Читать книгу Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man - Siegfried Sassoon - Страница 19

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Next morning I was a rather inattentive pupil, but Mr. Star rightly attributed this to the previous night’s gaities and was lenient with me, though my eyes often wandered through the window when they ought to have been occupied with sums, and I made a bad mess of my dictation. Mr. Star was still great on dictation, though I ought to have been beyond such elementary exercises at the age of twelve. ‘Parsing’ was another favourite performance of his.

The word parse always struck me as sounding slightly ridiculous: even now it makes me smile when I look at it; but it conjures up for me a very clear picture of that quiet schoolroom: myself in a brown woollen jersey with my elbows on the table, and my tutor in his shabby tail-coat, chalking up on the blackboard for my exclusive benefit the first proposition of Euclid. Above the bookcase (which contained an odd assortment of primers, poetry, and volumes of adventure) hung a map of the world—a shiny one, which rolled up. But the map of the world was too large for me that morning, and I was longing to look at the local one and find out how far it was to Heron’s Gate (and where it was).

As soon as Mr. Star had gone home to his little house in the village I slyly abstracted the ordnance map from the shelf where my aunt kept it (she was rather fond of consulting the map), and carried it back to the schoolroom with a sensation of gloating uncertainty. Heron’s Gate was hard to find, but I arrived at it in the end, marked in very small print with Windmill right up against it and a big green patch called Park Wood quite near. I wondered what it would look like, and at once visualized a large, dim bird sitting on a white gate.... I had never seen a heron, but it sounded nice.... But when I began measuring the distance with a bit of string both bird and gate were obliterated by the melancholy number of miles which meandered across the map. The string told its tale too plainly. Heron’s Gate was a good twelve miles to go....

The situation now seemed desperate, but Dixon might be able to do something about it. Without saying a word to Aunt Evelyn I waited until we were well away on our afternoon ride, and then asked, quite casually, “Have you ever been to Heron’s Gate, Tom?” (I had been telling him about the dance, but had not mentioned Denis Milden.) Dixon gravely admitted that he knew Heron’s Gate quite well. There was a short silence, during which he pulled his horse back into a walk. “Is it far from us?” I remarked innocently. He pondered for a moment. “Let’s see—it’s some way the other side of Hugget’s Hill.... About twelve miles from us, I should think.” I fingered Sheila’s mane and tried another tack. “How far were we from home when we finished up the other night?”

“About twelve miles.”

Unable to restrain myself any longer, I blurted out my eagerness to go to the meet next Tuesday. I never suspected that Dixon had known this all the time, though I might have guessed that he had looked up the list of meets in the local paper. But he was evidently pleased that my sporting instinct was developing so rapidly, and he refrained from asking why I specially wanted to go to Heron’s Gate. It was enough for him that I wanted to go out at all. We duped Aunt Evelyn by a system of mutual falsification of distances (I couldn’t find the map anywhere when she wanted to look it up), and at half-past eight on the Tuesday morning, in glittering sunshine, with a melting hoar-frost on the hedgerows, we left home for Heron’s Gate.