One is liable day by day to a great many different kinds of surprises;
but few persons can have known two in the same morning quite so unusual
and diverse....
I was sitting in my room, writing, when a new and mysterious sound
caught the ear. It came apparently from the heart of the wall, near the
chimney, and was such a sound as in the dead of night would lay an icy
hand on the heart. Since it was broad day I had courage and stood by
the fireplace waiting. It grew louder and louder, nearer and nearer,
and at last culminated in a scurry and clatter in the fireplace itself,
from which there emerged a robust, testy, and exceedingly embarrassed
starling. After looking round in dismay, he blundered across the room
and settled on the highest row of books, where, secure in his altitude,
he stared at me and collected his wits. I, too, collected mine and
realized that my destiny was, as ever, prosaic. For I thought instantly
of an American poet on the one hand, and on the other an English lady,
a friend of mine, both of whom under similar conditions achieved
romance. For when a bird visited Edgar Allan Poe in his study it was
a raven, dark not alone with the sable hue of night but with mystery
and fate, and when my friend awoke not long since in her room in a
beautiful Wiltshire manor-house, what did she see brooding musically
on the frame of an Old Master that hung on the opposite wall but a
dove--emblem of peace and sweetness and everything that is fortunate?
How different my luck! A starling.... Of all the fowls of the air,
would one not close one’s house to a starling first and foremost? Yet
the only visitor from that so near yet so strange world of birds that
ever came to me was this, the least poetical, least attractive.
That was the first surprise. For the understanding of the second,
which occurred only an hour later, I must explain that this house
is on a road which, almost immediately the gate is passed, ceases
gradually to be a road at all, first declining to a cart-track, and
then dwindling to nothing but a footpath or bridle-path up a South Down
of extreme steepness. This means that when, as sometimes happens, a
motor-car rushes past, we smile in our beards and await with stoicism
and amusement the groanings and shrieks of agony that indicate that a
mistake has been made and that a reluctant vehicle is being turned by
an angry chauffeur in a space far too narrow for it. On the morning
of which I write a car rushed by in the usual way, but as it did
not at once return I assumed that the party were not uninstructed,
but had come here by intent for a picnic, as has once or twice
happened--lobsters’ claws and other alien and sophisticated _débris_
having been found on the turf; and so thinking I forgot them. An hour
later, hearing the engine throb in the accustomed manner, I knew that
the picnic was over, and again forgot them.
A moment after, however, I was called out into the garden by a series
of shouts and whistles, to discover that the car had come to a stop for
the very sufficient reason that it was on fire. A motor-car at any time
is still--to me--a strange object, but to find one in full blaze close
to the gate is really a shock. You must have seen it to appreciate it.
There it stood, enveloped in flames, while leaning against the wall,
with his head cooling at the bricks, was its dejected owner. “What a
calamity! What a calamity!” was all that he could say, as he surveyed
first the burning wheels, and then his blackened hands, and then me.
“There’s nothing to be done, nothing,” he added.
But I did not wait; at least it was worth the effort of saving, and
we brought water in every variety of vessel and hurled it over the
conflagration. Here we were wrong, for by watering flaming petrol one
simply increases the area of the fire. Having learnt this, we bent
all our strength to getting the car a little farther along the road,
away from the seat of danger, then hurling the water over it once more.
This done, it was soon extinguished, and the owner and driver had an
opportunity to explain.
“Such a thing has never happened to me before,” he said. “All these
years and no accident. I had just filled the tank, you see, and started
her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a little. In a moment she was in
flames. I did my best. Nothing of the kind has ever happened to me
before.”
Meanwhile he had been joined by his friends, two cool and collected
ladies, who, all unconscious of the catastrophe, had been engaged in
the least incendiary of pastimes--photographing the church--and they
added their persuasions to our invitation to him to come in and consume
restoratives.
Misfortune handled him curiously. No, he said, he would not drink,
would not eat, did not want to wash, hated the idea of resting. And
all the while, as he was thus affirming and surveying his blistered
hands, he was approaching nearer to the table in the garden on which
refreshments had been placed. Vowing he would never sit, he sat;
declining the decanter with increased vehemence, he tilted it into
his glass; abjuring cake, he conveyed a piece to his mouth. He then
refused to drink any more, and was actually reaching out for the
decanter as he spoke. Finally, he said that he had not the least desire
to smoke, and took a cigarette. This was the last of his apostasies,
for to the blackness of his hands he adhered. And all the while, at
intervals, he was assuring us that, long as he had driven a car, he had
never previously had an accident in his life. Never! “I had just filled
the tank, you see, and started her. She backfired. Perhaps I spilt a
little. In a moment she was in flames. I did my best.... Nothing of the
kind ever happened to me before....”
That is the story. They were soon gone; the car, a scorched ruin, was
pushed into a neighbouring shed to await the repairers; and nothing
remained of the incident save a black place in the road and a waste
patch where grass had been. Life resumed its routine.
But why, when he came to give me his card, should I discover that he
now lived in a house in which, as a child, some of my happiest hours
were spent? No need for that added touch of coincidence. Why? He might
as easily have inhabited every other house in the world. Here you have
the prodigality of chance.