William Shakespeare - "The Merry Devil"

Pierre Louys - "Les chansons de Bilitis"

Lorin Low Dame - "Handbook of the Trees of New England"

Lyda Farrington Krausé - "We Ten"

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 Incomplete Amorist

E >> E. Nesbit >> The Incomplete Amorist




"I want you--I want you--I want you," said Vernon to the vision with
the pretty kitten face, and the large gray eyes. "I want you more than
everything in the world," he said, "everything in the world put
together. Oh, come back to me--dear, dear, dear."

He was haunted without cease by the little poem he had written when he
was training himself to be in love with Betty:

"I love you to my heart's hid core:
Those other loves? How should one learn
From marshlights how the great fires burn?
Ah, no--I never loved before!"

"Prophetic, I suppose," he said, "though God knows I never meant it.
Any fool of a prophet must hit the bull's eye at least once in a life.
But there was a curious unanimity of prophecy about this. The aunt
warned me; that Conway woman warned me; the Jasmine Lady warned me.
And now it's happened," he told himself. "And I who thought I knew all
about everything!"

Miss Conway's name, moving through his thoughts, left the trail of a
new hope.

Next day he breakfasted at Montmartre.

The neatest little Cremerie; white paint, green walls stenciled with
fat white geraniums. On each small table a vase of green Bruges ware
or Breton pottery holding not a crushed crowded bouquet, but one
single flower--a pink tulip, a pink carnation, a pink rose. On the
desk from behind which the Proprietress ruled her staff, enormous pink
peonies in a tall pot of Grez de Flandre.

Behind the desk Paula Conway, incredibly neat and business-like, her
black hair severely braided, her plain black gown fitting a figure
grown lean as any grey-hound's, her lace collar a marvel of fine
laundry work.

Dapper-waisted waitresses in black, with white aprons, served the
customers. Vernon was served by Madame herself. The clientele formed
its own opinion of the cause of this, her only such condescension.

"Well, and how's trade?" he asked over his asparagus.

"Trade's beautiful," Paula answered, with the frank smile that Betty
had seen, only once or twice, and had loved very much: "if trade will
only go on behaving like this for another six weeks my cruel creditor
will be paid every penny of the money that launched me."

Her eyes dwelt on him with candid affection.

"Your cruel creditor's not in any hurry," he said. "By the way, I
suppose you've not heard anything of Miss Desmond?"

"How could I? You know you made me write that she wasn't to write."

"I didn't _make_ you write anything."

"You approved. But anyway she hasn't my address. Why?"

"She's gone away: and she also has left no address."

"You don't think?--Oh, no--nothing _could_ have happened to her!"

"No, no," he hastened to say. "I expect her father sent for her, or
fetched her."

"The best thing too," said Paula. "I always wondered he let her come."

"Yes,"--Vernon remembered how little Paula knew.

"Oh, yes, she's probably gone home."

"Look here," said Miss Conway very earnestly; "there wasn't any love
business between you and her, was there?"

"No," he answered strongly.

"I was always afraid of that. Do you know--if you don't mind, when
I've really paid my cruel creditor everything, I should like to write
and tell her what he's done for me. I should like her to know that she
really _did_ save me--and how. Because if it hadn't been for her you'd
never have thought of helping me. Do you think I might?"

"It could do no harm," said Vernon after a silent moment. "You'd
really like her to know you're all right. You _are_ all right?"

"I'm right; as I never thought I could be ever again."

"Well, you needn't exaggerate the little services of your cruel
creditor. Come to think of it, you needn't name him. Just say it was a
man you knew."

But when Paula came to write the letter that was not just what she
said.




Book 4.--The Other Man




CHAPTER XXI.


THE FLIGHT.

The full sunlight streamed into the room when Betty, her packing done,
drew back the curtain. She looked out on the glazed roof of the
laundry, the lead roof of the office, the blank wall of the new
grocery establishment in the Rue de Rennes. Only a little blue sky
shewed at the end of the lane, between roofs, by which the sun came
in. Not a tree, not an inch of grass, in sight; only, in her room,
half a dozen roses that Temple had left for her, and the white
marguerite plant--tall, sturdy, a little tree almost--that Vernon had
sent in from the florist's next door but two. Everything was packed.
She would say good-bye to Madame Bianchi; and she would go, and leave
no address, as she had promised last night.

"Why did you promise?" she asked herself. And herself replied:

"Don't you bother. We'll talk about all that when we've got away from
Paris. He was quite right. You can't think here."

"You'd better tell the cabman some other station. That cat of a
concierge is sure to be listening."

"Ah, right. I don't want to give him any chance of finding me, even if
he did say he wanted to marry me."

A fleet lovely picture of herself in bridal smart travelling clothes
arriving at the Rectory on Vernon's arm:

"Aren't you sorry you misjudged him so, Father?" Gentle accents
refraining from reproach. A very pretty picture. Yes. Dismissed.

Now the carriage swaying under the mound of Betty's luggage starts for
the Gare du Nord. In the Rue Notre Dame des Champs Betty opens her
mouth to say, "Gare de Lyons." No: this is _his_ street. Better cross
it as quickly as may be. At the Church of St. Germain--yes.

The coachman smiles at the new order: like the concierge he scents an
intrigue, whips up his horse, and swings round to the left along the
prettiest of all the boulevards, between the full-leafed trees. Past
Thirion's. Ah!

That thought, or pang, or nausea--Betty doesn't quite know what it
is--keeps her eyes from the streets till the carriage is crossing the
river. Why--there is Notre Dame! It ought to be miles away. Suppose
Vernon should have been leaning out of his window when she passed
across the street, seen her, divined her destination, followed her in
the fleetest carriage accessible? The vision of a meeting at the
station:

"Why are you going away? What have I done?" The secret of this, her
great renunciation--the whole life's sacrifice to that life's
idol--honor, wrung from her. A hand that would hold hers--under
pretence of taking her bundle of rugs to carry.--She wished the
outermost rug were less shabby! Vernon's voice.

"But I can't let you go. Why ruin two lives--nay, three? For it is you
only that I--"

Dismissed.

It is very hot. Paris is the hottest place in the world. Betty is glad
she brought lavender water in her bag. Wishes she had put on her other
hat. This brown one is hot; and besides, if Vernon _were_ to be at the
station. Interval. Dismissed.

Betty has never before made a railway journey alone. This gives one a
forlorn feeling. Suppose she has to pay excess on her luggage, or to
wrangle about contraband? She has heard all about the Octroi. Is
lavender water smuggling? And what can they do to you for it? Vernon
would know all these things. And if he were going into the country he
would be wearing that almost-white rough suit of his and the Panama
hat. A rose--Madame Abel de Chatenay--would go well with that coat.
Why didn't brides consult their bridegrooms before they bought their
trousseaux? You should get your gowns to rhyme with your husband's
suits. A dream of a dress that would be, with all the shades of Madame
Abel cunningly blended. A honeymoon lasts at least a month. The roses
would all be out at Long Barton by the time they walked up that
moss-grown drive, and stood at the Rectory door, and she murmured in
the ear of the Reverend Cecil: "Aren't you sorry you--"

Dismissed. And perforce, for the station was reached.

Betty, even in the brown hat, attracted the most attractive of the
porters--also, of course, the most attractable. He thought he spoke
English, and though this was not so, yet the friendly blink of his
Breton-blue eyes and his encouraging smile gave to his:

"Bourron? Mais oui--dix heures vingt. Par ici, Meess. Je m'occuperai
de vous. Et des bagages aussi--all right," quite the ring of one's
mother tongue.

He made everything easy for Betty, found her a carriage without
company ("I can cry here if I like," said the Betty that Betty liked
least), arranged her small packages neatly in the rack, took her 50
centime piece as though it had been a priceless personal souvenir, and
ran half the length of the platform to get a rose from another
porter's button-hole. He handed it to her through the carriage window.

"_Pour egayer le voyage de Meess_. All right!" he smiled, and was
gone.

She settled herself in the far corner, and took off her hat. The
carriage was hot as any kitchen. With her teeth she drew the cork of
the lavender water bottle, and with her handkerchief dabbed the
perfume on forehead and ears.

"Ah, Mademoiselle--_De grace_!"--the voice came through the open
window beside her. A train full of young soldiers was beside her
train, and in the window opposite hers three boys' faces crowded to
look at her. Three hands held out three handkerchiefs--not very white
certainly, but--

Betty smiling reached out the bottle and poured lavender water on each
outheld handkerchief.

"_Ah, le bon souvenir_!" said one.

"We shall think of the beauty of an angel of Mademoiselle every time
we smell the perfume so delicious," said the second.

"And longer than that--oh, longer than that by all a life!" cried the
third.

The train started. The honest, smiling boy faces disappeared.
Instinctively she put her head out of the window to look back at them.
All three threw kisses at her.

"I ought to be offended," said Betty, and instantly kissed her hand in
return.

"How _nice_ French people are!" she said as she sank back on the hot
cushions.

And now there was leisure to think--real thoughts, not those broken,
harassing dreamings that had buzzed about her between 57 Boulevard
Montparnasse and the station. Also, as some one had suggested, one
could cry.

She leaned back, eyes shut. Her next thought was:

"I have been to sleep."

She had. The train was moving out of a station labelled Fontainebleau.

"And oh, the trees!" said Betty, "the green thick trees! And the sky.
You can see the sky."

Through the carriage window she drank delight from the far grandeur of
green distances, the intimate beauty of green rides, green vistas, as
a thirsty carter drinks beer from the cool lip of his can--a thirsty
lover madness from the warm lips of his mistress.

"Oh, how good! How green and good!" she told herself over and over
again till the words made a song with the rhythm of the blundering
train and the humming metals.

"Bourron!"

Her station. Little, quiet, sunlit, like the station at Long Barton; a
flaming broom bush and the white of May and acacia blossom beyond prim
palings; no platform--a long leap to the dusty earth. The train went
on, and Betty and her boxes seemed dropped suddenly at the world's
end.

The air was fresh and still. A chestnut tree reared its white blossoms
like the candles on a Christmas tree for giant children. The white
dust of the platform sparkled like diamond dust. May trees and
laburnums shone like silver and gold. And the sun was warm and the
tree-shadows black on the grass. And Betty loved it all.

"_Oh_!" she said suddenly, "it's a year ago to-day since I met
_him_--in the warren."

A shadow caressed and stung her. She would have liked it to wear the
mask of love foregone--to have breathed plaintively of hopes defeated
and a broken heart. Instead it shewed the candid face of a real
homesickness, and it spoke with convincing and abominably aggravating
plainness--of Long Barton.

The little hooded diligence was waiting in the hot white dust outside
the station.

"But yes.--It is I who transport all the guests of Madame Chevillon,"
said the smiling brown-haired bonnetless woman who held the reins.

Betty climbed up beside her.

Along a straight road that tall ranks of trees guarded but did not
shade, through the patchwork neatness of the little culture that makes
the deep difference between peasant France and pastoral England, down
a steep hill into a little white town, where vines grew out of the
very street to cling against the faces of the houses and wistaria hung
its mauve pendants from every arch and lintel.

The Hotel Chevillon is a white-faced house, with little unintelligent
eyes of windows, burnt blind, it seems, in the sun--neat with the
neatness of Provincial France.

Out shuffled an old peasant woman in short skirt, heavy shoes and big
apron, her arms bared to the elbow, a saucepan in one hand, a ladle in
the other. She beamed at Betty.

"I wish to see Madame Chevillon."

"You see her, _ma belle et bonne_," chuckled the old woman. "It is me,
Madame Chevillon. You will rooms, is it not? You are artist? All who
come to the Hotel are artist. Rooms? Marie shall show you the rooms,
at the instant even. All the rooms--except one--that is the room of
the English Artist--all that there is of most amiable, but quite mad.
He wears no hat, and his brain boils in the sun. Mademoiselle can chat
with him: it will prevent that she bores herself here in the Forest."

Betty disliked the picture.

"I think perhaps," she said, translating mentally as she spoke, "that
I should do better to go to another hotel, if there is only one man
here and he is--"

She saw days made tiresome by the dodging of a lunatic--nights made
tremulous by a lunatic's yelling soliloquies.

"Ah," said Madame Chevillon comfortably, "I thought Mademoiselle was
artist; and for the artists and the Spaniards the _convenances_ exist
not. But Mademoiselle is also English. They eat the convenances every
day with the soup.--See then, my cherished. The English man, he is not
a dangerous fool, only a beast of the good God; he has the atelier and
the room at the end of the corridor. But there is, besides the Hotel,
the Garden Pavilion, un appartement of two rooms, exquisite, on the
first, and the garden room that opens big upon the terrace. It is
there that Mademoiselle will be well!"

Betty thought so too, when she had seen the "rooms exquisite on the
first"--neat, bare, well-scrubbed rooms with red-tiled floors, scanty
rugs and Frenchly varnished furniture--the garden room too, with big
open hearth and no furniture but wicker chairs and tables.

"Mademoiselle can eat all alone on the terrace. The English mad shall
not approach. I will charge myself with that. Mademoiselle may repose
herself here as on the bosom of the mother of Mademoiselle."

Betty had her dejeuner on the little stone terrace with rickety rustic
railings. Below lay the garden, thick with trees.

Away among the trees to the left an arbour. She saw through the leaves
the milk-white gleam of flannels, heard the chink of china and
cutlery. There, no doubt, the mad Englishman was even now
breakfasting. There was the width of the garden between them. She sat
still till the flannel gleam had gone away among the trees. Then she
went out and explored the little town. She bought a blue packet of
cigarettes. Miss Voscoe had often tried to persuade her to smoke. Most
of the girls did. Betty had not wanted to do it any more for that. She
had had a feeling that Vernon would not like her to smoke.

And in Paris one had to be careful. But now--

"I am absolutely my own master," she said. "I am staying by myself at
a hotel, exactly like a man. I shall feel more at home if I smoke. And
besides, no one can see me. It's just for me. And it shows I don't
care what _he_ likes."

Lying in a long chair reading one of her Tauchnitz books and smoking,
Betty felt very manly indeed.

The long afternoon wore on. The trees of the garden crowded round
Betty with soft whispers in a language not known of the trees on the
boulevards.

"I am very very unhappy," said Betty with a deep sigh of delight.

She went in, unpacked, arranged everything neatly. She always arranged
everything neatly, but nothing ever would stay arranged. She wrote to
her father, explaining that Madame Gautier had brought her and the
other girls to Grez for the summer, and she gave as her address:

Chez Madame Chevillon, Pavilion du Jardin, Grez.

"I shall be very very unhappy to-morrow," said Betty that night,
laying her face against the coarse cool linen of her pillow; "to-day I
have been stunned---I haven't been able to feel anything. But
to-morrow."

To-morrow, she knew, would be golden and green even as to-day. But she
should not care. She did not want to be happy. How could she be happy
now that she had of her own free will put away the love of her life?
She called and beckoned to all the thoughts that the green world shut
out, and they came at her call, fluttering black wings to hide the
sights and sounds of field and wood and green garden, and making their
nest in her heart.

"Yes," she said, turning the hot rough pillow, "now it begins to hurt
again. I knew it would."

It hurt more than she had meant it to hurt, when she beckoned those
black-winged thoughts. It hurt so much that she could not sleep. She
got up and leaned from the window.

She wondered where Vernon was. It was quite early. Not eleven. Lady
St. Craye had called that quite early.

"He's with _her_, of course," said Betty, "sitting at her feet, no
doubt, and looking up at her hateful eyes, and holding her horrid
hand, and forgetting that he ever knew a girl named Me."

Betty dressed and went out.

She crossed the garden. It was very dark among the trees. It would be
lighter in the road.

The big yard door was ajar. She pushed it softly. It creaked and let
her through into the silent street. There were no lights in the hotel,
no lights in any of the houses.

She stood a moment, hesitating. A door creaked inside the hotel. She
took the road to the river.

"I wonder if people ever _do_ drown themselves for love," said Betty:
"he'd be sorry then."




CHAPTER XXII.


THE LUNATIC.

The night kept its promise. Betty, slipping from the sleeping house
into the quiet darkness, seemed to slip into a poppy-fringed pool of
oblivion. The night laid fresh, cold hands on her tired eyes, and shut
out many things. She paused for a minute on the bridge to listen to
the restful restless whisper of the water against the rough stone.

Her eyes growing used to the darkness discerned the white ribbon of
road unrolling before her. The trees were growing thicker. This must
be the forest. Certainly it was the forest.

"How dark it is," she said, "how dear and dark! And how still! I
suppose the trams are running just the same along the Boulevard
Montparnasse,--and all the lights and people, and the noise. And I've
been there all these months--and all the time this was here--this!"

Paris was going on--all that muddle and maze of worried people. And
she was out of it all; here, alone.

Alone? A quick terror struck at the heart of her content. An abrupt
horrible certainty froze her--the certainty that she was not alone.
There was some living thing besides herself in the forest, quite near
her--something other than the deer and the squirrels and the quiet
dainty woodland people. She felt it in every fibre long before she
heard that faint light sound that was not one of the forest noises.
She stood still and listened.

She had never been frightened of the dark--of the outdoor dark. At
Long Barton she had never been afraid even to go past the church-yard
in the dark night--the free night that had never held any terrors,
only dreams.

But now: she quickened her pace, and--yes--footsteps came on behind
her. And in front the long straight ribbon of the road unwound, gray
now in the shadow. There seemed to be no road turning to right or
left. She could not go on forever. She would have to turn,
sometime--if not now, yet sometime--in this black darkness, and then
she would meet this thing that trod so softly, so stealthily behind
her.

Before she knew that she had ceased to walk, she was crouched in the
black between two bushes. She had leapt as the deer leaps, and
crouched, still as any deer.

Her dark blue linen gown was one with the forest shadows. She breathed
noiselessly--her eyes were turned to the gray ribbon of road that had
been behind her. She had heard. Now she would see.

She did see--something white and tall and straight. Oh, the relief of
the tallness and straightness and whiteness! She had thought of
something dwarfed and clumsy--dark, misshapen, slouching beast-like on
two shapeless feet. Why were people afraid of tall white ghosts?

It passed. It was a man--in a white suit. Just an ordinary man. No,
not ordinary. The ordinary man in France does not wear white. Nor in
England, except for boating and tennis and--

Flannels. Yes. The lunatic who boiled his brains in the sun!

Betty's terror changed colour as the wave changes from green to white,
but it lost not even so much of its force as the wave loses by the
change. It held her moveless till the soft step of the tennis shoes
died away. Then softly and hardly moving at all, moving so little that
not a leaf of those friendly bushes rustled, she slipped off her
shoes: took them in her hand, made one leap through the crackling,
protesting undergrowth and fled back along the road, fleet as a
greyhound.

She ran and she walked, very fast, and then she ran again and never
once did she pause to look or listen. If the lunatic caught her--well,
he would catch her, but it should not be _her_ fault if he did.

The trees were thinner. Ahead she saw glimpses of a world that looked
quite light, the bridge ahead. With one last spurt she ran across it,
tore up the little bit of street, slipped through the door, and
between the garden trees to her pavilion.

She looked very carefully in every corner--all was still and empty.
She locked the door, and fell face downward on her bed.

Vernon in his studio was "thinking things over" after the advice of
Miss Voscoe in much the same attitude.

"Oh," said Betty, "I will never go out at night again! And I will
leave this horrible, horrible place the very first thing to-morrow
morning!"

But to-morrow morning touched the night's events with new colours from
its shining palette.

"After all, even a lunatic has a right to walk out in the forest if it
wants to," she told herself, "and it didn't know I was there, I
expect, really. But I think I'll go and stay at some other hotel."

She asked, when her "complete coffee" came to her, what the mad
gentleman did all day.

"He is not so stupid as Mademoiselle supposes," said Marie. "All the
artists are insane, and he, he is only a little more insane than the
others. He is not a real mad, all the same, see you. To-day he makes
drawings at Montigny."

"Which way is Montigny?" asked Betty. And, learning, strolled, when
her coffee was finished, by what looked like the other way.

It took her to the river.

"It's like the Medway," said Betty, stooping to the fat cowslips at
her feet, "only prettier; and I never saw any cowslips here--You
dears!"

Betty would not look at her sorrow in this gay, glad world. But she
knew at last what her sorrow's name was. She saw now that it was love
that had stood all the winter between her and Vernon, holding a hand
of each. In her blindness she had called it friendship,--but now she
knew its real, royal name.

She felt that her heart was broken. Even the fact that her grief was a
thing to be indulged or denied at will brought her no doubts. She had
always wanted to be brave and noble. Well, now she was being both.

A turn of the river brought to sight a wide reach dotted with green
islands, each a tiny forest of willow saplings and young alders.

There was a boat moored under an aspen, a great clumsy boat, but it
had sculls in it. It would be pleasant to go out to the islands.

She got into the boat, loosened the heavy rattling chain and flung it
in board, took up the sculls and began to pull. It was easy work.

"I didn't know I was such a good oar," said Betty as the boat crept
swiftly down the river.

As she stepped into the boat, she noticed the long river reeds
straining down stream like the green hair of hidden water-nixies.

She would land at the big island--the boat steered easily and lightly
enough for all its size--but before she could ship her oars and grasp
at a willow root she shot past the island.

Then she remembered the streaming green weeds.

"Why, there must be a frightful current!" she said. What could make
the river run at this pace--a weir--or a waterfall?

She turned the boat's nose up stream and pulled. Ah, this was work!
Then her eyes, fixed in the exertion of pulling, found that they saw
no moving banks, but just one picture: a willow, a clump of irises,
three poplars in the distance--and the foreground of the picture did
not move. All her pulling only sufficed to keep the boat from going
with the stream. And now, as the effort relaxed a little it did not
even do this. The foreground did move--the wrong way. The boat was
slipping slowly down stream. She turned and made for the bank, but the
stream caught her broadside on, whirled the boat round and swept it
calmly and gently down--towards the weir--or the waterfall.

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