My Friend the Chauffeur Part 9

Here was a revelation, but before I had time to question the speaker further, she and her mother were clinging to me again as if I were a Last Straw or a Forlorn Hope.

This sort of thing lasted for four or five minutes, which doubtless appeared long to them, but they were not in the least tedious for me. I was quite enjoying myself as a Refuge for s.h.i.+pwrecked Mariners, and I was rather sorry than otherwise when the mariners began to find their own bearings. They saw that, though their escapes seemed to be by the breadth of a hair, they always were escapes, and that no one was anxious except themselves. They probably remembered, also, that we were not pioneers in the sport of motoring; that some thousands of other people had done what we were doing now, if not worse, and still lived to tell the tale--with exaggerations.

Presently the strained look left their faces; their bodies became less rigid; and when they began to take an interest in the shops and villas I knew that the worst was over. My arm and knee felt lonely and deserted, as if their mission in life had been accomplished, and they were now mere obstacles, occupying unnecessary s.p.a.ce in the tonneau.

As for Terry, I could see by the set of his shoulders and the way he held his head that he was pleased with life, for he is one of those persons who shows his feelings in his back. He had fought against the idea of this trip, but now that the idea was crystallizing into fact he was happy in spite of himself. After all, what could he ask for that he had not at this moment? The steering wheel of his beloved motor (preserved for him by my cunning) under his hand; beside him a plucky and beautiful girl; behind him a devoted friend; in front, the fairest country in the world, and a road which would lead him to the Alps and to Piedmont; to stately Milan and to the blue, rapturous reaches of Como; a road that would beckon him on and on, past villages sleeping under cypresses on sunny hillsides to Verona, the city of the "star-crossed lovers;" to Giotto's Padua, and by peerless Venice to strange Dalmatia, where Christian and Moslem look distrustfully into one anothers' eyes.

What all this would be to Terry I knew, even though he was playing a part distasteful to him; for if he had missed being born an Irishman, and had reconciled it to his sense of humour to be born at all, he would certainly have been born an Italian. He loves Italy; he breathes the air as the air of home, drawn gratefully into the lungs after a long absence. He learned to speak Italian as easily as he learned to walk, and he could pour out liquid line after line of old Italian poetry, if he had not all a British male's self-conscious fear of making an a.s.s of himself. History was the only thing except cricket and rowing, in which he distinguished himself at Oxford, and Italian history was to him what novels are to most boys, though had it occurred to him at the time that he was "improving his mind" by reading it, he would probably have shut up the book in disgust.

He was not a stranger in the country to which we were going, though he had never entered it by this gate, and most of his motoring had been done in France; but I knew that he would revel in visiting once more the places he loved, in his own car.

"Have you ever been in Italy?" I asked the Countess, but she was evilly fascinated by a dog which seemed bent on committing suicide under our car, and it was Beechy who answered.

"We've never been _anywhere_ before, any of us," she said. "Mamma and I only had our machinery set running a few months ago, but now we _are_ wound up, goodness knows how far we'll get. As for Maida--she's no mechanical doll like us. But do you know the play about the statue that came to life?"

"Galatea?" I suggested.

"Yes, that's the name. Maida's like that; and I suppose she'll go back as soon as she can, and ask to be turned into a statue again."

"What do you mean?" I ventured to inquire; for these hints of the child's about her cousin were gradually consuming me to a grey ash with curiosity.

"I can't tell you what _I_ mean, because I promised I wouldn't. But that's what _Maida_ means."

"What she means?"

"Yes, to go back and be turned into a statue, forever and ever."

I ought to have been glad that the girl destined herself for a colder fate than a union with a happy-go-lucky Irishman as poor as herself, but somehow I was not glad. Watching the light glint on a tendril of spun gold which had blown out from the motor-hood, I could not wish her young heart to be turned to marble in that mysterious future to which Beechy Kidder hinted she was self-destined.

"Perhaps I'd better make love to her myself," was the suggestion that flashed into my mind; but innate canniness st.u.r.dily pushed it out again.

With my seven hundred a year, and _The Riviera Sun_ only just beginning to shed a few golden beams, I could not afford to take a penniless beauty off Terry's hands, even to save him from a disastrous marriage or her from the fate of Galatea.

Yet what a day it was in which to live and love, and motor over perfect roads through that radiant summer-land which the Ligurians loved, the Romans conquered, and the modern world comes from afar to see.

Though it was early in April, with Easter but a few days behind us, the sky, the air, the flowers, belonged to June--a rare, rich June to praise in poetry or song. Billows of roses surged over old pink and yellow stucco walls, or a soaring flame of scarlet geranium ran along their tops devouring trails of ivy with a hundred fiery tongues. White villas were draped with gorgeous panoply of purple-red bougainvillea; the breeze in our faces was sweet with the scent of lemon blossoms and a heavier under-tone of white-belled datura. Far away, over that polished floor of lapis-lazuli which was the sea, summer rain-clouds boiled up above the horizon, blue with the soft grey-blue of violets; and in the valleys, between horned or pointed mountains, we saw spurts of golden rain glittering in the morning sun.

What a world! How good to be in it, to be "in the picture" because one had youth, and was not hideous to look upon. How good to be in a motor-car. This last thought made the chorus at the end of each verse for me. I was very glad I had put that advertis.e.m.e.nt in _The Riviera Sun_, and that "Kid, Kidder, and Kiddest" had been before any one else in answering it.

I could hear Terry telling Miss Destrey things, and I knew that if they listened the others could hear him too. This was well, because an unfailing flow of information was included in the five guineas a day, and I should have been embarra.s.sed had I, as the supposed owner of the car, been called upon to supply it.

I listened with a lazy sense of proprietors.h.i.+p in the man, as my chauffeur related the pretty legend of St. Agnes's ruined castle and the handsome Pagan who had loved the Christian maiden; while he described the exquisite walks to be found up hidden valleys among the serrated mountains behind Mentone; and enlarged upon the charms of picnics with donkeys and lunch-baskets under canopies of olives or pines, with a carpet of violets and primroses.

He seemed well up in the history of the Grimaldis and that exciting period when Mentone and legend-crusted Roquebrune had been under the rule of tyrannical princes of that name, as well as Hercules's rock, Monaco, still their own. He knew, or pretended to know, the precise date when Napoleon III. filched Nice and Savoy from reluctant Italy as the price of help against the hated Austrians. Altogether, I was so pleased with the way in which he was beginning, that I should have been tempted to raise his wages had he been my paid chauffeur.

We skimmed past Englishmen and English or American girls in Panama hats, on their way to bathe or play tennis; on all hands we heard the English tongue. Skirting the Old Town, piled high upon its narrow nose of land, we entered the East Bay, and so climbed up to the French side of the Pont St. Louis.

"Now for some red tape," explained Terry. "When I came to the Riviera this season I had no idea of going further, and I'm sorry to say I left my papers in London, where apparently they've disappeared. But as the Countess doesn't care to come back into France, I hope it won't matter much."

As he spoke, a _douanier_ lounged out of his little whitewashed lair, and asked for that which Terry had just said he had not.

"I have no papers," Terry informed him, with a smile so agreeable that one hoped it might take away the sting.

"But you intend to return to France?" persisted the official, who evidently gave even a foreigner credit for wis.h.i.+ng to rush back to the best country on earth with as little delay as possible.

"No," said Terry apologetically. "We are on our way to Italy and Austria, and may go eventually to England by the Hook of Holland."

The _douanier_ gave us up as hopeless, with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. He vanished into his lair, consulted a superior officer, and after a long delay returned with the news that we must pay ten centimes, probably as a penance for our mulish stupidity in leaving France.

I dropped a penny into his palm.

"Will you have a receipt for this sum?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I smiled. "I have infinite trust in your integrity."

"Perhaps we'd better get the receipt all the same," said Terry. "I've never been paperless before, and there may be some fuss or other."

"It took them twenty minutes to decide about their silly ten centimes,"

said the Countess "and it will take them twenty more at least to make out a receipt for it. Do let's go on, if he'll let us. I'm dying to see what's on the other side of this bridge. We haven't been over into Italy before; there was so much to do in Nice and Monte Carlo."

"All right, we'll risk it, then, as you wish it," Terry agreed; and our prophetic souls did not even turn over in their sleep.

On we went, up the steep hill which, with our load, we were obliged to climb so slowly that Terry and I were ashamed for the car, and tried diplomatically to make it appear that, had we liked, we could have flown up with undiminished speed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _As he spoke a douanier lounged out of his little whitewashed lair_]

Terry pointed out objects of interest here and there. I questioned him rapidly and he, playing into my hand, answered as quickly, so that, if our wheels lagged, our tongues gave the effect of keeping up a rattling pace.

"Don't you think there's something particularly interesting and romantic about frontiers?" asked Terry of the company in general. "Only a fict.i.tious and arbitrary dividing line, one would say, and yet what a difference on either side, one from the other! Different languages, different customs, prejudices so different that people living within ten yards of each other are ready to go to war over them. Here, for instance, though the first thing one thinks of in crossing the bridge is the splendid view, the second thought that comes must be, how bare the Italian country looks compared to the luxuriant cultivation we're leaving behind. We're turning our backs now on cosy comfort, well-kept roads, tidy houses, tidy people; and we're on our way to meet beggars, shabbiness, and rags, poverty everywhere staring us in the face. Yet much as I admire France, it's to Italy I give my love."

"Talking of frontiers," I flung back the ball to him, "I've often asked myself why it is that a whole people should with one accord wors.h.i.+p coffin-beds, six inches too short for a normal human being, hard wedges instead of bolsters, and down coverings three feet thick; while another whole people just round a geographical corner fiercely demand bra.s.s beds, springy mattresses, and blankets light as--as love. But n.o.body has ever satisfactorily answered that question, which may be far more important in solving the profound mystery of racial differences than it would seem."

"Why are _you_ prudent and economical, and I reckless and extravagant?"

inquired Terry.

"Because I come from the country that took over England, and you from the country that England took over," I explained. But Terry only laughed, being too busy to pick up the cudgels for his native land.

"Probably that's also why I'm a chauffeur while you're an editor," he added, and Miss Destrey's little nose and long curve of dark eyelash, seen by me in profile, expressed the sympathy which one young soul in misfortune must feel for another.

"Now we're in Italy," he went on. "What I said is coming true already.

Look at these carts crawling to meet us down the hill. The harness seems to be a mere collection of 'unconsidered trifles,' picked up accidently by the drivers; bits of leather, string and rope. And the road you see is strewn with loose stones, though a few metres further back it was so smooth one might dance on it. In dear, lazy Italy, steam-rollers are almost as unknown as dragons. In most districts, if one wants to mend a road, one dumps some stones on it, and trusts to luck and traffic to have them eventually ground in. But luckily our tyres are almost as trustworthy as the Bank of England, and we don't need to worry about the roads."

At the pink Italian custom house Terry got down and vanished within, to pay the deposit and receive certain doc.u.ments without which we could not "circulate" on Italian soil. Far above our heads looked down the old, brown keep of the Grimaldis, once lords of all the azure coast; below us glittered Mentone, pink and blue and golden in the sun; beyond Monte Carlo sat throned, siren-like, upon her rock.

Terry had scarcely engaged the attention of the officials when the buzz of a motor, livelier and more nervous than our faithful "thrum, thrum,"

called to us to turn our heads; and there was Prince Dalmar-Kalm's brilliant car flying up the hill, even as we had wished to fly.

The Prince stopped his motor close to ours, to speak with the Countess sitting alone in it, and announced that he would have overtaken us long ago, had he not found himself obliged to pause for a talk with the ex-Empress Eugenie.

This announcement much impressed Mrs. Kidder, who doubtless realized more fully than before her good fortune in having such a distinguished personage for a travelling companion.