Through Welsh Doorways Part 9

"Where's my Sunday coat, mam?"

"In the chest where it is always."

"In the chest?"

"Aye."

Adam Jones bent over the big box where his Sunday coat lay spread out carefully from Sabbath to Sabbath. He groped around, fished out the coat, put it on unaided by Gladys, and leaned over his wife to say good-bye.

"Ye're not lovin' me much to-day, mother, are ye?"

Gladys gulped and pushed him away.

He left the house, his Bible under his arm, to join the people streaming up Twthill to the Chapel. Gladys ran to the door and called once. He turned around, but she bit her lips and said, "No matter."

As Adam stepped into the upward moving throng, Mrs. Thomas, the wife of Morris Thomas, whispered--

"Och, Morris, look!"

Morris gave one look, covered his mouth with his fingers, and began to shake; but dark bird that he was and long spoon that he had for supping with the devil, his face took on a pitying expression.

"'Tis too bad," he said; "what shall I do?"

Meantime the children had begun to giggle, little Dilys, and Haf and Delwyn and Ifor and Kats, and a score more. The suppressed t.i.ttering caught all the way down the line like a fuse attended by sundry minor explosions, and every eye was directed at Deacon Jones's back. But Morris's question remained unanswered, and no one did anything. The deacon, with his gentle bows to right and left and his long stride, skimmed past couple after couple, and entering the Chapel took his deacon's seat immediately under the pulpit, his back to the congregation.

Other deacons gathered rapidly about him on the circular seat, and there was much nudging among them, and more stir and craning of necks in the Chapel than had ever been there before. But soon the worshippers were launched upon a discussion of Arminianism, that unfortunate set of questions gentle John Wesley managed to flourish before Calvinism. Now Calvinism, full-tilt, rushed smoking and roaring from the kind mouths of the good people in the Chapel, belching flame and destruction upon the laxity of Wesleyanism. Deacon Adam Jones, with his eyes tight closed and his heart bursting with sorrow, was engaged in something like prayer. No matter that he could not know within himself that he was one of the elect. After all, if he strove to be saved and then wasn't, he could not grumble. He had tried his best; if he failed it was not his fault. But oh, his beloved Gladys, that her feet might be on the Rock and off this sliding sand of Wesleyanism! Or that already he might be landed on the happy sh.o.r.es of the other side, and know her foreordained to be saved!

She might ride the wicked Elephant and not fall; a thousand circuses would not harm her in his sight.

Suddenly there was the tramping of a mult.i.tude in their silent Sabbath street, followed by a wild "Yah!" The deacons quivered together like so many leaves on a branch, and looked to the high windows, but the windows were so high that only the hills peered down serenely upon the congregation.

At home Gladys, eyeing disconsolately the bright fire and the rows of bra.s.s candlesticks and the big shiny cheese dishes, sat in the same place in which Adam had left her. Ah! it was wicked for her to have done that, for her husband was so gentle to her, no man could be better. And now she was making a laughingstock of the lad among the neighbours. The tears rolled out of her eyes, and, irresponsible little body that she was, with the flow of her tears there came a great desire to be comforted for her wickedness. Adam had always comforted her. Suddenly she sat up, for there was the sound of many feet upon the road. She listened, she looked out, she gasped, she sped to the hedge. A great procession was going by. Her amazed eyes fell upon camels, with gentlemen in baggy trousers on their backs. The camels were walking forward, stealthily spreading out their soft-padded feet. And there were many elephants, uneasily swaying the keepers who sat on their heads; for the elephants, hearing the purring of the stream, thought it sounded like the rustling of long jungle-gra.s.s, and wished more than anything else that this tidy little hill were a jungle in which they might lie down. Instead, they must trundle wearily up hill, taking comfort in elephantine ways by holding by their trunks to one another's tails. And the ladies from Egypt, seated high in a great barge, fanned themselves and looked yellow and much as Cleopatra must have looked when Mark Antony wooed her. And the float-full of American Indians seemed tired, and something must have been washed off their faces, for certainly they were not red. And the gentlemen representing the musical talent of the German Empire were mopping their fat necks. And in the huge barge representing j.a.pan, courteous little j.a.ps covered their yawns with fastidiously-kept hands. And the "artist" who sat inside the steam-organ wagon became so sleepy that his hand slipped and struck one of the organ pedals. "Yah!" screeched the organ, and I think it was the loudest sound ever heard on Twthill. The only rosy, tidy being in the whole procession was a little maid in white cap and ap.r.o.n who was hanging up fresh towels in one of the living vans, and peeping out of the window at the curious cottages and unp.r.o.nounceable names decorating each one that she saw.

There was no talking, no laughter. This was part of the day's work for these men and women and beasts. They were on their way to Carnarvon for Monday's performance. The men looked tired and sober, and so did the women. Gladys thought they all seemed strangely draggled. Indeed, she had imagined they would be quite different, so bright and beautiful, very creatures of the air like the birds. She believed she did not wish to go to the circus after all, for if they were not happy, she was certain she could never be happy looking at them, poor dears! If only Adam would come home, she could stand the stillness, and she would never do anything wrong again.

In the Chapel the service went forward without interruption; the minister, a man of character, convinced that he had met on Twthill all the forces of the world and the flesh and the devil, was not to be terrified by a mult.i.tude of feet, even though those feet were an avenging host sent for the destruction of this wicked village, in which he laboured and struggled in vain. The congregation, ignorant of this unflattering opinion of them, followed their heroic leader to a man.

At the close of the service, Deacon Aphael Tuck leaned forward towards Adam Jones.

"Mr. Jones, your socks--your socks----"

"What is that, Mr. Tuck?"

"Your socks. I'm sorry, but did ye intend----"

"Aye, my socks, Deacon," said Adam, looking apprehensively towards his boots, "aye, I've been lookin' for them--my Sunday socks."

"They're on your back," said the senior deacon, coughing.

Adam Jones flushed all over his pale face; then he smiled, much as if he enjoyed having his Sunday socks on his back rather than on his feet, and then, recollecting, he began to explain to the deacon.

"Well, 'tis Sunday,"--the deacon knew this,--"and Gladys takes very good care of my clothes whatever, and puts them--lays them out in the chest an'--an' she's not well to-day."

While Aphael Tuck was pulling out the strong st.i.tches with which the socks were tacked on,--strong st.i.tches which he and Mrs. Tuck often discussed later as part of the liveliest day Twthill had ever known,--the Recording Angel, who had been taking down Adam's prayers much cut in angelic shorthand, s.p.a.ced out every one of these half-true faltering words carefully, and over them, the Angel wrote, in beautiful bright letters, LOVE, and beneath them, with lax impartiality to Calvinism and Wesleyanism, made this note, "Elect: Adam and wife."

_An Oriel in Eden_

Mrs. Jenkins looked over at Mr. Jenkins the shop merchant and bard, and there was love and wonderment in her eyes. He was reclining in an arm-chair, his long legs stretched before him, his head at rest against the chair, his hands folded over his stomach, his eyes tight closed, his mouth wide open, his lips moving, and every once in a while his tongue quickly lapping his upper lip. Janny looked away and out of the windows to the meadows that rolled up into the mist like big grey waves; this was the act of composition, she knew, and too sacred even for her, his humbler half, to behold. But the misty uplands suggested overmuch of that unnamable something which, when she looked at her husband, made her wish to shut her eyes; for, might she not, Janny reasoned, see more than she ought to see of the divine spirit that moved behind those hills and behind the lips of Ariel Jenkins. So her thoughts slipped back into the living-room of Ty Mawr, while her eyes avoided the inspired contents of the arm-chair. She had been a bride and the envied mistress of Ty Mawr just two weeks; however, she was forty and matrimony was late for her, and Ariel Jenkins being forty-five, it was none too early for him. Janny felt her responsibilities keenly. Was she living up to them? She was at the mercantile centre of the village, her better half was not only a merchant but also a crowned poet, her house the most important in Glaslyn. And Glaslyn expected changes; Mrs. Parry Wynn the baker said so, Mrs. Gomer Roberts the tinman had prophesied, and Mrs. Jeezer Morris the minister had whispered to Betto Griffiths who had told Janny of these expectations, that she supposed, nay, she _hoped_ Ariel Jenkins's home with a woman in it would soon look like a G.o.d-fearing place and receive some improvements. Janny's glance roved through the sitting-room. She had made a few alterations, but somehow in the half-light of dusk they seemed as nothing. What was the moving or replenishing of a taper holder, a fresh case for Ariel's harp, a new cover for the table, or the addition of a few pleasant-faced china cats to a regimental mantelpiece,--indeed, she sadly asked herself, what were these changes in comparison with the unappointed something she was expected to accomplish as Mrs. Ariel Jenkins the shop? She was a stranger in Glaslyn, an intruder from a great outside world, and now she felt bewildered, lonely. Her eyes flitted to Ariel's face for company.

"Dearie!"

There was no answer.

"Is it comin', Ariel dear?"

"Aye," he snapped.

Janny winced; she had never lived with genius, and, somehow, she thought it would be different. Her deep-blue eyes had a still look in them that suggested not only a long habit of self-repression but also perplexity, and sadness, too; there was appeal in every feature of her face,--an appeal made the more pathetic, perhaps, by the childlike lines of pale-gold curling hair about her forehead and tired eyes, and the delicate hollows beneath her cheek-bones, and the fragile sweetness of her mouth. It was a face in its soft bloom and delicacy, forever young and yet unforgettably weary. She straightened out her kirtle, and again her glance roved the room. There must be a clean hearth-brush, new muslin curtains for the cas.e.m.e.nt; the stairway landing, where it turned by the front windows, even in the twilight looked shabby with the wear and tear of heavily-booted feet and clogs, the light from the oriel window above the landing shining through with bald ugliness upon the stairs. As she looked at the light Janny's eyes dilated, her face flushed, and she leaned forward, gazing intently at the window. For the minute she had forgotten Ariel, but he, puff, puff, puff, with many sighs and yawns and much stretching of his long legs, was coming out of his inspired coma. His awakening look fell upon Janny there where she sat, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders tipped forward, her chin tilted upward, a circle of quiet light about her hair, her eyes intent upon the stairway window.

"Janny dear, what is it? What are ye lookin' at?"

"Oh! na--aye, lad, I--I----"

"Well, well, Janny!"

"Ariel, I was thinkin'."

"Aye, an' ye were plannin', too."

He was thoroughly aroused now from his inspiration, and studying that object, woman, which through some twenty-five years he had sung and praised. Ariel's eyes searched her; stanza, metre, rhyme, theme, were all forgotten, for he saw that Janny possessed a thought she had no intention of parting with to him. He glanced from her to the window upon which she had been looking so rapturously when he surprised her gaze.

So far as he could see it was like any other stairway light in Glaslyn, except that it was oval instead of rectangular, and perhaps a little deeper than some, but otherwise precisely like scores he had seen. Then he called imagination to his aid, that imagination which had been the means of begetting shillings over the counter of his shop, which had won for him a comfortable income, and commercial success, as well as made him the foremost bard in his county. He peered through the window; what he beheld was a bit of dusky sky with a shadowy star seemingly behind it. He dismissed imagination and returned to the study of his bride. It was a whim probably; perhaps one of those unshaped thoughts, elemental, unspoken, to which women listen in their idle moments; indeed, it might even be some dreaming about him of which Janny in the shyness of their relation, still new, was too sensitive to speak. Gradually Ariel forgot the problem in his renewed consciousness of the charm of Janny, with her deep blue eyes, her childlike pale-gold hair, the delicate lines of her fragile face so different from the Welsh women of their village. Under his scrutiny Janny sat serenely with a more than wonted air of self-possession.

She interrupted him: "Ariel, ye've been to sea, dear?"

"Aye, when I was a lad."

"Was it for long?"

"No, not long, two years sailin' with cargoes between our coast and Ireland."

"Did ye learn much of the ways of sailorfolk?"

"Aye, much."

"Runnin' up an' down the ropes?"

"Aye, that, an' more too."