National Velvet (3 page)

    
“If we had another pony,” said Velvet, “nobody would love you less. But we can't go on like this, it's awful. The gymkhanas all coming and nothing to ride. And you hate all that. It puts you in your worst mood.”

    
The door opened and Mally came in.

    
“Has she got a cough?”

    
“She hasn't coughed since I've been here,” said Velvet.

    
“Get over, you awful old thing!” said Mally, “and let me pass.”

    
“Don't, Mally . . .”

    
“The only way is to be as horrid to her as she is to us.”

    
“I've left the lamp down there. Hang it up somewhere. I can't reach the hook.”

    
Mally hung the lamp carefully out of way of the straw. The two sat up on the manger together. The pony, utterly disgusted, drew her ears back almost flat with her head, hung out her twitching underlip and faced round at an angle from them, her tail tucked sourly in.

    
“Look at her!” said Mally. “My God, what a mount!”

    
Velvet took out her plate and wrapped it in her handkerchief.

    
“Don't you leave it here,” said Mally. “It won't help us any. It was your plate-fiddling that went wrong at supper.”

    
Mally got up on to the manger's rim, reached to a ledge of wood below the window and took down two sticks of dark gold paper.

    
“Crunchie?” said Velvet, her face lighting.

    
“I got them this morning.”

    
“On tick still?”

    
“Yes. She was cross but I swore we'd pay by Saturday.”

    
In the gold paper was a chocolate stick. Beneath the chocolate was a sort of honeycomb, crisp and friable, something between biscuit and burnt sugar. Fry's chocolate crunchie. Not one of the sisters ate any other kind of sweet that year. It was their year's choice. The year before it had been Carmel Crispies.

    
“We must pay her. She's a wispy woman. She's pappy.”

    
“Aren't you queer about people. Always cutting 'em down to the bone.”

    
“I don't like people,” said Velvet, “except us and mother and Mi. I like only horses.”

    
“Pity you weren't a boy.”

    
“I should a bin a poor thin boy. With muscles just on one arm. From meat chopping.”

    
“As it is,” said Mally, “we're all going into tills. Into cages. To count out money.”

    
“I'm not,” said Velvet, examining her crunchie. “Do you like the end best or the middle?”

    
“I like the ones that don't seem cooked. Sticky in the middle.”

    
“I wish I had a proper coat with checks,” said Velvet.

    
“You? Why, Edwina's never had one.”

    
“Edwina isn't me. I'm not going to be a jersey-jumping child in a gymkhana any more.”

    
“I don't know how we're going to do anything in the gymkhanas at all. Miss Ada's turning sourer and sourer on us. She'll end by refusing to go into the ring.”

    
Miss Ada, seduced by the smell of the chocolate, turned slowly towards them, approaching by fractions.

    
“It's all right, Mally, I'll give her a bit of mine,” said Velvet. “You bought'em.”

    
“It doesn't matter who bought 'em,” said Mally. “We're all owing together. . . . She can have a crumb of mine too. Don't blow so, you idiot! She's sneezed her crumb off my hand!” Miss Ada stooped her head and began a vain search for one chocolate crumb in two inches of dingy straw.

    
The stable door opened and Mi put his head in.

    
“Meredith in here?”

    
“No . . . Whad'you want'er for?”

    
“Canary Breeder's Annual's
come. Come on last post.”

    
“Don' know where she is,” said Malvolia. “She won't be fit to live with for weeks.”

    
“Mi . . . Mi . . . Mi!” called a voice from the dark.

    
“In here. He's got your
Canary Breeder.”

    
“Mother said so! Oh. . . . I'll come in. Give it to me!”

    
Meredith took the book from Mi. “You've taken off the wrapper,” she said disappointedly; “I like to take it
off myself,” and leant back against Miss Ada, unconscious of the pony's body.

    
“ 'Nother time you can fetch your own
Annual
”, said Mi.

    
“Bet you don't remember next year,” said Mally.

    
“Listen to this! Listen to this! It's what I always thought!” said Meredith. “Listen to Mr. Lukie. He says (J. Lukie, Esquire, it's signed) he says, ‘Cod liver oil should be given to mating birds. My own birds did magnificently on Poon's Finchmixture Codliver . . .' ” Miss Ada removed her support sharply and Meredith sat violently on the straw. “Blast!” she said, without looking round at the pony, opened the
Annual
and searched again for the page.

    
“Yes, but his birds were already mating,” said Mally. “You keep wanting to give them the cod liver oil to make them mate. It doesn't make them mate. Lukie doesn't say it does!”

    
“I don't see why . . .” said Meredith, still hunting for the page. “You've got to be lively to mate. Vital or something. Cod liver oil gives vitality. I read it . . . it's here . . . ‘gives vitality to the mating bird.' ”

    
“Miss Ada'll step on your hand if you leave it there,” said Velvet.

    
Meredith got slowly up, reading as she rose. “It doesn't say whether it's the cock bird or the hen. Which do you think it is, Mi?”

    
“Cock before, hen after,” said Mi.

    
“There you are!” said Meredith. “I
wish
mother'd let me order it.”

    
“You got it all over the sofa last time.”

    
“But I've got a fountain pen filler now. I've trained the cock on drops of water. He's as good as gold. The hen makes a fuss. I could do her in the yard.”

    
“Bed,” said Edwina from the darkness outside.

    
They filed out without a word, Meredith reading to the last by the flare of the hurricane lamp. The spring gale had gone. The spring sky was indefinite and still, with a star in it. There was a new moon.

    
“Are you coming, Velvet?”

    
“You can't leave Miss Ada with nothing when we've used her stable. I'll be a second.” She opened the corn bin and Miss Ada dropped ten years off her looks. She plunged her nose on the two hands that cupped the corn and ducked her head to sniff out the droppings before they sank too far in the straw. Velvet, alone, saw the new moon. She bowed three times, glanced round to see that no one saw, then standing in the shadow of the stable door she put her hands like thin white arrows together and prayed to the moon—“Oh, God, give me horses, give me horses! Let me be the best rider in England!”

T
HE
next morning Meredith had to take some suet and a shin of beef over to Pendean. School was at nine. It was the last day of term. She rose at six. Mi called her on his way downstairs. He heated the coffee left over from last night and gave her three sardines between two pieces of bread. Then Meredith went out to saddle Miss Ada.

    
Miss Ada had a crupper to her saddle, partly because the hills were so steep and partly because she had no shoulders. Meredith forgot the crupper and left it dangling. She put the girths on twisted, put the
Canary Breeder
in the basket with the suet, and started off. Miss Ada tapped smartly up the village street on the tarmac. The flints on the church shone like looking-glass. Meredith trotted east into the rising sun. Her toes were warm and the sardines and the bread and coffee digested comfortingly. Over the Hullocks and down into the valleys, sun and shadow, cup and saucer, through the tarred gate, the wired gate, the broken gate, and finally into the Pendean valley and to the house.
She gave in the beef and the suet, would have stopped to talk to Lucy the farm daughter (only Lucy had a temperature), started on the home journey, crupper still dangling, and Miss Ada restive now from the sore of the twisted girth.

    
“We'll go the Dead-Horse-Patch way,” said Meredith suddenly, aloud; and then disliked the sound of the spoken words in the lonely landscape. One of Miss Ada's ears came forward. They were above the village now, though still two miles away. There were two ways down to the sea level. One by the two steep fields and the chalk road whence she had come up, the other by two more steep fields, two gates, a broken reaping machine, a cabbage field, to a haystack—and a place where a horse had once dropped dead.

    
For thirteen years Miss Ada had said that place was haunted. She had told Mr. Brown so plainly when Velvet was crawling. And he had never insisted with her, but let her come down the way she had planned for herself by the chalk road. Now to Meredith's mind came the desire to take Miss Ada the way she had never been taken by Edwina, Malvolia, Velvet or herself.

    
Even before the division of the ways the intention became communicated to the pony. A hardening took place, a clenching of spirit. A weight came into Miss Ada's head. She hung it provocatively upon her bit. Meredith sat uneasily and watchfully in her saddle.

    
Miss Ada's way was to the left. Meredith's was to the right. Miss Ada had two methods of getting her way. Either she didn't cede at all, or when Meredith pulled
she ceded too fast and whipped round. This method she chose and the saddle slipped over on the too-slack girths. Meredith fell off. Miss Ada with a look of sudden youth flicked her heels, cantered to the wire fence, stooped her head and cropped. The basket with the
Canary Breeder
had fallen too and Meredith, getting up, picked up her
Annual,
glanced at Miss Ada and after a minute sat down in the sun to read. She was now faced with a walk home. Nobody ever caught Miss Ada once she was loose. She would go home her own way and at her own time.

    
Meredith read comfortably what Mr. Lukie had to say, then closed her book and trudged off.

    
“You'll look an idiot!” she said partingly to Miss Ada. “Coming home with your saddle all upside down.” The whites of Miss Ada's eyes glinted as she cropped. Meredith went down towards the Dead-Horse-Patch. When she was out of sight Miss Ada moved off by the way she had intended to go.

    
Meredith ran down over a steep field that lay in shadow with its back to the rising sun, then up the opposite slope with the sun shining on her back. Over the rise she saw a rider in the distance nearing the haystack that stood at the edge of the cabbage field, the haystack where the legendary horse had laid down and died. The rider coming towards her, she could not see at first whether he was walking or trotting. . . . Then came a flick of movement and he was off. The horse as usual had shied at the Dead-Horse-Patch.

    
When Meredith reached him he was on his feet dusting
himself down, a tripper-rider, a great lad with loose flannel trousers and bicycle clips. The horse, like Miss Ada, was cropping feverishly as though it had never seen grass before.

    
“You got Mr. Belton's Bumble Bee,” said Meredith.

    
“What's the matter with him? Seen a ghost?” said the young man.

    
“Yes, he did,” said Meredith.

    
“Eh? How? You had a fall too?” eyeing the green-grass stain on her hip.

    
Meredith looked round to see if Miss Ada was in sight.

    
“Bin sliding,” she said.

    
“Can we catch the horse?” said the tripper.

    
“Maybe,” said Meredith, “but I shouldn't think so. I got to be in time for school.”