The irregular row of thatched cottages was set perhaps a hundred yards back from high-water mark, and the intervening space was a waste of sand, coarse tussocks, and the glaucous blue sea-holly. Half-overblown rubbish strewed the beach—rusty tin pans and kettles, old kedge anchors, corks, a mass of potato-parings in which three or four hens scratched, and the skeletons of a couple of disused boats. The half-dozen serviceable boats were gathered a couple of hundred yards away about a short wooden jetty. A mile away in the other direction rose the Trwyn, bronze with sunny heather and purple with airy shadow, with the lighthouse and the Dinas on the top. A small herd of black cattle had wandered slowly out to it, and was wandering slowly back again at the edge of the tide.
"John Willie!"
The cottages were thatched and claywashed, and while some of them had a couple of strides of garden in front, others rose from little taluses of blown sand. Sand was everywhere. It lodged in the crevices, took the paint off the doors, and had blunted the angles of posts and palings until they were as smooth and rounded as the two or three ships' figure-heads that stood within them. Grey old oars leaned up in corners; umber nets, with cork floats like dangling fruit upon them, hung from hooks in the walls; and the squat chimneys had flat stones on the tops of them. The windows were provided with swing-back wooden shutters. Between the farming part and the fishing part of Llanyglo the family had passed three chapels.
"John Willie!"
Mrs. Garden had descended, and stood over her neat boot-tops in sand, wondering which of her cramped members it would be best to try to straighten first. Standing by her only half awake, Minetta rubbed her eyes. At a respectful distance, but a convenient nearness, half a dozen barefooted children described as it were rainbow-curves in the air with their hands from the foreheads downwards, and a little further away the maritime population of Llanyglo watched the Royal Hotel driver struggle with the luggage. They did not stand off from hostility, but from an excess of delicacy. Then, as a heavy trunk slipped and stuck, a young man with braces over his gansey gave a quick smile, started forward, and bore a hand.
"John—Willie!"
It was Mr. Garden who called. He had put his key into the door of the cottage where the house-leek grew like a turkey's neck on the claywashed gate-post, and he wanted John Willie to help carry in the smaller parcels. Now John Willie was neither deaf, nor did he feign deafness, but he had a fine sense of the defensive uses of stupidity. Question him directly (say about those apples or that broken window-pane), and he knew nothing whatever. Question him further, and he knew less than nothing. You might conceivably have questioned him to the extreme point when his unadmitting blue eyes would have said, as plain as speech, "What is an apple?" His primrose head could be seen at this moment fifty yards away down the beach. He was watching a fisherman scrape hooks with an old clasp-knife. He had just spoken to the man. "Dim Saesneg," the man had replied. John Willie was now watching him, not as a man who scraped hooks, but as the possessor of a new and admirable defence against questions.
"John Wil——"
But this time the summons was broken in two on Mr. Garden's lips. He had opened the cottage door, and was looking mildly within.
The orders he had given for the preparation of the double cottage for his wife and children had included the lining of the interior with match-boarding, and he had understood that this had been finished a week and more ago. It was a month since he had had the advice-note from the timber merchant at Porth Neigr that the material had been delivered. And so it had. There it was. There, too, were the walls. But the matchboarding was not on the walls. It lay, tongued and grooved, with the scantling for fixing it, just where the timber merchant's men had deposited it—on the floor. It filled half the place. On the top of it, still in the sacking in which they had been sewn, were the articles of furniture that had been brought from Mr. Garden's Manchester attics and lumber-rooms. The rest of the furniture he had taken over from the previous tenants, whom some vicissitude of fortune had taken far away to South Wales.