“To Wales.”
“Ah, Wales! It used to be so wild and charming and remote—almost as good as those perfectly untrodden tracts we still get in the West of Ireland. But it’s frightfully overdone now,” complained Sydney. “One doesn’t know if it’s the fault of Lloyd George, or the picture postcards, or that appalling little railway up Snowdon, but Wales has become so obvious. When I’m going over to Ballycool, do you know, I have to read all the way in the train between Chester and Holyhead, in terror lest I should inadvertently catch sight of any of the ‘scenery.’ I assure you”—to Cicely—“that when you get that Snowdon Range, cut out in purple cardboard jig-saws against what the dear tourists call ‘a glorious sunset’ it’s almost exactly like a landscape in the Academy!”
“How perfectly dreadful!” sympathized Cicely—little humbug! who, only last year, used to mark her favourite pictures in the Academy Catalogue. I do hate a girl’s tastes to be mere echoes of the man she’s with!
“And those ruined castles; they’re really almost too priceless to be true,” enlarged Sydney. “Turrets like this”—he zig-zagged with a finger in the air, while a gold curb bracelet chinked at his slim wrist—“reflected, wherever possible, in water. Terrible! I mean, you simply have to laugh! You feel the landscape transforming itself into wings and a drop-scene before your eyes! And the ‘Elephant Mountain’ that they insist on pointing out to you, because it really is so like an elephant’s back! (Such an attraction!). And then those meaty pink clouds that they always contrive to get so symmetrically posed just behind the summit of Snowdon! Snowdon itself is so hopelessly banal that it only just falls short of perfection. Excruciating! Cader Idris, now, is a little better,” he went on kindly. “It is still possible to introduce Cader to one’s friends. Cader, with that quaint lake they have there, remains quite an attractive mountain, I think”—turning to Mr. Waters, who still looked as if he couldn’t think of anything to say to this person who patted the Welsh mountains, so to speak, on the head.
“We aren’t going to be among the mountains,” he announced briefly. “My people generally settle for six weeks or so in Anglesey.”
“Not really? How amusing—I mean, it’s really possible to ‘settle’ there?” said Sydney Vandeleur, lifting his dark Vandyke beard from his tie—heavens, what a tie! I’d only just noticed that. “One had always looked upon Anglesey as a sort of straight line leading to the North Wall.”
“H’m,” said the Governor, who, having checked a “Can-such-things-be?” start, was obviously trying to keep his eyes off that tie of Sydney’s: a bunch of amber silk, patterned with blatant little splashes of scarlet, black, magenta, emerald-green.... Futurist, I presume. How could I ever, ever have dreamt that life, even in Ballycool Castle, could have been tolerable with a man who wore ties like that? I should have left him in a week. No! I’m sure I should never have been there to leave him. I couldn’t....
Sydney lighted another cigarette, and the conversation languished. Nobody spoke.
In the middle of this sickening sag to the talk I had an inspiration!
I thought, since both these young men sing and one of them composes, that it would be at this juncture a bright thought to introduce the subject of music.