Why hadn’t I thought of that! If something would only happen....
It did.
Never, never has a motor breakdown been hailed with delight before by a passenger; but I blessed the fortunate accident that kept Monsieur Charrier and my employer fumbling, fidgeting and fuming about the bonnet for over half an hour by the roadside. Mademoiselle, in her lemon-coloured wrap and daring little hat, sat on the top of a low stone fence with me in my brown silk coat and skirt in which I’d first travelled down to The Lawn. I was so delighted by the delay that I could even laugh quite gaily at her as she chattered.
“Always the same! Each time that we take a passenger to make very quickly, there arrives this malheur!... Now, now, it is good? it is well? it is right? No?... Regard my father, Miss Nancy, on the earth under the auto nearly: he look like a little fat dog that has been run over, not? Ah look at this brave Billy, always the same idea, encore un spanner! Now he will lick her into shapes!... It is finish, Billy? No?... Ah, he is doing it express, on purpose.... You will loose the train, and Mademoiselle must return with you—what a chancey day!”
Mercy! Return with him?—the midnight train would be impossible—I should be kept until the next morning—Horrors! My heart was in my mouth at the thought....
It was with two minutes to spare, however, that we flung ourselves, with the hastiest of thanks, out of the motor, and rushed into the busy station that stretches down to the quay, where a couple of slanted funnels seemed as big as two leaning towers of Pisa painted red. No time to lose. He found me a corner-seat facing the engine, in a carriage with one other lady. He attended to my luggage with the speed and ease of a man who can make men obey, then he looked straight at me and began: “I haven’t time now, but look here, I shall——”
Again I baffled him.
“I have nothing to read!” I cried, as if in dismay over the fact. “Will you fetch me a paper—anything.”
With a little jerk of his shoulders he turned away to the bookstall, and I sat back in my corner looking dully out at the moving bustle on the platform below the big Norman Wilkinson posters of steamboats on a moonlit sea. Why couldn’t we start—it must be time! I’d said good-bye to his people, said it as if I were going no further than for one of my afternoon tramps at Porth Cariad with him. Now it was to him that I must say good-bye.... I couldn’t take it in yet. I didn’t want to. Above all, I didn’t want him to say it—or anything else.
Again the situation was unexpectedly saved.