There are more luxurious places than the slice that is stingily cut off the end of a horse-box and apportioned to grooms. It is as third class as a third class on the Cork and Skibbereen Railway—that is to say, it has neither cushions nor blinds, and the brake and axle seem to dislocate endless vertebræ in their anatomy immediately under the seat; but it has attractions, even when shared with two side-saddles, each of which takes as much room as three women and a basket. There is sole and undisputed possession, and there is the tranquillity of those who look on junctions and are never shaken, when the horse-box moves majestic among the interwoven points to the appointed platform, whither the purple aristocracy of the first class must toil by staircase and bridge. There are also two loopholes opening directly into the mangers of the horse-box, and through these, during the earlier part of the journey, we watched with concern the whites of the Tommies’ eyes glistening in the obscurity as they glared in vast query upon us and all things; but beyond distended nostrils and immovably pricked ears they made no comment on the situation.
The valley of the Dee jogged past, in accord with the bone-setting canter of the grooms’ carriage—a landscape always pretty, never startling, laden in the bright hot morning with the trance of June, and with the tenderness of its unconscious farewell to us. That one-sided foreknowledge of parting pervaded all things, and indued with romance the two inquiring faces—one bay with a white spot, the other drab with a white blaze—that gazed at us across the empty mangers in unwearied expectancy of oats. At Ruabon Junction, during a long, hot interval in a siding, we fed them with penny buns and with an armful of hay stolen by Miss O’Flannigan from a cart that stood outside a public-house adjacent to our siding. It was an unusual manifestation of sentiment, but it was accepted on its merits; and the lumps of warm dough were chewed and gulped with much fuss and detail, and the hay snatched from our hands with a voracity that we ventured to hope was a politeness. When, at Oswestry, the final moment came, they suffered
A final salute.
with dignity the farewell endearments of their aunts, staring through their loopholes with complete stolidity, after the manner of horse-flesh. Their liquid brown eyes expressed nothing beyond a desire for more penny buns; and when Miss O’Flannigan attempted, with a good deal of personal effort, to imprint a final salute upon her Tom’s ruddy brown muzzle, he snorted with apprehension and withdrew to the extremest limits of his cable. It was impossible to explain to them that we found some difficulty in parting with them, friends but of a fortnight though they were.
And in parting, too, from the other features of that fortnight,—from the leisure and independence, the fatigue and inconvenience, the life expanding unintellectually in long solitudes of open sky, after shrivelling for three months in the merely brain activity of London. Travelling towards Chester in the familiar monotony of a railway carriage, the eye noted discontentedly the level glide of the window along the landscape, and endeavoured to catch at the quiet existence of the country roads as the train took them at a stride. The bounteous grave stillness of the Welsh highways and mountain-fields was ours no more; that roomy calm, whose incidents were a multiplication of peace, must intrench itself in memory behind the dingy preoccupation of catching a train at Chester, the crush of ugly, self-centred people, the blasé porters, the importunities of little boys with cups of strong tea.
The climax of a variety of shocks to the rural mood was reached at Holyhead with the discovery that our luggage, sent from Bettwys by goods train, was not awaiting us. Whether or not to start without it was a matter of poignant uncertainty, even of frenzy, up to the moment when the gangway of the Kingstown boat was hauled in; while the officials did not conceal their amusement, and the porter of the Station Hotel waited immovable, in his red coat, foreknowing the end.
We stayed, and the Kingstown boat moved out on an oily sea into a murky west, and the rain began to fall.