[Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf]@TWC D-Link bookJacob’s Room CHAPTER NINE 4/37
Hedges and sky swoop in a semicircle.
Then as if your own body ran into the horse's body and it was your own forelegs grown with his that sprang, rushing through the air you go, the ground resilient, bodies a mass of muscles, yet you have command too, upright stillness, eyes accurately judging.
Then the curves cease, changing to downright hammer strokes, which jar; and you draw up with a jolt; sitting back a little, sparkling, tingling, glazed with ice over pounding arteries, gasping: "Ah! ho! Hah!" the steam going up from the horses as they jostle together at the cross-roads, where the signpost is, and the woman in the apron stands and stares at the doorway.
The man raises himself from the cabbages to stare too. So Jacob galloped over the fields of Essex, flopped in the mud, lost the hunt, and rode by himself eating sandwiches, looking over the hedges, noticing the colours as if new scraped, cursing his luck. He had tea at the Inn; and there they all were, slapping, stamping, saying, "After you," clipped, curt, jocose, red as the wattles of turkeys, using free speech until Mrs.Horsefield and her friend Miss Dudding appeared at the doorway with their skirts hitched up, and hair looping down.
Then Tom Dudding rapped at the window with his whip.
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