John Burroughs - "Birds and Poets"

Mary Hallock Foote - "The Desert and The Sown"

Various - "Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society Vol. 3"

Hosea Ballou - "A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation"

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 Far Horizon

L >> Lucas Malet >> The Far Horizon



E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Danny Wool, Lorna Hanrahan, Mary Musser,
Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team



THE FAR HORIZON

BY

LUCAS MALET

(MRS. MARY ST. LEGER HARRISON)




BY THE SAME AUTHOR

_The Wages of Sin_

_A Counsel of Perfection_

_Colonel Enderby's Wife_

_Little Peter_

_The Carissima_

_The Gateless Barrier_

_The History of Sir Richard Calmady_




"Ask for the Old Paths, where is the Good Way, and walk therein, and ye
shall find rest."--JEREMIAS.


"The good man is the bad man's teacher; the bad man is the material upon
which the good man works. If the one does not value his teacher, if the
other does not love his material, then despite their sagacity they must
go far astray. This is a mystery of great import."--FROM THE SAYINGS OF
LAO-TZU.


..."Cherchons a voir les choses comme elles sont, et ne voulons pas avoir
plus d'esprit que le bon Dieu! Autrefois on croyait que la canne a sucre
seule donnait le sucre, on en tire a peu pres de tout maintenant. Il est
de meme de la poesie. Extrayons-la de n'importe quoi, car elle git en
tout et partout. Pas un atome de matiere qui ne contienne pas la poesie.
Et habituons-nous a considerer le monde comme un oeuvre d'art, dont il
faut reproduire les procedees dans nos oeuvres."--GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.




CHAPTER I


Dominic Iglesias stood watching while the lingering June twilight
darkened into night. He was tired in body, but his mind was eminently,
consciously awake, to the point of restlessness, and this was unusual
with him. He had raised the lower sash of each of the three tall, narrow
windows to its extreme height, since the first-floor sitting-room, though
of fair proportions, appeared close. His thought refused the limits of
it, and ranged outward over the expanse of Trimmer's Green, the roadway
and houses bordering it, to the far northwest, that region of hurried
storm, of fierce, equinoctial passion and conflict, now paved with
plaques of flat, dingy, violet cloud opening on smoky rose-red wastes of
London sunset. All day thunder had threatened, but had not broken. And,
even yet, the face of heaven seemed less peaceful than remonstrant, a
sullenness holding it as of troops in retreat denied satisfaction of
imminent battle.

Otherwise the outlook was wholly pacific, one of middle-class suburban
security. The Green aforesaid is bottle-shaped, the neck of it debouching
into a crowded westward-wending thoroughfare; while Cedar Lodge, from the
first-floor windows of which Mr. Iglesias contemplated the oncoming of
night, being situate in the left shoulder, so to speak, of the bottle,
commanded, diagonally, an uninterrupted view of the whole extent of it.
Who Trimmer was, how he came by a Green, and why, or what he trimmed on
it, it is idle at this time of day to attempt to determine. Whether,
animated by a desire for the public welfare, he bequeathed it in high
charitable sort; or whether, fame taking a less enviable turn with him,
he just simply was hanged there, has afforded matter of heated
controversy to the curious in questions of suburban nomenclature and
topography. But in this case, as in so many other and more august ones,
the origins defy discovery. Suffice it, therefore, that the name remains,
as does the open space--the latter forming one of those minor "lungs of
London" which offer such amiable oases in the great city's less
aristocratic residential districts. Formerly the Green boasted a row of
fine elms, and was looked on by discreetly handsome eighteenth-century
mansions and villas, set in spacious gardens. But of these, the great
majority--Cedar Lodge being a happy exception--has vanished under the
hand of the early Victorian speculative builder; who, in their stead, has
erected full complement of the architectural platitudes common to his age
and taste. Dignity has very sensibly given place to gentility.
Nevertheless the timid red, or sickly yellow-grey, brick of the existing
houses is pleasingly veiled by ivy and Virginia creeper, while no shop
front obtrudes derogatory suggestion of retail trade. The local
authorities, moreover, some ten years back girdled the Green with healthy
young balsam-poplar and plane trees and enclosed the grass with iron
hurdles--to rescue it from trampling into unsightly pathways--thus doing
a well-intentioned, if somewhat unimaginative, best to safeguard the
theatre of long ago Trimmer's beneficence or infamy from greater
spoliation.

Hence it follows that, certain inherent limitations admitted, the scene
upon which Dominic Iglesias' eyes rested was not without elements of
attraction. And of this fact, being a person of an excellent temperance
of expectation, he was gratefully aware. His surroundings, indeed,
constituted, so it appeared to him, the maximum of comfort and advantage
which could be expected by a middle-aged gentleman, of moderate fortune,
in the capacity of a "paying guest." Not only in word but in thought--for
in acknowledgment of obligation he was scrupulously courteous. He
frequently tendered thanks to his neighbour and old school-fellow, Mr.
George Lovegrove, first for calling his attention to Mrs. Porcher's
advertisement, and subsequently for reassuring him as to its import. For,
though incapable of forming so much as a thought to her concrete
disparagement, Mr. Iglesias was not without a quiet sense of humour, or
of that instinct of self-protection common to even the most chivalrous of
mankind. He was, therefore, perfectly sensible that "the widow of a
military officer," who describes herself in print as "bright, musical and
thoroughly domesticated," while offering "a cheerful and refined home at
the West End, within three minutes of Tube and omnibus"--"noble dining
and recreation rooms, bath h. and c." thrown in--to unmarried members of
the stronger sex, must of necessity be a lady whose close acquaintance it
would be foolhardy to make without a trifle of preliminary scouting.

Happily not only George Lovegrove, but his estimable wife was at hand.
The latter hastened to prosecute inquiries, beginning with a visit to the
Anglican vicar of the parish, the Rev. Giles Nevington. He reported Mrs.
Porcher an evening communicant at the greater festivals, and a not
ungenerous donor to parochial charities; adding that a former curate had
resided under her roof with perfect impunity. Mrs. Lovegrove terminated
her researches by an interview with the fishmonger, who assured her that
"Cedar Lodge always took the best cuts," sternly refused fish or poultry
which had suffered cold storage, and paid its housebooks without fail
before noon on Thursday. She ascertained, further, from a source socially
intermediate between clergyman and tradesman, that Mrs. Porcher's
husband, some time veterinary surgeon of a crack regiment, had died in
the odour of alcohol rather than in that of sanctity, leaving his widow--in
addition to his numerous and heavy debts--but a fraction of the
comfortable fortune to procure the enjoyment of which he had so
considerately married her. The solid Georgian mansion was her freehold;
and it was to secure sufficient means for continued residence in it that
the poor lady started a boarding-house, or in the politer language of the
present day, had decided to receive paying guests.

Encouraged by the satisfactory nature of the above information, Mr.
Iglesias--shortly after his mother's death, now nearly eight years ago--
had become a member of Mrs. Porcher's household. He had never, so far,
had reason to regret that step. And it was with a consciousness of
well-being and repose that he returned daily--after hours of strenuous
work in the well-known city banking house of Messrs. Barking Brothers &
Barking--to this square first-floor sitting-room, to its dimly white
panelled and painted walls, its nice details of carved work in chimney-
piece and ceiling, and the outlook from its tall, narrow windows. A
touch of old-world stateliness in its aspect satisfied his latent pride
of race. To certain natures not obscurity or slender means, but the
pretentious vulgarity which, in English-speaking countries, too often
goes along with these constitutes the burden and the offence.

To-night, however, things were different. Material objects remained the
same; but the conditions of existence had taken on a strange appearance,
and with that appearance Iglesias was bound to reckon, being uncertain as
yet whether it was destined to prove that of a friend or of an enemy. In
furtherance of such reckoning, he had declined dining at the public
table, in company with his hostess, Miss Eliza Hart, her devoted friend
and companion, and the three gentlemen--Mr. de Courcy Smyth, Mr. Farge,
and Mr. Worthington--who shared with him the hospitalities of Cedar
Lodge. He had dined here, upstairs, solitary; and Frederick, the German-
Swiss valet, had just finished clearing the table and departed. Usually
under such circumstances Iglesias would have taken a favourite book from
the carved Spanish mahogany bookcase containing his small library; and,
reading again that which he had often read before, would have found
therein the satisfaction of friendship, along with the soothing
influences of familiarity. But to-night neither Gibbon's _Rome_--a
handsome early edition in many volumes--_The Travels of Anacharsis_,
Evelyn's _Diary_, Napier's _Peninsular War_, John Stuart Mill's _Logic_,
Byron's _Poems_, nor those of Calderon, nor of that so-called "prodigy of
nature," Lope de Vega, not even the dear and immortal _Don Quixote_
himself, served to attract him. His own thoughts, his own life, filled
his whole horizon, leaving no space for the thoughts or lives of others.
He found himself a prey to a certain mental incoherence, a bewildering
activity of vision. More than once before in the course of his laborious,
monotonous, and, as men go, very virtuous life had this same thing
happened to him--the tides of the obvious and accustomed suddenly
receding and leaving him stranded, as on some barren sand-bank, uncertain
whether the ship of his individual fate would lie there wind-swept and
sun-bleached till rusty rivets fell out and planks parted, disclosing the
ribs of her in unsightly nakedness, or whether the kindly tide, rising,
would float her off into blue water and she would sail hopefully once
again.

It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other
happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship of
his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school.
Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street,
Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain,
it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not
as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of
women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young
loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and
Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his
near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion
and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never
having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for
purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He
was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether
beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would
have it, with intimate and life-long results.

Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried
exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the fierce
and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived--
namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the house in the
Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high
wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its clinging odour
of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of
it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early
summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to
faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing
walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky
showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent
housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and
chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas
clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a
stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with
much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to
little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings
of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour.
Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the
happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable
materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by
vulgar comment.

His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of
absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small boy
a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the quiet
house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and going of
other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain effect of
hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear seemed to
enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows and closing
of doors. Before Dominic they were of few words; but became eloquent
enough, in sonorous foreign speech, as his ears testified when he was
banished from their rather electric presence to the solitude of the
nursery above. And so it came about that a sense of mystery, of large
issues, of things at once strong and hidden, impenetrable to his
understanding and concerning which no questions might be asked, encircled
Dominic's childhood and passed into the very fabric of his thought. While
through it all his mother moved, to him tender and wholly exquisite, but
with the reticence of some deep-seated enthusiasm silently cherished,
some far-reaching alarm silently endured, always upon her. And this
resulted in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility which
inevitably reacted on the boy, making him sober beyond his years,
tempering his natural vivacity with watchfulness, and pitching even his
laughter in a minor key.

Only many years later, when after his mother's death it became his duty
to read letters exchanged between his parents during this period, did
Dominic Iglesias touch the key to the riddle, and fully measure the
public danger, the private strain and stress which had surrounded his
childhood and early youth. For his father, a man of far from ignoble
nature, but of narrow outlook and undying hatreds, was deeply involved in
revolutionary intrigue of the most advanced type--a victim of that false
passion of humanity which takes its rise not in honest desire for the
welfare of mankind, but in blind rebellion against all forms of
authority. His self-confidence was colossal; all rule being abominable to
him--save his own--all rulers hideous, save himself. The anarchist,
rightly understood, is merely the autocrat, the tyrant, turned inside
out. And this man, as Dominic gathered from the perusal of those old
letters, to whom the end so justified the means that red-handed crime
took on the fair colours of virtue, his mother had loved, even while she
feared him, with all the faithfulness and pure passion of her Irish
blood. Pathetic combination, the patience and resignation of the one ever
striving to temper the flaming zeal of the other, as though the spindrift
of the Atlantic, sweeping inland from the dim sadness of far western
coasts, should strive with relentless fierceness of sunglare outpoured on
some high-lying walled city of arid central Spain! Mist is but a weak
thing as against rock and fire; and what his mother must have suffered in
moral and spiritual conflict, let alone all question of active dread, was
to her son almost too cruel to contemplate, although it explained and
justified much.

In 1860, when Dominic was a schoolboy of fourteen, his father left home
on one of those sudden journeys the object and objective of which were
alike concealed. For about a year letters arrived at irregular intervals,
hailing from Paris, Naples, Prague, and finally Petersburg. Then followed
silence, broken only by rumours furtively conveyed by a former associate,
one Pascal Pelletier--an angel-faced, long-haired, hysteric creature,
inspired by an impassioned enthusiasm for infernal machines and wholesale
slaughter in theory, and, in practice, by a gentle doglike devotion to
Mrs. Iglesias and young Dominic. He would arrive depressed and shadowy in
the shadowy twilights. But, once in the presence of the beings whom he
loved, he became effervescent. His belief was unlimited in the Head
Centre, the Chief, in his demonic power and fertility of resource. That
any evil should befall him!--Pascal snapped his thin fingers; while, with
the inalienable optimism of the born fanatic, he proceeded to state
hopeful conjecture as established fact, thereby doing homage to the
spirit of delusion which so conspicuously ruled him even to his inmost
thought. But a spell of cold weather in the winter of 1862 struck a
little too shrewdly through Pascal's seedy overcoat, causing that tender-
hearted subverter of society to cough his life out, with all possible
despatch, in the third-floor back of a filthy lodging-house off Tottenham
Court Road.

This was the end as far as information went, whether authentic or
apocryphal. But Dominic, his horizon still bounded by the world of
school, greedy of distinction both in learning and in games, away all day
and eagerly, if somewhat sleepily, busy over the preparation of lessons
at night, was very far from realising that. Poor voluble kind-eyed Pascal
he mourned with all his heart; yet the months of his father's absence
accumulated into years almost unnoticed. The same thing had so often
happened before; and then, at an unlooked-for moment, the wanderer had
returned. Moreover, the old habit of obedience was still strong in him.
It was understood that concerning his father's occupations and movements
no comment might be made, no questions might be asked.

Meanwhile, the small house in Holland Street was ever more still, more
unfrequented. As he grew older Dominic became increasingly sensible of
this--sensible of a sort of hush falling on him as he crossed the
threshold, so that instinctively he left much of his wholesome young
animality outside, while his voice took on softer tones in speech, and
his quick light footsteps became more scrupulously noiseless as he ran up
the little crooked stairs.

"When your father comes home we must decide what profession you shall
follow, my Dominic," it had been his mother's habit to declare. But, even
before the time for such decision arrived the boy had begun to understand
he must see to all that unaided. For his mother was ill, how deeply and
in what manner he could not tell. He shrank, indeed, from all clear
thought, let alone speech, on the subject, as from something indelicate,
in a way irreverent. Her beauty remained to her, notwithstanding a
gradual wasting as of fever. A peculiar, very individual grace of dress
and of bearing remained to her likewise. But she was uncertain in mood,
the victim of strange fancies, a being almost alarmingly far removed from
the interests of ordinary life. Long ago, in submission to her husband's
anti-clerical prejudices, she had ceased to practise her religion, so
that the services of the Church no longer called her forth in beneficent
routine of sacred obligation. Now she never left the house, living, since
poor Pascal Pelletier's death, in complete seclusion. Little wonder then
that a hush fell on Dominic crossing the threshold, since so doing he
passed from the world of healthy action to that of acquiescent sickness,
from vigorous hoarse-voiced realities to the intangible sadness of
unrelated dreams! The effect was one of rather haunting melancholy; and
it was characteristic of the lad that he did not resent it, though
rejoicing in the reputation at school of being high-spirited enough,
impatient of restraint or of any frustration of purpose. His mother had
always been sacred. She remained so, even though her sympathies had
become imperfect, and she moved in regions which his sane young
imagination failed to penetrate. One thing was perfectly plain to him,
though it cut at the root of ambition--namely, that he could not leave
her. So, in that matter of a profession, he must find work which would
permit of his continuing to live at home; and, since her income was
narrow, the work in question must make no heavy demand in respect of
preliminary expense.

Here was a problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of
Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his
position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent
in studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late
afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of
possible employers and the keeping of fruitless appointments. He would
set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full of
the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to reveal
herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue coal smoke
--it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and penetrating her
immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty of mere size. He
noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew strangely and feverishly
alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the pavements. A dazzling
glitter of shop windows marked the great thoroughfares, while often the
angry glare of a fire pulsed along the sky-line. When night comes in the
country, so Dominic told himself, the land sinks into peaceful repose.
But in cities it is otherwise. There the light leaves heaven for earth;
and walks the streets, with much else far from celestial, until the
small hours move towards the dawn and usher in the decencies of day.

Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its
enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld
with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted
condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he
could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented herself
to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature, breathing,
feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and breeding, terrible
in her power and vitality, age old, yet still unspent. Presented herself
to him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing her own unwieldy limits,
sending forth her children, year after year, all the wide world over by
shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of them back, proud with
accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or, disgraced and broken,
slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and darkness merely to swell
the numbers of the nameless who rot and die. He thought of those others,
too--and this touched his young ardour with a quick shudder of personal
fear--whom she never sends forth at all; but holds close in bondage all
their lives long, enslaved to her countless and tyrant activities by
their own poverty, or by their fellow-creatures' misfortune, cruelties,
and sins. Was it thus she was going to deal with him, Dominic Iglesias?
Was he to be among the great city's bondmen through the coming years,
better acquainted with the very earthly light which walks her streets by
night, than with the heavenly light which gladdens the sweet face of day
in the open country and upon the open sea? And for a moment the boy's
heart rebelled, hungry for pleasure, hungry for wide experience, hungry
even for knowledge of those revolutionary intrigues which, as he was
beginning to understand, had surrounded his childhood, and, as he was
beginning to fear, had cost his mother her reason and his father both
liberty and life. Thus did the ship of poor Dominic's fate appear to be
stranded or ever it had fairly set sail at all.

Meanwhile, if London claimed him, she did so in very cynical fashion,
mocking his willingness to labour, refusing to feed him even while she
refused to let him go. Everything, he feared, was against him--his youth,
his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving
definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present
whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and
feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless
face, his ready yet reticent speech--all these marked him as unusual and
exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour--of
whatever sort--has, it must be conceded, but little use. He is half
afraid, half contemptuous of it, instinctively disliking anything more
alert and alive than his own most stolid self. But while men, distrusting
the distinctness of his personality and his good looks, refused to give
Dominic work, women, relishing them, were only too ready to give him
enjoyment--of a kind. The boy, in those solitary wanderings, ran the
gauntlet of many temptations; and was presented--did he care to accept
it--with the freedom of the city on very liberal lines. Happily, inherent
cleanliness of nature saved him from much; and reverent shame at the
thought of entering the hushed and silent house where his mother lived--
spotless, amid pathetic memories and delicate dreams--with the soil of
licence upon him, saved him from more. Crime might have come close to him
in his childhood, but vice never; and the influences of vice are far more
insidious, and consequently more damaging, than those of crime.

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