National Velvet (33 page)

    
“D'you know what you've done?” said Velvet to The Piebald, but he shook his head suddenly as though a night gnat was on it.

    
“Wasa matter, Pie ole darling? Hasn' he gone in at the haunches terrible, Mally? Just in one day.”

    
“. . . an' what a day!” said Mally.

    
Velvet, her cheek on the top of the gate, Sir Pericles' breath blew her hair. “The worse was I got my mouth open an' couldn't shut it because the wind dried it. What was
your
worse, Pie ole darling?”

    
Velvet turned solemnly to Mally. “He'll be in every
book, Mally. He'll be the horse of this year, that won it this year. Though they disqualify us they'll never dare to drop him out altogether. He won't be on the Aintree Roll of Honour . . .”

    
“What's that?”

    
“A brown board with gold letters. But he'll be in the books the writers write. The first piebald horse that ever won the National. By what I've heard about it they'll try to buy him, but I'll never sell him. SELL you, Piebald!”

    
“The poor others!” said Mally. “Do they mind?”

    
“No, no . . . Pericles! Little sweetie . . . Mrs. James! You're squealing, you jealous old woman. She's tried to kick George, Mally. Get away . . . there . . .”

    
“George deserves all he gets,” said Mally. “He pokes his nose in everywhere and it's food he wants, not love. He and Mrs. James thought you'd come with a bucket.”,

    
“Come on, Piebald,” called Velvet, searching for the old halter they kept behind the wall. But The Piebald was cropping the cool night grass away with a layer of dark air between them, as though horses that had won the Grand National were turned out to grass in the early spring every night. Unceremonious and incredibly enduring, he moved away.

    
“Come on,” said Mally, “I should leave him. It's warm. He won't hurt. Mother said not to let you stay long. You're dead tired.”

    
“I gotta see Donald before I sleep,” said Velvet.

    
“Donald?”

    
“I thought about him the night I was going to ride. In that hotel bedroom. I was sick as anything . . .”

    
“Oh, poor Velvet! An' all alone!”

    
“No, Mi kep' Comin' in an' out. I thought about if I was killed an' never saw Donald again. On'y for a flash, but I thought it.”

    
“Funny thing to think. Why Donald?”

    
“It was funny. But I thought it anyway,” said Velvet doggedly. “I mus' jus' see him when I go in.”

    
They entered the house.

    
“Velvet wants to see Donald,” said Mally, somewhat aggrieved.

    
“I wanter kiss him in his bed,” said Velvet.

    
“She's overstrung,” said Mrs. Brown. “Go on up, he's dead asleep.”

    
Donald lay flung out in an abandoned and charming attitude. His eye-lashes were tender, bronze and shadowy; his hair a touch damp. The strangeness of his youth and exposed face, his battle for power by day and his abdication by night were something that Velvet had hardly expected. A gateway drew open within her and the misery and wild alarm of life rushed in.

    
“Velvet's crying over Donald!” said Mally aghast, running down to the living-room.

    
“Carry her to her bed, father,” said Mrs. Brown calmly. “It's to be expected.”

N
EXT
morning the Browns rose as usual. Edwina came down to take in the milk and the greeting of the milkman was a little long because it contained moderate congratulations. The milkman was a steady fellow.

    
From then on, however, nothing else was as usual. The crowd began to collect upon the Green in knots about nine, and by ten it was definitely clotted and pooling in the street. Mally, with her twitching nose, went out towards it early and scented radiations. The crowd, which was small and scattered at the time, definitely stirred as the front door opened, and something in the white faces and black eyes all looking one way made Mally shut the door again.

    
“I believe it's about Velvet,” she said with a gasp into the scullery. “Ther's people outside.”

    
“People?” said Mrs. Brown. “Someone want her?”

    
“Just people,” said Mally. “Standing about.”

    
Mrs. Brown went to look. She pulled the front blinds
down over the cinerarias. So on a sunny morning at the end of March Velvet started her first day of glory as though someone had died in the house.

    
The crowd grew denser during the morning and none of the Browns put a nose out of doors. Mrs. Brown set the four girls at little jobs in their bedrooms and told them to keep the yard end by the canary cages. The crowd made a great deal of noise in the street as it drifted about, and the house seemed very small.

    
“Are you sure it is only about Velvet?” said Meredith. “It isn't a revolution?”

    
Mr. Brown finally decided that this wouldn't do and he must go down to his shop. He went out the back way and was not definitely recognised, except by the local man on the Worthing
Witness and Echo
. This man walked beside him and asked him questions as he went towards his shop. Mr. Brown was not at all unwilling. “She was always a one for horses,” he said, and gave a lot of details.

    
“I kin do without me shopping,” said Mrs. Brown in the gloom at home. “There's enough of that cold salt beef.”

    
“Jolly!” said Edwina. “Winning the Grand National an' living with the blinds down an' eating cold salt beef. I don't know that Velvet's done us much of a turn.”

    
The first gloomy morning of fame went by, blinds down, salt beef, and everyone immured in the house. In the one local paper which they took there was a lot about Velvet, but no one thought of sending out for all the other papers.

    
“The ink don't print up Velvet's face too good,” said Mrs. Brown with distaste. It was only what she expected.

    
The picture was called “The Gate-Crasher at the Grand National.”

    
“Dam' silly title,” said Mally. “She didn't knock a thing.”

    
Velvet was suffering from reaction and sat about limp. She did not bother about the newspaper except to glance at her picture. “I'd like to go out an' look at The Pie.”

    
“You don't no one leave this house,” said Mrs, Brown. They yawned and moped and grumbled.

    
“We'll have to go to an hotel if this goes on,” said Edwina, who had once been to an hotel.

    
“That's what we'll do,” said Mrs. Brown surprisingly, “if it don't blow over in a day or two. It's not but what I'm not proud of you, Velvet. But What's the good of you standing up for them gaping loonies to look at. They can't get no more out of you than they have done. You done your best up at Aintree and that ought to be enough. But what gets me is this gaping an' gaping an' handshaking an' behaving unfriendly an' curious as though you were a black savage they'd caught on the beach.”

    
“Did they do it to you, mother, too? When you swum it?” Velvet jerked her head to the sea.

    
“They'd no modesty,” said Mrs. Brown shortly, and said no more.

    
“Mother'd like to go out with a broom,” said Meredith,
after Mrs. Brown had left the room, “an' sweep 'em away.”

    
“Mother's a one,” said Mally, pulling a chair up for her feet.

    
But the middle-day post consoled Edwina and gave them all something to do. The door bell had been rung incessantly by the representatives of newspapers, but Mrs. Brown had the big bar-arm down and stuffed a duster in the bell. She knew the postman's knock, however, and he had had the sense to go round to the back.

    
There was an enormous box of chocolates for Velvet from an unknown admirer, and almost at the same moment a florist's man appeared groaning under a silver wicker basket loaded with pots of ferns and pink azaleas, and draped from head to foot in pink ribbon. This was from two of the Aldermen on the Worthing Corporation.

    
But in the post itself there was something incredible. Among seven letters for Velvet, six were love letters, and again among them two were proposals of marriage. Edwina and Mally read them aloud with yelps of delight.

    
But the seventh, addressed to Miss V. Brown in a clerkly hand, was a different affair. It was written on paper like cardboard, its heading was neat and in fine scrollwork, and it explained to her that the Stewards at Aintree, not being satisfied with explanations given on March 23rd, the matter was referred to the Stewards of the National Hunt Committee, and the enquiry into the running of The Piebald by an unqualified rider would be held at 15, Cavendish Square on the following
Tuesday, at which meeting Miss V. Brown, Owner, was requested to appear.

    
“Trouble's got to come,” said Mr. Brown, when he had heard the letter too. He had by degrees, and through the day, night, and morning, become a father who walked on air. “Trouble's got to come, Velvet, but nothing can take away what you done, my girl.”

    
In the early afternoon the crowds grew denser.

    
“Brown family totally surrounded,” read the headlines in the London papers. “Extra police drafted in.” This brought more crowds. Worthing made hurried arrangements for a special bus-line, that people might see the crowds and become part of them.

    
Mrs. Brown closed the door upon reporters. And closed her lips. And closed her eyes and thought. To her the house seemed threatened. Edwina, Mally, Meredith . . . even the canaries seemed threatened. And Velvet most of all. The warmth, the cosiness, the privacy of life were blown with draught. Her house had a side taken out of it and she could not close it foursquare.

    
How long would it take to live it down? It was like a gale. It was like staying indoors in a gale. She let the spaniels into the living room, as one calls in a yard animal in a dangerous hurricane.

    
“I gotta get some air,” said Velvet feverishly at three o'clock, and stepped out of the back door to the orchard.

    
“Good day, Miss Velvet,” said a slim lady instantly.

    
“Good day, Miss,” said Velvet.

    
“I just wanted to ask you,” said the lady–

    
“I've got a car here,” said the lady. “Let's sit in it.”

    
Velvet hesitated. It was not in her to refuse. She crossed to the lane, looking back at the cactus window.

    
The lady opened the door of the car and Velvet got in.

    
“Now,” said the lady, settling down with Velvet beside her, “you're a great girl. Why, you're not as much as fourteen!”

    
“Fourteen,” said Velvet shyly.

    
“Got any boy friends?”

    
“Oh . . . Mi. Mi Taylor.”

    
“Who's he?”

    
“Dad's help. Father's help. In the slaughter-house.”

    
Velvet was without defences. Her innocent and murmured sentences were like poppy seeds in a corn field. The field went scarlet and smelt narcotic and bloomed. But mercifully this was in America, and Velvet never knew what was written and said.

    
They had not got far (but far enough) with the interview when Mrs. Brown intervened. She called from the back doorway and Velvet, breathing relief, sprang from the car and went to her. The lady followed. “One moment . . .” she said, crossing the road too.

    
“No!” said Mrs. Brown sharply, and sent Velvet in behind her bulk.

    
“Excuse me,” began the lady, “it's for the American Press.”

    
“In England we got rights,” said Mrs. Brown, and shut the door in her face.