THE UNVEXED ISLES
ТИХИЕ ОСТРОВА
/
Сборник рассказов
на английском языке
для студентов V курса
педагогических институтов
Обработка текста и комментарий
И. В. Ступникова
Рекомендовано к изданию
Министерством просвещения СССР
Ленинград «Просвещение»
Ленинградское отделение
1976
4П(Лнгл)
С 88
Ступников И. В. г
С 88 . Тихие острова. Сборник рассказов па англ. яз.
для студентов V курса пед. ин-тов. Обраб. текстам
п коммент. И. В. Ступникова. Л., «Просвещение»,
1976.
176 с. о пл, ,
Пособие представляет собой сборник рассказов английских .
л американских писателей с начала века до нашего времени
(Р. Ларднер, Р. П. Уоррен, Т. Уильямс и др.). Рассказы инте-
ресны по фабуле, занимательны, отличаются социальной на-
правленностью. За каждым рассказом следует ряд вопросов-за-
даний. Цель их — более глубокое проникновение в социальный
смысл произведения.
m 60602—063	'
ЮЗ (03)-76' 17 77
4П(Лпгл)
© Издательство «Просвещение», 1976 г,
Ring Wt Lardnqv
_ OLD FOLKS* CHRISTMAS
Tom and Grace Carter sat in their living-room oh
Christmas Eve, sometimes talking, sometimes pretend-
ing to read and all the time thinking things they didn’t
want to think. Their two children, Junior, aged nineteen,
and Grace, two years younger, had come home that
day from their schools for the Christmas vacation. Junior
was in his first year at the university and Grace, attending
a boarding-school that would fit her for college.
I won’t call them Grace and Junior any more, though
that is the way they had been christened.. Junior had
changed his name to Ted and Grace was now Caroline,
and thus they insisted on being addressed, even by
their parents. This was one of the things Tom and Grace
1*	3
the elder were thinking of as they sat in their living-
room Christmas Eve.
Other university freshmen who had lived here had
returned on the twenty-first, the day when the vacation
was supposed to begin. Ted had telegraphed that he
would be three days late owing to a special examination
which, if he passed it, would lighten the terrific burden
of the next term. He had arrived at home looking so
pale, heavy-eyed and shaky that his mother doubted
the wisdom of the concentrated mental effort, while
his father secretly hoped the stuff had been non-poison-
ous and would not have lasting effects. Caroline, too,
had been behind schedule, explaining that her laundry
had gone astray and she had not dared trust others to
trace it for her.
Grace and Tom had attempted, with fair success,
to conceal their disappointment over this delayed home-
coming and had continued with their preparations for
a Christmas that would thrill their children and conse-
quently themselves. They had bought an imposing lot
of presents, costing twice or three times as much as'
had been Tom’s father’s annual income when Tom was
Ted’s age, or Tom’s own income a year ago, before Gener-
al Motors’ acceptance of his new weather-proof paint
had enabled him to buy this suburban home and luxuries
such as his own parents and Grace’s had never dreamed
of, and to give Ted and Caroline advantages that he and
Grace had perforce gone without.
Behind the closed door of the music-room was the
elaborately decked tree. The piano and piano bench
and the floor around the tree were covered with berib-
boned packages of all sizes, shapes and weights, one of
them addressed to Tom, another to Grace, a few to the
servants and the rest to Ted and Caroline. A huge box
contained a sealskin coat for Caroline, a coat that had
cost as much as the Carters had formerly paid a year
for rent. Even more expensive was a “set” of jewelry
consisting of an opal brooch, a bracelet of opals and
gold filigree, and an opal ring surrounded by diamonds.
Grace always had preferred opals to any other stone,
but now that she could afford them, some inhibition
prevented her from buying them for herself; she could
enjoy them much more adorning her pretty daughter.
4
-*
There were boxes of silk stockings, lingerie, gloves and
handkerchiefs. And for Ted, a three-hundred-dollar
watch, a de-luxe edition of Balzac, an expensive bag
of shiny, new steel-shafted golf-clubs and the last word
of portable phonographs.
But the big surprise for the boy was locked in the
garage, a black Gorham sedan, a model more up to date
and better-looking than Tom’s own year-old car that
stood beside it. Ted could use it during the vacation if
the mild weather continued and could look forward to
driving it around home next spring and summer, there
being a rule at the university forbidding undergraduates
the possession or use of private automobiles.
Every year for sixteen years, since Ted was three and
Caroline one, it had been the Christmas Eve custom of
the Carters* to hang up their children’s stockings and
fill them with inexpensive toys. Tom and Grace had
thought it would be fun to continue the custom this
year; the contents of the stockings — a mechanical
negro dancing doll, music-boxes, a kitten who meowed
when you pressed a spot on her back, et cetera — would
make the “kids” laugh. And one of Grace’s first pronounce-
ments to her returned offspring was that they must
go to bed early so Santa Claus would not be frightened
away.
But it seemed they couldn’t promise to make it so
terribly early. They both had long-standing dates in
town. Caroline was going to dinner and a play with
Beatrice Murdock and Beatrice’s nineteen-year-old broth-
er Paul. The latter would call for her in his car at half
past six. Ted had accepted an invitation to see the hockey
match with two classmates, Herb Castle and Bernard
King. He wanted to take his father’s Gorham, but Tom
told him untruthfully that the footbrake was not working.
Ted must be kept out of the garage till tomorrow morn-
ing.
Ted and Caroline had taken naps in the afternoon
and gone off together in Paul Murdock’s stylish roadster,
giving their word that they would be back by midnight
or a little later and that tomorrow night they would
stay home.
And now their mother and father were sitting up
for them, because the stockings could not be filled and
5
1
.I
i*
hung till they were safely in bed, and also because trying
to go to sleep is a painful and hopeless business when
you are kind of }umpy.	•’ . -fv ‘M-i? ---
“What time is it?” asked Grace, looking'up from the
third page of a book that she had begun to “read” soon
after dinner.
“Half past two,” said her husband. (He had answered
the same question every fifteen or twenty minutes since
midnight.)
“You don’t suppose anything could have happened?”
said Grace. -
“We’d have heard if there had,” said Tom. •
“It isn’t likely, of course,” said. Grace, “but they
might have had an accident some .place where nobody
was there to report it or telephone or anything. We
don’t • know what kind of a ’ driver the Murdock boy 
is.”
“He’s Ted’s age. Boys that age may be inclined to
drive too fast, but they drive pretty well.” z
“How do you know?”	'.
“Well, I’ve watched some of them drive.”	,
Yes, but not all of them.”
“I doubt whether anybody in the world has seen every .
nineteen-year-old boy drive.”
“Boys these days seem so kind of irresponsible.”
' “Oh, don’t worry! They probably met some of their
young friends and stopped for a bite to eat or something. ”
Tom got up and walked to the window with studied-
carelessness. “It’s a pretty night,” he said. You can see
every star in the sky.”
But he wasn’t looking at the stars. He was looking
down the road for headlights. There were none in sight
and after a few moments he returned to his chair.
“What time is it?” asked Grace. I .
‘Twenty-two of,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of three.”
“Your watch must have stopped. Nearly an hour ago
you said me it was half past two.”
"My watch is all right. You probably dozed- off.”
I haven’t closed my eyes.”
Well, it’s time you did. Why don’t you go to bed?”
Why don’t you?”


fh
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Neither am I. But honestly, Tom, it’s silly for you
to stay up. I’m just doing it so I can fix the stockings,
and because I feel so wakeful. But there’s no use of your
losing your sleep.”
“I couldn’t sleep a wink till they’re home.”
“That’s foolishness! There’s nothing to worry about.
They’re just having a good time. You were young once
yourself.”
“That’s just it! When I was young, I was young.”
lie picked up his paper and tried to get interested in the
shipping news.
“What time is it?” asked ' Grace.
“Five minutes of three.”
“Maybe they’re staying at the Murdocks’ all night.’*
“They’d have let us know."
“They were afraid to wake us up, telephoning.”
At three-twenty a car stopped at the front gate.
“There they are!”
“I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
Tom went to the window. He could just discern the
outlines of the Murdock boy’s roadster, whose lighting
system seemed to have broken down.
“He hasn’t any lights,” said Tom. ‘Maybe I’d better
go out and see if I can fix them.”
“No, don’t!” said Grace sharply. “He can fix them
himself. He’s just saving them while he stands still.’’
“Why don’t they come in?”	;
“They’re probably making plans."
“They can make them in here. I’ll go out and tell
them we’re still up.”
“No, don’t!” said Grace as before, and Tom obediently
remained at the. window.
It was nearly four when the car lights flashed on and
the car drove away. Caroline walked into the house and
stared dazedly at her parents.
“Heavens! What , are you doing up?” ~
Tom was about to say-something, but Grace fore-
stalled him.
1 “We were talking over old Christmases,” she said.
“Is it very late?”
“I haven’t any idea,” said Caroline.
“Where is Ted?”	i
“Isn’t he home? I haven’t seen him since we dropped
him at the hockey place.”
“Well, you go right to bed,” said her mother. “You
must be worn out.”
“I am, kind of. We danced after the play. What time
is breakfast?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Oh, Mother, can’t you make it nine?”
“I guess so. You used to want to get up early on Christ-
mas.”
“I know, but — ”.
“Who brought you home?” asked Tom.
“Why, Paul Murdock — and Beatrice.”
“You look rumpled.”
* “They made me sit in the ‘rumple’ seat.”
She laughed at her joke, said good night and went
ipstairs. She had not come even within hand-shaking
distance of her father and mother.
“The Murdocks,” said Tom, “must have great man-
ners, making their guest ride in that uncomfortable
seat. ”
Grace was silent.
“You go to bed, too,” said Tom. “I’ll wait for Ted.”
"You couldn’t fix the stockings.”
“I won’t try. We’ll have time for that in the morning;
I mean, later in the morning.”
“I’m not going to bed till you go,” said Grace.
“All right, we’ll both go. Ted ought not to be long
now. I suppose his friends will bring him home. We’ll
hear him when he comes in.”
There was no chance not to hear him when, at ten
minutes before six, he came in. He had done his Christmas
shopping late and brought home a package.
Grace was downstairs again at half past seven, tell-
ing the servants breakfast would be postponed till
nine. She nailed the stockings beside the fireplace, went
into the music-room to see that nothing had been dis-
turbed and removed Ted’s hat and overcoat from where
he had carefully hung them on the hall floor.
Tom appeared a little, before nine and suggested
that the children ought to be awakened.
“I’ll wake them,” said Grace, and went upstairs.
She opened Ted’s door, looked, and softly closed it
8
lignin. She entered her daughter’s room and found Caro-
line semiconscious.
“Do I have to get up now? Honestly I can’t eat anything.
If you could just have Molla bring me some coffee. Ted:
nnd 1 are both invited to the Murdocks* for breakfast at
half past twelve, and I could sleep for another hour or two.”
“But, dearie, don’t you know we have Christmas
dinner at one?”
“It’s a shame, Mother, but I thought of course our
dinner would be at night.”
“Don’t you want to see your presents?”
"Certainly I do, but can’t they wait?”
Grace was abouUto go to the kitchen to tell the cook
that dinner would be at seven instead of one, but she
remembered having promised Signe the afternoon and
evening off, as a cold, light supper would be all anyone
wanted after the heavy midday meal.	>
Tom and Grace breakfasted alone and once more
sat in the living-room, talking, thinking and pretending
to read.
“You ought to speak to Caroline,” said Tom.
“I will, but not today. It’s Christmas.”
“And I intend to say a few words to Ted.”
“Yes, dear, you must. But not today.”
“I suppose they’ll be out again tonight.”
“No, they promised to stay home. We’ll have a nico
cozy evening.”
“Don’t bet too much on that,” said Tom.
At noon the “children” made their entrance and
responded to their parents* salutations with almost the
proper warmth. Ted declined a cup of coffee and he and
Caroline apologized for making a “breakfast” date at
the Murdocks’.
“Sis* and I both thought you’d be having dinner at
seven, as usual.”
“We’ve always had it at one o’clock on Christmas,"
said Tom.
“I’d forgotten it was Christmas,” said Ted.
“Well, those stockings ought to remind you.”
Ted and Caroline looked at the bulging stockings.
“Isn’t there,a tree?” asked Caroline.
"Of course,” said her mother. “But the stockings come
first.”
. 9
“We’ve only a little time,” said Caroline. “We’ll be
terribly late as it is. So can’t we see the tree now?”
“I guess so,” said Grace, and led the way into the
music-room.
 The servants were summoned and the tree stared at
and admired.
“You must open your presents,” said Grace to her
daughter.
“I can’t open them all now,” said Caroline. “Tell me
which is special.”
The cover was removed from the huge box and Grace
held up the coat.
“Oh, Mother!” said Caroline. “A sealskin coat!”
“Put it on,” said her father.
“Not now. We haven’t time.”
‘Then look at this!” said Grace, and opened the case
of jewels.
“Oh, Mother! Opals!” said Caroline.
“They’re my favourite stone,” said Grace quietly.
“If nobody minds,” said Ted, “I’ll postpone my per-
sonal investigation till we get back. I know I’ll like
everything you’ve given me. But if we have no car in
working order, I've got to call a taxi and catch a train.”
“You can drive in,” said his father.
“Did you fix the brake?"
“I think it’s all right. Come up to the garage and
we’ll see.”
Ted got his hat and coat and kissed his mother good-by.
“Mother,” he said, “I know you’ll forgive me for not
having any presents for you and Dad. I was so rushed
the last three days at school. And I thought I’d have
time to shop a little when we got in yesterday, but I
was in too much of a hurry to be home. Last night, every-
thing was closed.”
“Don’t worry,” said Grace, “Christmas is for young
people. Dad ’and I have everything we want.”
The servants had found their gifts and dissappeared,
expressing effusive Scandinavian thanks.
Caroline and her mother were left alone.
“Mother, where did the coat come from?”
“Lloyd and Henry’s.”
“They keep all kinds of furs, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind horribly if I exchanged this?”
“Certainly not, dear. You pick out anything you
like, and if it’s a little more expensive, it won’t make
any difference. We can go in town tomorrow or next
day. But don’t you want to wear your opals to the Mur-
docks’?”
“I don’t believe so. They might get lost or something.
And I’m not — well, I’m not so crazy about —
“I think they can be exchanged too,” said Grace.
“You run along now and get ready to start.”
Caroline obeyed with alacrity, and Grace spent a
welcome moment by herself.
Tom opened the garage door.
“Why, you’ve got two cars!” said Ted.
“The new one isn’t mine,” said Tom.
“Whose is it?”
“Yours. It’s the new model.”
“Dad, that’s wonderful! But it looks just like the
old one.”
“Well, the old one’s pretty good. Just the same, ~
yours is better. You’ll find that out when you drive it.
Hop in and get started, I had her filled with gas.”
“I think I’d rather drive the old one.”
“Why?”
“Well, what I really wanted, Dad, was a Barnes
sport roadster, something like Paul Murdock’s, only a
different color scheme. And if I don’t drive this Gorham
at all, maybe you could get them to take it back or make
some kind of a deal with the Barnes people.” 
Tom didn’t speak till he was sure of his voice. Then:
“All right, son. Take my car and I’ll see what can be
done about yours.”
Caroline, waiting for Ted, remembered something
and called to her mother. “Here’s what I got for you
and Dad,” she said. “It’s two tickets to Jolly Jane, the
play I saw last night. You’ll love it!”
“When are they for?” asked Grace.
“Tonight,” said Caroline.
“But, dearie,” said her mother, “we don’t want to go
out tonight, when you promised to stay home.”
“We’ll keep our promise,” said Caroline, “but the
Murdocks may drop in and. bring some friends and we’ll
dance and there’ll be music. And Ted, and I both thought
11
I'
you’d rather be away somewhere so our noise wouldn’t
disturb you.”
“It was sweet of you to do this,” said her mother, s
“hut your father and I don’t mind noise as long as you’re
enjoying yourselves.”
“It’s time anyway that you and Dad had a treat.”
“The real treat,” said Grace, “would be to spend a
quiet evening here with just you two.”
“The Murdocks practically invited themselves and
I couldn’t say no after they’d been so nice to me. And hon-
estly, Mother, you’ll love this play!”
“Will you he home for supper?”
“I’m pretty sure we will, but if we’re a little late,
don’t you and Dad wait for us. Take the seven-twenty
so you won’t miss anything. The first act is really the
best. We probably won’t be hungry, but have Signe
leave something out for us in case we are.”
Tom and Grace sat down to the elaborate Christmas
dinner and didn’t make much impression on it. Even
if they had had any appetite, the sixteen-pound turkey
would have looked almost like new when they had eaten
their fill. Conversation was intermittent and related
chiefly to Signe’s excellence as a cook and the mildness
of the weather. Children and Christmas were barely
touched on.
Tom merely suggested that on account of its being
a holiday and their having theatre tickets, they ought
to take the six-ten and eat supper at the Metropole.
His wife said no; Ted and Caroline might come home
and he dissappointed at not finding them. Tom seemed
about to make some remark, but changed his mind.
The afternoon was the longest Grace had ever known.
The children were still absent at seven and she and
Tom taxied to the train. Neither talked much on the
way to town. As for the play, which Grace was sure to
love, it turned out to be a rehash of Cradle Snatchers
and Sex* retaining the worst features of each.
When it was over, Tom said: “Now I am inviting
you to the Cove Club. You didn’t eat any breakfast or
dinner or supper and I can’t have you starving to death
on a feast-day. Besides, I’m thirsty as well as hungry.”
They ordered the special table d'hote and struggled
hard to get away with it. Tom drank six highballs, but
12
I hoy failed to produce the usual effect of making him
jovial. Grace had one highball and some kind of cor-
dial that gave her a warm, contented feeling for a moment.
Bui the warmth and contentment left her before the train
was half way home.
The living-room looked as if Von Kluck’s* army
had just passed through. Ted and Caroline had kept
their promise up to a certain point. They had spent
part of the evening at home, and the Murdocks must
have brought all their own friends and everybody else’s,
judging from the results. The tables and floors were strewn
with empty glasses, ashes and cigaret stubs. The stockings
had been torn off their nails and wrecked contents were
all over the place. Two sizable holes had been burnt
in Grace’s favorite rug.
Tom took his wife by the arm and led her into the
music-room.
“You never took the trouble to open your own present,”
he said.
“And I think there’s one for you, too,” said Grace.
“They didn’t come in here,” she added, “so I guess there
wasn’t much dancing or music.”
Tom found his gift from Grace, a set of diamond
sluds and cuff buttons for festive wear. Grace’s present
from him was an opal ring.
“Oh, Tom!” she said.
“We’ll have to go out somewhere tomorrow night,
so I can break these in,”* said Tom.
“Well, if we do that, we’d better get a good night’s
rest.”
“I’ll beat* you upstairs,” said Tom.
FOR DISCUSSION
1.	Are we asked to have an attitude toward the characters?
Does the author have an attitude toward them?
2.	Does the author show more favour to the parents than to the
children?
3.	What details show you the parents* feelings toward their
children, their love and tact?
4.	Comment on the details showing Tom and Grace Carters’
attitude toward each other.
5.	What conclusions about the characters of Ted and Caroline
can you draw from the first episodes of the story? Do these con-
clusions change while reading the story?
6.	Are you surprized at the young people’s behaviour or does
it seem quite normal to you? Explain your answer.
7.	Is the time, of the action an important element in this
story? Is the story strengthened or weakened by the actions taking
place during Christmas?
 8. Is the story emotionally moving? What details produce
an emotional reaction?
•	9. Tragical motives run through R. Lardner’s story. How can
you reveal them?
10.	Why is there such a great difference between the parents
and the children?
11.	What is, in your opinion, the basis for a healthy and affec-
tionate relationship between parents and children?
12.	Is the problem of father-son relationship the only one in
the story or are there any other problems?
Stacy Aumonier
MISS BRACEGIRDLE DOES HER DUTY
“This is the room, madame.”
“Ah, thank you... thank you.”
“Does it appear satisfactory to madame?”
“Oh, yes, thank you... quite.”
“Does madame require anything further?”
“Er — if not too late, may I have a hot bath?”
“Parfaitement* madame. The bathroom is at the
end of the passage on the left. I will go and prepare it
for madame.”
“There is one thing more... I have had a very long
journey. I am very tired. Will you please see that I am
not disturbed in the morning until I ring.”
“Certainly, madame.”
15
Millicent Bracegirdle was speaking the truth — she
was tired. In the sleepy cathedral town of Easingstoke,
from which she came, it was customary for every one
to speak truth. It was customary, moreover, for every
one to lead simple, self-denying lives — to give up
their time to good works and elevating thoughts. One
had only to glance at little Miss Bracegirdle to see that £
in her were epitomized all the virtues and ideals of Easing-
stoke. Indeed, it was the pursuit of duly which had
brought her to the Hotel de 1’Quest at Bordeaux* on
this summer’s night. She had travelled from Easingstoke
to London, then without a break to Dover,* crossed
that horrid stretch of sea to Calais,* entrained for Paris,
where she of necessity had to spend four hours — a
terrifying experience — and then had come on to Bor-
deaux, arriving at midnight. The reason of this journey
being that someone had to come to Bordeaux to meet
her young sister-in-law, who was arriving the next
day from South America. The sister-in-law was married ,
to a missionary in Paraguay, but the climate not agreeing
with her, she was returning to England. Her dear brother,
the dean, would have come himself, but the claims on
his time were so extensive, the parishioners would miss
him so... it was clearly Millicent’s duty to go.
She had never been out of England before, and she
had a horror of travel, and an ingrained distrust of foreign-
ers. She spoke a little French— sufficient for ihe
purposes of travel and for obtaining any modest neces-
sities, but not sufficient for carrying on any kind of
conversation. She did not deplore this latter fact, for
she was of opinion that French people were not the kind
of people that one would naturally want to have con-
versation with; broadly speaking, they were not quite
“nice”, in spite of their ingratiating manners.
The dear dean had given her endless advice, warning
her earnestly not to enter into conversation with stran-
gers, to obtain all information from the police, railway
officials — in fact, any one in an official uniform. He
deeply regretted to say that he was afraid that France
was not a country for a woman to travel about in alone.
There were loose, bad people about, always on the look-
out... He really thought perhaps he ought not to let
her go. It was only by the utmost persuasion, in which
iG
she rather exaggerated her knowledge of the French
language and character, her courage, and indifference
to discomfort, that she managed to carry the day.
She unpacked her valise, placed her things about
the room, tried to thrust hack the little stabs of homesick-
ness as she visualized her darling room at the deanery.
JI ow strange and hard and unfriendly seemed these
foreign hotel bedrooms — heavy and depressing, no
chintz and lavender and photographs of ... all the dear
family, the dean, the nephews and nieces, the interior
of the cathedral during harvest festival, no samplers
and needlework or coloured reproductions of the paint-
ings by Marcus Stone.* Oh dear, how foolish she was!
"What did she expect?
She disrobed and donned a dressing-gown; then,
armed with a sponge-bag* and towel, she crept timidly
down the passage to the bathroom, after closing her
bedroom door and turning out the light. The gay bath-
room cheered her. She wallowed luxuriously in the hot
water, regarding her slim legs with quiet satisfaction.
And for the first time since leaving home there came
to her a pleasant moment — a sense of enjoyment in
her adventure. After all, it was rather an adventure,
and her life had been peculiarly devoid of it. What queer
lives some people must live, travelling about, having
experiences! How old was she? Not really old — not
by any means. Forty-two? Forty-three? She had shut
herself up so. She hardly ever regarded the potentiali-
ties of age. As the world went, she was a well-preserved
woman for her age. A life of self-abnegation, simple
living, healthy walking and fresh air, had kept her
younger than these hurrying, pampered city people.
Love? yes, once when she was a young girl... he was
a schoolmaster, a most estimable kind gentleman. They
were never engaged — not actually, but it was a kind
of understood thing. For three years it went on, this
pleasant understanding and friendship. He was so gentle,
so distinguished and considerate. She would have been
happy to have continued in this strain for ever. But
there was something lacking. Stephen had curious rest-
less lapses. From the physical aspect of marriage she
shrunk — yes, even with Stephen, who was gentleness
and kindness itself. And then one day... one day he
17
went away — vanished, and never returned. They told
her he had married one of the country girls — a girl >
used to work in Mrs Forbes’s dairy — not a very nice
girl, she feared, one of these fast, pretty, foolish women.
Heighol* well, she had lived that down, destructive as
the blow appeared at the time. One lives everything
down in time. There is always work, living for others,
faith, duty... At the same time she could sympathize
with people who found satisfaction in unusual experi-
ences.
There would be lots to tell the dear dean when she
wrote to him on the morrow; nearly losing her spectacles
on the restaurant car; the amusing remarks of an American
child on the train to Paris, the curious food everywhere,
nothing simple and plain; the two English ladies at the
hotel in Paris who told her about the death of their
uncle — the poor man being taken ill on Friday and
dying on Sunday afternoon, just before tea-time; the
kindness of the hotel proprietor who has sat up for her;
the prettiness of the chambermaid. Oh, yes, every one
was really very kind. The French people, after all, were
very nice. She had seen nothing — nothing but was
quite nice and decorous; There would be lots to tell
the dean tomorrow.
Her body glowed with the friction of the towel.
She again donned her night attire and her thick, wool-
len dressing-gown. She tidied up the bathroom carefully
in exactly the same, way she was accustomed to do at
home, then once more gripping her sponge-bag and towel,
and turning out the light, she crept down the passage
to her room. Entering the room she switched on the
light and shut the door quickly. Then one of those ri-
diculous things happened — just the kind of thing you
would expect to happen in a foreign hotel. The handle
of the door came off in her hand.
She ejaculated a quiet “Bother!” and sought to re
place it with one hand, the other being occupied with
the towel and sponge-bag. In doing this she behaved
foolishly, for thrusting the knob carelessly against the
steel pin — without properly securing it — she only suc-
ceeded in pushing the pin farther into the door and the
knob was not adjusted. She uttered another little “Both-
er!” and put her sponge-bag and towel down on the
18 '
floor. She then tried to recover the pin with her left
hand, but it had gone in too far.
"How very foolish!” she thought, “I shall have to
ring for the chambermaid — and perhaps the poor girl
has gone to bed.”
She turned and faced the room, and suddenly the
awful horror was upon her. There was a man asleep in
her bed!
The sight of that swarthy face on the pillow, with
its black tousled hair and heavy moustache, produced
in her the most terrible moment of her life. Her heart
nearly stopped. For some seconds she could neither
think nor scream, and her first thought was: “I mustn’t
scream!”
She stood there like one paralysed, staring at the
man’s head and the great curved hunch of his body under
the clothes. When she began to think she thought very
quickly, and all her thoughts worked together. The
first vivid realization was that it wasn’t the man’s fault;
it was her fault. She was in the wrong room. It was the
man’s room. The rooms were identical, but there were
all his things about, his clothes thrown carelessly over
chairs, his collar and tie on the wardrobe, his great heavy
boots and the strange yellow trunk. She must get out
somehow, anyhow.
She clutched once more at the door, feverishly driv-
ing her finger-nails into the hole where the elusive pin
had vanished. She tried to force her fingers in the crack
and open the door that way, but it was of no avail. She
was to all intents and purposes locked in — locked in
a bedroom in a strange hotel alone with a man... a for-
eigner ... a Frenchman! She must think. She must think.
... She switched off the light. If the light was off he
might not wake up. It might give her time to think how to
act. It was surprising that he had not awakened. If
he did wake up, what would he do? How could she explain
herself? He wouldn’t believe her. No one would believe
her. In an English hotel it would be difficult enough,
but here where she wasn’t known, where they were all
foreigners and consequently antagonistic... merciful
heavens!
She must get out. Should she wake the man? No, she
couldn’t do that. He might murder her. He might...-
Oh, it was too awful to contemplate! Should she scream?
ring for the chambermaid? But no, it would be the same
thing. People would come rushing.- They would find her
there in the strange man’s bedroom after midnight — she,
Millicent Bracegirdle, sister of the Dean of Easingstoke!
Easingstoke!
Visions of Easingstoke flashed through her alarmed
mind. Visions of the news arriving, women whispering
around tea-tables: “Have you heard, my dear? ... Beally
no one would have imagined! Her poor brother! He will
of course have to resign, you know, my dear. Have a
little more cream, my love.”
Would they put her in prison? She might be in the
room for the purpose of stealing or... She might be in
the room for the purpose of breaking every one of the
ten commandments. There was no explaining it away.
She was a ruined woman, suddenly and irretrievably,
unless she could open the door. The chimney? Should
she climb up the chimney? But where would that lead
to? And then she visualized the man pulling her down
by her legs when she was already smothered in soot.
Any moment he might wake up. ...
She thought she heard the chambermaid going along
the passage. If she had wanted to scream, she ought to
have screamed before. The maid would know she had
left the bathroom some minutes ago. Was she going to
her room? Suddenly she remembered that she had told
the chambermaid that she was not to be disturbed until
she rang the next morning. That was something. No-
body would be going to her room to find out that she
was not there.
An abrupt and desperate plan formed in her mind.
It was already getting on for one o’clock. The man was
probably a quite harmless commercial traveller or busi-
ness man. He would probably get up about seven or
eight o’clock, dress quickly, and go out. She would hide
under his bed until he went. Only a matter of a few
hours. Men don’t look under their beds, although she
made a religious practice of doing so herself. When he
went he would be sure to open the door all right. The
handle would be lying on the floor as though it had
dropped off in the night. He would probably ring for
the chambermaid or open it with a penknife. Men were
20
но clever at those things. When he had gone she would
ciecp out and steal back to her room and then there
would be no necessity to give any explanation to any
one. But heavens! What an experience! Once under the
while frill of that bed she would be safe till the morning.
In daylight nothing seemed so terrifying.
With feline precaution she went down on her hands
and knees and crept toward the bed. What a lucky thing
(here was that broad white frill! She lifted it at the foot
of lhe bed and crept under. There was just sufficient
depth to take her slim body. The floor was fortunately
carpeted all over, but it seemed very close and dusty.
Suppose she coughed or sneezed! Anything might happen.
Of course... it would be much more difficult to explain
her presence under the bed than to explain her presence
just inside the door. She held her breath in suspense.
No sound came from above, but under this frill it was
difficult to hear anything. It was almost more nerve-
racking than hearing everything... listening for signs
and portents. This temporary escape in any case would
give her time to regard the predicament detachedly.
Up to the present she had not been able to visualize the
full significance of her action. She had in truth lost
her head. She had been like a wild animal, consumed
with the sole idea of escape... a mouse or a cat would
do this kind of thing — take cover and lie low. If only
il hadn’t all happened abroad\ She tried to frame sentences
of explanation in French, but French escaped her. And
then — they talked so rapidly, these people. They didn’t
listen. The situation was intolerable. Would she be able
to endure a night of it?
At present she was not altogether uncomfortable,
only stuffy and ... very, very frightened. But she had to
face six or seven or eight hours of it — perhaps even
then discovery in the end! The minutes flashed by as
she turned the matter over and over in her head. There
was no solution. She began to wish she had screamed
or awakened the man. She saw now that that would have
been the wisest and most politic thing to do; but she
had allowed ten minutes or a quarter of an hour to elapse
from the moment when the chambermaid would know
that she had left the bathroom. They would want an
explanation of what she had been doing in the man’s
21
bedroom all that time. Why hadn’t she screamed be- .
fore?	’
She lifted the frill an inch or two and listened. She ’
thought she heard the man breathing but she couldn’t^
be sure. In any case it gave her more air. She became a
little bolder, and thrust her face partly through the
frill so that she could breathe freely. She tried to steady ‘
her nerves by concentrating on the fact that — well, ;
there it was. She had done it. She must make the best 
of it. Perhaps it would be all right after all.
“Of course I shan’t sleep,’’she kept on thinking, “Ishan’t
be able to. In any case it will be safer not to sleep. I must
be on the watch.”
She set her teeth and waited grimly. Now that she
had made up her mind to see the thing through in this 1
manner she felt a little calmer. She almost smiled as
she reflected that there would certainly be something
to tell the dear dean when she wrote to him tomorrow.
How would he take it? Of course he would believe it — '
he had never doubted a single word that she had uttered 1
in her life — but the story would sound so... preposter- •
ous. In Easingstoke it would be almost impossible to '
envisage such an experience. She, Millicent Bracegirdle,
spending a night under a strange man’s bed in a foreign
hotel! What would those women think? Fanny Shields
and that garrulous old Mrs Rushbridger? Perhaps ... 1
yes, perhaps it would be advisable to tell the dear dean to j
let the story go no further. One could hardly expect Mrs j
Rushbridger to ... not make implications ... exaggerate. ’
Oh, dear! What were they all doing now? They would
be all asleep, every one in Easingstoke. Her dear brother ,
always retired at ten-fifteen. He would be sleeping calmly
and placidly, the sleep of the just... breathing the clear
sweet air of Sussex, not this — oh, it was stuffy! She
felt a great desire to cough. She mustn’t do that. Yes, I
at nine-thirty all the servants summoned to the library —
a short service — never more than fifteen minutes, (
her brother didn’t believe in a great deal of ritual —
then at ten o’clock cocoa for every one. At ten-fifteen
bed for every one. The dear sweet bedroom with the	;
narrow white bed, by the side of which she had knelt 1
every night as long as she could remember — even in i
her dear mother’s day — and said her prayers.
Prayers! Yes, that was a curious thing.  This was
tlio first night in her life’s experience that she had not
Hi id her prayers on retiring. The situation was certainly
very peculiar... exceptional, one might call it. God
would understand and forgive such a lapse. And yet
after all, why ... what was to prevent her saying her
prayers? Of course she couldn’t kneel in the proper de-
votional attitude, that would be a physical impossi-
bility; nevertheless, perhaps her prayers might be just
ns efficacious... if they came from the heart. So little
Miss Bracegirdle curved her body and placed her hands
in a devout attitude in front of her face and quite in-
audibly murmured her prayers under the strange man’s
bed.
“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy
name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth
ns it is in heaven; Give us this day our daily bread. And
forgive us our trespasses...”
Trespasses! Yes, surely she was trespassing on this
occasion, but God would understand. She had not wanted
to trespass. She was an unwitting sinner. Without ut-
tering a sound she went through her usual prayers in
her heart. At the end she added fervently:
“Please God protect me from the dangers and perils
of this night.”
Then she lay silent and inert, strangely soothed by
the effort of praying. “After all,” she thought, “it isn’t
the attitude which matters — it is that which occurs
deep down in us.”
For the first time she began to meditate — almost
to question — church forms and dogma. If an attitude
was not indispensable, why a building, a ritual, a church
at all? Of course her dear brother couldn't be wrong,
the church was so old, so very old, its root deep buried
in the story of human life, it was only that... well, out-
ward forms could be misleading. Her own present posi-
tion for instance. In the eyes of the world she had, by
one silly careless little action, convicted herself of being
the breaker of every single one of the ten commandments.
She tried to think of one of which she could not be
accused. But no — even to dishonouring her father and
mother, bearing false witness, stealing, coveting her
neighbour’s ... husband! That was the worst thing of
23
Г,Г‘
all. Poor man! He might be a very pleasant honourable ';
married gentleman with children and she — she was
in a position to compromise him! Why hadn’t she
screamed? Too late! Too late!	• 4
It began to get very uncomfortable, stuffy, but at
the same time draughty, and the floor was getting hard-.
er every minute. She changed her position stealthily
and controlled her desire to cough. Her heart was beating
rapidly. Over and over again recurred the vivid impres-
sion of every little incident and argument that had
occurred to her from the moment she left the bathroom.
This must, of course, be the room next to her own. So
confusing, with perhaps twenty bedrooms all exactly '
alike on one side of a passage — how was one to remember
whether one’s number was 115 or 116?
Her mind began to wander idly off into her school-
days. She was always very bad at figures. She disliked
Euclid* and all those subjects about angles and equa-
tions — so unimportant, not leading anywhere. History
she liked, and botany, and reading about strange foreign
lands, although she had always been too timid to visit
them. And the lives of great people, most fascinating —
Oliver Cromwell,* Lord Beaconsfield,* Lincoln,* Grace
Darling* — there was a heroine for you — General
Booth,* a great, good man, even if a little vulgar. She
remembered dear old Miss Trimming talking about
him one afternoon at the vicar of St. Bride’s* garden
party. She was so amusing. She... Good heavens!
Almost unwittingly, Millicent Bracegirdle had emitted
a violent sneeze!
It was finished! For the second time that night she
was conscious of her heart nearly stopping. For the second
time that night she was so paralysed with fear that her
mentality went to pieces. Now she would hear the man
get out of bed. He would walk across to the door, switch
on the light, and then lift up the frill. She could almost
see that fierce moustached face glaring at her and growl-
ing something in French. Then he would thrust out an
arm and drag her out. And then? О God in heaven!
What then?...
“I shall scream before he does it. Perhaps I had better
scream now. If he drags me out he will clap his hand
over my mouth. Perhaps chloroform...”
24
I
But somehow she could not scream. She was too fright-
ened even for that. She lifted the frill and listened.
Was he moving stealthily across the carpet? She thought—
no, she couldn’t be sure. Anything might be happening,
lie might strike her from above — with one of those
heavy boots perhaps. Nothing seemed to be happening,
but the suspense was intolerable. She realized now that
she hadn’t the power to endure a night of it. Anything
would be better than this — disgrace, imprisonment,
even death. She would crawl out, wake the man, and
Iry and explain as best she could.
She would switch on the light, cough, and say: “Mon-
sieur!'’
Then he would start up and stare at her.
Then she would say — what should she say?
“Pardon, monsieur, mats je —” What on earth was
the French for ‘I have made a mistake.’
“J ’at tort. C'est la chambre — er — incorrect. Voulez-
vous — er —”
What was the French for ‘door-knob,’ ‘let me go’?
It didn’t matter. She would turn on the light, cough
and trust to luck. If he got out of bed, and came toward
her, she would scream the hotel down ...
The resolution formed, she crawled deliberately out
at the foot of the bed. She scrambled hastily toward
the door — a perilous journey. In a few seconds the room
was flooded with light. She turned toward the bed,
coughed, and cried out boldly:
“M onsieur!"
Then, for the third time that night, little Miss Brace-
girdle’s heart all but stopped. In this case the climax
of the horror took longer to develop, but when it was
reached, it clouded* the other two experiences into insig-
nificance.
The man on the bed was dead!
She had never beheld death before, but one does
not mistake death.
She stared at him bewildered, and repeated almost
in a whisper:
“Monsieur! ... Monsieur! ”
Then she tiptoed toward the bed. The hair and mous-
tache looked extraordinarily black in that grey, wax-like
setting. The mouth was slightly open, and the face,
25
which in life might have been vicious and sensual, looked
incredibly peaceful and far away. It was as though she
were regarding the features of a man across some vast
passage of time, a being who had always been com-
pletely remote from mundane preoccupations.
When the full truth came home to her, little Miss
Bracegirdle buried her face in her hands and mur-
mured:
"Poor fellow... poor fellow!”
For the moment her own position seemed an affair
of small consequence. She was in the presence of some-
thing greater and more all-pervading. Almost instinc-
tively she knelt by the bed and prayed.
For a few moments she seemed to be possessed by an
extraordinary calmness and detachment. The burden of
her hotel predicament was a gossamer* trouble — a
silly, trivial, almost comic episode, something that
could be .explained away.
But this man — he had lived his life, whatever it
was like, and now he was in the presence of his Maker.
What kind of man had he been?
Her meditations were broken by an abrupt sound.
It was that of a pair of heavy boots being thrown down
by the door outside. She started, thinking at first it
was someone knocking or trying to get in. She heard the
“boots,” however, stumping away down the corridor,
and the realization stabbed her with the truth of her
own position. She mustn’t stop there. The necessity to |
get out was even more urgent.
To be found in a strange man’s bedroom in the night ;
is bad enough, but to be found in a dead man’s bedroom
was even worse. They could accuse her of murder, perhaps.
Yes, that would be it — how could she possibly explain
to these foreigners? Good God! they would hang her. - j
No, guillotine her, that’s what they do in France. They
would chop her head off with a great steel knife. Merci-
ful heavens! She envisaged herself standing blindfold,
by a priest and an executioner in a red cap, like that	'
man in the Dickens story — what was his name?...
Sydney Carton,* that was it, and before he went on the
scaffold he said:
“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever
done.”
26
	
But no, she couldn’t say that. It would be a far,
far worse thing that she did. What about the dear dean?
1 ler sister-in-law arriving alone from Paraguay tomorrow?
All her dear people and friends in Easingstoke? Her
darling Tony, the large grey tabby cat? It was her duty
not to have her head chopped off if it could possibly
be avoided. She could do no good in the room. She could
not recall the dead to life. Her only mission was to escape.
Any minute people might arrive. The chambermaid,
the boots, the manager, the gendarmes. ... Visions of
gendarmes arriving armed with swords and note-books
vitalized her almost exhausted energies. She was a des-
perate woman. Fortunately now she had not to worry
about the light. She sprang once more at the door and
tried to force it open with her fingers. The result hurt
her and gave her pause. If she was to escape she must
think, and think intensely. She mustn’t do anything
rash and silly, she must just think and plan
calmly.
She examined the lock carefully. There was no keyhole,
but there was a slip-bolts so that the hotel guest could
lock the door on the inside, but it couldn’t be locked
on the outside. Oh, why didn’t this poor dear dead man
lock his door last night? Then this trouble could not
have happened. She could see the end of the steel pin.
It was about half an inch down the hole. If any one was
passing they must surely notice the handle sticking
out too far the other side! She drew a hairpin out of
her hair and tried to coax the pin back,* but she only
succeeded in pushing it a little farther in. She felt the
colour leaving her face, and a strange feeling of faintness
come over her.
She was fighting for her life, she mustn’t give way.
She darted round the room like an animal in a trap, her
mind alert for the slightest crevice of escape. The window
had no balcony and there was a drop of five stories to
the sreet below. Dawn was breaking. Soon the activities
of the hotel and the city would begin. The thing must
be accomplished before then.
She went back once more and stared at the lock.
She stared at the dead man’s property, his razors, and
brushes, and writing materials, pens and pencils and
rubber and sealing-wax... Sealing-wax!
27
Necessity is truly the mother of invention. It is
in any case quite certain that Millicent Bracegirdle,
who had never invented a thing in her life, would never
have evolved the ingenious little device she did, had
she not believed that her position was utterly desperate.
For in the end this is what she did. She got together
a box of matches, a candle, a bar of sealing-wax, and
a hairpin. She made a little pool of hot sealing-wax,
into which she dipped the end of the hairpin. Collecting
a small blob on the end of it she thrust it into the hole,
and let it adhere to the end of the steel pin. At the sev-
enth attempt she got the thing to move. It took her
just an hour and ten minutes to get that steel pin back
into the room, and when at length it came far enough
through for her to grip it with her finger-nails, she burst
into tears through the sheer physical tension of the
strain. Very, very carefully she pulled it through, and
holding it firmly with her left hand she fixed the
knob with her right, then slowly turned it. The door
opened!
The temptation to dash out into the corridor and
scream with relief was almost irresistible, but she forbore.
She listened; she peeped out. No one was about. With
beating heart, she went out, closing the door inaudibly.
She crept like a little mouse to the room next door, stole
in and flung herself on her bed. Immediately she did so
it flashed through her mind that she had left her sponge-
bag and towel in the dead man's room!
In looking back upon her experience she always
considered that that second expedition was the worst
of all. She might have left the sponge-bag and towel
there, only that the towel — she never used hotel towels —
had neatly inscribed in the corner “M. B.”
With furtive caution she managed to retrace her
steps. She re-entered the dead man’s room, reclaimed
her property, and returned to her own. When this mis-
sion was accomplished she was indeed wellnigh spent.
She lay on her bed and groaned feebly. At last she fell
into a fevered sleep. ...
It was eleven o’clock when she awoke and no one
had been to disturb her. The sun was shining, and the
experience of the night appeared a dubious nightmare.
Surely she had dreamt it all!
28
With dread still burning in her heart she rang the
lirll. After a short interval of time the chambermaid
appeared. The girl’s eyes were bright with some uncontrol-
lable excitement. No, she had not been dreaming. This
girl had heard something.
“Will you bring me some tea, please?”
"Certainly, madame.”
The maid drew back the curtains and fussed about
the room. She was under a pledge of secrecy, but she
could contain herself no longer. Suddenly she approached
the bed and whispered excitedly:
“Oh, madame, I have promised not to tell... but a
terrible thing has happened. A man, a dead man, has
been found in room 117 — a guest. Please not to say
I tell you. But they have all been there, the gendarmes,
the doctors, the inspectors. Oh, it is terrible... terrible.”
The little lady in the bed said nothing. There was
indeed nothing to say. But Marie Louise Lancret was
too full of emotional excitement to spare her.
“But the terrible thing is — Do you knew who he
was, madame? They say it is Boldhu, the man wanted
for the murder of Jeanne Carreton in the barn at Vin-
cennes.* They say he strangled her, then cut her up in
pieces and hid her in two barrels which he threw into the
river... Oh, but he was a bad man, madame, a terrible
bad man... and he died in the room next door... suicide,
they think; or was it an attack of the heart? ... Bemorse,
some shock perhaps... Did you say a cafe complei*
madame?”
“No, thank you, my dear... just a cup of tea... strong
lea ...”
“Parfaitement, madame.”
The girl retired, and a little later a waiter entered
the room with a tray of tea. She could never get over
her surprise at this. It seemed so — well, indecorous
for a man — although only a waiter — to enter a lady’s
bedroom. There was no doubt a great deal in what the
dear dean said. They were certainly very peculiar, these
French people — they had most peculiar notions. It
was not the way they behaved at Easingstoke. She got
farther under the sheets, but the waiter appeared quite
indifferent to the situation. He put the tray down and
retired.	' -
29
When he had gone she sat up and sipped her tea,
which gradually warmed her. She was glad the sun was
shining. She would have to get up soon. They said that
her sister-in-law’s boat was due to berth at one o’clock.
That would give her time to dress comfortably, write
to her brother, and then go down to the docks. Poor
man! So he had been a murderer, a man who cut up the
bodies of his victims... and she had spent the night
in his bedroom! They were certainly a most — how
could she describe it? people. Nevertheless she felt
a little glad that at the end she had been there to kneel
and pray by his bedside. Probably nobody else had ever
done that. It was very difficult to judge people. ... Some-
thing at some time might have gone wrong. He might
not have murdered the woman after all. People were
often wrongly convicted. She herself... If the police
had found her in that room at three o’clock that morn-
ing... It is that which takes place in the heart which
counts. One learns and learns. Had she not learnt that
one- can pray just as effectively lying under a bed as
kneeling beside it? ... Poor man!
She washed and dressed herself and walked calmly
down to the writing-room. There was no evidence of
excitement among the other hotel guests. Probably none
of them knew about the tragedy except herself. She
went to a writing-table and after profound meditation
wrote as follows:
“My dear Brother,
“I. arrived late last night after a very pleasant journey.
Every one was very kind and attentive, the manager
was sitting up for me. I nearly lost my spectacle case
in the restaurant car! But a kind old gentleman found
it and returned it to me. There was a most amusing
American child on the train. I will tell you about her
on my return. The people are very pleasant, but the food
is peculiar, nothing plain and wholesome. I am going
down to meet Annie at one o’clock. How have you been
keeping, my dear? I hope you have not had any further
return of the bronchial attacks.
“Please tell Lizzie that I remembered in the train
on the way here that that large stone jar of marmalade
that Mrs Hunt made is behind those empty tins in the
top shelf of the cupboard next to the coach-house. I
30
1
wonder whether Mrs Butler was able to come to evensong*
after all? This is a nice hotel, but I think Annie and
I will stay at the ‘Grand’ tonight, as the bedrooms here
are rather noisy. Well, my dear, nothing more till I
return. Do take care of yourself. — Your loving sister,
“Millicent. ”
Yes, she couldn’t tell Peter about it, neither in the
letter nor when she went back to him. It was her duty
not to tell him. It would only distress him; she felt con-
vinced of it. In this curious foreign atmosphere the thing
appeared possible, but in Easingstoke the mere recount-
ing of the fantastic situations would be positively...
indelicate. There was no escaping that broad general
fact she had spent a night in a strange man’s bedroom.
Whether he was a gentleman or a criminal, even whether
he was dead or alive, did not seem to mitigate the jar
upon her sensibilities, or rather it would not mitigate
the jar upon the peculiarly sensitive relationship be-
tween her brother and herself. To say that she had been to
the bathroom, the knob of the door-handle came off
in her hand, she was too frightened to awaken the sleep-
er or scream, she got under the bed — well, it was
all perfectly true. Peter would believe her, but — one
simply could not conceive such a situation in Easingstoke
deanery. It would create a curious little barrier between
them, as though she had been dipped in some mysterious
solution which alienated her. It was her duty not to tell.
She put on her hat, and went out to post the letter.
She distrusted an hotel letter-box. One never knew who
handled these letters. It was not a proper official way
of treating them. She walked to the head post office
in Bordeaux.
The sun was shining. It was very pleasant walking
about amongst these queer excitable people, so foreign
and different-looking — and the cafes already crowded
with chattering men and women, and the flower stalls,
and the strange odour of — what was it? Salt? Brine?
Charcoal?... A military band was playing in the square...
very gay and moving. It was all life, and movement,
and bustle... thrilling rather.
“I spent a night in a strange man’s bedroom.”
Little Miss Bracegirdle hunched her shoulders, mur-
mured to herself, and walked faster. She reached the
31
post office and found the large metal plate with the
slot for letters and “R. F.”* stamped above it. Something
official at last! Her face was a little flushed — was it
the warmth of the day or the contact of movement and .v
life! — as she put her letter into the slot. After posting
it she put her hand into the slot and flicked it round
to see that there were no foreign contraptions to impede 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
its safe delivery. No, the letter had dropped safely in.
She sighed contentedly and walked off in the direction
of the docks to meet her sister-in-law from Paraguay.
FOR DISCUSSION
1. The way of expressing the story is irony. What is the irony
of the title?
2. What is the specific target of the author’s irony? What other
subjects receive ironic comment?
3. Does the comic quality of the story arise from the unfold-
ing situation, from a sequence of situations, or from the character
portrayal?
4. Are there any ironies of situation?
5. Are there any other techniques to convey ridicule or mock-
ery in the story?
6. Does the setting contribute any idea that modifies the
reader’s understanding of the character?
7. In your opinion, why does the author include the details
of the life in Easingstoke into the narrative?
8. Give an imaginary portrait of Miss Bracegirdle’s brother.
9. What was Miss Bracegirdle’s motto? Did she live up to it?
10. Did the incident in the hotel change Miss Bracegirdle’s
character in any way?
11. Are there any features of English national character in
Miss Bracegirdle’s thoughts and actions?
12. What is the author’s attitude toward his story? Amused?
Serious in any way? Support your answer with evidence from tho
story.
James Thurber
THE CATBIRD SEAT
Mr Martin bought the pack of Camels * on Monday
night in the most crowded cigar store on Broadway. It
was theatre time and seven or eight men were buying
cigarettes. The clerk didn’t even glance at Mr Martin,
who put the pack in his overcoat pocket and went out.
If any of the staff at F & S * had seen him buy the ciga-
rettes, they would have been astonished, for it was gener-
ally known that Mr Martin did not smoke, and never
had. No one saw him.
It was just a week to the day since Mr Martin had
decided to rub out Mrs Ulgine Barrows. The term “rub
out” pleased him because it suggested nothing more than
the correction of an error — in this case an error of Mr
2 И. В. Ступников
33
Fitweiler. Mr Martin had spent each night of the past;
week working out his plan and examining it. As he'
walked home now he went over it again. For the hundredth
time he resented the element of imprecision, the margin;
of guesswork that entered into the business. The project
as he had worked it out was casual and bold, the risks
were considerable. Something might go wrong anywhere j
along the line. And therein lay the cunning of his scheme.®1
No one would ever see in it the cautious, painstaking hand4
of Erwin Martin, head of the filing department * at:
F & S, of whom Mr Fitweiler had once said, “Man is
fallible but Martin isn’t.” No one would see his hand,,,
that is, unless it were caught in the act.
Sitting in his apartment, drinking a glass of milk,:
Mr Martin reviewed his case against Mrs Ulgine Barrows, ‘
as he had every night for seven nights. He began at the..’
beginning. Her quacking voice and braying laugh had
first profaned the halls.of F & S on March 7, 1941 (Mr
Martin had a head for dates). Old Roberts, the personnel
chief, had introduced her as the newly appointed special
adviser to the president of the firm, Mr Fitweiler. Tnoj
woman had appalled Mr Martin instantly, but he hadn’t'
shown it. He had given her his dry hand, a look of studious
concentration, and a faint smile. “Well,” she had said,
lifting
the 
looking at the papers on his desk,
“are you
oxcart out of the ditch?” * As Mr Martin recalled that
moment, over his milk, he squirmed slightly. He must
keep his mind on her crimes as a special adviser, not on
her peccadillos as a personality. This he found difficult
to do, in spite of entering an objection and sustaining it.*
The faults of the woman as a woman kept chattering on
in his mind like an unruly witness. She had, for almost 
two years now, baited him. In the halls, in the elevator,
even in his own office, into which she romped now and
then like a circus horse, she was constantly shouting
these silly questions at him. “Are you lifting the oxcart
out of the ditch? Are you tearing up the pea patch? Are
you hollering down the rain barrel?* Are you scraping
around the bottom of the pickle barrel? Are you sitting
in the catbird seat?”*
i It was Joey Hart, one of Mr Martin’s two assistants,
who had explained what the gibberish meant. “She must
be a Dodger fan,”* he had said. “Red Barber * announces
34
the Dodger games over the radio and he uses those expreS-1
pions — picked ’em up down South.” Joey had gone on
Io explain one or two. “Tearing up the pea patch” meant
going on a rampage; * “sitting in the catbird seat” meant
nit l ing pretty, like a batter with three balls and no
nt ri kes on him. * Mr Martin dismissed all this with an effort.
Il had been annoying, it had driven him near to distrac-
tion, but he was too solid a man to be moved to murder •
by anything so childish. It was fortunate, he reflected
п.ч he passed on to the important charges against Mrs
Barrows, that he had stood up under it * so well. He
had maintained always an outward appearance of polite
tolerance. “Why, I even believe you like the woman,"
Miss Paird, his other assistant, had once said to him.
lie had simply smiled.
A gavel rapped in Mr Martin’s mind and the case prop- ,
er was resumed. Mrs Ulgine Barrows stood charged with
willful, blatant, and persistent attempts to destroy the
efficiency and system of F & S. It was competent, material,
and relevant to review her advent and rise to power. Mr
Martin had got the story from Miss Paird, who seemed
always able to find things out. According to her, Mrs
Barrows had met Mr Fitweiler at a party, where she had
rescued him from the embraces of a powerfully built
drunken man who had mistaken the president of F & S
for a famous retired Middle Western football coach.
The aging gentleman had jumped to the conclusion there
and then that this was a woman of singular attainments,1
equipped to bring out the best in him and in the firm.
A week later he had introduced her into F & S as his
special adviser. On that day confusion got its foot in the
door. After Miss Tyson, Mr Brundage, and Mr Bartlett
had been fired and Mr Munson had taken his hat and
stalked out, mailing in his resignation later, old Roberts
had been emboldened to speak to Mr Fitweiler. He men-
tioned that Mr Munson’s department had been “a little
disrupted” and hadn’t they perhaps better resume the
old system there? Mr Fitweiler had said certainly not.
lie had the greatest faith in Mrs Barrows’ ideas. “They
require a little seasoning,* a little seasoning, is all,”
lie had added, Mr Roberts had given it up. Mr Martin
reviewed in detail all the changes wrought by Mrs Bar-
rows. She had begun chipping at the cornices of the
2*	85
firm's edifice and now she was swinging at the foundation
stones with a pickaxe.
Mr Martin came now, in his summing up, to the after-
noon of Monday, November 2, 1942 — just one week
ago. On that day, at 3 p. m., Mrs Barrows had bounced
into his office. “Boo!” she had yelled. “Are you scraping
around the bottom of the pickle barrel?” Mr Martin had
looked at her from under his green eyeshade, saying no-
thing. She had begun to wander about the office, taking
it in with her great, popping eyes. “Do you really need all
these filing cabinets?” she had demanded suddenly.
Mr Martin’s heart had jumped. “Each of these files,”
he had said, keeping his voice even, “plays an indispen-
sable part in the system of F & S.” She had brayed at him,
“Well, don’t tear up the pea patch!” and gone to the door.
From there she had bawled, “But you sure have got a lot
of fine scrap in here!” Mr Martin could no longer doubt
that the finger was on his beloved department. Her pickaxe
was on the upswing, poised for the first blow. It had not
come yet; he had received no blue memo * from the
enchanted Mr Fitweiler bearing nonsensical instructions
deriving from the obscene woman. But there was no doubt
in Mr Martin’s mind that one would be forthcoming.
He must act quickly. Already a precious week had gone
by. Mr Martin stood up in his living room, still holding
his milk glass. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said to himself,
“I demand the death penalty for this horrible person.”
The next day Mr Martin followed his routine, as usual.
He polished his glasses more often and once sharpened an
already sharp pencil, but not even Miss Paird noticed.
Only once did he catch sight of his victim; she swept past
him in the hall with a patronizing “Hi!” At five-thirty
he walked home, as usual, and had a glass of milk, as
usual. He had never drunk anything stronger in his life —
unless you could count ginger ale. The late Sam Schlosser,
the S of F & S,* had praised Mr Martin at a staff meeting
several years before for his temperate habits. “Our most
efficient worker neither drinks nor smokes,” he had said.
"The results speak for themselves.” Mr Fitweiler had sat
by, nodding approval.
Mr Martin was still thinking about that, red-letter
day as he walked over to Schrafft’s on Fifth Avenue near
36
Forty-sixth Street. He got there, as he always did, at
right o’clock. He finished his dinner and the financial
page of the Sun at a quarter to nine, as he always did.
11, was his custom after dinner to take a walk. This time
he walked down Fifth Avenue at a casual pace. His gloved
hands felt moist and warm, his forehead cold. He trans-
ferred the Camels from his overcoat to a jacket pocket,
lie wondered, as he did so, if they did not represent an
unnecessary note of strain. Mrs Barrows smoked only
Luckies.* It was his idea to puff a few puffs on a Camel
(after the rubbing-out), stub it out in the ashtray holding
her lipstick-stained Luckies, and thus drag a small red
herring across the trail.* Perhaps it was not a good idea.
Jt would take time. He might even choke, too loudly.
Mr Martin had never seen the house on West Twelfth
Street where Mrs Barrows lived, but he had a clear enough
picture of it. Fortunately, she had bragged to everybody
about her ducky * first-floor apartment in the perfectly
(I arling three-story red-brick. There would be no doorman
<ir other attendants; just the tenants of the second and
third floors. As he walked along, Mr Martin realized
that he would get there before nine-thirty. He had con-
sidered walking north on Fifth Avenue from Schrafft’s
to a point from which it would take him until ten o’clock
to reach the house. At that hour people were less likely
to be coming in or going out. 'But the procedure would
have made an awkward loop in the straight thread of his
casualness, and he had abandoned it. It was impossible
to figure when people would be entering or leaving the
house, anyway. There was a great risk at any hour. If
he ran into anybody, he would simply have to place the
rubbing-out of Ulgine Barrows in the inactive file *
forever. The same thing would hold true if there were some-
one in her apartment. In that case he would just say that
fie had been passing by, recognized her charming house
and thought to drop in.
It was eighteen minutes after nine when Mr Martin
turned into Twelfth Street. A man passed him, and a man
and a woman talking. There was no one within fifty paces
when he came to the house, halfway down the block. He
was up the steps and in the small vestibule in no time,
pressing the bell under the card that said “Mrs Ulgine
37
13arrows.” When the clicking in the lock started,* be
jumped forward against the door. He got inside fasi,
closing the door behind him. A bulb in a lantern hung
from the hall ceiling on a chain seemed to give a mon-
strously bright light. There was nobody on the stair, which
went up ahead of him along the left wall. A door opened
down the hall in the wall on the right. He went toward
it swiftly, on tiptoe.
“Well, for God’s sake, look who’s here!” bawled
Mrs Barrows, and her braying laugh rang out like the
report of a shotgun. He rushed past her like a football
tackle, bumping her. “Hey, quit shoving!” she said,
closing the door behind them. They were in her living
room, which seemed to Mr Martin to be lighted by a hun-
dred lamps. “What’s after you?”she said. “You’re as jumpy
as a goat.” He found he was unable to speak. His heart
was wheezing in his throat. "I — yes,” he finally brought
out. She was jabbering and laughing as she started to
help him off with his coat. “No, no,” he said. “I’ll put it
here.” He took it off and put it on a chair near the door.
“Your hat and gloves, too,’’ she said. “You’re in a lady’s
house.” He put his hat on top of the coat. Mrs Barrows
seemed larger than he had thought. He kept his gloves
on. “I was passing by,” he said. "I recognized — is there
anyone here?” She laughed louder than ever. “No,” she
said, “we’re all alone. You’re as white as a sheet, you
funny man. Whatever has come over you? I’ll mix you
a toddy.” She started toward a door across the room.
“Scotch-and-soda be all right? But say, you don’t
drink, do you?” She turned and gave him her amused
look. Mr Martin pulled himself together. “Scotch-and-
soda will be all right,” he heard himself say. He could
hear her laughing in the kitchen.
Mr Martin looked quickly around the living room for
» the weapon. He had counted on finding one there. There
were andirons and a poker and something in a corner that
looked like an Indian club. None of them would do. It
couldn’t be that way. He began to pace around. He came
to a desk. On it lay a metal paper knife with an ornate
handle. Would it be sharp enough? He reached for it and
knocked over a small brass jar. Stamps spilled out of it
and it fell to the floor with a clatter. "Hey,” Mrs Barrows
yelled from the kitchen, “are you tearing up the pea patch?”
38
Mr Martin gave a strange laugh. Picking up the knife,
he tried its point against his left wrist. It was blunt. It
wouldn’t do.
When Mrs Barrows reappeared, carrying two high-
balls, Mr Martin, standing there with his gloves on,
became acutely conscious of the fantasy he had wrought.
Cigarettes in his pocket, a drink prepared for him — it
was all too grossly improbable. It was more than that;
it was impossible. Somewhere in the back of his mind
a vague idea stirred, sprouted. “For heaven’s sake, take
off those gloves,” said Mrs Barrows. “I always wear them
in the house,” said Mr Martin. The idea began to bloom,
strange and wonderful. She put the glasses on a coffee
iable in front of a sofa and sat on the sofa. “Come over
here, you odd little man,” she said. Mr Martin went over
and sat beside her. It was difficult getting a cigarette
out of the pack of Camels, but he managed it. She held
a match for him, laughing. “Well,” she said, handing him
his drink, “this is perfectly marvellous. You with a dri nk
and a cigarette.”
Mr Martin puffed, not too awkwardly, and took a gulp
of the highball. “I drink and smoke all the time,” he said.
He clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s nuts to * that
old windbag, Fitweiler,” he said, and gulped again. The
stuff tasted awful, but he made no grimace. “Really,
Mr Martin,” she said, her voice and posture changing,
“you are insulting our employer.” Mrs Barrows was now.
all special adviser to the president. “I am preparing a
bomb,” said Mr Martin, “which will blow the old goat
- higher than hell.” He had only had a little of the drink,
which was not strong. It couldn’t be that. “Do you take
dope or something?” Mrs Barrows asked coldly. “Heroin,”
said Mr Martin. “I’ll be coked to the gills * when I bump
that old buzzard off.” “Mr Martin!” she shouted, getting
to her feet. “That will be all of that.* You must go at!
once.” Mr Martin took another swallow of his drink. He'
tapped his cigarette out in the ashtray and put the pack
of Camels on the coffee table. Then he got up. She stood,
glaring at him. He walked over and put on his hat and
coat. “Not a word about this,” he said, and laid an index
finger against his lips. All Mrs Barrows could bring out ,
was “Really!” Mr . Martin put his hand on the doorknob.
39
“I’m sitting in the catbird seat,” he said. He stuck his
tongue out at her and left. Nobody saw him go.
Mr Martin got to his apartment, walking, well before
eleven. No one saw him go in. He had two glasses of milk
after brushing his teeth, and he felt elated. It wasn’t
tipsiness, because he hadn’t been tipsy. Anyway, the
walk had worn off all effects of the whiskey. He got in
bed and read a magazine for a while. He was asleep before
midnight.
Mr Marlin got to the office at eight-thirty the next
morning, as usual. At a quarter to nine, Ulgine Barrows,
who had never before arrived at work before ten, swept
into his office. “I’m reporting to Mr Fitweiler now!”
she shouted. “If he turns you over to the. police, it’s no
more than you deserve!” Mr Martin gave her a look of
shocked surprise. “I beg your pardon?” he said. Mrs
Barrows snorted and bounced out of the room, leaving
Miss Paird and Joey Hart staring after her. “What’s the
matter with that old devil now?” asked Miss Paird. “I
have no idea,” said Mr Martin, resuming his work. The
other two looked at him and then at each other. Miss
Paird got up and went out. She walked slowly past the
closed door of Mr Fitweiler’s office. Mrs Barrows was
yelling inside, but she was not braying. Miss Paird could
not hear what the woman was saying. She went back to
her desk.
Forty-five minutes later, Mrs Barrows left the presi-
dent’s office and went into her own, shutting the door.
It wasn’t until half an hour later that Mr Fitweiler sent
for Mr Martin. The head of the filing department, neat,
quiet, attentive, stood in front of the old man’s desk.
Mr Fitweiler was pale and nervous. He took his glasses
off and twiddled them. He made a small, bruffing sound
in his throat. “Martin,” he said, “you have been with us
more than twenty years.” “Twenty-two, sir,” said Mr
Martin. “In that time,” pursued the president, “your
work and your-uh-manner have been exemplary.” “I
trust so, sir,” said Mr Martin. “I have understood, Martin,”
said Mr Fitweiler, “that you have never taken a drink or
smoked.” "That is correct, sir,” said Mr Martin. “Ah,
yes.” Mr Fitweiler polished his glasses. “You may describe
what you did after leaving the office yesterday, Martin,”
40
lie said. Mr Martin allowed less than a second for his
bewildered pause. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “I walked
home. Then I went to Schrafft’s for dinner. Afterward
I walked home again. I went to bed early, sir, and read
n magazine for a while. I was asleep before eleven.”
"Ah, yes,” said Mr Fitweiler again. He was silent for a
moment, searching for the proper words to say to the head
of the filing department. “Mrs Barrows,” he said finally,
"Mrs Barrows has worked hard, Martin, very hard. It
grieves me to report that she has suffered a severe break-
down. It has taken the form of a persecution complex
accompanied by distressing hallucinations.” “I am very
sorry, sir,” said Mr Martin. “Mrs Barrows is under the
delusion,” continued Mr Fitweiler, “that you visited her
last evening and behaved yourself in an-uh-unseemly
manner.” He raised his hand to silence Mr Martin’s little
pained outcry. “It is the nature of these psychological
diseases,” Mr Fitweiler said, “to fix upon the least likely
and most innocent party as the-uh-source of persecution.
These matters are not for the lay mind to grasp, Martin.
I've just had my psychiatrist, Dr Fitch, on the phone,
lie would not, of course, commit himself, but he made
enough generalizations to substantiate my suspicions.
I suggested to Mrs Barrows when she had completed her-
uh-story to me this morning, that she visit Dr Fitch*
for I suspected a condition at once. She flew, I regret to
say, into a rage, and demanded-uh-requested that I
call you on the carpet.* You may not know, Martin, but-
Mrs Barrows had planned a reorganization of your depart-
ment — subject to my approval, of course, subject to
in у approval. This brought you, rather than anyone else,
to her miml — but again that is a phenomenon for Dr
Fitch and not for us. So, Martin, I am afraid Mrs Barrows’
usefulness here is at an end.” “I am dreadfully sorry, sir,”
said Mr Martin.
It was at this point that the door to the office blew
open with the suddenness of a gas-main explosion and
Mrs Barrows catapulted through it. “Is the little rat
denying it?” she screamed. “He can’t get away with
that!” Mr Martin got up and moved discreetly to a point
beside Mr Fitweiler’s chair. “You drank and smoked at
my apartment,” she bawled at Mr Martin, “and you know
ill You calleil Mr Fitweiler an old windbag and said you
41ч

hi
ed to the J
catch her'- I
. “If - J
were going to blow him up when you got coked to
gills on your heroin!” She stopped yelling to <
breath and a new glint came into her popping eyes,
you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,” she said,
“I’d think you’d planned it all. Sticking your tongue
out, saying you were sitting in the catbird seat, because 1
you thought no one would believe me when I told it!;3
My God, it’s really too perfect!” She brayed loudly and:3
hysterically, and the fury was on her again. She glared аЦ1
Mr Fitweiler. “Can’t you see how he has tricked us, you .;
old fool? Can’t you see his little game?” But Mr Fitweiler
had been surreptitiously pressing all the buttons under '
the top of his desk and employees of F & S began pouring.^
into the room. “Stockton,” said Mr Fitweiler, “you anti I
Fishbein will take Mrs Barrows to her home. Mrs Powell, ’
you will go with them.” Stockton, who had played a little 1
football in high school, blocked Mrs Barrows as she made
for Mr Martin. It took him and Fishbein together to force I
her out of the door into the hall, crowded with stenog- 1
raphers and office boys. She was still screaming impreca- '
tions at Mr Martin, tangled and contradictory impreca- ]
lions. The hubbub finally died out down the corridor. ,
"I regret that this has happened,” said Mr Fitweiler. 1
“I shall ask you to dismiss it from your mind, Martin.” ч
“Yes, sir,” said Mr Martin, anticipating his chief’s “That j
will be all” by moving to the door. “I will dismiss it.” 1
He went out and shut the door, and his step was light j
and quick in the hall. When he entered his department Л
he had slowed down to his customary gait, and he walked j
quietly across the room to the W20 file, wearing a look '
of studious concentration.	1
Pi 1
FOR DISCUSSION
1.	What are Mr Martin’s reasons for wanting to do away with
Mrs Barrows?
2.	What details supplied by the author help to reveal the
characteristic of these two people?
3.	What are Mr Martin’s feelings when he reaches Mrs Bar-
row’s apartment house? What does his not having a weapon with
him reveal about his character?
4.	Why is Mr Martin elated when he goes to bed? Why does
ho drink two glasses of milk instead of his usual one?
5.	How does Mr Fitweiler interpret Mrs Barrows1 description
of Mr Martin’s visit? Why is his interpretation a perfectly natural
one?
6.	What makes Mrs Barrows’ situation worse as she tries to
convince Mr Fitweiler that she is telling the truth?
7.	What does the title of the story mean as it applies to Mr
Martin? Does it apply to any other character in the story?
8.	Why had Mr Fitweiler said “Man is fallible, but Martin
isn’t”?
9.	Refer to the story for clues that may help to reveal the
meaning of the following words. If you are not sure of the meaning
of a word, use a dictionary to check your guess.
peccadillos — Mrs Barrows had committed peccadillos as a per-
sonality as well as crimes as a special adviser, (p. 34)
rampage — Going on a rampage was like tearing up a pea
patch, (p. 35)
blatant — Mrs Barrows’ attempts at destruction were willful,
blatant, and persistent, (p. 35)
hallucinations — Hallucinations accompanied Mrs Barrows’
breakdown, (p. 41)
substantiated — The doctor substantiated Mr Fitweiler’s suspi-
cions. (p. 41)
surreptitiously — Mr Fitweiler surreptitiously pressed the
buttons under his desk. (p. 42)
10.	Show how the humour of this story depends greatly on the
author’s portrayal of his characters.
11.	What other qualities of the author’s style provide humorous
effect?
Robert Penn Warren
THE UNVEXED ISLES	1
The whisky — the best whisky in Russell Hill— sloshed
with unthrifty golden opulence into the third and
last of the glasses that stood on the lacquered tray. Pro-
fessor Dalrymple, something of the crystal-gazer’s pious
abstraction in his regard, watched the spill and whirl 4
of the liquor in the orbit of bright glass. Professor Dal-
rymple did not relish whisky, even the best whisky in
Russell Hill, which, indeed, he dispensed. But he never
entered the warm pantry on a Sunday evening, hearing
the competent rustle of the electric refrigerator and the
murmur of voices from a farther room, without feeling,
as he lifted the decanter, a sense of decorous liberation. .3
It was the same sense of liberation he sometimes felt
44
when, looking at his own fine white hands, he recalled
that one visit home and the sight of his brother’s hands
lying inert on the tablecloth in the lamplight: burned:
by sun, chapped by wind like rotten leather, grained
irrevocably with black dirt from the prairie.
Sacramentally, the whiskey sloshed into the glass.
Bubbles of air streamed upward, and at the surface mi-
nutely exploded.
Professor Dalrymple set the silver-mounted siphon
on the tray beside the silver bucket of ice, picked up the
tray, squared his shoulders as he did these days when
he detected that unconscious droop, and proceeded
through the door, across the dining room, where articles
of silver discreetly glimmered in the dimness, across the
hall, and into the room where they sat, waiting.
“Not the true, the blushing Hippocrene,” * he uttered,
and approached the bright fire where they sat, “but
’twill serve.”
“It’ll serve all right, Doctor,” Phil Alburt said. “It’s
as much of a beaker full of the warm South as I ask, even
on as lousy cold a night as tonight.” His voice filled the
room with authority, a kind of aimless vitality that
seemed to make the fire burn up brighter and the bulbs
behind their parchment shades glow with more assurance.
“It was snowing again when I came in.”
“So that’s what you got out of my English 40,* sir?”
the Professor demanded.
“Not exactly.” His laughter was like his voice.
“Well, Phil, if you didn’t get more than that, nobody
did. I’ll wager on that.”
“Don’t loiter, George,” Mrs Dalrymple commanded,
a tinge of asperity licking along the edge of the pleasantry.
“Mr Alburt can wait for his compliment, but I don’t want
to wait for my toddy.”
“Pardon me, Alice,” he said, and with some formality
presented the tray.
Looking at the ready tray, she commanded, “Squirt
it for me.”
Her husband set the tray on the little table, placed
his long white thumb with its chalky nail on the siphon
lever, and pressed. The liquor swirled, paled in the soft
light, rose toward the brim.
. “Ice,” she said. ...
45
“On a night like this,” Phil Alburt deplored.
“We always take ice back home in Baltimore,”* she
said.
Professor Dalrymple handed his wife the glass.
“No ice for me,” Phil Alburt said, “and not much
water.” •
“I remember," the Professor said. “No ice. Result of
your English visits, I suppose.”
“Perhaps,” Phil Alburt said, and laughed the vital,
vacant laugh.
“Not the only result, I’m sure,” the Professor said,
and carried the tray across to him. The young man laid
his cigarette on the receptacle beside him, looked up at
his host with a smile of affable toleration, and reached
for the siphon. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
The Professor regarded the head with its dark hair
which lay in neat gleaming curly folds as though carved.
As the water hissed peremptorily into the glass, the smoke
lifted from the idle cigarette on the tray under the Profes-
sor’s eyes and swayeil in its delicate substance. The Pro-
fessor’s glance rested on the cigarette. It is most singular,
he thought, that the tip of that cigarette should be stained
with lipstick. The words came through his head with
such emphatic clarity and distinctness that, rattling the
glasses, he started as though the sentence had been spoken
by an unseen observer.
“That’s fine. Thank you,” the young man was saying.
Professor Dalrymple, with effort, disengaged his
eyes from the cigarette to meet the large features turned
up at him in the contortion of amiability. The features
were large and suddenly naked: the strong lips, the even
white teeth unbared, the thrust of the nose, the wide
brown eyes in which swam flecks of gold, the heavy
eyebrows where hairs arched sleekly out from some vigor
at the root.
“You’re welcome,” Professor Dalrymple rejoined
mechanically, then, aware of his words, flushed. As he
turned about and traversed the excessive distance across
the blue carpet, he felt that all these objects accumulated
around him — table, chair, chair, blue carpet, rug,
lamp — were unfamiliar to him, and now for the first
time might, if he so chose, be construed in their unique
and rich unities. After he had adjusted the tray, with
special care, on the stand, he gave to its obscure design
a lingering and analytic regard. Lingering, as if he were
a schoolboy unwilling at the last moment to lay aside
the book before entering the examination room, or as
if his attention to the intricacies of the design might
postpone the need to inspect those people whose voices,
somewhat remotely, impinged upon him.
The liquid was cold and sweetish in his mouth. He
set the glass back, anti as he did so discoveretl with some
surprise that the muscles of his cheek were warped upward
in an attentive smile. He might have caught sight of him-
self in a random mirror, so surely did he see, not feel,
the thin, long, oversensitive lips lift and recede beneath
the accurate line of black bristle in the ambassadorial
mustache. I am making a great fool of myself, he reflected,
grinning like that.	/
Alice Dalrymple had just said, “I guess old Prexy
would turn over in his truckle bed if he knew we were
plying one of bis charges with toddy.”
Professor Dalrymple, yet smiling, cleared his throat
slightly. “You know, Phil, we are not able to follow the
dictates of hospitality as a general thing. Offering refresh-
ment to our undergraduates is, as a general thing, shall
I say, tabu. But I feel, we feel, that we are at liberty to
do so in certain cases where the undergraduate’s back-
ground is more liberal — when the undergraduate is more
mature, more, shall I say, a man of the world.” The words —
slipped precisely over his lips, and he was aware, at
their conclusion, of the lips still warped upward in the
smile. He was aware of having uttered the words at somo
time in the past, of some quality and inflection that
implied rehearsal. But as he said, “A man of the world,"
he did not experience that feeling of inner security and
relish which customarily was his on like occasions.
Phil Alburt lolled in dark well-tailored mass behind
a glass, a look of bland inattention on his features. When
he spoke, it was, likewise, with an accent of rehearsal.
“I must say I’m mature enough to appreciate the quality
of this hospitality,” he said, and significantly fingered
the glass.
Professor Dalrymple thought, A man of the world.
He slipped the phrase about in his mind as a child sucks
candy, but the words were hard and savorless like marbles.
-.47
Quite suddenly it occurred to him that the young man
opposite, who nodded his head in amused approbation
at some remark from the pretty woman, fancied himself
as a man of the world. Because he is rich, it occurred to
him, because he lives in New York and wears tailor-made
clothes and goes to Europe and drinks whisky, and, in fact,
has kissed Alice Bogan Dalrymple in my house, he fancies
himself a man of the world. I was born in Nebraska * in
a house that stood on the bare ground with no trees. Then
with a feeling of distant fatality, his sense of warmth
•for Phil Alburt, somewhat modified but real enough,
came back within him. In all perversity, it came back.
Alice Dalrymple gave her gaze to the fire, where flames
scrolled ornamentally upward to the black chimney
throat. The brass dogs gleamed, the hearth was swept to
a sharp border, the flames sprouted upward like flowers
from an accurate parterre. She turns her head so, Professor
Dalrymple observed, because she knows she looks best in
profile. She is thinner these days, she looks tired. Alice
Dalrymple held her head at right angles to the young
man’s chair: her profile was clean and delicate, with
a careful dyspeptic * beauty. The young man himself
was looking into the fire.
“So you are leaving Tuesday?” she said.
“Tuesday,” Phil Alburt said with the air of one gently
engrossed in the collaboration of fireside and toddy.
“Tuesday, and I get home the next night just in time to
hang up my stocking.” *
“And up early next morning,” Professor Dalrymple
said, “to sec your new velocipede.”
“Not to see my new velocipede, to take some Mother
Sill’s.* You see, I’ve got to hang my stocking up over
the wash basin on a boat to Bermuda.* Mother is dragging
me off down there.”
Mrs Dalrymple laughed, a quick accurate modulation.
“And Old Santy * comes down the hot water pipe and
fills it with little guest cakes of Palmolive * and Dr West
toothbrushes.” She laughed. “Instead of ashes and
switches.”
“I won’t care if it’s full of horsewhips, I’ll be feeling
so bad that first morning. I’m a rotten sailor.”
“Not horsewhips for a good little boy,” Professor Dal-
rymple echoed, and, quite unexpectedly, laughed too.
.48
“I’ve been planning to go East,” Mrs Dalrymple said
in a tone of mild frustration. “To Baltimore.”
“Home?” Phil Alburt said.
Home, Professor Dalrymple thought, Mrs George
Dalrymple lives in Russell Hill in Illinois. He tabulated
the items of her address in his mind. Mrs George Dal-
rymple, 429 Poplar Street, Russell Hill, Illinois, U. S. A.
“But George here can’t go,” she said, “and I’m going
to be sweet and dutiful and stay right here. ”
“You ought to go, Alice,” Professor Dalrymple said.
And he said to himself, She can't go because she can't
buy a ticket on a train to Baltimore. Because she married
a poor man.
“George, you see, wants to finish up some research
this vacation. He gets so little time during the year.”
“What is it, Doctor?”
“Just a little Chaucer * note I’ve been working on,”
the Professor answered, and thought for a minute that he
might, after all, write a paper. Satisfaction and meaning
filled him and velleities slipped away as he lifted his
glass to his lips.
“So I’ll stay here with him, a martyr to the noble
cause of scholarship.”
“A mild martyrdom, I would call it, to sit with my
heels on the fender,” the young man said.
“We used to have some pretty good Christmases in
Baltimore, didn’t we?” Mrs Dalrymple gave her husband
a full intimate glance, and he noted how the flesh dropped
thinly away from the base of her nostrils. “I believe Father
made the best eggnog I ever tasted. Everybody used to
come in for eggnog on Christmas. Everybody. You
ought to let your old research go hang * this Christmas,
George — ”
“Yes, indeed,” her husband said. He was conscious
of the rhythm of forgotten voices, forgotten excitements,
like the sea sound in empty whorls of a shell. Old Mr
Bogan’s voice saying, “Gentlemen, gentlemen.” Old
Mrs Bogan’s voice with the shrillness all drained away
in time. Form of voices with no sound.
“— but instead we’ll just sit this Christmas.”
Eggs. Dozens of eggs. Baskets of eggs. Whisky, sweet-
ish and gold. Hams. Arrogant turkeys. Wine. A steaming
mess heaped and poured on the altar of Lucile Bogan’s
49
and Alice Bogan’s need for a man to share the bed and
pay the bills. A steaming, sweating altar, while smoke
ascended from twenty-five cent cigars. Ah, he thought,
and old Mr Bogan’s ritualistic white shirt front obtruded,
a-glitter * with starch and studs, in the midst of his
fancy. Ah, they spent a lot of money and the best they got
was me. But that was when Alice wrote her little verses for
the Junior League magazine and showed an English pro-
fessor to her friends. Then he concluded with a flat feeling in
his head like a run-down clock: She would know better now.
“Well,” Phil Alburt said, “just sitting has .its points.
I’m going to do a good deal of sitting myself this vacation.
Taking my little school satchel along.”
“To Bermuda,” Professor Dalrymple said, dryly he
hoped, and realized on the instant that he hated Phil
Alburt, not because lipstick stained a dead cigarette butt
in the ash tray across the hearth, but because Phil Alburt
had said those precise words in that precise accent of com-
fort.
“To Bermuda,” Phil Alburt agreed, and laughed
without embarrassment.
Mrs Dalrymple laughed, again the quick accurate
modulation. Iler husband stonily inspected her mirth:
She has no more self-respect than to laugh after what he
just said to her. When she laughs now she holds her head
up so the skin won't sag in her neck. Craning her neck like
that, she looks like a cigarette advertisement. He looked
guiltily across at the tray by Phil Alburt, as if it were
necessary to assure himself that the dead butt reposed
there in its matrix of ash.
“However, I can’t just sit any more right now,” the
young man said. “I’ve got to go now and do a little work
before bedtim?. I just came to say good-bye.” He stood
in front of his chair, not really tall but erect, broad shoul-
ders appearing broader by the cut of his coat, his hair
with a dark waxen gleam in the light, the double-breasted
coat buttoned sleek and flat over his hips and belly.
Professor Dalrymple rose.
“Must you go,” Mrs Dalrymple asked, and likewise
stood.
“Must,” he said.
“Off to the happy isles,” Professor-Dalrymple said
cheerfully. Then: “I’m thinking about a trip myself.
J think I’ll go home this Christmas.” With a certain pleas-
ure he noted his wife’s faint movement of surprise —
or was it annoyance?
"Fine,” Phil Alburt said.
“You see,” he continued, “I haven’t been home in
<i long time. Not for nine years. I was born and reared
out in Nebraska.”
“On a ranch, I bet,” the young man said hopefully.
“No. On a dirt farm, that’s what they call them.
Near a place named Sinking Fork Station. Just a wheat
elevator and a siding. Did you ever hear of the place?”
Phil Alburt looked quickly at Mrs Dalrymple, a glance
of appeal for support or enlightenment. Then he managed
a smile. “I can’t say that I have,” he said.
“1 didn’t really imagine that you had. My brother out
there is still running the farm, I believe, unless they
have foreclosed his various mortgages.”
“Recent times have been difficult for the agriculturist,”
Phil Alburt said, somehow with a touch of piety.
“Indeed,” Professor Dalrymple said, an ambiguous
inflection to the word which he himself, for the flicker
of an instant, tried in his mind to decipher. But he could
scarcely decide what he had intended. He stood passively
while his guest, a perturbed peevish light in his brown
eyes, hesitated before taking comfort in the circumstance
of farewell. Phil Alburt and Mrs Dalrymple said good-
bye. Good-bye and Merry Christmas.
In the hall, while he held Phil Alburt’s coat, he felt
like a fool. At the door, he shook, cordially as one trying
to make amends, the hand offered him, refrained from
looking al the face of the parting guest for fear he might
find a smile on it, and said, several times, “Good-bye”.
After Phil Alburt had gone down the steps, he yet
stood in the open doorway, while the cold wind blew
down the street and a few small flakes whipped past,
and watched the figure proceed the length of the walk
and climb into an automobile. He called once, “Merry
Christmas,” but his voice, he knew immediately, was
lost in the easy, vicious whir of gears.
The wind which blew down the street tossed the deco-
rative conifers by the walk so that they looked like two
old women in tattered black shawls begging at his door-
step. He straightened his shoulders and experienced again,
51
though hut faintly, the accustomed sense of Sunday night
complacency. Then his wife called, “Shut the door!”
He knew exactly how she would be when he entered
the room. She would be standing before the fireplace,
very still, as though spent by agitations of the evening;
the black chiffon, in contrast to pale skin and pale hair,
would hang to her slender figure with that extravagant
flimsiness which once had made him suspect that a dress
was borrowed for the occasion; and her breasts defined
but flattish, would lift, then decline, in a movement of
disturbing finicky respiration.
He closed the heavy door, took three paces down the
hall, and entered the room.
There she stood.
“I think, Alice,” he announced with a premonitory
clearing of the throat, “I think that I shall do that paper.
The subject has never been approached from precisely —”
She fixed her eyes on him; said, “What paper?... Oh, of
course”; and relapsed into her stillness. The cigarette which
hung, almost artificially, from her thin nervous fingers
surrendered its trail of smoke to the air.
As he approached her across the carpet, warily as
though he trod a treacherous surface on which he might
slip and lose dignity, desire, an irritable but profound
desire, took him. “Alice,” he said, unsure of what words
were to follow.
She again looked at him. “You were very rude to Phil,”
she said.
“Rude?” he echoed.
“What ever made you so rude to him?” Her voice was
the voice of dutiful catechism.
He almost said: “Under the circumstances I had a
right to be rude to him”; but did not. Then he thought:
She is angry because I said what I did to that fool. She
doesn’t believe I am really going home. I am going home.
“What made you so rude?” she patiently demanded.
He was conscious of a small kernel of blind, blank
rage deep in him. Its tentacles dumbly, blindly, groped
within him.
“I never saw you act like that before.”
“If I was rude to Mr Alburt, I am sorry.” He framed
his words with care. “I assure you that my intentions
were of the kindest.”
52
The desire came back, profound and dangerous, but
lie preserved from it a strange detachment. He felt like
n inaii about to pick a scab: that perverse curiosity, that
impulse to view the object, to test his own pain. “Alice,”
lie said, hearing the syllables distantly, and put his
arm round her shoulders. His kiss did not reach her mouth;
ho felt the bristles of his mustache press into the yielding
flesh of her cheek.
He did not know whether she had disengaged herself,
or whether, in fact, his arm had simply fallen from her
shoulders. There she stood, and she lifted one hand, palm
against the temple, in that fatalistic gesture which now,
ns ever, filled him with a sense of insufficiency.
“I am very tired,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, “you look tired.” And he felt with
gratification that by not having said a moment before,
“1 love you,” he had maintained his self-respect.
“Good night,” she said.
She withdrew from him, past the chair where she
had sat that evening, past the table where his own drained
glass stood, and toward the door. With her movement
the black chiffon fluttered and waggled.
He looked at the door through which she had just
passed. Words took form in his mind with such special
satisfaction that he was tempted to speak them aloud.
1 would be doing my friend, Mr Alburt, a favor if I should
tell him that Alice Dalrymple is cold as a snake. Then, as
he surveyed the room, whose articles, now that she had
gone, seemed out of focus, he could not help but wonder
what she would have said, how she would have taken it,
if, after all, he had said, “I love you”.
He drifted toward the hall door, and out into the hall.
Somewhere on the upper floor a light burned, splaying
shadow and angular patches of illumination into the
lower section like a gigantic, ghostly pack of cards.
Without looking up, he passed down the hall to. his study
door, opened it, and threw the electric switch. The big
bronze lamp on the desk in the center of the room released
its steady flooding light over the appointed objects: over
the tray of pens which lay in meticulous intimacy side by
side, the bronze inkstand, the leather spectacle case. In shad-
ow, just beyond the rim of light, the books, tier on tier,
mounted like masonry of some blank, eyeless structure.
53
He seated himself before the desk; removed the spec-
tacles from the case; dutifully wiped them with a white
handkerchief; hooked them over his ears. He opened the -i|
book in front of him. He was scarcely aware that he had я
performed that set of actions, so habitual to him; it was, ‘4
indeed, with a subdued surprise that to him came recogni- da
tion of the words on the printed page. It was as if, on relax-
ing his attention at the end of each sentence, he should :l
say, “Well, well, here I am.”
He tried to follow the words that marched cleanly J
from margin to margin, line by line; but the faces per-
sistently came. He perceived Phil Alburt’s naked face .
set in the rich flaring fur of an overcoat collar, and beyond
it another face, undefined, unknown, anonymous, the ~
face of a girl whose body, reclining, was lapped in silk
and fur: faces fixed above the dash lamp * and the little 4
white unwinking dials that said all was well, all was 3
well, while the bold-flung beams of headlights ripped Ч
the snowy road and the dark that whirled toward tho- "
faces.
Between the words on the page, between the sentences,
he saw the faces appear and reappear as between the
spokes of a slowly revolving wheel. Necking, he thought, «
out necking. He suddenly discovered as though he had ’
been searching for it, that word he had heard the students	J
use. And he is going to Bermuda, he thought, and into	|
his mind crowded the pictures he had seen in travel adver- J
tiseinents, the man and woman on horseback, in bright
coats, riding along the white beach by blue water. To ’
Bermuda, he thought, but I am going home. Even if Alice
doesn't believe me, I am going home. That satisfied him
and he felt, somehow surprised at his emotion, a deep
homesickness.
He tried to comprehend the words on the page, but
his mind, like nervous fingers, dropped them. Whilo
the wind sweeping down the great valley of the Missi-
ssippi beat the town, beat the house, and hurled tho
sparse lost flakes through the upper reaches of darkness,
he sat in the ring of steady light from the bronze lamp
on his desk. At length before he possessed the calm, suf-
ficient meaning of the words under his eye, he knew that
he would slay here forever in Russell Hill, Illinois, at
LIiIh nnd| pretentious little college on the plain, in this
M
r	.	1	- .
house with the rustling electric refrigerator and the tiers
of books; that this Christmas, or any other, he would
not. go home; that the woman now sleeping upstairs where
I ho single light burned was perfectly his own; and that
I'hil Alburt, who had, really, nothing to do with them,
with George Dalrymple and Alice Bogan Dalrymple,
would ride away, forever, on horseback, his naked face
tuniling as he rode down the white beaches beside the
blue water of the unvexed isles.
ГОП DISCUSSION
1.	Discuss what you feel to he the most important element
of tliis story — plot, character or setting. Give reasons for your
answer with evidence from the story.
2.	Professor Dalrymple feels “a sense of decorous liberation”
al the beginning of the story. How would you describe his feelings
al the end?
3.	Why is a glow of security Professor Dalrymple felt
vanishing gradually up to the end of the story?
4.	What contribution does the concluding paragraph make
to your understanding of Professor Dalrymple’s character?
5.	What is your final opinion of Professor Dalrymple? Do you
feel any trace of sympathy lor him?
6.	What gives Phil Alburt his aimless vitality, his voice
of authority, in the presence of Dalrymple? His mere youth? His
greater wealth? Something less tangible?
7.	Is Alice Dalrymple as disenchanted with her husband as
he is with her? Comment on the details given in the story which
suggest their attitudes toward each other.
8.	What devices does the author use to reveal the charac-
ters of Professor Dalrymple and his wife?
9.	Discuss whether the story is strengthened by the element
of contrast.
10.	Warren’s title is an irony in itself. In Shakespeare’s The
Tempest the Bermudas were referred teas “still-vex’d” (i. e., always
stormy). Why does Warren, then, call them “unvexed”? To whom
are they always calm? Dalrymple? Phil Alburt?
IL E. Bates
A CHRISTMAS SONG
She gave lessons in voice-training in the long room
above the music shop. Her pupils won many examina-
tions and were afterwards very successful at local concerts
and sometimes in giving lessons in voice-training to other
pupils. She herself had won many examinations and
everybody said how brilliant she was.
Every Christmas, as this year, she longed for snow.
It gave a transfiguring gay distinction to a town that
otherwise had none. It lifted up the squat * little shops,
built of red brick with upper storeys of terra-cotta; it
made the roofs down the hill like glistening cakes; it
even gave importance to the stuffy gauze-windowed club
where local gentlemen played billiards and solo whist *
56'
over meagre portions of watered whisky. One could imag-
ine, with the snow, that one was in Bavaria or Vienna
or the Oberland,* and that horse-drawn sleighs, of which
she read in travel guides, would glide gracefully down
I ho ugly hill from the gasworks. One could imagine
Evensford, with its many hilly little streets above the
river, a little Alpine town. One could imagine anything.
Instead there was almost always rain and long columns
of working-class mackintoshes floating down a street
that was like a dreary black canal. Instead of singing
Mozart * to the show she spent long hours selling jazz
sheet music to factory workers and earned her reward,
at last, on Christmas Eve, by being bored at the Wil-
liamsons' party.
Last year she had sung several songs at the William-
sons’ party. Some of the men, who were getting hearty
on mixtures of gin and port wine, had applauded in the
wrong places, and Freddy Williamson had bawled out
"Good old Clara!”
She knew the men preferred Effie. Her sister was a
very gay person although she did not sing; she had never
passed an examination in her life, but there was, in a
strange way, hardly anything you felt she could not do.
She had a character like a chameleon; she had all the
love affairs. She laughed a great deal, in rippling infec-
tious scales, so that she made other people begin laugh-
ing, and she had large violet-blue eyes. Sometimes
she laughed so much that Clara herself would begin weep-
ing.
This year Clara was not going to the Williamsons’
party; she had made up her mind. The Williamsons were
in leather; * they were very successful and had a large
early Edwardian * house with bay-windows and corner
cupolas and bathroom windows of stained glass over-
looking the river. They were fond of giving parlies
several times a year. Men who moved only in Rotarian *
or golf circles turned up with wives whose corset suspend-
ers could be seen like bulging pimples under sleek dress-
es. About midnight Mrs Williamson grew rowdy and
began rushing from room to room making love to other
men. The two Williamson boys, George and Freddy,
became rowdy too, and took off their jackets and did
muscular and noisy gymnastics with the furniture. 1
57
At four o’clock she went upstairs to close the windows
of the music room and pull the curtains and make up the
fire. It was raining in misty delicate drops and the air
was not like Christmas. In the garden there were lime
trees and their dark red branches, washed with rain, were
like glowing veins in the deep blue air.
As she was coming out of the room her sister came
upstairs.
“Oh! there you are. There’s a young man downstairs
who wants a song and doesn’t know the name.”
“It’s probably a Danny Kaye. * It always is.”
“No it isn’t. He says it’s a Christmas song.”
“I’ll come,” she said. Then half-way downstairs she
stopped; she remembered what it was she was going to
say to Effie. “By the way, I’m not coming to the party,”
she said.
“Oh! Clara, you promised. You always come.”
“I know; but I’m tired, and I don’t feel like coming
and there it is.”
“The Williamsons will never let you get away with
it,” her sister said. “They’ll drag you by force.”
“I’ll see about this song,” she said. “What did he say
it was?”
“He says it’s a Christmas song. You’ll never get
away with it. They’ll never let you.”
She went down into the shop. Every day people came
into the shop for songs whose names they did not know.
“It goes like this,” they would say, “or it goes like that.”
They would try humming a few notes and she would
take it up* from them; it was always something popular,
and in the end, with practice, it was never very difficult.
A young man in a brown overcoat with a brown felt
hat and an umbrella stood by the sheet-music counter.
He took off his hat when she came up to him.
“There was a song I wanted —”
“A carol?” she said.
“No, a song,” he said. “A Christmas song.”
He was very nervous and kept rolling the ferrule of
the umbrella on the floor linoleum. He wetted his lips
and would not look at her.
“If you could remember the words?”
. “I’m afraid I can’t.”
“How does it go? Would you know that?" .
58/
He opened his mouth either as if to begin singing a few
notes or to say something. But nothing happened and he
began biting his lip instead.
“If you could remember a word or two,” she said.
“Is it a new song?”
“You see, I think it’s German,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Perhaps it’s by Schubert?” *
“It sounds awfully silly, but I simply don’t know.
We only heard it once,” he said.
He seemed about to put on his hat. He ground the
ferrule of the umbrella into the linoleum. Sometimes it
happened that people were too shy even to hum the notes
of the song they wanted, and suddenly she said:
“Would you care to come upstairs? We might find it
there.”
Upstairs in the music room she sang the first bars of
one or two songs by Schubert. She sat at the piano and
he stood respectfully at a distance, leaning on tho um-
brella, too shy to interrupt her. She sang a song by
Brahms * and he listened hopefully. She asked him if
these were the songs, but he shook his head, and finally,
after she had sung another song by Schubert, he blurted
out:
“You. see, it isn’t actually a Christmas song. It is,
and it isn’t. It’s more that it makes you think of Christ-
mas —”
"Is it a love song?”
“Yes.”
She sang another song by Schubert; but it was not the
one he wanted; and at last sho stood up. “You see, there
are so many love songs —”
“Yes, I know, but this one is rather different somehow.”
“Couldn’t you bring her in?” she said. “Perhaps she
would remember?”
“Oh! no,” he said. “I wanted to find it without that.”
They went downstairs and several times on the way
down he thanked her for singing. “You sing beautifully,”
he said. "You would have liked this song.”
“Come in again if you think of it,” she said. “If you
can only think of two or three bars.”
Nervously he fumbled with the umbrella and then
quickly put on his hat and then as quickly took it off
again. He thanked her for being so kind, raising his bat
59
a second time. Outside the shop he put up the umbrella
too sharply, and a breeze, catching it, twisted him on
the bright pavement and bore him out of sight.
Rain fell gently all evening and customers came in
and shook wet hats on bright pianos. She walked about
trying to think of the song the young man wanted. Songs
by Schubert went through her head and became mixed
with the sound of carol from gramophone cubicles and
she was glad when the shop had closed.
Effie began racing about in her underclothes, getting
ready for the party. “Clara, you can’t mean it that you’re
not coming.”
“I do mean it. I’m always bored and they really don't
want me.”
“They love you.”
“I can’t help it. I made up my mind last year. I never
enjoy it, and they’ll be better without me.”
“They won’t let you get away with it,” Effie said.
“I warn you they'll come and fetch you.”
At eight o’clock her father and mother drove off
with Effie in the Ford. She went down through the shop
and unbolted the front door and let them out into the
street. “The stars are shining,” her mother said. “It’s
getting colder.” She stood for a second or two in the
doorway, looking up at the stars and thinking that per-
haps, after all, there was a touch of frost in the air.
“Get ready!” Effie called from the car. “You know
what the Williamsons are!” and laughed with high infec-
tious scales so that her mother and father began laughing
too.
After the car had driven away she bolted the door
and switched off the front shop bell. She went upstairs
and put on her dressing-gown and tried to think once
again of the song the young man had wanted. She played
over several songs on the piano, singing them softly.
At nine o’clock something was thrown against the
sidestreet window and she heard Freddy Williamson
bawling:
“Who isn’t coming to the party? Open the window.”
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain
and stood looking down. Freddy Williamson stood in
the street below and threw his driving gloves at her.
“Get dressed! Come on!”
60
She opened the window.
•‘Freddy, be quiet. People can hear.”
“I want them to hear. Who isn’t coming to whose
parly? I want them to hear.”
lie threw the driving gloves up at the window again.
“Everybody is insulted!” he said. “Come on.”
“Please,” she said.
"Let me in then!” he bawled. “Let me come up and
talk to you.”
“All right,” she said.
She went downstairs and let him in through the shop
and he came up to the music room, shivering, stamping
enormous feet. “Getting colder,” he kept saying. “Getting
colder.”
“You should put on an overcoat,” she said.
“Never wear one,” he said. “Can’t bear to be stuffed up.”
“Then don’t grumble because you’re starved to
death.”
He stamped up and down the room, a square-boned
young man with enormous lips and pink flesh and small
poodle-like eyes, pausing now and then to rub his hands
lie fore the fire.
“The Mater sends orders you’re to come back with
me,” he said, “and she absolutely won’t take no for an
answer.”
“I’m not coming,” she said.
"Of course you’re coming! I’ll have a drink while you
gel ready.”
“I’ll pour you a drink,” she said, “but I’m not coming.
What will you have?”
“Gin,” he said. “Clara, sometimes you’re the most
awful bind.” *
She poured the drink, not answering. Freddy William-
son lifted the glass and said:
“Sorry, didn’t mean that. Happy Christmas. Good
old Clara.”
“Happy Christmas,” she said.
“Good old Clara. Come on, let’s have one for Christ-
mas.”
Freddy Williamson put clumsy hands across her
shoulders, kissing her with lips rather like those of a
heavy wet dog.
“Good old Clara,” he said again. “Good old girl.”
61
Songs kept crossing and recrossing her mind, bewil-
dering her into moments of dreamy distraction. She had
the feeling of trying to grasp something that was floating
away.
“Don’t stand there like a dream,” Freddy Williamson
said. “Put some clothes on. Come on.”
“I’m going to tie up Christmas presents and go to bed.”
“Oh! Come on, Clara, come on. Millions of chaps are
there Availing.”
She stood dreamily in the centre of the room, thinking
of the ardent shy young man who could not remember
the song.
“You’re such a dream,” Freddy Williamson said.
“You just stand there. You’ve got to snap out of yourself.”
Suddenly he pressed himself against her in attitudes
of muscular, heavier love, grasping her about the waist,
partly lifting her from the floor, his lips wet on her
face.
"Come on, Clara,” he kept saying, “let the blinds up.
Can’t keep the blinds down for ever.”
“Is it a big party?”
“Come on, let the blinds up,” he said.
“How can I come to the party if you keep holding me
here?”
“Let the blinds up and come to the party too,” he said.
“Eh?”
“No,” she said.
“Well, one more kiss,” ho said. He smacked at her
lips with his heavy dog-like mouth, pressing her body
backwards. “Good old Clara. All you got to do is let yourself
go. Come on — let the blinds up. Good old Clara.”
“All right. Let me get my things on,” she said. “Get
yourself another drink while you’re waiting.”
“Fair enough. Good old Clara.”
While she went away to dress he drank gin and
stumped about the room. She came back in her black coat
with a black and crimson scarf on her head and Freddy
Williamson said: “Whizzo.* That’s better. Good old
Clara,” and kissed her again, running clumsy * ruffling
hands over her face and neck and hair.
When they went downstairs someone was tapping
lightly on the glass of the street door. “Police for the car,”
Freddy. Williamson said. “No lights or some damn thing,”
(52
but when she opened the door it was the young man who
could not remember the song. He stood there already
raising his hat:
“I’m terribly sorry. Ohl you’re going out. Excuse
me.”
“Did you remember it?” she said.
“Some of it,” he said. “The words.”
“Come in a moment,” she said.
He came in from the street and she shut the door.
It was dark in the shop, and he did not seem so nervous.
I lo began to say: “It goes rather like this — I can’t remem-
ber it all. But something like this — Leise jlehen meine
Lieder — Liebchen, komm zu mir —”
“It is by Schubert,” she said.
She went across the shop and sat down at one of the
pianos and began to sing it for him. She heard him say,
“That’s it. That’s the one,” and Freddy Williamson fid-
geted with the latch of the shop door as he kept one hand
on it, impatient to go.
“It’s very beautiful,” the young man said. “It’s not
a Christmas song, but somehow —”
Freddy Williamson stamped noisily into the street,
and a second or two later she heard him start up the car.
The door-catch rattled where he had left it open and a cur-
rent of cold air blew into the dark shop.
She had broken off her singing because, after the first
verse, she could not remember the words. Softly plead
my songs — Loved one, come to me — she was not sure
how it went after that.
“I’m sorry I can’t remember the rest,” she said.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said. The door irritated
her by banging on its catch. She went over and shut it
and out in the street Freddy Williamson blew impatiently
on the horn of the car.
“Was it the record you wanted?” she said. “There is
a very good one —”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
"I think I can find it,” she said. “I’ll put on the
light.”
As she looked for the record and found it, she sang the
first few bars of it again. “There is great tenderness in it,”
; she began to say. “Such a wonderful tenderness,” but
suddenly it seemed as if the young man was embarrassed.
63
т
He began fumbling in his pocket-book for his money, ,
but she said, “Oh! no. Pay after Christmas. Pay any
time,” and at the same moment Freddy Williamson
opened the door of the shop and said:
“What goes on? After hours, after hours. Come on.”
“I’m just coming,” she said.
“I’ll say good night,” the young man said. “I’m very
grateful. I wish you a Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas,” she said.
Outside the stars were green and sharp in a sky with-
out wind; the street had dried except for dark prints of
frost on pavements.
“Damn cool,” Freddy Williamson kept saying. “Damn
cool.”
He drove rather fast, silent and a little sulky, out
towards the high ground overlooking the river. Rain
had been falling everywhere through all the first weeks
of December and now as the car came out on the valley
edge she could see below her a great pattern of winter
flood water, the hedgerows cutting it into rectangular
lakes glittering with green and yellow lights from towns
on the far side.
“I’d have told him to go to hell,” Freddy Williamson
said. “I call it damn cool. Damn cool.”
“See the floods,” she said. “There’ll be skating.”
“The damn cheek people have,” Freddy Williamson
said. “Damn cheek.”
He drove the car with sulky abandon into the gravel
drive of the big Edwardian house. Dead chestnut leaves
swished away on all sides, harsh and brittle, and she could
see frost white on the edges of the big lawn.
"One before we go in,” Freddy Williamson said. She
turned away her mouth but he caught it with clumsy
haste, like a dog seizing a bird. “Good old Clara. Let
the blinds up. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“Put the car away and I’ll wait for you,” she
said.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Anything you say. Good old
Clara. Damn glad you came.”
She got out of the car and stood for a few moments
looking down the valley. She bent down and put her
hands on the grass. Frost was crisp and hard already,
and she could see it sparkling brightly on tree branches
and on rain soaked stems of dead flowers. It made her
breath glisten in the house-lights coming across the lawn.
Il seemed to be glittering even on the long wide flood wa-
lers, so that she almost persuaded herself the valley was
one great river of ice already, wonderfully trans-
loniiedt
Standing there, she thought of the young man, with
his shy ardent manner, his umbrella and his raised hat.
The song he had not been able to remember began to go
through her head again — Softly plead my songs — Loved
tme, come to me — ; but at that moment Freddy William-
son came blundering up the drive and seized her once
again like a hungry dog.
“One before we go in,” he said. “Come on. Good old
Clara. One before we go in. Good show.”
Shrieks of laughter came suddenly from the house as
if someone, perhaps her sister, had ignited little fires of
merriment that were crackling at the windows.
“Getting worked up!” Freddy Williamson said. “Going
to be good!”
She felt the frost crackling under her feet. She grasped
nt something that, was floating away. Leise flehen meine
Lieder — Oh! my loved one — how did it go?
I'OR DISCUSSION
1.	Is the locus of the story on the plot or on the mood?
2.	How would you characterize the mood of the story? Which
details create this mood? Is it the content, the form of expression,
or both?
3.	Does the author succeed in keeping to this mood up to the
end of the story? What have choice of diction, sentence construction
and the arrangement of the parts of the narrative to do with
this?
3 II. В. Ступников
65
What is the meaning of the contrast between, the two sis-
What is the setting of this story? Why are the time and the
important to the plot?
How does the imaginary picture of the town in snow con-
4., The author s choice of- characters also helps to establish
and keep up the mood. Which character is the most important in
this regard? What qualities of the personality have this effect?
What other characters in the story help to support the mood?
How?
5.
teas?
6.
place so
' 7.
tribute to the general mood of the story?
8.	What is tho function of music in the story?
9.	Is the theme of Schubert’s song pertinent to the subject of/
the story? In what way?
10.	Explain what the author gains or loses by ending the story
where he does.
Eudora Welty
DEATH OF A TRAVELING SALESMAN
R. J. Bowman, who for fourteen years had traveled
for a shoe company through Mississippi, drove his Ford
along a rutted dirt path. It was a long day! The time did
not seem to clear the noon hurdle and settle into soft
afternoon. The sun, keeping its strength here even in
winter, stayed at the top of the sky, and every time
Bowman stuck his head out of the dusty car to stare
up the road, it seemed to reach a long arm, down and
push against the top of his head, right through his hat —
like the practical joke of an old drummer, long on
the road. It made him feel all the more angry and help-
less. He was feverish, and he was not quite sure of
the way.
3-	67
This was his first day back on the road after a long
siege of influenza. He had had very high fever, and
dreams, and had become weakened and pale, enough to tell
the difference in the mirror, and he could not think clear-
ly... All afternoon, in the midst of his anger, and for no
reason, he had thought of his dead grandmother. She
had been a comfortable soul. Once more Bowman wished
he could fall into the big feather bed that had been in
her room... Then he forgot her again.
This desolate hill country! And he seemed to be going
the wrong way — it was as if he were going back, far
back. There was not a house in sight... There was no use
wishing he were back in bed, though. By paying the hotel
doctor his bill he had proved his recovery. He had not
even been sorry when the pretty trained nurse said good-
bye. He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrust-
ed the road without signposts. It angered him. He had
given the nurse a really expensive bracelet, just because
she was packing up her bag and leaving.
But now — what if in fourteen years on the road he
had never been ill before and never had an accident?
His record was broken, and he had even begun almost to
question it... He had gradually put up at better hotels,
in the bigger towns, but weren’t they all, eternally, stuffy
in summer and drafty in winter? Women? He could only
remember little rooms within little rooms, like a nest
of Chinese paper boxes, and if he thought of one woman
he saw the worn loneliness that the furniture of that room
seemed built of. And he himself — he was a man who
always wore rather wide-brimmed black hats, and in the
wavy hotel mirrors had looked something like a bull-
fighter, as he paused for that inevitable instant on the
landing, walking downstairs to supper... He leaned out
of the car again, and once more the sun pushed at his
head.
Bowman had wanted to reach Beulah by dark, to go
to bed and sleep off his fatigue. As he remembered, Beu-
lah was fifty miles away from the last town, on a graveled
road. This was only a cow trail, flow had he ever come to
such a place? One hand wiped the sweat from his face,
and he drove on.
He had made the Beulah trip before. But he had never
seen this hill or this petering-out path before — or that
68
cloud, he thought shyly, looking up and then down quick-
ly — any more than he had seen this day before. Why
did he not admit he was simply lost and had been for
miles?... He was not in the habit of asking the way of
strangers, and these people never knew where the very
loads they lived on went to; but then he had not been
close enough to anyone to call out. People standing in
the fields now and then, or on the top of the haystacks,
had been too far away, looking like leaning sticks or weeds,
turning a little at the solitary rattle of his car across
their countryside, watching the pale sobered winter
dust where it chunked out behind like big squashes down
I he road. The stares of these distant people had followed
him solidly like a wall, impenetrable, behind which
they turned back after he had passed.
The cloud floated there to one side like the bolster
on his grandmother’s bed. It went over a cabin on the
edge of a hill, where two bare chinaberry trees * clutched
nt the sky. He drove through a heap of dead oak leaves,
his wheels stirring their weightless sides to make a silvery
melancholy whistle as the car passed through their bed.
No car had been along this way ahead of him Then he
snw that he was on the edge of a ravine that fell away,
n red erosion, and that this was indeed the road’s end.
He pulled the brake. But it did not hold, though
he put all his strength into it. The car, tipped toward the
edge, rolled a little. Without doubt, it was going over
the bank.
lie got out quietly, as though some mischief had been
done him and he had his dignity to remember. He lifted
his bag and sample case out, set them down, and stood
back and watched the car roll over the edge. He heard
something — not the crash he was listening for, but
a slow, unuproarious crackle. Rather distastefully he
went to look over, and he saw that his car had fallen
into a tangle of immense grapevines as thick as his arm,
which caught it and held it, rocked it like a grotesque
child in a dark cradle, and then, as he watched, con-
cerned somehow that he was not still inside it, released it
gently to the ground.
He sighed.
Where am I? he wondered with a shock. Why didn’t
I do something? All his anger seemed to have drifted
69
away from him. There was the house, back on the hill. j
He took a bag in each hand and with almost childlike
willingness went" toward it. But his breathing came
with difficulty, and he had to stop to rest.
It was a shotgun house,* two rooms and an open pas- I
sage between, perched on the hill. The whole cabin slant- J
ed a little under the heavy heaped-up vine that covered j
the roof, light and green, as though forgotten from sum- J
mer. A woman stood in the passage.
He stopped still. Then all of a sudden his heart began 1
to behave strangely. Like a rocket set off, it began to s
leap and expand into uneven patterns of beats which j
showered into his brain, and he could not think. But in „J
scattering and falling it made no noise. It shot up with 1
' great power, almost elation, and fell gently, like aero- .8
bats into nets. It began to pound profoundly, then waited
irresponsibly, hitting in some sort of inward mockery	1
first at his ribs, then against his eyes, then under his	J
shoulder blades, and against the roof of his mouth when 'л
he tried to say, “Good afternoon, madam.” But he could yj
not hear his heart — it was as quiet as ashes falling. This	I
was rather comforting; still, it was shocking to Bowman	J
to feel his heart beating at all.
Stock-still in his confusion, he dropped his bags,
which seemed to drift in slow bulks gracefully through ' 3
the air and to cushion themselves on the gray prostrate 1
grass near the doorstep.
As for the woman standing there, he saw at once that J
she was old. Since she could not possibly hear his heart, 3
he ignored the pounding and now looked at her carefully, Ж
and yet in his distraction dreamily, with his mouth open. Я
She had been cleaning the lamp, and held it, half
blackened half clear, in front of her. He saw her with !
the dark passage behind her. She was a big woman with
a weather-beaten but unwrinkled face; her lips were held <
tightly together, and her eyes looked with a curious
dulled brightness into his. He looked at her shoes, which
were like bundles. If it were summer she would be bare-
foot... Bowman, who automatically judged a woman’s
age on sight, set her age at fifty. She wore a formless
garment of some gray coarse material, rough-dried from ‘
a washing, from which her arms appeared pink and '
70
unexpectedly round. When she never said a word, and
sustained her quiet pose of holding the lamp, he was
convinced of the strength in her body.
“Good afternoon, madam,” he said.
She stared on, whether at him or at the air around
him he could not tell, but after a moment she lowered
her eyes to show that she would listen to whatever he
had to say.
“I wonder if you would be interested —” He tried
once more. “An accident — my car...”
Her voice emerged low and remote, like a sound across
a lake. “Sonny he ain’t here.”
“Sonny?”
“Sonny ain’t here now.”
Her son — a fellow able to bring my car up, he decided
in blurred relief. He pointed down the hill. “My car’s
in tho bottom of the ditch. I’ll need help.”
“Sonny ain’t here, but he’ll be here.”
She was becoming clearer to him and her voice strong-
er, and Bowman saw that she was stupid.
He was hardly surprised at the deepening postpone-
ment and tedium of his journey. He took a breath, and
heard his voice speaking over tho silent blows of his
heart. “I was sick. I am not strong yet... May I come in?”
He stooped and laid his big black hat over the handle
on his bag. It was a humble motion, almost a bow, that
instantly struck him as absurd and betraying of all his
weakness. He looked up at tho woman, the wind blowing
his hair. He might have continued for a long time in
l his unfamiliar attitude; he had never been a patient man,
but when he was sick he had learned to sink submissively
into the pillows, to wait for his medicine. He waited on
the woman.
Then she, looking at him with blue eyes, turned and
held open the door, and after a moment Bowman, as if
convinced in his action, stood erect and followed her in.
Inside, the darkness of the house touched him like
n professional hand, the doctor’s. The woman set the half-
cleaned lamp on a table in the center of the room and
pointed, also like a professional person, a guide, to a chair
with a yellow cowhide seat. She herself crouched on the
hearth, drawing her knees up under the shapeless dress.
71
At first he felt hopefully secure. His heart was quieter.
The room was enclosed in the gloom of yellow pine boards. ' I
He could see the other room, with the foot of an iron
bed showing, across the passage. The bed had been made .)
up with a red-and-yellow pieced quilt that looked like
a map or a picture, a little like his grandmother’s girl-
hood painting of Rome burning.
He had ached for coolness, but in this room it was *
cold. He stared at the hearth with dead coals lying on
it and iron pots in the corners. The hearth and smoked
chimney wore of the stone he had seen ribbing the hills,
mostly slate. Why is there no fire? he wondered.
And it was so still. The silence of the fields seemed I
to enter and move familiarly through the house. The
wind used the open hall. He felt that he was in a myste- м
rious, quiet, cool danger. It was necessary to do what?...
To talk.
“I have a nice line of women’s low-priced shoes...”/ я
he said.
But the woman answered, “Sonny ’ll be here. He’s ,
strong. Sonny ’ll move your car.”
“Where is he now?”
“Farms for Mr Redmond.”
Mr Redmond. Mr Redmond. That was someone he
would never have to encounter, and he was glad. Some-
how the name did not appeal to him... Ina flare of touchi-
ness and anxiety, Bowman wished to avoid even mention'
of unknown men and their unknown farms.
“Do you two live here alone?” He was surprised to
hear his old voice, chatty, confidential, inflected for
selling shoes, asking a question like that — a thing he
did not even want to know.
“Yes. We are alone.”
He was surprised at the way she answered. She had
taken a long time to say that. She had nodded her head '
in a deep way too. Had she wished to affect him with
some sort of premonition? he wondered unhappily. Or
was it only that she would not help him, after all, by .
talking with him? For he was not strong enough to receive :
the impact of unfamiliar things without a little talk to
break their fall. He had lived a month in which nothing
had happened except in his head and his body — an almost
Inaudible life of heartbeats and dreams that came back. »
и life of fever and privacy, a delicate life which had left
Inin weak to the point of — what? Of begging. The pulse
In his palm leapt like a trout in a brook.
lie wondered over and over why the woman did not
go ahead with cleaning the lamp. What prompted her
I о slay there across the room, silently bestowing her
presence upon him? He saw that with her it was not
n lime for doing little tasks. Her face was grave; she was
feeling how right she was. Perhaps it was only politeness.
In docility he held his eyes stiffly wide; they fixed them-
selves on the woman’s clasped hands as though she held
I ho cord they were strung on.
Then, “Sonny’s coming,” she said.
Ho himself had not heard anything, but there came
и man passing the window and then plunging in at the
door, with two hounds beside him. Sonny was a big
enough man, with his belt slung low about his hips.
He looked at least thirty. He had a hot, red face that
was yet full of silence. He wore muddy blue pants and an
old military coat stained and patched. World War?
Bowman wondered. Great God, it was a Confederate *
coat. On the back of his light hair he had a wide filthy
black hat which seemed to insult Bowman’s own. He
pushed down the dogs from his chest. He was strong, with
dignity and heaviness in his way of moving... There was
(he resemblance to his mother.
They stood side by side. ... He must account again
for his presence here.
“Sonny, this man, he had his car to run off over the
prec’pice an’ wants to know if you will git * it out for
him,” the woman said after a few minutes.
Bowman could not even state his case.
Sonny’s eyes lay upon him.
He knew he should offer explanations and show
money — at least appear either penitent or authoritative.
But. all he could do was to shrug slightly.
Sonny brushed by him going to the window, followed
by the eager dogs, and looked out. There was effort even
in the way he was looking, as if he could throw his sight
out like a rope. Without turning Bowman felt that his
own eyes could have seen nothing: it was too far.
“Got me a mule out there an’ got me a block an’
tackle,” said Sonny meaningfully. “I could catch me
73
my mule an' git me my ropes, an’ before long I’d git
your car out the ravine.”
He looked completely around the room, as if in medi-
tation, his eyes roving in their own distance. Then he
pressed his lips firmly and yet shyly together, and with
the dogs ahead of him this time, he lowered his head
and strode out. The hard earth sounded, cupping to his
powerful way of walking — almost a stagger.
Mischievously, at the suggestion of those sounds,
Bowman’s heart leapt again. It seemed to walk about
inside him.
“Sonny’s goin’ to do it,” the woman said. She said it
- again, singing it almost, like a song. She was sitting in
her place by the hearth.
Without looking out, he heard some shouts and the
dogs barking and the pounding of hoofs in short runs on
the-hill. In a few minutes Sonny passed under the window
with a rope, and there was a brown mule with quivering,
shining, purple-looking ears. The mule actually looked
in the window. Under its eyelashes it turned target-like
eyes into his. Bowman averted his head and saw the
woman looking serenely back at the mule, with only satis-
faction in her face.
She sang a little more, under her breath. It occurred
to him, and it seemed quite marvelous, that she was not
really talking to him, but rather following the thing that
came about with words that were unconscious and part
of her looking.
So he said nothing, and this time when he did not .
reply he felt a curious and strong emotion, not fear, rise
up in him.
This time, when his heart leapt, something — his
soul — seemed to leap too, like a little colt invited out
of a pen. He stared at the woman while the frantic nimble-
ness of his feeling made his head sway. He could not move;
'there was nothing he could do, unless perhaps he might
embrace this woman who sat there growing old and shape-
less before him.
But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been
sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am.
Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and
you may have heard it, protesting against emptiness...
It should be full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of
74
his heart now as a deep lake, it should be holding love
like other hearts. It should be flooded with love. There
would be a warm spring day... Come and stand in my
heart, whoever you are, and a whole river would cover
your feet and rise higher and take your knees in whirl-
pools, and draw you down to itself, your whole body,
your heart too.
But he moved a trembling hand across his eyes, and
looked at the placid crouching woman across the room.
She was still as a statue. He felt ashamed and exhausted
by the thought that he might, in one more moment, have
I ried by simple words and embraces to communicate some
si range thing — something which seemed always to have
just escaped him...
Sunlight touched the furthest pot on the hearth. It
was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be some-
where on a good graveled road, driving his car past things
that happened to people, quicker than their happening.
Seeing ahead to the next day, he was glad, and knew that
this was no time to embrace an old woman. He could
feel in his pounding temples the readying * of his blood
for motion and for hurrying away.
“Sonny’s hitched up your car by now,” said the woman,
“lie’ll git it out the ravine right shortly.”
“Fine!” he cried with his customary enthusiasm.
Yet it seemed a long time that they waited. It began
to get dark. Bowman was cramped in his chair. Any man
should know enough to get up and walk around while
he waited. There was something like guilt in such stillness
and silence.
But instead of getting up, he listened... His breathing
restrained, his eyes powerless in the growing dark, he
listened uneasily for a warning sound, forgetting in wari-
ness what it would be. Before long he heard something —
soft, continuous, insinuating.
“What’s that noise?”he asked, his voice jumping into the
dark. Then wildly he was afraid it would be his heart beat-
ing so plainly in the quiet room, and she would tell him so.
“You might hear the stream,” she said grudgingly.
Her voice was closer. She was standing by the table. He
wondered why she did not light the lamp. She stood there
Bowman would never speak to her now, for the time
was past. 1’11 sleep in the dark, he thought, in his bewil-
derment pitying himself.
Heavily she moved on to the window. Her arm, vaguely
white, rose straight from her full side and she pointed
out into the darkness.
“That white speck’s Sonny,” she said, talking to her-
self.
He turned unwillingly and peered over her shoulder;
he hesitated to rise and stand beside her. His eyes searched
the dusky air. The white speck floated smoothly toward
her finger, like a leaf on a river, growing whiter in the
dark. It was as if she had shown him something secret,
part of her life, but had offered no explanation. He looked
away. He was moved almost to tears, feeling for no reason
that she had made a silent declaration equivalent to his
own. His hand waited upon his chest.
Then a step shook the house, and Sonny was in the
room Bowman felt how the woman left him there and
went to the other man’s side.
“I done got your car out, mister," said Sonny’s voice
in the dark. “She’s settin’ a-wailin’ in the road, turned
to go back where she come from.”
“Finel” said Bowman, projecting his own voice to
loudness. “I’m surely much obliged — I could never have
done it myself — I was sick...”
“I could do it easy,” said Sonny.
Bowman could feel them both waiting in the dark,
and he could hear the dogs panting out in the yard, wait-
ing to bark when he should go. He felt strangely helpless
and resentful. Now that he could go, he longed to stay.
From what was he being deprived? His chest was rudely
shaken by the violence of his heart. These people cherished
something here that he could not see, they withheld some
ancient promise of food and warmth and light. Between
them they had a conspiracy. He thought of the way she
had moved away from him and gone to Sonny, she had
flowed toward him. He was shaking with cold, he was
tired, and it was not fair. Humbly and yet angrily he
stuck his hand into his pocket.
“Of course I’m going to pay you for everything — ”
“We don’t take money for such,” said Sonny’s voice
belligerently.
71)
"I want to pay. But do something more.. Let me stay—
tonight...” He took another step toward them. If only
they could see him, they would know his sincerity,
his real need! His voice went on, "I’m not very strong
yot, I’m not able to walk far, even hack to my car,
maybe, I don’t know — I don’t know exactly where
1 am-r”
He stopped. He felt as if he might burst into tears.
What would they think of him!
Sonny came over and put his hands on him. Bowman
felt them pass (they were professional too) across his
chest, over his hips. He could feel Sonny’s eyes upon him
in the dark.
“You ain’t no revenuer come sneakin’ here, mister,
ain’t got no gun?”
To this end of nowhere! And yet lie had come. He made
a grave answer. "No.”
“You can stay.”
“Sonny,” said the woman, “you’ll have to borry *
some fire.”
“I’ll go git it from Redmond’s,” said Sonny.
“What?” Bowman strained to hear their words to each
other.
“Our fire, it’s out, and Sonny’s got to borry some,
because its dark an’ cold,” she said.
“But matches — I have matches —”
“We don’t have no need for ’em,” she said proudly.
"Sonny’s goin1 after his own fire.”
“I’m goin’ to Redmond’s,” said Sonny with an air of
importance, and he went out.
After they had waited a while, Bowman looked out
the window and saw a light moving over the hill. It spread
itself out like a little fan. It zigzagged along the field,
darting and swift, not like Sonny at all... Soon enough,
Sonny staggered in, holding a burning stick behind him
in tongs, fire flowing in his wake, blazing light into the
corners of the room.
“We’ll make a fire now,” the woman said, taking the
brand.
When that was done she lit the lamp. It showed its
dark and light. The whole room turned golden-yellow
like some sort of flower, and the walls smelled of it and
77
seemed to tremble with the quiet rushing of the fire, and
the waving of the burning lampwick in ‘ its funnel of
light.
The woman moved among the iron pots. With the
tongs she dropped hot coals on top of the iron lids. They
made a set of soft vibrations, like the sound of a bell far
away.
She looked up and over at Bowman, but he could not
answer. He was trembling...
“Have a drink, mister?” Sonny asked. He had brought
in a chair from the other room and sat astride it with
his folded arms across the back. Now we are all visible
to one another, Bowman thought’, and cried, “Yes sir,
you bet, thanks!”
“Come after me and do just what I do,” said Sonny.
It was another excursion into the dark. They went
through the hall, out to the back of the house, past a shed
and a hooded well. They came to a wilderness of
thicket.
“Down on your knees,” said Sonny.
. x "What?” Sweat broke out on his forehead.
He understood when Sonny began to crawl through
a sort of tunnel that the bushes made over the ground.
He followed, startled in spite of himself when a twig or
a thorn touched him.gently without making a sound
clinging to him and finally letting him go.	-
Sonny stopped crawling and, crouched on his knees,
began to dig with both his hands into the dirt. Bowman
shyly struck matches and made a light. In a few minutes
Sonny pulled up a jug. He poured out some of the whisky
into a bottle from his coat pocket, and buried the jug
again. “You never know who’s liable to knock at your
door,” he said, and laughed. “Start back,” he said, almost
formally. “Ain’t no need for us to drink outdoors like
hogs.”
At the table by the fire, sitting opposite each other
in their chairs, Sonny and Bowman took drinks out of the
bottle, passing it across. The dogs slept; one of them was
having a dream.
“This is good,” said Bowman. “This is’what I needed.”
It was just as though he were drinking the fire off the
hearth.
“He makes it,” said the woman with quiet
pride.
She was pushing the coals off the pots, and the smells
of corn bread and coffee circled the room. She set every-
thing on the table before the men, with a bone-handled
knife stuck into one of the potatoes, splitting out its
golden fiber. Then she stood for a minute looking at them,
tall and full above them where they sat. She loaned a
little toward them.
“You all can eat now,” she said, and suddenly
smiled.
Bowman had just happened to be looking at her. He
set his cup back on the table in unbelieving protest.
A pain pressed at his eyes. He saw that she was not an
old woman. She was young, still young. He could think
of no number of years for her. She was the same age as
Sonny, and she belonged to him. She stood with the deep
dark corner of the room behind her, the shifting yellow
light scattering over her head and her gray formless
dress, trembling over her tall body when it bent over
them in its sudden communication. She was young. Her
teeth were shining and her eyes glowed. She turned and
walked slowly and heavily out of the room, and he heard
her sit down on the cot and then lie down. The pattern
on the quilt moved.
“She’s goin* to have a baby,” said Sonny, popping
a bite into his mouth.
Bowman could not speak. He was shocked with know-
ing what was really in this house. A marriage, a fruitful
marriage. That simple thing. Anyone could have had
that.
Somehow he felt unable to be indignant or protest,
although some sort of joke had certainly been played
upon him. There was nothing remote or mysterious here —
only something private. The only secret was the ancient
communication between two people. But the memory of
the woman’s waiting silently by the cold hearth, of the
man’s stubborn journey a mile away to get fire, and how
they finally brought out their food and drink and filled
the room proudly with all they had to show, was sud- '
denly too clear and too enormous within him for res-
ponse, ...
“You ain’t as hungry as you look," said Sonny.
79
‘  • -4
The woman came out of the bedroom as soon as tho
men had finished, and ate her supper while her husband
stared peacefully into the fire.
Then they put the dogs out, with the food that was
left.
“I think I’d better sleep here by the fire, on the floor,"
said Bowman.
He felt that ho had been cheated, and that ho could
afford now to be generous. Ill though he was, he was not
going to ask them for their bed. Ho was through with
asking favors in this house, now that he understood what
was there.
“Sure, mister.”
But he had not known yet how slowly he understood.
They had not meant to give him their bed. After a liltlo
interval they both rose and looking at him gravely went
into the other room.
He lay stretched by tho fire until it grew low and dying.
He watched every tongue of blaze lick out and vanish.
“There will be special reduced prices on all footwear
during the month of January,” he found himself repealing
quietly, and then he lay with his lips tight shut.
How many noises tho night had! He heard the stream
running, tho fire dying, and he was sure now that he
heard his heart beating, too, the sound it made under
his ribs. He heard breathing, round and deep, of the man
and his wife in the room across the passage. And that
was all. But emotion swelled patiently within him,
and he wished that the child were his.
He must get back to where he had been before. Ho stood
weakly before tho red coals and put on his overcoat. It
felt too heavy on his shoulders. As he started out he looked
and saw that the woman had never got through with
cleaning the lamp. On some impulse he put all the money
from his billfold under its fluted glass base, almost
ostentatiously.
Ashamed, shrugging a little, and then shivering, ho
took his bags and went out. Tho cold of the air seemed
to lift him bodily. The moon was in tho sky.
On the slope he began to run, ho could not help it.
Just as he reached the road, where his car seemed to sit
in the moonlight like a boat, his heart began to give off
tremendous explosions like a rifle, bang bang bang.
80
He sank in fright onto the road, his bags falling about
him. He felt as if all this had happened before. He covered
his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing
the noise it made.
But nobody heard it.
COR DISCUSSION
1.	What is your emotional reaction to the story?
2.	Does the sotting contribute any idea that modifies the
reader’s understanding of the character?
3.	Does the mentioning of the people whom Bowman met
before add anything to the reader’s idea of his character and way
of life?
4.	What are Bowman’s feelings toward the people in the house?
Do they change from the beginning to the end of the story? At what
moment did you notice this change?
5.	What contradictions are there in Bowman’s character?
Bind the examples in the text.
6.	What is the main reason of Bowman’s loneliness? Of what
was he deprived in his life?
7.	Do you think that the people in the house felt lonely? If
not, why so?
8.	Why Bowman was shocked with knowing what really was
in the house where Sonny and the woman lived?
9.	Why couldn’t he stay in the house any more?
10.	Can you extract from the story any statements that might,
with suitable alterations, seive as generalizations about human
natuie?
Irwin Shaw
WISTFUL, DELICATELY GAY
The phone rang, and Miss Drake answered it. Miss
Drake is my secretary. She was presented to me on Christ-
mas, when I was made a junior partner in Ronaldson,
Ronaldson, Jones and Muller. She has her desk in my
office. My office is only nine by eight feet and it does
not have a window of its own, but she is a sign that I am
advancing in life, and 1 still find myself looking over
at her with the same gloating sense of ownership and
achievement that a yachtsman has in looking at the
first cup he won in a big regatta.
“Mr Royal,” Miss Drake said, “it’s for you. A Miss
Hunt.” She has a provocative, half-scolding, half-
indulgent way of talking to me whenever a woman
asks for me on the telephone, even when it’s my
wife.	_ “	' - 4
A Miss Hunt.
I .hesitated a moment, weighing dangers.
Miss Drake waited. She was new to the firm, and
Carol Hunt on the telephone was only a Miss Hunt to
her. She was not yet well enough established in the office
hierarchy to have heard all the gossip. Or perhaps the
gossip was so old that even the most malicious or most
loose-tongued of the secretaries had forgotten it or at
least considered it so worn it would only be trotted out
when everything else had been exhausted. After all, it was
almost two years ago...
Pain has its own rules, and those people who tell you
the human race seeks to avoid it do not, of course, know
what they’re talking about.
“Shall I tell her you’re busy?” Miss Drake asked, hold-
ing her hand over the phone. She is one of those girls'
who eventually have to be fired because they do too much
thinking for their employers.
“No,” I said, hoping my face was my usual weekday
business face. “I’ll speak to her.”
Miss Drake flipped a lever and I picked up the phone,
and there was Carol’s voice, after two years. “Peter,”
she said, “I hope you don’t mind my calling you.”
“No,” I said. Whatever I felt, “mind” was not the word
to describe it.
“I’ve debated with myself for weeks,” she said, “and
I’ve put it off and put it off, and today’s the last day and
1 just had to talk to you.” Her voice was the same — low,
trained, musical, sensual, and I turned in my chair so
Miss Drake couldn’t see my face. I closed my eyes, listen-
ing, and the two years, slippery, lost, painful, slid danger-
ously away, and Carol Hunt was calling me to tell me
to meet her at the bar near her house on Second Avenue,
calling me to remind me we were expected for lunch on
Sunday in Westport, calling me to tell me she loved me, ...
“I’m leaving this afternoon, Peter,” the voice went on,
flowing, grave, with its sunny echoes of childhood that
had once given me so much pleasure, “and if it isn’t
too much bother for you, I’d love to see you. Just for
a few minutes. There’s something I want to tell you.”
83
“Leaving?” I wished Miss Drake would get out of the -
office. “Where to?”
“I’m going home, Peter,” Carol said.
“Home?” I asked stupidly. Somehow, it had always
seemed to me Carol’s only home was New York City.
“San Francisco,” she said. “My train leaves at three-
thirty.”
I looked at the clock on my desk. It was eleven-fifteen, i
“Look,” I said. “I’ll take you to lunch.” As I said it,
I decided I wouldn’t tell Doris. After six and a half months
of marriage, a man is entitled to one lie.
“I can’t make lunch,” Carol said.
There was no point in arguing with her. Whatever
other changes the two years had made in her, I was sure
that hadn’t changed.
“When?” I said. “When and where do you want me to
meet you?”
“Well, the train leaves from Pennsylvania Station,”
she said. "Do you want to meet me across the street, in
the Statler bar, at —” She hesitated, as though she were
going over in her mind exactly what she had to say to me,
and timing it, like the director of a radio program with
a stop watch. — “At say, two thirty?”
“Two thirty,” I said. Then 1 made one of those jokes
that wake you up at night and make you squirm in your
bed. “What’ll you be wearing?” I asked. “In case I don’t
recognize you.” 1 suppose I wanted to prove the two
years hadn’t damaged me as much as they had damaged
me. Or maybe I was just trying to sound brainlessly hard-
boiled because that was the style; everybody we know
tries, as much as possible, to sound brainlessly hard-
boiled.
There was a silence on the phone, and for a moment
I was afraid she had hung up.
Then she spoke. Her voice was flat and controlled and
not affectionate. "I’ll be wearing a smile,” she said. “A
wide, girlish, demolished smile. See you at two-thirty.”
•I put the phone down and I tried to work for another
halfhour, but of course I couldn’t work. Finally I stood
up and put on my hat and coat and told Miss Drake I
wouldn’t be in till around four o’clock that afternoon.
One advantage of being a junior partner at Ronaldson,
Ronaldson, Jones and Muller is that you can occasionally
84
take an afternoon or part of an afternoon off for private
tragedy or celebration, if the tragedies and celebrations
do not crowd each other with unbusinesslike frequency.
I walked aimlessly around the city, waiting for two-
i hirty. It was a clear, cold, sunny day, and New York had a
winter glitter, a brilliance of light reflected of a million
windows, a deep richness of northern shadow, which
made the city seem bold, busy, and entertaining. I won-
dered how Carol felt at that moment, knowing that in
lluее hours she would be leaving the city.
I met her at a theatrical cocktail party in an apartment
on Fifty-fourth Street. I was still new enough to New
York so that I went to every party 1 was invited to. Harold
Sinclair, who worked in the office with me, had a brother,
Charley, who was an actor and who occasionally took us
along with him when he was invited out. I liked theatrical
parties. The girls were pretty, the drinks plentiful, and
the people seemed bright, generous, and amusing, espe-
cially after a day spent among lawyers.
She was standing against a wall talking to an elderly
woman with bluish hair who was, I later found out, the
widow of a producer. I had never seen Carol Hunt before,
on or, off the stage, and she had not yet played any part
important enough so that people would remember her
name or point her out. I looked at her, and I was sure
she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Maybe
I still think so.
She was not spectacular-looking, but she seemed to
shine, in the corner of the crowded, smoky room, with
a scrubbed, springtime health. She was ^inall, blond,
with a neat-brushed head and deep-blue eyes, and her
movements were plain and unaffected, and as she talked
to the producer’s widow her eyes did not flicker hungrily
over the room, as did the eyes of most of the other women
I here. She had a slender throat that rose out of the high col-
lar of her dress, and her mouth, which had only a light
touch of lipstick on it, seemed almost childish and deli-
cately gay.
She gave the impression of being frail, innocent, and
very young, and even though wo were at a place in which
almost all the people were connected in one way or another
with the theater, I felt she was, like me, an outsider.
85
I also felt that, because of the delicacy of her structure
and coloring, I was the only one who realized how beauti-
ful she was. I was, of course, wrong.
Three months later, I asked her to marry me.
In those three months, I met her almost every night,
waiting for her at the stage door of the theater in which
she was playing and taking her out, with a miser’s wis-
dom, to supper in small, quiet restaurants. I watched
her in her play six or seven times, and although she had
only a small and undistinguished part, I came away
each time with the feeling she was a superlatively talent-r-
ed actress.
Lovers become biographers, and in those three months
of quiet midnights I ransacked her past, feeling, I suppose,
that in discovering the modest details of her childhood,
and adolescence and the exact nature of her ambitions
I was somehow making her more completely my own.
The more I learned about her the more I became con-,
vinced she was not only a beautiful girl but an extraordinary
and valuable one.
Since the waT I had had the uneasy impression that
a good many of my friends', men and women alike, had
allowed themselves to become soft, to drift, to limit
their aspiration. While it was easy to find excuses in the
unsteady climate of our times, I could not help feeling
that quite a few of the people I liked best and was most
attached to were, finally useless and unworthy. So it was
almost with a sense of relief that, finding myself irrevo-
cably in love with Carol Hunt, I found her at the same
time to be so full of merit.
She had arrived in New York five years before, along
with four thousand or forty thousand other girls. She
was just out of college, and she had firmly told a young
man who ran the eight-eighty * faster than any other
young man on the Pacific Coast that year, that she would
not marry him. His name was Dean and he looked more
like a movie star than a runner, Carol said, and his family
owned a chain of hotels on the West Coast. As far as she
could tell, carefully taking into account her youth and
her inexperience and the natural pride that came with
being offered a man who was the target for all the other
girls she knew, she was in love with him. She had only
86
II vo hundred dollars to her name and her father was dead
mid her mother had married a man who worked, not very
prosperously, in an engineer’s office, but she said no.
She said no because she >vantcd to go to New York
nnd be an actress. She was aware of the banality of the
mnbilion, aware, too, of the four thousand other girls
who would descend upon the city that year with the same
mnbilion and who would, along with the survivors and
victors of previous years, compete with her in that dwindl-
ing arena for the few prizes of the season. She was aware
of the size of the gamble, the stake she was risking (her
youth; the fleet, well-loved young man; the chain of ho-
tels, with everything that went along with it); she was
aware of the role of luck in the profession, the waste of
talent, the probability and pain of failure.
She had figured it all out, logically and hardheadedly,
because she was a logical and intelligent girl and capable
of thought, an attribute that, she knew, made her supe-
rior to almost all the other four thousand girls, and that,
given the nature of the theater, would not help her to
succeed over them. And after figuring it all out, she had
I nken her five hundred dollars out of the bank, kissed
I he mournful runner good-by, and sat up three days and
four nights in a steamy coach and arrived in New York.
She did all this not because she was stagestruck or
had any false notions about the gaity of backstage life,
or because she was adventurous and wanted to live in
n strange, great city or meet the kind of men she would
never be able to meet in San Francisco. She did it because
she possessed, she was sure, great talent, because there
was nothing else in the whole world she wished to do.
She did it with the hard, sexless obsessiveness of an artist
cleaving to his art.
She had a modest success almost immediately. She
got small parts and did them acceptably or better or
even did them as well as they could be done. But the satis-
faction she derived from all this was tantalizing and incom-
plete. The necessity of subduing her powers, of which
she was by now more confident than ever, to the modest,
supporting tones of a bit-part * actress left her with a
sense of time wasted, opportunities lost, energies dissi-
pated.




87.
Three of four times she was called back for audition
after audition for leading parts in plays in which other» ’ I
girls finally made great successes. But each time something - J
happened — a star telegraphed from Hollywood that
she would be available for the season; a girl who, in the/'’3
eyes of the director, was a more likely match for the:3
leading man, was discovered; an actress who had received
rave * reviews the season before suddenly closed on *
the road and stepped in.
Each time she disciplined her disappointment and
impatience, accepted smaller roles, and did them with
hidden fury, smeared, as she put it, with ingenue charm.
Carefully, she made no enemies, displayed no grudges, у
When her chance came, when the jumble of events finally I
fell into the one, glittering pattern that would send her
climbing upwards, she would have no offended director;
no half-guilty, half-angry producer; no jealous character*, 
actress, unexpectedly standing in her way.
In the meantime, she tried television, but after she4 J
had been in three different programs, she turned down. I
all other offers for jobs in that medium. She could have
used the money, but the three programs had convinced
her the damage she was doing herself was more than the,
money was worth. She had an accurate conception of how
she worked best, and she knew she was one of those actress-
es who feel their way into a part, who need long rehears- \
als and weeks of reflection to master a role. It was not
modesty but pride and reliance on her own powers of
criticism that made her realize that, with the short days
of rehearsal that were all the television people could,
afford, she played inadequately, even if the inadequacy,
for the moment, was noted only by herself.
J
ч
When, like almost every pretty girl around the thea-
ter, she was offered a screen test, she worked hard on it
and was not displeased with the result when she saw it?
on the screen. The man who had arranged the test and who
sat in the projection room with her when it was shown,' |
was impressed, too. But he was an old man who had been
in the business a long time and he had seen many pretty
and talented girls.
"Very good,” he said, “very good, indeed, Miss Hunt.”
I Io had a soft, polite voice and courtly manners, and ho
wns used to discouraging hungry young people in the gentl-
est., most assuaging way. “But there would be objections
on the Coast to the present nose.”
“What?” Carol asked, surprised and a little hurt.
She was proud of her nose and thought in some ways it
was her best feature. It was quite long and a little arched,
with tense, nervous-looking nostrils, and an artistic young
man who had been attached to her had once told her it
wns like the noses of the great English beauties of the
portraits of the eighteenth century. By a trifle, a shadow,
It seemed to deviate to one side, but one had to study
her face to realize this, and the slight irregularity gave,
she was sure, an added note of interest to her face. “What’s
wrong with the nose?” she asked.
“It’s a little long for film, my dear,” the old man said
gently, “and you and I know, don’t we, that it is not
plumb straight. It is a lovely nose and one you could be
proud of all the days of your life,” the old man went on,
smiling, honeying * the harsh, official, impersonal truth
with his own sweet-tempered, but personal and therefore
finally valueless truth, “but the American public is not
quite used to seeing young girls on film with noses of that
particular quality.”
“I could name you six stars,” Carol said stubbornly,
"with noses a lot funnier-looking than mine.”
The old man smiled and shrugged. “Of course, my
dear,” he said. “But they are stars. They are personalities.
The public accepts a personality all in one lump. If you
were a star, we would assign publicity men to write poems
Io your nose. In a little while, it would be a priceless
asset. When an unknown girl came into the office, we
would say, “Look, she has the Hunt nose. Let’s hire her
at once.”
lie smiled at her again, and she couldn’t help smiling
back, warmed, even at the moment of disappointment,
by his absurd, gentle manner.
“Well,” she said, getting up, “you’ve been very kind.”
Hut the old man did not rise. He sat in the big leather
chair, his hand absently touching the controls of the box
that communicated with the operator in the projection
booth, staring thoughtfully at her, doing the job he was
paid to do. “Of course,” he said, “something could be done.”
“What do you mean?” Carol asked.
8Э
"Noses,” the old man said, “while works of God, are 1
susceptible to the intervention of man.”
Now Carol saw he was embarrassed by what he was 3
forced by his position to say, and was using this high-flowmj
and rhetorical fashion of speaking to show her he was jJ
embarrassed. She was certain there were very few actors4
or actresses who could embarrass this hard, gentle old 1
man, and she was flattered by it.
“A plastic surgeon,” the old man was saying, “a little
snip here, a little scraping of bone there, and in three \
weeks you could almost be guaranteed a nose that would :<1
meet with anyone’s approval.”
“You mean,” Carol said, “in three weeks I could havedM
the standard, regulation-issue, starlet’s nose.”
The old man smiled sadly. “More or- less,” he said.
“And what would you do then?”
“I would sign you to a contract,” the old man saidi *
“and I would predict quite a promising future for you'A
on the Coast.”
Quite, Carol noticed. Quite a promising. He refuses
to lie, even in his predictions. Almost as if the old man had
put it into words, she could sense the images that were d
going through his head. The pretty girl on a contract,
with her acceptable bobbed nose, being used for bathing-'
suit publicity stills, small parts, perhaps after a while !
for unimportant leads in unimportant pictures, for two, 3 ’
three, four years, then being let out to make room for
other, newer, more acceptable pretty girls.
“No, thank you,” Caro] said. “I’m terribly attached A
to my present crooked long nose.”
The old man stood up now, nodding, as though he Q
was pleased, on his own, if not on the company’s account,
by her decision. “For the stage,” he said, “it is faultless.
Better than faultless.”
‘‘I’m going to confess something,” Carol said candily,* ’
more open with this old man than she had permitted her- A
self to be with anyone else in the city. “The only reason
I’m up here is that if you make a name for yourself in
the movies, it’s easier to go where you want to go in the
theater. I’ve planned myself for the stage.”
The old man stared at her, rewarding her candor
with surprise, then approval. “So much the better for the
stage,” he said gallantly. “I’ll call you again.”

“When?” Carol asked.
“When you’re a great star,” he said lightly, “to offer
you all the money in the world to work for us.”
He put out his hand, and Carol shook it. He held her
hand in both his for a moment, his face saddened, mischie-
vous, regretful, touched by the memory of all the lovely,
ambitious, courageous girls he had seen in the last thirty
years. “Isn’t it hell?” he said, grinning, patting her hand
in his rosy hands.
“I too,” I said, when she told me this story, “am at-
tached to your present nose. And to your present hair.
And to your lips. And to your —”
“Careful,” she said. “Remember, one of the reasons
I like you so much is that you’re so restrained and
legal.” *
So, for a little while longer, I remained restrained and
legal.
With all her devotion to her talent, Carol was careful
Io keep it almost completely to herself. Obsessions, she
explained one night, especially the obsession with one’s
own abilities and ultimate triumph, could very easily
give a woman a reputation for harshness and egotism, and
arouse resentment in the people one might eventually
depend on for the big chance. And her quality, which
she judged cooly and without conceit, was one of frailty,
wistfulness, pathos, adolescence, romance. These were
good things to have and great careers had been made in
the theater with just such weapons, but there would be
little chance to display them on stage if off stage she spoke
with the assurance of a general in command of a victo-
rious army or an evangelist preaching the certainty of
hell.
So she carried her ambition with her as undeclared
baggage, as a curious kind of.magic, hidden food that
nourished her only so long as no one suspected its exist-
ence. Actually, there was little strain in hiding it. Be-
cause her vanity was concerned only with her final full
expression of herself on the stage,. Carol sought no inter-
mediate, meaningless social triumphs. At parties she
never pressed for the center of attention, was kindly in
her criticisms, made no attempt to steal away from other
girls the occasional playwrights and directors whom
91
they appeared with and who might be useful in obtaining
parts. She was wary and fastidious with men and was,
in male company, frail, wistful, pathetic, delicately*
gay, adolescent, romantic. And only part of this was
cynical.
The three months of revelations served a double pur-
pose. I am methodical by inclination and training, and
I felt I was learning all there was to know about the girl
I was going to ask, when the time was ripe, to marry me.
What’s more, everything I learned about her made her
seem more valuable. The sobriety and purity of her pur-;
pose put her far above the aimless young women I had
until then traveled * with, and the courage and intelli-
gence with which she handled herself would be, I fell,
reassuring foundations for a marriage. And the combi-
nation of these rather austere virtues with her delicacy^
and youth I found charming and deeply touching.
As for her, the discovery, after five years of reticence,
of a confidant who would not compete with her or betray
her and who so plainly admired the very qualities she
had to dissemble everywhere else, seemed to slacken
a nervous tension in ber and lift a burden from her shoul-
ders. At first she was suspicious of my curiosity, then
amused and grateful; and finally, I think, it seemed, as
much as anything else, to bring her to the point where
she told me she loved me.
We were sitting in my car in front of her apartment
building on East Fifty-eighth Street when 1 asked her to
marry me. It was a Sunday night, and I had picked her
up at the theater in which she was rehearsing a play that
was due to open in Boston in twenty days. Charley Sin-
clair was in the same play, and we had stopped off for a
drink with him before driving on home across town from
the theater. It was about eleven-thirty at night, in the
autumn, and the street was dark and deserted and I felt,
well, this is as good a time as any.
I asked her, and she didn’t say anything. She just sat
neatly, in her big cloth coat, on her side of the front seat,
looking straight ahead through the windshield at the dark
street and the rows of lampposts.
1)2
It was the first time I had ever asked a girl to marry
Hie and I wasn’t quite sure of procedure, and it didn’t
look as though Carol was going to be any help at all.
“I’m doing this as a health measure,” I said, smiling
erratically to take the taint of ceremony off the moment
and make it easier for her to say no if that was what she
wanted to say. “1 have to get up at seven o’clock in the
morning to get to the office on time, and if I have to meet
yon for supper at eleven-thirty every night for a couple
of more months I’m going to run down like a pitiful old
1925 Ford. I’m just not durable enough,” I said, “to be
a lovelorn young lawyer who keeps a lovelorn young actor’s
hours.”
Carol sat there silently, looking through the wind-
shield, her profile outlined by the lamplights.
"Give me a minute,” she said at last. “I have something
solemn to say?’
“Take an hour,” I said. “Take the whole blessed, beauti-
ful night.”
“I was waiting for you to say it,” Carol said. “I wanted
you to say it."
“What?” I said. “That my health was failing because
of night-work?”
“No. That you wanted to marry me.”
“I have a brilliant idea,” I said, moving toward her.
"Let’s get married next week, before you find out about
my past or another war starts, and let’s go some place
that’s warm and lawyerless for our honeymoon. I can
get six weeks since it’s my first honeymoon.”
“I can’t get six weeks,” Carol said. “That’s part of the
solemn thing I have to say.”
“Oh,” I sighed. “The theater. I forgot. Maybe,” I said
hopefully, “it’ll be a turkey * and close in Boston and we
can fly to Sicily the day after —”
“It’s not going, to be a turkey,” she said. “I think it’s
going to be a success. But even if it isn’t I wouldn’t
leave New York for six weeks in the middle of the season.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll have our honeymoon on Forty-
fourth Street.”
“You must listen,” Carol said. “I want you to know
now what it would be like if we got married.”
“I know how it would be if we got married,” 1 said.
“Smashing.”
03
“J want you to remember something. I mean to be
a great actress.”
“Hell,” I said, “I’m not going to complain about that.
I’m modern. If it was up to me, I’d throw open all the
harems.” I hadn’t known how I was going to behave
the first time I asked a girl to marry me, but I certainly
never expected I’d be making one jittery joke after
another.
“What I’m trying to say,” Carol went on stubbornly,
“is that if I get married it has to be on certain terms.
Just as though I were a man —”
“Now, darling,” I said, “nobody here is opposed to
female suffrage or —”
“What I mean,” Carol said, “is that I’m not going
to be one of those girls who hang around the theater for
a couple of years and then get married and have babies
and move to the suburbs and talk about how they were
actresses in New York for the rest of their lives —”
“Now, wait a minute, darling,” I said. “Nobody’s-
moving to the suburbs —”
“The main thing in my life,” Carol said, “is not going
to be my husband. It’s going to be my work, just as the
main thing in a man’s life is, finally, his work. Is that
okay with you?” she asked harshly.
“Dandy," I said. “I love it.”	-4
“It hasn’t happened yet," Carol said, “but it’s going
to happen. My chance. And when it comes, I’m going to
be there to jump at it. I’m not going to be off on vacations
or tending babies or giving bridge parlies. And if I have
to go on the road with a play for a year at a time, because
that’s what I have to do —”
“Oh, lady,” I groaned, “not tonight.”
She had to laugh then and we kissed, and for a while
we just sal there, close together, half-forgetting what-
she had been talking about, and when I said, “It’ll work
out all right,” she nodded and kissed me again, and them
we went to a bar to celebrate and we decided to get married
sometime in June, at which time her play would probably
have finished its run, anyhow.
When I left her at her door, I kissed her good night,
and then, holding her, 1 said, very seriously, “One ques-.
tion, Carol...”
“Yes?”
64
"What happens,” I asked, “if nothing happens? If
your chance never comes?”
She hesitated a moment. Then she said soberly, “I’ll
bo disappointed for the rest of my life.”
The chance came a little more than three weeks later,
In Boston, and it came in a way nobody predicted and it
finished us. •
We spoke over the phone almost every night, and the
next to the last time I called her it was nearly one o’clock
In the morning and she was in her hotel room. The play
had opened two nights before, and she told me she had
got ten a nice little notice in one of the evening papers, that
Eileen Munsing, the star who had come back from the
movies to play the lead, had received very good reviews
and was no longer growing hysterical during rehearsals.
She also told me she loved me and she was looking forward
to Saturday, when I was coming up on the morning trajn
for the weekend.
Twelve hours later, when I left my office to go out to
lunch, I bought a newspaper and there, on the front page,
was Carol’s picture. The photograph of a man by the name
of Samuel Borensen was next to it, and the reason the two
pici ures were together was that at four-thirty that morning
Samuel Borensen had been found lying dead on the bed
In Carol Hunt’s hotel room in Boston.
Samuel Borensen’s photo had been on the front pages
of the newspapers a good many times during his life —
smiling, from airplane ramps on the way to conferences
in Europe; patriotic, addressing banquets of leaders of
industry; solemn, receiving honorary degrees from uni-
versities at commencement exercises. He was one of those
people you think of as moving publicly from place to
place, making pronouncements and running things.
I had never met him and I hadn’t known Carol knew him.
I looked carefully at his photograph. He looked fleshy,
handsome, robust, and conscious of his own value. I read
the account that went with the photograph and discovered
he was fifty years old and he had a wife and two almost
grown children in Palm Beach. Carol, according to the
newspaper, was an attractive, youthful blond, at the
moment appearing in Mrs Howard, which was scheduled
to open in two weeks in New York.
05
I threw the paper away and went back to iny apart-
ment and called Boston.
1 was surprised I was put through immediately to
Carol’s room. Somehow I had the feeling that now Carol
had made the front page of the newspapers she would
be very hard to reach.
“Yes?” Her voice was calm, musical.
“Carol, this is Peter."
“Oh.”
“Do you want me to come up there?” I asked. I tried
to keep my voice free of accusation or judgement.
“No,” she said.
“Do you want to explain anything?”
“No,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “good-by.”
“Good-by, Peter.”
I hung up. I look a drink, then called my office and
told them I was going out of town for ten days. I had
told people about our engagement, and they had read
the newspapers down at the office by then and they said,
“Sure, go ahead."
Then I got into the car and drove into Connecticut,
to a little town where there was a pleasant hotel I had
stopped at, the summer before, for lunch. I was the only
guest, and I spent my time reading, taking walks, and
looking out at the bare trees and the dead winter land-
scape.
I thought about Carol a good deal of the time. I went
over our three months together, searching for dues I
might have missed out of stupidity or infatuation, and
I couldn’t find a single one. Borensen’s name hadn’t
come up once, I was sure, and whatever attachments
she might have had with other men she must have broken
off as soon as she met me, because I couldn’t remember
any time she hadn’t been able to see me when I asked
for a date.
Curiously, I wasn’t angry. I was hurt, of course, and
shaken, and for a time I thought of leaving New York and
starting over somewhere else, but I found myself worrying
more for her sake than for my own. The vision of Carol,
frail, girlish, proper, caught up with doctors, policemen,
reporters, and forced to come onto a stage to be devoured
by the gossiping eyes of a new audience every evening
96
kept me from sleeping at night. As for her career, I was
sure it was finished. After five days alone in the empty
hotel, I was thinking almost exclusively of Carol, and
trying to figure out ways I could help her.
Love, I was finding out, does not stop conveniently,
just because one day, on the way to lunch, you pick
up a newspaper and see a girl’s picture on the front
page.
I was on the point of getting into the car and driving
up to Boston to see for myself if there was anything I
could do for Carol, when I remembered Charley Sinclair
was in the same play. I called Harold Sinclair at the office
for Charley’s telephone number, and then I put in a per-
son-to-person call for Charley in Boston. Before appearing
there, it would help if I found out just what was happen-
ing to Carol and in just what way I could help her most.
There was no question in my mind, of course, of going
through with the marriage. I was going on a rescue mis-
sion, I told myself grimly, not as a garlanded sacri-
fice.
“Hi, Peter,” Charley said when they finally put the
connection through. “What’s the good word?” * He sound-
ed surprised to hear from me.
“I’m all right,” I said. “How is it up in Boston?"
“Standing room only for the last two nights,” Charley
said.
“I don’t mean that,” I said impatiently. Charley Sin-
clair is a kind of lightweight, and he has a knack for
saying the wrong thing. I suppose that’s why he became
an actor. “How’s Carol?”
“Blooming,” Charley said. “She’s being so brave and
bereaved* she’d make a statue weep gin.”
I had always thought Charley liked her. I suddenly
realized why Carol had always been so quiet about her-
self around theatrical people.
“How are they treating her?” I asked, forcing myself
to be patient with him. “The people in the play, I mean?”
“Everybody’s being so damned considerate,” Charley
said, “you’d think her father just died.”
“Have they asked her to give notice?”
“Hell, no,” Charley said. “They’re just kicking them-
selves * they didn’t put her name up in lights. Why
do you think we’re selling out every night?”
4 И. В. Ступников
97
“Are you kidding?” I still didn’t believe him. I know I
strange things happen in the theater, but this was too.'1'Д
much.
“Kidding?” he asked. “When she comes out on theJiM
stage, they make a funny little gurgling sound, and then	I
it gets so quiet you’d think they’d all been strangled	j
in their seats. And you can feel them following every
move she makes, as though she had a private spot- 
light on her al] night. And she brings down thecal
house * when she goes off. Eileen Munsing is ready to -Я
blow.”	x
“I don’t care about that,” I said. “How is she taking
it?”
“Who knows,” Charley said coolly, “how that girl takes
anything? If you’re interested, the director says she’s
twenty times better than she ever was before."
“Well,” I said lamely, “that’s fine.”
“Why?” Charley asked.
“One more question,” I said, ignoring the “Why?” ;j
“Do you think people will hire her after this?”
“They’ll fall all over themselves,” Charley said. “Two ,
agents have been up from New York already. You coming
up?”
P “No,” I said.
"People die every day,” Charley said. “Some give 4
their bodies to science, some to art. Do you want me to „
pass on any word?"
“No,” I said. “Thanks, Charley.”
“You’re a fine friend,” Charley said. “You didn’t J
ask once how I was doing.”
“How're you doing, Charley?”
“Lousy,” he said. He chuckled coldly. You’d never Я
think he and his brother are in the same family. “See;.1?
you in New York.”
He hung up.
After that, there didn’t seem to be any sense in hang- •
ing around an empty little hotel in Connecticut ini
the middle of the winter, and I drove to the city and I
went back to work. The first few days were not easy,
and every time I came into a room I had the feeling
people had been telling each other about me. Even
now, two years after it happened, I still get suspicious ',
if people break off their conversations when 1 approach >'

98
them, and I find myself searching their faces for hidden
signs of amusement or pity.
I hadn’t intended to see Carol again, but on the
opening night of her play, I was in the balcony, alone,/
hunching into myself a little, I suppose, hoping no one
would recognize me. I paid very little attention to the
play itself. I was waiting for Carol’s entrance, and when
it came I saw Charley Sinclair had been telling the
truth. There was a rippling, hushing sound, and then
a kind of riveted silence. And I saw what Charley meant
when he said it was as though Carol had a private spot-
light on her which followed her wherever she moved
and sucked the attention of the audience to her, making
even the plainest of her lines and least important of
her movements take on a significance out of all pro-
portion to her role.
And it was true, too, she was better than she had
ever been. She looked beautiful, and she played with
a new certainty and serenity, as though this sudden,
intense focusing on her had deepened her talent.
At the curtain, she received almost as much applause
as the star of the show, Eileen Munsing, and as I made
my way out of the theater, I heard her name on people’s
lips again and again.
I bought all the papers the next day and saw she
had received a great deal of notice, more than her part
deserved. The critics, who were gentlemen and not
gossip writers, said nothing about what had happened
in Boston, and two of them went all the way about her,
predicting stardom. And one critic, who, I was sure,
Carol must have thought was the most perceptive man
in New York that morning, even used the words frail,
wistful, romantic, and gay.
My own reaction was one of neither pain nor pleasure.
I was numb and I was curious, and I think I was search-
ing, both at the theater and in the papers the next
day, for a key to where I had gone so wrong.
I didn’t see Carol after that, but I followed her on
the theatrical pages, and I was not surprised when I
read she was leaving the cast of Mrs Howard to take
the leading part in a new play. I went to the opening
of that play, too, and I had a feeling first of surprise,
4*	99
и!
then of gratification, at seeing Carol’s name so large
on the billboards. Even though we were completely
broken apart, I suppose I was still being influenced
by the faith I had put in her talent and was pleased
to see it justified so soon.
The producers had cast her shrewdly. She played
a young girl who was sweet and pathetic for two and
a half acts and turned out at the end to be a bitch.
They had cast not only her qualities but her reputa-
tion, and she couldn’t have been shown off to a better
advantage.
The curious thing was she didn’t quite come off.
I don’t know why, but although she seemed to be doing
everything right and performed with an assurance and
confidence you rarely see in a girl that young, the final
result was disappointing. The audience was polite enough
and the reviews the next day were not bad, but the
man who played opposite her and a middle-aged cha-
racter woman who came on only in the second act re-
ceived more attention than Carol.
I thought all this would do her no harm and that
in her next play or the one after, she would finally come
into her own. But Charley Sinclair told me I was wrong.
“She’s had it,” Charley said. “She had her chance
and she muffed it.”
“I didn’t think she was that bad,” I said.
“She wasn’t bad,” Charley said, “she just wasn’t
good enough to carry a play And now everybody knows
it. Farewell.”
“What will happen to her?” I asked.
“This play will flop in three weeks,” he said, “and
then, if she’s smart, she’ll go back, quick, to playing
supporting parts. If she can get them. Only she won’t
be that smart, because nobody is, and she’ll hang around
waiting for a lead again, and some fool will give it to
her and then they’ll really take off her hide and pin
it to the wall and she’d better learn how to type and
take shorthand or find some man and marry him.”
The fact that everything worked out as Charley
said it would, made me think more highly of his intel-
ligence, although it didn’t make me like him any bet-
ter. Carol did go into another play the following season
and she did get merciless criticized. I didn’t go to see
100
her in the play, because I had met Doris by then and
I felt there was no sense in looking for trouble.
I never saw her, even by accident, and I didn’t come
across her .name again in the theatrical news and I stopped
seeing Charley Sinclair, so that by the time Carol called
me that morning in my office, I had no notion of what
she had been doing with herself. When I happened to
think of her, I recognized there was still a painful and
dangerous spot on my memory, and I deliberately turned
to other things.
I got to the Statler a little early and ordered a drink
and watched the door. She came in exactly at two-thirty.
She wore a beaver coat she hadn’t had when I used to
see her every night, and a neat and rather expensive-
looking blue suit. She looked exactly as beautiful as
I remembered her, and I noticed that as she walked
through the room toward my table, most of the other
men in the room looked longingly at her.
I didn’t kiss her or even shake her hand. I suppose
I smiled and said hello, but all I rememberjg that I kept
thinking she hadn’t changed as I awkwardly helped her
take off her coat.
We sat side by side, facing out to the room, and
she ordered a cup of coffee. She never drank very much,
and whatever the experiences of the past two years had
done to her, they hadn’t pushed her to liquor. I turned
on the banquette to look at her, and she smiled at me
a little, knowing what I was doing, knowing I was search-
ing her face for the marks of failure and regret.
“Well,” she said. “How do you like it?”
“The same,” I said.
“The same.” She laughed a little,'soundlessly. "Poor
Peter. ”
I didn’t want to get started on that. “What’re you
going to do in San Francisco?” I asked.
She shrugged, carelessly. That, at least, was some-
thing new, that gesture. “I don’t know,” she said. “Look
for some kind of job. Hunt a husband. Reflect on my
mistakes. ”
“I’m sorry it turned out this way,” I said.
101
i, •	•			••	' 
She shrugged again. "Hazards of the trade,” she
said. She looked at her watch, and we both thought
of the train that was waiting to take her away from
the city after the seven years. “I didn’t come here to,
cry on your shoulder,” she said. “There’s something
I have to tell you about that night in Boston, to keep
the record straight and I haven’t much time.”
I sat, sipping at my drink, not looking at her, as
she talked. She talked swiftly and without emotion,
and never hesitated for a moment, as though every
detail of what had happened that night would be clear
in her memory, in its proper place, for the rest of her
life.
She had been alone in her room, she told me, when
I called her from New York, and after she had spoken
to me she had looked over some changes in her part.
Then she had gone to sleep.
When the knocking on the door awakened her, she
lay still for a moment, first thinking she had been dream-
ing, then thinking that whoever it was must have
mistaken her room for someone else’s and would go away.
But the knocking came again, light, guarded, per-
sistent, unmistakable.
She switched on the light and sat up in her bed.
“Who is it?” she called.
“Open the door, please, Carol.” It was a woman’s
voice, low and urgent and muffled by the door. “It’s
me, Eileen.”
Eileen, Eileen, Carol thought, stupidly. I don’t
know any Eileens.
“Who?” she asked, still dulled by sleep.
“Eileen Munsing,” came the whisper through the
door.
“Oh,” Carol said. “Miss Munsing.” She jumped out
of bed, and barefooted, in her nightgown, with the curl-
ers in her hair, she went over to the door and threw
it open. Eileen Munsing brushed past her, knocking
against her in her hurry.
Carol closed the door and turned to face Eileen Mun-
sing, standing next to the rumpled bed in the little
room, her face blocked out * in sharp light and shadow
by the single bedside lamp. She was a handsome woman
of thirty-five who looked like a handsome woman of
102
thirty on the stage and a handsome woman of forty off
the stage. The on-stage subtraction of five years was
due to the bold modeling of the bones of her face and
head and an almost visible reservoir of animal energy.
The off-stage addition of five years was due to drink,
the bite of ambition, and according to report, a good
deal of handling by men.
She was dressed in the black jersey skirt and sweater
Carol had observed on her when they came up in the
elevator together after the show and said good night
to each other in the corridor. The door to Eileen Mun-
sing’s suite was about thirty feet away, across the cor-
ridor from Carol’s room, on the front side of the hotel.
Almost automatically Carol noticed Eileen Munsing
was not drunk, her stockings were slightly twisted on
her legs, a ruby pin she had been wearing on her shoul-
der was no longer there. Also, her lipstick had just
been put on, too lavishly and not quite accurately,
and her wide mouth,' almost black in the harsh light,
seemed to be sliding unsteadily off to one side of her
face.
“What is it?” Carol asked, trying to make her voice
calm and soothing. “What’s the matter, Miss Munsing?”
“I’m in trouble,” the woman whispered. Her voice
was hoarse and frightened. "Bad, bad trouble. ... Who’s
in the next room?” She turned her head suspiciously
toward the wall next to the bed.
“I don’t know,” said Carol.
“Anybody from the company?”
“No, Miss Munsing,” Carol said. “We’re the only
ones from the company on this froor.”
“Cut the Miss Munsing. I’m not your grandmother.”
“Eileen,” Carol said.
“That’s better,” said Eileen Munsing. She stood
there, swaying slightly, staring at Carol as though she
were slowly approaching a decision about her. Carol
kept close to the door, feeling the knob in her back.
“I need a friend,” Eileen said. “I need help.”
“Anything I can do...”
“Don’t be so sweet,” said Eileen. “I need real help.’’
Carol felt very cold now, in her bare feet and thin
gown, and she shivered. She wished the woman would
go away.
103
I 
“Put on something,” Eileen Munsing said, as though
she had made her decision. “And come back with me to
my room, please.”
“It’s awfully late, Miss Munsing...”
“Eileen.”
“— Eileen. And I have to get up early tomorrow
morning and —”
“What’re you frightened of?” Eileen Munsing asked
harshly.
“I’m not frightened,” Carol said, lying. “It’s just
that there doesn’t seem to be any reason — ”
“There’s a reason,” said Eileen Munsing. “There’s
a very good reason. There’s a dead man in my bed.”
The man lay on the wide bed, on top of the blankets,
his head turned a little on the pillow toward the door,
his eyes open, an expression of almost smiling surprise
on his face. His shirt and jacket were off, hung, with
a solid navy-blue necktie, over the back of a chair,
and one foot was bare. The other foot still had a sock
on it, dribbled around the ankle, with a garter dangl-
ing from it. A pair of black shoes, neatly arranged,
stood on the floor, half under the bed. He was an enor-
mous man, with a fat, swelling diaphragm and oysterish *
skin, and he seemed too large, even for the big double
bed.
He was about fifty years old, with stiff gray hair,
and even though he was dead and half-naked, he looked
like a successful and important man who was used to
ordering people around.
Then Carol recognized him. Samuel Borensen. She
had seen his photograph in the newspapers, and he had
been pointed out to her in the lobby of the hotel two
days before.
“He was starting to get undressed,” Eileen Munsing
said, staring bitterly at the bed, “and he said, ‘I feel
a little funny. I think I’ll just lie down for a minute,*
and then he died.”
Carol turned her back to the bed. She didn’t want
to look at the flabby, domineering corpse any more.
She had put on a negligee over her nightgown and fleece-
lined slippers, but she was colder than ever. She wanted
to get out of the room and back into her own bed and
104
pull the covers up, warm, and not remember any more
that anyone had ever knocked on her door. But Eileen
Munsing barred the way, standing before the open door
that led into the brightly lit living room of the large,
Iwo-room suite, filled with flowers, bottles, baskets
of fruit, telegrams, because she was a star opening
in a play everybody thought was going to be a hit.
“I’ve known him for ten years,” Eileen Munsing was
saying, glaring past Carol at the bed. “We’ve been friends
for ten years, and then he goes and does something like
that.”
“Maybe he’s not dead,” Carol said. “Have you called
the doctor?”
“A doctor!” Eileen Munsing laughed harshly. “That’s
just what we need. What do you think would happen
if I called a doctor at three o’clock in the morning and
ho found Sam Borensen dead in Eileen Munsing’s bed-
room? What do you think the papers would be like
tomorrow?”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said, keeping her eyes resolutely
turned away from the body. “But I think I’d better
just go back to my room. I won’t say anything and — ”
“You can’t leave me alone," Eileen Munsing said,
“I’ll jump out the window if you leave me alone.”
“I’d love to help, if I could,” Carol said, having
difficulty, because her throat was dry and seemed to
be contracting in little, sharp spasms when she tried
to talk. “But I don’t know what I could do...”
“You can help me dress him,” Eileen Munsing said
flatly, “and get him back to his room.”
“Miss Munsing?”
“He’s too big for me to handle,” Miss Munsing said.
“I tried and I couldn’t even get his shirt on. He must
weigh two hundred pounds. He ate too much,” she said
fiercely, reproaching the still figure on the bed for all
the appetites that had brought him to this place and
left him there, intractable. “But between the two of
us...”
“Where’s his room?” Carol asked, fighting the spasms
in her throat.
“On the ninth floor.”
“Miss Munsing,” Carol said, noticing she was still
gasping. “We’re on the fifth floor. That’s four stories.
105
Even if I did help, what could we do? We couldn’t take
him in the elevator — ”
“I wasn’t thinking of the elevator," Eileen Munsing
said. “We could carry him up the fire-escape stairs.”
Carol made herself turn and look at the dead man.
He bulked on the blankets, looking huge, immovable,
making the bed sag in the middle. If she had to get
mixed up in something like this, Carol thought, why
couldn’t she pick a normal-size man.
“Not a chance,” Carol said through the constricted
throat. “The fire-escape stairs are way down at the other
side of the building, and we never could carry him,
we’d have to drag him.” Even as she spoke she was sur-
prised at herself for working so naturally on the prob-
lem, making herself responsible for joining, even in that
limited way, the conspiracy. “We’d have to pass twenty
rooms, dragging him, and somebody would be bound
to hear or the night watchman would come by. And
even if we got to the stairs, we’d never get him up even
one flight — ”
“We could leave him on the stairs,” Eileen Munsing
said. “They wouldn’t find him until morning.”
“You mustn’t talk like that.”
“Well, what?” Eileen Munsing said wildly. “Don’t
stand there grinning, telling me all the things I can’t do.”
Carol touched her face, surprised, as though to test,
with her fingers, the quality of expression. The effort
of trying to talk through her fright and the dry spasms
in her throat had contorted her mouth, and she supposed
to Miss Munsing, in her state, it had looked like a smile.
“Is there anybody else from the company on this
floor?” Eileen Munsing asked. “Any men?”
“No,” Carol said. Seward, the producer, had gone
down to New York for two days, and the other men were
at another hotel. “Mr Moss,” Carol said, hopefully,
remembering, “is staying here, though.” Mr Moss was
playing the male lead opposite Miss Munsing.
“He hates me,” Eileen Munsing said. “He’s up on
the tenth floor. Anyway, he’s with his wife.”
Carol looked at the traveling clock on the bed table,
next to the pale, half-smiling twisted face. It was nearly
four o’clock. “I’ll go into my room and think, and if
anything occurs to me I’ll — ”
106
She moved suddenly, and catching Eileen Munsing
by suprise, fled past her into the living room. She was
nl the door, fumbling with the knob, when Eileen Mun-
sing caught her, clamping her fingers over Carol’s wrist.
“Wait a minute. Please,” the woman begged. “You
can’t leave me alone like this.”
“I don’t know what I can possibly do, Miss Munsing,”
Carol said, panting as though she had been running
for a long time, although here, in the brightly lit living
room with the bowls of flowers and the baskets of fruit,
she was in better control of herself. “I would really like
to help, if I could. But I — ”
“Listen,’’Eileen Munsing whispered, holding her. “Don’t
get hysterical. There’s plenty to do. Come on over here,
she said soothingly, leading Carol to the couch. “Sit
down. Be1 sensible. There’s plenty of time. We don’t
have to lose our heads.”
Carol let herself be guided to the couch. She wanted
to say she was sorry but it was none of her business,
she hadn’t invited a famous man with a bad heart to
her bedroom at three in the morning, she hadn’t been
friends for ten years with a man who had a wife and
two children in Palm Beach. But she was both frightened
of Eileen Munsing and sorry for her, and she couldn’t
bring herself to leave her alone in the welter of flowers,
telegrams, ruin, scandal.
“Do you want a drink?” Eileen Munsing asked. “I think
we can both use a drink.”
“Yes, please.”
The actress poured two stiff whiskeys and gave one
to Carol. I am a very good friend of Eileen Munsing’s,
Carol thought foolishly, we often sit in her room after
the show to all hours, drinking and talking about theat-
rical problems, I owe a great deal of my present success
to the hints I ...
“Listen, Carol,” Eileen Munsing said, sitting beside
her, “there’s one thing for sure — he can’t be found here.”
“No,” Carol said stupidly, for a confused moment
being Eileen Munsing and realizing the impossibility of
having Samuel Borensen found dead in her room. “But —”
“I can’t stand it,” Eileen Munsing said. “This would
finish me. There was enough of a stink about my second
divorce.”
107
Vaguely, Carol remembered newspaper stories about
detectives, a diary, pictures taken with a telephoto
lens and shown in court, and the automobile accident
a few years before that, on the highway from Mexico,
and the laborer who had been run over coming out of
a dirt road and the police finding out the man driving
the car was drunk and not Eileen Munsing’s husband at all
(the first, the second, the third?) although they had
spent three days and nights under a name that belonged
to neither of them in a hotel at Ensenada.
“They had to hold up releasing my pictures for more
than a year,” Eileen Munsing was saying, drinking
in gulps, her hands working bonily on the glass, “and
it looked as though they’d never take me back. If
this comes out,” she said bitterly, “every woman’s club
in the country will vote to have me burned. Lord,”
she said, overcome with self-pity, “every time I make
a move it blows up in my face. I’ve used it all up,” she said.
“I’ve used up everybody’s forgiveness. Everything hap-
pens at the wrong time.” She drank thirstily, mechanically.
“If something like this had happened when I was
just starting, it would have been all right. It would’ve
been better than all right — it would have helped.
If I were a young girl starting in,” Eileen Munsing went
on, her bitter, hoarse voice whispering in the large,
plush room, “people’d say, ‘Well, you can’t blame her
too much — she’s just a young girl on her own. Natu-
rally, a man like that could talk her into anything.’
And they’d be interested in me, they’d be curious about me,
they’d talk about me, they’d want to see me. Lord,” she
said extravagantly, “if it had happened fifteen years ago,
it would have been better than a trunkful of rave reviews. ”
Carol stood up. She wasn’t cold any more, and the
spasms in her throat had stopped. She looked down
calmly at Eileen Munsing, sympathetic, linked, sisterly,
understanding.
“Eileen,” she said, the name for the first time coming
naturally to her lips, thinking. This is the moment.
Who would have ever thought it was going to come like
this? “Eileen,” she said, putting her drink down and
taking the older woman’s hands, soothing, sisterly,
in hers, “don’t worry. I think there’s something that
can be done.”
108
Eileen Munsing looked up at her, suspicious, not
understanding. “What?” she said, her hands cold and
limp in Carol’s.
“I think,” Carol said, her voice steady, reassuring,
"we’d better get started if we want to get him into my
room before daylight.”
The calm, remembering, melodious voice stopped.
Once more we were back in the Statler bar, two years
past the remembered night. We sat in silence for a moment.
1 because I was too confused and shaken to speak, Carol be-
cause the story, as far as she was concerned, was complete.
“The truth is,” she said, after the pause, “everything
worked out exactly as we planned. The only trouble
was I miscalculated. I thought I was better than I was,
that’s all. Well, who doesn’t make a mistake now and
I hen?” She looked at her watch and stood up. “I have to go.”
I helped her on with her coat, and walked to the
door with her.
“One thing,” I said. “Why did you finally tell me this?”
She looked at me candidly, sweetly, standing there
al the open door with the traffic of the city behind her.
“We probably will never see each other again,” she
said, “and I wanted to let you know I hadn’t been unfaith-
ful to you. I wanted you to be left with a good opinion
of me.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek and started
across the avenue, youthful, delicate, beautiful, dement-
ed — looking, with her pretty suit and soft fur coat
and her shining fresh blond hair, as though she were
setting out to conquer the city.
FOR DISCUSSION
I
1.	State the theme of the story and give your own opinion of
the idea the author wanted to convey.
2.	How does the author alter the chronological system of
narration? What is the function of such alteration?
3.	Can you separate the narrative into various parts, isolating
one section as the central episode; another as the prelude, or prepa-
ration; another as the postlude, or explanation?
4.	What is the climax of the story? Explain why.
5.	Which portions present information necessary for the appre-
ciation of the action? How does the author arrange the presentation
of this information?
6.	We learn about the characters from what the author tells
about them directly, by what they do and say, and by what other
characters say about them. Explain how these methods are used
in the story to describe Carol Hunt.
7.	Speak of Carol Hunt’s theatrical career. What was the
reason of her sudden success and why didn’t she come off afterwards?
8.	What details does the author give us that reveal Carol’s i
character?
9.	What characteristic of Carol is the most prominent? Does
it explain the decision she took in Boston?
10.	Show how the author prepared the reader for the outcome
of the story.
11.	Does the narrator’s own personality enter into the account?
Does it play an important role in the story?
Tennessee Williams
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN GLASS
We lived in a third floor apartment on Maple Street
in Saint Louis,* on a block which also contained the
Ever-ready Garage, a Chinese laundry, and a bookie
shop disguised as a cigar store.
Mine was an anomalous character, one that appeared
to be slated * for radical change or disaster, for I was
a poet who had a job in a warehouse. As for my sister
Laura, she could be classified even less readily than I.
She made no positive motion toward the world but
stood at the edge of the water, so to speak, with feet
that anticipated too much cold to move. She’d never
have budged an inch, I’m pretty sure, if my mother
who was a relatively aggressive sort of woman had not
111
shoved her roughly forward, when Laura was twenty
years old, by enrolling her as a student in a nearby
business college. Out of her “magazine money” (she
sold subscriptions to women’s magazines), Mother had
paid my sister’s tuition for a term of six months. It
did not work out. Laura tried to memorize the type-
writer keyboard, she had a chart at home, she used to
sit silently in front of it for hours, staring at it while
she cleaned and polished her infinite number of little
glass ornaments. She did this every evening after dinner.
Mother would caution me to be very quiet. “Sister is
looking at her typewriter chart!” I felt somehow that
it would do her no good, and I was right. She would
seem to know the position of the keys until the weekly
speed-drill got under way, and then they would fly
from her mind like a bunch of startled birds.
At last she couldn’t bring herself to enter the school
any more. She kept this failure a secret for a while.
She left the house each morning as before and spent
six hours walking around the park. This was in February,
and all the walking out-doors regardless of weather
brought on influenza. She was in bed for a couple of
weeks with a curiously happy little smile on her face.
Of course Mother phoned the business college to let
them know she was ill. Whoever was talking on the
other end of the line had some trouble, it seems, in remem-
bering who Laura was, which annoyed my mother and
she spoke up pretty sharply. “Laura has been attending
that school of yours for two months, you certainly ought
to recognize her name!” Then came the stunning dis-
closure. The person sharply retorted, after a moment
or two, that now she did remember the Wingfield girl,
and that she had not been at the business college once
in about a month. Mother’s voice became strident.
Another person was brought to the phone to verify the
statement of the first. Mother hung up and went to
Laura’s bedroom where she lay with a tense and fright-
ened look in place of the faint little smile. Yes, admitted
my sister, what they said was true. “I couldn’t go any
longer, it scared me too much, it made me sick at the
stomach!”
After this fiasco, my sister stayed at home and kept
in her bedroom mostly. This was a narrow room that
112
had two windows on a dusky areaway between two wings
of the building. We called this areaway Death Valley
for a reason that seems worth telling. There were a great
many alley-cats * in the neighborhood and one par-
ticularly vicious dirty white Chow who stalked them
continually. In the open or on the fire-escapes they could
usually elude him but now and again he cleverly con-
trived to run some youngster among them into the cul-
de-sac of this narrow areaway at the far end of which,
directly beneath my sister’s bedroom windows, they
made the blinding discovery that what had appeared
Io be an avenue of escape was really a locked arena,
a gloomy vault of concrete and brick with walls too
high for any cat to spring, in which they must suddenly
turn to spit at their death until it was hurled upon them.
Hardly a week went by without a repetition of this
violent drama. The areaway had grown to be hateful
Io Laura because she could not look out on it without
i ecalling the screams and the snarls of killing. She kept
the shades drawn down, and as Mother would not permit
the use of electric current except when needed, her days
wore spent almost in perpetual twilight. There were
three pieces of dingy ivory furniture in the room, a bed,
a bureau, a chair. Over the bed was a remarkably bad
religious painting, a very effiminate head of Christ
with teardrops visible just below the eyes. The charm
of the room was produced by my sister’s collection of
glass. She loved colored glass and had covered the walls
with shelves of little glass articles, all of them light
ami delicate in color. These she washed and polished
with endless care. When you entered the room there
was always this soft, transparent radiance in it which
came from the glass absorbing whatever faint light came
through the shades on Death Valley. I have no idea
how many articles there were of this delicate glass.
There must have been hundreds of them. But Laura
could tell you exactly. She loved each one.
She lived in a world of glass and also a world of music.
The music came from a 1920 victrola * and a bunch
of records that dated from about the same period, pieces
such as Whispering or The Love Nest or Dardanella.
These records were souvenirs of our father, a man whom
wo barely remembered, whose name was spoken rarely.
б И. В. Ступников
113
Before his sudden and unexplained disappearance from
our lives, he had made this gift to the household, the
phonograph and the records, whose music remaified
as a sort of apology for him. Once in a while, on pay-
day at the warehouse, I would ))ririg home a new record.
But Laura seldom cared, for these new records, maybe
because they reminded her too much of the noisy trage-
dies in Death Valley or the speed-drills at the business
college. The tunes she loved were the ones she had always
heard. Often she sang to herself at night in her bedroom.
Her voice was thin, it usually wandered off-key. Yet
it had a curious childlike sweetness. At eight o’clock
in the evening I sat down to write in my own mouse-
trap of a room. Through the closed doors, through the
walls, I would hear my sister singing to herself, a piece
like Whispering or I Love You or Sleepy Time Gal, losing
the tune now and then but always preserving the minor
atmosphere of the music. I think that was why I always
wrote such strange and sorrowful poems in those
days. Because I had in my ears the wispy sound of my sister
serenading her pieces of colored glass, washing them
while she sang or merely looking down at them with
her vague blue eyes until the points of gem-like radiance
in them gently drew the aching particles of reality from
her mind and finally produced a state of hypnotic calm
in which she even stopped singing or washing the glass
and merely sat without motion until my mother knocked
at the door and warned her against the waste of electric
current.
I don’t believe that my sister was actually foolish.
I think the petals of her mind had simply closed through
fear, and it’s no telling how much they had closed upon
in the way of secret wisdom. She never talked very much,
not even to me, but once in a while she did pop out
with something that took you by surprise.
After work at the warehouse or after I’d finished
my writing in the evening, I’d drop in her room for a
little visit because she had a restful and soothing effect
on nerves that, were worn rather thin from trying to rido
two horses simultaneously in two opposite directions.*
I usually found her seated in the straight-back ivory
chair with a piece of glass cupped tenderly in her palm.
“What are you doing? Talking to it?” I asked.
114
“No,” she answered gravely, “I was just looking
nt it.” '	'
On the bureau were two pieces of fiction which she
had received as Christmas or birthday presents. One
was a novel called the Rose-Garden Husband by someone
whose name escapes me. The other was Freckles by Gene
Stratton Porter.*! never saw her reading the Rose-Garden
Husband, but the other book was one that she actually
lived with. It had probably never occurred to Laura
that a book was something you read straight through
and then laid aside as finished. The character Freckles,
a one-armed orphan youth who worked in a lumber-
camp, was someone that she invited into her bedroom
now and then for a friendly visit just as she did me.
When I came in and found this novel open upon her
lap, she would gravely remark that Freckles was having
some trouble with the foreman of the lumber-camp
or that he had just received an injury to his spipe- when
a tree fell on him. She frowned with genuine sorrow when
she reported these misadventures of her story-book
hero, possibly not recalling how successfully he came
through them all, that the injury to the spine fortuitously
resulted in the discovery of rich parents and that the
bad-tempered foreman had a heart of gold at the end
of the book. Freckles became involved in romance with
a girl he called The Angel, but my sister usually stopped
reading when this girl became too prominent in the
story. She closed the book or turned back to the lonelier
periods in the orphan’s story. I only remember her making
one reference to this heroine of the novel. ‘The Angel
is nice,” she said, “but seems to be kind of conceited
about her looks.”
Then one time at Christmas, while she was trimming
the artificial tree, she picked up the Star of Bethlehem *
that went on the topmost branch and held it gravely
toward the chandelier.
“Do stars have five points really?” she enquired.
This was the sort of thing you didn’t believe and
that made you stare at Laura with sorrow and confu-
sion.
“No,” I told her, seeing she really meant it, “they’re
round like the earth and most of them much bigger.”
6*	115
She was gently surprised by this new information.
She went to the window to look up at the sky which
was, as usual during Saint Louis winters, completely
shrouded by smoke.
“It’s hard to tell,” she said, and returned to the tree.
So time passed on till my sister was twenty-three.
Old enough to be married, but the fact of the matter
was she had never even had a date with a boy. I don’t
believe this seemed as awful to her as it did to
Mother.
At breakfast one morning Mother said to me, “Why
don’t you cultivate some nice young friends? How about
down at the warehouse? Aren’t there some young men
down there you could ask to dinner?”
This suggestion surprised me because there was sel-
dom quite enough food on her table to satisfy three
people. My mother was a terribly stringent housekeeper,
God knows we were poor enough in actuality, but my
mother had an almost obsessive dread of becoming
even poorer. A not unreasonable fear since the man
of the house was a poet who worked in a warehouse,
but one which I thought played too important a part
in all her calculations.
Almost immediately Mother explained herself.
“I think it might be nice,” she said, “for your sister.”
I brought Jim home to dinner a few nights later.
Jim was a big red-haired Irishman who had the scrubbed
and polished look of well-kept chinaware. His big square
hands seemed to have a direct and very innocent hunger
for touching his friends. He was always clapping them
on your arms or shoulders and they burned through
the cloth of your shirt like plates taken out of an oven.
He was the best-liked man in the warehouse and oddly
enough he was the only one that I was on good terms
with. He found me agreeably ridiculous I think. He
knew of my secret practice of retiring to a cabinet in the
lavatory and working on rhyme schemes when work
was slack in the warehouse, and of sneaking up on the
roof now and then to smoke my cigarette with a view
across the river at the undulant * open country of Illi-
nois. No doubt I was classified as screwy in Jim’s mind
116
ns much as in the others’, but while their attitude was
suspicious and hostile when they first knew me, Jim’s
was warmly tolerant from the beginning. He called me
Slim, and gradually his cordial acceptance drew the
others around, and while he remained the only one who
actually had anything to do with me, the others had
now begun to smile when they saw me as people smile
at an oddly fashioned dog who crosses their path at some
distance.
Nevertheless it took some courage for me to invite
Jim to dinner. I thought about it all week and delayed
the action till Friday noon, the last possible moment,
as the dinner was set for that evening.
“What are you doing tonight?” I finally asked
him.
“Not a God damn thing,” said Jim. “I had a date
but her Aunt took sick and she’s hauled her freight *
to Centralia!” *
“Well,” I said, “why don’t you come over for din-
ner?”
“Sure!” said Jim. He grinned with astonishing bright-
ness.
I went outside to phone the news to Mother.
Her voice that was never tired responded with an
energy that made the wires crackle.
“I suppose he’s Catholic?” she said.
“Yes,” I told her, remembering the tiny silver cross
on his freckled chest.
“Good!” she said. “I’ll bake a salmon loaf!”*
And so we rode home together in his jalopy.
I had a curious feeling of guilt and apprehension
as I led the lamb-like Irishman up three flights of cracked
marble steps to the door of Apartment F, which was
not thick enough to hold inside it the odor of baking
salmon.
Never having a key, I pressed the bell.
“Laura!” came Mother’s voice. “That’s Tom and
Mr Delaney! Let them in!”
There was a long, long pause.
“Laura?” she called again. “I’m busy in the kitchen,
you answer the door!”
Then at last I heard my sister’s footsteps. They went
right past the door at which we were standing and into
117
,the parlor. I heard the creaking noise of the phonograph
irank. Music commenced. One of the oldest records,
a march of Sousa’s,* put on to give her the courage to
let in a stranger.
The door came timidly open and there she stood
in a dress from Mother’s wardrobe, a black chiffon ankle-
length and high-heeled slippers on which she balanced
uncertainly like a tipsy crane of melancholy plumage.
Her eyes stared back at us with a glass brightness and
her delicate wing-like shoulders were hunched with
nervousness.
“Hello!” said Jim, before I could introduce him.
He stretched out his hand. My sister touched it only
for a second.
“Excuse me!” she whispered, and turned with a breath-
less rustle back to her bedroom door, the sanctuary
beyond it briefly revealing itself with the tinkling,
muted radiance of glass before the door closed rapidly
but gently on her wraithlike figure.
Jim seemed to be incapable of surprise.
“Your sister?” he asked.
“Yes, that was her,” I admitted. “She’s terribly shy
with strangers.”
“She looks like you,” said Jim, “except she’s
pretty.”
Laura did not reappear till called to dinner. Her
place was next to Jim at the drop-leaf table and all
through the meal her figure was slightly tilted away
from his. Her face was feverishly bright and one eyelid,
the one on the side toward Jim, had developed a nerv-
ous wink. Three times in the course of the dinner sho
dropped her fork on her plate with a terrible claUer
and she was continually raising the water-glass to he?
lips for hasty little gulps. Shp went on doing this even
after the water was gone from the glass. And her handl-
ing of the silver became more awkward and hurried
all the time.
I thought of nothing to say.
To Mother belonged the conversational honors, such
as they were. She asked the caller about his home and
family. She was delighted to learn that his father had
a business of his own, a retail shoe store somewhere
in Wyoming.* The news that he went to night-school
418
io study accounting was still more edifying.* . What'
was his heart set on beside the warehouse? Radio-engi-
neering? My, my, my! It was easy to see that here was
n very up-and-coming young man who was certainly
going to make his place in the world!
Then she started to talk about her children. Laura,
she said, was not cut out Tor business. She was domestic,
however, and making a home was really a girl’s best
bet.
Jim agreed with all this and seemed not to sense
the ghost of an implication. I suffered through it dumbly,
trying not to see Laura trembling more and more beneath
the incredible unawareness of Mother.
And bad as it .was, excruciating in fact, I thought
with dread of the moment when dinner was going to
be over, for then the diversion of food would be taken
away, we would have to go into the little steam-heated
parlor. I fancied the four of us having run out of talk,
even Mother’s seemingly endless store of questions
about Jim’s home and his job all used up finally —
the four of us, then, just sitting there in the parlor,
listening to the hiss of the radiator and nervously clearing
our throats in the kind of self-consciousness that gets
to be suffocating.
But when the blanc-mange * was finished, a miracle
happened.
Mother got up to clear the dishes away. Jim gave
me a clap on the shoulders and said, “Hey, Slim, let’s
go have a look at those old records in there!”
He sauntered carelessly into the front room and
flopped down on the floor beside the victrola. He began
sorting through the collection of worn-out records and
reading their titles aloud in a voice so hearty that it
shot like beams of sunlight through the vapors of self-
consciousness engulfing my sister and me.
He was sitting directly under the floor-lamp and
all at once my sister jumped up and said to him, “Oh —
you have freckles!”
Jim grinned. “Sure that’s what my folks call me —
Freckles!”
“Freckles?” Laura repeated. She looked toward me
as if for the confirmation of some too wonderful hope.
I looked away quickly, not knowing whether to feel
119 .
relieved or alarmed at the turn that things were
taking.
Jim had wound the victrola and put on Darda-
nella.
He grinned at Laura.
“How about you an* me cutting the rug * a little?”
“What?” said Laura breathlessly, smiling and smiling.
“Dance!” he said, drawing her into his arms.
As far as I knew she had never danced in her life.
But to my everlasting wonder she slipped quite naturally
into those huge arms of Jim’s, and they danced round
and around the small steam-heated parlor, bumping
against the sofa and chairs and laughing loudly and
happily together. Something opened up in my sister’s
face. To say it was love is not too hasty a judgment,
for after all he had freckles and that was what his folks
called him. Yes, he had undoubtedly assumed the iden-
tity — for all practical purposes — of the one-armed
orphan youth who lived in the Limberlost, that tall
and misty region to which she retreated whenever tho
walls of Apartment F became too close to endure.
Mother came back in with some lemonade. She stopped
short as she entered the portieres.
“Good heavens! Laura? Dancing?”
Her look was absurdly grateful as well as startled.
“But isn’t she stepping all over you, Mr Delaney?”
“What if she does?” said Jim, with bearish gallantry.
“I’m not made of eggs!”
“Well, well, well!” said Mother, senselessly bea-
ming.
“She’s light as a feather!” said Jim. “With a little
more practice she’d dance as good as Betty!”
There was a little pause of silence.
“Betty?” said Mother.
“The girl I go out with!” said Jim.
“Oh!” said Mother.
She set the pitcher of lemonade carefully down and
with her back to the caller and her eyes on me, she asked
him just how often he and the lucky young lady went
out together.
“Steady!” said Jim.
Mother’s look, remaining on my lace, turned into
a glare of fury.
120
“Tom didn’t mention that you went out with a
girl!”
“Nope,” said Jim. “I didn’t mean to let the cat out
of the bag.* The boys at the warehouse’ll kid me to death
when Slim gives the news away.”
He laughed heartily but his laughter dropped heavily
and awkwardly away as even his dull senses were gradu-
ally penetrated by the unpleasant sensation the news
of Betty had made.
“Are you thinking of getting married?” said Mother.
“First of next month!” he told her.
It took her several moments to pull herself together.
Then she said in a dismal tone, "How nice! If Tom had
only told us we could have asked you bothl”
Jim had picked up his coat.
“Must you be going?” said Mother.
“I hope it don’t seem like I’m rushing off,” said
Jim, “but Betty’s gonna get back on the eight o’clock
train an’ * by the time I get my jalopy down to the
Wabash depot — ”
“Oh, then, we mustn’t keep you.”
Soon as he’d left, we all sat down, looking dazed.
Laura was the first to speak.
“Wasn’t he nice?” she said. “And all those freckles!”
“Yes,” said Mother. Then she turned on me.
“You didn’t mention that he was engaged to be mar-
ried!”
“Well, how did I know that he was engaged to be
married?”
“I thought you called him your best friend down
at the warehouse?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know he was going to be married!”
“How peculiar!” said Mother. “How very peculiar!"
“No,” said Laura gently, getting up from the sofa.
“There’s nothing peculiar about it.”
She picked up one of the records and blew on its
surface a little as if it were dusty, then set it softly back
down.
“People in love,” she said, “take everything for grant-
ed.”
What did she mean by that? I never knew.
She slipped quietly back to her room and closed the
door.
121
Not very long after that I lost my job at the ware- '
house. .1 was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe- ..
box. I left Saint Louis and took to moving around.
 The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that
were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.
My nature changed. I grew to be firm and sufficient.
In five years* time I had nearly forgotten home.
I had to forget it, I couldn’t carry it with me. But once '
in a while, usually in a strange town before I have found \
companions, the shell of deliberate hardness is broken
through. A door comes softly and irresistibly open.
I hear the tired old music my unknown father left in
the place he abandoned as faithlessly as I. I see the
faint and sorrowful radiance of the glass, hundreds
of little transparent pieces of it in very delicate colors.
1 hold my breath, for if my sister’s face appears among
them — the night is hers!
V:
<
lay
йю
№
FOR DISCUSSION

1.	How is your interest in the story influenced by the fact
that it is told in the first person?
2.	Who tells the story? What idea do you have of the teller’s
personality? What is his attitude toward Laura?
3.	What impressions of Laura does the author manage to
create? Why are they so sorrowful? Point out the details that contrib-
ute to these impressions. Do the details seem random, or do they
seem organized around selected topics (e. g., environment, family
associations, etc.)?
4.	Explain what aspects of Laura’s personality might make
it difficult tor her to adjust to the world. Why did she live in the
world invented by herself?
5.	Was Jim’s visit important for Laura? In what way could
it influence her?
122
6.	Discuss the importance of setting to this story. Show tho
ways in which the setting is designed to carry but the author’s'
intentions with regard to the plot and the characters of the story.
Show why a change in the setting would seriously impair or alter
tho story.
7.	Which of the descriptive details have as primary purpose
tho creation of a visualized setting? Which produce an emotional
reaction?
8.	Can the description be focused around a single general
statement? If not, what are the individual ideas the author wants to
suggest to the reader?
9.	Is a psycological tension.that focuses the reader’s interest
created? At which point is it at its height?
10.	Speak of Laura’s mother.
11.	What is the attitude of the author toward the characters
of the story?
12.	Discuss the theme of the story.

Muriel Spark
THE BLACK MADONNA
When the Black Madonna was installed in the Church
of the Sacred Heart the Bishop himself came to conse-
crate it. His long purple train was upheld by the two
curliest of the choir. The day was favoured suddenly with
thin October sunlight as he crossed the courtyard from
the presbytery to the church, as the procession followed
him chanting the Litany of the Saints: five priests in
vestments of white heavy silk interwoven with glinting
threads, four lay officials with straight red robes, then
the confraternities and the tangled columns of the Moth-
ers’ Union.
The new town of Whitney Clay had a large propor-
tion of Roman Catholics, especially among the nurses
124
at the new hospital; and at the paper mills, too, there
were many Catholics, drawn inland from Liverpool
hy the new housing estate; likewise, with the canning
factories.
The Black Madonna had been given to the church
by a recent convert. It was carved out of bog oak.
“They found the wood in the bog. Had been there
hundreds of years. They sent for the sculptor right away
by phone. He went over to Ireland and carved it there
and then. You see, he had to do it while it was still
wet.”
“Looks a bit like contemporary art.”
“Nah,* that’s not contemporary art, it’s old-fashioned.
If you’d ever seen contemporary work you’d know it was
old-fashioned.”
“Looks like contemp — ”
“It’s old-fashioned. Else how’d it get sanctioned
to be put up?”
“It’s not so nice as the Immaculate Conception *
at Lourdes.* That lifts you up.”
Everyone got used, eventually, to the Black Madonna
with her square hands and straight carved draperies.
There was a movement to dress it up in vestments, or
at least a lace veil.
“She looks a bit gloomy, Father, don’t you think?”
“No,” said the priest, “I think it looks fine. If you
start dressing it up in cloth you’ll spoil the line.”
. Sometimes people came from London especially
to see the Black Madonna, and these were not Catho-
lics; they were, said the priest, probably no religion
at all, poor souls, though gifted with faculties. They
came, as if to a museum, to see the line of the Black
Madonna which must not be spoiled by vestments.
The new town of Whitney Clay had swallowed
up the old village. One or two cottages with double
dormer windows, an inn called The Tyger, a Methodist
chapel, and three small shops represented the village;
the three shops were already threatened by the Council;
the Methodists were fighting to keep their chapel. Only
the double dormer cottages and the inn were protected
by the Nation and so had to be suffered by the Town
Planning Committee.
125
и
.'•5
The town was laid out like geometry in squares,
arcs (to allow for the by-pass), and isosceles triangles, ”
breaking off, at one point, to sliirt the old village which,
from the aerial view, looked like a merry doodle * on
the page.
Manders Road was. one side of a parallelogram of ,
green-bordered streets. It was named after one of the
founders of the canning concern,.Manders’ Figs in Syrup,
and it comprised a row of shops and a long high block ;
of flats named Cripps House after the late Sir Stafford ’
Cripps who had laid the foundation stone. In flat twenty- j
two on the fifth floor of Cripps House lived Raymond
and Lou Parker. Raymond Parker was a foreman at the .:
motor works, and was on the management committee.
He had been married for fifteen years to Lou, who was
thirty-seven at the time that the miraculous powers
of the Black Madonna came to be talked of.
Of the twenty-five couples who live in Cripps House
five were Catholics. All, except Raymond and Lou
Parker, had children. A sixth family had recently been ;
moved by the Council into one of the six-roomed houses '•
because of the seven children besides the grandfather.
Raymond and Lou were counted lucky to have ob- -i
tained their three-roomed flat although they had no chil-
dren. People with children had priority; but their name
had been on the waiting list for years, and some said
Raymond had a pull with one of the Councillors who
was a director of the motor works.
The Parkers were among the few tenants of Cripps
House who owned a motor-car. They did not, like most
of their neighbours, have a television receiver, from
being childless they had been able to afford to expand
themselves in the way of taste, so that their habits
differed slightly and their amusements considerably,
from those of their neighbours. The Parkers went to the 1
pictures only when the Observer * had praised the film, <
they considered television not their sort of thing; they
adhered to their religion; they voted Labour; they be-
lieved that the twentieth century was the best so far; they
assented to the doctrine of original sin; they frequently 
applied the word “Victorian” * to ideas and people they
did not like — for instance, when a local Town Coun- !
cillor resigned his office Raymond said, “He had to go. 3
126

lie’s Victorian. And far too young for the job”; and
Lou said Jane Austen’s* books were too. Victorian;
and anyone who opposed the abolition of capital punish-
ment was Victorian. Raymond took the Reader’s Digest,*
a magazine called Motoring and the Catholic Herald.
Lou took the Queen, Woman’s Own,* and Life* Their
daily paper was the News Chronicle.* They read two books
apiece each week. Raymond preferred travel books;
Lou liked novels.
For the first five years of their married life they
had been worried about not having children. Both had
submitted themselves to medical tests as a result of
which Lou had a course of injections. These were unsuc-
cessful. It had been a disappointment since both came
from large sprawling. Catholic families. None of their
married brothers and sisters had less than three chil-
dren. One of Lou’s sisters, now widowed, had eight; they
sent her a pound a week.
Their flat in Cripps House had three rooms and
a kitchen. All round them their neighbours were saving
up to buy houses. A council flat, once obtained, was
a mere platform in space to further the progress of the
rocket. This ambition was not shared by Raymond
and Lou; they were not only content, they were de-
lighted, with these civic * chambers, and indeed took
something of an aristocratic view of them, not without
a self-conscious feeling of being free, in this particular,
from the prejudices of that middle class, to which they
as good as belonged. “One day,” said Lou, “it will be
the thing to live in a council flat.”
They were eclectic as to their friends. Here, it is
true, they differed slightly from each other. Raymond
was for inviting the Ackleys to meet the Farrells. Mr
Ackley was an accountant at the Electricity Board.
Mr and Mrs Farrell were respectively a sorter at Manders*
Figs in Syrup and an usherette at the Odeon.*
“After all,” argued Raymond, “they’re all Catholics.”
“Ah well,” said Lou, “but now, their interests are
different. The Farrells wouldn’t know what the Ackleys
were talking about. The Ackleys like politics.The Far-
rells like to tell jokes. I’m not a snob, only sensible.”
“Oh, please yourself.” For no one could call Lou
a snob, and everyone knew she was sensible.
12’
Their choice of acquaintance was wide by reason
of their active church membership: that is to say, they
were members of various guilds and confraternities.
Raymond was a sideman, and he also organized the
weekly football lottery in aid of the Church Decoration
Fund. Lou felt rather out of things when the Mothers'
Union met and had special Masses, for the Mothers'
Union was the only group she did not qualify for.
Having been a nurse before her marriage she was, how-
ever, a member of the Nurses’ Guild.
Thus, most of their Catholic friends came from dif-
ferent departments of life. Others, connected with the
motor works where Raymond was a foreman, were of
different social grades to which Lou was more alive
than Raymond. He let her have her way, as a rule,
when it came to a question of which would mix with
which.
A dozen Jamaicans were taken on at the motor works.
Two came into Raymond’s department. He invited
them to the flat one evening to have coffee. They were
unmarried, very polite and black. The quiet one was
called Henry Pierce and the talkative one, Oxford St
John. Lou, to Raymond’s surprise and pleasure, decided
that all their acquaintance, from top to bottom, must
meet Henry and Oxford. All along he had known she
was not a snob, only sensible, but he had rather feared
she would consider the mixing of their new black and
their old white friends not sensible.
“I’m glad you like Henry and Oxford,” he said.
“I’m glad we’re able to introduce them to so many people.”
For the dark pair had, within a month, spent nine eve-
nings at Cripps House; they had met accountants, teachers,
packers, and sorters. Only Tina Farrell, the usherette,
had not seemed to understand the quality of these occa-
sions: “Quite nice chaps, them darkies, when you get
to know them.”
“You mean Jamaicans,” said Lou. “Why shouldn’t
they be nice? They’re no different from anyone else.”
“Yes , yes, that’s what I mean,” said Tina.
“We’re all equal,” stated Lou. “Don’t forget there
are black Bishops.”
“Jesus, I never said we were the equal of a Bishop,”
Tina said, very bewildered.
128
“Well, don’t call them darkies."
Sometimes, on summer Sunday afternoons Raymond
and Lou took their friends for a run in their car, ending
up at a riverside road-house. The first time they turned
up with Oxford and Henry they felt defiant; but there
were no objections, there was no trouble at all. Soon
the dark pair ceased to be a novelty. Oxford St John
took up with a pretty red-haired book-keeper, and Henry
Pierce, missing his companion, spent more of his time
at the Parkers’ flat. Lou and Raymond had planned
lo spend their two weeks’ summer holiday in London.
“Poor Henry,” said Lou. “He’ll miss us.”
Once you brought him out he was not so quiet as
you thought at first. Henry was twenty-four, desirous
of knowledge in all fields, shining very much in eyes,
skin, teeth, which made him seen all the more eager.
He called out the maternal in Lou, and to some extent
the avuncular in Raymond. Lou used to love him when
he read out lines from his favourite poems which he had
copied into an exercise book.
Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,
Sport that...*
Lou would interrupt: “You should say jest, jollity —
not yest, yollity.”
“Jest,” he said carefully. “And laughter holding
both his sides,” he continued. “Laughter — hear that,
Lou? — laughter. That’s what the human race was made
for. Those folks that go round gloomy, Lou, they...”
Lou loved this talk. Raymond puffed his pipe benign-
ly. After Henry had gone Raymond would say what
a pity it was such an intelligent young fellow had
lapsed. For Henry had been brought up in a Roman
Catholic mission. He had, however, abandoned religion.
He was fond of saying, “The superstition of today is the
science of yesterday.”
“I can’t allow,” Raymond would say, “that the
Catholic Faith is superstition. I can’t allow that.”
“He’ll return to the Church one day” — this .was
Lou’s contribution, whether Henry was present or not.
If she said it in front of Henry he would give her an angry
look. These were the only occasions when Henry lost
his cheerfulness and grew quiet again.
129
Raymond and Lou prayed for Henry, that he might
regain his faith. Lou said her rosary three times a week
before the Black Madonna.
“He’ll miss us when we go on our holidays.”
Raymond telephoned to the hotel in London. “Have
you a single room for a young gentleman accompanying
Mr and Mrs Parker?” He added, “a coloured gentleman.”
To his pleasure a room was available, and to his relief
there was no objection to Henry’s colour.
They enjoyed their London holiday, but it was some-
what marred by a visit to that widowed sister of Lou’s
to whom she allowed a pound a week towards the rearing
of her eight children. Lou had not seen her sister Elizabeth
for nine years.
They went to her one day towards the end of their
holiday. Henry sat at the back of the car beside a large
suitcase stuffed with old clothes for Elizabeth. Raymond
at the wheel kept saying, “Poor Elizabeth — eight
kids,” which irritated Lou, though she kept her peace.
Outside the Underground station at Victoria Park,*
where they stopped to ask the way, Lou felt a strange
sense of panic. Elizabeth lived in a very downward quar-
ter of Bethnal Green, and in the past nine years since
'she had seen her Lou’s memory of the shabby ground-
floor rooms with their peeling walls and bare boards, had
made a kinder nest for itself. Sending off the postal order
to her sister each week she had gradually come to picture
the habitation at Bethnal Green in an almost monastic
light; it would be bare but well-scrubbed, spotless, and
shining with Brasso* and holy poverty. The floor
boards gleamed. Elizabeth was grey-haired, lined, but
neat. The children were well behaved, sitting down be-
times to their broth in two rows along an almost refectory
table. It was not till they had reached Victoria Park that
Lou felt the full force of the fact that everything would
be different from what she had imagined. “It may have
gone down since I was last there,” she said to Raymond
who had never visited Elizabeth before.
“What’s gone down?”
“Poor Elizabeth’s place.”
Lou had not taken much notice of Elizabeth’s dull
little monthly letters, almost illiterate, for Elizabeth,
as she herself always said, was not much of a scholar.
130
James is at another job I hope thats the finish
of tho bother I had my blood presiuro there was
a Health visitor very nice. Also the assistance
they sent my Dinner all the time and for the kids
at home they call it meals on Wheels. I pray to
the Almighty that James is well out of his bother
he never lets on at sixteen their all the same never
open his mouth but Gods eyes are not shut. Thanks
for P. O. you will be rewarded your affect sister
Elizabeth.
Lou tried to piece together in her mind the gist of
nine years’ such letters. James was the eldest; she supposed
he had been in trouble.
“I ought to have asked Elizabeth about young James,”
said Lou. “She wrote to me last year that he was in a both-
er, there was talk of him being sent away, but I didn’t
take it in at the time, I was busy.”
“You can't take everything on your shoulders,” said
Raymond. “You do very well by Elizabeth.” They had
pulled up outside the house where Elizabeth lived on
the ground floor. Lou looked at the chipped paint, the
dirty windows, and torn grey-white curtains and was
reminded with startling clarity of her hopeless child-
hood in Liverpool from which, miraculously, hope has
lifted her, and had come true, for the nuns had got her
that job; and she had trained as a nurse among white-
painted beds, and white shining walls, and tiles, hot
water everywhere, and Dettol * without stint. When
she had first married she had wanted all white-painted
furniture that you could wash and liberate from germs;
but Raymond had been for oak, he did not understand
the pleasure of hygiene and new enamel paint, for his
upbringing had been orderly, he had been accustomed
to a lounge suite and autumn tints in the front room all
his life. And now Lou stood and looked at the outside
of Elizabeth’s place and felt she had gone right
back.
On the way back to the hotel Lou chattered with re-
lief that it was over. “Poor Elizabeth, she hasn’t had much
of a chance. I liked little Francis, what did you think
of little Francis, Ray?”
131
Raymond did not like being called Ray, but he made
no objection for he knew that Lou had been under a strain.
Elizabeth had not been very pleasant. She had expressed
admiration for Lou’s hat, bag, gloves, and shoes which
were all navy blue, but she had used an accusing tone.
The house had been smelly and dirty. “I’ll show you
round,” Elizabeth had said in a tone of mock refinement,
and they were forced to push through a dark narrow passage
behind her skinny form till they came to the big room where
the children slept. A row of old iron beds each with
a tumble of dark blanket rugs, no sheets. Raymond was
indignant at the sight and hoped that Lou was not feeling
upset. He knew very well Elizabeth had a decent living
income from a number of public sources, and was simply
a slut, one of those who would not help themselves.
“Ever thought of taking a job, Elizabeth?” he had
said, and immediately realized his stupidity. But Eliza-
beth took her advantage. “What d’you mean? I'm not
going to leave my kids in no nursery. I'm not going to
send them to no home. What kids need these days is
a good home-life and that’s what they get.” And she
added, “God’s eyes are not shut,” in a tone which was
meant for him, Raymond, to get at him for doing well
ia life.
Raymond distributed half-crowns to the younger
children and deposited on the table half-crowns for those
who were out playing in the street.
“Goin’ already?” said Elizabeth in her tone of reproach.
But she kept eyeing Henry with interest, and the re-
proachful tone was more or less a routine affair.
“You from the States?” Elizabeth said to Henry.
Henry sat on the edge of his sticky chair and answered,
no, from Jamaica, while Raymond winked at him to
cheer him.
“During the war there was a lot of boys like you from
the States,” Elizabeth said, giving him a sideways look.
Henry held out his hand to the second youngest child,
a girl of seven, and said, “Come talk to me.”
The child said nothing, only dipped into the box
of sweets which Lou had brought.
“Come talk,” said Henry.
Elizabeth laughed. “If she does talk you’ll be sorry
you ever asked. She’s got a tongue in her head,* that one.
132
Youshould hear her checking up to the teachers.” Eliza-
beth’s bones jerked with laughter among her loose
clothes. There was a lopsided double bed in the corner, and
beside it a table cluttered with mugs, tins, a comb and
brush, a number of hair curlers, a framed photograph
of the Sacred Heart, and also Raymond noticed what
1 he thought erroneously to be a box of contraceptives.
He decided to say nothing to Lou about this; he was
quite sure she must have observed other things which
he had not; possibly things of a more distressing nature.
Lou’s chatter on the way back to the hotel had a
touch of hysteria. “Raymond, dear,” she said in her most
chirpy West End voice, “I simply had to give the poor
dear all my next week’s housekeeping money. We shall
have to starve, darling, when we get home. That’s simply
what we shall have to do.”
“О. K-,” said Raymond.
“I ask you,” Lou shrieked, “what else could I do,
what could I do?”
“Nothing at all,” said Raymond, “but what you’ve
done.”
“My own sister, my dear,” said Lou; “and did you see
the way she had her hair bleached? — All streaky, and
she used to have a lovely head of hair.”
“I wonder if she tries to raise herself?" said Raymond.
“With all those children she could surely get better accom-
modation if only she — ”
“That sort,” said Henry, leaning forward from the
back of the car, “never moves. It’s the slum mentality,
man. Take some folks I’ve seen back home —”
“There’s no comparison,” Lou snapped suddenly,
“this is quite a different case.”
Raymond glanced at her in surprise; Henry sat back,
offended. Lou was thinking wildly, what a cheek him
talking like a snob. At least Elizabeth’s white.
Their prayers for the return of faith to Henry Pierce
were so far answered in that he took a tubercular turn
which was followed by a religious one. He was sent off
io a sanatorium in Wales with a promise from Lou and
Raymond to visit him before Christmas. Meantime, they
applied themselves to Our Lady for the restoration of
Henry’s health.
133
Cxford St John, whose love affair with the red-haired
girl had come to grief, now frequented their flat, but
he could never quite replace Henry in their affections.
Oxford was older and less refined than Henry. He would
stand.in front of the glass in their kitchen and tell him-
self: “Man, you just a big black bugger.” He kept referring
to himself as black, which of course he was, Lou thought,
but it was not the thing to say. He stood in the doorway
with his arms and smile thrown wide: “I am black but
comely, О ye daughters of Jerusalem." And once, when
Raymond was out, Oxford brought the conversation round
to that question of being black all over, which made Lou
very uncomfortable and she kept looking at the clock
and dropped stitches in her knitting.
Three times a week when she went to the black Our
Lady with her rosary to ask for the health of Henry Pierce,
she asked also that Oxford St John would get another
job in another town, for she did not like to make objections,
telling her feelings to Raymond; there were no objections
to make that you could put your finger on. She could
not very well complain that Oxford was common; Ray-
mond despised snobbery, and so did she, it was a very
delicate question. She was amazed when, within three
weeks, Oxford announced that he was thinking of looking
for a job in Manchester.
Lou said to Raymond, “Do you know, there’s something
in what they say about the bog-oak statue in the church.”
“There may be,” said Raymond. “People say so.”
Lou could not tell him how she had petitioned the
removal of Oxford St John. But when she got a letter
from Henry Pierce to say ho was improving, she told
Raymond, “You see, we asked for Henry to get back the
Faith, and so he did. Now we ask for his recovery and
he’s improving.”
“He’s having good treatment at the sanatorium,”
Raymond said. But he added, “Of course we’ll have to
keep up the prayers.” He himself, though not a rosary
man, knelt before the Black Madonna every Saturday
evening after Benediction to pray for Henry Pierce.
Whenever they saw Oxford he was talking of leaving
Whitney Clay. Raymond said, “He’s making a big mistake
going to Manchester. A big place can be very lonely.
I hope he’ll change’his mind.”
134
“He won’t,” said Lou, so impressed was she now by
the powers of the Black Madonna. She was good and tired*
of Oxford St John with his feet up on her cushions, and
calling himself a nigger.
“We’ll miss him,” said Raymond, “he’s such a cheery
big soul.”
“We will,” said Lou. She was reading the parish maga-
zine, which she seldom did, although she was one of the
voluntary workers who sent them out, addressing hun-
dreds of wrappers every month. She had vaguely noticed,
in previous numbers, various references to the Black
Madonna, how she had granted this or that favour. Lou
had heard that people sometimes came from neighbouring
parishes to pray at the Church of the Sacred Heart be-
cause of the statue. Some said they came from all over
England, but whether this was to admire the art-work
or to pray, Lou was not sure. She gave her attention to
the article in the parish magazine:
While not wishing to make excessive claims...
many prayers answered and requests granted to
the Faithful in an exceptional way...two remarkable
cures effected, but medical evidence is, of course,
still in reserve, a certain lapse of time being
necessary to ascertain permanency of cure. The
first of these cases was a child of twelve suffering
from leukaemia... The second... While not desir-
ing to create a cultus where none is due, we must
remember it is always our duty to honour Our
Blessed Lady, the dispenser of all graces, to whom
we owe...
Another aspect of the information received by
the Father Rector concerning our “Black Madonna”
is one pertaining to childless couples of which
three cases have come to his notice. In each case
the couple claim to have offered constant devotion
to the “Black Madonna”, and in two of the cases
specific requests were made for the favour of a
child. In all cases the prayers were answered. The
proud parents... It should be the loving duty of
every parishioner to make a special thanksgiving...
• The Father Rector will be grateful for any further
information...
135
“Look, Raymond,” said Lou. “Read this.”
They decided to put in for a baby, to the Black Ma-
donna.
The following Saturday, when they drove to the church
for Benediction, Lou jangled her rosary. Raymond pulled
up outside the church. “Look here, Lou,” he said, “do
you want a baby in any case?” — for he partly thought
she was only putting the Black Madonna to the test —
“Do you want a child, after all these years?”
This was a new thought to Lou. She considered her
neat flat and tidy routine, the entertaining with her good
coffee cups, the weekly papers and the library books, the
tastes which they would not have been able to cultivate
had they had a family of children. She thought of her
nice young looks which everyone envied, and her freedom
of movement.
“Perhaps we should try,” she said. “God won’t give
us a child if we aren’t meant to have one.”
“We have to make some decisions for ourselves,” he
said. “And to tell you the truth if you don’t want a child,
I don’t.”
“There’s no harm in praying for one,” she said.
“You have to be careful what you pray for,” he said.
“You mustn’t tempt Providence.”
She thought of her relatives, and Raymond’s, all
married with children. She thought of her sister Eliza-
beth with her eight, and remembered that one who cheeked
up to the teachers, so pretty and sulky and shabby, and
she remembered the fat baby Francis sucking his dummy
and clutching Elizabeth’s bony neck.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a baby,” said
Lou.
Oxford St John departed at the end of the month.
He promised to write, but they were not surprised when
weeks passed and they had no word. “I don’t suppose
we shall ever hear from him again,” said Lou. Raymond
thought he detected satisfaction in her voice, and would
have thought she was getting snobbish as women do as
they get older, losing sight of their ideals, had she not
gone on to speak of Henry Pierce. Henry had written
to say he was nearly cured, but had been advised to return
to the West Indies.
136
...
“We must go and see him,” said Lou. “We promised.
What about the Sunday after next?”
“О. K.,” said Raymond.
It was the Saturday before that Sunday when Lou
had her first sick turn. She struggled out of bed to attend
Benediction, but had to leave suddenly during the serv-
ice and was sick behind the church in the presbytery
yard. Raymond took her home, though she protested
against cutting out her rosary to the Black Madonna.
“After only six weeks!” she said, and she could hardly
tell whether her sickness was due to excitement or nature.
"Only six weeks ago,” she said — and her voice had a touch
of its old Liverpool — “did we go to that Black Madonna
and the prayer’s answered, see.”
Raymond looked at her in awe as he held the bowl
for her sickness. “Are you sure?” he said.
She was well enough next day to go to visit Henry
in the sanatorium. He was fatter and, she thought, a
little coarser; and tough in his manner, as if once having
been nearly disembodied he was not going to let it hap-
pen again. He was leaving the country very soon. He
promised to come and see them before he left. Lou
barely skimmed through his next letter before handing it
over to Raymond.
Their visitors, now, were ordinary white ones. “Not
so colourful,” Raymond said, “as Henry and Oxford
were.” Then he looked embarrassed lest he should seem
to be making a joke about the word coloured.
“Do you miss the niggers?” said Tina Farrell, and Lou
forgot to correct her.
Lou gave up most of her church work in order to sew
and knit for the baby. Raymond gave up the Reader’s
Digest. He applied for promotion and got it; he became
a departmental manager. The flat was now a waiting-
room for next summer, after the baby was born, when
they would put down the money for a house. They hoped
for one of the new houses on a building site on the out-
skirts of the town.
“We shall need a garden,” Lou explained to her friends.
“I’ll join the Mothers' Union,” she thought. Meantime
the spare bedroom was turned into a nursery. Raymond
made a cot, regardless that some of the neighbours com-
plained of the hammering. Lou prepared a cradle,
137
trimmed it with frills. She wrote to her relatives; she wrote jl
to Elizabeth, sent her five pounds, and gave notice that j
there would be no further weekly payments, seeing that 1
they would now need every penny.	j
“She doesn’t require it, anyway,” said Raymond.™
“The Welfare State looks after people like Elizabeth.”'1
And he told Lou about the contraceptives he thought.;!
he had seen on the table by the double bed. Lou became ч
very excited about this. “How did you know they were J
contraceptives? What did they look like? Why didn’t ',
you tell me before? What a cheek, calling herself a Cathd-
lie, do you think she has a man, then?”
Raymond was sorry he had mentioned the subject. .1
“Don’t worry, dear, don’t upset yourself, dear.” '’"Д
“And she told me she goes to Mass every Sunday, and '1
all the kids go excepting James. No wonder he’s got into d
trouble with an example like that. I might have known, .1
with her peroxide hair. A pound a week I’ve been sending |
up to now, that’s fifty-two pounds a year. I would never 3
have done it, calling herself a Catholic with birth control ]
by her bedside.”
“Don’t upset yourself, dear.”
Lou prayed to the Black Madonna three times a week  
for a safe delivery and a healthy child. She gave her . Я
story to the Father Rector who announced it in the next Я
parish magazine. “Another case has come to light of the a
kindly favour of our ‘Black Madonna’ towards a child- Д
less couple...” Lou recited her rosary before the statue I
until it was difficult for her to kneel, and, when she stood, 1
could not see her feet. The Mother of God with her black ']
bog-oaken drapery, her high black cheekbones and square
hands looked more virginal than ever to Lou as she stood 1
counting her beads in front of her stomach.
She said to Raymond, “If it’s a girl we must have Mary Я
as one of the names. But not the first name, it’s too or- ’/a
di nary.”
“Please yourself, dear,” said Raymond. The doctor Я
had told him it might be a difficult birth.
“Thomas, if it’s a boy,” she said, “after my uncle. л Я
But if it’s a girl I’d like something fancy for a first £1
name.”
He thought, Lou’s slipping, she didn’t used to say i
that word, fancy.
138
“What about Dawn?” she said. “I like the sound of
Dawn. Then Mary for a second name. Dawn Mary Parker,
it sounds sweet.”
“Dawn..That’s not a Christian name,” he said. Then
he told her, “Just as you please, dear.”
“Or Thomas Parker,” she said.
She had decided to go into the maternity wing of the
hospital like everyone else. But near the time she let
Raymond change her mind, since he kept saying: '“At
your age, dear, it might be more difficult than for the
younger women. Better book a private ward, we’ll manage
the expense.”
In fact, it was a very easy birth, a girl. Raymond was
allowed in to see Lou in. the late afternoon. She was half
asleep. “The nurse will take you to see the baby in the
nursery ward,” she told him. “She’s lovely, but terribly
red.”
“They’re always red at birth,” said Raymond.
He met the nurse in the corridor. “Any chance of
seeing the baby? My wife said...”
She looked flustered. “I’ll get the Sister,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t want to give any trouble, only my wife
said—”
“That’s all right. Wait here, Mr Parker.”
The Sister appeared, a tall grave woman. Raymond
thought her to be short-sighted for she seemed to look at
him fairly closely before she hade him follow her. .. - 1
The baby was round and very red, with dark curly hair.
“Fancy her having hair. I thought they were born
bald/’ said Raymond.
“They sometimes have hair at birth,” said the Sister.
“She’s very red in colour.” Raymond began comparing
his child with those in the other cots. “Far more so than
the others.”
“Oh, that will wear off.”
Next day he found Lou in a half-stupor. She had been
given a strong sedative following an attack of screaming
hysteria. He sat by her bed, bewildered. Presently a nurse
beckoned him from the door. “Will you have a word with
Matron?”
“Your wife is upset about her baby,” said the matron.
“You see, the colour. She’s a beautiful baby, perfect. It’s
a question of the colour.”
139
“I noticed the baby was red,” said Raymond, “but the
nurse said — ”
“Oh, the red will go. It changes, you know. But the
baby will certainly be brown, if not indeed black, as indeed
we think she will be. A beautiful healthy child.”
“Black?” said Raymond.
“Yes, indeed we think so, indeed I must say, certainly
so,” said the matron. “We did not expect your wife to take
it so badly when we told her. We’ve had plenty of dark
babies here, but most of the mothers expect it.”
“There must be a mix-up. You must have mixed up
the babies,” said Raymond.
“There’s no question of mix-up,” said the matron
sharply. “We’ll soon settle that. We’ve had some of
that before. ”
“But neither of us are dark,” said Raymond. “You’ve
seen my wife. You see me —”
“That’s something you must work out for yourselves.
I’d have a word with the doctor if I were you. But what-
ever conclusion you come to, please don’t upset your wife
at this stage. She has already refused to feed the child,
says it isn’t hers, which is ridiculous.”
“Was it Oxford St John?” said Raymond.
“Raymond, the doctor told you not to come here
upsetting me. I’m feeling terrible.”
“Was it Oxford St John?”
“Clear out of here, you swine, saying things like that.”
He demanded to be taken to see the baby, as he had
done every day for a week. The nurses were gathered round
it, neglecting the squalling whites in the other cots for
the sight of their darling black. She was indeed quite
black, with a woolly crop and tiny negroid nostrils. She
had been baptized that morning, though not in her par-
ents’ presence. One of the nurses had stood as godmother.
The nurses dispersed in a flurry as Raymond ap-
proached. He looked hard at the baby. It looked back with
its black button eyes. He saw the name-tab round its neck.
“Dawn Mary Parker.”
He got hold of a nurse in the corridor. Look here,
you just take that name Parker off that child’s neck.
The name’s not Parker, it isn’t my child.”
The nurse said, “Get away, we’re busy.”
140
“There’s just a chance," said the doctor to Raymond,
"that if there’s ever been black blood in your family or
your wife’s, it’s coming out now. It’s a very long chance.
I’ve never known it happen in my experience, but I’ve
heard of cases, I could read them up.”
“There’s nothing like that in my family,” said Ray-
mond. He thought of Lou, the obscure Liverpool ante-
cedents. The parents had died before he had met
Lou.
“It could be several generations back,” said the doc-
tor.
Raymond went home, avoiding the neighbours who
would stop him to inquire after Lou. He rather regretted
smashing up the cot in his first fury. That was something
low coming out in him. But again, when he thought
of the tiny black hands of the baby with their pink finger-
nails he did not regret smashing the cot.
He was successful in tracing the whereabouts of
Oxford St John. Even before he heard the result
of Oxford’s blood test he said to Lou, “Write and ask
your relations if there’s been any black blood in the
family.”
“Write and ask yours," she said.
She refused to look at the black baby. The nurses
fussed round it all day, and came to report its progress
to Lou.
“Pull yourself together, Mrs Parker, she’s a lovely
child.”
“You must care for your infant,” said the priest.
“You don’t know what I’m suffering,” Lou said.
“In the name of God,” said the priest, “if you’re a
Catholic Christian you’ve got to expect to suffer.” •
“I can’t go against my nature,” said Lou. “I can’t be
expected to —”
Raymond said to her one day in the following week,
“The blood tests are all right, the doctor says.”
“What do you mean, all right?”
“Oxford’s blood and the baby’s don’t tally, and —”
“Oh, shut up,” she said. “The baby’s black and your
blood tests can’t make it white.”
“No,” he said. He had fallen out with his mother,
through his inquiries whether there had been coloured
blood in his family. “The doctor says/’ he said, “that
141
-р-л; -л t. -	_ ;	-	* Л®
these black mixtures sometimes occur in seaport towns. JI
It might have been generations back.”
“One thing,” said Lou. “I’m not going to take that
child back to the flat.”
“You’ll have to,” he said.
Elizabeth wrote her a letter which Raymond inter?,!
cepted:
“Dear Lou Raymond is asking if we have any blacks I
in the family well thats funny you have a coloured God '
is not asleep. There was that Flinn cousin Tommy nt
Liverpool he was very dark they put it down to the past :
a nigro off a ship that would be before our late Mothers®
Time God rest her soul she would turn in her grave you Д
shoud have kept up your bit to me whats a pound a Week
to you. It was on our fathers side the colour and Mary a
Flinn you remember at the dairy was dark remember fl
her hare was like nigro hare it must be back in the olden
days the nigro some ansester but it is only nature. !
thank the almighty it has missed my kids and your hubby <1
must think it was that nigro you was showing off when J
you came to my place. I wish you all the best as a widow Я
with kids you shoud send my money as per usual your1'!
affec sister Elizabeth.”
“I gather from Elizabeth,” said Raymond to Lou, 1
“that there was some element of colour in your family.®
Of course, you couldn't be expected to know about it. j
I do think, though, that some kind of record should be Д
kept.”
“Oh, shut up,’’said Lou. “The baby’s black and nothing: 3
can make it white.”
Two days before Lou left the hospital she had a visitor,.,!
although she had given instructions that no one except j
Raymond should be let in to see her. This lapse she attri-" I
buted to the nasty curiosity of the nurses, for it was Henry' 4
Pierce come to say good-bye before embarkation. He j
stayed less than five minutes.
“Why, Mrs Parker, your visitor didn’t stay long,” *
said the nurse.
“No, I soon got rid of him. I thought 1 made it clear 
to you that I didn’t want to see anyone. You shouldn’t J
have let him in.”	-id
. "Oh, sorry, Mrs Parker, but the young gentleman looked 
so upset when we told him so- He said he was going abroad «
142
find it was his last chance, he might' never see you
lignin. He said, ‘How’s the baby?’, and we said,‘Tip-
lop1.”
“I know what’s in your mind,” said Lou. “But it isn’t
true. I’ve got the blood tests.”
“Oh, Mrs Parker, I wouldn't suggest for a min-
ute...”
"She must have went with one of they niggers that
used to come.”
Lou could never be sure if that was what she heard
from the doorways and landings as she climbed the stairs
of Cripps House, the neighbours hushing their conversa-
tion as she approached.
“I can’t take to the child. Try as I do, I simply can’t
oven like it.”
“Nor me,” said Raymond. “Mind you, if it was anyone
rise’s child I would think it was all right. It’s just tho
thought of it being mine, and people thinking it
isn t.
"That’s just it,” she said.
One of Raymond’s colleagues had asked him that
day how his friends Oxford and Henry were getting on.
Raymond- had to look twice before he decided that
the question was innocent. But one never, knew...
Already Lou and Raymond had approached the adop-
tion society. It was now only a matter of waiting for
word.
“If that child was mine,” said Tina Farrell, “I’d never
part with her. I wish we could afford to adopt another.
She’s the loveliest little darkie in the world.”
“You wouldn’t think so,” said Lou, “if she really was
yours. Imagine it for yourself, waking up to find you’ve
had a black baby that everyone thinks has a nigger for
its father.”
“It would be a shock,” Tina said, and tittered.
“We’ve got the blood tests,” said Lou quickly.
Raymond got a transfer to London. They got word
about the adoption very soon.
“We've done the right thing,” said Lou. “Even the
priest had to agree with that, considering how strongly
we felt against keeping the child.”
“Oh, he said it was a good thing?”
143
“No, not a good thing. In fact he said it would ha vol
been a good thing if we could have kept the baby. But J
failing that, we did the right thing. Apparently, there’s^
a difference.’’
FOR DISCUSSION
1.	Do you like the author’s method of characterization? i
Explain your answer.
2.	Discuss the importance of character portrayal in this story I
as it affects the plot.	J
3.	Discuss what devices the author used to reveal, gradually, j
the character of Lou Parker.
4.	At what point does the reader begin to realize that Lou Vfl
Parker is not so high-minded and sincere on the question of race j
and colour as she seemed to be?	' 1
5.	What advantages does the author gain by paying so much 4
attention to the Parkers’ friendship with the Jamaicans?
6.	How does the account of the Parkers’ visit to Elizabeth ;]
fit into the larger structure of the narrative?
7.	Consider, how much of the effect is produced by the fact a
that the Parkers were religious?
8.	Does tho end of the story come as a complete surprise to you?
If not, at what point in the story did you know how it would end?
9.	How does the author prepare the reader for the outcome?
What clues to the outcome might you see in tho story?
10.	What social views are represented in the story?
11.	What are some of the comments that the author makes J
about human nature?
12.	To make the story more effective M. Spark uses irony.
Point out some of the ironical elements of the story and explain !|
how they affect character portrayal and social views represented in
the story.
Flannery O'Connor
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST
CONVERGE
Her doctor had told Julian’s mother that she must
lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so
on Wednesday night Julian had to take her downtown
on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class
was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed
from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slim-
mer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or
weight. She would not ride the buses by herself at night
since they had been integrated,* and because the reducing
class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her
health, and free, she said Julian could at least put himself
out to take her, considering all she did for him.
Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but
6 И. В. Ступников
145
every Wednesday night he braced himself * and took
her.
She was almost ready to go, standing before the hall-
mirror, putting on her hat, while he, his hands behind 
him, appeared pinned to the door frame, waiting like.;
Saint Sebastian * for the arrows to begin’piercing him.
The hat was new and had cost her seven dollars and a
half. She kept saying, “Maybe I shouldn’t have paid that
for it. No, I shouldn’t-have. I’ll take it off and return
it tomorrow. I shouldn’t have bought it.”
Julian raised his eyes to heaven. “Yes, you should
have bought it,” he said. “Put it on and let’s go.” It was.
a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one
side of it and stood up on he other; the rest of it was green
and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He de-
cided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Every-
thing that gave her pleasure was small and depressed
him.
She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly
on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on
either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were
as innocent and untouched by experience as they must
have been when she was ten. Were it not that she was a
widow who had struggled fiercely to feed and clothe and
put him through school and who was supporting him still,
“until he got on his feet,” she might have been a little girl
that he had to take to town.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go.” He
opened the door himself and started down the walk to
get her going. The sky was a dying violet and the houses
stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstros-
ities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.
Since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty
years ago, his mother persisted in thinking they did well
to have an apartment in it. Each house had a narrow col-
lar of dirt around it in which sat, usually, a grubby child.
Julian walked with his hands in his pockets, his head
down and thrust forward and his eyes glazed with the
determination to make himself completely numb during
the time he would be sacrificed to her pleasure.
The door closed and he turned to find the dumpy fig-
ure, surmounted zby the atrocious Jiat, coming toward
him. “Well,” she said, “you only live once and paying

a little more:for,it, I.at least won’t meet myself coming -
and going.” *	•
“Some day I’ll start making money,” Julian said gloom-
ily — he knew he never would — “and you can have
one of those jokes whenever you take the fit.” But first
they would move. He visualized a place where the nearest
neighbors would be three miles away on either side..
“I think you’re doing fine,” she said, drawing on her
gloves. “You’ve only been out of school a year. Rome
wasn’t built in a day.”
She was one of the few members of the Y reducing
class who arrived in hat and gloves and who had a son
who has been to college. “It takes time,” she said, “and
the world is in such a mess. This hat looked better on me
than any of the others, though when she brought it out
I said, ‘Take that thing back. I wouldn’t have it on my
head,’ and she said, ‘Now wait till you see it on,’ and
when she put it on me, I said, ‘We-ull,’ and she said, ‘If
you ask me, that hat does something for you and you
do something for the hat, and besides,’ she said, ‘with
that hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going.’”
Julian thought he could have stood * his lot better
if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank
and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in
depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had
lost his faith. Catching sight of his long, hopeless, irri-
tated face, she stopped suddenly with a grief-stricken
look, and pulled back on his arm. “Wait on me,” she said.
“I’m going back to the house and take this thing off
and tomorrow I’m going to return it. I was out of my
head. I can pay the gas bill with that seven-fifty.”
He caught her arm in a vicious grip. “You are not
going to take it back,” he said. “I like it.”
“Well,” she said. “I don’t think I ought...”
“Shut up and enjoy it,” he muttered, more depressed
than ever.
“With the world in the mess it’s in," she said, “it’s
a wonder we can enjoy anything. I tell you, the bottom
rail is on the top.”
Julian sighed.
“Of course,” she said, “if you know who are you, you
can go anywhere.” She said this every time he took her
to the reducing class. “Most of them in it are not our kind
6*	147
of people,” she said, “but I can be gracious to anybody;
I know who I am.”
“They don’t give a damn for your graciousness,’’
Julian said savagely. “Knowing who you are is good for
one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where
you stand now or who you are.”
She stopped and allowed her eyes to flash at him.
“I most certainly do know who I am,” she said, “and if
you don’t know who you are, I’m ashamed of you.”
“Oh hell,” Julian said.
“Your great-grandfather was a former governor of
this state,” she said. “Your grandfather was a prosperous
land owner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh.”
“Will you look around you,” he said tensely, “and
see where you are now?” and he swept his arm jerkily
out to indicate the neighborhood, which the growing dark-
ness at least made less dingy.
“You remain what you are,” she said. “Your great-
grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves.”
“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.
“They were better off when they were,” she said. He
groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled
onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He
knew every step, every junction, every swamp along the
way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion
would roll majestically into the station: “It’s ridiculous.
It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on
their own side of the fence.”
“Let’s skip it,” Julian said.
“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that
are half white. They’re tragic.”
“Will you skip it?”
“Suppose we were half white. We would certainly
have mixed feelings.”
“I have mixed feelings now,” he groaned.
“Well let’s talk about something pleasant,” she said.
“I remember going to Grandpa’s when I was a little girl.
Then the house had double stairways that went up to what
was really the second floor — all the cooking was done
on the first. I used to like to stay down in the kitchen on
account of the way the walls smelled. I would sit with my
nose pressed against the plaster and take deep breaths.
Actually the place belonged to the Godhighs but your
148
grandfather Chestny paid the mortgage and saved it
for them. They were in reduced circumstances,” she said,
"but reduced or not, they never forgot who they
were. ”
“Doubtless that decayed mansion reminded them,”
Julian muttered. He never spoke of it without contempt
or thought of it without longing. He had seen it once
when he was a child before it had been sold. The double
stairways had rotted and been torn down. Negroes were
living in it. But it remained in his mind as his mother
had known it. It appeared in his dreams regularly. He
would stand on the wide porch, listening to the rustle
of oak leaves, then wander through the high-ceilinged
hall into the parlor that opened onto it and gaze at the
worn rugs and faded draperies. It occurred to him that
it was he, not she, who could have appreciated it. He
preferred its threadbare elegance to anything he could
name and it was because of that all the neighborhoods
they had lived in had been a torment to him — whereas
she had hardly known the difference. She called her
insensitivity “being adjustable.”
“And I remember the old darky who was my nurse,
Caroline. There was no better person in the world. I’ve
always had a great respect for my colored friends,” she
said. “I’d do anything in the world for them and they’d . ..”
“Will you for God’s sake get off that subject?” Julian
said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point
to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for
his mother’s sins.
“You’ve mighty touchy tonight,” she said. “Do you
feel all right?”
“Yes I feel all right,” he said. "Now lay off.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, you certainly are in a vile
humor,” she observed. “I just won’t speak to you at all.”
They had reached the bus stop. There was no bus in
sight and Julian, his hands still jammed in his pockets
and his head thrust forward, scowled down the empty
street. The frustration of having to wait on the bus as
well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot
hand. The presence of his mother was borne in upon him
as she gave a pained sigh. He looked at her bleakly. She
was holding herself very erect under the preposterous
hat, wearing it like a banner of her imaginary dignity.
149-
There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit. He sud- 'JM
denly unloosened his tie and pulled it off and put it in (4
his pocket.
She stiffened. “Why must you look like that when you
take me to town?” she said. “Why must you deliberately ’ $,)
embarrass me?”
“If you’ll never learn where you are,” he said, “you ’
can at least learn where I am.”
“You look like a — thug,” she said.
“Then I must be one,” he murmured.
“I’ll just go home,” she said. “I will not bother you.
If you can’t do a little thing like that for me...”
Rolling his eyes upward, he put his tie back on. “Re-
stored to my class,” he muttered. He thrust his face toward
her and hissed, “True culture is in the mind, the mind,”
he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.”
I
A
he said, and tapped his head, “the mind.
“It’s in the heart,” she said, “and in how you do things
and how you do things is because of who you are.” ‘,'i
“Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are.”
"I care who I am,” she said icily.
The lighted bus appeared on top of the next hill and
as it approached, they moved out into the street to meet ,*
it. He put his hand under her elbow and hoisted her up *
on the creaking step. She entered with a little smile, as ?
if she were going into a drawing room where everyone
had been waiting for her. While he put. in the tokens, she J-
sat down on one of the broad front seats for three which
faced the aisle. A thin woman with protruding teeth '
and long yellow hair was sitting on the end of it. His a
mother moved up beside her and left room for J ulian be- ''!
side herself. He sat down and looked at the floor across <3
the aisle where a pair of thin feet in red and white canvas I
sandals were planted.
His mother immediately began a general conversation j
meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it :fl
get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a
folding fan, black with a Japanese scene on it, which she ч
began to flutter before her.
“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the pro- я
trading teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment -j
couldn’t get no hotter.”
“It must get the afternoon sun,” his mother said. She
sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half >
150
=	ут;-" л -	’	’ '
J	” У” ’
’ <	•	-	- . .fj
filled. Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to
ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed!
“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the
owner of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one
the other day and they were thick as fleas — up front
and all through.”
“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said,
“I don’t know how we’ve let it get in this fix.”
“What gets my goat is all those boys from good fami-
lies stealing automobile tires,” the woman with the pro-
truding teeth said. “I told my boy, I said you may not
be rich but you been raised right and if I ever catch you
in any such mess, they can sent you on to the reformatory.
Be exactly where you belong.”
“Training tells,” his mother said. “Is your boy in '.
high school?”
“Ninth grade,” the woman said.
“My son just finished college last year. He wants to
write but he’s selling typewriters until he gets started,”
his mother said.
The woman leaned forward and peered at Julian. He
threw her such a malevolent look that she subsided against
the seat. On the floor across the aisle there was an aban-
doned newspaper. He got up and got it and opened it out
in front of him. His mother discreetly continued the con- ,
versation in a lower tone but the woman across the aisle
said in a loud voice, “Well that’s nice. Selling typewriters
is close to writing. He can go right from one to the
other. ”
“I tell him,” his mother said, “that Rome wasn’t
built in a day.”
Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into
the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most
of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which
he established himself when he could not bear to be a part
of what was going on around him. From it he could see
out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of pene-
tration from without. It was the only place where he
felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother
had never entered it but from it he could see her with
absolute clarity.
The old lady was clever enough and he thought that
if she had started from any of the right premises, more
151
might have been expected of her. She lived according to
the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which he
had never seen her set foot. The law of it was to sacrifice
herself for him after she had first created the necessity
to do so by making a mess of things. If he had permitted
her sacrifices, it was only because her lack of foresight
had made them necessary. All of her life had been a strug- >
gle to act like a Chestny without the Chestny goods, and
to give him everything she thought a Chestny ought to
have; but since, said she, it was fun to struggle, why
complain? And when you had won, as she had won, what
fun to look back on the hard times! He could not forgive ;
her that she had enjoyed the struggle and that she thought '
she had won.
What she meant when she said she had won was that -
she had brought him up successfully and had sent him to
college and that he had turned out so well — good looking „
(her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be straight-
ened), intelligent (he realized he was too intelligent to >
be a success), and with a future ahead of him (there was
of course no future ahead of him). She excused his gloomi-
ness on the grounds that he was still growing up and his
radical ideas on his lack of practical experience. She
said he didn’t yet know a thing about “life,” that he hadn’t
even entered the real world — when already he was as
disenchanted with it as a man of fifty.
The further irony of all this was that in spite of her, ”
he had turned out so well. In spite of going to only a
third-rate college, he had, on his own initiative, come
out with a first-rate education; in spite of growing up
dominated by a small mind, he had ended up with a
large one; in spite of all her foolish views, he was free of
prejudice and unafraid to face facts. Most miraculous
of all, instead of being blinded by love for her as she was
for him, he had cut himself emotionally free of her and ,
could see her with complete objectivity. He was not
dominated by his mother.
The bus stopped with a sudden jerk and shook him
from his meditation. A woman from the back lurched
forward with little steps and barely escaped falling in
his newspaper as she righted herself. She got off and a
large Negro got on. Julian kept his paper lowered to
watch. It gave him a certain satisfaction to see injustice
152
S’-
(i •
 J. 
in daily operation. It confirmed his view that with a few
exceptions there was no one worth knowing within a
radius of three hundred miles. The Negro was well dressed
and carried a briefcase. He looked around and then sat
down on the other end of the seat where the woman with
the red and white canvas sandals was sitting. He imme-
diately unfolded a newspaper and obscured himself be-
hind it. Julian’s mother’s elbow at once prodded insistently
into his ribs. “Now you see why I won’t ride on these
buses by myself,” she whispered.
The woman with the red and white canvas sandals
had risen at the same time the Negro sat down and had
gone further back in the bus and taken the seat of the
woman who had got off. His mother leaned forward and
cast her an approving look.
Julian rose, crossed the aisle, and sat down in the
place of the woman with the canvas sandals. From this
position, he looked serenely across at his mother. Her
face had turned an angry red. He stared at her, making
his eyes the eyes of a stranger. He felt his tension suddenly
lift as if he had openly declared war on her.
He would have liked to get in conversation with the
Negro and to talk with him about art or politics or any
subject that would be above the comprehension of those
around them, but the man remained entrenched behind
his paper. He was either ignoring the change of seating
or had never noticed it. There was no way for Julian to
convey his sympathy.
His mother kept her eyes fixed reproachfully on his
face. The woman with the protruding teeth was looking
at him avidly as if he were a type of monster new
to her.
“Do you have a light?” he asked the Negro.
Without looking away from his paper, the man reached
in his pocket and handed him a packet of matches.
“Thanks,” Julian said. For a moment he held the
matches foolishly. A no smoking sign looked down upon him
from over the door. This alone would not have deterred
him; he had no cigarettes. He had quit smoking some
months before because he could not afford it. “Sorry,”
he muttered and handed back the matches. The Negro
lowered the paper and gave him an annoyed look. He
took the matches and raised the paper again.
153
	'	....	' Jj
His mother continued to gaze at him but she did not
take advantage of his momentary discomfort. Her eyest|
retained their battered look. Her face seemed to be unnat- a
urally red, as if her blood pressure had risen. J ulian allowed |
no glimmer of sympathy to show on his face. Having got
the advantage, he wanted desperately to keep it and carry J
i t through. He would have liked to teach her a lesson that I
would last her a while, but there seemed no way to con- ,J
tinue the point. The Negro refused to come out from bo- -j
hind his paper.
Julian folded his arms and looked stolidly before him,
facing her but as if he did not see her, as if he had ceased ,~i
to recognize her existence. He visualized a scene in which,
the bus having reached their stop, he would remain in his
seat and when she said, “Aren’t you going to get off?” •
he would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly ’g
addressed him. The corner they got off on was usually a
deserted, but it was well lighted and it would not hurt
her to walk by herself the four blocks to the Y. He decided '
to wait until the time came and then decide whether or
not he would let her get off by herself. He would have to
be at the Y at ten to bring her back, but he could leave .,
her wondering if he was going to show up. There was no
reason for her to think she could always depend on him. S
He retired again into the high-ceilinged room sparsely t
settled with large pieces of antique furniture. His soul
expanded momentarily but then he became aware of his
mother across from him and the vision shriveled. He
studied her coldly. Her feet in little pumps dangled like
a child’s and did not quite reach the floor. She was train- 1
ing on him an exaggerated look of reproach. He felt ;
completely detached from her. At that moment he could 3
with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped
a particularly obnoxious child in his charge.
He began to imagine various unlikely ways by which |
he could teach her a lesson. He might make friends with J
some distinguished Negro professor or lawyer and bring
him home to spend the evening. He would be entirely
justified but her blood pressure would rise to 300. He
could not push her to the extent of making her have a 3
stroke, and moreover, he had never been successful at
making any Negro friends. He had tried to strike up an J
acquaintance on the bus with some of the better types,
154
S
1
-   -1
with ones that looked like professors or ministers or law-
yers. One morning he had sat down next to a distinguished-
looking dark brown man who had answered his questions
with a sonorous solemnity but who had turned out to
be an undertaker. Another day he had sat down beside
a cigar-smoking Negro with a diamond ring on his finger,
but after a few stilted pleasantries, the Negro had rung
the buzzer and risen, slipping two lottery tickets into
Julian’s hand as he climbed over him to leave.
He imagined his mother lying desperately ill and his
being able to secure only a Negro doctor for her. He toyed
with that idea for a few minutes and then dropped it for
a momentary vision of himself participating as a sympa-
thizer in a sit-in demonstration. This was possible but
he did not linger with it. Instead, he approached the
ultimate horror. He brought home a beautiful suspi-
ciously Negroid woman. Prepare yourself, he said. There
is nothing you can do about it. This is the woman I’ve
chosen. She’s intelligent, dignified, even good, and she’s
suffered and she hasn’t thought it fun. Now persecute us,
go ahead and persecute us. Drive her out of here, but
remember, you’re driving me too. His eyes were narrowed
and through the indignation he had generated, he saw
his mother across the aisle, purple-faced, shrunken to
the dwarf-like proportions of her moral nature, sitting
like a mummy beneath the ridiculous banner of her
hat.
- He was tilted out of his fantasy again as the bus
stopped. The door opened with a sucking hiss and out of the
dark a large, gaily dressed, sullen-looking colored woman
got on with a little boy. The child, who might have been
four, had on a short plaid suit and a Tyrolean hat with
a blue feather in it. J ulian hoped that he would sit down
beside him and that the woman would push in beside his
mother. He could think of no better arrangement.
As she waited for her tokens, the woman was surveying
the seating possibilities — he hoped with the idea of
sitting where she was least wanted. There was something
familiar-looking about her but Julian could not place
what it was. She was a giant of a woman. Her face was
set not only to meet opposition but to seek it out. The
downward tilt of her large lower lip was like a warning
sign: don't tamper with me. Her bulging figure was en-
155
cased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed in
red shoes. She had on a hideous hat. A purple velvet
flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the
other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion
with the stuffing out. She carried a mammoth red pocket-
book that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed with
rocks.
To Julian’s dissappointment, the little boy climbed
up on the empty seat beside his mother. His mother
lumped all children, black and white, into the common
category, “cute,” and she thought little Negroes were
on the whole cuter than little white children. She smiled
at the little boy as he climbed on the seat.
Meanwhile the woman was bearing down upon the
empty seat beside Julian. To his annoyance, she squeezed
herself into it. He saw his mother’s face change as the
woman settled herself next to him and he realized with
satisfaction that this was more objectionable to her than
it was to him. Her face seemed almost gray and there was
a look of dull recognition in her eyes, as if suddenly she
had sickened at some awful confrontation. Julian saw
that it was because she and the woman had, in a sense,
swapped sons. Though his mother would not realize the
symbolic significance of this, she would feel it. His amuse-
ment showed plainly on his face.
The woman next to him muttered something unintelli-
gible to herself. He was conscious of a kind of bristling
next to him, a muted growling like that of an angry
cat. He could not see anything but the red pocketbook
upright on the bulging green thighs. He visualized the
woman as she had stood waiting for her tokens — the
ponderous figure, rising from the red shoes upward over
the solid hips, the mammoth bosom, the haughty face,
to the green and purple hat.
His eyes widened.
The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him
with the radiance of a brilliant surpise. His face was sud-
denly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had
thrust upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud
chuckle so that she would look at him and see that he saw.
She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them
seemed to have turned a bruised purple. For a moment
he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it
156
lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Justice
entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened until it said
to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your punish-
ment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you
a permanent lesson.
Her eyes shifted to the woman. She seemed unable
to bear looking at him and to find the woman preferable.
He became conscious again of the bristling presence at
his side. The woman was rumbling like a volcano about
to become active. His mother’s mouth began to twitch
slightly at one corner. With a sinking heart, he saw
incipient signs of recovery on her face and realized that
this was going to strike her suddenly as funny and was
going to be no lesson at all. She kept her eyes on the woman
and an amused smile came over her face as if the woman
were a monkey that had stolen her hat. The little
Negro was looking up at her with large fascinated eyes.
He had been trying to attract her attention for some
time.
“Carver!” the woman said suddenly. “Come heah!”
When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last,
Carver drew his feet up and turned himself toward Julian’s
mother and giggled.
“Carver!” the woman said. “You heah me? Come
heah!”
Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting
with his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly
around toward Julian’s mother, who was smiling at him.
The woman reached a hand across the aisle and snatched
him to her. He righted himself and hung backwards on
her knee, grinning at Julian’s mother. “Isn’t he cute?"
Julian’s mother said to the woman with the protruding
teeth.
“I reckon he is,” the woman said without convic-
tion.
The Negress yanked him upright but he eased out
of her grip and shot across the aisle and scrambled, giggling
wildly, onto the seat beside his love.
“I think he likes me,” Julian’s mother said, and
smiled at the woman. It was the smile she used when she
was being particularly gracious to an inferior. Julian
saw everything lost. The lesson had rolled off her like
rain on a roof.
157
The woman stood up and yanked the little hoy off
the seat as if she were snatching him from contagion.
Julian could feel the rage in her at having no weapon like
his mother’s smile. She gave the child a sharp slap across
his leg. He howled once and then thrust his head into her
stomach and kicked his feet against her shins. “Be-have,”
she said vehemently.
The bus stopped and the Negro who had been reading
the newspaper got off. The woman moved over and set
the little boy down with a thump between herself and
Julian. She held him firmly by the knee. In a moment
he put his hands in front of his face and peeped at Julian’s
mother through his fingers.
“I see yoooooooo!” she said and put her hand in front
of her face and peeped at him.
The woman slapped his hand down. “Quit yo' * fool-
ishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus *
out of you!”
Julian was thankful that the next stop was theirs.
He reached up and pulled the cord. The woman reached
up and pulled it at the same time. Oh my God, he thought.
He had the terrible intuition that when they got off tho
bus together, his mother would open her purse and give
the little boy a nickel. The gesture would be as natural
to her as breathing. The bus stopped and the woman
got up and lunged to the front, dragging the child, who
wished to stay on, after her. Julian and his mother got
up and followed. As they neared the door, Julian tried
to relieve her of her pocketbook.
. “No,” she murmured, “I want to give the little boy
a nickel.” -
“No!” Julian hissed. “No!”
She smiled down at the child and opened her bag.
The bus door opened and the woman picked him up by the i
arm and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once
in the street she set him down and shook him.
Julian’s mother had to close her purse-while she got i
down the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the J
ground, she opened it again and began to rummage inside. |
“I can’t find but a penny,” she whispered, “but it looks
like a new one.”
“Don’t do it!” Julian said fiercely between his teeth.
There .was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to
158
get under it so that she could better see into her pocket-
book, The woman was heading off rapidly down the street
with the child still hanging backward on her hand. 7
“Oh little boy!” Julian’s mother called and took a few
quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamp-
post. “Here’s a bright new penny for you,” and she held
out the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.
The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her
shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage,
and stared at Julian’s mother. Then all at once she seemed
to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given
one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist
swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and
cringed as he heard the woman shout, "He don’t take
nobody’s pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman
was disappearing down the street with the little boy
staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian’s mother
was sitting on the sidewalk.
“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I
told you not to do that!”
He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth.
Her legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat
was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the
face. It was totally expressionless. “You got exactly what
you deserved,” ho said. “Now get up.”
He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen
out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny
caught his eye on the sidewalk andJie picked that up
and let it drop before her eyes into her purse. Then he
stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to pull
her up. She remained immobile. He signed. Rising above
them on either side were black apartment buildings,
marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of
the block a man came out of a door and walked off in the
opposite direction. “All right,”he said, “suppose somebody
happens. by and wants to know why you’re sitting on the
sidewalk?”
She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily
up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly
as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around
her. Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled
on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. “I
hope this teaches you a lesson,” he said. She leaned for-
159
ward and her eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to
determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing
familiar about him, she started off with a headlong move-
ment in the wrong direction.
“Aren’t you going on to the Y?” he asked.
“Home,” she muttered.
“Well, are we walking?”
For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his
hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she
had had go without backing it up with an explanation of
its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what
had happened to her. “Don’t think that was just an uppity
Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race
which will no longer take your condescending pennies.
That was your black double. She can wear the same hat
as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because
he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than
it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the
old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your
graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly
of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren’t
who you think you are,” he said.
She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to
him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped
her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked
it up and handed it to her but she did not take it.
“You needn't act as if the world had come to an end,”
he said, “because it hasn’t. From now on you’ve got to
live in a new world and face a few realities for a change.
Buck up,” he said, “it won’t kill you.”
She was breathing fast.
“Let’s wait on the bus,” he said.
“Home,” she said thickly.
"I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like
a child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He de-
cided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait
for a bus. “I’m not going any farther,” he said, stopping.
“We’re going on the bus.”
She continued to go on as if she had not heard him.
He took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her.
He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was
looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa
to come get me,” she said.
160
He stared stricken.
“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.
Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again,
walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide
of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!”
he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she
fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her
side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her
face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring,
moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored.
The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again,
found nothing and closed.
“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and
began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw
i n the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but
his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights
drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved
numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of dark-
ness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from
moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and
sorrow.
FOR DISCUSSION
1.	How would you sum up the theme of this story?
2.	What kind of details does the author provide about the
characters? Which specific facts provoke you to speculation about
their personalities? Does the author herself enter into such specula-
tions?
3.	What conclusions about the boy’s character can you draw
from the story?
4.	Do the figures of speech and the diction with which Julian
expresses his arguments seem to reflect the quality of his'
mind? >
5.	Did the author want you to he sympathetic with Julian,
or did he want you to be against him? What were you told about
him that made you feel as you did?
G.	In this story Julian is contrasted with his mother. What
differences are there between them? What is the reason of their
discord?
7.	How do you explain Julian’s feelings toward his mother
during the episode in the bus?
8.	What caused the change in Julian’s attitude toward his
mother at the end of the story?
9.	How does the author deal with the problem of loneliness
and alienation of people who love each other?
10.	Is there a system to increase the psychological tension?
11.	What is the meaning behind the title of the story?
12.	“Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Black Madon-
na” both deal with Negro problem. Which story gave you more to
think about? Why?
LIST OF AUTHORS
Aumonier, Stacy (1887—1928) — English novelist and short-
story writer. He was educated at Cranleigh, and began his career
as a decorative designer and landscape painter, exhibiting frequently
at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute, and the International.
In 1908 Aumonier launched as a society entertainer, giving
recitals of his own original character sketches at the Comedy,
Criterion, and other theatres. Aumonier began writing in 1913.
The first of his literary works to attract notice was The Friends,
a short story concerning two furniture salesmen who drank
themselves to death. The Querrils (1919), his best known novel, is
a sympathetic and observant study of a wartime family.
Aumonier’s short stories reflected the charm and humour of
a many-sided person, who had been a painter, entertainer and
journalist.
His principal works are Three Bars' Interval (1917), The Quer-
rils (1919), One After Another (1920), Heartbeat (1922), Miss Brace-
girdle and Others (1923), Odd Fish: Being a Casual Selection of
London Residents (with George Belcher) (1923), Overheard: Fifteen
Tales (1924), Little Windows (1931).
Bates, Herbert Ernest (1905—1974) — English novelist and sto-
ry writer. He was educated at the Grammar School, in Kettering,
then worked for a while on a local newspaper in the Midlands,
thinking this the quickest way to become an author. Disliking
the drudgery of journalism, he became a clerk in a leather ware-
house. This may have seemed worse, but at least it gave him leisure
to write first a play and then a novel. H. E. Bates published his
first book, The Two Sisters (1926), when he was twenty-one. In
the next fifteen years he won a distinguished reputation as nov-
elist, essayist, and short-story writer, particularly for his stories
about English country life. In 1941 he was commissioned as a
writer by the RAF, and under the pseudonym of “Flying Officer X”,
wrote his two famous books of short stories — The Greatest People
’ in the World (1942) and How Sleep the Brave (1943), which wore
followed in 1944, when Bates discarded his war-time pseudonym, by
Fair Stood the Wind for France. This, and his subsequent novels of
Burma, The Purple Plain (1947) and The Jacaranda Tree (1949),
and of India, The Scarlet Sword (1950), stemming directly or
indirectly from his war experience in the East, won him a new
reputation and, apart from their success in Britain and America,
have been translated into fifteen foreign languages.
H.	E. Bates was a prolific and widely anthologized story
writer — he appeared more often than any other author in Edward
J. O’Brien’s annual Best British Short Stories. His stories are nearly
all concerned with the working class, and particularly with agricul-
tural labourers or with those in small towns whose real background
is of the country. They are simple people, whose small tragedies he
has universalized.
Among his later books The Feast of July (1954), The Darling
Buds of May (1958), A Breath of French Air (1959), Now Sleeps
163
the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (1961), The Fabulous Mrs V.
(1964), A Wedding Party (1965), The Four Beauties (1968), The
Wild Cherry Three (1968) and two of his humorous trilogy of books
about the Larkin family have appeared.
Lardner, Ringold Wilmer (1885—1933) was known as a sports
writer and columnist in Chicago and New York before the great
success of his short stories. His first collection, You Know Me,
Al', A Bushers Letters (1916) describes the career of a novice on a
professional team, revealing an illiterate, boasting, moronic
baseball player and his world. Other hooks of this early period,
displaying the author’s talent for the humorous use of the vernacular
in portraying typical Americans include Bib Ballads (1915), a
collection of verse; Gullible's Travels (1917), satirical stories;
Treat 'Em Bough (1918), and The Big Town (1921), a humorous
novel.
The publication of How to Write Short Stories (1924), a col-
lection, first attracted critical attention to Lardner as a sardonic
humourist exposing follies and vices through his characters’ con-
versational speech. Though they seem to follow traditional meth-
ods of American humour, his stories are actually cynical and
mordant treatments of the subjects. The boxers, baseball players,
salesmen, stock brokers, song writers, barbers, actresses, stenogra-
phers, and other “average” characters whom he depicts are reduced
by the author’s implied bitterness to their essential common-
placeness, cruelty, viciousness, dullness, and stupidity.
This pessimistic view, as well as his ability to reproduce the
idioms and habits of mind of everyday people, continues to appear
in Lardner’s later collections of short stories: What of It (1925),
The Love Nest (1926), Bound Up (1929), and First and the Last
(1934).
O’Connor, Flannery (1925—1964) — American novelist, short-
story writer. She graduated from the Woman’s College of Geor-
gia, and received a M. A. degree from the Writer’s Workshop
University of Iowa, in 1947. Although O’Connor acknowledged
her indebtness to writers like Nathaniel West, William Faulkner,
and Ring Lardner, her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), was an origi-
nal production, notable for its grotesque portrayal of Southern
life. Her colourful description and realistic dialogue are combined
to produce a fascinating picture of Georgia backwoods society.
Flannery O’Connor’s deep involvement in the South was real
and penetrative. Belonging to the writers who have contributed
in varying degrees to the Southern Renaissance, Flannery O’Con-
nor concerns herself with tho deformed and the grotesque, most
of whom are outside the average person’s experience. Her story or
novel is always the slowly paced, leisurely uncovering of a series
of unusual people and circumstances.
The majority of Flannery O’Connor’s stories appeared either
in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) or in the posthumous col-
lection Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). They have
fairly similar Southern settings and exploit the problems of vio-
lence, redemption and grotesquerie which have always obsessed
164
her. But Flannery’ O’Connor is always patient enough to explain
the source of the moral, physical, or spiritual discomfort and has
way of building her story upon it. Her prime concern seems to be
with oddity of character but always within the demands of nar-
rative expression.
Flannery O’Connor’s work brought her various kinds of re-
cognition, such as the Kenyon Review Fellowship (1952), a Ford
Foundation Grant (1959), and two O. Henry Short Story Awards
(1956 and 1963).
Shaw, Irwin (1914) — novelist, short-story writer, playwright.
Shaw left Brooklyn College after falling in freshman mathematics,
worked in a cosmetics factory, a department store, and a furniture
company. Returning to college he conducted a column for the
student magazine and wrote plays for dramatic society.
After his graduation in 1934 he prepared serials for the radio
and then went to Hollywood to write screenplays.
Irwin Shaw’s works are marked by dramatic intensity and
social awareness. His plays include Bury the Dead (1936), Siege
(1937), The Gentle People (1939), Retreat to Pleasure (1940), Sons
and Soldiers (1944), The Assassin (1944), set in World War II,
and Children from Their Games (1963), a comedy. His novels are
The Young Lions (1948), one of the most important novels of World
War II where the action takes place both in Europe and the
L'nitcd States and the scenes of fascist barbarity give place to the
realistic descriptions of the customs in the American army with
its officers’ petty tyranny and national discrimination; The Trou-
bled Air (1951) about radio actors; Lucy Crown (1956) about a
middle-aged woman’s romance; Two Weeks in Another Town (1960),
and Voices of a Summer Day (1965), a middle-aged man’s bitter-
sweet memories.
Sailor off the Bremen (1939), Welcome to the City (1941), Act of
Faith (1946), Mixed Faith (1950), Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957), and
Love on a Dark Street (1965) — collections of stories.
Spark, Muriel (1918) was born and educated in Edinburgh,
and spent some years in Central Africa. She returned to Britain
during the war and worked in the Political Intelligence Depart-
ment of the Foreign Office.
She subsequently edited two poetry magazines, and her pub-
lished works include critical biographies of nineteenth-century
figures, and editions of nineteenth-century letters. A volume of
her poems has also been published.
In 1951 she was awarded first prize in an Observer short-story
competition and her stories have appeared in many English and
American magazines.
Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957, nnd
this was followed by Robinson (1958), The Go-Away Bird and Other .
Stories (1958), Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peclcham Rye
(1960), The Bachelors (1960), Voices at Play (1961), and The Prime
of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).
Iler play, Doctors of Philosophy, was produced In London III
1962.
10П
Thurber, James (1894—1961), a writer and artist, is con-
sidered by many the best American humourist since Mark Twain.
He was born in Columbus, Ohio, and educated at its public schools.
Thurber entered Ohio State University in 1913 and took a year off
to read texts not in the curriculum.
When World War I broke out he was refused by the Army be-
cause of poor eye-sight, spent 1917—1918 as a clerk in the State
Department at Washington and Paris, then returned to Columbus
to complete his studies in 1919. Until 1927 he worked as a repor-
ter in Columbus, Paris, and New York. In 1927 began Thurber’s
life-long association with The New Yorker, in which most of his
‘work first appeared. Of The New Yorker and its editor, Harold
Ross, Thurber wrote a personal history, The Years.with Ross (1958).
Thurber was probably the only contemporary American humour-
ist whose work is considered by the most critics to be a genuine
contribution to the nation’s literature.
The substance of Thurber’s writing is what gives it dura-
bility. His humour conveys a depth and consistency of thought
and feeling which make it eminently readable.
Thurber’s outlook is that in modern society irony itself becomes
an instrumentforchange:notthatexternalconditionsmay be altered;
but irony can anable one to accept things as-they are, so that ono
.does not waste himself tilting at the unchangeable, so that one’s
anger at external circumstances does not become self-destructive.
Comedy, for Thurber, is a means both for making man aware of
his condition, and for rendering life more tolerable. “Humour...
is the only solvent of terror and tension.” Through comedy, man
may come to awareness and acceptance of his world.
Thurber ranged widely in his work. He will always be known
primarily as a comic writer but many of his stories venture into
fantasy of the most delicate and thoughtful line. The story The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty, for example, a favourite among Thurber
readers, describes the fantasies of an average man who pictures
himself doing heroic deeds and tries to escape reality into a world of
popular fiction cliches, but these cliches only emphasize the distance
between Mitty’s self and popular masculine stereotypes.
Some of his funniest essays deal with events in his childhood,
home, events which he claims to have resounded with no more
than simple veracity. His essays, sketches, fables, stories, parables,
and reminiscences, illustrated by his distinctive drawings, include
My Life and Hard Times (1933), amusing recollections; The Mid-
dle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), Let Your Mind Alone
(1937), satirizing inspirational book and popularizations of psychol-
ogy; The Last Flower (1939), an ironic parable of modern war;
Fables of Our Time, and'FamousPoemsIllustrated (1940); My World—
and Welcome to It (1942), essays, sketches, and stories, including
the well-known tale The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and many
others.
While a keen satirical sense is shown in many essays, paro-
dies and burlesques, a gentle humour pervades such fairy tales
as The 13 Clocks (1950). Seriously a writer and only incidentally a
comic artist, Thurber produced both writings and drawings showing
odd characters in astonishing situations. The best collection of
his writing and drawings is The Thurber Carnival (1945).
166
James Thurber’s stories, essays and cartoons have had people
laughing for years. But like all humourists, Thurber did not write
simply to make people laugh. Very often his hilarious stories are a
criticism of some aspect of life; they are his way of saying something
serious or even pathetic about the human condition.
Warren, Robert Penn (1905) — poet, novelist, teacher. He was
educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of California
and Yale University, and has taught at Southwestern College,
Vanderbilt and Louisiana State Universities, the University of
Michigan, and Yale.
His contributions to the Fugitive (1922—25) while he was
still an undergraduate, reflected his militant interest in the South.
He helped found and edit The Southern Review (1935—42); and
with Albert Erskine edited two anthologies: A Southern Harvest
(1937) and A New Southern Harvest (1957).
Warren’s early reputation was made, however, with his poetry,
which showed him to be a writer with a finely controlled talent
for vivid metaphor and brilliant descriptions. Among his collections
are Thirty-Six Poems (1935), Eleven Poems on the Same Theme
(1942), Selected Poems 1923—1943 (1944), Brother to Dragons
(1953), Promises: Poems 1954—56 (1957).
Warren’s prose fiction won him a wider audience.-His first
novel, Night Rider (1939), is a story of the Kentucky Tobacco
War of 1904, At Heaven's Gate (1943) was suggested by the career
of Luke Lea, a corrupt Tennessee businessman and polititian.
All the King's Men (1946), Warren’s most popular novel, drew
partly from the career of Huey Long, American public official,
one of the most bizarre and audacious figures in public life in
America in the 20th century, for its account of vicious politics
in a Southern state; it won a Pulitzer prize and was made into
powerful motion picture (1949). Circus in the Attic (1948) is a
collection of two novelettes and twelve short stories.
A murder in Frankfort, Kentucky (1826), the famous “Kentucky
Tragedy”, gave Warren the story for World Enough and Time
(1950). Band of Angels (1955) is a tale of miscegenation in the
Civil War era. The Cave (1959) is a philosophical novel, and
Wilderness (1961), a historical novel of the Civil War period, that
represents Warren’s most significant accomplishment in the genre
of the historical novel. Its main hero Adam Rosenzweig has left a
Bavarian ghetto and sailed for America to join the Union Army.
Wilderness is the story of Adam’s adventures in America, his growth,
by experience, to a deeper understanding of himself and of the
world he must accept. Wilderness is the author’s attempt to make
human sense of the War and to dramatize this meaning so that
it appeals to the emotional, imaginative and spiritual sides of
man.
Among his later works Flood (1964), a novel, Who Speaks
for the Negro (1965), a work in journalism, and Selected Poems
(1966).
Warren is known equally as well for his wont as a critic and
scholar. A college textbook by him and Cleanth BrooKS, Under-
standing Poetry (1938), has probably been the most; influential
single factor in shaping the teaching of English in America during
167
the 20th century. His essays have been widely published in the
literary journals, and his Selected Essays appeared in 1958.
Welty, Eudora (1909) — American novelist, short-story writ-
er. Eudora Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women
and graduated from the University of Wisconsin. She studied ad-
vertising at Columbia University and worked at miscellaneous
writing and publicity jobs before she began to write seriously.
In her works she concentrates on the small-town Mississippi lito
she knows so well. Her first stories won instant critical acclaim,
but it was some time before the reading public recognized her
talents. Eudora Welty’s books include A Curtain of Green (1941), The
Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of the
Innisfallen (1955), stories set mainly in her region and depict-
ing characters, often grotesque, who fail to know themselves or their
neighbours; The Robber Bridegroom (1942), a novelette combining
fairy tale and ballad form, telling of the wooing of Rosamond,
the daughter of a Mississippi planter, by a bandit chief; Delta
Wedding (1946), a novel subtly revealing the sensibilities of a
modern plantation family; The Ponder Heart (1954), a comic fantasy
of small-town Mississippi life, dramatized in 1957; Place in Fiction
(1957), an essay; The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), a novel.
Miss Welty’s stories are “offbeat” accounts of extraordinary
happenings in seemingly ordinary lives. Coupled with the uncanny
accuracy of her colloquial speech, which she uses with richly comic
effect, is a sense of the mysterious which gives her work an almost
mythological dimension.
Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams) (1914) —
playwright, short-story writer, poet, novelist. During his early
years Williams held many different jobs to support himself while
writing short stories and plays that did not sell. He worked his
way through the University of Iowa and in 1940 was awarded
a Rockefeller fellowship to work on a play, Battle of A ngels,which
was produced in Boston and closed after a few weeks. Williams
later rewrote the play as Orpheus Descending (1957), which is a
story of a corruption which bigotry breeds and the brutality with
which it can explode. It is also the story of how love can revitalize
human beings.
His first successful play was The Glass Menagerie (1945), which
won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and established
him as a major American playwright. It is of the most tender
of Williams’ plays, and establishes the theme of illusion versus
reality — particularly of a lonely woman inhabiting a world of
dreams — which recurs frequently in his work. Portrait of a Girl
in Glass, included in this book, somewhat autobiographical and
one of Williams’s best, became the source of The Glass Menagerie.
Rich in detail, the story communicates the quality of southern
gentlewomen who are unable to cope with contemporary society.
Abnormally diffident, Laura, the main character of the story,
made no positive movements, but stood in the shade as if she
dreaded what the world might offer.
168
Williams continues this study with Blanche Du Bois of
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) showing the southern gentlewoman,
the last representative of a dying culture, who is too delicate to
withstand the crudeness and decay surrounding her. The conflict
between her standards and those represented by her brother-in-law
Stan Kowalski finally destroys her. It is the study of this final
descent into madness, with all its implied comment about the two
codes, that seems to interest the playwright. A Streetcar Named
Desire won a Pulitzer prize.
Summer and Smoke (1948) is a story of a soulful but repressed
woman who is unable to respond to the vitality of the man she
loves and is driven, by her dreams of purity, into lonely spinster-
hood. The Rose Tattoo (1951) deals with Gulf Coast Sicilians with
roisterous humour and sympathy. In Camino Real (1953) Williams
experimented with literary and stage techniques. Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof (1955), which also won a Pulitzer prize, depicts bitter,
abnormal family tensions in a struggle for control of a plantation,
revealing the darkest side of life of wealthy Southern families.
Williams’ latest plays are: Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)
produced with Something Unbroken (1958) under the title Garden
District, Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960),
and The Night of the iguana (1961), the last based on a short story
in One Arm and Other Stories (1948), The Eccentrittes of a Nightin-
gale (1964), The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1964),
Slapstick Tragedy (1967), The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968).
Some of Tennessee Williams’ plays, such as The Glass Menagerie,
A Streetcar Named Desire, Orpheus Descending, Sweet Bird of Youth
were staged in Soviet theatres.
Other work of Williams includes The Roman Spring of Mrs
Stone (1950), a novel, and Hard Candy (1954), a collection of
short stories. He collected several short plays in Twenty-Seven
Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays (1946). He published
one volume of poems, In the Winter of Cities (1955), and wrote
the screenplay for the motion picture Baby Doll (1956), based
on his Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton.
t
COMMENTARIES ’
Old Folks’ Christmas
sis (U. S. colloq.)= sister
Cradle Snatchers and Sex — plays staged in New York
in 4925 and 1926; both were long runs on the New York stage
Von Kluck Alexander (1846—1934) — German general. At the
opening of the First World War he commanded the First German
Army in the invasion of Belgium and the subsequent drive on Paris.
to break in — here: to insert cuff buttons
to brat — here: to open up or to prepare a way
Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty
parfaitement (Fr.) — yes, indeed
Bordeaux — a city in tho south of France
Dover — a port in eastern Kent, England, on the Strait of -
Dover (French, Pas de Calais), a strait 21 miles wide at the eastern
end of the English Channel
Calais — a French port on the English Channel, facing Dover
Stone, Marcus (1840—1921) — English painter. Many of his
pictures have been published as engravings and in this form have
become well known to the public
sponge-bag — an oil-skin case for a toilet sponge
heigho = heigh-ho
- Euclid — Athenian geometer who lived about 300 В. C.
Cromwell, Oliver (1599—1658) — English general and states-
man, lord-protector of England 1653—58 (after King Charles I
Kad been executed)
Lord Beaconsfield — Disraeli, Benjamin (1804—81), Earl of
Beaconsfield, English statesman and novelist, prime minister
1867, 1874—80
Lincoln, Abraham (1809—65) — president of the United
States (1861—65), and political leader of the Northern States in
the American Civil War. He was assassinated in 1865.
Darling, Grace — daughter of James Darling, keeper of tho
Outer-Farne lighthouse, off the coast of Northumberland, who
with her father in 1938 gallantly put out in a coble in a heavy sea
and rescued several passengers of the wrecked “Forfarshire” steamer
General Booth — Booth, William (1828—1912), founder of
the Salvation Army, known as General Booth
St. Bride or Saint Brigid (453?—523) — patroness of Ireland
identified with Brigid, ancient Irish goddess of fire, fertility, and
the manual arts
to cloud (here fig.) — to overshadow, throw into the shado
gossamer (here fig.) — flimsy, unimportant
Sydney Carton — a character in Dickens’s A Tale of Two
Cities
and tried to coax the pin back — and tried to draw the pin
back from its place (by persistent effort)
Vincennes — a town in the department of Seine, a south-
eastern suburb of Paris, just outside the walls and close to the
Bois-de-Vinccnnes
cafe complet (Fr.) — coffee with sugar and milk
170
evensong (Ecclesiastic) — tho service of evening prayer, or
the time, usually near sunset, of saying it; a song or hymn sung
at evening
R. F. — French Republic (Republiquo Franfaise)
The Catbird Seat
Camels — a brand of cigarette
F & S — the name of a firm or company
the filing department — the department of an organization
where catalogues, files and records are kept
are you lifting the oxcart out of the ditch? (pejorative or sar-
castic) — are you working hard?
in spite of entering an objection and sustaining it(legal termi-
nology) — in spite of inwardly agreeing with his own objection
Are you tearing up the pea patch? Are you hollering down
the rain barrel?, etc. — these expressions might have some meaning
in a given context; here they are used simply to illustrate Mrs
Barrow’s peculiar mode of speech and her pejorative attitude
towards the work of others
Arc you sitting in the catbird seat? = Are you sitting pretty?
which means to be safe and at an advantage, to be in a favourable
position, not to have any worries
a Dodger fan — a supporter of the famous baseball team from
New York known as “The Brooklyn Dodger”
Red Barber — the name of a sports commentator
going on a rampage (here: in a sporting sense) — to perform
(to play) very energetically
like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him — a situa-
tion in a game of baseball in which the player with the bat has
three opportunities of hitting the ball and has so far not missed
any chances, in other words, he is “sitting pretty”
to stand up (si.) — to keep waiting; he had stood up under it —
he had tolerated and endured her impossible behaviour so well
seasoning — here: moderating, adjusting
memo (abbr. form of memorandum) — here', a note sent by the
chief of a department to his staff: blue memo — here: a note con-
taining some criticism or unfavourable comment
the S of F & S — one of the partners (i. o. Schlosser) in the
firm of F & S
Luckies — a brand of cigarette the full name of which is
"Lucky Strike”
to drag a red herring across the trail — to divert somebody’s
attention
ducky (si.) — delightful; darling, dear
the inactive file — file where schemes, plans, or projects
which cannot be carried out are kept
When the clicking in the lock started.,. — in many American
apartment blocks there is a system whereby a visitor rings the
bell next to the name of the person he wishes to see. These names
and bells are arranged on a board next to the front door at street
level. The ringing of the bell is heard in the appropriate apartment
and the host by pressing a button inside his flat, can open the
front door, thus allowing the visitor to enter the building.
171
Here’s nuts to ... — an expression of contempt, similar in
meaning to “To hell with”, hut here it is much milder because it
is humourously used in the form of a toast
to he coked to the gills (si.) — to be under the influence of a
large amount of alcohol or, as in this case, narcotics
That will be all of that. — That is enough of that sort of talk.
. to call somebody on the carpet — to summon somebody in
order to admonish him or administer some criticism (a more com-
mon expression is to be on the carpet, i. e. to be reprimanded)
The Unvexed Isles
Ilippocrene — a fountain on Mount Helicon, Greece, tradi-
tionally sacred to the Muses and regarded as a source of poetic
inspiration
English 40 — a course of English delivered by the professor
in 1940
Baltimore — a port in Northern Maryland at the upper end
of Chesapeake Bay
Nebraska — a state in the north central United States; capital,
Lincoln
dyspeptic (fig.) — showing depression of spirit like that of
a person suffering from dyspepsia; gloomy or pessimistic
to hang up my stocking — the tradition is meant of using a
stocking as'a receptacle for the presents supposed by children to be
deposited in it by Santa Claus on Christmas eve
Mother Sill — pills for the stomach
Bermuda — an island group in the Western North Atlantic,
comprising a British colony; capital, Hamilton
Old Santy (colloq.) = Santa Claus
Palmolive — a kind of soap
Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340—1400) — the first great English
poet. Chaucer’s writings fall into three periods: (1) The period of
French influence in which he uses the octosyllabic couplet. To
this period The Boice of the Duchesse (1369) and the Romaunt of
the Rose, so far as written by Chaucer belong. (2) The period of
Italian influence, in which he leaves off the octosyllabic couplet,
uses mainly the “heroic” stanza of seven lines, and begins to use the
heroic couplet. To this period belong The Hous of Fame, The Parle-
ment of Foules, Troylus and Cryseyde, The Legende of Good Women;
and the first drafts of some of his tales. (3) The period of his matu-
rity, 1386—1400, in which he uses the heroic couplet. To this
period belong the Canterbury Tales, designed about 1387.
to let things go hang (colloq.) — to be indifferent to them,
take no interest in or care of them
a-glitter — in a glitter, glittering
dash lamp — a carriage lamp fixed in the centre of the dash-
board
A Christmas Song
squat — here-, thickset
solo whist — kind of whist in which one player opposes three
others
172
Oberland — a mountainous region of central Switzerland,
specifically the Bernese Oberland (Bernese Alps) „
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756—91) — great Austrian
composer
to be in leather — to be in leather business
early Edwardian — pertaining to the time of Edward VII
(1901—1910), a period often regarded latterly as ornate and over-
genteel
Rotarian — member of a Rotarian Club, international associ-
ation of professional and business men in a town for the purpose
of rendering services to the community
Kaye, Danny (b. 1913) — American actor and entertainer
to take up — here; to help in one’s singing, to encourage
smb’s singing
Schubert, Franz Peter (1797—1828) — Austrian composer.
Schubert’s name was immortalized through his songs, the titles
of nearly 500 of which are recorded. They were full of dramatic
intensity, poetry and pathos and full of music of infinite beauty
set to texts by Schiller, Goethe, Klopstock, to which he arranged
accompaniments of complete fitness and endless variety.
Brahms, Johannes (1833—1897) — famous German composer
bind (si.) — a depressing or very dull person
whizzo (as exclamation) — splendid
clumsy — here: = clumsily
Death of a Traveling Salesman
chinaberry tree — cither of two trees (Sapindus saponaria
and Sapindus marginatus) of the soapberry family; found in Mexico
and the SW United States, where each is known as the China treo
shotgun house — a house having a clear passageway straight
through
Confederate — a person who was on the side of the Confeder-
ate States of America, a league of eleven southern States of the
American Union that separated from the United States during the
Civil War (1861—65)
to git = to get
readying — a verbal substantive from the verb to ready- =
readiness
to borry = to borrow
Wistful, Delicately Gay
eight-eighty = eighty eight yards
bit-part — a small role in a play
rave (adj., colloq.) — extravagantly enthusiastic
to close on — here-, to draw near, approach, close
to honey (U. S.) — to talk fondly or in a coaxing manner;
to talk sweetly
candily — adverb formed from the verb to candy — to
make sweet, palatable, or agreeable
legal — here: restrained, courteous
to travel —here: to meet
173
a turkey (U.S. si.} == a play (occasionally, a motion picture)
that is a failure
What’s the good word? — a friendly, favourable, or lauda-
tory utterance
bereaved — deprived by death of a near relative, or of one
connected by some endearing tie
 to kick oneself — to have remorse or regret
to bring down the house — to evoke such demonstrative ap-
plause as threatens or suggests the downfall of the building; to evoke
wild applause or acclaim
to block out — here: to obscure from view
oysterish — of the nature of or resembling an oyster
Portrait of a Girl in Glass
Saint Louis — a settlement in Marion County, Oregon
to slate — here: to write or set down for nomination or ap-
pointment
alley-cat — short-haired, mongrel cat which forages for food
in alleys, etc.
victrola — a make of phonograph, a trade name
trying to ride two horses simultaneously in two opposite
directions — trying to do two different things simultaneously
Porter, Gene Stratton (1863—1924) — Indiana author of
books for girls, including sentimental novels and nature studies
illustrated by her own drawing. Пег most popular books are
Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909). '
Star of Bethlehem — stated in the New Testament to have
appeared in the sky at the time of the birth of Christ; Christmas
tree decoration resembling its form
undulant — here: undulating
to haul one’s freight — here: to go, to travel
Centralia — a city in Marion County
salmon loaf — the crust of a loaf or roll of bread with a stuff-
ing of salmon
Sousa, John Philip (1854—1932) — American conductor,
composer and author. Tn 1880 he as a composer of music established
a “march style” of his own which came to be recognized throughout
the world. At home and abroad he was known as tho “March King”.
Wyoming — a state in the NW United States; capital,
Cheyenne
edifying — here: profitable
blanc-mange [Ыэ'тэпз! (fr.) — jelly made with milk; used
for desserts
to cut the rug — here: to dance
to let the cat out of the bag — to disclose the secret
an’ — weakened from and
The Black Madonna
nah = ought not; the OE form made by the archaic negative
ne (not) blended formerly with the verb owe
Immaculate Conception — in the Roman Catholic Church,
the doctrine that the Virgin Mary in the first instant of her con-
ception was preserved free from all stain of original sin
Lourdes — a town in SW France; shrine and grotto o£ tho
Virgin (Our Lady of Lourdes)
doodle (colloq.) — a simpleton, noodle
Observer — a Sunday paper founded in 1792 by William
Clement. It added greatly to its popularity by the early adoption
of wood engraving to illustrate sensational incidents.
Victorian — pertaining to or characteristic of tho ideals and
standards of morality and taste prevalent during the reign of Queen
Victoria (1837—1901); prudish, conventional, narrow
Austen, Jane (1775—1817) — a great English novelist.
Of her completed novels Sense and Sensibility,.appeared in 1811,
Pride and Prejudice An 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, Emma in
1815, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion posthumously in 1818.
Reader's Digest — a popular literary journal publishing
books of world literature in abbreviation
Queen, Woman’s Own — illustrated English periodicals
designed for women’s interests
Life — a popular illustrated weekly published in the U. S. A.
News Chronicle — a London morning paper which resulted
from the amalgamation of several papers, notably the Daily News
and the Daily Chronicle in 1930
civic — here’, pertaining to a city
Odeon = Odeum
Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles.
— L’Allegro, a poem written in 1632 by John Milton (1608—
1674)
Victoria Park — (217 acres) is in tho northeast of London,
laid out and planted as a place of recreation for the poorer inhab-
itants of this part of London
Brasso — a special paste to polish brass things
Dettol — an anticeptic liquid
to get a tongue in one’s head = to have a tongue, to be
sarcastic or ironic, to have a sharp tongue
good and tired (colloq.) — very (completely) tired
Everything That Rises Must Converge
integrated (17. 5.) — made up of individuals, or groups
of various cultural, economic, racial, etc., backgrounds functioning
as a unit; cf. an integrated school
to brace oneself (here fig.) — in sense of summoning up reso-
lution for a task
Saint Sebastian — a Roman soldier and Christian martyr who
was shot to death with arrows for spreading Christianity; com-
memorated on January 20
I ... won’t meet myself coming and going — I ... won’t meet
myself here and there
to stand — here: to endure, undergo, or submit to
yo’ — an obsolete form of you
living Jesus — a blasphemous oath
Contents
Bing W. Lardner. Old Folk’s Christmas...........  •	>	3
Stacy Aumonier. Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty ........ 15
James Thurber. The CatbirdSeat.......................   33
Bobert Penn Warren. The Unvexed Isles.................. 44
H. E. Bates. A Christmas Song .......................   56
Eudora Welty. Death of a Traveling Salesman ........... 67
Irwin Shaw. Wistful, Delicately Gay.................... 82
Tennessee Williams. Portrait of a Girl in Glass....... Ill
Muriel Spark. The Black Madonna....................... 124
Flannery O’Connor. Everything That Rises Must Converge 145
List of Authors ...................................... 163
Commentaries ........................................	170
ТИХИЕ ОСТРОВА
Сборник рассказов на английском языке
для студентов V курса
педагогических институтов
Редактор Я. П. Тихонов. Художник О. Г. Бетехтин. Художест-
венный редактор В. В. Михневич. Технический редактор
' Я. И. Ленина. Корректор Я. Я. Зисман.
Сдано в набор 10/VIII 1976 г. Подписано к печати 16/XI 1976 г. Бумага
типографская Mi 2. Формат бумаги 84х1081/зг. Печ. л. 5,5. Уч.-изд. л. 10,17
Усл. печ. л. 9,24. Тираж 80.000 экз. Заказ № 790. Цена 29 к.
Ленинградское отделение ордена Трудового Красного Знамени изда-
тельства ..Просвещение" Государственного комитета Совета Минист-
ров РСФСР по делам издательств, полиграфии и книжной торговли.
191186, Ленинград, Д-186. Невский пр., 28.
Ордена Трудового Красного Знамени Ленинградское производственно-
техническое объединение «Печатный Двор» имени А. М. Горького Со-
юзполиграфпрома при Государственном комитете Совета Министров
СССР по делам издательств, полиграфии и книжной торговли. 197136,
Ленинград, П-136, Гатчинская ул., 26.
Обложка отпечатана на Ленинградской фабрике офсетпой печати Ki 1
Союзполпграфпрома при Государственном комитете Совета Министров
СССР по делам издательств, полиграфии и книжной торговли. 197101.
Ленинград, П-101, Кронверкская ул., 7.