I found Dr Wayne quite ready to acquiesce in my newly formed decision
to leave London; indeed, I fancy he still owned some qualms concerning
the style and expense of our present abode. The only question that
now remained was whither should we proceed. It was the Doctor and
not myself who ultimately settled this point, for he had set to
search the advertisement columns of his numerous journals, and after
much hesitation had lighted on the notice of a Welsh hotel which on
reflection commended itself also to my choice. The place was named
Glanymôr and was situated on the southern shores of Cardigan Bay at a
convenient distance from a small county town. It doubtless possessed
the double advantage of quiet and remoteness, the two qualities of
locale I especially demanded, so that after some farther discussion
I asked Dr Wayne to make the necessary arrangements for our proposed
sojourn there. In four days' time therefore from the date of the
incident of the Indian peddlers, we were able to leave Paddington
Station on our way towards the spot selected, where I looked to obtain
the peace and solitude essential for me to refresh my jaded brain and
to provoke it to some definite conclusion. I left London without a pang
of regret, but also without any pleasurable enthusiasm for the change
of air and scene I was seeking; so languid and detached was my outlook
towards the future.
After several hours of travelling westward, after noon we reached a
large market town of South Wales where a hired motor car was awaiting
us. It was a glorious day, cool, calm and bright, with the tang of
autumn in the air but the guise of summer still masking the face of
Nature. Ere long we were speeding through a district of tall hazel
hedges and small fields in endless succession, recalling at times an
immense rural chess-board set amidst steep hills of no distinction of
outline but with their grassy flanks relieved in many places by patches
of autumnal gorse, of roseate ling and of murrey bracken. Little rills,
peeping through miniature thickets of delicate lady fern, coursed here
and there down the slopes, and at times we were skirting the bank of
a torrent with golden-brown peat-stained waters circling and curling
around mossy boulders. In many places the hedge banks were still gay
with hawkweeds, scabious and belated foxgloves. Already the charm
of the revisited Earth was beginning to arouse my sluggish spirits,
and the sight of this mountain brook with its suggestions of a happy
childhood that delighted in rambling and fishing began to stir the
clogged and mantled pool of my earthly memory. Here at any rate was
still the Earth, the beloved Earth radiant and unspoiled, the Earth
untainted by the deadly miasma of modern progress which is striving
with too evident success to convert the whole world into grey suburban
uniformity and ugliness. Next we sped through a squalid hamlet compact
of raw stuccoed chapels, of tin-roofed cottages and blatant villas of