‘Weren’t you out last Saturday?’ he asked. I said yes.
‘Rotten day, wasn’t it?’ I said yes it was rather.
‘That’s a nice cob you were on. Jumped a bit too big for you at that fence outside Hoath Wood, didn’t she?’ He grinned good-humouredly. I went red in the face, but managed to blurt out a confused inquiry after the health of his chestnut pony. But before he could reply the Dumborough boy had shouted something at him and I was obliged to pay attention to the little girl alongside of me.
‘Do you hunt much?’ she inquired, evidently impressed by what she had overheard. Rather loftily I replied that I hunted whenever I got the chance, inwardly excusing myself with the thought that it wasn’t my own fault that I’d only had one chance so far….
I was now positively enjoying the party, but shortly afterwards Aunt Evelyn came gliding across the dark polished floor at the end of a polka and adroitly extricated me from the festivities…. ‘Really, darling, don’t you think it’s almost time we went home?’
I wished she wouldn’t call me darling in public, but I fetched my overcoat and followed obediently down to the draughty entrance hall. Denis happened to be sitting on the stairs with his partner. He jumped up politely to allow my aunt to pass. I shot a shy glance at his face.
‘Coming to Heron’s Gate on Tuesday?’ he asked. Deeply gratified, I said I was afraid it was too far for me.
‘You ought to try and get there. They say it’s one of the best meets.’ He sat down again with a nod and a smile.
‘Wasn’t that young Milden – the nice-mannered boy you spoke to as we went out?’ asked Aunt Evelyn when our rattle-trap conveyance was grinding briskly down the gravel road to the lodge gates.
‘Yes,’ I replied; and the monosyllable meant much.
7
Next morning I was a rather inattentive pupil, but Mr Star rightly attributed this to the previous night’s gaieties and was lenient with me, though my eyes often wandered through the window when they ought to have been occupied with sums, and I made a bad mess of my dictation. Mr Star was still great on dictation, though I ought to have been beyond such elementary exercises at the age of twelve. ‘Parsing’ was another favourite performance of his.
The word parse always struck me as sounding slightly ridiculous: even now it makes me smile when I look at it; but it conjures up for me a very clear picture of that quiet schoolroom: myself in a brown woollen jersey with my elbows on the table, and my tutor in his shabby tail-coat, chalking up on the blackboard, for my exclusive benefit, the first proposition of Euclid. Above the bookcase (which contained an odd assortment of primers, poetry, and volumes of adventure) hung a map of the world – a shiny one, which rolled up. But the map of the world was too large for me that morning, and I was longing to look at the local one and find out how far it was to Heron’s Gate (and where it was).
As soon as Mr Star had gone home to his little house in the village I slyly abstracted the ordnance map from the shelf where my aunt kept it (she was rather fond of consulting the map), and carried it back to the schoolroom with a sensation of gloating uncertainty. Heron’s Gate was hard to find, but I arrived at it in the end, marked in very small print with Windmill right up against it and a big green patch called Park Wood quite near. I wondered what it would look like, and at once visualized a large, dim bird sitting on a white gate…. I had never seen a heron, but it sounded nice…. But when I began measuring the distance with a bit of string both bird and gate were obliterated by the melancholy number of miles which meandered across the map. The string told its tale too plainly. Heron’s Gate was a good twelve miles to go….
The situation now seemed desperate, but Dixon might be able to do something about it. Without saying a word to Aunt Evelyn I waited until we were well away on our afternoon ride, and then asked, quite casually, ‘Have you ever been to Heron’s Gate, Tom?’ (I had been telling him about the dance, but had not mentioned Denis Milden.) Dixon gravely admitted that he knew Heron’s Gate quite well. There was a short silence, during which he pulled his horse back into a walk. ‘Is it far from us?’ I remarked innocently. He pondered for a moment. ‘Let’s see – it’s some way the other side of Hugget’s Hill…. About twelve miles from us, I should think.’ I fingered Sheila’s mane and tried another tack. ‘How far were we from home when we finished up the other night?’
‘About twelve miles.’
Unable to restrain myself any longer, I blurted out my eagerness to go to the meet next Tuesday. I never suspected that Dixon had known this all the time, though I might have guessed that he had looked up the list of meets in the local paper. But he was evidently pleased that my sporting instinct was developing so rapidly, and he refrained from asking why I specially wanted to go to Heron’s Gate. It was enough for him that I wanted to go out at all. We duped Aunt Evelyn by a system of mutual falsification of distances (I couldn’t find the map anywhere when she wanted to look it up), and at half-past eight on the Tuesday morning, in glittering sunshine, with a melting hoar-frost on the hedgerows, we left home for Heron’s Gate.
Emboldened by the fact that I was going out hunting with an inward purpose of my own, I clip-clopped alongside of Dixon with my head well in the air. The cold morning had made my fingers numb, but my thoughts moved freely in a warmer climate of their own. I was being magnetized to a distant meet of the hounds, not so much through my sporting instinct as by the appeal which Denis Milden had made to my imagination. That he would be there was the idea uppermost in my mind. My fears lest I should again make a fool of myself were, for the moment, as far below me as my feet. Humdrum home life was behind me; in the freshness of the morning I was setting out for an undiscovered country….
My reverie ended when Sheila slithered on a frozen puddle and Dixon told me to pay attention to what I was doing and not slouch about in the saddle. Having brought me back to reality he inspected his watch and said we were well up to time. A mile or two before we got to the meet he stopped at an inn, where he put our horses into the stable for twenty minutes, ‘to give them a chance to stale’. Then, seeing that I was looking rather pinched with the cold, he took me indoors and ordered a large glass of hot milk, which I should be jolly glad of, he said, before the day was out. The inn-parlour smelt of stale liquor, but I enjoyed my glass of milk.
The meet itself was an intensified rendering of my initiatory one. I was awed by my consciousness of having come twelve miles from home. And the scene was made significant by the phrase ‘one of their best meets’. In the light of that phrase everything appeared a little larger than life: voices seemed louder, coats a more raucous red, and the entire atmosphere more acute with imminent jeopardy than at Finchurst Green. Hard-bitten hunting men rattled up in gigs, peeled off their outer coverings, and came straddling along the crowded lane to look for their nags. Having found them, they spoke in low tones to the groom and swung themselves importantly into the saddle as though there were indeed some desperate business on hand….
Heron’s Gate was a featureless wayside inn at the foot of a green knoll. I had not yet caught a glimpse of Denis when the procession moved away toward Park Wood, but I looked upward and identified the bulky black Windmill, which seemed to greet me with a friendly wave of its sails, as much as to say, ‘Here I am, you see – a lot bigger than they marked me on the map!’ The Windmill consoled me; it seemed less inhuman, in its own way, than the brusque and bristling riders around me. When we turned off the road and got on to a sodden tussocked field, they all began to be in a hurry; their horses bucked and snorted and shook their heads as they shot past me – the riders calling out to one another with uncouth matutinal jocularities.
I was frightened, and I might have wondered why I was there at all if I had been old enough to analyse my emotions. As it was I felt less forlorn and insecure when we pulled up outside Park Wood and I caught sight of Denis on his chestnut pony. For the time being, however, he was unapproachable. With a gesture of characteristic independence he had turned his ba
ck on the jostling riders, who were going one by one into the wood through a narrow hunting-gate. I envied the unhesitating self-reliance with which he cantered along the field, turned his pony to put it at the low fence, and landed unobtrusively in the wood. It was all accomplished with what I should today describe as an unbroken rhythm. Thirty years ago I simply thought ‘Why can’t I ride like that?’ as I tugged nervously at Sheila’s sensitive mouth and only just avoided bumping my knee against the gate-post as I went blundering into the covert. Dixon conducted me along one of the bypaths which branched from the main ride down the middle.
‘We’ll have to keep our ears open or they’ll slip away without us,’ he remarked sagely. ‘It’s an awkward old place to get a fox away from, though, and we may be here most of the morning.’ Secretly I hoped we should be.
Where we rode the winter sunshine was falling warmly into the wood, though the long grass in the shadows was still flaked with frost. A blackbird went scolding away among the undergrowth, and a jay was setting up a clatter in an ivied oak. Some distance off Jack Pitt was shouting ‘Yoi-over’ and tooting his horn in a leisurely sort of style. Then we turned a corner and came upon Denis. He had pulled his pony across the path, and his face wore a glum look which, as I afterwards learnt to know, merely signified that, for the moment, he had found nothing worth thinking about. The heavy look lifted as I approached him with a faltering smile, but he nodded at me with blunt solemnity, as if what thoughts he had were elsewhere.
‘Morning. So you managed to get here.’ That was all I got by way of greeting. Somewhat discouraged, I could think of no conversational continuance. But Dixon gave him the respectful touch of the hat due to a ‘proper little sportsman’ and, more enterprising than I, supplemented the salute with ‘Bit slow in finding this morning, sir?’
‘Won’t be much smell to him when they do. Sun’s too bright for that.’ He had the voice of a boy, but his manner was severely grown up.
There was a brief silence, and then his whole body seemed to stiffen as he stared fixedly at the undergrowth. Something rustled the dead leaves; not more than ten yards from where we stood, a small russet animal stole out on to the path and stopped for a photographic instant to take a look at us. It was the first time I had ever seen a fox, though I have seen a great many since – both alive and dead. By the time he had slipped out of sight again I had just begun to realize what it was that had looked at me with such human alertness. Why I should have behaved as I did I will not attempt to explain, but when Denis stood up in his stirrups and emitted a shrill ‘Huick-holler’, I felt spontaneously alarmed for the future of the fox.
‘Don’t do that; they’ll catch him!’ I exclaimed.
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I knew I had made another fool of myself. Denis gave me one blank look and galloped off to meet the huntsman, who could already be heard horn-blowing in our direction in a maximum outburst of energy.
‘Where’d ye see ’im cross, sir?’ he exclaimed, grinning at Denis with his great purple face, as he came hustling along with a few of his hounds at his horse’s heels.
Denis indicated the exact spot; a moment later the hounds had hit off the line, and for the next ten or fifteen minutes I was so actively preoccupied with my exertions in following Dixon up and down Park Wood that my indiscretion was temporarily obliterated. I was, in fact, so busy and flurried that I knew nothing of what was happening except that ‘our fox’ was still running about inside the wood. When he did take to the open he must have slipped away unnoticed, for after we had emerged the hounds feathered dubiously over a few fields and very soon I found myself at a standstill.
Dixon was beside me, and he watched intently the mysterious operations of Jack Pitt, who was trotting across a ploughed field with the pack behind him. Dixon explained that he was ‘making a cast’. ‘He must be a long way ahead of us; they could scarcely speak to him after they took the line out of covert,’ he commented.
All this was incomprehensible to me, but I was warned by my previous blunder and confined myself to a discreet nod. Dixon then advised me not to wear my cap on the back of my head: I pulled the wretched thing well down over my eyes and made a supreme effort to look like a ‘hard man to hounds’…. I watched the riders who were chatting to one another in sunlit groups: they seemed to be regarding the proceedings of Jack Pitt with leisurely indifference.
Denis, as usual, had detached himself from his immediate surroundings, and was keeping an alert eye on the huntsman’s head as it bobbed up and down along the far side of the fence. Dixon then made his only reference to my recent misconception of the relationship between foxes and hounds. ‘Young Mr Milden won’t think much of you if you talk like that. He must have thought you a regular booby!’ Flushed and mortified, I promised to be more careful in future. But I knew only too well what a mollycoddle I had made myself in the estimation of the proper little sportsman on whom I had hoped to model myself…. ‘Don’t do that; they’ll catch him!’… It was too awful to dwell on. Lord Dumborough would be certain to hear about it, and would think worse of me than ever he did of a keeper who left the earths unstopped…. And even now some very sporting-looking people were glancing at me and laughing to one another about something. What else could they be laughing about except my mollycoddle remark? Denis must have told them, of course. My heart was full of misery…. Soon afterwards I said, in a very small voice, ‘I think I want to go home now, Tom.’… On the way home I remembered that Denis didn’t even know my name.
PART TWO
THE FLOWER SHOW MATCH
1
Ten minutes late, in the hot evening sunshine, my train bustled contentedly along between orchards and hop gardens, jolted past the signal-box, puffed importantly under the bridge, and slowed up at Baldock Wood. The station was exactly the same as usual and I was very pleased to see it again. I was back from Ballboro’ for the summer holidays. As I was going forward to the guard’s van to identify my trunk and my wooden play-box, the station-master (who, in those days, wore a top-hat and a baggy black frock-coat) saluted me respectfully. Aunt Evelyn always sent him a turkey at Christmas.
Having claimed my luggage I crossed the bridge, surrendered my ticket to a red-nosed and bearded collector, who greeted me good-naturedly, and emerged from the station with my cricket bat (which was wrapped in my cricket pads) under my arm. Dixon was waiting outside with a smart pony and trap. Grinning at me with restrained delight, he instructed my luggage-trundling porter to put it on the village omnibus and I gave the man the last sixpence of my journey-money. As we rattled up the road the unpunctual train with a series of snorts and a streamer of smoke sauntered sedately away into the calm agricultural valley of its vocation.
How jolly to be home for the holidays, I thought to myself. So far neither of us had said a word; but as soon as we were out of the village street (it wasn’t our own village) he gave the pony a playful flick of the whip and made the following remark: ‘I’ve got a place for you in tomorrow’s team.’ Subdued triumph was in his voice and his face.
‘What, for the Flower Show Match!’ I exclaimed, scarcely able to believe my ears. He nodded.
Now the Flower Show Match was the match of the year, and to play in it for the first time in my life was an outstanding event: words were inadequate. We mutually decided not to gush about it.
‘Of course, you’re playing too?’ I inquired. He nodded again. Dixon was one of the mainstays of the village team – a dashing left-hand bat and a steady right-arm bowler. I drew a deep breath of our local air. I was indeed home for the holidays! Expert discussion of tomorrow’s prospects occupied the remaining mile and a half to the house.
‘Miss Sherston won’t half be pleased to see you,’ he said as we turned briskly in at the white gate. ‘She misses you no end, sir.’
Aunt Evelyn had heard us coming up the drive, and she hurried across the lawn in her white dress. Her exuberant welcome ended with: ‘But you’re looking rather thin in the face, dear…. Don�
�t you think Master George is looking rather thin, Dixon?… We must feed him up well before he goes back.’ Dixon smiled and led the pony and cart round to the stable yard.
‘And now, dear, whatever do you think has happened? I’ve been asked to help judge the vegetables at the Flower Show tomorrow. Really, I feel quite nervous! I’ve never judged anything except the sweet peas before. Of course, I’m doing them as well.’ With great restraint I said that I was sure the vegetables would be very interesting and difficult.
‘I’m playing in the match,’ I added, with casual intensity. Aunt Evelyn was overjoyed at the news, and she pretended to be astonished. No doubt she had known about it all the time. The roast chicken at dinner tasted delicious and my bed felt ever so much more comfortable than the one at school.
My window was wide open when I went to bed, and I had left the curtains half-drawn. I woke out of my deep and dreamless sleep to a gradual recognition that I was at home and not in the cubicled dormitory at Ballboro’. Drowsily grateful for this, I lay and listened. A cock was crowing from a neighbouring farm; his shrill challenge was faintly echoed by another cock a long way off.
I loved the early morning; it was luxurious to lie there, half-awake, and half-aware that there was a pleasantly eventful day in front of me…. Presently I would get up and lean on the window-ledge to see what was happening in the world outside…. There was a starling’s nest under the window where the jasmine grew thickest, and all of a sudden I heard one of the birds dart away with a soft flurry of wings. Hearing it go, I imagined how it would fly boldly across the garden: soon I was up and staring at the tree-tops which loomed motionless against a flushed and brightening sky. Slipping into some clothes I opened my door very quietly and tiptoed along the passage and down the stairs. There was no sound except the first chirping of the sparrows in the ivy. I felt as if I had changed since the Easter holidays. The drawing-room door creaked as I went softly in and crept across the beeswaxed parquet floor. Last night’s half-consumed candles and the cat’s half-empty bowl of milk under the gate-legged table seemed to belong neither here nor there, and my own silent face looked queerly at me out of the mirror. And there was the familiar photograph of ‘Love and Death’, by Watts, with its secret meaning which I could never quite formulate in a thought, though it often touched me with a vague emotion of pathos. When I unlocked the door into the garden the early morning air met me with its cold purity; on the stone step were the bowls of roses and delphiniums and sweet peas which Aunt Evelyn had carried out there before she went to bed; the scarlet disc of the sun had climbed an inch above the hills. Thrushes and blackbirds hopped and pecked busily on the dew-soaked lawn, and a pigeon was cooing monotonously from the belt of woodland which sloped from the garden toward the Weald. Down there in the belt of river-mist a goods train whistled as it puffed steadily away from the station with a distinctly heard clanking of buffers. How little I knew of the enormous world beyond that valley and those low green hills.
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 1 - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Page 6