It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of the cure, the Maison Hiéropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller’s commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle? Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and, shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea—a poet, in his way, was Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him captive—the splendour of the idea of dashing up to hotels in his own automobile dazed him. He beheld himself doing his hundred kilometres an hour and trailing clouds of glory whithersoever he went. To a child a moth-eaten rocking-horse is a fiery Arab of the plains; to Aristide Pujol this cheat of the scrap-heap was a sixty-horse-power thunderer and devourer of space.
How they managed to botch up her interior so that she moved unpushed is a mystery which Aristide, not divining, could not reveal; and when and where he himself learned to drive a motor-car is also vague. I believe the knowledge came by nature. He was a fellow of many weird accomplishments. He could conjure; he could model birds and beasts out of breadcrumb; he could play the drum—so well that he had a kettle-drum hanging round his neck during most of his military service; he could make omelettes and rabbit-hutches; he could imitate any animal that ever emitted sound—a gift that endeared him to children; he could do almost anything you please—save stay in one place and acquire material possessions. The fact that he had never done a thing before was to him no proof of his inability to do it. In his superb self-confidence he would have undertaken to conduct the orchestra at Covent Garden or navigate a liner across the Atlantic. Knowing this, I cease to bother my head about so small a matter as the way in which he learned to drive a motor-car.
Behold him, then, one raw March morning, scuttering along the road that leads from Arles to Salon, in Provence. He wore a goat-skin coat and a goat-skin cap drawn down well over his ears. His handsome bearded face, with its lustrous, laughing eyes, peeped out curiously human amid the circumambient shagginess. There was not a turn visible in the long, straight road that lost itself in the far distant mist; not a speck on it signifying cart or creature. Aristide Pujol gave himself up to the delirium of speed and urged the half-bursting engine to twenty miles an hour. In spite of the racing-track surface, the crazy car bumped and jolted; the sides of the rickety bonnet clashed like cymbals; every valve wheezed and squealed; every nut seemed to have got loose and terrifically clattered; rattling noises, grunting noises, screeching noises escaped from every part; it creaked and clanked like an over-insured tramp-steamer in a typhoon; it lurched as though afflicted with loco-motor ataxy; and noisome vapours belched forth from the open exhaust-pipe as though the car were a Tophet on wheels. But all was music in the ears of Aristide. The car was going (it did not always go), the road scudded under him, and the morning air dashed stingingly into his face. For the moment he desired nothing more of life.
This road between Arles and Salon runs through one of the most desolate parts of France: a long, endless plain, about five miles broad, lying between two long low ranges of hills. It is strewn like a monstrous Golgotha, not with skulls, but with huge smooth pebbles, as massed together as the shingle on a beach. Rank grass shoots up in what interstices it finds; but beyond this nothing grows. Nothing can grow. On a sunless day under a lowering sky it is a land accursed. Mile after mile for nearly twenty miles stretches this stony and barren waste. No human habitation cheers the sight, for from such a soil no human hand could wrest a sustenance. Only the rare traffic going from Arles to Salon and from Salon to Arles passes along the road. The cheery passing show of the live highway is wanting; there are no children, no dogs, no ducks and hens, no men and women lounging to their work; no red-trousered soldiers on bicycles, no blue-bloused, weather-beaten farmers jogging along in their little carts. As far as the eye can reach nothing suggestive of man meets the view. Nothing but the infinite barrenness of the plain, the ridges on either side, the long, straight, endless road cleaving through this abomination of desolation.
To walk through it would be a task as depressing as mortal could execute. But to the speed-drunken motorist it is a realization of dim and tremulous visions of Paradise. What need to look to right or left when you are swallowing up free mile after mile of dizzying road? Aristide looked neither to right nor left, and knew this was heaven at last.
between the folds of the blanket peeped the face
of a sleeping child
Suddenly, however, he became aware of a small black spot far ahead in the very middle of the unencumbered track. As he drew near it looked like a great stone. He swerved as he passed it, and, looking, saw that it was a bundle wrapped in a striped blanket. It seemed so odd that it should be lying there that, his curiosity being aroused, he pulled up and walked back a few yards to examine it. The nearer he approached the less did it resemble an ordinary bundle. He bent down, and lo! between the folds of the blanket peeped the face of a sleeping child.
“Nom de Dieu!” cried Aristide. “Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!”
He ought not to have said it, but his astonishment was great. He stared at the baby, then up and down the road, then swept the horizon. Not a soul was visible. How did the baby get there? The heavens, according to history, have rained many things in their time: bread, quails, blood, frogs, and what not; but there is no mention of them ever having rained babies. It could not, therefore, have come from the clouds. It could not even have fallen from the tail of a cart, for then it would have been killed, or at least have broken its bones and generally been rendered a different baby from the sound, chubby mite sleeping as peacefully as though the Golgotha of Provence had been its cradle from birth. It could not have come there accidentally. Deliberate hands had laid it down; in the centre of the road, too. Why not by the side, where it would have been out of the track of thundering automobiles? When the murderous intent became obvious Aristide shivered and felt sick. He breathed fierce and honest anathema on the heads of the bowelless fiends who had abandoned the babe to its doom. Then he stooped and picked up the bundle tenderly in his arms.