Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/264

 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. He realised that I distrusted him and rather sulkily resigned the wheel, blaming the car for the accident and declaring that it could not have happened to his Panhard, which, of course, is silly. So Brown took the helm again, and Jimmy sat in the tonneau with Aunt Mary, where they whispered and chuckled a good deal together, appearing to have a real live mystery up their sleeves, which I suppose had something to do with the promised surprise at Cannes.

It was quite late in the day before the steering-gear was mended and we could take the road again, and then we all thought it a pity to run through the dark to Cannes, so we decided to stay a second night in Toulon, at the same hotel where I had dinner with Brown; he, poor fellow, being this time banished to some invisible lower region, or another hotel, for Aunt Mary and Jimmy would have had fits if I had proposed that he should make a fourth at our table. I thought the people of the hotel and the head waiter looked curiously at me; for one night they saw me dine with a gentleman who the next night drives to the door as my chauffeur (I assure you,