Читать книгу Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man - Siegfried Sassoon - Страница 11

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November, with its darkening afternoons and smell of burning weeds, found me gradually becoming acclimatized to ‘the new mare,’ as I importantly called her (using Dixonian phraseology). The groom was able to give me all his attention, since my aunt never rode in the winter. We now went longer distances; sometimes he would tell me that we were ‘on the edge of the Dumborough country,’ and he would pull up and point out to me, a few miles away, some looming covert where they often went to draw.

The Dumborough, as I afterwards discovered, was a scrambling sort of country to hunt in—heavily wooded and hilly. But as we turned away from its evening-lighted landscape I would listen eagerly to Dixon’s anecdotes of the sport he had seen there. He spoke often of Mr. Macdoggart, Lord Dumborough’s hard-riding agent, and how one year he had seen him win the Hunt Steeplechase by a short head from a famous ‘gentleman-rider’; and how, another year, Mr. Macdoggart had got concussion of the brain while riding in the same race.

Our afternoon expeditions usually took us in the Dumborough direction, and I suspect that Dixon always had a faint hope that we might ‘chip in with the hounds,’ though he knew too well that the foxes rarely ran our way. He also showed an increasing antipathy to the high road, and was continually taking short cuts across the country.

“It’ll do them good to have a pipe-opener,” he would say, turning in at a gate and setting his horse going up a long stretch of meadow, and my confidence in Sheila increased as I scuttled after him.

Sometimes he would pretend to be ‘riding a finish,’ and I would say, “Tom, show me how Mr. Macdoggart won the Hunt Cup on Nobleman.”

I had never seen a race in my life; nor had I ever been to a meet of the hounds. But I assiduously studied the novels of Surtees, of which my aunt had a complete set. She dipped into them herself now and again, and we often used to talk about Mr. Jorrocks.

As Christmas approached Dixon drew her attention to my rapid improvement as a rider. Finally he took the bull by the horns and intimated that it would do me no harm to go and have a look at the hounds. She seemed taken aback by this, but he assured her that he would only take me as far as the meet. When she suggested that he could drive me there in the dog-cart Dixon’s face assumed such an air of disapproval that she gave way at once, and it became only a matter of waiting for the next ‘near meet.’

“I think, ’m, you can rely on me to take proper care of Master George,” he remarked rather stiffly; the next moment he looked at me with a grin of delight followed by a solemn wink with the eye furthest away from my aunt.

A few days later I found him studying the local paper in the leather-smelling little harness-room. “They’re meeting at Finchurst Green on Saturday,” he announced with appropriate seriousness. It was an important moment in my life. Finchurst Green was not quite nine miles away.