TEXTS FOR THE LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 699.

CHAPTER 3

EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION

THE STUDY OF THE TITLE

Is the title of the story direct or indirect? Does it characterize anybody? Is it referred to pets in the shop only? What is the form of the word “caged” suggestive of? Do you think the title is symbolic? What does it symbolize? Is the meaning of the title the same for the storeowner and his customer? What is the reason for that? Can you speak of wide and narrow interpretation of the title?

What kind of a story have you read? Is it interesting, educative, informative, entertaining, plain, thought out, somewhat artificial, unreal? What has it taught you? Who do you side with? What emotions has it aroused in you?

The analytical study of a text is believed to be completed when all the information obtained is presented in the form of a report.

Read the story “THE STARE” by JOHN UPDIKE. Use dictionary if necessary.

Then there it was, in the corner of his eye. He turned, his heart frozen. The incredibility of her being here, now, at a table in this one restaurant on the one day when he was back in the city, did not check the anticipatory freezing of his heart, for when they had both lived in New York they had always been lucky at finding each other, time after time; and this would be one more time. Already, in the instant between recognition and turning, he had framed his first words; he would rise, with the diffidence she used to think graceful, and go to her and say, “Hey. It's you.”

Her face would smile apologetically, lids lowered, and undergo one of its little shrugs. “It's me.”

“I'm so glad. I'm so sorry about what happened.” And everything would be understood, and the nee of forgiveness once again magically put behind them, like a wall of paper flames they had passed through.

It was someone else, a not very young woman whose hair, not really the colour of her hair at all, had, half seen, suggested the way her hair, centrally parted and pulled back into a glossy French roll, would cut with two dark wings into her forehead, making her brow seem low and intense and emphasizing her stare. He felt the eyes of his companions at lunch question him, and he returned his attention to them, his own eye smarting from the effort of trying to press this unknown woman's appearance into the appearance of another. One of his companions at the table – a gentle grey banker whose affection for him, like a generous check, quietly withheld at the bottom a tiny deduction of tact, a modest minus paid as an increment on their mutual security – smiled in such a way as to balk his impulse to blurt, to confess. His other companion was an elderly female underwriter, an ex-associate, whose statistical insight was remorseless but who in personal manner was all feathers and feigned dismay. “I'm seeing ghosts,” he explained to her, and she nodded, for they had, all three, with the gay witheringcredulity of nonbelievers, been discussing ghosts. The curtain of conversation descended again, but his palms tingled, and, as if trapped between two mirrors, he seemed to face a diminishing multiplication of her stare.

The first time they met, in an apartment with huge slab-like paintings and fragile furniture that seemed to be tiptoeing, she came to the defence of something her husband had said, and he had irritably wondered how a woman of such evident spirit and will could debase herself to the support of statements so asinine, and she must have felt, across the room, his irritation, for she gave him her stare. It was, as a look, both blunt and elusive: somewhat cold, certainly hard, yet curiously wide, and even open – its essential ingredient shied away from being named. Her eyes were the only glamorous feature of a freckled, bony, tomboyish face, remarkable chiefly for its sharp willingness to express pleasure. When she laughed, her teeth were bared like a skull's, and when she stared, her great, grave, perfectly shaped eyes insisted on their shape as rigidly as a statue's.

Later, when their acquaintance had outlived the initial irritations, he had met her in the Museum of Modern Art, amid an exhibit of old movie stills, and, going forward with the innocent cheerfulness that her presence even then aroused in him, he had been unexpectedly met by her stare. “We missed you Friday night,” she said.

“You did? What happened Friday night?”

“Oh, nothing. We just gave a little party and expected you to come.”

“We weren't invited.”

“But you were. I phoned your wife.”

“She never said anything to me. She must have forgotten.”

“Well, I don't suppose it matters.”

“But it does. I'm so sorry. I would have loved to have come. It's very funny that she forgot it; she really just lives for parties.”

“Yes.” And her stare puzzled him, since it was no longer directed at him; the hostility between the two women existed before he had fulfilled its reason.

Later still, at the party they all did attend, he had, along with her for a moment, kissed her, and the response of her mouth had been disconcerting; backing off, expecting to find in her face the moist, formless warmth that had taken his lips, he encountered her stare instead. In the months that unfolded from this, it had been his pleasure to see her stare relax. Her body gathered softness under his; late one night, after yet another party, his wife, lying beside him in pre-dawn darkness of her ignorance, had remarked, with the cool, fair appraisal of a rival woman, how beautiful she – she, the other – had become, and he had felt, half dreaming in the warm bed he had betrayed, justified. Her laugh no longer flashed out so hungrily, and her eyes, brimming with the secret he and she had made, deepened and seemed to rejoin the girlishness that had lingered in the other features of her face. Seeing her across a room standing swathed in the beauty he had given her, he felt a creator's, a father's, pride. There existed, when they came together, a presence of tenderness like a ghostly child who when they partied was taken away and set to sleeping. Yet even in those months, in the depth of their secret, lying together as if in an intimate dungeon, discussing with a gathering urgency what they would do their secret crumbled and they were exposed, there would now and then glint out at him, however qualified by tears and languor, the unmistakable accusatory hardness. It was accusing, yet it was not its essence; his conscience shied away from naming the pressure that had formed it and that, it imperceptibly became apparent, he was helpless to relieve. Each time they parted, she would leave behind, in the last instant before the door closed, a look that haunted him, like flat persisting ring of struck crystal.

The last time he saw her, all the gentle months had been stripped away and her stare, naked, had become furious. “Don't you love me?” Two households were in turmoil and the rich instinct that had driven him to her had been reduced to a thin need to hide and beg.

“Not enough.” He meant it simply, as a fact, as something that already had been made plain.

But she took it as a death blow, and in a face whitened and drawn by the shocks of recent days, from beneath dark wings of tensely parted hair, her stare revived into a life so coldly controlled and adamantly hostile that for weeks he could not close his eyes without confronting it – much as a victim of torture must continue to see the burning iron with which he was blinded.

Now, back I New York. Walking alone soothed by food and profitable talk, he discovered himself so healed that his wound ached to be reopened. The glittering city bristled with potential prongs. The pale disc of every face, as it slipped from the edge of his vision, seemed to cut the possibility of being hers. He left her searching for him. Where would she look? It would be her style simply to walk the streets, smiling and striding in the hope of their meeting. He had a premonition – and yes, there, waiting to cross Forty-third Street between two Puerto Rican messenger boys, it was she, with her back toward him; there was no mistaking the expectant tilt of her head, the girlish curve of her high, taut cheek, the massed roll of hair pulled so glossy he used to imagine that the hairpins gave her pain. He drew abreast, timid and prankish, to surprise her profile, and she became a wrinkled painted woman with a sagging lower lip. He glanced around incredulously, and her stare glimmered and disappeared in the wavering wall-window of a modernistic bank. Crossing the street, he looked into the bank, but there was no one, no one he knew – only some potted tropical plants that looked vaguely familiar.

He returned to work. His company had lent him for this visit the office of a man on vacation. He managed to concentrate only by imagining that each five minutes were the final segment of time he would have for himself before she arrived. When the phone on his desk rang, he expected the receptionist to announce that a distraught woman with striking eyes was asking for him. When he went into the halls, a secretary flickering out of sight battered his heart with a resemblance. He returned to his borrowed office, and was startled not to find her in it, wryly examining the yellowed children's drawings – another man's children – taped to the walls. The bored afternoon pasted shadows on these walls. Outside the window, the skyscrapers began to glow. He went down the elevator and into the cool crowded dusk thankful for her consideration; it was like her to let him finish his day's work before to declare her presence. She had always assumed, in their scatted hours together, a wife's dutiful attitude toward him. But now, now she could cease considerately hiding, and he could take her to dinner with an easy conscience. He checked his wallet to make sure he had enough money. He decided he would refuse to take her to a play, though undoubtedly she would suggest it. She loved the stage. But they had too little time together to waste it in awareness of a third thing.

He had taken a room at what he still thought of as their hotel. To his surprise, she was not waiting for him in the lobby, which seemed filled with a party, a competition of laughter. Charles Boyer was waiting for the elevator. She would have liked that, sitting on the bench before the desk, waiting and watching, her long legs crossed and one black shoe jabbing the air with the prongs of its heel and toe. He had even prepared his explanation to the clerk; this was his wife. They had had (voice lowered, eyebrows lifted, the unavoidable blush not, after all, inappropriate) a fight, and impulsively she had followed him to New York, to make up. Irregular, but … women. So could his single reservation kindly be changed to a double? Thank you.

This little play was so firmly written in his head that he looked into the bar to make sure the leading actress was not somewhere in the wings. The bar was bluely lit and amply patronized by fairies. Their drawled, elaborately enunciating voices, discussing musical comedies in tones of peculiar passion, carried to him, and he remembered how she, when he had expressed distaste, had solemnly explained to him that homosexuals were people, too, and how she herself often felt attracted to them, and how it always saddened her that she had nothing, you know – her stare defensively sharpened – to give them. “That old bag, she's overexposed herself,” one of the fairies stridently declared, of a famous actress.

He took the elevator up to his room. It was similar to ones they had shared, but nothing was exactly the same, except the plumbing fixtures, and even these were differently arranged. He changed his shirt and necktie. In the mirror, behind him, a slow curve of movement, like a woman's inquisitive step, chilled his spine; it was the door drifting shut. He rushed from the suffocating vacant room into the street, to inhale the invisible possibility of finding her. He ate at the restaurant he would have chosen for them both. The waiter seemed fussed, seating a solitary man. The woman of a couple at a nearby table adjusted an earring with a gesture that belonged to her; she had never had her ears pierced, and this naïveté of her flesh had charmed him. He abstained from coffee. Tonight he must court sleep assiduously.

He walked to tire himself. Broadway was garish with the clash of mating - sailors with sweethearts, touts and tarts. Spring infiltrates a city through the blood of its inhabitants. The side streets were hushed like the aisles of long Pullman sleepers being drawn forward by their diminishing perspective. She would look for him on Fifth Avenue; her window-shopper's instinct would send her there. He saw her silhouette at a distance, near Rockefeller Center, and up close he spotted a certain momentary plane of her face that flew away in a flash, leaving behind the rubble of a face he did not know, had never kissed or tranquilly studied as it lay averted on a pillow. Once or twice, he even glimpsed, shadowed in a doorway, huddled on a bench tipping down toward the Promethean fountain, the ghostly child of their tenderness, asleep; but never her, her in the fragrant solidity he had valued with such a strange gay lightness when it was upon him. Statistically, it began to seem wonderful that out of so many faces not one was hers. It seemed only reasonable that he could skim, like interest, her presence from a sufficient quantity of strangers – that he could refine her, like radium, out of enough pitchblende. She had never been reserved with him; this terrible tact of absence was unlike her.

The moon gratuitously added its stolen glow to the harsh illumination around the iceless skating rink. As if sensing his search, faces turned as he passed. Each successive instant shocked him by being empty of her; he knew so fully how this meeting would go. Her eyes would light on him, and her mouth would involuntarily break into the grin that greeted all her occasions, however grave and dangerous; her stare would pull her body forward, and the gathering nearness of his presence would dissolve away the hardness, the controlled coldness, the – what? What was the element that had been there from the beginning and that, in the end, despite every strenuous motion of his heart, he had intensified, like some wild vague prophecy given a tyrannical authority in its fulfillment? What was the thing he had never named, perhaps because his vanity refused to believe that it could both attach to him and exist before him?

He wondered if he were tired now. There was an ache in his legs that augured well. He walked back to the hotel. The air of celebration had left the lobby. No celebrity was in sight. A few well-dressed young women, of the style that bloom and wither by thousands in the city's public places, were standing waiting for an escort or an elevator; as he pressed, no doubt redundantly, the button, a face cut into the side of his vision at such an angle that his head snapped around and he almost said aloud, “Don't be frightened. Of course I love you.”

Answer the following questions and fulfil the assignments.

1. What do you know about John Updike?

2. What is the title of the story? Is it used straightforwardly? Look up the meaning of the word “stare” in the dictionary. Prove that the title of the story has a symbolic character. Give examples of other symbols in the text.

3. Consider the plot-structure of the story and define the conflict the text is based on. What is the literary image of the story? What is the main idea of the text? What is the problem of the story?

4. What type of narration does the author employ? Through whose point of view are the events presented? Can we say that the text reminds of inner monologue? Why?

5. Pick out proper names employed in the story. What do they describe?

6. Pick out the words that name feelings and emotions of the characters. Write out their definitions from the dictionary. Analyze the intensity of feelings and emotions in the order they appear in the story. In what way do feeling and emotions change throughout the story?

7. Write out the descriptions of the stare from the story. Divide the lexical units into positively and negatively marked making use of the definitions from the dictionary. When do positive features prevail? What is the reason for negative associations to appear?

8. The words are apt to describe the situation of communication. What lexical units prove the situation to be rather formal than informal? What is it connected with?

9. What is the atmosphere of the story? Is it tense or light? Why? What makes the atmosphere of the story so? What kinds of sentences prevail in the story? What is the effect produced by numerous participial adjuncts?

10. What is the quality of interrogative and negative sentences in the story? What ideas do they reveal?

11. Pick out sentences with the auxiliary “would”. Comment on its use. What effect is produced by these sentences?

12. Pick out sentences with the verb “seem”. What feelings are portrayed through these sentences?

13. There are two answers to the question “Don't you love me?” Write them out from the text. Compare their structure. What attitude is revealed?

14. There are some words in italics in the story. Why are they so important?

15. What is the value of the story? Why should it be read?

Read the story “ENDURANCE FOR HONOUR” by James Aldridge. Use dictionary if necessary.

The strained, resentful growl of the twin motors pushing the D H Dove up into a steep climb was a wavery echo of the last mechanical sounds he would probably ever hear. So neatly caught like this – in the cocked hat of a deserted sea, deserted desert, deserted sky – he could guess the rest.

“If I do get out of it,” he said with a frivolity that did not convince him or satisfy him at all, “I'll give flying away. I've absolutely had it this time.”

Somewhere under the wreckage of a perfectly good aeroplane was the only hope he might ever have of getting out of this wildness. The only thing that puzzled him was why the strange twin-engined Dove had dipped over the desert to the north, had circled a blue hill in the desert, and then climbed off; not seeing him, not trying to see him, and perhaps not wanting to see him. Whoever was in the plane could not avoid noticing the great pull of white smoke he had sent up by setting fire to the wing fabric soaked in petrol; but if they had seen him they surely would have come nearer and circled. They looked as if they had been making an approach to land near that blue hill, but when they saw his smoke they had flown off as quickly as their twin-engines could go.

“Smugglers, no doubt,” he told himself cynically.

He could afford to be cynical. He was a smuggler himself.

“Any real point to survival?” he was mumbling half-heartedly when the plane had finally disappeared. But he knew the answer.

He had found what he was looking for in the wreckage. It was a booklet issued during the war to pilots regularly flying this route. He had originally saved it as a souvenir and brought it with him to Iraq. He thought its title a little too cheerful for its purpose: Forced landings and desert survival. An aid to walking home.

“That ought to make it easy,” he decided. He looked for and found a map in the pocket of the back cover. It showed all the positions where the R.A.F. had put down caches of emergency food, water, and other provisions in the Sinai. There ought to be at least two dumps marked between his position and the coast, if he could manage to find them, or if they were still hidden from the Bedu and not rotten by the sun.

Even so, it was going to be a game of irony and chance. What was he going to say when he arrived at the Egyptian coastguard but on the tip of Mirza Mohamed, the nearest inhabited point and his best chance of survival? Let him explain himself to the Egyptians, if he could.

“I'll look into that problem when I get there,” he decided and prepared for his journey, refusing to hurry, refusing to be absorbed into weariness by the heat, refusing to consider one flutter of panic.

“I'm the original emotionless man,” he said aloud, “and I intend to stay that way. All I have to do now is survive.”

It seemed possible. He came from a long line of survivors: pre-Norman Englishmen, West-country family. He supposed he was the last of a long feudal line which had won its dubious honours a little further to the north of here – Palestine, where one wild son of the Alwyns had assisted the Crusaders' rampage of Antioch and Tyre.

“So it wouldn't be too much of a dirty trick of fate if I ended where they began,” this Alwyn said.

The family crest said: Endurance for Honour. This was also the price of the Crusades, when claims like that were valued at the sword's edge, at the heart's centre.

He had abandoned them long ago himself. Too many proofs against them. Public-school boys, impoverished aristocrats, R.A.F. pilots, and hopeful men after wars – no such men should begin sensitive if they wanted to survive sensitive. He had been all four and he had not really survived such rough handling. He was a dried-up man.

This sort of thinking kept him going across the reddish desert right through the first day, going over his school-days calmly as he tried to forget the laden knapsack rubbing his shoulders to the bone, his shoes making blisters along the sides of his heels, and his eyes burning away to nothing in the heat.

Public school had been hell. He had neither endured it nor felt it honourable; he had allowed it to defeat him. He remembered it only as a process of the spirit, adolescent degradation, rude conformity ground into the soul, and…

“Etcetera, etcetera,” he told himself on the second day, when it became boring to recall schooldays and silly suffering. His raw heel was biting at every step now, and his face felt swollen with the sun.

Take the impoverished aristocrat, he decided, now limping a course south-west by west across brown scorched hills that kicked up from the desert in painful short rises, making the going slow and exhausting.

The aristocrat was impoverished and landless and no longer useful; yet he had believed in the essentials of the caste: the gentleman who believed the rules to mean exactly that – a gentle man. But no gentleness could survive a war, and every day of it had hurt, had ravished what was left of a young man who had tried to find a gentle way, some sensitive outline to live in. That was the day the sand blew up and found every corner between clothing and skin and began to grate unbearably.

This took him a long way over the foot-hills of the El Tih plateau to the first cache, which he found well marked according to the map descriptive. When he moved stones and dirt from the massive cairn the stores were mostly gone. Desert rats, ants perhaps, but certainly some desert diggers had burrowed in and helped themselves.

There was one untouched tin of foul Navy biscuits left. He put it in rucksack to augment the rotting melting cheese he had rescued from the plane, and the few bars of chocolate which melted into liquid in the heat of every day, and re-solidified again in the freezing cold at night. He hoarded every crumb and morsel as if it stored up the value of a life force, not gold and title deeds, but gristle on the flesh to give him the energy to move.

Very valuable stuff, these mouldy biscuits.

The third day, looking for the second cache, he worried about his water supply. There was only one remaining water well between him and the sea.

He forgot his birthright for a drop of water and remembered the days over the North Weald when the last of the Spitfires, already too slow, had tried to outride the Focke-Wolfes at 27,000 feet in packs above, below, and head on. The break-away that day had turned into a shambles, and he had watched the well-organized Focke-Wolfes stay and fight it out for a change. He had made a run for it when his ammunition was gone, to the hit, to fall into the sea, to be picked up in a miracle of rescue work, and never to fly that way again. He had been too frightened, and there was no honour in that either.

The heart was simply not in it. The games and the Pilot Officers' camaraderie had cropped all sentiments into little pieces, throwing it all out and bringing in new responses defined with words like pranged and bogget it and shaky do. They had grated on his nerves. His heroism, if that's what it was, had been accidental and fleeting. At most he had loved the aeroplane, at worst he had been afraid of it. He had been in heaven to escape it when the war was over.

“I don't think I'm going to make it,” he told himself mockingly.

His body was on the rack now. His arms were burnt fiery red, his face was untouchably raw, his legs grinding into each other along their delicate insides with sweat and sand, his lips were cracked, and his feet were shredded with sores. But he did not find the well.

He dug it out with his bare hands and filled his bottles and canvas water-bag with green brackish water which weighted his rucksack heavily again.

“If I ever do see the sea again,” he decided, “I'll spend the rest of my life on it, every day, wallowing in it. Mother of all men!” he said, to make sure he could still make a wry, intellectual remark.

On the fourth day he was very exhausted. He lay down a great deal of the time, preferring to move in the early morning and evening and at night. He saw the D H Dove again. It was weaving around to the north in its mysterious way, quite low, but too far away to attract. But he had the feeling that this time it was looking for him. By the time he had prepared a tamarisk brush fire it had climbed high and disappeared again.

“Up to no good,” he said. “Unless Gillespie told them I was overdue and they, whoever they are, set out looking for me. But I doubt it. No honour among smugglers. Only money.”

His last day seemed endless for its sunrises and sunsets; one an hour, if his brain was recording correctly. He supposed there was something wrong with his eyes, but you could not deceive the brain and it chalked them up: one sunrise and one sunset each hour; beautiful, as they must be in the desert, far away, and rosily sensitive. Very sensitive indeed.

That was very good stuff for the post-war man in him.

He had leaped out of the war on all fours – delighted with the future. But he had found this the most insensible operation of all. Wives were lovely and desirable. Good girls of good families. He had abandoned his dried-up philosophy and gone into it unprotected by the lessons of war and public school. He had forgotten that it was also a rough game on the spirit, and when you were betrayed in marriage it was more than treason, it was ultimate destruction.

Betrayal, children, and tragedy – this was the last lesson that had been learned.

Afterwards the drift became easier: not into dissolution but back to the simple dried-up philosophy of emotionless man. It sufficed to keep the edges rough enough for where adventure took him. In fact he had looked for the roughest edges to go on rubbing this lack of feeling into himself. He had sought insensibility. He had found Gillespie in Iraq flying gold into Egypt, and Egyptian pound out of it; gold into Greece and drachmas out of it; money where it was needed and gold where it was needed more. It had been half-legal in Iraq because they had taken off a fair piece of interest for being the clearing house. But not in Egypt. Too many wealthy men trying to get their money abroad illegally. And at the moment he was in Egypt.

Considering his predicament, therefore, a lack of feeling was all right. The family requirements of endurance with honour were not needed. He had long ago drowned them for ever anyway.

But he was caught. He stumbled down the El Tih plateau and reached the Red Sea road, still on his feet but almost delirious, having endured and survived. But it remained to be seen whether there was a current value for honour.

What was his name?

“Peter Alwyn.”

It was no use deceiving them. What had he been doing? Where did he come from? Impossible to lie, better not to deceive. They knew anyway. He had been flying from Iraq to the Qena mountains of Egypt.

“What for?”

“Hard to say,” he told them. “I simply fly on course, land, take off and return.”

“Yes, we know that already, Mr Alwyn,” the Egyptian frontier corps Colonel told him. “But what were you carrying into, or flying out of Egypt?”

“Can I say I don't know?” he suggested, still burned out of energy and resistance.

The Colonel smiled and shook his head. “I am afraid not.”

“Did you find my plane?” he asked.

“Yes. In fact we had a mysterious radio message that we must look for your plane. Perhaps it came from your friends, who would sooner that you were caught than die in the desert? You must be thankful.”

Alwyn bowed his head gratefully in acknowledgment.

“Was that your D H Dove that was flying about?” he asked the Colonel.

“No. We have two Austers and a Germini, not any Doves at all.”

“Must be a rival company in the same business,” Alwyn told himself and supposed he was foolish for mentioning it, but he was softening down in a camp bed with cool walls, dressed sores, and a water-jug and polite Colonel who questioned him delicately. There was nothing much left to say.

“Of course you were smuggling,” the Colonel told him.

“Not really,” Alwyn said. “I was giving people a lift in and out, at cut rates. That's all.”

“Not good enough!” the Colonel laughed. “Spying, perhaps?”

“Not a chance,” Alwyn shrugged calmly, drily now, knowing he was going to be beaten in this, and not liking the Colonel's tolerance. “Definitely not spying.”

“I know you weren't spying,” the Colonel said, amused. “I know quite well that you were smuggling. …”

“You may think you know,” Alwyn said, “but you don't really know.”

“I'm afraid I do,” the Colonel said, swishing away the flies from the bed and sighing. “You were smuggling hasheesh. Opium. …”

“Hasheesh? Drugs? Oh no! Not me, Colonel. I'm sorry. …”

“But we know you were.”

“You know no such thing.”

“We have found, near your wrecked plane, a veritable hoard of hasheesh, stored very nicely in a little cave in a blue hill-side quite near your smashed plane. It was luck, Mr Alwyn, but too obvious.”

“That's what that D H Dove was doing,” Alwyn snarled at himself. “Hasheesh, and tons of it, no doubt. Get out of this one, old chap. Let us see the emotionless man survive this.”

“That was nothing to do with me,” he said. “I can swear to that.”

The Colonel shook his head sadly. “No use swearing,” he said. “We can tolerate most things, even smuggling, but not hasheesh. You know that hundreds of kilos of it are smuggled into Egypt every year, and that we usually shoot an Egyptian if we catch him doing it. What are we to do with you, Mr Alwyn?”

“I don't know. But I wasn't smuggling hasheesh.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I don't know if I can or not, but I can tell you the truth.”

“Go ahead. …”

Force and morality were neatly balanced again. Had he endured simply to betray this last shred of an old character to a crime which would remove all sensibilities, all pretences of sentiment and delicacy, and for ever this time? Smuggling hasheesh?

“I won't admit to smuggling hasheesh,” he said. “I might admit to smuggling money.”

The Colonel nodded. “I suppose that would be a point of honour with you. Money, not drugs.”

“I suppose it would be.”

“And is it truth?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“All right, Mr Alwyn,” the Colonel said, getting up, satisfied, yet looking down at the victim with an English and rueful air. “I shall save your honour. I'll believe you. In any case you'll go to prison. …”

Alwyn shrugged. “If I must.”

“But did it ever occur to you,” the Colonel went on thoughtfully, “that what you were smuggling – money – corrupts the soul? Whereas hasheesh simply destroys the body. …”

“It hadn't occurred to me that way,” Alwyn admitted. “I haven't been in touch with the soul lately.”

“Think it over,” the Colonel told him as he left.

He said he would, but there was no need to think it over at all. The obvious was already true. The Colonel may have decorated it with a nice touch of irony, but he had already discovered it himself.

“no such thing as the emotionless man,” he told himself, looking at his bandaged feet. “A little pain, a little shame … poof, and he's gone.” He almost winced. “I suppose I'll have to start all over again from that, in prison or out of it.”

Knowing it, he lay back and felt grateful that his real requirements of endurance for honour had only begun.

Answer the following questions and fulfil the assignments.

1. What do you know about James Aldridge?

2. Look at the title of the story. Is it a slogan, a credo, a motto? How did it come into the life of Peter Alwyn?

3. What is the structure of the story? Do the components of the structure follow in logical succession? In what way might the story have been rearranged to present the logical development of the plot?

4. What is the literary image of the story? How would you formulate the idea and the problem of the text?

5. Pick out from the text proper names. What do the proper names describe? What real events do the proper names in the story mean?

6. Pick out from the story military terms. What function do they fulfil in the story? In what way do they describe the secret mission of Alwyn?

7. Pick out from the story the words that characterize the family crest. What is Alwyn's attitude towards it? What feelings does he suffer? How is it described through the semantics of the lexical items?

8. There is much direct speech in the text. Is it always a dialogue? What patterns of sentences are extremely frequent in the direct speech? Are they alike? What atmosphere is achieved through them?

9. There are some words in italics. What do they describe? Why are they important for the reader?

10. Whom do you side with: Alwyn or the Colonel?

Read the text “THE SMILE” by RAY BRADBURY. Use dictionary if necessary.

In the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning while cocks were crowing far out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All around, among the ruined buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new light of seven o'clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, on twos and threes, more people were gathering in for the day of marketing, the day of festival.

The small boy stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in the clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of the cold. The small boy stomped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and looking up at the soiled gunny-sack clothing of the men and down the long line of men and women ahead.

“Here, boy, what are you doing out so early?” said the man behind him.

“Got my place in line, I have,” said the boy.

“Why don't you run off, give your place for someone who appreciates?”

“Leave the boy alone,” said the man ahead, suddenly turning.

“I was joking.” The man behind put his hand on the boy's head. The boy shook it away coldly. “I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.”

“This boy is an appreciator of arts, I'll have you know,” said the boy's defender, a man, named Grigsby. “What's your name, lad?”

“Tom.”

“Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?”

“I sure am!”

Laughter passed down the line.

A man was selling cracked cups of coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the little hot fire and the brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn't really coffee. It was made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond the town, and it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth.

Tom stared ahead to the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall.

“They say she smiles,” said the boy.

“Aye, she does,” said Grigsby.

“They say she's made of oil and canvas.”

“True. And that's what makes me think she's not the original one. The original, now, I've heard, was painted on wood long time ago.”

“They say she's four centuries old.”

“Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.”

“It's 2061!”

“That's what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3000 or 5000, for all we know. Things were in a fearful mess there for a while. All we've got to know now is bits and pieces.”

They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

“How much longer before we see her?” Tom said uneasily.

“Just a few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and velvet rope, all fancy, to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don't allow rocks thrown at her.

“Yes, sir.”

The sun rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats.

“Why are we all here in line?” asked Tom at last. “Why are we all here to spit?”

Grigsby did not glance down at him, but judged the sun. “Well, Tom, there's lots of reasons.” He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for a cigarette that was not there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. “Tom, it has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how did we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs, and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain't that a lousy stew, I ask you?”

“Yes, sir, I guess so.”

“It's this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That's human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.”

“There's hardly nobody or nothing we don't hate,” said Tom.

“Right! The whole blooming caboodle of them people in the Past who run the world. So we are here on a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines, cold, live in caves and such, don't smoke, don't drink, don't do nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.” And Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years. The year they tore up all the books in the square and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing. And a festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motorcar and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge hammer at the car.

“Do I remember that, Tom? Do I remember? Why, I got to smash the front window, the window, you hear? My God, it made a lovely sound! Crash!”

Tom could hear the glass fall in glittering heaps. “And Bill Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!”

“But best of all,” recalled Grigsby, “there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out airplanes. Lord, did we feel good blowing it up!” said Grigsby. “And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?”

Tom puzzled over it. “I guess.”

It was high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings.

“Won't it ever come back, mister?'

“What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!”

“I could stand a bit of it,” said the man behind another man. “There were a few spots of beauty in it.”

“Don't worry your heads,” shouted Grigsby. “There's no room for that either.”

“Ah,” said the man behind the man. “Someone'll come along someday with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. Someone with a heart.”

“No,” said Grigsby.

“I say yes. Someone with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in peace.”

“First thing you know there's war!”

“But maybe next time it'd be different.”

At last they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the distance into the town. He had a piece of paper in his hand. In the center of the square was the roped-off area. Tom, Grigsby, and the others were collecting their spittle and moving forward – moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet.

“Here we go, Tom, let fly!”

Four policemen stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of yellow twine on their wrists to show their authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled.

“This way,” said Grigsby at the last moment, “everyone feels he's had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!”

Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a long time.

“Tom, spit!”

His mouth was dry.

“Get on, Tom! Move!”

“But,” said Tom, slowly, “she's beautiful!”

“Here, I'll spit for you!” Grigsby spat and the missile flew in the sunlight. The woman in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked back at her, his heart beating, a kind of music in his ears.

“She's beautiful,” he said.

“Now get on, before the police…”

“Attention!”

The line fell silent. One moment they were berating Tom for not moving forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback.

“What do they call it, sir?” asked Tom, quietly.

“The picture? Mona Lisa, Tom, I think. Yes, the Mona Lisa.”

“I have an announcement,” said the man on horseback. “The authorities have decreed that as of high noon today the portrait in the square is to be given over into the hands of the populace there, so they may participate in the destruction of…”

Tom hadn't even time to scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and pummeling about, stampeding toward the portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound. The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so many hungry birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through the broken thing. Reaching out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched a scrap of oily canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked, sent rolling to the outer rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothes torn, he watched old women chew pieces of canvas, men break the frame, kicked the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti.

Only Tom stood apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his and. It clutched the piece of canvas close to his chest, hidden.

“Hey there, Tom!” cried Grigsby.

Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and down the bomb-pitted road, into a field, across a shallow stream, not looking back, his hands clenched tightly, tucked under his coat.

At sunset he reached the small village and passed on through. By nine o'clock he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the half silo, in the part that still remained upright, tented over, he heard the sounds of sleeping, the family – his mother, father, and brother. He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and lay down panting.

“Tom?” called his mother in the dark.

“Yes.”

“Where've you been?” snapped his father. “I'll beat you in the morning.”

Someone kicked him. His brother who had been left behind to work their little patch of ground.

“Go to sleep,” cried his mother, faintly.

Another kick.

Tom lay getting his breath. All was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed.

Then he felt something and it was a cold white light. The moon rose very high and the little square of light moved in the silo and crept slowly over Tom's body. Then, and only then, did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him, Tom drew his hand forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then, waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the tiny fragment of painted canvas.

All the world was asleep in the moonlight. And there on his hand was the Smile. He looked at it in the white illumination from the mid-night sky. And he thought, over and over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.

An hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky toward morning.

Answer the following questions and fulfil the assignments.

1. What do you know about Ray Bradbury?

2. Is the title of the story direct or symbolic? Why?

3. What is the idea and the problem presented by the story

4. What is the structure of the story? What makes you think so?

5. What type of the narration is the text? What kind of speech prevails? Is it important? Why?

6. Pick out of the story the words that belong to American English. How have you learnt about it? In what way do they differ from analogues words in British English?

7. Pick out words which describe the consequences of the war. What kind of war was it? Was it only the destruction of the cities? How did the war influence the souls of people? What did they struggle against?

8. Pick out words that describe violence of the people. What role do phonetically motivated words play in the description?

9. Comment on the use of the words in italics. What feeling and emotions are revealed through them? Is it only bewilderment?

10. In what way do sentence patterns in exterior monologue differ from those in the dialogical part? Pick out the sentences that contradict grammar rules. What effect do they produce? In what way do they characterize the people in the story?

Read the story “CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE” by JEFFREY ARCHER. Use dictionary if necessary.

Women are naturally superior to men, and Mrs. Consuela Rosenheim was no exception.

Victor Rosenheim, an American banker, was Consuela's third husband, and the gossip columns on both sides of the Atlantic were suggesting that, like a chain smoker, the former Colombian model was already searching for her next spouse before she had extracted the last gasp from the old one. Her first two husbands – one an Arab, the other a Jew (Consuela showed no racial prejudice when it came to signing marriage contracts) – had not quite left her in a position that would guarantee her financial security once her natural beauty had faded. But two more divorce settlements would sort that out. With this in mind, Consuela estimated that she only had another five years before the final vow must be taken.

The Rosenheims flew into London from their home in New York – or, to be more accurate, from their homes in New York. Consuela had traveled to the airport by chauffeur-driven car from their mansion in the Hamptons, while her husband had been taken from his Wall Street office in a second chauffeur-driven car. They met up in the Concorde lounge at JFK. When they had landed at Heathrow another limousine transported them to the Ritz, where they were escorted to their usual suite without any suggestion of having to sign forms or book in.

The purpose of their trip was twofold. Mr. Rosenheim was hoping to take over a small merchant bank that had not benefited from the recession, while Mrs. Rosenheim intended to occupy her time looking for a suitable birthday present – for herself. Despite considerable research I have been unable to discover exactly which birthday Consuela would officially be celebrating.

After a sleepless night induced by jetlag, Victor Rosenheim was whisked away to an early-morning meeting in the City, while Consuela remained in bed toying with her breakfast. She managed one piece of thin toast and a stab at a boiled egg.

Once the breakfast tray had been removed, Consuela made a couple of phone calls to confirm luncheon dates for the two days she would be in London. She then disappeared into the bathroom.

Fifty minutes later she emerged from her suite dressed in a pink Olaganie suit with a dark collar, her fair hair bouncing on the shoulders. Few of the men she passed between the elevator and the revolving doors failed to turn their heads, so Consuela judged that the previous fifty minutes had not been wasted. She stepped out of the hotel and into the morning sun to begin her search for the birthday present.

Consuela began her quest in New Bond Street. As in the past, she had no intention of straying more than a few blocks north, south, east or west from that comforting landmark, while a chauffeur-driven car hovered a few yards behind her.

She spent some time in Asprey's considering the latest slimline watches, a gold statue of a tiger with jade eyes, and a Faberge egg, before moving on to Cartier, where she dismissed a crested silver salver, a platinum watch and a Louis XIV long-case clock. From there she walked another few yards to Tiffany's, which, despite a determined salesman who showed her almost everything the shop had to offer, she still left empty-handed.

Consuela stood on the pavement and checked her watch. It was 12.52, and she had to accept that it had been a fruitless morning. She instructed her chauffeur to drive her to Harry's Bar, where she found Mrs. Stavros Kleanthis waiting for her at their usual table. Consuela greeted her friend with a kiss on both cheeks, and took the seat opposite her.

Mrs. Kleanthis, this wife of a not unknown ship owner – the Greeks preferring one wife and several liaisons – had for the last few minutes been concentrating her attention on the menu to be sure that the restaurant served the few dishes that her latest diet would permit. Between them, the two women had read every book that had reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list which included the words “youth”, “orgasm”, “slimming”, “fitness” or “immortality” in its title.

“How's Victor?” asked Maria, once she and Consuela had ordered their meals.

Consuela passed to consider her response, and decided on the truth.

“”Fast reaching his sell-by date,” she replied. “And Stavros?”

“Well, past his, I'm afraid,” said Maria. “But as I have neither your looks nor your figure, not to mention the fact that I have three teenage children, I don't suppose I'll be returning to the market to select the latest brand.”

Consuela smiled as a salad was placed in front of her.

“So, what brings you to London – other than to have lunch with an old friend?” asked Maria.

“Victor has his eye on another bank,” replied Consuela, as if she were discussing a child who collected stamps. “And I am in search of a suitable birthday present.”

“And what are you expecting Victor to come up with this time?” asked Maria. “A house in the country? A thoroughbred racehorse? Or perhaps your own Lear jet?”

“None of the above,” said Consuela, placing her fork by the half-finished salad. “I need something that can't be bargained over as a future date, so my gift must be one that any court, in any state, will acknowledge is unquestionably mine.”

“Have you found anything appropriate yet?” asked Maria.

“Not yet,” admitted Consuela. “Asprey's yielded nothing of interest, Cartier's cupboard was almast bare, and the only attractive thing in Tiffany's was the salesman, who was undoubtedly penniless. I shall have to continue my search this afternoon.”

The salad plates were deftly removed by a waiter whom Maria considered far too young and far too thin. Another waiter with the same problem poured them both a cup of fresh decaffeinated coffee. Consuela refused the proffered cream and sugar, though her companion was not so quite disciplined.

The two ladies grumbled on about the sacrifices they were having to make because of the recession until they were the only diners left in the room. At this point a fatter waiter presented them with the bill – an extraordinarily long ledger considering that neither of them had ordered a second course, or had requested more than Evian from the wine waiter.

On the pavement of South Adley Street they kissed again on both cheeks before going their separate ways, one to the east and the other to the west.

Consuela climbed into the back of her chauffeur-driven car in order to be returned to New Bond Street, a distance of no more than half a mile.

Once she was back on familiar territory, she began to walk her way steadily down the other side of the street, stopping at Bentley's, where it appeared that they hadn't sold anything since last year, and moving rapidly on to Adler, who seemed to be suffering from much the same problem. She cursed the recession once again, and blamed it all on Bill Clinton, who, Victor had assured her, was the cause of most of the world's current problems.

Consuela was beginning to despair of finding anything worthwhile in Bond Street, and reluctantly began her journey back towards the Ritz, feeling she might even have to consider an expedition to Knightsbridge the following day, when she came to a sudden halt outside the House of Graff. Consuela could not recall the shop from her last visit to London some six months before, and as she knew Bond Street better than she had ever known any of her three husbands, she concluded that it must be a new establishment.

She gazed at the stunning gems in their magnificent settings, heavily protected behind the bulletproof windows. When she reached the third window her mouth opened wide, like a newborn chick demanding to be fed. From that moment she knew that no further excursions would be necessary, for there, hanging round a slender marble neck, was a peerless diamond and ruby necklace. She felt that she had seen the magnificent piece of jewellery somewhere before, but she quickly dismissed the thought from her mind, and continued to study the exquisitely set rubies surrounded by perfectly cut diamonds, making up a necklace of unparallel beauty. Without giving a moment's thought to how much the object might cost, Consuela walked slowly towards the thick glass door at the entrance of the shop, and pressed a discreet ivory button on the wall. The House of Graff obviously had no interest in passing trade.

The door was unlocked by the security officer who needed no more than a glance at Mrs. Rosenheim to know that he should usher her quickly through to the inner portals, where a second door was opened and Consuela came face to face with a tall, imposing man in a long black coat and pinstriped trousers.

“Good afternoon, madam,” he said, bowing slightly. Consuela noticed that he surreptitiously admired her rings as he did so. “Can I be of assistance?”

Although the room was full of treasures that might in normal circumstances have deserved hours of her attention, Consuela's mind was focused on only one object.

“Yes. I would like to study more closely the diamond and ruby necklace on display in the third window.”

“Certainly, madam,” the manager replied, pulling back a chair for his customer. He nodded almost imperceptibly to an assistant, who silently walked over to the window, unlocked a little door and extracted the necklace. The manager slipped behind the counter and pressed a concealed button. Four floors above, a slight burr sounded in the private office of Mr. Laurence Graff, warning the proprietor that a customer had enquired after a particularly expensive item, and that he might wish to deal with him personally.

Laurence Graff glanced up at the television screen on the wall to his left, which showed him what was taking place on the ground floor.

“Ah,” he said, once he saw the lady in the pink suit seated at the Louis XIV table. “Mrs. Consuela Rosenheim, if I'm not mistaken.” Just as the Speaker of the House of Commons can identify every one of its 650 members, so Laurence Graff recognized the 650 customers who might be able to afford the most extravagant of his treasures. He quickly stepped from behind hid desk, walked out of his office and took the waiting lift to the ground floor.

Meanwhile, the manager had laid out a black velvet cloth on the table in front of Mrs. Rosenheim, and the assistant placed the necklace delicately on top of it. Consuela stared down at the object of her desire mesmerized.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Rosenheim,” said Laurence Graff as he stepped out of the lift and walked across the thick pile carpet towards he would-be customer. “How nice to see you again.”

He had in truth only seen her once before – at a shoulder-to-shoulder cocktail party in Manhattan. But after that, he could have spotted her at a hundred paces on a moving escalator.

“Good afternoon, Mr. …” Consuela hesitated, feeling unsure of herself for the first time that day.

“Laurence Graff,” he said, offering his hand. “We met at Sotheby Parke Bennett last year – a charity function in aid of the Red Cross, if I remember correctly.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Rosenheim, unable to recall him, on the occasion.

Mr. Graff bowed reverently towards the diamond and ruby necklace.

“The Kanemarra heirloom,” he purred, then paused, before taking the manager's place at the table. “Fashioned in 1936 by Silvio di Larchi,” he continued. “All the rubies were extracted from a single mine in Burma, over a period of twenty years. The diamonds were purchased from De Beers by an Egyptian merchant who, after the necklace had been made up for him, offered the unique piece to King Farouk – for services rendered. When the monarch married Princess Farida he presented it to her on their wedding day, and she in return bore him four heirs, none of whom, alas, was destined to succeed to the throne.” Graff looked up from one object of beauty and gazed on another.

“Since then it has passed through several hands before arriving to the House of Graff,” continued the proprietor. “Its most recent owner was an actress, whose husband's oil wells unfortunately dried up.”

The flicker of a smile crossed the face of Consuela Rosenheim as she finally recalled where she had previously seen the necklace.

“Quite magnificent,” she said, giving it one final look. “I will be back,” she added as she rose from her chair. Graff accompanied her to the door. Nine out of ten customers who make such a claim have no intention of returning, but he could allow sense the tenth.

“May I ask the price?” Consuela asked indifferently as he held the door open for her.

“One million pounds, madam,” Graff replied, as casually as if she had inquired about the cost of a plastic key ring at a seaside gift shop.

Once she had reached the pavement, Consuela dismissed her chauffeur. Her mind was now working at a speed that would have impressed her husband. She slipped across the road, calling first at The White House, then Yves Saint Laurent, and finally at Channel, emerging some two hours later with all the weapons she required for the battle that lay ahead. She did not arrive back at her suite at the Ritz until a few minutes before six.

Consuela was relieved to find that her husband had not yet returned from the bank. She used the time to take a long bath, and to contemplate how the trap should be set. Once she was dried and powdered, she dabbed a suggestion of a new scent on her neck, then slipped into some of her newly acquired clothes.

She was checking herself once again in the full-length mirror when Victor entered the room. He stopped on the spot, dropping his briefcase on the carpet. Consuela turned to face him.

“You look stunning,” he declared, with the same look of desire she had lavished on the Kanemarra heirloom a few hours before.

“Thank you, darling,” she replied. “And how did your day go?”

“A triumph. The takeover has been agreed, and at half the price it would have cost me only a year ago.”

Consuela smiled. An unexpected bonus.

“Those of us who are still in possession of cash need no fear of the recession,” Victor added with satisfaction.

Over a quiet supper in the Ritz's dining room, Victor described to his wife in great detail what had taken place at the bank that day. During the occasional break in his monologue Consuela indulged her husband by remarking “How clever of you, Victor”, “How amazing”, “How you managed it I will never understand”. When he finally ordered a large brandy, lit a cigar and leaned back in his chair, she began to run her elegantly stockinged right foot gently along the inside of his thigh. For the first time this evening, Victor stopped thinking about the takeover.

As they left the dining room and strolled towards the lift, Victor placed an arm around his wife's slim waist. By the time the lift had reached the sixth floor he had already taken off his jacket, and his hand had slipped a few inches further down. Consuela giggled. Long before they had reached the door of their suite he had begun tugging off his tie.

When they entered the room, Consuela placed the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside doorknob. For the next few minutes Victor was transfixed to the spot as he watched his slim wife slowly remove each garment she had purchased that afternoon. He quickly pulled off his own clothes and wished once again that he had carried out his New Year's resolution.

Forty minute later Victor lay exhausted on the bed. After a few moments of sighing, he began to snore. Consuela pulled the sheet over their naked bodies, but her eyes remained wide open. She was already going over the next step in her plan.

Victor awoke the following morning to discover his wife's hand gently stroking the inside of his leg. He rolled over to face her, the memory of the previous night still vivid in his mind. They made love a second time, something they had not done for as long as he could recall.

It was not until he stepped out of the shower that Victor remembered it was his wife's birthday, and that he had promised to spend the morning with her selecting a gift. He only hoped that her eye had already settled on something she wanted, as he needed to spend most of the day closeted in the City with his lawyers, going over the offer document line by line.

“Happy birthday, darling,” he said as he padded back into the bedroom. “By the way, did you have any luck finding a present?” he added as he scanned the front page of the Financial Times, which was already speculating on the possible takeover, describing it as a coup. A smile of satisfaction appeared on Victor's face for the second time that morning.

“Yes, my darling,” Consuela replied. “I did come across one little bauble that I rather liked. I just hope it isn't too expensive.”

“And how much is this ‘little bauble'?” Victor asked. Consuela turned to face him. She was wearing only two garments, both of them black, and both of them remarkably skimpy.

Victor started to wonder if he still had the time, but then he remembered the lawyers, who had been up all the night and would be waiting patiently for him at the bank.

“I didn't ask the price,” Consuela replied. “You're so much cleverer than I am at that sort of thing,” she added, as she slipped into a navy silk blouse.

Victor glanced at his watch. “How far away is it?” he asked.

“Just across the road, in Bond Street, my darling,” Consuela replied. “I shouldn't have to delay you for too long.” She knew exactly what was going through her husband's mind.

“Good. Then let's go and look at this little bauble without delay,” he said as he did up the buttons on his shirt.

While Victor finished dressing, Consuela, with the help of Financial Times, skillfully guided the conversation back to his triumph of the previous day. She listened once more to the details of the takeover as they left the hotel and strolled up Bond Street together arm in arm.

“Probably saved myself several million,” he told her yet again. Consuela smiled as she led him to the door of the House of Graff.

“Several million?” she gasped. “How clever you are, Victor.”

The security guard quickly opened the door, and this time Consuela found that Mr. Graff was already standing by the table waiting for her. He bowed low, then turned to Victor. “May I offer my congratulations on your brilliant coup, Mr. Rosenheim.” Victor smiled. How may I help you?”

“My husband would like to see the Kanemarra heirloom,” said Consuela, before Victor had a chance to reply.

“Of course, madam,” said the proprietor. He stepped behind the table and spread out the black velvet cloth. Once again the assistant removed the magnificent necklace from its stand in the third window, and carefully laid it out on the center of the velvet cloth to show the jewels to their best advantage. Mr. Graff was about to embark on the piece's history, when Victor simply said, “How much is it?”

Mr. Graff raised his head. “This is no ordinary piece of jewellery. I feel…”

“How much?” repeated Victor.

“Its provenance alone warrants …”

“How much?”

“The sheer beauty, not to mention the craftsmanship involved …”

“How much?” asked Victor, his voice now rising.

“… the word unique would not be inappropriate.”

“You may be right, but I still need to know how much it's going to cost me,” said Victor, who was beginning to sound exasperated.

“One million pound, sir,” Graff said in an even tone, aware that he could not risk another superlative.

“I'll settle at half a million, not more,” came back the immediate reply.

“I am sorry to say, sir,” said Graff, “that with this particular piece, there's no room for bargaining.”

“There's always room for bargaining, whatever one is selling,” said Victor. “But I don't have that much time to spare this morning, so I'll write out a cheque for half a million, and leave you to decide whether you wish to cash it or not.”

“I fear you are wasting your time, sir,” said Graff. “I cannot let the Kanemarra heirloom go for less than one million.”

Victor took out a chequebook from his inside pocket, unscrewed the top of his fountain pen, and wrote out the words ‘Five Hundred Thousand Pounds Only' below the name of the bank that bore his name. His wife took a discreet pace backwards.

Graff was about to repeat his previous comment, when he glanced up, and observed Mrs. Rosenheim silently pleading with him to accept the cheque.

A look of curiosity came over his face as Consuela continued her urgent mime.

Victor tore out the cheque and left it on the table. “I'll give you twenty four hours to decide,” he said. “We return to New York tomorrow morning – with or without the Kanemarra Heirloom. It's your decision.”

Graff left the cheque on the table as he accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim to the front door and bowed them out onto Bond Street.

“You were brilliant, my darling,” said Consuela as the chauffeur opened the car door for his master.

“The bank,” Rosenheim instructed as he fell into the back seat. “You'll have your little bauble, Consuela. He'll cash the cheque before the twenty four hours are up, of that I'm sure.” The chauffeur closed the back door, and the window purred down as Victor added with a smile, “Happy birthday, darling.”

Consuela returned his smile, and blew him a kiss as the car pulled out into the traffic and edged its way towards Piccadilly. The morning had not turned out quite as she had planned, because she felt unable to agree with her husband's judgement – but then, she still had twenty-four hours to play with.

Consuela returned to the suite at the Ritz, undressed, took a shower, opened another bottle of perfume, and slowly began to change into the second outfit she had purchased the previous day. Before she left the room she turned to the commodities section of the Financial Times, and checked the price of green coffee.

She emerged from the Arlington Street entrance of the Ritz wearing a double-breasted navy blue Yves Saint Laurent suit and a wide-brimmed red and white hat. Ignoring her chauffeur, she hailed a taxi, instructing the driver to take her to a small, discreet hotel in Knightsbridge. Fifteen minutes later she entered the foyer with her head bowed, and after giving the name of her host to the manager, was accompanied to a suite on the fourth floor. Her luncheon companion stood as she entered the room, walked forward, kissed her on both cheeks and wished her a happy birthday.

After an intimate lunch, and an even more intimate hour spent in the adjoining room, Consuela's companion listened to her request and, having first checked his watch, agreed to accompany her to Mayfair. He didn't mention to her that he would have to be back in his office by four o'clock to take an important call from South America. Since the downfall of the Brazilian president, coffee prices had gone through the roof.

As the car traveled down Brompton Road, Consuela's companion telephoned to check the latest spot price of green coffee in New York (only her skill in bed managed to stop him from calling earlier). He was pleased to learn that it was up another two cents, but not as pleased as she was. Eleven minutes later, the car deposited them outside the House of Graff.

When they entered the shop together arm in arm, Mr. Graff didn't so much as raise an eyebrow.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Carvalho,” he said. “I do hope that your estates yielded an abundant crop this year.”

Mr.Carvalho smiled and replied, “I cannot complain.”

“And how may I assist you?” enquired the proprietor.

“We would like to see the diamond necklace in the third window,” said Consuela, without a moment's hesitation.

“Of course, madam,” said Graff, as if he were addressing a complete stranger.

Once again the black velvet cloth was laid out on the table, and once again the assistant placed the Kanemarra heirloom in its center.

This time Mr. Graff was allowed to relate its history, before Carvalho politely enquired after the price.

“One million pounds,” said Graff.

After a moment's hesitation, Carvalho said, “I'm willing to pay half a million.”

“This is no ordinary piece of jewellery,” replied the proprietor. “I feel …”

“Possibly not, but half a million is my best offer,” said Carvalho.

“The sheer beauty, not to mention the craftsmanship involved …”

“Nevertheless, I am not willing to go above half a million.”

“… the word unique would not be inappropriate.”

“Half a million, and no more,” insisted Carvalho.

“I am sorry to say, sir,” said Graff, “that with this particular piece there's no room for bargaining.”

“There's always room for bargaining, whatever one is selling,” the coffee grower insisted.

“I fear that is not true in this case, sir. You see …”

“I suspect you will come to tour senses in time,” said Carvalho. “But, regrettably I do not have any time to spare this afternoon. I will write out a cheque for half a million pounds, and leave you to decide whether you wish to cash it.”

Carvalho took a chequebook from his inside pocket, unscrewed the top of his fountain pen, and wrote out the words ‘Five Hundred Thousand Only'. Consuela looked silently on.

Carvalho tore out the cheque, and left it on the counter.

“I'll give you twenty-four hours to decide. I leave for Chicago on the early evening flight tomorrow. If the cheque has not been presented by the time I reach my office …”

Graff bowed his head slightly, and left the cheque on the table. He accompanied them to the door, and bowed again when they stepped out onto the pavement.

“You were brilliant, my darling,” said Consuela as the chauffeur opened the car door for his employer.

“The Exchange,” said Carvalho. Turning back to face his mistress, he added, “You'll have your necklace before the day is out, of that I'm certain, my darling.”

Consuela smiled and waved as the car disappeared in the direction of Piccadilly, and on this occasion she felt able to agree with her lover's judgement. Once the car had turned the corner, she slipped back into the House of Graff.

The proprietor smiled, and handed over the smartly wrapped gift. He bowed low and simply said, “Happy birthday, Mrs. Rosenheim.”

Answer the following questions and fulfil the assignments.

1. What do you know about Jeffrey Archer?

2. Is the title of the story direct or indirect? What makes you think so?

3. What is the structure of the story? What is the reason for the components of the structure to be well developed? Why are the details so important?

4. What is the idea of the story? What problem does it reveal?

5. What is the type of narration?

6. Pick out proper names out of the text. What information is obtained through the proper names mentioned in the story?

7. Pick out the words from the text which describe the necklace. In what way the quality of the piece of jewellery is described? What makes the necklace exquisite?

8. The syntactic structure of the exterior monologue and the dialogue differs. What are the main differences? What type of sentences prevails in the descriptive part of the story? What are the main syntactic structures in the dialogue? What effect does it produce?

9. What is the tone of the story? What atmosphere is created by repeated descriptions of the presentation of the necklace, the bargaining and the purchase of the piece of jewellery?

10. Pick out negative sentences from the text. Are they built on the same pattern? What do the negative sentences emphasize in the story?

Read the story “THE GUILTY PARTY” by O'HENRY. Use dictionary if necessary.

A red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sat in a rocking chair by a window. He had just lighted a pipe, and was puffing blue clouds with great satisfaction. He had removed his shoes and donned a pair of blue, faded carpet-slippers. With the morbid thirst of the confirmed daily news drinker, he awkwardly folded back the pages of an evening paper, eagerly gulping down the strong, black headlines, to be followed as a chaser by the milder details of the smaller type.

In an adjoining room a woman was cooking supper. Odors from strong bacon and boiling coffee contended against the cut-plug fumes from the vespertine pipe.

Outside was one of those crowded streets of the east side, in which, as twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace – here were the children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to humorists as the stork. But the people of Christie Street were better ornithologists. They called it a vulture.

A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting by the window, and said:

“Papa, won't you play a game of checkers with me if you aren't too tired?”

The red-haired, unshaven, untidy man sitting shoeless by the window answered, with a frown:

“Checkers. No, I won't. Can't a man who works hard all day have a little rest when he comes home? Why don't you go out and play with the other kids on the sidewalk?”

The woman who was cooking came to the door.

“John,” she said, “I don't like for Lizzie to play in the street. They learn too much there that ain't good for 'em. She's been in the house all day long. It seems that you might give up a little of your time to amuse her when you come home.”

“Let her go out and play like the rest of 'em if she wants to be amused,” said the red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, “and don't bother me.”

…………………………………………………………………………………….

“You're on,” said Kid Mullaly. “Fifty dollars to $25 I take Annie to the dance. Put up.”

The Kid's black eyes were snapping with the fire of the baited and challenged. He drew out his “roll” and slapped five tens upon the bar. The three or four young fellows who were thus “taken” more slowly produced their stake. The bartender, ex-officio stakeholder, took the money, laboriously wrapped it, recorded the bet with an inch-long pencil and stuffed the whole into a corner of the cash register.

“And, oh, what'll be done to you'll be a plenty,” said a bettor, with anticipatory glee.

“That's my lookout,” said the “Kid”, sternly. “Fill 'em up all around, Mike.”

After the round Burke, the Kid's sponge, sponge-holder, pal, mentor and Grand Vizier, drew him out to the bootblack stand at the saloon corner where all the official and important matters of the Small Hours Social Club were settled. As Tony polished the light tan shoes of the club's President and Secretary for the fifth time that day, Burke spake words of wisdom to his chief.

“Cut that blonde out, Kid,” was his advice, “or there'll be trouble. What do you want to throw down that girl of yours for? You'll never find one that'll freeze to you like Liz has. She's worth a hallful of Annies.”

“I'm no Annie admirer!” said the Kid, dropping a cigarette ash on his polished toe, and wiping it off on Tony's shoulder. “But I want to teach Liz a lesson. She thinks I belong to her. She's been bragging that I daren't speak to another girl. Liz is all right – in some ways. She's drinking a little too much lately. And she uses language that a lady oughtn't.”

“You're engaged, ain't you?” asked Burke.

“Sure. We'll get married next year, maybe.”

“I saw you make her drink her first glass of beer,” said Burke. “That was two years ago, when she used to come down to the corner of Christie bareheaded to meet you after supper. She was a quiet sort of a kid then, and couldn't speak without blushing.”

“She's a little spitfire, sometimes, now,” said the Kid. “I hate jealousy. That's why I'm going to the dance with Annie. It'll teach her some sense.”

“Well, you better look a little out,” were Burke's last words. “If Liz was my girl and I was to sneak out to a dance coupled up with an Annie, I'd want a suit of chain armor on under my gladsome rags, all right.”

Through the land of the stork-vulture wandered Liz. Her black eyes searched the passing crowds fierily but vaguely. Now and then she hummed bars of foolish little songs. Between times she set her small, white teeth together and spake crisp words that the east side has added to language.

Liz's skirt was green silk. Her waist was a large brown-and-pink plaid, well-fitting and not without style. She wore a cluster ring of huge imitation rubies and a locket than banged her knees at the bottom of a silver chain. Her shoes were run down over twisted high heels, and were strangers to polish. Her hat would scarcely have passed into a flour barrel.

The “Family Entrance” of the Blue Jay Café received her. At a table she sat, and punched the button with the air of milady ringing for her carriage. The waiter came with his large-chinned, low-voiced manner of respectful familiarity. Liz smoothed her silken skirt with a satisfied wriggle. She made the most of it. Here she could order and he waited upon. It was all that her world offered her of the prerogative of woman.

“Whiskey, Tommy,” she said as her sisters further uptown murmur “Champagne, James”.

“Sure, Miss Lizzie. What'll the chaser be?”

“Seltzer. And say, Tommy, has the Kid been around to-day?”

“Why, no, Miss Lizzie, I haven't saw him to-day.”

Fluently came the “Miss Lizzie”, for the Kid was known to be one who required rigid upholdment of the dignity of his fiancée.

“I'm lookin' for 'm,” said Liz, after the chaser had sputtered under her nose. “It's got to me that he says he'll take Annie Karlson to the dance. Let him. The pink-eyed white rat! I'm lookin' for 'm. You know me, Tommy. Two years me and the Kid's been engaged. Look at that ring. Five hundred, he said it cost. Let him take her to the dance. What'll I do? I'll cut his heart out. Another whiskey, Tommy.”

“I wouldn't listen to no such reports, Miss Lizzie,” said the waiter smoothly, from the narrow opening above his chin. “Kid Mullaly's not the guy to throw a lady like you down. Seltzer on the side?”

“Two years,” repeated Liz, softening a little to sentiment under the magic of the distiller's art. “I always used to play out on the street of evenin's 'cause there was nothin' doin' for me at home. For a long time I just sat on doorsteps and looked at the lights and the people goin' by. And then the Kid came along one evenin' and sized me up, and I was mashed on the spot for fair. The first drink, he made me take, I cried all night at home, and got a lickin' for makin' a noise. And now – say, Tommy, you ever see this Annie Karlson? If it wasn't for peroxide the chloroform limit would have put her out long ago. Oh, I'm lookin' for 'm. You tell the Kid if he comes in. Me? I'll cut his heart out. Leave it to me. Another whiskey, Tommy.”

A little unsteady, but with watchful and brilliant eyes, Liz walked up the avenue. On the doorstep of a brick tenement a curly-haired child sat, puzzling over the convolutions of a tangled string. Liz flopped down beside her, with a crooked, shifting smile on her flushed face. But her eyes had grown clear and artless of a sudden.

“Let me show you how to make a cat's-cradle, kid,” she said, tucking her green silk under her rusty shoes.

And while they sat there the lights were being turned on for the dance in the hall of the Small Hours Social Club. It was a bi-monthly dance, a dress affair in which the members took great pride and bestirred themselves huskily to further and adorn.

At 9 o'clock the President, Kid Mullaly, paced upon the floor with a lady on his arm. As the Loreley's was her hair golden. Her “yes” was softened to a “yah”, but its quality of assent was patent to the most Milesian ears. She stepped upon her own train and blushed, and – she smiled into the eyes of Kid Mullaly.

And then, as the two stood in the middle of the waxed floor, the thing happened to prevent which many lamps are burning nightly in many studies and libraries.

Out from the circle of spectators in the hall leaped Fate in a green silk skirt, under the nom de guerre of “Liz”. Her eyes were hard and blacker than jet. She did not scream or waver. Most unwomanly, she cried out one oath – the Kid's own favorite oath – and in his own deep voice; and then while the Small Hours Social Club went frantically to pieces, she made good her boast to Tommy, the waiter – made good as far as the length of her knife blade and the strength of her arm permitted.

And next came the primal instinct of self-preservation – or was it self-annihilation, the instinct that society has grafted on the natural branch?

Liz ran out and down the street swift and true as a woodcock flying through a grove of saplings at dusk.

And then followed the big city's biggest shame, its most ancient and rotten surviving canker, its pollution and disgrace, its blight and perversion, its forever infamy and guilt, fostered, unreproved and cherished, handed down from a long-ago century of the basest barbarity – the Hue and Cry. Nowhere but in the big cities does it survive, and here most of all. Where the ultimate perfection of culture, citizenship and alleged superiority joins, bawling, in the chase.

They pursued – a shrieking mob of fathers, mothers, lovers and maidens – howling, yelling, calling, whistling, crying for blood. Well may the wolf in the big city stand outside the door. Well may his heart, the gentler, falter at the siege. Knowing her way, and hungry for her surcease, she darted down the familiar ways until at last her feet struck the dull solidity of the rotting pier. And then it was but a few more panting steps – and good mother East River took Liz to her bosom, smoothed her muddily but quickly, and settled in five minutes the problem that keeps lights burning o' nights in thousands of pastorates and colleges.

…………………………………………………………………………………….

It's mighty funny what kind of dreams one has sometimes. Poets call them visions, but a vision is only a dream in blank verse. I dreamed the rest of this story.

The court officer opened the door and stepped out …

“The guilty party you've got to look for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading, in his stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.”

Now, wasn't that a silly dream?

Answer the following questions and fulfil the assignments.

1. What do you know about O'Henry?

2. The title of the story is given in the inverted comas. Why? What function does it fulfil?

3. What is the structure of the story? Is the denouement of the story of an ordinary type? What does it look like?

4. What are the idea and the problem of the story? What layer of the society serves as the literary image of the story?

5. What is the type of narration?

6. Pick out the words from the story which belong to American English. Name their distinguishing features from analogues words in British English.

7. Pick out the words that describe the occupations of the characters. What layer of the language do they belong to?

8. Pick out the words marked with the graphon. What do they signal about?

9. Pick out the words and expressions that are euphemistic. Comment on their function in the story.

10. What sentence patterns prevail in the story? Pick out sentences that contradict grammar rules. What is their function? What atmosphere is created by their means?