"Mae hen wlad fy Nhadau yn anwyl i mi,
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri——"
It is the commonest air you will hear in Wales—Land of my Fathers. Quarrymen sing it as they work by their trucks, slate-splitters whistle it as they tap in their wedges, farmers' lads tss-tss it between their teeth as they clump along the road, sitting sideways on their horses. You would think it had died an age ago of familiarity and repetition. Had it been God Save the King, played at an English theatre, there would have been a single line of it, half lost in the reaching for shawls and cloaks and fans, and here and there a man would have stood with an interval of an inch between his hat and his head, and already the attendants would have been getting out the sheeting for the stalls—so long is it since we knew adversity. But here, it needed but a stake driven into a foreshore that would hardly have pastured a donkey, and that was enough—so much adversity have they seen.... Then, as John Willie craned his neck, a man moved from in front of the candle among the geraniums, and Dafydd Dafis's hands could be seen. They seemed not so much hands as multiple things, assemblies of members each one of which was possessed of an independent life and will. There was not a finger that did not lurk, stiffen, clutch, and then start back from the throbbing string as if each note had been a poignant deed done, an old and secret vow redeemed. For the images that were evoked were cruel images. Those fingers of Dafydd's might have been choosing, not among strings of wire and gut, but among the living nerves of an enemy whose moans of suffering were transmuted into music. Know, that this—not the languid wrist nor the caressing hand, not the swans-neck forearm nor the coquetry of the foot on the pedal—not these, but the hook, the claw, the distortion, and the wreaking and the more than human and yet somehow less than human love—this is the harping of Wales....
"Gwlad! Gwlad!——"
Dafydd's head against the Post Office notice did not move, but his twisted hand might have wrenched the sinews from their shoulder-blade of a frame——
"Pleidiol wyf i'm Gwlad!——"
He did not sing the words, but the words that sang themselves in the ear of every man there meant that he was so enwrapped in his country that an alien stake in her soil was a stake in his heart also....
Within a week of that harping of Hen Wlad, Terry Armfield had more to mind than he had ever reckoned for.
There was no doubt that the flame was fanned largely by the Chapels. These were, respectively, of the three denominations most common in Wales, namely, Baptist, Calvinistic Methodist, and Independent; and Terry Armfield, coming down presently to see for himself what all the trouble was about, gave one affrighted look at their architecture, gasped, "Shade of Pugin!" and fled. The Baptist Chapel was a plain slate-roofed Noah's Ark of stone that, with the day-school adjoining it, stood alone in the middle of the sandhills. At one end of its roof-ridge was a small structure in which a bell swung, and the building had this further peculiarity, that, good stone being cheaper at Llanyglo than common bricks, the latter material had been used wherever an embellishment had been desired. The Independent Chapel was also of stone, with zinc ventilators like those of a weaving-shed; these looked over the fishermen's cottages out to sea not far from Edward Garden's house. And the third Chapel, that of the Methodists, of which body Howell Gruffydd was the principal pillar, lay behind the farms. It was of corrugated iron and wood, painted inside with a skirting of chocolate brown and upper walls of a peculiarly sickly light blue. On the walls were stencilled ribbons with V-shaped ends, and these bore texts in Welsh. Architecturally all these were hideous, but, to those whose grandfathers had worshipped in the fields and in clefts of the barren mountains and on the wide seashore, they had the beauty of a thing that has been ardently desired, and long suffered for, and passionately loved.
For from these three Chapels came not only the impulse of the spiritual life of Llanyglo, but its local politics of dissent also. Education, the Poor Law, matters of Local Government, Temperance, Tenure, the Eisteddfod, and the nursing of Nationalism—if these things were not actually Llanyglo's religion, they were hardly divisible from it. And this welding of Faith with secular works was helped by two other circumstances. The first circumstance was that no language was heard in the chapels but Welsh; and the second was that, as a result of the local-preacher system, three times out of four the Welsh issued from the same mouths—from Howell Gruffydd's mouth at the Methodist Chapel, from big John Pritchard at the Baptists', and from Owen Morgan's among the Independents. None of these went quite so far as openly to incite to the destruction of fences.
They merely prayed to be delivered from the situation in which they found themselves.