With the alien literature of the Visitors’ Book, Wales is endowed beyond
all countries known to us. Here, more than elsewhere, does the
Birmingham tourist, hitherto mute and inglorious, become sensible of
inspiration, and enter deliriously into poesy; here the funny man
scintillates with inveterate brilliancy, and the conscientious churn
forth adulation of scenery or cook, with solemn and almost death-bed
conviction.
The funny man is, as might be expected, widely prevalent--he is, indeed,
inexhaustible; and having achieved immortality by his own personal
entry, gambols at large through the thumbed pages, and bestows it upon
the signatures of the less gifted by lavish and sparkling comment. We
find him figuring as “Claud Hugo on the booze.” “T’other man playing
the giddy bug.” Or as “Mr and Mrs Augustus Thompson on _treaclemoon_.”
We cannot lay claim to the italics; they emanate from the funny man, and
partake of his inveteracy. We traced him through Wales in a variety of
titles, almost classable as the Visitors’ Book Peerage--as, for
instance, Lord Llanberis, Lord Shag, Duke of Seven Dials, Lord Watkins,
Earl of Bird, Queen of Table Waters. He warned us, in an eruption of
notes of exclamation, to “beware of potass and sodas in Wales,” and was
himself eclipsed by an inspired commentator, who added in pencil, “and
every other ass.”
The breezy and hardy athlete, also largely represented, partakes of the
nature of the funny man, but has a liver unfitted for cynicism. He is
usually replete with the glory of his miles per diem, and can only spare
breath for a robust epigram, such as “The breakfast we eat here this
morning will live in our remembrance.” (Note by funny man) “And the
landlady’s.”
But it is to conscientious encomium that the Visitors’ Book is indebted
for its chiefest adornments and its most varied types, though of these
it is possible only to cite the more salient. There is the encomium
which, though conscientious towards the landlady, sets forth with an
equal sense of justice the classical acquirements of the writer. It is a
large class, but one example will suffice:--
“The Inn had in mind by he who wrote, ‘shall I not take mine ease in
mine inn?’”
There is the pathetic yet faithful encomium: “The above” (a list of
names not as yet of historical interest), “during a week of hard and
anxious literary work, felt quite at home here, thanks to the kindness
of Mrs Jones and the untiring attention of Ellen in the coffee-room.”
Even the funny man has respected this tribute to female devotion--but in
what did Ellen’s attention consist? Did she, blending in her own person
the hero-worship of Desdemona and the more solid abnegations of
Molière’s cook, sit as audience, even as critic, to the achievements of
that hard and anxious week? Or, accepting the eulogy in a simpler sense,
did she feed the party hourly from an egg-spoon? We know that she
enhanced the home-like effect, and the rest is silence.
The impassioned: “Lord keep my memory green.--Wellesley Robinson.”
(First commentator) “Whoever is this fellow?” (Second do.) “God knows.”
The serious and almost religious:--
“With plenty here the board is spread,
And, e’er our onward path we tread,
We feed from the’ abundant store
And sound it’s praises more and more.”
The influence of Tate and Brady is evident from the mechanical addition
of the apostrophe after “the,” which is reproduced in its integrity, in
common with all expression marks and feats of English grammar throughout
the collection.
The excessively gentle yet condescending: “J. Brown. I am pleased with
Cambria’s lovely vales.”
The aristocratic but scarcely grammatical: “Lord and Lady D---- for
lunch. Very nice.”
With these panegyrics we have not been moved to compete. Not even the
glistening dawn of our last day in Wales prevailed, with its silent
greeting, to make us emulate J. Brown or Wellesley Robinson in their
valedictory “appreciations.” In vows and protestations let us rather
play Cordelia to their Goneril and Regan, reserving ourselves for that
possible future when Wales, repudiated of its Wellesley Robinsons,
forsaken as Lear, shall clamour for our support. Till then, let the name
of O’Flannigan and that other allied with it, achieve in the Visitors’
Book the distinction of beauty unadorned and verdict unvouchsafed.
If the truth must be told, the dawn that heralded our exit from Wales
suggested little to the eyes that turned away from it into the profound
sleep that heralds the hot water, and that little was exclusively
connected with horse-boxes. Tommy the elder, though much recovered of
the girth-gall, was very far from being fit for a saddle, therefore the
idea of a sensational finish on horseback at the central lamp-post in
Welshpool had been abandoned, and the Tommies were to be returned to the
ironmonger and the chemist in the ordinary course of rail _viâ_ Ruabon.
We were sentimentally anxious to maintain as long as possible our auntly
relation with them, even to the extent of travelling in the horse-box,
and holding their hands and giving them sal volatile in the
tunnels--this being, to the best of our belief, their first experience
of travelling otherwise than on their own legs. The confidence inspired
by human companionship would of course make everything easy;
nevertheless, when at the station we saw their special carriage bear
down upon us, behind an engine exuding steam at every pore and uttering
yell upon yell as it came, it seemed possible that our nephews would
require more than moral support. The engine steamed by, the doors of the
horse-box were banged open, and we each took hold of a Tommy and
prepared to lead it as if it were a forlorn hope. Perhaps the ostlers
and porters whom we waved aside were not as conscious as we presently
became that the Tommies were more than willing to enter the box, that
they were hurrying up the clattering gangway, that they were almost
ushering us into the dark interior which we had regarded with such
sympathetic alarms. The porters and ostlers laughed, but it may have
been from pure admiration. The Corwen and Ruabon Railway seems to be
accustomed to the transportation of menageries. Head-stalls that would
have held a buffalo were slipped upon the mildly aggrieved pony faces,
cables were attached to their nosebands on either side, and massive
partitions were let down between them. The Tommies were obviously a
little wounded, but beyond all other emotions they were bored.
There are more luxurious places than the slice that is stingily cut off
the end of a horse-box and apportioned to grooms. It is as third class
as a third class on the Cork and Skibbereen Railway--that is to say, it
has neither cushions nor blinds, and the brake and axle seem to
dislocate endless vertebræ in their anatomy immediately under the seat;
but it has attractions, even when shared with two side-saddles, each of
which takes as much room as three women and a basket. There is sole and
undisputed possession, and there is the tranquillity of those who look
on junctions and are never shaken, when the horse-box moves majestic
among the interwoven points to the appointed platform, whither the
purple aristocracy of the first class must toil by staircase and bridge.
There are also two loopholes opening directly into the mangers of the
horse-box, and through these, during the earlier part of the journey, we
watched with concern the whites of the Tommies’ eyes glistening in the
obscurity as they glared in vast query upon us and all things; but
beyond distended nostrils and immovably pricked ears they made no
comment on the situation.
The valley of the Dee jogged past, in accord with the bone-setting
canter of the grooms’ carriage--a landscape always pretty, never
startling, laden in the bright hot morning with the trance of June, and
with the tenderness of its unconscious farewell to us. That one-sided
foreknowledge of parting pervaded all things, and indued with romance
the two inquiring faces--one bay with a white spot, the other drab with
a white blaze--that gazed at us across the empty mangers in unwearied
expectancy of oats. At Ruabon Junction, during a long, hot interval in a
siding, we fed them with penny buns and with an armful of hay stolen by
Miss O’Flannigan from a cart that stood outside a public-house adjacent
to our siding. It was an unusual manifestation of sentiment, but it was
accepted on its merits; and the lumps of warm dough were chewed and
gulped with much fuss and detail, and the hay snatched from our hands
with a voracity that we ventured to hope was a politeness. When, at
Oswestry, the final moment came, they suffered
[Illustration: _A final salute._]
with dignity the farewell endearments of their aunts, staring through
their loopholes with complete stolidity, after the manner of
horse-flesh. Their liquid brown eyes expressed nothing beyond a desire
for more penny buns; and when Miss O’Flannigan attempted, with a good
deal of personal effort, to imprint a final salute upon her Tom’s ruddy
brown muzzle, he snorted with apprehension and withdrew to the extremest
limits of his cable. It was impossible to explain to them that we found
some difficulty in parting with them, friends but of a fortnight though
they were.
And in parting, too, from the other features of that fortnight,--from
the leisure and independence, the fatigue and inconvenience, the life
expanding unintellectually in long solitudes of open sky, after
shrivelling for three months in the merely brain activity of London.
Travelling towards Chester in the familiar monotony of a railway
carriage, the eye noted discontentedly the level glide of the window
along the landscape, and endeavoured to catch at the quiet existence of
the country roads as the train took them at a stride. The bounteous
grave stillness of the Welsh highways and mountain-fields was ours no
more; that roomy calm, whose incidents were a multiplication of peace,
must intrench itself in memory behind the dingy preoccupation of
catching a train at Chester, the crush of ugly, self-centred people, the
_blasé_ porters, the importunities of little boys with cups of strong
tea.
The climax of a variety of shocks to the rural mood was reached at
Holyhead with the discovery that our luggage, sent from Bettwys by goods
train, was not awaiting us. Whether or not to start without it was a
matter of poignant uncertainty, even of frenzy, up to the moment when
the gangway of the Kingstown boat was hauled in; while the officials did
not conceal their amusement, and the porter of the Station Hotel waited
immovable, in his red coat, foreknowing the end.
We stayed, and the Kingstown boat moved out on an oily sea into a murky
west, and the rain began to fall.
[Illustration]