National Velvet (34 page)

    
A big Daimler pushed its way up the street at three-thirty. Out of it got a little man with a big head and a
garden of rich fur on his coat collar. He had a talk with Mr. Brown, whom by luck he saw going in at the street door. He sat in the living-room for half-an-hour and as he rose to go he was heard to say that he would send his Daimler for both of them.

    
“Both who?” said Mrs. Brown, coming in when he had gone.

    
“Gentleman from the pictures,” said father. “An actor. Well, an actor-manager. Come from Elstree in Essex. Come all the way to ask if Velvet could go an' pose for them.”

    
“She going?”

    
“Says he's sending fer her to-morrow.”

    
“Well,” said Mrs. Brown, coming further into the room, “had she ought?”

    
Mr. Brown looked at her uneasily. “Hear that, Velvet?” he said to Velvet, who was sticking pictures of The Piebald into an album. “What do you feel about it yourself?”

    
“Think it might be fun,” said Velvet carelessly.

    
“There y'are,” said Mr. Brown irritably. “An' I don' see any harm. He wants the horse too. He's sending down a horse-box . . .”

    
“Wants the horse?” said Velvet, looking up.

    
“Says he's made for a film, that horse.”

    
“Can't have the horse,” said Velvet swiftly, and went on pasting.

    
“What's that?”

    
“Piebald on the films!” said Velvet with a light firmness
that had never been there before. “He seems to forget.”

    
“What's he forget?”

    
“That
that's
the horse that won the National.”

    
“That's why he wants him, Velvet,” said father with unaccustomed patience.

    
“I'll
go,” said Velvet, getting up. “It won't be half bad for us all to go and see me doing things on the curtain an' the band playing and us sitting looking. But The Piebald! He doesn't know, he wouldn't know. He's out there in that field steady and safe. He believes in me. I wouldn't let him in for a thing that he couldn't understand. He's not like a human. He doesn't know how to be funny, and he shan't learn!” And the tears of her unwonted defiance streamed down her face.

    
“Well!” said Mr. Brown.

    
“An' What's more,” sobbed Velvet, “an' What's more . . .”

    
“Well?” said Mr. Brown.

    
“I've read about horses . . . horses that has won . . . an' they write about them n-nobly's though they were statues. How can you write about a horse nobly if it goes on the films!”

    
“But what'll they be writing about your horse more'n they have done?”

    
“Not in the papers,” said Velvet, now fairly howling, “not in the p-papers. That's nothing. Mother–mother–mother l-lights the fire with that! In books! Big books. Roll-of-Honour books where they put down the winners an' call them the Immortal Manifesto.”

    
“The Immortal what?” said Mr. Brown.

    
“Manifesto. 'N' how can they call him the Immortal Piebald if he goes on the . . .”

    
“More like call you the Immortal Velvet!” growled Mr. Brown, thoroughly taken aback.

    
“Me! That's nothing. I'm nothing. If you could see what he did for me. He burst himself for me. 'N' when I asked him he burst himself more. 'N' when I asked him again he–he–doubled it. He tried near to death, he did. I'd sooner have that horse happy than go to heaven!”

    
“Behave yourself, Velvet!” said Mrs. Brown sharply. “Get upstairs. Merry's in an awful mess. She's upset the canary cage, water an' sand 'n' all on your bed. Get on up and help her.”

    
As the door shut—“That child's got something that you don't value, William! That child's more mine than all the rest.”

    
“I valued you all right once, didn't I, Araminty?”

    
“You did, William. Or maybe was it the pop an' squeak roun' me?”

    
“Now, Araminty,” said Mr. Brown, rising, “don't you go an' cut queer with me over this. I'm bound to say I don't know whether I'm on my head or my heels sometimes. It's like having a gunfire of bouquets thrown on you all at once n'you hardly know where it's coming from. It's like them sweepstakes that we all read break up the home, but we won't let all this to-do break up this home, will we?”

    
“You always was a nice chap,” said Mrs. Brown.
“On'y I'm so buried under me fat I feel half ashamed to tell you so. Love don't seem dainty on a fat woman. Nothin's going to break up this home not even if you lose yer head, but it'll make it easier if you keep it. On'y leave that child to me. She's got more to come. You think the Grand National's the end of all things, but a child that can do that can do more when she's grown. On'y keep her level, keep her going quiet. We'll live this down presently an' you'll see.”

    
After this, the longest speech Mrs. Brown had made for years, she went out into the yard to look for Donald.

    
She found, as she had hardly expected, that Donald was talking to a reporter.

    
There had been a pause. The reporter had not before tackled a mind which answered when it chose, on what lines it chose, or not at all.

    
Donald's interest in him was flickering, subterranean, critical. He was as usual torn by the suspicion that there might be something better to do.

    
“But she's a nice girl, your sister?” said the reporter desperately.

    
“She wasn't a nice girl larse . . . July,” said Donald. “She didn' pull the plug after she'd sat down. Mother said she wasn't nice.”

    
“Oh, well!” said the reporter almost gaily. “That's nothing! I've got a Gertrude that does that. She gets smacked for it.”

    
“Older'n me?”

    
“Much older than you.”

    
“I like pulling the plug but I'm not allowed to.”

    
The reporter's note-book remained blank.

    
“Yes, but . . . all that's no good to me.”

    
“Velvet tried to pull it,” went on Donald. “She broke it. It wouldn't pull. Father said it was a trashy plug.”

    
“Tell me something more about her.”

    
“She doesn't wash her neck sometimes.”

    
“Tell me something different,” said the reporter. “When your sister, Velvet, was a little girl . . .”

    
“I wasn't here,” said Donald quickly.

    
“No, of course,” said the reporter. “You were . . .”

    
“I wasn't a star either,” said Donald. “I was somewhere. Doing things. Where do you smack your Gertrude?”

    
“Tell me, like a nice little chap . . .” (contempt surged over Donald and his lashes half veiled his eyes) “what sort of things does your sister play with?”

    
“My sister Velvet?”

    
“Your sister Velvet.”

    
Donald considered. The reporter waited.

    
“See where I cut my ankle?” said Donald, holding up his leg. “I arsed fer the iodine myself.”

    
“Yes,” said the reporter dully, “it looks a bad cut.”

    
Donald, like Jacob, could do a thousand things at once. He could hear, feel, see, gauge, forecast, decide, act. He was a twinkling surface, giving off and taking in. He was an incredible telephone exchange run by motes and atoms and impulsions. He had heard Velvet crying, he knew it was nearly dinner time, he knew there was a broccoli stump blocking the water gutter, he knew at last that this fellow was as empty as a bladder,
and his mind went white towards him and turned red and blue and yellow towards everything else.

    
“Velvet's bin crying,” he remarked, practically to himself.

    
“Why's that?” said the reporter keenly.

    
“I gotta go,” said Donald, seeing his mother coming, and walked away.

V
ELVET
B
ROWN
, at a tender age and of a tender sex, won the Grand National. The mind of the public was at once stormed, irradiated and convulsed with a new surprise, fresh, keen, voracious. The fact crashed in the papers like a set of bells. The Mind of the public swung like bells too, pealing, pealing. As newspaper edition after edition came out the peals were set going in waves one after the other. The Mind could only swing and swing and ask to be pushed again. And the pushers flocked to push. The bell-ringers pealed and hauled. The music of news broke and poured over the land. Portions of the Mind began almost at once to rebel. There are people who prefer Wonder to arc through the sky, fall with its own curve, and cease on its fall. But the professional bell-pealers and wonder-mongers were not going to allow much of that. Bells must be handled again as their sound dies; wonder must be propped up and carry on in a straight line through the sky; the gaping Mind which had come alive like a
young chicken must be stuffed with details and choked with news.

    
The enormous and delicate and intricate machinery which hangs on the fringe of news was set going. Men hammered tin because piebald horses must prance on the heads of tiepins, women painted little mugs and teacups in Staffordshire, Velvet galloped across nearly a mile of white cardboard, stamped out in diamond-shapes and bent to hold a pound of chocolate creams. It was for the second impossible to be more notorious.

    
For a time Velvet and the sisters wandered in Arcady. They became princesses in Eden. People gave them sweets, adored their horses, took their photographs. What was so piquant in the papers was that in a row of beauties “it was the plain one that did it.” This was somehow full of salt.

    
Only when the portraits of the paper horses, surreptitiously lent by Mr. Brown, appeared below a picture of the shell-box in a Sunday paper did Velvet say slowly, “Who gave them that?”

    
“What?”

    
“My shell-box.”

    
But this blew over, and the shell-box was safe again on the sideboard, and Velvet hardly remembered that she had felt little scratches on her youth.

    
“Coo lummy . . .” began Edwina one day.

    
“You will please . . .” said Mr. Brown, “remember that you are now in the public eye.”

    
“It's Velvet's public eye,” said Edwina rather rudely. She was getting out of hand. But except for Edwina's
rudeness, and that was always latent in the poor, up-growing, beautiful child, and except for Mrs. Brown's not unusual silence, and for little plumes of unhelpful vanity in Mr. Brown, there was no real deterioration in the Brown household.

    
Mally and Meredith adored the fuss and the sweets and the visits from newspapers, and the marvel of the cinemas, and took delight in spotting “Velvet Novelties”; that piebald horse which now definitely galloped on the head of a tie-pin at Woolworth's, and postcards with Velvet crouching in a black shirt tearing past a winning post.

    
“Let's collect them!” said Mally. And they began to make a collection.

    
When Velvet saw her face for the first time on the cinema she felt a little strange. It was an enlargement face, done thin on the canvas in black and white. It seemed like her. She could not say it wasn't.

    
“I look like that,” she thought. And took it for granted that she did.

    
The same face, transplanted on to postcards, became almost a code-sign. She could not have said what she felt but it was queer. However, she shook it off. “If you want something for your collection,” said Edwina one day, “there's a brown silk in the window at Tinkler's called 'Velvet Brown.'”