My Neighbors | Page 9

there in crowds. Three sirs shall come."
"I am choked with engagements," said Ben. "I am preaching very busy
now just."
"Well-well. Asked I did for you are a clean Cymro bach. As I repeat,
only leading lines in speakers shall be there. Come now into the
drawing-room and I'll give you an intro to the Missus Enos-Harries. In
evening dress she is--chik Paris Model. The invoice price was ten-ten."
"Wait a bit," Ben remarked. "I would be glad if I could speak."
"Perhaps the next time we give you the invite. The Cymrodorion shall

be in the miting."
"As you plead, try I will."
"Stretching a point am I," Harries said. "This is a favor for you to
address this glorious miting where the Welsh drapers will attend and
the Missus Enos-Harries will sing 'Land of my Fathers.'"
Ben withdrew from his fellows for three days, and on the third
day--which was that of the Saint--he put on him a frock coat, and
combed down his mustache over the blood-red swelling on his lip; and
he cleaned his teeth. Here are some of the sayings that he spoke that
night:
"Half an hour ago we were privileged to listen to the voice of a lovely
lady--a voice as clear as a diamond ring. It inspired us one and all with
a hireath for the dear old homeland--for dear Wales, for the land of our
fathers and mothers too, for the land that is our heritage not by Act of
Parliament but by the Act of God....
"Who ownss this land to-day? The squaire and the parshon. By what
right? By the same right as the thief who steals your silk and your laces,
and your milk and butter, and your reddy-made blousis. I know a farm
of one hundred acres, each rod having been tamed from heatherland
into a manna of abundance. Tamed by human bones and
muscles--God's invested capital in His chosen children. Six months ago
this land--this fertile and rich land--was wrestled away from the owners.
The bones of the living and the dead were wrestled away. I saw it three
months ago--a wylderness. The clod had been squeesed of its zweat.
The land belonged to my father, and his father, and his father, back to
countless generations....
"I am proud to be among my people to-night. How sorry I am for any
one who are not Welsh. We have a language as ancient as the hills that
shelter us, and the rivers that never weery of refreshing us....
"Only recently a few shop-assistants--a handful of
counter-jumpers--tried to shake the integrity of our commerse. But their

white cuffs held back their aarms, and the white collars choked their
aambitions. When I was a small boy my mam used to tell me how the
chief Satan was caught trying to put his hand over the sun so as to give
other satans a chance of doing wrong on earth in the dark. That was the
object of these misguided fools. They had no grievances. I have since
investigated the questions of living-in and fines. Both are fair and
necessary. The man who tries to destroy them is like the swimmer who
plunges among the water lilies to be dragged into destruction....
"Welsh was talked in the Garden of Aden. That is where commerse
began. Didn't Eve buy the apple?...
"Ladies and gentlemen, Cymrodorion, listen. There is a going in these
classical old rafterss. It is the coming of God. And the message He
gives you this night is this: 'Men of Gwalia, march on and keep you
tails up.'"
From that hour Ben flourished. He broke his league with the
shop-assistants. Those whom he had troubled lost courage and humbled
themselves before their employers; but their employers would have
none of them, man or woman, boy or girl.
Vexation followed his prosperity. His father reproached him, writing:
"Sad I drop into the Pool as old Abel Tybach, and not as Lloyd
Deinol." Catherine harassed him to recover her house and chattels. To
these complainings he was deaf. He married the daughter of a wealthy
Englishman, who set him up in a large house in the midst of a pleasure
garden; and of the fatness and redness of his wife he was sickened
before he was wedded to her.
By studying diligently, the English language became as familiar to him
as the Welsh language. He bound himself to Welsh politicians and
engaged himself in public affairs, and soon he was as an idol to a
multitude of people, who were sensible only to his well-sung words,
and who did not know that his utterances veiled his own avarice and
that of his masters. All that he did was for profit, and yet he could not
win enough.

Men and women, soothed into