Chapter V (2)

By a diligent régime and much dumb-bell exercise Rivy hoped to be able to play polo in May. Meantime he was much perturbed by Francis’s wild schemes for 1911, for Francis, in almost every letter, urged the wholesale purchase of ponies. “You forget that to have fifty ponies you will want £20,000 a year. Unfortunately, some of us have a way of spending about three times as much as we have, and so it becomes necessary now and again to sell a pony. You write very foolish remarks about ‘you City chaps always wanting to sell ponies.’ If a mug happens to bid me £300 for ‘Sweetbriar’ I shall certainly sell her.” Early in April he had a touch of influenza, and his letters show it. “I have bought you the Empire typewriter that you asked for. Miss Friston says that it will take you some time probably to learn how to work it at any speed, but I say it will take you an eternity. I would suggest your writing some of your letters to your friends (except me) by it. I cannot think what you have bought it for, as the time you will be spending learning this you might have spent in learning how to outwit Wilhelm in the next Anglo-German war.” Again: “You always laugh at me over money, but it is time you realized that I only save because I know far more about it than you.... You have about £16,000 in the world, and get on it about £1,000 a year. How can you buy National horses, hunters, and the best polo ponies on that? You will, by spending more capital on horses, have less to invest, and so will have far less income. The only soldiers who ride steeplechases now are people like McCalmont, who has about a million, and George Paynter, who has £10,000 a year. These are facts, and cannot be got away from; so be content to be the best polo player in the best regiment, not a sort of mug steeplechase rider whom no one hears of, and who goes bust.” In letter after letter Rivy laboured to win Francis from his grandiose schemes and confine his ambitions to polo. He wanted to make up a first-class team in which he should play No. 1 and Francis No. 2; but Francis was obdurate. “I am going for the National,” he wrote, “the Grand Military, the Army P.-to-P., and our own Regimental cups. I will not hunt.”

In May came the famous 1909 Budget, on which Rivy’s comments show commendable moderation. “They have hit the rich from every corner, and so every one is crying out. Personally I think there is a great deal to be said in favour of these socialistic Budgets. Old Rothschild will not eat any less _foie gras_ because he has to pay a little more for his motor cars.” But books and politics and everything else were presently submerged, by the challenge of the American team. For the rest of the summer Rivy’s letters contained little besides polo, and even the student at Potchefstroom was stirred to enthusiasm. Rivy was tried for the English team, but did not ultimately get a place in it, for the committee thought that his operation had left him too weak. He accepted the decision loyally, and constituted himself the whole-hearted champion of the team ultimately chosen. The Americans greatly impressed him. “They have taken the place by storm. Money is absolutely no object at all. They have twenty-five ponies—all English except one, and all costing about £500 each. Instead of being bad players, as everybody expected, they are remarkably good, and their ponies are really wonderful. They not only have their own, but all the ponies that other millionaires have been buying during the last three years.”

In May he went for a week to Holland with Lord Grenfell and his sister-in-law. “He and I went out one morning early, and were looking at some rather nice biblical pictures in a shop window when we suddenly heard a terrific squealing. ‘By Jove,’ said the Uncle, ‘they are killing a pig.’ So off we went at top speed, to find some wretched pigs not being killed, as he had hoped, but being dragged from a high cart and being weighed for market. ‘Most instructive,’ said the Uncle. ‘I should never have known how to catch a pig.’ We went also to a diamond-cutting place, and saw where the Cullinan diamond was cut. It was difficult to get into, so I made the Uncle tell the Jew boy at the door that he was ‘Gold Stick in Waiting’ to the King. You never saw such a wonderful effect as it had on the nosy brigade. They showed us a cup given by the King, on which were inscribed the words: ‘To Benjamin, Joseph, and Moses Asscher, for services to the King of England’—which amused us very much indeed.”

After that there is nothing but polo. Rivy records how at one match he heard a lady in a stand saying, “Why do we not breed such ponies as that in this country? The Americans understand everything so much better than we do.” “Whose was the pony? None but the famous ‘Cinderella,’ sold by R. G. to the Americans at the end of last year. There is a good deal of rot like this being talked.” Rivy played very well in some of the trial matches, and for long it was a nice question whether he would not be chosen for England. He watched the performances of his old “Cinderella” with intense interest. “They play her in plain double bridle, but she does not seem quite so handy as when I had her. She has her near fore all wrapped up in cotton wool. I would laugh if she broke down, for, as a Jew once said, ‘Ze Christians have ze shares and ve ze cash’—the Yankees have the pony and I the cash, with which I bought two others.”

His letters about this time are so technical that they scarcely bear reprinting, but they seem to me to contain the complete philosophy of polo, and I have no doubt that Francis greatly benefited by them. Rivy had made up his mind that if the cup were lost he and Francis would make up a team which would recover it, and he studied every detail of every game, and especially the American method of pony management, with an acumen which might have made his fortune on the Stock Exchange. When the disastrous final match was played and the cup was lost, Francis wrote:—

“A very good letter from you full of how we are going to beat
the Yanks, but a telegram has appeared announcing England’s
defeat by 18 to 7.... I await your explanations. We must now
put our backs to it and go to America and get the cup back. It
will give us a dashed good goal to work up for, and all England
will give us a cheer. We must lie doggo for two or three years
and practise, practise, practise. Will you take it on? I have
never really laid myself out for polo as I am going to do now.
Every yokel here is discussing our defeat. I don’t suppose in
any colony there is a European who has not heard of it. So up,
ye men, and at ’em!”

Rivy’s comments on the final match seem to me very sound. “The American ponies are undoubtedly better than ours: they jump off quicker and go in quicker. As for the striking of the Americans, they hit the polo ball as if it were a racquet ball. They are truly wonderful. Whenever they get away they get a goal. This, as you know, is exceedingly rare on English ground. Freake and Pat Nickalls, whom I have always admired as fine hitters, are children compared with the Yankees. The extraordinary part is that ‘Cinderella’ has proved by far the best pony on the American side. I do not know what they have done with her, or whether the English ponies are worse than they were last year, but on all sides yesterday I kept hearing, ‘What a wonderful pony that is that Grenfell sold!’ All the papers seem to rub it in, and it seems funny to think that this pony was hawking round London last year for six weeks and advertised in the papers before the Yankees bought it. I am now perpetually asked, ‘Why on earth did you sell her?’ My only answer is, ‘Why on earth did I break my leg?’” He was very rightly furious at the attacks in the papers on the English team, especially before the final—“I thought it very unsportsmanlike of a decent paper to cut off the heads of the English players before they had gone on the field,”—and he wrote an excellent letter in the _Times_ on this point. He summed up the situation thus to Francis:—

“Whitney determined to try to win this cup four years ago. For
four years he has been collecting all the ponies he could, and
all his team has been trained to play together. The Waterburys
are two magnificent players. Larry is the champion racquet
player of America. They have played polo since they were ten,
and always together. To get the cup back we must do likewise.”

Among the many entertainments given to the American team was a luncheon at the Pilgrims’ Club, with Lord Grenfell in the chair. In the course of his speech he expounded the habits of his nephews. “I do not know if there is anybody present who is an uncle. If so I hope he has not been blessed with such nephews as the two that I have. One of them sits there; the other, thank Heaven, is engaged in South Africa. I have a small estate in the country where I hoped to feed and fatten some cattle and sheep. On my return from abroad I found some very thin cattle, some thinner sheep, and some extremely fat polo ponies. On making inquiries, my bailiff told me that he had received instructions that these ponies (sent down without my permission) were to be kept ‘in the field where the Uncle grows his hay.’ The result was that I had no grass; all the bark was torn from my trees; there was an enormous hole in my hayrick—which I think ‘Cinderella’ used as a bedroom; and in addition one day ‘Cinderella’ got loose and made a fine meal off my geraniums.”

I think it may fairly be said that of all polo players in England Rivy was the first to divine the secret of the American success, and to begin, laboriously and scientifically, to lay plans to win back the cup. He was very clear that it was no use attempting the thing in 1910, and that England must lie low until she had trained a team adequate for the purpose. His own dream was that that team should consist of himself as No. 1, Francis No. 2, Hardress Lloyd back, and either Bertie Wilson or Noel Edwards as No. 3. He estimated that it would take £15,000 to collect ponies. “If you and I practise hard together,” he wrote to Francis, “and discuss the thing every evening, we could, I am sure, become as good as the Waterburys. The whole American combination was due to them. They used to work out problems on the polo ground and then practise them.... It would be a big thing to do, and one worth _concentrating_ on; but if you are going to work for the Staff College and play this sort of polo, you must chuck all your other foolish ideas of steeplechasing.”

On 28th July he went to America for his firm, and stayed on his arrival with Mr. Devereux Milburn. With his host and the Waterburys he went down to Newport to see a match for the American Champion Cup. He was much struck by the hardness and fastness of the grounds, which reminded him more of India than of England. His conclusion was that the average American player was not good, and that the Meadowbrook team who had won the cup in England were in a class by themselves. He spent some pleasant weeks in America, busy in his American office and occasionally spending a Sunday with Jack Morgan. On their joint birthday he wrote to Francis: “I hope this is the last birthday for some years that we shall be separated. Twenty-nine seems dashed old to me; twenty-seven and twenty-eight always sounded young, but at twenty-nine we should start and be up and doing. I am getting on very well in my firm, and have really a great chance in the future. I made £1,500 this year, but, like an idiot, speculated last Christmas and lost some money and also spent about £2,000. Why do we spend such an infernal amount?” He varied his business with reading a good deal of Shakespeare, and Bryce’s _American Commonwealth_. One day he met an old Eton friend. “He amused me enormously, for he had, of course, got interested in a wonderful invention. Most people here are interested in large development schemes, but, just like a thin-headed Englishman, he has got a patent for closing whisky bottles. I did not like to suggest to him that the majority of people I met were searching for patents to open them.”

About the middle of September he came back to England to dispose of a new business which his firm had acquired, where he found his groom in despair over Francis’s African ponies, which had just arrived. “He wants to know what language they understand, as they don’t seem to answer to English.” At home he got the news of Francis’s success in his examination. “I never was so surprised in my life as to find that you had qualified in everything. You must have become a sort of encyclopædia, for there was not one word in any paper that I could have answered. It seems astounding what one can learn by hard work, for I have always felt that you would never pass anything except possibly the entry exam. into Eton!”

On 16th October he left again for America, and in the first week of November attended a dinner given to the American polo team. There he made a speech which was a huge success.

“These fellows have a pleasant way of suddenly calling upon you
for a speech; so, as I was anxious to do it properly, I worked
hard, not only at the words but at the delivery. At the dinner
there were two hundred people collected from all parts of the
U.S.A.—army officers from Wyoming, Canadian officers, Mr. Root
(a member of the Cabinet), Mr. Bacon (Secretary of State), Mr.
Milburn (head of the Bar), etc. I was not down to speak, and
luckily the speeches were all very bad, with no jokes. I sat on
the dais and was several times referred to, so that I felt I
ought to say something. At the beginning of dinner I had told
the chap next to me that Englishmen were very poor speakers. He
said that it came quite natural to most Americans; so I said
that nothing in the world scared me so much, and that I could
not do it. Just before the end of the last speech I told him I
felt I ought to say something, but did not know what to say.
He thought it a capital joke, and sent a message to Whitney
to call on me. I got up and, funnily enough, did not feel a
bit nervous. It is an extraordinary feeling when you get hold
of an audience. They roared at my jokes, much appreciated my
references to Whitney and the way we admired him, and finally,
when I sat down after fifteen minutes without a check, they
all stood up and sang, ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow.’ Mr.
Root congratulated me, and Mr. Bacon said he had rarely heard
a speech better delivered. I had to shake hands with everybody
there. The Canadians were delighted that a Britisher should
make a far better speech than any Yankee. My pal who sat next
me told every one I had said I could not speak at all, and that
I was quite unprepared. He thought me a sort of Demosthenes.
Wasn’t it luck? Francis Fitzgibbon was told on the Cotton
Exchange next day ‘that an Englishman had made the best speech
that was ever heard of.’”

Altogether Rivy had a very pleasant time in America, getting through a great deal of business and making innumerable friends. Among his recreations he rated high the privilege of roaming through Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s private library. “Some of the things simply took one’s breath away, and I am surprised that the British Museum allowed them to get out of the country. He has all Macaulay’s original letters and manuscripts, also Walpole’s, Thackeray’s, and Dickens’s, etc., with scratchings out and alterations made with their own pens. Mr. Morgan, senior, is a jolly old boy with a very determined look. He has told me to go and see his library whenever I like.”

Meantime Francis, having finished his labours, thought of relaxation. He departed in the end of August for Barotseland in company with M. Chevally, the French Consul at Johannesburg. When they got into the lion country on the Kafue his companion grew restless. “I sleep in his tent. He got up three times in one night and asked my hunter if that was a lion, as he thought he heard a moan. Last night I said, ‘It is so hot; let us have the tent open.’ ‘All right,’ he said, but the moment he thought I was asleep he got up and laced the tent down.” M. Chevally, who had not come out to hunt, presently returned home, and Francis went northward into the thick bush of the Kafue region. His letters to Rivy are filled with the usual details of African hunting, and in deference to his brother’s profession he intercalates observations on trade. “The few traders I have seen are remarkable for their lack of organization. I have met four. All are broke, and yet at times make £5,000 a year.” He greatly admired his hunter, “an old filibuster who used to trade in poached ivory. He has had over £30,000 to his credit, but is now, like most, broke. He is a sort of Starlight in _Robbery under Arms_, and has twice been tried for murder. He began, as in novels, by being shipwrecked off Quilimane in 1869 or thereabouts, the Portuguese being then at war with the natives. A Jew in Quilimane supplied the natives with powder, which my chap carried through to them and was paid £1,000.”

After leaving the Kafue Flats he rejoined the railway and went on to Broken Hill, whence he intended to trek towards Lake Nyassa. So far he had done fairly well with buck, having got eland, lechwe, roan, reedbuck, oribi, and wildebeest. At Broken Hill he was entertained by Charles Grey,[12] and had much trouble with his hunter, who was drunk for two days. “I have been in the most awful places after him. He broke into my chest and got rid of four bottles of brandy.”

In the beginning of October he was on the Loangwa River. “Charming country, big rivers, high hills, good trees; but Providence (Whose doings we cannot understand) has provided a Tsetse Fly that worries you all day.” There he got a charging rhino at about twenty yards, and had a stiff hunt after that most dangerous of quarries, the African buffalo. “I led the attack, cleared for action, with a nigger behind me to keep me on the spoor. We went through very high thick grass, like that stuff we got tiger out of in India. The niggers at first refused to go in. After seven hours’ pursuit we passed a tree up which, luckily, we put a nigger, and so spied the buffalo lying down fifty yards ahead. I climbed the tree like a monkey and killed him. The whole hunt lasted eight hours: we started just before daylight on the spoor, and killed the buffalo at 1.30—walking all the time in the middle of a Central African summer.” A little later he tried for an elephant, but had no luck, though he had four separate hunts, each taking about four days’ hard walking. Presently he came to the conclusion that he had had enough of it. “It made my mouth water,” wrote Rivy, “to hear that you were surrounded by about 6,000 big game, while I am surrounded by about 6,000 big noses of the Jewish fraternity.” But hunting, as Francis found it, was too monotonous a pursuit to satisfy him indefinitely. “It is extraordinary what regular walking does. I look on fifteen miles as nothing. Last week I did twenty miles and shot a hippo after it before sundown. That means a walk from Wilton Park to Ascot.” This is the young gentleman who in India had decided that Providence did not mean him to use his legs otherwise than on horseback! On his journey down country he did 150 miles on foot in six and a half days. On the 8th of November he was back in Potchefstroom. “I am exceedingly glad I have done the trip, but somehow I do not feel very anxious to do it again. But it has been a most thorough mental rest.”

The effects of the mental rest and the hard training which Francis had enjoyed were speedily apparent in his letters home. He discovered in himself a strong disinclination to turn his attention to books. His thoughts were all now on physical culture, on polo, and on his approaching return to England. He pled with Rivy to buy ponies, all of the best and as many as possible. “If you will not spend the money yourself, for Heaven’s sake spend mine.” He repudiated with scorn the suggestion that he should write of his Central African experiences in a magazine. “Don’t you become a Jew boy,” he told his brother, “because you live among them. I will never, never write to a magazine. Nothing does a soldier more harm. Every person has his own job, and the successful man is he who knows what is his and sticks to it. Literature and money-making are not mine, and I intend to interfere in neither. I think you are very ill-advised to be always looking for cheap advertisement.” The great sporting events for which he intended to enter monopolized his mind. At a boxing match, observing that one of the combatants sipped champagne between rounds, he came to the conclusion that even a teetotaller like himself might benefit by a little dope before a big match, so he implored Rivy to get the best medical opinion on the subject. He was not prepared to abate one jot of his ambitions. “You will be miserable,” he wrote in his Christmas letter, “to hear that I have definitely decided to try to win the National in 1911 and 1912. So my next few years will be busy to become (1) best polo player at No. 2; (2) to win the National; (3) to become a p.s.c. Best love, old boy; don’t become too studious, or you will become too old too soon.... Please stop going to theatres until I arrive, as it is miserable to come home full of cheer to find a _blasé_ brother whose method of entertainment is to give you a dinner at the Bath Club! We are going to have none of that. We will kick off at the Ritz, and laugh at the Gaiety.” In this mood of vaulting ambition and ecstatic vitality Francis’s period of soldiering abroad reached its close.