CHAPTER III.

Next morning Miss O’Flannigan went out sketching. The casual reader may skim this information permissively, as a harmless, picturesque thing, very proper for young ladies; but to the companion of Miss O’Flannigan’s travels it has other aspects. For example, the aspect of Miss O’Flannigan herself, as she sat on a paling with her feet tucked up, her hat tilted over a scarlet face, and her teeth clenched on a spare paint-brush; or mine, as I leaned on the rail of a footbridge over against her, in the furnace heat of the sun, with what negligence remains to the model who has stiffened for twenty minutes in the attitude so lightly and luxuriously undertaken. It must be admitted, however, that the cold caught the night before

was, in that unrelenting blaze, slowly baked away. Probably the children who sat along the banks of the stream and discussed us in Welsh saw it rise like a mist and melt into the blue: Miss O’Flannigan did not see it, but when painting she sees nothing but values. Ordinary humanity does not see values any more than fairies, but Miss O’Flannigan and other artists do.

It was afternoon when we forsook the simplicities of Cannoffice, and went forth to the unknown and the unpronounceable. Five minutes’ stroll will exploit the place, with its half-dozen ancient cottages, its “Zion,” and its post-office, where English is a difficulty, and the forwarding of a letter to a given address a problem too deep to be grappled with. But Cannoffice does not seem greatly to care whether its visitors stay minutes or months. Incorruptibly sylvan and indomitably Welsh, it shakes off the dust of each tourist season, and returns to its solitary and sufficing ways of life, and there are moments when one could wish to return with it.

Up into the west we went, along a road hilly and pastoral, lonely and hot. After some miles of it we dived into a fir-grove and emerged into a region of a strangely different sort. Connemara it might have been--the back of Connemara by the Erriff river--such and of such a greenness were the hills; so amongst them, along the marshy level, ran the unfenced road. Not a tree broke the tender barrenness of the outlines: big and mild, with the magnanimous curves of the brows of an elephant, the hills stood clothed in the sweet short grass; and among their hollows grazed sheep and black cattle, whose smallness may have been native, or may have been a deception of that great feeding-ground. We halted there in breezy silences where no horse-fly inhabited, and had an afternoon tea of patriarchal frugality,--a bunch of raisins and a crust of bread cut with Miss O’Flannigan’s pocket-knife, which had last been used for scraping out a tin of soft-soap.

The country closed in round us as we journeyed. Ravines clove the hills, woods ran hardily on the steeps, and stone walls replaced the hedges. The road rose to higher levels, winding parapeted above the ravines, and we began to meet people again--people of a politeness incredible, almost unnerving, to those whose belief in their own appearance has been sapped by various adversities, especially the insecurity of hairpins. Voices were on the hillsides, and once from the bottom of a ravine came up most freshly the lilt of a woman’s song. The words were Welsh, the tune unknown, but all clean and homely romance was borne on the notes of that careless, yet half-melancholy, peasant voice.

Following on this the rattle of a mowing-machine grated upon the farthest edge of silence, and going on towards it we came on an inn, the only one boasted of by the village of Mallwydd.

Thrice we rode to and fro before that humble hostelry, and, but for a weird, pig-styish smell which pervaded the village, had committed ourselves to it. We escaped from the expectant landlady, and applied the Tommies to the mile that remained between us and Dinas Mowddy--having, at all events, discovered that Maäthlooith and Deenas Mawthy were approximately the pronunciations for the two places. After a quarter of an hour we seemed nearer to nothing except a slate-quarry, and we addressed ourselves to a passer-by of majestic respectability on the subject of the Griffith Arms Hotel. This person informed us, with the utmost difficulty and with much pantomime, that “the hotel wass inside--yess indeed,” but beyond this his English did not carry him. In that language he did not know his right hand from his left, and graphic semaphoring on Miss O’Flannigan’s part did not seem to convey anything to his mind,--made him indeed hasten onwards, as one who finds he is entertaining a lunatic unawares.

As a matter of history, the Griffith Arms is inside nothing; it stands bare and square by the roadside, without so much as a garden paling before it. But there is a great deal outside it. A splendid hill, covered to the summit with blue-green pine-trees, looms up in front of it; behind is a long valley, pierced through the heart by a flashing mountain-stream; all round are more hills topped with yet more pine-woods; a snow-peak and a châlet would have made it Switzerland; and doubtless, in these days of enterprise and Earl’s Court, the thing could be arranged.

The hotel seemed to be well stocked with visitors. We had believed ourselves to be before the season, and yet through the shrubs of a garden at the end of the house we saw several ladies in bright-coloured blouses, sitting on garden seats and tending children of all ages, a most edifying and domestic spectacle; and I began to be sorry for Miss O’Flannigan, who had refused to take advice and a walking skirt, and would have to come down to dinner in her habit. Within was a strange emptiness--a large uninhabited coffee-room, an absence of _table d’hôte_, and an assiduous interest on the part of the landladies, of whom there seemed to be several. Apparently the virtuous band of mother tourists fed early with their progeny, for we dined alone. It seemed a little unusual when presently, from the windows of the coffee-room, we saw the chambermaid (a tall and handsome lady, with manners that quelled any suggestion of familiarity from us) go forth to the pleasure-ground, and, having seated herself, proceed to tell a convulsingly funny story to the tourists. We should have liked to have heard it, but could catch nothing except an inquiry shrieked by an auditor through the drowning laughter, “Did ’e say ‘Ma little duck’?” which awakened a persecuting curiosity while it deepened the mystery.

We examined the Visitors’ Book. No trace of the party was in it, unless it was indirectly hinted at by a cyclist, who, with that happy vein of humour and inventiveness of spelling with which Visitors’ Books are so replete, dilated on the “gossopping gardens” of the hotel. Many things were strange about the Griffith Arms. It was full of unseen presences, of suggestions of an inner life not subordinate to hotel routine, and we roamed solitary in their midst. The big, panelled bath-room, where before dinner I simmered off the fatigues of the ride, had the stale discouraged air of a room that has been left severely to itself. Its breath was heavy with suggestions of the wearing apparel that lined its shelves and hung in decaying grandeur on pegs on the door, and in the bath itself lay a pair of baby’s boots, thick, knitted ones, evidently forgotten there since winter. Miss O’Flannigan’s wardrobe contained an interesting selection of walking-sticks, fishing-tackle, razors, ties of the class known as “Jemima,” and finally, in a separate compartment, innumerable pairs of socks. They belonged to Mr Willy Griffith, the chambermaid explained, with the manner of one who disarms all objections in advance. He stayed at the hotel very often for fishing. She made the same reply when I commented, not unkindly, on the presence of several dozen pairs of socks and six well-greased fishing-boots in my chest of drawers. We did not venture to argue the matter, though it compelled us to distribute the contents of the hold-alls upon the floor.

Early next morning the house rang with the shrieks that accompanied the toilet of many children; and though the coffee-room was at breakfast-time as desolate as ever, the garden presently became filled to a state of _crèche_-like repletion, and Miss O’Flannigan and I wandered forth in search of a resting-place less fraught with domesticity. We made for the pine-clothed flanks of Moel Dinas, but the heat was terrific--the pine-trees were too young to keep it out, though they were old enough to hide the view; the flies were beyond belief, and the hot perfume from the trees became at last intolerable. We crept back to the hotel and lay about in the shadeless coffee-room, and it was afternoon before we discovered coolness by going down to the river and sitting on damp rocks in a draught under an arch of the new bridge, with the old one picturesquely visible in the background, while the children, the mothers, and the chambermaid

held high carnival in the garden above. It was here, probably, that Mr Willy Griffith cast his flies when in residence at the Griffith Arms; and Miss O’Flannigan absently added the figure of a youth of shop-walker beauty, in the guise of a fisherman, to the series of enervated scribbles which marked her sketch-book’s progress through that long hot Sunday. She was descending to the addition of an eyeglass and a cigarette, when a pebble dropped into the water beside us. As we looked up to the parapet of the bridge, another pebble was dropped, and there was an eldritch falsetto laugh. We caught one difficult glimpse of a grey beard and a Tyrolean hat, a running footstep resounded above, and then silence. It seemed time for evening church, and we retired.