literary gentleman goes pig-sticking

LOUIS GOLDING

in which the chivalry of algador contend with one another in feats of bloody mediæval valor

■ My friend, David Leith, is a literary gentleman. I should like to think there's no doubt either of the adjective or noun. He is also an inveterate traveller; and contessas and contesses, no less than countesses, spare no efforts to rope him in for their dinner-parties, their more informal dinner-parties. But he is so much more at home (he assures me wistfully) among stevedores and chorus-girls and gangsters and goatherds. What can a literary gentleman do about it?

When he went over to Algador, lately, in Africa, there was nothing at all he could do about it. Algador, I should say, is on the Moroccan coast over against Gibraltar. It was largely the fault of Jimmy Lion, the painter, and the charming house that he had, on a hill above Algador. He invited David to go and keep house with him; which David did. Now Jimmy is a very modish young man. He paints admirably, but dances divinely and not even Pierre, at the Crillon, mixes a more devilish cocktail. The countesses, contesses and contessas not merely have him at their parties. They buy his pictures. They wear synthetic pearls and buy his pictures.

The consequence of all this was that, before he knew where he was, poor David Leith was a butterfly on the wheel of the smart set of Algador, a mainly diplomatic smart set. The Great Powers have not yet made up their mind in what proportions the revenues from the casinos at Algador are to be divided. So Algador lives in a sort of international limbo, loud with the whirring of roulette-wheels, while the plenipotentiaries and ambassadors and diplomatic agents and consuls and vice-consuls, and the ladies of all these, dance and drink and shoot and play polo and race horses. And they stick pigs. Above all, they stick pigs.

I am wrong. It is not pigs they stick (David insisted mournfully). It is pig. For in the pig-sticking world it is as heinous to use the plural form "pigs" as it is heinous in fox-hunting circles to use the definite article "the" in conjunction with the noun, "hounds"; or as among Oxford men, it is heinous to speak of "New" when you mean "New College". We recapitulate. Hounds, severely unarticulated, break cover. One man is up at Queen's, his friend at New College. But more stringently, if he belongs to the smart world of Algador, he will go sticking pig—immaterial whether two pig or twenty. There is a lot more of this arcane pigsticking language, David tells me. Just as, if you have behaved with decorum, you may be "blooded" by the gory mask of the fox at your first kill, so at your first pig-stick, you may receive the pig's "tushes"—his tusks, that is to say. I am not sure that I spell that properly. Tusches? Tuhshes? I am no pig-sticker from Algador. And neither is my friend, David Leith. Really, he is not that sort of person. But from the moment he arrived on the terrace of Jimmy Lion's house in Algador, the pig-stickers were about him. The air was thick with the rumour of pig and the sticking of them. They told the most paralyzing stories of what happened at a pig-stick. Before you started, the quality of horsemanship it called for was just fabulous. You had to be a combination of Richard Cceur-de-Lion tilting at a tournament, with Frank Wootton taking a water-jump at the Grand National. You don't stick pig with pen-nibs. You use hefty mediaeval lances, like those that bristle in the canvases of Uccello. Then there are the pig themselves. From the pictures outlined by the pig-stickers over highball and sidecar, you got the idea of creatures slightly smaller than mammoths and slightly fiercer than tigers. The way their quills stood on end when you cornered them! The baleful glaring of their evil little eyes! Above all, the noise they made with the grinding together of their tushes! ("Like this!" said Archie Borgos. And he proceeded to make a noise beyond all the imagined scope of the phonofactive anatomy. A sawmill whined and a bullock roared, simultaneously. It was his chief contribution to the amenities of cocktail parties. He was of Hebrew extraction, and it was rumoured that the titan fury with which he stuck the pig was a Freudian compensation for the millenia of abstention from the flesh of that animal, imposed by his venerable creed. "Like this!" said Archie. "Isn't he priceless!" said Tom Poyndester, the British vice-consul.)

■ So when Borgos and Poyndester and the other pig-stickers of Algador suggested friendlily to David wouldn't he like to go to the last pig-stick of the season, what could David do? He went.

He went, I say. But he did not go with very happy feelings. He confessed that in point of fact he was acutely miserable. The first part was easy. It was early morning and all the pig-stickers went out in cars to the meet, about twenty miles from the ancient ramparts of Algador. The grooms had set out hours ago with the horses and the lances and the pack-mules and the enormous panniers in which the stuck pig were to be slung over the same. The beaters had set out very much earlier to beat all the pig in the thickets for miles around into the area to be hunted. It was beautiful country over among the sand-dunes fringing the Atlantic. The air was spicy with the odours of rosemary and myrtle and lentisk. The pigstickers dismounted from their cars. The horses whinnied and curtseyed and pawed the sand. David felt like eating it. The lances were lying in bundles, supported upon thick cushions of flowering rock-rose. The lance-heads glistened grimly in the blue air. David looked through the corner of his eyes to see what the initial proceeding was. You went up to a bundle of lances, picked them up by their middles one after the other, balanced them reflectively to see if they hung true, looked along their lines as you might along the barrel of a rifle, fingered the spear-head daintily and wisely. None of these exercises was beyond David's power. He went up nonchalantly and balanced and squinted and fingered with the best of them. Then he sauntered over to his mount, swinging the revolting thing as it might be a billiard-cue.

David is no great horseman. Even that overstates his prowess. He is rotten on a horse. Some of the other fellows held their lances while they leapt into the saddle. He would not be outdone by them. Clinging to the lance with one hand, seizing a fetlock by the other (he was not sure whether you called it a fetlock or a spavin) and shutting his eyes firmly, he too arrived upon his saddle. The morning was already full of the disgusting noises of beaters squealing, yelling, spitting, firing blank cartridges. The pig-stick was in progress. Tallyho! ("No, it was not Tallyho!" said David, passing his hand through his hair. "Yoicks? Attaboy? No!" he said wearily, "I have forgotten.")

■ It was all awfully mediaeval. Not only because of the lances and horses, and esquires holding your bridle-reins, but because the ladies of the pig-stickers had turned out in their smartest riding-kit, as to a tournament in the gold days of chivalry. David wondered what he would do about it if a large pig suddenly attacked Signora Roccapalumba, the chic little wife of the Italian envoy? Would he try the power of the human eye upon him (for he felt he could manipulate that instrument more formidably than his lance) ? The question for the moment did not arise. There was a sudden thickening of the beaters' tumult from a covert southward towards the shore. The horses plunged. The pig-stickers were away. The Signora Roccapalumba kissed her hands to them prettily. David was away. Despite all the conventions loosely referred to as gravitation, he kept his seat. He nearly stuck his lance into the spreading hips of the Baronin Gleichen von Steinbaden as he swept by. Only the Signora noticed it and her laughter tinkled out musically in the clear air.

There were no pig at all in the southward thicket. The alarm came suddenly from further inland. The cavaliers plunged off again, trampling the rock-roses and the seapink. The noise came from further than it seemed. There was a scrabbling up steep dunes and along stony water-courses that retained yesterday's heat and gaped for today's. The sun was gathering strength though it was still early. "Phew!" said David. The sweat trickled down his spine. "Phew!" said Archie Borgos, shaking the sweat from his pith-helmet.

There were no pig in the inland thicket. From eastward, from westward, the shrieking came and the firing of revolvers. But there were no pig. There were no pig. The Master of the pigstick had a face and temper as scarlet as paprika. "Confound those beaters!" he said. But he used another verb and inserted an adjective. Poyndester, the British vice-consul, started off with a refined Oxford accent. By ten o'clock he was bellowing like a bargee. Only David got happier as the day went on and the pig clung to their coverts and his clothes clung to his limbs like a bathing-suit. David got quite frisky. This was the sort of pig-sticking he appreciated. He waved his lance playfully. "I'll shew 'em!" he vowed. A noise of grinding suddenly impinged against his ear. He started convulsively. It was only the clack of the wings of a great cockchafer. Northward and southward plunged the pig-stickers after the phantom pig. There were no pig. There were no pig. When, exactly, the idea occurred to him (he does not swear to it now) David cannot decide. It was certainly before luncheon. But the idea occurred to him and he could not shake the idea from him, though it does him no credit.

Of course, there were no pig. What were the beaters there for? What had they gone out a day in advance for? What were they making these dreadful noises for? To see to it that there should be no pig! After all, it is no joke to come face to face with a wild boar slightly smaller than a mammoth and slightly fiercer than a tiger, with all his quills standing on end, and his tushes grinding, till a bloody froth foams among his nose-bristles! It is no joke. Pig-sticking is jolly good sport, but there are limits.

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Of course there were no pig. Despite the racking of all the bones in his body, and the pouring of the rivers of sweat, a great serenity fell upon David's spirit. A seraphic smile sat upon his lips. It lasted him all the way through luncheon, whither the trumpet of the Master's groom shortly summoned them. He was a greater social success at that al fresco party under the flowering thickets than he had ever been in the dining-rooms of Algador. The other men loured at him, notably the Italian envoy. The Signora Roccapalumba insisted on sharing his wine-glass. She was a trim little thing, in a Fascistic black riding-habit. She had eyes like black cherries. The Frau

Baronin Gleichen von Steinbaden was out of luck again. She very nearly sat down on a huge serpent, the colour of a raspberry sundae and very venomous. She was that sort of woman. But David dabbed her forehead with eau de Cologne and was altogether very helpful. He thought it a lovely luncheon-party, and only hoped it would go on till cocktail-time. There was any amount of stuff to make cocktails with. It was all so much nicer than this pig-sticking. And suppose some nasty old buck-pig had escaped the attention of the beaters and were still lurking in the neighbourhood? The pig-stickers attacked their caviar sandwiches and quail-pie glumly. "Shall we fill our glass again, Signora?" breathed David. The eyes like black cherries twinkled assent.

The Master looked at his watch. Two o'clock. "To your horses!" he bade curtly. The luncheon-party broke up.

So it started again, this pig-sticking business. It was much more unpleasant than before. It was hotter, colder, wetter and drier, all at the same time.

But David, despite the hideous pains that transfixed him, was struck dumb with admiration. He marvelled at the intensity with which the pig-stickers pretended to hunt pig which so manifestly were not there. (The distressing idea, you see, had completely taken possession of him.) The pig-stick was to conclude at four sharp. Never did time, so full of excitement though each separate minute was, drag along so desperately. Would it never be three o'clock? Ah, now, at length, at length, it was two minutes past three.

There were moments, David confesses, when the yelps of the beaters were so urgent and the pig-stickers pricked up their ears so sharply and thundered off to the coverts so fiercely, that he thought he might have been mistaken after all. Perhaps the idea really was to scare the pig on to the lances of the pig-stickers instead of away to the wilds of the Atlas Mountains. It was twenty-eight minutes past three. There were no pig. There were no pig. His spirit slipped into serenity again and his body from the saddle. He was so unspeakably exhausted that he had fallen asleep. He resumed his balance with a jerk. "Good dog!" he murmured, patting his beast's neck. It was a quarter-to-four.

David Leith was wrong. He was wrong to say there were no pig on that stretch of the Moroccan coast between Algador and Rabat. There, in point of fact, was a pig. It appeared at five minutes to four. The whole pig-stick was massed into a phalanx at the moment of its appearance, as if they were somehow convinced that even in these last minutes some monster might still emerge from his lair, who would need the thrust of all their combined lances. There were the Master and Tom Poyndester and the Herr Baron von Steinbaden and Archie Borgos and David Leith and all the other pig-stickers. On the crest of a sand-dune a hundred yards away, the ladies were gathered, waving their kerchiefs.

And then the pig appeared. It was not a very large pig. It was not larger than a large rabbit, and it was about as fierce. It was a dear little pig, a sweet pig, with trusting manners. It trotted out from the thicket and stood among the girdle of lances and twitched its pink snout inquisitively. And then Tom Poyndester held up his lance. "Hold back I " said the gesture. "This pig is a lady!" And pig-stickers do not attack ladies. The others held back. They lowered their lances. Then suddenly, with a wild cry, Tom Poyndester hurled himself and his steed and his lance upon the pig. He had reconsidered his judgment. It was a gentleman pig, after all. With cries not less wild—but they were cries of chagrin and envy and rage—the other pig-stickers hurled themselves upon the quarry too. For the first pigsticker to stick in his lance, receives the tushes—and Tom Poyndester had given himself a very useful start. The little pig was surprised. He had not expected such behaviour. He protested more in sorrow than in anger. Lancehead upon lance-head went home, deep between the quills. Still he looked about him, wondering whether some mistake had not been made. Then he lay down gently upon his side and the look in his small eyes changed. They meant it, these rude men. He would not die. He cried out again, but would not die. Till Archie Borgos at length leapt from his saddle and took out a jack-knife and gave the coupde-grace. The pig-stick was over. It was four o'clock.

They rammed the little fellow home into the smallest of the panniers that lay across the flank of the smallest of the mules. Like five meek banners of surrender rose the four pale little trotters and the little pink nose that twitched no longer. And the eyes of the Signora Roccapalumba were like large black cherries. But there was a mist upon the eyes of David Leith, the literary gentleman who went pigsticking. He took out a handkerchief from his breast-pocket and dabbed his eyes furtively.

And so the pig-stickers of Algador returned to Algador. There was to be a great ball that night, in the house of the Spanish Minister, to celebrate the pig-stick. A pig-stick ball. The odours of rosemary and lentisk came out in warm puffs from the crushed undergrowth. As the cortege approached the ramparts of Algador, three great storks glided towards them like pink clouds.