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Selection from Stories of Ourselves
6
Read this extract from The Bath (by Janet Frame), and then answer the question that follows it:
She was alone now. For a few moments she sat swilling the water against her skin,
perhaps as a means of buoying up her courage. Then resolutely she pulled out the plug,
sat feeling the tide swirl and scrape at her skin and flesh, trying to draw her down, down
into the earth; then the bathwater was gone in a soapy gurgle and she was naked and
shivering and had not yet made the attempt to get out of the bath.
How slippery the surface had become! In future she would not clean it with kerosene,
she would use the paste cleaner that, left on overnight, gave the enamel rough patches
that could be gripped with the skin.
She leaned forward, feeling the pain in her back and shoulder. She grasped the rim
of the bath but her fingers slithered from it almost at once. She would not panic, she told
herself; she would try gradually, carefully, to get out. Again she leaned forward; again her
grip loosened as if iron hands had deliberately uncurled her stiffened blue fingers from
their trembling hold. Her heart began to beat faster, her breath came more quickly, her
mouth was dry. She moistened her lips. If I shout for help, she thought, no one will hear
me. No one in the world will hear me. No one will know I’m in the bath and can’t get out.
She listened. She could hear only the drip-drip of the cold water tap of the washbasin,
and a corresponding whisper and gurgle of her heart, as if it were beating under water.
All else was silent. Where were the people, the traffic? Then she had a strange feeling of
being under the earth, of a throbbing in her head like wheels going over the earth above
her.
Then she told herself sternly that she must have no nonsense, that she had really
not tried to get out of the bath. She had forgotten the strong solid chair and the grip she
could get on it. If she made the effort quickly she could first take hold of both sides of the
bath, pull herself up, then transfer her hold to the chair and thus pull herself out.
She tried to do this; she just failed to make the final effort. Pale now, gasping for
breath, she sank back into the bath. She began to call out but as she had predicted there
was no answer. No one had heard her, no one in the houses or the street or Dunedin
or the world knew that she was imprisoned. Loneliness welled in her. If John were here,
she thought, if we were sharing our old age, helping each other, this would never have
happened. She made another effort to get out. Again she failed. Faintness overcoming
her she closed her eyes, trying to rest, then recovering and trying again and failing, she
panicked and began to cry and strike the sides of the bath; it made a hollow sound like a
wild drum-beat.
Then she stopped striking with her fists; she struggled again to get out; and for over
half an hour she stayed alternately struggling and resting until at last she did succeed in
climbing out and making her escape into the kitchen. She thought, I’ll never take another
bath in this house or anywhere. I never want to see that bath again. This is the end or the
beginning of it. In future a district nurse will have to come to attend me. Submitting to that
will be the first humiliation. There will be others, and others.
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How does Frame powerfully convey the woman’s thoughts and feelings at this moment in the
story?
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Selection from Stories of Ourselves
6
Read this extract from The Open Boat (by Stephen Crane), and then answer the question that
follows it:
The monstrous inshore rollers heaved the boat high until the men were
again enabled to see the white sheets of water scudding up the slanted beach. ‘We
won’t get in very close,’ said the captain. Each time a man could wrest his attention
from the rollers, he turned his glance toward the shore, and in the expression of the
eyes during this contemplation there was a singular quality. The correspondent, observing
the others, knew that they were not afraid, but the full meaning of their glances was
shrouded.
As for himself, he was too tired to grapple fundamentally with the fact. He tried
to coerce his mind into thinking of it, but the mind was dominated at this time by the
muscles, and the muscles said they did not care. It merely occurred to him that if he
should drown it would be a shame.
There were no hurried words, no pallor, no plain agitation. The men simply looked
at the shore. ‘Now, remember to get well clear of the boat when you jump,’ said the
captain.
Seaward the crest of a roller suddenly fell with a thunderous crash, and the long
white comber came roaring down upon the boat.
‘Steady now,’ said the captain. The men were silent. They turned their eyes from
the shore to the comber and waited. The boat slid up the incline, leaped at the furious
top, bounced over it, and swung down the long back of the wave. Some water had been
shipped, and the cook bailed it out.
But the next crest crashed also. The tumbling, boiling flood of white water caught
the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water swarmed in from all sides. The
correspondent had his hands on the gunwale at this time, and when the water entered at
that place he swiftly withdrew his fingers, as if he objected to wetting them.
The little boat, drunken with this weight of water, reeled and snuggled deeper into
the sea.
‘Bail her out, cook! Bail her out!’ said the captain.
‘All right, Captain,’ said the cook.
‘Now, boys, the next one will do for us sure,’ said the oiler. ‘Mind to jump clear of the
boat.’
The third wave moved forward, huge, furious, implacable. It fairly swallowed the
dinghy, and almost simultaneously the men tumbled into the sea. A piece of lifebelt had
lain in the bottom of the boat, and as the correspondent went overboard he held this to
his chest with his left hand.
The January water was icy, and he reflected immediately that it was colder than
he had expected to find it off the coast of Florida. This appeared to his dazed mind as a
fact important enough to be noted at the time. The coldness of the water was sad; it was
tragic. This fact was somehow mixed and confused with his opinion of his own situation,
so that it seemed almost a proper reason for tears. The water was cold.
When he came to the surface he was conscious of little but the noisy water. Afterward
he saw his companions in the sea. The oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming
strongly and rapidly. Off to the correspondent’s left, the cook’s great white and corked
back bulged out of the water; and in the rear the captain was hanging with his one good
hand to the keel of the overturned dinghy.
There is a certain immovable quality to a shore, and the correspondent wondered at
it amid the confusion of the sea.
It seemed also very attractive; but the correspondent knew that it was a long journey,
and he paddled leisurely. The piece of life preserver lay under him, and sometimes he
whirled down the incline of a wave as if he were on a hand-sled.
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But finally he arrived at a place in the sea where travel was beset with difficulty. He
did not pause swimming to inquire what manner of current had caught him, but there his
progress ceased. The shore was set before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he
looked at it and understood with his eyes each detail of it.
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In what ways does Crane vividly portray the power of the sea in this extract?
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Selection from Stories of Ourselves
6
Read this extract from The Moving Finger (by Edith Wharton), and then answer the question that
follows it:
This news of Mrs Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder
– one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as though all sorts of
renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of that one wheel. Not that Mrs
Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum to the social machine: her unique
distinction was that of filling to perfection her special place in the world. So many
people are like badly-composed statues, over-lapping their niches at one point and
leaving them vacant at another. Mrs Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it
be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big
gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined
by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility. Ralph Grancy’s was
in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those constructive influences
that, instead of crystallising into definite forms, remain as it were a medium for the
development of clear thinking and fine feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty
patch of life, and the fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries. If, to carry on
the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-cultivated enclosure, his wife was the
flower he had planted in its midst – the embowering tree, rather, which gave him
rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.
We had all – his small but devoted band of followers – known a moment when
it seemed likely that Grancy would fail us. We had watched him pitted against one
stupid obstacle after another – ill-health, poverty, misunderstanding and, worst of
all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious egotism. We had seen him
sinking under the leaden embrace of her affection like a swimmer in a drowning
clutch; but just as we despaired he had always come to the surface again, blinded,
panting, but striking out fiercely for the shore. When at last her death released him it
became a question as to how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone,
he revealed numb withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been
stripped. But gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady
who was to become his second wife – his one real wife, as his friends reckoned –
the whole man burst into flower.
The second Mrs Grancy was past thirty when he married her, and it was clear
that she had harvested that crop of middle joy which is rooted in young despair.
But if she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept its inner light; if her cheek
lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were young with the stored youth of half a
life-time. Grancy had first known her somewhere in the East – I believe she was
the sister of one of our consuls out there – and when he brought her home to New
York she came among us as a stranger. The idea of Grancy’s remarriage had
been a shock to us all. After one such calcining most men would have kept out of
the fire; but we agreed that he was predestined to sentimental blunders, and we
awaited with resignation the embodiment of his latest mistake. Then Mrs Grancy
came – and we understood. She was the most beautiful and the most complete of
explanations. We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave it hasty
burial under a prodigality of welcome. For the first time in years we had Grancy off
our minds. ‘He’ll do something great now!’ the least sanguine of us prophesied; and
our sentimentalist emended: ‘He has done it – in marrying her!’
In what ways does Wharton vividly reveal the effect Ralph Grancy’s wives have on him?
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