The Romance of Motoring

I

“THEY go by the breath of Allah! they go by the breath of Allah!” This exclamation of kneeling Arabs reveals an awe in the presence of motor-cars which we, of a more sophisticated race, hardly feel. The force which drives a six-cylinder machine is, for us, no spiritual thing. If we ride this sleek, this purring steel tiger, its power reminds us how low the gasolene is ebbing in our tank, or what tribute, in the guise of pay for that volatile fluid, we have poured so reluctantly into the golden flood from which magnates, in their moments of innocence, irrigate the bad lands of American education. But if, on the other hand, we shrink by the wayside while the monster of speed storms past, its power suggests to our shuddering minds neither the spirit of greed, nor Allah’s immortal breath. For us “what makes it go” is a breath, to be sure, but a breath from the Pit.

When the doctrine of speed for speed’s sake was orthodox, this Satanic impression came hourly to the wayfarer. Now that it has lapsed into heresy, the impression is so rare that spectators in search of it troop by thousands to the race-track. There the flash of dragon’s-eye lamps at dawn, the machine-gun fusillade of explosions, the smoke, the fire, the whirlwind speed, — these things make racing cars actually such fierce demons as their cousins of the road once appeared. Only, however, to hysterics, human and equine, can the road machines of to-day seem diabolic. For the rest of us, the loungingrooms on wheels which carry those princesses of democracy, our eighteen-yearold daughters of Success, on their shopping bouts and their calling “bats;” the motor-carts, if we may call them so, which convey their furbelows and flowers to the paternal mansion; these, and the runabouts in which bribe-givers hurry to court, and the touring-cars in which bribe-takers parade back and forth from jail, these are so usual, so tame, so traditional, that they induce in us the state of mind of the fur-clad, auto-riding fouryear-old who remarked, one winter day:

“Did n’t Adam ’n Eve feel cold speedin’ ?”

If some brisk little runabout, as this youngster supposed, had whisked our first parents naked through the Garden of Eden, or if huge sight-seeing “autos ” had chug-chugged into Canterbury on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pilgrimage, motorcars would seem to us as legendary as the armored chargers that clang across the background of Lord Tennyson’s poetry. But Time has had no leisure to wrap motor-cars in mystery; and Poetry abashed has turned away her head. Unveiled, except in dust, they shoot the rapids of our streets; unsung, unless in coon-songs, they purr across hill and meadow. Song will follow them. The Egyptian woman hides her face behind fold on fold of black; behind shining crimson and brass the tiger of modern speed hides, not its face, but a spirit of romantic fact.

If Poetry has not seen it, the unwary motorist is to blame. Speed-possessed, he hurls his “ auto,” stonelike, at the twin birds, space and time; and when its flight is once over, they lie dead before his spirit. To the wise motorist, space and time, as they fly, sing songs which thrill and echo in the mind. Up, then, and mount with the wisest of your acquaintance; up and be off with him where the heavens’ light, broken into the colors of tree, flower, and grass, accompanies the song. Then, as miles and moments slip behind you, all the past will seem like a dim and soundless cave, and your former self will stand before you strange as a skin-clad cave-dweller. So at least it will seem to your gladdened senses; nor will those enthusiasts be seriously deceived. For in motoring, one’s self is indeed transformed, and the world tinged, for the awakened mind, with a tone lively, fresh, and actual.

This tone is not, as skeptics may imagine, a mere product of singing swiftness. There are moments when a following breeze stills the wind of your motor’s making, moments of halting on some bridge, with the incessant machinery arrested, when the tinkle and gurgle of a brook below melt into the thrushes’ song among cool and scented balsams; there are moments such as these when stillness beneath dim branches is tinged with a tone as keen as the dazzle and swiftness of day. For wherever the wise motorist speeds or halts, there is the romance of reality.

II

A wise motorist is not merely exempt from speed-mania; he knows the time, the place, the way; he has the skill to make each inspired choice whereon poetic motoring depends. He knows when to brave wind and sun, when to seek sheltering hillsides or tunnels of green. Leaving the allurements of a road that would soon toss like the English Channel, he comes, on grassgrown lanes, to the ease of greenwinged locusts; waysides of jagged tawdriness he lets pass in one flare of color; and quenching a burst of speed, he makes beauty linger in long cadences of stream and willow.

All this, however, he can do perfectly, not for you, but for himself only. For in motoring, as in love, one man’s poem is another’s prose, one man’s cleansing joy another’s pool of infamy. Only with spirits whose nature he shares can the motor-sage share his romance. If then romantic motoring depends, for you, on the blindness of speed, a chauffeur’s bought wisdom must suffice you. If your thirst is for shy lights on ocean or hillside, friendship with some motoring painter may slake it. But if all reality waits for you like a goddess scarcely veiled, if it lurks in the street as in the desert, in the throbbing of machinery as in silence, in the sky as in the openness of a woman’s most intimate smile, — then, for you, chauffeurs will be an abomination, acquaintances inept, and even a close friend welcome only as he loosens your too firm grasp on the steering wheel, guides your fingers to the levers controlling throttle and electric spark, “ cranks ” your engine, and with a word or two of technical reminder, takes the seat beside you on your first long run.

No matter what zest may have dazzled you as the motoring-guest of youths or gallant maidens, it is outshone as you feel your machine leap, fraught with power by the crook of one forefinger, or steeled to nervous energy by the other’s bending. To drive the sun’s horses would seem, by comparison, dull. But though you escape a Phaeton’s catastrophe, your triumph must be quelled. Of a sudden your car shoots willfully to the left; too obediently following your corrective convulsion, it swerves to the right hand gutter, then slews across the road, and keeping forward incorrigibly, forges up a bank, grazes an apple tree, and by a wayward miracle stops just short of a wall.

An instant’s exultation smothered in shame, this and no romance have you tasted; for as yet you are no sage. On the contrary, a self-confessed motor-fool, to the core of all your bones, you descend, weak-kneed and with dewy brow, from your car to the grass, and under your mentor’s indulgent eye, seize the crank handle. With a slow twist and a pull like his, you seek to revive the engine. A jerk, a blow, and the handle is wrenched away, leaving you a spectator, first of your own bruised and bleeding fingers, then of your mentor’s skill as he readjusts a lever which, to your cost, you have neglected.

Then you mount and turn; then with brakes hard on, creep down the bank to a highway all peace and ease. For your muscles no longer meet each pull of the steering-wheel with panicky counter-tugs. They have learned their first lesson in proportionate readjustment, a lesson reflected in the machine’s abstinence from independent sallies, — till a baby-carriage on the uttermost horizon stirs it to caricature your unselfish anxiety in a series of snaky twinings. But though your muscles have been disciplined into a semblance of wisdom, you yourself must still grasp, and impart to those habits at work in the twilight of consciousness, many a fact and many a mystery: facts like those of the carburetor, to be learned only with the reek of gasolene in your nostrils; mysteries, like those of the electric spark, to be penetrated only by a flash of the imagination. For herein lies the sanity of your novitiate, that it is a double growth, a growth of faculties both plodding and picturesque. As a novice you must ascertain by exact experiment the mixture of fuel and air that will explode the most powerfully in your enginecylinders. Yet as a novice, too, you must so master the mysteries of the accelerating spark that, like Maeterlinck, you can say, on swifter and swifter flights, “ I feel as if thousands of unseen wings, the transparent wings of ghostly great birds . . . had come to strike with their vast coolness my temples and my eyes.”

III

When once stirred, even silently, to such lyrical thought as this, you grow irrepressible. Impatient to face alone the hazards of the road, you submit with an ill grace to the final task of your novitiate; unwillingly you remove, replace, and readjust every nut and cog of your machine. But then, rising from bent knees, you find yourself free to go whither you will.

Some fifty miles away, a house more inviting than others stands open to welcome you, and, motor-fledgeling though you are, you fare forth to attain it. Much more than a fledgeling you feel yourself as the city of your work begins to slip behind, dwindling, vanishing under its canopy of smoke; for every nerve and muscle of your body, every thought of your mind, tunes itself to the machine’s efficiency. Nor can you recognize your resulting thrill as a mere echo of perfect mechanism. So obedient is the speeding car that the high and exquisite key of its activity seems, on the contrary, an echo of your mastery. Buoyantly, then, you push forward. A village appears, keen-spired among trees; it sweeps near, sweeps past on either hand; and the road before you flows like a spring freshet down the slope that you surmount. As you spy ahead, familiar hills, arching their backs on a horizon, stir you with prophecies. Your spin imaginatively complete, you regret it while still faring on past field and farm, and past motorist after motorist, repairing punctured tires by the wayside.

As for you, your tires are intact, and your cylinders hum like a swarm of bees. Complacency swells within you, as large, as iridescent, and, alas, as thin as a child’s sunny soap-bubble; all this till, like the complacency of one other novice, it is touched by the finger of fact.

The fledgeling whom I have in mind turned one day into a lane whose smooth length, after a turn or two, appeared buried in sods, stones, and clods scraped from its sides by a village “ rud-agent’s ” road-machine. More annoyed than hindered, my fledgeling hastened on, bumping and swinging around a blind corner to where that plough-like monstrosity straddled a rise in the lane. In the nick of time he swerved aside, but with one rear wheel in the gutter, came helplessly to a standstill. In vain he opened his throttle to its widest; that wheel, deep in slime, revolved to no purpose till the “ rud-agent ” came down from his overgrown plough, and threw a spadeful of gravel where the whizzing wheel bit into it, and with quieter turnings, carried the machine to terra firma.

Thirty horse-power and the best of machines had proved less efficient than a spadeful of gravel. “Why the devil,” asked the fledgeling, correspondingly chagrined, “ why the devil do you plough your road into a potato-field ? ”

With a shrewd dim glance came the answer, “ Yer don’t like the looks of it? Wal, I guess yer would n’t like the looks of my boy’s back, either, when I’ve licked him like he needs.”

“Spare the plough and spoil the rud;” some such paraphrase of the old, vile adage was so fixed in the “ rud-agent’s ” brain, that even my fledgeling was mute; and with speech, his complacency left him. May yours escape such rude extinction! Yet fact must extinguish it; and most probably it does so when you pass, with the most triumphant sense of contrast, some car lying derelict beside the road. Then with a gun-shot report and a tug at your steering-wheel, Catastrophe is upon you. That tug instinctively mastered, you stop, dismount, and face this fact: that your “gun-shot” was the report of an exploding tire, a tire which you find, like a cast-off snakeskin, limply surrounding one of your wheels. Because some wayward urchin has scattered glass in the highway, you must now, not only labor while your engines sybaritically rest, but must pay, pay, pay! Forewarned, let us hope, you have paid before starting, and therefore carry a new tire at the back of your car. If so, you unstrap it, lay it by your wheel; then prod, pry, and pull at the old tirecasing, pull, pry, and prod again at the new; insert its intestinal tubing; and pump, pump, pump in the hot sunlight till the firm, replete, and distended tire encircles your wheel like some Gargantuan sausage.

Then, mopping at your forehead, you climb aboard, and settle in your seat, growling at the injustice which has made you suffer in labor and temper for the venom or folly which scattered that destructive glass. With a jerk, you “throw in ” the “ clutch ” which connects your engine with the wheels of the car. To your amazement it does not move. Are the brakes on ? No. What then ? As you sit puzzling, you grow at last aware of a great stillness around you, a stillness stirred only by the breeze seething in a wheatfield across the wall. Then suddenly, with a peal of laughter, you understand. Smothered in your own mood, you have forgotten a sine qua non; you have forgotten to start your engine!

Out you jump; forward you scamper; seize the crank handle, and turn it with a jerk that rouses your engine from its rest. Then back to your seat; and off you go, down the diagonal turn of a. white stateroad, where you can drink to the dregs those delights of speed: the delight of air sweeping past with a sound of great waters, and the delight of the foam-like road itself, as it rushes to vanish beneath you. Now your ear, like a yacht skimming a breaker, skims over a rolling rise; and while the azure horizon levels dissolve into a seeming ocean, you climb in a lapse of leisure to where the white chalkline of the road is seen sweeping first toward a bowl-shaped hollow, then over a knoll into woods.

Foreseeing a test of skill, you put on speed, and as you gain momentum, “ throw out ” the clutch. So while your fingers on sparkand throttle-levers make the engine’s throbbing almost cease, your car is free to speed yet more swiftly, in the grip of the still earth’s power, down, down, till the hollow rising toward you is not a hundred yards ahead. Still, in the miracle of its hushed acceleration, the car speeds on. The hollow, now, is beside you; now it is behind you. Will this rush of momentum carry you over the knoll ? Not, you judge, unless the engine is roused to aid it. So your finger moves; and the machinery’s throbbing grows swift and swifter, pulsing and more pulsing, till your ear believes it in harmony with the car’s whirring wheels. Then you “throw in” the clutch, reconnecting engine and car. It hesitates, and only as you open the throttle, does the pitch of the engine’s pulse rise in tune with your former speed.

The test has failed; the car’s momentary hesitation has proved your instinct wrong. But again, as you rush down a long incline, you “ throw out ” the clutch, and soothing the engine almost to sleep, give yourself up to the power of the earth. Your eye on a train across the valley, you contrast the passengers’ cooped-up suffoca tion with your own draining of the wind’s illimitable cup. The tail of your eye still on the laggard train, you grow aware of a hollow rising to meet you; and again, as you cross it, you listen while the crook of your forefinger converts the engine’s soft, slow throbbing into an evenly swift and swifter beat. Suddenly you feel it attuned to the speed of your car, and “ throwing in ” the clutch, you find your instinct verified. Smoothly cog slips into cog, and, with no instant’s hesitation, all the engine’s power joins the momentum of the car to carry it up the incline ahead, and along its spine-like ridge.

The woodland hill of your destination, its slope dignified by a house all grace and ancient welcome, flashes green and clear on your begoggled eyes. After good fortune and ill, after patience, zest, and labor, your run is almost over. Four miles more, eight minutes to make them in, and you may pride yourself on a success briskly earned. “ Speed, speed, on this snow-like road, speed,” you whisper, “ speed! ” and letting the cylinders inhale their explosive vapor through a throttle wide open, you make the unseen spark gleam within them earlier and ever earlier, till their purring turns to a note almost musical. “Speed, —speed!” you whisper; and your sleek steel tiger gathers force in a rush of wind that sings to you, as it sang to Henley: —

IV

Breaking into this glory of sane exhilaration, a blackness against the road ahead appears and defines itself as a buggy, whose driver raises one hand in appeal to you, while, with the other, he tries to control his horse. The horse waves and flaps himself like a pennant in the air, till you stop and silence your machine. Then, all docility, he passes; and you, recording an inward protest against the presence of mere animals on a road, prepare to pursue your way. The engine purring, you “ throw in ” the clutch. A rasping sound startles you; the machine stands motionless; and test your clutch as you may, the wheels of the car remain helplessly disconnected from the engine.

The seriousness of your plight you will learn all too soon. Sufficient to the instant is the woe thereof, — your woeful inability, with a smoothly running, thirtyhorse-power engine, to make that car budge. In vain you experiment; in vain you protestingly wrestle with all the imps of motoring. Even to get the machine to shelter you must have help, help that you receive at last from a ploughman and two oxen lured from a neighboring field.

The great dull brutes once yoked to your car, you who have sped so swiftly experience a strange thing. Seated placidly, steering lazily, you grow aware of a silence broken only by the slow footsteps of animals and man, the whisper of leaves, the scampering of squirrels along a branch above your head. And as your progress continues, slow and measured, toward the goal of your small journey, you sigh with delight in spreading elms, in honeysuckles, in wild violets, purple, white, and yellow. Of all this, you abruptly realize, speed would have bereft you. Then why such speed P Is it because you are no better than that first of dramatic motoring types, Bernard Sha w’s Straker, who drove a touring-car at sixty miles an hour simply “ to get her

money’s worth out of her ” ? And while you digest as best you may this acid query, your ears suddenly ring with the laughter of a girl possessed by the Comic Spirit.

V

A man in a brown study steering a machine which two ponderous oxen drag after them, — this man is so laughable that, unless utterly morose, he shares the spectator’s hilarity. Only in later solitude is he gnawed by questionings. But when repair-bills, reptilian in length, begin to uncoil themselves before him, he must be free-spirited indeed to escape the doubt whether this motor-fool can be made into a sage. The doubt, moreover, is real: only experience can solve it. But the doubter’s mood, meantime, grows less harassed, less personal, so that whatever his immediate plight, vicarious pleasures attend him. He delights in the old earth’s vitality, doubled and redoubled in men’s motoring; shares in imagination their breasting of snow-suffused wintry winds; pictures the loosening tentacles of cities as they release their prisoners to whiz into open sundown, starlight, and dawn; dreams of enormous organism upon factory organism created by men’s new craving for the machine; sees the inventive intellect conceiving, under the impulse of the lust for speed, mechanisms of such light yet terrible energy, that they overshoot their terrestrial purpose, and lift us into the kingdoms of the air.

In such outward-darting thoughts as these the defeated motorist finds recreation, then leaps again into action. Dreams have their truth: witness the flight of aeroplanes whose engines could never have existed were it not for engines first devised for automobiles. But the truest of dreams still lack the tang of actuality. Craving this, the defeated motorist soon spurns vicarious pleasures for experience of a machine sometimes wayward, sometimes whimsical, yet powerful as the spirit that rose out of Aladdin’s jar. By the magic of the Machine its master grows familiar with hidden beauties in smoke and pavement, earth and sky, and shares them in companionship with all lovers of reality. If Heaven smiles, he finds some few as gayly laughing as that spectator of a certain fledgeling’s ox-drawn progress; and if one of these be possessed by the spirit not only of comedy but of tenderness and awe, lie may learn at last the truest romance of motoring.