Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"Wait for things to come to them instead of going to fetch them----"
"Up t' Trwyn? We'll talk about it after I've had my forty winks. I must
have my forty winks after my dinner."
"Lunch, William."
"Lunch, then."
"He _will_ call it his dinner----"
"It _is_ my dinner----"
Then Mr. Morrell makes a signal, the younger ones troop out, breaking
into loud shouts the moment they are clear of the room. They are off to
the beach again. Shall we follow them?...
* * * * *
What do the Welshmen think of it all? It suits Howell Gruffydd's book,
as you see, and Howell has pacified John Pritchard with the promise of
Bazaars; but the others? Dafydd Dafis, say?
Again nothing is going right for Dafydd. He feels that another friend
has changed towards him--Minetta, to whom he used to sing _Serch Hudol_,
and tell his stories of fays and water-beings and knights, and make much
of for her elfin looks and quick and un-Saxon ways. For Minetta is
already displaying the artist's heartlessness, and does not see the
sorrow in Dafydd's eyes, but only what sort of a "head" he has from her
special point of view, and how he will "come" upon a piece of paper. She
tried to draw Dafydd only the other day, and ordered him, half absently,
to turn his head this way and that, and grew petulant when her drawing
went all wrong, and suddenly cried "Don't look at me like that!" when
Dafydd turned his eyes on her with a tear in the corner of each. Poor
Dafydd! He, like the Squire, would be better out of all this swiftly
oncoming change....
But Dafydd, who is of the phrase-making kind, has made out of his
sadness a phrase that more or less represents the attitude of every
Welshman in Llanyglo. He watched all these people coming in ones and
twos and threes out of the hotel one morning and walking down to their
deck-chairs and bathing-tents on the beach. He stood for a while,
looking at the gay parterre of sun-shades and summer clothes, of kites
and spades and buckets, and rings on fingers more carefully tended but
of coarser stuff than his own. And he listened to the accents that even
his alien ear told him were strained and affected and false. And he gave
them a half contemptuous and half pitying look as he turned away.
"_These summer things_," he said....
But Howell Gruffydd has Dafydd Dafis's measure also, and takes it, just
as he took John Pritchard's, in a single word.
"_Eisteddfodau_," he whispered to Dafydd behind his hand....
For they may by and by be advertising Llanyglo by means of an
Eisteddfod, and, as long as he is allowed to play, Dafydd does not
greatly care who he plays to nor whether they understand him or not.
IV
YNYS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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