Читать книгу The Motormaniacs - Lloyd Osbourne - Страница 3

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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.

Of course, Harry and Nelly were taking their lessons, too, and getting into their individual scrapes in the intervals of my getting into mine. Pa was the only stock-holder who never came to time, though he used to walk round to the garage on his day to make sure the bubble was at home. He was awfully mean about his rights and explained the syndicate principle to Mr. Hoover, the head of the establishment, and tipped right and left, so that there shouldn't be any doubt about the blanks being blanks. I tried to bluff Mr. Hoover once and take out the car on pa's day, but I bumped into a regular stone wall. Pa had given everybody there a typewritten schedule with his days marked in red ink, and the whole thing had become the joke of the garage, till even the wipers grinned when the foreman would call out: "Syndicate car there, for Miss Lockwood."

In fact, that car seemed to make everybody mean who was in the least way connected with it. I was a perfect pig myself, and Harry and Nelly were positively worse. It was one of our rules that the rider of the day should be answerable for any troubles or breakages that occurred when be (or she) was running the car. Naturally, there had to be some understanding of this kind, for personality counts a lot in automobiling, and often the chauffeur is more to blame than the machine. But it was awful what fibs it tempted us into, and how we were always "passing the buck," as they say in poker. Nelly got so treacherous that once she told me she didn't care to use the wagon that day, and would I like to? She had chewed up the bearings in a front wheel and if I hadn't suspected her generosity and taken a good look beforehand it would have cost me six dollars!

I guess I wasn't any better myself, and quite a coolness sprang up all around.

The repair bills came to a good deal of money, and the eighteen dollars a month we paid at the garage was the least of the total. The Henry Ward Beecher agent had told Harry it cost a cent a mile to run a Fearless, but if he had said a dollar-eighty he would have been nearer the mark. Mr. Hoover said cheerfully he knew only one person who had got automobiling down to bed-rock, and that was pa! But for the rest of the syndicate it was their life's blood. It began to dawn on Harry and Nelly that they could never get married at all, as long as they stayed in the combine. It had cost them all the money they had saved to come in, and now it was taking every cent they had to stay in. Nelly used to cry about it, though I never noticed that it made any difference in her taking out the car, which she did regularly, and didn't let me ride with her unless I paid a dollar each time in advance. She said she didn't know any other way of saving money.

Altogether, you wouldn't have known us for the same three people, we had all grown so horrid and changed and mercenary. Nelly was hankering to get married, while I was crazy to put in a radiator with a forced water circulation (ours was a silly old kind that boiled on you), and Harry wobbled one way and the other as though he couldn't make up his mind—sometimes agreeing with her, and sometimes frantic for a radiator. It looked as though the Fearless was going to make it a lifetime engagement, and Harry, said ruefully that their marriage was not only, made in Heaven, but would probably take place there. I should have felt sorrier for them if they hadn't been so horrid to me about it. From the way they talked, you'd think I had started the syndicate idea myself and had lured them into it against their own better judgment. They were nasty about pa, too, and said he was acting dishonorably with his blank days, and that as a new machine always had to be broken in and notoriously cost more for repairs the first year than ever afterward, he was meanly benefiting himself at our expense. Harry called it pa's "unearned increment" and seemed to think it was an outrage.

They struck a whole row of troubles about this time, too—stripping a gear, losing a front wheel on the main street and winding up by fracturing the whole transmission into finders. Nelly would hardly speak to me on the street, and the Gasoline Child told me they would be cheaply out of it at eighty dollars. Pa was the only person who didn't share the general depression. In fact, he never seemed to be so happy as when the car was stripped in the shop and sure to stay there. He used to go around there occasionally and tell them they needn't hurry—and they didn't!

The new transmission was of a better model than the old one, and I foresaw I might have trouble about it with the syndicate. It would be just like Harry to talk about "unearned increment" and rope me in to pay part. But I still owed on my leather coat and wasn't in the humor to hand out a cent. What is the good of iron-clad agreements, anyway, if people don't live up to them—and as for the transmission, I was quite satisfied with the old one till they broke it. So when Nelly came around one night, all smiles and friendliness, I suspected trouble and didn't kiss her very hard back. But she was in too high spirits to notice anything, and hugged me and hugged me till I inwardly relented ten dollars' worth on the transmission—for Nelly and I had been good chums before we went into the syndicate, and there was a time when we would have shared our last chocolate cream.

"Virgie, you can't guess!" she exclaimed, her eyes dancing.

"The makers will do the right thing and won't charge for it?"

This brought her back again to earth at once.

"It—it isn't the transmission at all," she said. "I am going to get married next month!"

"I thought they insisted that Harry had to save a thousand dollars first."

"He's got it! He's got it!" she cried delightedly.

I was nearly as happy as she was, for it had looked terribly hopeless up till then, what with all the money they had put into the syndicate and the way the bubble was gobbling us up.

"Oh, Nelly, I am so glad," I said. "I'll put in that forced water circulation at once, and I'll make your and Harry's share of it a wedding present!"

"Oh, I'm out of the syndicate," she said. "I guess we'd prefer something for the flat."

"Out of the syndicate?" I cried.

"Yes," she returned brazenly. "Sold out!"

It took me a moment to pull myself together. I felt premonitions running all over me. I didn't feel so enthusiastic about their marriage as I had at first thought I was.

"Oh, Virgie, darling, you won't hate me?" she asked.

"Not till I hear more about it," I said.

She thought to make it up by squeezing my hands. But it wasn't squeezing that I wanted, it was facts. I drew away a bit and waited for them.

"Losing that front wheel was bad enough," she said, "especially as I went over the dashboard in my dotted muslin and Harry has limped ever since; but when the transmission broke it seemed as though it was both our hearts. Harry said we had come to a place where we had to choose between owning an automobile or getting married. It was perfectly plain we couldn't do both. $e said he didn't want to influence me either way, but that there was no good drifting on and on, deceiving ourselves and thinking it would all come out right. Of course, when he put it to me like that the bubble wasn't in it—and so we towed home for the last time and Harry, went around to close out our interest in the syndicate."

She paused here and looked at me, quite frightened.

"Around where, exactly?" I demanded.

"Well," she went on, "your father was always dropping hints that he would buy us out at the price we paid, and so Harry went to his office and tried to make a deal. But your father said it wasn't reasonable to expect him to pay for the new transmission, too—and as Harry didn't want to, and couldn't, the whole thing hung fire till Harry ran into Morty Truslow on the street. Morty offered him a thousand dollars right off for his half-interest," continued Nelly; "you know how free-handed be is, and rich, and Harry just jumped at it and walked off with the check."

"But you only paid half of seven hundred and fifty dollars in the first place!" I exclaimed.

"Well, you see," said Nelly, "that car has gone up since. It's 'appreciated,' as Harry calls it. And just think what a fortune it has stood us in for repairs!"

"It's the most horrid, mean, treacherous thing one person ever did to another!" I cried; "you know I wouldn't speak to Morty Truslow if be had the only monkey-wrench in the world and I was carbonized on a country road. I think you have acted detestably, and so has he, and I consider it downright caddish for him to buy a half-interest in anything I am connected with"

"Oh, Virgie, you don't know how bad be feels!" said Nelly. "He told me be had just been breaking his heart, and that you wouldn't answer his letters or anything, and if you would only let him talk for fifteen minutes he'd explain everything and you'd take him back."

"I won't take him back," I said.

"He wears a little flower you gave him next his heart," continued Nelly, "and when he speaks about you it is with tears in his eyes, and if you weren't made of flint and rock candy you'd feel so sorry for him you couldn't sleep!"

"What did be offer you to say all this, Nelly?" I demanded.

"Only a pearl horseshoe," she returned, quite unabashed. "Said I might choose it for myself at Helbe's if I could persuade you to give him a fifteen minutes' talk"

"I am sorry about the pearl horseshoe," I said ironically, "but you might as well give up the idea right now. And if he talked forty times fifteen minutes it wouldn't make the least difference in the world. He thinks he's so handsome and so well off and that so many girls are crazy about him that he only, has to whistle for you to come!"

"If it wasn't for Harry I would," she said; "that is, if he whistled loud enough and there wasn't too much of a crowd thinking he meant them! Oh, Virgie, it's just like Faversham to hear him talk, and I can't think how anybody could be such a little fool as to say no!"

"If you call that being a little fool I guess I am," I said, "though for a year he was the one man in my life, and if it hadn't been for Mrs. Gettridge—well, it's all off, now, and it's going to stay off—and his owning half the bubble won't make the least difference in the world!"

"But you'll come to my wedding and be one of the bridesmaids?" she pleaded. "And you won't blame me too much for getting out of the syndicate as I did? I knew it wasn't right and I felt awfully about it—but then, Harry and I couldn't have managed otherwise, and it takes years and years to save a thousand dollars!" she looked so sweet and pitiful and contrite as she said this that I forgave her everything and hugged her till she choked. It seemed a shame to spoil her happiness with reproaches, and I couldn't but think how I'd have felt myself if it had been Mor—Not that I cared a row of pins for him now, and would have despised myself if I did—but everybody has moments of looking back—and girls are such fools anyway. And, of course, deep down somewhere I was pleased that he still cared.

I felt quite twittery when I first went to the garage after that, for I thought Morty might pop out at me from somewhere, and though I wasn't afraid to meet him and would have cut him if I had, it would inevitably be embarrassing and upsetting. But he had the good taste to stay away on my days, and I never saw as much as a pin-feather of him. But he was awfully artful, even if he didn't let himself be seen, and the things he did to the car went straighter to my heart than any words he could have spoken. He put in a radiator, a new battery with a switch, three twisted cowhide baskets, two fifty-dollar acetylene lamps, an odometer, a spark gap, a little clock on the dashboard, and changed the tooter for a splendid French horn. My repair bills, too, stopped as though by magic, and the bubble ran so well I guess people must have sat up nights with it! The engine would start at the half-turn of the crank; the clutches were adjusted to a hair; she speeded up to twenty now on the open throttle, which she had never done before except in the advertisement; she was the showiest, smartest, fastest little car in town, and when she miraculously went into red leather, edged with gold stampings, people used to fall over one another on the street. I believe those two months were the happiest months of my life. It was automobile Heaven, and if it hadn't been for pa's blanks and Morty's half-interest I should have been deliriously happy every day instead of every fourth.