ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER XIV
Breakfast at "The Golden Hind" was at 8.30, and at 9 o'clock sharp a maid came into the breakfast-room and announced in an almost unintelligible Buckinghamshire accent:
"Thatcher come, sir."
Mr. Fielding threw down his Times and bustled out, and Donald strolled after him unobtrusively. The thatcher was a tall, thin man of an indeterminate age—perhaps forty, perhaps seventy. His cheeks, of course, were a healthy red, like all Buckinghamshire cheeks, and a long brown moustache drooped down past each corner of his mouth almost to the edges of his chin. His eyes were pale blue. He wore corduroys and an old army leather jerkin without sleeves, and a tie without a collar, and he held his old tweed cap in both hands in front of him.
Mr. Fielding plunged at once into a complicated conversation, full of technical terms of carpentering and thatching, full of joists and trusses and ties and overhang and twists and pins. Each appeared to understand the other perfectly. Donald could make head or tail of neither.
"There's a fine old trade dying out," said Mr. Fielding, after the man had gone. "Old Mells is the only thatcher for many miles round and there's not a better craftsman in the land. And yet he can't get enough work to keep him busy all the week. He has to do hedging and ditching and odd-job gardening, and he's the village sexton too. Sad, isn't it? When he's dead there won't be a thatcher at all."
"Hasn't he got any sons?" enquired Donald. "A lot of these trades are hereditary, aren't they?"
"They were hereditary," replied Mr. Fielding, "but this is the last generation of it. There has been a thatcher called Mells in this village for centuries, I expect, but the old man you saw just now—he's got two sons and both of them are motor mechanics in Aylesbury. That's the rule nowadays. The stupid sons become farm labourers and the clever ones become mechanics. In the old days both clever sons and stupid sons followed their father's trade, except the occasional enterprising one who joined the army. But garages have spoilt all that."
Mrs. Fielding, a bundle of tradesmen's books under each arm, letters and bills and receipts and circulars and bulb catalogues and newspapers in her hands, and a cheque-book in her mouth, came out of the dining-room. Her husband relieved her of the impediment to speech, and she asked Donald what he would like to do.
Donald said that he had thought of walking over to Tainton Green to see the Meet, and he fancied that a fleeting glimmer of relief was visible on the faces of both host and hostess. A guest in the country who cannot amuse himself is a nuisance to busy people.
"Would you like the car? Or a bicycle?" asked Mr. Fielding promptly.
"I think I'd sooner walk," replied Donald, and again he thought they looked relieved.
"It's about two miles," said Mrs. Fielding. "If you start a little after 10 you'll be in plenty of time. The Meet's at 11 o'clock."
It was a warm January morning, sunny and spring-like, and Donald felt that there should have been buttercups in the meadows with larks above them, and swallows fooling about, and cowslips, and great drifts of the flower which the English call bluebells but the Scots wild hyacinths. The air was very still, and far away a bell was tolling. Cows and sheep grazed in the fields, and no ploughland chequered the greenness of the pasture with dark, kindly smears of earth. Somewhere near an axe was pecking at a tree, and on the edge of a copse of young oaks a band of small children were happily collecting firewood and putting it into a cart, home-made from a soap-box and a pair of ancient bicycle wheels.
Donald dived into a network of narrow lanes, unsignposted, untouched by the influence of Mr. Macadam, and flanked on each side by strips of grass which were a good deal wider than the lanes themselves. No buildings were visible. There was no sign of human life. Donald was in the heart of rural England.
He was recalled from his day-dreaming about village Hampdens, and plodding ploughmen, and the short and simple annals of the poor, by a terrific blast upon an electric motor-horn about two yards behind him. He sprang into the air in alarm and spun round to find himself facing the silver bonnet of a colossal pale-blue-and-silver Rolls-Royce, out of the driver's seat of which was leaning a young man with a red face. It was not the pink of the gaffers' faces in the Crooked Billet, but a mottled red.
"Hey! You!" shouted the young man. "When you've finished sleeping in the middle of the road, where the devil's Tainton Green?"
"I imagine it's straight on," replied Donald politely, "but I'm afraid——"
"Oh God!" interrupted the young man, "another bloody stranger!" and he released the clutch and the great car slid away.
Tainton Green looked as if a celestial town-planner had scattered Tudor cottages out of a pepper-pot and then, as an afterthought, had flung down a handful of rather larger Queen Anne houses. The newest house in the village must have been about two hundred years old. There was in Tainton Green what house-agents call "a wealth of old timber," and the cottages which it adorned stood at every conceivable angle to each other in an irregular ring round the Green.
But Donald had no desire at the moment to examine architecture. His whole attention was concentrated upon the most famous of all English sporting spectacles, the Meet of a pack of English foxhounds. As he had expected, there was no detail missing from the scene that has been so often described in books and pictures. Everything was there—dogs, shiny horses, admiring villagers, huntsmen in velvet caps, a horseman with a long whip and a brass horn, sharp-looking grooms in neat leggings and black-and-white check breeches, rows of motor-cars of immense brilliance and beauty (even the pale-blue-and-silver Rolls-Royce which had passed Donald in the lane was not particularly conspicuous), motor horse-boxes, liveried chauffeurs, liveried footmen, each carrying a fur rug over his left arm and looking bored and contemptuous, and here and there an occasional pony-trap. The pony-traps—there were not more than half a dozen of them—roused the chauffeurs a little from their massive stolidity into lofty smiles.
And, of course, there were the ladies and gentlemen who were going to risk their bones, perhaps even their necks, for the sake of sport. The first thing that struck Donald was the drabness of the feminine hunting-kit and the gorgeousness of the masculine. The women mostly wore queer-shaped bowler hats and black habits, with here and there a touch of white. But the men wore shiny toppers and scarlet coats and white or pale-yellow breeches and huge orange-topped boots and high stocks, and they strode about the Green like captains of Spanish galleons, or colonels of Napoleon's light cavalry, seeing no one except each other, but allowing themselves to be seen by everyone, chins out, heads high, superbly disdainful, like the camels of Bactria who alone know the hundredth name of God.
One of them stepped heavily into a puddle beside Donald and splashed him with mud and went on, his eyes fixed on eternal space, as if neither Donald nor the puddle had ever existed. Another, seated upon his charger like Bellerophon upon Pegasus, halted a yard or two away, and addressed a beautiful girl who was curveting round and round upon a mettlesome steed. "These bloody yokels who clutter up the place ought to be shot," he said. "Don't you agree, Pud?"
The beautiful girl persuaded her horse to stand still for a moment and looked at Donald as if he was some kind of slug. "Bloody bastards," she agreed, and then was curveted away again.
A colonel of Napoleonic light cavalry came past, perhaps a Hussar of Conflans—Donald could almost hear the clatter of his sabre upon the streets of Vienna or Warsaw or Berlin, and see the swing of the pale-blue, silver-buttoned dolman and the nodding of the horse-hair plume—stopped, put an eyeglass in his eye, and addressed the horseman.
"Hullo, Ted!" said Lasalle.
"Hullo, Squibs," replied Bellerophon, looking more than ever like a Bactrian camel, "I say, these bloody yokels who clutter up the place ought to be shot."
The beau sabreur looked quickly round and, seeing that at the moment no one was within ear-shot—for Donald, being only a yokel, was like a stone or a stump or a cow, and could not actually be said to be there at all—he lowered his voice and said urgently, "Look here, Ted, don't touch Moggeridge Ordinaries till they hit half a dollar. We're doing a wangle, see? Weinstein's coming in with us, and so's old Potts and old Finkelberg. Get me?"
He winked, and Donald thought that somehow he looked less like a swaggering hussar than before. For some ridiculous reason, Donald found himself thinking of week-ends at Brighton and peroxide.
All this time more cars and more horses and more intrepid sportswomen and sportsmen had been arriving, and punctually at 11 o'clock the whole apparatus of fox-killing, dogs, horses, women, and men moved off sedately towards a wood outside the village. Donald counted a hundred and seven riders and approximately sixty dogs. It was a formidable cavalcade. From a little rising ground he watched them enter a field and gradually spread out into a scattered semicircle as they approached the wood which was presumed to be the lair of one of the doomed vermin. They rode slowly, in little groups, and halted while the advance guard of scarlet and velvet and horn vanished among the trees. There was a pause of ten minutes, and then came the sound of distant shouting, and the horses sprang into activity. The hunt was up. The riders streamed away along the edges of the wood and vanished over a slope and reappeared on a far-off hill-side, a spectacle of unbelievable picturesqueness and romance. Donald stood and strained his eyes until the last scarlet pin-head had vanished behind the horizon of dark woods, leaving an empty landscape of dull greys and browns and greens. The splendour had gone, and Donald walked slowly homewards.
Half-way home he found that at his rate of walking he would be back at "The Golden Hind" before 12 o'clock, which would never do. Mr. and Mrs. Fielding would be busy, and they would abandon their busyness to try and entertain him and everyone would feel embarrassed. It was a warm morning; a tree-stump on the edge of a coppice was dry, and Donald had a book. He sat down in the sunshine and plunged into The Trail of the Poisoned Carpet, a work of fiction of which the nature and the absorbing interest can be readily judged when it is stated that Donald had just reached the point when the heroine, slim Miranda Tremayne, drugged, and bound hand and foot, was being lowered in an empty caviar barrel into a disused mine-shaft by La Sapphirita, a Bolshevik spy, and Boris Fernandowski, agent of the Ogpu.
Donald was soon completely absorbed. He read the chapter which described the brilliant rescue of slim Miranda by huge, ugly Dick Trelawney, who happened to alight providentially at the mouth of the mine-shaft in a racing balloon. He read the great scenes of Dick's fight with Ah Boo Wu and his gang in the Limehouse main drain, the reappearance of the secret submarine off Valparaiso, the forgery of Sir Dalhousie Canning's signature to the Bungiskhan Treaty, and the theft of the Poisoned Carpet itself from the nunnery in Hull, and he had just reached the point at which La Sapphirita has put cyanide upon the claws of a Siamese cat and, disguised in black satin trousers as a Government window-cleaner, has inserted the animal into the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office where huge, ugly Dick Trelawney is at work with an atlas and a manual of geography trying to discover exactly where Bungiskhan is, with which he has negotiated the Treaty. Donald had just reached this point when he became slowly aware that the stillness of the country-side was being broken by distant voices. A faint hallooing came across the fields, and then suddenly, out of the hedge on the other side of the road—tired, muddy, panting, limping, desperate—came the fox. He passed within a yard of Donald without appearing to see him and lolloped slowly into the coppice.
Donald watched him go and wished him good luck, adding aloud, "And a fat chance you've got! All alone against sixty dogs and a hundred and seven riders and a hundred and seven horses—two hundred and seventy-four against one."
He moved down the road to get out of the way of the pursuing angels, who were so nobly bent upon saving the country-side from vermin. The shouting and hallooing came nearer, but the human sounds were overwhelmed in the wild, excited, parrot-like, monkey-like yapping and screaming of the hounds, as they came pouring through the hedge in brave pursuit, all sixty of the intrepid heroes. Then came the first of the riders, the men in velvet caps and the men with the horns, taking the hedges with the lovely slow curve of a horse that knows it can jump and knows that its rider can be trusted. Behind them came the mob, galloping like Prince Rupert across the fields, the leaders unerringly finding the gaps and the gates, and the followers forming up into blasphemous queues behind them. Donald was astonished that so few of them made any attempt to jump the hedges. One or two deliberately set their horses at them, and five or six were obviously less keen about it than their mounts, and did their unsuccessful best to dissuade them from the perilous leap, but at least eighty per cent disdained such showy tactics and preferred the gates and gaps, where a reputation for hard riding could be more easily obtained by a lot of hard swearing.
There was a halt at the edge of the coppice, for the fox had gone to ground. He had outrun the whole two hundred and seventy-four of them, and in doing so he had provided an hour and a half of the best sport which the Hunt had seen that season. But though he had outrun them all, and though he had provided such sport, they had the laugh on him in the end. For they got a lot of spades and a couple of terrier dogs and dug him out of his hole and killed him; because, after all, the country-side must be saved from vermin even if ladies and gentlemen have to chase them on horseback for an hour and a half, and furthermore it would be an act of callous cruelty to dumb animals, which no Englishman could be guilty of, to deprive the sixty dogs of the midday meal which they had so bravely earned.
Donald resumed his homeward journey and in ten minutes came upon an animated scene. Just where his winding lane joined the main road, a caravan of gypsies had halted their motley crew of painted wagons. They could only have arrived within the last two hours, because Donald had not seen them on his way to Tainton Green.
The T-head where the lane actually joined the road was almost blocked with horses, and six or eight of the fox-hunters were standing dismounted among the riders, all with their backs to Donald and facing the main road. Beyond this façade of mud-bespattered black and scarlet and horse-flesh, furious voices were being raised, and language that would have startled Nell Gwynne, or brought a blush to the cheeks of Burke and Hare, was being freely used. Donald edged his way between the ditch and one of the horses into the front row of the stalls, and by the time he had reached his place, the flow of words had given way to a fast bout of fisticuffs. One of the antagonists was a six-foot, scarlet-coated, scarlet-faced young man; the other was a lean, dirty, dark gypsy. The muddied Adonis fought with a classical straight left; the smoky chal relied upon short-arm punches, low when possible. The bout only lasted a few seconds, for the fighters were dragged apart by other gentlemen in red coats, and the gypsy retired sullenly under the overwhelming force with which he was now faced.
The comments of the ring were so clear, and expressed so forcibly and so repeatedly, that Donald had no difficulty in discovering what it was all about.
"The bloody swine was kicking his horse!" said a girl of about nineteen, with lips like the petals of a rose.
"Bloody swine!" said another girl, the perfection of whose fragile face was a little marred by a diagonal stain of mud about six inches long and three inches broad.
A short, tubby man, who looked very rich, shouted out:
"Bravo, Ralph! Well done, boy!"
Two men on foot discussed the matter in grave undertones.
"Thank God it was a gypsy and not an Englishman," the first said.
"An Englishman wouldn't do a thing like that," said the second, rather shocked.
"If there's one thing that gets me mad," said the first, "it's cruelty to animals. I don't care whether it's a mouse or an elephant, it simply makes me see red."
"Absolutely," said the second. "One can stand a good deal, but one can't stand that."
"I never go abroad nowadays," said the first, "except to Le Touquet and Monte Carlo and Switzerland and so on, because I simply cannot stand the way those chaps treat animals."
"Just like this dago," assented the other. "Do you know the first thing I'm going to do when I get back to town to-night? I'm going to invite Ralph out to the best dinner at the Ritz that money can buy."
"By Jove!" cried the second enthusiastically. "Let me in on that, old chap. We'll share exes."
They drifted away.
A horseman, pale with passion, and covered with clay from silk hat to orange-topped boots, was staring wildly in front of him and repeating over and over again to the world in general, "I'll report him to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, I'll report him to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals!"
An old lady of about seventy, perched like a sparrow upon an enormous black horse, kept on saying plaintively: "Why doesn't someone flog him? I can't understand why no one flogs him."
Donald heard no more, for at that moment the shoulder of a horse took him neatly in the small of the back and knocked him into the hedge. The woman who was riding never even glanced in his direction. She was about fifty years of age and her mouth and jaw were resolute and her eye unwavering, and Donald recognized her at once as one of the nurses in a hospital near Hazebrouck in Flanders in which he had had measles. One pouring wet night when the hospital, which by an unfortunate mischance had been placed immediately beside a large ammunition dump, was being bombed by German aircraft, this hard-faced Diana carried out seven wounded officers from a burning ward into which the stretcher-bearers refused to go, and rigged up a shelter for them from the rain, and boiled tea for them by the light of the blazing huts, to the accompaniment of a full orchestra of machine-guns, anti-aircraft artillery, bombs, pattering splinters, and screams and groans. And on another occasion she held the icy hand of a dying subaltern for twenty-seven hours. And on another she told the Matron what she thought of her.
Donald picked himself out of the hedge and went slowly back to "The Golden Hind." Another fox had been found and the hunt had vanished with extraordinary swiftness, leaving nothing behind them save innumerable hoof-marks in the mud, a few gaps in fences for the farmers to repair, and the memory of a gallant panorama.
Donald had just time before lunch to reach the chapter in which Miranda, slimmer than ever, is lured by a false message into the bargain basement of an antique shop in Fez.
On Monday morning he read in The Times that the second fox had completely let down the North Bucks Hunt. The wretched creature had nipped off at a great rate and in five minutes had dived into a hole from which not even the valiant terriers could extract him. He was, in fact, as The Times said, "a bad fox."
The rest of the week-end passed pleasantly in visits to the ducks, turkeys, hens, geese, goats, guinea-fowl, cows, horses, and other live stock which lived in or around the rambling, lichened, mossy old barns at the back of "The Golden Hind"; in wandering round the village with Mr. and Mrs. Fielding, which was a slow business because both of them stopped to talk to every man, woman, child, and three-quarters of the horses and dogs, that they met; in exploring with Mr. Fielding the Saxon church and listening to him talking learnedly upon architecture; in discussing French novels, and the English Restoration Drama, and the decay of craftsmanship, and the taxation of land values, and the music of Arnold Bax, and Reparations, and fifty other subjects about which Mr. and Mrs. Fielding obviously knew far more than Donald; in helping the married daughter and her husband with the colic-stricken horse; in holding wool for the unmarried daughter, who was going to knit a jumper for herself in the intervals between dancing and badminton and trips to London and riding and Girl Guides and Women's Institutes and Women's British Legion and Glee-Club rehearsals and amateur theatricals; and in much good eating and drinking and pleasant sleeping.
On Monday morning another meandering train crept stealthily towards Marylebone Station with Donald among its passengers. On the journey, he read in The Times that the Bill for the Prevention of the Exportation of Worn-Out English Horses to Belgium and other countries, which had in the last Parliament passed without a division its first reading, its second reading, and all its Committee stages, and was simply waiting for the formality of the third reading, had been reintroduced into the new Parliament and had every prospect of securing a first reading within the next two years.
