Nell Speed - "Molly Brown's Orchard Home"

Various - "Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853"

Juliana Horatio Ewing - "Jackanapes"

Charles G. D. Roberts - "Earth's Enigmas"

Editorial
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 Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur




"It has passed," said O'Malley in a voice that seemed to crumble in
his mouth. "It is gone again into the mountains whence it came. We are
safe. With me," he added, not without a secret sense of humor stirring
in him, "you will always be safe. I can protect us both." He felt as
normal as a British officer giving orders to his soldiers. And the
Georgian slowly recovered his composure, yet for a long time keeping
close to the other's side.

The transition, thus, had been as sudden and complete as anything well
could be. O'Malley described it as the instantaneous dropping of a
shutter across his mind. The entire vision had lasted but a fraction of
a second, and in a fraction of a second, too, he had returned to his
state of everyday lesser consciousness. That blending with the Earth's
great Consciousness was but a flashing glimpse after all. The extension
of personality had been momentary.

So absolute, moreover, was the return that at first, remembering
nothing, he took up life again exactly where he had left it. The guide
completed the gesture and the sentence which the vision had interrupted,
and O'Malley, similarly, resumed his own thread of thought and action.

Only a hint remained. That, and a curious sense of interval, alone
were left to witness this flash of an immense vision,--of cosmic
consciousness--that apparently had filled so many days and nights.

"It was like waking suddenly in the night out of deep sleep," he said;
"not of one's own accord, or gradually, but as when someone shakes
you out of slumber and you are wide awake at once. You have been
dreaming vigorously--thick, lively, crowded dreams, and they all vanish
on the instant. You catch the tail-end of the procession just as it's
diving out of sight. In less than a second all is gone."

For this was the hint that remained. He caught the flying tail-end of
the vision. He knew he _had_ seen something. But, for the moment, that
was all.

Then, by degrees and afterwards, the details re-emerged. In the days
that followed, while with Rostom he completed the journey already
planned, the deeper consciousness gave back its memory piece by piece;
and piece by piece he set it down in notebooks as best he could. The
memory was on deposit deep within him, and at intervals he tapped it.
Hence, of course, is due the confused and fragmentary character of those
bewildering entries; hence, at the same time, too, their truth and value.
For here was no imaginative dream concocted in a mood of high invention.
The parts were disjointed, incomplete, just as they came. The lesser
consciousness, it seems, could not contain the thing complete; nor to the
last, I judge, did he ever know complete recapture.

* * * * *

They wandered for two weeks and more about the mountains, meeting
various adventure by the way, reported duly in his letters of travel.
But these concerned the outer man and have no proper place in this
strange record ... and by the middle of July he found himself once more
in--civilization. At Michaelevo he said good-bye to Rostom and
took the train.

And it was with the return to the conditions of modern life that the
reaction set in and stirred the deeper layers of consciousness to
reproduce their store of magic. For this return to what seemed the paltry
activities of an age of machinery, physical luxury, and superficial
contrivances brought him a sense of pain that was acute and trenchant,
more--a deep and poignant sense of loss. The yearnings, no longer
satisfied, began again to reassert themselves. It was not the actual
things the world seemed so busy about that pained him, but rather the
point of view from which the world approached them--those that it deemed
with one consent "important," and those, with rare exceptions, it
obviously deemed worth no consideration at all, and ignored. For himself
these values stood exactly reversed.

The Vision then came back to him, rose from the depths, blinded his eyes
with maddening beauty, sang in his ears, possessed his heart and mind. He
burned to tell it. The world of tired, restless men, he felt, must
equally burn to hear it. Some vision of a simple life lived close to
Nature came before his inner eye as the remedy for the vast disease of
restless self-seeking of the age, the medicine that should cure the
entire world. A return to Nature was the first step toward the great
Deliverance men sought. And, most of all, he yearned to tell it first to
Heinrich Stahl.

To hear him talk about it, as he talked perhaps to me alone, was
genuinely pathetic, for here, in Terence O'Malley, I thought to see the
essential futility of all dreamers nakedly revealed. His vision was so
fine, sincere, and noble; his difficulty in imparting it so painful; and
its marriage with practical action so ludicrously impracticable. At any
rate that combination of vision and action, called sometimes genius,
which can shake the world, assuredly was not his. For his was no
constructive mind; he was not "intellectual"; he _saw_, but with the
heart; he could not build. To plan a new Utopia was as impossible to him
as to shape even in words the splendor he had known and lived. Bricks and
straw could only smother him before he laid what most would deem
foundations.

At first, too, in those days while waiting for the steamer in Batoum,
he kept strangely silent. Even in his own thoughts was silence. He could
not speak of what he knew. Even paper refused it. But all the time this
glorious winged thing, that yet was simple as the sunlight or the rain,
went by his side, while his soul knew the relief of some divine, proud
utterance that, he felt, could never know complete confession in speech
or writing. Later he stammered over it--to his notebooks and to me,
and partially also to Dr. Stahl. But at first it dwelt alone and hidden,
contained in this deep silence.

The days of waiting he filled with walks about the streets, watching
the world with new eyes. He took the Russian steamer to Poti, and
tramped with a knapsack up the Tchourokh gorge beyond Bourtchka,
regardless of the Turkish gypsies and encampments of wild peoples on
the banks. The sense of personal danger was impossible; he felt the whole
world kin. That sense protected him. Pistol and cartridges lay in his
bag, forgotten at the hotel.

Delight and pain lay oddly mingled in him. The pain he recognized of
old, but this great radiant happiness was new. The nightmare of modern
cheap-jack life was all explained; unjustified, of course, as he had
always dimly felt, symptom of deep disorder; all due, this feverish,
external business, to an odd misunderstanding with the Earth. Humanity
had somehow quarreled with her, claiming an independence that could not
really last. For her the centuries of this estrangement were but a little
thing perhaps--a moment or two in that huge life which counted a million
years to lay a narrow bed of chalk. They would come back in time.
Meanwhile she ever called. A few, perhaps, already dreamed of return.
Movements, he had heard, were afoot--a tentative endeavor here and there.
They heard, these few, the splendid whisper that, sweetly calling, ever
passed about the world.

For her voice in the last resort was more potent than all others--an
enchantment that never wholly faded; men had but temporarily left her
mighty sides and gone astray, eating of trees of knowledge that brought
them deceptive illusions of a mad self-intoxication; fallen away into the
pains of separateness and death. Loss of direction and central control
was the result; the Babel of many tongues so clumsily invented, by which
all turned one against another. Insubordinate, artificial centers had
assumed disastrous command. Each struggled for himself against his
neighbors. Even religions fought to the blood. A single sect could damn
the rest of humanity, yet in the same breath sing complaisantly of its
own Heaven.

Meanwhile She smiled in love and patience, letting them learn their
lesson; meanwhile She watched and waited while, like foolish children,
they toiled and sweated after futile transient things that brought no
single letter of content. She let them coin their millions from her
fairest thoughts, the gold and silver in her veins; and let them turn it
into engines of destruction, knowing that each "life lost," returned into
her arms and heart, crying with the pain of its wayward foolishness, the
lesson learned; She watched their tears and struggling just outside the
open nursery door, knowing they must at length return for food; and
while thus waiting, watching, She heard all prayers that reached her; She
answered them with love and forgiveness ever ready; and to the few who
realized their folly--naughtiness, perhaps, at worst it was--this side of
"death," She brought full measure of peace and joy and beauty.

Not permanently could they hurt themselves, for evil was but distance
from her side, the ignorance of those who had wandered furthest into
the little dark labyrinth of a separated self. The "intellect" they were
so proud of had misled them.

And sometimes, here and there across the ages, with a glory that refused
utterly to be denied, She thundered forth her old sweet message of
deliverance. Through poet, priest, or child she called her children
home. The summons rang like magic across the wastes of this dreary
separated existence. Some heard and listened, some turned back, some
wondered and were strangely thrilled; some, thinking it too simple to
be true, were puzzled by the yearning and the tears and went back to
seek for a more difficult way; while most, denying the secret glory in
their hearts, sought to persuade themselves they loved the strife and
hurrying fever best.

At other times, again, she chose quite different ways, and sent the
amazing message in a flower, a breath of evening air, a shell upon the
shore; though oftenest, perhaps, it hid in a strain of music, a patch of
color on the sea or hills, a rustle of branches in a little twilight
wind, a whisper in the dusk or in the dawn. He remembered his own first
visions of it....

Only never could the summons come to her children through the intellect,
for this it was that led them first away. Her message enters ever by the
heart.

The simple life! He smiled as he thought of the bald Utopias here and
there devised by men, for he had seen a truth whose brilliance smote
his eyes too dazzlingly to permit of the smallest corner of darkness.
Remote, no doubt, in time that day when the lion shall lie down with
the lamb and men shall live together in peace and gentleness; when the
inner life shall be admitted as the Reality, strife, gain, and loss
unknown because possessions undesired, and petty selfhood merged in the
larger life--remote, of course, yet surely not impossible. He had seen
the Face of Nature, heard her Call, tasted her joy and peace; and the
rest of the tired world might do the same. It only waited to be shown the
way. The truth he now saw so dazzling was that all who heard the call
might know it for themselves at once, cuirassed with shining love that
makes the whole world kin, the Earth a mother literally divine. Each soul
might thus provide a channel along which the summons home should pass
across the world. To live with Nature and share her greater
consciousness, _en route_ for states yet greater, nearer to the eternal
home--this was the beginning of the truth, the life, the way.

He saw "religion" all explained: and those hard sayings that make men
turn away:--the imagined dread of losing life to find it; the counsel
of perfection that the neighbor shall be loved as self; the fancied
injury and outrage that made it hard for rich men to enter the kingdom.
Of these, as of a hundred other sayings, he saw the necessary truth. It
all seemed easy now. The world would see it with him; it must; it could
not help itself. Simplicity as of a little child, and selflessness as of
the mystic--these were the splendid clues.

Death and the grave, indeed, had lost their victory. For in the stages
of wider consciousness beyond this transient physical phase he saw all
loved ones joined and safe, as separate words upgathered each to each
in the parent sentence that explains them, the sentence in the paragraph,
the paragraph in the whole grand story all achieved--and so at length
into the eternal library of God that consummates the whole.

He saw the glorious series, timeless and serene, advancing to the climax,
and somehow understood that individuality at each stage was never lost
but rather extended and magnified. Love of the Earth, life close to
Nature, and denial of so-called civilization was the first step upwards.
In the Simple Life, in this return to Nature, lay the opening of the
little path that climbed to the stars and heaven.




XL


At the end of the week the little steamer dropped her anchor in the
harbor and the Irishman booked his passage home. He was standing on the
wharf to watch the unloading when a hand tapped him on the shoulder and
he heard a well-known voice. His heart leaped with pleasure. There were
no preliminaries between these two.

"I am glad to see you safe. You did not find your friend, then?"

O'Malley looked at the bronzed face beside him, noted the ragged
tobacco-stained beard, and saw the look of genuine welcome in the
twinkling brown eyes. He watched him lift his cap and mop that familiar
dome of bald head.

"I'm safe," was all he answered, "because I found him."

For a moment Dr. Stahl looked puzzled. He dropped the hand he held so
tightly and led him down the wharf.

"We'll get out of this devilish sun," he said, leading the way among
the tangle of merchandise and bales, "it's enough to boil our brains."
They passed through the crowd of swarthy, dripping Turks, Georgians,
Persians, and Armenians who labored half naked in the heat, and moved
toward the town. A Russian gunboat lay in the Bay, side by side with
freight and passenger vessels. An oil-tank steamer took on cargo. The
scene was drenched in sunshine. The Black Sea gleamed like molten
metal. Beyond, the wooded spurs of the Caucasus climbed through haze
into cloudless blue.

"It's beautiful," remarked the German, pointing to the distant coastline,
"but hardly with the beauty of those Grecian Isles we passed together.
Eh?" He watched him closely. "You're coming back on our steamer?" he
asked in the same breath.

"It's beautiful," O'Malley answered ignoring the question, "because
it lives. But there is dust upon its outer loveliness, dust that has
gathered through long ages of neglect, dust that I would sweep away--I've
learnt how to do it. He taught me."

Stahl did not even look at him, though the words were wild enough. He
walked at his side in silence. Perhaps he partly understood. For this
first link with the outer world of appearances was difficult for him to
pick up. The person of Stahl, thick-coated with the civilization whence
he came, had brought it, and out of the ocean of glorious vision in his
soul, O'Malley took at random the first phrases he could find.

"Yes, I've booked a passage on your steamer," he added presently,
remembering the question. It did not seem strange to him that his
companion ignored both clues he offered. He knew the man too well
for that. It was only that he waited for more before he spoke.

They went to the little table outside the hotel pavement where several
weeks ago they had drunk Kakhetian wine together and talked of deeper
things. The German called for a bottle, mineral water, ice, and
cigarettes. And while they sipped the cooling golden liquid, hats off and
coats on the backs of their chairs, Stahl gave him the news of the world
of men and events that had transpired meanwhile. O'Malley listened
vaguely as he smoked. It seemed remote, unreal, almost fantastic, this
long string of ugly, frantic happenings, all symptoms of some disordered
state that was like illness. The scream of politics, the roar and rattle
of flying-machines, financial crashes, furious labor upheavals, rumors of
war, the death of kings and magnates, awful accidents and strange turmoil
in enormous cities. Details of some sad prison life, it almost seemed,
pain and distress and strife the note that bound them all together. Men
were mastered by these things instead of mastering them. These
unimportant things they thought would make them free only imprisoned
them.

They lunched there at the little table in the shade, and in turn the
Irishman gave an outline of his travels. Stahl had asked for it and
listened attentively. The pictures interested him.

"You've done your letters for the papers," he questioned him, "and now,
perhaps, you'll write a book as well?"

"Something may force its way out--come blundering, thundering out in
fragments, yes."

"You mean you'd rather not--?"

"I mean it's all too big and overwhelming. He showed me such blinding
splendors. I might tell it, but as to writing--!" He shrugged his
shoulders.

And this time Dr. Stahl ignored no longer. He took him up. But not with
any expected words or questions. He merely said, "My friend, there's
something that I have to tell you--or, rather, I should say, to show
you." He looked most keenly at him, and in the old familiar way he placed
a hand upon his shoulder. His voice grew soft. "It may upset you; it may
unsettle--prove a shock perhaps. But if you are prepared, we'll go--"

"What kind of shock?" O'Malley asked, startled a moment by the gravity of
manner.

"The shock of death," was the answer, gently spoken.

The Irishman only knew a swift rush of joy and wonder as he heard it.

"But there is no such thing!" he cried, almost with laughter. "He
taught me that above all else. There is no death!"

"There is 'going away,' though," came the rejoinder, spoken low;
"there is earth to earth and dust to dust--"

"That's of the body--!"

"That's of the body, yes," the older man repeated darkly.

"There is only 'going home,' escape and freedom. I tell you there's
only that. It's nothing but joy and splendor when you really understand."

But Dr. Stahl made no immediate answer, nor any comment. He paid
the bill and led him down the street. They took the shady side. Passing
beyond the skirts of the town they walked in silence. The barracks where
the soldiers sang, the railway line to Tiflis and Baku, the dome and
minarets of the church, were left behind in turn, and presently they
reached the hot, straight dusty road that fringed the sea. They heard the
crashing of the little waves and saw the foam creamily white against the
dark grey pebbles of the beach.

And when they reached a small enclosure where thin trees were
planted among sparse grass all brown and withered by the sun, they
paused, and Stahl pointed to a mound, marked at either end by rough
stone boulder. A date was on it, but no name. O'Malley calculated the
difference between the Russian Calendar and the one he was accustomed
to. Stahl checked him.

"The fifteenth of June," the German said.

"The fifteenth of June, yes," said O'Malley very slowly, but with
wonder and excitement in his heart. "That was the day that Rostom
tried to run away--the day I saw him come to me from the trees--the
day we started off together ... to the Garden...."

He turned to his companion questioningly. For a moment the rush
of memory was quite bewildering.

"He never left Batoum at all, you see," Stahl continued, without
looking up. "He went straight to the hospital the day we came into port.
I was summoned to him in the night--that last night while you slept
so deeply. His old strange fever was upon him then, and I took him
ashore before the other passengers were astir. I brought him to the
hospital myself. And he never left his bed." He pointed down to the
little nameless grave at their feet where a wandering wind from the sea
just stirred the grasses. "That was the date on which he died."

"He went away in the early morning," he added in a low voice that
held both sadness and sympathy.

"He went home," said the Irishman, a tide of joy rising tumultuously
through his heart as he remembered. The secret of that complete and
absolute Leadership was out. He understood it all. It had been a
spiritual adventure to the last.

Then followed a pause.

In silence they stood there for some minutes. There grew no flowers on
that grave, but O'Malley stooped down and picked a strand of the withered
grass. He put it carefully between the pages of his notebook; and then,
lying flat against the ground where the sunshine fell in a patch of white
and burning glory, he pressed his lips to the crumbling soil. He kissed
the Earth. Oblivious of Stahl's presence, or at least ignoring it, he
worshipped.

And while he did so he heard that little sound he loved so well--which
more than any words or music brought peace and joy, because it told his
Passion all complete. With his ears close to the earth he heard it, yet
at the same time heard it everywhere. For it came with the falling of the
waves upon the shore, through the murmur of the rustling branches
overhead, and even across the whispering of the withered grass about him.
Deep down in the center of the mothering Earth he heard it too in faintly
rising pulse. It was the exquisite little piping on a reed--the ancient
fluting of the everlasting Pan....

And when he rose he found that Stahl had turned away and was gazing at
the sea, as though he had not noticed.

"Doctor," he cried, yet so softly it was a whisper rather than a call, "I
heard it then again; it's everywhere! Oh, tell me that you hear it too!"

Stahl turned and looked at him in silence. There was a moisture in his
eyes, and on his face a look of softness that a woman might have worn.

"I've brought it back, you see, I've brought it back. For that's the
message--that's the sound and music I must give to all the world. No
words, no book can tell it." His hat was off, his eyes were shining, his
voice broke with the passion of joy he yearned to share yet knew so
little how to impart. "If I can pipe upon the flutes of Pan the millions
all will listen, will understand, and--follow. Tell me, oh, tell me, that
_you_ heard it too!"

"My friend, my dear young friend," the German murmured in a voice of real
tenderness, "you heard it truly--but you heard it in your heart. Few hear
the Pipes of Pan as you do. Few care to listen. Today the world is full
of other sounds that drown it. And even of those who hear," he shrugged
his shoulders as he led him away toward the sea,--"how few will care to
follow--how fewer still will _dare._"

And while they lay upon the beach and watched the line of foam against
their feet and saw the seagulls curving idly in the blue and shining air,
he added underneath his breath--O'Malley hardly caught the murmur of his
words so low he murmured them:--

"The simple life is lost forever. It lies asleep in the Golden Age, and
only those who sleep and dream can ever find it. If you would keep your
joy, dream on, my friend! Dream on, but dream alone!"




XLI


Summer blazed everywhere and the sea lay like a blue pool of melted sky
and sunshine. The summits of the Caucasus soon faded to the east and
north, and to the south the wooded hills of the Black Sea coast
accompanied the ship in a line of wavy blue that joined the water and
the sky indistinguishably.

The first-class passengers were few; O'Malley hardly noticed their
existence even. An American engineer, building a railway in Turkey,
came on board at Trebizond; there were one or two light women on their
way home from Baku, and the attache of a foreign embassy from Teheran.
But the Irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk
who joined the ship at Ineboli from the interior of Asia Minor
and were bound as third-class emigrants for Marseilles and far America.
Dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea
before, and the sight of a porpoise held them spellbound. They lived
on the after-deck, mostly cooking their own food, the women and children
sleeping beneath a large tarpaulin that the sailors stretched for
them across the width of deck. At night they played their pipes and
danced, singing, shouting, and waving their arms--always the same
tune over and over again.

O'Malley watched them for hours together. He also watched the engineer,
the over-dressed women, the attache. He understood the difference
between them as he had never understood it before. He understood the
difficulty of his task as well. How in the world could he ever explain a
single syllable of his message to these latter, or waken in them the
faintest echo of desire to know and listen. The peasants, though all
unconscious of the blinding glory at their elbows, stood far nearer to
the truth.

"Been further east, I suppose?" the engineer observed, one afternoon
as the steamer lay off Broussa, taking on a little extra cargo of walnut
logs. He looked admiringly at the Irishman's bronzed skin. "Take a
better sun than this to put that on!"

He laughed in his breezy, vigorous way, and the other laughed with
him. Previous conversations had already paved the way to a traveler's
friendship, and the American had taken to him.

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