Beyond Couhé-Verac we had our first dog accident. Dogs, you know, are as great a nuisance to automobiles as they are to cycles, and they charge at one's car with such vehemence that their impetus almost carries them under the wheels. Sometimes they show their strength by galloping alongside the car for a couple of hundred yards, barking so furiously the while that their bodies are contorted by the violence of the effort. I was driving at a moderate pace (something under thirty miles an hour) when a beautiful collie which had been standing by the roadside walked quietly out and planted himself with his back to me in front of the car. The fact was that he saw his master coming along the road, and had gone forward to greet him. The whole thing happened in an instant, so that I had no time to stop. I think the dog must have been deaf not to hear the noise of the car. I shouted, but he took no notice. To swerve violently to one side was to risk upsetting the car; besides, there was no room to do this as another vehicle happened to be passing. If there had been only the car to sacrifice, I would have sacrificed it to save that collie; but I couldn't sacrifice Miss Randolph. There was nothing for it but to drive over the dog. With a sickening wrench of the heart, I saw the nice beast disappear under the front of the car. Instantly slowing down, I looked behind me expecting to see a mangled corpse. But there was the dog rolling over and over on the road. Clearly some under part of the car had struck him and sent him spinning. The noise, the unexpected blow, the fierce, hot blast of the poisonous exhaust pouring into his face, must have made the poor fellow think that he had struck a travelling earthquake. But happily he was unhurt. As I looked he got on to his feet, and with his tail between his legs, ran to his master for consolation. Our last glimpse showed us that comedy had followed tragedy, for the master was beating the dog with a cane for getting in our way. I was afraid Miss Randolph would scream or faint, but she did neither, only turned white as marble, and never looked prettier in her life. Aunt Mary yelled, of course, but more in fear for ourselves than for the collie, I think. She says she would like dogs better "if their bark could be extracted."
Angoulême is, like Poitiers, a town set upon a hill, a quaint old town, worth seeing, but we were eager now to get to the true South, and merely gave ourselves time to lunch (the waiter producing, with a flourish, enticing but indigestible pâtés de perdrix aux truffes) and to drive slowly along some of the famous terraced boulevards that form the distinction and the charm of Angoulême. Certainly the place stands romantically on its high and lonely hill, almost surrounded by the clear waters of the Charante. At Angoulême we saw, I may say, the first professional beggars we had met on the tour. A warm sun seems to breed beggars as it breeds mosquitoes, or is it that Southern peoples have less self-respect than the Northern?
A drawback to automobilism in France is the fact that many of the great direct main roads are pavé I believe that this is a remnant of the old days of road-making, when these heavy cobbles formed the one surface that would stand artillery. For ordinary traffic the pavé roads are impossible, and their existence must be a drawback to trade and intercourse. In France they sell special bicycling maps showing with dotted lines all the pavé roads, and these I have carefully studied, as it is worth making any détour to avoid the awful jolting of the pavé. But somehow, between Angoulême and Bordeaux, I took a wrong turning, and suddenly on ahead of us the good road ceased abruptly as if a straight line had been ruled across it, and the detestable pavé began.
"Oh, let's try it as an experience," commanded my Goddess. "I hate going back, and perhaps it doesn't last long." I trusted to this hope, for I knew that in many places the pavé is being dug up, here and there only short stretches of it being left, and I gingerly drove the Napier on to the execrable surface of uneven stones. We rattled and tossed, and steering became a matter of difficulty. The irritating thing was that each side of this detestable road were wide belts of inviting grass, but with malignant ingenuity these are cut up at frequent intervals by oblique drainage gutters, which forbid the passage of anything wider than a bicycle. For bicycles there are indeed special tracks kept in order by the Touring Club de France, but all four-wheeled vehicles must jolt and bump along the rough, uneven stones. By the time we reached the first cross-road Aunt Mary begged for mercy, and I was glad to have the order to get off the pavé at any cost. Soundly as the Napier is built, it was a tremendous and unfair strain upon springs and tyres, and all the while I was dreading that something would go. Threading our way through endless vineyards by a labyrinth of by-ways, we ran through Barbezieux and Libourne, and as day was falling crossed the noble bridge over the Garonne into bustling Bordeaux.
Next day we took a run on the car along the Quai des Chartrons and through some of the chief streets and squares of Bordeaux, just to get a glimpse of the handsome town, at which Miss Randolph turned up her pretty nose because it was "new and prosperous"; then, guided by a porter from the hotel who went before us on his bicycle, we threaded the city on our way out to Arcachon. There was some unavoidable pavé and many odious tramlines; but at last our guide left us on the outskirts of the town, and we sped on to a curious little toy suburb called St. Martin, studded with neat, one-storied, red-roofed cottages, like houses in a child's box of bricks, and all with romantic names, such as Belle Idée, Mon Repos, Augustine, Mon Cœur, and so on. The whole place seemed like an assemblage of dove cotes specially planned for honeymoon couples, and gave the oddest effect of unreality. Then we passed into the green twilight of the great pine forest which extends all the way to the sea.
A romantically beautiful road lay before us. For more than thirty miles it runs straight and smooth through high aromatic pines, springing from a carpet of bracken. Miss Randolph, I must tell you, has become an expert driver, and at sight of the long, straight road said she would take the wheel. So I stopped a moment, and we changed places. She put the car at its highest speed, and we flew along the infinite perspective of the never-ending avenue. This vast pine forest is a desert, and we passed only through small and scattered villages. That flight through the pine forest of the Landes will always be to me an ineffaceable memory. None of us spoke; two of us felt, I think, that we were close to Nature's heart. The heady, balsamic odour of the pines exhilarated us, and the wind, playing melancholy music on the Eolian harps of their branches, seemed like a deep accompaniment to the humming throb of the tireless motor. As often as I dared I stole a look sideways at Miss Randolph's profile. She sat erect, her little gauntletted hands resting light as thistledown upon the wheel, but her fingers and her wrist nervous and alert as a jockey riding a thoroughbred, her eyes intent on the long, straight road before her, and a look almost of rapture upon her face.
We had raced silently through the forest for nearly an hour, when, mingling with the balsam of the pines there came a pungent odour of ozone floating from open blue spaces beyond the sombre girdle of the pines. Miss Randolph threw at me a questioning glance. "It must be the sea," I answered, and in a few moments more, after passing through the ancient town of La Teste, we came out upon the edge of a vast lagoon, semicircular, the distant shores almost lost in an indistinct blue haze. "The Bassin d'Arcachon," I said. Still, no town was visible, only the great expanse of landlocked sea, its shore dotted with the brown wooden cabins of the oyster fishers. It seemed like coming to the end of the world.
Slowing down a little, we followed a raised causeway that skirted the edge of the Bassin, and presently entered upon a long, straight street-one of the oddest streets you have ever seen, one whole side of it (that next the sea) being composed of fantastic bungalows and pleasure-houses of all imaginable styles, each set in its own garden, and the whole town drowned in an ocean of pines. At the outskirts I took the helm again, for Miss Randolph scarcely trusts her skill in traffic. Not that there was enough to be alarming in Arcachon, for the place seemed under a spell of silence. We drove through the long main street, past an imposing white château and a good many quite charming houses, until we came to a hotel which the Goddess fancied, and turned into a garden. I'd never been to Arcachon before, and supposed from the guide-books that this was the place for "my ladies" (as the couriers say) to stop. But the landlady came out, and welcoming us with one breath, recommended us with the next to their winter house in the forest. This place, looking over the sea, was for summer; the other was now more agreeably sheltered.
The "house in the forest" sounded well in the ears of the Goddess, so we drove off to find it, according to the directions of Madame Feras. The Napier spun us up a steep, winding road into a charming garden surrounding an Alhambra sort of place, which Aunt Mary thought "real gay," being bitterly disappointed to find it was not our hotel, but Arcachon's casino. The garden proved to be, however, practically the beginning of the Ville d'Hiver, a quaint and delightful collection of villas which look as if they had been scattered like ornate seeds among the crowding pine of the Landes. Of these seeds the "Continental" is the most imposing, and, by-the-way, this climate would suit you, I should think; it's an extraordinary combination of pine and sea air, which would make a doctor's fortune as a tonic, if he could cork it up in bottles.