us from one loose-box to another, commenting affectionately on each inmate, and stimulated by the fact that one of his audience was a stranger. Each of them, apparently, was a compendium of unique equine qualities, on which I gazed with unaffected admiration, while Stephen chimed in with “Never seen the old chestnut look so fit, Colonel,” or “Looking an absolute picture,” while Dumbrell was deferentially at hand all the time to share the encomiums offered to his charges. The Colonel, of course, had a stock repertory of remarks about each one of them, including how they had won a certain point-to-point or (more frequently) why they hadn’t. The last one we looked at was a big well-bred brown horse who stood very much “over at the knees.” The Colonel had hunted him twelve seasons and he had an equivalently long rigmarole to recite about him, beginning with “I remember Sam Hames saying to me—(I bought him off old Hames of Leicester, you know)—that horse is the most natural jumper I’ve ever had in my stable. And he was right, for the old horse has only given me one bad toss in twelve years, and that was no fault of his own, for he landed on the stump of a willow tree; it was at that rough fence just outside Clout’s Wood—nasty place, too—you remember I showed it you the other day, Steve;” all of which Stephen had probably heard fifty times before, and had been shown the “nasty place” half a dozen times into the bargain. It was only when he heard the distant booming of the luncheon-gong that the Colonel was able to tear himself away from the brown horse’s loose-box.
While going into the house we passed through what he called “the cleaning room,” which was a sort of wide corridor with a skylight to it. Along the wall stood an astonishing array of hunting-boots. These struck me as being so numerous that I had the presence of mind to count them. There were twenty-seven pairs. Now a good pair of top-boots, if properly looked after and repaired, will last the owner a good many years; and a new pair once in three years might be considered a liberal allowance for a man who has started with two or three pairs. But the Colonel was nothing if not regular in his habits; every autumn he visited, with the utmost solemnity, an illustrious bootmaker in Oxford Street; and each impeccable little pair of boots had signalized the advent of yet another opening meet. And, since they had been impeccably cared for and the Colonel seldom hunted more than three days a week, they had consequently accumulated. As we walked past them it was as though Lord Roberts were inspecting the local Territorials, and the Colonel would have been gratified by the comparison to that gallant Field-Marshal.
It did not strike me at the time that there was something dumbly pathetic about those chronological boots with their mahogany, nut-brown, and salmon-coloured tops. But I can see now that they symbolized much that was automatic and sterile in the Colonel’s career. He had retired from the Army twenty years before, and was now sixty-six, though active and well preserved. And each of those twenty years had been as stereotyped as his ideas. The notions on which he had patterned himself were part regimental and part sporting. As a military man he was saturated with the Balaclava spirit, and one could also imagine him saying, “Women and children first” on a foundering troopship (was it the Warren Hastings which went down in the early nineties?). But the Boer War had arrived seven years too late for him, and the gist of the matter was that he’d never seen any active service. And somehow, when one came to know him well, one couldn’t quite imagine him in the Charge of the Light Brigade: but this may have been because, in spite of the dashing light-cavalry tone of his talk, he had served in a line regiment, and not at all a smart one either. (His affluence dated from the day when he had married where money was.)
As a sportsman he had modelled himself on what I may call the Wythe-Melville standard. His conversational behaviour echoed the sentiments and skylarking vivacities of mid-Victorian sporting novels and the coloured prints of a slightly earlier period. And yet one could no more imagine him participating in a moonlight steeplechase than one could visualize him being shot through the Bible in his breast pocket in a death or glory attack. Like many chivalrous spirits, he could never quite live up to the ideal he aimed at. He was always talking about “Brooksby,” a hard-riding journalist who, in the Colonel’s heyday, had written regularly for The Field. He had several volumes of these lively scribblings and he had read and reread them in his solitary evenings until he knew the name of every gorse-covert and woodland in the Shires.
But as Stephen might have said (if he’d been capable of relaxing his admirable loyalty to his godfather), “The dear old Colonel’s always bucking about Leicestershire, but I don’t suppose he’s had half a dozen days there since he was foaled!” And when the Colonel asked one to dine at “the Club” (“You’ll always find me in town in Ascot week, my dear boy”), “the Club” (he had two) wasn’t quite up to the standard he set himself, since instead of being that full-blown fogeydom “the Naval and Military,” it had to face things out as merely (“Capital Club! Lot of nice young chaps there!”) “the Junior.”
On this special Sunday, however, I could still estimate the Colonel’s importance as being equivalent to twenty-seven pairs of top-boots. In fact, I thought him a terrific swell, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that he’d won the Grand National when he was a gallant young subaltern. At luncheon (roast beef and apple tart) he was the most attentive of hosts, and by the time we had finished our port—(“I think you’ll find this a nice light-bodied wine. I get it through the Club”)—he had given most of his favourite anecdotes an airing. While the decanter was on its way round Stephen tackled him about the miseries of learning to be a chartered accountant. The lament was well received, and when he said, “I’ve been wondering, Colonel, whether I couldn’t possibly get into the Gunners through the Special Reserve,” the idea was considered a capital one.
The Colonel’s face lit up: “I tell you what, my boy, I’ll write at once to an old friend of mine at the War Office. Excellent officer—used to be in the Twenty-Third. Very useful man on a horse, too.”
Warmed up by the thought of Stephen getting a commission, he asked me whether I was in the Yeomanry. Reluctantly confessing that I wasn’t, I added that I’d been thinking about it; which was true, and the thought had filled me with unutterable alarm. When we rose from our chairs the Colonel drew my attention to the oil-paintings which adorned the walls. These were portraits of his past and present hunters—none of whom, apparently, “knew what it was to put a foot wrong.” Among many other relics and associative objects which he showed us was a large green parrot which he “had bought from a sailor five-and-twenty years ago.” He had taught the bird to ejaculate “Tear ’im and eat ’im,” and other hunting noises. Finally, with a certain access of grand seigneur dignity, he waved to us from his front doorstep and vanished into the house, probably to write a letter to his old friend at the War Office.
III
At nine o’clock next morning my cold fingers were making their usual bungling efforts to tie a white stock neatly; but as I had never been shown how to do it, my repeated failures didn’t surprise me, though I was naturally anxious not to disgrace the Rectory on my first appearance at a meet of the Ringwell Hounds. The breakfast bell was supplemented by Stephen’s incitements to me to hurry up; these consisted in cries of “Get-along-forrid” and similar hunt-servant noises, which accentuated my general feeling that I was in for a big day. While I was putting the final touches to my toilet I could hear him shouting to the two Scotch terriers who were scuttling about the lawn: (he was out there having a look at that important thing, the weather).
Fully dressed and a bit flurried, I stumped downstairs and made for the low buzz of conversation in the dining-room. Purposing to make the moderately boisterous entry appropriate to a hunting morning, I opened the door. After a moment of stupefaction I recoiled into the passage, having beheld the entire household on its knees, with backs of varying sizes turned toward me: I had entered in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer. After a temporizing stroll on the lawn I reentered the room unobtrusively; Stephen handed me a plate of porridge with a grin and no other reference was made to my breach of decorum.
After breakfast he told me that I’d no more idea of tying a stock than an ironmonger; when he had retied it for me he surveyed the result with satisfaction and announced that I now “looked ready to compete against all the cutting and thrusting soldier-officers in creation.”
By a quarter past ten the Rector was driving me to the meet in the buggy—the groom having ridden his horse on with Stephen, who was jogging sedately along on Jerry. The Rector, whose overcoat had an astrakhan collar, was rather reticent, and we did the five miles to the meet without exchanging many remarks. But it was a comfort, after my solitary sporting experiments, to feel that I had a couple of friendly chaperons, and Stephen had assured me that my hireling knew his way over every fence in the country and had never been known to turn his head. My only doubt was whether his rider would do him credit. We got to the meet in good time, and Mr. Whatman, a very large man who kept a very large livery-stable and drove a coach in the summer, was loquacious about the merits of my hireling, while he supervised my settlement in the saddle, which felt a hard and slippery one.
As I gathered up the thin and unflexible reins I felt that he was conferring a privilege on me by allowing me to ride the horse—a privilege for which the sum of thirty-five shillings seemed inadequate repayment. My mount was a wiry, nondescript-coloured animal, sober and unexcitable. It was evident from the first that he knew much more about the game than I did. He was what is known as a “safe conveyance” or “patent-safety”; this more than atoned for his dry-coated and ill-groomed exterior. By the time I had been on his back an hour I felt more at home than I had ever done when out with the Dumborough.
The meet was at The Five Bells, a wayside inn close to Basset Wood, which was the chief stronghold of fox-preservation in that part of the Ringwell country. There was never any doubt about finding a fox at Basset. Almost a mile square, it was well-rided and easy to get about in, though none too easy to get a fox away from. It was also, as Stephen remarked when we entered it, an easy place to get left in unless one kept one’s eyes and ears skinned. And his face kindled at the delightful notion of getting well away with the hounds, leaving three parts of the field coffee-housing at the wrong end of the covert. It was a grey morning, with a nip in the air which made him hopeful that “hounds would fairly scream along” if they got out in the open and, perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt a keen pleasure in the idea of sitting down and cramming my horse at every obstacle that might come in our way.
In the meantime I had got no more than a rough idea of the seventy or eighty taciturn or chattering riders who were now making their way slowly along the main-ride while the huntsman could be heard cheering his hounds a little way off among the oaks and undergrowth. I had already noticed several sporting farmers in blue velvet caps and long-skirted black coats of country cut. And scarlet-coated Colonel Hesmon had proffered me a couple of brown-gloved fingers with the jaunty airified manner of a well-dressed absentminded swell. He was on his corky little grey cob, and seemed to be having rather a rough ride. In fact the impetuous behaviour of the cob suggested that the Colonel had yet to find the key to his mouth.
An open space toward the top end of the wood formed a junction of the numerous smaller paths which were tributaries of that main channel—the middle-ride. At this point of vantage a few of the more prominent characters from among the field had pulled up, and since the hounds had yet to find a fox I was able to take a few observations of people who afterwards became increasingly familiar to me in my mental conspectus of the Ringwell Hunt. Among them was the Master, of whom there is little to be said except that he was a rich man whose resignation was already rumoured. His only qualification was his wealth, and he had had the bad luck (or bad judgment) to engage a bad huntsman. Needless to say the Master’s perplexities had been aggravated by the criticisms and cavillings of subscribers who had neither the wealth, knowledge, nor initiative necessary for the office which this gentleman had found so ungrateful. Much of this I had already learned at the Rectory, where he was given his due for having done his best to hunt the country in handsome style. Sitting there that morning on a too-good-looking, well-bred horse, he seemed glum and abstracted, as though he suspected that most of his field would poke fun at him when his back was turned. One of his troubles was that he’d never learnt how to blow his horn properly, and his inexpert tootlings afforded an adequate excuse for those who enjoyed ridiculing him.
Chief among these was Nigel Croplady. When I first observed him he was sitting sideways on his compact short-tailed brown horse; a glossy top-hat was tilted over his nose. His supercilious, clean-shaven face was preoccupied with a loose-lipped inspection of his own left leg; his boot-tops were a delicate shell-pink, and his well-cleaned white “leathers” certainly justified his self-satisfied scrutiny of them.
“That blighter’s always talking about getting a flying-start,” remarked Stephen in an undertone, “but when hounds run he’s the most chickenhearted skirter in Sussex.” I was able to verify this later in the day when I saw him go irresolutely at a small fence on a bank, pull his horse across it with a shout of “Ware wire!” and hustle away in search of a gate, leaving a hard-riding farmer to take it in his stride—the wire having been an improvisation of Croplady’s over-prudent mind.
The group which I was watching also included two undemonstrative elderly men (both of whom, said Stephen, were fifty pound subscribers and important covert owners) and several weather-beaten ladies, none of whom looked afraid of a liberal allowance of mud and water.
The Rev. Colwood (who was on a one-eyed screw which his soldier-son had picked up for seventeen pounds at a sale of Army remounts) now joined the group. He was sitting well forward in the saddle with the constrained look of a man who rather expects his horse to cross its front legs and pitch him over its head. Beside him, on a plump white weight-carrier, was a spare-built middle-aged man in a faded pink coat who scattered boisterous vociferations on everybody within hail. “Morning, Master. Morning, Mrs. Moffat. Morning, Nigel.” His beaming recognitions appeared to include the whole world in a sort of New Year’s Day greeting. And “Hallo, Stephen ole man,” he shouted, turning in our direction so suddenly that his animal’s rotund hind quarters bumped the Rector’s horse on his blind side and nearly knocked him over. The collision culminated when he grabbed my hand and wrung it heartily with the words, “Why, Jack, my lad, I thought you were still out in India!” I stared at him astonished, while his exuberance became puzzled and apologetic.
“Is it Jack?” he asked, adding, with a loud laugh, “No, it’s some other young bloke after all. But you’re the living split of Steve’s elder brother—say what you like!”
In this way I became acquainted with one of the most popular characters in the Hunt. Arthur Brandwick was a doctor who had given up his small country practice some years before. “Always merry and bright” was his motto, and he now devoted his bachelor energies to the pursuit of the fox and the conversion of the human race to optimism.
A solemn purple-faced man, who had been eyeing me as if he also had his doubts about my identity, now came up and asked me for a sovereign. This was Mr. McCosh, the Hunt secretary, and it was my first experience of being “capped” as a stranger. I produced the gold coin, but he very civilly returned it when Stephen informed him that I was staying at the Rectory.
Just as these negotiations concluded, a chorus of excited hallooings on the outskirts of the wood proclaimed that Reynard had been viewed by some pedestrians.
“Those damned foot people again! I’ll bet a tenner they’ve headed him back!” sneered Croplady, whose contempt for the lower classes was only equalled by his infatuation for a title. (His family were old-established solicitors in Downfield, but Nigel was too great a swell to do much work in his father’s office, except to irritate the clients, many of whom were farmers, with his drawling talk and dandified manners.)
“Come on, Snowball!” exclaimed Brandwick, shaking his corpulent white steed into a canter, and away he went along the main-ride, ramming his hat down on his head with the hand that held his whip and scattering mud in every direction.
“Chuckle-headed old devil! Mad as a hatter but as kindhearted as they make ’em,” said Stephen, watching him as he dipped in and out of the hollows with his coattails flapping over his horse’s wide rump. And without any undue haste he started off along one of the smaller rides with myself and my hireling at his heels.
Everybody hustled away into the wood except the stolid secretary and two other knowledgeable veterans. Having made up their minds that the fox would stick to the covert, they remained stock-still like equestrian statues, watching for him to cross the middle-ride. They were right. Foxhunting wiseacres usually are (though it was my wilful habit in those days to regard everyone who preferred going through a gate to floundering over a fence as being unworthy of the name of sportsman).
Later on, while Stephen and I were touring the covert with our ears open, we overtook a moody faced youth on a handsome bay horse. “Hullo, Tony! I thought you’d parted with that conspicuous quad of yours at Tatts last week,” exclaimed Stephen, riding robustly up alongside of him and giving the bay horse a friendly slap on his hind quarters.
Young Lewison (I remembered what Stephen had said about him and the expensive hunter which he “couldn’t ride a hair of”) informed us that the horse had been bought by a Warwickshire dealer and then returned as a slight whistler. “I’m sick of the sight of him,” he remarked, letting the reins hang listlessly on the horse’s neck.
Gazing at the nice-looking animal, I inwardly compared him with dear old Harkaway. The comparison was all in favour of the returned whistler, whose good points were obvious even to my inexperienced eyes. In fact, he was almost suspiciously good-looking, though there was nothing flashy about his fine limbs, sloping shoulders, and deep chest.
“His wind can’t be very bad if you’d never noticed it,” remarked Stephen, eyeing him thoughtfully, “and he certainly does look a perfect gentleman.”
Meanwhile the horse stood there as quiet as if he were having his picture painted. “I wish to goodness someone would give me fifty pounds for him,” exclaimed Lewison petulantly, and I had that queer sensation when an episode seems to have happened before. The whole scene was strangely lit up for me; I could have sworn that I knew what he was going to say before a single word was out of his mouth. And when, without a second’s hesitation, I replied, “I’ll give you fifty pounds for him,” I was merely overhearing a remark which I had already made.
Young Lewison looked incredulous; but Stephen intervened, with no sign of surprise, “Damn it, George, you might do worse than buy him, at that price. Hop off your hireling and see what he feels like.”
I had scarcely settled myself in the new saddle when there was a shrill halloa from a remote side of the covert. We galloped away, leaving Lewison still whoaing on one leg round the hireling, who was eager to be after us.
“Well, I’m jiggered! What an enterprising old card you are!” ejaculated Stephen, delightedly slapping his leg with his crop and then leaning forward to listen for the defect in the bay horse’s wind. “Push him along, George,” he added; but we were already galloping freely, and I felt much more like holding him back. “Dashed if I can hear a ghost of a whistle!” muttered Stephen, as we pulled up at a hunting-gate out of Basset Wood.
“We’re properly left this time, old son.” He trotted down the lane and popped over a low heave-gate into a grass field. My horse followed him without demur. There wasn’t a trace of the hunt in sight, but we went on, jumping a few easy fences, and my heart leapt with elation at the way my horse took them, shortening and then quickening his stride and slipping over them with an ease and neatness which were a revelation to me.
“This horse is an absolute dream!” I gasped as Stephen stopped to unlatch a gate.
But Stephen’s face now looked fit for a funeral. “They must have run like stink and we’ve probably missed the hunt of the season,” he grumbled.
A moment later his face lit up again. “There’s the horn—right-handed—over by the Binsted covers!” And away he went across a rushy field as fast as old Jerry could lay legs to the ground.
A lot of hoof-marks and a gap in a big boundary fence soon showed us where the hunt had gone. We were now on some low-lying meadows, and he said it looked as if we’d have to jump the Harcombe brook. As we approached it there was a shout from downstream and we caught sight of someone in distress. A jolly faced young farmer was up to his armpits in the water with his horse plunging about beside him.
“Hullo, it’s Bob Millet and his tubed mare!” Stephen jumped off Jerry and hurried to the rescue.
“I’m having the devil’s own job to keep the water out of my mare,” shouted Millet, who didn’t seem to be worrying much about getting soaked to the skin.
“Haven’t you got a cork?” inquired Stephen.
“No, Mr. Colwood, but I’m keeping my finger on the hole in her neck. She’ll be drowned if I don’t.”
This peculiar situation was solved by Stephen, who held the mare by her bridle and skilfully extricated her after several tremendous heaves and struggles.
We then crossed the brook by a wooden bridge a few hundred yards away—young Millet remarking that he’d never come out again without his cork. Soon afterwards we came up with the hounds, who had lost their fox and were drawing the Binsted covers without much enthusiasm. Colonel Hesmon commiserated with us for having missed “quite a pretty little dart in the open.” If he’d been on his brown mare, he said, he’d have had a cut at the Harcombe brook. “But this cob of mine won’t face water,” he remarked, adding that he’d once seen half the Quorn field held up by a brook you could have jumped in your boots.
The huntsman now enlivened the deflated proceedings by taking his hounds to a distant holloa on the other side of the brook. A man on a bicycle had viewed our fox returning to Basset Wood. The bicyclist (Stephen told me as we passed him in the lane where he’d been providing the flustered huntsman with exact information) was none other than the genius who reported the doings of the Hunt for the Southern Daily News. In the summer he umpired in county cricket matches, which caused me to regard him as quite a romantic personality.
While they were hunting slowly back to the big wood on a very stale line, young Lewison reappeared on my hireling. Looking more doleful than ever, he asked how I liked Cockbird. Before I had time to answer Stephen interposed with “He makes a distinct noise, Tony, and his wind’s bound to get worse. But my friend Sherston likes the feel of him and he’ll give you fifty.”
I concealed my surprise. Stephen had already assured me that the whistle was so slight as to be almost undetectable. He had also examined Cockbird’s legs and pronounced them perfect. Almost imperceptible, too, was the wink with which Stephen put me wise about his strategic utterance, and I met Lewison’s lacklustre eyes with contrived indifference as I reiterated my willingness to give him fifty. Internally, however, I was in a tumult of eagerness to call Cockbird my own at any price, and when my offer had been definitely accepted nothing would induce me to get off his back. We soon arranged that Mr. Whatman’s second horseman should call for the hireling at Lewison’s house on his way back to Downfield.
“We’ll send you your saddle and bridle tomorrow,” shouted Stephen, as Cockbird’s ex-owner disappeared along the lane outside Basset Wood. “Tony never thinks of anything except getting home to his tea,” he added.
We then exchanged horses, and though the hounds did very little more that afternoon, our enthusiasm about my unexpected purchase kept our tongues busy; we marvelled more and more that anyone could be such a mug as to part with him for fifty pounds. As we rode happily home to the Rectory Cockbird jogged smoothly along with his ears well forward. Demure and unexcited, he appeared neither to know nor to care about his change of ownership.
“Mr. Pennett can go to blazes!” I said to myself while I was blissfully ruminating in my bath before dinner. Stephen then banged on the door and asked if I intended to stay in there all night, so I pulled the plug out, whereupon the water began to run away with a screeching sound peculiar to that particular bathroom. (Why is it that up-to-date bathrooms have so much less individuality than their Victorian ancestors? The Rectory one, with its rough-textured paint and dark wooden casing, had the atmosphere of a narrow converted lumber-room, and its hotwater pipes were a subdued orchestra of enigmatic noises.)
While the water was making its raucous retreat my flippant ultimatum to the family solicitor was merged in a definite anxiety about paying for Cockbird. And then there was (an additional fifteen guineas) the question of my subscription to the Ringwell.
“Of course, you’ll enter him for our point-to-point,” Stephen had said while we were on our way home. “He’s a lot faster than Jerry, and he’ll simply walk away with the Heavy Weights. Send in your sub and start qualifying him at once. You’ve only got to bring him out eight times. He’s done nothing today, so you can have him out again on Wednesday.”
The idea of my carrying off the Colonel’s Cup had caused me delicious trepidations. But now, in the draughty bathroom and by the light of a bedroom candle, I was attacked by doubts and misgivings. It was easy enough for Stephen to talk about “qualifying” Cockbird; but how about my own qualifications as a race-rider? The candle flickered as if in ominous agreement with my scruples. There was a drop of water on the wick and the flame seemed to be fizzling toward extinction. Making it my fortune-teller, I decided that if it went out I should fall off at the first fence. After a succession of splutters it made a splendid recovery and spired into a confident survival.
At the dinner-table the Rector glowed with austere geniality while he carved the brace of pheasants which represented a day’s covert-shooting he’d had with Lord Dumborough—“a long-standing annual fixture of mine,” he called it. During our day’s hunting we had only caught occasional glimpses of him. But he had got away from Basset Wood with the hounds, and had evidently enjoyed himself in his reticent way. We discussed every small detail of our various experiences. Kind Mrs. Colwood kept up with the conversation as well as could be expected from an absentee who hadn’t ridden since she was quite a girl. She was interested and amused by hearing all about who had been out and what they had said, but she obviously found some difficulty in sharing her husband’s satisfaction about the clever way in which “Lord Nelson” (the one-eyed horse) had popped over a stile with an awkward takeoff and a drop on the landing-side. She must have endured many anxious hours while her family were out hunting, but her pinnacle of perturbation had been reached when Stephen rode in the Hunt Races—an ordeal which (unless Jerry went lame) was re-awaiting the next April. She could never be induced to attend “those horrible point-to-points” which, as she often said, would be the death of her.
On this particular evening my new horse was naturally the main topic, and his health was drunk in some port which had been “laid down” in the year of Stephen’s birth. After this ceremony the Rector announced that he’d heard for certain that the Master was sending in his resignation.
“Here’s to our next one,” he added, raising his glass again, “and I hope he’ll engage a first-rate huntsman.”
I assumed a sagacious air while they deplored the imperfections of Ben Trotter, and the way he was forever lifting his hounds and losing his head. Stephen remarked that whatever those humanitarian cranks might say, there was precious little cruelty to foxes when they were being hunted by a chap like Ben, who was always trying to chase his fox himself and never gave his hounds a chance to use their noses. The Rector sighed and feared that it was no use pretending that the Ringwell was anything but a cold-scenting country. We then adjourned to the study, where we soon had our noses close to the ordnance map. At this moment I can see Mr. Colwood quite clearly. With a slight frown he is filling his pipe from a tin of “Three Nuns” mixture; on the wall behind him hangs a large engraving of “Christ leaving the Praetorium.”
IV
Early in the afternoon of the following Thursday I journeyed homeward in the jolting annex of a horsebox. Although it was a sort of fifth-class compartment I felt serenely contented as I occasionally put my hand through the aperture to stroke Cockbird’s velvet nose. He appeared to be a docile and experienced railway traveller, and when he stepped out of the box at Dumbridge Station he had an air of knowing that he’d saved himself a twenty-mile walk. The porters eyed him with the respect due to such a well-bred animal. Having arranged for my kit-bag to be conveyed to Butley on the carrier’s van, I swung myself into the saddle which I had borrowed from the Colwoods. It was a mellow afternoon for midwinter, and our appearance, as reflected in the Dumbridge shopwindows, made me feel what, in those days, I should have called “a frightful nut.” Cockbird’s impeccable behaviour out hunting on the previous day had increased my complacency, and it was now an established fact that I had got hold of a top-hole performer with perfect manners.
Nobody at home was aware of what I’d been up to down in Sussex, and Dixon got the surprise of his life when we clattered into the stable-yard. So far as he was concerned it was the first really independent action of my career. When I arrived he was having his tea in his cottage above the coach-house; I could hear him clumping down the steep wooden stairs, and I sat like a statue until he emerged from the door by the harness-room with his mouth full of bread and butter. The afternoon was latening, but there was, I think, a quietly commemorative glow from the west. He stood with the sunset on his face and his final swallowing of the mouthful appeared to epitomize his astonishment. Taken aback he undoubtedly was, but his voice kept its ordinary composure. “Why, what’s this?” he asked. I told him.
Aunt Evelyn behaved like a brick about Cockbird. (How was it that bricks became identified with generous behaviour?) Of course she admired him immensely and considered it very clever of me to have bought him so cheap. But when it came to writing out the cheque for him I was obliged, for the first time in my life, to ask her to lend me some money. She promised to let me have it in a few days.
Next morning she went to London, “just to do a little Christmas shopping at the Army and Navy Stores.” I was in the drawing-room when she returned. I heard the dogcart drive up to the front door, and then Aunt Evelyn’s voice telling Miriam how tired she felt and asking her to make some tea. I didn’t bother to get up when she came into the room, and after replying to my perfunctory inquiry whether she’d had a good day she went to her bureau and fussed about with some papers. Somewhat irritably I wondered what she was in such a stew about as soon as she’d got home. Her quill-pen squeaked for a short time and then she came across to the armchair where I was sitting with Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son on my knee.
“There, dear. There’s the money for your horse, and the Hunt subscription as well.” She placed a cheque on the arm of the chair. “It’s your Christmas present,” she explained. It was so unexpected that I almost forgot to thank her. But I had the grace to ask whether she could really afford it.
“Well, dear,” she said, “to tell the truth, I couldn’t. But I can now.” And she confessed that she’d sold one of her rings for seventy-five pounds up in London. “And why not?” she asked. “I’m so delighted at your having taken up hunting again; it’s such a healthy hobby for a young man, and Dixon’s almost beside himself—he’s so pleased with the new horse. And after all, dear, I’ve got no other interest in the whole world except you.”
Miriam then appeared with the tea-tray, and soon afterwards I went upstairs to gloat over my good fortune.