Array Коллектив авторов - 30 лучших рассказов британских писателей / 30 Best British Short Stories

When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking-horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy bright.

‘Now!’ he would silently command the snorting steed. ‘Now take me to where there is luck! Now take me!’

And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again, and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there. He knew he could get there.

‘You’ll break your horse, Paul!’ said the nurse.

‘He’s always riding like that! I wish he’d leave off!’ said his elder sister Joan.

But he only glared down on them in silence. Nurse gave him up. She could make nothing of him. Anyhow he was growing beyond her.

One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.

‘Hallo! you young jockey! Riding a winner?’ said his uncle.

‘Aren’t you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You’re not a very little boy any longer, you know,’ said his mother.

But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.

At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop, and slid down.

‘Well, I got there!’ he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.

‘Where did you get to?’ asked his mother.

‘Where I wanted to go to,’ he flared back at her.

‘That’s right, son!’ said Uncle Oscar. ‘Don’t you stop till you get there. What’s the horse’s name?’

‘He doesn’t have a name,’ said the boy.

‘Gets on without all right?’ asked the uncle.

‘Well, he has different names. He was called Sansovino last week.’

‘Sansovino, eh? Won the Ascot. How did you know his name?’

‘He always talks about horse-races with Bassett,’ said Joan.

The uncle was delighted to find that his small nephew was posted with all the racing news. Bassett, the young gardener who had been wounded in the left foot in the war, and had got his present job through Oscar Cresswell, whose batman he had been, was a perfect blade of the ‘turf.’ He lived in the racing events, and the small boy lived with him.

Oscar Cresswell got it all from Bassett.

‘Master Paul comes and asks me, so I can’t do more than tell him, sir,’ said Bassett, his face terribly serious, as if he were speaking of religious matters.

‘And does he ever put anything on a horse he fancies?’

‘Well – I don’t want to give him away – he’s a young sport, a fine sport, sir. Would you mind asking him himself? He sort of takes a pleasure in it, and perhaps he’d feel I was giving him away, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Bassett was serious as a church.

The uncle went back to his nephew, and took him off for a ride in the car.

‘Say, Paul, old man, do you ever put anything on a horse?’ the uncle asked.

The boy watched the handsome man closely.

‘Why, do you think I oughtn’t to?’ he parried.

‘Not a bit of it! I thought perhaps you might give me a tip for the Lincoln.’

The car sped on into the country, going down to Uncle Oscar’s place in Hampshire.

‘Honour bright?’ said the nephew.

‘Honour bright, son!’ said the uncle.

‘Well, then, Daffodil.’

‘Daffodil! I doubt it, sonny. What about Mirza?’

‘I only know the winner,’ said the boy. ‘That’s Daffodil!’

‘Daffodil, eh?’ There was a pause. Daffodil was an obscure horse comparatively.

‘Uncle!’

‘Yes, son?’

‘You won’t let it go any further, will you? I promised Bassett’

‘Bassett be damned, old man! What’s he got to do with it?’

‘We’re partners! We’ve been partners from the first! Uncle, he lent me my first five shillings, which I lost. I promised him, honour bright, it was only between me and him: only you gave me that ten-shilling note I started winning with, so I thought you were lucky. You won’t let it go any further, will you?’

The boy gazed at his uncle from those big, hot, blue eyes, set rather close together. The uncle stirred and laughed uneasily.

‘Right you are, son! I’ll keep your tip private. Daffodil, eh! How much are you putting on him?’

‘All except twenty pounds,’ said the boy. ‘I keep that in reserve.’

The uncle thought it a good joke.

‘You keep twenty pounds in reserve, do you, you young romancer? What are you betting, then?’

‘I’m betting three hundred,’ said the boy gravely. ‘But it’s between you and me, Uncle Oscar! Honour bright?’

The uncle burst into a roar of laughter.

‘It’s between you and me all right, you young Nat Gould,’ he said, laughing. ‘But where’s your three hundred?’

‘Bassett keeps it for me. We’re partners.’

‘You are, are you! And what is Bassett putting on Daffodil?’

‘He won’t go quite as high as I do, I expect. Perhaps he’ll go a hundred and fifty.’

‘What, pennies?’ laughed the uncle.

‘Pounds,’ said the child, with a surprised look at his uncle. ‘Bassett keeps a bigger reserve than I do.’

Between wonder and amusement, Uncle Oscar was silent. He pursued the matter no further, but he determined to take his nephew with him to the Lincoln races.

‘Now, son,’ he said, ‘I’m putting twenty on Mirza, and I’ll put five for you on any horse you fancy. What’s your pick?’

‘Daffodil, uncle!’

‘No, not the fiver on Daffodil!’

‘I should if it was my own fiver,’ said the child.

‘Good! Good! Right you are! A fiver for me and a fiver for you on Daffodil.’

The child had never been to a race-meeting before, and his eyes were blue fire. He pursed his mouth tight, and watched. A Frenchman just in front had put his money on Lancelot. Wild with excitement, he flayed his arms up and down, yelling ‘Lancelot! Lancelot! ’ in his French accent.

Daffodil came in first, Lancelot second, Mirza third. The child, flushed and with eyes blazing, was curiously serene. His uncle brought him five five-pound notes: four to one.

‘What am I to do with these?’ he cried, waving them before the boy’s eyes.

‘I suppose we’ll talk to Bassett,’ said the boy. ‘I expect I have fifteen hundred now: and twenty in reserve: and this twenty.’

His uncle studied him for some moments.

‘Look here, son!’ he said. ‘You’re not serious about Bassett and that fifteen hundred, are you?’

‘Yes, I am. But it’s between you and me, uncle! Honour bright!’

‘Honour bright all right, son! But I must talk to Bassett.’

‘If you’d like to be a partner, uncle, with Bassett and me, we could all be partners. Only you’d have to promise, honour bright, uncle, not to let it go beyond us three. Bassett and I are lucky, and you must be lucky, because it was your ten shillings I started winning with…’

Uncle Oscar took both Bassett and Paul into Richmond Parkfor an afternoon, and there they talked.

‘It’s like this, you see, sir,’ Bassett said. ‘Master Paul would get me talking about racing events, spinning yarns, you know, sir. And he was always keen on knowing if I’d made or if I’d lost. It’s about a year since, now, that I put five shillings on Blush of Dawn for him: and we lost. Then the luck turned, with that ten shillings he had from you: that we put on Singhalese. And since that time, it’s been pretty steady, all things considering. What do you say, Master Paul?’