Gaudete

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Gaudete Page 11

by Ted Hughes


  He is lugging his trunk out though the back door.

  After backing his car up, he tilts the trunk into the boot,

  closes the boot, and returns into the house.

  Maud is crossing the space of gravel.

  Passing the open car-window her arm dips inside, and she

  goes on

  Round the far corner of the house.

  Half-way across the graveyard, she hesitates at a freshly-dug not yet occupied grave, and dropping the ignition keys between the covering planks, goes on toward the church.

  Lumb is making a last furious search through his room, ransacking drawers and cupboards.

  In the bar at the Bridge Inn

  The assembly of husbands and their sympathisers,

  muffled by ceiling and walls and cigarette smoke,

  Is a squabble of unlistened-to voices

  Trying to become a meeting.

  Mr Walsall continues to draw and push forward the

  required drinks.

  The photograph lies on the bar.

  Garten sits near it, watching over his property, installed

  in the focus of excitement.

  Evans keeps his print concealed, he has had enough of it.

  Behind backs and elbows

  Dunworth repeatedly tries to introduce a fuddled

  reasonable attitude.

  His mouth moves soundlessly in the din.

  Westlake is saying nothing, he listens to everybody

  Keeping his own thoughts untangled.

  Holroyd in a big consoling voice wants to see proof

  Because a photograph is not really proof.

  He for one can’t believe it’s quite as lurid as everybody

  wants to think.

  And he’s not going to commit himself till he gets facts.

  As for going up to the church, he can’t see what that will

  prove at all.

  A shout of voices swamps him,

  Complicating and simplifying the possibilities, faces are

  jerking and heads.

  Full pints stream over boots, glasses tilt empty and

  waiting,

  As Walsall’s arms move steadily.

  Nobody quite knows what to do.

  They continue to drink more forcefully in search of

  definition and action.

  They all know what they want to happen

  And they drink to make it more likely

  So that the criss-cross push and pull of voices works

  steadily in one direction.

  Evans keeps hauling the tangle into a tight hard knot and

  humping it further.

  When they hear his voice, everybody listens.

  As he gets drunker, his memory becomes more naked and

  ungoverned.

  He feels more and more his strength, feeling more and

  more the weakness of the others.

  His little eyes become deadlier.

  He gleams with impatience to do the direct, conclusive,

  simple thing.

  He has anaesthetised all thought of consequences.

  Only old Smayle, behind backs in the corner,

  Keeps his humour – as amazed, nevertheless,

  As he is amused.

  Lumb

  Is walking in a circle. The room is a maze of smoke

  From smouldering piles of herbs in ashtrays.

  He is holding something up, it is a stag’s antlered head on

  a pole,

  Heavy and swaying and shag-maned.

  The pipe and drum music is a tight, shuddering,

  repetitive machine

  Which seems bolted into the ground

  And as if they were all its mechanical parts, the women

  are fastened into it,

  As if the smoke were the noise of it,

  The noise of it raucous with the smoke and the smoke

  stirred by it.

  A hobbling, nodding, four-square music, a goblin

  monotony,

  The women in a circle clapping to the tread of it.

  Their hair dangles loose, their eyes slide oiled, their faces

  oiled with sweat

  In the trundling treadmill of it.

  It is like the music of a slogging, deadening, repetitive

  labour.

  They have left their faces hanging on the outside of the

  music as abandoned masks.

  They no longer feel their bodies.

  They have been taken deep into the perpetual motion of

  the music

  And have become the music.

  Now Lumb pauses

  Confronting one of the women as if at last he had been

  directed to her.

  She has stopped clapping and she waits, helpless, as the

  music intensifies –

  But it is not for her, and he leaves her, she is gathered

  back into the music.

  He weaves among the women and the smoke,

  Pausing here and there, in front of one woman then

  another.

  The clapping grows harder, sharper, it is like the

  slamming of wood slabs

  Of hands that are no longer hands.

  The women are stripping off their last clothing as if to

  cool and liberate their limbs,

  To work more freely in the gruelling trial of the music.

  Their feet are trying to climb the music but are too

  heavily rooted.

  The music is like all their heads being shaken together in

  a drum.

  Felicity is standing loose, hardly moving,

  Her eyes far off.

  In the lottery of the mushroom sandwich

  Everything was arranged for her.

  What she has eaten and drunk

  Is flying her through great lights and dropping her from

  gulf to gulf.

  Wings lift through her and go off.

  A tiger

  Is trying to adjust its maniac flame-barred strength to her

  body.

  And it seems natural

  That she should be gazing at the surprisingly handsome

  breasts

  The surprisingly young body of Mrs Davies,

  And the luminous face which is now revealed to her as an

  infinite sexual flower.

  She can see Mrs Davies is infinitely beautiful

  And Mrs Garten is a serpentine infinite wreath of flowing

  light.

  Inside Felicity a solid stone-hard core of honey-burning

  sweetness has begun to melt

  And she knows this is oozing out all over her body

  And wetting her cheeks and trickling on her thighs.

  The sweetness is like the hot rough fur of the tiger as it

  bulges and bristles into presence,

  A hot-throated opening flower of tiger, splitting all the

  leafy seams of her body,

  And Mrs Walsall’s bony frame is revealed to her as an

  Egyptian cat-headed goddess on an endless plain

  Swaying in tall flames, with a sparkling city in the

  distance beyond her.

  Lumb is suddenly standing in front of her looking at her.

  He is holding something shaggy and terrible above her.

  Felicity understands that she is a small anonymous

  creature which is now going to be killed.

  She starts to cry, feeling the greatness and nobility of her

  role.

  She starts to sing, adoring whatever the terrible lifted

  thing in front of her is,

  Which needs all she can give, she knows it needs her.

  She knows it is the love animal.

  The clapping hammers her head, her body has given up

  trying to move.

  Now she becomes aware that Lumb is holding some

  slender thing towards her.

  He touch
es her navel with it, it seems to her to be a

  foxglove.

  Fleetingly she cannot understand how she came to be

  naked.

  But it is too late to do anything about anything.

  She is already drowning in the deep mightiness of what is

  about to happen to her.

  She knows she herself is to be the sacramental thing.

  She herself is already holy

  And drifting at a great depth, a great remoteness, like a

  spark in space.

  She is numbed with the seriousness of it, she feels she is

  vast,

  Enlarging into space from a withering smoulder of petty

  voices.

  She touches the wand, which is actually of twisted

  leather, and moves as he leads her.

  The clapping no longer uses human energy.

  It is like the steel oiled parts of the music,

  Like a generator

  Pulsing radiance into her, solid and dazzling, fringing her

  whole body with flame.

  Somehow she has become a goddess.

  She is now the sacred doll of a slow infinite solemnity.

  She knows she is a constellation very far off and cold

  Moving through this burrow of smoke and faces.

  She moves robed invisibly with gorgeous richness.

  She knows she is burning plasma and infinitely tiny,

  That she and all these women are moving inside the body

  of an incandescent creature of love,

  That they are brightening, and that the crisis is close,

  They are the cells in the glands of an inconceivably huge

  and urgent love-animal

  And some final crisis of earth’s life is now to be enacted

  Faithfully and selflessly by them all.

  In the smoke-filled basement

  The faces, the smoke, the clapping, are a tunnel

  Down which she steps with Lumb

  Her outstretched fingertips touching the wand

  Towards the waiting unmoving figure of Maud.

  Estridge

  Has left Hagen in his study.

  Hagen disdains to squander his dignity.

  His face-shield, armorially quartered,

  The monument of hurt, no longer a nerve,

  Leans over trays of butterflies.

  To make up for the lost Major, Estridge’s purposeful rage redoubles itself, remembering that Hagen has gone through little enough yet, while he, Estridge, is an incinerator of loss and pain. His dead daughter, her living sister, what is left of his own life, make one flame, overpowering his dust and sticks and papery tissues, a glowing fullness of energy, extraordinarily comfortable. He does not know what he will do now. He knows that anything will have to be forgiven him.

  He enters the Bridge Inn for the first time in his life, remembering, as he pushes the door, the wren in Macbeth.

  His arrival

  Is like permission: it flings open all limits.

  His ferocity, concentrated in that bulbous hawk’s eye,

  Delegates, as in a battle,

  A legitimate madness to each member.

  Glasses drain into flushed radiant faces.

  Evans,

  Feeling himself the key in the log-jam, moves.

  They all march in a tight group up the middle of the evening street. The dry prattle of their herding feet brings faces to windows and doors.

  They are solemn, possessed by the common recklessness, not speaking above the odd murmur. Overawed by their own war-path seriousness. In the armour of alcohol, they feel safe. And new satisfactions open. The single idea of revenge shuffles its possible forms. Now Lumb will somehow pay for everything. Their decision has released them. It has outlawed him. Sentenced him. All they have to do is carry out the sentence.

  A straggle of boys trails along,

  Touched by the thunderish atmosphere of evening

  catastrophe,

  The mood of disaster,

  With thrushes washing their voices in the gardens, and

  beyond,

  And pigeons soothing each other,

  And the flame-burdened laburnums shedding their blue

  shadows on the pavement,

  And the dark phalanx of men close together,

  Like a mob of prisoners being taken to execution,

  Past the garden gates, the open doors,

  Led by an Alsatian

  That leans all its lunging weight on the air,

  Scrabbling to bound forward, and coughing

  On its chain.

  Maud

  Seems to have the head of a fox,

  The long ragged pelt of a giant fox hangs from her

  shoulders, its brush and hind legs dangling below her

  buttocks.

  Its forepaws are knotted at her throat, its head is on her

  head.

  Felicity is crying with fear

  As Maud spreads the blueish pale-fringed skin of a hind

  over her shoulders

  And knots its forelegs across her throat.

  She fastens its mask on to the top of her head with a

  hooked wire.

  Felicity feels its hind legs tapping at the back of her

  knees and calves.

  She understands she has become a hind.

  Her bowels coil and uncoil with fear.

  She waits for whatever it is they are going to do to her.

  She knows she has lost her way finally.

  She catches and loses again the idea that Lumb will

  somehow bring her out of all this.

  She feels everything beginning to deepen again.

  She forgets who she is or where she is.

  The giant face of a rocking owl is ogling her

  Over a pudgy unrecognisable body with swinging empty

  sock breasts.

  A giant expressionless badger with human arms and

  fingers,

  The smoke ropes them all together.

  Lumb bobs under stag antlers, the russet bristly pelt of a

  red stag flapping at his naked back.

  Everything and everybody is moving

  As if the music were the tumbling and boiling of a

  cauldron.

  Maud is leading Felicity on to the low rostrum.

  She pushes Felicity’s head down and forces her to kneel,

  And then straddles her neck from behind and grips it

  between her thighs.

  The music inside their bodies is doing what it wants at

  last

  As if they were all somnambulist

  They are no more awake than leaves in a whirlpool.

  Maud sits lower, more heavily

  Forcing Felicity’s brows to the floorboards,

  Gripping her by the hair.

  The women are crying out in the hoarse pulse of the

  music.

  Lumb mounts Felicity from behind, like a stag.

  A giant hare-headed creature drops on human knees as if

  shot

  And bows over folded human arms

  In imitation of Felicity,

  Shaking her head to the music, as if it were shaken.

  In the shuttered room,

  In the hot slowly-rending curtains of smoke,

  Huge-headed woodland creatures from a nursery fairy tale

  Are dropping on to their knees

  Hugging their human bodies with human arms

  As the music tears away the membranes, tearing them as

  the smoke tears,

  And Lumb’s mouth stretched open, like a painted mask,

  Utters a long cry inside the cry

  That is now torturing all of them

  As they all cry together

  As if they were being torn out of their bodies

  And Maud’s scream rips out the core of the sound

  As she drags Felicity, by the hair,

  Simulta
neously forward and out

  From between her knees.

  Felicity

  Tries to stand

  As Maud, lifting both fists locked together above her head

  Brings them down with all her crazy might on to

  Felicity’s bowed nape.

  Felicity’s head flings back

  As she sprawls forward two or three strides and collapses

  spreadeagled.

  The hind’s skin is plugged to the nape of her neck

  Like a coat on a peg

  By the hilt of Lumb’s dagger

  Whose blade is out of sight, inside her body.

  Maud starts to speak.

  The music prevents her, she speaks above the music

  In a throat-gouging scream.

  She is announcing

  That this girl is not one of them

  That she is his selected wife

  That he is going to abandon them and run away with this

  girl

  Like an ordinary man

  With his ordinary wife.

  The fuddled women grope for what has happened

  And for what is being said

  But their brains are still in the music

  And nothing will separate.

  They receive Maud’s words as the revelation of

  everything.

  Felicity’s body lies still, no longer any part of what

  matters,

  Twisted unhumanly, demonstrating her unimportance.

  Lumb is kneeling.

  He bows over her, close to her face,

  His cheek almost touching her cheek

  As he searches her face,

  Hardly daring to breathe,

  As if hardly daring to stir the air about her,

  As if this were some horribly burned body

  That has just dropped from a shocking height,

  In which every nerve has been roasted

  And every bone shattered, like a sackful of crockery.

  With all his gentleness

  He pulls on the hilt of the dagger,

  As if gentleness intense enough

  Could force a miracle

  And unmake the black-mouthed slot

  From which the frightening taper of steel

  Continues to glide

 

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