Character and Setting

This passage is from Stephen Crane's short story “The Upturned Face,” published in 1900. During a battle between two imaginary countries, Timothy Lean, an infantry officer, and an adjutant, a staff officer, have had two privates dig a hurried grave for Bill, a fellow officer who has just been killed, while enemy sharpshooters fire on them. The two officers have laid the body in the grave themselves.

The adjutant said, "I suppose we should – we should say something. Do you know the service, Tim?"

"They don't read the service until the grave is filled in," said Lean, pressing his lips to an academic expression.

"Don't they?" said the adjutant, shocked that he had made the mistake.

"Oh, well," he cried, suddenly, "let us – let us say something – while he can hear us."

"All right," said Lean. "Do you know the service?"

"I can't remember a line of it," said the adjutant.

Lean was extremely dubious. "I can repeat two lines, but – "

"Well, do it," said the adjutant. "Go as far as you can. That's better than nothing. And the beasts have got our range exactly."

Lean looked at his two men. "Attention," he barked. The privates came to attention with a click, looking much aggrieved. The adjutant lowered his helmet to his knee. Lean, bareheaded, he stood over the grave. The Rostina sharpshooters fired briskly.

"Oh, Father, our friend has sunk in the deep waters of death, but his spirit has leaped toward Thee as the bubble arises from the lips of the drowning. Perceive, we beseech, O Father, the little flying bubble, and – ".

Lean, although husky and ashamed, had suffered no hesitation up to this point, but he stopped with a hopeless feeling and looked at the corpse.

The adjutant moved uneasily. "And from Thy superb heights – " he began, and then he too came to an end.

"And from Thy superb heights," said Lean.

The adjutant suddenly remembered a phrase in the back part of the Spitzbergen burial service, and he exploited it with the triumphant manner of a man who has recalled everything, and can go on.

"Oh, God, have mercy – "

"Oh, God, have mercy – " said Lean.

"Mercy," repeated the adjutant, in quick failure.

"Mercy," said Lean. And then he was moved by some violence of feeling, for he turned suddenly upon his two men and tigerishly said, "Throw the dirt in."

The fire of the Rostina sharpshooters was accurate and continuous.

* * * * *

One of the aggrieved privates came forward with his shovel. He lifted his first shovel-load of earth, and for a moment of inexplicable hesitation it was held poised above this corpse, which from its chalk-blue face looked keenly out from the grave. Then the soldier emptied his shovel on – on the feet.

Timothy Lean felt as if tons had been swiftly lifted from off his forehead. He had felt that perhaps the private might empty the shovel on – on the face. It had been emptied on the feet. There was a great point gained there – ha, ha! – the first shovelful had been emptied on the feet. How satisfactory!

The adjutant began to babble. "Well, of course – a man we've messed with all these years – impossible – you can't, you know, leave your intimate friends rotting on the field. Go on, for God's sake, and shovel, you!"

The man with the shovel suddenly ducked, grabbed his left arm with his right hand, and looked at his officer for orders. Lean picked the shovel from the ground. "Go to the rear," he said to the wounded man. He also addressed the other private. "You get under cover, too; I'll finish this business."

The wounded man scrambled hard still for the top of the ridge without devoting any glances to the direction whence the bullets came, and the other man followed at an equal pace; but he was different, in that he looked back anxiously three times.

This is merely the way – often – of the hit and unhit.

Timothy Lean filled the shovel, hesitated, and then in a movement which was like a gesture of abhorrence he flung the dirt into the grave, and as it landed it made a sound – plop! Lean suddenly stopped and mopped his brow – a tired laborer.

"Perhaps we have been wrong," said the adjutant. His glance wavered stupidly. "It might have been better if we hadn't buried him just at this time. Of course, if we advance to-morrow the body would have been – "

"Damn you," said Lean, "shut your mouth!" He was not the senior officer.

He again filled the shovel and flung the earth. Always the earth made that sound – plop! For a space Lean worked frantically, like a man digging himself out of danger.

Soon there was nothing to be seen but the chalk-blue face. Lean filled the shovel. "Good God," he cried to the adjutant. "Why didn't you turn him somehow when you put him in? This – " Then Lean began to stutter.

The adjutant understood. He was pale to the lips. "Go on, man," he cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout. Lean swung back the shovel. It went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed it made a sound – plop!

This passage is from Ivan Turgenev's story “The Tryst,” in Constance Garnett's translation of A Sportsman's Sketches, published in 1895. The narrator, a hunter resting unseen in a birch wood in autumn, has been watching Akulina, a young peasant girl, as she meets Viktor, the valet of a rich young gentleman. Viktor has told her that he and his master leave for the city the next day, and he has just noticed the flowers she is holding. In the part omitted, Viktor says she could never understand life in the city, and Akulina begs him for one kind word before he goes.

'Yes,' Akulina responded dejectedly. 'That's some wild tansy I picked,' she went on, brightening up a little; 'it's good for calves. And this is bud-marigold – against the king's evil. Look, what an exquisite flower! I've never seen such a lovely flower before. These are forget-me-nots, and that's mother-darling.... And these I picked for you,' she added, taking from under a yellow tansy a small bunch of blue corn-flowers, tied up with a thin blade of grass.' Do you like them?'

Viktor languidly held out his hand, took the flowers, carelessly sniffed at them, and began twirling them in his fingers, looking upwards. Akulina watched him.... In her mournful eyes there was such tender devotion, adoring submission and love. She was afraid of him, and did not dare to cry, and was saying good-bye to him and admiring him for the last time; while he lay, lolling like a sultan, and with magnanimous patience and condescension put up with her adoration. I must own, I glared indignantly at his red face, on which, under the affectation of scornful indifference, one could discern vanity soothed and satisfied. Akulina was so sweet at that instant; her whole soul was confidingly and passionately laid bare before him, full of longing and caressing tenderness, while he... he dropped the corn-flowers on the grass, pulled out of the side pocket of his coat a round eye-glass set in a brass rim, and began sticking it in his eye; but however much he tried to hold it with his frowning eyebrow, his pursed-up cheek and nose, the eye-glass kept tumbling out and falling into his hand.

'What is it?' Akulina asked at last in wonder.

'An eye-glass,' he answered with dignity.

'What for?'

'Why, to see better.'

'Show me.'

Viktor scowled, but gave her the glass.

'Don't break it; look out.'

'No fear, I won't break it.' (She put it to her eye.) 'I see nothing,' she said innocently.

'But you must shut your eye,' he retorted in the tones of a displeased teacher. (She shut the eye before which she held the glass.)

'Not that one, not that one, you fool! the other!' cried Viktor, and he took away his eye-glass, without allowing her to correct her mistake.

Akulina flushed a little, gave a faint laugh, and turned away.

'It's clear it's not for the likes of us,' she said.

'I should think not, indeed!'

. . . 'And he might say one word, one word.... He might say, "Akulina... I..."'

Sudden heart-breaking sobs prevented her from finishing; she lay with her face in the grass and bitterly, bitterly she wept.... Her whole body shook convulsively, her neck fairly heaved.... Her long-suppressed grief broke out in a torrent at last. Viktor stood over her, stood a moment, shrugged his shoulders, turned away and strode off.

A few instants passed... she grew calmer, raised her head, jumped up, looked round and wrung her hands; she tried to run after him, but her legs gave way under her – she fell on her knees.... I could not refrain from rushing up to her; but, almost before she had time to look at me, making a superhuman effort she got up with a faint shriek and vanished behind the trees, leaving her flowers scattered on the ground.

I stood a minute, picked up the bunch of cornflowers, and went out of the wood into the open country. The sun had sunk low in the pale clear sky; its rays too seemed to have grown pale and chill; they did not shine; they were diffused in an unbroken, watery light. It was within half-an-hour of sunset, but there was scarcely any of the glow of evening. A gusty wind scurried to meet me across the yellow parched stubble; little curled-up leaves, scudding hurriedly before it, flew by across the road, along the edge of the copse; the side of the copse facing the fields like a wall, was all shaking and lighted up by tiny gleams, distinct, but not glowing; on the reddish plants, the blades of grass, the straws on all sides, were sparkling and stirring innumerable threads of autumn spider-webs. I stopped... I felt sad at heart: under the bright but chill smile of fading nature, the dismal dread of coming winter seemed to steal upon me. High overhead flew a cautious crow, heavily and sharply cleaving the air with his wings; he turned his head, looked sideways at me, flapped his wings and, cawing abruptly, vanished behind the wood; a great flock of pigeons flew up playfully from a threshing floor, and suddenly eddying round in a column, scattered busily about the country. Sure sign of autumn! Some one came driving over the bare hillside, his empty cart rattling loudly....

I turned homewards; but it was long before the figure of poor Akulina faded out of my mind, and her cornflowers, long since withered, are still in my keeping.

This passage is from “Adventure,” a story in Sherwood Anderson's book Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. Alice Hindman, a clerk in a dry goods store, was sixteen when Ned Currie, the young man she loved, left Winesburg for the city, promising to come back for her; within a year his letters stopped. Years later, lonely, she joined a church and began letting Will Hurley, a middle-aged drug clerk, walk her home. Her mother has married Bush Milton, a carriage painter.

In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days of summer have come, the country about Winesburg is delightful. The town lies in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields are pleasant patches of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to sit on Sunday afternoons. Through the trees they look out across the fields and see farmers at work about the barns or people driving up and down on the roads. In the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes, looking like a toy thing in the distance.

. . . During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a passionate restlessness took possession of Alice. She could not bear to be in the company of the drug clerk, and when, in the evening, he came to walk with her she sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and when, weary from the long hours of standing behind the counter in the store, she went home and crawled into bed, she could not sleep. With staring eyes she looked into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep within her there was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite answer from life.

Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a refrain. “Why doesn’t something happen? Why am I left here alone?” she muttered. Although she sometimes thought of Ned Currie, she no longer depended on him. Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her.

And then one night when it rained Alice had an adventure. It frightened and confused her. She had come home from the store at nine and found the house empty. Bush Milton had gone off to town and her mother to the house of a neighbor. Alice went upstairs to her room and undressed in the darkness. For a moment she stood by the window hearing the rain beat against the glass and then a strange desire took possession of her. Without stopping to think of what she intended to do, she ran downstairs through the dark house and out into the rain. As she stood on the little grass plot before the house and felt the cold rain on her body a mad desire to run naked through the streets took possession of her.

She thought that the rain would have some creative and wonderful effect on her body. Not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house a man stumbled homeward. Alice started to run. A wild, desperate mood took possession of her. “What do I care who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him,” she thought; and then without stopping to consider the possible result of her madness, called softly. “Wait!” she cried. “Don’t go away. Whoever you are, you must wait.”

The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening. He was an old man and somewhat deaf. Putting his hand to his mouth, he shouted. “What? What say?” he called.

Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was so frightened at the thought of what she had done that when the man had gone on his way she did not dare get to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees through the grass to the house. When she got to her own room she bolted the door and drew her dressing table across the doorway. Her body shook as with a chill and her hands trembled so that she had difficulty getting into her nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face in the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. “What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful,” she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

This passage was written for this course. It is from a short story set in Tucson, Arizona, in 2019. The narrator, a retired high school band director, has conducted a volunteer community band for eleven years.

Let me say first that I am not a man who needs to be needed. Thirty-seven years in a high school band room cure you of that. Every September a new crop of fourteen-year-olds arrives who cannot tell a quarter note from a parking ticket, and by May they play well enough to make a grandmother cry, and in June they walk out the door without a backward look, which is exactly as it should be. So when the board of the Saguaro Community Winds asked me last spring whether I might like "to take a season to rest," I understood it for what it was: a kindness. Arlene Voss, our president, has a sister who had a stroke at seventy-one. People project.

I told Arlene I was touched, and that I was not tired. She said, "Nobody said tired, Gordon." I said that was good, then, because I wasn't. We both laughed. Arlene has a nervous laugh, a flute player's laugh, mostly air.

Over the summer Denise Ochoa began running the sectionals. Denise teaches music at one of the middle schools and plays a capable second trumpet, and I suggested her for the job myself, or at least I did not object when her name came up, which in a volunteer organization amounts to the same thing. Sectionals are drudgery. You sit with the clarinets for an hour and fix the same eight bars. Someone has to, and I was glad to let her. When I came in on Tuesdays the players would be laughing at something she had said, and they would stop and turn toward me, still smiling, the way a room turns toward a door that has blown open in a draft.

I conduct with a baton my first marching band gave me in 1984. The cork handle has gone dark and taken the shape of my grip, so that no one else can hold it comfortably, which is the only real test of a tool. Denise conducts with a pencil. I have nothing against pencils.

In September the board sent an email about the new season. Rehearsals would move from Tuesday to Thursday evenings "to accommodate members' schedules," and the fall concert would be "shared among several conductors to give our players varied musical experiences." I read it twice. It was plainly a draft; Arlene writes everything by committee, and committees leave fingerprints on every sentence. I wrote back that Tuesdays had suited the band for eleven years and that I would see everyone at seven, as usual. No one replied, which is how volunteers agree.

So on Tuesday I came at six-thirty to set the chairs. I have always set the chairs myself. A conductor who lets the players arrange their own chairs will find the tubas drifting toward the exit by October. The custodian, a young man named Luis who wears his earbuds even while he is speaking to you, let me in and said something about Thursday. I told him I knew all about Thursday.

I set forty-one chairs in four arcs. I set the stands. I laid out the folders, though I noticed that someone had already removed the Holst from them and put in a piece called "Pulse of the Desert," which I did not program and which, as I looked it over, gives the low brass a great many measures of rest. At seven I stepped onto the podium. At seven-ten I began, because a band that waits for its stragglers teaches its stragglers to straggle.

I gave the downbeat to the empty chairs. I am not a sentimental man, and I will not pretend I heard anything. But I know the Holst so well that I could feel where the clarinets would come in and where the second trumpets always rush, and I brought them in and I held them back, and when I lowered my arms at the end of the first movement, Luis had stopped mopping in the doorway. He had taken out one of his earbuds. He was, I am fairly sure, listening.

This passage was written for this course. It is from a short story set in Los Angeles in 1987. Grace, a high school senior, works after school in the dry-cleaning shop her mother owns.

By the rule of the shop, anything left more than ninety days belonged to no one. Grace's mother had lettered the rule on a card in English and Korean and taped it beside the register, where the afternoon sun had faded the English first. Twice a year the unclaimed things came down from the back rail and went into black bags for the church rummage sale: blouses with the tags of stores that had since closed, a child's First Communion dress, a tuxedo jacket whose owner had apparently gotten married, or not, without it.

Emptying the pockets was Grace's job. She liked it more than she admitted. People left pieces of themselves in their pockets: matchbooks, a folded lottery ticket, a grocery list that said only eggs, eggs, call Ray. She kept the lists in a cigar box under the counter and did not tell her mother, who would have said that other people's trash was still trash.

The navy suit had hung on the rail for two years. Its ticket was pinned to the sleeve, Delgado, 2 pc, press only, with a date in 1985 in her mother's square hand. Grace had just found a folded paper in the inside pocket when the bell over the door rang.

The man who came in was older than her father would have been. He stopped just inside the door, as if the shop were a church he had not been raised in, and held out a pink claim ticket so worn that it had gone soft as cloth.

"I know it's late," he said.

Her mother came from the back with steam still rising from her forearms. She looked at the ticket, then at the card by the register, then at the man. Grace had watched her turn away customers who were three days late. She had watched her refuse a woman in a fur coat who cried. "Ninety days," her mother would say, and point at the card, as though the card had made the decision and she was only reading it aloud.

"It was my brother's," the man said. "He brought it in for my daughter's wedding. Then he didn't need it." He stopped. "I kept the ticket in my wallet. I don't know why I kept it."

Grace waited for the card. Her mother did not look at it. She went to the back rail, lifted down the navy suit, and brushed the shoulders with the flat of her hand, twice, though there was no dust on them. She did not charge him for the storage. She did not charge him anything. When he took out his wallet she folded his hand shut around it, the way you close a child's fingers over a coin so it won't be lost.

Grace held out the paper from the pocket. "This was in the jacket." He unfolded it and read it, and something happened in his face that was almost a laugh. Shoes. Blue tie? Toast: keep it short. "He never kept anything short," the man said, and he put the paper into his wallet, in the place where the ticket had been.

After he had gone, her mother went to the register and straightened the card, which was not crooked, and pressed the tape flat at each corner with her thumb. Grace started to say something. "Ninety days," her mother said, without turning around, and went back to the steam.

This passage was written for this course. It is from a short story set in the mountains of western Montana in 1952. The narrator recalls a summer she spent as a fire lookout, watching for wildfires from a tower and reporting them by radio.

The summer my brother Walt went to Korea, I took over his tower. That is how my mother put it to the neighbors, as though the tower were a coat he had outgrown and handed down to me, and it is how I still think of it: Walt's tower, Walt's stool with the glass feet, Walt's initials cut into the window frame beside the radio, where the Forest Service would have docked his pay for it if anyone had ever climbed up to look. No one ever did. That was the point of the place.

It stood on Hogback Peak, sixty feet of timber and crossbracing on a ridge so bare that the wind seemed to have scraped it clean for a living. I was nineteen. A ranger had taught me the fire finder in two afternoons, explaining everything twice and watching my hands the whole time, as if he expected them to drop something. Then the packer led his mules back down the switchbacks, and I was alone with the Bitterroot Mountains on every side and nothing to do but look at them.

Looking is harder than it sounds. In the mornings the valleys fill with a haze that rises like smoke and is not smoke, and by afternoon the heat bends the far ridges until they waver like stones seen through moving water. In my first week I called in three fires that turned out to be dust from a logging road, the shadow of a cloud, and a column of gnats. The dispatcher, a man named Harlan whom I never once saw, answered "Roger, Hogback" each time, in a voice so patient that I wanted to throw the radio off the catwalk.

Walt's letters came up with the supply mule every other Thursday. He wrote about the cold, which he said got into the oil of his rifle, and about a boy from Butte who could imitate any bird. He asked if I had spotted any smokes yet. I wrote back that it had been quiet. I did not tell him about the gnats.

In August a dry storm came over the divide at suppertime, all lightning and no rain. I counted fourteen strikes. I sat on the glass-footed stool, which is where you are supposed to sit in a lightning storm, and wrote down the bearing of each strike, and when the storm had moved east I watched the places where they had landed. Most of them stayed dark. At ten past nine, on the slope above Lost Horse Creek, a single thread of white went up and leaned with the wind.

I took the bearing three times. Then I called it in. Harlan asked if I was sure, and I heard the patience in his voice, and I said, "Two-four-one degrees, Lost Horse, one smoke, white, drifting northeast," and nothing else. The silence on the line went on long enough that I could hear the static breathing. Then he said, "Roger, Hogback," and it was a different roger. I have spent sixty years trying to describe the difference, and I still cannot.

The crew had it out by noon the next day. Six acres. The ranger wrote it up as a good catch.

Walt came home in March, thinner and quieter, and in June he went back up to Hogback, and I let him. My daughters have asked me about that; they think I should have fought for the tower, and they are right that I could have. But he needed it more than I did by then, or I believed he did, and I had already learned what it had to teach me, which was the difference between what rises and what only looks as if it does.

The following poem, “The Mill,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson was published in 1920. A weir (line 21) is a low dam built across a river.

The following poem by Edward Thomas was published in 1917, during the First World War. The “share” (line 10) is the blade of a plow, and charlock (line 6) is a weed with yellow flowers.

The following poem, “Music,” by Amy Lowell was published in 1914.

The following poem, “Saturday’s Child,” by Countee Cullen was published in 1925. Its title recalls an old nursery rhyme in which “Saturday’s child works hard for a living.” In line 9, “goddame” means godmother.

The following poem was written for this course. Its speaker is a grown daughter helping her father with his new phone.

The following poem was written for this course. In it, a man speaks to a young buyer who has come to look at a car he is selling.

The following poem was written for this course. In it, a woman remembers learning to drive.

This passage is the opening of Henrik Ibsen's play John Gabriel Borkman, published in 1896, in William Archer's English translation of 1897. Years earlier, Gunhild Borkman's husband, a banker, was imprisoned for misusing money entrusted to him; since his release he has lived shut away upstairs in the same house, apart from her. Erhart is their grown son. Ella Rentheim is Gunhild's sister.

MRS. BORKMAN's drawing-room, furnished with old-fashioned, faded splendour. . . . Through it a view over the garden; twilight with driving snow. . . . Further forward, a large old-fashioned iron stove, with the fire lighted. . . . In front, on the same side, a window, covered with thick curtains. . . .

MRS. GUNHILD BORKMAN sits on the sofa, crocheting. She is an elderly lady, of cold, distinguished appearance, with stiff carriage and immobile features. . . . Dressed in a gown of heavy dark silk, which has originally been handsome, but is now somewhat worn and shabby. A woollen shawl over her shoulders.

She sits for a time erect and immovable at her crochet. Then the bells of a passing sledge are heard.

MRS. BORKMAN. (Listens; her eyes sparkle with gladness and she involuntarily whispers.) Erhart! At last!

(She rises and draws the curtain a little aside to look out. Appears disappointed, and sits down to her work again, on the sofa. . . .)

(MISS ELLA RENTHEIM enters. She resembles her sister; but her face has rather a suffering than a hard expression. . . .)

(The two sisters stand silent for a time, and look searchingly at each other. Each is evidently waiting for the other to speak first.)

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Who has remained near the door.) You are surprised to see me, Gunhild.

MRS. BORKMAN. (Standing erect and immovable . . .) Have you not made a mistake? The bailiff lives in the side wing, you know.

ELLA RENTHEIM. It is not the bailiff I want to see to-day. . . .

MRS. BORKMAN. (Coming forward into the middle of the room.) Well – then sit down.

ELLA RENTHEIM. Thank you. I can quite well stand for the present.

MRS. BORKMAN. Just as you please. But at least loosen your cloak.

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Unbuttoning her cloak.) Yes, it is very warm here.

MRS. BORKMAN. I am always cold.

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Stands looking at her for a time . . .) Well, Gunhild, it is nearly eight years now since we saw each other last.

MRS. BORKMAN. (Coldly.) Since last we spoke to each other at any rate.

ELLA RENTHEIM. True, since we spoke to each other. . . .

MRS. BORKMAN. . . . (Vehemently; clenching her hands together.) No, I can't understand how such a thing – how anything so horrible can come upon one single family! And then – that it should be our family! So old a family as ours! Think of its choosing us out!

ELLA RENTHEIM. Oh, Gunhild – there were many, many families besides ours that that blow fell upon.

MRS. BORKMAN. Oh yes; but those others don't trouble me very much. For in their case it was only a matter of a little money – or some papers. But for us – ! For me! And then for Erhart! . . . (In rising excitement.) The shame that fell upon us two innocent ones! The dishonour! . . .

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Cautiously.) Tell me, Gunhild, how does he bear it?

MRS. BORKMAN. Erhart, do you mean?

ELLA RENTHEIM. No – he himself. How does he bear it?

MRS. BORKMAN. (Scornfully.) Do you think I ever ask about that? . . .

MRS. BORKMAN. (Looks at her in surprise.) You don't suppose I ever have anything to do with him? That I ever meet him? That I see anything of him?

ELLA RENTHEIM. Not even that!

MRS. BORKMAN. (As before.) The man was in gaol, in gaol for five years! (Covers her face with her hands.) Oh, the crushing shame of it! (With increased vehemence.) And then to think of all that the name of John Gabriel Borkman used to mean! No, no, no – I can never see him again! Never!

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Looks at her for a while.) You have a hard heart, Gunhild.

MRS. BORKMAN. Towards him, yes.

ELLA RENTHEIM. After all, he is your husband. . . .

MRS. BORKMAN. (Scornfully.) Yes, it was always the same story – we were to "cut a figure." And he did "cut a figure" to some purpose! . . . And they always called him by his Christian names – all the country over – as if he had been the king himself. "John Gabriel," "John Gabriel," "John Gabriel." Every one knew what a great man "John Gabriel" was!

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Warmly and emphatically.) He was a great man then.

MRS. BORKMAN. . . . (Drawing herself up menacingly.) But I tell you this, Ella, I do not give in yet! I shall redeem myself yet – you may make up your mind to that!

ELLA RENTHEIM. (Eagerly.) Redeem yourself! What do you mean by that?

MRS. BORKMAN. Redeem my name, and honour, and fortune! . . . I have some one in reserve, let me tell you – one who will wash away every stain that he has left.

ELLA RENTHEIM. Gunhild! Gunhild!

MRS. BORKMAN. (With rising excitement.) There is an avenger living, I tell you! One who will make up to me for all his father's sins!

ELLA RENTHEIM. Erhart you mean.

MRS. BORKMAN. Yes, Erhart, my own boy! He will redeem the family, the house, the name. All that can be redeemed. – And perhaps more besides.

This passage is from Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders, published in 1887. Mr. Percombe, a barber from the market town, has walked at night to the woodland village of Little Hintock to call on Marty South. He has already asked her once to sell her hair, which he wants for a wealthy lady who owns much of the village.

In the room from which this cheerful blaze proceeded, he beheld a girl seated on a willow chair, and busily occupied by the light of the fire, which was ample and of wood. With a bill-hook in one hand and a leather glove, much too large for her, on the other, she was making spars, such as are used by thatchers, with great rapidity. . . . To produce them she took up each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length, split it into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous blows, which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that of a bayonet.

. . . The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment and examined the palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with her to subdue it to what it worked in. . . . Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to do it in good time.

. . . In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood’s face to a premature finality. Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent particular – her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.

On this one bright gift of Time to the particular victim of his now before us the new-comer’s eyes were fixed; meanwhile the fingers of his right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his waistcoat-pocket – the bows of a pair of scissors, whose polish made them feebly responsive to the light within. In her present beholder’s mind the scene formed by the girlish spar-maker composed itself into a post-Raffaelite picture of extremest quality, wherein the girl’s hair alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.

He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. . . .

“Yes – to have your answer about this.” He touched her head with his cane, and she winced. “Do you agree?” he continued. . . .

“Don’t press me – it worries me. . . . I can not part with it – so there!”

“Now, look here, Marty,” said the barber, sitting down on the coffin-stool table. “How much do you get for making these spars?”

“Hush – father’s up-stairs awake, and he don’t know that I am doing his work.” . . .

“Well, look here,” he continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of her present purse and the woman’s love of comeliness, “here’s a sovereign – a gold sovereign, almost new. . . . That’s as much as you’d earn in a week and a half at that rough man’s work, and it’s yours for just letting me snip off what you’ve got too much of.”

The girl’s bosom moved a very little. “Why can’t the lady send to some other girl who don’t value her hair – not to me?” she exclaimed. . . .

“No, no, no!” she cried, beginning to be much agitated. “You are a-tempting me, Mr. Percombe. You go on like the Devil to Dr. Faustus in the penny book. But I don’t want your money, and won’t agree.” . . .

“. . . You see, Marty, as you are in the same parish, and in one of her cottages, and your father is ill, and wouldn’t like to turn out, it would be as well to oblige her. I say that as a friend.” . . .

Percombe had retired as far as the door; he came back, planted his cane on the coffin-stool, and looked her in the face. “Marty South,” he said, with deliberate emphasis, “you’ve got a lover yourself, and that’s why you won’t let it go!”

She reddened so intensely as to pass the mild blush that suffices to heighten beauty; she put the yellow leather glove on one hand, took up the hook with the other, and sat down doggedly to her work without turning her face to him again. He regarded her head for a moment, went to the door, and with one look back at her, departed on his way homeward.

This passage is from George Eliot's novel Felix Holt, the Radical, published in 1866 and set in England in the early 1830s. Mrs. Transome, the mistress of a debt-burdened country estate, has not seen her son Harold for fifteen years. He has made a fortune abroad, at Smyrna in Turkey, and is coming home now that his elder brother, Durfey, has died. While waiting she has been looking at a portrait of Harold made before he left. Her husband is an invalid. At this time the Tories and Whigs were the established parties; the Radicals demanded sweeping reform.

She heard herself called "Mother!" and felt a light kiss on each cheek; but stronger than all that sensation was the consciousness which no previous thought could prepare her for, that this son who had come back to her was a stranger. Three minutes before, she had fancied that, in spite of all changes wrought by fifteen years of separation, she should clasp her son again as she had done at their parting; but in the moment when their eyes met, the sense of strangeness came upon her like a terror. It was not hard to understand that she was agitated, and the son led her across the hall to the sitting-room, closing the door behind them. Then he turned toward her and said, smiling –

"You would not have known me, eh, mother?"

. . . Before she answered him, his eyes, with a keen restlessness, as unlike as possible to the lingering gaze of the portrait, had travelled quickly over the room, alighting on her as she said –

"Everything is changed, Harold. I am an old woman, you see."

"But straighter and more upright than some of the young ones!" said Harold; inwardly, however, feeling that age had made his mother's face very anxious and eager. "The old women at Smyrna are like sacks. You've not got clumsy and shapeless. How is it I have the trick of getting fat?" (Here Harold lifted his arm and spread out his plump hand.) "I remember my father was as thin as a herring. How is my father? Where is he?"

Mrs. Transome just pointed to the curtained doorway, and let her son pass through it alone. She was not given to tears: but now, under the pressure of emotion that could find no other vent, they burst forth. . . . Mrs. Transome had not the feminine tendency to seek influence through pathos; she had been used to rule in virtue of acknowledged superiority. The consciousness that she had to make her son's acquaintance, and that her knowledge of the youth of nineteen might help her little in interpreting the man of thirty-four, had fallen like lead on her soul; but in this new acquaintance of theirs she cared especially that her son, who had seen a strange world, should feel that he was come home to a mother who was to be consulted on all things, and who could supply his lack of the local experience necessary to an English landholder. Her part in life had been that of the clever sinner, and she was equipped with the views, the reasons, and the habits which belonged to that character; life would have little meaning for her if she were to be gently thrust aside as a harmless elderly woman. And besides, there were secrets which her son must never know. So, by the time Harold came from the library again, the traces of tears were not discernible, except to a very careful observer. And he did not observe his mother carefully; his eyes only glanced at her on their way to the North Loamshire Herald, lying on the table near her. . . .

"But your little boy, Harold – where is he? How is it he has not come with you?"

"Oh, I left him behind, in town," said Harold, still looking at the paper. "My man Dominic will bring him, with the rest of the luggage. Ah, I see it is young Debarry, and not my old friend Sir Maximus, who is offering himself as candidate for North Loamshire."

"Yes. You did not answer me when I wrote to you to London about your standing. There is no other Tory candidate spoken of, and you would have all the Debarry interest."

"I hardly think that," said Harold, significantly.

"Why? Jermyn says a Tory candidate can never be got in without it."

"But I shall not be a Tory candidate."

Mrs. Transome felt something like an electric shock.

"What then?" she said, almost sharply. "You will not call yourself a Whig?"

"God forbid! I'm a Radical."

Mrs. Transome's limbs tottered; she sank into a chair. Here was a distinct confirmation of the vague but strong feeling that her son was a stranger to her. Here was a revelation to which it seemed almost as impossible to adjust her hopes and notions of a dignified life as if her son had said that he had been converted to Mahometanism at Smyrna, and had four wives, instead of one son, shortly to arrive under the care of Dominic. For the moment she had a sickening feeling that it was of no use that the long-delayed good fortune had come at last – all of no use though the unloved Durfey was dead and buried, and though Harold had come home with plenty of money. . . . It was better to ask no questions, but silently to prepare herself for anything else there might be to come.

This passage was written for this course. It is from a novel set in a farming town in western Minnesota. The narrator, an adult looking back, recalls a winter night when she was sixteen.

My father had two voices, and for most of my childhood I believed the second one was the true one. The first came out of the kitchen radio at eleven every night, warm and unhurried, telling eleven hundred square miles of farmland that the roads were drifting shut near Ardell and that somebody's Holsteins had gotten loose on County 9. The second was the one he used at breakfast, when he used one at all: "Salt." "Coat." "Bus." My mother said he spent all his words at work. I took that to mean he had none left over for us, and I was sixteen before it occurred to me to wonder whom he was saving them for.

The station was a cinderblock building on a rise two miles out of town, with a tower behind it that blinked red all night like something trying to stay awake. KDLR, the Voice of the Valley, though there was no valley, only fields so flat that in winter you could watch the headlights of a single car for twenty minutes before it reached you. In February of 1984 the owner, a man in Fargo my father had met twice, sent a letter explaining that the overnight hours would now be handled by a satellite feed. It would play music chosen in Denver and read weather written in Omaha, and it would never need to be paid. My father read the letter at the kitchen table, folded it in thirds, and put it in his shirt pocket, where it stayed for two weeks, getting softer.

On his last night he asked me to come along. He did not say why, and I did not ask, because asking him things was like knocking on a frozen pond: you heard your own knuckles and nothing else.

The studio was smaller than I had imagined and smelled of burnt coffee and dust cooking on warm tubes. There was a board of switches, two turntables, and a microphone on a metal arm that he swung toward himself the way you would pull out a chair for a guest. Taped above the board was a list in his square handwriting, names and telephone numbers, and beside one of them the note "Mrs. Aune, insulin, check Tues." I asked what it was. "People who listen," he said, which was not an answer, and then he put on his headphones and became someone else.

I had heard him on the radio my whole life, but I had never watched him do it. He leaned toward the microphone as if it were an old man who was hard of hearing. He smiled at it. Between records he told the dark that the Svendsen boy had made the honor roll at the agricultural school, that the Lutheran church still needed pies for Sunday, that Highway 75 was glare ice past the elevator and nobody had any business on it who didn't have to be. He said "folks" and "friends," and once, reading a request, "sweetheart," and he did not look at me, and I understood that it was not meant for me. Mrs. Aune called at a quarter past one to say her furnace was making the noise again. He told her, on the air, which knob to turn, and waited, and she said it had stopped, and he said, "There you go, Ruth. Now get some sleep." I had never heard him say anyone's first name like that, not even my mother's.

At five minutes to six he read the weather one last time, slowly, town by town, as if he were calling roll. Then, instead of the last record, he reached over and pressed the button that shut off his microphone, and for nine seconds (I counted; I was a counting kind of girl) the whole valley that was not a valley heard nothing at all. Then the satellite came on, a woman's voice from Denver, bright as a new appliance, wishing a good morning to no town in particular.

He took off his headphones and hung them on their hook, carefully, the way you would hang up somebody else's coat. On the drive home the sun came up behind us, and the fields went from gray to pink to the plain white they would be all day. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him that I had heard. But he had already gone back to his other voice, the one with no words in it, and I was my father's daughter, and I said nothing, too.

This passage was written for this course. It is a scene from a play about a woman who, a few months after her husband's death, is taking her first driving test.

(The front seat of a 1986 Buick, parked at the start of the road-test course behind a state licensing office outside Cleveland. A gray November morning, 1997. CAROL BRANDT, fifty-eight, sits behind the wheel in a good wool coat, her purse on her lap. The driver's seat is pushed all the way back, so that she perches on its front edge to reach the pedals. TERRENCE OYELARAN, twenty-six, a state examiner, gets in on the passenger side with a clipboard.)

TERRENCE. Morning. Mrs. Brandt?

CAROL. Carol. Mrs. Brandt was my mother-in-law, and she failed this test three times.

TERRENCE. (Writing.) I'll need you to adjust your seat and mirrors before we begin, ma'am.

CAROL. They're fine.

TERRENCE. You're sitting on the edge of the seat.

CAROL. I'm comfortable on the edge. I've been on the edge since August. (He does not laugh. She looks at him.) That was a joke. My daughter says I make jokes when I'm nervous. She says it like it's a diagnosis.

TERRENCE. The seat, ma'am.

CAROL. (She finds the lever but does not pull it.) My husband was six foot three. Forty-one years he drove this car and the one before it, and I sat right where you are with the map on my knees. I could get you to Pittsburgh with my eyes shut. I just couldn't do it from this side. (She pulls the lever. The seat slides forward with a loud clack. She sits back for the first time.) There.

TERRENCE. Mirrors.

CAROL. (She reaches for the rearview mirror and stops.) He kept it tilted down. He liked to watch the back seat when the kids were small, and then he just liked it that way. (She tilts it up, catches sight of herself, and looks away.) There. Now I can see where I've been.

TERRENCE. Where you're going is through the windshield, ma'am. (A beat.) Sorry. They tell us to keep it neutral.

CAROL. That was a joke, Terrence. You made a joke. Put that on your form.

TERRENCE. (Not quite smiling.) Start the engine when you're ready, please, and pull forward to the first cone.

(She turns the key. The radio comes on loud in the middle of a hockey game, the announcer shouting. She fumbles at it; he reaches over and turns it off.)

CAROL. I'm sorry. He kept it on that station. I can't make myself change it. Isn't that the stupidest thing? I gave away his shoes. I sold his golf clubs to a man from church for twenty dollars, and the man was so embarrassed to be getting a bargain he couldn't look at me. But I can't push a button on a radio.

TERRENCE. You can leave it. It's not on the test.

CAROL. Everything's on the test.

(She pulls forward. The lights shift to show the passing of time. When they come up, the course has been driven, and the car is stopped at a red light with the engine running.)

TERRENCE. Good. Very good on the turnabout. When the light changes, proceed straight through the intersection and return to the lot.

CAROL. My daughter wants me to sell it. She says, "Mom, you don't need a car this big, you don't need a car at all, there's a bus." She has a list. She sends it to me by e-mail, which she knows I don't open.

TERRENCE. The light's green, ma'am.

(CAROL does not move. A horn sounds behind them, then another.)

TERRENCE. Mrs. Brandt. The light.

CAROL. (Quietly, looking straight ahead.) I know it is.

(A long moment. Then she drives through. The lights shift again: the car is back in the lot. She shifts into park and turns off the engine. Silence. He writes.)

CAROL. How long?

TERRENCE. Ma'am?

CAROL. At the light. How long did I sit there?

TERRENCE. About six seconds.

CAROL. It felt like a year. It felt like I could have gone anywhere. Left. Right. Pittsburgh. (A beat.) Is six seconds a failure?

TERRENCE. (After a pause.) It's a hesitation. There's a box for it.

CAROL. Is there a box for why?

TERRENCE. No, ma'am.

CAROL. Well. There should be. (She opens her purse, takes out a small cardboard pine tree, an air freshener still in its plastic wrapper, tears the wrapper off, and hangs the tree from the rearview mirror.) He hated these. He said they made a car smell like a gas station restroom in the middle of a forest. (She straightens it.) Go on and mark it. Whatever it is. I'd rather it was true.

(TERRENCE looks at the form. He looks at her. He holds his pen above the paper. The lights fade before he writes.)