C. Trouble with the car. (With which is incorporated trouble with the brakes and steering apparatus.)
It must not be imagined that the car will necessarily go because the engine is running. One of the wheels may refuse to go round, possibly because—
(1) You have omitted to take the brake off.
(2) Something has gone wrong with the differential. (I have no further comment to offer on this head.)
(3) It has just dropped off. (N.B. This only happened once.)
After a time, then, I was able not merely to foretell the coming of one of Bill Bailey’s periods of rest from labour, but to diagnose the cause and make up a prescription.
If the car came to a standstill for no outwardly perceptible reason, I removed the bonnet and took a rapid inventory of Bill’s most vital organs, sending The Gruffin back along the road at the same time, with instructions to retrieve anything of a metallic nature which she might discover there.
When Bill Bailey without previous warning suddenly charged a hedge or passing pedestrian, or otherwise exhibited a preference for the footpath as opposed to the roadway, I gathered that the steering-gear had gone wrong again. The Gruffin, who had developed an aptness for applied mechanics most unusual in her sex, immediately produced from beneath the seat a suit of blue overalls of her own construction, of which she was inordinately proud—I hope I shall be able to dress her as cheaply in ten years’ time—and proceeded to squirm beneath the car. Here, happy as a queen, she lay upon her back on the dusty road, with oil and petrol dripping in about equal proportions into her wide grey eyes and open mouth, adjusting a bit of chronically refractory worm-and-wheel gear which I, from reasons of embonpoint and advancing years, found myself unable to reach.
Finally, if my nose was assailed by a mingled odour of blistering paint, melted indiarubber, and frizzling metal, I deduced that the cooling apparatus had gone wrong, and that the cylinders were red-hot. The petrol tap was hurriedly turned off, and The Gruffin and I retired gracefully, but without undue waste of time, to a distance of about fifty yards, where we sat down behind the highest and thickest wall available, and waited for a fall of temperature, a conflagration, or an explosion, as the case might be.