Testimonies Page 6

  Exhaustion came sooner this time. The session went on, went on until it had lasted longer than the morning, and now the shearers were working with surly concentration: they leaned back and rested as each sheep was done—before they had talked and joked, a sound of voices above the noise of the sheep and the snip-snip-snip of the shears.

  On and on: sheep and more sheep. I had been doing this forever. My stomach and my back were giving me a great deal of pain, the first from the pounds of food I had stuffed into it, the second from the bend and lift, bend and lift that had been going on the length of this unending day.

  I was closed up entirely in the attempt to keep pace, to keep going at all, and I remained like that for a great space of time. If I relaxed at all I would never start again. The inner spur was obstinate anger, nothing more now. It was no longer important that Bronwen was there, picking up the stray pieces of wool into her apron; all that mattered was to keep going, to lift the sheep, mark and release them, and that was everything in life.

  It ended, of course: the sun was reaching down to Penmawr and the end came with a trickle of lambs—they had only their tails trimmed and their ears nicked. I was still laboring and closed in over my work when I saw the shearers beginning to get up. I thought it was only the break for tea, but I looked, and the far pen was empty. At the very end were the rams hidden in a pen by themselves: they were taken by the best shearers. I did not think I could lift them, but their horns were a handle, and somehow, lumping them along with my knees I carried them one by one to the middle. With the last ram I could hardly get up after I had marked him: I released him, watched him go, and stayed there on my knees. I thought I was going to be sick.

  Some of the shearers were going home, others stayed to help with the driving of the sheep up into the mountain again. I cleaned the stamp, corked the black oil and went away: they called after me to come in for tea, but I affected not to hear.

  In my deep chair I tried to relax, but I was twitching all over. In the end I went to sleep there, unwashed and in my filthy clothes, until one in the morning, when I jerked myself awake and crawled off to bed, cold and trembling.

  I was very poorly the next day, and for some days after that. Apart from a back as stiff as a board and blistered hands—normal consequences—my old illness began again: it was not very bad, but enough to make me feel rather ill all day and to stop me sleeping at night. Something was wrong with my digestion, as I have said before, and whatever it was (doctors were vague and contradictory) it was linked in some way with my nervous system, and, whenever the one went wrong, the other betrayed me.

  There is nothing more contemptible and selfish than a hypochondriac, and I always tried to avoid paying too much attention to my body; but for a man living alone, with a body that will force itself into notice, it is difficult to maintain a sense of proportion.

  I did hope for one good from this physical exhaustion and ill health: I hoped that I should plunge again into my usual habit of mind, and that I should shake off the strong passion that hurt me so. For a day or two it seemed that this might be the case, and I decided to go up to London for a time as soon as I felt better.

  But I was deceived. The first day that I did feel equal to a walk—the evening of Thursday—I went down from my garden to the bottom of the valley, across the huge flat slates that made the bridge and up to the Craig y Nos. This is the black precipice that breaks the side of the Saeth ridge, a sudden plunge of harsh granite among the slate and shale: above it there is an apron of green, close grass with an edge of bilberries and fern. It made a charming afternoon or evening walk—it kept the sun late—and I often went up there for half an hour or so in the last of the day.

  That evening the sun was hot on the stones and as I sat leaning on my knees, looking forward, I saw Bronwen come out of the farmyard and along to the big ash trees where the washing blew: I could tell her at once by the way she walked. She was wearing a blue dress and there on the brilliant grass under the ash trees she arranged and folded the bellying white sails of the sheets. As soon as I saw her I knew it was no good resisting, and I watched her with what I can only describe as concentrated love. I mean the high-flown term literally: I sent my love across through the clean air down.

  At the far end of the road by the cow house, I saw Emyr coming toward the farm. He was coming with his usual steady rapid lurching stride and his road would bring him past the ash trees. She had nearly finished the sheets and I prayed that she would be done and in before he came by. Impatiently I saw her dawdling with the smaller clothes. It would all be spoiled if she did not hurry; she dropped her pegs. He came steadily on, lumbering under my black hate (I managed it then, with no effort) and she was still picking up clothes-pegs from the grass. I willed her, tensing myself inside as I used to do when I was a child, but she would be no quicker: they were both in the same field of vision now—I did not have to shift my gaze to see him level with the first tree. He stopped to do something to the gate, where it was cobbled with string and wire, and she took her basket up and went into the house. It was a strange relaxation inside me; but then he stopped kicking the gate-post and went on. He opened the door with the push of the master, and I followed him in there alone with Bronwen. Even now I am ashamed to set down what a hot, uncontrolled imagination will do.

  When the crisis was over I felt the pain. They are right to say it breaks your heart: it is there, just there, you feel the empty, tearing pain, an actual present pain, nothing that is going on inside your head, but a great breaking pain, so that you bow over it and cry, with your throat stiff and the sobs coming up from your belly.

  I never let it go like that again, not just like that again, so cruel; but once the pain had found its place it did not leave me and it would come there, even when my mind was cold and it had no right to hurt me.

  Pugh

  Emyr Vaughan occupied my thoughts nearly as much as Bronwen. I could not in honesty dislike him. I looked for his faults and they were there, grossness and some ugly ways; and he was, if not downright avaricious, at least very near to it. Once I did see a fox that he had poisoned: it was strychnine they used, and the beast’s twisted agony was shocking, even to him. I suggested that he should use something less savage, like cyanide of potassium. He quite agreed that the torture was excessive, even for a fox (he really meant it, for in his way he was humane) but as an unanswerable objection he said, “But, Mr. Pugh, it is costing.” They were given the strychnine for nothing. I could see, from the look on his face, that he would do nothing about it—an ugly, shrewd look—so in the end I gave him some cyanide and he threw his old fox-bottle into the fire. But the meanness, if it was true meanness, and the other flaws I saw in him, all came from his way of life and his different values, and they were so far outbalanced by his goodness that they were not ground enough for dislike, still less for hatred.

  He was very kind to me: there were continual unprompted neighborly actions, loads of manure when I started gardening, a sack of potatoes, the boy sent up to tell me when anything interesting was going to be done at the farm. He never wanted to be thanked: it was the same when he answered my questions about the working of a farm, questions that must have been childish to a man brought up on the land; he answered them clearly, as plainly as he could, with no mystification or affectation of superiority (there are not so many, in any position, who can do that). He took great trouble in making things clear to me, and when it was a question of manual demonstration, raking or scything for example, he was the best teacher in the world: that was one of the reasons why the farm was so popular among the villagers who wanted their sons to start farming. He was acknowledged as a master in the complex skills of a farmer: I remember a man as far off as Llechog pointing out a stack and saying that it was as well thatched as if Emyr Vaughan, Gelli, had done it.

  He had many of the qualities that I lacked—qualities I had always envied in others. He was a great big fellow, to begin with; and he was young. In a way he was good-looking: tall, rathe
r bony, obviously very strong, with red hair and light blue eyes. He had the poor skin that goes with that hair, however, and his eye-lashes did not show at all, which made one think of albinos. Then again, both he and his father had a poor carriage, a heavy and shambling walk, fast enough, but laborious and ungainly; so many country men have that walk, and the same uneasy stance.

  On the other hand, he could look downright magnificent. He had brought me up a load of dung one day, a heavy load, and he put the strong young mare to the cart to bring it up. She was turning to vice, nervous and untrustworthy, a huge beast, tight in her skin with muscle, but as quick as a pony.

  Emyr had dumped the manure and he was standing at the side of the cart leaning against the wall and talking to me as I stood on the road above him. He was about level with the mare’s head, but at that moment he was not holding her. We were talking quietly when for no cause she reared and hurled forward: the shaft drove to crush him against the wall and the wheel to smash him. He was up, lithe as a cat, with his shoulders against the wall and his feet on the shaft, and with the force of his body he thrust the cart out and away from him. It passed clear by inches. He was down and at the horse’s head, dragging, hanging and jagging at the bit, tearing her head back in an arch. Then he was in front with a hand on each side of her mouth, forcing her back and back until she stood quiet, sweating and trembling. His face was transfigured: his eyes were blazing and there was foam at his mouth. He took the mare straight down the road, leading her fast and brutally; she was quite cowed.

  Whenever I thought of him like that it seemed reasonable that he should be married to Bronwen.

  Still, I was willing to dislike him, if I could find a cause: it would have clarified the situation. But I could no longer behave with my former naturalness to him, and that reduced our communication very much indeed, so I could not learn more about him.

  It was fortunate that the turning year brought the farm much more work; it enabled me to keep away without remark or offense. I did not quite give up my evening visits; I had been there too often to do so. But they were uneasy visits now.

  It was at this time that I made a discovery that others make (I suppose) in their adolescence. I had never understood lyric poetry, sonnets, love-verses before; my taste had been for narrative verse, the Canterbury Tales and the Dunciad I liked, epigrams and vers de société. I had perhaps admired the technical ability of the other poets, but behind I suspected that they were rather silly. Now how different it was. I cannot give any measure of the difference. But now Troilus called after Criseyde and my heart ached for him: Marvell could write

  My love is of a birth as rare

  As ’tis for object strange and high.

  It was begotten by Despair

  Upon Impossibility,

  and he wrote for my understanding; I knew what the words stood for now.

  I found, too, that I could tell the difference at once between the right poetry and the artificial: there was all the difference in the world, but I had never known it before.

  So there was poetry, a consolation; and there was fishing. Perhaps there is bathos in the conjunction, but there was consolation in both.

  But all the time, reading or fishing, or in the ordinary small things of every day, I was with my passion. If you have a sudden painful illness or a broken bone there is hardly a moment when you are not aware of it: it is the same with a heart astray. I was not of a romantic temperament, rather cold, lifeless and indifferent before, not inclined to sentiment at all: indeed, I had sometimes reproached myself for my lack of affection for others. It is a repulsive trait, and it usually goes with deep selfishness; but my life had not accustomed me to affection—I had no near relations, and in the common round of my adult life I had rarely met anyone who raised in me a feeling higher than tepid esteem. My boyhood friends had nearly all been killed in the war, and those who remained were scattered: Maturin was a parson in the north, buried in a huge family (his wife disliked me), Annwyl had a chair of philosophy thirteen thousand miles away, and Milsom was a rubber-planter.

  But now, night and day, there was this tumult going on inside me. Everything that I thought or read was in relation to her. The only difference was that at some times it was nearer my consciousness than others: but it was with me, always. It was so improbable—inconceivable, almost—that I asked myself whether I was not exaggerating, deluding myself and nourishing the deception: but I was not. The strength was from outside, beyond my control—a strong hand holding a dangling cloth puppet.

  So what consolations I had, I took. I read and I fished—writing was out of the question, and I packed away the dreary, unprofitable sheets. These two things made life tolerable on good days. No: it is excessive to speak like that—I passed delightful hours up there, and there was in fact a more vivid pleasure even in that pain (when it was not bitter and surmounting) than in any of the pleasures I had experienced before.

  I say “up there” meaning the high lake above Llyn Lliwiog, a remote barren tarn that was my best retreat. To reach this high lake it was necessary to climb to the Diffwys, to go the length of that dark valley and to climb again the height of the rim at its far end: from there it was a gentle walk down to the lake. There was another way around the back of the Saeth, but there were some shaly slopes that I found almost impassable with a rod to take care of, so in spite of my uneasiness in Cwm Erchyll, I threaded it whenever I went up there.

  There is no doubt, I suppose, that lake fishing from the shore is a dull thing compared with the delight of a good stream; but this lake had its advantages. To begin with there was its position of unearthly beauty in a dark crater that spilled the overflowing stream down a precipice five hundred feet to Llyn Lliwiog; below that there was a broad, changing valley with a third lake, much larger, a silver river, farms, woods, the winding ribbon of a main road with tiny objects passing on it. And beyond the silent, tall and solemn peaks of Carnedd and y Brenin, and sometimes single clouds swimming between me and them. Oh, it was intensely moving sometimes, and never two days the same, never predictable.

  Then there were fish in the lake, big trout and plenty of them. I never caught any, but I saw them often in the evening: sometimes the air would fall motionless about sunset, and there would be no ripples on the water; every rise showed and upon my word I have more than once seen the whole surface pocked with them like a puddle with rain falling into it. On those evenings I have heard fish rising there so large that it startled the silence. It was a great encouragement to go on fishing, and I would cast away with my arm almost dropping off, vainly lashing the water until long after the end of the rise.

  I never was, from my boyhood, one of those to whom skill comes easily. The throwing of a stone at a mark was a conscious effort of coordination rather than an instinctive unthinking fling. It was the same with fishing; every cast was the result of drill and theory—an earnest business. It was a solemn amusement, and I preferred to fish in remote places: it quite spoiled my pleasure if other people were near, to watch, to ask whether I had caught anything—they were in the way even a quarter of a mile off.

  I was not pleased, therefore, to see a man come over the skyline as I was fishing on the far side: as he came closer I stopped fishing to change my fly, taking my time in the hope that he would go away. But he took up his place on a rock and I was forced to go on; it was no good, my pleasure was gone now. When I had whipped off a fly I gave up. He came round the lake as I was putting my rod away and said that it was not a very good day for fishing. He was a very old man with a kind, wrinkled face and an air of fragile distinction—I met that quite often in Wales, among the really old people.

  We talked for some time and I told him who I was and where I came from: he knew all the older people of Cwm Bugail and most of the younger ones he knew by name, although it was a great many years since he had been there. He asked whether it was not Emyr Vaughan who had married the handsome young woman from Cwm Priddlyd; I said I thought it was, and looked sharply into his
gentle old face for meaning, but there was none there. He came from Nant Deiniol, he said, and I wondered how he had managed that long and arduous climb.

  One Friday, as I came over the ridge in the afternoon, I saw him again. I did not distinguish him at first, and I was angry to see a person walking on the shore—I felt, by this time, that the lake belonged to me. I minded less when I saw that it was the old man. He appeared to be towing something on a string as he walked slowly at the water’s edge: I could not see anything on the ruffled surface, but his attitude reminded me of a child at the Round Pond with a boat.

  He stopped dead on seeing me; I was quite near before he looked up, intent as he was upon the water. But when he recognized me his expression changed from closed hostility to a pleasant smile, and he asked me how all the people in Cwm Bugail were. I walked along the bank with him a little way and then he said that if I was going to fish with a rod he supposed that he would not disturb me by going up and down on the opposite shore. He added that he did not think we should either of us catch anything, because it was a very hard day.

  On the other side, the rocky side, I put up my rod and began to fish. All the time between casts I saw the old man swing in a slow, steady arc up and down the curve of the farther shore, on the end of his string. There was something restful and inevitable about his progress, and when he stopped abruptly in the middle of his beat it caught my attention at once. He was hauling on his string, winding it on a square of wood, and as I watched a flashing silver fish came up out of the water. I put down my rod and walked quickly round the lake. It was a lovely trout, with golden fins and an iridescent play of colors; the old man said that it would weigh a little over a pound. He was quite pleased at having caught it, but no more excited than if he had picked up a sixpence: he did not seem to think it anything out of the way. He told me about some of the fish he had caught, twenty and thirty a day, or on a summer’s night when he was young, and he showed me his machine, that now lay on the shore. He said he did not know the English for it, but in Welsh it was called a stwlan. It was a flat piece of wood, about two and a half feet long, eighteen inches deep and perhaps two inches thick—a piece of good solid plank. The bottom of it was heavily weighted with strips of lead, serving as a keel. In the water the lead pulled the board down so that it was almost submerged, floating upright and very deep—only an inch or two of its top edge showed above the surface. There were two holes in the board, with a string looped through them. His towing line was attached to this loop rather nearer the back of the board than the front, so that when he began to tow it the front pointed out at an angle from the shore, and the board, following its nose, pulled farther and farther out as he let the tight string slip. When it had gone far enough he held the string tight and towed the board against its inclination; it was not a very strong pull, but enough to keep the string straight and clear of the bottom. The essence of the thing was the flies that he attached by short lengths of gut, along the whole length of the towing line: all the way out to the middle of the lake he had flies, separated by a yard, working through the water behind the towing string.