by Dylan Thomas
‘Have you put the sponge bag in, Hilda?’
‘Of course I have,’ she answered from the kitchen.
Don’t let her look in the china-pantry, Samuel prayed among the women walking like lamp-posts. She never uses the best china for breakfast.
‘All right, all right; I just asked.’
‘Where’s his new hairbrush?’
‘That’s right, shout my head off. Here it is. How can I give it to you if you’re in the kitchen? It’s the brush with the initials—S.B.’
‘I know his initials.’
‘Mother, does he want all these vests? You know he never uses them.’
‘It’s January, Peggy.’
‘She knows it’s January, Hilda. You haven’t got to tell the neighbours. Can you smell something burning?’
‘It’s only mother’s sunshade,’ Samuel said in the locked bedroom.
He dressed and went down. The gas in the breakfast-room was on again. His mother was boiling an egg for him on the gas-stove. ‘We’ll have our breakfast later,’ she said; ‘you mustn’t miss the train. Did you sleep well?’
‘No burglars last night, Sam,’ his father said.
His mother brought the egg in. ‘You can’t expect them every night.’
Peggy and his father sat down in front of the empty grate.
‘What do you think you’ll do first when you get there, Sam?’ said Peggy.
‘He’ll get himself a nice room, of course, not too central. And don’t have an Irish landlady.’ His mother brushed his collar as he ate. ‘Go and get yourself settled straight away; that’s the important thing.’
‘I’ll get myself settled.’
‘Don’t forget to look under the wallpaper for bugs.’
‘That’s enough of that, Peggy. Sam knows a clean place when he sees one.’
He saw himself knocking at a lodging-house in the very centre of the city, and an Irishwoman appearing at the door. ‘Good morning, madam. Have you a cheap room?’ ‘Cheaper than sunlight to you, Danny Boy.’ She would not be more than twenty-one. ‘Has it got bugs?’ ‘All over the walls, praise be to God.’ ‘I’ll take it.’
‘I’ll know what I’m doing,’ he said to his mother.
‘Jenkins’ motor isn’t here yet,’ Peggy said. ‘Perhaps there’s a puncture.’
If he doesn’t come soon, they’ll notice everything. I’ll cut my throat on a piece of china.
‘Remember to call on Mrs. Chapman. Give her all our love from 42.’
‘I’ll call on her tomorrow, mother.’
The taxi drew up outside. The corners of bedroom blinds would be lifted all over the street.
‘Here’s your wallet. Don’t put it in your handkerchief pocket now. You never know when you’ll be wanting to blow your nose.’
‘You’ll be scattering largesse,’ Peggy said. She kissed him on the forehead.
Remind me to wipe it off in the cab.
‘You’re kissing the editor of the Times now,’ said his mother.
‘Well, not quite that, Sam. Not yet, eh?’ His father said, ‘Rungs of the ladder,’ and then looked away.
‘Write tomorrow morning sharp. Send us the news.’
‘You send me your news, too. Mrs. Jenkins is blowing his horn.’
‘Better than blowing your trumpet,’ Peggy said. ‘And there’s never any news in Mortimer Street.’
You wait, slyboots. Wait till the flames touch the doilie with the herons on it.
He came down to pat Tinker.
‘Come on, don’t fuss over the old dog; he’s all fleas. It’s gone seven.’
Peggy was opening the door of the taxi for him. His father shook him by the hand. His mother kissed him on the mouth.
‘Good-bye, Mortimer Street,’ he said, and the cab was off. ‘Good-bye, Stanley’s Grove.’
Through the back window he saw three strangers waving. He pulled down the blind.
3
Sitting with his bag in the lavatory of the moving train, for all the compartments were full, he read through his notebook and tore out the pages in order. He was dressed in a brand-new brown tweed overcoat, a brown town-suit, a white starched shirt with a woolen tie and a tiepin, and black, shining shoes. He had put his hard brown hat in the wash-basin. Here was Mrs. Chapman’s address next to the telephone number of a Mr. Hewson who was going to introduce him to a man who worked on a newspaper; and under these the address of the Literary Institute that had once awarded him a guinea for a poem in a competition: Will Shakespeare at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. He tore the page out. Then the name and address, in red ink, of a collected poet who had written him a letter thanking him for a sonnet-sequence. And a page of names that might help.
The lavatory door half opened, and he shut it quickly with his foot.
‘I beg your pardon.’
Hear her apologizing down the corridor, full as an egg. She could turn every handle the whole length of the train, and in every closet a fully-clothed man would be sitting with his foot against the door, lost and alone in the long, moving house on wheels, travelling in silence with no windows, at sixty miles an hour racing to another place that did not want him, never at home wherever the train stopped. The handle turned again, and Samuel coughed somebody away.
The last page of the notebook was the only one he kept. Under a drawing of a girl with long hair dancing into an address, he had written: Lucille Harris. A man he met on the Promenade had said as they sat on a bench, looking at the legs passing: ‘She’s okay. She’s a girl I know. She’s the best in the world; she’ll take care of you. Give her a call when you’re up. Tell her you’re Austin’s friend.’ That page he placed in his wallet between two one-pound notes.
The rest of the pages he picked up from the floor, bunched together, and threw down between his legs into the bowl. Then he pulled the chain. Down went the helping names, the influential numbers, the addresses that could mean so much, into the round, roaring sea and on to the rails. Already they were lost a mile behind, blowing over the track now, over the glimpses of hedges into the lightning-passing fields.
Home and help were over. He had eight pounds ten and Lucille Harris’ address. Many people have begun worse, he said aloud. I am ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and sentimental; I have the pull over nobody.
The handle turned again.
‘I bet you’re dancing,’ he said to the person the other side of the locked door.
Footsteps pattered away down the train.
First of all, when I reach there, I’ll have a Bass and a stale sandwich, he decided. I’ll take them to a table in a corner, brush off the cakecrumbs with my hat, and prop my book against the cruet. I must have all the details right at the beginning. The rest must come by accident. I’ll be sitting there before noon, cool and calm, my hat on my knees, my glass in my hand, looking not a day under twenty, pretending to read and spying from the corners of my eyes at the waiting, drinking, restless people busily alone at the counter. The other tables will be crowded. There will be women, beckoning without moving, over their cold coffee; old, anonymous men with snuff on their cheeks, trembling over tea; quiet men expecting no one from the trains they wait for eagerly every hour; women who have come to run away, to take a train to St. Ives or Liverpool or anywhere, but who know they will never take any train and are drinking cups of tea and saying to themselves, ‘I could be catching the twelve o’clock but I’ll wait for the quarter past’; women from the country with dozens of children coming undone; shop girls, office girls, street girls, people who have nothing worse to do, all the unhappy, happy in chains, bewildered foreign men and women in the station buffet of the city I know from cover to cover.
The door rattled. ‘You there,’ a voice said outside. ‘You’ve been there for hours.’
He turned on the hot-water tap. It spurted cold water into the basin before he could take his hat out. ‘I’m a director of the company,’ he said, but his voice sounded weak to him and without assurance.
When the foots
teps had faded again, he gathered up his cases and walked out of the lavatory and down the corridor. Standing outside a first-class compartment, he saw a man and a ticket-inspector come to the door and hammer on it. They did not try the handle.
‘Ever since Neath,’ the man said.
Now the train was losing speed, running out of the lost country into the smoke and a tunnel of factories, puffing past the district platforms and the high houses with broken windows and underclothes dancing in the dirty yards. Children at the windows never waved their hands to the train. It might have been the wind passing.
A crowd of people stood arguing outside the door as the train drew up under a great glass roof.
4
‘Nip of Bass, please, and a ham sandwich.’ He took them to a table in a corner, brushed off the crumbs with his wet hat, and sat down just before noon. He counted his money: eight pound nine and a penny, nearly three pounds more than he had ever seen. Some people had this every week. It had to last him until he was dead. At the next table sat a plump, middle-aged man with a chocolate-brown birthmark over his cheek and chin like the half of a beard. He was propping his book against an empty bottle when a young man walked over from the counter.
‘Hullo, Sam.’
‘Hullo, Ron. Fancy seeing you.’
He was Ronald Bishop who used to live in the Crescent off Stanley’s Grove.
‘Been up in the smoke for long, Sam?’
‘Just arrived. How’s tricks?’
‘Same as me, we must have been on the same train. Oh, so so. Still at the old game, Sam?’
‘Yeah, up on a bit of business. You at the usual?’
‘Yeah.’
They had never had anything to say to each other.
‘Where you staying, Ron?’
‘Usual. Strand Palace.’
‘Daresay I’ll be seeing you, then.’
‘Okay, make it tomorrow in the bar, about seven-thirty.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s a date, don’t forget.’
‘No fear.’
They both forgot it at once.
‘Well, be seeing you.’
‘Be good.’
As Ronald Bishop walked off, Samuel said silently into his glass: A fine beginning. If I go out of the station and turn round the corner I’ll be back in 42. The little Proberts will be playing doctor outside the Load of Hay. The only stranger anywhere near me is a business-man with a stained face, reading the palms of his hands. No, here comes a woman in a fur coat; she’s going to sit next to me. Yes, no, no. I smelt her as she passed; eau-de-Cologne and powder and bed.
The woman sat down two tables away, crossed her legs, powdered her nose.
This is the beginning of an advance. Now she is pretending not to notice that her knees are uncovered. There’s a lynx in the room, lady. Button your overcoat. She’s rattling her spoon on her saucer to attract my attention, but when I stare at her hand, without smiling, I see she is looking down gently and innocently into her lap as though she had a baby there. He was glad she was not brazen.
Dear mother, he wrote with his finger on the back of an envelope, looking up, between every few invisible words, at the unnoticing woman opposite, this is to tell you that I arrived safely and that I am drinking in the buffet with a tart. I will tell you later if she is Irish. She is about thirty-eight years old and her husband left her five years ago because of her carryings on. Her child is in a home, and she visits him every other Sunday. She always tells him that she is working in a hat shop. You need not worry that she will take all my money as we liked each other on first sight. And you need not worry that I shall break my heart trying to reform her, because I have always been brought up to believe that Mortimer Street is what is right, and I would not wish that on anybody. Besides, I do not want to reform her. Not that I think she is nasty. Her business is very hard on stockings, so I am going to pay the first week’s rent for our little room in Pimlico. Now she is going across to the counter to buy another cup of coffee. I hope you will notice that she is buying her own. Everybody in the buffet is unhappy except me.
As she came back to her table, he tore up the envelope and stared at her, unsmiling, for a full minute by the Bovril clock. Once she raised her eyes to his, then looked away. She was tapping her spoon on the side of her cup, then opening and closing the clasp of her handbag, then turning her head round slowly to face him and then looking away again quickly through the window. She must be new, he thought with a sudden compassion, but he did not stop staring. Should I wink? He tilted his hard, wet hat over one eye, and winked: a long, deliberate wink that screwed up his face and made his burning cigarette nearly touch the blunt end of his nose. She snapped her handbag, pushed two pennies under the saucer, and walked right out of the room, never looking at him as she passed.
She’s left her coffee, he thought. And then: My God, she was blushing.
A fine beginning.
‘Did you speak?’ asked the man with the birthmark, spying up. His face was red and purple where it was not brown, faintly shabby and unshaved, shiftily angry about the eyes as though his cunning were an irritation impossible to bear.
‘I think I said it was a fine day.’
‘Stranger in town?’
‘Yes, I’ve just come up.’
‘How do you like it?’ He did not appear to care at all.
‘I haven’t been outside the station yet.’
Now the woman in the fur coat would be telling a policeman, ‘I have just been winked at by a short boy wearing a wet hat.’ ‘But it isn’t raining, madam.’ That would settle her.
He put his hat under the table.
‘There’s plenty to see,’ the man said, ‘If that’s what you want. Museums, art galleries.’ Without speaking, he went through a list of names of other attractions, but rejected them all. ‘Museums,’ he said after a long pause. ‘There’s one at South Kensington, and there’s the British Museum, and there’s one at Whitehall with guns. I’ve seen them all,’ he said.
Now every table was occupied. Cold, stiff people with time to kill sat staring at their tea and the clock, inventing replies to questions that would not be asked, justifying their behaviour in the past and the future, drowning every present moment as soon as it began to breathe, lying and wishing, missing all the trains in the terror of their minds, each one alone at the terminus. Time was dying all over the room. And then all the tables except the one next to Samuel’s were unoccupied again. The lonely crowd went out in a funeral procession, leaving ash and tea-leaves and newspapers.
‘You must move out of the station some time, you know,’ the man said, returning to a conversation that held no interest for him. ‘If you want to see around. It’s only fair. It’s not fair to come up in a train and sit in the buffet and then go back and say you’ve seen London, is it?’
‘I’m going out now, quite soon.’
‘That’s right,’ the man said, ‘give London a chance.’
He is so tired of talking to me that he is nearly losing his temper, Samuel thought.
He looked around him again, at the mourners fidgeting to the counter, at the quick whisky drinkers in a knot by the tea-urn, at the waitresses listlessly busy with cardboard cakes and small change.
‘Otherwise, it’s like not getting out of bed, isn’t it?’ the man said. ‘You’ve got to walk round, you know, you’ve got to move some time. Everybody does it,’ he said in a sudden, dull passion.
Samuel bought another nip of Bass from a girl like Joan Crawford.
‘This is the last one, then I’m going,’ he said when he had returned to his table.
‘Do you think I care how many more you have? You can stay here all day, why should I mind?’ The man was looking at the palms of his hands again as his temper mounted. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’
Ronald Bishop still stood at the counter.
Mortimer Street has tracked me down, Samuel thought bitterly, even into this lopsided quarrel with a palmist in a station restauran
t. There was no escape. But it was not escape he wanted. The Street was a safe hole in a wall behind the wind in another country. He wanted to arrive and be caught. Ronald stood there like a fury with a rolled umbrella. Come in, Mrs. Rosser, in your fawn and beige antimacassar coat, with your tribal hat on your waves, and scream the news of the Street across the table in your whist-drive voice. I could not escape your fury on a birds’ rock, you would be mincing and pinching down to the fishy sea with your beak gaped open like a shopping bag.
‘I hate a nosey parker,’ the man said, and got up. On his way to the counter he passed the table where the Irish prostitute had sat and removed the pennies from under the plate.
‘Stop, thief!’ Samuel said softly. No one could hear. There is a waitress with a consumptive husband who needs those pennies. And two children, Tristram and Eve. He changed the names quickly. Tom and Marge. Then he walked over and put a sixpence under the plate just as a waitress came to the table.
‘It fell on the floor,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah?’
As he walked back, he saw that the waitress was talking to three men at the counter and nodding her head in his direction. One man was Ronald Bishop. One was the man with the birthmark.
Oh, fine, fine! If he had not broken the china he would have caught the next train back. The pieces would be swept up by now, but the tears would be running all over the house. ‘Mother, mother, he’s put my crochet-work up the chimney,’ he heard his sister scream in a guard’s whistle. Herons, flower baskets, palm trees, windmills, Red Riding Hoods, stuffed up in the flames and soot. ‘Get me a rubber to rub out coal, Hilda. I shall of course lose my position. That is only to be expected.’ ‘Oh my teapot, oh my blue set, oh my poor boy.’ He refused to look at the counter where Ronald Bishop inaudibly reviled him. The waitress knew as soon as she saw him that he stole from the begging tins of the blind and led them by the arm into thick traffic. The birthmarked man said that he had shown a certain postcard to a customer in a fur coat. The voices of his parents condemned above the clattering of the cups. He stared hard at his book though the print climbed and staggered as if the tears of the left house had run down after him along the rails and flowed into this hot, suspicious room over the tea-stained air into his eyes. But the image was false and the book was chosen for strangers. He did not like or understand it.