Through Connemara in a Governess Cart
Edith Anna Oenone Somerville
9781465638731
188 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
MY second cousin and I came to London for ten days in the middle of last June, and we stayed there for three weeks, waiting for a fine day. We were Irish, and all the English with whom we had hitherto come in contact had impressed upon us that we should never know what fine weather was till we came to England. Perhaps we came at a bad moment, when the weather, like the shops, was having its cheap sales. Certainly such half-hours of sunshine as we came in for were of the nature of “soiled remnants,” and at the end of the three weeks aforesaid we began to feel a good deal discouraged. Things came to a climax one day when we had sat for three-quarters of an hour in a Hungarian bread shop in Regent Street, waiting for the rain to clear off enough to let us get down to the New Gallery. As the fifth party of moist ladies came in and propped their dripping umbrellas against the wall behind us, and remarked that they had never seen such rain, our resolution first began to take shape. “Hansom!” said my second cousin. “Home!” said I. By home, of course we meant the lodgings—the remote, the Bayswaterian, but still, the cheap, the confidential; for be they never so homely, there’s no place—for sluttish comfort and unmolested unpunctuality—like lodgings. “England is no fit place for a lady to be in,” said my second cousin, as we drove away in our hansom with the glass down. “I’d be ashamed to show such weather to a Connemara pig,” I replied. Now Connemara is a sore subject with my second cousin, who lives within sight of its mountains, and, as is usually the case, has never explored the glories of her native country, which was why I mentioned Connemara. She generally changes the conversation on these occasions; but this time she looked me steadily in the face and said, “Well, let’s go to Connemara!” I was so surprised that I inadvertently pressed the indiarubber ball of the whistle on which my hand was resting, and its despairing wail filled the silence like a note of horror. “Let’s get an ass and an ass-car!” said my cousin, relapsing in her excitement into her native idiom, and taking no notice of the fact that the hansom had stopped, and that I was inventing a lie for the driver; “or some sort of a yoke, whatever, and we’ll drive through Connemara.” In the seclusion of the back bedroom we reviewed the position, while around us on the lodging-house pegs hung the draggled ghosts of what had been our Sunday dresses. “That’s the thing I wore last night!” said my second cousin, in a hard, flat voice, lifting with loathing finger a soaked flounce. As she did so, the river sand fell from it into the boots that stood beneath. “Soil of tea-garden, Kingston-on-Thames. Result of boating-picnic that has to fly for refuge to an inn-parlour ten minutes after it has started.” “It will wash,” I answered gloomily. “But look at that!” Here I pointed to an evening gown erstwhile, to quote an Irish divine, “the brightest feather in my crown.” “That’s what comes of trailing through Bow Street after the opera, looking for a hansom during the police riots. Give me Irish weather and the R.I.C.! We will go to Connemara!”
