Ironia is a country of extremes. Unusual wealth rubs elbows with abject poverty. Grand palaces line the Lodz in Serajoz, and in the narrow streets close on either side human beings fight for a meagre existence.
The same rule of contrast holds with reference to the Ironian character. The peasantry are honest, hospitable, devout and ignorant. The upper classes, the aristocracy, who control the mining and industrial enterprises from which Ironian wealth emanates, are sharp, clever and quite unscrupulous. Only in the few old families which had managed to escape extinction in the Turkish wars does the innate nobility of the peasant character, purified by education and refinement, show itself. Peter was typical of the aristocratic minority; Miridoff of the majority.
Fenton discovered to what a sharp degree the law of contrast was carried in this picturesque country when the driver turned out of the crowded streets of Serajoz and guided his car with a steadily increasing hum along one of the wonderfully well preserved Roman roads that run out in all directions from the capital city, like the fingers of an out-stretched land. Back in Serajoz every evidence was to be seen of advanced civilisation. In the country they soon passed out of the area where their car was accepted as a matter of course. Fifteen miles from the city their progress through the many villages that dotted the road became marked by confusion and clatter, the peasants staring in open-mouthed amazement at the spectacle of the fast-moving car. It was quite apparent that the automobile was still an object of almost superstitious wonder to these simple souls.
The excitement which attended their progress became more marked when the driver turned off the main road and struck through a maze of winding side-roads that circled along the foot-hills on a gradually ascending grade. Crouched back in the swaying tonneau, a prey to fear and worry, Fenton made frequent use of the only Ironian word that he had learned before starting on this headlong pursuit, "Faster." The driver, who reverenced the car with the same zeal that a Christian will sometimes show in the study of an Oriental creed, obeyed with gleeful alacrity. He had always wanted to know just how fast it could be made to go, this devil-wagon with its intricate buttons and levers, the secrets of which he had studied in the same spirit as he would have approached the formulæ of a sorcerer. Having at last found a passenger of the same frame of mind as himself, Jaleski leaned over the wheel with a smile that brought his beaked nose down with a still more pronouncedly owl-like suggestion, and the wheels fairly lifted off the ground. The car skimmed along the curving highways; ascended steep grades with a graceful ease of a powerful bird on the wing; dashed through villages like a puffing, black Juggernaut; and spread a trail of chattering, fear-stricken peasantry in its wake.
To Fenton the ecstatic Jaleski seemed like a genie crouched over the edge of a magic carpet, guiding it with supernatural speed across an earthly continent. He expected that every minute would be his last, though he made no effort to stave off the impending doom.
But Jaleski proved an artist at the wheel. He brought the imagination of the East to the manipulation of the levers and bars of the materialistic West, and seemed to be able to coax extra speed from them without relaxing his perfect control. He appeared to tell by instinct just what lay beyond the next bramble-obscured turn in the road. He had an extra sense for knowing when to turn out for unseen obstacles. Fenton began to feel that a sorcerer was at the wheel.
They came in record time to the quaint little village of Kail Baleski, which shelters itself at the very base of the foot-hills, and has not changed in any detail for the last two hundred years. They found the place in a state of wildest turmoil. Crowds of villagers stood in the one street along which the village straggles with a vague suggestion of child-built blocks. As Jaleski regretfully brought the car to a stop they were surrounded by a mob who waved their arms and jabbered incessantly. Jaleski picked the purport of it from the babel of talk, and, turning a tragic face on his passenger, endeavoured to relate the disturbing news.
After questioning him impatiently in imperfect German, Fenton gave up the effort to establish intelligent communication, and climbed from the car. He reproached himself bitterly for having started out on so important a mission without bringing an interpreter along.
Finally, however, he perceived a possible means out of his dilemma. Walking down the street toward them came the village priest, benevolent and white-haired, in a worn cassock and rusty clerical hat that bespoke either the poverty of the neighbourhood or the ascetic character of the wearer. The old priest's face was clouded with the same trouble that stared so unmistakably and yet so unintelligibly from the brown faces of the villagers. Fenton addressed him eagerly in French, haltingly in German and finally in English. And, wonder of wonders, at the last attempt he found that he had tuned his C.Q.D. message to the lingual receiver of the old cleric.
"I speak some Eenglish," said the priest slowly. "Once was I in London. Your Milton and your Shakespeare, of much have I read."