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!h0John Updike

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with myback to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eyefirst was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweetbroad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seemsto hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackerstrying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell.She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and noeyebrows, and I knowit made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty yearsand probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me alittle snort inpassing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by thetime I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without apushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins.They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was brightgreen and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed shejust got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunchedtogether under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, andone of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, thekind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they verywell know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall.She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making theirshoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, onthese long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walkin her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to hertoes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just alittle buzz like a bee in a glassjar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming inhere with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubbleall over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loosearound the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so allaround the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't haveknown there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off,there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this cleanbare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metaltilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that wasunravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it'sthe only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose

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white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more ofher there was.

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slotwatching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, andstopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to theother two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-ri ce-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks- rackers-and- cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and Iwatched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but onsecond thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girlswere walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were prettyhilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, orhop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet youcould set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checkingoatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus,no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them.A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make surewhat they had seen was correct.

You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what withthe glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P,under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along nakedover our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."

"Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselagealready, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen thisApril.

"Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he'sgoing to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov andPetrooshki Tea Company or something.

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on thePoint, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts orsomething before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually womenwith six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could careless. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can seetwo banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices andabout twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's notas if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen theocean for twenty years.

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, theypointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left

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for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints.Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at:least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sadmyself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to doexcept lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like apinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they comearound out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six orTony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars,and plastic toys done up in cellophane that faIl apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Aroundthey come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Threethrough Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesiewith his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cansof pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) sothe girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. KingfishFancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet,bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim lookshe lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar wentheavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.

Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full ofcabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which hehides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and therest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time,now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kindof startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yetkind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right downher voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-creamcoats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off abig plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint inthem. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitzin tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on.

"That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as ifit hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big duneand he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but heconcentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.

Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from theback -- a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the onething."

"That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that hehadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you comein here."

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"We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that sheremembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look prettycrummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It'sour policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What theothers want is juvenile delinquency.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeinga scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling apeach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most ofall Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?"

I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9,GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins tomake a lttle song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul(splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it justhaving come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, andpass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist itsneck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quickenough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keepright on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car,Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving mewith Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

"Did you say something, Sammy?"

"I said I quit."

"I thought you did."

"You didn't have to embarrass them."

"It was they who were embarrassing us."

I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and Iknow she would have been pleased.

"I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said.

"I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging itoff my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock againsteach other, like scared pigs in a chute.

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Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parentsfor years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't.But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold theapron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie ontop of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life,"Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blushmakes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and thedrawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with aclean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into theelectric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itselfopen, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some youngmarried screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss andaluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot,checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had aninjection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to mehereafter.

1""

PAUL'S CASE (1905)

A STUDY IN TEMPERAMENT

BY

WILLA SIBERT CATHER

I

IT was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburg High School

to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been suspended a week ago, and his

father had called at the principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul

entered the faculty room, suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and the

tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but, for all that, there

was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted

black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the

faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy

under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a

narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he

continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a

boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but

there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.

When questioned by the principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely

enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite

accustomed to lying—found it, indeed, indispensible for overcoming friction. His

teachers were asked to state their respective charges, which they did with such a rancour

and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and impertinence

were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors felt that it was scarcely

possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically

defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and

which he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been

making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to

2""his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder, and

thrust his hands violently behind him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been

more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and

definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another he had made all his

teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion.

His teachers felt, this afternoon, that his whole attitude was symbolized by his

shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy. He

stood through it, smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were

continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous

and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears

under that baptism of fire, but his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of

discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his

overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his hat. Paul was always

smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him

and trying to detect something. This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible

from boyish mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."

As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent

remark of the boy's, and the principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous

speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows

twitched.

"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite, or impolite, either. I guess

it's a sort of way I have of saying things, regardless."

The principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't think

that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he

was told that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was but a

repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing-master voiced the feeling of them

all when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them

understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from

insolence; there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one

3""thing. I happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months before his

mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."

The drawing-master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his

white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone

to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white,

blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips

twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from

his teeth.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the soldiers' chorus from "Faust,"

looking wildly behind him, now and then, to see whether some of his teachers were not

there to writhe under his light-heartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon, and

Paul was on duty that evening as usher in Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not

go home to supper, but would hang about an Oakland tobacconist's shop until it was

time to go to the concert hall.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room at about half-past seven that

evening, half a dozen boys were there already, and Paul began, excitedly, to tumble into

his uniform. It was one of the few that at all approached fitting, and he thought it very

becoming, though he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest,

about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably excited while he

dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of

the horns in the music-room; but to-night he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased

and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor

and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house

to seat the early comers.

He was a model usher; gracious and smiling, he ran up and down the aisles;

nothing was too much trouble for him; he carried messages and brought programs as

though it were his greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him

a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house filled, he

4""grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the color came to his cheeks and lips.

It was very much as though this were a great reception, and Paul were the host.

When the symphony began, Paul sank into one of the rear seats, with a long sigh

of relief. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but

the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within

him— something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab

fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert

hall blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul half

closed his eyes, and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages always

had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth

and the mother of many children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above

all, she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which, in

Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to

sleep, and to-night he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not

being able to let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which

was the only thing that could be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew,

and, after hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the side door

where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly up and down the walk,

waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through

the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like those of a lighted cardboard

house under a Christmas tree. All the actors and singers of the better class stayed there

when they were in the city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived

there in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go in and

out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor who helped her into

her carriage and closed the door with a cordial auf wiedersehen, which set Paul to

wondering whether she were not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage

over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer

5""alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened by a negro

in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that

he too entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm,

lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking

ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining-room,

the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in the supper-party pictures of

the Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden

vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the

gravel driveway; that his boots were letting in the water, and his scanty overcoat was

clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the

rain was driving in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him.

There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas

pantomime, but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the rain beat in his

face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night

outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come

sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did

not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up, his upstairs

room and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush

collar box and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and

John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red

worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down one of the

side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the

houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared

large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter

catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their

homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up

Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the

Cumberland minister. He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense of defeat, the

hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he always

6""had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters

close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical

depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food,

of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,

colorless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and

fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the

sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber, the cold bath-room, with the grimy zinc tub,

the cracked mirror, the dripping spigots, his father at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs

sticking out from his night-shirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much

later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul stopped

short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father to-night, that he

could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father

that he had no car fare, and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the

boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and

tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled

down the cellar wall to the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the

noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the

stairs. He found a soap box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed

from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to

sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified least he might have

awakened his father. In such reactions, after one of the experiences which made days

and nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened,

Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him getting in at

the window, and come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father

had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his

father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a

day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been

no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself

until daybreak.

7""

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last

flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath-

school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street

always sat out on their front "stoops," and talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or

called to those across the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat on gay

cushions placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their

Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending to be greatly at their

ease. The children played in the streets; there were so many of them that the place

resembled the recreation grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the steps—all in their

shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttoned—sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs

comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the

sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked over the

multitude of squabbling children, listened affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal

voices, smiling to see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and

interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at

school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of

his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the

minister's daughters next door about how many shirt-waists they had made in the last

week, and how many waffles some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the

weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls

made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red glass pitcher, ornamented with

forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbors

always joked about the suspicious color of the pitcher.

To-day Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who shifted a

restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held

up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would

pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and

faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that

curved about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation,

and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story

8""that, some five years ago—he was now barely twenty-six—he had been a trifle dissipated,

but in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of

wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft reiterated to his

employees, and at twenty-one, had married the first woman whom he could persuade to

share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he,

who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted,

like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean,

kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht

just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two

stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering,

of putting in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful

apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear

these legends of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these

stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo

appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of these cash-boys who had

become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul nervously asked

his father whether he could go to George's to get some help in his geometry, and still

more nervously asked for car fare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on

principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul

whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to

leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a poor man,

but he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul

to usher was, that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded up-stairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dish-water from his

hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of

violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his

geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street

and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and

began to live again.

9""

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the

downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy had been invited to drop

in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had

spent every available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had

won a place among Edwards's following, not only because the young actor, who could

not afford to employ a dresser, often found the boy very useful, but because he

recognized in Paul something akin to what Churchmen term 'vocation.'

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a

sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of

a secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he

breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying

splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the

overture from "Martha", or jerked at the serenade from "Rigoletto," all stupid and ugly

things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise

of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty.

Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school

picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the

unescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly

clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards

that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance

of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company

ever suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used

to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there; with

palms, and fountains, and soft lamps, and richly appareled women who never saw the

disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamored

of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-

and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

10""

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted

by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home

were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the

novels that some of his friends urged upon him—well, he got what he wanted much

more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel-organ. He

needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his

senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that

he was not stage-struck—not, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He

had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt

no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the

atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away

from everything.

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever

repulsive: the bare floors and naked walls, the prosy men who never wore frock-coats, or

violets in their button-holes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful

seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the

other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to

them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest, anyway. He had

autograph pictures of all the members of the stock company, which he showed his

classmates, telling them the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people,

of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them

and the flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his audience grew

listless, he became desperate and would bid all the boys good-night, announcing that he

was going to travel for a while, going to Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday,

he would slip back, conscious, and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should

have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors

know how heartily he despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was

appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with

theorems; adding, with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado

11""which so perplexed them, that he was helping the people down at the stock company;

they were old friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was, that the principal went to Paul's father, and Paul

was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get

another usher in his stead, the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him

to the house, and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see

him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's

stories reached them—especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of

them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at

having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty

and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.

II

The east-bound train was plowing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn

was beginning to show gray, when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul

started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-

misted window-glass with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in curling

eddies above the white bottom-lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and

along the fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks

protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of laborers

who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the

all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was, to

go into a Pullman, and partly because he was afraid of being seen there by some

Pittsburg business man, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When

the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with

an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the

slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby,

crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience

as best he could.

12""

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, Paul hurried through his breakfast,

manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-

third Street station, he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men's

furnishing establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent upward of two

hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put

on in the fitting-room; the frock-coat and dress-clothes he had bundled into the cab with

his linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany's,

where he selected his silver and a new scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver

marked, he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his purchases

packed into various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling

with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother

and father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their

steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for

them in advance, in engaging his rooms, a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New York. He

had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrap-book at home

there were pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers.

When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that

everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the

place did not realize, so he rang for the bell-boy and sent him down for flowers. He

moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering

it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and

then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent

in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The snow was

whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street but

within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the

taboret beside the couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself

with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, had stood up

to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted

13""to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and

the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and

concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually

determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all

surprised him was his own courage, for he realized well enough that he had always been

tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the

lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and

tighter. Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading

something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there—behind him, or before, or

on either side. There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he

dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him—and Paul

had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down

the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday

afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposits as usual—

but this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There were above two

thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank-notes which he had taken

from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new

deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office,

where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday,

giving a perfectly reasonable pretext. The bank-book, he knew, would not be returned

before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From

the time he slipped the bank-notes into his pocket until he boarded the night train for

New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. It was not the first time Paul had

steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done, and this time

there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow-

flakes whirling by his window until he fell asleep.

14""

When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a

start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in

dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite

perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went down-stairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue

toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated, carriages and tradesmen's wagons

were hurrying to and fro in the winter twilight, boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling

off the doorsteps, the avenue stages made fine spots of color against the white street.

Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under

glass cases, against the sides of which the snow-flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses,

carnations, lilies of the valley, somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they

blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-

piece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the

streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that

reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds.

A long, black stream of carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by

other streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance of his

hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning

that was stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the

door to the street. Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss

of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him

towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization;

the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was

whirling about him like the snow-flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the

elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor,

and he sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the

chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of color—he had for a moment the feeling

15""of not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told

himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-

rooms, reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted

palace, built and peopled for him alone.

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The

flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women,

the low popping of corks, the undulating repetitions of the "Blue Danube" from the

orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the rosy tinge of

his champagne was added—that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed

in his glass—Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was

what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about.

He doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a

place where fagged-looking business men got on the early car; mere rivets in a machine,

they seemed to Paul—sickening men, with combings of children's hair always hanging to

their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street—Ah! that belonged

to another time and country; had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night

after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such

shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his

thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to

know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to

watch the pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he

lonely later in the evening, in his loge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his

nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show

himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained

him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to

glance down at his attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone

to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and

sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it

was with the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity and

16""partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of

doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above

his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and

in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he

had run down for a "little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the

night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to

the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding

warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool.

The freshman pulled himself together to make his train and Paul went to bed. He awoke

at two o'clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and

the Pittsburg papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to

be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself

conspicuous. Even under the glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found

the stuff like a magician's wand for wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears

and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray

winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his

wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of power. He could not remember a time when

he had felt so at peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying,

lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure,

even at school, but to be noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other

Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest even, now that he

had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say,

"dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His golden days

went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair

exploited in the Pittsburg papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that

local news of a sensational nature was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson

announced that the boy's father had refunded the full amount of the theft, and that they

had no intention of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and

17""expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless boy, and his Sabbath-school teacher

declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor had reached Pittsburg

that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him

and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees,

and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of

Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched

before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the

yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with a

sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the

sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang

to his feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in

the mirror. With something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he had so

often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down

the corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music

than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment,

mounting with it, and finding it all-sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere

scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their old potency. He would show

himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than

ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his wine recklessly.

Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate beings born to the purple, was he not still

himself and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci

music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his

wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound

steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the world

had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his

need had been too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing

tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist.

Ah, it had paid indeed!

18""

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He

had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on.

His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and

burnt. There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never

occurred except when he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay

still and closed his eyes and let the tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told himself.

The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of

black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that

money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The

thing was winding itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,

and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table now; he had

got it out last night when he came blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his

eyes, and he disliked the looks of the thing.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to

attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become

Cordelia Street. Yet somehow, he was not afraid of anything, was absolutely calm;

perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough,

what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw

everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had

lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the

revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so he went down stairs and took a cab

to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing

the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the

roadways and had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass or

dried weed stalks projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul

dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a medley of

irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had

seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old

woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he

19""had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope

with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping

these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his

head, and the bitter burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into

his mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside,

where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped and sat

down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory

all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first

night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath

they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass, and it was a

losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is

run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole in the

snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a while, from his weak condition,

seemingly insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet,

remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood

watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from

them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he

were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his

haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.

There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the

yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly

through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently

relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing

visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

! 1!HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS (1927)

By Ernest Hemmingway

The hills across the valley of the Ebro1 were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

"What should we drink?" the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

"It's pretty hot," the man said.

"Let's drink beer."

"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.

"Big ones?" a woman asked from the doorway.

"Yes. Two big ones." The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the

felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

"They look like white elephants," she said.

"I've never seen one," the man drank his beer.

"No, you wouldn't have."

" I might have," the man said. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything." The girl looked at the bead curtain.

"They've painted something on it,” she said. "What does it say?"

"Anis del Toro. It's a drink."

"Could we try it?"

The man called "Listen" through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar. "Four reales."

“We want two Anis del Toro."

"With water?"

"Do you want it with water?"

" I don't know," the girl said. "Is it good with water?"

"It's all right."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!1. River in the north of Spain.

!

! 2!"You want them with water?" asked the woman.

"Yes, with water."

"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.

"That's the way with everything."

"Yes," said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."

"Oh, cut it out."

"You started it," the girl said. " I was being amused. I was having a fine time."

"Well, let's try and have a fine time."

"All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?"

"That was bright."

"I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it—look at things and try new drinks?"

" I guess so." The girl looked across at the hills. "They're lovely hills," she said. "They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."

"Should we have another drink?"

"All right."

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.

"It's lovely," the girl said.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

“I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything. "I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads. "And you think then we'll be all right and be happy."

"I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it."

"So have I, " said the girl. "And afterward they were all so happy."

"Well," the man said, "if you don't want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."

! 3!"And you really want to?"

"I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to."

"And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"

"I love you now. You know I love you."

"I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

"I'll love it. I love it now but I just can't think about it. You know how I get when I worry."

"If I do it you won't ever worry?"

"I won't worry about that because it's perfectly simple."

"Then I'll do it. Because I don't care about me."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't care about me."

"Well, I care about you."

"Oh, yes. But I don't care about me. And I'll do it and then everything will be fine."

"I don't want you to do it if you feel that way."

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

"And we could have all this," she said. "And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible."

"What did you say?"

"I said we could have everything."

"We can have everything."

"No, we can't."

"We can have the whole world."

"No, we can't."

"We can go everywhere."

"No, we can't. It isn't ours any more."

"It's ours."

"No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back."

"But they haven't taken it away." "

“We’ll wait and see."

"Come on back in the shade," he said. "You mustn't feel that way."

"I don't feel any way," the girl said. "I just know things."

"I don't want you to do anything that you don't want to do—"

! 4!“Nor that isn't good for me," she said. " I know. Could we have another beer?"

"All right. But you've got to realize—"

" I realize," the girl said. "Can't we maybe stop talking?"

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

“You've got to realize," he said, "that I don't want you to do it if you don't want to. I'm perfectly willing to go through with it if it means any-thing to you."

"Doesn't it mean anything to you? We could get along."

"Of course it does. But I don't want anybody but you. I don't want any one else. And I know it's perfectly simple."

"Yes, you know it's perfectly simple."

"It's all right for you to say that, but I do know it."

"Would you do something for me now?"

"I'd do anything for you."

"Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?"

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.

"But I don't want you to," he said, " I don't care anything about it."

"I'll scream," the girl said.

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. "The train comes in five minutes," she said.

"What did she say?" asked the girl.

"That the train is coming in five minutes."

The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.

"I'd better take the bags over to the other side of the station," the man said. She smiled at him.

"All right. Then come back and we'll finish the beer." He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

! 1!THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (1892)

By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

And what can one do?

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas.

Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

But what is one to do?

I did write for a while in spite of them; but it DOES exhaust me a good deal— having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.

I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house.

! 2!The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road,

quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a DELICIOUS garden! I never saw such a garden—large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There were greenhouses, too, but they are all broken now.

There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and coheirs; anyhow, the place has been empty for years.

That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care—there is something strange about the house—I can feel it.

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a DRAUGHT, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more.

He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear," said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge; for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

! 3!It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to

constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.

We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day.

I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength.

John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.

I am glad my case is not serious!

But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no REASON to suffer, and that satisfies him.

Of course it is only nervousness. It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!

I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able,—to dress and entertain, and order things.

It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby!

And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.

I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall- paper!

At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.

He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

"You know the place is doing you good," he said, "and really, dear, I don't care to

! 4!renovate the house just for a three months' rental."

"Then do let us go downstairs," I said, "there are such pretty rooms there."

Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things.

It is an airy and comfortable room as any one need wish, and, of course, I would not be so silly as to make him uncomfortable just for a whim.

I'm really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid paper.

Out of one window I can see the garden, those mysterious deepshaded arbors, the riotous old-fashioned flowers, and bushes and gnarly trees.

Out of another I get a lovely view of the bay and a little private wharf belonging to the estate. There is a beautiful shaded lane that runs down there from the house. I always fancy I see people walking in these numerous paths and arbors, but John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.

I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me.

But I find I get pretty tired when I try.

It is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work. When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.

I wish I could get well faster.

But I must not think about that. This paper looks to me as if it KNEW what a vicious influence it had!

There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other.

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy store.

! 5!I remember what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have,

and there was one chair that always seemed like a strong friend.

I used to feel that if any of the other things looked too fierce I could always hop into that chair and be safe.

The furniture in this room is no worse than inharmonious, however, for we had to bring it all from downstairs. I suppose when this was used as a playroom they had to take the nursery things out, and no wonder! I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.

Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.

But I don't mind it a bit—only the paper.

There comes John's sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing.

She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!

But I can write when she is out, and see her a long way off from these windows.

There is one that commands the road, a lovely shaded winding road, and one that just looks off over the country. A lovely country, too, full of great elms and velvet meadows.

This wall-paper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.

But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so—I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design.

There's sister on the stairs!

Well, the Fourth of July is over! The people are gone and I am tired out. John thought it might do me good to see a little company, so we just had mother and Nellie and the children down for a week.

Of course I didn't do a thing. Jennie sees to everything now.

But it tired me all the same.

John says if I don't pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.

But I don't want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!

! 6!Besides, it is such an undertaking to go so far.

I don't feel as if it was worth while to turn my hand over for anything, and I'm getting dreadfully fretful and querulous.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

Of course I don't when John is here, or anybody else, but when I am alone.

And I am alone a good deal just now. John is kept in town very often by serious cases, and Jennie is good and lets me alone when I want her to.

So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal.

I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wall-paper. Perhaps BECAUSE of the wall-paper.

It dwells in my mind so!

I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion.

I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of.

It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes—a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens—go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.

The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,—the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction.

It makes me tired to follow it. I will take a nap I guess. I don't know why I should write this. I don't want to.

! 7!I don't feel able.

And I know John would think it absurd. But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!

But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.

Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.

John says I musn't lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.

Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia.

But he said I wasn't able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose.

And dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head.

He said I was his darling and his comfort and all he had, and that I must take care of myself for his sake, and keep well.

He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self- control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.

There's one comfort, the baby is well and happy, and does not have to occupy this nursery with the horrid wall-paper.

If we had not used it, that blessed child would have! What a fortunate escape! Why, I wouldn't have a child of mine, an impressionable little thing, live in such a room for worlds.

I never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all, I can stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I never mention it to them any more—I am too wise,—but I keep watch of it all the same.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!

It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because

! 8!he loves me so.

But I tried it last night.

It was moonlight. The moon shines in all around just as the sun does.

I hate to see it sometimes, it creeps so slowly, and always comes in by one window or another.

John was asleep and I hated to waken him, so I kept still and watched the moonlight on that undulating wall-paper till I felt creepy.

The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.

I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper DID move, and when I came back John was awake.

"What is it, little girl?" he said. "Don't go walking about like that—you'll get cold."

I though it was a good time to talk, so I told him that I really was not gaining here, and that I wished he would take me away.

"Why darling!" said he, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before.

"The repairs are not done at home, and I cannot possibly leave town just now. Of course if you were in any danger, I could and would, but you really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know. You are gaining flesh and color, your appetite is better, I feel really much easier about you."

"I don't weigh a bit more," said I, "nor as much; and my appetite may be better in the evening when you are here, but it is worse in the morning when you are away!"

"Bless her little heart!" said he with a big hug, "she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!"

"And you won't go away?" I asked gloomily.

"Why, how can I, dear? It is only three weeks more and then we will take a nice little trip of a few days while Jennie is getting the house ready. Really dear you are better!"

"Better in body perhaps—" I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word.

"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"

So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before long. He

! 9!thought I was asleep first, but I wasn't, and lay there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately.

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.

The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

That is, sometimes!

There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.

When the sun shoots in through the east window—I always watch for that first long, straight ray—it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it.

That is why I watch it always.

By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn't know it was the same paper.

At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.

I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour.

I lie down ever so much now. John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. Indeed he started the habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal. It is a very bad habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep. And that cultivates deceit, for I don't tell them I'm awake—O no!

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable look.

It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis,—that perhaps it is the paper!

I have watched John when he did not know I was looking, and come into the

! 10!room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught him several times LOOKING AT THE PAPER! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with her hand on it once.

She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what she was doing with the paper— she turned around as if she had been caught stealing, and looked quite angry—asked me why I should frighten her so!

Then she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!

Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.

John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wall-paper.

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wall-paper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.

I don't want to leave now until I have found it out. There is a week more, and I think that will be enough.

I'm feeling ever so much better! I don't sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.

In the daytime it is tiresome and perplexing.

There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But there is something else about that paper—the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

It gets into my hair.

Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it—there is that smell!

! 11!Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find

what it smelled like.

It is not bad—at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met.

In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me.

It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell.

But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell.

There is a very funny mark on this wall, low down, near the mopboard. A streak that runs round the room. It goes behind every piece of furniture, except the bed, a long, straight, even SMOOCH, as if it had been rubbed over and over.

I wonder how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round—round and round and round—it makes me dizzy!

I really have discovered something at last.

Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out.

The front pattern DOES move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.

Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard.

And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!

If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad. I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I'll tell you why—privately—I've seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows!

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

I see her on that long road under the trees, creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.

I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!

! 12!I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know

John would suspect something at once.

And John is so queer now, that I don't want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don't want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.

I often wonder if I could see her out of all the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see out of one at one time.

And though I always see her, she MAY be able to creep faster than I can turn!

I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind.

If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little.

I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much.

There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes.

And I heard him ask Jennie a lot of professional questions about me. She had a very good report to give.

She said I slept a good deal in the daytime.

John knows I don't sleep very well at night, for all I'm so quiet!

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn't see through him!

Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months.

It only interests me, but I feel sure John and Jennie are secretly affected by it.

Hurrah! This is the last day, but it is enough. John is to stay in town over night, and won't be out until this evening.

Jennie wanted to sleep with me—the sly thing! but I told her I should undoubtedly rest better for a night all alone.

That was clever, for really I wasn't alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

A strip about as high as my head and half around the room.

And then when the sun came and that awful pattern began to laugh at me, I

! 13!declared I would finish it to-day!

We go away to-morrow, and they are moving all my furniture down again to leave things as they were before.

Jennie looked at the wall in amazement, but I told her merrily that I did it out of pure spite at the vicious thing.

She laughed and said she wouldn't mind doing it herself, but I must not get tired. How she betrayed herself that time! But I am here, and no person touches this paper but me—not ALIVE!

She tried to get me out of the room—it was too patent! But I said it was so quiet and empty and clean now that I believed I would lie down again and sleep all I could; and not to wake me even for dinner—I would call when I woke.

So now she is gone, and the servants are gone, and the things are gone, and there is nothing left but that great bedstead nailed down, with the canvas mattress we found on it.

We shall sleep downstairs to-night, and take the boat home to-morrow. I quite enjoy the room, now it is bare again. How those children did tear about here! This bedstead is fairly gnawed!

But I must get to work.

I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path.

I don't want to go out, and I don't want to have anybody come in, till John comes.

I want to astonish him.

I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!

But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on!

This bed will NOT move!

I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.

Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!

I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try.

Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.

I don't like to LOOK out of the windows even—there are so many of those

! 14!creeping women, and they creep so fast.

I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?

But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don't get ME out in the road there!

I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!

It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please!

I don't want to go outside. I won't, even if Jennie asks me to.

For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow.

But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.

Why there's John at the door!

It is no use, young man, you can't open it!

How he does call and pound!

Now he's crying for an axe.

It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door!

"John dear!" said I in the gentlest voice, "the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!"

That silenced him for a few moments. Then he said—very quietly indeed, "Open the door, my darling!" "I can't," said I. "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!"

And then I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see, and he got it of course, and came in. He stopped short by the door.

"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

! 1!The Lottery (1948)

by Shirley Jackson

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play. and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix-- the villagers pronounced this name "Dellacroy"--eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys. The girls stood aside, talking among themselves, looking over their shoulders at rolled in the dust or clung to the hands of their older brothers or sisters.

Soon the men began to gather. surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes. They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed. The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk. They greeted one another and exchanged bits of gossip as they went to join their husbands. Soon the women, standing by their husbands, began to call to their children, and the children came reluctantly, having to be called four or five times. Bobby Martin ducked under his mother's grasping hand and ran, laughing, back to the pile of stones. His father spoke up sharply, and Bobby came quickly and took his place between his father and his oldest brother.

The lottery was conducted--as were the square dances, the teen club, the Halloween program--by Mr. Summers. who had time and energy to devote to civic activities. He was a round-faced, jovial man and he ran the coal business, and people were sorry for him. because he had no children and his wife was a scold. When he arrived in the square, carrying the black wooden box, there was a murmur of conversation among the villagers, and he waved and called. "Little late today, folks." The postmaster, Mr. Graves, followed him, carrying a three- legged stool, and the stool was put in the center of the square and Mr. Summers set the black box down on it. The villagers kept their distance, leaving a space between themselves and the stool. and when Mr. Summers said, "Some of you fellows want to give me a hand?" there was a hesitation before two men. Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter. came forward to hold the box steady on the stool while Mr. Summers stirred up the papers inside it.

The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the

! 2!oldest man in town, was born. Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. Every year, after the lottery, Mr. Summers began talking again about a new box, but every year the subject was allowed to fade off without anything's being done.

The black box grew shabbier each year: by now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

Mr. Martin and his oldest son, Baxter, held the black box securely on the stool until Mr. Summers had stirred the papers thoroughly with his hand. Because so much of the ritual had been forgotten or discarded, Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations. Chips of wood, Mr. Summers had argued. had been all very well when the village was tiny, but now that the population was more than three hundred and likely to keep on growing, it was necessary to use something that would fit more easily into he black box. The night before the lottery, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves made up the slips of paper and put them in the box, and it was then taken to the safe of Mr. Summers' coal company and locked up until Mr. Summers was ready to take it to the square next morning. The rest of the year, the box was put way, sometimes one place, sometimes another; it had spent one year in Mr. Graves's barn and another year underfoot in the post office. and sometimes it was set on a shelf in the Martin grocery and left there.

There was a great deal of fussing to be done before Mr. Summers declared the lottery open. There were the lists to make up--of heads of families. heads of households in each family. members of each household in each family. There was the proper swearing-in of Mr. Summers by the postmaster, as the official of the lottery; at one time, some people remembered, there had been a recital of some sort, performed by the official of the lottery, a perfunctory. tuneless chant that had been rattled off duly each year; some people believed that the official of the lottery used to stand just so when he said or sang it, others believed that he was supposed to walk among the people, but years and years ago this p3rt of the ritual had been allowed to lapse. There had been, also, a ritual salute, which the official of the lottery had had to use in addressing each person who came up to draw from the box, but this also had changed with time, until now it was felt necessary only for the official to speak to each person approaching. Mr. Summers was very good at all this; in his clean white shirt and blue jeans. with one hand resting carelessly on the black box. he seemed very proper and important as he talked interminably to Mr. Graves and the Martins.

Just as Mr. Summers finally left off talking and turned to the assembled villagers, Mrs. Hutchinson came hurriedly along the path to the square, her sweater thrown over her shoulders, and slid into place in the back of the crowd. "Clean forgot what day it was," she said to Mrs. Delacroix, who stood next to her, and they both laughed softly. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood," Mrs. Hutchinson went on. "and then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty- seventh and came a-running." She dried her hands on her apron, and Mrs. Delacroix said, "You're in time, though. They're still talking away up there."

! 3!Mrs. Hutchinson craned her neck to see through the crowd and found her

husband and children standing near the front. She tapped Mrs. Delacroix on the arm as a farewell and began to make her way through the crowd. The people separated good-humoredly to let her through: two or three people said. in voices just loud enough to be heard across the crowd, "Here comes your, Missus, Hutchinson," and "Bill, she made it after all." Mrs. Hutchinson reached her husband, and Mr. Summers, who had been waiting, said cheerfully. "Thought we were going to have to get on without you, Tessie." Mrs. Hutchinson said. grinning, "Wouldn't have me leave m'dishes in the sink, now, would you. Joe?," and soft laughter ran through the crowd as the people stirred back into position after Mrs. Hutchinson's arrival.

"Well, now." Mr. Summers said soberly, "guess we better get started, get this over with, so's we can go back to work. Anybody ain't here?"

"Dunbar." several people said. "Dunbar. Dunbar."

Mr. Summers consulted his list. "Clyde Dunbar." he said. "That's right. He's broke his leg, hasn't he? Who's drawing for him?"

"Me. I guess," a woman said. and Mr. Summers turned to look at her. "Wife draws for her husband." Mr. Summers said. "Don't you have a grown boy to do it for you, Janey?" Although Mr. Summers and everyone else in the village knew the answer perfectly well, it was the business of the official of the lottery to ask such questions formally. Mr. Summers waited with an expression of polite interest while Mrs. Dunbar answered.

"Horace's not but sixteen vet." Mrs. Dunbar said regretfully. "Guess I gotta fill in for the old man this year."

"Right." Sr. Summers said. He made a note on the list he was holding. Then he asked, "Watson boy drawing this year?"

A tall boy in the crowd raised his hand. "Here," he said. "I'm drawing for my mother and me." He blinked his eyes nervously and ducked his head as several voices in the crowd said thin#s like "Good fellow, lack." and "Glad to see your mother's got a man to do it."

"Well," Mr. Summers said, "guess that's everyone. Old Man Warner make it?" "Here," a voice said. and Mr. Summers nodded.

A sudden hush fell on the crowd as Mr. Summers cleared his throat and looked at the list. "All ready?" he called. "Now, I'll read the names--heads of families first--and the men come up and take a paper out of the box. Keep the paper folded in your hand without looking at it until everyone has had a turn. Everything clear?"

The people had done it so many times that they only half listened to the directions: most of them were quiet. wetting their lips. not looking around. Then Mr. Summers raised one hand high and said, "Adams." A man disengaged himself from the crowd and came forward. "Hi. Steve." Mr. Summers said. and Mr. Adams said. "Hi. Joe." They grinned at one another humorlessly and nervously. Then Mr. Adams reached

! 4!into the black box and took out a folded paper. He held it firmly by one corner as he turned and went hastily back to his place in the crowd. where he stood a little apart from his family. not looking down at his hand.

"Allen." Mr. Summers said. "Anderson.... Bentham."

"Seems like there's no time at all between lotteries any more." Mrs. Delacroix said to Mrs. Graves in the back row.

"Seems like we got through with the last one only last week." "Time sure goes fast.-- Mrs. Graves said.

"Clark.... Delacroix" "There goes my old man." Mrs. Delacroix said. She held her breath while her husband went forward.

"Dunbar," Mr. Summers said, and Mrs. Dunbar went steadily to the box while one of the women said. "Go on. Janey," and another said, "There she goes."

"We're next." Mrs. Graves said. She watched while Mr. Graves came around from the side of the box, greeted Mr. Summers gravely and selected a slip of paper from the box. By now, all through the crowd there were men holding the small folded papers in their large hand. turning them over and over nervously Mrs. Dunbar and her two sons stood together, Mrs. Dunbar holding the slip of paper.

"Harburt.... Hutchinson."

"Get up there, Bill," Mrs. Hutchinson said. and the people near her laughed.

"Jones."

"They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery."

Old Man Warner snorted. "Pack of crazy fools," he said. "Listening to the young folks, nothing's good enough for them. Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about 'Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery," he added petulantly. "Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everybody."

"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.

"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."

"Martin." And Bobby Martin watched his father go forward. "Overdyke.... Percy."

"I wish they'd hurry," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son. "I wish they'd hurry."

"They're almost through," her son said.

! 5!"You get ready to run tell Dad," Mrs. Dunbar said.

Mr. Summers called his own name and then stepped forward precisely and selected a slip from the box. Then he called, "Warner."

"Seventy-seventh year I been in the lottery," Old Man Warner said as he went through the crowd. "Seventy-seventh time."

"Watson" The tall boy came awkwardly through the crowd. Someone said, "Don't be nervous, Jack," and Mr. Summers said, "Take your time, son."

"Zanini."

After that, there was a long pause, a breathless pause, until Mr. Summers. holding his slip of paper in the air, said, "All right, fellows." For a minute, no one moved, and then all the slips of paper were opened. Suddenly, all the women began to speak at once, saving. "Who is it?," "Who's got it?," "Is it the Dunbars?," "Is it the Watsons?" Then the voices began to say, "It's Hutchinson. It's Bill," "Bill Hutchinson's got it."

"Go tell your father," Mrs. Dunbar said to her older son.

People began to look around to see the Hutchinsons. Bill Hutchinson was standing quiet, staring down at the paper in his hand. Suddenly. Tessie Hutchinson shouted to Mr. Summers. "You didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted. I saw you. It wasn't fair!"

"Be a good sport, Tessie." Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of us took the same chance." "Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.

"Well, everyone," Mr. Summers said, "that was done pretty fast, and now we've got to be hurrying a little more to get done in time." He consulted his next list. "Bill," he said, "you draw for the Hutchinson family. You got any other households in the Hutchinsons?"

"There's Don and Eva," Mrs. Hutchinson yelled. "Make them take their chance!"

"Daughters draw with their husbands' families, Tessie," Mr. Summers said gently. "You know that as well as anyone else."

"It wasn't fair," Tessie said.

"I guess not, Joe." Bill Hutchinson said regretfully. "My daughter draws with her husband's family; that's only fair. And I've got no other family except the kids."

"Then, as far as drawing for families is concerned, it's you," Mr. Summers said in explanation, "and as far as drawing for households is concerned, that's you, too. Right?"

"Right," Bill Hutchinson said.

"How many kids, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked formally.

! 6!"Three," Bill Hutchinson said.

"There's Bill, Jr., and Nancy, and little Dave. And Tessie and me."

"All right, then," Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you got their tickets back?"

Mr. Graves nodded and held up the slips of paper. "Put them in the box, then," Mr. Summers directed. "Take Bill's and put it in."

"I think we ought to start over," Mrs. Hutchinson said, as quietly as she could. "I tell you it wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that."

Mr. Graves had selected the five slips and put them in the box. and he dropped all the papers but those onto the ground. where the breeze caught them and lifted them off.

"Listen, everybody," Mrs. Hutchinson was saying to the people around her.

"Ready, Bill?" Mr. Summers asked. and Bill Hutchinson, with one quick glance around at his wife and children. nodded.

"Remember," Mr. Summers said. "take the slips and keep them folded until each person has taken one. Harry, you help little Dave." Mr. Graves took the hand of the little boy, who came willingly with him up to the box. "Take a paper out of the box, Davy." Mr. Summers said. Davy put his hand into the box and laughed. "Take just one paper." Mr. Summers said. "Harry, you hold it for him." Mr. Graves took the child's hand and removed the folded paper from the tight fist and held it while little Dave stood next to him and looked up at him wonderingly.

"Nancy next," Mr. Summers said. Nancy was twelve, and her school friends breathed heavily as she went forward switching her skirt, and took a slip daintily from the box "Bill, Jr.," Mr. Summers said, and Billy, his face red and his feet overlarge, near knocked the box over as he got a paper out. "Tessie," Mr. Summers said. She hesitated for a minute, looking around defiantly. and then set her lips and went up to the box. She snatched a paper out and held it behind her.

"Bill," Mr. Summers said, and Bill Hutchinson reached into the box and felt around, bringing his hand out at last with the slip of paper in it.

The crowd was quiet. A girl whispered, "I hope it's not Nancy," and the sound of the whisper reached the edges of the crowd.

"It's not the way it used to be." Old Man Warner said clearly. "People ain't the way they used to be." "All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's."

Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and there was a general sigh through the crowd as he held it up and everyone could see that it was blank. Nancy and Bill. Jr.. opened theirs at the same time. and both beamed and laughed. turning around to the crowd and holding their slips of paper above their heads.

"Tessie," Mr. Summers said. There was a pause, and then Mr. Summers looked at

! 7!Bill Hutchinson, and Bill unfolded his paper and showed it. It was blank.

"It's Tessie," Mr. Summers said, and his voice was hushed. "Show us her paper. Bill."

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd.

"All right, folks." Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly."

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up."

Mr. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said. gasping for breath. "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you."

The children had stones already. And someone gave little Davy Hutchinson few pebbles.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

"It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

! 1!The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came

to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor

sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls,

between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and

public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes

of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies

and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong

and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children

dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights, over the

music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city,

where on the great water-meadow called the Green' Fields boys and girls, naked in the

bright air, with mud- stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive

horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their

manes were braided with streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils

and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the

only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west

the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so

clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across

the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to

make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the

silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city

streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air

that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great

joyous clanging of the bells.

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say

the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description

such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one

tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his

! 2!noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there

was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not

know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As

they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange,

the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not

simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less

complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and

sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is

intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the

banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it

hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to

lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a

happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of

Omelas? They were not naive and happy children – though their children were, in fact,

happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.

O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you.

Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once

upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids,

assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how

about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the

streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness

is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor

destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however – that of the

unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc. -- they could

perfectly well have central heating, subway trains,. washing machines, and all kinds of

marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for

the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I

incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to

Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-

decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building

in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains,

I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades,

horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not,

! 3!however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already

half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who

desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But

really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas – at least, not manned

temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about,

offering themselves like divine souffles to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the

flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations,

and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let

the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I

know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first

there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent

sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great

lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy

languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the

Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-

forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else

belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as

we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter

is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and

generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but

in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the

splendor of the world's summer; this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas,

and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don't think many of them need to

take drooz.

Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell

of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small

children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich

pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning

to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing,

is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men, wear her flowers in their

shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a

wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he

never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin

! 4!magic of the tune.

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from

the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on

their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders

stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering, "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty,

my hope. . . ." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the

racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has

begun.

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me

describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps

in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door,

and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand

from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room

a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The

floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three

paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child

is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is

feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through

fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with

its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two

mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the

mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is

always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no

understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a

person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it

stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes.

The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear.

The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the

tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will

! 5!be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used

to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of

whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no

calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a

day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own

excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see

it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there.

Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their

happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their

children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of

their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's

abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve,

whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the

child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the

child. No matter how well

the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always

shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves

superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They

would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child

were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and

comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour

all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.

Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for

that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the

chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to

the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have

seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years.

1

"August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) 1

Ray Bradbury

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time toget up, seven o'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. Theclock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time,seven-nine!

In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interioreight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, twocoffees, and two cool glasses of milk.

"Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city ofAllendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr.Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as arethe water, gas, and light bills."

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one! But

no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. Theweather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…"And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.

Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long waitthe door swung down again.

At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedgescraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested andflushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer andemerged twinkling dry.

Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small

cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustachedrunners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, theypopped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.

Ten o'clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city ofrubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off aradioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning airwith scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred westside where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of thehouse was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here,as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on woodin one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball,and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The restwas a thin charcoaled layer.

The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light. 1 Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1985), 166-172.

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Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "Whogoes there? What's the password?" and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, ithad shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old maidenly preoccupation with self-protectionwhich bordered on a mechanical paranoia.

It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shadesnapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, inchoirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

Twelve noon.A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but

now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behindit whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.

For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and thecopper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steeljaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was droppedinto the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.

The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the houserealized, that only silence was here.

It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was makingpancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.

The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ranwildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.

Two o'clock, sang a voice.Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray

leaves in an electrical wind.Two-fifteen.The dog was gone.In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.Two thirty-five.Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of

pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played.But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.At four o'clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the paneled walls.

Four-thirty.The nursery walls glowed.Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in

crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden filmsdocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived. The nursery floor was woven toresemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hotstill air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aroma of animal spoors! Therewas the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of apurring lion. And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, likeother hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of

3

parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes andwater holes.

It was the children's hour.

Five o'clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.Six, seven, eight o'clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study

a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar poppedout, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.

Nine o'clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling:"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"The house was silent.The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random."

Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite….

"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools singing at night,And wild plum trees in tremulous white;Robins will wear their feathery fire,Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not oneWill care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,if mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawnWould scarcely know that we were gone."

The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on itstray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.

At ten o'clock the house began to die.The wind blew. A failing tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning

solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!"Fire!" screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the

ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while thevoices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"

The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken bythe heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.

The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming easefrom room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls,pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.

But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased.The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.

The fire crackled up the stairs. It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, likedelicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.

Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!

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And then, reinforcements.From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green

chemical.The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were

twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through the attic to the

pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronzeshrapnel on the beams.

The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its

wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillariesquiver in the scalded air. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the brittle winterice. And the voices wailed Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high,low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped theirsheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.

In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. Thepanthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanishedoff toward a distant steaming river....

Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses,oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-controlmower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door, athousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before orafter the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaningmice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregardfor the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all thewires withered and the circuits cracked.

The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making

breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips,which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!

The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar intosub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in acluttered mound deep under.

Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall,

a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heapedrubble and steam:

"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…"

! 1!HARRISON BERGERON (1961)

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good- no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sash weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

! 2!"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel.

"I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

! 3!"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not – try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

! 4!Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The

photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first- cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

! 5!Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened

gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a riveting gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

! 6!"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."

1

Cathedral

By Raymond Carver (1981)

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to

spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s

relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements

were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would

meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one

summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in

touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t

enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind

bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the

blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-

eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any

money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in

officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in

love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in

the paper: HELP WANTED—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone

number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She worked with

this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that

sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-

service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind

man. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her

face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of

her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to

write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a

poem or two every year, usually after something really important had

happened to her.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In

the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over

her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about

what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I

can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her

that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I

reach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, this officer-to-be,

he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of

the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said good-bye

2

to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer,

and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d keep in touch, she and the

blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up

one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They

talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did

this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man she loved her

husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he

was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d

written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem

about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t

finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her

the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was

posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB,

McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night

she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that

moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She

went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and

washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and

passed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why

should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more

does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the

ambulance. In time, she put it all on tape and sent the tape to the blind man.

Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off

lickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief

means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to

live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about

her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man

about it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me

if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I

was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and

we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she

inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she

pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud

voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I

heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t

even know! And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only

conclude—“ But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and

we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I

wanted to.

3

Now this same blind man was coming over to sleep in my house.

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the

draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was

using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love

me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit,

I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said,

“goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost

his wife!”

I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her

name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.

“Was his wife a Negro?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or

something?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the

stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m just asking,” I said.

Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know.

I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began

to fall into place.

Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife

had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had

themselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to

such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the minister

and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was

what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been

carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight

years—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapid

decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the

bed and holding on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together,

slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All

this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It

was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man

for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this

woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she

was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after

day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman

whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or

something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference

4

to him? She could if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a

straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks, and purple shoes, no matter. And

then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes

streaming tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he

never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave.

Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty-peso

Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her.

Pathetic.

So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick

him up. With nothing to do but wait—sure, I blamed him for that—I was

having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive.

I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.

I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the

car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went

around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already

starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard!

A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the

backseat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door,

and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to

the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass,

dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband.

I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by

his coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand.

I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go.

“I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.

“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said,

“Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little

group, from the porch into the living room, my wife guiding him by the arm.

The blind man was carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said

things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a

chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this

sofa two weeks ago.”

I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa.

But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk,

about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you

should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York,

the left-hand side.

“Did you have a good train ride?” I said. “Which side of the train did

5

you sit on, by the way?”

“What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which

side?” she said.

“I just asked,” I said.

“Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly

forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time.

I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now, “ he said.

“So I’ve been told, anyway. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind

man said to my wife.

“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said.

“Robert, it’s just so good to see you.”

My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I

had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.

I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This

blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders,

as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a

light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But

he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark

glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wish he had a pair. At first

glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close,

there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for

one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his

knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the

left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in

one place. But it was only an effort, for that one eye was on the roam

without his knowing it or wanting it to be.

I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little

bit of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.”

“Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice.

“Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.”

He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the

sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that.

“I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said.

“No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go

up.”

“A little water with the Scotch?” I said.

“Very little,” he said.

“I knew it, “ I said.

He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that

fellow. When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink

6

whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his

hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop.

I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in

each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s

travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered

that. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drink

concerning that leg of the trip.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke

because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I

though I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this

blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one.

This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it.

When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. M

wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans.

I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for

you.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind

man lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the

phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate

like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed

the table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located

his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with

admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of

the meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped

potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and

eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to

bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.

We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few

moments, we sat as if stunned. Swear beaded on our faces. Finally, we got

up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took

ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my

wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks

while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in

the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined

in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think

I was feeling left out. They talked of things that had happened to them—to

them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s

sweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”—something like

that. But I heard nothing of the sort. More talk of Robert. Robert had done a

little of everything, it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all-trades. But most

7

recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I

gathered, they’d earned a living, such as it was. The blind man was also a

ham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversations he’d had

with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in

Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if her ever wanted to go visit

those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his

hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present

position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay

with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning

to run down, I got up and turned on the TV.

My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil.

Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a TV?”

The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and

a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and

I’m always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to

that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what

the announcer was saying.

“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I

can tell.”

“We traded up a while ago,” I said.

The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard,

sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his

ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned

back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.

My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She

said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into

something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said.

“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.

“I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said.

“I am comfortable,” the blind man said.

After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and

then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t

know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I

wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a

blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I

asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a

number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes.

8

“I’ll try some with you,” he said.

“Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.”

I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us

two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it

and inhaled.

“Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the

first thing.

My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink

slippers.

“What do I smell?” she said.

“We thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said.

My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and

said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.”

He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I

don’t feel anything yet.”

“This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you

can reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.”

“Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed.

My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her

the number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which

way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I

can hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t

have eaten so much.”

“It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,”

he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head.

“There’s more strawberry pie,” I said.

“Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said.

“Maybe in a little while,” he said.

We gave our attention to the TV. My wife yawned again. She said,

“Your bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you

must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.”

She pulled his arm. “Robert?”

He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes,

doesn’t it?”

I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers. He

inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing this

since he was nine years old.

“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m

beginning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife.

“Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and

9

passed it to me. “I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with

my eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it

bothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until

you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when

you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show

you up when you’re ready. You wake me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.”

She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back

down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across

the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that he robe had

slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw her

robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the

hell! I flipped the robe open again.

“You say you when you want some strawberry pie,” I said.

“I will,” he said.

I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed?

Are you ready to hit the hay?”

“Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right.

I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk.

Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening. “ He

lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter.

“That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.”

And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long

as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the

same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake

up from one of them, my heart going crazy.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not

your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to

the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back

to the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever

you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never

ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said.

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his

head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very

disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped

open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like

he was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.

10

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and

tormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils.

The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This

pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating the

thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind

man what was happening.

“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he

nodded.

The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look

at another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with

its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera

pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.

There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing

would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the

cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields

walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say

something. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now.

Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re

in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one

church.”

“Are those fresco painting, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his

drink.

I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I

could remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said. “That’s a

good question. I don’t know.”

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The difference in

the Portugese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that

great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something

occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any

idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If

somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re

talking about? Do you the difference between that and a Baptist church,

say?”

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds

of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man

say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a

cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on

them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub,

they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids

drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was

11

imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now.

This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,”

the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you

want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard

him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d

like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even

begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being

threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into

the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To

begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues.

“They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of

them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak.

These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for some

reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the

cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and

ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be

moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.

He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he

listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting

through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same.

He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to

say. “They’re really big,” I said. They’re massive. They’re built of stone.

Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals,

men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important

part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’m

sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no

good at it.”

“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you

don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a

simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re

my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my

asking?”

I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as

a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes

it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, I do,” he said.

12

“Right,” I said.

The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep.

She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a

cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve

done.”

The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.

I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me.

Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s

all they are.”

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought

something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I

get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen

to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some

heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get

us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in

them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s

room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table.

And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking

about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in

the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the

living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things,

smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the

carpet.

He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of

the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my

hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along

with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see.

Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a hose. It could have

been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I

drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never

thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well,

it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

13

I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great

doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen

and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper.

He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn,

and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the blind man said.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no

artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa,

her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to

know.”

I didn’t answer her.

The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are

working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he

said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you

can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying?

We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old

arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without

people?”

My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s

going on?”

“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man

said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”

“They’re closed,” I said.

“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went

over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a

look. What do you think?”

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little

longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t

feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

This is strictly for classroom supplementary use only. The author, author's representatives, and the

The Continuity of Parks

by Julio Cortázar HE HAD BEGUN TO READ THE NOVEL a few days before. He had put it aside because of some urgent business, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he allowed himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the drawing of characters. That afternoon, after writing a letter to his agent and discussing with the manager of his estate a matter of joint ownership, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, with his back to the door, which would otherwise have bothered him as an irritating possibility for intrusions, he let his left hand caress once and again the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. Without effort his memory retained the names and images of the protagonists; the illusion took hold of him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from all that surrounded him, and feeling at the same time that his head was relaxing comfortably against the green velvet of the armchair with its high back, that the cigarettes were still within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the afternoon air danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, immersed in the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself go toward where the images came together and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to repeat the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath pounded liberty, ready to spring. A lustful, yearning dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity. Even those caresses which writhed about the lover's body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it, sketched abominably the figure of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The cold-blooded, double re-examination of the details was barely interrupted for a hand to caress a cheek. It was beginning to get dark. Without looking at each other now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running with her hair let loose. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until he could distinguish in the yellowish fog of dusk the avenue of trees leading up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, and they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not. He went up the three porch steps and entered. Through the blood galloping in his ears came the woman's words: first a blue parlor, then a gallery, then a carpeted stairway. At the top, two doors. No one in the first bedroom, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then the knife in his hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.