CHAPTER XVII
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.