Chapter VIII: 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.