A FARMHOUSE UNDER A MOUNTAIN, A FIRE, AND SOME FIRESIDERS
Having passed the ruined abbey and the orchard, I came to a long, low
farmhouse kitchen, smelling of bacon and herbs and burning sycamore and
ash. A gun, a blunderbuss, a pair of silver spurs, and a golden spray of
last year's corn hung over the high mantelpiece and its many brass
candlesticks; and beneath was an open fireplace and a perpetual red
fire, and two teapots warming, for they had tea for breakfast, tea for
dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea between. The floor was of
sanded slate flags, and on them a long many-legged table, an oak settle,
a table piano, and some Chippendale chairs. There were also two tall
clocks; and they were the most human clocks I ever met, for they ticked
with effort and uneasiness: they seemed to think and sorrow over time,
as if they caused it, and did not go on thoughtlessly or impudently like
most clocks, which are insufferable; they found the hours troublesome
and did not twitter mechanically over them; and at midnight the twelve
strokes always nearly ruined them, so great was the effort. On the wall
were a large portrait of Spurgeon, several sets of verses printed and
framed in memory of dead members of the family, an allegorical tree
watered by the devil, and photographs of a bard and of Mr. Lloyd George.
There were about fifty well-used books near the fire, and two or three
men smoking, and one man reading some serious book aloud, by the only
lamp; and a white girl was carrying out the week's baking, of large
loaves, flat fruit tarts of blackberry, apple, and whinberry, plain
golden cakes, large soft currant biscuits, and curled oat cakes. And
outside, the noises of a west wind and a flooded stream, the whimper of
an otter, and the long, slow laugh of an owl; and always silent, but
never forgotten, the restless, towering outline of a mountain.
The fire was—is—of wood, dry oak-twigs of last spring, stout ash sticks
cut this morning, and brawny oak butts grubbed from the copse years
after the tree was felled. And I remember how we built it up one autumn,
when the heat and business of the day had almost let it die.
[Illustration:
DISTANT VIEW OF PENMAENMAWR—EARLY MORNING LIGHT
]
We had been out all day, cutting and binding the late corn. At one
moment we admired the wheat straightening in the sun after drooping in
rain, with grey heads all bent one way over the luminous amber stalks,
and at last leaning and quivering like runners about to start or like a
wind made visible. At another moment we admired the gracious groups of
sheaves in pyramids made by our own hands, as we sat and drank our
buttermilk or ale, and ate bread and cheese or chwippod (the harvesters'
stiff pudding of raisins, rice, bread, and fresh milk) among the furze
mixed with bramble and fern at the edge of the field. Behind us was a
place given over to blue scabious flowers, haunted much by blue
butterflies of the same hue; to cross-leaved heath and its clusters of
close, pensile ovals, of a perfect white that blushed towards the sun;
to a dainty embroidery of tormentil shining with unvaried gold; and to
tall, purple loosestrife, with bees at it, dispensing a thin perfume of
the kind that all fair living things, plants or children, breathe.
What a thing it is to reap the wheat with your own hands, to thresh it
with the oaken flail in the misty barn, to ride with it to the mill and
take your last trout while it is ground, and then to eat it with no
decoration of butter, straight from the oven! There is nothing better,
unless it be to eat your trout with the virgin appetite which you have
won in catching it. But in the field, we should have been pleased with
the plainest meal a hungry man can have, which is, I suppose, barley
bread and a pale "double Caermarthen" cheese, which you cut with a
hatchet after casting it on the floor and making it bounce, to be sure
that it is a double Caermarthen. And yet I do not know. For even a Welsh
hymnist of the eighteenth century, in translating "the increase of the
fields," wrote avidly of "wheaten bread," so serious was his distaste
for barley bread. But it was to a meal of wheaten bread and oat cake,
and cheese and onions and cucumber, that we came in, while the trembling
splendours of the first stars shone, as if they also were dewy like the
furze. Nothing is to be compared with the pleasure of seeing the stars
thus in the east, when most eyes are watching the west, except perhaps
to read a fresh modern poet, straight from the press, before any one has
praised it, and to know that it is good.
[Illustration: SILVERY LIGHT, CONWAY SHORE]
As we sat, some were singing the song "Morwynion Sir Gaerfyrdd-in." Some
were looking out at the old hay waggon before the gate.
Fine grass was already growing in corners of the wrecked hay waggon. Two
months before, it travelled many times a day between the rick and the
fields. Swallow was in the shafts while it carried all the village
children to the field, as it had done some sixty years ago, when the
village wheelwright helped God to make it. The waggoner lifted them out
in clusters; the haymakers loaded silently; the waggon moved along the
roads between the swathes; and, followed by children who expected
another ride, and drawn by Swallow and Darling, it reached the rick that
began to rise, like an early church, beside the elms. But hardly had it
set out for another load than Swallow shied; an axle splintered and tore
and broke in two, near the hub of one wheel, which subsided so that a
corner of the waggon fell askew into the tussocks, and the suspended
horse-shoe dropped from its place. There the mare left it, and switched
her black tail from side to side of her lucent, nut-brown haunches, as
she went.
All day the waggon was now the children's own. They climbed and slid and
made believe that they were sailors, on its thin, polished timbers. The
grass had grown up to it, under its protection. Before it fell, the
massive wheels and delicate curved sides had been so fair and strong
that no one thought of its end. Now, the exposed decay raised a smile at
its so recent death. No one gave it a thought, except, perhaps, as now,
when the September evening began, and one saw it on this side of the
serious, dark elms, when the flooded ruts were gleaming, and a cold
light fell over it from a tempestuous sky, and the motionless air was
full of the shining of moist quinces and yellow fallen apples in long
herbage; and, far off, the cowman let a gate shut noisily; the late
swallows and early bats mingled in flight; and, under an oak, a tramp
was kindling his fire....
Suddenly in came the dog, one of those thievish, lean, swift
demi-wolves, that appear so fearful of meeting a stranger, but when he
has passed, turn and follow him. He shook himself, stepped into the
hearth and out and in again. With him was one whose red face and shining
eyes and crisped hair were the decoration with which the wind invests
his true lovers. A north wind had risen and given the word, and he
repeated it: let us have a fire.
So one brought hay and twigs, another branches and knotted logs, and
another the bellows. We made an edifice worthy of fire and kneeled with
the dog to watch light changing into heat, as the spirals of sparks
arose. The pyre was not more beautiful which turned to roses round the
innocent maiden for whom it was lit; nor that more wonderful round
which, night after night in the west, the clouds are solemnly ranged,
waiting for the command that will tell them whither they are bound in
the dark blue night. We became as the logs, that now and then settled
down (as if they wished to be comfortable) and sent out, as we did
words, some bristling sparks of satisfaction. And hardly did we envy
then the man who lit the first fire and saw his own stupendous shadow in
cave or wood and called it a god. As we kneeled, and our sight grew
pleasantly dim, were we looking at fire-born recollections of our own
childhood, wondering that such a childhood and youth as ours could ever
have been; or at a golden age that never was?... The light spelt the
titles of the books for a moment, and the bard read Spenser aloud, as if
forsooth a man can read poetry in company round such a fire. So we
pelted him with tales and songs....
And one of the songs was "The Maid of Landybie," by the bard, Watcyn
Wyn. Here follows the air, and a translation which was made by an
English poet. The naïveté of the original has troubled him, and the
Welsh stanza form has driven him to the use of rhymeless feminine
endings; but I think that his version will, with the air, render not too
faintly the song I heard.
[Illustration:
THE MAID OF LANDYBIE
_Air_: Y Ferch o Blwyf Penderyn.
]
'Rwy'n car - u merch o Lan - dy - bi - e, Ac y mae hith-e'n fy
nghar - u i O bob merch i - fanc yn Sir Gaer - fyrdd-in,
'Does neb o hon - yn' mor hardd a hi, Ar ei grudd-iau mae rhos-
- yn - au, Cym - ysg liw - iau coch a gwyn: Y hi y'wr un - ig
ferch a fyn - af, A hith - e — dim ond y fi - ne fyn.
I love a maid of Landybie
And it is she who loves me too.
Of all the women of Caermarthen
None is so fair as she, I know.
White and red are her cheeks' young roses,
The tints all blended mistily;
She is the only maid I long for,
And she will have no lad but me.
I love one maid of Landybie.
And she too loves but one, but one;
The tender girl remains my faithful,
Pure of heart, a bird in tone.
Her beauty and her comely bearing
Have won my love and life and care,
For there is none in all the kingdoms
Like her, so blushing, kind, and fair.
While there is lime in Craig-y-Ddinas;
While there is water in Pant-y-Llyn;
And while the waves of shining Loughor
Walk between these hills and sing;
While there's a belfry in the village
Whose bells delight the country nigh,
The dearest maid of Landybie
Shall have her name held sweet and high.
[Illustration: A MOUNTAIN PASS—NOON]
When we are by this fire, we can do what we like with Time, making a
strange solitude within these four walls, as if they were cut off in
time as in space from the great world by something more powerful than
the night; so that, whether Llewelyn the Great, or Llewelyn the Last, or
Arthur, or Kilhwch, or Owen Glyndwr, or the most recent prophet be the
subject of our talk, nothing intrudes that can prevent us for the time
from being utterly at one with them. They sing or jest or make puns;
they talk of hero and poet as if they had met them on the hills; and as
the poet has said, "Folly would it be to say that Arthur has a grave."
In such a room are legends made, if made at all. In fact, I lately saw a
pretty proof of it.
The valley in which the farmhouse lies is not so fortified that some
foreign things of one kind and another cannot enter. And a miner or a
youth on holiday from London brought a song of Bill Bailey to the ears
of one of the children of the house, a happy, melancholy boy named
Merfyn. The elders caught it for a day or two, and though the song does
not recommend itself to those who are heirs to "Sospan bach" and "Ar hyd
y nos," the name of the hero stuck. The child asked who he was, and
could get no answer. When anything happened about the farm that could
not easily be explained, it was jestingly said that Bill Bailey was at
the bottom of it. The child seriously caught up the name and the
mystery, and applied it with amusing and strange effect. Thus, when he
had asked who made the mushrooms in the dawn, and was not satisfied, he
himself decided, and with pride and joy announced, that they were Bill
Bailey's work. Looking into the fire one night, and seeing faces that he
could not recognise among the throbbing heat, he saw Bill Bailey, as he
surmised. Thus is a new solar hero being bred. The last news is that he
made Cader Idris and Orion and the Pleiades, and that the owls cry so
sadly because he is afoot in the woods.
[Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE AND QUAY—NOON]
And yet, if we are so unwise as to draw back the curtain from the window
at night, the illusion of timelessness is broken for that evening, and
in the flower-faced owl by the pane, in the great hill scarred with
precipices, and ribbed with white and crying streams, with here and
there a black tree disturbed and a very far-off light, I can see nothing
but the past as a magnificent presence besieging the house. At such
times the legends that I remember most are those of the buried and
unforgotten lands. What I see becomes but a symbol of what is now
invisible. And sometimes I dream of something hidden out there and
elaborating some omnipotent alcahest for the world's delight or the
world's bane; sometimes, as when I passed Llanddeusant and Myddfai, I
could see nothing that was there, because I was thinking of what had
been long ago. There is still a tradition on the coast that Cardigan Bay
now covers a country that was once populous and fair and rich. The son
of a prince of South Wales is said to have had charge of the floodgates
on the protecting embankment, and one night the floodgates were left
open at high tide, while he slept with wine, and the sea was over the
corn. "Seithenyn the Drunkard let in the sea over Cantre-'r-Gwaelod, so
that all the houses and lands contained in it were lost. And before that
time there were in it sixteen fortified towns superior to all the towns
and cities in Wales, except Caerlleon on the Usk. And Cantre-'r-Gwaelod
was the dominion of Gwyddno, King of Cardigan, and this event happened
in the time of Ambrosius. And the people who escaped from that
inundation came and landed in Ardudwy, the country of Arvon, the Snowdon
mountains, and other places not before inhabited...." The sands in some
places uncover the roots of an old forest. According to one tradition
the flood took place during a feast. The harper suddenly foresaw what
was to happen and warned the guests; but he alone escaped. There is also
a tradition that Bala Lake covers old palaces. It is said that they have
been seen on clear moonlit nights, when the air is one sapphire, and
that a voice is heard saying, "Vengeance will come"; and another voice,
"When will it come?" and again the first voice saying, "In the third
generation." For a prince once had a palace where the lake is. He was
cruel and persisted in his cruelty, despite a voice that sometimes cried
to him, "Vengeance will come." One night there was a bright festival in
the palace, and there were many ladies and many lords among the guests,
for an heir had just been born to the prince. The wine shone and was
continually renewed. The dancers were merry and never tired. And a voice
cried, "Vengeance." But only the harper heard; and he saw a bird
beckoning him out of the palace. He followed, and if he stopped, the
bird called, "Vengeance." So they travelled a long way, and at last he
stopped and rested, and the bird was silent. Then the harper upbraided
himself, and turned, and would have gone back to the palace. But he lost
his way, for it was night. And in the morning he saw one calm large lake
where the palace had been; and on the lake floated the harper's harp....
* * * * *
This fire, in my memory, gathers round it many books which I have read
and many men that I have spoken with among the mountains—gathers them
from coal-pits and tin-works and schools and chapels and farmhouses and
hideous cottages, beside rivers, among woods; and I have drawn a thin
line round their shadows and have called the forms that came of it men,
and their "characters" follow.
[Illustration: CONWAY VALLEY]