CHAPTER XII.

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

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.