Testimonies: A Novel (17 page)

I sound as if I were making fun of them: a page or so before I spoke in an off-hand way about their longdrawn talk of illness. I should have put it better, because I have absolutely no intention of slighting these kind people: they were really kind and good hearted. They were doing the Christian duty of visiting the sick, often at great inconvenience to themselves—and even expense, for they invariably brought “a little something,” a dozen eggs, a great bowl of farm butter, cream, or some other delicacy. They would have liked the visits and the conversation themselves, and what other criterion is there?

Indeed, this whole piece, and what I am going to write about Ellis, the preacher, makes me feel uneasy and even dirty. The outpouring of dislike is ugly enough when it is spoken, but unpleasant things written about a man who cannot reply are graver and far more ugly. In any other circumstances I would keep these judgments to myself, but here the special considerations must be my excuse.

Ellis, then, came to sit with me, and I took an instant dislike to him. It was a dislike that started before the first words and increased with my knowledge of the man, and with all the charity at my command I still think it was well founded.

He was a little pigeon-breasted strutting man, black, with a lard-colored face. But what is the good of trying to describe what he looked like? Apart from giving his height and color—the passport details—what impression can I convey? I could labor at a description of his snouty nose and mouth, that air of self-satisfaction that survived every change of expression, his confidence, but even if my description were followed through its dry length, I am certain that the picture received would have very little resemblance to the original: there is no hope in my mind of giving the man as I saw him. One sees a man in a flash and one has judged him in a moment, the set of features, the body’s stance, the taste of his personality, all at once; no prolonged list, however accurate, can give that instant effect.

In some bird books at the end of each article there is a feather-by-feather description of the bird: it is only with a great effort that one can connect the list with a living bird, and as for recognizing a particular species from it, that is quite impossible. The whole is so much greater than the parts, or rather the most important parts are intangible, not to be found in any list. Probably no two men worship the same God: I am sure no two sects do. We are given a certain set of qualities, a few specific but many more ambiguous, metaphysical, capable of a hundred interpretations. (“God is just”: so is a hanging judge at the Old Bailey; so is a critic who is silent because he cannot speak truthfully without giving pain.) It is not to be wondered at if the deity invoked at a pontifical high mass is unlike that worshiped at a Salvation Army meeting—as different as the sound of Palestrina and the tambourine and cornet—no more remarkable than that a friend’s friend, described by letter, should turn out an unrecognizable stranger.

I can only repeat that he was about five feet four, very upright and strutting, with a great deal of black hair and a glabrous, cheesy face (the skin was matt, no penetration of the light at all) with the snout and smirk that I have mentioned before. Obviously I disliked him at once and wrote him down a bad man, though at that time I had no reasonable grounds for doing so. For all I knew then he had never done a downright bad thing in his life (though from the first moment I would have sworn that he would stop at no meanness) and in all probability he would have done much good; but for me he was a
bad
character. It is very unfair, this dividing of humanity into good and bad. I think everybody does it: certainly for me the world has always been divided so. Perhaps it is a severe reflection upon myself that for me the bad division has always contained more than the good.

I have often wondered what it would feel like to be one of the other side. Perhaps it never happens; the whole world is on the right side, self-justification is so strong. There is Rousseau’s saying, that every man is inwardly sure he is the most virtuous being alive. But how far down can that go? All the way to an atheistic parricide who lives by robbing the blind? Or is there a point where it must be abandoned, and if there is, what does it feel like after?

Of course, as we used to say so often in chapel, we are miserable sinners, and I know that in my life I did only too many things that I ought not to have done, and I suppose that when I did them I joined the other side—a joining that would have been obvious if I had been found out: but I never was and even at the time I imagine that I regarded these acts as exceptional, probably not wrong for me because of special circumstances, however condemnable they might be as a general rule. But even if they were wrong, and I admitted it in the doing, then I would have argued that they were but aberrations from a virtuous norm, and that once over (and undetected) I rejoined the unsinning sheep.

But the man whose daily life is evil, a hypocrite, can his justification keep pace? Or is he content to belong to the other side, and to compensate himself by a cynical appreciation of his own cleverness and success. I am speaking of a fairly intelligent man: for a stupid thief it must be quite easy—a brutish resentment against the world would suffice. I am speaking of Ellis.

Hypocrite unqualified is a big word, and I hesitate to apply it whole to Ellis. I think there were times when he was genuinely exalted by his extempore prayers and his hymn-singing and he may have taken that for religious experience; although I do not think he believed in God, a future life or the practice of a single one of the Christian tenets. But those moments of exaltation aside, he was Tartuffe to the life, and it astonished me that no one appeared to suspect this, in spite of his care. For he was very careful, very guarded. But he was not careful enough to keep his little pig eyes from running up and down Bronwen while they all sat, heads bowed, in the kitchen listening to him praying about the womb of the earth and the rains piercing its sterility, the seed and the ecstasy, and I sat watching him from the parlor, for they had left the door open in order that I might benefit from his unction.

In every human encounter there is a mutual probing, a weighing of the potentialities of the other. I was soon aware that this Ellis was very penetrating, very fine. He was an ignorant fellow as far as book-learning went, but there was a lively intelligence there, of a certain kind. I did not wish to be penetrated, divined by him: I kept at a distance, talking vaguely and sometimes foolishly: but when we came to our evening discussions, I found that he had exactly calculated my strength and my weakness as an adversary.

It was depressing to see the strength of his influence on the better people in the valley. Taid loved and respected him. The other deacon, old Lewis, Cletwr (very rich), came often to visit although the rivalry between him and Taid made Gelli an uneasy house for him, and it made me gasp to see this successful, hard old farmer hanging on the words of the Reverend Mr. Ellis. He was
revered:
there is no other word for it. The schoolmaster, too; he would get up when Ellis came in, though he must have been twice his age, and I know that he had a high sense of what was due to him.

I think that the base of Ellis’ power must have been his pulpit oratory, but I cannot speak of it as I never heard him preach. I did not understand him well when he delivered those long monologues that were half sermons, because of the particular accent and special delivery that Welsh preachers use, and the unaccustomed turn of phrase, but they seemed to have a great effect on Nain, Taid, Emyr and any of the visitors who came in to hear him. From the style of these and from what I knew of the man I supposed that his full-blown preaching would be of the most enthusiastic hell-and-damnation kind, and I was not surprised when Nain assured me, with tears in her eyes, that at one open-air function he had converted eighteen quarrymen, who had been wicked before.

Bronwen did not like him. I was sure of that before I ever saw them together. I could not pretend to “understand” her thoroughly, as people say; there was much too profound a character there for any glib, facile comprehension, and in spite of the sympathy that stretched like a bridge between us, there were many of her reactions that were dark to me, and much that I could not seize. But as far as that went I was completely certain: there was no question in my mind at all. And I was right. She was very polite to him and I think she respected him for his calling; a mind as pure as hers could hardly in so many words grasp the existence of a spirit wholly depraved: she suspected it then, I believe, but deep down; and she certainly turned from him with an instinctive aversion. Why was this aversion not more general? These people were not fools; they were not to be imposed upon in other ways. All that I could bring forward, different religious traditions, love of oratory, success (he was very successful), the power of example; these did not seem to me to be enough. But obviously they were: I did not understand it.

It was necessary to keep on civil terms; one must not start quarreling with the friends of the house, and in this case more than any other I would have done anything rather than disturb the peace of mind of my hosts: it was Taid in particular that I thought of; that good old man’s tranquillity—it would hardly have been an exaggeration to call it holy. He never suspected my loathing for Ellis: he was charmed that I should now have someone to talk to. “We are ignorant men,” he said, “like sheeps.”

It was fortunate that I should have had a good deal of practice in living sociably with people I disliked, because Ellis regarded my reserve as a challenge, and he would not let me alone. An invalid is very helpless, and although by this time I was walking about quite easily, up to Hafod and back for books with no great effort, I could rarely escape him; the wintry spring kept me indoors nearly all the time.

He soon found that I was not to be charmed, and then he tried to dominate me: at least I think it was that. He was always driven, he had to be proving his defenses by attack: I know that he felt that his reputation was at stake.

Whenever there was an audience, and there often was—Taid, Emyr and myself sitting round the big kitchen fire, with a visitor or two, and the boy Llew on the settle in the background—he would start some discussion or other, a point of doctrine, the superiority of the Welsh over the English (he was a prudent Nationalist, the depth of his dye depending on his company) or some political measure. He was a clever fellow: he knew exactly how to trim along with the opinion of his people—implied flattery of the audience and all the rest of it—and he always chose to talk on subjects with which he was well acquainted, like theology, or, if he strayed out of his narrow limits, to confuse it with irrelevances and cloak his ignorance with a cloud of words. He knew by this time that I knew what he was at, but he spoke for victory in the minds of his audience.

It is possible that he had a commonplace material motive as well: as I understand it appointments among the nonconformists depend on the favorable opinion of the elders; and Ellis was ambitious.

In these discussions there was no place for the liberal exchange of ideas; they were contests, nothing more or less. I was an unwilling participant most of the time: in the first place I did not care for being in the same room as Ellis, and I did not wish to be a party to his designs. There was no escape, however, without giving offense where I could not bear to give it. They loved these evenings, the others: Taid would sit beaming from one speaker to another, jerking his head in a very knowing fashion, and occasionally he would say Very good. Emyr would whisper a translation to him from time to time, otherwise even the general drift would have escaped him. Between translations Emyr sat with his mouth open and his face shining, enraptured: had we been two Solomons we could not have given him more pleasure.

In talk of this kind, with such an adversary, a man is shackled who has some regard for truth and civility. When we talked about Wales, for example, I could not bring forward instances of the nation’s bad side, not sitting there before a Welsh fire, a guest in a Welsh house. But Ellis was at liberty to vilify England as much as he liked, and free to make what accommodations he chose with fact; so he usually had the best of it. Although I knew that victory on these terms did not wholly satisfy him (he was too intelligent for that) and although I knew that often I was possessed of arms that could have crushed him if I had chosen to use them, yet still my vanity was sufficiently engaged for this to be irksome. It was petty of me, I know, to have been irritated by such a fellow, but I was: there were little things that stuck in my gullet, the snigger of Llew when Ellis scored a point (he was all ears, that boy, and he listened so intently that he dribbled), the unashamed partiality of the audience, and Ellis’ insufferable habit of touching me to emphasize his argument. Beyond that I must admit that he was a much more facile talker than I was; he had a glib flow of words and images that I could not but admire, however little I respected it.

What really vexed me was the presence of Bronwen. The women took no part in the talk; they hovered from time to time at the edge of the lamp-lit circle, but they never sat down with us. Before I understood this barbarous convention I had embarrassed them both by offering my chair. Still, they were there, and I was sure that Bronwen followed the turn and run of the argument. A man must be of a bigger nature than I was not to wish to shine a little, or at least not to be overcome, when his—what, sweetheart, beloved? mistress?—is there.

I did have my little triumphs, though. Once or twice Ellis’ caution slipped and he talked of things he did not understand. Greek poets, once. He knew some New Testament Greek, but nothing of Attic, and I indulged in the pleasure of making him look a fool; he disguised it very ably, but I knew he was writhing, and I kept it up for some time. And once I was able to knock his degree of Bachelor of Divinity on the head with my doctorates, but that was ignoble and gave me no pleasure on reflection. He was eternally jealous of my different education and standing, and he could not refrain from taking notice of it. His usual way was to try to make me appear to take a stand on privilege—a mock humility: “Of course, Mr. Pugh, I have not had your advantages,” or “But I dare say they know better than us at Oxford, isn’t it?” It is a difficult attack to parry, but the spite was a little too evident; he overplayed his hand, and sometimes he made the others uneasy.