Chapter V: “I thravelled a dale when I had th’ influenzy.”

That was how a County Waterford gardener described the delirious wanderings of fever. It also describes our state when the momentary joy of receiving our luggage from the station had passed, when the long process of dressing was over, and we lay, speechless victims of headache, on our beds. To the feverishness of heat and exhaustion was added the gliding panorama of mountain and wood and glaring sky, items of our ignoble twelve miles; they became abhorrent, and yet the brain toiled to fill in any forgotten feature. Such was the result of the Indian method of dealing with hot weather.

It was dealt with that afternoon in a more efficient manner. In the first place, a parasol was bought from the leading draper, a pink silk one, reduced from three-and-nine to two shillings, on account of the places where it had faded yellow. It was certainly a bargain, and an hour afterwards the barometer began to fall, very slightly, but sufficiently to show intelligence. Next morning the heat was still supreme, but this was in order that we might spend another two shillings on puggarees, after which the barometer fell a little more.

The shops of Dolgelly have the great advantage of a street on all four sides of each house, each standing “a tower of strength, four square, to every wind that blew,” so that bread, boots, millinery, vegetables, and patent medicines can command each a window, great or small; and the shopkeeper stands, Argus-eyed, in the centre, and caters for the enigmatic needs of tourists, much as a missionary might prepare glass beads for the Central African. Each shopkeeper knows his customers, to the last farmer’s wife; they are united to him in a bond inferior only to matrimony, as the interloper, of however long standing, finds to his cost.

“If you could get it anywhere else you wouldn’t come ’ere for it,” said a shopkeeper in our hearing, apostrophising the departing figure of a casual purchaser. “I’m ’ere twenty-five years,” he went on, wiping the flies off a perspiring piece of bacon with his pocket-handkerchief, “and they ’ave as little likin’ for me as the first day I took down my shutters, because I’m English. Ah, the Welsh stand together, they do, and they ’ate the English. They’re near, too--terrible near.”

It was no more than ten o’clock in the morning, and yet when we emerged from the shop, a “Rehoboth” was sending a stentorian hymn forth through the town, and the streets were full of people hurrying to it. The tune was wild and stately, and the minor phrases followed each other unfaltering. We insensibly drew towards the door, and listened while the slow melody rose and dropped like a path in the mountains--a path washed with mountain rain and purified with mountain wind. Within, the people stood close in the hideous pews, in the naked galleries; three men in black coats, stationed in three rostrums high up against the white wall, led the singing, and evidently found the weather too hot. We observed that their eyes were upon us, and that an elder seemed to be developing a tendency to offer us a Welsh hymnal, and we retired.

The morning was obviously one to sacrifice to expeditions, and any tourist worthy of the name would no doubt have been by noon on the top of Cader Idris or the Torrent Walk. The landlady of the “Angel,” looking more than ever like Miss O’Flannigan’s aunt, urged us to these and other courses with veiled reproach, as she would have reminded the impenitent of evening service, but the hills in whose lap Dolgelly lies remain unexplored by us. Others have been more conscientious; to them be the glories of accomplishment and the fell privileges of description. The one and only thing that Miss O’Flannigan desired to see was a Welsh woman in a Welsh hat; but this, the landlady was forced to admit, was the one and only thing not procurable in Dolgelly. There was the sextoness of the church, an octogenarian, who had preserved her mother’s hat--perhaps she would do. In half an hour Miss O’Flannigan was driving the octogenarian before her, carrying a band-box as old and yellow as herself; and the rest of the morning was spent in the seclusion of the hotel garden, where, seated on an upturned bucket, the octogenarian balanced the heirloom upon her spotted cap, while Miss O’Flannigan produced studies of her that were more forcible than polite.

I, no less enjoyably to myself, sat on a wheelbarrow in the stable, and laid down the law to the landlord, the ostler, and the saddler about “chambering” the stuffing of one of the saddles so as to fit certain swellings which had appeared on Tom’s back, which might be the result of warbles, or of an ill-fitting saddle, or of the sudden

rise to the dignity of oats, but were certainly capable of unpleasant developments. Tommy’s hard, yellow hide remained unaltered by saddle, oats, curry-comb, or any other of its new conditions. Looks were not his strong point, but we already relied on him--and there was something attractive in the conscientious way in which he shied at gate-posts, cows in the field, and other startling and irregular objects.

It was already far in the afternoon when we rode out over the bridge at Dolgelly, where a single trickle of water crept through the central arch. The sky had mackerel backs in it, the trees stirred delicately to a newly awakened breeze, and the barometer was still falling. The puggarees were packed up, and the pink parasol was furled, but they were doing their appointed work, and the change came slowly nearer. In the meantime we went on and up through wooded glens, past the ideally placed little fishing hotel of Thynn-y-Groes, in clear, genial sunshine, without a horse-fly; and gradually the vague headache, _réchauffé_ from the well-cooked one of yesterday, melted away in that perfect ride. The road was lonely, more lonely than a by-road in West Galway, and, as in Galway, low hazels grew thickly behind the stone walls; the wide lowlands down on our left lay sweet and placid, and silent except for the corncrake; the mountains ran like a blue wall along the west, a wall hacked and gashed as if by a siege, but still indomitable. Cader Idris blocked the end of the valley, overlooking all things; but of what avail are names, to what purpose the narrow English language? They will not give one breath of the transcendent air, or the greenness of the leaves that the goats were tearing from the hazel twigs, or one moment out of the heavenly silence.

Descending leisurely from the heights and their crisp, ragged woods, we discovered a line of railway, and farther on a desolate hillside village, called by its inhabitants “Trowsefunneth.” How they spell it is a different affair; probably they do not try. We had tea there. The proprietor of the inn wished us to have a leg of mutton--“quite tender, yess indeed! been in the ’ouse a week”--but we thought this would be high tea with a vengeance, and accepted the inevitable in its usual form of “’am-an’-ecks.” We can no longer refrain from mentioning that there are two things in Wales, yea, three, which the traveller would do well to avoid, and yet can hardly hope to escape from--butter, bacon, coffee,--all are bad, even odious; the bacon salt, tough, stringy; the butter yellow, coarse, and, if possible, more salt than the bacon; the coffee a shade worse than the ordinary drug supplied by the British hotel-keeper--and what has already been referred to as the narrow English language holds no epithet that will fitly stigmatise British hotel coffee.

It was past seven o’clock when the reckoning was paid, and we could have wished we were going to stay on in the little parlour with the German coloured prints, and the clatter of Welsh outside in the kitchen, but it could not be. Already the ascent of Snowdon was coming into the near future, a matter of the day after to-morrow, and the mackerel backs were in the sky. The reluctant Tommies were drawn from their lair, where the village sat in conclave on them and the hold-alls, and we pushed onwards by what the proprietor described as “Mr Oakley’s privvat road through the glen.” Those who know the Dargle, in the county of Wicklow, know what a glen can be at its best, and it is hard to admit that it has a rival; but in the evening light, with the deep places of that bosky cleft showing a writhing twist of white water a hundred feet below, Mr Oakley’s glen was very hard to beat. It was as nearly dark as the summer night knew how to be when the loafers of Mahntooroch--this is again the phonetic gasp of despair--took their pipes from their mouths to point out to us the way to the Grapes Hotel. We could make out that it was a sophisticated village, hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, and lying silent in the velvet gloom, except for the noise of running water and the irregular patter of the Tommies’ hoofs.

A scarlet face loomed in the entry of the hotel as we slid stiffly from our saddles, and afterwards, in the sitting-room, we found it burning like a red lamp at the central table. We fell into converse with its owner, while from a dark corner of the room a sickly jingle apprised us that some one was playing “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”

“My friend’s playin’ there,” explained the tourist with the roast face; “’e’s rather a shoy cha-ap.”

He further informed us that he came from Manchester and ’ad just bin up Snowdon. Perhaps he did not mean to be discouraging: his intentions were obviously of the best, and possibly his complexion had something to say to the lurid light in which he regarded our project of riding the Tommies up Snowdon. Nevertheless, as we heard how, not three years before, a pony had slipped and fallen down a precipice, how he himself had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him past the dreaded spot, and of how insuperably beset with clouds the topmost peak had been, our hearts fell into our boots, and the tune of “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” has, ever since that night, held a horror for us that is not entirely its own.