Vintage Reading Read Free Page B

between, the action alternates, always under Heathcliff’s malevolent spell. One gasps for fresher, happier air. The characters inhabit an unpolluted rural paradise; yet they’re as chained by human passion and weakness as men and women anywhere.
    Maybe more so. As the town-bred visitor, Lockwood, observes: “The people in these regions... live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface change, and frivolous external things.” There is less to dissipate consuming emotion and in such a setting the hate in dark Heathcliff can fester: “It’s odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me! Had I been born where laws are less strict, and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an evening’s entertainment.” “Those two,” be it noted, are his own son and his son’s future bride.
    Deeply theatrical all this is, and Bronte’s musical prose is often borne along on cadences that verge on the Shakespearean. “Come to the glass and I’ll let you see what you should wish,” young Heathcliff is instructed. “Do you mark these two lines between your eyes? And those thick brows, that instead of rising arched, sink in the middle?... Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles.”
    No, these characters hardly speak as we imagine people—even English gentry of a century and a half ago—to speak. And such high-flown language coupled with, perhaps, overdrawn characters, offer the parodist a rich vein of material.
    So, why read it today? When first published (under the authorship of one “Currer Bell”) in 1847, few did. It and Jane Eyre , by Emily’s sister Charlotte, both appeared in the same year. But it was to the latter that the English reading public flocked. “To enter fully into the spirit” of Wuthering Heights , one critic has noted, “the reader needs to face a truth more disquieting than the surface verisimilitude of Jane Eyre. The Victorian public was not ready to face this truth.”
    Are we? That goodness not allowed to grow can mutate unto evil, and that behind great cruelty may once have dwelt great love, is the essential, brutal lesson of Wuthering Heights .

Kim
    ____________
    By Rudyard Kipling
First published in 1901
    Kim’s father, a hard-drinking, opium-smoking member of His Majesty’s Army in India, dies when he is still a child. His mother long dead of cholera, he grows up with British blood and an Indian soul in the streets of Lahore. As the story opens, he meets an ancient lama while sitting outside the city’s antiquities museum.
    The lama has embarked on a quest for the river sprung from Buddha’s arrow: “Whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.” The boy, too, is on a personal quest—for what he grows up hearing called a red bull on a green field, the insignia of his father’s Irish regiment. The two take up with one another and set out upon the Grand Trunk Road that stretches across India. Kim becomes the lama’s chela , or disciple—washes his feet, begs for him.
    But Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is no tale of spiritual questing. Attached to the lama though he is, Kim remains a sharp-eyed denizen of back alley and bazaar. Indeed, so abruptly does the novel deposit us in the distant and exotic East, that we’re taken aback when we realize that it actually qualifies as that familiar literary genre, the spy-adventure story. For Kim, we learn, is in the service of Mahbub Ali, horse trader and spy; he is to play a central role in a major undercover operation, in a war with five native kings, and in international intrigue involving the Russians and the French.
    As for the lama, for all his talk about the Wheel of Life and the River of the Arrow, you never really know whether he’s a genuinely spiritual figure, a sly old codger or slightly daft.
    Suffusing the story, of course, is India in the days of the Raj, of crowdedbazaars, and grimly third-class railway coaches. We come upon isolated