But at last (which means in two months or thereabouts, at ten or twenty minutes’ practice off and on daily) I reached the goal, and could mount the bicycle without the slightest foreign interference or even the moral support of a sympathetic onlooker. In doing this I realized that the totality of what I had learned entered into the action. Every added increment of power that I had gained in balancing, pedaling, steering, taking advantage of the surfaces, adjusting my weight according to my own peculiarities, and so on, was set to my account when I began to manage the bulky steed that behaves worst of all when a novice seeks the saddle and strikes [47] ]out alone. Just so, I felt, it had been all my life and will be, doubtless, in all worlds and with us all. The totality of native forces and acquired discipline and expert knowledge stands us in good stead for each crisis that we have to meet. There is a momentum, a cumulative power on which we can count in every new circumstance, as a capitalist counts upon his credit at the bank. It is not only a divine declaration, it is one of the basic laws of being, that “all things work together for good to them that love God”—that is, to them that are in love with God; and he who loves a law of God and makes himself obedient to that law has by that much loved God, only he does not always have the wit to know it.
The one who has learned latest and yet has really learned the mastery of the bicycle is the best teacher. Many a time I have heard boys in college say that it was not the famed mathematician who could teach them anything—he knew too much, he was too [48] ]far ahead for them to hear his voice, he was impatient of their halting steps; but the tutor who had left college only the year before, and remembering his own failures and stupidity, had still that fellow-feeling that made him wondrous kind.
As has been stated, my last epoch consisted of learning to mount; that is the pons asinorum of the whole mathematical undertaking, for mathematical it is to a nicety. You have to balance your system more carefully than you ever did your accounts; not the smallest fraction can be out of the way, or away you go, the treacherous steed forming one half of an equation and yourself with a bruised knee forming the other. You must add a stroke at just the right angle to mount, subtract one to descend, divide them equally to hold your seat, and multiply all these movements in definite ratio and true proportion by the swiftest of all roots, or you will become the most minus of quantities. You must foot up your accounts with the strictest regularity; [49] ]there can be no partial payments in a business enterprise like this.
Although I could now mount and descend, turn corners and get over the ground all by myself, I still felt a lack of complete faith in Gladys, although she had never harmed me but once, and then it was my own fault in letting go the gleaming cross-bar, which is equivalent to dropping the bridle of a spirited steed. Let it be carefully remembered by every “beginning” bicycler that, whatever she forgets, she must forever keep her “main hold,” else her horse is not bitted and will shy to a dead certainty.
As we grew better acquainted I thought how perfectly analogous were our relations to those of friends who became slowly seasoned one to the other: they have endured the vicissitudes of every kind of climate, of the changing seasons; they have known the heavy, water-logged conditions of spring, the shrinkage of summer’s trying heat, the happy medium of autumn, and the contracting cold that [50] ]winter brings; they are like the bits of wood, exactly apportioned and attuned, that go to make up a Stradivarius violin. They can count upon one another and not disagree, because the stress of life has molded them to harmony. They are like the well-worn robe, the easy shoe. There is no short road to this adjustment, so much to be desired; not any will win it short of “patient continuance in well-doing.”
I noticed that the great law which I believe to be potential throughout the universe made no exception here: “According to thy faith be it unto thee” was the only law of success. When I felt sure that I should do my pedaling with judicial accuracy, and did not permit myself to dread the swift motion round a bend; when I formed in my mind the image of a successful ascent of the “Priory Rise”; when I fully purposed in my mind that I should not run into the hedge on the one side or the iron fence on the other, these prophecies were fulfilled with practical certainty. [51] ]I fell into the habit of varying my experience by placing before myself the image—so germane to the work in which I am engaged—of an inebriate in action, and accompanied this mental panorama by an orchestral effect of my own producing: “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man;” but could never go through this three consecutive times without lurching off the saddle. But when I put before me, as distinctly as my powers of concentration would permit, the image of my mother holding steadily above me a pair of balances, and looking at me with that quizzical expectant glance I knew so well, and saying: “Do it? Of course you’ll do it; what else should you do?” I found that it was palpably helpful in enabling me to “sit straight and hold my own” on my uncertain steed. She always maintained, in the long talks we had concerning immortality, that the law I mention was conclusive, and was wont to close our conversations on that subject (in which I held the interrogative position) with some [52] ]such remark as this: “If Professor —— thinks he is not immortal he probably is not; if I think I am I may be sure I shall be, for is it not written in the law, ‘According to thy faith be it unto thee’?”
Gradually I realized a consoling degree of mastery over Gladys; but nothing was more apparent to me than that we were not yet thoroughly acquainted—we had not summered and wintered together. I had not learned her kinks, and she was as full of them as the most spirited mare that sweeps the course on a Kentucky race-track. Although I have seen a race but once (and that was in the Champs Élysées, Paris, a quarter of a century ago), I am yet so much interested in the fact that it is a Flora Temple, a Goldsmith Maid, a Maud S., a Sunol, a California Maid that often stands first on the record, that I would fain have named my shying steed after one of these; but as she was a gift from Lady Henry Somerset this seemed invidious in me as a Yankee woman, and so I called her [53] ]Gladys, having in view the bright spirit of the donor, the exhilarating motion of the machine, and the gladdening effect of its acquaintance and use on my health and disposition.
As I have said, I found from first to last that the process of acquisition exactly coincided with that which had given me everything I possessed of physical, mental, or moral success—that is, skill, knowledge, character. I was learning the bicycle precisely as I learned the a-b-c. When I set myself, as a stint, to mount and descend in regular succession anywhere from twenty to fifty times, it was on the principle that we do a thing more easily the second time than the first, the third time than the second, and so on in a rapidly increasing ratio, until it is done without any conscious effort whatever. This was precisely the way in which my mother trained me to tell the truth, and my music-teacher taught me that mastership of the piano keyboard which I have lost by disuse. Falling from grace may mean falling from a habit formed—how [54] ]do we know? This opens a boundless field of ethical speculation which I would gladly have followed, but just then the steel steed gave a lurch as if to say, “Tend to your knitting”—the favorite expression of a Rocky Mountain stage-driver when tourists taxed him with questions while he was turning round a bend two thousand feet above the valley.
And now comes the question “What do the doctors say?” Here follow several testimonies:
“The question now of great interest to girls is in regard to the healthfulness of the wheel. Many are prophesying dire results from this fascinating exercise, and fond parents are refusing to allow their daughters to ride because they are girls. It will be a delight to girls to learn that the fact of their sex is, in itself, not a bar to riding a wheel. If the girl is normally constituted and is dressed hygienically, and if she will use judgment and not overtax herself in learning to ride, [55] ]and in measuring the length of rides after she has learned, she is in no more danger from riding a wheel than is the young man. But if she persists in riding in a tight dress, and uses no judgment in deciding the amount of exercise she is capable of safely taking, it will be quite possible for her to injure herself, and then it is she, and not the wheel, that is to blame. Many physicians are now coming to regard the ‘wheel’ as beneficial to the health of women as well as of men.”