The house call

·         Show the points of similarities and differences between the two supernatural stories ‘The House Call’ and ‘The Loving Mother’.

Ans. The two supernatural stories ‘The House Call’ and ‘The Loving Mother’ are similar for their plots, characters and settings, but they are different in their details. Both of them are related to spirit or ghost.

         In ‘The House Call’, there is a generous old surgeon who is ready to go on house call at night despite his tiredness after a hard work during the whole day. He is called by a small ghost girl to see her sick mother. He follows her to the semi-dark room on the fifth floor of an old tenement house where her sick mother is lying on a small bed. In ‘The Loving Mother’, a middle-aged chemist, a widower, is called by a ghost woman to see her lonely baby and take it to his protection. The baby is playing, licking ame-on-a-stick, beside the dead body of the woman on a small bed in a semi-dark room on the third floor of an old apartment building.

         In ‘The House Call’, the surgeon is known to the sick woman and the ghost girl. In ‘The Loving Mother’, the chemist doesn’t know both the mother and the baby. In THC, a small girl who loves her mother is ghost. In TLM, a young woman is ghost. In THC, the surgeon is called once only. In TLM, the chemist is haunted for five consecutive midnights. In THC, the surgeon follows the girl alone. In TLM, the chemist is with his photographer friend when he follows the woman. In THC, the ghost makes the surgeon follow her. In TLM, the ghost entices the chemist and his friend to follow her but pretends that she doesn’t know anything about it. In THC, the ghost disappears when its purpose is fulfilled. In TLM, the ghost disappears but the dead body is lying on the bed.

·         What did Dr. Braun discover when he went with the girl who came to his house?

Ans. Dr. Braun discovered that the girl who had gone to house to call him was only a spirit. Actually, she had died three months before. The ragged shawl and the shabby shoes the girl wore were wet in a corner of the room as if somebody had recently used them. Also, the sick woman was none other than his former staff  Elda who had gone to the country to live with her brother.

·         Why did the doctor have a look of surprise on his face when Elda told him that her little daughter died in September?

Ans. The doctor had a look of surprise on his face because the small girl who had gone to his house to call him was actually a ghost. She looked like a real girl and requested him to help her sick mother.

·         What did the mother keep to remind her to her daughter?

Ans. The mother had kept the ragged shawl and the shabby shoes of her daughter.