Another Part of the Wood

by Denis Mackail

  At the moment, however, we are thinking more particularly of its motor-cars, and of its remarkable and obstinate belief in their efficiency. Here is a contrivance which is more temperamental than the most artistic member of the race itself; which is always either being run in or decarbonised; which is always either over-lubricated or under-lubricated; which—as its individual owners well know—will never perform the same duties twice in the same manner, and invariably starts squeaking as soon as you have cured its knock, or drumming as soon as you have dealt with its rattle; bits of which are always working themselves in or wearing themselves out; and the whole of which is a mass of empirical compromise and mutually irreconcilable stresses. Yet so profoundly is the race imbued with this notion that its machines are more practically constructed than itself, that it marches into its garage day after day, and year after year, with the eternal expectation that this time the car really is going to go like the car of its dreams, or the car of the maker’s advertisement.

  “I’ve taken up that lining,” it says to itself. “I’ve cleaned out that filter. I’ve spotted the loose connection that made that funny noise last time. Now, then!”

  Away it goes. It listens carefully, with its head on one side. She’s pulling like a bird. It smiles contentedly, and lets her out. Instantly the most extraordinary row proceeds from some utterly indefinable source, or what the critics call “periodic vibration” begins at a speed where it had never begun before, or the feel of the various controls undergoes some subtle and ominous change. A look of baffled resignation spreads over the driver’s features, and if he is wise he settles down to make the best of it. But the joy has gone out of his heart and the hope from his soul. He and his friends and the entire technical Press have all lied so often and so convincingly, and he has paid so much more for this model than he can afford, that he simply cannot and will not realise that his experiences are being shared by every other driver on the road. They all believe that everyone else’s car is doing what no car can ever do. They all believe that they are dogged by some malignant and personal devil. They all believe everything that they are told, and nothing whatever that they perceive.

  And if any surviving pedestrian should doubt all this, then he has only to stand and watch their faces as they come bowling in their thousands along the nearest arterial road. Dull submission is the utmost that he will see there, but the vast majority display melancholy as positive as it is acute. Truly they are the victims of the machines that they have created; but only because the rotten things are even more uncertain and capricious than they are themselves.

  So this brings us back to Snubs Tipton, and the two-seater of which he had been the slave—though anything but the atrophied slave—for nearly three years. That, of course, is a long time to keep a car with two, four or any other number of seats; but then, as Snubs could have told you, there was extraordinarily little of the original vehicle left. With almost human intelligence the original vehicle had started dropping to pieces a week after the expiry of the manufacturers’ guarantee, and having continued this process ever since, it was now what is often described—to the fury of pedants—as rather unique. The manufacturers would, in fact, have been hard put to it to recognise their offspring in this synthetic jumble of bits and pieces, encrusted with the remains of innumerable worn-out gadgets, and reduced, by arduous employment, constant exposure and rigid economy in the matter of washing, to the colour of a very old brown-paper parcel.

  Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its astonishing unreliability in everything except running up bills, Snubs was absolutely devoted to this strange-looking craft. Over and over again it had done its utmost to break his heart and to kill his affection. It had let him down in circumstances of almost unimaginable inconvenience and ignominy. It had presented him with sprains, scalds, bruises and severe colds; it had attacked him with poison-gas and boiling oil; it had torn his clothes, and had deprived him of the means of buying new ones. Needless to say, also, that it was an expert in producing those strange and terrifying noises to which we recently referred, and produced them in stranger and more terrifying ways than any other car on the road. But was Snubs cast down? Only until the crisis was surmounted, when he would immediately begin boasting about the two-seater again with every appearance of meaning what he said. “She wasn’t quite herself to-day,” he might admit; “but, by gosh, you ought to see her when she is.”

  Very few witnesses had ever seen her in this condition, and, indeed, it is difficult to understand how she could ever hope to be herself when her identity was subject to such constant and radical revision. But Snubs said that she had character and individuality, which he seemed to think was in her favour. And even when he was too busy to take her out, he would often go and visit her in her garage, and fiddle with her entrails in a well-intentioned manner which hardly ever produced the results that he had expected. He also spoke of her and addressed her by the name of Gertie, and almost the only way in which you could really annoy him was by asking him if he were thinking of selling her.

  “Sell Gertie?” he would exclaim. “After all I’ve done for her? Why, there isn’t a car like her in the whole world. What an extraordinary idea?”

  And so it was, when you came to think of it, because who on earth would ever buy a car that wouldn’t even obey the man who worshipped it, and that looked like the remains of several fatal accidents, and was the colour of a very old brown-paper parcel? Why, nobody, of course, would dream of buying a car like that.

  So while Beaky was still groaning and muttering after another bootless postal delivery, which had brought nothing but a chatty note from a bookmaker and two letters for Snubs from his parents on their distant island, and while he was still muttering and groaning because of the disgrace which Noodles had brought on the name of Brett by running away from school and associating with a gang of pierrots; while, as we say, the third-floor sitting-room was echoing to these very painful sounds, young Mr. Tipton ran downstairs, and scampered along several streets, and plunged down a cobbled declivity under an archway, and so arrived in the mews where Gertie was waiting for him, and whiling away the time by dripping gently on the garage floor.

  “’Morning, sir,” said an apparition in greasy overans. ‘Nice morning, sir.”

  “Topping,” said Snubs.

  “Taking her out, sir?” said the apparition.

  “That’s the idea,” said Snubs, guardedly.

  “Right,” said the apparition. “Jest a minute.”

  He then shouted to a lad who looked as if he had been sleeping in an inspection-pit, and the three of them started pushing and pulling and twisting and manœuvring all the other vehicles behind which Gertie was hiding. “Steady!” they cried. “Woa!” “Other lock, sir.” “That’s it.” “Right over!” “Now she’ll do it.” “No, she won’t. Back again!” “Mind that pail!” “Careful!” And with these and similar phrases they gradually cleared a narrow and tortuous path between Gertie and the doorway.

  “Thanks,” said Snubs.

  “Can you manage it, sir?”

  “I think so,” said Snubs.

  He climbed gingerly over Gertie’s one practicable door—because it wasn’t so practicable that it would ever stay shut once you had opened it—and Gertie made a horrible noise of grinding and grating, and began to roar and throb so that Snubs shook like a jelly, and more or less vanished in a cloud of extremely mephitic smoke. Under this screen she advanced as far as the entrance, where Snubs’s voice could be heard calling for petrol.

  “How much, sir?” asked the apparition, coughing and wiping its eyes.

  Snubs leapt over the door again, raised the bonnet—which did its best to fall back and cut his hand off—raised it a second time with greater success, unscrewed the filler-cap, squinted into the orifice, extracted a piece of knotted string from a hole in the dash, lowered it carefully into the tank, and announced that could he do with five gallons.

  “Leaking a bit still, isn’t she, sir?” said the appariti
on.

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Snubs, loyally. “Five, I said.”

  Gertie then received about four and three-quarter gallons in her tank, and the balance anywhere that it happened to go.

  “Oil?” suggested the apparition.

  “Not from the look of things,” said Snubs. “But I could do with some water.”

  “Fred!” shouted the apparition. “Can!”

  But Snubs poured the water in himself, because a curious enlargement of the overflow pipe made this a matter of some technical skill.

  “You ought to have that seen to, sir,” said the apparition, watching the puddle that spread and trickled towards the grating.

  “Oh, she’s all right once she warms up,” said Snubs. “Nothing to worry about.”

  The apparition suddenly crouched down and stared penetratingly through Gertie’s off-side front wheel.

  “I don’t like the look of that rod,” he said.

  “Don’t you?” said Snubs. “Never mind.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Thanks,” said Snubs, edging the apparition out of the way. He closed the bonnet again, secured it with a large elastic-band where the catch had broken, and climbed back over the door. The apparition and the boy Fred stood clear with their wrists on their hips, and waited with interest while Snubs wound his legs in under the steering-wheel.

  “Now, then,” he said. And then: “Oh, I say!”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t worry if I’m not back for a night or two. I’m not quite certain how far I’m going.”

  The apparition and the boy Fred exchanged humorous and significant grins.

  “No, sir?” said the former. “Well——”

  But Snubs wasn’t going to sit there and hear cheap and obvious jokes being made about his adored Gertie. He jerked forward suddenly, so that his chin very nearly hit the windscreen, and once more the smoke-clouds poured from the exhaust and up through the floor-boards while the mews echoed and re-echoed to a sound which, for some unaccountable reason, was music in his ears. Looking very stern and masterful, he crawled over the cobblestones, accelerated past a dust-bin, shot up the rise under the archway, touched a button which produced a noise like a chorus of lost souls, and with a loud slap achieved top-speed and the macadam of the public thoroughfare. Anxious as he still was about the events which this day might yet bring, he couldn’t help feeling a deep joy and satisfaction at being once more re-united with Gertie. He sang to her as she chewed up the perspective of Wykeham Street. If only she could finish the day as she had just started it, he didn’t mind if he chased Noodles all over England.

  Then he stamped on the brake, and Gertie pulled up before the broad steps of Number Ninety-seven.

  3

  “Of course,” Beaky was saying to himself, upstairs, “even registered letters must get lost sometimes. Perhaps that’s what happened. Perhaps the postman went wrong suddenly. Or dropped it without noticing. Or perhaps that butler took it in and then forgot about it. I mean, surely she wouldn’t just not answer at all. I couldn’t possibly believe she’d do a thing like that.…”

  But the fact remained that she hadn’t answered.

  “Perhaps she’s ill,” said Beaky to himself, and was suddenly so terrified by this possibility that he had to cling for support to the back of a chair. Oh, Lord—to think of Sylvia being ill. In pain, perhaps. In agony. And his clumsy, blundering letter coming to worry her just when she ought to be having absolute peace and quiet. Of course she’d loathe him after that. Well, naturally. Or perhaps she was so ill that her mother had had to open and read the letter, and in that case.…

  Or perhaps she wasn’t ill at all.

  Supposing now—here was an idea—he rang up Dolphin Street, and didn’t say who he was, but just asked——

  No. The impracticability of this half-formed plan drove him away from the telephone long before he had reached it. For supposing—among many other destructive objections—that she answered the summons herself. That wouldn’t be the sort of situation that one could deal with, would it?

  How’d it be, then, if he wrote another letter—just saying that he’d written to her about something and he didn’t know if she’d ever got it because he couldn’t help thinking perhaps she hadn’t and in that case.… In that case, what?

  No, again. Very decidedly no. And this time, though he had actually started looking for the fatal writing-pad, he swung off again and began wondering if, after all, the Shirleys had gone down to Pippingfold earlier than they had said. If they’d done that—and of course it would be just like Mrs. Shirley if they had—then perhaps they had said don’t forward any letters, and in that case.…

  Pippingfold, though. Why had the thought of Pippingfold suddenly paralysed this careful chain of reasoning, and oppressed him with a fresh and different kind of anxiety? Something to do with Mr. Cottenham, was it? Oh, of course. Dash! This business about Noodles.

  That was a rotten idea of Snubs’s, to go careering off to Pippingfold and say nothing when you got there. What they really ought to have done, of course, was to have rung up St. Ethelburga’s last night, and to have found out if they’d got any news or what they were doing about it all. Then you’d have known where you were. Then you’d have known what to do next. Only of course they’d have said: “Who told you?” and if you answered that, it meant giving Noodles away just when she’d asked you not to. Not that she’d any right not to be given away, when she’d gone and done a thing like this; but—well, one couldn’t have Snubs looking at one as if one were a cad. If Snubs were so dashed honourable, then of course one had got to be honourable too. Even about one’s sister.

  “But,” said Beaky to himself, as he roamed the space between the table and the window, “there’s no doubt that this is going to be the most awful sort of Whitsun—whatever happens. There’s no doubt whatever that there is a curse on my family. And of course if anything really happened to Noodles.…”

  Even to himself, apparently, young Mr. Brett couldn’t admit that in an odd, queer, basic sort of way his affection for his sister Ursula touched portions of his soul which were at least as deep as those stirred by Miss Sylvia Shirley. Even to himself, apparently, he had to try and explain this fact away.

  “I mean,” he went on, “that when one’s always known somebody, and they’ve been through it with one, and they’re so absolutely hopeless at looking after themselves, and they will see nothing but good in everybody—well, I mean——”

  But here he was spared the discomfort of further analysis by the irruption from without of a familiar sound resembling a chorus of lost souls. He sprang to the nearer window-seat, and extruded his head.

  “Hullo!” he bawled. “Hullo, Snubs!”

  “Here we are!” yelled Snubs, referring presumably to Gertie and himself. “Buck up, you old blighter!”

  The faces of a number of wayfarers swung round to follow any further exchanges in this stentorian dialogue, but the head at the third-floor window had already vanished. In less than a minute—and it would have been quicker still but for an encounter with Miss Burgess on the second-floor landing, who had as usual been quite unable to decide whether to pass on the left or the right—it reappeared in company with its body and remaining limbs, and carrying a small, brown suit-case.

  “Right,” shouted Snubs. “Chuck it in. Nothing like pyjamas in an emergency.”

  The suit-case bounced into the dickey, and came to rest among Gertie’s jack and an old inner tube and the remains of what had once been her side-curtains, and Mr. Brett climbed over the door on to the vacant half of the front seat.

  “Just a moment,” said Snubs. “You’ve got the leg of your bags over the brake-handle. Ah—that’s better. Now, then.”

  After three attempts, each of which sounded as though a quantity of scrap-iron were being flung about in a gigantic churn, he succeeded in getting the gear-lever into first, and Gertie leapt forward as if she had been kicked. “That’s all right,” sa
id Snubs, repeating the noise with variations. And then slap! and Gertie was in top, and sailing up Wykeham Street, and sailing round the corner, and sailing round another corner, and sailing by within a few yards of her garage, and so threading her way with many crashes and squeaks and with a gradually diminishing trail of blue smoke through the early-morning traffic that was already trundling up and down the long-suffering streets of the capital.

  Presently there was a bridge, and then there were tramlines, and then the capital became greener and greener with the foliage that it would so soon have deluged with dust and soot. And then the road soared over a long hill by itself and came down again into a no man’s land that was neither town nor country, but was densely populated by inhabitants with tennis-racquets. And then it shook these off and wound away among frequent appeals on the part of landowners to dispose of their property as eligible building-sites. And the queue of southward-bound vehicles through which Sylvia and her mother had flashed yesterday afternoon was as nothing to the rushing, roaring queue in which Gertie was now embedded. And where there had been a hundred suit-cases on Friday, there seemed to be a thousand suit-cases now. And the patrols mopped their faces and saluted until they were dizzy. And the great motor-coaches came thundering along with music and perspiration. And hot, angry men whose offside tyres had burst skipped about and shook their fists at the vast stream that swept by within an inch of their running-boards. And scribes in London were already preparing to announce that this was the Biggest Exodus on Record, and wishing for some extraordinary reason that they were in it. And more thousands were rushing through their Saturday morning work so that they could make it bigger still at the first possible moment. And the late Mr. William Cobbett, who had ridden this way more than a hundred years ago and had been annoyed by meeting a solitary gig containing stock-jobbers on their way to the great Wen, looked down on this amazing scene and suddenly wondered if his contemporaries were quite as objectionable as he had declared. A remarkable spectacle, in short; but the great point was that Gertie was still firing like a pippin.