The Torrents Of Spring

XLII
This track soon changed into a tiny footpath, and at last disappeared altogether,
and was crossed by a stream. Sanin counselled turning back,
but Maria Nikolaevna said, ‘No! I want to get to the mountains! Let’s go
straight, as the birds fly,’ and she made her mare leap the stream. Sanin
leaped it too. Beyond the stream began a wide meadow, at first dry, then
wet, and at last quite boggy; the water oozed up everywhere, and stood
in pools in some places. Maria Nikolaevna rode her mare straight
through these pools on purpose, laughed, and said, ‘Let’s be naughty
children.’
‘Do you know,’ she asked Sanin, ‘what is meant by pool-hunting?’
‘Yes,’ answered Sanin.
‘I had an uncle a huntsman,’ she went on.
‘I used to go out hunting with him – in the spring. It was delicious!
Here we are now, on the pools with you. Only, I see, you’re a Russian,
and yet mean to marry an Italian. Well, that’s your sorrow. What’s that?
A stream again! Gee up!’
The horse took the leap, but Maria Nikolaevna’s hat fell off her head,
and her curls tumbled loose over her shoulders. Sanin was just going to
get off his horse to pick up the hat, but she shouted to him, ‘Don’t touch
it, I’ll get it myself,’ bent low down from the saddle, hooked the handle
of her whip into the veil, and actually did get the hat. She put it on her
head, but did not fasten up her hair, and again darted off, positively holloaing.
Sanin dashed along beside her, by her side leaped trenches,
fences, brooks, fell in and scrambled out, flew down hill, flew up hill,
and kept watching her face. What a face it was! It was all, as it were,
wide open: wide-open eyes, eager, bright, and wild; lips, nostrils, open
too, and breathing eagerly; she looked straight before her, and it seemed
as though that soul longed to master everything it saw, the earth, the
sky, the sun, the air itself; and would complain of one thing only – that
dangers were so few, and all she could overcome. ‘Sanin!’ she cried,
‘why, this is like Bürger’s Lenore! Only you’re not dead – eh? Not
dead … I am alive!’ She let her force and daring have full fling. It seemed
not an Amazon on a galloping horse, but a young female centaur at full
speed, half-beast and half-god, and the sober, well-bred country seemed
astounded, as it was trampled underfoot in her wild riot!
Maria Nikolaevna at last drew up her foaming and bespattered mare;
she was staggering under her, and Sanin’s powerful but heavy horse was
gasping for breath.
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