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英美短篇小说赏析
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2015/3/2
茆卫彤 编
目录
The Chaser ................................................................................................ 3
The Open Window .................................................................................... 7
A Shocking Accident ................................................................................ 11
Mr. Know All ............................................................................................ 17
My Father Sits in the Dark ...................................................................... 24
The Far and the Near .............................................................................. 30
The Tell-Tale Heart.................................................................................. 34
The Standard of Living ............................................................................ 39
Harrison Bergeron................................................................................... 46
The Lady or the Tiger? ............................................................................ 54
The Lottery.............................................................................................. 60
The Story of An Hour .............................................................................. 69
Hills like White Elephants ....................................................................... 73
Going Home ............................................................................................ 80
2
The Chaser
John Collier
Alan Austen, as nervous as a kitten, went up certain dark and creaky stairs
in the neighborhood of Pell Street, and peered about for a long time on the dim
landing before he found the name he wanted written obscurely on one of the
doors.
He pushed open this door, as he had been told to do, and found himself in a
tiny room, which contained no furniture but a plain kitchen table, a rocking-chair,
and an ordinary chair. On one of the dirty buff-colored walls were a couple of
shelves, containing in all perhaps a dozen bottles and jars.
An old man sat in the rocking-chair, reading a newspaper. Alan, without a
word, handed him the card he had been given. “Sit down, Mr. Austen,” said the
old man very politely. “I am glad to make your acquaintance.”
“Is it true,” asked Alan, “that you have a certain mixture that
has—er—quite extraordinary effects?”
“My dear sir,” replied the old man, “my stock in trade is not very large—I
don’t deal in laxatives and teething mixtures—but such as it is, it is varied. I think
nothing I sell has effects which could be precisely described as ordinary.”
“Well, the fact is—” began Alan.
“Here, for example,” interrupted the old man, reaching for a bottle from the
shelf. “Here is a liquid as colorless as water, almost tasteless, quite imperceptible
in coffee, wine, or any other beverage. It is also quite imperceptible to any known
method of autopsy.”
“Do you mean it is a poison?” cried Alan, very much horrified.
“Call it a glove-cleaner if you like,” said the old man indifferently. “Maybe
it will clean gloves. I have never tried. One might call it a life-cleaner. Lives need
cleaning sometimes.”
“I want nothing of that sort,” said Alan.
“Probably it is just as well,” said the old man. “Do you know the price of
this? For one teaspoonful, which is sufficient, I ask five thousand dollars. Never
less. Not a penny less.”
3
“I hope all your mixtures are not as expensive,” said Alan apprehensively.
“Oh dear, no,” said the old man. “It would be no good charging that sort of
price for a love potion, for example. Young people who need a love potion very
seldom have five thousand dollars. Otherwise they would not need a love potion.”
“I am glad to hear that,” said Alan.
“I look at it like this,” said the old man. “Please a customer with one article,
and he will come back when he needs another. Even if it is more costly. He will
save up for it, if necessary.”
“So,” said Alan, “you really do sell love potions?”
“If I did not sell love potions,” said the old man, reaching for another bottle,
“I should not have mentioned the other matter to you. It is only when one is in a
position to oblige that one can afford to be so confidential.”
“And these potions,” said Alan. “They are not just—just—er—”
“Oh, no,” said the old man. “Their effects are permanent, and extend far
beyond casual impulse. But they include it. Bountifully, insistently.
Everlastingly.”
“Dear me!” said Alan, attempting a look of scientific detachment. "How
very interesting!”
“But consider the spiritual side,” said the old man.
“I do, indeed,” said Alan.
“For indifference,” said the old man, “they substitute devotion. For scorn,
adoration. Give one tiny measure of this to the young lady—its flavor is
imperceptible in orange juice, soup, or cocktails—and however gay and giddy she
is, she will change altogether. She will want nothing but solitude, and you.”
“I can hardly believe it,” said Alan. “She is so fond of parties.”
“She will not like them any more,” said the old man. “She will be afraid of
the pretty girls you may meet.”
“She will actually be jealous?” cried Alan in a rapture. “Of me?”
4
“Yes, she will want to be everything to you.”
“She is, already. Only she doesn’t care about it.”
“She will, when she has taken this. She will care intensely. You will be her
sole interest in life.”
“Wonderful!” cried Alan.
“She will want to know all you do,” said the old man. “All that has happened
to you during the day. Every word of it. She will want to know what you are
thinking about, why you smile suddenly, why you are looking sad.”
“That is love!” cried Alan.
“Yes,” said the old man. “How carefully she will look after you! She will
never allow you to be tired, to sit in a draught, to neglect your food. If you are an
hour late, she will be terrified. She will think you are killed, or that some siren
has caught you.”
“I can hardly imagine Diana like that!” cried Alan, overwhelmed with joy.
“You will not have to use your imagination,” said the old man. “And, by the
way, since there are always sirens, if by any chance you should, later on, slip a
little, you need not worry. She will forgive you, in the end. She will be terribly
hurt, of course, but she will forgive you—in the end.”
“That will not happen,” said Alan fervently.
“Of course not,” said the old man. “But, if it did, you need not worry. She
would never divorce you. Oh, no! And, of course, she herself will never give you
the least, the very least, grounds for—uneasiness.”
“And how much,” said Alan, “is this wonderful mixture?”
“It is not as dear,” said the old man, “as the glove-cleaner, or life-cleaner, as
I sometimes call it. No. That is five thousand dollars, never a penny less. One has
to be older than you are, to indulge in that sort of thing. One has to save up for
it.”
“But the love potion?” said Alan.
“Oh, that,” said the old man, opening the drawer in the kitchen table, and
taking out a tiny, rather dirty-looking phial. “That is just a dollar.”
5
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am,” said Alan, watching him fill it.
“I like to oblige,” said the old man. “Then customers come back, later in life,
when they are better off, and want more expensive things. Here you are. You will
find it very effective.”
“Thank you again,” said Alan. “Good-bye.”
“Au revoir,” said the man.
Preview Questions:
1. Why is this story called “The Chaser”?
2. How would you describe the setting?
3. Discuss the characterization of Alan. How would you describe him?
4. Why is the potion that Alan wants so inexpensive?
5. Do you think that the old man is trying to trick Alan? Why or why not?
6. List the specific effects the old man claims his potion will have on Alan’s
beloved. How does Alan react to the old man’s promises?
7. How are the two characters different? Does this foreshadow the outcome of the
story?
8. What do you think the ending of the story means? Explain your answer.
9. Foreshadowing is defined as a technique in which a writer plants clues about
events that will happen later in the narrative. Looking back at the story, what
clues were planted that might have led you to expect the ending?
6
The Open Window
Saki (H H Munro)
"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young
lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and put up with me."
FramtonNuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter
the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come.
Privately he doubted more than ever whether these formal visits on a succession of
total strangers would do much towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed
to be undergoing
"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing to migrate to
this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and not speak to a living soul,
and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping. I shall just give you letters of
introduction to all the people I know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember,
were quite nice."
Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was presenting
one of the letters of introduction came into the nice division.
"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when she
judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.
"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying here, at the rectory, you
know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction to some of the
people here."
He made the last statement in a tone of distinct regret.
"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the self-possessed
young lady.
"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering whether
Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable something about
the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.
"Her great tragedy happened just three years ago," said the child; "that would be
since your sister's time."
7
"Her tragedy?" asked Framton; somehow in this restful country spot tragedies
seemed out of place.
"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened on to a
lawn.
"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but has that window
got anything to do with the tragedy?"
"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two
young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never came back. In crossing
the moor to their favorite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a
treacherous piece of bog. It had been that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places
that were safe in other years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were
never recovered. That was the dreadful part of it." Here the child's voice lost its
self-possessed note and became falteringly human. "Poor aunt always thinks that they
will come back someday, they and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them,
and walk in at that window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept
open every evening till it is quite dusk. Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how they
went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm, and Ronnie, her
youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as he always did to tease her,
because she said it got on her nerves. Do you know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings
like this, I almost get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that
window--"
She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt
bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late in making her
appearance.
"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.
"She has been very interesting," said Framton.
"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton briskly; "my
husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and they always come in
this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes today, so they'll make a fine mess
over my poor carpets. So like you menfolk, isn't it?"
She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of birds, and the
prospects for duck in the winter. To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a
desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic,
he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and
8
her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.
It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence that he should have paid his visit on this
tragic anniversary.
"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental
excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,"
announced Framton, who labored under the tolerably widespread delusion that total
strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments
and infirmities, their cause and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in
agreement," he continued.
"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn at the last
moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but not to what Framton
was saying.
"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and don't they look as if
they were muddy up to the eyes!"
Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to
convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out through the open
window with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock of nameless fear Framton
swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the lawn towards the
window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one of them was additionally
burdened with a white coat hung over his shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close
at their heels. Noiselessly they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice
chanted out of the dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"
Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the gravel drive, and
the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat. A cyclist coming along
the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.
"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in
through the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out
as we came up?"
"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton; "could only talk
about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of good-bye or apology when you
arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost."
"I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece calmly; "he told me he had a horror
of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges
by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the
9
creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone
lose their nerve."
Romance at short notice was her specialty.
Preview Questions:
1. How old is Mrs. Sappleton’s niece Vera?
2. How well does Framton know Mrs. Sappleton?
3. Who gave Framton his letters of introduction? What is the purpose of a letter of
introduction?
4. How does the reason for Framton’s visit help you understand his personality?
5. Why, according to the niece, does Mrs. Sappleton keep the window open?
6. Why did Framton try to change the subject of the conversation—“to turn the talk on
to a less ghastly topic”?
7. What did Framton do when he saw the three figures walking across the lawn?
8. When Vera saw the returning hunters, what was her reaction?
9. What did Mrs. Sappleton say about Framton’s sudden departure?
10. How did Vera explain Framton’s departure?
11. What does the last sentence mean? How would putting the last line at the
beginning change the story?
10
A Shocking Accident
By Graham Greene
1
Jerome was called into his housemaster's room in the break between the second
and the third class on a Tuesday morning. He had no fear of trouble, for he was a
warden -- the name that the proprietor and headmaster of a rather expensive
preparatory school had chosen to give to approved, reliable boys in the lower forms
(from a warden one became a guardian and finally before leaving, it was hoped for
Marlborough or Rugby, a crusader). The housemaster, Mr Wordsworth, sat behind his
desk with an appearance of perplexity and apprehension. Jerome had the odd
impression when he entered that he was a cause of fear.
“Sit down, Jerome,” Mr Wordsworth said. “All going well with the
trigonometry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve had a telephone call, Jerome. From your aunt. I’m afraid I have bad news
for you.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Your father has had an accident.”
“Oh.”
Mr Wordsworth looked at him with some surprise. “A serious accident.”
“Yes, sir?”
Jerome worshipped his father: the verb is exact. As man recreates God, so
Jerome recreated his father -- from a restless widowed author into a mysterious
adventurer who traveled in far places -- Nice, Beirut, Majorca, even the Canaries. The
time had arrived about his eighth birthday when Jerome believed that his father either
“ran guns” or was a member of the British Secret Service. Now it occurred to him that
his father might have been wounded in “a hail of machine-gun bullets”.
Mr Wordsworth played with the ruler on his desk. He seemed at a loss how to
continue. He said, “You know your father was in Naples?”
11
“Yes, sir.”
“Your aunt heard from the hospital today.”
“Oh.”
Mr Wordsworth said with desperation, “It was a street accident.”
“Yes, sir?” It seemed quite likely to Jerome that they would call it a street
accident. The police of course had fired first; his father would not take human life
except as a last resort.
“I’m afraid your father was very seriously hurt indeed.”
“Oh.”
“In fact, Jerome, he died yesterday. Quite without pain.”
“Did they shoot him through the heart?”
“I beg your pardon. What did you say, Jerome?”
“Did they shoot him through the heart?”
“Nobody shot him, Jerome. A pig fell on him.” An inexplicable convulsion took
place in the nerves of Mr Wordsworth’s face; it really looked for a moment as though
he were going to laugh. He closed his eyes, composed his features and said rapidly as
though it were necessary to expel the story as rapidly as possible. “Your father was
walking along a street in Naples when a pig fell on him. A shocking accident.
Apparently in the poorer quarters of Naples they keep pigs on their balconies. This
one was on the fifth floor. It had grown too fat. The balcony broke. The pig fell on
your father.”
Mr Wordsworth left his desk rapidly and went to the window, turning his back
on Jerome. He shook a little with emotion.
Jerome said, “What happened to the pig?”
2
This was not callousness on the part of Jerome, as it was interpreted by Mr
Wordsworth to his colleagues (he even discussed with them whether, perhaps, Jerome
was yet fitted to be a warden). Jerome was only attempting to visualize the strange
scene to get the details right. Nor was Jerome a boy who cried; he was a boy who
brooded, and it never occurred to him at his preparatory school that the circumstances
12
of his father’s death were comic -- they were still part of the mysteries of life. It was
later, in his first term at his public school, when he told the story to his best friend,
that he began to realize how it affected others. Naturally after that disclosure he was
known, rather unreasonably, as Pig.
Unfortunately his aunt had no sense of humor. There was an enlarged snapshot
of his father on the piano; a large sad man in an unsuitable dark suit posed in Capri
with an umbrella (to guard him against sunstroke), the Faraglione rocks forming the
background. By the age of sixteen Jerome was well aware that the portrait looked
more like the author of Sunshine and Shade and Ramblers in the Balearics than an
agent of the Secret Service. All the same he loved the memory of his father: he still
possessed an album filled with picture postcards (the stamps had been soaked off long
ago for his other collection), and it pained him when his aunt embarked with strangers
on the story of his father’s death.
“A shocking accident,” she would begin, and the stranger would compose his or
her features into the correct shape for interest and commiseration. Both reactions, of
course, were false, but it was terrible for Jerome to see how suddenly, midway in her
rambling discourse, the interest would become genuine. “I can’t think how such
things can be allowed in a civilized country,” his aunt would say. “I suppose one has
to regard Italy as civilized. One is prepared for all kinds of things abroad, of course,
and my brother was a great traveler. He always carried a water-filter with him. It was
far less expensive, you know, than buying all those bottles of mineral water. My
brother always said that his filter paid for his dinner wine. You can see from that what
a careful man he was, but who could possibly have expected when he was walking
along the Via DottoreManuelePanucci on his way to the Hydrographic Museum that a
pig would fall on him?” That was the moment when the interest became genuine.
It seemed to Jerome that there were two possible methods of recounting his
father’s death—the first led gently up to the accident, so that by the time it was
described the listener was so well prepared that the death came really as an
anti-climax. The chief danger of laughter in such a story was always surprise. When
he rehearsed his method Jerome began boringly enough.
“You know Naples and those high tenement buildings? Somebody once told me
that the Neapolitan always feels at home in New York just as the man from Turin
feels at home in London because the river runs in much the same way in both cities.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Naples, of course. You’d be surprised in the poorer quarters
what things they keep on the balconies of those sky-scraping tenements -- not
washing, you know, or bedding, but things like livestock, chickens or even pigs. Of
course the pigs get no exercise whatever and fatten all the quicker.” He could imagine
how his hearer’s eyes would have glazed by this time. “I’ve no idea, have you, how
heavy a pig can be, but these old buildings are all badly in need of repair. A balcony
on the fifth floor gave way under one of those pigs. It struck the third floor balcony on
13
its way down and sort of ricochetted into the street. My father was on the way to the
Hydrographic Museum when the pig hit him. Coming from that height and that angle
it broke his neck.” This was really a masterly attempt to make an intrinsically
interesting subject boring.
The other method Jerome rehearsed had the virtue of brevity.
“My father was killed by a pig.”
“Really? In India?”
“No, in Italy.”
“How interesting. I never realized there was pig-sticking in Italy. Was your
father keen on polo?”
In course of time, neither too early nor too late, rather as though, in his capacity
as a chartered accountant, Jerome had studied the statistics and taken the average, he
became engaged to be married: to a pleasant fresh-faced girl of twenty-five whose
father was a doctor in Pinner. Her name was Sally, her favorite author was still Hugh
Walpole, and she had adored babies ever since she had been given a doll at the age of
five which moved its eyes and made water. Their relationship was contented rather
than exciting, as became the love-affair of a chartered accountant; it would never have
done if it had interfered with the figures.
One thought worried Jerome, however. Now that within a year he might himself
become a father, his love for the dead man increased; he realized what affection had
gone into the picture-postcards. He felt a longing to protect his memory, and uncertain
whether this quiet love of his would survive if Sally were so insensitive as to laugh
when she heard the story of his father’s death. Inevitably she would hear it when
Jerome brought her to dinner with his aunt. Several times he tried to tell her himself,
as she was naturally anxious to know all she could that concerned him.
“You were very small when your father died?”
“Just nine.”
“Poor little boy,” she said.
“I was at school. They broke the news to me.”
“Did you take it very hard?”
“I can’t remember.”
14
“You never told me how it happened.”
“It was very sudden. A street accident.”
“You’ll never drive fast, will you, Jemmy?” (She had begun to call him
“Jemmy”.) It was too late then to try the second method -- the one he thought of as the
pig-sticking one.
They were going to marry quietly in a registry-office and have their honeymoon
at Torquay. He avoided taking her to see his aunt until a week before the wedding, but
then the night came, and he could not have told himself whether his apprehension was
more for his father’s memory or the security of his own love.
The moment came all too soon. “Is that Jemmy’s father?” Sally asked, picking
up the portrait of the man with the umbrella.
“Yes, dear. How did you guess?”
“He has Jemmy’s eyes and brow, hasn’t he?”
“Has Jerome lent you his books?”
“No.”
“I will give you a set for your wedding. He wrote so tenderly about his travels.
My own favorite is Nooks and Crannies. He would have had a great future. It made
that shocking accident all the worse.”
“Yes?”
Jerome longed to leave the room and not see that loved face crinkle with
irresistible amusement.
“I had so many letters from his readers after the pig fell on him.” She had never
been so abrupt before. And then the miracle happened. Sally did not laugh. Sally sat
with open eyes of horror while his aunt told her the story, and at the end, “How
horrible,” Sally said. “It makes you think, doesn’t it? Happening like that. Out of a
clear sky.”
Jerome’s heart sang with joy. It was as though she had appeased his fear for ever.
In the taxi going home he kissed her with more passion than he had ever shown and
she returned it. There were babies in her pale blue pupils, babies that rolled their eyes
and made water.
15
“A week today,” Jerome said, and she squeezed his hand. “Penny for your
thoughts, my darling.”
“I was wondering,” Sally said, “what happened to the poor pig?”
“They almost certainly had it for dinner,” Jerome said happily and kissed the
dear child again.
Preview Questions:
1. How old is Jerome at the beginning of the story? How do you know?
2. What sort of school was Jerome at, and why?
3. What is the relationship between Jerome and his father that you can figure out from
the first part of the story?
4. What did the housemaster at the prep school tell Jerome in the break? How did he
tell Jerome the news? How did Jerome react to the news?
5. What are the two methods Jerome uses to tell the accident to strangers or new
acquaintances? What is Jerome’s motive to do so?
6. How do Jerome’s feelings for his father develop as he grows up? Pick out the
phrases that describe these feelings.
7. How does the shocking accident affect Jerome as he grows up?
8. Do you think Sally will be a good wife? Why or why not?
16
Mr. Know All
Somerset Maugham
I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him. The war had just
finished and the passenger traffic in the ocean-going liners was heavy.
Accommodation was very hard to get and you had to put up with whatever the agents
chose to offer you. You could not hope for a cabin to yourself and I was thankful to
be given one in which there were only two berths. But when I was told the name of
my companion my heart sank. It suggested closed portholes and the night air rigidly
excluded. It was bad enough to share a cabin for fourteen days with anyone (I was
going from San Francisco to Yokohama, but I should have looked upon it with less
dismay if my fellow- passenger’s name had been Smith or Brown.
When I went on board I found Mr. Kelada’s luggage already below. I did not like
the look of it; there were too many labels on the suit-cases, and the wardrobe trunk
was too big. He had unpacked his toilet things, and I observed that he was a patron of
the excellent Monsieur Coty; for I saw on the washing-stand his scent, his hair-wash
and his brilliantine. Mr. Kelada`s brushes, ebony with his monogram in gold, would
have been all the better for a scrub. I did not at all like Mr. Kelada. I made my way
into the smoking-room. I called for a pack of cards and began to play patience. I had
scarcely started before a man came up to me and asked me if he was right in thinking
my name was so and so.
"I am Mr. Kelada," he added, with a smile that showed a row of flashing teeth,
and sat down.
"Oh, yes, we’re sharing a cabin, I think."
"Bit of luck, I call it. You never know who you’re going to be put in with. I was
jolly glad when I heard you were English. I’m all for us English sticking together
when we’re abroad, if you understand what I mean."
I blinked.
"Are you English?" I asked, perhaps tactlessly.
"Rather. You don’t think I look like an American, do you? British to the
backbone, that’s what I am."
To prove it, Mr. Kelada took out of his pocket a passport and airily waved it
under my nose.
17
King George has many strange subjects. Mr. Kelada was short and of a sturdy
build, clean-shaven and dark-skinned, with a fleshy hooked nose and very large,
lustrous and liquid eyes. His long black hair was sleek and curly. He spoke with a
fluency in which there was nothing English and his gestures were exuberant. I fell
pretty sure that a closer inspection of that British passport would have betrayed the
fact that Mr. Kelada was born under a bluer sky than is generally seen in England.
"What will you have?" he asked me.
I looked at him doubtfully. Prohibition was in force and to all appearance the
ship was bone-dry. When I am not thirsty I do not know which I dislike more, ginger
ale or lemon squash. But Mr. Kelada flashed an oriental smile at me.
"Whisky and soda or a dry martini, you have only to say the word."
From each of his hip-pockets he fished a flask and laid it on the table before me.
I chose the martini, and calling the steward he ordered a tumbler of ice and a couple
of glasses.
"A very good cocktail," I said.
"Well, there are plenty more where that came from, and if you’ve got any friends
on board, you tell them you’ve got a pal who’s got all the liquor in the world."
Mr. Kelada was chatty. He talked of New York and of San Francisco. He
discussed plays, pictures, and politics. He was patriotic. The Union Jack is an
impressive piece of drapery, but when it is flourished by a gentleman from Alexandria
or Beirut, I cannot but feel that it loses somewhat in dignity. Mr. Kelada was familiar.
I do not wish to put on airs, but I cannot help feeling that it is seemly in a total
stranger to put "mister" before my name when he addresses me. Mr. Kelada, doubtless
to set me at my ease, used no such formality. I did not like Mr. Kelada. I had put aside
the cards when he sat down, but now, thinking that for this first occasion our
conversation had lasted long enough, I went on with my game.
"The three on the four," said Mr. Kelada.
There is nothing more exasperating when you are playing patience than to be
told where to put the card you have turned up before you have had a chance to look
for yourself.
"It’s coming out, it’s coming out," he cried. "The ten on the knave."
With rage and hatred in my heart I finished.
18
Then he seized the pack.
"Do you like card tricks?"
"No, I hate card tricks," I answered.
"Well, I’ll just show you this one."
He showed me three. Then I said I would go down to the dining-room and get
my seat at table.
"Oh, that’s all right," he said. "I’ve already taken a seat for you. I thought that as
we were in the same state-room we might just as well sit at the same table."
I did not like Mr. Kelada.
I not only shared a cabin with him and ate three meals a day at the same table,
but I could not walk round the deck without his joining me. It was impossible to snub
him. It never occurred to him that he was not wanted. He was certain that you were as
glad to see him as he was to see you. In your own house you might have kicked him
downstairs and slammed the door in his face without the suspicion dawning on him
that he was not a welcome visitor. He was a good mixer, and in three days knew
everyone on board. He ran everything. He managed the sweeps, conducted the
auctions, collected money for prizes at the sports, got up quoit and golf matches,
organized the concert and arranged the fancy-dress ball. He was everywhere and
always. He was certainly the best hated man in the ship. We called him Mr. Know-All,
even to his face. He took it as a compliment. But it was at mealtimes that he was most
intolerable. For the better part of an hour then he had us at his mercy. He was hearty,
jovial, loquacious and argumentative. He knew everything better than anybody else,
and it was an affront to his overweening vanity that you should disagree with him. He
would not drop a subject, however unimportant, till he had brought you round to his
way of thinking. The possibility that he could be mistaken never occurred to him. He
was the chap who knew. We sat at the doctor’s table. Mr. Kelada would certainly
have had it all his own way, for the doctor was lazy and I was frigidly indifferent,
except for a man called Ramsay who sat there also. He was as dogmatic as Mr.
Kelada and resented bitterly the Levantine’s cocksureness. The discussions they had
were acrimonious and interminable.
Ramsay was in the American Consular Service and was stationed at Kobe. He
was a great heavy fellow from the Middle West, with loose fat under a tight skin, and
he bulged out of this ready-made clothes. He was on his way back to resume his post,
having been on a flying visit to New York to fetch his wife who had been spending a
year at home. Mrs. Ramsay was a very pretty little thing, with pleasant manners and a
19
sense of humor. The Consular Service is ill-paid, and she was dressed always very
simply; but she knew how to wear her clothes. She achieved an effect of quiet
distinction. I should not have paid any particular attention to her but that she
possessed a quality that may be common enough in women, but nowadays is not
obvious in their demeanor. You could not look at her without being struck by her
modesty. It shone in her like a flower on a coat.
One evening at dinner the conversation by chance drifted to the subject of pearls.
There had been in the papers a good deal of talk about the culture pearls which the
cunning Japanese were making, and the doctor remarked that they must inevitably
diminish the value of real ones. They were very good already; they would soon be
perfect. Mr. Kelada, as was his habit, rushed the new topic. He told us all that was to
be known about pearls. I do not believe Ramsay knew anything about them at all, but
he could not resist the opportunity to have a fling at the Levantine, and in five minutes
we were in the middle of a heated argument. I had seen Mr. Kelada vehement and
voluble before, but never so voluble and vehement as now. At last something that
Ramsay said stung him, for he thumped the table and shouted:
"Well, I ought to know what I am talking about. I’m going to Japan just to look
into this Japanese pearl business. I’m in the trade and there’s not a man in it who
won’t tell you that what I say about pearls goes. I know all the best pearls in the world,
and what I don’t know about pearls isn’t worth knowing."
Here was news for us, for Mr. Kelada, with all his loquacity, had never told
anyone what his business was. We only knew vaguely that he was going to Japan on
some commercial errand. He looked round the table triumphantly.
"They’ll never be able to get a culture pearl that an expert like me can’t tell with
half an eye." He pointed to a chain that Mrs. Ramsay wore. "You take my word for it,
Mrs. Ramsay, that chain you’re wearing will never be worth a cent less than it is
now."
Mrs. Ramsay in her modest way flushed a little and slipped the chain inside her
dress. Ramsay leaned forward. He gave us all a look and a smile flickered in his eyes.
"That’s a pretty chain of Mrs. Ramsay’s, isn’t it?"
"I noticed it at once," answered Mr. Kelada. "Gee, I said to myself, those are
pearls all right."
"I didn’t buy it myself, of course. I’d be interested to know how much you think
it cost."
20
"Oh, in the trade somewhere round fifteen thousand dollars. But if it was bought
on Fifth Avenue I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that anything up to thirty thousand
was paid for it."
Ramsay smiled grimly.
"You’ll be surprised to hear that Mrs. Ramsay bought that string at a department
store the day before we left New York, for eighteen dollars."
Mr. Kelada flushed.
"Rot. It’s not only real, but it’s as fine a string for its size as I’ve ever seen."
"Will you bet on it? I’ll bet you a hundred dollars it’s imitation."
“Done.”
"Oh, Elmer, you can’t bet on a certainty," said Mrs. Ramsay.
She had a little smile on her lips and her tone was gently deprecating.
"Can’t I? If I get a chance of easy money like that I should be all sorts of a fool
not to take it."
"But how can it be proved?" she continued. "It’s only my word against Mr.
Kelada’s."
"Let me look at the chain, and if it’s imitation I’ll tell you quickly enough. I can
afford to lose a hundred dollars," said Mr. Kelada.
"Take it off, dear. Let the gentleman look at it as much as he wants."
Mrs. Ramsay hesitated a moment. She put her hands to the clasp.
"I can’t undo it," she said. "Mr. Kelada will just have to take my word for it."
I had a sudden suspicion that something unfortunate was about to occur, but I
could think of nothing to say.
Ramsay jumped up.
"I’ll undo it."
21
He handed the chain to Mr. Kelada. The Levantine took a magnifying glass from
his pocket and closely examined it. A smile of triumph spread over his smooth and
swarthy face. He handed back the chain. He was about to speak. Suddenly he caught
sight of Mrs. Ramsay’s face. It was so white that she looked as though she were about
to faint. She was staring at him with wide and terrified eyes. They held a desperate
appeal; it was so clear that I wondered why her husband did not see it.
Mr. Kelada stopped with his mouth open. He flushed deeply. You could almost
see the effort he was making over himself.
"I was mistaken," he said. "It’s a very good imitation, but of course as soon as I
looked through my glass I saw that it wasn’t real. I think eighteen dollars is just about
as much as the damned thing’s worth."
He took out his pocket book and from it a hundred-dollar bill. He handed it to
Ramsay without a word.
"Perhaps that’ll teach you not to be so cocksure another time, my young friend,"
said Ramsay as he took the note.
I noticed that Mr. Kelada’s hands were trembling.
The story spread over the ship as stories do, and he had to put up with a good
deal of chaff that evening. It was a fine joke that Mr. Know-All had been caught out.
But Mrs. Ramsay retired to her state-room with a headache.
Next morning I got up and began to shave. Mr. Kelada lay on his bed smoking a
cigarette. Suddenly there was a small scraping sound and I saw a letter pushed under
the door. I opened the door and looked out. There was nobody there. I picked up the
letter and saw that it was addressed to Max Kelada. The name was written in block
letters. I handed it to him.
"Who’s this from?" He opened it. "Oh!"
He took out of the envelope, not a letter, but a hundred-dollar bill. He looked at
me and again he reddened. He tore the envelope into little bits and gave them to me.
"Do you mind just throwing them out of the porthole?" I did as he asked, and
then I looked at him with a smile.
"No one likes being made to look a perfect damned fool," he said.
"Were the pearls real?"
22
"If I had a pretty little wife I shouldn’t let her spend a year in New York while I
stayed at Kobe," said he.
At that moment I did not entirely dislike Mr. Kelada. He reached out for his
pocket book and carefully put in it the hundred-dollar note.
Preview Questions:
1.Where and when does the story take place?
2. What does the opening paragraph tell us about the narrator ?
3. What does Mr. Kelada do that annoys the narrator when they first meet?
4. Why does the narrator call Mr. Kelada “the best hated man in the ship”?
5. Who is Mr. Ramsay? What kind of person is he?
6. What is special about Mrs. Ramsay?
7. Who suggests a bet on Mrs. Ramsay’s pearls? Who wins the bet?
8. What does Mr. Kelada mean when he says “If I had a pretty little wife I shouldn’t
let her spend a year in New York while I stayed at Kobe.”
9. How do you understand the title “Mr. Know-All” after reading the story?
23
My Father Sits in the Dark
Jerome Weidman
My father has a peculiar habit. He is fond of sitting in the dark, alone. Sometimes
I come home very late. The house is dark. I let myself in quietly because I do not want
to disturb my mother. She is a light sleeper. I tiptoe into my room and undress in the
dark. I go to the kitchen for a drink of water. My bare feet make no noise. I step into
the room and almost trip over my father. He is sitting in a kitchen chair, in his
pajamas, smoking his pipe.
“Hello, Pop,” I say.
“Hello son.”
“Why don't you go to bed, Pa?”
“I will,” he says.
But he remains there. Long after I am asleep I feel sure that he is still sitting
there, smoking.
Many times I am reading in my room. I hear my mother get the house ready for
the night. I hear my kid brother go to bed. I hear my sister come in. I hear her do
things with jars and combs until she, too, is quiet. I know she has gone to sleep. In a
little while I hear my mother say goodnight to my father. I continue to read. Soon I
become thirsty. (I drink a lot of water.) I go to the kitchen for a drink. Again I almost
stumble across my father. Many times it startles me. I forget about him. And there he
is -- smoking, sitting, thinking.
“Why don't you go to bed, Pop?”
“I will soon, son.”
But he doesn't. He just sits there and smokes and thinks. It worries me. I can't
understand it. What can he be thinking about? Once I asked him.
“What are you thinking about, Pa?”
“Nothing,” he said.
24
Once I left him there and went to bed. I awoke several hours later. I was thirsty. I
went to the kitchen. There he was. His pipe was out. But he sat there, staring into a
corner of the kitchen. After a moment I became accustomed to the darkness. I took
my drink. He still sat and stared. His eyes did not blink. I thought he was not even
aware of me. I was afraid.
“Why don't you go to bed, Pop?”
“I will, son,”he said. 'Don't wait up for me.”
“But,” I said, “you've been sitting here for hours. What's wrong? What are you
thinking about?”
“Nothing, son,” he said. “Nothing. It's just restful. That's all.”
The way he said it was convincing. He did not seem worried. His voice was even
and pleasant. It always is. But I could not understand it. How could it be restful to sit
alone in an uncomfortable chair far into the night, in darkness?
What can it be?
I review all the possibilities. It can't be money. I know that. We haven't much,
but when he is worried about money he makes no secret of it. It can't be his health. He
is not reticent about that either. It can't be the health of anyone in the family. We are a
bit short on money, but we are long on health. (Knock wood, my mother would say.)
What can it be? I am afraid I do not know. But that does not stop me from worrying.
Maybe he is thinking of his brothers in the old country. Or of his mother and two
step-mothers. Or of his father. But they are all dead. And he would not brood about
them like that. I say brood, but it is not really true. He does not brood. He does not
even seem to be thinking. He looks too peaceful, too, well not contented, just too
peaceful, to be brooding. Perhaps it is as he says. Perhaps it is restful. But it does not
seem possible. It worries me.
If I only knew what he thinks about. If I only knew that he thinks at all. I might
not be able to help him. He might not even need help. It may be as he says. It may be
restful. But at least I would not worry about it.
Why does he just sit there, in the dark? Is his mind failing? No, it can't be. He is
only fifty-three. And he is just as keen-witted as ever. In fact, he is the same in every
respect. He still likes beet soup. He still reads the second section of the Times first. He
still wears wing collars. He still believes that Debs could have saved the country and
that T.R. was a tool of moneyed interests. He is the same in every way. He does not
even look older than he did five years ago. Everybody remarks about that.
25
Well-preserved, they say. But he sits in the dark, alone, smoking, staring straight
ahead of him, unblinking, into the small hours of the night.
If it is as he says, if it is restful, I will let it go at that. But suppose it is not.
Suppose it is something I cannot fathom. Perhaps he needs help. Why doesn't he
speak? Why doesn't he frown or laugh or cry? Why doesn't he do something? Why
does he just sit there?
Finally I become angry. Maybe it is just my unsatisfied curiosity. Maybe I am a
bit worried. Anyway, I become angry.
“Is something wrong, Pop?”
“Nothing, son. Nothing at all.”
But this time I am determined not to be put off. I am angry.
“Then why do you sit here all alone, thinking, till late?”
“It's restful, son. I like it.”
I am getting nowhere. Tomorrow he will be sitting there again. I will be puzzled.
I will be worried. I will not stop now. I am angry.
“Well, what do you think about, Pa? Why do you just sit here? What's worrying
you? What do you think about?”
“Nothing's worrying me, son. I'm all right. It's just restful. That's all. Go to bed,
son.”
My anger has left me. But the feeling of worry is still there. I must get an answer.
It seems so silly. Why doesn't he tell me? I have a funny feeling that unless I get an
answer I will go crazy. I am insistent.
“But what do you think about, Pa? What is it?”
“Nothing, son. Just things in general. Nothing special. Just things.”
I can get no answer.
It is very late. The street is quiet and the house is dark. I climb the steps softly,
skipping the ones that creak. I let myself in with my key and tiptoe into my room. I
remove my clothes and remember that I am thirsty. In my bare feet I walk to the
kitchen. Before I reach it I know he is there.
26
I can see the deeper darkness of his hunched shape. He is sitting in the same
chair, his elbows on his knees, his cold pipe in his teeth, his unblinking eyes staring
straight ahead. He does not seem to know I am there. He did not hear me come in. I
stand quietly in the doorway and watch him.
Everything is quiet, but the night is full of little sounds. As I stand there
motionless I begin to notice them. The ticking of the alarm clock on the icebox. The
low hum of an automobile passing many blocks away. The swish of papers moved
along the street by the breeze. A whispering rise and fall of sound, like low breathing.
It is strangely pleasant.
The dryness in my throat reminds me. I step briskly into the kitchen.
“Hello, Pop,” I say.
“Hello, son,” he says. His voice is low and dreamlike. He does not change his
position or shift his gaze.
I cannot find the faucet. The dim shadow of light that comes through the window
from the street lamp only makes the room seem darker. I reach for the short chain in
the center of the room. I snap on the light.
He straightens up with a jerk, as though he has been struck. “What's the matter,
Pop?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says. “I don't like the light.”
“What's the matter with the light?” I say. “What's wrong?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I don't like the light.”
I snap the light off. I drink my water slowly. I must take it easy, I say to myself. I
must get to the bottom of this.
“Why don't you go to bed? Why do you sit here so late in the dark?”
“It's nice,” he says. “I can't get used to lights. We didn't have lights when I was a
boy in Europe.”
My heart skips a beat and I catch my breath happily. I begin to think I understand.
I remember the stories of his boyhood in Austria. I see the wide-beamed kretchma,
with my grandfather behind the bar. It is late, the customers are gone, and he is dozing.
I see the bed of glowing coals, the last of the roaring fire. The room is already dark,
27
and grows darker. I see a small boy, crouched on a pile of twigs at one side of the
huge fireplace, his starry gaze fixed on the dull remains of the dead flames. The boy is
my father.
I remember the pleasure of those few moments while I stood quietly in the
doorway watching him.
“You mean there's nothing wrong? You just sit in the dark because you like it,
Pop?” I find it hard to keep my voice from rising to a happy shout.
“Sure,” he says. “I can't think with the light on.”
I set my glass down and turn to go back to my room. “Good night, Pop,” I say.
“Good night,” he says.
Then I remember. I turn back. “What do you think about, Pop?” I ask.
His voice seems to come from far away. It is quiet and even again. “Nothing,” he
says softly. “Nothing special.”
Kretchma: a Yiddish word for inn or tavern.
Debs: Eugene Debs (1855-1926), legendary labor leader, 1900-1920
T.R.: Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) U.S. president, 1901-1909
Preview Questions:
1.When and where does the story take place? What clues help you to find the time and
the place?
2. What does the narrator find frustrating and upsetting about his father’s behavior?
3. How does the father explain to the son his peculiar habit?
4. What are the possibilities the narrator figures out that his father worries over?
5. How does the narrator describe quietness and darkness in the kitchen?
28
6. What does the narrator mean when he says “My heart skips a beat and I catch my
breath happily”?
7. How much does the narrator learn about his father in this story?
8. What do you learn about the narrator?
9. Describe the conflicts in the story and discuss whether or not they are resolved by
the end of the story?
10. What do you think darkness and light symbolize in the story?
11. What is the significance of the story?
29
The Far and the Near
Thomas Wolfe
On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the
railway there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green
blinds. To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of
growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August. Before
the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive
shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers. The whole
place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort.
Every day, a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon, the limited express
between two cities passed this spot. At that moment the great train, having halted for a
breathing-space at the town near by, was beginning to lengthen evenly into its stroke,
but it had not yet reached the full drive of its terrific speed. It swung into view
deliberately, swept past with a powerful swaying motion of the engine, a low smooth
rumble of its heavy cars upon pressed steel, and then it vanished in the cut. For a
moment the progress of the engine could be marked by heavy bellowing puffs of
smoke that burst at spaced intervals above the edges of the meadow grass, and finally
nothing could be heard but the solid clacking tempo of the wheels receding into the
drowsy stillness of the afternoon.
Every day for more than twenty years, as the train had approached this house, the
engineer had blown on the whistle, and every day, as soon as she heard this signal, a
woman had appeared on the back porch of the little house and waved to him. At first
she had a small child clinging to her skirts, and now this child had grown to full
womanhood, and every day she, too, came with her mother to the porch and waved.
The engineer had grown old and gray in service. He had driven his great train,
loaded with its weight of lives, across the land ten thousand times. His own children
had grown up and married, and four times he had seen before him on the tracks the
ghastly dot of tragedy converging like a cannon ball to its eclipse of horror at the
boiler head—a light spring wagon filled with children, with its clustered row of small
stunned faces; a cheap automobile stalled upon the tracks, set with the wooden figures
of people paralyzed with fear; a battered hobo walking by the rail, too deaf and old to
hear the whistle’s warning; and a form flung past his window with a scream—all this
the man had seen and known. He had known all the grief, the joy, the peril and the
labor such a man could know; he had grown seamed and weathered in his loyal
service, and now, schooled by the qualities of faith and courage and humbleness that
attended his labor, he had grown old, and had the grandeur and the wisdom these men
have.
30
But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house
and the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed
in the mind of the engineer as something beautiful and enduring, something beyond
all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what
mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days.
The sight of the little house and of these two women gave him the most
extraordinary happiness he had ever known. He had seen them in a thousand lights, a
hundred weathers. He had seen them through the harsh bare light of wintry gray
across the brown and frosted stubble of the earth, and he had seen them again in the
green luring sorcery of April.
He felt for them and for the little house in which they lived such tenderness as a
man might feel for his own children, and at length the picture of their lives was carved
so sharply in his heart that he felt that he knew their lives completely, to every hour
and moment of the day, and he resolved that one day, when his years of service
should be ended, he would go and find these people and speak at last with them
whose lives had been so wrought into his own.
That day came. At last the engineer stepped from a train onto the station platform
of the town where these two women lived. His years upon the rail had ended. He was
a pensioned servant of his company, with no more work to do. The engineer walked
slowly through the station and out into the streets of the town. Everything was as
strange to him as if he had never seen this town before. As he walked on, his sense of
bewilderment and confusion grew. Could this be the town he had passed ten thousand
times? Were these the same houses he had seen so often from the high windows of his
cab? It was all as unfamiliar, as disquieting as a city in a dream, and the perplexity of
his spirit increased as he went on.
Presently the houses thinned into the straggling outposts of the town, and the
street faded into a country road—the one on which the women lived. And the man
plodded on slowly in the heat and dust. At length he stood before the house he sought.
He knew at once that he had found the proper place. He saw the lordly oaks before the
house, the flower beds, the garden and the arbor, and farther off, the glint of rails.
Yes, this was the house he sought, the place he had passed so many times, the
destination he had longed for with such happiness. But now that he had found it, now
that he was here, why did his hand falter on the gate; why had the town, the road, the
earth, the very entrance to this place he loved turned unfamiliar as the landscape of
some ugly dreams? Why did he now feel this sense of confusion, doubt and
hopelessness?
At length he entered by the gate, walked slowly up the path and in a moment
more had mounted three short steps that led up to the porch, and was knocking at the
31
door. Presently he heard steps in the hall, the door was opened, and a woman stood
facing him.
And instantly, with a sense of bitter loss and grief, he was sorry he had come. He
knew at once that the woman who stood there looking at him with a mistrustful eye
was the same woman who had waved to him so many thousand times. But her face
was harsh and pinched and meager; the flesh sagged wearily in sallow folds, and the
small eyes peered at him with timid suspicion and uneasy doubt. All the brave
freedom, the warmth and the affection that he had read into her gesture, vanished in
the moment that he saw her and heard her unfriendly tongue.
And now his own voice sounded unreal and ghastly to him as he tried to explain
his presence, to tell her who he was and the reason he had come. But he faltered on,
fighting stubbornly against the horror of regret, confusion, disbelief that surged up in
his spirit, drowning all his former joy and making his act of hope and tenderness seem
shameful to him.
At length the woman invited him almost unwillingly into the house, and called
her daughter in a harsh shrill voice. Then, for a brief agony of time, the man sat in an
ugly little parlor, and he tried to talk while the two women stared at him with a dull,
bewildered hostility, a sullen, timorous restraint.
And finally, stammering a crude farewell, he departed. He walked away down
the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an
old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the
familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange
and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stone’s throw of
him, and which he had never seen or known. And he knew that all the magic of that
bright lost way, the vista of that shining line, the imagined corner of that small good
universe of hope’s desire, was gone forever, could never be got back again.
Preview Questions:
1. How do you understand the title before you read the story?
2. Could you draw a picture of the little cottage according to the detailed description
in the first paragraph? From whose perspective is the cottage described? What is
the mood created by the setting?
32
3. From whose perspective is the train described in the second paragraph? Why is
there a detailed description of the train?
4. What do you know about the engineer from the fourth paragraph? Why does the
author mention the tragedies on the rail?
5. Does the engineer know the woman well? How do you know?
6. What motivates the engineer to visit the cottage? When does he visit the cottage?
7. What impact does the engineer’s visit to the cottage have on him?
8. What details from the story foreshadow an unpleasant ending?
9. How does the title summarize the theme of the story?
33
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe
True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but
why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not
destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all
things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I
mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole
story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it
haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the
old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had
no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a
vulture—a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran
cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the
old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you
should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what
caution—with what foresight—with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never
kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every
night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it—oh, so gently! And
then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all
closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would
have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly—very, very slowly,
so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole
head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.
Ha!—would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well
in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously—oh, so cautiously—cautiously (for the
hinges creaked)—I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture
eye. And this I did for seven long nights—every night just at midnight—but I found
the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old
man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went
boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a
hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have
been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I
looked in upon him while he slept.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A
watch’s minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had
I felt the extent of my own powers—of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my
feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he
34
not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and
perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may
think that I drew back—but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick
darkness (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so I knew
that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily,
steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped
upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out—“Who’s
there?”
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and
in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed
listening;—just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in
the wall.
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It
was not a groan of pain or of grief—oh, no!—it was the low stifled sound that arises
from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well.
Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my
own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I
knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at
heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he
had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been
trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself—“It is
nothing but the wind in the chimney—it is only a mouse crossing the floor,” or “it is
merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.” Yes, he has been trying to comfort
himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because
Death, in approaching him, had stalked with his black shadow before him, and
enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow
that caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor heard—tofeel the presence of
my head within the room.
When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I
resolved to open a little—a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it—you
cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily—until, at length a single dim ray, like the
thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.
It was open—wide, wide open—and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it
with perfect distinctness—all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the
very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person:
for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.
And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but overacuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound,
35
such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was
the beating of the old man’s heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum
stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern
motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the
hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and
louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I
say, louder every moment!—do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous:
so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old
house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some
minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I
thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me—the sound would be
heard by a neighbor! The old man’s hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the
lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once—once only. In an instant I
dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to
find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled
sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At
length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse.
Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many
minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no
more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise
precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked
hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the
arms and the legs.
I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all
between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no
human eye—not even his—could have detected anything wrong. There was nothing
to wash out—no stain of any kind—no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for
that. A tub had caught all—ha! ha!
When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o’clock—still dark as
midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I
went down to open it with a light heart—for what had I now to fear? There entered
three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police.
A shriek had been heard by a neighbor during the night; suspicion of foul play had
been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers)
had been deputed to search the premises.
I smiled,—for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I
said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I
36
took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search—search well. I led them, at
length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the
enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired themhere to
rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph,
placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the
victim.
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at
ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere
long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a
ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more
distinct:—it continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the
feeling: but it continued and gained definitiveness—until, at length, I found that the
noise was not within my ears.
No doubt I now grew very pale;—but I talked more fluently, and with a
heightened voice. Yet the sound increased—and what could I do? It was a
low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in
cotton. I gasped for breath—and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more
quickly—more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about
trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased.
Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if
excited to fury by the observation of the men—but the noise steadily increased. Oh
God! what could I do? I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I
had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and
continually increased. It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted
pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! —no, no!
They heard!—they suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my
horror! —this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony!
Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles
no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again!—hark! louder! louder!
louder! louder! —
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the
planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”
Preview Questions:
1.Where is the narrator? To whom is the narrator telling a story?
2. What does the narrator do to the old man? What is the relationship between the
narrator and the old man?
37
3. In paragraph 7 the narrator empathizes the old man’s fears. How does the narrator
know so much of what the old man feels?
4. Why does the narrator tell the police the truth in the end?
5. What are the reasons given by the narrator to prove his sanity? Do you agree on
what he tells?
6. What is the effect of Poe’s use of italics and repetition throughout the story?
7.What are the conflicts in the story? Are the conflicts resolved or not?
8. From what point of view is the story told? Do you think this point of view
particularly effective? Why?
38
The Standard of Living
Dorothy Parker
Annabel and Midge came out of the tea room with the arrogant slow gait of the
leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched, as
was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butter-fats. Usually they ate sandwiches
of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick
wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate
gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil,
containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries,
limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid,
not yet liquid, like salve that has been left in the sun. They chose no other sort of food,
nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and
their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.
Annabel and Midge had been best friends almost from the day that Midge had
found a job as stenographer with the firm that employed Annabel. By now, Annabel,
two years longer in the stenographic department, had worked up to the wages of
eighteen dollars and fifty cents a week; Midge was still at sixteen dollars. Each girl
lived at home with her family and paid half her salary to its support.
The girls sat side by side at their desks, they lunched together every noon;
together they set out for home at the end of the day's work. Many of their evenings
and most of their Sundays were passed in each other's company. Often they were
joined by two young men, but there was no steadiness to any such quartet; the two
young men would give place, unlamented, to two other young men, and lament would
have been inappropriate, really, since the newcomers were scarcely distinguishable
from their predecessors. Invariably the girls spent the fine idle hours of their
hot-weather Saturday afternoons together. Constant use had not worn ragged the
fabric of their friendship.
They looked alike, though the resemblance did not lie in their features. It was in
the shape of their bodies, their movements, their style, and their adornments. Annabel
and Midge did, and completely, all that young office workers are besought not to do.
They painted their lips and their nails, they darkened their lashes and lightened their
hair, and scent seemed to shimmer from them. They wore thin, bright dresses, tight
over their breasts and high on their legs, and tilted slippers, fancifully strapped. They
looked conspicuous and cheap and charming.
Now, as they walked across to Fifth Avenue with their skirts swirled by the hot
wind, they received audible admiration. Young men grouped lethargically about
39
newsstands awarded them murmurs, exclamations, even—the ultimate
tribute—whistles. Annabel and Midge passed without the condescension of hurrying
their pace; they held their heads higher and set their feet with exquisite precision, as if
they stepped over the necks of peasants.
Always the girls went to walk on Fifth Avenue on their free afternoons, for it
was the ideal ground for their favorite game. The game could be played anywhere,
and, indeed, was, but the great shop windows stimulated the two players to their best
form.
Annabel had invented the game; or rather she had evolved it from an old one.
Basically, it was no more than the ancient sport of
what-would-you-do-if-you-had-a-million-dollars? But Annabel had drawn a new set
of rules for it, had narrowed it, pointed it, made it stricter. Like all games, it was the
more absorbing for being more difficult.
Annabel's version went like this: You must suppose that somebody dies and
leaves you a million dollars, cool. But there is a condition to the bequest. It is stated in
the will that you must spend every nickel of the money on yourself.
There lay the hazard of the game. If, when playing it, you forgot, and listed
among your expenditures the rental of a new apartment for your family, for example,
you lost your turn to the other player. It was astonishing how many—and some of
them among the experts, too—would forfeit all their innings by such slips.
It was essential, of course, that it be played in passionate seriousness. Each
purchase must be carefully considered and, if necessary, supported by argument.
There was no zest to playing wildly. Once Annabel had introduced the game to Sylvia,
another girl who worked in the office. She explained the rules to Sylvia and then
offered her the gambit “What would be the first thing you'd do?” Sylvia had not
shown the decency of even a second of hesitation. “Well,” she said, “the first thing I'd
do, I'd go out and hire somebody to shoot Mrs. Gary Cooper, and then . . .” So it is to
be seen that she was no fun.
But Annabel and Midge were surely born to be comrades, for Midge played the
game like a master from the moment she learned it. It was she who added the touches
that made the whole thing cozier. According to Midge's innovations, the eccentric
who died and left you the money was not anybody you loved, or, for the matter of that,
anybody you even knew. It was somebody who had seen you somewhere and had
thought, “That girl ought to have lots of nice things. I'm going to leave her a million
dollars when I die.” And the death was to be neither untimely nor painful. Your
benefactor, full of years and comfortably ready to depart, was to slip softly away
during sleep and go right to heaven. These embroideries permitted Annabel and
Midge to play their game in the luxury of peaceful consciences.
40
Midge played with a seriousness that was not only proper but extreme. The
single strain on the girls' friendship had followed an announcement once made by
Annabel that the first thing she would buy with her million dollars would be a
silver-fox coat. It was as if she had struck Midge across the mouth. When Midge
recovered her breath, she cried that she couldn't imagine how Annabel could do such
a thing—silver-fox coats were common! Annabel defended her taste with the retort
that they were not common, either. Midge then said that they were so. She added that
everybody had a silver-fox coat. She went on, with perhaps a slight toss of head, to
declare that she herself wouldn't be caught dead in silver fox.
For the next few days, though the girls saw each other as constantly, their
conversation was careful and infrequent, and they did not once play their game. Then
one morning, as soon as Annabel entered the office, she came to Midge and said she
had changed her mind. She would not buy a silver-fox coat with any part of her
million dollars. Immediately on receiving the legacy, she would select a coat of mink.
Midge smiled and her eyes shone. “I think,” she said, “you're doing absolutely
the right thing.”
Now, as they walked along Fifth Avenue, they played the game anew. It was one
of those days with which September is repeatedly cursed; hot and glaring, with slivers
of dust in the wind. People drooped and shambled, but the girls carried themselves tall
and walked a straight line, as befitted young heiresses on their afternoon promenade.
There was no longer need for them to start the game at its formal opening. Annabel
went direct to the heart of it.
“All right,” she said. “So you've got this million dollars. So what would be the
first thing you'd do?”
“Well, the first thing I'd do,” Midge said, “I'd get a mink coat.” But she said it
mechanically, as if she were giving the memorized answer to an expected question.
“Yes,” Annabel said. “I think you ought to. The terribly dark kind of mink.” But
she, too, spoke as if by rote. It was too hot; fur, no matter how dark and sleek and
supple, was horrid to the thoughts.
They stepped along in silence for a while. Then Midge's eye was caught by a
shop window. Cool, lovely gleamings were there set off by chaste and elegant
darkness.
“No,” Midge said, “I take it back. I wouldn't get a mink coat the first thing.
Know what I'd do? I'd get a string of pearls. Real pearls.”
41
Annabel's eyes turned to follow Midge's.
“Yes,” she said, slowly. “I think that's a kind of a good idea. And it would make
sense, too. Because you can wear pearls with anything.”
Together they went over to the shop window and stood pressed against it. It
contained but one object--a double row of great, even pearls clasped by a deep
emerald around a little pink velvet throat.
“What do you suppose they cost?” Annabel said.
“Gee, I don't know,” Midge said. “Plenty, I guess.”
“Like a thousand dollars?” Annabel said.
“Oh, I guess like more,” Midge said. “On account of the emerald.”
“Well, like ten thousand dollars?” Annabel said.
“Gee, I wouldn't even know,” Midge said.
The devil nudged Annabel in the ribs. “Dare you to go in and price them,” she
said.
“Like fun!” Midge said.
“Dare you,” Annabel said.
“Why, a store like this wouldn't even be open this afternoon,” Midge said.
“Yes, it is so, too,” Annabel said. “People just came out. And there's a doorman
on. Dare you.”
“Well,” Midge said. “But you've got to come too.”
They tendered thanks, icily, to the doorman for ushering them into the shop. It
was cool and quiet, a broad, gracious room with paneled walls and soft carpet. But the
girls wore expressions of bitter disdain, as if they stood in a sty.
A slim, immaculate clerk came to them and bowed. His neat face showed no
astonishment at their appearance.
42
“Good afternoon,” he said. He implied that he would never forget it if they
would grant him the favor of accepting his soft-spoken greeting.
“Good afternoon,” Annabel and Midge said together, and in like freezing
accents.
“Is there something—?” the clerk said.
“Oh, we're just looking,” Annabel said. It was as if she flung the words down
from a dais.
The clerk bowed.
“My friend and myself merely happened to be passing,” Midge said, and stopped,
seeming to listen to the phrase. “My friend here and myself,” she went on, “merely
happened to be wondering how much are those pearls you've got in your window.”
“Ah, yes,” the clerk said. “The double rope. That is two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, Madam.”
“I see,” Midge said.
The clerk bowed. “An exceptionally beautiful necklace,” he said. “Would you
care to look at it?” “
“No, thank you,” Annabel said.
“My friend and myself merely happened to be passing,” Midge said.
They turned to go; to go, from their manner, where the tumbrel awaited them.
The clerk sprang ahead and opened the door. He bowed as they swept by him.
The girls went on along the Avenue and disdain was still on their faces.
“Honestly!” Annabel said. “Can you imagine a thing like that?”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” Midge said. “That's a quarter of a
million dollars right there!”
“He's got his nerve!” Annabel said.
They walked on. Slowly the disdain went, slowly and completely as if drained
from them, and with it went the regal carriage and tread. Their shoulders dropped and
43
they dragged their feet; they bumped against each other, without notice or apology,
and caromed away again. They were silent and their eyes were cloudy.
Suddenly Midge straightened her back, flung her head high, and spoke, clear and
strong.
“Listen, Annabel,” she said. “Look. Suppose there was this terribly rich person,
see? You don't know this person, but this person has seen you somewhere and wants
to do something for you. Well, it's a terribly old person, see? And so this person dies,
just like going to sleep, and leaves you ten million dollars. Now, what would be the
first thing you'd do?”
1. anemones: 秋牡丹
2. gambit: the opening move in a game 开局
3. Gary Cooper: (1901-1961), a popular American movie star best known for his
portrayal of Western heroes.
4. gee: a word that some people use to show that they are surprised, impressed or
annoyed
5. dais: a raised surface at one end of a meeting room which someone can stand on
when speaking to a group 主席台
6. tumbrel: a cart used during the French Revolution to take prisoners to the guillotine.
死囚车
7. carom away: jump aside or back.
Preview Questions:
1. How well do you come to know the young women? What is their style? How do
they dress, act, and talk?
2. How did Annabel and Midge spend their leisure time?
3. What game did the young women invent? Describe the rules of the game.
44
4. What were the innovations that Midge made for the game?
5. What does the game the two young women play tell you about them?
6. What “purchase” suddenly interrupted the game? How was the conflict resolved?
7. Why did Midge change her idea and decided to buy a string of pearls? What was
Annabel’s reaction to Midge’s choice?
8. What motivated them to go into the shop? How were they received?
9. How did the price of the necklace affect the girls’ mood?
10. What solution did Midge find? Did they change their “standard of living”?
11. What point of view is the story narrated? Why do you think Parker chooses this
point of view?
45
Harrison Bergeron
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than
anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or
quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th
Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the
United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still
drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the
H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard.
Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about
anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above
normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear
it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so,
the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from
taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks,
but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from
a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh?” said George.
“That dance – it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t
really very good – no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were
burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that
no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something
46
the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers
shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his
ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George
what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said
George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said
Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel.
Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a
woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel,
“I’d have chimes on Sunday – just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well – maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good
Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better’n I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son
who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped
that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the
rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor,
were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on
the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was
referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked
47
around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t
care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice
it any more. It’s just a part of me.
“You been so tired lately – kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some
way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of
them lead balls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,”
said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel.
“I mean – you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it
---and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody
competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. “The minute people start cheating on laws, what
do you think happens to society?”
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George
couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?”
“Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t
clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all
announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state
of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and gentlemen – ”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
48
“That’s all right –” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing.
He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise
for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and gentlemen--” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have
been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was
easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her
handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for
a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me – ”
she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just
escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the
government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under–handicapped, and should be
regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen upside
down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the
full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was
exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had
ever borne heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H–G men
could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a
tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles
were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches
besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a
military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a
walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H–G men required that he wear at all times a
red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white
teeth with black caps at snaggle–tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason
with him.”
“There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
49
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The
photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though
dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have –
for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God
–” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an
automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone.
A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. The
knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians,
musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor!
Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here –” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a
greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what
I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps
guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s scrap–iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head
harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and
spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber–ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor,
the god of thunder.
“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people.
“Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical
handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all, he removed her mask.
50
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now--” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning
of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of
their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and
dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first – cheap, silly, false. But Harrison
snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the
music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while – listened
gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girl’s tiny waist, letting her sense the
weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the
laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer
to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling.
They kissed it.
And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended
in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
51
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the
studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor
and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and
told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out
into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up.
And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun
in his head.
“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee –” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”
52
Preview Questions:
1. How does American society in the year 2081 differ from the society today?
2. What kind of people is considered average according to the government? How does
the government treat those who are above normal?
3. How old is Harrison Bergeron? Why is he taken away by the government?
4. Why don’t George and Hazel think much about their son’s capture?
5. What reason does George give for not trying to cheat? What is George’s view on
competition?
6. What is your response to the death of Harrison Bergeron and the dancer?
7. Who is Diana Moon Glampers? What purpose does she serve in the story?
8. Does the story argue for anything? How would you sum up its theme?
9. From what point of view is the story told? Why is it more effective than if Harrison
Bergeron had told his own story in the first person?
53
The Lady or the Tiger?
Frank Stockton
In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though
somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors,
were still large, florid, and untrammeled, as became the half of him which was
barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible
that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to
self-communing, and, when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done.
When every member of his domestic and political systems moved smoothly in its
appointed course, his nature was bland and genial; but, whenever there was a little
hitch, and some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still,
for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight and crush down
uneven places.
Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become semified was
that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of manly and beastly valor, the
minds of his subjects were refined and cultured.
But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself. The arena of the
king was built, not to give the people an opportunity of hearing the rhapsodies of
dying gladiators, nor to enable them to view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict
between religious opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far better adapted to
widen and develop the mental energies of the people. This vast amphitheater, with its
encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages, was an agent of
poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an
impartial and incorruptible chance.
When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest the
king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the accused person
would be decided in the king's arena, a structure which well deserved its name, for,
although its form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated solely from
the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he
owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted
form of human thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.
When all the people had assembled in the galleries, and the king, surrounded by
his court, sat high up on his throne of royal state on one side of the arena, he gave a
signal, a door beneath him opened, and the accused subject stepped out into the
amphitheater. Directly opposite him, on the other side of the enclosed space, were two
doors, exactly alike and side by side. It was the duty and the privilege of the person on
54
trial to walk directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open either door
he pleased; he was subject to no guidance or influence but that of the aforementioned
impartial and incorruptible chance. If he opened the one, there came out of it a hungry
tiger, the fiercest and most cruel that could be procured, which immediately sprang
upon him and tore him to pieces as a punishment for his guilt. The moment that the
case of the criminal was thus decided, doleful iron bells were clanged, great wails
went up from the hired mourners posted on the outer rim of the arena, and the vast
audience, with bowed heads and downcast hearts, wended slowly their homeward
way, mourning greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should
have merited so dire a fate.
But, if the accused person opened the other door, there came forth from it a lady,
the most suitable to his years and station that his majesty could select among his fair
subjects, and to this lady he was immediately married, as a reward of his innocence. It
mattered not that he might already possess a wife and family, or that his affections
might be engaged upon an object of his own selection; the king allowed no such
subordinate arrangements to interfere with his great scheme of retribution and reward.
The exercises, as in the other instance, took place immediately, and in the arena.
Another door opened beneath the king, and a priest, followed by a band of choristers,
and dancing maidens blowing joyous airs on golden horns advanced to where the pair
stood, side by side, and the wedding was promptly and cheerily solemnized. Then the
gay brass bells rang forth their merry peals, the people shouted glad hurrahs, and the
innocent man, preceded by children strewing flowers on his path, led his bride to his
home.
This was the king's semi-barbaric method of administering justice. Its perfect
fairness is obvious. The criminal could not know out of which door would come the
lady; he opened either he pleased, without having the slightest idea whether, in the
next instant, he was to be devoured or married. On some occasions the tiger came out
of one door, and on some out of the other. The decisions of this tribunal were not only
fair, they were positively determinate: the accused person was instantly punished if he
found himself guilty, and, if innocent, he was rewarded on the spot, whether he liked
it or not. There was no escape from the judgments of the king's arena.
The institution was a very popular one. When the people gathered together on one
of the great trial days, they never knew whether they were to witness a bloody
slaughter or a hilarious wedding. This element of uncertainty lent an interest to the
occasion which it could not otherwise have attained. Thus, the masses were
entertained and pleased, and the thinking part of the community could bring no charge
of unfairness against this plan, for did not the accused person have the whole matter in
his own hands?
This semi-barbaric king had a daughter as blooming as his most florid fancies, and
with a soul as fervent and imperious as his own. As is usual in such cases, she was the
55
apple of his eye, and was loved by him above all humanity. Among his courtiers was
a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the
conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens. This royal maiden was well
satisfied with her lover, for he was handsome and brave to a degree unsurpassed in all
this kingdom, and she loved him with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to
make it exceedingly warm and strong. This love affair moved on happily for many
months, until one day the king happened to discover its existence. He did not hesitate
nor waver in regard to his duty in the premises. The youth was immediately cast into
prison, and a day was appointed for his trial in the king's arena. This, of course, was
an especially important occasion, and his majesty, as well as all the people, was
greatly interested in the workings and development of this trial. Never before had
such a case occurred; never before had a subject dared to love the daughter of the king.
In after years such things became commonplace enough, but then they were in no
slight degree novel and startling.
The tiger-cages of the kingdom were searched for the most savage and relentless
beasts, from which the fiercest monster might be selected for the arena; and the ranks
of maiden youth and beauty throughout the land were carefully surveyed by
competent judges in order that the young man might have a fitting bride in case fate
did not determine for him a different destiny. Of course, everybody knew that the
deed with which the accused was charged had been done. He had loved the princess,
and neither he, she, nor any one else, thought of denying the fact; but the king would
not think of allowing any fact of this kind to interfere with the workings of the
tribunal, in which he took such great delight and satisfaction. No matter how the affair
turned out, the youth would be disposed of, and the king would take an aesthetic
pleasure in watching the course of events, which would determine whether or not the
young man had done wrong in allowing himself to love the princess.
The appointed day arrived. From far and near the people gathered, and thronged
the great galleries of the arena, and crowds, unable to gain admittance, massed
themselves against its outside walls. The king and his court were in their places,
opposite the twin doors, those fateful portals, so terrible in their similarity.
All was ready. The signal was given. A door beneath the royal party opened, and
the lover of the princess walked into the arena. Tall, beautiful, fair, his appearance
was greeted with a low hum of admiration and anxiety. Half the audience had not
known so grand a youth had lived among them. No wonder the princess loved him!
What a terrible thing for him to be there!
As the youth advanced into the arena he turned, as the custom was, to bow to the
king, but he did not think at all of that royal personage. His eyes were fixed upon the
princess, who sat to the right of her father. Had it not been for the moiety of barbarism
in her nature it is probable that lady would not have been there, but her intense and
fervid soul would not allow her to be absent on an occasion in which she was so
56
terribly interested. From the moment that the decree had gone forth that her lover
should decide his fate in the king's arena, she had thought of nothing, night or day, but
this great event and the various subjects connected with it. Possessed of more power,
influence, and force of character than any one who had ever before been interested in
such a case, she had done what no other person had done—she had possessed herself
of the secret of the doors. She knew in which of the two rooms, that lay behind those
doors, stood the cage of the tiger, with its open front, and in which waited the lady.
Through these thick doors, heavily curtained with skins on the inside, it was
impossible that any noise or suggestion should come from within to the person who
should approach to raise the latch of one of them. But gold, and the power of a
woman's will, had brought the secret to the princess.
And not only did she know in which room stood the lady ready to emerge, all
blushing and radiant, should her door be opened, but she knew who the lady was. It
was one of the fairest and loveliest of the damsels of the court who had been selected
as the reward of the accused youth, should he be proved innocent of the crime of
aspiring to one so far above him; and the princess hated her. Often had she seen, or
imagined that she had seen, this fair creature throwing glances of admiration upon the
person of her lover, and sometimes she thought these glances were perceived, and
even returned. Now and then she had seen them talking together; it was but for a
moment or two, but much can be said in a brief space; it may have been on most
unimportant topics, but how could she know that? The girl was lovely, but she had
dared to raise her eyes to the loved one of the princess; and, with all the intensity of
the savage blood transmitted to her through long lines of wholly barbaric ancestors,
she hated the woman who blushed and trembled behind that silent door.
When her lover turned and looked at her, and his eye met hers as she sat there,
paler and whiter than any one in the vast ocean of anxious faces about her, he saw, by
that power of quick perception which is given to those whose souls are one, that she
knew behind which door crouched the tiger, and behind which stood the lady. He had
expected her to know it. He understood her nature, and his soul was assured that she
would never rest until she had made plain to herself this thing, hidden to all other
lookers-on, even to the king. The only hope for the youth in which there was any
element of certainty was based upon the success of the princess in discovering this
mystery; and the moment he looked upon her, he saw she had succeeded, as in his
soul he knew she would succeed.
Then it was that his quick and anxious glance asked the question: "Which?" It was
as plain to her as if he shouted it from where he stood. There was not an instant to be
lost. The question was asked in a flash; it must be answered in another.
Her right arm lay on the cushioned parapet before her. She raised her hand, and
made a slight, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw her. Every
eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena.
57
He turned, and with a firm and rapid step he walked across the empty space.
Every heart stopped beating, every breath was held, every eye was fixed immovably
upon that man. Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and
opened it.
Now, the point of the story is this: Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the
lady ?
The more we reflect upon this question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a
study of the human heart which leads us through devious mazes of passion, out of
which it is difficult to find our way. Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of
the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric
princess, her soul at a white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy.
She had lost him, but who should have him?
How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild horror,
and covered her face with her hands as she thought of her lover opening the door on
the other side of which waited the cruel fangs of the tiger!
But how much oftener had she seen him at the other door! How in her grievous
reveries had she gnashed her teeth, and torn her hair, when she saw his start of
rapturous delight as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in
agony when she had seen him rush to meet that woman, with her flushing cheek and
sparkling eye of triumph; when she had seen him lead her forth, his whole frame
kindled with the joy of recovered life; when she had heard the glad shouts from the
multitude, and the wild ringing of the happy bells; when she had seen the priest, with
his joyous followers, advance to the couple, and make them man and wife before her
very eyes; and when she had seen them walk away together upon their path of flowers,
followed by the tremendous shouts of the hilarious multitude, in which her one
despairing shriek was lost and drowned!
Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed
regions of semi-barbaric futurity?
And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood!
Her decision had been indicated in an instant, but it had been made after days and
nights of anguished deliberation. She had known she would be asked, she had decided
what she would answer, and, without the slightest hesitation, she had moved her hand
to the right.
58
The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered, and it is not for
me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it
with all of you: Which came out of the opened door— the lady, or the tiger?
Preview Questions:
1. What do you think of the setting of the story? If possible, draw a picture of the
public arena where the king, the princess, the young man and the two doors are
located.
2. Why does the story-teller say the king was “semi-barbaric”?
3. In the kingdom described in the story, what happens when a person is accused of a
crime? Why do the members of the community support this method?
4. What is the young man’s crime? Why are his actions considered criminal?
5. What does the princess do when the young man is in the arena? What motive does
she have for sending him to his death, and what motive does she have for saving his
life?
6. The story is told from the third-person point of view at the beginning. How does the
point of view change? What is the effect of the change?
7. Why do you think the story ends with a question instead of an answer?
8. “Which came out of the opened door—the lady or the tiger?” What do you think?
Did the princess send her lover to the lady or to the tiger? Why?
59
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a
full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely, and the grass was richly
green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office
and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the
lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where
there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two
hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to
allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer,
and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together
quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of
the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already
stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example,
selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie
Delacroix— the villagers pronounced his name "Dellacroy"—eventually made a great
pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other
boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at
the boys, and the very small children rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their
older brothers or sisters.
Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting
and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the
corner, and their jokes were quiet, and they smiled rather than laughed. The women,
wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They
greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands.
Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the
children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin
ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones.
His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his
father and his oldest brother.
The lottery was conducted—as were the square dances, the teen-age club, the
Halloween program—by Mr. Summers, who had time and energy to devote to civic
activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man, and he ran the coal business, and people
were sorry for him, because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he
arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of
conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called, "Little late today, folks."
60
The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three-legged stool, and the
stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on
it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool,
and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?" there
was a hesitation before two men, Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, came forward
to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.
The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black
box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the
oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about
making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was
represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made
with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed
when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery,
Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was
allowed to fade off without anything's being done. The black box grew shabbier each
year; by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to
show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.
Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool
until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much
of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in
having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for
generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued, had been all very well when
the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and
likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more
easily into the black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves
made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe
of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it
to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put away, sometimes
one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and another
year underfoot in the post office, and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin
grocery and left there.
There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the
lottery open. There were the lists to make up—of heads of families, heads of
households in each family, members of each household in each family. There was the
proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at
one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed
by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory, tuneless chant that had been rattled off
duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just
so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the
people, but years and years ago this part of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There
had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in
61
addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed
with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person
approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue
jeans, with one hand resting carelessly on the black box, he seemed very proper and
important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.
Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers,
Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over
her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what day it
was," she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly.
"Thought my old man was out back stacking wood," Mrs. Hutchinson went on, "and
then I looked out the window and the kids were gone, and then I remembered it was
the twenty-seventh and came a-running." She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs.
Delacroix said, "You're in time, though. They're still talking away up there."
Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her
husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm
as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated
good-humoredly to let her through: two or three people said, in voices just loud
enough to be heard across the crowd, "Here comes your Missus, Hutchinson," and
"Bill, she made it after all." Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers,
who had been waiting, said cheerfully, "Thought we were going to have to get on
without you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson said, grinning, "Wouldn't have me leave
m'dishes in the sink, now, would you, Joe?" and soft laughter ran through the crowd
as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson's arrival.
"Well, now," Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this
over with, so's we can go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"
"Dunbar," several people said. "Dunbar, Dunbar."
Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar," he said. "That's right. He's
broke his leg, hasn't he? Who's drawing for him?"
"Me, I guess," a woman said, and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. "Wife
draws for her husband," Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for
you, Janey?" Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the
answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such
questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while
Mrs. Dunbar answered.
"Horace's not but sixteen yet," Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. "Guess I gotta fill in
for the old man this year."
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"Right," Mr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he
asked, "Watson boy drawing this year?"
A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I’ m drawing for
m’mother and me." He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several
voices in the crowd said things like "Good fellow, Jack," and "Glad to see your
mother's got a man to do it."
"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man Warner make it?"
"Here," a voice said, and Mr. Summers nodded.
A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at
the list. "All ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names—heads of families
first—and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in
your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?"
The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the
directions; most of them were quiet, wetting their lips, not looking around. Then Mr.
Summers raised one hand high and said, "Adams." A man disengaged himself from
the crowd and came forward. "Hi, Steve," Mr. Summers said, and Mr. Adams said,
"Hi, Joe." They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams
reached into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one
corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd, where he stood a
little apart from his family, not looking down at his hand.
"Allen." Mr. Summers said. "Anderson…. Bentham."
"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more," Mrs. Delacroix
said to Mrs. Graves in the back row. "Seems like we got through with the last one
only last week."
"Time sure goes fast,” Mrs. Graves said.
"Clark…. Delacroix."
"There goes my old man," Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her
husband went forward.
"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while
one of the women said, "Go on, Janey," and another said, "There she goes."
63
"We're next," Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around
from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely, and selected a slip of paper
from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded
papers in their large hands, turning them over and over nervously. Mrs. Dunbar and
her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.
"Harburt.... Hutchinson."
"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said, and the people near her laughed.
"Jones."
"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that
over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery."
Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young
folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go
back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a
saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be
eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added
petulantly. "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody."
"Some places have already quit lotteries," Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young
fools."
"Martin." And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke....
Percy."
"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish they'd hurry."
"They're almost through," her son said.
"You get ready to run tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.
Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and
selected a slip from the box. Then he called, "Warner."
"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner said as he went
through the crowd. "Seventy-seventh time."
"Watson." The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said,
"Don't be nervous, Jack," and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."
64
"Zanini."
After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers,
holding his slip of paper in the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one
moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to
speak at once, saying, "Who is it?," "Who's got it?," "Is it the Dunbars?," "Is it the
Watsons?" Then the voices began to say, "It's Hutchinson. It's Bill,” “Bill
Hutchinson's got it."
"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.
People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was
standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly, Tessie Hutchinson
shouted to Mr. Summers, "You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he
wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!"
"Be a good sport, Tessie," Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of
us took the same chance."
"Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.
"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast, and now we've
got to be hurrying a little more to get it done in time." He consulted his next list.
"Bill," he said, "you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in
the Hutchinsons?"
"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their chance!"
"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently.
"You know that as well as anyone else."
"It wasn't fair!" Tessie said.
"I guess not, Joe," Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My daughter draws with her
husband's family, that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the kids."
"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr. Summers said in
explanation, "and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you, too.
Right?"
"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.
"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.
65
"Three," Bill Hutchinson said. "There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And
Tessie and me."
"All right, then," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you got their tickets back?"
Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in the box, then,"
Mr. Summers directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."
"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. "I
tell you it wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw
that."
Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box, and he dropped
all the papers but those onto the ground, where the breeze caught them and lifted them
off.
"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.
"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked, and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance
around at his wife and children, nodded.
"Remember," Mr. Summers said, "take the slips and keep them folded until each
person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the hand of the
little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box,
Davy," Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. "Take
just one paper," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the
child's hand and removed the folded paper from the right fist and held it while little
Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.
"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends
breathed heavily as she went forward, switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily
from the box. "Bill, Jr.," Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet
overlarge, nearly knocked the box over as he got a paper out. "Tessie," Mr. Summers
said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly, and then set her lips and
went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.
"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt
around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.
The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy," and the sound of
the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.
66
"It's not the way it used to be," Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't the
way they used to be."
"All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's."
Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the
crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill, Jr.,
opened theirs at the same time, and both beamed and laughed, turning around to the
crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.
"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked
at Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.
"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper,
Bill."
Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand.
It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with
the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was
a stir in the crowd.
"All right, folks," Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box,
they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was
ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had
come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up
with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."
Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, "I
can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."
The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few
pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her
hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone
hit her on the side of the head.
Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was
in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon
her.
67
Preview Questions:
1.Where do you think “The Lottery” takes place? What purpose do you suppose the
author has in making this setting appear so familiar and ordinary?
2.When did you first realize that this was a strange lottery that winning the lottery was
not desired?
3. What details did the author add to make the lottery seem like a “normal” lottery?
What details indicate that the lottery was strange?
4. Which aspects of the lottery have changed? Which have not changed?
5. What was Mr. Warner’s attitude toward the lottery? In what way and why did his
attitude differ from those of other members of the community?
6. Why did Tessie want to include Don and Eva in the final drawing?
7. Why do you think everyone had to take part in the final step of the lottery?
8. Take a close look at Jackson’s description of the black wooden box and of the
black spot on the fatal slip of paper. What do these objects suggest to you? Are
there any other symbols in the story?
68
The Story of An Hour
Kate Chopin
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was
taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences, veiled hints that
revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It
was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad
disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had
only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had
hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed
inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment,
in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her
room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this
she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to
reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all
aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the
street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some
one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the
eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that
had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite
motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who
has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even
a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed
away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection,
but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What
was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it,
69
creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color
that filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this
thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with
her will—as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.
When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted
lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “Free, free, free!” The vacant stare
and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and
bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of
her body.
She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A
clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.
She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded
in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and
dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that
would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in
welcome.
There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live
for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence
with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a
fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a
crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter!
What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of
self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole,
imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door—you will
make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of
life through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and
summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick
70
prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder
that life might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a
feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of
Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs.
Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard
who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.
He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been
one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen
him from the view of his wife.
But Richards was too late.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.
Preview Questions:
1. Why are Mrs. Mallard’s relatives concerned about her hearing the news about her
husband?
2. What are Louise Mallard’s feelings toward her husband?
3. At what point in the story do you first suspect that Louise Mallard is not devastated
by the news of her husband’s death?
4. What is the “something coming to her and she was waiting for?”
5. What is the symbolic importance of the setting to which Louise retreats after the
news of her husband’s death?
6. Who arrives at the end of the story? Then what happens to Louise Mallard?
7. In what ways is the last line of the story an ironic statement? What is gained by
having the doctors make such a statement rather than putting it in the mouths of
Josephine or Richards?
71
8. What are some symbols in the story? How do they relate to the themes and
characters?
9. What is the significance of the story’s title?
72
Hills like White Elephants
Ernest Hemingway
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was
no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close
against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain,
made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out
flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the
building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes.
It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
“What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the
table.
“It’s pretty hot,” the man said.
“Let’s drink beer.”
“Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain.
“Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway.
“Yes. Two big ones.”
The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and
the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off
at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
“They look like white elephants,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove
anything.”
The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said.
“What does it say?”
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“Anisdel Toro. It’s a drink.”
“Could we try it?”
The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.
“Four reales.”
“We want two Anis del Toro.”
“With water?”
“Do you want it with water?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?”
“It’s all right.”
“You want them with water?” asked the woman.
“Yes, with water.”
“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That’s the way with everything.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve
waited so long for, like absinthe.”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.”
“Well, let’s try and have a fine time.”
“All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't
that bright?”
“That was bright.”
“I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it -- look at things and try
new drinks?”
“I guess so.”
74
The girl looked across at the hills.
“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just
meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.”
“Should we have another drink?”
“All right.”
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.
“It’s lovely,” the girl said.
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an
operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then
it’s all perfectly natural.”
“Then what will we do afterwards?”
“We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”
“What makes you think so?”
“That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.”
The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the
strings of beads.
“And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.”
“I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have
done it.”
75
“So have I,” said the girl. “And afterwards they were all so happy.”
“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you
do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“And you really want to?”
“I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really
want to.”
“And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love
me?”
“I love you now. You know I love you.”
“I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white
elephants, and you’ll like it?”
“I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I
worry.”
“If I do it you won’t ever worry?”
“I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”
“Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t care about me.”
“Well, I care about you.”
“Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be
fine.”
“I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.”
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side,
were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river,
were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw
the river through the trees.
76
“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every
day we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we could have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can have the whole world.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go everywhere.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”
“It’s ours.”
“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”
“But they haven’t taken it away.”
“We’ll wait and see.”
“Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.”
“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do –”
“Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?”
“All right. But you’ve got to realize –”
“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?”
They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of
the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to.
I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”
77
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.”
“Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else.
And I know it’s perfectly simple.”
“Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.”
“It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.”
“Would you do something for me now?”
“I’d do anything for you.”
“Would you please pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease stop talking?”
He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There
were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.
“But I don’t want you to,” he said, “I don’t care anything about it.”
“I’ll scream,” the girl said.
The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them
down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said.
“What did she say?” asked the girl.
“That the train is coming in five minutes.”
The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.
“I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She
smiled at him.
“All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.”
He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other
tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked
through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an
Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the
train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at
him.
78
“Do you feel better?” he asked.
“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”
Preview Questions
1. What mood is created through setting the story in a train-station bar in a foreign
country with a view of the “long and white” hills across the Ebro River valley?
Why does Jig admire the view of the mountains, the field of grain, and the river?
2. Why does Jig remark that the hills remind her of “white elephants”? What
symbolism is suggested by the expression “a whiter elephant”?
3. The main topic of discussion between the man and the girl is never mentioned.
What is the “awfully simple operation”? Why is it not named? What different
attitudes are taken toward it by the man and the girl? Why?
4. What is indicated about the past life of the man and the girl? What has happened to
the quality of their relationship? Why? How do we know?
5. Point out lines in the dialogue that seem to have a double or oblique meaning.
6. Trace the various phases of emotion in the girl.
7. Has Jig made an important decision at the end of the story?
8. The point of view is objective. Does this mean that we cannot tell whether the
sympathy of the author lies more with one character than with the other? Explain
your answer.
79
Going Home
William Saroyan
This valley, he thought, all this country between the mountains is mine, home to
me, the place I dream about, and everything is the same, not a thing is changed, water
sprinklers still splash in circles over lawns of bermuda grass, good old home town,
simplicity, reality.
Walking along Alvin Street he felt glad to be home again. Everything was fine,
common and good, the smell of earth, cooking suppers, smoke, the rich summer air of
the valley full of plant growth, grapes growing, peaches ripening, and the oleander
bush swooning with sweetness, the same as ever. He breathed deeply, drawing the
smell of home deep into his lungs, smiling inwardly. It was hot. He hadn't felt his
senses reacting to the earth so cleanly and clearly for years; now it was a pleasure
even to breathe. The cleanliness of the air sharpened the moment so that, walking, he
felt the magnificence of being, glory of possessing substance, of having form and
motion and intellect, the piety of merely being alive on the earth.
Water, he thought, hearing the soft splash of a lawn sprinkler; to taste the water
of home, the full cool water of the valley, to have that simple thirst and that solid
water with which to quench it, fulfillment, the clarity of life. He saw an old man
holding a hose over some geranium plants, and his thirst sent him to the man.
Good evening, he said quietly; may I have a drink?
The old man turned slowly, his shadow large against the house, to look into the
young man's face, amazed and pleased. You bet, he said; here, and he placed the hose
into the young man's hands. Mighty fine water, said the old man, this water of the San
Joaquin Valley; best yet, I guess. That water up in Frisco makes me sick; ain't got no
taste. And down in Los Angeles, why, the water tastes like castor oil; I can't
understand how so many people go on living there year after year.
While the old man talked, he listened to the water falling from the hose to the
earth, leaping thickly, cleanly, sinking swiftly into the earth. You said it, he said to the
old man; you said it, our water is the finest water on earth.
He curved his head over the spouting water and began to drink. The sweet rich
taste of the water amazed him, and as he drank he thought, God, this is splendid. He
could feel the cool water splashing into his being, refreshing and cooling him. Losing
his breath, he lifted his head, saying to the old man, We're mighty lucky, us folk in the
Valley.
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He bent his head over the water again and began again to swallow the splashing
liquid, laughing to himself with delight. It seemed as if he couldn't get enough of it
into his system; the more he drank, the finer the water tasted to him and the more he
wanted to drink.
The old man was amazed. You drunk about two quarts, he said.
Still swallowing the water, he could hear the old man talking, and he lifted his
head again, replying, I guess so. It sure tastes fine. He wiped his mouth with a
handkerchief, still holding the hose, still wanting to drink more. The whole valley was
in that water, all the clarity, all the genuineness, all the goodness and simplicity and
reality.
Man alive, said the old man. You sure was thirsty. How long since you had a
drink, anyway?
Two years, he replied. I mean two years since I had a drink of this water. I been
away, traveling around. I just got back. I was born here, over on G Street in Russian
town; you know, across the Southern Pacific tracks; been away two years and I just
got back. Mighty fine too, let me tell you, to be back. I like this place. I'm going to get
a job and settle down.
He hung his head over the water again and took several more swallows; then he
handed the hose to the old man.
You sure was thirsty, said the old man. I ain't never seen anybody anywhere
drink so much water at one time. It sure looked good seeing you swallow all that
water.
He went on walking down Alvin Street, humming to himself, the old man staring
at him.
Nice to be back, the young man thought; greatest mistake I ever made, coming
back this way.
Everything he had ever done had been a mistake, and this was one of the good
mistakes. He had come south from San Francisco without even thinking of going
home; he had thought of going as far south as Merced, stopping there awhile, and then
going back, but once he had got into the country, it had been too much. It had been
great fun standing on the highway in his city clothes, hitchhiking.
One little city after another, and here he was walking through the streets of his
home town, at seven in the evening. It was great, very amusing; and the water,
splendid.
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He wasn't far from town, the city itself, and he could see one or two of the taller
buildings, the Pacific Gas & Electric Building, all lit up with colored lights, and
another, a taller one, that he hadn’t seen before. That’s a new one, he thought; they
put up that one while I was away; things must be booming.
He turned down Fulton Street and began walking into town. It looked great from
where he was, far away and nice and small, very genuine, a real quiet little town, the
kind of place to live in, settle down in , marry in, have a home, kids, a job, and all the
rest of it. It was all he wanted. The air of the valley and the water and the reality of the
whole place, the cleanliness of life in the valley, the simplicity of the people.
In the city everything was the same: the names of the stores, the people walking
in the streets, and the slow passing of automobiles; boys in cars trying to pick up girls;
same as ever, not a thing changed. He saw faces he had known as a boy, people he did
not know by name, and then he saw Tony Rocca, his old pal, walking up the street
toward him, and he saw that Tony recognized him. He stopped walking, waiting for
Tony to come into his presence. It was like a meeting in a dream, strange, almost
incredible. He had dreamed of the two of them playing hooky from school to go
swimming, to go out to the country fair, to sneak into a moving- picture theater; and
now here he was again, a big fellow with a lazy, easy-going walk, and a genial Italian
grin. It was good, and he was glad he had made the mistake and come back.
He stopped walking, waiting for Tony to come into his presence, smiling at him,
unable to speak. The two boys shook hands and then began to strike one another with
affection, laughing loudly, swearing at one another. You old bastard, Tony said;
where the hell have you been? And he punched his friend in the stomach, laughing
loudly.
Old Tony, he said, good old punchdrunk Tony. God, it's good to see you. I
thought maybe you'd be dead by this time. What the hell have you been doing? He
dodged another punch and struck his friend in the chest. He swore in Italian at Tony,
using words Tony had taught him years ago, and Tony swore back at him in Russian.
I've got to go out to the house, he said at last. The folks don't know I'm here. I've
got to go out and see them. I'm dying to see my brother Paul.
He went on down the street, smiling about Tony. They would be having a lot of
good times together again; they might even go swimming again the way they did as
kids. It was great to be back.
Walking by stores, he thought of buying his mother a small gift. A little gift
would please the old lady. But he had little money, and all the decent things were
expensive. I'll get her something later, he thought.
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He turned west on Tulare Street, crossing the Southern Pacific tracks,
reached G Street, then turned south. In a few minutes he would be home again, at
the door of the little old house; the same as ever; the old woman, the old man, his
three sisters, and his kid brother, all of them in the house, living simple lives.
He saw the house from a distance of about a block, and his heart began to jump.
He felt suddenly ill and afraid, something he had forgotten about the place, about that
life which he had always hated, something ugly and mean. But he walked on, moving
slower as he came closer to the house. The fence had fallen and no one had fixed it.
The house suddenly appeared to be very ugly, and he wondered why in the hell the
old man didn't move to a better house in a better neighborhood. Seeing the house
again, feeling all its old reality, all his hatred for it returned, and he began to feel
again the longing to be away from it, where he could not see it. He began to feel, as he
had felt as a boy, the deep inarticulate hatred he had for the whole city, its falseness,
its meanness, the stupidity of its people, the emptiness of their minds, and it seemed to
him that he would never be able to return to such a place. The water, yes, it was good,
it was splendid; but there were other things.
He walked slowly before the house, looking at it as if he might be a stranger,
feeling alien and unrelated to it, yet feeling that it was home, the place he dreamed
about, the place that tormented him wherever he went. He was afraid someone might
come out of the house and see him, because he knew that if he was seen, he might
find himself running away. Still, he wanted to see them, all of them, have them before
his eyes, feel the full presence of their bodies, even smell them, that old strong
Russian smell. But it was too much. He began to feel hatred for everything in the city,
and he walked on, going to the corner. There he stood beneath the street lamp,
bewildered and disgusted, wanting to see his brother Paul, to talk to the boy, find out
what was going on in his mind, how he was taking it, being in such a place, living
such a life. He knew how it had been with him when he had been his brother's age,
and he hoped he might be able to give his brother a little advice, how to keep from
feeling the monotony and the ugliness by reading.
He forgot that he hadn't eaten since breakfast, and that he had been dreaming for
months of eating another of his mother's meals, sitting at the old table in the kitchen,
seeing her, large and red-faced and serious and angry toward him, loving him, but he
had lost his appetite. He thought he might wait at the corner; perhaps his brother
would leave the house to take a walk and he would see the boy and talk to him. Paul,
he would say, and he would talk to the boy in Russian.
The stillness of the valley began to oppress him, losing its piety, becoming
merely a form of the valley's monotony.
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Still, he couldn't go away from the house. From the corner he could see it, and he
knew that he wanted to go in and be among his people, a part of their lives; he knew
this was what he had wanted to do for months, to knock at the door, embrace his
mother and his sisters, walk across the floors of the house, sit in the old chairs, sleep
in his bed, talk with his old man, eat at the table.
And now something he had forgotten while he had been away, something real
but ugly in that life, had come up swiftly, changing everything, changing the
appearance and meaning of the house, the city, the whole valley, making it all ugly
and unreal, making him wish to go away and never return. He could never come back.
He could never enter the house again and go on with his life where he had left off.
Suddenly he was in the alley, climbing over the fence, walking through the yard.
His mother had planted tomatoes, and peppers, and the smell of the growing plants
was thick and acrid and very melancholy to him. There was a light in the kitchen, and
he moved quietly toward it, hoping to see some of them without being seen. He
walked close to the house, to the kitchen window, and looking in saw his youngest
sister Martha washing dishes. He saw the old table, the old stove, and Martha, with
her back turned to him; and all these things seemed so sad and so pathetic that tears
came to his eyes, and he began to need a cigarette. He struck a match quietly on the
bottom of his shoe and inhaled the smoke, looking at his little sister in the old house, a
part of the monotony. Everything seemed very still, very clear, terribly sad; but he
hoped his mother would enter the kitchen; he wanted to have another look at her. He
wanted to see if his being away had changed her much. How would she look? Would
she have that old angry look? He felt angry with himself for not being a good son, for
not trying to make his mother happy, but he knew it was impossible.
He saw his brother Paul enter the kitchen for a drink of water, and for a moment
he wanted to cry out the boy's name, everything that was good in him, all his love,
rushing to the face and form of the boy; but he restrained himself, inhaling deeply,
tightening his lips. In the kitchen, the boy seemed lost, bewildered, imprisoned.
Looking at his brother, he began to cry softly, saying, Jesus, O Jesus, Jesus.
He no longer wished to see his mother. He would become so angry that he would
do something crazy. He walked quietly through the yard, hoisted himself over the
fence, and jumped to the alley. He began to walk away, his grief mounting in him.
When he was far enough away not to be heard, he began to sob, loving them
passionately and hating the ugliness and monotony of their lives. He felt himself
hurrying away from home, from his people, crying bitterly in the darkness of the clear
night, weeping because there was nothing he could do, not one confounded thing.
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Preview Questions:
1. How long does the man leave his home? Where is his home?
2.What does the man feel about his hometown when he first sees it again? List the
words and phrases that show his feelings.
3.Is everything in his hometown the same as he remembers, or have things changed?
4. What is special about the water? What does the water symbolize?
5. What does the man mean when he says “greatest mistake I ever made, coming back
this way”?
6. When does a change in his feelings occur? List the words and phrases that reflect
his new attitude.
7. Why does he leave without seeing his mother?
8. What is the theme of the story? Is the theme directly stated or implied in the story?
9. The story is told in the third person, but describes only the man’s feelings. Why do
you think Saroyan chooses the third person rather than the first person?
10. What is the style of the story? What contribute to the writer’s style?
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