Testimonies: A Novel (14 page)

But I had to have the truth. They talk about love being blind: I did not want to be blind—for that matter, I do not think I ever wanted to be in love.

I went on and on at this prying, eavesdropping, spying, and I heard many things that hurt me to the quick. Nain, and the others in the farm, spoke of “Bronwen’s table, Bronwen’s dresser, Bronwen’s teapot.” It seemed that her
dot
was quite outside the common stock: certainly the things that were called hers were very much better—there was the prettiest little oak gate-leg table that I have ever seen outside a museum: they used to give me my tea on it: “Sit down, Mr. Pugh, sit down: I have putting your tea to Bronwen’s table, isn’t it.”

Always, if I asked Nain anything, she would refer the decision to Bronwen. I remember so clearly walking into the back kitchen, where the old lady was scrubbing on her hands and knees (the scrubbing brush and pail looked too big for her): she looked up and put her hand to a loose wisp of white hair. She said good morning with a smile on her tired, gentle old face and when I asked her whether I might have an extra half-pint of milk she called up the stairs to Bronwen: I did not hear what Bronwen said, but the sound of her voice was not very pleasant, and as I went from the house I heard the little boy Gerallt beginning to cry.

How depressing it was. It was one out of a great many instances—not conclusive (I would have taken a great deal of convincing, but I was sufficiently honest to have accepted a downright proof), not conclusive, but they mounted up, accumulated.

It is usual, I imagine, for a man to look for perfection where he loves: I was rather old for a lover; I was willing to compromise for much less, and if she was curt with Emyr that did not concern me—there might be so many things there that I could not understand, nor possibly judge—but I had to have a nature that would not be unkind to Nain, would not dispossess her of her place in the house where she had been the mistress for thirty or forty years, a nature that could not reduce the old lady to a super-annuated servant.

Perfection was there when we all sat in the farm kitchen, but when I lay in bed thinking it over, piecing my evidence together, playing the
advocatus diaboli
, what a black picture presented itself.

If it really did come down to a commonplace usurpation, dominating usurpation, what could be more wounding? And what other answer could there be? I struggled very hard against the idea (and, with a stupid wrongheadedness, toward it: duty seems so often to lie along the more unpleasant road, and the unacceptable notion is so often the correct one. But I am not to be talking of duty here).

To abridge a little: I worried myself into a pretty state by the autumn. It was a weeping autumn, no St. Martin’s summer, no memory of summer but the little sad piles of hay that rotted in the fields, and the brown fern decayed on my place above the Craig y Nos.

I had disagreed with Skinner. I had thought we might in the end, but it had come sooner than I had expected. To my astonishment it turned out that he was one of those people who believe that the English are Israelites: he did not speak about it until we knew one another quite well, but I should have guessed it from his books. I tried to keep him off the subject when it did appear that this was his belief, but he would talk about it, and one day when my heart was excoriated he chose to show me the logical grounds for his belief. I do not know whether he was one of the orthodox school (he thought we were descended from only two of the tribes)—I knew nothing about it except that the belief existed—but with him, he said, it was a matter of reason, not of faith, and he tried to convince me that right was on his side. I should never have entered into the discussion, but I did. The stuff he adduced was such an intolerable farrago of rubbish that I was shocked that it should have imposed upon a man of education and some reading. It was such an incoherent, verbose mumbo-jumbo, with esoteric twaddle jostling gnosticism, scholarship of the
lucus a non lucendo
order that I could not refrain (burning with my private fire) from saying some sharp things about his authors. I should have been quiet; of course I should, if only from civility, but I was not, and we parted on very formal and rigid terms.

I had touched him home once or twice: what he was talking about fell to pieces if you jarred it with a hard fact, and in spite of his taking refuge in a cloud of mystical jargon he was a man of some intelligence, and he must have felt the truth of some of the things that I said. I did not expect him to like me any the better for it, but I was not prepared for the letter he sent up by a boy: it was a violent, unbalanced letter, written in a tearing hurry, and it contained many rude statements of a personal nature, most of them false. Its manner, and some queer inversions, made me wonder whether the man were not off his head. There was nothing to say; no reply to be made. It made me sad for that day, and often afterwards when I remembered Skinner’s kindly side and our games of chess.

When you are ill, if nobody with authority tells you that you are particularly unwell, or knocks you down with the name of your disease, it is surprising how long you can go on living an ordinary life. There was Ransome, who broke two ribs falling off a ladder in the Bodleian, and took pneumonia. I saw him looking poorly, and when I asked him he said that he was very indifferent, and that he had a heavy cold: he had no doubt about carrying on with his work. When he was examined, however, and they told him that it was pneumonia and broken bones and put him to bed, he instantly began to speak in a feeble, exhausted whisper, with his eyes half-closed. Far be it from me to make game of Ransome: I do not think that he was malingering at all. I only mention him to show that one can walk about when one is in a really dangerous condition.

This was the case with me: there was a whole week when I dragged myself about, either unaware that I was seriously ill or denying it to myself. By the end of the week I had let everything slide; the cottage was in a horrible mess, but I lacked the courage to start setting it in order: even the effort of getting the milk from the farm was too much at the end—besides, I no longer possessed a milk jug that was not crusted with sour milk. I just sat over the fire and drank pot after pot of weak tea, letting time pass over me, day and night (I remember filling the lamp). Then the fuel ran out, and I crawled up to bed. The stairs were longer and steeper than ever.

Once I heard the postman, and I thought of calling to him, but while I was thinking about it he came and went. I heard the garden gate close behind him: he had a particular way of shutting it, with a sharp clack.

The clock stopped, and with it my own sense of the passing of time. It stopped as it was striking; the strokes went longer and longer, and the last came far behind, somberly.

It was a lethargy, not unpleasant, but gray and toneless. I was right down there, far down, sunk down and very quiet. I was there all right, and perfectly aware of myself, but reduced, very small and quiescent. My body had stopped hurting much. Only if I moved it hurt. I could lie quiet though. All that old griping and tension was gone and it was as if my body had consented to let me lie in peace so long as I did not bother it, lay quiet and let it have its way.

I thought it probable that I was dying, and upon my word I did not care very much. I was so glad that I did not have a dog: I had wanted a puppy, had nearly bought him, but in the end I did not because long ago when my old Tory died I had sworn never to have another.

In these long silent days my mind revolved with a curious motion, slow and dispassionate, following no logical pattern. I said that there was hardly any doubt that I had deceived myself; that my passion was no more than the last burning-up of the desires of a man who, though long celibate, was still, after all, a male creature; that I had idealized a perfectly ordinary young woman by way of making my love reasonable—for a love like that, if it is not an illusion, needs a wonderful object—that I had taken Bronwen at her face-value and I was a poor judge of faces.

It was sad: yes; it was sad, but I was down below sadness now and the rain drove on the window and the evening went into night.

I was still all that night, quite still, and as far as I was doing anything—feeling anything—I was waiting. When you are waiting like that your face sets, and you do not like to change your face.

Emyr came in the morning. I heard him on the path with his dogs: there was Meg there and Taff as well as the terriers. I did not want to see Emyr. I do not know why; I had no distaste for him, no embarrassment or anything like that any more; but I did not want to see him or change the way my face was. He called once or twice: more, perhaps, but there was a good deal of wind—I would not have known when he went but for his voice far away up the road calling for Meg.

Peace came back at once; the wind outside isolated the house and I was there alone. The progressive detachment was almost complete now and I was waiting, but with no impatience, no emotion of any kind. Before this I had made some preparation for giving an account of myself. There were many, many things I had done for which I was heartily sorry, and many that I should have been ashamed to recount; and I had led a selfish life. On the other side, I could claim to have been a fairly harmless creature: if I had not done much good, at least I had never had the opportunity for doing much harm. I hoped for a kind judge: I relied too much upon an unjust indulgence, for I hoped to shuffle by.

I was not afraid (physically, I mean): and as far as such a negative state can have a name I was content. Yet when I heard her voice calling, at once I rushed up through those peaceful depths, up to the surface of living and I called back, half raised in my bed. My voice was strange in my throat, another man’s voice. And there was the pain again.

It was so quick. Days I had taken to sink down there, days and a resignation of spirit, and she had not reached the top of the stairs before I was there, on the old plane and my heart beating hard.

I would have slipped on my dressing-gown, but I was too weak to get up. It was mortifying to be seen like this, but I could do nothing about it. She brought me some milk, and I was sick. I was talking very much at random: the words and the phrases formed themselves and came out. I knew they were inept, but I was not able to control them.

Lord, how kind she was. She was alarmed by my state and flustered by my silly talk, but she had the situation in hand: no fuss; great kindness and good sense.

They brought the doctor. By a good chance Davies was away and this was a young locum tenens: he was an intelligent man. I liked him. The pain, by this time, was bad again and it was terribly exhausting to fight against it. I grew confused and could no longer follow the sequence of events. In the end I was down at the farm, in a bed in the front parlor.

It was delightful to lie there, after the first days, when young Morgan had coped with the pain and I had grown resigned to the idea of being a burden and an imposition. I lay there day after day in a kind of vegetable happiness: she was always there, or just at hand and there was no thinking or reasoning or restraint and I loved her. How can I express it? I loved her from deep down, with my whole being; but calmly, no striving, no pain. It was as if it welled up in me and overflowed. It made me so happy, so deeply happy—no, content, assuaged. I was as weak as a cat, and happy. God, I was happy.

I do not know why I should have been: I did not know then, and I did not inquire.

The room I lay in was a little, formal, triangular piece of the house, wedged between the staircase and the outside kitchen, the one in which they did the washing and messy jobs like plucking fowls and geese. The big kitchen, the place where the life of the farm was, lay the other side of the front door: there was a narrow bit of lobby just inside the front door and then the stairs; so I was separated from the big kitchen by a space wide enough to deaden all noise but sufficiently narrow to allow a diffused sound of living to come through, a murmur of activity that attached me pleasantly to life. I wondered sometimes why I did not hear the child; usually he cried or screamed or banged whenever I was there, unless they had already put him to bed. They had sent him away to an uncle’s farm: that was typical of the kindness I found at Gelli. There was not one of them who did not seem pleased to have me there, planked down in their best room, eating their victuals, imposing in a hundred ways and turning their accustomed way of life topsy-turvy.

If I could single out one as especially good to me I should say it was Taid. He came and sat with me in the evenings and during the day on Sunday: we could not say much to one another, because my fragmentary Welsh did not reach him, and his English was limited to thirty or forty words, but we communed in our fashion. He would come in and say, “Is bettar?” and I would reply,
“Da iawn, diolch.
” Short observations like that, which I could say correctly, pleased him very much.

Then he would sit stiffly in the upright chair and nod, or shake his head, while he worked to form the next sentence. There was such a goodness in him that it was a pleasure to have him by. I do not know how this strong, good impression was conveyed: his smile, perhaps, as much as anything; he had a saintly old face, and he was generally smiling, unless he was very tired. I loved to see him on Sundays when he was dressed in his black clothes for chapel: he held himself as straight as a grenadier and in his black broadcloth of antique cut he looked the image of a Liberal statesman of the great days. It was charming to see him when Emyr was in the room. He hardly ever spoke, but looked from my face to Emyr’s, and when Emyr was speaking there was such pleasure in his face that no one could see it unmoved.

He and Bronwen were very good friends. There was no mistaking the affection between them, a quiet, undemonstrative pleasure in one another’s company. I could not know him well, of course: we signaled good-will over a gulf, and even if we had had a common language we should have had little to say to one another. But I do not know that I ever met a man more worthy of respect and esteem.