t on the left and dashed unregarding towards
him. George shouted. The boy, faced with sudden death, was happily so
paralysed that he fell down, thus checking his momentum by the severest
form of friction. George swerved aside, missing the small, outstretched
hands by an inch or two, but missing also by an inch or two the front
wheel of a tremendous motor-bus on his right. He gave a nervous giggle
as he flashed by the high red side of the motor-bus; and then he
deliberately looked back at the murderous boy, who had jumped up. At the
same moment George was brought to a sense of his own foolishness in
looking back by a heavy jolt. He had gone over half a creosoted wood
block which had somehow escaped from a lozenge-shaped oasis in the road
where two workmen were indolently using picks under the magic protection
of a tiny, dirty red flag. Secure in the guardianship of the bit of
bunting, which for them was as powerful and sacred as the flag of an
empire, the two workmen gazed with indifference at George and at the
deafening traffic which swirled affronting but harmless around them.
George slackened speed, afraid lest the jar might have snapped the
plates of his accumulator. The motor-bicycle was a wondrous thing, but
as capricious and delicate as a horse. For a trifle, for nothing at all,
it would cease to function. The high-tension magneto and the float-feed
carburetter, whose invention was to transform the motor-bicycle from an
everlasting harassment into a means of loco-motion, were yet years away
in the future. However, the jar had done no harm. The episode, having
occupied less than ten seconds, was closed. George felt his heart
thumping. He thought suddenly of the recent Paris-Madrid automobile
race, in which the elite of the world had perished. He saw himself
beneath the motor-bus, and a futile staring crowd round about. Simply by
a miracle was he alive. But this miracle was only one of a score of
miracles. He believed strongly in luck. He had always believed in it.
The smoke of the cigarette displayed his confidence to all Piccadilly.
Still, his heart was thumping.

And it had not ceased to thump when a few minutes later he turned into
Manresa Road. Opposite the entrance to the alley of Romney Studios,
there happened to be a small hiatus in the kerbstone. George curved the
machine largely round and, mounting the pavement through this hiatus,
rode gingerly up the alley, in defiance of the regulations of a great
city,