“Matchbox”
It was the event of Mr. John Denny’s life that he valued highest. It is twenty years now since it took place, and many other things have happened to him, such as going to England to give evidence in the Parnell Commission, and matrimony, and taking the second prize in the Lightweight Hunter Class at the Dublin Horse Show. But none of them, not even the trip to London, possesses quite the same fortunate blend of the sublime and the ridiculous that gives this incident such a perennial success at the Hunt and Agricultural Show dinners which are the dazzling breaks in the monotony of Mr. Denny’s life, and he prized it accordingly.
Mr. Johnny Denny—or Dinny Johnny as he was known to his wittier friends—was a young man of the straightest sect of the Cork buckeens, a body whose importance justifies perhaps a particular description of one of their number. His profession was something imperceptibly connected with the County Grand Jury Office, and was quite over-shadowed in winter by the gravities of hunting, and in summer by the gallantries of the Militia training; for, like many of his class, he was a captain in the Militia. He was always neatly dressed; his large moustache looked as if it shared with his boots the attention of the blacking brush. No cavalry sergeant in Ballincollig had a more delicately bowed leg, nor any creature, except, perhaps, a fox-terrier interviewing a rival, a more consummate swagger. He knew every horse and groom in all the leading livery stables, and, in moments of expansion, would volunteer to name the price at which any given animal could be safeguarded from any given veterinary criticism. With all these not specially attractive qualities, however, Dinny Johnny was, and is, a good fellow in his way. His temper was excellent, his courage indisputable; he has never been known to give any horse—not even a hireling—less than fair play, and a tendency to ride too close to hounds has waned since time, like an Irish elector, has taken to emphasising himself by throwing stones, and Dinny Johnny, once ten stone, now admits to riding 13.7.
In those days, before the inertia that creeps like mildew over country householders had begun to form, Mr. Denny was in the habit of making occasional excursions into remote parts of the County Cork in search of those flowers of pony perfection that are supposed to blush unseen in any sufficiently mountainous and unknown country, and the belief in which is the touch of wild poetry that keeps alive the soul of the amateur horse coper. He had never met the pony of his dreams, but he had not lost faith in it, and though he would range through the Bantry fair with a sour eye, behind the sourness there was ever a kindling spark of hope.
Towards the end of October, in the year ’83, Mr. Denny received an invitation from an old friend to go down to “the West”—thus are those regions east of the moon, and west of the sun, and south-west of Drimoleague Junction, designated in the tongue of Cork civilisation—to “look at a colt,” and with a saddle and bridle in the netting and a tooth-brush in his pocket he set his face for the wilderness. I have no time to linger over the circumstances of the deal. Suffice it to say that, after an arduous haggle, Mr. Denny bought the colt, and set forth the same day to ride him by easy stages to his future home.
It was a wet day, wet with the solid determination of a western day, and the loaded clouds were flinging their burden down on the furze, and the rocks, and the steep, narrow road, with vindictive ecstacy. They also flung it upon Mr. Denny, and both he and his new purchase were glad to find a temporary shelter in one of the many public-houses of a village on the line of march. He was sitting warming himself at an indifferent turf fire, and drinking a tumbler of hot punch, when the sound of loud voices outside drew him to the window. In front of a semi-circle of blue frieze coats, brown frieze trousers and slouched black felt hats, stood a dejected grey pony, with a woman at its head and a lanky young man on its back; and it was obvious to Mr. Denny that a transaction, of an even more fervid sort than that in which he had recently engaged, was toward.
“Fifteen pound!” screamed the woman, darting a black head on the end of a skinny neck out of the projecting hood of her cloak with the swiftness of a lizard; “fifteen pound, James Hallahane, and the divil burn the ha’penny less that I’ll take for her!”
The elderly man to whom this was addressed continued to gaze steadily at the ground, and turning his head slightly away, spat unostentatiously. The other men moved a little, vaguely, and one said in a tone of remote soliloquy:—
“She wouldn’t go tin pound in Banthry fair.”
“Tin pound!” echoed the pony’s owner shrilly. “Ah, God help ye, poor man! Here, Patsey, away home wid ye out o’ this. It’ll be night, and dark night itself before—”
“I’ll give ye eleven pounds,” said James Hallahane, addressing the toes of his boots. The young man on the pony turned a questioning eye towards his mother, but her sole response was a drag at the pony’s head to set it going; swinging her cloak about her, she paddled through the slush towards the gate, supremely disregarding the fact that a gander, having nerved himself and his harem to the charge, had caught the ragged skirt of her dress in his beak, and being too angry to let go, was being whirled out of the yard in her train.
Dinny Johnny ran to the door, moved by an impulse for which I think the hot whisky and water must have been responsible.
“I’ll give you twelve pounds for the pony, ma’am!” he called out.
A quarter of an hour later, when he and the publican were tying a tow-rope round the pony’s lean neck, Mr. Denny was aware of a sinking of the heart as he surveyed his bargain. It looked, and was, an utterly degraded little object, as it stood with its tail tucked in between its drooping hindquarters, and the rain running in brown streams down its legs. Its lips were decorated with the absurd, the almost incredible moustache that is the consequence among Irish horses of a furze diet (I would hesitatingly direct the attention of the male youth of Britain to this singular but undoubted fact), and although the hot whisky and water had not exaggerated the excellence of its shoulder and the iron soundness of its legs, it had certainly reversed the curve of its neck and levelled the corrugations of its ribs.
“You could strike a bally match on her, this minute, if it wasn’t so wet!” thought Mr. Denny, and with the simple humour that endeared him to his friends he christened the pony “Matchbox” on the spot.
“And it’s to make a hunther of her ye’d do?” said the publican, pulling hard at the knot of the tow-rope. “Begor’, I know that one. If there was forty men and their wives, and they after her wid sticks, she wouldn’t lep a sod o’ turf. Well, safe home, sir, safe home, and mind out she wouldn’t kick ye. She’s a cross thief,” and with this valediction Dinny Johnny went on his way.
There was no disputing the fact of the pony’s crossness.
“She’s sourish-like in her timper,” Jimmy, Mr. Denny’s head man, observed to his subordinate not long after the arrival, and the subordinate, tenderly stroking a bruised knee, replied:—
“Sour! I niver see the like of her! Be gannies, the divil’s always busy with her!”
On one point, however, the grey pony proved better than had been anticipated. Without the intervention of the forty married couples she took to jumping at once.
“It comes as aisy to her as lies to a tinker,” said Jimmy to a criticising friend; “the first day ever I had her out on a string she wint up to the big bounds fence between us and Barrett’s as indipindant as if she was going to her bed; and she jumped it as flippant and as crabbéd—By dam, she’s as crabbéd as a monkey!”
In those days Mr. Standish O’Grady, popularly known as “Owld Sta’,” had the hounds, and it need scarcely be said that Mr. Denny was one of his most faithful followers. This season he had not done as well as usual. The colt was only turning out moderately, and though the pony was undoubtedly both crabbéd and flippant, she could not be expected to do much with nearly twelve stone on her back. It happened, therefore, that Mr. Denny took his pleasure a little sadly, with his loins girded in momentary expectation of trouble, and of a sudden refusal from the colt to jump until the crowd of skirters and gap-hunters drew round, and escape was impossible until Mrs. Tom Graves’s splinty old carriage horse had ploughed its way through the bank, and all those whom he most contemned had flaunted through the breach in front of him. He rode the pony now and then, but he more often lent her to little Mary O’Grady, “Owld Sta’s” untidy, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, and quite uneducated little girl. It was probable that Mary could only just write her name, and it was obvious that she could not do her hair; but she was afraid of nothing that went on four legs—in Ireland, at least—and she had the divine gift of “hands”. From the time when she was five, up till now, when she was fifteen, Mr. Denny had been her particular adherent, and now he found a chastened pleasure in having his eye wiped by Mary, on the grey pony; moreover, experience showed him that if anything would persuade the colt to jump freely, it was getting a lead from the little mare.
“Upon my soul, she wasn’t such a bad bargain after all,” he thought one pleasant December day as he jogged to the Meet, leading “Matchbox,” who was fidgeting along beside him with an expression of such shrewishness as can only be assumed by a pony mare; “if it wasn’t that Mary likes riding her I’d make her up a bit and she’d bring thirty-five anywhere.”
There had been, that autumn, a good deal of what was euphemistically described as “trouble” in that district of the County Cork which Mr. Denny and the Kilcronan hounds graced with their society, and when Mr. O’Grady and his field assembled at the Curragh-coolaghy cross-roads, it was darkly hinted that if the hounds ran over a certain farm not far from the covert, there might be more trouble.
Dinny Johnny, occupied with pulling up Mary O’Grady’s saddle girths, and evading the snaps with which “Matchbox” acknowledged the attention, thought little of these rumours.
“Nonsense!” he said; “whatever they do they’ll let the hounds alone. Come on, Mary, you and me’ll sneak down to the north side of the wood. He’s bound to break there, and we’ve got to take every chance we can get.”
Curragh-coolaghy covert was a large, ill-kept plantation that straggled over a long hillside fighting with furze-bushes and rocks for the right of possession; a place wherein the young hounds could catch and eat rabbits to their heart’s content comfortably aware that the net of brambles that stretched from tree to tree would effectually screen them from punishment. From its north-east side a fairly smooth country trended down to a river, and if the fox did not fulfil Mr. Denny’s expectations by breaking to the north, the purplish patch that showed where, on the further side of the river, Madore Wood lay, looked a point for which he would be likely to make. Conscious of an act which he would have loudly condemned in any one else, Mr. Denny, followed by Mary, like his shadow, rode quietly round the long flank of the covert to the north-east corner. They sat in perfect stillness for a few minutes, and then there came a rustling on the inside of the high, bracken-fringed fence which divided them from the covert. Then a countryman’s voice said in a cautious whisper:—
“Did he put in the hounds yit?”
“He did,” said another voice, “he put them in the soud-aisht side; they’ll be apt to get it soon.”
“Get what?” thought Dinny Johnny, all his bristles rising in wrath as the idea of a drag came to him.
“There! they’re noising now!” said the first voice, while a whimper or two came from far back in the wood. “Maybe there’ll not be so much chat out o’ thim afther once they’ll git to Madore!”
“’Twas a pity Scanlan wouldn’t put the mate in here and have done with it,” said the second voice. “Owld Sta’ll niver let them run a dhrag.”
“Yirrah, what dhrag man! ’Twas the fox himself they had, and he cut open to make a good thrail, and the way Scanlan laid it the devil himself wouldn’t know ’twas a dhrag, and they have little Danny Casey below to screech he seen the fox—”
At the same instant the whimpers swelled into a far-away chorus, that grew each moment fainter and more faint. Much as Mr. Denny desired to undertake the capture of the imparters of these interesting facts, he knew that he had now no time to attempt it, and, with a shout to Mary, he started the colt at full gallop up the rough hillside, round the covert, while the grey pony scuttled after him as nimbly as a rabbit. The colt seemed to realise the stress of the occasion, and jumped steadily enough; but the last fence on to the road was too much for his nerves, and, having swerved from it with discomposing abruptness, he fell to his wonted tactics of rearing and backing.
Mr. Denny permitted himself one minute in which to establish the fruitlessness of spurs, whip and blasphemy in this emergency, and then, descending to his own legs, he climbed over the fence into the road and ran as fast as boots and tops would let him towards the point whence the cry of the hounds was coming, ever more and more faintly. In a moment or two he returned, out of breath, to where the faithful Mary awaited him.
“It’s no good, Mary,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his forehead; “they’re running like blazes to the south along through the furze. I suppose the devils took it that way to humbug your father, and then they’ll turn for the bridge and run into Madore; and there’s the end of the hounds.”
Mary, who regarded the hounds as the chief, if not the only, object of existence, looked at him with scared eyes, while the colour died out of her round cheeks.
“Will they be poisoned, Mr. Denny?” she gasped.
“Every man jack of them, if your father doesn’t twig it’s a drag, and whip ’em off,” replied Mr. Denny, with grim brevity.
“Couldn’t we catch them up?” cried Mary, almost incoherent from excitement and horror.
“They’ve gone half-a-mile by this, and that brute,” this with an eye of concentrated hatred at the colt, “won’t jump a broom-stick.”
“But let me try,” urged Mary, maddened by the assumption of masculine calm which Mr. Denny’s despair had taken on; “or—oh, Mr. Denny, if you rode ‘Matchbox’ yourself straight to Madore across the river, you’d be in time to whip them off!”
“By Jove!” said Dinny Johnny, and was silent. I believe that was the moment at which the identity of the future Mrs. Denny was made clear to him.
“And you’ll have to ride her in my saddle!” went on Mary at lightning speed, taking control of the situation in a manner prophetic of her future successful career as a matron. “There isn’t time to change—”
“The devil I shall!” said Dinny Johnny, and an unworthy thought of what his friends would say flitted across his mind.
“And you’ll have to sit sideways, because the lowest crutch is so far back there’s not room for your leg if you sit saddleways,” continued his preceptor breathlessly. “I know it—Jimmy said so when he rode her to the meet for me last week. Oh hurry—hurry! How slow you are!”
Mr. Denny never quite knew how he got into the horrors of the saddle, still less how he and “Matchbox” got into the road. At one acute moment, indeed, he had believed he was going to precede her thither, but they alighted more or less together, and turning her, by a handy gap, into the field on the other side of the road, he set off at a precarious gallop, followed by the encouraging shrieks of Mary.
“Thank the Lord there’s no one looking, and it’s a decent old saddle with a pommel on the offside,” he said to himself piously, while he grasped the curving snout of the pommel in question, “I’d be a dead man this minute only for that.”
He felt as though he were wedged in among the claws of a giant crab, but without the sense of retention that might be hoped for under such circumstances. The lowest crutch held one leg in aching durance; there was but just room for the other between the two upper horns, and the saddle was so short and hollow in the seat that its high-ridged cantle was the only portion from which he derived any support—a support that was suddenly and painfully experienced after each jump. He could see, very far off, the pink coat of “Owld Sta’” following a line which seemed each moment to be turning more directly for Madore, and in his agony he gave the pony an imprudent dig of the spur that sent her on and off a boggy fence in two goat-like bounds, and gave the sunlight opportunity to play intermittently upon the hollow seat of the saddle. She had never carried him so well, and as she put her little head down and raced at the fences, the unfortunate Dinny Johnny felt that though he was probably going to break his neck, no one would ever be able to mention his early demise without a grin.
Field after field fled by him in painful succession till he found himself safe on the farther side of a big stone-faced “double,” the last fence before the river.
“Please God I’ll never be a woman again!” ejaculated Mr. Denny as he wedged his left leg more tightly in behind the torturing leaping horn, “that was a hairy old place! I wish Mary saw the pair of us coming up on to it like new-born stags!”
Had Mary seen him and “Matchbox” a moment later, emerging separately from a hole in mid stream, her respect might not have prevented her from laughing, but the fact remains that the pair got across somehow. At the top of the hill beyond the river Dinny Johnny saw the hounds for the first time. They had checked on the road by the bridge, but now he heard them throwing their tongues as they hit the line again, the fatal line that was leading them to the covert. Even at this moment, Mr. Denny could not restrain an admiration that would appear to most people ill-timed.
“Aren’t they going the hell of a docket!” he exclaimed fondly, “and good old Chantress leading the lot of them, the darling! It’ll be a queer thing now, if I don’t get there in time!”
Blown though the pony was, he knew instinctively that he had not yet come to the end of her, and he drove her along at a canter until he reached a lane that encircled the covert, along which he would have to go to intercept the hounds. As he jumped into it he was suddenly aware of a yelling crowd of men and boys, who seemed, with nightmare unexpectedness, to fill all the lane behind him. He knew what they were there for, and oblivious of the lamentable absurdity of his appearance, he turned and roared out a defiance as he clattered at full speed down the stony lane. It seemed like another and almost expected episode in the nightmare when he became aware of a barricade of stones, built across the road to a height of about four feet, with along the top of it—raising it to what, on a fourteen hand pony, looked like impossibility—the branch of a fir-tree, with all its bristling twigs left on it.
He heard the cry of the hounds clearly now; they were within a couple of fields of the covert. Dinny Johnny drove his left spur into the little mare’s panting side, let go the crutch, took hold of her head in the way that is unmistakable, and faced her at the barricade. As he did so a countryman sprang up at his right hand and struck furiously at him with a heavy potato spade. The blow was aimed at Dinny Johnny, but the moment was miscalculated, and it fell on “Matchbox” instead. The sharp blade gashed her hind quarter, but with a spring like a frightened deer she rose to the jump. For one supreme moment Dinny Johnny thought she had cleared it, but at the next her hind legs had caught in the branch, and with a jerk that sent her rider flying over her head, she fell in a heap on the road. Fortunately for Mr. Denny, he was a proficient in the art of falling, and though his hands were cut, and blood was streaming down his face, he was able to struggle up, and run on towards the cry of the hounds. There was still time; panting and dizzy, and half-blinded with his own blood, he knew that there was still time, and he laboured on, heedless of everything but the hounds. A high wall divided the covert from the lane, and he could see the gate that was the sole entrance to the wood on this side standing open. It was an iron gate, very high, with close upright iron bars and Chantress was racing him to get there first, Chantress, with all the pack at her heels.
Dinny Johnny won. It was a very close thing between him and Chantress, and that good hound’s valuable nose came near being caught as the gates clanged together, but Dinny Johnny was in first. Then he flung himself at the pack, whipping, slashing, and swearing like a madman, as indeed he was for the moment. He had often whipped for Mr. O’Grady, and the hounds knew him, but without the solid abetting of the wall and the gate, he would have had but a poor chance. As it was, he whipped them back into the field up which they had run, and as he did so, “Owld Sta’” came puffing up the hill, with about a dozen of the field hard at his heels.
“Poison!” gasped Dinny Johnny, falling down at full length on the grass, “the wood’s poisoned!”
When they went back to look for “Matchbox” she was still lying in the bohireen. Her bridle had vanished, and so had the pursuing countrymen. Mary O’Grady’s saddle was broken, and could never be used again, and no more could “Matchbox,” because she had broken her neck.
And so the hounds, whom she had saved, subsequently ate her; but one of her little hoofs commemorates her name, and as Mr. Denny, with its assistance, lights his after-dinner pipe, he often heaves an appropriate sigh, and remarks: “Well, Mary, we’ll never get the like of that pony again”.