IV
Since the continuity of these memoirs is to depend solely on my experiences as a sportsman, I need not waste many words on the winter, spring, summer, and autumn that chronologically followed the last episode which I narrated. Outwardly monotonous, my life was made up of that series of small inward happenings which belong to the development of any intelligent little boy who spends a fair amount of time with no companion but himself. In this way I continued to fabricate for myself an intensely local and limited world. How faintly the vibrations of the outer world reached us on that rural atmosphere it is not easy to imagine in this later and louder age. When I was twelve years old I hadn’t been to London half a dozen times in my life, and the ten sleepy miles to the county town, whither the village carrier’s van went three times a week, were a road to romance. Ten miles was a long way when I was a child. Over the hills and far away, I used to think to myself, as I stared across the orchards and meadows of the weald, along which ran the proverbially slow railway line to London.
There were a few events which created in my mind an impression out of proportion to the architecture of my earthly ideas. Among them was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (though I cannot pretend to remember exactly how it struck me at the time, except that I counted fifty bonfires from the hill near our house). This was balanced by Canterbury Cricket Week: (I went there by train with Dixon and spent a long hot day watching Prince Ranjitsinhji make about 175 not out. My aunt’s black Persian cat was called Ranji, which made the celebrated Indian cricketer quite a comfortable idea for me to digest).
Almost my favourite books were The Palace in the Garden and Four Winds Farm, both by Mrs. Molesworth. Naturally there were other more impressive phenomena which cropped up in my mental existence, such as Scott’s Ivanhoe and Longfellow’s poem “Excelsior,” and Beethoven’s piano sonatas. But all these things clothed themselves in local associations. Sir Walter Scott had no existence outside of my aunt’s voice as she read him aloud in the evening, Longfellow was associated with Mr. Star in the schoolroom, Beethoven lived somewhere behind the faded silk on the back of the upright piano, and I never imagined any of them as in any other edition than those in which I knew them by sight. The large photograph of Watt’s picture, Love and Death, which hung in the drawing-room, gave me the same feeling as the “Moonlight” sonata, (my aunt could only play the first two movements).
In this brightly visualized world of simplicities and misapprehensions and mispronounced names everything was accepted without question. I find it difficult to believe that young people see the world in that way nowadays, though it is probable that a good many of them do. Looking back across the years I listen to the summer afternoon cooing of my aunt’s white pigeons, and the soft clatter of their wings as they flutter upward from the lawn at the approach of one of the well-nourished cats. I remember, too, the smell of strawberry jam being made; and Aunt Evelyn with a green bee-veil over her head. … The large rambling garden, with its Irish yews and sloping paths and wind-buffeted rose arches, remains to haunt my sleep. The quince tree which grew beside the little pond was the only quince tree in the world. With a sense of abiding strangeness I see myself looking down from an upper window on a confusion of green branches shaken by the summer breeze. In an endless variety of dream-distorted versions the garden persists as the background of my unconscious existence.
I had always been given to understand that I had a delicate constitution. This was one of the reasons which my aunt urged against my being sent to school when Mr. Pennett, the pink-faced solicitor who had charge of our affairs, paid us one of his periodic visits and the problem of my education was referred to in my presence. The solicitor used to come down from London for the day. In acknowledgment of his masculinity my aunt always conceded him the head of the table at lunch. I can remember him carving a duck with evident relish, and saying in somewhat unctuous tones, “Have you reconsidered, my dear Miss Evelyn, the well-worn subject of a school for our young friend on my left?”
And I can hear my aunt replying in a fluttering voice that she had always been nervous about me since I had pneumonia (though she knew quite well that it was only slight inflammation of the lungs, and more than two years ago at that). Fixing my gaze on his fat pearl tiepin, I wondered whether I really should ever go to school, and what it would feel like when I got there. Nothing was said about Mr. Star, but Mr. Pennett usually had a private conversation with him on the subject of my progress.
“Your guardian seems an extremely well-informed gentleman,” Mr. Star would say to me after one of these interviews. For Mr. Pennett had been to Harrow, and when Mr. Star spoke of him I was vaguely aware that he had made the modest old man feel even more humble than usual. My aunt was perfectly satisfied with Mr. Star, and so was I. But the solicitor knew that I was growing out of my tutor; and so, perhaps, did Mr. Star himself. … Indeed, I was getting to be quite a big boy for my age. People in the village were saying that I was “filling out a fair treat,” and “shooting up no end.” …
To one little incident I can give an exact date—not always an easy thing to do when one is looking back such a long way. It was in 1896, on the last Wednesday in May, and I had just returned from my afternoon ride. My aunt was out in the garden, wearing her leather gauntlets to cut some lilac, when I dashed excitedly across the lawn shouting, “Isn’t it splendid, Auntie—the Prince of Wales has won the Derby!”
“Oh, how splendid—has he really?” she exclaimed, dropping the branch of white lilac which she had just snipped off the tree with her huge pair of scissors.
“Yes,” I continued, bursting with the important news, “we stopped at the station on our way home, and the stationmaster showed Dixon the telegram.”
“What was it called?” she queried.
“Persimmon, of course; I should have thought you’d have known that!”
“Really, Georgie dear, you shouldn’t speak so rudely to your aunt.”
I was silent for a moment, feeling crestfallen. Then I remarked, in a subdued voice: “Earwig was third.”
“Earwig! What an odd name for a horse!” And then, as I bent down to pick up a spray of lilac, she added: “Good gracious, darling, how you’ve grown out of your riding-breeks! I really must get you another corduroy suit.” …
But my increasing size had another and far more important effect. I was growing out of Rob Roy. My aunt showed her inevitable lack of initiative in the matter: she said that a small pony was safer for me. During the summer, however, Dixon persistently drew her attention to the obvious fact that my legs were getting nearer and nearer to the ground, although he had the highest respect for gallant little Rob Roy, who was beloved by all who knew him. The end of it was that a “perfect home” was found for him, and he trotted out of my life as gaily as he had trotted into it. After his departure I had a good cry by myself in the kitchen garden.
“I shall never be so fond of anyone again as I was of Rob Roy,” I thought, mopping my eyes with a grubby handkerchief. Subsequent events proved my prophecy incorrect. And anyhow it was a fine day, early in September; a few minutes afterwards I was clambering up into a plum tree. The plums were particularly good that year.
As might be expected, Dixon lost no time in discovering an adequate substitute for my vanished favourite. For several weeks he remained reticent on the subject, except that once or twice he mentioned mysteriously that he thought he had heard of something. Conscientious inquiries among coachmen, innkeepers, and the local vet and the insertion of an advertisement in the county paper, culminated in the arrival of a fourteen-hand, mouse-coloured Welsh cog called Sheila. The sight of Sheila struck awe into my heart. She looked as much too big for me as Rob Roy had looked too small. I also divined that she was enormously expensive.
“Do you really think Master George’ll be able to manage her, Dixon?” asked my aunt, regarding Sheila with deprecatory approbation. Dixon reiterated his belief that the mare was thoroughly handy and as quiet as an old sheep; he added that we’d never get such a bargain again for thirty pounds.
“Jump on her back, Master George, and see if she doesn’t give you a good feel,” suggested that inexorably encouraging voice which was to make a sportsman of me. Whereupon he quickly circumvented the obvious fact that this was no jumping matter by giving me a leg-up into the saddle (a nearly full-sized one). There was no doubt at all that I was a long way from the ground. Rather timidly I surveyed the stable-yard from my new altitude. Then Dixon led the cob carefully through the gate into the paddock and she broke into a springy trot.