ODOURS OF PARADISE
I went down to Arfon in the very heat and bloom and fragrance of the
wonderful summer that they were enjoying there. In London there was no
such weather; it rather seemed as if the horror and fury of the war had
mounted to the very skies and were there reigning. In the mornings the
sun burnt down upon the city with a heat that scorched and consumed; but
then clouds heavy and horrible would roll together from all quarters of
the heavens, and early in the afternoon the air would darken, and a
storm of thunder and lightning, and furious, hissing rain would fall
upon the streets. Indeed, the torment of the world was in the London
weather. The city wore a terrible vesture; within our hearts was dread;
without we were clothed in black clouds and angry fire.
It is certain that I cannot show in any words the utter peace of that
Welsh coast to which I came; one sees, I think, in such a change a
figure of the passage from the disquiets and the fears of earth to the
peace of paradise. A land that seemed to be in a holy, happy dream, a
sea that changed all the while from olivine to emerald, from emerald to
sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst, that washed in white foam at the
bases of the firm, grey rocks, and about the huge crimson bastions that
hid the western bays and inlets of the waters; to this land I came, and
to hollows that were purple and odorous with wild thyme, wonderful with
many tiny, exquisite flowers. There was benediction in centaury, pardon
in eye-bright, joy in lady's slipper; and so the weary eyes were
refreshed, looking now at the little flowers and the happy bees about
them, now on the magic mirror of the deep, changing from marvel to
marvel with the passing of the great white clouds, with the brightening
of the sun. And the ears, torn with jangle and racket and idle, empty
noise, were soothed and comforted by the ineffable, unutterable,
unceasing murmur, as the tides swam to and fro, uttering mighty, hollow
voices in the caverns of the rocks.
* * * * *
For three or four days I rested in the sun and smelt the savour of the
blossoms and of the salt water, and then, refreshed, I remembered that
there was something queer about Llantrisant that I might as well
investigate. It was no great thing that I thought to find, for, it will
be remembered, I had ruled out the apparent oddity of the reporter's-or
commissioner's?--reference to lights, on the ground that he must have
been referring to some local panic about signalling to the enemy; who
had certainly torpedoed a ship or two off Lundy in the Bristol Channel.
All that I had to go upon was the reference to the "remarkable
occurrences" at some revival, and then that letter of Jackson's, which
spoke of Llantrisant church as "reeking" with incense, a wholly
incredible and impossible state of things. Why, old Mr. Evans, the
rector, looked upon coloured stoles as the very robe of Satan and his
angels, as things dear to the heart of the Pope of Rome. But as to
incense! As I have already familiarly observed, I knew better.
But as a hard matter of fact, this may be worth noting: when I went over
to Llantrisant on Monday, August 9th, I visited the church, and it was
still fragrant and exquisite with the odour of rare gums that had fumed
there.
* * * * *
Now I happened to have a slight acquaintance with the rector. He was a
most courteous and delightful old man, and on my last visit he had come
across me in the churchyard, as I was admiring the very fine Celtic
cross that stands there. Besides the beauty of the interlaced ornament
there is an inscription in Ogham on one of the edges, concerning which
the learned dispute; it is altogether one of the more famous crosses of
Celtdom. Mr. Evans, I say, seeing me looking at the cross, came up and
began to give me, the stranger, a resume--somewhat of a shaky and
uncertain resume, I found afterwards--of the various debates and
questions that had arisen as to the exact meaning of the inscription,
and I was amused to detect an evident but underlying belief of his own:
that the supposed Ogham characters were, in fact, due to boys' mischief
and weather and the passing of the ages. But then I happened to put a
question as to the sort of stone of which the cross was made, and the
rector brightened amazingly. He began to talk geology, and, I think,
demonstrated that the cross or the material for it must have been
brought to Llantrisant from the south-west coast of Ireland. This struck
me as interesting, because it was curious evidence of the migrations of
the Celtic saints, whom the rector, I was delighted to find, looked upon
as good Protestants, though shaky on the subject of crosses; and so,
with concessions on my part, we got on very well. Thus, with all this to
the good, I was emboldened to call upon him.
I found him altered. Not that he was aged; indeed, he was rather made
young, with a singular brightening upon his face, and something of joy
upon it that I had not seen before, that I have seen on very few faces
of men. We talked of the war, of course, since that is not to be
avoided; of the farming prospects of the county; of general things, till
I ventured to remark that I had been in the church, and had been
surprised, to find it perfumed with incense.
"You have made some alterations in the service since I was here last?
You use incense now?"
The old man looked at me strangely, and hesitated.
"No," he said, "there has been no change. I use no incense in the
church. I should not venture to do so."
"But," I was beginning, "the whole church is as if High Mass had just
been sung there, and--"
He cut me short, and there was a certain grave solemnity in his manner
that struck me almost with awe.
"I know you are a railer," he said, and the phrase coming from this mild
old gentleman astonished, me unutterably. "You are a railer and a bitter
railer; I have read articles that you have written, and I know your
contempt and your hatred for those you call Protestants in your
derision; though your grandfather, the vicar of Caerleon-on-Usk, called
himself Protestant and was proud of it, and your great-grand-uncle
Hezekiah, _ffeiriad coch yr Castletown_--the Red Priest of
Castletown--was a great man with the Methodists in his day, and the
people flocked by their thousands when he administered the Sacrament. I
was born and brought up in Glamorganshire, and old men have wept as they
told me of the weeping and contrition that there was when the Red
Priest broke the Bread and raised the Cup. But you are a railer, and see
nothing but the outside and the show. You are not worthy of this mystery
that has been done here."
I went out from his presence rebuked indeed, and justly rebuked; but
rather amazed. It is curiously true that the Welsh are still one people,
one family almost, in a manner that the English cannot understand, but I
had never thought that this old clergyman would have known anything of
my ancestry or their doings. And as for my articles and such-like, I
knew that the country clergy sometimes read, but I had fancied my
pronouncements sufficiently obscure, even in London, much more in Arfon.
But so it happened, and so I had no explanation from the rector of
Llantrisant of the strange circumstance, that his church was full of
incense and odours of paradise.
* * * * *
I went up and down the ways of Llantrisant wondering, and came to the
harbour, which is a little place, with little quays where some small
coasting trade still lingers. A brigantine was at anchor here, and very
lazily in the sunshine they were loading it with anthracite; for it is
one of the oddities of Llantrisant that there is a small colliery in the
heart of the wood on the hillside. I crossed a causeway which parts the
outer harbour from the inner harbour, and settled down on a rocky beach
hidden under a leafy hill. The tide was going out, and some children
were playing on the wet sand, while two ladies--their mothers, I
suppose--talked together as they sat comfortably on their rugs at a
little distance from me.
At first they talked of the war, and I made myself deaf, for of that
talk one gets enough, and more than enough, in London. Then there was a
period of silence, and the conversation had passed to quite a different
topic when I caught the thread of it again. I was sitting on the further
side of a big rock, and I do not think that the two ladies had noticed
my approach. However, though they spoke of strange things, they spoke of
nothing which made it necessary for me to announce my presence.
"And, after all," one of them was saying, "what is it all about? I can't
make out what is come to the people."
This speaker was a Welshwoman; I recognised the clear, over-emphasised
consonants, and a faint suggestion of an accent. Her friend came from
the Midlands, and it turned out that they had only known each other for
a few days. Theirs was a friendship of the beach and of bathing; such
friendships are common, at small seaside places.
"There is certainly something odd about the people here. I have never
been to Llantrisant before, you know; indeed, this is the first time
we've been in Wales for our holidays, and knowing nothing about the ways
of the people and not being accustomed to hear Welsh spoken, I thought,
perhaps, it must be my imagination. But you think there really is
something a little queer?"
"I can tell you this: that I have been in two minds whether I should not
write to my husband and ask him to take me and the children away. You
know where I am at Mrs. Morgan's, and the Morgans' sitting-room is just
the other side of the passage, and sometimes they leave the door open,
so that I can hear what they say quite plainly. And you see I understand
the Welsh, though they don't know it. And I hear them saying the most
alarming things!"
"What sort of things?
"Well, indeed, it sounds like some kind of a religious service, but it's
not Church of England, I know that. Old Morgan begins it, and the wife
and children answer. Something like; 'Blessed be God for the messengers
of Paradise.' 'Blessed be His Name for Paradise in the meat and in the
drink.' 'Thanksgiving for the old offering.' 'Thanksgiving for the
appearance of the old altar,' 'Praise for the joy of the ancient
garden.' 'Praise for the return of those that have been long absent.'
And all that sort of thing. It is nothing but madness."
"Depend upon it," said the lady from the Midlands, "there's no real harm
in it. They're Dissenters; some new sect, I dare say. You know some
Dissenters are very queer in their ways."
"All that is like no Dissenters that I have ever known in all my life
whatever," replied the Welsh lady somewhat vehemently, with a very
distinct intonation of the land. "And have you heard them speak of the
bright light that shone at midnight from the church?"