Harold Spender - "Home Rule"

George Bernard Shaw - "Der Mann des Schicksals"

Frederick A. Ober - "Amerigo Vespucci"

Charles Kingsley - "True Words for Brave Men"

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.

The Gentleman

A >> Alfred Ollivant >> The Gentleman




So unexpected was the effect, and so tickling--this grim old veteran
revealing in himself the Eternal Child who hides behind us all--that
the Frenchmen at their guns, hearing in the silence the sudden ripple
of a boy's laughter, whispered among themselves that the Englishman
had a woman aboard.


III


The breeze was very light and fast falling away. Old Ding-dong kept
one eye on his topsails, and one on his foe, sliding towards him across
the water.

"Like the Shadow o Death a'most, ain't she?" said the old man in hushed
voice--"so still-like and stealy." He dropped a kind eye on the boy's
face. "Makes ye think first time, don't it?--I mind Quiberon. Guts
feel fainty like."

He renewed his watch. The twinkle had left his eyes. He had withdrawn
deep down into himself. Somewhere in the centre of that square body
sat his mind, alert, cat-like, about to pounce.

The shadow of the _Cocotte_ fell across the sea nearly to their
feet. The wind breathed on the waters, dulling them. The languid topsails
swelled faintly.

The old man spun the wheel. The _Tremendous_ swung towards her
enemy.

Delicately across the glittering floor the two ships drew towards each
other, wary as panthers about to fight.

There was dead silence, alow and aloft. Only the tricolour at the enemy's
fore flapped insolently; and the red-cross flag, at the mizzen gaff
of the sloop, licked out a long tongue and taunted back.

"That's Mouche at the wheel," grunted the old Commander--"her skipper.
A fine fighter, but treecherous like em all.... Funny thing no one
on deck only him. Swarmin with men too, I'll lay."

The French skipper too was at the wheel: a dapper little personage,
black-a-vised, with fierce moustachios and eye-tufts.

He wore a huge tricorne, and vast tawdry epaulettes.

"How do you, sair?" he called, all bows and smiles and teeth, as the
two ships came within biscuit-toss. "Vair please to meet you once more."

"Queer lingo, ain't it?" muttered old Ding-dong. "All spit and gargle.
Comes from eatin all them frogs, I reck'n. Stick in their throats or
summat."

He raised his voice.

"Same to you and many on em," he growled. "I ain't seen that dirty
phiz o your'n in the Channel since our little bit of a tiff off the
Casquets last May. I yeard tell you was in the West Indies conwalescin
a'ter an attack o de _Tremendous_!" He chuckled at his joke.

The Frenchman shrugged and smiled.

"So I wass, sair, a while back. And now here--on express pisness; the
Emperor's pisness."

"What's up?" asked the Englishman bluffly. "Tired o waitin to wop
Nelson? Goin to embark the Armee o England straight off?"

"Not yet," replied the other, showing his teeth. "All in goot time,
my Captain. This first--this pit of pisness I do for my Emperor."

"Seems to me that Emperor o your'n must be put to the push if he's
druv to gettin a mucky little pirit like you to do his business," grumbled
the other.

The Frenchman waved the insult aside with utmost good humour.

"He send for me across the seas. 'I need my leetle Albairt,' he says.
'Come queegly.' So I spread my wings and come. And _La Coquette_
she slip out from Rochefort. And _La Guerriere_"-with a backward
jerk--"from Brest. Like swallows in April we flock to the
rendezvous--to meet the Queen of Hearts, is it not?"

He bowed low, hand to his bosom.

"And now you've come, sure I ope you'll stay," rumbled the grim old
seaman. "The trouble with you's always been your despart hurry to get
away."

"This time we stay," replied the Frenchman with a smirk--"all three,
for ever, if need be."

"We'll do our best to make you at ome, sir," grunted the Englishman;
and turning to Kit--

"Slip below and tell Mr. Lanyon to begin to talk when we're locked
fast--and not afoor."




CHAPTER X


THE MAIN-DECK

Kit scampered below.

The main-deck was clear as a room before a ball: bulkheads up; hammocks
slung. But for the sand on it, you might have danced there.

How big and sweet and clean it looked!--like the loft at home, where
he and Gwen and the black cat's kittens played on wet days.

But there was something other than the black cat's kittens to think
about now.

The sunshine poured in through the ports on the sleek guns crouching
ready. On the breech of one somebody had scrawled in chalk--

_God is Love. Hear me preach it:_

on others obscene mottoes, texts, and lines from patriotic songs.

About each gun clustered her crew, naked to the waist, black
handkerchieves bound about their foreheads. All had solemn puckers
about the brows; some were silent, some ghastly-joking in whispers,
and one, face averted, was obviously praying.

Up and down the sanded deck between the guns, picking his teeth,
strutted a tall and faded splendour.

His cocked hat was a-rake; his kid gloves white as his skipper's were
dingy; his whiskers, purple with dye newly applied, puffed out on
cheeks touched with rouge.

Could this dilapidated dandy, so alert, so nonchalant, be the drunkard
of last night?--

Yes. That tallowy nose, those eyes with the wild gleam in them, could
not be mistaken. It was Lushy Lanyon.

Somehow he had scraped up a First Lieutenant's uniform: bright blue
coat with long tails; white waist-coat, knee breeches, and stockings;
black hat cockaded, worn athwart-ships; and sword slung from a
shoulder belt. And the wonder was that it fitted and became him.

The boy gave his message.

The Gunner bowed ceremoniously.

"Be so good as to give Commander Ardin my compliments, and say I don't
pull a lanyard till I can see through her ports."

The other's formal politeness stirred the boy almost to laughter; yet
somehow the faded splendour of the man touched him too.

It was as when a great light seeks to shine through smoked glass. Last
night he had seen only the sodden body; now he beheld the soul, shining
dimly, it is true, but shining still through its sullied habitation.
The call to action had set it burning. It illuminated the blurred face,
notable still. In his youth the man must have been extraordinarily
handsome. Even now he was a noble ruin.

"Ah, you may stare, Mr. Caryll," said the Gunner, reading the other's
thoughts. "It was Lushy Lanyon last night; this morning it's _Me_!"

He swelled his chest, and stalked down the deck between his guns,
shooting his cuffs.

"Yes, sir. A fight's meat and drink to me. It pulls me together, and
makes me remember who I am." He threw back his head--"Magnificent
Arry, the man that's played more avock with earts in his day than any
other seaman afloat.... It's the whiskers done it," he added simply.

The two men in him were at war: the high and mighty fighting-man and
the confidential toper. Each came bobbing out in turns.

"And if you should want to see a main-deck fought as a main-deck should
be fought, why, sir, be good enough to take a seat."

He kicked a powder-monkey off his box, and offered it with a bow.

"Can't," said Kit, turning. "No time. See you again later."

The other stooped and peered out of a port.

"Doobious, I should say," he replied, picking his teeth. "Vairy
doobious. Ah! ----"

A great black shadow stole across the port. Its effect on the Gunner
was miraculous. He shot up like a flame. He was dark; he was terrible;
there was something of the majesty of Satan about the man. Some huge
sea of life seemed to lift him above himself, and land him among the
giants.

"Stand by the starboard battery!" he roared.




CHAPTER XI


COMMODORE MOUCHE

Kit ran up the ladder out of that bellowing Inferno.

The _Tremendous_ and her enemy lay side by side with locked spars;
the _Coquette_ becalmed beyond.

Then Kit understood the ruse of that wary old fighter, his Commander.
Old Ding-dong had placed the _Cocotte_ as a bulwark between him
and her consort. As he had foreseen, the wind, falling away this hour
past, had dropped to nothing now. The _Coquette_ could not bring
a gun into action.

Four hundred yards away, she might have been as many miles for all
the assistance she could render her sister-ship.

As the boy came up, the old Commander was leaning against the wheel,
bending towards his knee, and breathing hard.

There was a dark and peevish look about his face; and a trickle of
red was running down his white knee-breeches.

"Tell ye 'taint etiquette to have men in your tops only in general
actions and duels atween ships of the line," he was saying in slow
and painful voice, very querulous. "In all my fifty years' experience
o sea fightin, I never see sich a thing afoor, never! Dirty trick I
call it."

The little Frenchman across the narrow lane of water dividing
the ships, chattered excuses, all sympathy and shrugged shoulders.

"Ah, I so grieve. Pain! pain! terrible, n'est-ce-pas?--But what would
you, my Captain?--It is no fault of mine. The Emperor's orders. 'I
trust you, my Commodore,' says he. 'Coute que coute.'

"Emperor! about as much a h'Emperor as you are Commodore! And you're
welcome to tell him so with my compliments," snorted the old man.

He threw his eye aloft.

"Mr. Caryll, take a party o small-arm men aloft, and clear them sneakin
blay-guards out of her tops. Else they'll be boardin by the yards."

The boy rushed away.

Beneath his feet the deck staggered and shook. On the lower-deck of
the _Tremendous_ hell had broken loose, in flame and smoke and
horrible bellowings. The little ship was racked. In her agony she quivered
from truck to keel.

Suddenly the spars of the _Cocotte_ above him began to crackle and
blaze. Plip-plop-plank! the bullets smacked all about him. He was under
fire and he didn't like it. He wanted to dodge under the bulwark and lie
there; but he daren't. So he ran breathlessly, skipping as a bullet
spanked the deck at his feet.

They were in the enemy's main-top, swarms of them, tiny figures, crowding
along the spars, grinning at him, he thought.

How on earth with a handful of men, climbing up the rigging under a
pelting fire, he would ever clear that lot out!...

Even as he wondered the enemy's main-mast seemed to become alive. It
swayed; it shook; it almost danced; the taut shrouds sagged.

At first the boy thought that horror had turned his brain, and he was
going mad. He stopped dead and gazed.

Yes, it was coming down, coming towards him, towering, tremendous,
like a falling spire.

It came in jerks, tearing its way with a snapping of stays and crashing
of spars. Figures, like black birds, seemed to detach themselves, and
flop through the air. They were men, thrown clear, and falling with
floating coat-tails as they revolved.

One fell with an appalling bump on the deck of the sloop hard by the
wheel, a man in a red coat, bear-skinn'd and gaitered. He did not stir,
kneeling, his hands before him, head bowed, in attitude of adoration.
A sudden pool of scarlet seemed to spurt out of the deck and island him.

Kit, his work accomplished for him, ran back to the wheel.

"Reck'n that's the chap as got me," said old Ding-dong, nodding at
the dead man with a certain grim friendliness. "A red-coat, d'ye see?--Now
what's the meanin o that?--I never yeard tell of a privateer carrying
regulars afoor."

The old man was leaning against the wheel. His brow was puckered; and
there was a tense, breathless air about his face. It came to the boy
with a shock of surprise that a man hard-hit makes just the same sort
of face as a man who has got one on the funny bone at cricket.

"Are you hurt?" he asked anxiously.

"Nay, I'm none hurt, but I am hit. They've took fifty years doin it,
but they've done it at last. It was yon chap with the bashed skull.
Haul him alongside o me, wilta? I'll set on him--ease my old stumps!"

He lowered himself.

"I'll larn him shoot me," he said, arranging himself comfortably on
his corpse.

Kit giggled. Somehow this old man with the twinkle in his eye made
him feel at home among these screaming horrors.

"Lucky shot o Lanyon's," continued old Ding-dong. "There's a lot o
luck in fightin; and good job for us too. Luck's the favour o God.
He always favours us. We're straight, ye see."

He peered through the eddying smoke-drift.

"That there top-hamper o their'n makes a tidy bridge atween ships.
Now if they was to tumble to that, reckon they'd boord--and we'd be
about done."

Kit looked round.

The enemy's main-top had fallen across the deck of the sloop.

The lightning that is genius flashed in the boy's mind.

In a second he was across the self-fashioned drawbridge between the
two ships and on to the deck of the Frenchman. It was deserted save
for the dead men, red-coats all, flung from the falling top, and sprawling
broadcast everywhere. Even Mouche had disappeared.

Beneath him on the lower deck was the same bellowing Inferno as on
the _Tremendous_. He felt the privateer stagger and rend to a
broadside of the sloop, as though her bowels were being torn out. He
rushed to a hatchway belching smoke. In the pit below he could see
dim figures flitting about, and could hear the howls of those in torment.
Deafened, blinded, dizzied, he slammed the hatch upon them, clamping
it down. Swiftly he passed from hatchway to hatchway, making all fast.

With dancing heart, he ran back to the bridge.

As he did so a whimpering voice stayed him.

"O mon enfant!"

The French skipper was lying abaft the binnacle, a yard across his
lower body.

There was no make-believe about him now, no mockery. He was naked man,
stripped of his tinsel, and laid bare to the soul by the inexorable
Master, Pain. Across his chin, as though to mock him, lay his false
moustachios.

"Tuez-moi!" he whimpered hoarsely. "Tuez-moi!"

"I can't!" gasped Kit--"not in cold blood!"

The lad was face to face with one of the most appalling of God's
mysteries, and was unhinged by it. Gwen with the toothache had been
nothing to this.

The agonised man rolled his head from side to side.

"Sainte Mere de Dieu, intercedez pour moi!" he wailed.

Again that lightning flashed in the boy's mind.

The man's silver-mounted pistol lay on the deck beside him. He thrust
it into the other's hand.

"Here, sir!"

The man clutched it, as one dying in a desert may clutch the flagon
of water that means life to him.

The head ceased its dreadful weaving.

"Petit ange! petit Anglais!" he whispered, and tried to smile.

Kit ran for his bridge. Halfway across it, he heard a crack, and
looked back.

He could not see the French skipper; but what he could see made his
heart sick.

Boats, crammed to the teeth, were putting away from the
_Coquette_. Black and scurrying, they tore across the water
towards him, like rats racing for blood.




CHAPTER XII


BOARDERS


I


Kit rushed madly aft.

"Here they come, sir!" he screamed.

Old Ding-dong sat propped on his corpse, shaving a quid of tobacco.

"Who come?"

"The boats, sir--boarding."

"That's the game, is it?"

He shut his jack-knife deliberately, and arranged his plug in the corner
of his jaw.

"Fetch me that ere boardin-pike. Now give me a hike up. Then nip below
and pass the word to Mr. Lanyon."

As Kit turned, he heard the rip of the first boat under the counter
of the sloop and a sharp command in French, sounding strange and terrible
in his ears.

Furiously he sped along the deck. As he bundled down the ladder, he
caught a glimpse of the old Commander, braced against the bulwarks,
and spitting into his hands.

The boy dropped into hell.

Down there was no order. All was howling chaos. Each gun-captain fought
his own gun, regardless of the rest. Billows of smoke drifted to and
fro; shadowy forms flitted; guns bounded and bellowed; here and there
a red glare lit the fog.

Through the shattering roar of the guns, the rendings of planks, the
scream of round-shot, came the voices of men, dim-seen. Jokes,
blasphemies, prayers, groans, issued in nightmare medley from that
death-fog.

"Chri', kill me!--My God, I sweats!--Pore old Jake's got it!"

On mid-deck a shadow was pirouetting madly. Suddenly it collapsed;
and the boy saw it ended at the neck.

A dim figure lolled against an overturned gun. As the lad gazed, it
pointed to a puddle beside it.

"That's me," it said with slow and solemn interest.

The boy trod on something in the smoke. A bloody wraith, spread-eagled
upon the deck, raised tired eyes to his.

"That's all right, sir," came a whisper. "Don't make no odds. I got
all I want."

A hand out of the mist clutched his ankle.

"Stop this racket," gasped a voice, querulous and tearful. "I ain't
well." A stump flapped in his face.

A ghost, sitting up against the side close by, began to titter.

"Once I was mother's darling. Mightn't think it to see me now."

A shot, screeching past the boy's nose, took his breath away. He
staggered back, and brought up against a gun-captain, his shoulders
to the breech of the gun.

The man turned with a grin. It was the Gunner, naked to the waist,
and smoke-grimed.

"Sweet mess, ain't it?" he coughed. "How d'ye like your first smell
o powder, sir?"

"They're boarding!" panted Kit. "Quick!"

The man leapt up.

"Boardin!" he roared. "Board _ME!_ I'll give em board."

He snatched up a chain-shot, and raced down the deck.

"Up aloft the lot o you!" he howled. "Heaven waits ye there!"


II


As he flamed through the smoke-drift, the crew caught fire from him.

Behind him in roaring flood they poured--black men and bloody,
snatching each the weapon nearest to hand.

An aweful joy seemed beating up through mists in their faces. Time
and Eternity warred within them. Man, the creature, hideously afraid
for his flesh, strove with Man, the Creator, impregnable in his
immortality.

Kit, swept off his feet, was borne along with the flood.
The fury of enthusiasm, which the splendid drunkard had roused in the
hearts of his men, had seized him too.

His body was aflame; and his veins ran fire. Now for the first time
he knew what it was to be alive--Life spurting from his finger-tips,
making madness in his blood, issuing riotously from his lips. He sang;
he yelled; he laughed, battering at the lunatic in front. He caught
the blasphemies of his battle-fellows, and echoed them shrilly and
with joy. The light in his comrades' eyes revealed to him deeps of
being undreamed of before. His spirit was pouring through his flesh,
making glory as it went.

Uplifted as a lover, the wine of War drowned his senses. In the glory
of doing he had no thought for the thing done. His was the midsummer
madness of slaying. In that singing moment how should he remember the
bleak and shuddering autumn of pain inevitably to follow?--the winter
of clammy death?--the March-wind voices of distant women wailing their
mates?

"Jam, ain't it?" yelled a man in his ear, as they raced up the ladder.

"Glory! glory!" sang the boy, beside himself with passion.


III


Aft and alone stood the old Commander, a dead man at his feet.

Another swarmed over the side. The old Commander's boarding-pike met
him fair in the face. Back the fellow went into darkness and death.

"Good old Ding-dong!" came the Gunner's rollicking bellow, as he stormed
up on deck, swinging his chain-shot like a battle-axe. "That's your
sort!--bash em! blast em!--disembowl the ---- Turks!"

Behind him, out of the smoke, poured the men, red-hot and roaring,
like lava spewed up from the bowels of a volcano.

A stream of boarders, trickling over the bulwarks, raced across the
deck to meet them.

"Love and War! O my God, ain't they glory?" howled the Gunner, and
plunged into the opposing flood.

One man he felled with his chain-shot; then flung it aside.

"Naked does it!" he roared, and swept up a boarder in his arms. "Ow,
the luscious little armful! no good kickin, duckie! You've got to ave
it!" He rushed to the side, hugging his man, and screaming fearful
laughter.

"Love me and forgive me, pretty tartie!" he roared, and smashed
his burthen down over the side.

The fellow crashed into a ladder of boarders, swarming up one behind
the other. Back they hurled into the boats, a hurricane of men, one
on top of t'other. The boat rocked, crumpled up, and sank.

The tears were rolling down the Gunner's face.

"Quenched their little ardour!" he bellowed, leaping on to the bulwark.
"That's the style below there, boys! Go it, ye cripples! Give em the
little _Tremendous_!"

Beneath him the sea was black with boats. From the port-holes of the
main-deck the wounded were leaning out, hailing round-shot down into
the boats.

"Plug em! ply em!" roared the Gunner. "Red ot shot--cannister--case!
anything ye like only give em slaughter for eaven's sweet sake!"

He was back in the thick of it, raving up and down the deck, sowing
death broadcast, his great voice everywhere.

Not a man on board but seemed to have caught something of his heroic
fury. The purser's steward, primmest of Methodists, who was said to
pass his time in action converting the cook, came tripping out of the
galley, a black-jack of boiling water in his hand.

"Glory for you!" he screamed, and flung the contents in the face of
a boarder.

"There's the proper Christian!" gasped the Gunner, slammed
up against the main-mast. "Propagate the Gospel ow ye can!--bilin
bilge!--buckets o filth!--spit in his face if ye can't do no better."

A tall Frenchman pistoled the little steward.

The ship's cook, a flabby great flat-footed man, all in white, and
snorting strangely, bundled up with a poll-axe, and cleft the
Frenchman's skull.

"It a chap your own size!" he yelled, and felled from behind, went
down himself.


IV


Up and down the deck the battle raged: here a scrimmage; there a single
fight; men at hand-grips; men hurling round-shot. They swayed, they
staggered about in each other's arms; they shocked, parted, came together
again. Dead men lay in the scuppers; wounded men crawled the deck;
and up and down among them the living reeled. One man, turned cur,
crouched under the bulwark with ghastly face uplifted, and met his
death, whimpering. Another, strangely quiet amid the dance of devils,
stood against the foremast, nursing a broken arm. Nobody heeded him.
They were too busy.

To Kit a sudden madness seemed to have possessed the world. The deck
danced before him. He was bumped; he was battered; he was hurled to
and fro--a twig in a torrent.

All was dreadful; all was dizzy. Strange faces with appalling eyes
rose before him; men breathing terribly flitted past. There was a smell
of blood and sweat in his nostrils; a sound of panting and blasphemies
in his ears.

This then was a battle--not much like the stories! All the same he
wished they wouldn't tread on his toes so.

Blindly the boy slashed about him. Whether he killed them, or they
killed him, he hardly knew, and didn't greatly care. A sort of instinct
told him the men to stab at--the dirty beasts in shirts who showed
their teeth. The naked men were his own lot.

Once he heard a voice beside him.

"Go it, little un! you're almost a man!"

Then the Gunner staggered by, all black eyes and straining face, his
arms about a huge boarder, his teeth deep in the fellow's shoulder.

"Rip this ----'s backside up!" came a gurgling voice.

His hand went up automatically; automatically his dirk came down.
A mountain fell on top of him....

As he crept out a voice panted hard by,

"Old man's down."

Dizzily he saw the old Commander sprawling to a fall, a man on top
of him. The boy heard him grunt as he fell. That grunt angered him.

"I'm coming, sir!" he cried, and ran wrathfully with bloody dirk.
_"Beast!"_ he yelled. _"Leave him alone!"_

There was no need for him to cry.

The old man had done his own work from underneath with the jack-knife.
Out poked his badger-grey head from under his man, much as the boy
had often seen a ferret from beneath the body of a disembowelled rabbit.

"So fur so good," grunted the old man, crawling out on hands and knees,
the scent-bottle between his teeth. "How's things forrad?"

Forward the deck was all but clear.

The remnant of the boarders, jammed up in the bows, were being hammered
to death. A last fellow in a red night-cap, swarming out on the bowsprit,
plumped into the sea.

The Gunner leapt on to the bulwark.

"Cleared, be God! alow and aloft!" he roared, swinging his chain-shot
about his head. "Ats off all!--

_God save h'our gracious King._"

A bandaged head poked out of the hatchway.

"They're swarmin in through the port-holes!" came a husky scream.

Old Ding-dong lifted on his elbows.

"Leave the quarter-deck to me and the boy!" he roared. "Clear the
main-deck."

"Ay, ay, sir," answered the Gunner, racing for the ladder. "Back to
hell, the leetle beetches!"

The old man looked up.

"Any more for us, Mr. Caryll?"

A boat swept under the stern.

"Here's another of them, sir!"

The boy staggered to the side. A grappling iron swung from beneath
almost struck him in the face.

He seized the cook's poll-axe, and hacked away at the bulwark. Then
he put his shoulder to a carronade and shoved.

"H'all together eave!" whispered the dying cook, and lent a feeble
hand.

Over went the carronade with spinning wheels. It caught the boat
fair amidships, and broke it up like matchwood.

The boy leaned over. Beneath him in the green and sucking waters amid
a litter of wreckage one or two heads showed, swimming faintly.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.