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.
V
November, with its darkening afternoons and smell of burning weeds, found me gradually becoming acclimatized to “the new mare,” as I importantly called her (using Dixonian phraseology). The groom was able to give me all his attention, since my aunt never rode in the winter. We now went longer distances; sometimes he would tell me that we were “on the edge of the Dumborough country,” and he would pull up and point out to me, a few miles away, some looming covert where they often went to draw.
The Dumborough, as I afterwards discovered, was a scrambling sort of country to hunt in—heavily wooded and hilly. But as we turned away from its evening-lighted landscape I would listen eagerly to Dixon’s anecdotes of the sport he had seen there. He spoke often of Mr. Macdoggart, Lord Dumborough’s hard-riding agent, and how one year he had seen him win the Hunt Steeplechase by a short head from a famous “gentleman-rider”; and how, another year, Mr. Macdoggart had got concussion of the brain while riding in the same race.
Our afternoon expeditions usually took us in the Dumborough direction, and I suspect that Dixon always had a faint hope that we might “chip in with the hounds,” though he knew too well that the foxes rarely ran our way. He also showed an increasing antipathy to the high road, and was continually taking shortcuts across the country.
“It’ll do them good to have a pipe-opener,” he would say, turning in at a gate and setting his horse going up a long stretch of meadow, and my confidence in Sheila increased as I scuttled after him.
Sometimes he would pretend to be “riding a finish,” and I would say, “Tom, show me how Mr. Macdoggart won the Hunt Cup on Nobleman.”
I had never seen a race in
