“Where are you going?” he demanded as he looked up to see Teddie making off with the stride of a Diana.
But Teddie entirely ignored that question. Instead of answering that not unnatural interrogation she was calling sharply out to Watkins: “Tell Parrish I want my car. I want it at once!” And two minutes later, as the old Major folded up his paper and watched Teddie vanish down the West Drive leaving a scurry of gravel and a residuary cloud of dust above the shrubbery, he sighed audibly, and took out another cigarette, and sat deep in thought.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Teddie, as she swung into the open road and headed for the blue hills of Forgetfulness, which receded as she approached them, remembered that she was at least mistress of that ever-responsive piece of machinery on which she sat poised like a stormy petrel on the crest of a comber. It was hers to hasten and retard, to control and direct, as she wished. It was hers to curb into submission and harry into dust-trailing violation of the state road-laws. And as she went careening along the open highway, crouched frowningly over her mahogany wheel, she sought to ease the tumult in her perplexed young body by drinking up distance very much as disheartened men drink alcohol. She did her best to drug herself with speed, letting the air whip through the opened wind-shield and sting her clouded and untalcumed young face.
When she caught sight of Luddy O’Brien, the traffic cop at the Valley Crossing, she dropped an eye to her speedometer and automatically slowed down. Quite automatically, too, she accosted that officer, after the long-established manner so disapproved of by her family, by raising her left hand to the level of her ear, holding the palm outward, and wigwagging her hunched fingers nervously up and down, very much as if she were twanging the strings of an invisible Irish harp.
Luddy grinned briefly but fraternally, saluted, and declined to commit himself, as an officer of the law, by turning to observe her as she swept past him and mounted the next hill—at a rate, be it recorded, not strictly in accordance with traffic regulations.
Teddie, in fact, was already discovering how brief and deluding can be the sense of release born of four flying wheels with nowhere in particular to fly to. She almost wished that she might hear the put-put of Luddy’s motorcycle as it rode her down. She almost wished that Luddy would arrest her and have her committed to a jail-yard with high walls where she couldn’t possibly get out and where she could spend what remained of her blighted life breaking limestone rocks with a big hammer, breaking them by thumping them until they went to pieces, the same as she’d like to thump a few heads!
Then her thoughts went back to her car. From the crest of the hill which it had mounted like a swallow, Teddie could see the familiar gray ribbon of the road where it twined through the woodlanded valley below her. It was a very inviting road. It was more than inviting, in Teddie’s present mood—it was challenging. And she breathed deeper as she saw that she couldn’t even afford to keep an eye on her speedometer dial.
She was more than half-way down the long slope when she first caught sight of the motor-truck loaded with a double tier of cement blocks. That failed to trouble her, however, for she had ample room to slither by. What troubled her, for a moment, was something coming down the opposing slope. It was a pigeon-gray roadster stripped of its top, a homely and heavy-bodied roadster which trailed rolling cumuli of road-dust in its wake. Her quick eye told her that as the different factors now revealed themselves the pigeon-gray roadster would pass the motor-truck before she could. This meant that she would have to give way and slow down and humbly wait for the autocrat piloting the pigeon-gray roadster. And this Teddie had neither the desire nor the intention of doing. For she knew who owned that roadster. She knew it even before she saw the bareheaded driver alone in the high-backed seat, the tanned and goggled face with the oil-stained old putty-colored motor-coat buttoned close up under the bony young Cæsar-Augustus chin. It was Gerry West’s car. And Gerry West was in it, imperially demanding his right-of-way as he pounded man-like down a road which he regarded as entirely and altogether his own. But it was not Teddie’s intention, that afternoon, to play second fiddle to any one.
Her heart tightened a little, for she knew it would take promptness to swing out to the left and back to the right again before the lordly roadster pounded opposite the motor-lorry. If he had to slow up, at the last moment, so much the better, for he seemed, at the moment, to stand typical of those steam-rollers of life which she had always so actively resented. It was a bigger car than hers, a distinctly male car, and as such it owed her consideration. The burden of courtesy naturally must rest upon it.