Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

  Once upon a time, said the water voice.

  Do not adventure any more, said the echo.

  She is ringing a bell for you in the sea.

  I am the owl and the echo; you shall never go back.

  On a hill to the horizon stood an old man building a boat, and the light that slanted from the sea cast the holy mountain of a shadow over the three-storied decks and the Eastern timber. And through the sky, out of the beds and gardens, down the white precipice built of feathers, the loud combs and mounds, from the caves in the hill, the cloudy shapes of birds and beasts and insects drifted into the hewn door. A dove with a green petal followed in the raven’s flight. Cool rain began to fall.

  THE HOLY SIX

  The Holy Six of Wales sat in silence. The day was drawing to a close, and the heat of the first discussion grew cooler with the falling sun. All through the afternoon they had talked of nothing but the disappearance of the rector of Llareggub, and now, as the first lack of light moved in a visible shape and colour through the room, and their tongues were tired, and they heard the voices in their nerves, they waited only for the first darkness to set in. At the first signs of night they would step from the table, adjust their hats and smiles, and walk into the wicked streets. Where the women smiled under the lamps, and the promise of the old sickness stirred in the fingertips of the girls in the dark doorways, the Six would pass dreaming, to the scrape of their boots on the pavement, of the women throughout the town smiling and doctoring love. To Mr. Stul the women drifted in a maze of hair, and touched him in a raw place. The women drifted around Mr. Edger. He caught them close to him, holding their misty limbs to his with no love or fire. The women moved again, with the grace of cats, edging down the darker alleys where Mr. Vyne, envious of their slant-eyed beauty, would scrape and bow. To Mr. Rafe, their beauties, washed in blood, were enemies of the fluttering eyes, and moved, in what image they would, full-breasted, furfooted, to a massacre of the flesh. He saw the red nails, and trembled. There was no purpose in the shaping wombs but the death of the flesh they shaped, and he shrank from the contact of death, and the male nerve was pulled alone. Tugging and tweaking, putting salt on the old love-cuts, Mr. Lucytre conducted an imaginary attack upon the maiden-heads. Now here and now there he ripped the women, and, kissing them, he bit into their lips. Spitefully, Mr. Stipe watched him. Down fell the women on the sharp blade, and his heart smiled within him as they rose to dress their wounds.

  The holy life was a constant erection to these six gentlemen. Miss Myfanwy came in with a letter.

  Mr. Edger opened the envelope. It contained a square piece of paper that might be a banknote. It was a letter from Mrs. Amabel Owen and was written in a backward hand.

  She put malignity in the curves and tails of the characters, a cloven foot, a fork, and a snake’s sting coming out from the words in a separate life as the words lay back giddy from her revolving pen along the lines.

  She, like Peter the poet, wrote of the Jarvis valley. But while she saw by each bare tree a barer ghost and the ghost of the last spring and summer, he saw the statue of the tree and no ghost but his own that whistled out of the sick bed and raced among seaward fields.

  Here in the valley, wrote Mrs. Owen, my husband and I live quiet as two mice.

  As she writes, thought Mr. Stul, she feels the weight of her breasts on her ink-black arm.

  Do the holy gentlemen believe in ghosts?

  With the chains of cloud and iron suspended from their limbs, thought Mr. Rafe, they would drip the deadly nightshade into my ear.

  May she bear a vampire’s baby, said Mr. Stipe.

  The Reverend Mr. Davies of Llareggub is staying with us for an indefinite period, she wrote in her secret hand.

  Over the more level roadway on the lower hills, drawn in a jogcart by a sweating pony, the Holy Six journeyed in search of Mrs. Owen. Miss Myfanwy, seated uncomfortably between Mr. Stul and Mr. Lucytre, conscious of the exposure of her calf and the pressure of Mr. Lucytre’s hand in the small of her back, prayed that the moon might not go in. There in the crowded cart the darkness would conceal the roving of the holy hands, and better Mr. Stul’s delight.

  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 tumbling 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 clergical 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 hight 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 springing 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 cloves 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 oaksided, 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 s
till 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 bone-white 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 eighth 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 onto 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 the silence in the parlour, Mr. Davies turned trembling to the holy gentlemen. A timeless voice spoke in his ear, and a hand in his shrouded shoulder sank through the collar-bone; a hand was on his heart, and the intolerable blood-beat 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 was 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 fox-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 piskies 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 t
he ass’s belly till it brayed and threw Mary among the corpse-eaters and the quarreling 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 tissues of the deep, the barbed, stained and scissored, the clotted-with-mucus, sawn and thorny flesh, ached on a never-ending 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 tide, 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.