Kitabı oku: «Маленькая хозяйка большого дома / The Little Lady Of The Big House», sayfa 3
“Man,” Graham laughed, “you could make a poem about the water. I’ve met fire-worshipers, but you’re the first real water-worshiper I’ve ever encountered …”
Graham did not complete his thought. From the right, not far away, came a mighty splash and an outburst of women’s cries and laughter. They emerged in a blaze of sunshine, on an open space among the trees, and Graham saw an unexpected a picture.
And in the center of the pool, vertical in the water, struck upward and outward into the free air, while on its back, slipping and clinging, was the figure form, Graham realize that it was a woman who rode the horse. Her slim round arms were twined installion-mane21, while her white round knees slipped on the sleek.
Graham realized that the white wonderful creature was a woman, and sensed the smallness and daintiness of her. She reminded him of someDresden china figure22 set absurdly small and light and strangely on the drowning back of a titanic beast.
Her face smote Graham most of all. It was a boy’s face; it was a woman’s face; it was serious and at the same time amused. It was a white woman’s face—and modern; and yet, to Graham, it was all-pagan. This was not a creature and a situation one happened upon in the twentieth century.
The stallion sank. Glorious animal and glorious rider disappeared together beneath the surface, to rise together, a second later.
“Ride his neck!” Dick shouted. “Catch his foretop and get on his neck!”
The woman obeyed. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped back to the shoulders.
“Who … who is it?” Graham queried.
“Paula—Mrs. Forrest.”
“My breath is quite taken away23,” Graham said. “Do your people do such things frequently?”
“First time she ever did that,” Forrest replied.
“Risked the horse’s neck and legs as well as her own,” was Graham’s comment.
“Thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of neck and legs,” Dick smiled. “That was the price the breeders offered me for the horse last. But Paula never has accidents. That’s her luck. We’ve been married ten or a dozen years now, and, do you know, sometimes it seems to me I don’t know her at all, and that nobody knows her, and that she doesn’t know herself.”
