The Princess Passes

								

with motors and mules, far from valets and civilisation, I was
nevertheless toward enough to hint that Locker must be prepared for a
wire at any time. I had often derived a quaint pleasure from the
consciousness that he despised my bookish habits and certain
unconventionalities not suited to a 'hearl'; but one must draw the
line somewhere, and I drew it at the mule. I would give a good deal
rather than Locker should suspect me of the mule.
It was arranged that we should leave from Jack's house in Park Lane,
and as we wanted to reach Southampton early, our start was to be at
nine o'clock. "In France," Jack had said to me, "we could reel off the
distance almost as quickly as the train; but in our blessed land, with
its twenty miles an hour speed limit, its narrow winding roads,
chiefly used in country places as children's playgrounds, and its
police traps, motoring isn't the undiluted joy it ought to be. The
thing to prepare for is the unexpected."
At half-past eight at Jack's door, I bade an almost affectionate
farewell to the last cabhorse with which for many wild weeks I should
have business dealings. The untrammelled life before me seemed to be
signalised by the lonely suit case which was the one article of
luggage I was allowed to carry on the motor. A portmanteau was to
follow me vaguely about the Continent, and I had visions of a pack to
supersede the suit case, when my means of transport should be a mule.
Sufficient for the motor was the luggage thereof, however, and when my
neat leather case was deposited in Jack's hall, I was rewarded with
Molly's approving comment that it would "make a lovely footstool."
We had breakfast together, as though nothing dreadful were about to
happen, and I heartened myself up with strong coffee. By the time we
had finished, and Molly had changed herself from a radiant girl into a
cream-coloured mushroom, with a thick, straight, pale-brown stem, the
Thing was at the door--Molly's idol, the new goddess, with its votive
priest pouring incense out of a long-nosed oil can and waving a
polishing rag for some other mystic rite.
This servant of the car answered to the name of Gotteland, and having
learned from Jack that he had started life as a jockey in Hungary, I
thought evil of him for abandoning the horse for the machine. He
evidently belonged to that mysterious race of beings called suddenly
into existence by a vast new industry; mysterious, because how or why
a man drifts or jumps into the occupation of chauffeur is never
explained to those who see only the finished article. Jack praised him
as a model of chauffeury accomplishments, among which were a knowledge
of seventeen languages more or less, to say nothing of dialects, and a
temper warranted to stand a burst tyre, a disordered silencer, an
uncertain ignition, and (incidentally) a broken heart--all occurring
at the same time. Despite these alleged perfections, I distrusted the