SHONE EVANS
Shone, that is to say John, Evans was a miner in the Dulais Valley, in South Wales, and a man nearer forty than thirty.
The Dulais Valley had been solitary, with a brawling mountain stream flowing between great ridges of brown heathery moss-land, on which the sheep had browsed and shone white in the sun. But of late years there had come a transformation of the scene. Coalpits had been opened. Plain, ugly rows of houses had been run up. Tall chimneys had been erected, chapels and churches, public-houses, factories as well. What sheep still fed on the hilltops were grey, if not black, for the air was heavy with smoke, and the soot settled everywhere, and not the sweetest herb could avoid a flavour of soot, nor the fairest flower escape a film of “smuts.”
As for the sparkling, laughing Dulais, it had turned to a sullen, dirty stream, of which nothing was required but that it should carry off the scum and sewage of the dense population that clogged the valley and dug into the hills. In long-gone-by days the stream had acquired its name of Blackwater, for so Dulais may be interpreted, from the lyns and pools of bottle-green deeps, formed after its leaps over the barriers of rocks. Now it merited its name more truly, so sombre was it, in the midst of heaps of coal refuse, and so soiled were its waters with every sort of defilement.
“Man makes the town, God made the country,” is a saying; but it is only half true. God makes the town, for He it is who has laid the beds of coal, and run into the rock the veins of ore that draw men to excavate them, and without which men would hunger, and civilisation could not progress.
Beautiful on the hills of old were the harebells, beautiful in the evening the glory of light that lit up the russet hills—ugly, maybe, is now the mining settlement; and yet there is a loveliness above that of harebell and bracken and heather and foaming mountain rill in the lives of the men and women who have invaded and displaced the rude natural charms of the Dulais Valley. And I am going to tell you of one of these beauties, and thus I introduce you to Shone Evans.
The man himself was not comely. A broad-shouldered, plain man, with a stoop such as is often seen in colliers—a reserved, a serious man, and somewhat shy. Perhaps in this he was a typical Welshman—that he was full of tenderness of heart and deep feeling, but at the least token of ridicule or superciliousness, he closed like a flower against rain, brooded over any injury his feelings may have received, but he said nothing.
Centuries of isolation and of wrong done to the Welsh race have had this effect on them. They have been sneered at, swaggered over by domineering Saxons or tyrannical Normans, then exploited by speculative North-countrymen; they have been treated as men to be employed for the advantage of others, and when useless, to be cast aside as broken tools. Their idiosyncrasies have been the subject of joke and scoff; their language has been derided; their aspirations, national and individual, disregarded. This has bred in them a sensitiveness that is foreign to the coarser Saxon—a reserve that forms a crust about the manner that is repellent to the stranger, if in that stranger there be the smallest assumption of superiority. Yet underneath lies the richest, deepest, purest vein of golden love and goodwill that God, who formed the mountains and made man, ever buried in the human heart.