The Princess Passes

								

approaching cart, Jack was forced to steer perilously near the yapping
beast.
I snatched the weapon, pulled the trigger, and--a mild, mellifluous
trickle which would have disgraced a toilet vaporiser sprayed forth.
Jack, Molly, and the peasants in the approaching cart burst into
shouts of laughter. The Spitz, undismayed by the gentle shower, which
had spattered his nose with a drop or two, leaped at the weapon, and,
irritated, I flung it at his head. It fell innocuously in the road and
our last sight of the Spitz was when, rejoined by his lizard friend,
he industriously gnawed at the pistol, mistaking it for a bone, while
the Dachs gratefully lapped up the water I had provided. My surprise
was a popular success, but not the kind of success which I had
planned. Jack said that he could have "told me so" if I had asked him,
and I vowed in future to let dogs delight to bark and bite without
interference from me.
The one inept remark which Shelley seems ever to have made was that
"there is nothing to see in France." My opinion, as we spun along the
road which would lead us to Lucerne and my waiting mule, was that
there was almost too much to see, too much charm, too much beauty for
the peace of mind of an imaginative traveller; there were so many
valleys which one longed to explore, in which one felt one could be
content without going farther, so many blue glimpses of mysterious
mountains, veiled by the haze of dreamland, that one suffered a
constant succession of acute pangs in thinking that one would
probably never see them again, that one would need at least nine long
lives if one were to spend, say, even a month in each place.
Molly advised me not to be a spendthrift of my emotions, at this stage
of the journey, lest I should be a worn-out wreck before the grandest
part came, but the idea of husbanding enthusiasm did not commend
itself to me. Why not enjoy this moment, instead of waiting until the
moment after next? It was too much like saving up one's good clothes
for "best," a lower-middle-class habit which I have detested since the
days when I howled for my smartest Lord Fauntleroy frills in the
morning.
There were sweet villages where they made cheese, and where I could
have been happy making it with Helen Blantock; there were châteaux
with turret rooms where my book shelves would have fitted excellently;
but always we fled on, on, until at last, after two bewildering,
cinematographic days, we drove into the streets of that dignified and
delightful city, Bern.
It had not been necessary for us to pass through Bern; it was, in
fact, a few yards more or less out of the most direct path. We chose
this route simply and solely with the view of paying a visit to the
Bears. Molly had never met them; I had neglected them since childhood;
Jack looked forward to the pleasure of introducing them to his wife.
It was on our way to call upon the Bears, that destiny seduced me to
turn my head at a certain moment, and look into a shop window.