Rev. E. Donald Carr - "A Night in the Snow"

Various - "Short Stories of Various Types"

William Youatt - "The Dog"

Various - "Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864"

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.

Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude




He was at this time, like a man jostled and pushed and turned about at
some riotous fair; looking, now this way, now that, absorbed by a thousand
sights, a thousand sounds--and always through it all feeling, bitterly in
his heart, that something dear to him, somewhere in some place of silence,
was dying--

Well, hang it all, at any rate there was the Child!


II

At any rate there was the Child!

And what a child! Did any one ever have a baby like it, so fat and round
and white, with its head already covered with faint golden silk, its
eyes grey and wondering--with its sudden gravities, its amazing joys and
terrific humour, the beauty of its stepping away, as it did, suddenly
without any warning, behind a myriad mists and curtains, into some other
land that it knew of. How amazing to watch it as it slowly forgot all the
things that it had come into the world remembering, as it slowly realised
all the laws that this new order of things demanded of its obedience. Could
any one who had been present ever forget its crow of ecstasy at the first
shaft of sunlight that it ever beheld, at its first realisation of the
blue, shining ball that Peter bought, at its first vision, through the
window, of falling snow!

Peter was drunk with this amazing wonder. All the facts of life--even Clare
and his work--faded before this new presence for whose existence he had
been responsible. It had been one of the astonishing things about Clare
that she had taken the child so quietly. He had seen her thrilled by
musical comedy, by a dance at the Palace Music Hall, by the trumpery pathos
of a tenth-rate novel--before this marvel she stood, it seemed to him,
without any emotion.

Sometimes he thought that if it had not been for his reminder she would not
have gone to kiss the child goodnight. There were many occasions when he
knew--with wonder and almost dismay--that she was afraid of it; and once,
when they had been in the nursery together and young Stephen had cried and
kicked his heels in a tempest of rage, she had seemed almost to cling to
Peter for protection.

There were occasions when Peter fancied that the baby seemed the elder of
the two, it was at any rate certain that Stephen Westcott was not so afraid
of his mother as his mother was of him. And yet, Peter fancied, that could
Clare only get past this strange nervous fear she would love the baby
passionately--would love him with that same fierceness of passion that she
flung, curiously, now and again upon Peter himself. "Let me be promised,"
she seemed to say, "that I will never have any trouble or sorrow with my
son and I will love him devotedly." Meanwhile she went into every
excitement that life could provide for her....

It was on a March afternoon of early Spring after a lonely tea (Clare was
out at one of her parties) that Peter went up to the nursery. He had just
finished reading the second novel by that Mr. Rondel whose Violet sensation
had occurred some two years before. This second book was good--there was no
doubt about it--and Peter was ashamed of a kind of dim reluctance in his
acknowledgment of its quality. The fellow had had such reviews; the book,
although less sensational than its predecessor had hit the public straight
in the middle of its susceptible heart. Had young Rondel done it all with
bad work-well, that was common enough--but the book was good, uncommonly
good.

He sent the nurse downstairs and began to build an elaborate fortress on
the nursery floor. The baby lay on his back on a rug by the fire and
contemplated his woollen shoe which he slowly dragged off and disdainfully
flung away. Then, crowing to himself, he watched his father and the world
in general.

He was amazingly like Peter--the grey eyes, the mouth a little stern, a
little sulky, the snub nose, the arms a little short and thick, and that
confident, happy smile.

He watched his father.

To him, lying on the rug, many, many miles away there was a coloured glory
that ran round the upper part of the wall--as yet, he only knew that they
gave him, those colours, something of the same pleasure that his milk gave
him, that the warm, glowing, noisy shapes beyond the carpet gave him, that
the happy, comfortable smell of the Thing playing near him on the floor
gave him. About the Thing he was eternally perplexed. It was Something that
made sounds that he liked, that pressed his body in a way that he loved,
that took his fingers and his toes and made them warm and comfortable.

It was Something moreover from which delicious things hung--things that he
could clutch and hold and pull. He was perplexed but he knew that when this
Thing was near him he was warm and happy and contented and generally went
to sleep. His eyes slowly travelled round the room and rested finally upon
a round blue ball that hung turning a little from side to side, on a nail
above, his bed. This was, to him, the final triumph of existence--to have
it in his hand, to roll it round and round, to bang it down upon the floor
and watch it jump, this was the reason why one was here, this the solution
of all perplexities. He would have liked to have it in his hands now, so
crowing, he smiled pleasantly at the Thing on the floor beside him and then
looked at the ball.

Peter got up from his knees, fetched the ball down and rolled it along the
floor. As it came dancing, curving, laughing along young Stephen shrieked
with delight. Would he have it in his hands or would it escape him and
disappear altogether? Would it come to him?... It came and was clutched and
held and triumphed over.

Peter sat down by his son and began to tell him about Cornwall. He often
did this, partly because the mere mentioning of names and places satisfied
some longing in his heart, partly because he wanted Cornwall to be the
first thing that young Stephen would realise as soon as he realised
anything. "And you never can tell, you know, how soon a child can
begin...."

Stephen, turning the blue ball round and round in his fingers, gravely
listened. He was perfectly contented. He liked the sounds that circled
about him--his father's voice, the rustle of the fire, the murmur of
something beyond the walls that he could not understand.

"And then, you see, Stephen, if you go up the hill and round to the right
you come to the market-place, all covered with shiny cobbles and once a
week filled with stalls where people sell things. At the other end of it,
facing you, there's an old Tower that's been there for ages and ages. It's
got a fruit stall underneath it now, but once, years ago there was fighting
there and men were killed. Then, if you go past it, and out to the right,
you get into the road that leads out of the town. It goes right above the
sea and on a fine-day--"

"Peter!"

The voice broke like a stone shattering a sheet of glass. The ball dropped
from young Stephen's hands. He felt suddenly cold and hungry and wanted his
woollen shoe. He was not sure whether he would not cry. He would wait a
moment and see how matters developed.

Peter jumped to his feet and faced Clare: Clare in a fur cap from beneath
which her golden hair seemed to burn in anger, from beneath which her eyes,
furiously attacked his. Of course she had heard him talking to the baby
about Cornwall. They had quarrelled about it before ... he had thought
that she was at her silly tea-party. His face that had been, a few moments
before, gentle, humorous, happy, now suddenly wore the sullen defiance of a
sulky boy.

Her breast was heaving, her little hands beat against her frock.

"He shan't," she broke out at last, "hear about it."

"Of all the nonsense," Peter answered her slowly. "Really, Clare, sometimes
I think you're about two years old--"

"He shan't hear about it," she repeated again. "You don't care--you don't
care what I think or what I say--I'm his mother--I have the right--"

The baby looked at them both with wondering eyes and to any outside
observer would surely have seemed the eldest of the three. Clare's breath
came in little pants of rage--"You know--that I hate--all mention of that
place--those people. It doesn't matter to you--you never think of me--"

"At any rate," he retorted, "if you were up here in the nursery more often
you would be able to take care that Stephen's innocent ears weren't
insulted with my vulgar conversation--"

It was then that he saw, behind Clare, in the doorway, the dark smiling
face of Cards.

Cards came forward. "Really, you two," he said, laughing. "Peter, old man,
don't be absurd--you too, Clare" (he called her Clare now).

The anger died out of Clare's eyes: "Well, he knows I hate him talking
about that nasty old town to the baby--" Then, in a moment, she was smiling
again--"I'm sorry, Peter. Cards is quite right, and anyhow the baby doesn't
understand--"

She stood smiling in front of him but the frown did not leave his face.

"Oh! it's all right," he said sullenly, and he brushed past them up the
stairs, to his own room.


III

From the silence of his room he thought that he could hear them laughing
about it downstairs. "Silly old Peter--always getting into tempers--" Well,
was he? And after all hadn't it been, this time, her affair? Stephen and he
had been happy enough before the others had come in. What was this
senseless dislike of Clare's to Cornwall? What could it matter to her? It
was always cropping up now. He could think of a thousand occasions, lately,
when she had been roused by it.

But, as he paced, with frowning face, back and forwards across the room,
there was something more puzzling still that had to be thought about. Why
did they quarrel about such tiny things? In novels, in good, reliable
novels, it was always the big things about which people fought. Whoever
heard of two people quarrelling because one of them wanted to talk about
Cornwall? and yet it was precisely concerning things just as trivial that
they were always now disputing. Why need they quarrel at all? In the first
year there had always been peace. Why shouldn't there be peace now? Where
exactly lay Clare's altered attitude to himself, to his opinions, to the
world in general. If he yielded to her demands--and he had yielded on many
more occasions than was good either for her or himself--she had, he
fancied, laughed at him for being so easily defeated. If he had not yielded
then she had been, immediately, impossible....

And yet, after their quarrels, there had been the most wonderful, precious
reconciliations, reconciliations that, even now at his thought of them,
made his heart beat faster. Now, soon, when he went downstairs to dress
for dinner, she would come to him, he knew, and beg most beautifully,
his pardon. But to-night it seemed suddenly that this kind of thing had
happened too often lately. He felt, poor Peter, bewildered. There seemed to
be, on every side of him, so many things that he was called upon to manage
and he was so unable to manage any of them. He stopped in his treading to
and fro and stared at the long deal writing-table at which he always
worked.

There, waiting for him, were the first chapters of his new novel, "Mortimer
Stant." In the same way, two years ago, he had stared at the early chapters
of "The Stone House," on that morning before he had gone to propose to
Clare. Now there flashed through his mind the wonderful things that he
intended "Mortimer Stant" to be. It was to concern a man of forty (in his
confident selection of that age he displayed, most stridently, his own
youth) and Mortimer was to be a stolid, reserved Philistine, who was,
against his will, by outside forces, dragged into an emotional crisis.

At the back of his mind he had, perhaps, Maradick for his figure, but that
was almost unconscious. "Mortimer Stant" was to represent a wonderful duel
between the two camps--the Artists and the Philistines--with ultimate
victory, of course, for the Artists. It was to be.... Well what was it to
be? At present the stolid Mortimer was hidden behind a phalanx of
people--Clare, young Stephen, Cards, Bobby, Mrs. Rossiter (tiresome woman),
Alice Galleon--_That_ was it. It was hidden, hidden just as parts of "The
Stone House" had been hidden, but hidden more deeply--a regular jungle of
interests and occupations was creeping, stealthily, stealthily upon him.

And then his eye fell upon an open letter that lay on his table, and, at
the sight of it, he was seized with a burning sense of shame. How could he
have forgotten?

The letter ran--

_My dear Mr. Westcott,

You have not been to see me for many months. Further opportunities may, by
the hand of God, be denied you.

Come if you can spare the time.

Henry Galleon._

The words were written, feebly almost illegibly, in pencil. Peter knew
that Bobby had been, for many weeks, very anxious concerning his father's
health, and during the last few days he had abandoned the City and spent
all his time at home. That letter had come this very morning and Peter
had intended to go at once and inquire. The fact that he had left all
these months without going to see the old man rose before him now like an
accusing hand. He deserved, indeed, whatever the Gods might choose to send
him, if he could so wilfully neglect his duty. But he knew that there had
been, in the back of his mind, shame. His work had not, so he might have
put it to himself, been good enough to justify his presence. There would
have been questions asked, questions that he might have found it difficult,
indeed, to answer.

But now the sight of that letter immediately encouraged him. Henry Galleon,
even though he was too ill to talk, would put him right with all his
perplexities, would give him courage to cut through all these complications
that had been gathering, lately, so thickly about him. "This," the room
seemed to whisper to him, "is your chance. After all, you are given this
opportunity. See him once before he dies and your fate will be shown you,
clearly, honestly."

He stepped out of the house unperceived and was immediately conscious of
the Spring night. Spring--with a precipitancy and extravagance that seems
to be--to own peculiar quality in London--had leapt upon the streets.

The Embankment was bathed in the evening glow. Clouds, like bales of golden
wool, sailed down a sky so faintly blue that the white light of a departed
sun seemed to glow behind it. The lamps were crocus-coloured against black
barges that might have been loaded with yellow primroses so did they hint,
through their darkness, at the yellow haze around them.

The silence was melodious; the long line of dark houses watched like
prisoners from behind their iron bars. They might expect, it seemed, the
Spring to burst through the flagstones at their feet.

Peter's heart was lightened of all its burden. He shared the glory, the
intoxication of the promise that was on every side of him. On such a night
great ambitions, great ideals, great lovers were created.

He saw Henry Galleon, from behind his window, watching the pageant. He saw
him gaining new life, getting up from his bed of sickness, writing anew
his great masterpieces. And he saw himself, Peter Westcott, learning at
last from the Master the rule and discipline of life. All the muddle, the
confusion of this lazy year should be healed. He and Clare should see
with the same eyes. She should understand his need for work, he should
understand her need for help. All should be happiness and victory in this
glorious world and he, by the Master's side, should...

He stopped suddenly. The house that had been Henry Galleon's was blank and
dead.

At every window the blinds were down....




CHAPTER IX

WILD MEN


I

To Peter's immediate world it was a matter of surprise that he should take
Henry Galleon's death so hardly. It is a penalty of greatness that you
should, to the majority of your fellow men, be an Idea rather than a human
being. To his own family Henry Galleon had, of course, been real enough
but to the outside world he was the author of "Henry Lessingham" and "The
Roads," whose face one saw in the papers as one saw the face of Royalty.
Peter Westcott, moreover, had not appeared, at any time, to take more than
a general interest in the great man, and it was even understood that old
Mrs. Galleon and Millicent and Percival considered themselves somewhat
affronted because the Master had "been exceedingly kind to the young man.
Taken trouble about him, tried to know him, but young Westcott had allowed
the thing to drop--had not been near him during the last year."

Even Bobby and Alice Galleon were astonished at Peter's grief. To Bobby his
father's death came as a fine ending to a fine career. He had died, full of
honour and of years. Even Bobby, who thought that he knew his Peter pretty
well by now, was puzzled.

"He takes it," Bobby explained to Alice, "as though it were a kind of
omen, sees ever so much more in it than any of us do. It seems that he was
coming round the very evening that father died to talk to him, and that he
suddenly saw the blinds down; it was a shock to him, of course. I think
it's all been a kind of remorse working out, remorse not only for having
neglected my father but for having left other things--his work, I suppose,
rather to look after themselves. But he won't tell me," Bobby almost
desperately concluded, "he won't tell me anything--he really is the most
extraordinary chap."

And Peter found it difficult enough to tell himself, did not indeed try. He
only knew that he felt an acute, passionate remorse and that it seemed to
him that the denial of that last visit was an omen of the anger of all the
Gods, and even--although to this last he gave no kind of expression--the
malicious contrivance of an old man who waited for him down there in that
house by the sea. It was as though gates had been clanged in his face, and
that as he heard them close he heard also the jeering laughter behind
them.... He had missed his chance.

He saw, instantly, that Clare understood none of this, and that, indeed,
she took it all as rather an affectation on his part, something in him that
belonged to that side of him that she tried to forget. She hated, quite
frankly, that he should go about the house with a glum face because an old
man, whom he had never taken the trouble to go and see when he was alive,
was now dead. She showed him that she hated it.

He turned desperately to his work. There had been a hint, only the other
day, from the newspaper for which he wrote, that his reviews had not,
lately, been up to his usual standard. He knew that they seemed to him
twice as difficult to do as they had seemed a year ago and that therefore
he did them twice as badly.

He flung himself upon his book and swore that he would dissipate the
shadows that hid it from him. One of the shadows he saw quite clearly
was Cards' attitude to his work. It was strange, he thought almost
pathetically, how closely his feeling for Cards now resembled the feeling
that he had had, those years ago, at Dawson's. He still worshipped
him--worship was the only possible word--worshipped him for all the things
that he, Peter, was not. One could not be with him, Peter thought, one
could not watch his movements, hear his voice without paying it all the
most absolute reverence. The glamour about Cards was, to Peter, something
almost from another world. Peter felt so clumsy, so rough and ugly and
noisy and out-of-place when Cards was present that the fact that Cards was
almost always present now made life a very difficult thing. How could Peter
prevent himself from reverencing every word that Cards uttered when one
reflected upon the number of things that Cards had done, the things that he
had seen, the places to which he had been. And Cards' attitude to Peter's
work was, if not actually contemptuous, at least something very like it.
He did not, he professed, read novels. The novelists' trade at the best,
he seemed to imply, was only a poor one, and that Peter's work was not
altogether of the best he almost openly asserted. "What can old Peter know
about life?" one could hear him saying--"Where's he been? Who's he known?
Whatever in the world has he done?"

Against this, in spite of the glitter that shone about Cards' head, Peter
might, perhaps, have stood. He reminded himself, a hundred times a day,
that one must not care about the things that other people said, one must
have one's eyes fixed upon the goal--one must be sure of oneself--what had
Galleon said?...

But there was also the effect of it all upon Clare to be considered. Clare
listened to Cards. She was, Peter gloomily considered, very largely of
Cards' opinion. The two people for whom he cared most in the world after
young Stephen who, as a critic, had not yet begun to count, thought that he
was wasting his time.

Sometimes, as he sat at his deal table, fighting with a growing sense of
disillusionment that was like nothing so much as a child's first discovery
that its beautiful doll is stuffed with straw, he would wish passionately,
vehemently for the return of those days when he had sat in his little
bedroom writing "Reuben Hallard" with Norah Monogue, and dear Mr. Zanti and
even taciturn little Gottfried, there to encourage him.

_That_ had been Adventure--but this ...? And then he would remember young
Stephen and Clare--moments even lately that she had shared with him--and he
would be ashamed.


II

It was on an afternoon of furious wind and rain in early April that the
inevitable occurred. All the afternoon the trees in the little orchard had
been knocking their branches together as though they were in a furious
temper with Somebody and were indignant at not being allowed to get at Him;
they gave you the impression that it would be quite as much as your life
would be worth to venture into their midst.

Peter had, during a number of hours, endeavoured to pierce the soul of
Mortimer Stant--meanwhile as the wind howled, the rain lashed the windows
of his room, and the personality of Mr. Stant faded farther and farther
away into ultimate distance, Peter was increasingly conscious that he was
listening for something.

He had felt himself surrounded by this strange sense of anticipation
before. Sometimes it had stayed with him for a short period only, sometimes
it had extended over days--always it brought with it an emotion of
excitement and even, if he had analysed it sufficiently, fear.

He was suddenly conscious, in the naked spaces of his barely-furnished
room, of the personality of his father. So conscious was he that he got
up from his table and stood at the rain-swept window, looking out into
the orchard, as though he expected to see a sinister figure creeping,
stealthily, from behind the trees. In his thoughts of his father there was
no compunction, no accusing scruples of neglect, only a perfectly concrete,
active sense, in some vague way, of force pitted against force.

It might be summed up in the conviction that "the old man was not done with
him yet"--and as Peter turned back from the window, almost relieved that he
had, indeed, seen no creeping figure amongst the dark trees, he was aware
that never since the days of his starvation in Bucket Lane, had he been so
conscious of those threatening memories of Scaw House and its inhabitants.

At that, almost as he reached his table, there was a knock on his door.

"Come in," he cried and, scorning himself for his fears, faced the maid
with staring eyes.

"Two gentlemen to see you, sir," she said. "I have shown them into the
study."

"Is Mrs. Westcott in?"

"No, sir. She told me that she would not be back until six o'clock, sir."

"I will come down."

In the hall, hanging amongst the other things as a Pirate might hang beside
a company of Evangelist ministers, was Stephen Brant's hat....

As Peter's hand turned on the handle of the study door he knew that his
heart was beating with so furious a clamour that he could not hear the lock
turn.


III

He entered the room and found Stephen Brant and Mr. Zanti facing him. The
little window between the dim rows of books showed him the pale light that
was soon to succeed the storm. The two men seemed to fill the little room;
their bodies were shadowy and mysterious against the pale colour, and Peter
had the impression that the things in the room--the chairs, the books, the
table--huddled against the wall, so crowded did the place seem.

For himself, at his first sight of them, he was compelled, instantly, to
check a feeling of joy so overwhelming that he was himself astonished at
the force of it. To them, as they stood there, smiling, feeling that same
emotion to which he, also, was now succumbing! He checked himself. It was
as though he were forced suddenly, by a supreme effort of will, to drive
from the room a tumultuous crowd of pictures, enthusiasms and memories,
that, for the sake of the present and of the future, must be forbidden to
stay with him. It was absurd--he was a husband, a father, a responsible
householder, almost a personage... and yet, as he looked at Stephen's eyes
and Mr. Zanti's smile, he was the little boy back again in Tan's shop with
the old suit of armour, the beads and silver and Eastern cloths, and out
beyond the window, the sea was breaking upon the wooden jetty....

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.