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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781908069269 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Parthian Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
| Series: | Library of Wales |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 494 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Battle to the Weak
By Hilda Vaughan
Parthian
Copyright © 2010 Fflur DafyddAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908069-26-9
CHAPTER 1
Originally the roof of Ocean View had been slated, but layer upon layer of plaster and whitewash had softened the contours until they resembled those of a thatched cottage. The walls of the little house were tinted pink, and from a distance it looked like a button mushroom with snowy top and flesh-coloured stem. A white wall enclosed the trim garden. From the front door to the garden gate was a double row of large pebbles, polished by the scouring of waves. The owner of the place had expressed her love of decoration by ornamenting them with spots and flourishes of white paint. All the diminutive panes of the four front windows were freshly cleaned, and twinkled in the evening sunshine; and the rim of brass that adorned the doorstep glittered like gold.
Esther came out of the house, singing softly to herself, and wandered down the path of crushed cockleshells. She was dressed in the plain black frock in which she went to church, to funerals, and to fairs. Her abundant mass of coarse brown hair, shot with threads of copper, was coiled up beneath a black straw hat, the brim of which turned down demurely and shaded a face neither dainty enough to be described as 'pretty' nor classical enough to deserve the word 'beautiful'. At the end of the small garden she turned and surveyed her aunt's home with profound approval.
"Tis like a doll's house as I was seein' in the toyshop at Swansea,' she reflected. 'I do wish if I was havin' one like it for Gladys and myself.'
She had been staying with her aunt for three weeks now, and already she had begun to blossom like a flower that is transplanted into congenial soil. The spare outlines of her girlish figure were becoming more rounded, her movements less shrinking, her carriage self-confident, and her whole air healthier and happier than it had been under her parents' roof.
"Tis good,' she murmured, stroking the garden wall, 'all good – and Aunt Polly is bein' the best o' the lot.'
Aunt Polly kept a shop as well as a cottage and a garden full of flowers. Esther could see the large glass bottles, gay with sweets, the picture postcards, the tins of cocoa and packets of cigarettes ranged in an attractive pattern within the window on the left of the front door. In the midst of cooking her midday dinner, Aunt Polly was ever ready to serve a customer in the leisurely gossiping fashion in which business was transacted in Aberdulas. Her niece had often marvelled at her, leaning with plump arms folded upon the counter, as though she were deaf to the sounds of frizzling bacon which issued from the kitchen adjoining the shop, and had nothing to do in the world but to entertain her visitor. Yet the meals were never burnt, nor the crockery smeary from careless washing, and there were always fresh flowers upon the table. Esther and Gladys had delighted in flowers when they were little, but it had never occurred to them that grown-up people could care for such things, unless, of course, they were the 'quality' who had plenty of time to waste. Aunt Polly was not one of the 'quality', but her quiet days contained leisure as well as work. Night after night she would sit in the snug little parlour, playing hymn tunes upon the piano, and Esther, curled up in a deep wicker armchair, such as she had never sat in before, would let her eyes wander over the flamboyant wallpaper, sprawling with pink roses, and wonder why her own parents could not lead such a life as this in so ideally lovely a home.
'If only Gladys could share it with me,' she thought as she waited for her aunt in the garden. 'But maybe as we can both o' us be goin' out into service together when she do come a bit stronger, and then we'll be savin' up enough to buy a small little shop of our own some day. Father and mother 'ull be mad if we do leave 'em, but I do mean to be happy if I can, whatever they do say. Ever since I've comed to know Aunt Polly I've believed as 'tis right to be happy same as what she is.'
Turning her back on the house, she rested her elbows on the garden wall and gazed out to sea. Ocean View was the last of a straggling line of cottages which began halfway up a steep hillside behind the village and ended at the brink of a semicircular cove. Here the road lost itself in the shore within a few yards of Esther. The low cliff fell sheer at the place where she was standing so that, by leaning over the wall, she could have dropped a stone into the lapping froth beneath her. The sea was unusually calm – green inshore, and further out a deep blue, slashed by a golden pathway towards the setting sun.
'Now I am ready,' Mrs Jones announced, coming out of the house in her unhurrying way.
Her ample person, clothed in a voluminous black silk pelisse, seemed to fill up the whole of the garden, and her smile was wide as the ocean. She carefully locked the door, hid the key under the mat, where everyone in Aberdulas knew that it was to be found, and clasping an umbrella, a huge hymn book, a folded handkerchief, and a paper bag full of peppermints, led the way up the road through the village.
'We are bein' a bit late,' she observed, without appearing to be in the least distressed by the fact, and nodding right and left to the neighbours who stood at their cottage doors enjoying the close of a working day.
'Goin' to the singin' practice up yonder?' one of them called out.
'Yes, yes, wantin' my niece to hear how good we are singin' in these parts, I am.'
'You'll have to look sharp, then,' the neighbour shouted after her; but she continued at her own steady pace, like a broad-beamed ship in full sail.
'I never did see no use in rushin',' she informed Esther. 'Allus managin' to be there somehow, I am, but never afore time, lookin' all of a hurry and over-anxious, like what some folks is doin'.'
She chuckled at the thought. 'I'll tell you the way to catch a sweetheart, my gal. Don't you be too oncomin' at the start, it do put 'em shy, same as a customer will get with a shopkeeper as is in too much of a hurry to sell his goods. Not as I do fancy you are one to err on that side. Don't you be leavin' it too long neither. 'Tis a good job to be punctual in everything, I do say; in courtin' same as in everythin' else, you did ought to be there on the nick o' time.'
Esther gave one of her quiet throaty laughs.
"Tis the serious truth I'm tellin' of you,' her aunt protested. 'That's how I was gettin' holt o' your poor uncle. Very shy at the start he was, so I took him easy; but when I seed as he'd let the business stay there for years if nothin' happened to sharpen it up, well, I gave it a bit of a turn myself. Allus meanin' to marry him I was, long afore he did ever fancy me.'
'Oh, Aunty!'
Mrs Jones gave her niece a look of sly amusement. 'And why shouldn't an 'oman be havin' her fancy same as a man?'
Esther could not say. She only knew that it was contrary to the vague notions of modesty she had acquired from her Sunday-school teacher. But this disconcerting aunt of hers had a gift for making prejudices seem absurd.
'I don't believe you do mean half you say.' Esther tried to find excuses for her as she looked at the round roguish face, embedded, with scarcely any indication of a neck, in the fat shoulders. Certainly her aunt was not beautiful; but who could help loving every bit of her, vast as she was, from the rakish tuft of jet bugles in her bonnet, that leapt to and fro with every emphatic nod of her head, to her feet which bulged over the top of her shoes, and turned out ridiculously as she walked?
She paused and studied her niece with a twinkle in her blue eyes. 'Didn't you never want to sleep with no one?'
Esther flushed. 'What a thing to say,' she cried.
'Oh, a' right, a' right. I did only mean 'ouldn't you like to marry someone? – all quite respectable.'
'No,' Esther affirmed with decision. 'I do never mean to marry no one. I'm not likin' men.' She had scarcely spoken to any but her father. 'A drunken, swearin' lot they mostly are, and I do see a house like yours without no man in it a deal tidier and nicer.'
'Well, well, well.' Mrs Jones laughed outright. 'You do talk about men as if they was a lot of mangy old dogs – better poisoned and out o' the way. There's men to be found as do like things as nice about a place as what you are doin'.'
'Well, I haven't been meetin' 'em whatever. And Gladys and I do allus mean to keep single, as long as we do live, and to stay together. I've been promisin' her that faithful.'
'How old are you?'
The tone in which the question was delivered startled Esther, and she glanced at the speaker self-consciously, wondering whether she had said anything very callow and foolish.
'Eighteen,' she murmured apologetically; 'nineteen come the autumn.'
'Ah well, time 'ull show.'
By now they had left the village behind them, and had reached a high, undulating plateau. The open country ahead, its outlines unbroken by trees or houses, was still and restful as the sea. There were farms and hamlets dotted about on it, Esther knew, but they kept out of sight, sheltering in hollows from the winter gales, and nothing spoiled the illusion of profound peace and solitude.
In silence she walked on, and presently they reached their destination, a large wayside chapel that served the surrounding district. Dusk had fallen. The tombstones rose like watchful ghosts out of the rank grass, and the whispering groups of young men who hung about the door, too shy to enter until the singing should begin, had the guilty, mysterious air of conspirators.
Into the lighted building rustled Aunt Polly, the jet sequins on her pelisse making a faint jingling sound suggestive of wealth. She wedged herself into a narrow, uncomfortable pew on the ground floor, and deposited in an orderly manner on the book-rest in front of her, her umbrella, her folded handkerchief, her hymn book and her screw of peppermints. The sweets she began to suck audibly while she settled down to heavy enjoyment of what was to her a social function rather than an act of worship. Without appearing to stare indecorously, she looked about her, smiling and nodding at her acquaintances as she observed who they were with and what they were wearing.
Esther also stole a glance at the people who were near her, and was struck by something earnestly expectant in their faces. There were among them men bent double with rheumatism and manual labour, and women who had lost all beauty but that of a kindly expression; old toothless bodies wrapped in threadbare shawls, and young mothers with tired eyes, who incessantly rocked the babies they carried in their arms. There were neatly dressed farmers with the grim look of men who have had a hard struggle in business, and labourers dulled by routine, enduring and resigned. All these people had work-coarsened hands, rough and red, clasped between their knees or folded in their laps in an attitude of devotion. Yet they were not praying. They were waiting eagerly for something to happen for which they had been longing throughout the working hours of the week. Even Aunt Polly ceased after a while to signal her greetings, and fell into the prevailing mood of hushed expectancy.
Most of the younger folk had congregated in the gallery that ran round three sides of the building. Raising her eyes in their direction, Esther encountered those of a tall youth who had come into the shop one day and stared at her so intently that she had retreated in confusion into the kitchen. He was looking at her now with the same fixity, and she turned away her head.
'I'm sure I don't know what's amiss with me for a stranger to stare so,' she thought. 'He was lookin' at me just as hard when I passed him in the road the other night. It can't be along o' my bein' good lookin', nor I don't fancy as I'm all that ill-favoured neither. I can't make him out,' and she glanced up at the gallery once more.
The bright golden-brown eyes of the strange lad were still upon her.
'I do wish if he'd find summat else to look at,' she thought indignantly. "Tis terrible rude o' him to keep starin' at me; it do make me that uneasy.'
But the conductor had taken his place, the singing began, and instantly she forgot all else.
The whole assembly had risen to its feet and was singing as only in Wales can an untrained crowd be found to sing, with a natural sweetness, a fervour, an innate gift of expression that more than atoned for any fault in technique. Hymn after hymn they sang in Welsh, set to tunes that, though modernised and re-named, were ancient as the race itself, wild as the hills from which it sprang. Sometimes soft and plaintive like the sighing of wind in a forest, sometimes loud and passionate as the shouting of a gale at sea, they were all in the minor key, and sad as the Celtic soul. Slowly tears gathered in Esther's eyes and brimmed over unchecked. After each hymn she brushed them away with the back of her hand, and waited in an ecstasy of melancholy for the thrilling bass voices of the men and the clear sweet sopranos and trebles of the women and boys to blend together once more in some mournful refrain. The cause of her sadness, as of their love of singing, lay deeper than reason. She was aware only of a sense of grief, tender, tragic and fearful, as the melody changed.
While she listened and wept, the young man in the gallery above leaned on the rail, watching her.
'Is her own life bein' very sad,' he wondered, 'that the tears is comin' into her eyes like that? Or is it only that the big heart of her is aching for all the sorrows of the world? Kind eyes they are; and a kind and generous mouth. She's one to be more hurt by the troubles o' others nor by her own, I do reckon. If ever I seed the face of a good 'oman, there it is, with all in it as I 'ould like to have seen in my mother's, and all as ever I dreamed of in a sweetheart's.' A wave of joy swept over him and his heart was filled with a song of thanksgiving. 'I'm not in no mood for dirges tonight,' he thought. 'I'm feelin' the same as the man in the Bible that rejoiced for he had found an exceeding great treasure.'
He tried to reason himself into a critical state of mind. He had never spoken to this girl or heard the sound of her voice. He could not possibly know anything about her until he had made her acquaintance.
'Well,' he decided, 'I'll be talkin' to her tonight, so soon as ever the singin' is over. I do wish it 'ould last longer as a rule, but tonight I 'ould have it end now – now!'
His lean hands moved impatiently upon the rail. It seemed to him that he was suffering an interminable delay.
For Esther, time had ceased to exist. All the visible world was withdrawn beyond the magic circle of sound which, for the instant, was her whole life. Suddenly the singing stopped. Someone was praying aloud, and she awoke bewildered to see bowed heads. Immediately afterwards there broke out around her whispering and movement, and the shuffling of feet. She became aware of people pushing against her, of the varnished pinewood pews, of the bare walls of the chapel, and of unshaded oil lamps with a hurtful glare. She raised her hand to shelter her eyes, and, finding them wet with tears, was self-conscious and ashamed. Hurriedly she dried them, and, keeping her head bent so that no one might see she had been crying, followed her aunt out of the building.
'Bide you here a bit, there's some neighbours wantin' to speak to me,' came the command, and Esther was left alone leaning against the wall of the porch.
Night had stolen over the deserted countryside while its inhabitants were gathered together within doors. Overhead bright stars glittered in the sky and on the horizon hung a luminous haze as though the air itself were full of powdered silver. From the narrow windows of the chapel came shafts of reddish light, bright and hot as that of a fire. To Esther they seemed to fight with the cold light of the rising moon.
'What we do see, and touch and taste everyday is like the lamp light,' she told herself; 'but the moonlight is like what I was feelin' now just. 'Tis every bit as real; maybe 'tis even more real nor the other, but 'tis not to be proved so easy. Some folks is afeared o' it, and some is laughin' so as to show they aren't afeared, for the seen and the unseen is strivin' together allus.'
A voice disturbed her.
'You are the very same as me. Those old hymns is wakin' something in you most folks have forgotten nowadays.'
She looked up, startled to find the bright eyes that had so disconcerted her once more fixed on her face. She shrank away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Battle to the Weak by Hilda Vaughan. Copyright © 2010 Fflur Dafydd. Excerpted by permission of Parthian.
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