Testimonies: A Novel (15 page)

I had always understood that the beliefs of his chapel were particularly harsh, adapted for a gloomy and unloving people, very far removed from our conceptions of justice and mercy. However that may be, Taid had drawn serenity from them, and he was a man at peace.

I saw much less of Nain. She was more timid; she would never come in and sit down, but twice every day she would come as far as my bed’s foot and ask me how I did.

I never saw her without the idea of gentleness coming into my mind. The way she held herself, her quiet, hesitant voice and her lined, tired face—they were all very gentle. I think she had seen much more trouble than Taid, or had suffered more from what they had both experienced. She was small and slight—a curved feather, no more.

With all her timidity, she had a kind of fragile dignity that I had always admired: if one met her by chance, with a bucket of pig-swill in her hand, a man’s cap pinned awry on her head and a torn sacking apron, she would always put her bucket down and talk for a few minutes with the same polite gravity that one found on Sunday, with her in her black silk dress in the parlor. She was always a little diffident because of her English, but there was always that air of breeding and a perfect disregard for non-essentials—old clothes in this instance; but I could think of many more. That natural, unconscious fine breeding struck me again and again; both Nain and Bronwen had it, and I had seen it (less marked) in other farms about our valley. When I was young, I was brought up in an ordinary English middle-class home in London; most of the people we knew either “went to the office” or belonged to some profession. We had no grand connections at all. But my aunt Theresa, who lived with us—she was plain and unmarried, but a dear—had a great regard for the aristocracy. She knew Debrett and Burke through and through, and she went so far as to study heraldry; she knew more about it, I believe, than many an armiger of seize quarters. How she relished its terms and the herald’s names: she once met either Blue Mantle or Rouge Dragon, I forget which now, at a party in Hampstead, and it gave her more pleasure than if she had been presented at court, with feathers and curtsy and all. She had a very small income, but that little which she could regard as spending money went to form a library (after Debrett, Burke and Gwilym) of novels of a strongly aristocratic flavor. I loved her very much and when I was a little boy I took to her pursuits with enthusiasm; her values were mine at that time, and unquestioned.

She was not a snob. What she admired was worthy of admiration: for her a man of ancient lineage had the virtues of Bayard, as well as his glamour and panache. It was the virtue that she insisted upon, primarily, and she believed that if one were, by happy providence, born a de Vere one certainly should (and almost certainly would) behave nobly. I do not think that she ever met anyone whom she would have called an aristocrat (she was very severe on recent creations) so she died with her ideas unshaken.

Being a man, I went out into the world: not very far or deep, perhaps, but immeasurably farther than Aunt Theresa. I went with many illusions and I soon found them to be illusory. I did not hobnob much with the peerage, but at school, and very much more so at Oxford, a young man is brought into contact with others, some of them of very good family. With the best will in the world I looked for those qualities which I had been taught to expect, and I did not find them. I do not mean that these men were bad in any way; only that they were not better than the run of humanity, or at least not so much better that I could detect any difference. It is possible that I met an unrepresentative sample, but it was not until I came into Wales that I discovered the beautiful natural breeding that Aunt Theresa assured me was the mark of nobility. It was not common, but it was there; Nain had the manners of a duchess—a duchess according to Aunt Theresa.

I believe that my coming down to the farm did them all a great deal of good. That has an obnoxious sound, but I mean that the exercise of the purest charity brought out, or strengthened virtues in each of the four, and that they were the better for doing good. Certainly during the early days, when I was slowly getting better, it seemed to me that there was a complete harmony among them, just like that which I had thought to exist when I first came among them. Emyr showed at his best at this time: he shed those ways that I disliked—faults that I had had to search for, mostly. Though now that I come to think about it dispassionately, I am not so sure that I had been obliged to search for them: there were some that obtruded themselves, particularly his ruling in his father’s house and a low cunning that peered out at the mention of money. But now he behaved so well: he listened until one had finished speaking, a real piece of self-discipline for him, and he seemed to be much more gentle with his parents. He took great pains to entertain me; he sat and talked by the hour, although he would have to work late for it, he brought me magazines and papers from Dinas, and all the time he seemed to be casting round for some new way to make my convalescence agreeable. I think he was gentler to Bronwen, too; or perhaps she was to him: but their relationship, although it was almost certainly faulty in some way, was a thing that I had never attempted to understand; I shied away from it.

It may appear strange that I gathered so much from sickroom visits. I had more to go on than that: I eavesdropped. Whenever the door of the big kitchen was open, as it was all day once I began to improve, I could hear all that was said there. I could not help it, and I told them that I understood more Welsh than I could speak. They did not exactly disbelieve me, but it was obvious that they thought I was mistaken. It was like Borrow’s Spaniards, who spoke Spanish with him quite contentedly for days until they learned that he was a foreigner, and then refused to believe that he had more than four words of their language.

As far as my Welsh went, it was very far from being what Borrow’s Spanish must have been, but I had been among them for some time now, and all the time I had heard Welsh spoken round me: one absorbs a language unconsciously; its accent, the fall of the stress and the timbre of the speech grow imperceptibly more familiar, and if one starts with a basis of grammar and a fair vocabulary a time comes when one realizes that a sentence has formed its meaning in one’s head without any conscious effort, no catching and translating of the words, no re-arranging of the syntax to suit the English form. This came to me quite suddenly while I was lying there, my mind apparently vacant: it surprised me very much to find that I had seized the gist of a long and complicated conversation about the impending visit of one Pritchard Ellis, a minister. Some words escaped me, but the whole had conveyed its meaning as clearly as if it had been English.

The suddenness of my comprehension surprised me: it is true that long before I had been able to pick up the meaning of a good deal of what was said, particularly of short sentences called from one to another, but this was another thing altogether. It must have had a great deal to do with my physical state, because there were some days when I paid especial attention (days, generally, when I was feeling brisk and lively) and then the effort worked against itself: on those days I listened and the pattern of the sound seemed perfectly familiar, but somehow the meaning escaped me. It was as frustrating as a forgotten tune or a piece of machinery that has gone incomprehensibly and unreasonably out of order; you know that all the parts are correctly adjusted, the contacts clean, and yet the wheels will not go round.

The best time was when I was quite relaxed, lying comfortably and thinking of nothing, bathed in that mild euphoria that was such a delightful part of my life in that prim, incongruous little parlor, with its terrible best furniture and browning photographs: then the meaning came through, clear and effortless. Bronwen’s voice always conveyed more to me than the others. I used to turn her words over, reforming expressions and phrases to use myself, holding imaginary conversations. They never were much use afterwards, but that was because of my faulty enunciation and a foolish timidity that prevented me from talking well even in English whenever I was not sure of being understood.

Bronwen spoke more clearly than the others, and she spoke a much purer Welsh—purer, that is, by literary standards. Her home was well placed for that: Welsh, as I understand it, differs very much in accent and dialect from one region to another; our valley was just the wrong side of one of these linguistic borders, whereas hers was inside one of the best for purity.

I told them, as I have said, and I assuaged my conscience; but I was glad they did not believe me. I should not really have expected them to credit me with any useful knowledge, for they had a low opinion of my understanding and of my common sense. It was not that they thought me uninstructed, far from that. All ornamental knowledge, the arts entire they allowed me; any dead or foreign tongue was mine, and a perfect acquaintance with all things past. But they would not trust me to tell the difference between a horse and a mare, and when I was pottering about the farm, they would send the boy to usher and guide me in any operation more complex than closing a gate.

Gerallt was at Bronwen’s old home. Her brother (a pleasant, kindly little man, as far as I could tell from his intense shyness, but with nothing of Bronwen about him whatever) was much attached to the boy; he brought him over once or twice at the week-end, but for a long, peaceful time the farm was spared the howling, screeching and banging.

It appeared to me that Nain and Taid missed the little boy more than Bronwen; they spoke about him more often, and when he did reappear on these visits they were delighted, whereas her pleasure was more contained. These visits made me realize the value of peace. It was wonderfully peaceful at Gelli. Outside there were the farmyard noises, hens, ducks, the queer dry noise of turkeys, the horses in the paved yard, a pail being put on the flags and the clash of its handle falling after: generally there was the soft noise of the rain and the gutters running and sometimes when it had been raining hard all night the river in spate would be there, a great deep noise behind all the others, a noise that you did not hear unless the wind cut it off for a moment; as the wind blew, hard and soft, so the noise came, a breathing, then loud to a tone of menace. There were sheep always, mostly quite far, and sometimes cows, like organs when they were in the yard.

Bronwen used to bring her sewing in the afternoons: she had always used the deep sill of the parlor window—it had the best afternoon light—and once I was on the mend she took to it again.

Long, rambling, disjointed conversations we used to have. I do not recall what we talked about: it was very small talk, probably, but it was easy, unembarrassed and free. There was no sort of effort in talking to her. If we fell silent it was not that either was searching for something to say, it was just calm silence as companionable as talk. She had a fine gift for silence. How rare it is. I read somewhere that music is made up of the notes and the silence in between; the one as important as the other. It certainly holds good for talk.

She had no affectation; what she said was honest and ingenuous, and she talked good sense. When she thought before replying she had a way of looking straight into my face, gravely, as children do sometimes. It was disconcerting: at first I found it difficult not to smile back—hard to compose my face if we were talking about something for which a smile was inappropriate.

I came to know her then. All that I had supposed her to be she was, and more. There was character there, and strength, but a grace of mind beyond what I could have expected and—I do not know how to describe it—a purity, a quality of soul: but I lack the words for it.

We slipped at once into an open, friendly way of talking; closely, but well this side of familiarity. That was not the effect of reserve, still less that of awareness: on her side it came from a nature that kept itself a little remote from contact with other people. She had a world to herself where she was alone. For my part it was more conscious: I loved it so, and I would have feared any change.

I have looked over this last piece, and I am very sorry that it is so bald and inadequate: I have made her sound a prig. Nothing on the whole created earth could have been more essentially unlike Bronwen than a prig, yet I have described her as one. Try as I will I cannot convey what I felt with such clarity and strength. I am no poet.

Those days (I should have counted each one) were by far the happiest of my life. There were all the obvious causes for happiness, her presence, the sight of her beauty, her continual unfailing kindness—it was Bronwen who looked after me: if I begin to speak of her kindness, her perception and her delicacy while I was helpless I should never stop—and my great, confirmed, knowledge of her. There was the fact that I had been ill and in pain and that now I was getting better, and (here is bathos again) that Bronwen was a cook in a thousand, so that every day I ate more, with increasing enjoyment. But as well as that I had imposed a discipline on myself that allowed the happiness: before, I had made one of my own particular hells out of the thought of Emyr as Bronwen’s husband; now, in the house itself, I saw that unless I could do something about it I should either go mad—I mean mad, insane; a mind gnawed hollow with jealousy—or harry myself into a physical wreck again, eat my heart out, as they say. So I closed my mind to that. It was not so hard as I thought it would be: if you turn yourself to it with the devil behind you you can build a wall in your mind that is very nearly impenetrable.