“The parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back.”
“The parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back.”
“The parapet of the wooded precipice, from whose edge we were looking back.”
A stertorous sound began presently to be distinguishable from the hoarse note of rushing water in the deep places of the glen: then followed a tremor of the ground, lastly a traction-engine, advancing upon us like Behemoth throned on mill-wheels, opulent of smoke, with a clanging retinue of trucks. I felt in anticipation the mud ooze again through the seams of my gloves, as it had oozed last night, but the gate of a villa was suddenly and miraculously raised up on our left hand. Miss O’Flannigan was off, and had opened one-half with a celerity which suggested long practice in the hunting-field, and we burst through into the shadow of tall evergreens, tearing out a hold-all buckle in an encounter with the gate-post. We were startlingly confronted inside by an old lady in a mushroom hat, carrying a spud and garden-basket, and wearing an expression of complete and unaffected amazement, which, considering all things, and especially the fact that Miss O’Flannigan and I had fallen into maniac laughter, was a pardonable lapse of good breeding. Pointing to the traction-engine, we endeavoured to explain ourselves; but the chilly calm with which the Tommies regarded it, as it lumbered past the gate, was so painfully at variance with our representations, that it seemed better to retire, waving hysterical apologies. The old lady stirred neither hand nor foot throughout the occurrence, and for all we know may have been a rustic detail added, in wax, by a proprietor of a realistic turn.
After this the road was quiet in the balmy quietness of summer, that is so living a thing compared with the soulless grip of the air in winter silences. By the dignified gradients of the coach-road we mounted slowly through woods and glens, and then, with no less dignity and almost equal slowness, downwards into open country, clear and kindly, with pasture, and level roads, and a wide eastward horizon melting into blue. Behind us the Snowdon range stood mightily on the high pedestal of Carnarvonshire: it had never showed itself so great as now, viewed from these Denbigh meadow-lands, while we rodeto the east, with faces turning always back to the splendid barrier across the west. It was a lonely road, with scarcely a mark to ruffle its white dust except the ribbed footprint of the traction-engine, that stretched like an illimitable ladder in front of us. We met no one save two tramps who eyed us curiously, as members of the fraternity who ought to be able to impart useful facts about the temper of the nearest farmer’s wife, or the quality of the skilly at the Llanberis workhouse; a little farther on, on a long reach of road, quite remote, as it seemed, from human habitation, we met three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds, and each pressing a pocket-handkerchief with a wide black border to the point of a pink nose. Their eyes turned at us above these emblems of woe with something of interest, but they did not pause, and went on, three black blots on the white road between the glowing hedgerows; and we marvelled if some Welsh Mormon elder had lived and died, unknown, but obviously lamented, in these sunny solitudes.
“Three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds.”
“Three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds.”
“Three tall women, dressed alike in widows’ weeds.”
Pentre Voelas and Cernioge came in their turn, with mild episode of farmhouse and wayside inn, and manifold iterance of Rehoboths and Salems. Cernioge, as we discovered in the buying of a post-card, is pronounced Kernoggy. This eccentricity was, so far as we could see, its sole claim to distinction. From the first the Tommies had established a rule to demand nourishment at every inn they passed, and after twelve miles studdedwith—for them—disappointments, we yielded to their importunities, and paused at the glowing sign of the Saracen’s Head, Cerrig-y-Druidion.
In the best parlour sat in perfect silence a tradesman and his wife, middle-aged, serious, and too entirely respectable to be aware that they were bored almost to madness. They were out on their holiday, therefore they were enjoying themselves—and therefore the tradesman read a month-old copy of the ‘Cyclist,’ and his wife studied the ‘Farmers’ Gazette,’ and both eyed us with ravenous, but decently furtive, interest. For half an hour we and our safety-skirts were vouchsafed to them, while the familiar tea, with home-made gooseberry-jam and salt butter, was vouchsafed to us; and then the Tommies, having polished their mangers with their usual precision, were led forth again.
It was not a good ten miles that we rode from there to Corwen, except in the sense of good, full, statute measure. Disaster fell upon us like a net, tangling our endeavours with inexhaustible mesh. A “dee” of my saddle broke; consequentlyI had to carry the hold-all across my lap, like a baby of monstrous size and implacable pig-headedness. Tom the elder developed a new and much enlarged edition of his ancient girth-gall, and in the attempt to cope with this by re-saddling, a cushion of swelling was disclosed along his back. Miss O’Flannigan then said she would lead him the rest of the way, and did so, until the next milestone announced that it was four miles to Corwen, which at once degraded the project from the sublime to the ridiculous. Not all the Humane Society, in one throbbing merciful mass, could be absurd enough to expect any one to walk four miles in a riding-habit, and cloth gaiters, and the dog-days.
The cool of the evening was upon us before we at length sighted Corwen across the pastures, and a pale after-glow, pale as the points of gaslight that were starting up about the railway station, gleamed on the long curve of the river Dee as we crawled across the bridge outside the town. Corwen is a dingy, mean town, in spite of thewooded cliff at its back, and the river at its foot, and the river meadows with their tranquil sweetness; but on that Saturday night neither we nor the Tommies complained of its dinginess. It had a chemist, who kept sulphate of zinc and iodoform, and lead lotion, with which to anoint the invalid; and it had a sedate and venerable hotel, the Owen Glendwr, in which instantly to go to bed. Having risen thus to the occasion, Corwen may be assured that it has not lived in vain.
Carriages, with Sunday bonnets in them, began to pass next morning, while yet we were taking in the delicate antique absurdity of the pair of spinets in the drawing-room, the charms of the brass finger-plates and door-handles, the impressiveness of the low-ceiled, spotless kitchen, with the vast fireplace, and all the strong and sound old age of a house that has been a notable inn since the fifteenth century. Finding that the church was immediately behind the hotel, and, furthermore, that the service was in Welsh, we lingered a little in the tour of brew-house andstill-room, until the Venite, clear and harmonious, came across the graves to the wide kitchen window that leaned its sill on the churchyard grass.
Presently, when seated in the porch of the church itself, we heard again the rich accord of Welsh voices, with all their grave and fearless certainty, their peasant simplicity, their unblemished nationality. Would that many Irish and English congregations, shrieking in hideous rivalry half a bar behind the organ, could comprehend the reticence of strength, the indwelling instinct of time, and the sense of harmony, manifested at a Welsh country service, where the children lisp in altos, and the farm-hand and the butcher’s boy add their tenor or bass with modest assurance. The preacher’s voice was a fine one, and rung and swung in that strange metrical wail of Welsh that we had heard before in the church of Mallwydd, but it lacked something of the melancholy passion given to that first voice by the touch of age in the tone, the inference of sadness and misgiving. Owen Glendwr had a pew in this very church;probably was churchwarden, and sanctified while he indulged his predatory instincts by going round with the plate. There seemed something significant in the fact that his dagger is carved on a stone just outside the church: did he, we wondered, employ it as a discourager of threepenny-bits and a stimulator to half-crowns. At all events, he is now the next thing to a saint in Corwen, and his works any inhabitant can tell with chapter and verse in a manner which it is not our intention to vie with.
Among other chief tenets of Corwen morality is the necessity of seeing Llangollen. We had, indeed, been ourselves something fired by quotations from Wordsworth and other competent judges in the guide-book, and yielding to the serious representations of the landlady on the subject, we ordered a small trap in which we might thither drive ourselves and the drab Tommy. As we sat in the embrasure of the coffee-room window, waiting for the entrapped Tommy, we perceived a vehicle resembling amammoth governess-cart at the hotel door, with an old man, dressed in what we had learned to regard as the height of Welsh religious fashion, standing by it. His beard was long and white, his face was cross, with a crossness that momentarily deepened as he glanced at the hotel. We studied him with the refined observation of idleness.
“An Arch-Druid, evoluted into an elder of the straitest of the Rehoboths,” remarked Miss O’Flannigan, easily; “his wives and daughters had better not keep him waiting much longer, there is the flame of human sacrifice in his eye, pleasantly blended with the confidence of their eternal——”
At this juncture, Ellen, the coffee-room-maid, came into the room.
“If you please, ladies, the driver is waiting, and wants to know when you will be ready.”
So we were his wives and daughters! We went forth anxiously to accept the situation, too depressed even to wrangle as to which was which.
That no trap was available for Tommy was, insome abstruse way, known to Ellen and explained by her at some length, the result of the day being Sunday, as was also the attendance of the Arch-Druid. We ventured a suggestion that we should forego the latter privilege and ourselves drive the stolid black mare, whose massive beam barely filled the shafts; but, with a contempt apparently too deep for words, the Arch-Druid mounted to the prow of the governess-cart as to a pulpit, and, manipulating the mouth of the black mare with the ceaseless, circular action of a hurdy-gurdy grinder, started at a round pace for Llangollen.
It was a nine-mile drive, and by the time the eighth milestone had been passed, we began to look for some startling development of the calmly pretty valley of the Dee, along which we had driven. Large, but by no means stupendous, hills swelled prosperous and green on either side of it, pine-woods thatched them warmly and liberally, the Dee was irreproachably devious in its advance and charming in its manners, but no climax was arrived at, nor yet was contrast lyingin wait. If the poets had spared it their fine speeches, and their compliments fledged with suave metre, Llangollen could be appraised with a fresher eye and admired to the utmost of its mild deserving without antagonism and without disappointment. Also, if it is seen on the way into Wales instead of on the way out of it, it will occupy with fitting distinction its place in the crescendo of Welsh scenery, undiscounted by the coming fortissimo: to be one of the last notes in a diminuendo is quite a different thing.
Probably it was the two unparalleled persons known as the Ladies of Llangollen who did most for its fame. They ran away from their Irish homes to go and live there, which in itself, from our point of view, suggests eccentricity. Perhaps it was in lifelong penance for this act that ever after they wore riding-habits, summer and winter, indoors and out. After a fortnight spent in riding-habits we could appreciate such an expiation, even though the equipment we had dedicated to the Tommies did not include powdered hair and cartwheel felt hats. Pardonable curiosity might well have caused any traveller by the Holyhead coach who could scrape up an introduction to climb the hill to Plas Newydd; but it was not upon curiosity alone that the ladies relied for society. They had the agreeability that could at will turn the sightseer into an acquaintance, the means to weld with good dinners such acquaintanceships into permanence; and æsthetic taste, the best part of a century ahead of their time, that taught them to frame the grotesque romance of their lives and appearance in antique and splendid surroundings—the leisurely collection of many years—till the poets and other people of distinction turned, somewhat dazed, from the marvels of silver and brass and carved oak, and, looking over the pleasant vale of Llangollen from windows set deep in wood-carving, pronounced it to be unique.
The sun was very hot that afternoon as we climbed on foot the steep hill up to Plas Newydd, and it was difficult to receive withsangfroid, either moral or physical, the intelligence that visitorswere not admitted on Sunday. All that remained was to sit exhausted on the grass, and stare with amazement at the lacework of black carved wood spread upon the white walls. Not a nook without a satyr head or a writhing animal, not a doorway without its bossy pent-house, not a window without its special pattern of lattice panes, each representing a special acquisition, and doubtless a vast wear and tear of riding-habit. Their work is respected, and the plain two-storey house still holds like a casket the treasures of their finding, and stands, crusted with ornament, as freshly white and black as when the ladies took tea in their porch with Wordsworth or Sir Walter Scott. We hung about the small pleasure-grounds for a little, among antique stone fonts and sundials, and tried to find it pleasant; but the exasperation induced by a narrow vision of strange and lovely things, half seen through a lancet-window, would not be denied, and we presently went sulkily back to the Grapes Hotel. The Arch-Druid was awaiting us: we saw from afar his white beard, thronedhigh in the governess-cart, and felt its reproof and suitability for pulpit denunciation; his cough asserted his wrongs indignantly outside, during an otherwise unalloyed tea in the Grapes drawing-room; and his thoughts were, it was easy to suppose, back in the brave old Druidic days, when he would have driven forth to meet the tourist with scythes shining on the splinter-bar of the governess-cart, and discouraged his vicious trifling by utilising him as a burnt-offering.
He found, however, a poor nineteenth-century revenge in obliging the black mare to consume, at our expense, three feeds of corn. Such, at least, was the astonishing item in the bill; and, in a temporary lapse from the austerity of the sacerdotal mood, he stooped to a refection that called itself tea, and, judging by its price, must have been of considerable extent.
Withthe alien literature of the Visitors’ Book, Wales is endowed beyond all countries known to us. Here, more than elsewhere, does the Birmingham tourist, hitherto mute and inglorious, become sensible of inspiration, and enter deliriously into poesy; here the funny man scintillates with inveterate brilliancy, and the conscientious churn forth adulation of scenery or cook, with solemn and almost death-bed conviction.
The funny man is, as might be expected, widely prevalent—he is, indeed, inexhaustible; and having achieved immortality by his own personal entry, gambols at large through the thumbed pages, and bestows it upon the signatures of the less gifted by lavish and sparkling comment. We find himfiguring as “Claud Hugo on the booze.” “T’other man playing the giddy bug.” Or as “Mr and Mrs Augustus Thompson ontreaclemoon.” We cannot lay claim to the italics; they emanate from the funny man, and partake of his inveteracy. We traced him through Wales in a variety of titles, almost classable as the Visitors’ Book Peerage—as, for instance, Lord Llanberis, Lord Shag, Duke of Seven Dials, Lord Watkins, Earl of Bird, Queen of Table Waters. He warned us, in an eruption of notes of exclamation, to “beware of potass and sodas in Wales,” and was himself eclipsed by an inspired commentator, who added in pencil, “and every other ass.”
The breezy and hardy athlete, also largely represented, partakes of the nature of the funny man, but has a liver unfitted for cynicism. He is usually replete with the glory of his miles per diem, and can only spare breath for a robust epigram, such as “The breakfast we eat here this morning will live in our remembrance.” (Note by funny man) “And the landlady’s.”
But it is to conscientious encomium that the Visitors’ Book is indebted for its chiefest adornments and its most varied types, though of these it is possible only to cite the more salient. There is the encomium which, though conscientious towards the landlady, sets forth with an equal sense of justice the classical acquirements of the writer. It is a large class, but one example will suffice:—
“The Inn had in mind by he who wrote, ‘shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?’”
There is the pathetic yet faithful encomium: “The above” (a list of names not as yet of historical interest), “during a week of hard and anxious literary work, felt quite at home here, thanks to the kindness of Mrs Jones and the untiring attention of Ellen in the coffee-room.” Even the funny man has respected this tribute to female devotion—but in what did Ellen’s attention consist? Did she, blending in her own person the hero-worship of Desdemona and the more solid abnegations of Molière’s cook, sit as audience, even as critic, to the achievementsof that hard and anxious week? Or, accepting the eulogy in a simpler sense, did she feed the party hourly from an egg-spoon? We know that she enhanced the home-like effect, and the rest is silence.
The impassioned: “Lord keep my memory green.—Wellesley Robinson.” (First commentator) “Whoever is this fellow?” (Second do.) “God knows.”
The serious and almost religious:—
“With plenty here the board is spread,And, e’er our onward path we tread,We feed from the’ abundant storeAnd sound it’s praises more and more.”
“With plenty here the board is spread,And, e’er our onward path we tread,We feed from the’ abundant storeAnd sound it’s praises more and more.”
“With plenty here the board is spread,And, e’er our onward path we tread,We feed from the’ abundant storeAnd sound it’s praises more and more.”
The influence of Tate and Brady is evident from the mechanical addition of the apostrophe after “the,” which is reproduced in its integrity, in common with all expression marks and feats of English grammar throughout the collection.
The excessively gentle yet condescending: “J. Brown. I am pleased with Cambria’s lovely vales.”
The aristocratic but scarcely grammatical: “Lord and Lady D—— for lunch. Very nice.”
With these panegyrics we have not been moved to compete. Not even the glistening dawn of our last day in Wales prevailed, with its silent greeting, to make us emulate J. Brown or Wellesley Robinson in their valedictory “appreciations.” In vows and protestations let us rather play Cordelia to their Goneril and Regan, reserving ourselves for that possible future when Wales, repudiated of its Wellesley Robinsons, forsaken as Lear, shall clamour for our support. Till then, let the name of O’Flannigan and that other allied with it, achieve in the Visitors’ Book the distinction of beauty unadorned and verdict unvouchsafed.
If the truth must be told, the dawn that heralded our exit from Wales suggested little to the eyes that turned away from it into the profound sleep that heralds the hot water, and that little was exclusively connected with horse-boxes. Tommy the elder, though much recovered of thegirth-gall, was very far from being fit for a saddle, therefore the idea of a sensational finish on horseback at the central lamp-post in Welshpool had been abandoned, and the Tommies were to be returned to the ironmonger and the chemist in the ordinary course of railviâRuabon. We were sentimentally anxious to maintain as long as possible our auntly relation with them, even to the extent of travelling in the horse-box, and holding their hands and giving them sal volatile in the tunnels—this being, to the best of our belief, their first experience of travelling otherwise than on their own legs. The confidence inspired by human companionship would of course make everything easy; nevertheless, when at the station we saw their special carriage bear down upon us, behind an engine exuding steam at every pore and uttering yell upon yell as it came, it seemed possible that our nephews would require more than moral support. The engine steamed by, the doors of the horse-box were banged open, and we each took hold of a Tommy and prepared to leadit as if it were a forlorn hope. Perhaps the ostlers and porters whom we waved aside were not as conscious as we presently became that the Tommies were more than willing to enter the box, that they were hurrying up the clattering gangway, that they were almost ushering us into the dark interior which we had regarded with such sympathetic alarms. The porters and ostlers laughed, but it may have been from pure admiration. The Corwen and Ruabon Railway seems to be accustomed to the transportation of menageries. Head-stalls that would have held a buffalo were slipped upon the mildly aggrieved pony faces, cables were attached to their nosebands on either side, and massive partitions were let down between them. The Tommies were obviously a little wounded, but beyond all other emotions they were bored.
There are more luxurious places than the slice that is stingily cut off the end of a horse-box and apportioned to grooms. It is as third class as a third class on the Cork and SkibbereenRailway—that is to say, it has neither cushions nor blinds, and the brake and axle seem to dislocate endless vertebræ in their anatomy immediately under the seat; but it has attractions, even when shared with two side-saddles, each of which takes as much room as three women and a basket. There is sole and undisputed possession, and there is the tranquillity of those who look on junctions and are never shaken, when the horse-box moves majestic among the interwoven points to the appointed platform, whither the purple aristocracy of the first class must toil by staircase and bridge. There are also two loopholes opening directly into the mangers of the horse-box, and through these, during the earlier part of the journey, we watched with concern the whites of the Tommies’ eyes glistening in the obscurity as they glared in vast query upon us and all things; but beyond distended nostrils and immovably pricked ears they made no comment on the situation.
The valley of the Dee jogged past, in accordwith the bone-setting canter of the grooms’ carriage—a landscape always pretty, never startling, laden in the bright hot morning with the trance of June, and with the tenderness of its unconscious farewell to us. That one-sided foreknowledge of parting pervaded all things, and indued with romance the two inquiring faces—one bay with a white spot, the other drab with a white blaze—that gazed at us across the empty mangers in unwearied expectancy of oats. At Ruabon Junction, during a long, hot interval in a siding, we fed them with penny buns and with an armful of hay stolen by Miss O’Flannigan from a cart that stood outside a public-house adjacent to our siding. It was an unusual manifestation of sentiment, but it was accepted on its merits; and the lumps of warm dough were chewed and gulped with much fuss and detail, and the hay snatched from our hands with a voracity that we ventured to hope was a politeness. When, at Oswestry, the final moment came, they suffered
A final salute.
A final salute.
A final salute.
with dignity the farewell endearments of their aunts, staring through their loopholes with complete stolidity, after the manner of horse-flesh. Their liquid brown eyes expressed nothing beyond a desire for more penny buns; and when Miss O’Flannigan attempted, with a good deal of personal effort, to imprint a final salute upon her Tom’s ruddy brown muzzle, he snorted with apprehension and withdrew to the extremest limits of his cable. It was impossible to explain to them that we found some difficulty in parting with them, friends but of a fortnight though they were.
And in parting, too, from the other features of that fortnight,—from the leisure and independence, the fatigue and inconvenience, the life expanding unintellectually in long solitudes of open sky, after shrivelling for three months in the merely brain activity of London. Travelling towards Chester in the familiar monotony of a railway carriage, the eye noted discontentedly thelevel glide of the window along the landscape, and endeavoured to catch at the quiet existence of the country roads as the train took them at a stride. The bounteous grave stillness of the Welsh highways and mountain-fields was ours no more; that roomy calm, whose incidents were a multiplication of peace, must intrench itself in memory behind the dingy preoccupation of catching a train at Chester, the crush of ugly, self-centred people, theblaséporters, the importunities of little boys with cups of strong tea.
The climax of a variety of shocks to the rural mood was reached at Holyhead with the discovery that our luggage, sent from Bettwys by goods train, was not awaiting us. Whether or not to start without it was a matter of poignant uncertainty, even of frenzy, up to the moment when the gangway of the Kingstown boat was hauled in; while the officials did not conceal their amusement, and the porter of the Station Hotel waited immovable, in his red coat, foreknowing the end.
We stayed, and the Kingstown boat moved out on an oily sea into a murky west, and the rain began to fall.