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The Passionate Friends Chapter 1 - Mr. Stratton to His Son · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter one of The Passionate Friends. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
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  Speaker 1: by Peter Eastman. The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter the first Mister Stratton to his son one. I
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  Speaker 1: want very much to set down my thoughts and my
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  Speaker 1: experiences of life. I want to do so now that
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  Speaker 1: I have come to middle age, and now that my
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  Speaker 1: attitudes are all defined and my personal drama worked out.
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  Speaker 1: I feel that the toil of writing and reconsideration may
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  Speaker 1: help to clear and fix many things that remain a
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  Speaker 1: little unserted in my thoughts because they have never been
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  Speaker 1: fully stated. And I want to discover any lurking inconsistencies
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  Speaker 1: and unsuspect did gaps. And I have a story. I
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  Speaker 1: have lived through things that have searched me. I want
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  Speaker 1: to tell that story as well as I can while
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  Speaker 1: I am still a clear headed and active man, and
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  Speaker 1: while many details that may presently become blurred and altered
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  Speaker 1: are still rawly fresh in my mind. And to one
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  Speaker 1: person in particular, do I wish to think I am
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  Speaker 1: writing and that is to you, my only son. I
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  Speaker 1: want to write my story, not indeed to the child
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  Speaker 1: you are now, but to the man you are going
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  Speaker 1: to be. You are half my blood and temperamentally altogether mine.
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  Speaker 1: A day will come when you will realize this and
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  Speaker 1: want to know how life has gone with me. And
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  Speaker 1: then it may be altogether too late for me to
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  Speaker 1: answer your enquiries. I may have become inaccessible, as old
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  Speaker 1: people are sometimes inaccessible, And so I think of leaving
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  Speaker 1: this book for you. At any rate, I shall write
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  Speaker 1: it as if I meant to leave it for you.
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  Speaker 1: Afterwards I can consider whether I will indeed leave it.
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  Speaker 1: The idea of writing such a book as this came
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  Speaker 1: to me first as I sat by the dead body
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  Speaker 1: of your grandfather, my father. It was because I wanted
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  Speaker 1: so greatly such a book from him that I am
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  Speaker 1: now writing this. He died, you must know, only a
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  Speaker 1: few months ago, and I went to his house to
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  Speaker 1: bury him and settle all his affairs. At one time
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  Speaker 1: he had been my greatest friend. He had never indeed
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  Speaker 1: talked to me about himself for his youth, but he
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  Speaker 1: had always showed an extraordinary sympathy and helpfulness for me
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  Speaker 1: in all the confusion and perplexities into which I fell.
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  Speaker 1: This did not last to the end of his life.
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  Speaker 1: I was the child of his miss years, and suddenly,
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  Speaker 1: in a year or less, the curtains of age and
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  Speaker 1: infirmity fell between us. There came an illness, an operation,
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  Speaker 1: and he rose from it, ailing, suffering, dwarfed, and altogether changed.
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  Speaker 1: Of all the dark shadows upon life, I think that
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  Speaker 1: change through illness and organic decay in the thoughts and
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  Speaker 1: spirits of those who are dear and close to us
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  Speaker 1: is the most evil and distressing and inexplicable. Suddenly he
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  Speaker 1: was a changeling, a being querulous and pitiful, needing indulgence
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  Speaker 1: and sacrifices. In a little while, a new state of
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  Speaker 1: affairs was established. I ceased to consider him as a
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  Speaker 1: man to whom one told things, of whom one could
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  Speaker 1: expect help or advice. We all ceased to consider him
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  Speaker 1: at all in that way. We humored him, put pleasant
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  Speaker 1: things before him, sealed whatever was disagreeable. A poor old man,
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  Speaker 1: he was, indeed, in those concluding years, weakly rebellious against
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  Speaker 1: the firm kindliness of my cousin, his housekeeper and nurse.
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  Speaker 1: He who had once been so alert was now, at
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  Speaker 1: times astonishingly apathetic, at times an impish malice I had
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  Speaker 1: never known in him before, gleamed in little acts and speeches.
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  Speaker 1: His talk rambled, and for the most part was concerned
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  Speaker 1: with small, long forgotten contentions. It was indistinct and difficult
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  Speaker 1: to follow because of a recent loss of teeth, and
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  Speaker 1: he craved for Brandy to restore, even for a moment,
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  Speaker 1: the sense of strength and well being that ebbed and
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  Speaker 1: ebbed away from him, So that when I came to
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  Speaker 1: look at his dead face at last, it was with
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  Speaker 1: something like amazement. I perceived him grave and beautiful, more
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  Speaker 1: grave and beautiful than he had been even in the
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  Speaker 1: full of life. All the estrangement of the final years
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  Speaker 1: was wiped in an instant from my mind. As I
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  Speaker 1: looked upon his face, there came back a rush of
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  Speaker 1: memories of kind, strong, patient, human aspects of his fatherhood.
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  Speaker 1: And I remembered, as every son must remember, Even you,
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  Speaker 1: my dear, will someday remember, because it is in the
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  Speaker 1: very nature of sonship, insubordinations, struggles, ingratitudes, great benefits taken unthankfully,
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  Speaker 1: slights and disregards. It was not remorse I felt, nor repentance,
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  Speaker 1: but a tremendous regret that so things had happened, and
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  Speaker 1: that life should be so. Why is it? I thought
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  Speaker 1: that when a son has come to manhood, he cannot
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  Speaker 1: take his father for a friend. I had a curious
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  Speaker 1: sense of unprecedented communion as I stood beside him. Now
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  Speaker 1: I felt that he understood my thoughts. His face seemed
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  Speaker 1: to answer with an expression of still and sympathetic patience.
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  Speaker 1: I was sensible of amazing gaps. We had never talked together,
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  Speaker 1: of love, never of religion, all sorts of things that
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  Speaker 1: a man of twenty eight would not dream of. Hiding
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  Speaker 1: from a coeval he had hidden from me. For some days,
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  Speaker 1: I had to remain in his house. I had to
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  Speaker 1: go through his papers, handle all those intimate personal things
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  Speaker 1: that accumulate around a human being year by year, letters,
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  Speaker 1: yellowing scraps of newspaper, tokens, relics, kept, accidental vestiges, significant litter.
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  Speaker 1: I learned many things I had never treamed of. At
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  Speaker 1: times I doubted whether I was not prying, whether I
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  Speaker 1: ought not to risk the loss of those necessary legal facts.
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  Speaker 1: I sought and burn these papers unread. There were love
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  Speaker 1: letters and many such touching things. My memories of him
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  Speaker 1: did not change because of these new lights, but he
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  Speaker 1: became wonderfully illuminated. I realized him as a young man.
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  Speaker 1: I began to see him as a boy. I found
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  Speaker 1: a little half bound botanical book with stencil tinted illustrations,
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  Speaker 1: a good conduct prize my father had won at his
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  Speaker 1: preparatory school. A rolled up sheet of paper, carbonized and
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  Speaker 1: dry and brittle, revealed itself as a piece of specimen writing,
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  Speaker 1: stiff with boyish effort, decorated in ambitious and faltering flourishes,
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  Speaker 1: and still betraying the pencil rulings his rubber should have erased. Already,
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  Speaker 1: Your writing is better than that. And I founded a
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  Speaker 1: garritype portrait of him in knickerbockers, against a photographer's style.
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  Speaker 1: His then was not unlike yours. I stood with that
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  Speaker 1: in my hand at the little bureau in his bedroom
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  Speaker 1: and looked at his dead face, the flatly painted portrait
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  Speaker 1: of his father, my grandfather, hanging there in the stillness
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  Speaker 1: above the coffin, looking out on the world he had
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  Speaker 1: left with steady, humorous blue eyes that followed one about
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  Speaker 1: the room. That too, was revivified, touched into reality and participation.
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  Speaker 1: By this, and that became a living presence at a
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  Speaker 1: conference of lives. Things of his were there also in
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  Speaker 1: that life's accumulation. There we were three Strattons together, and
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  Speaker 1: down in the dining room were steel engravings to take
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  Speaker 1: us back two generations further. And we had all lived
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  Speaker 1: full lives, suffered, attempted, signified. I had a glimpse of
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  Speaker 1: the long successions of mankind. Mind, what a huge, inaccessible
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  Speaker 1: lumber room of thought and experience we amounted to. I thought,
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  Speaker 1: how much we are, how little we transmit? Each one
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  Speaker 1: of us was but a variation, an experiment upon the
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  Speaker 1: Stratton theme. All that I had now under my hands
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  Speaker 1: was but the merest hints and vestiges, moving and surprising, indeed,
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  Speaker 1: but casual and fragmentary of those obliterated repetitions. Man is
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  Speaker 1: a creature becoming articulate. And why should those men have
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  Speaker 1: left so much of the tale untold, to be lost
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  Speaker 1: and forgotten? Why must we all repeat things done and
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  Speaker 1: come again very bitterly to wisdom our fathers have achieved
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  Speaker 1: before us. My grandfather there should have left me something
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  Speaker 1: better than the still enigma of his watching face. All
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  Speaker 1: my life so far has gone in learning very painfully
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  Speaker 1: what many men have learnt before me. I have spent
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  Speaker 1: the greater part of forty years in finding a sort
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  Speaker 1: of purpose for the uncertain and declining decades that remain.
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  Speaker 1: Is it not time the generations drew together and helped
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  Speaker 1: one another? Cannot we begin now to make a better
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  Speaker 1: use of the experiences of life so that our sons
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  Speaker 1: may not waste themselves so much? Cannot we gather into
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  Speaker 1: books that men may read in an hour or so
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  Speaker 1: the gist of these confused and multitudinous realities of the
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  Speaker 1: individual career. Surely the time is coming for that, when
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  Speaker 1: a new private literature will exist, and fathers and mothers
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  Speaker 1: behind the roles of rulers, protectors and supporters, who prepare
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  Speaker 1: frank and intimate records of their thought and their feeling,
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  Speaker 1: told as one tells things to equals, without authority or
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  Speaker 1: reserves or discretions, so that they, being dead, their children
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  Speaker 1: may rediscover them as contemporaries and friends. That desire for
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  Speaker 1: self expression is indeed already almost an instinct with many
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  Speaker 1: of us. Man is disposed to create a traditional wisdom.
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  Speaker 1: For me, this book I contemplate is in need I
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  Speaker 1: am just a year and a half from a bitter
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  Speaker 1: tragedy and the loss of a friend as dear as
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  Speaker 1: life to me. It is very constantly in my mind.
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  Speaker 1: She opened her mind to me as few people open
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  Speaker 1: their minds to anyone. In a way, Little Stephen, she
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  Speaker 1: died for you, and I am so placed that I
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  Speaker 1: have no one to talk to quite freely about her.
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  Speaker 1: The one other person to whom I talk I cannot
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  Speaker 1: talk to about her. It is strange, seeing how we
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  Speaker 1: love and trust one another. But so it is. You
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  Speaker 1: will understand that the better as the story enfolds. For
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  Speaker 1: eight long years before the crisis that culminated in her
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  Speaker 1: tragic death, I never saw her yet quite apart from
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  Speaker 1: the shock and distresses of that time. It has left
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  Speaker 1: me extraordinarily lonely and desolate. And there was a kind
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  Speaker 1: of dreadful splendor in that last act of hers which
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  Speaker 1: has taken a great hold upon my imagination. It has
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  Speaker 1: interwoven with everything else in my mind. It bears now
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  Speaker 1: upon every question. I cannot get away from it. While
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  Speaker 1: it is thus pent from utterance. Perhaps having written this
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  Speaker 1: to you, I may never show it you or leave
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  Speaker 1: it for you to see. But yet I must write it.
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  Speaker 1: Of all conceivable persons, you, when you have grown to manhood,
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  Speaker 1: are the most likely to understand. Two. You did not
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  Speaker 1: come to see your dead grandfather, nor did you know
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  Speaker 1: very much about the funeral. Nowadays we do not bring
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  Speaker 1: the sweet egotisms, the vivid, beautiful personal intensities of childhood
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  Speaker 1: into the cold, vast presence of death. I would, as soon,
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  Speaker 1: my dear, have sent your busy little limbs toiling up
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  Speaker 1: the matter horn. I have put by a photograph of
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  Speaker 1: my father for you, as he lay in that last
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  Speaker 1: stillness of his that you will see at a properer time.
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  Speaker 1: Your mother and I wore black only at his funeral,
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  Speaker 1: and came back colored again into your colored world. And
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  Speaker 1: in a very little while your interest in this event
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  Speaker 1: that had taken us away for a time turned to
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  Speaker 1: other more assimilable things. But there happened a little incident
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  Speaker 1: that laid hold upon me. You forgot it perhaps a
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  Speaker 1: week or less, but I shall never forget it. And
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  Speaker 1: this incident it was that gathered up the fruits of
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  Speaker 1: those moments beside my father's body and set me to
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  Speaker 1: write this book. It had the effect of a little
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  Speaker 1: bright light held up against the vague, dark immensities of
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  Speaker 1: thought and feeling that filled my mind because of my
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  Speaker 1: father's death. Now that I come to set it down,
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  Speaker 1: I see that it is altogether trivial, and I cannot
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  Speaker 1: explain how it is that it is to me so
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  Speaker 1: piercingly significant. I had to whip you your respect for
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  Speaker 1: the admirable and patient Mademoiselle poutin the protectress and companion
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  Speaker 1: of your public expeditions, did, in some slight crisis suddenly
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  Speaker 1: fail you. In the extreme publicity of Kensington Gardens, in
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  Speaker 1: the presence of your two little sisters, before a startled world,
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  Speaker 1: you expressed an opinion of her in two languages and
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  Speaker 1: a lad voice that was not only very unjust, but
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  Speaker 1: extremely offensive and improper. It reflected upon her intelligence and goodness.
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  Speaker 1: It impeached her personal appearance. It was the kind of
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  Speaker 1: outcry no little gentleman should ever permit himself, however deeply
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  Speaker 1: he may be aggrieved. You, then, so far as I
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  Speaker 1: was able to disenthangle the evidence, assaulted her, violently, hurled
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  Speaker 1: a stone at her, and fled her company. You came
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  Speaker 1: home alone by a route chosen by yourself, flushed and wrathful,
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  Speaker 1: braving the dangers of Kensington High Street. This after my
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  Speaker 1: stern and deliberate edict that, upon pain of corporal punishment,
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  Speaker 1: respect and obedience must be paid to Mademoiselle Pautin, the
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  Speaker 1: logic of the position was relentless. But where your behavior
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  Speaker 1: was remarkable, where the affair begins to touch my imagination,
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  Speaker 1: was that you yourself presently put the whole business before
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  Speaker 1: me alone in the school room. You seemed to have
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  Speaker 1: come to some realization of the extraordinary dreadfulness of your behavior.
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  Speaker 1: Such moments happen in the lives of all small boys.
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  Speaker 1: They happened to me times enough, to my dead father,
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  Speaker 1: to that grandfather of the portrait which is now in
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  Speaker 1: my study, to his father and his, and so on,
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  Speaker 1: through long series of strattins, back to inarticulate shock, haired
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  Speaker 1: little sinners, slinking fearfully away from the awful wrath, the
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  Speaker 1: bellowings and limitless violence of the hairy old man of
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  Speaker 1: the herd. The bottom goes out of your heart. Then
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  Speaker 1: you are full of a conviction of sin. So far
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  Speaker 1: you did but carry on the experience of the race.
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  Speaker 1: But to ask audience of me to come and look
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  Speaker 1: me in the eye, to say you wanted my advice
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  Speaker 1: on a pressing matter that I think marks almost a
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  Speaker 1: new phase in the long developing history of father and son,
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  Speaker 1: And your account of the fracas struck me as quite
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  Speaker 1: reasonably frank and honest. I didn't seem able. You observed
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  Speaker 1: not to go on being batter and badd We discussed
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  Speaker 1: the difficulties of our situation, and you passed sentence upon yourself.
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  Speaker 1: I saw to it that the outraged dignity of Mademoiselle
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  Speaker 1: Poutin was mocked by no mere formality of infliction. You
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  Speaker 1: did your best to be stoical, I remember, but at
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  Speaker 1: last you yelped and wept. Then justice being done, you
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  Speaker 1: re arranged your costume. The situation was a little difficult
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  Speaker 1: until you still sobbing and buttoning. You are really a
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  Speaker 1: shocking bad hand at button's and looking a very small, tender, ruffled,
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  Speaker 1: rueful thing. Indeed, scrolled towards my study window. The pear
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  Speaker 1: tree is out next door, you remarked, without a trace
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  Speaker 1: of animosity, and sobbing as one might tick off. I
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  Speaker 1: suppose there are moments in the lives of all grown
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  Speaker 1: men when they come near to weeping aloud in some
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  Speaker 1: secret place within myself. I must have been a wild
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  Speaker 1: river of tears. I answered, however, with the same admirable
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  Speaker 1: detachment from the smarting past that you had achieved, that
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  Speaker 1: my study window was particularly adapted to the appreciation of
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  Speaker 1: our neighbor's pear tree because of its height from the ground.
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  Speaker 1: We fell into a conversation about blossom and the setting
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  Speaker 1: of fruit, kneeling together upon my window seat and looking
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  Speaker 1: up into the pear tree against the sky, and then
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  Speaker 1: down through its black branches into the gardens, all quickening
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  Speaker 1: with spring. We were on so friendly a footing when
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  Speaker 1: presently Mademoiselle Poutin turned and placed her dignity or her
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  Speaker 1: resignation in my hands, that I doubt if she believed
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  Speaker 1: a word of all my assurances until the unmistakable confirmation
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  Speaker 1: of your evening bath. Then, as I understood it, she
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  Speaker 1: was extremely remorseful to you and indignant against my violence.
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  Speaker 1: But when I knelt with you, little Urchin, upon my
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  Speaker 1: window seat, it came to me as a thing almost
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  Speaker 1: intolerably desirable, that some day you should become my real
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  Speaker 1: and understanding friend. I loved you profoundly. I wanted to
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  Speaker 1: stretch forward into time and speak to you man myself
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  Speaker 1: to the man you are yet to be. It seemed
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  Speaker 1: to me that between us there must needs be peculiar
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  Speaker 1: subtleties of sympathy. And I remembered that by the time
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  Speaker 1: you are a man, fully grown and emerging from the
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  Speaker 1: passionately tumultuous openings of manhood, capable of forgiving me all
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  Speaker 1: my blundering parentage, capable of perceiving all the justifying fine
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  Speaker 1: intention of my ill conceived disciplines and misdirections, I might
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  Speaker 1: be either an old man shriveling again to an inexplicable egotism,
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  Speaker 1: or dead. I saw myself as I had seen my father,
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  Speaker 1: first enfeebled and then inaccessibly tranquil. When presently you had
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  Speaker 1: gone from my study, I went to my writing desk
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  Speaker 1: and drew a paper pad towards me, and sat thinking
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  Speaker 1: and making idle marks upon it with my pen. I
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  Speaker 1: wanted to exceed the limits of those frozen silences that
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  Speaker 1: must come at last between us. Write a book that
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  Speaker 1: should lie in your world like a seed, and at last,
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  Speaker 1: as your own being ripened flower into living understanding by
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  Speaker 1: your side. This bookok, which before had been only an
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  Speaker 1: idea for a book competing against many other ideas, and
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  Speaker 1: the demands of that toilsome work for peace and understanding
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  Speaker 1: to which I have devoted the daily energies of my
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  Speaker 1: life had become I felt an imperative necessity between us three.
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  Speaker 1: And then there happened one of those crises of dread
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  Speaker 1: and apprehension and pain that are like a plowing of
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  Speaker 1: the heart. It was brought home to me that you
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  Speaker 1: might die. Even before the first pages of this book
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  Speaker 1: of yours were written. You became feverish, complained of that
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  Speaker 1: queer pain you had felt twice before, and for the
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  Speaker 1: third time you were ill with appendicitis. Your mother and
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  Speaker 1: I came and regarded your toushold head and flushed little
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  Speaker 1: face on the pillow as you slept uneasily, and decided
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  Speaker 1: that we must take no more risks with you. So
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  Speaker 1: soon as your temperature had fallen again, we set about
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  Speaker 1: the business of an operation. We told each other that
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  Speaker 1: nowadays these operations were as safe as going to sleep
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  Speaker 1: in your bed, But we knew better. Our own doctor
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  Speaker 1: had lost his son. That we said was different. But
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  Speaker 1: we knew well enough in our hearts that you were
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  Speaker 1: going very near to the edge of death. Nearer than
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  Speaker 1: you had ever been since first you came clucking into
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  Speaker 1: the world. The operation was done at home. A capable,
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  Speaker 1: fair complexioned nurse took possession of us, and my study,
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  Speaker 1: because it has the best light, was transfigured into an
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  Speaker 1: admirable operating room. All its furnishings were sent away, every
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  Speaker 1: cloth and curtain, and the walls and floor were covered
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: with white sterilized sheets. The high, little mechanical table they
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: erected before the window seemed to me like an altar
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: on which I had to offer up my son. There
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: were basins of disinfectants and towels conveniently about. The operator came,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: took out his array of scalpels and forceps and little
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: sponges from the black bag he carried, put them ready
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: for his hand, and then covered them from your sight
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: with a white cloth. And I brought you down in
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: my arms, wrapped in a blanket, from your bedroom to
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: the anesthetist. You were beautifully trustful and submissive and unafraid.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: I stood by you until the chloroform had done its work,
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: and then left you there, lest my presence should, in
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: the slightest degree, embarrass the surgeon. The anesthetic had taken
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: all the color out of your face, and you looked
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: pinched and shrunken and greenish, and very small and pitiful.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: I went into the drawing room and stood there with
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: your mother and made conversation. I cannot recall what we said.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: I think it was about the moorland to which we
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: were going for your convalescence. Indeed, we were but the
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: ghosts of ourselves. All our substance seemed listening, listening to
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: the little sounds that came to us from the study.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Then after long ages, there was a going to and
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: fro of feet, a bump, the opening of a door,
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: and our own doctor came into the room, rubbing his
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: hands together and doing nothing to conceal his profound relief. Admirable,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: he said, altogether successful. I went up to you and
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: saw a tumbled little person in the bed, still heavily
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: and sensible and moaning slightly. By the table were bloody towels,
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: and in a shallow glass tray was a small object,
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: like a damaged piece of earthworm. Not a bit too soon,
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: my inspection. It's on the very vergin of perforation. I
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: affected and attached in scientific interest. But the prevailing impression
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: in my mind was that this was a fragment from
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: very nearly the center of your being. He took it
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: away with him. I know not whither. Perhaps it is
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: now in spirits in a specimen jar an example to
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: all medical students of what to avoid in an appendix.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: Perhaps it was stained and frozen a microtomized into transparent sections,
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: as they do such things, and mounted on glass lips,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: and distributed about the world for curious astologists to wreak
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: their eyes upon. For a time you lay uneasily still,
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: and then woke up to pain. Even then you got
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: a fresh purchase on my heart. It has always been
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: our custom to discourage weeping and outcries, and you did
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: not forget your training. I sha'n't mind so much data,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: you remarked to me, if I may yelp, so for
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: a day, by special concession, you yelped, And then the
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: sting of those fresh wounds departed within a fortnight. So
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: quickly does an aseptic wound heel up again. You were
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: running about in the sun, and I had come back,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: as one comes back to a thing forgotten, to the
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: first beginnings of this chapter on my desk, but for
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: a time I could not go on working at it
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: because of the fear I had felt. And it is
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: only now in June, in this house in France, to
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: which we have come for the summer, with you more
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: flagrantly healthy than I have ever known you before, that
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: my heart creeps out of its hole again and I
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: can go on with my story. End of Chapter one,