How Green Was My Valley (56 page)

“No need for it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “there was. Come you, let us have a chase round the garden, is it?
Last one to the greenhouse has got bugs.”

Off we went, and me keeping just behind her, and she with her skirts bunched in her
hands, running as though glory to come was down there, and laughing up into the sky,
and stopping at last because her hat was coming off, and the hat-pins pulling her
plaits loose.

“O,” she was laughing, and swallowing air, and holding her chest, and pulling out
hat-pins and hair-pins. “There is good, Huw.”

“Yes,” I said. “Good, indeed.”

She looked down at the pins in her hands, and the wind blew about her hair, and she
was quiet.

The smells of the garden were rising warm about us, of turned earth down by the strawberry
beds, and the songs of the currant bushes, and a good fatness of syrup from the apple
trees, with bitter freshness of dahlias flowing on the top. And the wind happy to
carry it on his head with a little whistle, like a butcher boy with a good big baron
for somebody.

She looked at me, looked down again, turned the hat-pins, looked down the path and
watched a little blue butterfly, down at the pins, up at me, down again. Up and down,
again. Up and down. Up.

“Thank you, Huw,” she said, and looking from one eye to the other.

“It was nothing,” I said.

Down at the pins again.

“No,” she said, and tears ready. “It was nothing. O, Huw. You were the only one. Nobody
else cared. You told him.”

And crying to break the heart in bits. Coming to stand softly against me and lean,
and shake, and the hat-pins sticking in me, and a bumble bee having a good look at
both of us.

“Come on, girl,” I said. “Nothing to cry for, is it? All over, now.”

“First cry,” she said. “Never before. That is why. All over. Thank God.”

And off again, worse than ever. But not in pain. A scent from her, from a bottle,
that went deep.

“Finish, now then,” I said, “is it?”

So up with a good breath, and a smile coming, and a good blow on my handkerchief.

“Eh, dear,” she said. “I am like an old baby.”

“I expect there will be a new one in the house when I go back,” I said.

“Poor Bron,” she said. “Let us pick fruit for her.”

So back over the mountain I went with a couple of bushel baskets full of blessings
from the bushes and trees, and when I was home, I was an uncle again.

A boy, Taliesin, they called him.

Ivor was so proud that night.

And dead within the month.

We were on night shift and going up to our stall, and I had stopped to have a better
grip of the pick. I heard a crack, as though stone had been struck.

Ivor called in the darkness, but I never heard what he said.

The roof fell on top of him.

And I was standing there looking up into a black storm.

Helpless, as the rock fell, and splintered, and dust flew to blind and strangle.

Nothing to do but go back, hearing quietness coming quietly among the falls of echoes.

“Are you right, Morgan?” Rhys was shouting, with a candle in front of his face, and
his hand round it.

“My brother is under the rock,” I said.

“Blood of Christ, boy,” he said, “have your head sewn, quick. Picks up, and stop work.”

And men passed me one to another till I was out, and they were pressing forward, with
picks hitting at the rock, and lumps being passed from hand to hand, as I had been.

They found him, but he came up in his coffin, screwed down ready.

Bron sat in the corner chair for days, still, looking through the doorway, no tears,
no frown, nothing of fear. Just sitting quietly and looking.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“G
IVE ONE
,” my father said, while he was nursing Taliesin, “and take the other. The Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away.”

“Go in to that girl in by there,” my mother said, “and say it to her. She will have
an answer for you. Or perhaps I will save you trouble.”

“Hisht now, Beth,” my father said. “Kindle not the wrath.”

“To hell with the wrath,” my mother said. “And I said it plain to be heard.”

Mr. Gruffydd used to come up and sit with her, and sometimes take her to Tyn-y-Coed
for the afternoon. But it was long before we began to see the old Bron we had known.

I went back underground with Davy, in his colliery, a little farther away than my
father’s, only a few days after Ivor had gone. Then Davy went to London about the
Union, and I went in the blacksmith’s shop as a helper.

One day I came back in the afternoon with a bit of a burn and my mother went down
to borrow linseed oil from Bron, and came back with her.

“This old boy of mine is always cutting and burning,” my mother said.

“A good old boy, he is, fair play,” Bron said, and pouring oil.

“Soft words swell the head,” my mother said. “I am sorry in the heart that I spoke
for you to go down the colliery, my little one. Sorry in the heart.”

“Why, Mama?” I asked her. “Only small, these are. Other men have them, and no notice.”

“Other men are other men,” said my mother. “But my boys are my boys. A good glass
of buttermilk, now then, is it?”

“Yes, please, Mama,” I said. “And a bit of Bron’s shortcake.”

“O,” said my mother, with her mouth like a little buttonhole, “so your Mama’s shortcake
is to be given to the hens, is it?”

“No, Mama,” I said, “shortcake day is to-morrow with us, but to-day with Bron.”

“Only bread I made to-day,” Bron said, with a smile that was only stretching the mouth.
“Nobody to eat it, only Gareth and me, and we would rather have currant bread.”

Silence came to burst among us. We were like rock, not moving. And Ivor was large
about the place, putting his boots on, and telling my mother how flat the tenors were
singing in the second choir, and humming a bit to show her.

And my mother standing, holding her chest with her hands that were all of bone, and
looking sideways through the window, and her eye, that I could see, shining.

Bron went to the door and leaned against the jamb, with a hand flat upon the wall
inside.

“O, Mama, my little one,” she said, in a voice that should have been eased with many
tears, “I am lonely without him. I put his boots and clothes ready every night. But
they are there, still, in the morning. O, Mama, there is lonely I am.”

My mother stood for minutes after Bron had gone.

“Huw,” she said, “I will have Bron to live here, if she will come.”

“She will never come, Mama,” I said. “One mistress in a house.”

“Then you shall go down there and live, then,” my mother said, and sharp to move and
off with her apron. “I will go down now, and find out if she will have you. She have
got to cook and mend for somebody, and give comfort for somebody. So till the proper
time have gone, and she do find another husband, you will do.”

“Another husband, Mama?” I asked her, and O God, the world was flying to pieces and
black with a new hate that came to drop heavy about me like a fall of rock. A new
kind of hatred, I felt. A jealousy, and an envy, and a refusal in blood to see another
man beside Bronwen. A newness of vision I found, that made me deny another man to
have life in the world of moons beside Bronwen. Clean house, cook, sew, darn, all
those things that women do in their daily lives for men, all those things, she might
do for another man. But give him passage to the mightiness of song, and the strange
poetries, and the noise of harp and timbrel, and a place in golden skies with the
spinning of many moons, no. The anointment at the well, the immersion in the living,
richer Jordan, the warmer baptism, the glory of enunciation, no.

No.

And a hatred came to be red inside me, to keep the no, no.

I was the sentinel, the vigilant.

And yet I had no wish to be with Bron as I had been with Ceinwen. With Bron was her
own world that she had kept for Ivor, and I was the stranger at the gates, and no
desire in me to enter in.

Then I knew, and felt, the loneliness of Bron. For I was lonely for the world of Ceinwen,
the world that was mine and hers, that we had found together. That Garden of Worlds,
where stood an Angel with flaming sword to see that we had only a momentary moment
of its beauty, and sent us forth again, with shaking breaths and blind eyes and weakness
in the limbs to live in desolation jewelled sharp with the memory.

“Another husband,” my mother said. “Yes, boy. She is young. No wages going in the
house. She has got years of beauty yet. And too proud to ask help. Of course, another
husband. Quick, too.”

“I will go and see her,” I said.

I went down to her, and found her sitting in the corner chair, still looking through
the door.

“Bron,” I said, “would you have me in the house to live?”

She looked up as though I had been speaking another language.

“And have my wages,” I said.

“Your home is with Mama,” she said with quiet, but kind, as though giving excuses
to herself. For there was light behind her eyes.

“My home is wherever I am,” I said.

“Your Mama will be bruised in the heart,” she said.

“Mama, it was, who said it first,” I said.

“From pity,” Bronwen said.

“Not pity,” I said. “Sense. If you put clothes night and morning, let them be my clothes.”

“I am not a cook like Mama,” she said, going weak in the voice.

“You are a cook of cooks,” I said, “but Mama has years of cooking more than you, that
is all.”

“It will make trouble in the family,” she said, looking round the kitchen to see if
things to say were hiding behind the teapot, or behind the plates on the dresser,
or the copper pots on the mantelpiece.

“Trouble, yes,” I said. “If you say no. I will feel shamed to have been forward, and
Mama will think I am not good enough for you.”

Quiet, and if things to say were hiding, they were careful not to be seen.

She looked through the doorway again, but now her hands were putting tucks in her
apron. I went over the tiles with my boots sighing in the sand, and shut the door
with a swing, and put my back to it, and she looked at me with the smile that was
not a smile.

“Yes or no?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, with calm, and starting the chair to rock.

“Good,” I said, “I will get my bed.”

So up to this room I came, and rolled up the mattress I am sitting on now, and slid
it through the window, and then the bedstead. Downstairs, then, to take them up to
the little room like this one in Bron’s house, that was empty. Back to fetch my clothes,
and back again to give good-bye to my mother.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” I said.

“Off again, then,” she said.

“I will come plenty of times, Mama,” I said.

“Right, you,” she said. “And supper every night, is it?”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

“Good-bye, now, then,” my mother said, dry.

“Good-bye, Mama,” I said, and kissed her, and went.

Quiet, those first few months were, with Bronwen. There was a line drawn between us
that was plain as though put there fresh with chalk every day. From each side of that
line we lived, and spoke, and smiled. Not as strangers, for we knew each other too
well. We knew when we laughed that we were not having all the laugh, that it was not
wide, or deep, or high enough, that the best part of it was on each side of the line,
kept back. We knew when we talked together that we were not talking with all of us,
but only that bit of us that others would see and know as Bronwen and Huw Morgan.
If we came near each other we were like hedgehogs with spines to keep away, though
we never showed it. But we knew it. The air between us was hot with a hotness that
only the two of us could feel. Our laughing was false with a falseness that only we
could hear. Our talk was empty, of food, and the colour of Taliesin’s cheeks, and
the darkness so early in the evenings. But we know why we were talking emptily, and
why we never looked at each other.

We were gently afraid of each other, though without fear, and with nothing of fright.
We were afraid only in the spirit and delicacy of being afraid, of the same nature
of afraidness that blood horses feel when a hand is placed upon them, and they shake
under the skin from tail to muzzle.

A fear of the touch, whether from speech, eyes, or body.

And only because we knew of another world, that could be reached in a moment, and
felt for a moment, and gone in only a momentary moment.

In these months I knew why Eve took leaves, and why they hid from one another, and
I realised the magnitude of the curse that sent them from the Garden to work by the
sweat of the brow, out of that glory, one to cut coal in a crawling of dust, the other
to stand at a sink and scar her wrists with scum from greasy dishes.

Strange it is that you will live from day to day for months and months, and nothing
to happen except getting up and working and going to bed. Then a little thing happens
and you watch it grow about you, with terror, and to take the burden a little from
you, you try to pretend you are in a dream.

Chapter Thirty-Three

D
AVY
was a long time in London, with not much to show except knowledge of what was going
on in the Unions up there, and sending reports down to our branch. I did most of the
letter writing, and I was able to see the Union having strength as from the flow of
my pen.

Every week new members by the hundred, and every week more and more voices shouting
for action against the owners. Shorter working hours, more money, ballots for places
where the seam was richest, closing the collieries against outside labour, all had
their champions, and all ready to fight.

Ianto had been speaking night after night for weeks, not for action against the owners,
but against the Government. Mr. Gruffydd was with him, there. They wanted to stop
the royalties paid to landlords, especially those paid on every ton coming from under
pastureland, that paid rent above, and a royalty below only because the main heading
ran under it.