A COUNTRY WOMAN AT THE CITY RACES
Still do our jaded pulses bound
Remembering that eager race.--R. W. GILBERT.
This favour would never have come to me if I had not found a two-eyed
peacock feather in the paddock. It isn't reasonable to suppose that a
simple, country-bred person from back Alberta-way could have such
story-book luck on her first wager. La-la-la!
All the way down I kept praying, "Lead not Janey into temptation,"
knowing right well I would slay any one who kept me out. I take off my
hat to myself.
"Dear me!" says John. "One would think you cut your teeth on a bit
instead of a pen." Some people like the idea of betting: some don't.
At this Woodbine race-course in Toronto, they no longer have turf
accountants. Their days were numbered when careless people started to
call them bookies. They have been succeeded by steel slot affairs
called pari-mutuel machines. The words pari and mutuel would seem to
be almost synonymous, one meaning equal, the other reciprocal. The
reciprocal arrangements are like this; the party of the first part gets
the money; the party of the second part, the experience. "And the
machine?" you ask. (I asked that too.) The machine, which is only an
impersonal way of saying the Jockey Club, gets as its commission five
per centum of all wagers, and I am told it makes as high as eight
thousand dollars the day. There are as many ways of fixing the races
as there are of making bannocks on the Mackenzie River, but you can't
fix the machine. It never gets tired of being good. This being the
case, people must study the science of betting just as politicians
study the ways of the electorate.
A shrewd-spoken gentleman with ruddy features and fierce white
moustachioes to whom I was introduced in the paddock, told me some of
these rules he had learned. He said "My Good Lady, I can see you have
an honest face, although you come from Western Canada where the people
are exceedingly singular. I will therefore proceed to tell you in
confidence what I know concerning the canons of betting."
"A tip, so far as I can make out"--and here he flicked a butterfly off
my shoulder--"is a secret told to the whole betting ring."
"Unless you have money to lose you should bet small till you are using
money which you have won."
He told me many other rules about gambling, with much eagerness, for he
seemed to conceive a liking for me, but it avails nothing that I tell
them to you, in that no man gives heed to another man's method of
plying the art, thinking his own a vastly greater superiority, in which
respect gamblers do closely approach to the fraternity of the pen known
as authors.
* * * * *
This Woodbine race-course is a fair tarrying place, and I enjoy its
beauty with luxurious wonder. Outside its high palings, there are
thickly peopled, fusty streets, for this is the very heart of the city.
Why any place should be called the heart of the city I cannot
conjecture, except that both the civic and human heart are places of
huge trafficking and, above all things, desperately wicked.
The near foreground is a finely brushed lawn that, here and there, has
burst into flame-red flowers. In the centre of the ring where the
hunters take the hedges, two beautiful elms hold themselves proudly
erect as if to say, "Look at us, O woman of little wit! look at us; we
are finer creations than man, or even than horses."
Off in the background, with nothing intervening save the elms, little
sailing yachts like white birds, rock and dip in the sapphire blue of
the bay. Strong-built motor-boats scud across the horizon in so
terrific a hurry one can hardly follow their wake for dust. (The
editor will kindly permit me to say "dust.") We watch them, from our
box, three women of us, with a field-glass which we use in turn for all
the world like the three hoary witches who had only one eye between
them.
I like this landscape better than our prairie. The trouble with the
prairie is that you always seem to be in the middle of it. The garden
of Time and Chance, it has no parts or passions unless, indeed, its
spaces seem unfriendly. It has no mystery, no changeability, no
complexity.... But all this is digressing from the races and from the
beautifully dressed women who look like tall-stemmed flowers. I heard
a man in the next box compute that the feathers worn in the enclosure
had cost a hundred thousand dollars, but no matter what they cost they
were worth it--willow plumes, fish-spines, aigettes, birds-of-paradise,
ostrich mounts, ospreys, and other things I cannot name. Indeed, my
own hat has two bright scarlet wings which cause me no small
satisfaction, in spite of the fact that John says they are not so much
wings as a challenge to combat. Moreover, he says when I am better
civilized, I will know that feathers of any kind are an atavism and no
fit dress for Christian people. It is trying to have a near relative
with such views. The younger men of the enclosure affect Newmarket
coats, or Burberry's, and cloth spats, also field-glasses swung across
their shoulders. They express horse-language emphatically without a
word. The older men who have attained to the dignity of the Bench or
the Cabinet, run to silk hats and frock coats.
The enclosure is occupied by the favoured few who have boxes and who
are designed by the Grand Stand as "the society bunch." I would like
to write about this distinction, and sometime I will, but just now the
three-year olds are cavorting down the great white-way, for the autumn
cup which has $2500.00 tucked away in its inside. It is on Star
Charter that I have my hard-earned western dollars--egg and butter
money, mind you--and I must pay strict attention to this race. I think
he'll win. The Lord never gave him those legs and that frictionless
gait for nothing. I'm sure of that.
The horses do not mind their manners at the starting bar, but pick
objections, prance, and kick each other with the most admirable
precision. I have read that when the Otaheitans first saw a horse they
called it "a man-carrying pig." It is not possible to improve on the
definition.
But, after awhile, the horses make a clean break from the bar and are
off in a spume of dust. Gallant-goers they are, and this is sure to be
a tight race. Their necks are strained like teal on the wing, and
almost you expect to hear a sharp shot and see one tumble. Indeed,
they might be birds in autumn flight, in that they run in a wedge and
seem to obey a collective consciousness.
The jockeys ride high on the horses' shoulders and they ride for a
fall. The purple and blue jockey holds the lead and he's going some.
The enclosure says he is.
But the blue and silver jockey is fighting him for every inch and he's
gaining. The enclosure says he is.
The orange and black jockey is third. He's carrying my egg and butter
money. He'll win though, for the jockey who stays second or third must
get the advantage of the leading horses as a wind-shield. Presently he
will slip the bunch; he's sure to. The enclosure says he is. John
tells me to stop adjuring the jockey, that he will never hear me.
They've only a little way to go now--only a little way--and the orange
and black is coming steadily to the front. Even John gets excited and
keeps saying, "Good l'il ol' cayuse," and things like that, which are
bad form down East. Steadily on--steadily past the blue and
silver--steadily upon the haunches of the red and blue--now on his
shoulder--now on his neck--and now a neck ahead. This was how the
orange and black won, but you should have been there to see it.
And to think it all came from finding a two-eyed peacock feather in the
paddock!
Between races, we visit the paddock, insinuating our way through the
crowd in order to get near the ring where the horses show their paces
to the racegoers who make believe they are judges of speed, condition
and stamina. As a matter of fact, the horses are all very much
alike--wiry, wispy things like lean greyhounds with rippling veins that
stand out in relief, muscles of rawhide, and bell nostrils. There is
little difference in their speed either--a second, two seconds, or
mayhap three--but these seconds are, in their results, so vastly
different to the turfmen that all other contrarieties become as
nothing. The jockeys who know the horses from their hoofs up, and who
ride with instinct, are perhaps the only men who can fairly hazard what
the results will be--or should be.
They tell me that most of these jockeys die of consumption. This is
probably owing to the fact that they must rigidly train the flesh off
their bones. Napoleon said that Providence always favoured the
heaviest battalions. The dictum has no application to jockeys. Our
Western maxim that a cowboy is only as good as his nerves would be of
more general applicability.
But while, in the horses themselves, there seems to be little of marked
individuality, think of what volumes could be written on their names.
Here we have Ringmaster, Gun Cotton, Froglegs, Song of the Rocks,
Tankard, Scarlet Pimpernel, Porcupine, Pons Asinorum and other names
which hold a lure. So exactly co-natural are they to our extended
acquaintanceship among the humans back in the Province of Alberta, that
our homesickness vanishes into the sunny blue.
There were nine horses in the autumn steeplechase and Young Morpheus
would have beat handily had he not fallen on the last jump. The jockey
rocketed over his head and lay still, but Young Morpheus, being a
thoroughbred and no welcher, ran on and came slashing in to the finish.
That horse has a soul like John's and mine, only better than John's.
The prize was carried off by Highbridge, who seemed to be the
favourite, for the enclosure turned itself into a pandemonium. Men and
woman who before were separate entities, became merged into a mass of
frantic arms and white faces that with a pleading voice coaxed the
winner down the homestretch to victory. It is the steeplechase that
probes to the depths mankind's capacity for physical enjoyment.
"But the jockey was thrown," you say, "and lay still?" Think you we
wear the willow because of it? Not so, Honourable Gentleman. We are
consoled by the well-turned and doubtless truthful reflection that--
"Bright Lucifer into darkness hurled,
Was happier than angels quiet-eyed."
I did not see any more of the races because I was summoned to the
Government House box and invited to tea with the occupants thereof.
They must have heard what an excellent dairywoman I am, and things like
that, but how they heard I cannot surmise unless John has been telling.
"I'd like to live in your Province," said the Governor, "living is
mercilessly high there, but money keeps moving; money keeps moving, and
a fellow like me need never go to work without his breakfast."
In the Directors' room, we refreshed ourselves with little sweet cakes
and tea from a delicious brew. And in this room, I talked with the
handsome, well-mannered women from Kentucky, Virginia, and Hamilton who
have brought thither their horses--about six hundred in all--for this
autumn meet.
I have made up my mind that John shall not argue me into going home,
not if I have to fall ill from discomposure of spirit, and, as for
Toronto, ever hereafter it shall be to me a new city of Beucephala in
honour of its horses and because of the immutable game-loving
disposition of its people.