I
In a few days I left London and went to North Wales.
Opposite to me in the railway carriage sat an elderly lady, into
whose face I occasionally felt myself to be staring in an unconscious
way. But I was merely communing with myself: I was saying to myself,
'My love of North Wales, and especially of Snowdon, is certainly very
strong; but it is easily accounted for--it is a matter of
temperament. Even had Wales not been associated with Winnie, I still
must have dearly loved it. Much has been said about the effect of
scenery upon the minds and temperaments of those who are native to
it. But temperament is a matter of ancestral conditions: the place of
one's birth is an accident. As some, like my cousin Percy, for
instance are born with a passion for the sea, and some with a passion
for forests, some with a passion for mountains, and some with a
passion for rolling plains. The landscape amid which I was born had,
no doubt, a charm for me, and could bring to me that nature-ecstacy
which I inherited from Fenella Stanley. But with Wales I actually
fell in love the moment I set foot in the country. This is why I am
hurrying there now.'
And I laughed at myself, and evidently frightened the old lady very
much. She did not know that underneath the soul's direst
struggle--the struggle of personality with the tyranny of the
ancestral blood--there is an awful sense of humour--a laughter
(unconquerable, and yet intolerable) at the deepest of all
incongruities, the incongruity of Fate's game with man. I apologised
to her, and told her that I had been absorbed in reading a droll
story, in which a man believed that the Angel of Memory had
refashioned for him his dead wife out of his own sorrow and
unquenchable fountain of tears.
'What an extraordinary idea!' said the old lady, in the conciliatory
tone she would have adopted towards a madman whom she found alone
with her in a railway carriage. 'I mean he was very eccentric, wasn't
he?'
'Who shall say, madam? "Bold is the donkey-driver and bold the ka'dee
who dares say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in
any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart and
what it shall some day suffer."'
At the next station the old lady left the carriage and entered
another, and I was left alone.
My intention was to take up my residence at the cottage where
Winifred had lived with her aunt. Indeed, for a few days I did this,
taking with me one of the Welsh peasants with whom I had previously
made friends. But of course a lengthened stay in such a house was
impossible. More than ever now I needed attendance, and good
attendance, for I had passed into a strange state of irritability--I
had no command over my nerves, which were jarred by the most trifling
thing. I went to the hotel at Peri y Gwryd, but there tourists and
visitors made life more intolerable still to a man in my condition.
At first I thought of building a house as near to the cottage as
possible; but this would take time, and I could not rest out of
Wales. I decided at last to have a wooden bungalow built. By telling
the builders that time was the first consideration with me, the cost
a secondary one, I got a bungalow built in a few weeks. By the
tradesmen of Chester I got it fitted up and furnished to my taste
with equal rapidity. Attending to this business gave real relief.
When the bungalow was finished I removed into it the picture 'Faith
and Love.' I also got in as much painting material as I might want
and began to make sketches in the neighbourhood.
Time went on, and there I remained. In a great degree, however, the
habit of grieving was conquered by my application to work. My
moroseness of temper gradually left me.
Beautiful memories began to take the place of hideous ones--the
picture of the mattress and the squalor gave place to pictures of
Winifred on the sands of Raxton or on Snowdon. Yet so much of habit
is there in grief that even at this time I was subject to recurrent
waves of the old pain--waves which were sometimes as overmastering as
ever.
I did not neglect the cottage, which was now my property, but kept it
in exactly the same state as that in which it had been put by Sinfi
after Winnie had wandered back to Wales.
By isolating myself from all society, by surrounding myself with
mementos of Winifred, memory really did at last seem to be working a
miracle such as was worked for the widowed Ja'afar.
Yet not entirely had memory passed into an objective presence. I
seemed to feel Winnie near me; but that was all. I felt that more
necessary than anything else in perfecting the atmosphere of memory
in which I would live was the society of her in whom alone I had
found sympathy--Sinfi Lovell. Did I also remember the wild theories
of my father and Fenella Stanley about the crwth? To obtain the
company of Sinfi had now become very difficult--her attitude towards
me had so changed. When she allowed me to rejoin the Lovells at
Kingston Vale she did so under the compulsion of my distress. But my
leaving the Gypsies of my own accord left her free from this
compulsion. She felt that she had now at last bidden me farewell
for ever.
Still, opportunities of seeing her occasionally would, I knew,
present themselves, and I now determined to avail myself of these.
Panuel Lovell and some of the Boswells were not unfrequently in the
neighbourhood, and they were always accompanied by Sinfi and Videy.