Testimonies: A Novel Read Online Free

satisfactory. There was a crossroads; I turned to the right and there was the village a hundred yards from me, across the stream.
    It was a shock. I had not expected anything like it. It was a hard, rectilinear pattern, almost a cross, set on the rising slope of the Saeth ridge. The upright of the cross was the shiny macadam road on which I was walking, the cross-piece a lane running about thirty yards each way. In the lower left-hand space in the cross there was an official-looking building in a bald yard, obviously the school. The chapel stood in the right-hand top space. At the intersection I saw the bright red of the post-office.
    As I walked into the village, I saw that all the houses were exactly the same. They were built of slate, thick pieces either cut or left ragged, almost black. The windows were edged with yellow brick. The paint on the woodwork was everywhere a dark, purplish chocolate. There were no gardens at all: the houses rose straight from the earth.
    Those were my first impressions: they were mistaken. After I had been to the post-office (they had no tobacco; and in a way I was glad, because I was already ashamed of the weakness of my resolution) I walked about a little more and saw that there were four houses out of the pattern; they had front-door steps and railings. I had not noticed them before because they were overwhelmed by the monstrous chapel, which, like them, was covered with yellow stucco. It was a shocking piece of work: I got used to it, in time, but at first it made me gasp. I can hardly describe it; there is not much point, anyhow. It made a few bows in the direction of English church architecture (English church architecture of the ’80’s) and a few more at each of the classical orders in turn.
    The post-office was the only shop; and it did not appear to have much in it—it was not the general store that I had expected.
    I wondered what the devil the village was doing there, what was its raison d’être. It looked like the outburst of a malignant building lunatic. I was still staring at the chapel when a gentle rain began to fall. At once the gray roofs turned black and the slate walls grew even darker.
    I hurried back to avoid a ducking, and as I came to the crossroads I looked at the village again. It was a monstrous thing and it should never have been called a village; but it was not without beauty if you considered the hard lines (harder still now in the rain) and mechanical pattern of stark rectangles and cubes against the unbounded sweep of dissolving mountainside. Still, I was not sorry that it was invisible from Hafod, and that our upper valley was shut clean away from any influence of that kind whatever.

Lloyd

    “M y reason for coming here today, Mr. Lloyd,” he said, “is to ask you to tell me about Pentref. We thought about it for some time and decided that there was no one else so well qualified: ministers come and go, and even if they stayed all the time, I do not know that a minister would be able to see the whole picture so well as the schoolmaster.”
    Mr. Lloyd did not answer at once. It was hard to know where to begin: he knew so much about the place—fifty years of his life—he knew so much that the knowledge turned in unconnected fragments in his head.
    “If you were to begin by describing the place?”
    “Yes. Yes, I will do my best to describe it.”
    “Then you might go on to the people.”
    Mr. Lloyd cleared his throat. “Well, sir, the village—as you know, perhaps—is almost the highest in Gwynedd. It stands in Cwm Bugail, the valley between the Saeth and Penmawr y Gogledd, about halfway up the valley. The village is not down in the hollow of the valley, because of the floods, but rather up on the slope of the Saeth ridge. The river, it is not more than a stream ordinarily, runs just below the village, by the school, and there is a very old bridge, across it. That is the only old thing in the village, which was built for the big quarry up on