CHAPTER IV.

A dark-faced Kelt in a blue suit was reading the First Lesson as we made our entry. Bearing in mind Miss O’Flannigan’s riding-habit, it required nerve to present ourselves to the Church of Mallwydd at this shelterless stage of the service, but the congregation appeared to be inured to tourists. They scarcely ceased in their attention to the reader, and to his serious and careful rendering of the Lesson in his native tongue. “Darkling we listened” until the twice repeated “Samooel, Samooel,” suddenly flung out from the dark stream of Welsh, apprised us that it was the call of Samuel and the humiliation of Eli with which his strong brows rose or bent in sympathy.

Behind the reader was a glimpse of a surpliced arm, and a pale and languid hand supporting a grey head with the air of melancholy befitting a pastor of the Church of Wales at the present crisis. The thought of coming disaster was inseparable from him and the venerable little church, while the service progressed through prayers and hymns with a fervour worthy of dissent; and when the grey head and the sad face were above us in the pulpit, and the text, “The violent take it by force,” was given out in Welsh and English, it was easy to imagine the drift of the sermon that followed, spoken, or rather sung, as the Welsh manner is, in the preacher’s native tongue. With the monotony of a mountain wind, with the swinging cadence of a belfry, the minor periods rose and died. It might have been the sombre prophesying of a Druid, chanted beneath the oaks in days prior to Gregorians; it seemed to have in it echoes from ages of forgotten persecution, to be passionate with the protest of a threatened faith. The modern respectability of the congregation was amazingly out of keeping with it, but many of the listening faces were keen with unmistakable response. We recognised in different parts of the church some of the denizens of the Griffith Arms with their offspring--being, in fact, privileged to sit behind certain of the latter, and to mark the methods by which they wiled away the duration of the state prayers and other unbearable disciplines. It was something of a shock to discover the chambermaid seated in amity and a chancel pew beside a venerable gentleman whose grey beard had an unstudied luxuriance about it that recalled the pebble-thrower at the bridge. He stared at us with an excitement that seemed to deepen into ferocity, and once, during the prayers, I am almost certain that I saw him--after a wary glance at the chambermaid--thrust out his tongue, apparently at us. What had he to do with the chambermaid, and why did he object to us? These things were hid from us.

Let no one ask from these historians the facts about the Behemoth skull and the Leviathan backbone which are disposed in the timbered arch above the porch-door of the church. There are theories and there are legends, all equally improbable, so we were informed by the grey-haired vicar, with a classic and tolerant weariness which may well have been caused by the heat, or the Suspensory Bill, or the fact that Miss O’Flannigan was perhaps the five thousandth tourist by whom he had been asked the same question.

That night the order went forth for a half-past six o’clock breakfast. If the heat was tropical, so should be our manner of life, and the ride over the mountains to Dolgelly should be in the dewy cool of the morning. Nothing could be more idyllic. This quality, however, was not so prominent next morning, when at 6.15 A.M. Miss

O’Flannigan ranged forth through the sleeping house to call the chambermaid, or when at 7.15 the underdone poached eggs and the chill phantom of yesterday’s coffee were achieved by the cook in some favourable interval of her toilet. Nor, by the time that we had arranged ourselves upon the Tommies, was the coolness so striking as we could have wished, except in the representative of the landladies, with whom we had had occasion to discuss the bill. This matter caused an awkwardness in our usually effective farewells--so much so that we felt constrained to start at full gallop, and to keep up the pace till we believed ourselves out of sight of the group at the hotel door. The Tommies shied as though before that hour they had never looked on the things of earth, and the firry flank of the Moel Dinas had not intervened when Miss O’Flannigan’s hair came down and the strap of my hold-all had burst. A more determined effort than usual on Tommy’s part to go home placed me for a moment facing the Griffith Arms,--a glimpse worth gathering, discovering as it did the fact that the unexplained guests of the hotel, in varied and immature costumes, were exulting at every upper window, and that from the window of the apartment that had so recently been ours--the room that we had been told belonged to Mr Willy Griffith--waved the white beard of the old man of the bridge and the church. Was he Mr Willy Griffith?

We leave the problem, together with the _raison d’être_ of the female tourists, to be dealt with by future visitors to the Griffith Arms, of whose company we are not likely to be.

It is not necessary to enter into details of the half-hour that followed. Let it be understood that I mended my strap with my pocket-handkerchief, that Miss O’Flannigan did her hair with three surviving hairpins, and that we received all possible assistance from the horse-flies.

The midsummer sun in the heart of the Welsh mountains is bad to beat. It was blazing when we began the long ascent from the valley as though it had been at it all night--as, indeed, I suppose it had, somewhere or other--and until that early morning ride we cannot be said to have properly known what the word heat might mean. The pine-clad hills were storehouses of it, and gave it forth, fragrantly, after their kind, but suffocatingly. We had no umbrellas, no lessening of our apparel was possible; we were pitiable beyond all parties of pleasure. In stupor we emerged from the wooded country, and followed the long beckonings of a mountain-road, a lonely streak that climbed and climbed on the back of a green, tremendous hill. Other hills, sons of Anak, stood all about, with that same lucent, beryl greenness spread in smooth simplicity on their sweeping contours. Grey cottages lying far below and far apart in the great hollows, were as specks no larger than sheep. The sheep themselves had abandoned all attempt at grazing, and had essayed to hide from the sun in the cracks and crannies of the more broken ground at the top of the pass. From these they looked forth on us, dignified as Dons in their stalls at Oxford, but ready at an instant’s warning to exhibit “a passion and ecstasy of flight” not common in the Don. The hillsides were alive with their solemn faces; they were the only living things we saw, except two old men mending the road as an Irishman mends his house, with the nearest promiscuous stone and a clod of earth.

When it came to the descent of the mountain, we resolved to be merciful and lead the Tommies--a praiseworthy benevolence, but one not valued by Tom as it should have been. With stiff forelegs and resentful eye, he was dragged by Miss O’Flannigan down the immeasurable lengths of steep road, protesting in every hair against a mode of progress that was not, to his conservative mind, justified by precedent. Moreover, being sensitive to what was _outré_ in appearance, he may have taken exception to the puggaree made by Miss O’Flannigan out of bracken and a painting rag; but as, to our certain knowledge, he would have hungrily eaten either if left alone with it, we cannot but regard this as an affectation.

We neared again the freely-wooded valley scenery of which Wales keeps such store. Cader Idris was suddenly on our left, bare and fierce and coarsely magnificent: very different from our first far-away glimpse of it as a pale ethereal creature of the horizon--a fit companion for the most heavenly clouds of sunset. It meant that Dolgelly was near, but we began to doubt that we should ever reach Dolgelly. We galloped in desperation through the blinding heat; we recovered ourselves in the patches of shade. Our heads swam, our throats were as dry as the traditional lime-burner’s wig, and we thought, with a kind of passion, of Irish south-westerly gales bursting in floods of rain.

We drew rein at a shady roadside spring, at whose thin trickle a gipsy woman was filling an earthenware jug. Here should the Tommies drink their fill, while perchance a sketch was made of the tilt of the gipsy waggon, half hidden in trees a little back off the road. But the Tommies had other views. Panic-struck, they recoiled from that innocent trickle of water as from a thing bewitched; they whirled, trembled, snorted, and finally abandoned themselves to a _sauve-qui-peut_ flight in the direction of Dolgelly.

During the last half-hour the road grew more and more civilised; the “Cross Foxes” uplifted its popular sign by the roadside, villas were frequent, the scenery was charming, but we cared for none of these things. All we desired was a cool death--“something lingering,” with icebergs in it. We rode into the grey town of Dolgelly at 10.30 o’clock, having started at six, and accomplished twelve miles. It was one of our record performances. It is possible that some lame beggar-woman may rival it, but we are fairly confident that it will not easily be beaten.

The innkeepers stood at their doors and surveyed us as we passed, more in pity than in contempt; and we moved on through the town, trying to judge by the outward appearance whether the “Lion,” the “Hand,” the “Goat,” or the “Angel” were nearest what we wished. In this investigation we were much aided by the peculiar construction of the town. Every house stood alone, and had a street on every one of its four sides, a plan which takes a little room, but is handy in the long-run. We could see no back-yards, no gardens, as we rode round each grey block: the latter, we afterwards discovered, are kept outside the town; the former, and their ashpits, we can only suppose to occupy some dark and dreadful recess in the heart of the houses themselves.

The landlord of the “Angel” looked at us and the Tommies with a horsey and indulgent smile, as we passed him for the second time. His wife was remarkably like one of Miss O’Flannigan’s aunts. Moved by these considerations, we yielded ourselves to the ostler and staggered into shelter.