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JOHN GALSWORTHY
THE MAN OF PROPERTY
Part I
Chapter I
Never had there been so full an assembly, for mysteriously united in spite of all their differences, they had taken arms against a common peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared to run upon and trample the invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected to give; for though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way – “What are you givin'? Nicholas is givin' spoons!” – so very much depended on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking, it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect them. In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species of family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock Exchange – the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy's commodious, red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts Ann, Juley and Hester.
The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have been for any family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterise the great upper middle class, to feel otherwise than uneasy!
The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door; his curly hair had a rumpled appearance as though he found what was going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to himself.
George, speaking aside to his brother Eustace, said: “Looks as if he might make a bolt of it – the dashing Buccaneer!”
This “very singular-looking man”, as Mrs. Small afterwards called him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown face, a dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheekbones, and hollow cheeks. His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his head, and buldged out in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the lion-house at the Zoo. He had sherry-coloured eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old Jolyon's coachman, after driving June and Bossiney to the theater, had remarked to the butler: “I dunno what to make of 'im. Looks to me for all the world like an 'alf-tame leopard.”
And every now and then a Forsyte would come up, sidle around and take a look at him.
June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity – a little bit of a thing, as somebody once said, “all hair and spirit”, with fearless blue eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too slender for her crown of red-gold hair.
A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at these two with a shadowy smile.
Her hands, gloved in French gray, were crossed one over the other, her grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of all men near were fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed to set it moving. There was warmth, but little colour in her cheeks; her large, dark eyes were soft. But it was at her lips – asking a question, giving an answer, with that shadowy smile – that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.
The engaged couple thus scrutinised were unconscious of this passive goddess. It was Bossiney who first noticed her, and asked her name.
Food for thought
1. What image is created in the initial lines of the text? Analyse in detail the simile.
2. Explain the repetition of the words “uneasiness, uneasy”.
3. What implication has Bosinney’s portrayal?
4. Compare the description of June and Irene.
5. Find out and analyse analogy in portrayals of the main characters.
D.H. LAWRENCE
SONS AND LOVERS
Lad-and-Girl Love
Coming to the edge of the wood, they saw the sky in front, like mother-of-pearl and the earth growing dark. Somewhere on the outermost branches of the pine-wood the honeysuckle was streaming scent.
“Where?” he asked.
“Down the middle path”, she murmured, quivering.
When they turned the corner of the path she stood still. In the wide walk between the pines, gazing rather frightened, she could distinguish nothing for some moments; the greying light robbed things of their colour. Then she saw her bush.
“Ah!” she cried, hastening forward.
It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthorn-bush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great spilt stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses.
Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush.
“They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themselves”, he said.
She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstasy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship.
Food for thought
1. Comment on the role of nature in revealing the characters' mood.
2. Speak about the colour pattern.
3. Build up a thematic set of religious words and comment on their function.
4. Comment on the strong positions and the meaning of the word “love” for the characters.
RICHARD ALDINGTON
DEATH OF A HERO
Part II. 4
They had crossed the road outside Bushey Park and entered the palace gates. Between the wall which backs the Long Border, the Tudor side of the palace, and another long high wall, is the Wilderness, or old English garden, composed on the grandiose scale advocated by Bacon. It is both a garden and a 'wilderness', in the sense that it is planted with innumerable bulbs (which are thinned and renewed from time to time), but otherwise allowed to run wild. George and Elizabeth stopped with that sudden ecstasy of delight felt by the sensitive young – a few of them – at the sight of loveliness. Great secular trees, better protected than those in the outer Park, held up vast fans of glittering green-and-gold foliage which trembled in the light wind and formed moving patterns on the tender blue sky. The lilacs had just unfolded their pale hearts, showing the slim stalk of closed buds which would break open later in a foam of white and blue blossoms. Underfoot was the stouter green of wild plants, spread out like an evening sky of verdure for the thickclustered constellations of flowers. There shone the soft, slim yellow trumpet of the wild daffodil; the daffodil which has a pointed ruff of white petals to display its gold head; and the more opulent double daffodil which, compared with the other two, is like an ostentatious merchant between Florizel and Perdita. There were the many-headed jonquils, creamy and thick-scented; the starry narcissus, so alert on its long, slender, stiff stem, so sharp-eyed, so unlike a languid youth gazing into a pool; the hyacinth-blue frail squilla almost lost in the lush herbs; and the hyacinth, blue and white and red, with its firm, thick-set stem and innumerable bells curling back their open points. Among them stood tulips – the red, like thin blown bubbles of dark wine; the yellow, more cup-like, more sensually open to the soft furry entry of the eager bees; the large parti-coloured gold and red, noble and sombre like the royal banner of Spain.
English spring flowers! What an answer to our ridiculous 'cosmic woe', how salutary, what a soft reproach to bitterness and avarice and despair, what balm to hurt minds! The lovely bulb-flowers, loveliest of the year, so unpretentious, so cordial, so unconscious, so free from the striving after originality of the gardener's tamed pets! The spring flowers of the English woods, so surprising under those bleak skies, and the flowers the English love so much and tend so skilfully in the cleanly wantonness of their gardens, as surprisingly beautiful as the poets of that bleak race! When the inevitable 'fuit Ilium' resounds mournfully over London among the appalling crash of huge bombs and the foul reek of deadly gases while the planes roar overhead, will the conqueror think regretfully and tenderly of the flowers and the poets?…
Notes
Bacon, Francis – an English philosopher. Here is the allusion to his essay “Of gardens”
Florizel and Perdita – characters from Shakespeare's “Winter Tale”, who love each other with clear, idyll love
squilla= squill
fuit Ilium– Troy was – a phrase used to remind of Troy's being destroyed.
Food for thought
1. Introduce the selection. Define it as a kind of writing.
2. Into how many parts may we divide the extract thematically? Speak about their main ideas in general.
3. Comment upon the opening passage and say how it is related to the whole. Find repeated words and meanings in the opening passage.
4. Read the description of the Park. Comment on the stylistic devices conveying its beauty.
5. What is the tone of the closure of the text? What key-words create it? Disclose the symbolic value of the image of spring in the text. Reveal the symbolic character of allusion in the last paragraph.
6. Summarize your notes on the text and speak about the main theme of the text.
DEATH OF A HERO
Part III. 2
At last the train started and puffed slowly out of the station. Winterbourne sat quite still, listening to the crashes growing fainter and fainter as the train gathered speed. At last they disappeared altogether in the rattle of wheels. In place of the long, slow crawl coming up, the train clattered along at great speed. He passed undamaged stations, thronged with French peasants, French soldiers on leave, and British troops; he saw the lovely Corot poplars and willows shimmering in the sun as they wavered in the light breeze; there were cows in the fields, and he noticed yellow iris in the wet ditches, and tall, white hog’s parsley. A field of red clover and white daisies made him think of the old days at Martin’s Point. An immense effort of imagination was needed to link himself now with himself then. He looked almost with curiosity at his familiar khaki and rifle – so strange that ten years later that boy should be a soldier. Then he noticed that he had forgotten to sheath his bayonet. It had been fixed so long that he had to wrench it off. There was a little ring of rust round the bayonet boss. He got out his oily rag and anxiously cleaned it. The bayonet sheath was so full of dried mud that he had to clean that too.
At Boulogne he sent a telegram to Elizabeth. The R.T.O. told him to leave his kit on the quay, and to take only his personal belongings. He slipped off his equipment and laid his rifle beside his dinted helmet, feeling as if he were carrying out some strange valedictory rite. He went on board ship, holding his razor, soap, tooth-brush, comb, and some letters, wrapped in a clean khaki handkerchief. He managed to scrounge a haversack and strap on board.
The troop train from Folkestone to London was filled with leave men and others returned from France. As the train puffed up to the junction, the men crowded to the windows. Girls and women walking in the parallel street, standing in the doorways, leaning out the windows, waved pocket-handkerchiefs, cheered shrilly, and threw them kisses. The excited men waved and shouted to them. Winterbourne was amazed at the beauty, the almost angelic beauty, of women. He had not seen a woman for seven months.
It was dark when they got to Victoria, but the station was brilliantly lighted. A long barrier separated a crowd from the soldiers, who thronged out at one end. Here and there a woman threw her arms around the neck of a soldier in a close embrace which at least at that moment was sincere. The women’s shoulders trembled with their sobs; the men stood very still, holding them close a moment, and then drew them away. At once the women made an effort and seemed gay and unconcerned.
Many of the men were proceeding elsewhere, and were not met.
Winterbourne saw Elizabeth standing, in a wide-brimmed hat, at the end of the barrier. Again he was amazed at the beauty of women. Could it be that he knew, that he had dared to touch, so beautiful a creature? She looked so slender, so young, so exquisite. And so elegant. He was intimidated, and hung back in the crowd of passing soldiers; watching her. She was scanning the faces as they passed; twice she looked at him, and looked away. He made his way through the throng towards her. She looked at him again carefully, and once more began scanning the passing faces. He walked straight up to her and held out his hands:
“Elizabeth!”
She started violently, stared at him, and then kissed him with the barrier between them:
“Why, George! How you’ve altered! I didn’t recognize you!”
Food for thought
1. What is the symbolic meaning of the train?
2. Analyse all the epithets used in describing the scenery in France.
3. Speak about the stylistic function of antithesis “dark – brilliantly lighted”.
4. What does the word “barrier” symbolize?
5. Explain the meaning of Elizabeth’s words addressed to George.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A DAY'S WAIT
He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.
“What’s the matter, Schatz?”
“I’ve got a headache.”
“You better go back to bed”.
“No. I am all right”.
“You go to bed. I’ll see you when I'm dressed”.
But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years. When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.
“You go up to bed”, I said, “you're sick”.
“I'm all right”, he said.
When the doctor came he took the boy's temperature.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“One hundred and two”.
Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.
Back in the room I wrote the boy's temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.
“Do you want me to read to you?”
“All right. If you want to”, said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on. I read aloud from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.
“How do you feel, Schatz?” I asked him.
“Just the same, so far”, he said.
I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.
“Why don't you try to go to sleep? I'll wake you up for the medicine”.
“I'd rather stay awake”.
…
At the house they said the boy had refused to let any one come into the room.
“You can't come in”, he said. “You mustn't get what I have”.
I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed. I took his temperature.
“What is it?”
“Something like a hundred”, I said. It was one hundred and two and four tenths.
“It was a hundred and two”, he said.
“Who said so?”
“The doctor”.
“Your temperature is all right”, I said. “It's nothing to worry about”.
“I don't worry”, he said, “but I can't keep from thinking”.
“Don't think”, I said. “Just take it easy”.
“I'm taking it easy”, he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.
“Take this with water”.
“Do you think it will do any good?”
“Of course it will”.
I sat down and opened the Pirate book and commenced to read but I could see he was not following, so I stopped.
“About what time do you think I’m going to die?” he asked.
“What?”
“About how long will it be before I die?”
“You aren't going to die. What's the matter with you?”
“Oh, yes, I'm. I heard him say a hundred and two”.
“People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two. That's a silly way to talk.”
“I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can't live with forty-four degrees. I've got a hundred and two”.
He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o'clock in the morning.
“You poor Schatz”, I said. “Poor old Schatz. It's like miles and kilometres. You aren't going to die. That's a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal. On this kind it's ninety-eight”.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely”, I said. “It's like miles and kilometers. You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy miles in the car?”
“Oh”, he said.
But his gaze at the foot of the bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.
Food for thought
1. Compare the condition of the boy in the initial lines and in the closure of the text.
2. Why did the author mention Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates?
3. Explain the boy’s wish to stay awake.
4. What is the reason for misunderstanding?
5. Speak about the title and the boy’s behaviour.
GRAHAM GREENE
THE QUIET AMERICAN
Chapter IV
The men looked at the water and then, as though by a word of command, all together, they looked away. For a moment I didn't see what they had seen, but when I saw, my mind went back, I don't know why, to the Chalet and the female impersonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle saying, “This isn't a bit suitable.”
The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back, and I suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking, “Two can play at that game.” I too took my eyes away; we didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
Food for thought
1. Analyse the stylistic device used in the very first paragraph of the text.
2. What implication is in the metaphor “Irish stew”? What is the principle of foregrounding in the description of the victims?
3. Comment on the stylistic function of similies in the text.
4. Divide the text in two parts thematically and analyse the main idea of each part.
GRAHAM GREENE
THE COMEDIANS
Chapter IV
Doctor Magiot crouched a long time above the body of the ex-Minister. In the shadow cast by my torch he looked like a sorcerer exorcizing death. I hesitated to interrupt his rites, but I was afraid the Smiths might wake in their tower-suite, so at last I spoke and broke his thoughts, 'They can't make it out to be anything but suicide,' I said.
'They can make it out to be whatever suits them,' he replied. 'Do not deceive yourself.' He began to empty the contents of the Minister's left pocket which was exposed by the position of the body. He said, 'He was one of the better ones,' and looked with care at each scrap of paper like a bank-clerk checking notes for forgery, holding them close to his eyes and his big globular spectacles which he wore for reading only. 'We took our anatomy-course together in Paris. But in those days even Papa Doc was a good enough man. I remember Duvalier in the typhoid outbreak in the twenties...'
'What are you looking for?'
'Anything which could identify him with you. In this island the Catholic prayer is very apt — "The devil is like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour".
'He hasn't devoured you.'
'Give him time.' He put a notebook in his pocket. 'We haven't the leisure to go through all this now.' Then he turned the body over. It was heavy to move even for Doctor Magiot. 'I'm glad your mother died when she did. She had borne enough. One Hitler is sufficient experience for one lifetime.' We talked in whispers for fear of disturbing the Smiths. 'A rabbit's foot,' he said, 'for luck.' He put the object back. 'And here is something heavy.' He took out my brass paper-weight in the shape of a coffin marked R.I.P. 'I never knew he had a sense of humour.'
'That's mine. He must have taken it from my office.'
'Put it back in the same place.'
'Shall I send Joseph for the police?'
'No, no. We can't leave the body here.'
'They can hardly blame me for a suicide.'
'They can blame you because he chose this house to hide in.'
'Why did he? I never knew him. I met him once at a reception. That's all.'
'The embassies are closely guarded. I suppose he believed in your English phrase, "An Englishman's home is his castle". He had so little hope he sought safety in a catch-word.'
'It's the hell of a thing to find on my first night home.'
'Yes, I suppose it is. Tchehov wrote, "Suicide is an undesirable phenomenon".'
Doctor Magiot stood up and looked down at the body. A coloured man has a great sense of occasion — it isn't ruined by Western education: education only changes the form of its expression. Doctor Magiot's great-grandfather might have wailed in the slave-compound to the unanswering stars; Doctor Magiot pronounced a short carefully phrased discourse over the dead. 'However great a man's fear of life,' Doctor Magiot said, 'suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance — so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.’
Food for thought.
1. Analyse the function of understatement in creating the tension.
2. Discuss the ways courage of Dr Magiot is implied in the passage.
3. Speak on the parallel between Hitler and Duvallier.
4. Comment on allusions to religion and literature, reveal their significance to the message of the text.
GEORGE ORWELL
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Part I.
Chapter I.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagrencss of his body merely emphasised by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding comer. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one comer, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste - this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willowherb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS SRTENGTH.
Food for thought
1. Describe the world in which Winston Smith lives. By what details are the hardships of his life given?
2. Define the elements of totalitarian society mentioned in the passage.
3. Comment on the irony of the Ministries titles.
4. Disclose the paradoxes of the Party slogans.
5. Account on the graphic means in the passage.
J.R.R.TOLKIEN
THE RETURN OF THE KING.
THE SIEGE OF GONDOR.
'Cirith Ungol? Morgul Vale?' he said. 'The time,Faramir, the time? When did you part with them? Whenwould they reach that accursed valley?'
'I parted with them in the morning two days ago,'said Faramir. 'It is fifteen leagues thence to the vale of the Morgulduin, if they went straight south; and then they would be still five leagues westward of the accursed Tower At swiftest they could not come there before today, and maybe they have not come there yet. Indeed I see what you fear. But the darkness is not due to their venture. It began yestereve, and all Ithilien was under shadow last night. It is clear to me that the Enemy has long planned an assault on us, and its hour had already been determined before ever the travellers left my keeping.'
Gandalf paced the floor. 'The morning of two daysago, nigh on three days of journey! How far is the place where you parted?'
'Some twenty-five leagues as a bird flies,' answered Faramir. 'But I could not come more swiftly. Yestereve I lay at Cair Andros. the long isle in the River northward which we hold in defence: and horses are kept on the hither bank. As the dark drew on I knew that haste was needed, so I rode thence with three others that could also be horsed. The rest of my company I sent south to strengthen the garrison at the fords of Osgiliath. I hope that I have not done ill?' He looked at his father.
'Ill?' cried Denethor, and his eyes flashed suddenly. 'Why do you ask? The men were under your command. Or do you ask for my judgement on all your deeds? Your bearing is lowly in my presence, yet it is long now since you turned from your own way at my counsel. See, you have spoken skilfully, as ever; but I, have I not seen your eye fixed on Mithrandir, seeking whether you said wellor too much? He has long had your heart in his keeping.
'My son, your father is old but not yet dotard. I can see and hear, as was my wont; and little of what you have half said or left unsaid is now hidden from me. I know the answer to many riddles. Alas, alas for Boromir!' 'If what I have done displeases you, my father,'said Faramir quietly, 'I wish I had known your counsel before the burden of so weighty a judgement was thrust on me.'
'Would that have availed to change your judgement?' said Denethor. 'You would still have done just so, I deem. I know you well. Ever your desire is to appear lordly and generous as a king of old, gracious, gentle. That may well befit one of high race, if he sits in power and peace. But in desperate hours gentleness may be repaid with death.' 'So be it,' said Faramir.
'So be it!' cried Denethor. 'But not with your death only. Lord Faramir: with the death also of your father, and of all your people, whom it is your part to protect now that Boromir is gone.'
'Do you wish then,' said Faramir, 'that our places had been exchanged?'
'Yes, I wish that indeed,' said Denethor. 'For Boromir was loyal to me and no wizard's pupil. He would have remembered his father's need, and would not have squandered what fortune gave. He would have brought me a mighty gift.'
For a moment Faramir's restraint gave way. 'I would ask you, my father, to remember why it was that I, not he, was in Ithilien. On one occasion at least your counsel has prevailed, not long ago. It was the Lord of the City that gave the errand to him.'
'Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse yet lay in the dregs? As now indeed I find. Would it were not so! Would that this thing had come to me!'
'Comfort yourself!' said Gandalf. 'In no case would Boromir have brought it to you. He is dead, and died well;
may he sleep in peace! Yet you deceive yourself. He would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and then he returned you would not have known your son.'
The face of Denethor set hard and cold. 'You found Boromir less apt to your hand, did you not?' he said softly.
Notes.
Denethor is the Lord Steward of the City, Gondor and father to Faramir and Boromir.
Food for thought
1. State the function of Geographical names in the passage.
2. Comment on the imminent features of Denethor and Faramir and the way they are revealed in the text.
3. Speak how the elevation of the speach is to add to the solemnity of the situation.
4. Comment on the implied conflict between Gandalf and Denethor.