Chapter 4 - Page 2

before his reasons were marshalled, his resolutions were formed. He
had attempted a thousand remonstrances with himself; he had sought to
remedy the defects in his own character by written inscriptions in his
bedroom and memoranda inside his watch case. "Keep steady!" was one of
them. "Keep the End in View." And, "Go steadfastly, coherently,
continuously; only so can you go where you will." In distrusting all
impulse, scrutinising all imagination, he was persuaded lay his one
prospect of escape from the surprise of countless miseries. Otherwise he
danced among glass bombs and barbed wire.

There had been a time when he could exhort himself to such fundamental
charge and go through phases of the severest discipline. Always at last
to be taken by surprise from some unexpected quarter. At last he had
ceased to hope for any triumph so radical. He had been content to
believe that in recent years age and a gathering habit of wisdom had
somewhat slowed his leaping purpose. That if he hadn't overcome he had
at least to a certain extent minimised it. But this last folly was
surely the worst. To charge through this patient world with--how much
did the car weigh? A ton certainly and perhaps more--reckless of every
risk. Not only to himself but others. At this thought, he clutched the
steering wheel again. Once more he saw the bent back of the endangered
cyclist, once more he felt rather than saw the seething approach of the
motor bicycle, and then through a long instant he drove helplessly at
the wall....

Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely prolonged....

Anything might have been there in front of him. And indeed now, out of
the dreamland to which he could not escape something had come, something
that screamed sharply....

"Good God!" he cried, "if I had hit a child! I might have hit a child!"
The hypothesis flashed into being with the thought, tried to escape and
was caught. It was characteristic of Mr. Britling's nocturnal
imagination that he should individualise this child quite sharply as
rather plain and slender, with reddish hair, staring eyes, and its ribs
crushed in a vivid and dreadful manner, pinned against the wall, mixed
up with some bricks, only to be extracted, oh! _horribly_.

But this was not fair! He had hurt no child! He had merely pitched out
Mr. Direck and broken his arm....

It wasn't his merit that the child hadn't been there!

The child might have been there!

Mere luck.

He lay staring in despair--as an involuntary God might stare at many a
thing in this amazing universe--staring at the little victim his
imagination had called into being only to destroy....

Section 2