by Dylan Thomas
‘Another!’ said Mr. Roberts.
‘—made his way through the crowd and walked up to the door of the church and sent a message inside. John William Hughes and Henry William Hughes and the best man came out, and they all talked to the policeman, waving their arms and pointing to the taxi with Mary and the bridesmaids and the cousin in it.
‘John William Hughes ran down the path to the taxi and shouted through the window: “Dr. Lloyd is dead! We’ll have to cancel the wedding.”
‘Henry William Hughes followed him and opened the taxi door and said: “You must drive home Mary. We’ve got to go to the police station.”
‘“And the mortuary,” his father said.
‘So the taxi drove the bride-to-be home, and the sisters cried worse than she did all the way.’
‘That’s a sad end,’ said Mr. Roberts with appreciation. He poured himself another drink.
‘It isn’t really the end,’ Mr. Evans said, ‘because the wedding wasn’t just cancelled. It never came off.’
‘But why?’ asked Mr. Humphries, who had followed the story with a grave expression, even when Mr. Phillips fell in the gutter. ‘Why should the doctor’s death stop everything? She could get someone else to give her away. I’d have done it myself.’
‘It wasn’t the doctor’s death, but where and how he died,’ said Mr. Evans. ‘He died in bed in a bed-sitting-room in the arms of a certain lady. A woman of the town.’
‘Kiss me!’ Mr. Roberts said. ‘Seventy-five years old. I’m glad you asked us to remember his age, Mr. Evans.’
‘But how did Mary Phillips come to live in “Bellevue”? You haven’t told us that,’ Mr. Thomas said.
‘The William Hugheses wouldn’t have the niece of a man who died in those circumstances—’
‘However complimentary to his manhood,’ Mr. Humphries said, stammering.
‘—marry into their family, so she went back to live with her father and he reformed at once—oh! she had a temper those days—and one day she met a traveller in grain and pigs’ food and she married him out of spite. They came to live in “Bellevue,”and when Mr. Phillips died he left his money to the chapel, so Mary got nothing after all.’
‘Nor her husband either. What did you say he travelled in?’ asked Mr. Roberts.
‘Grain and pigs’ food.’
After that, Mr. Humphries read his biography, which was long and sad and detailed and in good prose; and Mr. Roberts told a story about the slums, which could not be included in the book.
Then Mr. Evans looked at his watch. ‘It’s midnight. I promised Maud not after midnight. Where’s the cat? I’ve got to put him out; he tears the cushions. Not that I mind. Sambo! Sambo!’
‘There he is, Mr. Evans, under the table.’
‘Like poor Mary,’ said Mr. Roberts.
Mr. Humphries, Mr. Roberts, and young Mr. Thomas collected their hats and coats from the bannister.
‘Do you know what time it is, Emlyn?’ Mrs. Evans called from upstairs.
Mr. Roberts opened the door and hurried out.
‘I’m coming now, Maud, I’m just saying good night. Good night,’ Mr. Evans said in a loud voice. ‘Next Friday, nine sharp,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll polish my story up. We’ll finish the second chapter and get going on the third. Good night, comrades.’
‘Emlyn! Emlyn!’ called Mrs. Evans.
‘Good night, Mary,’ said Mr. Roberts to the closed door.
The three friends walked down the drive.
Who Do You Wish Was With Us?
Birds in the Crescent trees were singing; boys on bicycles were ringing their bells and pedalling down the slight slope to make the whirrers in their wheels startle the women gabbing on the sunny doorsteps; small girls on the pavement, wheeling young brothers and sisters in prams, were dressed in their summer best and with coloured ribbons; on the circular swing in the public playground, children from the snot school spun themselves happy and sick, crying ‘Swing us!’ and ‘Swing us!’ and ‘Ooh! I’m falling!’; the morning was as varied and bright as though it were an international or a jubilee when Raymond Price and I, flannelled and hatless, with sticks and haversacks, set out together to walk to the Worm’s Head. Striding along, in step, through the square of the residential Uplands, we brushed by young men in knife-creased whites and showing-off blazers, and hockey-legged girls with towels round their necks and celluloid sun-glasses, and struck a letterbox with our sticks, and bullied our way through a crowd of day-trippers who waited at the stop of the Gower-bound buses, and stepped over luncheon baskets, not caring if we trod in them.
‘Why can’t those bus lizards walk?’ Ray said.
‘They were born too tired,’ I said.
We went on up Sketty Road at a great speed, our haversacks jumping on our backs. We rapped on every gate to give a terrific walker’s benediction to the people in the choking houses. Like a breath of fresh air we passed a man in office pin-stripes standing, with a dog-lead in his hand, whistling at a corner. Tossing the sounds and smells of the town from us with the swing of our shoulders and loose-limbed strides, half-way up the road we heard women on an outing call ‘Mutt and Jeff!’ for Ray was tall and thin and I was short. Streamers flew out of the charabanc. Ray, sucking hard at his bulldog pipe, walked too fast to wave and did not even smile. I wondered whom I had missed among the waving women bowling over the rise. My love to come, with a paper cap on, might have sat at the back of the outing, next to the barrel; but, once away from the familiar roads and swinging towards the coast, I forgot her face and voice, that had been made at night, and breathed the country air in.
‘There’s a different air here. You breathe. It’s like the country,’ Ray said, ‘and a bit of the sea mixed. Draw it down; it’ll blow off the nicotine.’
He spat in his hand. ‘Still town grey,’ he said.
He put back the spit in his mouth and we walked on with our heads high.
By this time we were three miles from the town. The semi-detached houses, with a tin-roofed garage each and a kennel in the back plot and a mowed lawn, with sometimes a hanging coco-nut on a pole, or a bird-bath, or a bush like a peacock, grew fewer when we reached the outskirts of the common.
Ray stopped and sighed and said: ‘Wait half a sec, I want to fill the old pipe.’ He held a match to it as though we were in a storm.
Hotfaced and wet-browed, we grinned at each other. Already the day had brought us close as truants; we were running away, or walking with pride and mischief, arrogantly from the streets that owned us into the unpredictable country. I thought it was against our fate to stride in the sun without the shop-windows dazzling or the music of mowers rising above the birds. A bird’s dropping fell on a fence. It was one in the eye for the town. A sheep cried ‘Baa!’ out of sight, and that would show the Uplands. I did not know what it would show. ‘A couple of wanderers in wild Wales,’ Ray said, winking, and a lorry carrying cement drove past us towards the golf links. He slapped my haversack and straightened his shoulders. ‘Come on, Let’s be going.’ We walked uphill faster than before.
A party of cyclists had pulled up on the roadside and were drinking dandelion and burdock from paper cups. I saw the empty bottles in a bush. All the boys wore singlets and shorts, and the girls wore open cricket shirts and boys’ long grey trousers, with safety-pins for clips at the bottoms.
‘There’s room for one behind, sonny boy,’ a girl on a tandem said to me.
‘It won’t be a stylish marriage,’ Ray said.
‘That was quick,’ I told Ray as we walked away from them and the boys began to sing.
‘God, I like this!’ said Ray. On the first rise of the dusty road through the spreading heathered common, he shaded his eyes and looked all round him, smoking like a chimney and pointing with his Irish stick at the distant clumps of trees and sights of the sea between them. ‘Down there is Oxwich, but you can’t see it. That’s a farm. See the roof? No, there, follow my finger. This is the life,’ he said.
Side by
side, thrashing the low banks, we marched down the very middle of the road, and Ray saw a rabbit running. ‘You wouldn’t think this was near town. It’s wild.’
We pointed out the birds whose names we knew, and the rest of the names we made up. I saw gulls and crows, though the crows may have been rooks, and Ray said that thrushes and swallows and skylarks flew above us as we hurried and hummed.
He stopped to pull some blades of grass. ‘They should be straws,’ he said, and put them in his mouth next to his pipe. ‘God, the sky’s blue! Think of me, in the G.W.R. when all this is about. Rabbits and fields and farms. You wouldn’t think I’d suffered to look at me now. I could do anything, I could drive cows, I could plough a field.’
His father and sister and brother were dead, and his mother sat all day in a wheel-chair, crippled with arthritis. He was ten years older than I was. He had a lined and bony face and a tight, crooked mouth. His upper lip had vanished.
Alone on the long road, the common in the heat mist wasting for miles on either side, we walked on under the afternoon sun, growing thirsty and drowsy but never slowing our pace. Soon the cycling party rode by, three boys and three girls and the one girl on the tandem, all laughing and ringing.
‘How’s Shanks’s pony?’
‘We’ll see you on the way back.’
‘You’ll be walking still.’
‘Like a crutch?’ they shouted.
Then they were gone. The dust settled again. Their bells rang faintly through the wood around the road before us. The wild common, six miles and a bit from the town, lay back without a figure on it, and, under the trees, smoking hard to keep the gnats away, we leant against a trunk and talked like men, on the edge of an untrodden place, who have not seen another man for years.
‘Do you remember Curly Parry?’
I had seen him only two days ago in the snooker-room, but his dimpled face was fading, even as I thought of him, into the colours of our walk, the ash-white of the road, the common heathers, the green and blue of fields and fragmentary sea, and the memory of his silly voice was lost in the sounds of birds and unreasonably moving leaves in the lack of wind.
‘I wonder what he’s doing now? He should get out more in the open air, he’s a proper town boy. Look at us here.’ Ray waved his pipe at the trees and leafy sky. ‘I wouldn’t change this for High Street.’
I looked at us there; a boy and a young man, with faces, under the strange sunburn, pale from the cramped town, out of breath and hot-footed, pausing in the early afternoon on a road through a popular wood, and I could see the unaccustomed happiness in Ray’s eyes and the impossible friendliness in mine, and Ray protested against his history each time he wondered or pointed in the country scene and I had more love in me than I could ever want or use.
‘Yes, look at us here,’ I said, ‘dawdling about. Worm’s Head is twelve miles off. Don’t you want to hear a tramcar, Ray? That’s a wood pigeon. See! The boys are out on the streets with the sports special now. Paper! paper! I bet you Curl’s potting the red. Come on! come on!’
‘Eyes right!’ said Ray, ‘I’s b—d! Remember that story?’
Up the road and out of the wood, and a double-decker roared behind us.
‘The Rhossilli bus is coming,’ I said.
We both held up our sticks to stop it.
‘Why did you stop the bus?’ Ray said, when we were sitting upstairs. ‘This was a walking holiday.’
‘You stopped it as well.’
We sat in front like two more drivers.
‘Can’t you mind the ruts?’ I said.
‘You’re wobbling,’ said Ray.
We opened our haversacks and shared the sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and meat paste and drank from the thermos in turns.
‘When we get home don’t say we took a bus,’ I said. ‘Pretend we walked all day. There goes Oxwich! It doesn’t seem far, does it? We’d have had beards by now.’
The bus passed the cyclists crawling up a hill. ‘Like a tow along?’ I shouted, but they couldn’t hear. The girl on the tandem was a long way behind the others.
We sat with our lunch on our laps, forgetting to steer, letting the driver in his box beneath drive where and how he liked on the switch-back road, and saw grey chapels and weather-worn angels; at the feet of the hills farthest from the sea, pretty, pink cottages—horrible, I thought, to live in, for grass and trees would imprison me more securely than any jungle of packed and swarming streets and chimney-roosting roofs—and petrol pumps and hayricks and a man on a cart-horse standing stock still in a ditch, surrQunded by flies.
‘This is the way to see the country.’
The bus, on a narrow hill, sent two haversacked walkers bounding to the shelter of the hedge, where they stretched out their arms and drew their bellies in.
‘That might have been you and me.’
We looked back happily at the men against the hedge. They climbed on to the road, slow as snails continued walking, and grew smaller.
At the entrance to Rhossilli we pushed the conductor’s bell and stopped the bus, and walked, with springing steps, the few hundred yards to the village.
‘We’ve done it in pretty good time,’ said Ray.
‘I think it’s a record,’ I said.
Laughing on the cliff above the very long golden beach, we pointed out to each other, as though the other were blind, the great rock of the Worm’s Head. The sea was out. We crossed over on slipping stones and stood, at last, triumphantly on the windy top. There was monstrous, thick grass there that made us spring-heeled, and we laughed and bounced on it, scaring the sheep who ran up and down the battered sides like goats. Even on this calmest day a wind blew along the Worm. At the end of the humped and serpentine body, more gulls than I had ever seen before cried over their new dead and the droppings of ages. On the point, the sound of my quiet voice was scooped and magnified into a hollow shout, as though the wind around me had made a shell or cave, with blue, intangible roof and sides, as tall and wide as all the arched sky, and the flapping gulls were made thunderous. Standing there, legs apart, one hand on my hip, shading my eyes like Raleigh in some picture, I thought myself alone in the epileptic moment near bad sleep, when the legs grow long and sprout into the night and the heart hammers to wake the neighbours and breath is a hurricane through the elastic room. Instead of becoming small on the great rock poised between sky and sea, I felt myself the size of a breathing building, and only Ray in the world could match my lovely bellow as I said: ‘Why don’t we live here always? Always and always. Build a bloody house and live like bloody kings!’ The word bellowed among the squawking birds, they carried it off to the headland in the drums of their wings; like a tower, Ray pranced on the unsteady edge of a separate rock and beat about with his stick, which could turn into snakes or flames; and we sank to the ground, the rubbery, gull-limed grass, the sheep-pilled stones, the pieces of bones and feathers, and crouched at the extreme point of the Peninsula. We were still for so long that the dirty-grey gulls calmed down, and some settled near us.
Then we finished our food.
‘This isn’t like any other place,’ I said. I was almost my own size again, five feet five and eight stone, and my voice didn’t sweep any longer up to the amplifying sky. ‘It could be in the middle of the sea. You could think the Worm was moving, couldn’t you? Guide it to Ireland, Ray. We’ll see W. B. Yeats and you can kiss the Blarney. We’ll have a fight in Belfast.’
Ray looked out of place on the end of the rock. He would not make himself easy and loll in the sun and roll on to his side to stare down a precipice into the sea, but tried to sit upright as though he were in a hard chair and had nothing to do with his hands. He fiddled with his tame stick and waited for the day to be orderly, for the Head to grow paths and for railings to shoot up on the scarred edges.
‘It’s too wild for a townee,’ I said.
‘Townee yourself! Who stopped the bus?’
‘Aren’t you glad we stopped it? We’d still be walking, like
Felix. You’re just pretending you don’t like it here. You were dancing on the edge.’
‘Only a couple of hops.’
‘I know what it is, you don’t like the furniture. There’s not enough sofas and chairs,’ I said.
‘You think you’re a country boy; you don’t know a cow from a horse.’
We began to quarrel, and soon Ray felt at home again and forgot the monotonous out-of-doors. If snow had fallen suddenly he would not have noticed. He drew down into himself, and the rock, to him, became dark as a house with the blinds drawn. The sky-high shapes that had danced and bellowed at birds crept down to hide, two small town mutterers in a hollow.
I knew what was going to happen by the way Ray lowered his head and brought his shoulders up so that he looked like a man with no neck, and by the way he sucked his breath in between his teeth. He stared at his dusty white shoes and I knew what shapes his imagination made of them; they were the feet of a man dead in bed, and he was going to talk about his brother. Sometimes, leaning against a fence when we watched football, I caught him staring at his own thin hand; he was thinning it more and more, removing the flesh, seeing Harry’s hand in front of him, with the bones appearing through the sensitive skin. If he lost the world around him for a moment, if I left him alone, if he cast his eyes down, if his hand lost its grip on the hard, real fence or the hot bowl of his pipe, he would be back in ghastly bedrooms, carrying cloths and basins and listening for handbells.
‘I’ve never seen such a lot of gulls,’ I said. ‘Have you ever seen such a lot? Such a lot of gulls. You try and count them. Two of them are fighting up there; look, pecking each other like hens in the air. What’ll you bet the big one wins? Old dirty beak! I wouldn’t like to have had his dinner, a bit of sheep and dead gull.’ I swore at myself for saying the word ‘dead.’ ‘Wasn’t it gay in town this morning?’ I said.
Ray stared at his hand. Nothing could stop him now. ‘Wasn’t it gay in town this morning? Everybody laughing and smiling in their summer outfits. The kids were playing and everybody was happy; they almost had the band out. I used to hold my father down on the bed when he had fits. I had to change the sheets twice a day for my brother, there was blood on everything. I watched him getting thinner and thinner; in the end you could lift him up with one hand. And his wife wouldn’t go to see him because he coughed in her face, Mother couldn’t move, and I had to cook as well, cook and nurse and change the sheets and hold father down when he got mad. It’s embittered my outlook,’ he said.