Mr. Britling Sees It Through, page 89 by H.G. Wells
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n certainly and perhaps more--reckless of every risk. Not only to himself but others. At this thought, he clutched the steering wheel again. Once more he saw the bent back of the endangered cyclist, once more he felt rather than saw the seething approach of the motor bicycle, and then through a long instant he drove helplessly at the wall....
Hell perhaps is only one such incident, indefinitely prolonged....
Anything might have been there in front of him. And indeed now, out of the dreamland to which he could not escape something had come, something that screamed sharply....
"Good God!" he cried, "if I had hit a child! I might have hit a child!" The hypothesis flashed into being with the thought, tried to escape and was caught. It was characteristic of Mr. Britling's nocturnal imagination that he should individualise this child quite sharply as rather plain and slender, with reddish hair, staring eyes, and its ribs crushed in a vivid and dreadful manner, pinned against the wall, mixed up with some bricks, only to be extracted, oh! horribly.
But this was not fair! He had hurt no child! He had merely pitched out Mr. Direck and broken his arm....
It wasn't his merit that the child hadn't been there!
The child might have been there!
Mere luck.
He lay staring in despair--as an involuntary God might stare at many a thing in this amazing universe--staring at the little victim his imagination had called into being only to destroy....
Section 2
If he had not crushed a child other people had. Such things happened. Vicariously at any rate he had crushed many children....
Why are children ever crushed?
And suddenly all the pain and destruction and remorse of all the accidents in the world descended upon Mr. Britling.
No longer did he ask why am I such a fool, but why are we all such fools? He became Man on the automobile of civilisation, crushing his thousands daily in his headlong and yet aimless career....
That was a