One of his obsessions in solitude, so said his mother when I travelled down with her to see the last of him, was a belief in a race who had kept themselves apart from the rest of men, though found among many nations, perhaps all. The belief may have come from the Bible, and this was the race that grew up alongside the family of Cain, the guiltless ‘daughters of men’ from whom the children of the fratricides obtained their wives. These, untainted with the blood of Cain, knew not sin or shame — so his belief seems to have been — but neither had they souls. They were a careless and a godless race, knowing not good or evil. They had never been cast out of Eden. ‘In fact,’ said Mrs Morgan, ‘they must be something like Aurelius.’ Some of the branches of this race had already been exterminated by men; for example, the Nymphs and Fauns. David Morgan was not afraid of uttering his belief. Others of them, he said, had adopted for safety many of men’s ways. They had become moorland or mountain men living at peace with their neighbours, but not recognised as equals. They were to be found even in the towns. There the uncommon beauty of the women sometimes led to unions of violent happiness and of calamity, and to the birth of a poet or musician who could abide neither with the strange race nor with the children of Adam. They were feared but more often despised, because they retained what men had lost by civilisation, because they lived as if time was not, yet could not be persuaded to believe in a future life.
Up in his tower Morgan came to believe his own father one of this people, and resolved to take a woman from amongst them for a wife. Angharad, the shy, the bold, the fierce dark Angharad whose black eyes radiated light and blackness together, was one of them. She became his wife and went up with him to the tower. After that these things only were certainly known; that she was unhappy; that when she came down to the village for food she was silent, and would never betray him or fail to return; and that he himself never came down, that he also was silent and with his unshorn hair looked like a wild man. He was seen at all hours, usually far off, on the high paths of the mountains. His hair was as black as in boyhood. He was never known tohave ailed, until one day the wild wife knocked at a farmhouse door near Abercorran, asking for help to bring him where he might be looked after, since he would have no one in the tower but her. The next day Mrs Morgan travelled down to see her son. When she asked me to accompany her I did so with some curiosity; for I had already become something of a stranger at Abercorran House, and had often wondered what had become of David Morgan up on his tower. His mother talked readily of his younger days and his stay in London. Though he had great gifts, some said genius, which he might have been expected to employ in the study, he had applied himself to direct social work. For a year he laboured ‘almost as hard,’ he said, ‘as the women who make our shirts.’ But gradually he formed the opinion that he did not understand town life, that he never could understand the men and women whom he saw living a town life pure and simple. Before he came amongst them he had been thinking grandly about men without realising that these were of a different species. His own interference seemed to him impudent. They disgusted him, he wanted to make them more or less in his own image to save his feelings, which, said he, was absurd. He was trying to alter the conditions of other men’s lives because he could not have himself endured them, because it would have been unpleasant to him to be like them in their hideous pleasure, hideous suffering, hideous indifference. In this attitude, which altogether neglected the consolations and even beauty and glory possible or incident to such a life, he saw a modern Pharisaism whose followers did not merely desire to be unlike others, but to make others like themselves. It was, he thought, due to lack of the imagination and sympathy to see their lives from a higher or a more intimate point of view, in connection with implicit ideals, not as a spectacle for which he had an expensive seat. Did they fall farther short of their ideals than he from his? He had not the power to see, but he thought not; and he came to believe that, lacking as their life might be in familiar forms of beauty and power, it possessed, nevertheless, a profound unconsciousness and dark strength which might some day bring forth beauty — might even now be beautiful to simple and true eyes — and had already given them a fitness to their place which he had for no place on earth. When it was food and warmth which were lacking he never hesitated to use his money, but beyond satisfying these needs he could not feel sure that he was not fancifully interfering with a force which he did not understand and could not overestimate. Therefore, leaving all save a little of his money to be spent in directly supplying the needs of hungry and cold men, he escaped from the sublime, unintelligible scene. He went up into the tower that he had built on a rock in his own mountains, to think about life before he began to live. Up there, said his mother, he hoped to learn why sometimes in a London street, beneath the new and the multitudinous, could be felt a simple and a pure beauty, beneath the turmoil a placidity, beneath the noise a silence which he longed to reach and drink deeply and perpetuate, but in vain. It was his desire to learn to see in human life, as we see in the life of bees, the unity, which perhaps some higher order of beings can see through the complexity which confuses us. He had set out to seek at first by means of science, but he thought that science was an end, not a means. For a hundred years, he said, men had been reading science and investigating, as they had been reading history, with the result that they knew some science and some history. ‘So he went up into his tower, and there he has been these twelve years,’ said Mrs Morgan, ‘with Angharad and no comforts. You would think by his letters that his thoughts had become giddy up there. Only five letters have I had from him in these twelve years. This is all,’ she added, showing a small packet in her handbag. ‘For the last six years nobody has heard from him except Ann. He wished he had asked Ann to go with him to the tower. She would have gone, too. She would have preserved him from being poetical. It is true he was only twenty-five years old at the time, but he was too poetical. He said things which he was bound to repent in a year, perhaps in a day. He writes quite seriously, as actors half seriously talk, in tones quite inhumanly sublime.’ She read me scraps from these old letters, evidently admiring as well as disapproving:
‘I am alone. From my tower I look out at the huge desolate heaves of the grey beacons. Their magnitude and pure form give me a great calm. Here is nothing human, gentle, disturbing, as there is in the vales. There is nothing but the hills and the silence, which is God. The greater heights, set free from night and the mist, look as if straight from the hands of God, as if here He also delighted in pure form and magnitude that are worthy of His love. The huge shadows moving slowly over the grey spaces of winter, the olive spaces of summer, are as God’s hand....
‘While I watch, the dream comes, more and more often, of a Paradise to be established upon the mountains when at last the wind shall blow sweet over a world that knows not the taint of life any more than of death. Then my thought sweeps rejoicing through the high Gate of the Winds that cleaves the hills — you could see it from my bedroom at Abercorran — far off, where a shadow miles long sleeps across the peaks, but leaves the lower wild as yellow in the sunlight as corn —
‘Following my thought I have walked upwards to that Gate of the Winds, to range the high spaces, sometimes to sleep there. Or I have lain among the gorse — I could lie on my back a thousand years, hearing the cuckoo in the bushes and looking up at the blue sky above the mountains. In the rain and wind I have sat against one of the rocks in the autumn bracken until the sheep have surrounded me, shaggy and but half visible through the mist, peering at me fearlessly, as if they had not seen a man since that one was put to rest under the cairn above; I sat on and on in the mystery, part of it but not divining, so that I went disappointed away. The crags stared at me on the hill-top where the dark spirits of the earth had crept out of their abysses into the day, and, still clad in darkness, looked grimly at the sky, the light, and at me....
‘More and more now I stay in the tower, since even in the mountains as to a greater extent in the cities of men, I a
m dismayed by numbers, by variety, by the grotesque, by the thousand gods demanding idolatry instead of the One I desire, Whose hand’s shadow I have seen far off....
‘Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising from behind a mountain, the awe and the glory of that first step into the broad heaven exalted me; a sound arose as of the whole of Time making music behind me, a music as of something passing away to leave me alone in the silence, so that I also were about to step off into the air....’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Morgan, ‘it would do him good to do something — to keep a few pigeons, now. I am afraid he will take to counting the stones in his tower.’ She continued her quotations:
‘The moon was rising. The sombre ranges eastward seemed to be the edge of the earth, and as the orb ascended, the world was emptied and grieved, having given birth to this mighty child. I was left alone. The great white clouds sat round about on the horizon, judging me. For days I lay desolate and awake, and dreamed and never stirred.’
‘You see,’ said Mrs Morgan, ‘that London could not cure him. He says:
‘“I have visited London. I saw the city pillared, above the shadowy abyss of the river, on columns of light; and it was less than one of my dreams. It was Winter and I was resolved to work again in Poplar. I was crossing one of the bridges, full of purpose and thought, going against the tide of the crowd. The morning had a low yellow roof of fog. About the heads of the crowd swayed a few gulls, inter-lacing so that they could not be counted. They swayed like falling snow and screamed. They brought light on their long wings, as the ship below, setting out slowly with misty masts, brought light to the green and leaden river upon the foam at her bows. And ever about the determined, careless faces of the men swayed the pale wings, like wraiths of evil and good, calling and calling to ears that know not what they hear. And they tempted my brain with the temptation of their beauty: I went to and fro to hear and to see them until they slept and the crowd had flowed away. I rejoiced that day, for I thought that this beauty had made ready my brain, and that on the mountains at last I should behold the fulness and the simplicity of beauty. So I went away without seeing Poplar. But there, again, among the mountains was weariness, because I also was there.”’
‘Why is he always weary?’ asked Mrs Morgan plaintively, before reading on: ‘But not always weariness. For have I not the company of planet and star in the heavens, the same as bent over prophet, poet, and philosopher of old? By day a scene unfolds as when the first man spread forth his eyes and saw more than his soul knew. These things lift up my heart sometimes for days together, so that the voices of fear and doubt are not so much in that infinite silence as rivulets in an unbounded plain. The sheer mountains, on some days, seem to be the creation of my own lean terrible thoughts, and I am glad: the soft, wooded hills below and behind seem the creation of the pampered luxurious thought which I have left in the world of many men....
‘Would that I could speak in the style of the mountains. But language, except to genius and simple men, is but a paraphrase, dissipating and dissolving the forms of passion and thought....
‘Again Time lured me back out of Eternity, and I believed that I longed to die as I lay and watched the sky at sunset inlaid with swart forest, and watched it with a dull eye and a cold heart ‘And they think he is an atheist. They think he has buried gold on the mountain,’ exclaimed Mrs Morgan, indignantly.
Little she guessed of the nights before her in the lone farmhouse with her bewildered son and the wild Angharad. While he raved through his last hours and Angharad spent herself in wailing, and Mrs Morgan tried to steady his thoughts, I could only walk about the hills. I climbed to the tower, but learnt nothing because Morgan or his wife had set fire to it on leaving, and the shell of stones only remained.
On the fourth morning, after a night of storm, all was over. That morning once more I could hear the brook’s murmur which had been obliterated by the storm and by thought. The air was clear and gentle in the coomb behind the farm, and all but still after the night of death and of great wind. High up in the drifting rose of dawn the tall trees were swaying their tips as if stirred by memories of the tempest. They made no sound in the coomb with the trembling of their slender length; some were never to sound again, for they lay motionless and prone in the underwood, or hung slanting among neighbour branches, where they fell in the night — the rabbits could nibble at crests which once wavered about the stars. The path was strewn with broken branches and innumerable twigs.
The silence was so great that I could hear, by enchantment of the ears, the departed storm. Yet the tragic repose was unbroken. One robin singing called up the roars and tumults that had to cease utterly before his voice could gain this power of peculiar sweetness and awe and make itself heard.
The mountains and sky, beautiful as they were, were more beautiful because a cloak of terror had been lifted from them and left them free to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The masses of the mountains were still heavy and sombre, but their ridges and the protruding tower bit sharply into the sky; the uttermost peaks appeared again, dark with shadows of clouds of a most lustrous whiteness that hung like a white forest, very far off, in the country of the sun. Seen out of the clear gloom of the wood this country was as a place to which a man might wholly and vainly desire to go, knowing that he would be at rest there and there only.
As I listened, walking the ledge between precipice and precipice in the coomb, the silence murmured of the departed tempest like a sea-shell. I could hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an endless explosion. All night the trees were caught up and shaken in the furious air like grasses; the sounds on earth were mingled with those of the struggle in the high spaces of air. Outside the window branches were brandished wildly, and their anger was the more terrible because the voice of it could not be distinguished amidst the universal voice. The sky itself seemed to aid the roar, as the stars raced over it among floes of white cloud, and dark menacing fragments flitted on messages of darkness across the white. I looked out from the death room, having turned away from the helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and saw the hillside trees surging under a wild moon, but they were strange and no longer to be recognised, while the earth was heaving and be-nightmared by the storm. It was the awe of that hour which still hung over the coomb, making its clearness so solemn, its silence so pregnant, its gentleness so sublime. How fresh it was after the sick room, how calm after the vain conflict with death.
The blue smoke rose straight up from the house of death, over there in the white fields, where the wife sat and looked at the dead. Everyone else was talking of the strange life just ended, but the woman who had shared it would tell nothing; she wished only to persuade us that in spite of his extraordinary life he was a good man and very good to her. She had become as silent as Morgan himself, though eleven years before, when she began to live with him on the mountain, she was a happy, gay woman, the best dancer and singer in the village, and had the most lovers. Upon the mountain her wholly black Silurian eyes had turned inwards and taught her lips their mystery and Morgan’s. They buried him, according to his wish, at the foot of the tower. Outraged by this, some of the neighbours removed his body to the churchyard under the cover of night. Others equally enraged at putting such a one in consecrated ground, exhumed him again. But in the end it was in the churchyard that his bones came to rest, with the inscription, chosen by Ann:
‘Though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle,
I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord.’!”
Angharad married a pious eccentric much older than herself, and in a year inherited his money. She lives on in one of those gray houses which make Queen Street so stately at Abercorran. She keeps no company but that of the dead. The children call her Angharad of the Folly, or simply Angharad Folly.
‘She ought to have gone back to the tower,’ said Mr Torrance in some anger.
‘She would have done, Mr Torrance,’ said Ann, ‘if she had been
a poet; but you would not have done it if you had been through those eleven years and those four nights. No, I really don’t think you would.... I knew a poet who jumped into a girl’s grave, but he was not buried with her. Now you are angry with him, poor fellow, because he did not insist on being buried. Well, but it is lucky he was not, because if he had been we should not have known he was a poet.’
‘Well said, Ann,’ muttered Aurelius.
‘Ann forgets that she was young once,’ protested Mr Torrance.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I do, but I think this, that you forget you will some day be old. Now, as this is Shrove Tuesday and you will be wanting pancakes I must go make them.’
‘Good old Ann,’ whispered Mr Torrance.
CHAPTER IX. MR TORRANCE, THE CHEERFUL MAN
MR TORRANCE openly objected to Ann’s epitaph for David Morgan, preferring his own choice of one from Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’:
‘And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings Silence and solitude were vacancy?’
‘But’ said Mr Morgan, ‘Shelley was born only a hundred years ago, and died at thirty, I think that in the matter of mountains an older man is better.’
‘But, father,’ said Roland, ‘how do you know that Jeremiah was not drowned at thirty with a copy of “Ecclesiastes” clasped to his bosom?’ ‘You read and see, my son,’ answered Mr Morgan. ‘Shelley could not pass himself off as an old man, though you know he did once claim to be eighty-nine, and Jeremiah would not have pretended to be thirty. That is only my opinion. I prefer the prophet, like Ann.’
Mr Torrance muttered that anyone who preferred Jeremiah to Shelley had no right to an opinion. It was just like Mr Torrance. He was always saying foolish things and fairly often doing them, and yet we felt, and Mr Morgan once declared, that he had in him the imperishable fire of a divine, mysterious wisdom. After walking the full length of the Abbey Road, where he lived, to discover him smiling in his dark study, was sufficient proof that he had a wisdom past understanding.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 18