Three Speeds Forward

Front matter

THREE SPEEDS FORWARD

Copyright, 1906, by THE RIDGWAY-THAYER COMPANY

Copyright, 1906, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Chapter 1

I

HEART-THROBS

I

HEART-THROBS

I 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 gentle 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.

Chapter 2

II

THE MAN THAT MADDENED A CONTINENT

II

THE MAN THAT MADDENED A CONTINENT

STUDDINGHAM was one of those swagger little places that had been taken care of before it was born. You couldn't build a house that cost less than ten thousand; you couldn't sell liquor, open a shop or hotel, manufacture anything, teach music, keeps pigs, burn soft coal, expose advertisements, dig wells or cesspools, mine, or generate acetylene gas. Forty lawyers had spent years in tying the infant Studding into bow-knots, and concocting what papa called "a deed of don'ts." Their success had been a matter of general congratulation, and, after nine years, it was left to this Marsden to find a crack in the legal wall. He was the manufacturer, proprietor, and inventor of the Bo-peep Puzzle!

You surely remember it? Twelve little Noah's-ark sheep, and a dolly shepherdess, and a checkerboard with three kinds of squares—with an unintelligible book of directions, and the look of its being childishly simple—till you took it up in a weak moment, and did nothing else for the next six months! No doubt you went crazy over it, like the rest of us, and bo-peeped and bo-peeped till your brains curdled! I know I did, and papa, and everybody; and we used to see his picture in the ends of the magazines, with big letters under it, calling him, "The Man that has Maddened a Continent!" A nice recruit, wasn't he, for poor little Studdingham, with red-hot aspirations for refinement and good form, and only just beginning to attract people like the Vincents!

Of course, we had had undesirables before, but we had chased them out very easily. They were usually simple-minded parvenus, who thought they had only to buy a house in order to tuck in socially. When they discovered they had invested their money in a mausoleum, they were as eager to go as we were to speed them, and the even tenor of our aristocratic way was not long disturbed. But the man that had maddened a continent gave us no such handle to expel him. He had come to bury himself in the great empty rooms of the Howard place, and think up fresh mind-rackers in its noble seclusion. Ostracizing him seemed rather an ineffectual weapon, and the situation, if it were to be relieved at all, plainly called for something more drastic. Anyway, Studdingham was simply boiling over with fury; and when the Vincents packed up and left, they were in the humor to tear him limb from limb.

Papa was the angriest of the lot, which was all the more to his credit, as he was by no means a highflyer, and rather pooh-poohed the snobbishness of the place. In fact, he had only settled there originally because, as he said, "they all looked so clean and happy." He was a born suburbanite, and would have lapsed to shirt sleeves and a watering pot if we hadn't sternly headed him off—one of those men who spend all day in ruling a large corporation with a rod of iron, and then return home in the evening to domestic servitude. In the newspaper caricatures he was usually engaged in throttling the State, or cramming his pockets full of legislators, and you wouldn't have thought he was afraid to say "Boo!" to the cook.

I don't know why he had taken such an impulsive liking to the Vincents. As a rule, he had a lazy indifference for newcomers, and let mamma and me do all the pioneer work of making their acquaintance and sizing them up. Even in our little convulsions he was always the last one to get excited, and preferred to lie back and blow smoke rings while everybody else was screaming. But he had fallen in love with the Vincents right off, and had made tremendous efforts to please and keep them. It was he who had put it into their heads to buy the Howard place, and that at a price that even two swell little innocents could see was a bargain. They were devoted to papa, too, and blindly trusted all the negotiations to him, so he was really to blame for letting Marsden jump in and get the property, while he waited and dillydallied and dickered to save them that thirty thousand. Poor papa! I was awfully sorry for him. He couldn't have been more depressed if a Limited had smashed up and let in the line for a million.

Well, so the Vincents left, and Mr. Marsden sneaked in, and papa went on like a she-bear robbed of its cubs. You only had to say "Marsden" for him to explode, and he spent most of his spare time thinking of ways to run him out. But the puzzle man was ter unassailable. He didn't put up his name at the Country Club; didn't try to make any friends; didn't put his head out of his shell for anybody to take a crack at it. The only apparent method of hurting him was to attack him from the outside—bust the puzzle business, and drive him into bankruptcy. But he hadn't been with us a month before he launched "Dobbin, Dobbin, Oh, Where's Dobbin?" and successfully maddened a continent for a second time. I gave papa one of the dollar sizes as a birthday present, but he didn't see any joke in it, and got blacker than a thundercloud. He was sorer than ever about losing the Vincents, and never passed the Howard place without gritting his teeth.

We all waited for Marsden to come out and startle us. We didn't know exactly what he was going to do—but we were sure, sooner or later, that he would do it. Then, as nothing happened, a sort of mystery grew up about him. He hid away in a corner of that vast old house with two German servants, an old man and an old woman; and as far as any splurge was concerned, he might have been the hired caretaker. I mean, except for his G. R. A. T. car, a forty-horse Austrian giant that used to slip out, mostly at night, and sizzle around like the wind. Papa said he was only trying to pique our curiosity, and that the surest way of getting people to know you, who don't want to know you, is to make them believe you don't want to know them.

Well, it went along like this for ever so long, till one day he actually did make an acquaintance, and—would you believe it?—that acquaintance was me. I was hung up on the road when I heard a big car purring up the hill, and when I turned round, I saw it was the G. R. A. T. It swerved for a moment in an undecided manner, passed me, slowed down, and stopped. I looked up from the bonnet, and there was Mr. Marsden getting out. I knew him in a minute from his picture, and, besides, the G. R. A. T. identified him like a passport. He was a startlingly hand man of about thirty, with heaps of reddish-brown hair, and wild gray eyes; tall and spare, with a musician look, and an aquiline nose. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, and held my breath.

"Might I not assist you?" he asked in a delightfully pleasant voice, raising his leather cap.

"Oh, thank you very much—it is nothing," I replied with what I considered the right degree of warmth to offset his courtesy, and yet give him no opening for a talk; and then, as he still stood there smiling, I added, in a please-go-away tone, "a broken porcelain; I'll have it right in a minute."

I was unprepared for his taking the plug out of my hand, which he did in the most matter-of-fact way, like a paid mechanic, and pulled out his knife to widen the points. He was as exasperatingly slow about it as though he had specially arrived from a garage in a trouble wagon.

"Why do all you people dislike me so

much?" he asked abruptly, raising his eyes and meeting mine. "Good heavens, what is the matter? What have I done? What crime have I committed?"

I couldn't help flushing at being asked such a point-blank question. Under the circumstances it struck me as hardly short of an impertinence.

"I do not know what you mean," I said; "and even if I did, I should not care to discuss it with you. Indeed, I'd be obliged if you'd let me fix my car for myself."

"I beg your pardon," he returned, still holding tight to the plug, and gazing down at me in the most disconcerting way. "It isn't that I mind being let alone. In fact, that's why I came here. The house has an atmosphere; and you can hardly imagine how important atmosphere is to a savant. But, while I was prepared to be regarded as a recluse—as a crank, even—it didn't occur to me that I was qualifying to become the pariah of Studdingham!"

He looked so sad and reproachful that it seemed only common humanity to say that he wasn't.

"Oh, it isn't as bad as that," I remarked, with all the gumption I could put into such an awful fib.

"I don't know why I should particularly care," he went on, "but it has kind of got on my nerves, you know. I feel myself boiling in a caldron of resentment, while your friends are cheerfully skimming the grease off the top. It—it's humiliating! I wish I could do what a friend of mine did in London when a Lord Somebody cut him on the street. Followed him, you know, calling out and raising such a hullabaloo, that finally the lord, in self-defense, was compelled to turn round and ask him angrily what was the matter. 'I just wanted to tell you,' said my friend, 'that if you don't want to know me, you needn't!' If it wouldn't be asking too much of you, I wish you'd give the same message from me to Studdingham."

He said this so whimsically that I burst out laughing.

"What fools people are!" he continued confidentially. "Here am I complaining because the curate hasn't called, and none of the village bores and busybodies have descended on me. For years I've been looking for a place where I could be stark alone, and now, when I have found it, I can't help feeling slighted and insulted."

"You ought to go off somewhere where you are more appreciated," I said. "Frankly, here you are not a success, and your pro-profession seems to jar on our susceptibilities."

"Profession!" he cried. "Do you mean my puzzles? Good heavens, I hope you don't think that's the only thing I do! I had to gain an independence somehow, and to a man of a mathematical turn that was the easiest way. I got the idea of Bo-peep from an algebraical formula I happened at the time to be using in some experiments. But apart from all that, is it such a crime to amuse the public?"

"But you tortured them," I said. "Your advertisement is only too true; and really and truly, how can you expect us to be chummy with a man that has maddened a continent!"

He groaned at this, and put out his hand as though to implore me to stop.

"I suppose," he remarked at last, very bitingly, "I suppose that if Sir Isaac Newton had sold peanuts, or Darwin had eked out his income by peddling the 'Life of General Grant,' you'd be quite blind to the trifling additions they made to the store of human knowledge."

"Oh, I wouldn't," I said. "But I wouldn't like to answer for Studdingham. Besides—I don't want to be rude, you know—but we see only the peanut side of your career, and, up to now, nobody had even guessed that there was another."

I waited for him to tell me what it was, but he didn't. I couldn't help feeling curious about it, because he was so handsome, and had such nice eyes, and the way he held back seemed to make it more mysterious and exciting.

"I am a digger," he said at last—"a poor, miserable, lonely digger. I dig and dig, and the deeper I get the less I appear to accomplish. To put it into common English, I am engaged in electrical research, not of the profitable, ingenious, touch-the-button kind, but in the study of some great basic, perhaps insoluble, phenomena that we have been content to name and then ignore—a scientific procedure more universal than you'd think."

He paused, and it seemed only polite on my part to ask him how he was getting on.

"Wait twenty years, and then, perhaps, I'll answer you," he returned. "Have you ever been a victim of those schoolboy jokes, when you open your parcel and then find another parcel inside of that, and another inside of that, and so on and so on? Well, that's what science is, only, in our case, there are a million more wrappers, and it often takes months to remove a single one!"

"And then you find it's a carrot after all, or a slate pencil," I said. "Oh, yes, I know that joke; though, even as a little girl, I never thought it a particularly good one!"

He smilingly agreed with me. "But Nature has her practical jokes, too, you know, and occasionally revenges herself for all we've robbed her of."

I suppose he caught me glancing at the spark plug, for he suddenly pulled himself up, and his face changed.

"I fear I have taken a great liberty in telling you all this," he went on, in an earnest, troubled tone. "You must make allowances for a man who sees no one—a scientific Crusoe on a desert island, who, in the absorption of one great dominating idea, has forgotten all the petty rules, and, worse still, even runs the risk of proving himself a bore. This meeting, this little talk here in the woods, that means nothing to you, that will be forgotten in an hour, will remain with me for months to come, the most radiant of memories."

It was rather hard to know what to reply to this. He was so naïve in his admiration, so innocent of any presumption or offense, that it would have been brutal to snub him. Yet I couldn't very well stand there and let him run along on this line. Heaven only knows where he would have got to, because— Oh, well, because— A girl doesn't need a sixth sense to tell her when a man— It seemed a happy thought to turn his electrical abilities to account by asking him to look at my buzzer, and thus sidetrack any more embarrassing confidences. It was lucky I did so, for he found that one of the vibrators was sticking slightly, and had quite a fight to get it into proper shape. Then, when he had screwed down the plug, wired up, and put back the hood covers, he was simply forced to crank up and let me go.

"I suppose it is good-by forever?" he said, looking at me in the most appealing manner, and holding to the car as though it might suddenly jump up and fly away.

"I am afraid it is, Mr. Marsden," I said, glad to make the matter quite plain. "And much obliged for your kindness," and with that I speeded up, and left him disconsolately in the road. I peeped back through my little window, and felt quite sorry for him.

It was hard to be a pariah, and he was really a charming fellow and wonderfully handsome and nice. If he hadn't been the puzzle king, hadn't maddened a continent, I should have indulged in a little sentiment about him, and wiped away a tear. But a sense of the ridiculous forbade, and I had to smile at myself. Perhaps it helped as a protection. Isn't it strange when a person's eyes can haunt you, and you can hear the tones of his voice? I suppose it was just because he was so out of the ordinary, and unlike anybody I had ever met before; and he was fair, and I was dark—and, oh— Really how can anybody explain those things, anyway?

Chapter 3

III

CHEWING UP THE LOW-GEAR

III

CHEWING UP THE LOW-GEAR

I 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.