Alexandre Dumas - "La dame de Monsoreau v.3"

Gouverneur Morris - "The Spread Eagle and Other Stories"

William Edward Hartpole Lecky - "Historical and Political Essays"

Fred W. Ward - "The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's)"

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




"Dirty weather coming," he said.

Peter was disturbed. That whispering noise that had crept across the
country frightened him. If it went on much longer it would make him
remember--he must not remember.

They turned down into a deep, mysterious lane and the whisper was hidden.
Now there was about them only the urgent crowding of the hedges, the
wild-flowers flinging their scent on to the night air, and above and below
and on every side of the old cab there streamed into the air the sweet
smell of crushed grass, as though many fields had been pressed between
giant's fingers and so had been left.

Peter sat there and about him, like flames licking woodwork, evil thoughts
devoured his body. He was going now at last to do all those things that,
these many years, he had prevented himself from doing. That at any rate he
knew.... He would drink and drink and drink, until he would never remember
anything again ... never again.... Meanwhile as the cab slowly began to
climb the hill again Mr. Jackson was telling a story.

He rolled his r's as though life were indeed a valuable and happy thing,
and now and again, waving his thin whip in the air, he would seem to appeal
to the moon.

"'Twas down to Dunotter Cove and I, a lad, my father bein' a fisherman, and
one night, I mind it as though it were yesterday, there was a mighty wreck.
Storm and wind and rain there was that night and there we were, out in it,
suddenly, all the village of us. I but a slip of a boy, you must know,
which it was thirty year back now and the rain sizzling on the cobbles and
the wind blawin' the chimneys crooked. Well--she were a mighty wreck blawn
right up against the Dunotter rocks, you understand, and sendin' up rockets
and we seein' her clear enough, black out to sea which she seemed enormous
in the night time and all. My father and the rest of 'em went out in the
boat--we waited and we waited and they didn't come back.... They never
come back--none of them only a crazed luny, Bill Tregothny--'e was washed
up against the rocks down to Bosillian and 'e were just livin' ... And
when it come daylight,"--Mr. Jackson cleared his throat and paused--"when
it come daylight there wasn't no wreck--nothing--nor no bodies
neither--nothing--only Bill Tregothny the fool...."

Peter had heard no single word of this. His ears were straining for the
return of that whisper. They were nearly once again at the hilltop. Then in
front of them there would be the sea--at the top of the hill there would be
the sea.... He was seized with a great terror--frightened like a child in
the dark.... "Bill Tregothny, you must understand sir, 'ad always been a
idiot--always, born so. When 'e was all well again 'e told strange tales
about the lot of them havin' boarded the vessel and there bein' gold all
over the decks--bars of it with the rain fallin' all about it--piled in
'eaps and 'e said the sailors weren't like common sailors yer knew, but all
in silks with cocked hats and the gold lyin' all about--

"O course Bill was the idiot you must understand, but it's true enough that
there were no vessel in the marnin'--no vessel at all--and my father and
the rest were never seen again--nor no bodies neither.... And they _do_
say--"

Here Mr. Jackson dropped his voice--

They were just at the top of the hill now. Peter was sitting with his hands
clenched, his body trembling.

"... They do say that up in the potato field over Dunotter they've seen
a man all in a cocked hat and red silk and gold lace--a ghost you must
understand, sir--which Bill Tregothny says ..."

The sea broke upon them with an instant, menacing roar. Between them and
this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven
with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here
and there where the moonlight touched it.

But across it, like a mob's menace, fell the thunder, flung up to them
from below, swelling from a menace to a sudden crash, then from crash to
echo, dying to murmur again. It had in it anger and power, also pity and
tenderness, also scorn and defiance. It cared for no one--it loved every
one. It was more intimate than any confidence ever made, and then it
shouted that intimacy to the whole world. It flung itself into Peter's
face, beat his body, lashed his soul--"Oh! you young fool--you've come
slinking back, have you? After all these years you've come slinking back.
Where are all your fine hopes now, where all those early defiances, those
vast ambitions?--Worthless, broken, defeated--worthless, broken, defeated."

And then it seemed to change:

"Peter--Peter--Hold out a little longer--the battle isn't over
yet--struggle on for a little, Peter--I'll help you--I'll bring your
courage back to you--Trust me, Peter--trust me...."

Through the rattle of the surf there came the sick melancholy lowing of the
Bell Rock; swinging over a space of waters it fell across fields,
unutterably, abominably sad.

And in the boy there instantly leapt to life his soul. Maimed and bruised
and stunned it had been--now alive, tearing him, bringing on to his bending
shoulders an awful tide of knowledge: "Everything is gone--your wife, your
boy, your friend, your work.... We have won, Peter, we have won. The House
is waiting for you...."

And above those dreadful voices the thundering echo, indifferent to his
agonies, despising his frailties, flinging him, sea-wreck of the most
miserable, to any insignificant end....

Peter suddenly stood up, rocking on his box. He seized the whip from the
driver's hands. He lashed the miserable horse.

"Get on, you devil, get on--leave this noise behind you--get out of it, get
out of it--"

The cab rocked and tossed, Mr. Jackson caught the boy about the shoulders,
held him down. The horse, tired and weary, paid no heed to anything that
might be happening but stumbled on.

"Good Lord, sir," Mr. Jackson cried, "you might have had us over--What's it
all about, sir?"

But Peter now was huddled down with his coat about his ears and did not
move again.

"Catchin' the whip like that--might 'ave 'ad us right into the 'edge,"
muttered Mr. Jackson, wishing his journey well over.

As they turned the corner the lights of Treliss burst into view.




CHAPTER II

SCAW HOUSE


I

Mr. Jackson inquired as to the hotel that Peter preferred and was told to
drive anywhere, so he chose The Man at Arms.

The Man at Arms had been turned, by young Mr. Bannister, from a small
insignificant hostelry into the most important hotel in the West of
England. It stood above the town, looking over the bay, the roofs of the
new town, the cottages of the old one, the curving island to the right, the
lighthouse to the left--all Cornwall in those grey stones, that blue sea,
the grave fishing boats, the flocks of gulls, far, far below.

Mr. Bannister had spared no trouble over The Man at Arms, and now it
was luxuriously modern Elizabethan, with an old Minstrels' Gallery kept
studiously dusty, and the most splendid old oak and deep fire-places with
electric light cunningly arranged, and baths in every passage. Of course
you paid for this skilful and comfortable romance, but Mr. Bannister
always managed his bills so delicately that you expected to find a poem
by Suckling or Lovelace on the back of them. When Peter had been last
in Treliss The Man at Arms had scarcely existed, but he was now utterly
unconscious of it, and stood in the dim square hall talking to Mr.
Bannister like a man in a dream.

He was aware now that he was exhausted with a fatigue that was beyond
anything that he had ever experienced. It was a weariness that was not,
under any conditions, to be resisted. He must lie down--here,
anywhere--now, at once and sleep ... sleep ... sleep.

Mr. Bannister caught him by the arm as he swayed.

"You looked played out, sir."

"Done up... done up!"

His eyes were closed. Then suddenly he had touched Mr. Bannister's
shoulder. He was looking at a wire letter rack, hanging by the
superintendent's little office. There were some telegrams and many letters
stretched behind the wire netting. One envelope was addressed--

_Miss Norah Monogue,
The Man at Arms Hotel.
Treliss,
Cornwall._

"Miss Monogue ... Miss Monogue ... have you any one here called Miss
Monogue?"

"Yes, sir--been here some weeks. Poor lady, she's very ill I'm afraid.
Something to do with her heart--strained it in some way. Seemed much better
... but the last few days...."

Peter stumbled upstairs to his room.


II

Some clock was striking five when he awoke and looking vaguely about his
room saw, by the light, that it must be late afternoon. He must have slept
for a day and a night. As he lay back on his bed his first moments of
consciousness were filled with a pleasant sense of rest and ease. He
remembered nothing ... he only knew that in the air there was the breath of
flowers and that through the open window there floated up to him a song, a
murmur of the sea, a rattle of little carts.

He looked about his room. On a distant wall there was a
photograph--"Dunotter Rocks, from the East." Then he remembered.

He flung the bed-clothes off him and hurried to dress. He must go up to
Scaw House at once, at once, at once. Not another moment must be wasted.
His hands trembled as he put on his clothes and when he came downstairs he
was dishevelled and untidy. He had eaten nothing for many hours but food
now would have choked him. He hurried out of the hotel.

The town must have had many recollections to offer him had he observed
it but he passed through it, looking neither to the right nor the left,
brushing people aside, striding with great steps up the steep cobbled
street that leads out of the town, on to the Sea Road.

Here on the Sea Road he paused. The wind, tearing, as it had always done,
round the corner met him and for a moment he had to pull himself together
and face it. He remembered, too, at that instant, Norah Monogue. Where had
he seen her? What had brought her to his mind quite lately? What did she
mean by interfering?--interfering? Then he remembered. It was her name in
the letter rack. She was at The Man at Arms ill. Impatiently, he would have
driven her from him, but all the way down the Sea Road she kept pace with
him.

"I'm done with her.... I'm done with everybody. Damn it all, one keeps
thinking...."

In the evening light the sea below the road was a pale blue and near the
shore a calm green. It was all very peaceful. The water lapped the shore,
the Bell Rock sighed its melancholy note across space; out a little way,
when some jagged stones sprang like shoulders from the blue, gentle waves
ringed them in foam like lace and broke with a whisper against their sides.

Except for the sea there was absolute silence. Peter alone seemed to walk
the world. As he strode along his excitement increased and his knees
trembled and his eyes were burning. He did not think of the earlier days
when he had walked that same road. That was another existence that had
nothing to do with him as he was now. The anticipation that possessed him
was parallel with the eager demand of the opium-smoker. "Soon I shall be
drugged. I'm going to forget, to forget, to forget. Just to let myself
go--to sink, to drown."

He had still with him the consciousness of keeping at bay an army of
thoughts that would leap upon him if he gave them an opportunity. But soon
that would be all over--no more battle, no more struggle. He turned the
corner and saw Scaw House standing amongst its dark trees, with its black
palings in front of its garden and the deserted barren patch of field in
front of that again. The sun was getting low and the sky above the house
was flaming but the trees were sombre and the house was cold.

It did not seem to him to have changed in any way since he had left it. The
windows had always been of a grim hideous glass, the stone shape of the
place always squat and ugly, and the short flight of steps that led up to
the heavy beetling door had always hinted, with their old hard surface, at
a surly welcome and a reluctant courtesy. It was all as it had been.

The sky, now a burning red, looked down upon an utterly deserted garden,
and the silence that was over all the place seemed to rise, like streaming
mist, from the heart of the nettles that grew thick along the crumbling
wall.

The paint had faded from the door and the knocker was rusty; as Peter
hammered his arrival on to the flat silence a bird flew from the black
bunch of trees, whirred into the air and was gone....

For a long time after the echo of his knock had faded away there was
silence, and it seemed to him that this could be only another of those
dreams--those dreams when he had stood on the stone steps in the heart of
the deserted garden and woken the echoes through the empty house. At last
there were steps; some one came along the passage and halted on the other
side of the door and listened. They both waited on either side, and Peter
could hear heavy thick breathing. He caught the knocker again and let it go
with a clang that seemed to startle the house to its foundations. Then he
heard bolts, very slowly drawn back, again a pause and then, stealthily the
door swung open.

A scent of rotten apples met him as the door opened, a scent so strong that
it was confused at once with his vision of the woman who stood there, she,
with her gnarled and puckered face, her brown skin and crooked nose
standing, as it were, for an actual and visible personification of all the
rotten apples that had ever been in the world.

He recognised also a sound, the drunken hesitating hiccough of the old
clock that had been there when he had come in that evening long ago ready
to receive his beating, that had kept pace with his grandfather's snorings
and mutterings and had seemed indeed, the only understanding companion that
the old man had ever had. The woman was, he saw, the arms-akimbo ferocious
cook of the old days, but now how wrinkled and infirm!--separated by so
many more years than the lapse of time allowed her from the woman of his
past appearance there. There was more in her than the mere crumbling of her
body, there was also the crumbling of her spirit, and he saw in her old
bleared eyes the sign of some fierce battle fought by her, and fought to
her own utter defeat.

In her eyes he saw the thing that his father had become....

What did he want, she asked him, coming disturbing them at that hour, but
in her face there was, he fancied, something more than the surly question
justified, some curiosity, some eagerness that seemed to show that she did
not have many visitors here and that their company might be an eager
relief.

"I'm Peter Westcott and I've come to see my father."

She did not answer this, but only, with her hand to her breast stood back
a little and watched him with frightened eyes. She was wearing an old,
faded, green blouse, open at her scraggy neck and her skirt was a kind of
bed-quilt, odd bits of stuffs of many colours stuck together. Her scanty
hair was pulled into a bunch on the top of her head, her face where it was
not brown was purple, and her hands were always shaking so that her fingers
rattled together like twigs. But her alarmed and startled eyes had some
appeal that made one pity her poor battered old body.

"You don't remember me," he said, looking into her frightened eyes. But she
shook her head slowly.

"You'd much better have kept away," she said.

"Where is he?" he asked her.

She shuffled in front of him down the dark hall. Except for this strange
smell of rotting apples it was all very much as it had been. The lamp
hanging at the foot of the stairs made the same spluttering noise and there
was the door of the room that had once been his grandfather's, and Peter
fancied that he could still see the old man swaying there in the doorway,
laughing at his son and his grandson as they struggled there on the floor.

The woman pushed open the dining-room door and Peter went in.

Peter's first thought was that his father was not there. He saw standing in
front of the well-remembered fireplace a genial-looking gentleman clothed
in a crimson dressing-gown--a bald gentleman, rather fat, with a piece of
toast in one hand and a glass of something in the other. Peter had expected
he knew not what--something stern and terrible, something that would have
answered in one way or another to those early recollections of terror
and punishment that still dwelt with him. He had remembered his father
as short, spare, black-haired, grim, pale--this gentleman, who was now
watching him, bulged in the cheeks and the stomach, was highly coloured
with purple veins down the sides of his nose and his rather podgy hands
trembled. Nevertheless, it was his father. When the red dressing-gown spoke
it was in a kind of travesty of that old sharp voice, those cutting icy
words--a thickened and degenerate relation:

"My boy! At last!" the gentleman said.

The room presented disorder. On the table were scattered playing cards, a
chair was overturned, under the cactus plant lay what looked like a fiddle,
and the only two pictures on the wall were very indecent old drawings taken
apparently from some Hogarthian prints.

Peter stared at all this in amazement. It was, after the grim approach and
the deserted garden, like finding an Easter egg in a strong box. Peter saw
that his father was wearing under the dressing-gown a white waistcoat and
blue trousers, both of them stained with dark stains and smelling very
strongly of whisky. He noticed also that his father seemed to find it
difficult to balance himself on both his legs at the same time, and that
he was continually shifting his feet in an indeterminate kind of way, as
though he would like to dance but felt that it might not be quite the
thing.

Mr. Westcott closed up both his eyes, opened his mouth and shut it again
and shook Peter excitedly by the hand. At the same time Peter felt that
his father was shaking his hand as much because he wanted to hold on to
something as for reasons of courtesy.

"Well, I am glad. I wondered when you would come to see your poor old
father again--after all these years. I've often thought of you and said to
myself, 'Well, he'll come back one day. You only be patient,' I've said to
myself, 'and your son will come back to you--your only son, and it isn't
likely that he's going to desert you altogether.'"

"Yes, father, I've come back," said Peter, releasing his hand. "I've come
back to stay."

He thought of the many times in London when he'd pictured his father,
stern and dark, pulling the wires, dragging his wicked son back to him--he
thought of that ... and now this. And yet....

"Well now, isn't that pleasant--you've come to stay! Could I have wanted
anything better? Come and sit down--yes, that chair--and have something to
drink. What, you won't? Well, perhaps later. So you've come to keep your
old father company, have you? I'm sure that's delightful. Just what a son
ought to do. We shall get along very well, I'm sure."

All the while that his father talked, still holding the toast and the glass
of something, Peter was intensely conscious of the silent listening house.
After all that grimness, that desertion, the old woman's warning had gone
for something. And yet, in spite of a kind of dread that hung about him,
in spite of a kind of perception that there was a great deal more in his
father than he at present perceived, he could not resist a kind of warm
pleasure that here at any rate was some sort of a haven, that no one else
in the world might want him, but here was some one who was glad to see him.

"Well, my boy, tell me all you've been doing these years."

"I've been in London, writing--"

"Dear, dear--have you really now? And how's it all turned out?"

"Badly."

"Dear me, I'm sorry for that. But there are better things in the world than
writing, believe me. I dare say, my boy, you thought me unkind in those
old days but it was all for your best--oh dear me, yes, entirely for your
best."

Here, for an instant, his father's voice sounded so like his old
grandfather's that Peter jumped.

"Married?" said his father.

"My wife has left me--"

"Dear me, I am sorry to hear that." Mr. Westcott finished the toast and
wiped his fingers on a very old and dirty red handkerchief. "Women--bless
them--angels for a time, but never to be depended on. Poor boy, I'm sorry.
Children?"

"I had a son. He died."

"Well now, I am indeed sorry, I'd have liked a grandson too. Don't want the
old Westcott stock to die out. Dear me, that is a pity."

It was at this point that Peter was aware, although he could not have given
any reasonable explanation of his certainty, that his father had been
perfectly assured beforehand of all the answers to these questions. Peter
looked at the man, but the eyes were almost closed, and the smile that
played about the weak lips--once so stern and strong--told one nothing.

It was dark now. Mr. Westcott got, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet.

"Come," he said, "I'll show you the house, my boy. Not changed much since
you were here, I'm sure. Wanted a woman's care since your dear mother died
of course--and your poor old grandfather--"

He whispered over again to himself as he shuffled across the room--"your
poor old grandfather--"

It had seemed to grow very suddenly dark. Outside in the hall, under the
spluttering lamp, Mr. Westcott found a candle. The house was intensely
silent.

As they climbed the stairs, lighted only by the flickering candle-light,
Peter's feelings were a curious mixture of uneasiness and a strange
unthinking somnolence. Some part of him, somewhere, was urging him to an
active unrest--"Norah ... what does she want interfering? I'll just go and
see her and come back.... No, I won't, I'll just stay here ... never to
bother again ... never to bother again...."

He was also, in some undefined way, expecting that at any moment his
father would change. The crimson dressing-gown swayed under the flickering
candle-light. Let it turn round and what would one see inside it? His
father never stopped talking for an instant--his thick wandering voice was
the only sound in the deserted house.

The rooms were all empty. They smelt as though the windows had not been
opened for years. It was in the little room that had once been his bedroom
that the apples were stored--piles upon piles of them and most of them
rotten. The smell was all over the house.

Mr. Westcott, standing with the apples on every side of him, flung
monstrous shadows upon the wall--"This used to be your room. I remember I
used to whip you here when you were disobedient. The only way to bring up
your child. The Westcotts have always believed in it. Dear me, how long ago
it all seems ... you can have this room again if you like. Any room in the
house you please. We'll be very good company for one another...."

All about Peter there was an atmosphere of extraordinary languor--just to
sit here and let the days slip by, the years pass. Just to stay here with
no one to hurt one, no need for courage....

They were out in the long passage. Mr. Westcott came and placed his hand
upon Peter's arm. The whole house was a great cool place where one slept.
Mr. Westcott smiled into Peter's face ... the house was silent and dark
and oh! so restful. The candle swelled to an enormous size--the red
dressing-gown seemed to enfold Peter.

In another moment he would have fallen asleep there where he stood. With
the last struggle of a drowning man he pulled back his fading senses.

"I must go back to the hotel and fetch my things." He could see his
father's eyes that had been wide open disappear.

"We can send for them."

"No, I must go for them myself--"

For a moment they faced one another. He wondered what his father intended
to do. Then--with a genial laugh, Mr. Westcott said: "Well, my boy, just
as you please--just as you please. I know you'll come back to your old
father--I know you'll come back--"

He blew the candle out and put his arm through his son's and they went
downstairs together.




CHAPTER III

NORAH MONOGUE


I

Peter found, next morning, Miss Monogue sitting by her window. She gave
him at once the impression of something kept alive by a will-power so
determined that Death himself could only stand aside and wait until it
might waver.

She was so thin that sitting there in the clear white colours of the
sky beyond her window she seemed like fine silk, something that, at an
instant's breath, would be swept like a shadow, into the air. She wore
something loose and white and over her shoulders there was a grey shawl.
Her grey hair was as untidy as of old, escaping from the order that it
had been intended to keep and falling over her beautiful eyes, so that
continually she moved her hand--so thin and white with its deep purple
veins--to push it back. In this still white figure the eyes burnt with an
amazing fire. What eyes they were!

One seemed, in the old days, to have denied them their proper splendour,
but now in this swiftly fading body they had gathered more life and vigour,
showing the soul that triumphed over so slender a mortality.

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