Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way perhaps a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he returned to his theme: “Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight; two up, two down, cross and repeat. Take that ahead of us. Could anything be simpler to paint?”
He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert. Beyond, stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches. An old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet handkerchief knotted about her head.
“You think it’s easy?” I asked.
“Easy! Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done—at least, the way you fellows do it!” He clenched his fingers as if upon the handle of a house-painter’s brush. “Slap, dash—there’s your road.” He paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of a barn. “Swish, swash—there go your fields and your stone bridge. Fit! Speck! And there’s your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your dealer will probably call ‘the human interest,’ all complete. Squirt the edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe. Throw a cup of tea over the whole, and there’s your haze. Call it ‘The Golden Road,’ or ‘The Bath of Sunlight,’ or ‘Quiet Noon.’ Then you’ll probably get a criticism beginning, ‘Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening on an English moor. The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward ploughman—‘”
He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white touring-car swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to see, and, snorting thunder, passed us “as if we had been standing still.”
It hurtled like a comet down the curve and we were instantly choking in its swirling tail of dust.
“Seventy miles an hour!” gasped George, swabbing at his eyes. “Those are the fellows that get into the pa—Oh, Lord! THERE they go!”
Swinging out to pass us and then sweeping in upon the reverse curve to clear the narrow arch of the culvert were too much for the white car; and through the dust we saw it rock dangerously. In the middle of the road, ten feet from the culvert, the old woman struggled frantically to get her cart out of the way. The howl of the siren frightened her perhaps, for she lost her head and went to the wrong side. Then the shriek of the machine drowned the human scream as the automobile struck.
The shock of contact was muffled. But the mass of machinery hoisted itself in the air as if it had a life of its own and had been stung into sudden madness. It was horrible to see, and so grotesque that a long-forgotten memory of my boyhood leaped instantaneously into my mind, a recollection of the evolutions performed by a Newfoundland dog that rooted under a board walk and found a hive of wild bees.
The great machine left the road for the fields on the right, reared, fell, leaped against the stone side of the culvert, apparently trying to climb it, stood straight on end, whirled backward in a half-somersault, crashed over on its side, flashed with flame and explosion, and lay hidden under a cloud of dust and smoke.