The Collected Stories

by Dylan Thomas

  Up river, called Beth, up river.

  Up river, he answered.

  Only the warm, mapped waters ran that night over the edges of the first beasts’ island white in a new moon.

  In the Direction of the Beginning

  In the light tent in the swinging field in the great spring evening, near the sea and the shingled boat with a mast of cedar-wood, the hinderwood decked with beaks and shells, a folded, salmon sail, and two finned oars; with gulls in one flight high over, stork, pelican, and sparrow, flying to the ocean’s end and the first grain of a timeless land that spins on the head of a sand glass, a hoop of feathers down the dark of the spring in a topsyturvy year; as the rocks in history, by every feature and scrawled limb, eye of a needle, shadow of a nerve, cut in the heart, by rifted fibre and clay thread, recorded for the rant of odyssey the dropping of the bay-leaf toppling of the oak-tree splintering of the moonstone against assassin avatar undead and numbered waves, a man was born in the direction of the beginning. And out of sleep, where the moon had raised him through the mountains in her eyes and by the strong, eyed arms that fall behind her, full of tides and fingers, to the blown sea, he wrestled over the edge of the evening, took to the beginning as a goose to the sky, and called his furies by their names from the wind-drawn index of the grave and waters. Who was this stranger who came like a hailstone, cut in ice, a snow-leafed seabush for her hair, and taller than a cedarmast, the north white rain descending and the whale-driven sea cast up to the caves of the eye, from a fishermen’s city on the floating island? She was salt and white and travelling as the field, on one blade, swung with its birds around her, evening centred in the neverstill heart, he heard her hands among the treetops—a feather dived, her fingers flowed over the voices—and the world went drowning down through a siren stranger’s vision of grass and waterbeasts and snow. The world was sucked to the last lake’s drop; the cataract of the last particle worried in a lather to the ground, as if the rain from heaven had let its clouds fall turtle-turning like a manna made of the soft-bellied seasons, and the hard hail, falling, spread and flustered in a cloud half flower half ash or the comb-footed scavenger’s wind through a pyramid raised high with mud or the soft slow drift of mingling steam and leaves. In the exact centre of enchantment he was a shoreman in deep sea, lashed by his hair to the eye in the cyclop breast, with his swept thighs strung among her voice; white bears swam and sailors drowned to the music she scaled and drew with hands and fables from his upright hair; she plucked his terror by the ears, and bore him singing into light through the forest of the serpent-haired and the stone-turning voice. Revelation stared back over its transfixed shoulder. Which was her genesis, the last spark of judgment or the first whale’s spout from the waterland? The conflagration at the end, a burial fire jumping, a spent rocket hot on its tail, or, where the first spring and its folly climbed the sea barriers and the garden locks were bruised, capped and douting water over the mountain candlehead? Whose was the image in the wind, the print on the cliff, the echo knocking to be answered? She was orioled and serpent-haired. She moved in the swallowing, salty field, the chronicle and the rocks, the dark anatomies, the anchored sea itself. She raged in the mule’s womb. She faltered in the galloping dynasty. She was loud in the old grave, kept a still, quick tongue in the sun. He marked her outcast image, mapped with a nightmare’s foot in poison and framed against the wind, print of her thumb that buckled on its hand with a webbed shadow, interrogation of the familiar echo: which is my genesis, the granite fountain extinguishing where the first flame is cast in the sculptured world, or the bonfire maned like a lion in the threshold of the last vault? One voice then in that evening travelled the light and water waves, one lineament took on the sliding moods, from where the gold green sea cantharis dyes the trail of the octopus one venom crawled through foam, and from the four map corners one cherub in an island shape puffed the clouds to sea.

  An Adventure from a Work in Progress

  The boat tugged its anchor, and the anchor flew up from the seabed like an iron arrow and hung poised in a new wind and pointed over the corskscrew channels of the sea to the dark holes and caves in the horizon. He saw birds searing out of the pitted distance blind by his anchor as he swam with a seal at his side to the boat that stamped the water. He gripped on the bows like a mane, the arrowing anchor shot north, and the boat sped beneath it with winds and invisible fire puffing and licking. His animal boat split the water into a thousand boatsized seas, bit deep into the flying shoals, halved and multiplied the flying fishes, it dived under waves like a wooden dolphin and wagged the fingering wrack off its stern, it swerved past a black and gold buoy with cathedral chimes and kept cold north. Spray turned to ice as it whipped through his hair, and pierced his cheeks and eyelids, and the running blood froze hard. He saw through a coat of red ice that the sea was transparent; under his boat the drowned dead burned in a pale green, grass-high fire; the sea rained on the flames. But on through the north, between glass hills on which shebears climbed and saw themselves reflected, eating the sea between the paddling floes, a shell of lightning fibres skimming and darting under an anchor-bolt, tossed and magnified among the frozen window weeds, through a slow snow-storm whose flakes fell like hills one at a time down the white air, lost in a round sudden house of the six year night and slipping through an arch of sleeping birds each roosted on an icicle, the boat came into blue water. Birds with blue feathers set alight by the sun, with live flames for their crests, flew by the hovering anchor to the trees and bushes on the rims of soft sand round the sea that brushed his boat slowly and whispered it like a name in letters of parting water towards a harbour grove and a slowly spinning island with lizards in its lap. The salmon of the still sail turned to the blue of the birds’ eggs in the tips of the fringing forest of each wave. The feathers crackled from the birds and drifted down and fell upon bare rods and stalks that fenced the island entrance, the rods and stalks grew into trees with musical leaves still burning. The history of the boat was spelt in knocking water on the hanging harbour bank; each syllable of his adventure struck on grass and stone and rang out in the passages of the disturbed rock-plants and was chattered from flame to tree. The anchor dived to rest. He strode through the blazing fence. The print of the ice was melting. The island spun. He saw between trees a tall woman standing on the opposite bank. He ran directly towards her but the green thighs closed. He ran on the rim towards her but she was still the same distance from him on the roundabout island. Time was about to fall; it had slept without sound under and over the blaze and spinning; now it was raised ready. Flowers in the centre of the island caught its tears in a cup. It hardened and shouted and shone in dead echoes and pearls. It fell as he ran on the outer rim, and oaks were felled in the acorn and lizards laid in the shell. He held the woman drowning in his arms, her driftwood limbs, her winking ballast head of glass; he fought with her blood like a man with a waterfall turning to fishdust and ash, and her salvaged seaweed hair twisted blindly about his eyes. The boat with anchor hovering and finned oars trembling for water after land, the beaks at the stern gabbling and the shells alive, was blown alongside him, by a wind that took a corner on one breath, from the harbour bank where roots of trees drove up the sky and foliage in cinders smouldered down, the lopped leg of a bird scratched against rock, a thundering cave sat upright and bolted mouthdown into the sea; he dipped the gills of the oars, the cedarmast shook like a cloth, warm north the boat sped off again from an island no longer spinning but split into vanishing caves and contrary trees. Time that had fallen rested in the edges of its knives and the hammock of its fires, the memory of the woman was strong on his hands, her claws and anemones, weedwrack and urchin hair, the sea was deserted and colourless, direction was dead as the island and north was a circle, a bird above the anchor spurted through a stationary cloud to catch its cry, the boat with gilled oars swimming ploughed through the foam in the wake, her pale brow glistened in the new moon of his nails and the drenched thread of her nerves
sprang up and down behind them, the stern beaks quacked and yawned, crabs clacked from the shells, a mist rose up that dressed and unshaped the sky and the sea flowed in secret. Through the mist, dragging a black weather with it, a spade-shaped shoal of clouds tacked to its peak, a broken moon, a wind with trumpets, came a mountain in a moment. The boat struck rock. The beaks were still. The shells snapped shut. He leaped into mud as the wind cried his name to the flapping shoals; his name rolled down the mountain, echoed through caves and crevices, ducked in venomous pools, slap on black walls, translated into the voice of dying stone, growling through slime into silence. He gazed at the mountain peak; a cloud obscured it, cords of light from the moon were looped around the tentacles of the crags. Lightning with a horn and bone on, with gristle white as a spine hardening and halving the forked sides, struck through the tacked cloud cap, lit the stone head, scorched the mist-curled fringe, cut through the cords until the moon sailed upwards like a kite. With the turning out of the lightning, the jackknife doubling up of the limp spine, the weather in tow rocked to work and flight in a sealed air, the mountain vanished leaving a hole in space to keep the shape of his horror as he sank, as the monuments of the dark mud toppled and his raised arms were cemented against rock with the wet maggot sacks and the mixed, crawling breasts of statues and creatures who once stood on the ledges of the mountain foot or blocked the crying mouths of caves. The wind, blowing matter with a noise, stuck to his cheek. The sea climbed his limbs like a sailor. Bound and drowning in that dismembered masonry, his eyes on a level with the shuffled circle of headpieces floating, he saw the lightning dart to strike again, and the horned bone stiffen among the forks; hope, like another muscle, broke the embraces of the nuzzling bodies, thrust off the face that death-masked his, for the mountain appeared on the strike of light and the hollow shape of his horror was filled with crags and turrets, rock webs and dens, spinning black balconies, the loud packed smashing of separate seas, and the abominable substances of a new colour. The world happened at once. There was the furnished mountain built in a flash and thunderclap colliding. The shapes of rain falling made a new noise and number. And the lightning stayed striking; its charted shaft of sawteeth struck and bit in continual light; one blind flash was a year of mornings. The mummyfolds, the mudpots, the wet masks, the quick casts, the closing sheathes, melted under the frostbite heat of that unwinking lightning. He boxed free from the statues and the caved and toppling watchers. From a man-sized dent in a melting thigh he came up strung with shells and mussed with weed like a child from the roots of the original sea into a dazzling bed. Once on hard land, with shells that swung from his hair ringing from the tail of a weed, and shells repeating the sea, he shook away calamity, bounced the weeds off his bare breast, threw back his head until the pealing shells took in their echo the voices of all miscellaneous water, and grappled with the mountainside. His shadow led and beckoned; he turned curves of the eel-backed paths, his shadow pointed to the footprints that appeared before his feet; he followed where his footprints led, saw the smudged outline of his hand on a wet stone as he quarrelled with stones and trees towards it up an attacking valley; animals closed their lips round the shout of a wind walking by and scooped his name to welcome it up hollow trunks and walls. He followed the flight of his name: it slipped to a stop at the peak: there a tall woman caught the flying name to her lips. He flourished in the middle of the pain of the mountain and joy sped with his shadow, the strong memory of the driftwrack woman was dead on his hands digging deep in the soil towards this stranger tall as a pulled tree and whiter at that great shortening distance than the lightning-coloured sea a hundred dangers below. The thighs smooth as groundstone and sensual cleft, limpet eye and musselmouth, the white boulders bent, blue shadows and pricked berries, the torrential flowers and blacks of the bush on the skull and the muffed pits, the draped cellars, the lashed stones, the creased face on the knees, all for a moment while he stood in love were still and near. Then slowly her peak in a cloud’s alcove—carved animals on an abbey, wind in an amice, arching accusing her—rose with his lovely dashing from stillness. Slowly her peak got up the cloudy arches, the stones he stumbled on followed her at the same speed. Though he hugged like a bear and climbed fast, she kept her distance from him. The mountain in the intervals of his breathing grew many times its size until time fell and cut and burned it down. The peak collapsed, the mountain folded, he clasped the woman diminishing in his arms; the downpours of her hair were short falls, her limbs stunted, her hands blunt, her teeth were small and square as dice and the rot marked them. A halo cracked like china, wings were spoked. Blood flapped behind all the windows of the world. And with the wasting of her limbs suddenly she grew young. Holding her small body, he cried in the nightmare of a naked child kissing and blaspheming close, breasts small as pears with milk foaming from them, the innocent holes of the open eyes, the thin, rouged musselmouth, when the head falls, the eyes loll, the small throat snaps, and the headless child lies loving in the dark. The mad bug trotted in at the ear with the whole earth on a feeler. With his cries she caved in younger. He held her hard. The marrow in her bones was soft as syrup. From a scar in the peak came a shadow with black gamp and scarlet basin. She dangled there with bald and monstrous skull, bunched monkey face and soaked abdominal tail. Out of the webbed sea-pig and water-nudging fish a white pool spat in his palm. Reeling to run seaward and away, he trod the flats of waves. The splintered claw of a crab struck from the killed hindershells. And, after the anchor burrowing through blind cloud, he rowed and sailed, that the world might happen to him once, past the events of revolving islands and elastic hills, on the common sea.

  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog*

  The Peaches

  The grass-green cart, with ‘J. Jones, Gorsehill’ painted shakily on it, stopped in the cobblestone passage between ‘The Hare’s Foot’ and ‘The Pure Drop.’ It was late on an April evening. Uncle Jim, in his black market suit with a stiff white shirt and no collar, loud new boots, and a plaid cap, creaked and climbed down. He dragged out a thick wicker basket from a heap of straw in the corner of the cart and swung it over his shoulder. I heard a squeal from the basket and saw the tip of a pink tail curling out as Uncle Jim opened the public door of ‘The Pure Drop.’

  ‘I won’t be two minutes,’ he said to me. The bar was full; two fat women in bright dresses sat near the door, one with a small dark child on her knee; they saw Uncle Jim and nudged up on the bench.

  ‘I’ll be out straight away,’ he said fiercely, as though I had contradicted him, ‘you stay there quiet.’

  The woman without the child raised up her hands. ‘Oh, Mr. Jones,’ she said in a high laughing voice. She shook like a jelly.

  Then the door closed and the voices were muffled.

  I sat alone on the shaft of the cart in the narrow passage, staring through a side window of ‘The Hare’s Foot.’ A stained blind was drawn half over it. I could see into half of a smoky, secret room, where four men were playing cards. One man was huge and swarthy, with a handlebar moustache and a love-curl on his forehead; seated by his side was a thin, bald, pale old man with his cheeks in his mouth; the faces of the other two were in shadow. They all drank out of brown pint tankards and never spoke, laying the cards down with a smack, scraping at their match-boxes, puffing at their pipes, swallowing unhappily, ringing the brass bell, ordering more, by a sign of the fingers, from a sour woman with a flowered blouse and a man’s cap.

  The passage grew dark too suddenly, the walls crowded in, and the roofs crouched down. To me, staring timidly there in the dark passage in a strange town, the swarthy man appeared like a giant in a cage surrounded by clouds, and the bald old man withered into a black hump with a white top; two white hands darted out of the corner with invisible cards. A man with spring-heeled boots and a two-edged knife might be bouncing towards me from Union Street.

  I called, ‘Uncle Jim, Uncle Jim,’ softly so that he should not hear.

  I began to whistle
between my teeth, but when I stopped I thought the sound went hissing on behind me. I climbed down from the shaft and stepped close to the half-blind window; a hand clawed up the pane to the tassel of the blind; in the little, packed space between me on the cobbles and the card-players at the table, I could not tell which side of the glass was the hand that dragged the blind down slowly. I was cut from the night by a stained square. A story I had made in the warm, safe island of my bed, with sleepy midnight Swansea flowing and rolling round outside the house, came blowing down to me then with a noise on the cobbles. I remembered the demon in the story, with his wings and hooks, who clung like a bat to my hair as I battled up and down Wales after a tall, wise, golden, royal girl from Swansea convent. I tried to remember her true name, her proper, long, black-stockinged legs, her giggle and paper curls, but the hooked wings tore at me and the colour of her hair and eyes faded and vanished like the grass-green of the cart that was a dark, grey mountain now standing between the passage walls.

  And all this time the old, broad, patient, nameless mare stood without stirring, not stamping once on the cobbles or shaking her reins. I called her a good girl and stood on tiptoe to try to stroke her ears as the door of ‘The Pure Drop’ swung open and the warm lamplight from the bar dazzled me and burned my story up. I felt frightened no longer, only angry and hungry. The two fat women near the door giggled ‘Good night, Mr. Jones’ out of the rich noise and the comfortable smells. The child lay curled asleep under the bench. Uncle Jim kissed the two women on the lips.