I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme’s Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I did not see the national emblem in any Welshman’s hat—to be sure, it was not St. David’s Day—it must have been boiling in every Welshman’s pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall witch-hats, with one of them saying: “I wass enjoying myself shocking, look you.” There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over them.
The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background, and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier where one could go and see Pierrots to one’s heart’s content, if one can ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.
Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie’s Little Mary given better than in New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner décolletée, and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them; and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene, all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy, but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening’s entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say, Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more indulgent of their whims.
V
A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle, we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for running and jumping.
The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle. I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them, but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as soon the bridge had not tried.
All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily find one’s self incommoded without feeling one’s self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.