There are no suburbs to Welshpool. Practical, like its countrywomen, it
does not trail a modish skirt across the meadows; the woods and
hedgerows run down to it, but it will not change its working-dress and
come up from its hollow to be idle with them. Of this, indeed, we were
not disposed to complain, when at some three of the clock on the next
afternoon we started on the first stage of our journey. We had received,
in the act of departure, an amount of interest and attention that would
have satiated, not to say embarrassed, a sandwich-man--from the
congregated friends of the chemist and ironmonger, from the old
Yorkshire woman (framed like a Holbein behind the glass of a firmly
closed window), from the exponents of fashion in baggy breeches and
slim gaiters who habitually “practised at the bar” of the hotel, from
the carriage of an unknown magnate, and from the pit and gallery section
which had early possessed itself of the best places on the central
lamp-post. The subtler observation of villa residences was at least
spared us, the vulture eye of the tradesman’s widow behind the lace
curtain, the scorn of the offspring of the dentist or the auctioneer.
Powys Castle and its woods towered aloof in a shimmer of heat, as
unaware of town and tourist as the cattle within its gates. The grey
houses of the town became smaller and older looking; cats sat on the
doorstep and mused on the deceitfulness of things, overawing the languid
dogs in the eternal supremacy of mind over matter; and the flame of
sunshine blazed tangibly round us and all things. Our last impression of
Welshpool is of its oldest house, a black-beamed cottage, lolling and
bulging, crooked and bowed in every line; impossible as to perspective,
but strong and stable beyond all houses in the town--so the town says.
Then the hedgerows, and the white road stretching westward into the
unknown. Elder-bushes, with their creamy discs; dog-roses of every shade
of pink gazing at us with soft innumerable faces; honeysuckle in
thickets; perfumes lonely and delicate, perfumes blended and
intoxicating. The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in
indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery
hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while
the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to
the saddles.
The mention of the hold-alls disperses like an east wind all ideas of
the indolent and the picturesque. Briefly they may be described as was a
kitchen-maid in a Galway household by an enraged fellow-servant--“She’s
able to put any one that’d be with her into a decay.” We had spent the
morning in packing them, in repacking them, in acrid argument as to
whether Miss O’Flannigan’s painting-box (apparently made of lead and
filled with stones) would fit in my hold-all with the teapot, tin
kettle, india-rubber bath, shooting-boots, drugs, and other angular
things which had been already bestowed in it; in punching fresh holes in
the straps, in going to the saddler to have more “dees” put on the
off-sides of the saddles, and finally in a harrowing parting with our
portmanteaus, which, labelled “Dolgelly, per goods train,” had been
delivered to the hand of the boots. It was the burning of the ships; and
while the smart, tightly-belted hold-alls were hoisted like plethoric
grooms to their saddles, we looked back to the portmanteaus, and said,
with a hope no larger than Brutus had, “If we do meet again, we’ll smile
indeed.”
For about two miles we crawled at a walk in the heat,--the drab Tommy
niggling, shuffling, and plodding; the bay Tom “dishing,” crossing his
legs, and stumbling, but both absolutely laid out for goodness. Lulled
to a false security, we ambled thus up and down the slopes, and prosed a
little to each other about the scenery: plump,
[Illustration: _Packing the “hold-alls.”_]
knobby hills, such as one would cut out of dough with a tumbler, with
strips of wood straddling over them; rich valleys with their sides
padded with dark-green trees, all complete and devoid of relation to
each other, but all similar, like a picture-gallery full of replicas of
the same landscape. This, we said, was not the kind of thing we had come
to Wales to see.
A shaded stretch of road tempted us at length to urge the Tommies to
their own wild trot, and to its vagaries we and the hold-alls rose and
fell, bumped and joggled with what grace we might. Roadside heaps of
stones, that had till now been merely matter for composed inquiry to the
Tommies, became at this pace fraught with all supernatural powers and
malign intents, and we cannoned violently and often, as Tom swerved,
wild-eyed, from one of these objects of terror, or as Tommy, the
ignoble, turned with incredible swiftness and endeavoured to flee home
to the chemist. We persevered to the top of a steep descent, where the
white dusty road fell away from our feet, and there slackened as there
came into view a cart drawn by four giant horses with solemn bowed heads
and huge legs that gave them the effect of wearing sailor’s trousers,
tight at the knee and full at the ankle. The trunk of a great elm lay on
the cart, a “vibrating star,” as George Eliot has described the prone
advance of such another tree, and on top of it sat a man in a blue linen
coat, looking as unimportant as a squirrel in relation to the mammoth
creatures who were accepting his authority. We looked at him with
respect as the quivering bole of the elm-tree drew slowly level with us,
but he regarded us not at all. His gaze was fixed on my hold-all, from
whose gaping mouth, as we suddenly became aware, a sponge-bag and the
spout of the tea-kettle were protruding.
“Hoy!” said the carter, pointing with his brass-ringed whip at something
on the road behind us.
It was Miss O’Flannigan’s india-rubber cup, a noisome vessel from which
she indifferently partook of tea, bovril, and claret. We dismounted,
and the saddles, released from the compensating balance of the weight
that experience had already taught us to bring to bear on the stirrups,
obeyed instantly the four-stone drag of each hold-all, and began to turn
very slowly and steadily to the off-side. We collected the cup and some
other scattered valuables, and then, while the flies closed in round us,
we began the long strife with straps and buckles. The Tommies sidled,
stamped, and snapped ungovernably; while the flies devoured us and them
impartially, the girths were dragged to their last holes, the hold-alls
repacked and strapped on again, and the reign of suffering that ceased
not till our journey’s end was fairly inaugurated.
Cannoffice was our destination, Llanfair was to be our stopping-place
for tea. I almost hesitate to mention that Llanfair is but seven miles
from Welshpool; but it is, perhaps, better to state at once that we,
and, still more, the Tommies, were above the vulgarities of
record-breaking, unless, indeed, we can lay claim to our daily journeys
being the shortest hitherto performed by any Welsh tourist. It must have
been five o’clock when we rode down the stony hill beside the no less
dry and stony river-bed, where at any time, except in this rainless
year, the water must swirl pleasantly below the grey village of
Llanfair. Welsh villages are composed of nearly equal parts of inns and
chapels, so that such names as “The Cross Foxes,” “Rehoboth,” “The
Goat,” “The Grapes,” “Addoldy,” “Salem,” and “Bethesda,” greet the
traveller in startling succession. We crossed the humpbacked bridge,
above the fevered bed of the river, where the children sat and played at
giving parties with many long drowned crockeries, and we rode the length
of the little street and selected the last of the inns that clung to its
steep sides.
It was the glimpse of oak settles and panels, and gleams of old brass
and copper, that we saw through the open door of the Wynnstay Arms that
turned the scale, already tilted by the vision of a fat ostler boy with
gold earrings, who grinned
[Illustration: _The fat ostler boy._]
from the stable opposite. That he spoke English about as well as a
French porter at Calais was subsequently a drawback, when it came to
words like surcingle and hold-all, and the beautiful kitchen with the
tiled floor and the high settles (and we are compelled to add, the
spittoons) was not permitted to us. For us was reserved the fusty
decorum of an upper parlour, obviously consecrate to domestic
ceremonies,--funeral cards and the plaster ornament of a wedding-cake
formed the chimney ornaments,--to the rare female visitor, and to a vow
that the windows should not be opened. We cannot, however, look back
otherwise than with affection to the tea which presently came to us, to
the cream and the bread-and-butter, and to the fact that it was the
first and last “plain tea” which Wales supplied us with at sixpence
each.
The journey to Cannoffice was resumed with reluctance on our part and on
the part of the Tommies, who were beginning to think that the thing was
getting past a joke and looked horribly like business. Our best
sympathies were given to them as we fought our way along the remainder
of that afternoon’s sixteen miles, decimating uselessly the hungry host
of horse-flies that every hedge recruited, flying from them at a
ludicrous full gallop, waving them back with branches of trees; perhaps
it would be truer to say that the Tommies had our second-best
sympathies. The noblest compassion of our hearts was lavished on
ourselves. The Tommies certainly played their part in the strife with
ingenuity that, in some degree, made up for the inadequacy of their
pigmy tails. They kicked flies off their stomachs and shoulders as
artlessly and easily as dogs; they bit their legs down to the pastern;
they rubbed themselves against the delicious angularities of the
hold-alls; they buried their faces in our habits in a way that would
have been maddening, if it had not appealed so torturingly to our pity.
It was eight o’clock before we reached Cannoffice, and the brilliant sky
of summer had lost but little of its radiancy. We and the Tommies had
perceptibly lost ours, but still the thing was done. We had passed from
among the lumpy green hills, and had, by slow ascent, reached more open
country, which had a tendency and a meaning in its strong, large, upward
curve. Already the faint ridge of the mountains was on the horizon, and
the balm of the uplands was
[Illustration: _The first flies._]
in the air. The old Cannoffice Inn looked pleasantly at us out of its
ivied windows and low porch; we took it for the vicarage till we saw
upon it the mystic sign of the winged wheel which marks the approval of
the cyclist club. In the evening, when we wandered between the dense
beech and yew hedges of the garden, or sat in a dark arbour and heard
the cattle cropping the dewy grass, the ineffable pastoralities of the
place made themselves felt. Children and dogs were playing noisily on a
hill opposite; out in the unseen hamlet behind a grove of pine-trees
there was now and then a distant snatch of voices singing in harmony;
and garden perfumes, cooled in night air, spoke of peace and of a
hundred sleeping roses. We forgot that our legs were stiffening into
acute angles, that our foreheads had been phrenologically remodelled by
horse-fly bites, and that our house-shoes were circling round Wales in a
luggage-train. And that, I think, was how I caught one of my very finest
colds in my head.