Hubert and Minnie

by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

For Hubert Lapell this first love-affair was extremely important. "Important" was the word he had used himself when he was writing about it in his diary. It was an event in his life, a real event for a change. It marked, he felt, a genuine turning-point in his spiritual development. "Voltaire," he wrote in his diary - and he wrote it a second time in one of his letters to Minnie - "Voltaire said that one died twice: once with the death of the whole body and once before, with the death of one's capacity to love. And in the same way one is born twice, the second time being on the occasion when one first falls in love. One is born, then, into a new world - a world of intenser feelings, heightened values, more penetrating insights." And so on. In point of actual fact Hubert found this new world a little disappointing. The intenser feelings proved to be rather mild not by any means up to literary standards. "I tell thee I am mad In Cressid's love. Thou answer'st; she is fair, Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice...." No, it certainly wasn't quite that. In his diary, in his letters to Minnie, he painted, it is true, a series of brilliant and romantic landscapes of the new world. But they were composite imaginary landscapes in the manner of Salvator Rosa - richer, wilder, more picturesquely clear-obscure than the real thing. Hubert would seize with avidity on the least velleity of an unhappiness, a physical desire, a spiritual yearning, to work it up in his letters and journals into something substantially romantic. There were times, generally very late at night, when he succeeded in persuading himself that he was indeed the wildest, unhappiest, most passionate of lovers. But in the daytime he went about his business nourishing something like a grievance against love. The thing was a bit of a fraud; yes, really, he decided, rather a fraud. All the same, he supposed it was important. For Minnie, however, love was no fraud at all. Almost from the first moment she had adored him. A common friend had brought him to one of her Wednesday evenings. "This is Mr. Lapell; but he's too young to he called anything but Hubert." That was how he had been introduced. And, laughing, she had taken his hand and called him Hubert at once. He too had laughed, rather nervously. "My name's Minnie," she said. But he had been too shy to call her anything at all that evening. His brown hair was tufty and untidy, like little boy's, and he had shy grey eyes that never looked at you for more than a glimpse at a time, but turned away almost at once, as though they were afraid. Quickly he glanced at you, eagerly - then away again; and his musical voice, with its sudden emphases, its quick modulations from high to low, seemed always to address itself to a ghost floating low down and a little to one side of the person to whom he was talking. Above the brows was a forehead beautifully domed, with a pensive wrinkle running up from between the eyes. In repose his full-lipped mouth pouted a little, as though he were expressing some chronic discontent with the world. And, of course, thought Minnie, the world wasn't beautiful enough for his idealism. "But after all," he had said earnestly that first evening, "one has the world of thought to live in. That, at any rate, is simple and clear and beautiful. One can always live apart from the brutal scramble." And from the depths of the arm-chair in which, fragile, tired, and in these rather "artistic" surroundings almost incongruously elegant, she was sitting. Helen Glamber laughed her clear little laugh. "I think, on the contrary," she said (Minnie remembered every incident of that first evening), "I think one ought to rush about and know thousands of people, and eat and drink enormously, and make love incessantly, and shout and laugh and knock people over the head." And having vented these Rabelaisian sentiments, Mrs. Glamber dropped back with a sigh of fatigue, covering her eyes with a thin white hand; for she had a splitting headache, and the light hurt her. "Really!" Minnie protested, laughing. She would have felt rather shocked if any one else had said that; but Helen Glamber was allowed to say anything. Hubert reaffirmed his quietism. Elegant, weary, infinitely fragile, Mrs. Glamber lay back in her arm-chair, listening. Or perhaps, under her covering hand, she was trying to go to sleep. She had adored him at first sight. Now that she looked back she could see that it had been at first sight. Adored him protectively, maternally - for he was only twenty and very young, in spite of the wrinkle between his brows, and the long words, and the undergraduate's newly discovered knowledge; only twenty, and she was nearly twenty-nine. And she had fallen in love with his beauty, top. Ah, passionately. Hubert, perceiving it later, was surprised and exceedingly flattered. This had never happened to him before. He enjoyed being worshipped, and since Minnie had fallen so violently in love with him, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to be in love with Minnie. True, if she had not started by adoring him, it would never have occurred to Hubert to fall in love with her. At their first meeting he had found her certainly very nice, but not particularly exciting. Afterwards, the manifest expression of her adoration had made him find her more interesting, and in the end he had fallen in love himself. But perhaps it was not to be wondered at if he found the process a little disappointing. But still, he reflected on those secret occasions when he had to admit to himself that something was wrong with this passion, love without possession could never, surely, in the nature of things, be quite the genuine article. In his diary he recorded aptly those two quatrains of John Donne: "So must pure lovers' souls descend To affections and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great prince in prison lies. To our bodies turn we thein, that so Weak men on love revealed may look; Love's mysterious in souls grow, But yet the body is his book." At their next meeting he recited them to Minnie. The conversation which followed, compounded as it was of philosophy and personal confidences, was exquisite. It really, Hubert felt, came up to literary standards. The next morning Minnie rang up her friend Helen Glamber and asked if she might come to tea that afternoon. She had several things to talk to her about. Mrs. Glamber sighed as she hung up the receiver. "Minnie's coming to tea," she called, turning towards the open door. From across the passage her husband's voice came back to her. "Good Lord!" it said in a tone of far-away horror, of absent-minded resignation; for John Glamber was deep in his work and there was only a little of him left, so to speak, above the surface to react to the bad news. Helen Glamber sighed again, and propping herself more comfortably against her pillows she reached for her book. She knew that far-away voice and what it meant. It meant that he wouldn't answer if she went on with the conversation; only say "h'm" or "m'yes." And if she persisted after that, it meant that he'd say, plaintively, heart-breakingly, "Darling, you must let me get on with my work." And at that moment she would so much have liked to talk a little. Instead, she went on reading at the point where she had broken off to answer Minnie's telephone call. "By this time the flames had enveloped the gynaeceum. Nineteen times did the heroic Patriarch of Alexandria venture into the blazing fabric, from which he succeeded in rescuing all but two of its lovely occupants, twenty-seven in number, all of whom he caused to be transported at once to his own private apartments...." It was one of those instructive books John liked her to read. History, mystery, lesson, and law. But at the moment she didn't feel much like history. She felt like talking. And that was out of the question; absolutely out of it. She put down her book and began to file her nails and think of poor Minnie. Yes, poor Minnie. Why was it that one couldn't help saying Good Lord! heart-feltly, when one heard she was coming to tea? And why did one never have the heart to refuse to let her come to tea? She was pathetic, but pathetic in such a boring way. There are some people you like being kind to, people you want to help and befriend. People that look at you with the eyes of sick monkeys. Your heart breaks when you see them. But poor Minnie had none of the charms of a sick monkey. She was just a great big healthy young woman of twenty-eight who ought to have been married and the mother of children, and who wasn't. She would have made such a good wife, such an admirably solicitous and careful mother. But it just happened that none of the men she knew had ever wanted to marry her. And why should they want to? When she came into a room, the light seemed to grow perceptibly dimmer, the electric tension slackened off. She brought no life with her; she absorbed what there was, she was like so much blotting-paper. No wonder nobody wanted to marry her. And yet, of course, it was the only thing. Particularly as she was always falling in love herself. The only thing. "John!" Mrs. Glamber suddenly called. "Is it really true about ferrets?" "Ferrets?" the voice from across the passage repeated. With a remote irritation. "Is what true about ferrets?" "That the females die if they're not mated." "How on earth should I know?" "But you generally know everything." "But, my darling, really..." The voice was plaintive, full of reproach. Mrs. Glamber clapped her hand over her mouth and only took it off again to blow a kiss. "All right," she said very quickly. "All right. Really. I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Really." She blew another kiss towards the door. "But ferrets..." repeated the voice. Sh - sh, sh - sh." "Why ferrets?" "Darling," said Mrs. Glamber almost sternly, "you really must go on with your work." Minnie came to tea. She put the case - hypothetically at first, as though it were the case of a third person; then, gaining courage, she put it personally. It was her own case. Out of the depths of her untroubled, pagan innocence, Helen Glamber brutally advised her. "If you want to go to bed with the young man," she said, "go to bed with him. The thing has no importance in itself. At least not much. It's only important because it makes possible more secret confidences, because it strengthens affection, makes the man in a way dependent on you. And then, of course, it's the natural thing. I'm all for nature except when it comes to painting one's face. They say that ferrets..." But Minnie noticed that she never finished the sentence. Appalled and fascinated, shocked and yet convinced, she listened. "My darling,' said Mrs. Glamber that evening when her husband came home - for he hadn't been able to face Minnie; he had gone to the Club for tea - "who was it that invented religion, and sin, and all that? And why?" John laughed. "It was invented by Adam," he said, "for various little transcendental reasons which you would probably find it difficult to appreciate. But also for the very practical purpose of keeping Eve in order." "Well, if you call complicating people's lives keeping them in order, then I dare say you're right." Mrs.Glamber shook her head. "I find it all too obscure. At sixteen, yes. But one really ought to have grown out of that sort of thing by twenty. And at thirty - the woman's nearly thirty, you know - well, really..." In the end, Minnie wrote to Hubert telling him that she had made up her mind. Hubert was staying in Hertfordshire with his friend Watchett. It was a big house, the food was good, one was very comfortable; and old Mr. Watchett, moreover, had a very sound library. In the impenetrable shade of the Wellingtonias Hubert and Ted Watchett played croquet and discussed the best methods of cultivating the Me. You could do a good deal, they decided, with art - books, you know, and pictures and music. "Listen to Stravinsky's Sacre" said Ted Watchett, "and you're for ever excused from going to Tibet or the Gold Coast or any of those awful places. And then there's Dostoievsky instead of murder, and D.H. Lawrence as a substitute for sex." "All the same," said Hubert, "one must have a certain amount of actual non-imaginative experience." He spoke earnestly, abstractedly; but Minnie's letter was in his pocket. "Gnosce teipsum. You can't really know yourself without coming into collision with events, can you?" Next day, Ted's cousin, Phoebe, arrived. She had red hair and a milky skin, and was more or less on the musical comedy stage. "One foot on and one foot off," she explained. "The splits." And there and then she did them, the splits, on the drawing-room carpet. "It's quite easy," she said, laughing, and jumped up again with an easy grace that fairly took one's breath away. Ted didn't like her. "Tiresome girl," he said. "So silly, too. Consciously silly, silly on purpose, which makes it worse." And, it was true, she did like boasting about the amount of champagne she could put away without getting buffy, and the number of times she had exceeded the generous allowance and been "blind to the world." She liked talking about her admirers in terms which might make you suppose that they were all her accepted lovers. But then she had the justification of her vitality and her shining red hair. "Vitality," Hubert wrote in his diary (he contemplated a distant date, after, or preferably before, his death, when these confessions and aphorisms would be published), "vitality can make claims on the world almost as imperiously as can beauty. Sometimes beauty and vitality meet in one person." It was Hubert who arranged that they should stay at the mill. One of his friends had once been there with a reading party, and found the place comfortable, secluded, and admirably quiet. Quiet, that is to say, with the special quietness peculiar to mills. For the silence there was not the silence of night on a mountain; it was a silence made of continuous thunder. At nine o'clock every morning the mill-wheel began to turn, and its roaring never stopped, all day. For the first moment the noise was terrifying, was almost unbearable. Then, after a little, one grew accustomed to it. The thunder became, by reason of its very unintermittence, a perfect silence, wonderfully rich and profound. At the back of the mill was a little garden hemmed in on three sides by the house, the outhouses, and a high brick wall, and open on the fourth towards the water. Looking over the parapet, Minnie watched it sliding past. It was like a brown snake with arrowy markings on its back; and it crawled, it glided, it slid along for ever. She sat there, waiting: her train, from London, had brought her here soon after lunch; Hubert, coming across country from the Watchetts, would hardly arrive before six. The water flowed beneath her eyes like lime, like destiny, smoothly towards some new and violent event. The immense noise that in this garden was silence enveloped her. Inured, her mind moved in it as though in its native clement. From beyond the parapet came the coolness and the weedy smell of water. But if she turned back towards the garden, she breathed at once the hot perfume of sunlight beating on flowers and ripening fruit. In the afternoon sunlight all the world was ripe. The old red house lay there, ripe, like a dropped plum; the walls were riper than the fruits of the nectarine trees so tenderly and neatly crucified on their warm bricks. And that richer silence of unremitting thunder seemed, as it were, the powdery bloom on a day that had come to exquisite maturity and was hanging, round as a peach and juicy with life and happiness, waiting in the sunshine for the bile of eager teeth. At the heart of this fruit-ripe world Minnie waited. The water flowed towards the wheel; smoothly, smoothly - then it fell, it broke itself to pieces on the turning wheel. And lime was sliding onwards, quietly towards an event that would shatter all the smoothness of her life. "If you really want to go to bed with the young man, go to bed with him." She could hear Helen's clear, shrill voice saying impossible, brutal things. If any one else had said them, she would have run out of the room. But in Helen's mouth they seemed, somehow, so simple, so innocuous, and so true. And yet all that other people had said or implied - at home, at school, among the people she was used to meeting - seemed equally true. But then, of course, there was love. Hubert had written a Shakespearean sonnet which began: "Love hallows all whereon 'tis truly placed, Turns dross to gold with one touch of his dart, Makes matter mind, extremest passion chaste, And builds a temple in the lustful heart. " She thought that very beautiful. And very true. It seemed to throw a bridge between Helen and the other people. Love, true love, made all the difference. It justified. Love - how much, how much she loved! Time passed and the light grew richer as the sun declined out of the height of the sky. The day grew more and more deliciously ripe, swelling with unheard-of sweetness. Over its sun-flushed cheeks the thundery silence of the mill-wheel spread the softest, peachiest of blooms. Minnie sal on the parapet, waiting. Sometimes she looked down at the sliding water, sometimes she turned her eyes towards the garden. Time flowed, but she was now no more afraid of that shattering event that thundered there, in the future. The ripe sweetness of the afternoon seemed to enter into her spirit, filling it to the brim. There was no more room for doubts, or fearful anticipations, or regrets. She was happy. Tenderly, with a tenderness she could not have expressed in words, only with the gentlest of light kisses, with fingers caressingly drawn through the ruffled hair, she thought of Hubert, her Hubert. Hubert, Hubert... And suddenly, startlingly, he was standing there at her side. "Oh," she said, and for a moment she stared at him with round brown eyes, in which there was nothing but astonishment. Then the expression changed. "Hubert," she said softly. Hubert took her hand and dropped it again; looked at her for an instant, then turned away. Leaning on the parapet, he stared down into the sliding water; his face was unsmiling. For a long time both were silent. Minnie remained where she was, sitting quite still, her eyes fixed on the young man's averted face. She was happy, happy, happy. The long day ripened and ripened, perfection after perfection. "Minnie," said the young man suddenly, and with a loud abruptness, as though he had been a long time deciding himself to speak and had at last succeeded in bringing out the prepared and pent-up words, "I feel I've behaved very badly towards you. I never ought to have asked you to come here. It was wrong. I'm sorry." "But I came because I wanted to," Minnie exclaimed. Hubert glanced at her, then turned away his eyes and went on addressing a ghost that floated, it seemed, jus) above the face of the sliding water. "It was too much to ask. I shouldn't have done it. For a man it's different. But for a woman..." "But, I tell you, I wanted to." "It's too much." "It's nothing," said Minnie, "because I love you." And leaning forward, she ran her fingers through his hair. Ah, tenderness that no words could express! "You silly boy," she whispered. "Did you think I didn't love you enough for that? " Hubert did not look up. The water slid and slid away before his eyes; Minnie's fingers played in his hair, ran caressingly over the nape of his neck. He felt suddenly a positive haired for this woman. Idiot! Why couldn't she take a hint? He didn't want her. And why on earth had he ever imagined that he did? All the way in the train he had been asking himself that question. Why? Why? And the question had asked itself still more urgently just now as, standing at the garden door, he had looked out between the apple tree and watched her, unobserved, through a long minute - watched her sitting there on the parapet, turning her vague brown eyes now at the water, now towards the garden, and smiling to herself with an expression that had seemed to him so dim and vacuous that lie could almost have fancied her an imbecile. And with Phoebe yesterday he had stood on the crest of the bare chalk down. Like a sea at their feet stretched the plain, and above the dim horizon towered heroic clouds. Fingers of the wind lifted the red locks of her hair. She stood as though poised, ready to leap off into the boisterous air. "How I should like to fly!" she said. "There's something particularly attractive about airmen, I always think." And she had gone running down the hill. But Minnie, with her dull hair, her apple-red checks, and big, slow body, was like a peasant girl. How had he ever persuaded himself that he wanted her? And what made it much worse, of course, was that she adored him, embarrassingly, tiresomely, like a too affectionate spaniel that insists on tumbling about at your feet and licking your hand just when you want to sit quietly and concentrate on serious things. Hubert moved away, out of reach of her caressing hand. He lifted towards her for a moment a pair of eyes that had become, as it were, opaque with a cold anger; then dropped them again. "The sacrifice is too great," he said in a voice that sounded to him like somebody else's voice. He found it very difficult to say this sort of thing convincingly. "I can't ask it of you, the actor pursued. "I won't." "But it isn't a sacrifice," Minnie protested. It s a joy, it's happiness. Oh, can't you understand?" Hubert did not answer. Motionless, his elbows on the parapet, he stared down into the water. Minnie looked at him, perplexed only, at first; but all at once she was seized with a nameless agonizing doubt that grew and grew within her, as the silence prolonged itself, like some dreadful cancer of the spirit, until it had eaten away all her happiness, until there was nothing left in her mind hut doubt and apprehension. "What is it? " she said at last. "Why are yon so strange? What is it, Hubert? What is it?" Leaning anxiously forward, she laid her two hands on either side of his averted face and turned it towards her. Blank and opaque with anger were the eyes. "What is it'?" she repeated. "Hubert, what is it?" Hubert disengaged himself. "It's no good," he said in a smothered voice. No good at all. It was a mistake. I'm sorry. I think I'd better go away. The trap's still at the door." And without waiting for her to say anything, without explaining himself any further, he turned and walked quickly away, almost ran, towards the house. Well, thank goodness, he said to himself, he was out of that. He hadn't done it very well, or handsomely, or courageously; but, at any rate, lie was out of it. Poor Minnie! He felt sorry for her; but after all, what could he do about it? Poor Minnie! Still, it rather flattered his vanity to think that she would be mourning over him. And in any case, he reassured his conscience, she couldn't really mind much. But on the other hand, his vanity reminded him, slic did adore him. Oh, she absolutely worshipped... The door closed behind him. Minnie was alone again in the garden. Ripe, ripe it lay there in the late sunshine. Half of it was in shadow now; but the rest of it, in the coloured evening light, seemed to have come to the final and absolute perfection of maturity. Bloomy with thundery silence, the choicest fruit of all lime hung there, deliciously sweet, sweet to the core; hung flushed and beautiful on the brink of darkness. Minnie sat there quite still, wondering what had happened. Had he gone, had he really gone. The door closed behind him with a bang, and almost as though the sound were a signal prearranged, a man walked out from the mill on to the dam and closed the sluice. And all at once the wheel was still. Apocalyptically there was silence: the silence of soundlessness took the place of that other silence that was uninterrupted sound. Gulfs opened endlessly out around her; she was alone. Across the void of soundlessness a belated bee trailed its thin buzzing; the sparrows chirped, and from across the water came the sound of voices and far-away laughter. And as though woken from a sleep, Minnie looked up and listened, fearfully, turning her head from side to side.

1. What are the conflicts of the story? Are they moral, emotional, intellectual?

2. What are the basic narrative methods of the story?

3. What means does the author use to reveal the characters?

4. What is the idea of the interpolation of a piece of poetry into the text?

5. What are the characteristics of the author’s style? Are they appropriate to the nature of the story?

TEXT EIGHT

Frère Jacques

John Cheever (1912-1982)

Five minutes before she drove into the yard behind the camp, he could hear the car coming down the dirt road. Its sound was hard to distinguish from the sound of the wind that had come up that day at dark, brushing through the tops of the pines. Then the headlights swept the room like the drunken light of a hurricane lamp, and he heard the motor idle and stall. She whistled to him. Then she called to him through the screen door:

“Open the door, please, Alex. I’m loaded down with bundles and Héloïse is cutting up*.”

Her voice sounded tired. He opened the door and she came into the room. In the crook of one arm she was carrying a large bundle of fresh laundry, holding it against her breast as if it were a child. In the other arm she had a lot of small packages.

“Back so soon?” he said. He was Russian and he spoke with a slight accent. “It didn’t take you long. Did you get everything?”

“Kiss me,” she said.

He kissed her.

“Did you get everything?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she said. “The Times, nails, the padlock, the laundry. The post office was closed, but I dropped our forwarding address in the mailbox. Oh, Alex, this business of moving gets me down. Look at my hands.” She held up her left hand to show him. It was trembling.

“Yes,” he said, “I know. It makes me tired, too.”

“It’s not that I’ve done anything,” she said. “It’s just the business of making the break. And this bloody weather. The way that wind blows up.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

She handed him the Times and laid down all of the parcels but the laundry bundle. She still held that affectionately in the crook of her arm. She was tired and he noticed it. Her face was pale and slightly drawn, and her voice was tired. Her yellow hair was trussed up simply at the crown of her head, and it made her look younger than her twenty-two years and accentuated the tiredness and restlessness of her features. He lit a lamp and sat down to read the paper. He was interested in the Spanish trouble and he was anxious to find who was holding Madrid.

“Mrs. Wiley said she was sorry to see us go”, she said. “She hasn’t swindled anyone on a laundry bill the way she swindled us for years. And I said good-bye to the butcher and the garage man for you. It’s surprising how many people you can get to know in two weeks. And I bought an ice cream for Héloïse.”

“You’re telling me,” he said, without looking up from the paper. “It’s all over her face. Chocolate?”

“Yes,” she said, “chocolate. If you have a handkerchief I’ll wipe it off.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a large, clean handkerchief. He always had clean handkerchiefs. She took the handkerchief and daubed at the face of the laundry bundle with it as if she were wiping the ice cream from a child’s mouth. The joke of the laundry bundle was an old one. Every bundle of salt, sugar, corn meal, flour, or laundry that she carried, during the two years they had lived together, she had called Héloïse, and they had talked lightly and facetiously over it as if it were their child. She was very young and this strained talk was some of the tenderest that had gone between them. But he was ten years older than she and he often tired of it. He was tired of it on that evening, and it was a strain for him to keep it up.

“Any better?” she asked, holding up the bundle for him to see.

“Much better,” he said. “Did honey like the ice cream?”

“Tell Daddy how good the ice cream was,” she said, hogging the bundle tenderly on her arm.

“Has the little girl lost her tongue?” he said.

He was bored and irritated by it, but he kept it up for her sake.

“Oh, well,” she said, “she’s as tired as we, and we can’t expect her to talk all the time. I do wish we could bring lier up in the country, Alex. She’d better be a brighter baby.”

“Money,” he said.

“Yes, darling,” she said, “I know. Back to Bank Street for you, Héloïse.”

He went back to his paper and she stood at the open door, looking out onto the lake. The oppressive clouds were filling in with dark, like sailcloth, and the lake was beginning to chop under a north-east wind. The clouds and the wind and the dark were all bearing up from the narrows, and in the gray light the lake seemed to have something as hostile and defenseless about it as the seaboard.

“There’s nothing more to do?” she asked.

“No,” he said. Her persistence in talking while he tried to read irritated him. “We can leave the keys here. We ought to get to bed soon. I want to start early in the morning. I’d like to get back to the city before dark.”

“That outboard* sounds like a hornet,” she said.

The single sound above the chopping of the waves was the droning of an outboard, way up beyond Basin Bay.

“What did you say about hornets?”

“That outboard,” she said; “it sounds like a hornet.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Want to go swimming?” she said. She stood with her back to him, looking out over the lake. She was still holding the laundry bundle.

“It’s too cold,” he said.

“No, Alex, it’s not too cold. And it’s our last chance to go swimming until next summer. And when you come out the air seems warmer.”

“You know what the doctor said.”

“To hell with the doctor.”

“Well, go swimming if you want. You’ll have to go alone.”

“I don’t want to go swimming alone,” she said quietly.

“Why don’t you sit down and enjoy yourself?” he said. “It’s your last chance.”

“I am enjoying myself,” she said. “Héloïse and I are having the time of our lives, aren’t we, Héloïse? Just a couple of bugs in a rug. See the gull?”

“Where?” he said, putting down his paper again.

“Right over there.”

“Oh, yes.”

A gray gull, a shade lighter than the overcast sky, rode above the water, hunting.

“I didn’t know gulls liked fresh water,” she said.

“They come down the St. Lawrence,” he said, “and then down Champlain.”

“I’ll bet they get homesick for the ocean,” she said.

For a long time neither of them spoke. He thought she had left the room, but when he looked up she was still standing there. The room had grown dark, but her white espadrilles* and her dress seemed to hold the light. He could still see them distinctly.

“Can we have a fire, Alex?”

“It’s not cold enough.”

“Oh, I don’t want it for that. It’s just that it would be a nice evening to have a fire. This is the kind of weather to have fires. It makes me feel lonely- the noise of that wind.”

“Anyhow, there isn’t any wood,” he said. “We burned it all last night.”

“Well, let’s do something,” she said. “Let’s play double Canfield.”

“I’m too tired,” he said.

“You get tired easier than I.”

“I’m older than you.”

“Love me, Alex?”

“Sure, but I’m tired.”

“I don’t know why I’m so restless,” she said. “I hate moving and I hate autumn. When I was nine years old, Grandfather took me up to Boston to buy some school clothes and we stayed at an old hotel and it smelled just like this camp. I had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom and I was terrified. I can still remember it.”

He wished she would stop talking.

“Well, Héloïse,” she said, patting the bundle, “maybe some day we’ll have money and we can have a house in the country. We’ll live in the same place year in and year out and we do all of those things that Mother remembers. Oh, living on Bank Street, honey, wouldn’t give you the faintest idea of what a life can be- a life without Mrs. Weiner and Mrs. White and Mrs. Deutsch and Daddy’s drinking companions ringing the doorbell all the time. Sometimes you think you’ve just dreamed it or imagined it, sweet, but it actually exists. The trucks don’t take your sleep away. It’s quiet at night. Daddy can hunt and Mummy can have a horse. ‘Bye-low, baby bunting,’ she sang, cradling the bundle, “Daddy’s gone a-hunting, to get himself a rabbit skin, to wrap his baby bunting in.”

She hesitated and bent over the bundle. She was very good at mimicry, and the angle of her arms and shoulders and the tone of her voice were absorbed and affectionate.

“Isn’t that sweet?” she whispered. “She’s fallen asleep. The poor little tyke is tired. She’s such a good egg, Alex. Here we’ve dragged her off to the country and now we’re dragging her back to the city, and not one word of complaint. Some babies would squall; but not Héloïse. She looks a lot like you when she’s asleep. Something about the eyes. Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” he said. He tried to show in the tone of one word how tired he was of her talk.

“We’ll have to have her photographed,” she went on. She spoke in a low voice, as if she were afraid she would wake the bundle. “We must keep a record of her golden months. I’ll get in Honnegen-Hunné. Both of our mothers were Boston women.”

“Please,” he said, “I’m trying to read.”

“All right,” she said. He was sorry to have spoken shortly and he looked over to where she was standing. He thought he heard her cough.

“That wind is cold, darling,” he said. “You’d better put a sweater on.”

She didn’t answer him. Then he saw that she was not coughing, but that she was crying. She was sobbing like a runner who is tired and short of breath.

“Now what’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” she said quietly. “I want a child.”

“But why bring that up now? You know we can’t afford one.”

“Yes, I know. But I want one, I want one, I want one!” she cried hotly, turning to him. Her face was shining with tears. “I’m sick of this, Alex; I’m sick to my heart of this.”

“But why do you get yourself excited about it? You know there’s nothing we can do now.”

“Or ever.”

“But why do you get yourself excited by it?”

“There are some things we could do.”

“What?”

“You might marry me.”

“What difference would that make?”

“A great difference for me,” she said. “A human difference.”

“Don’t get sentimental.”

“Mother is sentimental, Héloïse,” she said. “Comfort your sentimental mother. Reassure her. She feels as if she were falling.”

“Please,” he said tiredly, “don’t begin that.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, but she twisted quickly out of his reach.

“Father doesn’t understand us at all,” she said. She had stopped sobbing then and she was speaking to the bundle with great confidence.

“Father doesn’t understand us at all,” she repeated, “not at all. ‘Mais ça ne fait rien, chérie. Pas du tout, pas du tout. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,’” she crooned.

“Stop it,” he pleaded, “please.”

“’Dormez-vouz? Dormez-vouz? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines.’”

He was frightened, then, for if they had been frankly separating in a cold depot*, on a rainy pier, in the doorway of a restaurant, if she had been screaming and crying and drumming her heels on the floor, her words couldn’t have held more finality and estrangement than the simple, persistent words of that song.

______________________

cut up – behave in an annoying way

outboard – a motor fixed to the back of the boat

espadrilles – light canvas shoes with a fibre sole

depot – a small railroad or bus station

1. Who is the major character? What are the circumstances of the character’s life? How can you characterize the relationship between the characters?

2. What do details reveal about the character? What is the idea of the image of Héloïse?

3. What is the conflict of the story?

4. What is the idea of the interpolation into the text of a French song?

5. What atmosphere is conveyed by the language?

TEXT NINE

Eveline

by James Joyce (1892-1941)

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 odour 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 clacking 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 Waters, 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 in 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. Tizzied 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.

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 out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed 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 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 Hill, 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 on Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday’s 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 life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him bry 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 mouth on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her 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 out 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.

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 favourite, 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 odour 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 sick-room 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 craziness. 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 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. What is the basic narrative method? What is the type of a narrator?

2. What is the character’s background? What reason does the character have for feeling depressed? What traits of character are suggested by her mental and emotional state?

3. What conveys the character’s psychological state?

4. What can you say about the syntax of the text?

TEXT TEN

The bath

Janet Frame (b.1924)

On Friday afternoon she bought cut flowers – daffodils, anemones, a few twigs of a red-leaved shrub, wrapped in mauve waxed paper, for Saturday was the seventeenth anniversary of her husband’s death and she planned to visit his grave, as she did each year, to weed it and put fresh flowers in the two jam jars standing one on each side of the tombstone. Her visit this year occupied her thoughts more than usual. She had bought the flowers to force herself to make the journey that each year became more hazardous, from the walk to the bus stop, the change of buses at the Octagon, to the bitterness of the winds blowing from the open sea across almost unsheltered rows of tombstones; and the tiredness that overcame her when it was time to return home when she longed to find a place beside the graves, in the soft grass, and fall asleep.

That evening she filled the coal bucket, stoked the fire. Her movements were slow and arduous, her back and shoulder gave her so much pain. She cooked her tea – liver and bacon – set her knife and fork on the teatowel she used as a tablecloth, turned up the volume of the polished red radio to listen to the Weather Report and the News, ate her tea, washed her dishes, then sat drowsing in the rocking chair by the fire, waiting for the water to get hot enough for a bath. Visits to the cemetery, the doctor, and the relatives, to stay, always demanded a bath. When she was sure that the water was hot enough (and her tea had been digested) she ventured from the kitchen through the cold passageway to the colder bath-room. She paused in the doorway to get used to the chill of the air then she walked slowly, feeling with each step the pain in her back, across to the bath, and though she knew that she was gradually losing the power in her hands she managed to wrench on the stiff cold and hot taps and half-fill the bath with warm water. How wasteful, she thought, that with the kitchen fire always burning during the past month of frost, and the water almost always hot, getting in and out of a bath had become such an effort that it was not possible to bath every night nor even every week!

She found a big towel, laid it ready over a chair, arranged the chair so that should difficulty arise as it had last time she bathed she would have some way of rescuing herself; then with her night clothes warming on a page of newspaper inside the copal oven and her dressing-gown across the chair to be put on the instant she stepped from the bath, she undressed and pausing first to get her breath and clinging tightly to the slippery yellow-stained rim that now seemed more like the edge of a cliff with a deep drop below into the sea, slowly and painfully she climbed into the bath. I’ll put on my nightie the instant I get out, she thought. The instant she got out indeed! She knew it would be more than a matter of instants yet she tried to think of it calmly, without dread, telling herself that when the time came she would be careful, taking the process step by step, surprising her bad back and shoulder and her powerless wrists into performing feats they might usually rebel against, but the key to controlling them would be the surprise, the slow stealing up on them. With care, with thought. …

Sitting upright, not daring to lean back or lie down, she soaped herself, washing away the dirt of the past fortnight, seeing with satisfaction how it drifted about on the water as a sign that she was clean again. Then when her washing was completed she found herself looking for excuses not to try yet to climb out. Those old woman’s finger nails, cracked and dry, where germs could lodge, would need to be scrubbed again; the skin of her heels, too, growing so hard that her feet might have been turning to stone; behind her ears where a thread of dirt lay in the rim; after all, she did not often have the luxury of a bath, did she? How warm it was! She drowsed a moment. If only she could fall asleep then wake to find herself in her nightdress in bed for the night! Slowly she rewashed her body, and when she knew she could no longer deceive herself into thinking she was not clean she reluctantly replaced the soap, brush and flannel in the groove at the side of the bath, feeling as she loosened her grip on them that all strength and support were ebbing from her. Quickly she seized the nail-brush again, but its magic had been used and was gone; it would not adopt the role she tried to urge upon it. The flannel too, and the soap, were frail flotsam to cling to in the hope of being borne to safety.

She was alone now. For a few moments she sat swilling the water against her skin, perhaps as a means of buoying up her courage. Then resolutely she pulled out the plug, sat feeling the tide swirl and scrape at her skin and flesh, trying to draw her down, down into the earth; then the bathwater was gone in a soapy gurge and she was naked and shivering and had not yet made the attempt to get out of the bath.

How slippery the surface had become! In future she would not clean it with kerosene, she would use the paste cleaner that, left on overnight, gave the enamel rough patches that could be gripped with the skin.

She leaned forward, feeling the pain in her back and shoulder. She grasped the rim of the bath but her fingers slithered from it almost at once. She would not panic, she told herself; she would try gradually, carefully, to get out. Again she leaned forward; again her grip loosened as if iron hands had deliberately uncurled her stiffened blue fingers from their trembling hold. Her heart began to beat faster, her breath came more quickly, her mouth was dry. She moistened her lips. If I shout for help, she thought, no-one will hear me. No-one in the world will hear me. No-one will know I’m in the bath and can’t get out.

She listened. She could hear only the drip-drip of the cold water tap of the wash-basin, and a corresponding whisper and gurgle of her heart, as if it were beating under water. All else was silent. Where were the people, the traffic? Then she had a strange feeling of being under the earth, of a throbbing in her heart like wheels going over the earth above her.

Then she told herself sternly that she must have no nonsense, that she had really not tried to get out of the bath. She had forgotten the strong solid chair and the grip she could get on it. If she made the effort quickly she could first take hold of both sides of the bath, pull herself up, then transfer her hold to the chair and thus pull herself out.

She tried to do this; she just failed to make the final effort. Pale now, gasping for breath, she sank back into the bath. She began to call out but as she had predicted there was no answer. No-one had heard her, no-one in the houses or the street or Dunedin or the world knew that she was imprisoned. Loneliness welled in her. If John were here, she thought, if we were sharing our old age, helping each other, this would never have happened. She made another effort to get out. Again she failed. Faintness overcoming her she closed her eyes, trying to rest, then recovering and trying again and failing, she panicked and began to cry and strike the sides of the bath; it made a hollow sound like a wild drum-beat.

Then she stopped striking with her fists; she struggled again to get out; and for over half an hour she stayed alternately struggling and resting until at last she did succeed in climbing out and making her escape into the kitchen. She thought, I’ll never take another bath in this house or anywhere. I never want to see that bath again. This is the end or the beginning of it. In future a district nurse will have to come to attend me. Submitting to that, will be the first humiliation. There will be others, and others.

In bed at last she lay exhausted and lonely thinking that perhaps it might be better for her to die at once. The slow progression of difficulties was a kind of torture. There were her shoes that had to be made specially in a special shape or she could not walk. There were the times she had to call in a neighbour to fetch a pot of jam from the top shelf of her cupboard when it had been only a year ago that she herself had made the jam and put it on the shelf. Sometimes a niece came to fill the coal-bucket or mow the lawn. Every week there was the washing to be hung on the line – this required a special technique for she could not raise her arms without at the same time finding some support in the dizziness that overcame her. She remembered with a sense of the world narrowing and growing darker, like a tunnel, the incredulous almost despising look on the face of her niece when in answer to the comment.

- How beautiful the clouds are in Dunedin! These big billowing white and grey clouds – don’t you think, Auntie? she had said, her disappointment at the misery of things putting a sharpness in her voice.

• I never look at the clouds!

She wondered how long ago it was since she had been able to look up at the sky without reeling with dizziness. Now she did not dare look up. There was enough to attend to down and around – the cracks and hollows in the footpath, the patches of frost and ice and the pot-holes in the roads; the approaching cars and motorcycles; and now, after all the outside menaces, the inner menace of her body. She had to be guardian now over her arms and legs, force them to do as she wanted when how easily and dutifully they had walked, moved and grasped, in the old days! They were the enemy now. It had been her body that showed treachery when she tried to get out of the bath. If she ever wanted to bath again – how strange it seemed! – she would have to ask another human being to help to guard and control her own body. Was this so fearful? she wondered. Even if it were not, it seemed so.

She thought of the frost slowly hardening outside on the fences, roofs, windows and streets. She thought again of the terror of not being able to escape from the bath. She remembered her dead husband and the flowers she had bought to put on his grave. Then thinking again of the frost, its whiteness, white like a new bath, of the anemones and daffodils and the twigs of the red-leaved shrub, of John dead seventeen years, she fell asleep while outside, within two hours, the frost began to melt with the warmth of a sudden wind blowing from the north, and the night grew warm, like a spring night, and in the morning the light came early, the sky was pale blue, the same warm wind as gentle as a mere breath, was blowing, and a narcissus had burst its bud in the front garden.

In all her years of visiting the cemetery she had never known the wind so mild. On an arm of the peninsula exposed to the winds from two stretches of sea, the cemetery had always been a place to crouch shivering in overcoat and scarf while the flowers were set on the grave and the narrow garden cleared of weeds. Today, everything was different. After all the frosts of the past month there was no trace of chill in the air. The mildness and warmth were scarcely to be believed. The sea lay, violet-coloured, hush-hushing, turning and heaving, not breaking into foamy waves, it was one sinuous ripple from shore to horizon and its sound was the muted sound of distant forests of peace.

Picking up the rusted garden fork that she knew lay always in the grass of the next grave, long neglected, she set to work to clear away the twitch and other weeds, exposing the first bunch of dark blue primroses with yellow centres, a clump of autumn lilies, and the shoots, six inches high, of daffodils. Then removing the green-slimed jam jars from their grooves on each side of the tombstone she walked slowly, stiff from her crouching, to the everdripping tap at the end of the lawn path where, filling the jars with pebbles and water she rattled them up and down to try to clean them of slime. Then she ran sparkling ice-cold water into the jars and balancing them carefully one in each hand she walked back to the grave where she shook the daffodils, anemones, red leaves from their waxed paper and dividing them put half in one jar, half in the other. The blue dark of the anemones swelled with a sea-colour as their heads rested against the red leaves. The daffodils were short-stemmed with big ragged rather than delicate trumpets – the type for blowing; and their scent was strong.

Finally, remembering the winds that raged from the sea she stuffed small pieces of the screwed-up waxed paper into the top of each jar so the flowers would not be carried away by the wind. Then with a feeling of satisfaction – I look after my husband’s grave after seventeen years. The tombstone is not cracked or blown over, the garden has not sunk into a pool of clay. I look after my husband’s grave – she began to walk away, between the rows of graves, noting which were and were not cared for. Her father and mother had been buried here. She stood now before their grave. It was a roomy grave made in the days when there was a space for the dead and for the dead with money, like her parents, extra space should they need it. Their tombstone was elaborate though the writing was now faded; in death they kept the elaborate station of their life. There were no flowers on the grave, only the feathery seagrass soft to the touch, lit with gold in the sun. There was no sound but the sound of the sea and the one row of fir trees on the brow of the hill. She felt the peace inside her; the nightmare of the evening before seemed far away, seemed not to have happened; the senseless terrifying struggle to get out of a bath!

She sat on the concrete edge of her parents’ grave. She did not want to go home. She felt content to sit here quietly with the warm soft wind flowing around her and the sigh of the sea rising to mingle with the sighing of the firs and the whisper of the thin gold grass. She was grateful for the money, the time and the forethought that had made her parents’ grave so much bigger than the others near by. Her husband, cremated, had been allowed only a narrow eighteen inches by two feet, room only for the flecked grey tombstone In Memory of My Husband John Edward Harraway died August 6^th 1948, and the narrow garden of spring flowers, whereas her parents’ grave was so wide, and its concrete wall was a foot high; it was, in death, in equivalent of a quarter-acre section before there were too many people in the world. Why when the world was wider and wider was there no space left?

Or was the world narrower?

She did not know; she could not think; she knew only that she did not want to go home, she wanted to sit here on the edge of the grave, never catching any more buses, crossing streets, walking on icy footpaths, turning mattresses, trying to reach jam from the top shelf of the cupboard, filling coal buckets, getting in and out of the bath. Only to get in somewhere and stay in; to get out and stay out; to stay now, always, in one place.

Ten minutes later she was waiting at the bus stop; anxiously studying the destination of each bus as it passed, clutching her money since concession tickets were not allowed in the weekend, thinking of the cup of tea she would make when she got home, of her evening meal – the remainder of the liver and bacon, - of her nephew in Christchurch who was coming with his wife and children for the school holidays, of her niece in the home expecting her third baby. Cars and buses surged by, horns tooted, a plane droned, near and far, near and far, children cried out, dogs barked; the sea, in competition, made a harsher sound as if its waves were now breaking in foam.

For a moment, confused after the peace of cemetery, she shut her eyes, trying to recapture the image of her husband’s grave, now bright with spring flowers, and her parents’ grave, wide, spacious, with room should the dead desire it to turn and sigh and move in dreams as if the two slept together in a big soft grass double-bed.

She waited, trying to capture the image of peace. She saw only her husband’s grave, made narrower, the spring garden whittled to a thin strip; then it vanished and she was left with the image of the bathroom, of the narrow confining bath grass-yellow as old baths are, not frost-white, waiting, waiting, for one moment of inattention, weakness, pain, to claim her for ever.

1. What is the meaning of the contrast, created by the change of the weather from severe winter to mild spring? Has it any connection with the conflict between the woman’s desire of peace and rest and her will that makes her move, and act, and live?

2. Why does the author so precisely describe all, even the most habitual and insignificant actions of the woman, such as her detailed preparation for a bath – moving the chair, spreading the gown?

3. What makes “the bath” so important, that it occupies the strongest position in the text?

4. What is the concept of the story? Is it formed with the author’s explicit help?