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Indian Tales by Rudyard Kipling

R >> Rudyard Kipling >> Indian Tales




It seems that he had tracked Pornic's footprints fourteen miles across the
sands to the crater; had returned and told my servants, who flatly refused
to meddle with any one, white or black, once fallen into the hideous
Village of the Dead; whereupon Dunnoo had taken one of my ponies and a
couple of punkah-ropes, returned to the crater, and hauled me out as I
have described.

To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold
mohur a month--a sum which I still think far too little for the services
he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish
spot again, or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of
Gunga Dass I have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive
in giving this to be published is the hope that some one may possibly
identify, from the details and the inventory which I have given above, the
corpse of the man in the olive-green hunting-suit.



IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO

A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange;
_Churel_ and ghoul and _Djinn_ and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.

--_From the Dusk to the Dawn_.

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four
carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by
five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash
between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he
gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of
wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be
occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little black-and-tan terrier that was
stolen from an Englishman's house and given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day,
only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally,
except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the
cold, weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes'
Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend
of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my
recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station.
Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these
days. I dare say his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with
white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his
wits--outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at
Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs
was an ancient and more or less honorable profession; but Azizun has since
married a medical student from the Northwest and has settled down to a
most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an
extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed
to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you
know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of
Suddhoo. Then there is Me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes
in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the
cleverest of them all--Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie--except Janoo.
She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo's son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was
troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo's anxiety and made capital
out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to
telegraph daily accounts of the son's health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo's cousin's son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see
me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should
be conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I went to
him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he
might have sent something better than an _ekka_, which jolted fearfully,
to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April
evening. The _ekka_ did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled
up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh's Tomb near the main gate of the
Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that, by reason of my condescension,
it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while
my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of
my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes in the Huzuri Bagh,
under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that
there was an order of the _Sirkar_ against magic, because it was feared
that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn't know anything
about the state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was
going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the
Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State
practiced it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn't magic, I don't
know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was
any _jadoo_ afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my
countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean _jadoo_--white
magic, as distinguished from the unclean _jadoo_ which kills folk. It took
a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked
me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who
said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he
gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the
lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the
letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was
threatening his son, which could be removed by clean _jadoo_; and, of
course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told
Suddhoo that I also understood a little _jadoo_ in the Western line, and
would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in
order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had
paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already;
and the _jadoo_ of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was
cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son's danger; but I do
not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I
could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter's shop-front, as if
some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we
groped our way upstairs told me that the _jadoo_ had begun, Janoo and
Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the _jadoo_-work was
coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a
lady of a freethinking turn of mind. She whispered that the _jadoo_ was an
invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go
to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old
age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his
son's name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought
not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me
over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards
were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no
chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase.
That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier
barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out
the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow
from the two _huqas_ that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter
came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan.
Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a
shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale
blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show
Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between
her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on
the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was stripped
to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as my wrist round
his forehead, a salmon colored loin-cloth round his middle, and a steel
bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It was the face of the
man that turned me cold. It was blue-grey in the first place. In the
second, the eyes were rolled back till you could only see the whites of
them; and, in the third, the face was the face of a demon--a
ghoul--anything you please except of the sleek, oily old ruffian who sat
in the daytime over his turning-lathe downstairs. He was lying on his
stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him, as if he had been
thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only parts of him off the
floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a
cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room, on the bare
earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light
floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the man on the
floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I could
see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could
not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him,
except that slow curl and uncurl of the laboring back-muscles, Janoo from
the bed was breathing seventy to the minute; Azizun held her hands before
her eyes; and old Suddhoo, fingering at the dirt that had got into his
white beard, was crying to himself. The horror of it was that the
creeping, crawly thing made no sound--only crawled! And, remember, this
lasted for ten minutes, while the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered,
and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a
thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his
most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished that
unspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as
high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now I knew
how fire-spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease. The
business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl without trying to
raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not have thought. Both the
girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head dropped, chin-down on the
floor, with a thud; the whole body lying then like a corpse with its arms
trussed. There was a pause of five full minutes after this, and the
blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped to settle one of her anklets,
while Azizun turned her face to the wall and took the terrier in her arms.
Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically to Janoo's _huqa_, and she slid it
across the floor with her foot. Directly above the body and on the wall,
were a couple of flaming portraits, in stamped-paper frames, of the Queen
and the Prince of Wales. They looked down on the performance, and to my
thinking, seemed to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and
rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay
stomach-up. There was a faint "plop" from the basin--exactly like the
noise a fish makes when it takes a fly--and the green light in the centre
revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried,
shrivelled, black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth, and shaved
scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling exhibition.
We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man,
and you will realize less than one half of the horror of that head's
voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort of
"ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice, like the timbre of a bell.
It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes before I
got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me. I looked at
the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the hollow of the
throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing to do with any
man's regular breathing twitching away steadily. The whole thing was a
careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin that one reads about
sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling a piece of
ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the head was
"lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin, and speaking. It told
Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and of the state
of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I always shall
respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the time of the
Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors were night and
day watching over the man's life; and that he would eventually recover if
the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head in the basin,
were doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for twice
your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used when he rose
from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman of masculine
intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say "_Asli nahin!
Fareib!_" scornfully under her breath; and just as she said so, the light
in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we heard the room
door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match, lit the lamp, and we
saw that head, basin, and seal-cutter were gone. Suddhoo was wringing his
hands and explaining to any one who cared to listen, that, if his chances
of eternal salvation depended on it, he could not raise another two
hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in the corner; while Janoo
sat down composedly on one of the beds to discuss the probabilities of the
whole thing being a _bunao_, or "make-up."

I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter's way of _jadoo_; but her
argument was much more simple--"The magic that is always demanding gifts
is no true magic," said she. "My mother told me that the only potent
love-spells are those which are told you for love. This seal-cutter man is
a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything, or get anything done,
because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass the bunnia for two gold rings and a
heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. The seal-cutter is the
friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would poison my food. A fool's _jadoo_ has
been going on for ten days, and has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night.
The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons and _mantras_ before. He never
showed us anything like this till to-night. Azizun is a fool, and will be
a _purdahnashin_ soon. Suddhoo has lost his strength and his wits. See
now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo many rupees while he lived, and many
more after his death; and behold, he is spending everything on that
offspring of a devil and a she-ass, the seal-cutter!"

Here I said, "But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of
course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole
thing is child's talk--shame--and senseless."

"Suddhoo _is_ an old child," said Janoo. "He has lived on the roofs these
seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here to
assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the _Sirkar_, whose
salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the
seal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his
son. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have to
watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below."

Janoo stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation; while
Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket in the corner, and Azizun was
trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.


*
*
*
*
*

Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the
charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under
false pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal
Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the
Police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly,
and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly--lost in this big
India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak
to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would Suddhoo
disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is
bound hand and foot by her debt to the _bunnia_. Suddhoo is an old dotard;
and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the _Sirkar_ rather
patronizes the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well now; but Suddhoo
is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whose advice he
regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily the money that she
hoped to wheedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter, and becomes
daily more furious and sullen.

She will never tell, because she dare not; but, unless something happens
to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die of cholera--the
white arsenic kind--about the middle of May. And thus I shall be privy to
a murder in the House of Suddhoo.



BLACK JACK

To the wake av Tim O'Hara
Came company,
All St. Patrick's Alley
Was there to see.
_Robert Buchanan._

As the Three Musketeers share their silver, tobacco, and liquor together,
as they protect each other in barracks or camp, and as they rejoice
together over the joy of one, so do they divide their sorrows. When
Ortheris's irrepressible tongue has brought him into cells for a season,
or Learoyd has run amok through his kit and accoutrements, or Mulvaney has
indulged in strong waters, and under their influence reproved his
Commanding Officer, you can see the trouble in the faces of the untouched
two. And the rest of the regiment know that comment or jest is unsafe.
Generally the three avoid Orderly Room and the Corner Shop that follows,
leaving both to the young bloods who have not sown their wild oats; but
there are occasions--

For instance, Ortheris was sitting on the drawbridge of the main gate of
Fort Amara, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe, bowl down, in his
mouth. Learoyd was lying at full length on the turf of the glacis, kicking
his heels in the air, and I came round the corner and asked for Mulvaney.

Ortheris spat into the ditch and shook his head. "No good seein' 'im now,"
said Ortheris; "'e's a bloomin' camel. Listen."

I heard on the flags of the veranda opposite to the cells, which are close
to the Guard-Room, a measured step that I could have identified in the
tramp of an army. There were twenty paces _crescendo_, a pause, and then
twenty _diminuendo_.

"That's 'im," said Ortheris; "my Gawd, that's 'im! All for a bloomin'
button you could see your face in an' a bit o' lip that a bloomin'
Hark-angel would 'a' guv back."

Mulvaney was doing pack-drill--was compelled, that is to say, to walk up
and down for certain hours in full marching order, with rifle, bayonet,
ammunition, knapsack, and overcoat. And his offence was being dirty on
parade! I nearly fell into the Fort Ditch with astonishment and wrath, for
Mulvaney is the smartest man that ever mounted guard, and would as soon
think of turning out uncleanly as of dispensing with his trousers.

"Who was the Sergeant that checked him?" I asked.

"Mullins, o' course," said Ortheris. "There ain't no other man would whip
'im on the peg so. But Mullins ain't a man. 'E's a dirty little
pigscraper, that's wot 'e is."

"What did Mulvaney say? He's not the make of man to take that quietly."

"Said! Bin better for 'im if 'e'd shut 'is mouth. Lord, 'ow we laughed!
'Sargint,' 'e sez, 'ye say I'm dirty. Well,' sez 'e, 'when your wife lets
you blow your own nose for yourself, perhaps you'll know wot dirt is.
You're himperfectly eddicated, Sargint,' sez 'e, an' then we fell in. But
after p'rade, 'e was up an' Mullins was swearin' 'imself black in the face
at Ord'ly Room that Mulvaney 'ad called 'im a swine an' Lord knows wot
all. You know Mullins. 'E'll 'ave 'is 'ead broke in one o' these days.
'E's too big a bloomin' liar for ord'nary consumption. 'Three hours' can
an' kit,' sez the Colonel; 'not for bein' dirty on p'rade, but for 'avin'
said somthin' to Mullins, tho' I do not believe,' sez 'e, 'you said wot 'e
said you said.' An' Mulvaney fell away sayin' nothin'. You know 'e never
speaks to the Colonel for fear o' gettin' 'imself fresh copped."

Mullins, a very young and very much married Sergeant, whose manners were
partly the result of innate depravity and partly of imperfectly digested
Board School, came over the bridge, and most rudely asked Ortheris what he
was doing.

"Me?" said Ortheris, "Ow! I'm waiting for my C'mission. 'Seed it comin'
along yit?"

Mullins turned purple and passed on. There was the sound of a gentle
chuckle from the glacis where Learoyd lay.

"'E expects to get 'is C'mission some day," explained Orth'ris; "Gawd 'elp
the Mess that 'ave to put their 'ands into the same kiddy as 'im! Wot time
d'you make it, sir? Fower! Mulvaney 'll be out in 'arf an hour. You don't
want to buy a dorg, sir, do you? A pup you can trust--'arf Rampore by the
Colonel's grey'ound."

"Ortheris," I answered, sternly, for I knew what was in his mind, "do you
mean to say that"--

"I didn't mean to arx money o' you, any'ow," said Ortheris; "I'd 'a' sold
you the dorg good an' cheap, but--but--I know Mulvaney 'll want somethin'
after we've walked 'im orf, an' I ain't got nothin', nor 'e 'asn't
neither, I'd sooner sell you the dorg, sir. 'S'trewth! I would!"

A shadow fell on the drawbridge, and Ortheris began to rise into the air,
lifted by a huge hand upon his collar.

"Onything but t' braass," said Learoyd, quietly, as he held the Londoner
over the ditch. "Onything but t' braass, Orth'ris, ma son! Ah've got one
rupee eight annas of ma own." He showed two coins, and replaced Ortheris
on the drawbridge rail.

"Very good," I said; "where are you going to?"

"Goin' to walk 'im orf wen 'e comes out--two miles or three or fower,"
said Ortheris.

The footsteps within ceased. I heard the dull thud of a knapsack falling
on a bedstead, followed by the rattle of arms. Ten minutes later,
Mulvaney, faultlessly dressed, his lips tight and his face as black as a
thunderstorm, stalked into the sunshine on the drawbridge. Learoyd and
Ortheris sprang from my side and closed in upon him, both leaning toward
as horses lean upon the pole. In an instant they had disappeared down the
sunken road to the cantonments, and I was left alone. Mulvaney had not
seen fit to recognize me; so I knew that his trouble must be heavy upon
him.

I climbed one of the bastions and watched the figures of the Three
Musketeers grow smaller and smaller across the plain. They were walking as
fast as they could put foot to the ground, and their heads were bowed.
They fetched a great compass round the parade-ground, skirted the Cavalry
lines, and vanished in the belt of trees that fringes the low land by the
river.

I followed slowly, and sighted them--dusty, sweating, but still keeping up
their long, swinging tramp--on the river bank. They crashed through the
Forest Reserve, headed toward the Bridge of Boats, and presently
established themselves on the bow of one of the pontoons. I rode
cautiously till I saw three puffs of white smoke rise and die out in the
clear evening air, and knew that peace had come again. At the bridge-head
they waved me forward with gestures of welcome.

"Tie up your 'orse," shouted Ortheris, "an' come on, sir. We're all goin'
'ome in this 'ere bloomin' boat."

From the bridge-head to the Forest Officer's bungalow is but a step. The
mess-man was there, and would see that a man held my horse. Did the Sahib
require aught else--a peg, or beer? Ritchie Sahib had left half a dozen
bottles of the latter, but since the Sahib was a friend of Ritchie Sahib,
and he, the mess-man, was a poor man--

I gave my order quietly, and returned to the bridge. Mulvaney had taken
off his boots, and was dabbling his toes in the water; Learoyd was lying
on his back on the pontoon; and Ortheris was pretending to row with a big
bamboo.

"I'm an ould fool," said Mulvaney, reflectively, "dhraggin' you two out
here bekaze I was undher the Black Dog--sulkin' like a child. Me that was
soldierin' when Mullins, an' be damned to him, was shquealin' on a
counterpin for five shillin' a week--an' that not paid! Bhoys, I've took
you five miles out av natural pervarsity. Phew!"

"Wot's the odds so long as you're 'appy?" said Ortheris, applying himself
afresh to the bamboo. "As well 'ere as anywhere else."

Obituary: Donald Westlake

The disputed Holocaust memoir which was dropped from Penguin Group's publication schedule at the end of December is set to appear as a work of fiction.

Herman Rosenblat's memoir - which Oprah Winfrey called "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - recounted how as a teenage boy in a Nazi concentration camp, he was kept alive by the food which was thrown to him by a young girl, Roma Radzicky. Penguin's US imprint Berkley Books had planned to publish the story, which sees Rosenblat reunited with Radzicky on a blind date years later, as Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived, next month.

But a Holocaust historian said it would have been impossible to approach the fence in the Schlieben concentration camp to throw food over it, concluding that this part of the story was made-up. Berkley initially defended the book, saying it was a work of memory, but then decided to cancel its planned publication, and demanded the return of the advance it had made to Rosenblat. A $25m film based on the book, to be called The Flower of the Fence, is still going ahead, with production due to start this year.

Publisher York House Press based in White Plains, New York, has entered into a tentative agreement with the film production company to publish a novel based on the film script early this spring. It said the book would be "grounded in fact", and would rise "to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility".

A spokesperson for York House Press condemned the attacks which were made on the 80-year-old Rosenblat after the veracity of his story was questioned, describing them as a "savage" response to what was otherwise "a credible, heart-wrenching, and verifiable account" of his time in the concentration camp.

"No deliberate untruth is permissible, but beneath any fabrication is motivation and intent. We believe Mr. Rosenblat's motivations were very human, understandable and forgivable," the spokesperson said. "It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, try to forget, rationalise or fantasise and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves."

The president of the company producing the film, Harris Salomon from Atlantic Overseas Productions, said the book, "regardless of its shortcomings", would "challenge, educate and enlighten" readers about the horrors of the Holocaust. "The documented fact, acknowledged by his critics, is that Herman is a survivor of concentration camps," he said.

But Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst, said that neither she nor Rosenblat were involved with this version of his story. "Usually book rights from films come out after the movie is released," she told guardian.co.uk. "I think the timing on this is very insensitive."

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Obama to feature in Marvel comic

We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

Instead, what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath's poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It's a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity.

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Climbing the walls

Barack Obama is teaming up with Spider-Man in a comic from Marvel, which will see the future president exchanging a fist-bump with the superhero. The story sees one of Spidey's oldest enemies, the Chameleon, trying to stop Obama being inaugurated. Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker, is covering the event as a photographer, and saves the day.

"Ya hear that, Chameleon?" Spider-Man says as he thwacks the villain in the face. "The president-elect here just appointed me ... secretary of shuttin' you up."

He tells Obama: "This is your day, and I know it wouldn't look good to be seen palling around with me" - in a nod to Sarah Palin's comment that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists".

"When we heard that president-elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," said the publisher's editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada.

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