Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.

  VIII

  I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle, and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell’s lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to Llandudno.

  LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE

  Froissart’s saying, if it was Froissart’s, that the English amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.

  I

  The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their double l and their French u, Thlandidno. According to another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George Borrow’s, who says that the Welsh ll is the same as the Spanish ll, but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it lhl you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix Llan speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint’s sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally with all his brothers.

  But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the sight of his country’s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which they have religiously adhered.

  {Illustration: LLANDUDNO — THE CITY AND HARBOR}

  Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.

  II

  Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was about.

  Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: “At least we think so,” but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before, my actual Cymric youth said, “Then he asked you too little,” which seemed a non sequitur but was really an unexpected stroke of logic.

  It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno. They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to produce anything
which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so that his Wild Wales is a desert of blighted literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the composer.

  III

  One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go to hear it, not being good for a week’s music without intermission. At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers, which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots are amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.

  The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen’s apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators’ chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.

  {Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME’S NECK}

  On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband’s. It was indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme’s Head, and Little Orme’s Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little Orme’s Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme’s Head I was on terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.

  IV

  From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could not be much worse.

  The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme’s Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate, confining its commerce to that flower.

  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 p
ostal-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.