‘What you really want, sir,’ (on a special occasion he would deign to call Anthony ‘Sir’ though he would more willingly have addressed the car as such) ‘is a car with a prestige value.’
(The fact that Anthony did not and never would ‘want’ such a car never penetrated Copperthwaite’s car-intoxicated consciousness.)
‘Now the Roland-Rex 1967,’ he went on, trying to make the arcana of automobilism clear to Anthony’s non-mechanical mind, ‘with overdrive, under-drive, self-drive, automatic gears, et cetera, is just the car for you. It is a splendid car. I could tell you more about its performance, only you wouldn’t be interested, but its prestige value is enormous. I doubt if even a Rolls-Royce—’
Anthony Easterfield was indifferent, or nearly indifferent, to the prestige value of a Roland-Rex, but he knew that Copperthwaite’s interest in it, besides being mechanical, was also snobbish, and snobbism implies a sense of values that is not simply materialistic, even if it could scarcely be called spiritual.
To make people stare! To watch them gather round the Roland-Rex, wide-eyed with admiration, exclaiming to each other, patting and stroking it if they dared—venerating it as an object of excellence. To surpass, to excel! Not to keep up with the Joneses but to leave them behind, scattering and gaping. The deus ex machina! The God in the car!
Copperthwaite spent hours, literally hours, on Anthony’s commonplace little car, making it shine so that you could see your face in it; and when its lower quarters went wrong, as they often did, he would be under it with outstretched legs, and his face, if it were visible, which it seldom was, wearing a beatific expression, as if at last he had found true happiness. And if Anthony called him to come out of his dark grimy, oily hiding-place into the light of day, he would look disappointed, and almost cross, as if his orisons had been interrupted.
Laborare est orare. Copperthwaite’s happy (although to Anthony), his unenviable labours, were a form of prayer to the deus ex machina, the god in the car. If only he could save up enough to buy a Roland-Rex! Then Copperthwaite’s dream would come true, and if his labours were doubled, so would his prayers be. To be prostrate under the chassis of a Roland-Rex! To feel its oil dripping gently on his face! To be in close touch with its genitals (excuse the phrase) what bliss! What more could a man want? To labour for, and by so doing, to pray to the embodied principle of mechanical engineering! To communicate with it (no levity intended) by the oil dripping from it—to be at one with it! Anthony envied Copperthwaite his instinctive identification with the object of his devotion, his conviction that it was more important than he was, and that in its service was perfect freedom.
Anthony had learned to recognize a Roland-Rex, for when they passed, or, as seldom happened, overtook one, Copperthwaite would draw his attention to it. ‘Now that’s what we ought to have, sir.’
Anthony, who wanted Copperthwaite to be happy, would groan inwardly and think about his bank-balance.
He realized that Copperthwaite’s passion for cars was of a religious nature, and respected him for it, for he too, was religious after a fashion, although it was a different fashion from Copperthwaite’s.
Laborare est orare. To work is to pray. Yes; but is the converse true? Orare est laborare?—to pray is to work? It may be; many people besides the Saints had wrestled in prayer. Sweat had poured off their foreheads, tears had run down their cheeks; they had thrown their bodies this way and that; they had been taken up unconscious for dead. All this due to the physical effort of prayer. Labour! Could anyone labour more than that? Copperthwaite certainly laboured in his unuttered prayer to Anthony’s car; he withdrew himself from the light of day, he put himself into the most uncomfortable positions the body could assume, while studying and communing with the object of his adoration—albeit with its baser parts. His communication with it was immediate and instinctive, and needed no effort on his part; he required no confirmation from the car to assure him that he was completely en rapport with it, and it with him. Labour thrown away! No fear; even if he couldn’t find out what was wrong, the attempt to do so was its own reward. Another time, another hour or two, with his back on the cement and his eyes on a jungle of pipes (what he actually saw that so captivated him, Anthony, who was totally devoid of mechanical sense, never knew), he would find out, and his loving identification with the car would be closer than ever.
As for being brought out unconscious! Copperthwaite never looked more alive and kicking (for he had more or less to kick himself out) than when he emerged from under the car, patted its bonnet and gave it a grateful and a loving look.
Anthony’s orisons were physically much less laborious, for they only involved kneeling and sometimes wriggling and pressing his forehead against the bed, or the chair, or the pew, or wherever he happened to find convenient for his devotions. He didn’t go to church much; he knew, or had known, the order of the service so well that he listened to it with only half an ear; he preferred private to public worship. Following its majestic sequence did not give him time to slip in his own petitions. These needed an effort of memory which he could not compass while the clergyman, the choir, or the congregation, were all shouting or muttering against it. His prayers needed constant modification; this or that person had to be left out, this or that person put in. The task of selection and discrimination was difficult; and to perform it, Anthony felt he must be alone with God, undisturbed by the traffic noises, and the traffic signals, red, yellow, and green, on the Road to Heaven.
But did he really believe in the efficacy of his prayers? Did he really believe they would be answered? Did he believe in God, as implicitly and explicitly, as Copperthwaite believed in his car? Or was it all a superstition on his part, a sort of insurance against some calamity that might befall his friends or himself? or, having forgotten to mention this or that desired benefit, to have deprived them, and him, of some happiness?
He put his friends first, because he had had doubts about the propriety of praying for himself; perhaps for oneself one could only ask God to forgive one’s sins? To ask him to forgive other people’s sins was an impertinence, an almost blasphemous prompting of God’s Will, that Anthony would never be guilty of. Some of his friends were quite bad, and urgently in need of divine, moral and spiritual aid, so Anthony never presumed to mention who they were or how they could be improved.
His prayers, however, did include a long string of names of friends for whom he made a general, and sometimes an individual petition. They were divided mainly into two groups: friends who were still living, and relations of friends who had died. Anthony never counted them up (he had a Biblical distrust of counting the numbers of people) but together they must have come to forty at least. As he murmured the name, its owner for a moment came back to him, each one, living or dead, a link in the chain of his life, a link of love, a continuation of his own personality, a proof of identity, his and theirs.
But there are always snags, even in prayers. Anthony did not offer prayers for the dead. Not for doctrinal reasons, but because he thought he could do nothing for them; they were in the hands of God. But he prayed for the comfort and consolation of their relations, and friends, even when he knew that their relations and friends were quite glad to see the last of them.