pose and portion upon himself. Petersfield continued hunting that
season as though nothing had happened, but Edward grew moody and
disappeared. He was always imaginative, and imaginative people, instead
of being bored, brood and brood, and so a year passed. Petersfield
married again without much ado, but Edward did not think it was any
slight to Kathleen’s memory. Rather he came to think that, now her
husband had remarried, she was more than ever his own, and the feud
between the two men collapsed into its own ashes.
* * * * *
After a break of two seasons Edward was hunting again. Petersfield
was now Master of the pack, but nothing could ever induce the least
collision between the two. Edward’s ambitions and desires had been
steadily blunted through life. He had taken an honourable second so
often. There seemed nothing left for him but to enjoy good health and
a place in the ranks of sport. When they met in the field, he and
Petersfield exchanged cheery greeting. It was a good season and they
had plenty of hunting matters to discuss. They were having rattling
runs and the Hunt made lively reading in the rather monotonous
chronicle of foxhunting which spoils a daily column of _The Times_ for
the ordinary reader. Edward distinguished himself riding a young mare
which his father had bred, a nice black satin-coated creature that made
up for her slender shoulders by the cat-like cleverness with which she
took double fences and complicated obstacles. She became a familiar
beauty spot in the Hunt, and more than one generous offer was made
for her, but Edward enjoyed her mixture of cunning and staying power
which generally brought him to the front and sometimes gave him a hard
run to himself and the huntsmen. With all that money could buy him in
horseflesh, Petersfield could never appear on a mount like Edward’s.
One day, returning from the day’s sport, Edward told me with a quiet
bitterness that the bad blood was beginning to mount once again between
himself and Petersfield. I asked what in Heaven’s name it could be for?
“Over the mare of course. Petersfield cannot bear being passed when the
pace really begins to tell and I pass him every time. He has offered me
a record price for her.”
“You refused him, I hope,” I said. “I don’t see why he should have
everything in life.”
Edward nodded in a queer sort of way as though it was no good. I was
with him the next day when Petersfield swaggered up and congratulated
Edward on his riding during the week. “You won’t let me double my offer
of yesterday?” he laughed. Edward sat still. Petersfield continued:
“You know. What’s the name of the mare that you ride?” Edward looked
him fair in the face and said “Kathleen!”
It was the first and only time I saw Petersfield taken aback. He rode
back to his hounds without saying another word. Then Edward told me why
he had called her by the name of the dead woman he had loved. It was
only a whim brought on by an accident.
“The first time I rode her to hounds,” he began, “she stopped dead in
the corner of a field and would not move away. She whinnied and pawed
the ground not out of fear but as though to attract my attention. It
was no use trying to push, much less to punish such a willing goer,
so I dismounted and tried to find out what was worrying her. I got
off and looked round. Then I recognised the spot. It was the corner
where I had said good-bye to Kathleen three years previously. It all
came back to me then, and most curiously I immediately remembered for
the first time what Kathleen had been speaking to me on that strange
and ever-regretted afternoon. It was about old friends being best and
how pleasant it was to come back to them in after years, and would I
always allow her to feel like that toward me. That was about all. And
the scene dug up the old impressions in my memory so fresh that I lay
my head across the mare and fairly shook with grief. I thought she
understood almost, and when I mounted her again she trotted off and we
joined the hunt. She galloped like mad and I forgot her shying in the
first field after the exhilaration of that run. She just showed her
heels to the whole field. Though we often passed that field again, she
never stopped or repeated her action. But what had happened linked her
up in my mind with Kathleen and that is why I called her by the same
name.” So said Edward.
I saw a good deal of him that season and admired the perfect
partnership established between him and his mare. It was more like
telepathy than horsemanship. He told me that the mare could read his
thoughts before he passed them to her mouth or to his heels. She never
tired in the field and he was only afraid she would some day strain
herself. He had entered into the relations that an Arab bears to his
horse. They became inseparable companions. Not only in the field, but
in the stable; and out of the hunting season, Edward made the mare
the pet of his life. She moved, galloped and jumped under him with
something of the spirit-like obedience that a medium gives to a strong
control. I don’t think it was out of simple sentiment or in mockery of
the might-have-been that he called her Kathleen. I had to realise that
he really believed that Kathleen, the dead Kathleen, had found a way of
coming back to him out of the next world. I thought he might have saved
himself his emotions when he uttered her name in reply to Petersfield,
who, unless he was more thick-skinned than we thought, must have seen
how deep the old sorrow lay. Anyhow, Edward had taken the idea into his
cranium and as it gave him great consolation it must be regarded as a
good idea. It seemed fantastic enough that Kathleen, having presumably
regretted her marriage in the next world as well as in this, should
have found this rather round-about way of redeeming her frustrated love
for poor Edward. He, just like a man, was convinced that she had loved
him even when she chose the other man. He was convinced that he had not
lost her after all and suffered none of that imaginative agony in which
lovers think of the dear unattainable dead as annihilated in space or
crying a ghostly grief in the icy void. Edward was spared all that, and
a good gallop on the mare ridded him of loneliness and depression of
any kind. In the end he would never let anyone but himself ride her,
and after every ride he rubbed her down, and fed and watered her. She
appreciated his care and carried him and kept him in the first flight
all the season. They were a real ornament to the Hunt.
The bad times came to the old gentry and the squires. New taxes
and old mortgages hit them harder and harder and numbers fell out
of the County ranks, selling their Halls and Manors to financial
looters and legalised plunderers. The character of hunting began to
alter. Extraordinary people came a-hunting, packs changed hands and
the money-interest could always be felt, even in the necessity that
arose for artificially slowing the speed of the foxes. Huntsmen were
required to show kills rather than sport. The bad times hit Edward’s
father rather heavily and he had been unlucky in trying to recoup his
lost income in the Argentine. The family in consequence suffered not
merely decay but swift and total disaster. Unsuspected debts rose to
the surface and everything saleable had to be sold. Books followed
furniture, and finally went the horses. Edward’s father had a certain
call on the mare he had reared, and Kathleen had to be sold with the
rest. If it had not been for his father’s distress, I think Edward
would have preferred to shoot her there and then. But there was no way
of getting her out of the storm that was engulfing the fortunes of
the house, and she was expected to make the sale a success. She would
attract buyers who might likely buy the other horses.
Edward avoided Tattersalls the day of the sale. I went to watch the
bidding. The mare was well known in the world of horse-buyers and there
was a keen tussle between different hunts to purchase her. A dealer
bought her for four hundred guineas, a very fine price. Edward went
abroad after the sale to live in the Colonies, where bankrupt men may
live free and ride a horse. I saw him no more.
I spent that winter hunting, varied with excursions to races,
steeplechasing for choice. Amateur riding is always more amusing if not
such an exact science as professional work. Towards spring I attended
some point to point racing in the Midlands. There was a small crowd
at either end, and I took up a position in the middle of the course
beside the most formidable fence. Several of my friends were riding and
Petersfield was a strong favourite. Petersfield had never chequered
my life, but I confess I would rather have seen him second than have
won a good sum on his win. With my glasses I recognised him at the
start. I watched the starter and the anxious drop of his flag and the
solid burst of horses and riders opening like a fan and thinning out
as each obstacle brought one of them down. The race became a string
with Petersfield leading. He was riding beautifully and his mount was
tossing away the sods like a runaway ploughing machine. They splashed
through a water obstacle. The race seemed to me Petersfield’s, as I
watched him shoot past and over the fence at which I was standing. He
threw his mount like a cricket ball at the next fence, when suddenly
the horse doubled itself up and stopped dead. Petersfield slipped over
its head, landed on his feet and made a desperate effort to remount.
The horse’s front legs danced in the air. Petersfield jerked down the
sinewy snakehead and bundling the reins into his hand was scrambling
back into the saddle. He had lost the lead but it was exciting to see
if he could still win. There was a chance. No, there wasn’t! He was
ready again, but the survivors were two fences away. Not till then did
he seat himself squarely and face the jump, but not a step would his
horse take. So far from pricking his mount to the frenzy of the wind,
his spurs seemed only to transfix it to stone. The race was being won
at the other end. It was won! And Petersfield threw himself angrily out
of the saddle. It must have been maddening to him.
He seemed rather puzzled by what had happened. He walked round to the
horse’s head with an ugly look. If he wanted to punish the animal he
had the brute to himself for they were half hidden behind the fence....
I turned towards the finish and had started walking away when I heard
a quick, half-human squeal. I turned round again and realised to my
horror that it was not the horse but Petersfield who was squealing and
for an obvious reason. The animal had its mouth more than full with
Petersfield’s bull neck. He was down on the grass and she was holding
him there. I ran as hard as I could, hurling my stick at the horse’s
sides. But I could not dislodge the animal until I had snatched and
dragged the reins. With a sickening thrill I saw the heavy mouth move
across his neck and the big row of foaming teeth.... Good Heavens! He
had been shaken like a rat before I had rescued him. Not till then did
I recognise Edward’s famous mare. Her eyes were red-hot, and her ears
were laid back like a hare’s crouching in her form. It was the mare
called Kathleen all right!
I never let Edward know and indeed I never met him again. Why should
I? Men return from the undiscovered ends of the world and from foreign
countries but not from the Colonies. The Colonies are the Empire’s
blotting paper. They absorb all the superfluous ink and the mistakes
and the blots. Financial undoing is the most considerable of social
mistakes, and Edward was glad to be absorbed by the dreary dazzle of
Australia. I never saw him again. Whether the news of Petersfield’s
death ever reached him I do not know. I have no doubt he would have
laid a different interpretation to the scene at the fence than I did,
had he seen or known. I managed to account for it to my own mind. I
don’t think anything so absurd as that Kathleen, the dead woman, came
back to avenge an unlucky marriage, or to be near to Edward.... It
was all a matter of the power of thought. Thought when harnessed to
emotion is a soluble output which can penetrate and influence material
or living bodies, not necessarily human. In concentrated form the
emanations of the past often strike us as ghosts and we generally
feel them more often than we see them. If such an emanation hits a
receiving or containing agent, there is no limit to the tricks it can
play, duping the brain, catching the eye, even causing audibility.
In this case I think Kathleen had decided to kill herself, and all
her personality went out to Edward the day before, when she made
that queer and lingering farewell. Edward did not catch the tragedy
or meaning of it, but the emotion intended for him had saturated the
spot I believe. He was more receptive a year later when he came riding
to the same place, but even so the fierce thought and unconscious
exhalation of Kathleen’s dead agony pervading that corner of earth
where they had parted found its receiver in the sensitive mare he was
riding. Something of her no doubt survived bodily annihilation, and
that shred of unliving, earth-bound personality as it were impregnated
the primitive instinct of the mare, so that she came to answer Edward’s
craving for Kathleen’s return to him in any guise or in any shape. The
negative and positive poles were established between man and mare and
no wonder he felt the horrible material reaction of having to sell
her.... But I don’t for a moment think it was Kathleen. I only suppose
that the mare somehow became mixed up with Edward’s own feelings and
sensation, which would account for the unpleasantness of that scene
that I witnessed by the fence.... It was really only the memory of
those teeth that gave me such a queer turn.
JOHN SALTUS
I remember meeting John Saltus for the first time as vividly as any
coloured patch in my life. It was in the middle of Clubland and a day
that I was feeling unusually sore after being blackballed for the
Bachelors’. I was vaguely trying to decide whether to join the Y.M.C.A.
or to chance the ballot of the Athenæum under a _nom de plume_. For I
had to have some place in London in which to lunch. My real name I had
disgraced irretrievably, unintentionally enough, but foolishly beyond
belief. I need not recall that celebrated baccarat case in which I had
been mixed. It was quite enough to keep me out of any London Club. I
had been a fool, and folly, alas, does not connote innocence.
It simply made me a pariah in Mayfair. I had played at a table where
a Duchess with thirty thousand a year had been very rightly fleeced.
I enjoyed watching her being cheated by my best friend. There was a
sudden scene and I was held as an accomplice. Nothing could be proved,
but nothing was ever disproved. I went sniffing about Belgravia like an
hyena with his teeth drawn. In the suburbs of course I became rather
a lion, and tradesmen’s wives, and even my own wife’s tradesmen,
welcomed me to their Sunday socials. The hand that was believed to
have cheated at the tables of the great was greeted with considerable
sympathy by the great provision dealers, who, I may say, by less
dramatic methods extract even larger sums from the same tables. But
every class admires some vice from which it is circumstantially free.
Possessors of great wealth secretly admire burglars--an admiration
which sometimes breaks out in mild kleptomania. Atheists cause a secret
fascination to the wives of clergy. Sinners bow to the innocent. The
innocent kneel to sinners. It is based on the love of opposites. Many a
perfect draughtsman has cherished the ambition to write one drivelling
lyric. Browning said he liked “to know the butcher paints,” which the
Exhibition at the Royal Academy shows is often the case. Anyhow, as one
who had once cheated by accident at cards, I became the object of much
vicious veneration in Golders Green.
In Mayfair I was used to being cut as often as a pack of cards. Tom
Smithson was the only friend who stuck to me and showed his belief in
me by proposing me every year for the Bachelors’. And this, I remember
so well, was my fourth blackballing and here was Smithson coming down
St. James’s Street accompanied by a man to me unknown. Smithson was
the queerest fellow. He always claimed to be the rightful Duke of
Northumberland. He said the Percies had chivied him out.
Smithson turned sheepish the moment he caught sight of me, a natural
consequence, I supposed, of the social denigration I had received under
his auspices that morning. I only felt that he owed me the necessary
lunch to cover his humiliation and mine. It was the least he could
do. But after making an obvious effort to disembarrass himself of his
companion he showed signs of wishing to avoid me. I could not believe
I was such a pariah that he would not even introduce a friend. I felt
stirred to force an introduction for myself, and the casual crowd
assisted the manœuvre, for we were thrown into touch by an eddy of
passers. Even so, he chose to forget our names! He only placed a hand
on each of our shoulders and murmured: “I am going to leave you two
excellent fellows together without telling you who you are. You are
both well known in your way and you should have rather an amusing lunch
trying to find out who the other is. I have an engagement myself. I am
so sorry.” And he slipped into White’s with the nervous superiority of
an archangel leaving two imperfect beings outside the Paradisal fence.
I was left alone with the stranger.
“Lunch is a good idea, as ideas go,” I ventured to say, “but unluckily
I have no Club as yet.” A tinge of disappointment crossed his iron-grey
face as he echoed, “Nor have I!” I felt frank and did not mind telling
a stranger, who did not even know my name, that I had been badly
blackballed at the Bachelors’ that morning. At the word blackball he
turned livid white.
“I have never been blackballed, I suppose because nobody has ever
dared to propose me for a London Club,” he stated with a mechanical
smile. I then perceived the good looks under the sullen pitch of his
countenance. I proposed that we should evacuate the blind rut into
which Smithson had thrown us by quickly disclosing our names and
lunching in the first restaurant. I revealed my humble autonym, for
which he feigned immediate recognition, and, while I was wondering
which of the minors or minims his might represent in English art or
letters, he bespake his nomenclature: “I am John Saltus; you know
Saltus?”
Hope of lunch compelled me to utter some such pretended surprise as:
“Oh, Saltus? Not John Saltus? Why, of course. I am so glad to meet
you. So curious, isn’t it, after all these years?” But my over-ready
recognition seemed to pain rather than please. I had been as polite as
I could be under extempore circumstances, and yet he seemed annoyed.
Did he also prefer to keep his name under a bushel? Surely he couldn’t
be a pariah as well as myself? “I should like to have honoured myself
by giving you lunch at the Athenæum,” I said, trying to be more than
courteous.
“At the home of literary discoveries and lost wits?” he murmured with a
ghastly smile. I felt quite annoyed, for the Athenæum was to me one of
the fixed points in the English world, like _Punch_ or Lord’s Cricket
Ground or our sanitary system, and I could not brook the scornful.
“In that case will you partake with me at my favourite Aerated Bread
Shop?” I continued to say. He bowed, and we walked towards the City.
My favourite shop was empty, except for a mother giving her schoolboy
sons a farewell holiday meal. The quick lunchers and cheap eaters had
gone. It was late in the afternoon. I was lunching with a cynic, a not
unpleasing form of appetiser.
With his bitter sauce he irrigated the homely pudding of life until I
half enjoyed his quaint misanthropy. It was so unusual in an Aerated
Bread Shop. The lady at the next table seemed equally interested and
strained her ears to overhear what he had to say. The schoolboys gulped
as though about to be left stranded on some cakeless shore or some
iceless Sahara. They were in the middle of a second strawberry ice when
their mother caught the eye of John Saltus. There was a flash of real
recognition, and I watched her rise to her feet, flint-faced, and order
the boys to follow her out of the shop. In vain they protested, with
streaming lips. “Your father would not like you to eat here; no, not
for a moment,” and with her eyes, half afraid and half horrified, fixed
on Saltus she withdrew her brood. They left their ice unfinished. She
made one jerk with her parasol, as though she had just found a decayed
rat in the soup, and was gone.
I am neither curious nor critical. The past cannot interest me and the
future, being only the unborn past, is even dull to me. As for the
present, the evil of the day is sufficient to the day. Confidences
bore me and I never encourage _le récit d’une vie_. But this time I
felt that a little explanation was in season. I was used to being
blackballed at the clubs, but, when it comes to women stamping out of
Aerated Bread Shops rather than allow their children to eat in the same
room, I confess I felt a little annoyed.
I was wondering which of the seven unforgivable sins against Society
Saltus could have committed. Had he sinned like me basely at baccarat?
Or had he forged a Lord Chamberlain’s ticket to the Royal Enclosure
at Ascot or gone uninvited to the Gillies’ Ball at Balmoral? Had the
police arrested him embracing his wife with over fervour amid the
moonlit shadows of Hyde Park? Or, even more iniquitous, had he affixed
the pennant of the Royal Yacht Squadron to a houseboat on the Upper
Thames? I could not imagine.
Well, I never asked, and we walked together that afternoon as though
some subtle bond lay between us. We were fellow-pariahs and clung to
each other. There are some to whom the joys of ostracism make their
appeal and who even enjoy being seen with the notorious. But it was a
kind of self-protection that held us together.... That winter I often
lunched with Saltus and enjoyed his company. I came to appreciate
the fine-grained cynicism of his talk, and I guessed that he liked
me because I was neither curious nor critical. Such friendships can
last. All the same, I could not help observing that his notoriety was
greater than mine, for I often saw men turn aside from us, or at least
Saltus imagined they did, and his brow puckered like a frill and his
long shapely hand tightened upon mine. It was not one of the radiant or
rhapsodical friendships of my life, but I felt spellbound at times and
all the more attracted to his company. I felt I knew him well enough
to propose a jaunt in Paris. I knew he went abroad for his summers,
instead of pursuing those very uninteresting fauna at home, the deer,
salmon and grouse. I felt that Paris was a safe proposal, the great
caravanserai of the uninvited and unwanted and unmentionable of all
nations. To my surprise he bit his lip and said: “Paris? Not Paris. I
can never return there.” With an apologetical farewell he left me the
next moment.
Next day I received an invitation to follow him to his chalet in
Switzerland. I never knew he had one, but the address conveyed
meaning to the railway agent, and a week later I had taken my ticket.
Switzerland seemed an odd place for an Englishman seeking social
concealment. However, I am not curious and my mind was occupied by the
decision I had to make between the firms of Cook or Lunn. Lunn seemed
localised in Switzerland and the name bespoke avalanches of London
Alpinists, but Cook was a world-fact, one of the Catholicities from
which there is no escape. I was in suspense between Cook the Guelf and
Lunn the Ghibelline, between Capulet Cook and Montagu Lunn. It was
about as considerable a decision as my mind can attain to.
Eventually I purchased a ticket at Cook’s and drifted into a herded
party labelled Lunn, at whose expense I obtained a free transit between
two Paris stations. Saltus had written to me previously from Germany.
I wondered whether he minded my coming by Paris.... At any rate, the
next day I looked out of the carriage and took my first glimpse of the
Alps. I found them magnificently disappointing. However, I had not been
curious to see them, so I had no right to be critical.