The Collected Stories

by Dylan Thomas

  The wheels of the cart bumped on a boulder.

  Over we go, said Mr. Rafe, too frightened to brood upon the dissolution of his delicate body as it tumbled down the slope.

  Over we go, said Mr. Vyne, thinking how hard it was that death should come alone, the common flesh of Miss Myfanwy seated so near him.

  As the cart balanced on one wheel, and the pony, with the entire weight on one back leg, pawed at the air with its hanging hooves, Mr. Stul thrust his hand high up under Miss Myfanwy’s skirt, and Mr. Lucytre, smiling at destruction, drove his fingers into her back until the knuckles tingled and the invisible flesh reddened with pain. Mr. Edger clasped everything within reach, holding tight to his phallic hat. Mr. Stipe leant suddenly to one side. The pony slipped on the wet turf, whinnied, and fell. God is good, said old Vole the carter, and down he went, gathering speed, a white-haired boulder plunging into the craggy meadow fifty feet below. In one tight, black ball, the rest of the company rolled over the side. Is it blood? is it blood? cried Miss Myfanwy as they fell. Mr. Stul smiled, and fixed his arm more tightly round her.

  On the grass below old Vole lay quietly on his back. He looked at the winter moon, that had not slipped, and the peace in the field. As six clerical hats and a draggled bonnet dropped near his feet, he turned on one side and saw the bodies of his passengers tumbling down upon him like a bony manna.

  Darkness came for the second time. Now, with the hiding of the moon, the Holy Six arrived at the foot of the hills that separated the Jarvis valley from the fields of the wild land. The trees on those ridges were taller than any they had seen in their journey from the fatal meadow, greener and straighter than the trees in the town parks. There was a madman in each tree. This they did not know, seeing only the sanity of the trees on the broad back of the upper grasses. The hills, that had curved all day in the circle of light, now straightened out against the sky, in a hundred straight lines ascended to the clouds, and in one stark shadow blocked out the moon. Shifting along the properties of the soil, man’s chemic blood, pulled from him by the warring wind, mixed with the dust that the holy gentlemen, like six old horses, stamped into a cloud. The dust lay thick on their black boots; on old Vole’s beard it scraped, grey as water, between the ginger and the white; it drifted over Miss Myfanwy’s patent boots and was lost in the cracks of her feet. For a minute they stood, trembling at the height of the hills. Then they adjusted their hats.

  One behind the other they clambered upward, very far from the stars. The roots beneath their feet cried in the voices of the upspringing trees. It was to each member of the expedition a strange and a different voice that sounded along the branches. They reached the top of the hill, and the Jarvis valley lay before them. Miss Myfanwy smelt the clover in the grass, but Mr. Lucytre smelt only the dead birds. There were six vowels in the language of the branches. Old Vole heard the leaves. Their sentimental voice, as they clung together, spoke of the season of the storks and the children under the bushes. The Holy Six went down the hill, and the carter followed on the dark heels.

  But, before they knew where they were, and before the tenth Jarvis field had groaned beneath them, and before Mrs. Owen spelt out their flesh and bone in the big ball on her table, morning suddenly came down; the meadows were oak-sided, standing greener than a sea as a lull came to the early light, lying under the wind as the south-west opened; the ancient boughs had all the birds of Wales upon them, and, from the farms among the trees and the fields on the unseen hillside, the cocks crew and the sheep cried. The wood before them, glowing from a bloody centre, burned like cantharides, a tuft of half-parting blooms and branches erect on the land that spouted up to the summits of the hills, angelically down, through ribbed throats of flowers and rising poisons, to the county’s heart. The grass that was heavy with dew, though the crystals on each blade broke lightly, lay still as they walked, a woman’s stillness under the thrust of man lying in the waking furze and the back of the bedded ribs of the hill’s half heather, the halves of gold and green by the slope quarries staining a rich shire and a common soil. And it was early morning, and the world was moist, when the crystal-gazer’s husband, a freak in knickerbockers with an open coppish and a sabbath gamp, came over the stones outside his house to meet the holy travellers.

  His beard was wagging as he bowed. Your holiness, said Mr. Owen to the Six. Battered and bruised, the soles of their boots dragging like black and muddy wings along the ground, piously the Six responded. Mr. Owen bowed to Miss Myfanwy who, as his shirt wagged like a beard from his open trousers, curtsied low and blushed.

  In the parlour, where Mrs. Owen had read out the bloody coming, the Six gathered coldly round the fire, and two kettles sang. An old and ragged man dragged in a tub. Where is the mustard, Mr. Davies? questioned the crystal-gazer from her chair in the darkest corner. Aware of her presence for the first time, the Holy Six spun round, seeing the big ball move inwardly, the unendurable head of evil, green as the woman’s eyes and blacker than the shadows pouched under the lower lids, wriggle over the wet hint of hills at the globe’s edges. She was a tidy little body, with plump hands and feet, and a love-curl glistened on her forehead; dressed, like a Sunday, in cold and shining black, with a brooch of mother’s ivory and a bonewhite bangle, she saw the Holy Six reflected as six solid stumps, the amputated limbs of the deadly man who rotted in her as she swayed before his eyes, before his twelve bright eyes and the power of the staring Six.

  Her womb and her throat and her hair.

  Her green witch’s eyes.

  Her costly bangle.

  The moles on her cheek.

  Her young complexion.

  The bones of her legs, her nails, her thumb.

  The Six stood in front of her and touched her craftily, like the old men with Susannah, and stared upon her where the unborn baby stirred manfully in the eight month.

  The old man returned with mustard.

  This is the Reverend Mr. Davies of Llareggub, said Mrs. Owen.

  The Holy Six rubbed their hands.

  These are the Holy Six of Wales.

  Mr. Davies bowed, took off the kettles, half filled the tin tub, and poured the mustard on to the boiling water. Mr. Owen, appearing suddenly at his shoulder, gave him a yellow sponge. Bewildered by the yellow water that sucked at the spoon, by the dripping sponge in his fingers, and by the silence in the parlour, Mr. Davies turned trembling to the holy gentlemen. A timeless voice spoke in his ear, and a hand on his shrouded shoulder sank through the collar-bone; a hand was on his heart, and the intolerable blood-heat struck on a strong shadow. He knelt down in the wilderness of the tiny parlour, and off came the holy socks and boots. I, Davies, bathed their feet, muttered the grey minister. So that he might remember, the old, mad man said to himself, I, Davies, the poor ghost, washed the six sins in mustard and water.

  Light was in the room, the world of light, and the holy Jewish word. On clock and black fire, light brought the inner world to pass, and the shape in his image that changed with the silent changes of the shape of light twisted his last man’s-word. The word grew like light. He loved and coveted the last, dark light, turning from his memories to the yellow sea and the prowed beak of the spoon. In the world of love, through the drowning memories, he shifted one lover’s smile to the mouth of a naughty lover cruel to the slept-with dead who died before dressing, and slowly turned to the illuminated face and the firer of the dead. Touching Mr. Stul on the ankle, his ghost who laboured—now he was three parts ghost, and his manhood withered like the sap in a stick under a scarecrow’s tatters—leapt out to marry Mary; all-sexed and nothing, intangible hermaphrodite riding the neuter dead, the minister of God in a grey image mounted dead Mary. Mrs. Owen, wise to the impious systems, saw through the inner eye that the round but unbounded earth rotted as she ripened; a circle, not of her witch’s making, grew around her; the immaculate circle broadened, taking a generation’s shape. Mr. Davies touched the generation’s edges; up rose the man-stalking seed; and the circle broke. It w
as Mr. Stul, the horny man, the father of Aberystwyth’s bastards, who bounded over the broken circle, and, hand in hand with the grey ghost, kissed on divinity until the heavens melted.

  The Holy five were not aware of this.

  The lank-shanked Mr. Edger put out his right foot, and Mr. Davies washed it; careful of the temperature of the water rippling round the glassy skin, the minister of God washed the left foot; he remembered poor Davies, poor ghostly Davies, the man of bone and collar, howling, from a religious hill of the infinite curve of matter and the sound of the unspoken word; and, remembering Llareggub, the village with a rotting house, he grasped at the fat memories, the relics of the flesh that hung shabbily from him, and the undeniable desires; he grasped at the last senile hair on the skull as windily the world broke Davies up, and the ghost, having no greed or desire, came undead out of the particles.

  Neither were the Holy four aware of this.

  It was the foxy-whiskered Mr. Vyne who said out of the darkness to the ghost Davies: Beautiful is Mrs. Amabel Owen, the near-mother, the generation-bellied, from her teeth to her ten toes. My smile is a red hole, and my toes are like fingers. He sighed behind Mary and caught his breath at the seedy rim of the circle, seeing how beautiful she was as she shifted about him in the mothering middle of the earth. And out of the roots of the earth, lean as trees and whiter than the spring froth, rose her tall attendants. As the crystal-gazer and the virgin walked in one magic over their double grave, dead Davies and dead Vyne cried enviously: Beautiful is Amabel Mary, the ravished maiden, from her skull to her grave-walking feet.

  Where but an hour earlier a far sea wind had blown the sun about, black night dropped down. Time on the clock denied the black coming.

  Mr. Rafe was more frightened of the dark than anything else in the world. He watched, with wide, white eyes, the lighting of the parlour lamp. What would the red lamp disclose? A mouse in a corner playing with an ivory tooth, a little vampire winking at his shoulder, a bed of spiders with a long woman in it.

  Suddenly would the beautiful Mrs. Owen be a skeleton with a worm inside her? Oh, oh, God’s wrath on such small deer, and the dogs as big as your thumb. Mr. Owen turned up the wick.

  And secretly holding hands in the hour between the seconds, in the life that has no time for time, outside under the dark walked Mr. Rafe and the ghost Davies. Was the grass dead under the night, and did the spirit of the grass, greener than Niagara’s devil, sprout through the black weather like the flowers through a coffin’s cracks? Nothing that was not half the figure of a ghost moved up the miles. And, as the minister had seen his buried squires spin from the system of the dead and, ruddier-cheeked than ever, dance on the orbit of a flower in the last, long acre of Llareggub, so now he saw the buried grass shoot through the new night and move on the hill wind. Were the faces of the west stars the backs of the east? he questioned his dead parishioners. God’s wrath, cried Mr. Rafe, in the shadow of a voice, nothing that was not half the substance of a man writhing in his shadow as it fell aslant on the hill, on the double-thumbed piksies about me. Down, down—he slashed at the blades—down, you bald girls from Merthyr. He slashed at a walking echo, Ah, ah, oh, ah, cried the voice of Jerusalem, and Mary, from the moon’s arc over the hill, ran like a wolf at the wailing ministers.

  Midnight, guessed Mrs. Owen. The hours had gone by in a wind.

  Mr. Stipe put out his right foot, and nagged at the water with his left. He crept with ghost Davies through a narrow world; in his hair were the droppings of birds from the boughs of the mean trees; leading the ghost through dark dingles, he sprung the spiked bushes back, and pissed against the wind. He hissed at the thirsty dead who bit their lips, and gave them a dry cherry; he whistled through his fingers, and up rose Lazarus like a weazel. And when the virgin came on a white ass by his grave, he raised a ragged hand and tickled the ass’s belly till it brayed and threw Mary among the corpse-eaters and the quarrelling crows.

  Mr. Lucytre was not aware of this.

  The world, for him, rocked on a snapped foot; the shattered and the razor-bedded sea, the green skewered hulk with a stuffing of eyes, the red sea socket itself and the dead ships crawling around the rim, ached through the gristles and the bone, the bitten patch, the scaled and bubbling menses, the elastic issues of the deep, the barbed, stained, and scissored, the clotted-with-mucus, sawn and thorny flesh, ached on a neverending ache. As on a crucifix, and turning on her nails, the skinny earth, each country pricked to the bladder, each racked sea torn in the ride, hung despairing in a limp space. What should the cruel Lucytre, who drags ghost Davies over a timeless agony, smooth on her wounds? Rust and salt and vinegar and alcohol, the juice of the upas tree, the scorpion’s ointment and a sponge soaked in dropsy.

  The Holy Six stood up.

  They took the six glasses of milk from Mr. Owen’s tray.

  And will the holy gentlemen honour us for the night?

  A life in Mrs. Owen was stirring behind the comfortable little wall. She smiled at Mr. Davies, this time with an intimate wrinkling of the corners of her mouth; Mr. Owen smiled over his shoulder; and, caught between two smiles and understanding neither, he felt his own lips curl. They shared a mysterious smile, and the Six stood silently behind them.

  My child, said Mrs. Owen from her corner, shall be greater than all great men.

  Your child is my child, said Mr. Owen.

  And Mr. Davies, as suddenly as in the first bewilderment he had gone down upon his knees to pray, leant forward and patted the woman’s hand. He would have laid his hands upon the fold of her frock from hip to hip, blessing the unborn under the cotton shroud, but the fear of the power of her eyes held his hand.

  Your child is my child, said Mr. Davies.

  The ghost in him had coupled with the virgin, the virgin ghost that all the great stirrings of her husband’s love had left as whole as a flower in a cup of milk.

  But Mr. Owen burst out laughing; he threw back his head, and laughed at the matting shadows, at the oil in the clear, glass bag of the lamp. That there could be seed, shuffling to the spring of heat, in the old man’s glands. That there could be life in the ancient loins. Father of the jawbones of asses and the hair-thighed camel’s fleas, Mr. Davies swayed before him in a mist of laughter. He could blow the old man up the sky with a puff of his lungs.

  He is your child, said Mrs. Owen.

  She smiled at the shadow between them, the eunuch shadow of a man that fitted between the curving of their shoulders.

  So Mr. Davies smiled again, knowing the shadow to be his. And Mr. Owen, caring for no shadow but that cast on his veins by the rising and the setting of the blood, smiled at them both.

  The holy gentlemen would honour them that night.

  And the Six circled the three.

  Prologue to an Adventure

  As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with the loud electric faces and the crowded petrols of the wind dazzling and drowning me that winter night before the West died, I remembered the winds of the high, white world that bore me and the faces of a noiseless million in the busyhood of heaven staring on the afterbirth. They who nudged through the literate light of the city, shouldered and elbowed me, catching my trilby with the spokes of their umbrellas, who offered me matches and music, made me out of their men’s eyes into a manshape walking. But take away, I told them silently, the flannel and cotton, the cheap felt and leather, I am the nakedest and baldest nothing between the pinnacle and the base, an alderman of ghosts holding to watch-chain and wallet on the wet pavement, the narrator of echoes moving in man’s time. I have Old Moore by the beard, and the news of the world is no world’s news, the gossips of heaven and the fallen rumours are enough and too much for a shadow that casts no shadow, I said to the blind beggars and the paperboys who shouted into the rain. They who were hurrying by me on the narrow errands of the world, time bound to their wrists or blinded in their pockets, who consulted the time strappe
d to a holy tower, and dodged between bonnets and wheels, heard in my fellow’s footsteps the timeless accents of another walking. On the brilliant pavements under a smoky moon, their man’s world turning to the bass roll of the traffic, they saw in the shape of my fellow another staring under the pale lids, and heard the spheres turn as he spoke. This is a strange city, gentlemen on your own, gentlemen arm-in-arm making a rehearsed salute, gentlemen with ladies, ladies this is a strange city. For them in the friendless houses in the streets of pennies and pleasures a million ladies and gentlemen moved up in bed, time moved with the practised moon over a million roofs that night, and grim policemen stood at each corner in the black wind. O mister lonely, said the ladies on their own, we shall be naked as new-born mice, loving you long in the short sparks of the night. We are not the ladies with feathers between their breasts, who lay eggs on the quilt. As I walked through the skyscraping centre, where the lamps walked at my side like volted men or the trees of a new scripture, I jostled the devil at my elbow, but lust in his city shadows dogged me under the arches, down the black blind streets. Now in the shape of a bald girl smiling, a wailing wanton with handcuffs for earings, or the lean girls that lived on pickings, now in ragged woman with a muckrake curtseying in the slime, the tempter of angels whispered over my shoulder, We shall be naked but for garters and black stockings, loving you long on a bed of strawberries and cream, and the nakeder for a ribbon that hides the nipples. We are not the ladies that eat into the brain behind the ear, or feed on the fat of the heart. I remembered the sexless shining women in the first hours of the world that bore me, and the golden sexless men that cried All Praise in the sounds of shape. Taking strength from a sudden shining, I have Old Scratch by the beard, I cried aloud. But the short-time shapes still followed, and the counsellor of an unholy nakedness nagged at my heels. No, not for nothing did the packed thoroughfares confront me at each cross and pavement’s turning with these figures in the shapes of sounds, the lamp-chalked silhouettes and the walking frames of dreams, out of a darker allegory than the fictions of the earth could turn in twelve suns’ time. There was more than man’s meaning to the man-skulled bogies thumbing the skeletons of their noses, to the marrow-merry andrews scratching their armpits in a tavern light, and to the dead man, smiling through his bandages, who laid hand on my sleeve, saying in no man’s voice, There is more than man’s meaning in a stuffed man talking, split from navel to arsehole, and more in the horned ladies at your heels than a pinch of the cloven delights and the tang of sulphur. Heaven and hell shift up and down the city. I have the God of Israel in the image of a painted boy, and Lucifer, in a woman’s shirt, pisses from a window in Damaroid Alley. See now, you shining ones, how the tuner of harps has fallen, and the painter of winds like a bag of henna into the gutter. The high hopes lie broken with broken bottles and suspender-belts, the white mud falls like feathers, there out of Pessary Court comes the Bishop of Bumdom, dressed like a ratcatcher, a holy sister in Gamarouche Mews sharpens her index tooth on a bloodstone, two weazels couple on All Paul’s altar. It was an ungodly meaning, or the purpose of the fallen gods whose haloes magnified the wrong-cross-steepled horns on the pointed heads, that windily informed me of man’s lower walking, and, as I thrust the dead-and-bandaged and a split-like-cabbage enemy to my right side, up sidled my no-bigger-than-a-thimble friends to the naked left. He who played the sorcerer, appearing all at one time in a dozen sulphurous beckonings, saying, out of a dozen mouths, We shall be naked as the slant-thighed queens of Asia in your dreams, was a symbol in the story of man’s journey through the symboled city. And that which shifted with the greased lightning of a serpent from the nest holes in the bases of the cathedral pillars, tracking round the margins of the four cindery winds, was, too, a symbol in that city journey. In a mousetailed woman and a holy snake, the symbols of the city writhed before me. But by one red horn I had that double image, tore off the furry stays and leather jacket. We shall be naked, said Old Scratch variously emerging, as a Jewgirl crucified to the bedposts. We are all metaphors of the sound of shape of the shape of sound, break us we take another shape. Sideways the snake and the woman stroked a cross in the air. I saw the starfall that broke a cloud up, and dodged between bonnets and wheels to the iller-lit streets where I saw Daniel Dom lurching after a painted shadow.