# The Man at the Wheel

From Scribner's Magazine, Aug 1910
THE MAN AT
THE WHEEL
By E. W. Hornung
Illustrations by Fred Pegram
OSWALD ALFRED SMART had been christened (by permission) after the suburban magnate to whom his father was coachman at the time of the urchin's birth; and the two names went so well in double harness, as the coachman said, that they were never heard singly about the stables, although Mrs. Smart was very particular to say "our" Oswald Alfred, even when employing the vocative case, in respectful contradistinction to the master. Both Mr. and Mrs. Smart seem to have had their work cut out with the boy, who often had a stick about his back for his hot yet sullen temper, which was not cured by the treatment. He had, however, from his earliest years, when his better side was uppermost, a smile so sunny and so sudden as to transmute his leaden look to radiant gold. And it was largely this smile which got Oswald Alfred his engagements when, as a son of the house remarked, he "put the lid on" a consistently unfilial attitude by turning chauffeur at the first opportunity.
The old coachman, who knew the lad's temperament, though his knowledge of motor-cars was confined to keeping his carriage out of their way, enjoyed a gloomy view of the venture from the first. His confident misgivings were amply realized. Oswald Alfred's hot head lost him more than one situation in the first year, but not before he had cost successive employers large sums in fines and repairs, because they liked him for his eager alacrity and always hoped he would improve. His smile never failed to secure him a fresh start elsewhere; and as his sins were not due to lack of skill, but were purely a matter of nervous temperament, he went on better than he deserved until a really bad accident got into all the papers and ought clearly to have closed a dangerous career.
Old Smart was sanguine that it had, and made dogmatic computations as to what was not worth fifty bob a week; his attitude was one of chastened superiority on half that preposterous wage. But Oswald Alfred had not gone home after his other vicissitudes, and he was not going now to afford an object-lesson in accurate parental prophecy. He preferred to eat his heart out in his Shepherd's Bush lodgings, as long as his savings lasted, and sometimes even to squander them in defiant jaunts involving a very high collar and a rakish cigarette. But his luck held good, by returning before his pockets were quite empty, in the shape of a promising reply to his own reply to an advertisement for a chauffeur who "must be young man."
The young man invested in a higher collar than any in his now shabby stock, and slept on his best trousers before betaking himself to a Bloomsbury hotel to meet the gentleman with the funny name who had written to make the appointment. The gentleman had rather a funny face as well, dark and sallow, with eyes like chocolates; but there is never much light in Bloomsbury, at any rate in the month of February, and Oswald Alfred was not going to belie his stable upbringing in the matter of a gift-horse; for he had a shrewd suspicion that it was "all right," from the first funny accents in keeping with the whole personality of the advertiser, and of a piece with the curious locution (which the applicant had not noticed) in his advertisement.
"So Smart is your name, young man! Smart of name and smart of nature, is it not? Mine, as you know, is Ghum; by Ghum it is, like you say in the classic! I am very glad of you to swear by me, young man."
Oswald Alfred was merely embarrassed by these familiarities, for he had the instincts of a British servant in every vein, and had no desire to be treated otherwise in his new employ. His skin turned a dusky red, which deepened when Mr. Ghum displayed a startling knowledge of the accident which had cost him his last place.
"We spot it in the morning rag," the dark gentleman explained, with a show of teeth and an increasing air of idiomatic mastery; "we remember your name, and have wonder if we might hear of you. How have come you to meet such serious accident, young man?"
Oswald Alfred leaned forward from the edge of his chair, and stated his case to the lining of his cap as even he had never stated it before.
"It was like this, sir: I'd been to meet my lady and gentleman at Victoria Station (London, Chatham and Dover, sir); and the boat was very late, you see, and they'd brought over a new French maid who'd never been in a car before; an' that's 'ow the 'ole affair come to 'appen, sir. It was a limousine, sir, forty-'orse Feeut, an' that piled up with luggage we was absolutely top-'eavy; but my gentleman, 'e was always saying 'is car cost 'im quite enough without cab-fares over and above. I used to tell 'im 'ow it'd be some skiddy night, but he wouldn't take a word, though he'd a rough enough side to 'is own tongue, and I'd decided to give 'im notice when it 'appened in Sloane Street on the way 'ome that night. I was coming along at a good pace, but not exceeding, an' the only other thing in the street was a tradesman's van same way; 'im on the near side, sir, and me coming up on the crown, and blowing my horn. Suddenly he pulls right across me without ever 'olding out 'is 'and; right across me into Pont Street, without showing a finger! There was only one thing to be done, and I done it; took the corner myself, instead o' crashing into 'im, an' beat 'im round it, too! But with all the grease on the road and all that luggage on top we skidded somethink cruel, and took the pavement and smashed our near door against one o' them posts that are there to smash you. My lady and gentleman weren't hurt, they can't say they were, nor yet the worse off anyhow, being insured. But the girl, she'd never been in a car before, an' there she set beside me in front; it wasn't 'ardly right, sir; she didn't know enough even to 'old on. Out she went an' got concussion, and I lost my place for that!"
"A thing you could not help?"
"A thing I could no more help," declared Oswald Alfred, "than the babe unborn."
The chocolate eyes regarded him with sleepy benevolence. "It was hard on as young a man like you," said Mr. Ghum.
"It was very 'ard, sir."
"You deserve another opportunity."
"I should be very grateful if you could give me one, sir."
"And you would not find awful traffic our way," Mr. Ghum added, as though the statement contained a joke; but the subject was no joke to Oswald Alfred.
"I'm not afraid of traffic," he boasted with perfect truth; "but when 'orse-van drivers don't 'old out their 'ands they ought to be put in prison."
"On the other end of the equation," continued Ghum, soaring high over his hearer's head, "you would have a very invaluable life committed to your keeping. I would not be your master, but your master would be mine. I am not interviewing with you on my own account, but as the representative of one of the native big-bugs of my country, who is spending a little holidays in your old one."
Oswald Alfred had pricked up the ears of a keen and catholic sportsman; in fact, the newspaper of that name was even then folded carefully away in the pocket in which it was least likely to spoil the cut of a coat.
"Kind of Jam, or something?" he inquired with interest.
"Exactly! Quite! You hit it on the nail! His Highness the Jam Sahib of Boavista—my royal master and yours who is to be!"
An ill-concealed levity rather spoilt the effect of this descriptive mouthful on Oswald Alfred, but was soon forgotten in his joy over the terms that he succeeded in making for himself. It was wonderful how amenable Mr. Ghum proved to reason and Oswald Alfred's best smile. The lad had been getting fifty shillings in his last place, but of course keeping himself; in the new one he was promised forty and all found. It was not perhaps quite the kind of arrangement that a more independent chauffeur would have been so ready to entertain, but the financial improvement was such that he would soon be in a position to pick and choose again, unless he went and got into fresh trouble through the criminal negligence of others on the road. He was determined it should be through no fault of his own; and the old coachman himself could not have excelled his son in distrust of other drivers on the day that Mr. Ghum called for him with the car in Shepherd's Bush.
The car, a sound second-hand Cleland-Talboys, had been driven thus far by a chauffeur from the works in Notting Dale, where it had been some days undergoing repairs. Oswald Alfred very properly sought particulars, and the works' chauffeur was saying that so far as he knew there had been nothing at all the matter with her, when Mr. Ghum closed a promising discussion by inquiring if Smart could find his way to the Portsmouth Road.
"Then the sooner the better we are on it," he said curtly on getting an affirmative reply. "The car has been tune up for you, like they say in the classic; let me hear her melody without delay. Straight along the Portsmouth Road—but mind you traps—and when we arrive near Guildford I will give you direction."
It was one of those bitter afternoons which make the early spring for days together as cold as the depths of winter, and even colder to the eye. There was no sun in the bleak sky, and no rain in the clouds that flew there, but the trees looked black and brittle against both, and ploughed fields cold as new graves behind the trees. Telegraph posts stood along the side-strips of bleached grass, like sentinels frozen at attention, but here and there a live scout saluted with his reassuring grin. Mr. Ghum sat and shivered behind the windscreen in a coat like a dancing bear's; and the warm young blood at his side did dance with the delight of rattling along an open road again, and that without interference or complaint. Mr. Ghum raised no objection to thirty-five miles on the speedometer, nor yet to taking a corner on the wrong side or bucketing over patches of new metal, all of which were old tricks of the new chauffeur. If the Jam himself was as sensible it might be a pleasant place both on and off the car.
And a pleasant place it proved, at all events in the way of creature comforts and letting a man alone at his job; but Oswald Alfred did speedily find himself lonelier at other times than suited his habit as he liked to live. This again was a mere effect of causes in themselves both strange and disagreeable. There wasn't a female in the house, for instance; dusky heathen shuffled about the kitchen, and the new-comer's was the one white skin on the premises. Dusky heathen jabbered and guzzled in drawing-room and dining-room, and fresh relays were always being taken to the station or met there by the car. So it all seemed to Oswald Alfred. There was room for any number of the savages, as he himself was savage enough to call them in his heart; for the house had been formerly a preparatory school, and there were beds still in the dormitories, whither and whence the chauffeur was too often prevailed upon to carry weird bits of baggage. There were empty class-rooms, too, that gave him a chill when he passed their neglected windows. Yet it was a pretty house when the sun shone on its red brick and tiles, and its modern leaded casements, all so racy of the Surrey soil that surrounded it with sombre cedars and with yew hedges no longer of rectangular cut. The chief drawback was that it was a long way down a lane, which was a longer way down another lane; in fact, a more precious-spoken Oswald Alfred might have characterized the place as an oasis of bricks and timber in a wilderness of bracken and gorse.
Our Oswald Alfred confined himself to phrases like "the back of beyond," except on the subject of his never being allowed out anywhere alone, which moved him to the ruder eloquence of his old stable days. He never knew when his car might not be wanted, and was always expected to be on the spot himself in case of emergency. Of course he would never have stood it, had it not meant a steady saving of two pounds a week, and a "chit" (which was Mr. Ghum's synonym for a "character") whensoever he elected to leave of his own accord. But the youth was so well boarded and lodged (in what had been the sick-house of the departed school), and such was the consideration shown him in smaller matters, that he wisely resisted any inclination to make another change before the summer.
His Highness the Jam Sahib of Boavista (a name painted, curiously enough, on the garden gate) was the only member of the strange establishment to whom the new chauffeur took a real dislike; and it was not justifiable, inasmuch as the Jam never vouchsafed a word to him in praise or blame. He had a lean, mean face and figure, in striking contrast to his courtier Ghum, who was gross and genial; but it was the subdued ferocity with which his Highness would let his followers have it, in their own lingo, that made Oswald Alfred bustle before the ruthless lips had time to open fire on him. He gathered from Ghum that the potentate was leading his present quiet and modest life under doctor's orders and the sympathetic ægis of the Imperial Government.
Motoring was stated to be part of the treatment, and yet they did not motor daily, nor on the likeliest days, nor yet always when the chosen day was at its best. Often it would be the latter part of a dismal afternoon before Oswald Alfred went skidding through the muddy lanes with the burly Ghum beside him, his Highness and minor satellites abreast behind, and the acetylene head-lamps duly primed by order; for the Jam and his suite did not dissemble a natural kindness for dusk and darkness. Neither did the white youth object to either, or even to the crew he drove, when he was driving them; for they none of them interfered with him any more than Mr. Ghum had done, but let him go like the wind in the shortest of clear spaces, and cram on the brakes to his heart's content at the corner; so refreshing was their freedom from the little knowledge which is the abominable thing from a chauffeur's point of view. Ghum, however, was by way of acquiring some, but only from Oswald Alfred, who gave him indifferent driving lessons with little method and less regularity.
The party usually drove one way; but it was the most obvious way in the geographical circumstances. Guildford and Godalming ought to have been able to pick out the second-hand Cleland-Talboys even from the band of cars that flows over the fly-wheels of their main streets from dawn to dark; it was never quite dark when they clattered through to fly Hindhead like a hurdle; but they always lit up about the same place, just off the Portsmouth Road in the neighborhood of Liphook. Here may be found one of those impressively extravagant, because solid and interminable walls, which are by no means such a feature of the home counties as of the shires. Yet there was a point of this noble circle which was no great distance from the worthy pile within; the drive was not a long one; and a side gate, which came first, afforded a still shorter cut to the house.
It was through this gate that the motorists, on foot for the purpose, were peeping, one lighting-up-time at the beginning of March; and Oswald Alfred, attending to his own business with a box of matches, was taking as little interest as usual in theirs. He had gathered, from remarks dropped in Ghum's English, that H.H. had his royal eye on the place as a more fitting English seat than the deserted school; but he had no idea to whom it belonged. Suddenly a bicycle bell rang out between him and the peeping gentry at the gate, startling them more than himself, and causing an obsequious pantomime on their part in honor of the elderly gentleman who had jumped off the bicycle. Oswald Alfred was particularly impressed to see the Jam Sahib making as deep an obeisance as the youngest of his followers; he could only suppose they had been surprised by some very great personage indeed.
"Good evening, my friends!" cried the cyclist in a rich, kind voice. "Come to have another look at my kangaroo, have you?"
"Sir," replied the Jam, bowing lower than before, "some of these gentlemen had not the felicity of being present on the occasion to which you graciously refer. I was therefore taking the audacious liberty——"
"Nonsense!" interposed the cyclist, heartily. "You take 'em in and show 'em anything you can by this light, and I'll trundle on to the lodge and join you at the sub-tropical kennels with the keeper. My poor beasts have felt the winter as much as you and I have, I'm afraid; but we shall go back to the sun refreshed, and they never will, poor devils! Hurry up, or I'll be there before you!"
This in a genial crescendo as the four forms debouched through the gate and melted fast into the gloaming. Meanwhile Oswald Alfred was marvelling to find that after all his Highness could speak better English, when it suited him, than any of his retinue, and yet that his tone did not sweeten with his words. His tone had been bitter and truculent in some curiously subtle degree, which incurred no snub yet could penetrate the patriotic hide of a British coachman's son, and inject the virus of a vague resentment. Next moment the cyclist was giving his natural enemy the chauffeur a kindly word as well, and in the twin cones of acetylene gaslight the chauffeur recognized his great man at a glance.
"Good evening, my lord!" returned Oswald Alfred, with ready salute and the smile which had lain fallow at Boavista.
"Have we met before?" inquired the other in a tone both puzzled and amused.
"No, my lord, but I see it was Lord Amyott as soon as ever you come in front of the lamps. I seen your lordship's portrait many a time when you was out at the war."
There was genuine enthusiasm in this speech, for Oswald Alfred had a nice capacity for discriminating respect, inherited from the parent who had insisted on so christening him after the master. Lord Amyott, however, did not seem particularly flattered, and his wiry white mustache looked closer-cropped than before on its granite pedestal of chin.
"Ah, well, I'm in another part of the empire now," said he, "and only home for a few weeks, like our friends from the same place." He jerked his head toward the gate through which they had gone, and then stared harder at Oswald Alfred. "You ain't the chauffeur they had the other day?" he added.
"I've been in my situation a fortnight, my lord," was the considered reply.
"Do you know what happened to the other fellow?"
"I never 'eard, my lord."
"No more did I, and I should like to know. Nice lad, I thought him." Lord Amyott stepped up nearer to the bonnet, and lowered his voice. "Do they ever let you out of their sight?" he asked, grimly, but as though it were rather a joke as well.
"Never off the premises, my lord."
"They never let him! I suppose he couldn't stand it. But I should like to know."
Oswald Alfred was not to be outdone in dramatic undertones. "It's all the Jam!" said he sepulchrally.
"All the what?"
"'Im that spoke to your lordship; his Royal Highness the Jam Sahib," explained Oswald Alfred, feeling that he was indeed moving in exalted circles, and unconsciously adding to the altitude. But Lord Amyott only burst out laughing under his breath, after catching it in sheer surprise.
"Does he really call himself that?"
"Only in fun, my lordship, only in fun!" urged a silky voice; and the oleaginous Ghum stood fawning between the speakers in the acetylene rays; how he had returned without a sound, or whether he had ever gone off with the rest, neither knew.
He was the man, however, for an awkward moment, with his sleek and supple tact, and his engaging idiosyncrasies of speech. Oswald Alfred, for one, was easily convinced that the whole concoction of the title, unwittingly suggested by himself, as he was bound to admit, had been all along an elaborate joke at his own expense. Perhaps, however, it was Lord Amyott's laughter that carried most conviction, despite a grim note of its own; but when he really had mounted his bicycle, and disappeared round the bend in the direction of the main gates and the keeper's lodge, the unhappy young man was quickly and quietly informed of the enormity he had committed in speaking of the Jam as such.
"Did you not know," cried Ghum, "that he was in this country incogs? If I should tell him how you have given away, you go same way as last chauffeur without moment's hesitation."
"And what way was that?" asked Oswald Alfred, remembering Lord Amyott's inquiries; but the question made Ghum angrier than anything else.
"Never mind you!" said he. "You know what happens to servants who do not take satisfaction; let him be a warning to you. I will not tell his Highness what you have done. I dare not. It is more than I am worth."
"But is he 'is 'ighness?" demanded the young man. "First you say it's all a cod, and then you talk as if it wasn't."
"Of course it isn't!" the other declared in all solemnity. "He is exactly what I said him; the title is not invention or beastly lie. It is the whole truth, and nothing but the whole, only his Highness want it kept up the sleeve."
This was not quite good enough for the young man; he had heard Lord Amyott's first and loudest laugh; and his faith was shaken to its base. His imagination was stimulated, which was worse; it fastened on the last chauffeur and his fate, in which even a world's hero like Lord Amyott V.C. (and ever so many less popular letters of the alphabet) had shown such interest. Oswald Alfred was in fact a good deal disturbed by his conversation with his lordship; but it was an experience that left him still more proud, and he was seriously thinking of drilling a hole through the sovereign a noble hand had slipped into his.
His imagination, however, was strengthened in its hold on a disagreeable subject by a little circumstance which occurred on the way back that evening. On Hindhead a tire bumped heavily, and was discovered down; and the dark crew disembarked while the young white man jacked up his wheel and put on the Stepney. The spot was close to the famous Gibbet, and the quartette not only strolled on to the memorial stone by the roadside, but one of them returned for a side-lamp with which to illuminate the inscription. Now the chauffeur knew parts of this by heart, having bought picture post-cards of the stone "erected in detestation of a barbarous murder" when putting up at the Huts in his last employ. As he wrestled with his wheel he heard an uncouth clucking of alien tongues; but it was not this that made him look up, and left the bad impression on his mind; it was the sudden chorus of cacophonous merriment, and the spectacle of four human beings leaning back in a patch of lamp-light, on the grassy brink of a black abyss, and holding their sides before the record of the cruel deed once done there.
"They want tipping into it," thought Oswald Alfred; "the Devil's Punchbowl's just about their mark."
Their heathen behavior might not have struck him without Lord Amyott's previous inquiries after the last chauffeur, and those inquiries might not have stuck in his mind if the heathen had not behaved so that evening. The unfortunate sequence formed a vicious circle in a mind not used to coping with unpleasant fancies, and spoilt his night for as good a sleeper as a very young man should be. Nor was it quite nice to lie awake, wondering about one's predecessor, in his very bed, and that the only one in a separate building containing several locked rooms or potential Bluebeard chambers.
That night he thought of giving notice in the morning, and perhaps making off before his week was up, but a series of fine spring days hardened the lad in his original determination to "stick it" till the summer. He was no coward, when all was said in his disfavor, and as a rule he showed your real road-hog's plentiful lack of imagination. He was not going to be a fool and forfeit a clear two pounds a week, and no silly complaints. Even the now formidable Ghum made no further allusion to the indiscretion about the Jam, did not hold it over a fellow, but seemed to have forgotten all about it, and only redoubled the ardor of his own efforts to learn to drive the car.
But you may teach a man to drive like an arrow when there is nothing else on the Ripley Road, and yet never know when a wobble of the wheel or a foot on the wrong pedal may spell instantaneous disaster. It was only a wing and a step that Mr. Ghum damaged to the like detriment of a passing car; but he was seen no more at the wheel, and it was Smart Sahib (as the menials sometimes called him with rolling eyes) who took a select load in the favorite direction about a week after their last encounter with Lord Amyott. This time, however, it was the middle of the evening before they started. And no secret was made of their intention to see Lord Amyott again, and as it certainly appeared to Oswald Alfred, by appointment.
Over Hindhead hung a skyful of stars, and if there were fewer to be seen from the lane near Liphook, it was not the fault of stars or sky. This time no wistful peeping into Paradise, but confident entry at the side gate on the part of that powerful Peri Mr. Ghum and his serene master. The white youth scarcely noticed that a dark one quietly took the vacant seat beside him, that another leant as quietly against the Stepney wheel, or for that matter that there had been four of them seated behind instead of three. It was not a night on which you noticed all you ought; the stars were too beautiful, sparkling to the eves as the keen air did in the mouth and lungs. And for long enough nothing was to be heard but those small noises of the country night, which can mean so little individually to a cockney soul like Oswald Alfred's, yet perhaps so much in the mass. At all events he was not feeling frightened, or mean, or particularly anxious for further relations with Lord Amyott, or to give notice before he was given it, or to drive a six-cylinder at sixty miles an hour, when the new note of a lumbering gait and laboured breathing recalled him to his motor-self.
It was old Ghum blundering through the side gate. "They have sickness in there!" he called excitedly. "The lordship—the ladyship—I no breath tell you. The doctor—they want you! Straight on—hard you like!"
Oswald Alfred had heard of strokes and seizures, and naturally conceiving either Lord or Lady Amyott the victim of one, had leapt out and was winding up before these stertorous ejaculations had merged into native patter. Ghum was assisted into his old place, the driver climbed over him into his, and off they went with clanging gears and clashing lever.
"Wait till I let her out!" muttered the man at the wheel, and gave the second-hand Cleland-Talboys gas enough to drive a motor-bus. The gray lane wobbled under her lamps, plucked out of darkness in brilliant ovals, and the low wall wavered on the edge of the halo. Lane and wall bore continuously to the left, but Oswald Alfred took no heed of the obtuse corners, and only blew his horn when a couple of figures appeared like motes in the advancing gas-beam; they had plenty of time to get out of the way, but they both jumped for their lives in a style that made the heathen squeal with joy; and only at the last moment, which was the next moment, and the worst in all his life, did Oswald Alfred see who they were.
One was that villainous Jam, showing nothing but his teeth and the whites of his evil eyes; the other was a white shirt-front with pearl studs in it, a black tie, a collar, and a cropped mustache of which every silver bristle stood out as Lord Amyott reeled and stumbled in front of the car. There was a horrible impact, but no bumping over the mass of black and white that whirled out of the halo like a wounded magpie.
Meanwhile, at the ultimate or penultimate moment of recognition, Oswald Alfred had applied his brakes with such reckless violence that a less heavily-weighted car might have completed the tragedy by turning a somersault on the fatal spot; but the overcrowded Cleland-Talboys ground itself to a shivering standstill in its own length. And the white driver started to his feet behind the wheel.
"He done it! He's murdered 'is lordship! I saw the swine give 'im a push with both 'ands!"
So he began on the trio behind, flinging an accusing arm after the wretch who was already stooping over his mangled magpie in the bracken. A patch of white shirt showed through the fronds; and to his unspeakable indignation the chauffeur saw a kick dealt it, and the white roll over into black, before the brutal leader rejoined his grinning band.
"I saw you!" cried Oswald Alfred, in inadequate greeting; "I saw you give 'is lordship a push at the last moment! You'll swing for it yet, you dirty nigger!"
"On the contrary," replied the Jam, with bestial suavity, "it is you who have taken this valuable life, and you who shall answer for it with your own!"
The young man could not tell whether the fiend meant then or thereafter—by violence or by perjury—but he believed his last moments had arrived when Ghum screwed the muzzle of an automatic pistol into the flesh under his left ear.
"Down on your seat," hissed Ghum, "and drive like the devil where I say you to drive, or I blow in your brains this minute!"
Instantaneous surrender was the only answer to that. Yet the gibbering coward heard his own abject words but faintly, as at a distance, and not as his own words at all, only to grind his teeth when he knew they were, and what a coward he had lived to be! He sobbed to think he could have fallen so low, to be first hoodwinked by a lot of murdering niggers, and then to beg for his life at their dirty hands; and yet even while he sobbed he was out and busy with the starting-handle, and more than busy, with a zeal so ignoble that he felt its poison in every vein.
He a coward! He had never been such a thing in all his days; he would have struck the man or boy who had dared to call him one before to-night. Besides, it was absurd; a man who could drive as he could in the traffic, in and out with his eyes half-shut, or at his rate by night on a twisty road, was no coward whatever else he might be. He carried his life in his hands, that was what he did and had been doing ever since he learnt to drive a car. And yet he was driving one now at the absolute will and pleasure of a black fat fool with a pistol in his hand!
Right, left, right, and right again at that blackguard's bidding; and now they were back on the bleak main road under a full company of stars; and those were the lights of Hindhead in the distance, and here were a pair of enormous white-hot eyes scorching down the hill to meet him. If only he had the pluck to run into them! They would not all be killed, some of these murderers would live to hang, and a turn of the hand would do it . . . would do it now . . . even now . . . no, now it was too late.
"And a good job, too!" said Oswald Alfred to himself. "Jolly hard on the other coves!"
But in his heart he knew it was not "the other coves" he was considering, but his own miserable skin. Well! Try again; the Hindhead lights were quite near now; why not dash into the middle of them and wreck the car against the stout old wall of the Huts? He could hear the crash, could see the débris, and himself picking himself up, to live and tell the tale if there was a God above! He would do it; this time he would; he got so far as lifting his right foot ever so little on the accelerator, as dropping a speed an instant later on the hill. But that spoilt it; nothing under thirty-five an hour would make a job of it; and after all that was impossible at the top of a long hill.
He caught himself breathing again.
Ghum came to his assistance at the same instant. "Faster! faster," he hissed again, with his barrel against the young man's ribs. "Come to stoppage this side Boavista, and you join the lordship this very night!"
The brute's breath was on his cheek, deep-dyed with shame in the zone of light outside the Huts; a few loiterers were left idly gaping, neither more nor less interested in the carload of criminals than in the hundreds a day it was their fate to suffer from; and once more the oval searchlight danced ahead in the darkness.
There was light, too, in Oswald Alfred's brain, where the sullen embers had been fanned to passionate flame by the vile breath on his cheek and the succulent threat in his ear. The wretches behind were keeping quiet in the silent company of their crime and its risks; he was glad Ghum had spoken, to remind him what wretches they all were. Was it likely that they would spare his life in any case after that which had been done before his eyes? What had happened to the last chauffeur?
His successor thought of him for the first time that night, and the wind in his face felt warmer than his blood; he thought of the locked doors in the deserted sick-house, and would his own be locked to-morrow? He saw certain death awaiting him under the sheltering cedars and the warm red tiles of Boavista; and simultaneously with the outward eye he saw the memorial stone marking the scene of that other "barbarous murder"—the one at which these hounds had laughed! No wonder, while they hatched its infinite superior in barbarity!
There stood the stone, over the crest of the hill and down the timely slope, on the edge of the oval halo; on the edge also of a wide abyss with lights twinkling only on the opposite rim, and in the sky that seemed somehow nearer at that moment. If that was the Devil's Punchbowl, it looked full of boiling pitch as Oswald Alfred turned set teeth to his infamous companion, and shouted through them:
"Look out!"
Ghum looked that way as intended; for the young man was curiously determined not to die by a bullet, and this time his hands did not fail him at the last. Round went the wheel, and round came the storied stone, clean across the headlamps; a fringe of limelit gorse rose vividly between them and the pitchy void; there was a whir of wheels in the air, a lurch into space, and so the chapter ended for the occupants of the second-hand Cleland-Talboys.
Yet not for all, because by day the place is not what a dark night paints it, and there are always some who fall clear of a car.
There was one great unscathed scoundrel who stood his trial at Guildford, who insisted on giving evidence in his own defence, and who nearly succeeded in getting the court cleared by reason of his strangely individual locutions. Fourteen years was his portion; but a young spectacled coffee-colored student, being crippled for life, was more leniently handled.
Between these extreme cases of survival came a third, which was treated for a long time, and with ultimate success, in a nursing home near the scene of the catastrophe. It was summer, however, before Lord Amyott was admitted there, on two sticks, and ushered into the patient's presence, to be immediately rewarded by a wan but unmistakable edition of the very brilliant smile which had taken his fancy by night outside his own side gate.
"There are only two things I want to know," said Lord Amyott, in his kind rich voice. "I know all about most of it, including what happened to myself, so please hold your tongue about that, my good fellow! What I want to know is whether the final thing was another accident, so far as you were concerned, or whether you went mad and did it on purpose as that rascal Ghum declared in the witness-box."
Oswald Alfred did not hesitate long.
"I did it on purpose," he muttered "but I never went mad."
"In plain English, you absolutely meant to send the lot of them to hell—and to go with them so far?"
"That was it, my lord," said Oswald Alfred, finding more voice under the encouragement of a look and tone that rather astonished him in Lord Amyott.
"You sat tight and turned your wheel as though you were going round an ordinary corner?"
"Yes, my lord," replied our hero, as though he had never hesitated for a single unheroic moment; but a sharp twinge of remorse caused him to qualify the boast a little. "You see, my lord," the lad explained, "I felt they'd send me the way of the last chauffeur—and now we know what that was—but I'd a pretty good idea then, and I preferred my own way."
Lord Amyott hobbled between his two sticks into the balcony, and bent his brow over the darkling pines; perhaps he would have liked a little less complacency in the performer of the particular feat under discussion; and he thought that on the whole he would not put his skilled opinion of it into so many words.
"There's only one other thing I want to ask," said he, returning as far as the French windows. "We're a pretty pair of cripples, but I'm assured that it's only a matter of time in both cases, and I've booked my own passage for September. I've got a new car on order to go out in the same boat. Would you like to come out with me to take the wheel?"
And Oswald Alfred lay transfigured by a smile which, it is to be hoped, was not Lord Amyott's only reward for being braver than he knew.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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