OLWEN'S DREAM
The well-to-do and dignified personages who left their pews in the
chancel of Llantrisant Church and came hurrying into the nave could give
no explanation of what they had done. They felt, they said, that they
had to go, and to go quickly; they were driven out, as it were, by a
secret, irresistible command. But all who were present in the church
that morning were amazed, though all exulted in their hearts; for they,
like the sailors who saw the rose of fire on the waters, were filled
with a joy that was literally ineffable, since they could not utter it
or interpret it to themselves.
And they too, like the sailors, were transmuted, or the world was
transmuted for them. They experienced what the doctors call a sense of
_bien être_ but a _bien être_ raised, to the highest power. Old men felt
young again, eyes that had been growing dim now saw clearly, and saw a
world that was like Paradise, the same world, it is true, but a world
rectified and glowing, as if an inner flame shone in all things, and
behind all things.
And the difficulty in recording this state is this, that it is so rare
an experience that no set language to express it is in existence. A
shadow of its raptures and ecstasies is found in the highest poetry;
there are phrases in ancient books telling of the Celtic saints that
dimly hint at it; some of the old Italian masters of painting had known
it, for the light of it shines in their skies and about the battlements
of their cities that are founded on magic hills. But these are but
broken hints.
It is not poetic to go to Apothecaries' Hall for similes. But for many
years I kept by me an article from the _Lancet_ or the _British Medical
Journal_--I forget which--in which a doctor gave an account of certain
experiments he had conducted with a drug called the Mescal Button, or
Anhelonium Lewinii. He said that while under the influence of the drug
he had but to shut his eyes, and immediately before him there would rise
incredible Gothic cathedrals, of such majesty and splendour and glory
that no heart had ever conceived. They seemed to surge from the depths
to the very heights of heaven, their spires swayed amongst the clouds
and the stars, they were fretted with admirable imagery. And as he
gazed, he would presently become aware that all the stones were living
stones, that they were quickening and palpitating, and then that they
were glowing jewels, say, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, opals, but of
hues that the mortal eye had never seen.
That description gives, I think, some faint notion of the nature of the
transmuted world into which these people by the sea had entered, a world
quickened and glorified and full of pleasures. Joy and wonder were on
all faces; but the deepest joy and the greatest wonder were on the face
of the rector. For he had heard through the veil the Greek word for
"holy," three times repeated. And he, who had once been a horrified
assistant at High Mass in a foreign church, recognised the perfume of
incense that filled the place from end to end.
* * * * *
It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
wake from it.
The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."
Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
it was not a dream.
She said she woke up in the deep darkness, and she knew the life was
fast going from her. She could not move so much as a finger, she tried
to cry out, but no sound came from her lips. She felt that in another
instant the whole world would fall from her--her heart was full of
agony. And as the last breath was passing her lips, she heard a very
faint, sweet sound, like the tinkling of a silver bell. It came from far
away, from over by Ty-newydd. She forgot her agony and listened, and
even then, she says, she felt the swirl of the world as it came back to
her. And the sound of the bell swelled and grew louder, and it thrilled
all through her body, and the life was in it. And as the bell rang and
trembled in her ears, a faint light touched the wall of her room and
reddened, till the whole room was full of rosy fire. And then she saw
standing before her bed three men in blood-coloured robes with shining
faces. And one man held a golden bell in his hand. And the second man
held up something shaped like the top of a table. It was like a great
jewel, and it was of a blue colour, and there were rivers of silver and
of gold running through it and flowing as quick streams flow, and there
were pools in it as if violets had been poured out into water, and then
it was green as the sea near the shore, and then it was the sky at night
with all the stars shining, and then the sun and the moon came down and
washed in it. And the third man held up high above this a cup that was
like a rose on fire; "there was a great burning in it, and a dropping of
blood in it, and a red cloud above it, and I saw a great secret. And I
heard a voice that sang nine times, 'Glory and praise to the Conqueror
of Death, to the Fountain of Life immortal.' Then the red light went
from the wall, and it was all darkness, and the bell rang faint again by
Capel Teilo, and then I got up and called to you."
The doctor came on the Monday morning with the death certificate in his
pocket-book, and Olwen ran out to meet him. I have quoted his phrase in
the first chapter of this record: "A kind of resurrection of the body."
He made a most careful examination of the girl; he has stated that he
found that every trace of disease had disappeared. He left on the Sunday
morning a patient entering into the coma that precedes death, a body
condemned utterly and ready for the grave. He met at the garden gate on
the Monday morning a young woman in whom life sprang up like a fountain,
in whose body life laughed and rejoiced as if it had been a river
flowing from an unending well.
* * * * *
Now this is the place to ask one of those questions--there are many
such--which cannot be answered. The question is as to the continuance of
tradition; more especially as to the continuance of tradition among the
Welsh Celts of today. On the one hand, such waves and storms have gone
over them. The wave of the heathen Saxons went over them, then the wave
of Latin mediævalism, then the waters of Anglicanism; last of all the
flood of their queer Calvinistic Methodism, half Puritan, half pagan. It
may well be asked whether any memory can possibly have survived such a
series of deluges. I have said that the old people of Llantrisant had
their tales of the Bell of Teilo Sant; but these were but vague and
broken recollections. And then there is the name by which the
"strangers" who were seen in the market-place were known; that is more
precise. Students of the Graal legend know that the keeper of the Graal
in the romances is the "King Fisherman," or the "Rich Fisherman";
students of Celtic hagiology know that it was prophesied before the
birth of Dewi (or David) that he should be "a man of aquatic life," that
another legend tells how a little child, destined to be a saint, was
discovered on a stone in the river, how through his childhood a fish for
his nourishment was found on that stone every day, while another saint,
Ilar, if I remember, was expressly known as "The Fisherman." But has the
memory of all this persisted in the church-going and chapel-going people
of Wales at the present day? It is difficult to say. There is the affair
of the Healing Cup of Nant Eos, or Tregaron Healing Cup, as it is also
called. It is only a few years ago since it was shown to a wandering
harper, who treated it lightly, and then spent a wretched night, as he
said, and came back penitently and was left alone with the sacred vessel
to pray over it, till "his mind was at rest." That was in 1887.
Then for my part--I only know modern Wales on the surface, I am sorry to
say--I remember three or four years ago speaking to my temporary
landlord of certain relics of Saint Teilo, which are supposed to be in
the keeping of a particular family in that country. The landlord is a
very jovial, merry fellow, and I observed with some astonishment that
his ordinary, easy manner was completely altered as he said, gravely,
"That will be over there, up by the mountain," pointing vaguely to the
north. And he changed the subject, as a Freemason changes the subject.
There the matter lies, and its appositeness to the story of Llantrisant
is this: that the dream of Olwen Phillips was, in fact, the Vision of
the Holy Graal.