Emma Goldman - "Marriage and Love"

Charles Raymond Barrett - "Short Story Writing"

William D. Howells - "A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories"

James Whitcomb Riley - "A Child World"

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 Incomplete Amorist

E >> E. Nesbit >> The Incomplete Amorist



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Beth Trapaga and PG Distributed Proofreaders




THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST


By E. NESBIT



Illustrated by CLARENCE F. UNDERWOOD


1906


To

Richard Reynolds
and
Justus Miles Forman


"Faire naitre un desir, le nourrir, le developper, le grandir, le
satisfaire, c'est un poeme tout entier."

--_Balzac_.




CONTENTS

BOOK I. THE GIRL

Chapter I. The Inevitable
Chapter II. The Irresistible
Chapter III. Voluntary
Chapter IV. Involuntary
Chapter V. The Prisoner
Chapter VI. The Criminal
Chapter VII. The Escape

BOOK II. THE MAN

Chapter VIII. The One and the Other
Chapter IX. The Opportunity
Chapter X. Seeing Life
Chapter XI. The Thought
Chapter XII. The Rescue
Chapter XIII. Contrasts
Chapter XIV. Renunciation

BOOK III. THE OTHER WOMAN

Chapter XV. On Mount Parnassus
Chapter XVI. "Love and Tupper"
Chapter XVII. Interventions
Chapter XVIII. The Truth
Chapter XIX. The Truth with a Vengeance
Chapter XX. Waking-up Time

BOOK IV. THE OTHER MAN

Chapter XXI. The Flight
Chapter XXII. The Lunatic
Chapter XXIII. Temperatures
Chapter XXIV. The Confessional
Chapter XXV. The Forest
Chapter XXVI. The Miracle
Chapter XXVII. The Pink Silk Story
Chapter XXVIII. "And so--"




PEOPLE OF THE STORY

Eustace Vernon. The Incomplete Amorist
Betty Desmond The Girl
The Rev. Cecil Underwood Her Step-Father
Miss Julia Desmond Her Aunt
Robert Temple The Other Man
Lady St. Craye The Other Woman
Miss Voscoe The Art Student
Madame Chevillon. The Inn-Keeper at Crez
Paula Conway A Soul in Hell
Mimi Chantal A Model
Village Matrons, Concierges, Art Students, Etc.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"'Oh, what a pity,' said Betty from the heart, 'that we aren't
introduced now!'"

"'Ah, don't be cross!' she said."

"Betty stared at him coldly."

"Betty looked nervously around--the scene was agitatingly unfamiliar."

"Unfinished, but a disquieting likeness."

"'No, thank you: it's all done now.'"

"On the further arm of the chair sat, laughing also, a very pretty
young woman."

"The next morning brought him a letter."




Book 1.--The Girl




CHAPTER I.


THE INEVITABLE.

"No. The chemises aren't cut out. I haven't had time. There are enough
shirts to go on with, aren't there, Mrs. James?" said Betty.

"We can make do for this afternoon, Miss, but the men they're getting
blowed out with shirts. It's the children's shifts as we can't make
shift without much longer." Mrs. James, habitually doleful, punctuated
her speech with sniffs.

"That's a joke, Mrs. James," said Betty. "How clever you are!"

"I try to be what's fitting," said Mrs. James, complacently.

"Talk of fitting," said Betty, "If you like I'll fit on that black
bodice for you, Mrs. Symes. If the other ladies don't mind waiting for
the reading a little bit."

"I'd as lief talk as read, myself," said a red-faced sandy-haired
woman; "books ain't what they was in my young days."

"If it's the same to you, Miss," said Mrs. Symes in a thick rich
voice, "I'll not be tried on afore a room full. If we are poor we can
all be clean's what I say, and I keeps my unders as I keeps my
outside. But not before persons as has real imitation lace on their
petticoat bodies. I see them when I was a-nursing her with her fourth.
No, Miss, and thanking you kindly, but begging your pardon all the
same."

"Don't mention it," said Betty absently. "Oh, Mrs. Smith, you can't
have lost your thimble already. Why what's that you've got in your
mouth?"

"So it is!" Mrs. Smith's face beamed at the gratifying coincidence. "It
always was my habit, from a child, to put things there for safety."

"These cheap thimbles ain't fit to put in your mouth, no more than
coppers," said Mrs. James, her mouth full of pins.

"Oh, nothing hurts you if you like it," said Betty recklessly. She had
been reading the works of Mr. G.K. Chesterton.

A shocked murmur arose.

"Oh, Miss, what about the publy kows?" said Mrs. Symes heavily. The
others nodded acquiescence.

"Don't you think we might have a window open?" said Betty. The May
sunshine beat on the schoolroom windows. The room, crowded with the
stout members of the "Mother's Meeting and Mutual Clothing Club," was
stuffy, unbearable.

A murmur arose far more shocked than the first.

"I was just a-goin' to say why not close the door, that being what
doors is made for, after all," said Mrs. Symes. "I feel a sort of
draught a-creeping up my legs as it is."

The door was shut.

"You can't be too careful," said the red-faced woman; "we never know
what a chill mayn't bring forth. My cousin's sister-in-law, she had
twins, and her aunt come in and says she, 'You're a bit stuffy here,
ain't you?' and with that she opens the window a crack,--not meaning
no harm, Miss,--as it might be you. And within a year that poor
unfortunate woman she popped off, when least expected. Gas ulsters,
the doctor said. Which it's what you call chills, if you're a doctor
and can't speak plain."

"My poor grandmother come to her end the same way," said Mrs. Smith,
"only with her it was the Bible reader as didn't shut the door through
being so set on shewing off her reading. And my granny, a clot of
blood went to her brain, and her brain went to her head and she was a
corpse inside of fifty minutes."

Every woman in the room was waiting, feverishly alert, for the pause
that should allow her to begin her own detailed narrative of disease.

Mrs. James was easily first in the competition.

"Them quick deaths," she said, "is sometimes a blessing in disguise to
both parties concerned. My poor husband--years upon years he lingered,
and he had a bad leg--talk of bad legs, I wish you could all have seen
it," she added generously.

"Was it the kind that keeps all on a-breaking out?" asked Mrs. Symes
hastily, "because my youngest brother had a leg that nothing couldn't
stop. Break out it would do what they might. I'm sure the bandages
I've took off him in a morning--"

Betty clapped her hands.

It was the signal that the reading was going to begin, and the matrons
looked at her resentfully. What call had people to start reading when
the talk was flowing so free and pleasant?

Betty, rather pale, began: "This is a story about a little boy called
Wee Willie Winkie."

"I call that a silly sort of name," whispered Mrs. Smith.

"Did he make a good end, Miss?" asked Mrs. James plaintively.

"You'll see," said Betty.

"I like it best when they dies forgiving of everybody and singing
hymns to the last."

"And when they says, 'Mother, I shall meet you 'ereafter in the better
land'--that's what makes you cry so pleasant."

"Do you want me to read or not?" asked Betty in desperation.

"Yes, Miss, yes," hummed the voices heavy and shrill.

"It's her hobby, poor young thing," whispered Mrs. Smith, "we all 'as
'em. My own is a light cake to my tea, and always was. Ush."

Betty read.

When the mothers had wordily gone, she threw open the windows, propped
the door wide with a chair, and went to tea. She had it alone.

"Your Pa's out a-parishing," said Letitia, bumping down the tray in
front of her.

"That's a let-off anyhow," said Betty to herself, and she propped up a
Stevenson against the tea-pot.

After tea parishioners strolled up by ones and twos and threes to
change their books at the Vicarage lending library. The books were
covered with black calico, and smelt of rooms whose windows were never
opened.

When she had washed the smell of the books off, she did her hair very
carefully in a new way that seemed becoming, and went down to supper.

Her step-father only spoke once during the meal; he was luxuriating in
the thought of the _Summa Theologiae_ of Aquinas in leather still
brown and beautiful, which he had providentially discovered in the
wash-house of an ailing Parishioner. When he did speak he said:

"How extremely untidy your hair is, Lizzie. I wish you would take more
pains with your appearance."

When he had withdrawn to his books she covered three new volumes for
the library: the black came off on her hands, but anyway it was clean
dirt.

She went to bed early.

"And that's my life," she said as she blew out the candle.

Said Mrs. James to Mrs. Symes over the last and strongest cup of tea:

"Miss Betty's ailing a bit, I fancy. Looked a bit peaky, it seemed to
me. I shouldn't wonder if she was to go off in a decline like her
father did."

"It wasn't no decline," said Mrs. Symes, dropping her thick voice,
"'e was cut off in the midst of his wicked courses. A judgment if
ever there was one."

Betty's blameless father had been killed in the hunting field.

"I daresay she takes after him, only being a female it all turns to
her being pernickety in her food and allus wanting the windows open.
And mark my words, it may turn into a decline yet, Mrs. Symes, my
dear."

Mrs. Symes laughed fatly. "That ain't no decline," she said, "you take
it from me. What Miss Betty wants is a young man. It is but nature
after all, and what we must all come to, gentle or simple. Give her a
young man to walk out with and you'll see the difference. Decline
indeed! A young man's what she wants. And if I know anything of gells
and their ways she'll get one, no matter how close the old chap keeps
her."

Mrs. Symes was not so wrong as the delicate minded may suppose.

Betty did indeed desire to fall in love. In all the story books the
main interest of the heroine's career began with that event. Not that
she voiced the desire to herself. Only once she voiced it in her
prayers.

"Oh, God," she said, "do please let something happen!"

That was all. A girl had her little reticences, even with herself,
even with her Creator.

Next morning she planned to go sketching; but no, there were three
more detestable books to be put into nasty little black cotton coats,
the drawing-room to be dusted--all the hateful china--the peas to be
shelled for dinner.

She shelled the peas in the garden. It was a beautiful green garden,
and lovers could have walked very happily down the lilac-bordered
paths.

"Oh, how sick I am of it all!" said Betty. She would not say, even to
herself, that what she hated was the frame without the picture.

As she carried in the peas she passed the open window of the study
where, among shelves of dull books and dusty pamphlets, her
step-father had as usual forgotten his sermon in a chain of references
to the Fathers. Betty saw his thin white hairs, his hard narrow face
and tight mouth, the hands yellow and claw-like that gripped the thin
vellum folio.

"I suppose even he was young once," she said, "but I'm sure he doesn't
remember it."

He saw her go by, young and alert in the sunshine, and the May air
stirred the curtains. He looked vaguely about him, unlocked a drawer
in his writing-table, and took out a leather case. He gazed long at
the face within, a young bright face with long ringlets above the
formal bodice and sloping shoulders of the sixties.

"Well, well," he said, "well, well," locked it away, and went back to
_De Poenis Parvulorum_.

"I _will_ go out," said Betty, as she parted with the peas. "I don't
care!"

It was not worth while to change one's frock. Even when one was
properly dressed, at rare local garden-party or flower-show, one never
met anyone that mattered.

She fetched her sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically
try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite
accomplishment. She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the
Parish the time to practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily.
Daily, for half an hour, she read an improving book. Just now it was
The French Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was
sixty. She tried to read French and German--Telemaque and Maria
Stuart. She fully intended to become all that a cultured young woman
should be. But self-improvement is a dull game when there is no one to
applaud your score.

What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown.
Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby.

It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white
road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight.

She crossed the road and passed through the swing gate into the park,
where the grass was up for hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and
tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled
and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of
some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of
tall growing things stood a tree--a may-tree shining like silver, a
laburnum like fine gold. There were horse-chestnuts whose spires of
blossom shewed like fat candles on a Christmas tree for giant
children. And the sun was warm and the tree shadows black on the
grass.

Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow
path--the grasses met above her feet--crossed the park, and reached
the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry turf,
and the wild thyme grows thick.

A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A
wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most
difficult composition within sight.

"I will sketch that," said Eighteen, confidently.

For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she
became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself.

"And he's an artist, too!" said Betty. "How awfully interesting! I
wish I could see his face."

But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and
breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a
camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much
more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a
little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden
hat with last year's dusty flattened roses in it.

She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse
that had actually quickened its beat.

She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly
a real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his
palette. Was he staying with people about there? Should she meet him?
Would they ever be introduced to each other?

"Oh, what a pity," said Betty from the heart, "that we aren't
introduced _now_!"

Her sketch grew worse and worse.

"It's no good," she said. "I can't do anything with it."

She glanced at him. He had pushed back the hat. She saw quite plainly
that he was smiling--a very little, but he _was_ smiling. Also he was
looking at her, and across the fifteen yards of gray turf their eyes
met. And she knew that he knew that this was not her first glance at
him.

She paled with fury.

"He has been watching me all the time! He is making fun of me. He
knows I can't sketch. Of course he can see it by the silly way I hold
everything." She ran her knife around her sketch, detached it, and
tore it across and across.

The stranger raised his hat and called eagerly.

"I say--please don't move for a minute. Do you mind? I've just got
your pink gown. It's coming beautifully. Between brother artists--Do,
please! Do sit still and go on sketching--Ah, do!"

Betty's attitude petrified instantly. She held a brush in her hand,
and she looked down at her block. But she did not go on sketching. She
sat rigid and three delicious words rang in her ears: "Between brother
artists!" How very nice of him! He hadn't been making fun, after all.
But wasn't it rather impertinent of him to put her in his picture
without asking her? Well, it wasn't she but her pink gown he wanted.
And "between brother artists!" Betty drew a long breath.

"It's no use," he called; "don't bother any more. The pose is gone."

She rose to her feet and he came towards her.

"Let me see the sketch," he said. "Why did you tear it up?" He fitted
the pieces together. "Why, it's quite good. You ought to study in
Paris," he added idly.

She took the torn papers from his hand with a bow, and turned to go.

"Don't go," he said. "You're not going? Don't you want to look at my
picture?"

Now Betty knew as well as you do that you musn't speak to people
unless you've been introduced to them. But the phrase "brother
artists" had played ninepins with her little conventions.

"Thank you. I should like to very much," said Betty. "I don't care,"
she said to herself, "and besides, it's not as if he were a young man,
or a tourist, or anything. He must be ever so old--thirty; I shouldn't
wonder if he was thirty-five."

When she saw the picture she merely said, "Oh," and stood at gaze. For
it _was_ a picture--a picture that, seen in foreign lands, might well
make one sick with longing for the dry turf and the pale dog violets
that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the scent of the
thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland against the
sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet of the
Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly
blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was
artist to the tips of its fingers.

"Oh!" said Betty again.

"Yes," said he, "I think I've got it this time. I think it'll make a
hole in the wall, eh? Yes; it is good!"

"Yes," said Betty; "oh, yes."

"Do you often go a-sketching?" he asked.

"How modest he is," thought Betty; "he changes the subject so as not
to seem to want to be praised."

Aloud she answered with shy fluttered earnestness: "Yes--no. I don't
know. Sometimes."

His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes
with a smile.

"What unnecessary agitation!" he was thinking. "Poor little thing, I
suppose she's never seen a man before. Oh, these country girls!" Aloud
he was saying: "This is such a perfect country. You ought to sketch
every day."

"I've no one to teach me," said Betty, innocently phrasing a long-felt
want.

The man raised his eyebrows. "Well, after that, here goes!" he said to
himself. "I wish you'd let _me_ teach you," he said to her, beginning
to put his traps together.

"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Betty in real distress. What would he
think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! "I didn't mean
that at all!"

"No; but I do," he said.

"But you're a great artist," said Betty, watching him with clasped
hands. "I suppose it would be--I mean--don't you know, we're not rich,
and I suppose your lessons are worth pounds and pounds."

"I don't give lessons for money," his lips tightened--"only for love."

"That means nothing, doesn't it?" she said, and flushed to find
herself on the defensive feebly against--nothing.

"At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added: "_Vieux jeu_, my
dear, but you did it very prettily."

"But I couldn't let you give me lessons for nothing."

"Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and
sordid.

"I don't know," she answered tremulously, but I don't think my
step-father would want me to."

"You think it would annoy him?"

"I'm sure it would, if he knew about it."

Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know
of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.

"Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to him that
Betty's move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice
at the game.

"Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that! But wouldn't it
be wrong?"

"She's got the whole thing stereotyped. But it's dainty type anyhow,"
he thought. "Of course it wouldn't be wrong," he said. "It wouldn't
hurt him. Don't you know that nothing's wrong unless it hurts
somebody?"

"Yes," she said eagerly, "that's what I think. But all the same it
doesn't seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get
nothing in return."

"Well played! We're getting on!" he thought, and added aloud: "But
perhaps I shan't get nothing in return?"

Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do
something for _him_. But what? She looked straight at him, and the
innocent appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of
complacency. Was she--after all? No, no novice could play the game so
well. And yet--

"I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly, "because it
is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What
can I do?"

"What can you do?" he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to
the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met
his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back.

"Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait."

Betty was silent.

"Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged inwardly.

When she spoke her voice trembled.

"I don't know how to thank you," she said.

"And you will?"

"Oh, I will; indeed I will!"

"How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a silence.

Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:

"I think I ought to go home now."

He had the appropriate counter ready.

"Ah, don't go yet!" he said; "let us sit down; see, that bank is quite
in the shade now, and tell me--"

"Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic pause.

"Oh, anything--anything about yourself."

Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.

She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he
lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions:
she answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that
showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very
fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely
spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the
variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly
relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words
ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the
undercurrent of questions rang strong within her--"When is he to teach
me? Where? How?"--so that when at last there was left but the bare
fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner
she said abruptly:

"And when shall I see you again?"

"You take the words out of my mouth," said he. And indeed she had.
"She has no _finesse_ yet," he told himself. "She might have left that
move to me."

"The lessons, you know," said Betty, "and, and the picture, if you
really do want to do it."

"If I want to do it!--You know I want to do it. Yes. It's like the
nursery game. How, when and where? Well, as to the how--I can paint
and you can learn. The where--there's a circle of pines in the wood
here. You know it? A sort of giant fairy ring?"

She did know it.

"Now for the when--and that's the most important. I should like to
paint you in the early morning when the day is young and innocent and
beautiful--like--like--" He was careful to break off in a most natural
seeming embarrassment. "That's a bit thick, but she'll swallow it all
right. Gone down? Right!" he told himself.

"I could come out at six if you liked, or--or five," said Betty,
humbly anxious to do her part.

He was almost shocked. "My good child," he told her silently, "someone
really ought to teach you not to do all the running. You don't give a
man a chance."

"Then will you meet me here to-morrow at six?" he said. "You won't
disappoint me, will you?" he added tenderly.

"No," said downright Betty, "I'll be sure to come. But not to-morrow,"
she added with undisguised regret; "to-morrow's Sunday."

"Monday then," said he, "and good-bye."

"Good-bye, and--oh, I don't know how to thank you!"

"I'm very much mistaken if you don't," he said as he stood bareheaded,
watching the pink gown out of sight.

"Well, adventures to the adventurous! A clergyman's daughter, too! I
might have known it."




CHAPTER II.


THE IRRESISTIBLE.

Betty had to run all the way home, and then she was late for dinner.
Her step-father's dry face and dusty clothes, the solid comfort of the
mahogany furnished dining room, the warm wet scent of mutton,--these
seemed needed to wake her from what was, when she had awakened, a
dream--the open sky, the sweet air of the May fields and _Him_.
Already the stranger was Him to Betty. But, then, she did not know his
name.

She slipped into her place at the foot of the long white dining table,
a table built to serve a dozen guests, and where no guests ever sat,
save rarely a curate or two, and more rarely even, an aunt.

"You are late again, Lizzie," said her step-father.

"Yes, Father," said she, trying to hide her hands and the fact that
she had not had time to wash them. A long streak of burnt sienna
marked one finger, and her nails had little slices of various colours
in them. Her paint-box was always hard to open.

Usually Mr. Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw
everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her pink sleeve.

"I wish you would contrive to keep yourself clean, or else wear a
pinafore," he said.

Betty flushed scarlet.

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