THE FINAL DIAGNOSIS
by Arthur Hailey
"Oh, Dr Coleman! Do come in."
Kent O'Donnell got up courteously from his office desk as the young pathologist entered the room. David Coleman had been cleaning up after the dissection when the message from the chief of surgery had reached him.
"Sit down, won't you?" O'Donnell held out an engraved gold case. "Cigarette?"
"Thank you." Coleman took a cigarette and accepted the light O'Donnell offered. He leaned back, relaxed, in one of the leather armchairs. An instinct told him that what was to follow would be a turning point in his life.
O'Donnell moved behind the desk to the office window. He stood with his back to it, the morning sun behind him. "I imagine you've heard," he said, "that Dr Pearson has resigned."
"Yes, I'd heard." Coleman answered quietly, then to his own surprise he heard himself saying, "You know, of course, these past few days he hasn't spared himself. He's been here day and night."
"Yes, I know." O'Donnell regarded the glowing tip of his cigarette. "But it doesn't change anything. You realize that?"
Coleman knew that the chief of surgery was right. "No," he said, "I don't suppose it does."
"Joe has expressed a wish to leave at once," O'Donnell continued. "It means there will be an immediate vacancy here for a director of pathology. Shall you accept?"
For a second David Coleman hesitated. This was the thing he has coveted —a department of his own; freedom to reorganize, to mobilize the new aids of science, to practice good medicine, and to make pathology count as he knew it truly could. This was the cup he had sought. Kent O'Donnell had lifted it to his lips.
"Then fear struck him. Suddenly he was appalled at the awesome responsibility he would have to hold. It occurred to him there would be no one senior to relieve him of decisions; the ultimate choice— the final diagnosis—would be his alone. Could he face it? Was he yet ready? He was still young; if he chose, lie could continue as a second-in-command for several years more. After that there would be other openings—plenty of time to move ahead. Then he knew that there was no escaping, that this moment had been moving toward him since his own first arrival at Three Counties Hospital.
"Yes," he said. "If it's offered to me, I shall accept."
"I can tell you that it will be offered." O'Donnell smiled. He asked. "Would you tell me something?"
"If I can."
The chief of surgery paused. In his mind he was choosing the right phrases for the question he wanted to put. He sensed that what was to be said next would be important to them both. Finally he asked. "Will you tell me what your attitude is—to medicine and to this hospital?"
"It's hard to put into words," Coleman said.
"Will you try?"
David Coleman considered. It was true there were things he believed, but even to himself he had seldom expressed them. Now, perhaps, was a time for definition.
"I suppose the real thing," he said slowly, "is that all of us— physicians, the hospital, medical technology— exist only for one thing: for patients, for healing of the sick. I believe we forget this sometimes. I think we become absorbed in medicine, science, better hospitals; and we forget that all these things have only one reason for existence—people. People who need us, who come to medicine for help." He stopped. "I've put it clumsily."
"No," O'Donnell said, "you've put it very well." He had a sense of triumph and of hope. Instinct had not belied him: he had chosen well. He foresaw that the two of them—as chief of surgery and director of pathology—would be good together. They would go on and build and, with them. Three Counties would progress. Not all that they wrought would be perfect; it never was. " There would be flaws and failures, but at least their aims were the same, their feelings shared. They would have to remain close; Coleman was younger than himself, and there were areas in which O'Donnell's greater experience could be of help. In these past few weeks the chief of surgery himself had learned a good deal. He had learned that zeal could lead to complacency as surely as indifference, and that disaster could be reached by many routes. But from now on he would fight complacency on every front, and Pathology, with young Dr Coleman at its head, could be a stout right arm.
A thought occurred to him. He asked, "One more tiling. How do you feel about Joe Pearson and the way lie's leaving?"
"I'm not sure," David Coleman said. "I've been wishing I knew."
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by Charles Dickens
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on. Remembering then that the staircase lights were blown out, 1 took up my reading-lamp, and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
"There is some one down there, is there not?" I called out, looking down.
"Yes," said a voice from the darkness beneath.
"What floor do you want?"
"The top. Mr. Pip."
"That is my name. There is nothing the matter?"
"Nothing the matter," returned the voice. And the man came on.
I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant I had seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me.
Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially dressed, but roughly; like a voyager by sea.-That he had long iron-grey hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to me.
"Pray what is your business?" I asked him.
"My business?" he repeated, pausing. "Ah! I will explain my business, by your leave."
"Do you wish to come in?"
"Yes," he replied; "I wish to come in, Master. I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face. I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.
He looked about him with the strangest air—an air of wondering pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired—and he pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then I saw that his head was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-grey hair grew only on its sides. But I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the contrary, I saw him next moment once more holding out both his hands to me.
"What do you mean?" said I, half suspecting him to be mad.
He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over his head. "It's disappointing to a man," lie said in a coarse broken voice, "after having looked for'ard so distant, and come so fur; but you're not to blame for that—neither on us is to blame for that. I'll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please."
He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him attentively then, and recoiled a little from him, but I did not know him.
"There's no one nigh," said he, looking over his shoulder; "is there?"
"Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night, ask that question?" said I.
"You're a game one," he returned, shaking his head at me with a deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most exasperating: "I'm glad you've grow'd up a game one! But don't catch hold of me. You'd be sorry afterwards to have done it."
The painted Veil (1)
by W. Somerset Maugham
The little chapel, so ugly and vulgar, in its very crudeness was pathetic; it had something which was wanting in the greatness of a cathedral, with its stained glass and its pictures: it was very humble; and the faith which had adorned it, the affection which cherished it, had endued it with a delicate beauty of the soul. The methodical way in which the convent's work was carried on in the midst of the pestilence showed a coolness in the face of danger and a practical sense, almost ironical it was so matter of fact, which were deeply impressive. In Kitty's ears rang still the ghastly sounds she heard when for a moment Sister St Joseph opened the infirmary door.
It was unexpected the way they had spoken of Walter. First the Sister and then the Mother Superior herself, and the tone of her voice had been very gentle when she praised him. Oddly enough it gave her a little thrill of pride to know that they thought so well of him. Waddington also had told something of what Walter was doing; but it was not only his competence that the nuns praised (in Hong Kong she had known that he was thought clever), they spoke of his thoughtfulness and his tenderness. Of course he could be very tender. He was at his best when you were ill; he was too intelligent to exasperate, and his touch was pleasant, cool, and soothing. By some magic he seemed able by his mere presence to relieve your suffering. She knew that she would never see again in his eyes the look of affection which she had once been so used to that she found it merely exasperating. She knew now how immense was his capacity for loving; in some odd way he was pouring it out on these wretched sick who had only him to look to. She did not feel jealousy, but a sense of emptiness; it was as though a support that she had grown so accustomed to as not to realize its presence were suddenly withdrawn from her so that she swayed this way and that like a thing that was top-heavy.
She had only contempt for herself because once she had felt contempt for Walter. He must have known how she regarded him and he had accepted her estimate without bitterness. She was a fool and he knew it and because he loved her it had made no difference to him. She did not hate him now, nor feel resentment of him, but fear rather and perplexity. She could not but admit that he had remarkable qualities, sometimes she thought that there was even in him a strange and unattractive greatness; it was curious then that she could not love him, but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her. After thinking, thinking, all through those long days she rated accurately Charles Townsend's value; he was a common fellow and his qualities were second-rate. If she could only tear from her heart the love that still lingered there! She tried not to think of him. Waddington too thought highly of Walter. She alone had been blind to his merit. Why? Because he loved her and she did not love him. What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you? But Waddington had confessed that he did not like Walter. Men didn't. It was easy to see that those two nuns had for him a feeling which was very like affection. He was different with women; notwithstanding his shyness you felt in him an exquisite kindliness.
The painted Veil (2)
by W. Somerset Maugham
BUT after all it was the nuns that had most deeply touched her. Sister St Joseph, with her merry face and apple-red cheeks; she had been one of the little band that came out to China with the Mother Superior ten years before and she had seen one after another of her companions die of disease, privations, and homesickness; and yet she remained cheerful and happy.) What was it that gave her that naive and charming humour? And the Mother Superior. Kitty in fancy stood again in her presence and once more she felt humble and ashamed. Though she was so simple and unaffected she had a native dignity which inspired awe, and you could not imagine that any one could treat her without respect. Sister St Joseph by the way she stood, by every small gesture and the intonation of her answers, had shown the deep submission in which she held herself; and Waddington, frivolous and impertinent, had shown by his tone that he was not quite at his ease. Kitty thought it unnecessary to have told her that the Mother Superior belonged to one of the great families of France; there was that in her bearing which suggested ancient race, and she had the authority of one who has never known that it is possible to be disobeyed. She had the condescension of a great lady and the humility of a saint. There was in her strong, handsome, and ravaged face an austerity that was passionate; and at the same time she had a solicitude and a gentleness which permitted those little children to cluster, noisy and unafraid, in the assurance of her deep affection. When she had looked at the four new-born babies she had worn a smile that was sweet and yet profound: it was like a ray of sunshine on a wild and desolate heath. What Sister St Joseph had said so carelessly of Walter moved Kitty strangely; she knew that he had desperately wanted her to bear a child, but she had never suspected from his reticence that he was capable with a baby of showing without embarrassment a charming and playful tenderness. Most men were silly and awkward with babies. How strange he was!
But to all that moving experience there had been a shadow (a dark lining to the silver cloud), insistent and plain, which disconcerted her. In the sober gaiety of Sister St Joseph, and much more in the beautiful courtesy of the Mother Superior, she had felt an aloofness which oppressed her. They were friendly and even cordial, but at the same time they held something back, she knew not what, so that she was conscious that she was nothing but a casual stranger. There was a barrier between her and them. They spoke a different language not only of the tongue but of the heart. And when the door was closed upon her she felt that they had put her out of their minds so completely, going about their neglected work again without delay, that for them she might never have existed. She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her soul she hankered. She felt on a sudden alone as she had never felt alone before. That was why she hid wept.
And now, throwing back her head wearily, she sighed:
"Oh, I'm so worthless."
The Picture of Dorian Grey (1)
by Oscar Wilde
"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself—"murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden. And to-night I am to dine with you, and then go on to the Opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose, afterwards. How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I should have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? Oh, Harry, how I loved her once! It seems years ago to me now. She was everything to me. Then came that dreadful night—was it really only last night?—when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible. I said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong. And now she is dead. My God! my God! Harry, what shall I do? You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her."
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case, and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. If you had married this girl you would have been wretched. Of course you would have treated her kindly. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, I would not have allowed, but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure."
"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room, and looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty. It is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right. I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were."
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him, "why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I don't think I am heartless. Do you?"
"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry, with his sweet, melancholy smile.
The Picture of Dorian Grey (3)
by Oscar Wilde
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before— and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped—blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up, and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? ... No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognised that now.
But this murder—was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself—that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without hideous warnings he would be at peace. He sized the thing, stabbed the picture with it.
BLEAK HOUSE
by Charles Dickens
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of 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 close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little apprentice 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.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets "are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
On such an afternoon, if ever, Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here — as here he is - with a foggy -glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be — as here they are — mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee- deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it! This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might, the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which so exhausts finances patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give - who does not often give - the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"
AMERICANS IN ITALY. MR. EGLANTINE.
by Sinclair Lewis
Mr. Vernon Eglantine is thin and rather tall and as respectable looking as an English muffin. He resembles a professor in a five-elm college, and that is what he was until that slight misconception of his interest in a girl student, when the college president is said to have him chased down the steps of Old Main and halfway to the library. Since then, he has prepared house organs for large and robust Cleveland farms, written verse for greeting cards, and translated scandalous novels from languages he does not quite understand into English, which you'd better not understand. And for thirty years he has been a veteran of American artistic colonies in Europe, along with his latest wife, Mitzi, who is jolly and has large amounts of black hair, not often washed. Verny and Mitzi are usually shaky from ten a. m., when they rise till ten-ten, when they have their first cognac.
They were insiders in the good old days of the Left Bank in Paris. Ten thousand Americans lived in Paris then and had their own bars and restaurants and newspapers. There Verny added to his literary art and the art of sponging. His speciality was getting the names of rich new American arrivals from the local papers, calling on these innocents to ask, with all his skinny and storklike solemnity, about a hypothetical uncle back home, and gratefully inviting the tenderfoot of the boulevards out to a fat lunch. Good old Mitzi always just happened to drop in at the restaurant and she got invited too.
Sometimes, with Verny's bright conversation and hints of how to see in Paris what could not be seen, the lunch was good for a hundred-dollar touch, so thankful was the cultural sucker at having this new friend to show him the soft and dusky underside of Paris. Sometimes it was only twenty-five — and a dollar and a half accepted cheerfully. Anyway, it was always a lunch — enough sordid solid sustenance to last the Eglantines for two days, so that they could reserve their cash for the more necessary provender of grappa and brandy.
When the magnificent luncheon bill was reverently borne in, on silver, Verny as host would look at it yawningly, and do a skilled and professional fumble. Oh! He had left his purse at home! Never mind; they knew and loved him here in this brocaded restaurant, they'd take his check. And he would actually, with the slow art of the old master, bring out a real check book, but what do you think? All the checks had been used up.
Sometimes the Eglantines had a quarter of an hour of warm pleasure in watching the downfall of the sucker, who ten days before had been a canny banker or salesman back home. Sometimes, it was only five sly, exquisite minutes. But always, finally, the sucker paid for the lunch. Except that the Eglantines made it a principle that if he had "lent" them, as it was called, over seventy-five dollars, they themselves would pay out of the fistful of paper francs which Mitzi carried in her greasy black and gold handbag.
They felt that they were spiritually soiled by having thus to associate with American businessmen, but they made up for it in their wonderful permanent friends of the Latin Quarter cafes: women with faces like athletic young men, young men with faces like petulant girls, and all the geniuses who for ten years now had been writing a non-objective free-verse play about Edgar Allan Poe. (After 1946, this play, all the hundred lines of it so far written, would be turned into an existentialist drama with Lord Haw Haw as the hero.)
The Picture of Dorian Grey (2)
by Oscar Wilde
As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back. No; there was no further change in the picture. It had received the news of Sybil Vaine's death before he had known of it himself. It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. The vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. Or was it indifferent to results? Did it merely take cognisance of what passed within the soul? He wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it.
Poor Sibyl! what a romance it had all been! She had often mimicked death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her, and taken her with him. How had she played that dreadful last scene? Had she cursed him, as she died? No; she had died for love of him, and love would always be a sacrament to him now. She had atoned for everything, by the sacrifice she had made of her life. He would not think any more of what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the theatre. When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent onto the world's stage to show the supreme reality of Love. A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look and winsome fanciful ways and shy tremulous grace. He brushed them away hastily, and looked again at the picture.
He felt that the time had really come for making his choice. Or had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for him—life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins— he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.
A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. Was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? The pity of it! the pity of it!
For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease. It had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. And yet, who, that knew anything about Life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? Besides, was it really under his control? Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely into it?
THE SEVERED HEAD
by Iris Murdoch
I was lying on the big sofa at Hereford Square reading Napier's History of the Peninsular War and wondering whether Georgie's incense was going to give me asthma. A bright fire of coal and wood was glowing and murmuring in the grate, and intermittent lamps lit with a soft gold the long room which, even in winter, by some magic of Antonia's, contrived to smell of roses. A large number of expensive Christmas cards were arrayed on the piano; while upon the walls dark evergreens tied into various clever sprays and Joined together by long dropping swags of red and silver ribbon, further proclaimed the season. Antonia's decorations combined a traditional gaiety with the restrained felicity which marked all her domestic arrangements.
I had just come back from Georgie's and was still alone. I. had lied to Georgie about the time of Antonia's return - her session with Palmer was not due to end until six - so as to have an interval of quiet before the storm of excited chatter which would undoubtedly follow. Antonia always arrived back from Palmer's house in a state of restless elation. I had supposed, and one is often complacently led to believe by persons undergoing such treatment, that a psycho-analysis is a grim and humiliating affair; but in the case of my wife, analysis seemed to produce euphoria and even, self-satisfaction. At peace with the world and with myself I breathed the quiet air, lying relaxed and warm in the bright multi-coloured shell which Antonia and I had created, where silk and silver and rosewood, dark mahogany and muted gilt blended sweetly together against a background of Bellini green. I sipped the frosted fragrant Martini which I had just prepared for both of us and thought myself, I dare say. The luckiest of men. Indeed at that moment I was happy with an idle thoughtless happiness which was never to come, with that particular quality of a degenerate innocence, ever in my life again.
I was just looking at my watch, wondering whether she was late, when Antonia appeared in the doorway. Usually when she entered she took possession of a room, gliding immediately to the center of it, and even, with people she knew well, turning about as if to fill all the crannies and corners with her presence. But tonight, already so marked as unusual, she stayed at the door, as if afraid to enter, or as if conscious other entrance as dramatic. There she stood wide-eyed, her hand upon the door handle, staring at me in a disconcerting way. I noticed too that she had not changed her clothes, but was still wearing the striped silk blouse and cinnamon-coloured skirt which she had had on in the morning. Normally Antonia put on different clothes three or four times in a day.
"You haven't changed, my love.” I said, sitting up. I was still in the slow old world. 'What is it? You look a bit bothered. Come and have your drink and tell me all about it.” I laid Napier aside.
Antonia came in now, moving in a slow deliberate heavy-footed way and keeping her eyes fixed on me. I wondered if she had seen something, which I had missed in the evening papers, some account of a distant cataclysm, or of some accident to an acquaintance, either of which might be announced to me with a certain portentous interest. She sat down at the far end of the sofa, still watching me with a tense unsmiling look. 1 tinkled the long glass rod in the cocktail jug and poured her out a Martini.
“What is it, darling? Has there been an earthquake in China or have you been arrested for speeding?”
“Wait a minute.” said Antonia. Her voice sounded thick, almost as if she were drunk. She was taking slow deep breaths, like someone collecting his powers.
I said sharply. “What's the matter, Antonia? Has something had happened?”
“Yes.” said Antonia. “Wait a minute. Sorry.”
She sipped her drink and then poured the rest of it into my glass. I realized that she was inarticulate with emotion.
'For God's sake, Antonia,' I said, beginning to be thoroughly alarmed. 'Whatever is it?'
'Sorry. Martin.' said Antonia. 'Sorry. Wait a minute. Sorry.'
LOVE IS ETERNAL
by irving stone
the house was a blaze of light, the satin draperies of the front parlor and family sitting room having been opened and the hanging crystals sparkling from each of the six lighted lamps of the embossed brass chandeliers. In the front and back parlors the tufted green brocade sofas had been pushed against the walls on either side of the fireplace.
Mary walked up the four stone steps that led off the carriage drive and entered the wide front door with its hand-carved panels. In spite of the underlying tension between them, Mary had a deep-rooted respect for her stepmother, Betsy Humphreys Todd. She recalled her saying: "It takes seven generations to make a lady." Mary had to concede that this home and garden were the creations of a lady of taste, doubly so since it had originally been William Palmateer's tavern which Robert Todd had bought at a bankruptcy proceeding. Betsy had converted the spacious brick building into a charming town house with twelve-foot ceilings, the doors set in molded frames, fireplaces with carved woo mantels in each of the downstairs rooms as well as the bedrooms above.
As she had a dozen times between the age of eight, after her father had remarried, and her present age of twenty, Mary asked herself, Might we have loved each other if Grandma Parker had not set us children against her? For years Betsy lived in an aura of not being wanted. Could that not make her look forward to the day when we would be married ... and gone? Betsy would not come downstairs tonight; she had not yet recovered from the birth of her sixth child, but Mary knew that this was not the real reason. She was remaining upstairs to give Mary the full pleasure of being hostess at her own party.
She heard the musicians tuning up in the back parlor, from which the green velvet chairs had been moved into the hall, along with the carved cherrywood sofa. Reuben, Henry and George, the famous trio that belonged to Colonel Graham and played for the summer season at Graham Springs, were tuning their violin and guitar to the notes of the pianoforte. She bade them welcome, then indicated the number of the newly fashionable waltzes she wanted interspersed among the cotillions, round dances and reels.
"I think it might be amusing to start with a grand march, as though we were an enormous ball at Monsieur Giron's."
"We ready to strike up any time you say. Miss Todd."
There was the sound of a lone horseman riding up to the front door. She heard Sandy McDonald's voice.
McDonald was of medium height, with sand-colored hair and eyes, and a sandy complexion with a myriad of freckles, a few of which spilled down from his cheeks onto his lips. His coloring and his Scotch ancestry had gained him the name of Sandy; only the registrar at Transylvania University knew that his Christian name was Thomas.
"Good evening. Sandy. My, but you look resplendent in that new buff waistcoat and powder-blue coat."
"Made specially for your party, ma'am. Also to take back with me to Mississippi. I'll be the green-eyed envy of every man in the county."
It was now ten o'clock, and the open carriages began rolling into the driveway from Main Street. The first to arrive was her good friend Margaret Wickliffe, wearing a light blue antique moiré and her mother's diamond earrings. With her was her fiance. William Preston, who had recently been admitted to the bar in Louisville. Next came Isabella Bodley. dressed in heavy white silk, the shirt trimmed with ermine and rows of scarlet bands embroidered in gold. Isabella had boarded with Mary at Madame Mentelle's finishing school from the time they were fourteen until they were eighteen. Her escort was a young French student, Jacques Barye. Catherine Trotter, another former school friend, had just returned from a visit to New Orleans and had her hair piled high on top other head in the Creole fashion, wearing wild-rose skirts almost twelve feet in circumference. Margaret Stuart, her cousin, arrived with young Thomas Crittenden; the youngest of the three daughters of Dr. Elisha Warfield, the Todd family physician, was escorted by Robert Wickliffe. Most of the young men were Transylvania University students.
The Catcher in the Rye (2)
J.D.Sellinger
Finally I sat down on this bench, where it wasn't so goddam dark. Boy, I was still shivering like a bastard, and the back of my hair, even though I had my hunting hat on, was sort of full of little hunks of ice. That worried me. I thought probably I'd get pneumonia and die. I started picturing millions of jerks coming to my funeral and all. My grandfather from Detroit, that keeps calling out the numbers of the streets when you ride on a goddam bus with him, and my aunts — I have about fifty aunts — and all my lousy cousins. What a mob'd be there. They all came when Allie died, the whole goddam stupid bunch of them. I have this one stupid aunt with halitosis that kept saying how peacefu\ he looked lying there, D.B. told me. I wasn't there. I was still in the hospital. I had to go to the hospital and all after I hurt my hand. Anyway, I kept worrying that I was getting pneumonia, with all those hunks of ice in my hair, and that I was going to die. I felt sorry as hell for my mother and father. Especially my mother, because she still isn't over my brother Allie yet. I kept picturing her not knowing what to do with all my suits and athletic equipment and all. The only good thing, I knew she wouldn't let old Phoebe come to my goddam funeral because she was only a little kid. That was the only good part. Then I thought about the whole bunch of them sticking me in a goddam cemetery and all, with my name on this tombstone and all. Surrounded by dead guys. Boy, when you're dead, they really fix you up.' I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.
When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I certainly don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice — twice— we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner — everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wish he wasn't there. You didn't know him. If you'd known him, you'd know what I mean. It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.
After a while, just to get my mind off getting pneumonia and all, I took out my dough and tried to count it in the lousy light from the street lamp. All I had was three singles and five quarters and a nickel left - boy, I spent a fortune since I left Pencey. Then what I did, I went down near the lagoon and I sort of skipped the quarters and the nickel across it, where it wasn't frozen. I don't know why I did it, but I did it. I guess I thought it'd take my mind off getting pneumonia and dying. It didn't, though.
THE PORTRAIT of a LADY
by Henry James
Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the 'intellectual' superior. Mrs. Keyes, the second of the group, was the wife of an officer of the United States Engineers, and as our history is not further concerned with her it will suffice that she was indeed very pretty and that she formed the ornament of those various military stations, chiefly in the unfashionable West, to which, to her deep chagrin, her husband was successively relegated. Lilian had married a New York lawyer, a young man with a loud voice and an enthusiasm for his profession; the match was not brilliant, any more than Edith's, but Lilian had occasionally been spoken of as a young woman who might be thankful to marry at all - she was so much plainer than her sisters. She was, however, very happy, and now, as the mother of two peremptory little boys and the mistress of a wedge of brown stone violently driven into Fifty-third Street, seemed to exult in her condition as in a bold escape. She was short and solid, and her claim to figure was questioned, but she was conceded presence, though not majesty; she had moreover, as people said, improved since her marriage, and the two things in life of which she was most distinctly conscious were her husband's force in argument and her sister Isabel's originality. 'I've never kept up with Isabel - it would have taken all my time,' she had often remarked; in spite of which, however, she held her rather wistfully in sight; watching her as a motherly spaniel might watch a free greyhound. 'I want to see her safely married - that's what I want to see,' she frequently noted to her husband.
'Well, I must say I should have no particular desire to marry her,' Edmund Ludlow was accustomed to answer in an extremely audible tone.
'I know you say that for argument: you always take the opposite ground. I don't see what you've against her except that she's so original.'
'Well, I don't like originals: I like translations.' Mr Ludlow had more than once replied. "Isabel's written in a foreign tongue. I can't make her out. She ought to marry an Armenian or a Portuguese.'
'That's just what I'm afraid she'll do!' cried Lilian, who thought Isabel capable of anything.
She listened with great interest to the girl's account of Mrs Touchett's appearance and in the evening prepared to comply with their aunt's commands. Of what Isabel then said no report has remained, but her sister's words had doubtless prompted a word spoken to her husband as the two were making ready for their visit. 'I do hope immensely she'll do something handsome for Isabel; she has evidently taken a great fancy to her.'
'What is it you wish her to do?' Ldmund Ludlow asked. 'Make her a big present?'
'No indeed; nothing of the sort. But take an interest in her -sympathize with her. She's evidently just the sort of person to appreciate her. She has lived so much in foreign society; she told Isabel all about it. You know you've always thought Isabel rather foreign.'
'You want her to give her a little foreign sympathy, eh? Don't you think she gets enough at home?'
'Well, she ought to go abroad,' said Mrs Ludlow. 'She's just the person to go abroad.'
'And you want the old lady to take her, is that it?'
'She has offered to take her - she's dying to have Isabel go. But what I want her to do when she gets her there is to give her all the advantages. I'm sure all we've got to do,' said Mrs Ludlow, 'is to give her a chance.'
'A chance for what?'
'A chance to develop.'
'Oh Moses!' Edmund Ludlow exclaimed. '1 hope she isn't going to develop any more!'
'It'1 were not sure you only said that for argument I should feel very badly,' his wife replied. 'But you know you love her.'
'Do you know I love you?' the young man said. jocosely, to Isabel a little later, while he brushed his hat.
The time machine
byH.G. Wells.
"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and snowed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it's sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday; but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a. suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three! "I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting level with both hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in, and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion!' I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed, and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but 1 was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness: the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space, the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in (lie blue.
"The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green: they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes. The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun-bell swayed up and down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that, consequently, my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the white snow Hashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring.
" The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical
The catcher in the Rye (1)
by J.D. Salinger
I forgot to tell you about that. They kicked me out. I wasn't supposed to come back after Christmas vacation, on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all. They gave me frequent warning to start applying myself — especially around midterms, when my parents came up for a conference with old Thurmer — but I didn't do it. So I got the ax.' They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey. It has a very good academic rating, Pencey. It really does.
Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a witch's teat, especially on top of that stupid hill. I only had on my reversible and no gloves or anything. The week before that, somebody'd stolen my camel's-hair coat right out of my room, with my fur-lined gloves right in the pocket and all. Pencey was full of crooks. Quite a few guys came from these very wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding. Anyway, I kept standing next to that crazy cannon, looking down at the game and freezing my ass off. Only, I wasn't watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse.
I was lucky. All of a sudden I thought of something that helped make me know I was getting the hell out. I suddenly remembered this time, in around October, that I and Robert Tichener and Paul Campbell were chucking a football a around, in front of the academic building. They were nice guys, especially Tichener. It was just before dinner and it was getting pretty dark out, but we kept chucking the ball around anyway. It kept getting darker and darker, and we could hardly see the ball any more, but we didn't want to stop doing what we were doing. Finally we had to. This teacher that taught biology, Mr. Zambesi, stuck his head out of this window in academic building and told us to go back to the dorm I get ready for dinner. If I get a chance to remember that kind of stuff, I can get a good-by when I need one - at least, most of the time I can. As soon as I got it, I turned around and started running down the other side of the hill, toward old Spencer's house. He didn't live on the campus. He lived on Anthony Wayne Avenue.
I ran all the way to the main gate, and then I waited a second till I got my breath. I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I'm quite a heavy smoker, for one thing — that is, I used to be. They made me cut it out. Another thing, I grew six and a half inches last year. That's also how I practically got t.b. and came out here for all these goddam checkups and stuff. I'm pretty healthy, though.
Anyway, as soon as I got my breath back I ran across Route 204. It was icy as hell and I damn near fell down. I don't even know what I was running for - I guess I just felt like it. After I got across the road I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.
Catherine Mansfield
THE SINGING LESSON
With despair - cold, sharp despair - buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife, Miss Meadows, in cap and gown and earning a little baton, trod the cold corridors that led to the music hall. Girls of all ages, rosy from the air, and bubbling over with that gleeful excitement that comes from running to school on a fine autumn morning, hurried, skipped, fluttered by; from the hollow classrooms came a quick drumming of voices; a bell rang; a voice like a bird cried, "Muriel." And then there came from the staircase a tremendous knock-knock-knock-ing. Someone had dropped her dumbbells.
The Science Mistress stopped Miss Meadows. "'Good mor-ning," she cried, in her sweet, affected drawl. "Isn't it cold? It might be winter." Miss Meadows, hugging the knife, stared in hatred at the Science Mistress. Everything about her was sweet, pale, like honey. You would not have been surprised to see a bee caught in the tangles of that yellow hair. "It is rather sharp," said Miss Meadows, grimly. The other smiled her sugary smile. "You look frozen," said she. Her blue eyes opened wide; there came a mocking light in hem. (Had she noticed anything?) "Oh, not quite as bad as that," said Miss Meadows, and she gave the Science Mistress, in exchange for her smile, a quick grimace and passed on...
Forms Four, Five, and Six were assembled in the music hall. The noise was deafening. On the platform, by the piano, stood Mary Beazley, Miss Meadows' favorite, who played accompaniments. She was turning the music stool. When she saw Miss Meadows she gave a loud, warning "Sh-sh! girls!" and Miss Meadows, her lands thrust in her sleeves, the baton under her arm, strode down the center aisle, mounted the steps, turned sharply, seized the brass music stand, planted it in front of her, and gave two sharp taps with her baton for silence.
"Silence, please! Immediately!" and, looking at nobody, her glance swept over that sea of colored flannel blouses, with bobbing pink faces and hands, quivering butterfly hair bows, and music books outspread. She knew perfectly well what they were thinking. "Meady is in a wax." Well, let them think it! Her eyelids quivered; she tossed her head, defying them. What could the thoughts of those creatures matter to someone who stood there bleeding to death, pierced to the heart, to the heart, by such a letter -
"I feel more and more strongly that our marriage would be a mistake. Not that I do not love you. I love you as much as it is possible for me to love any woman, but, truth to tell, I have come to the conclusion that I am lot a marrying man, and the idea of settling down fills me with nothing but - and the word "disgust" was scratched out lightly and "regret" written over the top.
Basil! Miss Meadows stalked over to the piano. And Mary Beazley, who was waiting for this moment, bent forward; her curls fell over her cheeks while she breathed, "Good morning, Miss Meadows", and she motioned toward rather than handed to her mistress a beautiful yellow chrysanthemum. This little ritual of the flower had been gone through for ages and ages, quite a term and a half. It was as much part of the lesson as opening the piano. But this morning, instead of taking it up, instead of tucking it into her belt while she leaned over Mary and said, "Thank you, Mary. How very nice! Turn to page thirty-two," what was Mary's horror when Miss Meadows totally ignored the chrysanthemum, made no reply to her greeting, but said in a voice of ice, "Page fourteen, please, and mark the accents well."
Graham Greene
DOCTOR FISHER OF GENEVA
Now that I'm alone in this flat I try to remember the happiness we shared before that first party with Toads. But how does one convey happiness? Unhappiness we can easily describe - I was unhappy, we say, because... We remember this and that, giving good reasons, but happiness is like one of those islands far out in the Pacific which has been reported by sailors when it emerges from the haze where no cartographer has ever marked it. This island disappears again for a generation, but no navigator can be quite certain that it only existed in the imagination of some long-dead lookout. I tell myself over and over again how happy I was in those weeks, but when I search my head for the reason I can find nothing adequate to explain my happiness.
Is there happiness in a sexual embrace? Surely not. That is an excitement, a kind of delirium, and sometimes it is close to pain. Is happiness simply the sound of a quiet breath on the pillow beside me, or kitchen noises in the evening when I returned from work and read the Journal de Geneve in our only easy chair? We could have well afforded a second chair, but somehow we never had the time to find one in those weeks, and when finally we bought it in Vevey - and a dishwasher too which substituted the noise of an engine room for the cheerful clangour of a human washing-up - the island of great happiness had been lost already in the haze.
The approaching menace of Doctor Fisher's party had come between us by the time and it filled our silences. A darker shadow than an angel passed over our heads. Once at the end of some long pause I spoke my thoughts aloud: "I think I'll write to him after all and tell him I can't come. I'll say..."
"What?"
"We are taking a holiday, IT1 say - on the only date the firm will allow me."
"People don't take holidays in November."
"Then I'll write that you are not well and I can't leave you."
"He knows that I'm as strong as a horse."
And that in a way was true, but the horse must have been a thoroughbred, which I believe always needs a great deal of care. She was slim and fine-boned. I liked to touch her cheek-bones and the curve of her skull. Her strength showed mainly in her small wrists which were as strong as whipcord: she could always open a screw-jar which foxed me.
"Better not," she said. "You were right to accept and I was wrong. If you call it off now, you will think you are a coward and never forgive yourself. After all, it's only one party. He can't hurt us really. You aren't Mr. Kips and you aren't rich and we don't depend on him. You need never go to another."
"I certainly won't," I said and I believed it. All the same the date was approaching fast.
Jack London
THE CALL OF THE WILD
It was inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck wanted it. He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace-that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness. This was the pride of Dave as wheel-dog, of Sol-leks as he pulled with all his strength; the pride that laid hold of them at break of camp, transforming them from sour and sullen brutes into straining, eager, ambitious creatures; the pride that spurred them on all day and dropped them at pitch of camp at fight, letting them fall back into gloomy unrest and uncontent. This was the pride that bore up Spitz and made him thrash the sled -dogs who blundered and shirked in the traces or hid away at harness-up time in the morning. Likewise it was this pride that made him fear Buck as a possible lead-dog. And this was Buck's pride, too.
He openly threatened the other's leadership. He came between him and the shirks he should have punished. And he did it deliberately. One night there was a heavy snowfall, and in the morning Pike, the malingerer, did not appear. He was securely hidden in his nest under a foot of snow. Francois called him and sought him in vain. Spitz was wild with wrath. He raged through the camp, smelling and digging in every likely place, snarling so frightfully that Pike heard and shivered in his hiding-place.
But when he was at last unearthed, and Spitz flew at him to punish him, Buck flew, with equal rage, in between. So unexpected was it, and so shrewdly managed, that Spitz was hurled backward and off his feet. Pike, who had been trembling abjectly, took hart at his open mutiny, and sprang upon his overthrown leader, Buck, to home fairplay was a forgotten code, likewise sprang upon Spitz. But Francois, chuckling at the incident while unswerving in the administration of justice, brought his lash down upon Buck with all his might. This failed to drive Buck from his prostrate rival, and the butt of the whip was brought into play. Half stunned by the blow, Buck was knocked backward and the lash laid him again and again, while Spitz soundly punished the many times offending Pike.
In the days that followed, as Dawson grew closer and closer, Buck still continued to interfere between Spitz and the culprits; but he did it craftily, when Francois was not around. With the covert mutiny of Buck, a general insubordination sprang up and increased. Dave and Sol-leks were unaffected, but the rest of the team went from bad to worth. Things no longer went right. There was continual bickering and jangling. Trouble was always afoot, and at the bottom of it was Buck. He kept Francois busy, for the dog-driver was in constant apprehension of the life-and-death struggle between the two which he knew must take place sooner or later; and on more than one night the sounds of quarrelling and strife among the other dogs turned him out of his sleeping robe, fearful that Buck and Spitz were at it.
But the opportunity did not present itself, and they pulled into Dawson one dreary afternoon with the great fight still to come.
Virginia Woolf
THE NEW DRESS
Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs. Brnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion - that it was not right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking glass hung and looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction - the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people - set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking - "What's Mabel wearing? What a right she looks! What a hideous new dress!" - their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean, water- sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive: and her own drawing room so shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as she touched the letters on the hall table and said, "How dull!" to show off- all this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into Mrs. Dalloway's drawing room.
What she had thought that evening when sitting over the teacups, Mrs. Dalloway's invitation came, was that, of course, she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend even – fashion meant cut, meant style, mean thirty guineas at least—but why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And, getting up, she had taken that old fashion book of her mother's, a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire, and had thought how much prettier, more dignified, and more womanly the were then, and so set herself- oh, it was foolish - trying to be like them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest and old-fashioned and very charming, giving herself up, no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.
But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror - the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with it long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker's dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.
"But, my dear, it's perfectly charming!" Rose Shaw said, looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she; expected - Rose herself being dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like everybody else, always.
We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books she had read ages ago, suddenly came to her when she was in agony, and she repeated them over and over again. "Flies trying to crawl," she repeated.
Jonathan Swift
GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
It is the custom that every Wednesday (which, as I have before observed, was their Sabbath) the King and, Queen, with the royal issue of both sexes, dine together in the apartment of his Majesty, to whom I was now become a great favourite; and at these times my little chair and table were placed at his left hand, before one of the saltcellars. This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, inquiring into the manners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgement so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said- But, I confess, that after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state, the prejudices of his education prevailed so far, that he could not forbear taking me up in his right hand, and stroking me gently with the other, after an hearty fit of laughing, asked me whether I were a Whig or a Tory. Then turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff, near as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I: and yet, said he, I dare engage, these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honour, they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray. And thus he continued on, while my colour came and went several times with indignation to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honour and truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated.
But as I was not in a condition to resent injuries, so, upon mature thoughts, I began to doubt whether I were injured or no. For, after having been accustomed several months to the sight and converse of this people, and observed every object upon which I cast my eyes to be of proportionable magnitude, the horror I had first conceived from their bulk and aspect was so far worn off, that if I had then beheld a company of English lords and ladies in their finery and birth-day clothes, acting their several parts in the most tourtly manner, of strutting, and bowing, and prating, to say the truth, I should have been strongly tempted to laugh as much at them as the King and his grandees did at me. Neither indeed could I forbear smiling at myself, when the Queen used to place me upon her hand towards a looking-glass, by which both our persons appeared before me in full view together: and there could be nothing more ridiculous than the comparison; so that I really began to imagine myself dwindled many degrees below my usual size.
James Joyce
ARABY
Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlor watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which 1 myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration.
At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.
What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night.
When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. When I came downstairs again I found Mrs. Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old garrulous woman, a pawnbroker's widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs. Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn't wait any longer, but it was after eight o'clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists.
At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the hall door. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. 1 could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten. 'The people are in bed and after their first sleep now." he said.
I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically: "Can't you give him the money and let him go? You've kept him late enough as it is."
My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. He asked me where I was going and, when 1 had told him a second time he asked me did I know The Arab's Farewell to His Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.