Coleridge was perhaps the most celebrated of all drinkers of laudanum, and splendid studies have been written of its influence on his Muse. Nobody seems to have paid attention to its influence on his bowels, for laudanum was a rare constipator. How much of The Ancient Mariner was the result of intestinal stasis?
Thus, because of landanum, Hannah was pretty seriously plugged up, but as the eighteenth century thought that constipation was a feminine attribute, little notice was taken. Her other function of excretion, however, was in full working order, and imperious in its demands. Far too often for Roger’s patience the canoe had to be brought to the shore so that Hannah might be taken into some bushes to pass her water. If he protested, Hannah wept and Elizabeth told her brother that he had made his sister cry.
“The more she cries the less she’ll piss,” murmured Roger, and Elizabeth was dismayed by his coarseness and cruelty.
This did not add up to adventure in the story-book sense, but Pilgrim’s Progress did so. Anna had brought three books with her. The Bible, of course, and the Book of Common Prayer; but also Bunyan’s great tale of spiritual journeying, and every night, if there was light enough, she read some of it aloud. The young people knew it well already, but they did not tire of it, because Bunyan sweetened instruction with splendid character drawings, and Roger and Elizabeth, and even Hannah when she was not in great pain or asleep, made a game of identifying the people they met on their journey with figures that Christian met on his. Mr. Worldly Wiseman was everywhere, as was Pliable, who always figures heavily in troubled times; Hopeful was certainly Anna herself and Roger, unhampered by modesty, was not sure whether he was Greatheart or Valiant-for-Truth, and decided to be both. He insisted that Elizabeth was Talkative, which grieved her, because she wanted to be Christiana, and thought Bunyan was neglectful of women in his story, as indeed he was. They had had a disagreeable passage with a raucous supporter of the new regime, and decided that he was Giant Despair, as he talked unjustifiably of laying hold of the Gage family and turning them over to people he called The Authorities, but as there were no Authorities within reach who appeared to want them he was foiled. As for the Slough of Despond, it was an almost daily point on their journey, and the Valley of Humiliation came much too often, as they grew dirtier and more disreputable in appearance. But Anna, who had to supply courage to her too easily discouraged children, insisted that they were coming every day nearer to the Celestial City, which was certainly somewhere in British North America, if only they could find Uncle Gus. Their lowest moment was when they made their way inland a few miles to Greenbush, and found that the farms belonging to the Vermuelen estate had indeed been sequestered, and that their former tenants were scornful of them. And so they had to make their way sadly to the point where they turned north-west into the Mohawk River.
(20)
THE FILM-MAKER spared me most of their frequent portages, but I saw something of them. Roger carried the bow end of the canoe on his shoulders, and Anna followed under the stern; Elizabeth remained at wherever they had been forced to leave the water, to attend to Hannah, and guard the bundles, for which Roger and Anna returned as soon as they might. It was weary work, and far from anything Roger was prepared to accept as adventure. The portages on the Mohawk were more frequent, and by far the most taxing was that which led from the Mohawk to Wood Creek. But this was a recognized portage, and not the simple stretches of a mile or so of white water or other obstructions that they could not manage in their canoe, and so there were men to be found who would carry the canoe and the baggage to the Crick, as they called it. To the astonishment of the Gages, they ran, or loped rapidly, over the ground and for a time the travellers wondered if these helpers had made off with their belongings. Carrying Hannah over the long portage was heavy work. Not that the child was much heavier than a bundle from the canoe, but it was exhausting to listen to her cries and complaints, and Anna had begun to fear that too much laudanum was worse than toothache, earache and general debility. But in the end Oneida Lake was reached, and thence the Oswego River and, at last, Lake Ontario, a great inland sea such as they had never seen before.
To my eye, although I suffered with them, after they left the Hudson they were travelling through country of extraordinary beauty. The Mohawk, lying to the south of the mountains, was transportingly lovely in the autumn weather – for it was now autumn and the leaves were turning – but they saw nothing of this, and indeed were fearful of the solemnity and grandeur of the scene. I had to remind myself that these people had an eighteenth-century idea of landscape, and it was not rugged grandeur that moved them. They were creatures of a time before the Romantic Era, during which, and ever since, rough country, mountains topped with cloud, untouched forests, crags and river ravines have been promoted in human estimation into the most splendid sights that Nature can offer. Nature, in its untouched state, was hateful and fearful to these creatures of eighteenth-century classicism. It did not occur to them that these might be the Delectable Mountains of which Bunyan had spoken.
Their greatest dread was of bears, as they slept at night on the leaves or boughs which made their uncomfortable beds. They arranged a rota of watches, when Anna or Roger stayed awake, to give warning if the bears came snuffling out of the undergrowth. What could they have done? What is a pistol to a bear?
Although she had little time to be aware of it, or explore it, this was for Anna a time of incalculable spiritual growth. I would call it psychological growth, but the word would have been unknown to her. God, whom she had worshipped when she was a woman of fortune, though not of the highest station, in New York, had ceased to be a benevolent abstraction, demanding and deserving of reverence, rather like King George III on a larger scale. God had become terrible, but not malignant or unapproachable. The vastness and incalculability of God were apparent to her as she had never dreamed He might be in Trinity Church, or at prayer-time in her New York parlour. And yet, somehow, though she knew herself to be very small in the eye of God, she felt that the eye rested on her, and that it was not an angry eye. It was in the vastness of Oneida Lake that it came to her with a wonderful certainty that God meant her to win this exhausting battle, and that He would bring her at last to – . To Lake Ontario, it seemed, and a long, long journey round its southern shore.
Nor was it Anna alone who grew on the journey. Roger became a man, which is to say that he accepted without demur his place and his duty in the world. Perhaps he was not the best sort of man, but who is to judge? When sieges must be lifted, or maidens rescued, or hardship endured, it is to the Rogers we look, and we trust in their firmness of purpose. The lawgivers, the poets, and scientists are of other breeds, but without the Rogers we should perish.
As for Elizabeth, the tedious care of Hannah made her into a woman. Not a woman of affairs and plans, like her mother, but a woman in another sense, a gentle, nourishing, tender woman, ready to sacrifice herself, not quite entirely, but to the last instant before she was consumed, to duty and charity. She alone felt truly for Hannah. To Anna her ailing daughter was a charge, a duty, someone who must be succoured so far as succour went, but who was not, in the last instance, loved. It was Elizabeth who found love for Hannah, and if it found its expression in childish terms, was not Hannah, in her misery, a child who needed to be cherished like a child? Laudanum could only be used so far, and when it began to fail Elizabeth held Hannah very close and sang a nursery song;
Hey, dance a jig
For the Granny’s pig
With a rowdy-dowdy-dowdy;
Hey, dance a jig
For the Granny’s pig
While pussycat plays the crowdy.
“What’s a crowdy?” asked Hannah, many times after she knew the answer.
“It’s a little fiddle, darling, such as a pussycat might play.”
“Pusscat plays the crowdy,” says drugged Hannah. “Sing it again.”
How many times did Elizabeth sing the nursery song? There must be somewhere, in our computerized Universe
, a record of the number, and all very much to the credit of the gentle-hearted Elizabeth, who never failed her unhappy sister.
(21)
AUGUST VERMUELEN is sitting on the stoep of his very decent house at a small settlement called Stoney Creek. He is smoking a long pipe, and resting from a long day at his profession, which is that of a land surveyor. He is very busy, for new lands are being apportioned to new settlers, refugees from the American States. He is a contented, prosperous man.
Who are these tatterdemalions who have opened his gate and are coming toward him? A woman, brown as an Indian and in rags, with a dirty boy who holds his head very high, and a girl carrying what might be a monkey, but which from its wails he judges to be a child.
The woman is weeping. “Gus,” she calls; “Gus, it’s Anna.”
I too am weeping, in so far as I can as a – shall I say a ghost? A disembodied but not unfeeling spirit, at any rate. God be praised, Anna has made it! This is the end, and I can stop agonizing. For, since the film began, I have felt heartbeat for heartbeat with the actors. Are they actors?
As the scene on the film fades, it is replaced by a notice, a warning, in print:
NO … NOT THE END.
For me, the onlooker, how could it be The End? Quite a long time earlier in the film I had recognized that Anna was my great-great-great-great-grandmother. Here she was, risen from the waters into the land which was to be mine.
Not the end. A beginning.
III
Of Water and the Holy Spirit
I HAVE NEVER visited Wild Wales, that northern part of the Principality which I had heard of, vaguely, as the land of my Gilmartin forebears. Only the Welsh Border is known to me, and that from a weekend visit in childhood. How, then, do I recognize the mountain country at once, and with the familiarity I might feel if the screen showed some part of France or Italy, countries I know well? But as the third film in Going’s Festival, and the second in what now seems to be a Festival meant for me alone, appears on the screen, I know at once that I am looking at Wild Wales. I am next to Going, impalpable and invisible, eager for more about Anna Gage and her children. This must be a fairly modern film, for scenes of action are to be seen behind the title and the necessary preliminaries. But, as with The Spirit of ’76, this is beyond question a film peculiar to me, for the Sniffer is watching something different; his film is a prodigious affair called Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, the work of the great Soviet film director (and dissident) Sergei Paradzhanov. But there is nothing Russian about what I see. Wales, beyond a doubt. Is there some hidden connection? Am I really the witness to films addressed to my posthumous needs? It must be so. Is there any other explanation?
(2)
THE ACTION appears at first to be concerned with some horribly bad weather. Here is a mountain pass, through cliffs of the blackest slate, lashed by fierce rain driven hither and thither by capricious gusts of riotous wind. It is dusk above the mountains but in the pass it is already night. There is music; the composer has been given his head, but his orchestral fury is merely an accompaniment to the meteorological tumult. Thunder crashes and echoes from the slate sides of the declivity through which there appears to be a track better accommodated to mountain sheep than to travellers. But – yes – I can just make out the figure of one traveller, a man on foot, stumbling through the darkness, searching for a foothold where the water has washed away the scant soil and the sharp stones that once marked the road. From time to time he loses the path, but he cannot stray far because the way is too narrow and its sides are so steep that only a goat could climb them.
The traveller is drenched. His frieze cloak is sodden and his broad hat, which he has fastened to his head with a long scarf, pours water from all three of its cocks. He wears leather gaiters and strong boots, but they are as heavy with water as the cloak. Is he a brave man, or merely a desperate one? If he does not find shelter soon he will certainly die in this storm.
Has he found shelter? This must be a village, or a hamlet, a single street of perhaps nine houses, the most miserable this widely experienced traveller has ever seen in all his tramping through Wales. In hovel after hovel the windows are broken, where windows have ever pierced those stone walls, and not a sign of life is to be seen.
Not a sign, but does he hear a sound? From one miserable pile of tumbledown masonry there is a sound, and as he draws near, he knows what it is. It is the sound of a harp.
I sigh. Is this to be yet another film in which the Welsh people are shown as unremittingly musical and poetic, assuaging the harshness of their destiny with songs of love and valour and dreams? No, God be praised, it is not. The harp thrums and tinkles, and to its accompaniment somebody is singing a bawdy song, a song of shameful lust and filthy desire, and there is laughter at every evil hint and dirty word. I am astonished that I understand the ancient tongue, even in this disgraceful dunghill stretch of its vocabulary, but I reflect that death is full of surprises. The traveller pauses, to my astonishment, for he seems to be wondering if he can endure such company as this song could please. But a sharp gust almost throws him on his face, and he knows that he has no choice. He finds the leather string that lifts the wooden latch of the door, and as the wind drives it open with a crash he steps inside.
(3)
IT IS, apparently, an inn and the rudest inn that man has known since the inn that, so long ago, refused shelter to Mary and Joseph. The room is not a large one, and the only light is from a poor fire, but the place is full, and warm as much from the heat of the bodies of the guests as from the hearth.
The harper, who is also the singer, stops his ribald tale in mid-verse; he is old, filthy and apparently blind, for a leather shade hangs over his eyes like a penthouse. The other guests, who may number ten or a dozen, are big men who look at the traveller with sour mistrust. They are Welsh mountain men; nothing about them is remarkable except that they all have red hair. Not ginger hair, which is common enough in all Celtic countries, but a darker red which, if it were washed, might be called auburn.
“May I take shelter here?” asks the traveller in courteous Welsh. “The night is very bad.”
“You may, or you may not,” says one man, after a long and inhospitable pause. “Who may you be?”
“I am a traveller, bound on my Master’s work. My name is Thomas Gilmartin.”
“And who is your master, that he sends you to such a place as this, on such a night as this?” says the biggest man, a giant even among these mountain men.
“My Master is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and I am here and everywhere on His work, which never ends,” says the traveller. He shows no fear.
“Never heard of him,” says the big man. “He has no land here.” The other red-haired men guffaw, and repeat the joke among themselves – Never heard of him.
“Then I must tell you of Him. But first may I dry myself a little? I am wet through. Can I buy anything to eat here? I have had no food since morning, and I have been walking all day.”
“Oh, you can pay, is it? Too proud to ask for a bite, is it? Where do you think you are, little man?”
“I hoped to reach Mallwyd tonight, but I do not know where I am. Am I near there?”
“You are two miles or so from Mallwyd, and you will never get there tonight, or perhaps ever. You are at Dinas Mawddwy. Does the name of Dinas Mawddwy mean anything to you?”
“The blessing of God be on Dinas Mawddwy, then. May I stop here till morning?”
“The blessing of God has no meaning in Dinas Mawddwy. You must be a fool not to know that.”
“I only know that I have come from Dolgellau and I am making my way to Llanfair Caereinion – Shining Llanfair, as it is called – to carry on my work. Have I taken a wrong road? And I must tell you that the blessing of God is as powerful here as it is everywhere, say what you will.”
It is the blind harper who speaks now. Scarecrow though he is in outward appearance, his voice is finely deep and melodious. “Dinas Mawddwy is not a place of ble
ssings, but of curses, master,” says he. “You do not know who is talking to you. That is Cursing Jemmy, the blackest curser and swearer even in this cursing place. So you may stick your blessing up your arse so far that when you want it next it will pop into your mouth all brown and stinking.”
The red-headed men are much pleased with this witticism, and the harper bobs his head in acknowledgement of their laughter. The harper goes on; plainly he is Cursing Jemmy’s toady.
“Jemmy can curse for five minutes without a pause or taking fresh breath. Jemmy can curse the black out of a parson’s coat. The last parson came here ran off with his fingers in his ears.”
“That is formidable cursing indeed,” says the traveller. “I don’t suppose you would oblige me with a sample of it? I have heard some very fine cursing in my time, and though I now preach against it as the Devil’s work, I have a right to consider myself a judge.”
“You, a judge?” says the harper. “A Methodist preacher? What way would you be a judge, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
“You clearly know nothing of Methodist preachers,” says the traveller. “We are not your Church parsons, who have been to college and live snug in grand houses from birth to death. Most of us are saved men – brands snatched from the burning – and before we took up Our Lord’s work some of us were very great sinners, I may tell you. Now – you men of Dinas Mawddwy have not travelled far. I can tell, because you say you have never heard of Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name resounds throughout the whole world. Your ears are stopped against Him. I know. My ears were stopped against Him, too, but He can shout louder than you can stop your ears, and He will. He shouted till I had to hear him. Now, am I to hear your fine curser?”