THE HOUSE UNDER THE HILL
Though he did not write of it, Mr Torrance would gladly talk of the
house under the hill where he was born, of the surrounding country
and its people. “I can only hope,” he would say, “I can only hope
that when I am old, ‘in this our pinching cave,’ I shall remember
chiefly the valley of the river Uther where I was born, and the small
old house half encircled and half-shadowed by an enormous crescent of
beech-covered hills. That is my world in spite of everything. Those
fifteen or twenty square miles make the one real thing that I know and
cannot forget, in spite of a hundred English scenes wantonly visited
and forgotten, in spite of London unforgotten and unintelligible.
“A brook ran out of the hills where they were nearest to us, about half
a mile away. Dark trees darkened the two springs of crystal, and the
lightest wind made a sad sound in the leaves above them. Before it had
travelled a quarter of a mile the brook had gathered about itself a
brotherhood of huge trees that always seemed to belong to it, and gave
it pomp and mystery together, if the combination is possible. These
were sunny trees, a line of towering tall black poplars that led out
from the hills to the open agricultural land, a group of the mightiest
wych-elms I have ever seen, and one ash-tree standing alone at the
water’s edge, the only one of its kind in the neighbourhood. Three
miles from its source the brook ran into the main stream of the river
Uther, and beyond that I knew nothing except by rumour and guessing.
A line drawn between the two ends of the crescent of hills would pass
through the junction of brook and river and enclose the country which
was mine entirely. The long line of hills far off on the other side of
the valley--bare, rounded, and cloud-like hills, whose curving ridges
seemed to have growth and change like clouds--was the boundary of the
real world, beyond which lay the phantasmal--London, the ocean, China,
the Hesperides, Wineland, and all the islands and all the lands that
were in books and dreams.
“The farm-houses of my country, and also the manor-house, stood on
either side of the brook, low down. There was a mill and a chain of
ponds, hardly a mile from the source. Both the ponds and the running
water were bordered thickly with sedge, which was the home of birds far
more often heard than seen.
“The brook wound among little hills which were also intersected by
rough roads, green lanes, footpaths, and deserted trackways, watery,
and hollow and dark. As the roads never went on level ground all were
more or less deeply worn, and the overhanging beeches above and the
descending naked roots made them like groves in a forest. When a road
ran into another or crossed it there was a farm. The house itself was
of grey-white stone, roofed with tiles; the barn and sheds, apparently
tumbling but never tumbledown, were of dark boards and thatch, and
surrounded by a disorderly region of nettles, remains of old buildings
and walls, small ponds either black in the shadow of quince bushes,
or emerald with duck-weed, and a few big oaks or walnuts where the
cart-horses and their foals and a young bull or two used to stand. A
moorhen was sure to be swimming across the dark pond with a track of
ripples like a peacock’s tail shining behind it. Fowls scuttered about
or lay dusting themselves in the middle of the road, while a big
black-tailed cock perched crowing on a plough handle or a ruined shed.
A cock without a head or a running fox stood up or drooped on the roof
for a weather-vane, but recorded only the wind of some long past year
which had finally disabled it. The walls of outhouses facing the road
were garrulous with notices of sales and fairs to be held shortly or
held years ago.
“At a point where one lane ran into another, as it were on an island,
the inn with red blinds on its four windows looked down the road. The
inn-keeper was a farmer by profession, but every day drank as much as
he sold, except on a market or fair day. On an ordinary day I think
he was always either looking down the road for someone to come and
drink with him, or else consoling himself inside for lack of company.
He seemed to me a nice man, but enormous; I always wondered how his
clothes contained him; yet he could sit on the mower or tosser all day
long in the June sun when he felt inclined. On a market or fair day
there would be a flock of sheep or a lot of bullocks waiting outside
while the drover smoked half a pipe and drank by the open door. And
then the landlord was nowhere to be seen: I suppose he was at the
market or up in the orchard. For it was the duty of his wife, a little
mousy woman with mousy eyes, to draw the beer when a customer came to
sit or stand among the empty barrels that filled the place. It was
Called ‘The Crown.’ They said it had once been ‘The Crown and Cushion,’
but the cushion was so hard to paint, and no one knew why a crown
should be cushioned or a cushion crowned, and it was such a big name
for the shanty, that it was diminished to ‘The Crown.’ But it had those
four windows with crimson blinds, and the landlady was said to be a
Gypsy and was followed wherever she went by a white-footed black cat
that looked as if it was really a lady from a far country enchanted
into a cat. The Gypsy was a most Christian body. She used to treat with
unmistakeable kindness, whenever he called at the inn, a gentleman who
was notoriously an atheist and teetotaler. When asked upbraidingly why,
she said: ‘He seems a nice gentleman, and as he is going to a place
where there won’t be many comforts, I think we ought to do our best to
make this world as happy as possible for him.’
“Opposite to the inn was a carpenter’s shop, full of windows, and I
remember seeing the carpenter once at midnight there, working at a
coffin all alone in the glare in the middle of the blackness. He was
a mysterious man. He never touched ale. He had a soft face with silky
grizzled hair and beard, large eyes, kind and yet unfriendly, and
strange gentle lips as rosy as a pretty girl’s. I had an extraordinary
reverence for him due to his likeness to a picture at home of the
greatest of the sons of carpenters. He was tall and thin, and walked
like an over-grown boy. Words were rare with him. I do not think
he ever spoke to me, and this silence and his ceaseless work--and
especially that one midnight task--fascinated me. So I would stare for
an hour at a time at him and his work, my face against the window,
without his ever seeming to notice me at all. He had two dogs, a
majestic retriever named Ruskin who was eighteen years old, and a
little black and white mongrel named Jimmy; and the two accompanied
him and ignored one another. One day as I was idling along towards the
shop, smelling one of those clusters of wild carrot seeds, like tiny
birds’ nests, which are scented like a ripe pear sweeter and juicier
than ever grew on pear-tree, the carpenter came out with a gun under
one arm and a spade under the other and went a short distance down the
road and then into a field which belonged to him. I followed. No sooner
had I begun to look over the gate than the carpenter lifted his gun and
pointed it at the retriever who had his back turned and was burying a
bone in a corner of the field. The carpenter fired, the old dog fell
in a heap with blood running out of his mouth, and Jimmy burst out of
the hedge, snatched the bone, and disappeared. If it had been anyone
but the carpenter I should have thought this murder a presumptuous and
cruel act; his face and its likeness taught me that it was a just act;
and that, more than anything else, made justice inseparable in my mind
from pain and intolerable mystery. I was overawed, and watched him from
the moment when he began to dig until all that was mortal of the old
dog was covered up. It seems he had been ill and a burden to himself
for a long time. I thought it unjust that he should have been shot when
his back was turned, and this question even drowned my indignation at
the mongrel’s insolence.
“I knew most of the farmers and labourers, and they were and are as
distinct in my mind as the kings of England. They were local men with
names so common in the churchyard that for some time I supposed it was
a storehouse, rather than a resting-place, of farmers and labourers.
They took small notice of me, and I was never tired of following them
about the fields, ploughing, mowing, reaping, and in the milking sheds,
in the orchards and the copses. Nothing is more attractive to children
than a man going about his work with a kindly but complete indifference
to themselves. It is a mistake to be always troubling to show interest
in them, whether you feel it or not. I remember best a short, thick,
dark man, with a face like a bulldog’s, broader than it was long, the
under-lip sticking out and up and suggesting great power and fortitude.
Yet it was also a kind face, and when he was talking I could not take
my eyes off it, smiling as it was kneaded up into an enormous smile,
and watching the stages of the process by which it was smoothed again.
When he was on his deathbed his son, who was a tailor, used to walk
over every evening from the town for a gossip. The son had a wonderful
skill in mimicry, and a store of tales to employ it, but at last the
old man, shedding tears of laughter, had to beg him not to tell his
best stories because laughing hurt so much. He died of cancer. No man
could leave that neighbourhood and not be missed in a hundred ways;
I missed chiefly this man’s smile, which I could not help trying to
reproduce on my own face long afterwards. But nobody could forget him,
even had there been no better reasons, because after he died his house
was never again occupied. A labourer cultivated the garden, but the
house was left, and the vine leaves crawled in at the broken windows
and spread wanly into the dark rooms. A storm tumbled the chimney
through the roof. No ghost was talked of. The house was part of his
mortal remains decaying more slowly than the rest. The labourer in
the garden never pruned the vine or the apple-trees, or touched the
flower borders. He was a wandering, three-quarter-witted fellow who
came from nowhere and had no name but Tom. His devotion to the old man
had been like a dog’s. Friends or relatives or home of his own he had
none, or could remember none. In fact, he had scarce any memory; when
anything out of his past life came by chance into his head, he rushed
to tell his master and would repeat it for days with pride and for
fear of losing it, as he invariably did. One of these memories was a
nonsensical rigmarole of a song which he tried to sing, but it was no
more singing than talking, and resembled rather the whimper of a dog in
its sleep; it had to do with a squire and a Welshman, whose accent and
mistaken English might alone have made the performance black mystery.
They tried to get his ‘real’ name out of him, but he knew only Tom.
Asked who gave it to him, he said it was Mr Road, a former employer,
a very cruel man whom he did not like telling about. They asked him
if he was ever confirmed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they tried, but I could not
confirm.’ He would do anything for his master, rise at any hour of
the night though he loved his bed, and go anywhere. Summer or Winter,
he would not sleep in a house, but in a barn. Except his master’s in
the last illness, he would not enter any house. He was fond of beer
in large quantities, but if he got drunk with it he was ashamed of
himself, and might go off and not return for months: then one day he
would emerge from the barn, shaking himself and smiling an awkward
twisted smile and as bashful as a baby. What a place this modern world
is for a man like that, now. I do not like to think he is still alive
in it. All the people who could understand him are in the workhouse
or the churchyard. The churchyard is the only place where he would be
likely to stay long. No prison, asylum, or workhouse, could have kept
him alive for many days.
“The church was like a barn except that it was nearly always empty,
and only mice ever played in it. Though I went to it every Sunday I
never really got over my dislike of the parson, which began in terror.
He was the only man in the country who invariably wore black from top
to toe. One hot, shining day I was playing in a barn, and the doors
were open, so that I saw a field of poppies making the earth look as
if it had caught fire in the sun; the swallows were coming in and out,
and I was alone, when suddenly a black man stood in the sunny doorway.
The swallows dashed and screamed at him angrily, and I thought that
they would destroy themselves, for they returned again and again to
within an inch of him. I could not move. He stood still, then with a
smile and a cough he went away without having said a word. The next
time I saw him was in the churchyard, when I was about five, and had
not yet begun to attend the Church; in fact I had never entered it to
my knowledge. The nurse-girl wheeled me up to the churchyard wall and
stopped at the moment when the black man appeared out of the church.
Behind him several men were carrying a long box between them on their
shoulders, and they also were in complete black, and after them walked
men, women, and children, in black; one of the older women was clinging
convulsively to a stiff young man. When they had all stopped, the
parson coughed and muttered something, which was followed by a rustling
and a silence; the woman clinging to the young man sobbed aloud, and
her hair fell all over her cheeks like rain. The nurse-girl had been
chatting with a few passers-by who were watching outside the wall, but
as I saw the woman’s hair fall I began to cry and I was hurried away.
Through the lych-gate I saw a hole in the ground and everyone looking
down into it as if they had lost something. At this I stopped crying
and asked the girl what they were looking for; but she only boxed my
ears and I cried again. When at last she told me that there was a man
‘dead’ in the box, and that they had put him into the ground, I felt
sure that the black man was in some way the cause of the trouble. I
remembered the look he had given me at the barn door, and the cough. I
was filled with wonder that no one had attempted to rescue the ‘dead,’
and then with fear and awe at the power of the black man. Whenever I
saw him in the lane I ran away, he was so very black. Nor was the white
surplice ever more than a subterfuge to make him like the boys in the
choir, while his unnatural voice, praying or preaching, sounded as if
it came up out of the hole in the ground where the ‘dead’ had been put
away.
“How glad I was always, to be back home from the church; though dinner
was ready I walked round the garden, touching the fruit-trees one by
one, stopping a minute in a corner where I could be unseen and yet look
at the house and the thick smoke pouring out of the kitchen chimney.
Then I rushed in and kissed my mother. The rest of the day was very
still, no horses or carts going by, no sound of hoes, only the cows
passing to the milkers. My father and my mother were both very silent
on that day, and I felt alone and never wanted to stray far; if it was
fine I kept to the garden and orchard; if wet, to the barn. The day
seems in my memory to have always been either sunny or else raining
with roars of wind in the woods on the hills; and I can hear the sound,
as if it had been inaudible on other days, of wind and rain in the
garden trees. If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked
close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy
myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should
be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I
found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up
there, so quiet.
“Mrs Partridge was a labourer’s wife who came in two or three days a
week to do the rough work. I did not like her because she was always
bustling about with a great noise and stir, and she did not like me
because I was a spoilt, quiet child. She was deferential to all of
us, and called me ‘Sir’; but if I dared to touch the peel when she
was baking, or the bees-wax that she rubbed her irons on when she was
ironing, she talked as if she were queen or I were naught. While she
worked she sang in a coarse, high-pitched voice or tried to carry on
a conversation with my mother, though she might be up in the orchard.
She was a little woman with a brown face and alarming glittering eyes.
She was thickly covered with clothes, and when her skirts were hoisted
up to her knees, as they usually were, she resembled a partridge. She
was as quick and plump as a partridge. She ran instead of walking,
her head forward, her hands full of clothes and clothes-pegs, and her
voice resounding. No boy scrambled over gates or fences more nimbly.
She feared nothing and nobody. She was harsh to her children, but when
her one-eyed cat ate the Sunday dinner she could not bear to strike it,
telling my mother, ‘I’ve had the poor creature more than seven years.’
She was full of idioms and proverbs, and talked better than any man has
written since Cobbett. One of her proverbs has stayed fantastically in
my mind, though I have forgotten the connection--‘As one door shuts
another opens.’ It impressed me with great mystery, and as she said
it the house seemed very dark, and, though it was broad daylight and
summer, I heard the wind howling in the roof just as it often did at
night and on winter afternoons.
“Mrs Partridge had a husband of her own size, but with hollowed cheeks
the colour of leather. Though a slight man he had broad shoulders and
arms that hung down well away from his body, and this, with his bowed
stiff legs, gave him a look of immense strength and stability: to this
day it is hard to imagine that such a man could die. When I heard his
horses going by on a summer morning I knew that it was six o’clock;
when I saw them returning I knew that it was four. He was the carter,
and he did nothing but work, except that once a week he went into
the town with his wife, drank a pint of ale with her, and helped her
to carry back the week’s provisions. He needed nothing but work, out
of doors, and in the stables, and physical rest indoors; and he was
equally happy in both. He never said anything to disturb his clay pipe,
though that was usually out. What he thought about I do not know, and I
doubt if he did; but he could always break off to address his horses by
name, every minute or two, in mild rebuke or cheerful congratulation,
as much for his own benefit as for theirs, to remind himself that he
had their company. He had full responsibility for four cart-horses,
a plough, a waggon, and a dung-cart. He cared for the animals as if
they had been his own: if they were restless at night he also lost his
sleep. Although so busy he was never in haste, and he had time for
everything save discontent. His wife did all the talking, and he had
his way without taking the pipe out of his mouth. She also had her
own way, in all matters but one. She was fond of dancing; he was not,
and did not like to see her dance. When she did so on one tempting
occasion, and confessed it, he slept the night in the barn and she did
not dance again. There was a wonderful sympathy between them, and I
remember hearing that when she knew that she was going to have a baby,
it was he and not she that was indisposed.
“Our house was a square one of stone and tiles, having a porch and a
room over it, and all covered up in ivy, convolvulus, honeysuckle,
and roses, that mounted in a cloud far over the roof and projected in
masses, threatening some day to pull down all with their weight, but
never trimmed. The cherry-tree stretched out a long horizontal branch
to the eaves at one side. In front stood two pear-trees, on a piece of
lawn which was as neat as the porch was wild, and around their roots
clustered a thicket of lilac and syringa, hiding the vegetable-garden
beyond. These trees darkened and cooled the house, but that did not
matter. In no other house did winter fires ever burn so brightly or
voices sound so sweet; and outside, the sun was more brilliant than
anywhere else, and the vegetable-garden was always bordered by crimson
or yellow flowers. The road went close by, but it was a hollow lane,
and the heads of the passers-by did not reach up to the bottom of our
hedge, whose roots hung down before caves that were continually being
deepened by frost. This hedge, thickened by traveller’s joy, bramble,
and ivy, entirely surrounded us; and as it was high as well as thick
you could not look out of it except at the sky and the hills--the
road, the neighbouring fields, and all houses being invisible. The
gate, which was reached by a flight of steps up from the road, was
half-barricaded and all but hidden by brambles and traveller’s joy, and
the unkempt yew-tree saluted and drenched the stranger--in one branch a
golden-crested wren had a nest year after year.
“Two trees reigned at the bottom of the garden--at one side an apple;
at the other, just above the road, a cypress twice as high as the
house, ending in a loose plume like a black cock’s tail. The apple-tree
was old, and wore as much green in winter as in summer, because it
was wrapped in ivy, every branch was furry with lichen and moss, and
the main boughs bushy with mistletoe. Each autumn a dozen little red
apples hung on one of its branches like a line of poetry in a foreign
language, quoted in a book. The thrush used to sing there first in
winter, and usually sang his last evening song there, if it was a
fine evening. Yet the cypress was my favourite. I thought there was
something about it sinister to all but myself. I liked the smell of
it, and when at last I went to the sea its bitterness reminded me
of the cypress. Birds were continually going in and out of it, but
never built in it. Only one bird sang in it, and that was a small,
sad bird which I do not know the name of. It sang there every month
of the year, it might be early or it might be late, on the topmost
point of the plume. It never sang for long, but frequently, and always
suddenly. It was black against the sky, and I saw it nowhere else. The
song was monotonous and dispirited, so that I fancied it wanted us
to go, because it did not like the cheerful garden, and my father’s
loud laugh, and my mother’s tripping step: I fancied it was up there
watching the clouds and very distant things in hope of a change; but
nothing came, and it sang again, and waited, ever in vain. I laughed
at it, and was not at all sorry to see it there, for it had stood on
that perch in all the happy days before, and so long as it remained
the days would be happy. My father did not like the bird, but he was
often looking at it, and noted its absence as I did. The day after my
sister died he threw a stone at it--the one time I saw him angry--and
killed it. But a week later came another, and when he heard it he
burst into tears, and after that he never spoke of it but just looked
up to see if it was there when he went in or out of the porch. We
had taller trees in the neighbourhood, such as the wych-elms and the
poplars by the brook, but this was a solitary stranger and could be
seen several miles away like a black pillar, as the old cherry could in
blossom-time, like a white dome. You were seldom out of sight of it.
It was a station for any bird flying to or from the hills. A starling
stopped a minute, piped and flew off. The kestrel was not afraid to
alight and look around. The nightjar used it. At twilight it was
encircled by midges, and the bats attended them for half an hour. Even
by day it had the sinister look which was not sinister to me: some of
the night played truant and hid in it throughout the sunshine. Often
I could see nothing, when I looked out of my window, but the tree and
the stars that set round it, or the mist from the hills. What with
this tree, and the fruit-trees, and the maples in the hedge, and the
embowering of the house, I think the birds sometimes forgot the house.
In the mornings, in bed, I saw every colour on the woodpigeon, and the
ring on his neck, as he flew close by without swerving. At breakfast my
father would say, ‘There’s a kestrel.’ We looked up and saw nothing,
but on going to the window, there was the bird hovering almost above
us. I suppose its shadow or its blackening of the sky made him aware of
it before he actually saw it.
“Next to us--on still days we heard the soft bell rung in the yard
there at noon--was the manor-house, large, but unnoticeable among its
trees. I knew nothing about the inside of it, but I went all over the
grounds, filled my pockets with chestnuts, got a peach now and then
from the gardener, picked up a peacock’s feather. Wonderfully beautiful
ladies went in and out of that old house with the squire. A century
back he would have been a pillar of the commonwealth: he was pure
rustic English, and his white hair and beard had an honourable look as
if it had been granted to him for some rare service; no such beards are
to be found now in country-houses. I do not know what he did: I doubt
if there is anything for such a man to do to-day except sit for his
portrait to an astonished modern painter. I think he knew men as well
as horses; at least he knew everyone in that country, had known them
all when he and they were boys. He was a man as English, as true to the
soil, as a Ribston pippin.
“The woods on the hills were his, or at least such rights as anybody
had in them were his. As for me, I got on very well in them with no
right at all. Now, home and the garden were so well known, so safe, and
so filled with us, that they seemed parts of us, and I only crept a
little deeper into the core when I went to bed at night, like a worm in
a big sweet apple. But the woods on the hills were utterly different,
and within them you could forget that there was anything in the world
but trees and yourself, an insignificant self, so wide and solitary
were they. The trees were mostly beeches and yews, massed closely
together. Nothing could grow under them. Except for certain natural
sunny terraces not easily found, they covered the whole hills from
top to bottom, even in the steepest parts where you could slide, run,
and jump the whole distance down--about half a mile--in two minutes.
The soil was dead branches and dead leaves of beech and yew. Many
of the trees were dead: the stumps stood upright until they were so
rotten that I could overturn them with a touch. Others hung slanting
among the boughs of their companions, or were upheld by huge cables
of honeysuckle or traveller’s joy which had once climbed up them and
flowered over their crests. Many had mysterious caverns at their roots,
and as it were attic windows high up where the owls nested. The earth
was a honeycomb of rabbits’ burrows and foxes’ earths among the bony
roots of the trees, some of them stuffed with a century of dead leaves.
“Where the slope was least precipitous or had a natural ledge, two or
three tracks for timber-carriages had once been made. But these had not
been kept up, and were not infallible even as footpaths. They were,
however, most useful guides to the terraces, where the sun shone and
I could see the cypress and my mother among the sunflowers, and the
far-away hills.
“On my ninth birthday they gave me an old horn that had been a
huntsman’s, and when I was bold and the sun was bright, I sometimes
blew it in the woods, trembling while the echoes roamed among the gulfs
which were hollowed in the hillsides, and my mother came out into
the little garden far off. During the autumn and winter the huntsman
blew his horn in the woods often for a whole day together. The root
caves and old earths gave the fox more than a chance. The horses were
useless. The hounds had to swim rather than run in perpetual dead
leaves. If I saw the fox I tried hard not to shout and betray him, but
the temptation was very strong to make the echo, for I was proud of my
halloo, and I liked to see the scarlet coats, the lordly riders and the
pretty ladies, and to hear the questing hound and horn, and the whips
calling Ajax, Bravery, Bannister, Fury Nell, and the rest. Then at last
I was glad to see the pack go by at the day’s end, with sleepy heads,
taking no notice of me and waving tails that looked clever as if they
had eyes and ears in them, and to hear the clatter of horses dying
round the end of the crescent into the outer world.
“Nobody took heed of the woods except the hunters. The timber was
felled if at all by the west wind. The last keeper had long ago left
his thatched cottage under the hill, where the sun shone so hot at
midday on the reed-thatched shed and the green mummy of a stoat hanging
on the wall. So I met nobody in the woods. I took an axe there day
after day for a week and chopped a tree half through, unmolested except
by the silence, which, however, wore me out with its protest.
“The woods ended at the top in a tangle of thorns, and it was there
I saw my first fox. I was crawling among some brambles, amusing
myself with biting off the blackberries, when a fox jumped up out of
a tuft and faced me, his eyes on the level with mine. I was pleased
as well as startled, never took my eyes off him, and presently began
to crawl forward again. But at this the fox flashed his teeth at me
with a snap, and was off before I could think of anything to say. High
above these thorns stood four Scotch firs, forming a sort of gateway
by which I usually re-entered the woods. Gazing up their tall stems
that moved slowly and softly like a grasshopper’s horns, as if they
were breathing, I took my last look at the sky before plunging under
beech and yew. There were always squirrels in one of them, chasing one
another clattering up and down the bark, or chattering at me, close at
hand, as if their nerves were shattered with surprise and indignation.
When they had gone out of sight I began to run--faster and faster,
running and sliding down with a force that carried me over the meadow
at the foot, and across the road to the steps and home. I had ten years
in that home and in those woods. Then my father died; I went to school;
I entered an office. Those ten years were reality. Everything since
has been scarcely more real than the world was when it was still cut
off by the hills across the valley, and I looked lazily towards it
from under the cypress where the little bird sang. There is nothing to
rest on, nothing to make a man last like the old men I used to see in
cottage gardens or at gateways in the valley of the Uther.”
“Well,” said Mr Morgan once, “I don’t often agree with Mr Torrance, but
I am very glad he exists.”