Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  “What brought their quarreling to a head was the deaconry of the chapel—I mean which should be deacon now that there was a vacancy. The younger brother was the literary one of the family, but the elder had the elder’s rights. They had both taught in the Sunday school for many years, though of the two the younger was the more active.

  “You know the great importance of the chapels here, and the prestige and influence a deacon has: you can hardly overestimate it in the high farming valleys where there is no other authority or public opinion—where public opinion is integral and undiluted, I should say.

  “God knows what went on up there in Tŷ Bach, but the outcome of it was that when it was certain that the elder brother was going to be the deacon the younger denounced him to the police.

  “Well; there you are. Those are the sort of people we have to deal with: you see my point?”

  “Yes, I see your point perfectly well, but I do not see how you can argue that the Evanses were typical or that this ghastly affair has any bearing on the national character of the Welsh. After all, on that basis you could go through the Newgate calendars of every country and prove the survivors the greatest rogues unhung.”

  “Hm. I suppose I have explained it badly. It was not the thing itself that I was meaning, but the manner of it, and the motives.”

  “Yes, I appreciate that. But I still think that you could duplicate the whole of it elsewhere. Surely you do not intend to confine hypocrisy, violence and self-seeking to the Welsh. I am very sure that they do not have a monopoly; and more than that, I should say, saving your presence, that they have a larger share than usual of the contrary virtues.”

  I thought he was going to answer angrily, but he checked himself and said, “No. I have not chosen my case well. It does not really bring out what I meant to say—and the rest obscures it. I should have emphasized the closedness of these people, the fact that I was on terms of friendship with them—that the boy was—and that I knew nothing about them, never pierced through the barriers to see what sort of people they really were—and this after they had done it. That’s the important point. I was there within a matter of days of the crime, and I took my tea in a happy, model family and went over a number of englynion that the younger brother had just written.”

  There were a good many replies that came to my tongue, but I could not say them in his house. He went on eagerly, “You must have come across it. I am sure you will recognize it if you reflect. You know the Thomases at Hendre, don’t you? Or even more the people at Gelli—that is the place where the old man and his wife came from Cwm y Glo, isn’t it? And where the young one married a girl from Cwm Priddlyd recently? Yes, of course it is. Well, what do you know of the good people at Gelli? You think you know them pretty well, don’t you?” He paused and seemed to recollect himself; he looked at me for a moment, and I did not know how to interpret the look: I thought he was going to go on. He hesitated, fiddling with a pawn, and said in a different voice, “It’s a matter of years, perhaps. In the end you’ll come round to my way of thinking.” Then he began to rearrange the chessmen.

  Pugh

  It was toward the autumn that I began to feel so continuously unwell. I know it is ridiculous to keep harping on this, but I do insist upon it because a man (myself, at any rate) is ruled by his stomach. If it does not behave well one’s whole outlook on life is changed, and I really believe one’s character changes with it.

  My choice of a doctor was not fortunate: Davies had been an Army doctor for a long time and in Dinas he had a very large panel practice. I went to him on a vague recommendation and never after summoned up enough moral courage or energy to change. Changing doctors in the country is a great upheaval, and even if the other man had agreed to it he might have turned out worse. I did not often go to Davies or send for him; I was willing to be impressed, but I had no confidence in his mist. alb. or his brisk “No beef or mutton.” He would have cut off a leg or set an arm with the best, but he was not the man for me. What I wanted was one of those quiet, humane doctors who have few patients: they sometimes go into semi-retirement in country towns and doctor their friends from kindness and a desire to go on being useful; they do take notice of their patients, and even tend to coddle them. I knew such a one in Thame, and I lost a good friend when he died.

  If I had been a good physician to myself, I should have refrained from going down to the farm and from spending my afternoons on the Craig y Nos staring down to see Bronwen. It was always worse after that; but if I did not see her there was such a strong impatience in me, a tearing restlessness, that it had the same effect and I would find myself as nervous as a cat, unequal to my food, useless for reading or settling to any sort of work. As for my book, it had dropped into the utter distance; the pseudo-Basil and the nameless monks whose work I had transcribed into so many heavy notebooks for so many heavy years, and who had occupied my slow thoughts for such a dull length of time, they were as far from me now as I was from my old self.

  Nothing seemed worthwhile, and I am afraid that I let the household chores slide day after day until I was living in a slum. And how slowly the time passed. I had a little chiming clock that beat the quarters: as each passed after an empty gray space it seemed that I had gained something; and the hours were a victory, each one. I would not have minded so much if I had been able to sleep.

  I felt I was a constraint on them down at the farm, but I still went in the evenings: earlier on, when the surprise—the shock, even—had been new to me, I had almost stopped my visits, but now I went down quite often. I could not keep away and now, more than ever, I wanted to know whether I was right about Bronwen and Nain.

  I had noticed it in the first place, at a time when my perceptions were dull—how dull, and what a heavy clod I must have been for all those years of my life; half alive, no more.

  Now it was essential for me to know whether I had been right then, when I was an unmoved spectator. All the innumerable little things that had given me that impression seemed to point out that Nain was not being properly used. I had my periods of reaction, when I told myself that I was making a fool of myself, creating an image of Bronwen that had no relation to herself apart from physical resemblance. Then I would be sorry for my treachery, and go all the way back again.

  But there was something there, and the more I thought about it, when I was balanced between extremes, the more I felt its importance: because if she was in fact hard and unkind and dispossessing towards Nain, then she was not the woman I was breaking my heart for. I said that that would be for the best: I could go away then. Then I tried to see Emyr’s share in it (he was not always kind, and rarely considerate) and I tried to exculpate Bronwen, to lay it all on the difference of habit and tradition, the different way of life. But in the end I wanted the truth. The truth—no comfortable deceit or compromise—that was the essential.

  I was afraid of what I might find, and as time went on I became more afraid. It was all very well to say in my mind that I wanted my release; it was a damned lie. I wanted my love made certain, confirmed, redoubled; but my heart was afraid. (I cannot talk of this without the sound of romantic clap-trap: I am sorry for it.) I was very willing to search for the truth if it should tend in the direction I wanted, and I hated the search for it when everything seemed to point away.

  But I had to have the truth. They talk about love being blind: I did not want to be blind—for that matter, I do not think I ever wanted to be in love.

  I went on and on at this prying, eavesdropping, spying, and I heard many things that hurt me to the quick. Nain, and the others in the farm, spoke of “Bronwen’s table, Bronwen’s dresser, Bronwen’s teapot.” It seemed that her dot was quite outside the common stock: certainly the things that were called hers were very much better—there was the prettiest little oak gate-leg table that I have ever seen outside a museum: they used to give me my tea on it: “Sit down, Mr. Pugh, sit down: I have putting your tea to Bronwen’s table, isn’t it.”

  Always, if I
asked Nain anything, she would refer the decision to Bronwen. I remember so clearly walking into the back kitchen, where the old lady was scrubbing on her hands and knees (the scrubbing brush and pail looked too big for her): she looked up and put her hand to a loose wisp of white hair. She said good morning with a smile on her tired, gentle old face and when I asked her whether I might have an extra half-pint of milk she called up the stairs to Bronwen: I did not hear what Bronwen said, but the sound of her voice was not very pleasant, and as I went from the house I heard the little boy Gerallt beginning to cry.

  How depressing it was. It was one out of a great many instances—not conclusive (I would have taken a great deal of convincing, but I was sufficiently honest to have accepted a downright proof), not conclusive, but they mounted up, accumulated.

  It is usual, I imagine, for a man to look for perfection where he loves: I was rather old for a lover; I was willing to compromise for much less, and if she was curt with Emyr that did not concern me—there might be so many things there that I could not understand, nor possibly judge—but I had to have a nature that would not be unkind to Nain, would not dispossess her of her place in the house where she had been the mistress for thirty or forty years, a nature that could not reduce the old lady to a super-annuated servant.

  Perfection was there when we all sat in the farm kitchen, but when I lay in bed thinking it over, piecing my evidence together, playing the advocatus diaboli, what a black picture presented itself.

  If it really did come down to a commonplace usurpation, dominating usurpation, what could be more wounding? And what other answer could there be? I struggled very hard against the idea (and, with a stupid wrongheadedness, toward it: duty seems so often to lie along the more unpleasant road, and the unacceptable notion is so often the correct one. But I am not to be talking of duty here).

  To abridge a little: I worried myself into a pretty state by the autumn. It was a weeping autumn, no St. Martin’s summer, no memory of summer but the little sad piles of hay that rotted in the fields, and the brown fern decayed on my place above the Craig y Nos.

  I had disagreed with Skinner. I had thought we might in the end, but it had come sooner than I had expected. To my astonishment it turned out that he was one of those people who believe that the English are Israelites: he did not speak about it until we knew one another quite well, but I should have guessed it from his books. I tried to keep him off the subject when it did appear that this was his belief, but he would talk about it, and one day when my heart was excoriated he chose to show me the logical grounds for his belief. I do not know whether he was one of the orthodox school (he thought we were descended from only two of the tribes)—I knew nothing about it except that the belief existed—but with him, he said, it was a matter of reason, not of faith, and he tried to convince me that right was on his side. I should never have entered into the discussion, but I did. The stuff he adduced was such an intolerable farrago of rubbish that I was shocked that it should have imposed upon a man of education and some reading. It was such an incoherent, verbose mumbo-jumbo, with esoteric twaddle jostling gnosticism, scholarship of the lucus a non lucendo order that I could not refrain (burning with my private fire) from saying some sharp things about his authors. I should have been quiet; of course I should, if only from civility, but I was not, and we parted on very formal and rigid terms.

  I had touched him home once or twice: what he was talking about fell to pieces if you jarred it with a hard fact, and in spite of his taking refuge in a cloud of mystical jargon he was a man of some intelligence, and he must have felt the truth of some of the things that I said. I did not expect him to like me any the better for it, but I was not prepared for the letter he sent up by a boy: it was a violent, unbalanced letter, written in a tearing hurry, and it contained many rude statements of a personal nature, most of them false. Its manner, and some queer inversions, made me wonder whether the man were not off his head. There was nothing to say; no reply to be made. It made me sad for that day, and often afterwards when I remembered Skinner’s kindly side and our games of chess.

  When you are ill, if nobody with authority tells you that you are particularly unwell, or knocks you down with the name of your disease, it is surprising how long you can go on living an ordinary life. There was Ransome, who broke two ribs falling off a ladder in the Bodleian, and took pneumonia. I saw him looking poorly, and when I asked him he said that he was very indifferent, and that he had a heavy cold: he had no doubt about carrying on with his work. When he was examined, however, and they told him that it was pneumonia and broken bones and put him to bed, he instantly began to speak in a feeble, exhausted whisper, with his eyes half-closed. Far be it from me to make game of Ransome: I do not think that he was malingering at all. I only mention him to show that one can walk about when one is in a really dangerous condition.

  This was the case with me: there was a whole week when I dragged myself about, either unaware that I was seriously ill or denying it to myself. By the end of the week I had let everything slide; the cottage was in a horrible mess, but I lacked the courage to start setting it in order: even the effort of getting the milk from the farm was too much at the end—besides, I no longer possessed a milk jug that was not crusted with sour milk. I just sat over the fire and drank pot after pot of weak tea, letting time pass over me, day and night (I remember filling the lamp). Then the fuel ran out, and I crawled up to bed. The stairs were longer and steeper than ever.

  Once I heard the postman, and I thought of calling to him, but while I was thinking about it he came and went. I heard the garden gate close behind him: he had a particular way of shutting it, with a sharp clack.

  The clock stopped, and with it my own sense of the passing of time. It stopped as it was striking; the strokes went longer and longer, and the last came far behind, somberly.

  It was a lethargy, not unpleasant, but gray and toneless. I was right down there, far down, sunk down and very quiet. I was there all right, and perfectly aware of myself, but reduced, very small and quiescent. My body had stopped hurting much. Only if I moved it hurt. I could lie quiet though. All that old griping and tension was gone and it was as if my body had consented to let me lie in peace so long as I did not bother it, lay quiet and let it have its way.

  I thought it probable that I was dying, and upon my word I did not care very much. I was so glad that I did not have a dog: I had wanted a puppy, had nearly bought him, but in the end I did not because long ago when my old Tory died I had sworn never to have another.

  In these long silent days my mind revolved with a curious motion, slow and dispassionate, following no logical pattern. I said that there was hardly any doubt that I had deceived myself; that my passion was no more than the last burning-up of the desires of a man who, though long celibate, was still, after all, a male creature; that I had idealized a perfectly ordinary young woman by way of making my love reasonable—for a love like that, if it is not an illusion, needs a wonderful object—that I had taken Bronwen at her face-value and I was a poor judge of faces.

  It was sad: yes; it was sad, but I was down below sadness now and the rain drove on the window and the evening went into night.

  I was still all that night, quite still, and as far as I was doing anything—feeling anything—I was waiting. When you are waiting like that your face sets, and you do not like to change your face.

  Emyr came in the morning. I heard him on the path with his dogs: there was Meg there and Taff as well as the terriers. I did not want to see Emyr. I do not know why; I had no distaste for him, no embarrassment or anything like that any more; but I did not want to see him or change the way my face was. He called once or twice: more, perhaps, but there was a good deal of wind—I would not have known when he went but for his voice far away up the road calling for Meg.

  Peace came back at once; the wind outside isolated the house and I was there alone. The progressive detachment was almost complete now and I was waiting, but with no impatience, no emotion of
any kind. Before this I had made some preparation for giving an account of myself. There were many, many things I had done for which I was heartily sorry, and many that I should have been ashamed to recount; and I had led a selfish life. On the other side, I could claim to have been a fairly harmless creature: if I had not done much good, at least I had never had the opportunity for doing much harm. I hoped for a kind judge: I relied too much upon an unjust indulgence, for I hoped to shuffle by.

  I was not afraid (physically, I mean): and as far as such a negative state can have a name I was content. Yet when I heard her voice calling, at once I rushed up through those peaceful depths, up to the surface of living and I called back, half raised in my bed. My voice was strange in my throat, another man’s voice. And there was the pain again.

  It was so quick. Days I had taken to sink down there, days and a resignation of spirit, and she had not reached the top of the stairs before I was there, on the old plane and my heart beating hard.

  I would have slipped on my dressing-gown, but I was too weak to get up. It was mortifying to be seen like this, but I could do nothing about it. She brought me some milk, and I was sick. I was talking very much at random: the words and the phrases formed themselves and came out. I knew they were inept, but I was not able to control them.

  Lord, how kind she was. She was alarmed by my state and flustered by my silly talk, but she had the situation in hand: no fuss; great kindness and good sense.

  They brought the doctor. By a good chance Davies was away and this was a young locum tenens: he was an intelligent man. I liked him. The pain, by this time, was bad again and it was terribly exhausting to fight against it. I grew confused and could no longer follow the sequence of events. In the end I was down at the farm, in a bed in the front parlor.