“You said that?”
“Yes, wasn’t it a good thing to say… Angel, is anything wrong?”
“Oh, God.”
Adam dashed to the telephone.
“Central ten thousand… put me through to the night editor… Look here, I’ve got to make a correction in the Chatterbox page… it’s urgent.”
“Sorry, Symes. Last edition went to bed half an hour ago. Got everything made up early tonight.”
So Adam went back to finish his oysters.
“Bad tabulation there,” said Lord Monomark next morning, when he saw the paragraph.
So Miles Malpractice became Mr. Chatterbox.
“Now we can’t be married,” said Nina.
Ten
Adam and Miss Runcible and Miles and Archie Schwert went up to the motor races in Archie Schwert’s car. It was a long and cold drive. Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eyelashes in the dining room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave. At the next hotel they made Miss Runcible stay outside, and brought her cold lamb and pickles in the car. Archie thought it would be nice to have champagne, and worried the wine waiter about dates (a subject which had always been repugnant to him). They spent a long time over luncheon because it was warm there, and they drank Kümmel over the fire until Miss Runcible came in very angrily to fetch them out.
Then Archie said he was too sleepy to drive any more, so Adam changed places with him and lost the way, and they traveled miles in the wrong direction down a limitless bypass road.
And then it began to be dark and the rain got worse. They stopped for dinner at another hotel, where everyone giggled at Miss Runcible’s trousers in a dining room hung with copper warming pans.
Presently they came to the town where the race was to be run. They drove to the hotel where the dirt-track racer was staying. It was built in the Gothic style of 1860, large, dark and called the Imperial.
They had wired him to book them rooms, but “Bless you,” said the woman at the counter marked “Reception,” “all our rooms have been booked for the last six months. I couldn’t fit you in anywhere, not if you was the Speed Kings themselves, I couldn’t. I don’t suppose you’ll find anything in the town tonight. You might try at the Station Hotel. That’s your only chance.”
At the Station Hotel they made Miss Runcible wait outside, but with no better success.
“I might put one of you on the sofa in the bar parlor, there’s only a married couple in there at present and two little boys, or if you didn’t mind sitting up all night, there’s always the palm lounge.” As for a bed, that was out of the question. They might try at the “Royal George,” but she doubted very much whether they’d like that even if there was room, which she was pretty sure there was not.
Then Miss Runcible thought that she remembered that there were some friends of her father who lived quite near, so she found out their telephone number and rang them up, but they said no, they were sorry, but they had a completely full house and practically no servants, and that as far as they knew they had never heard of Lord Chasm. So that was no good.
Then they went to several more hotels, sinking through the various gradations of Old Established Family and Commercial, plain Commercial, High Class Board Residence pension terms, Working Girls’ Hostel, plain Pub and Clean Beds: Gentlemen Only. All were full. At last, by the edge of a canal, they came to the “Royal George.” The landlady stood at the door and rounded off an argument with an elderly little man in a bowler hat.
“First ’e takes off ’is boots in the saloon bar,” she said, enlisting the sympathy of her new audience, “which is not the action of a gentleman.”
“They was wet,” said the little man, “wet as ’ell.”
“Well, and who wants your wet boots on the counter, I should like to know. Then, if you please, he calls me a conspiring woman because I tells him to stop and put them on before he goes ’ome.”
“Want to go ’ome,” said the little man. “ ’Ome to my wife and kids. Trying to keep a man from ’is wife.”
“No one wants to keep you from your wife, you old silly. All I says is for Gawd’s sake put on your boots before you go ’ome. What’ll your wife think of you comin’ ’ome without boots.”
“She won’t mind ’ow I come ’ome. Why, bless you, I ain’t been ’ome at all for five years. It’s ’ard to be separated from a wife and kids by a conspiring woman trying to make yer put on yer boots.”
“My dear, she’s quite right, you know,” said Miss Runcible. “You’d far better put on your boots.”
“There, ’ear what the lady says. Lady says you’ve to put on your boots.”
The little man took his boots from the landlady, looked at Miss Runcible with a searching glance, and threw them into the canal. “Lady,” he said with feeling. “Trousers,” and then he paddled off in his socks into the darkness.
“There ain’t no ’arm in ’im really,” said the landlady, “only he do get a bit wild when he’s ’ad the drink. Wasting good boots like that… I expect he’ll spend the night in the lockup.”
“Won’t he get back to his wife, poor sweet?”
“Lor’ bless you, no. She lives in London.”
At this stage Archie Schwert, whose humanitarian interests were narrower than Miss Runcible’s, lost interest in the discussion.
“The thing we want to know is, can you let us have beds for the night?”
The landlady looked at him suspiciously.
“Bed or beds?”
“Beds.”
“Might do.” She looked from the car to Miss Runcible’s trousers and back to the car again, weighing them against each other. “Cost you a quid each,” she said at last.
“Can you find room for us all?”
“Well,” she said, “which of you’s with the young lady?”
“I’m afraid I’m all alone,” said Miss Runcible. “Isn’t it too shaming?”
“Never you mind, dearie, luck’ll turn one day. Well, now, how can we all fit in? There’s one room empty. I can sleep with our Sarah, and that leaves a bed for the gentlemen—then if the young lady wouldn’t mind coming in with me and Sarah…”
“If you don’t think it rude, I think I’d sooner have the empty bed,” said Miss Runcible, rather faintly. “You see,” she added, with tact, “I snore so terribly.”
“Bless you, so does our Sarah. We don’t mind… still, if you’d rather…”
“Really, I think I should,” said Miss Runcible.
“Well then, I could put Mr. Titchcock on the floor, couldn’t I?”
“Yes,” said Miles, “just you put Mr. Titchcock on the floor.”
“And if the other gentleman don’t mind going on the landing… Well, we’ll manage somehow, see if we don’t.”
So they all drank some gin together in the back parlor and they woke Mr. Titchcock up and made him help with the luggage and they gave him some gin, too, and he said it was all the same to him whether he slept on the floor or in bed, and he was very pleased to be of any service to anyone and didn’t mind if he did have another drop just as a nightcap, as they might say; and at last they all went to bed, very tired, but fairly contented, and oh, how they were bitten by bugs all that night.
Adam had secured one of the bedrooms. He awoke early to find rain beating on the window. He looked out and saw a gray sky, some kind of factory and the canal from whose shallow waters rose little islands of scrap iron and bottles; a derelict perambulator lay partially submerged under the opposite bank. In his room stood a chest of drawers full of horrible fragments of stuff, a wash-hand stand with a highly colored basin, an empty jug and an old toothbrush. There was also a rotund female bust covered in shiny red material, and chopped off short, as in primitive martyrdoms, at neck, waist and elbows; a thing known as a dressmaker’s “dummy” (there had been one of these in Adam’s home which they used to call “Jemima”—one day he stabbed “Jemima” with a chisel and scattered stuffing over the n
ursery floor and was punished. A more enlightened age would have seen a complex in this action and worried accordingly. Anyway he was made to sweep up all the stuffing himself).
Adam was very thirsty, but there was a light green moss in the bottom of the water bottle that repelled him. He got into bed again and found someone’s handkerchief (presumably Mr. Titchcock’s) under the pillow.
He woke again a little later to find Miss Runcible dressed in pajamas and a fur coat sitting on his bed.
“Darling,” she said, “there’s no looking glass in my room and no bath anywhere, and I trod on someone cold and soft asleep in the passage, and I’ve been awake all night killing bugs with drops of face lotion, and everything smells, and I feel so low I could die.”
“For heaven’s sake let’s go away,” said Adam.
So they woke Miles and Archie Schwert, and ten minutes later they all stole out of the “Royal George” carrying their suitcases.
“I wonder, do you think we ought to leave some money?” asked Adam, but the others all said no.
“Well, perhaps we ought to pay for the gin,” said Miss Runcible.
So they left five shillings on the bar and drove away to the “Imperial.”
It was still very early, but everyone seemed to be awake, running in and out of the lifts carrying crash helmets and overalls. Miles’ friend, they were told, had been out before dawn, presumably at his garage. Adam met some reporters whom he used to see about the Excess office. They told him that it was anyone’s race, and that the place to see the fun was Headlong Corner, where there had been three deaths the year before, and it was worse this year, because they’d been putting down wet tar. It was nothing more or less than a death trap, the reporters said. Then they went away to interview some more drivers. All teams were confident of victory, they said.
Meanwhile Miss Runcible discovered an empty bathroom, and came down half an hour later all painted up and wearing a skirt and feeling quite herself again and ready for anything. So they went in to breakfast.
The dining room was very full indeed. There were Speed Kings of all nationalities, unimposing men mostly with small mustaches and apprehensive eyes; they were reading the forecasts in the morning papers and eating what might (and in some cases did) prove to be their last meal on earth. There were a great number of journalists making the best of an “out-of-town” job; there were a troop of nondescript “fans,” knowledgeable young men with bright jumpers tucked inside their belted trousers, old public-school ties, check tweeds, loose mouths and scarcely discernible Cockney accents; there were R.A.C. officials and A.A. officials, and the representatives of oil firms and tire manufacturers. There was one disconsolate family who had come to the town for the christening of a niece. (No one had warned them that there was a motor race on; their hotel bill was a shock.)
“Very better-making,” said Miss Runcible with approval as she ate her haddock.
Scraps of highly technical conversation rose on all sides of them.
“… Changed the whole engine over after they’d been scrutineered. Anyone else would have been disqualified…”
“… just cruising round at fifty…”
“… stung by a bee just as he was taking the corner, missed the tree by inches and landed up in the Town Hall. There was a Riley coming up behind, spun round twice, climbed the bank, turned right over and caught fire…”
“… local overheating at the valve heads. It’s no sense putting a supercharger in that engine at all…”
“… Headlong Corner’s jam. All you want to do is to brake right down to forty or forty-five at the white cottage, then rev up opposite the pub and get straight away in second on the near side of the road. A child could do it. It’s the double bend just after the railway bridge where you’ll get the funny stuff.”
“… kept flagging him down from the pits. I tell you that bunch don’t want him to win.”
“… She wouldn’t tell me her name, but she said she’d meet me at the same place tonight and gave me a sprig of white heather for the car. I lost it, like a fool. She said she’d look out for it too…”
“… Only offers a twenty pound bonus this year…”
“… lapped at seventy-five…”
“… Burst his gasket and blew out his cylinder heads…”
“… Broke both arms and cracked his skull in two places…”
“… Tailwag…”
“… Speed-wobble…”
“… Merc…”
“… Mag…”
“… crash…”
When they finished breakfast Miss Runcible and Adam and Archie Schwert and Miles went to the garage to look for their Speed King. They found him hard at work listening to his engine. A corner of the garage had been roped off and the floor strewn with sand as though for a boxing match.
Outside this ring clustered a group of predatory little boys with autograph albums and leaking fountain pens, and inside, surrounded by attendants, stood the essential parts of a motor car. The engine was running and the whole machine shook with fruitless exertion. Clouds of dark smoke came from it, and a shattering roar which reverberated from concrete floor and corrugated iron roof into every corner of the building so that speech and thought became insupportable and all the senses were numbed. At frequent intervals this high and heartbreaking note was varied by sharp detonations, and it was these apparently which were causing anxiety, for at each report Miles’ friend, who clearly could not have been unduly sensitive to noise, gave a little wince and looked significantly at his head mechanic.
Apart from the obvious imperfection of its sound, the car gave the impression to an uninstructed observer of being singularly unfinished. In fact, it was obviously still under construction. It had only three wheels; the fourth being in the hands of a young man in overalls, who, in the intervals of tossing back from his eyes a curtain of yellow hair, was beating it with a hammer. It also had no seats, and another mechanic was screwing down slabs of lead ballast in the place where one would have expected to find them. It had no bonnet; that was in the hands of a sign painter, who was drawing a black number 13 in a white circle. There was a similar number on the back, and a mechanic was engaged in fixing another number board over one of the headlights. There was a mechanic, too, making a windscreen of wire gauze, and a mechanic lying flat doing something to the back axle with a tin of grate polish and a rag. Two more mechanics were helping Miles’ friend to listen to the bangs. “As if we couldn’t have heard them from Berkeley Square,” said Miss Runcible.
(The truth is that motor cars offer a very happy illustration of the metaphysical distinction between “being” and “becoming.” Some cars, mere vehicles with no purpose above bare locomotion, mechanical drudges such as Lady Metroland’s Hispano Suiza, or Mrs. Mouse’s Rolls-Royce, or Lady Circumference’s 1912 Daimler, or the “general reader’s” Austin Seven, these have definite “being” just as much as their occupants. They are bought all screwed up and numbered and painted, and there they stay through various declensions of ownership, brightened now and then with a lick of paint or temporarily rejuvenated by the addition of some minor organ, but still maintaining their essential identity to the scrap heap.
Not so the real cars, that become masters of men; those vital creations of metal who exist solely for their own propulsion through space, for whom their drivers, clinging precariously at the steering wheel, are as important as his stenographer to a stockbroker. These are in perpetual flux; a vortex of combining and disintegrating units; like the confluence of traffic at some spot where many roads meet, streams of mechanism come together, mingle and separate again.)
Miles’ friend, even had it been possible in the uproar, seemed indisposed to talk. He waved abstractedly and went on with his listening. Presently he came across and shouted:
“Sorry I can’t spare a moment, I’ll see you in the pits. I’ve got you some brassards.”
“My dear, what can that be?”
He handed them each a strip of white l
inen, terminating in tape.
“For your arms,” he shouted. “You can’t get into the pits without them.”
“My dear, what bliss! Fancy their having pits.”
Then they tied on their brassards. Miss Runcible’s said, “SPARE DRIVER”; Adam’s, “DEPOT STAFF”; Miles’, “SPARE MECHANIC”; and Archie’s, “OWNER’S REPRESENTATIVE.”
Up till now the little boys round the rope had been skeptical of the importance of Miss Runcible and her friends, but as soon as they saw these badges of rank they pressed forward with their autograph books. Archie signed them all with the utmost complaisance, and even drew a slightly unsuitable picture in one of them. Then they drove away in Archie’s car.
The race was not due to start until noon, but any indecision which they may have felt about the employment of the next few hours was settled for them by the local police, who were engaged in directing all traffic, irrespective of its particular inclinations, on the road to the course. No pains had been spared about this point of organization; several days before, the Chief Constable had issued a little route map which was to be memorized by all constables on point duty, and so well had they learned their lesson that from early that morning until late in the afternoon no vehicle approaching the town from any direction escaped being drawn into that broad circuit marked by the arrows and dotted line A–B which led to the temporary car park behind the Grand Stand. (Many doctors, thus diverted, spent an enjoyable day without apparent prejudice to their patients.)
The advance of the spectators had already assumed the form of a slow and unbroken stream. Some came on foot from the railway station, carrying sandwiches and camp stools; some on tandem bicycles; some in “runabouts” or motor cycle sidecar combinations, but most were in modestly priced motor cars. Their clothes and demeanor proclaimed them as belonging to the middle rank; a few brought portable wireless sets with them and other evidence of gaiety, but the general air of the procession was one of sobriety and purpose. This was no Derby day holiday-making; they had not snatched a day from the office to squander it among gypsies and roundabouts and thimble-and-pea men. They were there for the race. As they crawled along in bottom gear in a fog of exhaust gas, they discussed the technicalities of motor car design and the possibilities of bloodshed, and studied their maps of the course to pick out the most dangerous corners.