Mrs. Ryerson did not leave the house in Broadbent Street to which Ryerson had taken her on their marriage till she was carried out feet-foremost. But that was to be a long time hence. She was as tough as an old brier-root and went on tackling the business of living for many, many years. Soon after Ellen had left her, her eldest daughter married a monumental mason, a fellow whose infinite cheerfulness was undimmed by his daily occupation of chipping into stone and marble the records of human evanescence and mutability. It was almost as though he must make up for having death in his chisel by having laughter in his soul; and so he whistled as he worked, persuading pathos into a cherub’s face, mournfulness into an angel’s wing, and storing up in his mind the choicer epitaphs, to be retailed at night with appreciative laughter.
Mrs. Ryerson liked a good laugh, and she was delighted when the young people made their home with her. She knew that this would be a load off Arnie’s mind. Arnie was always a one to worry about his mother – not like some, she thought darkly – and since Ellen had left her, he was worrying in every letter about what she was going to do. Well, now she was all right. He could look after himself; and it was her opinion that he needed looking after a great deal more than she did. He had mentioned a girl named Pen Muff more than once in his letters; and she was not surprised when he turned up in Broadbent Street, bringing this girl with him, after the election. She was a lean, tough-looking little thing, and Mrs. Ryerson liked her. She wouldn’t have liked Arnie to marry anyone who was la-di-da; and Pen certainly wasn’t that. “She’s the sort that lasts,” Mrs. Ryerson reflected. “They can’t down that sort. She’ll be able to tackle things as well as I can myself.” It was a bit of a do, having two weddings on top of each other; and what Arnold was going to live on when he was married she didn’t know. He said he had saved some money during the last few years, and that he and Pen were going down to the Rhondda Valley, where her sister lived, to look about them.
Neither of them had ever been out of the North, and on that spring day in 1890, they left the North behind them as the train slid out of the mean and sordid purlieus of Crewe. It was a transformation so sudden as to be dramatic. One moment, the soot-blackened station with the blasted trees, skeletons of trees, barkless, leafless, all about it; the next, the deepening green of the South. Both Pen and Arnold were accustomed to see field divided from field by walls of loose-piled stones, zigzagging for miles across the grey-green of northern grass. Now they looked on hedges as green as the rivers of paradise, foamed with hawthorn. In the orchards the apple trees were domes of pink and white. The sheep were whiter; the cows were redder; the whole cut and contour of the land had more fat to it. The villages lolled lazily in the shade of their elms, and the clouds were slow and immense, bowling across the sky as opulently as though for two pins they would rain milk instead of water.
The young middle-aged-looking man with the side-whiskers, the heavy broadcloth suit, the solid watch-chain, held the hand of the girl as scrawny and sinewy-looking as an old chicken. A half-hoop bonnet framed her keen enthusiast’s face. Above them on the rack a yellow tin trunk rattled. Before their fascinated eyes the wealth of the English counties unfurled itself in mile upon lovely mile. Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire.
“We’ll soon be there,” Pen said. “Nell will meet us at Pontypool Road. That’s where we have to change.”
Abergavenny, with the great hills towering. Hazel-copses with brown trout-water sleeping in pools, gurgling over pebbles, swirling round the hoofs of cows standing there with tails flicking at flies.
“Did you know it was so beautiful?” Arnold asked.
“It’s not beautiful where we’re going to,” Pen said. “I’ve never been there, but I know what Nell’s told me. Hills as big as that” – she waved a thin hand towards the flying landscape – “and once as lovely, but now with their insides torn out and left to bleed and rot. Streams that ought to be as sweet as this, but full of all the filth on God’s earth. God’s earth? That’s a good one, isn’t it, Arnie? Remember that Shawcross and his dramatic recitation – ‘till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ He ought to come an’ have a shot at the Rhondda Valley. He wouldn’t find it so green and pleasant, to begin with.”
“Why don’t you like him?” said Arnold patiently.
“Do you?”
“I think he’s wonderful. I think when the Party is formed he’ll be one of the greatest men in it – perhaps the greatest one of these days.”
“You don’t answer me,” Pen persisted. “Do you like him or don’t you?”
Arnold patted her knee. “Personal likings and dislikings get us nowhere in the sort of fight that’s before us,” he said. “Look how lovely this is. Let’s enjoy it while we can.”
“You don’t answer me,” Pen persisted, edging closer to him. She pulled off her bonnet, and with their cheeks together, they watched the fragments of beauty leaping to momentary life, streaming away relentlessly as time, and the hills of Wales darkening their crests against the incandescence of the western sky.
*
Nell Richards met them at Pontypool Road. She was not a bit like Pen. Mrs. Muff had had two husbands and had enjoyed, nevertheless, only two years of marriage. Her first husband, a platelayer, was killed on the line within three months of making her his wife. When Nell was a year old, her mother married again. Pen’s father lasted for nearly two years. A weakness of the chest developed dramatically into what was called galloping consumption. Mrs. Muff, left with two small children, did not try a third time.
Nell had the generous build and ruddy colouring of her father. Her red hair was drawn back from a straight central parting and collected into an enormous “bun” on the neck, which was thick and white. Its heavy columnar strength did not seem inappropriate beneath the broad placid face with its generous mouth, large shapely nose and grey-green eyes. Nell looked like a rock against which the heaviest seas might rage without avail.
She enveloped the skinny form of Pen in an embrace, pressing her, as though she had been a child, against the firm bastion of her breasts. Her calm candid gaze, when she had put Pen away, rested on the pair of young lovers, as though she were weighing them up, assessing their chances in the long queer business of life that lay before them. Arnold, standing beside the yellow tin trunk, with a squarish bowler hat surmounting his grave face, felt extraordinarily vulnerable before that steady, mother-wise regard. “Well,” said Nell at last. “Good luck to you. If you manage to keep as happy as me and Ianto, you’ll do.”
Their train came in. “Come on, now,” Nell urged them. “I can’t be away too long. Dai’s all right with his grand-dad, but there’s Pryce now. I can’t leave him.”
Pryce Richards. Aged three months. Dai’s all right. Dai is nearly two. It’s as well to be all right as early as you can in the Rhondda Valley.
Arnold carried the trunk into the compartment that Pen and Nell had entered. It was a dirty compartment. About them the countryside was green, but the compartment was very dirty indeed. It had come from a dirty place, and it was going back there. They had been travelling from north to south. Now they had reached the spot whence the valley rayed away to the west, as the spokes of a fan ray from the junction with the handle.
The train rumbled over the Crumlin viaduct, serenely trailing its plume of smoke behind it up there above the abyss. From below, it must have looked like a caterpillar traversing a taut clothesline. Arnold looked down with some apprehension. Never before had he travelled across so deep a gulf. These valleys, clearly, were valleys indeed.
“Down yonder green valley where streamlets meander.” While Pen and Nell were cluckling away twenty to the dozen, he sat sunk in reverie, gazing at the darkening countryside, and the words of the song sang incongruously through his head. How green they must have been! he thought. What streamlets once meandered here! Nothing could alter the noble contours and proportions of the hills, but what infamy, what filthy degradation had been wrought upon them!
The pithead machines, with wheel turning against wheel in a dizzy dance of spokes; the synthetic mountains of black slag rising from the very backs of little cottages terraced on the hillsides, looking as though at any moment they might slide down and engulf them, and channelled with deep fissures that must in wet weather be conduits to sluice filth to the back doors; blear sidings, where now a light or two began to come out and the engines looked like little tubby dragons with their boiler fires eye-glowing and white steam snorting through up-ended nostrils; a stream choked with tins and done-for zinc baths and rotting baskets and smashed crockery and bloated long-dead dogs; and now, butting into the compartment at this station and that, the miners coming off the day-shift, chattering in high singsong Welsh voices, looking like infernal gnomes with their short, stooping stature, their faces coal-blackened and touched up grotesquely with red lips, white eye sockets, eyes that, shining through the ebon masks, seemed supernaturally keen and bright. They carried their tea-tins and their food-baskets. The slightest movement set a-dance about them the coal-dust with which their clothes were thick. Checked mufflers of red and black were at the throats of most, and their trousers were hitched up with yorkers below the knee. They filled the seats, they stood between the seats, they chewed tobacco, and they squirted the juice upon the floor.
Nell was unperturbed. She greeted some of them by name, and Arnold noticed that when she talked to them her voice tended to lose its customary intonation and to lilt and sing. Indeed, he might have thought, had his learning gone that way, whoever stayed here for long would be inundated, overrun, subdued, by these dark wiry midgets whose ancestry here in the valley went back to the halcyon age, the age when coal was undreamed of, when they walked on the green hills and watered their flocks in the flashing streams, the little dark people, the coracle men, earlier than the Romans, than Saxons or anything at all: the black Silures who were first called Britons.
And here they now were, clanking their tins, clutching their baskets, glaring fantastically out of their demoniac masks, tumbling with laughter out of the train, going with swift resonant hobnailed tread down the wooden platform, meagrely lighted by a few oillamps on which Arnold read the half-obliterated name Cwrndulais, He waited till Pen and Nell, both black-smeared in hands and face, had climbed out; then he followed with the yellow tin trunk and looked about him at the lights climbing here and there upon the hillsides beyond whose crests the glow of the day was now utterly gone.
*
From the station they climbed. Pen took one handle of the tin trunk, Arnold the other. Cwmdulais was a dimly lighted place. It didn’t seem to Arnold to be a town at all. The houses were scattered, the shops small and few; but they had passed three chapels before Nell said “That’s Horeb.”
From the acclivity up which they had been toiling they had turned to the left, into a short street terraced on the hillside. Horeb stood at the end of the street, a stark forbidding building of blackened stone, without beauty, with great iron railings about it, as though it were the kingdom of heaven that must be taken by storm. A street lamp lighted up the front, glittered on the gold-leafed name Parch Taliesin Howells, M.A., B.D., and on HOREB cut in deep letters upon the grey granite lintel of the door.
“We’re lucky to be so near to Horeb,” said Nell; and Arnold, always shy with strangers, could not ask what luck there was in being near to that mammoth ugliness. He had yet to learn the place of Horeb in the life of the Richards family.
Horeb Terrace. He knew that was the name of the street which was their destination. They were half-way along it when a lively clatter of hobnailed boots behind them caused Nell to stop. “That’s Ianto,” she said; and at the same time there came a voice hailing:
“Nell! ’Arf a mo, gel. Well, well, so these are them!” said Ianto, hurrying to join them. “I can’t shake hands with you, mun,” he said to Arnold, a smile splitting the black mask of his face. “Look at the state I’m in. Wait till I’ve had a wash. We’ll show you everything. Did you show ’em Horeb, Nell?”
Nell said she had shown them Horeb.
“And you’re Pen!” Ianto ran on, falling into step with them.
“Well, indeed, you’re not much like Nell. But there – who is? There’s not another girl like Nell in all the Rhondda. We’re little ’uns about here. I expect you’ve noticed that. Well, here we are.”
Here they were, in a house not unlike the Broadbent Street house that Arnold knew so well.
“Leave the trunk there in the passage,” Ianto sing-songed, “and come on in and see Dad. You’re not nervous, are you, mun?”
The tin trunk blocked the little passage like a barricade. Ianto took Arnold’s arm, gave it a reassuring squeeze, and drew him into the kitchen after Nell and Pen.
Richard Richards, Ianto’s father, got up from a wooden armchair that stood on the rag mat by the fire. He was as small as his son. They seemed a race of jockeys. His forehead, like Ianto’s, was tattooed with blue powder-marks, bitten irremovably into the skin, but you could not see Ianto’s now for coal-dust. Old Richard had lost one leg below the knee. For ten years now he had walked on a stump of wood, rubber-shod, with a cuplike top to it, in which the relic of his leg rested, held there by a complication of straps. Ten years ago since the night shift in Cwmdulais Main heard the distant thud, paused for a moment in dread speculation, then heard the water, released from old workings, hurtling towards them. And hurtling before it came a train of trucks, shooting downhill, full of men fleeing the wrath to come. Richard Richards, running with others to the shaft, slipped and fell, and when the trucks had thundered past he hardly knew what had happened till he tried to pick himself up again. Then he crawled, and the water overtook him, and he crawled in the water, dyeing it red. Ianto remembered standing at the pit-head as a summer dawn was breaking, he a boy of sixteen, and watching the stretchers come out of the cage and disappear into the colliery office. Drowned men and shattered men were brought up, and now and then, as the stretchers passed, someone would lift a corner of the cloth and the word would go round the crowd. And another woman would not wait any longer, but go home. Now old Richard Richards did not work in the pit any more, but kept the little corner shop at the opposite end of Horeb Terrace from Horeb Chapel, with his daughter Blodwen to help him. Whenever Nell left the children, it was Richard, not Blodwen, who came in to look after them.
Arnold looked at the old man, whose wooden peg made him think of Jimmy Spit-and-Wink, but there was nothing but this piece of timber in common between the two. Richard Richards, for all his little size, and he stood not more than five feet high, had an air, a dignity, about him that could not be overlooked. His hair, growing unusually long, swept poetically back behind the ears, and his beard was long and fine, and neither in the beard nor on his head was there a grey hair. It was a lustrous brown, and his dark eyes had a penetrating quality.
Young Dai Richards was asleep in his grandfather’s arms. Pryce was asleep in a home-made cot to the side of the fire. When the old man stood up, he held Dai easily in his left arm, and shook hands with his right. “They’ve been good,” he said to Nell. “I’ll take Dai up now, and you bring Pryce. Then I’ll be off. You won’t want me here any longer.”
He turned to Pen and Arnold as he was leaving the room. “You must be tired,” he said. “We’ll have time to talk later.” They heard his peg-leg thudding the scrubbed uncarpeted stair. Nell picked up the child from the cot and followed.
“Well, now, you two make yourselves at home,” Ianto said. “Go and hang your things in the passage; then go into the front room. There’s a fire there. Nell’ll want to feed Pryce. Then she’ll come down to scrub my back, and after that we’ll have supper in here.”
There were pans of water boiling on the fire. Ianto brought a big wooden tub in from the back kitchen and put it on the rag mat. He began to unknot his red and black muffler.
Pen and Arnold sat side by side on a yellow plush sofa in the front room. The fire was bringing out the earthy unused smell of the place. Apart from the sofa, there were two chairs with yellow plush seats, a table covered with yellow plush, ball-fringed, and a draping of the same material on the mantelshelf. A bamboo tripod in the window supported an aspidistra whose leaves shone metallically, as though they had been polished, as indeed they had. Nell was a great “fettler.” The brass fender twinkled. The bits and pieces of mirror in the fussy contraption over the fireplace twinkled. The fireirons and the legs of the chairs twinkled. The wood of the harmonium in the recess alongside the fireplace shone like silk.
Arnold put his arm round Pen and leaned his head on her shoulder. He was very tired. “This is nice, Pen,” he said. “Something like this will suit me better than something like Castle Hereward.”
“Aye, lad, I expect it’ll have to,” Pen said practically. “It’ll take a bit of doing to get something like this. And I’m not a good housewife like Nell. You mustn’t expect me to scrub your back.”
“I’d love you to,” said Arnold with daring.
“It’s all right for Nell,” Pen said, ignoring the opening, “but it’s hell’s delight for some o’ t’women in these valleys. Husbands and sons and lodgers, all on different shifts, coming into the house all the hours God sends, having to bath without baths, and slopping their muck all over t’place. And in yon house in Ackroyd Park, where no one takes a bit o’ muck from year’s end to year’s end, they bath in a bathroom every day. There’s no sense in t’world, lad. This ’ere Rhondda’ll open thi eyes.”
The northern speech came easily to her lips as her excitement mounted. She got up and stood kicking at the fender, glaring down into the fire. Arnold smiled his patient smile. He reached out for her hand and pulled her back on to the sofa. “You old warhorse,” he said. “You’re always sniffing the battle. Forget it all for once. This is our wedding night.”
She hitched up closer to him. “Do I get on your nerves?” she asked. “Sorry you ever met me? Sorry you ever married me?”
He stroked her hair. “We’re a grand couple,” he said. “Pen and Arnold Ryerson. Made for each other. You’re like a cart running downhill, and I’ve got a dull job. I’m just the brakes. Just to prevent you from smashing yourself to pieces at the bottom.”
“Poor Arnold!” she said. “I expect I’ll lead you a devil of a dance.”
He closed his hand over hers. “Listen! That’s Ianto having his back scrubbed.”
From the next room they could hear the slop and splash of water. Then suddenly Ianto’s voice burst out, singing in Welsh, a clear powerful baritone, shaken with sudden gasps which suggested Nell’s powerful hand, clutching a soapy flannel, going over him with spasmodic vigour. “It must be grand,” said Arnold. “I can’t sing. but I’d try.”
*
They went back into the kitchen as Nell was drying the stone floor with a mop and Ianto, clad in a shiny navy-blue suit, was emptying the tub into the back-kitchen sink. Ianto’s clothes, like most men’s clothes in the Rhondda Valley, had three phases of life. They began resplendently, worn on Sundays only to Bethel or Horeb, Ebenezer, Zion, or Pisgah. In those dandy days they had high company: a collar round the wearer’s neck, a hard hat on his head, and something special in the way of boots upon his feet. Then they became houseclothes, to be worn as Ianto was now wearing his navy-blue, or in casual knockings about the town, or on a visit to Cardiff for an international rugby match. They were not likely now to know the companionship of a collar. Look at Ianto, and you will see that there is a stud in the neck-band of his Welsh flannel shirt, but he is enjoying the ease of being collarless. Neither is his footwear stylish now. An old pair of boots with the uppers sliced off serves him for slippers. Finally, the suit that once perhaps had graced a deacon’s pew or harboured a body ecstatic with Hallelujah shouts goes down the pit, accompanied by a muffler, is dropped at night like the dirt it is to the floor alongside the wash-tub, and thereafter its fate need not be too closely inquired into. It may be blown to pieces in an explosion, or rotted by firedamp, or swamped by a sudden inflow of water. An arm of a coat or a leg of a trouser may remain where it has been cut off to facilitate the amputation of a limb; and if it finally escapes all these vicissitudes, the suit at last will be washed by a miner’s wife and either become part of a rag mat or go, via some Darkie Cheap, to the shoddy mills, to begin life all over again, resurrected and renewed, meet for Zion or Bethel or Horeb.
“Put the supper, Ianto,” Nell said. “I’ll show ’em their room.”
First, they went into the room at the front of the house where the big double bed was that Nell and Ianto shared. At the foot of it was the cot where Dai was now sleeping, a thumb in his mouth, and at the side of it was the high wicker cradle where Pryce, looking with his crinkled peach-bloom face incredibly unlike a potential troglodyte, whimpered for one moment at the noise of entry, then slept again. Nell looked about the room, in the faint glow of a night-light burning in a saucer, with the pride of her housewifery. “Nice,” she whispered, “Ianto likes things to be nice.”
There were crochet-work hair tidies hanging on the supports of the dressing-table’s swinging mirror. Everything on the table – brush, comb, glass candlestick, a bottle or two – stood on its own crochetwork mat. An immense photograph of Ianto’s father was oak-framed on the wall over the chest of drawers, on whose top was a brass-bound Bible, with a crochet mat on it and a pink vase of paper flowers on the mat. Nell, so big and strong and practical, seemed to dote on all the knick-knackery. She swept it up in one loving regard, and “Nice,” she repeated. “Come and see your room.”
Theirs was the back room. The curtains were undrawn. A moon had risen, and faintly by its light Arnold could see the hill rising up behind the house, seeming to impend upon it. From Heaven, no doubt, the great moon-silvered mountain looked no more than a mole-hill, he thought; and pictured the work of the busy moles who, even now, as incessantly, night and day, were at their work down there beneath this very room wherein he and Pen and Nell were standing: the bells clanging, the telephone ringing, the cage shooting up, falling down, loaded tubs running to the shaft, empty tubs running from the shaft, blind ponies plodding, brattice doors opening, shutting, the main way, the radial side-roads, low, timbered, small lengths of spruce and fir holding up the mountain, maintaining intact (with luck) the dark ways of the warren where the miners walk crouching, with Davy lamp, with pick, shovel, to the face, where they crouch, slide in eel-like on their sides, hack and hew as they lie, sometimes in stony places, sometimes in heat, sometimes in wet, so that always the empty tubs shall run from the shaft and the full tubs shall run to the shaft. And someone owns the mountain, someone who isn’t God looking down from Heaven on the mole-hill, someone named the Marquis of This or the Duke of That, who never carries a Davy lamp, who never has red lips and white eyes shining in a black mask, but who is the lord and master of all this coal, all this petrified vegetation that æons ago was trampled by mammoths and mastodons and drank in the light of a day before Homo sapiens began to squat on his hunkers. All that old sunlight transmuted into trees transmuted into leaf-mould transmuted into coal is theirs because they are clever enough to own the fruit of all the sunlight that shone on steamy swamps before the first man uttered his first grunt, clever enough to own the mountain they have never seen, let alone what is going on under it. And those who know what is going on under it, and do what is going on under it, like old Richard Richards, they must come up and wash as they can in a wooden tub in front of the kitchen fire, and have a nice little house – and be thankful for it – with a crochet-work mat on the Bible and a pink vase of paper flowers on the mat.
“D’you think it’s nice?” Nell was asking.
He turned with a start from the window, from his contemplation of the moon-frosted hillside. “Nice? Yes, it’s splendid. It’s very kind of you to have us, Nell. Is Ianto a socialist?”
“He doesn’t bother much with politics,” Nell said. “He’s a poet.”
*
To be a bard seemed somehow to be more even than to be a poet. And Ianto was a bard. He had a bardic title. His peers did not say “Good morning, Ianto Richards”; they said: “Good morning, Ap Rhondda.” Every Welsh village contains at least one boy eaten with desire to be a bard, as inevitably as every Scottish village contains a boy who wants to see “Rev.” before his name and “M.A.” after it. Ianto was the bard of Cwmdulais. Crushed away at the foot of a column in the South Wales Daily News you would occasionally see a few verses in Welsh, signed Ap Rhondda. At the Horeb Eisteddfod every year Ap Rhondda could count on carrying off the bardic laurels, and even at the august National Eisteddfod, when all Wales assembled and the Archdruid donned his fabulous robes and drew the bardic sword and called A Oes Heddwch? and the white-robed bards responded Heddwch! – even there the name of Ap Rhondda was breathed with respect.
You wouldn’t think this to see Ianto standing in the kitchen at Horeb Terrace, Cwmdulais, when Nell and Pen and Arnold came downstairs; but among the little dark Silures the poet has never been a man set apart from the people, but a man of the people, singing of the people’s hopes and fears and joys from the midst of their own toiling ranks.
Now that Ianto was washed, Arnold could see him more clearly. He was no longer an anonymous black mask, but a slim, sinewy Welshman, blue-jowled, dark-eyed, with hollow jaws and a thin straight nose. His close-cut hair was as blue-black as a crow’s wing. In the temple, on the bridge of the nose and in one cheek the powder explosions had tattooed him.
He stood at the table with a saucepan in one hand and a big wooden spoon in the other, his fingers blunt-ended, broken-nailed. Not a poet’s hands, but everyone in Cwmdulais and even farther afield knew Ap Rhondda’s poem about hearing the skylark on coming up from the night shift. We go down to hell; you go up to heaven; but what better do you or we know than our nest on the common earth? You can’t translate it: it is a lovely lyric in the Welsh.
And this was the sort of thing the poet was thinking of; this was Ap Rhondda’s nest: the small room with the old-fashioned cooking-range, the table with scrubbed American cloth in place of fine starched linen, the heavy earthenware plates, this odorous mash of meat, potato and gravy that he was now dishing out, and his phlegmatic Nell of the white columnar neck and red-glinting hair to share with him and Dai and Pryce. Give him these, and books to read, and Horeb where he could listen to a good sermon and join in the harmonies of the back-bone-creeping Welsh minor hymn-tunes – give him these and the Eisteddfods at which he stood forth, the bard, in the eyes of all men, and Ianto Richards asked for nothing more.
When supper was eaten, they sat round the unaccustomed fire in the front room and talked. It was unlike any conversation that Arnold had expected to hear in the Rhondda Valley. Ianto, who could recite enormous tracts of Shakespeare from memory, propounded and at great length supported a theory that Shakespeare was a Welshman. Did Pen and Arnold but know it, Ianto could bring positive proof that any distinguished person, in any walk of life, had at least a drop of Celtic blood in him. It was one of his manias. Arnold could not interest him in Labour politics or in politics of any sort. He was too polite to try very hard, and he was relieved when Ianto said naturally: “Well, indeed, I’m gassing too much as usual. It’s bed you two will be wanting.”
There were two candlesticks, with a box of matches in each, on the bottom step of the stairs. Ianto went out into the kitchen, and Pen remained in the front room with Nell, who had taken her in a close embrace and held her there. Arnold lit his candle and went up to the back bedroom. The moon was cloud-hidden now, and the mountain was nothing but a greater mass of darkness against the darkness of the sky. He looked timidly round the small icy room, and set his candle down on a chair. There was little light from it, and much wavering shadow. He wasn’t thinking any more about the restless life going on by day and night beneath the mountain. He was doing nothing but listen: to the loud alarming beat of his own heart and to Pen’s footsteps climbing the wooden stairs which seemed so noisy and unreticent.
*
When Arnold woke, he could see from where he lay on his back the whole extent of the mountain, clear to the top, and the sky above it. A sky of spring blue, with a few light clouds upon it, a lovely sky that promised a lovely day. He lay with his arm under Pen’s shoulders. It felt as dead as mutton, but he wouldn’t remove it. To lie there, relaxed, with Pen’s shoulders squeezing the life out of his arm, with the blue sky soothing his eyes – this was heavenly. Pen was frowning a little in her sleep, as though she could never wholly relinquish the problems and preoccupations of the day. Even now, dead to the world, she was a fierce-looking little thing, sharp as a needle overanxious to mend all the rents in the world’s happiness. He smiled at her tenderly, moved his head round, and kissed her cheek.
She woke as Ianto began to stir in the next room, sighed, and moved closer in to Arnold’s side. They heard Nell and Ianto go downstairs, and water splashing into a tin bowl in the back kitchen, and Ap Rhondda spluttering with delight at God’s good gift of clean cold water. They heard him lift up his voice and sing, but they did not understand the words.
“It must be wonderful,” said Arnold, “to speak two languages as well as Ianto does. I tried to learn French. No good.”
“It’s a pity,” Pen answered, “that there’s more than one language on earth. It’s nothing but a cause of strife and division.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Arnold. “I don’t want to kiss everybody who talks English.”
“I never suggested that you do. Let’s get up. It’s a nuisance in a house if people don’t eat their meals at the same time.”
“This is very nice,” Arnold temporized, slipping his arm round her waist.
“Yes. Nice for you and nice for me. But not nice for Nell.” She slipped from his grasp and got out of bed. “Come on. I shall not encourage you in self-indulgence.”
He smiled at her meagre righteous little face and pretended to protest. “This is our honeymoon.”
“I know. But it isn’t Nell’s. You’re not Lord Liskeard with a staff of servants at a house in Italy.”
“I’ll bet his night-shirt’s no better than this,” said Arnold, plunging out on to the cold floor.
Pen turned from the wash-basin and contemplated the long white sack that clothed her husband to the ankles. “By heck, Arnie,” she said. “Get summat on. You look like Lady Macbeth.”
The four of them had breakfast together, and Nell, Pen and Arnold went to the front door and watched Ianto, carrying his basket and tea-tin, go with his lithe springy stride down the street. He was whistling as he went, glad of the grand morning. At the corner, by Horeb, he turned and waved, then stopped, looking up into the sky. Something had attracted his attention. He gestured to them, pointing upward. They looked, and could see nothing, but could hear. It was a skylark, singing over the Rhondda Valley. They all nodded vigorously to let Ianto know that they had heard, and off went Ap Rhondda, round the bend, out of sight. Perhaps, in that last glimpse they were to have of him, his own whistled song suspended to hear the lovelier song above, he was thinking of his famous lyric, savouring the pride and joy of the bard.
Nell went upstairs to attend to the children, and Pen and Arnold washed the breakfast things. Then they went out together, to see this famous place whose products, pouring through the funnel of Cardiff, crossed the seven seas of the world. It was a fascinating mixture of loveliness and squalor. They walked for miles along dingy roads; they climbed hills and looked down on the rows of dismal slate-roofed houses, on chapels built like bastilles, on the railway lines curving through valley bottoms, opening out into sidings, running into colliery yards, busy with trains gorging themselves with the coal that day and night threaded its way through the subterranean galleries to burst at last into the sunlight which it had quitted æons ago. Steam of locomotives, steam of engine sheds, staccato stutter of shunted trucks. And everywhere the waste-product of the industry, hurled in filthy heaps, piling up year after year, obliterating the green bases of the hills, fouling, corroding.
“How d’you fancy this as a place to live in?” Arnold asked.
“It’s not a question of what we fancy,” Pen answered. “I suppose, if you’re born here, and all your friends are here, you’re blind to half you see. But we’re seeing it with new eyes, and, by heck, it’s awful. There’s plenty to do hereabouts, and it’d be a job worth tackling.”
“Tackling?” cried Arnold, amused to hear on Pen’s lips the word his mother loved. “You make me think of my mother when you say that.”
“I could make you think of plenty as is worse than her. In fact, if you want to flatter me, go on talking like that.”
They were lying high up on a hillside. The sun was warm. “Me flatter you?” said Arnold. “Come here. Let me kiss you. D’you know you’re worth ten or a dozen of me?”
Pen pushed him aside roughly and sat up, her hands pressing down to the earth on either side of her. “There’s summat up,” she said. “Look at all t’people running.” She pointed down into the valley. The people looked very small, but there was no mistaking their agitation. They were pouring from all directions toward the entrance of a colliery yard. They were through the gates. All the scattered bits and pieces of them were congealing in a milling mass outside the colliery office. Pen and Arnold got up and began to run. They did not even know the name of the pit that Ianto worked in. They did not know upon which pit there had swooped the disaster that this agitation spelled for them. But both their hearts were frozen with a single thought: Ianto! Ianto!
*
Ianto called the pony Hugh Price Hughes. He himself did not know why. It was one of those damn-fool things that begin somehow, and then go on. Now the pony, a stubborn little beast, expected to be addressed by the full honorific title: otherwise it would not budge. Over its stall its name was written in chalk: Hugh Price Hughes, M.A., B.D., which Ianto would explain with a smile meant Master of Anguish and Bachelor of Docility.
Master of Anguish! Ap Rhondda had written a poem about Hugh Price Hughes, ambling blindly through the stone forest that once had been a green forest, pulling the tubs down the petrified woodland rides from which the gods had withdrawn, on which the sun neither rose nor set. The anguish, no doubt, was in the mind of the poet, not of the horse. But to Ianto, Hugh Price Hughes was a symbol of all that was condemned to loss of beauty for the sake of coal: a symbol of much in his own life, of the valleys degraded from the bearing of corn, of the streams that once knew the clean leap of trout into sunshine and that oozed now over the accumulated filth of an industry that never cleaned up its dirty leavings. Hugh Price Hughes, who had given his eyes without a murmur, summed all this up, the supreme Master of Anguish; and Ianto hoped in his poem that the good god of men and beasts would grant to the pony, stumbling in his blindness along the roadways of the pit, an inner life irradiated with green fields in sunshine and celestial colts gambolling in meadows star-bright with daisies.
Hugh Price Hughes seemed comfortable enough down there in his stygian stall that was odorous with dung and urine and knew nothing of winter’s blasts or summer heats. He was temperamental. He was unhappy with anyone but Ianto, liable to kick viciously or to stand stock-still with invincible stubbornness unless the lilting voice of Ap Rhondda was in his ear. Ianto in the pit would sing for hours on end, and Hugh Price Hughes seemed happier for that. Ianto’s pocket was always filled with bread crusts, to be doled out as the labours of the long dark day dragged on.
When the explosion rocked Cwmdulais Main the poet and the pony in one fell second found themselves encompassed by the same tomb. Ianto had not even the time to cry aloud before the aisles and transepts hewn through the coal were staggering in a ghastly disintegration. The little pit props, so carefully carried so many miles across the sea, so carefully placed upright to take, puny Atlases, the downward thrust of all the world, splintered like matchsticks holding together a toy on which a giant’s foot had stamped as the giant shrieked in rage. One moment Ianto and the pony were ambling along, Ianto in full song; the next a mightier voice had drowned his singing; the mountain had heaved its shoulders; the world crumbled.
The bellow eased away to a rumble, a thunder’s diminuendo, and then silence fell save for the uneasy creak and strain of huge dislodged masses settling down to new adjustments of thrust and counterpoise. By the light of his Davy lamp, Ianto could see that doors had been shut behind him and before. He had no tools to swing to test their thickness. He kicked with his hobnailed boots; he might as well have kicked against the granite bastions of Land’s End.
Splintered trucks were strewn about him. Before him the pony lay upon his side. Hugh Price Hughes would kick no more; the fallen coal held him rigid in his final obstinacy. Soon now, if ever, his eyes would open on the fields of celestial colts. He had fallen sideways; all four legs were imprisoned to the knees in the forward wall.
Ianto knelt over the fallen pony. “Well, old butty,” he said, and he could say no more. He knew he was done for as surely as Hugh Price Hughes. The yellow-slimed lips of the Master of Anguish were drawn back over his long yellow teeth. His blind eyes seemed fixed in an agony of appeal upon Ap Rhondda’s face. The broken forward part of a truck was uneasy under the pony’s shoulders and Ianto began to tug it away, so that the beast might at least lie easy. Hugh Price Hughes, as though divining the intention and resolved to assist it, heaved his shoulders up with a supreme convulsive effort. The truck came away and the pony sank down with a long sighing expulsion of the breath. “That’s better, old butty,” Ianto said, knowing that Hugh Price Hughes was dead and done for.
There was nothing now for him to do but sit and listen. He had listened in his time with joy to many things: to the singing of larks and the chuckling of streams over pebbles; to the moan of the wind and the rhythmic alternation of the waves’ tumbling and their rasping backwash; to the thrust of bolts that meant that the day was done, with all well and Nell waiting for him upstairs; to the quavering cries of lambs and of his own new-born sons; to many voices upraised in Horeb in the greatest hymn-tunes the world has known, and to applause sweeping toward him, the bard, Ap Rhondda, ambrosial, sweet with the acceptance of his offerings to men. All these things he had heard and loved in his deep and simple fashion; but now it was not for these he was listening. He was listening, leaning back against the dead companion of so many labours, for the tapped-out code which would mean the swinging pick and crowbar, the sinewy assault of the saviours who, he knew, never by fault of their own left men to perish.
He never heard it. He did not know of the obstacle upon obstacle that lay between him and the mouth of the shaft. He did not for some time know of the gas seeping through this dead infernal forest as once the mist had seeped, twining about the trees that now were black brittle stone. But at last, through the tiny chinks and fissures of his cell it reached him, and numbed him and killed him, and those who know the strange secrets of the stone forest and never tell them found him with his arms thrown across Hugh Price Hughes’s body and his face buried in his flank, as though he had cast himself down there and died weeping.
*
Fifteen hearses, and after each hearse three or four carriages, with black horses pulling the hearses and carriages, and many spring flowers piled on top of the coffins that were varnished yellow and glittered with bright metal fittings; and in front of all the hearses and carriages a colliery band with silver instruments flashing in the light of the spring day, a band that walked with the stilted unnatural gait of the living trying to be as near as possible to the immobility of the dead, while the silver instruments snarled their sorrow. The Dead March in Saul. And behind the band, and the hearses with their flowers, and the carriages with crape-veiled faces at the windows, came the anonymous many, dressed in the Sabbath black of Horeb and Zion and Siloam. Thousands of them, a procession one mile long, so that the last slow-stepping straggling tail could not hear the wailing of the silver trumpets or the solemn thud of the drum, but only the singing of the larks climbing above the Rhondda Valley to their celestial look-outs.
*
Nell and old Richard Richards were in a carriage; Arnold and Pen walked, he with his face fixed, dumb with misery, upon his slow-shuffling boots, she with her eyes lifted fiercely and resentfully to the sky.
There was a long way to go, and when presently the band fell for a moment to silence there was an indescribable poignancy in the sound of the feet. Nothing else could be heard. All the sounds of labour were stilled for the day. Along the roads the blinds were down, and those who were not in the procession were standing bowed in their doorways. And through the silence went the sound of the feet: not the purposive beat of soldiers’ feet marching, not the gay staccato of feet going anyhow about their business; but a drear muffled unison, sorrow made audible, the texture and colour of crape translated into sound. It was, thought Pen, like humanity’s slow march to some inevitable Calvary; and Arnold, who could not formalize his impression, wept quietly at the moment’s content of unassuageable sadness.
Then the silver trumpets sang again, giving this time a theme that passed through the procession, inviting them all to take what consolation they might for the brevity and uncertainty of their days. The tune “Aberystwyth,” with its almost unbearable agonies of hope and supplication, throbbed through the air among the mountains, and all the host began to sing.
Never before had Pen and Arnold heard the Welsh sing. Never do the Welsh sing so heart-rendingly as on such an occasion as that was. “Jesu, Lover of my soul,” they sang in their own wild haunting tongue to that tune whose harmonies, embroidered by those thousands of untutored masters, could almost rend the heart from the body.
Other refuge have I none,
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, ah, leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
Thou of life the fountain art,
Freely let me take of Thee.
Spring Thou up within my heart,
Rise to all eternity.
Silence again, and the dirge of the feet again; till the trumpets, passing within the cemetery gates, begin once more to dole out the muffled heart-beats of the Dead March.
The mile-long procession disposed itself in a ragged black circle around the fifteen graves. The Rev. Taliesin Howell, M.A., B.D., committed the bodies to the ground, and if bodies could ever be at home in the ground then surely these should be which had moved for so many years so familiarly through its secret ways.
“These our brothers...”
They would be for a while remembered for many things. Evan Hughes, the best three-quarter Cwmdulais had ever put in the field; Owen Rees, the adulterer and wife beater; Gwilym Price, a deacon of Horeb; William Williams, who ran the gambling school out on the mountain; Henry Richardson, the Englishman, a huge flavoursome bawd and drunkard; Johnny Potham, who played the fiddle divinely; Ianto Richards, the poet, and all the rest of them, each with the mark and superscription of his own idiosyncrasy upon him. “These our brothers...” That is all that need be remembered at this moment. Brothers in the hardship and peril of life. Brothers in the uncertainty and brevity of days.
“Brothers,” said Pen, as Arnold lay with his arms about her in bed that night. “What a time to call men brothers, when you’re laying ’em in the earth.”
They were speaking very quietly, drawn close together by the day’s sorrow, which was with them still in the sound of Nell’s smothered weeping in the next room.
“It’s a beautiful service,” Arnold said. “It’s just as well to remember that death comes for the lot of us. We’re brothers to that extent, anyway.”
Pen grasped him tight and hid her face in his shoulder. “No, no!” she whispered fiercely. “Don’t let’s remember anything of the sort. Don’t talk about death. I hate the thought of death. You can call men what you like when they’re dead – these clods, these corpses. I want to walk about in Bradford and the Rhondda Valley, and think ‘These our brothers.’ Then’s the time. And that’s when people don’t do it. And that’s what we’ve got to do, Arnie. If Socialism doesn’t mean that, it means nothing. What the parsons say over a coffin is all blarney and eyewash.”
He could feel her body quivering with sorrow and anger. “Yes, yes,” he said, soothingly.
She was quiet for a while, and then she said: “I think Ianto had a very happy life.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“But what Nell and the children will do I don’t know. She was enough to break your heart tonight with those old poems.”
She was enough to break anybody’s heart. Old Richard Richards had come in, and Nell had produced from a drawer of the kitchen table the penny exercise book in which Ianto had written a fair copy of his work. “Read ’em,” Nell said; and Richard Richards read them in the language that no one there but he could understand. But they could understand the rhythm and the lilt of the old man’s voice; and Nell sat as white and rigid as a big statue, but with a fond silly smile on her face. It wasn’t a smile of pleasure; it was a smile to wring the heart, because it was a smile that was an almost inhuman mask against human sorrow.
“This is the one about the skylark,” the old man would say in English; and then the rippling Welsh would follow; “and this is the one about Hugh Price Hughes.” Hugh Price Hughes, the Master of Anguish. Perhaps St. Francis would have counted him in with “these our brothers.”
Nell put the book back in the kitchen drawer. “I’m glad Dai and Pryce will speak Welsh,” she said. “It’ll be nice for them. I’ll get them all printed.”
And when the old man was gone she said brightly: “Well, I’m going up now. Don’t you two hurry.”
They went up five minutes later and heard her smothered sobs coming from the big double bed in the room where the crochet-work mat was on the brass-bound Bible and the paper flowers were in the vase on the mat.
“Well,” said Arnold, “we’re having a queer honeymoon, luv.”
“It’s good for us,” Pen answered. “Life’s not a lot of silly stuff and flapdoodle, We’ve learned pretty soon what the Rhondda Valley is. We’ve learned summat about the price of coal. Let’s go on learning, and let’s do it here. What d’you say, Arnie? Could you stick this place?”
“Aye, I could stick owt with thee, lass.”
She sat up and looked down at his serious face in the candleshine. “Owt? Ah believe tha would. Tha’s a good old gowk, Arnie. Tha knows Ah luv thee?”
“Ah’m beginnin’ to think there’d be nowt much to life if tha didn’t, lass,” he said, and pulled her down beside him.