At Treff Loyne Farm
Let it be remembered, again and again, that, all the while that the
terror lasted, there was no common stock of information as to the
dreadful things that were being done. The press had not said one word
upon it, there was no criterion by which the mass of the people could
separate fact from mere vague rumor, no test by which ordinary
misadventure or disaster could be distinguished from the achievements
of the secret and awful force that was at work.
And so with every event of the passing day. A harmless commercial
traveler might show himself in the course of his business in the
tumbledown main street of Meiros and find himself regarded with looks
of fear and suspicion as a possible worker of murder, while it is
likely enough that the true agents of the terror went quite unnoticed.
And since the real nature of all this mystery of death was unknown, it
followed easily that the signs and warnings and omens of it were all
the more unknown. Here was horror, there was horror; but there was no
links to join one horror with another; no common basis of knowledge
from which the connection between this horror and that horror might be
inferred.
So there was no one who suspected at all that this dismal and hollow
sound that was now heard of nights in the region to the north of Porth,
had any relation at all to the case of the little girl who went out one
afternoon to pick purple flowers and never returned, or to the case of
the man whose body was taken out of the peaty slime of the marsh, or to
the case of Cradock, dead in his fields, with a strange glimmering of
light about his body, as his wife reported. And it is a question as to
how far the rumor of this melancholy, nocturnal summons got abroad at
all. Lewis heard of it, as a country doctor hears of most things,
driving up and down the lanes, but he heard of it without much
interest, with no sense that it was in any sort of relation to the
terror. Remnant had been given the story of the hollow and echoing
voice of the darkness in a colored and picturesque form; he employed a
Tredonoc man to work in his garden once a week. The gardener had not
heard the summons himself, but he knew a man who had done so.
“Thomas Jenkins, Pentoppin, he did put his head out late last night to
see what the weather was like, as he was cutting a field of corn the
next day, and he did tell me that when he was with the Methodists in
Cardigan he did never hear no singing eloquence in the chapels that was
like to it. He did declare it was like a wailing of Judgment Day.”
Remnant considered the matter, and was inclined to think that the sound
must be caused by a subterranean inlet of the sea; there might be, he
supposed, an imperfect or half-opened or tortuous blow-hole in the
Tredonoc woods, and the noise of the tide, surging up below, might very
well produce that effect of a hollow wailing, far away. But neither he
nor any one else paid much attention to the matter; save the few who
heard the call at dead of night, as it echoed awfully over the black
hills.
The sound had been heard for three or perhaps four nights, when the
people coming out of Tredonoc church after morning service on Sunday
noticed that there was a big yellow sheepdog in the churchyard. The
dog, it appeared, had been waiting for the congregation; for it at once
attached itself to them, at first to the whole body, and then to a
group of half a dozen who took the turning to the right. Two of these
presently went off over the fields to their respective houses, and four
strolled on in the leisurely Sunday-morning manner of the country, and
these the dog followed, keeping to heel all the time. The men were
talking hay, corn and markets and paid no attention to the animal, and
so they strolled along the autumn lane till they came to a gate in the
hedge, whence a roughly made farm road went through the fields, and
dipped down into the woods and to Treff Loyne farm.
Then the dog became like a possessed creature. He barked furiously. He
ran up to one of the men and looked up at him, “as if he were begging
for his life,” as the man said, and then rushed to the gate and stood
by it, wagging his tail and barking at intervals. The men stared and
laughed.
“Whose dog will that be?” said one of them.
“It will be Thomas Griffith’s, Treff Loyne,” said another.
“Well, then, why doesn’t he go home? Go home then!” He went through the
gesture of picking up a stone from the road and throwing it at the dog.
“Go home, then! Over the gate with you.”
But the dog never stirred. He barked and whined and ran up to the men
and then back to the gate. At last he came to one of them, and crawled
and abased himself on the ground and then took hold of the man’s coat
and tried to pull him in the direction of the gate. The farmer shook
the dog off, and the four went on their way; and the dog stood in the
road and watched them and then put up its head and uttered a long and
dismal howl that was despair.
The four farmers thought nothing of it; sheepdogs in the country are
dogs to look after sheep, and their whims and fancies are not studied.
But the yellow dog—he was a kind of degenerate collie—haunted the
Tredonoc lanes from that day. He came to a cottage door one night and
scratched at it, and when it was opened lay down, and then, barking,
ran to the garden gate and waited, entreating, as it seemed, the
cottager to follow him. They drove him away and again he gave that long
howl of anguish. It was almost as bad, they said, as the noise that
they had heard a few nights before. And then it occurred to somebody,
so far as I can make out with no particular reference to the odd
conduct of the Treff Loyne sheepdog, that Thomas Griffith had not been
seen for some time past. He had missed market day at Porth, he had not
been at Tredonoc church, where he was a pretty regular attendant on
Sunday; and then, as heads were put together, it appeared that nobody
had seen any of the Griffith family for days and days.
Now in a town, even in a small town, this process of putting heads
together is a pretty quick business. In the country, especially in a
countryside of wild lands and scattered and lonely farms and cottages,
the affair takes time. Harvest was going on, everybody was busy in his
own fields, and after the long day’s hard work neither the farmer nor
his men felt inclined to stroll about in search of news or gossip. A
harvester at the day’s end is ready for supper and sleep and for
nothing else.
And so it was late in that week when it was discovered that Thomas
Griffith and all his house had vanished from this world.
I have often been reproached for my curiosity over questions which are
apparently of slight importance, or of no importance at all. I love to
inquire, for instance, into the question of the visibility of a lighted
candle at a distance. Suppose, that is, a candle lighted on a still,
dark night in the country; what is the greatest distance at which you
can see that there is a light at all? And then as to the human voice;
what is its carrying distance, under good conditions, as a mere sound,
apart from any matter of making out words that may be uttered?
They are trivial questions, no doubt, but they have always interested
me, and the latter point has its application to the strange business of
Treff Loyne. That melancholy and hollow sound, that wailing summons
that appalled the hearts of those who heard it was, indeed, a human
voice, produced in a very exceptional manner; and it seems to have been
heard at points varying from a mile and a half to two miles from the
farm. I do not know whether this is anything extraordinary; I do not
know whether the peculiar method of production was calculated to
increase or to diminish the carrying power of the sound.
Again and again I have laid emphasis in this story of the terror on the
strange isolation of many of the farms and cottages in Meirion. I have
done so in the effort to convince the townsman of something that he has
never known. To the Londoner a house a quarter of a mile from the
outlying suburban lamp, with no other dwelling within two hundred
yards, is a lonely house, a place to fit with ghosts and mysteries and
terrors. How can he understand then, the true loneliness of the white
farmhouses of Meirion, dotted here and there, for the most part not
even on the little lanes and deep winding byways, but set in the very
heart of the fields, or alone on huge bastioned headlands facing the
sea, and whether on the high verge of the sea or on the hills or in the
hollows of the inner country, hidden from the sight of men, far from
the sound of any common call. There is Penyrhaul, for example, the farm
from which the foolish Merritt thought he saw signals of light being
made: from seaward it is of course, widely visible; but from landward,
owing partly to the curving and indented configuration of the bay, I
doubt whether any other habitation views it from a nearer distance than
three miles.
And of all these hidden and remote places, I doubt if any is so deeply
buried as Treff Loyne. I have little or no Welsh, I am sorry to say,
but I suppose that the name is corrupted from Trellwyn, or
Tref-y-llwyn, “the place in the grove,” and, indeed, it lies in the
very heart of dark, overhanging woods. A deep, narrow valley runs down
from the high lands of the Allt, through these woods, through steep
hillsides of bracken and gorse, right down to the great marsh, whence
Merritt saw the dead man being carried. The valley lies away from any
road, even from that by-road, little better than a bridlepath, where
the four farmers, returning from church were perplexed by the strange
antics of the sheepdog. One cannot say that the valley is overlooked,
even from a distance, for so narrow is it that the ashgroves that rim
it on either side seem to meet and shut it in. I, at all events, have
never found any high place from which Treff Loyne is visible; though,
looking down from the Allt, I have seen blue wood-smoke rising from its
hidden chimneys.
Such was the place, then, to which one September afternoon a party went
up to discover what had happened to Griffith and his family. There were
half a dozen farmers, a couple of policemen, and four soldiers,
carrying their arms; those last had been lent by the officer commanding
at the camp. Lewis, too, was of the party; he had heard by chance that
no one knew what had become of Griffith and his family; and he was
anxious about a young fellow, a painter, of his acquaintance, who had
been lodging at Treff Loyne all the summer.
They all met by the gate of Tredonoc churchyard, and tramped solemnly
along the narrow lane; all of them, I think, with some vague discomfort
of mind, with a certain shadowy fear, as of men who do not quite know
what they may encounter. Lewis heard the corporal and the three
soldiers arguing over their orders.
“The Captain says to me,” muttered the corporal, “‘Don’t hesitate to
shoot if there’s any trouble.’ ‘Shoot what, sir,’ I says. ‘The
trouble,’ says he, and that’s all I could get out of him.”
The men grumbled in reply; Lewis thought he heard some obscure
reference to rat-poison, and wondered what they were talking about.
They came to the gate in the hedge, where the farm road led down to
Treff Loyne. They followed this track, roughly made, with grass growing
up between its loosely laid stones, down by the hedge from field to
wood, till at last they came to the sudden walls of the valley, and the
sheltering groves of the ash trees. Here the way curved down the steep
hillside, and bent southward, and followed henceforward the hidden
hollow of the valley, under the shadow of the trees.
Here was the farm enclosure; the outlying walls of the yard and the
barns and sheds and outhouses. One of the farmers threw open the gate
and walked into the yard, and forthwith began bellowing at the top of
his voice:
“Thomas Griffith! Thomas Griffith! Where be you, Thomas Griffith?”
The rest followed him. The corporal snapped out an order over his
shoulder, and there was a rattling metallic noise as the men fixed
their bayonets and became in an instant dreadful dealers out of death,
in place of harmless fellows with a feeling for beer.
“Thomas Griffith!” again bellowed the farmer.
There was no answer to this summons. But they found poor Griffith lying
on his face at the edge of the pond in the middle of the yard. There
was a ghastly wound in his side, as if a sharp stake had been driven
into his body.