THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
MORGANS
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
LIGHT AND TWILIGHT
REST AND UNREST
ROSE ACRE PAPERS
_Small Octavo. 2s. 6d. net_
[Illustration]
THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
MORGANS
“But now--O never again”
THOMAS HARDY’S _Julie-Jane_
BY
EDWARD THOMAS
[Illustration]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
TO
MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. ABERCORRAN STREET 1
II. THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE 12
III. THE WILD SWANS 30
IV. HOB-Y-DERI-DANDO 38
V. AURELIUS, THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN 44
VI. OUR COUNTRY 63
VII. WOOL-GATHERING AND LYDIARD CONSTANTINE 76
VIII. ABERCORRAN AND MORGAN’S FOLLY 92
IX. MR TORRANCE, THE CHEERFUL MAN 112
X. THE HOUSE UNDER THE HILL 128
XI. MR STODHAM, THE RESPECTABLE MAN, AND THE DRYAD 154
XII. GREEN AND SCARLET 177
XIII. NED OF GLAMORGAN 186
XIV. THE CASTLE OF LEAVES, AND THE BEGGAR WITH THE LONG WHITE BEARD 207
XV. MR STODHAM SPEAKS FOR ENGLAND--FOG SUPERVENES 220
XVI. THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR 232
XVII. PHILIP AND THE OUTLAWS OF THE ISLAND 240
XVIII. WHAT WILL ROLAND DO? 254
XIX. THE INTERLUDE OF HIGH BOWER 263
XX. THE POET’S SPRING AT LYDIARD CONSTANTINE 280
THE HAPPY-GO-LUCKY MORGANS
CHAPTER I
ABERCORRAN STREET
My story is of Balham and of a family dwelling in Balham who were more
Welsh than Balhamitish. Strangers to that neighbourhood who go up
Harrington Road from the tram must often wonder why the second turning
on the right is called Abercorran Street: the few who know Abercorran
town itself, the long grey and white street, with a castle at one end,
low down by the river mouth, and an old church high up at the other,
must be delighted by the memories thus recalled, but they also must
wonder at the name. Abercorran Street is straight, flat, symmetrically
lined on both sides by four-bedroomed houses in pairs, and it runs at
right angles out of Harrington Road into another road which the pair
of four-bedroomed houses visible at the corner proclaim to be exactly
like it. The only external variety in the street is created by the
absence from two of the cast-iron gates of any notice prohibiting the
entrance of hawkers and canvassers.
When I myself first saw the white lettering on a blue ground of
ABERCORRAN STREET I was perhaps more surprised than most others have
been who paid any attention to it. I was surprised but not puzzled.
I knew very well why it was called Abercorran Street. For I knew
Abercorran House and the Morgans, its inhabitants, and the dogs and
the pigeons thereof. Who that ever knew the house and the people could
ever forget them? I knew the Morgans, the father and mother, the five
sons, the one daughter Jessie. I knew the house down to the kitchen,
because I knew old Ann, the one permanent--I had almost written
immortal--servant, of whom it was said by one knowing the facts, that
they also rule who only serve and wait. I knew the breakfast room
where breakfast was never finished; the dark Library where they had
all the magazines which have since died of their virtues; the room
without a name which was full of fishing-rods, walking-sticks, guns,
traps, the cross-bow, boxes of skins, birds’ eggs, papers, old books,
pictures, pebbles from a hundred beaches, and human bones. I knew
the conservatory crowded with bicycles and what had been tricycles. I
knew as well as any one the pigeon-houses, the one on a pole and the
one which was originally a fowl-house, built with some idea or fancy
regarding profit. I knew that well-worn square of blackened gravel
at the foot of the back steps, where everybody had to pass to go to
the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, and the wild garden beyond, and
where the sun was always shining on men and children and dogs. This
square was railed off from the rest of the garden. That also I knew,
its four-and-twenty elms that stood about the one oak in the long
grass and buttercups and docks, like a pleasant company slowly and
unwillingly preparing to leave that three-acre field which was the
garden of Abercorran House and called by us The Wilderness--a name now
immortalised, because the christener of streets has given it to the one
beyond Abercorran Street. Under the trees lay a pond containing golden
water-lilies and carp. A pond needs nothing else except boys like us
to make the best of it. Yet we never could fish in it again after the
strange girl was drawn out of it dead one morning: nobody knew who she
was or why she had climbed over into the Wilderness to drown herself;
yet Ann seemed to know, and so perhaps did the tall Roland, but both
of them could lock up anything they wished to keep secret and throw
away the key. I knew the elms and the one oak of the Wilderness as
well as the jackdaws did. For I knew them night and day, and the birds
knew nothing of them between half-past five on an October evening and
half-past five the next morning.
To-day the jackdaws at least, if ever they fly that way, can probably
not distinguish Abercorran Street and Wilderness Street from ordinary
streets. For the trees are every one of them gone, and with them the
jackdaws. The lilies and carp are no longer in the pond, and there is
no pond. I can understand people cutting down trees--it is a trade
and brings profit--but not draining a pond in such a garden as the
Wilderness and taking all its carp home to fry in the same fat as
bloaters, all for the sake of building a house that might just as well
have been anywhere else or nowhere at all. I think No. 23 Wilderness
Street probably has the honour and misfortune to stand in the pond’s
place, but they call it LYNDHURST. Ann shares my opinion, and she
herself is now living in the house behind, No. 21 Abercorran Street.
Ann likes the new houses as well as the old elm-trees, and the hundreds
of men, women, and children as well as the jackdaws--which is saying
a good deal; for she loved both trees and birds, and I have heard her
assert that the birds frequently talked in Welsh as the jackdaws used
to do at the castle of Abercorran; but when I asked her why she thought
so and what they said, she grew touchy and said: “Well, they did not
speak English, whatever, and if it was Welsh, as I think, you cannot
expect me to pervert Welsh into English, for I am no scholar.” She is
keeping house now for the gentleman at 21 Abercorran Street, a Mr Henry
Jones. She would probably have been satisfied with him in any case,
since he is the means by which Ann remains alive, free to think her own
thoughts and to bake her own bread; to drink tea for breakfast, tea for
dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea in between; to eat also at
long intervals a quart of cockles from Abercorran shore, and a baked
apple dumpling to follow; and at night to read the Welsh Bible and a
Guide to the Antiquities of Abercorran. But Ann is more than satisfied
because Mr Jones is Welsh. She admits his claim in spite of her
unconcealed opinion that his Dolgelly Welsh, of which she can hardly
understand a word, she says, is not Welsh at all. Of his speech as of
the jackdaws she can retort: “He does not speak English, whatever.”
Ann will never leave him unless he or she should die. She is untidy;
she has never decided what is truth; and she has her own affairs as
well as his to manage; but, as he says himself, he has entertained an
angel unawares and she is not to be thrust out. He covers his inability
to command her by asking what she could do at her age if she had to
leave. It is not likely that Mr Henry Jones could get the better of a
woman whom--in spite of the fact that she has never decided what is
truth--he has called an angel. For he did not use the word as a mere
compliment, as much as to say that she was all that a woman should be
when she is in domestic service. She is not; she is excellent only at
pastry, which Mr Jones believes that he ought never to touch. He has
been heard to call her “half angel and half bird”; but neither does
this furnish the real explanation, though it offers an obvious one. For
Ann is now--I mean that when we were children she seemed as old as she
seems now; she limps too; and yet it might partly be her limp that made
Mr Jones call her “half bird,” for it is brisk and quite unashamed,
almost a pretty limp; also she is pale with a shining paleness, and
often she is all eyes, because her eyes are large and round and dark,
looking always up at you and always a little sidelong--but that alone
would not justify a sensible man in calling her “half angel.” Nor would
her voice, which has a remarkable unexpectedness, wherever and whenever
it is heard. She begins abruptly in the middle of a thought without
a word or gesture of preparation, and always on an unexpectedly high
note. In this she is like the robin, who often rehearses the first
half of his song in silence and then suddenly continues aloud, as if
he were beginning in mid-song. Well, Mr Henry Jones, as I have said,
once called her “half angel and half bird,” and declared that he had
entertained an angel unawares in Ann, and I believe that he is right
and more than a sensible man. For he has grasped the prime fact that
she is not what she seems.
For my part I can say that she is such a woman that her name, Ann
Lewis, has for those who connect it with her, and with her alone, out
of all the inhabitants of earth, a curious lightness, something at
once pretty and old with an elfish oldness, something gay and a little
weird, also a bird-like delicacy, as delicate as “linnet” and “martin.”
If these words are useless, remember at least that, though half bird,
she is not a mere human travesty or hint of a winged thing, and that
she is totally unlike any other bird, and probably unlike any other
angel.
An ordinary bird certainly--and an ordinary angel probably--would have
pined away at 21 Abercorran Street after having lived at Abercorran
House and at Abercorran itself. But Ann is just the same as when I
last saw her in Abercorran House. She alone that day was unchanged.
The house, the Wilderness, the conservatory, the pigeon-houses, all
were changed; I was changed, but not Ann. Yet the family had then newly
gone, leaving her alone in the house. It was some years since I had
been there. They had been going on as ever in that idle, careless, busy
life which required a big country house and an illimitable playground
of moor and mountain for a full and fitting display. Gradually their
friends grew up, went to a university, to business, or abroad, and
acquired preferences which were not easily to be adapted to that
sunny, untidy house. At first these friends would be only too glad to
go round to Abercorran House of an evening after business, or a morning
or two after the beginning of the vacation. Perhaps they came again,
and after a long interval yet again. They said it was different: but
they were wrong; it was they themselves were different; the Morgans
never changed. In this way young men of the neighbourhood discovered
that they were no longer boys. They could no longer put up with that
careless hullabaloo of lazy, cheerful people, they took offence at the
laziness, or else at the cheerfulness. Also they saw that Jessie, the
girl, was as frank and untidy at seventeen as she had always been, and
it took them aback, especially if they were wanting to make love to
her. The thought of it made them feel foolish against their will. They
fancied that she would laugh. Yet it was easy to believe that Jessie
might die for love or for a lover. When somebody was pitying the girl
who drowned herself in the Wilderness pond, Jessie interrupted: “She
isn’t a _poor girl_; she is dead; it is you are poor; she has got what
she wanted, and some of you don’t know what you want, and if you did
you would be afraid of cold water.” The young men could see the power
of such words in Jessie’s eye, and they did not make love to her. Some
took their revenge by calling her a slut, which was what Ann used to
call her when she was affectionate, as she could be to Jessie only.
“Come on, there’s a slut,” she used to say. It was too familiar for
the youths, but some of them would have liked to use it, because they
felt that the phrase was somehow as amorous as it was curt, a sort of
blow that was as fond as a kiss. Even when, in their hard hats at the
age of twenty or so, they used the term, in condemnation, they would
still have given their hats for courage to speak it as Ann did, and
say: “Come on, Jessie, there’s a slut”; for they would have had to kiss
her after the word, both because they could not help it, and for fear
she should misunderstand its significance. At any rate, I believe that
nobody but Ann ever addressed that term of utmost endearment to Jessie.
Thus was there one reason the less for boys who were growing up,
ceasing to tear the knees of their trousers and so on, to frequent
Abercorran House. I lingered on, but the death of one there had set me
painfully free. After a time I used to go chiefly to honour an old
custom, which proved an inadequate motive. Then year after year, of
course, it was easier to put off revisiting, and one day when I went,
only Ann was left. She had her kitchen and her own room; the rest of
the house had no visible inhabitants. Yet Ann would not have it that it
was sad. “It does a house good,” she said, “to have all those Morgans
in it. Now they have gone back again to Abercorran in the county of
Caermarthen, and I am sure they are all happy but the mistress, and she
was incurable; that was all; and there was an end of it at last.” Ann
herself was staying on as caretaker till Abercorran House was let or
sold.