CHAPTER III
A LONG WAYS FROM HOME
TWO days of downpour greeted us at Galveston while we waited for our car to arrive. It was the climax of three months of rain which had followed three drouthy years. The storm swept waves and spray over the breakwater toward the frame town which has sprung up hopefully after twice being devoured by the sea monster. A city of khaki tents dripped mournfully under the drenching; wet sentries paced the coast-line, and looked suspiciously at two ladies—all women are ladies in Texas—who cared to fight their way along the sea-wall against such a gale. Toby and I were bored, when we were not eating Galveston’s oysters.
The city, pleasant enough under the sun, had its usual allotment of boulevards, bronze monuments, drug stores, bungalows of the modest and mansions of the local plutocrats, but it had not the atmosphere of New Orleans. We were soon to learn that regardless of size, beauty or history, some towns have personality, others have about as much personality as a reception room in a Methodist dormitory.
Next day, news came that our boat had docked, and telephoning revealed that the car was safely landed. There are joys to telephoning in the South. Central is courteous and eager to please, and the voices of strangers with whom one does curt business at home becomehere so soft and winning that old friendships are immediately cemented, repartee indulged in, and the receiver hung up with a feeling of regret. That is the kind of voice the agent for the Mallory Line had. To be sure, it took us a day to get the car from the dock to the street, when it would have taken half an hour at home, but it was a day devoted to the finer shades of intercourse and good fellowship. I reached the dock half an hour before lunch time.
“Yes’m, the office is open, but I reckon yo’ won’t find any hands to move yo’ car,” was the accurate prediction of the official to whom I applied. “Pretty nearly lunch time, yo’ know.”
So I waited, filling in time by answering the guarded questions the watchman put to me. I was almost as fascinating an object of attention to him as his Bull Durham, though I must admit that when there was a conflict between us, I never won, except once, when he asked where the car and I came from.
“Massachusetts?” Bull Durham lost.
A great idea struggled for expression. I could see him searching for the right, the inevitable word. I could see it born, as triumph and amusement played over his features. Then caution—should he spring it all at once or save it for a climax? Nonchalantly, as if such epigrams were likely to occur to him any time, he got it off.
“You’re a long ways fromhome, ain’t yo’?”
With the air of saying something equally witty, I replied, “I surely am.”
Like “When did you stop beating your wife,” his question was one of those which has all the repartee its own way. For six months, we were to hear it severaltimes daily, but it always came as a shock, and as if hypnotized, we were never to alter our response. And it was so true! Wewerea long ways from home, further than we then realized. At times we seemed so long that we wondered if we should ever see home again. But we were never too far to meet some man, wittier than his fellows, who defined our location accurately.
After his diagnosis and my acceptance of it, further conversation became anticlimactic. The “hands” were still absent at lunch, so I followed their example, and returning at two, found them still at lunch. But at last the agent drifted in, and three or four interested and willing colored boys. Everybody was pleasant, nobody was hurried, we exchanged courtesies, and signed papers, and after we really got down to business, in a surprisingly few minutes the car was rolled across the street by five-man power, while I lolled behind the steering wheel like Cleopatra in her galley. At the doorway the agent halted me.
“Massachusetts car?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” said I. Were there to be complications?
In a flash he countered.
“Yo’ surelyarea long ways from home.”
I laughed heartily, and with rapier speed replied,
“I surelyam.”
******
They told us the road from Galveston to Houston (Hewston) was good—none better.
“Good shell road all the way. You’ll maketimeon that road.” This is the distinction between a Southerner and a Westerner. When the former tells you a road is good, he means that it once was good. When a Westernertells you the same thing, he means that it is going to be good at some happy future date. In Texas the West and South meet.
We crossed the three-mile causeway which Galveston built at an expense of two million dollars, to connect her island town with her mainland. On all sides of us flatness like the flatness of the sea stretched to the horizon, and but for the horizon would have continued still further. The air was balmy as springtime in Italy. Meadow larks perched fat and puffy on fenceposts, dripping abrupt melodies which began and ended nowhere. The sky, washed with weeks of rain, had been dipped in blueing and hung over the earth to dry. After enduring gray northern skies, we were intoxicated with happiness.
The happier I am, the faster I drive. The road of hard oyster shell we knew was good. They had told us we could make time on it, in so many words. Forty-eight miles an hour is not technically fast, but seems fast when you suddenly descend into a hard-edged hole a foot and a half deep.
When we had separated ourselves from our baggage, we examined the springs. By a miracle they were intact. In first gear, the car took a standing jump, and emerged from the hole. For one of her staid matronly build, she did very well at her first attempt. Later she learned to leap boulders, and skip lightly from precipice to precipice and if we could have kept her in training six months longer, she could have walked out halfway on a tight-rope, turned around and got back safely to land.
The holes increased rapidly until there was no spot in the road free from them. Our course resembled anearthworm’s. Except for the holes, the road was all its sympathizers claimed for it. We maneuvered two partly washed away bridges, and came to a halt.
Airplanes were soaring above us in every direction. We were passing Ellington Field. But the immediate cause of our halt was two soldiers, who begged a lift to Houston. We were glad to oblige them, but after a hopeless glance at the tonneau piled high with baggage, they decided to ride on the running board. If the doughboy on the left had only been the doughboy on the right running board, this chapter would have been two days shorter. It was Friday, and we had thirteen miles to go, and Friday and thirteen make a bad combination.
Toby chatted with her soldier and I with mine, who was a mechanician at the flying field. It was a disappointment not to have him an aviator, though he admitted a mechanician’s was a far weightier responsibility. Before the war, he had been a professional racer, had come in second in a championship race between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and gave such good reasons why he hadn’t come in first that he seemed to have taken a mean advantage of the champion.
“Sixty-three miles is about as fast as I’ve ever driven,” I said in an off-hand way.
“Sixty-three? That’s not fast. When you get going ninety-five to a hundred, that’s something like driving.”
“This car,” I explained, “won’t make more than fifty. At fifty she vibrates till she rocks from side to side.”
He looked at the wheel hungrily. “Huh! I bet I could bring her up to seventy-five.”
Stung, I put my foot on the gas, and the speedometer needle swung to the right. As we merged with thetraffic of Houston, shell-holes were left behind us, and passing cars were taking advantage of a perfect concrete road. A Hudson with a Texas number passed us with a too insistent horn, the driver smiled scornfully and looked back, and his three children leaned out from the back to grin. And they were only going a miserable thirty. The near-champion looked impotently at the steering wheel, and in agonized tones commanded, “Step on it!”
The Hudson showed signs of fight, and lured us through the traffic at a lively pace. My companion on the running board was dying of mortification. I knew how he itched to seize the wheel, and for his sake I redoubled my efforts. In a moment the impudent Hudson children ceased to leer from the back of their car, and were pretending to admire the scenery on the other side. Then suddenly the Hudson lost all interest in the race.
“Turn down the side street,” yelled my passenger, frantically. I tried to turn, wondering, but the carburetor sputtered and died.
I will say that it is almost a pleasure to be arrested in Texas. Two merry motor-cops smiled at us winsomely. There was sympathy, understanding and good fellowship in their manner,—no malice, yet firmness withal, which is the way I prefer to be handled by the police. As officers they had to do their duty. As gentlemen, they regretted it.
Toby, chatting about aviation with the man on her running-board, was completely taken by surprise to hear “Ah’m sahry, lady, but we’ll jest have to ask you-all to come along with us.”
What an embarrassing position for our passengers! They had accepted our hospitality, egged us on to unlawfulspeed, and landed us in the court-house,—with pay-day weeks behind. Their chagrin deepened as their efforts to free us unlawfully went for naught. Our indulgent captors could not have regretted it more if we had been their own sisters, but they made it clear we must follow them.
“You go ahead, and I’ll show her the way,” suggested my tempter. That he had traveled the same road many, many times became evident to us. In fact, he confided that he had been arrested in every state in the Union, and his face was so well known in the Houston court that the judge had wearied of fining him, and now merely let him off with a rebuke. So hoping our faces would have the same effect on the judge, we trustingly following his directions into town, our khaki-clad friends leading.
“Turn off to the right here,” said my guide. I turned, and in a flash, the motor-cycles wheeled back to us.
Smiling as ever, our captors shook their heads warningly.
“Now, lady, none of that! You follow right after us.”
Profusely my guide protested he had merely meditated a short cut to the station house. Elaborately he explained the route he had intended to take. Poor chap, D’Artagnan himself could not have schemed more nimbly to rescue a lady from the Bastille. I saw how his madcap mind had visioned the quiet turn down the side street, the doubling on our tracks, the lightning change of himself into the driver’s seat, a gray Cadillac streaking ninety miles an hour past the scattering populace of Houston,then breathless miles on into the safety of the plains—the ladies rescued, himself a hero——
Instead, we tamely drew up before a little brick station-house two blocks beyond. He did all he could, even offering to appear in court the next day and plead for us, but from what we now knew of his local record, it seemed wiser to meet the judge on our own merits.
Our arrival caused a sensation. The police circles of Houston evidently did not every day see a Massachusetts car piled high with baggage driven by two women, flanked by a soldier on each running board. When we entered the sheriff’s office, every man in the room turned his back for a moment and shook with mirth. They led me to a wicket window with Toby staunchly behind. The sheriff, in shirt sleeves and suspenders, amiably pushed a bag of Bull Durham toward me. I started back at this unusual method of exchanging formalities. A policeman, also in shirt sleeves and suspenders, a twinkle concealed in his sweet Southern drawl, explained,
“The lady thawt yo’ meant them fixin’s for her, Charley, instead of fo’ that mean speed-catcher.”
The sheriff took my name and address.
“Massachusetts?” he exclaimed. Then, all of a sudden, he shot back at me. “Yo’re a lawng ways fromhome!”
“I wish I were longer,” I said.
“Never mind, lady,” he said, soothingly and caressingly. “Yo’ give me twenty dollars now, and tell the jedge your story tomorrow, an’ seein’ as how you’re a stranger and a lady, he’ll give it all back to you.”
On that understanding, I paid him twenty dollars.
At three next afternoon, Toby and I sought the court-houseto get our twenty dollars back, as agreed. The ante-room was filled with smoke from a group of Houstonians whose lurking smiles seemed to promise indulgence. The judge was old and impassive, filmed with an absent-mindedness hard to penetrate. Yet he, too, had a lurking grin which he bit off when he spoke.
“Yo’ are charged with exceeding the speed limit at a rate of fo’ty-five miles an hour.”
“Your Honor, this was my first day in the State, and I hadn’t learned your traffic laws.”
He looked up over his spectacles. “Yo’re from Massachusetts?”
“Yes, sir!”
Toby and I waited in suspense. We saw a faint spark light the cold, filmed blue eye, spread to the corner of his grim mouth, while a look of benevolent anticipation rippled over his set countenance. It was coming! I got ready to say with a spontaneous laugh “We surelyare.”
And then he bit it off!
“Yo’ know speeding is a very serious offense——”
“I wouldn’t have done it for worlds, your Honor, if I hadn’t seen all the Texas cars going quite fast, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I did the same. I only arrived yesterday from Massachusetts.”
“Thet’s so. Yo’re from Massachusetts?”
We waited hopefully. But again he bit it off.
“It’s a mighty serious offense. But, seein’ as yo’re a stranger and a lady at that——”
His voice became indulgently reassuring. We felt we had done well to wait over a day, and trust to Southern chivalry.
“Considering everything, I’ll be easy on you. Twenty dollars.”
His tone was so fatherly that I knew only gratitude for being saved from two months in a Texas dungeon.
“Thank you, your Honor,” I faltered.
Outside, Toby looked at me in scorn.
“What did you thank him for?” she asked.
Whether it be contempt of court or no, I wish to state that subsequent inquiry among the hairdressers, hotel clerks, and garage men of Houston, revealed that a fine of such magnitude had never been imposed in the annals of the town. The usual sentence was a rebuke for first offenses, two dollars for the second and so on. The judge was right. Iwasa stranger——
But what could you expect from a soul of granite who could resist such a mellowing, opportune, side-splitting bon mot?—could swallow it unsaid?
I hope it choked him.