A Small Country (25 page)

If he had done wrong in marrying Rose, and he supposed he had, he had done it because it had seemed necessary: Rose’s spirit had been broken and his instinct, as well as his duty, had been to protect and console her. He would tell Catrin that. To speak the simple, unvarnished truth could surely not be wrong or dishonourable. He couldn’t face the thought of going out to France before it was done.

He stood in the corridor, a bitter excitement struggling with the sadness and confusion in his mind. He thought about the war. He’d believed, like most other people, that it would be over in a matter of months. It had seemed a privilege, an honour, to fight for one’s country. By this time, it seemed only a grim necessity. Perhaps it was better to be stripped of false illusion. Even Rose, now that she was actually nursing the wounded, seemed more often outraged than excited by the war.

How complicated life was, how ambivalent every motive, every action. He thought about Rose, whom he admired, loved, though not ardently, and who, hating men, loved him in her own way. When he had decided to marry her instead of breaking off their engagement, the shock of disappointment he had felt at losing Catrin was not unmixed with relief that he was, after all, embarked on the easy, safe, approved, conventional way. He thought about Tom, his blunt, unimaginative friend who was in France ready to kill or be killed because he hadn’t been able to watch his mother’s suffering. About Catrin, with her longing for pleasure and success, who had suddenly dedicated herself to a difficult and badly-paid profession; sickened perhaps by the ease with which he had seemed to slip in and out of love, soured perhaps in her high expectation of life. Tom, who noticed little, had said she seemed to have lost all her joy. Oh, and if she was unhappy on his account, how could he bear not to comfort her? Was he strong enough to behave properly towards her? Perhaps it would be better, even now, if he stayed away from her. But he couldn’t stay away from her.

Suddenly, in the middle of his troubled thoughts, fighting against a need to sleep, one clear fact emerged like a light: he was on his way to see her. He was travelling towards her. He would look on her beauty again and talk to her and hear her lovely voice. He was so filled with joy and warmth that, opening his eyes, he was amazed to find the day still grey and foggy, the people around him still downcast and self-absorbed. Even if I only speak to her about her mother’s death, she will know why I came, and if I never see her again, I shall always be glad that she knew.

His exalted mood lasted for the remainder of the long, uncomfortable journey.

When he arrived at the hospital, he asked for the matron and was taken to her office. He explained his wish to see Nurse Evans, producing the letter he had received from her brother. The matron, who already had a soft spot for the poor motherless girl, was pleased that her brother’s friend, and quite the gentleman, had taken the trouble to visit her. Instead of sending him to the probationers’ common room where officially approved visitors could be entertained, she showed him into her private sitting-room – flowers on the table, a good fire in the grate – and had someone fetch Catrin there.

‘I’ll send you some tea, Lieutenant. Nurse Evans may stay with you for half an hour. It was good of you to travel from London to see her.’

She returned to her office.

Catrin knocked at the door of the matron’s sitting-room and went in. Told that there was a young officer waiting to see her, she had thought it would be Tom, home on leave because of their mother’s death. When she saw Edward in the room, she stopped abruptly, raising her hands to her throat.

‘Dear Catrin,’ Edward said. ‘Is it such a terrible shock?’

He led her to a fireside chair and sat down opposite her. He felt light-headed with pain and joy; it was only the entrance of a maid bringing a tray of tea that kept him from breaking down completely, from crying at her feet that he loved her.

The maid poured out the tea and left them.

‘I had to see you,’ Edward said. ‘Please say something. Say something, Catrin. Please.’

For an instant, he had been disappointed at her appearance; she seemed less radiant than his mental image of her. Her face was paler than ever, she looked older and thinner. Within seconds, though, he knew that her essential beauty was unimpaired, was, perhaps, even more formidable; her cheek bones finer, her lovely green eyes more expressive, more tenderly luminous, in her dear, wan face.

‘I heard about your mother’s death. I was so sorry. Tom asked me to write to you but I decided to try to see you instead.’

Catrin nodded her head gravely, and when at last she spoke, her clear, young voice gripped his heart as much as her appearance.

‘Tom shouldn’t have troubled you. You must be very busy, very tired. You look tired.’

‘I had to see you again, that’s the truth of the matter, I mustn’t pretend otherwise. Oh, don’t be angry. I had to see you again. I felt I had to tell you what happened when I left Hendre Ddu last June.’

‘You needn’t tell me. Please. You mustn’t feel you owe me an explanation. I can understand how it must have been for you.’

‘Rose was under arrest and frightened.’

Edward told his story very simply. As he spoke, his eyes never left hers.

‘So, you see, it was impossible to do what I intended. I had truly intended to tell Rose, and my parents and hers, about you. But it was impossible to do anything except what I did.

They sat staring at each other.

‘Do you understand, Catrin, what I’m trying to say? Catrin, you must tell me that you understand. I had to see you to tell you that I meant every word I said when I left you at Llanfair, though I can never say those words again. Will you believe me, Catrin?’

‘I’ll try. Oh, I’d like to try.’ Catrin’s voice was hardly audible.

‘Tell me you believe me, Catrin. Tell me you believe what I can’t say. Please tell me you believe me and it will always comfort me. Wherever I go, whatever happens, I’ll remember that you understood.’

‘Yes, I believe you, Edward. I do understand. Thank you for coming to tell me. I’m glad you did. I’ll always be glad you did.’

‘Now I must go, I suppose. I’ve seen you again, heard your voice. My dear girl. Remember what was between us for one half-hour. That can never pass away. I must go. Oh, I must go now.’

Edward got to his feet. He held out his hand, but withdrew it without touching hers.

‘You can’t leave me,’ Catrin said, her voice trembling.

He turned and took her into his arms and for what remained of the short half-hour, they clung together.

TWENTY

After their brief meeting in November, Catrin and Edward started writing to each other; their letters, though, containing no references to their bewildering love.

Catrin wrote about her work in the wards, her desire to excel in the first year examinations, about her colleagues and patients, about her occasional week-ends at home, her delight in her little half-sister. She wrote every night, however tired she was; the letters she actually sent him being only short, carefully chosen extracts from her long outpourings. Through that hard, lonely winter after her mother’s death, writing to Edward seemed the most real part of her life.

Edward, in his letters, reminisced about his life at Oxford with Tom, and about his summer days at Hendre Ddu, every moment of which seemed engraved on his memory. From time to time he included a fleeting mention of the war; of the first German air raid which had occurred just before Christmas and which had plunged London into darkness; once or twice a hint that France loomed ahead of him.

Edward was sent to the front line within a week or two of his arrival in France in March 1915.

After a few weeks of living in a trench, the monotonous food, the scarcity of water, the lack of privacy, the almost continual noise of rifle and shells, no one talked or thought of patriotism or glory. Such abstract ideas seemed absurd, part of another existence, real life shrank to a fight for survival, silent endurance became every man’s aim.

Edward didn’t mention, in his letters to Catrin, the terrible sights he was witnessing almost daily; dead colleagues who were almost unrecognizable, wounded men even more pitiable because still alive.

He wrote to her about the larks they could hear singing, still singing, over the dull roar of the heavy guns, about the clusters of bluebells that could be found here and there even on the walls of the trenches, about the books he was reading, paragraph by paragraph, the poetry he was trying to write. He told her his closest thoughts, ‘Life can’t be so frail that it can be quenched by a stray bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Surely it can’t. There must be something more. It has taken a war to make me recognize the eternal in life, the river that flows through us all, so that there is no real end.’

She knew his letters by heart. They were like a cloak around her. She had no idea whether she would ever see him again, she had no premonition either of his death or his safety; it seemed enough that she was able to write to him and receive his letters. Sometimes there would be an interval of several weeks between them, but then she would receive two or three together and she would keep them unopened all day in the inside pocket of her apron, waiting for the time when she could be alone to read them. On those days nothing was too much trouble for her.

She also heard from Tom. Tom seemed to be pre-occupied with the past and the future, hardly mentioning the present.

Do you remember how we got up at four o’clock in the morning to have a last look at the kite’s nest before I went back to school? What year was that? How old were we then? I have a vivid picture of you racing along trying to keep up with me, your hair unplaited and blowing all about your face. Father used to say it was like the mane of a mountain pony, do you remember? Do you remember the day I caught a fourteen-pound salmon in Pwll-y-Graig? What a day that was. When you next go home, will you ride over to Garth to see how the saplings are doing? Tell Glyn to clear the undergrowth if they seem choked. How strange that no one of our family is left in Hendre Ddu now, unless we count the baby. We must count the baby, I suppose. On the whole, I’m quite glad to think of her there with Nano and Lowri. I hope to meet your pretty friend Gwenllian when I come home, I’m sorry she doesn’t feel she can write to me, but I appreciate her sentiments. The war creates enough difficulties without adding to them by forcing relationships which should be slowly and carefully nurtured. I intend to see her, though, when I come home.

You see, I intend to come home. And when I do, I shall be like old Prosser, never venturing beyond Erw Fach Bridge. I think a man is essentially the product of the area that begets him. I seem to have forgotten Shrewsbury and Oxford. It’s men like old Abiah Prosser and Father I think about, women like Nano. And Mother, too, of course. I had hardly thought of myself as Welsh before – except at the International Rugby matches – had never thought of myself as different from my friends at school, and university. Now, I think of myself as the product of a different society, not better, not worse, but completely different, with a completely different history. Our grandparents, all four of them, spoke only Welsh, had never been out of Wales. How well worth preserving these differences seem to be. When I think of the civilization we’re fighting for, I can only think about the patch I know best. I like to think of its radical tradition, its passion for learning; all the craftsmen and labourers who tried to make an academy out of the village chapel. I’m sure the sterner religious element was negative and cramping in many ways, that’s why I stress that the society was different, not necessarily better, all the same, something about it was fine and worth preserving. And yet I am here with Welsh chaps whose families in one or two generations in industrial South Wales have completely lost their language and presumably with their language their consciousness of being different, their own special way of life. It seemed so strange that in this place, with all hell’s forces of destruction let loose about me, I should be concerned with things like the language and culture of our unimportant small country: I suppose we must all fix on something to keep us sane.

Do you remember that Russian play we went to see on our last holiday together? Chekov, wasn’t it? All the characters in it were longing for Moscow, just as you afterwards longed for London, London, London. I suppose it’s some state of grace we really want, some Nirvana. I know I long for Carmarthenshire, for Hendre Ddu. All I want is to stand and watch the green film on the ploughed acres which a few weeks before seemed as hard and dead as cement. And then the ripening wheat. My Nirvana, I suppose.

In May, Catrin tried and passed her first year examinations. Through the early summer she remained fairly optimistic, happy that time was passing. She was sure the war couldn’t last much longer. Life went on, mornings creeping into afternoons, afternoons sinking into night.

In August she had a fortnight’s holiday in Hendre Ddu, and when Doctor Andrews proposed to her again she promised to marry him in two years’ time, after she had completed her training. She felt she would make a good doctor’s wife. Besides, she liked him. Besides, no girl wanted to be alone all her life. She received his diamond ring, and before the end of the holiday went with Miss Rees to have tea at his house. He seemed a reassuring presence. As for Doctor Andrews, he was delighted that she seemed far less emotional, far more mature, than during the previous summer. She has, after all, a great deal of her mother about her, he thought. He was by this time convinced of her suitability as a wife. He was also in love with her.