“A costume modelled on that of the most sumptuous tourist.”
It was 10.30 when we reached the Quellyn Arms, and while the sympathetic Miss Jones prepared cans of hot water and breakfast, we visited the orphaned Tommies. The Quellyn Arms does not profess to stable horses, therefore it cannot be regarded as an unkindness if we mention that the Tommies were housed in what seemed to be a lumber-room. Broken things that might have been beds, washing-mangles, or turnip-cutters, choked the entrance. One saddle was perched on a bedpost, like a bonnet on a stand in a shop-window, the other lay on the ground, and behind the heap glowered the indignant faces of the Tommies. Both had pulled their heads out of their halters, and, in default of other food, were tearing the stuffing out of an ancient palliasse. In the boxes that served as mangers were a few nettles and stalks of mint, sole remnants of some strange repast which must have borne about the same relation to hay that curry does to boiled mutton. The hotel cook strolled into the stable while we were there; it seemed she had been hay-making during a pause in the duties of the cuisine—a fact that recurred to us when subsequently the flavour of the hay-fields was perceptible in that of the tea.
The cook at Rhyddu.
She kindly permitted us to fill the mangers of the Tommies from her private hoard of poultry corn, and it was on this occasion that we realised their relation to us was that of rather alarmed nephews towards severe but conscientious aunts. There was good feeling on both sides, there was even a little affection, but the auntly element was ineradicable.
CHAPTER IX.
The people of Rhyddu were unanimous on one point. They united with enthusiasm to assure us that there was a short cut to Llanberis, that the same was easy, and also that it was advantageous. At this stage of our investigations, however, a piano-organ with a monkey absorbed the attention which, till then, had been lavished upon us and the Tommies—and we left Rhyddu with nothing better to guide us than an impression of hands waving vaguely towards a spur of Snowdon, and some sense of the vital importance of a certain lane by a farmhouse.
In the course of two miles we attempted three lanes, and found they all ended alike at a barking dog and a closed door; finally, we addressed ourselves to a pair of shears, which, moved by unseen hands at the inner side of a hedge, was clapping its jaws malevolently among the topmost privet sprouts. There was a small hotel at the other side of the road, and neither lane nor farmhouse was in sight; but a voice from behind the hedge informed us in unusually fluent English that the short cut to Llanberis started precisely from the yard of the hotel. The yard was deserted, but some semblance of a track wandered from it, and we surrendered ourselves to it. It met with an early death at the gateway of a large, steep field, unpleasantly filled with cattle and young horses, and we were on the point of turning back to insult the man with the shears, when a cow in our vicinity lay down to ruminate, and disclosed a fat, yellow-haired boy who had been standing behind her. To him the stimulating copper was at once administered, and under his guidance we pursued an imperceptible path through the cattle up to the hill, with a confidence not shared by the Tommies, who were, indeed, but moderate mountaineers.
At the next field the boy paused, seeming to consider that we had had our pennyworth; further moneys at intervals impelled him upwards to the highest limits of the pasture-land; but there, unmoved even by the sight of sixpence, he left us, with the information that when we had gone as high as we could, we should—if we did not lose our way—find a gate, and from that gate a good road would take us to Llanberis. The instructions had a pleasing simplicity, and, if applied to a tree or a pyramid, would have been easily followed. The Snowdon range, however, offers a large selection of highest points, and of these we naturally chose the lowest and nearest. The Tommies crept like beetles athwart the slant of the hill, and we, our feelings of humanity somewhat blunted by the exertions of the morning, sat upon their backs, and saw momently a little more of their persons in front of us, as the saddles receded towards their tails.