Three Speeds Forward/Chapter 3
III
CHEWING UP THE LOW-GEAR
III
CHEWING UP THE LOW-GEAR
SUPPOSE chewing up that low-gear was the luckiest thing that ever happened. I didn't think so at the time, naturally, as I was eighteen miles from home, and the Bolinas road was so wild and unfrequented that you almost never meet a team. As luck would have it, the stage had passed just ten minutes before it dawned on me that I was in trouble. They talk about being alone in a great city, but getting stranded in the woods with a sick car is forty times worse. Of course, I had Olaff along, and I can't tell you what a comfort and consolation he was to me. He is a Great Dane, and everybody is afraid of him because he is so big and fierce, and he crowds up a car like a trunk, and has a large, meaty tail there never seems any room for. But, in a tight place, I'd rather have Olaff than any person I know, for he takes being a dog seriously, and would positively have liked to meet a mountain lion, just to show what he could do to it.
So Olaff sat and wagged his tail in the road, while I stripped off the transmission cover and felt inside. The metal band around the low-gear drum had fractured, and it didn't take two looks to see that this part of the outfit had gone out of business. It was made of a special imported unfracturable phospher-something bronze, slotted for lubrication, and I guess the manufacturers must have overdone the slots. Anyway, it was cracked. Even Olaff could see that as he put up his paws and gazed down at it with his head against mine, with a humorous expression, as though the joke were on us.
The reverse band was all right, and tightened nicely, and my first panic gave way as I saw I was sure to get home. The worst of that Bolinas road was its frightful hilliness, and there was bound to be a lot of working one's passage. So I screwed down the cover again, put on my switch, cranked up, and, getting Olaff on board, proceeded to back Dandy Dick in the direction of Studdingham. It was slow work and needed care, and there was the bothering apprehension of overheating. But I got up one hill all right, and smartly whisking her around on the decline of the next, I managed to throw in my high-speed clutch and scoot. It was like getting a pair of wings, and if the road in front hadn't been all grades, I should have sizzled home in no time.
The next hill wasn't such a terror, and I managed to nurse Dandy to the top by ignoring her little pounds for mercy, and doing wonders with the spark. But hill number two killed us before we had much more than started, and so I locked my brake and got out to cool. There was no sense in burning up the transmission, and this was plainly a case of making haste slowly. There was such a smell of fried engine, and such an irritable bubbling in the radiator, that to force matters would be to stick the pistons. Autoists are often accused of having no time to admire the scenery they pass through, but I think, what with our breakdowns and our enforced stoppages for adjustments, it would be found that we've absorbed more scenery than most of the horse people. The landscape of a place where you have once been stuck lives with you for years afterwards, and is absolutely ineffaceable. I can see that road now, with Olaff rolling out his tongue, and the stream tinkling at the bottom of the canyon, and every one of the hundred thousand million trees.
Well, after about twenty minutes of scenery, we started to back up some more, and backed and backed and backed till I thought my head would twist off. I was still hard at it when, high above me, I heard the boo of a horn, and the ponderous slish of a big car rounding the curve. I squeaked Dandy's tooter to save our lives, and straightened up and tried to look dignified, and as though I preferred to climb hills on the reverse, and wouldn't have used a first speed if I had had it. In another instant I saw the immense square bonnet of the G. R. A. T. darting into sight, with Mr. Marsden at the wheel, and his face so surprised and gratified at the unexpected sight of me that he almost forgot to ram home his brakes.
I don't know how it happened, but I found myself shaking his hand as though he was my long-lost brother. After all, Olaff mightn't have been equal to a mountain lion, and if ever there was a friend in need it was Mr. Marsden. Have you ever studied anything very hard, and then, after a long rest, discovered that you had learned it? That's true of friendships also, and I could feel we had made a big jump forward since we had last met. Besides, I was in the humor to like anybody that happened along just then, and so Mr. Marsden was all to the good. I needn't say he was most remarkably nice and kind and obliging, and took right hold as though his only business in life was to tow his friends out of their difficulties. He was so delighted, poor fellow, and seemed to find such a tremendous significance in all the train of events that it led him to taking the Bolinas trail. I was so grateful and relieved that I was quite willing he should see the finger of fate in our meeting, and didn't mind his being so enthusiastic about it.
"I never dreamed I was to have the privilege of speaking to you again," he said. "In fact, I was just on the point of shutting up the house and going away forever."
I suppose it was silly to ask why, but I asked it.
"I haven't the presumption to tell you," he returned, his handsome, sensitive face shadowing. "You might misjudge me—yes, you'd be sure to misjudge me. But what was the good of my staying on here, and being utterly wretched?"
I felt awfully sorry for him, because his voice was so sincere and trembling, and I could see he meant me.
"I suppose it is hard to be an outcast," I said sympathetically. "Once, at boarding school, I was sent to Coventry for a week because they thought I had caricatured Miss Drayton on the blackboard, while it was really that little sneak, Jessie Tillman, who was afraid to own up; and it nearly killed me."
"Oh, it's not that!" he cried, waving away the suggestion with his hand. "These people are no more to me than so many ants. What hurts me is that I'm prevented from knowing you."
"You seem to have broken through the net, though," I remarked, smiling.
"No, I haven't," he said savagely. "This is just a lucky accident—an accident that may never occur again. Don't you understand? I should like to come and see you, like other people—bring you flowers, and boxes of candy, and try to persuade you to like me. When a man's in earnest and really cares, it's a shame when he isn't even allowed a chance."
"Let's be sensible, Mr. Marsden," I said. "You know very well I cannot ask you to come and see me; and if you are going to talk like that, I'm not sure I would if I could. We're very conventional people here, and these short cuts of yours across the social grass are alarming."
"I love you," he said, with an awfully genuine flash of his eyes. "That's what I meant all the time—that's the crudest part of it; and these people here have ostracized me so successfully that they've made it an impertinence for me to say it!"
