heart complaint—gone off in his sleep, to finish his psalm where his
voice would give no offence.
HAROUN THE CARPENTER
HAROUN THE CARPENTER
Haroun, _bien entendu_, was not his name, but it was that by which some
called him among themselves. The reason will appear in the sequel. He
lived in a low house of one storey, with a door in the middle, and a
window on each side, a typical Welsh cottage, with a thatched roof, and
the roof drawn down over the gables, also in a peculiarly Welsh style.
He had his yard and workshop behind the house. In front was a bit of
garden, of which he took great care, and which was bright with flowers
from earliest spring to latest fall.
“Aaron,” the squire’s wife would say, “how _do_ you manage to get your
bulbs to bloom before mine?”
“My lady,” he would reply, “I hold they like the smell of the wood.”
Aaron was, in fact, his Christian name. The reason why, in the rectory
and in the Hall, he was called Haroun was this:—
Aaron was a man of one book, and that book was the “Arabian Nights.”
Many years ago a copy was given to the lending library of the village,
and was taken out by Aaron Price, the carpenter. He had not read three
pages before his mind was in the grip of the narrator. He read, he did
not sleep, he did not work, or worked badly, he went to church, but
did not pray—his mind had been carried up and away from the present,
away from the green Welsh valley in which he lived, away, over the
russet mountains to the gorgeous East, and to the times when Jinns were
all-powerful unless controlled by Solomon’s seal, and magicians were as
common as blackberries and as mischievous as kittens.
Aaron very nearly fell into disrepute as a carpenter on account of that
book, so badly was his work done when under the spell. But he rallied. He
became active, industrious, skilful once more, yet never, thenceforth,
was the witchery of the “Arabian Nights” off his mind. He had no rest to
his soul till he had purchased a copy for himself, and from that precious
volume he read daily. He never wearied of it; he never wanted another
book.
“Lord, sir, it is meat and drink to me!” he said once when questioned
about it. He was advised to give it up. “I couldn’t do it,” was his
reply. “Beside—what would be the good? It’s in me, all over me, in every
fibre. I know it from one cover to the other.”
“Then why not part with it—if so familiar?”
“Why don’t you part with your wife because you know her face and voice
and thoughts? I couldn’t do it. I love the book because so familiar to
me—every tale, every word.”
One day a note from the Hall told the rector that the squiress had got a
real treat for Haroun. She was going to give him as a Christmas present
“Tales of the Genii.”
The rector laid down his daily paper, took his hat and stick, and pushed
down to the Hall at once.
“My dear lady! I implore you, do nothing of the kind. Give him a book on
practical carpentering or a dictionary of gardening. But another book of
Jinns and necromancers will turn poor Haroun mad altogether.”
Now and then, on a Sunday evening, the rector would say to his wife,
“Look here, Rosie, I could read Haroun’s mind to-day as he sat under the
pulpit, as though it were a book in large primer type, open before me. He
was very attentive when I began my sermon, and he followed me some way,
but by degrees his eye became vacant, abstracted, his expression of face
altered, and I knew that he was away with the Three Calenders, hearing
why Zobeide whipped the hounds.”
“Harry,” responded the rectoress, “you have only yourself to blame. Try
to be more interesting when you preach.”
“My dear Rosie,” exclaimed the parson, “I do my level best, but what
pulpit discourse could ever compete with ‘Sindbad’s Voyages’ or ‘The
Hunchback’?”
The good lady sighed and said, “Whatever will Haroun do for a wife? We
have no Fatimas and Zobeides in this village.”
“I wish with all my heart that Haroun would weave his own web of romance,
fall in love, and—then he’d forget the ‘Arabian Nights.’”
“In time this infatuation will wear off.”
“I doubt it. This has now been going on for years, and that book only
works its way deeper into his soul. Upon my word, Rosie, I believe the
Bible interests him only because of the wonders that are in it.”
“Then, my dear, I am sure you judge him wrong. He is a good man, and
God-fearing.”
“Yes—but oh! so fantastical.”
Aaron Price did not keep his treasury of stories bottled up in his own
breast. He was great at retailing them, but he transferred the scenery to
Wales, translated Camaralzaman and Badoura into David Jones and Sheena
Williams, located every incident in some well-known spot, and thoroughly
bewildered his hearers, who could not make out whether he were poking fun
at them or narrating facts.
Perhaps the climax was reached when he converted Ganem the slave of Love,
into the amiable, somewhat corpulent, and eminently respectable squire,
Sir John Vaughan, at Llanselyf. The whole tale was told with so much
circumstance and such actuality, that next Sunday, when the squire came
to church, he found himself the object of intense interest, observation,
and private whispered comment.
It may be remembered that in the original tale Ganem was up a tree
overhanging a cemetery when he saw some slaves bury a chest, at the
dead of night, in the earth. When they were gone he descended from the
tree, dug down to and opened the chest, when he found it contained a
lady of incomparable beauty who “as soon as she was released from her
confined situation, and exposed to the open air began to sneeze, and
half-opening her eyes and rubbing them exclaimed, ‘Zohorob Bostan (Flower
of the Garden), Schagrom Marglan (Branch of Coral), Cassabos Souccar
(Sugar-cane), Nouronnihar (Light of Day), Nagmatos Sohi (Star of the
Morning), Nouzhetos Zaman (Delight of the Season), speak, where are you?’”
This, as related by the carpenter, took a very local and personal
complexion. The incident was transferred to the churchyard of his own
parish, and to a certain elm tree that grew there; it was Sir John
Vaughan who climbed the tree, and the lady when released from the box
exclaimed, “Mary Jones, my housemaid, Flower of the Garden, and you,
Susanna Rees, scullery-maid, Branch of Coral; and you also, Elizabeth
Thomas, tweenie maid and Sugar-cane; and you, Margaret Cole, the
lady’s-maid, Light of Day, and under housemaid Joan, Star of the Morning,
and third housemaid Wilmot, Delight of the Season, speak, my dear tried
servants, where are you?”
Now, on this particular Sunday morning, not only was Sir John an object
of great interest, but so was Lady Vaughan, and when, during the
service, she sneezed, it produced a general agitation; so also were the
maid-servants of the family. On their arrival there were nudgings, “Here
comes Branch of Coral, and there is Light of the Day. But where is Flower
of the Garden?” To which an answer came in a whisper, “Got a bad cold in
her head, and can’t come to church.”
Now, a remarkable occurrence in the parish took place. Aaron, _alias_
Haroun, fell in love, and took to courting Elizabeth Thomas, _alias_
Sugar-cane, _alias_ Cassabos Souccar, the tweenie maid. It took the
whole parish by surprise, for Elizabeth was not beautiful; she had not
the eyes or the frame, or the _svelte_ movements or the elastic tread of
the light gazelle. She was a somewhat heavily formed, broad-shouldered,
pudding-faced damsel, who could not cross a room without rattling all the
chimney ornaments, and who had no more imagination and genius than has a
duck. And in what did the attraction consist? Why had Aaron not become
enamoured of the lady’s-maid, a most willowy person with a very sweet
and refined face? Why not with the kitchen-maid, the Sprig of Coral,
who had indeed coralline lips, and who in time would know how to boil
a potato and do a chop so as not to be done to leather. But a tweenie!
and such a tweenie! The whole parish discussed it for a month. It was
most astounding that the man who romanced about every one and everything
and every place, should make such dead prose of his own love affair.
However, after this had been debated in the servants’ hall, at the forge,
in the stable, at the tavern, each such debate ended with some one
remarking sententiously, “After all, it is his affair and not mine.”
It is, however, a mistake to say that Aaron’s courtship was prosaic. That
it was not so was proved by one of his letters to Elizabeth Thomas, which
the girl carelessly left about; and it got read, copied, and distributed
through the village, and excited much admiration at the splendour of the
style, till some one detected the original, of which it was but a copy,
in the story of Abdul Hassan and Schemselnihar. Here is the epistle—
“AARON PRICE, _carpenter_, to ELIZABETH THOMAS, _tweenie maid_.
“Deprived of your presence, I seek to continue the illusion,
and converse with you by means of these ill-formed lines, which
afford me some pleasure, while I am prevented the happiness of
speaking to you.
“Patience, they say, is the remedy of all evils; yet those I
suffer are increased instead of relieved by it. Although your
image is indelibly engraven on my heart, my eyes nevertheless
wish again to behold the original.
“These sentiments, which my fingers trace, and in expressing
which I feel such inconceivable pleasure that I cannot repeat
them too often, proceed from the bottom of my heart, from that
incurable wound you have made in it; a wound which I bless a
thousand times, notwithstanding the cruel sufferings I endure
in your absence.
“Do not imagine that my words convey more than I feel. Alas!
whatever expressions I may use, I shall still think much more
than I can ever say. My eyes, which never cease looking for
you, and incessantly weep till they shall behold you again; my
afflicted heart, which seeks but you; my sighs, which escape
my lips whenever I think on you, and that is continually; my
imagination which never reflects any object but my beloved
prince tweenie-maid; the complaints I offer to heaven of the
rigour of my fate; in short, my melancholy, my uneasiness,
my sufferings, from which I have had no respite since I lost
sight of you, are all-sufficient pledges of the truth of what I
write. I pray that we may be granted an opportunity of telling
each other, without restraint, the tender affection we feel,
and that we will never cease to love. Farewell.
“I salute Lady Vaughan, to whom we each have so many
obligations.”
Not to make too long a story of this. The course of true love ran
smoothly enough. The adored tweenie took it all very calmly, very much as
a matter of course, and in due time they were married.
No one supposed that they could be happy together, so opposite were
they to each other. Yet never did the parish see a more affectionate and
devoted couple. Aaron “yarned” to his Bessie, telling her his marvellous
tales. She knitted or darned listening with a stolid face, and when he
had done said, “Aaron, get along with your nonsense, I don’t believe in
any of your marvels.”
He took her unbelief in good part. If she did not relish his tales, it
was her misfortune and not her fault. He was soul, she was body, and each
has its proper place in the economy of nature. He was everything that was
imaginative, she was wholly commonplace, and the mixture in one household
produced not ferment, but peace.
“I wish,” said Aaron, “I wish, Lizzie, I could see wonders. I read of
them, I think of them, I tell of them, and yet I have never seen one.”
Suddenly, to the amazement of every one, Aaron died. He caught a chill
that settled on his lungs, and he was dead in three days. His wife
attended to him with devotion and unflagging solicitude. One night he
turned his bright feverish eyes on her and said—
“Liz! kiss me. I’m going at last to see wonders, and you won’t say to me
there, where I am going: ‘Get along with your nonsense.’”
He did not say another word, but passed in this eager, expectant attitude
of soul into the World of Wonders.
Every one respected Haroun, though he had perplexed all, and all had
laughed at him. His death was felt by all, and the entire parish
attended his funeral. Sir John Vaughan forgave having been converted into
Ganem, the slave of Love, and he was there.
And when Aaron was gone, all said—
“We can’t, for certain, have a more pleasant and romancing carpenter in
his place, even if we get—which is doubtful—a better workman.”
And now I come to another singular fact, and fact it is. The widow,
Bessie Price, that dull, inanimate, prosaic body—soul none thought to
call her—moped and drooped after his death. Nothing roused her, nothing
interested her, she seemed to have lost everything when the earth closed
over the dear, rodomontading carpenter. Folk said at first, “Bless you,
she’s not one to feel her loss. She has not the depth in her.”
But they were mistaken. She felt her loss so deeply, so intensely, that
without any apparent malady, she drooped, faded, and from no perceptible
physical cause sank, and within twelve months, this bit of putty or dough
was laid by the quicksilver of her husband.
And so, even in this dull, heavy creature there was the poetry of love,
the romance of a life devoted to one man. Where Love is—there is the
Spirit of Poesy.
SHONE EVANS
SHONE EVANS
Shone, that is to say John, Evans was a miner in the Dulais Valley, in
South Wales, and a man nearer forty than thirty.
The Dulais Valley had been solitary, with a brawling mountain stream
flowing between great ridges of brown heathery moss-land, on which the
sheep had browsed and shone white in the sun. But of late years there had
come a transformation of the scene. Coalpits had been opened. Plain, ugly
rows of houses had been run up. Tall chimneys had been erected, chapels
and churches, public-houses, factories as well. What sheep still fed on
the hilltops were grey, if not black, for the air was heavy with smoke,
and the soot settled everywhere, and not the sweetest herb could avoid a
flavour of soot, nor the fairest flower escape a film of “smuts.”
As for the sparkling, laughing Dulais, it had turned to a sullen, dirty
stream, of which nothing was required but that it should carry off the
scum and sewage of the dense population that clogged the valley and dug
into the hills. In long-gone-by days the stream had acquired its name of
Blackwater, for so Dulais may be interpreted, from the lyns and pools of
bottle-green deeps, formed after its leaps over the barriers of rocks.
Now it merited its name more truly, so sombre was it, in the midst of
heaps of coal refuse, and so soiled were its waters with every sort of
defilement.
“Man makes the town, God made the country,” is a saying; but it is only
half true. God makes the town, for He it is who has laid the beds of
coal, and run into the rock the veins of ore that draw men to excavate
them, and without which men would hunger, and civilisation could not
progress.
Beautiful on the hills of old were the harebells, beautiful in the
evening the glory of light that lit up the russet hills—ugly, maybe, is
now the mining settlement; and yet there is a loveliness above that of
harebell and bracken and heather and foaming mountain rill in the lives
of the men and women who have invaded and displaced the rude natural
charms of the Dulais Valley. And I am going to tell you of one of these
beauties, and thus I introduce you to Shone Evans.
The man himself was not comely. A broad-shouldered, plain man, with a
stoop such as is often seen in colliers—a reserved, a serious man, and
somewhat shy. Perhaps in this he was a typical Welshman—that he was
full of tenderness of heart and deep feeling, but at the least token
of ridicule or superciliousness, he closed like a flower against rain,
brooded over any injury his feelings may have received, but he said
nothing.
Centuries of isolation and of wrong done to the Welsh race have had
this effect on them. They have been sneered at, swaggered over by
domineering Saxons or tyrannical Normans, then exploited by speculative
North-countrymen; they have been treated as men to be employed for the
advantage of others, and when useless, to be cast aside as broken tools.
Their idiosyncrasies have been the subject of joke and scoff; their
language has been derided; their aspirations, national and individual,
disregarded. This has bred in them a sensitiveness that is foreign to
the coarser Saxon—a reserve that forms a crust about the manner that is
repellent to the stranger, if in that stranger there be the smallest
assumption of superiority. Yet underneath lies the richest, deepest,
purest vein of golden love and goodwill that God, who formed the
mountains and made man, ever buried in the human heart.
Shone had not married till he was some way past thirty, and then,
perhaps, more for convenience than that passion which whirls most men
into matrimony; and about a year after his marriage his wife gave him a
little son, but did not recover the confinement, and died.
Shone was left alone in the cottage with a baby, and he had his daily
work to accomplish in order that he and his baby might live. He could
not neglect his work, and he would not neglect his baby. Some neighbours
offered to relieve him of the child, but to this Shone was averse. The
baby was his; it was almost the only living being that was absolutely,
indisputably his own. And now it was that the fountains of love in that
closed and sealed heart opened and gushed forth. He loved that child with
a love such as only a mother, one might have supposed, could entertain
for a poor little, feeble, wailing lump of flesh.
Shone considered what he should do. He would not commit the child to
Martha Rees, who had volunteered to take it, for she was a slovenly
person, and he could not be sure that she would keep the little creature
clean. Nor to Rachel Price, for she was violent tempered when put out:
she might lose patience if the child cried, and maltreat it, though
usually she was a most good-natured woman. Nor to Alice Tooker, for she
was an Englishwoman, and he would not have his child reared save to the
sound of the Welsh tongue, and sung to sleep with Welsh lullabies.
Then Shone formed his resolve—and to this he adhered for many, many
months.
One morning Shone appeared among the men of his shift, presenting
an aspect so surprising, that at first his mates were silent with
astonishment, and then broke into laughter.
Shone had taken a sheet, and had cast it over his left shoulder, then
wound it round him, thrown it over the right shoulder, and bound it about
his waist like a plaid, and between his shoulders, safely bedded in the
wraps, was his babe.
“Why, Shone, what have you brought the little kid here for?” was the
general exclamation.
“To make a collier of him,” answered Evans good-humouredly. He expected
some chaff, and did not take it amiss—from his mates. But chaff would not
deter him from carrying out his purpose.
And here it must be observed that throughout this story the conversation
must be understood to be translated from the Welsh, and will be,
accordingly, free from those colloquialisms or dialectic terms that would
be natural had it been carried on by English speakers.
“Shone, you are not going to take the child down the pit, surely?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Then he must pay his footing!”
“You must give him something, mates, first with which to pay,” said
Evans. “Or, hold! he will give you all round a swig at his bottle.”
“His bottle! You have brought that with you?”
“Certainly,” said Evans, and produced a feeder. “Who will have a smack?
Drink to the health of the new hand!”
“Not I,” said one, “in milk and water!”
“We would not deprive him of the least taste!” said another.
Instinctively, and at once, these rough men understood and appreciated
Shone’s conduct; he might have to, and he did, encounter good-natured
jokes—he was called “Mammy Shone,” but nothing was said in ridicule that
could wound. In every heart there sprang up great respect for Shone; and
as to the babe, he became the pet of the coalpit.
Thenceforth, whether Evans were on day or night shift, when he went down
to his work the child went with him, lodged between his shoulder-blades.
When he reached his place where he had to work, he unfolded the
sheet—often grimy, it could not be other—made up a nest of it among
lumps of coal, and placed the little creature in the folds, with its
feeding-bottle accessible. And as he toiled he turned his head over his
shoulder every now and then to say an endearing word, and to soothe the
child should it begin to cry.
When the men assembled for a meal, there were consultations held as to
what was suitable for the stomach if griped, or the gums, should there
appear a rash about the chin and lips; also as to whether the proportions
of milk and sugar and water were correct; and a lively and heated
discussion broke out relative to a suggestion made by one collier that
he had known a drop of gin added with the best possible effects—not, of
course, regularly, but when there was stomach-ache. Moreover, in the
relaxation from work, the babe was passed round and dandled and fondled,
admired and remarked upon by the colliers, and fulsome expressions
of admiration were lavished upon it, which may or may not have been
appropriate; but seeing that the infant succeeded in begriming its face
and entire body with coal-dust after the first few minutes that it had
been below, it was not possible for any one to pronounce a well-balanced
and justified opinion on its personal appearance.
However, affection sees not with ordinary eyes, and as the child was
loved by every man and boy in the pit, its beauties were accepted as
absolutely beyond dispute.
Now although every collier set himself up to be an authority on
baby-culture, and pumped his wife for information which he might retail
as his own, acquired experimentally, when next he was below, yet there
was an elderly man named Ebenezer Llewellyn who had been the father of
fourteen children, ten of which were living, and who was, therefore,
by common consent, regarded as a principal authority on the management
of babies; and when Ebenezer pronounced an opinion, all bowed to it,
whether on the constitution of milk or the adoption of fuller’s earth.
Llewellyn did not hold by violet powder; he said coal-dust was better, if
sufficiently fine.
On one occasion, in a panic, Shone rushed after Ebenezer to another
portion of the pit to bid him come to his assistance—the child was
strangling. According to his account it had got a lump of coal into its
mouth twice as big as its head, and Shone could not get it out.
“There is no room in the mouth for my finger to be inserted so as to
whisk it out. Come quick, Llewellyn, or the child will be dead—it is
black in the face.”
“But it always is,” said Ebenezer.
“I mean turning black between the coal grains and where its tears have
washed the face. Come at once.”
The father of fourteen, that man of wide experience, obeyed. He sat down,
took the infant on his lap, and dexterously with his little finger worked
the piece of coal out of the mouth; whereupon the babe set up a howl that
rang down the passages of the mine.
“I will tell you what is in prospect,” said Llewellyn sententiously.
“This kid is getting to use his hands. He will lay hold of everything he
can touch, and he will put whatever he grips into his mouth. They all do
it. I have had fourteen and have raised ten, so I ought to know. This is
the most critical period in the lives of little ones, and if you don’t
mind, he’ll eat up all your output every day—truckloads of coals he’ll
put away, if you let him.”
“But I will not allow him.”
“Then you must sit over him and watch his every movement.”
“I cannot do that.”
“There it is that women come in to be of some use in the world. They
can look after male babies when they are in the grabbing and devouring
age—that’s about teething time. You see how he dribbles. That,” pursued
Ebenezer gravely—“that comes of the gums being strained and painful.
Babes, at this period, must bite—it’s a necessity. They will bite
anything. I’ve had fourteen, so I ought to know. This is a terribly
critical time.”
Shone left the pit that day depressed and meditative. As it happened, he
encountered the doctor, who hailed him—
“What, Evans! still nursing your baby?”