So far I have not told the story of the things of Llantrisant, but rather the story of how I stumbled upon them and among them, perplexed1 and wholly astray, seeking, but yet not knowing at all what I sought; bewildered now and again by circumstances which seemed to me wholly inexplicable2; devoid3, not so much of the key to the enigma4, but of the key to the nature of the enigma. You cannot begin to solve a puzzle till you know what the puzzle is about. “Yards divided by minutes,” said the mathematical master to me long ago, “will give neither pigs, sheep, nor oxen.” He was right; though his manner on this and on all other occasions was highly offensive. This is enough of the personal process, as I may call it; and here follows the story of what happened at Llantrisant last summer, the story as I pieced it together at last.
It all began, it appears, on a hot day, early in last June; so far as I can make out, on the first Saturday in the month. There was a deaf old woman, a Mrs. Parry, who lived by herself in a lonely cottage a mile or so from the town. She came into the market-place early on the Saturday morning in a state of some excitement, and as soon as she had taken up her usual place on the pavement by the churchyard, with her ducks and eggs and a few very early potatoes, she began to tell her neighbours about her having heard the sound of a great bell. The good women on each side smiled at one another behind Mrs. Parry’s back, for one had to bawl5 into her ear before she could make out what one meant; and Mrs. Williams, Penycoed, bent6 over and yelled: “What bell should that be, Mrs. Parry? There’s no church near you up at Penrhiw. Do you hear what nonsense she talks?” said Mrs. Williams in a low voice to Mrs. Morgan. “As if she could hear any bell, whatever.”
“What makes you talk nonsense your self?” said Mrs. Parry, to the amazement7 of the two women. “I can hear a bell as well as you, Mrs. Williams, and as well as your whispers either.”
And there is the fact, which is not to be disputed; though the deductions8 from it may be open to endless disputations; this old woman who had been all but stone deaf for twenty years — the defect had always been in her family — could suddenly hear on this June morning as well as anybody else. And her two old friends stared at her, and it was some time before they had appeased9 her indignation, and induced her to talk about the bell.
It had happened in the early morning, which was very misty10. She had been gathering11 sage12 in her garden, high on a round hill looking over the sea. And there came in her ears a sort of throbbing13 and singing and trembling, “as if there were music coming out of the earth,” and then something seemed to break in her head, and all the birds began to sing and make melody together, and the leaves of the poplars round the garden fluttered in the breeze that rose from the sea, and the cock crowed far off at Twyn, and the dog barked down in Kemeys Valley. But above all these sounds, unheard for so many years, there thrilled the deep and chanting note of the bell, “like a bell and a man’s voice singing at once.”
They stared again at her and at one another. “Where did it sound from?” asked one. “It came sailing across the sea,” answered Mrs. Parry quite composedly, “and I did hear it coming nearer and nearer to the land.”
“Well, indeed,” said Mrs. Morgan, “it was a ship’s bell then, though I can’t make out why they would be ringing like that.”
“It was not ringing on any ship, Mrs. Morgan,” said Mrs. Parry.
“Then where do you think it was ringing?”
“Ym Mharadwys,” replied Mrs. Parry. Now that means “in Paradise,” and the two others changed the conversation quickly. They thought that Mrs. Parry had got back her hearing suddenly — such things did happen now and then — and that the shock had made her “a bit queer.” And this explanation would no doubt have stood its ground, if it had not been for other experiences. Indeed, the local doctor who had treated Mrs. Parry for a dozen years, not for her deafness, which he took to be hopeless and beyond cure, but for a tiresome14 and recurrent winter cough, sent an account of the case to a colleague at Bristol, suppressing, naturally enough, the reference to Paradise. The Bristol physician gave it as his opinion that the symptoms were absolutely what mighty15 have been expected.
“You have here, in all probability,” he wrote, “the sudden breaking down of an old obstruction16 in the aural17 passage, and I should quite expect this process to be accompanied by tinnitus of a pronounced and even violent character.”
But for the other experiences? As the morning wore on and drew to noon, high market, and to the utmost brightness of that summer day, all the stalls and the streets were full of rumours18 and of awed19 faces. Now from one lonely farm, now from another, men and women came and told the story of how they had listened in the early morning with thrilling hearts to the thrilling music of a bell that was like no bell ever heard before. And it seemed that many people in the town had been roused, they knew not how, from sleep; waking up, as one of them said, as if bells were ringing and the organ playing, and a choir20 of sweet voices singing all together: “There were such melodies and songs that my heart was full of joy.”
And a little past noon some fishermen who had been out all night returned, and brought a wonderful story into the town of what they had heard in the mist and one of them said he had seen something go by at a little distance from his boat. “It was all golden and bright,” he said, “and there was glory about it.” Another fisherman declared “there was a song upon the water that was like heaven.”
And here I would say in parenthesis21 that on returning to town I sought out a very old friend of mine, a man who has devoted22 a lifetime to strange and esoteric studies. I thought that I had a tale that would interest him profoundly, but I found that he heard me with a good deal of indifference23. And at this very point of the sailors’ stories I remember saying: “Now what do you make of that? Don’t you think it’s extremely curious?” He replied: “I hardly think so. Possibly the sailors were lying; possibly it happened as they say. Well; that sort of thing has always been happening.” I give my friend’s opinion; I make no comment on it.
Let it be noted24 that there was something remarkable25 as to the manner in which the sound of the bell was heard — or supposed to be heard. There are, no doubt, mysteries in sound as in all else; indeed, I am informed that during one of the horrible outrages26 that have been perpetrated on London during this autumn there was an instance of a great block of workmen’s dwellings27 in which the only person who heard the crash of a particular bomb falling was an old deaf woman, who had been fast asleep till the moment of the explosion. This is strange enough of a sound that was entirely28 in the natural (and horrible) order; and so it was at Llantrisant, where the sound was either a collective auditory hallucination or a manifestation29 of what is conveniently, if inaccurately30, called the supernatural order.
For the thrill of the bell did not reach to all ears — or hearts. Deaf Mrs. Parry heard it in her lonely cottage garden, high above the misty sea; but then, in a farm on the other or western side of Llantrisant, a little child, scarcely three years old, was the only one out of a household of ten people who heard anything. He called out in stammering31 baby Welsh something that sounded like “Clychau fawr, clychau fawr”— the great bells, the great bells — and his mother wondered what he was talking about. Of the crews of half a dozen trawlers that were swinging from side to side in the mist, not more than four men had any tale to tell. And so it was that for an hour or two the man who had heard nothing suspected his neighbour who had heard marvels32 of lying; and it was some time before the mass of evidence coming from all manner of diverse and remote quarters convinced the people that there was a true story here. A might suspect B, his neighbour, of making up a tale; but when C, from some place on the hills five miles away, and D, the fisherman on the waters, each had a like report, then it was clear that something had happened.
And even then, as they told me, the signs to be seen upon the people were stranger than the tales told by them and among them. It has struck me that many people in reading some of the phrases that I have reported, will dismiss them with laughter as very poor and fantastic inventions; fishermen, they will say, do not speak of “a song like heaven” or of “a glory about it.” And I dare say this would be a just enough criticism if I were reporting English fishermen; but, odd though it may be, Wales has not yet lost the last shreds33 of the grand manner. And let it be remembered also that in most cases such phrases are translated from another language, that is, from the Welsh.
So, they come trailing, let us say, fragments of the cloud of glory in their common speech; and so, on this Saturday, they began to display, uneasily enough in many cases, their consciousness that the things that were reported were of their ancient right and former custom. The comparison is not quite fair; but conceive Hardy’s old Durbeyfield suddenly waking from long slumber34 to find himself in a noble thirteenth-century hall, waited on by kneeling pages, smiled on by sweet ladies in silken c?tehardies.
So by evening time there had come to the old people the recollection of stories that their fathers had told them as they sat round the hearth35 of winter nights, fifty, sixty, seventy years; ago; stories of the wonderful bell of Teilo Sant, that had sailed across the glassy seas from Syon, that was called a portion of Paradise, “and the sound of its ringing was like the perpetual choir of the angels.”
Such things were remembered by the old and told to the young that evening, in the streets of the town and in the deep lanes that climbed far hills. The sun went down to the mountain red with fire like a burnt offering, the sky turned violet, the sea was purple, as one told another of the wonder that had returned to the land after long ages.
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perplexed
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| adj.不知所措的 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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enigma
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| n.谜，谜一样的人或事 | |
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bawl
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| v.大喊大叫，大声地喊，咆哮 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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amazement
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| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
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deductions
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| 扣除( deduction的名词复数 )； 结论； 扣除的量； 推演 | |
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appeased
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| 安抚，抚慰( appease的过去式和过去分词 )； 绥靖（满足另一国的要求以避免战争） | |
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misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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tiresome
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| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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obstruction
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| n.阻塞，堵塞；障碍物 | |
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aural
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| adj.听觉的，听力的 | |
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rumours
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| n.传闻( rumour的名词复数 )；风闻；谣言；谣传 | |
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awed
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| adj.充满敬畏的，表示敬畏的v.使敬畏，使惊惧( awe的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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choir
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| n.唱诗班，唱诗班的席位，合唱团，舞蹈团；v.合唱 | |
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parenthesis
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| n.圆括号，插入语，插曲，间歇，停歇 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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outrages
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| 引起…的义愤，激怒( outrage的第三人称单数 ) | |
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dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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manifestation
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| n.表现形式；表明；现象 | |
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inaccurately
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| 不精密地，不准确地 | |
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stammering
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| v.结巴地说出( stammer的现在分词 ) | |
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marvels
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| n.奇迹( marvel的名词复数 )；令人惊奇的事物（或事例）；不平凡的成果；成就v.惊奇，对…感到惊奇( marvel的第三人称单数 ) | |
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33
shreds
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| v.撕碎，切碎( shred的第三人称单数 )；用撕毁机撕毁（文件） | |
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slumber
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| n.睡眠，沉睡状态 | |
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hearth
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| n.壁炉炉床，壁炉地面 | |
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