Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man

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.

III

It was close on Christmas, but the weather remained mild, and in the following week I wrote a concise letter offering myself as a guest at Ringwell after Wednesday’s hunting⁠—the meet being only a few miles from the Kennels. At home I said not a word about my sudden elevation in the sporting world, and I allowed Aunt Evelyn to take it for granted that I was going to Hoadley Rectory. After I had actually been to the Kennels I could talk about it, but not before. It was too important an event for casual conversation, and even Dixon was kept in the dark about it. Aunt Evelyn had shown the right amount of interest in Denis Milden, remembering him as such a nice-looking boy, and remembering also how she had come across his people in Northamptonshire when she was a girl⁠—a well-known sporting family who had a large place near, she thought, Daventry. I sometimes wished that my own family was like that, for the architecture of my existence seemed meagre, and I wanted to be strongly connected with the hunting organism which at that time I thought of as the only one worth belonging to. And it was (though a limited one) a clearly defined world, which is an idea that most of us cling to, unless we happen to be transcendental thinkers.

Staying at the Kennels was the most significant occasion my little world could offer