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Глагол. Наклонение.
Глагол. Наклонение.
Задание 1. Прочтите следующий отрывок. Найдите предложения с глаголом в сослагательном наклонении. Есть ли в тексте глаголы в повелительном наклонении?
THE WILT ALTERNATIVE Tom Sharpe London, 2004
Henry Wilt, a university professor, gets bad scratches on his penis (he got drunk, tried to relieve on a rosebush, lost his balance and got the injury as a result). Trying to stop the bleeding he, still drunk, applies adhesive plaster and in the morning his wife tears it off. Feeling quite desperate he goes to the local Accident Centre and has a lot of difficulty trying to explain what the problem is without attracting other patients’ attention.
Twenty-five minutes later Wilt hobbled through the door of the Accident Centre at the Ipford Hospital, pale, pained and horribly embarrassed. He made his way to the desk and looked into the unsympathetic and obviously unimaginative eyes of the admissions clerk.
‘I'd like to see a doctor’, he said with some difficulty.
'Have you broken something?' asked the woman.
'Sort of,' said Wilt, conscious that his conversation was being monitored by a dozen other patients with more obvious but less distressing injuries.
'What do you mean, sort of?'
Wilt eyed the woman and tried to convey wordlessly that his was a condition that required discretion. The woman was clearly extraordinarily obtuse.
'If it's not a break, cut or wound requiring immediate attention, or a case of poisoning, you should consult your own doctor.' Wilt considered these options and decided that 'wound requiring immediate attention' fitted the bill.
'Wound,' he said.
'Where?' asked the woman, picking up a ballpen and a pad of forms.
'Well . . .' said Wilt even more hoarsely than before.
Half the other patients seemed to have brought their wives or mothers.
'I said where?' said the woman impatienly.
‘I know you did,' whispered Wilt. 'The thing is . . .'
I haven't got all day, you know.' I realize that,' said Wilt, it's just that . . . well I . . . Look, would you mind if I explained the situation to a doctor? You see . . .' But the woman didn't. In Wilt's opinion she was either a sadist or mentally deficient.
'I have to fill in this form and if you won't tell me where the wound is . . .' She hesitated and looked at Wilt suspiciously. 'I thought you said it was a break. Now you say it's a wound. You'd better make up your mind. I haven't got all day, you know.'
'Nor, at this rate, have I’, said Wilt, irritated by the repetition. 'In fact if something isn't done almost immediately I may well pass out in front of you.'
The woman shrugged. People passing out in front of her were evidently part of her daily routine. 'I still have to state whether it is a wound or a break and its location and if you won't tell me what it is and where it is I can't admit you.'
Wilt glanced over his shoulder and was about to say that he had had his penis practically scalped by his bloody wife when he caught the eyes of several middle-aged women who were paying close attention to the exchange. He changed his tactic hastily.
'Poison’, he muttered.
'Are you quite sure?'
'Of course I'm sure’, said Wilt. 'I took the stuff, didn't I?'
'You also claimed you had a break and then a wound. Now you say you've taken all three ... I mean you've taken poison. And it's no good looking at me like that. I'm only doing my job, you know.'
'At the speed you're doing it I wonder anyone gets in here at all before they're actually dead/ snapped Wilt, and instantly regretted it. The woman was staring at him with open hostility. The look on her face suggested that as far as Wilt was concerned he had just expressed her most ardent hope.
'Look,' said Wilt, trying to pacify the bitch, 'I'm sorry if I seem agitated . . .'
'Rude, more like.'
'Have it your own way. Rude then. I apologize, but if you had just swallowed poison, fallen on your arm and broken it and suffered a wound in your posterior you'd be a bit agitated.'
To lend some sort of credibility to this list of catastrophes he raised his left arm limply and supported it with his right hand. The woman regarded it doubtfully and took up the ballpen again.
'Did you bring the bottle with you?' she asked.
'Bottle?'
'The bottle containing the poison you claim to have taken.'
'What would I do that for?'
'We can't help you unless we know what sort of poison you took.'
'It didn't say what sort of poison it was on the bottle," said Wilt. 'It was in a lemonade bottle in the garage. All 1 know is that it was poison.'
'How?'
'How what?'
'How do you know it was poison?'
'Because it didn't taste like lemonade,' said Wilt frantically, aware that he was getting deeper and deeper into a morass of diagnostic confusion.
'Because something doesn't taste like lemonade it doesn't necessarily mean it's poisonous’, said the woman, exercising an indefatigable logic. 'Only lemonade tastes like lemonade. Nothing else does.'
Of course it doesn't. But this stuff didn't simply not taste like lemonade. It tasted like deadly poison. Probably cyanide.'
Nobody knows what cyanide tastes like,' said the woman, continuing to batter Wilt's defences. 'Death is instantaneous.'
Wilt glared at her bleakly. 'All right’, he said finally 'forget the poison. I've still got a broken arm and a wound that requires immediate attention. I demand to see a doctor.'
'Then you'll have to wait your turn. Now where did you say this wound was?'
'On my backside,' said Wilt, and spent the next hour regretting it. To substantiate his claim he had to stand while the other patients were treated and the admissions clerk continued to eye him with a mixture of outright suspicion and dislike. In an effort to avoid her eye Wilt tried to read the paper over the shoulder of a man whose only apparent claim to be in need of urgent attention was a bandaged toe. Wilt envied him and, not for the first time, considered the perversity of circumstances which rendered him incapable of being believed.
It wasn't as simple as Byron had suggested with his 'Truth is stranger than fiction'. If his own experience was anything to go by, truth and fiction were equally unacceptable. Some element of ambiguity in his own character, perhaps the ability to see every side of every problem, created an aura of insincerity around him and made it impossible for anyone to believe what he was saying. The truth, to be believed, had first to be plausible and probable, to fall into some easy category of pre-digested opinion. If it didn't conform to the expected, people refused to believe it. But Wilt's mind did not conform. It followed possibilities wherever they led in labyrinths of speculation beyond most people's ken. Certainly beyond Eva's. Not that Eva ever speculated. She leapt from one opinion to another without that intermediate stage of bewilderment which was Wilt's perpetual condition. In her world, every problem had an answer; in Wilt's, every problem had about ten, each of them in direct contradiction to all the others. Even now in this bleak waiting-room where his own immediate misery might have been expected to spare him concern for the rest of the world, Wilt's febrile intelligence found material to speculate upon.
The headlines in the paper OIL DISASTER: SEA BIRDS THREATENED dominated a page filled with apparently minor horrors. Apparently because they occupied such little space. There had been another terrorist raid on a security truck. The driver had been threatened with a rocket launcher and a guard had been callously shot through the head. The murderers had got away with £250,000 but this was of less importance than the plight of seagulls threatened by an oil slick off the coast. Wilt noted this distinction and wondered how the widow of the shot guard felt about her late husband's relegation to second place in public concern compared to the sea birds. What was it about the modern world that wildlife took precedence over personal misery? Perhaps the human species was so fearful of extinction that it no longer cared what happened to individuals, but closed collective ranks and saw the collision of two supertankers as a foretaste of its own eventual fate. Or perhaps . . .
Wilt was interrupted from this reverie by the sound of his name and looking up from the paper his eyes met those of a hatchet-faced nurse who was talking to the admissions clerk. The nurse disappeared and a moment later the admissions clerk was joined by an elderly and evidently important specialist, if his retinue of young doctors, a Sister and two nurses was anything to go by. Wilt watched unhappily while the man studied his record of injuries, looked over his spectacles at Wilt as at some specimen beneath his dignity to treat, nodded to one of the housemen and, smiling sardonically, departed.
'Mr. Wilt’, called the young doctor. Wilt stepped cautiously forward.
'If you’ll just go through to a cubicle and wait,' said the doctor.
'Excuse me, doctor’, said Wilt, 'I would like a word with you in private.'
'In due course, Mr. Wilt, we will have words in private and now if you have nothing better to do kindly go through to a cubicle.' He turned on his heel and walked down the corridor. Wilt was about to hobble after him when the admissions clerk stopped him.
Accident cubicles are that way,' she said, pointing to curtains down another corridor. Wilt grimaced at her and went down to a cubicle.
*
At the Accident Centre Wilt was finding he had no choice at all. The doctor who finally arrived at his cubicle to attend to him was accompanied by a formidable Sister and two male nurses. Wilt regarded him balefully from the couch on which he had been told to lie.
You've taken your time’, he grumbled. 'I've been lying here in agony for the last hour and
'Then we must get a move on,' said the doctor. 'We'll start with the poison first. A stomach wash-out will . . .'
What?' said Wilt, sitting up on the couch in horror.
'It won't take more than a minute’, said the doctor. 'Just lie back while Sister inserts the tube.'
'Oh no! Nothing doing,' said Wilt, bolting from the couch into a corner of the cubicle as the nurse closed in with a length of rubber pipe. 'I haven't taken poison.'
'It says on your admittance sheet that you have,' said the doctor. 'You are Mr Henry Wilt, I take it?'
Yes,' said Wilt, 'but you needn't take it that I have taken poison. I can assure you ..." He dodged round the couch to avoid the Sister, only to find himself grabbed from behind by the two male nurses.
‘I swear that -' Wilt's denial died on his lips as he was pushed back on to the couch. The pipe hovered over his mouth. Wilt stared villainously at the doctor. The man seemed to be smiling in a singularly sadistic manner.
'Now then, Mr Wilt, you will kindly cooperate'
'Won't,' grunted Wilt through clenched teeth. Behind him the Sister held his head and waited.
'Mr Wilt’, said the doctor, 'you arrived here this morning and stated quite adamantly and of your own free will that you had swallowed poison, broken your arm and had suffered a wound that required immediate attention. Is that not so?'
Wilt debated how to answer. It seemed safest not to open his mouth. He nodded and then tried to shake his head.
'Thank you. Not only that but you were impolite, to put it mildly, to the lady at the desk.'
'Wasn't,' said Wilt, only to regret both his rudeness and this attempt to state his case. Two hands attempted to insert the tube. Wilt bit the thing.
'Have to use the left nostril,' said the doctor.
No you fucking don't,’ yelled Wilt, but it was too late. As the pipe slid up his nose and, by the feel of it, expanded in his throat, Wilt's protests came to an unintelligible end. He writhed and gurgled.
'You may find the next part slightly uncomfortable,’ said the doctor with evident pleasure, Wilt stared at the man murderously and would, had the infernal pipe not prevented him, have stated forcefully that he found the present part bloody terrible. He was just burbling his protest when the curtains parted and the admissions clerk came in.
'I thought you might want to see this, Mrs Clemence,' said the doctor. 'Go ahead, Sister.' The Sister went ahead while Wilt silently promised himself that if he didn't suffocate first or burst he would wipe the smile off that sadistic doctor's face just as soon as this ghastly experience was over. By the time it was, Wilt's condition prevented him from doing anything except moan feebly. Only the Sister's suggestion that perhaps to be on the safe side they ought to give him an oil enema into the bargain provided him with the strength to state his case.
'I came here to have my penis attended to,' he whispered hoarsely.
The doctor consulted his record sheet. 'It doesn't make any mention of your penis here,' he said. 'It states quite clearly that . . .'
'I know what it states,' squeaked Wilt. 'I also know that if you were forced to go into a waiting-room filled with middle-class mothers and their skateboard-suicidal sons and had to announce at the top of your voice to that harridan there that you needed stitches in the top of your prick you'd have been more than reluctant to do it.'
‘I’m not standing here listening to a lunatic call me a harridan,’ said the clerk.
'And I wasn't standing out there shouting the odds about what had happened to my penis for all the bloody world to hear. I asked to see a doctor but you wouldn't let me. Deny that if you can.'
'I asked you if you had broken a limb, suffered a wound that required -'
'I know what you asked me,' yelled Wilt, 'don't I just. I can quote it word for word. Well, for your information a penis is not a limb, not in my case anyway. I suppose it comes into the category of an appendage and if I'd said I had damaged my appendage you'd have asked me which one and where and how and on what occasion and with whom and then sent me round to the VD clinic and . . .'
'Mr Wilt/ interrupted the doctor, 'we are extremely busy here and if you come and refuse to state exactly what is wrong with you . . .'
'I get a fucking stomach-pump stuffed down my gullet for my pains,’ shouted Wilt. 'And what happens if some poor bugger who is deaf and dumb comes in? I suppose you let him die on the waiting-room floor or whip his tonsils out to teach him to speak up for himself in future. And they call this the National Health Service. It's a fucking bureaucratic dictatorship. That's what I call it.'
Never mind what it's called, Mr Wilt. If there is something really the matter with your penis we're quite prepared to look at it.'
'I'm not,' said the admissions clerk firmly, and disappeared through the curtains. Wilt lay back on the couch and removed his pants.
The doctor observed him cautiously.
Mind telling me what you've got wound round it?' he asked.
Bloody handkerchief,' said Wilt and slowly untied the makeshift bandage.
'Good God,' said the doctor, 'I see what you mean about an appendage. Would it be asking too much to enquire how you got your penis into this condition?'
'Yes, said Wilt, it would. Everyone I've told so far hasn't believed me and I'd rather not go through that drill again.'
'Drill?’ asked the doctor pensively. 'You're surely not implying that this injury was inflicted by a drill? I don't know what you think, Sister, but from where I stand it looks as though our friend here had a rather too intimate relationship with a mincing machine'
'And from where I lie it feels like it,' said Wilt. 'And if it will help to cut the badinage let me tell you that my wife was Largely responsible.'
'Your wife?'
'Listen, doctor,' said Wilt, 'if it's all the same to you I’d just as soon not go into details.'
'Can't say I blame you,’ said the doctor, scrubbing his hands. 'If my wife did that to me I'd divorce the bitch. Were you having intercourse at the time?'
'No comment,' said Wilt, deciding that silence was the best policy. The doctor donned surgical gloves and drew his own ghastly conclusions. He loaded a hypodermic.
After what you’ve already been through,' he said, approaching the couch, 'this isn't going to hurt at all.'
Wilt bounded off the couch again. 'Hold it,' he shouted. 'If you imagine for one moment that you're going to stick that surgical hornet into my private fucking parts you can think again. And what's that for?'
The Sister had picked up an aerosol can. Just a mild disinfectant and freezer. I'll spray it on first and you won't feel the little prick.'
'Won't I? Well let me tell you that I want to feel it. If I'd wanted anything else I'd have let nature take its course and I wouldn't be here now. And what's she doing with that razor?'
'Sterilizing it. We've got to shave you.' 'Have you just? I’ve heard that one before, and while we're on the subject of sterilizing I'd like to hear your views on vasectomy.’
'I'm pretty neural on the subject,' said the doctor.
'Well I'm not' , snarled Wilt from the corner. 'In fact I am distinctly biased, not to say prejudiced. What are you laughing about?' The muscular Sister was smiling. 'You're not some damned women's libber, are you?'
I’m a working woman,’ said the Sister, 'and my politics are my own affair. They don't enter into the matter;
'And I’m a working man and I want to remain that way and politics do enter into the matter. I've heard what they get up to in India and if I walk out of here with a transistor, no balls and jabbering like an incipient mezzo-soprano I warn you I shall return with a meat cleaver and you'll both learn what social genetics are all about.'
Well, if that is your attitude,' said the doctor, 'I suggest you try private medicine, Mr Wilt. You get what you pay for that way. I can only assure you . . .'
It took ten minutes to lure Wilt back on to the couch and five seconds to get him off again clutching his scrotum.
Freezer/ he squealed. 'My God, you meant it too. What the hell do you think I've got down there, a packet of freezable peas?'
'Well just wait until the anaesthetic takes effect/ said the doctor. It shouldn't be long now.'
'It isn't,’ squawked Wilt, peering down. 'It's bloody disappearing. I came in here to have minor medication, not a sex-change operation, and if you think my wife is going to be happy having a husband with a clitoris you sorely misjudge the woman.'
'I'd say you had already misjudged her’, said the doctor cheerfully. Any woman who can inflict that sort of damage on her husband deserves what she gets.'
'She may but I don't,' said Wilt frantically. 'I happen . . . What's she doing with that tube?'
The Sister was unwrapping a catheter. 'Mr Wilt,' said the doctor, we are going to insert this . . .'
'No, you're not,' shouted Wilt. 'I may be shrinking rapidly in parts but I'm not Alice in Wonderland or a fucking dwarf with chronic constipation. I heard what she said about an oil enema and I'm not having one.'
'No one intends giving you an enema. This will simply enable you to pass water through the bandages. Now kindly get back on the couch before I have to call for assistance.'
'What do you mean pass water simply?' asked Wilt cautiously, climbing on to the couch. The doctor explained, and this time it took four male nurses to hold Wilt down. Throughout the operation he kept up a barrage of obscene observations and it was only the threat of a general anaesthetic that caused him to lower his voice. Even then his remark that the doctor and the Sister were less fitted for medicine than for offshore oil drilling could be heard in the waiting-room.
'That's right, send me out into the world like a bleeding petrol pump,' he said when he was finally allowed to go. 'There's such a thing as the dignity of man, you know'
The doctor looked at him sceptically. 'In the light of your behaviour I'll reserve my opinion on the matter. Call in again next week and we'll see how you're coming along.'
'The only reason I'll be back is if I don't come again,' said Wilt bitterly. 'From now on I'll see the family doctor.' He hobbled out to a telephone and called for a taxi.