Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  Nothing could have been much more trivial: the only excuse I can bring forward for my irritation is the crossness and the painfully acute hearing that so often go with convalescence.

  The discord in the house was another matter. The grandparents were injudicious, very injudicious: they adored the little boy and indulged him excessively. His father did much the same. In all the farms or cottages I visited in Wales, in the shops and the village streets, I found nothing to contradict my impression that the children were spoilt, ill-mannered and noisy. Perhaps I am wrong in supposing this to be peculiarly Welsh; I had not lived in the country before or come into contact with children except in nurseries or presented, washed and brushed, to pay their duty to a visitor: in other farms and other villages I dare say the children bawl and scream, but I do not know it from first-hand experience. Still, Welsh, English, Irish or Hottentot, it is not pleasant to see a whole room full of grown-ups, old people among them, forced to shout their words over the din of one self-willed child, or to suspend their conversation until the brat chooses to stop its noise. It is kind of them to sacrifice their comfort rather than stop the child’s enjoyment, but I am very sure that it is mistaken kindness.

  Then I do not like being pawed with jammy hands; I hate to see animals mauled about like stuffed toys; I do like a child of a reasonable age to reply when I bid it good day; and I do not like to hear a parent flatly contradicted in a scream as loud as the child’s lungs can make it.

  All these things I saw continually up and down our valley, and I wondered at the patience of the fathers. I might go into a farm where I was known; I (or any other visitor) would be an honored guest at once—the best chair would be set, a cup of tea would appear, they would listen attentively and reply in the politest manner. Then some child would enter with a crash, glare stupidly, make no answer to my greeting, and start to shout for a biscuit. Everything would stop for the child: it would be gently reasoned with, coaxed and caressed. Eventually it would get its biscuit and with luck it might go out to torture a hen; otherwise it would stay, fingering one, staring brutishly into one’s face.

  They would do anything to make a visitor comfortable—fire blown, prodded, raked, cushions plumped, dogs and even cats driven out into the rain, the Derby cup dusted, everything except guard him from the assaults of the children. Where that was concerned they did not even feel that any apology was necessary: more than once I have been forced to smirk at a mother who was ineffectually holding a kicking little brute of five or six, smiling at me over his head as who should say, “Don’t you admire his wonderful spirit?”

  The children have no chance brought up like that. Even in the village schools the discipline is most imperfect: I asked once whether the master often beat the boys, and they told me that not only was beating forbidden, but that if any teacher were so hardy as to lift his hand to a child he would run a very fair chance of being paid in his own coin by the father, uncles, elder brothers, cousins—the whole tribe.

  It is an ugly thing to watch, this spoiling and distortion of a child’s character, but here it was, going on at Gelli. Poor Bronwen, she did her best, but against such odds she had no chance. Still, she tried every day, and I could never blame her when sometimes she was betrayed into vexation and spoke as she should not—as an ideal being should not, for I defy any mortal woman to see the teaching of her child systematically undermined without some angry reaction.

  How many times did I hear her tell Gerallt to do something or call him from upstairs, and immediately afterwards hear one of the grandparents either call back to her or tell the little boy directly that he could do as he wished. Time and again the old man would give him something to eat from the corner-cupboard where the delicacies lived, or Nain would encourage some pretty insubordination. With the feeding out of time (they all did that) the child grew pasty and bilious, would not eat his meals and started a scene the moment they appeared on the table; the fractiousness of ill health was added to the natural childish bickering.

  I think Taid behaved as he did from a sort of childlike glee; he identified himself with Gerallt. There was no trace of malice in him, but if he had deliberately set himself to wreck the gentle discipline that is necessary for a peaceful home with a child in it, he could not have done worse. He was sparing and austere for himself: in the whole year his only treats were a visit to Caernarvon fair after the hay and perhaps one visit to a big eisteddfod. He may have indulged Gerallt, as formerly he had indulged Emyr, as a form of liberation; but perhaps that is fanciful.

  With Nain I could not tell: I thought, once or twice, that there was a conscious desire to go against Bronwen’s wishes. And with Emyr it seemed to be just a general wish for immediate gratification, an unthinking siding with his parents and the child: it was very evident in the nightly scene about eating supper and going to bed. The protests one side and another would be punctuated with fondlings and those loud smacking kisses that I found so unpleasant—it is not a pretty sight, an unshaven man bussing a child’s supper-smeared face. In the end the child would go off, far too late and usually screaming.

  All that was ground enough for disagreements in a house, and although I did not think that I had come quite to the root of it, my mind was at rest as to the conflict between Nain and Bronwen. I had troubled my heart cruelly about it before, but a little while after I came down to Gelli I left off weighing, reasoning and deliberating about it. I abandoned reason: whatever Bronwen did was right; that was axiomatic. It sounds besotted, but it was not so blind. I knew that she could not be the coarse, hard woman I had suspected in my most extreme reaction. It was knowledge that did not require demonstration, though now my daily ears supplied me with it. A hundred times I heard her tell Nain that she would feed the pig, scrub the floor, fetch the water: the old lady would gently argue (it was mostly when Bronwen was already doing something else) and if Nain agreed in the end Bronwen would go on with her cooking, bed-making or whatever it was, and in a few minutes I would hear the clang of the bucket and Nain’s slow, hesitating footsteps. Once, I am afraid, I heard the old lady, after one of these arguments, actually say to Emyr as he came in and met her, “Bronwen wants me to feed the little sow.”

  Then (this was more frequent later) I would hear her speak of Bronwen’s things: but Bronwen never spoke of them so. It was countless trivialities that supplied my demonstration, the confirmation of my unreasoned stand: I cannot list them one after another, but the sum was that I heard Nain react (or appear to react) from illusage, but never once did I hear the unkindness which could have caused it. Never, that is, apart from Bronwen’s rare, justified vexation over Gerallt.

  Another thing that I was sorry for was the departure of John, the gwas. He had reached the age at which, by law, he had to be paid a man’s wages, and Gelli did not yield enough for that. It had taken me a long time to get to know him; he was a stupid fellow, but not nearly such a dolt as he made out to strangers. He had a kindly, simple nature, and when he was not showing off he could say intelligent things about his work. There was that strange flash of poetry in him too, something that is not paralleled (I think) in any other country: he had been sent up once with the farm’s big cross-cut to help me saw some wood, and while we worked (the movement and the noise covering his shyness) he told me the tale of the great sow of Mon and about an Irish princess in the Lleyn, stories that must have come to him straight from the Mabinogion, or from the verbal tradition before that. He told them blunderingly in English, without any sort of affectation: I wish I could have seized them as they came from his mouth. Another time he told me stories that were familiar from my own childhood, though it took me some little time to sort the names from the Welsh to the English versions that I had known: Myrddin was Merlin and Cai was Sir Kay, but some I could not get. These were interspersed with garbled accounts of the films he had seen; they were equally contemporary for him.

  That poetic insight, continuity, feeling, is as real as the mist in the hills. I could digress for a long time wi
th great pleasure. A farmer from another land would not have said, as Emyr did, standing by the ripening corn, “It makes you want to take it in your arms, to smell to it: and to be with your scythe, so that it goes down with the noise. It bows as the scythe swings, isn’t it, and it falls curved.”

  John went; he was to go to a farm in the plains where he would earn much more money and where there was a tractor, but he left sadly and cried like a child on his last night at Gelli: Bronwen heard him in his bed on the landing and comforted him for a long while, until he went to sleep. I could always tell when John was asleep, because he snored for ten.

  He promised Taid never to drink or to smoke, and he was replaced by Llew, a younger boy from the village. Llew was not an attractive lad: he had a pimply vulgar face and something mean and furtive in his expression. He was a forward youth, always ready with his word, and he called me Mr. Pugh with every sentence. Still, he had an excellent character from the schoolmaster and he had been one of Mr. Lloyd’s brightest pupils.

  I do not know why I have not spoken of Mr. Lloyd before this. He was the most important man in the village after the chapel deacons, and as far as I could learn he was a most estimable person. His scholars were wild and rude, but they were said to be much better than those of the neighboring schools. He certainly had some very good ideas, and he did a great deal of voluntary work—evening classes, excursions, concerts, poetic contests. But I do not know how it was, we never seemed to find anything much to say to one another. We had met quite often and we had exchanged visits, but they were not successful. I consciously tried to be genial—fatal, of course, but the effort was necessary. He was always on the defensive with me, and would never speak freely. For many years he had been the only man of any reading, outside theology, in the valley, and he had grown unaccustomed to the mildest form of contradiction. Once, in order to keep the conversation alive, in an attempt to inject some vitality into it, I had questioned his remarks about the purely Welsh origin of the harp, and he had thought that I accused him of lying.

  It seemed a pity at the time that we did not get on, because he was a good man and he could have told me a great deal about the country and the people: but there it was, and I did not persist.

  I retained a high opinion of him, though, and I remember with pleasure how often the boys and young men who had been his pupils spoke of him with affection, even the oafs and young ruffians like Rhys Llwyn, who stole my macintosh when I left the door of Hafod open one day.

  Lloyd came to see me when I was getting better: practically everybody in the valley did at one time or another. It was very kind. It was ungrateful to wish they would not, and foolish, because if one wishes to understand a country there is no better way than talking freely to as large a number of the country-people as possible. It was the medical side of their conversation that distressed me: every single one had relatives who had undergone surgical operations or who had experienced troubles similar to mine. “The Gastric” in one form or another was a flail in the land and, I gathered, had decimated Wales. They described everything, especially women’s innards, however disgusting (they are not disgusting to a farmer, I dare say), and they were damnably repetitious and long-winded. Lloyd did spare me that, and I was grateful; but he remained formal and reserved, and I had not the energy to make a special effort, so we remained on the far side of cordiality.

  When the minister came for his visit he was brought to see me. I was sitting up by this time and he was almost the first visitor whose face I could see: all the others had sat in the stuffed chair with their backs to the window, and I from my bed, propped up and facing the light, had never been able to make out their features at all. This added very much to the strain of receiving visits: it is a strain to talk for any length of time in a foreign language; it is more of a strain to listen to people whose knowledge of your language is imperfect, and where any misunderstanding is offensive. In this case, if I misunderstood them it was particularly wounding, because of the link between fluent, correct English and social position. My difficulties, already grave enough, were much increased by my inability to follow the expressions on my visitors’ faces.

  I sound as if I were making fun of them: a page or so before I spoke in an off-hand way about their longdrawn talk of illness. I should have put it better, because I have absolutely no intention of slighting these kind people: they were really kind and good hearted. They were doing the Christian duty of visiting the sick, often at great inconvenience to themselves—and even expense, for they invariably brought “a little something,” a dozen eggs, a great bowl of farm butter, cream, or some other delicacy. They would have liked the visits and the conversation themselves, and what other criterion is there?

  Indeed, this whole piece, and what I am going to write about Ellis, the preacher, makes me feel uneasy and even dirty. The outpouring of dislike is ugly enough when it is spoken, but unpleasant things written about a man who cannot reply are graver and far more ugly. In any other circumstances I would keep these judgments to myself, but here the special considerations must be my excuse.

  Ellis, then, came to sit with me, and I took an instant dislike to him. It was a dislike that started before the first words and increased with my knowledge of the man, and with all the charity at my command I still think it was well founded.

  He was a little pigeon-breasted strutting man, black, with a lard-colored face. But what is the good of trying to describe what he looked like? Apart from giving his height and color—the passport details—what impression can I convey? I could labor at a description of his snouty nose and mouth, that air of self-satisfaction that survived every change of expression, his confidence, but even if my description were followed through its dry length, I am certain that the picture received would have very little resemblance to the original: there is no hope in my mind of giving the man as I saw him. One sees a man in a flash and one has judged him in a moment, the set of features, the body’s stance, the taste of his personality, all at once; no prolonged list, however accurate, can give that instant effect.

  In some bird books at the end of each article there is a feather-by-feather description of the bird: it is only with a great effort that one can connect the list with a living bird, and as for recognizing a particular species from it, that is quite impossible. The whole is so much greater than the parts, or rather the most important parts are intangible, not to be found in any list. Probably no two men worship the same God: I am sure no two sects do. We are given a certain set of qualities, a few specific but many more ambiguous, metaphysical, capable of a hundred interpretations. (“God is just”: so is a hanging judge at the Old Bailey; so is a critic who is silent because he cannot speak truthfully without giving pain.) It is not to be wondered at if the deity invoked at a pontifical high mass is unlike that worshiped at a Salvation Army meeting—as different as the sound of Palestrina and the tambourine and cornet—no more remarkable than that a friend’s friend, described by letter, should turn out an unrecognizable stranger.

  I can only repeat that he was about five feet four, very upright and strutting, with a great deal of black hair and a glabrous, cheesy face (the skin was matt, no penetration of the light at all) with the snout and smirk that I have mentioned before. Obviously I disliked him at once and wrote him down a bad man, though at that time I had no reasonable grounds for doing so. For all I knew then he had never done a downright bad thing in his life (though from the first moment I would have sworn that he would stop at no meanness) and in all probability he would have done much good; but for me he was a bad character. It is very unfair, this dividing of humanity into good and bad. I think everybody does it: certainly for me the world has always been divided so. Perhaps it is a severe reflection upon myself that for me the bad division has always contained more than the good.

  I have often wondered what it would feel like to be one of the other side. Perhaps it never happens; the whole world is on the right side, self-justification is so strong. There is Rousseau’s saying,
that every man is inwardly sure he is the most virtuous being alive. But how far down can that go? All the way to an atheistic parricide who lives by robbing the blind? Or is there a point where it must be abandoned, and if there is, what does it feel like after?

  Of course, as we used to say so often in chapel, we are miserable sinners, and I know that in my life I did only too many things that I ought not to have done, and I suppose that when I did them I joined the other side—a joining that would have been obvious if I had been found out: but I never was and even at the time I imagine that I regarded these acts as exceptional, probably not wrong for me because of special circumstances, however condemnable they might be as a general rule. But even if they were wrong, and I admitted it in the doing, then I would have argued that they were but aberrations from a virtuous norm, and that once over (and undetected) I rejoined the unsinning sheep.

  But the man whose daily life is evil, a hypocrite, can his justification keep pace? Or is he content to belong to the other side, and to compensate himself by a cynical appreciation of his own cleverness and success. I am speaking of a fairly intelligent man: for a stupid thief it must be quite easy—a brutish resentment against the world would suffice. I am speaking of Ellis.

  Hypocrite unqualified is a big word, and I hesitate to apply it whole to Ellis. I think there were times when he was genuinely exalted by his extempore prayers and his hymn-singing and he may have taken that for religious experience; although I do not think he believed in God, a future life or the practice of a single one of the Christian tenets. But those moments of exaltation aside, he was Tartuffe to the life, and it astonished me that no one appeared to suspect this, in spite of his care. For he was very careful, very guarded. But he was not careful enough to keep his little pig eyes from running up and down Bronwen while they all sat, heads bowed, in the kitchen listening to him praying about the womb of the earth and the rains piercing its sterility, the seed and the ecstasy, and I sat watching him from the parlor, for they had left the door open in order that I might benefit from his unction.