T was about half-past four in the afternoon when Harry Wingate finally emerged from the motor-house into the stable-yard, covered with grime and grease and oil and all the essential juices of motors from head to foot, absolutely unrecognizable but completely happy. He and Alford, his chauffeur, had spent a memorable and blissful three days in taking the old Bligh car “really” to bits, properly cleaning it and putting it together again, and now the old Bligh stood there again, clean and in her right mind, after looking for three days like a complicated railway accident. “As good as ever she was,” Harry said, “and probably better.”
There was nothing particular known about cars that Harry did not know, and even if such chance detail existed, Alford would be able to supply the knowledge. For Harry was a real motorist, not a man who owns a dozen cars, of which he scarcely knows one from the other, but is content to be driven about the country in any that the chauffeur is so kind as to bring to the door. He owned but two, the old Bligh and the later Bertram, but he knew these as the trained doctor knows the nerves and arteries and glands and bones of the human body.
If the car was not running well, he would not say “What's the matter, Alford?” but by instinct, it almost seemed, though the instinct was the direct and legitimate result of intimate knowledge, he would say exactly what in the internal economy of the car was not fulfilling its proper function.
Indeed motoring could scarcely be called a hobby with him; it was more rightly described as his passion, and Madge, his wife, declared that Harry said his prayers looking toward the motor-house, even as the Mohammedan turns to Mecca.
The old Bligh, at any rate, occupied a very distinct place in Harry's heart, partly because it had been a good and faithful servant, and partly because of sentimental reasons connected with it. He had.bought it just before his marriage, and had gone off on his honeymoon with Madge in it directly after.
And the old Bligh had behaved like a perfect angel—as, indeed, it always did—on that occasion. It had not once got its engine overheated, nor had there been trouble with carburetter or sparking-plugs; it had permitted no envious stone or nail to puncture its tires; it had gone for a whole month with the regularity of the moon or stars.
And indeed that was the nature of the kind car; it was not very fast, for it was only a two-cylinder eight-horse-power, but it was rather like a stout-hearted cob, never ill, always ready to go out, and always getting to the place you wanted it to go to, if only you were reasonable. And for a car of its caliber its climbing power was certainly amazing; it had been up Birdlip Hill without once stopping to look at the view, and though it felt itself compelled to go backward when they took it out to climb Porlock Hill, it climbed it all right.
But six months ago now the new Bertram—fifteen-horse-power, four-cylinder—had made its appearance, and it was with a certain sense of compunction last week that Harry thought that the old Bligh had been slighted and neglected. Madge, who had no more feeling about motors than she had about earwigs—indeed, rather less—infinitely preferred the higher speed and greater smoothness of the Bertram, and as, whenever the weather was fine, and very often when it was wet, Harry drove his wife after lunch over to the golf-links, continued his drive, and called for her again before tea-time, it followed that the Bertram had been almost exclusively used.
Indeed, on the only occasion lately when Madge had been out in the Bligh, the poor thing had rather disgraced itself, for a sparking-plug had a dreadful sort of cold, and she had missed her train. Then compunction had seized Harry; he realized that even the most agreeable and gifted car cannot clean itself, and a thorough overhauling of the old Bligh was the result.
He found that it had begun to rain rather heavily when he came out, but Madge had to be fetched from her golf, and he determined to drive the renovated Bligh over for that purpose. There was a cape-hood to it with wings, so that they would keep perfectly dry, and Alford had clearly had about enough to-day.
“Just run her once or twice up and down the hill, Alford,” he said, “and I'll come round for her in half an hour, when I've got clean. She's fit to start off on a tour this minute, I feel sure, but you might just take her up and down that hill.”