The Guest of Quesnay | Page 6

over on its side, flashed with flame and explosion, and lay hidden under
a cloud of dust and smoke.
Ward's driver slammed down his accelerator, sent us spinning round
the curve, and the next moment, throwing on his brakes, halted sharply
at the culvert.
The fabric of the road was so torn and distorted one might have thought
a steam dredge had begun work there, but the fragments of wreckage
were oddly isolated and inconspicuous. The peasant's cart, tossed into a
clump of weeds, rested on its side, the spokes of a rimless wheel slowly
revolving on the hub uppermost. Some tools were strewn in a semi-
circular trail in the dust; a pair of smashed goggles crunched beneath
my foot as I sprang out of Ward's car, and a big brass lamp had fallen
in the middle of the road, crumpled like waste paper. Beside it lay a

gold rouge box.
The old woman had somehow saved herself--or perhaps her saint had
helped her--for she was sitting in the grass by the roadside, wailing
hysterically and quite unhurt. The body of a man lay in a heap beneath
the stone archway, and from his clothes I guessed that he had been the
driver of the white car. I say "had been" because there were reasons for
needing no second glance to comprehend that the man was dead.
Nevertheless, I knelt beside him and placed my hand upon his breast to
see if his heart still beat. Afterward I concluded that I did this because I
had seen it done upon the stage, or had read of it in stories; and even at
the time I realised that it was a silly thing for me to be doing.
Ward, meanwhile, proved more practical. He was dragging a woman
out of the suffocating smoke and dust that shrouded the wreck, and
after a moment I went to help him carry her into the fresh air, where
George put his coat under her head. Her hat had been forced forward
over her face and held there by the twisting of a system of veils she
wore; and we had some difficulty in unravelling this; but she was very
much alive, as a series of muffled imprecations testified, leading us to
conclude that her sufferings were more profoundly of rage than of pain.
Finally she pushed our hands angrily aside and completed the
untanglement herself, revealing the scratched and smeared face of
Mariana, the dancer.
"Cornichon! Chameau! Fond du bain!" she gasped, tears of anger
starting from her eyes. She tried to rise before we could help her, but
dropped back with a scream.
"Oh, the pain!" she cried. "That imbecile! If he has let me break my leg!
A pretty dancer I should be! I hope he is killed."
One of the singularities of motoring on the main-travelled roads near
Paris is the prevalence of cars containing physicians and surgeons.
Whether it be testimony to the opportunism, to the sporting proclivities,
or to the prosperity of gentlemen of those professions, I do not know,
but it is a fact that I have never heard of an accident (and in the season
there is an accident every day) on one of these roads when a doctor in

an automobile was not almost immediately a chance arrival, and
fortunately our case offered no exception to this rule. Another
automobile had already come up and the occupants were hastily
alighting. Ward shouted to the foremost to go for a doctor.
"I am a doctor," the man answered, advancing and kneeling quickly by
the dancer. "And you--you may be of help yonder."
We turned toward the ruined car where Ward's driver was shouting for
us.
"What is it?" called Ward as we ran toward him.
"Monsieur," he replied, "there is some one under the tonneau here!"
The smoke had cleared a little, though a rivulet of burning gasoline ran
from the wreck to a pool of flame it was feeding in the road. The front
cushions and woodwork had caught fire and a couple of labourers,
panting with the run across the fields, were vainly belabouring the
flames with brushwood. From beneath the overturned tonneau
projected the lower part of a man's leg, clad in a brown puttee and a
russet shoe. Ward's driver had brought his tools; had jacked up the car
as high as possible; but was still unable to release the imprisoned body.
"I have seized that foot and pulled with all my strength," he said, "and I
cannot make him move one centimetre. It is necessary that as many
people as possible lay hold of the car on the side away from the fire and
all lift together. Yes," he added, "and very soon!"
Some carters had come from the road and one of