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.
He was dragged by Miss O’Flannigan down the immeasurable lengths of steep road.
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.