Testimonies: A Novel (2 page)

By finding this refuge, I hoped to make so complete a break with my established habits and discontents that I should return to them and to the writing of my book
(The Bestiary before Isidore of Seville)
with enough zeal to carry me through the term and the next few chapters. My idea was to do nothing very much, to read books unrelated to my trade, and to walk in the mountains when I felt like it, and to lie long in bed.

The place had another attraction: it lay in the very heart of North Wales, and for many years I had wished to know something of the country and the people. My great-grandfather (from whom I have my name of Pugh) had come from Wales before he had established himself as a draper in Liverpool, and I believe there was quite a strong Welsh tradition in our family as late as my father’s time. He, poor man, had been left a genteel competence by his draper grandfather; it had descended to him through his un-draper father, who had married a lady of very good family and dealt in large mercantile transactions, far from the counter. My father, a sociable man, living in a time of acute social distinctions, felt the Liverpool-Welsh side of his ancestry keenly. He dropped all Welsh contacts and added his mother’s name, Aubrey, to ours. He had never cared for me to ask him about it, and he was not pleased when I took to studying the language—it was a fit of enthusiasm caused by my friendship with Annwyl, and it lasted several terms in my undergraduate days.

By the time I had sorted my belongings into some degree of order it was quite dark, and I was hungry. The lighting of the fire had taken me longer than I supposed it would, and now I was faced with a plunge down the wet, unknown mountain-side in the dark, for it was my intention to make acquaintance with the farm and to buy some eggs and milk for my supper.

The walk was quite as bad as I had foreseen; twice I scrambled over dry-stone walls, dislodging the top-most stones, and once there was a flurry of beasts—sheep, I imagined—as I came awkwardly over, and half-seen forms rushed wildly into the mist. After an indeterminate period of wandering, I found myself ankle-deep in a stream, with very little remaining idea of the relative position of my cottage or the farm. At this point a furious barking of dogs on my left served as a guide, and I followed the stream down to a path, from which I could see the lamp-lit windows of the farm.

I had some difficulty in finding the right door: the darkness was filled with angry dogs, whose clamor scattered my wits; but in time my knocking brought a staring gowk of a boy. He stood in the vague light of a glimmer that reached the passage from a lighted room behind; he fled at the sound of my voice, leaving me half in and half out, still exposed to the attack of the dogs. I had always been foolishly timid with animals; and these, conscious of their advantage, bullied me without mercy. A clash of boots in the farmyard, and a man’s angry voice raised in Welsh oaths rescued me from this persecution; the dogs ceased, and the unseen figure addressed me, again in Welsh. In my agitation I could think of nothing better to say than, “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh; it is the gentleman from Hafod. Walk in, mister,” he said; and as he spoke the far door opened and the light showed me the way to the kitchen. As I came in two old people stood up and turned expectant, even anxious faces toward me.

“It is the gentleman from Hafod,” said the man behind me; but they were fluttered, and did not understand. He spoke again, quickly, in an undertone in Welsh, and their faces changed. The old lady hurried across the fireplace and placed the good chair by it, dislodging a cat and patting the cushion.

“Sit down, mister,” she said, with a hesitant, unfinished gesture toward the chair, and the men said, “Sit down.” She was very slight and frail; long ago she must have been beautiful; her faded blue eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles had the kindest expression and her face was set in the wrinkles that are caused by having worn a pleasant look for a lifetime. She stood with her hands folded and murmured, “Well, well,” in a gentle, embarrassed tone.

It was an enormous room, and the far walls hardly threw back the light of the lamp on the table. I had a general impression of great length and breadth, beams, two dressers with rows of plates, a long white table in the middle, and an undulating slate floor; fire and brass at my left hand, and a high mantelpiece with a clock, and a gun hanging above it.

The old man was sitting on a dark, narrow bench that ran along the wall by the window: the youth I had seen first stood awkwardly by the angle of the far dresser, staring at me without a movement. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence before the old man said, “How you like Wales?” He spoke in a harsh, grating voice, with so strong an accent that the simple phrase was barely comprehensible. His three-toothed stubbly face was advanced with an expectant smile, so pleasant that I felt my own answering smile spread even before I had quite pieced together the words. I said that I liked it very much, and that this valley in particular delighted me. The old man did not understand more than the general drift: he said, “Oh?” in the deaf tone of incomprehension, and after a moment he said that he had been in the valley for forty-seven years.

“It is telling me she is seeing a light in Hafod,” said the old lady. I told them that I had not expected to come until tomorrow (which they knew), that I had left my coming down to the farm later than I had meant, and that I had found it difficult to follow the right path. The three of them—for the younger man had finished with his boots and had come forward—listened with close attention, the strained attention of those listening to an unfamiliar voice talking a foreign language. Halfway through my recital I saw the folding intelligence die out of the eyes of the old people, but the younger man understood me very well. They were concerned that I had not been able to strike the path at once, and described the alternate ways.

“You must go by the
beudy
and then behind the
t
ŷ
gwair:
you cannot miss it,” said the young man, and the elders, with their faces turned toward him, nodded at the words. A blurting guffaw came from the youth by the dresser and cut the repeated direction short: finding himself observed and at a disadvantage, the youth fell silent as suddenly as he had burst out, and after a wretched moment squeezed himself out through the door.

The younger man pulled up a chair and sat by me. We talked about the cottage, postal deliveries, buses—the commonplaces of new arrival. He was a tall man, spare, red-haired with pale eyes and a thin, stretched skin: a reddish stubble on his chin, and papery, windbitten ears. His English was good, but he was nervous, and made mistakes. He listened attentively, leaning forward when I spoke, and answered my questions with anxious care: I felt that if a great land-owner of the Middle Ages had come into a farmhouse, this was the manner in which he would have been answered. I hoped that they had not some mistaken idea—did not suppose me to be a person of importance.

The others did not join in any more, though the old lady hovered by, looking at her son with a proud smile: I presumed he was her son, although there was no likeness between them. I was talking about the length of the journey (an unusually tedious train and several changes) when the door opened and a young woman came in, carrying a pile of clothes. I broke off, and the young man said, “Bronwen, here is the gentleman from Hafod.”

She was obviously surprised and a little put about: her hand went up to her hair. But she put the clothes down on the dresser and came forward to meet me with none of the awkwardness that I should have shown in the same case. It was charming to see her come the length of the room: she was about thirty—not a girl—but she held herself with adolescent grace. She was extraordinarily good-looking. We shook hands, and she offered me a cup of tea; I refused, saying that I had just come down in the hope of being allowed to buy some milk and eggs. She spoke the purest English of the four, and I noticed that she stood with her hands folded in front of her while I was speaking; it was a flattering attitude—it gave the impression that what was being said was of great interest and importance.

We talked a little more and then, accompanied by the unwilling, horror-struck youth with a hurricane-lamp to show me the way, I carried my eggs and milk up the hill to Hafod.

It was strange that I had not been able to hit the right path; nothing could have been plainer, and at least once on my way down I must have crossed it. I said something of this nature to the youth, choosing easy words and speaking distinctly; but he made no reply. Near the door of Hafod he left me suddenly, with a guttural laugh.

After my supper I pushed the crocks to one side and sat in front of the stove—it was drawing well and I had its doors open. The chair was comfortable, and as I sat there smoking, I had a very real sense of happiness. A good meal and creature comfort after a long and tiring day had something to do with it, but more came from a recollection of that good family down there at the farm. Perhaps it was because my own life had had so little domesticity in it that I appreciated it as much as I did, but I am sure that the most hag-ridden family man would have been affected by the gentle kindness, the fittingness (if decency is too pedantic) of the life of those people as I had seen them that evening. It may be that the lamplight had something to do with the strength of the impression, the lamplight and the glowing fire: an old man cannot look patriarchal under an electric bulb, but in the limited radiance of a lamp the attitudes of people, drawn closer of necessity, have a new significance, and their faces borrow character.

I was not sure of the relationships: at one time during the evening I had thought that the old man was employed by the younger, but at another it seemed that he possessed the farm. The young woman, the lovely young woman Bronwen, was almost certainly the young man’s wife, though it was not impossible that she was the old lady’s daughter. They had the confusing habit of referring to one another as Mr. Vaughan or Mrs. Vaughan, and as they all shared the same surname this told me nothing. It is true that I had heard the old people called Nain and Taid—grandmother and grandfather—but that might have been no more than the local usage, implying no actual relationship. One thing that was clear was that the youth was the farm servant. They spoke of him as the gwas when they said that he would light me home. He came from a family in the village, also called Vaughan, but not related.

I could have made it all perfectly clear by asking one of them, but that would not have been possible. Apart from their polite questions on how I liked their country they had not, even by implication, asked me anything about myself. That was a remarkable point of breeding, I thought, recalling it, they did not obviously avoid questions; it was that they showed no curiosity. I had not volunteered anything about myself, and as I was going to bed it occurred to me that it was a pity that I had not said anything about my acquaintance with their language. No natural opportunity had arisen, and it would have been absurd to drag in my little smattering all by itself, like a dormouse on a haywain. I wished that I had, because it was obvious that they would have spoken to one another in Welsh before me thinking their words to be private. It is true that, as far as my understanding went, they were; still, the principle remained, and I resolved to set things right at the first occasion that offered.

I did find it a little mortifying, I must admit, to see that I had hardly understood anything at all of the Welsh that I had heard spoken. Two or three words, no more, although for the last few weeks I had been turning over my old notebooks. The book language and the spoken Welsh, spoken rapidly, indistinctly and with innumerable contractions and elisions, were hardly recognizable as the same tongue: it was worse for me, because my friend Annwyl had come from Bro Morgannwg, the southernmost limit of the language, and it is well known that there is a great difference between the dialects of the north and the south.

The next day I was busy pottering about, finding where things were and putting my belongings away. I did get out once, to go to Pentref, the village, for tobacco: I had not intended to do this, because I meant to give up smoking, but somehow the arguments in favor of tobacco presented themselves so strongly that I said I would just go down and see whether there was any good brand in the shop.

I had hardly seen anything of the valley when I arrived and although from the time I had woken up I had been looking out of the window and stepping into the garden to stare at my surroundings the low cloud had prevented me from forming any clear impression: so I was not prepared for the splendor that stood high all round when I came out for my walk. The cloud had gone and there was the soaring mass of the Saeth sweeping up into the clear sky. It was a mountain as a child draws a mountain, a sharp, stabbing triangle. I had studied the maps, but the contours and figures, particularly the figures, had deceived me; I had expected hills, little more, and here was a mountain. Its height in figures meant nothing: there was the majesty, the serene isolation, that you expect (if Switzerland is your criterion) only from ten thousand feet and more. Indeed, I have seen many quite well-known peaks, high above the snow-line, without a tenth part of the Saeth’s nobility.

There was no snow on the Saeth, of course, but there was something very nearly as striking—great runs of shale, beds of it tilted up to ferocious slopes, and the lines of its fall.

This strong impression of grandeur never faded; the more I saw the mountain the finer I thought it. It was incredibly changeable: on some days it would be a savage, menacing dark mountain, a somber weight—I had almost said a threat—in the sky. Then in the evening, some evenings, when each rock on the skyline was etched hard and distinct against the sky, the Saeth took on a quality of remoteness, almost of unreality. The Saeth in moonlight, like something out of El Greco’s mind; the Saeth with snow; the hard triangular peak of the Saeth ripping through the tearing driven clouds from the sea—with a mountain like that outside your window, you are not lonely.