Luke Limner - "Christmas Comes but Once A Year"

Various - "Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853"

Franklin Beech - "The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics"

Sarah Tytler - "A Houseful of Girls"

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 Black Bag

L >> Louis Joseph Vance >> The Black Bag




The American nodded. "Very well," he agreed simply. "Get out your boat."

The fisherman turned away to shamble noisily over the shingle, huge booted
heels crunching, toward one of the dories. To this he set his shoulder,
shoving it steadily down the beach until only the stern was dry.

Kirkwood looked back, for the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing
moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner
problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had
promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten
times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But he had
neglected to conclude his bargain, to come to an understanding as to
the method of payment; and he felt more than a little dubious as to the
reception the fisherman would give his proposition, sound as he, Kirkwood,
knew it to be.

In the background the cabby loitered, gnawed by insatiable curiosity.

The fisherman turned, calling over his shoulder: "If ye'd catch yon vessel,
come!"

With one final twinge of doubt--the task of placating this surly dog was
anything but inviting--the American strode to the boat and climbed in,
taking the stern seat. The fisherman shoved off, wading out thigh-deep in
the spiteful waves, then threw himself in over the gunwales and shipped the
oars. Bows swinging offshore, rocking and dancing, the dory began to forge
slowly toward the anchored boat. In their faces the wind beat gustily, and
small, slapping waves, breaking against the sides, showered them with fine
spray....

In time the dory lay alongside the cat-boat, the fisherman with a gnarled
hand grasping the latter's gunwale to hold the two together. With some
difficulty Kirkwood transhipped himself, landing asprawl in the cockpit,
amid a tangle of cordage slippery with scales. The skipper followed, with
clumsy expertness bringing the dory's painter with him and hitching it to a
ring-bolt abaft the rudder-head. Then, pausing an instant to stare into the
East with somber eyes, he shipped the tiller and bent to the halyards. As
the sail rattled up, flapping wildly, Kirkwood marked with relief--for it
meant so much time saved--that it was already close reefed.

But when at least the boom was thrashing overhead and the halyards had
been made fast to their cleats, the fisherman again stood erect, peering
distrustfully at the distant wall of cloud.

Then, in two breaths: "Can't do it," he decided; "not at the price."

"Why?" Kirkwood stared despairingly after the brigantine, that was already
drawn far ahead.

"Danger," growled the fellow, "--wind."

At a loss completely, Kirkwood found no words. He dropped his head,
considering.

"Not at the price," the sullen voice iterated; and he looked up to find the
cunning gaze upon him.

"How much, then?"

"Five poun' I'll have--no less, for riskin' my life this day."

"Impossible. I haven't got it."

In silence the man unshipped the tiller and moved toward the cleats.

"Hold on a minute."

Kirkwood unbuttoned his coat and, freeing the chain from his waistcoat
buttonholes, removed his watch.... As well abandon them altogether; he had
designed to leave them as security for the two pounds, and had delayed
stating the terms only for fear lest they be refused. Now, too late as
ever, he recognized his error. But surely, he thought, it should be
apparent even to that low intelligence that the timepiece alone was worth
more than the boat itself.

"Will you take these?" he offered. "Take and keep them--only set me aboard
that ship!"

Deliberately the fisherman weighed the watch and chain in his broad, hard
palm, eyes narrowing to mere slits in his bronzed mask.

"How much?" he asked slowly.

"Eighty pounds, together; the chain alone cost me twenty."

The shifty, covetous eyes ranged from the treasure in his hand to the
threatening east. A puff of wind caught the sail and sent the boom
athwartships, like a mighty flail. Both men ducked instinctively, to escape
a braining.

"How do I know?" objected the skipper.

"I'm telling you. If you've got eyes, you can see," retorted Kirkwood
savagely, seeing that he had erred in telling the truth; the amount he had
named was too great to be grasped at once by this crude, cupidous brain.

"How do I know?" the man repeated. Nevertheless he dropped watch and chain
into his pocket, then with a meaning grimace extended again his horny,
greedy palm.

"What...?"

"Hand over th' two pound' and we'll go."

"I'll see you damned first!"

A flush of rage blinded the young man. The knowledge that the _Alethea_
was minute by minute slipping beyond his reach seemed to madden him.
White-lipped and ominously quiet he rose from his seat on the combing, as,
without answer, the fisherman, crawling out on the overhand, began to haul
in the dory.

"Ashore ye go," he pronounced his ultimatum, motioning Kirkwood to enter
the boat.

The American turned, looking for the _Alethea_, or for the vessel that he
believed bore that name. She was nearing the light-ship when he found
her, and as he looked a squall blurred the air between them, blotting
the brigantine out with a smudge of rain. The effect was as if she had
vanished, as if she were for ever snatched from his grasp; and with Dorothy
aboard her--Heaven alone knew in what need of him!

Mute and blind with despair and wrath, he turned upon the man and caught
him by the collar, forcing him out over the lip of the overhang. They were
unevenly matched, Kirkwood far the slighter, but strength came to him in
the crisis, physical strength and address such as he had not dreamed was at
his command. And the surprise of his onslaught proved an ally of unguessed
potency. Before he himself knew it he was standing on the overhang and had
shifted his hold to seize the fellow about the waist; then, lifting him
clear of the deck, and aided by a lurch of the cat-boat, he cast him
bodily into the dory. The man, falling, struck his head against one of the
thwarts, a glancing blow that stunned him temporarily. Kirkwood himself
dropped as if shot, a trailing reef-point slapping his cheek until it stung
as the boom thrashed overhead. It was as close a call as he had known; the
knowledge sickened him a little.

Without rising he worked the painter loose and cast the dory adrift; then
crawled back into the cockpit. No pang of compassion disturbed him as he
abandoned the fisherman to the mercy of the sea; though the fellow lay
still, uncouthly distorted, in the bottom of the dory, he was in no danger;
the wind and waves together would carry the boat ashore.... For that
matter, the man was even then recovering, struggling to sit up.

Crouching to avoid the boom, Kirkwood went forward to the bows, and,
grasping the mooring cable, drew it in, slipping back into the cockpit to
get a stronger purchase with his feet. It was a struggle; the boat pulled
sluggishly against the wind, the cable inching in jealously. And behind
him he could hear a voice bellowing inarticulate menaces, and knew that in
another moment the fisherman would be at his oars.

Frantically he tugged and tore at the slimy rope, hauling with a will and a
prayer. It gave more readily, towards the end, but he seemed to have fought
with it for ages when at last the anchor tripped and he got it in.

Immediately he leaped back to the stern, fitted in the tiller, and seizing
the mainsheet, drew the boom in till the wind should catch in the canvas.
In the dory the skipper, bending at his oars, was not two yards astern.

He was hard aboard when, the sail filling with a bang, Kirkwood pulled the
tiller up; and the cat-boat slid away, a dozen feet separating them in a
breath.

A yell of rage boomed down the wind, but he paid no heed. Careless alike of
the dangers he had passed and those that yawned before him, he trimmed
the sheet and stood away on the port tack, heading directly for the Nore
Lightship.




XI


OFF THE NORE

Kirkwood's anger cooled apace; at worst it had been a flare of
passion--incandescent. It was seldom more. His brain clearing, the
temperature of his judgment quickly regained its mean, and he saw his
chances without distortion, weighed them without exaggeration.

Leaning against the combing, feet braced upon the slippery and treacherous
deck, he clung to tiller and mainsheet and peered ahead with anxious eyes,
a pucker of daring graven deep between his brows.

A mile to westward, three or more ahead, he could see the brigantine
standing close in under the Essex shore. At times she was invisible; again
he could catch merely the glint of her canvas, white against the dark loom
of the littoral, toned by a mist of flying spindrift. He strained his eyes,
watching for the chance which would take place in the rake of her masts and
sails, when she should come about.

For the longer that manoeuver was deferred, the better was his chance of
attaining his object. It was a forlorn hope. But in time the brigantine,
to escape Maplin Sands, would be forced to tack and stand out past the
lightship, the wind off her port bows. Then their courses would intersect.
It remained to be demonstrated whether the cat-boat was speedy enough to
arrive at this point of contact in advance of, or simultaneously with, the
larger vessel. Every minute that the putative _Alethea_ put off coming
about brought the cat-boat nearer that goal, but Kirkwood could do no more
than hope and try to trust in the fisherman's implied admission that it
could be done. It was all in the boat and the way she handled.

He watched her anxiously, quick to approve her merits as she displayed
them. He had sailed small craft before--frail center-board cat-boats, handy
and swift, built to serve in summer winds and protected waters: never such
an one as this. Yet he liked her.

Deep bosomed she was, with no center-board, dependent on her draught and
heavy keel to hold her on the wind; stanch and seaworthy, sheathed with
stout plank and ribbed with seasoned timber, designed to keep afloat in
the wickedest weather brewed by the foul-tempered German Ocean. Withal her
lines were fine and clean; for all her beam she was calculated to nose
narrowly into the wind and make a pretty pace as well. A good boat: he had
the grace to give the credit to his luck.

Her disposition was more fully disclosed as they drew away from the beach.
Inshore with shoaling water, the waves had been choppy and spiteful but
lacking force of weight. Farther out, as the bottom fell away, the rollers
became more uniform and powerful; heavy sweeping seas met the cat-boat,
from their hollows looming mountainous to the man in the tiny cockpit; who
was nevertheless aware that to a steamer they would be negligible.

His boat breasted them gallantly, toiling sturdily up the steep
acclivities, poising breathlessly on foam-crested summits for dizzy
instants, then plunging headlong down the deep green swales; and left a
boiling wake behind her,--urging ever onward, hugging the wind in her wisp
of blood-red sail, and boring into it, pulling at the tiller with the
mettle of a race-horse slugging at the bit.

Offshore, too, the wind stormed with added strength, or, possibly, had
freshened. For minutes on end the leeward gunwales would run green, and now
and again the screaming, pelting squalls that scoured the estuary would
heel her over until the water cascaded in over the lee combing, and the
rudder, lifted clear, would hang idle until, smitten by some racing billow,
the tiller would be all but torn from Kirkwood's hands. Again and again
this happened; and those were times of trembling. But always the cat-boat
righted, shaking the clinging waters from her and swinging her stem into
the wind again; and there would follow an abbreviated breathing spell,
during which Kirkwood was at liberty to dash the salt spray from his eyes
and search the wind-harried waste for the brigantine. Sometimes he found
her, sometimes not.

Long after he had expected her to, she went about and they began to close
in upon each other. He could see that even with shortened canvas she was
staggering drunkenly under the fierce impacts of the wind. For himself, it
was nip-and-tuck, now, and no man in his normal sense would have risked a
sixpence on the boat's chance to live until she crossed the brigantine's
bows.

Time out of reckoning he was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit,
steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and
keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was
heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last
much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal
strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone,
muscle and sinew, required to keep the boat upon her course; though for
a time it might cope with and solve the problems presented by each new,
malignant billow and each furious, howling squall, the end inevitably must
be failure. To struggle on would be but to postpone the certain end ...
save and except the possibility of his gaining the brigantine within the
period of time strictly and briefly limited by his powers of endurance.

Long since he had become numb with cold from incessant drenchings of
icy spray, that piled in over the windward counter, keeping the bottom
ankle-deep regardless of his laborious but intermittent efforts with the
bailing dish. And the two, brigantine and cockle-shell, were drawing
together with appalling deliberation.

A dozen times he was on the point of surrender, as often plucked up hope;
as the minutes wore on and he kept above water, he began to believe that if
he could stick it out his judgment and seamanship would be justified ...
though human ingenuity backed by generosity could by no means contrive
adequate excuse for his foolhardiness.

But that was aside, something irreparable. Wan and grim, he fought it out.

But that his voice stuck in his parched throat, he could have shouted in
his elation, when eventually he gained the point of intersection an eighth
of a mile ahead of the brigantine and got sight of her windward freeboard
as, most slowly, the cat-boat forged across her course.

For all that, the moment of his actual triumph was not yet; he had still to
carry off successfully a scheme that for sheer audacity of conception and
contempt for danger, transcended all that had gone before.

Holding the cat-boat on for a time, he brought her about handsomely a
little way beyond the brigantine's course, and hung in the eye of the wind,
the leach flapping and tightening with reports like rifle-shots, and
the water sloshing about his calves--bailing-dish now altogether out of
mind--while he watched the oncoming vessel, his eyes glistening with
anticipation.

She was footing it smartly, the brigantine--lying down to it and snoring
into the wind. Beneath her stem waves broke in snow-white showers, whiter
than the canvas of her bulging jib--broke and, gnashing their teeth in
impotent fury, swirled and eddied down her sleek dark flanks. Bobbing,
courtesying, she plunged onward, shortening the interval with mighty,
leaping bounds. On her bows, with each instant, the golden letters of her
name grew larger and more legible until--_Alethea_!--he could read it plain
beyond dispute.

Joy welled in his heart. He forgot all that he had undergone in the
prospect of what he proposed still to do in the name of the only woman the
world held for him. Unquestioning he had come thus far in her service;
unquestioning, by her side, he was prepared to go still farther, though all
humanity should single her out with accusing fingers....

They were watching him, aboard the brigantine; he could see a line of heads
above her windward rail. Perhaps _she_ was of their number. He waved
an audacious hand. Some one replied, a great shout shattering itself
unintelligibly against the gale. He neither understood nor attempted to
reply; his every faculty was concentrated on the supreme moment now at
hand.

Calculating the instant to a nicety, he paid off the sheet and pulled up
the tiller. The cat-boat pivoted on her heel; with a crack her sail flapped
full and rigid; then, with the untempered might of the wind behind her, she
shot like an arrow under the brigantine's bows, so close that the bowsprit
of the latter first threatened to impale the sail, next, the bows plunging,
crashed down a bare two feet behind the cat-boat's stern.

Working in a frenzy of haste, Kirkwood jammed the tiller hard alee,
bringing the cat about, and, trimming the mainsheet as best he might, found
himself racing under the brigantine's leeward quarter,--water pouring in
generously over the cat's.

Luffing, he edged nearer, handling his craft as though intending to ram the
larger vessel, foot by foot shortening the little interval. When it
was four feet, he would risk the jump; he crawled out on the overhang,
crouching on his toes, one hand light upon the tiller, the other touching
the deck, ready ... ready....

Abruptly the _Alethea_ shut off the wind; the sail flattened and the cat
dropped back. In a second the distance had doubled. In anguish Kirkwood
uttered an exceeding bitter cry. Already he was falling far off her
counter....

A shout reached him. He was dimly conscious of a dark object hurtling
through the air. Into the cockpit, splashing, something dropped--a coil of
rope. He fell forward upon it, into water eighteen inches deep; and for the
first time realized that, but for that line, he had gone to his drowning in
another minute. The cat was sinking.

As he scrambled to his feet, clutching the life-line, a heavy wave washed
over the water-logged craft and left it all but submerged; and a smart tug
on the rope added point to the advice which, reaching his ears in a bellow
like a bull's, penetrated the panic of his wits.

"Jump! _Jump, you fool_!"

In an instant of coherence he saw that the brigantine was luffing; none the
less much of the line had already been paid out, and there was no reckoning
when the end would be reached. Without time to make it fast, he hitched it
twice round his waist and chest, once round an arm, and, grasping it above
his head to ease its constriction when the tug should come, leaped on the
combing and overboard. A green roaring avalanche swept down upon him and
the luckless cat-boat, overwhelming both simultaneously.

The agony that was his during the next few minutes can by no means be
exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately
to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and
incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood
underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated
and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of
suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel--limb
rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily
to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green
half-lights alternating with flashes of blinding white; of thunderings in
his ears like salvoes from a thousand cannon....

And his senses were blotted out in blackness....

Then he was breathing once more, the keen clean air stabbing his lungs, the
while he swam unsupported in an ethereal void of brilliance. His mouth
was full of something that burned, a liquid hot, acrid, and stinging. He
gulped, swallowed, slobbered, choked, coughed, attempted to sit up, was
aware that he was the focal center of a ring of glaring, burning eyes, like
eyes of ravening beasts; and fainted.

His next conscious impression was of standing up, supported by friendly
arms on either side, while somebody was asking him if he could walk a step
or two.

He lifted his head and let it fall in token of assent, mumbling a yes; and
looked round him with eyes wherein the light of intelligence burned more
clear with every second. By degrees he catalogued and comprehended his
weirdly altered circumstances and surroundings.

He was partly seated, partly held up, on the edge of the cabin sky-light,
an object of interest to some half-dozen men, seafaring fellows all, by
their habit, clustered round between him and the windward rail. Of their
number one stood directly before him, dwarfing his companions as much by
his air of command as by his uncommon height: tall, thin-faced and sallow,
with hollow weather-worn cheeks, a mouth like a crooked gash from ear to
ear, and eyes like dying coals, with which he looked the rescued up and
down in one grim, semi-humorous, semi-speculative glance. In hands both
huge and red he fondled tenderly a squat brandy flask whose contents had
apparently been employed as a first aid to the drowning.

As Kirkwood's gaze encountered his, the man smiled sourly, jerking his head
to one side with a singularly derisive air.

"Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now? Feelin' 'appier, eigh?"

[Illustration: "Hi, matey!" he blustered. "'Ow goes it now?"]

"Some, thank you ... more like a drowned rat." Kirkwood eyed him
sheepishly. "I suppose you're the man who threw me that line? I'll have to
wait till my head clears up before I can thank you properly."

"Don't mention it." He of the lantern jaws stowed the bottle away with
jealous care in one of his immense coat pockets, and seized Kirkwood's
hand in a grasp that made the young man wince. "You're syfe enough now.
My nyme's Stryker, Capt'n Wilyum Stryker.... Wot's the row? Lookin' for a
friend?" he demanded suddenly, as Kirkwood's attention wandered.

For the memory of the errand that had brought him into the hands of Captain
William Stryker had come to the young man very suddenly; and his eager eyes
were swiftly roving not along the decks but the wide world besides, for
sight or sign of his heart's desire.

After luffing to pick him up, the brigantine had been again pulled off on
the port tack. The fury of the gale seemed rather to have waxed than waned,
and the _Alethea_ was bending low under the relentless fury of its blasts,
driving hard, with leeward channels awash. Under her port counter, a mile
away, the crimson light-ship wallowed in a riot of breaking combers.
Sheerness lay abeam, five miles or more. Ahead the northeast headland
of the Isle of Sheppey was bulking large and near. The cat-boat had
vanished....

More important still, no one aboard the brigantine resembled in the
remotest degree either of the Calendars, father or daughter, or even
Mulready, the black-avised.

"I sye, 're you lookin' for some one you know?"

"Yes--your passengers. I presume they're below--?"

"Passengers!"

A hush fell upon the group, during which Kirkwood sought Stryker's eye in
pitiful pleading; and Stryker looked round him blankly.

"Where's Miss Calendar?" the young man demanded sharply. "I must see her at
once!"

The keen and deep-set eyes of the skipper clouded as they returned to
Kirkwood's perturbed countenance. "Wot're you talking about?" he demanded
brusquely.

"I must see Miss Calendar, or Calendar himself, or Mulready." Kirkwood
paused, and, getting no reply, grew restive under Stryker's inscrutable
regard.

"That's why I came aboard," he amended, blind to the absurdity of the
statement; "to see--er--Calendar."

"Well ... I'm damned!"

Stryker managed to infuse into his tone a deal of suspicious contempt.

"Why?" insisted Kirkwood, nettled but still uncomprehending.

"D'you mean to tell me you came off from--wherever in 'ell you did come
from--intendin' to board this wessel and find a party nymed Calendar?"

"Certainly I did. Why--?"

"Well!" cried Mr. Stryker, rubbing his hands together with an air
oppressively obsequious, "I'm sorry to _hin_-form you you've come to the
wrong shop, sir; we don't stock no Calendars. We're in the 'ardware line,
we are. You might try next door, or I dessay you'll find what you want at
the stytioner's, round the corner."

A giggle from his audience stimulated him. "If," he continued acidly,
"I'd a-guessed you was such a damn' fool, blimmy if I wouldn't've let you
drownd!"

Staggered, Kirkwood bore his sarcastic truculence without resentment.

"Calendar," he stammered, trying to explain, "Calendar _said_--"

"I carn't 'elp wot Calendar said. Mebbe 'e _did_ myke an engygement with
you, an' you've gone and went an' forgot the dyte. Mebbe it's larst year's
calendar you're thinkin' of. You Johnny" (to a lout of a boy in the group
of seamen), "you run an' fetch this gentleman Whitaker's for Nineteen-six.
Look sharp, now!"

"But--!" With an effort Kirkwood mustered up a show of dignity. "Am I to
understand," he said, as calmly as he could, "that you deny knowing George
B. Calendar and his daughter Dorothy and--"

"I don't 'ave to. Listen to me, young man." For the time the fellow
discarded his clumsy facetiousness. "I'm Wilyum Stryker, Capt'n Stryker,
marster and 'arf-owner of this wessel, and wot I says 'ere is law. We don't
carry no passengers. D'ye understand me?"--aggressively. "There ain't no
pusson nymed Calendar aboard the _Allytheer_, an' never was, an' never will
be!"

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