We started all right. “Pat” let his collar hang and seemed sleepy, but I knew his head was full of mischief: I could feel it through the eighteen feet of rein. In the hope of discouraging him, I turned up a narrow road with a high bank on either side. He still seemed drowsy, but I wasn't trusting him. It was a winding road. Suddenly, at a bend, he flung up his head and laid back his ears. “Hold on,” I shouted. The next moment we were charging up the bank. There was nothing else to be done but to let the wheeler follow: a dear quiet girl, when left to herself; but Pat always gave her a bit of his devil. The two men behind were shot out, but hung on, and managed somehow to scramble back. I wish they hadn't. I could have got on better without them. We cleared the top, and then they started cheering. We went through that cornfield at twenty miles an hour. I saw an open gate and made for that. We crossed a lane and through the hedge to the other side: by good luck it was chiefly bramble. The two fools at the back, I gathered, were unhurt. They were singing “Annie Laurie.” We took the Ewelme golf links still at the gallop. They seemed to me to be all bunkers. At the Icknield corner, I managed to get the horses on to the road. It rises four hundred feet in a mile and a half; and at Swyncombe, Pat agreed to my suggestion that we should pull up and have a look at the view. We returned home, via Nettlebed, at a gentle trot. Beyond having lost our hats, and the temporary use of my left eye, we were not much damaged. My Oxford friends crowded round Pat and congratulated him. The youngest of them, who had an indulgent mother, offered me my own price for him, then and there. He had been bitten with the idea of starting a tandem of his own.
Poor Pat! I had to shoot him when the motors came. He had never let anything pass him on the road, before, and one day, at the Henley Fair Mile, he ran his last race. He was only a few days short of twenty then: though you wouldn't have thought it. He had had a good time.
Tandem driving is asking for trouble, sooner or later. I had driven tandem, summer and winter, for over ten years, in and out among the Chilterns, which isn't an easy country; and my escapes had put it into my head, I suppose, that nothing ever could happen to me. And then, one afternoon, driving quietly round a corner at eight miles an hour, I tilted over a heap of stones that had been shot out there that morning for road-mending and broke poor Norma Lorimer's leg. She and Douglas Sladen were staying with us at the time. Sladen had remained behind to write a book-review in answer to a telegram: which shows how wise it is always to put duty before pleasure. Fortunately, we were near home, and some labourers quickly came to our assistance. I got on my bicycle and rode down to Wallingford, and wired for a bone setter; and when I started to return, I discovered I had broken an ankle. I had not known it till then, when my excitement had begun to cool down. I remember we boys had a way of getting into the Alexandra Palace by climbing a tree and dropping down inside the fence. One day, I slipped and fell upon the spikes. I felt nothing at the time, except the desire to put distance between myself and a young policeman who seemed to have suddenly sprung out of the earth. It was my mother who noticed that my arm was in ribbons. Nature, red though she be in tooth and claw, provides an anæsthetic. It was man who invented cold-blooded cruelty. Miss Lorimer stayed with us for a month, and forgave me. She talked as if all I had done had been to provide her with a good excuse for a pleasant holiday. But I was glad of that broken ankle. I'd have felt mean merely saying “I'm sorry.” We used to play croquet on crutches.
Killing has never attracted me. I give myself no airs. As Gilbert points out, there is no difference, morally speaking, between the Judge who condemns a man to be hanged and the industrious mechanic who carries out the sentence. If I like eating a pheasant (which I do) I ought, logically, to take a pleasure in shooting it. Possibly, if we all had to be our own butchers, vegetarianism would be less unpopular. But there would still remain a goodly number to whom the cutting of a pig's throat would afford enjoyment; and such, alone, are entitled to their bacon. There was an old farmer I knew in Oxfordshire, a simple soul. He owned the shooting over one solitary field, in the centre of which was a three-acre copse of beech wood. All round him, for miles, were rich men who spent quite fabulous sums on rearing pheasants.
“No,” he said to me one day during a big shoot. We were leaning over the gate of his one small field. “No, I don't myself go in for breeding. I just take what the Lord sends me.”
I didn't count them but, speaking roughly, I should say about a hundred birds had gained the shelter of that three-acre copse while we had been talking.
“They've got more sense than people think,” he added musingly. “They know they'll find a little corn there; and will be safe, poor things—till after Christmas.”
Riding to hounds would be good sport, if it were not for the fox. So long as the gallant little fellow is running for his life, excitement, one may hope, deadens his fear and pain. But the digging him out is cold-blooded cruelty. He ought to have his chance. How men and women, calling themselves sportsmen, can defend the custom passes my understanding. It is not clean.
As for the argument about the dogs, that is sheer twaddle. Is anybody going to tell me that my terrier will decline to chase rabbits on Tuesday, because the rabbit he ran after on Monday had the good luck to get away from him! I only wish it were so. Many a half-crown I'd have been saved, in my time.
I learnt riding with the Life Guards at Knightsbridge barracks. It was a rough school, but thorough. You were not considered finished until you could ride all your paces bareback, with the reins loose; and when the Sergeant-Major got hold of a horse with new tricks, he would put it aside for his favourite pupil.