‘Ladies to be bathed…. At Penhelig…. From 11 to 1.’ The changes that fifty years have brought about can be illustrated in another odd way. There was a retired sea-captain living on our hillside whose wife was regarded as little short of an abandoned woman; the only foundation for this opinion that we could discover was that someone passing her window had seen her behind the curtain, smoking!
Our evening occupations after supper followed a fairly regular routine, as we gathered round the one big oil lamp. Mrs. Hughes generally knitted, Arthur read Law, and I struggled with a bit of Greek. We always broke the evening’s work with one game of chess. At this I was only a little better than Charles, whose main idea of strategy was to move his king now and again ‘because that puts them out’. By keeping on the defensive, and occasionally making an attack that surprised myself as much as Arthur, I sometimes won a game, and was always strong enough to keep him from slacking. I also chastened him by inventing the rule that the winner must put away the pieces—a job he detested. On the few occasions when he saw his king hopelessly cornered he would exclaim, ‘Now you can put the men away’.
Last thing every evening we plotted some scheme for the next day—how we could get the most for the least money. The ordinary ‘tourist places’ didn’t tempt us, but when Arthur’s parson brother, Llewelyn, came to visit us he insisted that ‘Molly ought to see’ this and that. So to please him we agreed to let him take us to the Torrent Walk. This was a regular guide-book affair, and didn’t make much impression on me, and might have slipped my memory entirely had it not been for a curious incident on the way. Llewelyn, acting as host and guide, stood us a lunch at the inn nearest to the Walk. As we were starting off he asked the landlord which was the shortest road to take, for the short cuts were rather intricate.
‘Take the dog with you, Sir. He’s quite used to showing tourists the way…. Here, Prince! Take these visitors to the Torrent Walk.’
Off we started, with the dog a yard or two ahead.
‘Be sure you don’t speak Welsh,’ shouted the landlord after us, or he won’t take you. He thinks Welshmen ought to know the way.’
‘All right, we’ll remember,’ answered Llewelyn, laughing, for we naturally thought this was one of those ‘dog-stories’. All went well for some way, the dog duly trotting ahead, till one of those showers so common in Wales caught us suddenly. Spying a cowshed we went into it for shelter, dog and all. Presently a farm labourer came in for shelter too. Llewelyn, parson-like, began to chat with him about the weather and what not, in Welsh of course; and Arthur joined in.
‘Look there!’ I cried, and pointed to the dog, who was fast disappearing along the road to the inn. We put it down to his impatience at the delay, but the labourer said that everyone knew the dog, and that it was true that nothing would induce him to show Welsh people the way.
This incident made me ashamed of my own lack of enterprise. Even the dog was bilingual. The smallest children in the street would be shouting at one another in Welsh, and be able to turn on good English whenever required; and there was I, only able to say a few phrases in Welsh that Arthur had taught me, such as ‘Ydwyf yn dy garu di’ However, I was hoping to surprise him by picking up a little quite quietly from our servant. Her English was so simple, so free from the trammels of gender, number, and case, that I concluded her Welsh would be equally uncomplicated. Her invariable reference to her mistress as ‘he’ showed me how easily we could discard gender from our pronouns as we have from our adjectives. So, like Gonzalo, I had great comfort from this fellow, and finding an odd hour when Arthur was out of the way, I begged her to teach me some Welsh. She was all willing and proud. Now I knew the numbers from 1 to 7 from ‘The Bells of Aberdovey’, so I asked her to begin by teaching me some further numbers. In order to fix her mind definitely on the problem, I pointed to the old grandfather clock, and extracted the numbers in Welsh up to 12. Flushed with victory, I said,
‘Now can you tell me what “five minutes past twelve” would be?’
Yes, she could, and steadily we went on to ‘ten-past’, ‘fifteen-past’…up to ‘five-to’. I then approached a more delicate problem.
‘How would you say “twenty-three minutes past seven”’? She shook her head and denied that there was such a thing.
‘But suppose your train starts at seven-twenty-three, and you want to catch it?’
‘Well,’ she replied with finality in her tone, ‘you must just go early.’
My most valuable lesson from this was that if you want to pick up a language you must pick it up, and not try to extract it forcibly. However, there was one word that I did learn carefully from Arthur, in all its strange mutation of consonants—‘cariad’, ‘gariad’, ‘f’nghariad i’. In later years I once received a telegram in London from Arthur in Scotland: ‘carried, carried’. I wondered what the postmistress thought as to the meaning of the message—either that someone had been anxious for the success of a resolution at a meeting, or that it was a secret code, as of course it was. My favourite context for the word was a line from Dafydd ap Gwilym, inscribed by Arthur in a book he gave me:
Hanoddym bron, hon a hyllt,
Had o gar tad.
(In my heart, this stormy heart, she sowed the seed of love.)
§4
The life on Sundays at Aberdovey in ’88 was more restricted than any I had known before—if life it could be called. It made me think of the Pharisee who thought the best way to avoid breaking the Sabbath was to remain in bed all day. Neither work nor play of any kind was permissible. Boating, sketching, bathing, chess, law-reading, Greek translation, knitting, novel-reading—all had to be forsworn. However, Arthur managed to play his fiddle ad lib by wisely beginning with ‘Adeste Fideles’, and leaving Mrs. Hughes to assume that all the rest were hymn tunes. Presumably this insistence on Sabbath-keeping arose from the conviction that boredom would send people to church. No one but the definitely disreputable had any idea of staying away from a morning service of some kind. So each Sunday morning, after a late breakfast, Mrs. Hughes and Arthur and I dressed ourselves as grandly as we could, found our gloves and prayer-books, and walked sedately to the accompaniment of the wretched little tinkle called the church bell. This was always a source of annoyance to me, because one of my excitements in visiting Aberdovey was the chance of hearing the ‘Bells of Aberdovey’.
Services as a rule were in Welsh, but there was an extra one, in English, on Sunday morning for the sake of the English residents and the few summer visitors. As we went in we met the Welsh congregation coming out from their previous service. Arthur would much have preferred to attend this, but his mother couldn’t follow it easily. However, he always used a Welsh prayer-book, and all his life sang the Psalms in Welsh wherever he happened to be. In Aberdovey he had to read them instead of singing, but nothing made much difference to the miserable mutter of alternate verses that was customary. Only the Gloria was sung, and that I was soon able to sing in Welsh with Arthur; it sounds much more impressive in Welsh than in English. Sermons were dull, but I got some recreation out of them by noticing how the parson worked out his scheme. This, Arthur said, consisted in taking some word, such as ‘courage’, looking up all the places in Cruden where it occurs, and talking a bit about each. One Sunday I was pleased to see a young visiting curate mount the pulpit. His English was clearly limited, and his Welsh accent very strong. I was all ears. Giving out his text several times in different directions, he proceeded to tell us all that the sacred writer had omitted (much to the sacred writer’s credit, I thought).
‘Does he say that Enoch was honest? No. Only this, “Enoch walked with God”.’ (He pronounced it ‘wokkt with Godd’). ‘Does he tell us that he was generous? No. Only “Enoch walked with God”. Are we told that he was kind-hearted? No. Only that “Enoch walked with God”. These four words “Enoch walked with God” sum up all that we know of his life—just this—“Enoch walked with God”. What more do we want to know than this, “Enoch walked with God”?’
And so on.
Some English public-school boys on holiday were sitting in the pew in front of us, and I saw them bending as if in prayer or meditation. Mrs. Hughes was eyeing them with displeasure. I was biting the inside of my cheeks, and trying to think of a funeral, in frantic effort to keep back one of my egg-laying displays. I thanked goodness for the only consoling feature in the situation, that Arthur as usual in the sermon was quietly asleep. Stealing a glance at him sideways to make sure of this, I heard him mutter,
‘If he says it again I shan’t believe it.’
This finished me. Resorting to my last line of defence I dropped my handkerchief, and under cover of picking it up I stuffed it into my mouth and shook as noiselessly as Tony Weller. As I rose I heard to my relief of the demise of Enoch: ‘He wass not, for Godd took him.’
Fortunately my behaviour had not been noticed by Mrs. Hughes, whose whole attention had been devoted to ‘those ill-mannered English boys who were laughing all through the sermon’. I had better luck in this way than a well-known scientist (I think it was Huxley) whose friend took him to a Welsh church when they were on holiday. As distinguished visitors they were shown into a front pew. In full career of his sermon the preacher suddenly stopped and pointed at them.
‘Ye come to the house of God, and ye smile’ said he, and then added menacingly, ‘but there’ll be no smiling in Hell.’
I wish I could reproduce in writing the fervent accents of another sermon, which was described to me by one of Arthur’s Welsh friends. The preacher took for his theme the morals that could be drawn from the characteristics of certain animals. Of these my informant could remember only two, the elephant and the peacock, which went like this:
‘The elephant, my brethren, has but one bone in the whole of his boddy. This bone, my brethren, is situated in the smaal of his back. Now the pekkuliaritee of the elephant, my brethren, is this, that if the poor animal sits down, without help he cannot get up again. Once there was a poor elephant who sat down. There, my brethren, he sat. Presently there came by a kind gentleman. Now that kind gentleman, my brethren, helped that poor elephant to his feet. Ever afterwards, wherever that kind gentleman went, that elephant followed him! So, my brethren, we may see the Power and the Effects of LOV.’
The moral of the peacock ran thus: ‘The pekkuliaritee in the flesh of the peacock is this, my brethren, that the longer you boil him the rawer he gets. So, my brethren, it is with the hypocrite.’ No further explanation followed, and the connexion between hypocrisy and being underdone remained impressively mysterious.
Such intellectual refinements were mainly confined to the established Church. The nonconformists of Wales as well as Cornwall were simpler in their addresses, which were frequently given by ‘local preachers’ in the country districts. These were earnest working-men who knew their Bible and the needs of the congregation. Arthur told me that when he was a boy he used to go to hear them for the sake of trying to discover what the trade of the preacher was, by watching his gestures. A carpenter would saw the air, a blacksmith would thump down hammer-strokes on the pulpit, a cobbler would draw out his arms slowly sideways as though striving with the leather. This seemed to me a pleasing thing, as if the man had developed his ideas as he went about his daily routine, and I wondered whether St. Paul borrowed a gesture from his tent-making, or St. Peter from his fishing.
Wales differed from Cornwall considerably on the Church and Chapel question. Since the days of Wesley the Cornish, so I gathered from my mother, were quite tolerant in the matter, many of them attending church in the morning from ancient habit, and chapel in the evening to get a little religious excitement. No enmity existed between the two persuasions, the fundamental reason being, I fancy, that Cornwall has always been pagan at heart.
In Wales it was far otherwise. Ill-feeling, often virulent, seemed to exist between Church and Chapel, as though they were entirely different religions. The latter was not simply Wesleyanism, but had many shades of belief or behaviour, and suffered from internecine warfare. Wherever two or three cottages were gathered together there would spring up almost as many chapels—Methodist, Primitive Methodist, Calvinistic Methodist—all of them too ugly to be borne. And the congregations were united only in their dislike of the Church. The chief battle-ground was the village school. Chapel people had to send their children to the Church school because there was no other, and vented their spleen by pin-prick persecutions, such as complaints of inefficient teaching, lack of equipment, and so on. The young schoolmaster at Aberdovey lived next to us, and told us how miserable they made his life and how they hindered his work, which he had to carry on without any assistant.
Although Arthur raged against this kind of thing and against nonconformists in general, he was greatly attached to a few individuals among them, who had been friends of his boyhood. Among these was John Owen, who had now become a widely respected minister in Mold. It chanced that he was invited to preach one Sunday at Towyn, and as a matter of course came to spend all his spare time with us at Aberdovey. He was a cultivated, keen-brained man, and I am sure that he found Arthur a stimulating companion. I went with them on their walks and can still recall some of the arguments. Accustomed to speaking Welsh almost entirely John pronounced English with the elegant precision of a foreigner, and it charmed me to listen to their heated discussions on religion and politics, on no single point of which did they agree. Home Rule was the burning topic of the day. Arthur was a rabid Unionist, and John thought it best for a country to govern itself, even if it made the wildest mistakes in the process. Good government, like all other good things, he maintained, was no good if imposed upon you, for all real education must come from within. On this point Arthur was inclined to admit that he might be right, but on questions of religion John was badly worsted, and I was sure that he would like to have conceded far more points than he dared. Now and again he would invite me to give an opinion, and after a while he went the length of complimenting Arthur on his choice of a wife.
‘Oh, she’s all right,’ said Arthur, ‘she’s got some common sense.’
At this John told us of the old Welsh farmer who used to say to his son, ‘My boy, when you are thinking of getting married, there are three things to be desired in a girl: money, the grace of God, and common sense. As for money, never mind—it may come; as for the grace of God, never mind—it may come; but if she hasn’t got common sense, don’t marry her, for it’ll never come.’
Then John added that there was another point that he himself would consider an essential, and I was afraid that he was going to elaborate something akin to the grace of God, in which I knew myself to be deficient. But no; to our great satisfaction his idea of the sine qua non for married life was a sense of humour. This he held to be a kind of ‘fourth dimension’, and unless both husband and wife lived in it they could not be married in the fullest meaning of the term.
On the Saturday evening when the lamp was lit and the curtains drawn after supper, Arthur settled down to further argument, and John drew forth a pipe.
‘Hallo!’ said I. ‘I didn’t know you smoked; all the time we were out you never once lit up.’
Then the dreadful truth came out that he did not dare to be seen smoking, and until the curtain was drawn he was afraid that a passer-by might let some member of his flock know of his sinfulness; for his particular brand of religion disapproved of any fleshly indulgence in their minister. We were too profoundly sorry for him to make any remark on this. He was obviously cheered by Arthur’s promising to go over to Towyn to hear him preach on the Sunday evening. One good listener made all the difference to a preacher, he said.
Mrs. Hughes would not have been seen in a chapel at any price, but I had no such scruples and went off happily with Arthur and John to Towyn.
‘You may find it rather tiresome to sit through the whole thing in Welsh,’ said John as we paced along, ‘but I’ll do what I always do when I know there is an English stranger in the congregation, I’ll put in one prayer in E
nglish.’
‘How jolly it must be,’ said I, ‘to be able to turn from one language to another like that. Very effective sometimes, surely?’
John laughed and told me the story of the Welsh preacher in an English country church who said in the middle of his sermon, ‘How far more impressive is this passage in the original Hebrew. Listen.’ He then rolled out in his richest Welsh tones, ‘If there is a Welshman present will he kindly keep it to himself that I am talking Welsh and not Hebrew.’ In such a way, John admitted, a second language could be very impressive.
This anecdote put an idea into my head. We reached the ugly little chapel up a side street of Towyn, and it was already fairly crowded when Arthur and I took our seats, and John disappeared behind somewhere. When he began to preach my idea took shape. His face was a fine one, inspiring in itself. His voice, rising and falling as he warmed to his theme, had a magnetic influence on his congregation. Since I had no notion what he was talking about my idea of imagining it to be the Sermon on the Mount was easy to carry out. I pictured its first delivery in Aramaic, to the eager people on the hillside. When the congregation sat up a little in their interested attention, or one gave a sympathetic groan, I imagined that they had just been startled by the injunction to hit a man back good and hard by offering the other cheek.
Instead of being bored I was sorry when the sermon came to an end. Then some prayers ‘from the bosom’ followed, and right in the midst of them fell on my entranced ears my favourite collect ‘Lighten our darkness’. Although I had heard these words countless times, with what a fresh beauty they struck me in those strange surroundings, and my heart warmed to John for his kindness. Then came a hymn sung to the tune Hyfrydol. Anyone who has not heard a Welsh nonconformist gathering sing a hymn has really no idea what a hymn should be. All the world’s sorrows and all the triumphs of religion are in it, and you feel ready to face anything.
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 23