Books: The Motormaniacs
L >>
Lloyd Osbourne >> The Motormaniacs
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8
"I had given him about eighteen miles of this sort of thing when
the right-hand cylinder began to miss a little. Then, after a
while, the left started to skip, too. I stopped under a tree to
look for the trouble and pulled up the bonnet. The spark-plugs
were badly carbonized, and when I had seen to them and had put
the captain on the crank, we could only get explosions at
intervals. There was good compression; everything was
lubricating nicely; no heating or sticking anywhere--but the
engine had lain down on us. The captain was so angry he wouldn't
speak a word to me, and mumbled red-hot things to himself under
his breath. Guess how I felt. But he was too much of a
gentleman not to crank--and so he cranked and cranked and still
nothing happened. I chased a whole row of things one after
another--battery, buzzer, oil or gasoline in the cylinders,
defective insulation, commutator, water in the carburettor,
choked feed-pipe,--and all it did was to cough in a dreary,
tow-me-home-to-mother sort of way,
"If the captain had known anything about engines and could have
made it start, I expect I would have married him and lived happy
ever afterward. It was just his Heaven-sent chance to win out
and show he was the right man for the place. But he didn't know
enough to run a phonograph and began to talk about getting towed
home, and how if he ever bought a machine it would be electric.
If I had been out of patience with him before, imagine what I
felt then! He said he knew all the time I was driving too fast
and hurting something, and thought he had proved it by the
cylinders being hot--as though they aren't always hot. It was
awful how stupid he was and helpless and disagreeable. He
couldn't even crank properly and the engine back-fired on him and
hurt his hand. Finally I got so desperate that I sat down and
cried, while he nursed his hand and said we ought to desert the
machine and go home, and that papa would be anxious if we didn't
turn up to lunch. I knew all the time he was talking about his
lunch. You don't know what an Englishman is if he isn't fed
regularly, and it was now after one and we were eighteen miles
from High Court.
"But I wasn't the girl to give up the ship. As long as there
weren't any fractures or things stuck together I knew the expert
could have made it go--and if the expert, why not I? If the
captain hadn't flurried me with all the silly things he said, I
believe I would have ferreted out the trouble all right. But I
was so cross and tired and disgusted that my brain was stalled as
well as the Manton, and so I gave up for a little while and
wouldn't even answer the captain when he spoke to me.
"Oh, yes, we were pigs, both of us, he in his way and I in mine;
and the sun went down and down, and it didn't make me feel any
better to think that I was smudged all over with grease, and that
my hands and nails were something awful--while if ever there was
a galley-slave at the oar, it was the Honorable John Vincent
Cartwright cranking.
"We went on in this way till nearly four o'clock, when what
should we hear coming along the road but a buggy, and who should
be in that buggy but Gerard Malcolm with an actressy-looking
girl! I wasn't over-pleased at the girl part of it, but it did
my heart good to see Gerard. He drew up alongside the Manton and
leaped out of the buggy, so splendid and handsome and cool and
masterful, with a glisten in his eye which said: 'Bring on your
gas-engine!'--that I loved him harder than ever, and could have
almost torn the captain's ring off my finger. He didn't waste
any time saying how-do-you-do, but just asked this and that and
dived in. Then he pegged away for about five minutes, wiped his
hands, took his bat that the captain had been holding, and said:
'Gears!'
"'It'll take me about two hours to break them loose,' he said,
'and so if Miss Stanton wouldn't mind trading escorts, and if the
captain would take the buggy, I think Miss Hardy and I had better
stay by the machine.'
"Miss Stanton didn't look nearly so pleased as the captain; but
when Gerard said again he positively couldn't manage it under two
hours, and I snubbed her when she proposed towing, and when the
captain brightened up and made a good impression--he was so
excited, poor fellow, at the chance of getting away--that it all
came right, and they drove off cheerfully together. When they
had quite disappeared, Gerard threw down the wrench he had in his
hand, and said we'd now have that talk he had been trying to get
with me for the past month.
"'We'll do the gears first, thank you,' I said.
"'Gears!' he exclaimed, 'there's nothing the matter with the
gears. I thought you were chauffeur enough for that'
"'But you said--' I began.
"I can make this car move in five minutes,' he said, climbing
into the tonneau and motioning with his hand for me to take the
other seat.
"Of course I obeyed him. I didn't want to, but somehow when
Gerard wants a thing I always do it. They say every woman finds
her master, and though I hate to admit it even to myself, I
suppose Gerard is mine. But I hid it all I could and I dare say
I was pretty successful. It care all the easier because Gerard
himself was kind of embarrassed, and he colored up and stammered
while I sat in the tonneau, waiting for him to begin.
"'I thought you said you were going to talk,' I said.
"'Jess,' he said, 'my sister is going to get married.'
"Now, this was news, indeed. She was lots old older than Gerard
--forty years old, if a day--and a chronic invalid. I don't know
exactly what was the matter with her, but she had a bad
complexion, and used to stick pretty tight is the house, and was
always absorbed in church work. She had snappy black eyes, and
Gerard couldn't call his soul his own. They kept house together,
you know, and had been orphans ever since they were little.
"'Oh, married!' I said, pretending to be little interested.
"'It's Mr. Simpson, the curate,' he said.
"It seemed rude to be too surprised, so I just rattled off some
of the usual congratulations. Gerard didn't say a word. He
simply looked and looked, and there was something beautiful to me
in his shame and backwardness and hesitation.
"'It's very unexpected,' he blurted out at last. 'I thought I
was going to take care of her always. It is going to make a
great difference in my life.'
"'I know how you always devoted yourself to her,' I said.
"'I had made up my mind never to marry,' he went on. 'How could
I marry?--for it would have been like turning her out of doors.
She was too ill and helpless and despondent to live by herself,
and had I brought a third person into the family it would have
been misery all round.'
"Still I said nothing.
"'Jess,' he said suddenly, 'don't you understand? Can't you
understand?'
"In fact, I did understand very well. It explained a heap of
things--why he had always acted so strangely--sometimes so
devoted to me, sometimes so distant; crazy to hold my hand one
day and avoiding me the next. It was no wonder he had made me
utterly desperate and piqued me into accepting the captain. Then
he said: 'Jess, Jess!' like that; and 'for God's sake, was it too
late?'
"I couldn't trust myself to speak and I could feel my lips
trembling. I didn't sob or anything, but the tears just rolled
down my cheeks. Wasn't it a dead giveaway? It's awful to care
for a man as much as that. I thought it was splendid of him that
he didn't try to kiss me. He simply took my hand and pulled off
the captain's ring and said I had to give it back to him at once.
Then I broke down altogether and began to cry like a baby, while
Gerard got out and emptied the kerosene from the oil lamps into
the exhaust valves. You see, pieces of scale from the inside of
the cylinders had wedged against the exhaust-valve seats so that
they wouldn't close tight, but leaked and leaked. Gerard said
that new Mantons always feed too rich a mixture at first and that
he knew what was the matter the moment he stuck his fingers in.
"We went home on the second speed so that Gerard could steer with
one hand.
"Oh, the captain? He acted kind of miserable at first, and was
awfully sarcastic about being a gentleman and not a gas-engineer.
But I said the modern idea was to be both. He got himself
transferred home and I really think it was the making of him--for
what do you think happened last week? He won the nonstop London
to Glasgow race on an eighteen horsepower Renault. I felt quite
proud of him.
"He has asked Gerard and me and the Manton to spend a month with
him in England when we go abroad. He said I'd probably be
pleased to hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his
ancestral Norman chapel. But I suppose that was just his English
humor, you know. Anyway, we are the best of friends, and if I
ever see him again I'll give him a double toot on my French
horn."
"And what became of the curate and Gerard's sister?"
"Oh, they married and went into steam."
THE GREAT BUBBLE SYNDICATE
I suppose it was a fool arrangement, but anyway we did it; and
Harry Prentiss, who is learning how to be a corporation lawyer
and has specialized on contracts, spent a whole week making it
what he called iron-clad. When it was typewritten it covered
nine pages, and was so excessively iron-clad that nobody could
understand it but Harry. He said it undoubtedly covered the
ground, however, and would be worth all the trouble it cost him
in the friction it would save afterward. You'd hardly know Harry
as the same boy that played Yale full-back, he's grown so cynical
and suspicious, and he's got that lawyer way of looking at you
now, as though you were a liar and he was just about to pounce on
you with the truth. I thought he might have brought Nelly and
himself into the agreement under one head, considering he was
engaged to her and they were only waiting to save a thousand
dollars in order to get married; but he couldn't see it in that
way at all, and spoke about people changing their minds, and how
in law you must be prepared for everything (especially if it were
disagreeable and unexpected) and put supposistious cases till
Nelly broke down and cried.
They had got five hundred toward the thousand when they were both
taken with automobile fever--and taken bad; and then they decided
that, though marriage was all right, they were still young, and
the bubble had the first call. Harry had been secretly taking
the Horseless Age for three months, and as for Nelly--anybody
with a four-cylinder tonneau could have torn her from her happy
home. Not that she didn't love Harry tremendously. She was
crazy about him--but crazier for a bubble. It's an infatuation
like any other, only worse, and I guess I was no better than
Nelly myself, for I used to ride regularly with Lewis Wentz and
you know what Lewis Wentz is. And he only had a wheezy old steam
carriage anyway, and sometimes blue flames would leap up all
around you till you felt like a Christian martyr, and his boiler
was always burning out when he'd try to hold my hand instead of
watching the gage. You paid in every kind of way for riding with
Lewis Wentz, and people talked about you besides--but I always
went just the same. Oh, I know I ought to be ashamed to admit
it, and I said to myself every time should be the last; yet he
only had to double-toot at the front door for me to drop
everything and run. This naturally made him awfully forward and
troublesome, not to speak of complicating me with pa, who didn't
approve of him the least bit, and who used to regale me with
little talks beginning: "I would rather see you lying dead in
your coffin," and winding up with, "Now, won't you promise your
poor old dad?" till I was all broken up. But, as I said before,
Lewis Wentz had only to toot for me to forget my old dad and the
coffin and everything.
With only five hundred dollars to go on, Harry and Nelly, of
course, had to look about for more capital; and that was why they
chose me to go in with them. I didn't have any capital except a
rich father, but I suppose they thought that was the same thing.
People are so apt to--though I never found it the same thing at
all. Then, too, Nelly and I were bosom friends, and they
naturally wanted to give me the first chance. Their original
plan had been to have the bubble held in four equal shares,
taking in Morty Truslow as the fourth. I think there was a
little scheme in that, too, for Morty and I hadn't spoken for
three months, and it was all off between us. There was a time
when I thought there was only one thing in the world, and that
was Morty Truslow--but that was over for good, with nothing left
of it but a great big ache. I can never be grateful enough to
Mrs. Gettridge for putting me on to it, for, however much a girl
cares for a man, her pride won't let her--and she was Josie's
aunt, you know, and if anybody was on the inside track, she
was--and I cut him dead and sent back his letters unopened,
though he wrote and wrote--and it was awfully hard, you know,
because I just had to grit my teeth together to keep from loving
him to death. Nelly said I was just too proud and silly for
anything, and pa looked as depressed as though there was another
slump in Preferred Steel, and mama said he was such a catch that
the first designing girl would snap him up, and Harry said you
wouldn't know Morty now, he was so changed and different.
So that was how it was when Nelly and Harry started the Great
Bubble Syndicate and wanted to take Morty and me into it as
quarter share-holders each. But I wouldn't have joined in a
heavenly chariot on those terms, and so we talked and talked till
finally Morty was eliminated and we settled on a two-third and
one-third basis. The next point was to choose the car, for it
had to be a cheap car and we wanted to get the very best for our
money. Harry said the Model E Fearless runabout at seven hundred
and fifty was the bulliest little car on the market; and that the
Fearless agent was so good and kind and looked so much like Henry
Ward Beecher that you felt uplifted just to be with him; and that
you knew instinctively that his car was sure to be the best car.
A picture of the Fearless settled the matter, for it was a real
little beauty--long in the chassis and very low, with wood
artillery wheels and guards and lamps thrown in for nothing.
Harry said it had more power than it knew what to do with and was
a bird on the hills, and that he had a friend who had a friend
who owned one and swore by it. Afterward we met him and towed
him nine miles, and what swearing he did was all the other way;
however, I mustn't get ahead of the story, or anticipate, as they
say in novels.
Getting two hundred and fifty dollars from pa was the next step,
and of all my automobiling experiences it was certainly the
worst. He couldn't see it at all, though I caught him after
dinner and sat on the arm of his chair and rubbed my cheek
against his like the sunny-haired daughter on the stage.
He ought to have reciprocated by doing angel parent, but he
talked horse-sense instead; how he couldn't afford to buy me a
whole car, and how in his experience divided ownership always
ended in the people hating one another ever afterward, and how
dangerous automobiling was anyway, and how much nicer it would be
to have a beautiful little horse.
Then I gave him the iron-clad agreement. He put on his
spectacles and read it, asking me not to breathe on his neck, as
it tickled him. (How different real life is from the stage!)
And he began to giggle at the second page; at the third he could
hardly go on; and finally, when mama came in and asked what was
the matter, he couldn't speak at all, but got up and stamped
about the room till you thought he was going to have a fit. Then
he sat down again and wiped his eyes and asked as a favor whether
he mightn't have a copy for himself. I said I might possibly
manage it if he would come down with the two hundred and fifty.
Then he got kind of serious again; asked if I didn't know any
cheaper way of getting killed; said I might have appendicitis for
the same money and be fashionable. When pa is in the right humor
he can tease awfully, and that agreement had set him off worse
than I had ever remembered. But I stuck to my bubble and wasn't
to be guyed out of the idea, and finally he lit a cigar and
started, in to bargain.
Pa is the worst old skinflint in Connecticut, and never even gave
me a bag of peanut candy without getting a double equivalent.
First of all, I had to give up Lewis Wentz entirely; I wasn't to
speak to him, or bow or bubble or dance or anything. I put up a
good fight for Lewis Wentz--not that I cared two straws for him,
now that I was going to have an automobile of my own, but just to
head pa off from grasping for more. I didn't want to be eaten
out of house and home, you know, and I guess I am too much pa's
daughter to surrender more than I could help.
It was well I did so, for on top of that I had to promise never
to ride in any car except my own, and then he branched off into
my giving up coffee for breakfast, going to bed at ten, only one
dance a week, wearing flannel in winter, minding my mother more,
and Heaven only knows what all. But I said that Lewis Wentz
alone was worth two hundred and fifty, and that I'd draw on the
other things when I needed money for repairs. Then pa suddenly
had a new notion and said he wanted to be in the thing, too;
would take a quarter interest of his own; that we'd change the
syndicate to fourths instead of thirds.
I was almost too thunderstruck to speak. Think of hearing pa
saying he wished to buy in! It was like an evangelist wanting to
take shares in the devil. I could only say "Pa!" like that, and
gasp.
"I know I'm pretty old to change," he said. "But a fellow must
keep up with the procession, you know. And I always liked the
way they smell."
His eyes were dancing and I saw he meant mischief; but, after
all, the bubble was assured now, and that was the great thing.
It wasn't till up to that moment that I felt really safe.
"I read here in the agreement," he went on, "that the automobile
is taken in rotation by every member of the syndicate; and that
when it's my day it's my day, and nobody can say a word or use it
themselves, even if I don't care to."
"That's how we'll save any possibility of friction," I returned.
"For instance, to-day it is absolutely my car; to-morrow it's
yours; day after to-morrow it is Harry's; the day after that it's
Nelly's--and if anything breaks on your day it's up to you to pay
for it."
"Oh, I'm not going to break anything," said pa with the satisfied
look of a person who doesn't know anything about it.
"Don't you be too sure about that," I said. "I've been around
enough with Lewis Wentz to know better."
"Well, you see," said pa, "that depends on how much you use your
automobile. If you never take it out at all you eliminate most
of the bothers connected with it."
"Never take it out at all?" I cried.
"On my day it stays in the barn," he said.
I began to see now what he was smiling at. Wasn't it awful of
him? He simply meant to tie it up for a quarter of the time.
"Now, Virgie," he said, "you mustn't think that I am not
stretching a point to promise you what I have. It's too blamed
dangerous and you're all the little girl I have. Well, if you
must do it, I am going to cut the risk by twenty-five per cent
and my automobile days will be blanks."
I flared up at this. It's awful when your father wants to do
something you're ashamed of. It was such a dog-in-the-manger
idea, too, and so unsportsmanlike. But nothing could shake pa,
though I tried and tried, and said things that ought to have
pierced a rhinoceros. But pa ran for governor once, and his
skin's thicker. I felt almost sorry we hadn't taken in Morty
Truslow instead--not really, you know, but just for the moment.
"How can I tell Hairy and Nelly you're such a pig?" I said, half
crying.
"I'm not a pig," said pa, "though now I'm the next thing to it
--an automobilist. And, anyway, it's a straight business
proposition. Take it or leave it."
"Pa," I said, "if you'll stay out of it altogether, I'll take it
back about coffee for breakfast and not minding mama more."
"It's too late," he returned. "I've got the automobile fever now
myself. For two cents I'd buy out Harry and Nelly and keep the
red bug in the family."
Certainly pa has the most ingenious mind of anybody I know. He
ought to have been in the Spanish Inquisition just to think up
new torments. I don't wonder they like him so well on the Stock
Exchange: he probably initiates new members and makes them ride
goats. Anyway, nothing could change him about the automobile,
and I closed the deal quick, lest he might carry out his other
plan and absorb seventy-five per cent of the syndicate's stock.
The Fearless was even prettier than its picture, and there wasn't
a runabout in town in the same class with it. Then our lessons
began, which we took separately, because there was only room on
the seat for two, and nobody wanted the other members of the
syndicate to see him running into the curb or trying to climb
trees. The agent turned out less like Henry Ward Beecher than
Harry had thought, and it was sickening how he lost interest in
us after he got his money. But he threw in a tooter for nothing
and a socket-wrench, and in some ways lived up to the
resemblance. He would not take me out himself, but gave me in
charge of a weird little boy we called the Gasoline Child. The
Gasoline Child was about thirteen, and was so full of tools that
he rattled when he walked, and I guess his head rattled, too--he
knew so much about gas engines. He was the greasiest, messiest,
grittiest and oiliest little boy that ever defied soap; and Harry
always declared he was an automobile variety of coddling-moth or
Colorado beetle or june-bug, who would wind up by spinning a
cotton-waste cocoon in the center of the machinery and hatch out
a million more like himself. Perhaps he was too busy to start
his happy home, for I never saw him at the garage but his little
legs were sticking out of a bonnet, and you could hear him
hammering inside and telling somebody to "Turn it over, will
you?" or "Now, try it that way, Bill."
But with all the heaps he knew, the Gasoline Child was a good
deal like the man who got rich by never spending anything. His
knowledge was imbedded in him like gold in quartz; you could see
it there all right, but couldn't take it out. He tried so hard
to be helpful, too; would plunge his little paw into the greasy
darkness below the seat and say:
"That's a nut you ought to remember now it works on the babbitt
of the counter-shaft"--or something of the kind--"and you must
see to it regular." Or, "Watch your valves, Miss, and be keerful
they don't gum on you." Or, "Them commutators are often the seat
of trouble, for oftentimes they wear down and don't break the
spark right." When I'd grow dizzy with these explanations he
would reassure me by saying that "I'd soon fall into it, like he
did." But I didn't fall into it nearly so well as I could have
wished. On the contrary, the more I learned the more intricate
the whole thing seemed to grow, and I looked forward to taking
the car out alone by myself with the sensations of a prisoner
about to be guillotined. Not that I had lost heart in
automobilism. The elation of those rides was delicious. The
little car ran with a lightness that was almost like flying; it
was as buoyant, swift and smooth as a glorified sledge; one awoke
with joy to the fact that the world contained a new and
irresistible pleasure.
The Gasoline Child soon taught me to run it for myself. With him
by my side I was as brave as a lion, and I took the corners and
shaved eternity in a way to make him gasp. He said he had never
been really scared in an automobile before, and he used to look
at me with a ready-to-jump expression, as though I were a baby
playing with a gun. You see, I had graduated on Lewis Wentz's
steamer and a twenty-mile clip didn't feaze me any, though there
were times when I'd forget which things to pull, and this always
seemed to rattle his little nerves. It was strange, however, what
a coward I was when I first went out by myself. There was no
devil left in me at all, and I was certainly the crawly-crawliest
bubbler you ever saw, and I teetered at street-car crossings till
everybody went mad. It might have been worse than it was,
though, for the only real trouble I had was chipping the tail
off a milk wagon and ramming a silly horse on Eighth Avenue.
When his friends helped him up (he had been standing still at the
time, and I had forgotten the low gear always started with a
jump) they said his front legs were barked flve dollars' worth.
I wouldn't have minded if he had got the five dollars,
poor thing, for after ramming him once I became confused at the
notoriety I attracted, and, instead of reversing, I threw in the
highspeed clutch and rammed him some more. Oh, yes, he had some
right to have a kick coming, though all he did was to look at me
reproachfully and then lie down. He was an Italian vegetable
horse, and from the way his friends vociferated they must have
thought a lot of him.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8