Short stories:
- “Sings and Symbols” by Vladimir
Nabokov.
- “The Rocking Horse Winner” by
D.H Lawrence.
The Cut-Up story:
The
Son
At the time of his birth they
had been married already for a long time; a score of years had elapsed, and now
they were quite old. She
married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she
felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. There they waited again; and
instead of their boy shuffling into the room as he usually did (his poor face
blotched with acne, ill-shaven, sullen, and confused), a nurse they knew, and
did not care for, appeared at last and
brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all
right, she said, but a visit might disturb him. Although they lived in style, they felt
always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The mother had a
small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the
social position which they had to keep up. The father went into town to some
office. But though he had good prospects, these prospects never materialised.
There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style
was always kept up. And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase:
There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it
all the time though nobody said it aloud. In silence he sat down on the steps and in
silence rose when some ten minutes later she came, heavily trudging upstairs,
wanly smiling,shaking her head in deprecation of her
silliness.
This, and much more, she
accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after
another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. She
thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her
husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some
unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the
world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or
transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in
unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and
helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers
in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches. The boy saw she did not believe him; or
rather, that she paid no attention to his assertion. This angered him
somewhere, and made him want to compel her attention. But he became a partner.
And when the Leger was coming on Paul was 'sure' about Lively Spark, which was
a quite inconsiderable horse. The boy insisted on putting a thousand on the
horse, Bassett went for five hundred, and Oscar Cresswell two hundred. Lively
Spark came in first, and the betting had been ten to one against him. Paul had
made ten thousand. "But what are you going to do with your money?"
asked the uncle.
"Of course," said the
boy, "I started it for mother. She said she had no luck, because father is
unlucky, so I thought if I was lucky, it might stop whispering."
"What might stop
whispering?"
"Our house. I hate our house
for whispering."
So Uncle Oscar signed the
agreement, and Paul's mother touched the whole five thousand. Then something
very curious happened. The voices in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus
of frogs on a spring evening. There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had
a tutor. He was really going to Eton, his father's school, in the following
autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul's
mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of
mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions,
simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: "There must be more
money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w - there must
be more money! - more than ever! More than ever!"
"No doctors, no
doctors," he moaned, "To the devil with doctors! We must get him out
of there quick. Otherwise we'll be responsible. Responsible!" he repeated
and hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping
his forehead with his clenched fist. He smiled a quick smile and immediately
resumed his excited monologue. They would fetch him as soon as it was day.
Knives would have to be kept in a locked drawer. Even at his worst he presented
no danger to other people.
The Derby was drawing near, and
the boy grew more and more tense. He hardly heard what was spoken to him, he
was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny. His mother had sudden strange
seizures of uneasiness about him. Sometimes, for half an hour, she would feel a
sudden anxiety about him that was almost anguish. She wanted to rush to him at
once, and know he was safe. Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw
her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse. The blaze of
light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she
stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway. The
third day of the illness was critical: they were waiting for a change. The boy,
with his rather long, curly hair, was tossing ceaselessly on the pillow. He
neither slept nor regained consciousness, and his eyes were like blue stones.
His mother sat, feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone.
They sat down to their
unexpected festive midnight tea. The birthday present stood on the table. He sipped
noisily; his face was flushed; every now and then he imparted a circular motion
to his raised glass so as to make the sugar dissolve more thoroughly . The vein
on the side of his bald head where there was a large birthmark stood out
conspicuously and, although he had shaved that morning, a silvery bristle
showed on his chin. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his
spectacles and re-examined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little
jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled
out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to
crab apple, when the telephone rang again.
"I never told you, mother,
that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I'm absolutely sure - oh,
absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!"
"No, you never did,"
said his mother.
But the boy died in the night.
And even as he lay dead, his
mother heard her brother's voice saying to her, "My God, Hester, you're
eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But,
poor devil, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse
to find a winner."
