"Is that a road?" I asked, pointing up to a network like a skein of silk twisted in a hundred zigzags across the face of the mountain from bottom to top. "Why, it's like the way up Jack's beanstalk. No sane automobile could do it."
"Some could," said Mr. Barrymore, "but I dare say it's lucky for us that ours hasn't got to. It's the old road, only used now to communicate with that desolate fortress you see on the top shelf of the mountain, standing up there on the sky-line like the ark on Ararat. All this country is tremendously fortified by both the French and Italians, in case they should ever come to loggerheads. Above us somewhere is a long tunnel burrowing into the col, and the new road runs through that instead of over the summit."
"Bump!" went the car, as he finished his explanation, and then we began to wade jerkily through a thick layer of loose stones that had been spread over the road like hard butter over stale bread.
"Le corse" (that is what our landlord had called the cruel wind sweeping down from the snow mountains) was hurling itself into our faces; our fat rubber tyres were bouncing over the stones like baseballs, and I'd never been so uncomfortable nor so perfectly happy in my life. I wished I were a cat, so that I could purr, for purring has always struck me as the most thorough way of expressing satisfaction. When other people are in automobiles, and you are walking or jogging past with a pony, you glare and think what insufferable vehicles they are; but when you're spinning, or even jolting, along in one of them yourself, then you know that there's nothing else in the world as well worth doing. I made a remark like that to Mr. Barrymore, and he gave me such a friendly, appreciative look as he said, "Have you discovered all this already?" that I decided at once to eat my heart out with a vain love for him.
I haven't been really in love before since I was ten; so the sensation was quite exciting, like picking up a lovely jewel on the street, which you aren't sure won't be claimed by somebody else. I was trying to think what else I could say to fascinate him when the car lost its breath again, and—"r-r-retch" went in another speed.
"It's our 'first and last,'" said Mr. Barrymore. "Good old girl, she's going to do it all right, though there's many a twenty-four horse-power car that wouldn't rise to it. By Jove, this is a road—and a half. I believe, Ralph, that you and I had better jump off and ease her a bit."
Mamma squeaked, and begged our chauffeur not to leave us to go up by ourselves, or we should be over the awful precipice in an instant. But Mr. Barrymore explained that he wasn't deserting the ship; and he walked quickly along by the side of the car, through the bed of sharp stones, keeping his hand always on the steering-wheel like a pilot guiding a vessel among hidden rocks.
Maida would have been out too, in a flash, if Mr. Barrymore had let her, but he told us all to sit still, so we did, happy (judging the others by myself) in obeying him.
I hadn't supposed there could be such a road as this. If one hadn't had hot and cold creeps in one's toes for fear the "good old girl" would slide back down hill and vault into space with us in her lap, one would have been struck dumb with admiration of its magnificence. As a matter of fact, we were all three dumb as mutes, but it wasn't only admiration that paralysed my tongue or Mamma's, I know, whatever caused the phenomenon with Maida, who has no future worth clinging to.
As we toiled up, in spite of the stones that did their best to keep us back, we simply hung on the breathing of the motor, as Mamma used to on mine when I was small and indulged in croup. When she gasped, we gasped too; when she seemed to falter, we involuntarily strained as if the working of our muscles could aid hers. All our bodies sympathized with the efforts of her body, which she was making for our sakes, dragging us up, up, into wonderful white, shining spaces where it seemed that summer never had been and never would dare to come.