Under Milk Wood
Page 10
GIRL
Why?
THIRD BOY
Because my mother says I mustn’t.
GIRLS VOICES
Cowardy cowardy custard
Give Gwennie a penny.
GIRL
Give me a penny.
THIRD BOY
I haven’t got any.
GIRLS’ VOICES
Put him in the river
Up to his liver
Quick quick Dirty Dick
Beat him on the bum
With a rhubarb stick.
Aiee!
Hush!
And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away downhill with his patched pants falling, and his tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and his mother’s shame and his father’s wickedness with the loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum, for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and welshcakes and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her arms, he’ll never forget as he paddles blind home through the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, winegums, hundreds and thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nougat to tug and ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue in girls’ curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood, ice-cream cornets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.
Gossamer Beynon high-heels out of school. The sun hums down through the cotton flowers of her dress into the bell of her heart and buzzes in the honey there and couches and kisses, lazy-loving and boozed, in her red-berried breast. Eyes run from the trees and windows of the street, steaming ‘Gossamer,’ and strip her to the nipples and the bees. She blazes naked past the Sailors Arms, the only woman on the Dai-Adamed earth. Sinbad Sailors places on her thighs still dewdamp from the first mangrowing cockcrow garden his reverent goat-bearded hands.
GOSSAMER BEYNON
I don’t care if he is common,
she whispers to her salad-day deep self,
I want to gobble him up.
I don’t care if he does drop his aitches,
she tells the stripped and mother-of-the-world bigbeamed and Eve-hipped spring of her self.
so long as he’s all cucumber and hooves.
Sinbad Sailors watches her go by, demure and proud and schoolmarm in her crisp flower dress and sun-defying hat, with never a look or lilt or wriggle, the butcher’s unmelting icemaiden daughter veiled forever from the hungry hug of his eyes.
SINBAD SAILORS
Oh, Gossamer Beynon, why are you so proud?
he grieves to his Guinness,
Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B, I wish I wish that you were for me. I wish you were not so educated.
She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration, and sits down in the kitchen to a plate heaped high with chips and the kidneys of lambs.
In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in, from Lives of the Great Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes on reading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret.
MRS PUGH
Persons with manners do not read at table,
says Mrs Pugh. She swallows a digestive tablet as big as a horse-pill, washing it down with clouded peasoup water.
[Pause]
Some persons were brought up in pigsties.
MR PUGH
Pigs don’t read at table, dear.
Bitterly she flicks dust from the broken cruet. It settles on the pie in a thin gnat-rain.
MR PUGH
Pigs can’t read, my dear.
MRS PUGH
I know one who can.
FIRST VOICE
Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel.
MR PUGH
You know best, dear,
says Mr Pugh, and quick as a flash he ducks her in rat soup.
MRS PUGH
What’s that book by your trough, Mr Pugh?
MR PUGH
It’s a theological work, my dear. Lives of the Great Saints.
Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining vault.
MRS PUGH
I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly Garter. She was martyred again last night. Mrs Organ Morgan saw her with Mr Waldo.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
And when they saw me they pretended they were looking for nests,
said Mrs Organ Morgan to her husband, with her mouth full of fish as a pelican’s.
But you don’t go nesting in long combinations, I said to myself, like Mr Waldo was wearing, and your dress nearly over your head like Polly Garter’s. Oh, they didn’t fool me.
One big bird gulp, and the flounder’s gone. She licks her lips and goes stabbing again.
And when you think of all those babies she’s got, then all I can say is she’d better give up bird nesting that’s all I can say, it isn’t the right kind of hobby at all for a woman that can’t say No even to midgets. Remember Bob Spit? He wasn’t any bigger than a baby and he gave her two. But they’re two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?
ORGAN MORGAN
Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.
MRS ORGAN MORGAN
Organ Morgan, you haven’t been listening to a word I said. It’s organ organ all the time with you …
And she bursts into tears, and, in the middle of her salty howling, nimbly spears a small flatfish and pelicans it whole.
ORGAN MORGAN
And then Palestrina,
says Organ Morgan.
Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks—(one for each year of his loony age)—and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah’s whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wittu-woo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock.
The lust and lilt and lather and emerald breeze and crackle of the bird-praise and body of Spring with its breasts full of rivering May-milk, means, to that lordly fish-head nibbler, nothing but another nearness to the tribes and navies of the Last Black Day who’ll sear and pillage down Armageddon Hill to his double-locked rusty-shuttered tick-tock dust-scrabbled shack at the bottom of the town that has fal
len head over bells in love.
POLLY GARTER
And I’ll never have such loving again,
pretty Polly hums and longs.
POLLY GARTER [Sings]
Now when farmers’ boys on the first fair day
Come down from the hills to drink and be gay,
Before the sun sinks I’ll lie there in their arms
For they’re good bad boys from the lonely farms,
But I always think as we tumble into bed
Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead…
[A long silence]
The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llareggub Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, afterswill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.
MRS PUGH
Persons with manners,
snaps Mrs cold Pugh
do not nod at table.
Mr Pugh cringes awake. He puts on a soft-soaping smile: it is sad and grey under his nicotine-eggyellow weeping walrus Victorian moustache worn thick and long in memory of Doctor Crippen.
You should wait until you retire to your sty,
says Mrs Pugh, sweet as a razor. His fawning measly quarter-smile freezes. Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist’s den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.
MR PUGH
I beg your pardon, my dear,
he murmurs with a wheedle.
Captain Cat, at his window thrown wide to the sun and the clippered seas he sailed long ago when his eyes were blue and bright, slumbers and voyages; ear-ringed and rolling, I Love You Rosie Probert tattooed on his belly, he brawls with broken bottles in the fug and babel of the dark dock bars, roves with a herd of short and good time cows in every naughty port and twines and souses with the drowned and blowzybreasted dead. He weeps as he sleeps and sails.
One voice of all he remembers most dearly as his dream buckets down. Lazy early Rosie with the flaxen thatch, whom he shared with Tom-Fred the donkeyman and many another seaman, clearly and near to him speaks from the bedroom of her dust. In that gulf and haven, fleets by the dozen have anchored for the little heaven of the night; but she speaks to Captain napping Cat alone. Mrs Probert …
ROSIE PROBERT
from Duck Lane, Jack. Quack twice and ask for Rosie.
…is the one love of his sea-life that was sardined with women.
ROSIE PROBERT [Softly]
What seas did you see,
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?
CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like seals,
Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?
CAPTAIN CAT
As true as I’m her
Dear you Tom Cat’s tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.
ROSIE PROBERT
What seas were rocking
My little deck hand
My favourite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?
CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seesaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy.
Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
ROSIE PROBERT
Knock twice, Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.
CAPTAIN CAT
Rosie Probert.
ROSIE PROBERT
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the
darkness for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.
CHILD
Look,
says a child to her mother as they pass by the window of Schooner House,
Captain Cat is crying.
Captain Cat is crying,
CAPTAIN CAT
Come back come back,
up the silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night.
CHILD
He’s crying all over his nose,
says the child. Mother and child move on down the street.
He’s got a nose like strawberries,
the child says; and then she forgets him too. She sees in the still middle of the bluebagged bay Nogood Boyo fishing from the Zanzibar.
Nogood Boyo gave me three pennies yesterday but I wouldn’t,
the child tells her mother.
Boyo catches a whalebone corset. It is all he has caught all day.
NOGOOD BOYO
Bloody funny fish!
Mrs Dai Bread Two gypsies up his mind’s slow eye, dressed only in a bangle.
She’s wearing her nightgown.
[Pleadingly] Would you like this nice wet corset, Mrs Dai Bread Two?
MRS DAI BREAD TWO
No, I won’t!
NOGOOD BOYO
And a bite of my little apple?
he offers with no hope.
She shakes her brass nightgown, and he chases her out of his mind; and when he comes gusting back, there in the bloodshot centre of his eye a geisha girl grins and bows in a kimono of ricepaper.
I want to be good Boyo, but nobody’ll let me,
he sighs as she writhes politely. The land fades, the sea flocks silently away; and through the warm white cloud where he lies, silky, tingling, uneasy Eastern music undoes him in a Japanese minute.
The afternoon buzzes like lazy bees round the flowers round Mae Rose Cottage. Nearly asleep in the field of nannygoats who hum and gently butt the sun, she blows love on a puffball.
MAE ROSE COTTAGE [Lazily]
He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me
He loves me not
He loves me!—the dirty old fool.
Lazy she lies alone in clover and sweet-grass, seventeen and never been sweet in the grass ho ho.
The Reverend Eli Jenkins inky in his cool front parlour or poem-room tells only the truth in his Lifework—the Population, Main Industry, Shipping, History, Topography, Flora and Fauna of the town he worships in—the White Book of Llareggub. Portraits of famous bards and preachers, all fur and wool from the squint to the kneecaps, hang over him heavy as sheep, next to faint lady watercolours of pale green Milk Wood like a lettuce salad dying. His mother, propped against a pot in a palm, with her weddin
gring waist and bust like a black-clothed dining-table, suffers in her stays.
REV. ELI JENKINS
Oh, angels be careful there with your knives and forks,
he prays. There is no known likeness of his father Esau, who, undogcollared because of his little weakness, was scythed to the bone one harvest by mistake when sleeping with his weakness in the corn. He lost all ambition and died, with one leg.
Poor Dad,
grieves the Reverend Eli,
to die of drink and agriculture.
Farmer Watkins in Salt Lake Farm hates his cattle on the hill as he ho’s them in to milking.
UTAH WATKINS [In a fury]
Damn you, you damned dairies!
A cow kisses him.
Bite her to death!
he shouts to his deaf dog who smiles and licks his hands.
Gore him, sit on him, Daisy!
he bawls to the cow who barbed him with her tongue, and she moos gentle words as he raves and dances among his summerbreathed slaves walking delicately to the farm. The coming of the end of the Spring day is already reflected in the lakes of their great eyes. Bessie Bighead greets them by the names she gave them when they were maidens.