CHAPTER IIIA FARMHOUSE UNDER A MOUNTAIN, A FIRE, AND SOME FIRESIDERS

Having passed the ruined abbey and the orchard, I came to a long, low farmhouse kitchen, smelling of bacon and herbs and burning sycamore and ash. A gun, a blunderbuss, a pair of silver spurs, and a golden spray of last year's corn hung over the high mantelpiece and its many brass candlesticks; and beneath was an open fireplace and a perpetual red fire, and two teapots warming, for they had tea for breakfast, tea for dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea between. The floor was of sanded slate flags, and on them a long many-legged table, an oak settle, a table piano, and some Chippendale chairs. There were also two tall clocks; and they were the most human clocks I ever met, for they ticked with effort and uneasiness: they seemed to think and sorrow over time, as if they caused it, and didnot go on thoughtlessly or impudently like most clocks, which are insufferable; they found the hours troublesome and did not twitter mechanically over them; and at midnight the twelve strokes always nearly ruined them, so great was the effort. On the wall were a large portrait of Spurgeon, several sets of verses printed and framed in memory of dead members of the family, an allegorical tree watered by the devil, and photographs of a bard and of Mr. Lloyd George. There were about fifty well-used books near the fire, and two or three men smoking, and one man reading some serious book aloud, by the only lamp; and a white girl was carrying out the week's baking, of large loaves, flat fruit tarts of blackberry, apple, and whinberry, plain golden cakes, large soft currant biscuits, and curled oat cakes. And outside, the noises of a west wind and a flooded stream, the whimper of an otter, and the long, slow laugh of an owl; and always silent, but never forgotten, the restless, towering outline of a mountain.

The fire was—is—of wood, dry oak-twigs of last spring, stout ash sticks cut this morning, and brawny oak butts grubbed from the copse years after the tree was felled. And I remember how we built it up one autumn, when the heat and business of the day had almost let it die.

DISTANT VIEW OF PENMAENMAWR—EARLY MORNING LIGHT

We had been out all day, cutting and binding the late corn. At one moment we admired the wheat straightening in the sun after drooping in rain, with grey heads all bent one way over the luminous amber stalks, and at last leaning and quivering like runners about to start or like a wind made visible. At another moment we admired the gracious groups of sheaves in pyramids made by our own hands, as we sat and drank our buttermilk or ale, and ate bread and cheese or chwippod (the harvesters' stiff pudding of raisins, rice, bread, and fresh milk) among the furze mixed with bramble and fern at the edge of the field. Behind us was a place given over to blue scabious flowers, haunted much by blue butterflies of the same hue; to cross-leaved heath and its clusters of close, pensile ovals, of a perfect white that blushed towards the sun; to a dainty embroidery of tormentil shining with unvaried gold; and to tall, purple loosestrife, with bees at it, dispensing a thin perfume of the kind that all fair living things, plants or children, breathe.

What a thing it is to reap the wheat with your own hands, to thresh it with the oaken flail in themisty barn, to ride with it to the mill and take your last trout while it is ground, and then to eat it with no decoration of butter, straight from the oven! There is nothing better, unless it be to eat your trout with the virgin appetite which you have won in catching it. But in the field, we should have been pleased with the plainest meal a hungry man can have, which is, I suppose, barley bread and a pale "double Caermarthen" cheese, which you cut with a hatchet after casting it on the floor and making it bounce, to be sure that it is a double Caermarthen. And yet I do not know. For even a Welsh hymnist of the eighteenth century, in translating "the increase of the fields," wrote avidly of "wheaten bread," so serious was his distaste for barley bread. But it was to a meal of wheaten bread and oat cake, and cheese and onions and cucumber, that we came in, while the trembling splendours of the first stars shone, as if they also were dewy like the furze. Nothing is to be compared with the pleasure of seeing the stars thus in the east, when most eyes are watching the west, except perhaps to read a fresh modern poet, straight from the press, before any one has praised it, and to know that it is good.

SILVERY LIGHT, CONWAY SHORE

As we sat, some were singing the song "Morwynion Sir Gaerfyrdd-in." Some were looking out at the old hay waggon before the gate.

Fine grass was already growing in corners of the wrecked hay waggon. Two months before, it travelled many times a day between the rick and the fields. Swallow was in the shafts while it carried all the village children to the field, as it had done some sixty years ago, when the village wheelwright helped God to make it. The waggoner lifted them out in clusters; the haymakers loaded silently; the waggon moved along the roads between the swathes; and, followed by children who expected another ride, and drawn by Swallow and Darling, it reached the rick that began to rise, like an early church, beside the elms. But hardly had it set out for another load than Swallow shied; an axle splintered and tore and broke in two, near the hub of one wheel, which subsided so that a corner of the waggon fell askew into the tussocks, and the suspended horse-shoe dropped from its place. There the mare left it, and switched her black tail from side to side of her lucent, nut-brown haunches, as she went.

All day the waggon was now the children's own. They climbed and slid and made believe that they were sailors, on its thin, polished timbers. Thegrass had grown up to it, under its protection. Before it fell, the massive wheels and delicate curved sides had been so fair and strong that no one thought of its end. Now, the exposed decay raised a smile at its so recent death. No one gave it a thought, except, perhaps, as now, when the September evening began, and one saw it on this side of the serious, dark elms, when the flooded ruts were gleaming, and a cold light fell over it from a tempestuous sky, and the motionless air was full of the shining of moist quinces and yellow fallen apples in long herbage; and, far off, the cowman let a gate shut noisily; the late swallows and early bats mingled in flight; and, under an oak, a tramp was kindling his fire....

Suddenly in came the dog, one of those thievish, lean, swift demi-wolves, that appear so fearful of meeting a stranger, but when he has passed, turn and follow him. He shook himself, stepped into the hearth and out and in again. With him was one whose red face and shining eyes and crisped hair were the decoration with which the wind invests his true lovers. A north wind had risen and given the word, and he repeated it: let us have a fire.

So one brought hay and twigs, another branchesand knotted logs, and another the bellows. We made an edifice worthy of fire and kneeled with the dog to watch light changing into heat, as the spirals of sparks arose. The pyre was not more beautiful which turned to roses round the innocent maiden for whom it was lit; nor that more wonderful round which, night after night in the west, the clouds are solemnly ranged, waiting for the command that will tell them whither they are bound in the dark blue night. We became as the logs, that now and then settled down (as if they wished to be comfortable) and sent out, as we did words, some bristling sparks of satisfaction. And hardly did we envy then the man who lit the first fire and saw his own stupendous shadow in cave or wood and called it a god. As we kneeled, and our sight grew pleasantly dim, were we looking at fire-born recollections of our own childhood, wondering that such a childhood and youth as ours could ever have been; or at a golden age that never was?... The light spelt the titles of the books for a moment, and the bard read Spenser aloud, as if forsooth a man can read poetry in company round such a fire. So we pelted him with tales and songs....

And one of the songs was "The Maid of Landybie," by the bard, Watcyn Wyn. Herefollows the air, and a translation which was made by an English poet. The naïveté of the original has troubled him, and the Welsh stanza form has driven him to the use of rhymeless feminine endings; but I think that his version will, with the air, render not too faintly the song I heard.

THE MAID OF LANDYBIEAir:Y Ferch o Blwyf Penderyn.

'Rwy'n car - u merch o Lan - dy - bi - e, Ac y mae hith-e'n fynghar - u i O bob merch i - fanc yn Sir Gaer - fyrdd-in,'Does neb o hon - yn' mor hardd a hi, Ar ei grudd-iau mae rhos-- yn - au, Cym - ysg liw - iau coch a gwyn: Y hi y'wr un - igferch a fyn - af, A hith - e — dim ond y fi - ne fyn.

'Rwy'n car - u merch o Lan - dy - bi - e, Ac y mae hith-e'n fy

nghar - u i O bob merch i - fanc yn Sir Gaer - fyrdd-in,

'Does neb o hon - yn' mor hardd a hi, Ar ei grudd-iau mae rhos-

- yn - au, Cym - ysg liw - iau coch a gwyn: Y hi y'wr un - ig

ferch a fyn - af, A hith - e — dim ond y fi - ne fyn.

I love a maid of LandybieAnd it is she who loves me too.Of all the women of CaermarthenNone is so fair as she, I know.White and red are her cheeks' young roses,The tints all blended mistily;She is the only maid I long for,And she will have no lad but me.I love one maid of Landybie.And she too loves but one, but one;The tender girl remains my faithful,Pure of heart, a bird in tone.Her beauty and her comely bearingHave won my love and life and care,For there is none in all the kingdomsLike her, so blushing, kind, and fair.While there is lime in Craig-y-Ddinas;While there is water in Pant-y-Llyn;And while the waves of shining LoughorWalk between these hills and sing;While there's a belfry in the villageWhose bells delight the country nigh,The dearest maid of LandybieShall have her name held sweet and high.

I love a maid of Landybie

And it is she who loves me too.

Of all the women of Caermarthen

None is so fair as she, I know.

White and red are her cheeks' young roses,

The tints all blended mistily;

She is the only maid I long for,

And she will have no lad but me.

I love one maid of Landybie.And she too loves but one, but one;The tender girl remains my faithful,Pure of heart, a bird in tone.Her beauty and her comely bearingHave won my love and life and care,For there is none in all the kingdomsLike her, so blushing, kind, and fair.

I love one maid of Landybie.

And she too loves but one, but one;

The tender girl remains my faithful,

Pure of heart, a bird in tone.

Her beauty and her comely bearing

Have won my love and life and care,

For there is none in all the kingdoms

Like her, so blushing, kind, and fair.

While there is lime in Craig-y-Ddinas;While there is water in Pant-y-Llyn;And while the waves of shining LoughorWalk between these hills and sing;While there's a belfry in the villageWhose bells delight the country nigh,The dearest maid of LandybieShall have her name held sweet and high.

While there is lime in Craig-y-Ddinas;

While there is water in Pant-y-Llyn;

And while the waves of shining Loughor

Walk between these hills and sing;

While there's a belfry in the village

Whose bells delight the country nigh,

The dearest maid of Landybie

Shall have her name held sweet and high.

A MOUNTAIN PASS—NOON

When we are by this fire, we can do what we like with Time, making a strange solitude within these four walls, as if they were cut off in time as in space from the great world by something more powerful than the night; so that, whether Llewelyn the Great, or Llewelyn the Last, or Arthur, or Kilhwch, or Owen Glyndwr, or the most recent prophet be the subject of our talk, nothing intrudes that can prevent us for the time from being utterly at one with them. They sing or jest ormake puns; they talk of hero and poet as if they had met them on the hills; and as the poet has said, "Folly would it be to say that Arthur has a grave."

In such a room are legends made, if made at all. In fact, I lately saw a pretty proof of it.

The valley in which the farmhouse lies is not so fortified that some foreign things of one kind and another cannot enter. And a miner or a youth on holiday from London brought a song of Bill Bailey to the ears of one of the children of the house, a happy, melancholy boy named Merfyn. The elders caught it for a day or two, and though the song does not recommend itself to those who are heirs to "Sospan bach" and "Ar hyd y nos," the name of the hero stuck. The child asked who he was, and could get no answer. When anything happened about the farm that could not easily be explained, it was jestingly said that Bill Bailey was at the bottom of it. The child seriously caught up the name and the mystery, and applied it with amusing and strange effect. Thus, when he had asked who made the mushrooms in the dawn, and was not satisfied, he himself decided, and with pride and joy announced, that they were Bill Bailey's work. Looking into the fire one night, and seeing faces that he could not recognise among the throbbing heat, he saw Bill Bailey, as he surmised. Thus is a new solar hero being bred. The last news is that he made Cader Idris and Orion and the Pleiades, and that the owls cry so sadly because he is afoot in the woods.

CONWAY CASTLE AND QUAY—NOON

And yet, if we are so unwise as to draw back the curtain from the window at night, the illusion of timelessness is broken for that evening, and in the flower-faced owl by the pane, in the great hill scarred with precipices, and ribbed with white and crying streams, with here and there a black tree disturbed and a very far-off light, I can see nothing but the past as a magnificent presence besieging the house. At such times the legends that I remember most are those of the buried and unforgotten lands. What I see becomes but a symbol of what is now invisible. And sometimes I dream of something hidden out there and elaborating some omnipotent alcahest for the world's delight or the world's bane; sometimes, as when I passed Llanddeusant and Myddfai, I could see nothing that was there, because I was thinking of what had been long ago. There is still a tradition on the coast that Cardigan Bay now covers a country that was once populous and fair and rich. Theson of a prince of South Wales is said to have had charge of the floodgates on the protecting embankment, and one night the floodgates were left open at high tide, while he slept with wine, and the sea was over the corn. "Seithenyn the Drunkard let in the sea over Cantre-'r-Gwaelod, so that all the houses and lands contained in it were lost. And before that time there were in it sixteen fortified towns superior to all the towns and cities in Wales, except Caerlleon on the Usk. And Cantre-'r-Gwaelod was the dominion of Gwyddno, King of Cardigan, and this event happened in the time of Ambrosius. And the people who escaped from that inundation came and landed in Ardudwy, the country of Arvon, the Snowdon mountains, and other places not before inhabited...." The sands in some places uncover the roots of an old forest. According to one tradition the flood took place during a feast. The harper suddenly foresaw what was to happen and warned the guests; but he alone escaped. There is also a tradition that Bala Lake covers old palaces. It is said that they have been seen on clear moonlit nights, when the air is one sapphire, and that a voice is heard saying, "Vengeance will come"; and another voice, "When will it come?"and again the first voice saying, "In the third generation." For a prince once had a palace where the lake is. He was cruel and persisted in his cruelty, despite a voice that sometimes cried to him, "Vengeance will come." One night there was a bright festival in the palace, and there were many ladies and many lords among the guests, for an heir had just been born to the prince. The wine shone and was continually renewed. The dancers were merry and never tired. And a voice cried, "Vengeance." But only the harper heard; and he saw a bird beckoning him out of the palace. He followed, and if he stopped, the bird called, "Vengeance." So they travelled a long way, and at last he stopped and rested, and the bird was silent. Then the harper upbraided himself, and turned, and would have gone back to the palace. But he lost his way, for it was night. And in the morning he saw one calm large lake where the palace had been; and on the lake floated the harper's harp....

This fire, in my memory, gathers round it many books which I have read and many men that I have spoken with among the mountains—gathers them from coal-pits and tin-works and schools andchapels and farmhouses and hideous cottages, beside rivers, among woods; and I have drawn a thin line round their shadows and have called the forms that came of it men, and their "characters" follow.

CONWAY VALLEY

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