The waterfall

I t may have been true, too, that need and weakness bound us: but they had bound us effectively, so what need had we to protest against the terms of our bondage? What right had I to deny the conditions of our meeting? We were starving, when we met, James and I, parched and starving; and we saw love as the miraged oasis, shivering on the dusty horizon in all the glamour of hallucination: blue water, green fronds and foliage breaking from the dry earth. Like deluded travellers we had carefully approached, hardly able to trust the image's persistence, afraid that it would fade into yet more dry acres as we drew nearer: believing ourselves blinded by our own desires: but when we got there - when I got there, for how can I speak for him, so dead and speechless - when I got there, the image remained, it sustained my possession of it, and the water that I drank, the so much longed for water, was sweet, not sour and brackish to the taste. Nor were the leaves green merely through the glamour of distance, through the contrast with the preceding waste: they remained green to the touch, dense, endless foresting boughs, an undis­covered country, no shallow quickly-exhausted, quickly-drained sour well, but miles of verdure, rivers, fishes, coloured birds, miles with no sign of ending, and, perhaps,beyond them all, no ending but the illimitable, circular, inexhaustible sea.

That evening, when I went to the hospital, the sister in charge of the ward led me to James with pride, and said that he was lightening. I asked what she meant, and she said that she meant that he was less deeply unconscious, he was regaining some of his reflexes: she flashed a torch for me into his sightless eye, and I saw the iris, very faintly, contract. Life was restoring itself to that glaucous, opaque, visionary globe. I felt such relief, and I too felt pride: I felt that he was responding to my faith, as to the nurses' care. I told myself, at that point, that I would not care if he were lost to me forever, if that eye never again mirrored mine and saw in mine, as he had once said, proximity: I would be grateful if-he survived, to see other things, having been removed from me by fate and not by infidelity. I was lying to myself, of course I was lying, but how can one face such depths of selfishness? I sat by his bed for the accustomed half hour, staring not at him, because he did look too dreadful, despite the alleged lightening, but at the weave of my basket which I carried everywhere in place of a handbag - I had not had a handbag for years because I never went near handbag shops, but it was quite easy to buy baskets in the local ironmongers. It was a new basket, foreign, woven of rushes, and at first glance it seemed to be merely a neutral pale brown and yellow straw colour: but as I stared I noticed in the dried colourlessness of it faint watery tender streaks of green. I can't say how much this discovery affected me. I t seemed the green of the marshes where those rushes had once flourished: I saw suddenly a vision of vast acres of growing things, and it seemed so hopeful that the colour of growth should persist so obstinately in such dry tender shades. Even if James had died he would have been beautifully resolved into other elements. But it was no longer possible that he should die. When I touched his hand at parting I thought it stirred, very slightly, at my touch.

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

1. The extract is a sample of the inner monologue. Which elements of the text develop this narrative type?

2. The first paragraph introduces the image of an oasis symbolizing the emotions overwhelming the characters. It is developed by a convergence of various stylistic means.Trace them in the text.

3.What prevails in the tropeic complex of the first paragraph- the tenor(love) or the vehicle (oasis-water, vegetation)?

4.The metaphoric image of the first paragraph consists of two elements. Which are they?

5.In the second part Jane looks at her basket; because James looks dreadful. What does she see in the rushes that make it?What trope is used here to connect the realistic image of the basket and the metaphor of the first paragraph?

6.What is the symbolism of the green colour in the text? Compare it with the general symbolism of the word.

Oscar Wilde