Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog by Dylan Thomas

Author:Dylan Thomas [Thomas, Dylan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781780228952
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

WHERE TAWE FLOWS

Mr Humphries, Mr Roberts, and young Mr Thomas knocked on the front door of Mrs Emlyn Evans’s small villa, ‘Lavengro,’ punctually at nine o’clock in the evening. They waited, hidden behind a veronica bush, while Mr Evans shuffled in carpet slippers up the passage from the back room and had trouble with the bolts.

Mr Humphries was a school teacher, a tall, fair man with a stammer, who had written an unsuccessful novel.

Mr Roberts, a cheerful, disreputable man of middle age, was a collector for an insurance company; they called him in the trade a body-snatcher, and he was known among his friends as Burke and Hare, the Welsh Nationalist. He had once held a high position in a brewery office.

Young Mr Thomas was at the moment without employment, but it was understood that he would soon be leaving for London to make a career in Chelsea as a free-lance journalist; he was penniless, and hoped, in a vague way, to live on women.

When Mr Evans opened the door and shone his torch down the narrow drive, lighting up the garage and hen-run but missing altogether the whispering bush, the three friends bounded out and cried in threatening voices: ‘We’re Ogpu men, let us in!’

‘We’re looking for seditious literature,’ said Mr Humphries with difficulty, raising his hand in a salute.

‘Heil, Saunders Lewis! and we know where to find it,’ said Mr Roberts.

Mr Evans turned off his torch. ‘Come in out of the night air, boys, and have a drop of something. It’s only parsnip wine,’ he added.

They removed their hats and coats, piled them on the end of the bannister, spoke softly for fear of waking up the twins, George and Celia, and followed Mr Evans into his den.

‘Where’s the trouble and strife, Mr Evans?’ said Mr Roberts in a cockney accent. He warmed his hands in front of the fire and regarded with a smile of surprise, though he visited the house every Friday, the neat rows of books, the ornate roll-top desk that made the parlour into a study, the shining grandfather clock, the photographs of children staring stiffly at a dickybird, the still, delicious home-made wine, that had such an effect, in an old beer bottle, the sleeping tom on the frayed rug. ‘At home with the bourgeoisie.’

He was himself a homeless bachelor with a past, much in debt, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to envy his friends their wives and comforts and to speak of them intimately and disparagingly.

‘In the kitchen,’ said Mr Evans, handing out glasses.

‘A woman’s only place,’ said Mr Roberts heartily, ‘with one exception.’

Mr Humphries and Mr Thomas arranged the chairs around the fire, and all four sat down, close and confidential and with full glasses in their hands. None of them spoke for a time. They gave one another sly looks, sipped and sighed, lit the cigarettes that Mr Evans produced from a draughts box, and once Mr Humphries glanced at the grandfather clock and winked and put his finger to his lips.

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