Читать книгу The Plumed Serpent. Historical Novel - Life and Love after the Mexico Revolution онлайн

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Blindly and foolishly the bull ran ducking its horns each time at the rag, just because the rag fluttered.

‘Run at the MEN, idiot!’ said Kate aloud, in her overwrought impatience. ‘Run at the men, not at the cloaks.’

‘They never do, isn’t it curious!’ replied Villiers, with cool scientific interest. ‘They say no toreador will face a cow, because a cow always goes for HIM instead of the cloak. If a bull did that there’d be no bull-fights. Imagine it!’

She was bored now. The nimbleness and the skipping tricks of the toreadors bored her. Even when one of the banderilleros reared himself on tiptoe, his plump posterior much in evidence, and from his erectness pushed two razor-sharp darts with frills at the top into the bull’s shoulder, neatly and smartly, Kate felt no admiration. One of the darts fell out, anyway, and the bull ran on with the other swinging and waggling in another bleeding place.

The bull now wanted to get away, really. He leaped the fence again, quickly, into the attendants’ gangway. The attendants vaulted over into the arena. The bull trotted in the corridor, then nicely leaped back. The attendants vaulted once more into the corridor. The bull trotted round the arena, ignoring the toreadors, and leaped once more into the gangway. Over vaulted the attendants.