Susanna Moodie - "The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I"

Paul Heyse - "Andrea Delfin"

Ernest Seton Thompson - "The Biography of a Grizzly"

Daniel G. Brinton - "The Annals of the Cakchiquels"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Major Vigoureux

A >> A. T. Quiller Couch >> Major Vigoureux




"You have come by the boat? You will be from the mainland?" she said,
and he wondered a little, not being used as yet to hear his country
spoken of as the mainland. "And I am going to England to-morrow," she
added. "The boat which brought you will take me over on its return
journey."

"You know England well, I expect?" He found himself saying this for
lack of anything better.

"She has never been outside the Islands," said her sister, who also had
risen. "And it is the same with me. But to-morrow she is going--" the
girl paused here, not it (seemed) in pain, but wistfully, as in a kind
of solemn awe at the prospect. "We left the door open for father. He
has a fancy to see the light across the road as he comes up the hill.
But he is late to-night at the fishing."

The Commandant, glancing around the room, divined--he could not tell
why--that these girls were motherless. His eyes fell on the open book
which the elder sister laid on the chair as she rose. The firelight
enabled him to read its page-heading, printed in thick, blunt
type--"King Lear"! These girls, the one of them about to visit unknown
England, were reading Shakespeare together.

"_Urbem quam dicunt Romam_"--he felt a wild inclination to question
them, to ask what they expected to learn of England from Shakespeare,
and from that play of all others. But being a shy man, then as ever, he
forbore, and contented himself with asking the way to the Barracks.

They went with him to the door to direct him; and so, wishing them
good-night, he had gone up the hill. That was all. He had never seen
the elder sister again; did not know to this day what business had
taken her away to the mainland, not to return. The younger had married
a pilot, and was now the mother of a growing family in Saaron Island,
which lies next to Brefar, which faces Inniscaw. Her farmstead there
(the solitary one on the island), stood a short way above the landing
quay; and once or twice, catching sight of her in her doorway and
lifting his hat as he went by (for the Commandant was ever polite), he
had found it in his mind to stop and inquire after her sister.

He had never translated this resolve into action. The Commandant--as
everyone knew on the Islands--was "desperate shy," or "that shy you'd
never believe." But the scene had bitten itself upon his memory, and he
recalled it almost as often as he passed the door. He recalled it
to-night, as he stumbled by it in the fog and uphill to his cheerless
lodgings.

What a blind thing was life! blind even as this fog--and his home in it
these cheerless Barracks; to which nevertheless he must cling, in spite
of his honour, an old man, good for nothing, afraid to be found out! He
groped his way to the front door, opened it with his latchkey, lit the
candle which Sergeant Archelaus had considerately placed at the foot of
the stairs, and, climbing them to his bedroom, flung himself on his
knees by the bed.

Now the architect of the Barracks had designed them upon a singular
plan, of which the peculiar inconvenience was that almost every room
led to some other; which saved corridor space, but was fatal to
privacy.

Beyond the Commandant's bedroom, which opened upon the first floor
landing of the main staircase, lay a room in which he kept his fishing
clothes, and in which Sergeant Archelaus sometimes lit a fire to dry
them by.

It was a small room, well shielded from the draughts which raged
through the building in winter; and here Sergeant Archelaus had lit a
fire to-night and sat before it, sewing an artilleryman's stripe upon
the Commandant's cast dress trousers.

Hearing a noise in the outer room, and not expecting his master's
return for at least a couple of hours, he hurried out in some
perturbation, with the trousers flung across his arm--to find the
Commandant kneeling at his devotions.

"I beg your pardon, sir!"

"It's of no consequence," said the Commandant, looking up (but he was
desperately confused). "I--I always say my prayers, you know."

"What? Before undressing?" said Sergeant Archelaus.




CHAPTER IV

THE GUN IN THE GREAT FOG


Politely though he had contrived his departure, the Commandant left
Mrs. Fossell's whist-party to something like dismay. A passing
indisposition--no excuse could be more reasonable. Still, nothing of
the kind had ever interrupted these gatherings within Mrs. Fossell's
recollection, and she could not help taking a serious view of it.

"A passing indisposition," was Mr. Fossell's phrase, and he kept
repeating it--with an occasional "Nonsense, my dear"--in answer to his
wife's gloomy forebodings.

"But I shall send round, the first thing in the morning, to inquire,"
she insisted.

"Do so, my dear."

"It can't be serious, ma'am," Mr. Rogers assured her jollily. "You
heard him decline my arm when I offered to see him home."

"In my opinion," said Miss Gabriel, "the man is breaking up." She
touched her forehead lightly with the tip of her forefinger.

"Breaking up?" echoed her host and Mrs. Pope, incredulous. "My dear
Elizabeth!" began Mrs. Fossell.

"Breaking up," Miss Gabriel repeated with a very positive nod of her
head. "He has not been the same man since the Lord Proprietor took over
the presidency of the Court and he refused, upon pique, to be elected
an ordinary member. Say what you like, a man cannot be virtual Governor
of the Islands one day and the next a mere nobody without its preying
upon him."

"He made light of it at the time," observed Mr. Fossell, who (it goes
without saying) was councillor; "although I ventured to remonstrate
with him."

"And I," said Mr. Pope, who (it also goes without saying) was another.
"In the friendliest possible way you understand. I pointed out that the
Lord Proprietor was, after all, the Lord Proprietor, and, as such, did
not understand being thwarted. Very naturally, as you will all admit."

"It's human nature, when you come to think of it," put in the Steward's
wife (she preferred the title of Steward to that of agent, and was
gradually accustoming society to the sound, even as in earlier years,
when a young married woman, she had taught it to substitute "agent" for
"factor"). If, during the interval when her husband's dismissal seemed
inevitable, she had lost no opportunity of prophesying evil of the new
Lord Proprietor, she made up for it now by justifying his every action.

"If that's the ground you're going on," spoke up Mr. Rogers, who, with
all his faults was nothing of a snob, "it's human nature for Vigoureux
to feel sore. As for the magistracy, he's not the man to value it one
pin. It's the neglect; and to meet the old fellow mooning around his
batteries as I did this very afternoon--I tell you it makes a man
sorry."

If this speech did Mr. Rogers credit he cancelled it presently by his
atrocious behaviour at cards. The symmetry of the party being broken,
Miss Gabriel announced that she had enjoyed enough whist for the
evening, and that nothing in the world would give her greater pleasure
than half-an-hour's quiet talk, with the Vicar--that was, if Mrs.
Fossell and he would not mind cutting out and surrendering their seats
to Mr. Fossell and Mr. Rogers. In saying this she outrageously
flattered the Vicar, with whom it was impossible to hold conversation
in any tone below that of shouting. She meant that she was prepared to
listen; and she knew that no flattery was too outrageous for him to
swallow. She knew also that Mrs. Fossell in her heart of hearts
abhorred cards, and would be only too grateful for release, to look
after the preparations for supper and scold the parlour-maid outside.
So the Vicar and Mrs. Fossell cut out, and Mr. Fossell and Mr. Rogers
replaced them as partners against Mr. and Mrs. Pope.

Mr. and Mrs. Pope always played together. No one knew why, but it had
come to be an understood thing. Of "calls" and "echoes" the play of Mr.
and Mrs. Pope was innocent; but when Mrs. Pope, being second hand,
hesitated whether to trump her opponent's card or pass it, Mr. Pope had
an unconscious habit of saying, "Now dearest," when he desired her to
trump; and another unconscious habit, when Mrs. Pope had the lead and
he wanted trumps, of murmuring, "Your turn, darling." These two habits
Mr. Rogers had noted; and being in merry pin to-night over winning his
half-crown, at a moment when Mr. Fossell, having the lead, appeared to
hesitate (but the hesitation was only a part of Mr. Fossell's
deliberate play), he leaned over and playfully suggested, "Your turn,
darling!"

Mr. Fossell stared in the act of putting down a trump. For a moment he
appeared to think that Mr. Rogers had gone mad; then, in spite of
himself, the lines of his mouth relaxed.

"I do not think," said Mr. Pope, heavily--and the lines of Mr.
Fossell's mouth at once grew rigid again--"I do not think you two ought
to signal for trumps in that fashion."

His partner looked up innocently. In the slow pause Mr. Rogers was
growing purple in the face, when again the Vicar's voice broke across
the silence. "The Lord Proprietor's power in former days--I speak only
of former days--may well have warranted the Government in stationing a
military officer here to keep some check on him. For instance, he
shared all ordinary wrecks with the Lord High Admiral, but a wreck
became his sole property by law, if none of the crew remained alive; a
dangerous reservation, ma'am, in times when justice travelled slowly,
and much might happen in the Islands and never a word of it reach
London."

Miss Gabriel put up both hands--they were encased in mittens, and the
mittens decorated with steel beads--as if to close her ears.

"We must be thankful, indeed," she began, and paused in dismay as the
floor of Mrs. Fossell's drawing-room trembled under her, and at the
same moment the window sashes rattled violently throughout the house.

"Good Heavens!"

"What was that?"

The players dropped their cards. All listened.

"Upon my word," suggested the Vicar, who had heard nothing, but felt
the concussion, "if it weren't positively known to be empty one would
say the powder magazine at the Garrison----"

"Oh, Richard! Richard!"--here Mrs. Fossell came running in from the
dining-room with a dish of trifle in her hands--"Is it an earthquake?"

"I--I rather think not, my dear!"

"At any rate it can't be the end of the world?" She turned and appealed
to the Vicar, and from the Vicar again to her husband. "And if it is
not, I wish you would come to Selina, for she has dropped the cold
shape all over the floor and is having hysterics in the better of the
two armchairs!"

Indeed, Selina's hysterics could be heard.

"Earthquake? Fiddlesticks, ma'am!" said Mr. Rogers, buttoning his
pea-jacket and turning up its collar. "What you heard was a gun. There
is a vessel in distress somewhere, and we shall have my men here in a
moment with news of her."

"But there was no sound," objected Mrs. Pope.

"Fog, ma'am--fog; sound don't travel in a fog, and ships oughtn't to.
There has been a nasty bank of it to the south'ard ever since morning,
and you may bet that's the mischief."

He went into the hall for his lantern, brought it back, lit it, and
carried it out to the front door.

"Whe--ew!" he whistled, as he opened the door and stood, with lantern
lifted high, staring into the night.

The guests behind him wondered; for all was quiet outside--too quiet,
to ears accustomed to the wind which forever sings across the islands,
even on summer days, mingling its whispers and soft murmurings with the
hum of the distant tide-races. But while they wondered, Mr. Rogers's
figure grew vague and amorphous in a cloud of fog that drifted past him
into the passage. The light in his lantern had turned to a weak flame
of yellow, and seemed on the point of dying out.

"Ahoy, there! Is that Mr. Rogers?" called a thin voice out of the
night.

"Ahoy! Mr. Rogers, it is. What's wrong?"

"Thank God I've found you!" The voice sounded suddenly quite close at
hand, and a man blundered against the doorstep.

"Eh?"--the others saw Mr. Rogers give back in astonishment--"The Lord
Proprietor?"

"Safe and sound, too, by Heaven's mercy," said the Lord Proprietor,
plucking off his peaked cap and shaking the water from it. He carried a
lantern, and his jacket and loose trousers of yellow oilskin shone with
the wet like a suit of mail. "All the way from Inniscaw I've come, in
the gig. Peter Hicks and old Abe pulled me, and the Lord knows where we
made land or what has become of them. Man, there's a vessel ashore--a
liner, they say! Didn't you hear the gun a minute since?"

"Yes, yes; but where is she?"

"That's more than I know. Somewhere among the Off Islands; on the
Terrier, maybe, or the Hell-meadows. All I can tell you is that old Abe
brought the news to the Priory, almost three hours ago: his son-in-law,
young Ashbran, had seen her in a lift of the fog--a powerful steamship
with two funnels and a broad white band upon each. She hadn't struck
when he saw her; but she was nosing into an infernal mess of rocks, and
the light closing down fast. I didn't see Ashbran himself; Abe believed
he had put across to warn your men. But as the old man couldn't swear
to it I told him to get out the gig and fetch Peter Hicks, and so we
started."

"I'm wondering why those men of mine haven't brought me warning.
Ashbran can't have reached them."

"He started late, belike, and lost his way in the fog; or it's even
possible--though you won't believe it--that your men started to find
you and have lost themselves. My good sir, you never knew such a fog!"

"Yet I left word with the chief boatman," mused Mr. Rogers. "He knows
perfectly well where I am."

"Does he?" said the Lord Proprietor. "Then it's more than I do. What
house is this?"

"Why, Fossell's. Good Lord! didn't you know?"

"My dear Sir Caesar--" Mr. Fossel stepped forward solicitously.

"Eh? So it is.... Good evening, Mr. Fossell! That picture of the
Waterloo Banquet seemed familiar, somehow." The Lord Proprietor nodded
towards a framed engraving on the wall. "Yes, to be sure--and
Landseer's 'Twa Dogs.' But this is worse than the Arabian Nights! We
must have missed the harbour by miles!"

"You came ashore at Cam Point, most probably," Mr. Fossell suggested.
"The tide sets that way, and from Cam Point it is but a step."

"A step, is it? Man, I've been wandering in blank darkness for a full
hour. Twice I've found myself on the edge of a cliff. I've followed
walls only to be led into open fields. I've struck across open fields,
only to tumble against troughs, midden heaps, pig-styes. I walked
straight up against this house, supposing myself somewhere near the
batteries on Garrison Hill--though how I had managed to miss the town
was more than I could explain."

"The wonder is you ever fetched across from Inniscaw."

"It's my belief we had never done it, but for the tide. The night was
black as your hat when we started, but fairly clear. We kept sight of
the lamp on the pier-head until half-way across. Then the fog came
down; and then----!"

"Well, it's good hard causeway between this and St. Hugh's," said Mr.
Rogers. "We can't miss it. Afterwards.... However, you'll step along
with me to the Guard-house, Sir Caesar, and as soon as the weather lifts
at all one of my men shall put you back to Inniscaw."

"On the contrary, my good sir, I go with you."

Mr. Rogers looked at him, as he buttoned up his pea-jacket.

"We won't argue it here," he said. "You don't guess what it means,
though, searching for a wreck among the Off Islands on a night like
this. Not to mention that there's a sea running...."

And yet, apart from the fog, there was nothing in the weather to
suggest shipwreck and horrors. For a fortnight the Islands had lain
steeped in the sunshine of Indian summer; a fortnight of still starry
nights and days almost without a cloud. As a rule, such weather breaks
up in a gale, of which the glass gives timely warning. But the mercury
in Mr. Fossell's barometer indicated no depression--or the merest
trifle. The drenched night air was warm: to Miss Gabriel, inhaling it
in the passage by the drawing-room door, it seemed to be laden with the
scents of summer, and Miss Gabriel had not lived all her life in
Garland Town without learning the subtle aromas of the wind, to
distinguish those that were harmless or beneficent from those that
warned, those that threatened, those that were morose, savage,
malignant, those that piped a note of madness and meant a hurricane.
Nor did the fog in itself appear to her very formidable. To be sure,
she had never known a thicker one; but the Lord Proprietor (saving his
presence) had probably exaggerated its terror. He was--let this excuse
be made for him--a landsman, comparatively new to the Islands.

Probably Mr. Fossell and Mr. Pope and the Vicar took the same view. The
news of the wreck had excited them, and they were offering to accompany
Sir Caesar and Mr. Rogers to St. Hugh's Town, on the chance of some
information.

"And we had best go with them, my dear," suggested Miss Gabriel to Mrs.
Pope. (Their houses stood side by side and contiguous, on a gentle rise
at the foot of Garrison Hill, where the peninsular of New Town broadens
out and New Town itself melts into St. Hugh's.)

Mrs. Fossel begged them to wait and keep her company until the
gentlemen returned. "It is impossible," she urged as an inducement,
"that Selina can go on making this noise forever."

But Miss Gabriel had taken her decision, and from a decision Miss
Gabriel was not easily turned.

"My dear," said she, reaching for her cloak, "the gentlemen may not
return until goodness knows when, and I have a prejudice against late
hours."

They started in a body. The fog, to be sure, was a deal worse than ever
Miss Gabriel could have credited. Still, the gentlemen using their
lanterns and tapping to right and left with their sticks, they found
the hard causeway, and blundered along it towards St. Hugh's, the
ladies with their shawls drawn over their heads and their heads held
down against the drifting wall of moisture.

They had made their way thus for about four hundred yards--that is to
say, about a third of the length of the causeway--when suddenly the fog
ahead of them became luminous, and they perceived torches waving.

"Mr. Rogers! Is that Mr. Rogers?" called a voice.

"Ay, ay, men!" Mr. Rogers hailed in answer, recognising his coastguard.
"I am coming--fast as I can," he added, having at that moment run into
a wall.

"A wreck, sir!"

"Ay! Where is it?"

"Somewhere beyond St. Ann's, sir, as we make it--out towards the Monk.
There was a gun fired, and Dick, here, thinks as he saw the lighthouse
send up a signal; but lights there's none that the rest of us can make
out----"

"Hark!"

Again the fog shook with the concussion of a gun.

"Due west, as I make it out," said Mr. Rogers. "Are the boats ready?"

"Aye, sir; the jolly-boat manned and off, and the gig launched and
lying by the slip."

"Then run, men!"

"Why, they've left us!" gasped Mrs. Pope, as the glare of the torches
melted into the fog.

"It doesn't matter," Miss Gabriel assured her bravely. "We have only to
keep straight on."




CHAPTER V

THE S.S. MILO


Major Vigoureux fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the
pillow. He owed this habit originally to a clear conscience, and
although (as the reader knows) his conscience was no longer quite
clear, the habit had not forsaken him.

He dreamed that he was presenting himself at Mr. Fossell's bank, and
giving Mr. Fossell across the counter a number of plausible reasons why
his pay should be handed to him as usual. He knew all the while that
his arguments were sophistical and radically unsound; but he trusted
that he was making them cogent. (Why is it that in dreams we feel no
remorse for our sins, but only a terror lest we be found out? I cannot
tell; but the best men and women of my acquaintance agree that it is
so.) Mr. Fossell preserved an impassive, inscrutable face; but every
time the Commandant ventured a new argument Mr. Fossell's high, bald
head twinkled and suddenly changed colour like a chameleon. It was
green, it was violet, it was bathed in a soft roseate glow like an
Alpine peak at sunset; and still while he argued the Commandant was
forced to dodge his body about lest Mr. Fossell should catch sight of a
mirror fixed in the opposite wall, and perceive how strangely his scalp
was behaving. Finally, Mr. Fossell turned as if convinced, walked away
to an inner room, and came back bearing a bag of money, round and
distended--so tightly distended, indeed, that the Commandant called out
to him to be careful of the contents. But the cry came a moment too
late; for the bag, as it touched the counter, exploded with a dull
report, collapsed, and flattened itself out into a playing-card--the
queen of hearts!

At this point the Commandant excusably found himself awake, and sat up
blinking at Sergeant Archelaus, who stood in a haze of fog by his
bedside with a lighted candle.

"You heard it?" asked Sergeant Archelaus.

"Heard it?" echoed the Commandant, trembling, not yet in full
possession of his senses. "Of course, I heard it. The Bank--." Here he
checked himself and rubbed his eyes.

"You're dreaming; that's what's the matter with you," said Sergeant
Archelaus, using the familiarity of an old servant. "There's a ship on
the rocks."

"A ship? Where?"

The Sergeant, candle in hand, stepped to the casement, which the
Commandant, following his custom, had opened a little way before
getting into bed.

"Lord knows where she be by this time, if St. Ann's pilots ha'n't found
her. The gun sounded from west'ard, down by the Monk."

"Fog, is it?" asked the Commandant, staring about him and remembering.

"Fog it is," answered Sergeant Archelaus, and added, "Poor souls!"

"Thick?" By this time the Commandant had flung back the bed-clothes and
was thrusting his feet into his worn slippers.

"I never seen a thicker in my born days."

"If we had a gun----"

"Ah--if," agreed Sergeant Archelaus, curtly, and turning, let his voice
rise in a sudden passion. "Why did I wake ye? Set it down to habit.
I've known the time when the sound of a gun would have fetched forty
men out of the Barracks to save life or to take it; and a gun within
thirty seconds to alarm all the Islands. But we! What's the use of us?"

"Get on your coat," said the Commandant, sharply, putting on his
trousers. "Get on your coat and run to the bell--that is, if
Treacher----"

But at this moment the muffled note of a bell began to sound through
the fog, vindicating Treacher's vigilance. Treacher, however, was not
the ringer. The Commandant had scarcely slipped on his fatigue jacket,
and begun to search in the wardrobe for his overcoat, when Treacher's
voice sounded up the staircase, demanding to know if the garrison was
awake.

"Awake?" called back Archelaus. "Of course we be, and coming before you
can sound th' alarm. Reach down the bugle, man--from the rock behind
th' door, there--and sound it."

Treacher sounded. He was out of breath, and the two high notes quavered
broken-windedly; but the Commandant's chest swelled with something of
old pride. The alarm would reach the town, and the town would know that
the garrison had not been caught napping. He snatched at the candle
from the candlestick in Sergeant Archelaus' hand and rammed it into the
socket of a horn lantern he had unhooked from the cupboard.

"Come along, men! Keep sounding, Treacher--keep sounding!"

Even so he had called once--a many years ago--in the trenches under the
Redan. Treacher sounded obediently, and down the hill all three
staggered--past the garrison gates, with a call to Mrs. Treacher to
pull for all she was worth--and still forward among the ruts and loose
stones, all so familiar that relying on tread alone (as in fact they
did) they could not miss their way. Below them, along the quay, and on
the causeway at the head of it--voices were calling and lights moving;
but the fog reduced the shouts to a twitter, as of birds, and the
torches and lantern to mere glow-worm sparks. The coastguards were
embarking and the Lord Proprietor, just arrived upon the scene, was
running about--as Sergeant Archelaus put it afterwards, "like a paper
man in a cyclone"--calling out the names of volunteers for the
lifeboat.

If Sergeant Archelaus ever afterwards spoke disparagingly of the Lord
Proprietor's activities that night, something may be forgiven him; as
something may be forgiven the Lord Proprietor--for on such occasions
men blurt out what rises to their lips.

The fog had found its way into Treacher's bugle before our three heroes
reached the quay; but he continued to blow his best; and there, at the
end of the causeway, Sir Caesar ran into them--ran straight into the
Commandant, almost knocking out his breath--calling, as he ran, for
someone to take bow oar in the lifeboat.

"Will I do?" asked Sergeant Archelaus, coolly, as became a soldier.

"You?" The Lord Proprietor thrust his torch close. "Oh, get out of my
way--this is work to-night, work for men! And you"--catching sight of
the Commandant--"how much do you think you are helping us with this
tom-fool noise?"

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