After that it had been a slow crescendo of satisfaction.
Assistant cook for that outfit at Las Cruces. Their intolerance of any variation from the food they knew, and their delight in his accent. ("Say it again, Limey." And then their laughter and their delighted "Whaddya know!")
Cook to the Snake River round-up. And his discovery of horses. And the feeling it gave him of having come home.
Riding herd for the Santa Clara. And the discovery that «ornery» horses were less ornery when ridden by the limey kid.
A spell with the shoesmith at the Wilson ranch. He had had his first girl there, but it hadn't been half as exciting as seeing what he could do with the "hopeless lot" in the corral. "Nothing but shooting for them," the boss had said. And when he had suggested trying to do something about them, the boss had said unenthusiastically: "Go ahead; but don't expect me to pay hospital bills. You're hired as help to the farrier."
It was from that lot that Smoky came: his beautiful Smoky. The boss gave it him as a reward for what he had done with the hard cases. And when he went to the Lazy Y he took Smoky with him.
Breaking horses for the Lazy Y. That had been happiness. That had been happiness full up and running over. Nearly two years of it.
And then. That momentary slowness on his part; drowsy with heat or dazzled by the sun. And seeing the writhing brown back turning over on him. And hearing his thighbone crack.
The hospital at Edgemont. It had not been at all like the hospitals in films. There were no pretty nurses and no handsome internes. The ward had sage-green walls, the fittings were old and dingy, and the nurses overworked. They alternately spoiled and ignored him.
The sudden stoppage of letters from the boys.
The sweat-making business of learning to walk again, and the slow realisation that his leg had mended "short." That he was going to be permanently lame.
The letter from the boss that put an end to the Lazy Y.
Oil. They had struck oil. The first derrick was already going up not two hundred yards from the bunk house. The enclosed cheque would look after Brat till he was well again. Meanwhile, what should be done with Smoky?
What would a lame man do with a horse in an oil field?
He had cried about Smoky; lying in the dark of the ward. It was the first time he had cried about anyone.
Well, he might be too slow to break horses any more, but he would be no servant to oil. There were other ways of living with horseflesh.
The dude ranch. That had not been like the films either.
Ungainly women in unseemly clothes punishing the saddles of broken-spirited horses until he wondered that they didn't break in two.
The woman who had wanted to marry him.
She had been not at all the kind of woman you'd imagine would want a "kept man." Not fat or silly or amorous. She was thin, and tired-looking, and rather nice; and she had owned the place up the hill from the dude ranch. She would get his leg put right for him, she said. That was the bait she had offered.
The one good thing about the dude ranch was that you made money at it. He had never had so much money in his life as when he finished there. He planned to go East and spend it. And then something had happened to him. The smaller, greener country in the East, the smell of spring gardens, woke in him a nostalgia for England that dismayed him. He had no intention of going back to England for years yet.
For several restless weeks he fought the longing-it was a baby thing to want to go back-and then quite suddenly gave in. After all, he had never seen London. Going to see London was quite a legitimate reason for going to England.
And so to the back room in Pimlico and that meeting in the street.
5
He got up and took his cigarettes from the pocket of the coat that was hanging on the back of the door.
Why hadn't he been more shocked when Loding made his suggestion?
Because he had guessed that a proposition would be coming? Because the man's face had been warning enough that his interests would be shady? Because it quite simply had nothing to do with him, was not anything that he was likely to touch?
He had not been indignant with the man; had not said: "You swine, to think of cheating your friend out of his inheritance!" or words to that effect. But then he had never been interested in other people's concerns: their sins, their griefs, or their happiness. And anyhow, you couldn't be righteous with a man whose food you were eating.
He moved over to the window and stood looking out at the dim frieze of chimney-pots against the luminous haze. He was not broke yet but he had got the length of prospecting for a job, and the prospects were anything but encouraging. It seemed that there were far more people interested in stable jobs in England than stables to accommodate them. The horse world contracted as the horse lovers expanded. All those men who had lost their main interest in living when the cavalry was put down were still hale and active, and besieged stable entrances at the mere whiff of a vacancy.
Besides, he didn't want just to "do his two a day." If road engineering interested you you didn't pine to spend your days putting tar on the surface.
He had tried a few contacts, but none of the good places was interested in a lame stranger without references. Why should they be? They had their pick of England's best. And when he had mentioned that his experience of breaking had been in the States, that seemed to settle it. "Oh, cattle horses!" they said. They said it quite kindly and politely-he had forgotten until he came back how polite his countrymen were-but they had inferred in one way or another that Western kill-or-cure methods were not theirs. Since they never said so openly he could not explain that they were not his either. And anyhow, it wouldn't have been any good. They wanted to know something about you before they took you to work with them in this country. In America, where a man moved on every so often, it was different; but here a job was for life, and what you were mattered almost as much as what you could do.
The solution, of course, was to leave the country. But the real, the insurmountable trouble was that he didn't want to go. Now that he was back he realised that what he had thought of as free, purposeless wandering had merely been a long way round on the way back to England. He had come back, not via Dieppe, but via Las Cruces and points east; that was all. He had found what he wanted when he found horses; but he had no more sense of «belonging» in New Mexico than he had had at the grammar school. He had liked New Mexico better, that was all.
And better still, now that he looked at it, he liked England. He wanted to work with English horses in an English greenness on English turf.
In any case, it was much more difficult to get out of this country than to get into it, if you were broke. He had shared a table at the Coventry Street Lyons one day with a man who had been trying for eighteen months to work his passage somewhere or other. "Cards!" the little man had snarled. "That's all they ever say. Where is your card? If you don't happen to belong to the Amalgamated Union of Table-napkin Folders you can't as much as help a steward set a table. I'm just waiting to see them let a ship sink under them because no one aboard has the right card for manning a pump with."
He had looked at the Englishman's furious blue eyes and remembered the man in the Havre bistro. "One has also to have papers." Yes, the world was cluttered up with paper.
It was a pity that Loding's proposition was so very criminal.
Would he have listened to it with any more interest if Loding had mentioned the horses earlier?