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CHAPTER XVII. OF THINGS THAT HAPPENED ON A ROAD
Meanwhile Jane had very quietly been living on towards things unknown.
Her children had become her world; they were a problem to her, especially Norah.
Norah was now nearly twenty years old; and though, during the first decade and a half of her life, she had grown up in that isolation and repression of the heart which is the lot of children whose up-bringing is largely entrusted to strangers, her mother had tried hard to make up for that during the lustrum that followed. In vain. Norah was not only going on in the paths once chosen; she also showed more and more clearly that she was essentially her father's child - her father's as he had been in his own early years. Before she had even finished her public school course, two years before the war, she had in many ways betrayed a peculiar precocity. Already her inner world was made up of resentments, rebellions, frustrated egoisms which were the more dangerous since, in her daily intercourse with a paid governess, she soon learned to conceal them. In her high school years she had taken the infection of her time. Secretly, whenever she was out alone, she used paint and powder on her face; not, of course, in order to disguise fancied or real defects of her complexion; but in order to do what she considered asserting her individuality, in some aggressive or shocking way; when she went home, she carefully rubbed these things off in order to avoid a clash with her mother who was "so old-fashioned". The generation of female youth which reached puberty during and after the war seemed to know of no other orientation of life but the sexual one. At an age when her mother had been a tom-boy, full of contempt and even hatred for things male, Norah met, by appointment and in out-of-the-way places, young men, as they thought themselves to be, whom she lured and dared into audacities which gave her premature thrills. In France, people would have called her a demi-vièrge - a "semi-virgin".
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Her mother she treated often with a chilling politeness which disguised only thinly what was in reality a cold insolence hard to deal with. When Jane warned her against certain dangers, she shrugged her shoulders with a weary smile and said, "Believe me, mother, I am fully able to take care of myself." Although, at home, her speech was a model of unimpeachable English, she used the spicy slang of the day whenever she was with her chums or in the company of dashing young "men". With her brother whom she called "mother's pet" she had hardly any contact. Jane saw clearly, and often worried about it, that Norah's character was the natural growth of the home which she had had.
But Sidney, "mother's pet" though he might be, was no less of a problem in his own, different way. He had been delicate at birth and remained so; yet he was hard to manage; thus he would not submit to the strict and rigorous exercise which Dr. Halstrom prescribed for him. He was wilful and developed a pertinacity and strength of purpose which were a match for his mother's. He, too, was precocious. When a child of four, he would pester every one in the house, from his mother to the maids, to have stories told him; when seven years old, he learned to read and, henceforth, threatened to become a book-worm. Consequently, when, rather later than other children, he was sent to school, he was rapidly pushed ahead; the mechanical art of reading which, in the lower grades, furnishes the criterium of promotion offered no difficulties to him. For so young a child, he commanded an astonishing vocabulary. But, incomprehensibly, as he moved up in the grades, he began to lag behind other children. He would not apply himself. In the reasoning subjects of the curriculum his teachers soon began to call him, secretly, a dunce. Yet, outside of the rigid scholastic discipline, he often gave proof of a penetration far beyond his years. The two things seemed to be contradictory.
During Sidney's infancy, Jane had often dreamed of perfection in motherhood; she had criticised her own parents, especially her mother; but as Sidney grew, she had to acknowledge to herself that, as a
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guide for her children's development, she was no more efficient than they had been. The children seemed to go their own way; and since she, nevertheless, clung to the boy with a passionate love - into which went all her own, never evoked powers and needs of abandonment - she did at last the only thing such a mother seemed to be able to do: she spoiled the child; and he began to exercise over her an almost unlimited dominion.
Thus, she herself had become a middle-aged woman, stately in appearance, still beautiful, and inwardly resigned. Life had denied her what it had promised. She was keenly aware of the fact that all the great moments of her life, the moments of passion, had been negative. She had lived through the passionate defence of her virginity, in the days that had followed her marriage; she had lived through the passionate contempt for and hatred of the man who passed as her husband and was not - in the days after the great revelation; she was now living through a passionate readjustment of the conception of what her child should be. The best she seemed to be able to hope from the future was a quiet old age.
She had greatly desired that both her children should choose an academic career. Norah had at first, after completing her high-school course with mediocre success, absolutely declined to go on with her studies. Then, during the very summer of 1918, she had suddenly declared her desire to attend a certain college in Winnipeg; and, Jane at once consenting, she had departed in the middle of September. Jane half suspected that there were other motives behind that desire than thirst for knowledge. As for Sidney, she remained doubtful of any definite call that might lie dormant in the child's nature.
Thus, with Norah and, consequently, Mlle. Lefèvre gone, and with Sidney at school for the greater part of the day, the big house of which she had once been so proud, began to oppress her. She had her car; but she had never used it much. She began to do so now; and, once she had started, driving through the country soon became a passion
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with her. She often dropped in on her father who was now over seventy years old but still remarkably active and still supervising the operations on his farm. Whenever she did so, she passed, on leaving, Arthur Forrest's place; for she always returned by a different road, going through the town of Fisher Landing. There she saw Arthur working in the fields, looking somewhat grey and dull, but going about his daily and seasonal tasks with a quiet faithfulness which began to have something touching for her. To this man she had once been engaged; she had become his sister-in-law. Yet, all intercourse had been broken off between them for more, now, than two decades. Well, it was natural, was it not? He resented his having been disappointed in his expectations of her. On her part, a plausible delicacy had prevented her from trying to revive a merely external acquaintance, that being all that could exist between them; for that Jim and Arthur were no friends had been a matter of common knowledge, though nobody could have said how that knowledge had been arrived at. Arthur had not even called at the house on Albert Avenue when business had taken him into the city.
Once or twice, as her light little car took her past his fields where he was riding the binder or, later, the plow, she asked herself, not without a certain curiosity, what might have been her life had she after all married him instead of his brother. He had remained single. She had no doubt but that, in the past, he had sincerely loved her. Could it be that he had remained faithful to her memory? With him lived that old aunt of his - the one whom people called "the crazy spinster". Or was she dead? Why should she be? She had been younger even than Jane's father; old spinsters often lived to an astonishing age. Yes, it was quite probable that Arthur had never married because he had been thwarted in the love of his youth. How strange! Here was a man who remained "pure" throughout life because his affections had once been engaged; for she had somehow not the slightest doubt that he had been "pure" at the time when they had been
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intimate. His love for her had grown up since they had been children together; who knew? Perhaps it had survived his rejection by the woman who had been its object. Had it? Why had she rejected him? He had lacked, as compared with his brother, a certain polish, a certain air of higher, greater things; above all, he had not released in her that overflowing tenderness, that strange and incomprehensible feeling of dependence which, she remembered, had come to a climax one day when, from the window of her room, she had looked down on the other who was to wreck her life. Perhaps it had been - yes, certainly, it had been the blindness of her youth; of the two, no doubt, it was Arthur who had in him the really higher and greater impulses.
One day, when she saw him thus against the background of such thoughts, he suddenly reminded her incomprehensibly of her friend Ann Aikins, the woman beloved by a dray-man but married to a physician who did not appreciate her. Ann still called on her almost daily, in the afternoon; for Jane rarely went out after dinner. Her driving she did in the morning.
The very next time Ann came in - she, too, was a middle-aged woman now; and like Jane she was still stately and beautiful though she also had almost retired from "the world" - Jane spoke to her of it.
"Dear," she said, "I've been thinking a good deal about you of late."
Ann flashed a smile at her. Jane loved that smile. It always reminded her of a winter day in her childhood when her father had still been a young man and when, through the snow-covered landscape of the hills, they had driven with sleighs to a neighbour's place. All about, the bush had been heavily furred with hoar-frost glittering in the winter sun; and into that bush rather than through it, the road winding about, they had been driving with jingling sleigh-bells. Those bells Jane seemed to hear, and the glitter of the fresh-fallen snow she seemed to see, whenever her friend smiled in that peculiarly cordial and grateful way.
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"You have no children to think of," Jane went on.
Ann's face became serious. Traces of tears glimmered in the corners of her still brilliant, blue eyes. "No, dipsomaniacs and users of drugs, so I read in my husband's books, often lose the reproductive faculties."
Jane's face fell. "My dear, I had no idea you took it so hard. You have never told me."
"No," Ann said. "But you and I are of a generation which held that the task of life is one to be tackled rather than evaded as they do now."
"Perhaps. That settles, of course, what I'd been thinking of."
"The dray-man? You'd been making plans for my belated happiness, had you? I'll tell you. It has been a comfort, sometimes, to know that there was a man who honoured and appreciated a woman to the point where he would not even propose dishonourable things to her, though he made no secret of his feelings."
"Is that how it was? And he a dray-man!"
"Do you know what makes me feel soft when I think of him?"
"What?"
"He wears little silver rings in the lobes of his big, red ears, below curls of grey hair."
Both of them laughed. In some incomprehensible way Jane felt tremendously braced.
Ann rose and went through the room, balancing her body on her hips. Sleigh-bells seemed to tingle through a white-furred forest.
But Jane said irrelevantly. "We were young once; we are getting old."
Ann turned and looked at her. "And the world is becoming so strange! At heart we are as young as ever, dear. If only we could get into the stride with that world!"
"The trouble is, our limbs are chained."
"We've chained them ourselves."
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"The more terrible, dear! But you're a blessing. You are courage incarnate."
"I am wisdom and old-fashioned restraint."
At that they left it.
In the evenings, Stephen Carter still came occasionally though not so often as in years past. He was getting old and decrepit; his dropsy was gaining on him. He, too, was a living lesson in courage.
"Stephen," Jane asked him one night, for the question worried her, "do you find it terrible that we all get old; that every second that passes is gone forever?"
"Can't say that I do," he replied, speaking in his hurried way, without imparting the least emphasis to any word. He lifted himself in his arm-chair in order to readjust his weight in a less painful position. "I'm as young as ever; I'm a mere kid inside of this ugly carcass of mine. It's been worth while, hasn't it? Take your own case, child. You haven't been lying on a bed of roses exactly. There have been moments, no doubt, that were pretty tough for one of your fibre. But you're still you, aren't you?
You've lived your own life in the midst of it, haven't you? What's come over you, has come from the outside. That's nothing. You're still integrating. By the way, ever gone to church of late? No. I thought so. You don't need it, either. I belong to no church myself. I've all the church I want right at home; or here. But I wish you'd go. I've my reasons. Your reactions might teach you something."
A few days later, on the first Sunday in October, Jane went to St. Matthews, the great Anglican cathedral. As she entered, her little boy at her hand, an usher tried to take charge of her; but she shook her head and remained in the background among those who preferred to stand. She was late; the service was well advanced.
Great, tremulous bass notes, issuing from the organ, pulsed through the air confined in the nave and the aisles. She felt strangely moved and closed her eyes as she stood. A deep-napped, heavy curtain of
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black velvet seemed to be hung all about; a similar carpet to be spread over the floor. But suddenly high, silvery treble notes were poured into it, like a white brook of slow-moving, slow-flowing, molten, yet ice-cold metal. A shiver ran through her, gripping, yet full of an incomprehensible, almost painful joy. The music ceased; a melodious voice began to read a lesson from the old testament. She did not gather its meaning; she did not even follow its words; at the outset, she found herself arrested by certain phrases. "And it came to pass." "Behold, now." Irrepressibly, tears welled up in her eyes; gripping the hand of her little boy, she turned and somehow found her way to the door and went out.
Unseeingly she returned home. Yes, she knew what Stephen had meant; as always, he had been right. Perhaps she had wandered far with her mind which had necessarily fed on experience; or on that which had happened. But at bottom the impulse of her life was not changed. When she had been a little girl by the side of her father, like the child that went by her own side now, those phrases had thrilled her with a strange, exotic thrill; they thrilled her still in exactly the same way. At bottom she was a child to this day; perhaps it was good that she was. Was that the meaning of the words in Mark, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein?" But then, if she still was what she had ever been, was life still ahead instead of death?
It was in this mood which persisted that, on the following morning, a beautiful morning of the late fall, with the world in a haze, she took her car out even before Sidney had gone to school. She was going to have a long drive, without stopping anywhere; a longer drive than she had had for some time; she felt as if she must allow certain things within her to grow and to unfold themselves. In swinging out through the city, hurriedly, as if she were anxious to begin her great experience, she gave the little boy a lift; and, having deposited him at the gate of the school yard and kissed him fare-well, she went on,
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choosing the road leading north. Twenty miles beyond her father's place, along the same road, there stood the town of Glenholm where a bridge crossed Fisher Creek; on the far side of the river, a bold road led back, winding in and out along the declivities of the hills, some two or three hundred feet above the flood-plain of the valley. From that road, Fisher Creek could be seen meandering over its flood-plain for many miles; a strange longing had suddenly taken possession of Jane to look down on that valley, in this October light, with the hazy mist hanging over it and floating through the trees on the hill-sides. It was an eighty-mile drive; but what of that?
Now, as chance would have it, Jim was that very day working in the district west of Fisher Landing; with him things were coming to an issue. The day before, himself unseen, he had watched Jane sallying forth to church; he had been standing behind the curtains of his bed-room in that huge house of his. Jane had been dressed in black which always showed her complexion off to advantage. Jim had inwardly trembled to see her thus. Never, of late, had his feeling for her, or his reaction to her, been tinged with that particular physical attraction which she had once had for him. All that was gone and dead. Yet there was a physical residue left in it. He longed for peace and rest. He was weary of life. He would have liked to tell her that it was his intention of setting her free; yes, he would have done so, could he have hoped to feel her hand on his brow, if only for a moment, cool, soothing, forgiving.
As he drove along his country roads, as always almost unaware of the landscape, her vision obsessed him. So far, he had made one single call; it had been unsuccessful. And while he had been talking to the man, his distaste for his work - for persuading others into buying what they did not need or want and what could not add one cubit to their stature; for almost forcing on them what would enslave them to an in-essential of life, what would help to turn them away from the only
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thing that mattered, themselves - that distaste had suddenly become so overpowering that it amounted to an inhibition. He had left the man before he had even reached the point where he could have told whether there was a chance of success or not. He had broken off in the middle of a sentence, leaving the farmer stupidly staring after him as he climbed into his car and drove away.
By a mere chance, he was that day driving his own old car instead of the demonstration car of the make which he sold. When he had set out in the morning, he had found that that demonstration car was in need of a trifling repair; but he had been unwilling to wait for it. His own car, of a model so antiquated that he could not have sold it for any sum worth mentioning, somehow aided his mood. It had been bought at the very time when he had hoped that between him and Jane everything would be well in the long-run. It seemed to transport him back into a past when he had been what he now detested - a seemingly successful business man engrossed in the task of making money. It was also bound up with the vision of a Jane younger and more passionate than she was now; and with the memory of a scene in her library where, for the first and last time she had given full expression to the contempt she held for him - not for what he had done but for what he was; and in that lay the hopelessness of it all! For what he had done, he might have atoned. He felt that shortly he was going to do so. What he was, he was powerless to change. Yet, was he now what he had been in the past? Did she know? Did she ever even think of that?
He returned to the town of Fisher Landing, driving fast. At the steel bridge spanning the little lake into which the river had here been expanded by a dam built across its course west of the town, he stopped. Where go? What do? Go home? To Stockton? What do there with the rest of his day? He wanted to be alone. He hated the very sight of people whom he knew.
He felt that in all his reasonings, his probings, his musings about her and himself, there was a last step untaken; in his heart he
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knew that the time had come to take that step; that he would take it that very day. For that he needed a solitude beyond that solitude in which he had lived during the last few years.
But even here, where he had stopped his car, he was known. Almost every passer-by nodded to him. He barely nodded back. He could suddenly not even bear the thought of meeting any people at all, even such as were perfect strangers to him. In an impulse of all-embracing distaste he pushed the clutch home and turned north, at random.
This movement, as if rejecting the town and the south road which led home, made him conscious, as if by a second sight, of the picture he presented to others, sitting heavily, massively, grimly behind his wheel; and the contrast between his appearance of outward, iron composure and his true state of inner despondency and division struck him forcibly as one of the great ironies of his life. Well, soon he would settle that contrast. He would bring his inner and outer state into a last, final accord.
Steadily climbing, he went on for a mile. The road turned east, and north again. He took the turns with his conscious, expert skill, slowing down just sufficiently to keep the wheels in contact with the road. Even on this day of days he still took a certain satisfaction from such purely mechanical accomplishments.
On this stretch of the road, a bunch of horses blocked his path, grazing along the margins. He blew his horn; startled, they began to race ahead of him, hitting the earth resounding blows with their hooves. Then, two farm gates opening to right and left, the horses scattered. He speeded his machine up once more and soon shot along at the rate of fifty miles an hour. In ten minutes he reached the next turn, eight miles from the last; the road to which he came, running east and west, was a correction line. There, at the corner, he saw a child standing, just outside the yard-fence of a farm. He slowed down and stopped.
"Missed it, eh?" he asked, referring to the school van of the consolidated
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school four miles north.
"Don't think so," the boy answered, with that pert expression which betrayed that he knew better but that it served his purpose to lie.
Jim looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o'clock. "Sure," he said. He took a conscious pride in the fact that he could read this boy's mind in spite of the enormity of the decisions which he was facing himself.
"Did I?" The eagerness with which these two words were said, made it still clearer that he was playing truant.
"Give you a ride?" Jim asked half mocking.
"Oh no, thank you, sir. I'll go home," the boy said gleefully; anybody could have heard that home was certainly not the place he would go to.
Jim went on, turning east. The encounter had reminded him of his own boyhood days. As a child, he had been "I Myself," ruthless, obsessed with no thought but that of imposing his will on others. Yes, fundamentally, he had remained "I Myself" till, a few years ago, he had stood in Jane's library, facing her. There, the disintegration of his ego had begun. The disintegration? Was that all? Was there nothing else? If not, he had lived these last years in vain.
And suddenly he saw her again as he had seen her the day before; again the almost physical need for forgiveness came over him.
Three miles beyond the corner at which he had spoken to the boy, the road, with a sudden curve, dipped down into the river valley, winding through the bush. Here, inside the woods, there were still leaves on the trees which were almost green. But as he emerged into the valley, some two hundred feet above the flood-plain, the margins of the forest had already donned the gorgeous livery with which they seem to celebrate the leave-taking of the fall. Right opposite the point where he emerged, his eye fell on a knoll flanked by two steep ravines which formed cross-valleys in the hills of the south-eastern bank of Fisher Creek. Almost involuntarily he stopped
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his car and sat and stared ahead. He had often gone this way; but it had never struck him that he knew that knoll. Just beyond it stood the school which he had attended as a child; half a mile beyond the school stood the church in which he and Jane had been married. Another four miles south lay the farm on which he had been born and which was now the home of his brother. Yet, from all that, the wide valley separated him. That was the knoll, over there, on which Jane had, twenty years ago, sunk into his arms.
He seemed, in a sort of synopsis, as if foreshortened in time, not in space, to see many things at once. His brother's attitude, not so long ago, when he had gone to ask him for a loan. Himself on the day of his wedding when Arthur had hardly spoken to him although the Atkinsons, knowing nothing of the secret antagonism of a by-gone childhood, had quartered him, Jim, in his house. What could have been more natural than to quarter brother on brother? Twenty years ago! He also saw a peculiar look with which his brother had weighed him. He had been conscious of it at the time; but he had shrugged it aside. He, James Alvin, had still been "I Myself" who thought himself indubitably entitled to all the prizes of life!
There was no doubt in his mind any longer that, what he had heard at the time when he had first returned into these parts was true. There had been "something" between these two, Arthur and Jane. It had been broken off because of him, James Alvin, "I Myself". Till lately he had seen that brother when, as rarely happened, he had thought of him at all as a sort of patient beast of burden - as a being that would almost be honoured by being allowed to slave for him, James Alvin, "I Myself". He had slaved for him; first through the medium of that inheritance when he, Jim, had forced him to accept a valuation of the farm far in excess of its marketable value; and again through the years when, after having paid off the mortgage, he had saved and saved in order to have the money ready when he, Jim, would come to ask for it; as if he had foreseen that such would happen.
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There could be no doubt of it any longer. He had robbed his brother of the fruit of his labour over many, many years; and besides, he had robbed him of the woman for whom he lived.
And what had it come to? To this!
His brother had been robbed of money; but the woman had been robbed of her life! It was with the latter that his real concern still lay.
He pushed the clutch in and proceeded.
The road, turning roughly north, followed the windings of the valley and, within that valley, the foldings of the hills. A mile or so beyond his last stop, he topped just such a knoll as the one he had looked at across the river. Thence, he could see that river winding towards him over miles and miles of flood-plain, through the misty haze which was floating like a lid over the valley and trailing through the gorgeously coloured tree tops on the slopes of the hills. Something began to work in his innermost soul; he hardly knew yet what.
The road dipped down and then up again; he saw two or three miles of it ahead. Where it looped up, beyond the dip, it rose sharply to a precipitous hill-side cut off by an old land-slide the foot of which the river slowly quarried away. Up there, this road, for five or six hundred yards, was very narrow, well known to him. To the left, the hill rose steeply towards its summit, with an almost perpendicular wall; to the right, the landslide had torn it away, so that the precipice fell almost perpendicularly into the valley. He would stop there and try to puzzle out what was dimly rising in his mind. It was true, should he meet a car there, he would have to back out; on account of the narrowness of the road which, however, was little frequented; only once in many years had he met a car. He felt that what was working in him had something to do with the day and the landscape; that landscape he would be best able to survey from there.
When at last he stopped his car and alighted, moving heavily and slowly as was his wont, it seemed indeed as if the very spot were helping him to puzzle out what was troubling him. For, as he stood
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at the precipitous edge of the hanging road and looked out and down through that October haze, the something which had been working in his mind was suddenly clear.
Yes, it had been just such a day, more than twenty years ago when he had asked Jane to be his wife. As he saw things now, he had not exactly been in love. She had been beautiful, it was true; but primarily he had felt that she wanted him; he had felt flattered; he had realised how much such an alliance would help him; thus, originally, he had merely led her on. No, he had not then been in love; he had not even known what it meant to be in love; at most love had meant to him a sexual excitement; that excitement he had derived from others before her. But, in reaction to something in her which had necessarily remained undefined, he had glimpsed possibilities, seen even purely sexual ecstasies such as he had never known. More than that; even then he had divined the existence of a union of which the union in the flesh was a mere outward and separable though perhaps unavoidable and necessary symbol. Even at that time this divination had awed him, had almost frightened him. Now, it drew for him a goal; it created a supreme desire; that goal he was forbidden to approach.
He understood her now. He, she had said, had broken his faith to her before he had known her. It was true. If he, in his early youth, had had a vision of a woman like her; and if that vision had fired him with an irresistible longing, then, indeed, he would have kept himself clean for her sake, for the sake of an ultimate union with her; yes, perhaps even for the sake of that ideal itself, even though he might never have met it in the flesh.
And she, deluded by her very dreams, had given herself to him, believing him to be as she was. A breach had ensued: she had been repelled by things in him which had nothing to do with that fundamental state of purity or cleanness. Yet, again she had given herself. She had allowed him to approach even closer to her, on that day at the lake-shore, before she had gone to the western mountains.
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And then the terrible revelation had come, confirming all her instinctive and intuitive forebodings and hesitations. At the time he had thought that her anger sprang from the fact that he had made himself guilty in the eye of the law; that he had placed her in a position where she was in danger of losing what she had conquered from life, her status as a woman respectably married. Yes, in his utter inability to understand her, he had forced this woman to tell him in so many words just what made their complete separation an unavoidable issue: so much had they still been living in different worlds. For ten years it had puzzled him what was at the bottom of it. The separation from her and this puzzling and puzzling had ruined him in a commercial sense; it had destroyed, first his composure, then his self-reliance. Only now did he understand it all: now that it was too late.
He understood it at last because he had reached the point where he wished to do whatever it was he was going to do, not for himself who was utterly unworthy even of his own effort but for her. The best thing, the only thing he could do for her now was not to live for her but to die for her - to step out of the road so as to leave her free to make out of the remnant of her life what she could.
Filled with these thoughts, he stood at the edge of the road, his huge face reflecting his inner gloom, his heavy eyes staring almost unseeingly across that valley, his fleshy lips twitching now and then, and his wide, bulging forehead drawn into a fierce scowl.
The quality of the day took hold of him: the light, white atmosphere which, in the absence of the light of the sun, turned him back upon himself, intimately and painfully; this was his first conscious reaction to a landscape, for it irresistibly called another day out of the limbo of the past: a day over twenty years ago when he had held her in his arms, a virgin - he, the man who had embraced other women without count before her. He seemed to see her again as she had been, full of only half divined and entirely uncomprehended ardours; and superimposed on that vision was the vision of the day before: she, all
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in black, on her way to church, a child by her side: a child that was also his. Her body which was the only thing he had seen twenty-one years ago was a mere incarnation of that other thing, the soul. Now, he would willingly die if that soul would forgive him!
And suddenly his whole, huge, massive body shook; for again that thing which had been working in him took hold of him with an inescapable, bitter poignancy: the thought of what might have been.
He saw himself again as a child; not, this time, as the child he had actually been, as James Alvin, "I Myself"; as a different child, as what he was at the moment, delivered only of his years and stripped of the intervening life and therefore clean; as a child that was growing, and growing towards a union with that woman, towards a manhood worthy of her, worthy of being helped and directed by her. It was a vision of such utter potential felicity that, by comparison, he could not but realise his actual state as something which deserved only one single thing: it deserved to be stamped out.
A moment later he became aware of the fact that from the north-east, along the road, winding in and out on the hillsides, a car was approaching. Automatically he turned to his own car, went to the front, and span its crank. It was standing in the centre of the road, blocking it where it was narrowest. As soon as the engine was running, he entered it.
He had hardly inserted himself behind the wheel, when the other car appeared around a bend in the hills. The driver, seeing the path barred, applied the brakes; a second later, before Jim had had time to throw the gear into reverse, the two machines stood facing each other, no more than three feet clearance between them. So far, Jim had acted almost unconsciously, as if by reflex. His only impulse - for it was no thought - had been to clear the road for the other conveyance. But at the moment when he reached for the gear-shift lever he looked up.
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The driver at the wheel of the other car was Jane!
The reality deserved only one thing: to be stamped out! Stamp it out he would.
It was the work of a few seconds : perhaps it was the inspiration of a moment of insanity.
Slowly and deliberately he pushed the gear into reverse and, engaging the clutch, started to back and to open the throttle. He remained in the centre of the road till his machine was running at the rate of perhaps ten miles an hour. Then, again slowly and deliberately, he turned the wheel. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second he faced the wall of the hill to the north-west. It looked as if the car were hesitating; the turn had slowed its progress down. He opened the throttle still wider.
Her hands upon his brow! Clear the road for her! From a metaphor, it had become a sudden reality.
The enormously heavy machine took the edge of the precipice with a bound: it shot twenty feet out into the empty space before its fall became noticeable. There was a sheer, perpendicular drop of seventy-five feet; then a slope of sixty degrees like the talus at the foot of a cliff, this slope being a hundred and fifty feet in height; below, the remainder of the ancient landslide eased off into the bank of the river which had quarried away its foot. The car described two complete turns in the air, lengthwise, before it touched the slope; then, striking, it catapulted down, turning and turning, still lengthwise, spilling its wheel here, its cushions there, with the man still in his seat, holding on now to the steering wheel with the instinctive effort of desperation, and drawing in his already bleeding head. Then a last turn - it was breaking up by that time, disintegrating; and the driver's body was hurled out, on to the loose rubble of the landslide, close to the water's edge. The car had lodged the now bared ends of its frame in the yielding ground and stayed behind. A few clods of clay and a few round pebbles, the size of a fist, loosened
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by the impact of the heavy steel-rails of the frame, rolled after the human body which had preceded them. Then the whole lower part of the valley seemed to settle back into its immobility.
But up there, on the road, Jane had recognised Jim at the very moment when he had recognised her. For a fraction of a second she had felt a distinct annoyance at meeting him. As he began to back, she had pushed the lever of her own car into low gear and followed him at a distance of perhaps twenty-five feet. When she saw his car turning, she had, for another fraction of a second, merely thought that he was preparing to switch it over to the edge of the road; she had moved her lever forward into second speed, ready to pass him. Then, for a further fraction of a second, amazement and terror flooded through her whole body; something must have gone wrong with his steering gear; there would be an accident! She bent sideways out of her car and called a warning. And only now did she see that he was deliberately, purposefully, turning his wheel. She had a feeling as if the solid ground were yielding under her; as if the universe were falling into space. With her eyes bulging from their sockets, she yelled once more, "Brake! Brake!" Then she let go of her own steering wheel, screamed, and, raising her hands to her head, instinctively pushed both feet down, one on the clutch, the other on the foot-brake. If she had not done that, she would have gone over the edge herself.
What she did with her car, how she ran it against the hill, how she got out of it, how she got down the slope, she could never remember, much less explain. The only thing she knew was that, a few minutes after the accident - nobody ever called it anything else - she was down there, at the edge of the stream, bathing the heavy - face, which, apart from a wide flap of skin cut at the root of the hair from which blood flowed profusely, was strangely uninjured - with water from the river. The body was terribly broken and twisted - the later autopsy revealed a triple fracture of the spine, apart from other, minor injuries. It she dared not touch and scarcely look at. She kept talking
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to him. Since his head lay downward, the flowing motion of the water which she used replaced the skin of his forehead which, inside out, had fallen down over the rest of his face in its natural position. When she saw that, she aided this effect of the water by her hands, smoothing the skin where it lay in folds.
At this touch of her hands, he opened his eyes for one short moment. There was no thought, no realisation in the brief look; in fact, it was no look at all; it was probably no more than a reflex motion of the still living flesh. But it came, for her, at a moment when it seemed to have a meaning.
For, hardly aware of what she was saying, she had been stammering, again and again, "Oh Jim, forgive me if I've been harsh to you! Forgive me, Jim!"
In death he had his last great wish. Her hands were touching his brow.
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