CHAPTER XI.
Moses has many youthful yearnings. The exploits of the lads in fasting and feasting.
Some say it is a comfort to have a brother in affliction, visited by similar trials, and persecuted rigour. Now Moses and Twm could be sympathetic enough, for they had to endure labour enough and too much, but quite the opposite quantity of eatables; they, therefore, in their misery, became firm and attached companions. Twm at first found much to disgust him with his fellow sufferer, as he seemed disposed to talk of nothing but culinary matters; the roast and boiled, the stewed, the fried, were his darling topics. When Twm dilated on some of the festal doings at Graspacre-hall, the prematurely sunken eyes of this wretched starveling would glisten with a lambent flame that threatened the immediate extinction of his senses, he exclaimed, “O Lord, how I should like to make one of them!—I heard a strange man once talk of an ox being roasted whole—can such a thing be? what a—what a sight! O Lord, how I should like to tear two, three, four, hot ribs out of a roasting ox—I would get into the carcass, and roast with it, so that I might tug, tear, and eat my fill first. If I knew my way to any great town from this awful place, I’ll tell thee Twm, how I should like to get my living—I would eat for wagers—I have heard of such doings, and I know I could die contented, if I had once my stomach full of flesh—ha! ha! ha! I would tear it, and ha! ha! ha! Oh! how I would tear and swallow it!”
Twm felt horror-struck to hear these frantic ravings of this poor famished being, his eyes starting from their sockets, and his thin talon-like hands clutching vacantly at imaginary food. He strove to comfort him with future hopes, but the wretch had now sunk into a fit of weeping despondency, and as the tears ran down his young emaciated face, he exclaimed, in a tone of utter hopelessness, “no, no, I shall sleep on these mountains, and never have my fill of any thing but work and sorrow, work and sorrow till I die!” Suddenly starting from his reclining posture to his feet, and as suddenly changing his querulous tones to those of maniac rapture that was alarming from the startling transition—“Canst thee eat raw eggs, Twm? I have a store of them hid away in the barn—we’ll have a feast of them to-night, boy!”
Previous to this scene, they had been thrashing together till over fatigued they sat themselves down on the straw. The silence of their flails informed the quick ears of old Sheeny of this pause in their labour. Hastening with stealthy steps towards the barn, she unluckily arrived the moment when Moses vaunted of the intended feast of eggs. With the soundless steps and savage purpose of the taloned cat, that marks the moment to dart upon the heedless bird, she reached over the latch; unlatching it, she burst into the middle of the barn, and seizing the first flail in her way, she vowed with a tremendous oath to break every bone in his body with it unless the eggs were immediately produced. As she had once broke his leg, which Evans the blacksmith had imperfectly set for him, poor Moses made a virtue of necessity, and at once took her to his little hoard. Poor lad; it was like drawing his blood, to take away this prospect of a feed, and his eyes filled with tears as Sheeny gathered them all in her apron and marched off triumphantly. The loss of the eggs, valuable as they were in their hungry circumstances, was trivial to the daily annoyances of the female tongues that trimmed and stung them both within and without doors for many a day after, on this subject.
Old Sheeny was certainly a notable manager, an economist to the back bone. Abstemious moralists, those excellent friends of the human race, have declared, that the new-fangled improvements in modern cookery have inclined mankind to devour twice the quantity of food requisite or beneficial for the health and happiness of our species. Sheeny Greeg, the careful mistress of this mountain mansion, had no idea of inflicting such an evil on those favoured beings confided to her protection. Therefore, in a pure philosophic spirit, as an antidote to gluttony and intemperance, she took care, like an ancient Spartan dame, that the food and drink of her providing should be neither too rich nor too savory. Consequently gout and plethora were never found among the maladies of her inmates. She had an admirable contrivance that did honour to her inventive powers, of substituting durability for the dangerous quality of palatableness, in the food she administered.
For instance, in the article of bread, her custom was to bake an enormous batch at once; so that it soon got hard, musty and mouldy, it must be admitted that the temptation to gluttonize on it and its accompaniments, was diminished. In preparing that standing dish of the Welsh farm, the flummery, she would steep for a considerable time, a large portion of the oaten commodity for that purpose, till thoroughly soured to the acidity of crab-juice. The skim milk, in which this mess was soused, she considered as too gross for their unsophisticated stomachs, till diluted with the pure element from the brook.
The whey and butter-milk underwent the same process; and the cheese kept for home consumption was manufactured of that fang-defying, heart of oak, sort of toughness, which answers the patriotic purpose of cannon-balls, to repel invaders, should their cupidity ever be inflamed by the reported felicities of Cwmny Gwern Ddu: in which alarming supposition it is some satisfaction to reflect, as a point to our moral, that the crime would carry the punishment along with it. Whenever those rare and almost denounced strangers to the table, the beef or bacon made their appearance, the greedy fangs that seized them would suddenly relax their tenacious grip, like the blind dog that mistook a red-hot poker for a bone, in evident alarm, lest a portion of Lot’s wife had accidentally fallen in their way; a cannibal impression that seemed to haunt them long after, till washed away by many a copious draught of the fluid that cost nothing. Morris Greeg himself was a fine example to his household, as a scorner of unnecessary dainties. Doubtless it was very edifying to Twm and Moses, to hear him descant on the enormities of gross feeding, enlivened by anecdotes of people who had eaten themselves to death.
He would tell tales about the dreadful troubles brought upon a man by being over fat—obesity was, to hear him, a state of existence only equalled in horror by the pains and penalties of the lower regions. He narrated a veritable instance of a Daniel Lambert, who got so fat, and so immovable, that he rolled himself into a large trough of water, and voluntarily died the death of a suicide. Moses, the young infidel, would gape incredulously at such an intimation, and evidently doubted the probability of such a death; and if it were possible, impious cormorant as he was, he would have no objection to martyrdom on such a score.
“Plain food, and as little of it as possible,” quoth Morris, “is a fine thing,” grinding as he spoke a mass of black-eyed winter-dried beans with rusty bacon. “And leaven,” cried the sage of the mountains, “is far better in the bread than barn; it warms the stomach with its generous acid, and makes me content with little.”
Our hero, however, had a bold heart; and if a little better fed, would have endured all with that indifference and vein of whim which were natural to him. As it was, with the wild companionship of Moses, he turned misery herself into a scarecrow of mirth rather than of terror. Together those mischievously merry boys dispatched their breakfasts of highly watered milk and porridge, thickened with mouldy bread, with hungry yet loathing stomachs, and indulged in under currents of laughter, as either of them aped some peculiarity of gait or visage in their amiable hostess.
And when the rusty bacon liquor was enlarged for repeated messes of broth, their wry faces gave indications of their inmost feelings, whilst the latter manifested themselves by a waterspout movement generally supposed to indicate disquietude of the stomach. Their patience was severely tried; often when they felt a conviction that this species of drenching was over, they had the unexpected mortification to find a quantity of water added, to spin it out for another meal. This was truly a sad change to Twm, compelled as he was daily to embrace his antipathies, and disconnect himself from all that he had learned to love. He loved ballad lore, rural festivities, rambling, and all those light modes of passing his time that were most allied to idleness.
But in this dreary house, not a book was to be seen nor the sound of mirth, harp, or song, ever heard; still Twm did not despond; his good humour had the effect of brightening, by many a shade, the desponding apprehensions of Moses; and more than once he actually won a smile from one or two of the younger daughters of the house, who, however, soon rebuked themselves for descending to be pleased with anything that a parish apprentice boy could advance.
In the long winter evenings, when no one could possibly invent a task or job for them, Twm and Moses would be allowed to sit a little by the turf fire; when the latter would venture to narrate some hungry tale of gastronomic heroism, in which his fancy revelled, Twm would recite ghost stories that terrified the damsels; and war tales of olden times that he had heard from Ianto Gwyn, or his master, Rhys, that astonished and amused his auditors, at least part of them, for Sheeny Greeg and her echo Shaan disdained to be among the number, but cried shame on him for repeating such audacious lies.
Miserly people often overshoot their mark, and it was so in this farm-house. Old Elwes would have called Morris Greeg a worthy disciple, whilst other misers of even greater note would have looked upon the farm-house and its ways as the very acme of human felicity. But “greed” begets greater evils; and when Morris was by chance called away, the girls indulged themselves in the best way they could find. Theft was largely patronized, and as we should charitably think not without very reasonable excuse. One fair, day when Morris and Sheeny had betaken themselves to a distant corn and cattle mart, the girls, as usual, commenced their preparation for a regular junketing. Twm and Moses, whom they kept at the humble distance of lowly menials, were out together, mending some gaps in the hedges, when Moses sniffing the wind that blew from the direction of the house, with the gifted nose of a dog of the chase, called out with ecstacy, “Twm, I smell pan-cake!”
“So do I, Moses,” returned our little hero, expanding his nostrils with jocular comicality, “Ha!” cried Moses, with an envious snarl, “The selfish wenches of the house are treating their dainty chops with something nice.”
“Aye!” retorted Twm, quoting from some learned Theban, “when the cat’s away the mice will play. But stop thee here, Moses, and see if I don’t bring thee a share of what is going, in five minutes.” Moses grinned and licked his lips in eager anticipation as Twm hurried off. He entered the house with a sudden startling step, and a bundle of firewood under his arm as an excuse for the intrusion. All was panic within an instant. Two of the girls dashed their jug of sweetened small beer into the pail of hog’s wash, as they heard the first rattle of the wooden latch on Twm’s entrance; Shaan turned pale as the unfried pancake before her, so great was their fear that their parents had returned in the midst of their underhand clandestine doings. “It is only that devil Twm Shon Catty,” cried Shaan, who was the first to recover from the general terror; “Never mind, girls, go and sweeten more beer, for father and mother can’t be home before night.”
“Aye, go and sweeten more beer, and let poor Moses and I have a share of your beer and pancakes,” cried Twm, pointedly eyeing a raised heap of them in a wooden platter before the fire;—“let us have a part, and we won’t tell.”
“Get along to thy work, thou saucy cur!” cried Shaan, striking him with all her strength with the hot frying-pan. “Not till I have our share to take with me,” cried our hero, making a grasping snatch at the heaped pancakes, which he bore off in spite of the united efforts of the lasses to re-capture them. His manner of bestowing them was more commendable on the score of security than of delicacy, as the greater portion was thrust into his shirt-breast and breeches pockets; off he ran over the wooden bridge and along the path through the wood.
In this chase the great heat against his breast gave him considerable pain, and almost arrested his steps, half persuaded to throw away the larded delicacy; St. Vitus never danced faster nor more spasmodically under his pains, than did our hero under the effects of his hot pancakes. They gave him shocks equal in intensity to those from the voltaic pile; in fact he may be said to have been a Salamander enduring the scorchings of heat, but with this difference.—Twm Shon Catty could not well bear them, whereas the Salamander was represented as rather enjoying them than otherwise.
But, like the Spartan boy, Twm heroically determined to bear the self-inflicted torture, and endure to the last. However, it must be confessed, to the minoration of his fame, that not having been favoured with so stoical an education as the aforesaid Lacedemonian, he yielded to nature, and ran and roared, and roared and ran, till he outran his pursuers, who returned breathless home, and he as breathless joined young Moses, where, in their secret haunt, they enjoyed the fruit of his dexterity.
The spot they occupied was one of the discoveries of Moses, before Twm’s arrival, the craggy recesses of which became the depositaries of his filching achievements, and which recurring to in after years, he called his larder. It was situated above the torrent, beside the mountain, at the extreme end of the farm—just where the wilderness had refused to yield another patch to add to former accumulation. But these gormandizing youths were at present too busily engaged to remark on either the beauties or the horrors of the scene.
CHAPTER XII.
Studies piscatorial and fleshy, and certain tricks connected therewith. Pork capers—a new dish.
Emboldened by the impunity with which they had foraged for themselves during the last three months that had followed the doings in our last chapter, both Twm and Moses grew somewhat daring in their gastronomical speculations. Moses, among his restless peerings for something to gratify appetite, had peeped into one of the mountain pools, and joyfully detected the existence of a certain sizeable fish there. This was a discovery which made the young Jew’s mouth water, and his eyes distend with visions of future work for the jaws! Here was an El Dorado of good food, and Moses went into proportionate rapture at the prospect. Twm annoyed him not a little, by laughing at his futile attempts to spear a pike with the dull and clumsy prongs of a dungfork.
Our hero was more successful in his warfare on the trout and eels that abounded in a brook which ran through one of the tarns. Without any contrivance that resembled fishing-tackle in the most remote degree, he remarked a sweeping curve, of a horse-shoe shape, in one part of the brook, and determined, with the assistance of Moses, on sporting his engineering skill, in cutting a new channel for the water, so that it might for the future, run a straight course, and leave the horseshoe portion of it dry. This at different intervals, with no small labour, they at last effected; and when the flood ran along the new channel, its deserted curve became a mess of slimy mud. Into this, with naked feet, they soon waded, and groping cautiously about, succeeded in gathering an abundant harvest of trout and eels. Moses was noisy in his raptures at the result, and so anxious to have them immediately cooked, that he could scarcely wait for that tedious progress.
However, they soon kindled a fire by rubbing together some rotten wood, and with the aid of some dry turf, the quarry under the precipice of Allt y Craig became a temporary heath of blazing beauty. Utterly void of any culinary utensils, they resolved on the primitive mode of broiling their fish on hot stones, and Moses, all alacrity, proceeded on the task of preparing them.
But, alas, for the sequel of their adventure! Before they could realize their project, the dark countenance of Morris Greeg paralyzed their efforts, as the serpent’s gaze is said to fascinate its victim. The angry farmer gruffly demanded where they had been, how they had dared to idle away their time, and what was the meaning of that wasteful fire against the rock. The ready lie, or presence of mind as it is favourably called, of Twm and Moses soon supplied answers, such as they were. Twm said, that hearing the good woman of the house complain of a visit from the old enemy the cholic, he determined to catch a dish of fish for her, to drive it away, pointing triumphantly to his piscatory store; thus beating a retreat with all the diplomacy and tact of a good general, who when he finds he cannot obtain a victory, at any rate manages to gain credit for a wise ‘retrograde.’
Moses followed up Twm’s assertion by declaring that the fire was to frighten away the crows and the kites that might take fancy to the young lambs, or the wheat in the neighbouring field; a manifestation of care over his master’s property, which had, at any rate, the claim of originality to back it. Morris was as great an economist of his words as in matters of worldly goods, and therefore, whatever he thought, he did not waste breath with reply; but suddenly ordered Moses to carry the fish into the house, and Twm to give some hay to the cows. “And be sure,” quoth the careful farmer, “that you give most hay to the cow that gives most milk.”
“I will be sure of it!” replied Twm pointedly, and with sulky asperity. The next moment, to the great astonishment, and greater anger of Morris Greeg, he threw as much hay as his two arms could embrace, under the water-spout. “There,” cried the redoubted son of Catty, “that is the cow which gives me most milk, for that cursed broth and porridge is almost wholly made from this never-failing animal.”
A precipitous retreat of course, followed this explanation, and Morris Greeg was left alone to chew the cud of his resentment. At dinner the next day, the wrath of Morris having evaporated, all grew smooth again. While Twm and Moses bolted their insipid mess of dovery, otherwise called burgoo, the gratification was rather questionable in having as their share merely the smell of the fried fish, on which Sheeny and Shaan with the younger daughters were regaling, and praising the flavour at every mouthful they swallowed. Moses ground his teeth, and would have impaled them in the excess of his rage, for the loss of his expected feast. Twm said nothing, but inwardly resolved on faring better, and that very speedily. Shaan grinned like a hyena as she treated her dainty gums with fish after fish, and spitefully enjoyed their mortification, as she whispered to Twm, “now we are even for the pancakes.”
Just at the finishing of this mid-day meal, the barking of a strange dog drew Twm and Moses out to the yard. There they saw a half-starved cur, belonging to a cottager who was cutting turf in the adjoining turbary. This wretched animal, evidently a cut-throat leveller in principle, was disputing with one of the pigs his right to engross the whole trough to himself, which the bristly conservative at length resented by snapping in two one of the hind legs of his canine enemy.
The dog set up a dismal howl as a requiem for the loss of the fourth part of his understanding, which was soon silenced by Moses striking him on the head with a large stone, which killed him on the spot. The cottager hurried home, frightened by Twm, who told him would be sued for the damages done by his dog. Our hero, with the assistance of Moses, to whom he imparted the scheme he had now in hand, immediately bathed the buttocks of the pig with the dog’s blood; and then pouring some dry sand in his ear, drove him howling down the yard. Annoyed with the freedom thus taken with his auricular organ, the offended gentleman of the sty rushed to and fro, at a rate as violent as some of his celebrated ancestors, when they sought to drown both themselves and the devils within them in the sea. Morris lifted his hands amidst the assembled household, and ruefully exclaimed, “the devil is in the pig!” His gambols were certainly most extraordinary, and far surpassed the evolutions’ of the bull’s frisky wife, commonly called the cow’s courante. He sometimes aimed to stand on his hind legs, to emulate the figure, intimating in pantomime, “I am as good a man as the best of you!”
While in this position, he would toss his head as loftily as an envious beauty that heard her rival praised; and then, as if to evince his unrivalled versatility, he aimed to reverse his position, and stand on his head.
Thus did he enliven the farm-yard, and cut sundry unusual capers, not at all in keeping with the hitherto grave tenor of all his modest life; at which Morris was scandalized, the women astonished, and the two mischievous imps that caused this torture, amused as if a party of mountebanks had exhibited before them. “Such things have been in the days of old,” cried Morris, with a pious whine, “the pig is possessed of a devil.”
“Of a legion of devils!” screamed Sheeny and Shaan, in the utmost alarm; “the pig is mad!” cried Moses; “the dog was mad that bit the pig!” cried Twm. This remark, which assigned a natural cause for the frisky gambols of the tortured grunter, had the effect of sobering every one from their wild supernatural speculations, to the no less alarming fact that poor porker was the victim of hydrophobia. Morris all at once turned pious, and remarked that “this might be one of the signs which were to precede the end of the world.”
“Ah!” whispered Twm to Moses, “it is a sign which certainly precedes the end of the pig.”
Convinced by the reiteration of Twm and Moses, that the pig was really stark staring maliciously and mischievously mad, Morris seemed more grieved at his prospect of worldly loss in so much hog’s flesh, than as if his first suggestion had been verified about the dissolution of the world. He pathetically lamented the loss it would be, to kill him before he was duly fattened. “He must be killed and eaten fresh,” whined Morris, “as he is too lean to be salted and baconed.”
“He shall be killed and buried like a dog!” cried Sheeny, “or we shall all be maddened and biting one another, if we swallow a bit of him, fat or lean—Oh! the pity to lose this precious griskin!” “I won’t eat mad pork!” cried Shaan; “nor I,”—“nor I!” cried the younger lasses, deeply horrified at the idea of being smothered between two feather-beds, which Twm assured them, with a very grave and serious face, was an easy and comfortable death, and such as was always allotted by law to those who got mad by the bite of a mad dog, or by eating what was venomed by his bite. “I will never touch a bit of him,” cried all the girls at once; “but I will!” muttered both Twm and Moses, to themselves, glowing with the thought of future feasting.
Morris in the deepest tribulation pondered on the perversity of his household, and at last decided on waiting till next morning before he would give his ultimatum as to how the pig was to be disposed of, in the meantime locking him up in a stable. It was a night of trial for Morris. To lose an entire porker at one fell swoop, and the household to be so very unaccommodating as not to eat him, was a really serious thing. He mentally prayed for the renewed health on the part of the pig, or else that some kind pig-drover would fall from the clouds and be the saving angel of him. The said Morris Greeg’s conscience did not see further than his own acts. If the imaginary drover bought the pig, and others were made mad, why it was none of Morris’s concern. So much for his refined morality. Thus he comforted himself by reflecting, that whoever got mad with eating him, that was their concern, not his; as it would be unbecoming in him to dictate to others what they were to buy or to eat. And as to mentioning his faults, as some unreasonable readers require, he defied any one to prove that to be a fault, which was evidently his misfortune.
Boundless was the mirth of Twm and Moses, as in their season of rest they agitated the question as to what report they were to make in the morning. “Suppose,” said the waggish Jew-boy “that we let the pig out, and say that he escaped into the yard, and bit a goose, (which we can kill and eat;) that the goose got mad and bit the wheel-barrow; that the wheel-barrow dashed itself frantically against the dung-cart; and that both together they rolled and rattled all night about the yard, like the capering of ten thousand devils.” Twm over-ruled this wild suggestion, and gave a report more consonant with probabilities that the animal was more mad than ever, and that he feared his malady would infect the stable, so as to make it unsafe to put the horses there again till the walls were white-washed and every part of it purified.
This was a grave and plausible position in which to place the affair, and quite fell in with Morris’s own way of thinking; and at last he determined on having the maddened monster, as he called him, killed and buried. This was at last carried into effect by our young worthies, with the assistance of Mike the mat-man, who inhabited a wretched hovel in the neighbourhood, and maintained himself, a wife, and one child, by making rush mats, and coarse willow baskets, which he hawked over the country. Mike, of course, was let into the secret, and in the night the worthy trio commenced their avocations of body-snatchers. The much injured porker was disinterred, and more honours were paid him after death, than had ever been conferred upon him in life. But this is the way with human beings, sometimes, as well as with the denizens of the sty; and if we choose to moralize, we have an excellent opportunity given us—but we forbear.
Many and merry were the evenings spent over the remains of the pork, by Twm and Moses, under the humble roof of Mike the mat-man and his wife, who were equal partakers of the feast. These promising youths, on pretending to retire to their nightly rest, made a point of hastening to the place of goodly food and pleasant smells, where they spent the greater part of the night, and thus acquired their earliest taste for dissipation.