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Again: I once met at a race-meeting a school-friend, long lost sight of, whom I had last seen as a newly-wedded wife, loving and beloved. She was now very much changed, hard and haggard of face. I
It gave the holder himself and his eldest son, if of age, the right to a seat at our grand race banquet at which, I may tell you, Mr. Spargo, Royalty itself has been present in the good old days. Consequently, as you see, to be the holder of a silver ticket was to be somebody." "And when the race-meeting fell through?" asked Spargo. "What then?"
There were sixty years of mixed work to be sifted out between us, and since we had met one another from time to time in the quick scene-shifting of India a dinner, camp, or a race-meeting here; a dak-bungalow or railway station up country somewhere else we had never quite lost touch. Infant sat on the banisters, hungrily and enviously drinking it in.
"You looked straight at me, and did not seem to recognize me." "Did I? I am so short-sighted, you know. I had not forgotten you. Why should I?" And Netty glanced at Martin in her little, gentle, appealing way, and then looked elsewhere rather hastily. "Oh, you travellers must see so many people you cannot be expected to remember every one who is introduced to you at a race-meeting."
When such mobs of raw ponies reach a treaty-port they are known as "griffins," which term applies to all that have not previously run at any race-meeting; and with their tails sweeping the ground, their hogged manes and their long coats clotted with mud, they present a very dismal appearance, and one not at all in keeping with the accepted idea of race-horses.
As we plodded patiently along the road in our tarnished finery, with our eye-arresting checks and imitation velvet collars, caked with mud and wrinkled with rain, we looked like nothing so much on earth as a gang of weighers returning from an unsuccessful day at a suburban race-meeting. But now the khaki-mills have ground out another million yards or so, and we have regulation greatcoats.
The jockeys are all amateur and mostly personal friends, as also are the clerk of the course, starters, judges and stewards, so that instead of a race-meeting being a gathering of complete strangers, bookmakers and professionals, it partakes more of the social nature of a huge picnic. During the winter months a great feature of sport in Shanghai is paperchasing on horseback.
The actor who works in the theatre at night, and lives only among his peers during the day, ends by becoming a mummer even in private life; a teacher who does not systematically shake off the taint of the school is among the most tiresome of creatures; the man who hurries from race-meeting to race-meeting seems to lose the power of talking about anything save horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual fate of those who narrow their horizon.
"I happened to read that account, and remember it rather well. The robbery took place about five weeks ago the house was entered while everybody, including some of the servants, was at a race-meeting. Among the things stolen was a pair of shot-guns made by Holland and Holland." "But what on earth has that to do with anything? Where does the 'idea' come in?" "It doesn't come in there.
Certainly he was what some might call handsome, of a pictorial, exuberant style of beauty, all attitude, profile, and impudence: a man whom I could see in fancy parade on the grand stand at a race-meeting, or swagger in Piccadilly, staring down the women, and stared at himself with admiration by the coal porters.
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