PRECOCIOUS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
UEVFENT YEVTUSHENKO
In 1944 I was living alone in an empty apartment in a small quiet Moscow street. Chetvertaya Meshchanskaya.
My parents were divorced. My father was somewhere in Kazakhstan with his new wife and their two children. I seldom received letters from him.
My mother was at the front. She had given up her work as a geologist to become a singer and was giving concerts for the troops.
My education was left to the street. The street taught me to swear, smoke, spit elegantly through my teeth and to keep my fists up, always ready for a fight-a habit I have kept.
I realized that what mattered in the struggle for existence was to overcome my fear of those who were stronger.
The ruler of our street. Chetvertaya Meshchanskaya, was a boy of about sixteen who was nicknamed Red.
Red’s shoulders were incredibly broad for a boy of his age.
Red walked masterfully up and down our street. His legs wide apart and with a slightly rolling gait, like a seaman on the deck of his ship.
From under his peaked cap, always worn back to front his forelock tumbled down in a fiery cascade, and out of his round pockmarked face, green eyes, like a cat’s sparkled with scorn for everything and like a cat’s sparkled with scorn for everything and everyone crossing his path. Two or three lieutenants, in peaked caps back to front lime Red’s trotted at his heels.
Red could stop any boy and say impressively the one word money. His lieutenants would turn out the boy’s pockets and if he resisted they gave him a real beating.
Everyone was afraid of Red. I too was afraid. I knew he carried heavy brass knuckles in his pocket.
I wanted to conquer my fear of Red.
So I wrote a poem about him.
By the next day the whole street knew the piece by heart and relished it with triumphant hatred.
One morning on my way to school I suddenly came upon Red and his lieutenants. His eyes seemed to bore through me, ‘Ah the poet’ he drawled smiling crookedly. So you write verses. Do they rhyme?
Red’s hand darted into his pocket and came out armed with its brass knuckles; it flashed like lightning and struck my head. I fell down streaming with blood and lost consciousness.
This was my first payment as a poet.
I spent several days in bed.
When I went out, with instinctive fear but lost and took to my heels.
I ran all the way home. There I rolled on my bed, biting my pillow and pounding it with my fists in shame and impotent fury at my cowardice.
But then I made up my mind to vanquish it at whatever cost.
I went into training with parallel bars and weights and after very session I would feel my muscles. They were getting harder, but slowly. Then I remembered something I had read in a book about a miraculous Japanese method of wrestling which gave an advantage to the weak over the strong. I sacrificed a week’s ration card for a text book in jujitsu.
For three weeks I hardly left home-I rained with two other boys. Finally I felt I was ready and went out.
Red was sitting on the lawn in our yard, playing Twenty one with his lieutenants. He was absorbed in the game.
Fear was still in me and it ordered me to turn back. But I went up to the players and kicked the cards aside with me fool.
Red looked up, surprised at my impudence after my recent flight.
He got up slowly. You looking for more? He asked menacingly.
As before his hand dived into his pocket for the brass knuckles. But I made a quick jabbing movement and Red howling with pain rolled on the ground. Bnewildered he got up and came at me swinging his head furiously from side to side like a bull.
I caught his wrist and squeezed slowly as I had read in the book until the brass knuckles dropped from his limp fingers. Nursing his hand Red fell down again. He was sobbing and smearing the tears over his pockmarked face with his grimy fist. His lieutenants discreetly withdrew.
Hat day Red ceased to rule our street.
And from that day on I knew certain that there is no need to fear the strong. All our needs is to know the method of overcoming them. There is a special jujitsu for every strong man.
What I also learned that day was that, if I wished to be a poet, I must not only write poems but also know how to stand up for what I have written.
বুধবার, ২১ এপ্রিল, ২০১০
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
SIDNY WILLIUM PORTER
ONE DOLLER AND EIGHTY- SEVEN SENTS. That is all, And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one two at a time by bulldogging the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it, which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $ 8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description but it certainly had that word in the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name Mr. James Dillingham Young.
The Dillingham had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was shrunk to $ 30 per week. Now when the income was shrunk to $ 20 the letters of Dillingham looked blurred as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. but whenever Mr. James Dillingham young came home and reached his flat above he was called Jim and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham young, already introduced to you ad Della. Which is all very good?
Della finish her cry attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fencer in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas day and she had only $ 1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with his result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $ 1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many happy hours she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling- something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $ 8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della being slender had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood for the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty second. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham young’s in which they both tool a mighty pride. One was Jims gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft? Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate her, majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had king solemn been the janitor, with all his treasure piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear of two splashed on the worn red carpet. On went her old brown jacket: on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: Mum. Sofronie. Hair Goods of all kinds. One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, painting, Madame large, too white, chilly hardly looked the sofronie.
Will you buy my hair, asked Della?
I buy hair, said Madame. Take your hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.
Down rippled the brown cascade.
Twenty dollars, said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand.
Give it to me quick, said Della.
Oh and next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design. Properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation-as all good things should do. It was even worthy of the watch. As soon as she saw it. She knew that it must be Jim’s. its was like him Quietness and value the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leathers strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love which is always a tremendous task, dear friends a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close lying curls that made her like wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
If Jim doesn’t kill me, she said to herself. Before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do- oh! What could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob cabin in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered;
Please God, make him think I am still pretty; The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious, poor fellow, he was only twenty-two and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her, it was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of his sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression of his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
Jim darling, she cried, don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again-you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say Marry Christmas! Jim and let’s be happy, you don’t know what a nice- what a beautiful nice gift I’ve got for you.
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. Don’t you like me just as well anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?
Jim looked about the room curiously.
You say your hair is gone? He said, with an air almost of idiocy.
You needn’t look for it, said Della. It’s sold, I tell you- sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. May be the hairs of my head were numbered, she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat’s pocket and threw it upon the table.
Don’t make any mistake. Della he said, about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave of a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.
White fingers and nimble tore at the strange and paper. And then an ecstatic of joy; and then alas! A quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay the combs- the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jeweled rims – just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with Jim eyes and a smile and say; my hair grows so fast, Jim!
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, oh, oh!
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present she held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent sprite.
Isn’t it a dandy Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch; I want to see how it likes on it.
Instead of obeying Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
Della, said he, let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.
The magi, as you knew, were wise men wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were on doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
SIDNY WILLIUM PORTER
ONE DOLLER AND EIGHTY- SEVEN SENTS. That is all, And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one two at a time by bulldogging the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it, which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $ 8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description but it certainly had that word in the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name Mr. James Dillingham Young.
The Dillingham had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was shrunk to $ 30 per week. Now when the income was shrunk to $ 20 the letters of Dillingham looked blurred as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. but whenever Mr. James Dillingham young came home and reached his flat above he was called Jim and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham young, already introduced to you ad Della. Which is all very good?
Della finish her cry attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fencer in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas day and she had only $ 1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with his result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $ 1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many happy hours she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling- something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $ 8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della being slender had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood for the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty second. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham young’s in which they both tool a mighty pride. One was Jims gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft? Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate her, majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had king solemn been the janitor, with all his treasure piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear of two splashed on the worn red carpet. On went her old brown jacket: on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: Mum. Sofronie. Hair Goods of all kinds. One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, painting, Madame large, too white, chilly hardly looked the sofronie.
Will you buy my hair, asked Della?
I buy hair, said Madame. Take your hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.
Down rippled the brown cascade.
Twenty dollars, said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand.
Give it to me quick, said Della.
Oh and next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design. Properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation-as all good things should do. It was even worthy of the watch. As soon as she saw it. She knew that it must be Jim’s. its was like him Quietness and value the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leathers strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love which is always a tremendous task, dear friends a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close lying curls that made her like wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
If Jim doesn’t kill me, she said to herself. Before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do- oh! What could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob cabin in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered;
Please God, make him think I am still pretty; The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious, poor fellow, he was only twenty-two and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her, it was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of his sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression of his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
Jim darling, she cried, don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again-you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say Marry Christmas! Jim and let’s be happy, you don’t know what a nice- what a beautiful nice gift I’ve got for you.
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labour.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. Don’t you like me just as well anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?
Jim looked about the room curiously.
You say your hair is gone? He said, with an air almost of idiocy.
You needn’t look for it, said Della. It’s sold, I tell you- sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. May be the hairs of my head were numbered, she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat’s pocket and threw it upon the table.
Don’t make any mistake. Della he said, about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave of a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.
White fingers and nimble tore at the strange and paper. And then an ecstatic of joy; and then alas! A quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay the combs- the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jeweled rims – just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with Jim eyes and a smile and say; my hair grows so fast, Jim!
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, oh, oh!
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present she held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent sprite.
Isn’t it a dandy Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch; I want to see how it likes on it.
Instead of obeying Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
Della, said he, let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.
The magi, as you knew, were wise men wonderfully wise men-who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were on doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
READING FOR PLEASURE
READING FOR PLEASURE
L.A.G.Strong
To my mind the only sensible reason for reading anything is because we enjoy it or hope to enjoy it. Of course, pleasure covers a whole variety of feelings and shades of feeling. But it is my strangest belief about reading that one should read only what one likes, and because one likes it. I am taking, of course, of our private reading. When we are studying special subjects. Or working for examinations, we obviously have to read in other circumstances.
It may seem odd to insist that one should only read because one like it; but people read for such a queer variety of reasons. There are people who read a book not because they enjoy the book, but because they want to be able to say that they have read it. They want to be in the swim. Ten to one when they read a book for those reasons, they only skim through it, because all they really want do is to be able to talk as if they had read it. There are people who set themselves down to read a book because they think it will do them good. They make a duty of it a kind of penance; sometimes they go so far as to set themselves too many pages at a time. If it is some kind if technical book which they are reading in order to improve their knowledge well and good. But if it is a novel or a poem, or any part of what we call “English Literature” then the person who is reading it in this way is wasting his or her time.
You can not take a good book as if it were medicine. It is rude to the book and very silly from our own point of view, by approaching it in that way, you make sure of losing anything it might have to give you. You only begin to get good from a book when your sprit and the book’s sprit come together. A book is like a living person. You must meet it, is as a friend and actively like it, if any good is to pass between you.
A reason why people at school read books is to please their teacher. The teacher has said that this, that, or the other is a good book and that it is a sign of good taste to enjoy it. So a number of boys and girls, anxious to please their teacher get the book and read it. Two or three of them may genuinely like it, for its own sake, and be grateful to the teacher for putting it in their way. But many will not honestly like it, or will persuade themselves that they like it. And that does a great deal of harm. The people who cannot like the book run the risk of two things happening to them: either they are put off the idea of the book–let us suppose the book was David Copperfield–either they are put off the idea of classical novels, or they take a dislike to Dickens and decide firmly never to waste their time on anything of the sort again: or they get guilty conscience about the whole thing. They feel that they do not like what they ought to like and that therefore there is something wrong with them.
They are quite mistaken of course. There is nothing wrong with them. The mistake has all been in the teacher’s side. What has happened is that they have been shoved up against a book before they were ready for it. It is like giving a young child food only suitable for an adult. Result–indigestion violent stomach-ache and a rooted dislike of that article of food for evermore.
Still, I am not sure that even that is not better than the fate of the people who manage to persuade themselves that they enjoy the book. What happens to them is truly terrible. Once they get into the way of this kind of thing, they do not know what they think. Their real feelings, their real tastes are all Stoppard down under this sense of duty, which tells them that whatever Mr. Thingamabob or Miss Whatshername recommends to them is good, and that therefore, of course, they like it.
That has happened to a very great umber of men and women of my acquaintance. They do not know what is good; they know only what is supposed to be good. They do not know what they like: they know only what they ought to like. If you show them a book or a picture, if you play them a piece of music or put a record on the gramophone, you see them desperately trying to recognize it if it is music and looking quickly to see the author’s name if it is a book, because, until they have seen the label, they do not know whether they ought to like it or not. Give them something without a label and they are lost. They have long been without any power they ever had to judge a thing on its merits.
Now for a question on which people quarrel violently. Does it do any good to advice people to read certain books? What is the effect produced when a teacher or anybody else says. You ought to read Vanity Fair or the Old Curiosity shop”. Or whatever the name of the book may be? Does it make the average person want to read the book of does it put him or her right off?
The answer will depend in the first place, upon the person who give the advice and in the second place upon the person to whom the advice is given. It is not a subject upon which one can lay down the law. One way or another; and I cannot pretend to do more than give my own beliefs.
I do however; remember very clearly my own experiences and my own reading from a very early age. You may, or may not, be like me –but I confess that in the matter of reading at any rate, I have always been a bit contrary, I have always preferred to go my own way.
When I was a very small boy my ankles were weak and, I was slow in learning to walk. As a result, I learned to read sooner than most children. My grandmother used to read a great deal to me- school stories, all very virtuous were the hero and bad lad was terribly bad, and come to an edifying end in the last chapter but one. From these stories we came to Eric or Little by Little and St. Winfred’s which were similar in moral tone but much better written.
As I grew older, and chose my own reading. I rushed to comic papers and penny bloods. The youth of today can have no idea what a wonderful period that was for penny –bloods …….. It was the golden age of thrillers, and I read them all, I have got some still in my bookcase. Only a few, but I treasure them.
Some good people, when they saw me reading these in the train on my way to school, would shake their heads, and say they wondered my presents allow it. But my father a man of great sympathy and good sense took a wise and tolerant view. He argued that, if I had any sense, I would grow out of this type of reading; if I had not, it did not matter what I read, as I should be a fool anyway.
Beside he argued if he forbade me to read these things I should want to read them all the more, because they would have the charm of being illegal. He was proved right on that point. Once my mother and grandmother, horrified by a particularly lurid picture on the cover of one of my Claude Duval books, told me to tear it up. I could not board in my grandmother’s summer house, where it stayed for two or three years, and received many secret and guilty reading it would never have had otherwise; for my father was right in the other point too, I had grown out of my taste for highwaymen and gone o to other books. But this forbidden book lasted linger than all the rest, because it was forbidden.
I have never regretted my penny- dreadful period. Indeed, I owed my jock Sheppard library the discovery of one good writer at least. That was Harrison Ainsworth, whose novel about Jack Sheppard I found in my boarding school library during my first few days there and jumped to it with a homesick thrill. I liked it, and proceeded to read all the other Harrison Ainsworth I could fond.
Beside penny –bloods, I read other stories of adventure; and as I grew a little older, I begin to realize that they were better written than the penny –bloods. They were not less exciting; they were more exiting. Which was read to us at school, was better value than Claude Duval? Sherlock homes were batter value than Sexton Black, more exiting; satisfying. I could believe than in him better; the people he met were more like real people. Then my favorite magazine, The Captain, begin to print school stories by a new writer called P.G Warehouse; and they were better than the adventure of Tom Merry of Harry Wharton and Co. they were funnier and they were more like real school, then when I was getting better from measles, my father read me some of W.W Jacobs’s stories. I laughed till I nearly fell out of bed and from that day always read everything by Jacobs that I could fond.
One day, at school, an older boy said to me, if you like Jacobs, you’d like dickens. I was very suspicious but I tried one at last; and then I read ten of Dickens all in a row.
At my first school, we read Shakespeare plays with a teacher who made them very interesting indeed. The first time I came to London on a visit with my father in 1907, I gave him on peace till he took me to see Sir Herbert. Tree in the Merchant of Venice, the play we were reading at the time, later, when the Benson company came to Plymouth, I went every night for a whole week, reading the play by day and seeing it in the evening. After that I got hold of all the plays I could lay my hands on by the other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. I read all sorts and conditions of things as I do today for one reason and one reason only: because I like them.
There were poems that I liked too and when I say liked I mean liked. That same English teacher I mentioned just now used to read poetry to us and tactful about it she did not ram things down our throats or insist that we must like what she liked. She encouraged us to discuss the poems and say if we liked them or disliked them.
I was young enough not to have any prejudice against poetry. Very few people have, if on one puts them off it either by forcing it on them, or making them learn it by heart before they want to, or if they do not hear older boys and girls laughing and suggesting that it is sissy or highbrow to enjoy poetry. I do not see why anyone should read poetry who does not like it. Thank Heaven; we are none of us under any obligation to read anything. But a good many people will not give poetry a fair try, or let themselves enjoy it. I took it as it came, when I was a boy and I have had pleasure and good from it ever since…..
The books and plays and poem to which I was introduce by this schoolmistress I like in exactly the same way as I used ton like the penny bloods; that is to say. I enjoy reading them or heading them read, because they interested me. I read them for pleasure. At that school owing to the sense and understanding of this schoolmistress there was no nonsense about its being priggish or sissy to like good books. We only knew a book was good because we liked it. We did not know, for instance, that David Copperfield was an English classic. We only knew that one day the schoolmistress brought a copy into class, and made us start reading aloud about David going to church on Sunday morning, and about his visit to the upturned boat at Yarmouth, in which the peggottys lived. These things delighted us and made us laugh and so we thought that David Copperfield was a good book and enjoyed it, in just the same way as we were enjoying P. G. Wodehouse’s school stories in the Captain.
And that beyond all possible doubt in the way to go at your reading; to enjoy it, and to read because you enjoy it, and not to read anything that bores you, because that makes it even less likely that you will enjoy it later on, it is first of all, a question of age, of the stage in one’s growing up which one has reached. My friends and I used to read the Dick Turpins and Jack Sheppard because we were in a stage when violent and bloodthirsty adventures were all we wanted. Later on, when we had grown out of that stage, these stories on longer satisfied us. We had growing out of them, just as we had earlier grown out of stories about teddy bears and fairies and Jemima Puddliduck. Nearly everyone has a touch of blood thirstiness in his make up witness the thrillers and detective stories that are written for grown up readers. But they will not do for our only article of diet unless for one reason or another, our development has stopped and we remain at the mental age when such things are all we want. Normally, no one wants to feed all the time off one dish only. It gets monotonous and we want a change.
But – and this is where the opposite school of thought comes in. the formidable number of teachers and others who hold a different opinion but. Say these teacher the hard fact is that as you have admitted a moment ago, quite a number of people never grow out of the penny dreadful, gangster thriller stage of reading and cannot read anything else
You are assuming one of these people said to me, you are assuming that everyone has naturally good taste and will pass on from on this shot of reading to other sorts as long as he’s not interferes with. It isn’t true because a great many won’t ever find out that there are other short of reading. They know that they like, and they stick to it, unless at some stage in their growth preferable early, someone takes them by the scruff of the neck and compels them to read good books, there they stop.
Well it all depends on the view you take of teaching and what it should be. Personally, I dislike from my soul this assumption in Cultural matters that we have a right to take anyone by the scruff of the neck and compel him to read anything he doesn’t want to, I believe and maintain that no sane person reads except for pleasure. If people wish to stay at an elementary stage in reading, let them. I do not see why anybody should not read what he likes, nor why anybody should read what he does not like. I believe that all a teacher may legitimately do is to try to show him how much more pleasure he might get from a wider range of reading.
The real point about reading good books, well written books, and true books is that, once you are able to enjoy them, they give you more pleasure than the books that are less good, less well written and less true. The only reason I ever read a book in my spare time that is to say is because I expect pleasure from it. If I like it, I go on, if it bores me, I stop. No one can bully me into liking what I do not like and I should never try to bully anyone else into liking what he did not like.
L.A.G.Strong
To my mind the only sensible reason for reading anything is because we enjoy it or hope to enjoy it. Of course, pleasure covers a whole variety of feelings and shades of feeling. But it is my strangest belief about reading that one should read only what one likes, and because one likes it. I am taking, of course, of our private reading. When we are studying special subjects. Or working for examinations, we obviously have to read in other circumstances.
It may seem odd to insist that one should only read because one like it; but people read for such a queer variety of reasons. There are people who read a book not because they enjoy the book, but because they want to be able to say that they have read it. They want to be in the swim. Ten to one when they read a book for those reasons, they only skim through it, because all they really want do is to be able to talk as if they had read it. There are people who set themselves down to read a book because they think it will do them good. They make a duty of it a kind of penance; sometimes they go so far as to set themselves too many pages at a time. If it is some kind if technical book which they are reading in order to improve their knowledge well and good. But if it is a novel or a poem, or any part of what we call “English Literature” then the person who is reading it in this way is wasting his or her time.
You can not take a good book as if it were medicine. It is rude to the book and very silly from our own point of view, by approaching it in that way, you make sure of losing anything it might have to give you. You only begin to get good from a book when your sprit and the book’s sprit come together. A book is like a living person. You must meet it, is as a friend and actively like it, if any good is to pass between you.
A reason why people at school read books is to please their teacher. The teacher has said that this, that, or the other is a good book and that it is a sign of good taste to enjoy it. So a number of boys and girls, anxious to please their teacher get the book and read it. Two or three of them may genuinely like it, for its own sake, and be grateful to the teacher for putting it in their way. But many will not honestly like it, or will persuade themselves that they like it. And that does a great deal of harm. The people who cannot like the book run the risk of two things happening to them: either they are put off the idea of the book–let us suppose the book was David Copperfield–either they are put off the idea of classical novels, or they take a dislike to Dickens and decide firmly never to waste their time on anything of the sort again: or they get guilty conscience about the whole thing. They feel that they do not like what they ought to like and that therefore there is something wrong with them.
They are quite mistaken of course. There is nothing wrong with them. The mistake has all been in the teacher’s side. What has happened is that they have been shoved up against a book before they were ready for it. It is like giving a young child food only suitable for an adult. Result–indigestion violent stomach-ache and a rooted dislike of that article of food for evermore.
Still, I am not sure that even that is not better than the fate of the people who manage to persuade themselves that they enjoy the book. What happens to them is truly terrible. Once they get into the way of this kind of thing, they do not know what they think. Their real feelings, their real tastes are all Stoppard down under this sense of duty, which tells them that whatever Mr. Thingamabob or Miss Whatshername recommends to them is good, and that therefore, of course, they like it.
That has happened to a very great umber of men and women of my acquaintance. They do not know what is good; they know only what is supposed to be good. They do not know what they like: they know only what they ought to like. If you show them a book or a picture, if you play them a piece of music or put a record on the gramophone, you see them desperately trying to recognize it if it is music and looking quickly to see the author’s name if it is a book, because, until they have seen the label, they do not know whether they ought to like it or not. Give them something without a label and they are lost. They have long been without any power they ever had to judge a thing on its merits.
Now for a question on which people quarrel violently. Does it do any good to advice people to read certain books? What is the effect produced when a teacher or anybody else says. You ought to read Vanity Fair or the Old Curiosity shop”. Or whatever the name of the book may be? Does it make the average person want to read the book of does it put him or her right off?
The answer will depend in the first place, upon the person who give the advice and in the second place upon the person to whom the advice is given. It is not a subject upon which one can lay down the law. One way or another; and I cannot pretend to do more than give my own beliefs.
I do however; remember very clearly my own experiences and my own reading from a very early age. You may, or may not, be like me –but I confess that in the matter of reading at any rate, I have always been a bit contrary, I have always preferred to go my own way.
When I was a very small boy my ankles were weak and, I was slow in learning to walk. As a result, I learned to read sooner than most children. My grandmother used to read a great deal to me- school stories, all very virtuous were the hero and bad lad was terribly bad, and come to an edifying end in the last chapter but one. From these stories we came to Eric or Little by Little and St. Winfred’s which were similar in moral tone but much better written.
As I grew older, and chose my own reading. I rushed to comic papers and penny bloods. The youth of today can have no idea what a wonderful period that was for penny –bloods …….. It was the golden age of thrillers, and I read them all, I have got some still in my bookcase. Only a few, but I treasure them.
Some good people, when they saw me reading these in the train on my way to school, would shake their heads, and say they wondered my presents allow it. But my father a man of great sympathy and good sense took a wise and tolerant view. He argued that, if I had any sense, I would grow out of this type of reading; if I had not, it did not matter what I read, as I should be a fool anyway.
Beside he argued if he forbade me to read these things I should want to read them all the more, because they would have the charm of being illegal. He was proved right on that point. Once my mother and grandmother, horrified by a particularly lurid picture on the cover of one of my Claude Duval books, told me to tear it up. I could not board in my grandmother’s summer house, where it stayed for two or three years, and received many secret and guilty reading it would never have had otherwise; for my father was right in the other point too, I had grown out of my taste for highwaymen and gone o to other books. But this forbidden book lasted linger than all the rest, because it was forbidden.
I have never regretted my penny- dreadful period. Indeed, I owed my jock Sheppard library the discovery of one good writer at least. That was Harrison Ainsworth, whose novel about Jack Sheppard I found in my boarding school library during my first few days there and jumped to it with a homesick thrill. I liked it, and proceeded to read all the other Harrison Ainsworth I could fond.
Beside penny –bloods, I read other stories of adventure; and as I grew a little older, I begin to realize that they were better written than the penny –bloods. They were not less exciting; they were more exiting. Which was read to us at school, was better value than Claude Duval? Sherlock homes were batter value than Sexton Black, more exiting; satisfying. I could believe than in him better; the people he met were more like real people. Then my favorite magazine, The Captain, begin to print school stories by a new writer called P.G Warehouse; and they were better than the adventure of Tom Merry of Harry Wharton and Co. they were funnier and they were more like real school, then when I was getting better from measles, my father read me some of W.W Jacobs’s stories. I laughed till I nearly fell out of bed and from that day always read everything by Jacobs that I could fond.
One day, at school, an older boy said to me, if you like Jacobs, you’d like dickens. I was very suspicious but I tried one at last; and then I read ten of Dickens all in a row.
At my first school, we read Shakespeare plays with a teacher who made them very interesting indeed. The first time I came to London on a visit with my father in 1907, I gave him on peace till he took me to see Sir Herbert. Tree in the Merchant of Venice, the play we were reading at the time, later, when the Benson company came to Plymouth, I went every night for a whole week, reading the play by day and seeing it in the evening. After that I got hold of all the plays I could lay my hands on by the other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time. I read all sorts and conditions of things as I do today for one reason and one reason only: because I like them.
There were poems that I liked too and when I say liked I mean liked. That same English teacher I mentioned just now used to read poetry to us and tactful about it she did not ram things down our throats or insist that we must like what she liked. She encouraged us to discuss the poems and say if we liked them or disliked them.
I was young enough not to have any prejudice against poetry. Very few people have, if on one puts them off it either by forcing it on them, or making them learn it by heart before they want to, or if they do not hear older boys and girls laughing and suggesting that it is sissy or highbrow to enjoy poetry. I do not see why anyone should read poetry who does not like it. Thank Heaven; we are none of us under any obligation to read anything. But a good many people will not give poetry a fair try, or let themselves enjoy it. I took it as it came, when I was a boy and I have had pleasure and good from it ever since…..
The books and plays and poem to which I was introduce by this schoolmistress I like in exactly the same way as I used ton like the penny bloods; that is to say. I enjoy reading them or heading them read, because they interested me. I read them for pleasure. At that school owing to the sense and understanding of this schoolmistress there was no nonsense about its being priggish or sissy to like good books. We only knew a book was good because we liked it. We did not know, for instance, that David Copperfield was an English classic. We only knew that one day the schoolmistress brought a copy into class, and made us start reading aloud about David going to church on Sunday morning, and about his visit to the upturned boat at Yarmouth, in which the peggottys lived. These things delighted us and made us laugh and so we thought that David Copperfield was a good book and enjoyed it, in just the same way as we were enjoying P. G. Wodehouse’s school stories in the Captain.
And that beyond all possible doubt in the way to go at your reading; to enjoy it, and to read because you enjoy it, and not to read anything that bores you, because that makes it even less likely that you will enjoy it later on, it is first of all, a question of age, of the stage in one’s growing up which one has reached. My friends and I used to read the Dick Turpins and Jack Sheppard because we were in a stage when violent and bloodthirsty adventures were all we wanted. Later on, when we had grown out of that stage, these stories on longer satisfied us. We had growing out of them, just as we had earlier grown out of stories about teddy bears and fairies and Jemima Puddliduck. Nearly everyone has a touch of blood thirstiness in his make up witness the thrillers and detective stories that are written for grown up readers. But they will not do for our only article of diet unless for one reason or another, our development has stopped and we remain at the mental age when such things are all we want. Normally, no one wants to feed all the time off one dish only. It gets monotonous and we want a change.
But – and this is where the opposite school of thought comes in. the formidable number of teachers and others who hold a different opinion but. Say these teacher the hard fact is that as you have admitted a moment ago, quite a number of people never grow out of the penny dreadful, gangster thriller stage of reading and cannot read anything else
You are assuming one of these people said to me, you are assuming that everyone has naturally good taste and will pass on from on this shot of reading to other sorts as long as he’s not interferes with. It isn’t true because a great many won’t ever find out that there are other short of reading. They know that they like, and they stick to it, unless at some stage in their growth preferable early, someone takes them by the scruff of the neck and compels them to read good books, there they stop.
Well it all depends on the view you take of teaching and what it should be. Personally, I dislike from my soul this assumption in Cultural matters that we have a right to take anyone by the scruff of the neck and compel him to read anything he doesn’t want to, I believe and maintain that no sane person reads except for pleasure. If people wish to stay at an elementary stage in reading, let them. I do not see why anybody should not read what he likes, nor why anybody should read what he does not like. I believe that all a teacher may legitimately do is to try to show him how much more pleasure he might get from a wider range of reading.
The real point about reading good books, well written books, and true books is that, once you are able to enjoy them, they give you more pleasure than the books that are less good, less well written and less true. The only reason I ever read a book in my spare time that is to say is because I expect pleasure from it. If I like it, I go on, if it bores me, I stop. No one can bully me into liking what I do not like and I should never try to bully anyone else into liking what he did not like.
A MOTHER IN MANVILLE
A MOTHER IN MANVILLE
Majorie kinnan Rawlings
The orphanage is high in the Carolina Mountains. Some time in winter the snowdrifts are so deep that the institution is cut off from the village below, from the entire world. Fog hides the mountain peaks, the snow swirls down the valleys and a wind blows so bitterly that the orphanage boys who take the milk twice daily to the baby cottage reach the door with fingers stiff in an agony of numbness.
Or when we carry trays from the cookhouse for the ones that are sick, Jerry said, we get our faces frostbit, because we can’t put our hands over them. I have a glove, he added. Some of the boys don’t have any.
He like the late spring, he said. The rhododendron was in bloom: a carpet of colors across the mountain-sides, soft as the may winds that stirred the hemlocks. He called it labor.
Its pretty when the labor blooms, he said some of its pink and some of its white.
I was there in mountain, I wanted quite, isolation to so some troublesome writing, I wanted mountain air to blow out the malaria from too long a time in the sub-tropics, I was homesick, too for the flaming of maples in October, and for corn shocks and pumpkins and black walnut trees and the lift of hills, I found them all, living in a cabin that belonged to the orphanage, half a mile beyond the orphanage farm. When I took the cabin, I asked for a boy of man to come and chop wood for the fireplace. The first few days were warm, I found what wood I needed about the cabin. No one came and I forgot the order.
I looked up from my typewriter one late afternoon a little boy startled. A boy stood at the door, and my pointer dog, my companion, was at his side and had not barked to warn me. The boy probably twelve years old, but undersized. He wore overalls and a torn shirt and was barefooted.
He said, “I can chop some wood today”.
I said,” but I have a boy coming from the orphanage”.
“I’m the boy”
You? “You are small.”
Size doesn’t mater chopping wood.” he said.
“some of the big boys don’t chop good. I’ve been chopping wood at the orphanage a long time.”
I visualized mangled and inadequate branches for my fires, I was well into my work and not inclined to conversation, I was a little blunt.
Very well, there’s the axe. Go ahead and see what you can do.
I went back to work, closing the door. At first the sound of the boy dragging brush annoyed me. Then he began to chop. The blows were rhythmic and steady, and shortly, I had forgotten him, the sound no more of an interruption then a consistent rain, I suppose an hour and a half passed, for when I stopped and stretched, and heard the boy’s steps on the cabin stoop, the sun was dropping behind the farthest mountain and the valleys were purple with something deeper than the asters.
The boy said,” I have to go to supper now; I can come again tomorrow evening.”
I said, I’ll pay you now for what you’ve done.” Thinking I should probably have to insist on an older boy, ten cents an hour?
“Anything is all right.”
We went together back of the cabin. An astonishing amount of solid wood had been cut. There were cherry logs and heavy roots of rhododendron and blocks from the waste pine and oak left from the building of the cabin.
“But you’ve done as much as a man.” I said. This is a splendid pile.
I looked at him, actually, for the first time. His hair was the color of the corn shocks, and his eyes, very direct, were like the mountain sky when rain is pending- gray, with a showing of that miraculous blue. As I spoke a light came over him as through the sating sun had touched him with the same suffused glory with which it touched the mountains. I gave him a quarter.
‘You may come tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and thank you very much.”
He looked at me, and at the coin, and seemed to want ton speak, but could not, and turned away.
I’ll split the kindling tomorrow, “he said over his thin ragged shoulder, you’ll need kindling and medium wood and logs and backlogs.
At daylight I was half awakened by the spend of chopping. Again it was so even in texture that I went back to sleep. When I left my bed in the cool morning, the boy had come and gone, and a stack of kindling was neat against the cabin wall. he came again after school in the afternoon and worked until time to return to the orphanage. His name was Jerry; he was twelve years old, and he had been at the orphanage since he was four, I could picture him at four, with the same grave, gray –blue eyes and the same independence? No the word that comes to me is “integrity”.
The word means something very special to me, and the quality for which I use it is a rare one. My father had it- there is another of whom I am almost sure-but almost no man of my acquaintance possesses it with the clarity, the simplicity of a mountain stream. But the boy Jerry had it, it is bedded on courage, but it is more then brave. It is honest, but it is more then honesty. The axe –handle broke one day. Jerry said, the woodshop at the orphanage would repair it. I brought money to pay for the job and he refused it.
I’ll pay for it, he said. I broke it, I brought the axe down careless.”
But no one hits accurately every time”. I told him. The fault was in the wood of his own carelessness. He was a free-will agent and he chose to do careful work, and if he failed he took the responsibility with subterfuge.
And he did for me the unnecessary thing, the gracious thing that we find done only by the great of heart. Things on training can teach for they are done on the instant. With on predicated experience. He found a cubbyhole beside the fireplace that I had not noticed, there of his own accord, he put kindling and medium wood, so that I might always have dry fire material ready in case of sudden wet weather. A stone was loose in the rough walk to the cabin, he dug a deeper hole and steadied it, although he came, himself, by a short –cut over the bank, I found that when I tried to return his thoughtfulness with such things as candy and apples, he was wordless. “Thank you “ was perhaps an expression for which he had no use, for his courtesy was instinctive, he only looked at the gift and at me, and a curtain lifted, so that I saw seep into the clear well of his eyes and gratitude was there, and affection, soft over the firm granite of his character .
He made a simple excuse to come and sit with me. I could no more have turned him away than if he had been physically hungry, I suggested once that the best time for us to visit was just before supper, when I left off my writing. After that, he waited always until my typewriter had been some time quite. One day I worked until nearly dark, I went outside the cabin, having forgotten him. I saw him going up over the hill in the twilight toward the orphanage. When I sat down on my stoop, a place was warm from his body where he had been sitting.
He became intimate, of course, with my pointer, Pat. There is a strange communication between a boy and a dog. Perhaps they possess the same singleness of spirit, the same kind od wisdom. It is difficult to explain, but it exists. When I want across the state for a week-end I left the dog in Jerry’s charge. I gave him the dog whistle and the key to the cabin, and left sufficient food. He was to come two or three times a day and let out the dog and feed and exercises him. I should return Sunday night and jerry would, take out he dog for the last time Sunday afternoon and then leave the key under as agreed hiding place.
My return was belated and the fog filled the mountain passes so treacherously that I dared not drive at night, the fog held the next morning, and it was Monday noon before I reached the cabin. The dog had been fed and cared for that morning. Jerry came early in the afternoon, anxious.
The superintendent said, nobody would drive in the fog, “he said, I came just before bedtime last night and you hadn’t come. So I brought pat some of breakfast this morning. I wouldn’t have let anything happened to him.”
I was sure of that, I didn’t worry “.
When I heard about the fog, I thought you’d know”.
He was needed for work at the orphanage and he had to return at once, I gave him a dollar in payment and he looked at it and went away. But that night he came in the darkness and knocked at the door.
“Come in jerry,” I said. “If you’re allowed to be away this late.”
I told, may be a story, he said, I told them I thought you would want to see me,. That’s true, I assured him and I saw his relief, I want to hear about how you managed with the dog.”
He sat by the fire with me, with no other light, and told me of their two days together. The dog lay close to him and found a comfort there that I did not have for him. And it seemed to me that being with my dog, and caring for him, had brought the boy and me, too, too, together so that he left that he belonged to me as well as to the animal.
“He stayed right with me,” he told me, except when he ran in the laurel, he likes the laurel. I took him up over the hill and we both ran fast. There was a place where the grass was high and I lay down in it and hid, I could hear pat hunting for me. He found my trail and he barked, when he found me, he acted crazy and he ran around and around m din circles.”
We watched the flames.
That’s an apple log, he said. It burns the pretties of any wood.
Were very close.
He was not suddenly impelled to speak of things he had not spoken of before, nor had I cared to ask him.
You look a little bit like my mother, he said, especially in the dark by the fire.”
But you are only four, Jerry when you come here. You have remembered how she looked all these years.
My mother lives in Manville, he said.
For a moment, finding that he had a mother shocked me as greatly as anything in my life has ever done, and I did not know way it disturbed me then I understood my distress. I was filled with a passionate resentment that any woman should go away and leave her son. a fresh anger added itself. A son like this one! The orphanage was a wholesome place, the executives were kind, good people, the food was more than adequate, the boys were healthy a ragged shirt was no hardship or the doing of clean labor. Granted, perhaps, that the boy fell no lack, what about the mother? At four he would have looked the same as now. Nothing I thought, nothing in life could change those eyes. His quality must be apparent to an idiot, a fool, I burned with question I could not ask, in any I was afraid there would be pain.
Have you seen her, Jerry –lately?
I see her every summer. She sends for me.
I wanted to cry out. Why are you not with her? How can she let you go away again?
He said, she comes up here from Manville whenever she can. She doesn’t have a job now.
His face shone in the firelight.
She wanted to give me a puppy, but they can’t let anyone boy keep a puppy. You remember the suit I had in last Sunday? He was plainly proud. She sent me that for Christmas! The Christmas before that – he drew a long breath, savoring the memory – she sent me a pair of skates.”
Roller skates?
My mind was busy, making picture of her, tiring to understand her. She had not, then entirely to deserted ot forgotten him. But why, then –I thought.” but I must not condemn her without knowing.”
Roller skates. I let the other boys use them. There’s always borrowing them. But there’s careful of them.”
I’m going to take the dollar you gave me for taking care of pat, he said, and buy her a pair of gloves.”
I could only say, that will be nice. Do you know her size.”
I think it’s eight and a half? He asked.
No, I wear a smaller size a six.
Oh! Then I guess her hands are bigger than yours.”
I hate her, poverty or no, there was other food than bread, and the soul could starve as quickly as the body. He was taking his dollar to buy gloves for her big stupid hands, and she loves away from him, in Manville, and contented herself with sending him skates.
She likes white gloves, he said, do you think I can get them for a dollar?
I think so, I said.
I decided that I should not leave the mountains without seeing her and knowing for myself why she had done this thing.
The human mind scatters its interests as though made of thistle –down, and every wind stirs and moves it, I finished my work. It did not please me and I gave my thoughts to another field. I should need some Mexican, material.
I made arrangements to close my Florida place Mexico immediately, and dong the writing there, if conditions were favorable. Then Alaska with my brother. After that, heaven knew, what or where,.
I did not take time to go to Manville to see Jerry’s mother, nor even to talk with the orphanage officials about her. I was a trifle abstracted about the boy because of my work and plans. And after my first fury at her – we did mot speak of her again – his having a mother, any sort at all, all no far away, in Manville, relieved me of the ache I had about him, he did not question the anomalous relation. He was not lonely; it was none of my concern.
He came every day and cut my wood and did small helpful favors and stayed to talk. The days had become cold and often I let him come inside the cabin. He would lie on the floor in front of the fire with one arm across the pointer and they would both doze and wait quietly for me. Other days they ran with a common ecstasy through the laurel, and since the asters were now gone, he brought me back vermilion maple leaves and chestnut boughs dripping with imperial yellow, I was ready to go.
I said to him, you have been my good friend, jerry, I shall often think of you and miss you, pat will miss you too, I am leaving tomorrow.”
He did not answer. When he went away, I remember that a new moon hung over the mountains and I watched him go in silence up the hill. I expected him the next day, but he did nit come. The details of packing my personal belongings, loading me car, arranging the bed over the seat, where the dog would ride, occupied me until late in the day, I closed the cabin and started the car, noticing that the sun was in the west and I should do well to be out of the mountains by nightfall. Io stopped by the orphanage and left the cabin key and money for my light bill with Miss Clark.
And will you call jerry for me to say good-bye to him?
I don’t know where he is, she said, I’m afraid he’s not well. He didn’t eat his dinner this noon. One of boys saw him going over the hill in to the laurel. He was supposed to fire the boiler this afternoon. It’s not like him. He’s unusually reliable.’
I was almost relieved, for I knew I should never see him again and it would be easier not to say good-bye to him.
I said, I wanted to talk with you about his mother- why he’s here – but I’m in more of hurry than I expected to be. Its out of the question for me to see her now. But here’s some money I’d like to leave with you to buy things for him at Christmas and on his birthday. It will be better than for me to try to send him things. I could easily duplicate- skates for instance. “
She blinked her honest spinster’s eyes.
There’s not much use for skates here, she said. Her stupidity annoyed me.
What I mean, I said, is that I don’t want to duplicate things his mother sends him, I might have chosen skates if didn’t know she had already given them to him.
“I don’t understand,” she said, he has no mother. He has no skates.
Majorie kinnan Rawlings
The orphanage is high in the Carolina Mountains. Some time in winter the snowdrifts are so deep that the institution is cut off from the village below, from the entire world. Fog hides the mountain peaks, the snow swirls down the valleys and a wind blows so bitterly that the orphanage boys who take the milk twice daily to the baby cottage reach the door with fingers stiff in an agony of numbness.
Or when we carry trays from the cookhouse for the ones that are sick, Jerry said, we get our faces frostbit, because we can’t put our hands over them. I have a glove, he added. Some of the boys don’t have any.
He like the late spring, he said. The rhododendron was in bloom: a carpet of colors across the mountain-sides, soft as the may winds that stirred the hemlocks. He called it labor.
Its pretty when the labor blooms, he said some of its pink and some of its white.
I was there in mountain, I wanted quite, isolation to so some troublesome writing, I wanted mountain air to blow out the malaria from too long a time in the sub-tropics, I was homesick, too for the flaming of maples in October, and for corn shocks and pumpkins and black walnut trees and the lift of hills, I found them all, living in a cabin that belonged to the orphanage, half a mile beyond the orphanage farm. When I took the cabin, I asked for a boy of man to come and chop wood for the fireplace. The first few days were warm, I found what wood I needed about the cabin. No one came and I forgot the order.
I looked up from my typewriter one late afternoon a little boy startled. A boy stood at the door, and my pointer dog, my companion, was at his side and had not barked to warn me. The boy probably twelve years old, but undersized. He wore overalls and a torn shirt and was barefooted.
He said, “I can chop some wood today”.
I said,” but I have a boy coming from the orphanage”.
“I’m the boy”
You? “You are small.”
Size doesn’t mater chopping wood.” he said.
“some of the big boys don’t chop good. I’ve been chopping wood at the orphanage a long time.”
I visualized mangled and inadequate branches for my fires, I was well into my work and not inclined to conversation, I was a little blunt.
Very well, there’s the axe. Go ahead and see what you can do.
I went back to work, closing the door. At first the sound of the boy dragging brush annoyed me. Then he began to chop. The blows were rhythmic and steady, and shortly, I had forgotten him, the sound no more of an interruption then a consistent rain, I suppose an hour and a half passed, for when I stopped and stretched, and heard the boy’s steps on the cabin stoop, the sun was dropping behind the farthest mountain and the valleys were purple with something deeper than the asters.
The boy said,” I have to go to supper now; I can come again tomorrow evening.”
I said, I’ll pay you now for what you’ve done.” Thinking I should probably have to insist on an older boy, ten cents an hour?
“Anything is all right.”
We went together back of the cabin. An astonishing amount of solid wood had been cut. There were cherry logs and heavy roots of rhododendron and blocks from the waste pine and oak left from the building of the cabin.
“But you’ve done as much as a man.” I said. This is a splendid pile.
I looked at him, actually, for the first time. His hair was the color of the corn shocks, and his eyes, very direct, were like the mountain sky when rain is pending- gray, with a showing of that miraculous blue. As I spoke a light came over him as through the sating sun had touched him with the same suffused glory with which it touched the mountains. I gave him a quarter.
‘You may come tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and thank you very much.”
He looked at me, and at the coin, and seemed to want ton speak, but could not, and turned away.
I’ll split the kindling tomorrow, “he said over his thin ragged shoulder, you’ll need kindling and medium wood and logs and backlogs.
At daylight I was half awakened by the spend of chopping. Again it was so even in texture that I went back to sleep. When I left my bed in the cool morning, the boy had come and gone, and a stack of kindling was neat against the cabin wall. he came again after school in the afternoon and worked until time to return to the orphanage. His name was Jerry; he was twelve years old, and he had been at the orphanage since he was four, I could picture him at four, with the same grave, gray –blue eyes and the same independence? No the word that comes to me is “integrity”.
The word means something very special to me, and the quality for which I use it is a rare one. My father had it- there is another of whom I am almost sure-but almost no man of my acquaintance possesses it with the clarity, the simplicity of a mountain stream. But the boy Jerry had it, it is bedded on courage, but it is more then brave. It is honest, but it is more then honesty. The axe –handle broke one day. Jerry said, the woodshop at the orphanage would repair it. I brought money to pay for the job and he refused it.
I’ll pay for it, he said. I broke it, I brought the axe down careless.”
But no one hits accurately every time”. I told him. The fault was in the wood of his own carelessness. He was a free-will agent and he chose to do careful work, and if he failed he took the responsibility with subterfuge.
And he did for me the unnecessary thing, the gracious thing that we find done only by the great of heart. Things on training can teach for they are done on the instant. With on predicated experience. He found a cubbyhole beside the fireplace that I had not noticed, there of his own accord, he put kindling and medium wood, so that I might always have dry fire material ready in case of sudden wet weather. A stone was loose in the rough walk to the cabin, he dug a deeper hole and steadied it, although he came, himself, by a short –cut over the bank, I found that when I tried to return his thoughtfulness with such things as candy and apples, he was wordless. “Thank you “ was perhaps an expression for which he had no use, for his courtesy was instinctive, he only looked at the gift and at me, and a curtain lifted, so that I saw seep into the clear well of his eyes and gratitude was there, and affection, soft over the firm granite of his character .
He made a simple excuse to come and sit with me. I could no more have turned him away than if he had been physically hungry, I suggested once that the best time for us to visit was just before supper, when I left off my writing. After that, he waited always until my typewriter had been some time quite. One day I worked until nearly dark, I went outside the cabin, having forgotten him. I saw him going up over the hill in the twilight toward the orphanage. When I sat down on my stoop, a place was warm from his body where he had been sitting.
He became intimate, of course, with my pointer, Pat. There is a strange communication between a boy and a dog. Perhaps they possess the same singleness of spirit, the same kind od wisdom. It is difficult to explain, but it exists. When I want across the state for a week-end I left the dog in Jerry’s charge. I gave him the dog whistle and the key to the cabin, and left sufficient food. He was to come two or three times a day and let out the dog and feed and exercises him. I should return Sunday night and jerry would, take out he dog for the last time Sunday afternoon and then leave the key under as agreed hiding place.
My return was belated and the fog filled the mountain passes so treacherously that I dared not drive at night, the fog held the next morning, and it was Monday noon before I reached the cabin. The dog had been fed and cared for that morning. Jerry came early in the afternoon, anxious.
The superintendent said, nobody would drive in the fog, “he said, I came just before bedtime last night and you hadn’t come. So I brought pat some of breakfast this morning. I wouldn’t have let anything happened to him.”
I was sure of that, I didn’t worry “.
When I heard about the fog, I thought you’d know”.
He was needed for work at the orphanage and he had to return at once, I gave him a dollar in payment and he looked at it and went away. But that night he came in the darkness and knocked at the door.
“Come in jerry,” I said. “If you’re allowed to be away this late.”
I told, may be a story, he said, I told them I thought you would want to see me,. That’s true, I assured him and I saw his relief, I want to hear about how you managed with the dog.”
He sat by the fire with me, with no other light, and told me of their two days together. The dog lay close to him and found a comfort there that I did not have for him. And it seemed to me that being with my dog, and caring for him, had brought the boy and me, too, too, together so that he left that he belonged to me as well as to the animal.
“He stayed right with me,” he told me, except when he ran in the laurel, he likes the laurel. I took him up over the hill and we both ran fast. There was a place where the grass was high and I lay down in it and hid, I could hear pat hunting for me. He found my trail and he barked, when he found me, he acted crazy and he ran around and around m din circles.”
We watched the flames.
That’s an apple log, he said. It burns the pretties of any wood.
Were very close.
He was not suddenly impelled to speak of things he had not spoken of before, nor had I cared to ask him.
You look a little bit like my mother, he said, especially in the dark by the fire.”
But you are only four, Jerry when you come here. You have remembered how she looked all these years.
My mother lives in Manville, he said.
For a moment, finding that he had a mother shocked me as greatly as anything in my life has ever done, and I did not know way it disturbed me then I understood my distress. I was filled with a passionate resentment that any woman should go away and leave her son. a fresh anger added itself. A son like this one! The orphanage was a wholesome place, the executives were kind, good people, the food was more than adequate, the boys were healthy a ragged shirt was no hardship or the doing of clean labor. Granted, perhaps, that the boy fell no lack, what about the mother? At four he would have looked the same as now. Nothing I thought, nothing in life could change those eyes. His quality must be apparent to an idiot, a fool, I burned with question I could not ask, in any I was afraid there would be pain.
Have you seen her, Jerry –lately?
I see her every summer. She sends for me.
I wanted to cry out. Why are you not with her? How can she let you go away again?
He said, she comes up here from Manville whenever she can. She doesn’t have a job now.
His face shone in the firelight.
She wanted to give me a puppy, but they can’t let anyone boy keep a puppy. You remember the suit I had in last Sunday? He was plainly proud. She sent me that for Christmas! The Christmas before that – he drew a long breath, savoring the memory – she sent me a pair of skates.”
Roller skates?
My mind was busy, making picture of her, tiring to understand her. She had not, then entirely to deserted ot forgotten him. But why, then –I thought.” but I must not condemn her without knowing.”
Roller skates. I let the other boys use them. There’s always borrowing them. But there’s careful of them.”
I’m going to take the dollar you gave me for taking care of pat, he said, and buy her a pair of gloves.”
I could only say, that will be nice. Do you know her size.”
I think it’s eight and a half? He asked.
No, I wear a smaller size a six.
Oh! Then I guess her hands are bigger than yours.”
I hate her, poverty or no, there was other food than bread, and the soul could starve as quickly as the body. He was taking his dollar to buy gloves for her big stupid hands, and she loves away from him, in Manville, and contented herself with sending him skates.
She likes white gloves, he said, do you think I can get them for a dollar?
I think so, I said.
I decided that I should not leave the mountains without seeing her and knowing for myself why she had done this thing.
The human mind scatters its interests as though made of thistle –down, and every wind stirs and moves it, I finished my work. It did not please me and I gave my thoughts to another field. I should need some Mexican, material.
I made arrangements to close my Florida place Mexico immediately, and dong the writing there, if conditions were favorable. Then Alaska with my brother. After that, heaven knew, what or where,.
I did not take time to go to Manville to see Jerry’s mother, nor even to talk with the orphanage officials about her. I was a trifle abstracted about the boy because of my work and plans. And after my first fury at her – we did mot speak of her again – his having a mother, any sort at all, all no far away, in Manville, relieved me of the ache I had about him, he did not question the anomalous relation. He was not lonely; it was none of my concern.
He came every day and cut my wood and did small helpful favors and stayed to talk. The days had become cold and often I let him come inside the cabin. He would lie on the floor in front of the fire with one arm across the pointer and they would both doze and wait quietly for me. Other days they ran with a common ecstasy through the laurel, and since the asters were now gone, he brought me back vermilion maple leaves and chestnut boughs dripping with imperial yellow, I was ready to go.
I said to him, you have been my good friend, jerry, I shall often think of you and miss you, pat will miss you too, I am leaving tomorrow.”
He did not answer. When he went away, I remember that a new moon hung over the mountains and I watched him go in silence up the hill. I expected him the next day, but he did nit come. The details of packing my personal belongings, loading me car, arranging the bed over the seat, where the dog would ride, occupied me until late in the day, I closed the cabin and started the car, noticing that the sun was in the west and I should do well to be out of the mountains by nightfall. Io stopped by the orphanage and left the cabin key and money for my light bill with Miss Clark.
And will you call jerry for me to say good-bye to him?
I don’t know where he is, she said, I’m afraid he’s not well. He didn’t eat his dinner this noon. One of boys saw him going over the hill in to the laurel. He was supposed to fire the boiler this afternoon. It’s not like him. He’s unusually reliable.’
I was almost relieved, for I knew I should never see him again and it would be easier not to say good-bye to him.
I said, I wanted to talk with you about his mother- why he’s here – but I’m in more of hurry than I expected to be. Its out of the question for me to see her now. But here’s some money I’d like to leave with you to buy things for him at Christmas and on his birthday. It will be better than for me to try to send him things. I could easily duplicate- skates for instance. “
She blinked her honest spinster’s eyes.
There’s not much use for skates here, she said. Her stupidity annoyed me.
What I mean, I said, is that I don’t want to duplicate things his mother sends him, I might have chosen skates if didn’t know she had already given them to him.
“I don’t understand,” she said, he has no mother. He has no skates.
THE LUNCHEON
THE LUNCHEON
W. somerset Maughm
I caught sight of her at the play and in answer to her beckoning I went over during the interval and sat down beside her. It was long since I had last seen her and if some one had not mentioned her name I hardly think I would have recognition her, she addressed me brightly.
Well its many years since we first met. How time does fly! We’re none of us getting any younger. Do you remember the first time I saw you? You asked me to luncheon.
Did I remember?
It was twenty years ago and I was living in Paris. I had a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarters overlooking a cemetery and I was eating barely enough money to keep body and soul together, she had read a book of mine and I had written to me about it. I answered thinking her, and presently I received from her another latter saying that she was passing through Paris and would like to have a chat with him; but her time was limited and the only free moment she had was o the following Thursday she was spending the morning at the Luxembourg and would I gave her a little luncheon at Foyot’s is a restaurant at which the French senators eat and it was so far beyond my means that I had never even thought of going there but I was flattered and I was too young to have learned to say no to a woman. I had eighty francs to last me the rest of the month and a modest luncheon should not cost me more than fifteen. If I could out coffee for the next two weeks, I could manage enough.
I answered that I would meet my friend, by correspondence, at Foyot’s on Thursday at half past twelve. She was not so young as I expected and in appearance imposing rather than attractive. She was in face a woman of forty and she gave me the impression of having more teeth, white and large and even, than were necessary for any practical purpose, she was talk about me I was prepared to be an attentive listener.
I was startled when the bill of fare was brought, for the prices were a great deal higher than I had anticipated. But she reassured me.
“I never eat anything for luncheon”, she said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” I answered generously.
“I never eat more than one thing. I think people eat far too much nowadays, a little fish , perhaps, I wonder if they have any salmon.”
Well, it was early in the year for salmon and it was not on the bill of far, but I asked the waiter if there was any, yes, a beautiful salmon had just come in, it was the first they had had. I ordered it for my guest. The waiter asked her if she would have something while it was being cooked.
“no , she answered, I never eat more than one thing, unless you had a little caviar. I never mind caviar.
My heart sank a little. I know I could not afford caviar. But I could not very well tell her that I told the waiter by all means to bring caviar. For myself I chose the cheapest disk on the menu and that was a mutton chop.
Madame wants to know if you have any of those giant asparagus,”I ask the writer”.
I tried with all my might to will him to say ‘no’. A happy smile spread over his board, priest-like face, and he assured me that they had some so large, so splendid so tender, that I was a marvel.
I am not in the least hungry,”my guest sighed, but if you insist I don’t mind having some asparagus.”
I ordered them.
Aren’t you going to have any?
“No I never eat asparagus “
I know there are people who don’t like them. Face is you ruin your palate by all the meat you eat.
We wait for the asparagus to be cooked. Panic seized me. I was not a question now how much money I should have left overt for the rest of the month but whether I had enough to pay the bill. It would be burred from my guest, I could not bring myself to so that, I knew exactly how much I had and if the bill come to more I made up my mind that I would put my hand I my pocket and with that with a dramatic cry start up and say it had been picked. Of course it would be awkward, if she had not money enough either to pay the bill. Then the only thing would be to leave my watch and say I would come back and pay later.
The asparagus appeared, they were enormous succulent and appetizing the smell of the melted butter tickled my nostrils as the nostrils of Jehovah were tickled by the burnt offerings of the virtuous Semites I watch the abandoned woman thrust them down her throat in large voluptuous mouthfuls and in my polite way I discoursed on the condition of the drama in the blackens, at last she finished.
“Coffee” I said.
Yes, just an ice-cream and coffee. She answered.
I was past caring now. So I ordered coffee for myself and an ice-cream and coffee for her.
You know, there’s one thing I thoroughly believe in, “he said, as she ate the ice-cream.
One should always get up from a meal feeling one could eat a little mere.”
Are you still hungry? I asked faintly.
Oh no I’m not hungry; you see I don’t eat luncheon. I have a cup of coffee in the morning and the dinner, but I never eat more than one thing for luncheon. I was speaking for you.
“Ho, I see.”
Then a terrible thing happened. while we are waiting for a coffee, the head waiter, with an ingratiating smile on his false face, came up to us bearing a large basket full of huge peaches. They had the blush of an innocent girl; they had a rich tone of an Italian landscape. But surely peaches were not in season then. Lord knew that they cost. I knew too-a little later, for my guest, going on with her conversation, absentmindedly took one.
You see you’ve filled your stomach with a lot of meat- my one miserable little chop – and you can’t eat any more .but I have just had a snack and I shall enjoy a peach.
The bill came and when I paid it I found that I had only enough for a quite inadequate tip. Her eyes rested for an instant on the three francs I left for the waiter and I know that she through me mean. But when I walked out of the restaurant I had the whole month before me and a penny in my pocket.
“Follow my example, she said as we shook hands, and never eat more than one thing for luncheon.”
I’ll do better than that”, I retorted. I’ll eat nothing for dinner tonight.”
“Humorist,” she cried gaily, jumping into a cab.” You’re quite a humorist.”
But I had my revenge at last I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the result with complacency. Today she weight twenty-one stone.
W. somerset Maughm
I caught sight of her at the play and in answer to her beckoning I went over during the interval and sat down beside her. It was long since I had last seen her and if some one had not mentioned her name I hardly think I would have recognition her, she addressed me brightly.
Well its many years since we first met. How time does fly! We’re none of us getting any younger. Do you remember the first time I saw you? You asked me to luncheon.
Did I remember?
It was twenty years ago and I was living in Paris. I had a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarters overlooking a cemetery and I was eating barely enough money to keep body and soul together, she had read a book of mine and I had written to me about it. I answered thinking her, and presently I received from her another latter saying that she was passing through Paris and would like to have a chat with him; but her time was limited and the only free moment she had was o the following Thursday she was spending the morning at the Luxembourg and would I gave her a little luncheon at Foyot’s is a restaurant at which the French senators eat and it was so far beyond my means that I had never even thought of going there but I was flattered and I was too young to have learned to say no to a woman. I had eighty francs to last me the rest of the month and a modest luncheon should not cost me more than fifteen. If I could out coffee for the next two weeks, I could manage enough.
I answered that I would meet my friend, by correspondence, at Foyot’s on Thursday at half past twelve. She was not so young as I expected and in appearance imposing rather than attractive. She was in face a woman of forty and she gave me the impression of having more teeth, white and large and even, than were necessary for any practical purpose, she was talk about me I was prepared to be an attentive listener.
I was startled when the bill of fare was brought, for the prices were a great deal higher than I had anticipated. But she reassured me.
“I never eat anything for luncheon”, she said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” I answered generously.
“I never eat more than one thing. I think people eat far too much nowadays, a little fish , perhaps, I wonder if they have any salmon.”
Well, it was early in the year for salmon and it was not on the bill of far, but I asked the waiter if there was any, yes, a beautiful salmon had just come in, it was the first they had had. I ordered it for my guest. The waiter asked her if she would have something while it was being cooked.
“no , she answered, I never eat more than one thing, unless you had a little caviar. I never mind caviar.
My heart sank a little. I know I could not afford caviar. But I could not very well tell her that I told the waiter by all means to bring caviar. For myself I chose the cheapest disk on the menu and that was a mutton chop.
Madame wants to know if you have any of those giant asparagus,”I ask the writer”.
I tried with all my might to will him to say ‘no’. A happy smile spread over his board, priest-like face, and he assured me that they had some so large, so splendid so tender, that I was a marvel.
I am not in the least hungry,”my guest sighed, but if you insist I don’t mind having some asparagus.”
I ordered them.
Aren’t you going to have any?
“No I never eat asparagus “
I know there are people who don’t like them. Face is you ruin your palate by all the meat you eat.
We wait for the asparagus to be cooked. Panic seized me. I was not a question now how much money I should have left overt for the rest of the month but whether I had enough to pay the bill. It would be burred from my guest, I could not bring myself to so that, I knew exactly how much I had and if the bill come to more I made up my mind that I would put my hand I my pocket and with that with a dramatic cry start up and say it had been picked. Of course it would be awkward, if she had not money enough either to pay the bill. Then the only thing would be to leave my watch and say I would come back and pay later.
The asparagus appeared, they were enormous succulent and appetizing the smell of the melted butter tickled my nostrils as the nostrils of Jehovah were tickled by the burnt offerings of the virtuous Semites I watch the abandoned woman thrust them down her throat in large voluptuous mouthfuls and in my polite way I discoursed on the condition of the drama in the blackens, at last she finished.
“Coffee” I said.
Yes, just an ice-cream and coffee. She answered.
I was past caring now. So I ordered coffee for myself and an ice-cream and coffee for her.
You know, there’s one thing I thoroughly believe in, “he said, as she ate the ice-cream.
One should always get up from a meal feeling one could eat a little mere.”
Are you still hungry? I asked faintly.
Oh no I’m not hungry; you see I don’t eat luncheon. I have a cup of coffee in the morning and the dinner, but I never eat more than one thing for luncheon. I was speaking for you.
“Ho, I see.”
Then a terrible thing happened. while we are waiting for a coffee, the head waiter, with an ingratiating smile on his false face, came up to us bearing a large basket full of huge peaches. They had the blush of an innocent girl; they had a rich tone of an Italian landscape. But surely peaches were not in season then. Lord knew that they cost. I knew too-a little later, for my guest, going on with her conversation, absentmindedly took one.
You see you’ve filled your stomach with a lot of meat- my one miserable little chop – and you can’t eat any more .but I have just had a snack and I shall enjoy a peach.
The bill came and when I paid it I found that I had only enough for a quite inadequate tip. Her eyes rested for an instant on the three francs I left for the waiter and I know that she through me mean. But when I walked out of the restaurant I had the whole month before me and a penny in my pocket.
“Follow my example, she said as we shook hands, and never eat more than one thing for luncheon.”
I’ll do better than that”, I retorted. I’ll eat nothing for dinner tonight.”
“Humorist,” she cried gaily, jumping into a cab.” You’re quite a humorist.”
But I had my revenge at last I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the result with complacency. Today she weight twenty-one stone.
THE ANCIENT MARINER
THE ANCIENT MARINER
S. T. COLERIDGE
The marriage ceremony was over and the guests were all going to the feast. The old grey-bearded sailor sat on a stone outside the church and watched the people walking past home. He had a strange, mad look in his eyes, and suddenly he stopped one of the guests.
There was a ship ………… the old sailor began, and he spoke so strangely that the guest stood still and listened to him. The feast began; the guest could hear the music and the laughter, but for some reason he could not move to join the others. He had to stay and listen to the bright-eyed sailor’s story.
The old man told him about his last journey on the sea. They had sail away to the south, he said, until they arrived in cold gray seas. Even the sea was frozen, and the ice was all around them, in those days there were no steamships and the big white sails of their ship opened wide as the strong wind blew them quickly through the ice waters. The weather was very cold and there were no birds or animals in that snow-covered country, but one day the sailors saw an albatross flying towards the ship, the albatross is a big sea bird, and it brings good luck to sailors, so the men were pleased to see it. They gave it food and water and it become very tame, it comes to the ship every day when the sailors called it.
“But one day I shot the albatross!” the old sailor told the marriage gust . it was a terrible thing to do and everyone said I had kill the bird which made the winds blew. I had brought bad luck to the crew.
And they were right. The ship sailed out of the ice waters into another sea, where the sun shone hotly overhead. The wind dropped. Day after day they stayed in that silent sea. There were no wind to fill the sails, and the ship rested unmoving. “As idle as a painted shop upon a painted ocean”. The heat was terrible. There was not a breath of wind, or a cloud in the sky to guard them from the burning sun. Their supply of drinking water was finished, and they could not drink the salty sera water, there was water everywhere around them, but they had not a drop to drink.
The other sailors were very angry with the old man who had shot the albatross. They blamed him for their sufferings and their thirst. They cursed him, and hung the dead albatross round his neck as a punishment.
The next few days were terrible. The sailor’s throats were so dry that they could not speak. Their eyes hurt with looking across the bright, glassy sea, watching all day long far a ship to come to help them.
Suddenly the old sailor saw a ship coming towards them.
“a sail ! a sail !ha cried and the other saw it, too and cried aloud in joy but the ship come slowly nearer, and the men were filled with fear.
This was no ordinary ship: it was not real at all , it seemed like the shadow of a ship, and they could see the shape of the sun quite clearly through the sails. It come nearer and they saw that it had no crew there were only two people on board: one was a woman with bright red lips and a dead white skin and her companion was death himself. They had come to take away the suffering sailors, to carry their souls to the land of death. The old sailor watched, and saw his companions fall down dead, one after another, and the terrible ship of death sails away again with their souls .
He was the only man alive.
“Alone, Alone all, all alone.
Alone on a wide, wide sea.”
For seven days he tried to pray, but he could not break the sailors’ course, he could not sleep, all day and all night he had to look upon the bodies of his dead companions laying round him.
But at last God took pity on him. One day the sailor was watching the water –snakes swimming round the ship. There color were so beautiful and he was filled with such a strong wonder that he felt a great love for them and blessed them from his heart , at once the albatross fell from his neck into the sea’s and the old man fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up it was raining. His thirsty lips were wet and his throat felt fresh and cold again. He thought he heard music all around him, and two voices in the air. One voice said:
Is this the man who killed the harmless albatross?
And the other voice answered: he has been punished enough.”
A soft wind came and blew the ship gently back to harbors, the old man was weak and ill after all his sufferings and he was nearly dead by the time he got back home.
And that is all “, the old sailor finished his story , I was saved because I had shown a true love for all living things, even for water- snacks . Some tines I fell I must tell my terrible story again and teach others the importance of the lesson I learned:
“Prayed best who love best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God who loved us.
He made and loved all.”
I find peace and happiness again as soon as I have told my story and taught people that they must love all things on earth.
And the old sailor, his strange bright eyes and long grey beard went away, leaving the marriage guest alone.
S. T. COLERIDGE
The marriage ceremony was over and the guests were all going to the feast. The old grey-bearded sailor sat on a stone outside the church and watched the people walking past home. He had a strange, mad look in his eyes, and suddenly he stopped one of the guests.
There was a ship ………… the old sailor began, and he spoke so strangely that the guest stood still and listened to him. The feast began; the guest could hear the music and the laughter, but for some reason he could not move to join the others. He had to stay and listen to the bright-eyed sailor’s story.
The old man told him about his last journey on the sea. They had sail away to the south, he said, until they arrived in cold gray seas. Even the sea was frozen, and the ice was all around them, in those days there were no steamships and the big white sails of their ship opened wide as the strong wind blew them quickly through the ice waters. The weather was very cold and there were no birds or animals in that snow-covered country, but one day the sailors saw an albatross flying towards the ship, the albatross is a big sea bird, and it brings good luck to sailors, so the men were pleased to see it. They gave it food and water and it become very tame, it comes to the ship every day when the sailors called it.
“But one day I shot the albatross!” the old sailor told the marriage gust . it was a terrible thing to do and everyone said I had kill the bird which made the winds blew. I had brought bad luck to the crew.
And they were right. The ship sailed out of the ice waters into another sea, where the sun shone hotly overhead. The wind dropped. Day after day they stayed in that silent sea. There were no wind to fill the sails, and the ship rested unmoving. “As idle as a painted shop upon a painted ocean”. The heat was terrible. There was not a breath of wind, or a cloud in the sky to guard them from the burning sun. Their supply of drinking water was finished, and they could not drink the salty sera water, there was water everywhere around them, but they had not a drop to drink.
The other sailors were very angry with the old man who had shot the albatross. They blamed him for their sufferings and their thirst. They cursed him, and hung the dead albatross round his neck as a punishment.
The next few days were terrible. The sailor’s throats were so dry that they could not speak. Their eyes hurt with looking across the bright, glassy sea, watching all day long far a ship to come to help them.
Suddenly the old sailor saw a ship coming towards them.
“a sail ! a sail !ha cried and the other saw it, too and cried aloud in joy but the ship come slowly nearer, and the men were filled with fear.
This was no ordinary ship: it was not real at all , it seemed like the shadow of a ship, and they could see the shape of the sun quite clearly through the sails. It come nearer and they saw that it had no crew there were only two people on board: one was a woman with bright red lips and a dead white skin and her companion was death himself. They had come to take away the suffering sailors, to carry their souls to the land of death. The old sailor watched, and saw his companions fall down dead, one after another, and the terrible ship of death sails away again with their souls .
He was the only man alive.
“Alone, Alone all, all alone.
Alone on a wide, wide sea.”
For seven days he tried to pray, but he could not break the sailors’ course, he could not sleep, all day and all night he had to look upon the bodies of his dead companions laying round him.
But at last God took pity on him. One day the sailor was watching the water –snakes swimming round the ship. There color were so beautiful and he was filled with such a strong wonder that he felt a great love for them and blessed them from his heart , at once the albatross fell from his neck into the sea’s and the old man fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up it was raining. His thirsty lips were wet and his throat felt fresh and cold again. He thought he heard music all around him, and two voices in the air. One voice said:
Is this the man who killed the harmless albatross?
And the other voice answered: he has been punished enough.”
A soft wind came and blew the ship gently back to harbors, the old man was weak and ill after all his sufferings and he was nearly dead by the time he got back home.
And that is all “, the old sailor finished his story , I was saved because I had shown a true love for all living things, even for water- snacks . Some tines I fell I must tell my terrible story again and teach others the importance of the lesson I learned:
“Prayed best who love best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God who loved us.
He made and loved all.”
I find peace and happiness again as soon as I have told my story and taught people that they must love all things on earth.
And the old sailor, his strange bright eyes and long grey beard went away, leaving the marriage guest alone.
ONE WORD IS TOO OFTEN PROFANED
ONE WORD IS TOO OFTEN PROFANED
PERCY BUSSHE SHELLY
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling to falsely disdain’d
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love;
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,-
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the narrow?
The devotion to something a far
From the sphere of our sorrow.
PERCY BUSSHE SHELLY
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling to falsely disdain’d
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love;
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,-
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the narrow?
The devotion to something a far
From the sphere of our sorrow.
এতে সদস্যতা:
পোস্টগুলি (Atom)
