The land on which, as Squire Wynne had told Edward Garden, other mortgages were being foreclosed, began a furlong or so behind the unfinished house, reaching to and including one of the farms—Fotty, John Pritchard's. It formed a three-hundred-yards-wide strip of bents and rough grazing, which spread out inland with Fotty in the middle of its base. The mortgagee was Squire Wynne's Liverpool wine-merchant, and he had accepted the mortgage partly because he did not wish to be at cross-purposes with such of Squire Wynne's friends as were good customers of his, and partly because he was not very likely to get anything else in settlement of a longish account. This account had been reckoned off the sum advanced, which, besides, was based on a low valuation; and, not wanting the land himself, he was ready enough to sell to any optimist who did.
The land remained in the possession of the wine-merchant for exactly eleven weeks. At the end of that time he had found his optimist in the person of Terry Armfield.
And who was Terry Armfield, that his affairs should thus become mixed up with those of Llanyglo?
Well, the name of one of his grandfathers, which need not be mentioned, is to be found, in certain circumstances of notoriety, in Gomer Williams'sHistory of the Liverpool Privateers; and that of his father is associated with the bright story of the tea-clippers. Thus a certain adventurousness in Terry may perhaps be accounted for. But whence the rest of him derived was a mystery. Belated young Tractarians who burn incense in their monastic bedrooms were no more common in Liverpool then than they are to-day. In appearance, Terry was an ill-adjusted compromise between an ascetic and a young man about town. He was tall and of a buoyant movement, excellently dressed, had burning and ecstatic brown eyes, and was possessed of an extraordinary power of impressing people as long as, and even a little longer than, he was actually in their presence. This was all very well as long as he spoke only of pictures that this self-made merchant ought to buy, or of books without which some shipper's newly formed library would be incomplete. He really knew a little about these things, as also he did about architecture and engravings, vestments and Ritualism and furniture. The trouble began when he went beyond them. Wealthy business men, looking up as Terry lounged into their offices, would put up their hands defensively, cry, "It's no good, Terry—I won't listen," but would presently find themselves listening none the less. It was not that Terry was plausible. Plausible was not the word. He persuaded you only because he was, for the time being, overwhelmingly persuaded himself. His capacity for enthusiasm was astonishing. Circumstances having driven him from his true vocation (the Church) into business, he traded as it were under Letters of Marque that had had an apostolic blessing. House-property, leases, patents, picture-exhibitions, concessions, bills for discount, Irish-harvester agencies, philanthropy on a paying basis, and a hundred even vaguer values—some idealistic strain in Terry so moved the dullard-on-the-make that he had a new light on business as a benison, and on money-making as something nobler than he had supposed. What such an one commonly lacked, Terry was full and running over with; and the end of the matter frequently was that it was judged to be worth a certain amount of risk to be on the side of Terry and the angels.
Of course, Terry ought to have been locked up as a public danger. Anybody but Terry would have been locked up. But you cannot lock innocence and rapturous good faith up. Terry, if you had locked him up, would merely have sent for his crucifix, plunged into fresh scheming, and would have come out again as running over with piracies and the humanities as ever.
So Terry Armfield, who hitherto had never heard of Llanyglo and of whom Llanyglo had never heard, took over Fotty and the strip of land that ran down to Edward Garden's unfinished house, with, as it happened, extremely notable results.
For nobody who knew Terry ever supposed that he made purchases of real estate solely upon his own account. He represented others; and it is perhaps significant that the nickname by which he was known among the members of the Syndicate which made use of him was borrowed from the slang of the "swell mob." He was called "The Minder."
Now the Minder, as you ought not to know, is the gentleman who makes himself charming to you while the others consult about how much you may be worth, and how you may most conveniently be made worth less. Often, like Terry, he himself is not in the real councils of his allies. They want his looks, his candours, his repute, his address, and in Terry's case they especially wanted his powers remarkable of persuasion. Until it should be decided what people were to be persuaded of, Terry minded.
Little did John Pritchard, tenant-farmer of Fotty, dream of the solicitude with which his farm was regarded by a number of people who had never seen it and did not want ever to see it. Little did he think that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon. Little did he imagine what interest, what benevolence, what affectionate regard ... or, to put it in plain English, he had no notion whatever that, instead of having Squire Wynne for a landlord, he was now the tenant of a set of prospectus-vendors of whom two or three were the same men who had held those hopeful views on the paying-quantities of manganese that could be obtained from that other property of Squire Wynne's, the Abercelyn mines, thirty miles further down the coast.
The Corporation did not insist on manganese or on anything else. On the contrary, it was accommodating in the extreme. You paid your money and took your choice what commodity you found on its properties; you could have had tin, iron, copper, lead, anything you happened to fancy. It merely wished to be able to show, in case of need, its indefeasible title to real land, at Llanyglo or anywhere else, but the further from civilisation the better. It would be safer, and really not much dearer, to buy Pritchard's farm, than it would be to have to confess in open Court that the tin or iron or lead shares of which it was trying to create the value, unfortunately happened to have Pritchard's farm sitting on the top of them.
"No, we'd better get hold of a bit of real land from somewhere," the Syndicate had said. "Better have it in a new name too. All Abercelyn names exempt for three years. Who is there?... What about Armfield?"
All had agreed that Terry would make an excellent Minder.
When, in course of time, the Syndicate first heard from Terry (who heard it goodness knows where) that "glo" was the Welsh word for "coal," it was on the point of plumping for coal without further question.
"What more do you want?" it asked itself. "'Glo'—'coal'; there you are. Place-name. Awful lot in a genuine place-name. Find it on an old map, to show that we didn't invent it, and the whole thing settles itself. There's bound tobecoal. Sure to be. They didn't call it that for nothing. All ground's gotsomething in it.Isay coal. On the face of it. It seems to me Providential. (Shut up, Abercelyn; we're talking about Llanyglo now.) ... Who says coal, then?" ...
But Llanyglo was not destined to be a colliery village. Latticed shaft-heads were not to rise under the Trwyn, nor men to descend in cages to the galleries deep under the sandhills. Edward Garden's house was not to become a mine-manager's residence, nor a coal-quay to be constructed where the wooden jetty stuck out like a stumpy thumb into the sea.—Nevertheless, it almost looked at one time as if it might have been so.
The Syndicate's registered offices were within a hundred yards of Lime Street Station, and Terry, looking forth from an upper window, could see the august portico of St. George's Hall and the cabs and steam-trams running to and fro past it. He sat day by day at a high sloping desk, perched on a tall stool. A small pile of letters lay by his side, weighted with a surveyor's reel-tape, and on a shelf above the press with the dumb-bell arm, thrust among directories and files, wereStones of VeniceandThe Christian Year. There was a green cardboard shade on the double-elbowed gas-bracket, and on the wall near it hung an ebony-edged T-square and a number of French curves. There was a second stool for callers, and in a small outer office a youth of sixteen readThe Boys of London and New Yorkand chewed root-liquorice. The place was shabby, as befitted a hole-in-corner enterprise, but Terry saw not that shabbiness. He had splendour enough in his own visions. He did not look very busy, but he was. A dozen inspired and half-baked schemes fermented in his head, and besides these, he was minding Llanyglo—the thyme and wild pansies and butterflies of its sandhills, the glaucous blue sea-holly of its shore, its heathery Trwyn, its coal or what-not underfoot, and its crystal air overhead—especially its crystal air overhead....
On the forenoon of that day on which work on Edward Garden's house suddenly ceased, Dafydd Dafis, sitting astride of a coping, was singing as he drove heavy cut nails into a beam. His song was martial, and it almost made his joinering warlike. The burden of it was that Cambria's foes (here a bang with the hammer) should fall beneath the sword (another bang) as the pine falls when the levin (bang) flashes from the cloud that hides the head of Arenig (bang, and a nail well home). John Willie Garden, who had heard somewhere that coins of the current mintage were placed in cavities in foundation stones, was chipping a hollow in the bedding of the "E.G." stone for the reception of a well-brightened sixpence and a document in his own handwriting, that should tell future ages how one John Willie Garden had lived and had done thus and thus. The sun was hot; the new timbers were as bright as John Willie's own primrose-coloured hair against the intense blue; and the workmen below seemed to stand on their shadows as lead soldiers stand on their little bases of metal. John Willie finished his cavity, and then clambered up to the ridge-tree. There, putting his hands behind his head, he lay on his back, his dangling legs balancing him below. He blinked up at the sky, and from time to time called across to Dafydd Dafis, "Peth a elwir (whatever the English word might be) yn Cymraeg, Dafydd?" Then Dafydd would give him the Welsh, and he would practise it softly.
It was just on the stroke of midday when Dafydd abruptly broke off his singing in the middle of a word. John Willie, blinking up at the blue, waited for him to resume; as he did not do so, John Willie turned his head. Dafydd was looking away over the sandhills in the direction of John Pritchard's farm.
John Willie sat up.
"Who is it?" he asked.
Dafydd continued to look under his hand.—"Indeed, it look like Mr. Sheard," he muttered, "but he have strangers with him. It is Mr. Sheard's carr-adge, whatever.... Hugh Roberts!" He called to the men down below, who were making ready for their midday meal. He said something in Welsh to them, and they too looked.
Mr. Sheard's governess-cart was drawn up by the earth-wall half a mile away, and from it three figures had descended. They climbed over the wall and began to cross the sandhills. One of them walked slowly and somewhat after the manner of a clock-work toy, as if he was pacing a distance; and another, after looking this way and that about him, moved off to the right, apparently also pacing. He stopped and held up his hand, and then returned, laying out along the ground as he went, something that made a little glitter in the sun. They came together again, and seemed to confer. Then over the earth-wall John Pritchard climbed, and William Sheard went to meet him. After that they all pointed, in various directions.
Dafydd Dafis, from the top of the pale yellow toast-rack, called something else in Welsh, too quick for John Willie to hear. Then he gazed again. Something else was coming along the Porth Neigr road. Dafydd, who had the eyes of a river-poacher, knew both the cart and the two men who rode on the load. It drew nearer. Sheard and the two men seemed to be explaining something to John Pritchard. After a time John Pritchard walked away.
Dafydd Dafis descended from the roof, followed by John Willie Garden. He had put his hammer into his pocket; his little heap of cut nails remained on the coping. The men had gathered into a cluster, but none went over the sandhills to see what was happening.
Then a frequently repeated word struck John Willie's ear. He turned to Dafydd Dafis.
"Peth a elwir 'adwydd' yn Saesneg, Dafydd?" he asked.
Dafydd Dafis looked as if he had never sung in his life.
"Post—hedgestake," he replied.
Slowly they got out their dinner.
As they did so Howell Gruffydd came up from the beach. Formerly, he had rebuked Eesaac Oliver for speaking Welsh in the presence of those who did not understand it; now, John Willie Garden's presence was entirely disregarded. He did not understand six words of the low, rapid conversation.
Then in the middle of it a light sound came over the sandhills, and the talk suddenly ceased. They waited. The sound came again.
Hedgestakes were being flung from the cart down by the side of the road.
The workmen continued to sit after dinner, but not a ladder was mounted again that day.
John Pritchard was big and sickly and consumptive, and his farm kitchen was also the Llanyglo Post Office. There John Willie went at six o'clock that evening to post a letter for his mother. Nominally, John's mother, ancient Mrs. Pritchard, whom Dafydd Dafis so greatly loved, was the postmistress, but actually Miss Nancy Pritchard, the schoolmistress, did most of the work. She was sealing the letter-bag from a saucer of melted wax when John Willie entered. The postman's cart waited at the door, and beyond it, past the gate, could be seen the hedgestakes that had been shot down on the opposite side of the road. The postman was explaining something to John Pritchard, and Dafydd Dafis and his labourers listened in silence. In her chair by the fire sat ancient Mrs. Pritchard, seeming old as the Dinas itself, her face a skull with a membrane stretched over it, a black gophered snood surrounding it, her hands anatomies, and her mouth from time to time making a sort of weak baa-ing.
Of the hushed and rapid conversation at the door, John Willie caught this time a phrase or two he understood. "Wait and see, whatever," he heard them say; "let them drive them in ... adwydd ... perhaps it be on Thursday ... Saesneg...." He approached the group.
"Peth a elwir——" he began.
But the men who formerly had made much of him now took no notice of him at all.
The next day two strangers from Porth Neigr appeared at Llanyglo, and began to stake out and to enclose a belt of land that extended, roughly, from the Porth Neigr road on both sides of John Pritchard's farm nearly as far as Edward Garden's house. John Willie watched these two men at work with their pawls, measuring and driving, but the curious thing was that nobody else did so. Save for the Porth Neigr men, the blue and sulphur butterflies and the rabbits, the sandhills were extraordinarily deserted. John Willie wandered here and there in search of somebody to talk to, and by and by found himself in Howell Gruffydd's shop. The grocer showed his false teeth in a smile, and then continued to weigh sugar.
"Well, John Willie Garden, can you say 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyll——' yet?" he asked, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the bright scoop in his hand.
"Where's everybody?" John Willie demanded.
"You look for Eesaac Oliver?" Howell asked. "He go errand for me, to the lighthouse. You meet him coming back if you go."
"Where are all the men?" John Willie demanded again, and Howell made a quick and mocking gesture.
"Indeed, one hide behind that cur-tain—quick, look see!... Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed when John Willie involuntarily turned in the direction in which he had pointed. "I cat-ss you that time, John Willie Garden! You think there's a man behind that lit-tle cur-tain, hardly so big as my apron! Your sister, she s'arper than that, whatever!... You go find Eesaac Oliver. He fetch eggs from the lighthouse. Perhaps you meet all the men there too——"
And that was as much as John Willie could get out of him.
It was plain that something extraordinary was toward. It was a habit of John Willie Garden's to look in at Pritchard's farm of an evening, and there to pass the news with John Pritchard and to watch his ancient mother, bent doublefold over her Bible, running a rush-light along line after line so close to the page that the book was scored across with bars of smoky brown. He went as usual that evening. But he had hardly opened the door when it was closed again upon him. "We go to bed," said John Pritchard, and packed John Willie off without his customary "Nos da."
But John Willie knew that they were not going to bed. The door had not been closed so quickly but that he had seen a dozen men crowding the kitchen, and Dafydd Dafis's eyes, hollower than ever in the light of the candle that stood at his elbow, with a sentimental and knife-like gleam in them as they turned.
The next morning, every stake that those two Porth Neigr men had driven in had been uprooted again, and a board with "Rhybudd" on it lay down the beach, already lapped by the rising tide.
It was once told to the writer ofThe Visitors' Sixpenny Guide to Llanyglo and Neighbourhood—a young man with so little regard for his bread and butter that he made a labour of love of a job that brought him in exactly ten pounds—it was once told to this over-conscientious author, by a man who had known Squire Wynne very well, that the Squire, finding himself one day in Liverpool, and taking a walk to the docks with an acquaintance in the Royal Engineers, pointed down the Mersey past New Brighton, and said, "Do you know, I've sometimes had the idea that if this country was ever invaded the enemy would come up there?"—"But surely," exclaimed his friend, "it's a difficult piece of navigation?"—"Yes," the Squire replied, "but half the pilots are Welshmen."
No doubt the Squire said it without accepting too much responsibility for it. No doubt, too, he would not have allowed anybody else to suggest that Wales might slyly open a back-door into England. But that there was something, much or little, in it, the famous Llanyglo Inclosures Dispute, that now began, lasted off and on for three years, and then came to an end in as fantastic a manner as you could conceive, seemed to show.
For that dispute would not have been so obstinate and envenomed had it been simply a question of grazing, turbary, and right-of-way. True, there might still have been the fence-destruction and gate-burning that presently filled John Willie Garden's heart with a fearful joy; but—and this is what made the difference—Owen Glyndwr and his triumph over Mortimer would not have been dragged in, nor Taliesin and his prophecy, nor Howell Dda, nor Gruffydd ap Rhys, nor Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, nor a hundred other grey and valiant and unforgotten ghosts of princes and saints and bards whose names string (as it were) all Wales, from Braich-y-Pwll to St. David's Head, making of it one Western Harp in which the wind of sentiment is never still.
For these fences on the Llanyglo sandhills were not fences—they were Saxon fences. They were not notice-boards and gates—they were the insulting tokens of invasion and rapine and defeat. The Welshman says of himself that he is able to keep only that which he has lost, and, in Dafydd Dafis's view of it, at all events, not a piratical Liverpool Syndicate, but a marauding Saesneg king had come again.
On the evening of the day on which those fences were laid flat again, John Willie went once more to Pritchard's farm, and this time was not refused admittance. Perhaps nobody either saw or heard him enter. As if it had been put there for a signal, a single candle in a flat tin stick stood among the geraniums in the little square window-recess, and, save for a dull glow from the shell of peats on the hearth, that was the only light in the room. Again seven or eight men were gathered there, some sitting on the hard old horsehair sofa, two on the table, and others crouched or standing in corners; and the candle-light rested here on a bit of lustre-ware, there on a chair knob, and elsewhere on a cheekbone or the knuckles of a hand. It barely reached Dafydd Dafis, who sat in the farthest corner, with his cap on his head and his head resting against a Post Office proclamation that hung on the wall. No sound could be heard save the loud tock-tocking of the tall clock with the in-turned scrolls on the top and the gilt pippin between them.
John Willie thought it would be more grown-up to accept their silence and to share their motionlessness. He set his elbows on the dresser and sank his neck between his shoulders. The shadow of great John Pritchard, who sat on the sofa's end, covered John Willie and half the wall behind him as well, and John Willie's eyes only discovered Dafydd Dafis in the farther corner when Dafydd moved. As he moved, a bit of gilt fluting dipped forward out of the gloom of the chimney-corner. Dafydd had his harp.
The next moment a single thrumming note had broken out. It was followed by a soft chord of three or four more....
"Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi,Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri——"
"Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi,Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri——"
It is the commonest air you will hear in Wales—Land of my Fathers. Quarrymen sing it as they work by their trucks, slate-splitters whistle it as they tap in their wedges, farmers' lads tss-tss it between their teeth as they clump along the road, sitting sideways on their horses. You would think it had died an age ago of familiarity and repetition. Had it beenGod Save the King, played at an English theatre, there would have been a single line of it, half lost in the reaching for shawls and cloaks and fans, and here and there a man would have stood with an interval of an inch between his hat and his head, and already the attendants would have been getting out the sheeting for the stalls—so long is it since we knew adversity. But here, it needed but a stake driven into a foreshore that would hardly have pastured a donkey, and that was enough—so much adversity have they seen.... Then, as John Willie craned his neck, a man moved from in front of the candle among the geraniums, and Dafydd Dafis's hands could be seen. They seemed not so much hands as multiple things, assemblies of members each one of which was possessed of an independent life and will. There was not a finger that did not lurk, stiffen, clutch, and then start back from the throbbing string as if each note had been a poignant deed done, an old and secret vow redeemed. For the images that were evoked were cruel images. Those fingers of Dafydd's might have been choosing, not among strings of wire and gut, but among the living nerves of an enemy whose moans of suffering were transmuted into music. Know, that this—not the languid wrist nor the caressing hand, not the swans-neck forearm nor the coquetry of the foot on the pedal—not these, but the hook, the claw, the distortion, and the wreaking and the more than human and yet somehow less than human love—this is the harping of Wales....
"Gwlad! Gwlad!——"
"Gwlad! Gwlad!——"
Dafydd's head against the Post Office notice did not move, but his twisted hand might have wrenched the sinews from their shoulder-blade of a frame——
"Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad!——"
"Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad!——"
He did not sing the words, but the words that sang themselves in the ear of every man there meant that he was so enwrapped in his country that an alien stake in her soil was a stake in his heart also....
Within a week of that harping ofHen Wlad, Terry Armfield had more to mind than he had ever reckoned for.
There was no doubt that the flame was fanned largely by the Chapels. These were, respectively, of the three denominations most common in Wales, namely, Baptist, Calvinistic Methodist, and Independent; and Terry Armfield, coming down presently to see for himself what all the trouble was about, gave one affrighted look at their architecture, gasped, "Shade of Pugin!" and fled. The Baptist Chapel was a plain slate-roofed Noah's Ark of stone that, with the day-school adjoining it, stood alone in the middle of the sandhills. At one end of its roof-ridge was a small structure in which a bell swung, and the building had this further peculiarity, that, good stone being cheaper at Llanyglo than common bricks, the latter material had been used wherever an embellishment had been desired. The Independent Chapel was also of stone, with zinc ventilators like those of a weaving-shed; these looked over the fishermen's cottages out to sea not far from Edward Garden's house. And the third Chapel, that of the Methodists, of which body Howell Gruffydd was the principal pillar, lay behind the farms. It was of corrugated iron and wood, painted inside with a skirting of chocolate brown and upper walls of a peculiarly sickly light blue. On the walls were stencilled ribbons with V-shaped ends, and these bore texts in Welsh. Architecturally all these were hideous, but, to those whose grandfathers had worshipped in the fields and in clefts of the barren mountains and on the wide seashore, they had the beauty of a thing that has been ardently desired, and long suffered for, and passionately loved.
For from these three Chapels came not only the impulse of the spiritual life of Llanyglo, but its local politics of dissent also. Education, the Poor Law, matters of Local Government, Temperance, Tenure, the Eisteddfod, and the nursing of Nationalism—if these things were not actually Llanyglo's religion, they were hardly divisible from it. And this welding of Faith with secular works was helped by two other circumstances. The first circumstance was that no language was heard in the chapels but Welsh; and the second was that, as a result of the local-preacher system, three times out of four the Welsh issued from the same mouths—from Howell Gruffydd's mouth at the Methodist Chapel, from big John Pritchard at the Baptists', and from Owen Morgan's among the Independents. None of these went quite so far as openly to incite to the destruction of fences.
They merely prayed to be delivered from the situation in which they found themselves.
Whereupon, like Drake's men, heartened by prayer, they rose from their knees again to take another pull on the rope.
So three times in six weeks those fences were set up and laid flat again; and then it was that Terry Armfield came down, saw the Chapels (as above mentioned), gasped "Shade of Pugin!" and straightway sought Squire Wynne.
But before ever he set eyes on the Squire he had already almost forgotten the errand that had brought him. As the servant showed him to the dining-room he saw that noble ruin of a staircase, and his eyes became illumined. Then, in the dining-room, those same eyes rested on the coffered ceiling and the portraits and the wide mullioned lattice. By the time the Squire entered he was adoring the stately stone fireplace. He swung round, hearing the Squire's step.
"Magnificent, magnificent!" he cried. "Show me over the house—I beg you to show me over the house!—--"
The Squire, who had had this kind of visitor before (though none with quite that perilous smoulder in his eye that Terry had) naturally concluded that a fellow-antiquary, finding himself in the neighbourhood, had permitted himself to beg for a sight of the faded glories of the Plas.
"I'll show you over part of the house with pleasure," said the Squire; and he did so.
"Magnificent!" Terry cried again, when they were once more back in the dining-room. "And oh, that rood-screen—early sixteenth—and those sedilia—in your Church over there! I spent an hour there as I came along."
"Oh, you came Porth Neigr way, did you?" said the Squire.
As if he had previously written the Squire a letter setting forth his business in detail, which therefore he need not repeat, Terry leaped light-heartedly ahead.
"Yes, sir—and then, after that, to come upon those incredible Chapels! (That's a misnomer, by the way, unless they contain relics.) ... Of course, after that I'm not surprised at anything these people do—fences or anything else——"
The Squire was reaching port from the sideboard.—"Eh?" he said, not quite understanding.
"Thoseplaces an expression of religious emotion!" Terry cried, throwing up his hands. "Of course, what's happened was a perfectly natural result! Commit such an outrage on the æsthetic sense as that and—andnofence is safe! If I'd seen those Chapels first I'd as soon have bought a volcano as that land! They ought to have been mentioned by the vendors—flagrantsuppressio veri—deliberate concealment of a material fact—an action ought to lie—by Jove, I've a good mind to take advice about it!—--"
"I beg your pardon?" said the puzzled Squire.
A very few questions served to enlighten him. His mouth twitched as he filled his harebrained visitor's glass.
"Well," he said, "I don't quite follow your processes, but your result seems all right. If you mean there's some connection between the Chapels and your fences being pulled down, I dare say you're not very far wrong. The places of worship do settle a good many things indirectly here. But our own Establishment's been called a branch of the Civil Service, so I don't see how we can complain if some of their activities are a little secular too."
"'A little secular!'" echoed Terry. "Pulling down fences 'a little secular!' ... Now I'm anxious not to go to extreme lengths——"
"Eh?" said the Squire rather quickly. He gave Terry a longish look.... "Do you know Wales?" he asked politely.
"I do not. But I've not heard that it's outside the Law. I was going to say, that I don't want to issue summonses if it can be avoided——"
Thereupon the Squire, who was inclined to like this half-mystical zany of a guest, gave him the same advice he had given to Edward Garden.
"Oh, avoid it if you possibly can!" he said good-humouredly. "There's nothing these people won't do for you if you go the right way about it, but it must be the right way. A new neighbour of yours seems to be getting along with them quite successfully, a man called Garden. Quite an opportunist, I should say—takes things just as he finds them—settles every question strictly on its merits and has a good deal of audacity up his sleeve for use at the right moment, I don't doubt. Can't you take a leaf out of his book?"
"Do they pull down his fences?" Terry demanded over his shoulder; he had been looking at that marvellous fireplace again.
"I don't think so. As a matter of fact they're building his house for him.—By the way—Sheard's told me very little about it—have you bought your land to build on?"
Terry, remembering his Syndicate, had a momentary check.—"I don't know yet," he confessed.
"Because if you have," the Squire continued, "and find them employment—spend money in the place—and use a certain amount of tact—you might hit it off with them. But do try to overlook their Chapels. A soul's sometimes saved under a tin roof, you know."
Terry looked as if he would far rather have his soul damned under a Gothic nave.—"That's simply buying 'em off," he said. He would have preferred to burn them, each at one of the stakes they had uprooted.
"Well.... I'm afraid it's all the advice I can give you.—And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. I'll show you a rather fine carved kingpost before you go if you like——"
And Terry presently departed for Porth Neigr again, where he took the taste of the Chapels out of his mouth in a further ecstatic contemplation of the early sixteenth-century rood-screen.
The fences were set up again.
John Willie Garden could never be sufficiently grateful to his stars that what happened next came before he departed for school again. He had gone to bed that night, but was lying awake, thinking of the suspended building. He knew that the resumption of that building was not irremediably involved in the fencing dispute; Edward Garden had established a serviceable goodwill in Llanyglo; and that very night, standing by Pritchard's manure-heap, Dafydd Dafis had all but told John Willie that when Llanyglo had settled with the intruder it would have time to spare for the child of its adoption again. He had told him this, and had then ruffled up John Willie's fair hair with his hand and had added that it was ten o'clock and time he was in bed.
His little window, as well as that of the next room, where his mother slept, overlooked the sandhills, and John Willie, lying awake, did not at first notice the change in its colour. Neither did his ears hear at first a low muffled cracking that had been going on for some time. But suddenly he sat up. The muslin curtains and the claywashed embrasure of the window had a rusty glow, which reached the counterpane of the bed in which John Willie lay.
The moment he saw this John Willie was out of bed. Then, within thirty seconds, he had plunged into his jersey, tucked his nightgown hastily into his knickers, and, making as little noise as possible, had tiptoed down the stairs and out of the cottage.
The bright glow over the sandhills guided him, and he ran as fast as he could through the muffling sand. The continuous cracks were like pistols, and a deep roaring could be heard, which became louder. Then, mounting a hillock, John Willie saw the beautiful blaze. It was as high as a cottage, and the twisting, upstreaming column of sparks above it rose fifty feet into the night. It illumined the sandhills far and wide. The Baptist Chapel and schoolhouse looked as if they were cut out of red cardboard against the night. Even the zinc ventilators of the Independent Chapel, down by the sea, showed faintly. Then all became grey again as a dozen fresh stakes were piled on. By the time John Willie Garden got there these too had caught, with volleys of cracks. Every man in Llanyglo was there, and, farther off, groups of women also. The heat was intense, so that the men and lads who ran in to throw back half-consumed ends did so with their faces averted.
"Why didn't you tell me?" said John Willie to Dafydd Dafis reproachfully.
Dafydd was watching this beautiful Red Dragon of a flame that was burning Saxon stakes. His eyes blinked rapidly. Then he leant over John Willie, and his forefinger tapped two or three times on the boy's heart.
"You wass tell me you go to bed," he whispered. "You wass tell me that, at ten o'clock, at John Pritchard's. There iss two men over there——" suddenly he straightened himself again and pointed, "—you can tell them the same whatever."
A hundred and fifty yards away two men watched. They were the men from Porth Neigr who had set up the fences. They put up at a wayside cottage two miles away, and probably they were not surprised at what was happening. They did not approach any nearer.
Then there was a call of "John Willie!" and Mrs. Garden's terrified face could be seen in the outer ring of light. John Willie was haled off, in a rage that was nearer to tears than he would have admitted.
Four days later summonses were served on Dafydd Dafis and two other men.
The serving of those summonses had an instant and very remarkable effect. This effect was, that three of the inhabitants of Llanyglo straightway lost all recollection of the English language. And not only did they, the summoned ones, lose it, but every witness called from Llanyglo fell into an ignorance as blank. This happened at Sessions, before Squire Wynne himself, who, in the days before this visitation of forgetfulness, had talked English to all of them. The gloomy magistrates' Court opposite Porth Neigr railway station was crowded. Terry Armfield, at whose instance the summonses had been issued, thought he had never seen such a set of pigjobbers as stood against the perspiring walls or sat with their chins on their outspread forearms, their caps in their hands or in the pockets of their corduroys. The two men who had put up the fences sat in the well of the Court. They were brothers, and their name was Kerr. The skylight shone on the baldish head of the elder of them, and both had given their evidence in a strong Lancashire accent. They had been watching on the sandhills, they said, expecting something of the sort, and knew that it had taken place at exactly ten o'clock, because they had both looked at their watches....
So "Dim Saesneg," said man after man; and the Squire could only make dots with his pen on the blotting-paper before him, keep his eyes from Terry Armfield, and call for an interpreter.
Now interpretation takes time, during which time the person with most to gain can be thinking of the tale he will tell next. So the prosecuting solicitor stood up before Dafydd Dafis, and this kind of thing began:
"Were you on this land at ten o'clock that night?"
("Oeddych chi ar y tir yma am ddeg o'r gloch y noson hono, Dafydd Dafis?" This from the interpreter.)
A rapid denial from Dafydd, not a hair of his shaggy moustache moving.
"Ask him where he was."
"Lle r'oeddych chi, Dafydd Dafis?"
The harpist, his fingers twisting his cap, answered that he had been at Pritchard's farm, and this also was translated.
"Have you any witnesses?"
("Oes genych chi dystion, Dafydd Dafis?")
"Eh?"
"Oes genych chi dystion?"
"R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden."
("He says he can call the son of the man who is building a house there, sir.") ...
And so it went on, hour after hour, with the English evidence likewise translated for the benefit of the defendants. At the end of the first day the case was adjourned, but it came on again on the morrow, and again on the day after that. It began to dam all other business. As a block in traffic causes an accumulation behind, so other cases began to collect—drunks, dog-licences, drivings without lights, and innumerable other petty disputes. There was no question that the fences had been burned; the only question was whether they had got hold of the right men. The Bench could not understand the obstinacy with which the two Lancashire witnesses persisted that the outrage had occurred at exactly ten o'clock.
"But mightn't it have been half-past ten, or eleven, or even half-past eleven?" they were asked again and again.
"Ah, it might," they admitted open-mindedly. "But it wasn't," they added unshakably.
Dafydd Dafis wanted to know what they said.
"Oh, translate it," the Squire sighed, and for the fortieth time it was translated.
"R'oeddwn efo John Willie Garden," said Dafydd once more....
And that was great glory for John Willie, for he was called, asked whether he knew the nature of an oath, was sworn, and raised a general laugh by varying the formula with which the Court was not so drearily familiar, and saying, in Welsh, "Dim Cymraeg." He stood to it that at ten o'clock Dafydd Dafis had been talking to him by Pritchard's manure-heap.
"Oh, for God's sake settle it or do something!" the Squire said impatiently to Terry Armfield, as he crossed the road to the Station Hotel for lunch. "You can't say I didn't warn you."
"I doubt whether my own witnesses would let me now," Terry replied. "They're as cranky in their way as your own Fenians. Besides, as I told you, I'm acting for others."
"Well, if I bind 'em over they'll only do it again," sighed the Squire.
Terry himself began to weary. After all, he had other things to mind than a piece of beggarly waste land dotted with Chapels that were a blasphemy of the name of beauty.
As the Squire ate his chop in the coffee-room, the two witnesses from Lancashire sat each on a tall stool in the sawdusted tap round the corner. Thick imperial pint glasses of mild ale stood on the counter before them. The elder and baldish one was a man of three or four and forty, a hard, handy little man, with a curious dip and slope about his right shoulder. This slight lopsidedness he had acquired during the years in which he had wandered North Wales buying and felling alders for clog-soles. Any time this last twenty years you might have come across him in his little canvas hut in the middle of a wood, with a pile of split alder-billets on one side of him which, plying his hinged knife on its solid base with marvellous dexterity, he shaped roughly into the clog-soles which he cast on a pile on his other side, while his brother felled. He would buy all the alders in a wood, at so much a foot over all; the rough-dressed soles went off to Manchester; and no doubt a good many of them found their way into Edward Garden's spinning-sheds. In the course of his travels he had picked up from the gentry and their stewards volumes of gossip of families and their vicissitudes, of wills, boundaries, timber-news, and customs and tenures rapidly becoming obsolete; and his coat, a brown check with wide pockets, had probably been made a dozen years before in Conduit Street. He wore a tie, but no collar. As the Court had assumed on its own responsibility that he spoke no Welsh, he had not considered it his business to correct the mistake, but had allowed them to translate for him also—perhaps for reasons not fundamentally different from those of Dafydd Dafis himself. He had half a week's stubble on his chin and thin upper lip; he spat with great accuracy; and he turned to humour things not generally accounted humorous, such as scaffold accidents, fights, and deaths from dropsy.
His brother, save that he wore a collar and no tie, was a younger edition of him.
They drank from the thick glasses in silence, and then the elder of them drew out a short clay pipe with a dottle in the bottom of the bowl, struck a match on the side of it, and lighted up. The dottle made a noise like frying. His brother also drew out his pipe, a clay shaped like a cowboy's head. He gave an indescribably short jerk of his head in the direction of the other's waistcoat pocket, then, when the stub of cake was thrown over to him, cut it with a knife with a curved blade. He stuffed these brains of black tobacco into the cowboy's head, and made another minute gesture. This was a request for a match. Then, bringing out sixpence from his pocket, he knocked once with the heavy glass on the counter.
"Two more cups o' tea," he said to the young woman who approached.
They smoked again in silence.
It was the elder brother who spoke first.
"I'm capped about them watches, an' right!" he mused.
The other took a pull at his beer, and replaced the cowboy pipe in his mouth.
"I cannot think th' bairn wor telling 'em lies," the elder one mused again.
"Gi'e me another match," said his brother.
The alder-buyer's wrinkled eyes were peering sideways at an auction announcement pinned to the wall. He shifted his feet in the legs of the tall stool. By and by he spoke again.
"Let's see. Let's study it out.... We com' home at tea-time that day, didn't we?"
"Ay."
"Then we went out into th' yard and washed we'rsens at th' bucket."
"Ay."
A pause, and then, the speaker's eyes on his hearer's face like two prickers:
"Did yet tak' your waistcoat off?"
"I cannot tell ye."
"I did mine. I threw it down on a chair i' t' kitchen."
This time the younger brother shifted his feet.
"Happen I did mine an' all."
"Wor your watch i' your pocket?"
"Ay, it wad be."
"So wor mine."
They drank thoughtfully and simultaneously, and again the silence fell.
Then, more slowly still, the elder Kerr resumed.
"D'ye remember a chap coming in, a thin chap, 'at spoke Welsh to t' Missis?"
"Ay."
"He com' to fetch a pair o' boots to mend."
"Ay."
"Think ye——" again the look as of prickers, "—think ye there wor owt?"
"How, owt?"
"'At he wanted to know what time it wor, or owt?"
"There wor t' clock."
"Ay...."
There were minutes of silence this time. Evidently the younger brother occupied them by taking, in thought, a considerable journey. He spoke as if in objection to some far-fetched surmise.
"But they'd ha' to be set forrard again," he grunted.
"Ay, I'm bothered wi' that," the elder admitted, "—wi'out t' Missis herself——"
"Aw!... Think ye?..."
They knocked for two more cups of tea.
"And we've been swearing to ten o'clock."
"So ye think there wor summat?"
"I cannot think t' lad wor telling 'em lies," said the alder-buyer.
This time they both peered reflectively at the auction announcement on the wall, smoking and spitting as they peered.
"Then," said Terry's Syndicate, or such of its members as lounged in Terry's office, looking down on the Lime Street and St. George's Hall pavements as if they had been so many fishermen selecting a likely spot for the casting of a fly, "what about going back to the old idea—coal?"
"Hm!——" (a very dubious "Hm!").—"Far better have another shot at manganese—especially after what's happened——"
What had happened had started remotely enough from Llanyglo. It had started, to be exact, in the Balkans. Much manganese comes from the Balkans; a war there had suddenly made the supply a mere trickle, so that prices had whooped up; and—wonder of wonders—those old workings of Squire Wynne's, farther along the coast, actually looked like paying. Terry's Company, unhappily, had just transferred its rights, and was rather sore about it.
"Wouldn't that be a little too—timely?" a timid member suggested.
"Not if you—er—put it properly. It's only thirty miles away——" The speaker paused from delicacy. "From the real manganese" was understood.
"Might send a geologist down—one we could trust——"
A very young member of the Syndicate hazarded a remark.—"But wouldn't burnt mine-works come dearer than burnt fences?"
They smiled indulgently at him. He was merely suffering from a slight confusion of ideas. Nobody had said anything about mine-works. Then they turned to Terry.
"What do you say, Armfield?" ...
It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been no further fence-burning, but the Member for the constituency had been memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom, and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood. Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft they would make.
"The whole thing looks like being a damned bad spec," the Syndicate grumbled.
That opinion seemed to be gaming strength.
There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a total loss.
Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo.
The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one, with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was this:
With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still awaiting its sixpence—with all this arrested as life and growth and motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming out of its chimney.
That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of theSixpenny Guidethe Squire's remark about invasionviâthe Mersey, told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.
"You know what the words mean," he said. "Strictly speaking, it's the summer-house—pavilion—shelter—of a night. The essentials are that it must be built on common land, and in a single night. Then they can't eject you. At least that's the idea. Don't ask me how it stands in Law. It may be a kind of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have no standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither here nor there. They have their notions about it, and those at any rate are immemorial. Look here: you're pottering about this country just now; just count how many houses you find with the name 'Hafod Unos.' You'll find quite a lot. There's a very big one Bangor way, that probably took some years to build, but probably one of these places was its foundation.... And a house 'within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak, means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. Cook your breakfast there, and—well, after that you're a sort of tolerated freeholder. It might be worth putting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a footnote, though, that the 'f' in 'hafod' is a 'v,' and 'unos' is pronounced 'innos.' ... Not at all; you're welcome to any help I can give you——"
Llanyglo, snugly in bed, had heard the sounds across the sandhills during the night, but they had been set down to the newest development of the fencing dispute. This development was that, a week or so before, several cartloads of undressed stone had been shot down by the side of the sandy gully that ran from Pritchard's gap down to the shore. And Llanyglo had smiled. Aha! They were going to build a walled enclosure, were they? Something that wouldn't burn, whatever? Well, well, if it amused them to build walls on winter nights when everybody else was warm in bed, they might. They would only lose their labour in the end. Mr. Tudor Williams, of Ponteglwys, was going to ask a question in the House of Commons, yes, and he was coming down to speak at the Chapel and to see for himself. It was a cold night for building walls, whatever——
So they stayed in bed, and only the revolving Trwyn light, two reds and a white, saw the planting of the thorn in Llanyglo's side.
The two Kerrs did not do it alone. It took four of them—"a Kerr to each corner," as Howell Gruffydd afterwards said. The two other brothers had been sent for from Ratchet, where one of them worked in an asbestos factory and the other was a builder's labourer; and if these imported ones lacked that spur of conviction that their watches had been tampered with by tricky Welshmen, they had another and a double incentive—the sense of family unity, and of the honour of the gradeliest county on earth, Lancashire. No Kerr, no lad from Lancashire whomsoever, could thole to be bested by a Welshman. Lancashire was the place for which Johnnie Briggs played cricket, the place where the Waterloo Cup Meeting was held. They danced in clogs there, clogs with soles of Welsh alder, and laaked at quoits and knurr and spell, and knew a bit about homing pigeons, not to speak of cocks, the game kind. They were lads, and right, in Lancashire.—Wales? Wales produced nothing but alders and oats and goats and Chapels.
The idea had been that of Ned, the eldest brother, and it was part of the miscellaneous general information he had picked up on his alder-prospecting through Merionethshire and Montgomery and Carnarvon and Denbigh and Flint. He had seen a way of convicting Llanyglo out of its own mouth. They threw down fences on the grounds that the land was common land; very well, if it was common, as they claimed, it was a proper site for a Hafod Unos. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander; and merely as a poke in the eye for watch-tinkering Welshmen, and a vindication of Lancashire's superior wit and malice, it would be worth a night's work to see their faces in the morning.
So to work in the dark the four brothers got.
They helped themselves to a modest slice of Llanyglo earth, plotted it out with stakes and string, and then began to dig. The night was moonless, and they worked by the light of four lanterns. These illumined little enough of the waste; the moving, straddling shadows they cast hardly began before they were lost in the darkness again. Knitting-needles of light came and went again on the polished handles of the rising and falling spades, and faintly, regularly, and as if a spirit passed high overhead in the night, the intermittent Trwyn beam swung—red, red, white—red, red, white——
They had not to dig deep; there is much volcanic rock under the Llanyglo sand; and they had not set up fences half a dozen times without having a notion where it was.
"Here we are," Harry, the builder's labourer grunted as his spade gave a clink and a jump in his hand. "I thowt it wadn't be far off.—Is t' barril there, Tommy?"
Across a mound of thrown-up sand one of the lanterns cast a short parabola of shadow. It was the shadow of a nine-gallon barrel of beer.
"Nay, we mun do a bit first," Tommy replied, spitting on his hands and driving in his spade again.
Their house already existed, complete in their practical heads, before ever a spade was lifted. They had seen through its entire anatomy in the taproom of the Station Hotel, with beer to solve all difficulties. Nothing was done twice, and brother did not get in brother's way. Even as Howell Gruffydd said, they took a corner of their plan apiece and dry-walled, all save Tommy, who went to and fro with a hand-cart, fetching stone, not too much at a time, because of the dead softness of the sand. For the general design Ned's word was law; for details, each used his own gumption. They worked and grunted, and worked and grunted, and worked. By the time Sirius appeared over faraway Delyn, and Orion balanced himself on Mynedd Mawr, they had a serviceable first course laid. Then they put on their coats again, for it was a bitter night and they perspired, and with a single blow Tommy neatly tapped the barrel. They drank, threw off their coats again, and set to work once more.
"Never heed that, Sam," Ned said once, seeing his brother elaborating the stark essential plan that had been agreed upon in the taproom of the Station Hotel. "T' corners, t' beams, and t' roof; we haven't time to paint it and put a pot o' geraniums i' t' window."
By one o'clock the lanterns showed four irregular angles of masonry, shoulder-high, as rough as you please, but true by plumb and level. This might be a joke against Llanyglo, but it was a workmanlike one. Only two of the brothers now walled, for they had only two ladders; Sam helped Tom to lift and carry beams.
By three o'clock only two of the beams were laid, but they were the principal ones, and Ned seemed well content.
"That's t' main o' t' work," he said, with satisfaction. "How's t' barril going on, Tom?"
"True by t' level yet," Tom replied. "Shall we start on th' bread and cheese?——"
"Did ye think on to bring some pickled onions?"
"Ay."
"Then we'll ha' we're nooning."
They took their nooning, with Sirius now over Mynedd Mawr, and Orion soaring like a kite. They took it at their leisure; they were "lads from a reight place," setting about a job as if they meant to finish it, not Welshmen matchboarding. A mountain of sand filled the space within their four corners, and they lay on their backs on it, smoking, and watching the red and white spokes of the light high over their heads, twenty-mile spokes, of a wheel that had no circumference but its sweep through the night. Now and then Sam gave a low chuckle; but Ned smoked, spat, and was silent, save that he said from time to time, "Did ye number and letter them chamfers, Harry?" or some similar question. You would have said they had a month before them. Certainly the Kerrs, when there was a surprise to be prepared for foreigners who meddled with their watches, were members one of another.
At half-past three they set to work again. By four Ned had climbed up above, and was sitting astride a beam with the light of a lantern shining up on his streaming face.
"Give us another inch, Sam," he grunted, "—a bit more—a bit more—whoa!Tom, that quoin—no, th' one wi' th' bolt—this is th' chimney end—and get them three strutts ready, accordinglie to th' letters.... How are ye down there, Harry?"
The mason brother was building the chimney. It was an outside one, massive as a buttress, and Harry was building it well and truly, for it was the essential of the house. Smoke must go up it before dawn, the hearth-smoke of civilised man, the lowly and secular and beautiful token that he has made himself an abiding-place on a spot of earth, and becomes part of that spot, and it part of him, so that to deracinate him is to thrust him back again into the bestial state and to make the land as desert as the sea. By all prognostication, Edward Garden's smoke should have been the first to add itself to that of the cluster of humble dwellings between the mountains and the waves that was Llanyglo; but of that lawn of lightsome blue that veils Llanyglo to-day the breakfast-smoke of the Kerrs was the fore-runner. At half-past four they were shovelling out the mountain of sand and making the hearth for it. By six Tommy had brought in the bundle of dry twigs and faggots he had carefully hidden away. Harry was filling in the space between the main beam and the transom of the door; when Tom asked him for a match he sprang down, and Ned and Sam also descended from the roof.
"What time is it?" Tom asked.
Ned gave a glance round, and smiled for the first time that night as he drew out his watch.
"Five past six," he said, and added, with indescribable dryness, "—unless som'b'dy's been meddling wi' my watch."
"Here goes," said Tommy, striking a match....
They exchanged glances that were near to winks as they watched the flames. It was their equivalent of a cheer.
The night paled; the Trwyn light went out; and off the headland a seal disported itself in the icy sea. The day stole across Delyn, but Mynedd Mawr still remained an awful precipice of ink—the shadow of the morning bank lay over him. Then came the first glitter on the waves, and, as if with light all other faculties awake, folk became conscious of the crowing of cocks and the falling of the breakers on the shore. Howell Gruffydd got up and began to rekindle his fire. A bolt was shot back at Pritchard's farm. Dafydd Dafis packed his breakfast in his tin and set out for his day's work—a little reslating of the roof of the Baptist Chapel.
But on his way across the sandhills he suddenly changed, not only his direction, but his gait also. He advanced cautiously, skirted certain mounds of sand that he did not remember to have seen before, and then as suddenly drew back. Then, instead of advancing again, he returned by a circuitous route, dropped into a sunken sandy way, and then ran as fast as his legs would carry him down to the cottages. There he thrust his head into Morgan's cottage and said something, and ran to the next one—or rather to the next but two, for Edward Garden's double cottage had been locked up since October. Then Howell Gruffydd came to his shop door, and Dafydd called him.
Five minutes later half Llanyglo was out on the sandhills staring through a gap at something that lay beyond.
It was an extraordinary house they saw, and then went round to the back to look at from another point of view. It appeared to consist of a living-room and a scullery, with a patch under the skeleton of a sort of penthouse at the back. It was not even on the land that had been fenced and unfenced and fenced again. Of roof it had none—for you could hardly call the three or four tarpaulins, that lifted as the wind got under them and were kept down by stones, a roof. Parts of the walls were solidly constructed; other parts had been battened up with hedgestakes, filled in with sods and peats, stuffed up with coats, anything. It had an old door that had been used somewhere else, and appeared to be propped up with stones. Over one window-opening hung an old brown coat, the other frame was empty. A bright glow shone on the rubble within, and smoke and sparks came merrily from the chimney. The fire crackled loudly, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking bacon. All about the cavity in the sand lay stones big and little, timbers, stakes, loops of rope. There was a hand-cart too, with its handle making a T in the air. A scraping sound was heard, as of somebody cleaning out a pan, and then came a low "Wouf" and flare of fat in the chimney. Then somebody spoke.
"Squeeze t' barril, Tom, and see if there's another cup o' tea."
"Nay, we've supped t' lot."
"Blow down t' vent-hole...."
As if those walls vanished again even more quickly than they had sprung up, Llanyglo could see a picture vividly in its fancy—a picture of a tilted barrel, with the cheeks of one man distended over the spigot-hole while another caught a muddy trickle in a thick glass——
Then their vision fled, and they were staring at that unimaginable house again——
Slowly, and without a word, they moved off through the soft sand in the direction of the Baptist Chapel.