The Great Accident

by Ben Ames Williams

He turned abruptly and went out of the kitchen without saying what Wint was, and Hetty looked after him with understanding in her smile. Then her face became still and somber again. There was growing in Hetty’s eyes a certain unhappy light. A desperate fashion of unhappiness, which no one was sufficiently interested to notice. She was not so cheerful as she used to be. And there was a helplessness about her.

Word of Wint’s new industry spread slowly through Hardiston. It was Dick Hoover himself who told Joan of it. Dick was a Mason, and he took Joan to a Masonic dance one night. She spoke of Wint. “I have heard that he is studying law,” she said. “Is it true?”

So Dick told her. “True as Gospel,” he said. “And he’s darned quick to pick it up, too. The principles.... Of course, it will take time. But I’d just as soon have him try a case for me now, as some of these....”

He went on enthusiastically. Hoover was always enthusiastic about things. He was an extremist. His friends were the finest chaps in the world, his enemies were the least of created things. But he had few enemies. People liked him, and he liked people. Joan liked him; liked him particularly this evening because he talked to her of Wint.

Joan Arnold was, in a way of speaking, a girl to tie to. There was a peculiar steadfastness in her. She was a little taller than Wint, and she was habitually grave and quiet, especially when she was with him. In his presence she had always been faintly abashed and reticent as a girl is apt to be in the presence of a man she cares for. Joan had always cared for Wint. In spite of the fact that she was a year or two his junior, they had played together as children: and they had grown up together. When they were little children, they fought as only good friends can fight. When they were a little older, Wint scorned her because she was a girl. A year or so later, she scorned Wint because she was at the age when girls resolve to have a career and never marry at all. But in their late teens, they were devoted to each other, so that the mothers of the town smiled when they passed by, and nodded to each other, and whispered, with the delight women take in such matters, that they were a nice-looking couple together. Wint’s short, sturdy strength matched well the girl’s slightly larger stature and her quiet poise.

The first passage of affection between them had come when she was eighteen, when he went away to college. Before that they had been much together, but none save the most casual words had passed between them. The night before Wint went away, he went to see her. He was feeling adventurous and heroic and important as a boy does feel when he leaves home for the first time. He talked vastly, of big things he meant to do, of his dreams. She thrilled to his dreams with the half of her that was still child; she smiled at his enthusiasm with the half that was already woman. They were sitting on the porch of her home. There were locust trees about the veranda. They sat in a two-seated swing, facing each other, Wint leaning toward her earnestly.

He became melancholy, and she comforted him softly. He did not want to go away, he said. She told him he would be happy. The movement of the swing made him lean toward her. There was a moon, and the September evening was warm, and the very air seemed trembling in a rhythm that beat upon them both.

When he got up to go, she got up at the same time, and the swing lurched and threw them together. Ineptly, he kissed her, fumblingly, on the cheek. She did not move, she trembled where she stood. He took her awkwardly in his arms, as though afraid she would break, and kissed her cheek again. He rubbed his cheek against hers. She looked at him with wide eyes, lips a little parted, and he kissed her lips. They were cool, unused to kisses.

The months thereafter, till Wint was expelled from college, passed smoothly with them. Too smoothly, too placidly. They wrote short, broken letters; they saw each other when Wint came home. They thought they were very happy; yet each was conscious of a lack in their happiness. There was no fire in it, none of the exquisite anguish of love. They missed this, without knowing what they missed. All went too well with them.

Joan wept on her pillow when he was expelled, but she did not let him see her weep. She reassured him. There was an unsuspected strength in her. Women are full of these surprises. They are indescribably dainty creatures, habitually clad in fabrics like gossamer, seeming light as air and fit to vanish at a breath, who reveal—in a bathing suit, for instance—a surprising physical solidity. It was so, spiritually, with Joan. She was so quiet and so still that Wint, if he had thought at all, would have supposed she was a simple girl and nothing more; but in the revelations of his disaster, she showed a poise and a power which heartened him immensely, and made him a little afraid of her. She was a tower of strength for him to lean upon, a miracle of understanding and of sympathy.