Mushroom Town Part 5

"Well," said Mr. Tudor Williams at last, "Wynne is a man of no ideas. He is only a pettifogging country Squire, whose views on the Land Question are ob-solete in tot-to. But if he harbours men that are a nuisance, as John Pritchard says, perhaps it would be better if I went to see him----"

Nevertheless, he had no intention whatever of doing so. The truth was that the Squire's views on the Land Question were too obsolete altogether. They were so obsolete that he had sold when (as first Edward Garden had known, and now Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., knew) he ought to have held; and it was for Mr. Tudor Williams to profit by his error if he could, rather than to call his attention to it. He was very far from being a wealthy man.

VIII.

THELEMA.

Because Terry Armfield, believing in his idea, would not have abated one jot of it for all the money in Liverpool, therefore he got all the money he wanted. This--alas!--is not optimism, nor a hardy belief that merit infallibly meets with its deserts in this world; it merely means that a number of businessmen with rudimentary consciences were willing to pay a kind of hedging-premium on the off-chance of being, after all, on the side of Terry and the angels. It is astonishing how often your visionary can get money out of your man of affairs when another man of affairs would fail.

And, even as the man who chatted to the author of the Sixpenny Guide said, Terry was only a few years before his time. The things he dreamed of have not come to pa.s.s yet, but they are confidently promised to-morrow. As happy as the day was long, he was merely setting up the City that is not built with hands, and lighting it with the Light that never was. And if the "Thelema Estate Development Company" had done nothing else, it did, at any rate, put an end to that dispute that had begun when Dafydd Dafis had pulled down fences and burned them in his beautiful Red Dragon of a bonfire.

But, over and above that, it did leave its little mark on Llanyglo--a fleeting mark, laughable, bathetic, sad, hauntingly vacant, and lunatic (as Mr. Tudor Williams would have said) "in tot-to." Come to that little office near St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and see Terry Armfield in the closing stages of his minding of Llanyglo.

He not only conceived his Thelema; he drew the plans of it as well. He drew them on drawing-paper, on tracing-paper, on note-paper and bill-heads and the backs of envelopes. A paper-weight, with a k.n.o.b in the shape of a clenched fist grasping a short staff, kept half a hundred of his hasty drafts from flying off again into the air that gave them birth. And he added to them day by day, almost hour by hour.... Forty or forty-five or fifty houses, say, each with its little plot for private meditation and repose, yet sharing in common among them a s.p.a.cious pleasaunce where friend should meet friend and none but friends should come--that was the idea. A fair wide Way, with the mountains looking down its perspective to where gentle steps led down to the tawny sand--that was the idea. A wall all about it, or a ha-ha perhaps, not as against trespa.s.s, but as a symbol that here was an Isle that the tides of the care and of the trouble of the world did not invade--a shining and galleried chamber where light and happy laughter should rise to the groining of the roof (dim blue with gilt stars), and should echo and linger there as if the fane itself whispered--that was the idea. None of it existed, none of it was ever likely to exist; but without some such dreaming our life on earth is little worth. The people who put up the real money for it laughed at it, and laughed at Terry when he had gone, but humoured him while he was there as a nuisance, but a gentle one. If they lost their money there would, at any rate, be a good many of them in company, the land was exceedingly cheap, and they need not begin to build upon it till they pleased. Besides, by taking shares in his Thelema they had bought Terry off. When he came with his other wild and beautiful schemes they could say, "No, no, Terry, we'll see how Thelema turns out first," and pa.s.s him on to somebody else. That alone was worth the money.

Then there came to Terry one day a man who not only did not laugh at him, but grasped him by the hand, patted him all up the arm and across the breast as if he conferred invisible decorations upon him, gave Thelema his blessing, and said, in moved tones, "Indeed it is splen-did--splen-did--without vis-ion the people perish-eth." He told Terry that his name was Tudor Williams, and that he was the parliamentary representative of the const.i.tuency a portion of which Terry and the G.o.ds on high were developing. He did not ask outright for anything. He told Terry that, while he himself was a good Radical, believing that G.o.d made the land for the people, nevertheless, in this imperfect world things had to be done a lit-tle at a time, and his princ.i.p.al objection to the (temporary) private ownership of land was that it was too often in the wrong hands. If it could be put into the right hands much of the ini-quit-ty would disappear, whatever. Then, when he came to inform Terry that in his opinion he could be of great use to the Estate, he told him also that he was far from being a wealthy man, and that his usefulness must be set off as against the cost of any interest Terry might think fit to confer upon him....

"Look you," he said, "the conditions of labour are peculiar, and things that would be easy for me you might find a lit-tle diff-fi-cult. I do not say you would, and indeed I am a good democrat, and do not believe in one law for the ritss and another for the poor; but nowadays, when every man has his rights and his vote ... well, without a word here and a word there it might be a lit-tle diff-fi-cult...."

And Terry, who was quite acute enough to see this, asked Mr. Tudor Williams to come again.

When Mr. Tudor Williams came to see Terry for the third time, Terry pressed him to accept a seat on the Board. But Mr. Tudor Williams put up a deprecating hand.

"Aw-w-w, no!" he said. "Indeed it is very good of you, and I am very pleased you show so much confidence in me, but it would not do. There is my public position to consider. Indeed I would rather have a nominee. It is hard to make people understand a proper motive. If the time was ripe for it I would nationalise all land, yes indeed I would, but if it must be privately owned for a lit-tle while longer it is better that it should be in the trust of men like you and me for the public good. There is as many different kinds of landowning as there is of landowners. That pet-ti-fog-ging country squire, Wynne, he is repre-sen-ta-tive of all that is worst in a vic-ious sys-tem; he has no more vis-ion than that chair you sit on now; but we are not like that. I have not often found a sym-pathy like yours; indeed there has been tears in my eyes while you have talked.... But I will have a nominee. It will be better. And I will see you get your labour. There is John Jones, Contractor, Porth Neigr. He may even be willing to pay a lit-tle commission. We shall not quarrel about that.--But I am bet-ter off the Board."

Very curiously, he was not the only one who seemed a little shy about being put on the Board. Others displayed an equal bashfulness. This puzzled Terry. But it never puzzled him for long at a time. Always a fresh inspiration sent him off into his cloudland again. It was about that time that he acquired his second slice of Llanyglo, a tract adjoining the first and running down to that sh.o.r.e that Copley Fielding depicted with such accomplishment, elegance, and taste. And he took with that second piece of land a responsibility greater than that he had a.s.sumed when he had merely cajoled money out of the pockets of men who had known his tea-clipping father and whose fathers had known his privateering great-grandfather. Briefly, by enlarging his enterprise, Terry threw away the immediate advantage of his personal idealism and charm. The thing went to allotment shorn of his peculiar magnetism. He received money that would not, merely on the score that they liked him, be indulgently written off by those who would see that money no more.

His Prospectus is extant. Edward Garden's unfinished house came into it, and an affiliated interest, "Porth Neigr Omnibuses, Ltd.," about which Mr. Tudor Williams knew something. There were great swathes about the natural beauties of the situation, and lesser ones (the Syndicate pruned them down behind Terry's back) about the Thelema Idea. And there were a number of other things that are impossible, yet facts in the amazing History of Flotation. It is no good saying these things cannot happen when they happen daily. Had you or I bought shares in the "Thelema Estate Development Company, Limited," we should merely have bought, you and I, shares in that moonshine that poor, gentle, rapturous, cat's-paw Terry Armfield drew with freehand and French curves on his bits of paper and presently spread out in such a lunatic fashion over the sandhills of Llanyglo. Come, before we leave this dim chapter of the twilight of Llanyglo's forebeing, and see what Terry did.

Starting at right angles from the Porth Neigr road, a couple of hundred yards short of John Pritchard's farm, there runs straight down to the sh.o.r.e a street of rather more than a quarter of a mile in length. Crossing this street in the middle runs another street, not so long, but unfinished. These two streets intersect in an open s.p.a.ce or circus perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. The first street is called Delyn Avenue, because of the mountain that commands it. The second one is called Trwyn Way. The central circus is called by the names of the four Crescents it comprises. Farther back from the intersecting points are other streets. They also are named.

But do not suppose that these streets and Crescents and Avenues and Ways are streets in any ordinary sense. They are twenty-two and thirty-five foot roads, metalled, crowned, drained, and with a good stone kerb running parallel on either side. But there are no houses. There is not even a pavement, no, not a vestige of one, flagged, macadamed, cobbled, nor of any other description. There are no standards for gas or electric light; there are no standards even for the names of the thoroughfares--for you can hardly call those things standards--those low wooden boards, rather like the "Please Keep off the Gra.s.s" notices in a public park, that inform you that this is Delyn Avenue or that that is Trwyn Way. Exactly as it was all drawn on Terry Armfield's tracing-paper and envelopes and memo-heads, so it is now drawn on the Llanyglo sandhills, with strips of stone kerbing for pencil lines and the wind-blown sand where his india-rubber has pa.s.sed. Lie down on the sandhills with your eyes at the level of the kerbs, and, save for those eighteen-inch-high street name-boards, all disappears. Or if you care to climb the Trwyn you can see it all rather well from there....

There you are. Just a little patch of strapwork in the middle of the waste. Or like a rather large gridiron somebody has thrown away. And, if you are capable of seeing what Terry saw, namely all the things that are not there and that never will be there, then that little grid of laid-down and abandoned streets has a curiously mocking effect. You imagine the ghosts of Terry's Thelemites moving noiselessly there, pa.s.sing to and from their non-existent habitations. They are going, friendly ghost taking friendly ghost by the hand, to that groined and lofty chamber of Terry's dream, where the faint echoes of laughter linger in the roof of dim blue with gilt stars. They are going to walk in Terry's closes and courts and arbours, happy in that the sorrows and pains and substantialities of the world touch them not in their retreat. They are going down Delyn Avenue, to where the broad and gentle steps descend to the yellow sh.o.r.e. And all about them, but only to be seen if you can see what Terry saw (otherwise you will see only the sand and the wild thyme and the sulphur b.u.t.terflies and the blue), are Calaer and Anatole, Criere and Hesperia, Mesembrine and Arctic, which are the six towers of that Place with the great gate where bigots and hypocrites and defrauded and whining shareholders enter not, nor the violent Huns of the world of business nor the cruel Ostrogoths of commerce, but only the spruce and n.o.ble devotees of the Best, the Terrys before their time.

But when the wind gets up, then the sand blows over it all, and John Pritchard or somebody else, catching his foot against the unseen kerb, comes down his length into the middle of Terry's lovely and desired Place. But the men and women of Llanyglo are beginning to know their way about this phantom town, and none other, save the Gardens (whose house is now finished), and a friend or so of the Gardens' in the summer, ever comes there. The Kerrs, however, still have their Hafod, which they inhabit together when they are not away buying and cutting alders and shaping them into clog-soles with the free-hinged knife in the little canvas hut. And among the businessmen of Liverpool the whole thing is still a rich joke.--"Well, have you started building that house of yours in Wales yet?" a man who has not bought will ask a man who did; and this one will reply, "Oh, I'm thinking about it," or, "You must come down there and stop with me," or some other put-off. And it was rich in the extreme when, one day, the man at whose expense the joke was made took the jester by the b.u.t.ton, smiled, and whispered something confidential.... "What!" gasped the jester. "You've sold!... Wherever did you find him? In Manchester? Ha, ha, ha! Splendid! That's a dig in the ribs for Manchester!--I should like to see his face when he sees it!... A pity about poor Armfield, though--he'll catch snuff----"

For Terry had been refused bail.

PART TWO.

I.

RAILHEAD.

But something was coming to Llanyglo.

As Edward Garden might have said, looking at this something under his gla.s.ses and over his gla.s.ses as it crept slowly up out of the east--as Edward Garden might have said, looking at it again and yet again, and then gazing mildly and mistrustfully through the gla.s.ses at you, it appeared to be a railway.

At any rate, if it was not coming to Llanyglo it was coming within three miles of it.

As if a snail should leave behind it a track, not of slime, but of new iron, grey at first, then red with rust, but soon to be bright again, so it came on; and in other respects also it resembled a snail. It carried, for example, its lodging with it. And it put forward sensitive and intelligent antennae as it sought its food thirty miles away down the coast--manganese. It left the junction half a mile beyond Porth Neigr, and it was going to Abercelyn.

The lodging that the snail carried with it was called Railhead. Seen from a distance of a couple of miles it resembled a small excoriation on the face of the land; seen nearer it resolved itself into a town of wood and corrugated iron, with stockades of creosoted sleepers and trenches of earth and ramparts of ballast and metal for the laying of the permanent way. There were superintendents' offices and the sheds of clerks of works; there were forges and stables and strings of waggons and a telegraph cabin; there were huts and pumping-stations and cranes, stationary and travelling, and a gas-plant; and there were watchmen's boxes and the temporary dwellings of hundreds of men. By day these could be seen, spread out on the level or cl.u.s.tering about the embankments as the flies cl.u.s.tered about the treacled strings and fly-papers Howell Gruffydd hung up in his shop in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail seemed phosph.o.r.escent, its phosph.o.r.escence the flares and fires and lamps in cabin-windows and red eyes for danger that appeared when the other shift took over the work from the men of the day. Whistle of construction-engine and roar of dynamite cartridge; hiss of steam and clang of hammers as they fished the joints; rattle of road-metal as it was shot from the carts, and thud of the paviors' rammers; clank of couplings and agonised scream of a circular saw; purr of telephone-bells and the "Hallo!" as the clerk took down the receiver; sough of pumps and bubbling of cauldrons of tar; cries to horses, slish and slap of mortar and the clinking of the trowels; spitting of dinners cooking over the firebaskets, sounds of singing at night; with these and a hundred other noises the snail crept on with a spirit-level inside him--the level that kept him true to the line that had been laid down by staff and chain and theodolite a couple of years before.

And in some respects that something that looked so very much like a railway resembled not so much a snail as a snake. Did you ever see the great python that died lately at the Zoo climb his ragged staff of a tree? Not a joint or section of him but seemed to have that separate life of each of Dafydd Dafis's fingers when he mourned over his harp. A yard, two yards of the gorgeous waist-thick creature would ripple and flow and roll upwards to the crutch of the stump; another yard would follow, piling ever up and up; and you would wait for the toppling over of the great golden reticulated cable. And then all motion in that portion of the great fake would suddenly cease. Beyond the stump you would become aware that another glittering section was a-crawl, balancing, making fast, ever continuing the ascent.... Even so, before and behind Railhead, the work progressed. At a point the construction-engine stopped, the regiment of red and blue shirts and wondrous forearms and corduroy would move off, and presently all the life of the line would be five miles ahead, where they dug and built and drained and by and by pa.s.sed back the word that all was well. So they moved, between the finished and tested line at one point and the warning bell and the dynamite stick at the other; and there was an end of much gorse and heath and of many banks of flowering campion and ha.s.socks of wild thyme.

And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not pa.s.sing within three miles of Llanyglo, it was bringing the hamlet's appointed destiny with it. It was bringing (though, to be sure, not for some years yet) a pa.s.senger-junction where yet only irises and bog-cotton grew and frogs boomed out over the marsh at night. It was bringing sidings where John Pritchard's farthest field of oats now rippled silver-green in the wind. It was bringing a goods-yard and signal-bridges, and sheds and platforms and turntables and a cabrank in front and rows of railwaymen's dwellings behind. It was bringing a different breed of men, a breed that so far Llanyglo knows only in the persons of the four Kerrs. More than this, it was bringing progress, and sophistication, and wealth for some but nothing for others, and jollity, and vice, and some knowledge that was good and some that Llanyglo would have been no worse without, and always loads, loads, trainloads of white-faced people from the smoky towns. And most of all it was bringing to that vague yet unmistakable town-soul of Llanyglo growth and experience, growth that it could not escape and experience that it must square with those numbered days of its idyllic nonage as best it can. Through growing-pains and wild-oats, through revulsions of young remorse and impossible panaceas of repentance, through shrugging worldliness and cynicism and the forgetfulness that lies in laughter, Llanyglo must pa.s.s before it becomes--whatever it is to be. One thing only is certain: it can never again be as it was when Edward Garden first went there. Its wild thyme will remain only in patches on its Trwyn, and its sandhills will be glaucous with the blue sea-holly no more. The black cattle have not much longer in which to pace its sh.o.r.e, and Terry Armfield's gridiron will be forgotten--no Sixpenny Guide will point the way down Delyn Avenue nor past his immaterial Crescents along Trwyn Way. Railhead is creeping on. Two of the Kerrs are already working there, the other two have just bought the last of Squire Wynne's alders. Squire Wynne has now no land except that occupied by the Plas and its tangled and mossy and gra.s.sy and neglected gardens. "Porth Neigr Omnibuses, Limited," is already a serious undertaking, for it will ply between Llanyglo and the nearest point of the line. Howell Gruffydd has an option on the two original cottages that Edward Garden had had matchboarded--he may soon be requiring a larger shop. Compensations will be paid right and left. And there will soon be a larger a.s.sortment of young men for Miss Nancy Pritchard to choose a husband from....

For something is coming to Llanyglo.

Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been clever enough in the matter of the Omnibuses, Limited, nor, for the matter of that, had his cleverness stopped there; but for astuteness he could not hold a candle to Edward Garden. Edward Garden was not a Member of Parliament. As he musingly said when people asked him why he was not, it was out of his line. Therefore, he and his friends had left to others the promotion of the Bill, its steering through Select Committees of both Houses, and the whole conduct of the negotiations that, in their different way, were no less complicated than that concentration of various forces by virtue of which Railhead crept ever slowly forward. To a regiment of lawyers had likewise been left the adjustments under the general Acts to which, on the pa.s.sing of the Bill, the enterprise had become subject. Members and lawyers alike, those drest in a little brief obedience to the commands of the party whips, these as often as not Members themselves, were virtually the nominees of Edward Garden and his friends. Politics Edward Garden's "line"?... To all outward appearances he had no "line" at all. He merely added another emblem to that little cl.u.s.ter of Mercuries and Greyhounds and Winged Orbs that formed the pendant of his watch-chain. It was only when others, full of plans and hope and secrecy, sought "lines" for themselves that they discovered that he had been beforehand with them. To give an instance: When Mr. Tudor Williams, M.P., apparently as representing somebody else, had come forward with an offer to take up the remnants of poor Terry's Thelema, he had found there were no remnants to take up. To give another instance: When, by carefully engineered good offices and intermediaries, Mr. Tudor Williams had sought a reconciliation with Squire Wynne, and presently had gone to see him, he had found that he had pocketed his pride for nothing--the Squire no longer had a yard of land to sell. In a word, before ever whispers of the Bill had begun to circulate in the lobbies of the House of Commons, the sandhills and oat-fields of Llanyglo had been cut up like a jigsaw puzzle, raffled, dealt in, apportioned, and owned; and, save for his small holding in Thelema, between the Omnibuses at Porth Neigr and manganese at Abercelyn, there were very few pickings for Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys.

Therefore he returned with an enthusiasm more ardent than ever to his original crusade against the private ownership of the land that G.o.d made for the people, and took his const.i.tuents by the b.u.t.ton-holes, and spoke darkly of other Acts--Acts which by and by should give the Local Authority powers of compulsory purchase.

And all this time the eye still saw nothing to purchase but bents and blown sand, blue and lemon b.u.t.terflies, nodding harebells, a few tidemarks of black seaweed, a wooden jetty, a cl.u.s.ter of thatched kerb, the three Chapels, Edward Garden's house, and Ty Kerr.

But something was coming to Llanyglo.

On the whole they did not talk very much about it. Each had his reason for reticence, or brooding, or resentment, or calculation, as the case might be. Nevertheless, with Railhead still many miles away, they began to become accustomed to the coming and going of strangers. They came, these strangers, to Edward Garden's house, sleeping either there or else at the double cottage down by the beach; Edward Garden himself, with a lantern in his hand, saw them hospitably over the sandhills to bed. They were surveyors and architects, accountants, geologists, prospectors, men in control of the snail that left the track of iron and grey ballast and upturned clay across the land, lawyers, conveyancers, the directors of the stone-quarries along the Porth Neigr road, and others at whose business Llanyglo could only guess. And Mr. Tudor Williams also went there, perhaps to talk about compulsory powers. These and others wandered in groups along the straggling lines of seaweed, and up the Trwyn, and far inland behind John Pritchard's farm, pointing, pacing, discussing, exactly as those minions of the Liverpool Syndicate had done that morning when work had suddenly ceased on Edward Garden's new house; but there was no talk of fence-burning now. Even Dafydd Dafis saw the hopelessness of it, and once more went about with his head bowed like a head of corn heavy with rain. Already men were widening and levelling the Porth Neigr road. One week-end in July, after an unusually large gathering at Edward Garden's house, a new waggonette from Porth Neigr came to take them back in a body. It had a pair of horses, and it took the hills in style. Dafydd Dafis, whom the vehicle overtook on his ten miles' trudge into the town, was offered a seat, but he appeared not to hear, and the vehicle drove on, enveloping him in its dust. Half-way to Porth Neigr he came upon a squad of men setting up a telegraph pole. One of them spoke to him, in English. "Dim Saesneg," he muttered, and then perhaps wondered why he had done so. It might be "Dim Cymraeg" presently. A little farther on the waggonette pa.s.sed him again, once more hiding him in its dust. No doubt it had turned aside up the rough road that led to the stone-quarries. Dafydd continued his trudge.

But in the household of Howell Gruffydd the grocer, a suppressed excitement reigned. This, when Dafydd Dafis happened to be there, showed only as resignation and a bowing to the inevitable; but at other times it seemed to confer a more frequent glitter to Howell's teeth, a new impulse to his jocularity, and a sparkle and sharpness to his wife's eyes. Cases and canisters the like of which he had never handled before were delivered at his door by the Porth Neigr carrier; these were for the consumption of Edward Garden and his guests; and he waited in person upon Mrs. Garden every Monday morning. He thought of having a Christmas almanack with his own name printed upon it. Blodwen, his wife, made him, in antic.i.p.ation, a pair of linen half-sleeves that drew up over his forearms. Eesaac Oliver was forbidden any longer to fetch the eggs from the light-keeper's wife up the Trwyn; one of Hugh Morgan's boys might do this. As a preparation for Aberystwith, Eesaac Oliver was packed off to a second cousin of Blodwen's at Porth Neigr, there to attend an excellent endowed school. With the railway pa.s.sing so near it would be a simple matter for him to spend his week-ends at Llanyglo.

And big consumptive John Pritchard rarely said a word about that onward-creeping snail that left its double thread of permanent track behind it, but he thought exaltedly and powerfully. Stories had already reached him of drunkenness at Railhead, and fights, and singing at nights, and other G.o.dless orgies, and his brow was sternly set. When he preached at the Baptist Chapel about such as loved darkness and the evil paths in which they walked, it was known that he was thinking of Railhead. Men were now plotting their levels almost within sight of Llanyglo. They turned their surveying instruments on the hamlet as if they had been guns, and laid out their chains as if they had been enslaving the soil itself. Then an advance gang approached, and, even while John knew that the end was near (but not so near as all that), that end came. Eight men marched one evening into Llanyglo, bawling a bawdy chorus, with Sam Kerr showing the way. They had bottles and piggins and stone jars of beer, and, slung with joined-up leather belts between two of them, swung a barrel. They stumbled through the loose sand towards the Hafod Unos, hiccoughing and polluting the peaceful evening. Ned Kerr had evidently been advised of their coming; he stood at the door of the Hafod to receive them; and the carousing began.... It lasted half the night, and then each clay-stained navvy and tattooed platelayer slept and snored where he fell. John Pritchard did not sleep. Faintly he could hear their singing where he lay. The red and white of the Trwyn light dyed the darkness overhead. John remembered his own words: "It is a den of li-ons----"

Something had already come to Llanyglo.

II.

THE CLERK OF THE WORKS.

John Willie Garden was by this time at the age when he occasionally washed himself without being told. This he probably did, not out of any great love of cleanliness, but because by washing unbidden he acquired the right to retort, when the order to wash came, "I have--there!" Did one of the maids give the order he might add the word "Sucks!" This word he withheld when the command came from his mother.

He was still at school at Pannal, but ardently longed to leave. It was intended that sooner or later he should go into business with his father, and during the past Christmas vacation, which the Gardens had spent at home in Manchester, he had had the run of the offices and spinning-sheds. His real education, as distinct from his scholastic one, had been immensely advanced thereby. This real advance had taken place princ.i.p.ally after working hours. In such cases there is usually a young clerk or market-man ready to take the son of the firm into his charge, and a certain Jack Webster had had the bringing of John Willie out. This he had done at football matches, in the dressing-rooms where the t.i.tans clad themselves for the fray, and at their sing-songs and smokers afterwards. Therefore, John Willie esteemed himself a boy of the world, and already the day seemed far distant when he had shot the Llanyglo rabbits with his bow and arrow, and had buried a sixpence beneath the date-stone of his father's house.

To Llanyglo John Willie went again that summer, as the snail crept forward yard by yard to Abercelyn and the manganese.

All things considered, you might have been pardoned had you supposed that, without John Willie, the work at Railhead must have come to a stop. Had you wished to know anything about that railway--its cost per mile, its contractors' time-limits and penalties, its wages bills, its estimated upkeep--you would have gone, not to those men who spent week-ends at Edward Garden's house, but to John Willie. Railhead was now to him what the building of the Llanyglo house had formerly been, and the fence-burning, and rugby football, and many another interest of the days when he had been a kid and immature. It was in the summer of 1884 that the snail's antennae approached within sight of Llanyglo, and, rain or shine, permitted or forbidden, John Willie spent most of his waking hours among the masons and smiths and navvies and plate-layers who formed the population of that nomad town of wood and earth and sleepers and rolling stock and escaping steam and corrugated iron. He knew half the men by name. He joined them at dinner when the great buzzer told half a county that it was half-past twelve. He knitted his brows over the curling and thumb-marked plans in the foremen's cabins. He pa.s.sed this section of work or that, and gave the other his imprimatur. He adapted his stride to the distance between sleeper and sleeper. He spat reflectively on heaps of clay and mortar. With his hands, not in his pockets, but thrust (in imitation of the labourers with the "drop-front" corduroys) deep into his waist-band, and his cap on the back of his yellow, thistle-down head, he gave off-hand nods of greeting and warning "Steadys." He was variously known as "t' gaffer," "t' ganger," "t' clerk o' t' works," and "t' foreman."

And his friend, Percy Briggs, of Pannal School and Roundhay (where his father was an architect) accompanied him. Percy's father was one of Edward Garden's week-enders. He was making the plans of a second house, not far from where Terry Armfield's Thelemites were to have descended the shallow, marble steps to the golden sh.o.r.e. There was also some talk of an hotel.

For by this time quite a number of people knew at least the name of Llanyglo, and there is very little doubt that, had the place but had houses, it might even then have been that within another three or four years it actually had become--a quiet but not inaccessible resort, with perhaps a dozen striped bathing-tents and a row or two of deck-chairs drawn up on its beach, a couple of comfortable hydros established and a large new hotel a-building, a few donkeys (but no n.i.g.g.e.rs nor pierrots), a place for children and for such of their elders as sought a quiet not to be found at Blackpool nor the Isle of Man, a spot unvisited by trippers, "select," a little on the expensive side, where an acquaintance struck up between families might without too much risk be improved afterwards, where the nurses would be uniformed and the luggage would be sent on in advance, where a wealthy patron might even build a house of his own (if he could get the land), a "nice" place, a place you could afterwards tell anybody you had been to, a place from which you would go back feeling well and not in need of another holiday, a place--in short, a place like So-and-So, or So-and-So, out of which we try to shut history and change by being a little jealously secret about them. Llanyglo might have been, and for a short time actually was, such a place; and Percy Briggs's father, with others to tell him what to do and what not to do, was even now in the act of planning how to make it so.

In the meantime, Edward Garden's own house was a very different place from those two cottages that Dafydd Dafis had taken his own good time about matchboarding. That first lodging had been no more than a temporary camping-place for the summer. Any sagging old wicker-chairs or tables or chests of drawers from lumber-rooms had been good enough for it, and its crockery and kitchen appointments had been of the cheapest kind that Porth Neigr could supply. But not so with the new house. Everything about it spoke of permanence. The large plate-box was carried backwards and forwards at the beginning and end of the summer season, but not the Worcester dinner-service, nor the gla.s.s that filled its cupboards, nor the linen in its closets, nor the blankets nor the eiderdowns set by for winter, nor the few--the rather few--books. Mrs. Garden herself had told Howell Gruffydd that it was not likely that the place would be locked up for the winter months again. Edward Garden intended to spend more and more time there; indeed he must, unless by and by he would look musingly and a little ill-favouringly through his gla.s.ses at that spa.r.s.e line of bathing-tents and that little knot of combination-saddled donkeys and say, "This does not appear to be much of a watering-place." Already he had made special arrangement for the delivery of his Manchester letters; upstairs on the first floor he had his office, with a deep window, the side bays of which looked, the one towards the sea, the other to the mighty deltoid-shaped outline of Mynedd Mawr; and where Edward Garden settled he liked to settle comfortably. In that quiet and rugged and curtained room he was once more following the line of least resistance. The chances were that he already foresaw the direction that line was likely to take.

For Lancashire, which had been remote when folk had had to jog the ten miles from Porth Neigr behind a somnolent old brown horse, would be near when that snail had packed his lodging up and departed, leaving only its iron pathway behind it; and the Kerrs in their Hafod Unos would have been astonished to learn how much Edward Garden mused upon Lancashire and upon just such people as themselves. He mused upon the cost of living of such as they; and he mused upon their standard of living, which is a related thing, but not the same thing. He mused again as he saw the gradual change in that standard, and contrasted the things he saw with the things he remembered in his own early days. In those days, expressly taken holidays had been unheard-of things. Folk's excursions had reached little farther afield than their own legs could carry them. If John Pritchard, of Llanyglo, had never been to Porth Neigr, many and many a Manchester man of the days of Edward Garden's boyhood had never been to Liverpool. Many thousands had never seen the sea. It had been holiday enough in those days to meet in the streets, to play knurr and spell in the nearest field, to lean over walls and watch their pigs, and to tend their gardens. Slate Clubs and Goose Clubs and Holiday Clubs had not been invented. A shilling or half a crown a week painfully saved would not have been squandered again for the sake of that little superfluity that had now become the minimum itself. The ma.s.s of the people of his day would no more have dreamed of saving money in order that seaside lodging-house keepers should profit than they would have dreamed of taking the Grand Tour.

But a generation seemed to have arisen, very different in some ways, yet exactly the same in others. They were different in that they refused to be exploited any longer according to the old familiar formulas, yet the same in that they were as subject as their fathers had been, and as their sons and grandsons will be, to the man who could devise a new one. All manner of circ.u.mstances contributed to their unuttered invitation (it was that in effect, and the only thing they did not utter) that somebody should bring to their exploitation the spice of variety. There were smoulderings everywhere--smoulderings at Durham and West Ham, at Ayr and Lanark and Swansea, at Sheffield and Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds and Hull. Over his gla.s.ses and under his gla.s.ses Edward Garden noted them, and inferred that the sum of it all was that folk intended to have a better time than they had been having. They were quite unmistakably resolved to have a much better time. Their grandfathers' idea of a Wakes Week, for example, might have been staying at home and timing the pigeons into the cote; but they meant to improve on that. They intended to doff their clogs and to put on their thinnest shoes, to draw extravagant sums from the Club, to take railway-tickets, and not to rest from their arduous relaxation as long as a penny remained unspent.... Manganese? The moment they showed signs of coming his way, Edward Garden was after richer returns than manganese would yield. He granted that without manganese there would have been no Railhead coming up out of the east, but what he had his eye on was the new generation's deadly resolve to be amused, the crammed coffers of its Holiday Clubs, the beginnings of those tens and scores and hundreds of thousands of pounds that to-day a single town will get rid of in a single fortnight by the sea.

But only if it came his way. He was no Terry. It was his business to take things as they were, not to try to make them something they were not. He had no theories, no criticisms, no impulses, no hesitations. He asked for nothing but uncoloured data. Therefore, and to that extent, Llanyglo's future was not entirely in his hands. It was still free, and always, always, save for a little rising of new stone here and there, just the same to look at--watched over by the Light on its n.o.ble Trwyn, guarded by the majestic mountain behind, and presenting to its diurnal tides the same sh.o.r.e that Copley Fielding drew.

Now it befell towards the end of the July of that year that the Welshmen of Llanyglo held an open-air service for the young in one of the hollows of the sandhills. It was a blazing Sunday afternoon, with the sea like silk and the pale mountains seeming thrice their distance away. They had brought a small moveable platform and reading-desk from the Baptist Chapel, and first John Pritchard, and then Howell Gruffydd had mounted it. The sun beat on the bare heads and best bonnets and black-coated shoulders of parents; myriads of tiny hopping insects gave the surface of the sand the appearance of being in motion; and a buzzard sailed in great steady circles in the sky of larkspur blue, now standing out to sea, now a speck in the direction of Delyn or Mynedd Mawr.

Howell was teaching the twelve or fourteen urchins a new hymn-tune, singing it now alone, now with them, now listening with little gestures of encouragement and nods of pleasure as their voices rose. His secular jocularity was not absent, but tempered to the occasion.

"Louder, louder and quicker--it give you an appet.i.te for your tea," he said, waving his arms and beating with his foot to the accelerated time. "You will not wake Mrs. Hughes at the lighthouse--now--'Joyful, Joyful----'"

And, with Eesaac Oliver leading, they went through the tune again.

That a special exhortation should be given to those of tenderer years had been deliberately resolved upon. Since that evening when the eight men from the line had rolled drunkenly over the sandhills to the Kerrs' house, a fear had weighed on the chapel-goers of Llanyglo. Until then, their children had known nothing of the wide and wicked world; but that ignorance could not now be maintained. They must be put on their guard, and for that job the ingratiating Howell was the man.

The tune came to an end, and he put his leaflet of printed words into his pocket and shepherded the row of urchins into position with movements of his hands.

"Move that way, John Roberts--I cannot see Olwen Morgan's face. Hugh Morgan, stop poking your foot into that rabbit-hole or you fall down it and we have to dig you out. Miss Pritchard, give Gwen Roberts her sunbonnet, if you please, or she catss a sunstroke. Ithel, where is your handkerchief? Your nose resem-bles a snail.... Now listen to me. If I see a boy or girl not pay atten-sson I stop till he do pay atten-sson----"

And he began. He told them that soon, with the coming of the railway, there would come also all manner of pip-ple, some good pip-ple, some bad pip-ple. He told them that at Railhead were many bad pip-ple, who swore, and drank a great deal more than was good for them. He told them (discreetly, since he had no wish to preach a jehad against customers so good as the Gardens) that while some boys might go to Railhead to play, boys like some he would not mention, who had lived in large towns, yet it would be bet-ter if they kept themselves to themselves.... He did not go the length of a.s.serting that all good boys were Welsh and country boys, and that all bad ones were town-bred and English, but--but--well, things have to be put a little starkly to the young. They shuffled their feet in the hot loose sand as he talked. The buzzard sailed back from the mountains. The sandhoppers danced as if the ground had been a frying-pan. A holy peace brooded over the land. Away at Railhead men, those sinful men who drank and swore slept in rows, stretched face-downwards on the gra.s.s or the thrown-up banks of clay.

Then the grocer began to promise the rewards of virtue. He turned with an interrogative smile to John Pritchard.

"And now, Mr. Pritchard, do you think I might tell them that sec-ret? Indeed I think I get into trouble if I do! But yess, I will tell them.--Atten-sson now. Hugh Morgan, do not scratss your head. Now!--Can any boy or girl tell me what there iss to be in Mr. Pritchard's field next month?"

They guessed at once, with one voice. Howell Gruffydd knew better than to ask an audience questions it could not answer. He held up his hands in admiring surprise.

"Indeed they guess--they are every one right, Miss Pritchard! Astonissing! Dear me, I never saw such s'arp young men and women!--Yess, they are right. There is to be a Treat for the Sunday School scholars! There now! And there will be races, and prizes, and tea, and the books will be given for those who have had the largest num-ber of attendances and have not been late.--And now: who is giving this Treat?"

"Mr. Tudor Williams!" they cried.

"Right again--it is Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member of Parliament! And Mr. Williams is giv-ing something else too. He is giv-ing--I have seen them--new pictures--pictures of the construc-tion of flowers--(bot-tany I think it is called, Miss Pritchard?)--and an-i-mals--and fiss-sses----"

He turned up his eyes, as if to the heavens from which these rewards of virtuous living descended. The croupy shrilling of a c.o.c.k came from down by the beach. The bees droned, and the wheeling buzzard suddenly dropped like a plummet a hundred yards through the larkspur blue.

It was then, in that very moment, that Howell Gruffydd's face was seen to change. He stopped, listening. Beyond the hot cuplike hollow in which they were a.s.sembled was another sunken way, and along this way somebody was approaching. Probably in complete unconsciousness that any hearer was at hand, this somebody was singing softly as he came. It was Tommy, the youngest of the Kerrs, and he was singing to himself, in very bad Welsh, Glan Meddwdod Mwyn.

Now this song is one of the less reputable songs of Wales. The English drinking song usually contents itself with extolling the mere convivial act, drawing a decent veil over the lamentable effects of that act; but even in its t.i.tle Glan Meddwdod Mwyn (which words mean Fair, Kind Drunkenness) has no such reticence. It depicts ... but you can see the difference for yourself. No wonder it froze the words on Howell Gruffydd's lips. In the singer's complete unconsciousness that he was not alone lay the whole sting. The malice, the intent, the hateful Lancashire humour of the Kerrs they had had before, but not this home-thrust with a weapon they themselves had provided!

Tommy might just as well have climbed the hummock and told them that, since their language provided equally for these eventualities, they were no better than anyone else....

An English drunkard, to grub in the lees of their own language like this!---- And little Hugh Morgan had sn.i.g.g.e.red!---- The unseen Tommy and his (their) song pa.s.sed on towards the Hafod Unos.

Then Howell bestirred himself again. "There, now!" he said; "what had he just been tell-ing them? Indeed, that was opp-por-tune, whatever!" ... But, though he strove to hide it, there was a hollowness now in his exhortation. He felt as if he had been building a wall against a contagion that crept in upon the invisible air. If Thomas Kerr knew Glan Meddwdod Mwyn he might also know viler ditties still; if little Hugh Morgan, whom he had thought pure, had sn.i.g.g.e.red at Glan Meddwdod he might guffaw outright at the baser version of Sospan Bach....

It could only (Howell thought) be original sin....

It was at least a little balm to him to hear the fervour with which Eesaac Oliver once more led the singing of Joyful, Joyful.

And, by the way (speaking of songs), Eesaac Oliver's choice of the narrow and difficult path had already involved him in a persecution in which song played a minor part. This persecution was at the hands of John Willie Garden. For, in an unguarded moment, Eesaac Oliver had confided to John Willie his plans for his career; and since then the unfeeling John Willie, on his way to Railhead and debauchery, had held over him the song that contains the lines:-- "He wa.s.s go to Je-sus College For to try to get some knowledge---- Wa.s.s you ever see," etc. etc.

John Willie, itching to get away from Pannal, could not understand why anybody wanted to go to Jesus, Aberystwith, or any other College.

"I think it would be wiser For to stay with Sister Liza---- Wa.s.s you ever see," etc. etc.

he would hum softly and (alas) contemptuously; and, since it was part of his chosen career to do so, Eesaac Oliver would very expressly forgive John Willie, getting into quite a Christian heat about it.

On the day after that homily on the Llanyglo sandhills, John Willie Garden went as usual to Railhead, and was enabled to delight his leather-belted and corduroyed friends there with a piece of information, hitherto secret, that he had from his father's table. This was that the line was to be opened in the following Spring by His Royal Highness the Duke of Snell. The announcement produced an astonishing effect. Not one in ten of the men either knew or cared what the enterprise was all about. They knew that the railway was a railway, but beyond that, none of its dividends being destined for their pockets, it was merely the job--"the" job, the job of the moment, the job not very different from the last job, and very, very like all the other jobs to come, until their living hands should become as stiff as the picks they plied, and the light of their eyes be extinguished as their own lanterns were extinguished at daybreak. But at the news that the Duke of Snell was to do his trick when they had finished theirs, they were innocently uplifted and delighted. This would be something to tell their grandchildren in the years to come! They would spit on their hands and work better all the afternoon for this!... In the meantime they discussed it when the great buzzer called them to their beef and bacon sandwiches, their chops and pickles and bread and cheese.

"So it's to be t' Dewk o' Snell!" one of them admired, with as much satisfaction as if he himself had had a tremendous leg-up in the world thereby; he was a West Riding navvy, whom twenty years of digging up the length and breadth of England had delocalised of everything save his powerful accent. "Well, now, I'd figgered it out 'at it'ld happen be t' Prince o' Wales mesen----"

Here struck in a Cardiff man, so lean that you would not have got another pennyweight of fat off him if you had fried him in his own frying-pan.

"Wa.s.s-n't it the Duke of Snell that mar-ried the Prin-cess Victorine?"

"Noa. That wor t' Dewk o' Flint," the Yorkshire navvy replied, with authority. "T' Dewk o' Snell wed t' youngest, t' Princess Alix. I knaw all t' lot on 'em; t' missis hed all their pic'ters o' biscuit-boxes; they reached from one end o' t' chimley-piece to t'other; ye couldn't ha' got a finger in between."

"Well, well," said the Cardiff man, an inquiring mind among many complacent ones, "it is curious, how lit-tle diff-ference it makes to us. The Prinss of Wales, say you? If I wait for the Prinss of Wales to give me ano-ther piece of this ba-con I wait a long time, whatever!... But prapss we get our in-vi-ta-tions soon," he added jocularly, taking an enormous bite of bread. "S'all you be there, John Willie?"

John Willie answered, a little doubtfully, that he hoped to be present at the ceremony if he could get away from school. The Cardiff man wagged his head. There are few Welshmen who do not wag their heads at the sound of the word school.

"Ah, school; it iss a gra-and thing," he said, still wagging. "I not be work-king here with my shirt wet-t on my back if I go to a prop-per school."

"Oh, be dinged to that tale!" returned the Yorkshireman bluntly, cutting cheese on his leathery palm. "T' schools is all my backside! They learn 'em a lot o' newfangled stuff, but I remember 'at when tea wor eight shillin' a pund, an' they kept a penny nutmeg in a wood case as if it wor diamonds----"

"Aw-w-w, there iss that Burkie, talk-king again!" said the Cardiff man.

"It's reight, for all that----"