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Mushroom Town

by Oliver Onions · English · Gutenberg #39482 · 571,908 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mushroom Town

Author: Oliver Onions


        
Release date: April 19, 2012 [eBook #39482]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39482

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MUSHROOM TOWN ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)











                               MUSHROOM TOWN

                              BY OLIVER ONIONS

Author of "Gray Youth," "In Accordance with the Evidence," "Debit
Account," etc., etc.

    GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
    NEW YORK

    _Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton_

    Copyright, 1914,
    BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




DEDICATION


_In the following pages I have permitted myself to take a number of
liberties--geographical, historical, etymological, and even
geological--with a country for which I have conceived a strong
affection; I trust I have taken none with its beauty nor with its
hospitality. It will be useless to search for Llanyglo on any map. It is
neither in North Carnarvonshire, in Merioneth, nor in Lleyn. Of certain
features of existing places I have made a composite, which is the_
"MUSHROOM TOWN" _of this book._

_The kindnesses I have received in Wales during the past six years have
been innumerable; indeed, much of my work has consisted of writing down
(and not always improving) things told me by one of my hosts. For this
and other reasons I should like to render him such acknowledgment as a
Dedication may express._ "MUSHROOM TOWN" _is therefore inscribed, in
gratitude and affection, to_

ARTHUR ASHLEY RUCK

_Hampstead_, 1914




CONTENTS



      THE INVITATION                                       9


PART I


       I THE YEAR DOT                                     17

      II ITS NONAGE                                       31

     III THE MINDER                                       46

      IV "_DIM_ SAESNEG"                                  52

       V THE HAFOD UNOS                                   75

      VI THE FOOT IN THE DOOR                             86

     VII THE MEMBER                                       98

    VIII THELEMA                                         109


PART II

       I RAILHEAD                                        117

      II THE CLERK OF THE WORKS                          126

     III THE CURTAIN RAISER                              142

      IV YNYS                                            168


PART III

       I THE HOLIDAY CAMP                                179

      II THE GIANT'S STRIDE                              205

     III THE BLANK CHEQUE                                218

      IV PAWB                                            233


PART IV

       I THE BLIND EYE                                   244

      II JUNE                                            263

     III DELYN                                           275

      IV AN ORDINARY YOUNG MAN                           297

       V THE DWELLING OF A NIGHT                         310

      VI THE GLYN                                        323


PART V

       I THE WHEEL                                       335

      II ADIEU                                           347




THE INVITATION


"We'll take the little cable-tram, if you like, but it's not far to
walk--twenty minutes or so--the Trwyn's seven hundred feet high. You'll
see the whole of the town from the top. The sun will have made the grass
a little slippery, but there are paths everywhere; the sheep began them,
and then the visitors wore them bare. And we shall get the breeze....

       *       *       *       *       *

"There you are: Llanyglo. You see it from up here almost as the gulls
and razorbills see it. The bay's a fine curve, isn't it?--rather like a
strongly blown kite-string; and the Promenade's nearly two miles long.
But as you see, the town doesn't go very far back. From the Imperial
there to the railway station and the gasometers at the back isn't much
more than half a mile; the town seems to press down to the front just as
the horses draw the bathing-vans down to the tide. Shall we sit down?
Here's a boulder. It's chipped all over with initials, of course; so are
the benches, and even the turf; but you'd wonder that there was a bit of
wood or stone or turf left at all if you saw the crowds that come here
when the Wakes are on. It's odd that you should never see anybody
actually cutting them. Some of them must have taken an hour or two with
a hammer and chisel, but I've been up here countless times and never
seen anybody at it yet.

"Yes, that's Llanyglo; but look at the mountains first. This isn't the
best time of the day for seeing them; the morning or the evening's the
best time; the sun isn't far enough round yet. But sometimes, when the
light's just right, they start out into folds and wrinkles almost as
quickly as you could snap your fingers--it's quite dramatic. Foels and
Moels and Pens and Mynedds, look--half the North Cambrian Range. You
couldn't have a better centre for motor-cycle and char-a-banc tours than
Llanyglo.... Then on the other side's the sea. That's only a tinny sort
of glitter just now, but you should see the moon rise over it. People
come out from the concerts on the pier-head just to have a look....

"The Pier looks tiny from up here? Yes, but it's three furlongs long for
all that, and those two tart-tin-looking things at the end hold nearly a
thousand people apiece. But, as you say, it is rather like one of those
children's toy railways they sell on the stalls in Gardd Street for
sixpence-halfpenny. And that always strikes me as rather a curious thing
about Llanyglo. It's a big place now--nine thousand winter population;
but somehow it has a smaller look than it had when it was just a score
of cottages, all put together not much bigger than the Kursaal Gardens
there. I don't know why the cottages should have seemed more in scale
with the mountains than all this, but they did. I suppose it was because
they didn't set up for anything, like the Kursaal and the Majestic and
the Imperial.... But it doesn't do to tell the Llanyglo folk that. They
look at it in quite another way. To them the sea and the mountains are
so many adjuncts, something they can turn into money by dipping people
at sixpence a time and motoring them round at four-and-sixpence the
tour.... And sometimes you can't help thinking that it wouldn't take
very much (a wind a bit stronger than usual or an extra heave of the
sea, say) and all these hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of stone
and iron and paint and gilding would just disappear--be sponged out like
the castles and hoof-marks on the sands when the tide comes in--or like
a made-up face when you wipe the carmine and pencilling from it....
Eh?--No, I'm not saying they've spoiled the place--nor yet that they
haven't. You mustn't come here if you want a couple of miles of beach to
yourself. It all depends how you look at it. If Llanyglo's cheapjack in
one way, perhaps it isn't in another. It's merely that I remember it as
it used to be....

"Would it surprise you to learn that the whole place is only about
thirty years old? That's all. It grew like a mushroom; there are people
who were born here who don't know their way about their own town....
Mostly Welsh? Oh dear no, not by any means. I should say about
half-and-half. I suppose you're thinking of the Welsh names of the
streets? They don't mean very much. There's Gardd Street, for instance;
'gardd' is only the Welsh for 'garden,' and Edward Garden, John Willie
Garden's father, built the greater part of it (for that matter, he built
the greater part of Llanyglo). And if anybody called Wood (say) had put
up a house here, he'd probably have called it 'Ty Coed.' And some of it,
of course, is genuine Welsh. The Porth Neigr Road does go to Porth
Neigr, and Sarn, over there, has always been Sarn. But people think
they're getting better value for their money if they come away for a
fortnight and see foreign names everywhere; they've a travelled sort of
feeling; so they give the streets these names, and print all the
placards in two columns, with 'Rhybudd' on one side and 'Notice' on the
other.

"And that's given rise to one rather amusing little mistake. As you
know, this headland that we're on is called the Trwyn, and 'trwyn'
simply means a nose or a promontory. But over past the Lighthouse
there, there are the remains of an old Dinas, a British camp, and
half these Lancashire trippers think the headland's called after
that--'t'ruin'--'th' ruin'--you know how they talk....

"I'm interested in the place for several reasons (not money ones, I'm
sorry to say). For one thing, I like to watch the Welsh and Lancashire
folk together; that's been very amusing. And then, it's not often you
get the chance of seeing a whole development quite so concisely
epitomised as we've had it here. Llanyglo started from practically
nothing, and it's grown to this before John Willie Garden has a single
grey hair on his head (though, to be sure, that cowslip colour doesn't
show grey very much). Then there's that curious essence--I don't know
what you call it--the thing a town would still keep even though you
cleared every brick away and built it all over again, and sent every
inhabitant packing and re-peopled it. There's a field for speculation
there, too, though perhaps not a very profitable one. But most of all
I've been interested in seeing what various sets of people have given
Llanyglo, and what it's given to them in return--how the stones and the
people have taken colour from one another, if you understand me, and
what colour--in fact (if it doesn't sound a little pompous) in Llanyglo
as an expression of the life of our time. It's sometimes hard to believe
that something almost human hasn't got into its stone and paint and
mortar. The whole place, as it's spread out down there now--two-mile
line of front, houses, hotels, railway, gasometers and all--has had
almost a personal birth, and adolescence, and growing-pains, and sown
its wild oats, and has its things that it tells and its things that it
doesn't tell, in an extraordinary way--or else, as I say, it seems
extraordinary, because you get it all into a single focus. There may
even be a bit of me in Llanyglo. If you came half a dozen times there'd
be a bit of you too.

"I should like you to meet John Willie Garden. He's the man to go to if
you want to know anything about these streets and hotels and the seaside
and the stations on the front. Why not come to the Kursaal, on the
Terrace, at about nine to-night?--Good. He's a capital chap; a Something
or other on the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, adopted Conservative
Free Trade candidate for his division (but a Protectionist in other
countries) and probably worth a quarter of a million, a good deal of it
out of Llanyglo. Not bad for a little turned forty, eh? He'll probably
ask you to dinner. You can't see his house from here; it stands back
from Gardd Street. It was the first house to go up in Llanyglo--no, I'm
forgetting. There was one before it--just one before it, not counting
the original cottages, of course....

"What do you say to a turn? We've time to have a look at the Dinas
before we go down....

"It's British, and the _Sixpenny Guide_ will tell you all that's known
about it--possibly more. Its foundations are said to have been sprinkled
with the blood of Merlin. What's left of it's certainly sprinkled with
these everlasting initials. The Trwyn Light's just behind, two reds and
a white, and they're experimenting with the Rocket Apparatus, but I
don't think that will come to much.--There's little Porth Neigr,
look--and that point thirty miles away's Abercelyn....

"Now the mountains are beginning to show; there they are--Delyn on the
left, then Moel Eryr, then Mynedd Mawr. That's Penyffestyn, with the
great cavity in his side, and his shadow's right across Bwlch.... Yes,
very fine, and a perfect evening for it. The posters at Euston don't
overstate it, do they? Of course, you've seen that very familiar one, of
a Welsh Giantess, shawl, apron, steeple hat and all the lot, holding a
view of Llanyglo in her arms? Pink hotels, indigo mountains and
chrome-yellow sands....

"There's the _Queen of the Waters_ coming in. If we wait a few minutes
longer we shall see the town light up. Yes, electricity; the
power-station was finished only last year; it's over there beyond the
filter-beds; Llanyglo handles its own sewage.... Ah! There goes the
Promenade lights; three jumps, and the two miles are lighted up from end
to end; the kite-string's a necklace now; pretty, isn't it?... And there
goes the Pier.... There'll be a glare behind us like a shout of light in
a moment--the Trwyn Light....

"The mountains are dark now, but how the day lingers on the sea!
To-night it's like ribbon-grass.... Hear the post-horns? Those are the
chars-a-bancs coming in. The last tripper's running for the station
now.... Now the light's dying on the sea; it's a new moon and a spring
tide. Two or three riding-lights only--I say, it's solemn out there....
But they'll be dining at the Majestic presently. That long golden haze
is Gardd Street, and that spangle at the end of it's the New Bazaar.
There goes the Big Wheel in the Kursaal Gardens, with its advertisement
on it. We might look in at the Dancing Hall to-night; that's rather a
sight. They have firework displays in the grounds, too, and last year
there was one out in the bay; they put bombs and flares and serpents on
rafts, and laid them from boats, like mines. That was in honour of the
Investiture of the Prince of Wales....

"We'd better take the tram down, I think; we might stumble and break our
necks....

"The other turnstile.--That kiosk place? That's the visitors' bureau.
They'll tell you quite a number of useful things there--cab fares,
porters' charges, time and tide tables, excursions and so on; but John
Willie Garden can tell you more interesting things than those. Don't
forget you're to meet him to-night....

"You're sure you can't dine with me? Very well. The Kursaal, then, on
the Terrace, at a quarter to nine...."




PART ONE




I

THE YEAR DOT


On a Friday afternoon in the June of the year 1880, a roomy old
shandrydan, midway between a trap and a wagonette, moved slowly along
the Porth Neigr and Llanyglo road. It had been built as a pair-horse
vehicle for Squire Wynne, of Plas Neigr, but the door at the back of it
now bore the words, "Royal Hotel, Porth Neigr," and its present or some
intermediate owner had converted it to the use of a single horse. The
shaky-kneed old brown animal at present between the shafts might have
had a spirit-level inside him, so unerringly did he become aware when
the road departed by as much as a fraction from the true horizontal.
Taking the good with the bad, he was doing a fair five miles an hour. At
each of its revolutions the off hind-wheel gave a dry squeak like a pair
of boots that has not been paid for.

The day was warm, and hay was cutting. Combings of hay striped the
hedges where the carts had passed, and as the Royal Hotel conveyance was
so wide that it had to draw in in order to allow anything else to pass
it, wisps had lodged also in the cords of the great pile of boxes and
brown tin trunks that occupied the forward part of it. Honeysuckle
tangled the hedge-tops; the wild roses were out below; and in the
ditches the paler scabious was of the colour of the sky, the deeper
that of the mountains towards which the old horse lazily clop-clopped.

The pile of trunks in front hid the driver and the two print-skirted and
black-jacketed young women who sat beside him from those inside the
vehicle. These two young women were two of Mrs. Garden's domestics, and
they travelled far more comfortably than did their mistress. Packed up
by her bustle behind, on her right by her seven-years-old daughter who
slept with her head on her shoulders, on her left by the angle of the
trap, and in front by the hamper, the three or four straw basses, the
cardboard boxes, the hold-all of sticks and umbrellas, with a
travelling-rug thrown in (all of which articles she strove to balance on
her short, steep lap), she could only perspire. Her husband, who sat
opposite, could see no more of her than the top of her hen's-tail,
lavender bonnet. Even this he shut out when he took up, now his
newspaper (every line of which he had read twice), and now his
daughter's _Little Folks_ (for the inspection of which periodical,
though the print was much bigger than that of the newspaper, he put on
his gold-rimmed glasses). The smell of his excellent cigar mingled with
the scents of the roses and hay, and trailed like an invisible wake a
hundred yards behind.

John Willie Garden, who was eleven, had travelled half the distance from
Porth Neigr on the step of the trap. During the rest of the time, now
falling behind and now running on ahead, now up a campion-grown bank and
again lying down flat to drink at a brook, he had covered as much
distance as a dog that is taken out for a walk. He wore a navy blue
jersey, which, when peeled off over his head, had the double effect of
wiping his short nose and causing his shock of gilded hair to stand up
like flames, all in one movement. He carried a catapult in one hand.
Both pockets of his moleskin knickers bulged with ammunition for this
engine. In the heat of a catapult action, against hens or windows, he
used his mouth as a magazine, discharging and loading again with great
dexterity.--But, a mile or so back, his father, looking up over his
paper, had called the Cease Firing. John Willie now plipped the catapult
furtively, and without pebble. It was the chief drawback of the holiday
from his point of view that it had to be taken in the company of his
father. Among his brighter hopes was that Mr. Garden, having seen them
installed, would return to Manchester on the Monday.

Mr. Garden was head of the firm of Garden, Scharf and Garden, spinners,
and, to judge from his attire, he might have stepped straight from the
exchange. His square-crowned billycock hat, buttoned-up pepper-and-salt
grey suit, and crossover bird's-eye tie with the pebble pin in it, were
at odds with the slumbrous lanes and the scabious-blue mountains. He
carried a wooden-sticked, horn-handled umbrella, wrapped in a protecting
sheath, and from his heavy gold watch-chain depended a cluster of little
silver emblems that he would not have exchanged for as many Balas
rubies. All Manchester knew that he could have given up the dogcart in
which he drove daily to business, and set up a carriage and a pair of
horses in its stead, any day it had pleased him; and his opinions and
judgments, when he saw fit to utter them, were quoted. But he rarely
uttered them. When asked for his advice, say upon a letter, he would
adjust his glasses, read the letter slowly through, turn back and read
it all over again more slowly still, and then, when the person in
difficulties was awaiting the weighty pronouncement, would look through
the letter rapidly a third time, and at last, glancing over the top of
his glasses, would mildly observe, "This seems to be a letter."
Sometimes he would come to the very verge of committing himself by
adding, "From So-and-So." The grey eyes that looked over those gold rims
were remarkable. They seemed to serve less as appreciative organs of
immediate vision than as passers-on of an infinite number of visual
data, which would be accepted or rejected or laid for the present aside
by some piece of mechanism hidden behind. He was forty-four, clean
shaven, save for a pair of small mutton-chop whiskers already turning
grey, darkish and rather delicate-looking, and only half the size of his
stout, blonde wife. As long as Free Trade remained untouched, he had no
politics, and he was an adherent of the lower forms of the Established
Church. He was taking this journey on his daughter Minetta's account,
who was not doing so well as she ought to be. He had bought a couple of
the Llanyglo cottages, and judged that by this time they must be ready
for occupation.

The mountains drew nearer, and other pale colours began to show through
the scabious blue. The pile of luggage continued to brush the hedges,
and the off wheel to creak. Minetta snored lightly as she slept, and the
black legs that issued from her pink check frock, trimmed with crimson
braid, swung slackly with every jolt of the cart. Mrs. Garden's face
glistened; Mr. Garden allowed _Little Folks_ to fall from his hand, and
dozed; John Willie sought birds' nests and rabbits; and the old horse
continued to change from lumpish trot to slow walk and from slow walk to
lumpish trot, as if he had had a spirit-level inside him.

After this fashion the Gardens jogged along the lanes where to-day the
summer dust never settles for touring-cars, motor-cycles and the
Llanyglo motor chars-a-bancs.

"John Willie!"

It was five o'clock, and they had arrived. Leaving the cluster of three
or four farms that formed the land-ward part of Llanyglo, they had
turned through a gateless gap in a thymy earth-wall, and all save Mrs.
Garden and Minetta had descended. The cart-track had become less and
less distinct, and had finally lost itself altogether in deep, sandy
drifts in which their approach made no noise. There was a fresher feel
in the air.

And then, through a V in the sandhills, the sea had appeared, and the
lazy crash of a breaker had been heard.

The irregular row of thatched cottages was set perhaps a hundred yards
back from high-water mark, and the intervening space was a waste of
sand, coarse tussocks, and the glaucous blue sea-holly. Half-overblown
rubbish strewed the beach--rusty tin pans and kettles, old kedge
anchors, corks, a mass of potato-parings in which three or four hens
scratched, and the skeletons of a couple of disused boats. The
half-dozen serviceable boats were gathered a couple of hundred yards
away about a short wooden jetty. A mile away in the other direction rose
the Trwyn, bronze with sunny heather and purple with airy shadow, with
the lighthouse and the Dinas on the top. A small herd of black cattle
had wandered slowly out to it, and was wandering slowly back again at
the edge of the tide.

"John Willie!"

The cottages were thatched and claywashed, and while some of them had a
couple of strides of garden in front, others rose from little taluses
of blown sand. Sand was everywhere. It lodged in the crevices, took the
paint off the doors, and had blunted the angles of posts and palings
until they were as smooth and rounded as the two or three ships'
figure-heads that stood within them. Grey old oars leaned up in corners;
umber nets, with cork floats like dangling fruit upon them, hung from
hooks in the walls; and the squat chimneys had flat stones on the tops
of them. The windows were provided with swing-back wooden shutters.
Between the farming part and the fishing part of Llanyglo the family had
passed three chapels.

"John Willie!"

Mrs. Garden had descended, and stood over her neat boot-tops in sand,
wondering which of her cramped members it would be best to try to
straighten first. Standing by her only half awake, Minetta rubbed her
eyes. At a respectful distance, but a convenient nearness, half a dozen
barefooted children described as it were rainbow-curves in the air with
their hands from the foreheads downwards, and a little further away the
maritime population of Llanyglo watched the Royal Hotel driver struggle
with the luggage. They did not stand off from hostility, but from an
excess of delicacy. Then, as a heavy trunk slipped and stuck, a young
man with braces over his gansey gave a quick smile, started forward, and
bore a hand.

"John--Willie!"

It was Mr. Garden who called. He had put his key into the door of the
cottage where the house-leek grew like a turkey's neck on the claywashed
gate-post, and he wanted John Willie to help carry in the smaller
parcels. Now John Willie was neither deaf, nor did he feign deafness,
but he had a fine sense of the defensive uses of stupidity. Question
him directly (say about those apples or that broken window-pane), and he
knew nothing whatever. Question him further, and he knew less than
nothing. You might conceivably have questioned him to the extreme point
when his unadmitting blue eyes would have said, as plain as speech,
"What is an apple?" His primrose head could be seen at this moment fifty
yards away down the beach. He was watching a fisherman scrape hooks with
an old clasp-knife. He had just spoken to the man. "_Dim Saesneg_," the
man had replied. John Willie was now watching him, not as a man who
scraped hooks, but as the possessor of a new and admirable defence
against questions.

"John Wil----"

But this time the summons was broken in two on Mr. Garden's lips. He had
opened the cottage door, and was looking mildly within.

The orders he had given for the preparation of the double cottage for
his wife and children had included the lining of the interior with
match-boarding, and he had understood that this had been finished a week
and more ago. It was a month since he had had the advice-note from the
timber merchant at Porth Neigr that the material had been delivered. And
so it had. There it was. There, too, were the walls. But the
matchboarding was not on the walls. It lay, tongued and grooved, with
the scantling for fixing it, just where the timber merchant's men had
deposited it--on the floor. It filled half the place. On the top of it,
still in the sacking in which they had been sewn, were the articles of
furniture that had been brought from Mr. Garden's Manchester attics and
lumber-rooms. The rest of the furniture he had taken over from the
previous tenants, whom some vicissitude of fortune had taken far away
to South Wales.

Mr. Garden removed his glasses, wiped them, replaced them, and then,
looking over the top of them, spoke:

"Where's Dafydd Dafis?" he said.

But a cry from his wife, who had come up behind him, interrupted him.
She fell back again, not mildly, but in consternation.

"Nay, nay, Edward!--I never----" she gasped.

"Where's Dafydd Dafis?" Mr. Garden asked again.

"Of all the sights! If it isn't enough to--I thought you told me----"

Mr. Garden blew his nose and slowly put his handkerchief away again.

"Does anybody know where Dafydd Dafis is?"

"--and us fit to drop for a cup of tea!" Mrs. Garden continued. "Up
since five this morning, and come all that way, and not so much as a
fire lighted nor a kettle on to boil----"

Mr. Garden was looking about him again, as if he would have said, "These
appear to be boards," when suddenly his wife broke energetically in.

"Well, it's no good standing looking at it; we must all turn to, that's
all.--Jane! Ellen!--Off with them jackets, and one of you make a fire
while the other unpacks the groceries. The tea and things are in that
box under the shawls--and to think we might have come in wet, and not
even a winter-hedge to dry our things on!--There's no wood, you say?
Wood enough, marry! I can see nothing else!--And the tea isn't there?
Then run out and buy a quarter of a pound to be going on with; I won't
have everything unpacked now, not in the middle of this joiner's
shop!--Tell her where the grocer's is, Edward----"

And she threw off her lavender dolman and bonnet, and bustled about,
like the capable creature she was, as ready to turn to as if she had
never had a day's help in her life.

A little girl stood at the door, still describing rainbows from her
forehead; but scarce had Ellen asked her where the grocer's was when
there came up at a half run Howell Gruffydd himself, the keeper of the
single shop of the place. He was in his shirt-sleeves, wore an old
bowler hat, and wiped his hands on the coarse, white apron about his
middle. Over his glasses Edward Garden watched his approach, but he did
not speak. It was not anger that kept him silent. Already he had
accepted _fait accompli_--or in this case _inaccompli_. Howell Gruffydd
broke into sunny smiles of welcome.

"How d'you do, Mr. Garden? So you have arrived? How d'you do, madam? How
d'you do, miss? You had a pless-sant journey?"

He beamed on each of them, and then beamed on them again.

"Do you know where Dafydd Dafis is?" Mr. Garden asked once more.

"Indeed I do not, Mr. Garden. Perhaps he maake fenss for Squire Wynne.
Perhaps he fiss."

Then Howell Gruffydd's eyes fell on the boards as if he had not noticed
them before. He gave a heartfelt "Aw-w-w!"

"It is not finiss! Dear me, dear me! Hwhat a pitt-ty!" Then he became
cheerfully explanatory. "That will be old Mrs. Pritchard--Dafydd Dafis
he that fond of her as if she wass his own fless and blood. She iss
nine-ty, and for two weeks they have prayers for her in the chap-pil,
and Doctor Williams, he come from Porth Neigr, and that is five
s'illing, but the pains in her body was soa bad she not know hwhat to
dooa!--And it was good fiss-ing these three weeks and more--and the man
who bring the boards, he say they well season, but it do them no harm to
wait a little while longer----"

Mr. Garden's eyes were still looking over his glasses.

"Then is he going to let them season for ever?" he said.

Howell Gruffydd smiled soothingly.--"Naw-w-w! Not for ev-er, Mr.
Garden!"

"It's a good job he hasn't got to get his living in Manchester," Mr.
Garden observed.

At that Howell Gruffydd clasped his hands, as if he congratulated
himself that an interesting rumour was confirmed.

"Indeed, now," he said, "they do say that the pip-ple there is not the
same as the pip-ple here!"

At this point Mrs. Garden's voice was raised. She was on her knees by
the boxes, and could not find the sugar for tea. At the word "tea,"
Howell Gruffydd broke out with eager hospitality.

"Indeed it is cup of tea I came about," he said. "I say to Mrs.
Gruffydd, 'They come all this way,' I say, 'and they will be want-ting
cup of tea whatever.' It is all ready ... Eesaac Oliver!"--he called
from the doorway--"run to your mother, and say we be there in one
minnit! And do not answer me in Welss when there are pip-ple who do not
understand it--where are your manners, indeed!" He turned to the
new-comers again. "You s'all have cup of tea whatever, Mrs. Garden--it
cost you noth-thing--and the young gentleman, he is down at the boats,
but Eesaac Oliver s'all fetch him--come on----"

Howell Gruffydd, the grocer, speaks rather better English to-day than
he spoke then, but there is no more quickness and keenness in his
black-lashed light-blue eyes, and no more persuasiveness in his purring
voice. To the half-unpacked boxes of provisions on the floor he did not
drop an eye. He led the way past half a dozen cottages to the little
shop with showcards and paper packages in the diminutive window. He
showed them in and round the counter, lifting the old curtain that shut
off the parlour from the public part of the shop. Blodwen, his wife, in
a clean apron that showed the knife-edged creases of its ironing, was
curtsying as if she did not know how to stop. The parlour communicated
with the inner side of the counter, and behind the counter, on the left,
was the window. Bottles and canisters stood on the shelves, and below
them were innumerable small drawers. The fire-place had a high
mantelpiece with countless china objects upon it, and a large dresser
with blue and white plates stood against the inner wall. Next to the
dresser was a tall clock, with a ship sailing round the world on the
dial. A gigantic black turnip of a kettle sent out a cloud of steam;
cranpogs were keeping hot in a dish within the fender; and near them an
enormous marmalade-coloured cat slept. The room smelt of pepper and soap
and pickles and cheese, and Howell Gruffydd's guests filled it. He
helped his wife to wait upon them, and in the intervals attended to the
shop. A little girl came in for a pennyworth of bicarbonate of soda, and
Howell, returning from serving her, again showed his white, but false,
teeth.

"It maake the tea last longer," he said, with a jerk of his head; "but
there is no bi----" he smiled again apologetically, though he was
perfectly well able to pronounce the word, "--there is none of that in
this tea, Mrs. Garden. It is not tea like the fine pip-ple in
Manchester drink, but we are simple pip-ple here. Blodwen, the cranpogs;
make a good tea, Mr. Garden; indeed, you eat noth-thing; tut, tut, they
taake up no room!--You say what is that, young gentleman? That is a
Welss Bible. Aha, you cannot read that! Nor you cannot say,
'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychyndrobwlantysiligogogoch!'--You try? I say
it slowly----"

Though Howell had repeated the jaw-breaker twenty times, John Willie
Garden would still have maintained the silence of defence.

"Ha, ha, ha! It is easy!... Well, I ask you riddle instead.--There
was a young gentleman, and he have eight"--he held up his
fingers--"eight--sisters. And every one of them has a brother. Now you
tell me how many brothers and sisters there are!" He winked, but
respectfully, at Mr. Garden.

"Nine," said John Willie Garden contemptuously, with his mouth full of
cranpogs and jam.

Howell showed no discomfiture. He laughed.

"Ha, ha, ha! He say nine! I ask him again.--There was a young
gentleman ... but, dear me, there is the s'op again! We must earn our
living, all of us. Business before pleas-sure--it is a good rule----"

And he squeezed through to the counter again, while his wife boiled more
eggs and spiked the cranpogs on a fork, five at a time.

After tea Mrs. Garden was seen to be pulling up her skirt and to be
feeling for her pocket in the folds of her petticoat; but with an
imperceptible gesture her husband restrained her. He thanked Gruffydds,
and they returned to their own cottage, Eesaac Oliver accompanying them
to help to pile up the matchboards and to take the furniture from its
sacking. The cottage was much like the other cottages of the place. Its
ceiling consisted of tacked-up sheets, inside which spiders and dust and
sand whispered and the wind rippled. The black mantelpiece had brass
candlesticks and china ornaments, and on one side of the tall clock was
a grocer's almanac-portrait of Mr. Gladstone, while on the other was one
of Dr. Rees, the President of the Congregational Union of England and
Wales. A sampler, rather difficult to see in the bad light, hung
immediately within the door, and the window opened six inches, in which
position it had to be propped with a short stick. There were geraniums
on its sill, and a red sausage filled with sand kept out the draught
when it was closed. The outer door of the second cottage was to be
permanently fastened up when the match-boarding should be finished. The
cottages adjoining belonged to fishermen, the one with a wife and
children, the other a widower who kept his departed wife in mind by
means of a number of framed and glazed cenotaphs, consisting of a black
ground with white angels mourning over a tombstone, and, above, the
words, "_Er Serchog Cof_----"

This was Llanyglo when Minetta Garden was first brought there for the
benefit of her health. The authors of the Itineraries had not thought it
worth mentioning; Wyndham has nothing to say about it, Skrine did not
visit it, Pennant passes it by. But you may find an excellent steel
engraving of it, by Copley Fielding, full of accomplishment, elegance
and taste, and published by the London Art Union. If Minetta did well
there, it was Edward Garden's intention, so far as Edward Garden's
intentions were ever known, to let or sell his cottage and to build a
more convenient house of his own. There was stone to be had in abundance
within three or four miles. Mutton was plentiful and delicious, beef
not quite so plentiful nor quite so good. The larger grocery supplies
could be sent direct from Manchester, the odds and ends purchased from
Howell Gruffydd. Water was to fetch only a hundred yards, and lamp oil,
etc., came twice a week in the cart from Porth Neigr. And soon--Edward
Garden did not know yet, and if he did not know you may be sure nobody
else did--Porth Neigr might be brought nearer to the rest of the world
than ten miles' journey by road. For, besides being a spinner and a good
many other things, Edward Garden was a Director of the Ratchet and
Rawtonstall Railway, and, as is the compliment between railway and
railway, those little silver trinkets that dangled from his gold
watch-chain--little greyhounds and locomotives, winged orbs and other
emblems of speed--were the tokens of his freedom at all times over other
lines, and of his personal intimacy with men who open up land, not a
field at a time with a plough, but by running a sinew of steel through
it, with a nerve alongside that, touched at any point, quickens and
thrills throughout its length.

Nevertheless, it is quite true that he came to Llanyglo first of all for
the benefit of his daughter's health.




II

ITS NONAGE


At bottom, neither the good fishing nor the illness of ancient Mrs.
Pritchard had been the real cause of Dafydd Dafis's procrastination in
the matter of the match-boarding--any more than those greased cartridges
were the real cause of the Mutiny. He was merely vindicating the claims
of a temperament that kept him, and would always keep him, poor, yet a
power. He was a day-labourer, whom anybody could hire to build a wall,
mend a thatch or caulk a boat; but--and this was the secret of his
influence--he had a harp in his cottage. In a glorious baritone voice he
sang _Mentra Gwen_, _Y Deryn Pur_, and lorn songs of love and wild
songs of battle. More than that, he sang _penillion_; and as
_penillion_--which is an extempore form of song into which you may
plunge at any point you please, provided you finish pat and triumphant
with the double bar--as _penillion_ concerns itself mainly with two
themes, namely, the loved mountains and lakes of Cambria, and quick and
topical inventions of personal gossip, Dafydd Dafis held his hearers
both by their deeper sentiments and their lighter foibles. He was a
spare and roughly clad man of thirty, unmarried, with a kindling eye, a
handsome nose, and a ragged dark moustache; and when his head was bowed
by the side of his harp, all the life of him seemed to run out into the
lean and roughened fingers on the strings.

He came to see Edward Garden about that match-boarding on the Saturday
morning, bringing a youth of eighteen with him. Edward Garden, who had
had experience of the Welsh in Liverpool, which is the capital of Wales,
received him with resignation. Fair and softly goes far in a day, and he
knew that the luxury of chiding the bard of Llanyglo would prove a dear
one did Mrs. Garden find her egg supply suddenly fail and the Llanyglo
cows mysteriously cease to yield milk.

His forbearance was rewarded. Before he departed for Manchester on the
Monday morning he had the satisfaction of seeing Dafydd Dafis and the
youth actually begin the job. No doubt it would be finished by the time
divinely appointed for its finishing.

But whether Dafydd Dafis sang much as he worked, or worked a little as
he sang, remained an open question.

Now in whatever other respects Llanyglo may have changed, its air then
was the same air that the Guide Book so justly praises to-day. Minetta
felt the benefit of it at once. During her illness she had had her dark
hair close-cropped; for fear of taking cold, she still wore a red
"pirate" cap, that is, a cone of knitted wool with a bob at the peak
that fell on one side of her head: and for the same reason she wore
black stockings pulled well up over the bamboo-like joints of her bony
knees. She was a slight, dark pixy of a child, on whom so much care had
been expended that she had begun to care for herself and to talk wisely
about draughts and wet feet; and sometimes she consoled herself for the
loss of her hair by repeating her mother's assurance, that it would grow
the more strongly afterwards.

But within a fortnight of the Gardens' settling at Llanyglo there was no
further thought of taking her back home until the cold weather should
come. Her doll's-house and paint-box were sent for. Her health
continued to improve. By and by she was to be found squatted down by the
sand-blown palings, surrounded by the Llanyglo children, keeping a shop,
of which the commodities were shells, pebbles, starfish and the like.
Her dolls and their house were neglected. But the other little girls,
who had seen these wonders once, sometimes lingered wistfully about Mrs.
Garden's door, looking within, and whispering, "There it is,
Gwladys--see, by the cloch----"

Long before the match-boarding of a single room was completed, John
Willie Garden, whom at first his mother had not been able to drive out
of doors, had lost interest in Dafydd Dafis, his sawing, his hammering,
and his songs. He disappeared by the half-day together. It was a holiday
time at the school by the Baptist Chapel, and, with Eesaac Oliver
Gruffydd and other youngsters as his companions, he scrambled among the
rocks at the base of the Trwyn, or climbed the headland itself, or
digged for bait, or went out in the boats, or fished for crabs with
split mussels off the jetty end (he stuffed his catch up underneath his
blue jersey, where the animals crawled about on his friendly and naked
skin). The rainbow curves of the children ceased when he or Minetta
appeared, but they continued as a salute to Mrs. Garden. The weather
continued superb: it rained scarcely at all. The mountains were never
for two hours the same; the sea in the evenings was mother-of-pearl; and
the rising moon seemed to stand up on it, like the lateen of a felucca
of gold.

Mrs. Garden sent to Manchester for her tricycle.

Then the school by the Baptist Chapel re-opened, and for some days John
Willie, hanging idly about and listening to the droning within, was
undecided whether to give the insulting cry of liberty or to lament
that he was left to his own devices. He himself would not have to go
back to school till the middle of September. Then he still further
enlarged his circle of acquaintance. He attached himself to a farmer's
lad, who shot rabbits of an evening among the sandhills, and, after
being allowed to fire the gun, gave his catapult away to a "kid." July
passed. The match-boarding progressed by fits and starts. It was now
Minetta who impeded its progress. Dafydd Dafis loved her as if she had
been his own child, and told her stories of dragons and knights and
enchantments and fairies, and sang _Mentra Gwen_ to her, all by the hour
together, careless whether Edward Garden paid him for those same hours
or not.

With the passing of August, Llanyglo had made far more difference to the
Gardens than the Gardens had to Llanyglo. Indeed, Llanyglo looked like
absorbing them altogether, as animals not ultimately capable of
domestication are sucked back into the feral state. In the matter of
dress, for example, they had deteriorated alarmingly. Half his days John
Willie spent in and out of the water without a stitch on him, and he no
longer had a pair of sand-shoes to his name.--And Minetta? First she
lost the bob from the peak of her red "pirate" cap, and then the cap
itself was cast aside. From careful nightly brushings of her "new"
pleated navy-blue frock with the white braid, she allowed the pleats to
get full of sand, and, where the prints of her ribbed soles had been,
now her bare feet patterned the beach. Her bamboo legs were brown as
seaweed and barked up the shins; and when (with a totally abandoned
display of knickers) she emptied her shoes of sand, she would sit down
in a pool as soon as not.--And Mrs. Garden? Not for worlds would she
have had anybody from Manchester see her as she returned on her tricycle
from bathing among the Trwyn rocks, sessile on the saddle, a mackintosh
over her voluminous bathing-dress, a towel cast across her shoulders,
and her plump ivory legs rising and falling on the pedals like the twin
cranks of a vertical human engine. Yes, the Gardens were slipping back
into savagery. They were becoming part of Llanyglo. Manchester seemed,
not so much a hundred miles, as a hundred years away.

And when, on a Monday morning, it became necessary that Mrs. Garden
should put on her garments of civilisation again and traverse those
hundred miles, or years, in order to see how her other home was getting
on, the whole population gathered about the Royal Hotel shandrydan that
came to take her to Porth Neigr, and tears stood in eyes, and sobs
choked throats, and shawls and hands and handkerchiefs were waved as the
vehicle started off over the muffling sandhills, and as many promises
were made that Minetta and John Willie should be well looked after as if
she had been departing never to return, instead of coming back again on
the Friday. Howell Gruffydd picked a tear from his eye with his little
finger, and spoke of the mutability of human affairs.

"The one is ta-a-ke, the other left," he said. "It is all change. Dear
dear, it make me think of my cousin Evan Evans, of Carnarvon, and his
three boys, as fine boys as ever you see, and so-a hap-py, all living
under one roof, till Mary Evans die and wass buried, and the changes
come, and where are those boys now? They are scatter. One is in Bangor,
and one is in Menai Bridge, and one is in Pwllheli. Dear me! Dear me!
Mrs. Garden was a very kind one. There was no kinder 'ooman. Al-ways
the sa-a-me. She seem like one of ourselves. Well, well----"

And he picked away another tear, as grief-stricken as if he had been
reciting an epitaph "_Er Serchog Cof Am Amelia Garden_."

Then, when on the Friday she duly returned, there was as much rejoicing
as if she had been a sister, come back again from a long wandering.

Mrs. Garden had brought back with her in the Royal Hotel conveyance
wellnigh as much luggage as had laden the vehicle on their first coming;
for it had been decided that Minetta's stay was to be still further
prolonged. So warm clothing had been brought, and more blankets, and a
screen for the door, and a small family medicine-chest, and Minetta's
Compendium Box of Games. And that was bad news for John Willie Garden,
for it brought the shadow of his own departure near; and yet it was good
news too, for it seemed to promise a more sure establishment in the
place, with perhaps another visit for himself during the Christmas
holidays. He could not think how the summer days had slipped away, and
grew doleful as he remembered how few of them now remained.

Then, when September was a week or so old, he climbed the Trwyn in order
to take his good-bye look at Llanyglo.

A straggling row of cottages, a few paths over the sandhills, three
Chapels, a school, and a few scattered farms: the rest, mountains, sea,
and air. The tide was creaming over the short thumb of a jetty, and the
herd of small black cows was patrolling the beach. Morgan's cottage,
Roberts's cottage, their own cottage, not more than a dozen other
cottages; and then Howell Gruffydd's shop: already the place was full of
memories for John Willie Garden. That wide pool in the sands that
reflected the sky had not been there a fortnight before--for the sea had
now lost its summer look, and it changed the configuration of the shore
at night. A puff of low-blown smoke showed where Dafydd Dafis was giving
a boat a coat of tar. There was the small crack of a gun--John Willie's
friend was shooting rabbits. On the top of Mrs. Roberts's chimney a new
flat stone had been placed, and a new staple for the shutter had been
driven into the wall. John Willie had still no stockings on, but he was
sensible now of the wind on his legs. They were as brown as rope. His
hands too were brown and grimy, and smelt pleasant. That morning he had
been helping the men to get in the winter peat....

So he watched, and at tea-time he descended; but already he was making
up the exultant tales he would tell the boys of his form, of the
spanking place where his father had taken a cottage and might presently
be building a house. He would boast over them in the Welsh words he had
learned, and triumph no end that they did not understand him. Only to a
few of his special friends would he confide the meanings of his
expressions in English.

Three days later he was doing even so, at Pannal School, near Harrogate,
in Yorkshire.

Mr. Garden came to Llanyglo once more, bringing a doctor with him this
time in order that Minetta's health might be authoritatively reported
upon, and again he departed. The cottages, which in summer had been
places to live outside of, began to have a comfortable look as the
afternoons drew in. Minetta wore her boots and stockings again now, and
her maroon serge frock with the white collar, and Mrs. Garden put her
tricycle away in the little lean-to behind the house, smothering the
bright parts with vaseline and covering it up with sacking. The
last--the very last--piece of match-board had been nailed in its place,
and all had been pale oak-varnished, so that the sheen of the fire could
be seen in the walls. The glowing peats were reflected too, in still red
spots, in the black glass rolling-pin, the brass candlesticks, the
windows of the dolls' house, the plates and lustre jugs, and the china
sitting hen where they kept the eggs. The wind began to hoot in the
throat of the chimney. Mrs. Garden's ears became accustomed to the
louder falling of the breakers; soon the cessation of this noise would
have been the arresting thing. October wore on. There was very little
fishing now. Each of the three Chapels had a week-night service, and
nearly everybody went to all three. Twice the schoolroom was thrown open
for concerts; but most of the singing took place in the kitchen.
Sometimes, on the edge of the dark, a fantastic irregular shape would be
seen, rising and dipping and lurching as it approached over the
sandhills; it was Dafydd Dafis, carrying on his back the wooden case
that contained his harp. Save for these infrequent diversions, the
winter was a dead time at Llanyglo. The hamlet rolled itself up and
hibernated. Mrs. Garden sometimes sighed for a Halle concert, or a
dance, or "a few friends in the evening," but she bore up for the sake
of the dry and sunny and exhilarating days and the good they did
Minetta. Minetta got out her dolls, their house, and the Compendium Box
of Games; and she and Gwladys Roberts and Morwenna Morgan and Mary
Price, with the oil lamp on the table and the firelight glowing low on
the ceiling, had spring-cleanings of the mimic dwelling (to which the
Welsh children did not take with any great heartiness), and epidemics
among the dolls (which were more interesting), and once a funeral (to
which they gave themselves rapturously). They played Snap and Fishponds,
and then Minetta set about the making of a picture screen, with coloured
figures which she cut from the _Queen_ and _Lady's Pictorial_ and plain
ones which she coloured with her paint-box.

At Christmas Mr. Garden and John Willie came down, the former for a few
days, John Willie for a fortnight. One of his days Mr. Garden spent in a
visit to Squire Wynne, who lived at the Plas, three miles away. The sea
was some days as black as iron, on others as white as ash with the
tumult of the wind. There was snow on the mountains, but little at
Llanyglo. Even John Willie did not want to bathe. In the daytime he
tried to rig up a sail on his mother's tricycle, so that he might coast
along the two miles of beach before the wind; at night he often walked
down to the edge of the dimly creaming water, and stood looking out into
the blackness, or else at the Trwyn Light, two reds and a white.

Squire Wynne, the former owner of the Royal Hotel shandrydan, was the
ground landlord of Llanyglo, and the reason of Edward Garden's Christmas
call on him was--still quite simply and on Minetta's account--that he
had decided to build and wanted certain land to build on. But this was
not quite the simple matter it might have appeared to be. With this,
that, and the other, the Squire floundered in a morass of mortgages,
and, for the scraping together of his interest money, could scarce have
re-papered the dilapidated walls of the Plas dining-room. He had other
property also, thirty miles down the coast, which he had never the heart
to go and see. It was there that the family fortunes had been sunk. A
score of broken shaft-chimneys and heaps of fallen masonry on a
promontory were all he had to show for the good Wynne money--these, and
a deed-box full of scrip and warrants which you could have had for the
price of the stamps on them. For that remote volcanic waste had been a
happy hunting-ground for the prospectus-monger with hopeful views on
paying quantities, and the Squire had granted more concessions than he
could count. It was to be presumed that somebody had made money out of
the concessions, if not out of the mines themselves. The last enterprise
had been manganese.

"Let me pour you out a glass of port first; it's the only thing I have
that hasn't some sort of a charge on it," said the Squire. He was a
heavy man of near sixty, the owner of a family pew in Porth Neigr
Church, a stickler for rainbowing, and, in a feckless sort of way,
something of an antiquary. His adherence to the three-bottle habit
helped to make the fortunes of several quacks in our own day, who
advertise infallible cures for the neuritis he and his kind have
bequeathed to their descendants. The only sign the Squire himself showed
of this was a slightly ochreous eye.--Then, when he had poured out the
port, "It's you who have the money nowadays," he said, meaning by "you"
Gladstonian Liberals. "Look at this ceiling of mine. There isn't a
ceiling in Wales with a finer coffering, but look at the state it's
in!--And that chandelier! It holds forty candles, but _I_ can't afford
'em! This is what _I_ use." He pointed to his father's old reservoir
colza lamp on the table.--"And I'll show you the staircase presently....
Sell? It won't make sixpence difference to me one way or the other.
Which piece is it you want?"

Mr. Garden told him.

"Well, you'd better see my man about it. Sheard, Porth Neigr, next to
the corn-chandler's shop. Or I'll see him if you like. But if we do come
to terms I should like to give you a piece of advice."

"What is that?" Edward Garden asked.

"I suppose you're not Welsh by any chance?"

"No."

"Well, I'm half Welsh, and things jog on well enough as long as I'm
alive. There are all sorts of questions that simply don't arise. But
they're a queer people here, and when you get to the bottom of it,
practically the question of landowning resolves itself into keeping on
the right side of Dafydd Dafis, if you see what I mean." It was not
necessary to tell Edward Garden that, but he begged the Squire to go on.

"For instance," the Squire continued, "I've a couple of mortgages
foreclosing any time now--Sheard will tell you--I don't even know who
the mortgagees are. But if they're Welsh, so much the better for them. I
mean if they introduce changes, or go at things like a bull at a gate,
they'll wish I'd gone on paying them interest. A smile does more than a
smack here. If they inclose, for example----"

"Ah, this new Act----"

"Or any other Act There was a case at that No Man's Land of mine over
there----" The Squire jerked his head in the direction of the shafts
where the family fortunes had been sunk. "An Englishman came, and began
to fence, and there was a Dafydd Dafis sort of fellow there, and this
man Rodgers thought that because he wore strings round the knees of his
corduroys he wasn't anybody of consequence ... and there you are. The
only thing Edward the First could do with the bards was to destroy
them, and they're the same breed yet.--So that's my advice. For the
rest, you'd better see Sheard. Have another glass of port."

And, after he had been shown the magnificent ruin of a staircase, and
had noted without showing the grass on the Squire's paths and the moss
in the Squire's grass, Edward Garden thanked the Squire for his advice
and took his leave. He was able to come to terms with Sheard, and in the
following spring a new house began to go up in Llanyglo.

The site Edward Garden had selected for his house lay a little way
behind the row of cottages, over the thatches of which it looked out to
the sea. Rock cropped up there, amid a waste of bents and potentilla and
sea-thrift and thyme, and a rill slipped over moss and, a little further
on, disappeared into the sand, to emerge again down by the shore. From a
stone quarry on the Porth Neigr road stone was still being got for the
extension of Porth Neigr itself; and it would actually be nearer to
bring it to Llanyglo. Sheard saw to that also, and Edward Garden, taking
the Squire's advice, put Dafydd Dafis, match-boarder, in charge of the
work. It would take time, but it would save time. And, so long as it was
understood that it was Dafydd Dafis who might say to this man "Come,"
and he came, and to the other "Go," and he went, Edward Garden did not
anticipate difficulties did he wish, later, to "stiffen" his supply of
labour by importing a plumber, or a mason, or a carpenter or two from
Manchester.

So, in the spring, the rock was cleared and chisels began to clink; and
John Willie Garden, away at school in Pannal, could scarce contain
himself until the summer holidays should come. He sent, by letter, the
most peremptory specifications. His room was to be thus and thus, and
not otherwise. The letters also contained complaints to his mother that
his health was seriously impaired by arduous study; so was the health of
his friend Percy Briggs: indeed, all the fellows were remarking how
greatly in need of a change of air he and Percy seemed. Mrs. Garden's
chief preoccupation was that the new house should have water upstairs
and a cupboard at every turn.

And as that was the first building of their own that the folk of
Llanyglo had ever seen, its progress became their daily talk. The
farmers came from inland to look at it, and, as the weather grew milder,
the fishermen no longer smoked of an evening under the shelter of their
boats down by the jetty, but instead made a kind of club-house of the
triangular pile of floor-boards that the Porth Neigr timber merchant
presently delivered. They climbed inside this slatted prism, hung the
interstices with sacking as a protection from the wind, and smoked and
talked, while the stars peeped down on them. They talked of progress and
innovation, and of how little they had ever thought they would live to
see such a change as this on the face of their sandhills.

"But it will not be as big as the Plas, whatever," one of them would
remark, not so much as belittling Edward Garden's new house as in order
to correct a certain tendency to wild and disproportionate talk. Indeed,
they were proud of Llanyglo's growth. Only the building of another
chapel could have made them prouder.

"Aw-w-w, William Morgan, h-what a way to talk!" another would reply.
"You talk like a great simpleton! You say next it is not so big as the
railway station at Porth Neigr! Indeed, the Plas is big-ger, but it is
di-lap-i-date, a pit-ty to see, and the staircase--aw-w-w dear! They do
say Squire Wynne he go in lit-tle bedroom, not to fall through the
floor!"

"And the stables is lock up, all but one stall, and you shan't find a
handful of corn there, no, not more than will feed one horse!"

"There was sixteen horses there----"

"And the Squire, he hunt----"

"It all go to that Abercelyn in the mines--thousands of pounds!----"

"There is land here to build stables if Mr. Garden wiss----"

"Indeed, Hugh Roberts, if he build any more we be bigger than Porth
Neigr, whatever!----"

And this hyperbole always raised a laugh. Porth Neigr, besides being the
head of the railway, had a market place, two banks, a stone quay, a
court house, and an English Church.

The house rose higher and higher, and by the time John Willie Garden
came again, in July, it had reached the first floor. Long rows of roof
slates were stacked under a temporary shed, and, as if he had not had
lessons enough in the school by the Baptist Chapel, Eesaac Oliver
Gruffydd did multiplication sums and Welsh-English exercises upon them.
John Willie's eyes danced when they saw the scaffolding and ladders. He
was six rungs up a ladder before you could have turned round. He was up
that ladder and down a second and up a third almost as quickly, nor did
he take breath until, short of swarming up the scaffold-poles, he had
stood on the topmost point of the structure. Then, with the air of
something accomplished, he condescended to the level ground again.

Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of the farms and
cottages, to the tenants of which they were bound by ties of
consanguinity; the others put up at the little alehouse half a mile out
on the Porth Neigr road, which served also as a shop for the outlying
farms. Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth near the
mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. John Willie dined daily
with them. Never was such importance as that with which he came nigh to
bursting. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the Trwyn, no longer
called him; here was not only a house going up, but his house. In his
father's absence he could give orders. He became knowing in limes and
mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He strutted about
with a square, setting it carelessly against angles, and derided Eesaac
Oliver and his slates and long-division sums. The eaves-level was
reached; they began to get the roof-timbers up; the sandhills resounded
with hammering and sawing; and the upper part of the house began to
resemble a toast-rack against the sky. Only one stone remained to be set
in position. This was the gable-stone with "E. G., 1882" upon it. John
Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which he ciphered would
soon be required.

As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Already three men, a
plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, had been down from Manchester, and
fresh supplies of timber--sections of staircase and so on--had come in
carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all at once the work
came to a sudden stop--how that toast-rack stood against the sky for
another year without a slate upon it--and how Edward Garden, away in
Manchester, had once more to accept the line of least resistance, while
his son loitered disconsolately about the unfinished building until
something even more exciting claimed his interest--to tell these things
another chapter had better be begun.




III

THE MINDER


The land on which, as Squire Wynne had told Edward Garden, other
mortgages were being foreclosed, began a furlong or so behind the
unfinished house, reaching to and including one of the farms--Fotty,
John Pritchard's. It formed a three-hundred-yards-wide strip of bents
and rough grazing, which spread out inland with Fotty in the middle of
its base. The mortgagee was Squire Wynne's Liverpool wine-merchant, and
he had accepted the mortgage partly because he did not wish to be at
cross-purposes with such of Squire Wynne's friends as were good
customers of his, and partly because he was not very likely to get
anything else in settlement of a longish account. This account had been
reckoned off the sum advanced, which, besides, was based on a low
valuation; and, not wanting the land himself, he was ready enough to
sell to any optimist who did.

The land remained in the possession of the wine-merchant for exactly
eleven weeks. At the end of that time he had found his optimist in the
person of Terry Armfield.

And who was Terry Armfield, that his affairs should thus become mixed up
with those of Llanyglo?

Well, the name of one of his grandfathers, which need not be mentioned,
is to be found, in certain circumstances of notoriety, in Gomer
Williams's _History of the Liverpool Privateers_; and that of his
father is associated with the bright story of the tea-clippers. Thus a
certain adventurousness in Terry may perhaps be accounted for. But
whence the rest of him derived was a mystery. Belated young Tractarians
who burn incense in their monastic bedrooms were no more common in
Liverpool then than they are to-day. In appearance, Terry was an
ill-adjusted compromise between an ascetic and a young man about town.
He was tall and of a buoyant movement, excellently dressed, had burning
and ecstatic brown eyes, and was possessed of an extraordinary power of
impressing people as long as, and even a little longer than, he was
actually in their presence. This was all very well as long as he spoke
only of pictures that this self-made merchant ought to buy, or of books
without which some shipper's newly formed library would be incomplete.
He really knew a little about these things, as also he did about
architecture and engravings, vestments and Ritualism and furniture. The
trouble began when he went beyond them. Wealthy business men, looking up
as Terry lounged into their offices, would put up their hands
defensively, cry, "It's no good, Terry--I won't listen," but would
presently find themselves listening none the less. It was not that Terry
was plausible. Plausible was not the word. He persuaded you only because
he was, for the time being, overwhelmingly persuaded himself. His
capacity for enthusiasm was astonishing. Circumstances having driven him
from his true vocation (the Church) into business, he traded as it were
under Letters of Marque that had had an apostolic blessing.
House-property, leases, patents, picture-exhibitions, concessions, bills
for discount, Irish-harvester agencies, philanthropy on a paying basis,
and a hundred even vaguer values--some idealistic strain in Terry so
moved the dullard-on-the-make that he had a new light on business as a
benison, and on money-making as something nobler than he had supposed.
What such an one commonly lacked, Terry was full and running over with;
and the end of the matter frequently was that it was judged to be worth
a certain amount of risk to be on the side of Terry and the angels.

Of course, Terry ought to have been locked up as a public danger.
Anybody but Terry would have been locked up. But you cannot lock
innocence and rapturous good faith up. Terry, if you had locked him up,
would merely have sent for his crucifix, plunged into fresh scheming,
and would have come out again as running over with piracies and the
humanities as ever.

So Terry Armfield, who hitherto had never heard of Llanyglo and of whom
Llanyglo had never heard, took over Fotty and the strip of land that ran
down to Edward Garden's unfinished house, with, as it happened,
extremely notable results.

For nobody who knew Terry ever supposed that he made purchases of real
estate solely upon his own account. He represented others; and it is
perhaps significant that the nickname by which he was known among the
members of the Syndicate which made use of him was borrowed from the
slang of the "swell mob." He was called "The Minder."

Now the Minder, as you ought not to know, is the gentleman who makes
himself charming to you while the others consult about how much you may
be worth, and how you may most conveniently be made worth less. Often,
like Terry, he himself is not in the real councils of his allies. They
want his looks, his candours, his repute, his address, and in Terry's
case they especially wanted his powers remarkable of persuasion. Until
it should be decided what people were to be persuaded of, Terry minded.

Little did John Pritchard, tenant-farmer of Fotty, dream of the
solicitude with which his farm was regarded by a number of people who
had never seen it and did not want ever to see it. Little did he think
that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon.
Little did he imagine what interest, what benevolence, what affectionate
regard ... or, to put it in plain English, he had no notion whatever
that, instead of having Squire Wynne for a landlord, he was now the
tenant of a set of prospectus-vendors of whom two or three were the same
men who had held those hopeful views on the paying-quantities of
manganese that could be obtained from that other property of Squire
Wynne's, the Abercelyn mines, thirty miles further down the coast.

The Corporation did not insist on manganese or on anything else. On the
contrary, it was accommodating in the extreme. You paid your money and
took your choice what commodity you found on its properties; you could
have had tin, iron, copper, lead, anything you happened to fancy. It
merely wished to be able to show, in case of need, its indefeasible
title to real land, at Llanyglo or anywhere else, but the further from
civilisation the better. It would be safer, and really not much dearer,
to buy Pritchard's farm, than it would be to have to confess in open
Court that the tin or iron or lead shares of which it was trying to
create the value, unfortunately happened to have Pritchard's farm
sitting on the top of them.

"No, we'd better get hold of a bit of real land from somewhere," the
Syndicate had said. "Better have it in a new name too. All Abercelyn
names exempt for three years. Who is there?... What about Armfield?"

All had agreed that Terry would make an excellent Minder.

When, in course of time, the Syndicate first heard from Terry (who heard
it goodness knows where) that "glo" was the Welsh word for "coal," it
was on the point of plumping for coal without further question.

"What more do you want?" it asked itself. "'Glo'--'coal'; there you are.
Place-name. Awful lot in a genuine place-name. Find it on an old map, to
show that we didn't invent it, and the whole thing settles itself.
There's bound to _be_ coal. Sure to be. They didn't call it that for
nothing. All ground's got _some_thing in it. _I_ say coal. On the face
of it. It seems to me Providential. (Shut up, Abercelyn; we're talking
about Llanyglo now.) ... Who says coal, then?" ...

But Llanyglo was not destined to be a colliery village. Latticed
shaft-heads were not to rise under the Trwyn, nor men to descend in
cages to the galleries deep under the sandhills. Edward Garden's house
was not to become a mine-manager's residence, nor a coal-quay to be
constructed where the wooden jetty stuck out like a stumpy thumb into
the sea.--Nevertheless, it almost looked at one time as if it might have
been so.

The Syndicate's registered offices were within a hundred yards of Lime
Street Station, and Terry, looking forth from an upper window, could see
the august portico of St. George's Hall and the cabs and steam-trams
running to and fro past it. He sat day by day at a high sloping desk,
perched on a tall stool. A small pile of letters lay by his side,
weighted with a surveyor's reel-tape, and on a shelf above the press
with the dumb-bell arm, thrust among directories and files, were _Stones
of Venice_ and _The Christian Year_. There was a green cardboard shade
on the double-elbowed gas-bracket, and on the wall near it hung an
ebony-edged T-square and a number of French curves. There was a second
stool for callers, and in a small outer office a youth of sixteen read
_The Boys of London and New York_ and chewed root-liquorice. The place
was shabby, as befitted a hole-in-corner enterprise, but Terry saw not
that shabbiness. He had splendour enough in his own visions. He did not
look very busy, but he was. A dozen inspired and half-baked schemes
fermented in his head, and besides these, he was minding Llanyglo--the
thyme and wild pansies and butterflies of its sandhills, the glaucous
blue sea-holly of its shore, its heathery Trwyn, its coal or what-not
underfoot, and its crystal air overhead--especially its crystal air
overhead....




IV

"DIM SAESNEG"


On the forenoon of that day on which work on Edward Garden's house
suddenly ceased, Dafydd Dafis, sitting astride of a coping, was singing
as he drove heavy cut nails into a beam. His song was martial, and it
almost made his joinering warlike. The burden of it was that Cambria's
foes (here a bang with the hammer) should fall beneath the sword
(another bang) as the pine falls when the levin (bang) flashes from the
cloud that hides the head of Arenig (bang, and a nail well home). John
Willie Garden, who had heard somewhere that coins of the current mintage
were placed in cavities in foundation stones, was chipping a hollow in
the bedding of the "E.G." stone for the reception of a well-brightened
sixpence and a document in his own handwriting, that should tell future
ages how one John Willie Garden had lived and had done thus and thus.
The sun was hot; the new timbers were as bright as John Willie's own
primrose-coloured hair against the intense blue; and the workmen below
seemed to stand on their shadows as lead soldiers stand on their little
bases of metal. John Willie finished his cavity, and then clambered up
to the ridge-tree. There, putting his hands behind his head, he lay on
his back, his dangling legs balancing him below. He blinked up at the
sky, and from time to time called across to Dafydd Dafis, "Peth a elwir
(whatever the English word might be) yn Cymraeg, Dafydd?" Then Dafydd
would give him the Welsh, and he would practise it softly.

It was just on the stroke of midday when Dafydd abruptly broke off his
singing in the middle of a word. John Willie, blinking up at the blue,
waited for him to resume; as he did not do so, John Willie turned his
head. Dafydd was looking away over the sandhills in the direction of
John Pritchard's farm.

John Willie sat up.

"Who is it?" he asked.

Dafydd continued to look under his hand.--"Indeed, it look like Mr.
Sheard," he muttered, "but he have strangers with him. It is Mr.
Sheard's carr-adge, whatever.... Hugh Roberts!" He called to the men
down below, who were making ready for their midday meal. He said
something in Welsh to them, and they too looked.

Mr. Sheard's governess-cart was drawn up by the earth-wall half a mile
away, and from it three figures had descended. They climbed over the
wall and began to cross the sandhills. One of them walked slowly and
somewhat after the manner of a clock-work toy, as if he was pacing a
distance; and another, after looking this way and that about him, moved
off to the right, apparently also pacing. He stopped and held up his
hand, and then returned, laying out along the ground as he went,
something that made a little glitter in the sun. They came together
again, and seemed to confer. Then over the earth-wall John Pritchard
climbed, and William Sheard went to meet him. After that they all
pointed, in various directions.

Dafydd Dafis, from the top of the pale yellow toast-rack, called
something else in Welsh, too quick for John Willie to hear. Then he
gazed again. Something else was coming along the Porth Neigr road.
Dafydd, who had the eyes of a river-poacher, knew both the cart and the
two men who rode on the load. It drew nearer. Sheard and the two men
seemed to be explaining something to John Pritchard. After a time John
Pritchard walked away.

Dafydd Dafis descended from the roof, followed by John Willie Garden. He
had put his hammer into his pocket; his little heap of cut nails
remained on the coping. The men had gathered into a cluster, but none
went over the sandhills to see what was happening.

Then a frequently repeated word struck John Willie's ear. He turned to
Dafydd Dafis.

"Peth a elwir 'adwydd' yn Saesneg, Dafydd?" he asked.

Dafydd Dafis looked as if he had never sung in his life.

"Post--hedgestake," he replied.

Slowly they got out their dinner.

As they did so Howell Gruffydd came up from the beach. Formerly, he had
rebuked Eesaac Oliver for speaking Welsh in the presence of those who
did not understand it; now, John Willie Garden's presence was entirely
disregarded. He did not understand six words of the low, rapid
conversation.

Then in the middle of it a light sound came over the sandhills, and the
talk suddenly ceased. They waited. The sound came again.

Hedgestakes were being flung from the cart down by the side of the road.

The workmen continued to sit after dinner, but not a ladder was mounted
again that day.

John Pritchard was big and sickly and consumptive, and his farm kitchen
was also the Llanyglo Post Office. There John Willie went at six
o'clock that evening to post a letter for his mother. Nominally, John's
mother, ancient Mrs. Pritchard, whom Dafydd Dafis so greatly loved, was
the postmistress, but actually Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress,
did most of the work. She was sealing the letter-bag from a saucer of
melted wax when John Willie entered. The postman's cart waited at the
door, and beyond it, past the gate, could be seen the hedgestakes that
had been shot down on the opposite side of the road. The postman was
explaining something to John Pritchard, and Dafydd Dafis and his
labourers listened in silence. In her chair by the fire sat ancient Mrs.
Pritchard, seeming old as the Dinas itself, her face a skull with a
membrane stretched over it, a black gophered snood surrounding it, her
hands anatomies, and her mouth from time to time making a sort of weak
baa-ing.

Of the hushed and rapid conversation at the door, John Willie caught
this time a phrase or two he understood. "Wait and see, whatever," he
heard them say; "let them drive them in ... adwydd ... perhaps it be on
Thursday ... Saesneg...." He approached the group.

"Peth a elwir----" he began.

But the men who formerly had made much of him now took no notice of him
at all.

The next day two strangers from Porth Neigr appeared at Llanyglo, and
began to stake out and to enclose a belt of land that extended, roughly,
from the Porth Neigr road on both sides of John Pritchard's farm nearly
as far as Edward Garden's house. John Willie watched these two men at
work with their pawls, measuring and driving, but the curious thing was
that nobody else did so. Save for the Porth Neigr men, the blue and
sulphur butterflies and the rabbits, the sandhills were extraordinarily
deserted. John Willie wandered here and there in search of somebody to
talk to, and by and by found himself in Howell Gruffydd's shop. The
grocer showed his false teeth in a smile, and then continued to weigh
sugar.

"Well, John Willie Garden, can you say 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyll----' yet?"
he asked, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the bright scoop in his hand.

"Where's everybody?" John Willie demanded.

"You look for Eesaac Oliver?" Howell asked. "He go errand for me, to the
lighthouse. You meet him coming back if you go."

"Where are all the men?" John Willie demanded again, and Howell made a
quick and mocking gesture.

"Indeed, one hide behind that cur-tain--quick, look see!... Ha, ha, ha!"
he laughed when John Willie involuntarily turned in the direction in
which he had pointed. "I cat-ss you that time, John Willie Garden! You
think there's a man behind that lit-tle cur-tain, hardly so big as my
apron! Your sister, she s'arper than that, whatever!... You go find
Eesaac Oliver. He fetch eggs from the lighthouse. Perhaps you meet all
the men there too----"

And that was as much as John Willie could get out of him.

It was plain that something extraordinary was toward. It was a habit of
John Willie Garden's to look in at Pritchard's farm of an evening, and
there to pass the news with John Pritchard and to watch his ancient
mother, bent doublefold over her Bible, running a rush-light along line
after line so close to the page that the book was scored across with
bars of smoky brown. He went as usual that evening. But he had hardly
opened the door when it was closed again upon him. "We go to bed," said
John Pritchard, and packed John Willie off without his customary "Nos
da."

But John Willie knew that they were not going to bed. The door had not
been closed so quickly but that he had seen a dozen men crowding the
kitchen, and Dafydd Dafis's eyes, hollower than ever in the light of the
candle that stood at his elbow, with a sentimental and knife-like gleam
in them as they turned.

The next morning, every stake that those two Porth Neigr men had driven
in had been uprooted again, and a board with "Rhybudd" on it lay down
the beach, already lapped by the rising tide.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was once told to the writer of _The Visitors' Sixpenny Guide to
Llanyglo and Neighbourhood_--a young man with so little regard for his
bread and butter that he made a labour of love of a job that brought him
in exactly ten pounds--it was once told to this over-conscientious
author, by a man who had known Squire Wynne very well, that the Squire,
finding himself one day in Liverpool, and taking a walk to the docks
with an acquaintance in the Royal Engineers, pointed down the Mersey
past New Brighton, and said, "Do you know, I've sometimes had the idea
that if this country was ever invaded the enemy would come up
there?"--"But surely," exclaimed his friend, "it's a difficult piece of
navigation?"--"Yes," the Squire replied, "but half the pilots are
Welshmen."

No doubt the Squire said it without accepting too much responsibility
for it. No doubt, too, he would not have allowed anybody else to suggest
that Wales might slyly open a back-door into England. But that there was
something, much or little, in it, the famous Llanyglo Inclosures
Dispute, that now began, lasted off and on for three years, and then
came to an end in as fantastic a manner as you could conceive, seemed to
show.

For that dispute would not have been so obstinate and envenomed had it
been simply a question of grazing, turbary, and right-of-way. True,
there might still have been the fence-destruction and gate-burning that
presently filled John Willie Garden's heart with a fearful joy; but--and
this is what made the difference--Owen Glyndwr and his triumph over
Mortimer would not have been dragged in, nor Taliesin and his prophecy,
nor Howell Dda, nor Gruffydd ap Rhys, nor Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, nor a
hundred other grey and valiant and unforgotten ghosts of princes and
saints and bards whose names string (as it were) all Wales, from
Braich-y-Pwll to St. David's Head, making of it one Western Harp in
which the wind of sentiment is never still.

For these fences on the Llanyglo sandhills were not fences--they were
Saxon fences. They were not notice-boards and gates--they were the
insulting tokens of invasion and rapine and defeat. The Welshman says of
himself that he is able to keep only that which he has lost, and, in
Dafydd Dafis's view of it, at all events, not a piratical Liverpool
Syndicate, but a marauding Saesneg king had come again.

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 nobody 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 shell 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 lustre-ware, there on a chair knob, 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 repetition.
Had it been _God 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 foreshore 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, assemblies 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 transmuted 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 principal 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 seashore, they had the beauty of a thing that
has been ardently desired, and long suffered for, and passionately
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
circumstances. The first circumstance 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 noble 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 glass.

"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 damned 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 muffled 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 muffling 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 wass tell me you go to bed," he whispered. "You wass 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 shaggy 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 accumulation 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 God'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 glasses 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 assumed 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 glasses 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 glass 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
prickers:

"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."

"He com' to fetch a pair o' boots to mend."

"Ay."

"Think ye----" again the look as of prickers, "--think ye there wor
owt?"

"How, owt?"

"'At he wanted to know what time it wor, or owt?"

"There wor t' clock."

"Ay...."

There were minutes of silence this time. Evidently the younger brother
occupied them by taking, in thought, a considerable journey. He spoke as
if in objection to some far-fetched surmise.

"But they'd ha' to be set forrard again," he grunted.

"Ay, I'm bothered wi' that," the elder admitted, "--wi'out t' Missis
herself----"

"Aw!... Think ye?..."

They knocked for two more cups of tea.

"And we've been swearing to ten o'clock."

"So ye think there wor summat?"

"I cannot think t' lad wor telling 'em lies," said the alder-buyer.

This time they both peered reflectively at the auction announcement on
the wall, smoking and spitting as they peered.




V

THE HAFOD UNOS


"Then," said Terry's Syndicate, or such of its members as lounged in
Terry's office, looking down on the Lime Street and St. George's Hall
pavements as if they had been so many fishermen selecting a likely spot
for the casting of a fly, "what about going back to the old idea--coal?"

"Hm!----" (a very dubious "Hm!").--"Far better have another shot at
manganese--especially after what's happened----"

What had happened had started remotely enough from Llanyglo. It had
started, to be exact, in the Balkans. Much manganese comes from the
Balkans; a war there had suddenly made the supply a mere trickle, so
that prices had whooped up; and--wonder of wonders--those old workings
of Squire Wynne's, farther along the coast, actually looked like paying.
Terry's Company, unhappily, had just transferred its rights, and was
rather sore about it.

"Wouldn't that be a little too--timely?" a timid member suggested.

"Not if you--er--put it properly. It's only thirty miles away----" The
speaker paused from delicacy. "From the real manganese" was understood.

"Might send a geologist down--one we could trust----"

A very young member of the Syndicate hazarded a remark.--"But wouldn't
burnt mine-works come dearer than burnt fences?"

They smiled indulgently at him. He was merely suffering from a slight
confusion of ideas. Nobody had said anything about mine-works. Then they
turned to Terry.

"What do you say, Armfield?" ...

It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been
no further fence-burning, but the Member for the constituency had been
memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom,
and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood.
Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one
another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like
tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence
on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive
inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to
reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the
sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft
they would make.

"The whole thing looks like being a damned bad spec," the Syndicate
grumbled.

That opinion seemed to be gaming strength.

There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn
and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non
dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a
total loss.

Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo.

The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest
sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one,
with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up
behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact
remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its
eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was
this:

With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry
sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's
last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the
little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still
awaiting its sixpence--with all this arrested as life and growth and
motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had
gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it
now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming
out of its chimney.

       *       *       *       *       *

That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of the
_Sixpenny Guide_ the Squire's remark about invasion _via_ the Mersey,
told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.

"You know what the words mean," he said. "Strictly speaking, it's the
summer-house--pavilion--shelter--of a night. The essentials are that it
must be built on common land, and in a single night. Then they can't
eject you. At least that's the idea. Don't ask me how it stands in Law.
It may be a kind of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have
no standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither here nor
there. They have their notions about it, and those at any rate are
immemorial. Look here: you're pottering about this country just now;
just count how many houses you find with the name 'Hafod Unos.' You'll
find quite a lot. There's a very big one Bangor way, that probably took
some years to build, but probably one of these places was its
foundation.... And a house 'within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak,
means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. Cook your breakfast
there, and--well, after that you're a sort of tolerated freeholder. It
might be worth putting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a
footnote, though, that the 'f' in 'hafod' is a 'v,' and 'unos' is
pronounced 'innos.' ... Not at all; you're welcome to any help I can
give you----"

       *       *       *       *       *

Llanyglo, snugly in bed, had heard the sounds across the sandhills
during the night, but they had been set down to the newest development
of the fencing dispute. This development was that, a week or so before,
several cartloads of undressed stone had been shot down by the side of
the sandy gully that ran from Pritchard's gap down to the shore. And
Llanyglo had smiled. Aha! They were going to build a walled enclosure,
were they? Something that wouldn't burn, whatever? Well, well, if it
amused them to build walls on winter nights when everybody else was warm
in bed, they might. They would only lose their labour in the end. Mr.
Tudor Williams, of Ponteglwys, was going to ask a question in the House
of Commons, yes, and he was coming down to speak at the Chapel and to
see for himself. It was a cold night for building walls, whatever----

So they stayed in bed, and only the revolving Trwyn light, two reds and
a white, saw the planting of the thorn in Llanyglo's side.

The two Kerrs did not do it alone. It took four of them--"a Kerr to each
corner," as Howell Gruffydd afterwards said. The two other brothers had
been sent for from Ratchet, where one of them worked in an asbestos
factory and the other was a builder's labourer; and if these imported
ones lacked that spur of conviction that their watches had been tampered
with by tricky Welshmen, they had another and a double incentive--the
sense of family unity, and of the honour of the gradeliest county on
earth, Lancashire. No Kerr, no lad from Lancashire whomsoever, could
thole to be bested by a Welshman. Lancashire was the place for which
Johnnie Briggs played cricket, the place where the Waterloo Cup Meeting
was held. They danced in clogs there, clogs with soles of Welsh alder,
and laaked at quoits and knurr and spell, and knew a bit about homing
pigeons, not to speak of cocks, the game kind. They were lads, and
right, in Lancashire.--Wales? Wales produced nothing but alders and oats
and goats and Chapels.

The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and it was part of
the miscellaneous general information he had picked up on his
alder-prospecting through Merionethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon
and Denbigh and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo out of
its own mouth. They threw down fences on the grounds that the land was
common land; very well, if it was common, as they claimed, it was a
proper site for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander;
and merely as a poke in the eye for watch-tinkering Welshmen, and a
vindication of Lancashire's superior wit and malice, it would be worth a
night's work to see their faces in the morning.

So to work in the dark the four brothers got.

They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo earth, plotted it
out with stakes and string, and then began to dig. The night was
moonless, and they worked by the light of four lanterns. These
illumined little enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows
they cast hardly began before they were lost in the darkness again.
Knitting-needles of light came and went again on the polished handles of
the rising and falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a
spirit passed high overhead in the night, the intermittent Trwyn beam
swung--red, red, white--red, red, white----

They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic rock under the Llanyglo
sand; and they had not set up fences half a dozen times without having a
notion where it was.

"Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer grunted as his spade gave a
clink and a jump in his hand. "I thowt it wadn't be far off.--Is t'
barril there, Tommy?"

Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns cast a short
parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a nine-gallon barrel of beer.

"Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spitting on his hands and
driving in his spade again.

Their house already existed, complete in their practical heads, before
ever a spade was lifted. They had seen through its entire anatomy in the
taproom of the Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties.
Nothing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's way. Even
as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a corner of their plan apiece and
dry-walled, all save Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart,
fetching stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead softness of
the sand. For the general design Ned's word was law; for details, each
used his own gumption. They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted,
and worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway Delyn, and Orion
balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, they had a serviceable first course
laid. Then they put on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and
they perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped the barrel.
They drank, threw off their coats again, and set to work once more.

"Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his brother elaborating
the stark essential plan that had been agreed upon in the taproom of the
Station Hotel. "T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof; we haven't time to
paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window."

By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular angles of masonry,
shoulder-high, as rough as you please, but true by plumb and level. This
might be a joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. Only two
of the brothers now walled, for they had only two ladders; Sam helped
Tom to lift and carry beams.

By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, but they were the
principal ones, and Ned seemed well content.

"That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfaction. "How's t'
barril going on, Tom?"

"True by t' level yet," Tom replied. "Shall we start on th' bread and
cheese?----"

"Did ye think on to bring some pickled onions?"

"Ay."

"Then we'll ha' we're nooning."

They took their nooning, with Sirius now over Mynedd Mawr, and Orion
soaring like a kite. They took it at their leisure; they were "lads from
a reight place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, not
Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand filled the space within their
four corners, and they lay on their backs on it, smoking, and watching
the red and white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty-mile
spokes, of a wheel that had no circumference but its sweep through the
night. Now and then Sam gave a low chuckle; but Ned smoked, spat, and
was silent, save that he said from time to time, "Did ye number and
letter them chamfers, Harry?" or some similar question. You would have
said they had a month before them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a
surprise to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their watches,
were members one of another.

At half-past three they set to work again. By four Ned had climbed up
above, and was sitting astride a beam with the light of a lantern
shining up on his streaming face.

"Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, "--a bit more--a bit
more--_whoa!_ Tom, that quoin--no, th' one wi' th' bolt--this is th'
chimney end--and get them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th'
letters.... How are ye down there, Harry?"

The mason brother was building the chimney. It was an outside one,
massive as a buttress, and Harry was building it well and truly, for it
was the essential of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the
hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular and beautiful token
that he has made himself an abiding-place on a spot of earth, and
becomes part of that spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him
is to thrust him back again into the bestial state and to make the land
as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, Edward Garden's smoke
should have been the first to add itself to that of the cluster of
humble dwellings between the mountains and the waves that was Llanyglo;
but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llanyglo to-day the
breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore-runner. At half-past four they
were shovelling out the mountain of sand and making the hearth for it.
By six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and faggots he had
carefully hidden away. Harry was filling in the space between the main
beam and the transom of the door; when Tom asked him for a match he
sprang down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof.

"What time is it?" Tom asked.

Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time that night as he
drew out his watch.

"Five past six," he said, and added, with indescribable dryness,
"--unless som'b'dy's been meddling wi' my watch."

"Here goes," said Tommy, striking a match....

They exchanged glances that were near to winks as they watched the
flames. It was their equivalent of a cheer.

The night paled; the Trwyn light went out; and off the headland a seal
disported itself in the icy sea. The day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd
Mawr still remained an awful precipice of ink--the shadow of the morning
bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the waves, and, as if
with light all other faculties awake, folk became conscious of the
crowing of cocks and the falling of the breakers on the shore. Howell
Gruffydd got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot back at
Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his breakfast in his tin and set
out for his day's work--a little reslating of the roof of the Baptist
Chapel.

But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly changed, not only his
direction, but his gait also. He advanced cautiously, skirted certain
mounds of sand that he did not remember to have seen before, and then
as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing again, he returned by
a circuitous route, dropped into a sunken sandy way, and then ran as
fast as his legs would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust
his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and ran to the next
one--or rather to the next but two, for Edward Garden's double cottage
had been locked up since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop
door, and Dafydd called him.

Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the sandhills staring
through a gap at something that lay beyond.

It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then went round to the back
to look at from another point of view. It appeared to consist of a
living-room and a scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of
penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that had been fenced
and unfenced and fenced again. Of roof it had none--for you could hardly
call the three or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under
them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of the walls were
solidly constructed; other parts had been battened up with hedgestakes,
filled in with sods and peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had
an old door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to be
propped up with stones. Over one window-opening hung an old brown coat,
the other frame was empty. A bright glow shone on the rubble within, and
smoke and sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire crackled
loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking bacon. All about the
cavity in the sand lay stones big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of
rope. There was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the air.
A scraping sound was heard, as of somebody cleaning out a pan, and then
came a low "Wouf" and flare of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke.

"Squeeze t' barril, Tom, and see if there's another cup o' tea."

"Nay, we've supped t' lot."

"Blow down t' vent-hole...."

As if those walls vanished again even more quickly than they had sprung
up, Llanyglo could see a picture vividly in its fancy--a picture of a
tilted barrel, with the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole
while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick glass----

Then their vision fled, and they were staring at that unimaginable house
again----

Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through the soft sand in the
direction of the Baptist Chapel.




VI

THE FOOT IN THE DOOR


IT was a Saturday, a day on which the school did not assemble, and the
door of the schoolhouse was locked. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd was sent off
in haste for the key. They waited for him to come back, twenty of them,
men and women, with others hurrying over the sandhills to join them.
Eesaac Oliver ran panting up again, and they entered the schoolhouse.
This was a large, yellow-washed room with beams making triangles
overhead and hot-water pipes running round the walls below. A small
squad of desks stood upright behind, and a number of smaller benches
knelt, as it were, in front of them. These faced the raised desk of Miss
Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress. A yellow chair or two, a couple of
glass-fronted cupboards, a row of hooks for caps and cloaks at the back,
and a harmonium, completed the furniture. A short covered way near Miss
Pritchard's desk gave access to the adjoining Chapel. A door at the side
of this led to the little stone outhouse where the water for the pipes
both of school and Chapel was heated.

Their astonished exclamations had broken out now. As something legendary
and dear and native to their land, it was in their hearts to defend the
Hafod Unos; but for a stranger to set one up!

"Look you, it can-not be legal!" exclaimed Hugh Morgan, a little tubby
man with semicircular brows and a round bald forehead. "It iss not even
finiss; there iss holes in the walls so-a big I put my head through
them! And that iss not a roof--it iss only rick-covers----"

"It is wonderful how they did it, whatever!" said little restless-eyed
Mrs. Gruffydd. Those predatory eyes in Blodwen Gruffydd's pale face
could see a sixpence a mile away, and, having seen it, would not leave
it again until it had been safely dropped through the slot of the
money-box into which the savings for Eesaac Oliver's education went.
Eesaac Oliver was not to serve packets of tea and pennyworths of
bicarbonate of soda over a grocer's counter. He was to go to Aberystwith
College, and to become a preacher, and wear a black chip straw hat.

Howell Gruffydd, who had been as thunderstruck as the rest of them, now
affected to take a jocular view of the matter.

"De-ar me, first Mr. Garden's house, and now Ty Kerr! Well, it make
trade. Indeed, I need a bigger s'op presently--I think I start a Limited
Company----"

But big consumptive John Pritchard spoke in deep tones. More vividly
than any of them, John had seen, as if in a camera obscura, that vision
of a Kerr blowing into the vent-hole of a barrel, while another Kerr
anxiously watched the tap.--"We need a bigger public-house, I think," he
said grimly.

"Indeed you are right, John Pritchard," Hugh Morgan struck eagerly in,
the curves of his brows all marred with anxiety. "They sit in the
Sta-tion Hotel Porth Neigr, and do noth-thing but drinking all day--it
set a s'ock-king example, whatever."

"And they call it 'ano-ther cup of tea,'" said a third.

"They very smart ones----"

Again John Pritchard's deep voice came in.--"They're very deep ones."

Little Hugh Morgan spoke excitedly.

"Indeed you are right again, John Pritchard! John Williams Porth Neigr,
he say to me it would not surprise him if that Ned Kerr speak Welss so
well as nobody if he wiss!"

A shocked "_Aw-w-w!_" broke out. "And he say in the Court, 'No Welss!'"

"Tut-tut-tut--de-ar me!"

They were silent for a moment, contemplating this duplicity.

"And there iss four of them now," one resumed. "They send into England
for two more."

"We soon have large population," said Howell Gruffydd again....

John Pritchard had sat down on one of the yellow chairs with his knees a
yard apart. His brows seemed knitted.

"But there is noth-thing for them to do here," he said. "No work, no
wages--only building fences."

"Perhaps they have lot of money. Their bacon smell very good, whatever."

"They finiss their breakfast--I heard them wipe the frying-pan out as
plain as if I see it with my eyes!"

Again John Pritchard's heavy voice: "Finiss their breakfast indeed! They
finiss a whole barrel of beer!"

"And it is right what Hugh Morgan says," another struck in. "That Ned
Kerr, he know Wales as well as I know my two hands! I have let-ter from
my cousin Thomas Thomas in Towyn, and he say they buy lot-t of alders up
the Dysynni two years ago of Mr. Llewelyn Jones of Abergynolwyn, and set
up a hut in the 'ood, and make their clog soles, and pay six-pence a
foot for the trees."

"He set up more than a hut at Llanyglo, whatever!"

"Indeed they do no such thing! The Hafod Unos belong to the old days.
There iss no new Hafod Unos I don't know this how many years!"

"All the old things was new things once, Hugh Morgan."

Then, as if all at once they saw anew that house so magically sprung up
out of the sand, there fell a silence. Howell Gruffydd might make his
jests about taking a larger shop and forming a Limited Company, but the
hard fact remained, that aliens had squatted down at Llanyglo while they
had slept, and, by force or process of law, might be difficult to turn
out again. Howell's jocosity subsided; among the children's forms and
benches they took counsel together; and when, at half-past ten, John
Pritchard's eldest lad came in with the news that one of the Kerrs had
departed along the Porth Neigr road, while the other three kept guard
over what they had won, they drew closer together still, and spoke in
low tones of boycott.

Then suddenly somebody asked what Mr. Tudor Williams of Ponteglwys would
say, and the quick little outburst of "Yes, indeed," "Well said," "Mr.
Tudor Williams have some-thing to say," showed how pertinent the
observation was considered. For Mr. Tudor Williams, the Member, would be
able to tell them, if anybody could, whether the Hafod Unos was
countenanced by the Law, and whether the intruders could be served with
notice to quit. His promised visit now took on an added urgency.

"It is a pit-ty Mr. Williams fall out with Squire Wynne," Hugh Morgan
remarked. "It will be the Squire who will have to give them notice,
whatever."

"They quarrel one day outside the Court at Porth Neigr."

"But indeed, Howell Gruffydd, Mr. Tudor Williams wass in the right--it
was about the Tithes, and the Tithe iss a wick-ked system----"

"Aw-w-w, but the Welss Members they alter all that very soon!"

"But the Squire and the Bis-sop of St. Asaph is great friends----"

"Indeed that Bis-sop of St. Asaph he look at a Chap-pil like as if it
wass not worth his eyesight!"

Dafydd Dafis, who sat on a child's bench, looking moodily at the floor,
had not spoken yet. He gave a quick glance up, and then looked down
again.

"The Church iss a great robber," he muttered within his moustache....

They discussed questions of ecclesiastical polity....

"It iss a great robber," said Dafydd Dafis, again resuming his former
attitude.

Then Howell Gruffydd rose, and one or two others followed his example.
There was the day's work to be done. Soon all moved to the door, but
before going about their businesses they went to take another look at
that astonishing house.

But they looked only from a distance. If they had assumed that the
Kerrs, having worked all night, would now be sleeping, they were wrong.
They could see them, three of them, still busily walling, filling,
shovelling out sand.

"They try to finiss before Sunday," Hugh Morgan said.

But big John Pritchard glared sternly at him.

"They care noth-thing for Sunday, those ones," he said. "That other one
will have gone for more beer." And he added, in solemn tones, "It iss a
den of li-ons!"

The fencing dispute had now sunk into insignificance.

It quickly appeared, even as John Pritchard had said, that the Kerrs
cared nothing for Sunday. At a quarter to ten on the morning of that
day, Howell Gruffydd, in his tight black frock-coat and bowler hat,
passing up the sandy gully on his way to the Methodist Chapel, heard
sounds of carousing. He turned aside to look. The door of the Hafod
stood open, and a second barrel of beer, together with provisions and
some sticks of furniture, had been fetched during the night. Tommy, the
youngest of the Kerrs, was already drunk and singing. The eldest of
them, seeing Howell Gruffydd, gave him an insolently familiar nod, as if
he had as much right to be there as anybody else.

"Cold mornin'," he said. "Are ye coming in to hev' a tot?"

Howell turned away.

After service, Howell encountered John Pritchard. John, too, had heard
that godless levity from afar. Others gathered round them by the gap in
the thymy earth-wall, and John raised his voice on high. It shook with
bitter zeal.

"We hear them in the Chap-pil, in the mid-dle of prayers, singing!" he
cried. "On a Sunday morning they sing; they sing '_Thomas, make Room for
your Uncle_!' I said it was a den of li-ons, but indeed no li-ons ever
behave so s'ock-kingly! They sing '_Thomas, make Room for your Uncle_,'
in the mid-dle of prayers, like if it was out of the belly of hell!"

Dafydd Dafis, whose head for a day and a half had drooped like a wet
head of corn, gave a quick gleaming glance.

"They not build it any more quick than it can be pulled down again," he
said quickly. "They come out of the house sometime to work, I think.
They not gentry with lot of money, whatever."

And that was true. The Kerrs could hardly earn their living by drinking
beer and having continually to mount guard over the house they had made.

"There will be no peace in Llanyglo now till Mr. Tudor Williams has
been."

Dafydd Dafis's head drooped again.

"Indeed we do not need Mr. Tudor Williams for this," he muttered under
his breath.

And the Kerrs themselves? Did they suppose they could plant themselves
thus in the enemy's midst and not meet with hostile entertainment?

For this we may perhaps go once more to the gentleman without whose
friendly help the _Llanyglo Guide_ would have been done quite as well as
it needed to be, and in half the time.

"It's difficult to say, for two reasons," this gentleman said. "In the
first place, the humour of some of these Lancashire fellows is such an
incalculable thing; you never know how far they will carry it, nor how
soon it will end in black eyes and bloody noses. And in the second
place, there was that humanitarian scatterbrain, Armfield. I believe
myself that probably Armfield had already told Ned Kerr that there
_would_ be work presently....

"Of course, you've heard what Armfield's scheme was. The Syndicate had
decided not to rectify any more errors of Providence about the
disposition of coal and manganese; they only wanted to clear out
altogether, leaving somebody else 'holding the baby'--I believe that's
the expression. Their idea was simplicity itself: to buy land at a
shilling and sell it again at ten; but they didn't express it quite so
nakedly. That was where Terry Armfield came in--to dress the enterprise
up and make it attractive. As long as he enabled them to cut their loss
they didn't care what he did with Llanyglo.

"And there was nothing really wrong with the scheme, except that Terry
was twenty years before his time, and naturally had to suffer for it. I
think he called it '_The Thelema Estate Development Company_,' and
nowadays it would be called a Garden City. And if Terry hadn't Edward
Garden's sense of the line of least resistance, you must remember that
he hadn't Edward Garden's 'inside' information either. He had nothing
but that ecstatic power of persuading people. And he did persuade them.
I doubt if half a dozen of the people he sold to ever saw the place. Two
of them did, though, two brothers, in the produce line. They went down,
and came back again, and quietly sold out, keeping strictly to Terry's
representations; and I believe they warned Terry then that if he wasn't
careful he'd be getting into trouble. I asked them what they'd been
thinking of to let themselves be persuaded by a hare-brained enthusiast
like that. They told me it was all very well for me to talk _now_. They
knew perfectly well all the time that it was only one of Terry's dreams
of a better and a brighter world, but they bought for all that, and so
did crowds of others. Terry didn't admit a single difficulty. He talked
about angels and the higher life. He talked about Pugin and the soul's
need for seasons of contemplation and repose. He talked about the air
and the sea and the mountains and the Trwyn, and he made it out to be
Llanyglo's chief merit that it took a whole day to get there.... And so
on. To cut it short, they were to do their own building, but Terry, as
vendor, undertook the rest--laying out certain roads, draining and
lighting them, I believe the building of a sort of public hall, and so
forth. I don't think he said anything about the Chapels.

"And that (to get back where we started from) is probably the reason the
Kerrs stood by."

       *       *       *       *       *

Whether Dafydd Dafis would have watched the Kerrs out of the Hafod, or,
failing that, whether he would have pulled it down over their heads, is
hardly worth debating; for, as it happened, that very Sunday night there
befell something that for the time being had all the effect of a
declared truce between the hamlet and its invaders. Something deeper and
more solemn than the machinations of man took a hand in the making of
Llanyglo. This was the wind. It began to get up at about three o'clock
that afternoon; all day there had been a swell; and Dafydd Dafis and
others, returning from Howell Gruffydd's house (where a second letter to
Mr. Tudor Williams Ponteglwys had been written, as urgent as Eesaac
Oliver's pen could make it), saw all four of the brothers on the roof,
trying to secure the tarpaulin in which the wind volleyed; their
roof-slates were not expected till the following Wednesday. The ground
was a blurr of flying sand; the sea resembled a tossing fleece as far as
the eye could see; and from moment to moment the waves, breaking over
the Trwyn, rose in slow, gigantic fountains, fell again, and then came
the roar. The four men clung like limpets to the roof, crouching until
the worst gusts were past and then resuming their hammering. They were
trying to nail the covering down, using pieces of wood as washers to
prevent the material from ripping.

Suddenly Dafydd Dafis, looking up under his brows, saw Ned Kerr pause
with his hammer lifted and peer out to sea. Then, without moving his
head, Ned put up his hand and appeared to be shouting something to the
others. All four looked, and so did the men of Llanyglo, but from the
ground below they could see nothing.

Then, all in a moment, Ned Kerr gave a scramble and a spring, came down
like a bundle into a mound of soft sand, and was followed tumblingwise
by the others. There was a rip and a crack, and the released tarpaulin
was a hundred yards away, flapping grotesquely over the sandhills. Ned
was up again in an instant, and as he passed Dafydd Dafis at a run he
shouted a single word in Welsh:

"_Llongddrylliad!_"

It was a wreck.

The boats by the short thumb of a jetty had not been used for a week,
and lay high up the beach. Could they have got them through that boiling
of white sea and brown sand there was a towering ridge to be seen
beyond, maned with spray, that rushed forward and burst only to show
another in the same place. No more than one at a time could be seen. The
boats were open boats, and night was coming on. Small wonder there
seemed little to do but pray.

But Ned Kerr shouted another word.--"_Bad!_"

From the top of the Hafod he had seen a ship's boat.

The next moment he and Dafydd Dafis had each a shoulder to Hugh Morgan's
boat, and William Morgan, the three remaining Kerrs, and another man,
were hauling. All save the youngest Kerr continued to tumble aboard as
the boat lifted. He tried to struggle after it, but was overturned, and
they dragged him out and turned him upside down to pour the water out of
him.

They have a lifeboat now at Llanyglo, _The Ratchet_, presented and
maintained by the town of that name; but that night the men of
Lancashire and the men of Llanyglo went out in one of the half-dozen
open boats. They put her into the brown, and a moment later the water
had slipped from under her and she sat down on the sand, with every
plank started. They got ashore again as best they could, and raced for
another boat and more oars. They put out again. They dare not use the
wooden jetty, of which only the beginning could be seen. The first boat
was already matchwood. A sea crawled up the Trwyn almost as far as the
Light. They inspected its ravage the next day. It stood as a record for
many years.

Then the boat passed the brown, and stood out to that pale wall smoking
with spray. The wall came on and broke with a crash that shook the
shore. A woman gave a shrill scream ... then they saw the boat again----

It seemed madness to think that that open boat would be safer out
beyond----

After that, though they watched, they saw nothing.

Then the Trwyn Light opened its eye, two reds and a white. All Llanyglo
was gathered on the beach, and none thought of going to Chapel. Night
fell; the sky became clear as black ice; the dim seas resembled a lair
of white bears at play. Seven o'clock passed, and eight.... Already in
folks' minds the grim thought was born; it might have been worse. They
had dragged Hugh Morgan back as the second boat had pushed off, and
none of the Llanyglo men was married. Whether the three Kerrs were
married or not nobody knew.

Nine o'clock came....

Blodwen Gruffydd saw the return first, if, indeed, that vague speck lost
in the grey combings were they. Again the wave came on, and another
hideous range lifted its grey ridge.... By a miracle, it boiled far away
to right and left, but rolled, a grey-dappled dead weight, under the
boat. Already half a dozen men with a rope were waist-deep in the
water....

Then, as the boat crawled on its oars like an insect, another crest
rose, tilted them so that man fell on man, and a man came out....

They at the rope were swept out by the backwash to meet them....

And after all, they had come back empty-handed. They had seen neither
ship nor boat.

But (and this, in this tale of Llanyglo and of those who made it and
were made by it, is the point), an hour later Dafydd Dafis, opening his
eyes for the first time since he had been hauled out of the water, said
something in Welsh to John Pritchard, who bent over him. Translated it
ran:

"I would not pull that one's house down."

Then he closed his eyes again.

As far as the Hafod Unos was concerned, Mr. Tudor Williams's visit now
seemed superfluous.




VII

THE MEMBER


Ostensibly, Mr. Tudor Williams came to Llanyglo to assist at a Sasiwn,
which is a gathering very much like the Love Feasts of other parts of
the country (indeed, if memory serves, Mr. Wesley gave these assemblies
for prayer and mutual consolation the latter name as far north in Wales
as Builth--but then Mr. Wesley did not speak Welsh). Neither the fencing
dispute nor the question of the Hafod Unos had taken nominal precedence
of this. But Mr. Tudor Williams's visit was also something more. He was
a Member returning to his own constituency--exalted, yet their servant,
familiar with the great ones of the land, yet by their favour. For that
reason they liked him to bring the evidences of his greatness back with
him.

Mr. Tudor Williams did so, and handsomely. He was a small nimble man
with black brows and a ragged silvery moustache, and a very erect and
conscious carriage of the head. He wore a silk hat, a turned-down collar
with a flat black bow, a frockcoat with voluminous lapels of watered
silk, grey trousers, and new black kid gloves. He drove from Porth Neigr
in the carriage that had been lent him by a political supporter, and
alighted at the gap opposite John Pritchard's farm. They would have run
forward to greet him, but a certain awe of his clothes and equipage
combined with their own dignity as makers and unmakers of such as he to
keep them where they stood, in a semicircle across the road.

But if they were at one and the same time a little intimidated and
filled out with pride in him, Mr. Tudor Williams knew no hesitation. He
sprang down from the carriage, grasped John Pritchard by the hand, and
then, not content with that, patted him all up the arm as far as the
shoulder and across the breast with the other hand, as if he conferred
invisible decorations on him. His eyes were moist, but glad greetings
flowed from his tongue, in an accent that would have put the most
diffident speaker of English at his ease.

"Well, John Pritchard! Well, well! Indeed you have not grown any less! A
lit-tle man like me, I hardly reach up to your shoulder! Aw-w-w, you
look splen-did! I was spik-king of you a few days ago to the Member for
Carnarvon Boroughs--but dear me, here am I neglecting the ladies--I tell
you presently--How are you, Mrs. Gruffydd? This young man is never
Eesaac Oliver! Aw-w-w, how he grows! Did you write the let-ter to me,
Eesaac Oliver? That's the style! Education, knowledge--it is a grand
thing!--Now, Dafydd Dafis! And how is the harp? You sing me _Y Gadlys_
by and by:

    '_Mae cynhwrf yn y ceunant,
    Ar derfyn dydd y gad_----'

--dear, dear, you have to go away before you can come home again! There
is nothing like this over there; there is not the sym-pathy; as I was
saying to the Member for Caermarthen, Mr. Hughes Caegwynion, not three,
four days ago, 'You get no sym-pathy from England and the
Englishman'--and indeed you do not.--Here comes Howell Gruffydd,
run-ning (indeed he runs like a deer, Mrs. Gruffydd!).--Now, Howell
Gruffydd, you miss the train if you don't look sharp (he's making so
much money he cannot leave the shop for a min-nit!).--Now, my old friend
William Morgan! How is the rheumatics?--How are you, Hugh?--Is this your
youngest, Mrs. Roberts? Hwhat! Another since! Aw-w-w--and you more like
an elder sister than a mother!... And there is the Trwyn, just the
same----"

He was staying the night with John Pritchard, and the two moved away to
the house, the others following a yard or two behind. Mr. Tudor Williams
advanced to ancient Mrs. Pritchard's chair, took the hand that resembled
a dead bird's foot, and shouted in her ear:

"You see I do not lose a min-nit before I come to see you, Mrs.
Pritchard!" he cried in Welsh. ("Indeed she is a wonderful old
'ooman!)--How many grandchildren have you now, Mrs. Pritchard?" (The old
woman nodded her aged head.) "Great-grandchildren! _No-o-o!_ Think of
that! But I think you all live for ever at Llanyglo. It is not like
London. If I could take bagsfull of this air back with me I make my
for-tune!--Now, Miss Pritchard, I think I must have offended you, you
are so long in spik-king to me! And how is all in school? I tell you
press-ently something straight from the Board of Ed-u-ca-tion for you to
try. You whisper a subject in the scholar's ear as he comes in at the
door, and he walk straight to the middle of the room, no time for
think-king, and speak for five minutes about it! That will make them
ready speakers, hwhat? That will accustom them to public life and
speaking in the Chapel? But I tell you later.--Now, my old friend John,
if I could wash my hands before sitting down to a cup of tea--then we
will talk----"

He was shown into the best bedroom, with the cork-framed funeral-cards
and the cardboard watch-pockets on the walls, and the sound of his
moving about and pouring out water and spluttering as he washed his face
could be heard by those who waited below. Then he descended again and
sat down.

"Well," he said by and by, from his place where he sat at the table
alone, they respectfully yet proprietorially watching him eat and drink
his tea, "now tell me about those matters in the letter you wrote.... I
mean the other matters...."

But let us, before we pass to the other matters, look at the company
that watched Mr. Tudor Williams eat.

First there was John Pritchard, sitting on the other side of the table
with his hands upon his knees, and now and then turning his body a
little aside and bowing his back to cough. There was John, stern
religionist, believing in God and Disendowment; obstinate, dull, just,
unsmiling; as ready for the Day of Judgment as if it had been the
audit-day of the accounts he kept as principal trustee of the Baptist
Chapel. For all that he was so rooted in Llanyglo that he had never
travelled farther than Porth Neigr in the whole of his life, he was as
ardent a supporter of Missionary Endeavour abroad as his voice was
powerful at the Sasiwn at home. He watched Mr. Tudor Williams's plate,
and with his thumb made signs for his daughter to replenish it.

Next, there was Howell Gruffydd, with his pale and studious son, Eesaac
Oliver. You might have been sure even then that, should Llanyglo ever
grow, Howell Gruffydd's fortune would grow with it. Howell considered a
good penny worth the putting into his pocket, and, as if his apron
(which, however, he had now left behind at the shop) had made half a
housewife of him, he cared nothing, so it brought in money, whether he
did a man's labour or washed up the dishes or black-leaded the grate. He
could not read, but if at Porth Neigr a stranger chanced to ask him the
way, he would smile and reply, "There is the signpost," allowing it to
be understood that his questioner might read as well as he himself.
Howell had his inner dream. It was of a shop with two large windows, and
a bell inside the door, and brightly varnished showcards, and pyramids
of tinned salmon, and peas within the window that should suggest the
noses of children flattened against the pane, and handbills distributed
in the streets, and two assistants, and a son at College, who should
read for two, and perhaps--who knew?--sit while his constituents watched
him eat his tea--Mr. Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd, M.P.

Then, with his cap in his hands and his feet shifting nervously, there
was Dafydd Dafis, next to Eesaac Oliver, on the sofa. Should purchases
and rumoured purchases of land prove to be a portent, Dafydd had all to
lose and nothing to gain by change. With that soft cruelty of his of
which the hard and more profoundly sentimental Englishman knows nothing,
Dafydd was at least disinterested. The Kerrs he had forborne to harm,
but he only hated them the more on that account. He himself would not
have killed one of the blue and primrose butterflies that in the summer
hovered over the Llanyglo buffets of wild thyme, and he could not
understand a country that said it was fond of animals and yet, like
these Lancashire men, hunted rats with terriers and coursed hares with
dogs. Alone of that nation he had for a time loved delicate little
Minetta Garden, and had told her stories of fairies and had sung _Serch
Hudol_ and _Mentra Gwen_ to her; but Minetta had gone. All the things
for which Dafydd Dafis cared had gone, or were going, and Dafydd was
lonely. He told his harp so, with those warped and stealing fingers, and
the harp made music of his pain. All that Dafydd would gain by change
would be memories that became ever the more poignant the more they were
attenuated, and the less the world cared for him and his unprofitable
life.

Passing constantly between Mr. Tudor Williams and the saucepan where the
eggs boiled, or the plate in the fender where the lightcakes kept hot,
was Miss Nancy (_nee_ Nansi) Pritchard, schoolmistress and virtual
custodian of the Post Office. The development of Llanyglo, did that ever
come to pass, would be a good thing for Nancy, for otherwise there was
none in Llanyglo to marry her, and to domestic service elsewhere she
could not have stooped. She was tall and plump and ruddy, with black
hair and black-lashed blue eyes, and in her conversation she gave the
preference to the longer words. She had been to school in Bangor, wore
the longest skirts in Llanyglo, and between her and her father's guest
was the bond of their common superiority to everybody else there. She
was a _partie_, for John Pritchard was well-to-do; but for whom?
Apparently for nobody whom Llanyglo had yet seen.

The remaining spectators, with the exception of old Mrs. Pritchard, who
resembled a mummy rather than a spectator, partook in varying degrees of
these same characteristics; and there at the table sat Mr. Tudor
Williams, M.P., of Ponteglwys, one of his eyes aflow with tears of
sensibility while the other was glued to the main chance; Baptist,
nationalist, and arguer by metaphor and analogy; an elocutionist, and a
maker of elocutionists by that process of education that consists of
giving a scholar a subject and bidding him straightway speak for five
minutes upon it; and, above all, ever and again suggesting, by slight
gesture or quick glance, that his secret thought was that there, in cap
or corduroys, but for the Grace of God, went Mr. Tudor Williams of
Ponteglwys....

At last he put up his hand, refusing to eat more.

"No more, no more indeed! It is the best bread and but-ter I have tasted
since I was here before, but I should be ill in my stomach.--Dear me,
John Pritchard, the happy hours I have spent in this room! '_Mid
Pleas-sures and Palaces_'--indeed there is tears in my eyes when I see
the dres-ser with the plates on it, and the jugs, and Mrs. Prit-chard's
Bible in the window, just the same as when I was a boy!--Well, I have
had a splen-did tea at all events, and if you will excuse me a min-nit I
will return thanks for it.... Now, my friends!----"

Five minutes later, Mr. Tudor Williams, not so near to the Kerrs' Hafod
that he had the appearance of specially watching it, nor yet so far from
it but that he could see Ned Kerr and his brother Sam setting a rough
window-sash into position, was once more shaking hands and patting
shoulders and exchanging greetings with such of the men and women and
children of Llanyglo as he had not yet seen.

And now that they had got him there they hardly knew what they wanted of
him. That building exploit of the Kerrs having thrust the Inclosures
Dispute a good deal into the background, and Dafydd Dafis's honourable
if sullen refusal to injure men who had risked their lives with him
having given that exploit itself a kind of condonation, it seemed as if
their Member had merely come to a Sasiwn after all. But land had changed
hands: they had a vague sense of impending change and of the discomfort
of change; and, as they answered their Member's questions, the very
presence in their midst of this man who moved behind the scenes of the
drama of large events accentuated this feeling.

"What is he like, this one?" Mr. Tudor Williams asked, gently yet
absent-mindedly patting big John Pritchard's back as he stooped to
cough. They had been speaking of Terry Armfield.

They described Terry as he had appeared to them in the Court at Porth
Neigr.

"Is he taking over any other land?" ...

You would not have supposed, from the way in which Mr. Tudor Williams,
M.P., asked the question that he merely sought to know how much _they_
knew. And it had not occurred to Llanyglo that these transfers of land
might be, not an end, but only a beginning. Yet Mr. Tudor Williams had
good, if private reasons, for knowing that this very land might soon be
more than merely worth acquiring.... He was not deceiving them. It
pleased them to think that their Member was the repository of weighty
secrets, and he was merely indulging this simple and legitimate liking.
But already he intended to go to Liverpool in order to find out what
this Syndicate's plans really were. He wanted to know whether the
Syndicate, in its turn, was aware of something else, something still
very secret indeed, so secret that five minutes at certain keyholes
might have been worth many thousands of pounds....

"And this Hafod Unos--on whose land is it erected?" he next asked.

He made a little grimace when they told him, on Squire Wynne's.

"Then perhaps he will let it stand; he is cracked in his head about old
customs, and antiquities, and suchlike foolishness, when there is great
work wait-ing to be done. It is not our business if he likes to let
these people squat upon his land."

But here John Pritchard interposed heavily.

"But it is our business if they sing '_Thomas, make Room for your
Uncle_' in the middle of prayers," he said.

"No-o-o!" exclaimed Mr. Tudor Williams, shocked. Perhaps also he wished
to gain a little time; he had no wish to call upon Squire Wynne, either
about this or anything else. "Don't tell me they did that!" he added.

"Indeed, they did," said John quickly.

"Aw-w-w!--But it is a Liberal maxim, John, and Radical, too, that force
is no remedy. In my opinion our friend Dafydd here----" he put his arm
affectionately about Dafydd Dafis's waist, "--was a lit-tle headstrong
about burning the fences."

"I will not burn their house," said Dafydd sullenly. (By the way, had
the case been altered, it is doubtful whether the Kerrs would have done
as much for him.)

"Well--we can always take what the doc-tor told the man who wanted
information for noth-thing to take--advice," said Mr. Tudor Williams.

"It would be better to see Mr. Wynne first," said John Pritchard. "If
one comes others may come, and indeed I never saw such behaviour, no,
not in a den of li-ons!"

They continued to discuss the matter, while, before their eyes, the
Kerrs fitted their window-sash.

Yet it was curious to note how, within the bond of their passionate, if
loquacious nationalism, each man was jealously for himself. It was not
that their democracy was more conspicuously lacking in democrats than
are other democracies; perhaps it was rather that the Welshman
recognises two ties and two ties only--the tie of unity against the
foreigner, and the private claim of his strong family affections.
Between these two things is his void and vulnerable place. He has not
set up for himself the Englishman's stiff and serviceable and
systematised falsity of Compromise, that has no justification save that
it works. He has his age-long tradition, but no daily rule that can (and
indeed must) be applied without question. Each of his acts is his first
act, and so a retail act. Because his hypocrisy lacks the magnificent
scope of that of the Saxon, he bears the odium of a personal
stealthiness. Thus, perhaps, it comes about that while too strict an
adherence to the letter is the Englishman's ever-present danger, for his
brother Celt the spirit slayeth. Noble dreams, petty acts; and here, if
a little obscurely, may be hidden the reason why, when he seeks his
fortune in London, his greatest successes are the minor successes of
drapery and milk....

"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 pass 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 knob 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 spacious
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 trespass, 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 pass 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 constituency a portion of which
Terry and the gods on high were developing. He did not ask outright for
anything. He told Terry that, while he himself was a good Radical,
believing that God made the land for the people, nevertheless, in this
imperfect world things had to be done a lit-tle at a time, and his
principal 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 shore 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
assumed 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
shore 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 space 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 Grass_" 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 passed. 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,
passing 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 shore. 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 butterflies 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 noble 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 button, 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
glasses and over his glasses 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 glasses 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 clustering about the embankments as
the flies clustered about the treacled strings and fly-papers Howell
Gruffydd hung up in his shop in Llanyglo; at night the oncoming snail
seemed phosphorescent, its phosphorescence 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 passed 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 hassocks of
wild thyme.

And, for all this snail with its iron slime was not passing 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
passenger-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 pass 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 shore, 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 grassy 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 assortment 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 passing 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 cluster 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 God made
for the people, and took his constituents by the button-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 butterflies, nodding harebells, a few
tidemarks of black seaweed, a wooden jetty, a cluster 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 passed 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 anticipation, 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 passing 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 godless 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
principally 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 titans
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 passed
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 shore. 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 niggers 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 _any_body 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 glass 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
glasses at that sparse 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 mass 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 circumstances 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 glasses and under his glasses 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 L

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