by Dylan Thomas
Mr. Evans raised his eyebrows and whistled. ‘Whew! boys.’ He pretended to fan his face with his tie. Then his hand stopped still in the air. ‘She was used to a big house,’ he said, ‘with servants.’
Mr. Roberts brought out pencils and fountain pens from his side pocket. ‘Where’s the priceless MS.? Tempus is fugiting.’
Mr. Humphries and Mr. Thomas put notebooks on their knees, took a pencil each, and watched Mr. Evans open the door of the grandfather clock. Beneath the swinging weights was a heap of papers tied in a blue bow. These Mr. Evans placed on the desk.
‘I call order,’ said Mr. Roberts. ‘Let’s see where we were. Have you got the minutes, Mr. Thomas?’
‘“Where Tawe Flows,”’ said Mr. Thomas, ‘“a Novel of Provincial Life. Chapter One: a cross-section description of the town, Dockland, Slums, Suburbia, etc.” We finished that. The title decided upon was: Chapter One, “The Public Town.” Chapter Two is to be called “The Private Lives,” and Mr. Humphries has proposed the following: “Each of the collaborators take one character from each social sphere or stratum of the town and introduce him to the readers with a brief history of his life up to the point at which we commence the story, i.e. the winter of this very year. These introductions of the characters, hereafter to be regarded as the principal protagonists, and their biographical chronicles shall constitute the second chapter.” Any questions, gentlemen?’
Mr. Humphries agreed with all he had said. His character was a sensitive schoolmaster of advanced opinions, who was misjudged and badly treated.
‘No questions,’ said Mr. Evans. He was in charge of Suburbia. He rustled his notes and waited to begin.
‘I haven’t written anything yet,’ Mr. Roberts said, ‘it’s all in my head.’ He had chosen the Slums.
‘Personally,’ said Mr. Thomas, ‘I haven’t made up my mind whether to have a barmaid or a harlot.’
‘What about a barmaid who’s a harlot too?’ Mr. Roberts suggested. ‘Or perhaps we could have a couple of characters each? I’d like to do an alderman. And a gold-digger.’
‘Who had a word for them, Mr. Humphries?’ said Mr. Thomas.
‘The Greeks.’
Mr. Roberts nudged Mr. Evans and whispered: ‘I just thought of an opening sentence for my bit. Listen Emlyn. “On the rickety table in the corner of the crowded, dilapidated room, a stranger might have seen, by the light of the flickering candle in the gin-bottle, a broken cup, full of sick or custard.”’
‘Be serious, Ted,’ said Mr. Evans laughing. ‘You wrote that sentence down.’
‘No, I swear, it came to me just like that!’ He flicked his fingers. ‘And who’s been reading my notes?’
‘Have you put anything on paper yourself, Mr. Thomas?’
‘Not yet, Mr. Evans.’ He had been writing, that week, the story of a cat who jumped over a woman the moment she died and turned her into a vampire. He had reached the part of the story where the woman was an undead children’s governess, but he could not think how to fit it into the novel.
‘There’s no need, is there,’ he asked, ‘for us to avoid the fantastic altogether?’
‘Wait a bit! wait a bit!’ said Mr. Humphries, ‘let’s get our realism straight. Mr. Thomas will be making all the characters Blue Birds before we know where we are. One thing at a time. Has anyone got the history of his character ready?’ He had his biography in his hand, written in red ink. The writing was scholarly and neat and small.
‘I think my character is ready to take the stage,’ said Mr. Evans. ‘But I haven’t written it out. I’ll have to refer to the notes and make the rest up out of my head. It’s a very silly story.’
‘Well, you must begin, of course,’ said Mr. Humphries with disappointment.
‘Everybody’s biography is silly,’ Mr. Roberts said. ‘My own would make a cat laugh.’
Mr. Humphries said: ‘I must disagree there. The life of that mythical common denominator, the man in the street, is dull as ditchwater, Mr. Roberts. Capitalist society has made him a mere bundle of repressions and useless habits under that symbol of middle-class divinity, the bowler.’ He looked quickly away from the notes in the palm of his hand. ‘The ceaseless toil for bread and butter, the ogres of unemployment, the pettifogging gods of gentility, the hollow lies of the marriage bed. Marriage,’ he said, dropping his ash on the carpet, ‘legal monogamous prostitution.’
‘Whoa! whoa! there he goes!’
‘Mr. Humphries is on his hobby-horse again.’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Mr. Evans, ‘that I lack our friend’s extensive vocabulary. Have pity on a poor amateur. You’re shaming my little story before I begin.’
‘I still think the life of the ordinary man is most extraordinary,’ Mr. Roberts said, ‘take my own …’
‘As the secretary,’ said Mr. Thomas, ‘I vote we take Mr. Evans’s story. We must try to get Tawe finished for the spring list.’
‘My To-morrow and To-morrow was published in the summer in a heat wave,’ Mr. Humphries said.
Mr. Evans coughed, looked into the fire, and began.
‘Her name is Mary,’ he said, ‘but that’s not her name really. I’m calling her that because she is a real woman and we don’t want any libel. She lives in a house called “Bellevue,” but that’s not the proper name, of course. A villa by any other name, Mr. Humphries. I chose her for my character because her life is a little tragedy, but it’s not without its touches of humour either. It’s almost Russian. Mary—Mary Morgan now but she was Mary Phillips before she was married and that comes later, that’s the anti-climax—wasn’t a suburbanite from birth, she didn’t live under the shadow of the bowler, like you and me. Or like me, anyway. I was born in “The Poplars” and now I’m in “Lavengro.” From bowler to bowler, though I must say, apropos of Mr. Humphries’ diatribe, and I’m the first to admire his point of view, that the everyday man’s just as interesting a character as the neurotic poets of Bloomsbury.’
‘Remind me to shake your hand,’ said Mr. Roberts.
‘You’ve been reading the Sunday papers,’ said Mr. Humphries accusingly.
‘You two argue the toss later on,’ Mr. Thomas said.
‘“Is the Ordinary Man a Mouse?” Now, what about Mary?’
‘Mary Phillips,’ continued Mr. Evans, ‘—and any more interruptions from the intelligentsia and I’ll get Mr. Roberts to tell you the story of his operations, no pardons granted—lived on a big farm in Carmarthenshire, I’m not going to tell you exactly where, and her father was a widower. He had any amount of what counts and he drank like a fish, but he was always a gentleman with it. Now, now! forget the class war, I could see it smouldering. He came of a very good, solid family, but he raised his elbow, that’s all there is to it.’
Mr. Roberts said: ‘Huntin’, fishin’, and boozin’.’
‘No, he wasn’t quite county and he wasn’t a nouveau riche either. No Philippstein about him, though I’m not anti-Semite. You’ve only got to think of Einstein and Freud. There are bad Christians, too. He was just what I’m telling you, if you’d only let me, a man of good farming stock who’d made his pile and now he was spending it.’
‘Liquidating it.’
‘He’d only got one child, and that was Mary, and she was so prim and proper she couldn’t bear to see him the worse for drink. Every night he came home, and he was always the worse, she’d shut herself in her bedroom and hear him rolling about the house and calling for her and breaking the china sometimes. But only sometimes, and he wouldn’t have hurt a hair of her head. She was about eighteen and a fine-looking girl, not a film star, mind, not Mr. Roberts’s type at all, and perhaps she had an Oedipus complex, but she hated her father and she was ashamed of him.’
‘What’s my type, Mr. Evans?’
‘Don’t pretend not to know, Mr. Roberts. Mr. Evans means the sort you can take home and show her your stamp collection.’
‘I will have hush,’ said Mr. Thomas.
‘’Ave ’ush, is the phrase,�
�� Mr. Roberts said. ‘Mr. Thomas, you’re afraid we’ll think you’re patronizing the lower classes if you drop your aspirates.’
‘No nasturtiums, Mr. Roberts,’ said Mr. Humphries.
‘Mary Phillips fell in love with a young man whom I shall call Marcus David,’ Mr. Evans went on, still staring at the fire, avoiding his friends’ eyes, and speaking to the burning pictures, ‘and she told her father: “Father, Marcus and I want to be engaged. I’m bringing him home one night for supper, and you must promise me that you’ll be sober.”
‘He said: “I’m always sober!”but he wasn’t sober when he said it, and after a time he promised.
“If you break your word, I’ll never forgive you,”Mary said to him.
‘Marcus was a wealthy farmer’s son from another district, a bit of a Valentino in a bucolic way, if you can imagine that. She invited him to supper, and he came, very handsome, with larded hair. The servants were out. Mr. Phillips had gone to a mart that morning and hadn’t returned. She answered the door herself. It was a winter’s evening.
‘Picture the scene. A prim, well-bred country girl, full of fixations and phobias, proud as a duchess, and blushing like a dairymaid, opening the door to her beloved and seeing him standing there on the pitch-black threshold, shy and handsome. This is from my notes.
‘Her future hung on that evening as on a thread. “Come in,” she insisted. They didn’t kiss, but she wanted him to bow and print his lips on her hand. She took him over the house, which had been specially cleaned and polished, and showed him the case with Swansea china in it. There wasn’t a portrait gallery, so she showed him the snaps of her mother in the hall and the photograph of her father, tall and young and sober, in the suit he hunted otters in. And all the time she was proudly parading their possessions, attempting to prove to Marcus, whose father was a J.P., that her background was prosperous enough for her to be his bride, she was waiting fearfully the entrance of her father.
‘“O God,” she was praying, when they sat down to a cold supper,”that my father will arrive presentable.” Call her a snob, if you will, but remember that the life of country gentry, or near gentry, was bound and dedicated by the antiquated totems and fetishes of possession. Over supper she told him her family tree and hoped the supper was to his taste. It should have been a hot supper, but she didn’t want him to see the servants who were old and dirty. Her father wouldn’t change them because they’d always been with him, and there you see the Toryism of this particular society rampant. To cut a long story (this is only the gist, Mr. Thomas), they were half-way through supper, and their conversation was becoming more intimate, and she had almost forgotten her father, when the front door burst open and Mr. Phillips staggered into the passage, drunk as a judge. The dining-room door was ajar and they could see him plainly. I will not try to describe Mary’s kaleidoscopic emotions as her father rocked and mumbled in a thick voice in the passage. He was a big man—I forgot to tell you—six foot and eighteen stone.
‘”Quick! quick! under the table!”she whispered urgently, and she pulled Marcus by the hand and they crouched under the table. What bewilderment Marcus experienced we shall never know.
‘Mr. Phillips came in and saw nobody and sat down at the table and finished all the supper. He licked both plates clean, and under the table they heard him swearing and guzzling. Every time Marcus fidgeted, Mary said: “Shhh!”
‘When there was nothing left to eat, Mr. Phillips wandered out of the room. They saw his legs. Then, somehow, he climbed upstairs, saying words that made Mary shudder under the table, words of three syllables.’
‘Give us three guesses,’ said Mr. Roberts.
‘And she heard him go into his bedroom. She and Marcus crept out of hiding and sat down in front of their empty plates.
‘“I don’t know how to apologise, Mr. David,” she said, and she was nearly crying.
‘“There’s nothing the matter,” he said, he was an amenable young man by all accounts, “he’s only been to the mart at Carmarthen. I don’t like t.t.s myself.”
‘“Drink makes men sodden beasts,” she said.
‘He said she had nothing to worry about and that he didn’t mind, and she offered him fruit.
‘“What will you think of us, Mr. David? I’ve never seen him like that before.”
‘The little adventure brought them closer together, and soon they were smiling at one another and her wounded pride was almost healed again, but suddenly Mr. Phillips opened his bedroom door and charged downstairs, eighteen stone of him, shaking the house.
‘“Go away!” she cried softly to Marcus, “please go away before he comes in!”
‘There wasn’t time. Mr. Phillips stood in the passage in the nude.
‘She dragged Marcus under the table again, and she covered her eyes not to see her father. She could hear him fumbling in the hall-stand for an umbrella, and she knew what he was going to do. He was going outside to obey a call of nature. “O God,”she prayed, “let him find an umbrella and go out. Not in the passage! Not in the passage!” They heard him shout for his umbrella. She uncovered her eyes and saw him pulling the front door down. He tore it off its hinges and held it flat above him and tottered out into the dark.
‘“Hurry! please hurry!” she said. “Leave me now, Mr. David.” She drove him out from under the table.
‘“Please, please go now,” she said, “we’ll never meet again. Leave me to my shame.” She began to cry, and he ran out of the house. And she stayed under the table all night.’
‘Is that all?’ said Mr. Roberts. ‘A very moving incident, Emlyn. How did you come by it?’
‘How can it be all?’ said Mr. Humphries. ‘It doesn’t explain how Mary Phillips reached “Bellevue.” We’ve left her under a table in Carmarthenshire.’
‘I think Marcus is a fellow to be despised,’ Mr. Thomas said. ‘I’d never leave a girl like that, would you, Mr. Humphries?’
‘Under a table, too. That’s the bit I like. That’s a position. Perspectives were different,’ said Mr. Roberts, ‘in those days. That narrow puritanism is a spent force. Imagine Mrs. Evans under the table. And what happened afterwards? Did the girl die of cramp?’
Mr. Evans turned from the fire to reprove him. ‘Be as flippant as you will, but the fact remains that an incident like that has a lasting effect on a proud, sensitive girl like Mary. I’m not defending her sensitivity, the whole basis of her pride is outmoded. The social system, Mr. Roberts, is not in the box. I’m telling you an incident that occurred. Its social implications are outside our concern.’
‘I’m put in my place, Mr. Evans.’
‘What happened to Mary then?’
‘Don’t vex him, Mr. Thomas, he’ll bite your head off.’
Mr. Evans went out for more parsnip wine, and, returning, said:
‘What happened next? Oh! Mary left her father, of course. She said she’d never forgive him, and she didn’t, so she went to live with her uncle in Cardiganshire, a Dr. Emyr Lloyd. He was a J.P. too, and rolling in it, about seventy-five—now, remember the age—with a big practice and influential friends. One of his oldest friends was John William Hughes—that’s not his name—the London draper, who had a country house near his. Remember what the great Caradoc Evans says? The Cardies always go back to Wales to die when they’ve rooked the cockneys and made a packet.
‘And the only son, Henry William Hughes, who was a nicely educated young man, fell in love with Mary as soon as he saw her and she forgot Marcus and her shame under the table and she fell in love with him. Now don’t look disappointed before I begin, this isn’t a love story. But they decided to get married, and John William Hughes gave his consent because Mary’s uncle was one of the most respected men in the country and her father had money and it would come to her when he died and he was doing his best.
‘They were to be married quietly in London. Everything was arranged. Mr. Phillips wasn’t invited. Mary had her trousseau. Dr. Lloyd was to give her away. Beatrice and Betti
William Hughes were bridesmaids. Mary went up to London with Beatrice and Betti and stayed with a cousin, and Henry William Hughes stayed in the flat above his father’s shop, and the day before the wedding Dr. Lloyd arrived from the country, saw Mary for tea, and had dinner with John William Hughes. I wonder who paid for it, too. Then Dr. Lloyd retired to his hotel. I’m giving you these trivial details so that you can see how orderly and ordinary everything was. There the actors were, safe and sure.
‘Next day, just before the ceremony was to begin, Mary and her cousin, whose name and character are extraneous, and the two sisters, they were both plain and thirty, waited impatiently for Dr. Lloyd to call on them. The minutes passed by, Mary was crying, the sisters were sulking, the cousin was getting in everybody’s way, but the doctor didn’t come. The cousin telephoned the doctor’s hotel, but she was told he hadn’t spent the night there. Yes, the clerk in the hotel said, he knew the doctor was going to a wedding. No, his bed hadn’t been slept in. The clerk suggested that perhaps he was waiting at the church.
‘The taxi was ticking away, and that worried Beatrice and Betti, and at last the sisters and the cousin and Mary drove together to the church. A crowd had gathered outside. The cousin poked her head out of the taxi window and asked a policeman to call a church-warden, and the warden said that Dr. Lloyd wasn’t there and the groom and the best man were waiting. You can imagine Mary Phillips’s feelings when she saw a commotion at the church door and a policeman leading her father out. Mr. Phillips had his pockets full of bottles, and how he ever got into the church in the first place no one knew.’
‘That’s the last straw,’ said Mr. Roberts.
‘Beatrice and Betti said to her: “Don’t cry, Mary, the policeman’s taking him away. Look! he’s fallen in the gutter! There’s a splash! Don’t take on, it’ll be all over soon. You’ll be Mrs. Henry William Hughes.” They were doing their best.
‘“You can marry without Dr. Lloyd,”the cousin told her, and she brightened through her tears—anybody would be crying—and at that moment another policeman—’