But Albert died anyway two hours later at the hospital.
Finally—and somehow this was the worst of all—Mr. Andrews came tottering towards the people as they gathered around Albert. He was an insurance salesman, a little scrap of a man who was wasting away with some horrible joint disease. He was so feeble that he could not walk save by tottering along on a cane, and his great staring eyes and sunken face and large head, that seemed too heavy for the scrawny neck and body that supported it, went waggling, goggling, jerking about from side to side with every step he took, and his legs made sudden and convulsive movements as if they were going to fly away beneath him as he walked. Yet this ruin of a man had gotten nine children, and was getting new ones all the time. Monk had talked about this with the other boys in lowered voices, and with a feeling of horror and curiosity, for he wondered if his physical collapse had not come somehow from all the children he had got, if some criminal excess in nature had not sapped and gutted him and made his limbs fly out below him with these movements of convulsive disintegration; and he felt a terrible fascination and revulsion of the spirit because of the seminal mystery of nature that could draw forth life in swarming hordes from the withered loins of a walking dead man such as this.
But finally he had come around the corner, goggling, waggling, jerking onward with his huge, vacant, staring eyes, towards the bloody place where two of his children had been killed; and this, together with the strong congruent smells of rubber, leather, oil and gasoline, mixed with the heavy, glutinous sweetness of warm blood, and hanging there like a cloud in the cool, wet, earthy air of that grey-green day that just a moment before had impended with such a wordless and intolerable prescience of joy, and now was filled with horror, nausea, and desperate sickness of the soul—this finally was the memory that was to fix that corner, the hour, the day, the time, the words and faces of the people, with a feeling of the huge and nameless death that waits around the corner for all men, to break their backs and shatter instantly the blind and pitiful illusions of their hope,
HERE WAS THE place, just up the hill a little way from this treacherous corner, right there in front of Shepperton’s house, where another accident occurred, as absurd and comic as the first was tragic and horrible.
One morning about seven o’clock, in the Spring of the year when all the fruit trees were in blossom, George was awakened instantly as he lay in his room, with a vision of cherry blossoms floating slowly to the earth, and at the same time with the memory of a terrific collision—a savage grinding and splintering of glass, steel, and wood—still ringing in his ears. Already he could hear people shouting to one another in the street, and the sound of footsteps running. The screen door slammed in his uncle’s house next door, and the boy heard his Uncle Mark howl to someone in an excited tone:
“It’s down here on Locust Street! Merciful God, they’ll all be killed!”
And he was off, striding down the street.
But already George was out of bed, had his trousers on, and, without stopping for stockings, shoes, or shirt, he went running onto the porch, down the steps, and out into the street as hard as he could go. People were running along in the same direction, and he could see his uncle’s figure in the rapidly growing crowd gathered in front of Shepperton’s about a big telephone post which had been snapped off like a match stick near the base and hung half-suspended from the wires.
As he pounded up, the fragments of the car were strewn over the pavement for a distance of fifty yards—a wheel here, a rod there, a lamp, a leather seat at other places, and shattered glass everywhere. The battered and twisted wreckage of the car’s body rested solidly and squatly upon the street before the telephone post which it had snapped with its terrific impact, and in the middle of all this wreckage Lon Pilcher was solemnly sitting, with a stupid look upon his face and the rim of the steering wheel wrapped around his neck. A few feet away, across the sidewalk, and upon the high-banked lawn of the Shepperton house, Mr. Matthews, the fat, red-faced policeman, was sitting squarely on his solid bottom, legs thrust out before him, and with the same look of stupid and solemn surprise on his face that Lon Pilcher had.
Uncle Mark and some other men pulled Lon Pilcher from the wreckage of his car, took the steering wheel from around his neck, and assured themselves that by some miracle of chance he was not hurt. Lon, recovering quickly from the collision which had stunned him, now began to peer owlishly about at the strewn remnants of his car, and finally, turning to Uncle Mark with a drunken leer, he said: