Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  I think it is plain, too, that the Wales which strove to put its house in order after 1945 did so in a way which proved to be an uneasy marriage between a cold-headed refusal to endorse its immediate past by anything other than fierce rejection and a warm-hearted embrace of the things and people so loved and succoured that they soon crystallised into nostalgia or into a sentiment almost too large to withstand. Here, the 1940s will end with withering backward glances but also with the cracked grace note of Rhys Davies’ masterful ‘Boy with a Trumpet’, a tale set outside Wales completely yet redolent of a yearning for expressive horizons and a settlement that cannot, in all its paucity, be resisted.

  The story will, too, end Rhys Davies’ involvement in Story, though not, as will be apparent, his paramount place amongst the first generation of our short-story writers from Wales in English. His influence, more and more appreciated, has been as deep as it has been understated until recently. In the second volume of Story the 21 men and only 5 women of this volume will be replaced, numerically anyway, by 19 men and 13 women. Tone and the intended effect will change as well, and all that comes from the alteration of our story over time. No anthology, however, even two of them arriving together, can, even if it is perforce, omit so many good stories and ask to be regarded as definitive. But what I can hope is that Story (Volumes I and II) may serve, overall, as a definition, one amongst many to be sure, in a language and style fashioned here in Wales of what it has been to live with Welsh breath in our lungs and with Welsh stories to tell the world. This was our news. Read it, and think that you and we may yet know the how and the why of it.

  Dai Smith

  THE STORIES

  ENCHANTMENT

  THE GIFT OF TONGUES

  Arthur Machen

  More than a hundred years ago a simple German maid-of-all-work caused a great sensation. She became subject to seizures of a very singular character, of so singular a character that the family inconvenienced by these attacks were interested and, perhaps a little proud of a servant whose fits were so far removed from the ordinary convulsion. The case was thus. Anna, or Gretchen, or whatever her name might be, would suddenly become oblivious of soup, sausage, and the material world generally.

  But she neither screamed, nor foamed, nor fell to earth after the common fashion of such seizures. She stood up, and from her mouth rolled sentence after sentence of splendid sound, in a sonorous tongue, filling her hearers with awe and wonder. Not one of her listeners understood a word of Anna’s majestic utterances, and it was useless to question her in her uninspired moments, for the girl knew nothing of what had happened.

  At length, as it fell out, some scholarly personage was present during one of these extraordinary fits; and he at once declared that the girl was speaking Hebrew, with a pure accent and perfect intonation. And, in a sense, the wonder was now greater than ever. How could the simple Anna speak Hebrew? She had certainly never learnt it. She could barely read and write her native German. Everyone was amazed, and the occult mind of the day began to formulate theories and to speak of possession and familiar spirits. Unfortunately (as I think, for I am a lover of all insoluble mysteries), the problem of the girl’s Hebrew speech was solved; solved, that is, to a certain extent.

  The tale got abroad, and so it became known that some years before Anna had been servant to an old scholar. The personage was in the habit of declaiming Hebrew as he walked up and down his study and the passages of his house, and the maid had unconsciously stored the chanted words in some cavern of her soul; in that receptacle, I suppose, which we are content to call the subconsciousness. I must confess that the explanation does not strike me as satisfactory in all respects. In the first place, there is the extraordinary tenacity of memory; but I suppose that other instances of this, though rare enough, might be cited. Then, there is the association of this particular storage of the subconsciousness with a species of seizure; I do not know whether any similar instance can be cited.

  Still, minor puzzles apart, the great mystery was mysterious no more: Anna spoke Hebrew because she had heard Hebrew and, in her odd fashion, had remembered it.

  To the best of my belief, cases that offer some points of similarity are occasionally noted at the present day. Persons ignorant of Chinese deliver messages in that tongue; the speech of Abyssinia is heard from lips incapable, in ordinary moments, of anything but the pleasing idiom of the United States of America, and untaught Cockneys suddenly become fluent in Basque.

  But all this, so far as I am concerned, is little more than rumour; I do not know how far these tales have been subjected to strict and systematic examination. But in any case, they do not interest me so much as a very odd business that happened on the Welsh border more than sixty years ago. I was not very old at the time, but I remember my father and mother talking about the affair, just as I remember them talking about the Franco-Prussian War in the August of 1870, and coming to the conclusion that the French seemed to be getting the worst of it. And later, when I was growing up and the mysteries were beginning to exercise their fascination upon me, I was able to confirm my vague recollections and to add to them a good deal of exact information. The odd business to which I am referring was the so-called ‘Speaking with Tongues’ at Bryn Sion Chapel, Treowen, Monmouthshire, on a Christmas Day of the early Seventies.

  Treowen is one of a chain of horrible mining villages that wind in and out of the Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire valleys. Above are the great domed heights, quivering with leaves (like the dear Zacynthus of Ulysses), on their lower slopes, and then mounting by far stretches of deep bracken, glittering in the sunlight, to a golden land of gorse, and at last to wild territory, bare and desolate, that seems to surge upward for ever. But beneath, in the valley, are the black pits and the blacker mounds, and heaps of refuse, vomiting chimneys, mean rows and ranks of grey houses faced with red brick; all as dismal and detestable as the eye can see.

  Such a place is Treowen; uglier and blacker now than it was sixty years ago; and all the worse for the contrast of its vileness with those glorious and shining heights above it. Down in the town there are three great chapels of the Methodists and Baptists and Congregationalists; architectural monstrosities all three of them, and a red brick church does not do much to beautify the place. But above all this, on the hillside, there are scattered whitewashed farms, and a little hamlet of white, thatched cottages, remnants all of a pre-industrial age, and here is situated the old meeting house called Bryn Sion, which means, I believe, the Brow of Zion. It must have been built about 1790–1800, and, being a simple, square building, devoid of crazy ornament, is quite inoffensive.

  Here came the mountain farmers and cottagers, trudging, some of them, long distances on the wild tracks and paths of the hillside; and here ministered, from 1860 to 1880, the Reverend Thomas Beynon, a bachelor, who lived in the little cottage next to the chapel, where a grove of beech trees was blown into a thin straggle of tossing boughs by the great winds of the mountain.

  Now, Christmas Day falling on a Sunday in this year of long ago, the usual service was held at Bryn Sion Chapel, and, the weather being fine, the congregation was a large one – that is, something between forty and fifty people. People met and shook hands and wished each other ‘Merry Christmas’, and exchanged the news of the week and prices at Newport market, till the elderly, white-bearded minister, in his shining black, went into the chapel. The deacons followed him and took their places in the big pew by the open fireplace, and the little meeting-house was almost full. The minister had a windsor chair, a red hassock, and a pitch pine table in a sort of raised pen at the end of the chapel, and from this place he gave out the opening hymn. Then followed a long portion of Scripture, a second hymn, and the congregation settled themselves to attend to the prayer.

  It was at this moment that the service began to vary from the accustomed order. The minister did not kneel down in the usual way; he stood staring at the people, very strangely, as some of them thought. For perhaps a couple of minutes he f
aced them in dead silence, and here and there people shuffled uneasily in their pews. Then he came down a few paces and stood in front of the table with bowed head, his back to the people. Those nearest to the ministerial pen or rostrum heard a low murmur coming from his lips. They could not make out the words.

  Bewilderment fell upon them all, and, as it would seem, a confusion of mind, so that it was difficult afterwards to gather any clear account of what actually happened that Christmas morning at Bryn Sion Chapel. For some while the mass of the congregation heard nothing at all; only the deacons in the Big Seat could make out the swift mutter that issued from their pastor’s lips; now a little higher in tone, now sunken so as to be almost inaudible. They strained their ears to discover what he was saying in that low, continued utterance; and they could hear words plainly, but they could not understand. It was not Welsh.

  It was neither Welsh – the language of the chapel – nor was it English. They looked at one another, those deacons, old men like their minister most of them; looked at one another with something of strangeness and fear in their eyes. One of them, Evan Tudor, Torymynydd, ventured to rise in his place and to ask the preacher, in a low voice, if he were ill. The Reverend Thomas Beynon took no notice; it was evident that he did not hear the question: swiftly the unknown words passed his lips.

  ‘He is wrestling with the Lord in prayer,’ one deacon whispered to another, and the man nodded – and looked frightened.

  And it was not only this murmured utterance that bewildered those who heard it; they, and all who were present, were amazed at the pastor’s strange movements. He would stand before the middle of the table and bow his head, and go now to the left of the table, now to the right of it, and then back again to the middle. He would bow down his head, and raise it, and look up, as a man said afterwards, as if he saw the heavens opened. Once or twice he turned round and faced the people, with his arms stretched wide open, and a swift word on his lips, and his eyes staring and seeing nothing, nothing that anyone else could see. And then he would turn again. And all the while the people were dumb and stricken with amazement; they hardly dared to look at each other; they hardly dared to ask themselves what could be happening before them. And then, suddenly, the minister began to sing.

  It must be said that the Reverend Thomas Beynon was celebrated all through the valley and beyond it for his ‘singing religious eloquence’, for that singular chant which the Welsh call the hwyl. But his congregation had never heard so noble, so awful a chant as this before. It rang out and soared on high, and fell, to rise again with wonderful modulations; pleading to them and calling them and summoning them; with the old voice of the hwyl, and yet with a new voice that they had never heard before: and all in those sonorous words that they could not understand. They stood up in their wonder, their hearts shaken by the chant; and then the voice died away. It was as still as death in the chapel. One of the deacons could see that the minister’s lips still moved; but he could hear no sound at all. Then the minister raised up his hands as if he held something between them; and knelt down, and rising, again lifted his hands. And there came the faint tinkle of a bell from the sheep grazing high up on the mountainside.

  The Reverend Thomas Beynon seemed to come to himself out of a dream, as they said. He looked about him nervously, perplexed, noted that his people were gazing at him strangely, and then, with a stammering voice, gave out a hymn and afterwards ended the service. He discussed the whole matter with the deacons and heard what they had to tell him. He knew nothing of it himself and had no explanation to offer. He knew no languages, he declared, save Welsh and English. He said that he did not believe there was evil in what had happened, for he felt that he had been in Heaven before the Throne. There was a great talk about it all, and that queer Christmas service became known as the Speaking with Tongues of Bryn Sion.

  Years afterwards, I met a fellow countryman, Edward Williams, in London, and we fell talking, in the manner of exiles, of the land and its stories. Williams was many years older than myself, and he told me of an odd thing that had once happened to him.

  ‘It was years ago,’ he said, ‘and I had some business – I was a mining engineer in those days – at Treowen, up in the hills. I had to stay over Christmas, which was on a Sunday that year, and talking to some people there about the hwyl, they told me that I ought to go up to Bryn Sion if I wanted to hear it done really well. Well, I went, and it was the queerest service I ever heard of. I don’t know much about the Methodists’ way of doing things, but before long it struck me that the minister was saying some sort of Mass. I could hear a word or two of the Latin service now and again, and then he sang the Christmas Preface right through: “Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium” – you know.’

  Very well; but there is always a loophole by which the reasonable, or comparatively reasonable, may escape. Who is to say that the old preacher had not strayed long before into some Roman Catholic Church at Newport or Cardiff on a Christmas Day, and there heard Mass with exterior horror and interior love?

  THE COFFIN

  Caradoc Evans

  Captain Shacob owned Rhondda, the rowing boat from which he fished and in which he took folk on the sea at Ferryside. A plump widow named Ann who had sailed in his boat for pleasure said to him: ‘My son, Little Ben, is a prentice to the carpenter; be you a father to him. My husband, Big Ben, is in the graveyard; be you my second husband.’ She also told him that she rented a house and ten acres of fertile land on the bank of Avon Towy.

  Shacob sold his boat and married Ann, whose fields he trimmed at what time he was not repairing the ditches on the public roads. Now Ann fattened wondrously; her flesh almost choking her, she was wont in hot weather to throw up her hands and scream that she was dying. On arising on a July day, she went into a fit and fell back upon her bed. At midday she would not sup of the gingered and sugared bread and water which her husband offered her, nor again in the evening.

  ‘Eat, woman fach,’ said Shacob.

  ‘Let me perish on an empty belly,’ answered Ann.

  Having milked his cow, tended his two pigs, and shooed his fowls to roost, Shacob walked to the workshop of Lloyd the carpenter. He stood at the threshold of the workshop, his hands, like the claws of a very old crow, grasping the top of the half door, his eyes wearing the solemn aspect of the man who is soon to revel in the mournful joy that Death brings to us Welsh people; his long underlip curling over his purple-stained chin like the petal of a rose, Shacob stood at the door as if he were the reporter of sacred messages in the chapel.

  This is what he saw inside the workshop: the crutched figure of the carpenter, whose mouth, from the corners of which dribbled tiny streams of tobacco juice, was like the ungainly cut in a turnip lantern; the hairy face of the cobbler, much of whose wooden leg was thrust into the earth through the shavings and sawdust with which the ground was strewn; the bright countenance of the broken-out preacher, whose skin was of the freshness of that of a sucking pig; the head of Little Ben, whose nose had been twisted at birth, bending over a birdcage.

  The preacher was declaring that Jonah was not swallowed by a fish, even though the fish was a whale whereat the cobbler, driving his leg farther into the earth, cried: ‘Atheist!’

  ‘Hoit!’ said Shacob.

  None of the company heard him, so low was his voice.

  Presently Little Ben looked up, and after his gaze had rested for a while upon his stepfather’s hands he set to improve the perch-rod of his cage.

  ‘Hoity-ho!’ Shacob sounded.

  ‘Why do you stand there like a thirsty ox at the gate?’ asked the carpenter. ‘You have seen millions of whales at Ferryside. Sure, indeed, they can take in a man at a gulp.’

  ‘Hist-hist,’ said Shacob. ‘Ann is going for the sail.’

  ‘For two shillings – for one shilling and a morsel of butter,’ said the preacher, ‘I’ll make a memorial song to the dead.’

  ‘Don’t let him,’ cried the cobbler. ‘Be you warned by me.’ He struggle
d to free his leg. ‘Little Ben, pull her out.’

  ‘I am here about the coffin,’ Shacob announced.

  ‘How can I make the coffin,’ Lloyd replied, ‘when I am haymaking all the week? Why didn’t you come a month back? And Ann is so stout that it will be a longish job.’

  ‘Where else can I go?’ Shacob wailed.

  ‘That’s it!’ the carpenter growled. ‘Take your custom from me. Don’t bring your breaks here any more if you talk like that. Go away with your wheelbarrow and spade and pickaxe and shovel.’

  ‘The perished – the stout and the thin – must be housed,’ the preacher proclaimed.