When, after some minutes of scouting, he reached the gate and had a view of the road, he rather expected to see the motor-car lying in fragments in Watling Street, with, possibly, a couple of mangled corpses in the near neighbourhood, and a self-satisfied elephant dominating the picture. But his horrid premonitions were falsified.. The keeper had clearly proved the superiority of man over the brute creation; he was astride the neck of the obstreperous elephant, and the herd were trampling, with their soft, flabby footfalls, down Watling Street, along the sloping embankment, into the deep, broad valley which separates Dunstable from the belt of villages to the north of it. The lady with the motor-car stood quiescent in the road. She had got safely out of her chalk-pit, and was now waiting for the elephants to disappear before proceeding on her journey. Richard hesitated whether to return and examine the chalk-pit or to keep in touch with the lady. What any creature—especially a woman, and a young woman—could be doing with a motor-car in a chalk-pit in the middle of the night passed his wit to conceive. Nor could he imagine how any sane driver of a motor-car could take his car down such a steep slope as that cart-track with the least hope of getting it up again without the assistance of an elephant, or at least a team of horses. She must surely have been urged by the very strongest reasons to descend into the pit. What were those reasons? He wanted badly to examine the chalk-pit at once, but he decided ultimately that it would be better to watch the lady—‘Craig’s girl.’ The chalk-pit would always remain where it was, whereas the lady, undoubtedly an erratic individuality, might be at the other end of the world by breakfast-time. He crept back to his own car, found it unharmed in the deep shadow where he had left it, and mounted.
By this time the elephant herd had accomplished a good quarter of a mile down the gradual declivity of the embankment. ‘Craig’s girl’ started her car and followed gently. It seemed, in the profound silence of the night, that the spit, spit of her engine must be heard for miles and miles around. Richard started his own car, and rolled noiselessly in the traces of his forerunner. The surface of the road was perfect—for the Bedfordshire County Council takes a proper pride in its share of this national thoroughfare—and the vehicles moved with admirable ease, Richard’s being about a couple of hundred yards in the rear. Just at the top of the embankment is a tiny village, appropriately called Chalk Hill, and this village possesses a post pillar-box, a Wesleyan chapel of the size of a cottage, and an inn—the Green Man. As Richard swung past the Green Man a head popped out of one of its windows.
‘Anything wrong?’ asked a man.
‘No,’ said Richard, stopping his car and lowering his voice to a whisper, lest the girl in front should hear and turn round. ‘Go back to bed,’ he added.
‘Go to bed yourself,’ the man said, apparently angry at this injunction. ‘You circus-folk, you’ve got motor-cars now; as if camels and alligators wasn’t enough, you’ve got motorcars a-grunting and a-rattling. Three blessed hours you’ve been a-passing this house, and my wife down with erysipelas.’
Grumbling, the man closed the window. Richard laughed at being identified with the retinue of Bosco’s circus. He felt that it was an honour, for in the eyes of the village these circus-folk move always in an atmosphere of glory and splendour and freedom.
He passed on. The girl in front was gradually overtaking the elephants, which were scattered across the width of the road. Suddenly one of them turned—the one ridden by the keeper—and charged furiously back, followed more slowly by the others. Evidently the sound of the spit, spit of the motor-car had renewed the animal’s anger. Perhaps it thought: ‘I will end this spit, spit once for all.’ Whatever the brute’s thoughts, the keeper could not dissuade it from its intentions, though Richard could see him prodding it behind the ear with a goad. The girl, ‘Craig’s girl,’ perceived the danger which she ran, and, after a moment’s vacillation, began to wheel round, with the object of flying before this terrible elephantine wrath. But that moment’s vacillation was her undoing. Ere she could get the machine headed straight in the opposite direction the elephant was upon her and her car. Richard trembled with apprehension, for the situation was in truth appalling. With a single effort the elephant might easily have pitched both girl and car down the steep side of the embankment, which was protected only by a thin iron rail. Richard stopped his own car and waited. He could do nothing whatever, and he judged that the presence of himself and another car in the dreadful altercation might lead even to further disasters.
