CALLED “OF ACCIDENTS.”
For the first three or four miles I kept on pedalling steadily. I grazed
the corners, not even daring to look back, for I was haunted by a terror
that Léon, with his lips, was on the track behind me. But I heard only
the cries of the anarchist babies, calling to their playmate to come
back in Czech and Yiddish.
When I had escaped from the intricate tangle of Sussex lanes, and found
myself once more on the Queen’s highway of England, under the protecting
ægis of Britannia’s shield (in spite of the blood of the Pilgrim
Fathers), I paused to reflect upon the week’s adventures.
A bicycle in full swing, I maintain, is not an ideal place for calm
reflection. Hence the face of the bicyclist. Moreover, I had started
without due attention to my screws, in my eagerness to escape from my
sworn brothers, the anarchists, into the open air of Banded Despotism.
So I called a halt, and dismounted for a moment to tighten my loose
joints, metaphorically and literally. My knees still trembled under me,
and the wraith of Caliban, panting ever in the rear, still pursed its
thick lips in my face to mock me. I felt like Pliable when he abandoned
Christian at the outset of his pilgrimage, and slank back from the first
slough to the City of Destruction. For, in the background of my heart, I
still loved and admired these simple earnest souls, eager after their
kind to right human wrong, and to attain human perfection. I saw their
comic side; but I saw also that the root of the matter was in them. They
had noble enthusiasms—all save Caliban; he was the serpent in that
ten-acred Eden. When I got under weigh again, at a good easy pace,
beneath rifts of blue through white summer cloud, I began to be aware
that my first fortnight of free life had culminated in two distinct and
acknowledged failures. I had failed to accommodate myself to the
environment at Flor and Fingelman’s; I had failed to accommodate myself
to the public opinion of the anarchists at Pinfold. Environment was
triumphing all along the line. I felt constrained to regard myself as
one of the unfittest, who do _not_ survive, and whom no man pities.
Resolving myself into Committee of Finance, I found I had been acting
with reckless extravagance. Cash in hand amounted to four and
sevenpence—of which sum, four shillings represented my week’s earnings,
and sevenpence my balance from the bounty of St. Nicholas, after
settling for two weeks’ rent in London, with sundry expenses. It
occurred to me now (too late) that I had practically been paying twice
over for lodging—once in London by cash, and once at the Community by
giving my labour in return for a mere box of a cubicle. I felt so proud
of this discovery in economics, however, that I was almost inclined to
condone the error for the sake of its detection. In other ways, also, I
was demonstrably worse off than when I started. I had worn my pretty
brown cycling suit for a week in the stiff clay fields, not to mention
the fact that I had splashed it with mud in the vicarious effort to
rectify the lines of grace in my comrades’ riding; and I had done my
tyres no good on the rough roads of Sussex. Altogether, I was forced to
confess to myself with shame that I returned to London after this
escapade not only a wiser, but a poorer woman.
To crown all, I had no longer the use of my type-writer. The thirty
pieces of silver for which I had betrayed my entire stock-in-trade, the
instrument of production, were spent and lost to me. St. Nicholas had
proved but a broken reed. I had leaned upon him, and he had pierced my
hand. Never again should I trust the hypocritical smile on the face of
that bland and benignant impostor!
I pedalled on at half-speed. Little vocalists, ignorant of the name of
Mendelssohn, carolled songs without words in the sky overhead: but my
heart was heavy.
Yet, after all, I had had my amusement, and bought my experience.
A pheasant screamed; I mistook it for Caliban. Mr. Commissioner looked
up in my face and sympathised.
It was still early afternoon; for Saturday was a half-holiday: we had
struck work at noon, and dined, before proceeding to the division of
profits. June was almost come, and the days were lengthening. I hoped to
reach London long before the hour at which the Banded Despots compel us
to light our red lamps in the public interest.
Yet I was so delighted to have flung off the yoke of anarchy that I
could have fallen on the neck of a Banded Despot, had he appeared at
that moment, were it but in the guise of a Sussex County Constable. The
country smiled: if eglantine be sweet-briar, it bordered the road; if
honeysuckle, it scented the cottage porches.
I rode on and on, glad to be free once more, though sorry to be poor,
and doubtful where I could turn for the next few days’ board and
lodging. The words of the anarchist alphabet, which I had learned from
the one British brother at Pinfold, recurred strongly to my mind—
“F is the freedom that old England brags about;
If you haven’t got a dinner—why—you’re free to go without.”
I felt sure I might soon taste that common privilege secured to all of
us by Magna Charta.
In this mood I coasted recklessly down a slight hill near Holmwood, with
my feet on the rest, and my hands too incautiously removed from the
handle-bar. Behind me lay the Weald; in front rose the trenchant rampart
of the North Downs.
At the foot of the slope was a sudden turn. As I reached the bottom my
hand gripped the brake—too late. I was aware of a Foreign Body, rushing
eagerly round the curve, with flying fair hair; next, of a considerable
impact; then, of myself on the road, sprawling, and the Foreign Body
with the fair hair wringing its hands beside me.
She was a woman, fortunately.
I raised myself with dignity. It is always a good plan, in case of
collision, to take the aggressive first. “You came round that corner
rather fast, considering how sharp it is,” I observed in a coldly
critical tone, whose effect was perhaps rather marred by the fact that
my fingers were torn and bleeding. This was sheer bluff, and I knew it.
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” she cried, clapping her hands to her ears in an
agonised little paroxysm. I saw that she was slight and fair and
evidently frightened: a wisp of a figure, a fluff of amber hair, blue
eyes like April.
“It was a nasty spill,” I went on, growing severer in proportion as I
realised that my antagonist was little inclined to defend herself (which
was a meanness on my part). “You should slow round corners. I hope you
have not hurt yourself.”
She set to cry all at once. “A little,” she answered. “Or rather, a
great deal.”
She was a timid small atomy. I began to regret my hasty sternness, the
more so as I knew I was at least as much to blame as she, for I had run
down the hill without my fingers on the brake, and had trusted to chance
at the turn of the corner. All this too, I admit, with a wheel that had
already been badly buckled.
Happily, Commissioner Lin did not take it into his head to seize her.
I tried to console her. Then I turned to my machine. Which shows that I
am a woman first and a cyclist afterwards; for I notice that your born
cyclist looks first at her wheels, and only proceeds in the second place
to enquire which of her limbs is broken.
When I saw its condition, I recognised at once that my cup was full.
All, all was lost. The front wheel was twisted out of human recognition;
the tyre was punctured; I saw seven-and-sixpence worth of repairs
staring me full in the face before I could fall back upon my base of
operations in London.
I blush to confess it; but I followed her example. Lexington faded away.
I burst into tears, outright, and sank down on the ground by my broken
cycle. I suppose the spill had shattered my nerves. Mr. Commissioner
squatted on his haunches and stared at me.
How long we might have sat there, mingling tears together, it were hard
to say—had not St. George come by, in the nick of time, sword in hand,
to rescue us.
He was not mounted as usual on his milk-white steed, but more
prosaically seated on the box of a dog-cart. Yet what matters that? A
cavalier is a cavalier, be he horseman or gigman. The knights who ride
in all their pride around the frieze of the Parthenon are only knights
in virtue of their possession of the noble quadruped platonically adored
by the Grand Vizier and his satraps. So I knew it was a St. George,
though in place of a lance he had a lancet in his instrument case. To
unimaginative eyes he was the village doctor.
He pulled up his horse by the roadside, and called out to us cheerily:
“Anything wrong? Can I be of use to you?”
“Not for me,” I broke out, fearing he would want to dress my wounds and
be paid for it; “I am not hurt at all. About this lady I do not know.
She cannoned against me, and somebody seems to have fallen.”
St. George dismounted—if one can dismount from a dog-cart—a genial
giant. He looked at my hands, which were torn and bleeding, and
ingrained with sand and dirt from the road. “Excuse me,” he said,
gravely; “this is worse than you think. You have had a nasty wrench.
And, besides, the soil contains——”
“I know all that,” I answered. “The germs of lockjaw. I have gone
through an ambulance course, and helped the trained nurse at an East-End
Settlement. Well, the germs must take their chance. Tetanus microbes
have a right to live like the rest of us, I suppose.”
My manner was perhaps defiant. He smiled, not unkindly, a boundless
Pacific of a smile: his ears alone checked it. “Ha! an anarchist?” he
enquired, glancing back in the direction whence I had come.
“Yes,” I answered. “From Pinfold.”
“Tired of it?”
“Very much so. I am on my way back to London and the Banded Despots.”
He smiled again. “You must let me dress your hand,” he said,
persuasively.
I drew back in alarm. “Oh, no!” I cried, for I had nothing to pay him
with.
“Nonsense,” he went on with kind persistence, divining my thought in the
hot flush that came over me. “This is not a professional matter. A mere
passing courtesy to a lady in distress. Let me drive you to my surgery,
and then on to Holmwood Station. You won’t be able to get those machines
mended so as to return to town to-night. I can pack them both in. And
your friend will come with you.”
There was no resisting the frank kindliness of his big genial smile. He
was broad-shouldered and large-hearted, with a face to match. I
clambered up into the dog-cart, and the fair girl sat behind. How he
annihilated space so as to pack in the bicycles as well I have no idea.
But the age of miracles is _not_ past, nor yet the age of chivalry. St.
George convinced me that both still exist. At a moment of despair, he
revived my waning belief in human nature.
At the surgery, he washed my bleeding hands tenderly, spread an
antiseptic ointment and a cool rag on top, and bound it all up with
womanly solicitude. As a faint protest, I murmured at the end: “How much
am I in your debt?” But he smiled his expansive smile, and repeated,
“Nothing, nothing!” Then he examined the fair girl, who was the exact
counterpart of Michaela in the opera, and pronounced her sound in wind
and limb, though nervously shaken. Michaela wept at learning she was not
hurt; she would have fainted, I think, if he had told her she was
injured.
When our wounds had been assuaged, he drove us down to the station. On
the way, Michaela grew gradually calm enough to communicate her
misfortunes. “I want to get to Leith Hill,” she said. “I was going there
when I was so unlucky as to upset this lady.”
(My heart pricked me, but I refrained from confessing.)
“Leith Hill!” St. George cried, with his hearty great laugh. “Why, you
are five miles out for it! You have taken the wrong road. You were
straight on the way to Horsham when I met you.”
“Oh, I was afraid of that,” Michaela exclaimed, beginning to cry again;
she had a genius for tears that might have been utilised with advantage
for purposes of irrigation. “I—I was cycling with a gentleman.”
“Indeed?” I put in coldly.
“But I—I am engaged to him.”
“Of course,” I answered. Having left anarchy and all its works nine
miles behind me, I affected to believe _no_ young lady could be
bicycling with a man _unless_ he were engaged to her.
“And we kept together as far as Dorking,” Michaela went on; “but there I
stopped to speak to some friends I met by chance in the street, and
my—my escort went round the corner to buy some cigarettes; and when I
hurried on again to catch him up, I could not discover him; and I’m
afraid I must go back alone to London.” She spoke as though London were
in the heart of Africa.
The doctor laughed. “You took quite the wrong turn,” he said. “Or
rather, you kept straight on, when you should have swerved to the right.
That unhappy young man must be seeking you now, on the summit of Leith
Hill, with many qualms of conscience.”
“Do you think so?” Michaela cried, wringing her hands once more. She was
a study in helplessness. I could feel she was rich, brought up in
cotton-wool, and for her sake I was glad of it; for I wondered what she
would do if she should ever find herself face to face with real
misfortune.