Walt Whitman - "Drum Taps"

J. M. Barrie - "Better Dead"

W. D. Howells - "The Lady of the Aroostook"

Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4"

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




"Avast there, Red Beard!" he tittered. "You're that asty. Can't you
take a little joke?"

"I can take one o your little jokes about as easy as you can take one
o my little bullets in the belly," rumbled the giant. "Come in now.
Get out o that boat. You'd sell us as you sold the Gentleman. That bit
o wood's all that stands atween us and Kingdom Come."

"Easy all," chimed in Bandy Dick. "Only one thing's sure in our
present interestin sitiwation; and that is if we don't ang together,
we'll ang separate."




CHAPTER XXIII


THE CLIMB


I


Crouched behind the boulder, Kit listened.

Surely they must hear his heart! It was thumping so that he took his
hand off the boulder before him lest it should betray him by its
shaking.

Black Diamond!--Fat George!--the Gentleman!

There could be no question as to the identity of these kites. They
were the Gap Gang, and in desperate plight. Their lugger was gone, and
their leader dead. At sixes and sevens among themselves, they had
quarrelled with the only man who might somehow have saved them. Behind
them lay the gallows; before them the sea--and nothing to cross it in
but the lugger's long-boat, and that water-logged.

Their condition was desperate; but what about his own?

He could not round the Head. They stood between him and his goal.
Could he go back along the bay? He glanced back at the line of
headlands, shimmering in the sun. The tide in places already lapped
the foot of the cliff. And even as he pondered, a chill something
startled his feet. He looked down. It was the water, stealing in upon
him, quiet as a cat. He could not stay where he was. To do so was to
drown.

There was but one thing for it--to climb.

He glanced up. Things were not so hopeless as he had feared. The mists
were drifting seaward. He could see the dark crest of grass rimming
the cliff-edge above him.

Thank heaven!--this was no longer the blank and aweful wall, hundreds
of feet high and sheer as a curtain, which he had found above him last
night. The cliff must have fallen away towards the point. That dark
crest of grass, shivering in the wind, was not so far away; and the
cliff itself was by no means sheer.

The tide was already lapping the point. The smugglers had drifted away
before it. He could hear their voices on the other side. Now was his
chance.


II


On tiptoe he crept off the betraying shingle, and began to climb, the
scent-bottle in his mouth.

A recent fall of cliff helped him, making a ramp. Up it he went, a
tiny trickle of dislodged shale dribbling away beneath his feet.

At the top of the fall a mat of weeds had grown. On this he stayed.
The cliff arched out blue-white over him like the inside of a shell.
There was no hope there.

He looked about him. On his right a narrow ledge, grass-grown,
trickled darkly across the face of the cliff, inclining upwards and
out of sight. It would give him foothold, and no more.

He took it tremblingly, sidling along, his face pressed close to the
cliff, his hands finding finger-hold on the ridges and irregularities
above his head.

The track led up and up. He dared not look down: all there was sheer
now, he knew, and the sea lapping among the dead bones of the cliff.
He could not look up: to have done so, he must have craned backwards;
and little thing as that might seem, it would have been enough to
upset his balance on that skimpy track.

Up and up he sidled to the noise of trickling chalk, his eyes glued to
the white and callous cliff. His hands were damp and chill; his back
set against nothingness; his long eyelashes swept the chalk-surface.
He had a sense that the cliff was swelling itself to thrust him off.
It was alive; it was hostile. The leer he detected in the great blank
face pressed against his own roused his anger. He clung the more
tenaciously because of it, snarling back. G-r-r!--it shouldn't beat
him--beast!

All the same his fingers were getting tired and sore. He was
whimpering as he went. The great horror was overwhelming him. He shut
his mind against it: still it crept in. Head swirled: brain lost grip
of body: all was dissipation.

O--o--oh!

The voice of one of the Gang rose to his ears. It steadied him;
recalling all that hung on him ... old Ding-dong's trust ... Nelson
... Duty....

The track led round a corner--and ran away into nothing.

Retreat along that path or headlong death--these seemed his
alternatives. Of the two the latter appeared just then least horrible,
as swifter, and more certain: he had no need to look down to make sure
of that.

Biting his nails, he listened to his own breathing. A tiny shell had
become incrusted in the great blind face, so close to his own. Putting
out his tongue, he licked it, and hardly knew he had.

Suddenly he saw his mother. She was sitting in her particular little
low chair beside the fire in the Library, reading aloud a favourite
passage from her favourite Sunday book, Gwen sprawling at her feet.

_To go back is nothing but Death_, came the familiar voice, pure
and tranquil; _to go forward is fear of Death, and life everlasting
beyond it. I will yet go forward_.

The book snapped softly; his mother's eyes lifted to his as she
repeated,

_I will yet go forward_.


III


Yes, if there's a way!

On his right, some ten feet distant, a little table-land of grass
projected from the face of the cliff--the green top of a flying
buttress, as it were.

Once there he could at least lie down and recover himself. And, unless
he was mistaken, the cliff above there was no longer sheer.

But how to get there?--a ten-foot jump to be attempted off one leg at
a stand and sideways.

Half-way between him and the plateau a bush with feathery green plumes
grew out of a crevice overhead. Those green plumes stirred deliciously
in the breeze; the little stem, thick as his wrist, and reddish of
hue, thrust out sturdily over the sea. It was three feet out of reach,
and above him.

He scanned the distance. Without wings he certainly could not do it.

A butterfly settled on a purple sea-thistle close to his head. It
poised there with fanning wings, so languid, so unconcerned. _It_
didn't mind.

A bitter anger surged up in the boy's heart. It was sitting there
flopping its wings out of swagger--to show it had them. He'd teach it
to swagger!

He put up his thumb to crush it.

Then he remembered himself. He must be just in this that might be his
last moment on earth. After all the butterfly couldn't help itself. It
was made that way; and perhaps it didn't mean it. To kill it was
spiteful--worthy of a girl, worthy of Gwen, as he would have told her
had she been present. That would get Gwen into one of her states. His
eyes twinkled, and grew haggard again.

He observed the butterfly with extraordinary intensity. Its body and
wings were the colour of the sea; the undersides of the wings a
silvery-brown. The face was white, with large black eyes, and long
antennae. Lovely furry down clothed body, thighs, and lower wings. On
the nose two tiny horns stuck up....

He would have given all he possessed to be that butterfly just then.
Yet after all--could the butterfly venture for his country?--and would
he if he could?

Suddenly the boy's soul broke through the darkness shrouding it, and
bubbled up, a sea of twinkling, tumbling light. Standing there,
clawing the cliff, death at his feet, Eternity within touch of him, he
laughed.

At the crisis his humour, heaven's best gift, had saved him.

_I will yet go forward._

A knob of chalk, swelling out of the side of the cliff, caught his
eye. He saw it, and too wise to pause for thought, sprang. His foot
touched the knob. He thrust back. As he thrust, it gave beneath him,
and fell with a resounding splash into the sea.

But it had done its work; and he was swinging with one hand on the
stem of the green-plumed bush....

Curiously familiar this swinging in space with fluttering heart....
Was it only in dreams?...

The splash of the falling boulder set the gulls screaming.

"_There!_" shrilled a voice, faint and far beneath. "_What did
I tell you?_"

"_Take the boat, Red Beard, and have a look._"

Kit, swinging, heard the dip of oars. Another second and the boat
would be round the Head, and he, hanging there, black against the
white cliff, as easy to kill as a fly on a window-pane.

He reached up his left arm, swung once and again, and loosed his hold.

He flung through the air, the sea glancing sickeningly miles below,
and landed on hands and knees on the green carpet.

_Hallowed be Thy Name._




CHAPTER XXIV


THE CLIMB


I


_"There's nowt here,"_ called a voice from below. _"A fall of
the cliff belike."_

The boat put back.

Kit stayed on hands and knees on the grass plateau, his forehead bowed
to the ground in attitude of prayer.

He was sick with humility and thankfulness.

Already the boy began to have that sense which distinguishes the great
man from the herd, swinging him over obstacles to others
insurmountable, the sense that God is with him, and therefore he
cannot fail.

A fly was buzzing somewhere near. It comforted him amazingly. It was
earthy and every-day, that solid buz-z-z-z; reminding him of the
kitchen at home, fat Maria kneading dough, and the smell of fly-
papers. It steadied him as a feast of bread and meat steadies a man
heady with long fasting.

Rolling over on his back, he lay flat, panting.

How good it was to feel the earth beneath him once more! Faithful old
thing! she wouldn't give way beneath her child. He hammered her with
his heels; he patted her with his hands; he wriggled his shoulders
into her: all massive, all motherly, all good.

Turning on his side, he kissed her.

A while he lay there, arms and legs wide, eyes shut, breathing in
security and peace. Angels fanned him; strong arms held him up. Yes,
yes. It was all true. He _was_ loved.

The sea rustled beneath him, flowing on and on. How happy it was in
its work! He could have listened to it for ever. The sun, labouring
too, was climbing upwards in a shroud of glory. It stared him fiercely
in the face, bidding him rise and get to business.

He sat up and looked round.

It was as he had thought. He was on a flying buttress of the cliff, at
his feet a floor of water, silvery-ruffled.

On his right cathedral cliffs blocked out the light. Mighty-towering,
they made a white and awful gloom between him and heaven. The shadow
of them darkened his heart. Crouching fly-like there, he cowered as he
peered up at them. They were terrible: so stern, so white, so
inexorable. Had he wronged them?--They seemed to stand over him in
fearful and affronted majesty. Yet with the awe there came a pride,
the pride of possession. They were his, these tremendous battlements;
they were England's. With what a high and massive steadfastness they
challenged France! Surely they knew themselves impregnable.

Beneath him the sea, a vast plain of silver-blue, merged in a sky
white as diamonds. The one drifted, the other was still; the one
sparkled, the other shone: for the rest there was no distinction, no
dividing line. Each ran into the other; and all was splendid with
light and life.

Below, those dark dead men still scavenged on the edge of the tide. He
could have dropped a pebble on them. Dingy Joe's whine floated up to
him....

"_This cove's rings won't come off._"

"_Ain't you got a knife, then?_" growled the brutal Toadie--
"_talks like a Miss._"

"_Say! look at this chap's lady-bird._"

Bandy Dick held something aloft.

"_He won't want no lady-bird no more. She'll ave to get another
fancy-man._"

Followed filthiest jests on women ... love.... Such love!

Pah!--Were they men?--The beasts were purer.

The boy straight from his own white home and gayhearted mother
sickened as he heard.

Hell?--What need of Hell hereafter for these men, when they had
plunged into it on earth?

The words of a greater than Bunyan rang in his ears--

_Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin._

Servants! slaves rather; slaves of themselves.

From his perch in the high heavens the boy looked down on them as an
angel may look down on souls in torment.

An aweful anger seized his heart. He longed to do God's work for Him--
to avenge.

"_Vengeance is mine_," came a voice. "_I will repay._"

He started back, amazed.

Had he spoken? had the Lord?

The lightning words flashed down out of the heavens on the self-damned
below.

Dingy Joe flung up a ghastly face, screamed, and falling on his knees
in the water, began to babble about his Redeemer.

Fat George took to his heels. Furiously he splashed along, yellow
locks flopping. Kit could hear him snorting as he ran. All his life
the fat man had been running away from God, the Great Enemy; and still
He was there. Some day He would catch him--Fat George never doubted
that ... some day ... but not while he had legs.

How should he know that as he ran, God ran with him?

The others huddled together like thunder-frightened cattle. Bandy Dick
cocked a scared snook, while Red Beard was man enough to loose his
musket at the zenith.

"_Not yet, Governor!_" he shouted with a roaring laugh--"_not
yet!_"

Fools!--they were living in the Hell they feared. Their punishment was
_now_. They had long been damned. While they lived God, the
Avenger, would punish them inexorably. When they died, God, the
merciful Saviour, would take them and make them clean.

Death, the death they feared and fled from, would be their Salvation,
as it is every man's.


II


_I will yet go forward._
Kit turned to a reconsideration of his enterprise.

The top was far yet, but the cliff was no longer sheer; a precipitous
slope rather, patched with grass.

On hands and knees he set out. The grass trickled down like a dark
torrent from above, cutting as it were a channel between two bastions,
sheer on either side of him, and naked as the moon.

Up that dark trickle he climbed, and the sun climbed with him.

The grass gave him hand-hold. The chalk was rough and shale-like. He
dug knees and toes into it. There was a constant dribble of stuff away
from beneath his feet, and once a little land-slide, slithering
seaward.

Beneath was nothing but a shining waste, waiting for him. He rather
felt than saw it: for he dared not look down. He must think of what
lay above. Therein was his hope. He clung to it, as he clung to the
cliff-face, desperately.

The sun blazed on his back. The sweat trickled down his face. He kept
his mind to his work, and his nose to the cliff. A bee with an orange
tail sucked at a purple thistle. Butterflies chased, loved, and sipped
all round him. O for Gwen, and her killing-bottle!

Up and up; the sun fierce upon his back; the earth bulging beneath his
nose, the splash and ripple of the sea growing fainter and more faint
below.

Blue above him, blue beneath, blue in his brain, blue everywhere, save
for this dull leprous white beneath his nose--blue emptiness, calling
him, clutching him, waiting for him. Would it never end?

Once he looked up.

He was climbing into heaven.

The cliff bluffed up into the sky. He could see the bearded crest dark
against the light. Up there a pair of kestrels floated--two living
cross-bows bent above him. They were almost transparent and very
still: a tremble of the wings, a turn of the broad steering tail, a
motion of the blunt head, a swoop and a sway and a glint of russet
back.

They had wings too! Everything in the world had wings but himself, the
only one who really needed them.

Once he slipped, and hung sprawling over Eternity. The grass, tough as
wire, and wound about his hands, stood his friend. He recovered
foothold.

On again with battering heart. The top was not far now.

Hope began to flutter in his breast. It seemed to heave him upwards.
The way grew steeper and more steep. The stream of grass, faithful so
far, ended abruptly five feet below the top. Those feet were sheer,
the chalk darkening to the blackness of soil, and the crest of grass
making a rusty _chevaux-de-frise_ at the summit.

Cautiously he crept on, his hands feeling the blank wall. Now his
fingers touched the top.

He drew himself up.

His struggling toes found some sort of foot-hold. The wind blew on his
wet forehead. His eyes were on a level with the summit.

He could see over.

A man was sitting by the edge.

Kit could have stroked his back.




II

THE MAN ON THE CLIFF




CHAPTER XXV


THE GENTLEMAN BOWS


I


The man was babbling French and weeping; weeping over a dead woman.

So much was clear.

His back was against the light. He wore no hat; and here and there a
hair caught the sun and flashed like the sword of a fairy.

The dead girl must be lying with her head in his lap.

Unaware of anybody by, the young man poured out his heart: the dead
woman was his little one, his darling of the chestnut hair, his petite
pit-a-pat.

There was something so desolate about the grief of man, perched up
there between sea and sky, nobody near but a floating sea-gull, that
Kit almost wept to hear him.

But he had his own affairs to think about.

The man was a Frenchman: therefore an enemy.

What should he do?

As often happens, the question was decided for him.

Suddenly the projection on which his feet had found resting-place gave
way.

A lurch, and he was dangling at arms' length. His toes could find no
foothold. To drop even an inch or two was certain death: for he would
land on a slope almost sheer; and the impetus must carry him--down--
down--down....

"Sir!" he gasped.


II


A face flashed over the cliff, eagle-beaked and beautiful.

A young man knelt above him.

"Hullo!" he said in voice of quiet amusement, peering down at the boy
beneath him. "May I ask what you are doing here?"

If he was a Frenchman, he spoke English without a trace of accent.

"Hanging on for dear life!" gurgled Kit, the scent-bottle between his
teeth.

The young man broke into a ripple of boyish laughter.

"Flew so far: then the wings gave out, eh?"

He rose to his feet, and Kit saw he was wearing buck-skin breeches and
top-boots.

Bending, he grasped the boy's wrists.

"One--two--and--h'up she comes!"

He staggered back, and fell with a gay laugh, the boy on top of him.

"Thank you," said Kit between his teeth. "Let go my wrists, please."

The man, lying on his back, smiled up at him.

How strong he was! how young! and how handsome!

Tears still bedewed his lashes, and his eyes had the sparkle and
colour of the sword he wore at his side.

"What have you got between those nice milk-teeth of yours, Little
Chap?"

"Nothing for you," stammered the boy. "That is--only eggs. I've been
birds-nesting. Let go, please. I must get home. I'm late. I'll get
into a row as it is."

The other loosed his wrists suddenly; a long arm swept about him; the
thumb and forefinger of a hand like a steel-vice pressed his jaws
asunder.

"Parrdon," said a voice, half tender, half teasing, the roll of the r
for the first time betraying an alien strain.

Perforce the boy must open.

The scent-bottle rolled out upon the grass, and trundled towards the
edge.

Lithe as a panther, the young man pounced and snatched it.

As he did so, Kit leapt on his back.

"Give it up or I dirk!" he panted.

For all answer the man fell back on top of him with the merriest
laughter.

The boy's breath was shaken out of him. Two hands loosed his; and he
was left gasping on his back.

"I say! did I hurt you?" came an anxious voice.

Kit scrambled to his feet.

"Give it up!" he cried passionately, thrusting out a hand. "It was
given me. It's a trust."

"It's only eggs," the other reminded him, twinkling.

"I don't care what it is!" cried the boy. "It's mine!"

He was almost in tears, stamping his foot, much as in old days when
Gwen, a born tease, had stolen his woolly bear, and refused to give it
up.

The man made him feel like a baby--he, a King's officer.

"Forgive me," replied the other. "It is mine."

"Finding's keeping, I suppose!" sneered the boy, ablaze. "You take it
by brute force--you steal it--and it's yours! And I daresay you call
yourself a gentleman!"

"When I said it was mine," replied the other with the grave tenderness
of a gentleman dealing with an angry woman, "I meant it was mine. It
was given me by a lady. These are her initials on the stopper--E.H.,
d'you see?--If I was to surrender this bottle to you, two things would
happen. My work of weeks past would be undone, and a noble woman would
be hung unjustly." He put the bottle into his pocket. "And now to
prove to you that it really is mine I will tell you what it contains,
shall I?--A letter on tissue paper signed A. F. Is it not so?"

The flames in the boy's soul were beaten back.

"How d'you know?" sullenly.

"I wrote it."

Breathing through his nostrils, Kit eyed him.

"Then you're the Gentleman."

The young man bowed with an action that was altogether French.




CHAPTER XXVI


THE DEAD WOMAN


I


He stood bareheaded in the sun in long black riding-coat and muddied
boots and breeches.

"What's that red riband in your button-hole?" asked the boy in a kind
of awe.

"That! that's the Legion of Honour." He came a step forward. "Put your
finger on it. That little bit of riband once lay upon the heart of
Napoleon."

The boy began to tremble. That tiny square of red from which he could
not take his eyes had once throbbed to the heart-beats of the Arch-
enemy!

"D'you know him?"

"Little Boney!" laughing. "Yes, I know him."

The boy listened without hearing. It was all too dreamlike.

"D'you--d'you like him?"

The other chuckled.

"_Like_ him?--I don't know that I exactly _like_ him. You
see he's not what you and I should call a gentleman. Still he serves
me, so I serve him."

The boy's thumb was to his mouth, baby-like. All his anger had passed.
He was gazing at the other with brooding admiration.

This was the man who had kept three counties agog these two months
past!

He was an enemy, but O! he was a hero.

Strangely young too, almost a boy; tall and slight as his own sword,
the grey eyes big under dark brows, the face sun-golden and lean
almost to gauntness.

"How _did_ you do it?" murmured the boy.

The other's eyes clouded; the lids fell.

"I could not have done it but for her," he said.

Then for the first time the boy remembered the dead woman.


II


But it was no dead woman the Gentleman was standing over now; it was a
chestnut mare, the sun glistening on a coat that shone like a girl's
hair. She lay along the turf with lank neck, belly exposed, and shoes
flashing; strangely pathetic as a horse seen in such position always
looks.

There was not a stain of sweat on her coat, not a trace of froth about
her muzzle. A plain snaffle bridle lay beside her. Her head was bare
and fine as a lady's; the eyes wide, the nostrils still.

Strangely like somehow, mare and man; and about both faces something
of the length and strength of the eagle.

There was one marked difference. In the man life still rippled
gloriously; the mare was quiet for ever.

Born to the saddle as to the sea, the boy's eye ran over her.

"What a beauty!" he gasped.

"I couldn't have attempted it but for her," replied the other quietly.
"When the Emperor asked me to undertake it--'Sire,' I said, 'if I may
take my Bonnet Rouge!'... I tell you," he cried, turning almost
fiercely on the boy, "I've left Merton as the first star peeped, and
seen the sun rise out of the sea from here!... But I forgot...."


III


A cold shadow swept over him. Kit could feel the change--it was like
passing from day to night; and it chilled the boy's heart.

Up there in the lonely stillness, sea beneath, heaven above, earth
around, the two faced each other.

All the laughter had ebbed from the man's being. He was still and cold
as his sword.

"D'you know what is in here?" tapping the scent-bottle.

His eyes, frosty now, seemed to bore down to the boy's soul.

Kit froze too.

"Why?"

"Because if you will give me your word that you do not know, I will
let you go."

Those eyes of his were terrible.

"Will you give me your word?"

The boy was pale as ice.

Death in cold blood here on the quiet hillside--death like a pig's in
a sty.... Ugh!...

"No, thank you."

"Then prepare to meet your Maker."

He turned and fiddled with a pistol, snapped it, cursed in an
undertone, and thrust it back in his pocket.

Then he turned again.

The boy stood before him with dark eyes. Slight as a lily, and the
colour of one, he seemed to sway in the breeze.

"Give me your word not to speak of what you know till after Thursday
next--and you may go."

The boy shook his head.

"I mustn't."

The man flashed the hue of lightning.

"Then I must."

An arm swept about the boy. A hand at his waist was fumbling for his
dirk.

For a second the lad struggled: then he felt himself helpless as a
rabbit in a python's grip, and lay back quite still.

Once face to face with God, his heart calmed strangely.

There was a horrible breathing in his ear.

A face, all eyes, was bending over him.

"_My God_! _how like a girl he is_!" came a far whisper.

"Go on, please, and don't insult me," gurgled the boy. And as he said
it, his mind flashed back to Gwen: Gwen with her pride of sex,
standing before him, fists closed, challenging him to fight--"cad!"

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