Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  “It’s “Dutchland Over Alice,’” said Lady O’fflaherty in repressively aristocratic tones, as once again Hindenburg took his tribute from the provincial and cosmopolitan little crowd in that island so remote from him.

  “Aren’t you the wonder, Emily Maud!” exclaimed Mr. Doran admiringly.

  “And where’s the wonder in Lady O’fflaherty knowing foreign languages, I’d like to know?” demanded that portentously dignified voice.

  “Ah, go on with it, Emily. Will you make me call you that when we’re married?”

  “I may, or I may not. But I’ll not have anyone else drop the name, nor demean me by addressing me by yours.”

  “Well, that’s all right,” said Mr. Doran submissively. “Good for trade.”

  But Lady O’fflaherty was not to be appeased. The jumping was three-quarters of an hour late, her shoes were tight, and Hyacinth had shown gross meanness in not securing seats in the Grand Stand, and, simultaneously, pure folly in not standing lower down the course at the corner by the stone wall, which always took its toll of the tosses,—“You run the chance of seeing a man killed there better than anywhere else on the course.”

  Hyacinth stilled her soft desires with the discovery in his catalogue that her stepson, Sir Murrough, was riding for Ireland on his own mare, Con.

  “Where did he get the money to have his own mare, and he a beggarly medical student for all he’s a baronet? It wasn’t out of you, I know.”

  “It was not,” said the stepmother sourly, “but she was a foal in the stables and he led her out of them the very night after his da died, and carried her off as if she had been a bagged fox. And it’s little credit to you, Hyacinth Doran, to snigger at a heartless thief of a son like that, the living spit of his father, for didn’t I go and show Sir Standish the beautiful widow’s weeds I’d prepared for him when I knew he was dying, and walked all round his bed in my lovely black crêpe veils that he might see the respect I would pay him, and never a word he said to me, good nor bad, and never left me a fluke to pay for them.”

  “They’re off!” came the shouts all round them. Two riders, one in the French and one in the Italian uniform, came bobbing along side by side over the series of jumps. The crescendo of comment from the spectators broke into amused exclamation at the first toss. The Italian’s round was perfect, but the Frenchman’s mare, nervous after a fall at the water jump, refused the huge square bank, the worst on the course. Again and again he put the mare at it, and she merely bumped against it and cantered away again, until at last she succeeded only in straddling across it, to the laughter of the crowd.

  “Ah now—leaves her legs behind.”

  “Look at the way she’s laid them across the bank.”

  The round was hopeless after that, for the rider had lost his temper, and the mare, soured by his jerks and blows, refused jump after jump—and a pity she hadn’t altogether refused the big bank too, thought the subsequent riders who slid on the mud made by her squatting on it. It was practically a swamp by the time it was Sweden’s turn, with Ireland.

  The patriotic cheer that greeted O’fflaherty nearly made the horses bolt, and they swerved away from the course, but he brought Con back in no time and she took the first part of the round with effortless ease, rising from the ground and changing her feet on the smaller bank with the neat precision of a ballet-dancer. But she looked askance at the big one, and shied away. He bent and stroked her neck, let her canter off as if for a stroll in another direction, worked her up to a gallop, swung her round, gave her her head and got her with all four feet on the top. But there her hind legs slipped on that horribly muddy slide, and back she rolled down the five feet of steep bank.

  “Begob, her back’s broke!”

  “It’s not! It’s his!”

  “She’s on top of him!”

  “She’ll have him squeezed!”

  Up in the stand, Kay’s face had gone white and stiff between her flushed aunts’. “So it’s done,” she said, not knowing she spoke, “it’s done now, it’s done.”

  They were too excited to hear her.

  “Oh, the good lad—he’s clear,” cried Aunt Eily, and Aunt Grace shrilled above her, “She’s up, she’s away—no, she is not, he has a hold of her.”

  Yes, there he was, up, and holding the bridle, steadying her, soothing her, all in one swift movement of those strange hands that had steadied Kay. It was not done, it was all to do again; there he was in the saddle, putting her once again at that monstrous slippery mountain, and it was all she could do not to shout aloud, “Don’t do it, you fool, don’t do it!” Why did one ever get on a horse? Why? Why, for the rapture of it! Look at them clearing an earthwork like that as though it were a pebble, and they two a single bird soaring up from the ground!

  “Are you aware, Kay,” asked a severe voice beside her, “that your fingers have all but met through my knee?”

  “She’s taking very well to her first Horse Show,” said the kindlier voice on the other side.

  At last the winning numbers went up.

  “But why hasn’t he got the prize? He’s cleared the whole lot, even that double in-and-out gate at the end, and there’s scarcely one of them that didn’t knock off the top bar. Are they afraid of offending Mussolini? Why should Italy get it?”

  “Nonsense, child, it was that tumble at the big bank spoilt O’fflaherty’s chance. But he gave a very pretty bit of riding for all that. Did you notice, Eily, how he sat back in his saddle at the jumps, the very way his father used to when he ran the Blazers?”

  “Poor old Stancy, didn’t he marry his cook or something?”

  “He did, and died of it. Ah, here’s the hunters” competition. You’ll like this, Kay.”

  But Kay found that all excitement had gone out of the jumping. She was suddenly very tired, so tired that, quite inexplicably, she felt as though she wanted to cry. Her interest in those appalling obstacles could not be revived. She was thankful when her aunts rose, exclaiming simultaneously, “The Trotters! Tea!’

  Everybody seemed moved by the same impulse in the same direction, and the gangways were instantly choked. The sunlight, which had been coy and fugitive all day, sparkled out through the moist clouds and lit up the tiny fragile brightly painted chariots that were now careering round and round the course like tin toys, wound up to go faster and more fantastically than was possible in actual life. Higher and higher went the ponies” bent knees (Russian dancers could not do better), and were restrained, superhumanly, from breaking into a canter or gallop; round and round went those dazzling high wheels, “the only part of the trap that I can see!” exclaimed Kay.

  “Not a trap, child, a sulky. And I can tell you it’s the devil and all to stop those ponies. I tried one once, and the harder I pulled the faster he went, until the groom bawled at me as I went by to throw the reins on his neck.”

  “They’ll never do that here. They’re wound up and they’ll never stop.”

  She found she was speaking to a stranger; the aunts had passed on, and owing to their superior elbow action were now far ahead in the squash round the tea-ticket gates. Beyond those gates, in a blare of band music, hundreds of tea-tables were laid out under a thick green roof of branches, and hundreds of people were sitting at them or wandering plaintively in search of one. As she wriggled into the queue to the guichet, Kay felt her arm gripped from behind.

  “At last I’ve got you!” Murrough O’fflaherty was saying in her ear. “Come along and we’ll get tea.” He planked down two half-crowns for their tickets and swung her off with him to a small table which sprang up as if out of the ground after a brief passage of words (and something else) between him and one of the waitresses. He flung himself into his chair as energetically as if it were the saddle, and leaned across the table towards Kay.

  Something urgent, compelling, and yet reassuring in his gaze made her feel as though his hand were still on her arm. “Is this how he manages his mare Con?” she thought, amused but combative, and looked away
from him on to the sun-dappled scene of eagerly talking faces under the green leaves.

  The place wore an almost bewildered air of unaccustomed gaiety, as though transplanted to a foreign beer-garden. Waitresses who spoke in the thick Dublin brogue swung in and out among the white tables, with a Viennese lilt in time to the waltz tunes the band was playing.

  It was no good, her eyes had to come back to his face; besides, she must sympathize with him about the prize he had so nearly won. But he interrupted her almost before she began.

  “Oh, is it the prize? What does a beggarly £15 matter? I’m out after bigger money.”

  “Not the honour and glory?”

  “God, no! Do you think I’m here for sport? It’s business I’m on. Listen now. There’s an Englishman over there who’s after my mare—he was looking at her for a good twenty minutes in Paddock 5 this morning, called over Leary three or four times to look her over, and the last time he asked if he couldn’t throw a leg over her. He’s bought hunters here before, and Con’s worth a thousand if she’s worth fivepence—ah, what am I saying now, for she’d have brought eighteen hundred at least in the good old days; still, I might have to let her go at a thousand in these hard times, and then I’ve no doubt I could borrow the rest.”

  “You’d sell that little beauty?”

  “I’m not a gentleman rider. I’m a vet.”

  “I thought you were a bart. Bart’s aren’t vets.”

  “Aren’t they now? Then I’ll show them! I’ve got to buy my practice, it’s just fallen vacant and costs eleven hundred. If I get about a thousand from Con I’ll manage the rest somehow. Perhaps I might contrive to get the old gentleman in the pink waistcoat out of the dining-room and sell that.”

  “To buy a vet’s practice? Oh, why not burn down the house itself for the insurance money? It’s all yours, and you don’t care for it a bit.”

  She was shaking with irrational, almost hysterical anger.

  That house, lovely and undisturbed whoever ruled it, was again dominating her mind, but what had it to do with her, and what had this young man either? It added to her wrath that in spite of his rush of urgent talk he had managed to clear two whole platefuls of the brown plum bread and butter they called barmbrack.

  “Haven’t you had any lunch?” she asked rudely.

  “Would I have had lunch before the jumping? You are very cross. Waitress, some more barmbrack, please. You haven’t understood about this. I do care about the house. If I get that practice it would be there, at Baranemona; I could live there, turn out my stepmother, have horses to grass in my fields, and I’ll be a crack vet—you ask them here about my surgery! There are only a few crack vets in Ireland and they’re worth their weight in gold, people send for them across five counties and pay them three guineas for a consultation before they’ve done anything at all, just like London doctors, and don’t get rid of them under ten or twelve. That’s what I’m going to be, and I’m going to get the place back to what it was, you’ll see. You will, won’t you? You’ll come there with me, won’t you?”

  She held out the fresh plate of barmbrack for barrier. “Do look out. The next table are listening to you. Why on earth are you telling me all this now in this crowd when we had the whole night alone together last week?”

  “Do look out. The next table oughtn’t to listen to that?’

  He was laughing, helping himself from the plate she was holding to him; he repeated, “Do look out. I shall kiss you over this plate if you don’t put it down.”

  So she put it down, rather dazed, and very indignant with herself. Several young men had proposed to her, and one or two of them as impudently as this, but here she was as startled and solemn and at a loss as if she were quite unpractised.

  “You didn’t say a word to me that night,” she repeated, and kicked herself, but she could not help it.

  “I don’t talk on a bike going sixty an hour at night. Besides, I hadn’t thought of it then; it wasn’t till after I’d left you, and then I knew I wanted you at Baranemona with me. And you will, won’t you, Kay—what the devil is your other name? You never told me, you just said “Kay for Killarae” and shut the door in my face. Haven’t you thought about me since too, not a bit?”

  “Tell me, didn’t you want to kiss me on the doorstep—or was my nose too red?”

  “I never saw your nose.”

  “I knew you were a vet or something. Your hands made me go quiet at once when I was frightened.”

  He caught at hers under the table. “Then, if I sell Con——?” he began, then exclaimed, “For the love of heaven, look at those two old holy terrors, the Miss McCauslands! They’re brought out and dusted every Horse Show, and plenty like them, but they’re not like the others, they’re the grand old girls—not a penny to them, but their friends see to it that they’re mounted all through the hunting, for they’d not miss the hounds if they had to ride to them on a Kerry cow, and one of them did once for a bet. Ah, do come up from under the table—what is it you’re looking for? You mustn’t miss a sight of the Miss McCauslands.”

  “No,” said Kay, emerging from under the table, “I mustn’t miss them. Good-bye! See you later.”

  “327,” he called after her. “Don’t forget that. It’s Con’s number—327.”

  She threaded her way through the tables and managed to join her grand-aunts before they had discovered her.

  “Where in the world have you been?” they asked, and told her:

  “We have quite finished our tea.”

  “We have been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Your father is here.”

  Kay gasped: “Have you seen him?”

  “Not yet. But he is at the Show, Lord Towerscourt tells me, and might pick up a hunter if he sees one he likes. Now, I know an animal that would suit him nicely.”

  “Aunt Grace, please, Aunt Eily, if you see him, don’t tell him I’m here.”

  “Heavens, child, what a mystery! Tell us all about it.”

  “Ah, my dear aunts, I’m only English on my father’s side. Would you have me—what is the nasty word?—unbosom myself?”

  “327,” repeated Kay to herself, walking quickly down the long aisle of horses. Their scrubbed spruce leathery smell, their clanking thudding shrilling sounds filled the air. She had just time to visit Con in her stall before her turn came, for the bloodstock sales had began, but Con was some way down the list.

  There in stall No. 327 was Con’s owner, “going all over her with a powder puff and a manicure set,” so she told him. But he was not laughing this morning, and, for one who had proposed so vividly and publicly at tea-time yesterday, he paid little attention to her.

  A grim young man, he stood and stared with an eye of the coldest critical calculation at the possession that was so soon, he hoped, to cease to be his. The wild shy gaze of the mare answered his, she whinnied and bent her neck as if to invite his caress. Ah, but she was making it hard for him, thought Kay. He was looking at herself now, and said so low that she was not at first sure of his meaning, “Make it worth while to me to lose her.”

  For the life of him he could not say more then, she saw that, and she herself found she could not speak; she went out of the stall so quickly that she bumped into a very fat man’s tight check waistcoat, and stared up, apologizing, into fold after fold of purple-shaved chin. By the time her eye reached the topmost fold, Aunt Grace’s coy words were echoing in her head, “Poor Hyacinth, he’s easy prey for the women.”

  On an impulse that she had not yet translated into any plan of action, she exclaimed, “Ah, but aren’t you the great horse-dealer, Mr. Hyacinth Doran? I wonder if you could help me—” She was leading him further away from the stall, and went on breathlessly, though still low: “There’s a friend of mine wants to sell a horse—it’s No. 327—have you seen it?”

  “I have.”

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a nice mare.”

  She had never seen anyone look a le
ss easy prey.

  “People get dealers to bid for them, don’t they? It’s all a matter of business. Would you bid for me?”

  “Oh, is it yourself wants to buy the mare?”

  She looked at him and considered her chances in deceit. Nil, against that bare-lidded gimlet eye. Her plot must be laid with all her cards on the table.

  “No, I don’t want to buy. There’s someone else wants to, and I want to run him up.”

  “And find yourself left with the horse. Could you pay?”

  “No, but my father would have to. He’s responsible for any debts of mine until I’m of age.”

  “Are you not twenty-one now?” asked the gallant Hyacinth in so reflective a tone that she felt as though he were pushing up her lip to look at her teeth.

  “I’m twenty-two, but I don’t come of age till I’m twenty-three. You can find out all about it from the solicitors, they’re a Dublin firm appointed by my mother’s will. Come and “phone them now, there’s just time before No. 327 comes on. Ah, come on now, it’s desperate, here’s twopence for you.”

  He glanced over her points, the fine shape of her red head under its plain woollen cap, the clean cut of her hands and also of her shoes, the frank friendliness of her eye combined with an urgency that had in it more than a hint of command. Here was a straight-forward young woman, determined and accustomed to get her own way. That father of hers would pay up all right if she were landed with it—that is, if he could.

  “You’ve not said your father’s name.”

  “Mr. Gunne-Smith. He’s rich. Do you know of him? He’s hardly ever over.”

  “I’ve never seen him,” said Mr. Doran, but in spite of his tightly buttoned look she thought he had recognized the name.

  “Begob, I’ll chance it,” he exclaimed, and a mighty grin suddenly opened that great bag of a face.