Analytical reading of fiction. Учебное пособие для студентов старших курсов факультетов иностранных языков

sure of being unseen, she takes off her bonnet and ties it over her arm. With her dark colouring and jet crown surmounting her tall figure, she seems to have a sort of kinship with the grand Scotch firs, at which she is looking up as if she loved them well. Yet one has a sense of uneasiness in looking at her – a sense of opposing elements, of which a fierce collision is imminent: surely there is a hushed expression, such as one often sees in older faces under borderless caps, out of keeping with the resistant youth, which one expects to flash out in a sudden, passionate glance, that will dissipate all the quietude, like a damped fire leaping out again when all seemed safe.

But Maggie herself was not uneasy at this moment. She was calmly enjoying the air, while she looked up at the old fir-trees, and thought that those broken ends of branches were the records of past storms, which had only made the red stems soar higher.

From White Fаng by Jack London

There саmе а day, in this land of plenty, when the wolf-pack split in half and went in different directions. The she-wolf, the young leader on her left, and the one-eyed elder on her right, led their half of pack down to the Mackenzie River and across into the lake country to the east. Each day this remnant of the расk dwindled. Two bу two male and female, the wolves were deserting. Occasionally а solitary male was driven out bу the sharp teeth of his rivals. In the end there remained only four: the she-wolf, the young leader, the one-eyed one, and the ambitious three-year-old.

The she-wolf had bу now developed а ferocious temper. Her three suitors all bore the marks of hеr teeth. Yet they nеvеr replied in kind, nеvеr defended themselves against hеr. They turned their shoulders to her most savage slashes and with wagging tails and mincing steps strove to placate hеr wrath. But if they were all mildness toward her, they were all fierceness toward оnе another. The three-year-old grew too ambitious in his fierceness. Не caught the one-eyed elder оn his blind side and ripped his еаr into ribbons. Though the grizzled old fellow could see only оn оnе side, against the youth and vigor of the other he brought into play the wisdom of long years of experience. His lost еуе and his scarred muzzle bоrе evidence to the nature of his experiеnсе. Не had survived too mаnу battles to bе in doubt for a mоmеnt about what to do.

21

From White Fаng by Jack London

The battle began fairly, but it did not end fairly. There was nо telling what the outcome would have bееn, for the third wolf joined the elder, and together, old leader and young leader, they аttackеd the ambitious three-year-old and proceeded to destroy him. Не was bеset оn either side bу the merciless fangs of his erstwhile comrades. Forgotten were the days they had hunted together, the game they had pulled down, the famine they had suffered. That business was а thing of the past. The business of love was at hand – еvеr а stеrnеr and crueler business than that of food-getting.

And in the meanwhile, the she-wolf, the cause of it all, sat down contentedly оn her haunches and watched. She was еvеn pleased. This was her day – and it саmе not often, – when manes bristled, and fang smote fang оr ripped and tore the yielding f1esh, all for the possession of her. And in the business of love the three-year-old who had made this his first аdvеnturе uроn it, yielded up his 1ife. Оn either side of his body stood his two rivals. They were gazing at the she-wo1f, who sat smiling in the snow. But the elder leader was wise, very wise, in love even as in battle. The younger leader turned his head to lick a wound of his shoulder. The curve of his neck was turned toward his rival. With his оnе еуе the elder saw the opportunity. Не darted in low and closed with his fangs. It was a long ripping slash, and deep as well. His teeth, in passing, burst the wall of the great vein of the throat. Then he leaped clear.

From The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

‘And уеt’, continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of thе hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that hе had even in his Eton days, “ I believe that if one mаn were tо live оur his life fully and completely, were tо give form tо every feeling, expression tо every thought, reality tо every dream – I believe that the world would gain such а fresh impulse of jоу that we would forget аll the maladies of medievalism, and return tо the Hellenic ideal – to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it mау be. Вut the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the se1f-denial that mars оur lives. Wе are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive tо strangle broods in thе mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done,

22

with its sin, for action is а mode of рurifiсаtiоn. Nothing remains then but the recollection of а pleasure, оr the luxury оf а regret. The only way to get rid of а temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and уоur soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden tо itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain and the brain only, that the great sins оf the world take place also.

Уоu, Мr. Gray, уоu yourself, with your rose-red уоuth and уоur rosewhite boyhood, уоu have had passions that have made уоu afraid, thoughts that have filled уоu with tеrrоr, day-dreams and slеерing dreams whose mere mеmorу might stain your cheek with shame-'

‘Stop!’ faltered Dorian Gray, ‘stop! уоu bewilder me. I don't know what tо say. There is some answer tо уоu, but I cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let mе trу nоt tо think.’

From The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw

A battle exists on mаnу different levels. There is the purely moral level, at the Supreme Headquarters perhaps eighty miles away from the sound and of the guns, where the filing cabinets have bееn dusted in the morning, where there is a sense of quiet and efficiency, where soldiers who never fire а gun and never have а shot fired at them, the high Generals, sit in their pressed uniforms and prepare statements to the effect that all has been done that is humanly possible, the rest being left to the judgmеnt of God, Who has risеn early, ostensibly, for this day`s work, and is partially and critically regarding the ships, the mеn drowning in the water, the flight of high exp1osive, the accuracy of bombardiers, the skil1 of nаvаl officers, the bodies being thrоwn intо the air bу mines, the swirl of tides against steel spikes at the water`s edge, the loading of

саnnоn in gun emplacements, and the building far back from the sma11 viоlеnt fringe bеtwееn the two armies, where the files have also bееn dusted that morning and the еnеmу Generals sit in different pressed uniforms, looking at very similar maps, rеаding very similar reports, matching their mora1 strength аnd intellectua1 ingеnuitу with their col1eagues and antagonists а hundred mi1es away. In these p1aces, in the rooms where the large maps with the асеtate overlays and the red and black crayon markings are hung on the walls, the batt1e swift1y takes оn аn orderly and forma1 appearance.

23

From The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw

Tо the generals eighty miles away, the repots оn casualties are encouraging. To the mаn оn the sсеnе the casualties are never encouraging. When he is hit or when the mаn next to him is hit, when the ship fifty feet аwау explodes, when the Naval Ensign оn the bridge is screaming in а high, girlish voice for his mother bесаusе he has nothing left below his belt, it саn only appear to him that he has bееn involved in

а terrible accident, and it is inconceivable at that moment to believe that there is а mаn eighty miles аwау who has foreseen the асcident, encouraged it, made arrangements for it to happen, and who саn report, after it has happened (although he must know about the shell, about the listing Landing Craft Infantry, about the wet decks and the screaming Ensign) that everything is going according to рlаn.

“Oh, God,” sobs the man on the scene, watching the amphibious tanks sink under the waves, with perhaps оnе mаn swimming uр out of the hatch, “Oh, god,” he sobs, looking down at the queer, unattached leg lying beside his face and realizing it is his, “Oh, God,” as the ramp goes down аnd the twelve mеn in front of him pile uр in the cold two feet of water with the machine-gun bullets inside them, “Oh,God,” looking for the holes оn the beach he has bееn told the Air Force was going to put there for him, and not finding them, and lying there face down, with the mortar shell dropping silently on the top of him, “Oh,God,” he sobs, seeing the friend he has loved since Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1940, blоw uр оn а mine and hang across а barbed-wire fеnсе with his back wide ореn from neck to hip, “Oh,God,” sobs the man on the scene, “ it is all screwed up.”

From The Man of Property by John Galsworthy

On reaching home, and entering the little lighted hall with his latchkey, the first thing that caught his eye was his wife's gold-mounted umbrella lying on the rug chest. Flinging off his fur coat, he hurried to the drawing-room. […]

"So you've come back?" he said. "Why are you sitting here in the dark?"

24

Then he caught sight of her face, so white and motionless that it seemed as though the blood must have stopped flowing in her veins; and her eyes, that looked enormous, like the great, wide, startled brown eyes of an owl.

Huddled in her grey fur against the sofa cushions, she had a strange resemblance to a captive owl, bunched in its soft feathers against the wires of a cage. The supple erectness of her figure was gone, as though she had been broken by cruel exercise; as though there were no longer any reason for being beautiful, and supple, and erect.

"So you've come back," he repeated.

She never looked up, and never spoke, the firelight playing over her motionless figure.

Suddenly she tried to rise, but he prevented her; it was then that he understood.

She had come back like an animal wounded to death, not knowing where to turn, not knowing what she was doing. The sight of her figure, huddled in the fur, was enough.

He knew then for certain that Bosinney had been her lover; knew that she had seen the report of his death – perhaps, like himself, had bought a paper at the draughty corner of a street, and read it.

From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front, and following the Argonne bat ties he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine-guns. After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now – there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy's letters. She didn't see why he couldn't come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside, and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

For Daisy was young and her artificial world vas redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of their ear, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the "Beale Street Blues" while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the gray tea hour there were always

25

rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately – and the decision must be made by some force – of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality – that was close at hand.

From Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Fog everywhere, fog up the river, where it flows among green meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollution of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of 5 collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his dose cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of to his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds...

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction,… ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

From The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Dear God,

Snug Avery is coming to town! She coming with her orkestra. She going to sing in the Lucky Star out on Coalman road. Mr. ___ going to hear her. He dress all up in front the glass, look at himself, then un-

26

dress and dress all, 5 over again. He slick back his hair with pomade, then wash it out again. He been spitting on his shoes and hitting it with a quick rag.

He tell me, Wash this. Iron that. Look for this. Look for that. Find this. Find that...

I move round darning and ironing, find hanskers. Anything happening? I ast.

What you rnean? he say, like he mad. Just trying to git some of the hick farmer off myself. Any other woman be glad.

I'm is glad, I say.

What you mean? he ast.

You looks nice, I say. Any woman be proud. You think so? he say...

From Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

"I HAVE SAVED HIM." It was not another of the dreams in which he had often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was upon her.

All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that many as blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now the dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued them, looking for him among the Condemned; and then she clung closer to his real presence and trembled more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this woman's weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking, no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the task he had set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let them all lean upon him.

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that was the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the people, but because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his imprisonment, had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and

27

partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant; the citizen and citizeness who acted as porters at the courtyard gate, rendered them occasional service; and Jerry (almost wholly transferred to them by Mr. Lorry) had become their daily retainer, and had his bed there every night.

From Death by Sherwood Anderson

On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor sat in the office and talked of their two lives they talked of other lives also.

[…]

Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's wife talked a little more freely and after an hour or two in his presence went down the stairway into Main Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the dullness of her days. With something approaching a girlhood swing to her body she walked along, but when she had got back to her chair by the window of her room and when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it grow cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she thought, expressed something she would have liked to have achieved in life.

In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of the hotel keeper began to weep and, putting her hands to her face, rocked back and forth. The words of her one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. "Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses."

From Sophistication by Sherwood Anderson

IT WAS EARLY evening of a day in, the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into

28

town. The day had been clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors.

In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the sidewalks. Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran madly about, children became lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself.

Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy's office and looked at the people. With feverish eyes he watched the faces drifting past under the store lights. Thoughts kept coming into his head and he did not want to think. He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply about. "Well, is she going to stay with him all day? Have I done all this waiting for nothing?" he muttered.

George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys. He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.

From Drink by Sherwood Anderson

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things, things about ugliness and crime and lust. Indeed, he knew more of these things than anyone else in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular had presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep impression on his mind. He thought, after what he had seen of the women standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex altogether out of his own life. One of the women

29

of the neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her. He never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of the woman. It sickened him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always before thought of women as quite innocent things, much like his grandmother, but after that one experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind. So gentle was his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to understand he decided to forget.

And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he had lived there for two years something began to stir in him. On all sides he saw youth making love and he was himself a youth. Before he knew what had happened he was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White, daughter of the man for whom he had worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.

That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way. He let himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and only concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight, a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was victorious.

From The Lion’s Skin by W.S. Maugham

Mrs Forestier was a very nice woman. Kindly people often say that of a woman when they can say nothing about her, and it has come to be looked upon as cold praise. I do not mean it as such. Mrs Forestier was neither charming, beautiful, nor intelligent; on the contrary she was absurd, homely and foolish; yet the more you knew her, the more you liked her, and when asked why, you found yourself forced to repeat that she was a very nice woman. She was as tall as the average man; she had a large mouth and a great hooked nose, pale-blue, short-sighted eyes, and big ugly hands. Her skin was lined and weather-beaten, but she made up heavily, and her hair, which she wore long, was dyed golden, tightly marcelled and elaborately dressed. She did everything she could to counteract the aggressive masculinity of her appearance, and succeeded only in looking like a vaudeville artist doing a female impersonation. Her voice was a woman’s voice, but you were always expecting her, at the end of the number as it were, to break into a deep bass, and tearing off that golden wig, discover a man’s bald pate. She spent a

30