DAME QUICKLY AND THE BOILROASTER
SOMETHING had happened to Dame Quickly’s storage battery, and all the amperes seemed to have escaped. An extremely friendly and cheerful young man came up from Fred Seaman’s garage, with mysterious medical-looking instruments, to grant a consultation. In the course of the chat he remarked, “If you once ride in a Boilroaster car, you’ll never be satisfied with any other.”
His energetic hands were at that moment deep in our loved Dame Quickly’s mechanisms; she was wholly at his mercy; naturally we did not feel like contradicting him or saying anything tactless. We wondered, but only privately, whether the fact that Fred Seaman is the local agent for the Boilroaster had anything to do with this comment? Or perhaps, we thought to ourself, our friend the battery expert really is a convinced enthusiast for the Boilroaster, and felt that way about it before he took a job at Fred Seaman’s establishment? We were sorry that William James was dead, for we felt that the author of The Will to Believe would be the man to whom to submit this philosophical problem. We were puzzled, because only a few days earlier another man had said to us (with an equal accent of decisiveness and conviction) that he would rather have a Dame Quickly than any Boilroaster ever made. “They stand up better than any of ’em,” he had said. Suddenly it occurred to us how useful it would be if there were some kind of spiritual gauge—like the hydrometer our friend was plunging into the cells of the Dame’s battery—which one could dip into a man’s mind to test the intellectual mixture of his remarks; to evaluate the proportions of those various liquids (the strong acid of self-interest, the mild distilled water of candour, etc.) which electrify his mental ignition.
Well, how about the Boilroaster, we said—(searching for a technical term that would show him we are a practical man)—Do they stand up?
He suggested that we get into his own Boilroaster, which stood grandly overshining the dusty Dame (reminding us of those pictures where a silhouette of the new Majestic is placed behind a little picture of the Teutonic or some other humble ship of older days) and take a run around Salamis while he tinkered with the battery.
Oh, no, we said nervously. Dame Quickly is the only car we know how to run, and besides the gear shift is different in the Boilroaster; we might get confused and have to come all the way home in reverse, which would be bad for our reputation in the village.
Have you ever ridden in the Boilroaster? he asked.
Yes, we said—Fred Seaman took us over to Locust Valley the other evening. (Suddenly a horrid thought struck us. We had thought that Fred had given us that lift over to Locust Valley just in the goodness of his heart. But now we wondered——)
When he left, he put in our hand a handsome book all about the Boilroaster. That, we felt, was the first step in breaking down our “sales resistance,” as they say in the Business e19 Course up at Columbia.
We’ve been reading that book, and we want to say that the chaps who write that sort of literature are cunning fellows, and masters of a very insinuating prose style. They begin with a very pretty frontispiece of a Boilroaster car standing, all alone and dazzling-new, in a magnificent landscape of snow-clad peaks and clear lakes. How the Boilroaster got way up there (evidently somewhere near Banff) without any one driving her, and without even a speck of dust on her fenders, is a mystery. But there she is. Perhaps the man who drove her all those miles from the nearest distributing agency is at the bar of the C. P. R. Hotel, off behind those pine forests.
All the highbrow critics will tell you that the truly great writers are lovers of Beauty. Well, the anonymous author of the Boilroaster book is as keen a champion of Beauty as any one we ever heard of. And not only beauty, but refinement, too. There are two whole pages giving little pictures of “refinements.” This is a book, we think, that could be put in the hands of the young without any hesitation. In fact, that is just where we did put it, for the urchin is cutting out the pictures of Boilroasters at this very minute. The whole trend of Advertising nowadays (we wonder if they mention this in the lectures on Advertising Psychology up at Columbia) is to give delight to children. We would hate to tell the Cunard Line and the International Mercantile Marine Company how many of their folders our juveniles have scissored up with shouts of delight.
The Boilroaster book is going to be a lesson to us. We don’t know if we will ever own a Boilroaster, but we are certain that before we do we have got to spruce up and be a bit more genteel. At present, we would be a bit of anticlimax riding in a car like that. There is “new beauty in its double bevel body line.” We want to look a bit more streamline ourself before we go in for one. There are “massive head lamps, graceful cowl lights, the louvres are more in number and their edges show a smart touch of gold.” There is “a courtesy light illuminating the left side of the car,” and a ventilator in the cowl. We don’t know exactly what the cowl is, or the louvres, or at any rate we’ve never discovered them in Dame Quickly.
Just as we are writing this, we see a headline in the papers (in the Evening Post, to be accurate) about Sir Charles Higham, who “Sees Advertising as a Great Moral Force.” We know of no writer who has a more solid appreciation of moral forces than the author of our Boilroaster brochure. What he has to say about “sheer merit,” “sound principles,” “elimination of waste,” “combination of beauty and utility,” “superiority and refinement,” “good taste” and “harmony of colour” makes this work a genuine essay in æsthetics. Moreover, we like his rational eclecticism. When the car has a 126-inch wheelbase, it makes it very easy riding and gives it charming “roadability.” When it has a 119-inch wheelbase, it “gives a short turning radius which makes it remarkably easy to handle.” Even in the least details, our author has an eye for loveliness. He confesses himself struck by “the attractive grouping of instruments on the dash, which emphasizes Boilroaster individuality.” The upholstery, he says, is “restful.” The folding seat for the extra passenger is “in reality a comfortable chair.” And when we learn that the opalescent dome and corner lamps “provide enough light for reading,” our only regret is that he doesn’t add a suggested list of readings for tenants of a Boilroaster Enormous Eight.
Unhappily space is lacking to tell you in detail what a competent and winning fellow this author is. In the scientific portions of the work he rivals Fabre—in regard to the clutch, he says “the driven member is a single spider rotating between two rings.” His passion for elegance, comfort, simplicity, and economy has never been surpassed—no, not by Plato or Walter Pater. The only drawback about his essay is that we feel we could never live up to the vehicle he describes.
