Testimonies: A Novel (9 page)

There is no doubt, I suppose, that lake fishing from the shore is a dull thing compared with the delight of a good stream; but this lake had its advantages. To begin with there was its position of unearthly beauty in a dark crater that spilled the overflowing stream down a precipice five hundred feet to Llyn Lliwiog; below that there was a broad, changing valley with a third lake, much larger, a silver river, farms, woods, the winding ribbon of a main road with tiny objects passing on it. And beyond the silent, tall and solemn peaks of Carnedd and y Brenin, and sometimes single clouds swimming between me and them. Oh, it was intensely moving sometimes, and never two days the same, never predictable.

Then there were fish in the lake, big trout and plenty of them. I never caught any, but I saw them often in the evening: sometimes the air would fall motionless about sunset, and there would be no ripples on the water; every rise showed and upon my word I have more than once seen the whole surface pocked with them like a puddle with rain falling into it. On those evenings I have heard fish rising there so large that it startled the silence. It was a great encouragement to go on fishing, and I would cast away with my arm almost dropping off, vainly lashing the water until long after the end of the rise.

I never was, from my boyhood, one of those to whom skill comes easily. The throwing of a stone at a mark was a conscious effort of coordination rather than an instinctive unthinking fling. It was the same with fishing; every cast was the result of drill and theory—an earnest business. It was a solemn amusement, and I preferred to fish in remote places: it quite spoiled my pleasure if other people were near, to watch, to ask whether I had caught anything—they were in the way even a quarter of a mile off.

I was not pleased, therefore, to see a man come over the skyline as I was fishing on the far side: as he came closer I stopped fishing to change my fly, taking my time in the hope that he would go away. But he took up his place on a rock and I was forced to go on; it was no good, my pleasure was gone now. When I had whipped off a fly I gave up. He came round the lake as I was putting my rod away and said that it was not a very good day for fishing. He was a very old man with a kind, wrinkled face and an air of fragile distinction—I met that quite often in Wales, among the really old people.

We talked for some time and I told him who I was and where I came from: he knew all the older people of Cwm Bugail and most of the younger ones he knew by name, although it was a great many years since he had been there. He asked whether it was not Emyr Vaughan who had married the handsome young woman from Cwm Priddlyd; I said I thought it was, and looked sharply into his gentle old face for meaning, but there was none there. He came from Nant Deiniol, he said, and I wondered how he had managed that long and arduous climb.

One Friday, as I came over the ridge in the afternoon, I saw him again. I did not distinguish him at first, and I was angry to see a person walking on the shore—I felt, by this time, that the lake belonged to me. I minded less when I saw that it was the old man. He appeared to be towing something on a string as he walked slowly at the water’s edge: I could not see anything on the ruffled surface, but his attitude reminded me of a child at the Round Pond with a boat.

He stopped dead on seeing me; I was quite near before he looked up, intent as he was upon the water. But when he recognized me his expression changed from closed hostility to a pleasant smile, and he asked me how all the people in Cwm Bugail were. I walked along the bank with him a little way and then he said that if I was going to fish with a rod he supposed that he would not disturb me by going up and down on the opposite shore. He added that he did not think we should either of us catch anything, because it was a very
hard
day.

On the other side, the rocky side, I put up my rod and began to fish. All the time between casts I saw the old man swing in a slow, steady arc up and down the curve of the farther shore, on the end of his string. There was something restful and inevitable about his progress, and when he stopped abruptly in the middle of his beat it caught my attention at once. He was hauling on his string, winding it on a square of wood, and as I watched a flashing silver fish came up out of the water. I put down my rod and walked quickly round the lake. It was a lovely trout, with golden fins and an iridescent play of colors; the old man said that it would weigh a little over a pound. He was quite pleased at having caught it, but no more excited than if he had picked up a sixpence: he did not seem to think it anything out of the way. He told me about some of the fish he had caught, twenty and thirty a day, or on a summer’s night when he was young, and he showed me his machine, that now lay on the shore. He said he did not know the English for it, but in Welsh it was called a stwlan. It was a flat piece of wood, about two and a half feet long, eighteen inches deep and perhaps two inches thick—a piece of good solid plank. The bottom of it was heavily weighted with strips of lead, serving as a keel. In the water the lead pulled the board down so that it was almost submerged, floating upright and very deep—only an inch or two of its top edge showed above the surface. There were two holes in the board, with a string looped through them. His towing line was attached to this loop rather nearer the back of the board than the front, so that when he began to tow it the front pointed out at an angle from the shore, and the board, following its nose, pulled farther and farther out as he let the tight string slip. When it had gone far enough he held the string tight and towed the board against its inclination; it was not a very strong pull, but enough to keep the string straight and clear of the bottom. The essence of the thing was the flies that he attached by short lengths of gut, along the whole length of the towing line: all the way out to the middle of the lake he had flies, separated by a yard, working through the water behind the towing string.

I was charmed with the machine, and the old man showed me how to use it. It did not exceed my capacity, even at that first attempt: there were some refinements that I did not master, but I made it go out to the middle. It was the cunning jerk that moved the loop of string in the holes, thus altering the set of the board, so that one could reverse, that foxed me, and I was obliged to go on always in the same direction. While I walked round the lake with the string the old man fished with my rod. He said it was a pleasure to fish with a gentleman’s rod once in a way, but that he would do better with his stwlan. We neither of us caught anything.

In the evening, when we separated, he told me that he left his board hidden—he showed me the place—and that I was welcome to use it whenever I came up. He said that he left it partly because it was heavy to carry, and partly, he said with a significant look, because you did not want everybody to see you with it.

I could not see why not until long afterwards, when I learned that the otter-board is a poacher’s instrument, quite illegal, as well as unsporting. For my part I could never see why it was wrong to work one’s flies out in the water with one piece of wood rather than another. If the end of fishing was to catch fish, and if the stwlan would do it when a rod would not, I preferred the stwlan. But I lacked the true sportsman’s approach: if there had been a boat up there I would willingly have rowed up and down the lake, pulling a little trawl.

Whenever I went up there after that I used to begin with my rod, partly as a gesture toward the convenances and partly to improve my casting, and then I would take the otter-board and tow it round and round the lake.

I never caught anything: but what a pleasant occupation it was. The top of the board would be out there, perhaps a hundred yards away, just perceptible if you knew where to look, there would be the steady, living pull of the line, and the constant possibility of a sudden jerk from one of the big fish I knew to be there. Soon I came to know the shore so well that I could walk round, passing the marshy places and the rocks without thinking. With this sort of fishing there was just enough to do—a continual gentle motion and a steady, half-conscious watchfulness—to make it a perfect accompaniment for thinking. It suited me admirably. Fly-fishing was too anxious and spasmodic, angling was too dull: plain walking without any destination turned my mind in upon itself. Stwlan-fishing, with its faint dash of raffishness, was the thing for me, and many a day I spent up there, walking slowly round and round the lake, holding the string with my hands clasped behind my back and lines of verse turning, following one another in my head, and my mind running on its eternal preoccupation.

If I had seen her in a house, in North Oxford, in familiar, worn surroundings, would it have been the same? Up there I asked myself that, and until I saw her again I sometimes thought that it would not have been. In the deceiving calm of that high lake I could argue that my being was aroused by its new surroundings: it was a specious argument up there, where I was the only man in the world, and the lake and the mountains had stood since the beginning of time.

I had seen mountains and lakes before: in Switzerland I had seen higher mountains and broader lakes, but there I was on passage, I expected mountains and lakes—I had paid for them and I saw them; they did not affect me: I admired them, but they did not affect me. Here I was not a passing stranger in a tourist’s country; here I was in some degree part of it, and I know it affected me deeply. My question was whether it was the mountains, the whole newness, that distorted my judgment; whether perhaps it brought out something that had been latent in me, or whether it was disordered fancy.

But at the sight of her, even far across the valley as I came down, these speculations fled away, and I knew that whatever the force of my present circumstances might be, it would have been the same, in any country, or time, or place.

B
ronwen Vaughan folded her hands and prepared to answer the questions. Her heart was beating, high quick strokes, but her hands lay calm and folded.

Q
. Why did you many Emyr Vaughan?

A
. He asked me. (It did not sound pert: it came slowly, after a turning about for a truthful reply.)

Q
. But he did not ask you without any encouragement?

A
. No. I do not think I wanted him to ask me though. I was in a flutter, and I do not remember very well what I thought then. I did not think much. I had been quarreling with my sister-in-law.

Q
. You said yes at once, did you not?

A
. Not quite at once. I waited for a moment and looked at him—we had the stable lantern between us, and he looked so longing. It would have given him a terrible hurt, and he had no protection against it. His face was open and doubtful like a child’s: you could not say no. And I suppose the idea of getting away from home was underneath my mind.

Q
. Was your home very unhappy?

A
. Yes. It was very unhappy.

Q
. Tell me about it.

A
. It was
our
home when we were children: other people came to visit, but it was our home. My father used to tell me how his grandfather had made the first cart that had ever been seen in the valley: he made it in our cartshed and on the rafter over the door he had left some of the nails, which were a treasure for us when we were children. We were both born there, upstairs in the big bed. Then my father and mother died. I had thought all the world of them, and it made me very sad. For a long time it was all gray and I was very lonely in the house. Meurig told me he was courting and although I felt strange about it I told him I was pleased. She was older than him and I wondered how he could see anything in her at all: she frightened me.

It was worse than I had thought when they were married. Meurig was as kind as he could be: some people said he was soft, but he was not that. She had him down at once, poor Meurig, and he did not even know he was unhappy because she told him he was very fortunate to be a married man now.

The first day she called it “my house.” She said she did not like old-fashioned houses. She did not like old-fashioned furniture, either. There was the dresser in the kitchen: it had been put there before the front door was moved, in my great-grandfather’s time, and they said that it had been made by William Williams, Pandy, the poet. It had a kind of step underneath it where we used to play shop when we were children. Her first quarrel with Meurig was about selling it to a dealer in Llandudno: he stood up to her for a week, but in the end it went, and they had to take it to pieces to get it out of the door. The kitchen never looked the same again, and until I left home I kept trying to put the knives in the drawer that was no longer there, so I remembered it four times a day. But I must say that I was surprised at the money it fetched: Meurig had got over it by the time the money came, and he was very pleased. He always thought of money the same as sheep. I mean if he had fifty pounds and ewes were five pounds apiece the fifty pounds looked like ten ewes in a pen to him. He loved sheep. I could never blame him when the old things went. He bought some lovely rams, and there were white-painted flimsy things in the place of the old ones.