by Dylan Thomas
How old are you, Chubb? asked Sir Peregrine. You were the gardener here when Lady Astasia rode to her Queen, Elizabeth, over the rocky roads on a piebald horse. You tended the flowers when Quentin, third of the Quinceys, wrote to his lady in an ivory tower, wrapping the verses round a pigeon’s throat. At Christmas you made snowmen for me. How many years have you brooded over the dirty river? You always knew the end of all things lay where it stopped. I only knew to-day. It came to me suddenly and I knew.
The immortal Chubb made no answer. He tilted his felt hat further back on his head, and sent up a ring of smoke from a white pipe. His face, fringed with a yellowing beard, was as round and expressionless as a saucer. At any time a breath of wind might send another crack along its surface, and make a thousand smiles or frowns. Through a space in his teeth he breathed and whistled, and made a succession of mysterious tunes as he drew at his pipe.
The exterior Chubb belied what was divine beneath. He looked like nothing more than an ancient gardener, with his woman’s smock pinned untidily around him.
Chubb, I am going.
Sir Peregrine waited for the words to pierce the gardener’s smoky armour.
I am going to follow the river to its end. Tell me one word of cheer before I go. Say good-bye, undying Chubb.
The birds, said the gardener, ‘ave ‘ad the seeds.
It was enough. Sir Peregrine climbed quickly over the gate and ran down the field. At the end was a stile. He climbed it, and ran again over the uneven grass, his hair leaping about his head and his brass-buttoned waistcoat flapping against his sides. Three fields. Four fields. Sweat ran down his forehead on to his neck and collar. He could hear his heart thundering in his ears. But he kept at the same crazy jog, over another stile, along another field, stopping to climb through a small hole in the hedge, then on again, snorting and blowing.
A crow, perched on a scarecrow’s shoulder, suddenly started cawing as the twelfth baron galloped past, then flew above him, spurring him on with harsh cries.
Now he could hear the noise of the river. On the low bank above it, he stared down on to the little fishes and the shining pebbles. The crow, seeing him stop, gave a final sardonic caw, and flew back to its lone companion, who was swinging a ragged arm in the wind.
Sir Peregrine felt a great elation surging through him. He turned around, and saw the Quincey manor, on its imperial hill, squinting down upon him. He followed the river bank through the dirty fields and through a wood brown with owls’ wings. He saw the sun lowering in the sky. Now he no longer ran, but stumbled over the fields, his eyes dim, covered in tears, half unseeing. His clothes were damp about him. His hair that had, in the mad run down the seven fields, leapt so proudly on his head, straggled on to his wet brow. He was thirsty and tired. But he stumbled on.
Where does the river end? he called out to an old woman driving cows over a green field.
Where does it end? he asked. But the hedges and the ferns and the talking pebbles never replied.
He came at last to a well by the side of a meadow, and there a girl-child was washing clothes. He saw her through his tears and heard her voice singing.
Is this the end?
Yes, said the girl-child.
The end, said Sir Peregrine in a whisper. The end of the manor, the Quinceys, and me.
The words made such a nice little rhythm that he started to sing them in his old voice.
The end of the manor, the Quinceys and me.
The child was frightened.
For twelve generations, he said, the Quinceys have lived their little lives up there. And he pointed with a bewildered hand towards the sky. This is the end, he said.
Yes, said the child.
What is the end? he said. What have you to give? What at the end?
He held his arms out.
With a frightened cry, the girl-child thrust an un-washed napkin into his hand. He clasped it, and she ran away. Not looking, but holding it to his breast and making soft, delighted noises in his throat, Sir Peregrine lay down upon the grass. The moon came up. Chubb had not failed.
And that immortal gardener, as the twelfth baron lay down on a bed of grass and soft manure, was smoking a white pipe in the quiet of the Quincey gardens. Sunday was almost passed, and then there would be another day. Contentedly the ancient gardener, in his woman’s smock, leaned on the garden gate and smoked.
The Lemon
Early one morning, under the arc of a lamp, carefully, silently, in smock and rubber gloves, the doctor grafted a cat’s head on to a chicken’s trunk. The cat-headed creature, in a house of glass, swayed on its legs; though it stared through the slits of its eyes, it saw nothing; there was the flutter of a strange pulse under its fur and feathers; and, lifting its foot to the right of the glass wall, it rocked again to the left. Change the sex of a dog: it cries like a bitch in a high heat, and sniffs, bewildered, over the blind litter. Such a strange dog, with a grafted ovary, howled in its cage. The doctor put his ear to the glass, hoping for a new sound. The sun blew in through the laboratory windows, and the light of the wind was the colour of the sun. With music in his ears, he moved among the phials and the bottles of life; the mutilated were silent; the new born in the rabbits’ cages drew down the hygienic air delightedly into their lungs. To-morrow there were to be mastoids for the ferret by the window, but to-day it leapt in the sun.
The hill was as big as a mountain, and the house swelled like a hill on the topmost peak. Holding too many rooms, the house had a room for the wild owls, and a cellar for the vermin that multiplied on clean straw and grew fat as rabbits. The people in the house moved like too many ghosts among the white-sheeted tables, met face to face in the corridors and covered their eyes for fear of a new stranger, or suddenly crowded together in the central hall, questioning one another as to the names of the new born. One by one the faces vanished, but there was always one to take its place, a woman with a child at her breast, or a blind man from the world. All had possession of the keys of the house.
There was one boy among them who had the name of the house, and, son of the house that was called a hill, he played with the shadows in the corridors and slept at night in a high room shuttered from the stars. But the people of the house slept in sight of the moon; they heard the gulls from the sea, the noise of the waves, when the wind blew from the south, breaking on sand, and slept with their eyes open.
The doctor woke up with the birds, seeing the sun rise each morning in a coloured water, and the day, like the growths in his jars, grow brighter and stronger as the growing hours let the rain or the shine and the particles of winter light fall from them. As was his custom, he turned, this one morning, from the window where the weazel leapt, to the life behind glass. He marked with an unmortal calm, with the never-ended beginning of a smile no mother bared with the mouth of her milk, how the young lapped at their mothers and his creatures, and the newly hatched fluttered, and the papped birds opened their beaks. He was power and the clay knife, he was the sound and the substance, for he made a hand of glass, a hand with a vein, and sewed it upon the flesh, and it strengthened with the heat of the false light, and the glass nails grew long. Life ran from his fingers, in the heat of his acids, on the surface of the boiling herbs; he had death in a thousand powders; he had frozen a crucifix of steam; all the great chemistries of the earth, the mystery of matter—‘See,’ he said aloud, ‘a brand on a frog’s forehead where there was neither’—in his room at the top of the house had no mystery.
The house was one mystery. Everything happens in a blaze of light; the groping of the boy’s blind hands along the walls of the corridors was a movement of light, though the last candle dimmed by the head of the stairs and the lines of light at the feet of the locked doors were suddenly taken away. Nant, the boy, was not alone; he heard a frock rustle, a hand beneath his own scrape on the distemper. ‘Whose hand?’ he said softly. Then, flying in a panic down the dark carpets, he cried more loudly: ‘Never answer me.’ ‘Your hand,’ said the dark,
and Nant stopped still.
Death was too long for the doctor, and eternity took too much time.
I was that boy in a dream, and I stood stock still, knowing myself to be alone, knowing that the voice was mine and the dark not the death of the sun but the dark light thrown back by the walls of the windowless corridors. I put out my arm, and it turned into a tree.
Early that morning, under the arc of a lamp, the doctor made a new acid, turning it round and round with a spoon, seeing it have colour in its beaker and then, by the change of heat, be the colour of water. It was the strongest acid, burning the air, but it struggled through his fingers sweet as a syrup and did not burn at all. Carefully, silently, he raised the beaker and opened the door of a cage. This was a new milk for the cat. He poured the acid into a saucer, and the cat-headed creature slipped down to drink. I was that cat-head in a dream; I drank the acid, and I slept; I woke up in death, but there I forgot the dream and moved on a different being in the image of the boy who was terrified of the dark. And, my arm no longer the branch of a tree, like a mole I hurried from light and to the light; for one blind moment I was a mole with a child’s hands digging, up or down, I knew not which, in the Welsh earth. I knew that I was dreaming, but suddenly I awoke to the hard, real lack of light in the corridors of the house. There was nobody to guide me; the doctor, the foreigner in a white coat making a new logic in his tower of birds, was my only friend. Nant raced for the doctor’s tower. Up spiral stairs and a broken ladder, reading, by candle, a sign that said To London and the Sun, he climbed in my image, I in his, and we were two brothers climbing.
The key was on a chain ringed from my waist. Opening the door, I found the doctor as I always found him, staring through the walls of a glass cage. He smiled but paid no heed to me who had lusted a hundred seconds for his smile and his white coat. ‘I gave it my acid and it died,’ the doctor said. ‘And, after ten minutes, the dead hen rose to its feet; it rubbed against glass like a cat, and I saw its cat’s head. This was ten minutes’ death.’
A storm came up, black bodied, from the sea, bringing rain and twelve winds to drive the hillbirds off the face of the sky; the storm, the black man, the whistler from the sea bottom and the fringe of the fish stones, the thunder, the lightning, the mighty pebbles, these came up; as a sickness, an afterbirth, coming up from the belly of weathers; mad as a mist coming up, the antichrist from a seaflame or a steam crucifix, coming up the putting on of rain; as the acid was stronger, the multiplying storm, the colour of temper, the whole, the unholy, rock-handed, came up coming up.
This was the exterior world.
And the shadows, that were web and cloven footed in the house, with the beaks of birds, the shifted shadows that bore a woman in each hand, had no casting substances; and the foam horses of the exterior sea climbed like foxes on the hills. This that held Nant and the doctor, the bone of a horse head, the ox and black man arising from the clay picture, was the interior world. This was the interior world where the acid grew stronger, and the death in the acid added ten days to the dead time.
Still the doctor did not see me. I who was the doctor in a dream, the foreign logician, the maker of birds, engrossed in the acid strengthening and the search for oblivion, soon raised the beaker to my mouth as the storm came up. There was thunder as I drank; and, as he fell, the lightning crossed on the wind.
‘There is a dead man in the tower,’ a woman said to her companion as they stood by the door of the central hall.
‘There is a dead man in the tower,’ said the corner echoes, and their voices rose through the house. Suddenly the hall was crowded, and the people of the house moved among one another, questioning as to the name of the new dead.
Nant stood over the doctor. Now the doctor was dead. There was a corridor leading to the tower of ten days’ death, and there a woman danced alone, with the hands of a man upon her shoulders. And soon the virgins joined her, bared to the waist, and made the movements of dancing; they danced towards the open doors of the corridors, stood lightly in the doorways; they danced four steps towards the doors, and then danced four steps away. In the long hall they danced in celebration of the dead. This was the dance of the halt, the blind, and the half dead, this the dance of the abnegation of the dead, this the dance of the children, the grave girls bared to the waist, this the dance of the dreamers, the open-eyed and the naked hopheads, sleeping as they moved. The doctor was dead at my feet. I knelt down to count his ribs, to raise his jaw, to take the beaker of acid from his hand. But the dead hand stiffened.
Said a voice at my elbow: ‘Unlock the hand.’ I moved to obey the voice, but a softer voice said at my ear: ‘Let the hand stiffen.’ ‘Strike the second voice.’ ‘Strike the first voice.’ ‘Unlock the hand.’ ‘Let the hand stiffen.’ I struck at the two voices with my fist, and Nant’s hand turned into a tree.
At noon the storm was stronger; all afternoon it shook the tower, pulling the slates from the roof; it came from the sea and the earth from the sea beds and the roots of the forests. I could hear nothing but the voice of the thunder that drowned the two stricken voices; I saw the lightning stride up the hill, a bright, forked man blinding me through the tower windows. And still they danced, into the early evening, the storm increasing, and still the half-naked virgins danced to the doors. This was the dance of the celebration of death in the interior world.
I heard a voice say over the thunder: ‘The dead shall be buried. This was not everlasting death, but a death of days; this was a sleep with no heart. We bury the dead,’ said the voice that heard my heart, the brief and the everlasting. The storm up the wind measured off the distances of the voice, but a lull in the rain let the two struggling voices at my side recall me to the hand and the acid. I dragged up the stiffening hand, unlocked the fingers, and raised the beaker to my mouth. As the glass burned me, there came a knocking at the door and a cry from the people of the house. They who were seeking the body of the new dead worried the door. My boy’s heart was breaking. Swiftly I glanced towards the table where a lemon lay on a plate. I punctured the skin of the lemon, and poured in the acid. Then down came the storm of the dark voices and the knocks, and the tower door broke on its hinges. The dead was found. I fought between the shoulders of the entering strangers and, leaving them to their picking, spiralled down, sped through the corridors, the lemon at my breast.
Nant and I were brothers in this wild world far from the border villages, from the sea that has England in its hand, from the lofty spires and the uneaten graves beneath them. As one, one-headed, two-footed, we ran through the passages and the halls, seeing no shadows, hearing none of the wicked intimacies of the house. The rooms were empty of wickedness. We looked for a devil in the corners, but their secrets were ours. So we ran on, afraid of our footfalls, exulting in the beating of the blood, for death was at our breast, a sharp fruit, a full and yellow tumour shaped to the skin. Nant was a lonely runner in the house; I parted from him, leaving a half ache and a half terror, going my own way, the way of the light breaking over Cathmarw hill and the Black Valley. And, going his own way, he climbed alone up a stone stairs to the last tower. He put his mouth to her cheek and touched her nipple. The storm died as she touched him.
He cut the lemon in half with the scissors dangling from the rope of her skirt.
And the storm came up as they drank.
This was the coming of death in the interior world.
The Horse’s Ha
He saw the plague enter the village on a white horse. It was a cancerous horseman, with a furuncle for a hat, that galloped the beast over grass and cobble and the coloured hill. Plague, plague, cried Tom Twp as the horse on the horizon, scenting the stars, lifted a white head. Out came the grocer with an egg in his hand, and the butcher in a bloody coat. They followed the line of the lifted finger, but the horse had gone, the trees were no speakers, and the birds who flew criss-cross on the sky said no word of warning to the parson’s rookery or the chained starlings in the parlour of ApLlewelyn. As wh
ite, said Tom Twp, as the egg in your hand. He remembered the raw head of the horseman, and whispered slyly, As red as mother’s rump in your window. The clouds darkened, the sun went in, the suddenly ferocious wind broke down three fences, and the cows, blue-eyed with plague, nibbled at the centres of the marrow beds. The egg fell, and the red yolk struggled between the spaces of the cobbles, the white mixed with the rain that dripped from the scarlet coat. In went the grocer with a stained hand, and the butcher among the hands of veal. Tom Twp, following his finger towards the horizon where the horse of plague had stamped and vanished, reached the dark church as the rain grew sick of the soil and drew back to heaven. He ran between the graves where the worm rubbed in the tradesman’s hands. Mrs. ApLlewelyn raised a stone breast above the grass. Softly opening the door, he came upon the parson praying for disarmament in the central aisle. Disarm the forces of the army and the navy, he heard the parson murmur to the Christ of stained glass who smiled like a nannygoat above him, hearing the cries from Cardiff and the smoking West. Disarm the territorial forces, the parson prayed. In anger, God smote him. There is plague, said Tom Twp. ApLlewelyn in the organ loft reached for the bass stops. The white plague drifted through the church to the music of the savage voluntary. Parson and sinner stood beneath the reflections of the Holy Family, marking in each ginger halo the hair of blood. There was to one the voice of an arming God in the echo of each chord, and, to the other, the horse’s ha.
One by one the starlings died; the last remaining bird, with a pain in its crop, whistled at the late afternoon. ApLlewelyn, returning from music and marvelling at the sky, heard the last starling’s voice as he walked up the drive. Why is there no welcome, wondered the keeper, from my starling charges. Every day of the year they had lost their tempers, tore at the sashes of the window watching on the flying world; they had scraped on the glass, and fetched up their wings from the limed bar, signalling before him. On the rug at his feet lay six starlings, cold and stiff, the seventh mourning. Death in his absence had laid six singers low. He who marks the sparrows fall has no time for my birds, said ApLlewelyn. He smote big, bloody death, and death, relenting, pulled a last fart from the bodies of the dead birds.
