[Illustration]
A dark-faced Kelt in a blue suit was reading the First Lesson as we made
our entry. Bearing in mind Miss O’Flannigan’s riding-habit, it required
nerve to present ourselves to the Church of Mallwydd at this shelterless
stage of the service, but the congregation appeared to be inured to
tourists. They scarcely ceased in their attention to the reader, and to
his serious and careful rendering of the Lesson in his native tongue.
“Darkling we listened” until the twice repeated “Samooel, Samooel,”
suddenly flung out from the dark stream of Welsh, apprised us that it
was the call of Samuel and the humiliation of Eli with which his strong
brows rose or bent in sympathy.
Behind the reader was a glimpse of a surpliced arm, and a pale and
languid hand supporting a grey head with the air of melancholy befitting
a pastor of the Church of Wales at the present crisis. The thought of
coming disaster was inseparable from him and the venerable little
church, while the service progressed through prayers and hymns with a
fervour worthy of dissent; and when the grey head and the sad face were
above us in the pulpit, and the text, “The violent take it by force,”
was given out in Welsh and English, it was easy to imagine the drift of
the sermon that followed, spoken, or rather sung, as the Welsh manner
is, in the preacher’s native tongue. With the monotony of a mountain
wind, with the swinging cadence of a belfry, the minor periods rose and
died. It might have been the sombre prophesying of a Druid, chanted
beneath the oaks in days prior to Gregorians; it seemed to have in it
echoes from ages of forgotten persecution, to be passionate with the
protest of a threatened faith. The modern respectability of the
congregation was amazingly out of keeping with it, but many of the
listening faces were keen with unmistakable response. We recognised in
different parts of the church some of the denizens of the Griffith Arms
with their offspring--being, in fact, privileged to sit behind certain
of the latter, and to mark the methods by which they wiled away the
duration of the state prayers and other unbearable disciplines. It was
something of a shock to discover the chambermaid seated in amity and a
chancel pew beside a venerable gentleman whose grey beard had an
unstudied luxuriance about it that recalled the pebble-thrower at the
bridge. He stared at us with an excitement that seemed to deepen into
ferocity, and once, during the prayers, I am almost certain that I saw
him--after a wary glance at the chambermaid--thrust out his tongue,
apparently at us. What had he to do with the chambermaid, and why did he
object to us? These things were hid from us.
Let no one ask from these historians the facts about the Behemoth skull
and the Leviathan backbone which are disposed in the timbered arch above
the porch-door of the church. There are theories and there are legends,
all equally improbable, so we were informed by the grey-haired vicar,
with a classic and tolerant weariness which may well have been caused by
the heat, or the Suspensory Bill, or the fact that Miss O’Flannigan was
perhaps the five thousandth tourist by whom he had been asked the same
question.
That night the order went forth for a half-past six o’clock breakfast.
If the heat was tropical, so should be our manner of life, and the ride
over the mountains to Dolgelly should be in the dewy cool of the
morning. Nothing could be more idyllic. This quality, however, was not
so prominent next morning, when at 6.15 A.M. Miss
[Illustration: “_Miss O’Flannigan’s hair came down._”]
O’Flannigan ranged forth through the sleeping house to call the
chambermaid, or when at 7.15 the underdone poached eggs and the chill
phantom of yesterday’s coffee were achieved by the cook in some
favourable interval of her toilet. Nor, by the time that we had arranged
ourselves upon the Tommies, was the coolness so striking as we could
have wished, except in the representative of the landladies, with whom
we had had occasion to discuss the bill. This matter caused an
awkwardness in our usually effective farewells--so much so that we felt
constrained to start at full gallop, and to keep up the pace till we
believed ourselves out of sight of the group at the hotel door. The
Tommies shied as though before that hour they had never looked on the
things of earth, and the firry flank of the Moel Dinas had not
intervened when Miss O’Flannigan’s hair came down and the strap of my
hold-all had burst. A more determined effort than usual on Tommy’s part
to go home placed me for a moment facing the Griffith Arms,--a glimpse
worth gathering, discovering as it did the fact that the unexplained
guests of the hotel, in varied and immature costumes, were exulting at
every upper window, and that from the window of the apartment that had
so recently been ours--the room that we had been told belonged to Mr
Willy Griffith--waved the white beard of the old man of the bridge and
the church. Was he Mr Willy Griffith?
We leave the problem, together with the _raison d’être_ of the female
tourists, to be dealt with by future visitors to the Griffith Arms, of
whose company we are not likely to be.
It is not necessary to enter into details of the half-hour that
followed. Let it be understood that I mended my strap with my
pocket-handkerchief, that Miss O’Flannigan did her hair with three
surviving hairpins, and that we received all possible assistance from
the horse-flies.
The midsummer sun in the heart of the Welsh mountains is bad to beat. It
was blazing when we began the long ascent from the valley as though it
had been at it all night--as, indeed, I suppose it had, somewhere or
other--and until that early morning ride we cannot be said to have
properly known what the word heat might mean. The pine-clad hills were
storehouses of it, and gave it forth, fragrantly, after their kind, but
suffocatingly. We had no umbrellas, no lessening of our apparel was
possible; we were pitiable beyond all parties of pleasure. In stupor we
emerged from the wooded country, and followed the long beckonings of a
mountain-road, a lonely streak that climbed and climbed on the back of a
green, tremendous hill. Other hills, sons of Anak, stood all about, with
that same lucent, beryl greenness spread in smooth simplicity on their
sweeping contours. Grey cottages lying far below and far apart in the
great hollows, were as specks no larger than sheep. The sheep themselves
had abandoned all attempt at grazing, and had essayed to hide from the
sun in the cracks and crannies of the more broken ground at the top of
the pass. From these they looked forth on us, dignified as Dons in their
stalls at Oxford, but ready at an instant’s warning to exhibit “a
passion and ecstasy of flight” not common in the Don. The hillsides were
alive with their solemn faces; they were the only living things we saw,
except two old men mending the road as an Irishman mends his house, with
the nearest promiscuous stone and a clod of earth.
When it came to the descent of the mountain, we resolved to be merciful
and lead the Tommies--a praiseworthy benevolence, but one not valued by
Tom as it should have been. With stiff forelegs and resentful eye, he
was dragged by Miss O’Flannigan down the immeasurable lengths of steep
road, protesting in every hair against a mode of progress that was not,
to his conservative mind, justified by precedent. Moreover, being
sensitive to what was _outré_ in appearance, he may have taken exception
to the puggaree made by Miss O’Flannigan out of bracken and a painting
rag; but as, to our certain knowledge, he would have hungrily eaten
either if left alone with it, we cannot but regard this as an
affectation.
[Illustration: _He was dragged by Miss O’Flannigan down the immeasurable
lengths of steep road._]
We neared again the freely-wooded valley scenery of which Wales keeps
such store. Cader Idris was suddenly on our left, bare and fierce and
coarsely magnificent: very different from our first far-away glimpse of
it as a pale ethereal creature of the horizon--a fit companion for the
most heavenly clouds of sunset. It meant that Dolgelly was near, but we
began to doubt that we should ever reach Dolgelly. We galloped in
desperation through the blinding heat; we recovered ourselves in the
patches of shade. Our heads swam, our throats were as dry as the
traditional lime-burner’s wig, and we thought, with a kind of passion,
of Irish south-westerly gales bursting in floods of rain.
We drew rein at a shady roadside spring, at whose thin trickle a gipsy
woman was filling an earthenware jug. Here should the Tommies drink
their fill, while perchance a sketch was made of the tilt of the gipsy
waggon, half hidden in trees a little back off the road. But the Tommies
had other views. Panic-struck, they recoiled from that innocent trickle
of water as from a thing bewitched; they whirled, trembled, snorted, and
finally abandoned themselves to a _sauve-qui-peut_ flight in the
direction of Dolgelly.
During the last half-hour the road grew more and more civilised; the
“Cross Foxes” uplifted its popular sign by the roadside, villas were
frequent, the scenery was charming, but we cared for none of these
things. All we desired was a cool death--“something lingering,” with
icebergs in it. We rode into the grey town of Dolgelly at 10.30 o’clock,
having started at six, and accomplished twelve miles. It was one of our
record performances. It is possible that some lame beggar-woman may
rival it, but we are fairly confident that it will not easily be beaten.
The innkeepers stood at their doors and surveyed us as we passed, more
in pity than in contempt; and we moved on through the town, trying to
judge by the outward appearance whether the “Lion,” the “Hand,” the
“Goat,” or the “Angel” were nearest what we wished. In this
investigation we were much aided by the peculiar construction of the
town. Every house stood alone, and had a street on every one of its four
sides, a plan which takes a little room, but is handy in the long-run.
We could see no back-yards, no gardens, as we rode round each grey
block: the latter, we afterwards discovered, are kept outside the town;
the former, and their ashpits, we can only suppose to occupy some dark
and dreadful recess in the heart of the houses themselves.
The landlord of the “Angel” looked at us and the Tommies with a horsey
and indulgent smile, as we passed him for the second time. His wife was
remarkably like one of Miss O’Flannigan’s aunts. Moved by these
considerations, we yielded ourselves to the ostler and staggered into
shelter.