My Friend the Chauffeur
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.
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
fictitious 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