THE RINGING OF THE BELL
So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but
rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed
and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought;
bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly
inexplicable; devoid, not so much of the key to the enigma, but of the
key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till
you know what the puzzle is about. "Yards divided by minutes," said the
mathematical master to me long ago, "will give neither pigs, sheep, nor
oxen." He was right; though his manner on this and on all other
occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process,
as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at
Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I
can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old
woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or
so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday
morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up
her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and
eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours
about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each
side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry's back, for one had to bawl
into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs.
Williams, Penycoed, bent over and yelled: "What bell should that be,
Mrs. Parry? There's no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what
nonsense she talks?" said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan.
"As if she could hear any bell, whatever."
"What makes you talk nonsense your self?" said Mrs. Parry, to the
amazement of the two women. "I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs.
Williams, and as well as your whispers either."
And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the
deductions from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman
who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years--the defect had always
been in her family--could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as
anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some
time before they had appeased her indignation, and induced her to talk
about the bell.
It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty. She had been
gathering sage in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea.
And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing and singing and
trembling, "as if there were music coming out of the earth," and then
something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing
and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden
fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far
off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all
these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and
chanting note of the bell, "like a bell and a man's voice singing at
once."
They stared again at her and at one another. "Where did it sound from?"
asked one. "It came sailing across the sea," answered Mrs. Parry quite
composedly, "and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land."
"Well, indeed," said Mrs. Morgan, "it was a ship's bell then, though I
can't make out why they would be ringing like that."
"It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan," said Mrs. Parry.
"Then where do you think it was ringing?"
"Ym Mharadwys," replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means "in Paradise," and
the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs.
Parry had got back her hearing suddenly--such things did happen now and
then--and that the shock had made her "a bit queer." And this
explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for
other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry
for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless
and beyond cure, but for a tiresome and recurrent winter cough, sent an
account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally
enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his
opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty have been
expected.
"You have here, in all probability," he wrote, "the sudden breaking down
of an old obstruction in the aural passage, and I should quite expect
this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even
violent character."
* * * * *
But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon,
high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the
stalls and the streets were full of rumours and of awed faces. Now from
one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story
of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to
the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before.
And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew
not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were
ringing and the organ playing, and a choir of sweet voices singing all
together: "There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of
joy."
And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night
returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had
heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a
little distance from his boat. "It was all golden and bright," he said,
"and there was glory about it." Another fisherman declared "there was a
song upon the water that was like heaven."
And here I would say in parenthesis that on returning to town I sought
out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted a lifetime to
strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would
interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal
of indifference. And at this very point of the sailors' stories I
remember saying: "Now what do you make of that? Don't you think it's
extremely curious?" He replied: "I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors
were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing
has always been happening." I give my friend's opinion; I make no
comment on it.
Let it be noted that there was something remarkable as to the manner in
which the sound of the bell was heard--or supposed to be heard. There
are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed
that during one of the horrible outrages that have been perpetrated on
London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of
workmen's dwellings in which the only person who heard the crash of a
particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep
till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that
was entirely in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at
Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory
hallucination or a manifestation of what is conveniently, if
inaccurately, called the supernatural order.
For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears--or hearts. Deaf
Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty
sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a
little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a
household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering
baby Welsh something that sounded like "Clychau fawr, clychau
fawr"--the great bells, the great bells--and his mother wondered what he
was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were
swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any
tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had
heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels of lying;
and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner
of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a
true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale;
but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the
fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that
something had happened.
* * * * *
And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people
were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck
me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported,
will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions;
fishermen, they will say, do not speak of "a song like heaven" or of "a
glory about it." And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if
I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has
not yet lost the last shreds of the grand manner. And let it be
remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from
another language, that is, from the Welsh.
So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in
their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display,
uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that
were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The
comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy's old Durbeyfield
suddenly waking from long slumber to find himself in a noble
thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet
ladies in silken côtehardies.
So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of
stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth of
winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the
wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas
from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, "and the sound of its
ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels."
Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that
evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed
far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt
offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another
of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.