The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (acx book reading txt) 📕

she doesn’t get her hind legs under her uphill. I shall have to give her her head on the slope if I’m to catch that train.”

There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable. He caught the train.

“Take care going home; she’ll throw you down if she can. Goodbye, darling.”

“Goodbye,” called Holly, and kissed her hand.

In the train, after quarter of an hour’s indecision between thoughts of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book, all names, pedigrees, taproots, and notes about the make and shape of horses. The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie hankering for a Nutter. On getting back to England, after the profitable sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun seldom shone, Val had said to himself: “I’ve absolutely got to have an interest in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting’s not enough, I’ll breed and I’ll train.” With just that extra pinch of shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised by fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang! And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain of blood! Half-consciously, he thought: “There’s something in this damned climate which makes one go round in a ring. All the same, I must have a strain of Mayfly blood.”

In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called “the silly haw-haw” of some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some Englishwomen⁠—Holly had none of that and Holly was his model. Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:

“Mr. Val Dartie? How’s Mrs. Val Dartie? She’s well, I hope.” And he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen’s.

“Prosper Profond⁠—I met you at lunch,” said the voice.

“How are you?” murmured Val.

“I’m very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain inimitable slowness. “A good devil,” Holly had called him. Well! He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly intelligent.

“Here’s a gentleman wants to know you⁠—cousin of yours⁠—Mr. George Forsyde.”

Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at the Iseeum Club.

“I used to go racing with your father,” George was saying: “How’s the stud? Like to buy one of my screws?”

Val grinned, to hide the sudden feeling that the bottom had fallen out of breeding. They believed in nothing over here, not even in horses. George Forsyte, Prosper Profond! The devil himself was not more disillusioned than those two.

“Didn’t know you were a racing man,” he said to Monsieur Profond.

“I’m not. I don’t care for it. I’m a yachtin’ man. I don’t care for yachtin’ either, but I like to see my friends. I’ve got some lunch, Mr. Val Dartie, just a small lunch, if you’d like to ’ave some; not much⁠—just a small one⁠—in my car.”

“Thanks,” said Val; “very good of you. I’ll come along in about quarter of an hour.”

“Over there. Mr. Forsyde’s comin’,” and Monsieur Profond “poinded” with a yellow-gloved finger; “small car, with a small lunch”; he moved on, groomed, sleepy, and remote, George Forsyte following, neat, huge, and with his jesting air.

Val remained gazing at the Mayfly filly. George Forsyte, of course, was an old chap, but this Profond might be about his own age; Val felt extremely young, as if the Mayfly filly were a toy at which those two had laughed. The animal had lost reality.

“That ‘small’ mare”⁠—he seemed to hear the voice of Monsieur Profond⁠—“what do you see in her?⁠—we must all die!”

And George Forsyte, crony of his father, racing still! The Mayfly strain⁠—was it any better than any other? He might just as well have a flutter with his money instead.

“No, by gum!” he muttered suddenly, “if it’s no good breeding horses, it’s no good doing anything. What did I come for? I’ll buy her.”

He stood back and watched the ebb of the paddock visitors toward the stand. Natty old chips, shrewd portly fellows, Jews, trainers looking as if they had never been guilty of seeing a horse in their lives; tall, flapping, languid women, or brisk, loud-voiced women; young men with an air as if trying to take it seriously⁠—two or three of them with only one arm.

“Life over here’s a game!” thought Val. “Muffin bell rings, horses run, money changes hands; ring again, run again, money changes back.”

But, alarmed at his own philosophy, he went to the paddock gate to watch the Mayfly filly canter down. She moved well; and he made his way over to the “small” car. The “small” lunch was the sort a man dreams of but seldom gets; and when it was concluded Monsieur Profond walked back with him to the paddock.

“Your wife’s a nice woman,” was his surprising remark.

“Nicest woman I know,” returned Val dryly.

“Yes,”