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IN THE VINE COUNTRY
IN THE
VINE COUNTRY
BY
E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF
‘THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS CART, ETC.
[Illustration: E. Œ. Somerville]
_ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. H. TOWNSEND_
_FROM SKETCHES BY E. Œ. SOMERVILLE_
LONDON
W. H. ALLEN & CO. LIMITED
13 WATERLOO PLACE S.W.
1893
_The following pages, with their accompanying Illustrations, originally
appeared in the columns of ‘The Lady’s Pictorial,’ and are here
reprinted by permission of the Proprietors._
IN THE VINE COUNTRY
CHAPTER I.
It was our first day’s cub-hunting, and things had been going against us
from the outset.
To begin with, we had started rather late,--it is noticeable that the
minutes between five and six A.M. are fewer and closer together than
they are at any other period of the day,--and, when half way to the meet
we found that Betty had given way to her sporting proclivities, and had
surreptitiously followed us. When it is explained that Betty is a St.
Bernard puppy of cart-horse dimensions, whose expression of smiling
imbecility only cloaks a will of iron, it will be understood that there
was trouble before us. The trouble began at once. Directly she saw she
was discovered she ran away, and the next time we saw her she was three
fields ahead of us, lumbering cheerfully into covert at the heels of the
hounds, pursued by several cows and the curses of the master.
[Illustration: BETTY.]
By the time that she had been caught and immured in the bedroom of the
nearest cottage, we were covered with confusion and blazing with heat,
and while we were precariously scrambling on to our horses’ backs by the
help of the pigstye door, we were told by an excited old man that the
hounds had found, and were ‘firing away like the divil’ out of the far
side of the wood. This happened to be one of those statements that are
founded not so much on fact as on a desire to keep things stirring and
pleasant, but none the less did it send us at inconvenient speed to the
other side of the covert, there to find that the hounds had never left
it, and were hunting slowly back towards the side from which we had just
come.
Not long after this my second cousin lost her temper, and said she hated
cubbing, and wished she was back in Connemara, or anywhere out of the
county Cork. This expression of opinion occurred when she was picking
herself up out of a potato furrow, into which she and her horse had
ingloriously rolled, and it was a good deal embittered by the fact that
she had hurt her knee, torn her habit, and broken her hunting crop.
The day ended with this incident, so far, at least, as we were
concerned. Betty was released from the captivity that she had not
ceased to bewail in quivering, infantine shrieks, and we turned our
faces toward home. There is something very humbling in coming in at ten
o’clock to a late edition of the family breakfast, with nothing to
justify the routing up of the household at five A.M. except a torn habit
and a bruised knee; and we said to each other, as we went
unostentatiously up the back stairs, that cubbing was not worth the
candle by which one had to get up to be in time for it.
We did not know that a few days afterwards we should be hanging out of
the window of the train as, at a painfully early hour, it passed a
covert in the vicinity, straining jaundiced eyes of jealousy at the
distant specks that represented the field and the hounds--specks who
were to remain in the county Cork and go out cubbing, instead of faring
forth, as we were doing, to take our pleasure in foreign lands.
The letter that we found on the dining-room table, when we came
down-stairs on that day that had
[Illustration: MY SECOND COUSIN LOST HER TEMPER.]
been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this unexpected change of
circumstances. It said majestically, ‘You are to go to the vineyards of
the Médoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the
vintage;’ and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Médoc, its
vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even
with satisfaction.
The gibes of our friends were many and untiring, and were the harder to
bear that we felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large
and yet delicate mission,--what did we know of Château Lafite or Mouton
Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once
compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert?--and when on
a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank air was heavy with the
prognostications that we should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and
the last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final corner of the
avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue ribbon.
We had a singularly detestable journey to London, or perhaps it was that
a summer spent in country remoteness made the train and its loathsome
sister, the steamboat, more intolerable than usual. As far as Dublin we
were comparatively confident, though the trees at the station were
rustling a little in the wind, and the window-frames shook ominously in
dismal accompaniment to the lamentations of the emigrants who crowded
the platforms, waiting for the down train to Cork. There are happily few
things in the world that are as bad as they are expected to be, but a
bad crossing is worse than the combined efforts of imagination and
remembrance can make it. This, at least, is the opinion of my second
cousin, who ought by this time to have some knowledge of a subject to
which, according to her own reckoning of the time occupied in each
crossing, she has given some fifty of the best years of her life. The
trees and the window-frames had not overstated the case, and we had the
gloomy satisfaction of hearing the stewardess remark, as we neared
Holyhead, that it had been a rough passage. We could have told her so
ourselves, but still it was gratifying to have the thing placed on an
official basis.
In the pale morning, as we endured that last long hour before Euston is
reached, we read in headachy snatches a pamphlet that we had been lent
about the wines of the Médoc, and our souls sank at the prospect of
expounding the laws of fermentation to readers who would be as
oppressively bored by it as we ourselves. But our first day in London
routed this hobgoblin: we were to enjoy ourselves; we were to taste
claret if we wished, or talk bad French to the makers of it if it amused
us; but to improve other people’s minds by figures and able
disquisitions on viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera was
not, we heard with thanksgiving, to be our mission.
The three days before our start were spent in the manner customary in
such cases; that is to say, we moved incessantly and at an
ever-quickening pace between the Strand, the Army and Navy Stores, and
High Street, Kensington, laden with small parcels,
[Illustration: WE WERE LENT A KODAK.]
footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care-worn from the effort
to utilise the Underground return tickets that an ideally perfect
programme had induced us to take in the morning. In addition to these
usual cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot. We were lent
a Kodak,--for the benefit of the unlearned it may be mentioned that the
Kodak is a photographic camera of the kind that is to the ordinary
species as a compressed meat lozenge to a round of beef,--and as neither
of us knew anything about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism
in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind. Ambition fired us to
the attempt, and having adjourned with the Kodak and an instructor to
the severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames Embankment, we
received there our first and only lesson. What its results were will
never be known to the public; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling on a
bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of little interest to any
one except the artists, and even to their indulgent eyes its charm is of
a somewhat morbid character.
After these agitations, the corner seats of a railway carriage at
Victoria had a restful luxury about them that was almost stagnation. The
consciousness of two portmanteaus registered to Bordeaux almost made up
for the cumbrous row of hand packages that squatted in the netting; and
the half-hour of waiting for the train to start was a period of soothing
inaction scarcely ruffled by the slow filling of the carriage to its
limit of five on each side, and merely moved to a languid enjoyment by
the inexorable determination of the latest comers, a bride and
bridegroom, to sit next to each other irrespective of all previous
arrangements of old ladies and their baskets. They had about them the
well-known power of making their innocent and well-meaning
fellow-creatures feel in the way and in the wrong, and the eyes of the
carriage sought the windows or the ceiling as if by word of command
when, after the settling down of glowingly new bags and rugs was
completed, the latest comers leaned back and gazed into each other’s
faces with an unaffected ecstasy, the fact that both wore gold-rimmed
spectacles imparting a sort of serious lustre to their mutual regard.
The gaze seemed to us to last most of the way to Dover, except at those
moments when a glance or two was given to their fellow-passengers, a
glance of almost compassionate wonder that people so uninteresting and
so superfluous should be alive. It gave us an instant of pleasure when
some time afterwards on board the boat we saw that the bride’s fringe
was blown into dejected wisps, and that her groom’s nose was blue and
his face pinched.
Before we reached Dover an example was vouchsafed to us in further
proof, if such were needed, of the difficulty of saying good-bye
agreeably at the window of a railway carriage. In this case the victims
of the custom stood on the platform, smiling spasmodically at the other
victim in the carriage, and saying at intervals, ‘Well, you’ll write,
won’t you?’ ‘So good of you to come and see me off.’ ‘Well, _mind_ you
write!’ ‘Oh yes, dear, and be sure you give my love to Mary and Aunt
Williams.’ Then they all smiled brightly and nodded their heads, and the
traveller, with her chin upon the window-sill, beamed galvanically down
upon her friends, and in her turn adjured them not to forget to write.
As the train moved off at last, the farewells thickened to a climax,
and we were privileged to observe how, when the final delicate flutter
of the hand had been given, the smile disappeared from the face of the
traveller, and she thankfully yielded herself to the deferred enjoyment
of her newspaper.
Of the further journey to Paris there is happily little to record. ‘_Das
höchste Glück hat reine Lieder_,’ and the most satisfactory travelling
is that which lends itself least to description. The Calais boat made
its journey in the most brilliant of sunshine and the most refreshing of
breezes, trampling its way along the water at a pace that made the tall
merchantmen look more old-world and stately than usual as they moved
serenely down the Channel. The male part of the passengers walked the
deck as if their lives depended on it, after the custom of men; the
ladies sat in sheltered places and tried to keep their hair tidy; and
all alike exhibited the hypnotic consciousness of the presence of a
sketch-book, that makes the most cautious sketcher the object of instant
remark and suspicion.
We sat that night in the warm, airless courtyard of a Paris hotel; tall
dusty shrubs in pots hung their lank leaves limply over our heads;
waiters flitted like bats to and fro between the kitchen on one side and
the _salle-à-manger_ on the other. A French family, consisting of a
papa, a mamma, a beautifully behaved daughter with her hair in a queue,
a humorous old friend of a godfatherly type, and a little boy with
tasselled boots, partook of various liquids at a table near enough to us
to permit of our hearing their effortless, endless babble, and also to
observe with ever-growing hatred the self-conscious gambols of the
little boy. Later on, they adjourned to the _salon_, and the daughter
performed a selection of music. She began with a confident rendering of
‘_La Prière d’une Vierge_’ one of those pieces which once was the
strength and glory of every budding pianiste, but now in its old age is
only heard limping and faltering over the greasy keys of hotel pianos;
and she finished with an operatic gallop in which the treble fled about
in lonely frenzy, and the bass retired on to the lowest octave of the
piano and there had a fit of St. Vitus’s dance. The little boy
pirouetted about the room, the papa, mamma, and godfather clapped their
hands and laughed indulgently, and a good many of the windows that gave
on to the courtyard were suddenly and violently shut.
We went to bed after that; that is to say, we retired into a good-sized
opera-box, with windows opening on to lamps and palms, and a general
interior effect of red curtains and mirrors. It is one of the strangest
features of French hotels that dressing-tables are not included in any
suite of bedroom furniture; there are looking-glasses by the score,
there are handsome marble slabs bearing ornate clocks that do not go,
there are gorgeous _armoires à glace_, but never a good, commonplace,
useful dressing-table. French people seem to do without them in the same
simple, uncomplaining way that they do without baths.
We cannot pretend to say we slept well in our opera-box. Everything in
the hotel seemed to stay up
[Illustration: HE BROKE INTO A DEFIANT POLKA.]
all night, including a small but devoted party of fleas; and the
atmosphere, even when diluted with as much courtyard air as the windows
would let in, was heavy and hot. We came down next morning feeling
unrefreshed, and not at all disposed to bestow of our substance on the
street musician who, since eight o’clock, had been playing national airs
on an accordion in the courtyard. Having seen us pass by on our way to
breakfast, he immediately played ‘God save the Queen,’ gliding
subsequently into the ‘Marseillaise’ as a kind of corrective, and then
finding that we still drank our coffee unmoved, he broke into a defiant
polka, which, did he but know it, has ‘sung in our sleeping ear and
hummed in our waking head’ in elusive, half-remembered snatches,
revenging a thousandfold the callousness of the two _Anglaises_.
We had not much time to spare after breakfast, as the Bordeaux train by
which we were going started at 11.20. A mosquito net was, however, one
of the things we had forgotten, and one of the things which we were
assured was indispensable, and it was not until we had entered a
likely-looking shop that we realised that we did not know the French for
mosquito. My second cousin and the shopwoman regarded each other for a
few seconds in polite silence, and then the latter said
interrogatively,--
‘_Madame désire--?_’
[Illustration: RESOLVED THAT DEATH ALONE SHOULD PART US FROM BELLOWS’
DICTIONARY.]
My second cousin answered diffidently that she desired fine net as a--as
a--in short, for a veil against the--the flies that bite.
The shopwoman looked at her with compassion, and offered me a handsome
long black lace veil, and with it the assurance that mademoiselle would
find it very becoming. At this stage in the negotiation the two
purchasers began to laugh with the agonising laughter that has too often
overtaken them in shops, and the shopwoman, as is usual in such cases,
was obviously convinced that she was being laughed at, and haughtily
replaced the lace veil in its box. Having wept profusely and idiotically
before her for some moments, we recovered sufficiently to ask for white
muslin, and succeeded in buying a suitable piece, with which we slunk
out of the shop, resolved that in future death alone should part us from
Bellows’ Dictionary.