How Green Was My Valley (59 page)

“Have you tried to keep him back, Dada?” I asked him.

My father pointed his pipe up at the mountain.

“Go you,” he said, “and push that one by there out of its place. To Patagonia he is
going, and in Patagonia he will land one of these days. So make fast your mind.”

My mother came home while I was over the mountain buying wood. When I went in the
house she was still in her bonnet sitting on the rocking-chair in Bron’s, and nursing
Taliesin, with a towel over her black silk to save trouble.

“Well,” she said, when I kissed her. “More, now then?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

“When is the summons?” she asked me, as though she was asking when was Wednesday.

“Day after to-morrow,” I said.

“Are you afraid?” she asked me, and looking at me straight.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “I brought back a London hat for you special.”

“Thank you, Mama,” I said. “How is Angharad?”

“Going to Cape Town,” she said, and lifted Taliesin to kiss him and keep the shake
from her chin.

Chapter Thirty-Five

S
O IN MY LONDON HAT
, and best tweed, off I went to the court-house, with my father and Mr. Gruffydd on
each side of me in Thomas the Carrier’s best trap, and people to watch us go all the
way down the hill and through the village, without a smile or wave.

All the way over the mountain, slag heaps were like the backs of buried animals rising
as from the Pit. Living trees were buried in them, and in some, gorse was growing
with its lamps alight, and grass was trying to be green wherever the wind would let
it rest in peace.

“Will there be any of the Valley left free of slag?” I said to my father.

“It was never allowed in my young days,” my father said. “Laziness and bad workmanship,
and cheapness, my son. But I am thinking more of you coming to be free. The slag is
there, and nothing to be done about it.”

“We have got a good solicitor for you, Huw,” Mr. Gruffydd said, “so there is plenty
of chance for you.”

“I am not worried,” I said, and strange, I was not. I had been feeling that strangeness
in the belly as though a window was open down there, only to think of the court-house,
and police, and a judge, and worst of all, of prison and bars.

But Bron had given me my hat before I left, and stood by the door to kiss me good-bye.

“Good-bye,” she said.

We looked at one another, deep, deep we looked. And with suddenness I knew her loneliness,
her grief, her wanting for Ivor, that she never showed by word or look. Women have
their own braveries, their own mighty courageousness that is of woman, and not to
be compared with the courage shown by man.

In that moment when I was full of thought for myself, with winds in chorus through
the window in my belly, Bronwen had pity upon me, and in her pity, lost for only a
little minute the shield of her courage, and I saw deep into her eyes and felt the
emptiness behind there, and heard the voice calling in the silence, and felt the tears
she wept when all of us were sleeping.

So shamed I was, that I wanted to drop down there and kiss her feet.

Well I know why the old ones put camel hair upon themselves and used the whip.

“O, Bron,” I said, “only now I know.”

Her face cracked in front of my eyes, and I could not bear to look.

Up at the mountain I looked, to the green, the blueness up there on top, to feel his
hardness under my feet and his strong breath cold upon me, and then to pray for some
of his peace, while Bronwen bled beside me.

“I am not afraid any more, Bron, my little one,” I said, “but I am glad this came
if only to know this. If I come back, I come back. And if I stay there, I stay. But
back or stay, I am not afraid. I am only shamed. Good-bye, Bron.”

I put my arm about the gentle warmth of her, and in her tears and softness, with lavender
reaching into me to tear with claws, I kissed her cheek with a brother’s kiss, and
left her with my window tight shut and ready for the deaths of War. The bowmen at
Agincourt were not colder to choose a shaft than I was to pull a bit of mignonette
to wear in my buttonhole.

So into the trap and off, and with figs to everybody.

The court-house I never noticed. I had that feeling in me that you will have when
a cut is to be stitched, or a burn to be scraped, when the doctor is threading the
needle or honing his little knife. It is a blunting of feeling that you put upon yourself,
after you have prayed for the strength to keep your mouth shut and be held from the
shame of being a coward. As though you slept while you stood awake.

For long we sat on forms outside among crowds of people I knew. I smiled at them,
and that was all.

Then, Evan John came to me, with his youngest brother to talk for him, for his chin
was in thick bandage, and his eyes still swollen and sore with cuts.

“Huw,” Dafydd John said, “Evan wants to say this is no doing of his. He is going in
court only because he have been summonsed. He will say nothing.”

“Thank you, Evan,” I said.

“And he is sorry you had a fight and please to shake hands,” Dafydd said.

“I am sorry, too, Evan,” I said. “We have always been good friends. But I had to do
it, see.”

Evan shook hands and nodded a little bit, but even so such a nod gave him pain and
he frowned, and smiled with his eyes.

“No case, then,” Mr. Gruffydd said.

“Self-defence, if the colliery prosecutes,” our solicitor said. “That will be our
defence. The only danger to us will be the witnesses they call.”

Mr. Esdras Daniels was a small man with a long moustache that curled right down to
his chin, and then came back up again with another twist, like two broken circles,
tight, both of them, with pomade. His hair was flat to his head and polished across
his skull to hide the pinkness. Little black eyes he had, that looked at you as a
shopman looks at you for size, but Mr. Daniels was measuring you for a bill to item,
six and eightpence, with stamp, five shillings, and witness fee with expenses, and
begged leave to remain your most humble and obedient servant, in copperplate script
and a blur of purple ink.

“Morgan,” a man in a black gown shouted, from a face that had its colour from a handling
of pots. I passed by him while his mouth was slack, and knew.

Four old men on the bench up at the back, and that one on the end there, Abishai Elias.

“Up in the box,” somebody said to me, and I went to a little space behind three sides
of wood, while everybody shuffled feet and spoke in low voices, and book-covers flapped
on desk-tops, just like school when the teacher has gone out for a moment.

I will never know to this day how the man who asked me to raise the Testament said
the oath. In one long word he said it, and I gave him back my notion of what he said,
only by relying on the sound it made to my ear, and repeating it. If I said the oath,
it was not in my language, but nobody shall tell me that it was in English.

I swear by Almighty God.

Terror, there is, in the words.

Yet, in his mouth, and in mine, nothing, only a mess of oral sloth, shameful even
from a baby.

After that, I went back in my sleep, again, and I was up on the mountain with Dai
Bando and Cyfartha, and with Shani down by the school, and with Ceinwen at the acting,
anywhere with anybody, but firm in my mind not to make sense of the talk that I could
hear going on all round me.

Only when I saw my father’s hands on the back of the seat in front of him, and the
shouting whiteness of Mr. Gruffydd’s face, then, I opened my ears.

The other solicitor was talking to the Justices, and very graceful with a pencil between
his fingers, with his little fingers like women will use them on teacups when somebody
important is visiting.

“We apologize for having brought the case to court,” he was saying, “but in the circumstances
my client thought it necessary in the interests of justice. That our witnesses have
decided not to testify is, I think, a tribute to the defendant’s prowess. It is known
that he is a crony of prizefighters and others of the same kidney.”

Mr. Esdras Daniels got up very quiet and bent forward to the Bench with a smile made
by queen bees.

“Your Honour,” he said, “is this preamble strictly necessary?”

“My friend must allow me to acquaint the court,” Mr. Pritchard said and smiling to
chide angels, “of the circumstances which force us to withdraw the summons, thus causing
a great deal of inconvenience, and avoidable delay in a much-overworked court.”

“Proceed, Mr. Pritchard,” said one of the old men, and four heads nodded in a line.

“There is little more to be said,” Mr. Pritchard said, with a shaking of the head,
and speaking in the throat as though his breakfast was troubling him, “the unfortunate
affair, as I have said, was caused by a reference to the defendant’s sister, a married
woman, and a well-known preacher. Doubtless the defendant felt himself obliged to
defend the woman’s name, and did so with savage cruelty, taking the law into his own
hands, instead of calling upon the Law to come to his aid, and in a proper manner,
demanding satisfaction in the High Court with a writ for slander, to be issued by
the woman, or her absent husband, or by the preacher concerned. This was not done,
nor has it been done. And to-day, through the intractability of witnesses, I am forced
to ask the Court for permission to withdraw.”

“I submit,” said Mr. Esdras Daniels, up on his feet, and speaking as though he had
just drunk deep of The Wrath, “that my client, and other innocent people, have been
subjected to heaping indignities.”

A tap with the hammer from the Bench.

“Dismissed,” said the old voice, “no indignities, only shame. Shame, indeed. Dismissed.
And not sure if we are right to dismiss, either.”

Another man sitting below the four of them stood on his chair to talk to them quietly,
while noise in court of boot and voice came louder. Mr. Daniels and Mr. Pritchard
were having a little talk together, very happy, too, and a little laugh to finish,
before to tie papers and give to a man with a sack behind them.

A tap with the hammer, and quietness.

“Dismiss,” said the old man. “Next case.”

“Outside,” said the man in the gown to me, and out I went through crowds of staring
faces.

Straight out to the trap, with my father and Mr. Gruffydd up in their seats, waiting.

“Home for the love of God,” said my father, and Thomas whipped up.

Back into the wide greenness of the Valley we went, and not a sound all the way, with
that feeling about as that you will have when a man has had a hurt and keeps a little
smile on the mouth in case you look at him.

“Thank you, Thomas, my little one,” my father said, when we were home.

“Nothing, man, nothing,” Thomas said. “Good-bye now.”

No word or look for Mr. Gruffydd, before he whipped up down the Hill.

“Will you come in for dinner, sir?” my father asked him, but looking at the house.
I was looking at the cork lining inside my London hat.

Mr. Gruffydd put his hand on my father’s shoulder and turned about, and went from
us.

“O, God,” my father said, with tears. “Come you in, and shut the doors, my son.”

For the first time, our front door was shut tight in the daytime.

James Rowlands came round our back after dinner, and stood in the doorway. In his
best, he was, with a straightness of face.

“Gwilym,” he said, “meeting of deacons.”

“O,” said my father, “when, now then?”

“Now just,” said James. “Are you coming?”

“Yes,” my father said.

My mother was watching them both, in quiet, pale, with brightness in the eyes, but
not of smiles.

“Well,” my father said to her, and looked at her.

“Well,” my mother said to him, and looked at him.

In that quietness they were speaking their own language, with their eyes, with the
way they stood, with what they put into the air about them, each knowing what the
other was saying, and having strength one from the other, for they had been learning
through forty years of being together, and their minds were one.

“Good-bye, now,” said my father.

My mother nodded, and he went.

That night, when I came home after a meeting with Ianto, Bron was waiting with my
dinner.

“Mr. Gruffydd has been put from the Chapel,” she said. “The deacons said he was unfit.
Seven votes to three.”

“Plenty more chapels,” I said.

“Dada is leaving,” she said.

“So am I,” I said.

“And me,” said Bronwen. “We will have a Split.”

“With Mr. Gruffydd to preach and bring everybody from the Chapel,” I said. “Leave
the deacons by themselves.”

“He is going in a sailing ship to Patagonia at the end of the month,” she said. “He
asked them to let him stay till then. But they said he was unclean. Mr. Isaac Wynn.”

“What did Dada say?” I asked her, but not looking.

“Mr. Isaac Wynn is with vinegar plasters,” she said, and trimming her words as with
shears, “and your good father had a bit of an eye from somewhere.”

“Good,” I said. “Where is Mr. Gruffydd?”

“I took supper down to him, now just,” she said. “He was putting sacking about the
furniture. Ordered out by to-morrow, he is.”

Ice threw itself upon me with redness.

The clock marched and marched and marched.

“I will go down to him,” I said.

“To-morrow,” Bron said, and put a hand on my head. “His supper is in that basket.
No supper in Gethsemane, he said.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

I
WAS DOWN AT GORPHWYSFA
early next morning, but Mr. Gruffydd was up and washed, and reading, when I knocked.
The house was empty in sound, with roped bales and crates along the walls of the passage,
and more piled in the middle of the room.

“Well, Huw,” he said, with calmness, and no different from any other time, “I am glad
you have come.”