CHAPTER II.
There are no suburbs to Welshpool. Practical, like its countrywomen, it does not trail a modish skirt across the meadows; the woods and hedgerows run down to it, but it will not change its working-dress and come up from its hollow to be idle with them. Of this, indeed, we were not disposed to complain, when at some three of the clock on the next afternoon we started on the first stage of our journey. We had received, in the act of departure, an amount of interest and attention that would have satiated, not to say embarrassed, a sandwich-man—from the congregated friends of the chemist and ironmonger, from the old Yorkshire woman (framed like a Holbein behind the glass of a firmly closed window), from the exponents of fashion in baggy breeches and slim gaiters who habitually “practised at the bar” of the hotel, from the carriage of an unknown magnate, and from the pit and gallery section which had early possessed itself of the best places on the central lamp-post. The subtler observation of villa residences was at least spared us, the vulture eye of the tradesman’s widow behind the lace curtain, the scorn of the offspring of the dentist or the auctioneer.
Powys Castle and its woods towered aloof in a shimmer of heat, as unaware of town and tourist as the cattle within its gates. The grey houses of the town became smaller and older looking; cats sat on the doorstep and mused on the deceitfulness of things, overawing the languid dogs in the eternal supremacy of mind over matter; and the flame of sunshine blazed tangibly round us and all things. Our last impression of Welshpool is of its oldest house, a black-beamed cottage, lolling and bulging, crooked and bowed in every line; impossible as to perspective, but strong and stable beyond all houses in the town—so the town says. Then the hedgerows, and the white road stretching westward into the unknown. Elder-bushes, with their creamy discs; dog-roses of every shade of pink gazing at us with soft innumerable faces; honeysuckle in thickets; perfumes lonely and delicate, perfumes blended and intoxicating. The thought of them takes the pen from the paper in indolent remembrance of that first ride between the Montgomery hedgerows, while yet the horse-flies had not discovered us, and while the hold-alls lay trim and deceptive in the straps that bound them to the saddles.
The mention of the hold-alls disperses like an east wind all ideas of the indolent and the picturesque. Briefly they may be described as was a kitchen-maid in a Galway household by an enraged fellow-servant—“She’s able to put any one that’d be with her into a decay.” We had spent the morning in packing them, in repacking them, in acrid argument as to whether Miss O’Flannigan’s painting-box (apparently made of lead and filled with stones) would fit in my hold-all with the teapot, tin kettle, india-rubber bath, shooting-boots, drugs, and other angular things which had been already bestowed in it; in punching fresh holes in the straps, in going to the saddler to have more “dees” put on the off-sides of the saddles, and finally in a harrowing parting with our portmanteaus, which, labelled “Dolgelly, per goods train,” had been delivered to the hand of the boots. It was the burning of the ships; and while the smart, tightly-belted hold-alls were hoisted like plethoric grooms to their saddles, we looked back to the portmanteaus, and said, with a hope no larger than Brutus had, “If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed.”
For about two miles we crawled at a walk in the heat,—the drab Tommy niggling, shuffling, and plodding; the bay Tom “dishing,” crossing his legs, and stumbling, but both absolutely laid out for goodness. Lulled to a false security, we ambled thus up and down the slopes, and prosed a little to each other about the scenery: plump,
Packing the “hold-alls.”