The Rocking-Horse Winner

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 bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love — not for anybody. Everybody else said of her: "She is such a good mother. She adores her children." Only she and her children knew it was not so. They read it in each other's eyes.

The family lived in a pleasant house with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood. But there was always anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The father went into town to some office; the mother tried this and that; but their small income was nowhere near enough for the social position they had to keep up. 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, behind the shining new toys. Even the rocking-horse, bending his wooden head, seemed to be listening. It whispered from the springs of the still-swaying horse; the big doll heard it; the puppy heard it: There must be more money!

One day the boy, Paul, asked his mother: "Mother, why don't we keep a car of our own? Why do we always use uncle's?" "Because we're the poor members of the family," she said. "But why are we, mother?" "Well — I suppose," she said slowly and bitterly, "it's because your father has no luck." Paul was silent for a moment. "Is luck money, mother?" "No, Paul. Not quite. 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." "Well, anyhow," Paul 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. And he went off by himself, wanting to find luck — seeking it inwardly, on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, riding and riding until he got there.

Paul's secret ally was Bassett, the young gardener, who had been wounded in the war and had got his present job through Uncle Oscar. Bassett was a keen follower of the racing news, and the boy talked horses with him endlessly. One day Uncle Oscar took Paul for a ride in his car and asked, casually, about the racing. He discovered, to his astonishment, that the boy and the gardener were partners — and that they were winning. Paul had started with ten shillings Bassett had put on for him; now, said the child calmly, he had three hundred pounds in reserve. "When I'm sure," Paul explained, "like about Daffodil, we go strong, for all we have. When I'm not sure, we're careful. Are you a lucky uncle, would you like to be partners?"

Uncle Oscar, half-amused and half-serious, became a partner. At the Lincoln races, Daffodil came in first at four to one. Paul's face was blazing with a strange, quiet fire. He had made ten thousand pounds. "You see," he told his uncle, "when I'm absolutely sure — then we go strong." "But how do you know?" Oscar asked. "I don't know," said the boy uneasily. "I'm absolutely sure — and then it's as if I knew, uncle; that's all." How did he get sure? Riding his rocking-horse, furiously, until the charging wooden gallop carried him to the place where the name of the winner simply — arrived.

Paul had a plan for the money. "I started it for mother," he told his uncle. "She said she had no luck, because father is unlucky; so I thought if I was lucky, it might stop the whispering." "What whispering?" "Our house. It whispers — about money. I hate it. I thought if I was lucky…" So they arranged, through the family lawyer, for the mother to receive five thousand pounds — a thousand a year on her birthday, from an unknown relative. But on the morning of her birthday, the mother's face was cold and expressionless; and by afternoon she had been to the lawyer and asked whether the whole five thousand could be advanced at once. She got it — and the house went mad. There were new furnishings, a tutor for Paul, flowers in winter, luxury everywhere. And the voices in the house did not stop. They went suddenly mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening, screaming behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom: There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w — there must be more money! — more than ever! More than ever!

The secret certainty began to fail him. He didn't "know" for the Grand National, and lost a hundred pounds. He didn't "know" for the Lincoln, and lost fifty. He grew wild-eyed and strange, as if something were about to explode in him. "Don't worry about it, son," Uncle Oscar urged. But the boy seemed not to hear. "I've got to know for the Derby!" he insisted. His mother, feeling a strange anxiety about him at last, told him he ought to be sent to the seaside, away from the racing. "Not before the Derby, mother!" he pleaded. She noticed, uneasily, how his eyes blazed; and she noticed, too, that he had had his rocking-horse — a boy of nearly fourteen — moved up to his own bedroom at the top of the house. "Surely you're too big for a rocking-horse!" she had said. "Well, you see, mother, till I can have a real horse, I like to have some sort of animal about," was his quaint answer.

Two nights before the Derby, at a big party in town, the mother was seized by one of her rushes of anxiety about the boy — anxiety so strong she could hardly speak. She rang the house: "Are the children all right, Miss Wilmot?" "Oh, yes, they are quite all right." But close to midnight she and her husband drove home, and she stole upstairs to her son's room. Outside the door she stopped and listened. There was a strange, heavy, and yet not loud noise. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. Frozen with fear, she gently turned the door-handle. The room was dark — yet by the window she heard and saw something plunging to and fro. She switched on the light: there was her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse. "Paul!" she cried. "Whatever are you doing?" "It's Malabar!" he screamed in a powerful, strange voice. "It's Malabar!" And he fell with a crash to the ground, unconscious, into the brain-fever that possessed him for days and nights.

Paul lay critically ill, tossing and talking of horses, while his mother sat stone-hearted with grief by his bed. Bassett — allowed in for one moment — whispered to the boy that Malabar had come in first: Paul's stake, at fourteen to one, had won him over seventy thousand pounds; with what he had before, more than eighty thousand in all. "Malabar came in all right, Master Paul." "Did I say Malabar, mother?" the boy cried, struggling up. "Do you think I'm lucky, mother? I knew Malabar, didn't I? Over eighty thousand pounds! I call that lucky, don't you, mother? … Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!" "No, you never did," said his mother. But the boy died in the night. And as she sat, her brother's voice came to her: "My God, Hester, you're eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner."