Testimonies

by Patrick O'Brian

  Q. Was that because of your unhappiness with Emyr and his mother?

  A. If it had all been quite different, if I had been happy, I do not know. I would have been a different person without those years. But whatever I might have been I am sure I should have loved him if I had known him in the same way.

  Q. I think we are using the word for different things?

  A. Yes; perhaps.

  Q. It would be best if you were to tell me how things happened after he came down from Hafod.

  A. He came very ill, as I told you. We sent Gerallt away to my brother: it was Taid and I who thought of it, to save the noise. Emyr and Nain did not like it at first, but they said it was right afterwards.

  Q. A moment, please. What were your relations with Emyr and Nain at that time?

  A. They were better. Then when Gerallt was away and we were all anxious about Mr. Pugh we all drew together much more. Emyr was very good: he was really upset, and he would have done anything, only there was nothing he could do.

  Q. There was none of that trouble with Emyr?

  A. No. There had not been for a long time.

  Q. So things were all well at Gelli then?

  A. Yes. While he was ill, the time when he was getting better, but before Pritchard Ellis came, were the best days I ever had there, except for a little while after Gerallt was born. We were all friendly together: there was a good feeling in the house. I missed Gerallt though; he had never been from me before.

  Nain was kind to me: she knew I missed Gerallt and she was kind on purpose. When there was not Emyr or Gerallt between us she might have been my mother, she had such a good heart for me. At that time she did not mind my things in the house any more, nor my cooking.

  There was another thing. It had been a bad year, rain for the hay and the corn, and the foxes had had a great many of the lambs: then the prices at the Grading had been very bad. The cows were the only thing that did well that year, and they cost such a lot in the winter. We were all troubled for the winter. But when he was beginning to sit up and read books he asked to see Emyr. They were together a long time, and I heard Emyr say, No, oh no, you are very welcome, Mr. Pugh. He came out looking very happy and said to Taid that they could write off to Lincolnshire for the hay now. We were very sorry we had to take it, but it was the only thing (he could not have borne to be a burden) and it was such a help. Emyr gave Nain and me a new winter coat each. You would never have known he had done it: he always behaved just the same, like a friend we had asked to stay, not a visitor—not a summer person, I mean.

  Those days seemed so good and natural, not like something that was good but could not last. I used to sit with him in the afternoons, and we talked. If I had been clever I would have known how he felt, but I don’t think I did at all, at that time. We talked like friends. There was none of that air with him—do you know what I mean, jokes and a way of speaking? It was not him a man and me a woman.

  Q. What did you talk about?

  A. All sorts of things. Anything that came into our heads. I had never had anyone to talk with like that since I was a child. He knew a great deal, but he never talked as if I did not understand. Mostly we talked about quite ordinary things. I told him about when I was a little girl at home and about the old things my father had told us. But even when we talked about nothing much it seemed to be very interesting.

  He spoke sometimes about his life before. He had not been very happy. There were some funny ways he had: he spoke like a grandfather now and then, as if he was very old. He was not very old, anyone could see that, but he was afraid of being old and he talked as if he was very old. I would tell him that he was quite young—not flat out like that, of course, but so that it did not show. It did please him so.

  Q. What sort of an impression would Mr. Pugh have given to women in general?

  A. Nothing much at first, I don’t think. He was tall and much too thin: he did not stand up straight. He was not handsome. You would not notice him at first. He had a sad face, except when he was talking. He was very quiet, and he had beautiful manners, but until you knew him quite well you did not notice that—they were not party manners; they stayed all the time. Afterwards I used to be surprised that I had not noticed it before, how nice it was to see him smile.

  Q. Then Mr. Ellis came. What difference did that make?

  A. It was not only Pritchard Ellis. Poor little Gerallt came back too, and he was more spoilt than he had ever been. It was a queer thing that Meurig’s wife should have been so good to him; she had meant to give him a good holiday, not to spoil him, but it came to the same thing. It was strange, because she had never liked me, and Meurig had said over and over again, when she was there, that in time Gerallt should have the farm—you would have thought that would have put her against him, but it did not.

  He was becoming a very disobedient, self-willed little boy. He was still as good as gold at heart, but there were times when I wondered if it could last, and what sort of man he would be if he went on growing that way. My heart went cold when I thought of what it might be, Emyr being his father.

  At first I could hardly do anything with him, and he made as much noise as ten. I was very unhappy that Mr. Pugh should see him like that, because I should so have liked to show him at his best, and to be proud of him.

  It started the old trouble again. Nain and Taid were delighted to have him back, and if I checked him even a little they thought I was cruel. Soon with Nain it was “Bronwen says this,” “Bronwen says that,” “Don’t move the settle, because Bronwen will not like it.”

  Then Pritchard Ellis came. There was much more work to be done, and whatever I could do Nain would be scrubbing the floors or carrying the water. I wondered what he made of it, and what he thought of me.

  I think Nain began to stop liking him then. If I wanted Gerallt to behave well and be quiet it was partly so that he would be spared the noise—I did not see nearly so much of him then, but I did see that he suffered from it; he looked very pale sometimes, and I am sure his head hurt him—and so she began to wish him away.

  Q. Tell me about Mr. Ellis.

  A. Where shall I begin?

  Q. Start with how you came to know him, what you thought of him then, and how he came to be visiting you.

  A. He was a famous preacher, a relative of Mr. Lloyd yr Ysgol, and he had always come to stay with him in his holidays when he was a young man, before I married Emyr. Every year at the chapel they had him to preach, and then he would stay with one of the deacons. This time he was spending a long time with us, because he had left his old place in the south and he had to wait before his new one was ready. I do not know why he did not stay with Mr. Lloyd, but it was arranged long before that he should be with us. Taid was very pleased: he honored Pritchard Ellis, and loved to hear him. He was a famous preacher.

  I had heard of him before coming to Cwm Bugail, but being Church at home we had never seen him. The first time he came to stay for his preaching after I came I did not know what to make of him; it seemed that I could not be right, with the others and everybody in the village and in the papers saying what a fine man he was. He was very polite to me.

  The next time he came I still could not be sure, but when he came this time I knew I did not like him.

  Q. Why not?

  A. I just did not like him. He was like a slug.

  Q. Did you have no other reason than that?

  A. Well, his airs. He was always very neatly dressed in his black. He took great care of his clothes and he shaved every day. He never dirtied himself with work; his hands were white and rather fat, like a lady’s.

  He would come and watch the men at work, but he never took off his coat, though he had been born on a farm. He was so sure that he was right that nobody minded or took notice, even when every hand was wanted, like at the threshing. It was very different with Mr. Pugh: his coat was off in a moment and as far as he knew he would help in anything, however dirty. He took no notice at all of his clothes. (When I went thro
ugh his washing after he came down from Hafod I found he had not one whole pair of socks—he bought new when the holes were too big—and he had safety-pins where buttons had come off.) He never could help much, although he had such a good heart, because he did not know how to handle anything. He did his best. I have seen him as pale as death carrying a little ewe that the gwas could have swung with one hand. He did not know how to use his strength or how to handle any tools. You have to be born to it. Pritchard Ellis was born to it, and he could have done it easily, if he had had a man’s heart like Mr. Pugh.

  Q. So those were your reasons?

  A. Yes: I know it was wrong to think like that of a minister, but until I had good reason to stop I respected him. You can dislike a righteous person, but still respect and listen to him.

  Q. No, I did not say it was wrong; I only wanted to know the order of events. Please go on. You had come to your reasons for ceasing to respect Mr. Ellis.

  A. I saw him with Mr. Pugh. He hated Mr. Pugh for being what he could never be—oh, he was mean and envious. They used to talk in the kitchen after the day’s work. I knew Mr. Pugh wanted to talk peaceably and friendly with everybody, but Pritchard Ellis always turned it into a thing like those debating societies they have. He did it to show off and to work his spite on Mr. Pugh. You could almost see the spite oozing out of him.

  Often Mr. Pugh did not want to talk at all; anyhow not like that; sometimes he was feeling ill, and they kept him up in that stuffy room in front of the fire until I thought he would faint. He did not like to stay in his room: he was very careful about giving offense, and he knew what pleasure it gave Taid and Emyr to hear a discussion. He was so much above Pritchard Ellis. One thing showed it very well. There was the best chair: Taid sat in it on Sundays if there were no visitors. Mr. Pugh had always sat in it every time he had been in our kitchen. Pritchard Ellis was never quiet unless he was sitting in it: when the chairs were being put for the evening he would hang about near it so as to be ready to dart into it. Mr. Pugh never took any notice at all: you would never have known there was a best chair. Pritchard Ellis would look so triumphant and mean.

  Then when they were talking I knew very well that Mr. Pugh could have put him down many and many times, if he had chosen, but he did not, from politeness or just not troubling with him. If it had not been our house he would never have had two words with a fellow like Pritchard Ellis. Sometimes they talked about things we had talked about when I was sewing, and I knew what he could have said if he chose. I have seen Pritchard Ellis seem to make a fool of him, because he did not choose to answer what he could have answered. He let him do it, rather than offend the others who were listening—they were talking about the Welsh and English.

  Once or twice he let Pritchard Ellis know what he could do if he cared, and once he stopped him just like that, like slamming a door, because he was saying bad things about the King. He would not allow it to be said, and Pritchard Ellis never said another word—looked like a hang-dog thief. Oh I was so pleased to hear him at last. I could have hugged him.

  He properly frightened Pritchard Ellis: he was afraid it might go further and spoil his respectability. He made the others promise not to say anything, afterwards: he said he was just testing Mr. Pugh, for a joke. He liked to dandle with the Nationalists, but he wanted none of their risks. He had never gone so far. It was his spite that had pushed him, although he took such care.

  Q. You must have loved Mr. Pugh by that time, I think?

  A. Perhaps I had begun then.

  Q. Go on about Mr. Ellis.

  A. There was another sort of much bigger reason. Pritchard Ellis was bad. I had begun to suspect it because of something I found in his room. Then I knew it because he made a rat-hole bigger so that he could look into our room at night: I think I found it the same day and I moved a trunk against it; but it made me feel dirty all over.

  He touched me on the stairs—we were alone. I hit him so hard that he gasped: even then he was careful not to make a noise. I wish I had marked him. I would have killed him if I could. I hit him with all my strength. It made me cry, I felt so dirty. It was like having been smeared with a mess all over; even inside with filth.

  Q. Did you tell Emyr?

  A. No. I thought about it. But the fuss—then he would have denied it. And he was going away soon. No, I did not tell anybody. I would not have told Emyr in any case. There was no telling with him. He might have killed him, or it might have started him again. I could never trust poor Emyr.

  Q. How did Ellis behave afterwards?

  A. I was never alone with him again, I took care of that. He was not afraid; he knew I would not tell. It did not stop him. I saw his face when he looked at me. I know he left the dirty things in his bedroom on purpose so that I should see them.

  He went to spend the last week at Mr. Lloyd’s. It was a long week before he left. I hated to see him touch Gerallt, playing with him. I hated to hear him praying. It was false and wicked when you knew what was inside, and sometimes I understood him—the sense beneath, I mean—and it was disgusting to be there. When he was in the room I did not like to breathe the air that he had breathed. He was a bad man: the worst I have ever known.

  Q. I want to go off onto another point. You changed servants at that time, did you not?

  A. Yes, I forgot to say that. John went to Mr. Davies, Ysgubor. I was sorry to see him go. We had had better boys, but he was a good one. He had reached a silly age, and he went to the cinema too often, but he was a good, loving boy really. I often thought of him when Llew came. There was not anything you could like in Llew. He was clever and he did his work well, but you could not like him like the others. Pritchard Ellis might have been something like him when he was young.

  Q. To go back to Mr. Pugh for a moment. He did not like Ellis, of course; but did he dislike him very much?

  A. I believe he disliked him as much as he could. But Mr. Pugh was so far much better than Pritchard Ellis I do not think he could hate him properly. He would never have understood how bad and rotten he was.

  Pugh

  When Ellis left it seemed to me that the house had more air in it, it was a healthier place; one could breathe freely.

  It was too much to hope that the peace that he had spoiled would return at once, but we did have some beautiful days that I love to pass through my memory.

  Bronwen and I were very close at that time. There was an understanding between us that arose from no words, gestures, or looks. There was a curious side-shoot from this; time and again after a silence she would say the words that had already formed in my mind, or she would hum a tune, coming in at the bar that I had reached in my interior song. Sometimes I would know exactly what she was going to say and (what was stranger) what I was going to reply, so that I heard my own voice running over the words already familiar. This was a queer, disturbing feeling, something dreamlike. It had never happened to me before; but then I had never loved before, with my whole heart and soul.

  We were alone one day, one of the first windless, sunny days of the growing year, and I had brought my chair out to the lovely green under the ash trees. A stream ran deep along the edge against the plough, and there was the continual music of it in the still air. She joined me with a basket of darning, and all the long afternoon we talked. I love to dwell on this time, because I re-create my happiness and because while I am in it I need not go on. Perhaps it is out of place to record a conversation like this: it has no direct bearing on anything. But irrelevant or not, I am going to put it down.

  We were talking about the world at large. I said that I thought it was in a bad state, steadily getting worse: she thought that it was a good place for people to live in, and that it was getting better and better. She said she did not know anything much outside her own life (it was not false modesty; it was a statement of fact, and said like that) but even in her life there were so many things that were better already. There were anaesthetics (the blacksmith had pulled her first grown-up tooth), operations wher
e it had been death before, physic for the sheep, the injections for the cows, health insurance.

  “When I was a little girl,” she said, “my brother had appendicitis, and my father sent for the best doctor he could. He was a surgeon from Liverpool, staying with Dr. Rhys. My brother was very bad (it was sudden) and the surgeon came that evening in the trap from Bettws and Dr. Rhys with him. They did it in the kitchen, because the light was best there. When it was all over and they had had a cup of tea my father asked what he owed the surgeon from Liverpool, and he said sixty guineas. My father thought that he had not heard right, but he had. Dr. Rhys said it in Welsh. He paid down the money in sovereigns, and never said anything. Afterwards he said what did it matter compared with Meurig’s life or his health: he said nothing matters so long as you have got your health. But for weeks and weeks after he looked desperate and pale. It was within five pound all that he had been able to save, and all his safety. It was not the money that was costing, it was the sheep on the mountain and the life of the farm. It was not right like that.

  “A hundred years ago my brother would have died, and even twenty years ago it could have ruined a family; now it is the ambulance comes, and a few days in hospital and it is over.”

  “Yes, there are many improvements like that, and they are very good things, excellent; but I meant it in a more general way. You can cure some of the worst injustices, but you cannot get at the base of the misery. Indeed, you might say that everything that keeps people living longer or helps to increase the population really makes the misery worse, although it seems to be good in each particular case.

  “It is in towns that you see it most clearly, but it is really the same everywhere. Always, all the time, men are forcing themselves to do what they do not want to do, and keeping themselves from what they do want to do.”

  (I write this as though it had been a monologue: it was not, entirely, but it is a convenient form.)

  “Have you noticed that man is the only unhappy animal? and that the more complex the society the unhappier the man? Imagine living in an American industrial city. But even in good conditions, where do you find a happy man? A man happy in the ordinary course of his life, without some exceptional, temporary cause. In our days you find him in a madhouse.