“Yes, dear, he did indeed! He wanted thruppence and I gave him tuppence; he was tough, very tough, but I was shtubborn!”
“Ah, them English is great rogues,” said the friend, consolingly.
“More fish, Miss?” said the unobservant steward to my second cousin, thrusting a generous helping under her nose. It wanted but that, and she retired to the doubtful security of the ladies’ cabin.
We have travelled with many stewardesses on the various routes between England and Cork, and we have found that, as a species, they have at least two great points in common. They are all Irish, and they are all relentlessly conversational. They have no respect for the sanctity of the silence in which the indifferent sailor wishes to shroud herself; it is impossible for them to comprehend those solemn moments, when the thoughts are turned wholly inwards in a tumult of questioning, while the body lies in mummy stillness waiting for what the night shall bring forth. Their leading object seems to be to acquire information, but they are not chary of personal detail, and, speaking from experience, I should say that a stewardess will confide anything to the passenger by whose berth she has elected to take down her hair. For stewardesses generally do their hair two or three times in the course of a twelve hours’ crossing. When you go on board you find them at it. Your evening ablutions are embittered by the discovery of their hair-pins in the soap-dish, and at earliest dawn the traveller is aware of the stewardess combing her shining tresses over the washing-stand. I have sometimes wondered if from this custom arose the fable that the mermaid, when not decoying sailors to their fate, is incessantly “racking her poll,” as they say in the county Cork.
We will not linger on the details of the night, the sufferings of little Charlie, who, on the plea of extreme youth, had been imported by his mother into the ladies’ cabin; the rustlings and chumping of the rabbit, whose basket occupied the greater part of the cabin table, or the murmured confidences exchanged through the night hours by the stewardess and the friend of Charlie’s mother. These things are being forgotten by us as fast as may be; but my second cousin says she never can forget the waft of pigs that came to her through the porthole as the steamer drew alongside of the Cork quay.
The exigencies of return tickets had compelled us to go to Connemara viâ Cork and Milford, and it certainly is not the route we would recommend; however, it has its advantages, and we were vouchsafed a time of precious rest before the starting of our train for Limerick at 2.10, and we reposed in peace on the sofas of the ladies’ drawing-room in the Imperial Hotel. Much might be said, were there time, of the demeanour of ladies in hotel drawing-rooms; so hushed, so self-conscious, so eminent in all those qualities with which they are endued by the artist who “does” the hotel interiors for the guide-books. It is almost possible to believe that they are engaged for the season to impart tone, and to show how agreeable a lounge life can be when spent in the elegant leisure that is the atmosphere of hotel drawing-rooms.
We crossed Cork on an outside-car; and here, no doubt, we should enter on a description of its perils which would convulse and alarm English readers in the old, old way; but we may as well own at once that we know all about outside-cars; we believe we went to be christened on an outside-car, and we did not hold on even then—we certainly have not done so since.
Let us rather embark on a topic in which all, saving a besotted few, will sympathise. The nursery en voyage—the nurse, the nursemaid, the child, the feeding-bottle. These beset every traveller’s path, and we had considerably more than our fair share of them between Cork and Limerick. At Cork they descended upon the train, as it lay replete and helpless, a moment before starting, and before we had well understood the extent of the calamity, a nurse was glaring defiance at us over the white bonnet of a bellowing baby, and a nursemaid was already opening her basket of food for the benefit of two children of the dread ages of three and five respectively. Some rash glance on the part of my second cousin must have betrayed our sentiments to the nurse, and it is hard to say which was worse, her exaggerated anxiety to snatch the children from all contact with us, or the imbecile belief of the nursemaid that we wanted to play with them, and, of the two, enjoyed their wiping their hands on our rug in the intervals between the oranges. They never ceased eating oranges, those children. Oranges, seed cake, milk; these succeeded one another in a sort of vicious circle. An enterprising advertiser asks, “What is more terrible than war?” We answer unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.
However, everything, even the waits at the stations between Limerick and Athenry, comes to an end if you can live it out, and at about nine o’clock at night we were in Galway. Scarcely by our own volition, we found ourselves in an hotel ’bus, and we were too tired to do more than notice the familiar Galway smell of turf smoke as we bucketted through Eyre Square to our hostelry. It may be as well at this point to seriously assure English readers that the word “peat” is not used in Ireland in reference to fuel by anyone except possibly the Saxon tourist. Let it therefore be accepted that when we say “turf” we mean peat, and when, if ever, we say Pete, we mean the diminutive of Peter, no matter what the spelling.
We breakfasted leisurely and late next morning, serenaded by the screams of pigs, for it was fair day, and the market square was blocked with carts tightly packed with pigs, or bearing tall obelisks of sods of turf, built with Egyptian precision. We cast our eye abroad upon a drove of Connemara ponies, driven in for sale like so many sheep, and my second cousin immediately formed the romantic project of hiring one of these and a small trap for our Connemara expedition.