Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  She was quite well off, with pensions for her two men who had been killed in the quarry. It was surprising to hear that she had been married; I had supposed her to be one of those strong-minded, masculine women who do not marry but live alone, self-contained and formidable, to the end of their days. Her needs were few; twenty pounds would probably have covered her yearly expenditure apart from the auctions, and people gave her things, mutton and pork after a slaughtering, black pudding, corn for her hens. In the season she went to every farm for the shearing, where she was an expert roller of fleeces. She worked hard when she chose to work, but it was more from habit than from interest in the wages, and to satisfy her curiosity and her need for conversation. I know it was not for money that she threaded the mountains at shearing time, because she always took a fleece as her day’s pay, as they used to do in former times; but instead of having it made into flannel as the old people did she stored the wool in her loft, where it mounted and mounted, the home of innumerable rats and mice. Moldering wool was the chief of the smells in her cottage; the next in strength was her goat, her companion and pet.

  The first time I went to ask why she had not come she gave me a cup of tea with her goat’s milk in it; even in that dim light I could see the encrusted grime on the mug. There was something soft at the bottom, which my spoon encountered but did not entirely dislodge.

  It was conversation that proved the downfall of our relation; that and wounded pride. She was the most garrulous old woman I have ever heard. She knew very little English, but that did not prevent her from starting to talk as soon as she opened my door, a flood of words that did not stop until she closed the door behind her. As far as I could make out they were mostly anecdotes of her young days, or the history of families living in the valley, diseases, catastrophe, anger and death. It was impossible to follow her. Most of the farming people had some trouble with English pronouns (hi in Welsh is she in English, which starts them off on the wrong foot) but none was so wild as this old lady.

  I used to listen with strained attention to such phrases as “Then it went off with the hwnna [this took the place of any unknown English word] with Dai to the sheeps; and tomorning I say ‘Men: the damned things.’” It was a pity that I could not understand her, for I am sure she would have been most interesting: I tried, but the difficulty of language was far from being the greatest barrier. Her mental processes were tortuous and involved; she was the victim of association. She would plunge into a vast series of parentheses and never come out. An account of Criccieth fair thirty years ago would become the history of Mr. Williams, Moelgwyn, and then by some fresh association, dark to me, it would turn to a tale of obscure injustice.

  In the end I stopped trying, and she resented it. Once, during an inordinately tedious speech I got up at the end of a paragraph, hoping to be allowed to get on with the book that lay open on the table, but she said, “Sit down. I am not finishing…” so firmly that I had no choice.

  She grew more and more irregular in her attendance as I listened to her less, although I tried to make up for it by paying her more than our bargain. I wrote to her once or twice, to ask her to order coal if she were going down to Dinas, or to come on Thursday instead of Friday. She never acted on these notes, and answered evasively if I asked her about them: it occurred to me that she might not understand written English, so one day I wrote to her in Welsh. She never came again after that. She was quite illiterate (I wish I had known: I would not have humiliated her for the world) and she could make nothing of any of the notes; but when she learned that the last was in Welsh she found it wounding and insulting. She forgave me in the end, and we were quite friendly, but she said she was too old to go out any more.

  I looked everywhere for another woman; I advertised and made inquiries as far as Llanfair and Dinas, but there was none to be found. There was no middling gentry in this part of the country, and no local tradition of going out to service.

  I was obliged to keep house for myself. I did not do so badly after a while, though the ordinary mechanical operations like washing up, or making a bed always took me very much longer than they would have taken a woman. In a way it was a good thing: it opened a new perspective to me. Formerly I had used what I now found to be an unreasonable number of plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks: when each of these things has to be washed up, dried and put away, things take on a different aspect. Now I grew careful of my saucer (a triumph if it remained unslopped), never put butter or marmalade on the edge of my plate, so that the plate might get by with no more than a few crumbs, which could be blown off, and I learned that one course to each meal was enough.

  My simple diet appeared to suit me. That, the change, the excitement, the unwonted exercise and the mountain air combined in the first few months to make me feel better than I had felt for years. I ate when I chose and as much or as little as I chose—a great change from the set, unvarying meals of my former life. I rather insist upon this point, because I am convinced that a man’s diet and his surroundings have a deep effect on him. Before this time I had tended to coddle myself: I was hagridden by an ignominious and painful digestive trouble, and in an exactly ordered life I had spent much too much time watching my symptoms and worrying about them. My new way of eating did not have the permanent good effect that I had hoped (I write like a hypochondriac) but the vast country opened and strengthened my being in ways that I had never imagined. Many things that had appeared all-important dwindled to trifles, and other values rose. It is difficult to explain because it is difficult to seize; but I know that I began to feel more of a man—more complete and masculine—and less like a neutral creature in an unsatisfactory body.

  The strength of the country; that was a new concept for me. I had known the Cotswolds fairly well, and the Sussex downs; they are very beautiful, but they had never given me this idea of strength—a direct and powerful influence. This was something quite different: from my very first days in the valley it struck me that men, here, were no longer in the majority; it was the untamed land. It is possible that I exaggerated this because of my urban background, but making all allowances, it still seemed to me that it was neither fanciful nor weak to feel that the ancient order was hardly disturbed here. (If this was the case, and I am sure it was, a man’s natural reaction would be to become more virile.)

  The ancient order was hardly disturbed, particularly at night. I remember standing just under the black precipice that rushes up to the top of the Saeth looking down at the three or four handkerchiefs of fields down in the bottom of the valley and comparing their extent with the prodigious sweep of untouched mountain; the night was touching on the barren land, making it vaster and more powerful, while the little fields dwindled and vanished.

  There was no longer that great buffer of civilization between a man and his remote origins: I felt it strongly; and in an attempt to convey something of what I mean I have written the two following pieces, although they break the run of my narrative.

  I was walking along the road in the morning of a beautiful gentle day when I met Emyr Vaughan going the round of his sheep. We were well acquainted and friendly by this time and he often used to take me part of the way with him to show me things and explain them. It was still the lambing season, and twice every day he went clean round the lower mountain. He was having trouble this year with weak ewes who could not feed their lambs, and with foxes. As we walked he showed me here and there a patch of skin with the close-curled wool of a new lamb on it, and once the hoof, or the foot, of a lamb with the shank still uneaten. He slackened his pace for me, but it was still an effort to keep up, and I did not always hear or understand what he said; however, I remember being struck again by the extraordinary way he recognized individual sheep. “That ewe there, she is the daughter of the one by the wall. She had twins, but she could not feed both of them, and I put one to that ewe we passed by the road, the one I said had the maggot very bad last year—her lamb had the brait.” It was obvious that he was not talking for effe
ct: he had hundreds of sheep there, and he knew each one, with its maternal ancestry. I do not think that any of them had names except those few who had been hand-reared at the farm, brought up with a bottle, and I meant to ask him how he identified each, whether he said inwardly, “There is that sheep with the drooping ears and brown legs, the daughter of the one who got caught in the trap the autumn before the bad winter.”

  We were coming down again to the road a little way above my cottage when we found the body of a lamb, dragged between two rocks. Its head was eaten off.

  “Diwch annwyl!” he said. It was a fine well-grown lamb. He said that he thought he had seen the mother earlier in the day, much farther up. It was a fox of course, he said, and when he had thought for some time he said, “I will put some poison to it tonight.” He spoke with an air of caution—a hushed cunning, as if it were something illegal. He said he was sure I would not tell anybody. It was when he spoke like this that he lost his amiability entirely; all the idiot sharpness of the peasant came into his face; it was as if his eyes diminished and went red round the edges.

  I left him shortly after this and went home to make myself a pot of coffee and to cut some sandwiches for my lunch; the day was so fine that I decided to explore the Diffwys, the land that lay up above the end of the valley on the northern side.

  If I have managed to give a clear impression of Cwm Bugail it will be remembered that on the left-hand side is a green path that runs across the face of the Saeth and up toward a high cleft at the junction of the mountain’s shoulder and the hemicycle of rock that closes the top of the valley. A stream comes down from this cleft in a series of falls—a magnificent spectacle after a few days of rain—and the cleft itself is the beginning of the country that I wanted to explore. The green path—it soon stopped being green and turned to shale, but all that I saw from my window was green, and I always thought of it as the green path—took me longer than I had expected, with the sun on my back and my heavy coat too hot. With pauses I do not suppose that I spent less than two hours reaching the top. It was worth pausing often; every time I turned there was more of the world spread below under me, and more visible over the Penmawr ridge, and all from a higher, more detached and god-like standpoint. It is good for one’s self-esteem to be high up.

  At the cleft, a dramatically narrow and decisive entrance to the unknown high country, I turned for a last look down the length of Cwm Bugail: my cottage was there, distinct because of its whitewash, absurdly small, smaller than a matchbox, and the whole vast extent of the air was lit with the sun. Past the corner, through the black rocks of the cleft and at once it was another world, a sunless chasm with a silent lake. Chasm is not the right word; one thinks of a chasm from above, an enormous crack going down, essentially down. In this narrow, deep valley I was at the bottom, looking up. On my left hand the side was sheer, nearly the whole length of it; a precipitous scree here and there, and sometimes a little heather, but mostly naked rock going straight up to the top of the Saeth: the bed of the valley was a tarn, black, shining water with an abrupt and barren edge—no reeds, no mud, nothing green at all; it changed harshly from naked water to naked rock. On the right the land rose in a steep slope, a shapeless, tormented moorland with bare rock showing, neither so high nor so sheer as the wall on the left, but still reaching halfway up the sky. There was no breath of wind to stir the top of the water, and in all the length of the valley I could see no thing alive, nor in the air above it.

  From the run of the valley and the disposition of the soaring black cliff on its southern side the sun could never come into it at any time. At first, panting from my climb, I found the coolness agreeable, but after a little while I began to feel cold, and buttoned my jacket.

  A sheep track ran along before me, and I decided that I would try to walk round the lake before having my sandwiches: it seemed pointless to carry them too (they were bulky in my pocket and had galled me all the way up the green path) so I put them on a convenient rock, with the intention of coming back to sit there and eat them after I had been round the lake. Before I left I looked around in order to be sure that I should find them again, and my eye was caught by a shape on the skyline—a skyline that I had to lean back to see at all. Right up there on the edge of the black precipice there was this thing, perched like a gargoyle peering down. I could not tell why it had caught my eye: there were hundreds of jutting, strangely-shaped rocks all along that weathered salient, and none had fixed my attention. However, it did catch my eye, and held it. I could not see what it was: a sheep, perhaps? These agile mountain sheep did take up the most extraordinary attitudes, poised on an overhanging rock with a handful of grass in its crevices. Or conceivably one of those wild goats that I had heard about? It was a strange way for a sheep to stand, hooked there.

  I suppose, from the comparisons I made at the time with a sheep or a goat, that the thing was lighter in color than the surrounding rock: I do not remember now. What I do recall, and most clearly, is the air that it had of crouching there, poised over the valley. It was, of course, merely fanciful to suppose a malignance in it, a sort of evil domination of all that it looked down upon. It was fanciful, of course, and outside that sterile place it seems even absurd; but those were the ideas that came to me.

  In the end I said that whether it was a sheep or a rock or a goat it did not greatly matter, and set off along the track. From the far end of the valley (Cwm Erchyll was its name) I had over-simplified its construction; here and there I found a bay with a little sad gray beach of pebbles, and at the end there was a bog with a living stream flowing through it to fill the lake. Here a small bird like a snipe got up at my feet and stopped my heart dead still; it winged low over the water, a white flash in its flight and the saddest heartbroken cry in the world.

  Where the bog and the lake merged the shore was black and there were rushes: the stream ran cutting deep between banks of a spongy black substance, and in some places I could hear the sound of invisible tributaries that ran underground. On the shore itself the firm black mud showed a line of footprints; they looked to me like those of a dog, but a fox was more likely. It struck me again, and more forcibly, that a man can be ignorant of an infinite number of important, everyday things and still be reckoned educated. In this instance I could not distinguish between the tracks of a dog and a fox; it was not important, perhaps, but it was typical: I had not known the name of that melancholy bird, nor the curious plants that stood in the bog-pool before me—I did not know their names, still less their qualities. A hundred other cases presented themselves—the milking of a cow, the difference between a bull and a bullock, the lighting of a fire without kerosene—none perhaps a matter of life and death, but in all amounting to a great shameful fog of ignorance.

  These reflections occupied me until I was halfway round the other side of the lake, and there, where I had to negotiate a difficult piece of smooth rock overhanging the water, something prompted me to look up to the top of the black cliff: it was still there, its aspect slightly changed by my change in position, but surely motionless, and a rock without any sort of doubt. This was comforting, I hardly know why, and I crossed the rock and finished my tour of the lake in much higher spirits. When I sat down to my sandwiches I felt positively merry—a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.

  I left the tarn with a mind disturbed, more disturbed than I should have believed possible, and turned at the black cleft into our own valley with a feeling of escape and strong relief. The sun was low now, and the shadow was halfway up the Penmawr ridge; the light was much more golden than I remembered to have seen it before—the contrast, perhaps, between the dark, closed country that I had just left and this wide, beautiful valley with the tawny flank of Penmawr on the other side throwing back a flood of light. There were the white spots of sheep, and down at the bottom the squared fields and the farms with their domestic trees: I had thought of it as wild and barren before,
but now, at least for the moment, it looked almost homely.

  I went down the green path as slowly as I had come up it; a continual downhill walk that threatens every moment to break into an involuntary run is as tiring as a climb: the sun had left the top of the mountain long before I was halfway down. There was no reason to hurry; the long twilight was as soft as midsummer, and as I went down the length of the mountain wall the stones gave out a gentle warmth. I sat on the bridge for a long while before starting my climb home. The farm was asleep when I passed, walking softly through the yard; only one dog barked, and that perfunctorily—they were getting used to me.

  The last steep stretch was very tiring; I had gone too far for one day, and three times on the path up from the farm I stopped to breathe. The third time was just at the corner before my own wall, by the telegraph post: I leaned against it, listening to the singing in the wires, with the gentle breeze on my face and the faint stars showing above the ridge. On the white road, above the cattle-trap, two dogs came trotting toward Hafod. Whose dogs could those be? I thought, and I saw that they were not dogs; they were foxes. They came on steadily; from the road they looked over the low wall into my garden, twice. For a little while they were hidden by the cottage and when they appeared again they were just above me—I could have lobbed a stone underhand beyond them. One was larger than the other—a dog fox and a vixen, I supposed. Astonishing, the length of their legs, the height they stood off the ground. They went a little farther up—they were on my left hand by now—and stopped at the edge of the road, at the curve, where it is built up four or five feet. I thought they must see me now, but if they did they did not care: the smaller one leaned crouching over the edge of the road and screamed out a shrieking howl, horrifyingly loud and daunting. I saw the gape of her jaws. Instantly all the dogs in the valley answered, a furious bawling from each of the farms and a battering against the stable door down in Gelli. The vixen listened, crouching there in her ugly, evil attitude, and as the noise slackened she screamed again. What can give an impression of the sound? An evil, maniac laughter, a triumphant threatening, they were both in it, and something hellish, too.