It was as they swept by the picturesque walls under the big old trees that encircle Brandismead Park.  It was nothing but a slight miscalculation of distances.  Ahead of them and well to the left, rode a postman on a bicycle; towards them, with that curious effect of implacable fury peculiar to motor cycles, came a motor cyclist.  First Mr. Britling thought that he would not pass between these two, then he decided that he would hurry up and do so, then he reverted to his former decision, and then it seemed to him that he was going so fast that he must inevitably run down the postman.  His instinct not to do that pulled the car sharply across the path of the motor cyclist.  “Oh, my God!” cried Mr. Britling.  “My God!” twisted his wheel over and distributed his feet among his levers dementedly.

He had an imperfectly formed idea of getting across right in front of the motor cyclist, and then they were going down the brief grassy slope between the road and the wall, straight at the wall, and still at a good speed.  The motor cyclist smacked against something and vanished from the problem.  The wall seemed to rush up at them and then—­collapse.  There was a tremendous concussion.  Mr. Direck gripped at his friend the emergency brake, but had only time to touch it before his head hit against the frame of the glass wind-screen, and a curtain fell upon everything....

He opened his eyes upon a broken wall, a crumpled motor car, and an undamaged motor cyclist in the aviator’s cap and thin oilskin overalls dear to motor cyclists.  Mr. Direck stared and then, still stunned and puzzled, tried to raise himself.  He became aware of acute pain.

“Don’t move for a bit,” said the motor cyclist.  “Your arm and side are rather hurt, I think....”

Section 8

In the course of the next twelve hours Mr. Direck was to make a discovery that was less common in the days before the war than it has been since.  He discovered that even pain and injury may be vividly interesting and gratifying.

If any one had told him he was going to be stunned for five or six minutes, cut about the brow and face and have a bone in his wrist put out, and that as a consequence he would find himself pleased and exhilarated, he would have treated the prophecy with ridicule; but here he was lying stiffly on his back with his wrist bandaged to his side and smiling into the darkness even more brightly than he had smiled at the Essex landscape two days before.  The fact is pain hurts or irritates, but in itself it does not make a healthily constituted man miserable.  The expectation of pain, the certainty of injury may make one hopeless enough, the reality rouses our resistance.  Nobody wants a broken bone or a delicate wrist, but very few people are very much depressed by getting one.  People can be much more depressed by smoking a hundred cigarettes in three days or losing one per cent. of their capital.