МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РЕСПУБЛИКИ БЕЛАРУСЬ

МИНСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЙ

УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

РАССКАЗ: ЧТЕНИЕ И ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ

Учебно-методическое пособие

В двух частях

Часть 1

Минск 2003
УДК 802.0(075.8)
ББК 81.2 Ан
К 43

А в т о р ы - с о с т а в и т е л и: Е. Ю. Кирейчук, Т. Г. Васильева

Рецензенты: С. А. Дубинко, кандидат филологических наук,

доцент (БГУ); Т. В. Кононенко, кандидат педагогических наук, доцент (МГЛУ)

Р е к о м е н д о в а н о Редакционным советом Минского

государственного лингвистического университета

Рассказ: чтение и интерпретация = Reading and Appreciation of the

К 43 Short Story: Учеб.-метод. пособие / Авторы-сост. Е. Ю. Кирейчук, Т.
Г. Васильева: / В 2 ч. – Мн.: МГЛУ. / ч. 1. - 180 с.
Пособие предназначено для начального этапа обучения аналитическому
чтению в рамках курса «Чтение и интерпретация рассказа». 6 разделов данной
части 1 содержат информацию об основных пунктах анализа рассказа: краткая
передача содержания; определение жанра рассказа и типа конфликта,
особенностей структуры сюжета, функций экспозиции, форм презентации и
способов характеристики литературного героя.
Данная часть 1 включает 15 неадаптированных рассказов американских и
британских авторов для самостоятельного прочтения с послетекстовыми
вопросами, позволяющими выделить наиболее важные аспекты анализа, а также 2
контрольные работы, снабженные ответами на вопросы.
Адресованное студентам 3 курса заочного отделения факультета английского
языка МГЛУ, пособие существенно облегчит и упорядочит самостоятельную
работу студентов по подготовке к экзамену по практике устной речи.

УДК 802.0(075.8)
ББК 81.2 Ан

 Минский государственный лингвистический университет, 2003

 Е. Ю. Кирейчук, Т. Г. Васильева, 2003

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 CONTENTS
To the Student………………………………………………………………….4

Unit 1: Story Types…………………………………………………………….5

Summary Making Rules. ……………………………..……………...11

Unit 2: Plot and Its Structure. ……………………………...............................15

J. Joyce Eveline ……………………………………………………….17

Unit 3: Setting. …………………………………..............................................23

R. Bradbury. The Smile…………………………………......................27

Unit 4: Forms of Presentation: Narration. …………………………………….34

T. Capote. A Lamp in a Window ……………………………………....38

Unit 5: Forms of Presentation: Description. ……………………………..........43

O. Wilde. Symphony in Yellow …………………………......................47

Unit 6: Forms of Presentation: Characterization; Dialogue. …………………..49

W. S. Maugham. The Happy Man ……………………………………52
J. Thurber. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty…………………………...57

Reading Independently. The Scheme of Story Analysis ……………………..64

Stories for Independent Reading

1. R. Bradbury. All Summer in a Day…………………………………66
2. J. Archer. Just Good Friends………………………….....................73
3. J. Archer. The Luncheon……………………………………………79
4. Gr. Greene. The Case for the Defence……………………………...87
5. B. Malamud. My Son the Murderer………………………………...91
6. P. Lively. Next Term, We’ll Mash You……………………………..97
7. F. J. Hardy. The Returned Soldier…………………………………103
8. O. Henry. A Retrieved Reformation……………………………….111
9. Saki. The Open Window………………………………...................120
10. A. Maley. Gossip…………………………………………………..124
11. B. Brown. The Star Ducks…………………………………………128
12. F. Sargeson. They Gave Her a Rise………………………………..137
13. M. Spark. You Should Have Seen the Mess…………......................141
14. M. Binchey. The Garden Party……………...…………………….147
15. T. Pears. Blue……………………………………………………....154

Supplement……………………………………………………………………..........162

Reference……………………………………………………………………….........178
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 TO THE STUDENT

Reading will be a substantial component of students’ curriculum this year. This

course will aid in dealing with the reading and interpretation of short stories by
American and British writers and is aimed at the expansion of understanding of a
short story beyond the literal and simple recollection of factual details. The majority
of the activities in this course will concentrate on reading and analyzing the short
story and its elements (the genre, the plot-structure, and the forms of presentation).
During the 1st term students are expected:
• to read 21 short stories by British and American authors;
• to accomplish 2 home tests (supposed to be done independently and checked
with the attached keys);
• to do an entrance test and a final test.

This book covers the course of Reading and Appreciation of the Short Story
and aims at teaching students to:
• approach a literary text, understand and appreciate it;
• operate with the major notions important for literary analysis such as plot,
setting, forms of presentation, tone, title, symbolism;
• summarize, generalize and evaluate main points and implications of the text;
• comment on events and characters of a literary work, discovering the author’s
ideas and the means of conveying them.

Part 1 of the book is divided into 6 units containing original and unabridged
short stories, followed by sections of questions to help students to appreciate the text
and organize discussions in class. The texts are preceded by a necessary minimum of
information, which will allow the student to answer the After You Read questions and
accomplish the Before You Read tasks. The tasks take a variety of formats and are
meant for full class activities, group activities and individual work.

Part 1 also includes 15 short stories intended for students’ independent reading
and appreciation. To facilitate the task, a scheme of analysis is suggested and each
short story is followed by a set of questions which focus the reader’s attention on the
most relevant and important issues of interpretation. The supplement to Part 1
contains 2 home tests provided with keys for self-control.

The course presupposes thorough and conscientious independent and class

work on behalf of the student.
We hope that this course will encourage students to respond imaginatively to
what they read, to build up their vocabulary. It will help to understand and enjoy
reading English language literature and will give tools and methods for appreciating
fiction students will read in the future.

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 UNIT 1

STORY TYPES

Describing types of stories

Short stories can be set anywhere and at any time; they can involve all kinds of
characters and cover a vast range of themes. Classification of all short stories into
types would be an extremely difficult thing to do, particularly with the best short
stories, whose subtlety and thematic interest make them unique. However, the
definition of the type of a story (sometimes called genre) might be of some help in
the task of bringing forth its central ideas and the author’s message.
Look at the various genres and answer the questions given below.

psychological story humour story (auto)biography

science fiction fantasy horror story
love story thriller western,
crime story, parable romance
adventure story detective story historical fiction
fairy story spy story travelogue
folk-tale tear-jerker whodunnit
spine-chiller ghost story myth
anecdote legend joke
story with social significance

• Which of the above are usually oral: that is, people usually tell them to
each other rather than write them down?
• Which of the genres above are similar in that they have the same kind of
setting and same kind of characters?

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 • Can you think of some examples of the above genres by English writers
and from your own culture?
• Which of these genres do you like? Which do you never read? Can you
explain your preferences?

Exercise 1.
Here are 9 definitions of some popular story genres. Following them are passages
explaining the definitions. Match up each definition with the appropriate description.

Historical fiction Spy thriller Romance

Science fiction Detective story Western
Horror story Humour story Autobiography

A. Similar to fairy tales and legends, these stories appeal to a reader’s romantic
fantasies. In highly emotional, overblown language, they tell of love and adventure.
Escapist in nature, such stories free readers from the concerns of everyday life,
painting an idealized picture of human relationships.

B. This story genre presents fictitious characters interlinked with actual events
and figures of history. Historical characters are portrayed speaking in first person as
though an actual record exists of the event. Whatever their chronology, the characters
of fiction of this type speak in the idiom of the author, not of their day.

C. This genre features the stories and mythology of the American frontier of the
nineteenth century. Typical heroes are tough, self-reliant men with a love for the land.
Native Americans are often an important presence in the story. Like its typical hero,
its language is unadorned, with the dialogue often in dialect.

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D. Stories of this type present a puzzle in the form of a mystery that must be
solved. The main character (generally a detective) — and vicariously the reader —
conduct a search for clues. Protagonists are presented as tough, honest individuals,
ruthless but in pursuit of the social good. The language of “hard-boiled” fiction of
this genre is streetwise and direct.

E. Derived from the detective story, the hero of this genre is a modern fantasy
figure. Rebellious against authority or guilt-ridden from his deceptions, he
symbolizes the amorality of modern society. Writers of thrillers of such kind go into
great detail in their descriptions of procedures, events and tools of the trade, which is
a very effective way of arresting and keeping up the reader’s interest.

F. The basic themes of this popular kind of imaginative literature include space
travel, time travel and marvellous discoveries and inventions. Stories of this type may
be set in the future or in the past; some are set in a far-away universe. Unlike fantasy,
which deals with the impossible, this type of fiction describes events that could
actually occur, according to accepted or possible theories. Popularity of the genre
grew as developments in nuclear energy and space exploration showed that many of
its predictions were more realistic than many people believed them to be.

G. This is a personal history, usually informal in style, in which the writer tells of
persons known and things done sharing one’s own thoughts and emotions with the
reader.

H. Such stories induce smiles or outright laughter. They may be gentle, silly, or
sarcastic. In them, writers draw upon real concerns or contemporary issues, but
through irony, exaggeration, and satire, they make the serious funny.

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I. Melodramatic and containing mysterious and supernatural events, these stories
aim at frightening their readers. Set in a gloomy, forbidding location, suspense is
heightened by overblown descriptions, unaccountable sounds, darkness, and
premonitions of death. Today this genre represents characters who fail to understand
important clues and take on investigations that only get them into trouble — or
worse.

Exercise 2.
Label the passages given below as to their story type. Give your reasoning.

a) Before I tell you anything about myself, I would like to tell you, or at least
identify for you, the world into which I was born. My background. I mean of
course my mother — my father. My two parents. Mother died when I was
forty-odd. Dad died when I was fifty-odd. Thus I had them as my…Well, they
were always, for over forty years — there. They were mine. (Katharine
Hepburn, Me)

b)

c) For a humorist I think a lot about death… My main concern about my death
was that I would not make The New York Times obituary page. I was sure it
would be just my luck that Charles de Gaulle would die on the same day and
all the space would be taken up with tributes to him. The New York Times is
the only institution which has the power to decide if you existed or not. You
can spend eighty years on earth and if they don’t say anything about it when
you pass away, your life has been a waste. (Art Buchwald, Leaving Home)

d) He would remember her joyous laughter for the rest of his life. Max could
still see Cleo clearly in his mind, shimmering first with passion and then with

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 delight. And he was responsible for giving her both... Max savored the
unfamiliar pleasure that coursed through him… He was not accustomed to
being viewed as a man who could make someone else happy. He certainly had
never seen himself in such a light. But last night he, Max Fortune, had made
Cleo Robbins happy. She said she had waited all her life for the right man, for
him, and she claimed she had not been disappointed. Last night, for the first
time in his entire life, he, Max Fortune, had been someone’s Mr. Right. (Jayne
Ann Krentz, Grand Passion)

e) The rat jumped down and trotted off toward the elbow-bend further up.
Hank’s hand was trembling now, and the flashing beam slipped jerkily from
place to place, now picking out a dusty barrel, now a decades-old bureau that
had been loaded down here, now a stack of old newspapers, now — He jerked
the flashlight beam back toward the newspapers and sucked in breath as the
light fell on something to the left side of him. A shirt… was that a shirt?
Bundled up like an old rag. Something behind it that might have been blue
jeans. And something that looked like… Something snapped behind him. He
panicked, threw the keys wildly on the table, and turned away shambling into
a run. As he passed the box, he saw what made the noise. (Stephen King,
Salem’s Lot)

f) Theodore Roosevelt welcomed Blaise heartily into his railroad car, a

somewhat shabby affair for the governor of so great a state… “Delighted you
could come!” For once Roosevelt did not make two or three words of
delighted. He seemed uncharacteristically subdued, even nervous. With a
sudden shake, the train started. Blaise and Roosevelt fell together against
Senator Platt’s chair. From the chair came a soft cry. Blaise looked down and
saw two accusing eyes set in a livid face, glaring up at them. “Senator, forgive
me — us. The train…”. Roosevelt stuttered apologies. (Gore Vidal, Empire)

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f) The old man filled the cups, then leaned back in the booth and looked
at Mike… “Never told my story to anybody. Never felt no call to, an’ didn’t
want to be called a liar. Folks always figured I’d struck me a pocket, an’ I
surely did”. He chuckled. “Only it weren’t raw gold but ree-fined gold. Pure!
I found some all right an’ there’s aplenty where it came from if’n you aren’t
skeered of ha’nts and the like… That there desert now, them mountains
around Navajo an’ east of there… That’s wild country, boy! There’s places
yonder you see one time an’ they never look the same again. There’s canyons
no man has seen the end of nor ever will, either…” (Louis L’Amour, The
Haunted Mesa)

g) The last question was asked for the first time… on May 21, 2061, at a
time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a
result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way: Alexander
Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As
well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking
face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a
vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since
grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm
grasp of the whole. (Isaac Asimov, The Last Question)

h) It was a warm day, almost at the end of March, and I stood outside the
barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice
emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was
looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression,
like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He
was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a
beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me. His arms hung loose at his

10
 sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers… He looked
about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. (Raymond
Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely)

i) Ryan had been to the office of the Central intelligence several times
before to deliver briefings and occasional messages… Greer waved Ryan over
and passed him a folder. The folder was made of red plastic and had a snap
closure. Its edges were bordered with white tape and the cover had a simple
white paper label bearing the legends EYES ONLY and WILLOW. Neither
notation was unusual. Ryan opened the folder and looked first at the index
sheet. Evidently there were only three copies of the WILLOW document,
each initialed by its owner. A CIA document with only three copies was
unusual enough that Ryan, whose highest clearance was NEBULA, had never
encountered one. (Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October)

SUMMARY MAKING RULES

Summary is a clear concise orderly retelling of the contents of a story and is

generally no more than 10 sentences.

To write a good summary follow these directions:

• Read the text carefully. Divide it into logical parts. Sum up each part in 1-2
sentences.
• Pay special attention to the structure of the plot. Concentrate on the most
relevant turns of the events and the most important facts. Avoid minor
details and repetitions.
• Change direct narration into indirect.

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 • Use your own words instead of words used by the author. Do not give
quotations.
• Avoid figurative language, try to make it as neutral as possible.
• Stick either to the Past or the Present Tenses.
• Avoid expressing your own judgements, opinions, interpretation or
appreciation.

A helping hand
The story is taken from/written by…
The action takes place/is laid/is set in…
The main characters are…
The story opens up with the description of/the conversation between…
Then…/as the result of it…/after that…/finally…/in the end…
So/therefore/thus/because of it…

Exercise 1.
Each of these sentences can be rewritten much more briefly without really changing
the meaning. Read them carefully, and then rewrite them in few words (between two
and ten).

1. If I were asked to give an accurate description of my physical condition at the

present moment, the only possible honest reply would be that I am greatly in
need of liquid refreshment.
2. People whose professional activity lies in the field of politics are not, on the
whole, conspicuous for their respect for factual accuracy.
3. I must confess to a feeling of very considerable affection for the young female
person with whom I spend the greater part of my spare time.
4. Failure to assimilate an adequate quantity of solid food over an extended
period of time is absolutely certain to lead, in due course, to a fatal conclusion.

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 5. It is by no means easy to achieve an accurate understanding of that subject of
study which is concerned with the relationship between numbers.
6. It is my fervent wish that the creator of the universe will do his utmost to
preserve and protect the royal lady who graciously occupies the position of
head of state.
7. I should be greatly obliged if you would have the kindness to bring me, at your
convenience, a written statement of the indebtedness I have incurred in
connection with the meal which you have just finished serving to me.
8. The climactic conditions prevailing in the British Isles show a pattern of
alternating and unpredictable periods of dry and wet weather, accompanied by
a similarly irregular cycle of temperature changes.
9. I should be grateful if you would be so good as to stop the uninterrupted flow
of senseless remarks with which you are currently straining my patience to
breaking point.
10.I have long ceased to believe in the existence of the elderly male white-bearded
person who is in charge of bringing gifts annually in the last week of December.

Exercise 2.
Read the text carefully and render it in as few words as possible.

Just leave the keys in, sir

Stan Murch, in a uniform-like blue jacket, stood on the sidewalk in front of the
Hilton and watched cab after cab make the loop in to the main entrance. Doesn’t
anybody travel in their own car any more? Then at last a Chrysler Imperial with
Michigan plates came hesitantly up Sixth Avenue, made the left-hand loop into the
Hilton driveway and stopped at the entrance. As a woman and several children got
out of the doors on the right of the car, toward the hotel entrance, the driver climbed
heavily out on the left. He was a big man with a cigar and a camel’s-hair coat.

13
 Murch was at the door before it was halfway open, pulling it the rest of the way
and saying, “Just leave the keys in it, sir.”
“Right,” the man said around his cigar. He got out and sort of shook himself
inside the coat. Then, as Murch was about to get behind the wheel, the driver said,
“Wait.”
Murch looked at him, “Sir?”
“Here you go, boy,” the man said and pulled a folded dollar bill from his pants
pocket and handed it across.
“Thank you, sir,” Murch said. He saluted with the hand holding the dollar,
climbed behind the wheel, and drove away. He was smiling as he made the right turn
into 53rd Street; it wasn’t every day a man gave you a tip for stealing his car.

Exercise 3.
Make a summary of an examination short-story on your choice. In pairs, make a peer
correction of your summaries.

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 UNIT 2

PLOT AND ITS STRUCTURE

Plot is a chain of fictional events arranged in a meaningful pattern. Each link

in this chain helps to build suspense and to solve the problems that the characters
face. We can often gain much insight into the meaning of a story by looking at the
shape of its plot.

Components of the plot (traditional model of plot development):

• Exposition — usually includes the establishment of the setting, the
introduction of the theme and characters;
• Complications — follow the exposition and, as a rule, consist of
several events which become tenser (the rising action) as the plot
moves toward the moment of decision — the climax;
• Climax — the moment of the highest intensity (the peak of
intensity), the crucial event in the story;
• Denouement — the unwinding of the action (the falling action). At
this point the fate of the main character is clarified. The conflict is
resolved.

Many authors introduce certain deviations from the traditional pattern of plot
development, i.e. the author may leave out one or several of the components (e.g.
exposition or denouement) or rearrange the components of the plot structure (e.g. a
story may open up with the climax).

A fictional plot is usually based on a conflict — a situation or problem which a

character tries to resolve. A conflict can be external — a conflict between a character
and outside forces (a person against another person, a person against nature, a person
15
against society, etc.) or internal — a conflict within the character him/herself (an
individual conflict revealed through the character’s thoughts, feelings, etc.). The
largest part of the story will deal with the main character’s struggle to resolve this
problem or conflict hence he seeks a solution.

Although the typical fictional plot has a beginning, a middle, and an end,
authors may vary their patterns of narration.

Patterns of narration:

1) a straight line narrative (chronological sequence);

2) a complex structure (events are not arranged in chronological order
and flashbacks are used to bring the past of the characters into the story);
3) a frame structure (there is a story within the story; the two stories
contrast or parallel);
4) a circular structure (the closing event of the story returns the reader to
the introductory part).

The author often uses certain techniques to creatively unfold the plot:

• Flashback: A move back in time to an earlier incident, a scene from the past
inserted in the narration.
• Foreshadowing: A hint or allusion to events which will develop later in the
story.
• Retardation: The withholding of information (the author holds some facts back
and keeps the reader guessing).
• Trick ending: The end of a short story comes out as a complete surprise.

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Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.
J. Joyce
Eveline

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was
leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odor of dusty cretonne.
She was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she
heard his footsteps clicking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on
the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in
which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. Then a man from
Belfast bought the field and built houses in it — not like their little brown houses but
bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play
together in that field — the Devines, the Caters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple,
she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up.
Her father used often to hunt them out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but
usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming.
Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then, and
besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and
sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the
Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go
away like the others, to leave her home.
She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had
dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came
from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had
never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found
our the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the
broken harmonium beside the colored print of the promises made to Blessed

17
Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he
showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:
— He is in Melbourne now.
She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to
weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she
had those whom she had known all her life about her. Of course she had to work hard
both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they
found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her
place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had
always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.
— Miss Hill, don’t you see these ladies are waiting?
— Look lively, Miss HiII, please.
She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.
But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that.
Then she would be married — she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then.
She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over
nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it
was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never
gone for her, like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl; but
latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her
dead mother’s sake. And now she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and
Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down
somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday
nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages —
seven shillings — and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get
any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no
head, that he wasn’t going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the
streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad of a Saturday night. In the end
he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s

18
dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing,
holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through
the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work
to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to
her charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work —
a hard life — but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly
undesirable life.
She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly,
open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to
live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How well she
remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main
road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate,
his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of
bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the
Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and
she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was
awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and,
when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused.
He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her
to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries.
He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out
to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the
different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her
stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said,
and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had
found our the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.
— I know these sailor chaps, he said.
One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover
secretly.

19
 The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew
indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favorite
but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would
miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid
up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire.
Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of
Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the
children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her
head against the window curtain, inhaling the odor of dusty cretonne. Down far in the
avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should
come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep
the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's
illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside
she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away
and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom
saying:
— Damned Italians! coming over here!
As she mused, the pitiful vision of her mother’s life laid its spell on the very
quick of her being — that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziess.
She trembled, as she heard again her mother’s voice saying constantly with foolish
insistence:
— Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank
would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live.
Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in
his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held
her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the

20
passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages.
Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the
boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing.
She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to
direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into
the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming
towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back
after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept
moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
— Come!
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into
them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
— Come!
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid
the seas she sent a cry of anguish!
— Eveline! Evvy!
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to
go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless
animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

1. How would you define the type of the story? What type of conflict is at the
basis of the story?
2. Does the plot-structure seem traditional to you? Which pattern does the plot
of the story take?
3. Introduce the protagonist of the story: age, background, the situation she
finds herself in.
4. Analyze Eveline’s definition of the word home. To what extent does her idea
21
of home differ or contrast with her idea of new home?
5. What is the role of religion and romance in Eveline? Analyze the extent to
which both issues represent different ways of responding to the patriarchal
structure of families like Eveline’s.
6. What factors might have influenced Eveline’s decision to stay home, in your
opinion? Does the open ending of the story allow a variety of explanations?

22
 UNIT 3

SETTING

The setting can be defined as the place where the story happens, the time when
it happens and the conditions under which the story is told. The setting of a novel or a
short story is crucial to the creation of a complete work as it has a definite impact on
the character development and plot. The setting is often found in the exposition of the
plot and readily establishes time and place. Frequently it plays an important role in
the conflict giving credence to the rising action as a climax or turning point is
approached.

Possible elements of the setting:

1. Physical objects (e.g. elements of domestic interiors). Some writers provide

a great amount of detail when describing their novels’/short-stories’ settings, and they
do so for specific reasons. In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev distinguishes between two
kinds of country families by contrasting the elegance and the earthiness of their
respective households. The ominousness of Great Expectations by Dickens proceeds
as much from the bleak marshes and the Gothic house owned by the character Miss
Havisham as from anything the characters say or do.

2. Social and cultural environment. Some writers pay less attention to specific
physical objects, but this does not mean they are not concerned with social
environment. For instance, in focusing on details such as Mr. Bennet’s income in
Pride and Prejudice or Mr. Eliot’s background in Persuasion, Jane Austen creates an
atmosphere in which a character’s background and hometown — whether London,
the town of Meryton, or somewhere in northern England — becomes central to the
23
story.

3. Geographical location and landscape. Sometimes authors make time and

place so essential to the narrative that they become as important as the characters
themselves. For example, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, The Scarlet Letter by
Hawthorne, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy are inconceivable
without their settings of Stonehenge, colonial New England, and the Yorkshire moors,
respectively.

4. Historical period. The novel Jazz by Toni Morrison is set in the New York
City neighborhood of Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural
movement of the 1920s and early 1930s featured innovations in literature, theater, art
and music. The setting Morrison creates is integral to the book, whose narrative voice
echoes the loose, unpredictable rhythms of the jazz music of the time.

Possible functions of the setting:

1. Setting the story in a particular environment the author creates the necessary
atmosphere.
2. Setting the story in a true-to-life environment the author increases the
credibility of the characters and events in the story.
3. The setting, e.g. descriptions of nature, may function as means of expressing
the emotional state of the character.
4. The setting may also enhance characterization by paralleling the characters’
mood and behavior.
5. The main function of the domestic interior as an element of the setting is
individualization of the character, revealing certain features of his or her personality.

24
 6. The setting may serve as contrasting background to the action of the story.
Descriptions of peaceful and undisturbed nature may precede stormy violent action
in the story, and thus help the author to take the reader by surprise.
7. The setting may function as a main force opposing the character
(protagonist), if the story is based on the man-versus-nature conflict.
8. The setting often acquires a symbolic meaning and helps to reveal the central
idea(s) of the story.

The setting is usually given in the exposition of the story, but very often the
descriptions of the setting may be scattered throughout the whole story.

Exercise 1.
Read the passages given below. Point out the elements of the setting and comment on
their function.
1.
O. Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer
wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the
heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying,
smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just
catch the gleam of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear
the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows
of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in
front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and
making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the
medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness

25
and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long
unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of
the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar
of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

2.

Ch. Bronte
Jane Eyre

The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely. I walked fast till I
got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and analyze the species of pleasure
brooding for me in the hour and situation. It was three o’clock; the church bell tolled
as I passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay in its approaching dimness, in
the low-gliding and pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield; in a lane noted
for wild roses in summer, for nuts and blackberries in autumn, and even now
possessing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay
in its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no sound
here. Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle now
browsed; and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked
like single russet leaves that had forgotten to drop.
On the hill-top above me sat the rising moon: pale yet as a cloud, but
brightening momentarily, she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent up a
blue smoke from its few chimneys. It was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I
could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life.
A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away
and so clear — a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic clatter, which effaced the soft
wave-wanderings as, in a picture, the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a
great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance of
azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds where tint melts into tint.
26
3.
E. A. Poe
The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The apartment (the door of which, being found locked, with the key inside, was
forced open) was in the wildest disorder — the furniture broken and thrown about in
all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed,
and thrown in the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood.
On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of human hair, also dabbled
with blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. Upon the floor were
found four Napoleons, an ear-ring of topaz, three large silver spoons, and two bags,
containing nearly four thousand franks in gold. The drawers of a bureau, which stood
in one corner, were open, and had been, apparently, rifled, although many articles still
remained in them. A small iron safe was discovered under the bed. It was open, with
the key still in the door. It had no contents, beyond a few old letters, and other papers
of little consequence.

Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.

R. Bradbury
The Smile

In the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning while cocks
were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among
the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of
seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos and threes, more
people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.

27
 The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly
in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the
cold. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looked
up at the soiled gunny-sack clothing of the men and down the long line of men and
women ahead.

“Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?” said the man behind him.

“Got my place in line, I have,” said the boy.

“Whyn’t you run off, give your place to someone who appreciates?”

“Leave the boy alone,” said the man ahead, suddenly turning.

“I was joking.” The man behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook
it away coldly. “I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.”

“This boy’s an appreciator of arts, I’ll have you know,” said the boy’s defender,
a man named Grigsby. “What’s your name, lad?”
“Tom.”
“Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?”
“I sure am!”
Laughter passed down the line.

A man was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw
the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee. It was
made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and it sold a
penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the

28
wealth.

Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out
stone wall.

“They say she smiles,” said the boy.

“Aye, she does,” said Grigsby.

“They say she’s made of oil and canvas.”
“True. And that’s what makes me think she’s not the original one. The original,
now, I’ve heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.”
“They say she’s four centuries old.”
“Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.”
“It’s 2061!” “That’s what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3000 or 5000, for
all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits
and pieces.”

They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

“How much longer before we see her?” asked Tom uneasily.

“Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet
rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don’t allow rocks
thrown at her.”
“Yes, sir.”

The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed
their grimy coats and greasy hats.
“Why’re we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why’re we all here to spit?”

29
 Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. “Well, Tom, there’s
lots of reasons.” He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette
that wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. “Tom, it has to do with
hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state,
cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with
radio-activity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?”
“Yes, sir, I guess so.”

“It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down
and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.”

“There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,” said Tom.

“Right! The whole blooming caboodle of them people in the Past who run the
world. So here we are on a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines,
cold, live in caves and such, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t nothing except have our
festivals, Tom, our festivals.” And Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years.
The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was
drunk and laughing. And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in
the last motorcar and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one
smash of a sledge hammer at the car.
“Do I remember that; Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front
window, the window, you hear? My God, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”
Tom could hear the glass fall in glittering heaps. “And Bill Henderson, he got
to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!
“But best of all,” recalled Grigsby, “there was the time they smashed a factory
that was still trying to turn out airplanes. Lord, did we feel good blowing it up! And
then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them

30
together. Do you understand, Tom?”
Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”
It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and
things crawled among the tumbled buildings.
“Won’t it ever come back, mister?”
“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”
“I could stand a bit of it,” said the man behind another man. “There were a few
spots of beauty in it.”
“Don’t worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There’s no room for that, either.”
“Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Someone’ll come along someday with
imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.” “No,” said
Grigsby.
“I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of
limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.”
“First thing you know there’s war!”
“But maybe next time it’d be different.”
At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the
distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the center of the square
was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spittle and
moving forward — moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart
beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.
“Here we go, Tom, let fly!”
Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of
yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there
to prevent rocks being hurled.
“This way,” said Grigsby at the last moment, “everyone feels he’s had his
chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!”
Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.
“Tom, spit!”

31
 His mouth was dry.
“Get on, Tom! Move!”
“But,” said Tom, slowly, “she’s beautiful!”
“Here, I’ll spit for you!” Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The
woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his
heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.
“She’s beautiful,” he said. “Now get on before the police — “
“Attention!”
The line fell silent. One moment they were berating Tom for not moving
forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback.
“What do they call it, sir?” asked Tom, quietly.
“The picture? Mona Lisa, Tom, I think. Yes, the Mona Lisa.”
“I have an announcement,” said the man on horseback. “The authorities have
decreed that as of high noon today the portrait in the square is to be given over into
the hands of the populace there, so they may participate in the destruction of — “
Tom hadn’t even time to scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and
pummeling about, stampeding toward the portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound.
The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry
birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through the broken
thing. Reaching out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched a scrap of oily
canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked, sent rolling to the outer
rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothing torn, he watched old women chew pieces of
canvas, men break the frame, kick the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti. Only Tom
stood apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his hand. It clutched the
piece of canvas close to his chest, hidden.
“Hey there, Tom!” cried Grigsby.
Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and down the bomb-pitted road,
into a field, across a shallow stream, not looking back, his hand clenched tightly,
tucked under his coat.

32
 At sunset he reached the small village and passed on through. By nine o’clock
he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the half silo, in the part that
still remained upright, tented over, he heard the sounds of sleeping, the family — his
mother, father, and brother. He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and
lay down panting.
“Tom?” called his mother in the dark. “Yes.”
“Where’ve you been?” snapped his father. “I’ll beat you in the morning.”
Someone kicked him. His brother, who had been left behind to work their little
patch of ground.
“Go to sleep,” cried his mother, faintly.
Another kick.
Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest,
tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.
Then he felt something, and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high
and the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom’s body.
Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept
about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then,
waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.
All the world was asleep in the moonlight. And there on his hand was the
Smile. He looked at it in the white illumination from the midnight sky. And he
thought, over and over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.
An hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and
hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still
there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon
sailed up and then down the cold sky toward morning.

1. Define the genre of the story.

2. Which method is employed by the author to relate the story?
33
3. Where and when is the story set?
4. Which elements of the setting can you point out? What part do they play in
the operation of the story?
5. What is the main reason for the author’s telling the story? Do you think the
society described in the story is a likely future, or is the picture far too
pessimistic?
6. How do you think the author intends us to interpret the end of the story?

34
 UNIT 4

FORMS OF PRESENTATION: NARRATION

The sequence of events, character collisions may be represented in a variety of

ways: through narration, description, dialogue, and characterization, which are
the basic forms of presentation.

NARRATION/ POINT OF VIEW

Narration is the presentation of events in their development. The narration

may be done in the first person (the narrator combines two functions: that of a
character of a story and that of the narrator) and in the third person (the narrator does
not take part in the events).
Point of View is quite simply, who is telling the story, who is describing and
commenting on the events. All literature must be narrated or recorded by someone,
and an author must decide who that someone will be. The decision is an important
one, since the selection of a narrator determines the perspective, or point of view,
from which the story will be told, as well as the amount and kind of information the
reader will be given. Once the author has chosen the point of view, he/she must then
convey it to the reader and keep it consistent from beginning to end. Many writers
use the protagonist (the main character) as the point of view. Others create an
impartial character to narrate the story or use multiple narrators. In discussing
literature, it is most common to examine the following points of view.

First Person Narrator: A character in the story who speaks in the first person
voice. The first person narrator is a character in the story who can reveal his or her
feelings and thoughts, or information that has been directly received by other
characters. The first person narrator speaks in the first person, i.e. in the “I” voice,
35
saying “I saw…”, “I knew…”, “I realized…”, etc. Information is limited to what the
point of view character/narrator sees, hears, thinks, experiences, and feels. First
person allows the reader to feel an emotional connection with the main
character/narrator that is difficult to achieve with other points of view. It can result in
some powerful and emotionally charged scenes.

First person point of view is divided into the following categories:

• Subjective Narrator. The point of view character gives his/her thoughts and
feelings along with the events in the story.
• Objective Narrator. The point of view character tells the events only without
including his/her reactions to them.
• Multiple Narrators. First person accounts by several characters.

Third Person Narrator: third person is perhaps the most common point of
view. It allows the writer more freedom than any of the other points of view. It
provides the most information to the reader but does so in an impersonal way which
may lessen the emotional impact.

There are three basic types of third person narrators:

Third Person Objective Narrator: A narrator, who is not a character in the

story, speaks in the third person voice and can tell only what is observable through
the five senses. The third person objective narrator is not a character in the story. The
third person objective narrator refers to all characters in the third person, i.e. tells the
story in the “he/she/it” voice, saying “He looked…”, “She jumped…”, etc. They are
only able to make objective observations, however they have no knowledge of what
is going on in the mind of the characters, or anything else that would not be

36
observable to the reader if they were to enter the story. In other words, they describe
what the characters say or do without offering information on the characters thoughts,
feelings or reactions.

Third Person Omniscient Narrator: A narrator, who is not a character in the

story, speaks in the third person voice and can tell the thoughts and feelings of
characters within the story. Like the third person objective narrator, the third person
omniscient narrator speaks in the third person and is not a character in the story.
Unlike the third person objective narrator, however, the third person omniscient
narrator has knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of all characters in the story.

Third Person Limited Narrator: A narrator is not a character in the story,

speaks in the third person voice and can describe the thoughts and feelings of only
one character in the story (usually the main one). This narrator is similar to first
person in that the information is presented primarily through the eyes of one
character. For example, a sentence from a story in the third person limited may read,
“As she waited on the corner, she remembered the last time she had seen him”.

Exercise 1.
Read the following ways of describing an event (a — e). Then match them with the
five points of view listed below (1 — 5).

a) Mary Evans was driving home. There had been problems at the office again that
day. And at home, the behavior of her husband, Nick, had changed recently.
Suddenly a man stepped out in front of the car. Mary braked, but the car hit the
man and he fell to the ground. The blood drained from Mary’s face, and she sat
motionless behind the steering-wheel. A woman ran over and shouted to her
through the window, but she didn’t reply.

37
b) I was walking home along Seymour Road. The evening was fine, and I was
looking forward to dinner at my local restaurant. Suddenly I heard a screech of
brakes and looked around. I recognized Mary Evans’s car, and saw a man in front
of it, and then heard the horrible thud of body against car. I ran over. Mary had
gone completely white. I shouted “Mary! Mary!” through the window, but she was
obviously in a state of shock, and didn’t seem to recognize me at all.

c) Mary Evans was driving home after yet another difficult day. Doubts and fears
about her job and her marriage tormented her. Her worries were well founded: her
boss was increasingly dissatisfied with her work, and more importantly, her
husband, Nick, was thinking of leaving her. Suddenly a man on the pavement, lost
in worries of his own, stepped into the road without looking. Mary braked hard,
but too late. The man was knocked to the ground. Mary’s friend, Anna, who was
passing, ran over to her, but Mary was too shocked to speak or even think.

d) Mary Evans was driving home, wondering what to do about the problems that had
come up at the office that day, and her boss’s obvious displeasure. And Nick, her
husband, how would he behave when she got home? If only she knew why he was
behaving so strangely! Suddenly there was a man in front of the car. Instinctively,
her foot pushed hard on the brake. The man’s terrified face appeared in front of
her for an instant, then disappeared again. Everything seemed to go blank. From
what seemed a million miles away, someone was calling her name.

e) It had been another awful day at the office, one problem after another, and my
boss criticizing me all the time. And I wasn’t looking forward to my evening very
much either. My husband, Nick, had been acting strangely all week — I really
worry about losing him. I just wasn’t thinking about my driving, and the next

38
 thing I knew there was a man right in front of me. I remember braking, but it was
too late — there was nothing I could do. I can’t remember any more.

1. first-person narrator: a minor character in the story

2. first-person narrator: a main character in the story
3. third-person narrator: omniscient
4. third-person narrator: objective
5. third-person narrator: limited

Exercise 2.
Choose one of the following moments. Imagine who is there and what happens.
Choose a point of view and narrate the scene in 5 — 10 sentences.

1. an hour later, Mary at the hospital;

2. Mary at home, later that evening;
3. Mary at the police station;
4. any other moment from how you think the plot may develop.

Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.

T. Capote

39
 A Lamp in a Window

Once I was invited to a wedding; the bride suggested I drive up from New York
with a pair of other guests, a Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, whom I had never met before. It
was a cold April day, and on the ride to Connecticut the Robertses, a couple in their
early forties, seemed agreeable enough — no one you would want to spend a long
weekend with, but not bad.
However, at the wedding a great deal of liquor was consumed, I should say a
third of it by my chauffeurs. They were the last to leave the party — at approximately
11 p. m. — and I was most wary of accompanying them; I knew they were drunk, but
I didn’t realize how drunk. We had driven about twenty miles, the car weaving
considerably, and Mr. and Mrs. Roberts insulting each other in the most extraordinary
language, when Mr. Roberts, very understandably, made a wrong turn and got lost on
a dark country road. I kept asking them, finally begging them, to stop the car and let
me out, but they were so involved in their invectives that they ignored me. Eventually
the car stopped of its own accord (temporarily) when it swiped against the side of a
tree. I used the opportunity to jump out of the car’s back door and run into the woods.
Presently the cursed vehicle drove off, leaving me alone in the icy dark. I’m sure my
hosts never missed me; Lord knows I didn’t miss them.
But it wasn’t a joy to be stranded out there on a windy cold night. I started
walking, hoping I’d reach a highway. I walked for half an hour without sighting a
habitation. Then, just off the road, I saw a small frame cottage with a porch and a
window lighted by a lamp. I tiptoed onto the porch and looked in the window; an
elderly woman with soft hair and a round pleasant face was sitting by a fireside
reading a book. There was a cat curled in her lap, and several others slumbering at her
feet.
I knocked at the door, and when she opened it I said, with chattering teeth:
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve had a sort of accident; I wonder if I could use your
phone to call a taxi.”

40
 “Oh, dear,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t have a phone. Too poor. But
please, come in.” And as I stepped through the door into the cozy room, she said:
“My goodness, boy. You’re freezing. Can I make coffee? A cup of tea? I have a little
whiskey my husband left — he died six years ago.”
I said a little whiskey would be very welcome.
While she fetched it I warmed my hands at the fire and glanced around the
room. It was a cheerful place occupied by six or seven cats of varying alley-cat
colors. I looked at the title of the book Mrs. Kelly — for that was her name, as I later
learned — had been reading: it was Emma by Jane Austen, a favorite writer of mine.
When Mrs. Kelly returned with a glass of ice and a dusty quarter-bottle of
bourbon, she said: “Sit down, sit down. It’s not often I have company. Of course, I
have my cats. Anyway, you’ll spend the night? I have a nice little guest room that’s
been waiting such a long time for a guest. In the morning you can walk to the
highway and catch a ride into town, where you’ll find a garage to fix your car. It’s
about five miles away.”
I wondered aloud how she could live so isolatedly, without transportation or a
telephone; she told me her good friend, the mailman, took care of all her shopping
needs. “Albert. He’s really so dear and faithful. But he’s due to retire next year. After
that I don’t know what I’ll do. But something will turn up. Perhaps a kindly new
mailman. Tell me, just what sort of accident did you have?”
When I explained the truth of the matter, she responded indignantly: “You did
exactly the right thing. I wouldn’t set foot in a car with a man who had sniffed a glass
of sherry. That’s how I lost my husband. Married forty years, forty happy years, and I
lost him because a drunken driver ran him down. If it wasn’t for my cats…” She
stroked an orange tabby purring in her lap.
We talked by the fire until my eyes grew heavy. We talked about Jane Austen
(“Ah, Jane. My tragedy is that I’ve read all her books so often I have them
memorized”), and other admired authors: Thoreau, Willa Cather, Dickens, Lewis
Carroll, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Hawthorne, Chekhov, De Maupassant

41
— she was a woman with a good and varied mind; intelligence illuminated her hazel
eyes like the small lamp shining on the table beside her. We talked about the hard
Connecticut winters, politicians, far places (“I’ve never been abroad, but if ever I’d
had the chance, the place I would have gone is Africa. Sometimes I’ve dreamed of it,
the green hills, the heat, the beautiful giraffes, the elephants walking about”), religion
(“Of course, I was raised a Catholic, but now, I’m almost sorry to say, I have an open
mind. Too much reading, perhaps”), gardening (“I grow and can all my vegetables, a
necessity”). At last: “Forgive my babbling on. You have no idea how much pleasure it
gives me. But it’s way past your bedtime. I know it is mine.”
She escorted me upstairs, and after I was comfortably arranged in a double bed
under a blissful load of pretty scrapquilts, she returned to wish me goodnight, sweet
dreams. I lay awake thinking about it. What an exceptional experience — to be an old
woman living alone here in the wilderness and have a stranger knock on your door in
the middle of the night and not only open it but warmly welcome inside and offer him
shelter. If our situations had been reversed, I doubt that I would have had the courage,
to say nothing of the generosity.
The next morning she gave me breakfast in her kitchen. Coffee and hot
oatmeal with sugar and tinned cream, but I was hungry and it tasted great. The
kitchen was shabbier than the rest of the house; the stove, a rattling refrigerator,
everything seemed on the edge of expiring. All except one large, somewhat modern
object, a deep-freeze that fitted into a corner of the room.
She was chatting on: “I love birds. I feel so guilty about not tossing them
crumbs during the winter. But I can’t have them gathered around the house. Because
of the cats. Do you care for cats?”
“Yes, I once had a Siamese named Toma. She lived to be twelve, and we
traveled everywhere together. All over the world. And when she died I never had the
heart to get another.”
“Then maybe you will understand this,” she said, leading me over to the deep-
freeze, and opening it. Inside was nothing but cats: stacks of frozen, perfectly

42
preserved cats — dozens of them. It gave me an odd sensation. “All my old friends.
Gone to rest. It’s just that I couldn’t bear to lose them. Completely.” She laughed, and
said: “I guess you think I’m a bit dotty.”
A bit dotty. Yes, a bit dotty, I thought as I walked under grey skies in the
direction of the highway she had pointed out to me. But radiant: a lamp in a window.

43
1. Define the story-type.
2. Is the plot of the short story organized according to the traditional structure?
Did the author resort to any plot-structure techniques to make it more complex?
3. Consider different elements of the setting of the story. In what way does the
setting help to disclose the heroine’s personality?
4. State the type of presentation employed in the story. Through whose point of
view are the events related?
5. Recall your immediate reaction to the story. What feeling did the main
character provoke in you?
6. Did the narrator’s attitude toward the main heroine change in the end of the
story? Interpret the last sentence of the text describing her.

44
 UNIT 5

FORMS OF PRESENTATION: DESCRIPTION

Description is a presentation of a static picture: the atmosphere, the scenery,

the portrait, the interior and the like. It serves to depict the state of things in detail. It
is characterized by the use of mostly compound nominal predicates. Emphasis is put
on attributes, predicatives and other qualifying features.

MEANS OF EXPRESSIVENESS

One way in which writers make their descriptions vivid and exciting is by
using emotionally coloured and evaluative words. Fiction as all other art-forms
appeals to the reader through the senses and evokes responsive emotions. In fiction
the representation of reality can never be entirely neutral; in every literary work the
writer’s attitude to the characters and events is reflected in the tone, which is
conveyed through emotive-coloured lexis.
Vocabulary, or lexis, employed by authors in their works, mean the choice of
words. There are grammatical words (articles, demonstratives, pronouns, auxiliary
words and coordinators) and semantic words, which we pay more attention while
reading (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.). When you look them up in the dictionary the
first meaning you find of these words is their denotation, or the most basic, literal
meaning. Literature, however, communicates more than plain facts. It uses the
connotations of words — ideas, associations and emotions they suggest — to
influence our thoughts and feelings in more subtle ways. Connotations serve as bases
for special language means of expressiveness — figures of speech, which interrelate
language and thought, help to create an artistic literary work and the individual style
of the author. The use of figures of speech involves the reader in the interpretation of
the ideas which are not stated directly but implied. Below are some of the ways in
45
which writers communicate their views indirectly.
Metaphor is a form of comparison in which an idea or opinion is expressed by
comparing one thing with another to show a similarity. Words are used not in the true
sense but in an imaginative way, transferring a quality from one object to another.
e. g. I am an island.
He is a bull when he is roused.

Simile is characterization of an object by comparing it with another object belonging

to a different class of things and thus giving rise to a new understanding of it. Similes
have formal elements in their structure: connective words such as like, as, seem, as if,
such as, etc.
e. g. She sang like a kettle whistling as it boils.
He is as tall as a lamp-post.

The major difference between the metaphor and the simile is that the simile aims
at finding some point of resemblance by keeping the objects apart (a is like b)
while the metaphor aims at identifying the objects (a = b).
e. g. She was a feather in his arms. (a metaphor)
She was weightless like a feather in his arms. (a simile)

Epithet is characterization of a person, thing or phenomenon with the help of

adjectives, nouns or attributive phrases. It serves to emphasize a certain property or
feature and to express the author’s attitude toward what he describes.
e. g. She is really slim. — No, she isn’t. She is skinny.
The sick man gave a heart-breaking groan.

Irony is a figure of speech based on the simultaneous realization of two logical

meanings — logical and contextual, which stand in opposition to each other. In fact,
the writer says one thing but really means the opposite.

46
e. g. The food was so delicious that I took it home for my dog.
It must be delightful to find oneself in a foreign country without a penny in
one’s pocket!

Hyperbole means deliberate exaggeration of an essential feature or property of an

object, showing the author’s attitude to it (often humorous, ironic or overemotional).
e. g. I would give the world to make you happy.
He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face.

Personification takes place when an inanimate object or an animal is endowed with a

quality typical of a human being for a definite emotional colouring.
e. g. The cold winter wind outside was crying and whining and cursing.

Zeugma is a stylistic device based on simultaneous realization of the literal and the
transferred meanings of a word, when it is used in the same grammatical but different
semantic relations to two adjacent words in the context. The zeugma often brings
forth humorous connotations.
e. g. When he met Annette, who was to be his third wife, he gave her his heart
and his wallet.

Pun is a humorous use of a word or a phrase which has two meanings or of two
words or phrases which look or sound similar. Puns are used not only in jokes but
also in ads, newspaper headlines, etc. because they are eye-catching and amusing.
e. g. You have to be rich to play golf. — Then why are there so many poor
players?

Allusion is a reference to specific places, persons, literary or legendary characters or

historical events. The most frequently resorted to sources are mythology and the

47
Bible. The use of allusions presupposes knowledge of the fact, thing or person
alluded to and calls forth associations from the reader’s thesaurus.
e.g. He says his mother-in-law is a perfect Gorgon.

48
Exercise 1.
What does the writer really think in each of the following sentences?

1. She danced as daintily as a cow.

2. He usually manages to bulldoze his way through the committee meetings.
3. Jasmine is so incredibly beautiful, dignified and intelligent as to be the
eighth wonder of the world.
4. The new social centre is a tree growing naturally with strength and beauty to
fit the environment in which it had been placed.
5. His unrivalled brilliance as a student of the physical sciences was aptly
illustrated by his 10% in the physics examination.
6. I don’t want to be an island but a bridge.
7. His sarcasm often bites like an adder.
8. The furniture was about as comfortable as a cactus.

Exercise 2.
Sort out the sentences below into two groups tp indicate a positive or a negative
opinion.

1. The car is incredibly, heartstoppingly beautiful.

2. My own life had been so respectable and sheltered in comparison.
3. Don’t be so childish!
4. It turned out the most ghastly place you can imagine.
5. You never saw such a barren, boring landscape in your life, like the surface
of the moon in a heatwave.
6. Our wedding was particularly gruesome, with the two sets of totally
incompatible relatives grinding and grating against each other.
7. Louise was small but shapely built.

49
 8. He took it like a slap in the face.
9. Anne gave me a frosty look.
10. New York was certainly a disastrous choice.

Exercise 3.
What connotations do the following statements suggest?

1. But what can you expect from such a man? Do you find taste in the white of
an egg?
2. I’ve managed to stop smoking; now I’m trying to stop nuclear power.
3. Last night I got back to my room wet with wine and good intentions.
4. One cannibal to another while eating a clown: “Does this taste funny to
you?”
5. Happiness is like coke — something you get as by-product in the process of
making something else.
6. I hate her hypocritical, pretentious, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth air.
7. Diana looks a million bucks today.
8. I wouldn’t trust Bill in your place — he is as treacherous as a snake.

Read the poem and answer the questions that follow it.

O. Wilde
Symphony in Yellow

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by

50
 Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay

Are moved against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade

And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale-green Thames
Lies like a road of rippled jade.

1. Translate the title of the poem. What ideas does the choice of words in the
title suggest?
2. What is described in the poem? Through whose perception are the things
shown?
3. Consider the vivid comparisons O. Wilde creates. What emotions do they
suggest?
4. Do you think any of the metaphors or similes in the text are particularly
effective?
5. What general mood do you think is created in the poem?

51
UNIT 6

FORMS OF PRESENTATION: CHARACTERIZATION,

DIALOGUE

Characterization is used to present a character’s personality. We come to

know the characters in the short story through the indirect method of 1) physical
description, 2) the character’s thoughts, feelings and words, 3) the comments and
reactions of others, and 4) the actions of the character — indirect characterization;
and the direct method of the author’s stated opinion about the character — direct
characterization.

A person in a short story is called a character. The person around whom the
conflict revolves is called the main character. Most stories contain one or more main
characters and several minor characters. The hero of the story who is faced with a
conflict is the protagonist while the villain of the story, the person who causes the
conflict is the antagonist.

Character Development is the change in the person from the beginning to the
ending of a story. We say the character who changes in personality or attitude is a
dynamic character, those that remain the same are referred to as static characters. A

52
round character is a character with a fully developed, complex, even contradictory
personality. A flat character is a character with little depth or complexity, who may
be described in one or two phrases. A foil character is a minor character highlighting
certain features of a major character usually through contrast. The author’s
mouthpiece is a character, expressing the author’s view point as to the problems
raised in the story and sharing his ideas and set of values.

Dialogue is the speech of two or more characters who address each other.
Verbal behaviour (the way a character speaks, or what a character says in a certain
situation) is a powerful means of characterization, revealing the social and
intellectual standing, age, education and occupation, individual experiences and
psychology of a character. It also expresses his state of mind and feelings, the attitude
to his interlocutors. When analyzing speech characteristics, one should be alert for:

• Markers of official style (I presume, I beg your pardon, etc.), or markers of

informal conversational style: contracted forms, colloquialisms, elliptical
sentences, tag constructions (as you know), initiating signals (Well, Oh),
hesitation pauses, false start — pall of which normally occur in spontaneous
colloquial speech and often remain unnoticed, but in “fictional
conversation” they may acquire a certain function, as they create
verisimilitude and may indicate some features of the speaker’s character;
• Markers of the emotional state of the character: emphatic inversion, the use
of emotionally coloured words, the use of breaks-in-the-narrative that stand
for silence, the use of italics, interjections, hesitation pauses;
• Attitudinal markers: words denoting attitudes (hate, adore, despise),
intensifiers (very, absolutely, etc.);
• Markers of the character’s educational level: bookish words, rough words,
slang, vulgarisms, deviations from the standard;

53
• Markers of regional and dialectal speech, which define the speaker as to his
origin, nationality and social standing: foreign words, etc.;
• Markers of the character’s occupation: terms, jargonisms;
• Markers of the speaker’s idiolect, i.e. his individual speech peculiarities
which serve as a means of individualization and verisimilitude.

54
 How to write a character sketch

There are two effective ways of arranging your character sketch. One of them
is naming the qualities of a character first and then supporting your opinion with the
evidence from the text. The other one is analyzing a character’s behaviour in certain
circumstances and deducing his/her traits of character. While making a character
sketch you should try to find answers to the following questions:

• Who are the main characters? Are they like real people?
• Do they remind you of certain types of people? Which are the most interesting?
Why?
• Does the character seem to develop and change as the story progresses, or
does he/she remain about the same from beginning to end?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the character under study? What
incidents from the text can you cite to support your conclusions?
• To what extent does the personality of the character determine his/her success
or failure?
• What character did you like most and which did you dislike?
• With which ones did it make a difference to you whether they were happy or
not? Why?
• Which ones helped you to understand people a little better than before?
• How well does the author seem to know people and what “makes them tick”?

A helping hand

55
 the central/main/major character
the protagonist/the antagonist
the hero/heroine
the villain
a foil — to serve/act as a foil to…
the author’s mouthpiece
a simple/flat character
a complex/well-rounded character
moral/mental/physical/spiritual characteristics
direct/indirect characterization
to reinforce characterization
to contribute to characterization/individualization
to depict/portray/describe/reveal/disclose/a character
to evaluate/assess/rate/judge a character’s actions/words/decisions/set of
values
to share a character’s emotions
to arouse warmth/affection/compassion/admiration/resentment/antipathy,etc.

Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.

W. S. Maugham
The Happy Man

It is a dangerous thing to order the lives of others and I have often wondered at
the self-confidence of the politicians, reformers and suchlike who are prepared to
force upon their fellows measures that must alter their manners, habits, and points of
view. I have always hesitated to give advice, for how can one advise another how to
act unless one knows that other as well as one knows himself? Heaven knows, I know
little enough of myself: I know nothing of others. We can only guess at the thoughts

56
and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he
communicates with the other prisoners who form mankind, by conventional signs that
have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. And life, unfortunately, is
something that you cannot lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable and who am I
that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business
and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing; I
have not been tempted to teach my neighbor what he should do with his. But there are
men who flounder at the journey’s start, the way before them is confused and
hazardous, and on occasion however unwillingly, I have been forced to point the
finger of fate. Sometimes men have said to me, what shall I do with my life? And I
have seen myself for a moment wrapped in the dark cloak of Destiny.
Once I know that I advised well.
I was a young man, and I lived in a modest apartment in London near Victoria
Station. Late one afternoon, when I was beginning to think that I had worked enough
for that day, I heard a ring at the bell. I opened the door to a total stranger. He asked
me my name; I told him. He asked if he might come in.
“Certainly.”
I led him into my sitting-room and begged him to sit down. He seemed a trifle
embarrassed. I offered him a cigarette and he had some difficulty in lighting it
without letting go off his hat. When he had satisfactorily achieved this feat I asked
him if I should not put it on a chair for him. He quickly did this and while doing it
dropped his umbrella.
“I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you like this,” he said. “My name is
Stephens and I am a doctor. You’re in the medical, I believe?”
“Yes, but I don’t practice.”
“No, I know. I’ve just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask
you about it.”
“It’s not a very good book, I’m afraid.”
“The fact remains that you know something about Spain and there’s no one

57
else who does. And I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving me some
information.”
“I shall be very glad.”
He was silent for a moment. He reached out for his hat and holding it in one
hand absent-mindedly stroked it with the other. I surmised that it gave him
confidence.
“I hope you won’t think it were odd for a perfect stranger to talk to you like
this.”
He gave an apologetic laugh. “I am not going to tell you the story of my life.”
When people say this to me I always know that it is precisely what they are
going to do. I do not mind. In fact I rather like it.
“I was brought up by two old aunts. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done
anything. I’ve been married for six years. I have no children. I am a medical officer at
the Camberwell Infirmary. I can’t stick it any more.”
There was something very striking in the short, sharp sentences he used. They
had a forcible ring. I had not given him more than a cursory glance, but now I looked
at him with curiosity. He was a little man, thick-set and stout, of thirty perhaps; with a
round red face from which shone small, dark and very bright eyes. His black hair was
cropped close to a bullet-shaped head. He was dressed in a blue suit a good deal the
worse for wear. It was baggy at the knees and the pockets bulged untidily.
“You know what the duties are of a medical officer in an infirmary. One day is
pretty much like another. And that’s all I’ve got to look forward to for the rest of my
life. Do you think it’s worth it?”
“It’s a means of livelihood,” I answered.
“Yes. I know. The money’s pretty good.”
“I don’t exactly know why you’ve come to me.”
“Well, I want to know whether you thought there would be any chance for an
English doctor in Spain?”
“Why Spain?”

58
 “I don’t know, I just have a fancy for it.”
“It’s not like Carmen, you know.”
“But there is sunshine there, and there is good wine, and there is colour, and
there is air you can breathe. Let me say what I have to say straight out. I heard by
accident that there was no English doctor in Seville. Do you think I could earn a
living there? Is it madness to give up a good save job for an uncertainty?”
“What does your wife think about it?”
“She is willing.”
“It’s a great risk.”
“I know. But if you say take it, I will; if you say stay where you are, I’ll stay.”
He was looking at me intently with those bright dark eyes of his and I knew
that he meant what he said. I reflected for a moment.
“Your whole future is concerned: you must decide for yourself. But this I can
tell you: if you don’t want money but are content to earn just enough to keep body
and soul together, then go. For you will lead a wonderful life.”
He left me, I thought about him for a day or two, and then forgot. The episode
passed completely from my memory.
Many years later, fifteen at least, I happened to be in Seville and having some
trifling indisposition asked the hotel porter whether there was an English doctor in the
town. He said there was and gave me the address. I took a cab and as I drove up to
the house a little fat man came out of it. He hesitated when he caught sight of me.
“Have you come to see me?” he said. “I am an English doctor.” I explained my
errand and he asked me to come in. He lived in an ordinary Spanish house, with a
patio, and his consulting room which led out of it littered with papers, books, medical
appliances, and lumber. The sight of it would have startled a squeamish patient. We
did our business and then I asked the doctor what his fee was. He shook his head and
smiled.
“There is no fee.”
“Why on earth not?”

59
 “Don’t you remember me? Why, I’m here because of something you said to
me. You changed my whole life for me. I’m Stephens.”
I had not the least notion what he was talking about. He reminded me of our
interview, he repeated to me what we had said, and gradually, out of the night, a deem
recollection of the incident came back to me.
“I was wondering if I’d ever see you again,” he said. “I was wondering if ever
I’d have a chance of thanking you for all you’ve done for me.”
“It’s been a success then?”
I looked at him. He was very fat now and bald, but his eyes twinkled gaily and
his fleshy, red face bore an expression of perfect good humour. The clothes he wore,
terribly shabby they were, had been made obviously by a Spanish tailor and his hat
was the white-brimmed sombrero of the Spaniard. He looked to me as though he
knew a good bottle of wine when he saw it. He had a dissipated, though entirely
sympathetic, appearance. You might have hesitated to let him remove your appendix,
but you could not have imagined a more delightful creature to drink a glass of wine
with.
“Surely you were married?” I asked.
“Yes. My wife didn’t like Spain, she went back to Camberwell, she was more
at home there.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for that.”
His black eyes flashed a bacchanalian smile. He really had somewhat the look
of young Silenus.
“Life is full of compensations,” he murmured.
The words were hardly out of his mouth when a Spanish woman, no longer in
her first youth, but still boldly and voluptuously beautiful, appeared at the door. She
spoke to him in Spanish, and I could not fail to perceive that she was the mistress of
the house.
As he stood at the door to let me out he said to me:
“You told me when last I saw you that if I come here I should earn just enough

60
money to keep body and soul together, but that I should lead a wonderful life. Well, I
want to tell you that you were right. Poor I have been and poor I shall always be, but
by heaven I’ve enjoyed myself. I wouldn’t exchange the life I’ve had with that of any
king in the world.”

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 1. What is the author’s method of telling the story? Point out the peculiarities of
the plot structure.
2. Define the forms of presentation within the story.
3. What sources of characterization does the author employ to reveal the main
character’s personality?
4. Compare Dr. Stephens’ manner of behaviour the first and the second time
the narrator meets him.
5. Has the main character’s manner of speaking and vocabulary changed with
the course of time?
6. Each time the author pays much attention to the character’s clothes. Why?
7. What is the author’s attitude toward Dr. Stephens? Does it undergo any
change throughout the story? How do you know?

Read the short-story and answer the questions that follow it.

J. Thurber
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

“WE’RE GOING THROUGH!” The Commander’s voice was like tin ice
breaking. He wore his full dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled
down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a
hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the
Commander. “Throw the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!”
The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-
pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked
over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted.
“Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3
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turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to
their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at
each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another.
“The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!..”.
“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving
so fast for?”
“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with
shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had
yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t
like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward
Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN 202 through the worst storm in twenty
years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. “You’re
tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d
let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to
have her hair done. “Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair
done, she said. “I don’t need overshoes,” said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her
bag. “We’ve been all through that,” she said, getting out of the car. “You’re not a
young man any longer.” He raced the engine a little. “Why don’t you wear your
gloves? Have you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought
out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building
and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. “Pick it up, brother!”
snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and
lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove
past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.
“It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,” said the pretty nurse.
“Yes?” said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. “Who has the case?” “Dr.
Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from
New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.” A door opened

63
down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and
haggard. “Hello, Mitty,” he said. “We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan,
the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal
tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at him.” “Glad to,” said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: “Dr. Remington,
Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty.” “I’ve read your book on
streptothricosis,” said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. “A brilliant performance,
sir.” “Thank you,” said Walter Mitty. “Didn’t know you were in the States, Mitty,”
grumbled Remington. “Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a
tertiary.” “You are very kind,” said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to
the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-
pocketa-pocketa. “The new anesthetizer is giving way!” shouted an interne. “There is
no one in the East who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!” said Mitty, in a low, cool
voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-
pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. “Give me a
fountain pen!” he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty
piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. “That will hold for ten
minutes,” he said. “Get on with the operation.” A nurse hurried over and whispered to
Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. “Coreopsis has set in,” said Renshaw
nervously. “If you would take over, Mitty?” Mitty looked at him and at the craven
figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great
specialists. “If you wish,” he said. They slipped a white gown on him; he adjusted a
mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining …
“Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!” Walter Mitty jammed on the
brakes. “Wrong lane, Mac,” said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely.
“Gee. Yeh,” muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked
“Exit Only.” “Leave her sit there,” said the attendant. “I’ll put her away.” Mitty got
out of the car. “Hey, better leave the key.” “Oh,” said Mitty, handing the man the
ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and

64
put it where it belonged.
They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they
think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New
Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in
a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then
Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next
time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll
have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off
myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. “Overshoes,” he said to himself, and
he began looking for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his
arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to
get. She had told him twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a
way he hated these weekly trips to town — he was always getting something wrong.
Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate,
carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it.
“Where’s the what’s-its-name?” she would ask. “Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-
its-name.” A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.
“…Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The District Attorney suddenly
thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever seen
this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. “This is my
Webley-Vickers 50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom.
The Judge rapped for order. “You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I
believe?” said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted Mitty’s
attorney. “We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have
shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.”
Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With
any known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at
three hundred feet with my left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A

65
woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was
in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising
from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. “You miserable
cur!…”
“Puppy biscuit,” said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of
Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman
who was passing laughed. “He said ‘Puppy biscuit’,” she said to her companion.
“That man said ‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself.” Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an
A. & P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. “I want
some biscuit for small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk. “Any special brand, sir?”
The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. “It says ‘Puppies Bark for It’
on the box,” said Walter Mitty.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser’s in fifteen minutes Mitty saw in
looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble
drying it. She didn’t like to get to the hotel first, she would want him to be there
waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window,
and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an
old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. “Can Germany Conquer the World
Through the Air?” Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of
ruined streets.
“…The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,” said the
sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. “Get him to bed,” he
said wearily, “with the others. I’ll fly alone.” “But you can’t, sir,” said the sergeant
anxiously. “It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell
out of the air. Von Richtman’s circus is between here and Saulier.” “Somebody’s got
to get that ammunition dump,” said Mitty. “I’m going over. Spot of brandy?” He
poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined
around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and
splinters flew through the room. “A bit of a near thing,” said Captain Mitty carelessly.

66
“The box barrage is closing in,” said the sergeant. “We only live once, Sergeant,” said
Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. “Or do we?” He poured another brandy and
tossed it off. “I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir,” said the sergeant.
“Begging your pardon, sir.” Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-
Vickers automatic. “It’s forty kilometers through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty
finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?” The pounding of the
cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere
came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty
walked to the door of the dugout humming “Aupres de Ma Blonde.” He turned and
waved to the sergeant. “Cheerio!” he said …
Something struck his shoulder. “I’ve been looking all over this hotel for you,”
said Mrs. Mitty. “Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me
to find you?” “Things close in,” said Walter Mitty vaguely. “What?” Mrs. Mitty said.
“Did you get the what’s-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What’s in that box?”
“Overshoes,” said Mitty. “Couldn’t you have put them on in the store?” “I was
thinking,” said Walter Mitty. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes
thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to take your temperature when I get you
home,” she said.
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive
whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the
drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won’t be a
minute.” She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to
rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking… He
put his shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the handkerchief,” said
Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away.
Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad;
erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable
to the last.

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1. Make a summary of the story. Outline the actual events taking place in it.
Will the title be of any help for you in this case?
2. Accumulate the facts of the main character’s life (his age, job, profession,
marital status, children). Is the main hero of the story characterized directly?
3. What types of portrayal does the author resort to in creating the imaginary
incarnations of the personage (Walter Mitty the pilot, Doctor Mitty, Walter
Mitty the sniper, Captain Mitty)? Analyze their behaviour, manner of speaking,
the attitude of the people around to them.
4. Compare your observations of Walter Mitty’s real character and the persons
he imagines himself to be.
5. Is Walter Mitty viewed by the author as a sympathetic or unsympathetic
person? What is your opinion of the main character?

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Reading Independently

Preparation for the exam in Oral Practice will require a good deal of
independent work and thinking. Below, you will find 15 short stories for independent
appreciation. Read the short stories carefully, do a thorough vocabulary work and
apply the tools and skills of analysis you have learned during the winter term. The
suggested scheme of story analysis and After You Read questions will help you to
focus on the most important points of interpretation and to understand the author’s
message better.

The Scheme of Story Analysis

1. Type of story Is it a science fiction/crime/love/psychological story?

2. A brief account of events (5 sentences)

3. Plot How are the events arranged?

What conflict is there at the core of the story?

What is the turning point?
Is the ending predictable/tidy/troubling/thought-provoking
/surprising?

4. Setting Give examples of some elements and their function.

5. Narration Label the narrator and the effect created.

6. Description How effective is the author’s language?

Does the writer employ any figures of speech/emotive words? What
effect do they create?
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7. Characters Categorize the characters (major/minor/static/dynamic/complex
/simple).

How does the author reveal what his characters are like? Is it
through their statements and thoughts/the opinion of other
characters/their actions/their names, environment, or does the
author say directly what the characters are like?

Does the author employ implicit or explicit characterization?

Give examples of some personality traits attributable to the

characters and provide evidence from the text.

8. Message Identify the theme of the story.

and theme Is it about love/friendship/parents’ love for their children/a
person’s quest for happiness/bullying/sense of life/trials of life/
crime and punishment?

What is the central idea of the story?

What message does the author try to get across to the reader,
in your opinion?

For example:

The author suggests that love can work wonders and people can change for the
better when they are head over heels in love with somebody…

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 In telling the story, the writer hoped to drive home the thought that everybody
has their own idea of happiness…
The writer communicates by this story the idea that parents' love for their
children can be selfless and they always give their offspring a helping hand...
According to the story there are people who are shallow and narrow-minded
because they react to appearances only. They react to the surface of things and
people, not to their substance…

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 STORIES FOR INDEPENDENT READING

1.
R. Bradbury
All Summer in a Day

“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Now?”
“Soon.”
“Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”
“Look, look; see for yourself!”
The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds,
intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days
compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush
of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy
they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed
under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the
way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children
of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization
and live out their lives.
“It’s stopping, it’s stopping!”
“Yes, yes!”
Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember

72
a time when there wasn’t rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if
there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed
its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard
them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were dreaming and remembering gold
or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they
thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the
arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum,
the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the
gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read in class, about the sun. About how like a lemon
it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower,
That blooms for just one hour.

That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the
rain was falling outside.
“Aw, you didn’t write that!” protested one of the boys.
“I did,” said Margot “I did.”
“William!” said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were
crushed in the great thick windows.
“Where’s teacher?”
“She’ll be back.”
“She’d better hurry, we’ll miss it!”
They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.
Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost
in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red
from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from
an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she

73
stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.
“What’re you looking at?” said William.
Margot said nothing.
“Speak when you’re spoken to.” He gave her a shove. But she did not move;
rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.
They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away.
And this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of
the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and
did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips
barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move
as she watched the drenched windows.
And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only
five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and
the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their
lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long
since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot
remembered.
“It’s like a penny,” she said once, eyes closed.
“No it’s not!” the children cried.
“It’s like a fire,” she said, “in the stove.”
“You’re lying, you don’t remember!” cried the children.
But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the
patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school
shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the
water mustn’t touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was
different and they knew her difference and kept away.
There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next
year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of
thousands of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons

74
of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her
thinness, and her possible future.
“Get away!” The boy gave her another push. “What are you waiting for?”
Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was
waiting for was in her eyes.
“Well, don’t wait around here!” cried the boy savagely. “You won’t see
nothing!”
Her lips moved.
“Nothing!” he cried. “It was all a joke, wasn’t it?” He turned to the other
children. “Nothing’s happening today, is it?”
They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their
heads. “Nothing, nothing!”
“Oh, but,” Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. “But this is the day, the
scientists predict, they say, they know the sun...”
“All a joke!” said the boy, and seized her roughly. “Hey, everyone, let’s put her
in a closet before teacher comes!”
“No,” said Margot, falling back. They surged about her, caught her up and bore
her protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a
closet, where they slammed and locked door. They stood looking at the door and saw
it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled
cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the
teacher arrived.
“Ready, children?” She glanced at her watch.
“Yes!” said everyone.
“Are we all here?”
“Yes!”
The rain slackened still more.
They crowded to the huge door.
The rain stopped.

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 It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a
hurricane, a volcanic eruption something had, first, gone wrong with the sound
apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and
repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and
inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world
ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt
your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put
their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the
silent, waiting world came in to them.
The sun came out.
It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it
was a blazing blue tile color.
And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell,
rushed out, yelling, into the springtime.
“Now, don’t go too far,” called the teacher after them. “You’ve only two hours,
you know. You wouldn’t want to get caught out!”
But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun
on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun
burn their arms.
“Oh, it’s better than the sun lamps, isn’t it?”
“Much, much better!”
They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that
grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it. It was a nest
of octopi, clustering up great arms of fleshlike weed, wavering, flowering in this brief
spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without
sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the
moon.
The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and
squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and

76
fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they
squinted at the sun until tears down their faces, they put their hands up to that
yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and
listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no
sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then,
wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles.
They ran for an hour and did not stop running.
And then —
In the midst of their running one of the girls wailed.
Everyone stopped.
The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.
“Oh, look, look,” she said, trembling.
They came slowly to look at her opened palm.
In the center of it, cupped and huge, was a single rain drop. She began to cry,
looking at it. They glanced quietly at the sky.
“Oh. Oh.”
A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun
faded behind a stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them. They turned and started to
walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles
vanishing away.
A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they
tumbled upon each other and ran. Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a
mile, a half mile. The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.
They stood in the doorway of the underground for a moment until it was
raining hard. Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain
falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.
“Will it be seven more years?”
“Yes. Seven.”
Then one of them gave a little cry.

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 “Margot!”
“What?”
“She’s still in the closet where we locked her.”
“Margot.”
They stood as if someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor.
They looked at each other and then looked away. They glanced out at the world that
was raining now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other’s
glances. Their faces were solemn and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their
faces down.
“Margot.”
One of the girls said, “Well…?”
No one moved.
“Go on,” whispered the girl.
They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain. They turned
through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on
their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by
it.
Behind the closet door was only silence.
They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.

1. Consider the setting of the story. Does it help to identify the genre of the
short story?
2. Dwell on the descriptions of the nature and the weather on the planet Venus.
Analyze the emotional colouring of the words employed for this purpose,
interpret the means of expressiveness you are able to identify. What
atmosphere does the author create through such descriptions?
3. Examine the way the characters are presented; pay attention to the choice of
words, their connotations, the structure of the sentences. What attitude to the
78
 main character does the author establish?
4. Define the key of the story. Give your reasoning.
5. Outline the basic conflict and the themes of the story. What is the message
the author tries to get across?

2.
J. Archer
Just Good Friends

I woke up before him feeling slightly randy but I knew there was nothing I
could do about it.
I blinked and my eyes immediately accustomed themselves to the half light. I
raised my head and gazed at the large expanse of motionless white flesh lying next to
me. If only he took as much exercise as I did he wouldn’t have that spare tyre, I
thought unsympathetically.
Roger stirred restlessly and even turned over to face me, but I knew he would
not be fully awake until the alarm on his side of the bed started ringing. I pondered
for a moment whether I could go back to sleep again or should get up and find myself
some breakfast before he woke. In the end I settled for just lying still on my side day-
dreaming, but making sure I didn’t disturb him. When he did eventually open his eyes
I planned to pretend I was still asleep — that way he would end up getting breakfast
for me. I began to go over the things that needed to be done after he had left for the
office. As long as I was at home ready to greet him when he returned from his work,
he didn’t seem to mind what I got up to during the day.
A gentle rumble emanated from his side of the bed. Roger’s snoring never
disturbed me. My affection for him was unbounded, and I only wished I could find
the words to let him know. In truth, he was the first man I had really appreciated. As I

79
gazed at his unshaven face I was reminded that it hadn’t been his looks which had
attracted me in the pub that night.
I had first come across Roger in the Cat and Whistle, a pub situated on the
corner of Mafeking Road. You might say it was our local. He used to come in around
eight, order a pint of mild and take it to a small table in the corner of the room just
beyond the dartboard. Mostly he would sit alone, watching the darts being thrown
towards double top but more often settling in one or five, if they managed to land on
the board at all. He never played the game himself, and I often wondered, from my
vantage point behind the bar, if he were fearful of relinquishing his favourite seat or
just had no interest in the sport.
Then things suddenly changed for Roger — for the better, was no doubt how
he saw it — when one evening in early spring a blonde named Madeleine, wearing an
imitation fur coat and drinking double gin and its, perched on the stool beside him. I
had never seen her in the pub before but she was obviously known locally, and loose
bar talk led me to believe it couldn’t last. You see, word was about that she was
looking for someone whose horizons stretched beyond the Cat and Whistle.
In fact the affair — if that’s what it ever came to — lasted for only twenty
days. I know because I counted every one of them. Then one night voices were raised
and heads turned as she left the small stool just as suddenly as she had come. His
tired eyes watched her walk to a vacant place at the corner of the bar, but he didn’t
show any surprise at her departure and made no attempt to pursue her.
Her exit was my cue to enter. I almost leapt from behind the bar and, moving
as quickly as dignity allowed, was seconds later sitting on the vacant stool beside
him. He didn’t comment and certainly made no attempt to offer me a drink, but the
one glance he shot in my direction did not suggest he found me an unacceptable
replacement. I looked around to see if anyone else had plans to usurp my position.
The men standing round the dartboard didn’t seem to care. Treble seventeen, twelve
and a five kept them more than occupied. I glanced towards the bar to check if the
boss had noticed my absence, but he was busy taking orders. I saw Madeleine was

80
already sipping a glass of champagne from the pub’s only bottle, purchased by a
stranger whose stylish double-breasted blazer and striped bow tie convinced me she
wouldn’t be bothering with Roger any longer. She looked well set for at least another
twenty days.
I looked up at Roger — I had known his name for some time, although I have
never addressed him as such and I couldn’t be sure that he was aware of mine. I
began to flutter my eyelashes in a rather exaggerated way. I felt a little stupid but at
least it elicited a gentle smile. He leaned over and touched my cheek, his hands
surprisingly gentle. Neither of us felt the need to speak. We were both lonely and it
seemed unnecessary to explain why. We sat in silence, he occasionally sipping his
beer, I from time to time rearranging my legs, while a few feet from us the darts
pursued their undetermined course.
When the publican cried, “Last orders,” Roger downed the remains of his beer
while the dart players completed what had to be their final game.
No one commented when we left together and I was surprised that Roger made
no protest as I accompanied him back to his little semi-detached. I already knew
exactly where he lived because I had seen him on several occasions standing at the
bus queue in Dobson Street in a silent line of reluctant morning passengers. Once I
even positioned myself on a nearby wall in order to study his features more carefully.
It was an anonymous, almost commonplace face but he had the warmest eyes and the
kindest smile I had observed in any man.
My only anxiety was that he didn’t seem aware of my existence, just constantly
preoccupied, his eyes each evening and his thoughts each morning only for
Madeleine. How I envied that girl. She had everything I wanted — except a decent
fur coat, the only thing my mother had left me. In truth, I have no right to be catty
about Madeleine, as her past couldn’t have been more murky than mine.
All that had taken place well over a year ago and, to prove my total devotion to
Roger, I have never entered the Cat and Whistle since. He seems to have forgotten
Madeleine because he never once spoke of her in front of me. An unusual man, he

81
didn’t question me about any of the relationships either.
Perhaps he should have. I would have liked him to know the truth about my
life before we’d met, though it all seems irrelevant now. You see, I had been the
youngest in a family of four so I always came last in line. I had never known my
father, and I came home one night to discover that my mother had run off with
another man. Tracy, one of my sisters, warned me not to expect her back. She turned
out to be right, for I have never seen my mother since that day. It’s awful to have to
admit, if only to oneself, that one’s mother is a tramp.
Now an orphan, I began to drift, often trying to stay one step ahead of the law
— not so easy when you haven’t always got somewhere to put your head down. I
can’t even recall how I ended up with Derek — if that was his real name. Derek,
whose dark sensual looks would have attracted any susceptible female, told me that
he had been on a merchant steamer for the past three years. When he made love to me
I was ready to believe anything. I explained to him that all I wanted was a warm
home, regular food and perhaps in time a family of my own. He ensured that one of
my wishes was fulfilled, because a few weeks after he left me I ended up with twins,
two girls. Derek never set eyes on them: he had returned to sea even before I could
tell him I was pregnant. He hadn’t needed to promise me the earth; he was so good-
looking he must have known I would have been his just for a night on the tiles.
I tried to bring up the girls decently, but the authorities caught up with me this
time and I lost them both. I wonder where they are now? God knows. I only hope
they’ve ended up in a good home. At least they inherited Derek’s irresistible looks,
which can only help them through life. It’s just one more thing Roger will never
know about. His unquestioning trust only makes me feel more guilty, and now I never
seem able to find a way of letting him know the truth.
After Derek had gone back to sea I was on my own for almost a year before
getting part-time work at the Cat and Whistle. The publican was so mean that he
wouldn’t have even provided food and drink for me, if I hadn’t kept to my part of the
bargain.

82
 Roger used to come in about once, perhaps twice a week before he met the
blonde with the shabby fur coat. After that it was every night until she upped and left
him.
I knew he was perfect for me the first time I heard him order a pint of mild. A
pint of mild — I can’t think of a better description of Roger. In those early days the
barmaids used to flirt openly with him, but he didn’t show any interest.
I think I must have been the only one in that pub who was looking for
something more permanent. And so Roger allowed me to spend the night with him. I
remember that he slipped into the bathroom to undress while I rested on what I
assumed would be my side of the bed. Since that night he has never once asked me
to leave, let alone tried to kick me out. It’s an easy-going relationship. I’ve never
known him raise his voice or scold me unfairly. Forgive the clichй, but for once I
have fallen on my feet.
Brr. Brr. Brr. That damned alarm. I wished I could have buried it. The noise
would go on and on until at last Roger decided to stir himself. I once tried to stretch
across him and put a stop to its infernal ringing, only ending up knocking the
contraption on the floor, which annoyed him even more than the ringing. Never
again, I concluded. Eventually a long arm emerged from under the blanket and a
palm dropped on to the top of the clock and the awful din subsided. I’m a light
sleeper — the slightest movement stirs me. If only he had asked me I could have
woken him far more gently each morning. After all, my methods are every bit as
reliable as any man-made contraption.
Half awake, Roger gave me a brief cuddle before kneading my back, always
guaranteed to elicit a smile. Then he yawned, stretched and declared as he did every
morning, “Must hurry along or I’ll be late for the office.” I suppose some females
would have been annoyed by the predictability of our morning routine — but not this
lady. It was all part of a life that made me feel secure in the belief that at last I had
found something worthwhile.
Roger managed to get his feet into the wrong slippers — always a fifty-fifty

83
chance — before lumbering towards the bathroom. He emerged fifteen minutes later,
as he always did, looking only slightly better than he had when he entered. I’ve
learned to live with what some would have called his foibles, while he has learned to
accept my mania for cleanliness and a need to feel secure.
“Get up, lazy-bones,” he remonstrated but then only smiled when I re-settled
myself, refusing to leave the warm hollow that had been left by his body.
“I suppose you expect me to get your breakfast before I go to work?” he added
as he made his way downstairs. I didn’t bother to reply. I knew that in a few
moments’ time he would be opening the front door, picking up the morning
newspaper, any mail, and our regular pint of milk. Reliable as ever, he would put on
the kettle, then head for the pantry, fill a bowl with my favourite breakfast food and
add my portion of the milk, leaving himself just enough for two cups of coffee.
I could anticipate almost to the second when breakfast would be ready. First I
would hear the kettle boil, a few moments later the milk would be poured, then
finally there would be the sound of a chair being pulled up. That was the signal I
needed to confirm it was time for me to join him.
I stretched my legs slowly, noticing my nails needed some attention. I had
already decided against a proper wash until after he had left for the office. I could
hear the sound of the chair being scraped along the kitchen lino. I felt so happy that I
literally jumped off the bed before making my way towards the open door. A few
seconds later I was downstairs. Although he had already taken his first mouthful of
cornflakes he stopped eating the moment he saw me.
“Good of you to join me,” he said, a grin spreading over his face.
I padded over towards him and looked up expectantly. He bent down and
pushed my bowl towards me. I began to lap up the milk happily, my tail swishing
from side to side.
It’s a myth that we only swish our tails when we’re angry.

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 1. State the forms of presentation and the type of narration employed.
2. Why do you think dialogue as a form of presentation is absent from the
story?
3. What is the climactic point of the story? Why do you think so?
4. Accumulate the information about the protagonist’s past life and present
occupation. Compare your idea of the narrator at the beginning and at the end
of the story.
5. How can the personality of the narrator in this case help to define the genre
of the short story and its main idea?

3.
J. Archer
The Luncheon

She waved at me across a crowded room of the St. Regis Hotel in New York. I
waved back realising I knew the face but I was unable to place it. She squeezed past
waiters and guests and had reached me before I had a chance to ask anyone who she
was. I racked that section of my brain which is meant to store people, but it
transmitted no reply. I realised I would have to resort to the old party trick of
carefully worded questions until her answers jogged my memory.
“How are you, my darling?” she cried, and threw her arms around me, an
opening that didn’t help as we were at a Literary Guild cocktail party, and anyone
will throw their arms around you on such occasions, even the directors of the Book-
of-the-Month Club. From her accent she was clearly American and looked to be
approaching forty, but thanks to the genius of modern make-up might even have
overtaken it. She wore a long white cocktail dress and her blonde hair was done up in
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one of those buns that looks like a cottage loaf. The overall effect made her appear
somewhat like a chess queen. Not that the cottage loaf helped because she might have
had dark hair flowing to her shoulders when we last met. I do wish women would
realise that when they change their hair style they often achieve exactly what they set
out to do: look completely different to any unsuspecting male.
“I’m well, thank you,” I said to the white queen. “And you?” I inquired as my
opening gambit.
“I’m just fine, darling,” she replied, taking a glass of champagne from a
passing waiter.
“And how’s the family?” I asked, not sure if she even had one.
“They’re all well,” she replied. No help there. “And how is Louise?” she
inquired.
“Blooming,” I said. So she knew my wife. But then not necessarily, I thought.
Most American women are experts at remembering the names of men’s wives. They
have to be, when on the New York circuit they change so often it becomes a greater
challenge than The Times crossword.
“Have you been to London lately?” I roared above the babble. A brave
question, as she might never have been to Europe.
“Only once since we had lunch together.” She looked at me quizzically. “You
don’t remember who I am, do you?” she asked as she devoured a cocktail sausage.
I smiled.
“Don’t be silly, Susan,” I said. “How could I ever forget?”
She smiled.
I confess that I remembered the white queen’s name in the nick of time.
Although I still had only vague recollections of the lady, I certainly would never
forget the lunch.
I had just had my first book published and the critics on both sides of the
Atlantic had been complimentary, even if the cheques from my publishers were less
so. My agent had told me on several occasions that I shouldn’t write if I wanted to

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make money. This created a dilemma because I couldn’t see how to make money if I
didn’t write.
It was around this time that the lady, who was now facing me and chattering on
oblivious to my silence, telephoned from New York to heap lavish praise on my
novel. There is no writer who does not enjoy receiving such calls, although I confess
to having been less than captivated by an eleven-year-old girl who called me collect
from California to say she had found a spelling mistake on page forty-seven and
warned me she would ring again if she discovered another. However, this particular
lady might have ended her transatlantic congratulations with nothing more than
goodbye if she had not dropped her own name. It was one of those names that can, on
the spur of the moment, always book a table at a chic restaurant or a seat at the opera
which mere mortals like myself would have found impossible to achieve given a
month’s notice. To be fair, it was her husband’s name that had achieved the
reputation, as one of the world’s most distinguished film producers.
“When I’m next in London you must have lunch with me,” came crackling
down the phone.
“No,” said I gallantly, “you must have lunch with me.”
“How perfectly charming you English always are,” she said.
I have often wondered how much American women get away with when they
say those few words to an Englishman. Nevertheless, the wife of an Oscar-winning
producer does not phone one every day.
“I promise to call you when I’m next in London,” she said.
And indeed she did, for almost six months to the day she telephoned again, this
time from the Connaught Hotel to declare how much she was looking forward to our
meeting.
“Where would you like to have lunch?” I said, realising a second too late, when
she replied with the name of one of the most exclusive restaurants in town, that I
should have made sure it was I who choose the venue. I was glad she couldn’t see my
forlorn face as she added with unabashed liberation:

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 “Monday, one o’clock. Leave the booking to me — I’m known there.”
On the day in question I donned my one respectable suit, a new shirt which I
had been saving for a special occasion since Christmas, and the only tie that looked
as if it hadn’t previously been used to hold up my trousers. I then strolled over to my
bank and asked for a statement of my current account. The teller handed me a long
piece of paper unworthy of its amount. I studied the figure as one who has to take a
major financial decision. The bottom line stated in black lettering that I was in credit
to the sum of thirty-seven pounds and sixty-three pence. I wrote out a cheque for
thirty-seven pounds. I feel that a gentleman should always leave his account in credit,
and I might add it was a belief that my bank manager shared with me. I then walked
up to Mayfair for my luncheon date.
As I entered the restaurant I observed too many waiters and plush seats for my
liking. You can’t eat either, but you can be charged for them. At a corner table for two
sat a woman who, although not young, was elegant. She wore a blouse of powder
blue crepe-de-chine, and her blonde hair was rolled away from her face in a style that
reminded me of the war years, and had once again become fashionable. It was clearly
my transatlantic admirer, and she greeted me in the same “I’ve known you all my
life” fashion as she was to do at the Literary Guild cocktail party years later.
Although she had a drink in front of her I didn’t order an aperitif, explaining that I
never drank before lunch — and would like to have added, “but as soon as your
husband makes a film of my novel, I will.”
She launched immediately into the latest Hollywood gossip, not so much
dropping names as reciting them, while I ate my way through the crisps from the
bowl in front of me. A few minutes later a waiter materialised by the table and
presented us with two large embossed leather menus, considerably better bound than
my novel. The place positively reeked of unnecessary expense. I opened the menu
and studied the first chapter with horror; it was eminently putdownable. I had no idea
that simple food obtained from Govern Garden that morning could cost quite so much
by merely being transported to Mayfair. I could have bought her the same dishes for a

88
quarter of the price at my favourite bistro, a mere one hundred yards away, and to add
to my discomfort I observed that it was one of those restaurants where the guest’s
menu made no mention of the prices. I settled down to study the long list of French
dishes which only served to remind me that I hadn’t eaten well for over a month, a
state of affairs that was about to be prolonged by a further day. I remembered my
bank balance and morosely reflected that I would probably have to wait until my
agent sold the Icelandic rights of my novel before I could afford a square meal again.
“What would you like?” I said gallantly.
“I always enjoy a light lunch,” she volunteered. I sighed with premature relief,
only to find that light did not necessarily mean “inexpensive”.
She smiled sweetly up at the waiter, who looked as if he wouldn’t be
wondering where his next meal might be coming from, and ordered just a sliver of
smoked salmon, followed by two tiny tender lamb cutlets. Then she hesitated, but
only for a moment, before adding “and a side salad”.
I studied the menu with some caution, running my finger down the prices, not
the dishes.
“I also eat lightly at lunch” I said mendaciously. “The chefs salad will be quite
enough for me.” The waiter was obviously affronted but left peaceably.
She chatted of Coppola and Preminger, of Al Pacino and Robert Redford, and
of Greta Garbo as if she saw her all the time. She was kind enough to stop for a
moment and ask what I was working on at present, I would like to have replied — on
how I was to explain to my wife that I only have sixty-three pence left in the bank;
whereas I actually discussed my ideas for another novel. She seemed impressed, but
still made no reference to her husband. Should I mention him? No. Mustn’t sound
pushy, or as though I needed the money.
The food arrived, or that is to say her smoked salmon did, I sat silently
watching her eat my bank account while I nibbled a roll. I looked up only to discover
a wine waiter hovering by my side.
“Would you care for some wine?” said I, recklessly.

89
 “No, I don’t think so,” she said. I smiled a little too soon: “Well, perhaps a little
something white and dry.”
The wine waiter handed over a second leather-bound book, this time with
golden grapes embossed on the cover. I searched down the pages for half bottles,
explaining to my guest I never drank at lunch, I chose the cheapest. The wine
waiter reappeared a moment later with a large silver salver full of ice in which the
half bottle looked drowned, and, like me, completely out of its depth. A junior waiter
cleared away the empty plate while another wheeled a large trolley to the side of our
table and served the lamb cutlets and the chefs salad. At the same time a third waiter
made up an exquisite side salad for my guest which ended up bigger than my
complete order. I didn’t feel I could ask her to swap.
To be fair, the chef’s salad was super — although I confess it was hard to
appreciate such food fully while trying to work out a plot that would be convincing if
I found the bill came to over thirty-seven pounds.
“How silly of me to ask for white wine with lamb,” she said, having nearly
finished the half bottle, ordered a half bottle of the house red without calling for the
wine list. She finished the white wine and then launched into the theatre, music and
other authors. All those who were still alive she seemed to know and those who were
dead she hadn’t read. I might have enjoyed the performance if it hadn’t been for the
fear of wondering if I would be able to afford it when the curtain came down. When
the waiter cleared away the empty dishes he asked my guest if she would care for
anything else.
“No, thank you,” she said — I nearly applauded. “Unless you have one of your
famous apple surprises.”
“I fear the last one may have gone, madam, but I’ll go and see.” Don’t hurry, I
wanted to say, but instead I just smiled as the rope tightened around my neck. A few
moments later the waiter strode back in triumph weaving between the tables holding
the apple surprise, in the palm of his hand, high above his head. I prayed to Newton
that the apple would obey his law. It didn’t.

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 “The last one, madam.”
“Oh, what luck,” she declared.
“Oh, what luck,” I repeated, unable to face the menu and discover the price. I
was now attempting some mental arithmetic as I realised it was going to be a close
run thing.
“Anything else, madam?” the ingratiating waiter inquired.
I took a deep breath.
“Just coffee,” she said.
“And for you, Sir?”
“No, no, not for me.” He left us. I couldn’t think of an explanation for why I
didn’t drink coffee.
She then produced from the large Gucci bag by her side a copy of my novel,
which I signed with a flourish, hoping the head waiter would see me and feel I was
the sort of man who should be allowed to sign the bill as well, but he resolutely
remained at the far end of the room while I wrote the words “An unforgettable
meeting” and appended my signature.
While the dear lady was drinking her coffee I picked at another roll and called
for the bill, not because I was in any particular hurry, but like a guilty defendant at
the Old Bailey I preferred to wait no longer for the judge’s sentence. A man in a
smart green uniform, whom I had never seen before, appeared carrying a silver
tray with a of paper on it not unlike my bank statement. I pushed back the edge of
the check slowly and read the figure: thirty-six pounds and forty pence. I casually
put my hand into my inside pocket and withdrew my life’s possessions and then
placed the crisp new notes on the silver tray. They were whisked away. The man
in the green uniform returned a few moments later with my sixty pence change,
which I pocketed as it was the only way I was going to get a bus home. The waiter
me a look that would: have undoubtedly won him a character part in any film
produced by the lady’s distinguished husband.
My guest rose and walked across the restaurant, waving at, and occasionally

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kissing people that I had previously only seen in glossy magazines. When she
reached the door she stopped to retrieve her coat, a mink. I helped her on with the
fur, again failing to leave a tip. As we stood on the Curzon Street pavement, a
dark blue Rolls-Royce drew up beside us and a liveried chauffeur leaped out and
opened the rear door. She climbed in.
“Goodbye, darling,” she said, as the electric window slid down. “Thank you
for such a lovely lunch.”
“Goodbye,” I said, and summoning up my courage added: “I do hope when
you are next in town I shall have the opportunity of meeting your distinguished
husband.”
“Oh, darling, didn’t you know?” she said as she looked out from the Rolls-
Royce.
“Know what?”
“We were divorced ages ago.”
“Divorced!” said I.
“Oh, yes,” she said gaily, “I haven’t spoken to him for years.”
I just stood there looking helpless.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself on my account,” she said. “He’s no loss. In
any case I have recently married again,” — another film producer, I prayed. —
“In fact, I quite expected to bump into my husband today — you see, he owns the
restaurant.”
Without another word the electric window purred up and the Rolls-Royce
glided effortlessly out of sight leaving me to walk to the nearest bus stop. As I
stood surrounded by Literary Guild guests, staring at the white queen with the
cottage loaf bun, I could still see her drifting away in that blue Rolls-Royce. I
tried to concentrate on her words.
“I knew you wouldn’t forget me, darling” she was saying. “After all, I did
take you to lunch, didn’t I?”

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 1. Regard the plot-structure of the story. Which techniques have been
employed to make it complex?
2. Define the forms of presentation. Is description as a form of presentation
essential in the story?
3. Why does the author indulge in great detail while describing the setting
(the interior of the restaurant, some objects and things, the clothes of the
characters, etc.)? What effect does such detailed description produce?
4. Analyze Susan’s speech, manners and behaviour. What sort of person
does she seem to you?
5. What is the central idea of the story?

4.
Gr. Greene
The Case for the Defence

It was the strangest murder trial I ever attended. They named it the Peckham
murder in the headlines, though Northwood Street, where the old woman was found
battered to death, was not strictly speaking in Peckham. This was not one of those
cases of circumstantial evidence in which you feel the jurymen’s anxiety — because
mistakes have been made — like domes of silence muting the court. No, this
murderer was all but found with the body: no one present when the Crown counsel
outlined his case believed that the man in the dock stood any chance at all.
He was a heavy stout man with bulging bloodshot eyes. All his muscles
seemed to be in his thighs. Yes, an ugly customer, one you wouldn’t forget in a hurry
— and that was an important point because the Crown proposed to call four witnesses
who hadn’t forgotten him, who had seen him hurrying away from the little red villa in
Northwood Street. The clock had just struck two in the morning.
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 Mrs. Salmon in 15 Northwood Street had been unable to sleep: she heard a
door click shut and thought it was her own gate. So she went to the window and saw
Adams (that was his name) on the steps of Mrs. Parker’s house. He had just come out
and he was wearing gloves. He had a hammer in his hand and she saw him drop it
into the laurel bushes by the front gate. But before he moved away, he had looked up
— at her window. The fatal instinct that tells a man when he is watched exposed him
in the light of a street-lamp to her gaze — his eyes suffused with horrifying and
brutal fear, like an animal’s when you raise a whip. I talked afterwards to
Mrs. Salmon, who naturally after the astonishing verdict went in fear herself. As I
imagine did all the witnesses — Henry MacDougall, who had been driving home
from Benfleet late and nearly ran Adams down at the corner of Northwood Street.
Adams was walking in the middle of the road looking dazed. And old Mr. Wheeler,
who lived next door to Mrs. Parker, at No. 12, and was wakened by a noise — like a
chair falling — through the thin-as-paper villa wall, and got up and looked out of the
window, just as Mrs. Salmon had done, saw Adams’s back and, as he turned, those
bulging eyes. In Laurel Avenue he had been seen by yet another witnes — his luck
was badly out; he might as well have committed the crime in broad daylight.
“I understand,” counsel said, “that the defence proposes to plead mistaken
identity. Adams’s wife will tell you that he was with her at two in the morning on
February 14, but after you have heard the witnesses for the Crown and examined
carefully the features of the prisoner, I do not think you will be prepared to admit the
possibility of a mistake.”
It was all over, you would have said, but the hanging.
After the formal evidence had been given by the policeman who had found the
body and the surgeon who examined it, Mrs. Salmon was called. She was the ideal
witness, with her slight Scotch accent and her expression of honesty, care and
kindness.
The counsel for the Crown brought the story gently out. She spoke very firmly.
There was no malice in her, and no sense of importance at standing there in the

94
Central Criminal Court with a judge in scarlet hanging on her words and the reporters
writing them down. Yes, she said, and then she had gone downstairs and rung up the
police station.
“And do you see the man here in court?”
She looked straight at the big man in the dock, who stared hard at her with his
pekingese eyes without emotion.
“Yes,” she said, “there he is.”
“You are quite certain?”
She said simply, “I couldn’t be mistaken, sir.”
It was all as easy as that.
“Thank you, Mrs. Salmon.”
Counsel for the defence rose to cross-examine. If you had reported as many
murder trials as I have, you would have known beforehand what line he would take.
And I was right, up to a point.
“Now, Mrs. Salmon, you must remember that a man’s life may depend on your
evidence.”
“I do remember it, sir.”
“Is your eyesight good?”
“I have never had to wear spectacles, sir.”
“You are a woman of fifty-five?”
“Fifty-six, sir.”
“And the man you saw was on the other side of the road?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it was two o’clock in the morning. You must have remarkable eyes,
Mrs. Salmon?”
“No, sir. There was moonlight, and when the man looked up he had the
lamplight on his face.”
“And you have no doubt whatever that the man you saw is the prisoner?”
I couldn’t make out what he was at. He couldn’t have expected any other

95
answer than the one he got.
“None whatever, sir. It isn’t a face one forgets.”
Counsel took a look round the court for a moment. Then he said, “Do you
mind, Mrs. Salmon, examining again the people in court? No, not the prisoner. Stand
up, please, Mr. Adams,” and there at the back of the court with thick stout body and
muscular legs and a pair of bulging eyes, was the exact image of the man in the dock.
He was even dressed the same — tight blue suit and striped tie.
“Now think very carefully, Mrs. Salmon. Can you still swear that the man you
saw drop the hammer in Mrs. Parker’s garden was the prisoner — and not this man,
who is his twin brother?”
Of course she couldn’t. She looked from one to the other and didn’t say a word.
There the big brute sat in the dock with his legs crossed, and there he stood too
at the back of the court and they both stared at Mrs. Salmon. She shook her head.
What we saw then was the end of the case. There wasn’t a witness prepared to
swear that it was the prisoner he’d seen. And the brother? He had his alibi, too; he
was with his wife.
And so the man was acquitted for lack of evidence. But whether — if he did
the murder and not his brother — he was punished or not, I don’t know. That
extraordinary day had an extraordinary end. I followed Mrs. Salmon out of court and
we got wedged in the crowd who were waiting, of course, for the twins. The police
tried to drive the crowd away, but all they could do was keep the road-way clear for
traffic. I learned later that they tried to get the twins to leave by a back way, but they
wouldn’t. One of them — no one knew which — said, “I’ve been acquitted, haven’t
I?” and they walked bang out of the front entrance. Then it happened. I don’t know
how, though I was only six feet away. The crowd moved and somehow one of the
twins got pushed on to the road right in front of a bus.
He gave a squeal like a rabbit and that was all; he was dead, his skull smashed
just as Mrs. Parker’s had been. Divine vengeance? I wish I knew. There was the other
Adams getting on his feet from beside the body and looking straight over at

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Mrs. Salmon. He was crying, but whether he was the murderer or the innocent man
nobody will ever be able to tell. But if you were Mrs. Salmon, could you sleep at
night?

1. Define the forms of presentation within the story. Who is the narrator? What
effect does the chosen point of view produce?
2. Is description as a form of presentation vital in the story? Does the
description of the criminal’s appearance result in characterization? Does the
author create a sympathetic character? Go back to the text and support your
opinion.
3. Dwell on other characters’ actions and decisions. Do you approve of the
defence lawyer’s course of action? Why do you think Mrs. Salmon changed her
evidence?
4. Look through the story and find points in the text which create a sense of
anticipation and maintain suspense.
5. What is the tensest moment of the story? What impression did the accident
produce on the narrator? And on the reader? Why did the author choose such
an ending, in your opinion? How is it connected with the story’s themes and
ideas? Explain.

5.
B. Malamud
My Son the Murderer

He wakes feeling his father is in the hallway, listening. He listens to him sleep
and dream. Listening to him get up and fumble for his pants. He won’t put on his
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shoes. To him not going to the kitchen to eat. Staring with shut eyes in the mirror.
Sitting an hour on the toilet. Flipping the pages of a book he can’t read. To his
anguish, loneliness. The father stands in the hall. The son hears him listen.
My son the stranger, he won’t tell me anything.
I open the door and see my father in the hall. Why are you standing there, why
don’t you go to work?
On account of I took my vacation in the winter instead of the summer like I
usually do.
What the hell for if you spend it in this dark smelly hallway, watching my
every move? Guessing what you can’t see. Why are you always spying on me?
My father goes to the bedroom and after a while sneaks out in the hallway
again, listening.
I hear him sometimes in his room but he don’t talk to me and I don’t know
what’s what. It’s a terrible feeling for a father. Maybe someday he will write me a
letter, My dear father…
My dear son Harry, open up your door. My son the prisoner.
My wife leaves in the morning to stay with my married daughter, who is
expecting her fourth child. The mother cooks and cleans for her and takes care of the
three children. My daughter is having a bad pregnancy, with high blood pressure, and
lays in bed most of the time. This is what the doctor advised her. My wife is gone all
day. She worries something is wrong with Harry. Since he graduated college last
summer he is alone, nervous, in his own thoughts. If you talk to him, half the time he
yells if he answers you. He reads the papers, smokes, he stays in his room. Or once in
a while he goes for a walk in the street.
How was the walk, Harry?
A walk.
My wife advised him to go look for work, and a couple of times he went, but
when he got some kind of an offer he didn’t take the job.
It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s that I feel bad.

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 So why do you feel bad?
I feel what I feel. I feel what is.
Is it your health, sonny? Maybe you ought to go to a doctor?
I asked you not to call me by that name any more. It’s not my health. Whatever
it is I don’t want to talk about it. The work wasn’t the kind I want.
…branches cutting the sunless sky. At the corner of Avenue X, just about
where you can smell Coney Island, he crossed the street and began to walk home. He
pretended not to see his father cross over though he was infuriated. The father crossed
over and followed his son home. When he got to the house he figured Harry was
upstairs already. He was in his room with the door shut. Whatever he did in his room
he was already doing.
Leo took out his small key and opened the mailbox. There were three letters.
He looked to see if one of them was, by any chance, from his son to him. My dear
father, let me explain myself. The reason I act as I do… There was no such letter. One
of the letters was from the Post Office Clerks Benevolent Society, which he slipped
into his coat pocket. The other two letters were for Harry. One was from the draft
board. He brought it up to his son’s room, knocked on the door and waited.
He waited for a while.
To the boy’s grunt he said, There is a draft-board letter here for you. He turned
the knob and entered the room. His son was lying on his bed with his eyes shut.
Leave it on the table.
Do you want me to open it for you, Harry?
No, I don’t want you to open it. Leave it on the table. I know what’s in it.
Did you write them another letter?
That’s my goddamn business.
The father left it on the table.
The other letter to his son he took into the kitchen, shut the door, and boiled up
some water in a pot. He thought he would read it quickly and seal it carefully with a
little paste, then go downstairs and put it back in the mailbox. His wife would take it

99
out with her key when she returned from their daughter’s house and bring it up to
Harry.
The father read the letter. It was a short letter from a girl. The girl said Harry
had borrowed two of her books more than six months ago and since she valued them
highly she would like him to send them back to her. Could he do that as soon as
possible so that she wouldn’t have to write again?
As Leo was reading the girl’s letter Harry came into the kitchen and when he
saw the surprised and guilty look on his father’s face he tore the letter out of his hand.
I ought to murder you the way you spy on me.
Leo turned away, looking out of the small kitchen window into the dark
apartment-house courtyard. His face burned, he felt sick.
Harry read the letter at a glance and tore it up. He then tore up the envelope
marked personal.
If you do this again don’t be surprised if I kill you. I’m sick of you spying on
me.
Harry, you are talking to your father.
He left the house.
Leo went into his room and looked around. He looked in the dresser drawers
and found nothing unusual. On the desk by the window was a paper Harry had
written on. It said: Dear Edith, why don’t you go fuck yourself? If you write me
another letter I’ll murder you.
The father got his hat and coat and left the house. He ran slowly for a while,
running then walking, until he saw Harry on the other side of the street. He followed
him, half a block behind.
He followed Harry to Coney Island Avenue and was in time to see him board a
trolley-bus going to the Island. Leo had to wait for the next one. He thought of taking
a taxi and following the trolley-bus, but no taxi came by. The next bus came by
fifteen minutes later and he took it all the way to the Island. It was February and
Coney Island was wet, cold, and deserted. There were few cars on Surf Avenue and

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few people in the streets. It felt like snow. Leo walked on the boardwalk amid snow
flurries, looking for his son. The gray sunless beaches were empty. The hot-dog
stands, shooting galleries, and bathhouses were shuttered up. The gunmetal ocean,
moving like melted lead, looked freezing. A wind blew in off the water and worked
its way into his clothes so that he shivered as he walked. The wind white-capped the
leaden waves and the slow surf broke on the empty beaches with a quiet roar.
He walked in the blow almost to Sea Gate, searching for his son, and then he
walked back again. On his way toward Brighton Beach he saw a man on the shore
standing in the foaming surf. Leo hurried down the boardwalk stairs and onto the
ribbed-sand beach. The man on the roaring shore was Harry, standing in water to the
tops of his shoes.
Leo ran to his son. Harry, it was a mistake, excuse me, I’m sorry I opened your
letter.
Harry did not move. He stood in the water, his eyes on the swelling leaden
waves.
Harry, I’m frightened. Tell me what’s the matter. My son, have mercy on me.
I’m frightened of the world, Harry thought. It fills me with fright.
He said nothing.
A blast of wind lifted his father’s hat and carried it away over the beach. It
looked as though it were going to be blown into the surf, but then the wind blew it
toward the boardwalk, rolling like a wheel along the wet sand. Leo chased after his
hat. He chased it one way, then another, then toward the water. The wind blew the hat
against his legs and he caught it. By now he was crying. Breathless, he wiped his eyes
with icy fingers and returned to his son at the edge of the water.
He is a lonely man. This is the type he is. He will always be lonely.
My son who made himself into a lonely man.
Harry, what can I say to you? All I can say to you is who says life is easy?
Since when? It wasn’t for me and it isn’t for you. It’s life, that’s the way it is — what

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more can I say? But if a person don’t want to live what can he do if he’s dead?
Nothing. Nothing is nothing, it’s better to live.
Come home, Harry, he said. It’s cold here. You’ll catch a cold with your feet in
the water.
Harry stood motionless in the water and after a while his father left. As he was
leaving, the wind plucked his hat off his head and sent it rolling along the shore.
My father listens in the hallway. He follows me in the street. We meet at the
edge of the water.
He runs after his hat.
My son stands with his feet in the ocean.

1. Define the conflict at the basis of the short story and its main theme.
2. Define the prevailing form of presentation. What types of narration can you
point out?
3. How many narrators does the author employ?
4. Can you differentiate between the instances of interior monologue and the
characters’ dialogue? How do you know they are addressing each other if the
formal marks of dialogue are absent? What is the author’s purpose in resorting
to such specific forms of presentation?
5. What is the effect of multiple narration as compared to the presentation of
events through only one point of view?

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6.
P. Lively
Next Term, We’ll Mash You

Inside the car it was quiet, the noise of the engine even and subdued, the air
just the right temperature, the windows tight-fitting. The boy sat on the back seat, a
box of chocolates, unopened, beside him, and a comic, folded. The trim Sussex
landscape flowed past the windows: cows, white-fenced fields, highly-priced period
houses. The sunlight was glassy, remote as a coloured photograph. The backs of the
two heads in front of him swayed with the motion of the car.
His mother half-turned to speak to him. “Nearly there now, darling.”
The father glanced downwards at his wife’s wrist. “Are we all right for time?”
“Just right. Nearly twelve.”
“I could do with a drink. Hope they lay something on.”
“I’m sure they will. The Wilcoxes say they’re awfully nice people. Not really
the schoolmaster-type at all, Sally says.”
The man said, “He’s an Oxford chap.”
“Is he? You didn’t say.”
“Mmn.”
“Of course, the fees are that much higher than the Seaford place.”
“Fifty quid or so. We’ll have to see.”
The car turned right, between white gates and high, dark, tight-clipped hedges.
The whisper of the road under the tyres changed to the crunch of gravel. The child,
staring sideways, read black lettering on a white board: “St. Edward’s Preparatory
School. Please Drive Slowly”. He shifted on the seat, and the leather sucked at the
bare skin under his knees, stinging.
The mother said, “It’s a lovely place. Those must be the playing-fields. Look,
darling, there are some of the boys.” She clicked open her handbag, and the sun
caught her mirror and flashed in the child’s eyes; the comb went through her hair and

103
he saw the grooves it left, neat as distant ploughing.
“Come on, then, Charles, out you get.”
The building was red brick, early nineteenth century, spreading out long arms
in which windows glittered blackly. Flowers, trapped in neat beds, were alternate red
and white. They went up the steps, the man, the woman, and the child two paces
behind.
The woman, the mother, smoothing down a skirt that would be ridged from
sitting, thought: I like the way they’ve got the maid all done up properly. The little
white apron and all that. She’s foreign, I suppose. Au pair. Very nice. If he comes here
there’ll be Speech Days and that kind of thing. Sally Wilcox says it’s quite dressy —
she got that cream linen coat for coming down here. You can see why it costs a bomb.
Great big grounds and only an hour and a half from London.
They went into a room looking out onto a terrace. Beyond, dappled lawns,
gently shifting trees, black and white cows grazing behind iron railings. Books,
leather chairs, a table with magazines — Country Life, The Field, The Economist.
“Please, if you would wait here. The Headmaster won’t be long.”
Alone, they sat, inspected. “I like the atmosphere, don’t you, John?”
“Very pleasant, yes.” Four hundred a term, near enough. You can tell it’s a cut
above the Seaford place, though, or the one at St. Albans, Bob Wilcox says quite a
few City people send their boys here. One or two of the merchant bankers, those kind
of people. It’s the sort of contact that would do no harm at all. You meet someone, get
talking at a cricket match or what have you… Not at all a bad thing.
“All right, Charles? You didn’t get sick in the car, did you?”
The child had black hair, slicked down smooth to his head. His ears, too large,
jutted out, transparent in the light from the window, laced with tiny, delicate veins.
His clothes had the shine and crease of newness. He looked at the books, the dark
brown pictures, his parents, said nothing.
“Come here, let me tidy your hair.”
The door opened. The child hesitated, stood up, sat, then rose again with his

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father.
“Mr. and Mrs. Manders? How very nice to meet you — I’m Margaret Spokes,
and will you please forgive my husband who is tied up with some wretch who broke
the cricket pavilion window and will be just a few more minutes. We try to be
organised but a schoolmaster’s day is always just that bit unpredictable. Do please sit
down and what will you have to revive you after that beastly drive? You live in
Finchley, is that right?”
“Hampstead, really,” said the mother. “Sherry would be lovely.” She worked
over the headmaster’s wife from shoes to hairstyle, pricing and assessing. Shoes old
but expensive — Russell and Bromley. Good skirt. Blouse could be Marks and
Sparks — not sure. Real pearls. Super Victorian ring. She’s not gone to any particular
trouble — that’s just what she’d wear anyway. You can be confident, with a voice like
that, of course. Sally Wilcox says she knows all sorts of people.
The headmaster’s wife said, “I don’t know how much you know about us.
Prospectuses don’t tell you a thing, do they? We’ll look round everything in a minute,
when you’ve had a chat with my husband. I gather you’re friends of the Wilcoxes, by
the way. I’m awfully fond of Simon — he’s down for Winchester, of course, but I
expect you know that.”
The mother smiled over her sherry. Oh, I know that all right. Sally Wilcox
doesn’t let you forget that.
“And this is Charles? My dear, we’ve been forgetting all about you! In a
minute I’m going to borrow Charles and take him off to meet some of the boys
because after all you’re choosing a school for him, aren’t you, and not for you, so he
ought to know what he might be letting himself in for and it shows we’ve got nothing
to hide.”
The parents laughed. The father, sherry warming his guts, thought that this was
an amusing woman. Not attractive, of course, a bit homespun, but impressive all the
same. Partly the voice, of course; it takes a bloody expensive education to produce a
voice like that. And other things, of course. Background and all that stuff.

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 “I think I can hear the thud of the Fourth Form coming in from games, which
means my husband is on the way, and then I shall leave you with him while I take
Charles off to the common-room.”
For a moment the three adults centred on the child, looking, judging. The
mother said, “He looks so hideously pale, compared to those boys we saw outside.”
“My dear, that’s London, isn’t it? You just have to get them out, to get some
colour into them. Ah, here’s James. James — Mr. and Mrs. Manders. You remember,
Bob Wilcox was mentioning at Sports Day…”
The headmaster reflected his wife’s style. His clothes were mature rather than
old, his skin well-scrubbed, his shoes clean, his geniality untainted by the least
condescension. He was genuinely sorry to have kept them waiting, but in this
business one lurches from one minor crisis to the next ... And this is Charles? Hello,
there, Charles. His large hand rested for a moment on the child’s head, quite
extinguishing the thin, dark hair. It was as though he had but to clench his fingers to
crush the skull. But he took his hand away and moved the parents to the window, to
observe the mutilated cricket pavilion, with indulgent laughter.
And the child is borne away by the headmaster’s wife. She never touches him
or tells him to come, but simply bears him away like some relentless tide, down
corridors and through swinging glass doors, towing him like a frail craft, not
bothering to look back to see if he is following, confident in the strength of
magnetism, or obedience.
And delivers him to a room where boys are scattered among inky tables and
rungless chairs and sprawled on a mangy carpet. There is a scampering, and a rising,
and a silence falling, as she opens the door.
“Now this is the Lower Third, Charles, who you’d be with if you come to us in
September. Boys, this is Charles Manders, and I want you to tell him all about things
and answer any questions he wants to ask. You can believe about half of what they
say, Charles, and they will tell you the most fearful lies about the food, which is
excellent.”

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 The boys laugh and groan; amiable, exaggerated groans. They must like the
headmaster’s wife: there is licensed repartee. They look at her with bright eyes in
open, eager faces. Someone leaps to hold the door for her, and close it behind her.
She is gone.
The child stands in the centre of the room, and it draws in around him. The
circle of children contracts, faces are only a yard or so from him; strange faces,
looking, assessing.
Asking questions. They help themselves to his name, his age, his school. Over
their heads he sees beyond the window an inaccessible world of shivering trees and
high racing clouds and his voice which has floated like a feather in the dusty
schoolroom air dies altogether and he becomes mute, and he stands in the middle of
them with shoulders humped, staring down at feet: grubby plimsolls and kicked
brown sandals. There is a noise in his ears like rushing water, a torrential din out of
which voices boom, blotting each other out so that he cannot always hear the words.
Do you? they say, and Have you? and What’s your? and the faces, if he looks up,
swing into one another in kaleidoscopic patterns and the floor under his feet is
unsteady, lifting and falling.
And out of the noises comes one voice that is complete, that he can hear. “Next
term, we’ll mash you,” it says. “We always mash new boys.”
And a bell goes, somewhere beyond doors and down corridors, and suddenly
the children are all gone, clattering away and leaving him there with the heaving floor
and the walls that shift and swing, and the headmaster’s wife comes back and tows
him away, and he is with his parents again, and they are getting into the car, and the
high hedges skim past the car windows once more, in the other direction, and the
gravel under the tyres changes to black tarmac.
“Well?”
“I liked it, didn’t you?” The mother adjusted the car around her, closing
windows, shrugging into her seat.
“Very pleasant, really. Nice chap.”

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 “I liked him. Not quite so sure about her.”
“It’s pricey, of course.”
“All the same…”
“Money well spent, though. One way and another.”
“Shall we settle it, then?”
“I think so. I’ll drop him a line.”
The mother pitched her voice a notch higher to speak to the child in the back of
the car. “Would you like to go there, Charles? Like Simon Wilcox. Did you see that
lovely gym, and the swimming-pool? And did the other boys tell you all about it?”
The child does not answer. He looks straight ahead of him, at the road coiling beneath
the bonnet of the car. His face is haggard with anticipation.

1. Which forms of presentation are employed in the short story?

2. Do you regard the narrator of the story as omniscient or limited omniscient?
3. Point out the characters whose course of thinking is exposed to us. Support
your opinion by giving specific references to the text. Through whose
perception are the events filtered?
4. Who seems to you the main character of the story?
5. Why do you think the reader is not given access to the thoughts and frame of
mind of the main character?
6. Define the conflict at the basis of the plot and decide whether it is resolved
by the end of the story. What are the basic themes treated in the story?

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7.
F. J. Hardy
The Returned Soldier

The sign outside the factory read: NO HANDS WANTED. A tall shabby man
stood gazing at the sign. He wore a threadbare overcoat, once black, but faded a dirty
green with the years. There were no buttons on it. He held the coat close around him
with one hand. His other hand was in its pocket. His dirty shirt was collarless. His
grey trousers were grimy and frayed around the cuffs. Incongruously, he wore a pair
of cheap, fairly new sandshoes. He needed a shave, and it seemed, a bath.
He turned and walked slowly away with listless gait, slightly stooped forward
into the cold wind, with an air about him that indicated he had seen such a sign many
times before, and no longer believed it to be fantastic that he wanted work and could
find none.
I told Mary it was no use, he was thinking; no use to look any more. Just to be
satisfied to rot on the dole. Yet she was right; I must find work. To pay the bills, the
rent especially; to get some good tucker and clothes; to get the sewing machine back.
Those reasons are easy to understand, but the main reason is not so easy to
understand. I’m getting down, down... No fight left... no guts... Don’t bother to
wash... shave... nothin’. Gotta get a job or I’m finished.
He walked on aimlessly. He passed many factories which had been forced long
ago to put up signs to halt the streams of job seekers; until at last, he dully noted a
large factory without such a sign. He went in, found the office, and approached
hesitantly.
ENQUIRIES. PLEASE RING. He reached towards the bell, pulled his hand
back as if afraid he might be electrocuted, then pressed it sharply.
The pretty young woman who opened the sliding window, eyed him
distastefully and said: “Yes?”

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 Though he had asked the questions thousands of times in his periodic
excursions looking for work, now he felt tongue-tied.
Finally he blurted out: “A job. Work. Any kinda work.”
She pursed her lips affectedly. “We have no vacancies.”
He hesitated as if to say more, to plead, to ask to see the Manager, but
changing his mind turned slowly and walked away.
Outside, he stood as though undecided in which direction to turn, then crossed
the road and walked down the opposite footpath with tentative strides.
He walked a long way, without looking either to the right or left, passed several
factories with the forbidding signs outside, until he came to another without a sign.
A machine shop! In a man’s own trade with no sign outside. He entered
quickly. Inside the factory, the familiar hum and whirr of the machines was as music
to his ears. He watched a young man turning a motor car piston on a lathe.
He rubbed the tips of his left fingers on his right hand. He straightened his
shoulders. Lathes to be worked and no sign outside! He walked briskly towards the
office, wishing he had put on a collar and tie and spruced himself up a bit. He
brushed his hair with his hands.
The man who came to the enquiry window was kindly looking and grey-
haired. He wore a navy blue suit. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Er, yes. I’m looking for work. This is my trade. Turner and fitter. Good
references. Work any of these lathes.” “I’m sorry. Business is quiet.”
“But you have no sign outside. You must need a good man. Top-line
tradesman. Good references”.
The grey-haired man seemed to waver, as though it pained him to turn men
away. His eyes ran down the shabby figure and up again, then surveyed the lapel of
the old overcoat. “Actually, we only employ returned soldiers.”
“I’m a returned soldier.”
“Er, have you any means of proving that... You see, we get many...”
The shabby man put his right hand into his vest pocket then withdrew it. “Yeh,

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I’ve got proof that I’m a returned soldier, but it means nothin’ now, except on Anzac1
Day...”
“Well, we have no vacancies at the moment, but if you submit proof that you
are a returned digger, I’ll put your name down. Then perhaps later on...”
“Don’t trouble... Don’t trouble...” the shabby man answered. He turned on his
heels and slowly retraced his steps.
Again he trudged aimlessly on, away from the city until he came to a wide
bridge.
He leaned on the side of the bridge, looking into the murky, swirling water. He
looked back the way he had come and saw the dingy houses, the factories, the shops,
the smoke-stained drabness. Then he turned his head and gazed across the river at the
lawns, and the mansions that looked down from the opposite banks, as if in silent
gloating. Apparently struck by a sudden idea he crossed the bridge, and, limping now,
he trudged up the hill and entered a wide concrete street skirted on either side by neat
lawns and beautiful trees.
He stopped in front of the first house, then walked on. At the second big gate
he hesitated, ran his hands down the sides of his overcoat and through his hair, then
entered slowly, surveying the well-kept garden as he walked up the curved, gravel
path.
He walked gingerly over the polished-brick front verandah and rang the door
bell uncertainly.
After a while he rang again, then the door was opened by a well-dressed
woman. She was elderly, but tried unsuccessfully to disguise her age with powder and
paint and a ridiculous hair style.
She started a little when she saw him, and said tartly: “What do you mean
coming to the front door?”
“Er, sorry, madam, I didn’t think... You see, I thought perhaps you wanted a
gardener; just the lawns cut, perhaps. Just an hour or two’s work, or something...”

1
Anzac — Australian and New Zealand Army Corps — military units sent to Europe during World
War I.
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 “We have a professional landscape gardener. In future, learn your place and go
to the tradesmen’s entrance. Not that we want any tramps around here.”
The man’s abject, servile manner changed. His eyes gleamed, his fists
clenched.
Suddenly he threw his overcoat open wide, unbuttoned his vest with savage
fingers, pulled his shirt out of his trousers and, drawing it up, bared his white
stomach.
“See that? See that scar! A bullet went through there and out the other side. I
fought for bitches like you!”
The woman shrank back, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with terror.
She screamed piercingly.
The man turned without waiting to tuck in his shirt, and ran frantically out the
gate down the hill across the bridge.
There he stopped, panting, out of breath. He looked around furtively, tucked in
his shirt and walked back towards the city. He seemed to have stooped lower and his
limp was more marked. His sandshoes were too small for him, his toes were skinned,
his feet blistering.
He walked on for block after block without raising his head, sometimes
bumping into people, until he reached the outskirts of the city, near a public park.
From the lawns nearby he heard animated voices. He looked and saw three
bedraggled men sitting on the lawn; one of them was drinking from a bottle.
“Hello, Collins, ‘ave a drink,” one of them called out, holding up a wine bottle.
He hesitated, crossed the lawn and joined them.
“How are yer, Sam? Don’t mind if I do.”
He took the bottle, wiped the top and gulped a few mouthfuls. He shuddered,
and handed the bottle back. “Thanks.”
The other three men had the ragtail appearance, blotched skin and bleary eyes
of the plonk-drinker. One of them began to tell a story in a croaking voice riddled
with lunacy. They all laughed heartily.

112
 Sam and these other two have the solution, Collins thought. Drink and drown
your troubles, no use to worry and look for work. Sam’s given up lookin’.
“Yup,” the storyteller continued. “One of the gardeners tied me and Jack’s legs
together while we was sleepin’, see? When we woke up I stood up and tried to walk
away and fell over; then Jack stood up and he fell over... They was watchin’ us from
behind the bushes. It was funny all right. I laughed till I thought I’d kill meself.”
Till I thought I’d kill meself, that’s what he said. Collins’ distraught mind
gripped the phrase. Thought I’d kill meself.
He turned and walked away from them without speaking again.
“Thanks for the drink, mate,” one of them called after him in a sarcastic, high-
pitched voice.
But he did not hear. He limped off thinking: Man’s going silly. Thought I’d kill
meself. The plonk-drinker’s words kept ringing in his ears.
As he walked into the city, black clouds came up suddenly and heavy rain
began to fall. He put his hands in his overcoat pockets and drew it around him. The
rain soon soaked through his sandshoes and aggravated his sore feet. He limped on
into the rain. The cheap wine had turned sour in his empty stomach. He felt sick.
What’s the use. How long now? Since thirty-one; three years without more
than a few days’ work at a time. Only the susso and ten bob a week pension. No good
tucker, no good clothes, rent behind — get kicked out — and debts — plenty of ‘em.
The light cut off, sewing machine repossessed. Mary gone scraggy and skinny, and
the kids at school without boots. On the last of the wood... Thought I’d kill meself!
Night fell suddenly, and lights came on shimmering in the rain. Cars swishing
and splashing by, the rain and the cold wind.
He walked, not knowing or caring where he was going, until he found himself
in a city arcade on the corner of a lane.
He turned into the lane and huddled against the wall. Better go home for tea.
He could smell food. Saliva filled his mouth. The back of a cafe somewhere.
Told Mary not to worry if I was late. Would take any work offering, would start right

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away, night shift, anything. He laughed aloud and his laughter echoed down the lane.
The sickly feeling in his stomach vanished and was replaced by gnawing
hunger. He had not eaten since morning, and then only fried bread and dripping with
tea.
The back of a cafe. Here some are getting a feed this way. He walked slowly
up the dark lane. He heard voices. He saw about a dozen men huddled round a
doorway, near two large scrap bins.
Presently, a door opened throwing a beam of light. The other men were even
shabbier than he. They clustered round the man in a white coat who came out and
tipped a tin of scraps into one of the bins without speaking to, or looking at, the
scavengers. The light revealed cabbage leaves, half-eaten pieces of meat, chop bones,
fruit peels, tea leaves — all churned into a disgusting mess.
The assembled men swarmed around the bin, jostling each other, grabbing
handfuls of the scraps from the bin, nearly overturning it in their hungry eagerness.
Collins joined them for a moment; then suddenly pulled himself clear. No! Not this!
Like a dog! Never.
He ran from the lane, and continued his wanderings in the rain.
His stinging feet carried him to a wide bridge. He stood on its side-walk,
thinking. Without looking for traffic he started to cross to the other side. As he
reached the middle of the road, brakes screeched. A truck skidded and swerved, but
by some miracle it missed him. He did not notice it. The truck stopped.
The driver stuck his head out and shouted: “What’s wrong with you? Trying to
commit suicide?”
The shabby man did not hear him. He stepped on to the pavement and leaned
on the side of the bridge, looking over to where he could hear the water lapping
against the huge supporting pillars. He stood thus for several minutes.
Presently he felt in his vest pocket, and drew a small purse from it. He pressed
the clasp, opened the purse and drew out a small object, which he threw with a flick
of his wrist. It glinted in the dull light. It was a small bronze cross, with a ribbon

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attached. There was a plop as it hit the water. He stood motionless looking down into
the river for a while, sighed, then turned and retraced his steps. The rain was falling
in torrents now. He trudged on slowly, limping badly, through the city into a drab
industrial suburb. He was shivering, his feet were squelching, his clothes soaked right
through.
He entered a dark street. A shaft of light coming from a doorway attracted him.
He stopped. It was the entrance to a hall. In the lighted lobby near the door was a
sign: Meeting To-night. The Society Against War.
He squinted close to the sign. The Society against war. Against war.
He entered dubiously, blinking at the light. He saw a man on the platform
addressing the half-filled hall.
Collins sat down in a chair in the back row. He leaned forward only vaguely
hearing the speaker.
“Danger of war. A second world war would be a calamity.”
As the speech continued, the shabby man listened more intently, dwelling on
every word with a puzzled frown.
The speaker concluded:
“We must tell the people of the horrors of war. We must warn them of the
danger of war. We must tell the people that many of the heroes of the war are now
walking the streets, war is not heroic, but insane. Our organisation will hold meetings
everywhere, telling the people the facts.”
The speaker resumed his seat. The chairman stood up.
Suddenly Collins leapt to his feet and shouted:
“Listen, mister!”
The chairman looked in his direction with a startled air. The audience swung
towards the rear of the hall.
Collins stood grasping the back of the chair in front of him tightly.
“Yes?” said the chairman, puzzled.
“Listen, mister,” the shabby man repeated. “Here’s something you can tell the

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people. Tell ‘em a man won the V. C.1, and threw it in the river!”
Voices mumbled and eyes stared incredulously.
“It’s true, I tell yer. I won the Victoria Cross. I can prove it”.
He fumbled in his vest pocket, and took out the little purse and held it up.
“See that. That’s the purse I carried it in for seventeen years. I won the Victoria
Cross and threw it in the river this very night, because there’s no work for heroes. I
been outta work for three years.” His voice rose to a piercing yell, “Tell the people
that a man won the Victoria Cross and he threw it in the river. Tell ‘em that!” A great
sob broke from him. He stumbled from the hall into the cold, rainy night.
Collins walked towards home. His limp was gone. He had straightened up and
walked briskly, head high, arms swinging. He seemed oblivious of the weather, his
cold, blistered feet and the aching emptiness in his stomach.

1. Where and when do the events of the story take place? What are the
indications in the text?
2. Introduce the protagonist of the story (age, occupation, background, marital
status, etc.). Pay attention to the lexis used in the description of his appearance,
clothes, in his speech. What tone does it create?
3. Examine the scenes and the atmosphere at each potential place of
employment. How do the character’s manner, mood, the way he is treated
interact?
4. Dwell on the mood and the atmosphere in the episodes of Collins’
conversation with the drunkards and his meeting homeless people at the back
of a cafй. Since these scenes are not connected with looking for a job, account
for their significance for the story.
5. Define the key of the story. Dwell on the role of weather descriptions: rain,

1
V. C. — Victoria Cross — the highest military award in Great Britain.
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 wind, the sky.
6. When does Collins’ despair seem to reach its maximum? What to your mind
is the climactic point of the story? Support your opinion.
7. Interpret the title and the central idea of the story. Is the theme still relevant
in your opinion?

8.
O. Henry
A Retrieved Reformation

A guard came to the prison shoe-shop, where Jimmy Valentine was assiduously
stitching uppers, and escorted him to the front office. There the warden handed
Jimmy his pardon, which had been signed that morning by the governor. Jimmy took
it in a tired kind of way. He had served nearly ten months of a four-year sentence. He
had expected to stay only about three months, at the longest. When a man with as
many friends on the outside as Jimmy Valentine had is received in the “stir” it is
hardly worth while to cut his hair.
“Now, Valentine,” said the warden, “you’ll go out in the morning. Brace up,
and make a man of yourself. You’re not a bad fellow at heart. Stop cracking safes,
and live straight.”
“Me?” said Jimmy, in surprise. “Why, I never cracked a safe in my life.”
“Oh, no,” laughed the warden. “Of course not. Let’s see, now. How was it you
happened to get sent up on that Springfield job? Was it because you wouldn’t prove
an alibi for fear of compromising somebody in extremely high-toned society? Or was
it simply a case of a mean old jury that had it in for you? It’s always one or the other
with you innocent victims.”
“Me?” said Jimmy, still blankly virtuous. “Why, warden, I never was in

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Springfield in my life!”
“Take him back, Cronin,” smiled the warden, “and fix him up with outgoing
clothes. Unlock him at seven in the morning, and let him come to the bull-pen. Better
think over my advice, Valentine.”
At a quarter past seven on the next morning Jimmy stood in the warden’s outer
office. He had on a suit of the villainously fitting, ready-made clothes and a pair of
the stiff, squeaky shoes that the state furnishes to its discharged compulsory guests.
The clerk handed him a railroad ticket and the five-dollar bill with which the
law expected him to rehabilitate himself into good citizenship and prosperity. The
warden gave him a cigar, and shook hands. Valentine, 9762, was chronicled on the
books “Pardoned by Governor,” and Mr. James Valentine walked out into the
sunshine.
Disregarding the song of the birds, the waving green trees, and the smell of the
flowers, Jimmy headed straight for a restaurant. There he tasted the first sweet joys of
liberty in the shape of a broiled chicken and a bottle of white wine — followed by a
cigar a grade better than the one the warden had given him. From there he proceeded
leisurely to the depot. He tossed a quarter into the hat of a blind man sitting by the
door, and boarded his train. Three hours set him down in a little town near the state
line. He went to the cafe of one Mike Dolan and shook hands with Mike, who was
alone behind the bar.
“Sorry we couldn’t make it sooner, Jimmy, my boy,” said Mike. “But we had
that protest from Springfield to buck against, and the governor nearly balked. Feeling
all right?”
“Fine,” said Jimmy. “Got my key?”
He got his key and went upstairs, unlocking the door of a room at the rear.
Everything was just as he had left it. There on the floor was still Ben Price’s collar-
button that had been torn from that eminent detective’s shirt-band when they had
overpowered Jimmy to arrest him.
Pulling out from the wall a folding-bed, Jimmy slid back a panel in the wall

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and dragged out a dust-covered suit-case. He opened this and gazed fondly at the
finest set of burglar’s tools in the East. It was a complete set, made of specially
tempered steel, the latest designs in drills, punches, braces and bits, jimmies, clamps,
and augers, with two or three novelties invented by Jimmy himself, in which he took
pride. Over nine hundred dollars they had cost him to have made at — , a place where
they make such things for the profession.
In half an hour Jimmy went downstairs and through the cafe. He was now
dressed in tasteful and well-fitting clothes, and carried his dusted and cleaned suit-
case in his hand.
“Got anything on?” asked Mike Dolan, genially.
“Me?” said Jimmy, in a puzzled tone. “I don’t understand. I’m representing the
New York Amalgamated Short Snap Biscuit Cracker and Frazzled Wheat Company.”
This statement delighted Mike to such an extent that Jimmy had to take a
seltzer-and-milk on the spot. He never touched “hard” drinks.
A week after the release of Valentine, 9762, there was a neat job of safe-
burglary done in Richmond, Indiana, with no clue to the author. A scant eight hundred
dollars was all that was secured. Two weeks after that a patented, improved, burglar-
proof safe in Logansport was opened like a cheese to the tune of fifteen hundred
dollars, currency; securities and silver untouched. That began to interest the rogue-
catchers. Then an old-fashioned bank-safe in Jefferson City became active and threw
out of its crater an eruption of bank-notes amounting to five thousand dollars. The
losses were now high enough to bring the matter up into Ben Price’s class of work.
By comparing notes, a remarkable similarity in the methods of the burglaries was
noticed. Ben Price investigated the scenes of the robberies, and was heard to remark:
“That’s Dandy Jim Valentine’s autograph. He’s resumed business. Look at that
combination knob — jerked out as easy as pulling up a radish in wet weather. He’s
got the only clamps that can do it. And look how clean those tumblers were punched
out! Jimmy never has to drill but one hole. Yes, I guess I want Mr. Valentine. He’ll do
his bit next time without any short-time or clemency foolishness.”

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 Ben Price knew Jimmy’s habits. He had learned them while working up the
Springfield case. Long jumps, quick get-aways, no confederates, and a taste for good
society — these ways had helped Mr. Valentine to become noted as a successful
dodger of retribution. It was given out that Ben Price had taken up the trail of the
elusive cracks-man, and other people with burglar-proof safes felt more at ease.
One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his suit-case climbed out of the mail-hack
in Elmore, a little town five miles off the railroad down in the black-jack country of
Arkansas. Jimmy, looking like an athletic young senior just home from college, went
down the board sidewalk toward the hotel.
A young lady crossed the street, passed him at the corner and entered a door
over which was the sign “The Elmore Bank.” Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes,
forgot what he was, and became another man. She lowered her eyes and colored
slightly. Young men of Jimmy’s style and looks were scarce in Elmore.
Jimmy collared a boy that was loafing on the steps of the bank as if he were
one of the stock-holders, and began to ask him questions about the town, feeding him
dimes at intervals. By and by the young lady came out, looking royally unconscious
of the young man with the suit-case, and went her way.
“Isn’t that young lady Miss Polly Simpson?” asked Jimmy, with specious guile.
“Naw,” said the boy. “She’s Annabel Adams. Her pa owns this bank. What’d
you come to Elmore for? Is that a gold watch-chain? I’m going to get a bulldog. Got
any more dimes?”
Jimmy went to the Planters’ Hotel, registered as Ralph D. Spencer, and
engaged a room. He leaned on the desk and declared his platform to the clerk. He
said he had come to Elmore to look for a location to go into business. How was the
shoe business, now, in the town? He had thought of the shoe business. Was there an
opening?
The clerk was impressed by the clothes and manner of Jimmy. He, himself,
was something of a pattern of fashion to the thinly gilded youth of Elmore, but he
now perceived his shortcomings. While trying to figure out Jimmy’s manner of tying

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his four-in-hand he cordially gave information.
Yes, there ought to be a good opening in the shoe line. There wasn’t an
exclusive shoe-store in the place. The dry-goods and general stores handled them.
Business in all lines was fairly good. Hoped Mr. Spencer would decide to locate in
Elmore. He would find it a pleasant town to live in, and the people very sociable.
Mr. Spencer thought he would stop over in the town a few days and look over the
situation. No, the clerk needn’t call the boy. He would carry up his suit-case, himself;
it was rather heavy.
Mr. Ralph Spencer, the phoenix that arose from Jimmy Valentine’s ashes —
ashes left by the flame of a sudden and alterative attack of love — remained in
Elmore, and prospered. He opened a shoe-store and secured a good run of trade.
Socially he was also a success, and made many friends. And he accomplished
the wish of his heart. He met Miss Annabel Adams, and became more and more
captivated by her charms.
At the end of a year the situation of Mr. Ralph Spencer was this: he had won
the respect of the community, his shoe-store was flourishing, and he and Annabel
were engaged to be married in two weeks. Mr. Adams, the typical, plodding, country
banker, approved of Spencer. Annabel’s pride in him almost equalled her affection.
He was as much at home in the family of Mr. Adams and that of Annabel’s married
sister as if he were already a member.
One day Jimmy sat down in his room and wrote this letter, which he mailed to
the safe address of one of his old friends in St. Louis:

DEAR OLD PAL:

I want you to be at Sullivan’s place, in Little Rock, next Wednesday night, at
nine o’clock. I want you to wind up some little matters for me. And, also, I want to
make you a present of my kit of tools. I know you’ll be glad to get them — you
couldn’t duplicate the lot for a thousand dollars. Say, Billy, I’ve quit the old business
— a year ago. I’ve got a nice store. I’m making an honest living, and I’m going to

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marry the finest girl on earth two weeks from now. It’s the only life, Billy — the
straight one. I wouldn’t touch a dollar of another man’s money now for a million.
After I get married I’m going to sell out and go West, where there won’t be so much
danger of having old scores brought up against me. I tell you, Billy, she’s an angel.
She believes in me; and I wouldn’t do another crooked thing for the whole world. Be
sure to be at Sully’s, for I must see you. I’ll bring along the tools with me.
Your old friend, JIMMY.

On the Monday night after Jimmy wrote this letter, Ben Price jogged
unobtrusively into Elmore in a livery buggy. He lounged about town in his quiet way
until he found out what he wanted to know. From the drug-store across the street
from Spencer’s shoe-store he got a good look at Ralph D. Spencer.
“Going to marry the banker’s daughter, are you, Jimmy?” said Ben to himself,
softly. “Well, I don’t know!”
The next morning Jimmy took breakfast at the Adamses. He was going to Little
Rock that day to order his wedding-suit and buy something nice for Annabel. That
would be the first time he had left town since he came to Elmore. It had been more
than a year now since those last professional “jobs,” and he thought he could safely
venture out.
After breakfast quite a family party went down town together — Mr. Adams,
Annabel, Jimmy, and Annabel’s married sister with her two little girls, aged five and
nine. They came by the hotel where Jimmy still boarded, and he ran up to his room
and brought along his suitcase. Then they went on to the bank. There stood Jimmy’s
horse and buggy and Dolph Gibson, who was going to drive him over to the railroad
station.
All went inside the high, carved oak railings into the banking-room — Jimmy
included, for Mr. Adams’s future son-in-law was welcome anywhere. The clerks were
pleased to be greeted by the good-looking, agreeable young man who was going to
marry Miss Annabel. Jimmy set his suit-case down. Annabel, whose heart was

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bubbling with happiness and lively youth, put on Jimmy’s hat and picked up the suit-
case. “Wouldn’t I make a nice drummer?” said Annabel. “My! Ralph, how heavy it is.
Feels like it was full of gold bricks.”
“Lot of nickel-plated shoe-horns in there,” said Jimmy, coolly, “that I’m going
to return. Thought I’d save express charges by taking them up. I’m getting awfully
economical.”
The Elmore Bank had just put in a new safe and vault. Mr. Adams was very
proud of it, and insisted on an inspection by every one. The vault was a small one, but
it had a new patented door. It fastened with three solid steel bolts thrown
simultaneously with a single handle, and had a time-lock. Mr. Adams beamingly
explained its workings to Mr. Spencer, who showed a courteous but not too
intelligent interest. The two children, May and Agatha, were delighted by the shining
metal and funny clock and knobs.
While they were thus engaged Ben Price sauntered in and leaned on his elbow,
looking casually inside between the railings. He told the teller that he didn’t want
anything; he was just waiting for a man he knew.
Suddenly there was a scream or two from the women, and a commotion.
Unperceived by the elders, May, the nine-year-old girl, in a spirit of play, had shut
Agatha in the vault. She had then shot the bolts and turned the knob of the
combination as she had seen Mr. Adams do.
The old banker sprang to the handle and tugged at it for a moment. “The door
can’t be opened,” he groaned. “The clock hasn’t been wound nor the combination
set.”
Agatha’s mother screamed again, hysterically.
“Hush!” said Mr. Adams, raising his trembling hand. “All be quiet for a
moment. Agatha!” he called as loudly as he could. “Listen to me.” During the
following silence they could just hear the faint sound of the child wildly shrieking in
the dark vault in a panic of terror.
“My precious darling!” wailed the mother. “She will die of fright! Open the

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door! Oh, break it open! Can’t you men do something?”
“There isn’t a man nearer than Little Rock who can open that door,” said Mr.
Adams, in a shaky voice. “My God! Spencer, what shall we do? That child — she
can’t stand it long in there. There isn’t enough air, and, besides, she’ll go into
convulsions from fright.”
Agatha’s mother, frantic now, beat the door of the vault with her hands.
Somebody wildly suggested dynamite. Annabel turned to Jimmy, her large eyes full
of anguish, but not yet despairing. To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the
powers of the man she worships.
“Can’t you do something, Ralph — try, won’t you?”
He looked at her with a queer, soft smile on his lips and in his keen eyes.
“Annabel,” he said, “give me that rose you are wearing, will you?”
Hardly believing that she heard him aright, she unpinned the bud from the
bosom of her dress, and placed it in his hand. Jimmy stuffed it into his vest-pocket,
threw off his coat and pulled up his shirt-sleeves. With that act Ralph D. Spencer
passed away and Jimmy Valentine took his place.
“Get way from the door, all of you,” he commanded, shortly.
He set his suit-case on the table, and opened it out flat. From that time on he
seemed to be unconscious of the presence of any one else. He laid out the shining,
queer implements swiftly and orderly, whistling softly to himself as he always did
when at work. In a deep silence and immovable, the others watched him as if under a
spell.
In a minute Jimmy’s pet drill was biting smoothly into the steel door. In ten
minutes — breaking his own burglarious record — he threw back the bolts and
opened the door.
Agatha, almost collapsed, but safe, was gathered into her mother’s arms.
Jimmy Valentine put on his coat, and walked outside the railings toward the
front door. As he went he thought he heard a far-away voice that he once knew call
“Ralph!” But he never hesitated.

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 At the door a big man stood somewhat in his way.
“Hello, Ben!” said Jimmy, still with his strange smile. “Got around at last, have
you? Well, let’s go. I don’t know that it makes much difference, now.”
And then Ben Price acted rather strangely.
“Guess you’re mistaken, Mr. Spencer,” he said. “Don’t believe I recognize you.
Your buggy’s waiting for you, ain’t it?” And Ben Price turned and strolled down the
street.

1. Think of the genre definition for the short story. Point out the story types
whose characteristic features it combines.
2. Outline the main hero’s background and character. What sort of person does
he seem to you in the beginning of the story?
3. Regard the plot-structure of the story. What starts the events of the story
moving? What is the turning point? Does the story have a resolution?
4. How do you label the pattern of narration employed by the author? .
What form does the ending take?
5. What is the central idea of the story?

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9.
Saki
The Open Window

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young
lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”
Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which should duly
flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come.
Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of
total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed
to be undergoing.
“I know how it will be,” his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate
to this rural retreat; “you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul,
and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of
introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember,
were quite nice.”
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was
presenting one of the letters of introduction, came into the nice division.
“Do you know many of the people round here?” asked the niece, when she
judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.
“Hardly a soul,” said Framton. “My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you
know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the
people here.” He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
“Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the self-
possessed young lady.
“Only her name and address,” admitted the caller. He was wondering whether
Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about
the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

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 “Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child; “that would
be since your sister’s time.”
“Her tragedy?” asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies
seemed out of place.
“You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon,” said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a
lawn.
“It is quite warm for the time of the year,” said Framton; “but has that window
got anything to do with the tragedy?”
“Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two
young brothers went off for their day’s shooting. They never came back. In crossing
the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a
treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places
that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were
never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it.” Here the child’s voice lost its self-
possessed note and became falteringly human. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will
come back some day, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and
walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open
every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they
went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her
youngest brother, singing, “Bertie, why do you bound?” as he always did to tease her,
because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet
evenings like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that
window — “
She broke off with a little shudder, it was a relief to Framton when the aunt
bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her
appearance.
“I hope Vera has been amusing you?” she said.
“She has been very interesting,” said Framton.

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 “I hope you don’t mind the open window,” said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; “my
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in
this way. They’ve been out for snipe in the marshes to-day, so they’ll make a fine
mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk, isn’t it?”
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the
prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a
desperate but only partially successful effort to run the talk on to a less ghastly topic;
he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention,
and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn
beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit
on this tragic anniversary.
“The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,”
announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total
strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments
and infirmities, their cause and cure. “On the matter of diet they are not so much in
agreement,” he continued.
“No?” said Mrs. Sappleton in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last
moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention — but not to what
Framton was saying.
“Here they are at last!” she cried. “Just in time for tea, and don’t they look as if
they were muddy up to the eyes!”
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to
convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open
window with dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton
swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards
the window; they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally
burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close

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at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice
chanted out of the dusk: “I said, Bertie, why do you bound?”
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall-door, the gravel-drive, and
the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along
the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
“Here we are, my dear,” said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in
through the window; “fairly muddy, but most of it’s dry. Who was that who bolted
out as we came up?”
“A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton; “could only
talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when
you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost.”
“I expect it was the spaniel,” said the niece calmly; “he told me he had a horror
of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges
by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the
creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make any one
lose their nerve.”
Romance at short notice was her speciality.

1. Define the genre of the short story. Regard the Gothic setting. Which details
make it suitable for a ghost-story?
2. Which pattern does the plot structure of the story take?
3. What tone is established in the story? Give your reasoning. At what point did
you start to guess that Vera’s story was the fruit of her imagination?
4. Analyze Vera’s behaviour and manner of speech. Do you find her
imaginative and inventive or cruel and thoughtless? Explain.
5. What sort of person does Mr. Framton seem to be? How is his personality
disclosed? Is he sympathetic to you?
6. What is the author’s purpose in creating the story?
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10.
A. Maley
Gossip

Fred Battersby had a fine collection of married women, and he tried to treat
them equally. No favourites. He usually called round on them once a week, staying
perhaps for an hour, trying to pay exactly the same amount of attention to each one.
He still remembered the day one of them, Audrey Ball, had stopped him in the
street and said: “I hear you’ve been to see Ann twice this week, and you haven’t been
to see me once!” Of course she tried to make it sound like a joke, but Fred’s sensitive
antennae picked up the undertones of jealousy. After that, he was always careful to
share himself out, as it were.
So it was that Fred had his regular round, calling in turn on Audrey and Ann
and Judy and Carol and — but it is unnecessary to list them all: the point is that they
were all very fond of Fred, and always very pleased to see him.
“Hello, Fred! Come in! I’ve just put the kettle on. Would you like a cup of
tea?” said one.
“Ah, Fred, I’m so glad to see you. I wonder if you’d give me a hand to move
this settee?” said another.
“Good morning, Fred. Sorry if I’m not very cheerful, but I’m worried about my
youngest: she’s got a terrible cough,” said a third.
“Hello, Fred. How are you? I’m a bit fed up myself. To tell you the truth,
Richard and I have had another row,” confided a fourth.
And so it went, Fred was like a counsellor to them. He was a friend, an adviser,
a doctor, a priest and a handyman all rolled into one. And Fred loved it. Firstly, he
loved it because he was good at it. Fred lived alone, his wife having died a year or
two before. He was still no more than middle-aged, a tallish, not handsome but with a
pleasant open face that seemed to encourage people to confide in him. He was good
at it because he was one of those rare men who actually like women. Of course, most

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men will tell you, and themselves, that they like women, but the fact is that most men
feel more relaxed and comfortable in the company of other men. They need women,
certainly, as lovers and mothers and housekeepers and admirers, but on the whole
they do not actually like them — probably because they do not really understand
them.
This is where Fred was different. He enjoyed the company of women, and he
understood them. He knew what it was like for married women to look after houses
and husbands and children, serving up perhaps twenty meals a week, nursing the
family through its problems and illnesses, listening patiently while husbands
complained about the boss or the terrible time they had had at work that day. And all
the time, these same women were trying to stay attractive and lively. Fred understood
all this, and did his best to be a good friend to his married ladies.
“Here you are, Ann. I’ve brought you some tomatoes from my greenhouse.
They’ll put the colour back in your cheeks!”
“Audrey, you’ve had your hair done. It really suits you!”
“Hello, Judy. You’re looking a bit tired. Are you sure you’re not overdoing
things a bit?”
“That’s a pretty dress, Carol. What? You made it yourself? I wish I had a talent
like that.”
He listened to their problems, took an interest in their children, complimented
them on their appearance, tried to make them feel important. He even flirted with
them sometimes in a light-hearted way that amused them but never offended them. In
short, he did all those things that husbands should do, but often forget to do because
they are too busy and too wrapped up in themselves.
So, Ann and Audrey and Carol and the rest appreciated Fred when he came
round each week to collect the insurance premiums. They looked forward to a
friendly chat, a helping hand when they needed one, or simply a break from the
boring routine of housework. But Hadley is a small village, and tongues began to
wag. The sight of Fred’s old bike propped up against Ann Fletcher’s front wall or

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against the side of Carol Turner’s house for an hour or more, when everyone knew he
only needed to be there two minutes, started the gossip among the older village
women.
“I always said he was no good.”
“I think it’s a disgrace. She’s a married woman with two small children!”
“Her poor husband: he doesn’t even suspect what’s going on!”
“That Ann Fletcher. Personally, I think she leads him on, you know, actually
encourages him!”
The worst of these gossips was undoubtedly old Mrs. Somersham. Her
husband was not only the manager of the local bank, but also chairman of the Parish
Council. She told him about her suspicions, but in that indirect way which makes
gossip seem more like concern for the welfare of others. Mr. Somersham took no
notice at first, but then began to wonder. He heard one or two comments from other
sources and eventually began to believe the stories about Fred. He thought for a
while, and decided to have a quiet word with one of the husbands. As is always the
way with these things, it was not long before the other husbands were made aware of
the gossip about their wives and the unspeakable Fred Battersby. Well, these men had
their pride, so naturally they were sure that their wives were as innocent as angels.
But it was clear that these innocent angels were in danger from a widower with a
roving eye and the morals of a stray dog. So the husbands of Carol Turner and Ann
Fletcher and the rest began to get jealous or angry or sulky, and they began to say
unkind things or to drop hints about Fred Battersby in the offhand way that people
have when they don’t want to look foolish but still want to have their way.
Eventually, the smell of scandal reached too many noses, and something had to
happen. Tired of Mrs. Somersham’s references to the subject, Mr. Somersham
decided to have another quiet word, this time with his old friend, Porter, who
happened to be the managing director of the insurance company that Fred worked for.
Just a quiet word was enough. Fred lost his job shortly afterwards. He could feel the
cold atmosphere around him and, before long, packed his things and moved to

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another village several miles away. Mrs. Somersham clucked with satisfaction, old
Somersham breathed a sigh of relief, the offended husbands relaxed, and peace
settled once more over Hadley.
For a time, that is. But then, the strangest things began to happen to Fred’s
married ladies. Not long after Fred’s departure, Ann Fletcher had an affair (a real,
serious love affair) with an estate agent from Stamford. Then, a month or two later,
Audrey Ball just got up one day and walked out on her husband.
At about the same time, a rumour started going round that Carol Turner was
getting a divorce. And by now, even the local postman was aware that Judy Smith
was no longer sleeping in the same bed as her husband. At least, these were the kinds
of rumours that reached even Fred Battersby, living in his little caravan in another
village some miles away. Not that he took any notice of such stories: Fred’s the sort
of man who has always refused to listen to gossip.

1. In what way was the main character helpful to his married ladies? What was
it that they missed? Why could not the husbands give their wives what Fred
gave them, in your opinion?
2. Why do you think the local authorities decided to interfere into the matter?
3. How can you account for the fact that soon after Fred’s disappearance the
women’s families started to break? Who is to blame?
4. What is absolutely essential for keeping a family together from the author’s
view-point? What is important in man-woman relationship?
5. Identify the central themes of the short story. Do you share the author’s
position as to the problems touched upon?

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11.
B. Brown
The Star Ducks

Ward Rafferty’s long, sensitive newshawk’s nose alerted him for a hoax as
soon as he saw the old Alsop place. There was no crowd of curious farmers standing
around, no ambulance.
Rafferty left The Times press car under a walnut tree in the drive and stood for
a moment noting every detail with the efficiency that made him The Times’ top
reporter. The old Alsop house was brown, weathered, two-storey with cream-coloured
filigree around the windows and a lawn that had grown up to weeds. Out in back
were the barn and chicken houses and fences that were propped up with boards and
pieces of pipe. The front gate was hinging by one hinge but it could be opened by
lifting it. Rafferty went in and climbed the steps, careful for loose boards.
Mr. Alsop came out on the porch to meet him. “Howdy do,” he said.
Rafferty pushed his hat back on his head the way he always did before he said:
“I’m Rafferty of The Times.” Most people knew his by-line and he liked to watch
their faces when he said it.
“Rafferty?” Mr. Alsop said, and Rafferty knew he wasn’t a Times reader.
“I’m a reporter,” Rafferty said. “Somebody phoned in and said an airplane
cracked up around here.”
Mr. Alsop looked thoughtful and shook his head slowly.
“No,” he said.
Rafferty saw right away that Alsop was a slow thinker so he gave him time,
mentally pegging him a taciturn Yankee. Mr. Alsop answered again,
“Noooooooooooo.”
The screen door squeaked and Mrs. Alsop came out. Since Mr. Alsop was still
thinking, Rafferty repeated the information for Mrs. Alsop, thinking she looked a
little brighter than her husband. But Mrs. Alsop shook her head and said,

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“Nooooooooooo,” in exactly the same tone Mr. Alsop had used.
Rafferty turned around with his hand on the porch railing ready to go down the
steps.
“I guess it was a phony tip,” he said. “We get lots of them. Somebody said an
airplane came down in your field this morning, straight down trailing fire.”
Mrs. Alsop’s face lighted up. “Ohhhhhhhhhh!” she said. “Yes, it did but it
wasn’t wrecked. Besides, it isn’t really an airplane. That is, it doesn’t have wings on
it.”
Rafferty stopped with his foot in the air over the top step. “I beg your pardon?”
he said. “An airplane came down? And it didn’t have wings?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Alsop said. “It’s out there in the barn now. It belongs to some folks
who bend iron with a hammer.”
This, Rafferty thought, begins to smell like news again.
“Oh, a helicopter,” he said.
Mrs. Alsop shok her head. “No, I don’t think it is. It doesn’t have any of those
fans. But you can go out to the barn and have a look. Take him out, Alfred. Tell him
to keep on the walk because it’s muddy.”
“Сome along,” Mr. Alsop said brightly. “I’d like to look the contraption over
again myself.”
Rafferty followed Mr. Alsop around the house on the board walk thinking he’d
been mixed up with some queer people in his work, some crackpots and some
screwballs, some imbeciles and some lunatics, but for sheer dumbness, these Alsops
had them all beat.
“Got a lot of chickens this year,” Mr. Alsop said. “All fine stock. Minorcas.
Sent away for roosters and I’ve built a fine flock. But do you think chickens’ll do
very well up on a star, Mr. Rafferty?”
Rafferty involuntarily looked up at the sky and stepped off the boards into the
mud.
“Up on a what?”

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 “I said up on a star.” Mr. Alsop had reached the barn door and was trying to
shove it open. “Sticks,” he said. Rafferty put his shoulder to it and the door slid.
When it was open a foot, Rafferty looked inside and he knew he had a story.
The object inside looked like a giant plastic balloon only half inflated so that it
was globular on top and its flat bottom rested on the straw-covered floor. It was just
small enough to go through the barn door. Obviously it was somebody’s crackpot
idea of a space ship, Rafferty thought. The headline that flashed across his mind was
“Local Farmer Builds Ship For Moon Voyage”.
“Mr. Alsop,” Rafferty said hopefully, “you didn’t build this thing, did you?”
Mr. Alsop laughed. “Oh, no, I didn’t build it. I wouldn’t know how to build one
of those things. Some friends of ours came in it. Gosh, I wouldn’t even know how to
fly one.”
Rafferty looked at Mr. Alsop narrowly and he saw the man’s face was serious.
“Just who are these friends of yours, Mr. Alsop?” Rafferty asked cautiously.
“Well, it sounds funny,” Mr. Alsop said, “but I don’t rightly know. They don’t
talk so very good. They don’t talk at all. All we can get out of them is that their name
is something about bending iron with a hammer.”
Rafferty had been circling the contraption, gradually drawing closer to it. He
suddenly collided with something he couldn’t see. He said ‘ouch’ and rubbed his
shin.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mr. Rafferty,” Mr. Alsop said, “they got a gadget on it
that won’t let you get near, some kind of a wall you can’t see. That’s to keep boys
away from it.”
“These friends of yours, Mr. Alsop, where are they now?”
“Oh, they’re over at the house,” Mr. Alsop said. “You can see them if you want
to. But I think you’ll find it pretty hard talking to them.”
“Russian?” Rafferty asked.
“Oh, no. I don’t think so. They don’t wear Cossacks.”
“Let’s go,” Rafferty said in a low voice and led the way across the muddy

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barnyard toward the house.
“These folks come here the first time about six years ago,” Mr. Alsop said.
“Wanted some eggs. Thought may be they could raise chickens up where they are.
Took ’em three years to get back. Eggs spoiled. So the folks turned right around and
come back. This time I fixed ’em up a little brooder so they can raise chickens on the
way home.” He suddenly laughed. “I can’t just see that little contraption way out
there in the sky full of chickens.”
Rafferty climbed up on the back porch ahead of Mr. Alsop and went through
the back door into the kitchen. Mr. Alsop stopped him before they went into the living
room.
“Now, Mr. Rafferty, my wife can talk to these people better than I can, so
anything you want to know you better ask her. Her and the lady get along pretty
good.”
“Okay,” Rafferty said. He pushed Mr. Alsop gently through the door into the
living room, thinking he would play along, act naпve.
Mrs. Alsop sat in an armchair close to a circulating heater. Rafferty saw the
visitors sitting side by side on the davenport, he saw them waving their long antennae
delicately, he saw their lavender faces as expressionless as glass, the round eyes that
seemed to be painted on.
Rafferty clutched the door facings and stared.
Mrs. Alsop turned toward him brightly.
“Mr. Rafferty,” she said, “these are the people that came to see us in that
airplane.” Mrs. Alsop raised her finger and both the strangers bent their antennae
down in her direction.
“This is Mr. Rafferty,” Mrs. Alsop said. “He’s a newspaper reporter. He wanted
to see your airplane.”
Rafferty managed to nod and the strangers curled up their antennae and nodded
politely. The woman scratched her side with her left claw.
Something inside Rafferty’s head was saying, you’re a smart boy, Rafferty,

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you’re too smart to be taken in. Somebody’s pulling a whopping, skilful publicity
scheme, somebody’s got you down for a sucker. Either that or you’re crazy or drunk
or dreaming.
Rafferty tried to keep his voice casual.
“What did you say their names are, Mrs. Alsop?”
“Well, we don’t know,” Mrs. Alsop said. “You see they can only make pictures
for you. They point those funny squiggly horns at you and they just think. That makes
you think, too — the same thing they’re thinking. I asked them what their name is
and then I let them think for me. All I saw was a picture of the man hammering some
iron on an anvil. So I guess their name is something like Man-Who-Bends-Iron. May
be it’s kind of like an Indian name.”
Rafferty looked slyly at the people who bent iron and at Mrs. Alsop.
“Do you suppose,” he said innocently, “they would talk to me — or think to
me?”
Mrs. Alsop looked troubled.
“They’d be glad to, Mr. Rafferty. The only thing is, it’s pretty hard at first.
Hard for you, that is.”
“I’ll try it,” Rafferty said. He took out a cigarette and lighted it. He held the
match until it burned his fingers.
“Just throw it in the coal bucket.”
Rafferty threw the match in the coal bucket.
“Ask these things … ah … people where they come from,” he said.
Mrs. Alsop smiled. “That’s a very hard question. I asked them that before but I
didn’t get much of a picture. But I’ll ask them again.”
Mrs. Alsop raised her finger and both horns bent toward her and aimed directly
at her head.
“This young man,” Mrs. Alsop said in a loud voice like she was talking to
someone hard of hearing, “wants to know where you people come from.”
Mr. Alsop nudged Rafferty. “Just hold up your finger when you want your

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answer.”
Rafferty felt like a complete idiot but he held up his finger. The woman whose
husband bends iron bent her antenna down until it focused on Rafferty between the
eyes. He involuntarily braced himself against the door facings. Suddenly his brain felt
as though it were made of rubber and somebody was wringing and twisting and
pounding it all out of shape and moulding it back together again into something new.
The terror of it blinded him. He was flying through space, through a great white void.
Stars and meteors whizzed by and a great star, dazzling with brilliance, white and
sparkling stood there in his mind and then it went out. Rafferty’s mind was released
but he found himself trembling, clutching the door facings. His burning cigarette was
on the floor. Mr. Alsop stooped and picked it up.
“Here’s your cigarette, Mr. Rafferty. Did you get your answer?”
Rafferty was white.
“Mr. Alsop!” he said. “Mrs. Alsop! This is on the level. These creatures are
really from out there in space somewhere!”
Mr. Alsop said: “Sure, they come a long way.”
“Do you know what this means?” Rafferty heard his voice becoming hysterical
and he tried to keep it calm. “Do you know this is the most important thing that has
ever happened in the history of the world? Do you know this is … yes, it is, it’s the
biggest story in the world and it’s happening to me, do you understand?” Rafferty
was yelling. “Where’s your phone?”
“We don’t have a telephone,” Mr. Alsop said. “There’s one down at the filling
station. But these people are going to go in a few minutes. Why don’t you wait and
see them off? Already got their eggs and the brooder and feed on board.”
“No!” Rafferty gasped. “They can’t go in a few minutes! Listen, I’ve got to
phone — I’ve got to get a photographer!”
Mrs. Alsop smiled.
“Well, Mr. Rafferty, we tried to get them to stay for supper but they have to go
at a certain time. They have to catch the tide or something like that.”

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 “It’s the moon,” Mr. Alsop said with authority. “It’s something about the moon
being in the right place.”
The people from space sat there demurely, their claws folded in their laps, their
antennae neatly curled to show they weren’t eavesdropping on other people’s minds.
Rafferty looked frantically around the room for a telephone he knew wasn’t
there. Got to get Joe Pegley at the city desk, Rafferty thought. Joe’ll know what to do.
No, no, Joe would say you’re drunk.
But this is the biggest story in the world, Rafferty’s brain kept saying. It’s the
biggest story in the world and you just stand here.
“Listen, Alsop!” Rafferty yelled. “You got a camera? Any kind of a camera? I
got to have a camera!”
“Oh, sure,” Mr. Alsop said. “I got a fine camera. It’s a box camera but it takes
good pictures. I’ll show you some I took of my chickens.”
“No, no! I don’t want to see your pictures. I want the camera!”
Mr. Alsop went into the parlour and Rafferty could see him fumbling around on
top of the organ.
“Mrs. Alsop!” Rafferty shouted. “I’ve got to ask lots of questions!”
“Ask away,” Mrs. Alsop said cheerily. “They don’t mind.”
But what could you ask people from space? You got their names. You got what
they were here for: eggs. You got where they were from …
Mr. Alsop’s voice came from the parlour.
“Ethel, you seen my camera?”
Mrs. Alsop sighed. “No, I haven’t. You put it away.”
“Only trouble is,” Mr. Alsop said, “haven’t got any film for it.”
Suddenly the people from space turned their antennae toward each other for a
second and apparently coming to a mutual agreement, got up and darted here and
there about the room as quick as fireflies, so fast Rafferty could scarcely see them.
They scuttered out the door and off toward the barn. All Rafferty could think was:
“My God, they’re part bug!”

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 Rafferty rushed out the door, on toward the barn through the mud, screaming at
the creatures to stop. But before he was halfway there the gleaming plastic
contraption slid out of the barn and there was a slight hiss. The thing disappeared into
the low hanging clouds.
All there was left for Rafferty to see was a steaming place in the mud and a
little circle of burnt earth. Rafferty sat down in the mud, a hollow, empty feeling in
his middle, with the knowledge that the greatest story in the world had gone off into
the sky. No pictures, no evidence, no story. He dully went over in his mind the
information he had:
“Mr. and Mrs. Man-Who-Bends-Iron …” It slowly dawned on Rafferty what
that meant. Smith! Man-Who-Bends-Iron on an anvil. Of course that was Smith …
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith visited at the Alfred Alsop place Sunday. They returned to their
home in the system of Alpha Centauri with two crates of hatching eggs.”
Rafferty got to his feet and shook his head. He stood still in the mud and
suddenly his eyes narrowed and you knew that the Rafferty brain was working —
that Rafferty brain that always came up with the story. He bolted for the house and
burst into the back door.
“Alsop!” he yelled. “Did those people pay you for those eggs?”
Mr. Alsop was standing on a chair in front of the china closet, still hunting for
the camera.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “In a way they did.”
“Let me see the money!” Rafferty demanded.
“Oh, not in money,” Mr. Alsop said. “They don’t have any money. But when
they were here six years ago they brought us some eggs of their own in trade.”
“Six years ago!” Rafferty moaned. Then he started. “Eggs! What kind of
eggs?”
Mr. Alsop chuckled a little. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We called them star
ducks. The eggs were star shaped. And you know we set them under a hen and the
star points bothered the old hen something awful.”

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 Mr. Alsop climbed down from the chair.
“Star ducks aren’t much good though. They look something like a little
hippopotamus and something like a swallow. But they got six legs. Only two of them
lived and we ate them for Thanksgiving.”
Rafferty’s brain still worked, grasping for that single fragment of evidence that
would make his city editor — and the world — believe.
Rafferty leaned closer. “Mr. Alsop,” he almost whispered, “you wouldn’t know
where the skeletons of the star ducks are?”
Mr. Alsop looked puzzled. “You mean the bones? We gave the bones to the
dog. That was five years ago. Even the dog’s dead now.”
Rafferty picked up his hat like a man in a daze.
“Thanks, Mr. Alsop,” he said dully. “Thanks.”
Rafferty stood on the porch and put on his hat. He pushed it back on his head.
He stared up into the overcast; he stared until he felt dizzy like he was spiraling off
into the mist.
Mr. Alsop came out, wiping the dust off a box camera with his sleeve.
“Oh, Mr. Rafferty,” he said. “I found the camera.”

1. Define the genre of the short story.

2. Can the reader regard the main characters (the married couple and the
reporter) as foils? Which features of character of the main personages do you
think the author wants to stress by comparing and contrasting them?
3. Does the description of the character’s appearances and manner of speech
contribute to their characterization? In what way?
4. Compare the characters’ reaction and attitude to the most unusual event in
the story. Do they differ? Why? Does this fact illuminate the characters’ world-
outlook?
5. Whose opinion and manner of action would you assume in a similar
situation? Why?
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12.
F. Sargeson
They Gave Her a Rise

When the explosion happened I couldn’t go and see where it was. I’d been
working on the wharves, and a case had dropped on my foot. It put me on crutches
for a fortnight.
I was boarding with Mrs. Bowman down by the waterfront at the time. She was
quite a good sort though a bit keen on the main chance. But I didn’t blame her
because her husband had cleared out, and to make ends meet she took on cleaning
jobs several days a week.
Explosions are like fires, you can’t tell how far off they are. But it was some
explosion. Mrs. Bowman and I were in the kitchen and the crockery rattled, and the
dust came down off the light shade. Sally Bowman was working out at the
ammunition factory. And they said some of the hands had been blown to smithereens.
Mrs. Bowman broke down.
She’s dead, she said, I know she’s dead.
Well, we couldn’t do anything. I went over next door on my crutches and asked
the people if they’d find out about Sally and whistle me. Then I’d break the news to
Mrs. Bowman.
I went back and Mrs. Bowman was worse than ever. She’d been getting dinner
at the time and she sat with her head down on the table among the potato peelings.
Her hair’d come all unput too, and she looked awful. But she wasn’t crying, and you
sort of wished she had’ve been.
She’s dead, she said, I know she’s dead.
She’s not dead, I said.
I know she’s dead.
Bull’s wool, I said, she’s not dead.
Oh God, she said, why did I make her go and work in that factory?

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 I’ll guarantee she’s been lucky.
She’s all I’ve got. And now she’s dead.
If you don’t look out you’ll start believing it, I said.
It was no good. She went on a treat. I asked her if she’d like me to get one of
the neighbours in but she said no.
I don’t want to see nobody no more, she said. Sally’s all I was living for, and
now she’s dead. She was a good girl, she said, she was good to her mother.
Sure, I said. Of course she was good to her mother. So she always will be.
She won’t. She’s dead.
I couldn’t do anything. The worst of it was I had a sort of sick feeling that Sally
had been blown up. She was only seventeen and a nice kid too. And Mrs. Bowman as
good as a widow. It was tough all right.
Then Mrs. Bowman started to pray.
Lord God Jesus, she said, give me back my baby. You know she’s all I’ve got.
Do please Jesus Christ Almighty give me back my baby. Please Jesus just this once.
Darling Jesus I know I done wrong. I shouldn’t ought to have made my Sally go and
work in that factory. It was because of the money. I had to make her go, you know I
did. But oh sweet Jesus if you’ll only give me back my baby just this once I won’t
never do another wrong thing in my life. Without a word of lie I won’t, so help me
God.
She went on like that. It sounded pretty awful to me, that sort of praying,
because Mrs. Bowman was always down on the churches. You wouldn’t have thought
she had a spark of religion in her at all. Still, it was tough. And I felt like nothing on
earth.
The next thing was Sally was brought home in a car, one of those big
limousines too. The joker driving had been going home from golf and he’d
volunteered. He had to help Sally out of the car and up the steps because she was just
a jelly. Her hat was on crooked and she couldn’t stop crying. Of course the
neighbours all came round but I told them to shove off and come back later on.

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 Well, Mrs. Bowman had kidded herself into believing that Sally had been
blown to smithereens. So when Sally walked in she went properly dippy and carried
on about her having come back from the dead. So I slung off at her a bit for being
dippy and banged about cheerful-like getting them a cup of tea. Sally wasn’t hurt at
all, but some of the girls had been killed so naturally she was upset. Anyhow I
slapped her on the back just to show her mother it wasn’t a ghost that had walked in,
then Mrs. Bowman began crying and you could see she felt better. So both of them
sat there and cried until the tea was ready.
I can’t believe my eyes, Mrs. Bowman said, I thought you was dead.
Well, I’m not dead, Sally said.
I thought you was.
I thought I was too. There’s Peg Watson, she’s dead.
What a shame, Mrs. Bowman said.
And Marge Andrews, she’s dead too.
Poor Mrs. Andrews.
Mum it was awful. It was just like the noise of something being torn.
Something big. A wind sort of tore at you too. And then there was a funny smell.
Anyhow you’re not dead. You’ve been spared.
The wind knocked me over. I thought I was dead then.
You’ve been spared.
Yes I know. But what about Peg Watson and Marge Andrews?
Poor Mrs. Andrews, Mrs. Bowman said.
Then Mrs. Bowman roused on to me for putting too much sugar in her tea.
I thought I’d never taste tea again, Sally said, not when I was knocked over I
didn’t.
Have another cup? I said.
Mr. Doran, Mrs. Bowman said, how ever much tea did you put in the teapot?
I made it strong, I said. I thought you’d like it strong.
Anyone would think we was millionaires, Mrs. Bowman said.

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 Sally said she wasn’t ever going back to work in the ammunition factory again.
Why not? Mrs. Bowman asked. You could see she was feeling a lot better and
she spoke quite sharp.
Well I’m not. You never got knocked over by that wind.
I’ve had things to put up with in my life. Yes, I have.
I know you have, mum. But you never got knocked over by a wind like that.
You can’t avoid accidents.
I know you can’t. But what about Peg and Marge?
Isn’t it a shame? Poor Mrs. Andrews. Marge was getting more money than you,
wasn’t she?
Anyhow I’m not going back. So there.
Oh, indeed, young lady, Mrs. Bowman said. So that’s the way you’re going to
talk. Not going back! Will you tell me where our money’s coming from if you’re not?
Huh! You’d sooner see your mother scrubbing floors, wouldn’t you?
Listen mum, Sally said. Listen…
Well, I left them to it. I went over next door to talk to the people, and you could
hear Sally and her mother squabbling from there.
Of course Sally wasn’t off for long. And they gave her a rise.

1. Consider the forms of presentation within the short story. See if the choice of
forms of presentation is connected with that of techniques of characterization.
2. Is it important that the I-narrator functions as a character? What technique of
characterization does this fact allow to employ?
3. Does the author resort to the direct portrayal of the characters?
4. Analyze the main character’s speech and manner of behaviour on hearing the
crucial news. What sort of parent does she make?
5. Can you account for the change in the main character’s decision by the end
of the story?
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13.
M. Spark
You Should Have Seen the Mess

I am now more than glad that I did not pass into the grammar school five years
ago, although it was a disappointment at the time. I was always good at English, but
not so good at the other subjects!!
I am glad that I went to the secondary modern school, because it was only
constructed the year before. Therefore, it was much more hygienic than the grammar
school. The secondary modern was light and airy, and the walls were painted with a
bright, washable gloss. One day, I was sent over to the grammar school, with a note
for one of the teachers, and you should have seen the mess! The corridors were dusty,
and I saw dust on the window ledges, which were chipped. I saw into one of the
classrooms. It was very untidy in there.
I am also glad that I did not go to the grammar school, because of what it does
to one’s habits. This may appear to be a strange remark, at first sight. It is a good
thing to have an education behind you, and I do not believe in ignorance, but I have
had certain experiences, with educated people, since going out into the world.
I am seventeen years of age, and left school two years ago last month. I had my
A certificate for typing, so got my first job, as a junior, in a solicitor’s office. Mum
was pleased at this, and Dad said it was a first-class start, as it was an old-established
firm. I must say that when I went for the interview, I was surprised at the windows,
and the stairs up to the offices were also far from clean. There was a little waiting-
room, where some of the elements were missing from the gas fire, and the carpet on
the floor was worn. However, Mr. Heygate’s office, into which I was shown for the
interview, was better. The furniture was old, but it was polished, and there was a good
carpet, I will say that. The glass of the bookcase was very clean.
I was to start on the Monday, so along I went. They took me to the general
office, where there were two senior shorthand-typists, and a clerk, Mr. Gresham, who

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was far from smart in appearance. You should have seen the mess!! There was no
floor covering whatsoever, and so dusty everywhere. There were shelves all round the
room, with old box files on them. The box files were falling to pieces, and all the old
papers inside them were crumpled. The worst shock of all was the tea-cups. It was
my duty to make tea, mornings and afternoons. Miss Bewlay showed me where
everything was kept. It was kept in an old orange box, and the cups were all cracked.
There were not enough saucers to go round, etc. I will not go into the facilities, but
they were also far from hygienic. After three days, I told Mum, and she was upset,
most of all about the cracked cups. We never keep a cracked cup, but throw it out,
because those cracks can harbour germs. So Mum gave me my own cup to take to the
office.
Then at the end of the week, when I got my salary, Mr. Heygate said, “Well,
Lorna, what are you going to do with your first pay?” I did not like him saying this,
and I nearly passed a comment, but I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “What do you do
in the evenings, Lorna? Do you watch Telly?” I did take this as an insult, because we
call it TV, and his remark made me out to be uneducated. I just stood, and did not
answer, and he looked surprised. Next day, Saturday, I told Mum and Dad about the
facilities, and we decided I should not go back to that job. Also, the desks in the
general office were rickety. Dad was indignant, because Mr. Heygate’s concern was
flourishing, and he had letters after his name.
Everyone admires our flat, because Mum keeps it spotless, and Dad keeps
doing things to it. He has done it up all over and got permission from the Council to
remodernize the kitchen. I well recall the Health Visitor, remarking to Mum, “You
could eat off your floor, Mrs. Merrifield.” It is true that you could eat your lunch off
Mum’s floors, and any hour of the day or night you will find every corner spick and
span.
Next, I was sent by the agency to a publisher’s for an interview, because of
being good at English. One look was enough!! My next interview was a success, and
I am still at Low’s Chemical Co. It is a modern block, with a quarter of an hour rest

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period, morning and afternoon. Mr. Marwood is very smart in appearance. He is well
spoken, although he has not got a university education behind him. There is special
lighting over the desks, and the typewrites are the latest models.
So I am happy at Low’s. But I have met other people, of an educated type, in
the past year, and it has opened my eyes. It so happened that I had to go to the
doctor’s house, to fetch a prescription for my young brother, Trevor, when the
epidemic was on. I rang the bell, and Mrs. Darby came to the door. She was small,
with fair hair, but too long, and a green maternity dress. But she was very nice to me.
I had to wait in their living-room, and you should have seen the state it was in! There
were broken toys on the carpet, and the ash trays were full up. There were
contemporary pictures on the walls, but the furniture was not contemporary, but old-
fashioned, with covers which were past standing up to another wash, I should say. To
cut a long story short, Dr. Darby and Mrs. Darby have always been very kind to me,
and they meant everything for the best. Dr. Darby is also short and fair, and they have
three children, a girl and a boy, and now a baby boy.
When I went that day for the prescription Dr. Darby said to me, “You look
pale, Lorna. It’s the London atmosphere. Come on a picnic with us, in the car, on
Saturday.” After that I went with the Darbys more and more. I liked them, but I did
not like the mess, and it was a surprise. But I also kept in with them for the
opportunity of meeting people, and Mum and Dad were pleased that I had made nice
friends. So I did not say anything about the cracked lino, and the paintwork all
chipped. The children’s clothes were very shabby for a doctor, and she changed them
out of their school clothes when they came from school, into those worn-out
garments. Mum always kept us spotless to go out to play, and I do not like to say it,
but those Darby children frequently looked like the Leary family, which the Council
evicted from our block, as they were far from houseproud.
One day, when I was there, Mavis (as I called Mrs. Darby by then) put her head
out of the window, and shouted to the boy, “John, stop peeing over the cabbages at
once. Pee on the lawn.” I did not know which way to look. Mum would never say a

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word like that from the window, and I know for a fact that Trevor would never pass
water outside, not even bathing in the sea.
I went there usually at the week-ends, but sometimes on week-days, after
supper. They had an idea to make a match for me with a chemist’s assistant, whom
they had taken up too. He was an orphan, and I do not say there was anything wrong
with that. But he was not accustomed to those little extras that I was. He was a good-
looking boy, I will say that. So I went once to a dance, and twice to films with him.
To look at, he was quite clean in appearance. But there was only hot water at the
week-end at his place, and he said that a bath once a week was sufficient. Jim (as I
called Dr. Darby by then) said it was sufficient also, and surprised me. He did not
have much money, and I do not hold that against him. But there was no hurry for me,
and I could wait for a man in a better position, so that I would not miss those little
extras. So he started going out with a girl from the coffee bar, and did not come to the
Darbys very much then.
There were plenty of boys at the office, but I will say this for the Darbys, they
had lots of friends coming and going, and they had interesting conversation, although
sometimes it gave me a surprise, and I did not know where to look. And sometimes
they had people who were very down and out, although there is no need to be. But
most of the guests were different, so it made a comparison with the boys at the office,
who were not so educated in their conversation.
Now it was near the time for Mavis to have her baby, and I was to come in at
the week-end, to keep an eye on the children, while the help had her day off. Mavis
did not go away to have her baby, but would have it at home, in their double bed, as
they did not have twin beds, although he was a doctor. A girl I knew, in our block,
was engaged, but was let down, and even she had her baby in the labour ward. I was
sure the bedroom was not hygienic for having a baby, but I did not mention it.
One day, after the baby boy came along, they took me in the car to the country,
to see Jim’s mother. The baby was put in a carry-cot at the back of the car. He began
to cry, and without a word of a lie, Jim said to him over his shoulder, “Oh shut your

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gob, you little bastard.” I did not know what to do, and Mavis was smoking a
cigarette. Dad would not dream of saying such a thing to Trevor or I. When we
arrived at Jim’s mother’s place, Jim said, “It’s a fourteenth-century cottage, Lorna.” I
could well believe it. It was very cracked and old, and it made one wonder how Jim
could let his old mother live in this tumble-down cottage, as he was so good to
everyone else. So Mavis knocked at the door, and the old lady came. There was not
much anyone could do to the inside. Mavis said, “Isn’t it charming, Lorna?” If that
was a joke, it was going too far. I said to the old Mrs. Darby, “Are you going to be re-
housed?” but she did not understand this, and I explained how you have to apply to
the Council, and keep at them. But it was funny that the Council had not done
something already, when they go round condemning. Then old Mrs. Darby said, “My
dear, I shall be re-housed in the Grave.” I did not know where to look.
There was a carpet hanging on the wall, which I think was there to hide a damp
spot. She had a good TV set, I will say that. But some of the walls were bare brick,
and the facilities were outside, through the garden. The furniture was far from new.

One Saturday afternoon, as I happened to go to the Darbys, they were just

going off to a film and they took me too. It was the Curzon, and afterwards we went
to a flat in Curzon Street. It was a very clean block, I will say that, and there were
good carpets at the entrance. The couple there had contemporary furniture, and they
also spoke about music. It was a nice place, but there was no Welfare Centre to the
flats, where people could go for social intercourse, advice, and guidance. But they
were well-spoken, and I met Willy Morley, who was an artist. Willy sat beside me,
and we had a drink. He was young, dark, with a dark shirt, so one could not see right
away if he was clean. Soon after this, Jim said to me, “Willy wants to paint you,
Lorna. But you’d better ask your Mum.” Mum said it was all right if he was a friend
of the Darbys.
I can honestly say that Willy’s place was the most unhygienic place I have seen
in my life. He said I had an unusual type of beauty, which he must capture. This was

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when we came back to his place from the restaurant. The light was very dim, but I
could see the bed had not been made, and the sheets were far from clean. He said he
must paint me, but I told Mavis I did not like to go back there. “Don’t you like
Willy?” she asked. I could not deny that I liked Willy, in a way. There was something
about him, I will say that. Mavis said, “I hope he hasn’t been making a pass at you,
Lorna.” I said he had not done so, which was almost true, because he did not attempt
to go to the full extent. It was always unhygienic when I went to Willy’s place, and I
told him so once, but he said, “Lorna, you are a joy.” He had a nice way, and he took
me out in his car, which was a good one, but dirty inside, like his place. Jim said one
day, “He has pots of money, Lorna,” and Mavis said, “You might make a man of him,
as he is keen on you.” They always said Willy came from a good family.
But I saw that one could not do anything with him. He would not change his
shirt very often, or get clothes, but he went round like a tramp, lending people money,
as I have seen with my own eyes. His place was in a terrible mess, with the empty
bottles, and laundry in the corner. He gave me several gifts over the period, which I
took as he would have only given them away, but he never tried to go to the full
extent. He never painted my portrait, as he was painting fruit on a table all that time,
and they said his pictures were marvellous, and thought Willy and I were getting
married.
One night, when I went home, I was upset as usual, after Willy’s place. Mum
and Dad had gone to bed, and I looked round our kitchen which is done in primrose
and white. Then I went into the living-room, where Dad had done one wall in a
patterned paper, deep rose and white, and the other walls pale rose, with white
woodwork. The suite is new, and Mum keeps everything beautiful. So it came to me,
all of a sudden, what a fool I was, going with Willy. I agree to equality, but as to me
marrying Willy, as I said to Mavis, when I recall his place, and the good carpet gone
greasy, not to mention the paint oozing out of the tubes, I think it would break my
heart to sink so low.

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 1. Define the forms of presentation and think whether the I-narrator serves as
the author’s mouthpiece in this case.
2. Consider the setting of each episode. Which details arrest the attention of the
main character? Compare the places described in the story with her own place.
3. The events are related through the perception and with the language of the
main character. What are the points of primary importance for her while
speaking of people?
4. Regard the narrator’s view-point of the general problems (education, career,
marriage, friendship, etc.). How does her set of values characterize her?
5. Are you sympathetic with the protagonist? What is the author’s purpose in
creating such an image?

14.
M. Binchey
The Garden Party

Helen looked out the window at the garden next door. It was a mass of colour,
mainly from bushes and small trees. No troublesome flowerbeds that would need
endless weeding, nor were there paths that would have to have their edges trimmed,
or rockeries where one thing might spill and crowd out another. Little brick paths
wound through it and there were paved areas with tubs of plants around the garden
seats; unlike her own garden which badly needed attention.
She had been told that her neighbour was a Mrs. Kennedy, who had two placid
cats and was known to be easy-going. Admittedly Helen had been told this by the
estate agent who would hardly have warned her even if Mrs. Kennedy had been one
of the Brides of Dracula.
Helen had been there for three days and she had not yet seen Mrs. Kennedy.
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The two big cats spent almost all day asleep on the sunny garden seats. They looked
so peaceful, Helen envied them. Dim creatures purring and dozing in the sunshine;
someone to feed them at the end of every evening, birds to watch sleepily from a
distance. How Helen wished that she too could have a life like that instead of
sleepless nights, hours of anxiety, torrents of grief and regret. And now the whole
nightmarish business of facing a new house, a new life, because Harry didn’t love her
any more, because he had found real love with this girl young enough to he his
daughter. The girl who was pregnant with his child.
And Harry was so pleased to be a father. For fourteen years of their marriage
he had told Helen that he wasn’t ready for parenthood yet and that they were so
complete in themselves they didn’t need anyone else in their lives. Now, when she
was thirty-six years old and he was approaching his fortieth birthday, he decided he
would like to be a father. But he told her about the change of heart and direction only
after he said that he was leaving her, and the mother of his child would be a nineteen-
year-old.
Other people survived, but then other people could never have felt so betrayed,
so shocked and so aimless now in life.
Her sisters lived far away in other cities; they were not a family given to
writing or long telephone calls. And her friends? Helen knew only too well how easy
it was to alienate your friends by weeping all night at their kitchen tables. Friends
preferred to think you were coping, or trying to cope. Then they were supportive and
practical and around. Friends could disappear into the woodwork if you cried on their
shoulders as much as you wanted to.
So when Helen told people that she was going to move house, make a fresh
start, everyone seemed pleased. A place with a garden, ideal they all said. Her sisters
wrote and said she would find great consolation in digging the earth and planting and
seeing things grow. Helen read their letters with mute rage.
She spent many hours of her first week in the new house staring aimlessly from
the window and wondering about the unfairness of life. And then when she was least

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expecting it she saw Mrs. Kennedy; much younger than she’d imagined — this
woman barely looked ten years older than herself. She wore a rainbow-coloured skirt
and a white T-shirt. She had a big black straw hat and smiled as she carried a tray of
tea things to one of the two wooden tables in her garden.
Helen watched as she saw her neighbour sit down and stretch and close her
eyes with pleasure in the afternoon sunshine. She was as languid and relaxed as one
of the big sleepy cats.
As she watched, Helen heard the gate creak and two girls came in. One about
sixteen, dark and attractive; one about six, a moppet with blonde curls. They flung
themselves at the woman on the wooden seat.
“You were asleep, Debbie,” the older girl cried. “We’ve finally caught you.
This is what you do all day!”
“Poor Debbie, are you tired?” The six - year – old had climbed on
Mrs. Kennedy’s lap and was hugging her.
Helen felt a wave of self-pity wash over her. She would never know anything
like this. How could life have been so unfair? She wondered for a bit why they called
the woman Debbie, but she could look and listen no longer. She sat down by a box of
untouched china. She didn’t know where she would store it, who would eat from it.
No marvellous children would come and throw their arms around her calling her
Helen.
The afternoon wore on. Helen unpacked one cup and one saucer and one plate.
She couldn’t live the rest of her life like this. But what were the alternatives? Harry
was gone; he was not coming back. She wished she could get the woman next door
out of her mind, but it was like probing a sore tooth.
When she heard a car draw up outside and a younger woman arrived to collect
the girls, Helen was again at the window. The younger woman seemed to have
trouble dragging the children away; there were still so many things to do. The
teenager wanted to inspect the flowerbed, which was her very own, and examine the
lupins. The little girl said she had to feed the cats. Then there was a final hug.

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 “Give our love to Granny,” said the teenager to Mrs. Kennedy.
“Do you still have Granny, aren’t you wonderful, Debbie,” said the younger
woman: the girls’ mother?
“I love Granny coming, we’ll be making gingerbread and fudge tomorrow if
you want to drop in.” Mrs. Kennedy smiled encouragingly.
Immediately the girls said they would come, and Helen saw from her upstairs
window a look of irritation cross the younger woman’s face. She had to know who
they were, these people who were acting out a play in the garden next door. There
was wine unopened in her fridge. Helen wrapped it in tissue paper.
“I’m your new neighbour, Mrs. Kennedy. I saw your friends or family leave
just now so I thought I would come in and introduce myself. I’m Helen…” she began,
and then burst into tears.
She didn’t really remember the next bit, but she was sitting in the garden on the
wooden seat with a cushion at her back. Debbie Kennedy had poured them two
glasses of wine and produced some little bits of cheese and celery. They sat like old
friends in the evening sun. And Debbie seemed to look into the distance at the
sleeping cats as Helen wept the story of Harry and his betrayal. “I can’t go on, it’s no
use pretending.”
“I think you have to pretend one way or another, we all do. But the question is
which way you pretend.” She was very matter of fact.
“How do you mean?” Helen had stopped crying.
“Well, you could go one route and pretend nothing had changed and that you
still thought he was wonderful, remain part of his life and take over the best bits…”
Debbie spoke calmly. “Or you could pretend that he is no longer part of your life and
that you have forgotten him, and eventually, of course, you will. It will take time, but
you will. It just depends which you think would bring you more peace, but both of
them involve pretending.”
“I’ll not forget him. I can’t write it off, start again.” Helen felt the prickling
tickling in her nose, and hoped she wasn’t going to start crying again.

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 “Well then, don’t forget him. Stick to him like a limpet, take over his life. I
did,” Mrs. Kennedy said, pouring them another glass of wine as she explained the
story.
Her husband left her seven years ago for a woman who already had a ten-year-
old daughter. A ready-made family, he called it. He left with a series of cliches:
Debbie was a survivor, she had a good job, she wouldn’t miss him, it would leave her
time and space for the things she really loved. But Debbie had really loved her
husband. She had been shattered as Helen was now. If grief could be measured, hers
had been just as great. But she had decided not to lose him.
She had not been hostile to the woman with the ready-made family. She had
been welcoming. She had offered to baby-sit for them. She had won the mind and
heart of the girl who was now her husband’s stepdaughter, Tina. She had moved to
live near them; she was a presence in their lives. Her ex-husband thought she was a
woman in a million. He sometimes came and talked with her in the garden. He lived
in a place where the garden didn’t flourish.
Debbie Kennedy had decided to make her successor’s weaknesses her own
strengths. Perhaps the new woman — she never spoke her name — was a tigress in
bed; perhaps she was an intellectual giant; perhaps she flattered him more than
Debbie had done. But Debbie still cooked better than she did, Debbie picked up his
children from school and entertained them royally while the new woman was still at
work. Debbie entertained her husband’s mother regularly when the new woman had
no time or inclination to do so. Debbie had arranged deviously that Tina should win
two pedigree kittens in a competition when she knew the new woman was allergic to
cats, and Debbie kept them, on loan, for Tina.
“It sounds like hard work,” Helen said, full of admiration.
“It’s very hard work,” Debbie agreed. “But then I was like you, I didn’t think
the day would come when I could ever live without him.”
“And now you could?”
“Oh yes, indeed I could. Now he actually bores me. Not totally but slightly.

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He’s very predictable. You would know immediately how he will respond. I never
thought the day would come…”
“So, if you’re over him why don’t you bow out? Live your own life?” Helen
wondered.
“I can’t now. I have too many other people that I love and who love me. I have
his mother; she never liked me much during the marriage, but I’m like some kind of
angel compared to the new woman.”
“But surely…”
“No, I can’t abandon her, she never did anyone any harm. She didn’t abandon
me and divorce me, her son did. And I adore the girls. And there are the cats. I only
organised them out of spite, but I love them now. I couldn’t move on somewhere and
abandon them when they had served their purpose.
“And the garden: I realised that the secret was to have the minimum to do, but
to give the children a flowerbed each, and I work on those secretly and feed whatever
they plant, so they think it’s all their own work. It’s a life, Helen, and I had no life the
day he said he was leaving.”
“But he’s not the centre of it?”
“No, not now. He was when I needed it. Every single thing I did, I did from
some kind of vengeance, and it gave me a purpose to my day.”
“I don’t think I could do it. I mean it’s not as if there were a ready-made
family. There’s only a bump and an awful nineteen-year-old, and he doesn’t have a
mother, and the cat thing wouldn’t work.”
“It’s that or get out of his orbit completely. When do you go back to work?”
“Next week.”
“Right, if you like, I’ll ask the girls and Gran to help you unpack tomorrow. It’s
much better with a few people there. We’ll do a great deal in an hour and a half…”
“But I can’t.”
“Of course you can, and then, when you get back to work, have a gardening
party. Invite every one of your colleagues to lunch, say that in return for two hours’

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gardening they’ll have a great picnic. Hire a huge trestle table for the day. I’ll tell you
what to tell them to plant and what to weed.”
“But I haven’t decided, which road to choose; whether to worm my way back
into Harry’s life or not.”
“You’ll still need to unpack and to clear up that messy garden,” Debbie said.
They wouldn’t talk about plans and strategies again. From now on they would not
need to refer to the desperation of the one and the deviousness of the other. As the
curtains went up at the windows, and the china was unpacked on to the shelves and
into the cupboards, and the garden took shape, their lives would go on. Helen would
make friends again. She would start with her colleagues in the bank who would view
her differently after they had seen her as the host of a marvellous gardening party.
Debbie’s surrogate family would never know she had loved them initially as an act of
revenge. It was good to have such solidarity established on a summer evening.

1. What does the story concentrate on? Who are the characters and what
situation they find themselves in?
2. Debbie was also deserted by her husband. What similarities were there
between her situation and Helen’s?
3. Describe the two routes that Debbie offers to Helen as ways out of her
present situation. What other courses of action might deserted wives take?
4. What attitude towards the characters does the author create?
5. Is The Garden Party a good title for this story, so you think? Is it
appropriate, and if so, in what way? What other titles can you suggest?

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15.
T. Pears
Blue

He knew he’d died at three o’clock in the afternoon of Wednesday, July the
27th, 1988, the moment he woke up in the room that he’d come to hate. He hadn’t left
it for two months now, and he was wearily familiar not only with every object — the
thermometer in a glass beside the lamp and the heavy chest of drawers and the dark,
forbidding wardrobe — also with the quality of light and shadow in the room
according to what time of day it was; with the way the room expanded and contracted
as the ceiling joists shrank at night and swelled during the day; and how sound
changed at different times so that in the morning his voice was dulled and barely
reached the door but in the dark the room became an echo chamber, his daughter’s
name, ‘Joan’, rebounding off the walls and returning to him from many different
directions.
He was familiar with all these things but none of them interested him, as he
declined in the starched sheets, propped up against a backrest of awkward, misshapen
pillows that his daughter regularly thumped and plumped up with a ritualised but
desolate enthusiasm, as if doing with them what she wished she could do for her
father. He’d gradually lost his huge rustic appetite until it had become a torment to
swallow even the soups and junkets she prepared in the liquidiser, and he lost weight
with inexorable logic until the robust farmer was a skinny wraith whose ribs were
showing for the first time in fifty years.
The pain moved around his body like a poacher in the night searching for a
vulnerable deer in the pinewoods. It had first attacked him in his heel, reappeared in
his neck, then after a six-month respite erupted from deep cover in his back, to roam
up and down his spine with sporadic, intense malevolence. He knew (and so did
everyone else) that it had to be lung cancer, since he’d smoked forty untipped
cigarettes a day since the age of fifteen; so why the hell didn’t it just eat up his lungs

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and have done with it?
The pain was what had wrecked him. Joseph had always thought he was
impervious to pain and his grandson, Michael, had grown up in awe of his
grandfather’s disdain of both the occasional accident and the regular discomfort that
beset the life of a farmer. When he gashed his hand or banged his head he only
bothered to use his handkerchief if the blood was making too much of a mess of
everything. And when they’d unclogged the field drains the previous February, while
Mike was whimpering like a child from the cold his grandfather thrust his arms into
icy mud as if oblivious of reality.
But this pain was different: it gripped him in its teeth like a primitive dog, and
there was neither escape nor end to its torture. He felt nauseous. He fantasized
heating up a kitchen knife and cutting out whole inflicted chunks of his own flesh,
that that might bring relief — but he couldn’t even reach the stairs. Dr. Buckle
prescribed ever-changing drugs of increasing dosage, until the pain was dulled and so
were all his senses and he found himself withdrawing into a small space where there
was no sense and no sensation, only a vague disgust with the faint remaining
evidence of a world he’d once inhabited with force and command.

Joseph Howard knew he’d died at three o’clock in the afternoon when he woke
from an inconclusive nap and he looked around the room with a sharpness of vision
that made his mind collapse backwards through the years, because he’d refused to
wear spectacles and hadn’t seen the world as clearly as this since his fortieth birthday.
He could read the hands of the alarm clock without holding it three inches in front of
his face, he could make out each stem and petal in the blue floral wallpaper, and the
edges of things were miraculous in their definition, lifting away from each other and
occupying their own precise space instead of merging into a dull stew of objects.
He pricked up his ears and heard a voice outside calling, and although it was
too far away for him to make out the actual words he could recognise, beyond any
doubt, the tone and inflection of his grandson, Mike. And even more remarkably,

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when another man’s voice answered, from even further away, he knew that that was
old Freemantle’s grandson, Tom.
It was then that he realised, too, that the pain had gone. His whole body ached
with something similar to the symptoms of flu, as if his body had been punched in his
sleep; but it was such a contrast to the agony of these last months that he felt on top
of the world. He got out of bed and stood up, and the blood drained from his head and
made him feel faint and dizzy, so he sat back down to get his balance. Yet it was
actually pleasurable to come so close to fainting, woozy and lost. It made him recall
the one time he had ever fainted, as a beansprouting adolescent in the farmyard, the
world suddenly losing its anchorage and drifting deliriously out of control.
Joseph had finished dressing and was trying his shoelaces, with an infant’s
concentration and pleasure, when his daughter came into the room carrying a mug of
weak tea. “Father!” she cried. “What on earth does you think you’re doing?” She
rushed around the side of the bed but he took no notice of her until he’d finished, and
then he sat up and looked her in the eyes and said: “Joan, I feels better and I’m
getting up.” Then his smile disappeared and he studied her face with a scrutiny that
she found unnerving, taking in the crow’s-feet and the puffiness around her eyes and
the small lines at each side of her mouth, and he said: “You’re a good girl, Joan.”
He knew he’d died but he didn’t care. He found his stick behind the door and
went for a walk into the village. He could feel his blood flow thin through his veins
and his left hip no longer troubled him. He passed two or three people on his way to
the shop and they returned his cheerful greeting with manifest surprise and a certain
awkwardness. The shop bell rang and Elsie came through from the kitchen. Her large
owl’s eyes widened behind her thick pebble-specs, and then narrowed. “Does Joan
know you’s out, Joseph?” she demanded suspiciously. “She was only in yere just
now.”
“Don’t worry about me, Elsie,” he replied, “I never felt better. Only I wants
some fags. I’ve not had a smoke in ages.”
Elsie looked away, embarrassed. “I haven’t got none of your sort in, Joseph.

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You’s the only one what smoked that brand.” She reached over to the shelves. “You
could try some of this, they says ‘tis a strong one.”
“I’m not bothered, I’ll take a packet of they,” he smiled. She handed them to
him hurriedly and he felt in his pockets. “Damn it,” he said, “I’ve come out without
any money. You know how much I hates credit, but can I send the lad down later
on?”
“Course you can, bay,” she said without looking at him. “You git on, now.”
As he turned to leave, he said: “I might even bring it myself.”
Dr. Buckle appeared the next day and took the temperature and checked his
pulse and listened to the sounds of his insides through the dangling stethoscope. Then
he declared, in a voice of scientific indifference: “It’s an impressive respite, Joseph.
But you’re still weak. Don’t overdo it.”
He wanted to get straight back out on the farm, but Joan told Mike she’d hold
him responsible if Joseph picked up so much as an ear of corn, so he left his
grandfather behind in the yard. Joseph wandered around the garden and poked about
in the sheds. It was a hot day, the sun rose high in a blue sky and he wiped the sweat
from his neck and forehead. Sparrows swooped in and out of the eaves, a throstle
sang from one of the apple trees, and when he saw a magpie in the first field he knew
without any doubt that he’d see another, and sure enough there it was over by the
hedge.
A ladybird landed on the back of his hand. At first the tiny creature appeared
strange, only for being so distinct in his cleansed vision, but then he observed that its
markings were red dots on a black shell instead of the usual other way round. He
didn’t think he’d ever seen one like that before, but he might well have and never
been struck by it. There must be a name for it, he thought: an inverted ladybird,
perhaps; a topsy-turvy. He lifted his hand and blew, and the tiny insect opened its
wings and flew away.
During the months of his miserable decline Joan had climbed uncomplaining
up the stairs many times a day to make him comfortable, to help him on to the bedpan

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and carry it off to the bathroom, to rub cream into his dry skin, eventually to spoon
food into his mouth. His recovery must have meant a great easing of her burden and
he was frankly glad that she let him occupy himself now without interruption.
Midway through the afternoon he became aware of a curious, pleasing sensation
somewhere inside him and then he realised with surprise what it was: hunger. He
marched into the kitchen.
“You’ll not believe this, girl, but I’ve got myself an appetite all of a sudden.”
She didn’t look at him directly but fussed around in the fridge and said at the same
time: “Sit down, I’ll knock ‘e a sandwich.”
Joseph planted himself at the table and laid his cigarettes and matches on its
grainy surface. He could remember his own father making it, after a huge old beech
tree had come down in an April gale. He could remember the sweet smell of the
shavings as his father sawed and planed in the far shed, and he could remember the
way his father kept nails between his moist lips.
Joan set a plate of sliced-white-bread sandwiches in front of him and
murmured that she was off shopping, as she departed from the room. He watched her
through the window disappear down the lane and then he closed his eyes, the better to
appreciate the texture of mushy bread and coarse ham, and to savour the sharp
distraction of mustard, contradicted by granules of sugar.

That evening after supper Joseph suggested a game of draughts with Mike, and
they played for the first time since Mike was a child and Joseph had taught him, after
the boy’s father had left. They played half a dozen games, all of which Mike spent
hunched over the board uneasily, never once looking up at his grandfather, who won
every game.
That night Joseph slept for eight hours solid, untroubled by the morbid,
drugged dreams of those last months, and he woke fully rested. He lay and listened to
the chickens squawking and to house martins scurrying. He yawned and stretched,
slowly, his knotty old muscles elastic again, and he relished their pleasure.

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 As he got dressed he saw his older grandson, John, who always came home late
and left early, drive off to work in Exeter. Joseph went downstairs. The kitchen was
empty. He heard the tractor ignition and stepped outside; he called but Mike didn’t
turn around, as the tractor coughed and rattled into the lane. He came back in and
called his daughter, but there was no reply, so he made himself a mug of strong tea
and wondered whether there was any secret to making toast. And he assumed there
must be because he burnt it, but he ate it anyway and enjoyed the taste of charcoaled
bread beneath the butter and home-made, thick-rind marmalade. Then he took his cap
and went outside.
He knew he’d died because he felt so light and so at ease. It occurred to him
that that evening he should challenge Mike to an arm-wrestle, and he laughed out
loud at the idea. He tried to look at the sun and it made his eyes water. He walked
through the lower fields. The wheat was high and brittle. He bit some grains and let
the dry nutty flavour linger on his tongue and he wondered who first discovered how
to make flour, and then bread. He entered the pasture where the dairy herd was
grazing and passed among his Friesian cows, patting their flanks. He rolled up his
sleeves and held out his arms, and the braver among them licked his skin for its salt
with their rough wet tongues, though still like all the others eyeing him with dull
expression of fear and reproach. He wondered whether they forgave him for his life’s
labour of exploitation and butchery, and he realised how much he loved this farm,
these animals, this rich and crooked valley.

Joseph walked into the village. As he began climbing Broad Lane he realised
he’d left his walking stick behind, but he also realised that he didn’t need it: he was
striding forward, with his bow legs and his slightly inturned toes; his tendons and
sinews and leathery veins felt invincible, and he wiped the healthy sweat from his
face without pausing. For the first time in he didn’t know how long, he thought of his
wife, whom he once used to walk to Doddiscombleigh to, and then court during long
walks in Haldon Forest, where, while the Second World War raged far away from

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them, they made urgent love in the shadows of the pines on a scratchy bed of cones
and needles, dry twigs crackling as they moved. But he found that, in truth, he was
thinking less of her than of himself — walking, much walking in his life; he could
carry on walking now and he needn’t ever stop, he felt so strong, he felt he could
walk the length of the Teign Valley and back again.
Joseph looked around as he walked, peering over hedges and through gates, but
there wasn’t a soul around. When he got up to the phone box he thought he saw a
child running along the lane in the distance, but he wasn’t sure. He sat down on the
bench at the top of the Brown. The improvised goalposts stood quiet and forlorn. An
absurd television image leapt perfectly remembered out of his memory, of the
majestic black French defender Marius Tresor lunging into a breathtakingly insane
tackle during the 1982 World Cup semi-final.
Joseph felt some tiny drops of rain fall on his hands: he looked up and the sky
was a clear, unblemished blue. He wondered whether they were the prickles of pins
and needles and he lifted his hands and shook them, and ran them down over his face.
The world was silent and empty. He knew he’d died three days earlier at three
o’clock in the afternoon, and he leaned forward with his head in his hands and wept.
When he heard the church bell tolling he wiped his eyes with his damp sweaty
handkerchief, which made his eyes sting, and walked up past the almshouses and then
the village hall where he’d once gone to school, and he walked through the lych-gate
into graveyard. Twenty yards away they were lowering the coffin into the ground and
the Rector read from his Bible but Joseph couldn’t hear him. Then the Rector, still
reading, picked up a handful of soil and threw it into the grave and then he did hear,
faintly, granules scattering across the lid of the coffin.
He knew everyone there: Granny Sims, for twenty years his fellow
churchwarden; Douglas Westcott; old Freemantle and some of his fragmented family;
Martin the retired hedge layer; Elsie and Stuart from the shop.
As to his own family, in front of the various cousins and nieces and nephews,
John held his mother Joan’s arm, while Mike looked like he ought to sit down,

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because he was leaning a little too much of his weary weight against his girlfriend,
whose name Joseph never could remember.

He looked across the graveyard at them and for the first time since his death
Joseph felt a sudden upsurge of anger. It swelled inside him, pure and physical: a rage
of bile, while his heart pumped hot blood through his veins. Volcanic anger. Anger so
strong he thought he might burst.
He closed his eyes, clinched his fists and gritted his teeth. And then he shouted
out: “Why did you not show me this world before, you bastard!” as he lifted his eyes
to the wide blue sky, and felt himself light and rising.

1. Consider the exposition of the short story (the time, the place, the main
characters.)
2. State the forms of presentations employed in the story. What type of
narration does the author resort to?
3. Through whose point of view are the events of the three days of the story
proper related?
4. Will you regard the narrator as reliable or unreliable?
5. Define the genre of the story. Does the personality of the narrator help you to
do it?
6. What is the central idea of the story related through such an unusual point of
view?

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SUPPLEMENT

TEST 1

Consider the information given in Units 1—6 and accomplish the tasks given
below. Check them with the keys.

1. Read the following representative passages and define the story types.

a) Once upon a time there was a Prince. And this Prince’s dad and mom (the King
and Queen) somehow got into their royal heads that no Princess would be good for
their boy unless she could feel a pea through one hundred mattresses. So it should
come as no surprise that the Prince had a very hard time finding a Princess. Every
time he met a nice girl, his mom and dad would pile one hundred mattresses on top a
pea and then invite her to sleep over. When the Princess came down for breakfast, the
Queen would ask, “How did you sleep, dear?” The Princess would politely say,
“Fine, thank you.” And the King would show her the door.

b) My mother arrived at the port of Harwich some time in February, and was
immediately apprehended by the British authorities for having filled up her landing
form with undue accuracy. To the question: Where born? she had answered St
Petersburg. To the question: Where educated? she had answered Leningrad. The
immigration authorities were convinced that she was making light of the
questionnaire, and I feel bound to add with a certain pride that it was only my
presence that saved her from further unpleasantness. This tendency to answer official
questions too literally seems to run in the family, perhaps owing to the many frontiers
we all have crossed since such encumbrances were invented. (Peter Ustinov, Dear
Me)

c) Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to
sleep at all the first night after parting from John Willoughby. She was awake the
whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with an headache, was
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unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment. When breakfast was over, she
walked out by herself, and wandered along their favourite walks, indulging the
recollection of past enjoyment and crying over the present reverse. The evening
passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling. Marianne played over every song that
she had been used to play to Willoughby, every air in which their voices had been
oftenest joined, and sat at the instrument gazing on every line of music that he had
written out for her, till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be gained;
and this nourishment of grief was every day applied. She spent whole hours at the
piano alternatively singing and crying, her voice often totally suspended by her tears.
In books, too, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present
was certain of giving. She read nothing but what they had been used to read together.
(Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility)

d) Soon, other men began to come into the house. First a doctor, then two
detectives, one of whom she knew by name. Later, a police photographer
arrived and took pictures, and a man who knew about fingerprints. There was a
great deal of whispering and muttering beside the corpse, and the detectives
kept asking her a lot of questions. She told her story again, right from the
beginning, when Patrick had come in, and she was sewing, and he was so tired
that he hadn’t wanted to go out for supper. She told how she’d put the meat in
the oven and slipped out to the grocer for vegetables, and come back to find
him lying on the floor. “Which grocer?” one of the
detectives asked. She told him, and he turned and whispered something to the
other detective who immediately went outside into the street. In fifteen minutes
he was back with a page of notes, and there was more whispering, and through
her sobbing she heard a few of the whispered phrases — “…acted quite
normal…very cheerful…wanted to give him a good supper…peas…cheese…
impossible that she…” (Roald Dahl, A Lamb to the Slaughter)
e) “It is absurd asking me to behave myself,” the ghost answered, looking in
astonishment at the pretty little girl who had ventured to address him, “quite
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 absurd. I must rattle my chains, and groan through keyholes, and walk about at
night, if that is what you mean. It is my only reason for existence.”
“It is no reason at all for existing, and you know you have been very wicked.
You killed your wife, and it is very wrong to kill any one.”
“Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics! My wife was very plain, never
had my ruffs properly starched, and knew nothing about cookery! However, it is no
matter now, for it is all over; and I don’t think it was very nice of her brothers to
starve me to death, though I did kill her.”
“Starve you to death? Oh, Mr. Ghost, I mean Sir Simon, are you hungry? I
have a sandwich in my case. Would you like it?”
“No, thank you, I never eat anything now; but it is very kind of you all the
same.”(Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost)

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f) My name is Joe. That is what my collegue, Milton Davidson, calls me. He is a
programmer and I am a computer. I am part of the Multivac-complex and am
connected with other parts all over the world. I know everything. Almost everything.
I am Milton’s private computer. His Joe. He understands more about computers
than anyone in the world, and I am his experimental model. He has made me speak
better than any other computer can. (Isaac Asimov, True Love)

g) One can ready oneself for death. I see death as more of a dynamic than a static
event. The actual physical manifestation of the absence of life is simply the ultimate
step of a process that leads inevitably to that stage. In the interim, before the absolute
end, one can do much to make life as meaningful as possible. What would have
devastated me was to discover that I had infected my wife, Jeanne, and my daughter,
Camera. I do not think it would have made any difference, on this score, whether I
had contracted AIDS “innocently” from a blood transfusion or in one of the ways that
most of society disapproves of, such as homosexual contacts or drug addiction. The
overwhelming sense of guilt and shame would be the same in either case, if I had
infected another human being. (Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace)

2. (A) Matching stories. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of four
different books. Read them carefully and match them up. Define the story types.

a) I was born on 16th April 1889, at eight o’clock at night, in East Lane, Walworth.
Soon after, we moved to West Square, St. George’s Road, Lambeth. According to
Mother my world was a happy one.

b) “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man left on earth!” Netta faced him
defiantly, a tiny figure shaking with outrage, her spirit as fiery as the color of her
copper curls. “The feeling is mutual,” he snapped back through tight lips.

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c) At the palace the King was glad to welcome his son’s bride. He arranged a
magnificent wedding for the Prince and his chosen wife. The wedding feast lasted
a whole week and they all lived happily ever after.

d) With such happiness, I sometimes sit out on our terrace at sunset and look over a
vast green lawn to the lake in the distance, and beyond the lake the reassuring
mountains, and in this mood think of nothing, but enjoy their magnificent serenity.

e) Once upon a time there was a little girl called Cinderella. Her mother was dead,
and she lived with her father and two elder sisters.

f) When I have finished writing, I shall enclose this whole manuscript in an envelope
and address it to Poirot. And then — what shall it be? Veronal? There would be a
kind of poetic justice. Not that I take any responsibility for Mrs. Ferrars’s death. I
was the direct consequence of her own actions. I feel no pity for her.

g) He laughed softly at the memory, and she joined in gaily. She had been
wonderfully, blissfully on time. She started to tell him so, but his lips claimed her
own, masterfully silencing the words that no longer needed to be spoken.

h) Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of the 16th — 17th September — a Thursday. I was
sent for at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday the 17th. There was nothing to be
done. She had been dead some hours.

(B) Titles and Authors. Here are the titles and authors, again mixed up. Match
each book with its correct title and author.

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 The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd Sue Peters
Cinderella Agatha Christie
Marriage in Haste Charlie Chaplin
My Autobiography a traditional fairy story

3. Writing economically. Shorten these sentences using as few words as possible.

(If you learn to write economically, this will help you to write effective summaries.)

a) My physical condition is, on the whole, one in which food would be of

considerable benefit.
b) I’m telling no more than truth when I say that George is a habitual smoker.
c) In her employment, Mary showed a thoroughly satisfactory degree of energy and
efficiency.
d) The main problem with which I am faced is to decide whether it is preferable to
continue in existence, or whether it would, on balance, be a more advisable policy to
give up the struggle. (Shakespeare)
e) It is undeniable that the large majority of non-native learners of English experience
a number of problems in attempting to master the phonetic patterns of the language.
f) It is not uncommon to encounter sentences which, though they contain a great
number of words and are constructed in a highly complex way, none the less turn out
to contain very little meaning of any kind.

4. A) These are some common expressions used when talking about short stories.
Match them with the definitions below.

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 suspense surprise plot character(s)
setting climax theme style

a) the manner of writing used in the story —

b) the feeling in the reader caused by something unexpected happening —
c) the place and time at which the events of a story take place —
d) the set of connected events on which the story is based —
e) what the story is about, rather than what happens in the story —
f) a tense feeling in the reader, caused by wondering what may happen further in the
story —
g) the most intense part of a story, generally towards the end —
h) a person (or people) in a story —

B) Use the words in point (A) to fill in the gaps in these sentences.

a) The story is too simple to be interesting: the _____________ are too neatly
divided into good and bad.
b) I found the _____________ too complicated: at times it was difficult to
understand what was going on.
c) __________ is maintained throughout this thrilling story: you don’t find out the
identity of the murderer until the last page, and when you do, it comes as a
complete ____________.
d) Very little actually happens in this story — it is an ordinary day in the life of an
ordinary person — but the writer’s ____________ makes it fascinating reading.
e) In spite of the exotic _________, in India at the time of the Mogul Emperors, the
story is rather dull.

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f) The story’s ______, racial intolerance in an urban setting, makes it still relevant
for today’s reader.
g) The writer builds up the reader’s expectations skillfully, but the __________ itself
is rather disappointing.

TEST 2

Read the short story given below. Do a thorough vocabulary work and
accomplish the tasks that follow the story. Check them with the keys.

K. Chopin
The Story of an Hour

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was
taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that
revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It
was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad
disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed”. He
had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had
hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a
paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden wild
abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went
away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this
she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to
reach into her soul.
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 She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all
aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the
street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some
one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the
eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that
had met and piled above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair quite
motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who
has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and
even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was
fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of
reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What
was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it,
creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color
that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize
this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back
with her will-as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.
When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly
parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “Free, free, free!” The vacant
stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen
and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every
inch of her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and
exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands

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folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and
gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to
come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to
them in welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live
for herself. There would be no powerful will bending her in that blind persistence
with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a
fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a
crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him — sometimes. Often she had not. What did it
matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of
self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole,
imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door — you will
make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of
life through the open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and
summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick
prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder
that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was
a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of
Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs.
Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard
who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.
He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been

177
one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to
screen him from the view of his wife. But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease — of joy that
kills.

1. Improve the following summary:

The story I am going to analyze is very interesting. Louise Mallard, a young

woman with a heart trouble, receives the news of her husband’s death in a road
accident. Greatly shocked at first she retreated to her room to grieve but suddenly felt
relieved. Louise realizes now that her husband is dead she is free to live as she
chooses and do what she likes: “Free! Body and soul free!” The young woman
anticipates the beginning of a new life, while her sister Josephine is entreating her to
calm down: “Open the door, Louise, you will make yourself ill!” When Louise is
down with her relatives again, the entrance door opens and her husband, Brently
Mallard, appears “composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella”. It turns out that
the husband’s death has been a mistake. Louise’s weak heart could not endure one
more shock and she died instantly. Everyone was sure that she had been glad to see
her husband safely back home and died “of joy that kills”. I think the main problems
touched upon in the short story are those of freedom and self-assertion of a woman.

178
2. Define the forms of presentation in the short story and try to relate it from one of
the following points of view:

a) first-person narrator: a minor character in the story (Josephine, Brently Mallard or

a doctor);
b) first-person narrator: the main character (Louise Mallard);
c) third-person narrator: limited (a minor character);
d) third-person narrator: objective.

3. Fill in the chart taking into consideration the information about the setting of a
story:

Element Example Function

1. Domestic
interior
(physical objects)

2. There were patches of blue sky showing here

and
there through the clouds that had met and
piled
above the other in the west facing her
window.

3. Landscape

179
 KEYS TO TEST 1

1. a) fairy tale;
b) autobiography;
c) romance;
d) detective story;
e) humour story;
f) science story;
g) story with social significance.

2. a, d autobiography (Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography);

b, g romance/love story (Sue Peters, Marriage in Haste);
c, e fairy story ( Cinderella, traditional fairy story);
f, h detective story (Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).

3. a) I’m hungry.
b) George smokes.
c) Mary is an energetic and efficient worker.
d) To be or not to be.
e) English phonetic patterns are often difficult for non-native learners.
f) There are sentences that are wordy and complicated but not really
informative.

4. A) a) style;
b) surprise;
c) setting;
d) plot;
e) theme;
g) climax;
f) suspense;
h) character(s).
180
 B) a) characters;
b) plot;
c) suspense, surprise;
d) style;
e) setting;
f) theme;
g) climax.

KEYS TO TEST 2

1. The story “The Story of an Hour” is written by Kate Chopin. The main
character, Louise Mallard, a young woman with a heart trouble, receives the news of
her husband’s death in a road accident. Greatly shocked at first she retreats to her
room to grieve but suddenly feels relieved. Louise realizes now that her husband is
dead she is free to live as she chooses and do what she likes. When Louise is down
with her relatives again, the entrance door opens and her husband, Brently Mallard,
appears. It turns out that the husband’s death has been a mistake. Louise’s weak
heart can not endure one more shock and she dies instantly. Everyone is sure that
she dies because she is glad to see her husband safely back home.

2. a) My younger sister Louise had a serious heart trouble so when the news
about her husband’s death in a road accident arrived, I tried to tell her about it as
carefully as possible. She wept at once and then retired to her room to grieve. I
begged her to open the door and finally she joined us downstairs. Then suddenly the
entrance door opened and Brently appeared safe and sound! Louise screamed and
fell down. We did our best to revive her but I think the joy of having Brently
restored to life and his family was too much for her weak heart. Louise died so
young and I don’t know how her husband and I will get over it.
181
 b) When I heard Brently was dead I felt a pang in the heart and a strike of real
grief, of a loss. I rushed to my room as I couldn’t bear any consolation at that
moment. I fell into the armchair to cry my heart out but all of a sudden I felt a relief.
Brently is gone, what am I going to do? But I am young and attractive and rich! I am
absolutely free to live as I choose and do what I like! I will live long, I will be happy!
But my sister is calling for me behind the door. I’d better go and pretend I’m
absolutely killed. But what is it? The door opens… Brently?! Could it be Brently?!
Oh, no! No, Lord! No…

c)… he came back home at the usual hour and opened the door with his own
key. He saw the white faces of his relatives turning to him, their swollen eyes opening
wide. Then Louise gave a faint cry and fell on the floor. He had always known she
had a serious heart trouble, but he wasn’t prepared — no, not her, she was so young
and beautiful! They all rushed to her, tried to revive her but in vain. He remembered
doctors came and explained things about weak hearts but he didn’t listen, he also felt
sick at heart. Josephine had told him Louise just couldn’t stand two shocks in an hour
and died of joy that kills. What a cruel irony of fate…

d) On that sweet spring morning Louise Mallard, a young woman with a heart
trouble, received a terrible blow — her husband was said to have been killed in a road
accident. Her sister Josephine was really careful and tender trying to console her, but
Louise rushed to her room. She fell into the armchair and cried bitterly, but then,
looking into the window on a glorious spring landscape, she gradually calmed down
and joined her relatives downstairs. At that moment the entrance door opened and her
husband came in. The news of his death turned out to be a mistake. At seeing her
husband Louise fell dead. Doctors said her weak heart had failed her — she died of
joy that kills.

182
3.

183
Element Example Function
1. Domestic There stood, facing the The description of one’s domestic
interior open window, a interior helps to make out the
(physical comfortable, roomy character’s social background, mode
objects) armchair. Into this she of life, habits, financial state,
sank… personal tastes, preferences and
dislikes.

2. Nature There were patches of The natural phenomena, described in

blue sky showing here a setting, serve as a means of
and there through the expressing the emotional state of the
clouds that had met and character, as a background for the
piled above the other in character’s state of mind, mood,
the west facing her feelings. The patches of blue sky
window. showing through the clouds
symbolize the gradual change in
Louise’s mood: the troubles and
misfortunes of her married life give
way to the happiness of freedom and
self-assertion, to new plans and
hopes.

184
3. Surrounding She could see in the open Seasons in fiction are often
landscape square before her tops of associated with stages of a human
trees that were all life. “Spring” symbolizes the
aquiver with the new beginning of a new life, a better one,
spring life. The delicious for Louise. Spring is generally
breath of rain was in the associated with the revival of Nature
air. In the street below a from a long winter sleep (Louise’s
peddler was crying his married life). Louise feels renewed,
wares. The notes of a all her feelings and senses awaken –
distant song which she now perceives and enjoys life
someone was singing with all her senses: smell (the
reached her faintly, and delicious breath of rain), hearing (the
countless sparrows were distant song, the twitter of birds),
twittering in the eaves. eyesight (the tops…aquiver with
new life), touch (the comfortable
armchair). She enjoys her revival
and anticipates her future free life,
full of hopes and happiness. (The
same idea is stressed with the image
of an open window).

185
 REFERENCE

Archer J. Twelve Red Herrings. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997.

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Capote T. Music for Chameleons. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Collier J., Slater S. Short Stories for Creative Classrooms. Cambridge Univ. Press,
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Escott J., Basset J. The Eye of Childhood. Oxford Univ. Press, 2000.

Felder M., Bromberg A.B. Light and Lively: Humourous American Short Stories.
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Henry O. Selected Stories. M.: Progress Publishers, 1976.

Martin A., Hill R. Modern Short Stories. London: Prentice Hall, 1996.

Maugham W.S. The Complete Short Stories. New York: Washington Square Press,
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More Modern Short Stories / Ed. by J. W. Taylor. Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.

Poe E. A. Selected Tales. London: Penguin Books,1994.

Saki. The Best of Saki. London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.

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Story Genres. English Teaching Forum. 1995. January.

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The English Review. London: Philip Allan Updates, 2001.

The Penguin Book of Very Short Stories / Ed. by A. Maley. London: Penguin Books,
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Thurber J. Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems. New York: Harper and Brothers,
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