Mushroom Town

by Oliver Onions

He began to be aware of the change the Wakes people had wrought in Llanyglo before the trap had carried him a mile along the road. Twice in that distance he had to whip up to get through the dust of vehicles ahead. He had been right in saying that the landaus and brakes and wagonettes would be all over the place now. They were taking the family parties back to dinner at the hotels.

Then, still five miles from Llanyglo, he began to allow the brakes and wagonettes to overtake him again. He had remembered that he was in no hurry. Hurry would only mean the crowd sooner, the noise sooner, and supper sooner, with the conversation of June and Minetta. At a place called Doll he turned aside into a narrow lane that would take him by a circuitous route into the Porth Neigr road near the stone quarries. Then, sitting sideways on the seat, with his head sunk and the whiplash trailing over the dashboard, he allowed the horse to take him at its own pace.

Of course, he could marry Ynys; there was nothing to be said against that except that hitherto he had not thought of marriage. Marriage, in John Willie's observation of his married friends and acquaintances, was a quite definite and circumscribed thing, in which prospects played a part, and settlements, and houses of a certain kind, and certain well-marked changes in the bride's demeanour towards her still unmarried friends, and a certain tendency to stoutness and baldness on the part of the groom. Moreover, behind every suggested marriage there lurked the question whether it "would do." His father and mother, when he came to speak of marriage, would want to know whether it would "do"; Minetta would have her opinion about whether it would "do"; and if it did not "do," all his friends and acquaintances would by and by shake their heads and say that it had been plain all along how that would turn out....

On the other hand, the case was complicated—not in principle (that was beastly clear)—but by allowances in practise. Llanyglo had for some time been far from exacting; it was now, in certain of its phases, at any rate, almost exacting in the opposite direction. As many social allowances were made for the young man who had something "on" as liberties were granted to properly affianced couples who had got their certificate that it would "do." Percy Briggs would have gone off alone, with his hat on the back of his head and cheerfully whistling, at the least hint that John Willie had something "on." ... But this that had come so suddenly and overmasteringly over John Willie was a different thing altogether. Here was not somebody who played a game of which the rules and forfeits were known. That game, under one veiling or another, might form the staple of the Lunas' Drawing-room Entertainment at the Palace, or of the songs of Miss Sal Volatile in the Pavilion on the Pier; but Ynys had not even known what she had turned her back on when she had stood under the raspberry-coloured light, looking out at the gathering darkness of sky and the still lingering gleam on the sea. Warned probably, not by hearing and sight, but by some apprehension more sensitive still, she had stayed to see that orange rising, and then, before it had become a setting again, had been far on the road to Delyn....

Suddenly John Willie sat up and shook the reins.

"No, damn it," he said.

He began to bowl more briskly along the hilly lanes.

It was after eight o'clock when he reached the quarry, and then for a time he had to go carefully down the by-lane that the stone-carts had deeply scored. But on the Porth Neigr road he whipped up again. Hearing a sound behind him, he drew in; and when there had passed him a great brake hung all over with Chinese lanterns and full of people singing, the spell of silence under which he had lain all day was broken. Thereafter sound merely succeeded sound. As he took the railway bridge, a "special" roared past below, carrying more people to Llanyglo; and before its red tail-lights had mingled with the other rubies and emeralds of the line he had come upon the first couple turning at the limit of their walk. Then came a large board with "Imperial Hotel" on it, then a new horse-trough; then benches, then walls with placards on them. A mile ahead lay the golden corona of the town. This began to break up into single lights and groups of lights, and then, at a turn, he saw the Wheel and the jewelled finger of the Pier. He could hear the noise, an indistinguishable something in the air that was not the wind and not the sound of the sea; and then at the first roadside lamp it seemed suddenly to become night. More slowly he rounded Pritchard's Corner; at the tram terminus the belated shopkeepers made a press about the Promenade-Pontnewydd Street car; and from the open doors of the "Tudor Arms" was wafted the smell of beer.

Delyn and Glyn Iago were part of the night behind him.

He did not attempt to drive through the crowd that suddenly thickened about the middle of Pontnewydd Street, where half the road was being taken up. One of the "Imperial" ostlers took the horse's head, said "All right, Mr. Garden," and John Willie descended and walked. On the balconies of the "Grand" and "Imperial," people stood and watched the stream that descended to the Front. From the Kursaal Gardens came a noise that presently the ear ceased to hear, so steady and monotonous was it. Then, walking in the wake of a tram that moved slowly forward among the street barriers with an incessant clanging of its bell, John Willie reached the Promenade.