25

That same night Owen sat on in the kitchen after his father and mother had gone to bed. He could not think of sleeping because his mind was so agitated. It was almost like the day when the news of Twm’s death came. He and his mother had let their feelings sweep over them. Despite that, he felt no better. But instead of thinking only about his brother, now his thoughts went off in all directions. The pensions officer had thrown a stone into a pool, and Owen could not tell where or when the turbulence would end. Before, the loss of his brother had filled the whole compass of his mind and feeling. It was as if the War had been watching their family and had struck Twm down to take revenge on them.

From now on his brother’s death would be something hard and cold lying upon his heart, but his mind would be working in other directions. Before this, he had reacted only passively to the War. He suffered some kind of unavoidable fate which had come upon the world, feeling fear and hope; fear that it would come and overwhelm his family, and hope that it would not. In the midst of all this, he saw plenty of kindness mixed with the silly, daft talk. He heard of men getting rich from the War; he saw them from afar. But today he found himself witnessing at first hand a cruel act carried out by one of their people, as it were. Strangely enough, he was not afraid that his mother would be hauled up before the magistrate for hitting the man, and he wasn’t worried either if his mother got not a halfpenny of pension, but the sheer cruelty of the thing itself tormented him. That’s what war was like; it wasn’t only the killing and the suffering that was cruel but casual incidents like this. Like when his mother had to have the news that her son had been killed translated for her.

He broke out in a sweat just thinking of it, and the kitchen became unbearable for him. He lit the lamp, went outside and turned in the direction of the mountain. It was a moonlit night, and the road was greyish white under his feet. A sheep would get up silently from her resting place now and again and run off into the night on hearing his footsteps as he walked past. The sound of the streams was so quiet that it made him think they were simply swirling around in the same spot rather than flowing onward. He sat down on a large rock. The village lay beneath him like fairyland* in the uncanny light of the moon. Here and there like black specks were the houses of the small holdings, with a cluster of trees around them sheltering the yards and buildings. The moon shone on some of the houses, and its light ran in a strip along the roof tiles. The houses’ long shadows fell in front of them, and the fields appeared yellow in the moonlight. Right at the bottom was a field of corn in stooks. The earth around where he was sitting was reddish black, and Owen knew that all the land he could see in front of him would have been the same a hundred years before. The people responsible for turning this earth green were by now lying in the parish cemetery, in the richer earth of the plains that lay between him and the sea. Some of them had come from the far ends of the parish to till the soil of the mountain and to live on it, and they went back to their native plot to sleep out the ‘long sleep’.

And it wasn’t just here in front of his eyes that the work of those hard hands could be seen. He could imagine many countries all over the world, great cities and endless rows of houses roofed with slates from Moel Arian, and the same moon shining down upon them as was throwing down its spears of light on Moel Arian itself tonight.

He turned towards the quarry’s waste heap. Tonight it was just a black patch on the side of the mountain. It was the same people who had built farmhouses on the peat land who were responsible for the quarry’s waste heap too. Between these two, the villagers had been working hard from morning to night for a hundred years, until they laid down their heads at last before they even reached middle age. Some of them supposed they could help their children avoid this by sending them to Schools and offices and shops.

His thoughts came back to his own family. They were an ordinary example of a family from the district, people who had worked hard, who had had their share of troubles, who had tried to pay their way, though they often failed, and when the end of that was in sight, and there was hope that his parents would have an easier life, here was a totally unexpected blow.

He remembered hearing Ann Ifans say once what smart clothes his mother had when she first came into the district. She never had new clothes now. She bought some mourning clothes when Twm died but she had never worn them since. He remembered how good she had looked that prize-giving day in the County School. In all the family it was only him who tried to help them a bit, though he wasn’t the only one who could have done so. He didn’t think of that as a virtue on his part. It was softness, nothing more. He couldn’t help himself. It was a kind of selfishness. Something had drawn him towards his mother ever since he was a child. He longed to have all her love, but he never got it. He got her kindness and her care, but not her love. He wondered if the other children felt the same way. Except for Elin, home meant nothing to the others. Owen sometimes thought that Twm was closer to his mother’s heart than any of the rest of them, but he had no proof of this. Probably she would feel the same if he – Owen – had been lost in the War.

His parents were always reticent about their feelings, and it was difficult to know what gave them pleasure. They enjoyed many things, but he knew for certain that the two of them were looking forward to the day when they were quits with the world and they could enjoy a rest at the end of their lives without having to worry any more. In this they were no different from the rest of the human race. That’s what made their bereavement doubly hard, Owen thought. When the prospect of calling it quits with the world was in sight, there came this unexpected blow.

That was what kept drawing him towards his mother and making him try to forget Ann Ellis. Since his foolish love for Gwen years ago, no girl had appealed to him as Ann did. He had not yet fallen head over heels for her, though, but he did like her a lot. At School, he would look forward to the time in the evening when he would be able to talk to her. In his melancholy fit today on his way back from blackberrying, thinking of her was the only ray of hope he had that he would one day feel better. By now, though, the trouble with the pensions officer had changed things again. It wasn’t the financial side of things that affected him, but the emotional side. The attraction towards his mother was stronger once more.

And his eyes were opened to the possibility of doing something, instead of suffering mutely. It was high time for someone to stand up against all this injustice. To do something. Thinking about it, that was the trouble with his people. They were heroic in their capacity to suffer, and not in their capacity to do something to oppose the cause of their suffering. William was the only one of his family who had shown opposition to things as they were, unless you could say that Sioned had. Perhaps what she had done was a rebellion against the kind of life her family led, since she lived according to completely different moral standards. Even Twm had turned his back on home and had shown that he could leave it, at any rate. Only he, Owen, was cowardly, that was the truth of the matter. He let his mother hit that pensions officer, when he should have hit him himself. He had never left home, either to go to School or college, without throwing up on account of his homesickness.*

He looked out over the land. Apart from the very faint lights of the town, nobody would have been able to tell that there was a war on anywhere. It was astonishing to think that some little out-of-the-way corner of Wales* like this had a part in the War. And yet, the claws of that beast reached the farthest nooks and crannies of the mountains. A few weeks ago, a lad from the district had deserted from the army and had taken shelter in caves in the rocks, going home to his mother for supper every night. But the army’s bloodhounds found him, and he was seen going to the station between two soldiers with a look of defeat upon him. Within three days, the news came that he had been killed in France, and his family and most of the neighbours were gullible enough to believe it. Why didn’t the people of the district rise up against something like that? But what was the use of talking? He was one of them himself. He sometimes thought it would have been better if his ancestors had stayed on the other side of Yr Eifl in Lleyn and just carried on tilling the earth.

But perhaps he was, after all, hoping for a life that was too neat, too perfect, and was putting too much trust in the belief that things would turn out right if he did his duty. The webs of people’s lives were spread about all over the place, and it was hopeless to think you could draw them neatly together.

He got up from the rock, and saw that there was something familiar about it. He looked more closely and saw that the names of many of the children of the neighbourhood were carved on it, his own name among them. Four of them had been killed in the War. He could see T. G. there clearly, and the letters showed that they were more recent than those of O. G. He remembered that this was the rock they used to rest their bundles of heather on when they used to go and gather it for starting the fire. Then they would haul the bundles up on their backs once more for the final trek down the mountain. As he walked down the same path now, he remembered the smell of the heather and the peat – the heather in the bundle scratching the back of his neck and the particles of earth trickling down under his shirt collar, and his imagination turning the bits of soil into thousands of ants crawling over his skin.

When he reached the house, the cat was sitting on the doorstep. She rubbed herself caressingly against his legs and followed him into the house with her tail up. He turned up the flame in the lamp and gave the fire a poke. The cat kept on rubbing against his legs and purring. He sat in the armchair and reached for his pipe to have a smoke, the first of the day.