The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMushroom TownThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Mushroom TownAuthor: Oliver OnionsRelease date: April 19, 2012 [eBook #39482]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MUSHROOM TOWN ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Mushroom TownAuthor: Oliver OnionsRelease date: April 19, 2012 [eBook #39482]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Title: Mushroom Town
Author: Oliver Onions
Author: Oliver Onions
Release date: April 19, 2012 [eBook #39482]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MUSHROOM TOWN ***
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANYNEW YORK
Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton
Copyright, 1914,By George H. Doran Company
In the following pages I have permitted myself to take a number of liberties—geographical, historical, etymological, and even geological—with a country for which I have conceived a strong affection; I trust I have taken none with its beauty nor with its hospitality. It will be useless to search for Llanyglo on any map. It is neither in North Carnarvonshire, in Merioneth, nor in Lleyn. Of certain features of existing places I have made a composite, which is the"Mushroom Town"of this book.
The kindnesses I have received in Wales during the past six years have been innumerable; indeed, much of my work has consisted of writing down (and not always improving) things told me by one of my hosts. For this and other reasons I should like to render him such acknowledgment as a Dedication may express."Mushroom Town"is therefore inscribed, in gratitude and affection, to
ARTHUR ASHLEY RUCK
Hampstead, 1914
"We'll take the little cable-tram, if you like, but it's not far to walk—twenty minutes or so—the Trwyn's seven hundred feet high. You'll see the whole of the town from the top. The sun will have made the grass a little slippery, but there are paths everywhere; the sheep began them, and then the visitors wore them bare. And we shall get the breeze....
"There you are: Llanyglo. You see it from up here almost as the gulls and razorbills see it. The bay's a fine curve, isn't it?—rather like a strongly blown kite-string; and the Promenade's nearly two miles long. But as you see, the town doesn't go very far back. From the Imperial there to the railway station and the gasometers at the back isn't much more than half a mile; the town seems to press down to the front just as the horses draw the bathing-vans down to the tide. Shall we sit down? Here's a boulder. It's chipped all over with initials, of course; so are the benches, and even the turf; but you'd wonder that there was a bit of wood or stone or turf left at all if you saw the crowds that come here when the Wakes are on. It's odd that you should never see anybody actually cutting them. Some of them must have taken an hour or two with a hammer and chisel, but I've been up here countless times and never seen anybody at it yet.
"Yes, that's Llanyglo; but look at the mountains first. This isn't the best time of the day for seeing them; the morning or the evening's the best time; the sun isn't far enough round yet. But sometimes, when the light's just right, they start out into folds and wrinkles almost as quickly as you could snap your fingers—it's quite dramatic. Foels and Moels and Pens and Mynedds, look—half the North Cambrian Range. You couldn't have a better centre for motor-cycle and char-à-banc tours than Llanyglo.... Then on the other side's the sea. That's only a tinny sort of glitter just now, but you should see the moon rise over it. People come out from the concerts on the pier-head just to have a look....
"The Pier looks tiny from up here? Yes, but it's three furlongs long for all that, and those two tart-tin-looking things at the end hold nearly a thousand people apiece. But, as you say, it is rather like one of those children's toy railways they sell on the stalls in Gardd Street for sixpence-halfpenny. And that always strikes me as rather a curious thing about Llanyglo. It's a big place now—nine thousand winter population; but somehow it has a smaller look than it had when it was just a score of cottages, all put together not much bigger than the Kursaal Gardens there. I don't know why the cottages should have seemed more in scale with the mountains than all this, but they did. I suppose it was because they didn't set up for anything, like the Kursaal and the Majestic and the Imperial.... But it doesn't do to tell the Llanyglo folk that. They look at it in quite another way. To them the sea and the mountains are so many adjuncts, something they can turn into money by dipping people at sixpence a time and motoring them round at four-and-sixpence the tour.... And sometimes you can't help thinking that it wouldn't take very much (a wind a bit stronger than usual or an extra heave of the sea, say) and all these hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of stone and iron and paint and gilding would just disappear—be sponged out like the castles and hoof-marks on the sands when the tide comes in—or like a made-up face when you wipe the carmine and pencilling from it.... Eh?—No, I'm not saying they've spoiled the place—nor yet that they haven't. You mustn't come here if you want a couple of miles of beach to yourself. It all depends how you look at it. If Llanyglo's cheapjack in one way, perhaps it isn't in another. It's merely that I remember it as it used to be....
"Would it surprise you to learn that the whole place is only about thirty years old? That's all. It grew like a mushroom; there are people who were born here who don't know their way about their own town.... Mostly Welsh? Oh dear no, not by any means. I should say about half-and-half. I suppose you're thinking of the Welsh names of the streets? They don't mean very much. There's Gardd Street, for instance; 'gardd' is only the Welsh for 'garden,' and Edward Garden, John Willie Garden's father, built the greater part of it (for that matter, he built the greater part of Llanyglo). And if anybody called Wood (say) had put up a house here, he'd probably have called it 'Ty Coed.' And some of it, of course, is genuine Welsh. The Porth Neigr Road does go to Porth Neigr, and Sarn, over there, has always been Sarn. But people think they're getting better value for their money if they come away for a fortnight and see foreign names everywhere; they've a travelled sort of feeling; so they give the streets these names, and print all the placards in two columns, with 'Rhybudd' on one side and 'Notice' on the other.
"And that's given rise to one rather amusing little mistake. As you know, this headland that we're on is called the Trwyn, and 'trwyn' simply means a nose or a promontory. But over past the Lighthouse there, there are the remains of an old Dinas, a British camp, and half these Lancashire trippers think the headland's called after that—'t'ruin'—'th' ruin'—you know how they talk....
"I'm interested in the place for several reasons (not money ones, I'm sorry to say). For one thing, I like to watch the Welsh and Lancashire folk together; that's been very amusing. And then, it's not often you get the chance of seeing a whole development quite so concisely epitomised as we've had it here. Llanyglo started from practically nothing, and it's grown to this before John Willie Garden has a single grey hair on his head (though, to be sure, that cowslip colour doesn't show grey very much). Then there's that curious essence—I don't know what you call it—the thing a town would still keep even though you cleared every brick away and built it all over again, and sent every inhabitant packing and re-peopled it. There's a field for speculation there, too, though perhaps not a very profitable one. But most of all I've been interested in seeing what various sets of people have given Llanyglo, and what it's given to them in return—how the stones and the people have taken colour from one another, if you understand me, and what colour—in fact (if it doesn't sound a little pompous) in Llanyglo as an expression of the life of our time. It's sometimes hard to believe that something almost human hasn't got into its stone and paint and mortar. The whole place, as it's spread out down there now—two-mile line of front, houses, hotels, railway, gasometers and all—has had almost a personal birth, and adolescence, and growing-pains, and sown its wild oats, and has its things that it tells and its things that it doesn't tell, in an extraordinary way—or else, as I say, it seems extraordinary, because you get it all into a single focus. There may even be a bit of me in Llanyglo. If you came half a dozen times there'd be a bit of you too.
"I should like you to meet John Willie Garden. He's the man to go to if you want to know anything about these streets and hotels and the seaside and the stations on the front. Why not come to the Kursaal, on the Terrace, at about nine to-night?—Good. He's a capital chap; a Something or other on the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, adopted Conservative Free Trade candidate for his division (but a Protectionist in other countries) and probably worth a quarter of a million, a good deal of it out of Llanyglo. Not bad for a little turned forty, eh? He'll probably ask you to dinner. You can't see his house from here; it stands back from Gardd Street. It was the first house to go up in Llanyglo—no, I'm forgetting. There was one before it—just one before it, not counting the original cottages, of course....
"What do you say to a turn? We've time to have a look at the Dinas before we go down....
"It's British, and theSixpenny Guidewill tell you all that's known about it—possibly more. Its foundations are said to have been sprinkled with the blood of Merlin. What's left of it's certainly sprinkled with these everlasting initials. The Trwyn Light's just behind, two reds and a white, and they're experimenting with the Rocket Apparatus, but I don't think that will come to much.—There's little Porth Neigr, look—and that point thirty miles away's Abercelyn....
"Now the mountains are beginning to show; there they are—Delyn on the left, then Moel Eryr, then Mynedd Mawr. That's Penyffestyn, with the great cavity in his side, and his shadow's right across Bwlch.... Yes, very fine, and a perfect evening for it. The posters at Euston don't overstate it, do they? Of course, you've seen that very familiar one, of a Welsh Giantess, shawl, apron, steeple hat and all the lot, holding a view of Llanyglo in her arms? Pink hotels, indigo mountains and chrome-yellow sands....
"There's theQueen of the Waterscoming in. If we wait a few minutes longer we shall see the town light up. Yes, electricity; the power-station was finished only last year; it's over there beyond the filter-beds; Llanyglo handles its own sewage.... Ah! There goes the Promenade lights; three jumps, and the two miles are lighted up from end to end; the kite-string's a necklace now; pretty, isn't it?... And there goes the Pier.... There'll be a glare behind us like a shout of light in a moment—the Trwyn Light....
"The mountains are dark now, but how the day lingers on the sea! To-night it's like ribbon-grass.... Hear the post-horns? Those are the chars-à-bancs coming in. The last tripper's running for the station now.... Now the light's dying on the sea; it's a new moon and a spring tide. Two or three riding-lights only—I say, it's solemn out there.... But they'll be dining at the Majestic presently. That long golden haze is Gardd Street, and that spangle at the end of it's the New Bazaar. There goes the Big Wheel in the Kursaal Gardens, with its advertisement on it. We might look in at the Dancing Hall to-night; that's rather a sight. They have firework displays in the grounds, too, and last year there was one out in the bay; they put bombs and flares and serpents on rafts, and laid them from boats, like mines. That was in honour of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales....
"We'd better take the tram down, I think; we might stumble and break our necks....
"The other turnstile.—That kiosk place? That's the visitors' bureau. They'll tell you quite a number of useful things there—cab fares, porters' charges, time and tide tables, excursions and so on; but John Willie Garden can tell you more interesting things than those. Don't forget you're to meet him to-night....
"You're sure you can't dine with me? Very well. The Kursaal, then, on the Terrace, at a quarter to nine...."
On a Friday afternoon in the June of the year 1880, a roomy old shandrydan, midway between a trap and a wagonette, moved slowly along the Porth Neigr and Llanyglo road. It had been built as a pair-horse vehicle for Squire Wynne, of Plas Neigr, but the door at the back of it now bore the words, "Royal Hotel, Porth Neigr," and its present or some intermediate owner had converted it to the use of a single horse. The shaky-kneed old brown animal at present between the shafts might have had a spirit-level inside him, so unerringly did he become aware when the road departed by as much as a fraction from the true horizontal. Taking the good with the bad, he was doing a fair five miles an hour. At each of its revolutions the off hind-wheel gave a dry squeak like a pair of boots that has not been paid for.
The day was warm, and hay was cutting. Combings of hay striped the hedges where the carts had passed, and as the Royal Hotel conveyance was so wide that it had to draw in in order to allow anything else to pass it, wisps had lodged also in the cords of the great pile of boxes and brown tin trunks that occupied the forward part of it. Honeysuckle tangled the hedge-tops; the wild roses were out below; and in the ditches the paler scabious was of the colour of the sky, the deeper that of the mountains towards which the old horse lazily clop-clopped.
The pile of trunks in front hid the driver and the two print-skirted and black-jacketed young women who sat beside him from those inside the vehicle. These two young women were two of Mrs. Garden's domestics, and they travelled far more comfortably than did their mistress. Packed up by her bustle behind, on her right by her seven-years-old daughter who slept with her head on her shoulders, on her left by the angle of the trap, and in front by the hamper, the three or four straw basses, the cardboard boxes, the hold-all of sticks and umbrellas, with a travelling-rug thrown in (all of which articles she strove to balance on her short, steep lap), she could only perspire. Her husband, who sat opposite, could see no more of her than the top of her hen's-tail, lavender bonnet. Even this he shut out when he took up, now his newspaper (every line of which he had read twice), and now his daughter'sLittle Folks(for the inspection of which periodical, though the print was much bigger than that of the newspaper, he put on his gold-rimmed glasses). The smell of his excellent cigar mingled with the scents of the roses and hay, and trailed like an invisible wake a hundred yards behind.
John Willie Garden, who was eleven, had travelled half the distance from Porth Neigr on the step of the trap. During the rest of the time, now falling behind and now running on ahead, now up a campion-grown bank and again lying down flat to drink at a brook, he had covered as much distance as a dog that is taken out for a walk. He wore a navy blue jersey, which, when peeled off over his head, had the double effect of wiping his short nose and causing his shock of gilded hair to stand up like flames, all in one movement. He carried a catapult in one hand. Both pockets of his moleskin knickers bulged with ammunition for this engine. In the heat of a catapult action, against hens or windows, he used his mouth as a magazine, discharging and loading again with great dexterity.—But, a mile or so back, his father, looking up over his paper, had called the Cease Firing. John Willie now plipped the catapult furtively, and without pebble. It was the chief drawback of the holiday from his point of view that it had to be taken in the company of his father. Among his brighter hopes was that Mr. Garden, having seen them installed, would return to Manchester on the Monday.
Mr. Garden was head of the firm of Garden, Scharf and Garden, spinners, and, to judge from his attire, he might have stepped straight from the exchange. His square-crowned billycock hat, buttoned-up pepper-and-salt grey suit, and crossover bird's-eye tie with the pebble pin in it, were at odds with the slumbrous lanes and the scabious-blue mountains. He carried a wooden-sticked, horn-handled umbrella, wrapped in a protecting sheath, and from his heavy gold watch-chain depended a cluster of little silver emblems that he would not have exchanged for as many Balas rubies. All Manchester knew that he could have given up the dogcart in which he drove daily to business, and set up a carriage and a pair of horses in its stead, any day it had pleased him; and his opinions and judgments, when he saw fit to utter them, were quoted. But he rarely uttered them. When asked for his advice, say upon a letter, he would adjust his glasses, read the letter slowly through, turn back and read it all over again more slowly still, and then, when the person in difficulties was awaiting the weighty pronouncement, would look through the letter rapidly a third time, and at last, glancing over the top of his glasses, would mildly observe, "This seems to be a letter." Sometimes he would come to the very verge of committing himself by adding, "From So-and-So." The grey eyes that looked over those gold rims were remarkable. They seemed to serve less as appreciative organs of immediate vision than as passers-on of an infinite number of visual data, which would be accepted or rejected or laid for the present aside by some piece of mechanism hidden behind. He was forty-four, clean shaven, save for a pair of small mutton-chop whiskers already turning grey, darkish and rather delicate-looking, and only half the size of his stout, blonde wife. As long as Free Trade remained untouched, he had no politics, and he was an adherent of the lower forms of the Established Church. He was taking this journey on his daughter Minetta's account, who was not doing so well as she ought to be. He had bought a couple of the Llanyglo cottages, and judged that by this time they must be ready for occupation.
The mountains drew nearer, and other pale colours began to show through the scabious blue. The pile of luggage continued to brush the hedges, and the off wheel to creak. Minetta snored lightly as she slept, and the black legs that issued from her pink check frock, trimmed with crimson braid, swung slackly with every jolt of the cart. Mrs. Garden's face glistened; Mr. Garden allowedLittle Folksto fall from his hand, and dozed; John Willie sought birds' nests and rabbits; and the old horse continued to change from lumpish trot to slow walk and from slow walk to lumpish trot, as if he had had a spirit-level inside him.
After this fashion the Gardens jogged along the lanes where to-day the summer dust never settles for touring-cars, motor-cycles and the Llanyglo motor chars-à-bancs.
"John Willie!"
It was five o'clock, and they had arrived. Leaving the cluster of three or four farms that formed the land-ward part of Llanyglo, they had turned through a gateless gap in a thymy earth-wall, and all save Mrs. Garden and Minetta had descended. The cart-track had become less and less distinct, and had finally lost itself altogether in deep, sandy drifts in which their approach made no noise. There was a fresher feel in the air.
And then, through a V in the sandhills, the sea had appeared, and the lazy crash of a breaker had been heard.
The irregular row of thatched cottages was set perhaps a hundred yards back from high-water mark, and the intervening space was a waste of sand, coarse tussocks, and the glaucous blue sea-holly. Half-overblown rubbish strewed the beach—rusty tin pans and kettles, old kedge anchors, corks, a mass of potato-parings in which three or four hens scratched, and the skeletons of a couple of disused boats. The half-dozen serviceable boats were gathered a couple of hundred yards away about a short wooden jetty. A mile away in the other direction rose the Trwyn, bronze with sunny heather and purple with airy shadow, with the lighthouse and the Dinas on the top. A small herd of black cattle had wandered slowly out to it, and was wandering slowly back again at the edge of the tide.
"John Willie!"
The cottages were thatched and claywashed, and while some of them had a couple of strides of garden in front, others rose from little taluses of blown sand. Sand was everywhere. It lodged in the crevices, took the paint off the doors, and had blunted the angles of posts and palings until they were as smooth and rounded as the two or three ships' figure-heads that stood within them. Grey old oars leaned up in corners; umber nets, with cork floats like dangling fruit upon them, hung from hooks in the walls; and the squat chimneys had flat stones on the tops of them. The windows were provided with swing-back wooden shutters. Between the farming part and the fishing part of Llanyglo the family had passed three chapels.
"John Willie!"
Mrs. Garden had descended, and stood over her neat boot-tops in sand, wondering which of her cramped members it would be best to try to straighten first. Standing by her only half awake, Minetta rubbed her eyes. At a respectful distance, but a convenient nearness, half a dozen barefooted children described as it were rainbow-curves in the air with their hands from the foreheads downwards, and a little further away the maritime population of Llanyglo watched the Royal Hotel driver struggle with the luggage. They did not stand off from hostility, but from an excess of delicacy. Then, as a heavy trunk slipped and stuck, a young man with braces over his gansey gave a quick smile, started forward, and bore a hand.
"John—Willie!"
It was Mr. Garden who called. He had put his key into the door of the cottage where the house-leek grew like a turkey's neck on the claywashed gate-post, and he wanted John Willie to help carry in the smaller parcels. Now John Willie was neither deaf, nor did he feign deafness, but he had a fine sense of the defensive uses of stupidity. Question him directly (say about those apples or that broken window-pane), and he knew nothing whatever. Question him further, and he knew less than nothing. You might conceivably have questioned him to the extreme point when his unadmitting blue eyes would have said, as plain as speech, "What is an apple?" His primrose head could be seen at this moment fifty yards away down the beach. He was watching a fisherman scrape hooks with an old clasp-knife. He had just spoken to the man. "Dim Saesneg," the man had replied. John Willie was now watching him, not as a man who scraped hooks, but as the possessor of a new and admirable defence against questions.
"John Wil——"
But this time the summons was broken in two on Mr. Garden's lips. He had opened the cottage door, and was looking mildly within.
The orders he had given for the preparation of the double cottage for his wife and children had included the lining of the interior with match-boarding, and he had understood that this had been finished a week and more ago. It was a month since he had had the advice-note from the timber merchant at Porth Neigr that the material had been delivered. And so it had. There it was. There, too, were the walls. But the matchboarding was not on the walls. It lay, tongued and grooved, with the scantling for fixing it, just where the timber merchant's men had deposited it—on the floor. It filled half the place. On the top of it, still in the sacking in which they had been sewn, were the articles of furniture that had been brought from Mr. Garden's Manchester attics and lumber-rooms. The rest of the furniture he had taken over from the previous tenants, whom some vicissitude of fortune had taken far away to South Wales.
Mr. Garden removed his glasses, wiped them, replaced them, and then, looking over the top of them, spoke:
"Where's Dafydd Dafis?" he said.
But a cry from his wife, who had come up behind him, interrupted him. She fell back again, not mildly, but in consternation.
"Nay, nay, Edward!—I never——" she gasped.
"Where's Dafydd Dafis?" Mr. Garden asked again.
"Of all the sights! If it isn't enough to—I thought you told me——"
Mr. Garden blew his nose and slowly put his handkerchief away again.
"Does anybody know where Dafydd Dafis is?"
"—and us fit to drop for a cup of tea!" Mrs. Garden continued. "Up since five this morning, and come all that way, and not so much as a fire lighted nor a kettle on to boil——"
Mr. Garden was looking about him again, as if he would have said, "These appear to be boards," when suddenly his wife broke energetically in.
"Well, it's no good standing looking at it; we must all turn to, that's all.—Jane! Ellen!—Off with them jackets, and one of you make a fire while the other unpacks the groceries. The tea and things are in that box under the shawls—and to think we might have come in wet, and not even a winter-hedge to dry our things on!—There's no wood, you say? Wood enough, marry! I can see nothing else!—And the tea isn't there? Then run out and buy a quarter of a pound to be going on with; I won't have everything unpacked now, not in the middle of this joiner's shop!—Tell her where the grocer's is, Edward——"
And she threw off her lavender dolman and bonnet, and bustled about, like the capable creature she was, as ready to turn to as if she had never had a day's help in her life.
A little girl stood at the door, still describing rainbows from her forehead; but scarce had Ellen asked her where the grocer's was when there came up at a half run Howell Gruffydd himself, the keeper of the single shop of the place. He was in his shirt-sleeves, wore an old bowler hat, and wiped his hands on the coarse, white apron about his middle. Over his glasses Edward Garden watched his approach, but he did not speak. It was not anger that kept him silent. Already he had acceptedfait accompli—or in this caseinaccompli. Howell Gruffydd broke into sunny smiles of welcome.
"How d'you do, Mr. Garden? So you have arrived? How d'you do, madam? How d'you do, miss? You had a pless-sant journey?"
He beamed on each of them, and then beamed on them again.
"Do you know where Dafydd Dafis is?" Mr. Garden asked once more.
"Indeed I do not, Mr. Garden. Perhaps he maake fenss for Squire Wynne. Perhaps he fiss."
Then Howell Gruffydd's eyes fell on the boards as if he had not noticed them before. He gave a heartfelt "Aw-w-w!"
"It is not finiss! Dear me, dear me! Hwhat a pitt-ty!" Then he became cheerfully explanatory. "That will be old Mrs. Pritchard—Dafydd Dafis he that fond of her as if she wass his own fless and blood. She iss nine-ty, and for two weeks they have prayers for her in the chap-pil, and Doctor Williams, he come from Porth Neigr, and that is five s'illing, but the pains in her body was soa bad she not know hwhat to dooa!—And it was good fiss-ing these three weeks and more—and the man who bring the boards, he say they well season, but it do them no harm to wait a little while longer——"
Mr. Garden's eyes were still looking over his glasses.
"Then is he going to let them season for ever?" he said.
Howell Gruffydd smiled soothingly.—"Naw-w-w! Not for ev-er, Mr. Garden!"
"It's a good job he hasn't got to get his living in Manchester," Mr. Garden observed.
At that Howell Gruffydd clasped his hands, as if he congratulated himself that an interesting rumour was confirmed.
"Indeed, now," he said, "they do say that the pip-ple there is not the same as the pip-ple here!"
At this point Mrs. Garden's voice was raised. She was on her knees by the boxes, and could not find the sugar for tea. At the word "tea," Howell Gruffydd broke out with eager hospitality.
"Indeed it is cup of tea I came about," he said. "I say to Mrs. Gruffydd, 'They come all this way,' I say, 'and they will be want-ting cup of tea whatever.' It is all ready ... Eesaac Oliver!"—he called from the doorway—"run to your mother, and say we be there in one minnit! And do not answer me in Welss when there are pip-ple who do not understand it—where are your manners, indeed!" He turned to the new-comers again. "You s'all have cup of tea whatever, Mrs. Garden—it cost you noth-thing—and the young gentleman, he is down at the boats, but Eesaac Oliver s'all fetch him—come on——"
Howell Gruffydd, the grocer, speaks rather better English to-day than he spoke then, but there is no more quickness and keenness in his black-lashed light-blue eyes, and no more persuasiveness in his purring voice. To the half-unpacked boxes of provisions on the floor he did not drop an eye. He led the way past half a dozen cottages to the little shop with showcards and paper packages in the diminutive window. He showed them in and round the counter, lifting the old curtain that shut off the parlour from the public part of the shop. Blodwen, his wife, in a clean apron that showed the knife-edged creases of its ironing, was curtsying as if she did not know how to stop. The parlour communicated with the inner side of the counter, and behind the counter, on the left, was the window. Bottles and canisters stood on the shelves, and below them were innumerable small drawers. The fire-place had a high mantelpiece with countless china objects upon it, and a large dresser with blue and white plates stood against the inner wall. Next to the dresser was a tall clock, with a ship sailing round the world on the dial. A gigantic black turnip of a kettle sent out a cloud of steam; cranpogs were keeping hot in a dish within the fender; and near them an enormous marmalade-coloured cat slept. The room smelt of pepper and soap and pickles and cheese, and Howell Gruffydd's guests filled it. He helped his wife to wait upon them, and in the intervals attended to the shop. A little girl came in for a pennyworth of bicarbonate of soda, and Howell, returning from serving her, again showed his white, but false, teeth.
"It maake the tea last longer," he said, with a jerk of his head; "but there is no bi——" he smiled again apologetically, though he was perfectly well able to pronounce the word, "—there is none of that in this tea, Mrs. Garden. It is not tea like the fine pip-ple in Manchester drink, but we are simple pip-ple here. Blodwen, the cranpogs; make a good tea, Mr. Garden; indeed, you eat noth-thing; tut, tut, they taake up no room!—You say what is that, young gentleman? That is a Welss Bible. Aha, you cannot read that! Nor you cannot say, 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychyndrobwlantysiligogogoch!'—You try? I say it slowly——"
Though Howell had repeated the jaw-breaker twenty times, John Willie Garden would still have maintained the silence of defence.
"Ha, ha, ha! It is easy!... Well, I ask you riddle instead.—There was a young gentleman, and he have eight"—he held up his fingers—"eight—sisters. And every one of them has a brother. Now you tell me how many brothers and sisters there are!" He winked, but respectfully, at Mr. Garden.
"Nine," said John Willie Garden contemptuously, with his mouth full of cranpogs and jam.
Howell showed no discomfiture. He laughed.
"Ha, ha, ha! He say nine! I ask him again.—There was a young gentleman ... but, dear me, there is the s'op again! We must earn our living, all of us. Business before pleas-sure—it is a good rule——"
And he squeezed through to the counter again, while his wife boiled more eggs and spiked the cranpogs on a fork, five at a time.
After tea Mrs. Garden was seen to be pulling up her skirt and to be feeling for her pocket in the folds of her petticoat; but with an imperceptible gesture her husband restrained her. He thanked Gruffydds, and they returned to their own cottage, Eesaac Oliver accompanying them to help to pile up the matchboards and to take the furniture from its sacking. The cottage was much like the other cottages of the place. Its ceiling consisted of tacked-up sheets, inside which spiders and dust and sand whispered and the wind rippled. The black mantelpiece had brass candlesticks and china ornaments, and on one side of the tall clock was a grocer's almanac-portrait of Mr. Gladstone, while on the other was one of Dr. Rees, the President of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. A sampler, rather difficult to see in the bad light, hung immediately within the door, and the window opened six inches, in which position it had to be propped with a short stick. There were geraniums on its sill, and a red sausage filled with sand kept out the draught when it was closed. The outer door of the second cottage was to be permanently fastened up when the match-boarding should be finished. The cottages adjoining belonged to fishermen, the one with a wife and children, the other a widower who kept his departed wife in mind by means of a number of framed and glazed cenotaphs, consisting of a black ground with white angels mourning over a tombstone, and, above, the words, "Er Serchog Cof——"
This was Llanyglo when Minetta Garden was first brought there for the benefit of her health. The authors of the Itineraries had not thought it worth mentioning; Wyndham has nothing to say about it, Skrine did not visit it, Pennant passes it by. But you may find an excellent steel engraving of it, by Copley Fielding, full of accomplishment, elegance and taste, and published by the London Art Union. If Minetta did well there, it was Edward Garden's intention, so far as Edward Garden's intentions were ever known, to let or sell his cottage and to build a more convenient house of his own. There was stone to be had in abundance within three or four miles. Mutton was plentiful and delicious, beef not quite so plentiful nor quite so good. The larger grocery supplies could be sent direct from Manchester, the odds and ends purchased from Howell Gruffydd. Water was to fetch only a hundred yards, and lamp oil, etc., came twice a week in the cart from Porth Neigr. And soon—Edward Garden did not know yet, and if he did not know you may be sure nobody else did—Porth Neigr might be brought nearer to the rest of the world than ten miles' journey by road. For, besides being a spinner and a good many other things, Edward Garden was a Director of the Ratchet and Rawtonstall Railway, and, as is the compliment between railway and railway, those little silver trinkets that dangled from his gold watch-chain—little greyhounds and locomotives, winged orbs and other emblems of speed—were the tokens of his freedom at all times over other lines, and of his personal intimacy with men who open up land, not a field at a time with a plough, but by running a sinew of steel through it, with a nerve alongside that, touched at any point, quickens and thrills throughout its length.
Nevertheless, it is quite true that he came to Llanyglo first of all for the benefit of his daughter's health.
At bottom, neither the good fishing nor the illness of ancient Mrs. Pritchard had been the real cause of Dafydd Dafis's procrastination in the matter of the match-boarding—any more than those greased cartridges were the real cause of the Mutiny. He was merely vindicating the claims of a temperament that kept him, and would always keep him, poor, yet a power. He was a day-labourer, whom anybody could hire to build a wall, mend a thatch or caulk a boat; but—and this was the secret of his influence—he had a harp in his cottage. In a glorious baritone voice he sangMentra Gwen,Y Deryn Pur, and lorn songs of love and wild songs of battle. More than that, he sangpenillion; and aspenillion—which is an extempore form of song into which you may plunge at any point you please, provided you finish pat and triumphant with the double bar—aspenillionconcerns itself mainly with two themes, namely, the loved mountains and lakes of Cambria, and quick and topical inventions of personal gossip, Dafydd Dafis held his hearers both by their deeper sentiments and their lighter foibles. He was a spare and roughly clad man of thirty, unmarried, with a kindling eye, a handsome nose, and a ragged dark moustache; and when his head was bowed by the side of his harp, all the life of him seemed to run out into the lean and roughened fingers on the strings.
He came to see Edward Garden about that match-boarding on the Saturday morning, bringing a youth of eighteen with him. Edward Garden, who had had experience of the Welsh in Liverpool, which is the capital of Wales, received him with resignation. Fair and softly goes far in a day, and he knew that the luxury of chiding the bard of Llanyglo would prove a dear one did Mrs. Garden find her egg supply suddenly fail and the Llanyglo cows mysteriously cease to yield milk.
His forbearance was rewarded. Before he departed for Manchester on the Monday morning he had the satisfaction of seeing Dafydd Dafis and the youth actually begin the job. No doubt it would be finished by the time divinely appointed for its finishing.
But whether Dafydd Dafis sang much as he worked, or worked a little as he sang, remained an open question.
Now in whatever other respects Llanyglo may have changed, its air then was the same air that the Guide Book so justly praises to-day. Minetta felt the benefit of it at once. During her illness she had had her dark hair close-cropped; for fear of taking cold, she still wore a red "pirate" cap, that is, a cone of knitted wool with a bob at the peak that fell on one side of her head: and for the same reason she wore black stockings pulled well up over the bamboo-like joints of her bony knees. She was a slight, dark pixy of a child, on whom so much care had been expended that she had begun to care for herself and to talk wisely about draughts and wet feet; and sometimes she consoled herself for the loss of her hair by repeating her mother's assurance, that it would grow the more strongly afterwards.
But within a fortnight of the Gardens' settling at Llanyglo there was no further thought of taking her back home until the cold weather should come. Her doll's-house and paint-box were sent for. Her health continued to improve. By and by she was to be found squatted down by the sand-blown palings, surrounded by the Llanyglo children, keeping a shop, of which the commodities were shells, pebbles, starfish and the like. Her dolls and their house were neglected. But the other little girls, who had seen these wonders once, sometimes lingered wistfully about Mrs. Garden's door, looking within, and whispering, "There it is, Gwladys—see, by the cloch——"
Long before the match-boarding of a single room was completed, John Willie Garden, whom at first his mother had not been able to drive out of doors, had lost interest in Dafydd Dafis, his sawing, his hammering, and his songs. He disappeared by the half-day together. It was a holiday time at the school by the Baptist Chapel, and, with Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd and other youngsters as his companions, he scrambled among the rocks at the base of the Trwyn, or climbed the headland itself, or digged for bait, or went out in the boats, or fished for crabs with split mussels off the jetty end (he stuffed his catch up underneath his blue jersey, where the animals crawled about on his friendly and naked skin). The rainbow curves of the children ceased when he or Minetta appeared, but they continued as a salute to Mrs. Garden. The weather continued superb: it rained scarcely at all. The mountains were never for two hours the same; the sea in the evenings was mother-of-pearl; and the rising moon seemed to stand up on it, like the lateen of a felucca of gold.
Mrs. Garden sent to Manchester for her tricycle.
Then the school by the Baptist Chapel re-opened, and for some days John Willie, hanging idly about and listening to the droning within, was undecided whether to give the insulting cry of liberty or to lament that he was left to his own devices. He himself would not have to go back to school till the middle of September. Then he still further enlarged his circle of acquaintance. He attached himself to a farmer's lad, who shot rabbits of an evening among the sandhills, and, after being allowed to fire the gun, gave his catapult away to a "kid." July passed. The match-boarding progressed by fits and starts. It was now Minetta who impeded its progress. Dafydd Dafis loved her as if she had been his own child, and told her stories of dragons and knights and enchantments and fairies, and sangMentra Gwento her, all by the hour together, careless whether Edward Garden paid him for those same hours or not.
With the passing of August, Llanyglo had made far more difference to the Gardens than the Gardens had to Llanyglo. Indeed, Llanyglo looked like absorbing them altogether, as animals not ultimately capable of domestication are sucked back into the feral state. In the matter of dress, for example, they had deteriorated alarmingly. Half his days John Willie spent in and out of the water without a stitch on him, and he no longer had a pair of sand-shoes to his name.—And Minetta? First she lost the bob from the peak of her red "pirate" cap, and then the cap itself was cast aside. From careful nightly brushings of her "new" pleated navy-blue frock with the white braid, she allowed the pleats to get full of sand, and, where the prints of her ribbed soles had been, now her bare feet patterned the beach. Her bamboo legs were brown as seaweed and barked up the shins; and when (with a totally abandoned display of knickers) she emptied her shoes of sand, she would sit down in a pool as soon as not.—And Mrs. Garden? Not for worlds would she have had anybody from Manchester see her as she returned on her tricycle from bathing among the Trwyn rocks, sessile on the saddle, a mackintosh over her voluminous bathing-dress, a towel cast across her shoulders, and her plump ivory legs rising and falling on the pedals like the twin cranks of a vertical human engine. Yes, the Gardens were slipping back into savagery. They were becoming part of Llanyglo. Manchester seemed, not so much a hundred miles, as a hundred years away.
And when, on a Monday morning, it became necessary that Mrs. Garden should put on her garments of civilisation again and traverse those hundred miles, or years, in order to see how her other home was getting on, the whole population gathered about the Royal Hotel shandrydan that came to take her to Porth Neigr, and tears stood in eyes, and sobs choked throats, and shawls and hands and handkerchiefs were waved as the vehicle started off over the muffling sandhills, and as many promises were made that Minetta and John Willie should be well looked after as if she had been departing never to return, instead of coming back again on the Friday. Howell Gruffydd picked a tear from his eye with his little finger, and spoke of the mutability of human affairs.
"The one is ta-a-ke, the other left," he said. "It is all change. Dear dear, it make me think of my cousin Evan Evans, of Carnarvon, and his three boys, as fine boys as ever you see, and so-a hap-py, all living under one roof, till Mary Evans die and wass buried, and the changes come, and where are those boys now? They are scatter. One is in Bangor, and one is in Menai Bridge, and one is in Pwllheli. Dear me! Dear me! Mrs. Garden was a very kind one. There was no kinder 'ooman. Al-ways the sa-a-me. She seem like one of ourselves. Well, well——"
And he picked away another tear, as grief-stricken as if he had been reciting an epitaph "Er Serchog Cof Am Amelia Garden."
Then, when on the Friday she duly returned, there was as much rejoicing as if she had been a sister, come back again from a long wandering.
Mrs. Garden had brought back with her in the Royal Hotel conveyance wellnigh as much luggage as had laden the vehicle on their first coming; for it had been decided that Minetta's stay was to be still further prolonged. So warm clothing had been brought, and more blankets, and a screen for the door, and a small family medicine-chest, and Minetta's Compendium Box of Games. And that was bad news for John Willie Garden, for it brought the shadow of his own departure near; and yet it was good news too, for it seemed to promise a more sure establishment in the place, with perhaps another visit for himself during the Christmas holidays. He could not think how the summer days had slipped away, and grew doleful as he remembered how few of them now remained.
Then, when September was a week or so old, he climbed the Trwyn in order to take his good-bye look at Llanyglo.
A straggling row of cottages, a few paths over the sandhills, three Chapels, a school, and a few scattered farms: the rest, mountains, sea, and air. The tide was creaming over the short thumb of a jetty, and the herd of small black cows was patrolling the beach. Morgan's cottage, Roberts's cottage, their own cottage, not more than a dozen other cottages; and then Howell Gruffydd's shop: already the place was full of memories for John Willie Garden. That wide pool in the sands that reflected the sky had not been there a fortnight before—for the sea had now lost its summer look, and it changed the configuration of the shore at night. A puff of low-blown smoke showed where Dafydd Dafis was giving a boat a coat of tar. There was the small crack of a gun—John Willie's friend was shooting rabbits. On the top of Mrs. Roberts's chimney a new flat stone had been placed, and a new staple for the shutter had been driven into the wall. John Willie had still no stockings on, but he was sensible now of the wind on his legs. They were as brown as rope. His hands too were brown and grimy, and smelt pleasant. That morning he had been helping the men to get in the winter peat....
So he watched, and at tea-time he descended; but already he was making up the exultant tales he would tell the boys of his form, of the spanking place where his father had taken a cottage and might presently be building a house. He would boast over them in the Welsh words he had learned, and triumph no end that they did not understand him. Only to a few of his special friends would he confide the meanings of his expressions in English.
Three days later he was doing even so, at Pannal School, near Harrogate, in Yorkshire.
Mr. Garden came to Llanyglo once more, bringing a doctor with him this time in order that Minetta's health might be authoritatively reported upon, and again he departed. The cottages, which in summer had been places to live outside of, began to have a comfortable look as the afternoons drew in. Minetta wore her boots and stockings again now, and her maroon serge frock with the white collar, and Mrs. Garden put her tricycle away in the little lean-to behind the house, smothering the bright parts with vaseline and covering it up with sacking. The last—the very last—piece of match-board had been nailed in its place, and all had been pale oak-varnished, so that the sheen of the fire could be seen in the walls. The glowing peats were reflected too, in still red spots, in the black glass rolling-pin, the brass candlesticks, the windows of the dolls' house, the plates and lustre jugs, and the china sitting hen where they kept the eggs. The wind began to hoot in the throat of the chimney. Mrs. Garden's ears became accustomed to the louder falling of the breakers; soon the cessation of this noise would have been the arresting thing. October wore on. There was very little fishing now. Each of the three Chapels had a week-night service, and nearly everybody went to all three. Twice the schoolroom was thrown open for concerts; but most of the singing took place in the kitchen. Sometimes, on the edge of the dark, a fantastic irregular shape would be seen, rising and dipping and lurching as it approached over the sandhills; it was Dafydd Dafis, carrying on his back the wooden case that contained his harp. Save for these infrequent diversions, the winter was a dead time at Llanyglo. The hamlet rolled itself up and hibernated. Mrs. Garden sometimes sighed for a Hallé concert, or a dance, or "a few friends in the evening," but she bore up for the sake of the dry and sunny and exhilarating days and the good they did Minetta. Minetta got out her dolls, their house, and the Compendium Box of Games; and she and Gwladys Roberts and Morwenna Morgan and Mary Price, with the oil lamp on the table and the firelight glowing low on the ceiling, had spring-cleanings of the mimic dwelling (to which the Welsh children did not take with any great heartiness), and epidemics among the dolls (which were more interesting), and once a funeral (to which they gave themselves rapturously). They played Snap and Fishponds, and then Minetta set about the making of a picture screen, with coloured figures which she cut from theQueenandLady's Pictorialand plain ones which she coloured with her paint-box.
At Christmas Mr. Garden and John Willie came down, the former for a few days, John Willie for a fortnight. One of his days Mr. Garden spent in a visit to Squire Wynne, who lived at the Plas, three miles away. The sea was some days as black as iron, on others as white as ash with the tumult of the wind. There was snow on the mountains, but little at Llanyglo. Even John Willie did not want to bathe. In the daytime he tried to rig up a sail on his mother's tricycle, so that he might coast along the two miles of beach before the wind; at night he often walked down to the edge of the dimly creaming water, and stood looking out into the blackness, or else at the Trwyn Light, two reds and a white.
Squire Wynne, the former owner of the Royal Hotel shandrydan, was the ground landlord of Llanyglo, and the reason of Edward Garden's Christmas call on him was—still quite simply and on Minetta's account—that he had decided to build and wanted certain land to build on. But this was not quite the simple matter it might have appeared to be. With this, that, and the other, the Squire floundered in a morass of mortgages, and, for the scraping together of his interest money, could scarce have re-papered the dilapidated walls of the Plas dining-room. He had other property also, thirty miles down the coast, which he had never the heart to go and see. It was there that the family fortunes had been sunk. A score of broken shaft-chimneys and heaps of fallen masonry on a promontory were all he had to show for the good Wynne money—these, and a deed-box full of scrip and warrants which you could have had for the price of the stamps on them. For that remote volcanic waste had been a happy hunting-ground for the prospectus-monger with hopeful views on paying quantities, and the Squire had granted more concessions than he could count. It was to be presumed that somebody had made money out of the concessions, if not out of the mines themselves. The last enterprise had been manganese.
"Let me pour you out a glass of port first; it's the only thing I have that hasn't some sort of a charge on it," said the Squire. He was a heavy man of near sixty, the owner of a family pew in Porth Neigr Church, a stickler for rainbowing, and, in a feckless sort of way, something of an antiquary. His adherence to the three-bottle habit helped to make the fortunes of several quacks in our own day, who advertise infallible cures for the neuritis he and his kind have bequeathed to their descendants. The only sign the Squire himself showed of this was a slightly ochreous eye.—Then, when he had poured out the port, "It's you who have the money nowadays," he said, meaning by "you" Gladstonian Liberals. "Look at this ceiling of mine. There isn't a ceiling in Wales with a finer coffering, but look at the state it's in!—And that chandelier! It holds forty candles, butIcan't afford 'em! This is whatIuse." He pointed to his father's old reservoir colza lamp on the table.—"And I'll show you the staircase presently.... Sell? It won't make sixpence difference to me one way or the other. Which piece is it you want?"
Mr. Garden told him.
"Well, you'd better see my man about it. Sheard, Porth Neigr, next to the corn-chandler's shop. Or I'll see him if you like. But if we do come to terms I should like to give you a piece of advice."
"What is that?" Edward Garden asked.
"I suppose you're not Welsh by any chance?"
"No."
"Well, I'm half Welsh, and things jog on well enough as long as I'm alive. There are all sorts of questions that simply don't arise. But they're a queer people here, and when you get to the bottom of it, practically the question of landowning resolves itself into keeping on the right side of Dafydd Dafis, if you see what I mean." It was not necessary to tell Edward Garden that, but he begged the Squire to go on.
"For instance," the Squire continued, "I've a couple of mortgages foreclosing any time now—Sheard will tell you—I don't even know who the mortgagees are. But if they're Welsh, so much the better for them. I mean if they introduce changes, or go at things like a bull at a gate, they'll wish I'd gone on paying them interest. A smile does more than a smack here. If they inclose, for example——"
"Ah, this new Act——"
"Or any other Act There was a case at that No Man's Land of mine over there——" The Squire jerked his head in the direction of the shafts where the family fortunes had been sunk. "An Englishman came, and began to fence, and there was a Dafydd Dafis sort of fellow there, and this man Rodgers thought that because he wore strings round the knees of his corduroys he wasn't anybody of consequence ... and there you are. The only thing Edward the First could do with the bards was to destroy them, and they're the same breed yet.—So that's my advice. For the rest, you'd better see Sheard. Have another glass of port."
And, after he had been shown the magnificent ruin of a staircase, and had noted without showing the grass on the Squire's paths and the moss in the Squire's grass, Edward Garden thanked the Squire for his advice and took his leave. He was able to come to terms with Sheard, and in the following spring a new house began to go up in Llanyglo.
The site Edward Garden had selected for his house lay a little way behind the row of cottages, over the thatches of which it looked out to the sea. Rock cropped up there, amid a waste of bents and potentilla and sea-thrift and thyme, and a rill slipped over moss and, a little further on, disappeared into the sand, to emerge again down by the shore. From a stone quarry on the Porth Neigr road stone was still being got for the extension of Porth Neigr itself; and it would actually be nearer to bring it to Llanyglo. Sheard saw to that also, and Edward Garden, taking the Squire's advice, put Dafydd Dafis, match-boarder, in charge of the work. It would take time, but it would save time. And, so long as it was understood that it was Dafydd Dafis who might say to this man "Come," and he came, and to the other "Go," and he went, Edward Garden did not anticipate difficulties did he wish, later, to "stiffen" his supply of labour by importing a plumber, or a mason, or a carpenter or two from Manchester.
So, in the spring, the rock was cleared and chisels began to clink; and John Willie Garden, away at school in Pannal, could scarce contain himself until the summer holidays should come. He sent, by letter, the most peremptory specifications. His room was to be thus and thus, and not otherwise. The letters also contained complaints to his mother that his health was seriously impaired by arduous study; so was the health of his friend Percy Briggs: indeed, all the fellows were remarking how greatly in need of a change of air he and Percy seemed. Mrs. Garden's chief preoccupation was that the new house should have water upstairs and a cupboard at every turn.
And as that was the first building of their own that the folk of Llanyglo had ever seen, its progress became their daily talk. The farmers came from inland to look at it, and, as the weather grew milder, the fishermen no longer smoked of an evening under the shelter of their boats down by the jetty, but instead made a kind of club-house of the triangular pile of floor-boards that the Porth Neigr timber merchant presently delivered. They climbed inside this slatted prism, hung the interstices with sacking as a protection from the wind, and smoked and talked, while the stars peeped down on them. They talked of progress and innovation, and of how little they had ever thought they would live to see such a change as this on the face of their sandhills.
"But it will not be as big as the Plas, whatever," one of them would remark, not so much as belittling Edward Garden's new house as in order to correct a certain tendency to wild and disproportionate talk. Indeed, they were proud of Llanyglo's growth. Only the building of another chapel could have made them prouder.
"Aw-w-w, William Morgan, h-what a way to talk!" another would reply. "You talk like a great simpleton! You say next it is not so big as the railway station at Porth Neigr! Indeed, the Plas is big-ger, but it is di-lap-i-date, a pit-ty to see, and the staircase—aw-w-w dear! They do say Squire Wynne he go in lit-tle bedroom, not to fall through the floor!"
"And the stables is lock up, all but one stall, and you shan't find a handful of corn there, no, not more than will feed one horse!"
"There was sixteen horses there——"
"And the Squire, he hunt——"
"It all go to that Abercelyn in the mines—thousands of pounds!—--"
"There is land here to build stables if Mr. Garden wiss——"
"Indeed, Hugh Roberts, if he build any more we be bigger than Porth Neigr, whatever!—--"
And this hyperbole always raised a laugh. Porth Neigr, besides being the head of the railway, had a market place, two banks, a stone quay, a court house, and an English Church.
The house rose higher and higher, and by the time John Willie Garden came again, in July, it had reached the first floor. Long rows of roof slates were stacked under a temporary shed, and, as if he had not had lessons enough in the school by the Baptist Chapel, Eesaac Oliver Gruffydd did multiplication sums and Welsh-English exercises upon them. John Willie's eyes danced when they saw the scaffolding and ladders. He was six rungs up a ladder before you could have turned round. He was up that ladder and down a second and up a third almost as quickly, nor did he take breath until, short of swarming up the scaffold-poles, he had stood on the topmost point of the structure. Then, with the air of something accomplished, he condescended to the level ground again.
Half of Dafydd Dafis's men lodged at one or other of the farms and cottages, to the tenants of which they were bound by ties of consanguinity; the others put up at the little alehouse half a mile out on the Porth Neigr road, which served also as a shop for the outlying farms. Dafydd paid their wages, and they had built a hearth near the mortar heap for the cooking of their dinners. John Willie dined daily with them. Never was such importance as that with which he came nigh to bursting. The rocks and the rabbits, the boats and the Trwyn, no longer called him; here was not only a house going up, but his house. In his father's absence he could give orders. He became knowing in limes and mortars, expert in the use of the plumb and level. He strutted about with a square, setting it carelessly against angles, and derided Eesaac Oliver and his slates and long-division sums. The eaves-level was reached; they began to get the roof-timbers up; the sandhills resounded with hammering and sawing; and the upper part of the house began to resemble a toast-rack against the sky. Only one stone remained to be set in position. This was the gable-stone with "E. G., 1882" upon it. John Willie warned Eesaac Oliver that the slates on which he ciphered would soon be required.
As matters turned out, he was wrong in this. Already three men, a plumber, his mate, and a carpenter, had been down from Manchester, and fresh supplies of timber—sections of staircase and so on—had come in carts over the sound-deadening sandhills. But how all at once the work came to a sudden stop—how that toast-rack stood against the sky for another year without a slate upon it—and how Edward Garden, away in Manchester, had once more to accept the line of least resistance, while his son loitered disconsolately about the unfinished building until something even more exciting claimed his interest—to tell these things another chapter had better be begun.