Chapter 32: At the Gate

Verbal discussion was plainly useless; it was soon made sufficiently clear that nothing short of physical force would persuade that driver. Situated as they were it was not easy to see how they could resort to that method of convincing him of the error of his ways. Mrs. Lamb told him, with the lucidity of which under such circumstances she was past mistress, what she thought of him, and what treatment she would have accorded him if the conditions had only been a little different. In a tongue fight the man proved to be her match; he could pack at least as many disagreeable allusions into a sentence as she could. For ten minutes or a quarter of an hour they wrangled, then the driver delivered himself of an ultimatum.

“I’m not going to stay here all night listening to you. If you won’t get down I’ll drive you back. Now which is it to be? I’m off!”

“Off! Yes, you are off, as I’ll soon show you.”

She showed him there and then. Whirling round on her seat, she gave the driver a sudden push; over he went on to the road. Snatching the reins in one hand, the whip in the other, before he quite knew what had happened, she was urging the horse to pursue its onward career.

“Stop! stop!” he yelled. “I’m under the wheel! You’re driving over me!”

“Then if you don’t want me to drive over you, you’ll get from under the wheel; I’m going on.”

“Are you? I’ll teach you, you----!”

The fellow’s language was full-blooded. Scrambling up as best he could, he made a vigorous attempt to board the vehicle and expel her from the seat she had usurped. She was not disposed to yield. Down came the whip upon his head and shoulders. There ensued a lively few moments.

“When you two have quite finished your little conversation perhaps you’ll let me know,” groaned Mr. Luker from the rear.

The “little conversation” came to a rapid, and, perhaps on the whole, not surprising termination. The quadruped between the shafts, an animal apparently of the cart-horse kind, was, also apparently, a creature of an extremely patient disposition. But even the most enduring patience has its limits; that horse reached the end of his. Mrs. Lamb and the driver were, between them, tugging at the reins in a fashion to which he was, no doubt, entirely unaccustomed, while the whip-lash, when it missed the driver, occasionally alighted on the animal’s flanks. Probably wholly at a loss to understand what was happening, not unreasonably the creature finally made up his mind that he had had enough of it, whatever it was. Suddenly the vehicle was set in motion; both parties persisting in sticking to the reins, and also, in a sense, to each other, the course steered was of the most erratic kind. Before the horse had gone very far there was a lurch which was more ominous than any which had gone before, and they had been pregnant with meaning; the cart was turned clean over; the three persons concerned were thrown out of it. Mr. Luker was the first to give expression to his feelings. Clinging to the side as the thing went over, he had alighted with comparative gentleness on the ground.