The superiority of 40 H.P. over 10 H.P. is only too painfully apparent. It was on the Mont Cenis that the cup of our humiliation flowed over and the blackest envy filled our souls. We had started from Turin. For the first thirty miles the road is perfectly flat. We rolled along it in very dashing style; the smaller Fiats ate our dust. In front of us, like an immense uneven wall, the Alps rose suddenly out of the plain. Susa lies at the head of a long flat-bottomed valley that leads into the heart of the hills.
You pass through the town and then, suddenly, without warning, the road begins to climb, steeply. It goes on climbing without respite for the next fifteen miles. The top of the pass is six thousand five hundred feet above the sea. The Citroën went into second and remained there; slowly we puffed up the long ascent. We had gone about a mile, when we became aware of a noise coming up from the valley, a noise like the noise of massed machine-guns. It grew louder and louder. A minute later a huge red Alfa Romeo road racer, looking suspiciously like the machine that had just won the Grand Prix of Europe, roared past at a speed that cannot have been less than fifty miles an hour.
It was evidently being driven by a genius; for, looking up, we saw the scarlet monster negotiating turn after hairpin turn in the zigzag road above us without once abating its speed by a mile an hour. In another thirty seconds it was out of sight. The noise of it solemnly reverberated among the mountains, like thunder. Slowly we puffed on. Half an hour later we met the red terror descending; round the corners it showed the same disregard for the elementary laws of dynamics as it had shown on the way up. We imagined that we had seen the last of it.
But waiting at the Italian custom-house while the officer in charge examined our papers—a process which, as at all custom-houses, took a very long time—we heard, far off, a familiar sound. In a few minutes the sound became deafening. Like a huge red rocket, trailing behind it a cloud of smoke, the Alfa Romeo passed at the head of its white dust. ‘They’re doing hill-climbing tests,’ the soldier on guard explained. We set out once more. The custom-house is only half-way up the hill; we had another three thousand feet or so before we reached the summit. Slowly, on second, we addressed ourselves to the ascent. We were only a mile from the custom-house, when, for the second time, we met the Alfa Romeo descending. It disappeared, carrying with it a load of hatred, envy and mixed uncharitableness of every variety.
The road mounted and mounted. We passed through the region of pine woods. Around and above us, now, the slopes were bare; quite close, among the nearer summits, across the valley, were patches of snow. For all that the season was summer, the air was uncommonly sharp and nipping. A wind blew; in the shade it was positively cold. But that did not prevent the car from boiling.
The hospice and the hotels of the Mont Cenis stand on the shores of a lake in the middle of a little plateau that lies, a miracle of flatness amid the surrounding perpendicularity. Towards the Italian side this shelf among the hills ends abruptly in what is nearly a precipice. For the last four or five hundred feet the road leading up to it is terraced out of the rock and rises with uncommon steepness. We were half-way up these final zigzags, when all at once, bursting with a roar round the corner of a bluff that had muffled the sound of its approach, the scarlet Alfa Romeo appeared at the bottom of the precipice up which we were painfully zigzagging. It came up after us, like a wild beast pursuing its prey, bellowing. Just as we reached the top, the monster overhauled us, passed and went racing across the plain.
Our humiliation was complete. Envy and discontent boiled up within us, like the water boiling in the radiator of our miserable little machine. ‘If only,’ we said, ‘if only we had a real car….’ We longed to exchange the passion of envy for the equally malignant and un-Christian passions of pride and contempt, to be those who pass exultantly instead of those who are passed. ‘Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.’ When we reached the hotel, the Alfa Romeo had turned round and was just preparing to begin its third descent. ‘It’s an ugly-looking car,’ we said.
Such are the moral consequences of being the owner of a small car. We tried to reason with ourselves. ‘After all,’ we said, ‘this little machine has done good service. It has taken us over bad roads, up and down enormous hills, through a variety of countries. It has taken us, not merely through space, across the face of the map, but through time—from epoch to epoch—through art, through many languages and customs, through philology and anthropology. It has been the instrument of great and varied pleasures. It costs little, behaves well, its habits are as regular as those of Immanuel Kant. In its unpretentious way it is a model of virtue.’ All this we said, and much more; and it was comforting. But in the bottom of our hearts envy and discontent still lurked, like coiled serpents, ready to raise their heads the very next time that forty horses should pass us on a hill.
It may be objected that the small-car owner is not alone in envying. The wander-birds doing their four miles an hour, sweating, up the dusty hill, must envy indiscriminately both the ten and the forty horse-power man. True, some of them probably do. But it must not be forgotten that there are pedestrians who walk because they genuinely prefer walking to being carried effortlessly along by a machine. In my youth I used to try to pretend that I preferred walking to other means of locomotion. But I soon found that it was not true. For a little time I was one of those hypocrites of country heartiness (and they are quite numerous) who tramp and drink ale in little inns, because it is the right thing to do.
In the end, however, I frankly admitted to myself and to other people that I was not one of nature’s walkers, that I did not like hearty exercise and discomfort, and did not mean any longer to pretend that I did. But I still have the greatest respect for those who do, and I consider that they are probably a superior type of humanity to the idle and comfort-loving breed predominant at the present time. One of the great charms of mechanical progress is that it allows us to do everything quickly, easily and comfortably. This is very agreeable; but I doubt whether it is, morally speaking, very healthy. It is not even very healthy for the body. It is in the civilized countries, where human beings eat most and take least exercise, that cancer is most prevalent. The disease spreads with every fresh expansion of Henry Ford’s factories.
None the less I prefer to follow in the car. To the wander-birds whom we pass on our way, I take off my hat. It is a mark of my sincere esteem. But inwardly I repeat to myself the words of the Abbot in the Canterbury Tales: ‘Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.’
THE TRAVELLER’S-EYE VIEW
I could give many excellent reasons for my dislike of large dinner-parties, soirées, crushes, routs, conversazioni and balls. Life is not long enough and they waste precious time; the game is not worth the candle. Casual social intercourse is like dram-drinking, a mere stimulant that whips the nerves but does not nourish. And so on. These are respectable contentions and all quite true. And they have certainly had weight with me. But the final argument against large assemblages and in favour of solitude and the small intimate gathering has been, in my case, of a more personal character. It has appealed, not to my reason, but my vanity. The fact is that I do not shine in large assemblies; indeed, I scarcely glimmer. And to be dim and conscious of one’s dimness is humiliating.
This incapacity to be bright in company is due entirely to my excessive curiosity. I cannot listen to what my interlocutor is saying or think of anything to say in answer to him, because I cannot help listening to the conversations being carried on by everybody else within earshot. My interlocutor, for example, is saying something very intelligent about Henry James and is obviously expecting me, when he has done, to make some smart or subtle comment. But the two women on my left are telling scandalous stories about a person I know. The man with the loud voice
