“I’ve got one or two real good recipes,” he resumed.
“But I’ve got no horse,” I replied, and that seemed to finish the
interview.
“No offence, I hope, sir,” he said, and passed on towards the Delectable
Mountains.
He was a mystery; his speech disclosed no marked local accent; he had
certainly had some education; and he was hawking horse-remedies in
Watling Street at sunrise. Here was the germ of my first lesson in
rusticity. Except in towns, the “horsey” man does not necessarily
look horsey. That particular man resembled a tailor, and by a curious
coincidence the man most fearfully and wonderfully learned in equine lore
that I have yet known is a tailor.
But horses! Six miles away to the West I could see the steam of
expresses on the London and North Western Main line; four miles to the
East I could see the steam of expresses on the Midland. And here was
an individual offering stable-recipes as simply as though they had been
muffins! I reflected on my empty stable, harness-room, coachhouse. I
began to suspect that I was in a land where horses entered in the daily
and hourly existence of the people. I had known for weeks that I must
buy a horse; the nearest town and the nearest railway station were
three miles off. But now, with apprehension, I saw that mysterious and
dangerous mercantile operation to be dreadfully imminent: me, _coram
publico_, buying a horse, me the dupe of copers, me a butt for the
covert sarcasm of a village omniscient about horses and intolerant of
ignorance on such a subject!
*****
Down in the village, that early morning, I saw a pony and an evidently
precarious trap standing in front of the principal shop. I had read
about the “village-shop” in novels; I had even ventured to describe it
in fiction of my own; and I was equally surprised and delighted to find
that the villageshop of fiction was also the village-shop of fact. It
was the mere truth that one could buy everything in this diminutive
emporium, that the multifariousness of its odours excelled that of
the odours of Cologne, and that the proprietor, who had never seen me
before, instantly knew me and all about me. Soon I, was in a fair way to
know something of the proprietor. He was informing me that he had five
little children, when one of the five, snuffling and in a critical mood,
tumbled into the shop out of an obscure Beyond.
“And what’s your name?” I enquired of the girl, with that fatuous, false
blandness of tone which the inexpert always adopt toward children. I
thought of the five maidens whose names were five sweet symphonies, and
moreover I deemed it politic to establish friendly relations with my
monopolist.
“She’s a little shy,” I remarked.
“It’s a boy, sir,” said the monopolist.
It occurred to me that Nature was singularly uninventive in devising new
quandaries for the foolish.
“Tell the gentleman your name.”’
Thus admonished, the boy emitted one monosyllable: “Guy.”
“We called him Guy because he was horn on the fifth of November,” the
monopolist was good enough to explain.
As I left the shop a man driving a pony drew up at the door with an
immense and sudden flourish calculated to impress the simple. I noticed
that the pony was the same animal which I had previously seen standing
there.
“Want to buy a pony, sir?” The question was thrown at me like a missile
that narrowly escaped my head; launched in a voice which must once have
been extremely powerful, but which now, whether by abuse of shouting in
the open air or by the deteriorating effect of gin on the vocal chords,
was only a loud, passionate whisper: so that, though the man obviously
bawled with all his might, the drum of one’s ear was not shattered. I
judged, partly from the cut of his coat and the size of the buttons on
it, and partly from the creaminess of the shaggy, long-tailed pony, that
my questioner was or had been connected with circuses. His very hand was
against him; the turned-back podgy thumb showed acquisitiveness, and the
enormous Gophir diamonds in brass rings argued a certain lack of really
fine taste. His face had literally the brazen look, and that absolutely
hard, impudent, glaring impassivity acquired only by those who earn more
than enough to drink by continually bouncing the public.
“The finest pony in the county, sir.” (It was an animal organism
gingerly supported on four crooked legs; a quadruped and nothing more.)
“The finest pony in the county!” he screamed, “Finest pony in England,
sir! Not another like him! I took him to the Rothschild horse-show,
but they wouldn’t have him. Said I’d come too late to enter him for the
first-clawss. They were afraid--afferaid! There was the water-jump.
‘Stand aside, you blighters,’ I said, ‘and he’ll jump that, the d----d
gig and all,’ But they were afferaid!”