“All right, all right.”
The chess game was at an impasse. Herr Braun spoke in an aside to Kurt. “An intermission will do us both good.” Then he turned to Hans. “You’ve got to think the second levitation,” he said, leaning back in his chair, squinting through half-closed eyes. “You’ve got to think it before the first one is done. Think it right through your hands and legs and seat into Borina’s being. Suppose you give yourself an examination. Write down precisely what you should do and when. Then tomorrow, do it! Sometimes it can be as simple as that.”
Sitting on the bed, writing as fast as his pencil would go, Hans finished his list in less than ten minutes. After showing it to Herr Braun, he tucked it under his pillow. His sleep that night was dreamless, but even so the written words seemed to work magic. The next day Hans put them into action. To his utter joy Borina executed two spectacular leaps, one right after the other!
The aftermath was electrifying. When, next month, the programs were printed, Hans’s name appeared twice. In the quadrille, of course, but where it mattered was in the seventh event: “Airs Above the Ground.” There, in big black bold type was Borina’s full name Maestoso Borina, and directly opposite, Rider-Candidate Haupt.
Chapter 25
ONE BEAM OF SPLENDOR
Now event followed event, like a string of popping firecrackers when you light the fuse. Kurt and Hans both were fitted for full-dress uniforms, bright scarlet with gold epaulets and yards of gold braid. And their heads were measured for new bicorn hats, in rich black with a golden cockade.
“But why?” Hans asked the tailor. “I thought the dress uniforms were worn just on special occasions. Like visiting royalty.”
“Ja, I thought so too,” Kurt chimed in, “or maybe some celebration out of history.”
The tailor, a little penguin of a man with a tape measure tied about his middle, made a steeple of his flipper-like hands. “And what,” he asked through a mouthful of pins, “could be more special than the visit of England’s Prince of Wales? There’s a man who has a good tailor!”
Kurt whistled in astonishment.
Hans’s lips made an “O” but he couldn’t get a sound to come out. To perform the courbette before royalty! If only his father could know.
He had little time to think in the few days before Sunday’s gala performance. All hands were needed to polish every knob of brass, every marble crib, every square of window, every shiny plate of gold on every piece of tack. Morning lessons, of course, went on as usual, the discipline no more stern, no less.
Early in the week Hans made up his mind that his mother must see this special performance. Then in a burst of generosity he decided to include the whole family. In the end he dug deep into his earnings and bought six tickets. It was funny, he thought, how differently each person reacted to his gift. His mother cried into her apron. Anna hugged him. Jacques did a cartwheel right in the kitchen. Henri twisted his mustache; for once he was wordless and slapless. The policeman on the Josefsplatz clapped Hans on the shoulder. And Fräulein Morgen fortified him with a look that said, “I knew you could do it; and on Sunday you will.”
When the day arrived, Hans, elegant in his new uniform, peeked into the empty Riding Hall to see if anything was different. He stopped short at the entrance, transfixed by what he saw. Swags of red-and-white bunting draped the lower gallery and were seemingly stabbed into place by great sheafs of live red roses. The reds were all alike; they even matched his own bright coat. He stood there a moment watching two men raking the sand and sawdust. It looked deep and soft. But when you were dumped off, it didn’t feel soft. He flushed, remembering.
He sniffed the air in excitement. It was almost time for the visitors’ door to open. He left the hall and went to the stable to see if Borina was ready. He looked over the stanchion and saw that he already wore the red velvet saddlepad trimmed with gold and the white deerskin saddle. An elderly groom stood by with bridle in hand. “How does it feel, Hans,” he asked, “to be a Rider-Candidate and not have to do your own tacking any more?”
“I miss it,” Hans confessed. “I like the way Borina reaches for the bit and clamps onto it as if he can’t wait to get out and perform.”
“Here then, you do it this morning. For luck.”
Hans removed his white gloves. He took the gold-trimmed bridle, and standing at Borina’s side he slipped the reins over the stallion’s head, and offered the bit. Borina took it of his own accord.
“Ja, he should take it easy, like that,” the groom nodded. “He’s got experience.”
The groom left. Borina and Hans stood eye to eye. They smelled the smells of each other. Borina blew the softest, whisperiest, hay-scented breath in Hans’s face. Why don’t people have such sweet breath, he wondered. He put on his gloves and rested his hands lightly on Borina’s rump. Now came the interminable time of waiting, doing nothing. They sighed in unison as they had done backstage at the opera.
All at once Hans straightened. Without really hearing it he was suddenly aware of music—solemn, festive, splendid—the entrance march. And he saw the Riding Hall in his head, not grand and empty, but grander, with the Prince of Wales looking young and elegant in the Imperial Box; and he saw both galleries full to bursting, and his own family in the left top gallery, level with the first chandelier; and Fräulein Morgen at the near end, facing the portrait of Charles VI. Hans placed them exactly in his mind as if they were chessmen. Then he would not be tempted to look up when his turn came.
So there was the whole audience, royalty and all, leaning over the red-velvet railing, eyes gazing fixedly on the first event. He thrust his hand in the inner pocket of his bright red coat and drew out the program. He knew it by heart but he read again.
The first number. Young Stallions. Six of them. He let his inward eye run over the youthful iron-gray fellows going through their paces—the collected trot, the extended trot, muscles rippling, hindquarters beginning to show power and propulsion. The picture in his mind stopped abruptly as four stallions were led past him on their way to the Riding Hall. They were next.
Excitement mounting, Hans suddenly couldn’t endure the waiting. He moved away from Borina, stepped outside the stall, not wanting him to catch any part of his nervousness. He tried to wear blinders, but the whole glittering pageant seemed unwinding like a reel in his head. He saw the four middle-aged stallions doing all of the turns and paces of haúte école. He saw even their tails fanning out in beautiful rhythm as they danced in circles and half-circles. He saw the pas de trois, the little drill of three with Colonel Podhajsky leading the maneuvers. He saw the horses step and pace and two-track, and he heard the applause and the music. And he lived through the work on the short hand-rein, and on the long, and he fancied he heard the gasp of the people, astonished that a man dare walk so close to a stallion’s hindquarters.
And then at last he was in the anteroom to the arena—he and Kurt and Bereiter Wittek and the others, all mounted and ready. Now violins and cellos playing the Wiener Blut were sweeping them into the hall. And so they entered in the high feather step of the passage, the prelude to the “Airs Above the Ground.”
It is the moment the audience has awaited. They clap their hands in anticipation. Borina’s ears prick sharply. He is stimulated by the applause, beautified by it. Hans can feel the steady beating of Borina’s heart between his knees. He can feel the airiness of his steps.
Hans is not aware of the audience. He is aware only that Time is racing away. The moment cannot last. He is riding in harmony with Borina, adapting himself to Borina’s rhythm. The other stallions are performing their aerial routines, one by one, while he and Borina walk in quiet rhythm, awaiting their turn.
Bereiter Wittek now puts his horse into the marbled beauty of a levade. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds. The applause bursts. When it dies he nods to Hans.
The time is now. The time for the courbette.
Hans guides Borina to the center of the arena. In a shaft of sunlight, more da
zzling than spotlight, everything suddenly dissolves into unreality. The hum of excitement is voiceless, expectant, as Borina crouches on his hindquarters until, prompted by Hans’s invisible cue, he rears up with one graceful fluid motion. The audience holds its thunder as Borina galvanizes his muscles, then leaps forward. At the moment his hind legs return to earth, Hans helps him spring up and forward once again. Hans barely breathes. It is Borina whose breath is heard as he leaps a third time! A fourth! And yet a fifth! It is Borina whose animal grace has reached the purest and most exalted heights of the courbette.
Like the roar of an earthquake the applause and bravos break loose. It is the moment of Hans’s life. But he does not look up. He eases Borina into the Spanish Step and then down to the free walk. The moment is passing, is gone. It does not stand still.
• • •
When Hans went back into the hall to ride in the closing number, he felt a kind of sacredness in being part of the beauty of this ancient art of ballet. He understood with his whole heart and soul what Colonel Podhajsky had meant on that long-ago morning. “Our school is a small candle in a troubled world. If we can send out one beam of splendor, of glory, of elegance, it is worth a man’s lifetime, no?”
In all of the turns and figures—the pirouettes, the flying change of leg at the canter, the lively cadenced trot, the shoulder-in movement—Hans thought, This is what joy is. Harmony between man and mount and music. He wished somehow he could be spectator and participant both.
Fräulein Morgen had anticipated the wish. She snapped a picture of Borina in the splash of sunlight at the full height of his courbette. Afterward she sent it to Hans, framed in red velvet. Underneath the picture she had written in her beautiful handwriting:
He bounds from the earth
With the very exuberance of his spirits .
Xenophon
Hans examined the picture carefully, slowly. He studied the angle of the leap, the position of the haunches, the hocks, the bend of the forelegs, the arch of the neck. Then he looked at the rider. The face did not show. It might have been himself, or anyone he knew, or no one. The rider had somehow extinguished himself in order to glorify the horse, to make him look as if he had performed of his own will—joyously, gaily.
Now, at last, Hans understood the mystery.
Epilogue
Borina never recaptured his earlier record of ten courbettes, but he did achieve another distinction. He became the oldest performer in the history of the Spanish Court Riding School. In his thirtieth year he was still piaffing with vigor, and courbetting twice, and often three and four times in succession.
Then gradually his energy dwindled. But no one in the stable ever, for an instant, thought of putting him down. They coddled him with love. They ground his oats so he could gum instead of chew them. They added molasses for energy. And every day Hans took Borina for longer or shorter walks in the outdoor arena. The Viennese word for these walks is spazieren. It implies a leisureliness, a contentment, impossible of translation. But Hans and Borina needed no interpreter. They strolled side by side, neither one uttering a sound for minutes at a time, and then perhaps only a sigh of attunement.
After only a short period as a Rider-Candidate, Hans became a full-fledged Riding Master. He worked with the promising younger stallions now, teaching them to do, on command, what they had already been doing naturally. He had been trained by the finest professor, the great Maestoso Borina. Now he was passing on that learning.
Filled with the wisdoms of life, Borina died in the springtime of his thirty-third year. Meanwhile, far off in the Alpine meadows of Piber, pitch-black foals, full of the exuberant joy of life, were dancing and prancing. With no audience but their mothers, and no music except wind whispers, they were leaping into the air for the sheer fun of it.
And so the circle is complete. The great past and the future joined to perpetuate the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, the oldest of its kind in the world.
About the Author and Artist
“Today’s children and many adults believe that Marguerite Henry is probably the most successful writer of horse stories we have ever had,” says May Hill Arbuthnot, noted authority on children’s literature. “Her success rests on a sound basis. Every book represents meticulous research, the stories measure up to the highest standards of good storytelling, the animal heroes are true to their species, and the people in her books are as memorable as the animals.”1
From the time she was ten years old, Marguerite Henry knew she wanted to become a writer. To date, she has written over forty books for boys and girls, most of them dealing with horses or dogs. Many have received literary awards. Her King of the Wind was awarded the Newbery Medal. Misty of Chincoteague became a Newbery Honor Book and also received the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award and the Junior Book Award given by the Boys Clubs of America; Justin Morgan Had a Horse, also a Newbery Honor Book, was given the Friends of Literature Award. Brighty of the Grand Canyon won the William Allen White Award; Black Gold, the Sequoyah Award; Gaudenzia, the Clara Ingram Judson Award; and Mustang, the Western Heritage Award. Misty and Brighty have been made into theatrical movies; Justin Morgan Had a Horse and San Domingo, The Medicine Hat Stallion (re-titled Peter Lundy and the Medicine Hat Stallion) are teleplays.
Mrs. Henry’s books are almost always based on actual fact, and she takes extraordinary pains to make sure her facts are as accurate as possible. She enjoys working on location, whether it is Chincoteague Island, the Grand Canyon, Siena, or Vienna. When not traveling to gather material for her books, she makes her home in a horse-loving countryside in southern California.
• • •
Wesley Dennis, who worked so successfully as a “team” with Marguerite Henry, was a genuine down-Easterner—born in Massachusetts and brought up on Cape Cod. He studied art in both the United States and Paris, and after several years of free-lancing, decided that his real interest lay in country life, especially horses. In 1942 he wrote and illustrated his first juvenile book: Flip, the story of a flying horse. About the same time he began to illustrate a series of articles for hunting periodicals. Later he won acclaim as a highly successful and popular illustrator of juvenile books—especially vigorous out-of-door stories. He illustrated most of the Marguerite Henry books, in addition to many by other writers and several of his own. Until his death, in 1966, he lived near Warrenton, Virginia, where he carried on his painting and illustrating in the kind of surroundings he found most stimulating.
* * *
1. Children and Books, by May Hill Arbuthnot. Scott, Foresman and Company.
OTHER BOOKS BY MARGUERITE HENRY
Album of Horses
Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin
Black Gold
Born to Trot
Brighty of the Grand Canyon
Brown Sunshine of Sawdust Valley
Gaudenzia, Pride of the Palio
Justin Morgan Had a Horse
King of the Wind
Misty of Chincoteague
Misty’s Twilight
Mustang, Wild Spirit of the West
San Domingo, the Medicine Hat Stallion
Sea Star
Stormy, Misty’s Foal
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This Aladdin paperback edition March 2014
Text copyright © 1964 by Rand McNally
Cover illustration copyright © 2014 by John Rowe
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ALADDIN is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc., and related logo is a
registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Interior designed by Ellice M. Lee
Cover designed by Jeanine Henderson
The text of this book was set in Garamond.
Library of Congress Control Number 93034065
ISBN 978-1-4814-0391-7
ISBN 978-1-4814-0393-1 (eBook)
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