Indeed it did something like it. Watching it, you would have thought of one of Philip Lacey's gardens in the short days before Spring had begun to warm the air. Neat, bare, brown, friable soil, with not yet a crocus or a snowdrop to be seen; here and there a stick with a tiny linen tab fluttering (reminding you of Terry Armfield's little "Keep off the Grass" board with "Delyn Avenue" written upon it); frames half open and inverted bells, dibbing-strings, sprinklings of lime, and a few whirligigs to keep the birds away; these, and the promise of the scent and colour to come—it did indeed resemble Llanyglo. Not all at once did the pea-sticks become builders' scaffold-poles, the lines of string the plotting-out of streets. As of Philip's gardens, you could not have said of Llanyglo on any particular day, "This has changed more than it was changing yesterday, more than it will be again changing to-morrow." But for all that, nothing remained any longer the same. Philip's men, working over the blindfold earth with clay and spittle, caused its lids to open; Edward Garden and his associates, similarly, with money for manure, labour to let in the air and light, and the gentle airs of advertisement already fanning an incipient repute, made a garden of stone and iron, with buds of stucco, flowers of paint and glass and gilding, and fruit after its kind to ripen by and by.
Humanity was the soil he worked on, and his knowledge of it the force with which he did so. Its hopes and appetites, its need of noise and change and laughter, its stretching itself after fetters struck off and its resolve to have a better, a much better time than it had ever had before—out of these things came Edward Garden's beds and borders. He would grow flowers of pleasure for those of the towns to pick. And, since you do not advance the glory of July by neglecting to make the most of March, his crops also had their rotation. For this, in a manner of speaking, was Llanyglo's March, and what though it lasted two, three, four years? The Laceys and the Raymond Briggses were to be cultivated while they were yet there. Blooming and falling again, they would make an excellent preparation, and there was plenty to do in the meantime. There were other hotels to build, and a wet-weather pavilion for tea and talk and dancing, and a landing-stage for the twenty new boats, and this and that and the other—and always, always, the coming full summer to look forward to, the summer of ten, eleven, twelve years thence, the summer when, not the Laceys, but the employees of their fourteen or fifteen shops should talk of Llanyglo; the summer when Mr. Morrell should come no more, but his operatives should draw their thousands from the Clubs and rain them upon the town; the summer when all should be changed but the steadfast Trwyn, and all different save the mountains behind, and nothing the same save the still and watching sea.
The Sarn-Porth Neigr Loop was constructed in 1886-7, and opened in the May of the last-named year. One of its earlier trains brought, in a first-class compartment, Philip and Mrs. Lacey and the Misses June and Wygelia, fresh from Paris; and in a third-class compartment it brought a family called Topham. Mr. Topham was head-clerk in a Liverpool Irish-bacon-importing concern, and Philip Lacey, meeting him once or twice at Philharmonic Promenade Concerts, had forgotten the golden rule that it is easier to get into conversation with a man than it is to shake him off again, and had fallen into the habit of nodding to him. In fact, a sort of acquaintanceship had been struck up. He had learned Topham's name, and Topham his. All this had been in Liverpool.
But it was one thing to strike up an acquaintanceship in Liverpool, and quite another to continue that acquaintanceship elsewhere. Philip Lacey, seeing Barry Topham get into the train, had not doubted that the bacon-importer's clerk would be dropping off again after a few stations. But at Stockport, where Philip had descended to stretch his legs, Topham had met him on the platform and had informed him that he was going to Llanyglo.
Now when Philip went away for a few weeks' change he liked that change to be a change. He didn't come to Llanyglo to meet casuals from Liverpool.
He began to wonder whether Llanyglo was quite what it had been.
And so did Mr. Morrell, who brought his daughter Hilda from Brighton that year.
And so did Val Clayton, who also came that year, merely in order to see what sort of vermouth they sold at the other hotels.
For soon there were three hotels, the original "Cambrian," the "Cardigan," and the "Montgomery." All these were on what by and by became the front, and between the "Cambrian" and the "Cardigan" was a space of perhaps a couple of hundred yards. Thence to the "Montgomery," however, was quite a walk for Val of a morning—a quarter of a mile or more on towards the Trwyn. Of the three hotels the "Montgomery" was the largest. It had sixty bedrooms. Its stabling (for there was now a landau-service up into the mountains) blocked up one of Terry's dream-avenues a hundred yards from where the easy marble steps were to have descended to the shore. A wide metalled road ran past the three hotels, but it reminded you of unexplored rivers on an ancient map, which are traced for a score or a hundred miles, and then dissipate in interrogative dots. Another road at right angles ran past the Kerrs' Hafod to the gap opposite Pritchard's farm, and there were yet other roads, if those widish alleys bounded by stakes and wire could properly be called roads. When the wind rose the sand still whistled everywhere, scouring paint, rounding wooden corners, stinging faces; but so far it had made very little impression on a large, black, tarred notice-board firmly stayed into the sand midway between the "Cardigan" and "Montgomery" hotels, a board bigger than the whole front of the Kerrs' Hafod, which bore a straggling plan upon it in white, and the words:
LEASEHOLD!
For 999 Years!
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