A SECRET IN A SECRET PLACE
Now here was I altogether at a loss and quite bewildered. The children
broke into the conversation of the two ladies and cut it all short, just
as the midnight lights from the church came on the field, and when the
little girls and boys went back again to the sands whooping, the tide of
talk had turned, and Mrs. Harland and Mrs. Williams were quite safe and
at home with Janey's measles, and a wonderful treatment for infantile
earache, as exemplified in the case of Trevor. There was no more to be
got out of them, evidently, so I left the beach, crossed the harbour
causeway, and drank beer at the "Fishermen's Rest" till it was time to
climb up two miles of deep lane and catch the train for Penvro, where I
was staying. And I went up the lane, as I say, in a kind of amazement;
and not so much, I think, because of evidences and hints of things
strange to the senses, such as the savour of incense where no incense
had smoked for three hundred and fifty years and more, or the story of
bright light shining from the dark, closed church at dead of night, as
because of that sentence of thanksgiving "for paradise in meat and in
drink."
For the sun went down and the evening fell as I climbed the long hill
through the deep woods and the high meadows, and the scent of all the
green things rose from the earth and from the heart of the wood, and at
a turn of the lane far below was the misty glimmer of the still sea, and
from far below its deep murmur sounded as it washed on the little
hidden, enclosed bay where Llantrisant stands. And I thought, if there
be paradise in meat and in drink, so much the more is there paradise in
the scent of the green leaves at evening and in the appearance of the
sea and in the redness of the sky; and there came to me a certain vision
of a real world about us all the while, of a language that was only
secret because we would not take the trouble to listen to it and discern
it.
It was almost dark when I got to the station, and here were the few
feeble oil lamps lit, glimmering in that lonely land, where the way is
long from farm to farm. The train came on its way, and I got into it;
and just as we moved from the station I noticed a group under one of
those dim lamps. A woman and her child had got out, and they were being
welcomed by a man who had been waiting for them. I had not noticed his
face as I stood on the platform, but now I saw it as he pointed down the
hill towards Llantrisant, and I think I was almost frightened.
He was a young man, a farmer's son, I would say, dressed in rough brown
clothes, and as different from old Mr. Evans, the rector, as one man
might be from another. But on his face, as I saw it in the lamplight,
there was the like brightening that I had seen on the face of the
rector. It was an illuminated face, glowing with an ineffable joy, and I
thought it rather gave light to the platform lamp than received light
from it. The woman and her child, I inferred, were strangers to the
place, and had come to pay a visit to the young man's family. They had
looked about them in bewilderment, half alarmed, before they saw him;
and then his face was radiant in their sight, and it was easy to see
that all their troubles were ended and over. A wayside station and a
darkening country, and it was as if they were welcomed by shining,
immortal gladness--even into paradise.
* * * * *
But though there seemed in a sense light all about my ways, I was myself
still quite bewildered. I could see, indeed, that something strange had
happened or was happening in the little town hidden under the hill, but
there was so far no clue to the mystery, or rather, the clue had been
offered to me, and I had not taken it, I had not even known that it was
there; since we do not so much as see what we have determined, without
judging, to be incredible, even though it be held up before our eyes.
The dialogue that the Welsh Mrs. Williams had reported to her English
friend might have set me on the right way; but the right way was outside
all my limits of possibility, outside the circle of my thought. The
palæontologist might see monstrous, significant marks in the slime of a
river bank, but he would never draw the conclusions that his own
peculiar science would seem to suggest to him; he would choose any
explanation rather than the obvious, since the obvious would also be
the outrageous--according to our established habit of thought, which we
deem final.
* * * * *
The next day I took all these strange things with me for consideration
to a certain place that I knew of not far from Penvro. I was now in the
early stages of the jig-saw process, or rather I had only a few pieces
before me, and--to continue the figure my difficulty was this: that
though the markings on each piece seemed to have design and
significance, yet I could not make the wildest guess as to the nature of
the whole picture, of which these were the parts. I had clearly seen
that there was a great secret; I had seen that on the face of the young
farmer on the platform of Llantrisant station; and in my mind there was
all the while the picture of him going down the dark, steep, winding
lane that led to the town and the sea, going down through the heart of
the wood, with light about him.
But there was bewilderment in the thought of this, and in the endeavour
to match it with the perfumed church and the scraps of talk that I had
heard and the rumour of midnight brightness; and though Penvro is by no
means populous, I thought I would go to a certain solitary place called
the Old Camp Head, which looks towards Cornwall and to the great deeps
that roll beyond Cornwall to the far ends of the world; a place where
fragments of dreams--they seemed such then--might, perhaps, be gathered
into the clearness of vision.
It was some years since I had been to the Head, and I had gone on that
last time and on a former visit by the cliffs, a rough and difficult
path. Now I chose a landward way, which the county map seemed to
justify, though doubtfully, as regarded the last part of the journey. So
I went inland and climbed the hot summer by-roads, till I came at last
to a lane which gradually turned turfy and grass-grown, and then on high
ground, ceased to be. It left me at a gate in a hedge of old thorns; and
across the field beyond there seemed to be some faint indications of a
track. One would judge that sometimes men did pass by that way, but not
often.
It was high ground but not within sight of the sea. But the breath of
the sea blew about the hedge of thorns, and came with a keen savour to
the nostrils. The ground sloped gently from the gate and then rose again
to a ridge, where a white farmhouse stood all alone. I passed by this
farmhouse, threading an uncertain way, followed a hedgerow doubtfully;
and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire
plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet
the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of
glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining
with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond
the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the
awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations,
wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.
* * * * *
Within these smoothed, green mounds, looking across the shining and
changing of the waters in the happy sunlight, I took out the bread and
cheese and beer that I had carried in a bag, and ate and drank, and lit
my pipe, and set myself to think over the enigmas of Llantrisant. And I
had scarcely done so when, a good deal to my annoyance, a man came
climbing up over the green ridges, and took up his stand close by, and
stared out to sea. He nodded to me, and began with "Fine weather for the
harvest" in the approved manner, and so sat down and engaged me in a net
of talk. He was of Wales, it seemed, but from a different part of the
country, and was staying for a few days with relations--at the white
farmhouse which I had passed on my way. His tale of nothing flowed on to
his pleasure and my pain, till he fell suddenly on Llantrisant and its
doings. I listened then with wonder, and here is his tale condensed.
Though it must be clearly understood that the man's evidence was only
second-hand; he had heard it from his cousin, the farmer.
So, to be brief, it appeared that there had been a long feud at
Llantrisant between a local solicitor, Lewis Prothero (we will say), and
a farmer named James. There had been a quarrel about some trifle, which
had grown more and more bitter as the two parties forgot the merits of
the original dispute, and by some means or other, which I could not
well understand, the lawyer had got the small freeholder "under his
thumb." James, I think, had given a bill of sale in a bad season, and
Prothero had bought it up; and the end was that the farmer was turned
out of the old house, and was lodging in a cottage. People said he would
have to take a place on his own farm as a labourer; he went about in
dreadful misery, piteous to see. It was thought by some that he might
very well murder the lawyer, if he met him.
They did meet, in the middle of the market-place at Llantrisant one
Saturday in June. The farmer was a little black man, and he gave a shout
of rage, and the people were rushing at him to keep him off Prothero.
"And then," said my informant, "I will tell you what happened. This
lawyer, as they tell me, he is a great big brawny fellow, with a big jaw
and a wide mouth, and a red face and red whiskers. And there he was in
his black coat and his high hard hat, and all his money at his back, as
you may say. And, indeed, he did fall down on his knees in the dust
there in the street in front of Philip James, and every one could see
that terror was upon him. And he did beg Philip James's pardon, and beg
of him to have mercy, and he did implore him by God and man and the
saints of paradise. And my cousin, John Jenkins, Penmawr, he do tell me
that the tears were falling from Lewis Prothero's eyes like the rain.
And he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the deed of Pantyreos,
Philip James's old farm that was, and did give him the farm back and a
hundred pounds for the stock that was on it, and two hundred pounds, all
in notes of the bank, for amendment and consolation.
"And then, from what they do tell me, all the people did go mad, crying
and weeping and calling out all manner of things at the top of their
voices. And at last nothing would do but they must all go up to the
churchyard, and there Philip James and Lewis Prothero they swear
friendship to one another for a long age before the old cross, and
everyone sings praises. And my cousin he do declare to me that there
were men standing in that crowd that he did never see before in
Llantrisant in all his life, and his heart was shaken within him as if
it had been in a whirl-wind."
I had listened to all this in silence. I said then:
"What does your cousin mean by that? Men that he had never seen in
Llantrisant? What men?"
"The people," he said very slowly, "call them the Fishermen."
And suddenly there came into my mind the "Rich Fisherman" who in the old
legend guards the holy mystery of the Graal.