Charles Norris Williamson

“ We've been up Vesuvius, not in the daytime, like the humdrum tourists, but by torchlight, and we saw the moon rise. Instead of rushing to the Museum the first thing and mooning vaguely about there for hours, we saved it until after we'd been out to Pompeii on the motor-car; then it was a hundred times more interesting, and we are coming back after Capri to pay another visit to the busts of Tiberius and his terrible mother. I felt in Rome as if it were an impertinence to be modern and young. ”

“ The road swept round to the left, ascending loop after loop, to a saddle of the island lying between two cliffs, crowned with the most picturesque ruins I ever saw. Everywhere you looked was a new picture, and oh! the delicious colour of sky, and sea, and the dove-grey of the cliffs! You can see next to nothing of the town till you come on it; then suddenly you are in a busy piazza, with an old palace or two and a beautiful tower, and everything characteristically Italian, even the sunshine, which is so vivid that it is like a pool of light. ”

“ MOLLY RANDOLPH TO HER FATHER
rand Hotel, Toulon⁠
December 20. My Wingless Angel,
It's lucky your poor dear hair is getting conspicuous by its absence, or it would stand up on end, I don't doubt, when you read a few lines farther. So, you see, even baldness is a blessing in disguise.
I won't keep you in suspense. The worst shall come first; after all that's happened I don't mind such a little thing as an anticlimax in writing to my indulgent and uncritical Dad.
Now for it.
I have deserted Aunt Mary and Jimmy Payne in a gorge. I am alone in a hotel—with Brown. ”

“ And one can take the bad, Catherine taste out of one's mouth by thinking of lovely little Mary Stuart singing like a lark through the rooms, and living there and in the garden the happiest days that she was ever to know.
One wouldn't suppose that a gloomy, plotting mind like Catherine's would have had a place in it for creating beauty; but it had its one ornamental corner, or she couldn't have thought out the bridge-gallery thrown across the Cher, springing from the original building and spanning the river to the farther shore. ”

“ Brown faced round too, and at the same instant, the fire having drunk the last drop of petrol, the flame suddenly died down, and there fell a curious silence after the roaring of the fire, which had been like a blast. The woodwork of the car, the hood and the upper part, as well as the wooden wheels, had all disappeared—the flame had swallowed and digested them. Of my varnished and dignified car there remained only a heap of twisted bits of iron, glowing a dull red. In the grey dawn we must have looked like witches at some secret and unholy rite. ”

“ Our landlady was there, a duck of a woman; the hotel porters in green baize aprons stood and stared; some women washing clothes at a trough in the corner stopped their work; and a lot of funny, wee schoolboys, with short cropped hair and black blouses with leather belts, buzzed round, gesticulating and trying to explain the mechanism of the car to each other. Rattray bustled about with an oil-can in his hand, then loaded up our luggage, and all was ready. With more dignity than confidence I mounted to the high seat beside Aunt Mary. ”

“ But somehow, bewteen Angoulême and Bordeaux, I took a wrong turning, and suddenly on ahead of us the good road ceased abruptly as if a straight line had been ruled across it, and the detestable pavé began.
"Oh, let's try it as an experience," commanded my Goddess. "I hate going back, and perhaps it doesn't last long." I trusted to this hope, for I knew that in many places the pavé is being dug up, here and there only short stretches of it being left, and I gingerly drove the Napier on to the execrable surface of uneven stones. We rattled and tossed, and steering became a matter of difficulty. ”

“ Fancy Aunt Mary and me lolling luxuriously (I love that word "lolling") in a snow-white car with scarlet cushions, all the brass-work gleaming like a fireman's helmet—the rakiest, smartest car imaginable! There are two seats in front and a roomy tonneau behind. The steering and other arrangements are quite different from those in the poor dead Dragon—rest its wicked soul! There's a steering-wheel, and below it two ducky little handles that do everything. One's the "advance sparking lever," the other the "mixture lever." ”

“ It is a place of entrancing beauty, and the gem of it all is the ancient Greek theatre. I suppose that nowhere in the world have nature and the noblest art that ever adorned the earth combined in a more perfect picture.
The resting-place chosen by Miss Randolph is not out of that picture, but a part of it. For five hundred years it was a monastery. How well those good old monks knew how to do themselves! They laid out a fairy garden on a gracious headland above the sea, overlooking a panorama the most beautiful in Sicily. ”

“ In England you see twenty good country houses for every one you pass in France—excepting only the district of the Loire; and outdoor life as we know it, on the road and on the river, doesn't seem to exist over here. Somehow I was never so much struck with this contrast before, though I know this country almost as well as I know my hat. Think of the English roads and lanes, of the pretty girls and decent men one meets on horseback or in smart dogcarts, the dowagers in victorias, the crowds of cyclists, the occasional fine motor-car, knickerbockered men walking for the pleasure of exercise! ”

“ Miss Randolph gave a little cry, translating for her aunt, who has no French.
"Shocking!" ejaculated Aunt Mary. "A regular juggernaut."
"Your car does not go as fast as that, mademoiselle?" the Frenchman went on. "A little heavy, I should think; a slow hill-climber?"
"On the contrary," Miss Randolph fired up. "Though my car has—er—some drawbacks, it goes splendidly uphill, doesn't it, Brown?"
"That is its strong point," I answered, grateful for the unexpected and kindly word of recognition thrown to me, one of the Others; but the Frenchman did not deign to notice the chauffeur. ”

“ Though we mounted many hundreds of feet, the road was so well engineered that gradients were not very trying. Our agreeable Napier, at any rate, made nothing of them, but simply flew up at twelve or fourteen miles an hour. And the descent on the other side! My heart comes into my mouth when I think of it. "It's quite safe," said Brown; but it looked the most breakneck thing in the world, and my very toes seemed to curl up, not with fear, but with a kind of awful joy. I think when a bird takes its great swoops through the air it must feel like we felt that day. ”

“ They belonged to a race of Amazons bred on Capri, whose daily work it is to land heavy goods and carry trunks on their heads to the omnibuses and cabs in waiting at the end of the quay. Before we were fairly in, they swooped like a pack of wolves on the car, laughing and gabbling, and somehow they and Brown landed it on the slippery little quay.
The news that there was an automobile on the island must have flashed around by magic telegraph, for people—swarms of people, more than you would have thought could live on the whole of Capri—came running from everywhere to see us start. ”

“ The bridge rests on an island in the middle of the wide, yellow, slow-moving stream of the Loire, which has a curiously still surface like ice. Brown drove slowly without my having to ask. He's wonderful that way. He always knows what you are feeling, as if you had telegraphed him the news. And there before us lay the little town of Amboise, sprinkled along the river-bank as if each house were a votive offering on the shrine of the Château towering above on its plateau of rock. ”

“ There's nothing in the world to equal travelling on a motor-car. You can go fast or slow; you can stop where you like and as long as you like; with a little luggage on your car you're as independent as a bird; and like a bird you float through the open air, with no thought for time-tables. When will the poet come who will sing the song of the motor-car? Maeterlinck has sung it in prose, but the song was too short.
Of course, after that horrid affair the other side of Toulon I couldn't let Jimmy drive any more. ”

“ One couldn't guess what would be on the other side of that tower; and it was like walking on through the next chapter of the same novel (walking slowly and with dignity, so that we might "live up to" the author of our being) to wander up a steep road leading to a plateau and reach the still, formal garden with the great castle rising out of it. ”

“ The morning we left Orleans was exquisite. The car went well; the magnificent Loire was brimming from bank to bank, and not meandering among disfiguring sand-banks, as it does later in the year; the wide, green landscape shone through a glitter of sunshine; and here and there in the blue sky floated a mass of tumbled white cloud. Our little party at first was silent. I think the beauty of the scene influenced us all, even Aunt Mary; and the thrumming of the motor formed a monotonous undercurrent to our thoughts. ”

“ It was almost a shock to see something so fresh and young living in such a forbidding, torture-haunted den as Louis' Château of Loches. She was like one of the little bright-coloured winter blossoms springing out from a cranny of the grey walls. When she had lighted rather a smelly lantern, we prepared to follow into the "fastnesses" of the castle. If ever that good old double-dyed word could be appropriate, it is to Loches. ”

“ As you don't know Biarritz, you'll think that in exchanging all the comforts of a servants' hall for a monkey-house I am not doing myself as well as I might. But there are monkey-houses and monkey-houses. This one is a delightful glass room built on to the front of the hotel, facing a garden and tennis courts, commanding a glorious view of the sea and also of every creature, human and inhuman, who goes by. One has tea in the monkey-house; one writes letters, reads novels, smokes or gossips, according to sex and inclination ”

“ I never knew how beautiful marble could be until I came to Pisa and Rome. Somehow I had associated Pisa with the Leaning Tower, and not with the Baptistry. I knew it existed, and, vaguely, that it was worth seeing; but Pisa meant the Leaning Tower to me. Now I couldn't tell you which has left the deeper impression. I'm not at all the same girl that I was before I put Pisa and Rome into the gallery of my mind. I must make myself a worthy frame for such pictures as I am storing up now. ”

“ I've always imagined that it must be terrible for a girl to come to herself after an accident and find she had no face.
I scrambled to my feet and began calling to the others. I think I called Brown first, because, you see, he is so quick in emergencies, and he would be ready to look after the others. But he didn't speak, and the most awful cold, sick feeling settled down on my heart. "Oh, Brown, Brown!" I heard myself crying, just as you hear yourself in a nightmare, and it hardly seemed more real than that. ”

“ How the car could have got on fire of its own accord was a mystery, unless it had spontaneous combustion, like that awful old man of Dickens, who burnt up and left a greasy black smudge; but there was no time to think, and I only kept saying to myself, as I hurried to slip on a few clothes (the sketchiest toilet I ever made, just a mere outline) , how lucky it was that my automobile stood in the courtyard where there was no roof, instead of being in the barn, like Monsieur Talleyrand's. ”

“ I was flying up a slope of perhaps one in fifteen, when I became aware of Beauty in Distress. An antediluvian car, which was recognisable by its rearward protuberance as something archaic, was stationary on the hill; two ladies sat on an extraordinarily high seat behind like a throne, and a mechanic was slouching towards a smith's forge by the roadside. One motorist, of course, must always offer help to another—to pass a stranded car would be like ignoring signals of distress at sea ”

“ I was a proud man when I drove my employers into the old-fashioned courtyard of the d'Orleans. Almond, I knew, was at the St. Aignan with the Napier, and there I presently joined him, to hear that he had done the total run from Versailles, with an hour's stop for lunch, in under the four hours, the car running splendidly all the way. Almond does not at all understand why he is left alone, and why I have gone off to drive two ladies in an out-of-date German car which any self-respecting automobilist would be ashamed to be seen on in France. ”

“ Beyond Salon the road becomes interestingly accidentée. One climbs among the mountains which fold Marseilles in their encircling arms, and has spacious views over the great Etang de Berre to the glittering Mediterranean. The Napier crested the hills without faltering, and from the top we had a long run down (over bad pavé at the last) into the lively, noisy streets of gay Marseilles, Payne guiding the car very decently over intricate tram lines, finally turning across the pavement to circle into the white, airy court of a large hotel. ”

“ At Palermo she had bought Douglas Sladen's book, In Sicily, and Miss Lorimer's travel-romance, By the Waters of Sicily, so that she was already fired at the name of Castrogiovanni, and needed no persuasion from me to turn aside to scale the ancient rock-fortress that marks the very centre of Sicily. I am pretty sure that never before has a motor-car climbed that winding road, and I think the whole population turned out and ran at our heels as we drove slowly through the sombre, wind-swept, eagle-eyrie of a town. ”

“ The two ladies were still on the car. Payne had got off at first, but had slipped back when things began to be lively. I alone was on the ground, close to the bonnet, so that if needful I could protect the motor and Miss Randolph at the same time.
The crowd consulted an instant, then stampeded the car. Aunt Mary shrieked, and threw out her purse, as if she flung a live lamb to hungry wolves. The motor was going still, but to charge into the crowd might mean killing a dozen wretched peasants. ”

“ Dad, we drove in the automobile along the Appian Way. It sounds shocking, but it wasn't; it was glorious. There is never anything jarring (I don't mean that for a pun) about going into the midst of old and wonderful things on a motor-car, for it is wonderful too, and it has a dignity of its own—the dignity of fine and perfect mechanism which seems alive, like a splendid Pegasus or an obedient unicorn, or some other strange legendary animal which you are obliged to respect and marvel at.
And Brown took me into the Colosseum last night—late—when the moon was rising out of torn black clouds. ”