“He doesn’t suffer. It’s being fond of people makes you suffer. He’s got all he wants. Look at him.”
The firelight on the face—its points and hollows, its shining eyes, its stillness and intensity, its smile; and on the cat, hunched and settled in the curve of the warm body. And the two young people, shrinking back, pass on between small houses, clutching each other’s hands.
1923.
HAD A HORSE
I
Some quarter of a century ago, there abode in Oxford a small bookmaker called James Shrewin—or more usually ‘Jimmy’—a run-about and damped-down little man, who made a precarious living out of the effect of horses on undergraduates. He had a so-called office just off the ‘Corn,’ where he was always open to the patronage of the young bloods of Bullingdon, and other horse-loving coteries, who bestowed on him sufficient money to enable him to live. It was through the conspicuous smash of one of them—young Gardon Colquhoun—that he became the owner of a horse. He had been far from wanting what was in the nature of a white elephant to one of his underground habits, but had taken it in discharge of betting debts, to which, of course, in the event of bankruptcy, he would have no legal claim. She was a three-year old chestnut filly, by Lopez out of Calendar, bore the name of Calliope, and was trained out on the Downs near Wantage. On a Sunday afternoon, then, in late July, ‘Jimmy’ got his friend, George Pulcher, the publican, to drive him out there in his sort of dog-cart.
“Must ’ave a look at the bilkin’ mare,” he had said; “that young ‘Cocoon’ told me she was a corker; but what’s third to Referee at Sandown, and never ran as a two-year-old? All I know is, she’s eatin’ ’er ’ead off!”
Beside the plethoric bulk of Pulcher, clad in a light-coloured box-cloth coat with enormous whitish buttons and a full-blown rose in the lapel, ‘Jimmy’s’ little, thin, dark-clothed form, withered by anxiety and gin, was, as it were, invisible; and compared with Pulcher’s setting sun, his face, with shaven cheeks sucked in, and smudged-in eyes, was like a ghost’s under a grey bowler. He spoke offhandedly about his animal, but he was impressed, in a sense abashed, by his ownership. ‘What the ’ell?’ was his constant thought. Was he going to race her, sell her—what? How, indeed, to get back out of her the sum he had been fool enough to let young ‘Cocoon’ owe him, to say nothing of her trainer’s bill? The notion, too, of having to confront that trainer with his ownership was oppressive to one whose whole life was passed in keeping out of the foreground of the picture. Owner! He had never owned even a white mouse, let alone a white elephant. And an ’orse would ruin him in no time if he didn’t look alive about it!