“A Day’s Wait” by Ernest Hemingway

TEXT

He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.

‘What’s the matter, Schatz?’

‘I’ve got a headache.’

‘You better go back to bed.’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘You go to bed. I’ll see you when I’m dressed.’

But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years. When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.

‘You go up to bed,’ I said, ‘you’re sick.’

‘I’m all right,’ he said.

When the doctor came he took the boy’s temperature. ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘One hundred and two.’

Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.

Back in the room I wrote the boy’s temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.

‘Do you want me to read to you?’

‘All right. If you want to,’ said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.

I read aloud from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.

‘How do you feel, Schatz ?’  I asked him.

‘Just the same, so far,’ he said.

I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.

‘Why don’t you try to go to sleep? I’ll wake you up for the medicine.’

‘I’d rather stay awake.’

After a while he said to me, ‘You don’t have to stay here with me, Papa, if it bothers you.’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘No, I mean you don’t have to stay if it’s going to bother you.’

I thought perhaps he was a little light-headed and after giving him the prescribed capsule at eleven o’clock I went out for a while.

It was a bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice. I took the young Irish setter for a little walk up the road and along a frozen creek, but it was difficult to stand or walk on the glassy surface and the red dog slipped and slithered and fell twice, hard, once dropping my gun and having it slide over the ice.

We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the bank. Some of the covey lit the trees, but most of them scattered into brush piles and it was necessary to jump on the ice-coated mounds of brush several times before they would flush. Coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.

At the house they said the boy had refused to let anyone come into the room.

‘You can’t come in,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t get what I have.’

I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed.

I took his temperature.

‘What is it?’

‘Something like a hundred,’ I said. It was one hundred and two and four tenth.

‘It was a hundred and two,’ he said.

‘Who said so?’

‘The doctor.’

‘Your temperature is all right,’ I said. It’s nothing to worry about.’

‘I don’t worry,’ he said, ‘but I can’t keep from thinking.’

‘Don’t think,’ I said. ‘Just take it easy.’

‘I’m taking it easy,’ he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.

‘Take this with water.’

‘Do you think it will do any good?’

‘Of course it will.’

I sat down and opened the Pirate book and commenced to read, but I could see he was not following, so I stopped.

‘About what time do you think I’m going to die?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘About how long will it be before I die?’

‘You aren’t going to die. What’s the matter with you?’

Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two.’

‘People don’t die with a fever of one hundred and two. That’s a silly way to talk.’

‘I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can’t live with forty-four degrees. I’ve got a hundred and two.’

He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o’clock in the morning.

‘You poor Schatz,’ I said. ‘Poor old Schatz. It’s like miles and kilometers. You aren’t going to die. That’s a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal. On this kind it’s ninety-eight.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s like miles and kilometers. You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy in the car?’

‘Oh,’ he said.

But his gaze at the foot of his bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no  importance.

 

READER'S QUIZ

Some of these statements are true (T) , and some are false (F), Can you tell which are true and why the others are not?

( ) 1, The time of day was early in the morning at the beginning of the story.

( ) 2, The boy pretended to be listening attentively while his father was reading to him.

( ) 3. The boy preferred to stay awake because he thought there wouldn't be too much time left for him.

( ) 4, The father did not realize what the boy was really thinking about and went out hunting in the woods.

( ) 5, The author described the hunting scene for the reason that it diverts the reader's attention so that the boy's real thoughts will be a greater surprise when they are revealed.

( ) 6, The child kept tight control over himself throughout the day because he thought he was going to die and he must show courage in the face of death .

( ) 7, The boy refused to let anyone come into the room because he complained that they did not understand his terrible tension inside.

( ) 8 .What led the boy to think that he was going to die was that he mistook the Fahrenheit scale for the Celsius one.

( ) 9. The father made an analogy between the difference of two thermometers and that of miles and kilometers.

( ) 10. The next day the boy cried easily at trifling matters. The reason for this is probably that as a spoiled boy, he often complained about unimportant things.

 

VOCABULARY.

A. Use each of the following terms in a sentence.

1, to bring down

2, to keep from

3, to prescribe

4, would rather

5, to flush

6, to bother

7, to be detached from

8, to make

9, something like

10, to hold tight onto onself

B. Read the text below.. Use the word in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the space in the same line. There is an example at the beginning.

 

 

The Death Clock

There was a section related to death during the first full cast rehearsal on April 18. Director asked the actors to write an obituary and invent the date of death, the way of death and who writes the obituary. After they finished writing it , they were asked to use the obituary and create a short performance. I was sitting aside, watching and observing all the 14 different (1) ____ of death. And yet, I was impressed by the actors'(2) ____ way of dealing with death: sadness, humorous, silence, narrative, surprising and (3) ____ .

A few days later after the rehearsal, in a sharing thought section of another weekday rehearsal, one of the casts said that she was so scary writing her own obituary and she kept asking herself: "Why am I writing this ? What am I writing? " I understood this kind of death phobia.

What we are unable to understand worries us, and this fears us. We fear because we are not familiar with it like the sun rising and setting. We are afraid because we are (4) ____ to determine and control it like we drive the car. This is why death scares us--we know nothing about what happens before the (5) _____ of our life and what  happens after we die. What we know is : we are born, we grow , we die, and we must die.

Death is one of the(6) _____companions of all of us. death has accompanied me  since I was  born. I first learned the word death, in Mandarin when I was in standard two. si-wang,(7)_____ the end of a life. When I started my newspaper reading habit, I was educated by the newspaper reports that we were born in the same way but we will die in various ways: murder, accident, illness, disaster, war, terrorism attack and many (8) _____ ways. The only similarity is: we are all certificated when we are born and when we die, and we are recognized by a certification of birth and death. We have to admit the reality of "Everything that has a beginning has an end" , as the Oracle of The Matrix 3 says.

 

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION & APPRECIATION

1,  In whose point of view is the story told?

2, What is the purpose of the author in writing about the doctor's visit?

3, What conclusion can you draw from the hunting scene about the father's character and his influence upon his son?

4, What does the title of the story probably mean?

5, what is the theme of the story?

6, Hemingway often thought of courage as a person's ability to be calm and controlled in the face of death. What do you think of such a definition of courage ?

7. Hemingway is noted  for writing short, simple sentences, Look at the text closely and decide whether this is true of the language in this story.

8. The story is built around the misunderstanding between the father and his little son. Can you find some examples in which the father and his son are each thinking of different things in the conversations?

SPEED READING

Attitude is Everything

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a  good mood and always had something positive to say . When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, " If I were any better, I would be twins ! "

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude . He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day  I went up to Jerry and asked him, " I don't get it !  You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do yo do it? " Jerry replied, " Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ' Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood .' I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or i can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it,  Every time someone coms to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life."

"Yeah, right, it's not that easy. " I protested.

"Yes it is." Jerry said. "Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk. every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations . You choose how people will affect you mood. You chose to be a good mood or bad mood . The bottom line: It's your choice how you live life ."

I reflected on what Jerry said. Soon thereafter. I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when i made  a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later. I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business : he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe , his hand , shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination, The robbers panicked and shot him.

Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care. Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When i asked him how he was, he replied, "If I were any better, I'd be twins, Wanna see my scars?"

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place.

"The first thing that went through my mind was that i should have locked the back door," Jerry replied . "Then, as i lay on the floor, I remembered that i had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live."

"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness? " I asked .

Jerry continued. "The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes. I read, 'He's a dead man.' I knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me," said Jerry." She asked if I was allergic to anything.'Yes,' I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Bullets!' Over their laughter, I told them, ' I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead .'"

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully.

Attitude,, after all, is everything.

 

Comprehension Exercises.

1, Decide the answer that best completes the following statements according to the information provided in the text.

1, Jerry was a motivator by nature, because of ____

[a], his positive attitude towards life.
[b], his good personality
[c], his sense of humor
[d], his tolerance with his employees

2, According to Jerry, life is all about choices. By saying this, he meant that _____

[a], every situation is a choice.
[b], people choose how they react to situations
[c], people choose how others will affect their mood
[d], it's your choice how you live life.

3, The first thing that went through Jerry's mind when the robbery took place was that _______

[a], he lay on the floor and remembered his famous choices.
[b], a restaurant manager should have never opened his back door
[c], he should not have forgotten to lock the back door
[d], he was shot because of his nervousness.

4, In the emergency room, Jerry was scared because ______.

[a], he  was at a loss as to what choice he should make: to live or to die.
[b], the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses told him he was dying.
[c], the doctors and nurse stopped operating on him
[d], the doctors and nurse were operating as if he were dead

5, The title of this passage is intended to convey the message that ____.

[a], we always have two choices to make every morning
[b], we have to make the choice of how to live fully every day .
[c], it is your attitude that leads you to the right choice of life.
[d], how you live life is the choice you have to embrace all the time.

II,  Decide whether the following statements are true (T) or false (F) according to the information given in the text.

(    ) 1, Jerry always pointed out the positive side of life if someone came to him complaining.
(    ) 2, According to the narrator, Jerry was a positive person all the time.
(    ) 3, When the nurse asked Jerry if he was allergic to anything , Jerry was still in a good mood and kept a sense of humor.
(    ) 4, Jerry survived not only because of the skills of his doctors , but also of his amazing attitude.
(    ) 5, Jerry's life philosophy is based on the belief that everything starts with the right attitude.