Mushroom Town Part 2

On the evening of the day on which those fences were laid flat again, John Willie went once more to Pritchard's farm, and this time was not refused admittance. Perhaps n.o.body either saw or heard him enter. As if it had been put there for a signal, a single candle in a flat tin stick stood among the geraniums in the little square window-recess, and, save for a dull glow from the sh.e.l.l of peats on the hearth, that was the only light in the room. Again seven or eight men were gathered there, some sitting on the hard old horsehair sofa, two on the table, and others crouched or standing in corners; and the candle-light rested here on a bit of l.u.s.tre-ware, there on a chair k.n.o.b, and elsewhere on a cheekbone or the knuckles of a hand. It barely reached Dafydd Dafis, who sat in the farthest corner, with his cap on his head and his head resting against a Post Office proclamation that hung on the wall. No sound could be heard save the loud tock-tocking of the tall clock with the in-turned scrolls on the top and the gilt pippin between them.

John Willie thought it would be more grown-up to accept their silence and to share their motionlessness. He set his elbows on the dresser and sank his neck between his shoulders. The shadow of great John Pritchard, who sat on the sofa's end, covered John Willie and half the wall behind him as well, and John Willie's eyes only discovered Dafydd Dafis in the farther corner when Dafydd moved. As he moved, a bit of gilt fluting dipped forward out of the gloom of the chimney-corner. Dafydd had his harp.

The next moment a single thrumming note had broken out. It was followed by a soft chord of three or four more....

"Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi, Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri----"

It is the commonest air you will hear in Wales--Land of my Fathers. Quarrymen sing it as they work by their trucks, slate-splitters whistle it as they tap in their wedges, farmers' lads tss-tss it between their teeth as they clump along the road, sitting sideways on their horses. You would think it had died an age ago of familiarity and repet.i.tion. Had it been G.o.d Save the King, played at an English theatre, there would have been a single line of it, half lost in the reaching for shawls and cloaks and fans, and here and there a man would have stood with an interval of an inch between his hat and his head, and already the attendants would have been getting out the sheeting for the stalls--so long is it since we knew adversity. But here, it needed but a stake driven into a foresh.o.r.e that would hardly have pastured a donkey, and that was enough--so much adversity have they seen.... Then, as John Willie craned his neck, a man moved from in front of the candle among the geraniums, and Dafydd Dafis's hands could be seen. They seemed not so much hands as multiple things, a.s.semblies of members each one of which was possessed of an independent life and will. There was not a finger that did not lurk, stiffen, clutch, and then start back from the throbbing string as if each note had been a poignant deed done, an old and secret vow redeemed. For the images that were evoked were cruel images. Those fingers of Dafydd's might have been choosing, not among strings of wire and gut, but among the living nerves of an enemy whose moans of suffering were trans.m.u.ted into music. Know, that this--not the languid wrist nor the caressing hand, not the swans-neck forearm nor the coquetry of the foot on the pedal--not these, but the hook, the claw, the distortion, and the wreaking and the more than human and yet somehow less than human love--this is the harping of Wales....

"Gwlad! Gwlad!----"

Dafydd's head against the Post Office notice did not move, but his twisted hand might have wrenched the sinews from their shoulder-blade of a frame---- "Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad!----"

He did not sing the words, but the words that sang themselves in the ear of every man there meant that he was so enwrapped in his country that an alien stake in her soil was a stake in his heart also....

Within a week of that harping of Hen Wlad, Terry Armfield had more to mind than he had ever reckoned for.

There was no doubt that the flame was fanned largely by the Chapels. These were, respectively, of the three denominations most common in Wales, namely, Baptist, Calvinistic Methodist, and Independent; and Terry Armfield, coming down presently to see for himself what all the trouble was about, gave one affrighted look at their architecture, gasped, "Shade of Pugin!" and fled. The Baptist Chapel was a plain slate-roofed Noah's Ark of stone that, with the day-school adjoining it, stood alone in the middle of the sandhills. At one end of its roof-ridge was a small structure in which a bell swung, and the building had this further peculiarity, that, good stone being cheaper at Llanyglo than common bricks, the latter material had been used wherever an embellishment had been desired. The Independent Chapel was also of stone, with zinc ventilators like those of a weaving-shed; these looked over the fishermen's cottages out to sea not far from Edward Garden's house. And the third Chapel, that of the Methodists, of which body Howell Gruffydd was the princ.i.p.al pillar, lay behind the farms. It was of corrugated iron and wood, painted inside with a skirting of chocolate brown and upper walls of a peculiarly sickly light blue. On the walls were stencilled ribbons with V-shaped ends, and these bore texts in Welsh. Architecturally all these were hideous, but, to those whose grandfathers had worshipped in the fields and in clefts of the barren mountains and on the wide seash.o.r.e, they had the beauty of a thing that has been ardently desired, and long suffered for, and pa.s.sionately loved.

For from these three Chapels came not only the impulse of the spiritual life of Llanyglo, but its local politics of dissent also. Education, the Poor Law, matters of Local Government, Temperance, Tenure, the Eisteddfod, and the nursing of Nationalism--if these things were not actually Llanyglo's religion, they were hardly divisible from it. And this welding of Faith with secular works was helped by two other circ.u.mstances. The first circ.u.mstance was that no language was heard in the chapels but Welsh; and the second was that, as a result of the local-preacher system, three times out of four the Welsh issued from the same mouths--from Howell Gruffydd's mouth at the Methodist Chapel, from big John Pritchard at the Baptists', and from Owen Morgan's among the Independents. None of these went quite so far as openly to incite to the destruction of fences.

They merely prayed to be delivered from the situation in which they found themselves.

Whereupon, like Drake's men, heartened by prayer, they rose from their knees again to take another pull on the rope.

So three times in six weeks those fences were set up and laid flat again; and then it was that Terry Armfield came down, saw the Chapels (as above mentioned), gasped "Shade of Pugin!" and straightway sought Squire Wynne.

But before ever he set eyes on the Squire he had already almost forgotten the errand that had brought him. As the servant showed him to the dining-room he saw that n.o.ble ruin of a staircase, and his eyes became illumined. Then, in the dining-room, those same eyes rested on the coffered ceiling and the portraits and the wide mullioned lattice. By the time the Squire entered he was adoring the stately stone fireplace. He swung round, hearing the Squire's step.

"Magnificent, magnificent!" he cried. "Show me over the house--I beg you to show me over the house!----"

The Squire, who had had this kind of visitor before (though none with quite that perilous smoulder in his eye that Terry had) naturally concluded that a fellow-antiquary, finding himself in the neighbourhood, had permitted himself to beg for a sight of the faded glories of the Plas.

"I'll show you over part of the house with pleasure," said the Squire; and he did so.

"Magnificent!" Terry cried again, when they were once more back in the dining-room. "And oh, that rood-screen--early sixteenth--and those sedilia--in your Church over there! I spent an hour there as I came along."

"Oh, you came Porth Neigr way, did you?" said the Squire.

As if he had previously written the Squire a letter setting forth his business in detail, which therefore he need not repeat, Terry leaped light-heartedly ahead.

"Yes, sir--and then, after that, to come upon those incredible Chapels! (That's a misnomer, by the way, unless they contain relics.) ... Of course, after that I'm not surprised at anything these people do--fences or anything else----"

The Squire was reaching port from the sideboard.--"Eh?" he said, not quite understanding.

"Those places an expression of religious emotion!" Terry cried, throwing up his hands. "Of course, what's happened was a perfectly natural result! Commit such an outrage on the aesthetic sense as that and--and no fence is safe! If I'd seen those Chapels first I'd as soon have bought a volcano as that land! They ought to have been mentioned by the vendors--flagrant suppressio veri--deliberate concealment of a material fact--an action ought to lie--by Jove, I've a good mind to take advice about it!----"

"I beg your pardon?" said the puzzled Squire.

A very few questions served to enlighten him. His mouth twitched as he filled his harebrained visitor's gla.s.s.

"Well," he said, "I don't quite follow your processes, but your result seems all right. If you mean there's some connection between the Chapels and your fences being pulled down, I dare say you're not very far wrong. The places of worship do settle a good many things indirectly here. But our own Establishment's been called a branch of the Civil Service, so I don't see how we can complain if some of their activities are a little secular too."

"'A little secular!'" echoed Terry. "Pulling down fences 'a little secular!' ... Now I'm anxious not to go to extreme lengths----"

"Eh?" said the Squire rather quickly. He gave Terry a longish look.... "Do you know Wales?" he asked politely.

"I do not. But I've not heard that it's outside the Law. I was going to say, that I don't want to issue summonses if it can be avoided----"

Thereupon the Squire, who was inclined to like this half-mystical zany of a guest, gave him the same advice he had given to Edward Garden.

"Oh, avoid it if you possibly can!" he said good-humouredly. "There's nothing these people won't do for you if you go the right way about it, but it must be the right way. A new neighbour of yours seems to be getting along with them quite successfully, a man called Garden. Quite an opportunist, I should say--takes things just as he finds them--settles every question strictly on its merits and has a good deal of audacity up his sleeve for use at the right moment, I don't doubt. Can't you take a leaf out of his book?"

"Do they pull down his fences?" Terry demanded over his shoulder; he had been looking at that marvellous fireplace again.

"I don't think so. As a matter of fact they're building his house for him.--By the way--Sheard's told me very little about it--have you bought your land to build on?"

Terry, remembering his Syndicate, had a momentary check.--"I don't know yet," he confessed.

"Because if you have," the Squire continued, "and find them employment--spend money in the place--and use a certain amount of tact--you might hit it off with them. But do try to overlook their Chapels. A soul's sometimes saved under a tin roof, you know."

Terry looked as if he would far rather have his soul d.a.m.ned under a Gothic nave.--"That's simply buying 'em off," he said. He would have preferred to burn them, each at one of the stakes they had uprooted.

"Well.... I'm afraid it's all the advice I can give you.--And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. I'll show you a rather fine carved kingpost before you go if you like----"

And Terry presently departed for Porth Neigr again, where he took the taste of the Chapels out of his mouth in a further ecstatic contemplation of the early sixteenth-century rood-screen.

The fences were set up again.

John Willie Garden could never be sufficiently grateful to his stars that what happened next came before he departed for school again. He had gone to bed that night, but was lying awake, thinking of the suspended building. He knew that the resumption of that building was not irremediably involved in the fencing dispute; Edward Garden had established a serviceable goodwill in Llanyglo; and that very night, standing by Pritchard's manure-heap, Dafydd Dafis had all but told John Willie that when Llanyglo had settled with the intruder it would have time to spare for the child of its adoption again. He had told him this, and had then ruffled up John Willie's fair hair with his hand and had added that it was ten o'clock and time he was in bed.

His little window, as well as that of the next room, where his mother slept, overlooked the sandhills, and John Willie, lying awake, did not at first notice the change in its colour. Neither did his ears hear at first a low m.u.f.fled cracking that had been going on for some time. But suddenly he sat up. The muslin curtains and the claywashed embrasure of the window had a rusty glow, which reached the counterpane of the bed in which John Willie lay.

The moment he saw this John Willie was out of bed. Then, within thirty seconds, he had plunged into his jersey, tucked his nightgown hastily into his knickers, and, making as little noise as possible, had tiptoed down the stairs and out of the cottage.

The bright glow over the sandhills guided him, and he ran as fast as he could through the m.u.f.fling sand. The continuous cracks were like pistols, and a deep roaring could be heard, which became louder. Then, mounting a hillock, John Willie saw the beautiful blaze. It was as high as a cottage, and the twisting, upstreaming column of sparks above it rose fifty feet into the night. It illumined the sandhills far and wide. The Baptist Chapel and schoolhouse looked as if they were cut out of red cardboard against the night. Even the zinc ventilators of the Independent Chapel, down by the sea, showed faintly. Then all became grey again as a dozen fresh stakes were piled on. By the time John Willie Garden got there these too had caught, with volleys of cracks. Every man in Llanyglo was there, and, farther off, groups of women also. The heat was intense, so that the men and lads who ran in to throw back half-consumed ends did so with their faces averted.

"Why didn't you tell me?" said John Willie to Dafydd Dafis reproachfully.

Dafydd was watching this beautiful Red Dragon of a flame that was burning Saxon stakes. His eyes blinked rapidly. Then he leant over John Willie, and his forefinger tapped two or three times on the boy's heart.

"You wa.s.s tell me you go to bed," he whispered. "You wa.s.s tell me that, at ten o'clock, at John Pritchard's. There iss two men over there----" suddenly he straightened himself again and pointed, "--you can tell them the same whatever."

A hundred and fifty yards away two men watched. They were the men from Porth Neigr who had set up the fences. They put up at a wayside cottage two miles away, and probably they were not surprised at what was happening. They did not approach any nearer.

Then there was a call of "John Willie!" and Mrs. Garden's terrified face could be seen in the outer ring of light. John Willie was haled off, in a rage that was nearer to tears than he would have admitted.

Four days later summonses were served on Dafydd Dafis and two other men.

The serving of those summonses had an instant and very remarkable effect. This effect was, that three of the inhabitants of Llanyglo straightway lost all recollection of the English language. And not only did they, the summoned ones, lose it, but every witness called from Llanyglo fell into an ignorance as blank. This happened at Sessions, before Squire Wynne himself, who, in the days before this visitation of forgetfulness, had talked English to all of them. The gloomy magistrates' Court opposite Porth Neigr railway station was crowded. Terry Armfield, at whose instance the summonses had been issued, thought he had never seen such a set of pigjobbers as stood against the perspiring walls or sat with their chins on their outspread forearms, their caps in their hands or in the pockets of their corduroys. The two men who had put up the fences sat in the well of the Court. They were brothers, and their name was Kerr. The skylight shone on the baldish head of the elder of them, and both had given their evidence in a strong Lancashire accent. They had been watching on the sandhills, they said, expecting something of the sort, and knew that it had taken place at exactly ten o'clock, because they had both looked at their watches....

So "Dim Saesneg," said man after man; and the Squire could only make dots with his pen on the blotting-paper before him, keep his eyes from Terry Armfield, and call for an interpreter.

Now interpretation takes time, during which time the person with most to gain can be thinking of the tale he will tell next. So the prosecuting solicitor stood up before Dafydd Dafis, and this kind of thing began: "Were you on this land at ten o'clock that night?"

("Oeddych chi ar y tir yma am ddeg o'r gloch y noson hono, Dafydd Dafis?" This from the interpreter.) A rapid denial from Dafydd, not a hair of his s.h.a.ggy moustache moving.

"Ask him where he was."

"Lle r'oeddych chi, Dafydd Dafis?"

The harpist, his fingers twisting his cap, answered that he had been at Pritchard's farm, and this also was translated.

"Have you any witnesses?"

("Oes genych chi dystion, Dafydd Dafis?") "Eh?"

"Oes genych chi dystion?"

"R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden."

("He says he can call the son of the man who is building a house there, sir.") ...

And so it went on, hour after hour, with the English evidence likewise translated for the benefit of the defendants. At the end of the first day the case was adjourned, but it came on again on the morrow, and again on the day after that. It began to dam all other business. As a block in traffic causes an acc.u.mulation behind, so other cases began to collect--drunks, dog-licences, drivings without lights, and innumerable other petty disputes. There was no question that the fences had been burned; the only question was whether they had got hold of the right men. The Bench could not understand the obstinacy with which the two Lancashire witnesses persisted that the outrage had occurred at exactly ten o'clock.

"But mightn't it have been half-past ten, or eleven, or even half-past eleven?" they were asked again and again.

"Ah, it might," they admitted open-mindedly. "But it wasn't," they added unshakably.

Dafydd Dafis wanted to know what they said.

"Oh, translate it," the Squire sighed, and for the fortieth time it was translated.

"R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden," said Dafydd once more....

And that was great glory for John Willie, for he was called, asked whether he knew the nature of an oath, was sworn, and raised a general laugh by varying the formula with which the Court was not so drearily familiar, and saying, in Welsh, "Dim Cymraeg." He stood to it that at ten o'clock Dafydd Dafis had been talking to him by Pritchard's manure-heap.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake settle it or do something!" the Squire said impatiently to Terry Armfield, as he crossed the road to the Station Hotel for lunch. "You can't say I didn't warn you."

"I doubt whether my own witnesses would let me now," Terry replied. "They're as cranky in their way as your own Fenians. Besides, as I told you, I'm acting for others."

"Well, if I bind 'em over they'll only do it again," sighed the Squire.

Terry himself began to weary. After all, he had other things to mind than a piece of beggarly waste land dotted with Chapels that were a blasphemy of the name of beauty.

As the Squire ate his chop in the coffee-room, the two witnesses from Lancashire sat each on a tall stool in the sawdusted tap round the corner. Thick imperial pint gla.s.ses of mild ale stood on the counter before them. The elder and baldish one was a man of three or four and forty, a hard, handy little man, with a curious dip and slope about his right shoulder. This slight lopsidedness he had acquired during the years in which he had wandered North Wales buying and felling alders for clog-soles. Any time this last twenty years you might have come across him in his little canvas hut in the middle of a wood, with a pile of split alder-billets on one side of him which, plying his hinged knife on its solid base with marvellous dexterity, he shaped roughly into the clog-soles which he cast on a pile on his other side, while his brother felled. He would buy all the alders in a wood, at so much a foot over all; the rough-dressed soles went off to Manchester; and no doubt a good many of them found their way into Edward Garden's spinning-sheds. In the course of his travels he had picked up from the gentry and their stewards volumes of gossip of families and their vicissitudes, of wills, boundaries, timber-news, and customs and tenures rapidly becoming obsolete; and his coat, a brown check with wide pockets, had probably been made a dozen years before in Conduit Street. He wore a tie, but no collar. As the Court had a.s.sumed on its own responsibility that he spoke no Welsh, he had not considered it his business to correct the mistake, but had allowed them to translate for him also--perhaps for reasons not fundamentally different from those of Dafydd Dafis himself. He had half a week's stubble on his chin and thin upper lip; he spat with great accuracy; and he turned to humour things not generally accounted humorous, such as scaffold accidents, fights, and deaths from dropsy.

His brother, save that he wore a collar and no tie, was a younger edition of him.

They drank from the thick gla.s.ses in silence, and then the elder of them drew out a short clay pipe with a dottle in the bottom of the bowl, struck a match on the side of it, and lighted up. The dottle made a noise like frying. His brother also drew out his pipe, a clay shaped like a cowboy's head. He gave an indescribably short jerk of his head in the direction of the other's waistcoat pocket, then, when the stub of cake was thrown over to him, cut it with a knife with a curved blade. He stuffed these brains of black tobacco into the cowboy's head, and made another minute gesture. This was a request for a match. Then, bringing out sixpence from his pocket, he knocked once with the heavy gla.s.s on the counter.

"Two more cups o' tea," he said to the young woman who approached.

They smoked again in silence.

It was the elder brother who spoke first.

"I'm capped about them watches, an' right!" he mused.

The other took a pull at his beer, and replaced the cowboy pipe in his mouth.

"I cannot think th' bairn wor telling 'em lies," the elder one mused again.

"Gi'e me another match," said his brother.

The alder-buyer's wrinkled eyes were peering sideways at an auction announcement pinned to the wall. He shifted his feet in the legs of the tall stool. By and by he spoke again.

"Let's see. Let's study it out.... We com' home at tea-time that day, didn't we?"

"Ay."

"Then we went out into th' yard and washed we'rsens at th' bucket."

"Ay."

A pause, and then, the speaker's eyes on his hearer's face like two p.r.i.c.kers: "Did yet tak' your waistcoat off?"

"I cannot tell ye."

"I did mine. I threw it down on a chair i' t' kitchen."

This time the younger brother shifted his feet.

"Happen I did mine an' all."

"Wor your watch i' your pocket?"

"Ay, it wad be."

"So wor mine."

They drank thoughtfully and simultaneously, and again the silence fell.

Then, more slowly still, the elder Kerr resumed.

"D'ye remember a chap coming in, a thin chap, 'at spoke Welsh to t' Missis?"

"Ay."