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Read Ebook: The Motormaniacs by Osbourne Lloyd
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Ebook has 899 lines and 34082 words, and 18 pages
"Oh, I'm quite silly about him."
"That must have happened later," I said. "It certainly didn't show at the time."
"Everything must have a beginning, you know."
"That's what I want to get at,--what made you get a transfer from the captain?"
"It all happened through an automobile," she said.
"Oh, an automobile!" I exclaimed.
"It was an awfully up-to-date affair altogether!"
"I suppose it ran away and he caught it by the bridle at the risk of his life?"
"No, he didn't stop it," she said. "He made it go."
"It isn't everybody can do that with an automobile."
"You ought to have seen the poor captain turn the crank!" she exclaimed, with a little laugh of recollection.
"So the captain was there, too?" I said. "He never struck me as the kind of man that could make anything go, exactly."
"Oh, he didn't," she said.
"I am surprised that he even tried."
"But Gerard is a perfectly beautiful mechanic. You ought to see how respectful they are to him at the garage--especially, when there's a French car in trouble."
"They are respectful to me, too."
"That's only because you're rich," she returned.
"I own a French car and drive it myself," I said, "and--but I see there's no use of my saying anything."
"It's genius with Gerard," she said. "It makes one solemn to think how much he knows about gas engines."
"So that's how he did it!" I observed. "Different men have different ways to charm, I suppose. I don't remember that looks were his long suit."
"If you were a woman, that would be called catty."
"Oh, I don't want to detract from him," I said. "He used to dance with wall-flowers and they said he was an angel to his sister."
"It was that sister who was the real trouble," she said meditatively.
"What had she to do with it?" I asked.
"Oh, just being there--being his sister--being an invalid, yon know."
"No, I don't know, at all."
"The trouble is, I'm telling you the end of the story first."
"Let's start at the very beginning."
"In real life beginnings and middles and ends of things are all so jumbled up."
"When I went away," I said, "everybody thought it was Harry Clayton, with the Englishman as a strong second, and there wasn't any Malcolm about it."
"Do yon remember the flurry in Great Westerns?" she asked.
"That's surely the beginning of something else," I remarked,
"No, it's the beginning of this."
I've a faint memory they jumped up to something tremendous, didn't they?"
"It was the biggest thing of its kind ever seen on Wall Street."
"Wall Street!" I exclaimed. "The voice is Jess Hardy's, but--"
"Well, you can't buy a Manton car without a little trouble."
"Or twenty-five hundred dollars in a certified check."
"It's nearer three thousand, with acetylene lamps, top, baskets, extra tires, French tooter, freight, insurance, extra tools and a leather coat."
"You've got the thing down fine," I said. "You speak like a folder."
"Well, I didn't have any three thousand dollars," she continued, undisturbed; "all I had was an allowance of a hundred a month, a grand piano, a horse a lot of posters, and a father."
"He seems to me the biggest asset of the lot," I observed.
"I thought so, too, till I tried him," she said. "He had the automobile fever, too--only the negative kind--wanted to shoot them with a gun."
"Surely it's dangerous enough already, without adding that."
"For a time I didn't know what to do," she went on. "I thought I'd have to try the stage, or write one of those Marie Bashkirtseff books that shock people into buying them by thousands--and whenever I saw a Manton on the road my eyes would almost pop out of my head. Then, when I was almost desperate, Mr. Collenquest came on a visit to papa."
"I see now why you said Wall Street," I remarked.
"Mr. Collenquest is an old friend of papa's," she continued. "They were at the same college, and both belonged to what they call 'the wonderful old class of seventy-nine,' and there's nothing in the world papa wouldn't do for Mr. Collenquest or Mr. Collenquest for papa. I had never seen him before and had rather a wild idea of him from the caricatures in the paper--you know the kind--with dollar-signs all over his clothes and one of his feet on the neck of Honest Toil. Well, he wasn't like that a bit--in fact, he was more like a bishop than anything else and the only thing he ever put his foot on was a chair when he and papa would sit up half the night talking about the wonderful old class of seventy-nine. Papa is rather a quiet man ordinarily, but that week it seemed as though he'd never stop laughing; and I'd wake up at one o'clock in the morning and hear them still at it. Of course, they had long serious talks, too, and Mr. Collenquest was never so like a bishop as when the conversation turned on stocks and Wall Street. When he boomed out things like 'the increasing tendency of associated capital in this country,' or 'the admitted financial emancipation of the Middle West,'--you felt somehow you were a better girl for having listened to him. What he seemed to like best--besides sitting up all night till papa was a wreck--was to take walks. He was as bad about horses as papa was about automobiles--and of course papa had to go, too --and naturally I tagged after them both--and so we walked and walked and walked.
"Well, one day they were talking about investments, and stocks, and how cheap money was, and how hard it was to know what to do with it, and I was picking wild-flowers and wondering whether I'd have my Manton red, or green with gilt stripes, when I heard something that brought me up like an explosion in the muffler.
"'I know you are pretty well fixed, Fred,' said Mr. Collenquest, 'but I never knew a man yet who couldn't do with forty or fifty thousand more.'
"'I don't care to get it that way, Bill,' said my father.
"'I tell you Great Western is going to reach six hundred and fifty,' said Mr. Collenquest.
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