CHAPTER XV

IN WHICH I AM INITIATED INTO THE MYSTERIES OF THE RING, AND AM MORE BEWILDERED THAN USUAL BY MY COUNTRYMEN'S AVOIDANCE OF FACTS

The scene from our box was remarkable. Beneath was stretched an undulating mass of people such as it is usual to call, in descriptive articles, a sea of humanity, and in the present instance the simile has peculiar propriety, for from it rose a persistent, murmuring roar very like the waves in certain moods. This sound proceeded chiefly from the breakers--or bookmakers--immediately beneath us, in the privileged enclosure where gambling is a duty. Then came the course, and then a square mile of rabble, black in the main, like all crowds, but chequered with brighter colours, and broken by booths and roundabouts and all the fun of the fair.

We began our lunch at once and ate through the first race, on which Dollie was not betting. Then Dollie invited me down among the bookies, and the men of us went, except Ingleside.

"No," he said, "so many of the staid young gentlemen in my department are absent to-day owing to domestic troubles, that I am nervous. It would hurt me too much to run into any of them. It is too crowded, too," he added. "The fact is, I am an anti-social animal and it's no use disguising the fact. I like a few persons very much; but all the rest affright me. Write me as one who loves his fellow-men but is very easily bored by them."

So we fought our way into the enclosure in the very centre of the competitive clamour. Never have I heard such a noise; never seen human faces so distorted by vociferousness. It was a remarkable scene. Everyone there was doing a thing which it is generally agreed by statesmen and sociologists is bad, and which, if it is done outside the course, is illegal. Some of the leading men in the land were here, and the Monarch and Defender of the Faith was in a box just above. Enough money to endow all the hospitals of the country was changing hands lightly over the issue of a contest between a dozen horses; and not one penny of it was going to the country, except indirectly, later on, in the form of death duties or income tax. For we do not make racing men or bookmakers pay a farthing towards the exchequer for their amusement. Even France, which has never pretended that betting was wrong and holds its most popular race-meetings on Sunday, makes the betting class pay two and a half per cent. of its winnings to the hospitals of the land; but in England we allow this great source of revenue to go untouched.

I afterwards asked Sir Gaston how this was.

"Simple enough," he said. "If you tax betting you legalize it; and then you have all Nonconformity in arms against you."

"But we let it go on," I said.

"Yes," he replied, "but that's England. We have a profound aptitude as a nation for closing one eye."

"The odd thing about England in that respect," I said, "is that, individually, all the Englishmen that one meets agree that we are absurdly illogical if not hypocritical; yet in the mass these hypocrisies are encouraged. How is that? In France the units are representative of the national feeling; in England the units are not representative."

"I don't know," said Sir Gaston. "The same problem has perplexed me. I'm not proud of the anomaly."

"Are they all Jews?" I asked Dollie, in the ring.

"Nearly all, and the owners, too," said Dollie; "but that's all right. What's the matter with Jews? They're good enough Christians, most of them. Here's a tip-topper anyway," and he stopped to speak to an eager anxious man in a white hat who, if he was not a Jew, had been vaccinated with Hebrew lymph.

I was introduced to the tip-top Christian and he wished me a lucky day.

"No money about," he said, "compared with what it used to be."

"Do you mean there's less betting?" I inquired.

"Oh no, much more," he said, "but; it's chiefly S.P. now. They don't do it here as they used."

"Starting price, that means," Dollie explained. "The law allows starting-price betting anywhere, but betting of this kind only on race-courses. The difference is that in S.P. betting you don't know what the odds are until the race is finished, and in course betting you try to get the best odds you can. S.P. betting is chiefly done by telegram, and no money may change hands till after the race, otherwise it's illegal. They say the post office would smash if it weren't for betting."

"Oh, do stop," I said; "you are giving me far too much to think about."

Turning away from this predatory avaricious scene--for it is idle to call it anything else--I made my way to the distant paddock to see the innocent causes of all the trouble, the race-horses. It is one of the strangest mysteries in a world that specializes in such things, that this beautiful, loyal creature should leave behind it such a wake of seaminess and fraud.

After a few minutes in the paddock I returned to the ring where Dollie and Farrar were still busy trying to find longer odds on their fancies; but the horses coming out of the paddock on their way to the starting-point sent Dollie upstairs at the run to see what the girls wanted to back. "Girls," he added, "always choose horses by either the jockey's face or his colours--and I'm hanged if it isn't as good a way as following what we call form."

Dollie was an eternity on his mission, and I had a thousand elbows in my back in my efforts to remain where he had placed me; and I heard, I suppose, a thousand tips as to the winner passing between friends. But one phrase alone impressed me, uttered by a jovial old man to a youthful companion who might have been his nephew, "Always back the favourite to win, my boy," he said, "and the most likely of the outsiders both ways."

Being always open to good counsel I determined to follow this advice; so when Dollie returned and asked me what I wished to back, I said I wanted four pounds on the favourite to win, and three pounds each way on Peppermint.

Dollie opened his eyes. "You seem to know your own mind all right," he said.

"I always determined to follow this rule," I said, "if ever I should take to betting--to back the favourite to win and a likely outsider both ways."

Dollie whistled. "Are you taking me to the Derby or am I taking you?" he asked. "Very well, come and put it on. Naomi is on to Peppermint too; she says the jock's such a little angel. (She ought to hear him in the paddock!) Mrs. Farrar wants old rose and purple--he's on a hopeless ruin named Usquebaugh. See what you can get," Dollie added.

I approached the reputed Christian, who was besieged by clients, and at last secured his ear.

"I want to put four pounds on Paladin," I said.

"Seven pounds to four, Mr. Heathcote's friend," he directed his clerk instantly, without even looking at me, but holding out his hand for the money.

"And three pounds each way Peppermint," I said.

"Twenty-four pounds to three and six pounds to three Peppermint, Mr. Heathcote's friend," he continued, and was taking Dollie's various commissions before I could move.

"That's the way," said Dollie, as we struggled back up the stairs. "Those are the heads! If we only had Cabinet Ministers like that!"

We were in time to see the start through our glasses a mile away over the crowds and the booths. A roar indicated that the horses were off and at once the hubbub below quieted, only to break out afresh into new offers as the horses began to assert themselves.

One race, knowing men often say, is as good as another; only one horse can win anyway, and as desperate efforts to be that horse are made at Lingfield as at Newmarket, Ascot or Epsom. This may be true, on paper, but, as a matter of emotional fact, there is no race like the Derby, because there is no race with so much human interest behind it. These thousands of people cannot be disregarded; each brings something of intensity. And then the stage management of the Derby is so much more elaborate than that of any other race; the steady growth of interest in the horses, the daily bulletins in the press, the sweepstakes, and so forth. And the race itself--all horses starting at the same weight and the same age. No, there may by chance be finer riding in certain races of the year, and closer finishes, but the Derby horses start in an air more heavily charged with human electricity than any other, and, I imagine, always will. For heroic endurance on a great scale, the Grand National; but for the maximum of excitement, the Derby.

An outsider won, and the favourite was not even placed; and immediately we knew the result we all knew why we should have backed it if only we had thought a little longer. But at the Derby thought is not easy; there is so much distraction, and the conditions of life are so upset, that one's ordinary mental processes refuse to work. The winner was a grey filly, and there was every reason why I, for one, should have known it would win, because the only horse that I had specially noticed on the way down was a grey filly rolling in a field. Surely there was the finger of Providence in that! On my mentioning this, Dollie asked with much asperity why I had not told him?

"It meant nothing to me," I said, "partly because I am not a gambler, and not a little because I had no notion that any of the Derby runners were grey or fillies. Had I stayed at home and read the paper I might have known; absurd to bring me to the course and then expect me to know anything of the horses. There was no grey filly in the paddock."

"No," said Dollie, "I'm afraid you're right. No one ever yet saw a real horse in the paddock--at least, not until the race was over."