by Denton Welch
I suddenly remembered the drowned people, and I saw again the piece of shroud poking through the coffin on the hillside. An extraordinary impulse seized me, making me hold Lymph Est out of the porthole above the water.
For a moment I hesitated, afraid, yet longing for the pain and the sight I would never forget; then, as if absent-mindedly, I relaxed the grip of my fingers and shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, I saw Lymph Est’s squat limbs, silk face, whorish black eyes, and scarlet mouth all framed in the mud-green water. No dead men dragged it down. The kapok stuffing kept it floating perfectly. Lymph Est was unmolested and serene and doomed.
And as I watched it sailing away, I was pierced by my own wantonness, and I started to call out for help.
Coolie ran along the deck with a boat-hook and tried to fish Lymph out for me, but it was beyond his reach. I watched it disappear between the coal barges; and as I looked for the last time on that extraordinary face, my feelings were so interwoven and twisted that I felt mad.
Boy, Cook, Coolie, all comforted me so gently. What was I to do? Was I to take everything to myself, hypocritically, pretending that it had been an accident? Even if I dared to explain, what could I say?
Had I sacrificed Lymph Est just to cause a sensation, to fix people’s interest on myself? The knowledge of what I had done was not clearly revealed to me; but now I know that I gave Lymph Est to the river because of the corpses at the bottom, and because of the thing wrapped in cloth on the hill.
I FIRST BEGAN TO WRITE
I first began to write when I was nine. I remember it was a Gothic poem and my mother asked me when I showed it to her why I wrote on dead things. We were in Switzerland, and I looked out of the hotel windows and knew that I should never show her anything again. I did not want to write about anything that I did; only about the dead and past.
I felt my poem might be silly; it was almost consciously silly behind the cardboard chivalry.
I did not write again until one day at school when I was fourteen. We had been told to write the chapter of a ghost story. I knew this one lesson was for me. I wrote about the silver sconces on the walls and the high bed crowned with ostrich feathers, the red damask of the curtains and the lovely dress the graceful spectre wore.
I was used to no praise, so when the master said that this was a picture seen, I felt a little intoxicated.
The next time that I wrote was in the Red Sea. I was sixteen and was going to China with my brother. Suddenly from the deck we saw the hot rust-coloured mountains sweeping down into the sea as if they were crumbling heaps of sand, and I knew that I must write a poem. I had my drawing-book with me and I ran to the rail and leaned against it, writing and smiling.
When I got to China I saw some lotus leaves in a pond, and I seemed to feel their flesh and veins and stems. I was in a public park, lying on the grass, and I was suddenly happy when I found that I had brought my stub of pencil and an old envelope. I wrote with excitement. It was longer than anything I had written before and I wondered if it was good.
After this I met a soldier whom I admired and I wrote many poems. I knew that they were bad, but I liked writing them very much. When I showed the nature poems to my brother, he frowned a little and said that they were rather unformed. I lay back in bed rather hurt but feeling that he did not really know. Oh those summer nights in that penthouse in Shanghai. How the streams of light twinkled that lit the roads eight storeys below. The heat and the mosquitoes did not seem to come so high, and I sat thinking of my poems and whether they were good.
None of the stories I wrote got beyond the first page. I never wanted to tell a story; only to write how I felt.
Back in England again the next year, I was at an art school. I was not happy. I lay in a field, neglecting drawing from the Antique, trying to write my school story. I knew how difficult it was; I had no perseverance.
Then I was very ill and I wrote in bed for over a year. It was in the night that I wrote and the very early mornings—sometimes poetry and sometimes just what I felt. I was very interested in the last doctor I had and I wrote many unfinished stories about him. I felt I wanted to die and everything I wrote ended with death. This thought was with me so much that one day I felt that I must leave nothing behind me.
I found all my old notebooks and the scraps of paper I had used. I read everything, longing to want to keep some of it; but I never wanted anyone to read it, so I gradually cut more and more out of the books until there was a heap of loose leaves and the empty covers lying on the floor. Then I burnt the leaves in the fire—all my adolescent writing, keeping only in my head some of the lines which I could not forget.
I kept the covers for painting boards and that very day began to write again in a new notebook.
THE BARN
I turned and skidded obediently on the little patch of lawn at the side of the house. My brother was teaching me this accomplishment and he was an exacting master. I looked over my shoulder at the last brown wound on the grass. It was meagre, not bold and fierce like the gashes my brother made.
‘Don’t be such a funk, Denton!’ he yelled from his position under the crab-apple tree. ‘You can’t skid properly unless you turn and jam your brakes on as hard as you can.’
He snatched the bicycle from me, threw his leg over it, pedalled furiously for a few moments, so that I felt he must certainly end in the hedge, then turned violently, making a superb chocolate fan on the emerald grass.
I was lost in admiration. He was so ruthless and competent.
‘Now do it again!’ he ordered, severely.
I mounted on the gravel path, tore on to the little lawn as wildly as I dared, overshot the appointed skidding-place by a few feet, and tried desperately to turn where all the scattered crab-apples lay. Of course my wheel caught on one of the bright, hard little fruits, and I suddenly lay sprawling beside the madly revolving pedals of my bicycle.
I was hurt and dazed, but I dared not show it; so I laughed and smiled anxiously, and then, in desperation, picked up one of the little red balls and bit into its crisp white acid heart. I felt the juice skinning my teeth, roughening my tongue, making it feel like a cat’s tongue.
I made no attempt to get up, but lay there indolently, thinking of the cleanness of the apple, smiling slackly. I knew that this behaviour would disgust my brother, but I had to wait until I had recovered a little self-respect. I could not jump up straight away, still shaken, looking flustered and foolish.
Paul turned from me contemptuously and was about to walk into the house when my father appeared at the French window with a note in his hand. He held it out to Paul, saying, ‘Take this to Mrs Singleton for me, will you?’
My brother jerked his head away sullenly. He hated encountering other people.
‘Can’t Denton take it, Daddy?’ he asked.
‘Why should he when I’ve asked you?’ was the reply.
‘Because he doesn’t mind. He likes old ladies!’
And with this last shouted jeer, my brother darted down the path and was away into the fields, no one knew where.
‘I expect he’ll have a guilty conscience about that later,’ said my father comfortably, then, turning to me: ‘Will you take it, Denton, since he’s so silly?’
I felt proud. This was something I could do easily. I was not nervous of people, unless they were other children or rude old men. I hated the very thought of an old man. It spelt dirt and bad temper to me. With women it was different. I felt that, whatever they were like, some part of them was human and could be reached.
I took the note, and leaving the bicycle still lying on the grass, I walked out of the garden, between the tiny box hedges, into the lane.
Mrs Singleton was our landlady. When my parents had rented her house for the summer, she had moved out with her Colonel, her dogs and her grown-up daughters to the army hut which had been re-erected on the edge of their land, at the far end of the lane.
I walked down the lane, keeping close to
the brook and looking down into its depths. Hosts of tiny minnows flapped their fins to hold their position against the current. I loved the brook. The house was called after the brook, but Brook House somehow did not sound romantic; it sounded dull.
As I got nearer to the army hut I composed my face and took the letter from my pocket. I had a deep snobbish pity for Mrs Singleton, because we had turned her out of her dignified house, where her family had lived for a hundred years, into this squalid little army hut.
The front door was open, and some soiled gym shoes lay beside it. I gave a quiet, well-bred, rather furtive knock, and the door swung with an unpleasant creak.
‘Who’s there?’ shouted Mrs Singleton, peremptorily. Her voice came from the room on the right of the hall. It sounded so hard and questioning that I became uneasy.
‘It’s me,’ I said childishly.
I can only imagine that, from this, Mrs Singleton imagined me to be one of her daughters, for the next moment she appeared before me in all the glory of soiled and elaborate corsets, which reached from her bosom to her pale grey thighs. She wore no stockings, and the suspenders dangled uselessly against her heavy blue-veined legs. Her hair was like a nest made by some very slovenly rook.
With an exasperated, outraged exclamation, she turned about—splaying her huge, grey blancmange buttocks—and fled into her bedroom.
From there she carried on a ladylike and furious conversation either with me or with herself. I could not tell which, for I was too frighted to listen or to distinguish the words.
She emerged at last in the ruin of a feathered peignoir.
With a queenly and austere gesture, she held out her hand, making me feel that it was I who had appeared before her in a semi-naked and disgusting condition. She took the note in silence and shut the door. I too felt that it was no time for small-talk.
Rather shaken by the horror, I walked slowly back to Brook House, wondering what to do with myself. My brother, I knew, had disappeared for the rest of the day. As I walked drops of rain began to fall. They hissed into the brook and spat against my face.
I entered by the stable-yard gate, and walked over the cobbles. The puddles were growing between the big curved stones. Outside the disused barn I stopped, and pulled at the huge, crazy door. It opened creakingly. I went in and shut it after me.
I was in darkness which smelt of dust and mice and hay. Chinks and cracks in the walls shot beams of light into the blackness.
I climbed on some boxes, then caught hold of a beam and swung there, like a monkey. I gnashed my teeth and contorted my face. I gibbered and hung on with one hand as I scratched under my arm with the other.
I grew hot, swinging in the darkness, and my arms began to feel the strain. I broke my last imaginary peanut between my teeth and spat as disgustingly and coarsely as I could on the invisible floor; then I sank down on the boxes and thought that I was miserable and lonely indeed.
And as I lay there I decided to be a slave who had to sweat and labour in the barn all day. But slaves had to be naked. I put my hand inside my flannel shirt and felt the flesh on my chest. Slowly I leant forward and began to pull the shirt over my head. It was straining work, for I was sitting on the tails. When my body was free of the shirt and my arms were imprisoned in it above my head, I looked down at the vague whiteness of my skin. I thought of the men I had seen, with tufts of strong hair on their chests and under their arms. It was ugly and beautiful at once, I thought.
I caught hold of the beam again and swung about fiercely, hurting my arms, straining the muscles as I pulled myself up. I swore not to stop pulling until I had rested my chin on the top of the beam. At last, with a shudder of pain and pleasure, I brought it to rest there on the rough, beetle-eaten oak. The harsh wood grazed the soft skin on my throat.
Then slowly and gently I felt my trousers slipping. They slid caressingly over my hips and fell with a soft plop to my ankles, where they caught in bunched-up folds. I still hung there, supported by my chin and my tingling arms. Soft draughts of air blew deliciously against my complete nakedness.
‘Now I am a criminal whose feet have been tied together, and whose body has been stripped by the hangman,’ I told myself. ‘I shall be swinging here till late at night, when my friends will come to cut me down.’
I hung there not moving, living passionately my idea of a criminal on a gibbet; while the rain beat against the great barn door, and drops fell from the roof.
Gradually, as my strength gave out, I sank nearer to the ground, until my arms were stretched out agonisingly. There were still some feet to fall to reach the ground. I decided to drop, although I knew that my feet were trapped in the trousers. I fell in a crumpled mass, and lay on the barn floor with the short pieces of hay pricking me. I felt the smooth, satiny mounds of bird-droppings against my flesh. Slowly and wearily I put on my shirt, pulled up my trousers, ran my fingers through my hair, and went in to tea.
Towards evening, as I sat in my little room, polishing my favourite possessions—an ugly Japanese ivory, a Chinese agate chicken and a painted tear-bottle (how many times had I tried, without success, to catch my own tears in it!)—I heard the cook go into the library and begin talking to my father. This was unusual, and I stopped polishing and waited to hear any of her words.
As she opened the door, about to leave the room, this remark floated up the staircase well: ‘He wants to know if he can put up in the barn for tonight, sir.’
I heard my father say, ‘I’ll come and see him.’ Then he followed Cook into the back of the house.
I waited excitedly. Who wanted to put up in the barn for the night? I looked on it as my barn, where I did secret things. When my father came back I ran down to him.
‘What’s happened, Daddy?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. A tramp only asked Cook if he could sleep in the barn, because it’s raining so hard, and I said of course he could.’ My father made a gruesome horrific face and added, ‘I hope he won’t murder us all in our beds tonight!’
I was fascinated and frightened.
‘May I go and see him?’ I asked urgently.
‘Certainly not. He doesn’t want to be stared at. Cook has given him something to eat, and then he wants to go to sleep in the hay. He’s very tired.’
I shut the door and went upstairs again, tingling with excitement. I decided to visit the tramp in the middle of the night, when everyone else was asleep.
I got ready a bundle of blankets to take out to him, and a bottle of sweets I had been given.
Impatiently I waited for supper to be over and ‘goodnights’ to be said. I lay in bed with all my clothes on, and my mother came and kissed me and put out the light.
‘If only she knew!’ I thought. ‘If only she knew—!’
She went downstairs again, and I heard her talking to my father. At last I could wait no longer for them to go to bed. I snatched up the bundle of bedclothes and the bottle of sweets, and ran down the back stairs out into the dripping stable-yard. Then I ran back again to get my torch.
I crouched over the blankets to keep them dry. The huge door swung open easily and I turned my torch on and shone it in all the corners and into the thickness of the hay.
At first I could see nothing, then I saw him lying full length in a deep nest of hay which billowed in soft, high walls all round him. He was asleep, and as I stood still I heard the heavy rhythm of his breathing.
I tiptoed up to him, and, too curious to be considerate, shone the torch full on his face. For a moment the face remained still and grey and smooth as marble, except for the crisp stubble on his chin. There was no expression. He looked beautiful. Then, as he suddenly woke, his face broke into a cobweb of connecting lines. His eyes and his mouth fell open in fear, and he shouted out hoarsely, ‘What’s that? Who’s that?’
I was frightened at the change I had brought about.
‘I’ve only come from the house,’ I whispered urgently, ‘to bring you some blankets and some sweets.’
‘
Let’s have a look at you, mate,’ he said. ‘Shine the torch on your face.’ I obeyed, delighting in the word ‘mate’.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘You’d better guess,’ I said, playing for time, wondering how many years I could add to my age without appearing too absurd.
‘Oh, I see—’ His voice tailed off and I was afraid he was going to fall asleep again; I snatched at the first thing and asked, ‘And how old are you?’
‘What do you want to know for?’
Then he relented and added, ‘I’m twenty-four, if that’s any good to you.’
It was clear that I amused him. This upset me.
‘Do you like sleeping in this barn?’ I questioned him almost severely.
‘It’s not a bad old place. Better than being under a hedge on a night like this.’
‘I’d like to do what you do,’ I said earnestly, looking at him. ‘I’d like to walk miles every day, and sleep in a different place every night, and get my own food.’
‘Oh, no you wouldn’t, mate; you’d be much too soft. You’d be half dead after a day of it,’ he jeered.
I handed him the sweets, feeling deeply hurt; although it was comforting that he still called me ‘mate’ after seeing my face. I looked up at the beam above our heads and said abruptly, ‘I do exercises in this barn on most afternoons.’
‘Getting your muscles up?’ he jeered again.
Since he would not take me seriously, I fell silent. I pointed the torch so that the beam lay on the length of his figure in the hay. He had the sort of body that I wanted to have when I grew up. It was not tall, but solid and compact, and rounded. Through a rent in his trousers I could see his hard thigh. I thought how different his flesh was from Mrs Singleton’s. And at the thought of her, hot blood rushed up into my cheeks.
‘I’m going to sleep in the hay too!’ I said.
‘What for? Ain’t you got a bed?’ he asked coldly.
‘I want to try it,’ I said.
‘You’ll cop it if your ma finds out,’ he warned me humiliatingly.