The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(179)

She ran up the steps, and turned the key.





Chapter Twenty-one




WILFRID’S mood when he left his publisher at ‘The Jessamine’ was angry and confused. Without penetrating to the depths of Compson Grice’s mental anatomy, he felt that he had been manipulated; and the whole of that restless afternoon he wandered, swung between relief at having burnt his boats and resentment at the irrevocable. Thus preoccupied, he did not really feel the shock his note would be to Dinny, and only when, returning to his rooms, he received her answer did his heart go out to her, and with it himself to where she had fortuitously found him. In the few minutes while they paraded Mount Street, silent and half-embraced, she had managed to pass into him her feeling that it was not one but two against the world. Why keep away and make her more unhappy than he need? And he sent her a note by Stack next morning asking her to go ‘joy-riding’. He had forgotten the Derby, and their car was involved almost at once in a stream of vehicles.

‘I’ve never seen the Derby,’ said Dinny. ‘Could we go?’

There was the more reason why they should go because there seemed to be no reasonable chance of not going.

Dinny was astonished at the general sobriety. No drinking and no streamers, no donkey-carts, false noses, badinage. Not a four-in-hand visible, not a coster nor a Kate; nothing but a wedged and moving stream of motor ‘buses and cars mostly shut.

When, at last, they had ‘parked’ on the Downs, eaten their sandwiches and moved into the crowd, they turned instinctively towards the chance of seeing a horse.

Frith’s ‘Derby Day’ seemed no longer true, if it ever was. In that picture people seemed to have lives and to be living them; in this crowd everybody seemed trying to get somewhere else.

In the paddock, which at first sight still seemed all people and no horses, Wilfrid said suddenly:

‘This is foolish, Dinny; we’re certain to be seen.’

‘And if we are? Look, there’s a horse!’

Quite a number of horses, indeed, were being led round in a ring. Dinny moved quickly towards them.

‘They all look beautiful to me,’ she said in a hushed voice, ‘and just as good one as the other – except this one; I don’t like his back.’

Wilfrid consulted his card. ‘That’s the favourite.’

‘I still don’t. D’you see what I mean? It comes to a point too near the tail, and then droops.’

‘I agree, but horses run in all shapes.’

‘I’ll back the horse you fancy, Wilfrid.’

‘Give me time, then.’

The people to her left and right kept on saying the horses’ names as they passed. She had a place on the rail with Wilfrid standing close behind her.

‘He’s a pig of a horse,’ said a man on her left, ‘I’ll never back the brute again.’

She took a glance at the speaker. He was broad and about five feet six, with a roll of fat on his neck, a bowler hat, and a cigar in his mouth. The horse’s fate seemed to her the less dreadful.

A lady sitting on a shooting-stick to her right said:

‘They ought to clear the course for the horses going out. That lost me my money two years ago.’

Wilfrid’s hand rested on her shoulder.

‘I like that one,’ he said, ‘Blenheim. Let’s go and put our money on.’

They went to where people were standing in little queues before a row of what looked like pigeon-holes.

‘Stand here,’ he said. ‘I’ll lay my egg and come back to you.’

Dinny stood watching.

‘How d’you do, Miss Cherrell?’ A tall man in a grey top-hat, with a very long case of field-glasses slung round him, had halted before her. ‘We met at the Foch statue and your sister’s wedding – remember?’

‘Oh! yes. Mr Muskham.’ Her heart was hurrying, and she restrained herself from looking towards Wilfrid.

‘Any news of your sister?’

‘Yes, we heard from Egypt. They must have had it terribly hot in the Red Sea.’

‘Have you backed anything?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I shouldn’t touch the favourite – he won’t stay.’

‘We thought of Blenheim.’

‘Well, nice horse, and handy for the turns. But there’s one more fancied in his stable. I take it you’re a neophyte. I’ll give you two tips, Miss Cherrell. Look for one or both of two things in a horse: leverage behind, and personality – not looks, just personality.’

‘Leverage behind? Do you mean higher behind than in front?’

Jack Muskham smiled. ‘That’s about it. If you see that in a horse, especially where it has to come up a hill, back it.’