Gaudete (12 page)
Authors: Ted Hughes
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 touches 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.
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.
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,
Simultaneously 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
Like a snake’s endless length gliding from a hole.
The bright dove-crimson blood suddenly bulges out
around it.
And all the time Maud is scourging his ear-nerves
With sounds that try only to mutilate.
The shock has sobered him, and stilled him,
Like a drastic injection.
His lips touch Felicity’s cheek.
He sees her eyelashes clogged with tears,
He thinks this at least is a sign of life.
Then Maud’s fingers hook down over his face,
She hauls his upper lips and nostrils upwards, as if she
would tear his face off upwards.
Mrs Westlake
Slews Felicity’s slack sack-heavy body
Away across the floor, by one ankle.
The attached pelt swirls after, in the dust.
Lumb tries to struggle free
But women have twisted to a weight like enfolding nets
under water.
They are clinging to his knees, his waist, his arms, his neck
As if they too were drowning.
Maud has stripped the stag’s pelt off him.
She is flogging him over his bald skull with the cable-
hard, twisted, horny stag’s pizzle.
The women have made one undersea monster, heaving in
throes.
Now he has wrenched his weapon from Maud.
He cuts a way out, flailing a path.
He fights to the stairway that leads up into the
churchyard
And leaps up it and with great strides hurls out under the
open,
And bounds twenty yards and stops.
Panting, he braces himself, forcing himself to look all round, under control, assessing the world and the moment. He looks back toward the church, still fighting clear of the terror that grabbed him down there in the basement. Nobody is following.
The vast light of clouds and stilled evening sky, the hardening, blue, cooling shapes of trees, are an enclosing shock, as if he were hot metal plunged into water. Sweat scalds the cross-hatching nail-wounds in his skin, the lumping weals and claw-rips. He gulps recovery, looking all round at the familiar land, intently, as if he had never been here before, and would be away again in a few minutes. Trembling, he starts to walk towards the gate into the rectory garden.
His whole being is in fiery tatters.
He is whirling in blazing rags, like a blazing rag effigy
Cartwheeling down a mountain.
He grips the stag’s pizzle.
He takes careful note of the tight-scrolled baby ferns on a
grave.
He clasps with his look
The all-suffering million-year gravel, which nothing can
hurt,
As if he could somehow anchor the holocaust of himself
Which seems to be hurtling through space, off some
brink,
Flinging out great streamers of flame and disintegrating.
With deliberate measure, like a drilled soldier, he moves
now to numbers.
In his bedroom he dresses
With a paced fury.
When one cuff-button resists him, he locks to it
With all his strength and attention
As to an antagonist,
While second after second splutters burning in the room,
like a fuse, and hot thoughts grab at him,
reflecting from every surface,
That somehow
Everything has to be cooled, everything has to be
dismantled,
Everybody back into their clothes and their discretion.
The explanation
For Felicity’s body
Is a bomb
They will all have to dig out carefully somehow together.
Somehow everything
Will have to be cancelled, the whole error
Carefully taken apart
And the parts put back where they belonged.
Everybody has to return to exactly where they were,
To stillness, calm, and normality,
Everything has to be cleaned, groomed and made quiet,
as at the start.
Suddenly he remembers Maud’s voice, jarring his ear.
And he feels through all his muscles
The grip of Felicity’s flesh on the dagger-blade as he
pulled.
He sees, with electric shock fright in his every hair,
That horribly long blade still coming out and still coming
out –
At the same moment
He sees through the window men in the churchyard.