It seemed to him that the soft noise of the crash was not yet dead in the air. It was as if he had made the intervening distance in one leap. In that same little second his brain encompassed limitless areas,—terror, remorse, certain vivid vistas of his past life, the whiteness of the eyelids and the limpness of the little arms, and the startled faces of the spectators who were hurrying toward him. His mental mechanism, dulled before by drink, was keyed to such a degree that the full scope of the accident went home to him in an instant.
The car he had struck was one of the thousands of “jitneys” of which he had so often spoken with contempt. The girl was a shopgirl or factory worker, on her way home. Shaken with horror, but still swift and strong from the stimulus of the crisis, he lifted her head and shoulders in his arms.
It was a dark second in the life of this care-free, self-indulgent son of wealth as he stared into the white, blank, thin face before him. He was closer to the Darkness that men know as Death than he had ever been before,—so close that some of its shadow went into his own eyes, and made them look like odd black holes in his white skin, quite different from the vivid orbs that Rodney Coburn had seen over the tall glasses an hour before. For once, Ned Cornet was face to face with stern reality. And he waited, stricken with despair, for that face to give some sign of life.
It was all the matter of a second. The people who had seen the accident and the remaining passengers of the “jitney” had not yet reached his side. But for all that, the little instant of waiting contained more of the stuff of life than all the rest of Ned Cornet’s time on earth. Then the girl smiled in his face.
“I’m not hurt,” he heard her say, seemingly in answer to some senseless query of his. She shook her head at the same time, and she smiled as she did it. “I know what I’m saying,” she went on. “I’m not hurt—one—bit!”
A great elation and enthusiasm went over the little crowd that was gathering around her. There could be no doubt but that she told the truth. Her voice had the full ring of one whose nerves are absolutely unimpaired. Evidently she had received but the slightest blow from one of the cars when its momentum was all but spent. And now, with the aid of a dozen outstretching hands, she was on her feet.
The little drama, as if hurled in an instant from the void, was already done. Tragedy had been averted; it was merely one of the thousands of unimportant smash-ups that occur in a great city every year. Some of the spectators were already moving on. In just a moment, before half a dozen more words could be said, other cars were swinging by, and a policeman was on the scene asking questions and jotting down license numbers. Just for a moment he paused at Ned’s elbow.
“Your name and address, please?” he asked coldly.
Ned whirled, turning his eyes from the girl’s face for the first time. “Ned Cornet,” he answered. And he gave his father’s address on Queen Anne Hill.
“Show up before Judge Rossman in the morning,” he ordered. “The jitney there will send their bills to you. I’d advise you to pay ’em.”