My Friend the Chauffeur
this already?" that I decided at once to eat my heart out with a vain
love for him.
I haven't been really in love before since I was ten; so the sensation
was quite exciting, like picking up a lovely jewel on the street, which
you aren't sure won't be claimed by somebody else. I was trying to think
what else I could say to fascinate him when the car lost its breath
again, and--"r-r-retch" went in another speed.
"It's our 'first and last,'" said Mr. Barrymore. "Good old girl, she's
going to do it all right, though there's many a twenty-four horse-power
car that wouldn't rise to it. By Jove, this is a road--and a half. I
believe, Ralph, that you and I had better jump off and ease her a bit."
Mamma squeaked, and begged our chauffeur not to leave us to go up by
ourselves, or we should be over the awful precipice in an instant. But
Mr. Barrymore explained that he wasn't deserting the ship; and he walked
quickly along by the side of the car, through the bed of sharp stones,
keeping his hand always on the steering-wheel like a pilot guiding a
vessel among hidden rocks.
Maida would have been out too, in a flash, if Mr. Barrymore had let her,
but he told us all to sit still, so we did, happy (judging the others by
myself) in obeying him.
I hadn't supposed there could be such a road as
this. If one hadn't had hot and cold creeps in one's toes for fear the
"good old girl" would slide back down hill and vault into space with us
in her lap, one would have been struck dumb with admiration of its
magnificence. As a matter of fact, we were all three dumb as mutes, but
it wasn't only admiration that paralysed my tongue or Mamma's, I know,
whatever caused the phenomenon with Maida, who has no future worth
clinging to.
As we toiled up, in spite of the stones that did their best to keep us
back, we simply hung on the breathing of the motor, as Mamma used to on
mine when I was small and indulged in croup. When she gasped, we gasped
too; when she seemed to falter, we involuntarily strained as if the
working of our muscles could aid hers. All our bodies sympathized with
the efforts of her body, which she was making for our sakes, dragging us
up, up, into wonderful white, shining spaces where it seemed that summer
never had been and never would dare to come.
The twisted skein of silk we had looked up to was turning into a coil of
rope now, stretched taut and sharp from zig to zag, and on from zag to
zig again. Below, when we dared to look back and down, the coil of rope
lay looser, curled on itself. The mountain-top crowned by the fort
(which as Mr. Barrymore said, did certainly look like the ark on Ararat
when all the rest of creation was swept off the globe) didn't appear so
dimly remote now. We were coming almost into friendly relations with it,
and with neighbouring mountains whose summits had seemed, a little while
ago, as far away as Kingdom Come.
I began to feel at last as if I could speak without danger of giving the
motor palpitation of the heart. "What are you thinking of, Maida?" I
almost whispered.
"Oh!" she answered with a start, as if I'd waked her out of a dream. "I
was thinking, what if, while we're still in this world we could see
heaven, a far, shining city on a mountain-top like one of these. How
much harder we would strive after worthiness if we _saw_ the place
always with our bodily eyes; how much harder we'd try; and how much
less credit it would be for those who succeeded."
"What are _you_ thinking of, Mamma?" I asked. "Did the big mountains
give you a thought too?"
"Yes, they did," said she, "but I'm afraid it was more worldly than
Maida's. I was saying to myself, the difference in being down far below,
where we were, and high up as we are now, is like our old life in Denver
and our life here." As she went on to expound her parable, she lowered
her voice, so that Sir Ralph and Mr. Barrymore, walking, couldn't catch
a word. "In those days at home, it would have seemed as impossible that
we could have princes and baronets and--and such people for our most
_intimate_ friends, as it looked a little while ago for us to get near
that fort up there, or the mountain-tops. Yet we are, in--in every sense
of the word, _getting there_."
The thoughts which the mountains had put into Maida's golden head and
Mamma's (now) auburn one were so characteristic of the heads themselves
that I chuckled with glee, and our two men glanced round questioningly.
But in accordance with Mamma's simile, to explain to them would have
been like explaining to the mountains themselves.
By and by, though still going up, we were on snow level. Snow lay white
as Maida's thoughts on either side of the steep road, but _le corse_ had
run shrieking farther down the mountain, and was not at home in its own
high house. We were less cold than we had been; and when presently the
worst of the zigzags were past and a great black tunnel-mouth in sight
to show we'd reached the _col_, the sun was almost warm. A few moments
more, and (on our second best speed, with all five on board) we had shot
into that great black mouth.
I always thought that we had the longest and biggest of everything in
our country, but I never heard of a tunnel like this in America.
It was the queerest thing to look into I ever saw.
The lamps of our automobile which Mr. Barrymore had stopped to light
before plunging in, showed us a long, long, straight passage cut through
the mountain, with an oval roof arched like an egg. Except for a few
yards ahead, where the way was lit up and the arch of close-set stones
glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been
for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as
our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had
a spine made of diamonds, Jonah would have got much the same effect that
we did as he wandered about in the dark trying to get his bearings.
It was only the most distant electric lamps that looked as if they were
diamonds stuck close together along the roof. The near ones were balls
of light under swaying umbrellas of ink-black shadow; and sometimes we
would flash past great sharp stalactites, which were, as Maida said,
like Titanesses' hatpins stuck through from the top of the mountain.
At first the tunnel road was inches thick with white dust; then, much to
our surprise, we ran into a track of greasy mud which made our car waltz
as it had in the Roya valley close to the precipice.
"It's the water filtering in through the holes your Titanesses' hatpins
have made in their big pincushion," explained Mr. Barrymore, who had
heard Maida make that remark. And the hateful creatures had so
honeycombed the whole mountain over our heads, that Mamma and I put up
umbrellas to save ourselves from being drenched.
"What a place this would be for an accident! Or--suppose we met
something that _objected_ to us!" Mamma shrieked, her voice all but
drowned by the reverberation made by our motor in the hollow vault.
With that, as if her words had "conjured it from the vasty deep"--to use
a quotation of Sir Ralph's--something appeared, and it did object to us
very much.
It was a horse, and it gleamed like silver as our front lamp pointed it
out to our startled eyes with a long, bright finger of light.
He was coming towards us, down the narrow, arched passage, walking on
his hind legs, with some one in a cart behind him, standing up and
hitting him on the head with a whip.
We were not really going very fast on account of the splashy mud; but
what with the roaring echo of the motor, the dripping of water, the
narrowness of the tunnel, the yapping of our little dog, the shouts of
the man in the cart, and the strangeness of the picture ahead--just like
a lighted disc on the screen of a magic lantern--it did seem as if
everybody concerned must come to awful grief in about three seconds.
I don't know whether I screamed or not; though I know Mamma did; a deaf
man would have known that. But the first thing I was really sure of was
that Mr. Barrymore had not only stopped the car but the motor, had
jumped down, and gone to the horse's head.
He said something quickly to the driver, which I couldn't understand,
because it was in Italian; but the man didn't yell or whip the horse any
more. Mr. Barrymore patted the poor beast, and talked to him, until he
seemed tired of dancing about as if he were popcorn over a hot fire.
Then, when he had quieted down, and remembered that his forefeet were
given him to walk with and not to paw the air, Mr. Barrymore led him
gently up to our automobile, patting his neck all the time. He snorted
and quivered for a minute, then smelt of what Mr. Barrymore calls the
"bonnet," with the funniest expression of disgust and curiosity.
I imagined the horse was thinking, "This is a very nasty thing, but it
seems to belong to the nicest, kindest man I ever met, so perhaps it
isn't as bad after all as I thought at first."
The driver's scowl turned to a smile, as he eventually drove by, we
waiting till he had got safely past.
"I think that was real nice of you, Mr. Barrymore," said Mamma, as we
went teuf-teufing on again.
She is always a little uneasy with him, because, though he's a friend of
Sir Ralph Moray's, he's only a chauffeur, and she isn't quite sure
whether she oughtn't to patronize him a little to keep up her dignity
as a Countess. But it was a good sign that she should remember his name
for once. As for me, I've given him one for use behind his back, which
is to make up for his lack of a title, express his gorgeousness and
define his profession all at the same time. It is "Chauffeulier," and I
rather pride myself on it.
"It was only decent," he answered Mamma. "I love horses, and I've enough
imagination to guess pretty well how one feels when he's called upon to
face some unknown horror, with no sympathy from behind. It would have
been sheer brutality not to stop motor and all for that poor white chap.
He won't be as bad next time; and perhaps his master will have learned a
little common sense too. All the same, that kind of adventure spells
delay, and I hope this tunnel isn't infested with timid horses. Luckily,
the line seems all clear ahead."
A few minutes more, and looking before and after, we could see far away
two little oval pearls of daylight, one straight ahead, one straight
behind. It was like having one's foresight as good as one's hindsight;
which in real life, outside tunnels, would save a lot of disasters. Mr.
Barrymore explained that we'd reached the apex of two slopes, and now we
would be descending gradually.
It gave us a shock to burst out into the sunlight again by-and-by, but
it was a glorious shock, with a thrill as the dazzling white mountains
seemed to leap at our eyes.
If you speak of zigzags going up hill, oughtn't you to call them zagzigs
going down? Anyway, there they were, hundreds of them apparently,
looking something as a huge corkscrew might look if it had been laid on
a railroad track for a train to flatten.
We began to fly down, faster and faster, the motor making no noise at
all. At each turn of the corkscrew it seemed to me as if we must leap
over into space, and I felt as if I had been struck by lightning; but
always our chauffeur steered so as to give plenty of margin between our
tyres and the edge of the precipice; and by-and-by I was thoroughly
charged with electricity so that I ceased to be actually afraid. All I
felt was that my soul was covered with a very thin, sensitive skin.
"Oh, Mr. Terrymore, for mercy's sake, for _heaven's_ sake...!" wailed
Mamma. "I don't feel _able_ to die to-day."
"You shan't, if I can help it," answered Mr. Barrymore, without looking
round; but as he never wears goggles, I could see his face plainly from