SUMMARY
The story starts with a conversation between a
journalist and the narrator. They are in a theatre watching a show. On the stage,
there is a man playing the violin. The journalist tells our narrator he had to
write a humorous column about the violin player, but his story was so sad that
he only could be able to write a tragedy.
But after hearing the story, our narrator disagreed
and said he could make a funny tale of it. And here you go:
Frank Barry and John Delaney were bosom friends. They
both were in love with the same woman, a girl of 18 called Helen. But as Helen
only loved Frank, she got married to him and John was just the best man.
However, after the wedding ceremony, when the happy couple were on the point of
going on their honeymoon, John ran to see Helen while she was alone in her room
to declare his passionate love for her, entreating her to run away with him and
forget her husband. But Helen didn’t think at all about forgetting her husband
and rejected Frank outright. John, desperate, apologized and said he would
disappear into exotic countries to try to make up for his disappointment.
But casually, Frank saw John kissing Helen’s hand to
say goodbye forever and thought his just married wife was having an affair with
his best friend. Frank, desperate, run away from Helen’s home and never came
back.
Twenty years passed by without any news from Frank or
John. Helen Barry was now the owner of her mother’s shop and lived alone. She
was 38, but her beauty never had faded. She got proposals, but her answer was
always, “I’m a married woman.”
However, the business didn’t go so well as before, and
she had to rent two rooms of her house.
She didn’t have to wait long for tenants. One of them was a violin player called Ramonti who was looking for a quieter place to live in,
and Helen’s house was perfect for his ears.
After a time, another tenant came. This man was very
chatty and told Helen a lot of stories and showed certain admiration for the
landlady. Helen thought that he could be her lost husband, but she didn’t want to
betray herself so early: he wanted to punish him a little for his long absence.
But one evening, Ramonti stated his love for Helen. He
was a quiet and friendly man, but he had amnesia: he didn’t know exactly who
was and what was his previous life because he had had an accident and had lost all
his old memories. He only knew how to play the violin and that he loved her
devotedly.
Helen felt joyous again, as when she was young. Still,
she rejected him with the old sentence “I’m a married woman”, and he had to go
back to his room and play the violin.
An hour later, the second tenant appeared and revealed
to Helen who he was: he was John Delaney and his love for her was intact. He
knelt down before her as twenty years before and kissed her hand asking her to
marry him. He also told her that that fateful wedding day he met her husband on
the street and, out of irrepressible jealousy, punched him; Frank fell down,
hit his head on the ground, was unconscious and had to be carried to a
hospital. Nevertheless, John didn't know for sure if Frank was dead or alive.
And all of a sudden, all was clear for Helen ―she knew
what she had to do.
QUESTIONS?
-Is it possible to love two men or two women at the
same time? Have you seen the film Keeping the Faith?
-The narrator says one should get elated if one had had
a secure husband and, in addition, a devoted admirer. Would you feel the same way?
Have you seen Beröringen, by Bergman?
-In which context does Hamlet say the sentence “The
play is the thing”: I’ll have grounds / More relative than this —the play’s the thing /
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King? What does the phrase exactly mean? Why in our story is it the other
way round, “The thing is the play”?
-What do you know about The House that Jack Built?
-What stories do you remember about amnesic people?
VOCABULARY
fell down on, write up, hooks, curtain raiser,
stationery, best man, gibbering, hominy, fire-escape, babble, amaranth,
galluptious, legal cap, quaint, innuendo