Pearl Veal and I
Pearl's new car is a wonder. It picked us up last Tuesday at the Westbury house, gathered us in with a shower of rice and old shoes. With a fiendish roar it started, but all the devils went out of it with a siss and a bang, and by the time we had swung through the gate it was going sweetly and swiftly, so softly that we seemed to be borne on the wind that swept over the plain, so quickly that, did the road hold straight and hard and smooth, we could circle the world in a day. How we flew! Constables shouted from the fences, but we outsped the sound of their voices. Horses shied into ditches, and drivers called down maledictions; but when Pearl Veal is abroad in her car you hear just the rustle of the angels' wings and see nothing. At Jamaica a mounted policeman thought that he saw something, put spurs to his steed, came clattering down the road in chase, yelling fiercely, and the answer was a wild scream of the horn as we shot around a corner and knew him no more. She cut across three funerals just to show that she was not superstitious, then almost cost us all our lives to save a dog from being flattened under the wheels.
"Madam," said Gascan, the chauffeur, with a tremble even in his voice, "they will catch us at the ferry."
"We will go by the bridge, then," was the quiet answer. "It will take but a few minutes longer."
So by the bridge we came, losing ourselves in the mazes of the East Side and ending forever all chances of pursuit; turning at last sedately into the avenue and picking our way uptown through the crush of carriages that block the way on a bright spring afternoon.
"Why, we have been over an hour from Westbury," she said, glancing at the clock on the Brick Church tower.
That is the way we have been travelling for a week—flying. Sometimes Gascan, the silent, takes the wheel, and we roll easily along at legal speed, not at all to keep within the absurd law, but to quiet our nerves with a smoke, to rest our eyes on the blue sky and the stately clouds, and our ears with the music of the wood and meadow. Then Pearl will take command, Pearl, all goggled and armored, all enwrapped in dust cloth and ashes till she would seem an animated mummy instead of the fairest girl in town. With her eyes intent on the road, intent on the spot a mile ahead where we are to be an instant later, and mine intent on her as she sits beside me, strong, alert, resourceful, we go at top speed, a mad pace, for miles and miles and miles, running away from the law and the world. We forget them all, all the Mints and Bumpschuses, the Wherrys and Lites, the Nocastles and Nothinghams, all the smart folk and noble folk with whom God and Mrs. Radigan have seen fit to cast our lot in the past few years. Sometimes we forget even John and Sally, but that is only in the excitement of the road when we are hurling ourselves over hill and valley. When evening comes and Gascan has unloaded the car, and dinner comes, and Pearl and I sit over coffee and a cigarette, she will blow a smoke ring and say, as she watches it rise into the darkness: "I wonder what Sally is doing now."
"Reading her novel to Lord Algernon Fitznit," I will venture.
"Or to Green," Pearl will say with a quiet smile.
"Or preparing for Newport," I will suggest.