* * * * * Claire roused from her damp doze and sighed, "Well, I must get busy and
get the car out of this."
"Don't you think you'd better get somebody to help us?"
"But get who?"
"Whom!"
"No! It's just 'who,' when you're in the mud. No. One of the good things
about an adventure like this is that I must do things for myself. I've
always had people to do things for me. Maids and nice teachers and you,
old darling! I suppose it's made me soft. Soft--I would like a soft
davenport and a novel and a pound of almond-brittle, and get all sick,
and not feel so beastly virile as I do just now. But----"
She turned up the collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed
out--the muscles of her back racking--and examined the state of the rear
wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in
solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too
late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered
from the narratives of motoring friends that brush in mud gave a firmer
surface for the wheels to climb upon.
She also remembered how jolly and agreeably heroic the accounts of their
mishaps had sounded--a week after they were over.
She waded down the road toward an old wood-lot. At first she tried to
keep dry, but she gave it up, and there was pleasure in being defiantly
dirty. She tramped straight through puddles; she wallowed in mud. In the
wood-lot was long grass which soaked her stockings till her ankles felt
itchy. Claire had never expected to be so very intimate with a
brush-pile. She became so. As though she were a pioneer woman who had
been toiling here for years, she came to know the brush stick by
stick--the long valuable branch that she could never quite get out from
under the others; the thorny bough that pricked her hands every time she
tried to reach the curious bundle of switches.
Seven trips she made, carrying armfuls of twigs and solemnly dragging
large boughs behind her. She patted them down in front of all four
wheels. Her crisp hands looked like the paws of a three-year-old boy
making a mud fort. Her nails hurt from the mud wedged beneath them. Her
mud-caked shoes were heavy to lift. It was with exquisite self-approval
that she sat on the running-board, scraped a car-load of lignite off her
soles, climbed back into the car, punched the starter.
The car stirred, crept forward one inch, and settled back--one inch. The
second time it heaved encouragingly but did not make quite so much
headway. Then Claire did sob.
She rubbed her cheek against the comfortable, rough, heather-smelling
shoulder of her father's coat, while he patted her and smiled, "Good
girl! I better get out and help."