As the two walked down the many windings of the mule path they met labourers coming up from the day's work in the country of the rich, far below. Some of the young men, clattering along in groups, joined in singing the strange tuneless songs, memories of Saracen days, which Vanno had heard on his first mountain walk. The old men did not sing. They climbed stolidly, with heads and shoulders bent, yet not as if discouraged by the thought of the long, steep way before them before they could rest at home. They had the air of taking life as it was, entirely for granted.
The darkness was bleached with a sheen of stars, and the pulsing beams that shot across the sky from the lighthouses of Cap Ferrat and Antibes. Here and there, too, an electric lamp dangled from a wire over the mule path, and revealed a flash of white teeth in a dark face or struck a glint from a pair of deep Italian eyes. But they were the eyes and the teeth of young men, or of girls climbing with baskets of washing on their heads. The old men looked down, watching their own footsteps; and their stooping figures were vague and shadowy as ships that pass in the night, not to be recognized if seen again by daylight. Now and then a little old woman stumbled up the path, driving a donkey which tripped daintily along in silent primness, under a load of fresh-cut olive branches. The sound of the tiny feet on the stones and the swish of olive leaves against the wall added to the poetry of the night for Vanno, though he reflected that it was all commonplace enough to the donkeys and the women, who were as important as he in the scheme of things. After all, it was but a question of thinking!
Boys coming up from some late errand, played at being soldiers, and sprang out at each other from behind jutting corners of rock, imitating the firing of guns, or uttering explosive cries.
Vanno felt a great kindness for all the world, and especially for these people who—almost all of them—had the blood of Italy in their veins. He remembered the curé's saying with a smile that even now, if all Italians were banished from the French coast between Cannes and Mentone, the Riviera would be emptied of more than half its inhabitants; and it gave him a warm feeling in his heart to be surrounded by people of his own blood, at this moment of his great happiness. He would have liked to give these men something to make them happy also, for he knew that they were poor, and that those who were most fortunate were those who worked hardest. Each shadowy figure, as it passed on its way up the mountain, gave out a faint odour, not disagreeable or dirty, but slightly pungent, and like the smell of iron filings: what Tolstoi called "the good smell of peasants."
The fire which had enveloped all Monte Carlo at sunset had burnt out long ago, but in the west a faint red-brown glow smouldered, as if a smoky torch had been trailed along the horizon. Monte Carlo and the Rock of Monaco rose out of the steel-bright sea like one immense jewel-box, or a huge purple velvet pincushion, stuck full of diamond and topaz headed pins, with here and there a ruby or an emerald. These lights, reflected in the water, trailed down into mysterious depths, like illuminated roots of magic flowers; and the bright shimmer spreading out over the moving ripples lay on the surface like glittering chain-armour.
Although they had the blaze of these amazing jewels always before their eyes, somehow in talking Mary and Vanno contrived to lose the way, descending to the high road nearer Cap Martin than Monte Carlo. It was six o'clock, and a long tramp home along the level, in the dust thrown up by motors and the trotting hoofs of horses, but in the distance a tram car coming from Mentone sent out a shower of electric sparks, like fireflies crushed to death between iron wheels and iron track. As the car advanced, Vanno stepped out into the road and hailed it. No arrêt was near, but the driver stopped, with an obliging, French-Italian smile, and the two young people almost hurled themselves into empty seats at the first-class end of the tram.
Faces which had been inclined to frown at the illegal delay, even of six seconds, smoothed into good nature at sight of the handsome couple. Every one at once took it for granted that they were lovers. Mary's hair, ruffled by the hasty putting on of her hat, without a mirror, told the story of a stolen kiss to German eyes swimming with sentiment and romance—eyes which to an unappreciative world appeared incapable of either. Most of the eyes in this first-class compartment were German eyes, and some of the faces out of which they looked were round and uninteresting; but not all. German was the language being loudly talked across the car, from one seat to another; and a German mandate had caused all the windows and ventilators to be shut, in fear of that fatal thing, "a draught." English people sitting stiffly in corners, boiling with the desire to protest yet too reserved and proud to "risk a row," raged internally with the belief that their German neighbours were coarse, food-loving, pushing, selfish creatures who cared nothing for the beauty of the Riviera, and came only because of the cheap round trip, and the hope of winning a few five-franc pieces. The real truth was very different. The "pushing creatures" were selfish only because they were not self-conscious. They were as perfectly happy as children. They raved loudly in ecstasy over the beauty of everything, and were blissfully ignorant that it was possible for any one to despise or hate them. Frankly they admired Vanno and Mary, staring in the unblinking, unashamed, beaming way that children have of regarding what interests them; and their kind, unsnobbish hearts went out to the young couple as no English hearts in the car went out.
Two persons sitting together at the other end, but on the same side as the newcomers, could not see what the pair were like, without bending forward and stretching out their necks. One of these, fired by the intense interest displayed on German faces, could not resist the temptation to be curious. She peered round the corner of a large, well-filled overcoat from Berlin, and saw Mary and Vanno smiling at each other, as oblivious of all observers as though they had the tram to themselves.
"You must take a peep, St. George," she said in her husband's ear, that she might be heard over the noise of the tram, without roaring. "It's that beautiful Miss Grant I told you about; and she's with the Roman Prince who invented the parachute Rongier used in the Nice 'flying week.' They are certainly in love with each other! They couldn't look as they do if they weren't. Perhaps they're engaged. Poor Dick! All his trouble for nothing."
"Why poor Dick?" inquired the Reverend George Winter.