Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  I was charmed with the machine, and the old man showed me how to use it. It did not exceed my capacity, even at that first attempt: there were some refinements that I did not master, but I made it go out to the middle. It was the cunning jerk that moved the loop of string in the holes, thus altering the set of the board, so that one could reverse, that foxed me, and I was obliged to go on always in the same direction. While I walked round the lake with the string the old man fished with my rod. He said it was a pleasure to fish with a gentleman’s rod once in a way, but that he would do better with his stwlan. We neither of us caught anything.

  In the evening, when we separated, he told me that he left his board hidden—he showed me the place—and that I was welcome to use it whenever I came up. He said that he left it partly because it was heavy to carry, and partly, he said with a significant look, because you did not want everybody to see you with it.

  I could not see why not until long afterwards, when I learned that the otter-board is a poacher’s instrument, quite illegal, as well as unsporting. For my part I could never see why it was wrong to work one’s flies out in the water with one piece of wood rather than another. If the end of fishing was to catch fish, and if the stwlan would do it when a rod would not, I preferred the stwlan. But I lacked the true sportsman’s approach: if there had been a boat up there I would willingly have rowed up and down the lake, pulling a little trawl.

  Whenever I went up there after that I used to begin with my rod, partly as a gesture toward the convenances and partly to improve my casting, and then I would take the otter-board and tow it round and round the lake.

  I never caught anything: but what a pleasant occupation it was. The top of the board would be out there, perhaps a hundred yards away, just perceptible if you knew where to look, there would be the steady, living pull of the line, and the constant possibility of a sudden jerk from one of the big fish I knew to be there. Soon I came to know the shore so well that I could walk round, passing the marshy places and the rocks without thinking. With this sort of fishing there was just enough to do—a continual gentle motion and a steady, half-conscious watchfulness—to make it a perfect accompaniment for thinking. It suited me admirably. Fly-fishing was too anxious and spasmodic, angling was too dull: plain walking without any destination turned my mind in upon itself. Stwlan-fishing, with its faint dash of raffishness, was the thing for me, and many a day I spent up there, walking slowly round and round the lake, holding the string with my hands clasped behind my back and lines of verse turning, following one another in my head, and my mind running on its eternal preoccupation.

  If I had seen her in a house, in North Oxford, in familiar, worn surroundings, would it have been the same? Up there I asked myself that, and until I saw her again I sometimes thought that it would not have been. In the deceiving calm of that high lake I could argue that my being was aroused by its new surroundings: it was a specious argument up there, where I was the only man in the world, and the lake and the mountains had stood since the beginning of time.

  I had seen mountains and lakes before: in Switzerland I had seen higher mountains and broader lakes, but there I was on passage, I expected mountains and lakes—I had paid for them and I saw them; they did not affect me: I admired them, but they did not affect me. Here I was not a passing stranger in a tourist’s country; here I was in some degree part of it, and I know it affected me deeply. My question was whether it was the mountains, the whole newness, that distorted my judgment; whether perhaps it brought out something that had been latent in me, or whether it was disordered fancy.

  But at the sight of her, even far across the valley as I came down, these speculations fled away, and I knew that whatever the force of my present circumstances might be, it would have been the same, in any country, or time, or place.

  Bronwen

  Bronwen Vaughan folded her hands and prepared to answer the questions. Her heart was beating, high quick strokes, but her hands lay calm and folded.

  Q. Why did you many Emyr Vaughan?

  A. He asked me. (It did not sound pert: it came slowly, after a turning about for a truthful reply.)

  Q. But he did not ask you without any encouragement?

  A. No. I do not think I wanted him to ask me though. I was in a flutter, and I do not remember very well what I thought then. I did not think much. I had been quarreling with my sister-in-law.

  Q. You said yes at once, did you not?

  A. Not quite at once. I waited for a moment and looked at him—we had the stable lantern between us, and he looked so longing. It would have given him a terrible hurt, and he had no protection against it. His face was open and doubtful like a child’s: you could not say no. And I suppose the idea of getting away from home was underneath my mind.

  Q. Was your home very unhappy?

  A. Yes. It was very unhappy.

  Q. Tell me about it.

  A. It was our home when we were children: other people came to visit, but it was our home. My father used to tell me how his grandfather had made the first cart that had ever been seen in the valley: he made it in our cartshed and on the rafter over the door he had left some of the nails, which were a treasure for us when we were children. We were both born there, upstairs in the big bed. Then my father and mother died. I had thought all the world of them, and it made me very sad. For a long time it was all gray and I was very lonely in the house. Meurig told me he was courting and although I felt strange about it I told him I was pleased. She was older than him and I wondered how he could see anything in her at all: she frightened me.

  It was worse than I had thought when they were married. Meurig was as kind as he could be: some people said he was soft, but he was not that. She had him down at once, poor Meurig, and he did not even know he was unhappy because she told him he was very fortunate to be a married man now.

  The first day she called it “my house.” She said she did not like old-fashioned houses. She did not like old-fashioned furniture, either. There was the dresser in the kitchen: it had been put there before the front door was moved, in my great-grandfather’s time, and they said that it had been made by William Williams, Pandy, the poet. It had a kind of step underneath it where we used to play shop when we were children. Her first quarrel with Meurig was about selling it to a dealer in Llandudno: he stood up to her for a week, but in the end it went, and they had to take it to pieces to get it out of the door. The kitchen never looked the same again, and until I left home I kept trying to put the knives in the drawer that was no longer there, so I remembered it four times a day. But I must say that I was surprised at the money it fetched: Meurig had got over it by the time the money came, and he was very pleased. He always thought of money the same as sheep. I mean if he had fifty pounds and ewes were five pounds apiece the fifty pounds looked like ten ewes in a pen to him. He loved sheep. I could never blame him when the old things went. He bought some lovely rams, and there were white-painted flimsy things in the place of the old ones.

  Q. Was she a bad woman?

  A. Oh no.

  Q. I mean was she untruthful, dishonest, undutiful, dirty?

  A. I suppose she was honest: she was very clean. But she was not dutiful, if that is obeying a good husband in big things. And she was not kind. I think she had a real tenderness for him, but she was impatient with what she called his softness, and she did not think that he could manage as well as she could, ever. I hated her.

  Q. Did you not think it wrong to hate her?

  A. Yes.

  Q. When did Emyr come?

  A. We had always known him. His father used to come over for our shearing, although it was far away, and we used to go to theirs. Emyr often came when he was a little boy, and Meurig and he marked the sheep: when he was old enough to shear he always came.

  Q. Did you like him as a little boy?

  A. Not much. He was always telling Meurig things: he was older than Meurig.

  Q. What sort of things?

  A. Like a schoolmaster.

/>   Q. When did you start to like him?

  A. Not until a little while before my father’s death. It was at the Festival at Dinas, when I had a new dress. It was a very pretty blue spotted dress with a belt that Miss Dashwood gave me—they stayed every summer at the Rectory and they always used to come in and have tea when Mr. Dashwood fished in the lake—it was too small around the waist for her, but it fitted me exactly. I was very pleased with it. It was lovely quality material from London, the best I had ever seen. I did my hair up behind to go with it. At the Festival I saw Emyr staring and staring from the other side, where the young men sit. Any other time he would have come over, but he was too shy now; only when we were going out he came behind in the crowd and talked to Meurig. He was looking at me most of the time and in the end he said, “Well, Bronwen.” He did not say anything else until we were getting into the trap, and then I did not hear it, but I was pleased. It had been a very good Festival, better than I had ever heard the singing was; so I had had a fine evening, with my new dress, the singing and being admired, and I liked Emyr for admiring me.

  After that he began coming over more often, by himself. At first he hardly spoke to me, but went fishing up in the lake with Meurig. Meurig thought that Emyr came to see him indeed, but I knew better than that. I must have been turned to him a little at that time, because when he came after the Festival I was covered with whitewash from doing the dairy and in my old mac and rubber boots, and I was angry to be seen like that. Before, I would not have minded.

  He kept on coming. At the beginning he always had some reason—sheep, or they wanted to buy hay, or did we have a setting of turkey eggs for his mother. Sometimes they were such long-fetched reasons that Meurig stared at him, but my father understood him soon enough, and it came to be that he would come over the mountain once a week without any excuse, on Sunday evenings, usually. It is a very long way by road, and even over the mountains for a shepherd it is better than twenty miles, there and back, but he came, in rain or any weather, and sometimes I used to see him on a good night for the moon, looking up at the house from the river.

  Q. Were you in love with him?

  A. No. Certainly I was not in love with him: but sometimes when he was not there I thought perhaps I was—little I knew of it, a young girl. I knew that it all gave a kind of new excitement to the days when he came, and I was a long time in front of the looking-glass when I heard his voice below; and I felt a tenderness for him when he sat on the settle bent over with his hands flat between his knees, and nothing to say. He was always shy, and I liked that in a great strong tall man (he was twice Meurig’s size). I liked his strength too: he was modest about it, not standing in attitudes or bending the kitchen poker like Griffi Tŷ Hyll. But I knew nothing about him until we were married.

  Q. How long were you engaged?

  A. Only a little while. Mrs. Meurig wanted me to go, I wanted to be away, and Emyr was impatient: there seemed to be nothing to wait for. Meurig was very pleased: our father had told him that Emyr was a very good young man—he had asked for his character in Pentref long before. Emyr’s parents were pleased—I had been over there and they had been to ours, and Mrs. Vaughan had told me that they had been afraid Emyr would never marry—he would never look after any girl but me—and they were very glad he was going to many such a nice girl. She was such a dear, gentle old lady, and when she sat by me and told me what a good son Emyr was to them, and how they were both old now, I cried.

  Q. Was there any arrangement about how you should live?

  A. At Gelli?

  Q. Yes. Were you to come into the house as a daughter?

  A. No one said anything about that. I thought about it, but I did not like to say. I supposed it would work out. I know I had no idea of taking the house over from Mrs. Vaughan: I had seen something of that, and I did not want to be anything like Meurig’s wife. I thought we would all live together.

  Q. What was Meurig’s wife’s name?

  A. Gwladys. Gwladys Evans. Her father was Evans Drapers.

  Q. How did she behave at this time?

  A. She was pleased about it, and I think she tried to be kind; she would have given me a lot of clothes if I had liked them—shiny satin. She wanted to tell me things before I was married, but I would never let her begin—I said I knew all about it. If it had been anybody else I would have been very glad to have been told.

  Q. So you were married.

  A. Yes. In church: properly.

  Q. Did you go away?

  A. Yes, we went to Liverpool. We meant to stay a fortnight, but it was miserable, the noise of the trams and the traffic all the time, and crowds; and the English people at the hotel, Emyr said they were laughing at us. We came back after a week.

  Q. Straight to Gelli?

  A. Yes.

  Q. How did you like that?

  A. It was very strange: as strange as Liverpool, only they spoke Welsh. It began badly, because they had not been expecting us, and the house was still upside down. Mrs. Vaughan had been meaning to have it all clean and ready at the end of the fortnight. But they were as kind as could be, and Emyr was very good to me; so I began to settle down.

  Q. Will you describe the people of the house?

  A. There was the old man, Emyr’s father; he was a good man. He was true and kind. He was as good as my father, and I liked to be with him. But he had got under the burden of life too young, and he had worked and worked so hard all his life and he had had so much misfortune that it had made him stupid. No; it is wrong to say that of such a good, loving man; but in his old age he could not think of much but work and food (apart from Emyr)—that was all his life except Sundays, when it was chapel. He was a deacon. He was very strict: no one ever smoked or drank or danced at Gelli, and the year’s hay would rot if it rained on a Sunday; for no one would think of bringing it in. He did not like stories, or English books from the library. There was not even poetry, and I missed that. It was not that old Mr. Vaughan thought it was exactly wrong, but there was none there, nor music—they none of them had an ear for it nor cared much about it, though they would go to the festivals and eisteddfods. My father had been a lovely poet: he was always competing, and sometimes he won. I thought he was much better than the others I ever heard. Meurig too; but he liked the new way, while my father would never have anything to do with any poems but cynghanedd.

  Noson lawen we used to have often in my home: songs and poems—not only hymns, but old songs about things and love. How I missed them; and the piano. I played it, not properly, but enough for the tunes.

  Mr. Vaughan was strict, but he was strict without being nasty, if you can imagine that. He was straight through and through, and even Mr. Lewis, Cletwr, the other deacon, could never find anything worse to say of him than that he was selfish and wanted everything in the valley for Emyr. I hardly ever heard old Mr. Vaughan say anything unkind about anyone, except when Mr. Lewis, Cletwr, took Dolforgan (they had three farms already): then he said that they wanted the whole county, and that it was wrong of a rich farmer to take up little farms like that, which should be a living for a family.

  Q. What were his faults?

  A. While I knew him I never knew him do one thing that he thought wrong. You could say that he worked too hard, so that other people had to too, and that he was mean and selfish. But it was not true: he worked hard because he thought it was right that people should work hard: and as for being mean, he had had such a bad time in the hard years when sheep were worth nothing that he was frightened about money, and guarded it like a weapon—not for himself, but for his family. He was selfish for his family, but I am sure he never knew it, and I am sure he would never have done a wrong thing even to have advanced Emyr.

  Q. Did he like you?

  A. Yes. We always liked one another very much from the beginning. When the others had gone to bed we used to sit together sometimes, and I would read to him, or he would tell me about things that had happened long ago. He loved his food, and I used to cook him the t
hings he liked best. I do not mean that he was greedy, though.