“Has he got any tricks?” she asked.
“Not that I know of, my Lady: not tricks exactly. But he’s one of these temperamental creatures, as they say. Though I say, every horse is temperamental, when you come down to it. But this one, it is as if he was a trifle raw somewhere. Touch this raw spot, and there’s no answering for him.”
“Where is he raw?” asked Lou, somewhat mystified. She thought he might really have some physical sore.
“Why, that’s hard to say, my Lady. If he was a human being, you’d say something had gone wrong in his life. But with a horse it’s not that, exactly. A high-bred animal like St. Mawr needs understanding, and I don’t know as anybody has quite got the hang of him. I confess I haven’t myself. But I do realise that he is a special animal and needs a special sort of touch, and I’m willing he should have it, did I but know exactly what it is.”
She looked at the glowing bay horse that stood there with his ears back, his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning-conductor. He was a stallion. When she realised this, she became more afraid of him.
“Why does Mr. Griffith Edwards want to sell him?” she asked.
“Well — my Lady — they raised him for stud purposes — but he didn’t answer. There are horses like that: don’t seem to fancy the mares for some reason. Well, anyway, they couldn’t keep him for the stud. And as you see, he’s a powerful, beautiful hackney, clean as a whistle, and eaten up with his own power. But there’s no putting him between the shafts. He won’t stand it. He’s a fine saddle-horse, beautiful action, and lovely to ride. But he’s got to be handled, and there you are.”
Lou felt there was something behind the man’s reticence.
“Has he ever made a break?” she asked, apprehensive.
“Made a break?” replied the man. “Well, if I must admit it, he’s had two accidents. Mr. Griffith Edwards’s son rode him a bit wild, away there in the Forest of Dean, and the young fellow had his skull smashed in against a low oak bough. Last autumn, that was. And some time back, he crushed a groom against the side of the stall — injured him fatally. But they were both accidents, my Lady. Things will happen.”
The man spoke in a melancholy, fatalistic way. The horse, with his ears laid back, seemed to be listening tensely, his face averted. He looked like something finely bred and passionate that has been judged and condemned.
“May I say how do you do?” she said to the horse, drawing a little nearer in her white, summery dress and lifting her hand that glittered with emeralds and diamonds.
He drifted away from her, as if some wind blew him. Then he ducked his head and looked sideway at her from his black, full eye.
“I think I’m all right,” she said, edging nearer, while he watched her.
She laid her hand on his side and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her, through the lacquer of red-gold gloss. So slippery with vivid, hot life!
She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse’s sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young woman’s soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in. She wanted to buy St. Mawr.
“I think,” she said to Saintsbury, “if I can, I will buy him.” The man looked at her long and shrewdly.
“Well, my Lady,” he said at last, “there shall be nothing kept from you. But what would your Ladyship do with him, if I may make so bold?”
“I don’t know,” she replied vaguely. “I might take him to America.”
The man paused once more, then said:
“They say it’s been the making of some horses, to take them over the water, to Australia or such places. It might repay you — you never know.”
She wanted to buy St. Mawr. She wanted him to belong to her. For some reason the sight of him, his power, his alive, alert intensity, his unyieldingness, made her want to cry.
She never did cry: except sometimes with vexation, or to get her own way. As far as weeping went, her heart felt as dry as a Christmas walnut. What was the good of tears, anyhow? You had to keep on holding on in this life, never give way, and never give in. Tears only left one weakened and ragged.
But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her Awn world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question, while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power.
What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him.
She hid herself away from Rico. She could not bear the triviality and superficiality of her human relationships. Looming like some god out of the darkness was the head of that horse, with the wide, terrible, questioning eyes. And she felt that it forbade her to be her ordinary, commonplace self. It forbade her to be just Rico’s wife, young Lady Carrington, and all that.
It haunted her, the horse. It had looked at her as she had never been looked at before: terrible, gleaming, questioning eyes arching out of darkness, and backed by all the fire of that great ruddy body. What did it mean, and what ban did it put upon her? She felt it put a ban on her heart: wielded some uncanny authority over her, that she dared not, could not understand.
No matter where she was, what she was doing, at the back of her consciousness loomed a great, over-aweing figure out of a dark background: St. Mawr, looking at her without really seeing her, yet gleaming a question at her, from his wide, terrible eyes, and gleaming a sort of menace, doom. Master of doom, he seemed to be!
“You are thinking about something, Lou dear!” Rico said to her that evening.
He was so quick and sensitive to detect her moods — so exciting in this respect. And his big, slightly prominent blue eyes, with the whites a little bloodshot, glanced at her quickly, with searching and anxiety, and a touch of fear, as if his conscience were always uneasy. He, too, was rather like a horse — but forever quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust, which he covered with anxious love.
At the middle of his eyes was a central powerlessness that left him anxious. It used to touch her to pity, that central look of powerlessness in him. But now, since she had seen the full, dark, passionate blaze of power and of different life in the eyes of the thwarted horse, the anxious powerlessness of the man drove her mad. Rico was so handsome, and he was so self-controlled, he had a gallant sort of kindness and a real worldly shrewdness. One had to admire him: at least she had to.
But after all, and after all, it was a bluff, an attitude. He kept it all working in himself deliberately. It was an attitude.
She read psychologists who said that everything was an attitude. Even the best of everything. But now she realised that, with men and women, everything is an attitude only when something else is lacking. Something is lacking and they are thrown back on their own devices. That black fiery flow in the eyes of the horse was not ‘attitude’. It was something much more terrifying, and real, the only thing that was real. Gushing from the darkness in menace and question, and blazing out in the splendid body of the horse.
“Was I thinking about something?” she replied in her slow, amused, casual fashion. As if everything was so casual and easy to her. And so it was, from the hard, polished side of herself. But that wasn’t the whole story.
“I think you were, Loulina. May we offer the penny?”
“Don’t trouble,” she said. “I was thinking, if I was thin
king of anything, about a bay horse called St. Mawr.” — Her secret almost crept into her eyes.
“The name is awfully attractive,” he said with a laugh. “Not so attractive as the creature himself. I’m going to buy him.”
“Not really!” he said. “But why?”
“He is so attractive. I’m going to buy him for you.”
“For me? Darling? How you do take me for granted. He may not be in the least attractive to me. As you know, I have hardly any feeling for horses at all. — Besides, how much does he cost?”
“That I don’t know, Rico dear. But I’m sure you’ll love him, for my sake.” — She felt, now, she was merely playing for her own ends.
“Lou dearest, don’t spend a fortune on a horse for me, which I don’t want. Honestly, I prefer a car.”
“Won’t you ride with me in the Park, Rico?”
“Honestly, dear Lou, I don’t want to.”
“Why not, dear boy? You look so beautiful. I wish you would. — And, anyhow, come with me to look at St. Mawr.”
Rico was divided. He had a certain uneasy feeling about horses. At the same time, he would like to cut a handsome figure in the Park.
They went across to the mews. A little Welsh groom was watering the brilliant horse.
“Yes, dear, he certainly is beautiful: such a marvellous colour! Almost orange! But rather large, I should say, to ride in the Park.”
“No, for you he’s perfect. You are so tall.”
“He’d be marvellous in a Composition. That colour!” And all Rico could do was to gaze with the artist’s eye at the horse, with a glance at the groom.
“Don’t you think the man is rather fascinating too?” he said, nursing his chin artistically and penetratingly. The groom, Lewis, was a little, quick, rather bow-legged, loosely-built fellow of indeterminate age, with a mop of black hair and a little black beard. He was grooming the brilliant St. Mawr out in the open. The horse was really glorious: like a marigold, with a pure golden sheen, a shimmer of green-gold lacquer upon a burning red-orange. There on the shoulder you saw the yellow lacquer glisten. Lewis, a little scrub of a fellow, worked absorbedly, unheedingly at the horse, with an absorption that was almost ritualistic. He seemed the attendant shadow of the ruddy animal.
“He goes with the horse,” said Lou. “If we buy St. Mawr we get the man thrown in.”
“They’d be so amusing to paint; such an extraordinary contrast! But darling, I hope you won’t insist on buying the horse. It’s so frightfully expensive.”
“Mother will help me. — You’d look so well on him, Rico.”
“If ever I dared take the liberty of getting on his back — — !”
“Why not?” She went quickly across the cobbled yard. “Good morning, Lewis. How is St. Mawr?”
Lewis straightened himself and looked at her from under the falling mop of his black hair.
“All right,” he said.
He peered straight at her from under his overhanging black hair. He had pale grey eyes, that looked phosphorescent, and suggested the eyes of a wild cat peering intent from under the darkness of some bush where it lies unseen. Lou, with her brown, unmatched, oddly perplexed eyes, felt herself found out. — ”He’s a common little fellow,” she thought to herself. “But he knows a woman and a horse at sight.” — Aloud she said, in her Southern drawl:
“How do you think he’d be with Sir Henry?”
Lewis turned his remote, coldly watchful eyes on the young baronet. Rico was tall and handsome and balanced on his hips. His face was long and well-defined, and with the hair taken straight back from the brow. It seemed as well-made as his clothing, and as perpetually presentable. You could not imagine his face dirty, or scrubby and unshaven, or bearded, or even moustached. It was perfectly prepared for social purposes. If his head had been cut off, like John the Baptist’s, it would have been a thing complete in itself, would not have missed the body in the least. The body was perfectly tailored. The head was one of the famous ‘talking heads’ of modern youth, with eyebrows a trifle Mephistophelian, large blue eyes a trifle hold, and curved mouth thrilling to death to kiss.
Lewis, the groom, staring from between his bush of hair and his beard, watched like an animal from the underbrush. And Rico was still sufficiently a colonial to be uneasily aware of the underbrush, uneasy under the watchfulness of the pale grey eyes, and uneasy in that man-to-man exposure which is characteristic of the democratic colonies and of America. He knew he must ultimately be judged on his merits as a man, alone without a background: an ungarnished colonial.
This lack of background, this defenceless man-to-man business which left him at the mercy of every servant, was bad for his nerves. For he was also an artist. He bore up against it in a kind of desperation, and was easily moved to rancorous resentment. At the same time he was free of the Englishman’s water-tight suffisance. He really was aware that he would have to hold his own all alone, thrown alone on his own defences in the universe. The extreme democracy of the Colonies had taught him this.
And this, the little aboriginal Lewis recognised in him. He recognised also Rico’s curious hollow misgiving, fear of some deficiency in himself, beneath all his handsome, young-hero appearance.
“He’d be all right with anybody as would meet him halfway,” said Lewis, in the quick Welsh manner of speech, impersonal.
“You hear, Rico!” said Lou in her sing-song, turning to her husband.
“Perfectly, darling!”
“Would you be willing to meet St. Mawr half-way, hm?”
“All the way, darling! Mahomet would go all the way to that mountain. Who would dare do otherwise?”
He spoke with a laughing, yet piqued sarcasm.
“Why, I think St. Mawr would understand perfectly,” she said in the soft voice of a woman haunted by love. And she went and laid her hand on the slippery, life-smooth shoulder of the horse. He, with his strange equine head lowered, its exquisite fine lines reaching a little snake-like forward, and his ears a little back, was watching her sideways from the corner of his eye. He was in a state of absolute mistrust, like a cat crouching to spring.
“St. Mawr!” she said. “St. Mawr! What is the matter? Surely you and I are all right!”
And she spoke softly, dreamily stroked the animal’s neck. She could feel a response gradually coming from him. But he would not lift up his head. And when Rico suddenly moved nearer, he sprang with a sudden jerk backwards, as if lightning exploded in his four hoofs.
The groom spoke a few low words in Welsh. Lou, frightened, stood with lifted hands arrested. She had been going to stroke him.
“Why did he do that?” she said.
“They gave him a beating once or twice,” said the groom in a neutral voice, “and he doesn’t forget.”
She could hear a neutral sort of judgment in Lewis’s voice. And she thought of the ‘raw spot’.
Not any raw spot at all. A battle between two worlds. She realised that St. Mawr drew his hot breaths in another world from Rico’s, from our world. Perhaps the old Greek horses had lived in St. Mawr’s world. And the old Greek heroes, even Hippolytus, had known it.
With their strangely naked equine heads, and something of a snake in their way of looking round, and lifting their sensitive, dangerous muzzles, they moved in a prehistoric twilight where all things loomed phantasmagoric, all on one plane, sudden presences suddenly jutting out of the matrix. It was another world, an older, heavily potent world. And in this world the horse was swift and fierce and supreme, undominated and unsurpassed. — ”Meet him half-way,” Lewis said. But half-way across from our human world to that terrific equine twilight was not a small step. It was a step, she knew, that Rico could never take. She knew it. But she was prepared to sacrifice Rico.
St. Mawr was bought, and Lewis was hired along with him. At first, Lewis rode him behind Lou, in the Row, to get him going. He behaved perfectly.
Phoenix, the half Indian, was very jealous when he saw the black-bearded Welsh groom o
n St. Mawr.
“What horse you got there?” he asked, looking at the other man with the curious unseeing stare in his hard, Navajo eyes, in which the Indian glint moved like a spark upon a dark chaos. In Phoenix’s high-boned face there was all the race misery of the dispossessed Indian, with an added blankness left by shell-shock. But at the same time, there was that unyielding, save to death, which is characteristic of his tribe; his mother’s tribe. Difficult to say what subtle thread bound him to the Navajo, and made his destiny a Red Man’s destiny still.
They were a curious pair of grooms, following the correct, and yet extraordinary, pair of American mistresses. Mrs. Witt and Phoenix both rode with long stirrups and straight leg, sitting close to the saddle, without posting. Phoenix looked as if he and the horse were all one piece, he never seemed to rise in the saddle at all, neither trotting nor galloping, but sat like a man riding bareback. And all the time he stared around at the riders in the Row, at the people grouped outside the rail, chatting, at the children walking with their nurses, as if he were looking at a mirage, in whose actuality he never believed for a moment. London was all a sort of dark mirage to him. His wide, nervous-looking brown eyes with a smallish brown pupil, that showed the white all round, seemed to be focused on the far distance, as if he could not see things too near. He was watching the pale deserts of Arizona shimmer with moving light, the long mirage of a shallow lake ripple, the great pallid concave of earth and sky expanding with interchanged light. And a horse-shape loom large and portentous in the mirage, like some prehistoric beast.
That was real to him: the phantasm of Arizona. But this London was something his eye passed over as a false mirage. He looked too smart in his well-tailored groom’s clothes, so smart, he might have been one of the satirised new rich. Perhaps it was a sort of half-breed physical assertion that came through his clothing, the savage’s physical assertion of himself. Anyhow, he looked ‘common’, rather horsey and loud.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 539
