21ST CENT LIT Lessons 1

21St CENTURY LITEARTURE FROM THE
PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
TEACHER
21ST CENTURY LITEARTURE FROM THE PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
UNIT 1: PHILIPPINE HISTORY AND LITEARTURE

 INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE 4
 I AM A FILIPINO BY CARLOS P. ROMULO 5
 FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH BY JOSE GARCIA VILLA 7
UNIT 2: PHILIPPINE REALITIES
 THE MATS BY FRANCSICO ARCELLANA 12
 THE LAKE OF ICE BY JOSE A. QUIRINO 14
 MAY DAY EVE BY NICK JOAQUIN 16
UNIT 3: THE PHILIPPINE DIASPORA
 WEDDING DANCE BY AMADOR DAGUIO 23
 WORMS BY GODOFREDO BURCE BUNAO 29
 THE CENTIPEDE BY RONY V. DIAZ 30
UNIT 4: PHILIPPINE SPECULATIVE FICTION
 CHAMBER OF THE SEA BY EDITH TIEMPO 35
 DEAD STARS BY PAZ MARQUEZ BENITEZ 40
 BONSAI BY EDITH TIEMPO 44
UNIT 5: WORLD HISTORY AND LITEARTURE
 INTRODUCTION TO WORLD LITERATURE 46
 AFTER 20 YEARS BY O.HENRY 47
 A LETTER TO GOD 50
UNIT 6: REAL WORLD ISSUES
 THE NECKLACE BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT 53
 THE PARTING BY AZONA GALE 59
 THE PARABLE OF THE LOST SON 61
UNIT 7: WORLD IDENTITIES
 THE GREAT DECISION BY FULTON OURSLER 64
 THE LAST LEAF BY O.HENRY 65
 THE PARABLE OF THE COFFEE BEAN, CARROT AND EGG 69
 GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS BY LEO TOLSTOY 70
UNIT 8: SPECULATIVE FICTION
 THE MAN WITH A HOE BY EDWIN MARKHAM 78
 SEVEN AGES OF MAN BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 80
 A MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME BY CRAIG RAINE 81
 THE ROAD NOT TAKEN BY ROBERT FROST 82
UNIT 1
PHILIPPINE HISTORY AND LITERATURE
What is Literature?
 Litera - Latin word which literally means an “acquaintance with letters”
 Webster defines literature as anything that is printed, as long as it is related to the ideas and feelings of people, whether it is true, or just a
product of one’s imagination.
 It is a body of work, either written, oral, or visual, containing imaginative language that realistically portrays thought, emotions, and
experiences of the human condition.
 Literature is a product of particular culture that concretizes man’s array of values, emotions, actions and ideas. It is therefore a creation of
human experiences that tells about people and their world.
 According to Webster’s Dictionary:
 Literature covers all the writings of a particular country, time , kind, etc. specially those valued for excellence of from and expression.
 “Literature raises life to a new level of meaning and understanding, and in the process restores sanity and justice in an insane and unjust
world.” - Cirilo F. Bautista
Importance of Literature
1. Studying literature is like looking at the mirror of life where man’s experiences, his innermost feelings and thoughts are reflected.
2. Through literature, we learn the culture of people across time and space
3. We understand not only the past life of a nation but also its present.
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4. We become familiar not only with the culture of neighboring countries but also with that of others living very
Why do we need to study Philippine Literature?
 To trace out rich heritage of ideas and handed down to us from our forefathers.
 For Appreciation of our heritage.
 To understand that we have noble traditions which can serve as the means to assimilate other cultures.
Two Types of Literature
1. POETRY is much more economical in the use of words and relies heavily on imagery figurative language, rhythm and sound.
2. PROSE includes novels, short stories, myths, parables, romance and epics. It is created using sentences and paragraphs.
Genres of Literature
1. Poetry
2. Short Story
3. Novel
4. Drama
5. Essay
I AM A FILIPINO
CARLOS P. ROMULO
I am a Filipino–inheritor of a glorious past, hostage to the uncertain future. As such I must prove equal to a two-fold task–the task of meeting my
responsibility to the past, and the task of performing my obligation to the future.
I sprung from a hardy race, child many generations removed of ancient Malayan pioneers. Across the centuries the memory comes rushing back to me:
of brown-skinned men putting out to sea in ships that were as frail as their hearts were stout. Over the sea I see them come, borne upon the billowing
wave and the whistling wind, carried upon the mighty swell of hope–hope in the free abundance of new land that was to be their home and their
children’s forever.
This is the land they sought and found. Every inch of shore that their eyes first set upon, every hill and mountain that beckoned to them with a green-
and-purple invitation, every mile of rolling plain that their view encompassed, every river and lake that promised a plentiful living and the fruitfulness of
commerce, is a hallowed spot to me.
By the strength of their hearts and hands, by every right of law, human and divine, this land and all the appurtenances thereof–the black and fertile soil,
the seas and lakes and rivers teeming with fish, the forests with their inexhaustible wealth in wild life and timber, the mountains with their bowels swollen
with minerals–the whole of this rich and happy land has been, for centuries without number, the land of my fathers. This land I received in trust from
them and in trust will pass it to my children, and so on until the world is no more.
I am a Filipino. In my blood runs the immortal seed of heroes–seed that flowered down the centuries in deeds of courage and defiance. In my veins yet
pulses the same hot blood that sent Lapulapu to battle against the first invader of this land, that nerved Lakandula in the combat against the alien foe,
that drove Diego Silang and Dagohoy into rebellion against the foreign oppressor.
That seed is immortal. It is the self-same seed that flowered in the heart of Jose Rizal that morning in Bagumbayan when a volley of shots put an end to
all that was mortal of him and made his spirit deathless forever, the same that flowered in the hearts of Bonifacio in Balintawak, of Gergorio del Pilar at
Tirad Pass, of Antonio Luna at Calumpit; that bloomed in flowers of frustration in the sad heart of Emilio Aguinaldo at Palanan, and yet burst fourth
royally again in the proud heart of Manuel L. Quezon when he stood at last on the threshold of ancient Malacañan Palace, in the symbolic act of
possession and racial vindication.
The seed I bear within me is an immortal seed. It is the mark of my manhood, the symbol of dignity as a human being. Like the seeds that were once
buried in the tomb of Tutankhamen many thousand years ago, it shall grow and flower and bear fruit again. It is the insignia of my race, and my
generation is but a stage in the unending search of my people for freedom and happiness.
I am a Filipino, child of the marriage of the East and the West. The East, with its languor and mysticism, its passivity and endurance, was my mother,
and my sire was the West that came thundering across the seas with the Cross and Sword and the Machine. I am of the East, an eager participant in its
spirit, and in its struggles for liberation from the imperialist yoke. But I also know that the East must awake from its centuried sleep, shake off the lethargy
that has bound his limbs, and start moving where destiny awaits
For I, too, am of the West, and the vigorous peoples of the West have destroyed forever the peace and quiet that once were ours. I can no longer live, a
being apart from those whose world now trembles to the roar of bomb and cannon-shot. I cannot say of a matter of universal life-and-death, of freedom
and slavery for all mankind, that it concerns me not. For no man and no nation is an island, but a part of the main, there is no longer any East and West–
only individuals and nations making those momentous choices which are the hinges upon which history resolves.
At the vanguard of progress in this part of the world I stand–a forlorn figure in the eyes of some, but not one defeated and lost. For, through the thick,
interlacing branches of habit and custom above me, I have seen the light of the sun, and I know that it is good. I have seen the light of justice and
equality and freedom, my heart has been lifted by the vision of democracy, and I shall not rest until my land and my people shall have been blessed by
these, beyond the power of any man or nation to subvert or destroy.
I am a Filipino, and this is my inheritance. What pledge shall I give that I may prove worthy of my inheritance? I shall give the pledge that has come
ringing down the corridors of the centuries, and it shall be compounded of the joyous cries of my Malayan forebears when first they saw the contours of
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this land loom before their eyes, of the battle cries that have resounded in every field of combat from Mactan to Tirad Pass, of the voices of my people
when they sing:
Land of the morning,

Child of the sun returning–
Ne’er shall invaders

Trample thy sacred shore.
Out of the lush green of these seven thousand isles, out of the heartstrings of sixteen million people all vibrating to one song, I shall weave the mighty
fabric of my pledge. Out of the songs of the farmers at sunrise when they go to labor in the fields, out of the sweat of the hard-bitten pioneers in Mal-lig
and Koronadal, out of the silent endurance of stevedores at the piers and the ominous grumbling of peasants in Pampanga, out of the first cries of
babies newly born and the lullabies that mothers sing, out of the crashing of gears and the whine of turbines in the factories, out of the crunch of plough-
shares upturning the earth, out of the limitless patience of teachers in the classrooms and doctors in the clinics, out of the tramp of soldiers marching, I
shall make the pattern of my pledge:
“I am a Filipino born to freedom, and I shall not rest until freedom shall have been added unto my inheritance—for myself and my children and my
children’s children—forever.”
FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH
BY JOSE GARCIA VILLA
The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about Teang when he got home, after he had unhitched the
carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and fed it. He was hesitant about saying it, but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of serious
import as it would mark a climacteric in his life. Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father
was silent hard-working farmer who chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodong’s grandmother.
I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.
The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many slender soft worms emerged from the furrows and
then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short colorless worm marched blindly to Dodong’s foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and
jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did not bother to look where it fell, but thought of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was
not young any more.
Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head to look at him with dumb faithful eyes. Dodong
gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside him to its shed. He placed bundles of grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong
looked at it without interests.
Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry, Dodong did. He was seventeen, he had pimples on
his face, the down on his upper lip already was dark–these meant he was no longer a boy. He was growing into a man–he was a man. Dodong felt
insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in statue. Thinking himself a man grown, Dodong felt he could do anything.
He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he dismissed it cursorily. He lifted his leg and looked at the
hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool sundown he thought wild you dreams of himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face
and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable she was to him. She made him dream even during the day.
Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he had come, then he marched obliquely to a creek.
Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass. The he went into the water, wet his body over,
and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The bath made him feel cool.
It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low unvarnished square table was set for supper.
His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish, rice, bananas, and caked sugar.
Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one held them they felt more fluid than solid. Dodong
broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the
remainder for his parents.
Dodong’s mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash them. She walked with slow careful steps and
Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he
was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the
housework alone.
His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him often and again to let the town
dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if
he had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father.
Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had to say, and over which he had done so much
thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent
moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the still black temples of his father. His father looked old now.
“I am going to marry Teang,” Dodong said.
His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and cruel, and Dodong wished his father would suck
that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because his father kept looking at him without uttering anything.
“I will marry Teang,” Dodong repeated. “I will marry Teang.”
His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat.
“I asked her last night to marry me and she said…yes. I want your permission. I… want… it….” There was impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting
protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke
dully the night stillness.
“Must you marry, Dodong?”
Dodong resented his father’s questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a quick impassioned easy in his mind about selfishness, but later
he got confused.
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“You are very young, Dodong.”
“I’m… seventeen.”
“That’s very young to get married at.”
“I… I want to marry…Teang’s a good girl.”
“Tell your mother,” his father said.
“You tell her, tatay.”
“Dodong, you tell your inay.”
“You tell her.”
“All right, Dodong.”
“You will let me marry Teang?”
“Son, if that is your wish… of course…” There was a strange helpless light in his father’s eyes. Dodong did not read it, so absorbed was he in himself.
Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while he even felt sorry for him about the diseased
tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young dream….
——————————————-
Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was damp. He was still as a tree and his thoughts were confused.
His mother had told him not to leave the house, but he had left. He had wanted to get out of it without clear reason at all. He was afraid, he felt. Afraid of
the house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang. Teang was giving birth in the house; she
gave screams that chilled his blood. He did not want her to scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He began to wonder madly if the process of
childbirth was really painful. Some women, when they gave birth, did not cry.
In a few moments he would be a father. “Father, father,” he whispered the word with awe, with strangeness. He was young, he realized now,
contradicting himself of nine months comfortable… “Your son,” people would soon be telling him. “Your son, Dodong.”
Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw-horse with his feet close together. He looked at his callused toes. Suppose he had ten children… What
made him think that? What was the matter with him? God!
He heard his mother’s voice from the house:
“Come up, Dodong. It is over.”
Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow he was ashamed to his mother of his youthful paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if
he had taken something no properly his. He dropped his eyes and pretended to dust dirt off his kundiman shorts.
“Dodong,” his mother called again. “Dodong.”
He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother.
“It is a boy,” his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up.
Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents’ eyes seemed to pierce him through and he felt limp.
He wanted to hide from them, to run away.
“Dodong, you come up. You come up,” he mother said.
Dodong did not want to come up and stayed in the sun.
“Dodong. Dodong.”
“I’ll… come up.”
Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps slowly. His heart pounded mercilessly in him. Within, he
avoided his parents eyes. He walked ahead of them so that they should not see his face. He felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying. His eyes smarted
and his chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go back to the yard. He wanted somebody to punish him.
His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently.
“Son,” his father said.
And his mother: “Dodong…”

How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong.
“Teang?” Dodong said.
“She’s sleeping. But you go on…”
His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl-wife, asleep on the papag with her black hair soft around her face. He did not
want her to look that pale.
Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips, but again that feeling of embarrassment came over him and
before his parents he did not want to be demonstrative.
The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heard it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly. He could not control the swelling of happiness in him.
“You give him to me. You give him to me,” Dodong said.
——————————————-
Blas was not Dodong’s only child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came along. Dodong did not want any more children,
but they came. It seemed the coming of children could not be helped. Dodong got angry with himself sometimes.
Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if she was young. There was interminable work
to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children. She cried sometimes, wishing she had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing
him to dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by
nine years, and that was why she had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was
childless until now. She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not, either. That was a better lot. But she loved
Dodong…
Dodong whom life had made ugly.

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired and querulous. He wanted to ask questions and
somebody to answer him. He wanted to be wise about many things.
One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth’s dreams. Why it must be so. Why one was forsaken… after Love.
Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must be so to make youth Youth. Youth must be dreamfully sweet.
Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know a little wisdom but was denied it.
When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late at night and Teang and the other children were asleep. Dodong
heard Blas’s steps, for he could not sleep well of nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark and lie down softly. Blas was restless on his mat and could
not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not sleep. Blas said he could not sleep.
“You better go to sleep. It is late,” Dodong said.
Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.
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Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.
“Itay …,” Blas called softly.
Dodong stirred and asked him what it was.
“I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight.”
Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.
“Itay, you think it over.”
Dodong lay silent.
“I love Tona and… I want her.”
Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything was still and quiet. The moonlight was cold and
white.
“You want to marry Tona,” Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very young. The life that would follow marriage would be hard…
“Yes.”
“Must you marry?”
Blas’s voice stilled with resentment. “I will marry Tona.”
Dodong kept silent, hurt.
“You have objections, Itay?” Blas asked acridly.
“Son… n-none…” (But truly, God, I don’t want Blas to marry yet… not yet. I don’t want Blas to marry yet….)
But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph… now. Love must triumph… now. Afterwards… it will be life.
As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong… and then Life.
Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him.
UNIT 2
PHILIPPINE REALITIES
The Mats
By FRANCISCO ARCELLANA
For my family, Papa’s homecoming from his many inspection trips around the Philippines was always an occasion to remember. But there was one
homecoming - from a trip to the south – that turned out to be more memorable than any of the others.
Papa was an engineer. He inspected new telegraph lines for the government. He had written from Lopez, Tayabas: I have just met a marvelous
matweaver – a real artist – and I shall have a surprise for you. I asked him to weave a sleeping mat for every one of the family. I can hardly wait to show
them to you…
After a few days Papa wrote again:
I am taking the Bicol Express tomorrow. I have the mats with me, and they are beautiful. I hope to be home to join you for dinner.
Mama read Papa’s letter aloud during the noon meal. Talk about the mats flared up like wildfire.
“I like the feel of mats,” said my brother Antonio. “I like the smell of new mats.”
“Oh, but these mats are different,” said Susanna, my younger sister. “They have our names woven into them. There is a different color for each of us.”
A mat was not something new to us. There was already one such mat in the house. It was one we seldom use, a mat older than any of us. This mat had
been given to Mama by her mother when Mama and Papa were married. It had been with them ever since. It was used on their wedding night and
afterwards only on special occasions. It was a very beautiful mat. It had green leaf borders and gigantic red roses woven onto it. In the middle it said:
Emilia y Jaime Recuerdo
The mat did not ever seem to grow old. To Mama it was always as new as it had been on her wedding night. The folds and creases always looked new
and fresh. The smell was always the smell of a new mat. Watching it was an endless joy.
Mama always kept that mat in her trunk. When any of us got sick, the mat was brought out and the sick child made to sleep on it. Every one of us had at
some time in our life slept on it. There had been sickness in our family. And there had been deaths…. That evening Papa arrived. He had brought home
a lot of fruit from the fruit-growing provinces he had passed in his travels. We sampled pineapple, lanzones, chico, atis, santol, watermelon, guayabano,
and avocado. He had also brought home a jar of preserved sweets.
Dinner seemed to last forever. Although we tried not to show it, we could hardly wait to see the mats.
Finally, after a long time over his cigar, Papa rose from his chair and crossed the room. He went to the corner where his luggage was piled. From the
heap he pulled out a large bundle. Taking it under his arm, he walked to the middle of the room where the light was brightest. He dropped the bundle to
the floor. Bending over and balancing himself on his toes, he pulled at the cord that bound it. It was strong. It would not break. It would not give way.
Finally, Alfonso, my youngest brother, appeared at Papa’s side with a pair of scissors. Papa took the scissors. One swift movement, snip!, and the
bundle was loose!
Papa turned to Mama and smiled. “These are the mats, Miling,” he said.
He picked up the topmost mat in the bundle.
“This is yours, Miling.” Mama stepped forward to the light, wiping her still moist hands against the folds of her apron. Shyly, she unfolded the mat without
a word.
We all gathered around the spread mat.
It was a beautiful mat. There was a name in the very center of it: Emilia. Interwoven into the large, green letters where flowers – cadena de amor.
“It’s beautiful, Jaime.” Mama whispered, and she could not say any more.
“And this, I know, is my own,” said Papa of the next mat in the bundle. His mat was simple and the only colors on it were purple and cold.
“And this, for you, Marcelina.”
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I had always thought my name was too long. Now I was glad to see that my whole name was spelled out on the mat, even if the letters were small.
Beneath my name was a lyre, done in three colors. Papa knew I loved music and played the piano. I was delighted with my new mat.
“And this is for you, Jose.” Jose is my oldest brother. He wanted to become a doctor.
“This is yours, Antonio.”
“And this, yours, Juan.”
“And this is yours, Jesus.”
One by one my brothers and sisters stepped forward to receive their mats. Mat after mat was unfolded. On each mat was a symbol that meant
something special to each of us.
At last everyone was shown their mats. The air was filled with excited talk.
“You are not to use the mats until you go the university,” Papa said.
“But, Jaime,” Mama said, wonderingly, “there are some more mats left in the bundle.”
“Yes there are three more mats to unfold. They are for the others who are not here…” Papa’s voice grew soft and his eyes looked far away.
“I said I would bring home a sleeping mat for every one of the family. And so I did,” Papa said. Then his eyes fell on each of us. “Do you think I’d
forgotten them? Do you think I had forgotten them? Do you think I could forget them?
“This is for you, Josefina!
“And this, for you, Victoria!
“And this, for you, Concepcion!”
Papa’s face was filled with a long-bewildered sorrow.
Then I understood. The mats were for my three sisters, who died when they were still very young.
After a long while, Papa broke the silence. “We must not ever forget them,” he said softly. “They may be dead but they are never really gone. They are
here, among us, always in our hearts.”
The remaining mats were unfolded in silence. The colors were not bright but dull. I remember that the names of the dead among us did not glow o shine
as did the other living names.
The Lake of Ice

Jose A. Quirino
Figure skating became an obsession to Tito Guanzon after a winter he spent with a sister in Canada. When he arrived there the trees were
just turning purple and the cold seemed no more severe than April in Baguio. By the end of November, however, Montreal was turning into a white city.
Then in December, the snow began falling in the daytime and Tito loved to walk into the falling snow.
In January, the winter set in and every body of water in Montreal was frozen hard. Just across the streets from St. Anne’s Hospital where his
sister worked as a nurse was a small park with a lake in it.
Swans floated on the lake in summer; in winter it was taken over by then skaters. Tito loved to watch them spinning around in pairs, arms
interlocked, doing figure eights or dizzy whirls. He told himself he would become part of winter’s purity if he could only skate as expertly as the
Canadians.
One day he was sitting as usual at the edge of the lake of ice, watching the skaters, when an apple-checked girl in red plaid, muffler flying
from her neck, came to a stop right in front of him.
“You Italian?’ she asked. Tito blushed deeply.
“No, Filipino,: he mumbled.
“What’s that?” cried the girl. But she didn’t wait for an answer. Suddenly, she grabbed his gloved hands. “Come on, skate with me!”
“I don’t know,” cried Tito blushing even redder, ”Anyway, I don’t even have skates.”
“I can get you a pair. I can teach you.”
“Not in front of all these people!” exclaimed Tito.
“Why not?” shrugged the girl.” You’re funny. Are all Filipinos funny like you?”
“Well, we’re rather shy when not in our own land.”
“I’m not in my own land,” laughed the girl. “I’m form California.”
“And I thought you were a Canadian.”
“No, I’m just here for the snow and all that. We don’t have winter where I come from.”
“Same here.,” sighed Tito. “Then how come you know how to skate?”
“Because I like to do things that don’t come naturally!” she said.
That, thought Tito, was the difference between him and the girl. She had daring, he has his country’s paralyzing shyness.
“What’s your name?” he suddenly asked.
“Linda.” She said. “Listen, write it down somewhere, my name, Linda Anderson. Someday you’re going to see it up in lights.”
“But you’re famous already. Your name is even in a song, you know. When I go to sleep I never count sheep, I count all the charms about
Linda and all the jazz.” Tito was surprised with himself. Suddenly he was singing and humming before this strange, lovely creature.
“Oh, you’re pulling my leg because you think I’m mad,” she laughed.
“No-oh, no!” he gasped, feeling embarrassed.
“Then write down my name, “ she insisted. He pulled out his ball pen and notebook and worte down Linda Andreson.
“And what’s your name?” she asked, stooping over him.
“Tito,”was all he could say.
She kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Good bye Tito,” she whispered. “The kiss was to make you remember me on the likae of ice. When we meet again, it’s going to be on another
lake of ice and under bright famous lights!”
Well, about five years later, Tito back in Manila, took his girl to the ice show that was the holiday attraction at the Araneta Coliseum. In the
darkness, the lake of ice gleamed clean and pure and holy and suddenly Tito felt seventeen again and imagined Montreal during that winter vacation
with his sister nurse.
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One spotlight pierced the darkness and in the circle of light, Tito saw an apple-cheeked girl in red plaid, with a muffler flying from her neck.
“That’s the star of the show,”whispered the irl at his side. “do you know that she had infantile paralysis and couldn’t walk for years?” said Tito’s
girlfriend, who had obviously read press accounts about the star of the icetravaganza.
“She didn’t walk until she was a teenager and she made herself not only walk but dance , jump and run as well. And now she’s a star skater.
Don’t you think that’s wonderful, Tito?”
Tito now understood the history of human adventure. People were so wonderful because they were always daring enough to do what didn’t
come naturally.
“I’ll never be timid again,” Tito thought as he watched the superstar, Linda Anderson, dancing on silver skates on the lake of ice!
May Day Eve

By Nick Joaquin
The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was almost midnight before the carriages came filing up the
departing guests, while the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the young men gathering around to wish them a good
night and lamenting their ascent with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate but straightway going off to finish the punch and
the brandy though they were quite drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and audacity, for they were young bucks
newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and bragged and swaggered and flirted all night and
where in no mood to sleep yet--no, caramba, not on this moist tropic eve! not on this mystic May eve! --with the night still young and so seductive that it
was madness not to go out, not to go forth---and serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in the Pasid! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a
third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats and capes, for hats and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last
carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile
sky murky with clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling
now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood fragrances or ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously
down the street that the girls who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at the windows, but were
soon sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those wicked young men and their handsome apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and
their elegant mustaches so black and vivid in the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished with love, and began crying to one another how carefree
were men but how awful to be a girl and what a horrid, horrid world it was, till old Anastasia plucked them off by the ear or the pigtail and chases them off
to bed---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and
the mighty roll of his great voice booming through the night, "Guardia serno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.
And it was May again, said the old Anastasia. It was the first day of May and witches were abroad in the night, she said--for it was a night of
divination, and night of lovers, and those who cared might peer into a mirror and would there behold the face of whoever it was they were fated to marry,
said the old Anastasia as she hobble about picking up the piled crinolines and folding up shawls and raking slippers in corner while the girls climbing into
four great poster-beds that overwhelmed the room began shrieking with terror, scrambling over each other and imploring the old woman not to frighten
them.
"Enough, enough, Anastasia! We want to sleep!"
"Go scare the boys instead, you old witch!"
"She is not a witch, she is a maga. She is a maga. She was born of Christmas Eve!"
"St. Anastasia, virgin and martyr."
"Huh? Impossible! She has conquered seven husbands! Are you a virgin, Anastasia?"
"No, but I am seven times a martyr because of you girls!"
"Let her prophesy, let her prophesy! Whom will I marry, old gypsy? Come, tell me."
"You may learn in a mirror if you are not afraid."
"I am not afraid, I will go," cried the young cousin Agueda, jumping up in bed.
"Girls, girls---we are making too much noise! My mother will hear and will come and pinch us all. Agueda, lie down! And you Anastasia, I
command you to shut your mouth and go away!""Your mother told me to stay here all night, my grand lady!"
"And I will not lie down!" cried the rebellious Agueda, leaping to the floor. "Stay, old woman. Tell me what I have to do."
"Tell her! Tell her!" chimed the other girls.
The old woman dropped the clothes she had gathered and approached and fixed her eyes on the girl. "You must take a candle," she
instructed, "and go into a room that is dark and that has a mirror in it and you must be alone in the room. Go up to the mirror and close your eyes and
shy:
Mirror, mirror, show to me him whose woman I will be. If all goes right, just above your left shoulder will appear the face of the man you will
marry." A silence. Then: "And hat if all does not go right?" asked Agueda. "Ah, then the Lord have mercy on you!" "Why." "Because you may see--the
Devil!"
The girls screamed and clutched one another, shivering. "But what nonsense!" cried Agueda. "This is the year 1847. There are no devil
anymore!" Nevertheless she had turned pale. "But where could I go, hugh? Yes, I know! Down to the sala. It has that big mirror and no one is there
now." "No, Agueda, no! It is a mortal sin! You will see the devil!" "I do not care! I am not afraid! I will go!" "Oh, you wicked girl! Oh, you mad girl!" "If you
do not come to bed, Agueda, I will call my mother." "And if you do I will tell her who came to visit you at the convent last March. Come, old woman---give
me that candle. I go." "Oh girls---give me that candle, I go."
But Agueda had already slipped outside; was already tiptoeing across the hall; her feet bare and her dark hair falling down her shoulders and
streaming in the wind as she fled down the stairs, the lighted candle sputtering in one hand while with the other she pulled up her white gown from her
ankles. She paused breathless in the doorway to the sala and her heart failed her. She tried to imagine the room filled again with lights, laughter, whirling
couples, and the jolly jerky music of the fiddlers. But, oh, it was a dark den, a weird cavern for the windows had been closed and the furniture stacked up
against the walls. She crossed herself and stepped inside.
The mirror hung on the wall before her; a big antique mirror with a gold frame carved into leaves and flowers and mysterious curlicues. She
saw herself approaching fearfully in it: a small while ghost that the darkness bodied forth---but not willingly, not completely, for her eyes and hair were so
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dark that the face approaching in the mirror seemed only a mask that floated forward; a bright mask with two holes gaping in it, blown forward by the
white cloud of her gown. But when she stood before the mirror she lifted the candle level with her chin and the dead mask bloomed into her living face.
She closed her eyes and whispered the incantation. When she had finished such a terror took hold of her that she felt unable to move, unable to open
her eyes and thought she would stand there forever, enchanted. But she heard a step behind her, and a smothered giggle, and instantly opened her
eyes.
"And what did you see, Mama? Oh, what was it?" But Dona Agueda had forgotten the little girl on her lap: she was staring pass the curly head
nestling at her breast and seeing herself in the big mirror hanging in the room. It was the same room and the same mirror out the face she now saw in it
was an old face---a hard, bitter, vengeful face, framed in graying hair, and so sadly altered, so sadly different from that other face like a white mask, that
fresh young face like a pure mask than she had brought before this mirror one wild May Day midnight years and years ago.... "But what was it Mama?
Oh please go on! What did you see?" Dona Agueda looked down at her daughter but her face did not soften though her eyes filled with tears. "I saw the
devil." she said bitterly. The child blanched. "The devil, Mama? Oh... Oh..." "Yes, my love. I opened my eyes and there in the mirror, smiling at me over
my left shoulder, was the face of the devil." "Oh, my poor little Mama! And were you very frightened?" "You can imagine. And that is why good little girls
do not look into mirrors except when their mothers tell them. You must stop this naughty habit, darling, of admiring yourself in every mirror you pass- or
you may see something frightful some day." "But the devil, Mama---what did he look like?" "Well, let me see... he has curly hair and a scar on his cheek--
-" "Like the scar of Papa?" "Well, yes. But this of the devil was a scar of sin, while that of your Papa is a scar of honor. Or so he says." "Go on about the
devil." "Well, he had mustaches." "Like those of Papa?" "Oh, no. Those of your Papa are dirty and graying and smell horribly of tobacco, while these of
the devil were very black and elegant--oh, how elegant!" "And did he speak to you, Mama?" "Yes… Yes, he spoke to me," said Dona Agueda. And
bowing her graying head; she wept.
"Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one," he had said, smiling at her in the mirror and stepping back to give her a low mocking
bow. She had whirled around and glared at him and he had burst into laughter. "But I remember you!" he cried. "You are Agueda, whom I left a mere
infant and came home to find a tremendous beauty, and I danced a waltz with you but you would not give me the polka." "Let me pass," she muttered
fiercely, for he was barring the way. "But I want to dance the polka with you, fair one," he said. So they stood before the mirror; their panting breath the
only sound in the dark room; the candle shining between them and flinging their shadows to the wall. And young Badoy Montiya (who had crept home
very drunk to pass out quietly in bed) suddenly found himself cold sober and very much awake and ready for anything. His eyes sparkled and the scar
on his face gleamed scarlet. "Let me pass!" she cried again, in a voice of fury, but he grasped her by the wrist. "No," he smiled. "Not until we have
danced." "Go to the devil!" "What a temper has my serrana!" "I am not your serrana!" "Whose, then? Someone I know? Someone I have offended
grievously? Because you treat me, you treat all my friends like your mortal enemies." "And why not?" she demanded, jerking her wrist away and flashing
her teeth in his face. "Oh, how I detest you, you pompous young men! You go to Europe and you come back elegant lords and we poor girls are too
tame to please you. We have no grace like the Parisiennes, we have no fire like the Sevillians, and we have no salt, no salt, no salt! Aie, how you weary
me, how you bore me, you fastidious men!"
"Come, come---how do you know about us?"
"I was not admiring myself, sir!" "You were admiring the moon perhaps?" "Oh!" she gasped, and burst into tears. The candle dropped from her
hand and she covered her face and sobbed piteously. The candle had gone out and they stood in darkness, and young Badoy was conscience-stricken.
"Oh, do not cry, little one!" Oh, please forgive me! Please do not cry! But what a brute I am! I was drunk, little one, I was drunk and knew not what I said."
He groped and found her hand and touched it to his lips. She shuddered in her white gown. "Let me go," she moaned, and tugged feebly. "No. Say you
forgive me first. Say you forgive me, Agueda." But instead she pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it - bit so sharply in the knuckles that he cried with
pain and lashed cut with his other hand--lashed out and hit the air, for she was gone, she had fled, and he heard the rustling of her skirts up the stairs as
he furiously sucked his bleeding fingers. Cruel thoughts raced through his head: he would go and tell his mother and make her turn the savage girl out of
the house--or he would go himself to the girl’s room and drag her out of bed and slap, slap, slap her silly face! But at the same time he was thinking that
they were all going to Antipolo in the morning and was already planning how he would maneuver himself into the same boat with her. Oh, he would have
his revenge, he would make her pay, that little harlot! She should suffer for this, he thought greedily, licking his bleeding knuckles. But---Judas! He
remembered her bare shoulders: gold in her candlelight and delicately furred. He saw the mobile insolence of her neck, and her taut breasts steady in
the fluid gown. Son of a Turk, but she was quite enchanting! How could she think she had no fire or grace? And no salt? An arroba she had of it!
"... No lack of salt in the chrism At the moment of thy baptism!" He sang aloud in the dark room and suddenly realized that he had fallen madly
in love with her. He ached intensely to see her again---at once! ---to touch her hands and her hair; to hear her harsh voice. He ran to the window and
flung open the casements and the beauty of the night struck him back like a blow. It was May, it was summer, and he was young---young! ---and
deliriously in love. Such a happiness welled up within him that the tears spurted from his eyes. But he did not forgive her--no! He would still make her
pay, he would still have his revenge, he thought viciously, and kissed his wounded fingers. But what a night it had been! "I will never forge this night! he
thought aloud in an awed voice, standing by the window in the dark room, the tears in his eyes and the wind in his hair and his bleeding knuckles
pressed to his mouth.
But, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and May time passes; summer lends; the storms break over the rot-tipe orchards and the
heart grows old; while the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and pile up, till the mind becomes too crowded, too confused: dust gathers
in it; cobwebs multiply; the walls darken and fall into ruin and decay; the memory perished...and there came a time when Don Badoy Montiya walked
home through a May Day midnight without remembering, without even caring to remember; being merely concerned in feeling his way across the street
with his cane; his eyes having grown quite dim and his legs uncertain--for he was old; he was over sixty; he was a very stopped and shivered old man
with white hair and mustaches coming home from a secret meeting of conspirators; his mind still resounding with the speeches and his patriot heart still
exultant as he picked his way up the steps to the front door and inside into the slumbering darkness of the house; wholly unconscious of the May night,
till on his way down the hall, chancing to glance into the sala, he shuddered, he stopped, his blood ran cold-- for he had seen a face in the mirror there---
a ghostly candlelight face with the eyes closed and the lips moving, a face that he suddenly felt he had been there before though it was a full minutes
before the lost memory came flowing, came tiding back, so overflooding the actual moment and so swiftly washing away the piled hours and days and
months and years that he was left suddenly young again; he was a gay young buck again, lately came from Europe; he had been dancing all night; he
was very drunk; he s stepped in the doorway; he saw a face in the dark; he called out...and the lad standing before the mirror (for it was a lad in a night
go jumped with fright and almost dropped his candle, but looking around and seeing the old man, laughed out with relief and came running.
"Oh Grandpa, how you frightened me. Don Badoy had turned very pale. "So it was you, you young bandit! And what is all this, hey? What are
you doing down here at this hour?" "Nothing, Grandpa. I was only... I am only ..." "Yes, you are the great Señor only and how delighted I am to make
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your acquaintance, Señor Only! But if I break this cane on your head you maga wish you were someone else, Sir!" "It was just foolishness, Grandpa.
They told me I would see my wife."
"Wife? What wife?" "Mine. The boys at school said I would see her if I looked in a mirror tonight and said: Mirror, mirror show to me her whose
lover I will be.
Don Badoy cackled ruefully. He took the boy by the hair, pulled him along into the room, sat down on a chair, and drew the boy between his
knees. "Now, put your cane down the floor, son, and let us talk this over. So you want your wife already, hey? You want to see her in advance, hey? But
so you know that these are wicked games and that wicked boys who play them are in danger of seeing horrors?"
"Well, the boys did warn me I might see a witch instead."
"Exactly! A witch so horrible you may die of fright. And she will be witch you, she will torture you, she will eat your heart and drink your blood!"
"Oh, come now Grandpa. This is 1890. There are no witches anymore."
"Oh-ho, my young Voltaire! And what if I tell you that I myself have seen a witch.
"You? Where?
"Right in this room land right in that mirror," said the old man, and his playful voice had turned savage.
"When, Grandpa?"
"Not so long ago. When I was a bit older than you. Oh, I was a vain fellow and though I was feeling very sick that night and merely wanted to
lie down somewhere and die I could not pass that doorway of course without stopping to see in the mirror what I looked like when dying. But when I
poked my head in what should I see in the mirror but...but..."
"The witch?"
"Exactly!"
"And then she bewitch you, Grandpa!"
"She bewitched me and she tortured me. l She ate my heart and drank my blood." said the old man bitterly.
"Oh, my poor little Grandpa! Why have you never told me! And she very horrible?
"Horrible? God, no--- she was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen! Her eyes were somewhat like yours but her hair was like black
waters and her golden shoulders were bare. My God, she was enchanting! But I should have known---I should have known even then---the dark and
fatal creature she was!"
A silence. Then: "What a horrid mirror this is, Grandpa," whispered the boy.
"What makes you slay that, hey?"
"Well, you saw this witch in it. And Mama once told me that Grandma once told her that Grandma once saw the devil in this mirror. Was it of
the scare that Grandma died?"
Don Badoy started. For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had perished---the poor Agueda; that they were at peace at
last, the two of them, her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the earth---from the trap of a May night; from the
snare of summer; from the terrible silver nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and bones in the end: a whimpering withered
consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue; her eye like live coals; her face like ashes... Now, nothing--- nothing save a name on a stone; save a
stone in a graveyard---nothing! was left of the young girl who had flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long ago.
And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had bitten his hand and fled and how he had sung aloud in the
dark room and surprised his heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore up his throat and eyes that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the
boy away; stood up and looked out----looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul street where a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last
carriage was rattling away upon the cobbles, while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tiled roofs looming like sinister chessboards against
a wild sky murky with clouds, save where an evil old moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling
now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable the window; the bowed old man sobbing so bitterly at the window; the tears
streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his hair and one hand pressed to his mouth---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of the
watchman’s boots on the cobbles, and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his voice booming through the night:
"Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o!"
UNIT 3
THE PHILIPPINE DIASPORA
Wedding Dance
By Amador Daguio
Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge of the headhigh threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with one bound
that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some moments during
which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening darkness.
"I'm sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it."
The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house like muffled roars of falling waters. The woman who had moved with a start when the
sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas for she did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave no sign that she
heard Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the darkness.
But Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on all fours to the middle of the room; he knew exactly where the stove was.
With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering embers, and blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of pine on them,
then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.
"Why don't you go out," he said, "and join the dancing women?" He felt a pang inside him, because what he said was really not the right thing to say and
because the woman did not stir. "You should join the dancers," he said, "as if--as if nothing had happened." He looked at the woman huddled in a corner
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of the room, leaning against the wall. The stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights
upon her face. She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or hate.
"Go out--go out and dance. If you really don't hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the men will see you dance well; he will like your
dancing, he will marry you. Who knows but that, with him, you will be luckier than you were with me."
"I don't want any man," she said sharply. "I don't want any other man."
He felt relieved that at least she talked: "You know very well that I won't want any other woman either. You know that, don't you? Lumnay, you know it,
don't you?"
She did not answer him.
"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.
"Yes, I know," she said weakly.
"It is not my fault," he said, feeling relieved. "You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to you."
"Neither can you blame me," she said. She seemed about to cry.
"No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have nothing to say against you." He set some of the burning wood in place. "It's
only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is just too long to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance before it is too
late for both of us."
This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her left leg in. She wound the blanket more snugly around herself.
"You know that I have done my best," she said. "I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed many chickens in my prayers."
"Yes, I know."
"You remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in the terrace because I butchered one of our pigs without your
permission? I did it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I wanted to have a child. But what could I do?"
"Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child," he said. He stirred the fire. The spark rose through the crackles of the flames. The smoke and soot
went up the ceiling.
Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan that kept the split bamboo flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan flooring. Each
time she did this the split bamboo went up and came down with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her care through the walls.
Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked at her bronzed and sturdy face, then turned to where the jars of water stood
piled one over the other. Awiyao took a coconut cup and dipped it in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain creek early that
evening.
"I came home," he said. "Because I did not find you among the dancers. Of course, I am not forcing you to come, if you don't want to join my wedding
ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay, although I am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as strong in planting beans,
not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best wives in the
whole village."
"That has not done me any good, has it?" She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed to smile.
He put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held her face between his hands and looked longingly at her beauty. But her eyes
looked away. Never again would he hold her face. The next day she would not be his any more. She would go back to her parents. He let go of her
face, and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers as they tugged softly at the split bamboo floor.
"This house is yours," he said. "I built it for you. Make it your own, live in it as long as you wish. I will build another house for Madulimay."
"I have no need for a house," she said slowly. "I'll go to my own house. My parents are old. They will need help in the planting of the beans, in the
pounding of the rice."
"I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the first year of our marriage," he said. "You know I did it for you. You helped me to make it
for the two of us."
"I have no use for any field," she said.
He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time.
"Go back to the dance," she said finally. "It is not right for you to be here. They will wonder where you are, and Madulimay will not feel good. Go back to
the dance."
"I would feel better if you could come, and dance---for the last time. The gangsas are playing."
"You know that I cannot."
"Lumnay," he said tenderly. "Lumnay, if I did this it is because of my need for a child. You know that life is not worth living without a child. The man have
mocked me behind my back. You know that."
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"I know it," he said. "I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay."
She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.
She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes they had in the beginning of their new life, the day he took her away from her parents
across the roaring river, on the other side of the mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep canyon which they had to cross. The
waters boiled in her mind in forms of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled,
resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs; they were far away now from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges, and they
had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks they had to step on---a slip would have meant death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the other side of the mountain.
She looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features---hard and strong, and kind. He had a sense of lightness in his way of saying things which
often made her and the village people laugh. How proud she had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and compact in their hold
upon his skull---how frank his bright eyes were. She looked at his body the carved out of the mountains
five fields for her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber were heaving; his arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles--he
was strong and for that she had lost him.
She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. "Awiyao, Awiyao, my husband," she cried. "I did everything to have a child," she said passionately
in a hoarse whisper. "Look at me," she cried. "Look at my body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in the fields; it could climb
the mountains fast. Even now it is firm, full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die."
"It will not be right to die," he said, gathering her in his arms. Her whole warm naked naked breast quivered against his own; she clung now to his neck,
and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness.
"I don't care about the fields," she said. "I don't care about the house. I don't care for anything but you. I'll have no other man."
"Then you'll always be fruitless."
"I'll go back to my father, I'll die."
"Then you hate me," he said. "If you die it means you hate me. You do not want me to have a child. You do not want my name to live on in our tribe."
She was silent.
"If I do not try a second time," he explained, "it means I'll die. Nobody will get the fields I have carved out of the mountains; nobody will come after me."
"If you fail--if you fail this second time--" she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. "No--no, I don't want you to fail."
"If I fail," he said, "I'll come back to you. Then both of us will die together. Both of us will vanish from the life of our tribe."
The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.
"I'll keep my beads," she said. "Awiyao, let me keep my beads," she half-whispered.
"You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My grandmother said they come from up North, from the slant-eyed people across the sea. You
keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty fields."
"I'll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me," she said. "I love you. I love you and have nothing to give."
She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him from outside. "Awiyao! Awiyao! O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the dance!"
"I am not in hurry."
"The elders will scold you. You had better go."
"Not until you tell me that it is all right with you."
"It is all right with me."
He clasped her hands. "I do this for the sake of the tribe," he said.
"I know," she said.
He went to the door.
"Awiyao!"
He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her. Her face was in agony. It pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to him. What
was it that made a man wish for a child? What was it in life, in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence of the night, in the
communing with husband and wife, in the whole life of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter and speech of a child? Suppose he changed
his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand, anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him? And if he was fruitless--but he
loved Lumnay. It was like taking away of his life to leave her like this.
"Awiyao," she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. "The beads!" He turned back and walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the trunk
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where they kept their worldly possession---his battle-ax and his spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the darkness the beads
which had been given to him by his grandmother to give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them in place. The white and jade and deep orange
obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.
"Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!" She gasped, and she closed her eyes and huried her face in his neck.
The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he buried out into the night.
Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door and opened it. The moonlight struck her face; the moonlight spilled itself on the
whole village.
She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the caverns of the other houses. She knew that all the houses were empty that the
whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent. And yet was she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most lightness and grace?
Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully
timed to the beat of the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy the way she stretched her hands like the wings of the
mountain eagle now and then as she danced? How long ago did she dance at her own wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once
danced in her honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that perhaps she could give her
husband a child.
"It is not right. It is not right!" she cried. "How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not right," she said.
Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go to the chief of the village, to the elders, to tell them it was not right. Awiyao was
hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let her be the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man may take another woman.
She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He surely would relent. Was not their love as strong as the
river?
She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was. There was a flaming glow over the whole place; a great bonfire was burning. The
gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they were calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly now. The man
leaped lightly with their gangsas as they circled the dancing women decked in feast garments and beads, tripping on the ground like graceful birds,
following their men. Her heart warmed to the flaming call of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she started to run. But the gleaming
brightness of the bonfire commanded her to stop. Did anybody see her approach?
She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the bonfire leaped in countless sparks which spread and rose like yellow points
and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to her like a spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the wedding feast.
Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village. She thought of the new clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had started to
make only four moons before. She followed the trail above the village.
When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody held her hand, and the stream water was very cold. The trail went up again,
and she was in the moonlight shadows among the trees and shrubs. Slowly she climbed the mountain.
When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood the blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the wedding was. She could
hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock her; they seemed to
call far to her, to speak to her in the language of unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude for her
sacrifice. Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.
Lumnay though of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago-- a strong, muscular boy carrying his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to
his home. She had met him one day as she was on her way to fill her clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest; and she had
made him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut shell. After that it did not take him long to decide to throw his spear on the stairs of her father's
house in token on his desire to marry her.
The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind began to stir the leaves of the bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big rock on which to
sit down. The bean plants now surrounded her, and she was lost among them.
A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests---what did it matter? She would be holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture, silken
almost, but moist where the dew got into them, silver to look at, silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes. The stretching of
the bean pods full length from the hearts of the wilting petals would go on.
Lumnay's fingers moved a long, long time among the growing bean pods.
WORMS
Godofredo burce bunao
it isn't the kind of illness

that pushes one
down flat; she still reports,
like everyone,
to the office, and the rest
of her time she lives
the way she must, holding on
to what she beleives.
but, somehow,word has seeped out
that miss ver is sick
she may not last the year
"a dirty trick"
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said a voice in the room
where meets the board:
miss ver has fed the firm
much of its hoard
of profit anf prestige
all the while age
has crept after her in that
huge air cooled age
that has become her home
and now her sickbed
management will care for her
till she falls dead;
she's listed under assets
but, more than this,
it is laws that hire the doctor---
she knows it is
meantime, a few have dreams
about her chair
worms dream ----she laughs--of corpses
that they can share.
The Centipede
Rony V. Diaz
WHEN I saw my sister, Delia, beating my dog with a stick, I felt hate heave like a caged, angry beast in my chest. Out in the sun, the hair of my sister
glinted like metal and, in her brown dress, she looked like a sheathed dagger. Biryuk hugged the earth and screamed but I could not bound forward nor
cry out to my sister. She had a weak heart and she must not be surprised. So I held myself, my throat swelled, and I felt hate rear and plunge in its cage
of ribs.
I WAS thirteen when my father first took me hunting. All through the summer of that year, I had tramped alone and unarmed the fields and forest around
our farm. Then one afternoon in late July my father told me I could use his shotgun.
Beyond the ipil grove, in a grass field we spotted a covey of brown pigeons. In the open, they kept springing to the air and gliding away every time we
were within range. But finally they dropped to the ground inside a wedge of guava trees. My father pressed my shoulder and I stopped. Then slowly, in a
half-crouch, we advanced. The breeze rose lightly; the grass scuffed against my bare legs. My father stopped again. He knelt down and held my hand.
“Wait for the birds to rise and then fire,” he whispered.
I pushed the safety lever of the rifle off and sighted along the barrel. The saddle of the stock felt greasy on my cheek. The gun was heavy and my arm
muscles twitched. My mouth was dry; I felt vaguely sick. I wanted to sit down.
“You forgot to spit,” my father said.
Father had told me that hunters always spat for luck before firing. I spat and I saw the breeze bend the ragged, glassy threads of spittle toward the birds.
“That’s good,” Father said.
“Can’t we throw a stone,” I whispered fiercely. “It’s taking them a long time.”
“No, you’ve to wait.”
Suddenly, a small dog yelping shrilly came tearing across the brooding plain of grass and small trees. It raced across the plain in long slewy swoops, on
outraged shanks that disappeared and flashed alternately in the light of the cloud-banked sun. One of the birds whistled and the covey dispersed like
seeds thrown in the wind. I fired and my body shook with the fierce momentary life of the rifle. I saw three pigeons flutter in a last convulsive effort to stay
afloat, then fall to the ground. The shot did not scare the dog. He came to us, sniffing cautiously. He circled around us until I snapped my fingers and
then he came me.
“Not bad,” my father said grinning. “Three birds with one tube.” I went to the brush to get the birds. The dog ambled after me. He found the birds for me.
The breast of one of the birds was torn. The bird had fallen on a spot where the earth was worn bare, and its blood was spread like a tiny, red rag. The
dog scraped the blood with his tongue. I picked up the birds and its warm, mangled flesh clung to the palm of my hand.
“You’re keen,” I said to the dog. “Here. Come here.” I offered him my bloody palm. He came to me and licked my palm clean.
I gave the birds to my father. “May I keep him, Father?” I said pointing to the dog. He put the birds in a leather bag which he carried strapped around his
waist.
Father looked at me a minute and then said: “Well, I’m not sure. That dog belongs to somebody.”
“May I keep him until his owner comes for him?” I pursued.
“He’d make a good pointer,” Father remarked. “But I would not like my son to be accused of dog-stealing.”
“Oh, no!” I said quickly. “I shall return him when the owner comes to claim him.”
“All right,” he said, “I hope that dog makes a hunter out of you.”
Biryuk and I became fast friends. Every afternoon after school we went to the field to chase quails or to the bank of the river which was fenced by tall,
blade-sharp reeds to flush snipes. Father was away most of the time but when he was home he hunted with us.
BIRYUK scampered off and my sister flung the stick at him. Then she turned about and she saw me.
“Eddie, come here,” she commanded. I approached with apprehension. Slowly, almost carefully, she reached over and twisted my ear.
“I don’t want to see that dog again in the house,” she said coldly. “That dog destroyed my slippers again. I’ll tell Berto to kill that dog if I see it around
again.” She clutched one side of my face with her hot, moist hand and shoved me, roughly. I tumbled to the ground. But I did not cry or protest. I had
passed that phase. Now, every word and gesture she hurled at me I caught and fed to my growing and restless hate.
MY sister was the meanest creature I knew. She was eight when I was born, the day my mother died. Although we continued to live in the same house,
she had gone, it seemed, to another country from where she looked at me with increasing annoyance and contempt.
One of my first solid memories was of standing before a grass hut. Its dirt floor was covered with white banana stalks, and there was a small box filled
with crushed and dismembered flowers in one corner. A doll was cradled in the box. It was my sister’s playhouse and I remembered she told me to keep
out of it. She was not around so I went in. The fresh banana hides were cold under my feet. The interior of the hut was rife with the sour smell of damp
dead grass. Against the flowers, the doll looked incredibly heavy. I picked it up. It was slight but it had hard, unflexing limbs. I tried to bend one of the
legs and it snapped. I stared with horror at the hollow tube that was the leg of the doll. Then I saw my sister coming. I hid the leg under one of the
banana pelts. She was running and I knew she was furious. The walls of the hut suddenly constricted me. I felt sick with a nameless pain. My sister
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snatched the doll from me and when she saw the torn leg she gasped. She pushed me hard and I crashed against the wall of the hut. The flimsy wall
collapsed over me. I heard my sister screaming; she denounced me in a high, wild voice and my body ached with fear. She seized one of the saplings
that held up the hut and hit me again and again until the flesh of my back and thighs sang with pain. Then suddenly my sister moaned; she stiffened, the
sapling fell from her hand and quietly, as though a sling were lowering her, she sank to the ground. Her eyes were wild as scud and on the edges of her
lips,. drawn tight over her teeth, quivered a wide lace of froth. I ran to the house yelling for Father.
She came back from the hospital in the city, pale and quiet and mean, drained, it seemed, of all emotions, she moved and acted with the keen,
perversity and deceptive dullness of a sheathed knife, concealing in her body that awful power for inspiring fear and pain and hate, not always with its
drawn blade but only with its fearful shape, defined by the sheath as her meanness was defined by her body.
Nothing I did ever pleased her. She destroyed willfully anything I liked. At first, I took it as a process of adaptation, a step of adjustment; I snatched and
crushed every seed of anger she planted in me, but later on I realized that it had become a habit with her. I did not say anything when she told Berto to
kill my monkey because it snickered at her one morning, while she was brushing her teeth. I did not say anything when she told Father that she did not
like my pigeon house because it stank and I had to give away my pigeons and Berto had to chop the house into kindling wood. I learned how to hold
myself because I knew we had to put up with her whims to keep her calm and quiet. But when she dumped my butterflies into a waste can and burned
them in the backyard, I realized that she was spiting me.
My butterflies never snickered at her and they did not smell. I kept them in an unused cabinet in the living room and unless she opened the drawers,
they were out of her sight. And she knew too that my butterfly collection had grown with me. But when I arrived home, one afternoon, from school, I
found my butterflies in a can, burned in their cotton beds like deckle. I wept and Father had to call my sister for an explanation. She stood straight and
calm before Father but my tear-logged eyes saw only her harsh and arrogant silhouette. She looked at me curiously but she did not say anything and
Father began gently to question her. She listened politely and when Father had stopped talking, she said without rush, heat or concern: “They were
attracting ants.”
I RAN after Biryuk. He had fled to the brambles. I ran after him, bugling his name. I found him under a low, shriveled bush. I called him and he only
whimpered. Then I saw that one of his eyes was bleeding. I sat on the ground and looked closer. The eye had been pierced. The stick of my sister had
stabbed the eye of my dog. I was stunned. ,For a long time I sat motionless, staring at Biryuk. Then I felt hate crouch; its paws dug hard into the floor of
its cage; it bunched muscles tensed; it held itself for a minute and then it sprang and the door of the cage crashed open and hate clawed wildly my brain.
I screamed. Biryuk, frightened, yelped and fled, rattling the dead bush that sheltered him. I did not run after him.
A large hawk wheeled gracefully above a group of birds. It flew in a tightening spiral above the birds.
On my way back to the house, I passed the woodshed. I saw Berto in the shade of a tree, splitting wood. He was splitting the wood he had stacked last
year. A mound of bone-white slats was piled near his chopping block When he saw me, he stopped and called me.
His head was drenched with sweat. He brushed away the sweat and hair from his eyes and said to me: “I’ve got something for you.”
He dropped his ax and walked into the woodshed. I followed him. Berto went to a corner of the shed. I saw a jute sack spread on the ground. Berto
stopped and picked up the sack.
“Look,” he said.
I approached. Pinned to the ground by a piece of wood, was a big centipede. Its malignantly red body twitched back and forth.
“It’s large,” I said.
“I found him under the stack I chopped.” Berto smiled happily; he looked at me with his muddy eyes.
“You know,” he said. “That son of a devil nearly frightened me to death”
I stiffened. “Did it, really?” I said trying to control my rising voice. Berto was still grinning and I felt hot all over.
“I didn’t expect to find any centipede here,” he said. “It nearly bit me. Who wouldn’t get shocked?” He bent and picked up a piece of wood.
“This wood was here,” he said and put down the block. “Then I picked it up, like this. And this centipede was coiled here. Right here. I nearly touched it
with my hand. What do you think you would feel?”
I did not answer. I squatted to look at the reptile. Its antennae quivered searching the tense afternoon air. I picked up a sliver of wood and prodded the
centipede. It uncoiled viciously. Its pinchers slashed at the tiny spear.
“I could carry it dead,” I said half-aloud.
“Yes,” Berto said. “I did not kill him because I knew you would like it.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“That’s bigger than the one you found last year, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s very much bigger.”
I stuck the sliver into the carapace of the centipede. It went through the flesh under the red armor; a whitish liquid oozed out. Then I made sure it was
dead by brushing its antennae. The centipede did not move. I wrapped it in a handkerchief.
My sister was enthroned in a large chair in the porch of the house. Her back was turned away from the door; she sat facing the window She was
embroidering a strip of white cloth. I went near, I stood behind her chair. She was not aware of my presence. I unwrapped the centipede. I threw it on her
lap.
My sister shrieked and the strip of white sheet flew off like an unhanded hawk. She shot up from her chair, turned around and she saw me but she
collapsed again to her chair clutching her breast, doubled up with pain The centipede had fallen to the floor.
“You did it,” she gasped. “You tried to kill me. You’ve health… life… you tried…” Her voice dragged off into a pain-stricken moan.
I was engulfed by a sudden feeling of pity and guilt.
“But it’s dead!” I cried kneeling before her. “It’s dead! Look! Look!” I snatched up the centipede and crushed its head between my fingers. “It’s dead!”
My sister did not move. I held the centipede before her like a hunter displaying the tail of a deer, save that the centipede felt thorny in my hand.
UNIT 4
PHILIPPINE SPECULATIVE FICTION
Chambers of the Sea

Edith L. Tiempo
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown. ----T.S Eliot
“Call your Tio Teban.” Amalia nodded at her youngest son. This is very inconsiderate of Teban, went her hurried flurried mind.
“Tell him we are waiting lunch for him.” Tony flushed with importance. He slid off his chair and ran toward the bathroom where Tio Teban had
haughtily locked himself in. The twins, Deena and Mario, were seated together on one side of the table; their identically turned-up noses were crinkled in
a superior way. The twins had unabashed eyes; very discomforting to people because of the too interested look in them. Their faces were quite alike, for
Page | 14
all that one was a girl and the other a boy. Just now they broke out in suppressed grins at the thought of Tio Teban’s grim and somewhat undignified
retreat an hour before.
Amalia and Miguel, and their oldest child Daniel, remained grave. Tony’s childish treble and his tapping on the bathroom door cut through the
continuous background of freely- flowing water from the faucet beyond the door and the defiant plop-plop of Tio Teban’s hands beating the soap and the
dirt out of his undershirts and drawers and handkerchiefs.
Whenever Tio Teban got indignant about something, he took to washing furiously his soiled undershirts and drawers and handkerchiefs. It
seemed as though the sight of his intimate wear blowing fresh and white on the clothesline in the yard washed his soul clean of resentment, too. “Tio
Teban! Tio Teban!” Tony’s knocks became frantic and his voice rose. The child sounded shrilly determined. Pak! Pak! went the hands behind the door.
The rhythm of the beating was broken. Then abruptly the silence was complete and almost weird. The faces at the table grew anxious. “Get away!”
The man tight hiss of Tio Teban swished out suddenly. Tony jumped as from a lash. His face as he ran back to the table was screwed up in
confusion and he blubbered on the edge of tears. “Never mind,” Amalia soothed her youngest. “ Tio Teban did not mean to frighten you.” Thus it was
minutes later when Miguel and Amalia had relaxed themselves and the children around the table. Daniel observed, then, “It was Deena and Mario.
Deena and Mario laughed when he slid coming up the back stairs with a port of rice.”
At this calm observation of his oldest brother, Tony looked at his parents expectantly. Deena and Mario were very studious with their food.
Miguel looked up his oldest child, at Daniel’s pimpled virtuous face. Sometimes Miguel’s firstborn irritated him; his voice, for one thing, was just starting
to settle and it cracked and squeaked like an uncertain saw. Miguel put down his fork slowly. A frown crowded his brows together. “Later, later,” Amalia
mumbled hastily. “Daniel!” she snapped, when the pimpled face stopped chewing to speak up once more. At his mother’s level look Daniel shrugged and
piously took up his spoon. Often Tio Teban had threatened to himself to leave the house and return to Bangan.
The children drove him frantic. Even after five years he could not get used to them. Entrenched in his own room, he thought with satisfaction
how the children might now be squirming with their guilt -----for he had refused to eat his lunch. Directly after hanging out the wash he had gone to his
room. And he was staying there. Amalia was a fool about her children. If they were his children he would know what to do with them.
Those twins, Deena and Mario, they would feel the edge of his tongue as well as the edge of his belt. And that self-righteous Daniel! -----He
would put him in his place, conceited squirt! He thought with choking resentment of the way he had deteriorated in this house. He, with an M.A in
Political Science, washing underwear! It was those misbegotten brats. He was both powerless and indignant at how the twins crept up on him when he
was most engrossed ------sometimes at the siesta hour when he was writing his letters to his numerous far-away friends or to relatives in Bangan,
sometimes at bedtime when he was reading Cervantes or Toynbee or Rizal------and suddenly how that peculiar feeling would hover in the air and ruffle
his composure hard-won through the hours of reading, and he would look up from the page to see the two bland round faces staring from around the
door.
Four solemn eyes round and black and avid for something Tio Teban hastily refused to define even to himself. At first the little monsters even
got into his room and made paper boats and planes out of letters in his desk drawers, tearing around the room with them, shrieking back and forth,
pummeling each other when they got excited. He kept a straight cold face throughout although inside he quaked with horror when their hands dived into
the drawers for his letters. He remembered the time he saw Daniel reading one of the sheets which the twins had made into a paper boat. It was one of
those he had failed to retrieve. The sly smirk on Daniel’s face as he looked him shamelessly in the eyes and handed him back the letter! Even until now
he shook inside to think of it. What right had that young lout to read what people wrote to him of their secret sleves, their private feeling divulged to him
in complete confidence.
What right had he to act amused like somebody superior! And was he exempt from pain and worry just because he was not a grown man yet?
But Tio Teban was triumphant about one thing. At least the twins were more careful, since the time he had snatched the letters from their hands and
shaken them till their heads wobbled on their necks. Now their vandalism was confirmed to the doorway. It was true it was disconcerting to have their
eyes on him and his book for minutes at a time. It even occurred to him they might just be wanting to romp with him-----what a thought!-----but all the
same he was he was glad he had frightened them out of his room.
With all these Tio Teban did not think he would ever go back to Bangan, even if his father asked him. And he knew the old man would not. The
old man could not forgive his only son for turning out to be so like him in looks but quite unlike him in ways. His father had only a distant contempt for
what to him was his son’s womanish disposition-----His flower garden of eighteen varieties of roses, his small framed watercolors which he gave away to
favorite relatives and friends, his strolls along the countryside, his perpetual reading until he had to get a pair of glasses and never quite got rid of that
forward bend of his head and the squint of his eyes as though he were always in a dazed scrutiny of people and objects. Gradually as the old man grew
physically less able, he threw the responsibilities of overseeing the rice land on his son-in-law, the husband of Tio Teban’s younger sister Mina.
Antero should have been his father’s son, Tio Teban thought in grim amusement. They were so alike in their relentless preoccupation with
fences and seedlings and ditches and patient sweating tenants. How he had come to live with his Cousin Amalia’s family he could tell to the last detail. It
had been deliberate from the time he first thought of leaving Bangan to the day he moved into this room. It was a pleasant room overlooking the orange
grove bordering the woods lot that had belonged to Miguel’s father and to his father before him. Why have I come here, Tio Teban had thought to
himself the first time he had taken possession of the room and looked out at the tops of the orange trees and at the woods beyond. Leaving my own
father’s land to live on another man’s, with another mans’ family.
But he had to get away from Bangan. His father’s remote contempt was no longer to be met with a thick face. There was that odd speculative
look, too, that lurked in his father’s eyes whenever he looked at him. And his older sister Quirina , a widow, was embittered at him for allowing Antero to
usurp his rightful place. “And what happens when Father dies? Antero and his children will get the land. A family bearing an entirely different name will
own the land! Even if my own son, had lived I would not have allowed him to meddle with the land---no, not as long as there is still one of us with the
name of Ferrer alive! Now there is Antero, with Father’s eyes still wide open, to say nothing of you----although you’d rather poke at your flowers and your
books----“ She made his engrossments sound indecent. It was oppressive. Unthinkable the way they expected him to canter around on horse and bury
himself in rice and rice and rice. All the same he could have stood it if he was sure it was only that-----only their selfish desire to gain possession of his
time, his life. But gradually he became aware of another kind of interest, even from his father----a surprised curiosity about him, a frank amazement,
almost prying, on the part of Quirina. What made up his mind was Quirina’s shameless question which even now he burned in embarrassment to recall.
His *
“And that reminds me,” she said before he could say anything, “the Edward leaves tomorrow for Manila.” She swept out of the room with the
fat handbag tucked under her arm, leaving Tio Teban to decipher the last cryptic remark. Pulling off his pajamas he remembered how her look had
darted out of the window and he decided she meant she must get the oranges plucked that day to be sent to her sister in Manila by the Edward in the
morning. She had been reminding herself about if for days. He shaved, only a little disturbed by the scrutiny of the open-mouthed Tony. After watering
Page | 15
the two ferns at his window he took his breakfast by himself in the kitchen. The other children were at school and Miguel had already gone to the bank.
For a while he heard the tap of Amalia’s heels downstairs and then he heard the gate shut as she went out. The house was quiet. This was the time of
the morning he could call all his own. He read, or he walked in the orchard or in the woods. Hemmed in there by ancient mangoes and guavas and
tamarinds he sometimes forgot the sea was just nearby, and especially on a day of high winds there was something incongruous to him in the roar of the
surf breaking through the walls of trees.
Usually he walked across the woods lot and out on a path heading toward a part of the beach where a fisherman’s shed leaned sideways in
the sun. The shed was strung up inside with nets and traps to be mended. He often stopped in the shed to watch the divers out at seas setting up a fish
trap or repairing the stakes of a corral that had been damaged by strong winds. “Would you like us to go the beach, Tony?” “Now?” “Yes.” As the boy’s
face lighted up he added, “Only don’t cry and say you are hungry or you want to swim or something. Remember now.” He had taken the twins to the
beach a number of times to watch the men come in from the sea. The bottom of their boats piled with gleaming andohao or adlo, the men swelled and
swaggered a little as they came ashore and titillated the haggling market retailers with their catch, Or he and the twins would wander off one afternoon to
a porting of the beach scattered over with salvage thrown up by waves. One time thy came upon a crowd staring fascinated at a whale flung up on the
shore. The twins quickly squirmed through the crowd but he had to wait nearly fifteen minutes before he could come close to see the huge mammal.
It was quite dead; perhaps, wounded fatally by some fisherman’s harpoon, it had evaded capture but was soon washed ashore dead. It was
the sea equivalent of a carabao. Think of that dark, thick skin, he observed to himself, that compact body, more animal than fish for its tremendous bulk.
When he and Tony reached the shed it was empty. All the men were out on the sea setting up a new fish corral. The boy wandered out of the
shed after a while and started to build mounds on the sand, and the early morning sun glinted on his hair as he bent over his work. Out on the sea the
naked men dived by turns from a baroto, and their skins, too, glinted in the sun. Their shouts came to Tio Teban, shouts full of glee and yet so far away.
His look went beyond the men to the white cumulus clouds piled above the horizon, and then worked back over the whole stretch of undulating sea.
Fishes and prawns and squids, he thought, lurked in the sea. Under the gently waving surface was active life. And the eyes of man could only steal brief
glances at that life. And somehow, looking at the traps and the naked diving men, he felt sad. There was a diver standing upright, straight and slim in the
baroto.
He dripped wet and glistened darkly in the sunlight. Tio Teban noticed the clean lines of his form, the hips that tapered to the quick legs, the
flashing brown arms. Like a supplicant the diver raised his arms stiffly, flexed his knees and plunged into the sea. The sea rose around him, receiving
him in a calyx of foam. On the sand Tony had built three creditable mounds. Coming home, he and Tony took the longer way skirting the woods lot.
Through his nonchalant enjoyment of the morning a mood of self-questioning sneaked in and would not be ignored. What am I doing here, playing
nursemaid to a boy not even mine? What am I making out of my days-----where are my garden and my painting? What had he done here but the
creditable mound of a Master of Arts to be swept away at the wash of a wave! Since he arrived from Bangan he had not painted a single watercolor nor
frown a single bloom. And a question even more disturbing------why am I not bothered by the loss of these occupations? What is wrong with me,
anyway, that I should have betrayed myself into mean domestic involvements? In all these years there was one thing that comforted him, though: he
was still essentially untrammeled; with Miguel and Amalia he could never be forced to do anything against his will.
Ultimately, it was still true that he could involve himself or not as he pleased. Always as he pleased. They were now in the orange grove.
Beside him Tony tugged at his hand for attention. “Tio Teban, Tio Teban! You will take me again to the beach, won’t you?” “I will see. That depends.”
That afternoon as Miguel was leaving the house for the office he was met at the gate by the telecommunications messenger. The telegram was
addressed to Esteban Ferrer and it came from Bangan. Miguel signed for it. As the messenger rode off on his bicycle, Miguel turned the paper over in
his hand. “Teban!” he called out, suddenly realizing it was almost two o’clock and he must be off. Tio Teban thrust an inquiring head out of the window.
He hurried out when he saw what it was.
In his room Tio Teban sat staring at the opened piece of blue paper. It was from Antero. The old man was dead. His father. Dead. . . . Quite
without reason he remembered the day his father had stopped under the tamarind tree where Tio Teban had been sitting for nearly an hour in front of his
easel. Why he should think of that incident he could not understand. Perhaps because his father was dead and that was one of the times the two of them
might have spoken, forgetting self and prejudice. He had been looking at the east corner of the rice field and trying to decide how to get the morning light
not harsh, and he was rapidly putting on the large strokes of the watercolor as his father came up.
He was hurrying, as the light on the east corner was quite what he wanted just then. He thought his father would pass him, and was uneasy
when he stopped and looked at the picture. The old man tipped the front brim of his balangot hat a little over his eyes to shut out the glare as he leaned
above the painting. For two or three minutes he stood like that, not saying anything, and all the time the painting grew swiftly under the sure, easy
strokes of the brush. The old man straightened backward, still looking at him.
The long eyes under the white brows were deep and long-lashed and just then had a puzzled squint. “I have only come from the municipio.
They asked if I would lead the Red Cross drive.” Tio Tean laughed. “You should never have bought the arm for that man.” His father said quickly, “No,
Teban. I told them I was too old. But I would ask you to do it.” A long line of yellow-gold streaked downward on the painting as his hand dropped to his
side. “What?” “Will you do it?” “Of course not,” he said irritably. “What did they say?” “What do you think?” The painting was spoiled now. He cleaned his
brushes and started putting them away.
His father turned and walked off. As Teban folded his chair he saw the old man’s figure on one end of the field to look at the east corner. . . .
Now his father was dead. Antero said that funeral was in a week’s time, as soon as Tio Teban arrived. He laid the telegram on the table, put on his
shoes and walked out of the house. He strayed through the orchard and out of the woods and was soon on the beach where he and Tony were this
morning. It was close to four o’clock and the shadows of the coconuts were slanted all around on the sand. The men were not diving now and the sea
was undisturbed by human voices.
But the voices in Tio Teban were far from still. He could already hear Quirina’s shrill tones demanding atrocious possibilities from him. Both
his sisters would expect him to take over, now that their father was dead. Was that it after all? He left the shed and walked along the shore toward a
large bend. On that side of the beach were a few huts of deep-sea fisherman, and high up on the sand where some vines had partly covered the ground
under the coconut trees, were five beached boats. Farther ahead he saw one boat that had come in. A group of people on the shore, about seven or
eight fisherman and their wives, were looking at the catch laid out on the sand. A couple of dark things, whale or porpoise, maybe, or some other sea
monsters. They were each about four or five feet long.
As he stood over the creatures lying side by side he saw with horror that they were truly monsters of the deep. Strange, terrifying, half-human.
Dark coarse hair sprouted from the heads and fell about their long horse-like faces. Slimy hair grew on the spots where human hair would grow. Their
bodies were a dark grey-brown, and the epithelium had a thick, rough, pore-ridden texture. Only the fin that formed the base of each figure was fish-like.
Were they perhaps man and wife? Or twins? He pushed off the horrible thought. As the waves washed over them, the long hair swayed and streamed
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out briefly and swayed again. He realized with another shock that these were mermaid and merman in the popular tales. But they must be beautiful and
graceful in the deep! He remembered the straight young diver he had seen that morning. He was sure these creatures were lovely in their home.
At the mouth of a cave a mother might nurse her young. She would lean there quietly while the lines of her form ripped and undulated with the
waves. Her hair would stream softly around her face and her fin would swish gently. Why could they not have been left to die in the sea? Who was to
delight in this ugly nakedness?
At least Tio Teban knew one thing for himself as he turned and walked rapidly away.
DEAD STARS
PAZ MARQUEZ BENITEZ
THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the
sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless
melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the
rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired
waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped away.
"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa,
do you remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the
beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not understand those months of a
great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the
dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that
others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up
his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love,
as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his
boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone
had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time
immemorial. In the meantime, he became very much engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it
will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future
fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.
"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has
been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize.
He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is
natural enough for a beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative
language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible
evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of
forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather
a poet with wayward humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.
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He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the
little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao
hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in
the Martinez yard.
Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks
ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--
One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor
with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old
man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through
a shrug and a smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In
the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence
that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's
sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young
lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.
To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I had once before."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.
"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my
name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"
He laughed with her.
"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake
without help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator
and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately
tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming
speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña Adela was of a different type
altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion
of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker,
of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them
beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go
out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking
with her and it was evident that she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course.
Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now he had not waited for
Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in
their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly
love another woman.
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That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was not free to give. He realized
that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to
her, the shadows around, enfolding.
"Up here I find--something--"
He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart
BONSAI
EDITH TIEMPO
All that I love

I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.
All that I love?

Why, yes, but for the moment-
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.
It’s utter sublimation,

A feat, this heart’s control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand’s size
Till seashells are broken pieces

From God’s own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.
UNIT 5
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WORLD HISTORY AND LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD LITERATURE
LITERATURE - is a body of work, either written, oral, or visual, containing imaginative language that realistically portrays thought, emotions, and
experiences of the human condition.
WORLD LITERATURE
It is considered in global context. It suggests to the sum of total world’s national literature and also the circulation of work into the
wider world beyond country’s origin.
PERIODS OF LITERATURE
PERIODS OF LITERATURE Famous Works Famous Authors
Old English Literature (450 – 1066) - Beowulf - Caedmon
- Also known as ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD - Cynewulf
- Most literatures are ORAL.
- Words have different spellings
- It has different grammar
Medieval Period (1066 AD – 1500) - The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

- Stories are about kings and noble people by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Focused on Chivalry, Romance & Religion
- Printing Press was invented by William Caxton (1476)
Renaissance Period (1500 – 1600) - William Shakespeare

- The Golden Age of Literature
- Famous for the drama and Theatre
- Stories are about Religion and Faith
Neoclassical Period (1600 - 1785)
- Also known as “ENLIGHTENMENT PERIOD”
- Stories about science and logic
- Detective stories
- Form of Essays are introduced
Romantic Period (1785 – 1830) - Dracula – Bram - Edgar Allan Poe
- Stories have Medieval period influential Stoker - Jane Austen
- Famous for Gothic writings and Horror stories - Pride & Prejudice, - Bronte Sisters
- Themes of the stories are nature and inner most emotions and Emma by Jane
Austen
Victorian Period (1832 – 1901) - Emily Dickinson
- Free verse poetry is introduced - Charles Dickens
- Novels are introduced - Robert and Elizabeth Barrett
- Prose Fiction is introduced Browning
- Children’s Literature is introduced
- Stories are about Revolution / Power / Social
Modern & Postmodern Period (1901 – Present)
- Experimentation of subject matter, style, and form of writing
After Twenty Years

by O. Henry
The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few. The time
was barely 10 o'clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with a taste of rain in them had well nigh depeopled the streets.
Trying doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and artful movements, turning now and then to cast his watchful eye adown the pacific
thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart form and slight swagger, made a fine picture of a guardian of the peace. The vicinity was one that kept early
hours. Now and then you might see the lights of a cigar store or of an all-night lunch counter; but the majority of the doors belonged to business places
that had long since been closed.
When about midway of a certain block the policeman suddenly slowed his walk. In the doorway of a darkened hardware store a man leaned, with an
unlighted cigar in his mouth. As the policeman walked up to him the man spoke up quickly.
"It's all right, officer," he said, reassuringly. "I'm just waiting for a friend. It's an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little funny to you, doesn't
it? Well, I'll explain if you'd like to make certain it's all straight. About that long ago there used to be a restaurant where this store stands--'Big Joe'
Brady's restaurant."
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"Until five years ago," said the policeman. "It was torn down then."
The man in the doorway struck a match and lit his cigar. The light showed a pale, square-jawed face with keen eyes, and a little white scar near his right
eyebrow. His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly set.
"Twenty years ago to-night," said the man, "I dined here at 'Big Joe' Brady's with Jimmy Wells, my best chum, and the finest chap in the world. He and I
were raised here in New York, just like two brothers, together. I was eighteen and Jimmy was twenty. The next morning I was to start for the West to
make my fortune. You couldn't have dragged Jimmy out of New York; he thought it was the only place on earth. Well, we agreed that night that we would
meet here again exactly twenty years from that date and time, no matter what our conditions might be or from what distance we might have to come. We
figured that in twenty years each of us ought to have our destiny worked out and our fortunes made, whatever they were going to be."
"It sounds pretty interesting," said the policeman. "Rather a long time between meets, though, it seems to me. Haven't you heard from your friend since
you left?"
"Well, yes, for a time we corresponded," said the other. "But after a year or two we lost track of each other. You see, the West is a pretty big proposition,
and I kept hustling around over it pretty lively. But I know Jimmy will meet me here if he's alive, for he always was the truest, stanchest old chap in the
world. He'll never forget. I came a thousand miles to stand in this door to-night, and it's worth it if my old partner turns up."
The waiting man pulled out a handsome watch, the lids of it set with small diamonds.
"Three minutes to ten," he announced. "It was exactly ten o'clock when we parted here at the restaurant door."
"Did pretty well out West, didn't you?" asked the policeman.
"You bet! I hope Jimmy has done half as well. He was a kind of plodder, though, good fellow as he was. I've had to compete with some of the sharpest
wits going to get my pile. A man gets in a groove in New York. It takes the West to put a razor-edge on him."
The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.
"I'll be on my way. Hope your friend comes around all right. Going to call time on him sharp?"
"I should say not!" said the other. "I'll give him half an hour at least. If Jimmy is alive on earth he'll be here by that time. So long, officer."
"Good-night, sir," said the policeman, passing on along his beat, trying doors as he went.
There was now a fine, cold drizzle falling, and the wind had risen from its uncertain puffs into a steady blow. The few foot passengers astir in that quarter
hurried dismally and silently along with coat collars turned high and pocketed hands. And in the door of the hardware store the man who had come a
thousand miles to fill an appointment, uncertain almost to absurdity, with the friend of his youth, smoked his cigar and waited.
About twenty minutes he waited, and then a tall man in a long overcoat, with collar turned up to his ears, hurried across from the opposite side of the
street. He went directly to the waiting man.
"Is that you, Bob?" he asked, doubtfully.
"Is that you, Jimmy Wells?" cried the man in the door.
"Bless my heart!" exclaimed the new arrival, grasping both the other's hands with his own. "It's Bob, sure as fate. I was certain I'd find you here if you
were still in existence. Well, well, well! --twenty years is a long time. The old gone, Bob; I wish it had lasted, so we could have had another dinner there.
How has the West treated you, old man?"
"Bully; it has given me everything I asked it for. You've changed lots, Jimmy. I never thought you were so tall by two or three inches."
"Oh, I grew a bit after I was twenty."
"Doing well in New York, Jimmy?"
"Moderately. I have a position in one of the city departments. Come on, Bob; we'll go around to a place I know of, and have a good long talk about old
times."
The two men started up the street, arm in arm. The man from the West, his egotism enlarged by success, was beginning to outline the history of his
career. The other, submerged in his overcoat, listened with interest.
At the corner stood a drug store, brilliant with electric lights. When they came into this glare each of them turned simultaneously to gaze upon the other's
face.
The man from the West stopped suddenly and released his arm.
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"You're not Jimmy Wells," he snapped. "Twenty years is a long time, but not long enough to change a man's nose from a Roman to a pug."
"It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one, said the tall man. "You've been under arrest for ten minutes, 'Silky' Bob. Chicago thinks you may
have dropped over our way and wires us she wants to have a chat with you. Going quietly, are you? That's sensible. Now, before we go on to the station
here's a note I was asked to hand you. You may read it here at the window. It's from Patrolman Wells."
The man from the West unfolded the little piece of paper handed him. His hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by the time he
had finished. The note was rather short.
"Bob: I was at the appointed place on time. When you struck the match to light your cigar I saw it was the face of the man wanted in Chicago. Somehow
I couldn't do it myself, so I went around and got a plain clothes man to do the job.
JIMMY."
A Letter to God
Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes
Translated by Donald A. Yates
The house – the only one in the entire valley – sat on the crest of a low hill. From this height one could se the river and, next to the corral, the field of ripe
corn dotted with the kidney bean flowers that always promised a good harvest.
The only thing the earth needed was a rainfall, or at least a shower. Throughout the morning Lencho – who knew his fields intimately – had done nothing
else but scan the sky toward the northeast.
“Now we’re really going to get some water, woman.”
The woman, who was preparing supper, replied: “Yes, God willing.”
The oldest boys were working in the field, while the smaller ones were playing near the house, until the woman called to them all: “Come for dinner…”
It was during the meal that, just as Lencho had predicted, big drips of rain began to fall. In the northeast huge mountains of clouds could be seen
approaching. The air was fresh and sweet.
The man went out to look for something in the corral for no other reason than to allow himself the pleasure of feeling the rain on his body, and when he
returned he exclaimed: “those aren’t raindrops falling from the sky, they’re new coins. The big drops are ten-centavo pieces and the little ones are
fives…”
With a satisfied expression he regarded the field of ripe corn with its kidney bean flowers, draped in a curtain of rain. But suddenly a strong wind began
to fall. These truly did resemble new silver coins. The boys, exposing themselves to the rain, ran out to collect the frozen pearls.
“It’s really getting bad now,” exclaimed the man, mortified. “I hope it passes quickly.”
It did not pass quickly. For an hour the hail rained on the house, the garden, the hillside, the cornfield, on the whole valley. The field was white, as if
covered with salt. Not a leaf remained on the trees. The corn was totally destroyed. The flowers were gone from the kidney bean plants. Lencho’s soul
was filled with sadness. When the storm had passed, he stood in the middle of the field and said to his sons: “A plague of locusts would have left more
than this… the hail has left nothing: this year we will have no corn or beans…”
That night was a sorrowful one: “All our work, for nothing!”
“There’s no one who can help us!”
But in the hears of all who lived in that solitary house in the middle of the valley, there was a single hope: help from God.
“Don’t be so upset, even though this seems like a total loss. Remember, no one dies of hunger!”
“That’s what they say: no one dies of hunger….”
All through the night, Lencho thought only of his one hoe: the help of God, whose eyes, as he had been instructed, see everything, even what is deep in
one’s conscience.
Lencho was an ox of a man, working like an animal in the fields, but still he knew how to write. The following Sunday, at day break, after having
convinced, himself that there is a protecting spirit he bgan to write a letter which he himself would carry to town and place in the mail.
It was nothing less than a letter to God.
“God,” he wrote, “if you don’t help me, my family and I will go hungry this year. I need a hundred pesos in order to resow the field and to live until the
crop comes, because the hailstorm…”
He wrote “To God” on the envelope, put the letter inside and, still troubled, went to town. At the post office he placed a stamp on the letter and dropped it
into the mailbox.
One of the employees, who was a postman and also helped at the post officer, went to his boss, laughing heartily and showed him the letter to God.
Never in his career as a postman had he known that address. The postmaster – a fat amiable fellow – also broke out laughing, but almost immediately
he turned serious and, tapping the letter on his desk, commented: “what faith! I wish I had the faith of the man who wrote this letter. To believe the way
he believes. To hope with the confidence that he knows how to hope with. Starting up a correspondence with God!”
So, in order not to disillusion that prodigy of faith, revealed by a letter that could not be delivered, the postmaster cmae up with an idea: answer the
letter. But when he opened it, it was evident that to answer it he needed something more than good will, ink and paper. But he stuck to his resolution: he
asked for money from his employee, he himself gave part of his salary, and several friends of his were obliged to give something “for an act of charity”.
It was impossible for him to gather together the hundred pesos requested by Lencho, so he was able to send the farmer only a little more than half. He
put the bills in an envelope addressed to Lencho and with them a letter containing only a signature:
GOD
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The following Sunday Lencho came a bit earlier than usual to ask if there was a letter for him. It was the postman himself who handed the letter to him,
while the postmaster, experiencing the contentment of a man who ahs performed a good deed, looked on from the doorway of his office.
Lencho showed not the slightest surprise on seeing the bills – such was his confidence – but he became angry when he counted the money. God could
not have made a mistake, nor could he have denied Lencho what he had requested!
Immediately, Lencho went up to the window to ask for paper and ink. On the public writing table, he started to write with much wrinkling of his brow,
caused by the effort he had to make to express his ideas. When he finished, he went to the window to buy a stamp, which he licked and then affixed to
the envelope with a blow of his fist.
The moment that the letter fell into the mailbox the postmaster went to open it. It said;
“God: Of the money that I asked for only seventy pesos reached me. Send me the rest, since I need it very much. But don’t send it to me through the
mail, because the post office employees are a bunch of crooks. Lencho.”
UNIT 6
REAL WORLD ISSUES
The Necklace
by Guy de Maupassant
The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had
no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved, married by any rich and distinguished man; so she let herself be married to a little
clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction.
She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was unhappy as if she had really fallen from a higher station; since with women there is
neither caste nor rank, for beauty, grace and charm take the place of family and birth. Natural ingenuity, instinct for what is elegant, a supple mind are
their sole hierarchy, and often make of women of the people the equals of the very greatest ladies.
Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries. She was distressed at the poverty of her dwelling, at the
bareness of the walls, at the shabby chairs, the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have
been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her despairing
regrets and bewildering dreams. She thought of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, illumined by tall bronze candelabra, and of two great
footmen in knee breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the oppressive heat of the stove. She thought of long reception halls hung
with ancient silk, of the dainty cabinets containing priceless curiosities and of the little coquettish perfumed reception rooms made for chatting at five
o'clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire.
When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth in use three days, opposite her husband, who uncovered the soup tureen
and declared with a delighted air, "Ah, the good soup! I don't know anything better than that," she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of
tapestry that peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest; and she thought of delicious dishes
served on marvellous plates and of the whispered gallantries to which you listen with a sphinxlike smile while you are eating the pink meat of a trout or
the wings of a quail.
She had no gowns, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that. She felt made for that. She would have liked so much to please, to be envied, to
be charming, to be sought after.
She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, who was rich, and whom she did not like to go to see any more because she felt so sad when she
came home.
But one evening her husband reached home with a triumphant air and holding a large envelope in his hand.
"There," said he, "there is something for you."
She tore the paper quickly and drew out a printed card which bore these words:
The Minister of Public Instruction and Madame Georges Ramponneau request the honor of M. and Madame Loisel's company at the palace of the
Ministry on Monday evening, January 18th.
Instead of being delighted, as her husband had hoped, she threw the invitation on the table crossly, muttering:
"What do you wish me to do with that?"
"Why, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had great trouble to get it. Every one wants to go; it
is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there."
She looked at him with an irritated glance and said impatiently:
"And what do you wish me to put on my back?"
He had not thought of that. He stammered:
"Why, the gown you go to the theatre in. It looks very well to me."
He stopped, distracted, seeing that his wife was weeping. Two great tears ran slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the corners of her mouth.
"What's the matter? What's the matter?" he answered.
By a violent effort she conquered her grief and replied in a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:
"Nothing. Only I have no gown, and, therefore, I can't go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I am."
He was in despair. He resumed:
"Come, let us see, Mathilde. How much would it cost, a suitable gown, which you could use on other occasions--something very simple?"
She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and wondering also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal
and a frightened exclamation from the economical clerk.
Finally she replied hesitating:
"I don't know exactly, but I think I could manage it with four hundred francs."
He grew a little pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of
Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks there of a Sunday.
But he said:
Page | 23
"Very well. I will give you four hundred francs. And try to have a pretty gown."
The day of the ball drew near and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy, anxious. Her frock was ready, however. Her husband said to her one evening:
"What is the matter? Come, you have seemed very queer these last three days."
And she answered:
"It annoys me not to have a single piece of jewelry, not a single ornament, nothing to put on. I shall look poverty-stricken. I would almost rather not go at
all."
"You might wear natural flowers," said her husband. "They're very stylish at this time of year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses."
She was not convinced.
"No; there's nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich."
"How stupid you are!" her husband cried. "Go look up your friend, Madame Forestier, and ask her to lend you some jewels. You're intimate enough with
her to do that."
She uttered a cry of joy:
"True! I never thought of it."
The next day she went to her friend and told her of her distress.
Madame Forestier went to a wardrobe with a mirror, took out a large jewel box, brought it back, opened it and said to Madame Loisel:
"Choose, my dear."
She saw first some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian gold cross set with precious stones, of admirable workmanship. She tried on the
ornaments before the mirror, hesitated and could not make up her mind to part with them, to give them back. She kept asking:
"Haven't you anymore?"
"Why, yes. Look further; I don't know what you like."
Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb diamond necklace, and her heart throbbed with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as
she took it. She fastened it round her throat, outside her high-necked waist, and was lost in ecstasy at her reflection in the mirror.
Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anxious doubt:
"Will you lend me this, only this?"
"Why, yes, certainly."
She threw her arms round her friend's neck, kissed her passionately, then fled with her treasure.
The night of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel was a great success. She was prettier than any other woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling and wild
with joy. All the men looked at her, asked her name, sought to be introduced. All the attaches of the Cabinet wished to waltz with her. She was remarked
by the minister himself.
She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of
happiness comprised of all this homage, admiration, these awakened desires and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman's heart.
She left the ball about four o'clock in the morning. Her husband had been sleeping since midnight in a little deserted anteroom with three other
gentlemen whose wives were enjoying the ball.
He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought, the modest wraps of common life, the poverty of which contrasted with the elegance of the ball
dress. She felt this and wished to escape so as not to be remarked by the other women, who were enveloping themselves in costly furs.
Loisel held her back, saying: "Wait a bit. You will catch cold outside. I will call a cab."
But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the stairs. When they reached the street they could not find a carriage and began to look for one,
shouting after the cabmen passing at a distance.
They went toward the Seine in despair, shivering with cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient night cabs which, as though they were
ashamed to show their shabbiness during the day, are never seen round Paris until after dark.
It took them to their dwelling in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they mounted the stairs to their flat. All was ended for her. As to him, he reflected that he
must be at the ministry at ten o'clock that morning.
She removed her wraps before the glass so as to see herself once more in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She no longer had the necklace
around her neck!
"What is the matter with you?" demanded her husband, already half undressed.
She turned distractedly toward him.
"I have--I have--I've lost Madame Forestier's necklace," she cried.
He stood up, bewildered.
"What!--how? Impossible!"
They looked among the folds of her skirt, of her cloak, in her pockets, everywhere, but did not find it.
"You're sure you had it on when you left the ball?" he asked.
"Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the minister's house."
"But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It must be in the cab."
"Yes, probably. Did you take his number?"
"No. And you--didn't you notice it?"
"No."
They looked, thunderstruck, at each other. At last Loisel put on his clothes.
"I shall go back on foot," said he, "over the whole route, to see whether I can find it."
He went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without any fire, without a thought.
Her husband returned about seven o'clock. He had found nothing.
He went to police headquarters, to the newspaper offices to offer a reward; he went to the cab companies--everywhere, in fact, whither he was urged by
the least spark of hope.
She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this terrible calamity.
Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face. He had discovered nothing.
"You must write to your friend," said he, "that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to turn
round."
Page | 24
She wrote at his dictation.
At the end of a week they had lost all hope. Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:
"We must consider how to replace that ornament."
The next day they took the box that had contained it and went to the jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.
"It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have furnished the case."
Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other, trying to recall it, both sick with chagrin and grief.
They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds that seemed to them exactly like the one they had lost. It was worth forty thousand
francs. They could have it for thirty-six.
So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand francs, in case
they should find the lost necklace before the end of February.
Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He would borrow the rest.
He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous obligations,
dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders. He compromised all the rest of his life, risked signing a note without even knowing whether he could meet
it; and, frightened by the trouble yet to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral
tortures that he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, laying upon the jeweler's counter thirty-six thousand francs.
When Madame Loisel took back the necklace Madame Forestier said to her with a chilly manner:
"You should have returned it sooner; I might have needed it."
She did not open the case, as her friend had so much feared. If she had detected the substitution, what would she have thought, what would she have
said? Would she not have taken Madame Loisel for a thief?
Thereafter Madame Loisel knew the horrible existence of the needy. She bore her part, however, with sudden heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid.
She would pay it. They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof.
She came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her dainty fingers and rosy nails on
greasy pots and pans. She washed the soiled linen, the shirts and the dishcloths, which she dried upon a line; she carried the slops down to the street
every morning and carried up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the
grocer, the butcher, a basket on her arm, bargaining, meeting with impertinence, defending her miserable money, sou by sou.
Every month they had to meet some notes, renew others, obtain more time.
Her husband worked evenings, making up a tradesman's accounts, and late at night he often copied manuscript for five sous a page.
This life lasted ten years.
At the end of ten years they had paid everything, everything, with the rates of usury and the accumulations of the compound interest.
Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households--strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew
and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down
near the window and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so admired.
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed
to make or ruin us!
But one Sunday, having gone to take a walk in the Champs Elysees to refresh herself after the labors of the week, she suddenly perceived a woman
who was leading a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming.
Madame Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it. Why not?
She went up.
"Good-day, Jeanne."
The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain good-wife, did not recognize her at all and stammered:
"But--madame!--I do not know---- You must have mistaken."
"No. I am Mathilde Loisel."
Her friend uttered a cry.
"Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!"
"Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great poverty--and that because of you!"
"Of me! How so?"
"Do you remember that diamond necklace you lent me to wear at the ministerial ball?"
"Yes. Well?"
"Well, I lost it."
"What do you mean? You brought it back."
"I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us ten years to pay for it. You can understand that it was not easy for us, for us who had
nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad."
Madame Forestier had stopped.
"You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?"
"Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very similar."
And she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous.
Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her hands.
"Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!"
The Parting
By Zona Gale
Bill was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four. Bill’s carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could keep his
home for Minna and himself. All day while he worked at his bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for a few hours, the
woman next door looked after her. Bill could cook a little, coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flapjacks, and he found bananas and sardines and
crackers useful. When the woman next door said it was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to cook oatmeal and vegetables, and
though he was always burned the dishes in which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day. He swept, all but corners, and he dusted, dabbing
Page | 25
at every object; and he complained that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see as well as he could before. He washed and patched Minna’s
little garments and mended her doll. He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn’t be lonely. At night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle
of the floor with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning. If she forgot the prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing in
the morning. He himself used to pray: “Lord, make me do right by her if you see me doing wrong.” On Sundays, he took her to church and listening with
his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving Minna peppermints when she rustled. He stopped work for a day and took her to the Sunday-
school picnic. “Her mother would of,” he explained. When Minna was old enough to go to kindergarten, Bill used to take her morning or afternoon, and
he would call for her. Once he dressed himself in his best clothes and went to visit the school. “I think her mother would of,” he told the teacher,
diffidently. But he could make little of the colored paper and the designs and the games, and he did not go again. “There’s something I can’t be any help
to her with,” he thought.
Minna was six when Bill fell ill. On a May afternoon, he went to a doctor. When he came home, he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing. The
sun was beaming through the window in bright squares. He was not going to get well. It might be that he had six months. … He could hear Minna
singing to her doll.
When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must never kiss her now. He held her arm’s length, looked in her eyes, said: Minna’s a
big girl now. She doesn’t want Papa to kiss her.” But her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went to another doctor to make
sure. The other doctor made him sure.
He tried to think what to do. He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was a tired woman. His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of many
words. And little Minna… there were things known to her which he himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs. He wished that he
could hear of somebody who would understand her. And he had only six months…
Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the child there, and him coughing as he was; and he knew that his decision was
already upon him.
One whole night he thought. Then he advertised in a city paper:
A man with a few months more to live would like nice people to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls. References required.
They came in limousine, as he had hoped that they would come. Their clothes were as he had hoped. They had with them a little girl who cried: “Is this
my little sister?” On which the woman in the smart frock said sharply:
“Now then, you do as mama tells you and keep out of this or we’ll leave you here and take this darling little girl with us.”
So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other plans for his little girl. He watched the great blue car roll away. “For the land sake!”
said the woman next door when she heard. “You done her out of fortune. You hadn’t the right—a man in your health.” And then the other cars came, and
he let them go, this woman told her husband that Bill ought to be reported to the authorities.
The man and woman who walked into Bill’s shop one morning were still mourning their own little girl. The woman was not sad—only sorrowful, and the
man, who was tender of her, was a carpenter. In blooming of his hope and his dread, Bill said to them: “You’re the ones.” When they asked: “How long
before we can have her?” Bill said: “One day more.”
That day he spent in the shop. It was summer and Minna was playing in the yard. He could hear the words of her songs. He cooked their supper and
while she ate, he watched. When he had tucked her in her bed, he stood in the dark hearing her breathing. “I’m a little girl tonight—kiss me,” she had
said, but he shook his head. “A big girl, a big girl,” he told her.
When they came for the next morning, he had her ready, washed and mended, and he had mended her doll. “Minna’s never been for a visit!” he told her
buoyantly. And when she ran toward him, “A big girl, a big girl,” he reminded her.
He stood and watched the man and woman walking down the street with Minna between them. They had brought her a little blue parasol in case the
parting should be hard. This parasol Minna held bobbing above her head, and she was so absorbed in looking up at the blue silk that she did not
remember to turn and wave her hand.
The Parable of the Lost Son
11
Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. 12
The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided
his property between them.
13
“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living.14 After he had
15
spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that
16
country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
17
“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18
I will set out
19
and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinnedagainst heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me
like one of your hired servants.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed
him.
21
“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
Page | 26
22
“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. 23
Bring the fattened
calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to
celebrate.
25
“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. 26
So he called one of the servants and asked
him what was going on. 27 ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
28
“The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these
years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But
when this son of yours who has squandered your propertywith prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
31
“‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32
But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of
yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
UNIT 7
WORLD IDENTITIES
The Great Decision
Fulton Oursler
Stella was dark and slim and young, and her flashing back eyes were full of questions, she was very eager about people and the world. One
Thanksgiving day, at a football game, she met Ralph. He was a student from John Hopkins University, a blonde, thoughtful, intellectual lad from the
Deep South. As the storybooks used to say, they fell madly in love, and in their courtship days, they were so happy that they almost afraid of such glory.
Often in the moonlight walks through the whispering groves of Thruid Hill Park, they swore to each other that nothing – nothing whatever
should part them.
Ralph, a medical student, came from an old colonial family, his father and his grandfather having been doctors before him. In spite of his
precise, logical way of reasoning everything out, he seemed to Stella the kindest, most romantic man she had ever known. I say man instead of youth,
because while Stella was nineteen, Ralph was nearly thirty. It never occurred to Stella to wonder why her fiancé was so late in reaching his graduation
year. They were too full of plans for their future to think of such details.
Within two months of their first meeting they decided to be married; the ceremony would be held right after he passed his state medical board
examinations. Then, one day, while they were waiting for the results, Stella had a visitor. Sitting stiffly in her living room, an elderly woman was waiting
for her, tears glittering like melting ice in her eyes. She was Ralph’s mother, and this is what she had come to say.
“I know you love her son. I am sure that you will be a good wife to him. And I’m certain your marriage will be a success. However, there is
something about Ralph that you have to know, and he is afraid to tell you. I have urged him tolet you know and he has refused. That is why he has
always off our meeting. Against his wishes, therefore, I considered it my duty to come and tell you myself, even though it may end everything.”
“My son spent three years of his life in mental asylum.”
“Oh, the doctors regard him as completely cure. They all feel his trouble will never return. But if you are going to be his wife, and that means
until death, you should go into marriage knowing the truth.”
What wasthe right thing to do? For days and nights Stella wrestled with her soul. When she thought of the long years ahead and of the
possibility of children, horrors thronged her mind. Even though it broke her own heart as well as his, her common sense told her she must break the
engagement and try to forget him. But another part of her pleaded for love.
In her heart, where she had treasured so much of eager devotion, there waited up a passionate rebuttal.
“At the altar you would promise to love him in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. You should do that even if this sad thing about
him were not true. Yet afterward he might be crippled in an accident, and then you would stand by him. Why not stand by him now? Take the chance for
him not against. If you love him, pray for better, but take him for better or worse.”
The other logical part of her relpied;
“If he had told you about himself, you might feel differently. How can you trust him?”
To which her heart replied: “He loved me so much he was afraid to risk tossing our happiness.”
The end of it was that Stella’s mind, her sensible arguments won over her hearts entreaties. The logical conclusion that the engagement be
broken, and so it was. Ralph left Baltimore and went to California. For a long time after his going, Stella was inconsolable. Indeed, ten years passed
before she was able to become interested in another man. That time did come, however, and in her young thirties, she became a wife of a lawyer in
Trenton, New Jersey.
Then, only a few years after her marriage, she awoke one night and found the bed beside her empty. She began searching through the house,
only to find her husband in the cellar, swinging an axe against the stone foundations of the house and screaming: “I am Samson and I am going to tear
down this place.”
Quite mad he was – and incurably so. Today he is ending his life in asylum.
After the commitment Stella took a long trip West. One night a small city in California, she came by chance, face to face with Ralph again. He
was the most distinguish surgeon in that whole region. With him were his wife, his son and his daughter – all sane all happy.
END
Of course, in making our decisions, we must use our brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts, which he also gave us – as part of
himself.
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THE LAST LEAF
O. HENRY
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These "places" make
strange angles and curves. One Street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with
a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics
and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a "colony."
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. "Johnsy" was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine; the other from
California. They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth Street "Delmonico's," and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so
congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there
with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow
and moss-grown "places."
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly
fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through
the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow.
"She has one chance in - let us say, ten," he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. " And that chance is for her to want to
live. This way people have of lining-u on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that
she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?"
"What is it, dear?" asked Sue.
"Six," said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. "They're falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count
them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now."
"Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie."
"Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?"
"Oh, I never heard of such nonsense," complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. "What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used
to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were - let's
see exactly what he said - he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the
street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy
port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self."
"You needn't get any more wine," said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. "There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves
just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go, too."
"Johnsy, dear," said Sue, bending over her, "will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working? I
must hand those drawings in by to-morrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down."
"Couldn't you draw in the other room?" asked Johnsy, coldly.
"I'd rather be here by you," said Sue. "Beside, I don't want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves."
"Tell me as soon as you have finished," said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as fallen statue, "because I want to see the last one
fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired
leaves."
"Try to sleep," said Sue. "I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move 'til I come back."
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down
from the head of a satyr along with the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough
to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted
nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony
who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old
man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio
above.
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Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been
waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed,
light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away, when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
"Vass!" he cried. "Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a
thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der brain of her? Ach, dot poor leetle
Miss Yohnsy."
"She is very ill and weak," said Sue, "and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do not care to
pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are a horrid old - old flibbertigibbet."
"You are just like a woman!" yelled Behrman. "Who said I will not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am
ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go away.
Gott! yes."
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there
they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling,
mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
"Pull it up; I want to see," she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy
leaf. It was the last one on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely
from the branch some twenty feet above the ground.
"It is the last one," said Johnsy. "I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time."
"Dear, dear!" said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, "think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?"
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy
seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of
the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
"I've been a bad girl, Sudie," said Johnsy. "Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You
may bring a me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and - no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me, and I
will sit up and watch you cook."
And hour later she said:
"Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples."
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.
"Even chances," said the doctor, taking Sue's thin, shaking hand in his. "With good nursing you'll win." And now I must see another case I have
downstairs. Behrman, his name is - some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope
for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable."
The next day the doctor said to Sue: "She's out of danger. You won. Nutrition and care now - that's all."
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And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm
around her, pillows and all.
"I have something to tell you, white mouse," she said. "Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor
found him the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn't
imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and
some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it, and - look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't
you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece - he painted it there the night that the last leaf
fell."
THE PARABLE OF THE COFFEE BEAN, CARROT AND EGG
A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and
wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved a new one arose.
Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water. In the first, she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and the last she
placed ground coffee beans.
She let them sit and boil without saying a word. In about twenty minute she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a
bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee into a bowl. Turning to her daughter, she asked, “Tell me what
you see?
“Carrots, eggs, and coffee,” she replied.
She brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. She then asked her to take an egg and break it. After
pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg. Finally, she asked her to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled, as she tasted its rich aroma.
The daughter then asked, “What’s the point, mother?”
Her mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity… boiling water – but each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong,
hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell
had protected its liquid interior. But, after being through the boiling water, its inside became hardened. The ground coffee beans were unique, however.
After they were in the boiling water they had changed the water.
“Which are you?” she asked the daughter. “When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?”
Think of this: Which am I?
Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?
Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after death, a break up, a financial hardship, or
some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff? Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and a
hardened heart?
Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases
the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you.
When the hours are the darkest and trials are their greatest do you elevate to another level?
How do you handle adversity?
GOD SEES THE THRUTH BUT WAITS

LEO TOLSTOY
In the town of Vladimir lived a young merchant named Ivan Dmitrich Aksionov. He had two shops and a house of his own.
Aksionov was a handsome, fair-haired, curly-headed fellow, full of fun, and very fond of singing. When quite a young man he had been given to drink,
and was riotous when he had had too much; but after he married he gave up drinking, except now and then.
One summer Aksionov was going to the Nizhny Fair, and as he bade good-bye to his family, his wife said to him, "Ivan Dmitrich, do not start to-day; I
have had a bad dream about you."
Aksionov laughed, and said, "You are afraid that when I get to the fair I shall go on a spree."
His wife replied: "I do not know what I am afraid of; all I know is that I had a bad dream. I dreamt you returned from the town, and when you took off your
cap I saw that your hair was quite grey."
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Aksionov laughed. "That's a lucky sign," said he. "See if I don't sell out all my goods, and bring you some presents from the fair."
So he said good-bye to his family, and drove away.
When he had travelled half-way, he met a merchant whom he knew, and they put up at the same inn for the night. They had some tea together, and then
went to bed in adjoining rooms.
It was not Aksionov's habit to sleep late, and, wishing to travel while it was still cool, he aroused his driver before dawn, and told him to put in the horses.
Then he made his way across to the landlord of the inn (who lived in a cottage at the back), paid his bill, and continued his journey.
When he had gone about twenty-five miles, he stopped for the horses to be fed. Aksionov rested awhile in the passage of the inn, then he stepped out
into the porch, and, ordering a samovar to be heated, got out his guitar and began to play.
Suddenly a troika drove up with tinkling bells and an official alighted, followed by two soldiers. He came to Aksionov and began to question him, asking
him who he was and whence he came. Aksionov answered him fully, and said, "Won't you have some tea with me?" But the official went on cross-
questioning him and asking him. "Where did you spend last night? Were you alone, or with a fellow-merchant? Did you see the other merchant this
morning? Why did you leave the inn before dawn?"
Aksionov wondered why he was asked all these questions, but he described all that had happened, and then added, "Why do you cross-question me as
if I were a thief or a robber? I am travelling on business of my own, and there is no need to question me."
Then the official, calling the soldiers, said, "I am the police-officer of this district, and I question you because the merchant with whom you spent last
night has been found with his throat cut. We must search your things."
They entered the house. The soldiers and the police-officer unstrapped Aksionov's luggage and searched it. Suddenly the officer drew a knife out of a
bag, crying, "Whose knife is this?"
Aksionov looked, and seeing a blood-stained knife taken from his bag, he was frightened.
"How is it there is blood on this knife?"
Aksionov tried to answer, but could hardly utter a word, and only stammered: "I--don't know--not mine." Then the police-officer said: "This morning the
merchant was found in bed with his throat cut. You are the only person who could have done it. The house was locked from inside, and no one else was
there. Here is this blood-stained knife in your bag and your face and manner betray you! Tell me how you killed him, and how much money you stole?"
Aksionov swore he had not done it; that he had not seen the merchant after they had had tea together; that he had no money except eight thousand
rubles of his own, and that the knife was not his. But his voice was broken, his face pale, and he trembled with fear as though he went guilty.
The police-officer ordered the soldiers to bind Aksionov and to put him in the cart. As they tied his feet together and flung him into the cart, Aksionov
crossed himself and wept. His money and goods were taken from him, and he was sent to the nearest town and imprisoned there. Enquiries as to his
character were made in Vladimir. The merchants and other inhabitants of that town said that in former days he used to drink and waste his time, but that
he was a good man. Then the trial came on: he was charged with murdering a merchant from Ryazan, and robbing him of twenty thousand rubles.
His wife was in despair, and did not know what to believe. Her children were all quite small; one was a baby at her breast. Taking them all with her, she
went to the town where her husband was in jail. At first she was not allowed to see him; but after much begging, she obtained permission from the
officials, and was taken to him. When she saw her husband in prison-dress and in chains, shut up with thieves and criminals, she fell down, and did not
come to her senses for a long time. Then she drew her children to her, and sat down near him. She told him of things at home, and asked about what
had happened to him. He told her all, and she asked, "What can we do now?"
"We must petition the Czar not to let an innocent man perish."
His wife told him that she had sent a petition to the Czar, but it had not been accepted.
Aksionov did not reply, but only looked downcast.
Then his wife said, "It was not for nothing I dreamt your hair had turned grey. You remember? You should not have started that day." And passing her
fingers through his hair, she said: "Vanya dearest, tell your wife the truth; was it not you who did it?"
"So you, too, suspect me!" said Aksionov, and, hiding his face in his hands, he began to weep. Then a soldier came to say that the wife and children
must go away; and Aksionov said good-bye to his family for the last time.
When they were gone, Aksionov recalled what had been said, and when he remembered that his wife also had suspected him, he said to himself, "It
seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him alone expect mercy."
And Aksionov wrote no more petitions; gave up all hope, and only prayed to God.
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Aksionov was condemned to be flogged and sent to the mines. So he was flogged with a knot, and when the wounds made by the knot were healed, he
was driven to Siberia with other convicts.
For twenty-six years Aksionov lived as a convict in Siberia. His hair turned white as snow, and his beard grew long, thin, and grey. All his mirth went; he
stooped; he walked slowly, spoke little, and never laughed, but he often prayed.
In prison Aksionov learnt to make boots, and earned a little money, with which he bought The Lives of the Saints. He read this book when there was light
enough in the prison; and on Sundays in the prison-church he read the lessons and sang in the choir; for his voice was still good.
The prison authorities liked Aksionov for his meekness, and his fellow-prisoners respected him: they called him "Grandfather," and "The Saint." When
they wanted to petition the prison authorities about anything, they always made Aksionov their spokesman, and when there were quarrels among the
prisoners they came to him to put things right, and to judge the matter.
No news reached Aksionov from his home, and he did not even know if his wife and children were still alive.
One day a fresh gang of convicts came to the prison. In the evening the old prisoners collected round the new ones and asked them what towns or
villages they came from, and what they were sentenced for. Among the rest Aksionov sat down near the newcomers, and listened with downcast air to
what was said.
One of the new convicts, a tall, strong man of sixty, with a closely-cropped grey beard, was telling the others what be had been arrested for.
"Well, friends," he said, "I only took a horse that was tied to a sledge, and I was arrested and accused of stealing. I said I had only taken it to get home
quicker, and had then let it go; besides, the driver was a personal friend of mine. So I said, 'It's all right.' 'No,' said they, 'you stole it.' But how or where I
stole it they could not say. I once really did something wrong, and ought by rights to have come here long ago, but that time I was not found out. Now I
have been sent here for nothing at all... Eh, but it's lies I'm telling you; I've been to Siberia before, but I did not stay long."
"Where are you from?" asked some one.
"From Vladimir. My family are of that town. My name is Makar, and they also call me Semyonich."
Aksionov raised his head and said: "Tell me, Semyonich, do you know anything of the merchants Aksionov of Vladimir? Are they still alive?"
"Know them? Of course I do. The Aksionovs are rich, though their father is in Siberia: a sinner like ourselves, it seems! As for you, Gran'dad, how did
you come here?"
Aksionov did not like to speak of his misfortune. He only sighed, and said, "For my sins I have been in prison these twenty-six years."
"What sins?" asked Makar Semyonich.
But Aksionov only said, "Well, well--I must have deserved it!" He would have said no more, but his companions told the newcomers how Aksionov came
to be in Siberia; how some one had killed a merchant, and had put the knife among Aksionov's things, and Aksionov had been unjustly condemned.
When Makar Semyonich heard this, he looked at Aksionov, slapped his own knee, and exclaimed, "Well, this is wonderful! Really wonderful! But how old
you've grown, Gran'dad!"
The others asked him why he was so surprised, and where he had seen Aksionov before; but Makar Semyonich did not reply. He only said: "It's
wonderful that we should meet here, lads!"
These words made Aksionov wonder whether this man knew who had killed the merchant; so he said, "Perhaps, Semyonich, you have heard of that
affair, or maybe you've seen me before?"
"How could I help hearing? The world's full of rumours. But it's a long time ago, and I've forgotten what I heard."
"Perhaps you heard who killed the merchant?" asked Aksionov.
Makar Semyonich laughed, and replied: "It must have been him in whose bag the knife was found! If some one else hid the knife there, 'He's not a thief
till he's caught,' as the saying is. How could any one put a knife into your bag while it was under your head? It would surely have woke you up."
When Aksionov heard these words, he felt sure this was the man who had killed the merchant. He rose and went away. All that night Aksionov lay
awake. He felt terribly unhappy, and all sorts of images rose in his mind. There was the image of his wife as she was when he parted from her to go to
the fair. He saw her as if she were present; her face and her eyes rose before him; he heard her speak and laugh. Then he saw his children, quite little,
as they: were at that time: one with a little cloak on, another at his mother's breast. And then he remembered himself as he used to be-young and merry.
He remembered how he sat playing the guitar in the porch of the inn where he was arrested, and how free from care he had been. He saw, in his mind,
the place where he was flogged, the executioner, and the people standing around; the chains, the convicts, all the twenty-six years of his prison life, and
his premature old age. The thought of it all made him so wretched that he was ready to kill himself.
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"And it's all that villain's doing!" thought Aksionov. And his anger was so great against Makar Semyonich that he longed for vengeance, even if he
himself should perish for it. He kept repeating prayers all night, but could get no peace. During the day he did not go near Makar Semyonich, nor even
look at him.
A fortnight passed in this way. Aksionov could not sleep at night, and was so miserable that he did not know what to do.
One night as he was walking about the prison he noticed some earth that came rolling out from under one of the shelves on which the prisoners slept.
He stopped to see what it was. Suddenly Makar Semyonich crept out from under the shelf, and looked up at Aksionov with frightened face. Aksionov
tried to pass without looking at him, but Makar seized his hand and told him that he had dug a hole under the wall, getting rid of the earth by putting it
into his high-boots, and emptying it out every day on the road when the prisoners were driven to their work.
"Just you keep quiet, old man, and you shall get out too. If you blab, they'll flog the life out of me, but I will kill you first."
Aksionov trembled with anger as he looked at his enemy. He drew his hand away, saying, "I have no wish to escape, and you have no need to kill me;
you killed me long ago! As to telling of you--I may do so or not, as God shall direct."
Next day, when the convicts were led out to work, the convoy soldiers noticed that one or other of the prisoners emptied some earth out of his boots.
The prison was searched and the tunnel found. The Governor came and questioned all the prisoners to find out who had dug the hole. They all denied
any knowledge of it. Those who knew would not betray Makar Semyonich, knowing he would be flogged almost to death. At last the Governor turned to
Aksionov whom he knew to be a just man, and said:
"You are a truthful old man; tell me, before God, who dug the hole?"
Makar Semyonich stood as if he were quite unconcerned, looking at the Governor and not so much as glancing at Aksionov. Aksionov's lips and hands
trembled, and for a long time he could not utter a word. He thought, "Why should I screen him who ruined my life? Let him pay for what I have suffered.
But if I tell, they will probably flog the life out of him, and maybe I suspect him wrongly. And, after all, what good would it be to me?"
"Well, old man," repeated the Governor, "tell me the truth: who has been digging under the wall?"
Aksionov glanced at Makar Semyonich, and said, "I cannot say, your honour. It is not God's will that I should tell! Do what you like with me; I am your
hands."
However much the Governor! tried, Aksionov would say no more, and so the matter had to be left.
That night, when Aksionov was lying on his bed and just beginning to doze, some one came quietly and sat down on his bed. He peered through the
darkness and recognised Makar.
"What more do you want of me?" asked Aksionov. "Why have you come here?"
Makar Semyonich was silent. So Aksionov sat up and said, "What do you want? Go away, or I will call the guard!"
Makar Semyonich bent close over Aksionov, and whispered, "Ivan Dmitrich, forgive me!"
"What for?" asked Aksionov.
"It was I who killed the merchant and hid the knife among your things. I meant to kill you too, but I heard a noise outside, so I hid the knife in your bag
and escaped out of the window."
Aksionov was silent, and did not know what to say. Makar Semyonich slid off the bed-shelf and knelt upon the ground. "Ivan Dmitrich," said he, "forgive
me! For the love of God, forgive me! I will confess that it was I who killed the merchant, and you will be released and can go to your home."
"It is easy for you to talk," said Aksionov, "but I have suffered for you these twenty-six years. Where could I go to now?... My wife is dead, and my
children have forgotten me. I have nowhere to go..."
Makar Semyonich did not rise, but beat his head on the floor. "Ivan Dmitrich, forgive me!" he cried. "When they flogged me with the knot it was not so
hard to bear as it is to see you now ... yet you had pity on me, and did not tell. For Christ's sake forgive me, wretch that I am!" And he began to sob.
When Aksionov heard him sobbing he, too, began to weep. "God will forgive you!" said he. "Maybe I am a hundred times worse than you." And at these
words his heart grew light, and the longing for home left him. He no longer had any desire to leave the prison, but only hoped for his last hour to come.
In spite of what Aksionov had said, Makar Semyonich confessed, his guilt. But when the order for his release came, Aksionov was already dead.
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UNIT 8
SPECULATIVE FICTION
THE MAN WITH A HOE
EDWIN MARKHAM
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God
After the silence of the centuries?
SEVEN AGES OF MAN
WILLAIM SHAKESPEARE
All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Page | 34
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav’d, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
A MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME (1979)

CRAIG RAINE
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings

and some are treasured for their markings –
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside –
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Page | 35
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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21ST CENT LIT Lessons 1

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21St CENTURY LITEARTURE FROM THE

PHILIPPINES AND THE WORLD

UNIT 1: PHILIPPINE HISTORY AND LITEARTURE

Land of the morning,

Ne’er shall invaders

And his mother: “Dodong…”

Dodong whom life had made ugly.

The Lake of Ice

May Day Eve

She did not answer him.

"You know it Lumnay, don't you?" he repeated.

"Yes, I know," she said weakly.

"I have no use for any field," she said.

"You know that I cannot."

"Then you'll always be fruitless."

"I'll go back to my father, I'll die."

She was silent.

"I am not in hurry."

"The elders will scold you. You had better go."

"Not until you tell me that it is all right with you."

"It is all right with me."

"I know," she said.

He went to the door.

it isn't the kind of illness

Chambers of the Sea

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"In love? With whom?"

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

He laughed with her.

"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."

"Up here I find--something--"

"No; youth--its spirit--"

"Are you so old?"

"And heart's desire."

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart

All that I love

All that I love?

It’s utter sublimation,

Till seashells are broken pieces

Medieval Period (1066 AD – 1500) - The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

Renaissance Period (1500 – 1600) - William Shakespeare

After Twenty Years

The policeman twirled his club and took a step or two.

"Is that you, Bob?" he asked, doubtfully.

"Oh, I grew a bit after I was twenty."

"Doing well in New York, Jimmy?"

The Parable of the Lost Son

his property between them.

"What is it, dear?" asked Sue.

"Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie."

"Couldn't you draw in the other room?" asked Johnsy, coldly.

"Pull it up; I want to see," she ordered, in a whisper.

Wearily Sue obeyed.

The ivy leaf was still there.

And hour later she said:

"Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples."

THE PARABLE OF THE COFFEE BEAN, CARROT AND EGG

“Carrots, eggs, and coffee,” she replied.

The daughter then asked, “What’s the point, mother?”

Think of this: Which am I?

How do you handle adversity?