by Dylan Thomas
‘Go on, you big pussycat,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘Get me out of here.’
‘Is this the first time you’ve come to London? I felt like that when I came up first, too. Years and years ago. I felt there was something I must find, I can’t explain it. Something just round the corner. I searched and searched. I was so innocent. I felt like a sort of knight.’
‘Get me out of here,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘I feel like the whole room’s on top of me.’
‘I never found it.’ George Ring laughed and sighed and stroked the side of the bath. ‘Perhaps you’ll be lucky,’ he said. ‘You’ll walk round the corner and there she’ll be. Lucille. Lucille. Is she on the telephone?’
‘Yes. I’ve got her number in my book.’
‘Oh, that makes it easier, doesn’t it. Come on, Rose,’ he said. ‘I know exactly where you are. She’s in a pet.’
Samuel rocked softly on his box in the middle of the furniture. This was the fullest room in England. How many hundreds of houses had been spilt in here, tables and chairs coming in on a wooden flood, chests and cupboards soaring on ropes through the window and settling down like birds. The other rooms, beyond that jostled door, would be taller and darker even than this, with the mute, black shape of the locked piano mountainous under a shroud of carpets and Rose, with her comb like the prow of a ship, driving into their darkness and lying all night motionless and silent where she struck. Now she was dead still on a sunk bed between the column of chairs, buried alive, soft and fat and lost in a grave in a house.
‘I’m going to buy a hammock,’ George Ring said. ‘I can’t bear sleeping under all this furniture.’
Perhaps the room was crowded at night with people who could not see each other, stretched under chairs, under sofas, dizzily asleep on the tops of raised tables, waking up every morning and crying out, ‘Earthquake, earthquake!’
‘And then I’ll go to bed like a sailor.’
‘Tell Rose to come and get me out of here,’ Mr. Allingham said, behind the cloaked hallstand, ‘I want to eat.’
‘She’s sulking Donald. She’s mad about a Japanese screen now.’
‘Do you hear that, Sam? Isn’t there enough privacy in this room? Anybody can do anything, nobody can see you. I want to eat. I want to have a snack at Dacey’s. Are you sleeping here tonight?’
‘Who?’ Samuel asked. ‘Me?’
‘You can doss down in one of the other rooms, if you think you can get up again. There’s enough beds for a harem.’
‘Harem,’ George Ring said, pronouncing it another way. ‘You’ve got company, Rose darling. Do come out and be introduced.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Allingham,’ Samuel said.
‘Didn’t you really have any idea at all?’ George Ring bounced, and for a moment his scented head was level with Samuel’s. One wide, bright, horse-toothed smile, and the head was gone. ‘About sleeping and things. I think it’s awfully brave. You might have fallen in with all kinds of people. “He fell among thieves.” Do you know Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem?’
‘He flung his empty revolver down the slope,’ Samuel said.
The day was moving carelessly on to a promised end and in a dark room full of furniture where he’d lie down with his bunch of wives in a crow’s-nest bed or rock them in a hammock under the ceiling.
‘Goodie goodie! It’s so exciting to find someone who knows about poetry. “The voices faded and the hills slept.” Isn’t that beautiful? The voices faded …? I can read poetry for hours, can’t I, Donald? I don’t care what kind of poetry it is, I love it all. Do you know, “Is there anybody there, said the traveller?” Where do you put the emphasis, Mr. Bennet? Can I call you Sam? Do you say, “Is there anybody there” or “Is there anybody there”?’
‘It isn’t natural,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘for a man not to be able to see anybody when he’s sitting right next to them. I’m not grumbling, but I can’t see anything, that’s all. It’s like not being in the room.’
‘Oh, do be quiet, Donald. Sam and I are having a perfectly serious discussion. Of course you’re in the room, don’t be morbid.’
‘I think I’d put about the same emphasis on all the words,’ Samuel said.
‘But don’t you find it tends to make the line rather flat? ”Is there anybody there, said the traveller,’” George Ring murmured, pacing the mattresses, his head on one side. ‘I feel you do want a stress somewhere.’
Will I be alone tonight in the room with the piano? Samuel wondered. Alone like a man in a warehouse, lying on each bed in turn, opening cupboards and putting my hand in, looking at myself in mirrors in the dark.
‘Don’t you call me morbid, George Ring,’ Mr. Allingham said. He tried to move, but the statue fell against his chair. ‘I remember once I drank forty-nine Guinnesses straight off and I came home on the top of a bus. There’s nothing morbid about a man who can do that. Right on the top of the bus, too, not just in the upper deck.’
Or will the room be full as a cemetery, but with the invisible dead breathing and snoring all around me, making love in the cupboards, drunk as tailors in the dry baths? Suddenly a warm body might dive in through the door and lie in my bed all night without a name or a word.
‘I think forty-nine Guinnesses is piggish,’ said George Ring.
‘It was raining,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘and I never get truculent. I may sing and I may have a bit of a dance, but I never get nasty. Give me a hand, Sam.’
Samuel took the carpet off the hallstand and pushed the statue away. It had fallen between Mr. Allingham’s legs. He came up slowly into sight and rubbed his eyes like a man waking.
‘I told you,’ he said, ‘you get trapped. Coming to Dacey’s, George?’
‘I’ll have to stay for hours, you know that,’ George Ring said. ‘You know I’m the only person who can humour Rosie when she’s in one of her states. Oh, come on, Rosie, don’t be temperamental. It’s ninety per cent temper and ten per cent mental. Just because you’re an actress you think you can stay under the furniture all the afternoon. I’ll count five …’
Samuel followed Mr. Allingham to the door.
‘Five, six, seven,’ George Ring said, as Mr. Allingham slammed the door hard, and his voice was lost in the noise of furniture falling. They went down the stairs into the hallway that smelt of cabbage, and out on to the grey street.
‘I think it must have been the rocking-chair,’ Samuel said.
‘Mrs. Dacey’s is just round the corner,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘There you are. See the Cadbury sign?’
2
Mrs. Dacey’s front window was whitewashed from inside, and the words ‘High Class’ had been scrawled across it. ‘“Susan Dacey, licensed to sell tobacco,”’ Samuel read aloud. ‘Is it a restaurant too?’
‘You must tell her that,’ Mr. Allingham said, opening the door. A bell rang. ‘It hasn’t been called that before.’ He held his foot against the door so that the bell kept ringing. ‘She’s a woman in a thousand.’
A tall, thin, dignified woman came through the private door at the back of the shop, her hands clasped in front of her. She was dressed in black almost down to the ankles, with a severe white collar, and she held her head primly as though it might spill. God help the other nine hundred and ninety-nine. But she smiled then, and her eyes were sharp and light; the dullness raced from her mouth, leaving it cruel and happy.
‘Take your trotter off the door,’ she said.
The bell stopped.
‘That’s better. You made enough noise to wake the dead.’ She was a well-spoken woman, clear and precise, like a schoolmistress.
‘Keeping well, Mrs. Dacey? This is a new friend, Sam Bennet. Two pies and two coffees, please. Where’s Polly?’
‘Up to no good,’ said Mrs. Dacey, stepping behind the counter. Her grand dress floated around her. ‘You’re from the country,’ she said, over her shoulder, as she turned the coffee tap on the brass urn. ‘How did you find Ikey Mo?’
‘That’s me.’ Mr. Allingham b
lushed on one side of his face.
‘I’m not from the country really.’ Samuel told her where he came from. ‘I met Mr. Allingham in the station. I’m going to sleep in his flat tonight.’
‘I’d sooner sleep in an ashpit,’ she said.
The coffee was thick and white and tasteless. They took their cups to a cubicle and Samuel brushed off the crumbs from his chair with his sleeve. His hat was gone. There were small pellets of dirt in the dust at his feet.
‘You’ve got a bottle on your finger,’ she said.
‘There, you see, everybody notices. Why don’t you take it off, Sam? It isn’t a decoration, it isn’t useful, it’s just a bottle.’
‘I think my finger must have swollen, Mr. Allingham. The bottle’s much tighter now.’
‘Let me have a look at you again.’ Mrs. Dacey put on a pair of spectacles with steel rims and a hanging chain. ‘He’s only a baby.’
‘I’m twenty.’
‘Ikey Mo, the baby farmer.’ She walked carefully to the back of the shop and called, ‘Polly, come down here. Polly. Polly.’
A girl’s voice called back from high up the house, ‘What for, ma?’
‘Come and get a gentleman’s bottle off.’
‘It sounds like a Russian composer, doesn’t it, darling?’ George Ring said, at the door. ‘What a marvellous dress, you look like a murderess.’
He sat down next to Samuel.
‘I couldn’t get Rose to move. She’s going to lie there all day in a tantrum. Do tell me what’s happening, everybody.’
‘It’s that bottle again,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘Why didn’t he put his finger in a glass or something? I don’t know what he was poking his finger about for in the first place. It’s an enigma to me.’
‘Everything’s an enigma to you. You can’t understand the slightest touch of originality. I think it must be awful not to have any imagination. It’s like a sense of humour.’
‘I’m just saying that not to be able to go in and buy a bottle of Bass without having to leave with the bottle on your finger seems to me like a kind of nightmare. That’s all I’m saying.’
Samuel heard Mrs. Dacey’s daughter running downstairs. Then he saw her hand on the edge of the door. In the second she took to push the door open and come in, he made her a hundred faces; he made her talk and walk in all the disguises of his loves at night; he gave her golden hair, black hair, he knew that she would be gypsy-skinned and white as milk. Polly come and put the kettle on with your white, slender, brown, broad hands, and see me waiting like a grenadier or a caliph in the mousey cubicle.
‘It’s like one of those nightmares when you’re playing billiards and the cue’s made of elastic,’ Mr. Allingham said.
In came a girl with a long, pale face and glasses. Her hair was not any of Samuel’s colours, but only dark and dull.
‘Go and help to pull his bottle off,’ said Mrs. Dacey.
Polly sat down on the table and took his hand. ‘Does it hurt? I’ve never done it before.’ She pulled at his finger.
‘I hope you won’t ever have to do it again, either,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘I don’t care if I haven’t got any imagination. I’m glad I’m like I am without anything on my finger.’
Polly bent over Samuel’s hand and he saw down her dress. She knew that he was looking, but she did not start back or spread her hand across the neck of her dress; she raised her head and stared at his eyes. I shall always remember this, he said to himself. In 1933 a girl was pulling at a bottle on the little finger of my left hand while I looked down her dress. It will last longer than all my poems and troubles.
‘I can’t get it off,’ she said.
‘Take him up to the bathroom then and put some soap on it,’ said Mrs. Dacey, in her dry, neat voice. ‘And mind it’s only his bottle.’
George Ring said as they got up to go, ‘Scream if you want me, I’ll be up in a wink. She’s the most terrible person, aren’t you, darling? You wouldn’t catch little George going up there all alone.’
Polly led the way upstairs.
‘I’m not complaining,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘I’m just making a statement. I’m not saying it isn’t all as it should be. He’s got a bottle on his finger and I’ve got a tooth in my pie.’
His voice faded.
3
Someone had drawn the ragged curtains in the bathroom to shut out the damp old day, and the bath was half full of water with a rubber duck floating on it. As Polly closed and locked the door birds began to sing.
‘It’s only the birds,’ she said. She put the key down her dress. ‘You needn’t be frightened.’
Two cages hung from the ceiling.
But Samuel had looked frightened when she turned the key and put it away where he never wanted to find it, not when the room grew suddenly like a wood in the tangled shadows of the green curtains.
‘It’s a funny place to have birds,’ he said.
‘They’re mine.’ Polly let the hot water run and the birds sang more loudly as though they heard a waterfall. ‘Mr. Allingham comes here for a bath on Wednesdays and he says they sneer at him and blow little raspberries all the time he’s washing. But I don’t think he washes very much. Doesn’t Mr. Allingham make you laugh too?’
He expected her to be smiling when she turned to him, but her face was still and grave, and all at once he saw that she was prettier than any of the girls he had made up in his mind before she opened the door downstairs. He distrusted her prettiness because of the key. He remembered what Mrs. Dacey had said when Mr. Allingham asked where Polly was. ‘Up to no good.’ He did not think she was going to put her arms around him. That would have been different. If she tried to put his head under the water he’d shout for George Ring and up he’d come like a horse, neighing and smelling of scent.
‘I only locked the door because I don’t want George Ring to come in. He’s queer. He puts scent all over his underclothes; did you know that? The Passing Cloud, that’s what we call him. The Passing Cloud.’
‘You didn’t have to put the key where you put it, though,’ Samuel said. ‘I might push you down and fish for it, I might be that sort.’
‘I don’t care.’
If only she would have smiled at him when she said that. But she looked as though she really did not care whether he pushed her down or whether he sat on the edge of the bath and touched the duck with his bottle.
The duck floated in circles on the used, greasy water.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Sam.’
‘Mine’s Mary. But they call me Polly for short.’
‘It isn’t much shorter, is it?’
‘No, it’s exactly the same length.’
She sat by his side on the edge of the bath. He could not think of anything to say. Here was the locked door he had often made up in stories and in his head, in bed in Mortimer Street, and the warm, hidden key, and the girl who was willing for anything. The bathroom should be a bedroom and she should not be wearing glasses.
‘Will you take off your glasses, Polly?’
‘If you like. But I won’t be able to see very far.’
‘You don’t have to see very far, it’s only a little room,’ he said. ‘Can you see me?’
‘Of course I can. You’re right next to me. Do you like me better now?’
‘You’re very pretty, I suppose, Polly.’
‘Pretty Polly,’ she said, without a smile.
Well, he said to himself, here you are, here she is without any glasses on.
‘Nothing ever happens in Sewell Street.’ She took his hand and let his finger with the bottle on it lie in her lap.
Her you are, he said, with your hand in her lap.
‘Nothing ever happens where I come from, either. I think things must be happening everywhere except where one is. All kinds of things happen to other people. So they say,’ he said.
‘The man who was lodging next door but one cut his throat like this,’ she said, ‘before breakfast.’
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br /> On his first free days since he was born Samuel sat with a loose girl in a locked bathroom over a tea-shop, the dirty curtains were drawn, and his hand lay on her thighs. He did not feel any emotion at all. O God, he thought, make me feel something, make me feel as I ought to, here is something happening and I’m cool and dull as a man in a bus. Make me remember all the stories. I caught her in my arms, my heart beat against hers, her body was trembling, her mouth opened like a flower. The lotus of Osiris was opening to the sun.
‘Listen to the old birds,’ she said, and he saw that the hot water was running over the rim of the washbasin.
I must be impotent, he thought.
‘Why did he cut his throat like that, Polly? Was it love? I think if I was crossed in love I’d drink brandy and whisky and crème de menthe and that stuff that’s made with eggs.’
‘It wasn’t love with Mr. Shaw. I don’t know why he did it. Mrs. Bentley said there was blood everywhere, everywhere, and all over the clock. He left a little note in the letter-rack and all it said was that he’d been meaning to do it ever since October. Look, the water’ll drip right through into the kitchen.’
He turned it off. The birds stopped singing.
‘Perhaps it was love, really. Perhaps he loved you, Polly, but he wouldn’t say so. From a distance.’
‘Go on, he had a limp,’ she said. ‘Old Dot and Carry. How old are you?’
‘Twenty.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, nearly.’
‘No you’re not.’
Then they were silent, sitting on the bath, his hand in her lap. She trailed her pale hand in the water. The birds began again.
‘Pale hands I love,’ he said.
‘Beside the Shalimar. Do you, Sam? Do you love my hands? That’s a funny thing to say.’ She looked dully at the long, floating weed in the water and made a wave. ‘It’s like the evening here.’
‘It’s like evening in the country,’ he said. ‘Birds singing and water. We’re sitting on a bank by the river now.’
‘Having a picnic’
‘And then we’re going to take our clothes off and have a swim. Gee, it’ll be cold. You’ll be able to feel all the fish swimming about.’