It was past seven o’clock when the reckoning was paid, and we could have wished we were going to stay on in the little parlour with the German coloured prints, and the clatter of Welsh outside in the kitchen, but it could not be. Already the ascent of Snowdon was coming into the near future, a matter of the day after to-morrow, and the mackerel backs were in the sky. The reluctant Tommies were drawn from their lair, where the village sat in conclave on them and the hold-alls, and we pushed onwards by what the proprietor described as “Mr Oakley’s privvat road through the glen.” Those who know the Dargle, in the county of Wicklow, know what a glen can be at its best, and it is hard to admit that it has a rival; but in the evening light, with the deep places of that bosky cleft showing a writhing twist of white water a hundred feet below, Mr Oakley’s glen was very hard to beat. It was as nearly dark as the summer night knew how to be when the loafers of Mahntooroch—this is again the phonetic gasp of despair—took their pipes from their mouths to point out to us the way to the Grapes Hotel. We could make out that it was a sophisticated village, hemmed in between a wooded hill and a river, and lying silent in the velvet gloom, except for the noise of running water and the irregular patter of the Tommies’ hoofs.
A scarlet face loomed in the entry of the hotel as we slid stiffly from our saddles, and afterwards, in the sitting-room, we found it burning like a red lamp at the central table. We fell into converse with its owner, while from a dark corner of the room a sickly jingle apprised us that some one was playing “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.”
“My friend’s playin’ there,” explained the tourist with the roast face; “’e’s rather a shoy cha-ap.”
He further informed us that he came from Manchester and ’ad just bin up Snowdon. Perhaps he did not mean to be discouraging: his intentions were obviously of the best, and possibly his complexion had something to say to the lurid light in which he regarded our project of riding the Tommies up Snowdon. Nevertheless, as we heard how, not three years before, a pony had slipped and fallen down a precipice, how he himself had felt “that sick and giddy” at one place that on the downward path two guides had enveloped his head in a sack and carried him past the dreaded spot, and of how insuperably beset with clouds the topmost peak had been, our hearts fell into our boots, and the tune of “The Man that broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” has, ever since that night, held a horror for us that is not entirely its own.
The tourist at the Grapes Inn, Maentywrog.