Chewing the Cud (16 page)

We usually made up a party of eight or ten other couples
and were not wholly innocent of honkerishness. Usually plenty of food and exercise kept the effects of drink at bay, and now and again pleasantly uninhibited moments would make the evening one to be remembered, like one particular gathering at the Pump Room.

By suppertime our party had grown by the addition of three total strangers who came to sit with us unasked — a dull girl with a very long double-barreled name, a man who was introduced as “Armadillo Dung,” and a second man who said nothing but looked ill.

As we all sat eating, strange expressions varying from pleasure through puzzlement to downright annoyance began to pass over the faces of the women as each glanced, or studiously did not look, at her neighbor, be he someone else's husband or Armadillo Dung or the unnamed stranger. Beneath the table, the smallest and most sloshed of us was crawling happily round on hands and knees, feeling each and every female leg in turn.

No sooner had he been discovered and hauled out than the face of the nameless man, which had now turned putty-colored, fell forward with a splash into his plate, and ominous convulsive sounds threatened worse to come. With great presence of mind somebody grabbed a jug of water that stood, surprisingly, among the army of bottles and emptied it into a pot plant
in time to catch the stranger's sole contribution to the evening.

And to round that night off, there were a couple of splendid public rows. One was a case of good old-fashioned jealousy between husband and wife.

“Just how many more times do you intend to dance with so-and-so?”

“As many as I like. If you want to dance with me, you've got a tongue in your head.”

“Bloody disgusting, slobbering all over the bloody man. Everybody's been looking at you.”

“I was not slobbering, as you call it. And everybody's looking at you, shouting and yelling and making an idiot of yourself.”

“I AM NOT SHOUTING…!” And so on.

The other barney was a little more unusual, for the couple were newly engaged and might therefore have been expected to be happy with one another. But suddenly, for whatever cause — and we could not hear above the music the furious words that we could see them spitting as they danced angrily past the band — the girl broke free from her fiancé's grip and tore off her engagement ring. Setting herself like a discus thrower, she hurled it into the midst of the bemused musicians even as they resolutely rendered some sweet song for young lovers.

And after the ball was over and we were muffled and gloved for the cold haul home, we took a last look into the dimmed and deserted ballroom. The stage still held one large shadowy figure, searching on hands and knees for that symbol of happy bondage that was gone with the wind or more probably with the brass, straight down somebody's euphonium.

Memory treasures one last unforgettable picture, at the very end of yet another annual beaglers' assembly, this time at the Guildhall. Coats had all been left somewhere in the upper regions of the building, so that Thomas Baldwin's fine flight of stairs carried a press of people making their way up or down, a way that was unusually narrow by reason of a magnificent display of many-colored flowers arranged along the length of the staircase.

Suddenly the gaze of the entire company, both those like us who were gathered in the great hall below already dressed for the journey and those climbing or descending, was drawn to one of our party, a tall figure standing midway between top and bottom. A steady stream of men and women gingerly edged their way past him, faces rigid in their studied lack of expression.

His customary short “nose-warmer” pipe was clenched between his teeth, his handsome head was bent in concentration, and he wore the blissful look of the man who is
bursting and has made it to the garden at last as with both hands he carefully directed upon that great bank of chrysanthemums a steady, clearly visible, and seemingly never-ending parabola of pee.

A
ctually the workaday pattern of life was a very sober-colored one. As a rule, we had a drink proper only at weekends. The perfect caveat passed the bottom of the farm drive every morning, in the shape of the tragicomic figure of Cider Harry, en route for the Ring of Bells. During the war, Cider Harry had been that then most respected of rural figures, the local police sergeant. But now, only a handful of years later, that alcoholic drink made from apples had cost him first his stripes and then his job and made of him a sad figure of fun.

Unbuttoned, unlaced, his face a match for the reddest apple, he grinned his way along the road, his nose a huge squashed strawberry above the slack mouth. He was a big man, but his long stride had turned to a short nervous shuffle, as though he must keep both feet pressed to the ground or, raising one, risk a fall.

Not quite oblivious to the world, for he would nod in answer to a greeting, Cider Harry hurried carefully towards the pub and then, much later, back home again, this time pausing once or twice to urinate in the hedge, his back politely turned to the passing traffic. Home, they said in the village, was a chicken house in his sister's garden. She would not have him come indoors.

The memory of Cider Harry has lingered because I named my first goat, perhaps for some reason of resemblance, after his sister, a Mrs. Pearce.

My Mrs. Pearce was a gentle, sweet-natured animal, black and white and carrying a modest pair of neat crenellated horns by which she could be led about without any of that pulling and head tossing or butting in which some goats indulge.

She was very hairy, not only about the chin, so that a skirt or apron of hair hung about her almost to the ground. She was small, like her milk yield, and short, like her life with us. For when I went to milk poor Mrs. Pearce
one morning in the orchard, where she was tethered, there she lay with her throat torn out.

There had been some worrying in the district, and one dog, I suppose, could not tell the goats from the sheep.

In due course I acquired a number of goats, but at least I had sense enough not to keep a billy. The smell of the one to which I first took my nanny goat was powerful enough even to have cleared Cider Harry's head. Large and shaggy, with a wicked sweep of horn, this animal was very obviously common in the unkindest sense of the word, compounding its natural rankness by spraying itself with its own urine. Its coat thus more yellow than white, it would advance upon the visiting female, neck outstretched and head thrown back so that the horn tips rested upon its withers. Cold eyes half-closed in anticipation, nostrils flaring, it rolled its rubbery upper lip back from its dirty teeth with a horrid relish.

A nice old superstition says that you never see a goat for the whole of the twenty-four hours because once every day it pays a visit to the Devil to have its beard combed. After a couple of times I decided never to see this one again, not for one minute, and took my animals in future to an elegant pedigree Saanen who was hornless, practically clean-shaven, and by comparison positively fragrant.

First to wed this upper-class person was my fourth and
favorite goat, Rachel. After Mrs. Pearce's tragic end, Mrs. Wilkins had slipped off a steep bank and strangled herself on her tethering chain, and Mrs. Maypole had tired of life and died in her sleep, so I renounced the local ladies and named Rachel for her looks, which were pure Old Testament.