Murther and Walking Spirits

  Thus Thomas is lost to his home, though there is no cruel break. On Mothering Sunday, when all servants are given leave to visit their mothers, or any credible equivalent, he rides on a borrowed pony to Llanfair, with a present of a Simnel cake, baked in the Castle kitchen, and a gift from the Countess. He regales his parents and his half-brother Samuel with tales of the high life. His welcome is saddened by the fact that he has now embraced the Church of England, because the Castle servants are expected to attend the Anglican chapel-of-ease in the park every Sunday. This is a necessity of his employment, but Thomas does not conceal the fact that he likes it, likes the gentility of it, and the ceremonial of the service. Likes sitting in the servants’ gallery, and sharing a hymnbook with the prettiest housemaid.

  Worse, he has become a Tory, for the Castle expects any servant to support the Earl’s candidate at an election with his cheers, and sometimes with his fists, and, although Thomas is not yet of the financial rank that would give him a vote, he has listened with reverence over the years as Mr. Fewtrell held forth in the servants’ hall against the iniquities of Radicals and Reformers, and levellers of all kinds. Thomas has turned his coat, but he knows, and his family know, that he has turned it for a velvet coat with silver buttons, and it takes a great deal of principle to speak against that. Indeed, principle has begun to run low in the Gilmartin family after the death of Young Wesley, by then Old Wesley, in 1850.

  (9)

  FINELY EDUCATED as he was, it is unlikely that John Wesley paid any attention to that curmudgeonly Greek sage Heraclitus who was the first, so far as we know, to point out the psychological fact that anything, if pursued beyond a reasonable point, turns into its opposite. But John Wesley saw too much of life to escape the fact, and in a moment of terrible prophetic knowledge said: “Godliness begets Industry; Industry begets Wealth; Wealth begets Ungodliness.” And I now see this law at work in the family of Old Wesley Gilmartin, who had been baptized by water and the Spirit and accepted into the Christian family by a direct disciple of Wesley himself, a man who had been confirmed in the ministry by Wesley, and had profited by the good counsel of his great master.

  Old Wesley had not been an imaginative man, and was little troubled by discontent. He was industrious, and sure enough Industry – all that buying of red flannel in prodigious lengths of 132 yards, all those trains of pack-horses over the hills to Scotland, all that honest, moderate profit – brought Wealth, or what was Wealth in the circumstances in which he lived. His Godliness was, however, the great concern of his life, and when I watch his death I know him to be a truly good man, firm in his faith, if narrow in his intellect.

  What about the Wealth? It was plain that Samuel, as the eldest son and his father’s right hand, should carry on the business. But there was money-money in a leather bag under the boards of the parlour floor – and when it was all counted up, and Old Wesley’s few debts were paid, there was a little more than seven hundred pounds for each son.

  Thomas takes his money, and takes the bag, and hides both in a place where he keeps his own savings, from his wages and the tips, still called “vails,” that came his way at the Castle.

  (10)

  SAMUEL NOW has the business, and employs weavers, because he has grown too great for the drudgery of the loom. He also has his stepmother to keep; being the eldest son is not all gain, for she inherits nothing except her clothes and some pieces of furniture which are, by agreement, her own. He also inherits the economic situation of his time, and it is troublesome.

  The Scotch Trade is on the wane, for country women no longer wear so many red petticoats or the red cloaks which defy rain and snow. They are even giving up the steeple-crown hats that were handed down from mother to daughter, sometimes for four generations. Cleanliness and dress are taking on new forms.

  Is Samuel reconciled to a loss of income? Not he.

  Samuel is godly. He gives a yearly tenth of what he makes to the chapel, for its maintenance and for the poor. He honours his stepmother and she lives a life of ease and contentment. He prays night and morning, but his prayers are not so feeling, so unctuous, as those of Old Wesley. God has brought him prosperity, and it is not surprising that, to a mind like his, prosperity looks like solid evidence of God’s favour. God is, in fact, a business partner. Is it God’s will that he should cling to a declining trade? God, like fortune, favours the bold.

  Thus it is that Samuel looks about him and sees that the trains of pack-horses are giving way to the steam trains that are being built all over Wales. Samuel is not a big enough man, financially, to buy into the railway companies and he has a peasant mistrust of railway shares, which he could buy if he wanted them. But as he rides here and there on his business he sees that the armies of men who build the railways must have food where they work, and it is not easily found in the mountains. So he buys a couple of carts, and makes an arrangement with the gangers who employ the railway builders that the men shall buy food from his carts, and from his alone. Intruders are warned off. It is not more than a year or so before he has pretty much given up the Scotch Trade to those who are so blind as to continue it, and his weavers are now pushing the carts every day to where the workers are, and bread, and cheese, and bacon and beer are sold to the workers in a lively trade, and Samuel is richer than his father could have believed.

  He leaves his stepmother in the old house in Llanfair, and moves to larger and more convenient quarters down the valley, in Trallwm, where provisions are to be bought cheaper, and distributed more widely. He lives over his place of business, but his house is finer than his father’s, and in the bigger Trallwm chapel he is known as a substantial man and – John Wesley would have frowned at this – he is admired as a Big Giver.

  Could he do all this and still be a godly man, in his father’s understanding of the term? Godliness has brought Wealth, and where there is Wealth, Industry takes on another colour.

  The colour, of course, is that of Samuel’s own nature, and though I can see that he is not, in a coarse sense, a carnal man, he is undoubtedly a fleshy one. He has grown physically big, for, though he is not tall, and he is too hard of body to be strictly fat, he has become a man whose clothes demand a lot of good cloth. He takes to a tall hat even on weekdays. He has a large and impressive watch-chain, of the sort called an Albert, because the fashion was set by the Prince Consort; his watch is of the largest, loudest-ticking, most infallible sort. He even affects a gold brooch in his satin stock, although his wife has doubts about it and wonders if it is not a vanity. A man needs a watch, of course, but a brooch – ? But Samuel is not ruled by his wife and he likes the brooch. It is the headlight of his engine.

  For to my eyes, Samuel looks uncommonly like the engine of one of the new railway trains. His broad short figure, crowned by the very tall black hat of the day, and the short steps of his short legs, make him appear to advance as if on wheels, inexorably. He is on his way and no one shall stop him.

  Samuel is what the town calls “long-headed.” He is a reflecting man, and he reflects a great deal on what may bring him a profit. His fine clothes, which need so much cloth, give him a new idea. The railways are pretty much all built, but in the new world of the nineteenth century people of any account have ceased to wear old indestructible clothes, patched and mended, as once they did. Only the poor continue to wear the clothes that look almost like the costume of a harlequin, so patched are they with any cloth that came handy. Clothes are the thing, and Samuel decides that he will be a tailor.

  He will be, moreover, a smart tailor. Not to say fashionable, because that would alarm the farmers and local tradesmen who will be his customers, but he will offer something better than the garments made by the inept botcher whose failing shop he buys, and whose clothes might almost have been made by Robinson Crusoe. He will offer the new cloths, the tweeds from the north and the good broadcloths from London, the fancy waistcoats to wear to chapel and smartly cut, dropleaf-front breeches of whipcord for farmers who are rising in the world and
want the world to take notice. He is not appealing to dandies, for there are none; but he is aiming at solid men, below the gentleman rank but of proven worth, like himself. His fine broadcloth is impeccable, but of a provincial cut, and the full copper beard he wears, with a shaven upper lip, marks him firmly as a Trallwm man.

  He hires a good tradesman from Shrewsbury to be his foreman, but he has an eye to the future, and sends his younger son David to London to learn the art of cutting. To some extent cutting is a gift, but much may be learned, and Samuel has hopes that the gift may assert itself in David.

  That settles his family, thinks Samuel. Walter doing brilliantly at a good school. David launched in a fine trade. Polly, his only daughter, at Dr. Williams’s, the best Methodist school for girls in Wales, and headed, assuredly, for a good, prosperous marriage.

  David is a mercurial youth, a great jester, so perhaps there may be some hint of the artist in him. At seventeen he is already a pocket version of his father, a stocky, short, copper-bearded fellow who looks almost as thick as he is tall, though this is not really so; it is an impression given by a giant’s torso on short legs. He has a moist eye, and is a favourite with the girls, though not the most modest girls. His father does not yet know it, but David drinks, and not beer, but spirits. Mary Evans, the barmaid at the Angel Inn, knows David better than his father does.

  Samuel is fond of his dram, too, but he is discreet, as a chapel deacon ought to be. He is a member of a small club, made up of perhaps twenty prosperous tradesmen like himself, who do not care to be seen in the saloon bar at the Green Man, but who own a handsome old place called – nobody knows why – the Mansion House, and there they meet, ostensibly to discuss the politics of the day, but also to wet their whistles with brandy and seltzer. Industry and Wealth are truly lurching toward Ungodliness and Samuel knows it, but he can argue it away when the knowledge becomes too insistent.

  His wife rebukes him no longer, for she has died. A good, pious, charitable and loving woman, but Samuel’s prosperity was too rapid for her. Moreover she was imprisoned in the Welsh language which, fine as it is, does not agree with Samuel’s bustling life. He is trapped in his modernity; she in a feudal world. She strove to speak English, but it was not the comfortable clothing of her mind, or her link with her God. So he rushed into the future and she remained in the past.

  (11)

  SAMUEL IS a rising man. He is prominent in the Radical interest in the town, and it is growing, for there are more and more tradesmen who are no longer tenants of the Earl, or who have their premises on such long leases that they have nothing to fear from the Castle, so long as their rents are paid. Reform and Dissent are powers to be reckoned with in Trallwm. People of historical bent recall that in 1745 not a man would rally to the banner of Prince Charles Edward in the town, to the indignation of the Castle. Samuel becomes an alderman, and his business sense and long-headedness make him such a good one that, in an overturn that greatly annoys the Castle, he is elected Mayor of the Borough. The first Nonconformist ever to be Mayor of a Welsh borough! Think of that! The scarlet gown and the mayoral chain become his stately, short figure better than the succession of Castle supporters who have gone before him, for as long as the Borough has existed. On great occasions his short legs, beneath the scarlet gown and the fur-trimmed tricorn hat, move so deliberately that he seems to travel on castors.

  When Samuel is at his pinnacle, Fate strikes him down. I knew Fate would do it, because when I was alive I was a drama critic, and I had inherited a good sense of melodrama from my father. But Samuel did not know it, because men never do foresee such blows, and are always astonished when their destiny follows some old familiar path. Fate is even so devoted to cliché as to strike Samuel in the three most predictable places: in his family, in his pride, and in his rectitude.

  Family first. It is Thomas who makes the name of Gilmartin odious to the godly. He is by now the head footman at the Castle, and carries on the trade in “long ends” that goes with the job. It is not to Samuel’s liking that his half-brother is a professional bower and scraper, but he can do nothing about it, and he will not turn his back on his brother. But Thomas has for many years enjoyed to the full a footman’s perk of seducing the prettier maids in the Castle service, and everybody knows it in the town, but nobody speaks of it except late at night, in the saloon bar of the Green Man, or in hints at Chapel tea-meetings. In those privileged places it is spoken of often.

  It is not the local fashion to speak too loudly about such things, as nobody speaks about the disgraceful entries, locally called “shuts,” down which a dozen huddled dwellings, and perhaps three brick privies, house the hard core of Trallwm poverty. Chapel people of the more practical sort venture down the shuts with baskets of necessities for the wretched women and hungry children, but it needs more than that to make the shuts superfluous. It needs some cure that probably does not exist in a world so economically lunatic as this. It needs, perhaps, a revolution in the nature of man, which will make everybody industrious, prudent, decent and loving. And how Old Heraclitus would laugh at that notion! Prosperity must have its coeval and its opposite, and that is what the shuts are in Trallwm, and in every place bigger than a hamlet.

  Everybody speaks of Thomas’s hobby, and with indignation, when one of the girls dies. It had always been his custom, if one of his pretty subordinates whispered to him tearfully that she feared she was pregnant, to arrange for her to visit a local Wise Woman, Old Nan, who lived at a nearby crossway called the Brandy Shop. Old Nan has a proven remedy for pregnancy, which she makes from herbs and sells to trusted customers at a guinea a bottle. But the most recent favourite disobligingly developed blood poisoning after a miscarriage brought about too late, and died distressingly in the maids’ dormitory at the Castle, and it cannot be kept from the Countess. She is furious, and insists that the Earl’s agent, Mr. Forrester Addy, get to the root of the matter, and Thomas is in disgrace. Mr. Addy thinks that legal proceedings would be a mistake, because the culprit is the brother of the Mayor, and the Mayor, as a Justice of the Peace, would either have to sit in judgement – which would be dreadful – or refuse to do so – which would be equally dreadful in another way. But Thomas is cast out, and the scandal is on every tongue.

  When Samuel meets Thomas, it is Samuel who feels the disgrace. Thomas appears buoyant. Samuel cannot, of course, ask this seducer to his house; not a seducer, and perhaps not a Castle servant, brother though he may be. Nor can he ask his brother to the Mansion House, for he is a servant, however much money he may have tucked away. So Samuel has to let Thomas into the Town Hall at night, by a side door, and talk with him in the Mayor’s Parlour, which is not the luxurious apartment the name suggests. He gestures Thomas to a chair, then walks to and fro until his anger is hot enough for him to begin the interview.

  “Fornicator!” he says, rounding on Thomas and glaring at him.

  “You have always used hard words to me, Sam,” says Thomas, and he appears to consider himself the injured brother. “Years ago you damned me, and I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve forgiven you, of course. Oh indeed, yes. But you know what the Bible has to say about a man that damns his brother. You’ve always been a hard man, Sam.”

  “I told you you’d be damned yourself, Tommo, and I was right! Here’s a pretty kettle of fish! I’ve managed to keep this from our Mam, but everybody else in the county knows of it, and knows what to think of you.”

  “Oh, not everybody, Sam. A few gossips, perhaps.”

  “Yes, everybody. Last Sunday, in Chapel, I had to hear the minister pray for ‘one of our brothers who had sustained a heavy blow.’ And me sitting right below him, in the deacons’ pew, with all the other Big Heads of the Chapel! How do you suppose I liked that? Me, the Mayor, and the first Nonconformist Mayor, look you! And what do I hear but that up at St. Mary’s the Vicar spoke from the pulpit of the sorrow of the Countess, who was known for her kindness to her girls, and had lost one of them under circumstances that he could no
t mention in a sacred place. Oh, you’ve disgraced us finely, Tommo.”

  “I don’t really see what it has to do with you.”

  “Do you not? I suppose this is something you’ve picked up from the English up at the Castle. They don’t know what family is. My own brother!”

  “Half-brother.”

  “Who do you suppose thinks of that? You, whose father was baptized through water and the Holy Spirit by a man who had served John Wesley himself.”

  “There’s a bastard in the Wesley family now, did you know? Was that the Holy Spirit, do you suppose? I’ve no bastards, that I know of.”

  “That will do! You’ve a girl’s death on your conscience.”

  “A misfortune, certainly. She brought it on herself, Sam. I couldn’t get rid of her. Couldn’t get enough, she couldn’t. I never forced her. A nice enough girl, but a bit of a fool.”

  “God forgive you, you heartless villain! But that’s enough of that. What are you going to do?”

  “Well, I must say Mr. Addy hasn’t been as understanding as I would have expected a gentleman to be, and so I’ve been turned off. I suppose I’ll find something hereabouts.”