Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  “I think it can be explained like this: we are an evolutionary mistake. We evolved too quickly, and now with the instinctive equipment of apes we are faced with a social life as complicated as a beehive. Men cannot live that kind of life; it cannot be done, and I am sure the attempt will kill us as a species.

  “The root of the unhappiness is that man’s instinctive sense of right clashes with that of society: and it is not surprising that it does, when you consider the speed of our evolution. Only a little time ago, a very little time as these things are reckoned, man was a comparatively simple creature living in small bands. He had reached this point by the ordinary very slow development and of course he was suited for it by the necessary set of instincts. His ideas of right and wrong would have been based on what was good for his band, a small group made up of his family. That right and wrong would have allowed for a great deal of what we now call selfishness, but it would also have called for courage and devotion for the sake of the group—for his own small group only, not any other group.

  “Then at some time, the Fall, with the forbidden fruit, our queer lopsided intelligence came in, with all that followed—fire, tools, weapons, the conquest of other creatures, agriculture, the enormous increase in our numbers, and farewell to happiness. Men breed slower than almost any other creatures, four or five generations in a hundred years—there are not so many generations between us and that time. There has hardly been time enough to grow a single new instinct, or to discard an old one. So now we must face this ant-hill, beehive of a life with the old set of instincts hardly altered at all. Everything that we have that is new has had to come from outside, learned from experience and reason: it all has to be learned. No child starts life with language or the alphabet. Every man begins as a little ape; his hair grows so that it will shed the rain as he squats; his hands will swing his new-born body if you give him a twig. If he were left alone he would obey the laws suitable to his ancestors’ condition, but he would be an impossible member of our present society: he must be made to conform (as if he had to be squeezed into the carapace of an ant), he must be taught the right and wrong of a social creature and made to obey it by all the force of example, education, public opinion, all the imaginable substitutes for genuine social instincts.

  “All this, law, religion and all, is not enough to beat the old Adam. To obey the code that his education and his reason tell him is right for his present state, a man must perpetually cross and thwart the first, instinctive wish that rises in him. There was Confucius: he says that it was not until he was seventy that he could obey his impulses and yet do what was right. It was not until he was seventy that he could be entirely happy. If it takes seventy years for a very wise man, how long is it going to take for an ordinary man? He is never going to manage it. He is in continual conflict with himself, and he is unhappy. An unhappy man dislikes himself and his fellows. This unhappiness has been going on from the earliest historical times: our whole history is a tale of unhappiness, with war following war, each cruder and bloodier than the last, until in our day we wipe out a hundred thousand with one bomb.

  “There is continual war within the nations: for every detected crime there are hundreds unknown. The very existence of laws proves the need for more and more control, and proves the little value of the control. The crime goes before the law, and how many laws are there now, in our country alone? No one can count them.

  “No; I am sure that it is the natural way for a mistake to wipe itself out. The poor thing has grown mistakenly and he is unhappy, so he will come to an end. (Countless thousands of other kinds of creature have done so before him—extinct for other reasons, but evolutionary mistakes just the same.) He will multiply and multiply: he is bound to that now, but as his progress grows faster and faster so it becomes more and more impossible for him to be what he must force himself to become.

  “I suppose the end will be a violent one—it looks very much like it. But if it is not, then I suppose he will taper away into the unknown, from despair. Already you see the birthrate falling in the advanced Western countries. Once they pass a certain point of misery, creatures stop breeding. It may seem strange to speak of the more advanced countries as more wretched than countries where famine and pestilence are there every day, but it is just because of the advance that the real misery is greater—the difference between what a man is and what he is made to be is greater. There, in the barbarous countries the enemies are obvious, they are external enemies that can sometimes be beaten. With us the enemy is inside each man: you can beat famine and disease in the end, but while you remain a man you cannot beat the ape.”

  Bronwen, after a silence, asked me how all that fitted with a man having a soul, and I said I did not know. It was something new that I had been thinking about, and I had not yet sorted out all my notions. I thought that I was right then, in the main, and that there was nothing in this that was irreconcilable with another concept of man’s nature.

  A cold wind sprang up, blowing off the somber face of the Saeth, and drove us indoors. The gwas Llew was there—I had the impression that he had been hanging about for some time—and our talk was finished.

  The others came home shortly after. The men had been to a sale of cattle and the old lady had taken Gerallt down to see a family of cousins: I turned in quite soon. I had some letters to write, and anyhow I did not feel equal to talk that evening.

  When I was in bed I thought about our good, peaceful afternoon and I wondered why I had been talking as I did. She had taken it all in her stride, but it was not a suitable kind of talk at all. Was it just the pleasure of opening my mind without restraint? That was a real enough pleasure, and there were few people I had known to whom I could talk in that way, saying freely whatever arose, however foolish, without any contest or pretense or desire to shine. I wondered whether the search for hidden motives was really worth the trouble, and whether one did not perplex the issue by overmuch subtlety. Was it better to leave one’s subconscious mind alone—take the motives at their face value—or was it better to pick at it with unskillful fingers?

  Leave it alone, was my answer, and leave the gnosce teipsum to wiser men. But still I wondered. I had not meant to show off, I was sure of that. Was it true that the whole tendency of the discourse was to undermine her faith in religion, to debase man to the level of the brutes, and to shake her ideas of right and wrong. Was there any truth in that? I rejected it with indignation. With too much indignation? I knew very well what it meant in my case when I said that every day a man had to force himself to do what he did not want to do, and to keep himself from doing what he did want to do. And I knew what had made me so unhappy for so long, so desperately unhappy. In these quiet days I did not suffer as I had, not a thousandth part, but I wanted her, always. I wanted her, in spite of all the discipline and the barriers that I had put up in my mind, I wanted her with a longing that went right through me, as strong as a man can feel.

  I wanted her physically, too; I had no doubt of that. When I was a young fellow and had my few little fluttering affairs, timid affections, I was ashamed of wanting any of the girls I admired; it seemed impure and wrongful then.

  I drifted off my train of thought as I grew more sleepy and I let images form in my mind as I used to do when I was a child: there was the picture of her head, bowed over her work with the dark mountain behind, she was listening closely and there was that queer moving smile on her face. I smiled too at the memory of it—I felt the smile come on my face in the dark.

  After he had left the farm Pritchard Ellis had gone to stay at the schoolmaster’s house, and I heard that the day before he left he preached a sermon that was very much admired: from what I heard it had been about the sin against the Holy Ghost. I did not think much about it, except to regret that the simpler days of thunderbolts for blasphemy were past: I was heartily glad that the valley was free of his unclean presence.

  But the slime that he left wherever he went did not disappear with his going; whatever I may hav
e hoped. Even a fortnight after I had said good-by to him (with as hypocritical a smirk as I have ever summoned up) I felt that it was still there, poisoning the atmosphere.

  Apart from that one day I hardly saw any more of Bronwen. There was something wrong in the atmosphere; there was something lacking that had made that good feeling of community in the house. It was hard to analyze, and I could not put my finger on it. The daily round, the meals, the casual talk, it seemed to be all the same, but there was something lacking, something essential; but I could not tell what.

  What was more disturbing was that their attitude toward me seemed to have changed. Or was I imagining that again? They were as polite still as on the first day I had seen them, in spite of the familiarity of our life. No: I was sure that the old cordiality had gone. Nain was different, and probably the others too. I churned over a hundred far-fetched causes: was I giving too much trouble, eating too much, making extra work? Was I a bore, a restraint? Did they resent their lack of privacy? Had they seen that I disliked the child? Surely not: I often played with him; and really he had a sweet ingenuous side when it was not overlaid, when he was not being rowdy and unpleasant—and I would have borne fifty times the noise without complaint because he was his mother’s son.

  I even, for one chill moment, thought that my love had been discovered—talking in my sleep, some romantic nonsense of that kind. At the very beginning, the year before, I had been afraid of my shadow, terrified of betraying myself; I had felt that it must be written on my forehead for all to see. But after a few uneasy weeks common sense had returned and I knew that it was my secret. My guards had become instinctive; the manner of my love was rare. A love without words, looks, gestures, no outward life at all, who can tell of its existence? I had never thought of it again until that moment, and now the thought rested only long enough to be rejected.

  “‘Whoever guesses, thinks or dreams he knows, Who is my mistress,”’ I said, “must be a man who has dived into my heart, a man of supernatural powers.” And I dismissed it forever. That, at least, I did not have to fear. There were plenty of other less fantastic things to weigh.

  The house was changed; and I would have given my right hand to change it back again. There was the difference in Emyr. He was distrait, almost hag-ridden. He had always given me the impression of being a very nervous man, liable to excess of delight or despair; he had none of his father’s serenity. Now every morning at breakfast I saw him silent and brooding, his eyes rimmed with red as if he had not slept; it was painful to see him come from the depth of some unhappy thought and put on a smile to say good morning or to answer a trivial remark. It had been a bad year, I knew, and I thought it might all be caused by worrying about money.

  From what I had learned by observation and inquiry, I had gathered that all these mountain farms were worked with the minimum of capital, often with less than that, so that a couple of bad years in succession would bowl them over or plunge them so far into debt that it amounted to much the same thing. In addition to this chronic lack of capital, they relied on sheep alone for their money. The other things came more under the heading of subsistence farming. So if the sheep did badly, everything went; and there were so many ways for sheep to do badly. There was disease and bad weather to begin with, then the causes quite outside the farmer’s control, the international price of wool (an abundant shearing in Australia could be the deciding factor in turning a struggling Welsh farmer off his land) and the market for lamb and mutton.

  I talked to Emyr about these things in general; he confirmed what I had thought, and I told him that at that time I had a certain amount of free capital that was doing nothing (it was quite true: I had sold out a block of Rio Tintos for the purpose) and that if he chose to make use of it he was very welcome. I suggested that the money should pay interest if and when it made profit, and I flatter myself that I sounded reasonably businesslike and avaricious. I told him also that I was a man alone in the world, with no relative nearer than a second cousin—a man far richer than myself—and that I had thought of leaving Gerallt a life interest in my little fortune before it went to my old college.

  I said that this was by way of a thank-offering for their kindness to me while I was ill; that it could not cause me the remotest inconvenience, as I should necessarily be dead before the act could have any effect; and that it made no difference to my college, which was already six hundred years old and which would (God willing) last another six hundred easily, whether it received my trifling addition sooner or later.

  My conscience in this was perfectly clear. I wish that all the actions of my life had been as unmixed. The first idea was to make things easier and less worrying for the farm. The investment (and I knew I should not lose by it) was something from myself to Emyr as a man, a man for whom I had a real esteem: Emyr as Bronwen’s husband did not enter into it for a moment. By that time I had succeeded in making a pretty rigid division between them. It would cause me no trouble of any sort, for I was living well below my income, and there was even money lying idle in my bank. As for the second idea, it was one that had been in my head for a long time. I would have done it anyhow, without speaking of it, but it followed naturally in the conversation. It was more selfish, perhaps, because the boy (disagreeable though he was) was Bronwen’s son, after all. But what I had said was true, and a sufficient motive: in such a case it was not so very wonderful—certainly not disproportionate when one considers how very little it must mean to me after I was dead who had my money.

  Emyr’s reactions surprised me. He had not spoken much while I was talking, which was strange, because he had, to an advanced degree, that damnable habit of interrupting which you generally find in nervous people. He was very much embarrassed. He brought out his stumbling expression of gratitude with difficulty and an utter lack of grace (I had noticed before that he could not say thank you freely, and it was a trait that I regretted) and although I saw a real pleasure in him, a grasping at the idea, I was almost certain that basically he wanted to refuse the money, both the one and the other.

  I had not expected that, not for a moment; particularly as he had owned that nothing would be more valuable to the farm than an extra thousand pounds of capital (I had mentioned twelve hundred): there were the current needs and a whole list of obsolete or worn-out equipment to replace, as well as new things, draining, reclamation and re-stocking.

  We left the things in an unsatisfactory, undecided state, hanging in the air, and I went to bed very disappointed. Before our talk I had nourished the comfortable vision of myself as the Fairy Queen, my offers received with glad cries; and that was quite shattered. Perhaps it was fitting; but it was a disappointment.

  This all happened after supper, in the parlor. I went to bed directly afterwards, and I heard them talking and talking in the big kitchen until well after midnight.

  I had a strange dream. It was one of those dreams that you read—a printed page is the image—but at the same time you are not a detached reader; you are the person about whom you read. It was a very clear, complete dream, beginning, middle and end all sharply defined: it ran—

  “He woke suddenly, completely; he was clear awake at once from a bottomless sleep. It was entirely dark and he could not tell which way round he was. With his two arms stiff behind him he sat up, propped up, listening. Why was he listening, and what room was this? He moved, felt with his hand for his pillow; it was not there: he tried—a separate effort—to remember the lie of the room (what room?) and where the light was. How extraordinary not to see any hint of light, no undarkness to betray the curtains. It was as if he was blind. Was he blind? He had heard of a man who had been blind in the morning, from a syphilitic gumma.

  “He held his hand in front of his face and his staring eyes focused: the warmth of its nearness he felt, but he saw nothing.

  “There appeared to be no wall behind the head of his bed. His tentative fingers stretched out and out into the darkness. His body was waiting. Yes, but why? And why was his mind t
ense? Tense to breaking, I mean?

  “He did not move again for a long time, waiting for the tension to die and for everything to clear, fall into the recognized pattern: but still there was the darkness pressing against his face, pressing in all round, crowding him.

  “‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said at last. Was he damned? Yes; he was damned for ever now.

  yes he was damned for ever now for ever and ever now for ever and ever damned

  yes he was damned for ever now for ever and ever now for ever and ever damned

  yes he was damned for ever now for ever and ever now for ever and ever damned.”

  And so the pages ran, turning fast, the print diminishing to footnote size, smaller, faster the repetition forever faster and the speed was terrifying.

  In the morning my propositions were accepted—gracelessly on Emyr’s part, I must say—I gave him my check and we worked out a system of accounting. It was unnecessary for me to insist on its not being an obligation, but a profitable business deal, a speculation on my part; Emyr saw to that.

  With Taid it was very different. The good old honest man was frankly delighted. He smiled and laughed like a man with a great impregnable wall between himself and the enemy who had been at his throat. He held the check with endearing admiration; he said he had once seen one for eight hundred and thirty pounds, but never one like that, with four figures. If it had not been for their ingrained love of secrecy I believe he would have shown it to his friends; but in that country matters touching money are kept silent, always, though there is an intense curiosity about them.

  He shook my hand for a long while, lovingly I might say, and he said I was a good man. It is pleasant to be treated like that, and I almost forgot my disappointment.