SUMMARY
Mrs Hammond has been ten months away from home visiting her eldest daughter in Europe. Now the ship in which she has been travelling has stopped outside Auckland harbour for no apparent reason. A doctor has been sent for to go on board, and this situation lasts for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile, Mr Hammond, who has come from Napier where
he lives, has been waiting with a number of people for the ship docking. Mr
Hammond has been very nervous and agitated: he has paced up and down the wharf,
he has lifted and girl on a barrel and then forgotten her, he has felt his
heart beating… He has wondered if his wife had been ill on board...
Finally, the ship has berthed and is moored. Mr
Hammond runs to greet his wife Janey; he goes on board to help her with the luggage.
He is very excited because he wants to be alone with her and have some
intimacy. He has even left their children at home and has booked a room in a
hotel to spend at least a night together before going back to Napier with the
family.
But before going away from the boat, Mrs Hammond wants
to thank the captain and to say goodbye to her traveller mates, and Mr Hammond
realizes her wife is very popular and he feels proud of her and likes her the
more. But then, when she wants to say goodbye to the doctor, Mr Hammond is
afraid again thinking that perhaps his wife has been ill during the passage,
and what is more, he suspects that something singular (he doesn’t know what)
has happened.
He longs to get some hours alone with his wife, but
her responses to his desires are distant or cold. When they arrive to the hotel,
he’s so in a hurry that he didn’t even greet his mates there: he wants to be
immediately in their room. Alone with his wife, he doesn’t want to go down to
the restaurant to have dinner. But he is a bit confused because of this lack of
tenderness in his wife: she’s been ten months away!
In the end, she tells him why she’s in a so melancholic
mood: a young passenger has died in her arms. He had felt sick and, according
to the doctor, he has had a heart attack. Mr Hammond is more unsettled when he
knows she was alone with the young man before and in the moment of his death.
And he feels jealous, he feels he won’t be alone with his wife ever more. A
dead man has beaten him to the punch, and he’ll never be able to get a rematch.
Jealousy, or envy, is in this case a contradictory
feeling, because the object which spurs it doesn’t exist any more; so it’s like
striking in the air, it’s a ghost and you’ll never be able to defeat it.
But is he really jealous, or he’s only disappointed
because he couldn’t get satisfaction for his intimacy?
QUESTIONS
-At the beginning of the story it seems that the ship
waiting near the harbour is in quarantine. What do you remember about the quarantine
in the beginning of 2020? Where does the word “quarantine” come from (because
sometimes means 15 days and in our case lasted 3 months)?
-What resources use the author to give us the
impression that Mr Hammond is very anxious to meet his wife?
-When does he start to being jealous? Is jealousy a
feature of a character, or it’s something you can feel all of a sudden? Is
really a bad thing (morally) being jealous? Is it something you learn, or does
it belong to the human nature?
-What can be the difference between “well-meaning
envy” and “green envy”? Give examples.
-At the end of the story, we can see that a dead man
has “replaced” or “overcame” the husband. James Joyce did something similar in
his story The Dead. Why in the story is the bond with the dead man so
strong? What do you think of the famous sentence in The Little Prince,
by Saint Exupéry, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed [or
saved]”?
VOCABULARY
crinkled, galley, stern, snugly, glasses, roped, liner,
dent, thrum, wheezed, raked, rot, bee-line, pikestaff, took it all, put off, butting
in, chucked, thirsted, hover