there ain’t no hurry. They can’t hold the funeral without YOU.”
Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a
panic when I went over them. I could hit any kind of a stone,
no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at
first I couldn’t help trying to do that. It is but natural.
It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some
inscrutable reason.
It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary
for me to round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you
undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility,
and neither is it likely to succeed. Your confidence oozes away,
you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of
you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and
gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric
anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and
perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the
bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, defying all
prayers and all your powers to change its mind–your heart stands
still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight
on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the
curb now. And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to
save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your
head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of
TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound
inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience. I
dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat
down on the curb to examine.
I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a
farmer’s wagon poking along down toward me, loaded with cabbages.
If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering,
it was just that. The farmer was occupying the middle of the road
with his wagon, leaving barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space
on either side. I couldn’t shout at him–a beginner can’t shout;
if he opens his mouth he is gone; he must keep all his attention
on his business. But in this grisly emergency, the boy came
to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful to him.
He kept a sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and
inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:
“To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass ‘ll run over you!”
The man started to do it. “No, to the right, to the right!
Hold on! THAT won’t do!–to the left!–to the right!–to the
LEFT–right! left–ri– Stay where you ARE, or you’re a goner!”
And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went
down in a pile. I said, “Hang it! Couldn’t you SEE I was coming?”
“Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn’t tell which WAY you
was coming. Nobody could–now, COULD they? You couldn’t
yourself–now, COULD you? So what could _I_ do?
There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to
say so. I said I was no doubt as much to blame as he was.
Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that
the boy couldn’t keep up with me. He had to go back to his gate-
post, and content himself with watching me fall at long range.
There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the
street, a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I could steer
pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit
them. They gave me the worst falls I ever got in that street,
except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that
no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always
able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true: but
I think that the reason he couldn’t run over the dog was because