My Friend the Chauffeur
myself why it is that a whole people should with one accord worship
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 brass
beds, springy mattresses, and blankets light as--as love. But nobody 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 documents 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.
He stood leaning on the side of our luggage-wreathed vehicle, with an
air of charming condescension. There was no need for him to hurry over
the formalities of the _douane_, he said, for even if he were
considerably behind us in starting, he would catch us up soon after we
had reached La Mortola.
Thus beguiled, the half-hour occupied by the leisurely officials in
providing us with papers and sealing the car with an important looking
leaden seal, passed not too tediously for the ladies. Finally, the
Prince saw us off, smiling a "turned-down smile" at our jog trot as we
proceeded up that everlasting hill, which runs like a shelf along the
face of the great grey cliff of rock.
Far below, azure waves draped the golden beach with blue and silver
gauze and fringed it daintily with a foam of lace.
Then, at last, the steep ascent came to an end, with a curve of the road
which plunged us down into a region of coolness and green shadow.
"Why, I don't think Italy's so shabby after all," exclaimed the
Countess. "Just see that pretty little Maltese cross above the road, and
that fine school-house--"
"Ah, but we're in Hanbury-land now," I said.
"Hanbury-land? I never heard of it. Is it a little independent
principality like Monacoa? But how funny it should have an
English-sounding name sandwiched in right here between Italy and
France."
"The lord of the land is an Englishman, and a benevolent one, a sort of
fairy god-father to the poor in all the country round," I explained.
"You won't find Hanbury-land mentioned on the map; nevertheless it's
very real, fortunately for its inhabitants; and here's the gate of the
garden which leads to the royal palace. La Mortola is a great show
place, for the public are allowed to go in on certain days. I forget if
this is one of them, but perhaps they will let us see the garden,
nevertheless. Shall I ask?"
It was in my mind that, if we stopped, we might miss the Prince as well
as see the garden, so that we should be killing two birds with one
stone, and I was glad when the Countess caught eagerly at the suggestion
that we should beg for a glimpse of La Mortola, a place famed throughout
Europe.
Permission was given; the big iron gates swung open to admit us. We
entered, and a moment later were descending a long flight of stone steps
to terraces far below the level of the road where the car stood waiting
our return.
Had Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the days before his unfortunate
misunderstanding with the Geni and demanded the most beautiful of
gardens, the fulfilment of his wish could have taken no fairer form than
this. Strange, tropical flowers, vivid as flame, burned in green
recesses; water-sprites upset their caskets of pearls over rock-shelves
into translucent pools where lilies lay asleep, dreaming of their own
pale beauty. Long, green pergolas, starred with flowers, framed
blue-veiled pictures of distant coast-line, and mediaeval strongholds,
coloured with the same burnt umber as the hills on which they stood,
gloomed and glowed across a cobalt sea.
There is nothing that pleases the normal male more than to be able to
point out objects worthy of interest or admiration to the female of his
kind. Since time immemorial, have not landscape-pictures in books of
travel been filled in, in the foreground, with the figures of men
showing the scenery to women? Did any one ever see such a work of art
representing a woman as indicating any point of view to a man? No doubt
many could have done so; and the ladies in the pictures had probably
noticed the objects in question before their male escorts pointed to
them; but knowing the amiable weakness of the other sex, they politely
refrained from saying, "Oh, we saw that _long_ ago."
Thus did Terry and I, after the conventional traditions of our species,
lead our little party through avenues of cypresses, to open rock-spaces,
or among a waving sea of roses to battle-grounds of rare cacti, with
writhing arms like octopi transformed into plants.
Here, peering down into a kind of dyke, paved with rough tesselation, we
vied with each other in telling our charges that this was the old Roman
road to Gaul, the Aurelian Way, over which Julius Caesar, St. Catherine
of Siena, Dante, and other great ones passed. Then we showed them one of
Napoleon's old guns, covered with shells, as when it was fished out of
the sea. We enlarged upon the fact that there was no tree, shrub, or
blossom on the known face of the earth of which a specimen did not grow
at La Mortola; and when we had wandered for an hour in the garden
without seeing half there was to see, we climbed the long flight of
steps again, congratulating ourselves--Terry and I--that we had played
Dalmar-Kalm rather a neat trick. The crowd of villagers who had
clustered round our car outside the entrance gates would screen it from
the Prince as he flashed by, and he would go on and on, wondering how we
had contrived to get so far ahead.
Our way would take us, after passing through Ventimiglia, up the Roya
Valley which Terry had decided upon as a route because of its wild and
unspoiled beauty, different from anything that our passengers could have
seen in their brief experience of the Riviera. But as there were no inns
which offered decent entertainment for man or automobile within
reasonable distance, we were to lunch at Ventimiglia, and no arrangement
had been made with Dalmar-Kalm concerning this halt. His
confidence--perhaps well founded--in the superiority of his speed over
ours had led him to believe that he could pause at our side for
consultation whenever he wished. Therefore, we had left Cap Martin
without much discussion of plans. Mrs. Kidder was of opinion that we
would find him waiting in front of the "best hotel in Ventimiglia," with
an excellent luncheon ordered.
"The best hotel in Ventimiglia!" poor lady, she had an awakening before
her. Not only was there no Prince, but there was no best hotel. Old
Ventimiglia, in its huddled picturesqueness, must delight any man with
eyes in his head; new Ventimiglia must disgust any man with a vacancy
under his belt. As we sat in the shabby dining-room of a seventh-rate
inn (where the flies set an example of attentiveness the waiters did not
follow), pretending to eat macaroni hard as walking-sticks and veal
reduced to _chiffons_, I feared the courage of our employers would fail.
They could never, in all their well-ordered American lives, have known
anything so abominable as this experience into which we had lured them,
promising a pilgrimage of pleasure. But the charmingly dressed beings,
who looked like birds of paradise alighted by mistake in a pigsty, made
sport of the squalor which we had expected to evoke their rage.
"Dear me, I wish we'd brought some chewing gum," was Beechy's one
sarcasm at the expense of the meal, and Maida and the Countess laughed
merrily at everything, even the flies, which they thought did not know
their own power as well as American flies.
"We've some _lovely_ cakes and candy packed in that sweet tea-basket we
bought at an English shop in Paris," said Mrs. Kidder; "but I suppose
we'd better not get anything out to eat now, for fear of hurting the
waiters' feelings. What do you think, Sir Ralph?"
"Personally, I should like nothing better than to hurt them," I replied
severely, "but I'm thinking of myself. Cakes and candy on top of those
walking-sticks! 'T were more difficult to build on such a foundation
than to rear Venice on its piles and wattles.
"We'd better save what we have till later on," said Maida. "About four
o'clock, perhaps we shall be glad to stop somewhere, and I can make tea.
It will be fun having it in the automobile."
"There she goes now, revealing domestic virtues!" I thought ruefully.
"It will be too much for Teddy to find her an all-round out-of-doors and
indoors girl in one. He always said the combination didn't exist; that
you had to put up with one or the other in a nice girl, and be jolly
thankful for what you'd got."
But Terry did not seem to be meditating upon the pleasing trait just
brought to light by his travelling companion. He remarked calmly that by
tea-time we should doubtless have reached San Dalmazzo, a charming
little mountain village with an old monastery turned into an inn; and
then he audibly wondered what had become of the Prince.
"My! What a shame, I'd almost forgotten him!" exclaimed Mrs. Kidder.
"He must have given us up in despair and gone on."
"Perhaps he's had a break-down," I suggested.
"What! with that wonderful car? He told me last night that nothing had
ever happened to it yet. He must be miles ahead of us by now."
"Then this is his astral body," said Terry. "Clever of him to 'project'
one for his car too. Never heard of its being done before."
Nor had I ever heard of an astral body who swore roundly at its
chauffeur, which this apparition now stopping in front of the restaurant