John Fox - "In Happy Valley"

Frederik van Eeden - "The Bride of Dreams"

C. N. Williamson - "A Soldier of the Legion"

Isabella Lucy Bird - "The Englishwoman in America"

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 sun had climbed the sky, burning up the hoarfrost and mist, so
that the houses opposite had become clearly discernible. Presently he
beheld a tall, upright figure emerge from the front door of Cedar
Lodge. For a moment Mr. Iglesias stood at the head of the flight of
immaculately white stone steps, rolling up his umbrella and putting on
his gloves preparatory to setting forth on his morning walk. And,
watching him, a wave of humility and self-depreciation swept over
George Lovegrove's gentle and candid soul, combined with an aching or
regret that destiny had not seen fit to deal with him rather otherwise
than it actually had. He felt a great longing that he, too, were
possessed of a stately presence, brains, breeding, and handsome looks.
There stirred in him an almost impassioned craving for romance, for
escape from the interminable respectabilities and domesticities of
English middle-class suburban life. He went a step further, rebelling
against the feminine atmosphere which surrounded him, in which
"feelings" so constantly usurped the place of actions, and
suppositions that of fact. Then, the vision of a beautiful woman with
a strange rose-scarlet dress, in whose eyes sorrow struggled with
mocking laughter, once again assailed him. Who she might be, and what
her history, he most emphatically knew not; yet that she breathed a
keener and more tonic air than that to which he was habituated, that
feelings in her case did not stand for actions, or suppositions for
fact, he was fully convinced.

"Poor old chappie, take a brandy and soda. Got the hump?"--this,
shrilly, from the parrot hanging head downwards from the roof of its
cage.

At the sound of that at once unhuman and singularly confidential voice
close beside him, George Lovegrove gave a guilty start.

"Yes, the wife is quite right," he said, half aloud. "If you want to
keep a happy mind there is very much of which it is as well to be
ignorant."

Then shame covered him, for in his recent meditations and
apprehensions had he not come very near turning traitor, and being, in
imagination at all events, subtly unfaithful to that same large kindly
comfortable wife?




CHAPTER XXII


Two months had passed, and February was about to give place to March--
two months empty of outward event for Dominic Iglesias, but big with
thought and consolidation of purpose. He had been more than ever
solitary during this period, for his acquaintance, even to the
faithful George Lovegrove, stood aloof. But Dominic hardly noticed
this. Though solitary, he had not been lonely, since his mind was
absorbed in question, in pursuit, in the consciousness of deepening
conviction. For the recognition not merely of religion, but of
Christianity, as a supreme factor in earthly existence, which had come
to him in the dreary December twilight, as, broken in health and in
spirit, he gazed upon the carven picture of Calvary, had proved no
fugitive experience. It remained by him, entracing his imagination and
satisfying both his heart and his intelligence; so that he looked back
upon the hour of his despair thankfully, seeing in it the starting-
point of a journey the prosecution of which promised not only to be
the main occupation of his remaining years here in time, but, the
river of death once crossed, to stretch onward and onward through
realms, at present inconceivable, of beauty, of knowledge, and of
love. And so, for the moment, solitude was sweet to him, leaving him
free of petty cares and anxieties--he moving forward, ignorant of the
gossip which in point of fact surrounded him, innocent of the feminine
plots and counterplots of which his blameless bachelorhood was at
once the provoking cause and the object; while in his eyes--though of
this, too, he was ignorant--dwelt increasingly reflection of that
mysterious and lovely light which, let obstinately purblind man deny
it as he may, lies forever along the far horizon, for comfort of godly
wayfarers and as beacon of the elect.

Yet it must not be supposed that the outset of Iglesias' spiritual
journey was wholly serene, free from obstacle or hesitation, from risk
of untoward selection, or rejection, of the safe way. Many roads, and
those bristling with contradictory signposts, presented themselves.
Noisy touts, each crying up his own special mode and means of
conveyance, rushed forth at every turn.

Modern Protestantism, as he encountered it in the pages of popular
newspapers and magazines, at Mrs. Porcher's dinner-table, or in the
good Lovegroves' drawing-room, had small attraction for him, since it
appeared to advance chiefly by negations stated with rather blatant
self-sufficiency and self-conceit. It might tend to the making of
respectable municipal councillors; but, in his opinion, it was idle to
pretend that it tended to the making of saints--and for the saints,
those experts in the divine science, Iglesias confessed a weakness. Of
spirituality it showed, to his seeing, as little outward evidence as
of philosophy or of art. The phrases of piety might still be upon the
lips of its votaries; but the attitude and aspirations engendered by
piety were unfortunately dead. Its system of ethics was frankly
utilitarian. Its goal, though hidden from the simple by a maze of
high-sounding sentiment, was Rationalism pure and simple. Its god was
not the creator of the visible universe, of angels and archangels,
dominions, principalities, and powers, of incalculable natural and
supernatural forces, but a jerky loose-jointed pasteboard divinity,
the exclusive possession, since it is the exclusive invention, of the
Anglo-Saxon race, through whose gaping mouth any and every self-
elected prophet was free to shout, as heaven-descended truth, in the
name of progress and liberty, whatever political or social catchword
chanced to be the fashion of the hour.

Nor did the neo-mystics, whose utterances are also sown broadcast in
contemporary literature and who are so lavish with their offers of
divine enlightenment, please Iglesias any better. For his mind, thanks
to his Latin ancestry, was of the logical order, while a business
training and long knowledge of affairs had taught him the value of
method, giving him an unalterable reverence for fact, and impressing
upon him the existence of law, absolute and immutable, in every
department of nature and of human activity--law, to break which is to
destroy the sequence of cause and effect, and so procure abortion.
Therefore this new school of thinkers--if one can dignify by the name
of thinkers persons of so vague and topsy-turvy a mental habit--
nourishing themselves upon the windy meat of secular and time-exploded
fallacies, upon the temple-sweepings of all the religions, oriental
and occidental, old and new, combined with ill-attested marvels of
modern physical and psychological experiment, were far from commending
themselves to his calm and patient judgment. Such excited persons, as
a slight acquaintance with history proves beyond all question, have
existed in every age; and, suffering from chronic mental dyspepsia,
have ever been liable to mistake the rumblings of internal flatulence
for the Witness of the Spirit. In their current pronouncements
Iglesias met with a wearisome passion for paradox, and an equally
wearisome disposition to hail all eccentricity as genius, all hysteria
as inspiration. While in their exaltation of the "sub-conscious self"
--namely, of those blind movements of instinct and foreboding common
to
the lower animals and to savage or degenerate man alike--as against
the intellect and the reasoned action of the will, he saw a menace to
human attainment, to civilisation--in the best meaning of that word--
to right reason and noble living, which it would be difficult to
overestimate. These good people, while pouring contempt on the body,
and even denying its existence, in point of fact thought and talked
about little else. All of which struck him as not only very tiresome
and very silly, but very dangerous. Modern Protestantism might
eventuate in Rationalism, in a limiting of human endeavour exclusively
to the end of material well-being. But this worship of the pseudo-
sciences, this tinkering at the accepted foundations and accepted
decencies of the social order, this cultivation of intellectual and
moral chaos, could, for the vast majority of its professors at all
events, eventuate only in the mad-house. And to the mad-house, whether
by twentieth-century esoteric airship or occult subway, Dominic
Iglesias had not the very smallest desire to go.

For he had no ambition to be "on time" and up-to-date, to electrify
either himself or his contemporaries by an exhibition of mental
smartness. He merely desired, earnestly yet humbly, to be given grace
to find the road--however archaic in the eyes of the modern world that
road might be--which leads to the light on the far horizon and beyond
to the presence of God. The more he meditated on these things the more
inconceivable it became to him but that this road veritably existed;
and that, not by labour of man, but by everlasting ordinance of God.
It was absurd, in face of a state of being so complex, so highly
organised, so universally subjected to law, as the one in which he
found himself, that a matter of such supreme importance as the channel
of intercourse between the soul and its Maker should have been left to
haphazard accident or blundering of lucky chance. And so, having
supplemented his researches in print, by listening to the discourses
of many teachers, from one end of London to the other in lecture-hall,
chapel, and church, having even stood among the crowds which gather
around itinerant preachers in the Park, Dominic found his thought
fixing itself with deepening assurance upon the communion in which he
had been born and baptised, which his father, in the interests of the
revolutionary propaganda, had so bitterly repudiated, and from which
his mother, broken by the tyranny of circumstance and bodily weakness,
had lapsed.

Outside that communion he beheld only weltering seas of prejudice and
conflicting opinion, heard only the tumult of confused and acrimonious
contest. Within he beheld the calm of fearlessly wielded authority and
of loyal obedience; heard the awed silence of those who worship being
glad. For the Catholic Church, as Iglesias began to understand, is
something far greater than any triumphant example of that which can be
attained by cooperation and organisation. It is not an organisation,
but an organism; a Living Being, perfectly proportioned, with inherent
powers of development and growth; ever-existent in the Divine Mind
before Time was; recipient and guardian of the deepest secrets, the
most sacred mysteries of existence; endlessly adaptable to changing
conditions yet immutably the same. Hence it is that Catholicism
presents no questionable historic pedigree and speaks with no
uncertain voice. Claiming not only to know the road the soul must
tread would it reach the far horizon, but to be the appointed warden
of that same road and sustainer of it, she points with proud
confidence to the vast multitude which, under her guidance, has
joyfully trodden it--a multitude as diverse in gifts and estate, as in
age and race--as proof of the authenticity of her mission to the
toiling and sorrowful children of men.

Yet, since unconditional surrender must ever strike a pretty shrewd
blow at the roots both of personal pride and worldly caution, Dominic
Iglesias hesitated to take the final step and declare himself. To one
who has long lived outside the creeds, and that not ungodly, still
less bestially, it is no light matter to subject attitude of mind and
daily habit to distinct rule. Not only does the natural man rebel
against the apparent limiting of his personal freedom, but the
conventional and sophisticated man fears lest agreement should, after
all, spell weakness, while indifferentism--specially in outward
observances--argues strength. A certain shyness, moreover, withheld
Iglesias, a not unadmirable dread of being guilty of ostentation. It
was so little his custom to obtrude himself, his opinions, and his
needs upon the attention of others, that he was scrupulous and
diffident in the selection of time and place. The affair, however,
decided itself, as affairs usually do when the intention of those
undertaking them is a sincere one--and thus.

The tide of war had begun to turn. Earlier in the week had come the
news of General Cronje's surrender, after the three days' shelling of
his laager at Paardeberg. Hence satisfaction, not only of victory but
of compassion, since a sense of horror had weighed on the hearts of
even the least sentimental at thought of the stubborn thousands,
penned in that flaming rat-trap of the dry river-bed, ringed about by
sun-baked rock and sand and death-belching guns. To-day came news of
the relief of long-beleaguered Ladysmith, and London was shaken by
emotion, under the bleak moisture-laden March sky, the air thick with
the clash of joy-bells, buildings gay with riotous outbreak of many-
coloured flags, the streets vibrant with the tread and voices of
surging crowds.

Iglesias, who early that afternoon had walked Citywards to see the
holiday aspect of the town and glean the latest war news, growing
somewhat weary on his homeward journey of the humours of his fellow-
citizens--which became beery and boisterous as the day drew on--turned
in at the open gates of the Oratory, in passing along the Brompton
Road. His purpose was to gain a little breathing space from the
jostling throng, by standing at the head of the steps under the wide
portico of the great church. Looking westward, above the wedge of mean
and ill-assorted houses that marks the junction of the Fulham and the
Cromwell Roads--the muddy pavements of which, far as the eye carried,
were black with people--the yellowish glare of a pallid sunset spread
itself across the leaden dulness of the sky. The wan and sickly light
touched the architrave and columns of the facade of the great church,
bringing this and the statue of the Blessed Virgin which surmounts it
into a strange and phantasmal relief--a building not material and of
this world, but rather of a city of dreams. To Iglesias it appeared as
though there was an element of menace in that cold and melancholy
reflection of the sunset. It produced in him a sense of insecurity and
distrust, which the roar of the traffic and horseplay of the crowd
were powerless to counteract. London, the monstrous mother, in this
hour of her rejoicing showed singularly unattractive. Her features
were grimed with soot, her dull-hued garments foul with slush, her
gestures were common, her laughter coarse. His soul revolted from the
sight and sound of her; revolted against the fate which had bound him
so closely to her in the past, and which bound him still. The spirit
of her infected even the sky above her, painting it with the sad
colours of perplexity and doubt. He stepped farther back under the
portico, moved by desire to escape from the too insistent thought and
spectacle of her. Doing so, he became aware of music reaching him
faintly from behind the closed doors of the church, fine yet sonorous
harmonies supporting the radiant clarity of a boy's voice.

Then Iglesias understood that he was presented here and immediately
with the moment of final choice. Delay was dishonourable, since it was
nothing less than a shirking of the obligations which his convictions
had created. So there, on the one hand--for so the whole matter
pictured itself to his seeing--was London, the type, as she is in fact
the capital, of the modern world--of its ambitions, material and
social, of its activities, of its amazing association of pleasure and
misery, of the rankest poverty and most plethoric wealth--at once
formless, sprawling, ugly, vicious, while magnificent in intelligence,
in vitality, in display, as in actual area and bulk. On the other
hand, and in the eyes of the majority phantasmal as a city of dreams,
was Holy Church, austere, restrictive, demanding much yet promising
little save clean hands and a pure heart, until the long and difficult
road is traversed which--as she declares--leads to the light on the
far horizon and beyond to the presence of God.

"If one could be certain of that last, then all would be simple and
easy," Iglesias said to himself, looking out over the turbulence of
the streets to the pallid menace of the western sky. "But it is in the
nature of things, that one cannot be certain. Certainty, whether for
good or evil, can only come after the event. One must take the risk.
And the risk is great, almost appallingly great."

For just then there awoke and cried in him all the repressed and
frustrated pride of a man's life--lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes,
overweening ambition of power and place, of cruelty even, of gross
licence and debauch. For the moment he ceased to be an individual,
limited by time and circumstances, and became, in desire, the
possessor of the passions and reckless curiosity of the whole human
race. So that, in imagination he suffered unexampled temptations; and,
in resisting them, flung aside unexampled allurements of grandeur and
conceivable delight. Not what actually was, or ever had been, possible
to and for him, Dominic Iglesias, bank-clerk, assailed him with
provocative vision and voice; but the whole pageant of earthly being,
and the inebriation of it. Nothing less than this did he behold, and
drink of, and, in spirit, repudiate and put away forever, as at last
he pulled open the heavy swing doors and passed into the church.

Within all was dim, mist and incense smoke obscuring the roof of the
great dome, the figures of the kneeling congregation far below showing
small and dark. Only the high altar was ablaze with many lights, in
the centre of which, high-uplifted, encircled by the golden rays of
the monstrance, pale, mysterious, pearl of incalculable price, showed
the immaculate Host.

Quietly yet fearlessly, as one who comes by long-established right,
Dominic walked the length of the nave, knelt devoutly on both knees,
prostrating himself as, long ago, in the days of early childhood his
mother had taught him to do at the Exposition of the Blessed
Sacrament. Now, after all these years--and a sob rose in his throat--
he seemed to feel her hand upon his shoulder, the gentle pressure of
which enjoined deepest reverence. Then rising, he took his place in
the second row of seats on the gospel side, and remained there,
through the concluding acts of the ceremonial, until the silent
congregation suddenly finds voice--penetrated by austere emotion--in
recitation of the Divine Praises.

Some minutes later he knelt in the confessional, laying bare the
secrets of his heart.

Thus did Dominic Iglesias cast off the bondage of that monstrous
mother, London-town, cast off the terror of those unbidden companions,
Loneliness and Old Age, using and, taking the risks, humbly reconcile
himself to Holy Church.




CHAPTER XXIII


Good George Lovegrove wandered solitary in Kensington Gardens. He had
chosen the lower path running parallel with Kensington Gore, which
leads, between flowerborders and thickset belts of shrubbery, from the
Broad Walk to the railings enclosing the open space around the Albert
Memorial. This path, being sheltered and furnished with many green
garden seats, is specially nurse and baby haunted, and it was to see
the babies, whether sturdily on foot or seated in their little
carriages, that George Lovegrove had come hither, being sad. Thrushes
sang lustily from the treetops. The flowerborders grew resplendent
with polyanthus, crocus yellow, purple, and white, with early
daffodils, and the heaven blue of _scilla sibirica_. Above, here
and there a froth of almond or cherry blossom overspread the dark
twigs and branches, while a ruddiness of burgeoning buds flushed the
great elms. But babies of position, looking like tiny pink-faced polar
bears, still wore their long leggings and white furs, the March wind
being treacherous. They galloped, trumpeting, the clean air and merry
sunshine going to their heads in the most inebriating fashion. It was
early, moreover, so that they were full of the energy of a good
night's sleep, of breakfast, and of comfortable nursery warmth. And
George Lovegrove stepped among them carefully, watching their gambols
moist-eyed, nervously anxious lest his quaintly solid figure should
obstruct the erratic progress of toy-horse, or hoop, or ball. He
craved for notice, for even the veriest scrap of friendly recognition,
yet was too diffident to attempt any direct intercourse with these
delectable small personages, who, on their part, were royally
indifferent to his existence so long as he did not get in their way.
This he clearly perceived, yet for it bore them no ill-will,
preferring, as does every truly devout lover, to worship the beloved
from a respectful distance rather than not worship at all.

And it was thus, even as a large and dusky elephant picking its way
very gently through a flock of skippeting and lively lambs, that Mr.
Iglesias, entering the sheltered walk from the far end, first caught
sight of him. To Dominic, it must be admitted, babies, song-birds,
burgeoning buds and blossoms, alike presented themselves as but
elements in the setting of the outward scene--a scene sweet enough had
one leisure to contemplate it, touched by the genial vernal influence,
witness to nature's undying youth. But his appreciation of that
sweetness was just now cursory and indirect. His thought was absorbed
and eager, penetrated by apprehension of matters lying above and
beyond the range of ordinary human speech. For he was in that exalted
interval of a many hours' fast when the spiritual intelligence is
wholly alive and awake, the body becoming but the vesture of the soul
--a vesture without impediment or weight, a beautifully negligible
quantity in the general scheme of existence. Later reaction sets in.
The claims of the body become dominant; and the exalted moment is too
often paid for sorrowfully enough in sluggish brain and irritated
nerves. Dominic, however, had not reached that stage of the
tragi-comedy of the marriage of flesh and spirit. He was happy,
with the white unearthly happiness of those who have been admitted
to the Sacred Mysteries. And it was not without a sense of shock,
as of rough descent to common things, of pity and of regret, that he
recognised good George Lovegrove cruising thus, elephantine, among the
roystering babes. Then Iglesias checked himself sternly. To humble
themselves, remembering their own great unworthiness, to come down
from the Mount of Transfiguration to the dwellers in the plain, and be
gentle and human towards them--this surely is the primary duty of
those who have assisted at the Divine Sacrament? And so Iglesias went
forward and hailed his old school-fellow in all tenderness and
friendship, causing the latter to raise his eyes from pathetic
contemplation of those charming but wholly self-absorbed small human
animals, and look up.

"Dominic!" he cried. "Well, to be sure, you do surprise me. Who would
have expected to meet you out at this hour of the morning? I do
congratulate myself. I am pleased," he said. His honest face beamed,
his fresh colour deepened. As a girl at the unlooked-for advent of her
lover, he grew confused and shy. And Iglesias warmed towards him.
Whimsical in appearance, simple-minded, not greatly skilled in any
sort of learning, yet he had a heart of gold--about that there could
be no manner of doubt.

"Turn back then, and let us walk together," Iglesias said
affectionately. "It is a long while since we have had a quiet talk--
that is, of course, if you have no particular business which calls you
to town."

"I have no business of any description," he answered. "And between
ourselves, Dominic, since I lost my seat on the borough council, I
have had too much time on my hands, I think. It is beginning to be
quite a trouble with me."

"Is life too softly padded, too dead-level easy and comfortable?"
Iglesias inquired. "Are you beginning to quarrel a little with your
blessings?"

George Lovegrove became very serious.

"Yes," he said, "I am afraid you are right. As usual you have laid
your finger on the spot. I do reproach myself for unthankfulness
often. I know I have a good home, and everything decent and
respectable about me; more so, indeed, than a man in my position has
any right to expect. And yet I regret the old days in the city,
Dominic, that I do. I should enjoy to be back at my old desk at the
bank--just the little snap of anxiety in the morning as to whether
one would catch the 'bus; the long ride through the streets with one's
morning paper; the turning out with the other clerks--good fellows all
of them, on the whole, were they not?--to get a snack of lunch. And
then the coming home at night, with some trifling present or dainty to
please the wife; and a look round the greenhouse and garden afterwards
in your lounge suit; and hearing and retailing all the day's news, and
talking of the good time coming when you would retire and be quite the
independent gentleman; and the half-day on Saturday, too, taking some
nice little outing to Richmond or Kew, or an exhibition or something
of the sort, and then the Sunday's rest."

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