He did let me play the car's musical siren, though; a fascinating bugbear, supposed to warn children, chickens, and other light-minded animals that something important is coming, and they'd better look alive. It has two tunes, one grave, one gay. I suppose we would use the grave one if the creature hadn't looked alive?
Although he didn't say much, the chauffeur (or "shuvvie" as he scornfully names himself) knew all about Robert Macaire and Caspard De Besse—knew more about them than I, also their escapades on this road over the Esterels, and in the mountain fastnesses, when highwaymen were as fashionable as motor-cars are now. I'd forgotten that it was this part of the world where they earned their bread and fame; and was quite thrilled to hear that the ghost of De Besse is supposed to keep on, as a permanent residence, his old shelter cave near the summit of strangely shaped Mont Vinaigre. I'm sure, though, even if we'd passed his pitch at midnight instead of midday, he wouldn't have dared pop out and cry "Stand and deliver!" to a sixty-horsepower Aigle.
I almost wished it were night, as we swooped over mountain tops, our eyes plunging down the deep gorges, and dropping with fearful joy over precipices, for the effect would have been more solemn, more mysterious. I could imagine that the fantastically formed rocks which loomed above us or stood ranged far below would have looked by moonlight like statues and busts of Titans, carved to show poor little humanity such creatures as a dead world had known. But it is hard for one's imagination to do the best of which it feels capable when one is dying for lunch.
Even the old "Murder Inn," which my companion obligingly pointed out, didn't give me the thrill it ought, because time was getting on when we flew past it, and I would have been capable of eating vulgar bread and cheese under its wickedly historic roof if I had been invited.
"Do you suppose they know anything about the road and its history?" I asked the chauffeur, with a slight gesture of my swathed head toward the solid wall of glass which was our background.
"They? Certainly not, and don't want to know," he answered with an air of assurance.
"Why do they go about in motors then," I wondered, "if they don't take interest in things they pass?"
"You must understand as well as I do why this sort of person goes about in motors," said he. "They go because other people go—because it's the thing. The 'other people' whom they slavishly imitate may really like the exhilaration, the ozone, the sight-seeing, or all three; but to this type the only part that matters is letting it be seen that they've got a handsome car, and being able to say 'We've just come from the Riviera in our sixty-horse-power motor-car.' They'd always mention the power."
"Lady Turnour did, even to me," I remembered. "But is Sir Samuel like that?"
"No, to do him justice, he isn't, poor man. But his wife is his Juggernaut. I believe he enjoys lying under her wheels, or thinks he does—which is the same thing."