Testimonies: A Novel (6 page)

At the cleft, a dramatically narrow and decisive entrance to the unknown high country, I turned for a last look down the length of Cwm Bugail: my cottage was there, distinct because of its whitewash, absurdly small, smaller than a matchbox, and the whole vast extent of the air was lit with the sun. Past the corner, through the black rocks of the cleft and at once it was another world, a sunless chasm with a silent lake. Chasm is not the right word; one thinks of a chasm from above, an enormous crack going
down
, essentially down. In this narrow, deep valley I was at the bottom, looking up. On my left hand the side was sheer, nearly the whole length of it; a precipitous scree here and there, and sometimes a little heather, but mostly naked rock going straight up to the top of the Saeth: the bed of the valley was a tarn, black, shining water with an abrupt and barren edge—no reeds, no mud, nothing green at all; it changed harshly from naked water to naked rock. On the right the land rose in a steep slope, a shapeless, tormented moorland with bare rock showing, neither so high nor so sheer as the wall on the left, but still reaching halfway up the sky. There was no breath of wind to stir the top of the water, and in all the length of the valley I could see no thing alive, nor in the air above it.

From the run of the valley and the disposition of the soaring black cliff on its southern side the sun could never come into it at any time. At first, panting from my climb, I found the coolness agreeable, but after a little while I began to feel cold, and buttoned my jacket.

A sheep track ran along before me, and I decided that I would try to walk round the lake before having my sandwiches: it seemed pointless to carry them too (they were bulky in my pocket and had galled me all the way up the green path) so I put them on a convenient rock, with the intention of coming back to sit there and eat them after I had been round the lake. Before I left I looked around in order to be sure that I should find them again, and my eye was caught by a shape on the skyline—a skyline that I had to lean back to see at all. Right up there on the edge of the black precipice there was this thing, perched like a gargoyle peering down. I could not tell why it had caught my eye: there were hundreds of jutting, strangely-shaped rocks all along that weathered salient, and none had fixed my attention. However, it did catch my eye, and held it. I could not see what it was: a sheep, perhaps? These agile mountain sheep did take up the most extraordinary attitudes, poised on an overhanging rock with a handful of grass in its crevices. Or conceivably one of those wild goats that I had heard about? It was a strange way for a sheep to stand, hooked there.

I suppose, from the comparisons I made at the time with a sheep or a goat, that the thing was lighter in color than the surrounding rock: I do not remember now. What I do recall, and most clearly, is the air that it had of
crouching
there, poised over the valley. It was, of course, merely fanciful to suppose a malignance in it, a sort of evil domination of all that it looked down upon. It was fanciful, of course, and outside that sterile place it seems even absurd; but those were the ideas that came to me.

In the end I said that whether it was a sheep or a rock or a goat it did not greatly matter, and set off along the track. From the far end of the valley (Cwm Erchyll was its name) I had over-simplified its construction; here and there I found a bay with a little sad gray beach of pebbles, and at the end there was a bog with a living stream flowing through it to fill the lake. Here a small bird like a snipe got up at my feet and stopped my heart dead still; it winged low over the water, a white flash in its flight and the saddest heartbroken cry in the world.

Where the bog and the lake merged the shore was black and there were rushes: the stream ran cutting deep between banks of a spongy black substance, and in some places I could hear the sound of invisible tributaries that ran underground. On the shore itself the firm black mud showed a line of footprints; they looked to me like those of a dog, but a fox was more likely. It struck me again, and more forcibly, that a man can be ignorant of an infinite number of important, everyday things and still be reckoned educated. In this instance I could not distinguish between the tracks of a dog and a fox; it was not important, perhaps, but it was typical: I had not known the name of that melancholy bird, nor the curious plants that stood in the bog-pool before me—I did not know their names, still less their qualities. A hundred other cases presented themselves—the milking of a cow, the difference between a bull and a bullock, the lighting of a fire without kerosene—none perhaps a matter of life and death, but in all amounting to a great shameful fog of ignorance.

These reflections occupied me until I was halfway round the other side of the lake, and there, where I had to negotiate a difficult piece of smooth rock overhanging the water, something prompted me to look up to the top of the black cliff: it was still there, its aspect slightly changed by my change in position, but surely motionless, and a rock without any sort of doubt. This was comforting, I hardly know why, and I crossed the rock and finished my tour of the lake in much higher spirits. When I sat down to my sandwiches I felt positively merry—a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.

I left the tarn with a mind disturbed, more disturbed than I should have believed possible, and turned at the black cleft into our own valley with a feeling of escape and strong relief. The sun was low now, and the shadow was halfway up the Penmawr ridge; the light was much more golden than I remembered to have seen it before—the contrast, perhaps, between the dark, closed country that I had just left and this wide, beautiful valley with the tawny flank of Penmawr on the other side throwing back a flood of light. There were the white spots of sheep, and down at the bottom the squared fields and the farms with their domestic trees: I had thought of it as wild and barren before, but now, at least for the moment, it looked almost homely.

I went down the green path as slowly as I had come up it; a continual downhill walk that threatens every moment to break into an involuntary run is as tiring as a climb: the sun had left the top of the mountain long before I was halfway down. There was no reason to hurry; the long twilight was as soft as midsummer, and as I went down the length of the mountain wall the stones gave out a gentle warmth. I sat on the bridge for a long while before starting my climb home. The farm was asleep when I passed, walking softly through the yard; only one dog barked, and that perfunctorily—they were getting used to me.

The last steep stretch was very tiring; I had gone too far for one day, and three times on the path up from the farm I stopped to breathe. The third time was just at the corner before my own wall, by the telegraph post: I leaned against it, listening to the singing in the wires, with the gentle breeze on my face and the faint stars showing above the ridge. On the white road, above the cattle-trap, two dogs came trotting toward Hafod. Whose dogs could those be? I thought, and I saw that they were not dogs; they were foxes. They came on steadily; from the road they looked over the low wall into my garden, twice. For a little while they were hidden by the cottage and when they appeared again they were just above me—I could have lobbed a stone underhand beyond them. One was larger than the other—a dog fox and a vixen, I supposed. Astonishing, the length of their legs, the height they stood off the ground. They went a little farther up—they were on my left hand by now—and stopped at the edge of the road, at the curve, where it is built up four or five feet. I thought they must see me now, but if they did they did not care: the smaller one leaned crouching over the edge of the road and screamed out a shrieking howl, horrifyingly loud and daunting. I saw the gape of her jaws. Instantly all the dogs in the valley answered, a furious bawling from each of the farms and a battering against the stable door down in Gelli. The vixen listened, crouching there in her ugly, evil attitude, and as the noise slackened she screamed again. What can give an impression of the sound? An evil, maniac laughter, a triumphant threatening, they were both in it, and something hellish, too.

The dog fox barked once. He too looked out over the valley, and the two stared there like masters in their own place: that was the dominant impression.
They
were the ones.

After a moment they crossed the road back to the smooth green piece on the far side and I heard them playing with the lamb’s foot there. Playing, if playing is the word, for what they did with such a hideous undertone of noise. Once or twice they appeared on the road, worrying and tearing the foot or a piece of wolly skin; then they were gone—they went up the mountain-side and the slope hid them.

At home I went to bed very soon, after a scrap meal, for I was quite done up. But I could not sleep; my legs kept twitching and my mind ran on those appalling foxes. I had never thought of a fox before except as something people hunted, or as the subject of proverbs about cunning: nothing in my vague preconception had given me a hint of that cold, malignant ferocity; I had had no idea of an animal of such a size, such moral dimensions.

When I did sleep it seemed that I had not been off for more than a few minutes before I was awake again, wholly awake, with a feeling of nightmare. It was the yelling of a soul in torment just outside the cottage, a shocking, naked screaming. Instantly young Vaughan’s words about the poison came into my mind, and at once I was sure that the fox, or perhaps a loose dog, had returned to the lamb and was now howling out its life in agony. I hurried on my clothes and ran up the road, in the silent, unearthly light of the moon, to the green slope where the lamb lay dragged between the rocks. It was untouched, at least by a fox. Vaughan had gone to it, and what I had heard was the raging vented spite of the vixen forestalled.

I had meant, in writing this, to illustrate my point and to give something of that feeling of strangeness that was always present; not merely to describe two particular incidents. It was a feeling that was with me all the time, more or less consciously; it changed my outlook in many ways that I recognized, and probably in many more that I did not. It is such an intangible thing, the real difference between living in a city and in the wild, untamed country; it is not just the difference of landscape or amenity, it is not that the thunder of a lorry will wake you in the one and the scream of a vixen in the other. It is something subtle and penetrating, and it seemed to me that the only way I could convey anything of it was by example.

I
t is with design that I have not spoken about her yet. At first I saw little of her, and apart from thinking that it was strange and pleasant that there should be such a beautiful woman at the farm, I did not take much notice.

It was in the spring and the summer that it began. I was settled and established in Hafod and I was going out much more; young Vaughan had begun my education as a countryman and I was often on the mountain with him. In the evenings I went down, sometimes, to ask him about things that I had seen in the day.

It was then, in those quiet evenings at the farm, that I began to look at her with particular attention: it was not because of any sudden emotion but because of something that I could not quite understand. She had, more than anybody I had ever seen, the appearance of an amiable young woman, kind and dutiful; and yet day after day I saw the old lady, Emyr’s mother, carrying the pig-swill, scrubbing the floor, drawing the water: sometimes she would have both hands full while the young people were doing nothing. Their standards were different, I knew that: on a mountain farm everybody works—it is hard labor for life. But still this seemed to me to be wrong. There were other less tangible things and I began to wonder whether Bronwen, though lovely to see, were not hard and insensitive; spoilt. A really beautiful face is so rare that one cannot always see beyond it. She certainly tended to be less indulgent than other countrywomen with her child, an unattractive little boy called Gerallt. There seemed to be a contradiction there: I had no pretensions as a physiognomist, but I was unwilling to believe that I could be as mistaken as that. I am sure that what one calls a good-looking face is the outward expression of a kind and generous spirit: that is why one calls it good. It is the product of experience, as simple as recognizing the fruit by its skin: the appearance that one learns to associate with ripeness is a good appearance. If a peach were at its best when it was as rotten as a medlar, one would soon find a dark, wrinkled peach good-looking. I could have sworn that the goodness in Bronwen’s face, the goodness that was there together with her beauty, could not exist with the hardness that appeared in her conduct to old Mrs. Vaughan and, sometimes, to her husband. I thought about it a good deal.

I watched them. I wanted to find that Bronwen was as beautiful as she looked, because when I looked at her I felt a strange, happy feeling—benign, tender—I do not know how to describe it.