The Lightning Conductor | Page 7

favour is that
it has solid tyres, and not those horrid pneumatics, which are always
bursting and puncturing, and give no end of trouble. "With solid tyres
you are always safe," said Mr. Cecil-Lanstown. I can't help thinking,
though, that on roads like these of Dieppe it would be soothing to have
"pneus," as they call them. Jingle, jingle! scrunch, scrunch! goes the
machinery inside, and all the loose parts of the car. It did get on my
nerves.
But soon we were out of the town and on one of the smoothest roads
you ever saw. Rattray said it was a "route nationale," and that they are
the best roads in the world. The car bounded along as if it were on a
billiard-table. Even Aunt Mary said, "Now, if it were always like this--"
My spirits went up, up. I proudly smiled and bowed to the peasants in
their orchards by the roadsides. I was even inclined to pat Rattray on
the shoulder of his black leather coat. This, this was life! The sun shone,
the fresh air sang in our ears, the car ran as if it had the strength of a
giant. I felt as independent as a gipsy in his caravan, only we were

travelling at many times his speed. The country seemed to unfold just
like a panorama. At each turn I looked for an adventure.
We skimmed through a delicious green country given up to enormous
orchards which, Aunt Mary read out of a guide-book, yield the famous
cidre de Normandie. I thought of the lovely pink dress this land would
wear by-and-by, and then suddenly we came out from a small road on
to a broad, winding one, and there was a wide view over waving
country, with a white town like a butterfly that had fluttered into a
bird's nest. Rattray let the car go down this long road towards the valley
at something like thirty miles an hour, and Aunt Mary's hand had
nervously grasped the rail when there came a kind of sigh inside the car,
and it paused to rest.
Rattray jumped off and made puzzled inspection, "Can't see anything
wrong, miss; must take off the luggage and look inside." It is a
peculiarity that every working part is hidden modestly under the body
of the car. This protects them from wet and dust, Mr. Cecil-Lanstown
told me; but it seems a little inconvenient to have to haul off all the
luggage every time you want to examine the machinery. It didn't take
long to find out what was the matter. The "aspiration pipe," Rattray
said, had worked loose (no doubt through the jolting over the Dieppe
pavé) and the "vapour couldn't get from the carburetter to the explosion
chamber."
I only partly understood, but I felt that the poor car wasn't to blame.
How could it be expected to go on without aspirating? There was "no
spanner to fit the union," and Rattray darkly hinted at further trouble.
Three little French boys with a go-cart had come to stare. I Kodaked
them and send you their picture in this letter as a sort of punctuation to
my complaints.
Well, when Rattray had screwed up the "union" as well as he could
(isn't that what our statesmen did after the confederate war?), off we
started again, bustled through the town in the valley (which I found
from Murray was Neufchâtel-en-Bray), and had a consoling run
through beautiful country until, at noon, we shot into the market-place
of Forges les Eaux. It was market-day, and we drove at a walking pace

through the crowded place, all alive with booths, the cackling of
turkeys, and the lowing of cows. There seemed to be only one decent
inn, and the salle à manger was full of loud-talking peasants, with
shrewd, brown, wrinkled faces like masks, who "ate out loud," as I
used to say.
The place was so thronged that Rattray had to sit at the same table with
us, and though as a good democrat I oughtn't to have minded, I did
squirm a little, for his manners--well, "they're better not to dwell on."
But the luncheon was good, so French and so cheap. We hurried over it,
but it took Rattray half an hour to replenish the tanks of the car with
water (of course he had to lift down the luggage to do this) and to oil
the bearings. We sailed out of Forges les Eaux so bravely that my
hopes went up. It seemed certain we should be in Paris quite in good
time, but almost as soon as we had got out of the town one of the
chains glided gracefully off on to the road.
You'd think it the simplest thing in the world to slip it