Traffics and Discoveries Part 25

"It ain't fair! It ain't fair!" our guest moaned. "You're makin' me sick."

"What an ungrateful blighter he is!" said Pyecroft. "Money couldn't buy you a run like this ... Do it well overboard!"

"We'll just trundle up the Forest and drop into the Park Row, I think,"

said Kysh. "There's a bit of good going hereabouts."

He flung a careless knee over the low raking tiller that the ordinary expert puts under his armpit, and down four miles of yellow road, cut through barren waste, the Octopod sang like a six-inch sh.e.l.l.

"Whew! But you know your job," said Hinchcliffe. "You're wasted here. I'd give something to have you in my engine-room."

"He's steering with 'is little hind-legs," said Pyecroft. "Stand up and look at him, Robert. You'll never see such a sight again!"

"Nor don't want to," was our guest's reply. "Five 'undred pounds wouldn't begin to cover 'is fines even since I've been with him."

Park Row is reached by one hill which drops three hundred feet in half a mile. Kysh had the thought to steer with his hand down the abyss, but the manner in which he took the curved bridge at the bottom brought my few remaining hairs much nearer the grave.

"We're in Surrey now; better look out," I said.

"Never mind. I'll roll her into Kent for a bit. We've lots of time; it's only three o'clock."

"Won't you want to fill your bunkers, or take water, or oil her up?" said Hinchcliffe.

"We don't use water, and she's good for two hundred on one tank o' petrol if she doesn't break down."

"Two hundred miles from 'ome and mother _and_ faithful Fido to-night, Robert," said Pyecroft, slapping our guest on the knee. "Cheer up! Why, I've known a destroyer do less."

We pa.s.sed with some decency through some towns, till by way of the Hastings road we whirled into Cramberhurst, which is a deep pit.

"Now," said Kysh, "we begin."

"Previous service not reckoned towards pension," said Pyecroft. "We are doin' you lavish, Robert."

"But when's this silly game to finish, any'ow?" our guest snarled.

"Don't worry about the _when_ of it, Robert. The _where's_ the interestin'

point for you just now."

I had seen Kysh drive before, and I thought I knew the Octopod, but that afternoon he and she were exalted beyond my knowledge. He improvised on the keys--the snapping levers and quivering accelerators--marvellous variations, so that our progress was sometimes a fugue and sometimes a barn-dance, varied on open greens by the weaving of fairy rings. When I protested, all that he would say was: "I'll hypnotise the fowl! I'll dazzle the rooster!" or other words equally futile. And she--oh! that I could do her justice!--she turned her broad black bows to the westering light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Suss.e.x oak; she devoured infinite perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she repeated the motions. Over naked uplands she droned like a homing bee, her shadow lengthening in the sun that she chased to his lair. She nosed up unparochial byways and accommodation- roads of the least accommodation, and put old scarred turf or new-raised molehills under her most marvellous springs with never a jar. And since the King's highway is used for every purpose save traffic, in mid-career she stepped aside for, or flung amazing loops about, the brainless driver, the driverless horse, the drunken carrier, the engaged couple, the female student of the bicycle and her staggering instructor, the pig, the perambulator, and the infant school (where it disembogued yelping on cross-roads), with the grace of Nellie Farren (upon whom be the Peace) and the lithe abandon of all the Vokes family. But at heart she was ever Judic as I remember that Judic long ago--Judic clad in bourgeois black from wrist to ankle, achieving incredible improprieties.

We were silent--Hinchcliffe and Pyecroft through professional appreciation; I with a layman's delight in the expert; and our guest because of fear.

At the edge of the evening she smelt the sea to southward and sheered thither like the strong-winged albatross, to circle enormously amid green flats fringed by martello towers.

"Ain't that Eastbourne yonder?" said our guest, reviving. "I've a aunt there--she's cook to a J.P.--could identify me."

"Don't worry her for a little thing like that," said Pyecroft; and ere he had ceased to praise family love, our unpaid judiciary, and domestic service, the Downs rose between us and the sea, and the Long Man of Hillingdon lay out upon the turf.

"Trevington--up yonder--is a fairly isolated little dorp," I said, for I was beginning to feel hungry.

"No," said Kysh. "He'd get a lift to the railway in no time.... Besides, I'm enjoying myself.... Three pounds eighteen and sixpence. Infernal swindle!"

I take it one of his more recent fines was rankling in Kysh's brain; but he drove like the Archangel of the Twilight.

About the longitude of Ca.s.socks, Hinchcliffe yawned. "Aren't we goin' to maroon our Robert? I'm hungry, too."

"The commodore wants his money back," I answered.

"If he drives like this habitual, there must be a tidyish little lump owin' to him," said Pyecroft. "Well, I'm agreeable."

"I didn't know it could be done. S'welp me, I didn't," our guest murmured.

"But you will," said Kysh. And that was the first and last time he addressed the man.

We ran through Penfield Green, half stupefied with open air, drugged with the relentless boom of the Octopod, and extinct with famine.

"I used to shoot about here," said Kysh, a few miles further on. "Open that gate, please," and he slowed as the sun touched the sky-line. At this point we left metalled roads and bucked vigorously amid ditches and under trees for twenty minutes.

"Only cross-country car on the market," he said, as we wheeled into a straw-yard where a lone bull bellowed defiance to our growlings. "Open that gate, please. I hope the cattle-bridge will stand up."

"I've took a few risks in my time," said Pyecroft as timbers cracked beneath us and we entered between thickets, "but I'm a babe to this man, Hinch."

"Don't talk to me. Watch _him!_ It's a liberal education, as Shakespeare says. Fallen tree on the port bow, Sir."

"Right! That's my mark. Sit tight!"

She flung up her tail like a sounding whale and buried us in a fifteen- foot deep bridle-path b.u.t.tressed with the exposed roots of enormous beeches. The wheels leaped from root to rounded boulder, and it was very dark in the shadow of the foliage.

"There ought to be a hammer-pond somewhere about here." Kysh was letting her down this chute in brakeful spasms.

"Water dead ahead, Sir. Stack o' brushwood on the starboard beam, and--no road," sang Pyecroft.

"Cr-r-ri-key!" said Hinchcliffe, as the car on a wild cant to the left went astern, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g herself round the angle of a track that overhung the pond. "If she only had two propellers, I believe she'd talk poetry. She can do everything else."

"We're rather on our port wheels now," said Kysh; "but I don't think she'll capsize. This road isn't used much by motors."

"You don't say so," said Pyecroft. "What a pity!"

She bored through a ma.s.s of crackling brushwood, and emerged into an upward sloping fern-glade fenced with woods so virgin, so untouched, that William Rufus might have ridden off as we entered. We climbed out of the violet-purple shadows towards the upland where the last of the day lingered. I was filled to my moist eyes with the almost sacred beauty of sense and a.s.sociation that clad the landscape.

"Does 'unger produce 'alluciations?" said Pyecroft in a whisper. "Because I've just seen a sacred ibis walkin' arm in arm with a British c.o.c.k- pheasant."

"What are you panickin' at?" said Hinchcliffe. "I've been seein' zebra for the last two minutes, but I 'aven't complained."

He pointed behind us, and I beheld a superb painted zebra (Burch.e.l.l's, I think), following our track with palpitating nostrils. The car stopped, and it fled away.

There was a little pond in front of us from which rose a dome of irregular sticks crowned with a blunt-muzzled beast that sat upon its haunches.

"Is it catching?" said Pyecroft.