A dull roar vibrated through my dreams at some unknown hour of the next
morning, and with such faculties as were not absorbed by the feat of
sliding head-first down Snowdon on a telegraph wire, I set it down as
being a manifestation of the circus ladies and gentlemen. Later on I
realised that the circus ladies and gentlemen did not manifest
themselves to any appreciable extent before luncheon-time; and while we
sat at a lonely breakfast in the coffee-room, and inhaled through an
open window the rainy wind that was preferable to the prisoned aroma
suggestive of “a wet night,” the vibrating roar fell at intervals into
our moody silence. Between the gables of temperance hotels, and through
the cold drifts of rain, the sheer face of a mountain gleamed black as
ink, checkered with angular scars, carved and sliced into precipitous
terraces, ridden of blaspheming steam-engines that vaunted over its
defeat with their white plumes of vapour. Occasionally a darkly
glittering avalanche of slate-rubbish shot downwards into the lake
below, the mountain groaned as its dead went hurtling to their burial,
and the sullen protest shook the air. Llanberis seems indifferent to the
fact that the principal feature in its scenery is being transferred in
slices to the roofs of other people’s houses, and in helter-skelter tons
to the bottom of its lake: perhaps it is helpless, and if so we offer it
sympathy.
As has been insinuated, it was a wet day, and for some time I feared
that my influence over Miss O’Flannigan was not sufficient to dissuade
her from purchasing a species of pall, made of black painted canvas, and
worn as a cape by “the common quarrymen,” as she was coldly told by the
lady behind the counter. The further information, however, that its
price was seven and elevenpence, caused her to lay it longingly down
and ask for an umbrella--“A very bad umbrella,” she explained; “the
worst kind you have got----”
Economy is a virtue that the Welsh do not encourage in the alien. The
shopwoman did not for some time permit herself to believe that what Miss
O’Flannigan desired was primarily cheapness, and secondarily extent, and
not silver chains, and ouches, and greyhounds’ heads carved in the
purest bone. Like many another of her race and calling, she was fated to
find us commercial disappointments of the most ignoble kind, and forth,
with whatever reluctance, came eventually the lustrous alpaca, the
gingham that even in youth looks grey and stout, the massive black
handle, the gluey fragrance. A subordinate in goloshes, worn over white
stockings, brought them in relays from some remote parts of the
house,--some apparently from a period of hibernating in a feather-bed,
judging by the fragments of down that adhered both to them and to their
bearer. With the largest of the ginghams, at one-and-nine, with two red
comforters, such as are worn by virtuous woodmen in coloured almanacs,
and with a bag of biscuits (bought at the opposite counter), we retired
into the rain through a doorway garnished with alarming sacrifices in
flannelettes and elastic-sided boots, and hardened our hearts for the
road.
[Illustration: “We retired into the rain.”]
Bettwys-y-Coed was twelve miles away, or even more, as the landlady
warned us with what we hope was disinterested zeal for our welfare; but
even twelve miles in the rain seemed preferable to the ladies’
drawing-room with the photograph-books and the view into the first floor
above the opposite shop, where the hat-trimming department, unoccupied
as ourselves, sat conversationally in the windows, “nor deemed the
pastime slow.”
Draped in horse-sheets to keep the saddles dry, the Tommies presently
stood at the door; and swaddled, like cabmen, in comforters and capes,
we came forth and mounted. During the process of sorting the reins, the
umbrellas, and the tips for the two ostlers, we could not but be aware
of the guileless enjoyment of the hat department opposite, and the more
critical but equally unaffected interest of the circus ladies and
gentlemen at the window of a ground-floor sitting-room. As we unfurled
the pink parasol and the tent-like gingham and went down the street like
a pair of fungi on four legs, the chorus that broke from the
ground-floor window was acutely audible:--
“Oo’re ye goin’ to meet, Bill?
’_Ave_ ye bought the street, Bill?
Lorf?--why, I thought I should’a _died_----”
Our riding-canes were in the hold-alls, but we kicked the Tommies to a
trot and fled. The temperance hotels and the villas faded into the mist
behind, and we were alone.
In the partial shelter of a soaked sycamore the usual, the inevitable,
process of altering the girths was carried out, while the drips flopped
suddenly on our noses or the backs of our necks, with an untiring sense
of humour, and the tips to the ostlers were repented of with more than
usual fervour.
To visit the Pass of Llanberis in such weather was an act as unworthy as
calling on a stranger during a spring cleaning. Its mountains were
dressing-gowned in ragged cloud, its lake turned to a slab of slate, its
vista bleared by the cold, thick rain; but it had still a murky
nobility, and streams, long silent, cast themselves from its parapets,
and gauged with white streaks the depth of precipice and jutting crag.
Upwards in streaming gradients rose the road, along the slanting floor
of the valley--if indeed the name of valley is not too tender for that
rent in the dark heart of the mountain, with its sides strewn with
wreckage of boulders, and its black walls towering implacably,
untouched by summer. Upwards also, in exaggerated dolour, crept the
Tommies, as well aware as we that the hold-alls, in which were our
riding-canes, were following by coach. The stick of the gingham was
indeed a formidable club, but being swathed in voluminous folds of
material, a blow from it amounted to no more than a cumbrous caress, and
the application of handle, spikes, or ferrule proved equally
ineffective.
Bare green hills followed on Llanberis Pass. We were high among them in
a strong wind that sang in our teeth, and brought the hard rain slanting
against us. We looked neither before nor after, and barely spared a
sidelong eye for such things as appeared on either hand. They were not
many. The lonely inn of Pen-y-Gwrd, where a glimpse was caught of
tourists thronging in a window to snatch this sovereign incident of a
day that might otherwise have ended in a strait-waist-coat; a herd of
pony-mothers with their foals; a plover wheeling and whistling in the
belief that she was leading astray our search for her nest; then Capel
Curig, a scattered village, lying pleasantly and beautifully on the
shoulder of a lake-filled valley. Through the windows of a big hotel we
saw luncheon lie even more beautifully, but it could not be thought of.
Six miles of mountain rain had not been thrown away upon us; our clothes
had admitted it at all possible crevices; the red comforters were
inscribing equally red stripes upon our necks with their wet, harsh
folds; the gingham looked like a widowed vulture, weeping tears of gluey
ink upon all things in its vast circumference. Better to accumulate all
possible wetness, and spread ourselves irrevocably to dry at
Bettwys-y-Coed.
The road was suddenly lovely at Capel Curig, and thereafter to Bettwys.
Trees shaded it, deep glens beside it hid their rivers and waterfalls
under the locked branches of beech and oak, and the rain dropped more
kindly in the still shelter. We were on the great Holyhead and London
coach-road, along which previous generations had driven with what cheer
they might, after a day or so spent in sailing from Kingstown to
Holyhead. Many an Irish member thrilled here with inward rehearsal of
the peroration that should shake Westminster; many a grudging rebel eye
looked for the first time at the roadside life of a country whose beauty
would put Ireland on her mettle to excel, whose careful tending showed
national pride in a form which probably had not before presented itself
to the rebel mind. Patriot or undergraduate, genius or duellist, the
best that Ireland had to give swung along this road towards London to
the tune of sixteen hoofs; the people of no account stayed at home in
those days, and when genius travels nowadays, third class in the North
Wall train, it could wish that they still did so.
The spell of that older time hung unbroken on the broad road, with the
river soliloquising, deep-throated, in the ravine; the time when wind
and limb did the work in a primitive way, and every stage saw the
perfected relation of man and horse.
A swish, a whirr, the sharp sting of a bell, and two black-caped
cyclists were upon us from the opening of a by-road, like two humpbacked
monstrosities flying out of the book of Heraldry. The next thing that I
saw with any distinctness was the mud squirming through my fingers as I
clutched the surface of the road in an endeavour to get my legs clear of
the saddle; and the next, as Tommy and I rose simultaneously to our
feet, was Miss O’Flannigan and her Tom retiring to the horizon at the
rate of twenty miles an hour. The cyclists were also retiring, in the
opposite direction, at about sixty miles an hour. Had Tommy been more
practised in the art of pivoting suddenly on his hind-legs while
trotting downhill, I should probably have been following in Miss
O’Flannigan’s wake: as it was, an hysterical “slip up” had been the
result, and a final wallowing in the mire. My further impressions of the
noble old Holyhead coach-road may be summed up in the statement that its
mud is white and is mixed with size to give it adhesive quality.
[Illustration: “_I clutched the surface of the road._”]
By the time that I had emptied some of it from my gloves, and
rough-dried the saddle and Tommy with a wisp of grass, Miss O’Flannigan
had returned, minus the gingham, and with girlishly floating hair. Our
subsequent entry into Bettwys was mercifully cloaked by deluge, but it
was difficult to bear with dignity the successive eyes of a walking
party, trudging in single file away from it--the same walking party on
whom we had bestowed a scornful compassion as we met them in the airless
heat near Beddgelert. Even on such a day as this the villas and
lodging-houses of Bettwys could look nothing else but flawlessly clean
and smart, with their clear grey-stone walls and white-frilled window
curtains. Between them and the speeding river (whose bridge and island
were, even at a glance, familiar as the mainstay of many water-colour
exhibitions) we huddled in downpour to the hotel of our choice; not the
Royal Oak, with its legion of waiters and its private road to the
railway station, but to the more sympathetic Glan Aber, where the
windows were innocent of the rain-bound tourist lady, and the hall
unhaunted of her husband.
In half an hour a great part of the sopping bulk that had paused,
dripping, in the hall while the landlady decided to take a trade risk
and admit it as guests, had been transferred to the kitchen in armfuls,
to the laundress in yet further armfuls, and what remained (in my case)
was in bed, drinking hot tea that was yellow with cream. The remnant of
Miss O’Flannigan was draped with gloomy grace in plaid-shawls of
Dissenting Chapel odour, lent, to the best of our remembrance, by the
chambermaid’s mother.
“Not by appointment do we meet delight and joy, They heed not our
expectancy----” And so also not by appointment do we meet the ideal
chambermaid--unless, indeed, we are fortunate enough to be her young
man--but we met her that afternoon at the Glan Aber Hotel, and hope some
day to do it again.
It was late that evening before the hold-alls arrived from Llanberis,
and therefore our toilettes for _table-d’hôte_ were, as the fashion
articles say, dainty confections, composed of a damp habit-skirt, a
mackintosh, shirts hot from the hotel laundry, and the severest of the
plaid-shawls. It is scarcely to be wondered at that the sole other
occupant of the hotel, a godly young amateur photographer, should have
awaited us somewhat nervously as we swept through the long room towards
a table laid for three, and should have carved the soup and fish with a
trembling hand. With the chicken, however, the photographer had almost
ceased to look round for our keeper, and a conversation about Thornton
Pickard shutters and time-exposures was beginning to thrive at the hands
of Miss O’Flannigan, who affects some acquaintance with these things.
The evening finished with all the domesticity imparted by a fire in the
drawing-room and a display of negatives, Kodaks, shoulder-straps, and
other ingredients of a photographic walking tour. We felt that we were a
godsend to this good and lonely youth, and parted from him with every
hope that on the morrow he would ask to be permitted the privilege of
photographing the Tommies and the expedition generally. It was therefore
crushing to find on the morrow that he had unexpectedly fled at
daybreak, with all his worldly possessions. He did not know it, but he
was obeying the decree that, Claudian-like, we should blight the
fortunes of every hotel we stayed at, and reign in malign monopoly of
coffee-room and _table-d’hôte_.