The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [23]
Whenever Harry fell, the students gently poked fun at him, but he didn’t mind. That was the great thing about Mr. D; he never acted above the girls. That night, before going to sleep, Bonnie recorded the event in her diary: “Rode Chief—Olympic Course—wouldn’t go. I fell off. Mr. D got on. He fell off.” She would be sore the next morning, but Mr. D had taught her that you always get back in the saddle. A Spanish proverb says, “It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.” Harry de Leyer knew how to ride, and he knew how to fall, and he taught his girls the same lesson. It was not the trip into the dust that mattered, it was the way the girls got back on and rode again.
Harry still struggled with English, and one day, one of his crackerjack riders, Jackie Bittner, made him a deal: English lessons for riding lessons. If he would give her a little more time to ride, she would teach him to speak better English. Sure, Harry told Jackie, one of the youngest and bravest riders, teach me English. What’s the harm in that? He was happy to give any girl extra time to ride.
Not long after, Harry was summoned to the headmistress’s office. Miss Wood stood up, escorted him to a chair, and closed the door behind him. Harry’s world revolved around the barn. He felt awkward up in the manor house, conscious of his muddy boots and the horsey odor that clung to his wool coat. He held his hat on his knees and looked at Miss Wood’s long face with apprehension.
“Which girls have been teaching you words down at the barn?” she asked.
Harry hesitated for a moment before replying. He did not want to get his girls in trouble, but the question seemed innocent enough, and maybe Miss Wood wanted to praise the girls who were helping him. Helping others was held in high esteem at the Knox School.
“Well, Jackie has been giving me English lessons …”
Miss Wood frowned. “Very well, then,” she said. “Thank you for your time.”
The next day at the barn, Jackie didn’t come for her lesson; nor the next day, nor the next. Worried about his pupil, Harry asked the other girls what had happened. Was she sick? Had she left school? There were giggles and silence, and then one of the girls admitted the truth: Jackie had been confined to the infirmary for three days. Jackie’s “English lessons” to Harry had specialized in four-letter words.
Harry laughed to himself, secretly savoring the story. The girls made him laugh and helped him feel at home, despite the school’s rarefied environment. He liked spending time with them and the horses in the barn, and now he liked seeing his workhorse Snowman looking content, his head hanging over the Dutch door to watch the goings-on in the stable courtyard. Snowy had made a good transition to the barn at Knox, toting the girls around their lessons with his unflappable sense of calm. Among the thoroughbreds that belonged to the rich girls, Snowman stuck out—but Harry felt sympathy for the horse. Both of them knew the rigors of working a plow. Sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—Harry felt like an impostor. Snowman was an impostor, too. Harry had a hard time shaking the idea that his horse knew that he needed to be on his best behavior.
Not just weekdays were devoted to horses. One of the best things about the riding program was escaping the school on weekends. Many Sundays, Harry took the girls to meetings of the Smithtown Hunt. Foxhunting, a passion imported from the English, was a favorite pastime of the landed elite along the eastern seaboard, with strongholds on Long Island and in Pennsylvania and Virginia’s Piedmont. Foxhunting on Long Island dated back to the colonial period. The Meadowbrook Hunt, Long Island’s oldest hunt club, in nearby Old Westbury, boasted that General George Washington had been a member. Teddy Roosevelt extolled the pleasures of Long Island foxhunting in an 1886 article in Century Magazine. The Smithtown Hunt, the closest hunt club to the Knox School, had traditionally