Next morning Miss O’Flannigan went out sketching. The casual reader may
skim this information permissively, as a harmless, picturesque thing,
very proper for young ladies; but to the companion of Miss O’Flannigan’s
travels it has other aspects. For example, the aspect of Miss
O’Flannigan herself, as she sat on a paling with her feet tucked up, her
hat tilted over a scarlet face, and her teeth clenched on a spare
paint-brush; or mine, as I leaned on the rail of a footbridge over
against her, in the furnace heat of the sun, with what negligence
remains to the model who has stiffened for twenty minutes in the
attitude so lightly and luxuriously undertaken. It must be admitted,
however, that the cold caught the night before
[Illustration: _Next morning Miss O’Flannigan went out sketching._]
was, in that unrelenting blaze, slowly baked away. Probably the children
who sat along the banks of the stream and discussed us in Welsh saw it
rise like a mist and melt into the blue: Miss O’Flannigan did not see
it, but when painting she sees nothing but values. Ordinary humanity
does not see values any more than fairies, but Miss O’Flannigan and
other artists do.
It was afternoon when we forsook the simplicities of Cannoffice, and
went forth to the unknown and the unpronounceable. Five minutes’ stroll
will exploit the place, with its half-dozen ancient cottages, its
“Zion,” and its post-office, where English is a difficulty, and the
forwarding of a letter to a given address a problem too deep to be
grappled with. But Cannoffice does not seem greatly to care whether its
visitors stay minutes or months. Incorruptibly sylvan and indomitably
Welsh, it shakes off the dust of each tourist season, and returns to its
solitary and sufficing ways of life, and there are moments when one
could wish to return with it.
Up into the west we went, along a road hilly and pastoral, lonely and
hot. After some miles of it we dived into a fir-grove and emerged into a
region of a strangely different sort. Connemara it might have been--the
back of Connemara by the Erriff river--such and of such a greenness were
the hills; so amongst them, along the marshy level, ran the unfenced
road. Not a tree broke the tender barrenness of the outlines: big and
mild, with the magnanimous curves of the brows of an elephant, the hills
stood clothed in the sweet short grass; and among their hollows grazed
sheep and black cattle, whose smallness may have been native, or may
have been a deception of that great feeding-ground. We halted there in
breezy silences where no horse-fly inhabited, and had an afternoon tea
of patriarchal frugality,--a bunch of raisins and a crust of bread cut
with Miss O’Flannigan’s pocket-knife, which had last been used for
scraping out a tin of soft-soap.
The country closed in round us as we journeyed. Ravines clove the hills,
woods ran hardily on the steeps, and stone walls replaced the hedges.
The road rose to higher levels, winding parapeted above the ravines, and
we began to meet people again--people of a politeness incredible, almost
unnerving, to those whose belief in their own appearance has been sapped
by various adversities, especially the insecurity of hairpins. Voices
were on the hillsides, and once from the bottom of a ravine came up most
freshly the lilt of a woman’s song. The words were Welsh, the tune
unknown, but all clean and homely romance was borne on the notes of that
careless, yet half-melancholy, peasant voice.
Following on this the rattle of a mowing-machine grated upon the
farthest edge of silence, and going on towards it we came on an inn, the
only one boasted of by the village of Mallwydd.
Thrice we rode to and fro before that humble hostelry, and, but for a
weird, pig-styish smell which pervaded the village, had committed
ourselves to it. We escaped from the expectant landlady, and applied
the Tommies to the mile that remained between us and Dinas
Mowddy--having, at all events, discovered that Maäthlooith and Deenas
Mawthy were approximately the pronunciations for the two places. After a
quarter of an hour we seemed nearer to nothing except a slate-quarry,
and we addressed ourselves to a passer-by of majestic respectability on
the subject of the Griffith Arms Hotel. This person informed us, with
the utmost difficulty and with much pantomime, that “the hotel wass
inside--yess indeed,” but beyond this his English did not carry him. In
that language he did not know his right hand from his left, and graphic
semaphoring on Miss O’Flannigan’s part did not seem to convey anything
to his mind,--made him indeed hasten onwards, as one who finds he is
entertaining a lunatic unawares.
As a matter of history, the Griffith Arms is inside nothing; it stands
bare and square by the roadside, without so much as a garden paling
before it. But there is a great deal outside it. A splendid hill,
covered to the summit with blue-green pine-trees, looms up in front of
it; behind is a long valley, pierced through the heart by a flashing
mountain-stream; all round are more hills topped with yet more
pine-woods; a snow-peak and a châlet would have made it Switzerland; and
doubtless, in these days of enterprise and Earl’s Court, the thing could
be arranged.
The hotel seemed to be well stocked with visitors. We had believed
ourselves to be before the season, and yet through the shrubs of a
garden at the end of the house we saw several ladies in bright-coloured
blouses, sitting on garden seats and tending children of all ages, a
most edifying and domestic spectacle; and I began to be sorry for Miss
O’Flannigan, who had refused to take advice and a walking skirt, and
would have to come down to dinner in her habit. Within was a strange
emptiness--a large uninhabited coffee-room, an absence of _table
d’hôte_, and an assiduous interest on the part of the landladies, of
whom there seemed to be several. Apparently the virtuous band of mother
tourists fed early with their progeny, for we dined alone. It seemed a
little unusual when presently, from the windows of the coffee-room, we
saw the chambermaid (a tall and handsome lady, with manners that quelled
any suggestion of familiarity from us) go forth to the pleasure-ground,
and, having seated herself, proceed to tell a convulsingly funny story
to the tourists. We should have liked to have heard it, but could catch
nothing except an inquiry shrieked by an auditor through the drowning
laughter, “Did ’e say ‘Ma little duck’?” which awakened a persecuting
curiosity while it deepened the mystery.
We examined the Visitors’ Book. No trace of the party was in it, unless
it was indirectly hinted at by a cyclist, who, with that happy vein of
humour and inventiveness of spelling with which Visitors’ Books are so
replete, dilated on the “gossopping gardens” of the hotel. Many things
were strange about the Griffith Arms. It was full of unseen presences,
of suggestions of an inner life not subordinate to hotel routine, and
we roamed solitary in their midst. The big, panelled bath-room, where
before dinner I simmered off the fatigues of the ride, had the stale
discouraged air of a room that has been left severely to itself. Its
breath was heavy with suggestions of the wearing apparel that lined its
shelves and hung in decaying grandeur on pegs on the door, and in the
bath itself lay a pair of baby’s boots, thick, knitted ones, evidently
forgotten there since winter. Miss O’Flannigan’s wardrobe contained an
interesting selection of walking-sticks, fishing-tackle, razors, ties of
the class known as “Jemima,” and finally, in a separate compartment,
innumerable pairs of socks. They belonged to Mr Willy Griffith, the
chambermaid explained, with the manner of one who disarms all objections
in advance. He stayed at the hotel very often for fishing. She made the
same reply when I commented, not unkindly, on the presence of several
dozen pairs of socks and six well-greased fishing-boots in my chest of
drawers. We did not venture to argue the matter, though it compelled us
to distribute the contents of the hold-alls upon the floor.
Early next morning the house rang with the shrieks that accompanied the
toilet of many children; and though the coffee-room was at
breakfast-time as desolate as ever, the garden presently became filled
to a state of _crèche_-like repletion, and Miss O’Flannigan and I
wandered forth in search of a resting-place less fraught with
domesticity. We made for the pine-clothed flanks of Moel Dinas, but the
heat was terrific--the pine-trees were too young to keep it out, though
they were old enough to hide the view; the flies were beyond belief, and
the hot perfume from the trees became at last intolerable. We crept back
to the hotel and lay about in the shadeless coffee-room, and it was
afternoon before we discovered coolness by going down to the river and
sitting on damp rocks in a draught under an arch of the new bridge, with
the old one picturesquely visible in the background, while the children,
the mothers, and the chambermaid
[Illustration: _“A youth of shop-walker beauty, in the guise of a
fisherman.”_]
[Illustration: _“We caught a glimpse of a grey beard and a Tyrolean
hat.”_]
held high carnival in the garden above. It was here, probably, that Mr
Willy Griffith cast his flies when in residence at the Griffith Arms;
and Miss O’Flannigan absently added the figure of a youth of shop-walker
beauty, in the guise of a fisherman, to the series of enervated
scribbles which marked her sketch-book’s progress through that long hot
Sunday. She was descending to the addition of an eyeglass and a
cigarette, when a pebble dropped into the water beside us. As we looked
up to the parapet of the bridge, another pebble was dropped, and there
was an eldritch falsetto laugh. We caught one difficult glimpse of a
grey beard and a Tyrolean hat, a running footstep resounded above, and
then silence. It seemed time for evening church, and we retired.