"Listen," he commanded, "and try not to be a little idiot. Whatharm can a cow do you? Or if it could"--with a burst ofinspiration--"why should you throw yourself into the middle ofthem--perhaps with a broken leg?"
A smothered gasp told him that this shot had told, and he drove ongrimly; the nearly obliterated track led straight into the nibblingherd. As the monstrous, labouring chariot neared them they liftedtheir heads, stared gloomily a moment, and lumbered off, herdinginto a clumsy canter as the unknown enemy gained on them. Stuntedfirs rose here and there beside the track; the wheels crushed thesmaller stumps now, and tipped more alarmingly as they took theunavoidable stones. They two might have been the first (or last) ofhuman pairs in all the world, for they rode utterly alone betweenthe dun earth and the blue sky. Each moment Antony expected towake, gripping the sheets, and each moment this dreamlike progress,this mad chase of dappled cows, this pitching, tossing, clangorousflight, grew more real, more ludicrous, more menacing.
Suddenly the path grew smoother; even, it seemed to Antony, moreslippery. The wheels took a different motion, the noise ofmachinery grew by tiny degrees less and lower and died into adrone. It almost seemed that they were gliding with the force ofgravity alone, for the track (now a broad muddy band) dippedslightly but steadily. They appeared to be bound for a providentialgap in an ugly stone wall; below this stretched a wonderfully greenfield bounded by a thick row of feathery sage-coloured trees, thefirst full foliage they had seen.
Drugged with the steady head-wind of their flight, his handsmechanically glued to the wheel, his brain a mere phonograph thatsang, over and over, "Keep in the track! Keep In the track!" Antonytook his juggernaut through the scant six feet in the wall, markedhow those of the cattle that had crowded through the opening madefor the thinnest place in the fringe of trees, tried to estimatethe force of a collision with one of those gnarled and twistedtrunks, and realised to his horror that all power of initiativewas exhausted in him. Helpless and hypnotised, fatalistic as awild-riding Arab, he could only sit and grasp the wheel and wondervaguely what would happen. Would she jump? He was practicallycertain that the motive-power was completely or nearlyexhausted, and that they were slipping along on a different andsloping soil. Even as this flashed through his mind he saw awelcome gap in the sage-green trees and made for it, though indoing so he left the path, which, for that matter, splitinexplicably into many tiny paths.
What was that behind the green? What fields or walls or trees areblue? What blue shimmers and sparkles? . . .
"Jump! Jump!" he cried, hoarsely, but she sat fascinated, turned tostone by his side.
As one watches the water in a globe of coloured glass by theseashore and smiles at the tiny splashing mites that sport in it,so Antony watched a large red-and-white cow stagger helplessly downa steepish slope, and smiled as she plunged clumsily into the broadriver. "It is beyond her depth, for she is swimming," he thought,and then they hung for three seconds on the brink of the tinyslope, a maddening three seconds, in which they might have jumped,but could not--and plunged, with a sharp, sweet scream from therigid girl by his side, into the river. It rose up strangely, as itseemed, to meet them, and with the cold shock of the waterAntony's will returned to him, and he rolled over the side of thecar before it was quite submerged, dragging Nette with him, andpitching her over beyond him with his left arm. She slipped fromhis grasp by the very force of the movement and went down, and thecurrent caught them both.
THE RETURN
An Idyll of All Fools' Day Page 3
