The Unimportance of being Skinny.

Skinny has turned up again. He is one of those people who are either turning up or being turned down. Skinny provides little psychological solace through the naked eye, and he seems to exist in defiance of all evidence to the contrary; but his heart beats Romance like a tom-tom in a sound-proof cell. Skinny is happy to be Skinny in spite of the unimportance of being Skinny. Often the mediocre are made great by whisky, the timid made courageous by fear, the weak made strong by necessity, and the vacillating made firm by desperation; but Skinny recognises that he was merely made Skinny.

As a baby his nurse considered him a blemish on the fair face of the child-welfare movement, his mother nurtured him with misgivings, and his father blamed him on to his mother's people. At school, the part of him which answered the roll was subsersive of the part which sponsored the whole. While the principle imports, exports and disports of Anglomania were being subjected to cross-examination, Skinny's inward and invisible sighs were for the far white north, the far whiter south, the homicidal west, or east of east where the breakers pound the coral reef.

Since he left school, with nothing to his credit except what he had failed to learn, he has been searching for the elusive elements of which rainbow's feet are made.

Outwardly, Skinny is one of those people whom you would sue without evidence, arrest without attention, ignore without effort, and pass in passing. And yet his pursuit of Lady Lightfoot, the daughter of Illusion, has served to keep his head in the skies and his feet on the ground. Skinny could extract music from the scales of a fish, and beauty from a bag of “bull's eyes.” He has been all things to all men, but only one to himself. One of the many walks of life he has invaded was a run—a non-stop run in the Shepherd's Plate at the Roa Races (unregistered). Skinny was the jockey who rode Gentle Annie to victory, and then some.

Survival and Arrival.

This is the tale as propounded. It happened in the horse-days, before the horse-power daze. Skinny connected with Roa by coach, via mud, impecuniosity, and the urge to lap up the spirit of life “before Life's liquor in its cup be dry.”

Roa and environs were mostly environs, virile, vertical and untamed. When Skinny fell off the coach through his inability to identify one leg from the other, both being frozen south of the ham-strings, Roa was raving with the preparatory delirium of its annual race meeting. Skinny dropped in providentially, like a thistledown cast among cannon balls. In Roa, the light-weights tipped the bar at thirteen page 62

“He-he-men who laugh at the boy with a bulge.”

stone, the featherweights weighed in at eleven stone, whereas Skinny, at nine stone, was a disgusting example of forced feeding. At eight stone he personified the ideal state of muscle-bound moribundity pictured in the press by he-he-men who toss the scornful laugh at the boy who bulges. While Skinny essayed to sort himself up, a large chip of the old back-blocks, lavishly encrusted with barberous growth, ran a speculative eye over his geography. There was doubt in the large one's glance, yet hope.

“You looking for a job?” he rumbled. Skinny supported the supposition. “Do you ride?” asked the pioneering person, in the tone of one who says “of course you don't play golf.” “I do,” answered Skinny, like one taking the oath of submission at the altar. If “riding” is merely a matter of survival and arrival, Skinny could ride. He had “picked up” riding as one “picks up” influenza and statistics.

The large exhibit explained. It appeared that he owned a horse, name of Gentle Annie, which he had entered for the Shepherd's Plate. She was a good horse, but she hated weight like a dishonest grocer. Weight did not appear to be one of Skinny's secret vices. He was engaged to exhort Gentle Annie to victory.

Enter Gentle Annie.

Next morning Skinny had a private view of Gentle Annie in her natural haunts. At first it was difficult to say what constituted Gentle Annie and what constituted the haunts, for she was enjoying the bracing air by zooming round the pad-dock like a shell-shocked crayfish. It transpired eventually that she was a flaming chestnut, who looked as if she had been dipped in ox-blood. She had a white eye, and nostrils which palpitated like a pair of demented sea anemonies.

“We don't ride her much,” explained the boss.

“I don't blame us,” said Skinny.

“If she don't win the Plate, I'm a mug,” volunteered the boss.

“Me, too,” said Skinny.

He might have said “Sez you,” but it hadn't been vocabulated at that time.

“Well, give her a go and see how you get on together,” said the boss.

“Oh, I'm sure we'll get on like a horse on fire,” said Skinny.

Catching Gentle Annie was like lassoing a barrel of blanc mange without the barrel; but eventually it was accomplished, and Gentle Annie submitted quietly to the saddle but contemplated Skinny with an evil eye. When he mounted she appeared to rock with demoniac laughter. After turning her head to make sure that he was really on, she sprang ten feet sideways and ten forward. Then she stole another look to see if he were still among those present, slipped into “top” and proceeded to jerk junks out of the atmosphere. Skinny's synthetic grinders rattled like castinets at a Spanish casserole, five buttons left his trousers unanimously, and his spine played rag-time on the ceiling of his hat-

“Riding is a matter of arrival and survival.”

page 63 holder. But by perseverance and ignorance he remained more or less in touch with hindquarters. When Gentle Annie finally folded up her legs and came to earth Skinny was still on top.

Grit, Sand and the Turf.

Roa's racecourse was a nine-mile beach, and every mile was as smooth as the sales talk of a Grecian oil merchant. Everything transportable attended the races, including ten barrels of necessary enthusiasm, wives and sweethearts. The Shepherd's Plate was about to be run. Skinny was mounted. He patted Gentle Annie in a last attempt to heal the breach. She tried to bite his leg. The gun went off. One horse fell over and the remaining nine took off for the south. They bunched for a furlong, and then Gentle Annie drew ahead. Skinny's impression was that he was being hurled through a sand storm on a three-legged camel with delirium trimmings. He was too busy trying to keep abreast of events to see the scenery passing in leaps and bounds, or to hear the shouts emanating from the sandhills. Not his to reason why, but his to do or die—or both. After several years of sustained effort the galloping ball of sand and horse-flesh reached the judge, with Gentle Annie leading by a length. Unfortunately the judge had armed himself with a large red flag with which to signal when the race was run and won. As Gentle Annie pounded past she glimpsed the emblem of revolt from the corner of her wild white eye, and emitting a scream like an engine whistle with laryngitis, she turned her back on the sea and made for the beyond, beyond the beyond. Skinny's knees were so stiff from cramp that he could not have fallen off even had he so desired.

Travelling First-class-single on the railway

Skinny, like John Gilpin gallopin', threatened and cajoled, but Gentle Annie was as immune from the contagion of speech as a deaf mute at an auction sale. A lone cow-herd threw a bucket at them as they zoomed through his yard. Dogs chased them. Men cursed them; but no one stopped them. They missed disaster by a whisker a hundred times. Water hazards, bunkers, broken ground; they were as nothing to Gentle Annie; but she holed out at the hundredth-and-ninth. Skinny remembers little of the final fracture of their long association. He had a fair recollection of going up, and was sure that Gentle Annie wasn't with him at the moment. He remained poised like a “blimp” quiescent in a field of azure, for sufficiently long to admire the wonders of Nature; the descent was swifter, and terminated in a night attack accompanied by Verey lights, a barrage of gasometers, and a mine explosion. Then a very old gentleman, wearing white whiskers and a bunch of keys, demanded his gateticket. While he was searching for it, three other gentlemen with black whiskers, telling each other to handle him easy, lifted him into a cart.

This terminated Skinny's connection with the turf and the sport of kings.

But it's impossible to cure Skinny. His latest ambition is to get a job on the Railways as a shunter, his contention being that the iron horse is the only sort of horse on which you can ride in front and look where you're going, while you go where you're looking.