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 hoarfrost 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 analyze 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 back 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
