Читать книгу Whistlers' Van - Idwal Jones - Страница 4

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The dwellers at Moor House rose early, and were ordinarily afoot long before the hares and the quail began to stir in the heather. Gwilym came from his tower room, felt his way down the landing, and pushed open the window to glance at the weather-vane atop the barn. Then he knocked at his grandfather’s door and spoke his greeting:

“Good morning, Taid. It is misty, with a light wind from the east.”

Answer there was none. He knew the room was empty; that during the night his grandfather had slipped away. But it was Gwilym’s secret, and he had shouted his greeting so loudly that Shan, the maid, could hear it downstairs. This secret he pondered as he descended into the huge beamed kitchen of the farmhouse, with its rushlights and the great peat fire before which she was baking cakes. She rolled out lumps of oaten dough and twirled them on her palms before the fire. As she twirled she intoned a baking song, which is the custom of folk in the Welsh highlands.

“Look you, now, Young Master,” she cried, sweeping the hearth clean with a goose-wing. “Here are thirty fine cakes—better than any in the village cook-shop. You go and fetch in your Taid. It is six o’clock and he will be wanting his meal.”

The dew was heavy this morning, and Gwilym strapped on his high boots.

“He will be digging turfs in the bog,” she said. “Run now, good Little Master that you are, and tell him the kettle is boiling.”

Pushing open the gate in the wall, he went out upon the moor.

“Taid!” he shouted.

He repeated his cry until his head almost split from the noise. Not a soul was visible in this dewy, silent outer world smoking with mist. In the peat bog where Thomas Anwyl had been digging, a spade was thrust upright, with his old hat upon it. It was very like a scarecrow, Gwilym thought; but a rook happened to be perched on the crown of the hat. Birds of every feather made Moor House farm their home, for the Anwyls shot at nothing winged, nor at any animal save the hare.

“Taid!” screeched another voice.

Myfi, his sister, had come out, with her short kirtle whipping about her knees.

“It’s no use calling,” said Gwilym. “He’s a long way off by now.”

She glanced about her, and saw that the dog-cart was gone and also Twm-Twm, the pony.

“Twm-Twm! Where is he? Shall we ever see him again?”

“Oh, yes. He’s only gone on the road.”

That night, Gwilym had been awakened by a clumping below the window, the pad of hoofs on the heather. Looking out he beheld the dog-cart, with lamps aglow, and Twm-Twm between the shafts. Then Taid appeared with a mackintosh, for a heavy dew was falling; he climbed into the seat, and drove off—drove off straight, without once looking back. He must have made up his mind suddenly, for he had said nothing about going away. And if he had wished Shan Gof to know, he would have told her, or at least left a note on the kitchen dresser.

“The Whistlers!” echoed Myfi, clutching his arm. “They have come for him!” She broke into tears, a weakness that Gwilym overlooked, because she was only eight. “Oh, we shall never see him again. Poor Twm-Twm!”

“Don’t worry about the pony. He’ll come back, as if he were a cat. Has he not been to market a hundred times?”

“Will Taid come back, too?”

“He should.”

That consoled Myfi a little.

Taid had been restless for many weeks; every day he had climbed the tower to Gwilym’s room, to throw open the window and scrutinize the vast green expanse of the moor, as if he had been expecting to see a cart come from the direction of the hills, or from the east. And who else should it be, but the Whistlers? They came every year in the spring, just about the time the elders and the plum trees began to bud. They were men, sometimes two, sometimes three, who came in a Gipsy cart that invariably drew near the wall or the hedge around Moor House. They never spoke, but gave a low, penetrating whistle. After repeating it twice, they went away.

Taid never gave sign that he had noticed them. If he were in the peat bog or in the garden, he kept on with his task. If he were in his study, by the open window, he retained his gaze on his books, oblivious to the steady, reproachful glance of the visitors.

Only the evening before, he had asked Gwilym:

“When you came home from school, did you see anything strange?”

“No, sir.”

“When you left the village, whom did you see?”

“Dai Shepherd, and crows on the elm tree near the bridge.”

“Nobody or anything else?” asked Taid, looking out the window.

“Nothing and nobody,” answered Gwilym without looking surprised.

And now he was gone, gone hurriedly into the night—even before the Whistlers had come. Some impulse, some reason had driven him forth. But not fear. The Anwyls did not know what it was to be afraid. Gwilym’s and Myfi’s father, Captain Geoffrey Anwyl, had been killed in the War, and Taid had been a very great boxer.

“Don’t let Shan know you have been crying,” said Gwilym. “Taid has gone to the fair. That’s nothing to cry about.”

“But I couldn’t say good-bye to Twm-Twm.”

“He’ll come back, and Taid will bring you a fairing.”

The table was set for breakfast when they came in. The tea-cozy was oozing steam. Between the plate of new, golden butter and a wooden bowl of currant jam was the fresh pile of oatcake.

“Now, then, where is your Taid?” Shan girded at them.

They could avert their eyes no longer.

“He is not here,” said Gwilym. “Nor is Twm-Twm. They must have gone to the fair.”

“The fair! The fair is over—over three days ago.”

“Anyway, he is gone.”

“Blessed King!” she shouted. “I never heard of such a thing in my life. To go away like that! As if he were a Gipsy, and the constable after him!”

She went to the doorway and loudly spoke her amazement and anger to the rows of wet hollyhocks standing in the garden, then scolded as if the children were somehow to blame for his disappearance. Deaf to her clacking, Gwilym reached for a crisp, warm oatcake. Shan made a swoop and carried off the plate.

“For such a woeful day as this, last week’s bara cerch is good enough to eat.”

She took down a plateful of stale oatcake from the mantelpiece, blew off the dust and dropped it scornfully on the table. The print of butter, with its leaves and acorns, she replaced with a cup of beef dripping.

“Please don’t take away the butter,” wailed Myfi.

“Fetch the butter here,” said Gwilym.

“Eh, eh? My fine Little Master, who is the mistress of Moor House now? Who if not Shan Gof, the daughter of Thomas Blacksmith? Someone must look after Moor House, or else straight to the poorhouse you all go. And you will be orphans, indeed! Master Anwyl goes by night to a fair when there is no fair. What a madness!

“Blessed King forbid—but if Vicar Pritchard heard of it, or Elias Schoolmaster, or the other respected men of the parish, what would they think?”

“Perhaps to another fair, further away. To buy a sickle, or a new bridle for Twm-Twm,” Gwilym suggested; though he knew perfectly well that if it were just to visit a fair, Taid would not have left mysteriously in the dead of night.

“Those he could buy at the village,” cried Shan. “Fair, indeed! Why should a goodly farmer go among drunken wastrels? Oh, Little People, a great pity on you! To have a Taid that would rather sleep under a hedge like a tinker than in his bed like an honest chapel Christian!”

She clacked back and forth in wooden shoes, twisting her hands in her apron, uttering shrill laments.

“Blessed King! And not a word did he say to me! If only the constable were here, or Cadwalader Wagon-mender who can read tracks and point which way he went. Little Master, you must find the constable. The good man, he was hiding in the plum trees of White Calf farm last night to see if those Gipsies would come again. They stole two aprons and the best Sunday handkerchief of Davies White Calf from the clothesline, and such bold rapscallions they are, they will be sure to return tonight, and the little constable must lose more sleep, though he has a large family.

“What is to become of us with all these Gipsies roaming about? We shall wake up to find the teeth stolen clean out of our heads.”

Heedless of her scolding, Gwilym and Myfi ate their stale oatcakes. Shan wrapped the butter in a cabbage leaf and put it into a basket with a handful of the new cakes.

“In the village is a widow, poor soul, that would be glad of these gifts, and she shall have them.

“And now, Little Master, before you go to school, peel some more rushlights for tonight. Be careful you don’t break them for the dried sap is brittle. The more rushlights you make, the more candles we save, and the more pennies for the missionary.”

With shawl over her head, and basket slung on her arm, Shan left the house. As she went down the garden path, lightning flashed through the larches. Thunder crumpled, with a final roll so deafening that the earth rocked. Shan recoiled in terror.

“Angry is the Voice!” she cried. “God is full of wrath on the house today. The Master has gone to the fair where there is drinking and fiddle-music and fighting with the constables. Blessed King forgive us!”

Another burst of thunder smothered her plaint. She folded the shawl across her face, leaned forward against the rain and trudged under the dripping branches to the moor.

Gwilym stood at the window, watching her as she disappeared into the mist. His thought was that if the Voice was angry it was because Shan had carried off the butter. No doubt, to sell in the village for sixpence to buy herself a bottle of scent or some peppermints to nibble whilst listening to the sermon.

The wind blew still harder. Ducks’ feathers lay on the pool, as if it had just snowed. Taid’s hat came over the wall, as shapeless as a dishrag. The shovel must have been blown down. What a storm! Who would not be out on a jolly day like this?

Now he had to make rushlights. If it wasn’t rushlights, then it was spills, twisted out of strips of newspaper, to save matches. He sat before the cleared table and with his finger-nails peeled a bundle of long, needle-like rushes. Taid had a large hanging-lamp in his study, and a student’s lamp by the desk on which he wrote. The others in the house conned books or sewed by the light of these slivers of dried pith that gave off a flame hardly larger than a bean, just as in any other Welsh farmhouse.

On the window the rain hammered steadily. The wind, after bumping against the door until it had despaired of crashing in, made a new assault down the chimney. It fanned peat smoke and dust all over the place, and Gwilym and Myfi coughed until its fury abated.

Gooseberries, whisked from the garden, drummed against the windows like hail. Clouds, shot through with lightning, lowered bulkily to the moor and released cataracts of water. The darkness was of night, and made weird by the screaming of curlews and gulls helpless in the variable wind.

Inside, it was comfortable, for the draft began to go up the chimney instead of down. The peat, composed of fern mold and brier roots, glowed as evenly as coal, with dancing gobbets of flame; the kettle on the pot-hook whistled a tune to the jigging of the heavy lid.

Gwilym had peeled another bundle of rushes.

“Well, that’s enough,” he said. “I’ll do no more, not even if she sends me to bed in the dark.”

“She will, to save rushlights,” said Myfi. “I wish Taid was back.”

They stood looking through the window until it grew lighter and the rain ceased. The brook in the moor had overflowed its banks; shortly, after the level had fallen a bit, the fishing would be good, and the trout would snap at worms.

“Whether anybody’s home or not, I suppose I must go to school,” Gwilym sighed.

Myfi didn’t have to go; Taid gave her lessons in his study, and a holiday was now before her. Gwilym slung a strap of books over his shoulder and slouched out. With long steps, for he was tall and straight as a dart, he moved into a world of thick, swirling mist, peopled with hollyhocks and foxgloves. The world was soundless, except for the rushing of the water in the garden pool and the plunking of the last raindrops on the rhubarb leaves. Overhead marched the smoky-yellow clouds, raking the top of the larches that on these upland moors grew to an immense height. He stared upward, picking out grotesque forms in the procession—castles, witches, galleons, and oxen. He stood there, at the brow of the hill, until the mist lifted and the mountains outlined themselves at the rim of the bowl-shaped panorama.

He studied the moor road. It began at the farm, wound through the gorse, dipped into a brier-filled combe, where there was a brook, then was lost in a wilderness of hazel-bush and rocks. It was the road to Beyond, and on bright, clear days, standing at this point, he had a glimpse of the tumbling sea.

Years before, he had traveled on it himself, coming over from the north horizon with Myfi, when Taid brought them to Moor House. He had not wandered over it since, for life had been full enough at the farm and the village. But he often came to this height to look curiously upon the road, looking at the travelers, the wagons and char-à-bancs that climbed and descended at the far distance; carrying people intent on their strange businesses so remote from life in this corner of the moors.

At times a great longing came over him, with a sting in his blood, to venture out beyond the sky-line and see things for himself, and this was the season of the year when he felt it most.

Gwilym strode on, at a lurching pace, his face darker and more thoughtful than usual. He gained the village and strode past the church with its tall spire and the tombs of black stone, on which lay the recumbent statues of knights. He gave a passing glance at the window touched by the sun. The school came next; a grimy building, as forbidding as a prison. He slid into his seat and was soon immersed in his Latin grammar.

Mr. Elias, the schoolmaster, tapped the globe with his cane.

“A dillar, a dollar, a ten o’clock scholar. Master Anwyl, what is the meaning of this tardiness?”

At the words, barked harshly through his mustache, a shudder went through the frames of the ten pupils.

“You are a quarter of an hour late, sir.”

Gwilym rose. “Then, Mr. Elias, your watch is sixteen minutes fast.”

Mr. Elias stiffened. Behind his spectacles his eyes glittered brightly cold, then he angrily pushed back his silk cap.

“Indeed!”

Though of a grim aspect, and inclined to apply his cane to the palm or the shoulders of a pupil for the least offense, he was at heart a quite harmless being. He struck lightly, for one thing. He ruled through the ferocity of his looks. He was a bachelor, and he lived by himself in the adjoining cottage, with its garden and row of bee-hives. And he was also a crony of Thomas Anwyl, with whom he smoked pipes of an evening and played at draughts.

“H’m,” he muttered, and pulled out his watch. Then he held it to his ear. “I thought so. I forgot to wind it. Master Anwyl, let me see your timepiece.”

“Sir, I haven’t one.”

“Aha! Then how should you know exactly what time it is?”

“When I came past the church, the sun was full on the transept window. That means it is just nine o’clock.”

“Indeed! Gentlemen of the class, do you hear that? That’s observation! None so blind as those that will not see. Master Anwyl, you are fortunate. You will be spared the trouble of having to wind watches, for you will not have need of them. I wish I hadn’t. ‘Fugit hora.’ Time flies. Please decline ‘mensa.’ ”

Gwilym raced through the declension.

“Bound Mesopotamia.”

“It lies between two rivers, Euphrates on the west, Tigris on the east. Those are the natural boundaries. The political ones have been changed since the War. I don’t know how much, because your globe is a very old one.”

“Well, it shows the oceans, anyway, and the Equator. That will be all, Master Anwyl.”

Gwilym resumed his seat. His lessons were over for the day, but as a matter of form he propped a geography in front of him. It was the turn of the others. The skies darkened again. An inky panoply of cloud unrolled across the heavens. Lightning rove through, glare after glare fanned into the room.

Elias Schoolmaster put a match to the lamp, and poured more coals into the grate. The pupils droned their lessons, and murmured the tables they had to learn by heart.

It was dull for Gwilym. He had stalked through all the class textbooks as easily as he stalked with his long legs ahead of his mates on the road. He had wrestled with far deeper books in his grandfather’s study, which was so full of them that there was hardly room for a chair to sit in. But since the lessons were so easy for him, it gave him an excuse to send his fancy wandering while his body stayed at the desk. School, he felt, was necessary for most people, but as for himself—

Elias Schoolmaster, who had been half dozing in his chair by the grate, stirred, announced a singing lesson and struck a tuning-fork on the table. The adolescent voices struggled with the day’s hymn:

The hymn ended in silence, the last singer only five notes behind the others.

“That wasn’t very bad,” said the master. “It wasn’t very good, neither. The fog must have got into your throats. Mud-toads and fishes never can quite get the hang of music, somehow.”

Gwilym’s eyes were on the geography, but unseeing, and he hardly even heard the voices; not even the wind that moaned at the casements and plucked handfuls of thatch from all the roofs on the street, whirling them into the air with leaves and bits of paper. His thoughts were far across the moor and on the distant road where wagons and char-à-bancs went up and down and travelers, with dreams in their breasts, toiled onward to the horizon for secret reasons of their own.

The moor road! Its lure was almost too great for him to withstand. One more term of school, and that would be enough for him. He was weary of its regulations, weary of the sing-song drone of his fellows: David Gamekeeper, Evan Blacksmith, Thomas Aleshop, Hugh Cattlebuyer, Garth Wooldealer, and the others, all known after their fathers’ trades. They had never been out of Wales. They had never even been out of the village. Nor would they ever wander elsewhere, nor stray any further—Oh, height of their dreams!—than the fair at Llangollen, or to the battlefield, if there should be another war.

He rebelled against the acrid, dusty smell of chalk, and the hard scratching of pencils on slate, that put his teeth on edge. And most of all he rebelled against having to stay where he was, at Moor House, when the wind’s call was ceaseless and the road across the moor was ever beckoning to him.

His father, because of the Gipsy strain in him, had rebelled in his time. Captain Anwyl, as a lad in this farmhouse, could never hear the clink of the tinker’s hammer in the bracken, nor see the glim of a Rommany campfire without leaving his meal or hurling aside his book to be lost for an hour. More than once he had been lost for a month.

“I should give you a trouncing,” Taid used to say to the returned nomad, who showed up tanned, smiling, unrepentant.

“What do you mean by bolting off like that? It’s a scandal. Most lads would have got a sound birching for it. We hadn’t an idea where you were. Couldn’t you have mailed a postcard, at least?”

“Sir, we didn’t stop in any town long enough.”

“Ha! All crouched in the heath like hedgehogs, I suppose. Upon my word, that was scandalous! H’m. Whom did you join up with?”

“The Bramwells—Gammer and Joseph. They said they remembered you, and hoped you were well.”

“The Bramwells!”

Here Taid rubbed his chin, looked reflectively out the window at the moor road, and raising himself up on his toes, then down, gave a curious sort of chuckle.

“And what have they been doing?”

“Dukkering—telling fortunes. And soldering pots. They go in their caravan all over Wales, and last year they went to Devon, but Gammer got homesick, so they stayed only a week.”

“Homesick for the old hedges.”

“They had a message for you, but I didn’t understand it. ‘Tell him Wongur kairs the grasni jal.’ It means ‘Money makes the mare go,’ but when I told them we hadn’t a mare at Moor House, they looked at each other and laughed, then said you would understand what it meant.”

Taid gave a quiet laugh. He was not quite sure himself how much his son knew of his past life, how he had for years been one of the Bramwell tribe, though of another branch that were horse-traders and knew more of the land and its crops. And being owner of Moor House with its fine wall and trees, he was thought to be a wealthy man, even by people in the village. And such little tales as these, some of them even stranger, all the villagers knew, though not in the deep way that Gwilym knew them.

A bell tinkled. It roused Gwilym from his reverie. The morning session was over.

“No riot, boys!” said Elias Schoolmaster. “Go out gently!—Master Anwyl, please stay in a moment.”