by Dylan Thomas
‘I can hear the 47 bus, too,’ she said. ‘People are going home to tea. It’s cold without any clothes on, isn’t it? Feel my arm, it’s like snow, only not so white. Pale hands I love,’ she began to sing. ‘Do you love me altogether?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I feel anything like that at all. I never do feel much until afterwards and then it’s too late.’
‘Now it isn’t too late. It isn’t too late, Sam. We’re alone. Polly and Sam. I’ll come and have a swim with you if you like. In the dirty old river with the duck.’
‘Don’t you ever smile, Polly? I haven’t seen you smile once.’
‘You’ve only known me for twenty minutes. I don’t like smiling much, I think I look best when I’m serious, like this.’ She saddened her eyes and mouth. ‘I’m a tragedienne. I’m crying because my lover’s dead.’
Slowly tears came to her eyes.
‘His name was Sam and he had green eyes and brown hair. He was ever so short. Darling, darling, darling Sam, he’s dead.’ The tears ran down her cheeks.
‘Stop crying now, Polly. Please. Stop crying. You’ll hurt yourself.’
But she was crying pitifully.
‘Stop it, Polly, pretty Polly.’ He put his arm round her shoulders. He kissed her on the cheek. It was warm and wet. ‘Nobody’s dead, Polly darling,’ he said. She cried and moaned his name in the abandon of her made grief, tore at the loose, low neck of her dress, threw back her hair and raised her damp eyes to the birds in their cages and the cracked heavens of the ceiling.
‘You’re doing it fine,’ he said in despair, shaking her shoulders. ‘I’ve never seen such fine crying. Stop now, please, Polly, please, while you can stop.’
Ninety-eight per cent of the human body is water, he thought. Polly Dacey is all salt water. She sat by his side like a flood in an apron.
‘I’ll do anything you like if you’ll only stop,’ he said. ‘You’ll drown yourself, Polly. I’ll promise to do anything in the world.’
She dried her eye’s on her bare arm.
‘I wasn’t really breaking my heart, silly. I was only depicting. What’ll you do, then? Anything? I can depict being glad because my lover’s not really dead, too. The War Office made a mistake.’
‘Anything,’ he said. ‘I want to see you being glad tomorrow. You mustn’t do one after the other.’
‘It’s nothing to me, I can do them all in a row. I can do childbirth and being tight and—’
‘You do being quiet. Do being a quiet lady sitting on a bath, Polly.’
‘I will if you’ll come and have a swim with me. You promised.’ She patted her hair into place.
‘Where?’
‘In the bath. You get in first, go on. You can’t break your promise.’
George Ring, he whispered, gallop upstairs now and bite your way through the door. She wants me to sit with my overcoat on and my bottle on my finger in the cold, greasy bath, in the half-dark bathroom, under the sneering birds.
‘I’ve got a new suit,’ he said.
‘Take it off, silly. I don’t want you to go in the bath with your clothes on. Look, I’ll put something over the window so you can undress in the dark. Then I’ll undress too. I’ll come in the bath with you. Sam, are you frightened?’
‘I don’t know. Couldn’t we take our clothes off and not go in the bath? I mean, if we want to take them off at all. Someone might come in. It’s terribly cold, Polly. Terribly cold.’
‘You’re frightened. You’re frightened to lie in the water with me. You won’t be cold for long.’
‘But there’s no sense in it. I don’t want to go in the bath. Let’s sit here and you do being glad, Polly.’
He could not move his hand, she had caught the bottle between her legs.
‘You don’t want to be frightened. I’m not any older than you are,’ she said, and her whispering mouth was close to his ear. ‘As soon as you get in the bath I’ll jump on top of you in the dark. You can pretend I’m somebody you love if you don’t like me properly. You can call me any name.’ She dug her nails into his hand. ‘Give me your coat, I’ll hang it over the window. Dark as midnight,’ she said, as she hung the coat up, and her face in the green light through the curtains was like a girl’s under the sea. Then all the green went out, and he heard her fumbling. I do not want to drown. I do not want to drown in Sewell Street off Circe Street, he whispered under his breath.
‘Are you undressing? I can’t hear you. Quick, quick, Sam.’
He took off his jacket and pulled his shirt over his head. Take a good look in the dark, Mortimer Street, have a peek at me in London.
‘I’m cold,’ he said.
‘I’ll make you warm, beautifully warm, Sam.’ He could not tell where she was, but she was moving in the dark and clinking a glass. ‘I’m going to give you some brandy. There’s brandy, darling, in the medicine cupboard. I’ll give you a big glass. You must drink it right down.’
Naked, he slipped one leg over the edge of the bath and touched the icy water.
Come and have a look at impotent Samuel Bennet from Mortimer Street off Stanley’s Grove trembling to death in a cold bath in the dark near Paddington Station. I am lost in the metropolis with a rubber duck and a girl I cannot see pouring brandy into a tooth-glass. The birds are going mad in the dark. It’s been such a short day for them, Polly.
‘I’m in the bath now.’
‘I’m undressing too. Can you hear me?’ she said softly. ‘That’s my dress rustling. Now I’m taking my petticoat off. Now I’m naked.’ A cold hand touched him on the face. ‘Here’s the brandy, Sam. Sam, my dear, drink it up and then I’ll climb in with you. I’ll love you, Sam, I’ll love you up. Drink it all up, then you can touch me.’
He felt the glass in his hand and he lifted it up and drank all that was in it.
‘Christ!’ he said in a clear, ordinary voice. ‘Christ!’
Then the birds flew down and kicked him on the head, carefully between the eyes, brutally on each temple, and he fell back in the bath.
That was all the birds singing under the water, and the sea was full of feathers that swam up his nostrils and into his mouth. A duck as big as a ship sailed up on a drop of water as big as a house and smelt his breath as it spurted out from broken, bleeding lips, like flames and waterspouts. Here came a wave of brandy and birds, and Mr. Allingham, naked as a baby, riding on the top with his birthmark like a rainbow, and George Ring swimming breast-stroke through the open door, and three Mrs. Daceys gliding in yards above the flowing ground.
The darkness drowned in a bright ball of light, and the birds stopped.
4
Voices began to reach him from a great distance, travelling in lavatories in racing trains along a liquid track, diving from the immeasurably high ceiling into the cold sea in the enormous bath.
‘Do you see what I see?’ That was the voice of the man called Allingham, who slept under the furniture. ‘He’s taking a little dip.’
‘Don’t let me look, Donald, he’s bare all over.’ I know him, Samuel thought. That’s George Ring the horse. ‘And he’s ill too. Silly Sam.’
‘Lucky Sam. He’s drunk, George. Well, well, well, and he hasn’t even got his bottle off. Where’s Polly?’
‘You look over there,’ Mrs. Dacey said. ‘Over there on the shelf. He’s drunk all the eau de cologne.’
‘He must have been thirsty.’
Large, bodiless hands came over the bath and lifted him out.
‘He’s eccentric,’ Mr. Allingham said, as they laid him on the floor, ‘that’s all I’m saying. I’m not preaching, I’m not condemning. I’m just saying that other people get drunk in the proper places.’
The birds were singing again in the electric dawn as Samuel fell quietly to sleep.
Four Lost Souls
1
He sank into the ragged green water for the second time and, rising naked with seaweed and a woman under each arm and a mouthful of broken shells, he saw the whole of his
dead life standing trembling before him, indestructible and unsinkable, on the brandy-brown waves. It looked like a hallstand.
He opened his mouth to speak, but a warm wave rushed in.
‘Tea,’ said Mrs. Dacey. ‘Tea with plenty of sugar every five minutes. That’s what I always gave him, and it didn’t do a bit of good.’
‘Not too much Worcester, George; don’t bury the egg.’
‘I won’t,’ Samuel said.
‘Oh, listen to the birds. It’s been such a short night for the birds, Polly.’
‘Listen to the birds,’ he said clearly, and a burning drink drowned his tongue.
‘They’ve laid an egg,’ Mr. Allingham said.
‘Try some Coca-Cola, Donald. It can’t do any harm; he’s had tea and a prairie oyster and angostura and Oxo and everything.’
‘I used to pour the tea down by the pint,’ Mrs. Dacey said affectionately, ‘and up it came, lump sugar and all.’
‘He doesn’t want a Coca-Cola. Give him a drop of your hair oil. I knew a man who used to squeeze boot-blacking through a veil.’
‘You know everybody piggish. He’s trying to sit up, the poor darling.’
Samuel wrestled into the dry world and looked around a room in it, at Mrs. Dacey, now miraculously divided into one long woman, folding her black silk arms in the doorway, at George Ring arching his smile and hair toward the rusty taps, at Mr. Allingham resigned above him.
‘Polly’s gone,’ he said.
It was then that he understood why the three persons in the bathroom were so tall and far. I am on the floor, looking up, he said to himself. But the others were listening.
‘You’re naked too,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘under the blanket.’
‘Here’s a nice wet sponge.’ George Ring dabbed and smoothed. ‘Keep it on your forehead. There, like that. That better?’
‘Eau de cologne is for outside the body,’ said Mrs. Dacey without disapproval, ‘and I’ll give our Polly such a clip. I’ll clip her on the earhole every time she opens her mouth.’
Mr. Allingham nodded. ‘Whisky I can understand,’ he said. ‘But eau de cologne! You put that on handkerchieves. You don’t put whisky on handkerchieves.’ He looked down at Samuel. ‘I don’t.’
‘No, mustn’t suck the sponge, Sam.’
‘I suppose he thinks red biddy’s like bread and milk,’ Mr. Allingham said.
They gathered his clothes from the side of the bath and hurriedly dressed him. And not until he was dressed and upright, shivering along the landing to the dark stairs, did he try to speak again. George Ring and Mr. Allingham held his arms and guided him toward the top of that winding grave. Mrs. Dacey, the one mourner, followed with a rustle of silk.
‘It was the brandy from the medicine cupboard,’ he said, and down they went into the coarse, earth-like silence of the stairs.
‘Give me furniture polish,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘Crack. Mind your head. Especially when I’m out of sorts in the bath.’
The darkness was settling like more dirt and dust over the silent shop. Someone had hung up a sign, ‘Closed’, on the inside of the window not facing the street. ‘Meths is finicky,’ Mr. Allingham said.
They sat Samuel down on a chair behind the counter and he heard Mrs. Dacey, still on the stairs, calling for Polly up into the dark, dirty other floors and caves of the drunken house. But Polly did not answer.
She would be in her locked bedroom now, crying for Sam gone, at her window staring out on to the colourless, slowly disappearing street and the tall houses down at heel; or depicting, in the kitchen, the agony of a woman in childbirth, writhing and howling round the crowded sink; or being glad at a damp corner of the landing.
‘Silly goose,’ said George Ring, sitting long-legged on the table and smiling at Samuel with a ferocious coyness. ‘You might have been drownded. Drownded,’ he said again, looking slyly up from under the spider line of his eyebrows.
‘Lucky you left the door open,’ Mr. Allingham said. He lit a cigarette and looked at the match until it burned his finger. ‘I suppose,’ he said, his finger in his mouth.
‘Our maid at home always said “drownded”,’ said George Ring.
‘But I saw Polly lock the door. She put the key down her dress.’ Samuel spoke with difficulty from behind the uncertain counter. The words came out in a rush, then reversed and were lost, tumbling among the sour bushes under his tongue. ‘She put it down her dress,’ he said, and paused at the end of each word to untie the next. Now the shop was almost entirely dark.
‘And chimbley. You know, for chimney. Well, my dear, the door was open when we went up. No key, no Polly.’
‘Just a boy in the bath,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘Do you often get like that, Sam? The water was up to your chin.’
‘And the dirt!’
‘It wasn’t my dirt. Someone had been in the bath before. It was cold,’ Samuel said.
‘Yes, yes.’ Samuel could see Mr. Allingham’s head nodding. ‘That alters the situation, doesn’t it? Dear God,’ he said, ‘you should have gone in with your clothes on like everybody else.’
‘Polly’s gone,’ said Mrs. Dacey. She appeared out of nowhere in the wall and stood behind the counter at Samuel’s side. Her rustling dress brushed against his hands, and he drew them sharply back. I touched a funeral, he said to the dazed boy in his chair. Her corpse-cold hand fell against his cheek, chilling him out of a moment’s sleep. The coffin has walked upright into my sitting bed.
‘Oooh,’ he said aloud.
‘Still cold, baby?’ Mrs. Dacey bent down, creaking like a door, and mothered him about the hair and mouth.
There had been little light all day, even at dawn and noon, mostly the close, false light of bedroom and restaurant. All day he had sat in small, dark places, bathroom and travelling lavatory, a jungle of furniture, a stuffed shop where no one called except these voices saying:
‘You looked so defenceless, Sam, lying there all cold and white.’
‘Where was Moses when the light went out, Mrs. Dacey?’
‘Like one of these cherubs in the Italian Primitives, only with a bottle on your finger, of course.’
‘In the dark. Like this.’
‘What did our Polly do to you, the little tart?’ Mrs. Dacey said in her tidy, lady’s voice.
Mr. Allingham stood up. ‘I’m not listening. Don’t you say a word, Sam, even if you could. No explanations. There he was, gassed in the bath, at half-past four in the afternoon. I can stand so much.’
‘I want to go out,’ Samuel said.
‘Out the back?’
‘Out.’
Out of the blind, stripping hole in a wall, aviary and menagerie, cold water shop, into the streets without locks. I don’t want to sleep with Polly in a drawer. I don’t want to lie in a cellar with a wet woman, drinking polish. London is happening everywhere; let me out, let me go. Mrs. Dacey is all cold fingers.
‘Out then. It’s six o’clock. Can you walk, son?’
‘I can walk okay; it’s my head.’
Mrs. Dacey, unseen, stroked his hair. Nobody can see, he said silently, but Mrs. Susan Dacey, licensed to sell tobacco, is stroking my hair with her lizards; and he gave a cry.
‘I’ve got no sympathy,’ said Mr. Allingham. ‘Are you coming, Sue?’
‘Depends where you’re going.’
‘Taking the air down the Edgware Road. He’s got to see around, hasn’t he? You don’t come up from the provinces to drink eau de cologne in the bath.’
They all went out, and Mrs. Dacey locked the shop.
It was raining heavily.
2
‘Fun!’ George Ring said.
They walked out of Sewell Street into Praed Street arm-in-arm.
‘I’m a fool for the rain.’ He shook his clinging curls and danced a few steps on the pavement.
‘My new brown-overcoat’s in the bathroom,’ Samuel said, and Mrs. Dacey covered him with her umbrella.
‘Go on, you’re not the sort that p
uts a coat on in the rain, are you? Stop dancing, George.’
But George Ring danced down the pavement in the flying rain and pulled the others with him; unwillingly they broke into a dancing run under the lamp posts’ drizzle of light, Mrs. Dacey, black as a deacon, jumping high over the puddles with a rustle and creak, Mr. Allingham, on the outside, stamping and dodging along the gutter, Samuel gliding light and dizzy with his feet hardly touching the ground.
‘Look out. People,’ cried Mr. Allingham, and dragged them, still dancing, out on to the slippery street. Caught in a circle of headlights and chased by horns, they stamped and scampered on to the pavement again, clinging fast to each other, their faces glistening, cold and wet.
‘Where’s the fire, George? Go easy, boy, go easy.’ But Mr. Allingham, one foot in the gutter, was hopping along like a rabbit and tugging at George Ring’s arm to make him dance faster. ‘It’s all Sam’s fault,’ he said as he hopped, and his voice was high and loud like a boy’s in the rain.
Look at London flying by me, buses and glow-worms, umbrellas and lamp posts, cigarettes and eyes under the water doorways, I am dancing with three strangers down Edgware Road in the rain, cried Samuel to the gliding boy around him. Light and without will as a suit of feathers, he held on to their arms, and the umbrella rode above them like a bird.
Cold and unsmiling, Mrs. Dacey skipped by his side, seeing nothing through her misted glasses.
And George Ring sang as he bounced, with his drenched hair rising and falling in level waves, ‘Here we go gathering nuts and may, Donald and Mrs. Dacey and George and Sam.’
When they stopped, outside the Antelope, Mr. Allingham leaned against the wall and coughed until he cried. All the time he coughed he never removed his cigarette.
‘I haven’t run for forty years,’ he said, his shoulders shaking, and his handkerchief like a flag to his mouth. He led them into the Saloon Bar, where three young women sat with their shoes off in front of the electric log fire.