National Velvet (20 page)

    
Suddenly the boy on the brown appeared on her left. Both the grey and the brown drew ahead and Velvet strung out a near third. Like hounds over a wall they rose, one, two, three over the fourth hurdle and went sweeping round the uphill curve to the table.

    
Mrs. Brown stood like an oak tree. Velvet galloped and drew up in a stagger beside her, throwing the single rein loose on Sir Pericles' neck. She stooped and hung over him, kicking both feet free from the stirrups to steady him. Trembling, panting, his sides heaving in and out he stood, his four feet still upon the ground, like a bush blown by a gale but rooted. Mrs. Brown's needle flashed.

    
Velvet was off, stirrups flying, down the grass hill, the blazing light no longer in her eyes, going east. First
the grey, then the brown, were after her. At the fifth hurdle the grey passed her, but the brown never drew near. The grey was wound up to go. Its hind-quarters opened and shut like springs in front of her. She saw it rise at the sixth hurdle just ahead of her, and come down almost upon its head. It slowed. As she drew up she saw the little man was done, stretched up unnaturally on its neck. He took a year falling. She passed him while he was still at it—jumped the seventh and eighth hurdles and whispered to herself as the noise went up behind the ropes, “A fiver . . .” And the piebald's glistening future spread like a river before her, the gates of the world all open. She pulled up, flung herself off Sir Pericles and glanced down at his feet.

    
He was all right. And the Steward was examining her button . . . That was all right too! Here came the sisters . . . The little man in the bowler, unhurt, was leading his horse down the track. Mrs. Brown . . . Where was mother? Mi was by her side.

    
“Lead him off! Don't stand there! You look daft,” said Mi lovingly, and his little blue eyes winked and shone. “Good girl, Velvet!” said Mr. Croom as she neared the exit. And hands patted her and voices called.

    
The ruthless voice of the Broadcaster was gathering competitors for the next event.

    
“Thirty shillings is yours, Mi.”

    
“You'll have to give me forty. I want ten to get me teeth out of pawn.”

    
“You put them in again?”

    
“I had to. Hadn't nothing.”

    
“How is it they're so valuable, Mi?”

    
“Mass o' gold. My old dad got 'em done. He said, “You always got money on you if you got gold in your mouth.' I can raise ten shillings on them most towns.”

    
“You whistle better without them.”

    
“Yes, I do,” said Mi. “Where's that Jacob?”

    
It was the evening, before supper. They had turned the horses into the field after a good meal, and the piebald in with them. He had shown no sign of kicking. He trotted happily about among the new companions, his tail raised in an arch and his nostrils blown out with excitement. Velvet leant on the gate and Mi stood beside her. The others had gone home before them down the road, clinking the buckets.

    
“Sir Pericles was lovely,” said Velvet for the twentieth time. Mi was tired of grunting assent. The reddest sun that ever sank after a wet day went down behind them and sent streams of light through rushes and branches. Mi shaded his eyes to look for Jacob, that thorn in his side.

    
“Was The Lamb really only fourteen-two?” asked Velvet casually.

    
“Some say fourteen-two. Some say fifteen.”

    
“Smallest horse ever won the National, wasn't he?”

    
“Won it twice.”

    
“You ever bin round there?”

    
“The course? Know every stick. Been on it hundreds a times.”

    
“What's the highest jump?”

    
Mi gazed into the field. He stuck his chin towards the piebald. “He jumped as high as any to-day”

    
“I thought he did” said Velvet, low and happy.

    
There was a long silence. The fields rolled uphill, The hedge at the top of the field was indigo. Sir Pericles was cropping, like a tawny shadow against it. The piebald, disturbed and excited, cantered the length of the hedge, neighing. Sir Pericles looked up, kicked gaily at the empty air, and cantered too. Mrs. James rolled an eye and laid her ears back.

    
Evenings, after triumphs, are full of slack and fluid ecstasy. The air swims with motes, visions dip into reach like mild birds willing to be caught. Things are heavenly difficult, but nothing is impossible. Here stood gazing into the field in the sunset the Inspirer, the Inspired and, within the field, the Medium.

    
Under his boil of red hair Mi's thoughts were chattering “Why not?”

    
And beside him Velvet looked, throbbing with belief, at her horse.

    
“Pity
you
don't ride,” said Velvet at last.

    
“The rider's all right,” said Mi mystically.

    
“What rider?”

    
“You.”

    
A pause.

    
“There's jockeys from Belgium,” said Mi, following the insane thread of thought, “no one's ever seen before. Who's to know?”

    
“You think he could do it?”

    
“The two of you could do it.”

    
“Mi . . . oh, Mi . . .”

    
Pause.

    
“Who'd you write to? Fer entries.”

    
“Weatherby's.”

    
“Where are they?”

    
“Telephone book. London somewhere.”

    
“Weatherby's.”

    
There are evenings, full of oxygen and soft air, evenings after rain (and triumph) when mist curls out of the mind, when reason is asleep, stretched out on a low beach at the bottom of the heart, when something sings like a cock at dawn, a long-drawn, wild note.

    
Velvet and Mi dreamed a boldness bordering on madness.

    
The race was being run in stage light, under the lamps of the mind. The incandescent grass streamed before Velvet's eyes. There was an unearthly light around the horses, their rumps shone. The white of the painted rails was blue-white like ice. The grass snaked in green water under the horses' feet. There was a thunder rolling in the piebald like a drum. His heart, beating for the great day of his life.

    
“Weatherby's,” said Velvet again. The word was a gateway to a great park. You could touch it, crisp, crested, full of carving . . .
Weatherby's
. Green grass, white rails, silk jackets. Through the arch of Weatherby's.

    
“Who's to know I'm a girl?” said Velvet, very, very far along the road.

    
Mi was not far behind her.

    
“Just wants thinking out,” he said. His belly felt hollow with the night air. “Supper, Velvet.” Slowly they left the gate and walked towards the village.

    
“Once I caught a dove,” said Donald, sitting up to supper on the gymkhana night.

    
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Brown absently.

    
“I did,” said Donald. “It was in . . . July. When you was in France.”

    
“Never bin to France but once,” said Mrs. Brown. And suddenly the soles of her feet tingled with the sting of Calais cobbles, slipping, slipping under her tired weight. Memories surged up. In the air to-night, this gymkhana night, when little Velvet had touched the tail of glory, there was something abroad.

    
“It was on the roof,” said Donald.

    
(Coming up out of the water in the early dawn after a gale . . .)

    
“I put a ladder up. A man gave it to me. I caught it in my hand.”

    
Silence . . .

    
“I EAT it,” said Donald quietly, and looked round.

    
“Poor dove,” said Velvet kindly, as nobody said anything.

    
“It said I could eat it,” said Donald.

    
(The water had been kinder than the beach. She had been exposed in front of thousands, dripping, huge, shapeless, tired. She had been held up by her soaking legs and chaired to the hotel. The battle with the water
had been pure and dark, but in the morning she began to wonder why she had done it. Dan had been pleased. It was for Dan that she had done it. He had made a warfare between the water and her strength and courage. She had never thought of the crowds on the beach, the cameras, and newspapers. She had a sense of honour and chastity as sharp as a needle, and she had been outraged. Great burning virgin as close as an oyster and dark as the water at night. Stupid, fierce, honourable, strong and courageous. She and Dan could have opened a new world together, he directing, she enduring. She could have been a great mare whom a jockey rode to victory. Dimly behind the hooded eyes of the innocent and savage mother those aspirations washed.)

    
“It was that dove that made me sick . . .” said Donald.

    
“Shut up with that dove,” said Mr. Brown, reading his paper.

A
FTER
three days of gale the sea's surface lay in an oily, moulded condition, yellow as clay, folds thick as treacle and casting shadows. Gulls tipped in the dun valleys and rose on the crests. No water broke. The clouds tumbled and heaved, subsiding, and shadows like the shadows of creatures streaked the sea.

    
After imprisonment of wind and rain the washing flew in banners down the gardens. Velvet mouched about the village, basking, her clothes and face dappled with sun. Little boys carried tyres to the yellow sea and floated in them. The village stank of seaweed.

    
By the head of the shore stood a singing mendicant, mouth yapping aimlessly, a thread of aged sound coming from him.

    
Edwina walked lightly down the street with Teddy. Teddy carried his beach gramophone and Edwina's bathing dress. They waved to Velvet leaning on the cobbled wall and went down the gap to the beach.
They did not want her and she did not want them, there was nothing sad about that.

    
There are pleasures earlier than love. A may tree, a cat's back will evoke them. Earlier than love, nearer heaven. As Velvet leant on the wall and heard the cries of Teddy's gramophone she would not have changed her bliss for theirs.