Arthur Schnitzler - "Casanova's Homecoming"

Leslie Stephen - "Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.)"

Erasmus Roterodamus - "Selections from Erasmus"

Charlotte Mary Yonge - "Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II"

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




Thus the boy grew up into a strong, slow man, gentle of manners, shy of
the sound of his own voice, but tenacious of purpose and stubborn when
his will was crossed. Except for the few months when he went wooing
after Ruth Cara--in the year after his mother's death--his life, hopes,
purposes, dreams and waking thoughts concentrated themselves upon
Saaron, and from the day he brought his bride home to it the island
became more than ever his sufficing world. He knew a thousand small
things concerning it--secrets of the soil, of the tides, of the sand
drift--voices of the wind, varying colours of the sea, and what weather
they foretold--where this moss grew, that bird nested--in what week the
wild duck arrived, on what wind the geese might be looked for, and what
feeling in the spring air announced that the guillemots were due. He
had learnt these things unconsciously, and was quite unaware of his
knowledge, having never an occasion to review it or put it into words.
Moreover, it was strangely limited. To his ancestors, to the folk who
had lived here before him, he never gave a thought, except to wonder
what their tillage had been or why they had rounded off a hedge at such
and such a corner. Of the history of his own farm-house he could tell
you next to nothing, and nothing at all of the small ruined church he
passed at least twice a day--though this testified that Saaron had been
populous once on a time. How long had the Tregarthens lived on the
Island? How far back beyond the five or six generations attested by the
signatures on old leases hidden away in his strong-box? One might as
well ask how long the sandpipers and oyster-catchers had bred on their
separate grounds under the north slope of the cliffs towards Brefar. On
the summit of the hill stood eleven mounds, and in each mound (so
tradition said) lay the burnt bones of royalty. Was he, perhaps,
descended from these Island kings? Tregarthen would not have given
sixpence to discover. They were dead, and less than names: the place of
their burial belonged to him, and he had to wring a livelihood from it
to support his wife and family. Sometimes, when he thought of his three
youngsters--of the boy especially--the man felt a vague longing which
puzzled him as well by its foolishness as by its strength; a longing to
pass, when his time came, into these barren acres and watch (though
helplessly) while his heir improved what he had painfully won. It was
absurd, of course, to desire any such perpetuity; wicked, perhaps. It
could not be reconciled with heaven and the future life promised by the
Bible. Yet it haunted him, though at rare intervals, and not
importunately. To the past he gave never a thought.

Ruth Tregarthen, his wife, was one of those women who find their
happiness within their own doors. The farm-house stood some way up the
slope of the southern hill, facing eastward over the valley which
curved a little at its feet and spread into a line of small flat
meadows around the East Bay, where the farmer kept his two boats; and
the site had been chosen here to avoid the seas which, with a gale
falling on top of the equinoctial springs, are driven up the valley
from east and west, and meet to form an isthmus, cutting the Island in
two.

The state-rooms of the farm-house--parlour, hall, and best
bedrooms--looked eastward upon Cromwell's Sound; but the waters of the
Sound were hidden from the lower windows by a stout hedge of tamarisk.
The kitchen window at the back--by far the largest in the house, as the
kitchen itself, where the family took its meals on every day but
Christmas Day and Good Friday, was the true focus of the
household--looked across the town-place, or farm-yard, upon another
tall hedge of tamarisk, above which climbed the hill, steep, strewn
with small white stones, shutting out the Atlantic.

The kitchen table stood close beside this window, just beyond the edge
of the bacon-rack; and directly opposite, across the wide paved floor,
was a wide open hearth, fitted with crooks and brandises, where all the
day long something or other would be cooking, and where the night
through the logs smouldered and fell in soft grey ash, to be fed and
stirred to flame again in the early morning. Yes, and as though this
was not enough, the hearth had beside it an iron door which, being
opened, disclosed to the children a long narrow hole filled with fire;
vision to them of a passage leading straight to hell, though their own
mother (and she so gentle) stoked it with bunches of furze, and drew
from it loaves and saffron cakes, hot and detectable.

To the children it seemed that their parents seldom or never talked,
and never by any chance took a rest.

Their names were Annet, Linnet and Matthew Henry, and this was the
order of their ages--Annet nine, Linnet seven, and Matthew Henry rising
five. On fine days they attended school at Inniscaw, being rowed to and
fro across the Sound by John Nanjulian (Old Jan), the hind, or Stevy,
the farm-boy. These, with Melia Mundy, the house-girl, whose parents
lived on Brefar, made up Farmer Tregarthen's employ, and took their
meals at table with the family.

The school which Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry attended had been
built by the Lord Proprietor on Inniscaw shore, to serve the three
islands of Inniscaw, Brefar, and Saaron. The children brought their
school-pence weekly, on Friday mornings; but, of course, their pence
did not pay--scarcely even began to pay--for the cost. Also there were
days, and sometimes many days together, when no boat could be put
across; and, considering this, the Lord Proprietor (who was a
philanthropist in his way, but his way happened to be a despotic one)
had commanded his architect to prepare plans for a smaller school on
Brefar. This, to be sure, would not help the three children on Saaron;
but it gave him yet another reason to feel indignant with that fellow
Tregarthen for clinging so obstinately to his solitude and barren
acres.

The children themselves did not regret living so far from school; for
they were ordinary healthy youngsters though brighter-witted than most,
and felt as other youngsters feel towards that wise and elderly
beneficence which boxes them up in a room for instruction. To be sure
they missed the games in the play-ground before and after school; but
this was no such loss as the reader, remembering his own childhood,
might be disposed to think. For, sad to tell, only a few of the
hundreds of thousands of children attending schools really understand
games, or can be said to have learnt to play, and the Island children
were in this respect some way behind their brothers and sisters on the
mainland. If at whiles the small trio looked back wistfully as old Jan
rowed them homeward, or if the shouts that followed across the water
from the playground now and again reproached them, on the whole they
would not have changed places with their school-fellows even at a
price. After all, no island in the world could compare with Saaron.
Their father had never said this, but they were sure that he thought
it; and their father knew everything. As he walked along he would say
suddenly, "Go there"--but without lifting his eyes, just waving his
hand towards the spot--"and there you will find a bunting's nest, or a
stone-chat's"; nor once in a dozen times would he be mistaken.

There were compensations, too, in living on an island where on any
morning you might wake and find a gale of wind blowing, forbidding you
to go to school. But even in fine weather one could always look forward
to Saturday and Sunday, each a whole holiday.

It was Saturday. The three had opened their eyes soon after daybreak
and lay in their cots "chirruping," as their mother called it--talking,
planning out a campaign of adventures for the long two days before
them. The sun shone through their nursery window, which faced the East.
They had curled themselves to sleep before the great fog came up and
covered the Islands, and the sound of guns had neither awakened them
nor reached their dreams. They awoke to a clear morning sky, and while
they chatted, waiting the order to tumble out and dress, their father
looked in at the nursery door and astonished and excited them with news
of a great steamer which had entered the Roads in the night and was
already lifting anchor to pursue her voyage.

From the hill above the farmhouse they watched her, after breakfast, as
she steamed past the southern point of the island, nosed her way slowly
through Chough Sound, between Inniscaw and St. Lide's, and so headed
away to the northward until her smoke lay in a low trail on the
horizon. They had never before seen a steamer of her size.

Thus strangely began a day which the three had still stranger cause to
remember. They had planned to take their dinner wrapped in their
handkerchiefs and climb to the old tombs on the hill overlooking
Brefar, then to play at being Aztecs, from hints which Annet had dug
out of an old History of Mexico on her mother's bookshelf, and at
hiding treasure from the Spaniards, whose ships were to come sailing
through the Off Islands. Having concealed their hoard, they were either
to descend upon the Western Bay, which they called The Porth, and there
offer a bloody resistance to the invaders, or (this was Annet's notion,
which for the present she kept to herself) to wait until the north
channel dried and make a desperate escape across the sands to Brefar.
The trouble was, she could not be sure of low water being early enough
to let them dash across and back before dusk again. She was a brave
girl--a great deal braver, at least in these adventures, than her
sister Linnet; but she had to bear in mind that Matthew Henry was but
five years old and easily tired, and also that if they arrived home
after dusk her mother would be anxious and her father angry. So she
nursed the project in her own heart, and when the three had taken
seizin of the northern hill, eaten their manchets of saffron cake, and
shared their canful of milk, she took up a post from which, while the
others scanned the offing for Spaniards, she could watch and time the
ebb of the tide on the flats.

The afternoon was sunny; the flat rock on which they were perched lay
out of the wind's reach; and to beguile the interval of waiting Annet
drew out a book which she had brought with her--a much-worn copy of
Hans Andersen which had arrived at Christmas, three years ago, as a
gift from that mysterious Aunt Vazzy of whom their mother talked so
often. Linnet stoutly maintained that this aunt of theirs, whom they
had never set eyes on, must be a fairy herself--neither more nor less;
and Annet had her doubts on this point. But the book, at any rate, was
real, with a real inscription on the fly-leaf; and the children (though
some of the stories puzzled them) believed it to be the most beautiful
book in the world.

Each child had a favourite story. Matthew Henry's was "The Tinder-Box,"
and he would wake in the night from dreams, deliciously terrible, of
the three dogs "with eyes as big as coach wheels." Linnet, who had a
practical mind, preferred such as dealt with rolling-pins, flat-irons,
and shirt-collars, because these were familiar objects, and their
histories usually ended cheerfully--(she liked "The Ugly Duckling"
because he was a duckling, but objected to much of the tale as being
too sad). Annet declared for "The Little Mermaid," which is perhaps the
saddest of all; and this was the one she chose to-day, though
half-penitently, because she felt pretty certain that it would make
Linnet cry.

But to-day Linnet no sooner recognized the opening of the story than
she set her face defiantly; and when Annet reached that most pathetic
passage where the little mermaid glances down sorrowfully at her fish's
tail, and "Let us be merry," says the grandmother, "let us dance and
play for the three hundred years we have to live," Linnet lifted her
chin, stared hard at the horizon and said resolutely--albeit in a voice
that trembled a little--

"I don't believe there are any such things as mermaids!"

Young Matthew Henry opened his mouth and stared, round-eyed at such
dreadful scepticism.

Annet, too, gazed up from her book.

"But the story says there are," she answered, simply and gravely.

"Who ever saw one?" persisted doubting Linnet.

"Hundreds of people--" Annet began, and with that, as a shadow fell on
the rock, she lifted her eyes and uttered a little cry.

Just above, on the flat tombstone that jutted over the ridge, stood a
beautiful lady, and looked down on them.




CHAPTER XIII

THE LADY FROM THE SEA


How it happened the children never precisely knew. When they came to
compare notes that evening their recollections varied on several
important particulars. But this was certain, that before they could
rise and run--and Matthew Henry protested that, for his part, he had
never an idea of running--the apparition had stepped down from her
pedestal and seated herself among them in the friendliest way.

"Good day!" she nodded. "Now let me see ... this is Annet, and this is
Linnet, and that is Matthew Henry, and I hope you're all uncommonly
well."

Annet gasped that they were quite well, thank you. Who and what could
she be, this lady out of nowhere?... Not a witch, for no witch could
smile with such a beautiful face or wear such beautiful clothes. On the
other hand, Annet had not supposed that fairies were ever so tall. Yet
something of the sort she must be, for she knew their names....

"You want to know where I come from? But that is easy." The stranger
reached out a white hand with a diamond upon it, and Annet yielded the
book to her without resisting. "I come from here"--and she tapped the
pages mysteriously.

"But how can that be?" demanded Linnet, who was always the
matter-of-fact one. "Out of a book! Such things do not happen."

Vashti laughed merrily. "I assure you," she answered, with a glance at
the fly-leaf, "I have been in the book all the while you were reading;
and," she added, her eyes softening as they rested on the child, "of
you three it is Linnet who is most like her mother."

They had not thought of this before, but she had no sooner said it than
they knew it to be the truth; and the discovery made her more
marvellous than ever.

"Yes," she went on, "I have lived inside this book; and, what is more,
I know the man who wrote it."

She looked around on the three faces; and--so strange are children--for
the first time in his life Matthew Henry at once asserted himself as a
person entirely different from his sisters. For Annet and Linnet merely
looked puzzled; to them the book was a book, just as the hill upon
which they sat was a hill, and they had never troubled their heads
about such a thing as an author. But Matthew Henry opened his infantine
eyes still wider.

"Tell us about him," he demanded.

Vashti eyed the child curiously for a moment before answering. "He
lives in the north," she said, "in a city where the sea is sometimes
frozen for weeks in the winter, and where night after night you may see
the Northern Lights over the roofs. That is why he writes so much of
snow and fir-trees and cold winters."

Annet nodded. "I have seen the Northern Lights--once--from Saaron
here," she announced proudly. "Father took me out of my bed and held me
up to the window to look at them; Linnet, too--but she was too young to
remember, and Matthew Henry was not even born at the time."

"But tell us," persisted Matthew Henry, "about the man who wrote the
book."

"Well, the Northern Lights were shining in the streets on the night
when I met him. I drove to his house in a sleigh from the theatre--if
you know what a theatre is?" Vashti paused dubiously; but Annet nodded
and assured her--

"That's all right. We don't know about these things, but they are all
in the book."

"And so," said Vashti, "is the man himself, or most of him. He was a
queer, shy old man, with oddly-shaped hands and feet, but oh, such
timid eyes! And he lived in a fine house all by himself, for he had no
wife. In the days when he wanted a wife he had been an Ugly Duckling,
and now, when he had turned into a swan, it was too late to marry. He
was very old indeed; but this was his birthday, and he had lit up all
his rooms for us and made a great feast, and at the feast he made me
sit on his right hand.... There were princesses to do him honour, but
he chose me out because I had sung to him; and the princesses were not
angry because he was an old man. Out in the streets the people were
letting off fireworks, and while he talked to me I could hear the whole
sky banging with rockets and crackers. It put me in mind of his story
of 'The Flying Trunk.' But he talked of Italy and the South, because I
had come from there; and of the Mediterranean and of beautiful inland
lakes which he had known, but would never see again; for he was over
seventy. And he told me that, in spite of the snow and frost outside,
he could feel the spring coming northward again with the storks. It was
the last time (he said) that he should ever see it, but he filled his
glass and drank to me because, as he put it, I had sung the South back
to him for this last time. So now you know why I was proud to come to
you out of his book."

"But," said Linnet, gravely, "we were reading about mermaids; and you
can't be one of _them_, because there aren't any."

Matthew Henry would by no means allow this. "But Jan's father caught
one," he objected, "in a pool just inside Piper's Hole, where she was
left by the tide. He has told us about her, dozens of times. And
besides," he added, getting in a home-thrust, "if there isn't any such
thing, why were you crying over the story, just now?"

"I wasn't," contended Linnet, very red in the face. But she shifted her
ground. "Why," pointing to Vashti's skirts--"her clothes aren't even
wet, to say nothing of a tail!"

Vashti laughed. "My dears, you are both right and both wrong. As for
the mermaids, Linnet, they were friends of mine before I reached your
age, and you must let me introduce you to one by-and-by, to cure you of
disbelieving. But you are right about me. I am not a mermaid; and yet I
have come from the sea ... like the Queen Zenobia."

"Who was she?" asked Annet, speaking for the others.

"She was a Queen in Carthage, more than two thousand years ago. She
came to the Islands in a ship, to visit the tin-mines which used to lie
between them and the mainland before the sea covered them, and from
which she drew her great wealth. Her ship arrived in the middle of the
Great Storm; and before she came to land, here on Saaron, the waters
were rolling over the richest part of all her dependencies. Little she
cared; for in the first place she had never seen it, and could not
realise her loss, and moreover her ship had been tossing for three days
and nights, past all hope, so that she was glad enough to reach a
shore, however barren. She reached it, holding on to the shoulders of a
brown man, a Moor, who swam for land as the ship began to break up; and
the story goes that when his feet touched the sand he fell forward and
died, for the swimming had burst his heart. But have you never heard
the song about it?" Vashti sank her voice and began to chant, and low
though the strain was, and monotonous, the children had never heard
such wonderful singing--

It was the Queen Zenobia
With her gold crown,
That sailed away from Africa
With a down-derry-down!

--To westward and to northward
From Carthage town,
Beyond the strait of Cadiz
The sky began to frown.

"Well-a-mercy!" cried her ladies,
All of high renown;
"I think the sea is troublesome
And we shall all drown."

The seas came white aboard
And wetted her gown;
"Would I were back in Carthage
A-walking up and down!

That I were back in Carthage
Which is dry ground,
I would give my jewels
And a thousand pound."

Then round went the good ship,
And thrice she went round,
The third time she brast herself
With a down-derry-down!

Some cried misericordia,
And others did swoun;
But up there stood a guardsman
A naked man and brown--

"You are the Queen of Carthage
And gey young to drown;
But hold you to my girdle
That goes me around;
And swim with me to Saaron,
As I will be bound."

"Your girdle it is breaking
That goeth you around."
"Nay, hold you to the girdle
That is strong yet and sound;
My heart you felt a-breaking,
But here is dry ground."

With white sand and shingle
The shore did abound;
With white sand she covered him
And built him a mound.

With flotsam and with wreckage
The shore was all strown;
She built of it a cottage,
And there she sat down.

"Though this be not Africa,
Nor yet Carthage town,
Deo-gracey," said Zenobia,
"That I did not drown!"

"That's where the tune changes," interrupted Matthew Henry, clapping
his small sunburnt hands together.

"You know the song then?" asked Vashti, looking from one to the other.

All three nodded. "We know a verse or two," Annet answered. "Mother was
always singing it when she rocked Matthew Henry to sleep, and sometimes
we get her to sing as much as she can remember for a treat."

"But she can only remember five or six verses," said Linnet; "and her
voice is not beautiful like yours."

Annet and Matthew Henry protested. Their mother's was a beautiful
voice; one of the most beautiful in the world.

"But not beautiful like hers," Linnet persisted. "I mean that it's
quite different."

They admitted this--so much their loyalty allowed them. "And I like the
end of the song best," Linnet went on, "because it's cheerfuller. It
goes on 'At daybreak she dressed her....'"

But for a moment or two, though she felt the children's eyes fastened
on her expectantly, Vashti did not resume the song. Those same
expectant eyes were open windows through which she looked into the
past, as into a house tenanted by ghosts. Through Annet's, through
Linnet's, she saw familiarly, recognising the dim children that played
within and beyond the shadow of the blinds. But the child Matthew
Henry's frightened her. She and Ruth had lost a brother once. He had
died in infancy, a scrap of childhood, almost forgotten.... Yes,
Matthew Henry's eyes too had a playroom behind them; and there too a
shadowy child played at hide and seek.

Her voice shook a little as she picked up the old song--

At daybreak she dressed her,
Her wet hair she wound,
When she saw a lithe shepherd,
Stood under the mound.

He stood among the wreckage
With crook and with hound,
Alone in the morning,
That most did astound.

"O tell to me, lithe shepherd,
What king owns this ground?"
"No king, ma'am, but Zenobia,
A Queen of renown."

"Lithe lad, she is shipwrecked;
Myself saw her drown."
"Then 'tis you are Queen of Saaron
If you will step down.

"I have sheep, goat, and cattle
And a clear three pound,
If you'll mate with me and settle
In goods we will abound."

"Well-a-way!" sighed Zenobia,
"I have lost Carthage town,
But I like this lithe shepherd
So handsome and brown.

"If I marry you," said Zenobia,
"Farewell to renown!
If I marry you," said Zenobia,
"I mate with a clown.
But I'll marry you for all that,
With a down-derry-down!"

"And," said Linnet, as the song concluded, "they married and had twelve
children--six boys and six girls. Mother told me about it."

But Matthew Henry turned to the singer gravely. "Is it true?" he asked.
"And are you really Queen Zenobia?"

"Come and see," said Vashti, rising. "The sands are bare between us and
Brefar, and if Linnet is brave enough we will take a boat and she shall
be shown the cave where Jan's father caught the mermaid."

"But we must get back again," objected Annet.

"I will see that you get back again."

"The sands may not be safe."

"When you told us yourself that they were quite safe!" protested
Matthew Henry. "And you said you would lead us over and back without
any danger at all."

"The fact is," said Vashti, quietly, "Annet feels herself responsible
for you, and thinks that very likely I am a witch."

The child faced her bravely, biting her lip upon the inward struggle.

"You are not a witch," she said. "Your eyes are too good. And, besides,
there are people in Brefar who will take care of us if we miss our way
back."

Vashti smiled, and again half sadly, for out of her own past this child
confronted her. "That is brave, Annet; brave enough for the moment,
though by and by we shall have to be braver. See how the sands shine
below us! Shall we race for them and see who wins?"

She took Matthew Henry's small, unresisting hand, and the four pelted
down the slope. Something in Vashti's eyes--it could not have been in
the words of her last answer, for they were mysterious enough--had
apparently reassured Annet, who cast away care and called back in
triumph as she won the race down to the golden sands.

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