Matthew Arnold - "Culture and Anarchy"

Hamlin Garland - "Prairie Folks"

G. A. Henty - "At Agincourt"

Hugh Walpole - "Fortitude"

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 Golden Calf

M >> M. E. Braddon >> The Golden Calf




Here to-night in the dusk, there stood a covered cart of the pedler order
and Vernon, who had been walking on in front with Mr. Jardine, rushed
back to his sister to say that there was a Cheap Jack in front of the
'Royal Oak.'

'Oh, he has been there for a long time--ever since the beginning of the
year,' said Ida; 'he is quite an institution.'

'What's an institution?' asked Vernon.

'Something fixed and lasting, don't you know. I believe he does no end of
good among the villagers--doctoring them, and advising them, and helping
them when they are ill or out of work; but he has a very churlish way
with the gentry. Mr. Mason, our curate, says the man always reminds him
of the Black Dwarf, except that he is not so ugly, nor deformed in any
way.'

'Then he can't be like the Black Dwarf,' said Vernon, who knew almost all
Sir Walter's novels, his sister having read Shakespeare, Scott, and
Dickens to him for hours on end, during the long winter evenings at
Wimperfield.

'Does he live in that cart always?' asked Bessie.

'Not always; he has taken possession of that dilapidated cottage upon the
Hanger, which used to be occupied by Lord Pontifex's gamekeeper, and I
believe he oscillates between the cart and the cottage. I have hardly
seen him, for he is such a morose personage that he always hides when any
of the gentry approach his hut.'

'Sulks in his tent, like Achilles,' said Mr. Jardine.

They were on the edge of the little patch of green by this time.
The cart--painted a lively yellow, and with a little window on each
side--stood in the middle of the green, backed by a clump of tall elms.
There was a little crowd in front of the cart, and a man with a black
beard and a red fez cap was discoursing in a deep, sonorous voice to the
assembly--descanting, with seeming fluency, upon a picture which he held
in his hand, his tawny, gipsy-like face only half shown by the flame of a
flaring naphtha lamp, and his features rendered grotesque by the play of
lights and shadows. The party from the park, however, had very little
opportunity for seeing what manner of man he was; for no sooner did he
catch sight of Mr. Jardine's tail hat over the circle of rustic heads,
than he flung the engraving he had been exhibiting inside the cart,
extinguished his lamp, wished his audience an abrupt good night, and shut
the door of his dwelling upon the outside world.

The rustics gave him a round of applause before they dispersed. The women
and children moved towards the village; the men and lads lingered a
little on the green, irresolute, and then slowly gravitated to the 'Royal
Oak,' touching their hats as they passed the gentlefolks. Mr. Jardine
stopped one of the men midway.

'A curious customer that,' he said, looking towards the cart.

'Yes, sir, so he be; but rale right down clever.'

'Was he trying to sell you that picture?'

'No, sir; him don't often sell things to we; sometimes him do--knives,
and comforters, and corderoy waistcoats, and flannel shirts, and such
like, and oncommon good they be, too, and oncommon cheap. He wor givin'
we a bit of a lecture loike, on lions and tigers, and ryenosed-horses,
and such-loike beasts, and on they queer creatures wot lived before the
flood. Lord! there was one beast with a long neck, and paddles for
swimmin' with, as made we all ready to bust with laughin' when him showed
us the pictur' of his skeleton.'

'Does he often give you a lecture of that kind?'

'Yes, sir; him do lecture we about all manner o' things--flowers, and
ferns, and insects--kindness to hanimals--hinstinct in dogs--Lord knows
what; but he have a way of makin' it all go down--much better nor parson;
and ha allus gets a good laugh out o' we. And when there's any on us ill,
or out o' work, then Cheap Jack be a real good friend, and very ready
with the brass.'

'But can he afford to help you? is he so much better off than you are?'

'Well, sir, you see him haven't got no missus nor young 'uns, and I
fancy him's got a few pounds saved in a old stocking. Him don't drink,
nayther--not so much as a mug o' beer.'

'Is he a native of these parts?'

'Lor no, sir, turn's a furriner; why, his skin's as brown as a berry!'

'Is he a gipsy, do you think?'

'I ain't sure o' that, but him can talk their patter; and when the
gipsies come this way him and them is as thick as thaves.'

'I see--half a gipsy and half a foreigner, and altogether a rover, I
suppose. Well, I'm glad he gives you a little instruction and amusement
now and then, and I hope he'll find the way to keep you out of the
public-house,' said Mr. Jardine.

'Why, you see, parson, a man must have his mug o' beer; but it's summot
to the good if he don't sit down over it and make it three or four mugs
o' beer. There ain't been so much sitting down since Cheap Jack corned
among us.'

'Isn't that a desolate hovel up on the hill where he lives sometimes?'

'It was oncommon deserlate till Cheap Jack took it in hand there ain't a
owl in the wood that would have liked to live in it; but Jack hammers a
bit of wood here, and a plank there, and a bit o' matting up agen the
walla, and puta in a stove from Petersfield, and makes it as snug as a
burd's nest. I've smoked many a pipe with him alongside that stove, and
drank many a cup o' coffee. That's Jack's drink--not a drain o' beer or
sperrits ever goes inside o' he.'

'That accounts for the money in the stocking,' said Bessie.

The rustic shook his head dubiously.

'Him ain't got no childer,' he said. 'It's them as makes the coin go.'

'I wish he'd come out again and go on lecturing,' exclaimed Vernon, with
an aggrieved air. 'I do so want to hear him.'

'Oh, but him won't show the end of his nose now you're here, Sir Vernon,'
answered the rustic. 'Him can't abide gentlefolks. Parson ha' tried his
hardest to get round he, but Jack shuts the door in parson's face. Him
don't want nothing of 'em, and don't want their company.'

'A natural corollary,' said Mr. Jardine, laughing. 'But I'm afraid your
friend is a desperate radical.'

'Well, I don't know, sir. Him don't speak hard agen the Queen; him don't
want to do away with soldiers and sailors, like grocer down street; and
though Jack don't go to church, Jack reads his Bible, and holds by his
Bible. I fancy as some rich gentleman must ha' done he a great injury
once upon a time, and that it turned he agen the breed.'

'Very like the Black Dwarf,' said Mr. Jardine to Ida. 'I daresay I shall
hear of your playing the part of Isabella Vere, and interviewing this
half-savage, half-Christian recluse. But do you mean to tell me that he
has lived here six months, within a mile and a half of your house, and
you have never seen him?'

'It is a fact. You had a specimen of his manners just now. Whenever I
have passed his cottage he has shut the door or the window in my face, if
he happened to be standing at either. To Mr. Mason he has been absolutely
rude.'

'It isn't every man who appreciates the privilege of being interviewed by
a parson,' said John Jardine.

'Oh, Jack,' cried Bessie! 'all your people love to see you at their
doors.'

'Yes, they are a sociable lot. That comes from living on Salisbury Plain,
far from the madding crowd.'

After this they went home, watching the golden summer moon rise above the
pine-clad Hanger as they went. They found Lady Palliser nodding in her
arm-chair in front of the low tea table, the teapot still intact. It was
ten o'clock, but Brian had not come in to talk to her after her tea. John
Jardine went in quest of him, and found him in the dining-room, mooning
over his wine. He murmured a vague excuse about feeling too tired to talk
to anybody, and then bade Mr. Jardine good night, and vent up to his
room; not to sleep, but to fling the window wide open, and lean his
elbows on the sill, and stare out into the exquisite summer night, the
leafy wood, the moon-kissed crest of the hill, in a half-dreamy,
half-hysterical state of mind.

'I begin to think I am like Swift, and shall go first at top,' he said to
himself; 'this quiet life is killing; and yet if I was to go back I
should be worse. The nights in Elm Court, when I went home alone after a
glorious evening, were devilish.




CHAPTER XXV.


'MY SEED WAS YOUTH, MY CROP WAS ENDLESS CAKE.'

Mr. and Mrs. Jardine went back to their Wiltshire parsonage after a two
days' visit, and Ida had her boy all to herself. His education, from a
classical and mathematical point of view, had only begun when he went to
John Jardine; but the foundations of education, the development of
thought and imagination had begun long ago at Les Fontaines, when Ida and
he took their long wintry rambles together, and the girl talked to the
child of all things in heaven and earth, imparting in the easiest way
much of that information which she had acquired as pupil and teacher in
the educational mill at Mauleverer. Beyond learning to read and to write,
and the most elementary forms of arithmetic, this oral instruction was
all the education which Vernie had received up to the time of his leaving
home; but then what a large range of information can be imparted by an
intelligent woman who reads a great deal, and who reads with the
student's deep love of knowledge. Vernon, without being a prodigy, like
the infant Goethe, or that wondrous product of paternal scholarship, John
Stuart Mill, knew more about things in general, from the course of the
planets to the constitution of the glowworms in the hedges, than many
full-grown undergraduates. Flowers and ferns, shells and minerals, had
been his playthings. His sister had taught him the nature and attributes
of all the animals and birds he loved, or slaughtered; and then his
imagination had been fed upon Shakespeare and Scott, Dickens and
Goldsmith. He had derived his first vivid impressions of history from
Shakespeare and Scott, his knowledge of a wide range of life outside his
own home from Dickens; and with that knowledge a quickened sympathy with
the joys and sorrows of the humbler classes. All that Vernon knew of the
struggles of the lower middle classes was derived from that great
panorama of life which Charles Dickens painted for us. His own small
experiences of village life had taught the boy very little; for he had
only seen the rustic from that outside and smoothly varnished aspect
which the tiller of the soil presents to the squire.

And now the boy had come home, after an absence of some months, and he
wanted to absorb Ida from morning till night She must walk and drive with
him, read to him, play with him, be interested in his dogs, his guns, his
fishing-tackle, every detail of his busy young life.

Ida was never happier than when thus occupied. The boy seemed to her the
incarnate spirit of youth, and joy, and hope, and all those bright
impulses which wear out in ourselves at so early a stage of life's
journey that we are very glad to taste them vicariously in the unspoiled
ardour of childhood. To be with Vernon was to escape from the narrowness
of her own fettered life, to forget its disappointments, its
disillusions, its one deep incurable regret--regret for her own mad
folly, which had bartered freedom for a sordid hope--folly as mad as
Esau's when he sold his birthright--regret for him who loved her too
late.

Unhappily, even her unselfish delight in her brother's society was not
unalloyed with pain. She never forgot her duty as a wife, nor failed in
any act of attention to her husband. And yet Brian's morbid jealousy of
the boy was but too evident. He rarely spoke of Vernon without a sneer,
when he and his wife were alone; although he was careful not to say
anything uncivil before Lady Palliser. He scoffed at the little lad's
position, as if it had been an offence in the child himself--called him
the microscopic baronet, the baby thane, laughed with bitterest laughter
at any little touch of arrogance which clouded the natural sweetness of
the boy's character.

Ida endured this morbid jealousy with a patience that was almost heroic.
She saw that her husband was ill, and that this mysterious malady of his,
which had at first seemed to her sheer hypochondriasis, was only too
real. It was a malady which affected the mind more than the body. Brian's
character had undergone a complete change since his illness. He who had
been of old so easy-tempered, so lively, was now melancholy and
irritable, at times garrulous to a degree that was painful to his
hearers, keenly resentful of trifles, always fancying himself neglected
or slighted.

In vain did Lady Palliser and Ida urge the necessity of medical advice.
Brian obstinately refused to see the local apothecary; and, as there was
nothing tangible in his illness and he was able to be about all day, to
go out of doors, and do pretty much as he pleased, there was no excuse
for calling in the doctor without his permission.

'If I felt that I wanted advice, I would go up to town and see Mallison,'
he said; 'but there is nothing amiss with me, except a disappointed life.
I begin to feel that I am a failure. Other fellows of my age have passed
me in the race; and it is hard at nine-and-twenty to feel oneself
beaten.'

'But, Brian,' his wife answered gently, 'don't you think if your
contemporaries have outstripped you, it is because they have tried harder
than you? Remember what St. Paul says about the one who obtaineth the
prize.'

'For Heaven's sake, don't preach!' cried Brian, irritably. I tell you I
tried hard enough; tried--yes, slaved night after night; scribbling
articles for those infernal magazines, to get my manuscript returned with
thanks after nearly a twelve-month's detention; spelling over dry-as-dust
briefs for a guinea fee, in order to post up some bloated Queen's
Counsel, who treated me as if I were dirt, and pretended not to know my
name. I tell you, Ida, the Bar is a sickening profession; literature is
worse; all the professions are played out, Europe is overcrowded with
educated men; they swarm like aphides in a hot summer--your single fly
the progenitor of a quintillion of living creatures. When I see the men
in their wigs and gowns, hurrying up and down the Temple courts, swarming
on all the staircases, choking up the doors of the law-courts, they
remind me of the busy, hungry creatures on an ant-heap.

"Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys, Every gate
is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow."

He was walking up and down the room in an agitated way, angry, excited
beyond the occasion.

'But in your case, Brian, it seems to me that the path has been made so
smooth. With such an independence as ours, it must be so easy to get on.'

'I thank you for reminding me how much I owe your father,' sneered her
husband.

'I was not thinking especially of my father. You owe as much to your
cousin.'

'Yes, my cousin has been vastly generous--damnably generous; but if I had
married any other woman, do you suppose he would have done as much? Of
course, I know it was for your sake he gave me that income. Was he ever
so liberal before, do you think? No, he dribbled out an occasional
hundred or two when I was up a tree, but nothing more. It was for your
sake his purse-strings relaxed.'

'You have no right to say that,' Ida answered indignantly. 'I have a
right to say what I think to my wife. I have not forgotten what you said
to me at the hotel that day. You told me to my face that you loved
another man. Do you think I was such a dullard as not to guess that man's
name? You fell in love with Wendover of the Abbey, before you saw him;
and your innocent love for the shadow grew into guilty love for the man,
after you were my wife. I knew all about it; but I was not going to let
you give me the slip. I have known all along that I am nothing to you,
that you despise me, detest me, perhaps; and that knowledge has made me
what I am--a broken, blighted man, a wreck, at nine-and-twenty.'

'Oh, Brian, this is too cruel! Have I ever failed in my duty to you?'

'Damn duty!' cried Brian, savagely. 'I wanted your love, not your
duty--love such as I thought you gave me in those autumn days by the
river. Great God, how happy I was in those days! I hadn't a sixpence; I
was up to my eyes in debt; but I thought you loved me, and that we were
going to be happy in our garret till good fortune tumbled down the
chimney.'

'I don't think a garret would have suited you long, Brian, had I been
ever so devoted. You are too much of a sybarite.'

'I should have been happy with you. I should have thought myself in Eden.
Well, fate never meant me to be happy. I am a wretch, judged before I was
born, foredoomed to misery in this world and the next. Yes, I begin to
think Calvin was right--there are some creatures predestined to
damnation. Before ever the stars spun into their places, when all the
suns and moons and planets were rings of fiery gas revolving in space, my
doom was already written in the book of fate.

It had been a common thing of late for Brian to ramble on in such
despondent strains as these, half angry, half despairing. Ida was
supremely patient with him, sometimes soothing him, sometimes arguing
with him; yet hardly knowing how much of his talk arose from real gloom
of mind, or how much was sheer rhodomontade. The hours which she spent
with him were intensely painful, and as the days went by he became more
and more exacting, more and more resentful of her absence, and grudgingly
jealous of Vernon.

Another cause for pain was Ida's growing conviction that her husband's
frequent doses of soda and brandy, and the champagne which he drank at
dinner, and the port or Burgundy which he took after dinner, had a great
deal to do with his altered mental condition. Painful as it was to speak
of such a thing, she took courage one morning, and told him plainly that
she believed he was suffering from, the effect of habitual--almost
unconscious--intemperance.

'You are taking soda and brandy all day long. You have brandy in your
bedroom at night, Brian,' she said. 'I am sure you can have no idea how
much you take in the course of the twenty-four hours.'

'I have no idea that I am a drunkard, if that's what you mean,' he
answered, white with rage; and then he burst into a torrent of
abuse--such language as she had never heard from mortal lips until that
hour, and his wife fled, shuddering and terror-stricken, from the room.

When next they met he cowed before her with a craven air, and made no
allusion to this scene. But after this she observed that he pretended to
drink less, and had a crafty way of getting his glass refilled at dinner.
He no longer kept a brandy bottle on the table beside his bed, as he had
done heretofore, on the pretence that a little weak brandy and water
helped him to sleep, nor did the soda-water bottles and spirit decanter
adorn one of the tables in his study; but more than once his wife met him
creeping to the dining-room with a stealthy air to supply himself at the
sideboard, and when she went into his room at night to see if he slept,
his fevered breath reeked of brandy. It seemed to her later, as time went
on, that even his garments exhaled spirituous odours.

It was not long after this that he began to talk mysteriously of some
trouble which menaced him, which gradually took the shape of a criminal
prosecution overhanging him. He had been falsely accused of some awful
crime--some nameless, unspeakable offence--hateful as the gates of hell.
He was innocent, but his enemies were legion; and at any moment a
detective might be sent to Wimperfield to arrest him. One evening, in
the summer twilight after dinner, he took it into his head that one of
the footmen--a man whose face ought to have been thoroughly familiar to
him--was a detective in disguise. He flew at the worthy young fellow in a
furious rage, and the butler had hard work to prevent his doing poor John
Thomas a mischief. But when the lamps were brought in, Brian perceived
his mistake, and apologised to the footman for his violence.

'You don't know what devils those detectives are,' he said,
deprecatingly; 'they can make themselves look like anybody. And if they
once get hold of me, the case will be tried at Westminster Hall. It will
take weeks to try, and all the Bar will be engaged; and then it will have
to go to the House of Lords. There has not been such a case within the
last century. All Europe will ring with it.'

'Dear Brian, I am sure this is a delusion of yours,' said Ida, trying to
soothe him; 'you cannot have done anything so wicked.'

'Done! no, I am as innocent as a baby; but the whole Bar--the Bench
too--is in league against me. They'll make out their case, depend upon
it. "It's a case for a jury;" that's what the Lord Chancellor said when I
told him about it.'

After this there could be no doubt that there was actual mental
disturbance. Lady Palliser sent for the local medical man, who had very
little difficulty in diagnosing the case. Sleeplessness, restless nights,
tossing from side to side, an utter inability to keep still, horrible
dreams, impaired vision, clouds floating before the eyes,--these symptoms
Mr. Fosbroke heard from the wife. The patient himself was obstinately
silent about his sensations, declared that there was nothing the matter
with him, and let the doctor know he considered his visit an impertinent
intrusion.

'I had a touch of brain fever early in the year,' he said. 'I had the
best advice in London during my illness, and afterwards. I know exactly
how to treat myself. The symptoms which alarm my wife are nothing but the
natural reaction after a severe shock to the nervous system. The tonics I
am taking will soon pull me up again; but as I am now under a special
treatment by Dr. Mallison, of Harley Street, you will under, stand that I
don't care about further advice.'

'Undoubtedly,' replied the medical man, meekly. 'But I believe it would
be a satisfaction to Lady Palliser and to Mrs. Wendover both if you would
do me the honour to consult me, and allow me to look after you while you
are here, I could place myself under Dr. Mallison's instructions, if you
like.'

'No, there is no necessity. I tell you I know exactly what is amiss, and
how to manage my own health.'

Mr. Fosbroke argued the point, but in vain. Brian would not even allow
him to feel his pulse. But the doctor knew very well what was amiss, and
told Mrs. Wendover, with delicate circumlocution, that her husband was
suffering from an imprudent use of stimulants for some time past.

'That is what I feared,' said Ida; but it is too dreadful. It is the very
last thing I expected. I thought nobody drank nowadays.'

'Very few people get drunk, my dear Mrs. Wendover,' replied the doctor;
'but, unhappily, though there is very little drunkenness, there is a
great deal of what is called "pegging"--an intermittent kind of tippling
which goes on all day long, beginning very early and ending very late. A
man, whose occupation in life is headwork, begins to think he wants a
stimulant--begins by having his brandy and soda at twelve o'clock
perhaps; then finds he can't get on without it after eleven; then takes
it before breakfast--in lieu of breakfast; and goes on with brandy and
soda at intervals till dinner-time. At dinner he has no appetite, tries
to create one with a bottle of dry champagne, eats very little, but dines
on the champagne, feels an unaccountable depression of spirits later on
in the evening, and takes more brandy, without soda this time; and so on,
and so on; till, after a period of sleeplessness, he begins to have ugly
dreams, then to see waking visions, hear imaginary voices, stumble upon
the edge of an imaginary precipice. If he is an elderly man he gets shaky
in the lower limbs, then his hands become habitually tremulous,
especially in the early morning, when he is like a figure hung on
wires--and so on, and so on; and unless he pulls himself up by a great
moral effort, the chances are that he will have a sharp attack of
_delirium tremens_.'

'You do not fear such an attack for my husband?

'Mr. Wendover is a young man, but he has evidently abused his
constitution; there is no knowing what may happen if you don't take care
of him. Alcohol is a cumulative poison, and that "pegging" I have told
you of is diabolical. Nature throws off an over-dose of alcohol, but the
daily, hourly dose eats into the system.'

'How am I to take care of him?' asked Ida, despairingly.

'You must keep wine and spirits away from him, except in extreme
moderation.'

'What! speak to the butler? Tell him that my husband is a drunkard?'

'You need not go quite so far as that, but it will be necessary to cut
off the supplies somehow, and to substitute a nourishing diet for
stimulants.'

'Yes, if he could eat: but he has no appetite--he eats hardly anything.'

'Unhappily, that is one of the symptoms of his disease, and the most
difficult to overcome. But you must do your utmost to make him eat, and
to prevent his getting brandy. A little light claret or Rhine wine may be
allowed; nothing more. I will send you a sedative which you can give him
at bedtime.'

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