“… 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 linen, 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 sceptical 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
