F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield - "Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use"

George Durston - "The Boy Scouts on the Trail"

by Alfred Russell Wallace - "The Malay Archipelago"

Herbert Carter - "The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire"

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




The sound affected Dominic Iglesias deeply, begetting in him an almost
hopeless sense of isolation. The vapid talk at dinner, poor little Mrs.
Porcher's misplaced advances--the fact of which it appeared to him
equally idle to deny and fatuous to admit--the dreary scene with his
unhappy fellow-lodger, the good deed done which just now appeared
fruitless--all these contributed to make the complaint of the exiled
cedar's tormented branches an echo of the complaint of his own heart. For
a long while he listened to these voices of the night, the great city,
the great tree, the wind and the wet; and listening, by degrees he
rallied his patience in that he humbled himself.

"After all, I have been little else but self-seeking," he said, half
aloud. "For I gave not to the man, but to myself. I clutched at a
personal reward, if not of spoken gratitude yet of subjective content. It
has not come. I suppose I did not deserve it."

And then, somehow, his thoughts turned to that other human creature who,
though in a very different fashion to de Courcy Smyth the unsavoury, had
claimed his help. He thought not of her over-red lips, but of her wise
eyes; not of her irrepressible effervescence and patter, but of her
serious moments and of the honesty and courage which at such moments
appeared to animate her. About a fortnight ago he had called at the
little flower-bedecked house on the confines of Barnes Common, but had
obtained no response to his ringing. He supposed she was engaged, or
possibly away. With a certain proud modesty he had abstained from
renewing his visit. But now, listening to the roar of London and the
complaint of the cedar tree, he turned to the thought of her as to
something of promise, of possible comfort, of equal friendship, in which
there should be not only help given, but help received.




CHAPTER XIII


Dominic Iglesias stood on Hammersmith Bridge looking upstream. The
temperature was low for the time of year, the sky packed with heavy-
bosomed indigo-grey clouds in the south and west, whence came a gusty
wind chill with impending rain. The light was diffused and cold, all
objects having a certain bareness of effect, deficient in shadow. The
weather had broken in the storm of the preceding night; and, though it
was but early September, summer was gone, autumn and the melancholy of
it already present--witness the elms in Chiswick Mall splotched with
raw umber and faded yellow. The tide had still about an hour to flow.
The river was dull and leaden, save where, near Chiswick Eyot, the
wind meeting the tide lashed the surface of it into mimic waves, the
crests of which, flung upward, showed against the gloomy stretch of
water beyond, like pale hands raised heavenward in despairing protest.
Steam-tugs, taking advantage of the tide, laboured up-stream in the
teeth of the wind, towing processions of dark floats and barges. Long
banners of smoke, ragged and fleeting, swept wildly away from the
mouths of the tall chimneys of Thorneycroft's Works, which rose black
into the low, wet sky. The roadway of the huge suspension bridge
quivered under the grind of the ceaseless traffic, while the wind
cried in the massive pea-green painted iron-gearing above. There was a
sense of hardly restrained tumult, of conflict between nature and the
multiple machinery of modern civilisation, the two in opposition,
alike victims of an angry mood. And Iglesias stood watching that
conflict among the crowd of children, and loafers, and decrepit, who
to-day--as every day--thronged the foot-way of the bridge.

Poppy St. John stood on the foot-way, too. She had crossed from the
southern side. But, though by no means insensible to the spirit or the
details of the scene around her, she was less engaged in watching the
drama of the stormy afternoon than in watching Dominic Iglesias--as
yet unconscious of her presence. His tall, spare, shapely figure,
grave, clean-shaven face, and calm, self-recollected manner--which
removed him so singularly from the purposeless neutral-tinted human
beings close about him--delighted her artistic sense.

"If one had caught him young," she said to herself, "if one had only
caught him young, heavenly powers, what a time one might have had, and
yet stayed good--oh! very quite good indeed!"

Then she made her way between much undeveloped and derelict humanity.

"Look at me, dear man," she said, "look at me--really I am worth it. I
got home late last night and I was possessed by a great longing to see
you.--Excuse my shouting, but things in general are making such an
infernal clatter.--I was determined to see you. I set my whole mind to
making you come. And I felt so sure you must come that this afternoon
I have journeyed thus far to meet you. And here you are, and here I
am."

Poppy stood before him bracing her back against the hand-rail of the
bridge.

"Tell me, are you glad?" she said.

And Dominic Iglesias, surprised, yet finding the incident curiously
natural, answered simply:

"Yes, I am, very glad."

"That's all right," she rejoined; "because, after all, coming was a
pretty lively act of faith on my part. I have superstitious turns at
times; and the weather, and things that had happened, had made me feel
pretty cheap somehow. I don't mind telling you as you are here that if
you'd failed me there would have been the devil to pay. I should have
been awfully cut up."

Iglesias still smiled upon her. Poppy presented herself under a new
aspect to-day, and that aspect found favour in his sight. She was no
longer the Lady of the Windswept Dust, arrayed in fantastic flowery
hat and trailing skirts, but was clothed in trim black workman-like
garments, which revealed the delicate contours of her figure and gave
her an unexpected air of distinction. Yet, though charmed, the caution
of pride--which, in his case, was also the caution of modesty--made
him a trifle shy in addressing her. He paused before speaking, and
then said, with a certain hesitancy:

"I fancy my attitude of mind last night was the complement of your
own. I, too, had fallen on rather evil days. I wanted to see you. I
came out this afternoon to find you. If I had failed to do so, it
would have gone a little hard with me, too, I think."

Poppy looked at him questioningly, intently, for a minute, her teeth
set. Then she whirled round, leaned her elbows on the hand-rail,
pulled her handkerchief out of the breast pocket of her smartly
fitting coat and dabbed her eyes with it, finely indifferent to
possible comment or observation.

Iglesias remained immediately behind her, but a little to the right,
so as to save her from being jostled by the passers-by. He had a sense
of being only the more alone with her because of the traffic and the
crowd; a sense, moreover, of dependence on her part and protection on
his; a sense, in a way, of her belonging to him and he to her. And
this was very sweet to him, solemnly sweet, as are all things of
beauty and moment holding in them the promise of enduring result. Old
Age ceased to threaten and Loneliness to haunt. Over Iglesias' soul
passed a wave of thankful content.

Suddenly Poppy straightened herself up and faced him. Her lips
laughed, but her eyes were wet.

"I'll play fair," she said; "by the honour of the mother that bore
you, I'll play fair."

Then she laid her hand on his arm and pointed London-wards.

"Now, come along, dear man, for I have got to pull myself together
somehow. Let us walk. Take me somewhere I've never been before,
somewhere quiet--only let us walk."

Therefore, desiring to meet her wishes, a little way up the broad
straggling street Dominic Iglesias turned off to the left into the
narrow old-world lanes and alleys which lie between the river frontage
and King Street West. The district is a singular one, suggestive of
some sleepy little dead-alive seaport town rather than of London.
Quaint water-ways, crossed by foot-bridges, burrow in between small
low cottages and warehouses. Some of these have overhanging upper
stories to them, are half-timbered or yellow-washed. Some are built
wholly of wood. There is an all-pervading odour of tar and hempen
rope. Small industries abound, though without any self-advertisement
of plate-glass shop fronts. Chimney-sweeps and cobblers give notice of
their presence by swinging signs. Newsvendors make irruption of
flaring boards upon the pavement. Little ground-floor windows exhibit
attenuated stores of tinware, string, and sweets. Modest tobacconists
mount the image of a black boy scantily clothed or of a Highlander in
the fullest of tartans above their doors. Cats prowl along walls and
sparrows rise in flights from off the ill-paved roadways. But of human
occupants there appear to be but few, and those with an unusual stamp
of individuality upon them; figures a trifle strange and obsolete--as
of persons by choice hidden away, voluntarily self-removed from the
levelling rush and grind of the monster city. The small heavy-browed
houses are very secretive, seeming to shelter fallen fortunes, obscure
and furtive sins, sorrows which resist alleviation and inquiry. Seen,
as to-day, under the low-hanging sky big with rain, in the diffused
afternoon light, the place and its inhabitants conveyed an impression
low-toned, yet distinct, finished in detail, rich though mournful in
effect as some eighteenth-century Dutch picture. A linnet twittered,
flitting from perch to perch of its cage at an open window. A boy,
clad in an old mouse-brown corduroy coat, passed slowly, crying "Sweet
lavender" shrilly yet in a plaintive cadence. Occasionally the siren
of a steam-tug tore the air with a long-drawn wavering scream.
Otherwise all was very silent.

And, as they threaded their way through the maze of crooked streets,
Dominic Iglesias and Poppy St. John were silent also; but with the
silence of intimacy and good faith, rather than with that of
embarrassment or indifference. Each was very fully aware of the
presence of the other. So fully aware, indeed, that, for the moment,
speech seemed superfluous as a vehicle for interchange of thought.
Then, as they emerged on to the open gravelled space of the Upper Mall
with its low red-brick wall and stately elm trees, Poppy held out her
hand to Mr. Iglesias.

"You are beautifully clever," she said. "You give me just what I
wanted. I'm as steady as old Time now. But what a queer rabbit-warren
of a place it is! How did you find your way?"

"I came here often, in the past," he said, "at a time when I was
suffering grave anxiety. I could not leave home, after my office work
was over, for more than an hour together. And in the dusk or at night,
with its twinkling and evasive lights, the place used to please me,
leading as it does to the river bank, the mystery of the ebbing and
flowing tide, the ceaseless effort seaward of the stream, and those
low-lying spaces on the Surrey side. It was the nearest bit of nature,
unharnessed, irresponsible nature, which I could get to; and it
symbolised emancipation from monotonous labour and everlasting bricks
and mortar. I could watch the dying of the sunset, and the outcoming
of the stars, the tossing of the pale willows--there on the eyot--in
the windy dusk, undisturbed. And so I have come to entertain a great
fondness for it, since it tranquillised me and helped me to see life
calmly and to bring myself in line with fact, to endure and to
forgive."

While he spoke Poppy's hand continued to rest passively in his.

"You are a poet," she said, "and you are very good."

Dominic Iglesias smiled and shook his head.

"No," he answered. "I am neither a poet nor am I very good. Far from
that. I only tried to keep faith with the one clear duty which I saw."

Poppy moved forward across the Mall and stood by the river wall,
looking out over the flowing tide. It was high now, and washed and
gurgled against the masonry.

"You did and suffered all that for some woman," she said. "A man like
you always breaks himself for some woman. I hope she was worth it--
often they aren't. Who was she? The woman you loved? Your wife?"

"The woman I loved," Iglesias answered, "but not my wife."

Poppy looked at him sharply, her eyes full of question and of fear, as
though she dreaded to hear very evil tidings.

"Not your mistress?" she said. "Don't tell me that. The Lord knows
I've no right to mind. But I should mind. It would be like switching
off all the lights. I couldn't stand it. So, if it's that, just let us
part company at once. I've no more use for you.--I know where I am
now. If I go up into St. Peter's Square I can pick up a hansom and
drive back home--I suppose I may as well call it home, as I have no
other. And as for you, if you've any mercy in you, never let me see
you again. Never come near me. I have no use for you, I tell you. So
leave me to my own devices--what those devices are is no earthly
concern of yours."

She paused breathless, her eyes blazing, her face very white. She
seemed to have grown tall, and there was a tremendous force in her of
bitterness, repudiation, and regret.

"After all," she cried, "I don't so much as know your name; and so,
thank heaven, it can't be so very difficult to forget you."

Her aspect moved Iglesias strangely, seeming as it did to embody the
very spirit of the angry sky, of the gloomy river, all the sorrow of
the dead summer and stormy autumn light. For a moment he watched her
in silence. Then he took both her hands in his and held them, smiling
at her again very gently.

"No, dear friend," he said, "the woman was not my mistress. She was my
mother." His voice shook a little. "I never talk of her. But I think
of her always. She was very perfect and very lovely. And she suffered
greatly, so greatly that it unhinged her reason. Now do you
understand? For years she was mad."




CHAPTER XIV


In the month of October immediately following two events took place
which, though of apparently very different magnitude and importance,
intimately and almost equally--as it proved in the sequel--affected
Dominic Iglesias' life. The first was the declaration of war by the
South African Republics. The second was the return of Miss Serena
Lovegrove to town.

Now war is, unquestionably, not a little staggering to the modern
civilised conscience; and this particular war possessed the additional
unpleasantness of having in it, at first sight, an element of the
grotesque. It is not too much to say that it struck the majority of
the British public as being of the nature of a very bad joke. For it
was as though a very small and very cheeky boy, after making offensive
signs, had spat in the nation's face. Clearly the boy deserved sharp
chastisement for his impudence. Nevertheless, the position remained an
undignified and slightly ridiculous one; and the British public
proceeded to safeguard its proper pride by treating the matter as
lightly as possible. It assured itself--and others--that, given a
reasonable parade of strength, the small boy, blubbering, his fists in
his eyes, would speedily and humbly beg pardon and promise to mind his
manners in future. A few persons, it is true, remembered Majuba Hill,
and doubted the small boy's immediate reduction to obedience. A few
others dared to suspect that English society was suffering from wealth
apoplexy and the many unlovely symptoms which, in all ages of history,
have accompanied that form of seizure, and to doubt whether blood-
letting might not prove salutary. Dominic Iglesias was among these.
His recent observations upon and excursions into the world of fashion,
stray words let drop by Poppy St. John on the one hand, and by unhappy
de Courcy Smyth on the other, had begotten in him the suspicion that
the sobering and sorrowful influences of war might be healthful for
the body politic, just as a surgical operation may be healthful for
the individual body. Next to the Jew, the Dutchman is the most
stubbornly tenacious of human creatures. He is a fighting man into the
bargain. Iglesias could not flatter himself that the campaign would
result in an easy walk-over for so much of the British army as a
supine and annoyed Government condescended to place in the field. The
whole affair lay heavy on his soul. It lay there all the heavier that
a few days subsequent to the declaration of war Mr. Iglesias' thought
was unexpectedly swept back into the arena of speculative finance.

In the portion of his morning paper allotted to business subjects, he
had lighted on a long and evidently inspired article dealing with the
flotation of a company just now in process of acquiring control over
extensive areas in Southeast Africa. The prospects held out to
investors were of the most golden sort. The land was declared to be
not only remarkably rich in precious stones and precious metals, but
also adapted for corn-growing on a vast scale--thus, both above and
below the surface, promising prodigious wealth were its resources
adequately developed.

Iglesias did not dispute the truth of these statements. The data
quoted appeared trustworthy enough. Moreover, he was already fairly
conversant with the enterprise, since Mr. Reginald Barking--that
junior member of the great banking firm whose name has been mentioned
in connection with strenuous modern business methods--was, to his
knowledge, deeply interested in the promotion of it. That which
troubled him, striking him as unsound and misleading, was the fact
that the profits, as set forth in the newspaper article, were
calculated--so at least it was evident to Iglesias--on the results of
such development when completed, irrespective of the lapse of time
required for such development; irrespective of possible and arresting
accident; irrespective, too, of immediate and even protracted loss by
the tying-up of huge sums of money which could yield but little or no
return until the said process of development was an accomplished fact.
To Iglesias' clear-seeing and logical mind the enterprise, therefore,
presented itself as one of those gigantic modern gambles of which the
incidental risks are emphatically too heavy, since they more often
than not make rich men poor, and poor men paupers, before they come
through--if, indeed, they even come through at all.

Reginald, in virtue of his youth, his energy, and relentless
concentration of purpose, had rapidly become the ruling spirit of the
house of Barking Brothers & Barking. Iglesias had no cause to love
him, since to him he owed his dismissal. But that fact failed to
colour his present meditations. Under the influence of his cherished
and new-found charity, Dominic had little time or inclination for
personal resentment. Too, the habits of the best part of a lifetime
cannot be thrown aside in a day. Directly he touched business on the
large scale, it became to him serious and imposing. And so the future
of the firm and the issue of its operations, in face of current
events, concerned him deeply, all the more that he gauged Reginald
Barking's temper of mind and proclivities.

The young man's father--now happily deceased--had offered an
instructive example of social and religious survival--survival, to be
explicit, of the once famous Clapham Sect, and that in its least
agreeable aspect. His theology was that of obstinately narrow
misinterpretation of the Scriptures; his piety that of self-invented
obligations; his virtue that of unsparing condemnation of the sins of
others. His domestic morality was Hebraic--death kindly playing into
his hands in regard of it. He married four times--Reginald, the only
child of his fourth marriage, having the further privilege of being
his only son. The boy was delicate and of a strumous habit. This fact,
combined with his parents' ingrained conviction that a public school
is synonymous, morally speaking, with a common sewer, caused his
education to be conducted at home by a series of tutors as
undistinguished by birth as by scholarship--tentative apologetic young
men, the goal of whose ambitions was a wife and a curacy, failing
which they resigned themselves to the post of usher in some ultra-
Protestant school. Sport in all its forms, art and literature, being
alike forbidden, the boy's hungry energy had found no reasonable
outlet. He had been miserable, peevish, ailing, until at barely
eighteen--after a discreditable episode with a scullery-maid--he had
been shipped off to New York to learn business in the house of certain
brokers and bill-discounters with whom Messrs. Barking Brothers had
extensive financial relations. Life in the land of the Puritans was
not, even at that time of day, inevitably immaculate. Freedom from
parental supervision and the American climate went to the lad's head.
He passed through a phase of commonplace but secret vice, emerging
there-from with an unblemished social reputation; a blank scepticism
in matters religious, combined with bitter animosity against the Deity
whom he declared non-existent; and a fiercely driving ambition, not so
much for wealth in itself, as for that control ever the destinies of
men, and even of nations, with which wealth under modern conditions
endows its possessor. He was a pale, dry, lizard-like young man,
suggesting light without heat, and excitement without emotion. Early
in his career he recognised that the great sources of wealth and power
lie with the younger countries, in the development of their natural
and industrial resources, of their railways and other forms of
transport. The phenomenal advance of America, for example, was due to
her enormous territory and the opportunities of expansion, with the
bounds of nationality, which this afforded her people. But he also
recognised that America was essentially for the Americans, and that it
was useless for an outsider, however skilful, however even
unscrupulous, to pit his business capacity against that of the native
born. His dreams of power and speculative activity directed
themselves, consequently, to the British Colonies, and to those as yet
unappropriated spaces of the earth's surface where British influence
is still only tentatively present.

Meanwhile he had espoused Miss Nancy Van Reenan, daughter of a famous
transatlantic merchant prince, first cousin, it may be added, to the
beautiful Virginia Van Reenan whose marriage with Lawrence Rivers, of
Stoke Rivers in the county of Sussex, so fluttered the smartest
section of New York society a few years ago. He returned to England in
the spring of 1897, convinced that America had taught him,
commercially speaking, all there was to know. This knowledge he
prepared to apply to waking up the venerable establishment in
Threadneedle Street, while employing the unimpeachable respectability
and solvency of the said establishment as a lever towards the
realisation of his own far-reaching ambitions. He brought with him
from the United States, in addition to his elegant wife, two dry, pale
children, whose contours were less Raphaelesque than gnat-like, and
the acuteness of whose critical faculty was very much more in evidence
than that of their affections. These bright little results of
modernity and applied science--in the shape of the incubator--took
their place in the social movement, at the ages of three and five
respectively, with the hard and chilling assurance of a world-weary
man and woman. They never exhibited surprise. They rarely exhibited
amusement. They were radically disillusioned. They frequently referred
to their nerves and their digestions, in the interests of which they
consistently repudiated every form of excess.

With these rather terrible little gentry Dominic Iglesias was, happily
for himself, unacquainted; but with their father he was very well
acquainted, as has already been stated. Hence his fears. Folding his
newspaper together, he laid it on the table and proceeded to walk
meditatively up and down his sitting-room. The morning was keen with
sunshine, the leaves of the planes and balsam-poplars fell in brown
and yellow showers upon the Green, on the further side of which the
details of the red and yellowish grey houses stood out in high relief
of sharp-edged light and shadow. Mr. Iglesias had risen in a hopeful
frame of mind. Of late it had become his habit to call weekly on Poppy
St. John. Today was the one appointed for his visit. Since he had
spoken to her about his mother his friendship with Poppy St. John had
entered upon a new phase. It was no longer experimental, but absolute,
the more so that she had in no way presumed upon his confidence. He
felt very safe with her--safe to tell or safe to withhold as
inclination should move him. And in this there was a strange and
delicate lessening of the burden of his loneliness, without any
encroachment on his pride. He had found, moreover, that behind her
patter lay an unexpected acquaintance with public affairs and the
tendencies of current events, so that it was possible to talk on
subjects other than personal with her. He was coming to have much
faith in her judgment as well as in her sincerity of heart. And, so,
with the prospect of seeing her before him, Dominic had risen in the
happiest disposition, had so remained till the newspaper article
disturbed his mind. For what, as he asked himself, did it portend,
this extravagant puff of the company's lad and the company's
prospects, at this particular juncture? Why was it so urgently and
eloquently forced upon the market just now? Was it but another proof
of the contemptuous attitude adopted by Englishmen of all classes
towards the Boer Republics? Or did it take its origin very much
elsewhere--namely, in the fact that Reginald Barking had so deeply
involved the capital and pledged the credit of the firm that it became
necessary to make violent and doubtfully honest bid for popular
support before the position of the said firm, through difficulty and
accident induced by war, became desperate?

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