Her father was easily tired, but he drowsed through the early afternoons
when a none-too-digestible small-town lunch was as lead within him.
Despite the beauty of the land and the joy of pushing on, they both had
things to endure.
After lunch, it was sometimes an agony to Claire to keep awake. Her eyes
felt greasy from the food, or smarted with the sun-glare. In the still
air, after the morning breeze had been burnt out, the heat from the
engine was a torment about her feet; and if there was another car ahead,
the trail of dust sifted into her throat. Unless there was traffic to
keep her awake, she nodded at the wheel; she was merely a part of a
machine that ran on without seeming to make any impression on the
prairie's endlessness.
Over and over there were the same manipulations: slow for down hill,
careful of sand at the bottom, letting her out on a smooth stretch,
waving to a lonely farmwife in her small, baked dooryard, slow to pass a
hay-wagon, gas for up the next hill, and repeat the round all over
again. But she was joyous till noon; and with mid-afternoon a new
strength came which, as rose crept above the golden haze of dust,
deepened into serene meditation.
And she was finding the one secret of long-distance driving--namely,
driving; keeping on, thinking by fifty-mile units, not by the ten-mile
stretches of Long Island runs; and not fretting over anything whatever.
She seemed charmed; if she had a puncture--why, she put on the spare. If
she ran out of gas--why, any passing driver would lend her a gallon.
Nothing, it seemed, could halt her level flight across the giant land.
She rarely lost her way. She was guided by the friendly trail
signs--those big red R's and L's on fence post and telephone pole,
magically telling the way from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
Her father's occasional musing talk kept her from loneliness. He was a
good touring companion. Motoring is not the best occasion for epigrams,
satire, and the Good One You Got Off at the Lambs' Club last night. Such
verbiage on motor trips invariably results in the mysterious finding of
the corpse of a strange man, well dressed, hidden beside the road.
Claire and her father mumbled, "Good farmhouse--brick," or "Nice view,"
and smiled, and were for miles as silent as the companionable sky.
She thought of the people she knew, especially of Jeff Saxton. But she
could not clearly remember his lean earnest face. Between her and Jeff
were sweeping sunny leagues. But she was not lonely. Certainly she was
not lonely for a young man with a raincoat, a cat, and an interest in
Japan.
No singer after a first concert has felt more triumphant than Claire
when she crossed her first state-line; rumbled over the bridge across
the Red River into North Dakota. To see Dakota car licenses everywhere,
instead of Minnesota, was like the sensation of street signs in a new
language. And when she found a good hotel in Fargo and had a real bath,
she felt that by her own efforts she had earned the right to enjoy it.