Butonlyif it came his way. He was no Terry. It was his business to take things as they were, not to try to make them something they were not. He had no theories, no criticisms, no impulses, no hesitations. He asked for nothing but uncoloured data. Therefore, and to that extent, Llanyglo's future was not entirely in his hands. It was still free, and always, always, save for a little rising of new stone here and there, just the same to look at—watched over by the Light on its noble Trwyn, guarded by the majestic mountain behind, and presenting to its diurnal tides the same shore that Copley Fielding drew.
Now it befell towards the end of the July of that year that the Welshmen of Llanyglo held an open-air service for the young in one of the hollows of the sandhills. It was a blazing Sunday afternoon, with the sea like silk and the pale mountains seeming thrice their distance away. They had brought a small moveable platform and reading-desk from the Baptist Chapel, and first John Pritchard, and then Howell Gruffydd had mounted it. The sun beat on the bare heads and best bonnets and black-coated shoulders of parents; myriads of tiny hopping insects gave the surface of the sand the appearance of being in motion; and a buzzard sailed in great steady circles in the sky of larkspur blue, now standing out to sea, now a speck in the direction of Delyn or Mynedd Mawr.
Howell was teaching the twelve or fourteen urchins a new hymn-tune, singing it now alone, now with them, now listening with little gestures of encouragement and nods of pleasure as their voices rose. His secular jocularity was not absent, but tempered to the occasion.
"Louder, louder and quicker—it give you an appetite for your tea," he said, waving his arms and beating with his foot to the accelerated time. "You will not wake Mrs. Hughes at the lighthouse—now—'Joyful, Joyful——'"
And, with Eesaac Oliver leading, they went through the tune again.
That a special exhortation should be given to those of tenderer years had been deliberately resolved upon. Since that evening when the eight men from the line had rolled drunkenly over the sandhills to the Kerrs' house, a fear had weighed on the chapel-goers of Llanyglo. Until then, their children had known nothing of the wide and wicked world; but that ignorance could not now be maintained. They must be put on their guard, and for that job the ingratiating Howell was the man.
The tune came to an end, and he put his leaflet of printed words into his pocket and shepherded the row of urchins into position with movements of his hands.
"Move that way, John Roberts—I cannot see Olwen Morgan's face. Hugh Morgan, stop poking your foot into that rabbit-hole or you fall down it and we have to dig you out. Miss Pritchard, give Gwen Roberts her sunbonnet, if you please, or she catss a sunstroke. Ithel, where is your handkerchief? Your nose resem-bles a snail.... Now listen to me. If I see a boy or girl not pay atten-sson I stop till he do pay atten-sson——"
And he began. He told them that soon, with the coming of the railway, there would come also all manner of pip-ple, some good pip-ple, some bad pip-ple. He told them that at Railhead were many bad pip-ple, who swore, and drank a great deal more than was good for them. He told them (discreetly, since he had no wish to preach ajehadagainst customers so good as the Gardens) that while some boys might go to Railhead to play, boys like some he would not mention, who had lived in large towns, yet it would be bet-ter if they kept themselves to themselves.... He did not go the length of asserting that all good boys were Welsh and country boys, and that all bad ones were town-bred and English, but—but—well, things have to be put a little starkly to the young. They shuffled their feet in the hot loose sand as he talked. The buzzard sailed back from the mountains. The sandhoppers danced as if the ground had been a frying-pan. A holy peace brooded over the land. Away at Railhead men, those sinful men who drank and swore slept in rows, stretched face-downwards on the grass or the thrown-up banks of clay.
Then the grocer began to promise the rewards of virtue. He turned with an interrogative smile to John Pritchard.
"And now, Mr. Pritchard, do you think I might tell them that sec-ret? Indeed I think I get into trouble if I do! But yess, I will tell them.—Atten-sson now. Hugh Morgan, do not scratss your head. Now!—Can any boy or girl tell me what there iss to be in Mr. Pritchard's field next month?"
They guessed at once, with one voice. Howell Gruffydd knew better than to ask an audience questions it could not answer. He held up his hands in admiring surprise.
"Indeed they guess—they are every one right, Miss Pritchard! Astonissing! Dear me, I never saw such s'arp young men and women!—Yess, they are right. There is to be a Treat for the Sunday School scholars! There now! And there will be races, and prizes, and tea, and the books will be given for those who have had the largest num-ber of attendances and have not been late.—And now: who is giving this Treat?"
"Mr. Tudor Williams!" they cried.
"Right again—it is Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of Parliament! And Mr. Williams is giv-ing something else too. He is giv-ing—I have seen them—new pictures—pictures of the construc-tion of flowers—(bot-tany I think it is called, Miss Pritchard?)—and an-i-mals—and fiss-sses——"
He turned up his eyes, as if to the heavens from which these rewards of virtuous living descended. The croupy shrilling of a cock came from down by the beach. The bees droned, and the wheeling buzzard suddenly dropped like a plummet a hundred yards through the larkspur blue.
It was then, in that very moment, that Howell Gruffydd's face was seen to change. He stopped, listening. Beyond the hot cuplike hollow in which they were assembled was another sunken way, and along this way somebody was approaching. Probably in complete unconsciousness that any hearer was at hand, this somebody was singing softly as he came. It was Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs, and he was singing to himself, in very bad Welsh,Glan Meddwdod Mwyn.
Now this song is one of the less reputable songs of Wales. The English drinking song usually contents itself with extolling the mere convivial act, drawing a decent veil over the lamentable effects of that act; but even in its titleGlan Meddwdod Mwyn(which words meanFair, Kind Drunkenness) has no such reticence. It depicts ... but you can see the difference for yourself. No wonder it froze the words on Howell Gruffydd's lips. In the singer's complete unconsciousness that he was not alone lay the whole sting. The malice, the intent, the hateful Lancashire humour of the Kerrs they had had before, but notthishome-thrust with a weapon they themselves had provided!
Tommy might just as well have climbed the hummock and told them that, since their language provided equally for these eventualities, they were no better than anyone else....
An English drunkard, to grub in the lees of their own language like this!——
And little Hugh Morgan had sniggered!——
The unseen Tommy and his (their) song passed on towards the Hafod Unos.
Then Howell bestirred himself again. "There, now!" he said; "what had he just been tell-ing them? Indeed, that was opp-por-tune, whatever!" ... But, though he strove to hide it, there was a hollowness now in his exhortation. He felt as if he had been building a wall against a contagion that crept in upon the invisible air. If Thomas Kerr knewGlan Meddwdod Mwynhe might also know viler ditties still; if little Hugh Morgan, whom he had thought pure, had sniggered atGlan Meddwdodhe might guffaw outright at the baser version ofSospan Bach....
It could only (Howell thought) be original sin....
It was at least a little balm to him to hear the fervour with which Eesaac Oliver once more led the singing ofJoyful, Joyful.
And, by the way (speaking of songs), Eesaac Oliver's choice of the narrow and difficult path had already involved him in a persecution in which song played a minor part. This persecution was at the hands of John Willie Garden. For, in an unguarded moment, Eesaac Oliver had confided to John Willie his plans for his career; and since then the unfeeling John Willie, on his way to Railhead and debauchery, had held over him the song that contains the lines:—
"He wass go to Je-sus CollegeFor to try to get some knowledge——Wass you ever see," etc. etc.
"He wass go to Je-sus CollegeFor to try to get some knowledge——Wass you ever see," etc. etc.
John Willie, itching to get away from Pannal, could not understand why anybody wanted to go to Jesus, Aberystwith, or any other College.
"I think it would be wiserFor to stay with Sister Liza——Wass you ever see," etc. etc.
"I think it would be wiserFor to stay with Sister Liza——Wass you ever see," etc. etc.
he would hum softly and (alas) contemptuously; and, since it was part of his chosen career to do so, Eesaac Oliver would very expressly forgive John Willie, getting into quite a Christian heat about it.
On the day after that homily on the Llanyglo sandhills, John Willie Garden went as usual to Railhead, and was enabled to delight his leather-belted and corduroyed friends there with a piece of information, hitherto secret, that he had from his father's table. This was that the line was to be opened in the following Spring by His Royal Highness the Duke of Snell. The announcement produced an astonishing effect. Not one in ten of the men either knew or cared what the enterprise was all about. They knew that the railway was a railway, but beyond that, none of its dividends being destined for their pockets, it was merely the job—"the" job, the job of the moment, the job not very different from the last job, and very, very like all the other jobs to come, until their living hands should become as stiff as the picks they plied, and the light of their eyes be extinguished as their own lanterns were extinguished at daybreak. But at the news that the Duke of Snell was to do his trick when they had finished theirs, they were innocently uplifted and delighted.Thiswould be something to tell their grandchildren in the years to come! They would spit on their hands and work better all the afternoon forthis!... In the meantime they discussed it when the great buzzer called them to their beef and bacon sandwiches, their chops and pickles and bread and cheese.
"So it's to be t' Dewk o' Snell!" one of them admired, with as much satisfaction as if he himself had had a tremendous leg-up in the world thereby; he was a West Riding navvy, whom twenty years of digging up the length and breadth of England had delocalised of everything save his powerful accent. "Well, now, I'd figgered it out 'at it'ld happen be t' Prince o' Wales mesen——"
Here struck in a Cardiff man, so lean that you would not have got another pennyweight of fat off him if you had fried him in his own frying-pan.
"Wass-n't it the Duke of Snell that mar-ried the Prin-cess Victorine?"
"Noa. That wor t' Dewk o' Flint," the Yorkshire navvy replied, with authority. "T' Dewk o' Snell wed t' youngest, t' Princess Alix. I knaw all t' lot on 'em; t' missis hed all their pic'ters o' biscuit-boxes; they reached from one end o' t' chimley-piece to t'other; ye couldn't ha' got a finger in between."
"Well, well," said the Cardiff man, an inquiring mind among many complacent ones, "it is curious, how lit-tle diff-ference it makes to us. The Prinss of Wales, say you? If I wait for the Prinss of Wales to give me ano-ther piece of this ba-con I wait a long time, whatever!... But prapss we get our in-vi-ta-tions soon," he added jocularly, taking an enormous bite of bread. "S'all you be there, John Willie?"
John Willie answered, a little doubtfully, that he hoped to be present at the ceremony if he could get away from school. The Cardiff man wagged his head. There are few Welshmen who do not wag their heads at the sound of the word school.
"Ah, school; it iss a gra-and thing," he said, still wagging. "I not be work-king here with my shirt wet-t on my back if I go to a prop-per school."
"Oh, be dinged to that tale!" returned the Yorkshireman bluntly, cutting cheese on his leathery palm. "T' schools is all my backside! They learn 'em a lot o' newfangled stuff, but I remember 'at when tea wor eight shillin' a pund, an' they kept a penny nutmeg in a wood case as if it wor diamonds——"
"Aw-w-w, there iss that Burkie, talk-king again!" said the Cardiff man.
"It's reight, for all that——"
And presently the talk had veered round to those very changes of standards and conditions, his careful study of which had led Edward Garden to the conclusion that a generation had arisen that intended thenceforward to have more of the world's good things than it had been having or know the reason why.
As it happened, the work on the line had that day taken a new leap forward. Again all the life of the python had rolled on ahead, and John Willie, lunching with his friends, was doing so at a point actually beyond Llanyglo, two miles nearer to Abercelyn. From the Abercelyn end also the line was coming to meet them, and the two sections would meet at a place called Sarn. Sarn means Causeway, and there the sea showed, like a piece of bright piano-wire, across a waste of fleecy bog-cotton and bog-myrtle, sundew and flags and rushes. A siding was to be made there. Because of Sarn Church, a tiny little building with an odd Fifteenth-Century circular tower, Squire Wynne loved this region, and attended service there; but as that Service was held only once a year, the "Hough!" of the shunting-engines and the clanking of couplings would disturb it little. The Squire sighed to think that, among so many, many other changes, it would be only one change the more. His sales of land had provided him with just enough money to last his time out, and on the whole he thought he did not want to outlive his time. Perhaps he too had had his glimpse of that vision of Edward Garden's, though as it were in obverse; and, looking, he shrugged his shoulders. Who, in another twenty or thirty years, would care for the things he had cared for? Who would waste a thought on antiquity? Who would open his County History, or his books on Brasses or Church Plate, Memorials or Heraldry or Glass? Who would know each tree he came upon on his walks, as a country doctor knows his patients—its sickness, its health, its need of air, its treatment, its amputations? Who would repair the staircase at the Plas, and restore its magnificent ceilings, and set the merry smoke streaming up its chimneys once more?... Mr. Tudor Williams would probably do this last. He would no doubt convert the Plas into a Museum (as he would have converted Sarn Church itself into a Museum), and fill it with cases of ice-scratched pebbles, and diagrams of strata and flowers, for reluctant and educated urchins to gape at. The Squire was entirely in sympathy with John Willie Garden's corduroyed friend Burkie about these things. It seemed to him that the multitude, which after all had backbone enough to starve rather than go on the Parish, would not resist this organised pauperisation of its mind. It was time the Squire died, since he held that not everybody has the right to everything and no questions asked. Otherwise not an inhumane man, there were nevertheless abstractions which he loved more than he loved his fellow-being....
And who would drink what was left of that wondrous old port?
Well, the Squire, sighing and smiling a little wistfully both at once, intended to see to that himself.
But while the march of events drove the aborigines of Llanyglo ever more and more closely together, as the reaping of a field of corn drives the mice and snakes and rabbits to the narrowing square in the centre, at the same time something of the opposite process went on. Two or three stood aloof, Welsh when it suited them to be Welsh, less Welsh at other times. One of these was Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of Parliament. Another was Howell Gruffydd, the grocer.
For thick as thieves now were Edward Garden and Tudor Williams, and to their frequent councils was admitted also Raymond Briggs, the architect, whose son had been John Willie's schoolfellow at Pannal.
This Raymond Briggs was a Yorkshireman, from Hunslet, but you wouldn't have thought it to look at him. You saw at a glance that he was superfine, but you had no idea how superfine until he opened his mouth. He was tall, plumpish, very erect, numerously chinned and faultlessly dressed; and, having entered into culture by one of the noblest of its portals, architecture, it was small wonder that he wished to forget Hunslet, with its black canal, its serried weaving-sheds, its grimy warehouses, and its sooty brickfields. Certainly he had completely forgotten it in his speech. Over an alien mode he had acquired a really remarkable mastery; and had it not been for a trifling uncertainty about his vowels, particularly his "a's," you would have set him down as quite as much London as Leeds. And so more or less with everything else about Raymond.—But his wife haled you north again. To her, acquirements were like hot plates to the fingers, to be kept constantly in motion or else dropped altogether. Her husband was probably the most humourless man who ever came to Llanyglo; but Maud Briggs would use the homeliest of dialect-words in the most artificial of accents, and would tell you, even while she was mothering you with cool drinks in the most hospitable fashion, that the piece of ice she dropped with a clink into your glass was positively "the last piece in the hoil"—if you know your West Riding well enough to understand the peculiar significance of the word "hoil" as applied to a house. Her rings were dazzling, for Raymond's invaluable lack of humour had enabled him to make his mark on the world; the blue-and-white collapsible boat which their son Percy brought with him to Llanyglo had cost his father a cool twenty-five pounds in London; and it would not be for lack of money if Percy did not turn out a very superior silk purse indeed.
So when the snail, his journey finished, rested and made the siding at Sarn and then returned to Porth Neigr again, and Railhead was dismantled, and grasses began to seed themselves about the upturned soil, Edward Garden and Raymond Briggs and Tudor Williams, M.P., had their heads frequently together; and no longer were the short days and long nights a season of hibernation for Llanyglo. Three years out of four the Llanyglo winters are mild; this particular winter was not so inclement that it stopped building-operations for more than a day or two at a time; and, with a sort of miniature Railhead strung out along the Porth Neigr road for his labour, Raymond's second house rose steadily course by course, and already they were draining and digging for the first hotel. If they were mainly Porth Neigr men Raymond employed, that did not mean that Dafydd Dafis or any other Llanyglo man who was so minded would not be taken on; indeed they were taken on; but it did mean that the centre of gravity of the labour-supply had shifted, and would never shift back again. Those temporary dwellings along the Porth Neigr road were a constant reminder that if the Llanyglo men did not like it they might lump it; and as they did neither, but while disliking it intensely, bore a hand and took their wages just the same, they appeared to be sufficiently quelled.
Edward Garden, while making Llanyglo his headquarters, was again much away. A whisper was started that he was once more treating for land, but, as no further land appeared to be available, the rumour was derided as idle. Howell Gruffydd was already converting the two original matchboarded cottages to his own use. Something Departmental happened somewhere beyond Llanyglo's ken (probably Mr. Tudor Williams knew all about it), and the word came that the Post Office was to be transferred from John Pritchard's to Howell's new shop; and though the Post Office was on the whole more trouble than it was worth, for a little while Howell seemed likely to have a quarrel on his hands.
But Howell had not definitely taken a part without knowing equally definitely how to bear himself in that part.Hedid not intend to be herded into the gloomy company of a lot of beaten and sulking Welsh nationalists! As if already a vast spud had cut about Manchester or Liverpool, and an equally vast spade had taken either of these cities up bodily like a square of peat and had set it down again on the Llanyglo sandhills, so the idea of expansion had taken hold of Howell's mind. He even went a little preposterously beyond bounds, as others did later, when they learned that their old Welsh dressers and armchairs were a rarity and marketable, and proceeded to put ridiculous prices upon them. And probably Edward Garden had a use for Howell. Already it looked like it. The answer with which Howell appeased John Pritchard in the matter of the transference of the Post Office looked very much like it. Edward Garden himself could not so have reconciled John to all this innovation with a single whispered word.
For "Bazaars," Howell said furtively to John, behind his hand; and the quick electric gleam in his eyes was instantly extinguished again....
You see. They had never had a bazaar at Llanyglo. There would have been little profit in passing their own money about among themselves. Butstrangers'money.... That was the soul of good in things otherwise evil that Howell whispered to John Pritchard, and later it was so observingly distilled out for the benefit of the Baptist and other Chapels that for a time there was actually a danger lest the mulcting should keep folk away.
And if even Mr. Tudor Williams himself now appeared a little absent-minded among his constituents, and hauled himself, as it were, out of remote fastnesses of thought to grasp them fervently (if indiscriminately) by the hand, and to inquire after their rheumatics and wives and other plagues, well, he was a busy, and not at all a wealthy man. At Llanyglo, as elsewhere, it was not only Welsh and English; it was also Get or Go Wanting. The early bird....
So (to push on) circular smears of white appeared on the windows of the second of Raymond Briggs's houses (it was finished by Christmas), and these gave it the appearance of a sudden new Argus, looking out on every side for other houses to join it; and the scaffold-poles began to rise about the new hotel like a larch-plantation. Raymond came and went, and Mr. Tudor Williams came and went, and short winter day followed short winter day. Then, with cat's-ice still glazing the ruts and pools but a feeling of Spring in the air, Porth Neigr, ten miles away, came bustlingly to life. An emissary of the Lord-Lieutenant of the County took up his quarters at the Royal Hotel, and there he was one day joined by the Lord-Lieutenant himself, with Sir Somebody Something, of the Office of Works. These summoned others, who in turn summoned others, and maps and plans were sent for and a line of route was chosen. Police were drafted in, and folk went up into their upper front rooms to see which bedstead or table-leg would best stand the strain of a rope across the street. The old station had been repainted to suit with the new extension, and masts rose at its entrance. To the residents in the principal streets the Council lent loyal emblems and devices. The sounds of bands practising could be heard. His Royal Highness the Duke of Snell was coming to open the line.
Then on the appointed day, the town broke into a flutter of bunting. The March sun shone merrily on Royal Standard and Red Dragon, on Union Jack and ensign, on gold-fringed banners with "CROESAW" on one side and "WELCOME" on the other. On the new metals a Royal Salute of fog-signals was laid. Warning of the Approach passed along the line, on the red-druggeted platform officials great and small waited, and John Willie Garden's friends, whose picks and shovels had made the clay fly, would no doubt read all about it a few days later in the papers.
So, with detonation of fog-signals, and some cheers, but more wide-eyed gazing, and bared heads and bowing backs, and an Address, and other circumstances of loyalty and fraternisation and joy, His Royal Highness and John Willie Garden between them declared the line open; but only the Duke rode on the footplate of the garlanded engine with the crossed flags on its belly. Probably intensely bored, he rode out about a mile towards Abercelyn, and then returned to luncheon at the Royal Hotel. An hour later, coming out again, he passed away to Lancashire. All was over. Folk might now take down their bunting as soon as they pleased. The trick was virtually done for Llanyglo. A loop at Sarn or a new junction, and a realisation on the part of those in authority that there were things that paid better than Abercelyn manganese, and Llanyglo would be "linked up" with rigid iron to the rest of the world.
Nay, it is already linked up even more straitly. A few poles and a thread of wire, crossing the sandhills and ending at the Llanyglo Stores, have some weeks ago put an end to its isolation. It is the nerve that accompanies the sinew, and Howell Gruffydd now receives and despatches telegrams. All is over bar the shouting, and it will not be long before that begins. They are busy now, painting and papering the new hotel, and decorating and upholstering it. It reeks of new paint and varnish and furniture-polish and the plumbers' blowpipes. It resounds with all the doubly loud noises of a half-empty place—with hammering and tacking, clanking buckets, the "Whoas!" to the horses of the delivery-vans, the jolting of heavy things moved upstairs, the rasp of scrubbing-brushes, the squeak of window-cloths. It is spick-and-span, from the feathery new larches in front to the silvery new dustbins behind.... Wherefore, seeing that we shall only be in the way, with never a chair to sit down on yet, and nothing to eat in the place save what the charwoman and the green-aproned carters and carriers have brought for themselves, we may as well leave all these things to the folk whose business it is to attend to them, and take a nap for a month or two, secure that when we wake up again the scene will be set for Llanyglo'slever de rideau, that starched and polite and not quite real little piece that preludes the main action of our tale. There is heather and wild thyme up the Trwyn, very comfortable to doze on; suppose we have our nap up there?...
Ah-h-h-h!—That was the July sun that woke us. It's a warm and brilliant morning. Stretch yourself first, and then have a look down....
That's a surprise, isn't it? You didn't quite expect that? Really not much changed, and yet it's entirely changed. Two new houses and an hotel (in this clean air they'll be new-looking for years yet), and that little border of deck-chairs and bathing-tents and slowly moving parasols, not a couple of hundred yards long altogether, and yet the whole appearance of the place is altered. After a moment you find it quite difficult to remember it as it was the last time we were up here. See that little puff of smoke over there? That's a shunting-engine at Sarn; you'll hear the sound in a moment; there!—Butterflies about us, like hovering pansies; you can see just one corner of poor old Terry's Thelema showing; and out there, where the sea changes colour, just where the gulls are rocking, that's a bank of sand a storm threw up three or four years ago. And that's the telegraph-wire I spoke of, running straight across to Howell Gruffydd's shop there. Yes, that links Llanyglo up....
Where did all these people come from? Well, it's hard to say, but no doubt Edward Garden's got them here for one reason and another. He may even have "packed" the place a little carefully; I don't know. At any rate, he's lent "Sea View" there (that's the newer of the two houses) to Gilbert Smythe. Who's Gilbert Smythe? Well, he's the Medical Officer for Brannewsome, Lancs., and a very clever and quite an honest man. But Gilbert's family's grown more quickly than his fortune, live as frugally as he will he's always in debt, and he isn't going to say "No" to the free offer of a well-built, roomy house, not three minutes from the sands where the children can play all day, and furnished from the potato-masher in the kitchen to the little square looking-glasses in the servants' attics. And of course Edward Garden asks nothing in return. ButifGilbert cares to say that the Llanyglo water is abundant and pure, Edward won't object—it is excellent water. AndifGilbert likes to praise its air and low rainfall (low for Wales), well, he'll be telling no more than the truth. AndifGilbert (not bearing ancient Mrs. Pritchard too much in mind) finds the longevity at Llanyglo remarkable, what's the harm in that? As a matter of fact, there is a saying that the oldest inhabitant always dies first at Llanyglo, and the others follow in order of age, which would be a poor look-out for anybody setting up in the Insurance business here.... So if by and by Gilbert signs a statement to this general effect, you can hardly blame him. He has his way to make, and he is a wise man who allows the galleons of the Gardens of the world to give his skiff a tow.
The others? Well, Edward Garden's a cleverer man than I, and you can hardly expect me to explain the workings of his mind to you in detail. But I think we may assume he knows what he is about. I needn't say they're all very well-to-do; you can see that even from here; but there's something else about them, something we saw in Raymond Briggs, that's a little difficult to describe—perhaps it's merely that they too intend (mutatis mutandis, of course) that their children shall have a better time than their parents have had—or perhaps we'd better say their grandparents had, for their parents do themselves very well, indeed. I don't think you can say more about them than that—it's just that dash of Raymond Briggs.... Squire Wynne wouldn't understand them in the least. The Squire's wasted too much time over antiquity. He doesn't know anything about these people who are coming on. Except in their clothes, and so on, he'd see very little difference between them and people Raymond Briggs would look at as if they weren't there. He wouldn't understand Philip Lacey, for example. (Do you see that orange-and-black striped blazer—there by the seaweed: he's pointing; that's Philip Lacey.) Philip is the big Liverpool florist, seedsman, and landscape-gardener; if he hasn't his "roots in the land" in exactly the sense the Squire understands, his plants have; and Philip distinctly does not intend that Euonyma and Wygelia, who are at present at school at Brighton, shall go into one of his fourteen or fifteen retail shops. Philip isn't spending all that money for that.... (Understand me, I think Philip's perfectly right; the only thing I don't quite see is why he should veneer good sound stuff with something that's an obvious sham.) Of his wife, frankly, I don't think very much. Her processes show too plainly. Philip has his business to attend to, but Mrs. Lacey never leaves her one idea, day or night.... There, Philip's stopped and spoken to Mr. Morrell. Mr. Morrell has just as many hopes and plans for Hilda as the Laceys have for Euonyma and Wygelia, but he knows that his "a's" are past praying for, so he makes rather a display of his native speech. I needn't tell you what a trial that is to Hilda....
And bear in mind that these are prosperous people, well-travelled people (though they mostly keep to the beaten tracks where they meet one another—it's Mrs. Briggs's chief recollection of Florence that she met some people she knew in Leeds there), people who put up at far better hotels than you or I do. And if these, who can afford it, can be shown the way to Llanyglo, the chances are that a crowd of other people, who certainly can't afford it but as certainly won't be out of it, will come in their wake.
What do you say to our going down and having a closer look at them? We might take a stroll as far as Howell Gruffydd's shop—I beg its pardon, Stores. Sit still a moment though; here's Minetta Garden behind us. She's been sketching the Dinas, very likely. Minetta very much wants to be an artist, and you meet her with her sketching things all over the place. It may or may not be a passing fancy; she certainly has what Raymond Briggs calls a "Rossetti head"—enormous dark eyes, sharpish jaw, straight dark hair, and a disconcerting way of staring at people who are "putting it on" a little more thickly than usual (she stares pretty frequently at Raymond himself). Ah, she's taking the steep way down. We'll take the other way....
Now we're on the level; better put your tie straight—or aren't you overpowered by these things? I confess I am; Raymond Briggs always chills me when he casts his eye over my front elevation. No thick-booted undergraduates' holiday-parties nor furry art-students with knickers and bare throats here. We're spruce at Llanyglo. Even on a week-day it's like a Church Parade, and on Sundays we go one better still. All the men have brightly coloured flannel blazers and gaudy cammerbands, and the women carry many-flounced parasols by a ring at the ferrule end, and wear toilettes straight out of the "Queen." Some of them will change for lunch; all of them will fortable d'hôteat seven. They protest that they vastly prefer dinner at seven, but what with the servants' dinners at midday, and husbands who prefer the old-fashioned hour, and one thing and another, they take their principal meal at one. There's no reason they shouldn't. There's no reason they should mention it at all. But they do, every day. If you're introduced to them, they'll all have told you within twenty-four hours. It's as if they didn't want there to be any mistake about something or other....
Here's where the donkeys turn. They have red and white housings, and their names across their foreheads—"Tiny," "Prince," and so on; the donkey-rides are a little offshoot ofPorth Neigr Omnibuses. Kite-flying's popular here too—that's Mr. Morrell's, the big star-shaped one. The bathing-tents and deck-chairs are mostly hired from Howell Gruffydd, but there are no boats yet except Percy Briggs's twenty-five-pound collapsible one; those who want to go fishing have to use one of those old Copley Fielding things by the jetty there.... Now we're coming to the people. Here's Raymond Briggs with Mr. Lacey, Raymond in his orange-and-black blazer and a white Homburg hat, Philip in a blue blazer with white braid and a plain straw hat; both with perfect creamy rippling white trousers and spotless white doeskin boots. They're talking off-handedly about other holiday-places—Norway, the Highlands, the Riviera—and they're afraid of showing any enthusiasm or delight. Of every place they know they say that it has "gone off" since they first went there. There's a subtle undercurrent of contest about their conversation. Philip was at Hyères as recently as last winter, looking at the violets; but Raymond has been three times to Arles and Nimes. I suppose honours are easy.
"Roman, I've heard?" Philip remarks. (You can hear him as you pass.)
"Yes, Roman, with a Saracenic tower."
"Ah, that tower's Saracenic, is it?"
"Saracenic."
"Wonderful people!"
"Indeed yes!"
"Curious how it takes you back into ancient times."
"Yes, yes, it shortens history."
"But the hotel accommodation!—--"
"Oh, bad in the extreme!"
"What they want is entirely new and up-to-date management——"
"Quite so——"
"Can't say I thought much of theirbouillabaisse."
"An acquired taste, I suppose——"
And they pass on. They'll talk like that the whole morning. They're not really interested in their subject. As I say, it makes you think of a sort of contest. Personally, I always want to applaud when somebody scores a good point. Perhaps the idea is that they're doing Llanyglo a favour by coming here—
There, stepping over the tent-ropes, are Mrs. Briggs and Mr. Ashton. Mr. Ashton is Edward Garden's chief London representative, a man of pleasure and of the world, and for all I know his function may be to keep these prosperous northerners up to the metropolitan mark. Mrs. Briggs, for example, who is very short and stout, and wears a lavender bonnet and pelisse, and certainly will not walk far on the sand in those heels, is on her mettle now. She is telling Mr. Ashton some London hotel experience or other. I like Mrs. Briggs. She's worth ten of Raymond. But I don't think she quite knows which is the paste and which the jewels in her speech.
"——and so at the 'Metropole' they couldn't take Ray and I in; not that I was surprised in the very least, such frights as we looked after the voyage, and hardly any luggage; it hadn't come on from Paris, you see. So I says to Ray, 'It's no good making a noration here, for it's plain they don't want us.I'm glad they're doing so well they can afford to turn money away.' So I turns to the manager, who was staring at my slippers I'd put on for the railway-journey, and 'Don't if it hurts you,' I said, and with that we slammed our things together and drove off to the 'Grand'——"
You can hear Mr. Ashton's sympathetic murmurs ... but that's Mrs. Lacey, with Mr. Morrell, just turning; she thinks that Euonyma and Wygelia have been quite long enough in the water. Mr. Morrell is in cool-looking cream alpaca; Mrs. Lacey, who is hook-nosed and pepper-and-salt haired and thin as a hop-pole, resembles a many-flounced hollyhock in her silvery battleship grey.
"They'll tak' no harm, weather like this," Mr. Morrell is saying. "What's that I was going to ask you, now?... I have it. Is it right 'at Briggs is to build you a new house ovver yonder?"
A foot or so over Mr. Morrell's head, Mrs. Lacey replies that Mr. Lacey hasn't decided yet.—"You see, with the girls at Brighton for another year yet, and then of course they'll have to go to Paris, it's early to say."
"There's some talk of his making a Floral Valley, isn't there?"
"I've not heard.—But I'm sure those girls——"
"They're as right as rain wi' Mrs. Maynard——"
But that is precisely where Mrs. Lacey thinks Mr. Morrell is mistaken. She has nothing whatever against Mrs. Maynard, who is a young widow, but she would like to know a little more about the late Mr. Maynard before admitting her to unreserved intimacy. Mrs. Maynard has not quite the figure a "Mrs." ought to have, and does more bathing than swimming (if you understand me). That's an accomplishment she learned at Ostend (for if Mr. Ashton, the London agent, is metropolitan, Mrs. Maynard brings quite a cosmopolitan air to Llanyglo). The misses Euonyma and Wygelia, on the other hand, learned to swim at Brighton, walking to the bathing-place in a crocodile. You see the difference. Brighton is not Ostend, any more than Llanyglo is either, and Mrs. Lacey considers that you can't be too careful.... That's Mrs. Maynard, with her back to the oncoming breaker. Her bathing-dress is quite complete, as complete as Mrs. Garden's, drying outside her tent there; but Mrs. Lacey disapproves of those twinkling scarlet ribbons. She considers them to be little points of attraction, that do all that is asked of them, and more. She prophesied that the red would "run" in the water, but it didn't, and that makes matters rather worse, for if Mrs. Maynard knows as well as that which red will run and which won't she is practised——
And those two graceful but rather skinned-rabbit-looking young shapes in the gleaming navy-blue costumes with the white braid are the girls.
Now we're among the castles. Quite a horde of children, and very pretty children too, with their spades and buckets and their petticoats bunched up inside striped knickers (those too you get at Gruffydd's). That's Gilbert Smythe, the Medical Officer, the tall shaggy man carrying the bucket of water for the little boy's moat. He'll be giving Llanyglo its bathing testimonial too. Don't tread on that seaweed; it may be a castle garden, or a sea-serpent, or anything else in the child's imagination.... There are the boys trying to launch the collapsible boat. John Willie hasn't grown much; he won't be a tall man; but he's filling out. That minx Mrs. Maynard makes quite a lot of him, and says she likes the feel of his fine-spun hair. Whether John Willie likes her to feel it or not he does not betray.
Now for Howell Gruffydd's....
There you are. "THE LLANYGLO STORES," in big gold letters right across the front of the two cottages. What do you think of it?
Yes in one way and another, there must be a largish sum sunk in "stock." Whether Howell's buying on credit or not I don't know, but he looks prosperous; he's had his beard trimmed, and he wears a new hat. Green butterfly-nets and brown and white and grey sandshoes—spades and buckets and balls and fishing-lines and toy ships—bottles of scent and the "Llanyglo Sunburn Cure" (made up for him by the chemist at Porth Neigr)—a new board with "Tricycles for Hire" on it (that's the shed at the back, and Eesaac Oliver, home for the holidays, books the hirings and does the repairs)—baskets and spirit-kettles and ironmongery, all in addition to the groceries.—Yes, Howell has quite a big business now. Let's go inside and buy something.
"Good morning, Mr. Gruffydd; papers in yet? No? I thought I saw Hugh coming down the Sarn road half an hour ago. Yes, a lovely day. How's Eesaac Oliver? Still at Porth Neigr?... No, no, I know he's home for his holidays; I saw him driving Mr. Pritchard's hay-cart yesterday; I mean when is he going to Aberystwith?... Next year? Good! He'll make his mark in the world!—Mr. Garden been in this morning yet?... He's driving in the mountains? Well, there's always a breeze in the mountains.... No, serve Mrs. Roberts first. How are you, Mrs. Roberts?"
Howell still sells Mrs. Roberts her pennyworth of bicarbonate of soda, and with the same smile as ever, but he could do without her custom now. Look round. Crates of eggs (the Trwyn hens can't keep pace with the demand now), great Elizabethan gables of tinned fruits and salmon, a newspaper counter, the Post Office behind the wire grating there, strings of things hanging from the ceiling, scarcely an inch of Edward Garden's matchboarding to be seen, and three assistants, all busily weighing, packing, checking, snipping the string off on the little knives on the wooden string-boxes, and passing the parcels to the boys with the hand-carts. But we ought to have been here a couple of hours ago. Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Lacey and Mrs. Garden were giving their orders for the day then. They come every morning, rings on their fingers and bells on their toes, high heels and flounced parasols and all the lot, and Howell doesn't have it all his own way then, I can tell you. For this is where our ladies are really efficient. They may never dream of travelling otherwise than first-class, but they know the price of everything to a halfpenny and a farthing. There's no "If 'twill do 'twill do" about them when it comes to the management of a house. And when Hilda Morrell grows out of the stage of wishing her father would talk "like other people," the chances are that she'll discover too that this is her real strength, as it was her mother's. Mrs. Maynard comes in with them of a morning sometimes, and tells them how tre-men-dously clever she thinks them, to know the differences between things like that, and vows thathertradesmen rob her right and left because she hasn't been properly brought up; and then Mrs. Briggs, putting down the egg she is holding to the light, cries, "Eh, it's nothing, love—I could learn you in a month!"
But Mrs. Lacey detects a secret sarcasm in the phrase about the bringing-up.
And the men will be in for their newspapers presently.
Now a stroll to the hotel, and just a peep at them by and by as they have lunch....
This is the hotel lounge. The varnish is quite dry, though it doesn't look it. A dozen little round tables, chairs heavily upholstered in crimson velvet, festoons of heavy gilt cord on the curtains, and that's the service-hatch in the corner. The waiters are rather melancholy; you see, it isn't a public-house; everything goes down on the residents' bills; and that means fewer tips. Tea is served here in the afternoon, but of course the ladies never dream of tipping. Those excellent purchasers work out everything at cost price, omit such items as interest on capital, insurance, depreciation, and so on, and find a shilling for two pennyworth of bread and butter, a twopenny cake, and a pinch of two-shilling tea with hot water thrown in, tip enough.
"Ting! Ting! Ting!"
It is Val Clayton, ordering another drink for himself and his two friends. He drinks vermouth, his friends bottles of beer. Val drinks vermouth because it is foreign (he runs over to Paris frequently, and travels to Egypt for Clayton Brothers and Clayton), and perhaps he makes love to Mrs. Maynard (if you can call it making love) because she too is almost a continental. Since Mrs. Maynard is to be seen in her red ribbons, you might expect to find Val on the beach instead of drinking vermouth in the hotel lounge; but that is far from being "in character" when you know Val. The world's pleasures a little in excess have already set their mark on Val. He will tell you that he would not miss his morning drink, "not for the best woman living." Others may fetch and carry for their hearts' mistresses, but not Val. In the afternoon, perhaps, if he feels a little less jaded, in a hollow of the sandhills and with the warm sun to help, Val may bestir himself a little, but in the meantime he wants another vermouth.
"Ting! Ting! Ting!—They want to have French waiters here," Val grumbles. "I never mind tipping a waiter if I can get what I want when I want it.Wai—oh, you've come, have you? Well, since you are here, you may as well bring these again, and then see if the papers have come in yet——"
"And bring me a box of Egyptian cigarettes."
"No—hi!—don't bring those cigarettes.—You don't want to smoke the rubbish they sell here. Fill your case out of this—I've a thousand upstairs I brought from Cairo myself——"
"Oh!... Thanks.—Well, as I was saying——"
And the speaker (who might as well be in Manchester for all he sees of Llanyglo, at any rate in the mornings) resumes some narrative that the replenishing of the glasses has interrupted.
Now the others are dropping in, those who like oneaperatifbefore lunch but not half a dozen. Their wives have gone upstairs to tittivate themselves. The velvet chairs fill; extra waiters appear; and a light haze ascends from cigars and cigarettes to the roof. Listen to the restrained hubbub.
"Waiter!Ting!Waiter!—--" and then a slight gesture; the waiters are supposed to know the tastes of the realhabituésby this time; (it counts almost as a "score" if the waiter brings your refection without your having as much as opened your mouth to ask for it).—"The usual, sir—yes, sir—coming!" And again they are talking, not on subjects, but as if the act of talking were itself subject enough. Philip Lacey discusses with Mr. Ashton the improvement in the Harwich-Hook of Holland crossing, and Mr. Morrell exchanges views on Local Government with Raymond Briggs. "Ting! ting!You haven't cassis? Then why haven't you cassis?"—"Very sorry, sir—coming, sir!"—"What's happened to the newspapers this morning?"—"Of course, if it goes to arbitration——"—"Nay, John, don't drown t' miller!" "Ten o'clock, first stop Willesden——" "Your very good health, Mr. Morrell——" "Debentures——" "New heating in both greenhouses——"—"Same again, Val?"—"Ting!"——
"BOO-O-O-OOM-M-MMMMM!"
It is the luncheon gong.
Just a glance as they sit at table. Don't you think it's a pleasant room? Three tall windows looking out on the sea, noiseless carpet, ornaments on the sideboards rather like wooden broccoli, but the decorations straight from London. But those two large chandelier gas-brackets don't work yet; the plant isn't installed; that's why the red-shaded oil-lamps are placed at intervals down the T of tables. The older folk gather round the head of the T, and down the stalk stretch the children. These will rise before their parents, just as they go out of Church after the Second Lesson; they will break off just below John Willie Garden and the Misses Euonyma and Wygelia there—who, by the way, are more usually called June and Wy. The flowers are chosen to "last well," for Llanyglo is almost as short of flowers as it is of trees; but the linen and plate and other appointments are all good—these actors in Llanyglo's little fore-piece are not accustomed to roughing it, even on a holiday.
As I told you they would, half the women have changed their frocks. Mrs. Lacey is a pink hollyhock now, of which her daughters seem cuttings, and her hat is a sort of pink strawképi, trimmed with flowers that resemble virginia stock. She sits at the end of one arm of the T, with her back to the window. Near her is Mrs. Briggs, in stamped electric-blue velvet—her forearms, on which bracelets shiver, are as uniform in contour from whatever point you look at them as if they had been turned in a lathe. The Misses June and Wy also wear bracelets, from which depend bundles of sixpences, a sixpence for each of their birthdays, sixteen for Wiggie, fourteen for June. John Willie is lunching with Percy Briggs to-day, who lunched with him yesterday. Next to his chair is an empty one. It is Mrs. Maynard's, who has not come down yet. Then comes Val Clayton. Over all, with his napkin tucked into his collar as if he had prepared, not for a lunch, but for a shave, Mr. Morrell presides.
For some reason or other, lunch always begins a little stiffly; but they unbend as they go on. At present Raymond Briggs cannot get away from the subject of the newspapers and their unaccountable lateness.
"Can't understand it," he says for the fifth or sixth time.
"And they were late last Wednesday—no, Thursday—no, I was right, it was Wednesday."
"Was it Wednesday?"
"Yes, the day it looked like rain; you remember?"
"Ah, yes; the day it cleared up again."
"All but a drop or two—nothing to hurt——"
A pause.
"Well, I don't suppose there's anything in them."
"Speaking for myself, I don't care a button. I don't want to see the newspapers. 'No letters, no newspapers,' I always say when I go away."
"A real country holiday, eh?"
"Change and rest—those are the great things."
"You're right. Complete change. No trouble about how you dress nor what you eat. That's the best of this place."
"Still, if the newspapers are coming we may as well know when they are coming."
"They ought to have a man, not that young boy."
"Hugh Morgan?"
"Is that his name? There are so many Morgans."
"Common Welsh name."
"Met another boy, I expect."
"Boys are all alike."
"Not a pin to choose among 'em."
"Wish I was behind him with a stick for all that."
"Another glass of wine, Mr. Ashton?" ...
Then there enters with a little commotion, and trips half running to the empty chair between John Willie Garden and Val Clayton, Mrs. Maynard. She wears a big black hat swathed in black tulle, and her dress is of black lace, with close sleeves that reach to the middle knuckles of her taper fingers. She shakes out the mitre of her napkin and breaks forth to Val as she settles in her chair.
"My horrid hair!" she pouts; "it always takes me three-quarters of an hour! Really, I shall have to stop bathing, but I do love it so. It seems a kind of fate; I always have to give up the things I love!"
Hereupon Val—or perhaps vermouth, since Val seems a little astonished at his own gallantry—suddenly replies that if he were like that he would have to give up Mrs. Maynard. If Mrs. Maynard also is a little surprised she covers it with great readiness.
"Oh, now the dreadful man's beginning again!" she cries. "If youwillsay those things, Mr. Clayton, I shall have to change places at table!"
Mr. Clayton asks here what is wrong with her hair.—"I think it's champion," he adds. "Very nice indeed," he adds once more.
"Oh, howcanyou!" (As a matter of fact, Mrs. Maynard's hair is rather wonderful, dark, and so long that she can sit on it.) "No fish, thank you," she says, with a smile to the waiter.
Then Mrs. Lacey's firm voice is heard. "Can anybody tell me whether there have been many wrecks on this coast?"
The person best qualified to give this information is John Willie Garden, but Mrs. Maynard has turned to John Willie, and is asking him whether he does not think she swims rather nicely. Her tendril-like fingers are again stroking his hair. Mrs. Lacey considers Mrs. Maynard's tulle-swathed hat the ostentation of modesty and the coquetry of mourning (if she is in mourning), and, getting no answer to her question about the wrecks, invents a name for Mrs. Maynard: "Mrs. Maynard—as she calls herself." Plates are changed, corks pop, and from time to time a seltzogene gives a spurt and a cough. Raymond Briggs explains that he is fond of strawberries, but strawberries are not fond of him. The chatter grows louder.
"I took her as a kitchen-maid, but she turned out quite a good plain cook——"
"Oh, like a top—as Dr. Smythe says, it's the air."
"Oh, Ipreferit rustic; like this!"
"Quite so—the first tripper and I'm off!"
"So I opened her box myself; and there they were, if you please—four silver spoons!—--"
"Now, June, you and Wy talk French—you haven't talked it for days——"
"John's booked the rooms for next year already——"
"Oh,Mis-ter Clayton! I never promised any such thing!"
"They can talk it if they like, as fast as a mill——"
"If I were you I should see Tudor Williams about it——"
"You can put on your oldest things and there's nobody to see you——"
"But really I'm almost ashamed to go about the fright I do!—--"
"But that's a new dress?——"
"New!—Last year—but it's good enough for here——"
"Can't manage those double-l's——"
"Gutturals——"
"Llan—Thlan—Lan——"
"June, your legs are younger than mine—run and get Aunt May's letter out of my dressing-table drawer——"
"Mrs. Smythe?... The best thing for the baby, of course, but I can't help thinking that notquiteso publicly——"
"Oh, I always let Percy suck, whoever was there!—--"
"John will have his dinner in the middle of the day——"
"Smythe? Oh, one of the nicest fellows, but no push, I'm afraid——"
"That's his failing——"
"Where he misses it——"
"Extraordinary——"
"Well, some men are born like that——"
"Wait for things to come to them instead of going to fetch them——"
"Up t' Trwyn? We'll talk about it after I've had my forty winks. I must have my forty winks after my dinner."
"Lunch, William."
"Lunch, then."
"Hewillcall it his dinner——"
"Itismy dinner——"
Then Mr. Morrell makes a signal, the younger ones troop out, breaking into loud shouts the moment they are clear of the room. They are off to the beach again. Shall we follow them?...
What do the Welshmen think of it all? It suits Howell Gruffydd's book, as you see, and Howell has pacified John Pritchard with the promise of Bazaars; but the others? Dafydd Dafis, say?
Again nothing is going right for Dafydd. He feels that another friend has changed towards him—Minetta, to whom he used to singSerch Hudol, and tell his stories of fays and water-beings and knights, and make much of for her elfin looks and quick and un-Saxon ways. For Minetta is already displaying the artist's heartlessness, and does not see the sorrow in Dafydd's eyes, but only what sort of a "head" he has from her special point of view, and how he will "come" upon a piece of paper. She tried to draw Dafydd only the other day, and ordered him, half absently, to turn his head this way and that, and grew petulant when her drawing went all wrong, and suddenly cried "Don't look at me like that!" when Dafydd turned his eyes on her with a tear in the corner of each. Poor Dafydd! He, like the Squire, would be better out of all this swiftly oncoming change....
But Dafydd, who is of the phrase-making kind, has made out of his sadness a phrase that more or less represents the attitude of every Welshman in Llanyglo. He watched all these people coming in ones and twos and threes out of the hotel one morning and walking down to their deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the beach. He stood for a while, looking at the gay parterre of sun-shades and summer clothes, of kites and spades and buckets, and rings on fingers more carefully tended but of coarser stuff than his own. And he listened to the accents that even his alien ear told him were strained and affected and false. And he gave them a half contemptuous and half pitying look as he turned away.
"These summer things," he said....
But Howell Gruffydd has Dafydd Dafis's measure also, and takes it, just as he took John Pritchard's, in a single word.
"Eisteddfodau," he whispered to Dafydd behind his hand....
For they may by and by be advertising Llanyglo by means of an Eisteddfod, and, as long as he is allowed to play, Dafydd does not greatly care who he plays to nor whether they understand him or not.
There came one day at about that time a Welsh gipsy fortune-teller to Llanyglo. Her name was Belle Lovell, she was a known character all over the countryside, and she was some sort of a connection of Dafydd Dafis's. There was always a packet of tobacco for her in the Squire's kitchen when she appeared, and her companion on her travels was her thirteen-years-old daughter Ynys.[1]Belle sold baskets and mended chairs, and Ynys drew the cart, which was no more than a large deal packing-case mounted on four perambulator wheels, and with two flat shafts roughly nailed to its sides. The mother's boots, which you might have hit with a hammer and not have dinted, resembled grey old wooden dug-outs; the child went barefooted and barelegged, and it would have been a stout thorn that could have pierced the calloused pads of her hardened soles.
These two appeared at Llanyglo at midday, ate their frugal meal on the doorstep of Dafydd's single-roomed cottage behind the Independent Chapel, and then, leaving the cart behind them, strolled down to have a look at that splendacious new caravan, Howell Gruffydd's shop. Belle, her greenish light brown eyes never for a moment still, gossiped with her old acquaintances; her daughter, whose head was as steadily held as if she balanced an invisible pitcher on it, stood looking at the green butterfly-nets and red-painted buckets, admiring, but no more desiring them than she would have desired anything else impossibly beyond her reach. Her mother joined a group about Mrs. Roberts's door; the visitors, who had lunched, began to descend to the beach again; and there approached down the path that led to the Hafod Unos Ned, the oldest of the Kerrs.
Now Ned had run across Belle on many alder-expeditions, and, while the invasion of "summer things" had not driven Ned into naturalisation as a Welshman, it had, by emphasising the distinction between the well-to-do and the poor of the world, shown him how to jog along in peace with his neighbours. He gave Belle an intelligent grin, and jerked his head in the direction of the bathing-tents.
"Well, mother," he said, "ye've dropped in at just about th' right time."
"There iss no wrong time for seeing friends," Belle replied, in an up-and-down and very musical Welsh accent.
"Nay, I wanna thinking-g o' that," Ned replied, strongly doubling the "g" that terminated the present participle. "I wor thinking-g of a bit o' fortune-telling. There's a lot ovver yonder wi' more brass nor sense, and it allus tickles 'em to talk about sweethearts an' sich."
"Indeed Llanyglo has become grea-a-at big place, whatever," the gipsy replied, and continued her conversation with Mrs. Roberts.
And presently, whether she took the hint or whether she had come precisely for that purpose, Belle's greenish-brown eyes roved again, she made a slight gesture to Ynys, who had turned from the butterfly-nets and was looking out to sea, and the pair of them made off along the beach in the direction of that bright plot of colour that made as it were a herbaceous border between the grey-green tussocks and the glittering sea.
For a hundred yards Belle's dug-outs left behind her a heavy shuffling track in the sand, parallel with the light kidney-shaped prints of the child who walked as if she carried an invisible pitcher on her head; and then, with the cluster of tents and parasols still far ahead, they stopped. John Willie Garden and Percy Briggs, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd ready to bear a hand if called upon to do so, but otherwise a little fearful of intruding, were victualling the blue-and-white collapsible boat for a cruise. But it was not in order to tell the fortunes of the three boys that Belle stopped. She stopped for the same reason that the street-seller pulls out his rattle or his conjuring trick, while his quick-silver eyes dart this way and that in search of his crowd. The only difference was that Belle was her own conjuring-trick. The gesture with which she performed it was superbly negligent. She had a wonderful old mignonette-coloured shawl, which, when she had talked with the group about Mrs. Roberts's doorstep, had been drawn up over her head; and suddenly she allowed it to fall to her shoulders. The effect might well have carried twice the distance it was intended to carry. Out of the folds of the shawl her neck rose as erect as the pistil of an arum lily. Against it gleamed her heavy gold earrings. Her cheekbones and the nodule of her high nose gleamed like bronze, and about the whorl of the springing of her hair at the back of her head the sunshine made as it were a sun-dog on the lustrous blackness. Her silver wedding-ring, an old tweed jacket that might have belonged to her kinsman Dafydd Dafis, and a patched old indigo petticoat, completed the legerdemain. Ynys, clad to all appearances in a single garment only, watched the boys exactly as she had watched the balls and butterfly-nets and buckets outside Howell Gruffydd's shop.
They too made a shiningcoup d'œil. There was just swell enough to set the long breakers hurdling in, and wind enough to take the tops off them in rattling showers of brilliant spray. Indeed it was so merry a sea that, not half an hour before, Mrs. Maynard had declared to John Willie that she had come within an ace of drowning during her bathe that morning, and had asked him whether, had he seen her in difficulties, he would have come to her rescue. "Mmmmm, John Willie?" she had asked, curling his hair with her perfumed fingers; but John Willie, seeing Percy Briggs approaching, had jerked away his head. This had not been because he had been afraid of being laughed at by Percy. For that matter, Percy had confided to John Willie only a week before that he "liked their Minetta," and so was in no position to jeer at the softer relations. No; it had merely been that, as Llanyglo's curtain had risen, suddenly revealing a soft and alluring group of Euonymas and Wygelias and Hildas, not to speak of Mrs. Maynard herself, all temptingly set out like fruit upon a stall, the curtain of John Willie Garden's peculiar privacy had come down with a run. Mrs. Maynard was always trying to peep behind it, but probably there was nothing behind. Probably that was the reason it had come so sharply and closely down. No boy wants to show that he has nothing to show.
Smack!—A bucketful of spray drenched the stores, and the wave ran hissing and creaming back under the counter of the blue-and-white boat. John Willie shouted rather crossly to Eesaac Oliver.
"Pull her up a bit, can't you, instead of standing there doing nothing!"
Eesaac Oliver started to life and obeyed. He was rather a fetcher and carrier for these more happily circumstanced boys, but privately he knew himself to be in some things their superior. To tell the truth, Eesaac Oliver knew just a lee-tle too much about what went on within himself, and communicated it just a lee-tle too readily to others. For he dropped no curtain; on the contrary, the windows of his soul were flung wide open. The experience of the world he had acquired at the school at Porth Neigr had already caused him to declare himself as being thenceforward powerfully on the side of the angels; and that ingenious educational exercise which consists of speaking extempore on any subject given only a moment ago had a lee-tle abnormally developed certain natural powers of expression which his race rarely lacks. Had Mrs. Maynard attempted to stroke Eesaac Oliver's hair (which was thick and black, and rose in a great lump in front, falling thence in a lappet over his pale forehead), he would either have cried "Apage!" or else, suffering the seduction, would have undergone torments of remorse afterwards.
Therefore it was with a meek dignity that Eesaac Oliver bore a hand with the boat, and then fell back and a little enviously watched again.
Then that crafty and stately piece of legerdemain of Belle's had its reward. In his rippling cream alpaca, there approached along the sands Mr. Morrell himself, and Belle's neck no longer resembled the pistil of an arum lily. She bent ingratiatingly forward; as if a key had clicked, a dazzling smile cut her face into two; and after a jocular word or two Mr. Morrell bore her off, Ynys following. Let us follow too.
Do look at the contrast—those summer things, and the two wanderers in whom all the seasons are ingrained; carefully veiled and sunburn-cured complexions, and these other vagrants, brown as the upturned earth; the indefatigable maintenance of artificial attitudes even before one another, and the grave ease of the child, the deliberate gesture with which the mother looses as it were in the sheath the only weapon she has against the world.... Frith's "Derby Day?" Yes, it is a little like it; but listen. Mrs. Maynard, with a sparkling glance about her that says "Mum," has slipped off her wedding-ring, and Belle has taken her hand. It is slim as a glove that has never been put on, and Mrs. Maynard intends to trip Belle if she can.
So, when Belle begins to promise Mrs. Maynard a husband who shall be such-and-such, there are winks and glances and nudges, as much as to say that now they are going to have some fun, and Mr. Morrell says, "Here, ho'd on a bit, mother—how do you know she isn't married?"
If Belle shows the knife for a moment, she does it so delicately that nobody notices it.
"If the prit-ty lady was married, her man he srink a ring upon her finger, red-hot, as they srink a tyre on a cart-wheel," Belle replies; and the reading of Mrs. Maynard's palm continues.
Mrs. Lacey, a pale blue hollyhock, looks as if she pooh-poohed the whole thing; but inwardly she is a-tremble with eagerness to have the fortunes of her two daughters told. As it happens, no sooner is Mrs. Maynard's hand dropped than Mr. Morrell, who happens to be standing next to June, catches her by the arm.
"Come on, June, and be told how to get a husband!" he cries, and he slips a shilling into Belle's hand.
June will never be prettier than she is now. She is indeed very pretty—apple-blossom and cream, bright-haired, freshly starched, back straight and elbows well down, and as glossy from top to toe as the broad mauve ribbon of her sash. Soon she will be as tall as her mother; already she is taller than her father, the landscape-gardener; and the thought of whether she will marry or not, and whether brilliantly or otherwise, never enters her head. Of course she will marry, and of course her marriage will be a brilliant one. "Marriage" and "brilliant marriage" are one and the same thing. In this, as in most other things, Wygelia is of the same opinion as June. A close understanding, which has not yet outgrown the form of surreptitious kicks under the table, and private and abbreviated words, exists between the two sisters. Other things being equal, they would probably prefer to marry two brothers.
"I tell the prit-ty miss a harder thing than that—I tell her how to keep her man when she has got him," Belle replied amid laughter; and she proceeds to describe June's husband. He is to come over the water (landing at Newhaven, Mrs. Lacey instantly concludes, and taking the first train to the Boarding School at Brighton), and he shall be devoted to her, and she shall have such-and-such a number of children. (Mrs. Lacey straightens her back; this is something like; her grandfather, whom she remembers quite well, was June's great-grandfather, and will have been the great-great-grandfather of June's boys and girls, which is getting on, especially when you remember the younger sons and grandsons of somebodies, who are estate-bailiffs and engine-drivers and carriers of milk-cans in the Colonies.) When June's fortune is finished all applaud her, as if she had performed some feat of skill, and then Mr. Morrell seizes Wy.
"Come on, Wy—no hanging back—let's see what sort of a fist Wy's going to make of it——"
And Wy also is haled forward, blushing and conscious and biting her lip, and is told that for her too somebody is languishing, and that presently he will drink out of her glass and thenceforward think her thoughts, which are already complex. And Hilda's palm is read, and little Victoria Smythe's fat one, and Val Clayton's, and others, and silver rains into Belle's palm. Chaffingly Mr. Morrell offers her a sovereign for her takings, uncounted, but is refused. Then Mrs. Briggs "wants the boys done," and somebody is despatched along the shore for Percy and John Willie, and as they arrive, bearing their bottles of milk and parcels of jam-sandwiches (for the blue-and-white boat had been paid off), there comes up also Minetta, carrying her sketching-kit. She stands peering at Ynys, more as seeing in her a subject than as at a fellow-being.
So, idly and laughingly, an hour of the summer afternoon passes; and then an accident mars its harmony. John Willie and Percy, feeling the pangs of thirst, had drunk their milk and had then set up the bottle as a mark to throw stones at; and Ynys, walking down to the sea-marge, has set her foot upon a piece of the broken glass. Unconcernedly she bathes the cut in the salt water.
But as the laughing group breaks up, and her mother calls her again, the blood wells out once more, dabbling with a dark stain those light kidney-shaped prints in the sand. Mrs. Garden and Mrs. Briggs see the child's plight simultaneously. It is a cruel gash, and the two ladies utter loud cries.
"Nay, nay, whativver in the world!" cries Mrs. Briggs, all of her that is not pure mother suddenly becoming pure Hunslet. "Nay, nay! Come here, doy!—--"
She and Mrs. Garden kneel down before the gipsy child, and a dozen others gather round. Cries of sympathy break out.