1
Supplemental
Short Stories and Poems
AP English Literature
Atascadero High School
2
Table of Contents
A Piece of String ............................................................................................................... 1
Stalking ....................................................................................................................................................... 4
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ........................................................................................ 8
The Fall of the House of Usher ..................................................................................................................... 11
Birthday Party ......................................................................................................................................... 20
Roman Fever ........................................................................................................................................ 21
Shiloh ............................................................................................................................................... 28
The Bear .................................................................................................................................................. 35
Lament, for Cocoa ....................................................................................................................... 42
“Lament for Cocoa” Analytical Outline ................................................................................................. 43
The Day the TV Broke ................................................................................................................... 44
Dulce Et Decorum Estº .......................................................................................................................... 45
“Dulce et Decorum Est” Analytical Outline ....................................................................................... 46
Poems by Thomas Hardy .................................................................................................................... 47
Sir Philip Sidney .................................................................................................................................. 48
William Shakespeare............................................................................................................................... 49
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer ......................................................................................... 50
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” Analytical Outline Sample.................................................. 51
Storm Warnings ................................................................................................................................... 52
Prologue: Downstream ....................................................................................................................... 52
2003: Eros ............................................................................................................................................. 55
1979: Spring .......................................................................................................................................... 56
1985: Nature ......................................................................................................................................... 57
3
1
A Piece of String
Guy de Maupassant
1
It was market-day, and from all the country round
Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming
toward the town. The men walked slowly, throwing the
whole body forward at every step of their long,
crooked legs. They were deformed from pushing the
plough which makes the left- shoulder higher, and
bends their figures side-ways; from reaping the grain,
when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on
their feet. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as though
varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little
embroidered design and blown out around their bony
bodies, looked very much like balloons about to soar,
whence issued two arms and two feet.
Some of these fellows dragged a cow or a calf at
the end of a rope. And just behind the animal followed
their wives beating it over the back with a leaf-covered
branch to hasten its pace, and carrying large baskets out
of which protruded the heads of chickens or ducks.
These women walked more quickly and energetically
than the men, with their erect, dried-up figures,
adorned with scanty little shawls pinned over their flat
bosoms, and their heads wrapped round with a white
cloth, enclosing the hair and surmounted by a cap.
Now a char-a-banc passed by, jogging along
behind a nag and shaking up strangely the two men on
the seat, and the woman at the bottom of the cart who
held fast to its sides to lessen the hard jolting.
In the market-place at Goderville was a great
crowd, a mingled multitude of men and beasts. The
horns of cattle, the high, long-napped hats of wealthy
peasants, the headdresses of the women came to the
surface of that sea. And the sharp, shrill, barking voices
made a continuous, wild din, while above it
occasionally rose a huge burst of laughter from the
sturdy lungs of a merry peasant or a prolonged bellow
from a cow tied fast to the wall of a house.
5
It all smelled of the stable, of milk, of hay and of
perspiration, giving off that half-human, half-animal
odor which is peculiar to country folks.
Maitre Hauchecorne, of Breaute, had just arrived
at Goderville and was making his way toward the
square when he perceived on the ground a little piece
of string. Maitre Hauchecorne, economical as are all
true Normans, reflected that everything was worth
picking up which could be of any use, and he stooped
down, but painfully, because he suffered from
rheumatism. He took the bit of thin string from the
ground and was carefully preparing to roll it up when
he saw Maitre Malandain, the harness maker, on his
doorstep staring at him. They had once had a quarrel
about a halter, and they had borne each other malice
ever since. Maitre Hauchecorne was overcome with a
sort of shame at being seen by his enemy picking up a
bit of string in the road. He quickly hid it beneath his
blouse and then slipped it into his breeches, pocket,
then pretended to be still looking for something on the
ground which he did not discover and finally went off
toward the market-place, his head bent forward and his
body almost doubled in two by rheumatic pains.
He was at once lost in the crowd, which kept
moving about slowly and noisily as it chaffered and
bargained. The peasants examined the cows, went off,
came back, always in doubt for fear of being cheated,
never quite daring to decide, looking the seller square in
the eye in the effort to discover the tricks of the man
and the defect in the beast.
The women, having placed their great baskets at
their feet, had taken out the poultry, which lay upon the
ground, their legs tied together, with terrified eyes and
scarlet combs.
They listened to propositions, maintaining their
prices in a decided manner with an impassive face or
perhaps deciding to accept the smaller price offered,
suddenly calling out to the customer who was starting
to go away:
10
"All right, I'll let you have them, Mait' Anthime."
Then, little by little, the square became empty, and
when the Angelus struck midday those who lived at a
distance poured into the inns.
At Jourdain's the great room was filled with eaters,
just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every
sort -- wagons, gigs, chars-a- bancs, tilburies,
innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with
mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to
heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on
the ground and their rear in the air.
Just opposite to where the diners were at table the
huge fireplace, with its bright flame, gave out a burning
heat on the backs of those who sat at the right. Three
spits were turning, loaded with chickens, with pigeons
and with joints of mutton, and a delectable odor of
roast meat and of gravy flowing over crisp brown skin
2
arose from the hearth, kindled merriment, caused
mouths to water.
All the aristocracy of the plough were eating there
at Mait' Jourdain's, the innkeeper's, a dealer in horses
also and a sharp fellow who had made a great deal of
money in his day.
The dishes were passed round, were emptied, as
were the jugs of yellow cider. Every one told of his
affairs, of his purchases and his sales. They exchanged
news about the crops. The weather was good for
greens, but too wet for grain.
15
Suddenly the drum began to beat in the courtyard
before the house. Every one, except some of the most
indifferent, was on their feet at once and ran to the
door, to the windows, their mouths full and napkins in
their hand.
When the public crier had finished his tattoo he
called forth in a jerky voice, pausing in the wrong
places:
"Be it known to the inhabitants of Goderville and
in general to all persons present at the market that there
has been lost this morning on the Beuzeville road,
between nine and ten o'clock, a black leather
pocketbook containing five hundred francs and
business papers. You are requested to return it to the
mayor's office at once or to Maitre Fortune
Houlbreque, of Manneville. There will be twenty francs
reward."
Then the man went away. They heard once more
at a distance the dull beating of the drum and the faint
voice of the crier. Then they all began to talk of this
incident, reckoning up the chances which Maitre
Houlbreque had of finding or of not finding his
pocketbook again.
The meal went on. They were finishing their
coffee when the corporal of gendarmes appeared on
the threshold.
He asked:
"Is Maitre Hauchecorne, of Breaute, here?"
Maitre Hauchecorne, seated at the other end of the
table answered:
"Here I am, here I am."
And he followed the corporal.
20
The mayor was waiting for him, seated in an
armchair. He was the notary of the place, a tall, grave
man of pompous speech.
"Maitre Hauchecorne," said he, "this morning on
the Beuzeville road, you were seen to pick up the
pocketbook lost by Maitre Houlbreque, of Manneville."
The countryman looked at the mayor in
amazement frightened already at this suspicion which
rested on him, he knew not why.
"I -- I picked up that pocketbook?"
"Yes, YOU."
"I swear I don't even know anything about it."
"You were seen."
"I was seen -- I? Who saw me?"
"M. Malandain, the harness-maker."
Then the old man remembered, understood, and,
reddening with anger, said:
"Ah! he saw me, did he, the rascal? He saw me
picking up this string here, M'sieu le Maire."
And fumbling at the bottom of his pocket, he pulled
out of it the little end of string.
But the mayor incredulously shook his head:
"You will not make me believe, Maitre
Hauchecorne, that M. Malandain, who is a man whose
word can be relied on, has mistaken this string for a
pocketbook."
The peasant, furious, raised his hand and spat on
the ground beside him as if to attest his good faith,
repeating:
"For all that, it is God's truth, M'sieu le Maire.
There! On my soul's salvation, I repeat it."
The mayor continued:
"After you picked up the object in question, you
even looked about for some time in the mud to see if a
piece of money had not dropped out of it."
25 The good man was choking with indignation and
fear.
"How can they tell -- how can they tell such lies as
that to slander an honest man! How can they?"
His protestations were in vain; he was not
believed.
He was confronted with M. Malandain, who
repeated and sustained his testimony. They railed at
one another for an hour. At his own request Maitre
Hauchecorne was searched. Nothing was found on
him.
At last the mayor, much perplexed, sent him away,
warning him that he would inform the public
prosecutor and ask for orders.
30
The news had spread. When he left the mayor's
office the old man was surrounded, interrogated with a
curiosity which was serious or mocking, as the case
might be, but into which no indignation entered. And
he began to tell the story of the string. They did not
believe him. They laughed.
3
He passed on, buttonholed by every one, himself
buttonholing his acquaintances, beginning over and
over again his tale and his protestations, showing his
pockets turned inside out to prove that he had nothing
in them.
They said to him:
"You old rogue!"
He grew more and more angry, feverish, in despair
at not being believed, and kept on telling his story.
The night came. It was time to go home. He left with
three of his neighbors, to whom he pointed out the
place where he had picked up the string, and all the way
he talked of his adventure.
That evening he made the round of the village of
Breaute for the purpose of telling every one. He met
only unbelievers.
He brooded over it all night long.
35 The next day, about one in the afternoon, Marius
Paumelle, a farm hand of Maitre Breton, the market
gardener at Ymauville, returned the pocketbook and its
contents to Maitre Holbreque, of Manneville.
This man said, indeed, that he had found it on the
road, but not knowing how to read, he had carried it
home and given it to his master.
The news spread to the environs. Maitre
Hauchecorne was informed. He started off at once and
began to relate his story with the denoument. He was
triumphant.
“What grieved me," said he, "was not the thing
itself, do you understand, but it was being accused of
lying. Nothing does you so much harm as being in
disgrace for lying."
All day he talked of his adventure. He told it on
the roads to the people who passed, at the cabaret to
the people who drank and next Sunday when they
came out of church. He even stopped strangers to tell
them about it. He was easy now, and yet something
worried him without his knowing exactly what it was.
People had a joking manner while they listened. They
did not seem convinced. He seemed to feel their
remarks behind his back.
40
On Tuesday of the following week he went to
market at Goderville, prompted solely by the need of
telling his story.
Malandain, standing on his doorstep, began to
laugh as he saw him pass. Why?
He accosted a farmer of Criquetot, who did not let
hire finish, and giving him a punch in the pit of the
stomach cried in his face: "Oh, you great rogue!" Then
he turned his heel upon him.
Maitre Hauchecorne remained speechless and
grew more and more uneasy. Why had they called him
"great rogue"?
When seated at table in Jourdain's tavern he began
again to explain the whole affair.
45
A horse dealer of Montivilliers shouted at him:
"Get out, get out, you old scamp! I know all about
your old string."
Hauchecorne stammered:
"But since they found it again, the pocketbook!"
But the other continued:
"Hold your tongue, daddy; there's one who finds it
and there's another who returns it. And no one the
wiser."
The farmer was speechless. He understood at last.
They accused him of having had the pocketbook
brought back by an accomplice, by a confederate.
He tried to protest. The whole table began to
laugh.
He could not finish his dinner, and went away
amid a chorus of jeers.
He went home indignant, choking with rage, with
confusion, the more cast down since with his Norman
craftiness he was, perhaps, capable of having done
what they accused him of and even of boasting of it as
a good trick. He was dimly conscious that it was
impossible to prove his innocence, his craftiness being
so well known. He felt himself struck to the heart by
the injustice of the suspicion.
50
He began anew to tell his tale, lengthening his
recital every day, each day adding new proofs, more
energetic declarations and more sacred oaths, which he
thought of, which he prepared in his hours of solitude,
for his mind was entirely occupied with the story of the
string. The more he denied it, the more artful his
arguments, the less he was believed.
"Those are liars proofs," they said behind his back.
He felt this. It preyed upon him and he exhausted
himself in useless efforts.
He was visibly wasting away.
Jokers would make him tell the story of "the piece
of string" to amuse them, just as you make a soldier
who has been on a campaign tell his story of the battle.
His mind kept growing weaker and about the end of
December he took to his bed.
He passed away early in January, and, in the
ravings of death agony, he protested his innocence,
repeating:
55
"A little bit of string -- a little bit of string.
See, here it is, M'sieu le Maire."
4
Stalking
by Joyce Carol Oates
1
The Invisible Adversary is fleeing across a field.
Gretchen, walking slowly, deliberately, watches
with her keen unblinking eyes the figure of the Invisible
Adversary some distance ahead. The Adversary has run
boldly in front of all the traffic—on long spiky legs
brisk as colts’ legs—and jumped up onto a curb of new
concrete, and now is running across a vacant field. The
Adversary glances over his shoulder at Gretchen.
Saturday afternoon November. A cold gritty day.
Gretchen is out stalking. She has hours for her game.
Hours. She is dressed for the hunt, her solid legs
crammed into old blue jeans, her big square, strong
feet jammed into white leather boots that cost her
mother forty dollars not long ago, but are now scuffed
and filthy with mud. Hopeless to get them clean again,
Gretchen doesn’t care. She is wearing a dark-green
corduroy jacket that is worn out at the elbows and the
rear, with a zipper that can be zipped up and down,
attached to a fringed leather strip. On her head
nothing, though it is windy today.
She has hours ahead.
5
Cars and trucks and buses from the city and
enormous interstate trucks hauling automobiles pass by
on the highway; Gretchen waits until the way is nearly
clear, then stalks out. A single car is approaching. Slow
down, Gretchen thinks; and like magic he does.
Following the footstep of the Invisible Adversary.
There is no sidewalk here yet, so she might as well cut
right across the field. A gigantic sign announces the site
of the new Pace & Fischbach Building, an office
building of fifteen floors to be completed the following
year. The land around here is all dug up and muddy;
she can see the Adversary’s footsteps leading right past
the gouged-up area . . . and there he is, smirking back at
her, pretending panic.
I’ll get you. Don’t worry. Gretchen thinks carefully.
Because the adversary is so light-footed and
invisible, Gretchen doesn’t make any effort to be that
way. She plods along as she does at school, passing
from classroom to classroom, unhurried and not even
sullen, just unhurried. She knows she is very visible.
She is thirteen years old and one hundred and thirtyfive pounds. She’s only five foot three – stocky,
muscular, squat in the torso and shoulders, with good
strong legs and thighs. She could be good at gym, if she
bothered; instead, she just stands around, her face
empty, her arms crossed and shoulders a little slumped.
If forced, she takes part in the games of volleyball and
basketball, but she runs heavily, without spirit, and
sometimes bumps into other girls, hurting them. Out of
my way, she thinks; at such times her face shows no
expression.
And now?... The Adversary is peeking out at her
from around the corner of the gas station. Something
flickers in her brain. I see you, she thinks, with quiet
excitement. The Adversary ducks back out of sight.
Gretchen heads in the direction, plodding through a
jumbled, bulldozed field of mud and thistles and debris
that is mainly rocks and chunks of glass. The gas
station is brand-new and not yet open for business. It is
all white tile, white concrete, perfect plate-glass
windows with whitewashed X’s on them, a large
driveway with eight gasoline pumps, all proudly erect
and ready for business. But the gas station has not
opened since Gretchen and her family moved here –
about six months ago. Something must have gone
wrong. Gretchen fixes her eyes on the corner where the
Adversary was last seen. He can’t escape.
10
One wall of the gas station’s white tile has been
smeared with something like tar. Dreamy, snakelike,
thick twistings of black. Black tar. Several windows
have been broken. Gretchen stands in the empty
driveway, her hands jammed into her pockets. Traffic is
moving slowly over here. A barricade has been set up
to direct traffic out onto the shoulder of the highway,
on a narrow, bumpy, muddy lane that loops out and
back again onto the pavement. Cars move slowly,
carefully. Their bottoms scape against the road. The
detour signs are great rectangular things, bright yellow
with black zigzag lines. SLOW DETOUR. In the
center lanes of the highway are bulldozers not being
used today, and gigantic concrete pipes to be used for
storms sewers. Eight pipes. They are really enormous;
Gretchen’s eyes crinkle with awe, just to see them.
She remembers the Adversary.
There he is- heading for the shopping plaza. He
won’t get away in the crowds, Gretchen promises herself.
She follows. Now she is approaching an area that is
more completed, though there are still no sidewalks
and some of the building are brand-new and yet
unoccupied, vacant. She jumps over a concrete ditch
that is stained with rust-colored water and heads up a
slight incline to the service drive of the Federal Savings
5
Bank. The drive-in tellers’ windows are all dark today,
behind their green-tinted glass. The whole bank is dark,
closed. Is this the bank her parents go to now? It takes
Gretchen a minute to recognize it.
Now a steady line of traffic, a single lane, turns
onto the service drive that leads to the shopping plaza.
BUCKINGHAM MALL. 101 STORES. Gretchen
notices a few kids her own age, boys or girls, trudging
in jeans and jackets ahead of her, though the mud.
They might be classmates of hers. Her attention is
captured again by the Invisible Adversary, who has run
all the way up to the mall and is hanging around the
entrance of the Cunningham Drug Store, teasing her.
You’ll be sorry for that, Gretchen thinks with a smile.
15
Automobiles pass by her slowly. The parking lot
for the mall is enormous, many acres. A city of cars on
a Saturday afternoon. Gretchen sees a car that might be
her mother’s, but she isn’t sure. Cars are parked slanted
here, in lanes marked LOT K, LANE 15; LOT K,
LANE 16. The signs are spheres, bubbles, perched up
on long slender pole. At night they are illuminated.
Ten or twelve older kids are hanging around the
drugstore entrance. One of them is sitting on top of a
mailbox, rocking it back and forth. Gretchen pushes
past them – they are kidding around, trying to block
people – and inside the store her eye darts rapidly up
and down the aisles, looking for the Invisible
Adversary.
Hiding here? Hiding?
She strolls along, cunning and patient. At the
cosmetics counter a girl is showing an older woman
some liquid makeup. She smears a small oval onto the
back of the woman’s hand, rubs it in gently. “That’s
Peach Pride,” the girl says. She has shimmering blond
hair and eyes that are penciled to show a permanent
exclamatory interest. She does not notice Gretchen,
Who lets a hand drift idly over a display of markeddown lipsticks, each only $1.59.
Gretchen slips the tube of lipstick into her pocket.
Neatly. Nimbly. Ignoring the Invisible Adversary, who
is shaking a finger at her, she drifts over to the
newsstand, looks at the magazine covers without
reading them, and edges over to another display.
Packages in a cardboard barrel, out in the aisle. Big
bargains. Gretchen doesn’t even glance in the barrel to
see what is being offered…she just slips one of the
packages into her pocket. No trouble.
She leaves by another door, the side exit. A small
smile tugs at her mouth.
20
The Adversary is trotting ahead of her. The mall is
divided in geometric areas, each colored differently; the
Adversary leaves the blue pavement and is now in the
6
green. Gretchen follows. She notices the Adversary
going into a Franklin Joseph store.
Gretchen enters the store, sniffs in the perfumy,
overheated smell, sees nothing that interest her on the
counters or on the dress racks, and so walks right to
the back of the store, to the ladies’ room. No one is
inside. She takes the tube of lipstick out of her pocket,
opens it, examines the lipstick. It has a tart, sweet smell.
A very light pink: Spring Blossom. Gretchen goes to the
mirror and smears the lipstick onto it, at first lightly,
then coarsely; part of the lipstick breaks and falls into a
sink littered with hair. Gretchen goes into one of the
toilet stalls and tosses the tube into the toilet bowl. She
takes handfuls of toilet paper and crumbles them into a
ball and throws them into the toilet. Remembering the
package from the drugstore, she takes it out of her
pocket—just toothpaste. She throws it, cardboard
package and all, into the toilet bowl, then, her mind
glimmering with the idea, she goes to the apparatus that
holds the towel—a single cloth towel on a roll—and
tugs at it until it comes loose, then pulls it out hand
over hand, patiently, until the entire towel is out. She
scoops it up and carries it to the toilet. She pushes it in
and flushes the toilet.
The stuff doesn’t go down, so she tries again. This
time it goes partway down before it gets stuck.
Gretchen leaves the rest room and strolls
unhurriedly throughout the store. The Adversary is
waiting for her outside–peeking through the window—
wagging a finger at her. Don’t you wag no finger at me, she
thinks, with a small tight smile. Outside, she follows
him at a distance. Loud music is blaring around her
head. It is rock music, piped out onto the colored
squares and rectangles of the mall, blown everywhere
by the November wind, but Gretchen hardly hears it.
25
Some boys are fooling around outside of the
record store. One of them bumps into Gretchen and
they all laugh as she is pushed against the trash can.
“Watch it, babe!” the boy sings out. Her leg hurts.
Gretchen doesn’t look at them but, with a cold, swift
anger, her face averted, she knocks the trash can over
onto the sidewalk. Junk falls out. The cans rolls. Some
women shoppers scurry to get out of the way and the
boys laugh.
Gretchen walks away without looking back.
She wanders through Sampson Furniture, which
has two entrances. In one door and out the other, as
always, it is a ritual with her. Again she notices the sofa
that is like the sofa in their family room at home—
covered with black and white fur, real goatskin. All
over the store there are sofas, chairs, tables, beds. A
jumble of furnishings. People stroll around them, in
and out of little displays, displays meant to be living
rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, family rooms…It
makes Gretchen’s eyes squint to see so many displays:
like seeing the inside of a hundred houses. She slows
down, almost comes to a stop. Gazing at a living-room
display on a raised platform. Only after a moment does
she remember why she is here – whom she is following
– and she turns to see the Adversary beckoning to her.
She follows him outside again. He goes into
Dodi’s Boutique and, with her head lowered so that her
eyes seem to move to the bottom of her eye-brows,
pressing up against her forehead, Gretchen follows
him. You’ll regret this, she thinks. Dodi’s Boutique is
decorated in silver and black. Metallic strips hang down
from a dark ceiling, quivering. Salesgirls dressed in
pants suits stand around with nothing to do except
giggle with one other and nod their head in time to the
music amplified throughout the store. It is music from
a local radio station. Gretchen wanders over to the
dress racks, for the hell of it. Size 14. “The time is now
2:35,” a radio announcer says cheerfully. “ The weather
is 32 degrees with a chance of showers and possible
sleet tonight. You’re listening to WCKK, Radio
Wonderful…” Gretchen selects several dresses and a
salesgirl shows her to a dressing room.
“Need any help?” The girl asks. She has long
swinging hair and a high shouldered, indifferent, bright
manner.
“No,” Gretchen mutters.
30
Alone, Gretchen takes off her jacket. She is
wearing a navy blue sweater. She zips one of the
dresses open and it falls off the flimsy plastic hanger
before she can catch it. She steps on it, smears mud
onto the white wool. She lets it lie there and holds up
another dress, gazing at herself in the mirror.
She has untidy, curly hair that looks like a wig set
loosely on her head. Light brown curls spill out
everywhere, bouncy, a little frizzy, a cascade, a tumbling
of curls. Her eyes are deep set, her eyebrows heavy and
dark. She has a stern, staring look, like and adult man.
Her nose is perfectly formed, neat and noble. Her
upper lip is long, as if it were stretched to close with
difficulty over the front teeth. She wears no makeup,
her lips are perfectly colorless, pale, a little chapped.
And they are usually held tight, pursed tightly shut. She
has a firm, rounded chin. Her facial structure is strong,
pensive, its feature stern and symmetrical as a statue’s,
blank neutral, withdrawn. Her face is attractive. But
7
there is a blunt, neutral stillness to it, as if she were
detached from it and somewhere else, uninterested.
She holds the dress up to her body, smooths it
down over her chest, staring at herself.
After a moment she hangs the dress up again, and
runs down the zipper so roughly that it breaks. The
other dress she doesn’t bother with. She leaves the
dressing room, putting on her jacket.
At the front of the store the salesgirl glances at
her… “—Didn’t fit?— ”
35
“No,” says Gretchen.
She wanders around for a while, in and out of
Carmichael’s, the Mall’s big famous store, where she
catches sight of her mother on an escalator going up.
Her mother doesn’t notice her. She pauses by a display
of “winter homes.” Her family owns a home like this,
in the Upper Peninsula, except theirs is larger. This one
comes complete for only $5330: PACKAGE
ERECTED ON YOUR LOT – YEAR-ROUND
HOME FIBER GLASS INSULATION –
BEAUTIFUL ROUGH-SAWN VERTICAL B.C.
CEDER SIDING WITH DEEP SIMULATED
SHADOAW LINES FOR A RUGGED EXTERIOR.
Only 3:15. Gretchen goes into the Big Boy
restaurant and orders a ground-rounds hamburger with
French fries. Also a Coke. She sits at the crowded
counter and eats slowly, her jaws grinding slowly, as she
glances at her reflection in the mirror directly in front
of her – her mop of hair moving almost imperceptibly
with the grinding of her jaws – and occasionally she
sees the Adversary waiting outside, coyly. You’ll get yours,
she thinks.
She leaves the Big Boy and wanders out into the
parking lot, eating from a bag of potato chips. She
wipes her greasy hands on her thighs. The afternoon
has turned dark and cold. Shivering a little, she scans
the maze of cars for the Adversary – yes, there he is—
and starts after him. He runs ahead of her. He runs
through the parking lot, waits teasingly at the edge of a
field, and as she approaches he runs across the field,
trotting along with a noisy crowd of four or five loose
dogs that don’t seem to notice him.
40
Gretchen follows him through that field, trudging
in the mud, and through another muddy field, her eyes
fixed on him. Now he is at the high-way—hesitating
there—now he is about to run across in front of
traffic—now, now—now he darts out—
Now! He is struck by a car. His body knocked
backward, spinning backward. Ah, now, now how does it
feel? Gretchen asks.
He picks himself up. Gets to his feet. Is he
bleeding? Yes, bleeding! He stumbles across the
highway to the other side, where there is a sidewalk.
Gretchen follows him as soon as the traffic lets up. He
is staggering now, like a drunken man. How does it feel?
Do you like it now?
The adversary staggers along the sidewalk. He
turns onto a side street, beneath an archway, Piney
Woods. He is leading Gretchen into the Piney Woods
subdivision. Here the homes are quiet large, on
artificial hills that show them to a good advantage.
Most of the homes are white colonials with attached
garages. There are no sidewalks here, so the Adversary
has to walk in the street, limping like an old man, and
Gretchen follows him in the street, with her eyes fixed
on him.
Are you happy now? Does it hurt? Does it?
45
She giggles at the way he walks. He looks like a
drunken man. He glances back at her, white-faced, and
turns up a flagstone walk…goes right up to a big white
colonial house…
Gretchen follows him inside. She inspects the
simulated brick of the foyer: yes, there are blood spots.
He is dripping blood. Entranced, she follows the
splashes of blood into the hall, to the stairs…forgets
her own boots, which are muddy…but she doesn’t feel
like going back to wipe her feet.
Nobody seems to be home. Her mother is
probably still shopping, her father is out of town for
the weekend. The house is empty. Gretchen goes into
the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, takes out a Coke,
and wanders to the rear of the house, to the family
room. It is two steps down from the rest of the house.
She takes off her jacket and tosses it somewhere. Turns
on the television set. Sits on the goatskin sofa and
stares at the screen: a return of a Shotgun Steve show,
which she has already seen.
If the Adversary comes crawling behind her,
groaning in pain, weeping, she won’t even bother to
glance at him.
8
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
By James Thurber
1
“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice
was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress
uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled
down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make
it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m
not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander.
“Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500!
We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders
increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketapocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on
the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of
complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he
shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated
Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!”
shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3
turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the
huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked
at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us
through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t
afraid of Hell!” . . .
“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs.
Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”
“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife,
in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She
seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who
had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fiftyfive,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than
forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on
toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202
through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying
fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.
“You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of
your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you
over.”
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the
building where his wife went to have her hair done.
“Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having
my hair done,” she said. “I don’t need overshoes,” said
Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. “We’ve
been all through that,” she said, getting out of the car.
“You’re not a young man any longer.” He raced the
engine a little. “Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have
you lost your gloves?” Walter Mitty reached in a pocket
and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after
she had turned and gone into the building and he had
driven on to a red light, he took them off again. “Pick it
up, brother!” snapped a cop as the light changed, and
Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead.
He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and
then he drove past the hospital on his way to the
parking lot.
5
. . . “It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington
McMillan,” said the pretty nurse. “Yes?” said Walter
Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. “Who has the case?”
“Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two
specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and
Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.” A
door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr.
Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard.
“Hello, Mitty,” he said. “We’re having the devil’s own
time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close
personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal
tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at him.” “Glad
to,” said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered
introductions: “Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr.
Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty.” “I’ve read your book on
streptothricosis,” said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking
hands. “A brilliant performance, sir.” “Thank you,”
said Walter Mitty. “Didn’t know you were in the States,
Mitty,” grumbled Remington. “Coals to Newcastle,
bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary.” “You
are very kind,” said Mitty. A huge, complicated
machine, connected to the operating table, with many
tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketapocketa-pocketa. “The new anaesthetizer is giving
way!” shouted an interne. “There is no one in the East
9
who knows how to fix it!” “Quiet, man!” said Mitty, in
a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was
now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He
began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials.
“Give me a fountain pen!” he snapped. Someone
handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston
out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place.
“That will hold for ten minutes,” he said. “Get on with
the operation.” A nurse hurried over and whispered to
Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. “Coreopsis
has set in,” said Renshaw nervously. “If you would take
over, Mitty?” Mitty looked at him and at the craven
figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave,
uncertain faces of the two great specialists. “If you
wish,” he said. They slipped a white gown on him; he
adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses
handed him shining . . .
“Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!” Walter
Mitty jammed on the brakes. “Wrong lane, Mac,” said
the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely.
“Gee. Yeh,” muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to
back out of the lane marked “Exit Only.” “Leave her
sit there,” said the attendant. “I’ll put her away.” Mitty
got out of the car. “Hey, better leave the key.” “Oh,”
said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The
attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with
insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.
They’re so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty,
walking along Main Street; they think they know
everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off,
outside New Milford, and he had got them wound
around the axles. A man had had to come out in a
wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning
garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him
drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next
time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they
won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling
and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off
myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk.
“Overshoes,” he said to himself, and he began looking
for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the
overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began
to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told
him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out
from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated
these weekly trips to town-he was always getting
something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor
blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate,
carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up.
But she would remember it. “Where’s the what’s-itsname?” she would ask. “Don’t tell me you forgot the
what’s-its-name.” A newsboy went by shouting
something about the Waterbury trial.
10
. . . “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.” The
District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at
the quiet figure on the witness stand. “Have you ever
seen this before?” Walter Mitty took the gun and
examined it expertly. “This is my Webley-Vickers
50.80,” he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the
courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. “You are a
crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?” said the
District Attorney, insinuatingly. “Objection!” shouted
Mitty’s attorney. “We have shown that the defendant
could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he
wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the
fourteenth of July.” Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly
and the bickering attorneys were stilled. “With any
known make of gun,” he said evenly, “I could have
killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my
left hand.” Pandemonium broke loose in the
courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam
and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter
Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her
savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the
man have it on the point of the chin. “You miserable
cur!” . . .
“Puppy biscuit,” said Walter Mitty. He stopped
walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of
the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A
woman who was passing laughed. “He said ‘Puppy
biscuit,’ ” she said to her companion. “That man said
‘Puppy biscuit’ to himself.” Walter Mitty hurried on.
He went into an A. & P., not the first one he came to
but a smaller one farther up the street. “I want some
biscuit for small, young dogs,” he said to the clerk.
10
“Any special brand, sir?” The greatest pistol shot in the
world thought a moment. “It says ‘Puppies Bark for It’
on the box,” said Walter Mitty.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser’s in
fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch,
unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had
trouble drying it. She didn’t like to get to the hotel first;
she would want him to be there waiting for her as
usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing
a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy
biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy
of Liberty and sank down into the chair. “Can
Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?”
Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes
and of ruined streets.
. . . “The cannonading has got the wind up in
young Raleigh, sir,” said the sergeant. Captain Mitty
looked up at him through touselled hair. “Get him to
bed,” he said wearily. “With the others. I’ll fly alone.”
“But you can’t, sir,” said the sergeant anxiously. “It
takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies
are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman’s circus
is between here and Saulier.” “Somebody’s got to get
that ammunition dump,” said Mitty. “I’m going over.
Spot of brandy?” He poured a drink for the sergeant
and one for himself. War thundered and whined
around the dugout and battered at the door. There was
a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room.
“A bit of a near thing,” said Captain Mitty carelessly.
“The box barrage is closing in,” said the sergeant. “We
only live once, Sergeant,” said Mitty, with his faint,
fleeting smile. “Or do we?” He poured another brandy
and tossed it off. “I never see a man could hold his
brandy like you, sir,” said the sergeant. “Begging your
pardon, sir.” Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on
his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. “It’s forty
kilometres through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty
finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly,
“what isn’t?” The pounding of the cannon increased;
there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from
somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketapocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty
walked to the door of the dugout humming “Auprès de
Ma Blonde.” He turned and waved to the sergeant.
“Cheerio!” he said. . . .
Something struck his shoulder. “I’ve been looking
all over this hotel for you,” said Mrs. Mitty. “Why do
you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect
me to find you?” “Things close in,” said Walter Mitty
vaguely. “What?” Mrs. Mitty said. “Did you get the
what’s-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What’s in that
box?” “Overshoes,” said Mitty. “Couldn’t you have put
them on in the store?” “I was thinking,” said Walter
Mitty. “Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes
thinking?” She looked at him. “I’m going to take your
temperature when I get you home,” she said.’
15
They went out through the revolving doors that
made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you
pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At
the drugstore on the corner she said, “Wait here for
me. I forgot something. I won’t be a minute.” She was
more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It
began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against
the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his
shoulders back and his heels together. “To hell with the
handkerchief,” said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took
one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away.
Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his
lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless,
proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated,
inscrutable to the last. ♦
Note: All cartoons are James Thurber’s work from The
New Yorker magazine. They bear no relation to the text.
11
The Fall of the House of Usher
by Edgar Allan Poe
1
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless
day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung
oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing
alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract
of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of
the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy
House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the
first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable
gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the
feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable,
because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually
receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate
or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon
the mere house, and the simple landscape features of
the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant
eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and
upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an
utter depression of soul which I can compare to no
earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream
of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into
everyday life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil.
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart
-- an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no
goading of the imagination could torture into aught of
the sublime. What was it -- I paused to think -- what
was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the
House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor
could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded
upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon
the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond
doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural
objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still
the analysis of this power lies among considerations
beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a
mere different arrangement of the particulars of the
scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient
to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for
sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I
reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and
lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling,
and gazed down -- but with a shudder even more
thrilling than before -- upon the remodelled and
inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly treestems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now
proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its
proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon
companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed
since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately
reached me in a distant part of the country -- a letter
from him -- which, in its wildly importunate nature,
had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The
MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer
spoke of acute bodily illness -- of a mental disorder
which oppressed him -- and of an earnest desire to see
me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend,
with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my
society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the
manner in which all this, and much more, was said -- it
the apparent heart that went with his request --which
allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly
obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate
associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His
reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was
aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of
temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in
many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in
repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as
well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies,
perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily
recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned,
too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the
Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth,
at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that
the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and
had always, with very trifling and very temporary
variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered,
while running over in thought the perfect keeping of
the character of the premises with the accredited
character of the people, and while speculating upon the
possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of
centuries, might have exercised upon the other -- it was
this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the
consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son,
of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length,
so identified the two as to merge the original title of the
estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the
12
"House of Usher" -- an appellation which seemed to
include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both
the family and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat
childish experiment --that of looking down within the
tarn --had been to deepen the first singular impression.
There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the
rapid increase of my superstition -- for why should I
not so term it? -- served mainly to accelerate the
increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the
paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a
basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that,
when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from
its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange
fancy -- a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but
mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations
which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my
imagination as really to believe that about the whole
mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere
peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity -an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of
heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed
trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn -- a pestilent
and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible,
and leaden-hued.
5
Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a
dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the
building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an
excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been
great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior,
hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet
all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation.
No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there
appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still
perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling
condition of the individual stones. In this there was
much that reminded me of the specious totality of old
wood-work which has rotted for long years in some
neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of
the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive
decay, however, the fabric gave little token of
instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer
might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure,
which, extending from the roof of the building in front,
made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until
it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short
causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my
horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A
valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence,
through many dark and intricate passages in my
progress to the studio of his master. Much that I
encountered on the way contributed, I know not how,
to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have
already spoken. While the objects around me -- while
the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the
walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the
phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I
strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which,
I had been accustomed from my infancy -- while I
hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this - I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the
fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one
of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His
countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of
low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with
trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a
door and ushered me into the presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large
and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and
pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken
floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within.
Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way
through the trellised panes, and served to render
sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects
around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the
remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the
vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon
the walls. The general furniture was profuse,
comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and
musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to
give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an
atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and
irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on
which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me
with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first
thought, of an overdone cordiality -- of the constrained
effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance,
however, at his countenance, convinced me of his
perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments,
while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling
half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before
so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself
to admit the identity of the wan being before me with
the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character
of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and
luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and
13
very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose
of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of
nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded
chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of
moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and
tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion
above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a
countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the
mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these
features, and of the expression they were wont to
convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom
I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the
now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things
startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had
been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild
gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the
face, I could not, even with effort, connect its
Arabesque expression with any idea of simple
humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck
with an incoherence -- an inconsistency; and I soon
found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile
struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy -- an
excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter,
than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by
conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical
conformation and temperament. His action was
alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly
from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits
seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic
concision -- that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and
hollow-sounding enunciation -- that leaden, selfbalanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance,
which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the
irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his
most intense excitement.
10
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit,
of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he
expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length,
into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady.
It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy -- a mere
nervous affection, he immediately added, which would
undoubtedly soon pass. It displayed itself in a host of
unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed
them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps,
the terms, and the general manner of the narration had
their weight. He suffered much from a morbid
acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was
alone endurable; he could wear only garments of
certain texture; the odours of all flowers were
oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light;
and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from
stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with
horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a
bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish
in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise,
shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in
themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the
thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which
may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I
have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its
absolute effect -- in terror. In this unnerved -- in this
pitiable condition --I feel that the period will sooner or
later arrive when I must abandon life and reason
together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm,
FEAR."
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through
broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of
his mental condition. He was enchained by certain
superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling
which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had
never ventured forth -- in regard to an influence whose
supposititious force was conveyed in terms too
shadowy here to be re-stated -- an influence which
some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of
his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he
said, obtained over his spirit -- an effect which
the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the
dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at
length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation,
that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted
him could be traced to a more natural and far more
palpable origin -- to the severe and long-continued
illness -- indeed to the evidently approaching
dissolution -- of a tenderly beloved sister -- his sole
companion for long years -- his last and only relative on
earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I
can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless
and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers."
While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she
called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the
apartment, and, without having noticed my presence,
disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment
not unmingled with dread -- and yet I found it
impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of
stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her
14
retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon
her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the
countenance of the brother -- but he had buried his
face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far
more than ordinary wanness had overspread the
emaciated fingers through which trickled many
passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled
the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual
wasting away of the person, and frequent although
transient affections of a partially cataleptical character,
were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily
borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had
not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in
of the evening of my arrival at the house, she
succumbed (as her brother told me at night with
inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the
destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained
of her person would thus probably be the last I should
obtain -- that the lady, at least while living, would be
seen by me no more.
15
For several days ensuing, her name was
unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this
period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate
the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read
together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild
improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a
closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more
unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more
bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at
cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent
positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the
moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation
of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many
solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the
House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to
convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or
of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me
the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality
threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long
improvised dirges will ring forever in my cars. Among
other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last
waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which
his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by
touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more
thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why; -from these paintings (vivid as their images now are
before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more
than a small portion which should lie within the
compass of merely written words. By the utter
simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested
and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least -- in
the circumstances then surrounding me -- there arose
out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac
contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of
intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in
the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too
concrete reveries of Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my
friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of
abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in
words. A small picture presented the interior of an
immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with
low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or
device. Certain accessory points of the design served
well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an
exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No
outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent,
and no torch, or other artificial source of light was
discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled
throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and
inappropriate splendour.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the
auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to
the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of
stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits
to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar,
which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic
character of his performances. But the fervid facility of
his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They
must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the
words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal
improvisations), the result of that intense mental
collectedness and concentration to which I have
previously alluded as observable only in particular
moments of the highest artificial excitement. The
words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily
remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly
impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or
mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I
perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness
on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason
upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The
Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately,
thus:
15
I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace -Radiant palace -- reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion -It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This -- all this -- was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odour went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh -- but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this
ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there
became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I
mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for
other men have thought thus,) as on account of the
pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion,
in its general form, was that of the sentience of all
vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea
had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed,
under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of
inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent,
or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief,
however, was connected (as I have previously hinted)
with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers.
The conditions of the sentience had been here, he
imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these
stones -- in the order of their arrangement, as well as in
that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of
the decayed trees which stood around -- above all, in
the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement,
and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence --the evidence of the sentience --was to be
seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the
gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of
their own about the waters and the walls. The result
was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries
had moulded the destinies of his family, and which
made him what I now saw him -- what he was. Such
opinions need no comment, and I will make none.
20
Our books -- the books which, for years, had
formed no small portion of the mental existence of the
invalid -- were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping
with this character of phantasm. We pored together
over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of
Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and
Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of
Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of
Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la
Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck;
and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favourite
volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium
Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne;
and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the
16
old African Satyrs and OEgipans, over which Usher
would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight,
however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly
rare and curious book in quarto Gothic -- the manual
of a forgotten church --the Vigilae Mortuorum
secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this
work, and of its probable influence upon the
hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed
me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he
stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a
fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of
the numerous vaults within the main walls of the
building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for
this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at
liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his
resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the
unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of
certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her
medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation
of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that
when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the
person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of
my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what
I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means
an unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in
the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The
body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to
its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had
been so long unopened that our torches, half
smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little
opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and
entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at
great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the
building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It
had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for
the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days,
as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly
combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the
whole interior of a long archway through which we
reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The
door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly
protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually
sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon
tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned
aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked
upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude
between the brother and sister now first arrested my
attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts,
murmured out some few words from which I learned
that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that
sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always
existed between them. Our glances, however, rested
not long upon the dead -- for we could not regard her
unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady
in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all
maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery
of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that
suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so
terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the
lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our
way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments
of the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed,
an observable change came over the features of the
mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had
vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or
forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with
hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his
countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly
hue --but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone
out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was
heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of
extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance.
There were times, indeed, when I thought his
unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some
oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the
necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to
resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of
madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for
long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention,
as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no
wonder that his condition terrified -- that it infected
me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain
degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet
impressive superstitions.
25
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the
night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of
the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced
the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my
couch -- while the hours waned and waned away. I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had
dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that
much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the
bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the
room -- of the dark and tattered draperies, which,
tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest,
swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled
17
uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my
efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremour
gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat
upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless
alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I
uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly
within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened
-- I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit
prompted me -- to certain low and indefinite sounds
which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long
intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an
intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet
unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I
felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and
endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable
condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to
and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a
light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my
attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In
an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at
my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance
was, as usual, cadaverously wan -- but, moreover, there
was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes -- an evidently
restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air
appalled me -- but anything was preferable to the
solitude which I had so long endured, and I even
welcomed his presence as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after
having stared about him for some moments in silence - "you have not then seen it? -- but, stay! you shall."
Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp,
he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely
open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly
lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous
yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its
terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently
collected its force in our vicinity; for there were
frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the
wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which
hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house)
did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with
which they flew careering from all points against each
other, without passing away into the distance. I say that
even their exceeding density did not prevent our
perceiving this -- yet we had no glimpse of the moon or
stars -- nor was there any flashing forth of the
lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of
agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects
immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural
light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous
exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the
mansion.
"You must not -- you shall not behold this!" said I,
shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle
violence, from the window to a seat. "These
appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon -- or it may be that they
have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn.
Let us close this casement; -- the air is chilling and
dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite
romances. I will read, and you shall listen; -- and so we
will pass away this terrible night together."
30
The antique volume which I had taken up was the
"Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called
it a favourite of Usher's more in sad jest than in
earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and
unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest
for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was,
however, the only book immediately at hand; and I
indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now
agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the
history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies)
even in the extremeness of the folly which I should
read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or
apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might
well have congratulated myself upon the success of my
design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the
story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having
sought in vain for peaceable admission into the
dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an
entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the
words of the narrative run thus:
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty
heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of
the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken,
waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who,
in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but,
feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the
rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and,
with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the
door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling
therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore
all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollowsounding wood alarummed and reverberated
throughout the forest."
18
At the termination of this sentence I started, and
for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although
I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived
me) -- it appeared to me that, from some very remote
portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my
ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of
character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly)
of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir
Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond
doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the
casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the
still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing,
surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I
continued the story:
"But the good champion Ethelred, now
entering within the door, was sore enraged and
amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful
hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a
scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery
tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of
gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there
hung a shield of shining brass with this legend
enwritten -Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;
And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck
upon the head of the dragon, which fell before
him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so
horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that
Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands
against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof
was never before heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a
feeling of wild amazement -- for there could be no
doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear
(although from what direction it proceeded I found it
impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but
harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or
grating sound -- the exact counterpart of what my
fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's
unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence
of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a
thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and
extreme terror were predominant, I still retained
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any
observation, the sensitive nervousness of my
companion. I was by no means certain that he had
noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a
strange alteration had, during the last few minutes,
taken place in his demeanour. From a position fronting
my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so
as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and
thus I could but partially perceive his features, although
I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring
inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast -- yet
I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid
opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile.
The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this
idea -- for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet
constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken
notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir
Launcelot, which thus proceeded:
35
"And now, the champion, having escaped from
the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of
the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the
enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass
from out of the way before him, and approached
valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to
where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth
tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet
upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible
ringing sound."
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than
-- as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment,
fallen heavily upon a floor of silver -- I became aware
of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet
apparently muffled reverberation. Completely
unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured
rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed
to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly
before him, and throughout his whole countenance
there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand
upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over
his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips;
and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering
murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending
closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous
import of his words.
"Not hear it? -- yes, I hear it, and have heard it.
Long -- long -- long -- many minutes, many hours,
many days, have I heard it -- yet I dared not -- oh, pity
me, miserable wretch that I am! -- I dared not -I dared not speak! We have put her living in the
tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell
you that I heard her first feeble movements in the
hollow coffin. I heard them -- many, many days ago -yet I dared not -- I dared not speak! And now -- tonight -- Ethelred -- ha! ha! -- the breaking of the
19
hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the
clangour of the shield! -- say, rather, the rending of her
coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison,
and her struggles within the coppered archway of the
vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here
anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste?
Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her
heart? Madman!" -- here he sprang furiously to his feet,
and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were
giving up his soul -- "Madman! I tell you that she now
stands without the door!"
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance
there had been found the potency of a spell -- the huge
antique pannels to which the speaker pointed, threw
slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and
ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust -- but
then without those doors there did stand the lofty and
enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher.
There was blood upon her white robes, and the
evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of
her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained
trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold -then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon
the person of her brother, and in her violent and now
final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and
a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled
aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I
found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there
shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see
whence a gleam so unusual could wi have issued; for
the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me.
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red
moon which now shone vividly through that once
barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before
spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a
zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure
rapidly widened -- there came a fierce breath of the
whirlwind -- the entire orb of the satellite burst at once
upon my sight -- my brain reeled as I saw the mighty
walls rushing asunder -- there was a long tumultuous
shouting sound like the
voice of a thousand
waters -- and the deep
and dank tarn at my feet
closed sullenly and
silently over the
fragments of the "House
of Usher."
20
Birthday Party
By Katharine Brush
1
They were a couple in their late thirties, and they looked
unmistakably married. They sat on the banquette opposite us in a little
narrow restaurant, having dinner. The man had a round, self-satisfied
face, with glasses on it; the woman was fadingly pretty, in a big hat.
5
There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly
noticeable, until the end of their meal, when it suddenly became obvious
that this was an Occasion—in fact, the husband’s birthday, and the wife
had planned a little surprise for him. It arrived, in the form of a small but
glossy birthday cake, with one pink candle burning in the center. The
10 head waiter brought it in and placed it before the husband, and
meanwhile the violin-and-piano orchestra played “Happy Birthday to
You,” and the wife beamed with shy pride over her little surprise, and
such few people as there were in the restaurant tried to help out with a
pattering of applause. It became clear at once that help was needed,
15 because the husband was not pleased. Instead, he was hotly
embarrassed, and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him.
You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, “Oh, now,
don’t be like that!” But he was like that, and as soon as the little cake had
been deposited on the table, and the orchestra had finished the birthday
20 piece, and the general attention had shifted from the man and the
woman, I saw him say something to her under his breath—some
punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind. I couldn’t bear to look at the
woman then, so I stared at my plate and waited for quite a long time.
Not long enough, though. She was still crying when I finally glanced
25 over there again. Crying quietly and heartbrokenly and hopelessly, all to
herself, under the gay big brim of her best hat.
21
Roman Fever
by Edith Wharton
I
1
From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age
moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other,
and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but
benevolent approval.
As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. "Well, come
along, then," it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, "and let's leave the young things to their
knitting," and a voice as fresh laughed back: "Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—" "Well, I mean
figuratively," rejoined the first. "After all, we haven't left our poor parents much else to do.. . ." At that point the
turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.
The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller
and paler one shook her head and colored slightly.
"Barbara!" she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway.
The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous
black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. "That's what our daughters think of us."
5
Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. "Not of us individually. We must remember that. It's just
the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—" Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted
black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. "One never knows," she
murmured. "The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just
looking—even at this." Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet.
The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort
of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The
luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite
extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering look at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and
fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height.
"Well, I don't see why we shouldn't just stay here," said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic
brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled
herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. "After all, it's still the most beautiful view in the world."
"It always will be, to me," assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the "me" that Mrs.
Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of oldfashioned letter writers.
"Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned," she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: "It's a
view we've both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our
girls are now. You remember!"
"Oh, yes, I remember," murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable stress—"There's that head-waiter
wondering," she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in
the world.
"I'll cure him of wondering," said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as
Mrs. Ansley's. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and
would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service!
The headwaiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still
more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember....
10
Mrs. Slade's black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even
unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. "Well, why not! We might do worse.
There's no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don't!"
22
Mrs. Ansley again colored slightly. "I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited
them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they'll want to wait and fly back by moonlight."
"Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they're as sentimental as we were?"
"I've come to the conclusion that I don't in the least know what they are," said Mrs. Ansley. "And perhaps
we didn't know much more about each other."
"No, perhaps we didn't."
15
Her friend gave her a shy glance. "I never should have supposed you were sentimental, Alida."
"Well, perhaps I wasn't." Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in retrospect; and for a few moments the two
ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course,
had a label ready to attach to the other's name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or
anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you
wouldn't believe it, would you! though, of course, still charming, distinguished.... Well, as a girl she had been
exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to the new standards
at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say. Funny where she got it, with those two nullities as
parents. Yes; Horace Ansley was—well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York.
Good-looking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as
well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East Seventy-third Street were
renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries,
illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with
it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had
already begun to think: "I'd rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided." The
idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman's lunch. It made a
hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She
hoped not, but didn't much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a discount, and it did the
irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little.
A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands. There was an appropriate
exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief renewal of intimacy in the half shadow of their mourning; and
now, after another interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest
appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together, lending itself to mild
jokes, and the mutual confession that, if in old days it must have been tiring to "keep up" with daughters, it was
now, at times, a little dull not to.
No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big
drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain
conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple
they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer,
always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the
impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London,
Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in her wakes:
"What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade's wife! Really!
Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps."
Yes; being the Slade's widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such a husband all her
faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have
inherited his father's gifts had died suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her
husband was there, to be help ed and to help ; now, after the father's death, the thought of the boy had become
unbearable. There was nothing left but to mother her daughter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter that
she needed no excessive mothering. "Now with Babs Ansley I don't know that I should be so quiet," Mrs. Slade
sometimes half-enviously reflected; but Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant friend, was that rare accident,
an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as their absence. It was all
perplexing—and to Mrs. Slade a little boring. She wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong man,
23
even; that she might have to be watched, out-maneuvered, rescued. And instead, it was Jenny who watched her
mother, kept her out of drafts, made sure that she had taken her tonic...
20
Mrs. Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait of Mrs. Slade was slighter,
and drawn with fainter touches. "Alida Slade's awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks," would have
summed it up; though she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been an
extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughrer, who was pretty, of course, and clever in a way, but had
none of her mother's—well, "vividness," someone had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words
like this, and cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like her mother.
Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on the whole she had had a sad life. Full of
failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had always been rather sorry for her....
So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope.
II
For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as though, to both, there
was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which
faced them. Mrs. Slade sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the Caesars, and after a
while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she too sank into meditation. Like many intimate friends,
the two ladies had never before had occasion to be silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by
what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet know how
to deal.
Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver.
Mrs. Slade glanced at her wristwatch. "Five o'clock already," she said, as though surprised.
Mrs. Ansley suggested interrogatively: "There's bridge at the Embassy at five." For a long time Mrs. Slade
did not answer. She appeared to be lost in contemplation, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her.
But after a while she said, as if speaking out of a dream: "Bridge, did you say! Not unless you want to.... But I
don't think I will, you know."
25
"Oh, no," Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. "I don't care to at all. It's so lovely here; and so full of old
memories, as you say." She settled herself in her chair, and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade
took sideways note of this activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands remained motionless on her knee.
"I was just thinking," she said slowly, "what different things Rome stands for to each generation of
travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be
guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don't know it—but how
much they're missing!"
The long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knitting a little closer to her eyes.
"Yes, how we were guarded"
"I always used to think," Mrs. Slade continued, "that our mothers had a much more difficult job than our
grandmothers. When Roman fever stalked the streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls
at the danger hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of disobedience
thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to
it to keep us in—didn't they!"
She turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in her knitting. "One, two,
three—slip two; yes, they must have been," she assented, without looking up.
30
Mrs. Slade's eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. "She can knit—in the face of this! How like
her.... "
Mrs. Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to the long green
hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the
Colosseum. Suddenly she thought: "It's all very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and
moonlight. But if Babs Ansley isn't out to catch that young aviator—the one who's a Marchese—then I don't
know anything. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I know that too. I wonder if that's why Grace Ansley likes
24
35
40
45
50
the two girls to go everywhere together! My poor Jenny as a foil—!" Mrs. Slade gave a hardly audible laugh, and
at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her knitting.
"Yes—?"
"I—oh, nothing. I was only thinking how your Babs carries everything before her. That Campolieri boy is
one of the best matches in Rome. Don't look so innocent, my dear—you know he is. And I was wondering, ever
so respectfully, you understand... wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had
managed to produce anything quite so dynamic." Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity.
Mrs. Ansley's hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage
of passion and splendor at her feet. But her small profile was almost expressionless. At length she said, "I think
you overrate Babs, my dear."
Mrs. Slade's tone grew easier. "No; I don't. I appreciate her. And perhaps envy you. Oh, my girl's perfect;
if I were a chronic invalid I'd—well, I think I'd rather be in Jenny's hands. There must be times... but there! I
always wanted a brilliant daughter... and never quite understood why I got an angel instead."
Mrs. Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. "Babs is an angel too."
"Of course—of course! But she's got rainbow wings. Well, they're wandering by the sea with their young
men; and here we sit... and it all brings back the past a little too acutely."
Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imagined (if one had known her less well,
Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also, too many memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august
ruins. But no; she was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about! She knew that Babs
would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri. "And she'll sell the New York
house, and settle down near them in Rome, and never be in their way... she's much too tactful. But she'll have an
excellent cook, and just the right people in for bridge and cocktails... and a perfectly peacefuI old age among her
grandchildren."
Mrs. Slade broke off this prophetic flight with a recoil of self-disgust. There was no one of whom she had
less right to think unkindly than of Grace Ansley. Would she never cure herself of envying her! Perhaps she had
begun too long ago.
She stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the tranquilizing magic of the
hour. But instead of tranquilizing her the sight seemed to increase her exasperation. Her gaze turned toward the
Colosseum. Already its golden flank was drowned in purple shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal clear,
without light or color. It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in midheaven.
Mrs. Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend's arm. The gesture was so abrupt that Mrs. Ansley
looked up, startled.
"The sun's set. You're not afraid, my dear?"
"Afraid—?"
"Of Roman fever or pneumonia! I remember how ill you were that winter. As a girl you had a very delicate
throat, hadn't you?"
"Oh, we're all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly cold, all of a sudden... but not
here."
"Ah, of course you know because you had to be so careful." Mrs. Slade turned back to the parapet. She
thought: "I must make one more effort not to hate her." Aloud she said: "Whenever I look at the Forum from
up here, I remember that story about a great-aunt of yours, wasn't she? A dreadfully wicked great-aunt?"
"Oh, yes; Great-aunt Harriet. The one who was supposed to have sent her young sister out to the Forum
after sunset to gather a nightblooming flower for her album. All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have
albums of dried flowers."
Mrs. Slade nodded. "But she really sent her because they were in love with the same man—"
"Well, that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years afterward. At any rate, the
poor little sister caught the fever and died. Mother used to frighten us with the story when we were children."
"And you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls. The winter I was engaged
to Delphin."
Mrs. Ansley gave a faint laugh. "Oh, did I! Really frightened you? I don't believe you're easily frightened."
25
"Not often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I wonder if you know what
that means?"
"I—yes... " Mrs. Ansley faltered.
"Well, I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made such an impression on me. And I
thought: 'There's no more Roman fever, but the Forum is deathly cold after sunset—especially after a hot day.
And the Colosseum's even colder and damper.'"
55
"The Colosseum—?"
"Yes. It wasn't easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it
could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn't meet elsewhere. You knew that?"
"I—I daresay. I don't remember."
"You don't remember? You don't remember going to visit some ruins or other one evening, just after
dark, and catching a bad chill! You were supposed to have gone to see the moonrise. People always said that
expedition was what caused your illness."
There was a moment's silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: "Did they? It was all so long ago."
60
"Yes. And you got well again—so it didn't matter. But I suppose it struck your friends—the reason given
for your illness. I mean—because everybody knew you were so prudent on account of your throat, and your
mother took such care of you.... You had been out late sightseeing, hadn't you, that night"
"Perhaps I had. The most prudent girls aren't always prudent. What made you think of it now?"
Mrs. Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke out: "Because I simply can't
bear it any longer—"
Mrs. Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. "Can't bear what?"
"Why—your not knowing that I've always known why you went."
65
"Why I went—?"
"Yes. You think I'm bluffing, don't you? Well, you went to meet the man I was engaged to—and I can
repeat every word of the letter that took you there."
While Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag, her knitting and gloves, slid
in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost.
"No, no—don't," she faltered out.
26
70
75
80
85
90
95
"Why not? Listen, if you don't believe me. 'My one darling, things can't go on like this. I must see you
alone. Come to the Colosseum immediately after dark tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one
whom you need fear will suspect'—but perhaps you've forgotten what the letter said?"
Mrs. Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steadying herself against the chair she
looked at her friend, and replied: "No; I know it by heart too."
"And the signature? 'Only your D.S.' Was that it? I'm right, am I? That was the letter that took you out that
evening after dark?"
Mrs. Ansley was still looking at her. It seemed to Mrs. Slade that a slow struggle was going on behind the
voluntarily controlled mask of her small quiet face. "I shouldn't have thought she had herself so well in hand,"
Mrs. Slade reflected, almost resentfully. But at this moment Mrs. Ansley spoke. "I don't know how you knew. I
burned that letter at once."
"Yes; you would, naturally—you're so prudent!" The sneer was open now. "And if you burned the letter
you're wondering how on earth I know what was in it. That's it, isn't it?"
Mrs. Slade waited, but Mrs. Ansley did not speak.
"Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!"
"You wrote it?"
"Yes."
The two women stood for a minute staring at each other in the last golden light. Then Mrs. Ansley
dropped back into her chair. "Oh," she murmured, and covered her face with her hands.
Mrs. Slade waited nervously for another word or movement. None came, and at length she broke out: "I
horrify you."
Mrs. Ansley's hands dropped to her knees. The face they uncovered was streaked with tears. "I wasn't
thinking of you. I was thinking—it was the only letter I ever had from him!"
"And I wrote it. Yes; I wrote it! But I was the girl he was engaged to. Did you happen to remember that?"
Mrs. Ansley's head drooped again. "I'm not trying to excuse myself... I remembered... "
"And still you went?"
"Still I went."
Mrs. Slade stood looking down on the small bowed figure at her side. The flame of her wrath had already
sunk, and she wondered why she had ever thought there would be any satisfaction in inflicting so purposeless a
wound on her friend. But she had to justify herself.
"You do understand? I'd found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you were in love with Delphin—
and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness... your... well, I wanted you out of the way,
that's all. Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter... I don't know why
I'm telling you now."
"I suppose," said Mrs. Ansley slowly, "it's because you've always gone on hating me."
"Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind." She paused. "I'm glad you destroyed
the letter. Of course I never thought you'd die."
Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was conscious of a strange sense of
isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of human communion. "You think me a monster!"
"I don't know... It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn't write it"
"Ah, how you care for him still!"
"I cared for that memory," said Mrs. Ansley.
Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically reduced by the blow—as if, when she
got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust. Mrs. Slade's jealousy suddenly leaped up again at the sight.
All these years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere
memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to. Wasn't it she who was the monster?
"You tried your best to get him away from me, didn't you? But you failed; and I kept him. That's all."
"Yes. That's all."
"I wish now I hadn't told you. I'd no idea you'd feel about it as you do; I thought you'd be amused. It all
happened so long ago, as you say; and you must do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think
27
you'd ever taken it seriously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months afterward? As
soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather
surprised—they wondered at its being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of
pique—to be able to say you'd got ahead of Delphin and me. Kids have such silly reasons for doing the most
serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you'd never really cared."
"Yes. I suppose it would," Mrs. Ansley assented.
The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over it, abruptly darkening the Seven
Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on
the deserted terrace—waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing with trays
and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straightened. A feeble string of electric lights
flickered out. A stout lady in a dustcoat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if anyone had seen the
elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker. She poked with her stick under the table at which she
had lunched, the waiters assisting.
The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted. For a long time neither
of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again: "I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—"
100
"A joke?"
"Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love especially. And I remember laughing to
myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening
for every sound, trying to get in—of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward."
Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly toward her companion. "But I
didn't wait. He'd arranged everything. He was there. We were let in at once," she said.
Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. "Delphin there! They let you in! Ah, now you're lying!" she
burst out with violence.
Mrs. Ansley's voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. "But of course he was there. Naturally he came—"
105
"Came? How did he know he'd find you there? You must be raving!"
Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. "But I answered the letter. I told him I'd be there. So he came."
Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. "Oh, God—you answered! I never thought of your
answering...."
"It's odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter."
"Yes. I was blind with rage."
110
Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. "It is cold here. We'd better go.... I'm sorry for you,"
she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat.
The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. "Yes; we'd better go." She gathered up her bag and
cloak. "I don't know why you should be sorry for me," she muttered.
Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky mass of the Colosseum. "Well—because I
didn't have to wait that night."
Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. "Yes, I was beaten there. But I oughtn't to begrudge it to you, I suppose.
At the end of all these years. After all, I had everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing
but that one letter that he didn't write."
Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she took a step toward the door of the terrace, and turned back,
facing her companion.
115
"I had Barbara," she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway.
28
Shiloh
by Bobbie Ann Mason
1
Leroy Moffitt's wife, Norma Jean, is working on
her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to
warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell.
Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of
Wonder Woman.
"I'd give anything if I could just get these muscles
to where they're real hard," says Norma Jean. "Feel this
arm. It's not as hard as the other one."
"That's 'cause you're right-handed," says Leroy,
dodging as she swings the barbell in an arc.
"Do you think so?"
5
"Sure."
Leroy is a truck driver. He injured his leg in a
highway accident four months ago, and his physical
therapy, which involves weights and a pulley, prompted
Norma Jean to try building herself up. Now she is
attending a body-building class. Leroy has been
collecting temporary disability since his tractor-trailer
jackknifed in Missouri, badly twisting his left leg in its
socket. He has a steel pin in his hip. He will probably
not be able, to drive his rig again. It sits in the
backyard, like a gigantic bird that has flown home to
roost. Leroy has been home in Kentucky for three
months, and his leg is almost healed, but the accident
frightened him and he does not want to drive any more
long hauls. He is not sure what to do next. In the
meantime, he makes things from craft kits. He started
by building a miniature log cabin from notched
Popsicle sticks. He varnished it and placed it on the
TV set, where it remains. It reminds him of a rustic
Nativity scene. Then he tried string art (sailing ships
on black velvet), a macramé owl kit, a snap-together B17 Flying Fortress, and a lamp made out of a model
truck, with a light fixture screwed in the top of the cab.
At first the kits were diversions, something to kill time
but now he is thinking about building a full-scale log
house from a kit. It would be considerably cheaper
than building a regular house, and besides, Leroy has
grown to appreciate how things are put together. He
has begun to realize that in all the years he was on the
road he never took time to examine anything. He was
always flying past scenery.
"They won't let you build a log cabin in any of the
new subdivisions," Norma Jean tells him.
"They will if I tell them it's for you," he says,
teasing her. Ever since they were married, he has
promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home
one day. They have always rented, and the house they
live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel
like a home, Leroy realizes now.
Norma Jean works at the Rexall drugstore, and she
has acquired an amazing amount of information about
cosmetics. When she explains to Leroy the three stages
of complexion care, involving creams, toners, and
moisturizers, he thinks happily of other petroleum
products—axle grease, diesel fuel. This is a connection
between him and Norma Jean. Since he has been
home, he has felt unusually tender about his wife and
guilty over his long absences. But he can't tell what she
feels about him. Norma Jean has never complained
about his traveling; she has never made hurt remarks,
like calling his truck a"widow-maker." He is reasonably
certain she has been faithful to him, but he wishes she
would celebrate his permanent homecoming more
happily. Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at
home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed
about it. Perhaps he reminds her too much of the early
days of their marriage, before he went on the road.
They had a child who died as an infant, years ago.
They never speak about their memories of Randy,
which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home
all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each
other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should
mention the child. He has the feeling that they are
waking up out of a dreamtogether—that they must
create a new marriage, start afresh. They are lucky they
are still married. Leroy has read that for most people
losing a child destroys the marriage—or else he heard
this on Donahue. He can't always remember where he
learns things anymore.
10
At Christmas, Leroy bought an electric organ for
Norma Jean. She used to play the piano when she was
in high school. "It don't leave you," she told him once.
"It's like riding a bicycle."
The new instrument had so many keys and buttons
that she was bewildered by it at first. She touched the
keys tentatively, pushed some buttons, then pecked out
"Chopsticks." It came out in an amplified fox-trot
rhythm, with marimba sounds.
29
"It's an orchestra!" she cried.
The organ had a pecan-look finish and eighteen
preset chords, with optional flute, violin, trumpet,
clarinet, and banjo accompaniments. Norma Jean
mastered the organ almost immediately. At first she
played Christmas songs. Then she bought The Sixties
Songbook and learned every tune in it, adding
variations to each with the rows of brightly colored
buttons.
"I didn't like these old songs back then," she said.
"But I have this crazy feeling I missed something."
15
"You didn't miss a thing," said Leroy.
Leroy likes to lie on the couch and smoke a joint
and listen to Norma Jean play "Can't Take My Eyes
Off You" and "I'll Be Back." He is back again. After
fifteen years on the road, he is finally settling down
with the woman he loves. She is still pretty. Her skin
is flawless. Her frosted curls resemble pencil trimmings.
Now that Leroy has come home to stay, he notices
how much the town has changed. Subdivisions are
spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick.
The sign at the edge of town says "Pop: 11,500"—only
seven hundred more than it said twenty years before.
Leroy can't figure out who is living in all the new
houses. The farmers who used to gather around the
courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play
checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been
years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and
they have disappeared without his noticing.
Leroy meets a kid named Stevie Hamilton in the
parking lot at the new shopping center. While they
pretend to be strangers meeting over a stalled car,
Stevie tosses an ounce of marijuana under the front
seat of Leroy's car. Stevie is wearing orange jogging
shoes and a T-shirt that says CHATTAHOOCHEE
SUPER-RAT. His father is a prominent doctor who
lives in one of the expensive subdivisions in a new
white-columned brick house that looks like a funeral
parlor. In the phone book under his name there is a
separate number, with the listing "Teenagers."
"Where do you get this stuff?" asks Leroy. "From
your pappy?"
20
"That's for me to know and you to find out,"
Stevie says. He is slit-eyed and skinny.
"What else you got?"
"What you interested in?"
"Nothing special. Just wondered."
Leroy used to take speed on the road. Now he has
to go slowly. He needs to be mellow. He leans back
against the car and says, "I'm aiming to build me a log
house, soon as I get time. My wife, though, I don't
think she likes the idea."
25
"Well, let me know when you want me again,"
Stevie says. He has a cigarette in his cupped palm, as
though sheltering it from the wind. He takes a long
drag, then stomps it on the asphalt and slouches away.
Stevie's father was two years ahead of Leroy in
high school. Leroy is thirty-four. He married Norma
Jean when they were both eighteen, and their child
Randy was born a few months later, but he died at the
age of four months and three days. He would be about
Stevie's age now. Norma Jean and Leroy were at the
drive-in, watching a double feature (Dr. Strangelove
and Lover Come Back), and the baby was sleeping in
the back seat. When the first movie ended, the baby
was dead. It was the sudden infant death syndrome.
Leroy remembers handing Randy to a nurse at the
emergency room, as though he were offering her a
large doll as a present. A dead baby feels like a sack of
flour. "It just happens sometimes," said the doctor, in
what Leroy always recalls as a nonchalant tone. Leroy
can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still
sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the
President of the United States was talking in a folksy
voice on the hot line to the Soviet premier about the
bomber accidentally headed toward Russia. He was in
the War Room, and the world map was lit up. Leroy
remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside
him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this
strange girl? Hehad forgotten who she was. Now
scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus.
Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers
are always changing.
When Leroy gets home from the shopping center,
Norma Jean's mother, Mabel Beasley, is there. Until
this year, Leroy has not realized how much time she
spends with Norma Jean. When she visits, she inspects
the closets and then the plants, informing Norma Jean
when a plant is droopy or yellow. Mabel calls the
plants "flowers," although there are never any blooms.
She always notices if Norma Jean's laundry is piling up.
Mabel is a short, overweight woman whose tight,
brown-dyed curls look more like a wig than the actual
wig she sometimes wears. Today she has brought
Norma Jean an off-white dust ruffle she made for the
bed; Mabel works in a custom-upholstery shop.
30
"This is the tenth one. I made this year," Mabel says. "I
got started and couldn't stop."
"It's real pretty," says Norma Jean.
"Now we can hide things under the bed," says
Leroy, who gets along with his mother-in-law primarily
by joking with her. Mabel has never really forgiven
him for disgracing her by getting Norma Jean pregnant.
When the baby died, she said that fate was mocking
her.
30
"What's that thing?" Mabel says to Leroy in a loud
voice, pointing to a tangle of yarn on a piece of canvas.
Leroy holds it up for Mabel to see. "It's my
needlepoint," he explains. "This is a Star Trek pillow
cover."
"That's what a woman would do," says Mabel.
"Great day in the morning!" "All the big football
players on TV do it," he says.
"Why, Leroy, you're always trying to fool me. I
don't believe you for one minute. You don't know
what to do with yourself—that's the whole trouble;
Sewing!"
"I'm aiming to build us a log house," says Leroy
"Soon as my plans come."
35
"Like heck you are," says Norma Jean. She takes
Leroy's needlepoint and shoves it into a drawer. "You
have to find a job first. Nobody can afford to build
now anyway."
Mabel straightens her girdle and says, "I still think
before you get tied down y'all ought to take a little run
to Shiloh."
"One of these days, Mama," Norma Jean says
impatiently.
Mabel is talking about Shiloh, Tennessee. For the
past few years, she has been urging Leroy and Norma
jean to visit the Civil War battleground there.
Mabel went there on her honeymoon—the only
real trip she ever took. Her husband died of a
perforated ulcer when Norma Jean was ten, but Mabel,
who was accepted into the United Daughters of the
Confederacy in 1975, is still preoccupied with going
back to Shiloh.
40
"I've been to kingdom come and back in that truck
out yonder," Leroy says to Mabel, "but we never yet set
foot in that battleground. Ain't that something? How
did I miss it?"
"It's not even that far," Mabel says
After Mabel leaves, Norma Jean reads to Leroy
from a list she has made. "Things you could do," she
announces. "You could get a job as a guard at Union
Carbide, where they'd let you set on a stool. You could
get on at the lumberyard. You could do a little
carpenter work, if you want to build so bad. You
could—"
"I can't do something where I'd have to stand up
all day."
"You ought to try standing up all day behind a
cosmetics counter. It's amazing that I have strong feet,
coming from two parents that never had strong feet at
all." At the moment Norma Jean is holding on to the
kitchen counter, raising her knees one at a time as she
talks. She is wearing two-pound ankle weights.
45
"Don't worry," says Leroy. "I'll do something."
"You could truck calves to slaughter for
somebody. You wouldn't have to drive any big old
truck for that."
"I'm going to build you this house," says Leroy. I
want to make you a real home."
"I don't want to live in any log cabin."
"It's not a cabin. It's a house."
50
"I don't care. It looks like a cabin."
"You and me together could lift those logs. It's
just like lifting weights." Norma Jean doesn't answer.
Under her breath, she is counting. Now she is
marching through the kitchen. She is doing goose
steps.
Before his accident, when Leroy came home he
used to stay in the house with Norma Jean, watching.
TV in bed and playing cards. She would cook fried
chicken, picnic ham, chocolate pie—all his favorites.
Now he is home alone much of the time. In the
mornings, Norma Jean disappears, leaving a cooling
place in the bed. She eats a cereal called Body Buddies,
and she leaves the bowl on the table, with the soggy tan
balls floating in a milk puddle. He sees things about
Norma Jean that he never realized before. When she
chops onions, she stares off into a corner, as if she
can't bear to look. She puts on her house slippers
almost precisely at nine o'clock every evening and
nudges her joggingshoes under the couch. She saves
bread heels for the birds. Leroy watches the birds at
the feeder. He notices the peculiar way goldfinches fly
past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then
spread their wings to catch and lift themselves. He
wonders if they close their eyes when they fall. Norma
Jean closes her eyes when they are in bed. She wants
the lights turned out. Even then, he is sure she closes
her eyes.
31
He goes for long drives around town. He tends to
drive a car rather carelessly. Power steering and an
automatic shift make a car feel so small and
inconsequential that his body is hardly involved in the
driving process. His injured leg stretches out
comfortably. Once or twice he has almost hit
something, but even the prospect of an accident seems
minor in a car. He cruises the new subdivisions, feeling
like a criminal rehearsing for a robbery. Norma Jean is
probably right about a log house being inappropriate
here in the new subdivisions. All the houses look
grand and complicated. They depress him.
One day when Leroy comes home from a drive he
finds Norma Jean in tears. She is in the kitchen making
a potato and mushroom-soup casserole, with gratedcheese topping. She is crying because her mother
caught her smoking.
55
"I didn't hear her coming. I was standing here
puffing away pretty as you please," Norma Jean says,
wiping her eyes.
"I knew it would happen sooner or later," says
Leroy, putting his arm around her.
"She don't know the meaning of the word
'knock,"' says Norma Jean. "It's a wonder she hadn't
caught me years ago."
"Think of it this way," Leroy says. "What if she
caught me with a joint?"
"You better not let her!" Norma Jean shrieks.
"I'm warning you, Leroy Moffitt!"
60
"I'm just kidding. Here, play me a tune. That'll
help you relax.”
Norma Jean puts the casserole in the oven and sets
the timer. Then she plays a ragtime tune, with horns
and banjo, as Leroy lights up a joint and lies on the
couch, laughing to himself about Mabel's catching him
at it. He thinks of Stevie Hamilton-a doctor's son
pushing grass. Everything is funny. The whole town
seems crazy and small. He is reminded of Virgil
Mathis, a boastful policeman Leroy used to shoot pool
with. Virgil recently led a drug bust in a back room at a
bowling alley, where he seized ten thousand dollars'
worth of marijuana. The newspaper had a picture of
him holding up the bags of grass and grinning widely.
Right now, Leroy can imagine Virgil breaking down the
door and arresting him with a lungful of smoke. Virgil
would probably have been alerted to the scene because
of all the racket Norma Jean is making. Now she
sounds like a hard-rock band. Norma Jean is terrific.
When she switches to a Latin-rhythm version of
"Sunshine Superman," Leroy hums along. Norma
Jean's foot goes up and down, up and down.
"Well, what do you think?" Leroy says, when
Norma Jean pauses to search through her music.
"What do I think about what?"
His mind has gone blank. Then he Says, "I'll sell
my rig and build us a house." That wasn't what he
wanted to say. He wanted to know what she
thought—what she really thought—about them.
65
"Don't start in on that again," says Norma Jean.
She begins playing "Who'll Be the Next in Line?"
Leroy used to tell hitchhikers his whole life
story—about his travels, his hometown, the baby. He
would end with a question: "Well, what do you think?"
It was just a rhetorical question. In time, he had the
feeling that he'd been telling the same story over and
over to the same hitchhikers. He quit talking to
hitchhikers when he realized how his voice sounded—
whining and self-pitying, like some teenage-tragedy
song. Now Leroy has the sudden impulse to tell
Norma Jean about himself, as if he had just met her.
They have known each, other so long they have
forgotten a lot about each other. They could become
reacquainted. But when the oven timer goes off and
she runs to the kitchen, he forgets why he wants to do
this.
The next day, Mabel drops by. It is Saturday and
Norma Jean is cleaning. Leroy is studying the plans of
his log house, which have finally come in the mail. He
has them spread out on the table—big sheets of stiff
blue paper, with diagrams and numbers printed in
white. While Norma Jean runs the vacuum, Mabel
drinks coffee. She sets her coffee cup on a blueprint.
"I’m just waiting for time to pass," she says to
Leroy, drumming her fingers on the table.
As soon as Norma Jean switches off the vacuum,
Mabel says in a loud voice, "Did you hear about the
datsun dog that killed the baby?"
70
Norma Jean syas, “The is “dachshund.’”
“They put the dog on trial. It chewed the baby’s legs
off. The mother was in the next room all the time."
She raises her voice. "They thought it was neglect."
Norma Jean is holding her ears. Leroy manages to
open the refrigerator and get some Diet Pepsi to offer
Mabel. Mabel still has some coffee and she waves away
the Pepsi.
32
"Datsuns are like that," Mabel says. "They're
jealous dogs. They'll tear a place to pieces if you don't
keep an eye on them."
"You better watch out what you're saying, Mabel,"
says Leroy.
"Well, facts is facts."
75
Leroy looks out the window at his rig. It is like a
huge piece of furniture gathering dust in the backyard.
Pretty soon it will be an antique. He hears the vacuum
cleaner. Norma Jean seems to be cleaning the living
room rug again.
Later, she says to Leroy, "She just said that about
the baby because she caught me smoking. She's trying
to pay me back."
"What are you talking about?" Leroy says,
nervously shuffling blueprints.
"You know good and well," Norma Jean says. She
is sitting in a kitchen chair with her feet up and her
arms wrapped around her knees. She looks small and
helpless. She says, "The very idea, her bringing up a
subject like that! Saying it was neglect."
"She didn't mean that," Leroy says.
80
"She might not have thought she meant it. She
always says things like that. You don't know how she
goes on."
"But she didn't really mean it. She was just
talking."
Leroy opens a king-sized bottle of beer and pours
it into two glasses, dividing it carefully. He hands a
glass to Norma Jean and she takes it from him
mechanically. For a long time, they sit by the kitchen
window watching the birds at the feeder.
Something is happening. Norma Jean is going to
night school. She has graduated from her six-week
body-building course and now she is taking an adulteducation course in composition at Paducah
Community College. She spends her evenings
outlining paragraphs.
"First you have a topic sentence," she explains to
Leroy. "Then you divide it up. Your secondary topic
has to be connected to your primary topic."
85
To Leroy, this sounds intimidating. "I never was
any good in English," he says.
"It makes a lot of sense."
"What are you doing this for, anyhow?"
She shrugs. "It's something to do." She stands up
and lifts her dumbbells a few times.
"Driving a rig, nobody cared about my English."
"I'm not criticizing your English."
90
Norma Jean used to say, "If I lose ten minutes'
sleep, I just drag all day." Now she stays up late,
writing compositions. She got a B on her first paper—
a how-to theme on soup-based casseroles. Recently
Norma Jean has been cooking unusual foods—tacos,
lasagna, Bombay chicken. She doesn't play the organ
anymore, though her second paper was called "Why
Music Is Important to Me." She sits at the kitchen
table, concentrating on her outlines, while Leroy plays
with his log house plans, practicing with a set of
Lincoln Logs. The thought of getting a truckload of
notched, numbered logs scares him, and he wants to be
prepared. As he and Norma Jean work together at the
kitchen table, Leroy has the hopeful thought that they
are sharing something, but he knows he is a fool to
think this. Norma Jean is miles away. He knows he is
going to lose her. Like Mabel, he is just waiting for
time to pass.
One day, Mabel is there before Norma Jean gets
home from work, and Leroy finds himself confiding in
her. Mabel, he realizes, must know Norma Jean better
than he does.
"I don't know what's got into that girl," Mabel
says. "She used to go to bed with the chickens. Now
you say she's up all hours. Plus her a-smoking. I like to
died."
"I want to make her this beautiful home," Leroy
says, indicating the Lincoln Logs. "I don't think she
even wants it. Maybe she was happier with me gone."
"She don't know what to make of you, coming home
like this."
"Is that it?"
95
Mabel takes the roof off his Lincoln Log cabin.
"You couldn't get me in a log cabin," she says. "I was
raised in one. It's no picnic, let me tell you."
"They're different now," says Leroy.
"I tell you what," Mabel says, smiling oddly at
Leroy.
"What?"
"Take her on down to Shiloh. Y'all need to get
out together, stir a little. Her brain's all balled up over
them books."
100
Leroy can see traces of Nor ma Jean's features in
her mother's face. Mabel's worn face has the texture of
crinkled cotton, but suddenly she looks pretty. It
occurs to Leroy that Mabel has been hinting all along
that she wants them to take her with them to Shiloh.
"Let's all go to Shiloh," he says. "You and me and
her. Come Sunday." Mabel throws up her hands in
33
protest "Oh, no, not me. Young folks want to be by
theirselves."
When Norma Jean comes in with groceries, Leroy
says excitedly, "Your mama here's been dying to go to
Shiloh for thirty-five years. It's about time we went,
don't you think?"
"I'm not going to butt in on anybody's second
honeymoon," Mabel says.
"Who's going on a honeymoon, for Christ's sake?"
Norma Jean says loudly.
105
"I never raised no daughter of mine to talk that-away," Mabel says.
"You ain't seen nothing yet," says Norma Jean. She
starts putting away boxes and cans, slamming cabinet
doors.
"There's a log cabin at Shiloh," Mabel says. "It
was there during the battle. There's bullet holes in it."
"When are you going to shut up about Shiloh,
Mama?" asks Norma Jean.
"I always thought Shiloh was the prettiest place, so
full of history," Mabel goes on. "I just hoped y'all
could see it once before I die, so you could tell me
about it." Later, she whispers to Leroy, "You do what
I said. A little change is what she needs."
110
"Your name means 'the king,"' Norma Jean says to
Leroy that evening. He is trying to get her to go to
Shiloh, and she is reading a book about another
century.
"Well, I reckon I ought to be right proud."
"I guess so."
"Am I still king around here?"
Norma Jean flexes her biceps and feels them for
hardness. "I'm not fooling around with anybody, if
that's what you mean," she says.
115
"Would you tell me if you were?"
"I don't know."
"What does your name mean?"
"It was Marilyn Monroe's real name."
"No kidding!"
120
"Norma comes from the Normans, They were
invaders," she says. She closes her book and looks
hard at Leroy. "I'll go to Shiloh with you if you'll stop
staring at me."
On Sunday, Norma Jean packs a picnic and they
go to Shiloh. To Leroy's relief, Mabel says she does
not want to come with them. Norma Jean drives, and
Leroy, sitting beside her, feels like some boring
hitchhiker she has picked up. He tries some
conversation, but she answers him in monosyllables.
At Shiloh, she drives aimlessly through the park, past
bluffs and trails and steep ravines. Shiloh is an
immense place, and Leroy cannot see it as a
battleground. It is not what he expected. He thought
it would look like a golf course. Monuments are
everywhere, showing through the thick clusters of
trees. Norma Jean passes the log cabin Mabel
mentioned. It is surrounded by tourists looking for
bullet holes.
"That's not the kind of log house I've got in
mind," says Leroy apologetically.
"I know that."
"This is a pretty place. Your Mama was right"
125
"It's O.K.," says Norma Jean. "Well, we've seen it.
I hope she's satisfied." They burst out laughing
together.
At the park museum, a movie on Shiloh is shown
every half hour, but they decide that they don't want to
see it. They buy a souvenir Confederate flag for Mabel,
and then they find a picnic spot near the cemetery.
Norma Jean has brought a picnic cooler, with pimiento
sandwiches, soft drinks, and Yodels. Leroy eats a
sandwich and then smokes a joint, hiding it behind the
picnic cooler. Norma Jean has quit smoking altogether.
She is picking cake crumbs from the cellophane
wrapper, like a fussy bird.
Leroy says, "So the boys in gray ended up in
Corinth. The Union soldiers zapped 'em finally. April
7, 1862."
They both know that he doesn't know any history.
He is just talking about some of the historical plaques
they have read. He feels awkward; like a boy on a date
with an older girl. They are still just making
conversation.
"Corinth is where Mama eloped to," says Norma
Jean.
130
They sit in silence and stare at the cemetery for the
Union dead and, beyond, at a tall cluster of trees.
Campers are parked nearby, bumper to bumper, and
small children in bright clothing are cavorting and
squealing. Norma Jean wads up the cake wrapper and
squeezes it tightly in her hand. Without looking at
Leroy, she says, "I want to leave you."
Leroy takes a bottle of Coke out of the cooler and
flips off the cap. He holds the bottle poised near his
mouth but cannot remember to take a drink. Finally he
says, "No, you don't."
34
"Yes, I do."
"I won't let you."
"You can't stop me."
135
"Don't do me that way."
Leroy knows Norma Jean will have her own way.
"Didn't I promise to be home from now on?" he says.
"In some ways, a woman prefers a man who
wanders," says Norma Jean. "That sounds crazy, I
know."
"You're not crazy."
Leroy remembers to drink from his Coke. Then
he says, "Yes, you arecrazy. You and me could start all
over again. Right back at the beginning."
140
"We have started all over again," says Norma
Jean. "And this is how it turned out."
"What did I do wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Is this one of those women's lib things?" Leroy
asks.
"Don't be funny."
145
The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white
markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to
comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for
some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a
graveyard.
"Everything was fine till Mama caught me
smoking," says Norma Jean, standing up. "That set
something off."
"What are you talking about?"
"She won't leave me alone—you won't
leave me alone." Norma Jean seems to be
crying, but she is looking away from him. "I
feel eighteen again. I can't face that all over
again." She starts walking away. "No, it
wasn't fine. I don't know what I'm saying.
Forget it."
Leroy takes a lungful of smoke and closes
his eyes as Norma Jean's words sink in. He
tries to focus on the fact that thirty-five
hundred soldiers died on the grounds around
him. He can only think of that war as a board
game with plastic soldiers. Leroy almost
smiles, as he compares the Confederates'
daring attack on the Union camps and Virgil
Mathis's raid on the bowling alley. General
Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the
Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel
and Jet Beasley were married years later, when
Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The
next day, Mabel and Jet visited the
battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then
she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost,
and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same
battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He
is leaving out the insides of history. History was always
just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that
building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too
simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like
most of history, have escaped him. Now he sees that
building a log house is the dumbest idea he could have
had. It was clumsy of him to think Norma Jean would
want a log house. It was a crazy idea. He'll have to
think of something else, quickly. He will wad the
blueprints into tight balls and fling them into the lake.
Then he'll get moving again. He opens his eyes.
Norma Jean has moved away and is walking through
the cemetery, following a serpentine brick path.
150
Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is
asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far
away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and
he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past
him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the
bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River.
Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is
she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an
exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually
pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their
bed.
35
The Bear
by William Faulkner
He was ten. But it had already begun, long before that day when at last he wrote his age in two figures and he saw
for the first time the camp where his father and Major de Spain and old General Compson and the others spent two
weeks each November and two weeks again each June. He had already inherited then, without ever having seen it, the
tremendous bear with one trap-ruined foot which, in an area almost a hundred miles deep, had earned itself a name, a
definite designation like a living man.
He had listened to it for years: The long legend of the corncribs rifled, or shotes and grown pigs and even calves
carried bodily into the woods and devoured, of traps and deadfalls overthrown and dogs mangled and slain, and a
shotgun and even rifle charges delivered at point-blank range and with no more effect than so many peas blown through
a tube by a boy—a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back before he was born, through which sped, not
fast but rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape.
It ran in his knowledge before he ever saw it. It looked and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed
woods where it left its crooked print, shaggy, huge, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big—too big for the dogs which
tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it, too big for the
very country which was its constricting scope. He seemed to see it entire with a child’s complete divination before he
ever laid eyes on either—the doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with
axes and plows who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where
the old bear had earned a name, through which ran not even a mortal animal but an anachronism, indomitable and
invincible, out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life at which the puny humans
swarmed and hacked in a fury of abhorrence and fear, like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant: the old
bear, solitary, indomitable and alone, windowered, childless, and absolved of mortality—old Priam reft of hid old wife
and having outlived all his sons.
Until he was ten, each November he would watch the wagon containing the dogs and the bedding and food and
guns and his father and Tennie’s Jim, the Negro, and Sam Fathers, the Indian, son of the a slave woman and a
Chickasaw chief, depart on the road to town, to Jefferson, where Major de Spain and the others would join them. To the
boy, at seven, eight, and nine, they were not going into the Big Bottom to hunt bear and deer, but to keep yearly
rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill. Two weeks later they would return, with no trophy, no
head and skin. He had not expected it. He had not even been afraid it would be in the wagon. He believed that even
after he was ten and his father would let him go too, for those two weeks in November, he would merely make another
one, along with his father and Major de Spain and General Compson and the others, the dog which feared to bay at it
and the rifles and shotguns which failed even bleed it, in the yearly pageant of the old bear’s furious immortality.
5
Then he heard the dogs. It was in the second week of his first time in the camp. He stood with Sam Fathers against
a big oak beside the faint crossing where they had stood each dawn for nine days now, hearing the dogs. He had heard
them once before, one morning last week— a murmur, sourceless, echoing through the wet woods, swelling presently
into separate voices which he could recognize and call by name. He had raised and cocked the gun as Sam told him and
stood motionless again while the uproar, the invisible course, swept and past and faded; it seemed to him that he could
actually see the deer, the buck, blond, smoked-colored, elongated with speed, fleeing, vanishing, the woods, the gray
solitude, still ringing even when the cries of the dogs had died away.
“Now let the hammer down,” Sam said.
“You knew they were not coming here too,” he said.
“Yes,” Sam said. “I want you to learn how to do when you didn’t shoot. It’s after the chance for the bear or the
deer has done already come and gone that men and dogs get killed.”
“Anyway,” he said, “it was just a deer.”
10
Then on the tenth morning he heard the dogs again. And he readied that too-long, too-heavy gun as Sam had
taught him, before Sam even spoke. But this time it was no deer, no ringing chorus of dogs running strong in a free
scent, but a moiling yapping an octave too high, with something more than indecision and even abjectness in it, not
even moving very fast, taking a long time to pass completely out of hearing, leaving them somewhere in the air that
36
echo, thin, slightly hysterical, abject, almost grieving, with no sense of a fleeting, unseen, smoked-colored, grass-eating
shape ahead of it, and Sam breathing at his shoulder, and he could see the arched curve of the old man’s inhaling
nostrils.
“Hah,” Sam said. “Not even running. Walking,”
“Old Ben!” the boy said. ”But up here!” he cried. “Way up here!”
“He do it every year,” Sam said. “Once. Maybe to see who in the camp this time, if he can shoot or not. Whether
we got the dog yet that can bay and hold him. He’ll take them to the river, then he’ll send them back home. We may as
well go back too; see how they look when they come back to camp.”
When they reached the camp the hounds were already there, ten of them crouching back under the kitchen, the boy
and Sam squatting to peer back into the obscurity where they had huddled, quiet, the eyes luminous, flowing at them and
vanishing, and no sound, only that effluvium of something more than dog, stronger than dog and not just animal, just
beast, because still there had been nothing in front of that abject and almost painful yapping save the solitude, the
wilderness, so than when the eleventh hound came in at noon and with all the others watching—even old Uncle Ash,
who called himself first a cook—Sam daubed the tattered ear and the raked shoulder with turpentine and axle grease, to
the boy it was still no living creature, but the wilderness which, leaning for the moment down, had patted lightly once
the hound’s temerity.
15
“Just like a man,” Sam said. “Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time
that sooner or later she would have to be brave to keep on living with herself, and knowing all the time beforehand
what was going to happen to her when she done it.”
The afternoon, himself on the one-eyed wagon mule which did not mind the smell of blood nor, as they told him,
of bear, and with Sam on the other one, they rode for more than three hours though the rapid, shortening winter day.
They followed no path, no trail even that he could see; almost at once they were in a country which he had never seen
before. Then he knew why Sam had made him ride the mule which would not spook. The sound one stopped short and
tried to whirl and bolt even as Sam got down, blowing its breath, jerking and wrenching at the rein, while Sam held it,
coaxing it forward with his voice, since he could not risk tying it, drawing it forward while the boy got down from the
marred one.
Then, standing beside Sam in the gloom of the afternoon, he looked down at the rotted over-turned log, gutted and
scored with claw marks and, in the wet earth beside it, the print of the enormous warped two-toed foot. He knew now
what he had smelled when he peered under the kitchen where the dogs huddled. He realized for the first time that the
bear which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before he could remember to the contrary, and
which, therefore, must have existed in the listening and dreams of his father and Major de Spain and even old General
Compson, too, before they began to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal, and if they had departed for the camp
each November without any actual hope of bringing its trophy back, it was not because it could not be slain, but because
so far they had no actual hope to.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“We’ll try tomorrow,” Sam said. “We ain’t got the dog yet.”
20
“We’ve got eleven. They ran him this morning.”
“ It won’t need but one,” Sam said “He ain’t here. Maybe he ain’t nowhere. The only other way will be for him to
run by accident over somebody that has a gun.”
“That wouldn’t be me,” the boy said. “It will be Walter or Major or—“
“It might,” Sam said. “You watch close in the morning. Because he’s smart. That’s how come he has lived this
long. If he gets hemmed up and has to pick out somebody to run over, he will pick out you.”
“How?” the boy said. “How will he know—“ He ceased. “You mean he already knows me, that I ain’t never been
here before, ain’t had time to find out yet whether I—“ he ceased again, looking at Sam, the old man whose face
revealed nothing until it smiled. He said humbly, not even amazed, “It was me he was watching. I don’t reckon he did
need to come but once.”
25
The next morning they left the camp three hours before daylight. They rode this time because it was too far to walk,
even the dogs in the wagon; again the first gray light found him in the place which he had never seen before, where Sam
had placed him and told him to stay and then departed. With the gun which was too big for him, which did not even
belong to him, but to Major de Spain, and which he had fired only once—at a stump on the first day, to learn the recoil
37
and how to reload it—he stood against a gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without movement
out of a canebrake and crossed small clearing and into cane again, where, invisible, a bird—the big woodpecker called
Lord-to-God by Negroes—clattered at a dead limb.
It was a stand like any other, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for ten days;
a territory new to him, yet no less familiar than that other one which, after almost two weeks, he had come to believe he
knew a little—the same solitude, the same loneliness through which human beings had merely passed without altering it,
leaving no mark, no scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam Fathers’ Chickasaw
predecessors crept into it and looked about, club or stone ax or bone arrow drawn and poised; different only because,
squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he smelled the hounds huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and
shoulder of the one who, Sam said, had had to be brave once in order to live with herself, and saw yesterday on the earth
beside the gutted log the print of the living foot.
He heard no dogs at all. He never did they hear them. He only heard drumming of the woodpecker stop short off
and knew that the bear was looking at him. He never saw it. He did not know whether it was in front of him or behind
him. He did not move, holding the useless gun, which he had not even had warning to cock and which even now he did
not cock, tasting in his saliva that taint as of brass which he knew now because he had smelled it when he peered under
the kitchen at the huddled dogs.
Then it was gone. As abruptly as it had ceased, the woodpecker’s dry, monotonous clatter set up again, and after a
while he even believed he could hear the dogs-—a murmur, scarce a sound even, which he had probably been hearing
for some time before he even remarked it, drifting into hearing and then out again, dying away. They came nowhere near
him. If it was a bear they ran, it was another bear. It was Sam himself who came out of the cane and crossed the bayou,
followed by the injured bitch of yesterday. She was almost at heel, like a bird dog, making no sound. She came and
crouched against his leg, trembling, staring off into the cane.
“I didn’t see him,” he said “ I didn’t, Sam!”
30
“I know it.” Sam said. “He done the looking. You didn’t hear him neither, did you?”
“No,” The boy said. “I-“
“He smart,” Sam said. “Too smart.” He looked down at the hound, trembling faintly and steadily against the boy’s
knee. From the raked shoulder a few drops of fresh blood oozed and clung. “Too big. We ain’t got the dog. But maybe
someday. Maybe not next time. But someday.”
So I must see him, he thought. I must look at him. Otherwise, It seemed to him that it would go on like this forever, as it
had gone on with his father and Major de Spain, who was older than his father, and even with the old general Compson,
who had been old enough to be a brigade commander in 1865, Otherwise, it would go on so forever, next time and next
time, after and after and after. It seemed to him that he could never see the two of them, himself and the bear, shadowy
in the limbo from which time emerged, becoming time; the old bear absolved of mortality and himself partaking,
sharing a little of it, enough of it. And he knew now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his saliva.
He recognized fear. So I will have to see him, he thought, without dread or even hope. I will have to look at him.
It was in June of the next year. He was eleven. They were in camp again, celebrating Major De Spain’s and General
Compson’s birthdays. Although the one had been born in September and the other in the depth of winter and another
decade, they had met for two weeks to fish and shoot squirrels and turkey and run coons and wildcats with the dogs at
night. That is, he and Boon Hoggenbeck and the Negroes fished and shot squirrels and ran the coons and cats, because
the proved hunters, not only Major de Spain and old General Compson, who spent those two weeks sitting in a rocking
chair before a tremendous iron pot of Brunswick stew, stirring and tasting, with old Ash to quarrel with about how he
was making it and Tennie’s Jim to pour whiskey from the demijohn into the tin dipper from which he drank it, but even
the boy’s father and Walter Ewell, who were still young enough, scorned such, other than shooting the wild gobblers
with pistols for wagers on their marksmanship.
35
Or, that is, his father and the others believed he was hunting squirrels. Until the third day, he thought that Sam
Fathers believed that too. Each morning he would leave the camp right after breakfast. He had his own gun now, a
Christmas present. He went back to the tree beside the bayou where he had stood that morning. Using the compass that
old General Compson had given him, he ranged from that point; he was teaching himself to be a better-than-fair
woodsman without knowing he was doing it. On the second day he even found the gutted log where he had first seen
38
the crooked print.it was almost completely crumbled now, healing with unbelievable speed, a passionate and almost
visible relinquishment, back into the earth from which the tree had grown.
He ranged the summer woods now, green with gloom; if anything, actually dimmer than in November’s gray
dissolution, where, even at noon, the sun fell only in intermittent dappling upon the earth, which never completely dried
out and which crawled with snakes—moccasins and water snakes and rattlers, themselves the color of dappling gloom,
so that he would not always see them until they moved, returning later and later, first day, second day, passing in the
twilight of the third evening the little log pen enclosing the log stable where Sam was putting up the horses for the night.
“You ain’t looked right yet,” Sam said.
He stopped. For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he said peacefully, in a peaceful rushing burst as when a boy’s
miniature dam in a little brook gives way, “All right. But how? I went to the bayou. I even found that log again. I—“
“ I reckon that was alright. Likely he’s been watching you. You never saw his foot?”
40
“I,” the boy said—“I didn’t—I never thought—“
“It’s the gun,” Sam said. He stood beside the fence motionless—the old man, the Indian, in the battered faded
overalls and the five-cent straw hat which in the Negro’s race had been the badge of his enslavement and was now the
regalia of his freedom. The camp—the clearing, the house, the barn and its tiny lot with which Major De Spain in his
turn had scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness—faded in the dusk, back into the immemorial darkness of
the woods. The gun, the boy thought. The gun.
“Be scared,” Sam said. “You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you
unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a
brave man has got to be.”
The gun, the boy thought.
“You will have to choose,” Sam said
45
He left the camp before daylight, long before Uncle Ash would wake in his quilts on the kitchen floor and start the
fire for breakfast. He had only the compass and a stick for snakes. He could go almost a mile before he would begin to
need the compass. He sat on a log, the invisible compass in his invisible hand, while the secret night sounds, fallen still at
his movements, scurried again and then ceased for good, and the owls ceased and gave over to the waking of day birds,
and he could see the compass. Then he went fast yet still quietly; he was becoming better and better as a woodsman, still
without having yet realized it.
He jumped a doe and a fawn at sunrise, walking them out of the bed, close enough to see them—the crash of
undergrowth, the white scut, the fawn scudding behind her faster than he had believed it could run. He was hunting
right, upwind, as Sam had taught him; not that it mattered now. He had left the gun; of his own will and relinquishment
he had accepted not a gambit, not a choice, but a condition on which not only the bear’s heretofore inviolable
anonymity but all the old rules and balances of hunter and hunted had been abrogated. He would not even be afraid, not
even in the moment when the fear would take him completely—blood, skin, bowels, bones, memory from the long time
before it became his memory—all save that thin, clear, immoral lucidity which alone differed him from this bear and
from all the other bear and deer he would ever kill in the humility and pride of his skill and endurance, to which Sam
had spoken when he leaned in the twilight on the lot fence yesterday.
By noon he was far beyond the little bayou, farther into the new and alien country than he had ever been. He was
traveling now not only by compass but by the old, heavy, biscuit-thick silver watch which had belonged to his
grandfather. When he stopped at last, it was far enough. He had left the camp nine hours ago; nine hours from now,
dark would have already been an hour old. But he didn’t think that. He thought, All right. Yes. But what? And stood for a
moment, alien and small in the green and topless solitude, answering his own question before it had formed and ceased.
It was the watch, the compass, the stick—the three lifeless mechanicals with which for nine hours he had fended the
wilderness off; he hung the watch and compass carefully on a bush and leaned stick beside them and relinquished
completely to it.
He had not been going very fast for the last two or three hours. He went no faster now, since distance would not
matter even if he could have gone fast. And he was trying to keep a bearing on the tree where he had left the compass,
trying to complete a circle which would bring him back to it or at least intersect itself, since direction would not matter
now either. But the tree was not here, and he did as Sam had schooled him—made the next circle in the opposite
direction, so that the two patterns would bisect somewhere, but crossing no print of his own feet, finding the tree at last,
39
but in the wrong place—no bush, no compass, no watch—and the tree not even the tree, because there was a down log
beside and he did what Sam Fathers had told him was the next thing and the last.
As he sat down on the log he saw the crooked print—the warped, tremendous, two-toed indentation which, even
as he watched it, filled with water. As he looked up, the wilderness coalesced , solidified—the glade, the tree he sought,
the bush, the watch and the compass glinting
where the ray of sunshine touched them. Then he
saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear; it was just
there, immobile, solid, fixed in the hot dappling of
the green and windless noon, not as big as he had
dreamed it, but as big as he had expected it,
bigger, dimensionless, against the dappled
obscurity, looking at him where he sat quietly on
the log and looked back at it.
50
Then it moved. It made no sound. It did not
hurry. It crossed the glade, walking for an instant
into the full glare of the sun; when it reached the
other side it stopped again and looked back at him
across one shoulder while his quiet breathing
inhaled and exhaled three times.
Then it was gone. It didn’t walk into the woods,
the undergrowth. It faded, sank back into the
wilderness as he had watched a fish, a huge old
bass, sink and vanish into the dark depths of its
pool without even any movement of its fins.
He thought, It will be next fall. But it was not next fall, nor the next nor the next. He was fourteen then. He had killed
his buck, and Sam Fathers had marked his face with the hot blood, and in the next year he killed a bear. But even before
that accolade he had become as competent in the woods as many grown men with the same experience; by his
fourteenth year he was a better woodsman than most grown men with more. There was no territory within thirty miles
of the camp that he did not know—bayou, ridge, brake, landmark, tree and path. He could have led anyone to any point
in it without deviation, and brought them out again. He knew the games trails that even Sam Fathers did not know; in
his thirteenth year he found a buck’s bedding place, and unbeknown to his father he borrowed Walter Ewell’s rifle and
lay in wait at dawn and killed the buck when it walked back to the bed, as Sam had told how the Chickasaw fathers did.
But not the old bear, although by now he knew its footprints better than he did his own, and not only the crooked one.
He could see any one of three sound ones and distinguish it from any other, and not only by its size. There were other
bears within these thirty miles which left tracks almost aslarge, but this was more than that. If Sam Fathers had been his
mentor and the back-yard rabbits and squirrels at home his kindergarten, then the wilderness the old bear ran was his
college, the old male bear itself, so long unwifed and childless as to have become its own underground progenitor , was
his alma mater. But he never saw it.
He could find the crooked print now almost whenever he liked, fifteen or ten or five miles, or sometimes nearer the
camp than that. Twice while on stand during the three years he heard dogs strike its trail by accident; on the second time
they jumped it seemingly, the voices high, abject, almost human in hysteria, as on that first morning two years ago. But
not the bear itself. He would remember that noon three years ago, the glade, himself and the bear fixed during that
moment in the windless and dappled blaze, and it would seem to him that it had never happened, that he had dreamed
that too. But it had happened. They had looked at each other, they had emerged from the wilderness old as earth,
synchronized to the instant by something more than the blood that moved the flesh and bones which bore them, and
touch, pledged something, affirmed, something more lasting than frail web of bones and flesh which any accident could
obliterate.
40
55
Then he saw it again. Because of the very fact that he thought of nothing else, he had forgotten to look for it. He
was still hunting with Walter Ewell’s rifle. He saw it cross the end of a long blow-down, a corridor where a tornado had
swept, rushing through rather than over the tangle of trunks and branches as a locomotive would have, faster than he
had ever believed it could move, almost as fast as a deer even, because a deer would have spent most of that time in the
air, faster than he could bring the rifle sights up with it. And now he knew what had been wrong during all three years.
He sat on a log shaking and trembling as if he had never seen the woods before nor anything that ran them, wondering
with incredulous amazement how he could have forgotten the very thing which Sam Fathers had told him and which the
bear itself had proved the next day and had now returned after three years to reaffirm.
And now he knew what Sam Fathers had meant about the right dog, a dog in which size would mean less than
nothing. So when he returned alone in April—school was out then, so that the sons of farmers could help with the
land’s plantings, and at last his father had granted him permission, on his promise to be back in four days—he had the
dog. It was his own, a mongrel of the sort called by Negroes a fyce, a ratter, itself not much bigger than a rat and
possessing that bravery which had long since stopped being courage and had become foolhardiness.
It did not take four days. Alone again, he found the trail on the first morning. It was not a stalk; it was an ambush.
He timed the meeting almost as if it were an appointment with a human being. Himself holding the fyce muffled in a
feed sack and Sam Fathers with two of the hounds on a piece of a plowline rope, they lay down wind of the trail at dawn
of the second morning. They were so close that the bear turned without even running, as if in surprised amazement at
the shrill and frantic uproar of the released fyce, turning at bay against the trunk of a tree, on its hind feet; it seemed to
the boy that it would never stop rising, taller and taller, and even the two hounds seemed to take a desperate and
despairing courage from the fyce, following it as it went in.
Then he realized that the fyce was actually not going to stop. He flung, threw the gun away, and ran; when he
overtook and grasped the frantically pin-wheeling little dog, it seemed to him that he was directly under the bear.
He could smell it, strong and hot and rank. Sprawling, he looked up to where it loomed and towered over him like a
cloudburst and colored like a thunderclap, quite familiar, peacefully and even lucidly familiar, until he remembered: this
was the way he had used to dream about it. Then it was gone. He didn’t see it go. He knelt, holding the frantic fyce with
both hands, hearing the abashed wailing of the hounds drawing farther and farther away, until Sam came up. He carried
the gun. He laid it down quietly beside the boy and stood looking down at him.
60
“You’ve done seed him twice now with a gun in your hands,” he said. “This time you couldn’t have missed him.”
The boy rose. He still held the fyce. Even in his arm and clear of the ground, it yapped frantically, straining and
surging after the fading uproar of the two hounds like a tangle of wire springs. He was panting a little but he was neither
shaking nor trembling now.
“Neither could you!” he said. “You had the gun! Neither did you!”
“And you didn’t shoot,” his father said. “How close were you?”
“I don’t know, sir,” he said. “There was a big wood tick inside his right hind leg. I saw that. But I didn’t have the
gun then.”
“But you didn’t shoot when you had the gun,” his father said. “Why?”
But he didn’t answer, and his father didn’t wait for him to, rising and crossing the room, across the pelt of the bear
which the boy had killed two years ago and the larger one which his father had killed before he was born, to the
bookcase beneath the mounted head of the boy’s first buck. It was the room which his father called the office, from
which all the plantation business was transacted; in it for the fourteen years if his life he had heard the best of all talking.
Major de Spain would be there and sometimes old General Compson, and Walter Ewell and Boon Hoggenbeck and Sam
Fathers and Tennie’s Jim, too, were hunters, knew the woods and what ran them.
He would hear it, not talking himself but listening—the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any
recorded document of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it on Indian ruthless enough
to pretend that any fragment of it had been to his convey. It was of the men, not the white nor black nor red, but men,
hunters with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bears and the
deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and
unremitting contest by the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter, the voices
quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exact remembering, while he squatted in the
41
blazing firelight as Tennie’s Jim squatted, who stirred only to put more wood on the fire and to pass the bottle from one
glass to another. Because the bottle was always present, so that after a while it seemed to him that those fierce instants of
heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not
women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of
the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base hope of acquiring the virtues of
cunning and strength and speed, but in salute to them.
His father returned with the book and sat down again opened it. “Listen,” he said. He read the five stanzas aloud,
his voice quiet and deliberate in the room where there was no fire now because it was already spring. Then he looked up.
The boy watched him “All right,” his father said. “Listen.” He read again, but only the second stanza this time, to the
end of it, the last two lines, and closed the book and put it on the table beside him. “She cannot fade, though thou hast
not thy bliss, forever wilt thou love, and she be fair,” he said
“He’s talking about a girl,” the boy said.
70
“He had to talk about something,” his father said. Then he said, “He was talking about truth. Truth doesn’t
change. Truth is one thing. It covers all things which touch the heart—honor and pride and pity and justice and courage
and love. Do you see now?”
He didn’t know. Somehow it was simpler than that. There was an old bear, fierce and ruthless, not merely just to
stay alive, but with the fierce pride of liberty and freedom, proud enough of the liberty and freedom to see it threatened
without fear or even alarm; nay, who at times even seemed deliberately to put that freedom and liberty in jeopardy in
order to savor them, to remind his old strong bones and flesh to keep supple and quick to defend and preserve them.
There was an old son of a Negro slave and an Indian king, inheritor on the one side of the long chronicle of a people
who had learned humility though suffering, and pride though the endurance which survived the suffering and injustice,
and on the other side, the chronicle of a people even longer in the land than the first, yet who no longer existed in the
land at all save in the solitary brotherhood of an old Negro’s alien blood and the wild and invincible spirit of and old
bear. There was a boy who wished to learn humility and pride in order to become skillful and worthy in the woods, who
suddenly found himself becoming so skillful so rapidly that he feared he would never become worthy because he had
not learned humility and pride, although he had tried to, until one day and as suddenly he had discovered that an old
man who could not have defined either had led him, as though by hand, to that point where an old bear and little
mongrel of a dog showed him that, by possessing one thing other, he would possess them both.
And a little dog, nameless and mongrel and many-fathered, grown, yet weighing less than six pounds saying as if to
itself, “I can’t be dangerous because there’s nothing much smaller than I am; I can’t be fierce, because they would call it
just a noise, I can’t be humble, because I’m already too close to the ground to genuflect; I can’t be proud, because I
wouldn’t be near enough to it for anyone to know who was casting the shadow, and I don’t even know that I’m not
going to heaven, because they have already decided that I don’t possess an immortal soul. So all I can be is brave. But it’s
all right. I can be that, even if they still call it just noise.”
That was all. It was simple, much simpler than somebody talking in a book about youth and a girl he would never
have to grieve over, because he could never approach any nearer her and would never have to get any farther away. He
had heard about a bear, and finally got big enough to trail it, and he trailed it for four years and at last met it with a gun
in his hands and he didn’t shoot. Because a little dog—But he could have shot long before the little dog covered the
twenty yards to where the bear waited, and Sam Fathers could have shot at any time during that interminable minute
while Old Ben stood on his hind feet over them. He stopped. His father was watching him gravely across the spring-rife
twilight of the room; when he spoke, his words were as quiet as the twilight, too, not loud, because they did not need to
be because they would last. “Courage, and honor, and pride,” His father said, “and pity, and love of justice and of
liberty. They all touch the heart, and what heart holds to become truth, as far as we know the truth. Do you see now?”
Sam, and Old Ben, and Nip, he thought. And himself too. He had been all right too. His father had said so. “Yes,
sir,” he said.
42
Lament, for Cocoa
By John Updike
The scum has come
My cocoa’s cold.
The cup is numb,
And I grow old.
5
It seems an age
Since from the pot
It bubbled, beige
And burning hotToo hot to be
10
Too quickly quaffed,
Accordingly,
I found a draft
And in it placed
The boiling brew
15
And took a taste
Of toast or two.
Alas, time flies
And minutes chill;
My cocoa lies
20
Dull brown and still.
How wearisome!
In likelihood,
The scum, once come,
Is come for good.
43
“Lament for Cocoa” Analytical Outline
Plain Sense:
The speaker is complaining that his cocoa is now cold. He remembers that it used to be so hot that he couldn’t quickly
drink it. So he placed the cup of too-hot cocoa in a draft to cool it. While it was cooling he took a few bites of toast.
When he returns to his chocolate, he finds it’s no longer hot and scum has formed on it.
Imagery:
Central image: the cup of cocoa.
 Senses: sight and touch.
 When the cocoa is new it’s seen bubbling and fresh
 Once it’s cooled with age it’s “dull brown and still.”
 Scum, an unappealing image with unpleasant connotations, has permanently formed upon the surface.
Stanzas 3 and 4 switch the emphasis to the speaker. He appears to be in somewhat of a rush: since the cocoa cannot be
consumed quickly he sets it in a draft to hasten its cooling so he can quickly drink it. While the cocoa is cooling the
speaker’s attention is diverted to his toast. When the speaker returns he discovers, to his dismay, that the freshness has
gone and it can’t be regained.
Figurative Language:
Two items are personified the cup and time
 “the cup is numb”. Numbness = poor circulation. Problem with old people, why they often feel cold.
o Same sentence “and I grow old.” reinforces this (line 4)
 “Alas, time Flies”. Time personified as flying is a commonly used cliché, indicating the brevity of all things. As
applied to the cocoa. It’s only a short time before the bubbling hot, fresh cocoa is too cool and old to be
enjoyed.
 “And minutes chill”: the minutes are affecting the cocoa
Symbolism:
Updike likens the cold cocoa to approaching old age in the first stanza. He has created an extended metaphor (a
conceit). Like the fresh cocoa, youth’s blood was hot. There’s so much to experience, so much energy, that it seems as if
we’ll never run out of it. Furthermore, to give into it wholeheartedly, to submit completely to its appealing impulses,
could be injurious. It is “Too hot to be/Too quickly quaffed”. Consequently, we try to tame it, to subdue our
impulsiveness hence, the speaker sets the too hot cocoa in a draft to cool it. This draft might be the centering of
attention to our once too hot youth/cocoa: we find we have now become dull and sedentary (see line 20). Scum could
be the trappings of approaching old age (gray hair, wrinkles, ect).
Theme:
The speaker is lamenting the brevity of youth. While life can be long it does not stay young and fresh for very long. He’s
not advocating that we give in completely to the impulse of youth: it’s not a “live-fast-die-young” philosophy he’s
expressing here. Yet it appears that Updike is cautioning us not to divert our attention from our “cup of life” because its
freshness or youthfulness is over so quickly. Life and youth, suggests Updike, should be savored.
44
The Day the TV Broke
by Gerald Jonas
5
10
15
20
It was awful. First,
The silence. I thought I’D die.
This is the worst,
I said to myself, but I
Was wrong. Soon, the house began
to speak.
(There are boards in the halls
that creak
when no foot falls.
The wind strains
At the door, as if in pursuit
Of someone inside, and when it rains,
The drainpipe croaks. Nothing is mute.)
That night, there came a noise from the shelves
Like mice creeping.
It was the books, reading themselves
Out loud to keep me from sleeping.
I can tell you I was glad to see
The repairman arrive.
Say what you will about a TV—
At least it isn’t alive.
45
Dulce Et Decorum Estº
By Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
5
10
15
20
25
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Ninesº that dropped behind.
Gas!º Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmetsº just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or limeº . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cudº
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Published 1920
Dulce et Decorum Est (dull-kay) - the first words of a Latin saying taken from an ode by Horace. The full saying ends
the poem: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and right to die for your country.)
8. Five-Nines - 5.9 calibre explosive shells
9. Gas! - poison gas. From the symptoms it would appear to be chlorine or phosgene gas. The filling of the lungs with
gas had the same effects as when a person drowned
10. Helmets - the early name for gas masks
12. Lime - a white chalky substance which can burn live tissue
23. Cud - normally the regurgitated grass that cows chew usually green and bubbling. Here a similar looking material
was issuing from the soldier's mouth
46
“Dulce et Decorum Est” Analytical Outline
Plain Sense:
The poem describes a war scene: military men are attacked with chlorine gas, and one of them is unable to get his mask
on quickly enough and endures a gruesome death.
Analysis Method: mood/tone developed by images
Opening Images (lines 1-8)
The poem opens by establishing the soldiers as tired out, making the reader sympathetic (mood)

“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks” (1)
 “Men Marched asleep. Many had lost their boots/ But limped on, blood shod.” (5-6)
o in these quotes, the detailed description shows the men as haggard, injured--starting the poem by invoking
a mood of sympathy for the soldiers
 “coughing like hags” (2). Auditory image, presents soldiers as sick old women
 “tired, outstripped Five-Nines” (8).
o Although this refers to the distance the soldiers have traveled, it still makes even the guns sound tired and
useless, just like the men.
Gas Attack (lines 9-16)
An exciting event allows the author to expand on tone, showing the soldiers as victims
 “Gas! GAS! Quick boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling” (9)
 “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” (11)
 “as under a green sea, I saw him drowning” (14)
o in the second stanza, the vivid imagery of this chaotic scene creates a mood of shock, even an echo of the
panic the soldiers feel as the reader takes in the soldiers’ desperation and horror
 “an ecstasy of fumbling,/ fitting the clumsy helmets just in time” (9-10)
 “yelling out and stumbling” (11)
o The opening lines hinted at a negative tone that becomes more obvious here. Soldiers are helpless – shown
as victims by these word/image choices
Final commentary (lines 17-28)
In the final lines, the author’s blistering scorn for war is unmistakable
 “his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin” (20)
 “the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs/ Obscene as cancer” (21-23)
o the final two stanzas are gruesome and disturbing in their imagery, brutally providing unrestrained detail to
the horrible death of the soldier. This is meant to create a mood of horror and discomfort that forces the
reader to acknowledge the terrible casualties of war
 “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ to children ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie..”
(25-27)
o The final stanzas expose the sharp ironic bitterness of the author’s tone as he begins to address the reader
and draw them in by using “you” in his accusations that these searches for honor and glory in war only
bring about the horror and misery in violent death. The vivid depiction of the soldier’s death emphasizes
his tone and thus his argument
Theme: War brings about violent death, not the glory and honor that people believe it to bring.
Credit to Tori Comin, class of 2014, for the outline
47
Poems by Thomas Hardy
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chiddenº of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
-They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
5
10
cursed
Your eyes on me were as the eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
15 Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
In Time of “Breaking of Nations”º
Jeremiah 51:20
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk,
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
5
10
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch grass:º
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wightº
Come whispering by;
War’s annalsº will fade into night
Ere their story die.
weeds from a field
lover
recorded history
48
Sir Philip Sidney
Sonnet 9: Queen Virtue's Court
5
10
Queen Virtue's court, which some call Stella's face,
Prepar'd by Nature's choicest furniture,
Hath his front built of alabaster pure;
Gold in the covering of that stately place.
The door by which sometimes comes forth her Grace
Red porphir is, which lock of pearl makes sure,
Whose porches rich (which name of cheeks endure)
Marble mix'd red and white do interlace.
The windows now through which this heav'nly guest
Looks o'er the world, and can find nothing such,
Which dare claim from those lights the name of best,
Of touch they are that without touch doth touch,
Which Cupid's self from Beauty's mine did draw:
Of touch they are, and poor I am their straw.
49
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18
5
10
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 130
5
10
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
50
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
by John Keats
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
5
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesneº;
(de-main) realm
Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneº
air
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
10 When a new planet swims into his kenº;
field of sight
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific -and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmiseSilent, upon a peak in Darien.
Panama
51
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” Analytical Outline Sample
Plain Sense
The poet describes the feeling he has when first reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’s works. He starts by claiming
he has travelled widely, but only heard of Homer’s Greece – never visited it. When he first read Chapman, he felt like an
astronomer discovering a new planet, or Cortez discovering the Pacific.
Analysis Method: Primary/Secondary figures
Primary Figure (Lines 1-4)
The opening quatrain contains a metaphor: reading literature = traveling
 “Much have I traveled in realms of gold” (1)
o Poet establishes the metaphor – he’s been all around.
 “Western islands…bards in fealty to Aopllo hold” (3-4
o Here, the poet means ancient Greece. In other words, he’s been to Greece too!
Homer and Chapman (Lines 5-8)
In the second quatrain, the author introduces Homer and the Chapman translation
 “Homer ruled as his demesne/Yet never did I breathe it’s pure serene”
o Having established a figure of literal travel, Keats continues it by presenting Homer’s poetry as a land
(“demesne”) and its beauty as pure air
 Through Chapman’s translation, Keats will be able to discover new lands on his poetic journey
Closing Sestet (9-14)
In the sestet, we see the impact of the new translation has on Keats through two similes
 “watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken” (9-10)
o Simile: an astronomer discovering a new planet
 “stout Cortez…stared at the Pacific” (11-12)
o Simile: Cortez discovering a new ocean (which was actually discovered by Balboa. Keats – you should
have paid attention to your tutors!)
 The dominant meaning of the opening figure impacts these secondary figures as well. They don’t continue the
metaphor of Keats traveling the globe himself (thus avoiding an extended metaphor) but instead focus on the
concept of discovery.
 This is where the primary figure comes into play. Since it focused on traveling through literature, we can now
easily translate that analogy to these similes; the new planet and the new ocean are really Homer’s words, seen
for the first time by this new reader. Keats feels like an astronomer or Cortez because he is experiencing, like
them, the thrill of discovery.
 The sonnet lends itself well to these primary/secondary figures, as the primary figure can be introduced in the
octave, and its impact explored in the sestet.
Theme: a good translation of classic literature can be like opening up a new world for your discovery. (And dang, but
that sounds Velveeta!)
52
1981
Read the following poem carefully. Then write an essay in which you explain how the organization of the poem and the
use of concrete details reveal both its literal and its metaphorical meanings. In your discussion, show how both of these
meanings relate to the title. (Suggested time—35 minutes)
Prologue: Downstream
by Thomas Kinsella
5
10
15
20
I wonder whether one expects
Flowing tie or expert sex
Or even absent-mindedness
Of poets any longer. Less
Candour than the average,
Less confidence, a ready rage,
Alertness when it comes to beer,
An affectation that their ear
For music is a little weak,
These are the attributes we seek;
But surely not the morning train,
The office lunch, the look of pain
Down the blotched suburban grass,
Not the weekly trance at Mass. . .
Drawing on my sober dress
These, alas, I must confess.
I pat my wallet pocket, thinking
I can spare an evening drinking;
Humming as I catch the bus
Something by Sibelius,
Suddenly—or as I lend
25
30
35
40
A hand about the house, or bend
Low above an onion bed—
Memory stumbles in the head;
The sunlight flickers once upon
The massive shafts of Babylon
And ragged phrases in a flock
Settle softly, shock by shock.
And so my bored menagerie
Once more emerges: Energy,
Blinking, only half awake,
Gives its tiny frame a shake;
Fouling itself, a giantess,
The bloodshot bulk of Laziness
Obscures the vision; Discipline
Limps after them with jutting chin,
Bleeding badly from the calf;
Old Jaws-of-Death gives laugh for laugh
With Error as they amble past,
And there as usual, lying last,
Helped along by blind Routine,
Futility flogs a tambourine
53
54
Storm Warnings
By Adrianne Rich
5
10
15
20
25
The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.
55
2003: Eros
The following poems are both concerned with Eros, the god of love in Greek mythology. Read the poems carefully.
Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two concepts of Eros and analyze the techniques used to
create them. (Suggested time—40 minutes)
5
10
15
20
25
EΡΩΣ1
Eros
Why hast thou nothing in thy face?
Thou idol of the human race,
Thou tyrant of the human heart,
The flower of lovely youth that art;
Yea, and that standest in thy youth
An image of eternal Truth,
With thy exuberant flesh so fair,
That only Pheidias2 might compare,
Ere from his chaste marmoreal3 form
Time had decayed the colours warm;
Like to his gods in thy proud dress,
Thy starry sheen of nakedness.
I call for love
But help me, who arrives?
This thug with broken nose
And squinty eyes.
‘Eros, my bully boy,
Can this be you,
With boxer lips
And patchy wings askew?’
Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile,
But shameless will and power immense,
In secret sensuous innocence.
O king of joy, what is thy thought?
I dream thou knowest it is nought,
And wouldst in darkness come, but thou
Makest the light where’er thou go.
Ah yet no victim of thy grace,
None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,
Hath cared to look up thy face.
5
10
15
20
‘Madam,’ cries Eros,
‘Know the brute you see
Is what long overuse
Has made of me.
My face that so offends you
Is the sum
Of blows your lust delivered
One by one.
We slaves who are immortal
Gloss your fate
And are the archetypes
That you create.
Better my battered visage,
Bruised but hot,
Than love dissolved in loss
Or left to rot.’
Anne Stevenson (1990)
Robert Bridges (1899)
1 Eros
(in Greek)
sculptor of the fifth century B.C.
3 marble
2 Greek
56
1979: Spring
Carefully read the two poems below. Then write a well-organized essay in which you show how the attitudes towards
the coming of spring implied in these two poems differ from each other. Support your statements with specific
references to the texts. (Suggested time—40 minutes)
Spring and All
5
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
10
15
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
5
10
as though it were not
wearying, wearying
to hear in the bushes
the mild harping of the breeze,
the daffodils flocking and honking—
15
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one the objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
Sap rises from the sodden ditch
and glues two green ears to the dead
birch twig. Perilous beauty—
and already Jane is digging out
her coloured tennis shoes,
one mauve, one yellow, like large crocuses.
And by the laundromat
the Barletts in their tidy yard—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
20
For Jane Meyers
20
Look how the bluet* falls apart, mud
pockets the seed.
Months, years, then the dull blade of the wind.
It is spring! We are going to die!
And now April raises up her plaque of flowers
and the heart
expands to admit its adversary.
*bluet: a wild flower with bluish blossoms
25
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
William Carlos Williams
Louise Glück
57
1985: Nature
These two poems present encounters with nature, but the two poets handle those encounters very differently. In a wellorganized essay, distinguish between the attitudes (toward nature, toward the solitary individual, etc.) expressed in the
poems and discuss the techniques that the poets use to present these attitudes. Be sure to support your statements with
specific references to the texts.
(Suggested time—40 minutes)
5
10
15
20
25
There Was a Boy
The Most of It
There was a boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander!—many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills
Rising or settling, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him.—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call, —with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus* on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.
William Wordsworth
5
10
15
20
* rock debris at the bottom of a cliff
Robert Frost