A RECORD OF HOLIDAY

Of summer holidays it may at least be contended that they involve two periods of undiluted enjoyment; the time of anticipation, and the calm—if sometimes chastened—season of retrospect.

I am glad; now that the mice are nesting in my trunks, and the spiders weaving fresh straps round my hold-all, that I have been to Switzerland, that the greasy Visitors' books of several West of Ireland hotels hold my name. Also, I remember how very cheerful it was to study a scarlet-hued Bradshaw, and to reflect that, with certain financial restrictions, the Continent of Europe lay smiling before me. (I remember also, that I lent that entertaining work to an American friend, and found the utmost difficulty in recovering it from him. It was only restored, indeed, on the morning of my departure, and my friend mentioned that he had sat up all night reading it, "Just to see how it ended," he said.)

Between, however, these seasons of satisfaction, there stretches the actual time of holiday, and as I reflect upon it, I am struck by the fact that its more salient features are misfortunes. From a literary point of view this has its advantages; the happy traveller has no history. If the converse is true it would need Gibbon or Macaulay to deal with our transit from the County Cork to that Alpine fastness for which we had trustingly, fearlessly labelled our luggage.

It began with fog in the Channel—the Irish Channel—solid, tangible fog, through which our bewildered steamer stumbled, uttering large, desolate cries of distress, stopping every now and then to bellow like a lost cow, sometimes, even, going astern, while muffled hootings told of another wanderer who had drawn nearer than was convenient.

"When I heard 'em giving the signal to go astern," said a sailor officer of high degree, next morning, as he gobbled a belated mouthful of breakfast, "I thought it was about time to get up and put on my clothes. Said nothing about it to m' wife, though!"

I wonder if he has realised yet why everyone smiled.

In London, rain; in Paris, blinding heat. Dizzily we staggered round the elder Salon, and through its innumerable small square rooms, with their lining of flagrant canvases; it was like exploring the brain-cells of a fever patient in delirium. One healing instant was ours, when at the public baths in the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, the waters of a "Bain Complet" closed over the exhausted person; but that, even, was speedily poisoned by the discovery that towels and soap, being extras, were not left in the Cabinet de Bain, and the bather, having with dripping hands explored the pocket for the needed coins, had then to tender them to the attendant through a difficult slit of doorway, receiving in exchange a small fragment of slightly scented marble and a gauze veil.

After that, the night journey to Geneva. Heat, sardine-like proximity of fellow travellers, two dauntless English ladies, who turned the long night into one unending and clanking tea-party; a nightmare interlude of douaniers, then, when a troubled sleep had at length been bestowed, Geneva; and all the horrors that attend the finish of a long train journey.

At breakfast, at our hotel, a survey of what we had hitherto endured in the pursuit of pleasure stung us to a brief revolt. This was a holiday, we told ourselves, why hurry? Fortified by a principle, theoretically unassailable, we strolled about Geneva. It was cold and very wet; still, in our newly realised leisure, we made a point of strolling. On our return to our hotel most of the staff were on the pavement, seemingly very much excited. A voiture, laden with our luggage, stood at the door. It appeared that our steamer left for Villeneuve in eight minutes. I imagine that the hotel staff's agitation arose from the fear that we should not have time to tip them all. This was, alas, unfounded.

The driver took us first to the wrong steamer. He then turned his machine too short, and locked the fore carriage. Then he shambled across the long bridge to the other steamboat quai, while we sat forward, like the coxswains of racing eights, in sweating agony, watching our boat getting up steam and preparing for instant departure.

We caught the boat by springing, like Spurius Lartius and Herminius, across the widening chasm between her deck and the shore, and therewith fell into a species of syncope. Mists shrouded the mountains; a chilled rain swept the lake. For our parts, slowly recovering, we kept the cabin, and swept the tea-table. It was almost our first moment of enjoyment.

The Alpine fastness, already alluded to, was not gained for a further couple of days, during which an awakening distaste for Switzerland slowly grew in us, though it did not thoroughly mature till mellowed by a mule ride up a mountain. Reticence in narration is a quality that I endeavour to cultivate. It becomes a necessity in treating of the village and its surrounding slums from and through which our start was made. Having, in a state nearing starvation, been offered the sole refreshment available, namely, concentrated essence of typhoid in the guise of glasses of milk, and having retained sufficient self-control to refuse them, we started on mule-back for the mountain. Traversing, as I have every reason to believe, the open main drain of the village, our animals proceeded to totter up a narrow and precipitous watercourse.

"La voie la plus directe," explained the mule-driver, lashing his ancient cattle in a general way, and without animosity.

The cloud that accompanied our wanderings, as in the case of the Israelites, did not fail of its usual office. Even through the crown of a Panama straw hat the rain attained to my skin. Thence it descended, enveloping me, as it were an inner garment. Twice my mule fell down. I could not reproach it. Indeed, nothing but the fact that one of its parents had been an ass explained its readiness to pick itself up and go on again. It had, however, an incentive, supplied in the rear by its proprietor; we had naught save the fetish of Holiday to goad us onward, and its potency was beginning to weaken.

One week of the mountain hotel was as much as we were able to endure. The usual "exceptional" weather prevailed. How familiar is the formula, and how entirely unworthy of credence!

"For seventeen years"—the Landlord calls heaven to witness—"it has never been so wet, or so cold, or so stormy at this time. If Monsieur or Madame, had come but three weeks ago—or would wait but three days longer——"

There was a time when the glamour of holiday might have induced belief, might even have beguiled a further endurance of the age-long table-d'h?te repasts, of the aggressive muscularity of the English schoolmaster, who, during the progress of the ménu from the watery soup to the acrid Alpine strawberry, faced us, boasting at large and in detail; of the German bride, who practised the piano for four hours daily (her head upon her bridegroom's shoulder, his faithful arm round her waist). These things, though unattractive in themselves, might once have been submitted to as elements of the theoretical holiday (in Switzerland), as mere inevitable crumples in the rose-leaf.

But, on this occasion—it is possibly one of the compensations of advancing years—we found ourselves endowed with a juster sense of proportion. The close of the eighth day saw us heading for home with a speed that almost amounted to rout. The mule-driver's maxim, "la voie la plus directe" seemed good common sense; we drew neither breath nor bridle, Geneva, Paris, London were but names in the night, till we found ourselves facing America from the front doorstep of a certain remote hostelry in the far west of Connaught.
FACING AMERICA
FACING AMERICA

Then, and not till then, did something of the largeness, the leisure, the absurdity, the unconventionality, that should enter into all true holiday, begin for us.

I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.

Thus we, led by our carman, an habitué of the house, found them, and thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we spent among them.

"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh—the sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.

Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff.

"Hot wather? O cerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your pardon—" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and china, *objets d'art. "I left me hat pins—" here she giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of the objets d'art, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."

A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis for theory.

There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door was dealt a single blow.

I said "Come in!" not without a slight recurrence of religious terror.

A very little and ancient woman stood there, with the trade marks of soot and grease thick upon her. When she curtseyed she seemed to merge in the door mat, so small was she and so dingy.

There was reassurance in the discovery that she seemed as much in awe of us as we of her.

"How would I know what the likes o' ye would fancy?" she said, almost with despair, and went on to hope that our visit might prove an education into the ways of the aristocracy of which she had long stood in need, but she coupled the admission with a warning that she "was very owld and very dull."

It was a high responsibility, this position of exponents of an unknown type, and it is much to be regretted that we were forced to leave our venerable disciple under the impression that the upper classes usually cook their own food at hotels. It should here be said that this expedition had not been entered upon without a certain foreknowledge of what it was likely to involve, and amongst other precautions were provisions of a portable sort. These included sausages, and the sausages we confided to our old lady.

We sat in the parlour enjoying the appetite for dinner that is one of the bright features of a genuine holiday. After a delay of about half an hour, Mary Kate's head was thrust through a narrow opening of the door.

"Granne'ma says will the little puddings be split?"

Had the answer been Yes, and that it was usual to serve them with cream and sugar, I feel sure that grandmamma would have complied. As it was, after instructions to Mary Kate, of a lucidity unrivalled by Mrs. Beeton, the sausages appeared, pale, tepid, raw, in a pie-dish, just a-wash with luke-warm water.

The holiday appetite quailed at the sight, and the chef was summoned from the conversazione still raging in the kitchen. A single glance at the guests told her of failure, and, with a masterly grasp of the position, she hurried back to the kitchen and returned with the frying-pan.

"Keep it now yersels," she said. "Didn't I say to ye I was too owld?"

From that time the parlour grate led a sullied life, but—which may have consoled it—a thoroughly useful one. We re-cooked the sausages upon it; the perambulator yielded its increase, toast, grilled beef, sausages, who could reasonably ask for more?

We spent two days and two nights there; days of perfect weather, spent in exploring a coast as wild and beautiful as the heart of holiday maker could desire, nights strangely, almost desolately devoid of the entomological excursions and pursuits usual to village inns, and, in spite of the peculiarities of the pillows, sleep was not difficult. Or rather, in candour it should be said, was difficult only after the rising of the sun. For with the dawn, a vagrant population was astir in the village; a street Arab community of hens, dogs, geese and donkeys, incessant and clarion-toned in their addresses to morn and to each other; creatures who slept under carts and in stray corners; who treated life as a lounge, and regarded their owners as suzerains merely, to whom occasional allegiance was to be rendered, or a tributary egg or two laid in an inaccessible place.

On the whole, the donkeys are those of whom I can speak least temperately. They had, for want, possibly, of other employment, adopted the position of town-criers to the village, or perhaps were its prophets, perhaps its Cassandras, and they uplifted their testimony from sunrise till nightfall with a poignancy that rent the very skies. Standing one evening on one of the low hills that hemmed the village into its corner by the sea, I counted easily, and with half a glance, four of these enthusiasts, planted each on a commanding rock or mound, and sending his wild voice abroad over the valley. It was a sunny evening, after a day of sad and opalescent beauty, and the sea had brightened into blue and silver; the white-washed gables and a far white lighthouse were radiant with recovered cheerfulness, but the jackasses were as despairful and implacable as Jeremiah.

There was but one disaster during our brief sojourn at the Sea View Hotel. A few sausages and a tin of sardines remained, "spared," as Mary Kate said, from the first repast. These she proposed to store, for safety and coolness, in one of our bedrooms. The idea not being well received, she finally deposited them in the Post Office, which was attached to the hotel. But even this hiding place was not improbable enough to hoodwink that skilled tactician, the hotel cat, and he, in some dark hour of the night, found and feasted on them with, no doubt, all the ravishing joy of a new experience.
IN WEST CARBERY
IN WEST CARBERY

We could not but sympathise with him. Thanks to the Sea View Hotel that subtle joy was also ours.

I began by saying that of the Summer holidays the times of anticipation and of retrospect were the times of truest pleasure. Yet I can remember long September days beside a sea of Mediterranean blue, the sea of Southern Ireland, when the perfect present asked nothing of either past or future. The long creek wound, blue-green as a peacock's breast, between deep woods. High places of rock and heather were there, where you could lie, "ringed with the azure world," and see the huge liners, yes, and hear them too, as they went throbbing and trampling along the sun's path westward.

Those who know this place of holiday are comparatively few, but there is at least one distinguished name of the company—Dean Swift, no less. A couple of hundred years or so ago, he spent a summer in West Carbery, (an ivy-covered ruin, known as Swift's Tower, testifies to the fact,) and he forthwith made a poem about it, a Latin poem, addressed to the Rocks of Carbery.

One gathers that it was of the nature of an encomium, though the points selected for description are not those that would tempt the effete holiday maker of to-day. Possibly it was the Dean's majestic eighteenth-century manner of thanking his host for "a very pleasant visit." I came upon it in the house of a descendant of that host, reverently quoted in a copy of Dr. Smith's history of the County Cork, dated 1749. Thanks to the sympathetic scholarship of a contemporary divine, the Revd. Dr. Donkin, who made a translation of it, I am able to give some quotations from it. Dr. Smith thinks that "the Dean's descriptions are as just as his numbers are beautiful." It is not for me to disagree with him. Let them—or some of them—dignify these unworthy pages.

    "Lo! From the top of yonder cliff, that shrouds
    Its airy head amidst the azure clouds,
    Hangs the huge fragment, destitute of props,
    Prone on the waves the rocky ruin drops.

*      *      *      *      *

    Oft too with hideous yawn, the cavern wide
    Presents an orifice on either side;
    A dismal orifice, from sea to sea
    Extended, pervious to the god of day.

*      *      *      *      *

    High on the cliff their nests wild pigeons make,
    And sea calves stable in the oozey lake ...
    When o'er the craggy steep without controul,
    Big with the blast, the raging billows roll, ...
    The neighbouring race, tho' wont to brave the shocks
    Of angry seas and run along the rocks,
    Now pale with terror, while the ocean foams,
    Fly far and wide, nor trust their native homes.
    The goats, while pendant from the mountain top,
    The wither'd herb improvident they crop,
    Wash'd down the precipice with sudden sweep,
    Leave their sweet lives beneath th' unfathomed deep."
    

I am sorry to say that in these degenerate times the improvident goat has lost his ancient skill and is no longer pendant, and the oozey lake and stabling sea calf (the latter possibly a lingering survivor of the Deluge) may no more be found. None the less, I can confidently commend the scenes of these catastrophes to the holiday maker of to-day.

Even now, when the sunshine of last September has faded to a memory, and that of next September is too far away to be even a hope, I can still feel the soft lift of the western wind, still hear the booming of the waves in the deep and riven heart of the cliff.