Who were these people who strolled among the droning bees of the sandhills or pushed out from the shore in boats? Well, they were of more kinds than one or two now. The charges at the "Cambrian" were still stiffish; a week there cost as much as a fortnight at the "Cardigan," or a month at the "Montgomery"; and so we still exhibit the social degrees. There has even been a certain amount of "feeling" about this. Of two Rochdale men, say, with little to choose between them in point of income, one will be seen on the "Cambrian's" balcony in the evening after dinner, his heart-shaped dinner-shirt one of a number of heart-shaped dinner-shirts, the bosom and neck and head of the lady he is chatting with rising out of her lacy corsage as a bouquet rises from the paper frill that encloses and bedecks it. He will be seen there, with the red-shaded lamps of the empty dining-room behind him and the moonlight making his sunburnt face very dark. But the other's face is sunburnt too, and at half the cost. He too could attitudinise like this were he so minded. And he reflects that Jones or Jackson may cut a dash among strangers, but he mustn't try it on with people who know him at home. As for himself, he's thankful to say that he's just the same wherever he is, at home or away on a holiday....
In fact Jones or Jackson is precisely the man Edward Garden more than half expected—the man who can't quite afford it, but will.... But this, it is hardly necessary to observe, is to take the "Cambrian" at less than its average and the "Cardigan" at rather more.
The "Montgomery" is actually outclassed by the better "Private Hotels" and one or two of the superior "Boarding Establishments." Indeed, of these last the "Cadwallader" almost ranks with the "Cambrian" itself. And so we come by degrees down to Ham-and-Egg Terrace.—But enough of these nuances of difference of a fortnight's duration. Who, taken by-and-large, are these people, and where do they come from?
You have only to ask yourself, "Who else should they be?" and your question is half answered. Remember the smallness of these Islands, and the scores of pulsing, radiating, almost radio-active centres within them, every one swarming with folk who intend to have a better time than their fathers have had. Could the East Coast be pushed out beyond the North Sea, and Lancashire be stretched until it took in Galway, St. George's Channel and all, there might be room enough on England's shores for every parliamentary voter to have a few acres of Trwyn foreshore of his own and a black cow walking up and down them, seeking coolness and food hock-deep in the glistening ebb; but, as things are, the littoral is by much too small. True, scores and fifties of miles of it remain practically unvisited; but no snail has snuffled out its manganese there, and they are not within a few hours and a thirty-shilling circular fare of the human ant-heaps of the land, where King's Ransoms of Holiday Club money are put by. There was no wonder about the growth of Llanyglo. Geographically situated as it was, the marvel would have been had it not grown. With a few posters and similar devices to advertise it, it would presently continue to advertise itself.
Therefore the folk who flocked there were of every kind, short of the grey and overwhelming multitude itself. Because it was only partly built, because it had not yet shaken down to a definite character and physiognomy and personality, it spread its net the wider. Did you want to dress for dinner, and to have your luggage carried by a man in a red jacket? There was the "Cambrian." Did you want everything that the Cambrians had, barring only the luxury of being seen lounging in one of the wicker-chairs about its portals, and still to keep your money in your pocket? There was the "Cardigan." Did you want to read or to idle, to botanise or merely to forget your cares for a fortnight, to picnic up the Trwyn or to have your meals in bed? They asked no questions at the "Montgomery." From Philip Lacey's piece of Floral Geometry to the nooks on the farther side of the Trwyn where you could spend a whole morning undisturbed, there was something for every taste. And they actually had to turn people away who had been so ill-advised as to come with their luggage without having first secured their lodging.
And now it had come to this: that while these came to Llanyglo for a change of air, John Willie Garden, who spent his days among lime and mortar and wheeling-planks and newly dressed stone, frequently turned his back on Llanyglo for precisely the same reason. Once a week or so he was seen to drive past Pritchard's Corner in a light yellow trap at nine o'clock in the morning. He was off to see to another of his father's interests—that "catchment area" far away up in the mountains. He drove eight miles, put up at an inn past which a trout-stream brawled (hardly yet settled from its precipitous plunging cataracts), and then set out on foot up a road that rose one-in-five under a whispering wood, to see the skyline of which you had to throw your head back. It took him an hour of walking to get to his destination—a solitary wooden cabin where the agent lived. The agent had on the whole an easy time of it, for hardly a hundred yards from his cabin door, above the woods now, lay Llyn Delyn, pure looking-glass in the mile long crook of the mountain. An old boat was moored among the sedges at one end, the launching of which on the unbroken surface of that lovely water always seemed to invoke vague judgments, penalties perhaps forborne, but none the less incurred. Here the agent, whose name was Sharpe, fished. John Willie fished with him. Fishing was a good enough way of passing the time, for they were not really doing anything up there. They were merely waiting—waiting for more people to come to Llanyglo, for the Town Hall to rise, for the seat of local administration to be shifted from Porth Neigr, and then for the Waterworks Scheme. They had the water as fast as prevision and Law could make it. They would not drive too hard a bargain with the town. In the meantime they fished, speaking little, noting whether it was the gnat or the cochybondhu that killed, casting so lightly that the boat scarcely rocked. Sometimes, when the amber evening light was clear behind them, so impeccable was the profound mirror below that, while their tweed-clad forms could hardly be distinguished from the hues of the mountain behind, the upside-down shapes beneath them were sharp and dark as the silhouettes in your grandmother's little oval frames.
III
THE BLANK CHEQUE
Death took a hand that winter in Llanyglo's making. They were getting well up with the Town Hall, in what is now Gardd Street; still the flag floated at the polehead, in token that they had got thus far without serious mishap; and then it had to be run down to the half-mast. It was a common scaffold accident. Harry Kerr, on one of the upper stages, stepped back upon empty air; Sam sprang forward to save him; and they picked them both up from among the debris below. A few remembered the launching of that open boat on that wild night seven years before, and said that it seemed out of nature that these comparatively young men should go off before ancient Mrs. Pritchard; and Mrs. Pritchard herself baa-ed, and said that there would be more room now in the Hafod Unos whatever. But most of the residents were new-comers now, who knew more of Tommy Kerr's present delinquencies than of the history of his brothers, and they could hardly be expected to grieve. They buried them both at Sarn, under the shadow of that pepper-caster of a fifteenth-century church tower, and the problem of however the Hafod had held them all became a thing of the past.