Читать книгу Testimonies - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 9

That spring my uncle Caley, the lawyer, died: I had not seen him for twenty years and I had never liked him (an angry starched white prig) any more than he liked me, so I was not much affected by his death. However, he died intestate: I was his heir-at-law, and I felt a certain compunction in taking his money – he would so have disliked my having it. He was not a real uncle, but a cousin of the older generation.

It did not take me long to overcome these scruples. No one else would naturally have benefited: Bernard was two or three degrees farther removed than myself, and although he always cried poverty he ran two cars and hung gee-gaws on his enormous wife until she looked like a Christmas tree. It was not really worth mentioning this; my compunction had vanished before the next post, but I felt that it was creditable in so poor a man to have entertained it so long.

To resume: my uncle Caley died intestate, and I inherited. The first firm decision that came into my mind was to take Hafod and go and live in it. I would buy it if it was for sale or lease it if it were not, but at all events I would go and live there. I could now. Often, during my stay in the autumn I had said that if I searched a hundred years I should never chance on a place I liked more, and I had reckoned the number of years before I could retire: it was not the effect of first acquaintance or enthusiasm; I had been there long enough to see the disadvantages, but even if they had been doubled or trebled I should still have been of the same opinion.

All through the winter I had thought of the cottage (I used to draw it in idle moments) and the valley and the good Vaughans at the farm. I had sent them a Christmas card, and I had intended to send the child a present, but I left it too late and could find nothing suitable.

But now I could go there: the faint, ultimately-to-be-realized-perhaps dreams with which I had nourished myself in the winter – a garden, drainage, a bathroom – took on an immediate concrete reality. That was my one basic decision. A great many other things occurred to me, minor things; I was tempted by books, a piano and a car. I hesitated a long time over the car, and I believe that I would have bought it, if I had known how to drive.

It was not really such a great deal of money; but up to that time I had never had a hundred pounds, clear, unmortgaged and expendable, in my hands at one time, so a sum of thousands appeared a great deal to me. The solicitor who acted for me referred to it as This little nest-egg, and showed me how, by careful investment it could be made to produce an income a little larger than that which I earned. He said it would be very useful as extra pocket-money; perhaps he meant it as a joke: it irritated me beyond words.

For me it was a release. I had spent many happy days in my college, and there were many men I knew and liked in the university. But I was unsuited for my teaching duties; I performed them badly and with a great deal of pain, and to the end I could never stand up to lecture without dying a little private agony. And in recent years some of the men who had come into the college were not of the kind that I could like; they joined with one or two of the older fellows and the bursar to make what old Foley called ‘a corporate platitude and an underbred aggressive commonplace’.

But with all these strong feelings (and I see that I have painted them rather larger than life), feelings that were profound more than vivid, I found my actual separation from my college much more painful than I had expected. Very painful: not merely twice or three times as painful but hundreds of times. My friends, they were so unexpectedly kind, but even more my – not exactly enemies, but the people to whom I was, in general, little more than civil, came up to me and said the most obliging things, and with a sincerity that I found very moving indeed. It was coals of fire, and often I was heartily ashamed of the feelings that I had entertained and the witticisms that I had made in petto.

There was a presentation, speeches, and some good wine. They saw me off handsomely. My last sentimental pilgrimage and my last night in my old rooms cost me some hard tears.

It was not a transient feeling: when I was sitting in the train it seemed to me that the disadvantages of a collegiate life had never been so slight, and never again could I recapture the strength of my dislike for it.

I had hoped that Wales would compensate me for my sacrifice, but at Ruabon it was raining, and from there a dirty little train crawled spasmodically through cloud and showers, threading its interminable way through the invisible Principality. In the end I missed my station and I had all the difficulty in the world to find a cab that would take me from Llanfair up Cwm Bugail.

When I reached my own house through the pouring rain it was dark and the fires had not been lighted: a tomb-like smell met me as I opened the door. The old woman from across the valley had either not received my note or had misunderstood it. I went straight to my damp bed and lay there shivering for an hour or two before I drifted off to a haunted sleep. It was a fitting end for a day that had begun with emotional exhaustion and had ended in extreme physical fatigue.

Things looked much better in the morning. The sun was shining from a brilliant sky and the valley was looking finer than I had ever seen it. From my bed I looked straight out over to the other side, where the ridge of the Saeth sloped up right-handed to fill half my window. By moving a little I could see the peak itself, rising above a wisp of cloud like a veil, still just tinged with pink.

The valley was full of lambs. Their voices were everywhere, loud and insistent, a hundred different tones; and everywhere the answering ewes, much deeper. I could see the lambs on the other side. So far away they were no more than white flecks, but brilliant white, and never still.

Quite suddenly I felt active and happy, and I longed to be out. The air smelled wonderful in the garden, and there was a bird of some kind singing away, as I should have sung if I could. The boy from the farm appeared: he lurked about in view for some time and then shouted something in which I caught the word Parcels, and he pointed down to the farm. I went down and found that the kind people had taken in a number of things that I had sent to Hafod – household things and books, gramophone, records and so on – and had carefully stored them out of the rain. They were as welcoming as if I had been a native returning – how very pleasant it is to be made cordially welcome – and they insisted on giving me breakfast, ham of their own curing, eggs, a mountain of butter, and their own bread. Afterwards young Vaughan picked up my cases as though they were empty (I can think of nothing heavier nor more awkward than a box of gramophone records) and carried them up the hill to Hafod.

For the next week I hardly stirred from the cottage. It is unusual, perhaps, for a man to reach middle age without ever having set up house; but I had not. It was terribly hard work: when one is naturally unhandy and has to learn all the techniques for the first time the putting up of a single shelf is a day’s labour; but Lord, the satisfaction of putting the books on it, clearing the floor of them and their packing, stowing away the boxes and reducing the place to something like order. There is a wonderful satisfaction, a feeling of accomplishment when you sit down for the first time in a neat room and look at the straight rows, one above another to the ceiling, all standing square on solid bases. Without being a bibliomaniac it has always seemed to me that books are the supreme decoration of a room, and I took the liveliest pleasure in arranging them according to their height and colour.

I had a great disappointment, however; it was the defection of Mrs Bowen, who was to do for me. It was a blow, for I had based my assumptions, my projected way of life on somebody else doing the cooking and the work of the household. She was a savage old creature, with rather less notion than myself about the running of a house, but I had taken a liking to her in the autumn, and I had hoped that she might get better with practice. It was an extravagant hope, as I should have known from the visits I paid her: her place was spick and span outside (she was a great gardener) but the interior, as much as could be seen of it in the gloom, was a congestion of huge vases, rococo furniture and tin trunks ajar. Most of these objects still had their lot numbers: the old lady had a passion for auctions, and attended every sale within twenty miles. She knew the mountain paths like a shepherd, and she could be seen in the wild desolation of the Diffwys creeping along bowed under a crimson pouffe or even, as I found her once, recruiting her strength on an Empire buffet, poised on the black crag above the silent, menacing Llyn Du.

She was quite well off, with pensions for her two men who had been killed in the quarry. It was surprising to hear that she had been married; I had supposed her to be one of those strong-minded, masculine women who do not marry but live alone, self-contained and formidable, to the end of their days. Her needs were few; twenty pounds would probably have covered her yearly expenditure apart from the auctions, and people gave her things, mutton and pork after a slaughtering, black pudding, corn for her hens. In the season she went to every farm for the shearing, where she was an expert roller of fleeces. She worked hard when she chose to work, but it was more from habit than from interest in the wages, and to satisfy her curiosity and her need for conversation. I know it was not for money that she threaded the mountains at shearing time, because she always took a fleece as her day’s pay, as they used to do in former times; but instead of having it made into flannel as the old people did she stored the wool in her loft, where it mounted and mounted, the home of innumerable rats and mice. Mouldering wool was the chief of the smells in her cottage; the next in strength was her goat, her companion and pet.

The first time I went to ask why she had not come she gave me a cup of tea with her goat’s milk in it; even in that dim light I could see the encrusted grime on the mug. There was something soft at the bottom, which my spoon encountered but did not entirely dislodge.

It was conversation that proved the downfall of our relation; that and wounded pride. She was the most garrulous old woman I have ever heard. She knew very little English, but that did not prevent her from starting to talk as soon as she opened my door, a flood of words that did not stop until she closed the door behind her. As far as I could make out they were mostly anecdotes of her young days, or the history of families living in the valley, diseases, catastrophe, anger and death. It was impossible to follow her. Most of the farming people had some trouble with English pronouns (hi in Welsh is she in English, which starts them off on the wrong foot) but none was so wild as this old lady.

I used to listen with strained attention to such phrases as ‘Then it went off with the hwnna [this took the place of any unknown English word] with Dai to the sheeps; and tomorning I say “Men: the damned things.”’ It was a pity that I could not understand her, for I am sure she would have been most interesting: I tried, but the difficulty of language was far from being the greatest barrier. Her mental processes were tortuous and involved; she was the victim of association. She would plunge into a vast series of parentheses and never come out. An account of Criccieth fair thirty years ago would become the history of Mr Williams, Moelgwyn, and then by some fresh association, dark to me, it would turn to a tale of obscure injustice.

In the end I stopped trying, and she resented it. Once, during an inordinately tedious speech I got up at the end of a paragraph, hoping to be allowed to get on with the book that lay open on the table, but she said, ‘Sit down. I am not finishing …’ so firmly that I had no choice.

She grew more and more irregular in her attendance as I listened to her less, although I tried to make up for it by paying her more than our bargain. I wrote to her once or twice, to ask her to order coal if she were going down to Dinas, or to come on Thursday instead of Friday. She never acted on these notes, and answered evasively if I asked her about them: it occurred to me that she might not understand written English, so one day I wrote to her in Welsh. She never came again after that. She was quite illiterate (I wish I had known: I would not have humiliated her for the world) and she could make nothing of any of the notes; but when she learned that the last was in Welsh she found it wounding and insulting. She forgave me in the end, and we were quite friendly, but she said she was too old to go out any more.

I looked everywhere for another woman; I advertised and made inquiries as far as Llanfair and Dinas, but there was none to be found. There was no middling gentry in this part of the country, and no local tradition of going out to service.

I was obliged to keep house for myself. I did not do so badly after a while, though the ordinary mechanical operations like washing up, or making a bed always took me very much longer than they would have taken a woman. In a way it was a good thing: it opened a new perspective to me. Formerly I had used what I now found to be an unreasonable number of plates, cups and saucers, knives and forks: when each of these things has to be washed up, dried and put away, things take on a different aspect. Now I grew careful of my saucer (a triumph if it remained unslopped), never put butter or marmalade on the edge of my plate, so that the plate might get by with no more than a few crumbs, which could be blown off, and I learned that one course to each meal was enough.

My simple diet appeared to suit me. That, the change, the excitement, the unwonted exercise and the mountain air combined in the first few months to make me feel better than I had felt for years. I ate when I chose and as much or as little as I chose – a great change from the set, unvarying meals of my former life. I rather insist upon this point, because I am convinced that a man’s diet and his surroundings have a deep effect on him. Before this time I had tended to coddle myself: I was hagridden by an ignominious and painful digestive trouble, and in an exactly ordered life I had spent much too much time watching my symptoms and worrying about them. My new way of eating did not have the permanent good effect that I had hoped (I write like a hypochondriac) but the vast country opened and strengthened my being in ways that I had never imagined. Many things that had appeared all-important dwindled to trifles, and other values rose. It is difficult to explain because it is difficult to seize; but I know that I began to feel more of a man – more complete and masculine – and less like a neutral creature in an unsatisfactory body.

The strength of the country; that was a new concept for me. I had known the Cotswolds fairly well, and the Sussex downs; they are very beautiful, but they had never given me this idea of strength – a direct and powerful influence. This was something quite different: from my very first days in the valley it struck me that men, here, were no longer in the majority; it was the untamed land. It is possible that I exaggerated this because of my urban background, but making all allowances, it still seemed to me that it was neither fanciful nor weak to feel that the ancient order was hardly disturbed here. (If this was the case, and I am sure it was, a man’s natural reaction would be to become more virile.)

The ancient order was hardly disturbed, particularly at night. I remember standing just under the black precipice that rushes up to the top of the Saeth looking down at the three or four handkerchiefs of fields down in the bottom of the valley and comparing their extent with the prodigious sweep of untouched mountain; the night was touching on the barren land, making it vaster and more powerful, while the little fields dwindled and vanished.

There was no longer that great buffer of civilization between a man and his remote origins: I felt it strongly; and in an attempt to convey something of what I mean I have written the two following pieces, although they break the run of my narrative.

I was walking along the road in the morning of a beautiful gentle day when I met Emyr Vaughan going the round of his sheep. We were well acquainted and friendly by this time and he often used to take me part of the way with him to show me things and explain them. It was still the lambing season, and twice every day he went clean round the lower mountain. He was having trouble this year with weak ewes who could not feed their lambs, and with foxes. As we walked he showed me here and there a patch of skin with the close-curled wool of a new lamb on it, and once the hoof, or the foot, of a lamb with the shank still uneaten. He slackened his pace for me, but it was still an effort to keep up, and I did not always hear or understand what he said; however, I remember being struck again by the extraordinary way he recognized individual sheep. ‘That ewe there, she is the daughter of the one by the wall. She had twins, but she could not feed both of them, and I put one to that ewe we passed by the road, the one I said had the maggot very bad last year – her lamb had the brait.’ It was obvious that he was not talking for effect: he had hundreds of sheep there, and he knew each one, with its maternal ancestry. I do not think that any of them had names except those few who had been hand-reared at the farm, brought up with a bottle, and I meant to ask him how he identified each, whether he said inwardly, ‘There is that sheep with the drooping ears and brown legs, the daughter of the one who got caught in the trap the autumn before the bad winter.’

We were coming down again to the road a little way above my cottage when we found the body of a lamb, dragged between two rocks. Its head was eaten off.

‘Diwch annwyl!’ he said. It was a fine well-grown lamb. He said that he thought he had seen the mother earlier in the day, much farther up. It was a fox of course, he said, and when he had thought for some time he said, ‘I will put some poison to it tonight.’ He spoke with an air of caution – a hushed cunning, as if it were something illegal. He said he was sure I would not tell anybody. It was when he spoke like this that he lost his amiability entirely; all the idiot sharpness of the peasant came into his face; it was as if his eyes diminished and went red round the edges.

I left him shortly after this and went home to make myself a pot of coffee and to cut some sandwiches for my lunch; the day was so fine that I decided to explore the Diffwys, the land that lay up above the end of the valley on the northern side.

If I have managed to give a clear impression of Cwm Bugail it will be remembered that on the left-hand side is a green path that runs across the face of the Saeth and up toward a high cleft at the junction of the mountain’s shoulder and the hemicycle of rock that closes the top of the valley. A stream comes down from this cleft in a series of falls – a magnificent spectacle after a few days of rain – and the cleft itself is the beginning of the country that I wanted to explore. The green path – it soon stopped being green and turned to shale, but all that I saw from my window was green, and I always thought of it as the green path – took me longer than I had expected, with the sun on my back and my heavy coat too hot. With pauses I do not suppose that I spent less than two hours reaching the top. It was worth pausing often; every time I turned there was more of the world spread below under me, and more visible over the Penmawr ridge, and all from a higher, more detached and god-like standpoint. It is good for one’s self-esteem to be high up.

At the cleft, a dramatically narrow and decisive entrance to the unknown high country, I turned for a last look down the length of Cwm Bugail: my cottage was there, distinct because of its whitewash, absurdly small, smaller than a matchbox, and the whole vast extent of the air was lit with the sun. Past the corner, through the black rocks of the cleft and at once it was another world, a sunless chasm with a silent lake. Chasm is not the right word; one thinks of a chasm from above, an enormous crack going down, essentially down. In this narrow, deep valley I was at the bottom, looking up. On my left hand the side was sheer, nearly the whole length of it; a precipitous scree here and there, and sometimes a little heather, but mostly naked rock going straight up to the top of the Saeth: the bed of the valley was a tarn, black, shining water with an abrupt and barren edge – no reeds, no mud, nothing green at all; it changed harshly from naked water to naked rock. On the right the land rose in a steep slope, a shapeless, tormented moorland with bare rock showing, neither so high nor so sheer as the wall on the left, but still reaching halfway up the sky. There was no breath of wind to stir the top of the water, and in all the length of the valley I could see no thing alive, nor in the air above it.

From the run of the valley and the disposition of the soaring black cliff on its southern side the sun could never come into it at any time. At first, panting from my climb, I found the coolness agreeable, but after a little while I began to feel cold, and buttoned my jacket.

A sheep track ran along before me, and I decided that I would try to walk round the lake before having my sandwiches: it seemed pointless to carry them too (they were bulky in my pocket and had galled me all the way up the green path) so I put them on a convenient rock, with the intention of coming back to sit there and eat them after I had been round the lake. Before I left I looked around in order to be sure that I should find them again, and my eye was caught by a shape on the skyline – a skyline that I had to lean back to see at all. Right up there on the edge of the black precipice there was this thing, perched like a gargoyle peering down. I could not tell why it had caught my eye: there were hundreds of jutting, strangely-shaped rocks all along that weathered salient, and none had fixed my attention. However, it did catch my eye, and held it. I could not see what it was: a sheep, perhaps? These agile mountain sheep did take up the most extraordinary attitudes, poised on an overhanging rock with a handful of grass in its crevices. Or conceivably one of those wild goats that I had heard about? It was a strange way for a sheep to stand, hooked there.

I suppose, from the comparisons I made at the time with a sheep or a goat, that the thing was lighter in colour than the surrounding rock: I do not remember now. What I do recall, and most clearly, is the air that it had of crouching there, poised over the valley. It was, of course, merely fanciful to suppose a malignance in it, a sort of evil domination of all that it looked down upon. It was fanciful, of course, and outside that sterile place it seems even absurd; but those were the ideas that came to me.

In the end I said that whether it was a sheep or a rock or a goat it did not greatly matter, and set off along the track. From the far end of the valley (Cwm Erchyll was its name) I had over-simplified its construction; here and there I found a bay with a little sad grey beach of pebbles, and at the end there was a bog with a living stream flowing through it to fill the lake. Here a small bird like a snipe got up at my feet and stopped my heart dead still; it winged low over the water, a white flash in its flight and the saddest heartbroken cry in the world.

Where the bog and the lake merged the shore was black and there were rushes: the stream ran cutting deep between banks of a spongy black substance, and in some places I could hear the sound of invisible tributaries that ran underground. On the shore itself the firm black mud showed a line of footprints; they looked to me like those of a dog, but a fox was more likely. It struck me again, and more forcibly, that a man can be ignorant of an infinite number of important, everyday things and still be reckoned educated. In this instance I could not distinguish between the tracks of a dog and a fox; it was not important, perhaps, but it was typical: I had not known the name of that melancholy bird, nor the curious plants that stood in the bog-pool before me – I did not know their names, still less their qualities. A hundred other cases presented themselves – the milking of a cow, the difference between a bull and a bullock, the lighting of a fire without kerosene – none perhaps a matter of life and death, but in all amounting to a great shameful fog of ignorance.

These reflections occupied me until I was halfway round the other side of the lake, and there, where I had to negotiate a difficult piece of smooth rock overhanging the water, something prompted me to look up to the top of the black cliff: it was still there, its aspect slightly changed by my change in position, but surely motionless, and a rock without any sort of doubt. This was comforting, I hardly know why, and I crossed the rock and finished my tour of the lake in much higher spirits. When I sat down to my sandwiches I felt positively merry – a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.

I left the tarn with a mind disturbed, more disturbed than I should have believed possible, and turned at the black cleft into our own valley with a feeling of escape and strong relief. The sun was low now, and the shadow was halfway up the Penmawr ridge; the light was much more golden than I remembered to have seen it before – the contrast, perhaps, between the dark, closed country that I had just left and this wide, beautiful valley with the tawny flank of Penmawr on the other side throwing back a flood of light. There were the white spots of sheep, and down at the bottom the squared fields and the farms with their domestic trees: I had thought of it as wild and barren before, but now, at least for the moment, it looked almost homely.

I went down the green path as slowly as I had come up it; a continual downhill walk that threatens every moment to break into an involuntary run is as tiring as a climb: the sun had left the top of the mountain long before I was halfway down. There was no reason to hurry; the long twilight was as soft as midsummer, and as I went down the length of the mountain wall the stones gave out a gentle warmth. I sat on the bridge for a long while before starting my climb home. The farm was asleep when I passed, walking softly through the yard; only one dog barked, and that perfunctorily – they were getting used to me.

The last steep stretch was very tiring; I had gone too far for one day, and three times on the path up from the farm I stopped to breathe. The third time was just at the corner before my own wall, by the telegraph post: I leaned against it, listening to the singing in the wires, with the gentle breeze on my face and the faint stars showing above the ridge. On the white road, above the cattle-trap, two dogs came trotting toward Hafod. Whose dogs could those be? I thought, and I saw that they were not dogs; they were foxes. They came on steadily; from the road they looked over the low wall into my garden, twice. For a little while they were hidden by the cottage and when they appeared again they were just above me – I could have lobbed a stone underhand beyond them. One was larger than the other – a dog fox and a vixen, I supposed. Astonishing, the length of their legs, the height they stood off the ground. They went a little farther up – they were on my left hand by now – and stopped at the edge of the road, at the curve, where it is built up four or five feet. I thought they must see me now, but if they did they did not care: the smaller one leaned crouching over the edge of the road and screamed out a shrieking howl, horrifyingly loud and daunting. I saw the gape of her jaws. Instantly all the dogs in the valley answered, a furious bawling from each of the farms and a battering against the stable door down in Gelli. The vixen listened, crouching there in her ugly, evil attitude, and as the noise slackened she screamed again. What can give an impression of the sound? An evil, maniac laughter, a triumphant threatening, they were both in it, and something hellish, too.

The dog fox barked once. He too looked out over the valley, and the two stared there like masters in their own place: that was the dominant impression. They were the ones.

After a moment they crossed the road back to the smooth green piece on the far side and I heard them playing with the lamb’s foot there. Playing, if playing is the word, for what they did with such a hideous undertone of noise. Once or twice they appeared on the road, worrying and tearing the foot or a piece of woolly skin; then they were gone – they went up the mountain-side and the slope hid them.

At home I went to bed very soon, after a scrap meal, for I was quite done up. But I could not sleep; my legs kept twitching and my mind ran on those appalling foxes. I had never thought of a fox before except as something people hunted, or as the subject of proverbs about cunning: nothing in my vague preconception had given me a hint of that cold, malignant ferocity; I had had no idea of an animal of such a size, such moral dimensions.

When I did sleep it seemed that I had not been off for more than a few minutes before I was awake again, wholly awake, with a feeling of nightmare. It was the yelling of a soul in torment just outside the cottage, a shocking, naked screaming. Instantly young Vaughan’s words about the poison came into my mind, and at once I was sure that the fox, or perhaps a loose dog, had returned to the lamb and was now howling out its life in agony. I hurried on my clothes and ran up the road, in the silent, unearthly light of the moon, to the green slope where the lamb lay dragged between the rocks. It was untouched, at least by a fox. Vaughan had gone to it, and what I had heard was the raging vented spite of the vixen forestalled.

I had meant, in writing this, to illustrate my point and to give something of that feeling of strangeness that was always present; not merely to describe two particular incidents. It was a feeling that was with me all the time, more or less consciously; it changed my outlook in many ways that I recognized, and probably in many more that I did not. It is such an intangible thing, the real difference between living in a city and in the wild, untamed country; it is not just the difference of landscape or amenity, it is not that the thunder of a lorry will wake you in the one and the scream of a vixen in the other. It is something subtle and penetrating, and it seemed to me that the only way I could convey anything of it was by example.