How Green Was My Valley (37 page)

“Did you hit hard, boy?” Bron said, and wiping the flour from her hands.

“Yes,” I said, “him and the blackboard.”

“Only once?” Bron asked, and coming near.

“Five times in all,” I said. “And twice he was on the floor.”

“Five kisses you shall have,” Bron said, and caught hold of me and put five smacks
of kisses all over my face. “Now go in and tell Mama.”

“I am afraid,” I said.

“Afraid, boy?” Bron said, high up. “Your Mama has done everything to him except put
onions and grill with cheese. Go you, and come back for fresh strawberry tart.”

“Right,” I said, “but I am still afraid.”

So out I went in the back, and walked along, kicking the ice from the cobbles and
taking as long about it as I could. When you are afraid, there seems to be a centre
in the mind that requires time before it gives the orders for you to go, and it will
have you doing the most senseless things for minutes on end before your courage comes
to you and takes you to do the thing you fear. It took me minutes to reach our back
door, and more minutes while I went to extremes in cleaning my boots, and when I looked
up, there was my mother looking at me and smiling through the back window.

“Come you,” she said, and her voice dull behind the window, and down went the curtain.

In I went and stood. It is another strange thing that if you have something on your
conscience and you expect punishment you will stand in the most uncomfortable way,
as though that, too, would help you out of your trouble.

“Well?” said my mother.

“I have been sent from school, Mama,” I said, in no voice at all.

“Bron told me,” my mother said. “I have wanted somebody to take those book-shelves
down to Mr. Gruffydd these weeks. Go you.”

“But I had Mr. Jonas on the floor, Mama,” I said, to know whether I was in or out.

“Did you give him a good kick?” Mama asked me, and tapping her thimble on the stone
in the sock.

“No, Mama,” I said.

“I should have been there,” Mama said. “Shelves, Mr. Gruffydd.”

I could have carried fifty shelves on my little fingers, so good I did feel.

But Mr. Gruffydd had other notions about it.

“You hit your master?” he said, when I told him, and every hair in his beard seemed
to rise. “Think shame to yourself, Huw Morgan. Never have I heard such a shameful
thing. Hit your master? A mere boy lifting his hand against a man set over him in
authority?”

“I lost my temper,” I said.

“You lost your temper,” Mr. Gruffydd said, with enough contempt to cover the slag.
“You lost your temper, did you? Temper, indeed. Well, well. So when we are put upon,
or made to feel our places, we must lose our tempers and hit, eh? Did you ever hear
of Jesus Christ? Did He lose His temper?”

“With the money-changers,” I said.

“Because they desecrated a holy place,” said Mr. Gruffydd, “but never against the
law or constituted authority. Not even when they were going to kill Him. But Master
Morgan must lose his temper and hit his teacher to the floor. Oh, yes. Did Master
Morgan ever hear of Socrates?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Then kindly read the argument concerning the laws of the land between himself, that
shining great one, and Crito,” said Mr. Gruffydd, and pointed to the book. “Master
Plato shall instruct you.”

I went to Plato and found the place.

“Two thousand and more years ago that was written,” said Mr. Gruffydd, “and shame
to us that with all our fine educational schemes we still find a young bully putting
his silly fists into the face of one set in authority over him. Go on, you. We shall
find you on the gallows tree yet.”

“I am sorry, sir,” I said, and feeling I had a grievance sore as a wound in the chest.

“Sorry?” Mr. Gruffydd said. “Eh, dear, dear. He has the grace to be sorry. But he
must spill blood first, to satisfy his precious temper, and he must feel sorry. Did
you think, first? No. But Socrates was a man, made in the image of God, and noble
because of it. Even did he take his own life rather than offend the laws of the state,
or gainsay the word of those placed in authority over him. Did Master Morgan? Go from
me, boy. I am ashamed down to my very shadow.”

Slink from the little house I did, and up the hill, and slunk round our back, and
in, to sit in the darkness on the covered engine, and see Mr. Gruffydd again, and
hear his voice, and with every word to writhe.

And when I had had enough of that, I climbed the shed and through the window to bed,
for there are times when bed is the only place on earth where peace is to be had,
and that was one of them.

“The fault is on both sides,” my father said, next morning. “But I might have done
just the same, so I will say nothing. We will see what is said when you go back there
on Monday.”

“Mr. Motshill said he wanted to put me in the examination for university,” I said.

“Your brothers could have had it,” my father said, “but the stubborn mules would go
to work instead. You win the first examination, my son, and you shall have ten sovereigns.
We will see what next after that. Is it?”

“Yes, Dada,” I said.

“Eat,” said my mother. “Eat plenty, and grow brains, now.”

That week went past me as though carried on the shoulders by a couple of slugs. I
cleaned the fowl houses and put in pieces of wood where the foxes had been nosing,
and did as much to the garden as I could, and whitewashed the front of the house,
and Bron’s, and cleaned the old engine till it shone gold and silver and I was sick
of the sight of it. Only for Monday to come, and make a fresh start.

Angharad came to me toward the end of the week and said Mr. Gruffydd wanted some help
at the little house. I was off down there at a run, and when I went in he smiled as
he had used to, and held out his hand.

“Come, Huw,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and that was all.

“I am going to start my furniture, Huw,” he said. “Here are the drawings.”

Well, indeed, the drawings would have made you almost cry with pleasure. Lines that
started at the top and finished at the floor in a long, elegant curve, no bumps or
knobs or silly bits, and roundnesses and squarenesses, with simplicity, but with craft,
for it was plain that a knowing eye had observed that just proportion, which not merely
balances design but gives to it that dignity which announces, as with a sound of trumpets,
that the craftsman has set his hand and raised his monument.

“There is beautiful,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Bring in the wood, and we will measure off.”

The saw had not rasped an inch in the wood when Isaac Wynn came to knock on the front
and run in straight from the pit.

“Mr. Evans slipped beneath a tram on the low level,” he said, and reaching for breath.
“Can you come, Mr. Gruffydd?”

Mr. Gruffydd was out of the house and running long before Isaac Wynn had started,
but he left hat and overcoat, so I picked them up, and a muffler, and off after him.
I might have saved myself trouble, for when I got to the pit they had brought Old
Evans up and put him in the winding-house, so I gave the things to the lamp-man, and
came back, and while I was coming back I heard the hymn.

All the way down the street, as far as the sound would reach, men were taking off
their caps, and standing still. Women came from their doors and quietly called in
their children, and stood. The village was full of people standing still while the
hymn rose sternly from the pithead and the wind sighed miserably.

Old Evans had passed away among his own men, in the winding-house that he had helped
to build, whose wheel had turned night and day through the years to enrich him, and
now, at the last, had turned once more to carry him up to die.

I went back to cutting wood till Mr. Gruffydd came in, and when he did, I was sorry
to see his face. He looked ill, and near to dead in the eyes.

“Home, Huw,” he said, and sat on the plank. “Ask your good mother to excuse me from
dinner to-day.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Will I come after dinner to finish?”

“No,” he said. “Leave me to be by myself. I will tell you when.”

So out I went, again, and home.

My mother said nothing when I told her, but she gave a look at Angharad who had been
crying on the stool by the fire and clicked her tongue, and went to cut the bread
as though she hated it.

Old Evans had a funeral that looked to be never ending. Not only did people walk over
the mountain behind and before, but almost every foot of the way up was lined with
people from all the other valleys. Every colliery, every railway yard, every ironworks,
every customer and agent, every chapel, every society and choir and football team
came over in strength.

Never had I seen so many people, and long, long, sad lines of red faces, shining with
soap and redder and shinier because of the snow. And black, black, black, everyone,
from top to toe, except about the collar in the men and to the nose in the women,
where all was spotless white. Hymn on hymn for miles, with all the legs moving, sometimes
together, sometimes ragged. And when the hymn stopped for a moment you heard the tramp
and squeak of best boots, and the muttering of women’s skirts going up, and up, and
up, never stopping, and the snow giving a marvellous polish to the hundreds of top-hats.

Angharad was with my mother and father, just behind Iestyn, and his two uncles from
London, who sold the output, and Mr. Gruffydd, and four other preachers.

I was with Bronwen, watching from half-way up the Hill, and glad to be out of it.

“Come you,” said Bron, when it was not half gone by, “back to the house and a good
cup of tea, us.”

So we ran up all the way, but I had the kettle on before she was near the house.

“Poor Angharad,” Bron said. “Though why poor, there is no telling. Two good men and
make a choice. Not much poor in that.”

“Do you think she will have Mr. Gruffydd?” I asked her.

“If Mr. Gruffydd will have her,” Bron said. “His trouble is conscience. She is going
on for eighteen. He is near to forty. And a poor man to the end of his days.”

“Is he poor?” I asked her, and surprised, too.

“Twenty-five pounds a year,” Bron said. “Your mother has had that from your father
in ten days many a time not very long ago.”

“Ten shillings a week?” I asked her, and surprised now outside words. “For Mr. Gruffydd?
Only ten old shillings a week?”

“If they remember to pay,” Bron said. “Your Dada has been on to them now for weeks,
but they only say the strike has swallowed all and let Mr. Gruffydd wait. He will
wait till the shoes do rot on his feet, and not a word will he say.”

“How can we help him, Bron?” I asked her.

“By keeping our mouths shut, boy,” she said. “Mr. Gruffydd will be talking for himself
when he wants. Not for us, him.”

“So Iestyn will have Angharad, then?” I said.

“I hope,” Bron said. “Marry a preacher and you marry the Chapel. Not for a hundred
gold sovereigns a week, me. Iestyn is a rich man, now, so poor Mr. Gruffydd shall
have it all the harder. There is sorry I am.”

When Angharad came from the funeral she went straight to bed, and next day my mother
sent her with Ceridwen up to the farm to be out of the way. Mr. Gruffydd came nowhere
near our house for days, and whenever I went down there to help with the furniture,
the little house was always closed. But we knew he was at his work, for Ellis saw
him going up to the farms on the mountain, and he had big meetings every night of
the week in Chapel.

Iestyn had gone to London with his uncles. Every morning Ellis came with a fat letter
for Angharad that Bron took up to her, and not one morning except Sunday was missed
all the time he was away. He must have spent his days in front of black-edged paper.

Back to school I went on the Monday and very anxious I felt every step of the way.
Ceinwen met me down by the ironworks, and pretended she was only going that way for
thread for her mother, but though we passed Meredith the Haberdasher she made no move
to go in, even though I reminded her. We said nothing very much till we got to the
gate and then she hung back because boys and girls were crowded about it.

“Huw,” she said, “will you take me to hear the nightingales one night?”

“Nightingales?” I said. “It is winter, girl.”

“Well, when nightingales are ready, then,” she said.

“Right,” I said, “in three months, perhaps more, you shall come.”

“Right, you,” she said. “A promise, mind.”

“A promise,” I said.

I went through the crowd and they made way very civil, smiling and wishing me good
morning, until I was surprised to find myself swelling up as though I had become someone
of importance, but I squeezed it from me with one look at the study door. I had another
look at the boards on the wall while I waited for Mr. Motshill, and tried to imagine
a board with only my name on it, in gold, there between the picture of the last headmaster
and the board with the boys who had gained other awards. I made certain I would have
it there if I had to bleed from the brains.

“Well, Morgan,” said Mr. Motshill, behind me.

“Good morning, sir,” I said, and going hot.

“I hope it is a good morning, Morgan,” he said, but cool, and wiping his glasses,
not looking at me. “Are you sorry for what you did?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Are you prepared to work harder than you have been doing?” he asked me, and putting
on his glasses, looking up at the window to see if they were clear.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Then go to your classroom,” said Mr. Motshill. “I shall expect to be confounded with
pleasure when I open your books on Friday next. Nothing less than confounded, understand.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and went in the class, glad to be alone to crush the tears that
were coming to my eyes. It is strange how kindness will bring tears, and so silly.

Well, there is a surprise I had when the class came in.