In the vine country

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this unexpected change of circumstances. It said majestically, ‘You are to go to the vineyards of the Médoc, and must start at once in order to be in time for the vintage;’ and in spite of a grand and complete ignorance of Médoc, its vintages, and wines in general, we accepted the position with calm, even with satisfaction.

The gibes of our friends were many and untiring, and were the harder to bear that we felt a secret scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet delicate mission,—what did we know of Château Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and a half of the former had once compelled my second cousin to untimely slumber at dessert?—and when on a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank air was heavy with the prognostications that we should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and the last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final corner of the avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue ribbon.

We had a singularly detestable journey to London, or perhaps it was that a summer spent in country remoteness made the train and its loathsome sister, the steamboat, more intolerable than usual. As far as Dublin we were comparatively confident, though the trees at the station were rustling a little in the wind, and the window-frames shook ominously in dismal accompaniment to the lamentations of the emigrants who crowded the platforms, waiting for the down train to Cork. There are happily few things in the world that are as bad as they are expected to be, but a bad crossing is worse than the combined efforts of imagination and remembrance can make it. This, at least, is the opinion of my second cousin, who ought by this time to have some knowledge of a subject to which, according to her own reckoning of the time occupied in each crossing, she has given some fifty of the best years of her life. The trees and the window-frames had not overstated the case, and we had the gloomy satisfaction of hearing the stewardess remark, as we neared Holyhead, that it had been a rough passage. We could have told her so ourselves, but still it was gratifying to have the thing placed on an official basis.

In the pale morning, as we endured that last long hour before Euston is reached, we read in headachy snatches a pamphlet that we had been lent about the wines of the Médoc, and our souls sank at the prospect of expounding the laws of fermentation to readers who would be as oppressively bored by it as we ourselves. But our first day in London routed this hobgoblin: we were to enjoy ourselves; we were to taste claret if we wished, or talk bad French to the makers of it if it amused us; but to improve other people’s minds by figures and able disquisitions on viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera was not, we heard with thanksgiving, to be our mission.

The three days before our start were spent in the manner customary in such cases; that is to say, we moved incessantly and at an ever-quickening pace between the Strand, the Army and Navy Stores, and High Street, Kensington, laden with small parcels,

WE WERE LENT A KODAK.

footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care-worn from the effort to utilise the Underground return tickets that an ideally perfect programme had induced us to take in the morning. In addition to these usual cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot. We were lent a Kodak,—for the benefit of the unlearned it may be mentioned that the Kodak is a photographic camera of the kind that is to the ordinary species as a compressed meat lozenge to a round of beef,—and as neither of us knew anything about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind. Ambition fired us to the attempt, and having adjourned with the Kodak and an instructor to the severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames Embankment, we received there our first and only lesson. What its results were will never be known to the public; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling on a bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of little interest to any one except the artists, and even to their indulgent eyes its charm is of a somewhat morbid character.

After these agitations, the corner seats of a railway carriage at Victoria had a restful luxury about them that was almost stagnation. The consciousness of two portmanteaus registered to Bordeaux almost made up for the cumbrous row of hand packages that squatted in the netting; and the half-hour of waiting for the train to start was a period of soothing inaction scarcely ruffled by the slow filling of the carriage to its limit of five on each side, and merely moved to a languid enjoyment by the inexorable determination of the latest comers, a bride and bridegroom, to sit next to each other irrespective of all previous arrangements of old ladies and their baskets. They had about them the well-known power of making their innocent and well-meaning fellow-creatures feel in the way and in the wrong, and the eyes of the carriage sought the windows or the ceiling as if by word of command when, after the settling down of glowingly new bags and rugs was completed, the latest comers leaned back and gazed into each other’s faces with an unaffected ecstasy, the fact that both wore gold-rimmed spectacles imparting a sort of serious lustre to their mutual regard. The gaze seemed to us to last most of the way to Dover, except at those moments when a glance or two was given to their fellow-passengers, a glance of almost compassionate wonder that people so uninteresting and so superfluous should be alive. It gave us an instant of pleasure when some time afterwards on board the boat we saw that the bride’s fringe was blown into dejected wisps, and that her groom’s nose was blue and his face pinched.

Before we reached Dover an example was vouchsafed to us in further proof, if such were needed, of the difficulty of saying good-bye agreeably at the window of a railway carriage. In this case the victims of the custom stood on the platform, smiling spasmodically at the other victim in the carriage, and saying at intervals, ‘Well, you’ll write, won’t you?’ ‘So good of you to come and see me off.’ ‘Well, mind you write!’ ‘Oh yes, dear, and be sure you give my love to Mary and Aunt Williams.’ Then they all smiled brightly and nodded their heads, and the traveller, with her chin upon the window-sill, beamed galvanically down upon her friends, and in her turn adjured them not to forget to write. As the train moved off at last, the farewells thickened to a climax, and we were privileged to observe how, when the final delicate flutter of the hand had been given, the smile disappeared from the face of the traveller, and she thankfully yielded herself to the deferred enjoyment of her newspaper.