My Neighbors | Page 9

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 false ease and quickened into counterfeit wrath, commended him, crying: "Thank God for Ben Lloyd." Such praise puffed him up, and howsoever mighty he was in the view of fools, he was mightier in his own view.
"At the next election I'll be in Parliament," he boasted in his vanity. "The basis of my solidity--strength--is as immovable--is as impregnable as Birds' Rock in Morfa."
Though the grandson of Simon Idiot and Dull Anna prophesied great things for himself, it was evil that came to him.
He trembled from head to foot to ravish every comely woman on whom his ogling eyes dwelt. His greed made him faithless to those whom he professed to serve: in his eagerness to lift himself he planned, plotted, and trafficked with the foes of his officers. Hearing that an account of his misdeeds was spoken abroad, he called the high London Welshmen into a room, and he said to them:
"These cruel slanderers have all but broken my spirit. They are the wicked inventions of fiends incarnate. It is not my fall that is required--if that were so I would gladly make the sacrifise--the zupreme sacrifise, if