The Soldier and the Gentlewoman

by Hilda Vaughan

  The novel presents two opposing approaches towards inheritance; not only in terms of monetised land and property but also in its cultural, ideological and emotive aspects. Sisters Gwenllian and Frances have both been brought up in Plâs Einon. While Gwenllian has stayed at home and devoted herself entirely to the estate, Frances has taken flight as a young woman, giving up the comfort and security of a woman of her social class and finding ‘glorious freedom’, first at a post in the secretariat of a suffrage organisation in London and then as the happy wife of a naval officer, ‘without means or prospects’, and as a mother of three children. As nomadic as Gwenllian is rooted, Frances and her family move from one naval port to another. During her occasional visits to Plâs Einon, Frances shocks Dick with her liberal political views and exasperates Gwenllian with her apparent lack of regard for tradition. Frances muses the she and Gwenllian are:

  ‘…more alike than many sisters, alike in our appearance, alike in our streak of fanaticism. But all Gwen’s fanaticism has dragged her inward and inward on to the property; she’s given up everything for that. And mine has forced me outward, away from this property and all property. I want my life to be an adventure, full of love. I’ve flung away everything else – even things beautiful in themselves – things I do love and prize…for fear they’d become more precious than human affections – growth – change of ideas. She wants her life to be set, like a frozen stream. There must be no warmth in it, for then the stream would melt, and begin to flow, and carry her away.’

  Interestingly, following the death of all the male members of the immediate family, Gwenllian and Frances take on roles that would traditionally have been ascribed to the eldest and the second sons. In their opposing relationship with their home and inheritance, two choices are presented in the construction of identity; a choice between an identification with a particular place and a people and a wider affinity with all humanity.

  The themes of inheritance and identity explored here rework many of the chief concerns of Vaughan’s novel Her Father’s House (1930), the title that had immediately preceded The Soldier and the Gentlewoman. In many ways one is a photo-negative of the other, with the earlier book favourably presenting its heroine’s commitment to upholding tradition and identity and the latter providing a depiction that is infinitely darker. Nell in Her Father’s House walks from London to Wales while heavily pregnant in order to ensure that her child is born in her ancestral home. The novel concludes with her having successfully reinvigorated her family’s crumbling estate and it is suggested that her newborn child betokens hope for the future. Conversely, Gwenllian’s firstborn child, loved so little for his own sake, is viewed primarily as ‘this gift of hers to the race she worshipped’ and the novel ends with the estate referred to as a place of death, decay and destruction. It would be all too easy to read the later novel as a rejection of patriotism or even nationalist principles, however. In an explanation of her fervour, Gwenllian describes the agonising emotional burden of her role as a guardian of her family’s lands: ‘It seems to me so base to be the weak link in a long chain – the first poor soft thing to let it break.’ In so doing, a more complex picture emerges as she voices a sentiment that resonates with the work of Welsh-language poets such as Gwenallt, a key voice in twentieth-century Welsh-language literature and an early member of Plaid Cymru. His poem ‘Cymru’, published three years after The Soldier and the Gentlewoman, articulates the painful and relentless sense of duty in striving to protect a language and culture under threat. It asks of Wales, ‘[w]hy have you given us this misery, / The pain like leaden weights on flesh and blood? / Your language on our shoulders like a load, / And your traditions shackles round our feet.’ (Paham y rhoddaist inni’r tristwch hwn, / A’r boen fel pwysau plwm ar gnawd a gwaed? / Dy iaith ar ein hysgwyddau megis pwn, / A’th draddodiadau hual am ein traed?)9

  Gwenllian’s gender adds yet further nuance to her position as a cultural custodian. Her battle with Dick to gain control over the estate is so fiercely waged because it is the last of a series of acts of dispossession, all of which have previously been committed against her by Welsh men, suggesting that the Welsh woman is doubly disenfranchised by both her gender and her nationality. Despite her superior skill, bravery and intelligence she has had to take a secondary role to her brothers, whose ‘invasion of her home’ she resentfully endured as a child. She has strived to gain the respect of a father who refused to see his daughter as of equal worth as his sons, and the culmination of this has left her feeling bitterly disempowered. Men are according to Gwenllian, ‘in possession, hour by hour and generation by generation, of all that she desired to possess; they invaded her integrity, usurped the inheritance of her soul. Without them, how little evil there would be in her…’ Her final act to win control of the estate is, in fact, not really an act at all but a form of neglecting to do what is expected of her as a caring wife. It is significant that in Vaughan’s novel the disenfranchised Welsh woman can only gain power by rejecting the gendered roles demanded of her as a nurturing wife and loving mother.

  As the title of the novel makes clear, Gwenllian is not simply a woman but a ‘gentlewoman’. The mismatched pairing of the daughter of a squire and the son of a governess provoked a critic in The Times to write that ‘the final tragedy, impressively staged though it is, fails of its effect because the conflict turns on a difference of breeding and social usage rather than on the clash of character.’10 It is indeed suggested that Dick’s middle-class upbringing leaves him ill-equipped to run the Plâs Einon Estate. He eventually acknowledges that, ‘though he scarcely liked to admit it to himself, he was envious of the city clerks who lived in comfortable obscurity among their own class.’ Similarly, the Liverpool Post objected to the book’s reliance upon the country house which, it asserted, ‘harbours a society whose point of view is very remote from that of the average Welsh man or woman.’11 Though Vaughan skilfully portrays the lives of the working class Welsh in many of her novels, she hailed from a rather different background. The author was the daughter of a country solicitor, Henry Vaughan, Clerk of the Peace and Under Sheriff of Radnorshire. She recounts her relatively privileged upbringing in her autobiographical essays ‘A Country Childhood’ (1934) and ‘Far Away: Not Long Ago’ (1935). Vaughan’s social class was one reason cited for the critical neglect of her work in the latter part of the twentieth century. In an act of literary dispossession, she was not included in the influential study of Welsh writing in English The Dragon Has Two Tongues by Glyn Jones on the grounds that she writes ‘about the squirearchy and its anglicised apers.’12

  The contemporary mainstream press in Wales, however, was enthusiastic in its approval of Vaughan’s writing. She was seen to inhabit the ‘truthful’ ground between the ‘pretty stories’ of Allen Raine and the ‘scabrous piffle’ of Caradoc Evans, whose fictional portrayal of the rural nonconformist communities of Ceredigion had provoked a national scandal.13 In a review of The Soldier and the Gentlewoman the Western Mail decreed that if ‘Hilda Vaughan were to devote herself entirely to her native heath as the background for her stories her countrymen would no longer have reason to complain of misrepresentation in the field of fiction.’14 Such an assertion is somewhat surprising, however, given the dark portrayal of its Welsh (anti-)heroine. Just as the chapel elders in Caradoc Evans’ My People (1915) commit acts of abuse and violence that go unpunished by the community so long as they contribute to the chapel’s coffers, Gwenllian’s crimes are concealed under a veneer of pious respectability, with the neighbourhood ‘beginning to speak of her as of a saint.’ This is thrown into sharp relief when the local vicar pays a call moments after Gwenllian has created a poppet or voodoo-style doll of her husband. She donates the brooch used to stick a pin through the wax doll’s heart to the sale of work in aid of the Church Lads’ Brigade.

  As the latter image suggests, the novel owes much to the Gothic tradition of writing and can be seen as inhabiting a specifically Welsh strand of that genre, only recently co
nsidered in its own right by Jane Aaron in Welsh Gothic (2013). At first glance, Plâs Einon represents culture and civilization. It is the very image of the British country house with its paintings by Romney on the walls, the Nantgarw and Crown Derby in the china cabinet and the Chelsea and Bow figures on the mantelshelves. Amongst the waterfalls, artificial ponds and picturesque follies, however, there are clues that it holds a more primitive and specifically Welsh past. At the edge of the drive there stands a ring of yew trees that ‘were never planted in the Age of Reason. They seemed, rather to be survivals, like very ancient witches, of a time of faith and fear, when the land was still haunted by ghosts and demons.’ It is here that, early on in the novel, Gwenllian comes to hatch her plan to regain control of the estate. From time to time we gain occasional glimpses of the more Gothic elements of Welsh folklore. From the servants’ talk of death portents, to Gwenllian’s assertion that a stormy night heralds the coming of the Cŵn Annwn, ‘the pack of fiends, hunting for the souls of the wicked.’ It is during a moment of extreme frustration with her husband’s lack of regard for the future of the estate, that Gwenllian forms a wax effigy of him. She recalls being taught how to bring about the death of a man by an old ‘wise’oman’, who is believed to have been a distant relative. This is one of the few direct examples of the passing on of traditions found in the novel and it is significant that it manifests itself in the most sinister of forms.

  The novel ends with the sense of Gothic menace in which it began. Having realised the full horror of the acts committed by her sister to ensure the future of the estate, Frances stands on the ancient burial chamber, the vantage point from which Dick first viewed his inheritance. She takes a final glimpse of ‘beautiful, devouring Plâs Einon’ before fleeing for England, never to return. The description seems to suggest that the characters have been figures in a sinister landscape that has itself been a powerful agent in bringing about this terrible conclusion. The novel provides a brutal and unblinking exploration of what it means to be Welsh, but above all, what it means to be a Welsh woman. At its close we witness the full implications of the choices made by the two sisters. Though Gwenllian now has sole possession of the estate ‘as if she were an only son’, her triumph has come at the price of her goodness. The narrative presents Frances’ decision to flee for England as the more rational and humane choice. This is not in itself an indictment of tradition, patriotism, or nationalism but instead it issues a warning against extremism in any of its forms, without consideration of the human cost. Vaughan herself was keen to lovingly preserve in her writing a rural way of life in Wales that she felt was rapidly changing. We see this in her novels but also in her autobiographical essay, ‘Far Away: Not Long Ago’ which makes explicit the author’s intention to record the past for future generations. Vaughan’s portrayal of rural Wales was not as an idyll, however, and she was ready to examine the more negative aspects of her land and its traditions, nowhere more incisively, perhaps, than in the dark tale of The Soldier and the Gentlewoman. As the sisters, Gwenllian and Frances, occupy opposing positions in their relationship with their homeland, perhaps it is Vaughan’s work itself, in its implicit call for moderation, which succeeds in negotiating a path between the two stances.

  Notes

  1 Evening News, 5 May 1932.

  2 The Book Society News, May 1932.

  3 See Eiluned Lewis, ed. Selected Letters of Charles Morgan, London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1967, p.17.

  4Hilda Vaughan in an unpublished speech entitled, ‘Why authors are cads’, given at the Sunday Times Book Exhibition at Grosvenor House, London on 20 November 1934. I am indebted to Mr Roger Morgan for this reference.

  5 See for example, The New Era, April 1933 and Launceston Post, 30 April 1932.

  6 Hilda Vaughan quoted in Deirdre Beddoe, Out of the Shadows: A History of Women in Twentieth-Century Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000, p. 67. Vaughan’s speech appears in almost exact replica, spoken by a recruiting officer for the Land Army in Berta Ruck, The Land Girl’s Love Story, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919, p. 24.

  7 Unpublished letter from W. Robertson Nicoll to Hilda Vaughan, dated 1 February 1921. Reproduced by kind permission of Mr Roger Morgan.

  8 New York Times, 7 September 1930.

  9 Gwenallt, ‘Cymru’, Ysgubau’r Awen, Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1935, p. 84; trans. J. P. Clancy, ‘Wales’, in Menna Elfyn and John Rowlands (eds), The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry: Twentieth-century Welsh-language Poetry in Translation, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2003, p. 12.

  10 The Times, 6 May 1932.

  11 Liverpool Post, 19 December 1932.

  12Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues: Essays on Anglo-Welsh Writers and Writing, London: Dent, 1986, p.42.

  13 Dr. J. Gwenogvryn Evans in the Western Mail, 25 September 1926.

  14 Western Mail, 5 May 1932.

  Further Reading

  Aaron, Jane, ed. A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales (Dinas Powys: Honno, 1999)

  Aaron, Jane, Welsh Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013)

  Gramich, Katie, Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Land, Gender, Belonging (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007)

  Newman, Christopher, Hilda Vaughan, Writers of Wales series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981)

  Thomas, Lucy, ‘The Fiction of Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985): Negotiating the Boundaries of Welsh Identity’, unpublished PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2008

  Vaughan, Hilda, Her Father’s House (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1930)

  Vaughan, Hilda, ‘A Country Childhood’, [1934] Radnorshire Society Transactions, 1982, 9-18

  Vaughan, Hilda, ‘Far Away: Not Long Ago’, [1935] Radnorshire Society Transactions, 1982, 19-26

  Wallace, Diana, ‘“Mixed Marriages”: three Welsh historical novels in English by women writers’, Moment of Earth: Poems and Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker, ed. Christopher Meredith (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007), pp. 171-184

  Williams, Jeni, ‘The Intertexts of Literary History: “Gender” and Welsh Writing’, European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context, eds. Patsy Stoneman and Ana María Sánchez-Arce with Angela Leighton (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 156-176

  BOOK I

  I. He looks on his inheritance

  II. He meets his cousin

  III. She remembers the past

  IV. He listens to her

  V. He is again her listener

  VI. She decides his future

  VII. He accepts her decision

  VIII. He and she face life together

  Chapter I

  HE LOOKS ON HIS INHERITANCE

  “There you are, Captain,” said the man who had insisted upon shewing him the way. “There’s your estate, sir.”

  “Where?”

  The sharp breath on which the word was spoken betrayed Dick’s excitement, and his cheeks flushed. He wished that he could be less obviously eager, but already he had put on the brakes with clumsy haste and the car was groaning under them.

  The countryman in the seat beside him grinned. “We’re four fields off it yet, sir, ” he said.

  Dick glanced at him with resentment. The man was a small, assertive fellow with a facetious manner; every word he spoke was like a nudge in the ribs. He sat up in the car with a straight back and his head cocked like a sparrow’s. Dick had seen his wink at the crowd that had watched their departure from the Green Dragon at Llanon and had been ruffled by it. Though he had been in the village but one night, he was, he knew, the object of everyone’s curiosity, and he had thought more than once with sympathy of the Prince of Wales. To be followed, smiled at and saluted by strangers made him shy, but until Jones had exchanged winks with the crowd there had been compensations in flattery. You couldn’t tell what thought was moving behind those dark, keen eyes. You couldn’t be sure why the man winked.

  “Tell me when to stop, then,” Dick said with pretende
d indifference, and drove on.

  Ten minutes straining of his new car on bottom gear had brought them up out of Llanon on to a high plateau. For six or seven miles they had driven across it, with a hazy sea far below on their left, and mountains, faint as clouds, on their right. Around them a wide tableland was divided into fields by hedges and by stone walls that had a grey and ancient look. To Dick, whose weak blue eyes had not long ago been blinking at the arid glare of Mesopotamia, the colours of this landscape—the rich brown of peat bogs, the bronze of last year’s bracken, the mauve cloud shadows and pale cobalt of ocean and sky, the gay sprouting green of the foreground—were magically soft. He liked the little white farmhouses with their folds awash with liquid mud. He was amused by the ducks quacking and splashing on stream and pond, and by the lambs at frolic in the fields. Gorse in flower beside the wilder stretches of the road brought agreeably to his mind the proverb about kissing. There were golden kingcups, too, like a spendthrift’s scatter of sovereigns, wherever water ran; and the whole country sparkled with running water. Never had he seen any land so wet and soft and harmless. You could fall off your horse anywhere and not be hurt. This sun had no sting in it; it wouldn’t raise a freckle on a girl; and he took off his felt hat with a delicious sensation of challenge, as though it had been a topee. Jones’s quizzical glance brought him back to his habitual self-consciousness.

  “Are you seeing that there small little tump?” “That what?” said Dick.

  “There, sir, on the brow o’ the high land, straight ahead o’ us,”

  “Oh yes,” Dick answered. “A tumulus, isn’t it?”

  “That I couldn’t say, but an ancient old burial place some do reckon it. There’s not many as will pass near him after dark,” the man continued with his offensive wink. “That do make him a grand safe place to go courting on, so long as you’re careful not to show against the skyline. But you ’on’t need to seek such cover as that, sir,” he added with a chuckle. “There’s summer-houses in your grounds and all.”