CHAPTER I.

“Well, I’m not exactly sure,” said the ironmonger, gazing out into the glaring street through a doorway festooned with tin mugs and gridirons, “but I think it was the gentleman as played the kettle-drum that rode him.” His eyes seemed to follow some half-remembered pageant, though outwardly they rested on the languid salutations of the saddler’s dog and the hotel collie on the opposite pavement.

Miss O’Flannigan, who looked and was too hot for conversation, remained impassive where she sat, on the top of an “Empress” cottage stove, with her gaze fixed on the zinc pails that hung like Chinese lanterns from the ceiling.

“Unfortunately we shall not take a kettle-drum,” I replied, hesitatingly.

“Well, no, of course,” admitted the ironmonger; “but I assure you that a pony that’s bin in the yeomanry band won’t be partikler as to traction-engines or sech. You ladies could play any instrument when ridin’ ’im.”

Miss O’Flannigan laughed sardonically from the “Empress” stove, and Mr Griffiths’ attitude of mild bewilderment changed to wounded dignity.

“Perhaps Mr Williams, the chemist, could oblige you with sech animals as you require,” he said, with the stiffness of one of his own swing-door hinges; “but there isn’t sech a cob in Welshpool as what my cob is.”

We temporised with Mr Griffiths and proceeded to the chemist’s, noticing as we did so a determination of the inhabitants of Welshpool to their shop doors, while the loafers round the stone pedestal of the gas lamp that seems to form the focus of Welshpool life, turned to look after us like sunflowers to the sun. Further away than ever went the memory of the thud of ‘bus-horses’ feet on wood pavement, the hot glitter of harness and livery buttons at Hyde Park Corner, the precarious dive across Piccadilly, and all the other environments of yesterday. The heat of noon lay here like a spell on the street, and Welshpool, for the most part, sat in its shady back parlours in comfortable lethargy.

Like the other shops, Mr Williams, the chemist’s, was cool and empty, with the air of a place where it is always dinner-hour hanging drowsily over it. Indeed, the pimpled cheek of the apprentice--why are pimples the common wear of chemists’ assistants?--was still inflated by a mouthful when he made his appearance, and a sound as of dumpling impeded the voice in which he told us that Mr Williams had a pony, and that the mistress would speak to us herself.

“Mr Williams was away,” explained Mrs Williams, “drawing teeth and measuring for new ones; and y’know what a job that is,” she concluded, examining Miss O’Flannigan’s smile with the eye of a connoisseur. Miss O’Flannigan relapsed somewhat abruptly into gloom.

“I have a pair of real little beauties,” went on the chemist’s wife, beaming at us between minarets of Eno’s Fruit Salt and Mellin’s Food, “just the thing for London work. I’ll have them round at the hotel for you in ten minutes.”

We were conscious of social shrinkage as the work for which we required the ponies was explained; a fortnight’s road work in Wales, with the proviso that the animals would have to carry packs--“large packs,” added Miss O’Flannigan--held a suggestion of bagmen, not to say tinkers. But Mrs Williams’ stable sank unhesitatingly to the level of our needs. She had yet another pony, three years old, thirteen hands high, steady, “and bin ridden with the Yeomanry,” she ended, reassuringly.

From the eye that Miss O’Flannigan cast upon me I knew that her mind was, like mine, occupied with a vision of the Yeomanry mounted, like cyclists, on “dwarf-safeties,” and we ventured to ask whether the St Bernard, whose eyes gleamed from the dark corner of the shop where he lay, pantingly protruding a tongue like a giant slice of ham, had been ridden during the training. The jest had a high success, and a suetty giggle from somewhere near the open door of the parlour apprised us that this gem of Irish humour was not lost on the apprentice.

Before we returned to the hotel several things had been accomplished. We were possessors of the chemist’s pony for a fortnight; we had bakingly retraced our steps to the ironmonger, and by dint of remaining immutable on the top of the cottage stove, had made a like bargain with him; and we had interested Welshpool more whole-souledly than any event since the election and the last circus. Coolness and peace awaited us at the Royal Oak Inn, with its thick walls and polished floors, and its associations of the old coaching days, wonderfully striking to an Irish eye, accustomed to connect antiquity with dirt and dilapidation. We have nothing hale and honourable like these hostelries, with their centuries of landlord ancestry: we have the modern hotel after its kind, and also the unspeakable pothouse, with creeping things after their kind; but antiquity, if such there be, is a poor, musty ghost, lingering among broken furniture and potsherds, to sadden the eyes of such as can discern it.

Ireland seemed a long way off, while we lunched largely and languidly on fruit and cream, and wondered how we were going to ride through four counties in heat of this kind. A sense of inadequacy grew upon us like a slight indigestion, or, perhaps, it came to us in that guise, and the fussy clatter of ponies’ hoofs in the yard below had a ring in it of the inexorable. Miss O’Flannigan sharpened a pencil and began to make notes, evidently to restore her moral tone,--notes about Welshpool, she said, antiquities, and such things; but as subsequently these proved to consist of the entry, “Saturday, June 10, ‘Black and White,’ lunch, Academy, headache, tea, tried on, &c.,” with a bulbous profile of the ironmonger, her method of working back to ancient history must have been mystic and gradual.

While we thus sat dubious of ourselves and all things, expecting to hear that the chemist and the ironmonger had alike thought better of it, there was a shuffling of many feet in the hall, and the door opened to its widest to admit an immense old lady, advancing with the solemnity of a hearse, while two daughters of some fifty-five or sixty hard-won years moved beside her like pall-bearers, supporting each a weighty elbow on their lean arms. A third daughter walked behind, carrying a white dog of the Spitz breed. As a foundation-stone sinks to its resting-place, so, and with a like deliberation, was the old lady lowered into the largest and, indeed, the only possible chair; one daughter shut the window, another rang the bell, and a meal of fried beef-steak, onions, and bottled stout was ordered. The temperature of the room seemed perceptibly to rise, and Miss O’Flannigan and I communed by glances as to whether we had energy to get up and go away.

“Eh! it’s warm, vera warm,” said the old lady, addressing the company in general, but ceaselessly examining Miss O’Flannigan and me with eyes as blue and bright as those of any heroine of inexpensive fiction; “it mak’s a body p’spire vera free, that it dew. But ye dew enjoy it----”

She spoke with a Yorkshire accent as broad as the foot which, in its cloth shoe and white stocking, was handsomely displayed below her skirt hem--and we apologise for probable mistakes in the reproduction by an Irish hand of that sturdy, grumbling drawl.

“Ah’m come all the way oop fra’ Yorkshire for a too-er,” she went on; “t’ yoong folks like a change,” she indicated her grey-haired attendants, “but Wales is a bit dool when ye come out for a holiday. Eh, Scarbro’s the gay, bonny place! Eh, but ye miss a treat if ye don’t see Scarbro!”

She held us with her glittering eye, and the eulogy of Scarborough proceeded with the burr of a noontide bee, by promenades, hotels, family histories of friends who kept lodgings in the best terraces, and many other highways and byways; while the three daughters and the white dog sat and filled in the mesmeric effect, immovable as scenery. A message that the ponies were in the yard came at last to our relief, like good news from a far country, and with the activity of a hunting morning we made our exit in the wake of the waitress, who, at the Royal Oak, as at many other Welsh inns, has worthily replaced the waiter and the cheerless glory of his evening suit. The needed fillip had been given; the present moment, with its release and its ponies, sparkled suddenly, and that Wales which the old Yorkshire woman found so “dool” by comparison with Scarborough, lay awaiting us in restored glamour.

The large, clean yard, with its respectable coaching and fox-hunting associations, was acquiring a new experience. The loafers had detached themselves from the lamp-post, the tide of commerce had flowed from the shops to stand round the stable doors, and discuss in the guttural, shrewish Welsh tongue what manner of she-yeomanry they might be who thus requisitioned Welshpool ponies for their own undivulged purposes. There was a dead silence as we came forth, hobbling and waddling in our fettering safety habit-skirts--a silence, as we hope, of admiration, but we have not inquired into it. The ponies were there--a bay of a little over fourteen hands, a chestnut dun of a hand smaller, both ill-fitted by their big saddles, both possessed of a generous contour that told of long summer days of revelling in the young grass, and summer nights of serious gobbling of it when the flies were asleep. Mr Williams the chemist, and Mr Griffiths the ironmonger, stood at their heads, and began a species of funeral oration upon their virtues, and upon the pangs of parting from them; while an attendant, with his knee against the side of the bay, and his head buried under the flap of the saddle, exerted what strength was in him to overcome the pangs of meeting exhibited by the girths and their buckles: nothing remained for us except to mount, and to trust that we should be spared disaster in the eyes of Welshpool.

Miss O’Flannigan asked the name of the bay pony, and having ascertained that it was Tom, commanded that he should be brought to the mounting-block. Tom, a three-year-old of precocious gravity, erstwhile bearer of the kettle-drum and possessed of the serious good looks of one of Mrs Sherwood’s curates, reluctantly approached the hoary limestone block, with a horrified eye fixed on Miss O’Flannigan as she awaited him in her safety skirt. Persuasion failed to bring him within three yards of a garment which, as he doubtless expressed it, would have made Mrs Sherwood turn in her grave; and Miss O’Flannigan was finally pitched on to his back from an indefinite spot near the stable door, whither, with one foot in the stirrup, she had hopped in pursuit of her steed. It was damping to find that the name of the chemist’s pony was Tommy, but we felt sure that in the first few minutes of our first journey we should think of something clever with which to re-christen both. We subsequently spent several hours of several journeys in this endeavour, but their baptismal names have not as yet been improved on.

“He iss a little unused to the town, marm,” said the chemist’s stable-boy, as Tommy submitted with unexpected calm to the infliction of my weight; “but he iss goot--yes, indeed!”

The next moment I was pursuing Miss O’Flannigan up the street like the conventional pattern of a flash of lightning. Happily, the houses, carts, barrels, and other objects possessed of terrors for Tommy alternated on either side with tolerable regularity, so that one shy acted as a corrective to the last; but these advantages were denied to Miss O’Flannigan. Her Tom fled along before me, cantering with the fore and trotting widely with the hind legs, and making startling attempts to turn in at unexpected side entrances--attempts that were only frustrated by serious effort on the part of his rider.

It was somewhere during this rush through Welshpool and its environs, while the saddles rolled and our faces blazed, that we were conscious of passing a building like a Methodist chapel, from which came men’s and women’s voices, singing in harmony. It was only a moment’s hearing, but it lived, ringing and resonant, in our ears, and is notable still to us as our first experience of Welsh voices. When, at sunset, we returned dishevelled and hairpinless, but masters of the situation, Miss O’Flannigan had remembered several quotations from the poets to express the effect of these keen, strong voices flung out into the sleepy afternoon. I, regarding the heat-stained coats of the Tommies and Miss O’Flannigan’s back-hair, could remember nothing except the conversation of two men at a race meeting in Galway--

“Did ye see them skelping round by Glan corner?”

“I did not, faith.”

“Then ye seen nothing.”