Three Speeds Forward/Chapter 1
I
HEART-THROBS
I
HEART-THROBS
HADN'T been engaged to Charlie Lepperts a week before I began to suspect my mistake. I spent a second week making allowances, and doing my best to see his "good side." At the end of the third week I decided he hadn't any, and by the fourth we were at daggers drawn. I don't know how I ever got myself into such a silly tangle. It wasn't altogether my fault, and you must remember, besides, I was only nineteen, and a good deal of a kid. It all came about through his being boomed in advance, and all of us having made up our minds that he was the biggest prize in the young-man line that was ever likely to come our way.
Then, too, his father and mother were quite the nicest people in Studdingham, and they shed a tone over us all, that papa said enhanced the value of real estate from here to Wiskigee. They were not only rich, for we were all that, more or less—Tonyham and Richville being the slang names for Studdingham outside—but they were tremendously cultured and refined, and good form to us always meant what the Lepperts said and did. The State was a pretty new State, and this idea of being "smart" had only struck us yesterday; and so it was natural for the rest of us to venerate people who had used finger bowls for three generations, and had struggled with butlers and liveried footmen, when people like papa were eating out of tin plates, and pioneering railroads through the alkali.
Of course, I don't blame the Lepperts for having boomed Charlie in the way they did. He was their only son, and who could find fault with them for thinking him a paragon? They were forever talking about him, and bragging about him, and making us all crinkle with suspense and anticipation. Whenever there were four or five of us girls together, Mrs. Lepperts would say, in that arch and gracious manner that always reminded passing Englishmen of Queen Victoria: "Ah, who of you little buds is going to capture Prince Charlie?" And a tiny voice inside me always answered—to myself, of course—"Why, I am, to be sure!" And so the situation was ripe for what actually happened when he did come. I went into the scramble head-down, and didn't really have a good look at the prize till after I had grabbed it.
Then the disillusion came, and the rupture and the fuss and the gossip and the heartbreak generally. He was nice enough to look at, though rather pale, and aggravatingly languid and superior. Much more of a gentleman outside than in, and therefore deceptive. Sixteen coats of piano varnish—but the chassis of a cad. Indeed, when he tried, he could be very charming; and he caught our eye by his showy horsemanship, his unmistakable elegance and fashion, and a deprecatory fastidiousness, as of a prince in exile, condemned to make the best of a social Siberia. He had a knack for insinuation; and while it was impossible to pin him down to any straight-out lies, he was the worst slanderer and mischief-maker that ever lived. That's where I came in, you know, for, after we had broken it off, he deliberately set himself to get even—starting those little snowballs that grow as they run, till you find yourself dodging mountains.
Not that I knew anything of this till later—very soon later, I can assure you. All I did was to tell him, quite simply, that I had made an awful mistake, and didn't seem to like him nearly as much as I thought I had; and then I went off, and proceeded to break my heart. No, not for him—the idea!—but from shame and misery at having made such a little fool of myself, and given rise to such hurricanes of chatter. And, more than anything, at Charlie's misrepresenting the affair, as though it had been his doing, instead of the other way about. And as I was too proud and shy and hurt to contradict it, I was exposed to the worst thing of all—people being sorry for me, and old cats saying, "What a narrow squeak that poor, dear boy had!"
Then I began to have headaches and die away, till the doctors said I'd have to go on a sea voyage, or East on a visit to my aunt's. I wasn't so terribly, awfully, dreadfully, horribly sick, but I didn't eat much, and lay a lot on the sofa, and thought how nice it would be to have a runabout. This was an old fight between papa and me. I had wanted one for years, and he had objected to one for years; and now, at last, like Sindbad in the tunnel, I began to see gleams of daylight. What was the use of always rubbing in our big four-cylinder Dauntless? The manufacturers had told papa that if he had a coachman, that was all the care it needed; and so it was given over to Albert, whose one idea was to shine it up beautifully and keep it tight in the barn. In the morning he took papa to the railway station, three miles off, and called back for him every afternoon at five; and this baby-carriage performance was supposed to leave it exhausted for all the intervening hours. On Sundays, Albert would take us all for a solemn drive on the second speed, and if we covered forty miles, he acted as though we had crossed the continent. Between papa, who was mortally afraid of Albert, and Albert, who was mortally afraid of the car, our bubbling was a good deal of the hearsey-hearse order, and not as satisfying as a ride on the trolley.
What I wanted was a little car of my own, in a little house of my own, with my own grease, my own cotton waste, my own gasoline supply—and all this as far away from Albert as it could possibly be put. And the sicker I got the more I wanted it, till finally papa, in sheer desperation, handed down the moon, and an expert came from Wiskigee to teach me how to run it. It was a little Maxwell, ten-horse, horizontal double-opposed, speeding up to thirty-five miles on the level, everything incased, and the cooling thermo-syphon. I took bounds of recovery from that moment, and a fresh bound every time I managed to coax an extra out of papa. A bound for my baskets, a bound for my Jones speedometer, a bound for my Latham spirals, a bound for my search lights, and two more for a yellow Cape top and a new coil, found me so pink and well that I was forced to buy two wet cells out of my poor little allowance. (Don't you prefer voltage batteries? I do.)
I was in the mood when people were a torment to me, and I wanted to get away from everything and everybody. Studdingham was so small that there wasn't room in it for a pair that hated each other as much as I and Charlie Lepperts. Had he been any way a gentleman, he would have gone away, but he stayed instead, and so it fell to me to get out into the tall grass. At dinners, dances, picnics—everywhere—there was always Charlie Lepperts with his pale face and sneering smile; and though I bore up well enough when I had to, these meetings humiliated me, and I grew more and more to avoid them.
At last I drew out entirely, and people learned it was no use inviting me. I preferred to whisk about all day in my little Maxwell, with seldom any other company than my dog Olaff and a spare tire. But when a girl is badly hurt—heart hurt—she instinctively turns to doing good. When you are happy, I suppose it is too big a bore, and it's an old saying that misery loves company. Studdingham was a very poor field for philanthropy, but I chased up a pimply orphan, took Mrs. Agnew's trained nurse for a few rides, and discovered an exasperating nursery governess who was convalescing from typhoid. Not that I spent my whole time doing good, but at long intervals, when I felt unusually discouraged or sad. As a rule, I wasn't either, and then couldn't be bothered—spinning all day through the prettiest country imaginable, with my honest old Olaff on the seat beside me, and my tireless little engine going chi-chi-chi-chi under its hood. How soothing and sweet that sound is to anyone who has the ear for it—the unfailing explosion, the consciousness of perfect mixture, the humming of the coils, and the rhythm of a beautifully balanced reciprocity! Chi-chi-chi-chi, till you are lulled into dreams, and the wind against your cheek seems to fan away all the little cares, and heart-aches of a dreary world. You see, I invariably strained my gasoline through chamois leather, and thus eliminated carburetor troubles entirely. If people would always take the trouble to do this religiously, and keep their terminals tight, and not grudge a few dollars for a voltometer, they'd eliminate most of the troubles connected with a chug-cart.
It was a strange life for a girl to lead—one, I mean, who had been so popular and had gone everywhere, and had counted for so much in the gayeties of Studdingham. Some of the boys didn't seem able to get used to it at all, and pretended to be awfully cut up—which was nice of them, and a compliment—though it wasn't enough to get the canary back into the cage. I was out of humor with the things I used to like, and kind of manhating and moody; and I wouldn't have traded Dandy Dick (which was the name I called the Maxwell car) for a full-fledged prince, with an ancestral castle and curly hair. No, I wanted to be alone, and free to bubble-bubble-bubble from morn till night, and recover in the open air and trees something that I seemed to have lost.
Of course, I was alive to the romantic side of it, and didn't spare any pains to look as pretty as I could, and wear the most killing clothes. Dropping out absolutely, and yet remaining conspicuous—every day sizzling through the friends I had long ceased to have anything to do with, except to tootle them out of the road and drown them in the exhaust. Morbid, if you like, but tremendously soothing and soul-sustaining, for you can't really enjoy being a recluse unless there are stacks of people looking on. Perhaps you'll think I was posey and silly. It may be that I was. It is hard for a girl to be a hundred per cent sincere, when ninety-eight per cent of her is numb, like the poor wretches hypnotists run pins into; and I guess all my top skin was frozen.
I was still comfortably enjoying the sensation I was making, when Studdingham, with the fickleness of all audiences, suddenly concentrated its attention elsewhere. A person named George Marsden popped into public notice and shook the foundations of society by coming to live with us. I mean, he bought the great big splendid Howard place, that had been shut up for years, and got ahead of the Vincents, who had been slowly negotiating for it for six months. Now, everybody wanted the Vincents. Jim Vincent's sister had married the Duke of Porchester, and they were horribly important and swell, and we had watched them through all the stages of coming to Studdingham, liking Studdingham, falling in love with Studdingham, and finally announcing their determination to live and die in Studdingham. It seemed they couldn't do the last two unless they bought the Howard place, which was a dream of everything mossy, aristocratic, and beautiful, with terraced gardens, and stables a mile big. And they were not only horribly important, as I have already said, but so gay and young and unaffected and sociable that we adored them for themselves.
Imagine the feelings of Studdingham, therefore, when this Marsden creature walked up, planked down his check, and insolently slammed the door, so to speak, in the faces of the Vincents, whose furniture was on the way, and who were confidently waiting for the Howard trustees to snip thirty thousand off the price. And so Mr. Marsden arrived, quite unconscious that a frenzied community was thirsting for his blood, and modestly installed himself in the powder magazine.
