There was a rail dividing the stand, cleaving the two-shilling section from the half-crown. This puzzled her, as the planks on either side were equally hard. Harriet’s explanation that you got sixpenny-worth more water-jump scarcely seemed to go deep enough. The grinders were half-crowners, she noticed, glued as a rule to the side of some local celebrity, such as the Member or the High Sheriff or the President; but the leeches only ran to two shillings—with the exception of Helwise, who was inviting Bluecaster to come and see how badly they wanted a new bath at Crabtree, when she wasn’t issuing orders to Lanty in the ring.
Apart from his aunt, Lancaster was having the usual harried time of an authority on these occasions. When he wasn’t helping or looking for the judge, he was calling competitors or catching stray sheep, artfully eluding business-demands from button-holing tenants, or rescuing the usual veterans of the ring who stand so trustingly behind the hurdles. He knew everybody, it seemed, just as Helwise, talking baths, knew everybody, and Harriet, flourishing her clumsy gamp. Names passing from mouth to mouth were no more than empty sound to herself. The fact that Seaman was jumping did not fill her with anticipation, nor could the recent death of a well-known horseman move her to a sense of loss. She began to be rather bored by the unhurrying succession of events, and checked herself guiltily in a yawn. The judge of the moment was having a real day out with a fine hunter-class, and had to be practically dragged off each horse in turn. Hamer was drinking in Harriet’s observations like an eager child, but he was as new to it all as his daughter.
Even the old hands were getting a little weary, and found time to turn a speculative eye upon the strangers—the cheery, handsome man and the slim, well-groomed girl; and the Legend went round in ascending chromatics of incredulity. Some knew Hamer by accident, so to speak: “Behaved very decently over that Abbey Corner smash, don’t you know! Sporting and all that—gave a thumping big subscription to to-day’s business,” etc. etc., and wondered vaguely whether he might not be worth cultivating. The women with sons looked at Dandy and said that anybody married anybody nowadays, and that even Kitchen Tea might be made positively chic if the butter were spread thick enough. The women with daughters only were not interested.
Dandy had ceased to be self-conscious, however. She was watching Lancaster at work with the same dreary chill of separation that she had experienced in the Lane. This was his life, this interchange of business and friendship to which she was an absolute stranger. Harriet was perfectly at ease in it, grumbling, grunting, cracking a joke with a passing farmer or summing-up a prize-winner in a pithy sentence—at ease and happy.
“Dull enough to you, I expect,” she observed, detecting Dandy’s secret yawn. “We’re brought up to it, of course. Besides, it’s my trade. Rotten show, though! Rotten judging! Fool of a crowd! But all the same I couldn’t stop away, any more than Lanty Lancaster. I’ve grown to it, you see. When I was a kid it was my big blow-out of the year, and I’ve still got the same feeling for it, like Christmas Day and all that piffle. It isn’t the thing itself—it gets slacker and rottener every year, as I’m always telling them, especially Lanty Lancaster—it’s what it stands for, and all the years behind it. If ever I want to purr, it’s when I’m sitting on this shaky old stand, watching a flat-footed imitation of a horse going slap for the water. But you must be about fed up on it, I suppose! It’s as slow as Noah’s Ark, and, besides, it always rains.” She slipped the catch of the gamp to see if it worked, and shot a glance at the sun which should have sent it slinking over the horizon like a dog shouted to kennel. “We’re getting through to the jumping, though. You’ll find that a bit more enlivening. Stubbs is turning out—did I tell you? He’s got a mount that can jump about as much as a hedgehog, but he thinks he’s going to win all right. It’s no use my jawing; he won’t take anything from me. I hope he’ll behave decently, that’s all, and not get slanging the judges. Trust Stubbs to have been where the sun is shining, even though it always rains!”
The band behind the stand broke into a dirge which proved to be “The Girl in the Taxi,” and to this suitable motif the leapers sidled into the ring for their primary reconnaissance. There was something of the dignity of ritual in their solemn progression from fence to fence, in the measuring thrust of the intelligent heads through the furze. Dandy had her first thrill in spite of the accompaniment. She wanted to beat a little drum in the wake of the processional hoofs.
Harriet knew the riders, gentleman, groom or horse-dealer, just as she knew the mounts,—from the hunter, that did a little gentle following of hounds by the aid of gates, to the professional “leppers,” that never see open country, but spend their time winning prizes at a round of shows, and jump more with their brains than with any other section of their queer-shaped carcasses. She dragged out a pencil like a poker, and settled down to work.
“That’s Captain Pole-Pole on Griselda, the little gray. Rushes everything that she doesn’t take steck at, and a brute to hold, by the look of her. The big roarer waving its wild tail and doing an imitation of a charging squadron belongs to Bluecaster. Lanty has her out for the fun of the thing. They call her something idiotic—oh, yes—Flossie! She can jump quite a bit—Heaven knows how—though you can feel the stand shake. There’s a groom up—plays the triangle in my village orchestra. The thing called Chipmunk, looking as though it was made of knitting-needles, belongs to the Ritson Bros. One’s riding, and the other runs in and throws things if Chippie starts frivolling. There’s the winner—the little brown like an oak box with head and legs. You’d think he hadn’t the reach for a grass-plot rail, but he’s there, every time. Watch his eyes, and his good-tempered ears! He’s as pleased as Punch all along, and as dead in earnest as a city man sprinting for his train. Yes, he’ll win right enough! Why? Because he jumps with his head. You can see him stop to think just before he takes off, and he doesn’t give the fence an inch more than is wanted. This is his living—he comes from Saddleback way—and little Seaman doesn’t mean to waste himself playing round. Stubbs must be cracked to think he can beat him! The rough-looking black with the rope-reins has been taught to behave like a mad circus and an Ulster riot combined. Its owner is a blacksmith in his spare time, and nobody else can stick on its back. It’s clever, too, but it’s apt to get carried away by its play-acting and make mistakes. Flyer goes to sleep and leaves his heels behind him, and Grace tries to do the tight-rope act on the pole with all four feet at once. That’s Stubbs on his beetle-crusher—Lapwing, he calls it! He doesn’t look any too genial, does he? We had a row before starting about rotifers, if you know what those are—some sort of a measly swimming microbe or rotten reptile of that kind. It’s the only thing he cares a rap about except horses and the inside of a glass, and he was ramping mad because some of the beastly things had got thrown away. I hope Lanty is somewhere about.”
Stubbs was immense—very check, very baggy, and very red in the face. His side-whiskers bristled aggressively, and there was a vicious gleam in his eye. He was riding a boring chestnut with weak quarters and the action of a schoolboy in clogs. Harriet dug the person in front of her with the gamp by way of relieving her feelings. Hamer and Dandy tried to think of things to say, but she cut them short.
“Oh, it won’t be the first time he’s made fools of us both in public! I can’t help feeling a bit grubbed, but I suppose I can stick it out. Anyhow, I’ve got to stop and see him through. Save them hunting me up, if he goes and breaks his neck.”