The Motormaniacs | Page 8

that
talk he had been trying to get with me for the past month.
"'We'll do the gears first, thank you,' I said.
"'Gears!' he exclaimed, 'there's nothing the matter with the gears. I
thought you were chauffeur enough for that'
"'But you said--' I began.

"I can make this car move in five minutes,' he said, climbing into the
tonneau and motioning with his hand for me to take the other seat.
"Of course I obeyed him. I didn't want to, but somehow when Gerard
wants a thing I always do it. They say every woman finds her master,
and though I hate to admit it even to myself, I suppose Gerard is mine.
But I hid it all I could and I dare say I was pretty successful. It care all
the easier because Gerard himself was kind of embarrassed, and he
colored up and stammered while I sat in the tonneau, waiting for him to
begin.
"'I thought you said you were going to talk,' I said.
"'Jess,' he said, 'my sister is going to get married.'
"Now, this was news, indeed. She was lots old older than Gerard --forty
years old, if a day--and a chronic invalid. I don't know exactly what
was the matter with her, but she had a bad complexion, and used to
stick pretty tight is the house, and was always absorbed in church work.
She had snappy black eyes, and Gerard couldn't call his soul his own.
They kept house together, you know, and had been orphans ever since
they were little.
"'Oh, married!' I said, pretending to be little interested.
"'It's Mr. Simpson, the curate,' he said.
"It seemed rude to be too surprised, so I just rattled off some of the
usual congratulations. Gerard didn't say a word. He simply looked and
looked, and there was something beautiful to me in his shame and
backwardness and hesitation.
"'It's very unexpected,' he blurted out at last. 'I thought I was going to
take care of her always. It is going to make a great difference in my
life.'
"'I know how you always devoted yourself to her,' I said.
"'I had made up my mind never to marry,' he went on. 'How could I
marry?--for it would have been like turning her out of doors. She was
too ill and helpless and despondent to live by herself, and had I brought
a third person into the family it would have been misery all round.'
"Still I said nothing.
"'Jess,' he said suddenly, 'don't you understand? Can't you understand?'
"In fact, I did understand very well. It explained a heap of things--why
he had always acted so strangely--sometimes so devoted to me,
sometimes so distant; crazy to hold my hand one day and avoiding me

the next. It was no wonder he had made me utterly desperate and
piqued me into accepting the captain. Then he said: 'Jess, Jess!' like that;
and 'for God's sake, was it too late?'
"I couldn't trust myself to speak and I could feel my lips trembling. I
didn't sob or anything, but the tears just rolled down my cheeks. Wasn't
it a dead giveaway? It's awful to care for a man as much as that. I
thought it was splendid of him that he didn't try to kiss me. He simply
took my hand and pulled off the captain's ring and said I had to give it
back to him at once. Then I broke down altogether and began to cry
like a baby, while Gerard got out and emptied the kerosene from the oil
lamps into the exhaust valves. You see, pieces of scale from the inside
of the cylinders had wedged against the exhaust-valve seats so that they
wouldn't close tight, but leaked and leaked. Gerard said that new
Mantons always feed too rich a mixture at first and that he knew what
was the matter the moment he stuck his fingers in.
"We went home on the second speed so that Gerard could steer with
one hand.
"Oh, the captain? He acted kind of miserable at first, and was awfully
sarcastic about being a gentleman and not a gas-engineer. But I said the
modern idea was to be both. He got himself transferred home and I
really think it was the making of him--for what do you think happened
last week? He won the nonstop London to Glasgow race on an eighteen
horsepower Renault. I felt quite proud of him.
"He has asked Gerard and me and the Manton to spend a month with
him in England when we go abroad. He said I'd probably be pleased to
hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his ancestral Norman
chapel. But I suppose that was just his English humor, you know.
Anyway,