Chapter 6: Lesson Number One

Frankly, I am not much of a hand at machinery of any sort. I have no prejudice against it as such, for some of my best friends are of a mechanical turn of mind, and very nice fellows they are too. But the pencil sharpener in our office is about as far as I, personally, have ever got in the line of operating a complicated piece of mechanism with any degree of success.

So, when George suggested that he teach me to run his car, it seemed a reasonable proposition. Obviously, some one had to teach me. I couldn’t be expected to go out and pick the thing up by myself, like learning to eat olives. No matter how well-intentioned I might be, or how long I stuck at it, the chances are that I never could learn to drive a car simply by sitting in the seat alone and fooling around among the gadgets until I found the right ones. Something would be sure to happen to spoil the whole thing long before I got the hang of it.

The car was, therefore, brought out into the driveway at the side of the house, like a bull being led into the ring for a humid afternoon with the matador. It was right here that George began to show his true colors, for he stopped the engine, which was running very nicely as it was, and said that I might as well begin by learning to crank it, as I probably would spend seven-eighths of my driving time cranking in the future.

I didn’t like this in George. It showed that he wasn’t going about it in the right spirit. He was beginning with the assumption that I would make a dub of myself, and, as I was already beginning to assume the same thing, it looked rather black for the lesson, with both parties to it holding the same pessimistic thought.

So, right off the bat, I said:

“No, George. It seems to me that you ought to crank it yourself. To-day I am learning to drive the car. ‘One thing at a time’ is my motto. That is what has brought our modern industrial system to its present state of efficiency: the Division of Labor--one man who does nothing but make holes in washers, another who does nothing but slip the washers over the dinguses over which they belong; one man who devotes his whole time to running a car, another who specializes in cranking it. Now, in the early days of industry, when the guild was the unit of organization among the workers--”

George, having cranked the engine, motioned me into the driver’s seat, and took his position beside me. It struck me that the thing was very poorly arranged, in that the place which was to be occupied by the driver, obviously the most important person in the car (except, of course, the lady member of the party in the tonneau, who holds the bluebook and gives wrong directions as to turnings), was all cluttered up with a lot of apparatus and pedals and things, so much so that I had to inhale and contract in order to squeeze past the wheel into my seat. And even then I was forced to stretch one leg out so far that I kicked a little gadget on a box arrangement on the dashboard, which apparently stopped the engine. As he cranked it again, George said, among other things, that it couldn’t possibly have been done except on purpose, and that he could take a joke as well as the next man, but that, good night, what was the use of being an ass?

As if I, with no mechanical instinct whatever, knew what was in that box! I don’t know even now, and I have got my driver’s license.

George finally got things stirring again and climbed in, leaving the door partly open no doubt in order that, in case of emergency, he could walk, not run, to the street via the nearest exit.

“The gear set of this car is of the planetary type,” he said, by way of opening the seminar, while the motor behaved as if it were trying to jiggle its way out from under the cushions and bite me. “This planetary system gives two forward speeds and a reverse motion.”

“Nothing could be fairer than that. It sounds like an almost perfect arrangement to me,” I said, to show that I was listening. And then, to show that I was thinking about the thing as well, I asked: “But surely you don’t have to pedal the thing along yourself by foot power! All those pedals down there would seem to leave very little for the gasoline power to do.”

“Those three pedals are what do the trick,” explained George. And then he added ominously: “If you should step on that left-hand one now, you would throw in your clutch.”

“Please, George, don’t get morbid,” I protested. “I’m nervous enough as it is, without having to worry about my own bodily safety.”

“The middle pedal, marked ‘R, ‘ is the reverse, and the one at the right, marked ‘B, ‘ is the foot brake. Now, when you want to start--”

“Just a minute, please,” I said sternly. “You skip over those as if there were something about them you were a little ashamed of, George. Are you keeping something from me about the reverse and the foot brake?”

“I didn’t know but that somewhere in your valuable college course they taught you what ‘reverse’ meant, and I was sure that your little son had told you all about the foot brake on his express wagon,” said George, waxing sarcastic in the manner of the technical man that he is.

“I don’t want you to take anything for granted in teaching me to run this thing,” I replied. “It is those little things that count, you know, and I would feel just as badly as you would if I were to run your car over a cliff into a rocky gorge because of some detail that I was uninformed about. You know that, George.”

“Very well,” he said, “I’ll get down to fundamentals. When you push the reverse pedal, you drive the car in the opposite direction from that in which it is headed. This is done by tightening the external contracting clutch bands which are between the gearing and the disk clutch.”

Somehow this struck me as funny. The idea of reversing by tightening any bands at all, much less external contracting ones, was the one thing needed to send me off into roars of laughter. The whole thing seemed so flat, after the excitement of the war, and everything.

Naturally George didn’t get it. It was ‘way over his head, and I knew that there would be no use trying to explain it to him. So I just continued to chuckle and murmur: “External contracting clutch bands! You’ll be the death of me yet, George!”

But I felt that, as the minutes went by, the situation was getting strained. My instructor and I were growing farther and farther apart in spirit, and, after all, it was his car and he was going to considerable trouble to teach me to run it, and the least that I could do would be to take him seriously, whether the thing struck me as being sensible or not.

So I calmed myself with some effort, and tried to bring the conversation around to an opening for him to begin with further explanations.