THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN
Harry Sanderson was acting in a kind of fevered dream. His head and
hands were bare, his face white and immobile, and his eyes stared
straight before him with the persistent fixity of the sleep-walker's.
They did not see a bowed, plodding figure pushing a rickety, wheeled
melodeon, who scurried from before the hurtling weight that had all but
run him down. Nor could they see far behind in the eddying dust a little
dog, moaning, limping piteously on three legs, with tongue lolling and
shaggy coat caked with mud--following the hopeless, bird-like flight.
One mile, two miles, three miles. The streets were far behind now. The
country road spun before him, a dusty white ribbon, along which the dry
battered corn rattled as if in a surge of torrid wind. The great
motor-car was reeling off the distance like a maddened thing, swooping
through the haloed dark, the throttle out, the lever pushed to its
utmost limit of speed, rocking drunkenly, every inch of tested steel
ringing and throbbing. Yet Harry's fingers had no tremor, no hesitancy,
no lack of cunning. His heart was beating measuredly. He kept the road
by a kind of instinct as rudimentary as that which points the homing
carrier-pigeon. He seemed to be moving in a mental world created by some
significant clairvoyancy, in which the purpose operated without recourse
to the spring of reason. The light of neurasthenia burned behind his
eyelids; he felt at once a consuming flame within, a paralyzing frost
without. The light autumn mist drenched him like a fine, sifting rain;
the wheel-flung dust adhered like yellow mud, and above the clatter of
the exhaust the still air shrieked past like a shrewd wind.
Five miles, through the dark, under the breathless, expectant stars. The
car was on the broad curve now, where the road bent to the bluff above
the river to pass the skeleton railroad bridge. But Harry knew neither
place nor time. He was conscious only of motion--swift, swallow-like,
irresistible--this, and the racing pictures in his brain, stencilled on
the blur of night that closed around him. These pictures came and went;
the last revel of The Saints when he was Satan Sanderson--Hugh sneering
at his calling--Jessica facing him with unbandaged eyes--Hallelujah
Jones, preaching on the street corner. The figure of the street
evangelist recurred again and again with a singular persistency. It grew
more tangible! It threatened him!
Something in Harry's brain seemed to snap. A tiny shutter, like that of
a camera, fell down. His hands dropped from the steering-wheel, and,
swaying in his seat, he began to sing, in a voice made high and uneven
by the speed of the car:
"Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!"
He sang but the three lines. For suddenly the car left the road--the
inflated tires rebounded from the steel ridge of the railroad track--the
forward axle caught an iron signal post--and the great motor-car, its
shattered lamp jingling like a gong, its pistons thrusting in midair,
reared on two wheels, hurling its occupant out like a pebble thrown from
a sling, half-turned, and, leaving a trail of sparks like the tail of a
rocket behind it, plunged heavily over the rim of the bluff into the
river.
A moment later the deep black waters of "the hole" had closed above the
mass of sentient steel. The swift current had smoothed away every trace
of the strange monster it had engulfed, and there, by the side of the
track, huddled against the broken signal post, his clothing plastered
with mud and grime, motionless, and with a nasty cut on the temple, lay
Harry Sanderson.