Welsh Journals

In the Mist of Life A SHORT STORY By IVOR LEWIS SO this was what they called a fair, thought Mr. Jenkins, remembering the great six-day fairs of his youth with a line of contending stalls the length of the main street, slick urchin-assisted men from the coast, and thick pieces of strong mint-flavoured toffee in pink and white pleats. The littered display of plants beneath the town clock, chrysanthemums, pinks, and sweet william, was the remains of a minor feature of the week, in place of the long-wished-for carnival season he had known as a boy. He stood idly to one side as though almost too embarrassed to approach any nearer, staring abstractedly at the dowdily-coloured window of Nanette's" and appearing to examine the rodeo-bright shirts which, for the past five years, had been Nanette's idea of what Hollywood was wearing yesterday. He spat noisily but without expression, making a playgirl blonde shrug her shoulders tempestuously as passing, so that the head of her sham silver-fox fur rested between her shoulder blades, its glassy eyes cold and gleaming in the direction of Mr. Jenkins' serge back. Abrupt as sheet lightning, a transitory burst of sunshine covered him as he scraped the curb with his boot, his face,unshaded by the shop's sunblind, suddenly illuminated, as though picked out by a searchlight Mr. Jenkins was a tall, lean and shambling man, approaching fifty His hair, worn tousled except on the seventh day, was brown and wiry, but grizzled at the temples, his eyes innocently blue like some rare china his doorhammer of a nose seemed to grow downwards, splayed massively. His cheeks lacked the countryman's distinguishing flush (the conventional daub of a painter), for the red in them followed little lines just beneath the surface of the skin, as traceable as the veins of a leaf but more numerous. In his second-best suit, with which he humoured the ramshackle town he had visited no more than three times a year since his wife's death, he possessed something of the unapproach- able severity of a Church elder, the mildness in his eyes became questionable. And this grave and forbidding air was not illusory. In the Calvinistic chapel of his home village, six miles up the valley from the market town, Mr. Jenkins was considered very good on his knees," only it was a shame that the long hours he had to work at Hafod-y-Cwm prevented him from attending the midweek Seiat more often. Hafod-y-Cwm was a large farm owned by a young man who spent nost of the year shooting, now on his brother's estate in-Anglesey, now