That no trap was available for Tommy was, in some abstruse way, known to Ellen and explained by her at some length, the result of the day being Sunday, as was also the attendance of the Arch-Druid. We ventured a suggestion that we should forego the latter privilege and ourselves drive the stolid black mare, whose massive beam barely filled the shafts; but, with a contempt apparently too deep for words, the Arch-Druid mounted to the prow of the governess-cart as to a pulpit, and, manipulating the mouth of the black mare with the ceaseless, circular action of a hurdy-gurdy grinder, started at a round pace for Llangollen.
It was a nine-mile drive, and by the time the eighth milestone had been passed, we began to look for some startling development of the calmly pretty valley of the Dee, along which we had driven. Large, but by no means stupendous, hills swelled prosperous and green on either side of it, pine-woods thatched them warmly and liberally, the Dee was irreproachably devious in its advance and charming in its manners, but no climax was arrived at, nor yet was contrast lying in wait. If the poets had spared it their fine speeches, and their compliments fledged with suave metre, Llangollen could be appraised with a fresher eye and admired to the utmost of its mild deserving without antagonism and without disappointment. Also, if it is seen on the way into Wales instead of on the way out of it, it will occupy with fitting distinction its place in the crescendo of Welsh scenery, undiscounted by the coming fortissimo: to be one of the last notes in a diminuendo is quite a different thing.
Probably it was the two unparalleled persons known as the Ladies of Llangollen who did most for its fame. They ran away from their Irish homes to go and live there, which in itself, from our point of view, suggests eccentricity. Perhaps it was in lifelong penance for this act that ever after they wore riding-habits, summer and winter, indoors and out. After a fortnight spent in riding-habits we could appreciate such an expiation, even though the equipment we had dedicated to the Tommies did not include powdered hair and cartwheel felt hats. Pardonable curiosity might well have caused any traveller by the Holyhead coach who could scrape up an introduction to climb the hill to Plas Newydd; but it was not upon curiosity alone that the ladies relied for society. They had the agreeability that could at will turn the sightseer into an acquaintance, the means to weld with good dinners such acquaintanceships into permanence; and æsthetic taste, the best part of a century ahead of their time, that taught them to frame the grotesque romance of their lives and appearance in antique and splendid surroundings—the leisurely collection of many years—till the poets and other people of distinction turned, somewhat dazed, from the marvels of silver and brass and carved oak, and, looking over the pleasant vale of Llangollen from windows set deep in wood-carving, pronounced it to be unique.
The sun was very hot that afternoon as we climbed on foot the steep hill up to Plas Newydd, and it was difficult to receive with sangfroid, either moral or physical, the intelligence that visitors were not admitted on Sunday. All that remained was to sit exhausted on the grass, and stare with amazement at the lacework of black carved wood spread upon the white walls. Not a nook without a satyr head or a writhing animal, not a doorway without its bossy pent-house, not a window without its special pattern of lattice panes, each representing a special acquisition, and doubtless a vast wear and tear of riding-habit. Their work is respected, and the plain two-storey house still holds like a casket the treasures of their finding, and stands, crusted with ornament, as freshly white and black as when the ladies took tea in their porch with Wordsworth or Sir Walter Scott. We hung about the small pleasure-grounds for a little, among antique stone fonts and sundials, and tried to find it pleasant; but the exasperation induced by a narrow vision of strange and lovely things, half seen through a lancet-window, would not be denied, and we presently went sulkily back to the Grapes Hotel. The Arch-Druid was awaiting us: we saw from afar his white beard, throned high in the governess-cart, and felt its reproof and suitability for pulpit denunciation; his cough asserted his wrongs indignantly outside, during an otherwise unalloyed tea in the Grapes drawing-room; and his thoughts were, it was easy to suppose, back in the brave old Druidic days, when he would have driven forth to meet the tourist with scythes shining on the splinter-bar of the governess-cart, and discouraged his vicious trifling by utilising him as a burnt-offering.
He found, however, a poor nineteenth-century revenge in obliging the black mare to consume, at our expense, three feeds of corn. Such, at least, was the astonishing item in the bill; and, in a temporary lapse from the austerity of the sacerdotal mood, he stooped to a refection that called itself tea, and, judging by its price, must have been of considerable extent.
CHAPTER XII.
With the alien literature of the Visitors’ Book, Wales is endowed beyond all countries known to us. Here, more than elsewhere, does the Birmingham tourist, hitherto mute and inglorious, become sensible of inspiration, and enter deliriously into poesy; here the funny man scintillates with inveterate brilliancy, and the conscientious churn forth adulation of scenery or cook, with solemn and almost death-bed conviction.
The funny man is, as might be expected, widely prevalent—he is, indeed, inexhaustible; and having achieved immortality by his own personal entry, gambols at large through the thumbed pages, and bestows it upon the signatures of the less gifted by lavish and sparkling comment. We find him figuring as “Claud Hugo on the booze.” “T’other man playing the giddy bug.” Or as “Mr and Mrs Augustus Thompson on treaclemoon.” We cannot lay claim to the italics; they emanate from the funny man, and partake of his inveteracy. We traced him through Wales in a variety of titles, almost classable as the Visitors’ Book Peerage—as, for instance, Lord Llanberis, Lord Shag, Duke of Seven Dials, Lord Watkins, Earl of Bird, Queen of Table Waters. He warned us, in an eruption of notes of exclamation, to “beware of potass and sodas in Wales,” and was himself eclipsed by an inspired commentator, who added in pencil, “and every other ass.”
The breezy and hardy athlete, also largely represented, partakes of the nature of the funny man, but has a liver unfitted for cynicism. He is usually replete with the glory of his miles per diem, and can only spare breath for a robust epigram, such as “The breakfast we eat here this morning will live in our remembrance.” (Note by funny man) “And the landlady’s.”
But it is to conscientious encomium that the Visitors’ Book is indebted for its chiefest adornments and its most varied types, though of these it is possible only to cite the more salient. There is the encomium which, though conscientious towards the landlady, sets forth with an equal sense of justice the classical acquirements of the writer. It is a large class, but one example will suffice:—