His information was really nothing more than a
bit of gruesome gossip, which he had heard probably at third or fourth
or fifth hand. The horrible detail of faces "as if they had been bitten
to pieces" had made its violent impression on him, that was all.
I gave him up and took a tram to the district of the disaster; a
sort of industrial suburb, five miles from the centre of the town. When
I asked for the factory, I was told that it was no good my going to it
as there was nobody there. But I found it; a raw and hideous shed with
a walled yard about it, and a shut gate. I looked for signs of
destruction, but there was nothing. The roof was quite undamaged; and
again it struck me that this had had been a strange accident. There had
been an explosion of sufficient violence to kill work-people in the
building, but the building itself showed no wounds or scars.
A man came out of the gate and locked it behind him. I began to ask
him some sort of question, or rather, I began to "open" for a question
with "A terrible business here, they tell me," or some such phrase of
convention. I got no farther. The man asked me if I saw a policeman
walking down the street. I said I did, and I was given the choice of
getting about my business forthwith or of being instantly given in
charge as a spy. "Th'ast better be gone and quick about it," was, I
think, his final advice, and I took it.
Well, I had come literally up against a brick wall, thinking the
problem over, I could only suppose that the smelter or his informant
had twisted the phrases of the story. The smelter had said the dead
men's faces were "bitten to pieces" this might be an unconscious
perversion of "eaten away." That phrase might describe well enough the
effect of strong acids, and, for all I knew of the processes of
munition-making, such acids might be used and might explode with
horrible results in some perilous stage of their admixture.
It was a day or two later that the accident to the airman,
Western-Reynolds, came into my mind. For one of those instants which
are far shorter than any measure of time there flashed out the
possibility of a link between the two disasters. But here was a wild
impossibility, and I drove it away. And yet I think the thought, mad as
it seemed, never left me; it was the secret light that at last guided
me through a sombre grove of enigmas.
It was about this time, so far as the date can be fixed, that a
whole district, one might say a whole county, was visited by a series
of extraordinary and terrible calamities, which were the more terrible
inasmuch as they continued for some time to be inscrutable mysteries.
It is, indeed, doubtful whether these awful events do not still remain
mysteries to many of those concerned; for before the inhabitants of
this part of the country had time to join one link of evidence to
another the circular was issued, and thenceforth no one knew how to
distinguish undoubted fact from wild and extravagant surmise.
The district in question is in the far west of Wales; I shall call
it, for convenience, Meirion. In it there is one seaside town of some
repute with holiday-makers for five or six weeks in the summer, and
dotted about the county there are three or four small old towns that
seem drooping in a slow decay, sleepy and grey with age and
forgetfulness. They remind me of what I have read of towns in the west
of Ireland. Grass grows between the uneven stones of the pavements, the
signs above the shop windows decline, half the letters of these signs
are missing, here and there a house has been pulled down, or has been
allowed to slide into ruin, and wild greenery springs up through the
fallen stones, and there is silence in all the streets. And it is to be
noted, these are not places that were once magnificent. The Celts have
never had the art of building, and so far as I can see, such towns as
Towy and Merthyr Tegveth and Meiros must have been always much as they
are now, clusters of poorish, meanly built houses, ill kept and down at
heel.
And these few towns are thinly scattered over a wild country where
north is divided from south by a wilder mountain range. One of these
places is sixteen miles from any station; the others are doubtfully and
deviously connected by single-line railways served by rare trains that
pause and stagger and hesitate on their slow journey up mountain
passes, or stop for half an hour or more at lonely sheds called
stations, situated in the midst of desolate marshes. A few years ago I
travelled with an Irishman on one of these queer lines, and he looked
to right and saw the bog with its yellow and blue grasses and stagnant
pools, and he looked to left and saw a ragged hillside, set with grey
stone walls. "I can hardly believe," he said, "that I'm not still in
the wilds of Ireland."
Here, then, one sees a wild and divided and scattered region, a land
of outland hills and secret and hidden valleys. I know white farms on
this coast which must be separate by two hours of hard, rough walking
from any other habitation, which are invisible from any other house.
And inland, again, the farms are often ringed about by thick groves of
ash, planted by men of old days to shelter their roof-trees from rude
winds of the mountain and stormy winds of the sea; so that these
places, too, are hidden away, to be surmised only by the wood smoke
that rises from the green surrounding leaves. A Londoner must see them
to believe in them; and even then he can scarcely credit their utter
isolation.
Such, then, in the main is Meirion, and on this land in the early
summer of last year terror descended—a terror without shape, such
as no man there had ever known.
It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the
lanes to pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the
cottage on the hill.
The child who was lost came from a lonely cottage that stands on the
slope of a steep hillside called the Allt, or the height. The land
about it is wild and ragged; here the growth of gorse and bracken, here
a marshy hollow of reeds and rushes, marking the course of the stream
from some hidden well, here thickets of dense and tangled undergrowth,
the outposts of the wood. Down through this broken and uneven ground a
path leads to the lane at the bottom of the valley; then the land rises
again and swells up to the cliffs over the sea, about a quarter of a
mile away. The little girl, Gertrude Morgan, asked her mother if she
might go down to the lane and pick the purple flowers—these were
orchids—that grew there, and her mother gave her leave, telling
her she must be sure to be back by tea time, as there was apple tart
for tea.
She never came back.
1 comment