When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking-horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy bright.
‘Now!’ he would silently command the snorting steed. ‘Now take me to where there is luck! Now take me!’
And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again, and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there. He knew he could get there.
‘You’ll break your horse, Paul!’ said the nurse.
‘He’s always riding like that! I wish he’d leave off!’ said his elder sister Joan.
But he only glared down on them in silence. Nurse gave him up. She could make nothing of him. Anyhow he was growing beyond her.
One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.
‘Hallo! you young jockey! Riding a winner?’ said his uncle.
‘Aren’t you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You’re not a very little boy any longer, you know,’ said his mother.
But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.
At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop, and slid down.
‘Well, I got there!’ he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.
‘Where did you get to?’ asked his mother.
‘Where I wanted to go to,’ he flared back at her.
‘That’s right, son!’ said Uncle Oscar. ‘Don’t you stop till you get there. What’s the horse’s name?’
‘He doesn’t have a name,’ said the boy.
‘Gets on without all right?’ asked the uncle.
‘Well, he has different names. He was called Sansovino last week.’
‘Sansovino, eh? Won the Ascot.[50] How did you know his name?’
‘He always talks about horse-races with Bassett,’ said Joan.
The uncle was delighted to find that his small nephew was posted with all the racing news. Bassett, the young gardener who had been wounded in the left foot in the war, and had got his present job through Oscar Cresswell, whose batman he had been, was a perfect blade of the ‘turf.’ He lived in the racing events, and the small boy lived with him.
Oscar Cresswell got it all from Bassett.
‘Master Paul comes and asks me, so I can’t do more than tell him, sir,’ said Bassett, his face terribly serious, as if he were speaking of religious matters.
