by Dylan Thomas
The boy invited him to play. A friendly family stood waiting some way off, the tousled women with their dresses tucked in their knickers, the bare-footed men in shirt-sleeves, a number of children in slips and cut-down underwear. He bowled bitterly to a father standing with a tray before the wicket of hats. ‘The lone wolf playing ball,’ he said to himself as the tray whirled. Chasing the ball towards the sea, passing undressing women with a rush and a wink, tripping over a castle into a coil of wet girls lying like snakes, soaking his shoes as he grabbed the ball off a wave, he felt his happiness return in a boast of the body, and, ‘Look out, Duckworth, here’s a fast one coming,’ he cried to the mother behind the hats. The ball bounced on a boy’s head. In and out of the scattered families, among the sandwiches and clothes, uncles and mothers fielded the bouncing ball. A bald man, with his shirt hanging out, returned it in the wrong direction, and a collie carried it into the sea. Now it was mother’s turn with the tray. Tray and ball together flew over her head. An uncle in a panama smacked the ball to the dog, who swam with it out of reach. They offered the young man egg-and-cress sandwiches and warm stout, and he and an uncle and a father sat down on the Evening Post until the sea touched their feet.
Alone again, hot and unhappy, for the boasting minute when he ran among the unknown people lying and running loudly at peace was struck away, like a ball, he said, into the sea, he walked to a space on the beach where a hell-fire preacher on a box marked ‘Mr. Matthews’ was talking to a congregation of expressionless women. Boys with pea-shooters sat quietly near him. A ragged man collected nothing in a cap. Mr. Matthews shook his cold hands, stormed at the holiday, and cursed the summer from his shivering box. He cried for a new warmth. The strong sun shone into his bones, and he buttoned his coat collar. Valley children, with sunken, impudent eyes, quick tongues and singing voices, chest thin as shells, gathered round the Punch and Judy and the Stop Me tricycles, and he denied them all. He contradicted the girls in their underclothes combing and powdering, and the modest girls cleverly dressing under tents of towels.
As Mr. Matthews cast down the scarlet town, drove out the bare-bellied boys who danced around the ice-cream man, and wound the girls’ sunburnt thighs about with his black overcoat—‘Down! down!’ he cried, ‘the night is upon us’—the young man in dejection stood, with a shadow at his shoulder, and thought of Porthcawl’s Coney Beach, where his friends were rocking with girls on the Giant Racer or tearing in the Ghost Train down the skeletons’ tunnel. Leslie Bird would have his arms full of coconuts. Brenda was with Herbert at the rifle-range. Gil Morris was buying Molly a cocktail with a cherry at the ‘Esplanade.’ Here he stood, listening to Mr. Matthews, the retired drinker, crying darkness on the evening sands, with money hot in his pocket and Saturday burning away.
In his loneliness he had refused their invitations. Herbert, in his low, red sports car, G.B. at the back, a sea-blown nymph on the radiator, called at his father’s house, but he said: ‘I’m not in the mood, old man. I’m going to spend a quiet day. Enjoy yourselves. Don’t take too much pop.’ Only waiting for the sun to set, he stood in the sad circle with the pleasureless women who were staring at a point in the sky behind their prophet, and wished the morning back. Oh, boy! to be wasting his money now on the rings and ranges of the fair, to be sitting in the chromium lounge with a short worth one and six and a Turkish cigarette, telling the latest one to the girls, seeing the sun, through the palms in the lounge window, sink over the promenade, over the Bath chairs, the cripples and widows, the beach-trousered, kerchiefed, week-end wives, the smart, kiss-curled girls with plain and spectacled girl friends, the innocent, swaggering, loud bad boys, and the poms at the ankles, and the cycling sweet-men. Ronald had sailed to Ilfracombe on the Lady Moira, and, in the thick saloon, with a party from Brynhyfryd, he’d be knocking back nips without a thought that on the sands at home his friend was alone and pussyfoot at six o’clock, and the evening dull as a chapel. All his friends had vanished into their pleasures.
He thought: Poets live and walk with their poems; a man with visions needs no other company; Saturday is a crude day; I must go home and sit in my bedroom by the boiler. But he was not a poet living and walking, he was a young man in a sea town on a warm bank holiday, with two pounds to spend; he had no visions, only two pounds and a small body with its feet on the littered sand; serenity was for old men; and he moved away, over the railway points, on to the tramlined road.
He snarled at the flower clock in Victoria Gardens.
‘And what shall a prig do now?’ he said aloud, causing a young woman on a bench opposite the white-tiled urinal to smile and put her novel down.
She had chestnut hair arranged high on her head in an old-fashioned way, in loose coils and a bun, and a Woolworth’s white rose grew out of it and drooped to touch her ear. She wore a white frock with a red paper flower pinned on the breast, and rings and bracelets that came from a fun-fair stall. Her eyes were small and quite green.
He marked, carefully and coldly in one glance, all the unusual details of her appearance; it was the calm, unstartled certainty of her bearing before his glance from head to foot, the innocent knowledge, in her smile and the set of her head, that she was defended by her gentleness and accessible strangeness against all rude encounters and picking looks, that made his fingers tremble. Though her frock was long and the collar high, she could as well be naked there on the blistered bench. Her smile confessed her body bare and spotless and willing and warm under the cotton, and she waited without guilt.
How beautiful she is, he thought, with his mind on words and his eyes on her hair and red and white skin, how beautifully she waits for me, though she does not know she is waiting and I can never tell her.
He had stopped and was staring. Like a confident girl before a camera, she sat smiling, her hands folded, her head slightly to one side so that the rose brushed her neck. She accepted his admiration. The girl in a million took his long look to herself, and cherished his stupid love.
Midges flew into his mouth. He hurried on shamefully. At the gates of the gardens he turned to see her for the last time on earth. She had lost her calm with his abrupt and awkward going, and stared in confusion after him. One hand was raised as though to beckon him back. If he waited, she would call him. He walked round the corner and heard her voice, a hundred voices, and all hers, calling his name, and a hundred names that were all his, over the bushy walls.
And what shall the terrified prig of a love-mad young man do next? he asked his reflection silently in the distorting mirror of the empty ‘Victoria’ saloon. His ape-like hanging face, with ‘Bass’ across the forehead, gave back a cracked sneer.
If Venus came in on a plate, said the two red, melon-slice lips, I would ask for vinegar to put on her.
She could drive my guilt out; she could smooth away my shame; why didn’t I stop to talk to her? he asked.
You saw a queer tart in a park, his reflection answered, she was a child of nature, oh my! oh my! Did you see the dewdrops in her hair? Stop talking to the mirror like a man in a magazine, I know you too well.
A new head, swollen and lop-jawed, wagged behind his shoulder. He spun round to hear the barman say:
‘Has the one and only let you down? You look like death warmed up. Have this one on the house. Free beer to-day. Free X’s.’ He pulled the beer handle. ‘Only the best served here. Straight from the rust. You do look queer,’ he said, ‘the only one saved from the wreck and the only wreck saved. Here’s looking at you!’ He drank the beer he had drawn.
‘May I have a glass of beer, please?’
‘What do you think this is, a public house?’
On the polished table in the middle of the saloon the young man drew, with a finger dipped in strong, the round head of a girl and piled a yellow froth of hair upon it.
‘Ah! dirty, dirty!’ said the barman, running round from behind the counter and rubbing the head away with a dry cloth.
Shielding the dirtiness with his hat, the
young man wrote his name on the edge of the table and watched the letters dry and fade.
Through the open bay-window, across the useless railway covered with sand, he saw the black dots of bathers, the stunted huts, the jumping dwarfs round the Punch and Judy, and the tiny religious circle. Since he had walked and played down there in the crowded wilderness excusing his despair, searching for company though he refused it, he had found his own true happiness and lost her all in one bewildering and clumsy half a minute by the ‘Gentlemen’ and the flower clock. Older and wiser and no better, he would have looked in the mirror to see if his discovery and loss had marked themselves upon his face in shadows under the eyes or lines about the mouth, were it not for the answer he knew he would receive from the distorted reflection.
The barman came to sit near him, and said in a false voice: ‘Now you tell me all about it, I’m a regular storehouse of secrets.’
‘There isn’t anything to tell. I saw a girl in Victoria Gardens and I was too shy to speak to her. She was a piece of God help us all right.’
Ashamed of his wish to be companionable, even in the depth of love and distress, with her calm face before his eyes and her smile reproving and forgiving him as he spoke, the young man defiled his girl on the bench, dragged her down into the spit and sawdust and dolled her up to make the barman say:
‘I like them big myself. Once round Bessy, once round the gasworks. I missed the chance of a lifetime, too. Fifty lovelies in the nude and I’d left my Bunsen burner home.’
‘Give me the same, please.’
‘You mean similar.’
The barman drew a glass of beer, drank it, and drew another.
‘I always have one with the customers,’ he said, ‘it puts us on even terms. Now we’re just two heart-broken bachelors together.’ He sat down again.
‘You can’t tell me anything I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen over twenty chorines from the Empire in this bar, drunk as printers. Oh, les girls! les limbs!’
‘Will they be in to-night?’
‘There’s only a fellow sawing a woman in half this week.’
‘Keep a half for me.’
A drunk man walked in on an invisible white line, and the barman, reeling in sympathy across the room, served him with a pint. ‘Free beer to-day,’ he said. ‘Free X’s. You’ve been out in the sun.’
‘I’ve been out in the sun all day,’ said the man.
‘I thought you looked sunburnt.’
‘That’s drink,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been drinking.’
‘The holiday is drawing to an end,’ the young man whispered into his glass. Bye-bye blackbird, the moment is lost, he thought, examining, with an interest he could not forgive, the comic coloured postcards of mountain-buttocked women on the beach and hen-pecked, pin-legged men with telescopes, pasted on the wall beneath the picture of a terrier drinking stout; and now, with a jolly barman and a drunk in a crushed cap, he was mopping the failing day down. He tipped his hat over his forehead, and a lock of hair that fell below the hat tickled his eyelid. He saw, with a stranger’s darting eye that missed no single subtlety of the wry grin or the faintest gesture drawing the shape of his death on the air, an unruly-haired young man who coughed into his hand in the corner of a rotting room and puffed the smoke of his doped Weight.
But as the drunk man weaved towards him on wilful feet, carrying his dignity as a man might carry a full glass around a quaking ship, as the barman behind the counter clattered and whistled and dipped to drink, he shook off the truthless, secret tragedy with a sneer and a blush, straightened his melancholy hat into a hard-brimmed trilby, dismissed the affected stranger. In the safe centre of his own identity, the familiar world about him like another flesh, he sat sad and content in the plain room of the undistinguished hotel at the sea-end of the shabby, spreading town where everything was happening. He had no need of the dark interior world when Tawe pressed in upon him and the eccentric ordinary people came bursting and crawling, with noise and colours, out of their houses, out of the graceless buildings, the factories and avenues, the shining shops and blaspheming chapels, the terminuses and the meeting-halls, the falling alleys and brick lanes, from the arches and shelters and holes behind the hoardings, out of the common, wild intelligence of the town.
At last the drunk man had reached him. ‘Put your hand here,’ he said, and turned about and tapped himself on the bottom.
The barman whistled and rose from his drink to see the young man touch the drunk on the seat of the trousers.
‘What can you feel there?’
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s right. Nothing. Nothing. There’s nothing there to feel.’
‘How can you sit down then?’ asked the barman.
‘I just sit down on what the doctor left,’ the man said angrily. ‘I had as good a bottom as you’ve got once. I was working underground in Dowlais, and the end of the world came down on me. Do you know what I got for losing my bottom? Four and three! Two and three ha’pence a cheek. That’s cheaper than a Pig.’
The girl from Victoria Gardens came into the bar with two friends: a blonde young girl almost as beautiful as she was, and a middle-aged woman dressed and made up to look young. The three of them sat at the table. The girl he loved ordered three ports and gins.
‘Isn’t it delicious weather?’ said the middle-aged woman.
The barman said: ‘Plenty of sky about.’ With many bows and smiles he placed their drinks in front of them. ‘I thought the princesses had gone to a better pub,’ he said.
‘What’s a better pub without you, handsome?’ said the blonde girl.
‘This is the “Ritz” and the “Savoy,” isn’t it, gargon darling?’ the girl from the Gardens said, and kissed her hand to him.
The young man in the window seat, still bewildered by the first sudden sight of her entering the darkening room, caught the kiss to himself and blushed. He thought to run out of the room and through the miracle-making Gardens, to rush into his house and hide his head in the bed-clothes and lie all night there, dressed and trembling, her voice in his ears, her green eyes wide awake under his closed eyelids. But only a sick boy with tossed blood would run from his proper love into a dream, lie down in a bedroom that was full of his shames, and sob against the feathery, fat breast and face on the damp pillow. He remembered his age and poems, and would not move.
‘Tanks a million, Lou,’ said the barman.
Her name was Lou, Louise, Louisa. She must be Spanish or French or a gipsy, but he could tell the street that her voice came from; he knew where her friends lived by the rise and fall of their sharp voices, and the name of the middle-aged woman was Mrs. Emerald Franklin. She was to be seen every night in the ‘Jew’s Harp,’ sipping and spying and watching the clock.
‘We’ve been listening to Matthews Hellfire on the sands. Down with this and down with that, and he used to drink a pint of biddy before his breakfast,’ Mrs. Franklin said. ‘Oh, there’s a nerve!’
‘And his eye on the fluff all the time,’ said the blonde girl. ‘I wouldn’t trust him any further than Ramon Navarro behind the counter.’
‘Whoops! I’ve gone up in the world. Last week I was Charley Chase,’ said the barman.
Mrs. Franklin raised her empty glass in a gloved hand and shook it like a bell. ‘Men are deceivers ever,’ she said. ‘And a drop of mother’s ruin right around.’
‘Especially Mr. Franklin,’ said the barman.
‘But there’s a lot in what the preacher says, mind,’ Mrs. Franklin said, ‘about the carrying on. If you go for a constitutional after stop-tap along the sands you might as well be in Sodom and Gomorrah.’
The blonde girl laughed. ‘Hark to Mrs. Grundy! I see her with a black man last Wednesday, round by the museum.’
‘He was an Indian,’ said Mrs. Franklin, ‘from the university college, and I’d thank you to remember it. Every one’s brothers under the skin, but there’s no tarbrush in my family.’
‘Oh, dear! oh
, dear!’ said Lou. ‘Lay off it, there’s loves. This is my birthday. It’s a holiday. Put a bit of fun in it. Miaow! miaow! Marjorie, kiss Emerald and be friends.’ She smiled and laughed at them both. She winked at the barman, who was filling their glasses to the top. ‘Here’s to your blue eyes, gaçgon!’ She had not noticed the young man in the corner. ‘And one for grand-dad there,’ she said, smiling at the swaying, drunk man. ‘He’s twenty-one to-day. There! I’ve made him smile.’
The drunk man made a deep, dangerous bow, lifted his hat, stumbled against the mantelpiece, and his full pint in his free hand was steady as a rock. ‘The prettiest girl in Carmarthenshire,’ he said.
‘This is Glamorganshire, dad,’ she said, ‘where’s your geography? Look at him waltzing! mind your glasses! He’s got that Kruschen feeling. Come on, faster! give us the Charleston.’
The drunk man, with the pint held high, danced until he fell, and all the time he never spilt a drop. He lay at Lou’s feet on the dusty floor and grinned up at her in confidence and affection. ‘I fell,’ he said. ‘I could dance like a trooper when I had a beatyem.’
‘He lost his bottom at the last trump,’ the barman explained.
‘When did he lose his bottom?’ said Mrs. Franklin.
‘When Gabriel blew his whistle down in Dowlais.’
‘You’re pulling my leg.’
‘It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Em. Hoi, you! get up from the vomitorium.’
The man wagged his end like a tail, and growled at Lou’s feet.
‘Put your head on my foot. Be comfy. Let him lie there,’ she said.
He went to sleep at once.