Rupert Hughes - "We Can't Have Everything"

Various - "The Best Short Stories of 1915"

St. George Stock - "Deductive Logic"

Mrs. Humphry Ward - "The Coryston Family"

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 Mermaid

L >> Lily Dougall >> The Mermaid




How long he remained stunned he did not know. He felt the water rushing
about his head again; he felt that he had been drowned, and he knew,
too--in that foolish way in which the half-awakened brain knows the
supposed certainties of dreams--that the white hand he had essayed to
hold had grasped his beard firmly under his chin, and that thus holding
his head above the surface of the water, she was towing him away to
unknown regions.

Then he seemed to know nothing again; and again he opened his eyes, to
find himself lying on a beach in the moonlight, and the sea-maid's face
was bending over his. He saw it distinctly, all tender human solicitude
written on the moonlit lineaments. As his eyes opened more her face
receded. She was gone, and he gazed vacantly at the sky; then, realizing
his consciousness more clearly, he sat up suddenly to see where she had
gone.

It seemed to him that, like a kind enchantress, she had transformed
herself to break his passion. Yes, he saw her, as he had so often
curiously longed to see her, moving over the dry shore--she was going
back to her sea. But it was a strange, monstrous thing he saw. From her
gleaming neck down to the ground was dank, shapeless form. So a walrus
or huge seal might appear, could it totter about erect upon low,
fin-like feet. There was no grace of shape, no tapering tail, no shiny
scales, only an appearance of horrid quivering on the skin, that here
and there seemed glossy in the moonlight.

He saw her make her way toilsomely, awkwardly over the shingle of the
beach; and when she reached the shining water, it was at first so
shallow that she seemed to wade in it like a land-animal, then, when the
water was deep enough to rise up well around her, she turned to him once
more a quick glance over her shoulder. Such relief came with the sight
of her face, after this monstrous vision, that he saw the face flash on
him as a sword might flash out of darkness when light catches its blade.
Then she was gone, and he saw the form of her head in the water while
she swam swiftly across the silver track of the moonbeams and out into
the darkness beyond.

Caius looked around him with senses still drowsy and head aching sorely.
He was in no fairy region that might be the home of mermaids, but on the
bit of beach from which he had launched himself into the water. His
coat and hat lay near him, and just above the spot where he lay was the
rude epitaph of baby Day, carved by his own boyish hand so long ago.

Caius put his hand to his head, and found it badly bruised on one side.
His heart was bruised, too, partly by the sight of the monstrous body of
the lovely sea-child, partly by the fresh experience of his own weakness
and incapacity.

It was long before he dragged himself home. It seemed to him to be days
before he recovered from the weariness of that secret adventure, and he
bore the mark of the bruise on his head for many a day. The mermaid he
never saw again.




CHAPTER XI.

YEARS OF DISCRETION.


Caius Simpson took ship and crossed the sea. The influence of the
beautiful face remained with him. That which had come to him was the new
birth of mind (not spirit), which by the grace of God comes to many an
individual, but is more clearly recognised and recorded when it comes in
the life of nations--the opening of the inward eye to the meaning and
joy of all things that the outward senses have heretofore perceived as
not perceiving them. The art of the Old World claimed him as her own, as
beauty on land and sea had already done. The enjoyment of music and
pictures became all-important to him, at first because he searched in
them for the soul he had seen in the sea-maid's eyes.

Caius was of noble birth, because by inheritance and training he was the
slave of righteousness. For this reason he could not neglect his work,
although it had not a first place in his heart. As he was industrious,
he did not fail in it; because it was not the thing he loved best, he
did not markedly succeed. It was too late to change his profession, and
he found in himself no such decided aptitude for anything else as should
make him know that this or that would have been preferable; but he knew
now that the genius of the physician was not his, that to do his work
because it was duty, and to attain the respectable success which
circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he
could hope. This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the
smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions.
The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties,
and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in
consequence a nobler man. But all this, which was so much to him for a
year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation than that of
disappointment in the fact that he could only so meagrely fulfil his
father's ideal and his own. There came a sense of dishonesty, too, in
having used the old man's money chiefly in acquiring those mental graces
which his father could neither comprehend nor value.

Three years passed. Gradually the memory of his love for the sea-maid
had grown indistinct; and, more or less unconscious that this love had
been the door to the more wealthy gardens of his mind, he inclined to
despise it now as he despised the elegy he had written for the child who
was drowned. It was his own passion he was inclined to forget and
despise; the sea-maid herself was remembered, and respected, and
wondered at, and disbelieved in, and believed in, as of old, but that
which remains in the mind, never spoken of, never used as a cause of
activity of either thought or action, recedes into the latent rather
than the active portion of the memory.

Once, just once, in the first year of his foreign life, he had told to a
friend the history of that, his one and only love-story. The result had
not been satisfactory. His companion was quite sure that Caius had been
the subject of an artful trick, and he did not fail to suggest that the
woman had wanted modesty. Nothing, he observed, was more common than for
men who were in love to attribute mental and physical charms to women
who were in reality vulgar and blatant. Caius, feeling that he could
advance no argument, refused to discuss the subject; it was months
before he had the same liking for this friend, and it was a sign that
what the other called "the sea-myth" was losing its power over him when
he returned to this friendship.

Caius did not make many friends. It was not his nature to do so, and
though constant to the few that he had, he did not keep up any very
lively intercourse. It was partly because of this notable failure in
social duty that, when he at last decided that the work of preparation
must be considered at an end, and the active work of life begun, no
opening immediately revealed itself to his inquiring gaze. Two vacant
positions in his native country he heard of and coveted, and before he
returned he gathered such testimonials as he could, and sent them in
advance, offering himself as a candidate. When he landed in Canada he
went at once to his first college to beg in person that the influence of
his former teachers might be used on his behalf. The three years that
had passed without correspondence had made a difference in the attitude
of those who could help him; many of his friends also were dispersed,
gone from the place. He waited in Montreal until he heard that he was
not the accepted candidate for the better of the two positions, and that
the other post would not be filled till the early spring.

Caius went home again. He observed that his parents looked older. The
leaves were gone from the trees, the days were short, and the earth was
cold. The sea between the little island and the red sandstone cliff was
utterly lonely. Caius walked by its side sometimes, but there was no
mermaid there.




_BOOK II._




CHAPTER I.

THE HAND THAT BECKONED.


It was evening. Caius was watering his father's horses. Between the
barns and the house the space was grass; a log fence divided it, and
against this stood a huge wooden pump and a heavy log hollowed out for a
trough. House and barns were white; the house was large, but the barns
were many times larger. If it had not been that their sloping roofs of
various heights and sizes formed a progression of angles not unpleasant
to the eye, the buildings would have been very ugly; but they had also a
generous and cleanly aspect which was attractive.

Caius brought the horses to the trough in pairs, each with a hempen
halter. They were lightly-built, well-conditioned beasts, but their days
of labour had wrought in them more of gentleness than of fire. As they
drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing
them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water
for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low
down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the
bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but
showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a
window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree
that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in the
air, as bare bones might rattle.

It was while he was still at the watering that the elder Simpson drove
up to the house door in his gig. He had been to the post-office. This
was not an event that happened every day, so that the letter which he
now handed Caius might as well as not have been retarded a day or two in
its delivery. Caius took it, leading the horses to their stalls, and he
examined it by the light of the stable lantern.

The writing, the appearance of the envelope and post-mark, were all
quite unfamiliar. The writing was the fine Italian hand common to ladies
of a former generation, and was, in Caius' mind, connected only with the
idea of elderly women. He opened the letter, therefore, with the less
curiosity. Inside he found several pages of the same fine writing, and
he read it with his arm round the neck of one of the horses. The
lantern, which he had hung on a nail in the stall, sent down dim
candlelight upon the pair.

When Caius had read the letter, he turned it over and over curiously,
and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any
relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le
Maitre, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own
home, was almost as unknown to him as the most remote foreign part. It
came from one of the Magdalen Islands, that lie some eighty miles'
journey by sea to the north of his native shore. The writer stated that
she knew few men upon the mainland--in which she seemed to include the
larger island of Prince Edward--that Caius Simpson was the only medical
man of whom she had any personal knowledge who was at that time
unemployed. She stated, also, that upon the island where she lived there
were some hundreds of fisher-folk, and that a very deadly disease, that
she supposed to be diphtheria, was among them. The only doctor in the
whole group refused to come to them, because he feared to take back the
infection to the other islands. Indeed, so great was the dread of this
infection, that no helpful person would come to their aid except an
English priest, and he was able only to make a short weekly visit. It
was some months now since the disease had first appeared, and it was
increasing rather than diminishing.

"Come," said the letter, "and do what you can to save the lives of these
poor people--their need of you is very great; but do not come if you are
not willing to risk your life, for you will risk it. Do not come if you
are not willing to be cut off from the world all the months the ice lies
in the gulf, for at that time we have no communication with the world.
You are a good man; you go to church, and believe in the Divine Christ,
who was also a physician. It is because of this that I dare to ask you.
There is a schooner that will be lying in the harbour of Souris for two
or three weeks after the time that you receive this letter. Then she
will come here upon her last winter trip. I have arranged with the
captain to bring you to us if you can come."

After that the name of the schooner and its captain was given, a list
also of some of the things that he would need to bring with him. It was
stated that upon the island he would receive lodging and food, and that
there were a few women, not unskilled in nursing, who would carry out
his instructions with regard to the sick.

Caius folded the letter after the second reading, finished his work with
the horses, and walked with his lantern through the now darkening air to
the house. Just for a few seconds he stopped in the cold air, and looked
about him at the dark land and the starry sky.

"I have now neither the belief nor the enthusiasm she attributes to me,"
said Caius.

When he got into the bright room he blinked for a moment at the light by
which his father was reading.

The elder man took the letter in his hard, knotted hand, and read it
because he was desired to do so. When finished, he cast it upon the
table, returning to his newspaper.

"Hoots!" said he; "the woman's mad!" And then meditatively, after he had
finished his newspaper paragraph: "What dealings have you ever had with
her?"

"I never had any dealings with her."

"When you get a letter from a strange woman"--the father spoke with some
heat--"the best thing that you can do with it is to put it in the fire."

Now, Caius knew that his father had, as a usual thing, that kindly and
simple way of looking at the actions of his fellow-men which is
refinement, so that it was evident that the contents of the letter were
hateful. That was to be expected. The point that aroused the son's
curiosity was to know how far the father recognised an obligation
imposed by the letter. The letter would be hateful just in so far as it
was considered worthy of attention.

"I suppose," said the young man dubiously, "that we can easily find out
at Souris whether the statements in the letter are true or not?"

The father continued to read his paper.

The lamp upon the unpolished walnut table had no shade or globe upon it,
and it glared with all the brilliancy of clean glass, and much wick and
oil. The dining-room was orderly as ever. The map of Palestine, the old
Bible, and some newly-acquired commentaries, obtruded themselves
painfully as ornaments. There was no nook or corner in which anything
could hide in shadow; there were no shutters on the windows, for there
was no one to pass by, unless it might be some good or evil spirit that
floated upon the dark air.

Mr. Simpson continued to read his paper without heeding his son. The
mother's voice chiding the maid in the next room was the only sound that
broke the silence.

"I'll write to that merchant you used to know at Souris, father," Caius
spoke in a business-like voice. "He will be able to find out from all
the vessels that come in to what extent there is disease on the
Magdalens."

The exciting cause in Caius of this remark was his father's indifference
and opposition, and the desire to probe it.

"You'll do nothing of the sort." Simpson's answer was very testy. "What
call have you to interfere with the Magdalens?" His anger rose from a
cause perhaps more explicable to an onlooker than to himself.

In the course of years there had grown in the mind of Caius much
prejudice against the form and measure of his parents' religion. He
would have throttled another who dared to criticise them, yet he
himself took a certain pleasure in an opportunity that made criticism
pertinent rather than impertinent. It was not that he prided himself on
knowing or doing better, he was not naturally a theorist, nor didactic;
but education had awakened his mind, not only to difficulties in the
path of faith, but to a higher standard of altruism than was exacted by
old-fashioned orthodoxy.

"I think I'd better write to Souris, sir; the letter is to me, you see,
and I should not feel quite justified in taking no steps to investigate
the matter."

How easy the hackneyed phrase "taking steps" sounded to Caius! but
experience breeds strong instincts. The elder man felt the importance of
this first decision, and struck out against it as an omen of ill.

"In my opinion you'll do well to let the matter lie where it is. How
will you look making inquiries about sick folk as if you had a great
fortune to spend upon philanthropy, when it turns out that you have
none? If you'd not spent all my money on your own schooling, perhaps
you'd have some to play the fine gentleman with now, and send a hospital
and its staff on this same schooner." (This was the first reproach of
his son's extravagance which had ever passed his lips; it betokened
passion indeed.) "If you write you can't do less than send a case of
medicines, and who is to pay for them, I'd like to know? I'm pretty well
cleared out. They're a hardened lot of wreckers on those islands--I've
heard that told of them many a time. No doubt their own filth and bad
living has brought disease upon them, if there's truth in the tale; and
as to this strange woman, giving no testimony or certificate of her
respectability, it's a queer thing if she's to begin and teach you
religion and duty. It's a bold and impudent letter, and I suppose you've
enough sense left, with all your new fangles, to see that you can't do
all she asks. What do you think you can do? If you think I'm going to
pay for charity boxes to be sent to people I've no opinion of, when all
the missionary subscriptions will be due come the new year, you think
great nonsense, that's all." He brought his large hard hand down on the
table, so that the board rang and the lamp quaked; then he settled his
rounded shoulders stubbornly, and again unfurled the newspaper.

This strong declaration of wrath, and the reproaches concerning the
money, were a relief to Caius. A relief from what? Had he contemplated
for a moment taking his life in his hand and obeying the unexpected
appeal? Yet he felt no answering anger in return for the rebuke; he only
found himself comfortably admitting that if his father put it on the
score of expense he certainly had no right to give time or money that
did not belong to him. It was due to his parents that all his occupation
should henceforth be remunerative.

He put the letter away in his pocket, but, perhaps because he laid it
next his heart, the next day its cry awoke within him again, and would
not be silenced.

Christianity was identified in his mind with an exclusive way of life,
to him no longer good or true; but what of those stirring principles of
Socialism that were abroad in the world, flaunting themselves as
superior to Christianity? He was a child of the age, and dared not deny
its highest precepts. Who would go to these people if he did not go? As
to his father, he had coaxed him before for his own advantage; he could
coax him now for theirs if he would. He was sufficiently educated to
know that it was more glorious to die, even unrenowned, upon such a
mission, than to live in the prosperity that belongs to ordinary
covetousness, that should it be his duty to obey this call, no other
duty remained for him in its neglect.

His personal desire in the matter was neither more nor less noble than
are the average feelings of well-meaning people towards such enterprise.
He would have been glad to find an excellent excuse to think no more of
this mission--very glad indeed to have a more attractive opening for
work set before him; but, on the other hand, the thought of movement and
of fresh scenes was more attractive than staying where he was. Then, it
would be such a virtuous thing to do and to have done; his own
conscience and everyone who heard of the action must applaud it. And he
did not think so much of the applause of others as of the real
worthiness of the deed. Then, again, if he came back safely in the
spring, he hoped by that time the offer of some good post would be
waiting for him; and it would be more dignified to return from such an
excellent work to find it waiting, than to sit at home humbly longing
for its advent.

Caius went to Souris and questioned the merchants, talked to the
captains of the vessels in the port, saw the schooner upon which Madame
Le Maitre had engaged his passage. What seemed to him most strange in
the working out of this bit of his life's story, was that all that the
letter said appeared to be true. The small island called Cloud Island,
where the pestilence was, and to which he had been invited, was not one
at which larger ships or schooners could land, so that it was only from
the harbour of another island that the seamen got their news. On all
hands it was known that there was bad disease upon Cloud Island, that no
doctor was there, and that there was one lady, a Madame Le Maitre, a
person of some property, who was devoting herself to nursing the sick.
When Caius asked who she was, and where she came from, one person said
one thing and one another. Some of the men told him that she was old,
some of them affirmed that she was young, and this, not because there
was supposed to be any mystery concerning her, but because no one seemed
to have taken sufficient interest in her existence to obtain accurate
information.

When Caius re-entered the gate of his father's farm he had decided to
risk the adventure, and obey the letter in all points precisely.

"Would you let it be said that in all these parts there was no one to
act the man but a woman?" he said to his father.

To his mother he described the sufferings that this disease would work,
all the details of its pains, and how little children and mothers and
wives would be the chief sufferers, dying in helpless pain, or being
bereft of those they loved best.

As he talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed
her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in
this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest
dreams of opulence and renown. She credited him with far purer motives
than he knew himself to possess.

A father's rule over his own money is a very modified thing, the very
fact of true fatherhood making him only a partner with his child. Caius
was under the impression that his father could have refused him the
necessary outfit of medical stores for this expedition, but that was not
the way old Simpson looked at it.

"If he must, he must," he said to his wife angrily, gloomily, for his
own opinion in the matter had changed little; but to Caius he gave his
consent, and all the money he needed, and did not, except at first,
express his disapproval, so that Caius took the less pains to argue the
matter with him.

It was only at the last, when Caius had fairly set out on his journey,
and, having said good-bye, looked back to see his father stand at the
gate of his own fields, that the attitude of the stalwart form and gray
head gave him his first real insight into the pain the parting had
cost--into the strong, sad disapproval which in the father's mind lay
behind the nominal consent. Caius saw it then, or, at least, he saw
enough of it to feel a sharp pang of regret and self-reproach. He felt
himself to be an unworthy son, and to have wronged the best of fathers.
Whether he was doing right or wrong in proceeding upon his mission he
did not know. So in this mind he set sail.




CHAPTER II.

THE ISLES OF ST. MAGDALEN.


The schooner went out into the night and sailed for the north star. The
wind was strong that filled her sails; the ocean turbulent, black and
cold, with the glittering white of moonlight on the upper sides of the
waves. The little cabin in the forecastle was so hot and dirty that to
Caius, for the first half of the night, it seemed preferable almost to
perish of cold upon the deck rather than rock in a narrow bunk below.
The deck was a steep inclined plane, steady, but swept constantly with
waves, as an incoming tide sweeps a beach. Caius was compelled to crouch
by what support he could find, and, lying thus, he was glad to cover
himself up to the chin with an unused sail, peeping forth at the gale
and the moonlight as a child peeps from the coverings of its cot.

With the small hours of the night came a cold so intense that he was
driven to sleep in the cabin where reigned the small iron stove that
brewed the skipper's odorous pot. After he had slept a good way into the
next day, he came up again to find the gale still strong and the
prospect coloured now with green of wave and snow of foam, blue of sky
and snow of winged cloud. The favourable force was still pushing them
onward toward the invisible north star.

It was on the evening of that day that they saw the islands; five or six
hilly isles lay in a half-circle. The schooner entered this bay from the
east. Before they came near the purple hills they had sighted a fleet of
island fishing boats, and now, as night approached, all these made also
for the same harbour. The wind bore them all in, they cutting the water
before them, gliding round the point of the sand-bar, making their way
up the channel of the bay in the lessening light, a chain of gigantic
sea-birds with white or ruddy wings.

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