The
Rocking-Horse Winner (I)
by D. H. Lawrence
D.
H. Lawrence wrote many short stories concerned with social problems
of his time. In the short story given below, a boy tried to
win love from his mother. What did the boy do? Did he succeed?
Please read the following.
There
was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages,
yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned
to dust. She had bony children, yet she felt they had been
thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked
at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And
hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself.
Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless,
when her children were present, she always felt the center
of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner
she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children,
as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that
at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could
not feel love, no, not for anybody. Everybody else said of
her: "She is such a good mother. She adores her children."
Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was
not so. They read it in each other's eyes.
There were a boy and two little girls. They
lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet
servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighborhood.
Although
they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house.
There was never enough money. The mother had a small income,
and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for
the social position which they had to keep up. The father
went in to town to some office. But though he had good prospects,
these prospects never materialized. There
was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though
the style was always kept up.
At last the mother said:" I will see if I
can't make something." But she did not know where to begin.
She
racked her brains, and tried this thing and the other, but
could not find anything successful. The failure made deep
lines come into her face. Her children were growing up, they
would have to go to school. There must be more money, there
must be more money. The father who was always very handsome
and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be
able to do anything worth doing. And the mother, who had a
great belief in herself, did not succeed any better, and her
tastes were just as expensive.
And so the house came to be haunted by the
unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more
money! The children could hear it all the time, though nobody
said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive
and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern
rocking-horse, behind the smart doll's house, a voice would
start whispering: "There must be more money! There must be
more money!" And the children would stop playing, to listen
for a moment. They would look into each other's eyes, to see
if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the
other two that they too had heard. "There must be more money!
There must be more money!"
It came whispering from the springs of the
still-swaying rocking-horse and even the horse, bending his
wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so
pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly,
and seemed to be smirking all the more sell-consciously because
of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the
teddy-bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for
no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over
the house: "There must be more money!"
Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper
was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no
one ever says: "We are breathing!" in spite of the fact that
breath is coming and going all the time.
"Mother," said the
boy Paul one day, "why don't we keep a car of our own? Why
do we always use uncle's, or else a taxi?"
"Because
we're the poor members of the family," said the mother.
"But why are we, mother?"
"Well─I suppose," she said slowly and bitterly,
"it's because your father has no luck."
The boy was silent for some time.
"Is luck money, mother?" he asked rather timidly.
"No, Paul. Not quite. It's what causes you
to have money."
"Oh!" said Paul vaguely. "I thought when Uncle
Oscar said filthy lucker, it meant money."
"Filthy lucre does mean
money," said the mother. "But it's lucre, not luck."
"Oh!" said the boy. "Then what is luck,
mother?"
"It's what causes you to have money. If you're
lucky you have money. That's why it's better to be born lucky
than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money. But if
you're lucky, you will always get more money."
"Oh! Will you? And is father not
lucky?"
"Very unlucky, I should
say," she said bitterly.
The boy watched her with unsure eyes.
"Why?" he asked.
"I don't know. Nobody ever knows why one person
is lucky and another unlucky."
"Don't they? Nobody at all? Does nobody
know?"
"Perhaps God. But He never
tells."
"He ought to, then. And aren't you lucky either,
mother?"
"I can't be, if I married an unlucky
husband."
"But by yourself, aren't
you?"
"I used to think I was, before I married.
Now I think I am very unlucky indeed."
"Why?"
"Well─never mind! Perhaps I'm not
really,"
she said.
The child looked at her, to see if she meant
it. But he saw, by the lines of her mouth, that she was only
trying to hide something from him.
"Well, anyhow," he said stoutly,
"I'm a lucky person."
"Why?" said his mother, with a sudden laugh.
He stared at her. He didn't even know why
he had said it.
"God told me," he asserted, brazening it out.
"I hope He did, dear!" she said, again with
a laugh, but rather bitter.
"He did, mother!"
"Excellent!" said the mother, using one of
her husband's exclamations.
The boy saw she did not believe him; or, rather,
that she paid no attention to his assertion. This angered
him somewhat, and made him want to compel her attention.
He went off by himself, vaguely, in a childish
way, seeking for the clue to "luck." Absorbed, taking no heed
of other people, he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking
inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted
it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery,
he would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into
space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him
uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair
of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The
little girls dared not speak to him. 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," 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.
"Honor
bright?" 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, honor 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! Honor
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 four 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.
Honor bright!"
"Honor 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, honor 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 ..."
(2 379 words)
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