“Not at all; but there’s a note in the paper here that the master of the Tunster has broken his thigh in a fall and will be unable to ride for a long time; the mastership will be taken by somebody else. You might do worse than offer your services. It would tide you through a bad time.”
“I’d rather have the bad time. Why hunt, when there are a thousand things that need doing right under one’s nose?”
“I think you under-estimate fox-hunting,” the old man said. “The English have only had two pleasures, as far as I can follow the matter, in the last three hundred years; puritanic religion and fox-hunting. Both seem to me now to be in their decadence. I do not feel that either yields or ever has yielded a very desirable joy, but remove them and what remains to the poor land?”
“Drink,” Frampton said.
“No, no. The days of drink are past. The present seeming boom in drink is only due to the fact that drink now is weaker than it was, so that women have discovered it. No. I’m afraid the only thing remaining will be patent medicines. I’m not sure that they haven’t ousted the old firms already. And they have every advantage. The Puritans have only one God, and the fox-hunters only one kind of fox, the one to be worshipped and the other to be killed in only one sort of way. But man has two hundred and forty major ailments, and two hundred and forty nostrums for each, so I think the drug people will win.”
“I hope so, I’m sure,” Frampton said.
“Yes, I suppose you do; but why, Fram?”
“I’m not religious in any way. You were generous to me in that. You helped me to see that unless religion is a mystical thing, it is not important to the soul. I loathe sport, because it is based on cruelty. No man would tolerate the torture of sport if he would consider it. Think of the outcry there would be if, I will not say grown men and women, but boys were to chase a cat, or a dog, or a pony, with dogs. It would be counted an infamy and the boys would be birched by magistrates’ order, or have their souls examined by some analyst. Yet sportsmen (grown men and women, mind you; mature beings) are permitted to run stags, foxes and otters to death in every county of the land. These same people are quick enough to raise a stir, if some lout or brute draws a badger or has a main of cocks. Then they’ll hunt a stag or a fox or an otter till he drops; and boast of it in the Press for years, especially if a few horses are killed. ‘Grand day with the Tunster: Stag takes to sea: Seven couple of hounds drowned’: you know the kind of tosh. And then the tripe about all these fellows being born cavalry leaders and the rest of it. And the improvement in the breed of horses. What is the hunter good for, except hunting? He isn’t any use for draught. As for chargers, I hope we’ve come to the end of them. As to the devotion of the fox-hunter for his favourite horse, it may exist, and probably does; but I’ve seen several hunting men scrap their old hunters after years of service. . . .
“You were saying that the English are giving up their two pleasures, Puritanism and fox-hunting, for a third pleasure, the taking of patent medicines. D’ye know, I take that for a sign of life. They realise they aren’t up to the mark and are trying to make themselves fit. Presently, they’ll learn that they’ll not be really well till they work in the fields again, in the open air, and eat the fresh food they raise; then they’ll find that health will suggest and cause pleasure enough. Long before then, though, they’ll drop a few of the forms of death they love most, including Mansell’s matchless guns. They’ll drop a lot of bunk and a deal of blah before they get to that point.”
“They’ll drop what we call civilisation.”
“Yes. And what does it amount to? Money-snatching in cities and fox-hunting in the country. Who would be tuppence the worse if the whole of Europe died to-night?”
The old man looked at his son with sad eyes; Margaret’s death had made him cynical, as he had feared it might.
“The world would be the worse,” he said; “some right ways are being tried, as well as some wrong ones. But, think over my suggestion about hunting, or at least riding. There is something in being a part of one’s community, whatever it may be; a man gets strength from it. All the mess in the world seems to me to come from that one point, that the governors are out of touch with the governed. You’ll find that they’ll expect you to hunt. In that Mullples district, hunting is the main occupation and interest of the inhabitants. The paper said that the chap with the broken thigh had brought it, that is the Tunster pack, to a fine pitch of perfection. He’s a fox-hunter who knows his business, it said.”
“I suppose it isn’t a difficult business,” Frampton growled. “Judging by the people who do it most. Few of them do anything else and couldn’t if they had to. Imagine them on a committee. They were in charge in the early part of the War, and a pretty lot of tombstones are raised to their credit.”