PAGE 10
My Winter Garden
by
I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared. Old Virginal’s stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens. One whimper, and she is away full-mouthed through the wood, and the pack after her: but not I.
I am not going with them. My hunting days are over. Let it suffice that I have, in the days of my vanity, ‘drank delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains’ of many a county, grass and forest, down and vale. No, my gallant friends. You know that I could ride, if I chose; and I am vain enough to be glad that you know it. But useless are your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right hands. ‘Life,’ as my friend Tom Brown says, ‘is not all beer and skittles;’ it is past two now, and I have four old women to read to at three, and an old man to bury at four; and I think, on the whole, that you will respect me the more for going home and doing my duty. That I should like to see this fox fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not. That I should like it as much as I can like any earthly and outward thing, I deny not. But sugar to one’s bread and butter is not good; and if my winter-garden represent the bread and butter, then will fox-hunting stand to it in the relation of superfluous and unwholesome sugar: so farewell; and long may your noble sport prosper–‘the image of war with only half its danger,’ to train you and your sons after, into gallant soldiers–full of
‘The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill.’
So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my eyes and my horse’s at every moment; and woe to the ‘anchorite,’ as old Bunbury names him, who carries his nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe to the self- willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs or fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or cowardly, or in anywise not ‘masters of the situation.’
Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look anywhere but over your horse’s nose, under the dark roof between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no tinkling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow ditches some twenty feet apart. Blundering among the stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden in long hassock grass. Oh Aira caespitosa, most stately and most variable of British grasses, why will you always grow where you are not wanted? Through you the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe. Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of your hassocks, jumped with his horse’s nose full butt against a fir-stem, and stopped,
‘As one that is struck dead
By lightning, ere he falls,’
as we shall soon, in spite of the mare’s cleverness. Would we were out of this!
Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at last, bright between the dark stems. Up a steep slope, and over a bank which is not very big, but being composed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and out on the open moor.