Louisa de la Rame) - "A Dog of Flanders"

Anthony Trollope - "Autobiography of Anthony Trollope"

W. Stanley - "Instruction for Using a Slide Rule"

John Carr - "The Stranger in France"

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.

Wayside Courtships

H >> Hamlin Garland >> Wayside Courtships




His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile even about the eyes. He
knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the passion of
a woman.

"Our home is yours, just as long as you can bear the monotony of our
simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and
unmistakable in its sincerity.

She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her
head, and they rode in silence.

After they left the car, Allen sat with savage eyes and grimly set
mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and
helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful,
remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire.

It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be
helpless--that they should need some man to protect them against some
other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women
subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they
could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or
she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young.

He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life
but--he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his
responsibility. He followed her on her downward path till he saw her
stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances--alone
and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with
flashes of wit, and then----

He shuddered. "O my God! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?"

* * * * *

On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes debating
whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones
grew weary, the noise of the autumn wind--the lonely, woeful, moaning
prairie wind--came to his ears and he shuddered. His wife observed it.

"What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?"

"Oh, no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he
took his little girl into his arms and held her close.


IV. THE PASSING STRANGER.

This was the story the mystic told:

It was about eleven o'clock of an October night. The street was one of
the worst of the city, but it was Monday--one of its quiet nights.

The saloons flared floods of feverish light upon the walk, and breathed
their terrible odors, like caverns leading downward into hell. Restless,
loitering crowds moved to and fro, with rasping, uncertain footsteps,
out of which the click of health had gone.

Policemen occasionally showed themselves menacingly, and the crowd
responded to their impact by action quickened, like a python touched
with a red-hot rod.

It was nearly time to close, and the barkeepers were beginning to betray
signs of impatience with their most drunken customers.

A dark, tall man in cloak and fez moved slowly down the street. His face
was serene but somber. In passing the window of a brilliantly lighted
drinking place he stopped and looked in.

In the small stall, near the window and behind the counter, sat three
women and two men. All had mugs of beer in their hands. The women were
all young, and one of them was handsome. They were dressed nattily,
jauntily, in modish, girlish hats, and their dainty jackets fitted
closely to their slight figures.

Their liquor had just been served, and their voices were ringing with
wild laughter. Their white teeth shone from their rouged faces with a
mirth which met no answering smile from the strange young man without.
He stood like a shadow against the pane.

The smile on the face of the youngest girl stiffened into a strange
contortion. Her eyes looked straight ahead into the eyes of the
stranger.

Her smile smoothed out. Her face paled; her eyes expanded with wonder
till they lost their insane glitter, and grew sad and soft and dark.

"What is it, Nell?" the others asked.

She did not hear them. She seemed to listen. Her eyes seemed to see
mountains--or clouds. A land like her childhood's home with the sunset
light over it. Her mug fell with a crash to the table. She rose. Her
hand silenced them, with beautiful finger raised:

"Listen! Don't you hear him? His eyes are calling me. It is Christ."

The others looked, but they saw only a tall figure moving away. He wore
a long black cloak like a priest.

"Some foreign duffer lookin' in. Let 'im look," said one of the other
girls.

"One o' them Egyptian jugglers," said another.

"What's the matter of ye, Nell? You look as if you'd seen a ghost of y'r
grandmother. Set down an' drink y'r beer."

The girl brushed her hand over her eyes. "I'm going home," she said in a
low voice from which all individuality had passed. Her face seemed
anxious, her manner hurried.

"What's the matter, Nell? My God! Look at her eyes!--I'm going with
her."

The girl put him aside with a gesture. Her look awed him.

One of the others began to laugh.

"Stop! You fool," one of the girls cried. They sat in silence as the
younger girl went out, putting aside every hand stretched out to touch
her. She walked like one in stupor--her face ghastly. The arch of her
beautiful eyebrows was like that of Ophelia in her bitterest moment.

The others watched her go in silence.

One of them drew a sigh and said: "I'm going home, too; I don't feel
well."

"I'll go with ye," one of the men said.

"Stay where you are!" said the girl sharply.

* * * * *

Once on the street, the younger girl hurried on the way the stranger had
gone. His face seemed before her.

She could see it; she should always see it. It was the face of a young
man. A firm chin, a strong mouth with a feminine curve in it, a face
with a clear pallor that seemed foreign somehow. But the eyes--oh, the
eyes!

They were deep and brown, and filled with an infinite sadness--for her.
She felt it, and the knot of pain in the forehead, that was also for
her. Something sweet and terrible went out from his presence. A
knowledge of infinite space and infinite time and infinite compassion.

No man had ever looked at her like that. There was something divine in
the penetrating power of his eyes.

Some way she knew he was not a priest, though his cloak and turban cap
looked like it. He seemed like a scholar from some strange land--a man
above passion, a man who knew God.

His eyes accused her and pitied her, while they called her.

No smile, no shrinking of lips into a sneer--nothing but pity and
wonder, and something else----

And a voice seemed to say: "You are too good to be there. Follow me."

As she thought of him he seemed to stand on an immeasurable height
looking down at her.

She had laughed at him--O God!--she flushed hot with shame from head to
foot--but his eyes had not changed. His lips had kept their pitying
droop, and his somber eyes had burned deep into the sacred places of
her thought, where something sweet and girlish lay, unwasted and
untrampled.

"He called me. He called me."

* * * * *

Under the trees where the moonlight threw tracing of shadows she came
upon him standing, waiting for her. She held out her hand to him like a
babe. He was taller than she thought.

He took her hands silently and she grew calm at once. All shame left
her. She forgot her city life; she remembered only the sweet, merry life
of the village where she was born. The sound of sleigh bells and song,
and the lisp of wind in the grass, and songs of birds in the maples came
to her.

His voice began softly:

"You are too good and sweet to be so devoured of beasts. In your little
Northern home they are waiting for you. To-morrow you will go back to
them."

He placed his hand, which was soft and warm and broad, over her eyes.
His voice was like velvet, soft yet elastic.

"When you wake you will hate what you have been. No power can keep you
here. You will go back to the simple life from which you should never
have departed. You will love simple things and the pleasures of your
native place."

Her face was turned upward, but her eyelids had fallen.

"When you wake you will not remember your life here. You will be a girl
again, unstained and ready to begin life without remorse and without
accusing memory. When I leave you at your door to-night, you will belong
to the kingdom of good and not to the kingdom of evil."

He dropped her hands and pointed across the park.

"Now go to that gray house. Ring the bell, and you will be housed for
the night. _Remember you are mine._ When the bell rings you will
'wake.'"

She moved away without looking back--moved mechanically like one still
in sleep.

The man watched her until the door opened and admitted her; then he
passed on into the shadow of the narrow street.

And this the listener gravely asked:

"One was chosen, the other left. Were the others less in need of
grace?"




BEFORE THE LOW GREEN DOOR.


Matilda Bent was dying; there was no doubt of that now, if there had
been before. The gruff old physician--one of the many overworked and
underpaid country doctors--shook his head and pushed by Joe Bent, her
husband, as he passed through the room which served as dining room,
sitting room, and parlor. The poor fellow slouched back to his chair by
the stove as if dazed, and before he could speak again the doctor was
gone.

Mrs. Ridings was just coming up the walk as the doctor stepped out of
the door.

"O doctor, how is she?"

"She is a dying woman, madam."

"Oh! don't say that, doctor. What's the matter?"

"Cancer."

"Then the news was true----"

"I don't know anything of the news, Mrs. Ridings, but Mrs. Bent is dying
from the effects of a cancer primarily, which she has had for
years--since her last child, which died in infancy, you remember."

"But, doctor, she never told me----"

"Neither did she tell me. But no matter now. I have done all I can for
her. If you can make death any easier for her, go and do it. You will
find some opiate powders there with directions. Keep the pain down at
all hazards. Don't let her suffer; that is useless. She is likely to
last a day or two--but if any change comes to-night, send for me."

When the good matron entered the dowdy, suffocating little room where
Matilda Bent lay gasping for breath, she was sick for a moment with
sympathetic pain. There the dying woman lay, her world narrowed to four
close walls, propped up on the pillows near the one little window. Her
eyes seemed very large and bright, and the brow, made prominent by the
sinking away of the cheeks, gave evidence that it was an uncommon woman
who lay there quietly waiting the death angel.

She smiled, and lifted her eyebrows in a ghastly way.

"O Marthy!" she breathed.

"Matildy, I didn't know you was so bad, or I'd 'a' come before. Why
didn't you let me know?" said Mrs. Ridings, kneeling by the bed and
taking the ghostly hands of the sufferer in her own warm and soft palms.
She shuddered as she kissed the thin lips.

"I think you'll soon be around agin," she added, in the customary
mockery of an attempt at cheer. The other woman started slightly,
turned her head, and gazed on her old friend long and intently. The
hollowness of her neighbor's words stung her.

"I hope not, Marthy--I'm ready to go. I want to go. I don't care to
live."

The two women communed by looking for a long time in each other's eyes,
as if to get at the very secretest desires and hopes of the heart. Tears
fell from Martha's eyes upon the cold and nerveless hands of her
friend--poor, faithful hands, hacked and knotted and worn by thirty
years of ceaseless daily toil. They lay there motionless upon the
coverlet, pathetic protest for all the world to see.

"O Matildy, I wish I could do something for you! I want to help you so.
I feel so bad that I didn't come before. Ain't they somethin'?"

"Yes, Marthy--jest set there--till I die--it won't be long," whispered
the pale lips. The sufferer, as usual, was calmer than her visitor, and
her eyes were thoughtful.

"I will! I will! But oh! must you go? Can't somethin' be done. Don't yo'
want the minister to be sent for?"

"No, I'm all ready. I ain't afraid to die. I ain't worth savin' now. O
Marthy! I never thought I'd come to this--did you? I never thought I'd
die--so early in life--and die--unsatisfied."

She lifted her head a little as she gasped out these words with an
intensity of utterance that thrilled her hearer--a powerful,
penetrating earnestness that burned like fire.

"Are you satisfied?" pursued the steady lips. "My life's a failure,
Marthy--I've known it all along--all but my children. O Marthy, what'll
become o' them? This is a hard world."

The amazed Martha could only chafe the hands, and note sorrowfully the
frightful changes in the face of her friend. The weirdly calm, slow
voice began to shake a little.

"I'm dyin', Marthy, without ever gittin' to the sunny place we
girls--used to think--we'd git to, by an' by. I've been a-gittin' deeper
'n' deeper--in the shade--till it's most dark. They ain't been no
rest--n'r hope f'r me, Marthy--none. I ain't----"

"There, there! Tillie, don't talk so--don't, dear. Try to think how
bright it'll be over there----"

"I don't know nawthin' about over there; I'm talkin' about here. I ain't
had no chance here, Marthy."

"He will heal all your care----"

"He can't wipe out my sufferin's here."

"Yes, He can, and He will. He can wipe away every tear and heal every
wound."

"No--he--can't. God himself can't wipe out what has been. O Mattie, if I
was only there!--in the past--if I was only young and purty agin! You
know how tall I was! how we used to run--O Mattie, if I was only there!
The world was all bright then--wasn't it? We didn't expect--to work all
our days. Life looked like a meadow, full of daisies and pinks, and the
nicest ones and the sweetest birds was just a little ways on--where the
sun was--it didn't look--wasn't we happy?"

"Yes, yes, dear. But you mustn't talk so much." The good woman thought
Matilda's mind was wandering. "Don't you want some med'cine? Ain't your
fever risin'?"

"But the daisies and pinks all turned to weeds," she went on, waiting a
little, "when we picked 'em. An' the sunny place--has been always behind
me, and the dark before me. Oh! if I was only there--in the sun--where
the pinks and daisies are!"

"You mustn't talk so, Mattie! Think about your children. You ain't sorry
y' had them. They've been a comfort to y'. You ain't sorry you had 'em."

"I ain't glad," was the unhesitating reply of the failing woman; and
then she went on, in growing excitement: "They'll haf to grow old jest
as I have--git bent and gray, an' die. They ain't ben much comfort to
me; the boys are like their father, and Julyie's weak. They ain't no
happiness--for such as me and them."

She paused for breath, and Mrs. Ridings, not knowing what to say, did
better than speak. She fell to stroking the poor face, and the hands
getting more restless each moment. It was as if Matilda Fletcher had
been silent so long, had borne so much without complaint, that now it
burst from her in a torrent not to be stayed. All her most secret doubts
and her sweetest hopes seemed trembling on her lips or surging in her
brain, racking her poor, emaciated frame for utterance. Now that death
was sure, she was determined to rid her bosom of its perilous stuff.
Martha was appalled.

"I used to think--that when I got married I'd be perfectly happy--but I
never have been happy sence. It was the beginning of trouble to me. I
never found things better than they looked; they was always worse. I've
gone further an' further from the sunshiny meadow, an' the birds an'
flowers---- and I'll never git back to 'em again, never!" She ended with a
sob and a low wail.

Her face was horrifying with its intensity of pathetic regret. Her
straining, wide-open eyes seemed to be seeing those sunny spots in the
meadow.

"Mattie, sometimes when I'm asleep I think I am back there ag'in--and
you girls are there--an' we're pullin' off the leaves of the wild
sunflower--'rich man, poor man, beggar man'--and I hear you all laugh
when I pull off the last leaf; an' when I come to myself--and I'm an
old, dried-up woman, dyin' unsatisfied!"

"I've felt that way a little myself, Matildy," confessed the watcher in
a scared whisper.

"I knew it, Mattie; I knew you'd know how I felt. Things have been
better for you. You ain't had to live in an old log house all your
life, an' work yourself to skin an' bone for a man you don't respect nor
like."

"Matildy Bent, take that back! Take it back, for mercy sake! Don't you
dare die thinkin' that--don't you dare!"

Bent, hearing her voice rising, came to the door, and the wife, knowing
his step, cried:

"Don't let him in! Don't! I can't bear him--keep him out; I don't want
to see him ag'in."

"Who do you mean? Not Joe?"

"Yes. Him."

Had the dying woman confessed to murder, good Martha could not have been
more shocked. She could not understand this terrible revulsion in
feeling, for she herself had been absolutely loyal to her husband
through all the trials which had come upon them.

But she met Bent at the threshold, and, closing the door, went out with
him into the summer kitchen, where the rest of the family were sitting.
A gloomy silence fell on them all after the greetings were over. The men
were smoking; all were seated in chairs tipped back against the wall.
Joe Bent, a smallish man, with a weak, good-natured face, asked in a
hoarse whisper:

"How is she, Mis' Ridings?"

"She seems quite strong, Mr. Bent. I think you had all better go to bed;
if I want you I can call you. Doctor give me directions."

"All right," responded the relieved man. "I'll sleep on the lounge in
the other room. If you want me, just rap on the door."

When, after making other arrangements, Martha went back to the bedroom,
she was startled to hear the sick woman muttering to herself, or perhaps
because she had forgotten Martha's absence.

"But the shadows on the meadow didn't stay; they passed on, and then the
sun was all the brighter on the flowers. We used to string
sweet-williams on spears of grass--don't you remember?"

Martha gave her a drink of the opiate in the glass, adjusted her on the
pillow, and threw open the window, even to the point of removing the
screen, and the gibbous moon flooded the room with light. She did not
light a lamp, for its flame would heat the room. Besides, the moonlight
was sufficient. It fell on the face of the sick woman, till she looked
like a thing of marble--all but her dark eyes.

"Does the moon hurt you, Tilly? Shall I put down the curtain?"

The woman heard with difficulty, and when the question was repeated said
slowly:

"No, I like it." After a little--"Don't you remember, Mattie 'how
beautiful the moonlight seemed? It seemed to promise happiness--and
love--but it never come for us. It makes me dream of the past now--just
as it did o' future then; an' the whip-poor-wills too----"

The night was perfectly beautiful, such a night as makes dying an
infinite sorrow. The summer was at its liberalest. Innumerable insects
of the nocturnal sort were singing in unison with the frogs in the
pools. A whip-poor-will called, and its neighbor answered it like an
echo. The leaves of the trees, glossy from the late rain, moved
musically to the light west wind, and the exquisite perfume of many
flowers came in on the breeze.

When the failing woman sank into silence, Martha leaned her elbow on the
window sill, and, gazing far into the great deeps of space, gave herself
up to unwonted musings upon the problems of human life. She sighed
deeply at times. She found herself at moments in the almost terrifying
position of a human soul in space. Not a wife, not a mother, but just a
soul facing the questions which harass philosophers. As she realized her
condition of mind she apprehended something of the thinking of the woman
on the bed. Matilda had gone beyond or far back of the wife and mother.

The hours wore on; the dying woman stirred uneasily now and then,
whispering a word or phrase which related to her girlhood--never to her
later life. Once she said:

"Mother, hold me. I'm so tired."

Martha took the thin form in her arms, and, laying her head close beside
the sunken cheek, sang, in half breath, a lullaby till the sufferer grew
quiet again.

The eastern moon passed over the house, leaving the room dark, and
still the patient watcher sat beside the bed, listening to the slow
breathing of the dying one. The cool air grew almost chill; the east
began to lighten, and with the coming light the tide of life sank in the
dying body. The head, hitherto restlessly turning, ceased to move. The
eyes grew quiet and began to soften like a sleeper's.

"How are you now, dear?" asked the watcher several times, bending over
the bed, and bathing back the straying hair.

"I'm tired--tired, mother--turn me," she murmured drowsily, with heavy
lids drooping.

Martha adjusted the pillows again, and turned the face to the wall. The
poor, tortured, restless brain slowly stopped its grinding whirl, and
the thin limbs, heavy with years of hopeless toil, straightened out in
an endless sleep.

Matilda Fletcher had found rest.




UPON IMPULSE


The seminary buildings stood not far from the low, lodgelike railway
station, and a path led through a gap in the fence across the meadow.
People were soberly converging toward its central building, as if
proceeding to church.

Among the people who alighted from the two o'clock train were Professor
Blakesly and his wife and a tall, dark man whom they called Ware.

Mrs. Blakesly was plump and pretty, plainly the mother of two or three
children and the sovereign of a modest suburban cottage. Blakesly was as
evidently a teacher; even the casual glances of the other visitors might
discover the character of these people.

Ware was not so easy to be read. His face was lean and brown, and his
squarely clipped mustache gave him a stern look. His body was well
rounded with muscle, and he walked alertly; his manner was direct and
vigorous, manifestly of the open air.

As they entered the meadow he paused and said with humorous
irresolution, "I don't know what I am out here for."

"To see the pretty girls, of course," said Mrs. Blakesly.

"They may be plain, after all," he said.

"They're always pretty at graduation time and at marriage," Blakesly
interpreted.

"Then there's the ice cream and cake," Mrs. Blakesly added.

"Where do all these people come from?" Ware asked, looking about. "It's
all farm land here."

"They are the fathers, mothers, and brothers of the seminary girls. They
come from everywhere. See the dear creatures about the door! Let's hurry
along."

"They do not interest me. I take off my hat to the beauty of the day,
however."

Ware had evidently come under protest, for he lingered in the daisied
grass which was dappled with shadows and tinkling with bobolinks and
catbirds.

A broad path led up to the central building, whose double doors were
swung wide with most hospitable intent. Ware ascended the steps behind
his friends, a bored look on his dark face.

Two rows of flushed, excited girls with two teachers at their head stood
flanking the doorway to receive the visitors, who streamed steadily into
the wide, cool hall.

Mrs. Blakesly took Ware in hand. "Mr. Ware, this is Miss Powell. Miss
Powell, this is Mr. Jenkin Ware, lawyer and friend to the Blakeslys."

"I'm very glad to see you," said a cool voice, in which gladness was
entirely absent.

Ware turned to shake hands mechanically, but something in the steady
eyes and clasp of the hand held out turned his listless manner into
surprise and confusion. He stared at her without speaking, only for a
second, and yet so long she colored and withdrew her hand sharply.

"I beg your pardon, I didn't get the name."

"Miss Powell," answered Mrs. Blakesly, who had certainly missed this
little comedy, which would have been so delicious to her.

Ware moved on, shaking hands with the other teachers and bowing to the
girls. He seized an early moment to turn and look back at Miss Powell.
His listless indifference was gone. She was a fine figure of a woman--a
strong, lithe figure, dressed in a well-ordered, light-colored gown. Her
head was girlish, with a fluff of brown hair knotted low at the back.
Her profile was magnificent. The head had the intellectual poise, but
the proud bosom and strong body added another quality. "She is a modern
type," Ware said, remembering a painting of such a head he had seen in a
recent exhibition.

As he studied her she turned and caught him looking, and he felt again a
curious fluttering rush at his heart. He fancied she flushed a little
deeper as she turned away.

As for him, it had been a very long while since he had felt that
singular weakness in the presence of a young woman. He walked on, trying
to account for it. It made him feel very boyish. He had a furtive desire
to remain in the hall where he could watch her, and when he passed up
the stairs, it was with a distinct feeling of melancholy, as if he were
leaving something very dear and leaving it forever.

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