We stopped so long at the Certosa that the sun had gone far down the west as we walked through the beautiful, strange gateway to the roadside resting-place of our car.
Where crowds come from in the country is as mysterious as where pins and hairpins go to; but anyhow, there was a wide ring of people round the automobile, in which our hired caretaker sat gazing condescendingly on the throng. When we arrived on the scene, with our hands full of scents made and bottled by the banished monks, quaint pottery, and photographs of frescoes, general interest was transferred to us, but only for a moment. Even Maida's beauty failed as an attraction beside the starting-handle of the car, when the Chauffeulier turned it.
"Don't you see many motors here?" asked Sir Ralph of our deposed guard, and he shook his head. "Not one a month," he said, "though they say that some of the rich men in Milan use them. I do not know where they go."
Almost as he spoke a big one shot by, heading for Alessandria and—who knows but for Cuneo? When we came to think, it was the first we had seen since Ventimiglia, though on the French side of the Riviera the things had been a pest to everybody—who hadn't one.
As we started, the sinking sun turned a million tiny clouds floating up from behind the world into rose-pink marabout feathers, which by-and-by were silvered round their curly edges by a wonderful light kindled somewhere in the east. It grew brighter and brighter as the rose-coloured plumes first took fire down at the western horizon, and then burned to ruddy ashes. When half the sky was silver up came floating a huge pearl, glistening white, and flattened out of the perfect round on one side, like two or three of the biggest pearls on Mamma's long rope.
Even in America I never saw the sunset-glow so quickly quenched by a white torrent of moonlight. But on this night it was not white; it was soft and creamy, like mother-of-pearl. And as the opal gleam of the sky darkened to deep amethyst the stars came out clear and sparkling and curiously distinct one from the other, like great hanging lamps of silver, diamond-crusted.
All the world was bathed in this creamy light, while the sky scintillated with jewels like the flashing of a spangled fan, as we drove into the outskirts of Milan.
It had been lucky for us that there was a moon, as we had a crumpled brass waffle in the place of our big lamp; but the effect of the town lights, orange-yellow mingling with the white radiance pouring down from the sky, was wonderful and mysterious on arched gateways, on dark façades of tall buildings, on statues, on columns, on fountains. Coming in out of the country stillness, the noise and rush of the big city seemed appalling. Fierce electric trams dashed clanging and flashing in all directions, making a pandemonium worse than Chicago or the streets of Paris. Horses and carts darted across the glittering tracks under our noses, bicyclists spun between our car and lumbering hotel omnibuses, and hadn't an inch to spare. In the middle of one huge street was something that looked like a Roman ruin, with every shadow sharp as a point of jet in the confused blending of light. Brazen bells boomed, mellow chimes fluted, church clocks mingled their voices, each trying to tell the hour first; and to add to the bewildering effect of our entry, drivers and people on foot waved their arms, yelling wildly something I couldn't understand.
Mr. Barrymore understood, however, and only just in time to save an accident, for it seemed that we were on the wrong side of the road. Suddenly and arbitrarily it was the rule to keep on the left side instead of the right, and the Chauffeulier shot across before a tram, approaching at the speed of a train, could run us down.
"That's the worst of this part of Italy," I heard him shout over the din to Maida. "Any town that chooses makes a different rule for itself and its suburbs, and then expects strangers to know by instinct just where and when it changes."