by Dylan Thomas
The slates shone around him, in the smoke of the magnified stacks and through the vapours of the hill. Below him, in a world of words, men on their errands moved to no purpose but the escape of time. Brave in his desolation, he scrambled to the edge of the slates, there to stand perilously above the tiny traffic and the lights of the street signals. The toy of the town was at his feet. On went the marzipan cars, changing gear, applying brake, over the nursery carpets into a child’s hands. But soon height had him and he swayed, feeling his legs grow weak beneath him and his skull swell like a bladder in the wind. It was the image of an infant city that threw his pulses into confusion. There was dust in his eyes; there were eyes in the grains of dust ascending from the street. Once on the leveller roofs, he touched his left breast. Death was the bright magnets of the streets; the wind pulled off the drag of death and the falling visions. Now he was stripped of fear, strong, night-muscled. Over the housetops he ran towards the moon. There the moon came, in a colder glory than before, attended by stars, drawing the tides of the sea. By a parapet he watched her, finding a word for each stage of her journey in the directed sky, calling her same-faced, wondering at her many masks. Death mask and dance mask over her mountainous features transformed the sky; she struggled behind a cloud, and came with a new smile over the wall of wind. Image, and all was image, from Marlais, ragged in the wind, to the appalling town, he on the roofs invisible to the street, the street beneath him blind to his walking word. His hand before him was five-fingered life.
A baby cried, but the cry grew fainter. It is all one, the loud voice and the still voice striking a common silence, the dowdy lady flattening her nose against the panes, and the well-mourned lady. The word is too much with us, and the dead word. Cloud, the last muslin’s rhyme, shapes above tenements and bursts in cold rain on the suburban drives. Hail falls on cinder track and the angelled stone. It is all one, the rain and the macadam; it is all one, the hail and cinder, the flesh and the rough dust. High above the hum of the houses, far from the skyland and the frozen fence, he questioned each shadow; man among ghosts, and ghost in clover, he moved for the last answer.
The bare boy’s voice through a stone mouth, no longer smoking at this hour, rose up unanswerably: ‘Who walks, mad among us, on the roofs, by my cold, brick-red side and the weathercock-frozen women, walks over This street, under the image of the Welsh summer heavens walks all night loverless, has two sister lovers ten towns away. Past the great stack forests to the left and the sea his lovers burn for him endlessly by a hundred orchards.’ The gossips’ voices rose up unanswerably: ‘Who walks by the stone virgins is our virgin Marlais, wind and fire, and the coward on the burning roofs.’
He stepped through the open window.
Red sap in the trees bubbled from the cauldron roots to the last spray of blossom, and the boughs, that night after the hollow walk, fell like candles from the trunks but could not die for the heat of the sulphurous head of the grass burned yellow by the dead sun. And flying there, he rounded, half mist, half man, all apple circles on the sea-village road in the high heat of noon as the dawn broke; and as the sun rose like a river over the hills so the sun sank behind a tree. The woman pointed to the hundred orchards and the black birds who flocked around her sister, but a wind put the trees out and he woke again. This was the intolerable, second waking out of a life too beautiful to break, but the dream was broken. Who had walked by the virgins near the orchards was a virgin, wind and fire, and a coward in the destroying coming of the morning. But after he had dressed and taken breakfast, he walked up This street to the hilltop and turned his face towards the invisible sea.
‘Good morning, Marlais,’ said an old man sitting with six greyhounds in the blackened grass.
‘Good morning, Mr David Davies.’
‘You are up very early,’ said David Two Times.
‘I am walking towards the sea.’
‘The wine-coloured sea,’ said Dai Twice.
Marlais strode over the hill to the greener left, and down behind the circle of the town to the rim of Whippet valley where the trees, for ever twisted between smoke and slag, tore at the sky and the black ground. The dead boughs prayed that the roots might shoulder up the soil, leaving a dozen channels empty for the leaves and the spirit of the cracking wood, a hole in the valley for the mole-handed sap, a long grave for the last spring’s skeleton that once had leapt, when the blunt and forked hills were sharp and straight, through the once-green land. But Whippet’s trees were the long dead of the stacked south of the country; who had vanished under the hacked land pointed, thumb-to-hill, these black leaf-nailed and warning fingers. Death in Wales had twisted the Welsh dead into those valley cripples.
The day was a passing of days. High noon, the story-killer and the fire bug (the legends of the Russian seas died as the trees awoke to their burning), passed in all the high noons since the fall of man from the sun and the first sun’s pinnacling of the half-made heavens. And all the valley summers, the once monumental red and the now headstone-featured, all that midsummer afternoon were glistening in the seaward walk. Through the ancestral valley where his fathers, out of their wooden dust and full of sparrows, wagged at a hill, he walked steadily; on the brink of the hole that held LlanAsia as a grave holds a town, he was caught in the smoke of the forests and, like a ghost from the clear-cut quarters under the stack roots, climbed down on to the climbing streets.
‘Where are you walking, Marlais?’ said a one-legged man by a black flower-bed.
‘Towards the sea, Mr William Williams.’
‘The mermaid-crowded sea,’ said Will Peg.
Marlais passed out of the tubercular valley on to a waste mountain, through a seedy wood to a shagged field; a crow, on a molehill, in Prince Price’s skull cawed of the breadth of hell in the packed globe; the afternoon broke down, the stumped land heaving, and, like a tree or lightning, a wind, roots up, forked between smoke and slag as the dusk dropped; surrounded by echoes, the red-hot travellers of voices, and the devils from the horned acres, he shuddered on his enemies’ territory as a new night came on in the nightmare of an evening. ‘Let the trees collapse,’ the dusty journeymen said, ‘the boulders flake away and the gorse rot and vanish, earth and grass be swallowed down on to a hill’s v balancing on the grave that proceeds to Eden. Winds on fire, through vault and coffin and fossil we’ll blow a manfull of dust into the garden. Where the serpent sets the tree alight, and the apple falls like a spark out of its skin, a tree leaps up; a scarecrow shines on the cross-boughs, and, by one in the sun, the new trees arise, making an orchard round the crucifix.’ By midnight two more valleys lay beneath him, dark with their two towns in the palms of the mined mountains; a valley, by one in the morning, held Aberbabel in its fist beneath him. He was a young man no longer but a legendary walker, a folk-man walking, with a cricket for a heart; he walked by Aberbabel’s chapel, cut through the graveyard over the unstill headstones, spied a red-cheeked man in a nightshirt two foot above ground.
The valleys passed; out of the water-dipping hills, the moments of mountains, the eleventh valley came up like an hour. And coming out timelessly through the dwarf’s eye of the telescope, through the ring of light like a circle’s wedding on the last hill before the sea, the shape of the hundred orchards magnified with the immaculate diminishing of the moon. This was the spectacle that met the telescope, and the world Marlais saw in the morning following upon the first of the eleven untold adventures: to his both sides the unbroken walls, taller than the beanstalks that married a story on the roof of the world, of stone and earth and beetle and tree; a graveyard before him the ground came to a stop, shot down and down, was lost with the devil in bed, rose shakily to the sea-village road where the blossoms of the orchards hung over the wooden walls and sister-roads ran off into the four white country points; a rock line thus, straight to the hill-top, and the turning graph scored with trees; dip down the county, deep as the history of the final fire burning through the chamber one story over Eden, the fir
st green structure after the red downfall; down, down, like a stone stuck with towns, like the river out of a glass of places, fell his foot-holding hill. He was a folk-man no longer but Marlais the poet walking, over the brink into ruin, up the side of doom, over hell in bed to the red left, till he reached the first of the fields where the unhatched apples were soon to cry fire in a wind from a half-mountain falling westward to the sea. A man-in-a-picture Marlais, by noon’s blow to the centre, stood by a circle of apple-trees and counted the circles that travelled over the shady miles into a clump of villages. He laid himself down in the grass, and noon fell back bruised to the sun; and he slept till a handbell rang over the fields. It was a windless afternoon in the sisters’ orchards, and the fair-headed sister was ringing the bell for tea.
He had come very near to the end of the indescribable journey. The fair girl, in a field sloping seaward three fields and a stile from Marlais, laid out a white cloth on a flat stone. Into one of a number of cups she poured milk and tea, and cut the bread so thin she could see London through the white pieces. She stared hard at the stile and the pruned, transparent hedge, and as Marlais climbed over, ragged and unshaven, his stripped breast burned by the sun, she rose from the grass and smiled and poured tea for him. This was the end to the untold adventures. They sat in the grass by the stone table like lovers at a picnic, too loved to speak, desireless familiars in the shade of the hedge corner. She had shaken a handbell for her sister, and called a lover over eleven valleys to her side. Her many lovers’ cups were empty on the flat stone.
And he who had dreamed that a hundred orchards had broken into flame saw suddenly then in the windless afternoon tongues of fire shoot through the blossom. The trees all around them kindled and crackled in the sun, the birds flew up as a small red cloud grew from each branch, the bark caught like gorse, the unborn, blazing apples whirled down devoured in a flash. The trees were fireworks and torches, smouldered out of the furnace of the fields into a burning arc, cast down their branded fruit like cinders on the charred roads and fields.
Who had dreamed a boy’s dream of her flesh-and-ghost hand in the windless afternoon saw then, at the red height, when the wooden step-roots splintered at the orchard entrance and the armed towers came to grief, that she raised her hand heavily and pointed to the trees and birds. There was a flurry in the sky, of wing and fire and near-to-evening wind in the going below of the burned day. As the new night was built, she smiled as she had done in the short dream eleven valleys old; lame like Pisa, the night leaned on the west walls; no trumpet shall knock the Welsh walls down before the last crack of music; she pointed to her sister in a shadow by the disappearing garden, and the dark-headed figure with crows on her shoulders appeared at Marlais’s side.
This was the end of a story more terrible than the stories of the quick and the undead in mountainous houses on Jarvis hills, and the unnatural valley that Idris waters is a children’s territory to this eleventh valley in the seaward travel. A dream that was no dream skulked there; the real world’s wind came up to kill the fires; a scarecrow pointed to the extinguished trees.
This he had dreamed before the blossom’s burning and the putting-out, before the rising and the salt swinging-in, was a dream no longer near these orchards. He kissed the two secret sisters, and a scarecrow kissed him back. He heard the birds fly down on to his lovers’ shoulders. He saw the fork-tree breast, the barbed eye, and the dry, twig hand.
The End of the River
Twelve generations of the Quincey family, that dogfaced line, had left their mark upon the manor. The walls remained steadfast, but covered with a green fungus that sprouted upon the Quincey habitations, regardless of pruning. The gardener had not neglected the lawns, and the flower-beds, though pale and blowsy, were tended with all his senile care, for Chubb could never die, bound, as he was, so inextricably to the Quincey bosom. But weeds grew thick where weeds were little expected to grow. Ivy climbed up the walls of the coach house, and, in spite of the daily attentions of the youngest housemaid but one, moss invaded the front steps and rust lay thick upon the knocker. Hens upon the bird-limed patch beyond the kitchen died at a premature age, while the eggs they contrived to lay were rarely oval and often of a withered shape and a rather unpleasant mottled colour. The pigs were fed as heartily as pigs could wish, but they grew thin and died. The cows’ milk tasted like vinegar.
The Quincey manor, with its portrait gallery of canine gentlemen, its dining-hall furnished in three periods, and its perilous verandahs from which the bloodless Quinceys, on midsummer nights, would pass their gravish comments on the moon, had resolved to crumble, spurning renovations and improvements, sitting on the camel hill over the disagreeable river, waiting for its end.
And Sir Peregrine, twelfth baron, had nothing but sympathy for it. It had sheltered twelve generations of doggy aristocrats and their litters, had seen small boys grow to be small men, had seen them meet, mate, and lie, at last, in the depths of the family vault, their dead paws on their chests. It had entertained near-royalty, and consequently had allotted a royal bedroom to its left wing. Over all the passions of a most impure world it had spread its painted roofs, and, on one notable occasion, had hidden, in a cellar full of stale wine and rats, the murdered body of poor Sir Thomas.
The manor, thought Sir Peregrine, was old enough to die, had pondered enough upon the human follies and felt no fear of death.
Stroking a three-days’ beard, he placed a deck-chair on the safest part of the verandah, looked up into the sun and turned to the year 1889 in the Quincey Chronicles.
Somewhere a romantic daughter spelt out her Sunday music. His lady, in the quiet of her room, was writing to an Australian cousin. In his apartment the butler was reading from the literary pages of the Observer. Chubb, in the not very far distance, leaned on a garden gate and smoked.
Peregrine, read the twelfth baron from the Chronicles, took up the title on the death of his father, Belphigor, in 1889. In 1902 he married the Honourable Katerina Hautley, second daughter of Lord and Lady Winch of Alltheway Park, Gloucestershire. From this union were born three daughters: Katerina, who died of influenza in her second year, Astasia, and Phoebe Mary. Sir Peregrine was a colonel in the Territorial Army up to the Great War (1914-1918), and an official in the Ministry of War during those troubled years. He was elected Master of the Tidhampton Hunt in 1920, following upon the death of Alderman Alcock, and in 1922 broke his arm while riding with the hounds. In the following year Phoebe Mary married the Honourable Douglas Dougal, son of Sir Douglas and Lady Dougal of Halfandhalf Castle, Perth. In 1924 Phoebe Mary died in childbirth.
That was all. The Chronicles of the previous Quincey generations were written in detail and with an ornamentation of style that did credit to the literary accomplishments of the family. But Sir Peregrine dealt in facts, and facts alone. His life until that moment, but shorn of its hopes and foolishness, its strength and weaknesses, delights and dolours, spread over half a page of the ponderous book. This little life set between the eccentricities of the longwinded Belphigor and…
Sir Peregrine put the book down.
Chubb was still leaning and smoking. The smoke rose up vertically into the windless air. Chubb had not moved. His eyes rested on the river which went Sir Peregrine knew not where, meandering, he supposed, through a world of fields and rushes, making noise over pebbles, till it came to a sudden stop. He had always called it the one river that did not wind safely to the sea.
Astasia had stopped her playing.
Life was good, he found, on most Sunday afternoons. But to-day he was restless, and could not sit, as he had for so many years, dreamily upon the verandah, feeling the world grow and hum around him, hearing the music of a sweetly untuned piano or the songs of birds.
The day was beautiful. Clouds sailed on the sky. There was a warm sun. He looked down to where the Chronicles lay at his feet, and knew, quite suddenly and almost happily, all that was the matter. The time had come for the dissolution of the Quinceys, fo
r the fall of their manor and the end of their dynasty.
Sir Peregrine, lifting the book, took out a pencil used to a stump through the solving of innumerable crossword puzzles.
In 1924 he read again, Phoebe Mary died in childbirth.
Phoebe Mary had been his favourite daughter. He had cried for six nights after she was buried. Then he, too, had buried her, under the clouds and mists of his mind. Once he had forgotten her name. Phoebe Mary? he said, and had fallen to wondering who that could be with such a name.
Phoebe Mary died in childbirth.
The end of the Quinceys, he wrote with the pencil.
Then he added the date.
In the garden he looked around him, at the flowers whose colours were as even as those in a toy paint box. The little wind there was moved the petals so that they seemed, to him, to breathe for the last time the sweet air of the surrounding beds. He knew they were aware of climax, and loved them for their serenity. Chubb had nurtured them, and the end of the world would see the gardener like a god, waiting in a woman’s blue smock, for his reward.
The end of the world was the end of the manor. And Chubb, though he would say nothing of it, neither affirm nor contradict, had tended the first bed for the first young baron.
Sir Peregrine found him at the end of the path. The gardener did not move. His arms were resting on the gate that led to the seven fields going down to the river.
Sir Peregrine, wiping a remnant of dinner from his ancient waistcoat, looked down to where the water rolled over the dirty stones. At the end of the water was the end of everything. Today he was to walk over the fields and follow the river where it went, through towns or countries, over hills or under, until the sudden stop.
The garden was humming behind them.
The clouds moved on softly to some stop.