Читать книгу My Friend the Chauffeur - C. N. Williamson - Страница 21

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The Prince let us take the lead. He could start twenty minutes later and still easily pass us before the frontier, he said. He had two or three telegrams to send, and one or two little affairs to settle; but he would not be long in catching us up, and after that the ladies might count upon his services in any—er—any emergency.

"He might better have gone on ahead and polished up that old castle of his a bit before Mrs. Kidder sees it," Terry murmured to me; but we had no right to object to the Prince's companionship, if it were agreeable to our employers, and we uttered no audible word of dissent to his plan.

Beechy and her mother had the two corner seats in the roomy tonneau, and I settled myself on the flap which lets down when the door is closed. In doing this, I was not unconscious of the fact that if the fastening of the door gave way owing to vibration or any other cause, I should indubitably go swinging out into space; also, that if this disagreeable accident did occur, it would be my luck to have it happen when the back of the car was hanging over a precipice. Nevertheless I kept a calm face. These things usually befall some one else rather than one's self; the kind of some one else you read of over your morning coffee, murmuring, "Dear me, how horrid!" before you take another sip.

Terry started the car, and though it carried five persons and enough luggage for ten (I speak of men, not women), we shot away along the perfect road, like an arrow from the bow.

At our first fine panther bound, Mrs. Kidder half rose in her seat and seized my right arm, while Beechy's little hand clutched anxiously at my left knee.

"Oh, mercy!" the Countess exclaimed. "Tell him not to go so fast—oh, quick! we'll be killed."

"No, we won't, Don't be frightened; it's all right," I answered soothingly, primed by my late experience in leaving the Châlet des Pins. "Why, we're going slowly—crawling at the rate of twenty—"

"Fifteen!" laughed our chauffeur over his shoulder.

"Fifteen miles an hour," I amended my sentence wondering in what way the shock of surprise had affected the Vestal Virgin. Somehow I couldn't fancy her clawing weakly at any part of Terry's person. "You wouldn't have us go slower, would you? The Prince is sure to be watching."

"Oh, I don't know," wailed Mrs. Kidder. "I didn't think it would be like this. Isn't it awful?"

"I believe I—I'm going to like it by-and-by," gasped Beechy, her eyes as round as half-crowns, and as big. "Maida, have you fainted?"

Miss Destrey looked back into the tonneau, her face pale, but radiant. "I wouldn't waste time fainting," said she. "I'm buckling on my wings."

"Wish she were a coward!" I thought. "Terry hates 'em like poison, and would never forgive her if she didn't worship motoring at the first go-off." As for me, I have always found a certain piquant charm in a timid woman. There is a subtle flattery in her almost unconscious appeal to superior courage in man which is perhaps especially sweet to an undersized chap like me; and I had never felt more kindly to the Countess and her daughter than I did at this moment.

As Lothair with his Corisande, I "soothed and sustained their agitated frames" so successfully, that the appealing hands stole back to their respective laps, but not to rest in peace for long. The car breasted the small hill at the top of the Cap, sturdily, and we sped on towards Mentone, which, with its twin, sickle bays, was suddenly disclosed like a scene on the stage when the curtains have been noiselessly drawn aside. The picture of the beautiful little town, with its background of clear-cut mountains, called forth quavering exclamations from our reviving passengers; but a few minutes later when we were in the long, straight street of Mentone, weaving our swift way between coming and going electric trams, all the good work I had accomplished had to be done over again.

"I can't stand it," moaned Mrs. Kidder, looking, in her misery, like a frost-bitten apple. "Oh, can't the man see that street car's going to run us down? And now there's another, coming from behind. They'll crush us between them. Mr. Terrymore, stop—stop! I'll give you a thousand dollars to take me back to Cap Martin. Oh, he doesn't hear! Sir Ralph—why you're laughing!"

"Mamma, you'd send a mummied cat into hysterics," giggled Beechy. "I guess together we'd make the fortune of a dime museum, if they could show us now. But the cars didn't run over us, did they?"

"No, but the next ones will—and oh, this cart! Mr. Terrymore's the queerest man, he's steering right for it. No, we've missed it this time."

"We'll miss it every time, you'll see," I reassured her. "Barrymore is a magnificent driver; and look, Miss Destrey isn't nervous at all."

"She hasn't got as much to live for as Mamma and I have," said Beechy, trying to hide the fact that she was holding on to the side of the car. "You might almost as well be smashed in an automobile as end your days in a convent."

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 Shipwrecked 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 space 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 ass 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 sturdily 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 advertisement 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 embarrassed had I, as the supposed owner of the car, been called upon to supply it.

I listened with a lazy sense of proprietorship 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 wishing 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.