IV
THE LADY WHO LOOKED ON
I wonder how many nowadays remember that pretty bit of goods, Maisa Hubbard, who used to drive the racing cars in France, and was the particular fancy of half the motormen who drive on the other side of the blue water.
I first met her at the Gordon Bennett of 1901, and I must say I thought her "sample goods." It's true that many would have it she was over-well-known in America, and more than one young man got on the rocks because of her; but the world rather likes a bit of scandal about a pretty woman, and there's no shorter road to the masculine favour.
Anyway, Maisa Hubbard was popular enough down at Bordeaux, and you might still have called her the belle of the ball on June 26 in the year 1902, when we started from Champigny for the great race across the Arlberg Mountains. That was the occasion, you will remember, when two of our little company did something by way of a record in smashing up their cars—but the story of one of these, Max, who drove for a French company, has so often been told that I shall certainly not re-tell it here. The other is a different story, and since it is the story of a good man, a good car, and a pretty woman, there's no reason why Lal Britten should not put his pen to it.
Well, I was driving for an English company at that time, the Vezey they called themselves, though Wheezy would have been the better name. Such a box of tricks I do believe was never put upon a chassis before or since. It took two of us to start the engine in the morning, and the same number to persuade her to leave off firing at night. The works manager, Mr. Nathan, whose Christian name was Abraham, said that she'd done eighty miles an hour with him easily; but the only time I got her over fifty she broke her differential by way of an argument, and nothing but a soft place in a hayfield saved me from the hospital. All of which, of course, was good advertisement for the firm—and, truly, if it came to making a noise in the world, why, you could hear their car a good quarter of a mile away.
This was the flier I took over to France and tried to break in upon the fine roads we all know so well. As I finished the race almost before I began it, the less said about the affair the better—but I shall never forget that Paris to Vienna meeting, and I shall never forget it because of my friend Ferdinand,[[1]] one of the best and bravest who ever turned a wheel, and the right winner of that great prize, but for the woman who said "No," and said it so queerly and to such effect that a magician out of the story-books couldn't have done it better.
I liked Ferdinand, liked him from the start. A better figure of a man I shall never see; six feet to an inch, square set and wonderfully muscular. His hair was dark and ridiculously curly, so much so that talk of the "irons and brown paper" was the standing joke amongst the racing men in Paris, who knew no more of him than that he was an Italian by birth and had spent half his life in America. For the rest, he spoke English as well as I did, and I never knew whether Ferdinand was his real name, or one he took for the racecourse—nor did I care.
They say that there is no cloud without a silver lining—a poor consolation in a thunderstorm when your hood is at home and the nearest tree is three miles away. There had been a thunderstorm, I remember, on the morning I met poor Ferdinand, and my batteries had refused to hand out another volt, notwithstanding the plainest kind of speech in which I could address them. Just in the middle of it, when the rain was running in at the neck and out at the ankles, and I was asking myself why I wasn't a footman in yellow plush breeches, what should happen but that a great red car came loping up on the horizon, like some mad thing answering to the lightning's call—and no sooner was it a mile distant than it was by me, so to speak, and I was listening to my friend Ferdinand for the first time.
"Halloa, and what's taken your fancy in these parts?" he asked in a cheery voice. I told him as plainly.