How Green Was My Valley

  “Proceed, Mr. Pritchard,” said one of the old men, and four heads nodded in a line.

  “There is little more to be said,” Mr. Pritchard said, with a shaking of the head, and speaking in the throat as though his breakfast was troubling him, “the unfortunate affair, as I have said, was caused by a reference to the defendant’s sister, a married woman, and a well-known preacher. Doubtless the defendant felt himself obliged to defend the woman’s name, and did so with savage cruelty, taking the law into his own hands, instead of calling upon the Law to come to his aid, and in a proper manner, demanding satisfaction in the High Court with a writ for slander, to be issued by the woman, or her absent husband, or by the preacher concerned. This was not done, nor has it been done. And to-day, through the intractability of witnesses, I am forced to ask the Court for permission to withdraw.”

  “I submit,” said Mr. Esdras Daniels, up on his feet, and speaking as though he had just drunk deep of The Wrath, “that my client, and other innocent people, have been subjected to heaping indignities.”

  A tap with the hammer from the Bench.

  “Dismissed,” said the old voice, “no indignities, only shame. Shame, indeed. Dismissed. And not sure if we are right to dismiss, either.”

  Another man sitting below the four of them stood on his chair to talk to them quietly, while noise in court of boot and voice came louder. Mr. Daniels and Mr. Pritchard were having a little talk together, very happy, too, and a little laugh to finish, before to tie papers and give to a man with a sack behind them.

  A tap with the hammer, and quietness.

  “Dismiss,” said the old man. “Next case.”

  “Outside,” said the man in the gown to me, and out I went through crowds of staring faces.

  Straight out to the trap, with my father and Mr. Gruffydd up in their seats, waiting.

  “Home for the love of God,” said my father, and Thomas whipped up.

  Back into the wide greenness of the Valley we went, and not a sound all the way, with that feeling about as that you will have when a man has had a hurt and keeps a little smile on the mouth in case you look at him.

  “Thank you, Thomas, my little one,” my father said, when we were home.

  “Nothing, man, nothing,” Thomas said. “Good-bye now.”

  No word or look for Mr. Gruffydd, before he whipped up down the Hill.

  “Will you come in for dinner, sir?” my father asked him, but looking at the house. I was looking at the cork lining inside my London hat.

  Mr. Gruffydd put his hand on my father’s shoulder and turned about, and went from us.

  “O, God,” my father said, with tears. “Come you in, and shut the doors, my son.”

  For the first time, our front door was shut tight in the daytime.

  James Rowlands came round our back after dinner, and stood in the doorway. In his best, he was, with a straightness of face.

  “Gwilym,” he said, “meeting of deacons.”

  “O,” said my father, “when, now then?”

  “Now just,” said James. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  My mother was watching them both, in quiet, pale, with brightness in the eyes, but not of smiles.

  “Well,” my father said to her, and looked at her.

  “Well,” my mother said to him, and looked at him.

  In that quietness they were speaking their own language, with their eyes, with the way they stood, with what they put into the air about them, each knowing what the other was saying, and having strength one from the other, for they had been learning through forty years of being together, and their minds were one.

  “Good-bye, now,” said my father.

  My mother nodded, and he went.

  That night, when I came home after a meeting with Ianto, Bron was waiting with my dinner.

  “Mr. Gruffydd has been put from the Chapel,” she said. “The deacons said he was unfit. Seven votes to three.”

  “Plenty more chapels,” I said.

  “Dada is leaving,” she said.

  “So am I,” I said.

  “And me,” said Bronwen. “We will have a Split.”

  “With Mr. Gruffydd to preach and bring everybody from the Chapel,” I said. “Leave the deacons by themselves.”

  “He is going in a sailing ship to Patagonia at the end of the month,” she said. “He asked them to let him stay till then. But they said he was unclean. Mr. Isaac Wynn.”

  “What did Dada say?” I asked her, but not looking.

  “Mr. Isaac Wynn is with vinegar plasters,” she said, and trimming her words as with shears, “and your good father had a bit of an eye from somewhere.”

  “Good,” I said. “Where is Mr. Gruffydd?”

  “I took supper down to him, now just,” she said. “He was putting sacking about the furniture. Ordered out by to-morrow, he is.”

  Ice threw itself upon me with redness.

  The clock marched and marched and marched.

  “I will go down to him,” I said.

  “To-morrow,” Bron said, and put a hand on my head. “His supper is in that basket. No supper in Gethsemane, he said.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I WAS DOWN AT GORPHWYSFA early next morning, but Mr. Gruffydd was up and washed, and reading, when I knocked. The house was empty in sound, with roped bales and crates along the walls of the passage, and more piled in the middle of the room.

  “Well, Huw,” he said, with calmness, and no different from any other time, “I am glad you have come.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “You have done everything, then, and nothing I can do for you. I am sorry.”

  “There is, my little one,” he said, and smiling. “A great service you may do for me. Will you?”

  Well.

  You shall only look, and try to move the stones.

  He turned his back and went to look through the window.

  “Do you remember the daffodils, my little one?” he said, and his voice with the lowness of wind from the north-east. “Mentor and pupil, we have been. But friends always. This furniture, that we made together, I want you to take to Tyn-y-Coed. I promised it.”

  Quietness again, and birds beginning to shout in the garden.

  “I was wrong to call this room Gethsemane,” he said, “I sullied the name. Blind and selfish and foolish, we are, at such times. We did that work with love in this room. We were happy here. Nothing wrong with the Garden, only me.”

  A blackbird putting loops and twists in his voice outside, and thrushes shouting in the grass, and blueness coming to the sky.

  “I am only sorry to go, with nothing done,” he said. “Sorry for nothing else. The idle tongues, the meannesses, the poverty of mind, are as much my fault as anybody’s. Perhaps there will be good work to be done where I am going.”

  Ellis going by, and Mari the mare wanting a nail in her shoe.

  “I am going this morning,” he said, and Mari dancing among the deeps of his voice. “This watch my father gave me when I entered the Ministry. I would like to give you more. Take it, Huw. It has marked time that I loved.”

  Warm from his pocket in my hand, the smoothness of gold and glass.

  “No need for us to shake hands,” he said, and his voice riding winds and seas, and his back black in front of me. “We will live in the minds of each other, Huw, my little one. Good-bye, with love.”

  I went from there. With blood on my chin I went from there.

  Up on the mountain I went, and stayed there with my face in the grass till the sun was hot on my back.

  When I went down, Gorphwysfa was empty.

  Place of Rest, well named.

  The village was like a place of the dead for days afterward. People walked as though the skies might open and pour fire. Children were kept from the streets. A quietness was upon us.

  My father was like a man in his sleep, but he had the sense to pay rent for a stable and buy paint and whitewash to clean it. We were down
there every day till Sunday scrubbing and painting.

  On Sunday morning we went to Chapel just the same. We said good mornings to the same people and passed them on the Hill as we had always done. But we turned to the right at the bottom of the Hill and went in to the stable, that was our new Chapel, and my father read the lessons.

  The Split, we were.

  Ten of us.

  And for three-quarters of an hour we sat in silence, and the voice of Mr. Gruffydd, wherever he was, filled us again with courage, and with hope of a better world.

  And his watch was in my hand, warm as when he gave it to me.

  “Are you with us here this morning, Mr. Gruffydd?” my father said, with my mother’s hand in his. “Lifting up our eyes to the hills, we are, see. As you said, so we do. Forever. God bless you. Yes. And, O God, give ease to the sore hearts this day. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said we all.

  “Let us sing a good hymn,” my father said. “Let us give our voices a good bit of work, now, before they will wash away.”

  So we sang, and I seemed to hear Mr. Gruffydd’s basso as you will hear it from a choir, only to be heard if you bend your ear and listen well, and only then, if you know what to listen for.

  As months went to winter, the Split came to have nearly a hundred people, and we bought the stables between us, and worked on it to make it a fitting place for the reading of The Book. Night after night we were down there, carving seats, and woodwork for the pulpit, and making doors, and paving the floor, until it was pleasure to go in there.

  Even Dai Bando and Cyfartha helped with the masonry, for Dai could lay stones with the best, and no help needed to lift them, either.

  “Huw,” he said, one night, “come with us on Saturday, is it? Benefit for Cyfartha it is, and we want extra seconds. You have never been before. Eh, Cyfartha?”

  “For a favour,” Cyfartha said. “Dai is fighting, see.”

  “Dai?” I said, and in surprise, for he was coming to fifty in years, and a bit short in the lungs on top of the mountain, too.

  “Needle match,” Cyfartha said. “I am timekeeper. Willie Lewis is one second we can trust, see, and you are the other. Will you come?”

  “If it is benefit for Cyfartha,” I said, “I will come. What is the needle for?”

  “Talking too loud,” Dai said. “Big Shoni, it was. In the Three Bells.”

  But Big Shoni was taller, and broader even than Dai, a man with a loud voice who punched little men and drank their beer. Many times he had been hit across the head with pick-handles to teach him, but he was not the kind to learn. So many were afraid of him, and even in the colliery they kept friends, and gave him good places where he could fill trams with least trouble.

  “Where will you fight?” I asked him.

  “Over the mountain,” Dai said.

  “I will be with you,” I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I TOLD BRON where I was going, for I liked to be in the house early to tell the boys stories before to go to bed, and it was a long walk home, so I knew I would be early if I got in the house with daylight.

  “Well,” she said, with thinking, “as long as you will be safe, go, you.”

  “I will be safe, Bron,” I said. “Sorry I am, not to tell them their story. But two on Monday, is it?”

  “With a couple of sweets,” she said.

  Happy we were, in that little house, happy, indeed.

  There had never been a word between Bron and me since the morning I had told her how shamed I was, and that feeling of shiver between us had gone, too. We were as though one, neither man nor woman, safe, solid, at peace.

  There is strange to go from the quiet of home to a place where men go to enjoy themselves with sport. A change, they call it, and a change it is, indeed.

  I had never been to a prize-fight before, so it was a life in another world, and a world I can rest quiet to see burnt.

  The air was a stink of blueness, sharp with the heat of bodies, and with the weight of puddled beer drying into boards that never knew soap and water, and soured with tobacco spit.

  Black and grey they huddled on benches, the sportsmen, with their faces red in rows, regular as match heads, one behind the other, every mouth wide, every eye wild, and their voices mixed in a thickness of sound, an untidiness of raw tone, without good thought or sense.

  Born in the image of God, they were, every one of them, and some loving woman having pains of the damned to bring them forth, to sit there with their mouths open, like calves under the net in the market-place.

  Enjoying themselves.

  “Dai,” I said, “I would go from here quick, if you and Cyfartha had another second.”

  “What is the matter, man?” Dai asked me, and bending to my ear, for the shouting was senseless.

  “It is shame to bring good lungs in here,” I said, “more shame to fight only to please these. There are better grazing in the fields.”

  “Sport this is,” Dai said, in such surprise that you would laugh to see, “boxing, man. Do you want it in bloody Chapel, now then?”

  “These men are in blood for money,” I said. “To hell with it.”

  “To hell with you, too,” Dai said. “Eh, Cyfartha?”

  “Would you fight free, Huw?” Cyfartha asked me.

  “Every morning for years with you,” I said. “No money, and better sport than this. I will have a man in blood if there is a matter between us. But not for money. And not for these cattle, either.”

  “Let them hear you,” Dai said.

  “To hell with them,” I said. “Am I afraid of worse than cattle?”

  Dai looked at Cyfartha with pity and hopelessness.

  “A second, mind you,” he said. “Fighting two, I will be, to-night. Big Shoni and him, eh, Cyfartha?”

  Cyfartha spat a full ten feet.

  Two men were in the ring, tops bare, and belts about their trews. Small gloves they wore, but worse than the bare fist to punch, for the leather was frayed and it cut the skin.

  I looked at the floor, for both of them were punching the life from each other, hit one, hit the other, no science, no brains, nothing, only fists landing flat on flesh to fetch blood bubbling, and bruises red.

  A rare pleasure, indeed, and a sport, and please to hear the cattle bawling.

  A boxer would have put both in their graves, and a riddance.

  What is there in the spirit of man to make him earn his money by crushing the bones and drawing the blood of another, I shall never know.

  I was sick to sit there, with that sound about me that stained the air when a Man sweated on a cross, and blood spurted upon the walls of Roman arenas, and flames took flesh from the legs of silent men.

  Here with us still, the same sound, changeless.

  “Come you,” Cyfartha said, “our corner, this one by here. Bucket and bottle up there, quick.”

  You should have seen Big Shoni.

  Six foot of him, solid, with muscle thick under fat, and smooth, without a hair on him. Big jaws he had, that seemed to come out of his chest without help of a neck, and his bald head coming to a point, like an egg, with scars across it, and little dents that were full of shadow. His eyes, it was, that gave fright, for they shone yellow in any light, and looking across at us, they seemed to be jewels of the devil put there to kill spirit.

  “God is my life,” Willie Lewis said to me, in whispers, “Old Dai must be from his senses to put foot in the ring. Look at that one, by there.”

  “Big he is,” I said. “But Dai knows where to hit.”

  “I hope,” Willie said, and meant. “If that one hits Dai, we will bury him on the way back. If you are having my opinion, see, old Dai have picked himself a burden, here.”

  “Bucket and bottle?” Dai said, and pulling on the ropes to come in, with a coat over his shoulders, and his legs in clean white breeches and stocking, with soft shoes.

  “All here,” I said.

  He looked square at me while he rubbed his
hands dry from the pickling tub. Each knuckle was like a little rock with him, and each hand bigger than both of mine, brown now, from the pickle that hardened them. Fists to put fear in you, especially with those pale eyes that watched you, without a blink from slits that never opened. Deadly, they were, with courage that knew nothing of doubt, little of worry, and less of powers beyond. A man whose world was fixed inside the things he knew, with the things he had done and seen, and having seen and done, he knew, and knowing, was unafraid, without desire to question further, or wish to have a reason.

  “Cattle, then?” he said to me, in his high little voice.

  “Look at them,” I said, “only waiting to see you in blood. Hear them, then.”

  “Shouting for a win, they are,” he said. “What is the matter with that?”

  “Plenty,” I said. “If you had friends here they would be stopping you, not shouting for a win. And friends of his would be sorry to see him having disgrace to fight a man half his weight.”

  “Me, half his weight?” Dai said. “What the hell do I care? I will hit him out in two rounds.”

  “Hear the cattle, then,” I said.

  “Men, they are,” Dai said. “Come to see sport, man. What is wrong, Huw? Are you having fogs in the brains, with you? A good boy, I thought you, and hoping to see you earn a few sovereigns for yourself.”

  “Never,” I said. “No money buys my blood, or pays me to take it from somebody else. Fight, yes. Prize-fight, no. Prostitution, it is.”

  Cyfartha rang his bell, then, and boots were busy on the floor to show impatience, and the cattle were shouting ready to be milked of lust to see pain plain on the faces of others, and bruises blemish the white polish of other flesh, and blood sticky about fists and chests and floor, and red and thick from crushed nose, and cut eyes, and broken mouths.

  Eliel John, landlord of the Post Horn, with a belly curving almost to the knees, and thick in the moustache, was pushed up on the outside boards of the ring, and held on to a corner post, looking about the cattle with an eye soft with spirits, tearful with fellowship.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, and pulled home a breath to straighten himself, knowing himself at last to be an importance, and feeling inside himself a desire to show forth the qualities of dignity that oratory demands. “I am known to you all as a sportsman, I am hoping. Yes?”