The Collected Stories

by Dylan Thomas

‘I can’t have drunks on the premises.

  ‘You know where to go then.’

  ‘Cru-el Mrs. Franklin!’

  ‘Go on, attend to your business. Serve the young man in the corner, his tongue’s hanging out.’

  ‘Cru-el lady!’

  As Mrs. Franklin called attention to the young man, Lou peered shortsightedly across the saloon and saw him sitting with his back to the window.

  ‘I’ll have to get glasses,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll have plenty of glasses before the night’s out.’

  ‘No, honest, Marjorie, I didn’t know anyone was there. I do beg your pardon, you in the corner,’ she said.

  The barman switched on the light. ‘A bit of lux in tenebris.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Lou.

  The young man dared not move for fear that he might break the long light of her scrutiny, the enchantment shining like a single line of light between them, or startle her into speaking; and he did not conceal the love in his eyes, for she could pierce through to it as easily as she could turn his heart in his chest and make it beat above the noises of the two friends’ hurried conversation, the rattle of glasses behind the counter where the barman spat and polished and missed nothing, and the snores of the comfortable sleeper. Nothing can hurt me. Let the barman jeer. Giggle in your glass, our Em. I’m telling the world, I’m walking in clover, I’m staring at Lou like a fool, she’s my girl, she’s my lily. O love! O love! She’s no lady, with her sing-song Tontine voice, she drinks like a deep-sea diver; but Lou, I’m yours, and Lou, you’re mine. He refused to meditate on her calmness now and twist her beauty into words. She was nothing under the sun or moon but his. Unashamed and certain, he smiled at her; and, though he was prepared for all, her answering smile made his fingers tremble again, as they had trembled in the Gardens, and reddened his cheeks and drove his heart to a gallop.

  ‘Harold, fill the young man’s glass up,’ Mrs. Franklin said.

  The barman stood still, a duster in one hand and a dripping glass in the other.

  ‘Have you got water in your ears? Fill the young man’s glass!’

  The barman put the duster to his eyes. He sobbed. He wiped away the mock tears.

  ‘I thought I was attending a première and this was the royal box,’ he said.

  ‘He’s got water on the brain, not in his earhole,’ said Marjorie.

  ‘I dreamt it was a beautiful tragi-comedy entitled “Love at First Sight, or, Another Good Man gone wrong.” Act one in a boozer by the sea.’

  The two women tapped their foreheads.

  Lou said, still smiling: ‘Where was the second act?’

  Her voice was as gentle as he had imagined it to be before her gay and nervous playing with the over-familiar barman and the inferior women. He saw her as a wise, soft girl whom no hard company could spoil, for her soft self, bare to the heart, broke through every defence of her sensual falsifiers. As he thought this, phrasing her gentleness, faithlessly running to words away from the real room and his love in the middle, he woke with a start and saw her lively body six steps from him, no calm heart dressed in a sentence, but a pretty girl, to be got and kept. He must catch hold of her fast. He got up to cross to her.

  ‘I woke before the second act came on,’ said the barman. ‘I’d sell my dear old mother to see that. Dim lights. Purple couches. Ecstatic bliss. Là, là chèrie!’

  The young man sat down at the table, next to her.

  Harold, the barman, leaned over the counter and cupped his hand to his ear.

  The man on the floor rolled in his sleep, and his head lay in the spittoon.

  ‘You should have come and sat here a long time ago,’ Lou whispered. ‘You should have stopped to talk to me in the Gardens. Were you shy?’

  ‘I was too shy,’ the young man whispered.

  ‘Whispering isn’t manners. I can’t hear a word,’ said the barman.

  At a sign from the young man, a flick of the fingers that sent the waiters in evening dress bustling with oysters about the immense room, the barman filled the glasses with port, gin, and Nutbrown.

  ‘We never drink with strangers,’ Mrs. Franklin said, laughing.

  ‘He isn’t a stranger,’ said Lou, ‘are you Jack?’

  He threw a pound note on the table: ‘Take the damage.’

  The evening that had been over before it began raced along among the laughter of the charming women sharp as knives, and the stories of the barman, who should be on the stage, and Lou’s delighted smiles and silences at his side. Now she is safe and sure, he thought, after her walking like my doubtful walking, around the lonely distances of the holiday. In the warm, spinning middle they were close and alike. The town and the sea and the last pleasure-makers drifted into the dark that had nothing to do with them, and left this one room burning.

  One by one, some lost men from the dark shuffled into the bar, drank sadly, and went out. Mrs. Franklin, flushed and dribbling waved her glass at their departures. Harold winked behind their backs. Marjorie showed them her long, white legs.

  ‘Nobody loves us except ourselves,’ said Harold. ‘Shall I shut the bar and keep the riff-raff out?’

  ‘Lou is expecting Mr. O’Brien, but don’t let that stop you,’ Marjorie said. ‘He’s her sugar daddy from old Ireland.’

  ‘Do you love Mr. O’Brien?’ the young man whispered.

  ‘How could I, Jack?’

  He could see Mr. O’Brien as a witty, tall fellow of middle age, with waved greying hair and a clipped bit of dirt on his upper lip, a flash ring on his marriage finger, a pouched knowing eye, dummy dressed with a whalebone waist, a broth of a man about Cardiff, Lou’s horrible lover tearing towards her now down the airless streets in the firm’s car. The young man clenched his hand on the table covered with dead, and sheltered her in the warm strength of his fist. ‘My round, my round,’ he said, ‘up again, plenty! Doubles, trebles, Mrs. Franklin is a jibber.’

  ‘My mother never had a jibber.’

  ‘Oh, Lou!’ he said, ‘I am more than happy with you.’

  ‘Coo! coo! hear the turtle doves.’

  ‘Let them coo,’ said Marjorie. ‘I could coo, too.’

  The barman looked around him in surprise. He raised his hands, palms up, and cocked his head.

  ‘The bar is full of birds,’ he said.

  ‘Emerald’s laying an egg,’ he said, as Mrs. Franklin rocked in her chair.

  Soon the bar was full of customers. The drunk man woke up and ran out, leaving his cap in a brown pool. Sawdust dropped from his hair. A small, old, round, red-faced, cheery man sat facing the young man and Lou, who held hands under the table and rubbed their legs against each other.

  ‘What a night for love!’ said the old man. ‘On such a night as this did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew. Do you know where that comes from?’

  ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ Lou said. ‘But you’re an Irishman, Mr. O’Brien.’

  ‘I culd have sworn you were a tall man with a little tish,’ said the young man gravely.

  ‘What’s the weapons, Mr. O’Brien?’

  ‘Brandies at dawn, I should think, Mrs. Franklin.’

  ‘I never described Mr. O’Brien to you at all. You’re dreaming!’ Lou whispered. ‘I wish this night could go on for ever.’

  ‘But not here. Not in the bar. In a room with a big bed.’

  ‘A bed in a bar,’ said the old man, ‘if you’ll pardon me hearing you, that’s what I’ve always wanted. Think of it, Mrs. Franklin.’

  The barman bobbed up from behind the counter.

  ‘Time, gentlemen and others!’

  The sober strangers departed to Mrs. Franklin’s laughter.

  The lights went out.

  ‘Lou, don’t you lose me.’

  ‘I’ve got your hand.’

  ‘Press it hard, hurt it.’

  ‘Break his bloody neck,’ Mrs. Franklin said in the dark. ‘No offence meant.’

  ‘Marjorie smack hand,’ said Marjorie. ‘Let’s get ou
t of the dark. Harold’s a rover in the dark.’

  ‘And the girl guides.’

  ‘Let’s take a bottle each and go down to Lou’s,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll buy the bottles,’ said Mr. O’Brien.

  ‘It’s you don’t lose me now,’ Lou whispered. ‘Hold on to me, Jack. The others won’t stay long. Oh, Mr. Christ, I wish it was just you and me!’

  ‘Will it be just you and me?’

  ‘You and me and Mr. Moon.’

  Mr. O’Brien opened the saloon door. ‘Pile into the Rolls, you ladies. The gentlemen are going to see to the medicine.’

  The young man felt Lou’s quick kiss on his mouth before she followed Marjorie and Mrs. Franklin out.

  ‘What do you say we split the drinks?’ said Mr. O’Brien.

  ‘Look what I found in the lavatory,’ said the barman, ‘he was singing on the seat.’ He appeared behind the counter with the drunk man leaning on his arm.

  They all climbed into the car.

  ‘First stop, Lou’s.’

  The young man, on Lou’s knee, saw the town in a daze spin by them, the funnelled and masted smoke-blue outline of the still, droning docks, the lightning lines of the poor streets growing longer, and the winking shops that were snapped out one by one. The car smelt of scent and powder and flesh. He struck with his elbow, by accident, Mrs. Franklin’s upholstered breast. Her thighs, like cushions, bore the drunk man’s rolling weight. He was bumped and tossed on a lump of woman. Breasts, legs, bellies, hands, touched, warmed, and smothered him. On through the night, towards Lou’s bed, towards the unbelievable end of the dying holiday, they tore past black houses and bridges, a station in a smoke cloud, and drove up a steep side street with one weak lamp in a circle of railings at the top, and swerved into a space where a tall tenement house stood surrounded by cranes, standing ladders, poles and girders, barrows, brick-heaps.

  They climbed to Lou’s room up many flights of dark, perilous stairs. Washing hung on the rails outside closed doors. Mrs. Franklin, fumbling alone with the drunk man behind the others, trod in a bucket, and a lucky black cat ran over her foot. Lou led the young man by the hand through a passage marked with names and doors, lit a match, and whispered: ‘It won’t be very long. Be good and patient with Mr. O’Brien. Here it is. Come in first. Welcome to you, Jack!’ She kissed him again at the door of her room.

  She turned on the lights, and he walked with her proudly into her own room, into the room that he would come to know, and saw a wide bed, a gramaphone on a chair, a wash-basin half-hidden in a corner, a gas fire and a cooking ring, a closed cupboard, and her photograph in a cardboard frame on the chest of drawers with no handles. Here she slept and ate. In the double bed she lay all night, pale and curled, sleeping on her left side. When he lived with her always, he would not allow her to dream. No other men must lie and love in her head. He spread his fingers on her pillow.

  ‘Why do you live at the top of the Eiffel Tower!’ said the barman, coming in.

  ‘What a climb!’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘But it’s very nice and private when you get here.’

  ‘If you get here!’ said Mrs. Franklin. ‘I’m dead beat. This old nuisance weighs a ton. Lie down, lie down on the floor and go to sleep. The old nuisance!’ she said fondly. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ernie,’ the drunk man said, raising his arm to shield his face.

  ‘Nobody’s going to bite you, Ernie. Here, give him a nip of whiskey. Careful! Don’t pour it on your waistcoat; you’ll be squeezing your waistcoat in the morning. Pull the curtains, Lou, I can see the wicked old moon,’ she said.

  ‘Does it put ideas in your head?’

  ‘I love the moon,’ said Lou.

  ‘There never was a young lover who didn’t love the moon.’ Mr. O’Brien gave the young man a cheery smile, and patted his hand. His own hand was red and hairy. ‘I could see at the flash of a glance that Lou and this nice young fellow were made for each other. I could see it in their eyes. Dear me, no! I’m not so old and blind I can’t see love in front of my nose. Couldn’t you see it, Mrs. Franklin? Couldn’t you see it, Marjorie?’

  In the long silence, Lou collected glasses from the cupboard as though she had not heard Mr. O’Brien speak. She drew the curtains, shut out the moon, sat on the edge of her bed with her feet tucked under her, looked at her photograph as at a stranger, folded her hands as she folded them, on the first meeting, before the young man’s worship in the Gardens.

  ‘A host of angels must be passing by,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘What a silence there is! Have I said anything out of place? Drink and be merry, to-morrow we die. What do you think I bought these lovely shining bottles for?’

  The bottles were opened. The dead were lined on the mantelpiece. The whisky went down. Harold the barman and Marjorie, her dress lifted, sat in the one arm-chair together. Mrs. Franklin, with Ernie’s head on her lap, sang in a sweet, trained contralto voice The Shepherd’s Lass. Mr. O’Brien kept rhythm with his foot.

  I want Lou in my arms, the young man said to himself, watching Mr. O’Brien tap and smile and the barman draw Marjorie down deep. Mrs. Franklin’s voice sang sweetly in the small bedroom where he and Lou should be lying in the white bed without any smiling company to see them drown. He and Lou could go down together, one cool body weighted with a boiling stone, on to the falling, blank white, entirely empty sea, and never rise. Sitting on their bridal bed, near enough to hear his breath, she was farther from him than before they met. Then he had everything but her body; now she had given him two kisses, and everything had vanished but that beginning. He must be good and patient with Mr. O’Brien. He could wipe away the embracing, old smile with the iron back of his hand. Sink lower, lower, Harold and Marjorie, tumble like whales at Mr. O’Brien’s feet.

  He wished that the light would fail. In the darkness he and Lou could creep beneath the clothes and imitate the dead. Who would look for them there, if they were dead still and soundless? The others would shout to them down the dizzy stairs or rummage in the silence about the narrow, obstacled corridors or stumble out into the night to search for them among the cranes and ladders in the desolation of the destroyed houses. He could hear, in the made-up dark, Mr. O’Brien’s voice cry, ‘Lou, where are you? Answer! answer!’ the hollow answer of the echo, ‘answer!’ and hear her lips in the cool pit of the bed secretly move around another name and feel them move.

  ‘A fine piece of singing, Emerald, and very naughty words. That was a shepherd, that was,’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  Ernie, on the floor, began to sing in a thick, sulking voice, but Mrs. Franklin placed her hand over his mouth and he sucked and nuzzled it.

  ‘What about this young shepherd?’ said Mr. O’Brien, pointing his glass at the young man. ‘Can he sing as well as make love? You ask him kindly, girlie,’ he said to Lou, ‘and he’ll give us a song like a nightingale.’

  ‘Can you sing, Jack?’

  ‘Like a crow, Lou.’

  ‘Can’t he even talk poetry? What a young man to have who can’t spout the poets to his lady!’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  From the cupboard Lou brought out a red-bound book and gave it to the young man, saying: ‘Can you read us a piece out of here? The second volume’s in the hatbox. Read us a dreamy piece, Jack. It’s nearly midnight.’

  ‘Only a love poem, no other kind,’ said Mr. O’Brien. ‘I won’t hear anything but a love poem.’

  ‘Soft and sweet,’ Mrs. Franklin said. She took her hand away from Ernie’s mouth and looked at the ceiling.

  The young man read, but not aloud, lingering on her name, the inscription on the fly-leaf of the first volume of the collected poems of Tennyson: ‘To Louisa, from her Sunday School teacher, Miss Gwyneth Forbes. God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’

  ‘Make it a love poem, don’t forget.’

  The young man read aloud, closing one eye to steady the dancing print, Come into the Garden, Maud. And when he reached the beginning of the fourth verse his voice grew loud
er:

  ‘I said to the lily, “There is but one

  With whom she has heart to be gay.

  When will the dancers leave her alone?

  She is weary of dance and play.”

  Now half to the setting moon are gone,

  And half to the rising day;

  Low on the sand and loud on the stone

  The last wheel echoes away.

  ‘I said to the rose, “The brief night goes

  In babble and revel and wine.

  O young lord-lover, what sighs are those,

  For one that will never be thine?

  But mine, but mine,” so I sware to the rose,

  “For ever and ever, mine.”’

  At the end of the poem, Harold said, suddenly, his head hanging over the arm of the chair, his hair made wild, and his mouth red with lipstick: ‘My grandfather remembers seeing Lord Tennyson, he was a little man with a hump.’

  ‘No,’ said the young man, ‘he was tall and he had long hair and a beard.’

  ‘Did you ever see him?’

  ‘I wasn’t born then.’

  ‘My grandfather saw him. He had a hump.’

  ‘Not Alfred Tennyson.’

  ‘Lord Alfred Tennyson was a little man with a hump.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been the same Tennyson.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong Tennyson, this was the famous poet with a hump.’

  Lou, on the wonderful bed, waiting for him alone of all the men, ugly or handsome, old or young, in the wide town and the small world that would be bound to fall, lowered her head and kissed her hand to him and held her hand in the river of light on the counterpane. The hand, to him, became transparent, and the light on the counterpane glowed up steadily through it in the thin shape of her palm and fingers.

  ‘Ask Mr. O’Brien what Lord Tennyson was like,’ said Mrs. Franklin. ‘We appeal to you, Mr. O’Brien, did he have a hump or not?’

  Nobody but the young man, for whom she lived and waited now, noticed Lou’s little loving movements. She put her glowing hand to her left breast. She made a sign of secrecy on her lips.

  ‘It depends,’ Mr. O’Brien said.

  The young man closed one eye again, for the bed was pitching like a ship; a sickening, hot storm out of a cigarette cloud unsettled cupboard and chest. The motions of the sea-going bedroom were calmed with the cunning closing of his eye, but he longed for night air. On sailor’s legs he walked to the door.