The Princess Passes

								

believe this. They were too kind and cordial; still, something in that
look exchanged between them hinted at a secret which concerned me, and
my curiosity was pricked. Nevertheless, I was grateful to Molly,
whatever her motive might be for hurrying on to Paris. Fond as I was
of the two, their happy love, constantly though inadvertently
displayed before my eyes, was not a panacea for the wound which they
were trying to cure, and I still longed for high Alpine solitudes.
I had let myself drift into a gloomy thought-land, when it occurred to
Jack that I had better learn to drive. No doubt the clear fellow
fancied that I "wanted rousing" and certainly I got it. Luckily, as a
small boy, I had taken an interest in mechanics, to the extent of
various experiments actively disapproved of by my family, and the old
fire was easily relit. I listened to his harangue in mere civility at
first, then with a certain eagerness. Molly sat in the tonneau, Jack
driving, full-petrol ahead, and I beside him. We talked motor talk,
and he forgot the churches, except when they seemed actually to come
out of their way to get in ours. I listened, and at the same time
gathered impressions of roads--long, strange, curiously individual
roads.
Someone has written of the "long, long Indian day." I should like to
write of the long, long roads of France. They had never before had any
place in my thoughts. Paris and the Riviera had been France for me
till now. I had never been intimate, never even got on terms of real
friendship with any country save my own; and I had sometimes been
narrow enough to take a kind of pride in this. The sweet English
country had yielded up her secrets to me; I knew her spring whimsies,
her soft summer moods, her autumn dreams, her wintry tempers, and I
had vaunted my faithfulness and love. But here was France in prime of
summer, giving me of her best. My heart warmed to her loveliness, and
I sniffed the perfume of her breath, mysteriously characteristic as
the chosen perfume of some loved woman's laces. It was glorious to
spin on, on, between the rows of sentinel poplars, bound for the
horizon, yet never reaching it, and regarding crowded haunts of men
more as interruptions than as halting places.
Harfleur was a mere mirage to me, a vision of a gently decaying town
left stranded by the stream of civilisation, flowing past to busy
Havre. Some lines from "Henry the Fifth" made elusive music in my
brain, mixed with a discussion of carburetters, explosion chambers,
and sparking-plugs. At Lillebonne, Winston deigned to break short his
string of motor technicalities and point out the position of the Roman
theatre, almost the sole treasure of the sort possessed by Northern
Europe. I stared through my goggles at the castle where the Conqueror
unfolded to the assembled barons his scheme for invading England; and
I begged for a slackening of speed at ancient Caudebec, which, with
its quay and terrace overhanging the Seine, and its primly pruned