II
IN THE CURRANHILTY COUNTRY
It is hardly credible that I should have been induced to depart from my
usual walk of life by a creature so uninspiring as the grey horse that
I bought from Flurry Knox for £25.
Perhaps it was the monotony of being questioned by every other person
with whom I had five minutes' conversation, as to when I was coming out
with the hounds, and being further informed that in the days when
Captain Browne, the late Coastguard officer, had owned the grey, there
was not a fence between this and Mallow big enough to please them. At
all events, there came an epoch-making day when I mounted the Quaker
and presented myself at a meet of Mr. Knox's hounds. It is my belief
that six out of every dozen people who go out hunting are disagreeably
conscious of a nervous system, and two out of the six are in what is
brutally called "a blue funk." I was not in a blue funk, but I was
conscious not only of a nervous system, but of the anatomical fact that
I possessed large, round legs, handsome in their way, even admirable in
their proper sphere, but singularly ill adapted for adhering to the
slippery surfaces of a saddle. By a fatal intervention of Providence,
the sport, on this my first day in the hunting-field, was such as I
could have enjoyed from a bath-chair. The hunting-field was, on this
occasion, a relative term, implying long stretches of unfenced moorland
and bog, anything, in fact, save a field, the hunt itself might also
have been termed a relative one, being mainly composed of Mr. Knox's
relations in all degrees of cousinhood. It was a day when frost and
sunshine combined went to one's head like iced champagne; the distant
sea looked like the Mediterranean, and for four sunny hours the Knox
relatives and I followed nine couple of hounds at a tranquil footpace
along the hills, our progress mildly enlivened by one or two scrambles
in the shape of jumps. At three o'clock I jogged home, and felt within
me the newborn desire to brag to Peter Cadogan of the Quaker's doings,
as I dismounted rather stiffly in my own yard.
I little thought that the result would be that three weeks later I
should find myself in a railway carriage at an early hour of a December
morning, in company with Flurry Knox and four or five of his clan,
journeying towards an unknown town, named Drumcurran, with an
appropriate number of horses in boxes behind us and a van full of
hounds in front. Mr. Knox's hounds were on their way, by invitation,
to have a day in the country of their neighbours, the Curranhilty
Harriers, and with amazing fatuity I had allowed myself to be cajoled
into joining the party. A northerly shower was striking in long spikes
on the glass of the window, the atmosphere of the carriage was blue
with tobacco smoke, and my feet, in a pair of new blucher boots, had
sunk into a species of Arctic sleep.
"Well, you got my letter about the dance at the hotel to-night?" said
Flurry Knox, breaking off a whispered conversation with his amateur
whip, Dr. Jerome Hickey, and sitting down beside me. "And we're to go
out with the Harriers to-day, and they've a sure fox for our hounds
to-morrow. I tell you you'll have the best fun ever you had. It's a
great country to ride. Fine honest banks, that you can come racing at
anywhere you like."
Dr. Hickey, a saturnine young man, with a long nose and a black torpedo
beard, returned to his pocket the lancet with which he had been
trimming his nails.
"They're like the Tipperary banks," he said; "you climb down nine feet
and you fall the rest."
It occurred to me that the Quaker and I would most probably fall all
the way, but I said nothing.
"I hear Tomsy Flood has a good horse this season," resumed Flurry.
"Then it's not the one you sold him," said the Doctor.
"I'll take my oath it's not," said Flurry with a grin. "I believe he
has it in for me still over that one."
Dr. Jerome's moustache went up under his nose and showed his white
teeth.
"Small blame to him! when you sold him a mare that was wrong of both
her hind-legs. Do you know what he did, Major Yeates? The mare was
lame going into the fair, and he took the two hind-shoes off her and
told poor Flood she kicked them off in the box, and that was why she
was going tender, and he was so drunk he believed him."
The conversation here deepened into trackless obscurities of
horse-dealing. I took out my stylograph pen, and finished a letter to
Philippa, with a feeling that it would probably be my last.
The next step in the day's enjoyment consisted in trotting in cavalcade
through the streets of Drumcurran, with another northerly shower
descending upon us, the mud splashing in my face, and my feet coming
torturingly to life. Every man and boy in the town ran with us; the
Harriers were somewhere in the tumult ahead, and the Quaker began to
pull and hump his back ominously. I arrived at the meet considerably
heated, and found myself one of some thirty or forty riders, who, with
traps and bicycles and footpeople, were jammed in a narrow, muddy road.
We were late, and a move was immediately made across a series of grass
fields, all considerately furnished with gates. There was a glacial
gleam of sunshine and people began to turn down the collars of their
coats. As they spread over the field I observed that Mr. Knox was no
longer riding with old Captain Handcock, the Master of the Harriers,
but had attached himself to a square-shouldered young lady with
effective coils of dark hair and a grey habit. She was riding a
fidgety black mare with great decision and a not disagreeable swagger.
It was at about this moment that the hounds began to run, fast and
silently, and every one began to canter.
"This is nothing at all," said Dr. Hickey, thundering alongside of me
on a huge young chestnut; "there might have been a hare here last week,
or a red herring this morning. I wouldn't care if we only got what'd
warm us. For the matter of that, I'd as soon hunt a cat as a hare."
I was already getting quite enough to warm me. The Quaker's
respectable grey head had twice disappeared between his forelegs in a
brace of most unsettling bucks, and all my experiences at the
riding-school at Sandhurst did not prepare me for the sensation of
jumping a briary wall with a heavy drop into a lane so narrow that each
horse had to turn at right angles as he landed. I did not so turn, but
saved myself from entire disgrace by a timely clutch at the mane. We
scrambled out of the lane over a pile of stones and furze bushes, and
at the end of the next field were confronted by a tall, stone-faced
bank. Everyone, always excepting myself, was riding with that furious
valour which is so conspicuous when neighbouring hunts meet, and the
leading half-dozen charged the obstacle at steeplechase speed. I
caught a glimpse of the young lady in the grey habit, sitting square
and strong as her mare topped the bank, with Flurry and the redoubtable
Mr. Tomsy Flood riding on either hand; I followed in their wake, with a
blind confidence in the Quaker, and none at all in myself. He refused
it. I suppose it was in token of affection and gratitude that I fell
upon his neck; at all events, I had reason to respect his judgment, as,
before I had recovered myself, the hounds were straggling back into the
field by a gap lower down.
It finally appeared that the hounds could do no more with the line they
had been hunting, and we proceeded to jog interminably, I knew not
whither. During this unpleasant process Flurry Knox bestowed on me
many items of information, chiefly as to the pangs of jealousy he was
inflicting on Mr. Flood by his attentions to the lady in the grey
habit, Miss "Bobbie" Bennett.
"She'll have all old Handcock's money one of these days--she's his
niece, y' know--and she's a good girl to ride, but she's not as young
as she was ten years ago. You'd be looking at a chicken a long time
before you thought of her! She might take Tomsy some day if she can't
do any better." He stopped and looked at me with a gleam in his eye.
"Come on, and I'll introduce you to her!"
Before, however, this privilege could be mine, the whole cavalcade was
stopped by a series of distant yells, which apparently conveyed
information to the hunt, though to me they only suggested a Red Indian
scalping his enemy. The yells travelled rapidly nearer, and a young
man with a scarlet face and a long stick sprang upon the fence, and
explained that he and Patsy Lorry were after chasing a hare two miles
down out of the hill above, and ne'er a dog nor a one with them but
themselves, and she was lying, beat out, under a bush, and Patsy Lorry
was minding her until the hounds would come. I had a vision of the
humane Patsy Lorry fanning the hare with his hat, but apparently nobody
else found the fact unusual. The hounds were hurried into the fields,
the hare was again spurred into action, and I was again confronted with
the responsibilities of the chase. After the first five minutes I had
discovered several facts about the Quaker. If the bank was above a
certain height he refused it irrevocably, if it accorded with his ideas
he got his forelegs over and ploughed through the rest of it on his
stifle-joints, or, if a gripe made this inexpedient, he remained poised
on top till the fabric crumbled under his weight. In the case of walls
he butted them down with his knees, or squandered them with his
hind-legs. These operations took time, and the leaders of the hunt
streamed farther and farther away over the crest of a hill, while the
Quaker pursued at the equable gallop of a horse in the Bayeux Tapestry.
I began to perceive that I had been adopted as a pioneer by a small
band of followers, who, as one of their number candidly explained
"liked to have some one ahead of them to soften the banks," and
accordingly waited respectfully till the Quaker had made the rough
places smooth, and taken the raw edge off the walls. They, in their
turn, showed me alternative routes when the obstacle proved above the
Quaker's limit; thus, in ignoble confederacy, I and the offscourings of
the Curranhilty hunt pursued our way across some four miles of country.
When at length we parted it was with extreme regret on both sides. A
river crossed our course, with boggy banks pitted deep with the
hoof-marks of our forerunners; I suggested it to the Quaker, and
discovered that Nature had not in vain endued him with the hindquarters
of the hippopotamus. I presume the others had jumped it; the Quaker,
with abysmal flounderings, walked through and heaved himself to safety
on the farther bank. It was the dividing of the ways. My friendly
company turned aside as one man, and I was left with the world before
me, and no guide save the hoof-marks in the grass. These presently led
me to a road, on the other side of which was a bank, that was at once
added to the Quaker's black list. The rain had again begun to fall
heavily, and was soaking in about my elbows; I suddenly asked myself
why, in Heaven's name, I should go any farther. No adequate reason
occurred to me, and I turned in what I believed to be the direction of
Drumcurran.
I rode on for possibly two or three miles without seeing a human being,
until, from the top of a hill I descried a solitary lady rider. I
started in pursuit. The rain kept blurring my eye-glass, but it seemed
to me that the rider was a schoolgirl with hair hanging down her back,
and that her horse was a trifle lame. I pressed on to ask my way, and
discovered that I had been privileged to overtake no less a person than
Miss Bobbie Bennett.
My question as to the route led to information of a varied character.
Miss Bennett was going that way herself; her mare had given her what
she called "a toss and a half," whereby she had strained her arm and
the mare her shoulder, her habit had been torn, and she had lost all
her hairpins.
"I'm an awful object," she concluded; "my hair's the plague of my life
out hunting! I declare I wish to goodness I was bald!"
I struggled to the level of the occasion with an appropriate protest.
She had really very brilliant grey eyes, and her complexion was
undeniable. Philippa has since explained to me that it is a mere male
fallacy that any woman can look well with her hair down her back, but I
have always maintained that Miss Bobbie Bennett, with the rain
glistening on her dark tresses, looked uncommonly well.
"I shall never get it dry for the dance to-night," she complained.
"I wish I could help you," said I.
"Perhaps you've got a hairpin or two about you!" said she, with a
glance that had certainly done great execution before now.
I disclaimed the possession of any such tokens, but volunteered to go
and look for some at a neighbouring cottage.
The cottage door was shut, and my knockings were answered by a
stupefied-looking elderly man. Conscious of my own absurdity, I asked
him if he had any hairpins.
"I didn't see a hare this week!" he responded in a slow bellow.
"Hairpins!" I roared; "has your wife any hairpins?"
"She has not." Then, as an after-thought, "She's dead these ten years."
At this point a young woman emerged from the cottage, and, with many
coy grins, plucked from her own head some half-dozen hairpins, crooked,
and grey with age, but still hairpins, and as such well worth my
shilling. I returned with my spoil to Miss Bennett, only to be
confronted with a fresh difficulty. The arm that she had strained was
too stiff to raise to her head.
Miss Bobbie turned her handsome eyes upon me. "It's no use," she said
plaintively, "I can't do it!"
I looked up and down the road; there was no one in sight. I offered to
do it for her.
Miss Bennett's hair was long, thick, and soft; it was also slippery
with rain. I twisted it conscientiously, as if it were a hay rope,
until Miss Bennett, with an irrepressible shriek, told me it would
break off. I coiled the rope with some success, and proceeded to nail
it to her head with the hairpins. At all the most critical points one,
if not both, of the horses moved; hairpins were driven home into Miss
Bennett's skull, and were with difficulty plucked forth again; in fact,
a more harrowing performance can hardly be imagined, but Miss Bennett
bore it with the heroism of a pin-cushion.
I was putting the finishing touches to the coiffure when some sound
made me look round, and I beheld at a distance of some fifty yards the
entire hunt approaching us at a foot-pace. I lost my head, and,
instead of continuing my task, I dropped the last hairpin as if it were
red-hot, and kicked the Quaker away to the far side of the road, thus,
if it were possible, giving the position away a shade more generously.
There were fifteen riders in the group that overtook us, and fourteen
of them, including the Whip, were grinning from ear to ear; the
fifteenth was Mr. Tomsy Flood, and he showed no sign of appreciation.
He shoved his horse past me and up to Miss Bennett, his red moustache
bristling, truculence in every outline of his heavy shoulders. His
green coat was muddy, and his hat had a cave in it. Things had
apparently gone ill with him.
Flurry's witticisms held out for about two miles and a half; I do not
give them, because they were not amusing, but they all dealt ultimately
with the animosity that I, in common with himself, should henceforth
have to fear from Mr. Flood.
"Oh, he's a holy terror!" he said conclusively; "he was riding the
tails off the hounds to-day to best me. He was near killing me twice.
We had some words about it, I can tell you. I very near took my whip
to him. Such a bull-rider of a fellow I never saw! He wouldn't so
much as stop to catch Bobbie Bennett's horse when I picked her up, he
was riding so jealous. His own girl, mind you! And such a crumpler as
she got too! I declare she knocked a groan out of the road when she
struck it!"
"She doesn't seem so much hurt?" I said.
"Hurt!" said Flurry, flicking casually at a hound. "You couldn't hurt
that one unless you took a hatchet to her!"
The rain had reached a pitch that put further hunting out of the
question, and we bumped home at that intolerable pace known as a
"hound's jog." I spent the remainder of the afternoon over a fire in
my bedroom in the Royal Hotel, Drumcurran, official letters to write
having mercifully provided me with an excuse for seclusion, while the
bar and the billiard-room hummed below, and the Quaker's three-cornered
gallop wreaked its inevitable revenge upon my person. As this process
continued, and I became proportionately embittered, I asked myself, not
for the first time, what Philippa would say when introduced to my
present circle of acquaintances.
I have already mentioned that a dance was to take place at the hotel,
given, as far as I could gather, by the leading lights of the
Curranhilty Hunt. A less jocund guest than the wreck who at the
pastoral hour of nine crept stiffly down to "chase the glowing hours
with flying feet" could hardly have been encountered. The dance was
held in the coffee-room, and a conspicuous object outside the door was
a saucer bath full of something that looked like flour.
"Rub your feet in that," said Flurry; "that's French chalk! They
hadn't time to do the floor, so they hit on this dodge."
I complied with this encouraging direction, and followed him into the
room. Dancing had already begun, and the first sight that met my eyes
was Miss Bennett, in a yellow dress, waltzing with Mr. Tomsy Flood.
She looked very handsome, and, in spite of her accident, she was
getting round the sticky floor and her still more sticky partner with
the swing of a racing cutter. Her eye caught mine immediately, and
with confidence. Clearly our acquaintance that, in the space of twenty
minutes, had blossomed tropically into hair-dressing, was not to be
allowed to wither. Nor was I myself allowed to wither. Men, known and
unknown, plied me with partners, till my shirt cuff was black with
names, and the number of dances stretched away into the blue distance
of to-morrow morning. The music was supplied by the organist of the
church, who played with religious unction and at the pace of a
processional hymn. I put forth into the mêlée with a junior Bennett,
inferior in calibre to Miss Bobbie, but a strong goer, and, I fear,
made but a sorry début in the eyes of Drumcurran. At every other
moment I bumped into the unforeseen orbits of those who reversed, and
of those who walked their partners backwards down the room with faces
of ineffable supremacy. Being unskilled in these intricacies of an
elder civilisation, the younger Miss Bennett fared but ingloriously at
my hands; the music pounded interminably on, until the heel of Mr.
Flood put a period to our sufferings.
"The nasty dirty filthy brute!" shrieked the younger Miss Bennett in a
single breath; "he's torn the gown off my back!"
She whirled me to the cloak-room; we parted, mutually unregretted, at
its door, and by, I fear, common consent, evaded our second dance
together.
Many, many times during the evening I asked myself why I did not go to
bed. Perhaps it was the remembrance that my bed was situated some ten
feet above the piano in a direct line; but, whatever was the reason,
the night wore on and found me still working my way down my shirt cuff.
I sat out as much as possible, and found my partners to be, as a body,
pretty, talkative, and ill dressed, and during the evening I had many
and varied opportunities of observing the rapid progress of Mr. Knox's
flirtation with Miss Bobbie Bennett. From No. 4 to No. 8 they were
invisible; that they were behind a screen in the commercial-room might
be inferred from Mr. Flood's thundercloud presence in the passage
outside.
At No. 9 the young lady emerged for one of her dances with me; it was a
barn dance, and particularly trying to my momently stiffening muscles;
but Miss Bobbie, whether in dancing or sitting out, went in for "the
rigour of the game." She was in as hard condition as one of her
uncle's hounds, and for a full fifteen minutes I capered and swooped
beside her, larding the lean earth as I went, and replying but
spasmodically to her even flow of conversation.
"That'll take the stiffness out of you!" she exclaimed, as the organist
slowed down reverentially to a conclusion. "I had a bet with Flurry
Knox over that dance. He said you weren't up to my weight at the pace!"
I led her forth to the refreshment table, and was watching with awe her
fearless consumption of claret cup that I would not have touched for a
sovereign, when Flurry, with a partner on his arm, strolled past us.
"Well, you won the gloves, Miss Bobbie!" he said. "Don't you wish you
may get them!"
"Gloves without the _g_, Mr. Knox!" replied Miss Bennett, in a voice
loud enough to reach the end of the passage, where Mr. Thomas Flood was
burying his nose in a very brown whisky-and-soda.
"Your hair's coming down!" retorted Flurry. "Ask Major Yeates if he
can spare you a few hairpins!"
Swifter than lightning Miss Bennett hurled a macaroon at her retreating
foe, missed him, and subsided laughing on to a sofa. I mopped my brow
and took my seat beside her, wondering how much longer I could live up
to the social exigencies of Drumcurran.
Miss Bennett, however, proved excellent company. She told me artfully,
and inch by inch, all that Mr. Flood had said to her on the subject of
my hair-dressing; she admitted that she had, as a punishment, cut him
out of three dances and given them to Flurry Knox. When I remarked
that in fairness they should have been given to me, she darted a very
attractive glance at me, and pertinently observed that I had not asked
for them.
As steals the dawn into a fevered room,
And says "Be of good cheer, the day is born!"
so did the rumour of supper pass among the chaperons, male and female.
It was obviously due to a sense of the fitness of things that Mrs.
Bennett was apportioned to me, and I found myself in the gratifying
position of heading with her the procession to supper. My impressions
of Mrs. Bennett are few but salient. She wore an apple-green satin
dress and filled it tightly; wisely mistrusting the hotel supper, she
had imported sandwiches and cake in a pocket-handkerchief, and, warmed
by two glasses of sherry, she made me the recipient of the remarkable
confidence that she had but two back teeth in her head, but, thank God,
they met. When, with the other starving men, I fell upon the remains
of the feast, I regretted that I had declined her offer of a sandwich.
Of the remainder of the evening I am unable to give a detailed account.
Let it not for one instant be imagined that I had looked upon the wine
of the Royal Hotel when it was red, or, indeed, any other colour; as a
matter of fact, I had espied an inconspicuous corner in the entrance
hall, and there I first smoked a cigarette, and subsequently sank into
uneasy sleep. Through my dreams I was aware of the measured pounding
of the piano, of the clatter of glasses at the bar, of wheels in the
street, and then, more clearly, of Flurry's voice assuring Miss Bennett
that if she'd only wait for another dance he'd get the R.M. out of bed
to do her hair for her--then again oblivion.
At some later period I was dropping down a chasm on the Quaker's back,
and landing with a shock; I was twisting his mane into a chignon, when
he turned round his head and caught my arm in his teeth. I awoke with
the dew of terror on my forehead, to find Miss Bennett leaning over me
in a scarlet cloak with a hood over her head, and shaking me by my coat
sleeve.
"Major Yeates," she began at once in a hurried whisper, "I want you to
find Flurry Knox, and tell him there's a plan to feed his hounds at six
o'clock this morning so as to spoil their hunting!"
"How do you know?" I asked, jumping up.
"My little brother told me. He came in with us to-night to see the
dance, and he was hanging round in the stables, and he heard one of the
men telling another there was a dead mule in an outhouse in Bride's
Alley, all cut up ready to give to Mr. Knox's hounds."
"But why shouldn't they get it?" I asked in sleepy stupidity.
"Is it fill them up with an old mule just before they're going out
hunting?" flashed Miss Bennett. "Hurry and tell Mr. Knox; don't let
Tomsy Flood see you telling him--or any one else."
"Oh, then it's Mr. Flood's game?" I said, grasping the situation at
length.
"It is," said Miss Bennett, suddenly turning scarlet; "he's a disgrace!
I'm ashamed of him! I'm done with him!"