Testimonies. Patrick O’Brian

ugly, evil attitude, and as the noise slackened she screamed again. What can give an impression of the sound? An evil, maniac laughter, a triumphant threatening, they were both in it, and something hellish, too.

      The dog fox barked once. He too looked out over the valley, and the two stared there like masters in their own place: that was the dominant impression. They were the ones.

      After a moment they crossed the road back to the smooth green piece on the far side and I heard them playing with the lamb’s foot there. Playing, if playing is the word, for what they did with such a hideous undertone of noise. Once or twice they appeared on the road, worrying and tearing the foot or a piece of woolly skin; then they were gone – they went up the mountain-side and the slope hid them.

      At home I went to bed very soon, after a scrap meal, for I was quite done up. But I could not sleep; my legs kept twitching and my mind ran on those appalling foxes. I had never thought of a fox before except as something people hunted, or as the subject of proverbs about cunning: nothing in my vague preconception had given me a hint of that cold, malignant ferocity; I had had no idea of an animal of such a size, such moral dimensions.

      When I did sleep it seemed that I had not been off for more than a few minutes before I was awake again, wholly awake, with a feeling of nightmare. It was the yelling of a soul in torment just outside the cottage, a shocking, naked screaming. Instantly young Vaughan’s words about the poison came into my mind, and at once I was sure that the fox, or perhaps a loose dog, had returned to the lamb and was now howling out its life in agony. I hurried on my clothes and ran up the road, in the silent, unearthly light of the moon, to the green slope where the lamb lay dragged between the rocks. It was untouched, at least by a fox. Vaughan had gone to it, and what I had heard was the raging vented spite of the vixen forestalled.

      I had meant, in writing this, to illustrate my point and to give something of that feeling of strangeness that was always present; not merely to describe two particular incidents. It was a feeling that was with me all the time, more or less consciously; it changed my outlook in many ways that I recognized, and probably in many more that I did not. It is such an intangible thing, the real difference between living in a city and in the wild, untamed country; it is not just the difference of landscape or amenity, it is not that the thunder of a lorry will wake you in the one and the scream of a vixen in the other. It is something subtle and penetrating, and it seemed to me that the only way I could convey anything of it was by example.

       PUGH

      It is with design that I have not spoken about her yet. At first I saw little of her, and apart from thinking that it was strange and pleasant that there should be such a beautiful woman at the farm, I did not take much notice.

      It was in the spring and the summer that it began. I was settled and established in Hafod and I was going out much more; young Vaughan had begun my education as a countryman and I was often on the mountain with him. In the evenings I went down, sometimes, to ask him about things that I had seen in the day.

      It was then, in those quiet evenings at the farm, that I began to look at her with particular attention: it was not because of any sudden emotion but because of something that I could not quite understand. She had, more than anybody I had ever seen, the appearance of an amiable young woman, kind and dutiful; and yet day after day I saw the old lady, Emyr’s mother, carrying the pig-swill, scrubbing the floor, drawing the water: sometimes she would have both hands full while the young people were doing nothing. Their standards were different, I knew that: on a mountain farm everybody works – it is hard labour for life. But still this seemed to me to be wrong. There were other less tangible things and I began to wonder whether Bronwen, though lovely to see, were not hard and insensitive; spoilt. A really beautiful face is so rare that one cannot always see beyond it. She certainly tended to be less indulgent than other country-women with her child, an unattractive little boy called Gerallt. There seemed to be a contradiction there: I had no pretensions as a physiognomist, but I was unwilling to believe that I could be as mistaken as that. I am sure that what one calls a good-looking face is the outward expression of a kind and generous spirit: that is why one calls it good. It is the product of experience, as simple as recognizing the fruit by its skin: the appearance that one learns to associate with ripeness is a good appearance. If a peach were at its best when it was as rotten as a medlar, one would soon find a dark, wrinkled peach good-looking. I could have sworn that the goodness in Bronwen’s face, the goodness that was there together with her beauty, could not exist with the hardness that appeared in her conduct to old Mrs Vaughan and, sometimes, to her husband. I thought about it a good deal.