ABERCORRAN AND MORGAN’S FOLLY
Once or twice I joined Philip on a holiday in Wales, but not at
Abercorran. It was years later that I found myself by chance at
Abercorran and saw enough of it to spoil somewhat the beautiful
fantastic geography learned from a thousand references by Philip,
Jessie, and old Ann. The real place--as it may be seen by anyone who
can pay the railway fare--is excellent, but I think I should never have
gone there had I foreseen its effect on that old geography. Having
seen the place with these eyes I cannot recover perfectly the original
picture of the castle standing at the meet of two small rivers and
looking over their wide estuary, between the precipices of enormous
hills, to the sea; the tiny deserted quay, the broken cross on the open
space glistening with ever-renewed cockle shells, below the castle; the
long, stately street leading from the church down to the castle, named
Queen Street because an English queen once rode down it; the castle
owls and the inexhaustible variety and the everlasting motion of the
birds of the estuary. To see it as the Morgans once made me see it you
must be able to cover the broad waters with glistening white breasts,
at the same moment that its twin precipices abide in gloom that has
been from the beginning; you must hear an undertone of the age of
Arthur, or at least of the great Llewelyn, in the hoots of the castle
owls, and give a quality of kingliness to a street which has a wide
pavement on one side, it is true, but consists for the most part of
cottages, with a castle low down at one end, and at the other a church
high up.
The Morgans’ old house, far above the townlet of Abercorran, had
windows commanding mountains behind as well as sea in front. Their
tales had given me, at the beginning, an idea of mountains, as distinct
from those objects resembling saw teeth by which they are sometimes
represented. They formed the foundation of my idea of mountains. Then
upon that I raised slowly a magnificent edifice by means of books of
travel and of romance. These later elements were also added unto the
Welsh mountains where Jack found the kite’s nest, where Roland saw an
eagle, where Philip had learnt the ways of raven, buzzard, and curlew,
of badger, fox, and otter. My notions of their size had been given to
me by Ann, in a story of two men who were lost on them in the mist. For
three days the men were neither seen nor heard in their wanderings; on
the fourth they were discovered by chance, one dead, the other mad.
These high solitudes, I thought, must keep men wild in their minds, and
still more I thought so after hearing of the runaway boy from Ann’s own
parish. He lived entirely out of doors--without stealing, said Ann--for
a year and a half. Every now and then someone caught sight of him, but
that was all the news. He told nothing when he was arrested on the
charge of setting fire to a rick. Ann said that if he did this it was
an accident, but they wanted to get rid of the scandal of the “wild
boy,” so they packed him off to a training ship until he was sixteen.
“He would have thought it a piece of luck,” said Ann, “to escape from
the ship, however it was, for he thought it worse than any weather
on the mountains; and before he was sixteen he did escape--he fell
overboard by some mercy, and was never seen again on sea or land, my
children.”
But above all other tales of the mountains was the one that had David
Morgan for hero. David Morgan was the eldest brother of the Morgans
of Abercorran House. He had been to London before ever the family
thought of quitting their Welsh home; in a year’s time he had returned
with an inveterate melancholy. After remaining silent, except to his
mother, for some months, he left home to build himself a house up in
the mountains. When I was at Abercorran, Morgan’s Folly--so everybody
called it--was in ruins, but still made a black letter against the
sky when the north was clear. People imagined that he had hidden gold
somewhere among the rocks. He was said to have worshipped a god who
never entered chapel or church. He was said to speak with raven and
fox. He was said to pray for the end of man or of the world. Atheist,
blasphemer, outlaw, madman, brute, were some of the names he received
in rumour. But the last that was positively known of him was that,
one summer, he used to come down night after night, courting the girl
Angharad who became his wife.
One of his obsessions in solitude, so said his mother when I travelled
down with her to see the last of him, was a belief in a race who had
kept themselves apart from the rest of men, though found among many
nations, perhaps all. The belief may have come from the Bible, and this
was the race that grew up alongside the family of Cain, the guiltless
“daughters of men” from whom the children of the fratricides obtained
their wives. These, untainted with the blood of Cain, knew not sin or
shame--so his belief seems to have been--but neither had they souls.
They were a careless and a godless race, knowing not good or evil. They
had never been cast out of Eden. “In fact,” said Mrs Morgan, “they must
be something like Aurelius.” Some of the branches of this race had
already been exterminated by men; for example, the Nymphs and Fauns.
David Morgan was not afraid of uttering his belief. Others of them,
he said, had adopted for safety many of men’s ways. They had become
moorland or mountain men living at peace with their neighbours, but not
recognised as equals. They were to be found even in the towns. There
the uncommon beauty of the women sometimes led to unions of violent
happiness and of calamity, and to the birth of a poet or musician who
could abide neither with the strange race nor with the children of
Adam. They were feared but more often despised, because they retained
what men had lost by civilisation, because they lived as if time was
not, yet could not be persuaded to believe in a future life.
Up in his tower Morgan came to believe his own father one of this
people, and resolved to take a woman from amongst them for a wife.
Angharad, the shy, the bold, the fierce dark Angharad whose black eyes
radiated light and blackness together, was one of them. She became his
wife and went up with him to the tower. After that these things only
were certainly known; that she was unhappy; that when she came down to
the village for food she was silent, and would never betray him or fail
to return; and that he himself never came down, that he also was silent
and with his unshorn hair looked like a wild man. He was seen at all
hours, usually far off, on the high paths of the mountains. His hair
was as black as in boyhood. He was never known to have ailed, until one
day the wild wife knocked at a farm-house door near Abercorran, asking
for help to bring him where he might be looked after, since he would
have no one in the tower but her. The next day Mrs Morgan travelled
down to see her son. When she asked me to accompany her I did so
with some curiosity; for I had already become something of a stranger
at Abercorran House, and had often wondered what had become of David
Morgan up on his tower. His mother talked readily of his younger days
and his stay in London. Though he had great gifts, some said genius,
which he might have been expected to employ in the study, he had
applied himself to direct social work. For a year he laboured “almost
as hard,” he said, “as the women who make our shirts.” But gradually he
formed the opinion that he did not understand town life, that he never
could understand the men and women whom he saw living a town life pure
and simple. Before he came amongst them he had been thinking grandly
about men without realising that these were of a different species. His
own interference seemed to him impudent. They disgusted him, he wanted
to make them more or less in his own image to save his feelings, which,
said he, was absurd. He was trying to alter the conditions of other
men’s lives because he could not have himself endured them, because
it would have been unpleasant to him to be like them in their hideous
pleasure, hideous suffering, hideous indifference. In this attitude,
which altogether neglected the consolations and even beauty and glory
possible or incident to such a life, he saw a modern Pharisaism whose
followers did not merely desire to be unlike others, but to make others
like themselves. It was, he thought, due to lack of the imagination
and sympathy to see their lives from a higher or a more intimate point
of view, in connection with implicit ideals, not as a spectacle for
which he had an expensive seat. Did they fall farther short of their
ideals than he from his? He had not the power to see, but he thought
not; and he came to believe that, lacking as their life might be in
familiar forms of beauty and power, it possessed, nevertheless, a
profound unconsciousness and dark strength which might some day bring
forth beauty--might even now be beautiful to simple and true eyes--and
had already given them a fitness to their place which he had for no
place on earth. When it was food and warmth which were lacking he never
hesitated to use his money, but beyond satisfying these needs he could
not feel sure that he was not fancifully interfering with a force which
he did not understand and could not overestimate. Therefore, leaving
all save a little of his money to be spent in directly supplying
the needs of hungry and cold men, he escaped from the sublime,
unintelligible scene. He went up into the tower that he had built on a
rock in his own mountains, to think about life before he began to live.
Up there, said his mother, he hoped to learn why sometimes in a London
street, beneath the new and the multitudinous, could be felt a simple
and a pure beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath the noise a
silence which he longed to reach and drink deeply and perpetuate, but
in vain. It was his desire to learn to see in human life, as we see in
the life of bees, the unity, which perhaps some higher order of beings
can see through the complexity which confuses us. He had set out to
seek at first by means of science, but he thought that science was an
end, not a means. For a hundred years, he said, men had been reading
science and investigating, as they had been reading history, with the
result that they knew some science and some history. “So he went up
into his tower, and there he has been these twelve years,” said Mrs
Morgan, “with Angharad and no comforts. You would think by his letters
that his thoughts had become giddy up there. Only five letters have I
had from him in these twelve years. This is all,” she added, showing
a small packet in her handbag. “For the last six years nobody has
heard from him except Ann. He wished he had asked Ann to go with him
to the tower. She would have gone, too. She would have preserved him
from being poetical. It is true he was only twenty-five years old at
the time, but he was too poetical. He said things which he was bound
to repent in a year, perhaps in a day. He writes quite seriously, as
actors half seriously talk, in tones quite inhumanly sublime.” She
read me scraps from these old letters, evidently admiring as well as
disapproving:
“I am alone. From my tower I look out at the huge desolate heaves of
the grey beacons. Their magnitude and pure form give me a great calm.
Here is nothing human, gentle, disturbing, as there is in the vales.
There is nothing but the hills and the silence, which is God. The
greater heights, set free from night and the mist, look as if straight
from the hands of God, as if here He also delighted in pure form and
magnitude that are worthy of His love. The huge shadows moving slowly
over the grey spaces of winter, the olive spaces of summer, are as
God’s hand....
“While I watch, the dream comes, more and more often, of a Paradise
to be established upon the mountains when at last the wind shall blow
sweet over a world that knows not the taint of life any more than of
death. Then my thought sweeps rejoicing through the high Gate of the
Winds that cleaves the hills--you could see it from my bedroom at
Abercorran--far off, where a shadow miles long sleeps across the peaks,
but leaves the lower wild as yellow in the sunlight as corn....
“Following my thought I have walked upwards to that Gate of the Winds,
to range the high spaces, sometimes to sleep there. Or I have lain
among the gorse--I could lie on my back a thousand years, hearing
the cuckoo in the bushes and looking up at the blue sky above the
mountains. In the rain and wind I have sat against one of the rocks in
the autumn bracken until the sheep have surrounded me, shaggy and but
half visible through the mist, peering at me fearlessly, as if they had
not seen a man since that one was put to rest under the cairn above; I
sat on and on in the mystery, part of it but not divining, so that I
went disappointed away. The crags stared at me on the hill-top where
the dark spirits of the earth had crept out of their abysses into the
day, and, still clad in darkness, looked grimly at the sky, the light,
and at me....
“More and more now I stay in the tower, since even in the mountains as
to a greater extent in the cities of men, I am dismayed by numbers,
by variety, by the grotesque, by the thousand gods demanding idolatry
instead of the One I desire, Whose hand’s shadow I have seen far off....
“Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising from behind a mountain, the
awe and the glory of that first step into the broad heaven exalted me;
a sound arose as of the whole of Time making music behind me, a music
as of something passing away to leave me alone in the silence, so that
I also were about to step off into the air....”
“Oh,” said Mrs Morgan, “it would do him good to do something--to keep
a few pigeons, now. I am afraid he will take to counting the stones in
his tower.” She continued her quotations:
“The moon was rising. The sombre ranges eastward seemed to be the
edge of the earth, and as the orb ascended, the world was emptied and
grieved, having given birth to this mighty child. I was left alone. The
great white clouds sat round about on the horizon, judging me. For
days I lay desolate and awake, and dreamed and never stirred.”
“You see,” said Mrs Morgan, “that London could not cure him. He says:
“‘I have visited London. I saw the city pillared, above the shadowy
abyss of the river, on columns of light; and it was less than one of
my dreams. It was Winter and I was resolved to work again in Poplar.
I was crossing one of the bridges, full of purpose and thought, going
against the tide of the crowd. The morning had a low yellow roof of
fog. About the heads of the crowd swayed a few gulls, inter-lacing
so that they could not be counted. They swayed like falling snow and
screamed. They brought light on their long wings, as the ship below,
setting out slowly with misty masts, brought light to the green and
leaden river upon the foam at her bows. And ever about the determined,
careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings, like wraiths of evil
and good, calling and calling to ears that know not what they hear.
And they tempted my brain with the temptation of their beauty: I went
to and fro to hear and to see them until they slept and the crowd had
flowed away. I rejoiced that day, for I thought that this beauty had
made ready my brain, and that on the mountains at last I should behold
the fulness and the simplicity of beauty. So I went away without seeing
Poplar. But there, again, among the mountains was weariness, because I
also was there.’”
“Why is he always weary?” asked Mrs Morgan plaintively, before reading
on:
“But not always weariness. For have I not the company of planet
and star in the heavens, the same as bent over prophet, poet, and
philosopher of old? By day a scene unfolds as when the first man spread
forth his eyes and saw more than his soul knew. These things lift up my
heart sometimes for days together, so that the voices of fear and doubt
are not so much in that infinite silence as rivulets in an unbounded
plain. The sheer mountains, on some days, seem to be the creation of my
own lean terrible thoughts, and I am glad: the soft, wooded hills below
and behind seem the creation of the pampered luxurious thought which I
have left in the world of many men....
“Would that I could speak in the style of the mountains. But language,
except to genius and simple men, is but a paraphrase, dissipating and
dissolving the forms of passion and thought....
“Again Time lured me back out of Eternity, and I believed that I longed
to die as I lay and watched the sky at sunset inlaid with swart forest,
and watched it with a dull eye and a cold heart....”
“And they think he is an atheist. They think he has buried gold on the
mountain,” exclaimed Mrs Morgan, indignantly.
Little she guessed of the nights before her in the lone farmhouse with
her bewildered son and the wild Angharad. While he raved through his
last hours and Angharad spent herself in wailing, and Mrs Morgan tried
to steady his thoughts, I could only walk about the hills. I climbed to
the tower, but learnt nothing because Morgan or his wife had set fire
to it on leaving, and the shell of stones only remained.
On the fourth morning, after a night of storm, all was over. That
morning once more I could hear the brook’s murmur which had been
obliterated by the storm and by thought. The air was clear and gentle
in the coomb behind the farm, and all but still after the night of
death and of great wind. High up in the drifting rose of dawn the
tall trees were swaying their tips as if stirred by memories of the
tempest. They made no sound in the coomb with the trembling of their
slender length; some were never to sound again, for they lay motionless
and prone in the underwood, or hung slanting among neighbour branches,
where they fell in the night--the rabbits could nibble at crests which
once wavered about the stars. The path was strewn with broken branches
and innumerable twigs.
The silence was so great that I could hear, by enchantment of the ears,
the departed storm. Yet the tragic repose was unbroken. One robin
singing called up the roars and tumults that had to cease utterly
before his voice could gain this power of peculiar sweetness and awe
and make itself heard.
The mountains and sky, beautiful as they were, were more beautiful
because a cloak of terror had been lifted from them and left them free
to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The masses of the mountains
were still heavy and sombre, but their ridges and the protruding tower
bit sharply into the sky; the uttermost peaks appeared again, dark with
shadows of clouds of a most lustrous whiteness that hung like a white
forest, very far off, in the country of the sun. Seen out of the clear
gloom of the wood this country was as a place to which a man might
wholly and vainly desire to go, knowing that he would be at rest there
and there only.
As I listened, walking the ledge between precipice and precipice in the
coomb, the silence murmured of the departed tempest like a sea-shell.
I could hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an
endless explosion. All night the trees were caught up and shaken in the
furious air like grasses; the sounds on earth were mingled with those
of the struggle in the high spaces of air. Outside the window branches
were brandished wildly, and their anger was the more terrible because
the voice of it could not be distinguished amidst the universal voice.
The sky itself seemed to aid the roar, as the stars raced over it among
floes of white cloud, and dark menacing fragments flitted on messages
of darkness across the white. I looked out from the death room, having
turned away from the helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and saw
the hillside trees surging under a wild moon, but they were strange
and no longer to be recognised, while the earth was heaving and
be-nightmared by the storm. It was the awe of that hour which still
hung over the coomb, making its clearness so solemn, its silence so
pregnant, its gentleness so sublime. How fresh it was after the sick
room, how calm after the vain conflict with death.
The blue smoke rose straight up from the house of death, over there in
the white fields, where the wife sat and looked at the dead. Everyone
else was talking of the strange life just ended, but the woman who
had shared it would tell nothing; she wished only to persuade us that
in spite of his extraordinary life he was a good man and very good to
her. She had become as silent as Morgan himself, though eleven years
before, when she began to live with him on the mountain, she was a
happy, gay woman, the best dancer and singer in the village, and had
the most lovers. Upon the mountain her wholly black Silurian eyes had
turned inwards and taught her lips their mystery and Morgan’s. They
buried him, according to his wish, at the foot of the tower. Outraged
by this, some of the neighbours removed his body to the churchyard
under the cover of night. Others equally enraged at putting such a one
in consecrated ground, exhumed him again. But in the end it was in the
churchyard that his bones came to rest, with the inscription, chosen by
Ann:
“Though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle,
I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.”
Angharad married a pious eccentric much older than herself, and in a
year inherited his money. She lives on in one of those gray houses
which make Queen Street so stately at Abercorran. She keeps no company
but that of the dead. The children call her Angharad of the Folly, or
simply Angharad Folly.
“She ought to have gone back to the tower,” said Mr Torrance in some
anger.
“She would have done, Mr Torrance,” said Ann, “if she had been a poet;
but you would not have done it if you had been through those eleven
years and those four nights. No, I really don’t think you would.... I
knew a poet who jumped into a girl’s grave, but he was not buried with
her. Now you are angry with him, poor fellow, because he did not insist
on being buried. Well, but it is lucky he was not, because if he had
been we should not have known he was a poet.”
“Well said, Ann,” muttered Aurelius.
“Ann forgets that she was young once,” protested Mr Torrance.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think I do, but I think this, that you forget
you will some day be old. Now, as this is Shrove Tuesday and you will
be wanting pancakes I must go make them.”
“Good old Ann,” whispered Mr Torrance.