The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [21]
Harry de Leyer, riding instructor. (illustration credits 5.3)
One day, Bonnie was riding one of the new horses in the stable, Chief Sunset. Like many of the horses Harry bought, he had a streak of brilliance almost equally counterbalanced by some terrible flaw—a flaw serious enough to have put him within Harry’s price range. Chief was an off-the-track thoroughbred with bloodlines that traced to Man o’ War, but the stallion was hot-tempered and difficult. Only Bonnie was good enough to ride him. The horse was especially unruly that day, and she could not get him to settle down in the ring. He pulled and bucked, refusing to listen to her commands.
Mr. D told her to take Chief outside the ring and let him go at a flat-out gallop across the fields, to work off some of his steam. Bonnie, who was having enough trouble managing the horse within the confines of the ring, told him that she didn’t want to do it. She braced herself for his reaction, but to her relief, he just smiled.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
Swinging lightly onto the horse’s back, he guided the stallion out of the fenced riding ring and into the big open field beyond. Rising up in his stirrups into the galloping position, Harry let the horse out to his full speed—the flat-out gallop that is sometimes described as a run. Not a pace normally used by amateur riders, it’s the gait typically seen on a thoroughbred racecourse. Fleet of foot, this thoroughbred stretched out across the field, with Harry crouched close to his wind-whipped mane. To Bonnie, it was a breathtaking sight.
A few minutes later, he slowed the horse and circled him back to where his student stood, in awe of the unleashed speed she had just witnessed. Sure enough, when the horse got back in the ring, he was calm and well-mannered, for once. Harry hopped off and tossed the reins to her with a smile and a twinkle in his blue eyes.
“You gotta talk Dutch to him, Bonnie.”
The teenager sheepishly climbed back on the horse, disappointed in herself for not rising to the challenge. As promised, the horse behaved like a gentleman for the rest of the afternoon.
The girls may have learned manners and deportment, Latin and French from their mistresses, but under Mr. D’s friendly but exacting eye they learned courage.
Harry’s life had taught him that sometimes courage is needed—not manners, not breeding and white gloves and nice coats, but the bravery to do what is required of you when the going gets tough. Harry had first learned courage as a small boy, looking between the ears of a horse at a fast gallop, not knowing that the same daring would someday lead him past Nazi checkpoints. He fervently hoped that these girls would never have to display courage when bullets were flying, and that war would never come to this place, but no one who had lived through the terrible war in Europe could afford to be naïve.
Harry was determined to teach his girls to be brave, to be tough. You never knew what life would throw your way. Out in the field, over the outside course, the girls flew, balanced in their stirrups at a fast gallop, wind whipping into their faces. Harry liked nothing better than leading the girls on a breakneck gallop across woodland and field, riding in a pack, taking fences as they came, adapting seat and balance to uneven terrain—these were the skills needed to foxhunt, and these were the skills he wanted for his girls. From the school, you could ride all the way to the beach or into St. James—though the girls got demerits for leaving the school grounds without permission. Harry had noticed