《【英文读物】Through Connemara in a governess cart.docx》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文读物】Through Connemara in a governess cart.docx（45页珍藏版）》请在taowenge.com淘文阁网|工程机械CAD图纸|机械工程制图|CAD装配图下载|SolidWorks_CaTia_CAD_UG_PROE_设计图分享下载上搜索。
1、【英文读物】Through Connemara in a governess cartCHAPTER I. 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
2、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
3、 we began to feel a good deal discouraged. Things2 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
4、 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 lodgingsthe remote, the Bayswaterian, but still, the cheap, the confidential;
5、 for be they never so homely, theres no placefor sluttish comfort and unmolested unpunctualitylike 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.“Id be ashamed to show such weather to a Connemara pig,” I replied.Now
6、Connemara is a sore subject with my second3 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
7、steadily in the face and said,“Well, lets 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.“Lets get an ass and an ass-car!” said my cousin, relapsing in
8、 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 well drive through Connemara.”In the seclusion of the back bedroom we reviewed the position, while around us on t
9、he lodging-house pegs hung the draggled ghosts of what had been our Sunday dresses.4“Thats 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
10、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.”
11、 “Thats 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!”. . . . . .The Milford and Cork boat starts at eight, and at half-past eight a doomed crowd was sitting round its still stat
12、ionary tea-table. My second cousin was feverishly eating dry toast and drinking a precautionary brandy and soda, but the others were revelling5 Image unavailable.“IN THE SECLUSION OF THE BACK BEDROOM.”67 on beefsteak and fried fish. The company was mixed. Opposite to us sat an American and his bride
13、, both young, and both uncertain of the rules that govern the consumption of fish; the bride feeling that a couple of small forks, held as though they were pens, would meet the situation, while her big, red-headed husband evidently believed that by holding the fork in the right hand and the knife in
14、 the left the impropriety of using the latter would be condoned. Beside us were two elderly ladies, returning, like us, to their native land.“Yes, me dear,” we heard one saying to the other; “I had nothing only my two big boxes and seven little small parcels, and poor little Charlies rabbit, and tha
15、t porther wanted to get thruppence out o me!”“Dye tell me so?” remarked the friend.“Yes, dear, he did indeed! He wanted thruppence and I gave him tuppence; he was tough, very tough, but I was shtubborn!”“Ah, them English is great rogues,” said the friend, consolingly.8“More fish, Miss?” said the uno
16、bservant steward to my second cousin, thrusting a generous helping under her nose. It wanted but that, and she retired to the doubtful security of the ladies cabin.We have travelled with many stewardesses on the various routes between England and Cork, and we have found that, as a species, they have
17、 at least two great points in common. They are all Irish, and they are all relentlessly conversational. They have no respect for the sanctity of the silence in which the indifferent sailor wishes to shroud herself; it is impossible for them to comprehend those solemn moments, when the thoughts are t
18、urned wholly inwards in a tumult of questioning, while the body lies in mummy stillness waiting for what the night shall bring forth. Their leading object seems to be to acquire information, but they are not chary of personal detail, and, speaking from experience, I should say that a stewardess will
19、 confide anything to the passenger by whose berth she has elected to take down her hair. For stewardesses generally do their9 hair two or three times in the course of a twelve hours crossing. When you go on board you find them at it. Your evening ablutions are embittered by the discovery of their ha
20、ir-pins in the soap-dish, and at earliest dawn the traveller is aware of the stewardess combing her shining tresses over the washing-stand. I have sometimes wondered if from this custom arose the fable that the mermaid, when not decoying sailors to their fate, is incessantly “racking her poll,” as t
21、hey say in the county Cork.We will not linger on the details of the night, the sufferings of little Charlie, who, on the plea of extreme youth, had been imported by his mother into the ladies cabin; the rustlings and chumping of the rabbit, whose basket occupied the greater part of the cabin table,
22、or the murmured confidences exchanged through the night hours by the stewardess and the friend of Charlies mother. These things are being forgotten by us as fast as may be; but my second cousin says she never can forget the waft of pigs that10 came to her through the porthole as the steamer drew alo
23、ngside of the Cork quay.The exigencies of return tickets had compelled us to go to Connemara via Cork and Milford, and it certainly is not the route we would recommend; however, it has its advantages, and we were vouchsafed a time of precious rest before the starting of our train for Limerick at 2.1
24、0, and we reposed in peace on the sofas of the ladies drawing-room in the Imperial Hotel. Much might be said, were there time, of the demeanour of ladies in hotel drawing-rooms; so hushed, so self-conscious, so eminent in all those qualities with which they are endued by the artist who “does” the ho
25、tel interiors for the guide-books. It is almost possible to believe that they are engaged for the season to impart tone, and to show how agreeable a lounge life can be when spent in the elegant leisure that is the atmosphere of hotel drawing-rooms.We crossed Cork on an outside-car; and here, no doub
26、t, we should enter on a description of its perils11 which would convulse and alarm English readers in the old, old way; but we may as well own at once that we know all about outside-cars; we believe we went to be christened on an outside-car, and we did not hold on even thenwe certainly have not don
27、e so since.Let us rather embark on a topic in which all, saving a besotted few, will sympathise. The nursery en voyagethe nurse, the nursemaid, the child, the feeding-bottle. These beset every travellers path, and we had considerably more than our fair share of them between Cork and Limerick. At Cor
28、k they descended upon the train, as it lay replete and helpless, a moment before starting, and before we had well understood the extent of the calamity, a nurse was glaring defiance at us over the white bonnet of a bellowing baby, and a nursemaid was already opening her basket of food for the benefi
29、t of two children of the dread ages of three and five respectively. Some rash glance on the part of my second cousin must have betrayed our sentiments to the nurse, and it is12 hard to say which was worse, her exaggerated anxiety to snatch the children from all contact with us, or the imbecile belie
30、f of the nursemaid that we wanted to play with them, and, of the two, enjoyed their wiping their hands on our rug in the intervals between the oranges. They never ceased eating oranges, those children. Oranges, seed cake, milk; these succeeded one another in a sort of vicious circle. An enterprising
31、 advertiser asks, “What is more terrible than war?” We answer unhesitatingly, oranges in the hands of young children.However, everything, even the waits at the stations between Limerick and Athenry, comes to an end if you can live it out, and at about nine oclock at night we were in Galway. Scarcely
32、 by our own volition, we found ourselves in an hotel bus, and we were too tired to do more than notice the familiar Galway smell of turf smoke as we bucketted through Eyre Square to our hostelry. It may be as well at this point to seriously assure English readers that the word “peat” is not used in
33、Ireland in reference to13 fuel by anyone except possibly the Saxon tourist. Let it therefore be accepted that when we say “turf” we mean peat, and when, if ever, we say Pete, we mean the diminutive of Peter, no matter what the spelling.We breakfasted leisurely and late next morning, serenaded by the
34、 screams of pigs, for it was fair day, and the market square was blocked with carts tightly packed with pigs, or bearing tall obelisks of sods of turf, built with Egyptian precision. We cast our eye abroad upon a drove of Connemara ponies, driven in for sale like so many sheep, and my second cousin
35、immediately formed the romantic project of hiring one of these and a small trap for our Connemara expedition.“They are such hardy little things,” she said, enthusiastically, “we had two of them once, and they always lived on grass. Of course they never did any work really, and I remember they used t
36、o bite anyone who tried to catch thembut still I think one of them would be just the thing.14”“I beg your pardon, Miss,” said the waiter, who was taking away our breakfast things, “but thim ponies is very arch for the likes of you to drive. One o thimd be apt to lie down in the road with yerself and
37、 the thrap, and maybe itd be dark night before hed rise up for ye. Faith, there was one o them was near atin the face off a cousin o me own that was enticin him to stand up out o the way o the mail-car.”My second cousin looked furtively at me, and rose from her seat in some confusion.“Oh, I think we
38、 should be able to manage a pony,” she said, with a sudden resumption of the dignity that I had noticed she had laid aside since her arrival in Galway. “Is thereerany two-wheeledertrap to be had?”“Sure there is, Miss, and a nate little yoke itd be for the two of ye, though the last time it was out o
39、ne of the shafts”“Is it in the yard?” interrupted my second cousin, severely.15“It is, Miss, but the step took the ground”My cousin here left the room, and I followed her. A few moments later the trap was wheeled into the yard for our inspection. It was apparently a segment of an antediluvian brough
40、am, with a slight flavour about it of a hansom turned the wrong way, though its great-grandfather had probably been a highly-connected sedan-chair. The door was at the back, as in an omnibus, the floor was about six inches above the ground, and the two people whom it with difficulty contained had to
41、 sit with their backs to the horse, rocking and swinging between the two immense wheels, of which they had a dizzy prospect through the little side windows.“There it is for ye, now!” said the waiter, triumphantly. He had followed us downstairs and was negligently polishing a tablespoon with his napk
42、in. “And Jimmy,” indicating the ostler, “ll know of the very horse thatll be fit to put under it.”“No,” we said faintly, “that would never do; we want to drive ourselves.16”The ostler fell into an attitude of dramatic meditation.“Would you be agin dhrivin a side-car?”We said “No.”Equally dramatic ec
43、stasy on the part of both ostler and waiter. The former, strange to say, had a friend who was the one person in Galway who had the very thing we wanted. “Letyees be gettin ready now,” said Jimmy, “for Ill go fetch it this minute.”About half an hour later we were standing at the hotel doorsteps, prep
44、ared for our trial trip. On the pavement were clustered about us the beggarwomen of Galwayan awesome crew, from whose mouths proceeded an uninterrupted flow of blessings and cursings, the former levelled at us, the latter at each other and the children who hung about their skirts. We pushed our way
45、through them, and getting up on the car announced that we were ready to start, but some delay in obtaining a piece of cord to tie up the breeching gave the beggars a precious opportunity.17 My second cousin was recognised, and greeted by name with every endearment.“Aha! didnt I tell ye twas her?” “A
46、rrah, shut yer mouth, Nellie Morris. I knew the fine full eyes of her since she was a baby.” “Dont mind them, darlin,” said a deep voice on a level with the step of the car; “sure yell give to yer own little Judy from Menlo?”This was my cousins own little Judy from Menlo, and at her invocation we bo
47、th snatched from our purses the necessary blackmail and dispensed it with furious haste. Most people would pay largely to escape from the appalling presence of this seventy-year-old nightmare of two foot nothing, and she is well aware of its compelling power.The car started with a jerk, the driver b
48、oy running by the horses side till he had goaded it into a trot, and then jumping on the driving-seat he lashed it into a gallop, and we swung out of Eyre Square followed by the admiring screams of the beggars. The pace was kept up, and we were well out of Galway before18 a slightly perceptible hill
49、 suddenly changed it to a funeral crawlthe animals head disappearing between its forelegs.“Give me the reins,” said my second cousin. “These country boys never know how to drive,” she added in an undertone as she took them from the boy. The horse, a pale yellow creature, with a rusty black mane and tail, turned his head, and fixing a penetrating eye upon her, slightly slackened his pace. M