Charles Bennett - "The Frog Who Would A Wooing Go"

Ferdinand Raimund - "Der Diamant des Geisterkoenigs"

Arthur Scott Bailey - "The Tale of Mrs. Ladybug"

William Henry Gladstone - "The Hawarden Visitors' Hand Book"

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 Great Amulet

M >> Maud Diver >> The Great Amulet




He went forward at length, but so noiselessly that Honor had no idea of
his presence till his arms came round her from behind, and drew her up
so close against him that her wet cheek touched his own.

"Theo . . . that wasn't fair!" she protested with a little broken laugh.

"Not quite. But I couldn't resist it."

Then they stood silent, looking down at the sleeping child.

He lay on his back, one half-opened hand flung high above his head, and
the fair soft face, in its halo of red-gold hair, bore the impress of
the angelic, that only comes with sleep, and vanishes like magic at the
lifting of the eyelids.

Suddenly Desmond tightened his hold of her, and by a mutual impulse
their lips met.



[1] Headman.




CHAPTER XVII.

"Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; and the battle goes
sore against us to the going down of the sun."--R.L.S.


The rain, which had set in with such quiet determination at sunset,
fulfilled its promise of continuing through the night: and the
pattering on the slates that had mingled with Quita's latest thoughts
greeted her, with derisive iteration, when she opened her eyes next
morning. But its power to thwart her was at an end. Now that daylight
was come, nothing short of a landslip could withhold her from the thing
she craved. The thought leaped in her brain before she was fully
awake. "And after all, why should I wait till the afternoon," was her
practical conclusion. "I'll go down at eleven."

With that she sprang out of bed, and slipping on a dull blue
dressing-gown, hurried into the dining-room, where she and Michael
always met for _chota hazri_.

Here she found him, in Japanese smoking suit and slippers, smiling
contentedly over an item of his early post.

"What's pleasing you, _mon cher_?" she asked absently, depositing a
light kiss on his hair. For a woman in love--and a man no less--is as
royally indifferent to the joys and sorrows of all creation as
childhood itself.

"A letter from my pretty Puritan. It is not for nothing that she has
those straight brows, and that small resolute chin. She will not be
thrust down any man's throat for all the hen-sparrows in Christendom!"

"Why--what does she say?" Quita asked, peering critically into the
teapot, and wondering how it would feel to pour out Eldred's early tea!

"Listen then; and judge for yourself:

"'DEAR MR MAURICE,---There seems to have been an unlucky
misunderstanding between you and mother yesterday. But I hope this
need not make any real difference in our friendship. Because I think
we have always understood each other, haven't we? Of course if my
parents prefer that we should not be about together quite so much,
there is no help for it. But at least I would like you to know that I
am still, as I always have been, your friend (if you wish it)

"'ELSIE MAYHEW.'"


"_Tiens_! How is that for your 'child of twenty'? It is the letter of
a woman; and a woman with an exquisite sense of her own dignity into
the bargain."

Quita smiled thoughtfully as she buttered her toast.

"I am wondering how she would have answered if you had asked her," was
all she said. "I don't feel quite so certain as I did last night."

"_Ni moi non plus_. Which makes the situation just twice as
interesting. For all the Button Quail's beak and claws, I fancy I
shall see more of my Undine yet!"

With a chuckle of satisfaction, he fell to re-reading Elsie's note: and
Quita, immersed in her own affairs, promptly forgot them both.

An hour later she reappeared--her whole face and form radiating the
light within; went straight to her easel, flung aside its draperies,
and surveying her work of the previous day, found it very good. But
there were certain lines and shadows that displeased her critical eye.
She would study his face afresh this morning, with the twofold
appreciation of heart and brain, and surprise him with the picture when
it was nearer completion.

Just then the bearer, entering, handed her a note. She opened it
eagerly--recognising Eldred's handwriting--and read, with a
bewilderment bordering on despair, the stoical statement of facts set
down by Lenox in the first bitterness of disappointment, ten hours ago.
The shock staggered her like a blow between the eyes. Her lips parted
and closed on a soundless exclamation. The abrupt change in her face
was as if a light had been suddenly blown out.

"_Mon Dieu_, . . . cholera!" she murmured helplessly, putting one hand
over her eyes as if to shut out the horror of it. "This is my
punishment for ever having let him go."

Then, as if in hope of discovering some mitigation of her sentence, she
re-read the short letter, lingering on the last paragraph, which alone
contained some ray of comfort, some assurance of the strong love that
was at once the cause and the anodyne of their mutual pain.


"And now, my dearest" (Lenox wrote), "what more can I say, except--be
of good courage, and write to me often. The rest, and there's a good
deal of it, can't be put upon paper. That's the curse of separation.
Start a picture, and throw your heart into your work, as I must into
mine. God knows when I shall see you again. But trust me, Quita, as
soon as ever I can, and dare, to put an end to this intolerable state
of things.--Till then, and always, your devoted husband,----E. L."


It was the first time he had signed himself thus: and the envelope was
addressed 'Miss Maurice'! The irony of it cut her to the quick. Tears
of self-pity, flooding her eyes, startled her back to reality; and sent
her stumbling towards her own room. But before she could reach it,
Michael's voice arrested her.

"Come on, Quita," he shouted good-humouredly. "Where _are_ you off to?
I want my breakfast."

She turned upon him a face distorted with grief.

"_Parbleu, cherie, qu'y-a-t'il a maintenant_?" he demanded, with an odd
mingling of irritation and concern.

"Cholera at Dera Ishmael--Eldred's gone down this morning. . . ." Then
tears overwhelmed her, and he turned sharply away. "Oh go, . . . go,
and have your breakfast, Michel; and let me be. I want nothing,
nothing, but to be left alone."

And vanishing into her room, she bolted the door behind her.

Maurice frowned, and sighed. In all his knowledge of her, Quita had
never so completely lost her self-control. It was quite upsetting: and
he disliked being upset the first thing in the morning. It put him out
of tune for the rest of the day. But after all . . one must eat. And
he retraced his steps to the dining-room.

"I wish to heaven she had never discovered this uncomfortable husband
of hers!" he reflected as he went "Since he will neither marry her, nor
leave her alone; and it is we who have to suffer for his heroics!"

For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten
o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him:--a wrinkled hag, whom
he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a
towering load of grass, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers
relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a
goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise,
interset with three plaques of beaten silver;--the only form of savings
bank known to these simple children of the hills.

While hastily demolishing his breakfast, Maurice visualised his picture
in every detail: and with the arrival of his model all thought of Quita
and her woes was crowded out of his mind. Yet the man was not
heartless, by any means. He was simply an artist of the extreme type,
endowed by temperament with the capacity for subordinating all
things,--his own griefs no less than the griefs of others,--to one
dominant, insatiable purpose. And according to his lights he must be
judged.


Quita remained invisible till lunch-time, lying inert, where she had
flung herself, upon her unmade bed.

The first tempest of misery, and rebellion, and self-castigation had
given place to sheer exhaustion. For even suffering has its
limitations; which is perhaps the reason why grief rarely kills. All
the springs of life seemed suddenly to have run down. Her spirit felt
crushed and broken by the obstructiveness of all about her. The strain
of the past three weeks, following upon a severe shock, had told upon
her more than she knew; and this morning's sharp revulsion of feeling
brought her near to purely physical collapse.

And while she lay alone through two endless hours, tracing designs from
the cracks in the whitewashed wall, one conviction haunted her with
morbid persistence. Because she had not valued him in the beginning,
because she had repudiated him in a moment of wounded pride, he would
be taken from her, now that heart and soul were set upon him, and she
would never see him again. It was useless to argue that the idea was
childish; a mere nightmare of overwrought nerves. It persisted and
prevailed, till she felt herself crushed in the grip of a relentless,
impersonal Force, against which neither penitence nor tears would avail.

Finally, worn out with pain and rebellion, she fell asleep.




BOOK III.-THE TENTS OF ISHMAEL.


CHAPTER XVIII.

"Leave the what at the what's-its-name,
Leave the sheep without shelter;
Leave the corpse uninterred,
Leave the bride at the altar."
--Kipling.


Even in a land where danger and discomfort flourish like the ungodly,
that journey from the cedar-crowned Himalayas to the white hot flats of
the Derajat, with the Punjab furnace in full swing, was an experience not
readily forgotten by the three who set out upon it in the dripping grey
dawn of a July morning. Before them stretched two nights and three days
of pure martyrdom, aggravated by that prince of evils--a troubled mind:
for the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing
realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months
stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on
earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of
responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that
constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim
foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential
progress into a land of fire and death.

Throughout their fifty mile descent to the foot-hill terminus it rained
perseveringly. But toward evening the clouds parted, and an hour of
sunshine set the drenched earth steaming like a soup kettle when the lid
is lifted off. Desmond had ordained that Lenox and his wife should be
carried down in doolies; an indignity to which they submitted under
protest: and Honor, scrambling out of her prison through an opening level
with the ground, passed quite gratefully from its stuffy twilight,
redolent of sodden canvas and humanity, to the smell of hot wood and
leather that pervaded the sun-saturate railway carriage awaiting them in
Pathankot station.

With the unhurried deftness of an experienced pilgrim, she set about
making the place cooler, and more habitable; drew up all the
window-shutters; opened her bedding roll; and taking possession of Lenox,
established him, with tender imperiousness, in the least stifling corner,
a pillow set lengthways behind him. He leaned against it, and closed his
eyes.

"Head bad?" she asked a little anxiously. For the concussion headache is
no child's play, and ten hours in a doolie might breed neuralgia in a
cannon-ball.

"Pretty average. Nothing to trouble about." The assurance was not
convincing: and she gleaned the truth from two deep lines in his forehead.

"I'm going to make you some tea in a minute," she announced cheerfully,
opening her basket, and clamping a travelling spirit-lamp to the woodwork
above the seat. "Real tea. Not the stewed leaves and water we should
pay six annas for outside! There's half a dozen of soda, three pints of
champagne, a fowl, and an aspic in the icebox under your seat. But tea
would be best now. We'll keep the rest for your dinners."

He opened his eyes and smiled at her.

"You've a remarkable talent for spoiling a man!"

"It's one I'm very proud of," she answered simply: and leaning out of the
open doorway, caught sight of her husband striding down the platform,
closely followed by an army of coolies, two bearers, and two
pessimistic-looking dogs on chains. "Theo," she called, "do leave that
eternal luggage to Amar Singh, and come and be spoilt! We're going to
have tea."

Before the train jolted out of the station, she had served it to them in
large cups, an insubstantial biscuit in each saucer: for it is drink, not
food, that a man wants when the thermometer stands at 110 degrees in the
shade.

At Umritsur the train halted for half an hour. The thermometer had not
fallen with the sun; and when the faint breeze of their going died down,
there seemed to be no air left to breathe.

Lenox dined regally out of the ice-box: while Desmond and Honor,
silencing his protests by flight, carried off iced soda and a
whisky-flask to the frowsy, airless refreshment room, where they wrestled
undismayed with curried kid, the ubiquitous chicken cutlet, and two
plates of discoloured water,--flavoured with _jharron_,[1]--that
masqueraded as clear soup. Two quarrelsome Eurasians shared their table.
A punkah that may once have been white waggled officiously overhead. But
for all that the flies were lords of the meal; and enjoyed it far better
than those who paid for it.

"Thank God for my good dinner!" Desmond muttered with a wry face as he
put down his money. "_You_ must supplement it out of Lenox's rations,
old lady. _Hukm hai . . . sumja_?" [2]

She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Having won the victory that
mattered, she could afford to be submissive over trifles.

An hour or so before midnight, they clanked into Lahore station--a
big-bastioned building, whose solid masonry breathed fire, as literally
as any dragon of romance. Within was a great darkness, partially
dispelled by hanging oil-lamps; and babel enough to wake the Seven
Sleepers. The uninitiated arriving at an Indian railway station are apt
to imagine that a riot of some sort must be in progress. But it is only
the third-class passenger, whose name is legion, fighting, tooth and
nail, for the foot of space due to every possessor of the precious morsel
of cardboard tucked into the folds of his belt: because he knows, from
harsh experience, that when the train moves on more than a few will be
left disconsolate, to watch its unwinking eye vanish out of their
ken:--bewildered adventurers, for many of whom the "fire-carriage" still
remains a new-fangled god, who feeds on coal and water, and can only be
propitiated by repeated offerings of that wonder-working hieroglyph--the
tikkut.

At Lahore passengers to Dera change into the night mail for Mooltan: and
almost before the train drew up Desmond was out on the platform, pushing
his way, purposefully, through a mass of jostling, shouting, perspiring
humanity:--Sikhs, Punjabi farmers, moneylenders, 'fat and scant of
breath,' women of all ages, with apathetic babies, in round cap and
necklet, astride upon their hips. In the station-master's office he
found the fateful red envelope awaiting him; and broke the seal with a
shaking hand.


"Crisis over. Condition more hopeful. Will wire Jhung."


"Thank God!" he muttered, choking down a lump that had risen in his
throat. Then, elbowing his way back to where Honor and Lenox stood guard
over a disordered pile of luggage, he thrust the paper into her hand.

"We'll bring him round between us, you and I," he said, as she looked up;
and she nodded contentedly, her eyes deep in his. He could no longer
regret having given way to her; and she knew it!

They were not the only English passengers in the Mooltan train. Two Dera
subalterns, who had fled posthaste from Simla, stood smoking outside
their carriage:--Hodson, the 'slacker' of the Battery, a small sallow
individual, with heavy-lidded eyes, and a disagreeable mouth; and Major
Olliver's 'sub,' Bobby Nixon, who answered indiscriminately to half a
dozen names, but was officially registered as The Chicken, a tribute to
his cheerful lack of wisdom, worldly or otherworldly, and to the sparse
crop of 'down' that surmounted an extensive freckled face, and shadowed a
mouth whose one beauty lay in its readiness to smile capaciously upon the
world at large.

As Honor and Lenox came towards him, the said mouth screwed itself into a
low whistle.

"Great Scott, Mrs Desmond, . . but this is flagrant heroism! Who'd have
dreamt of meeting _you_ here?"

"A pleasant surprise, I hope," she asked, smiling, as they shook hands.

"Why, of course it's always good to see you," the boy answered, looking
upon her with frank admiration. "And you bet we're proud to have our
ladies facing the music with us. But still . . cholera's cholera; and it
looks like a record year. They've got it hot and strong at Mian Mir.
Two of the Norfolks came down the hill with us, swearing like Billy O.
Been up less than a fortnight; and there's a masked ball on at the Club
to-morrow. Oh Lord, it's a lively country! Poor old Hodson only got a
week in Simla; and he has fever on him still."

Lenox glanced quizzically at the man he desired to weed out of his
beloved Battery by the simple means of making him work.

"Hard luck," he remarked; a suspicion of irony in his tone. And Hodson,
anathematising under his breath India in general, and the Frontier in
particular, strolled off down the platform, head in air. There was
little love lost between him and a commandant for whom work was the
backbone of life.

Just then, through the open windows of the next carriage, there came
forth a voice of thunder--articulate, unparliamentary thunder: and Lenox,
with a touch of friendly authority, drew Honor farther away.

"That's old Buckstick," Bobby explained genially. "Giving it to his poor
devil of a bearer, because he wants to hit out at some one. They say in
the regiment that some fool of a palmist told him to beware of cholera;
and I believe the old chap's in a blue funk. Queer thing, funk. Put
that man on an unbroken horse, or in the thick of a hand-to-hand
scrimmage, and he wouldn't know the meaning of fear. Yet now . . ."

His dissertation was interrupted by the appearance at the window of
Colonel Stanham Buckley of the Punjab Infantry, who mopped a moist bald
head, and inquired picturesquely of a passing official when the blank
this blankety blank train was supposed to start. Then catching sight of
a woman's figure, he vanished, with a final incoherent explosion,
slamming up the window-shutter behind him.

How the devil, he asked himself furiously, should a sane man expect
to find an Englishwoman hanging about Lahore station on a murderous
night of July? The idea that she might be travelling to Dera never
entered his head. His own wife, after five years of Frontier
vicissitudes,--aggravated by debt, and the tyranny of 'little drinks at
mess,'--had developed pronounced views on the duties of motherhood.
These had led to a house in Surrey, which, for one reason or another, it
had never yet seemed feasible to give up: and Buckley had consoled
himself after the fashion of his kind, with hard drinking, hard riding,
and hard swearing,--the only form of Trinity recognised by a certain type
of man.

And as he opened his ice-box, and helped himself to a stiff 'nightcap'
before turning in, Desmond joined the group outside.

"Come on, you two," he said, grasping an arm of each, "Dogs and luggage,
and carriage all square. We shall be off in a minute. Only half an hour
behind time! See you again at Chichawutni, Nick. Don't lie too flat,
and get apoplexy. We can't afford to lose willing men!"

They met again, all six of them, on the Chichawutni platform, in a dry
hot dawn; for they were nearing the desolation of the Sindh Sagar desert,
where the monsoon is a negligible quantity. Lenox, who had neither slept
nor smoked all night, looked rather more ragged than usual in the clear
light; but otherwise seemed to be bearing the journey well. 'Old
Buckstick,' as he had been christened by irreverent juniors, raised his
hat to Honor from a distance; and wondered what the hell women of that
sort were made of.

Early breakfast over, they set out upon a six hours' tonga drive to
Jhung; an isolated civil station fifty miles off the line of rail.
Tortured India was already awake and astir; and along an interminable
road of fine white dust, covered with straw, they sped at a hand-gallop
between converging lines of sheesham-trees, with clank and rattle and
incessant tooting of horns, scattering the unhurried traffic of the open
road:--a procession of five tongas loaded to the limit of allowance with
human beings, dogs, saddles, and battered boxes. In all directions the
unprofitable land rolled level to the sky-line. Every seven or eight
miles they stopped to change ponies. Every hour the heat and glare grew
fiercer; the clangour of wheels and tonga-bar more assertive, till it
seemed to beat on bared nerves; and the terrible thirst of the Frontier
took hold upon the dust-filled throats of dog and man alike.

It is possible to compress a good deal of discomfort into six hours: and
the Dak Bungalow, in its noonday quiet and comparative coolness, seemed
an Island of the Blest after the glare and riot of the road. Here the
Desmonds were cheered by a reassuring telegram; and here all rested till
after sundown, when the pitiless tongas claimed them again; and all night
long they fled across the open desert over a track of straw, through an
interminable darkness strewn with stars.

Now and again a handful of these, seemingly dropped to earth, heralded a
changing station, and a halt for fresh ponies. Here would be brief and
blessed respite; a moment to stretch cramped limbs: moving lights that
revealed shadowy shapes of men and horses: much apostrophising of the
Prophet, interspersed with questionable jokes and laughter: and the voice
of the pariah, roused from light sleep, or the absorbing pursuit of
fleas. Here also Colonel Buckley would wake up, and confound creation in
smothered expletives, mindful of Honor's presence; and on one occasion
Hodson was heard confiding to the Chicken his determination to 'get quit
of this blasted Frontier' on the first opportunity. Whereat Lenox lost
his apathy, and turned upon Desmond, who walked beside him.

"Listen to that now! By Jove, he shall get his opportunity sooner than
he thinks for. We can't have young skrimshankers of his kidney
patronising the finest service in India."

"Get Richardson to give him a taste of the swimming-bath, in his mess
kit, when the cold weather comes!" Desmond suggested with a laugh. "I've
known that knock the nonsense out of some of 'em."

Lenox nodded thoughtfully.

"I'm not over-partial to that form of argument," said he. "But in this
case, I believe I should rather enjoy it."

Then the voice of the driver requested the Heaven-borne to return to
their seats: and they were off again, full clatter, half a dozen pariahs
speeding their progress. Honor, by her own choice, shared the back seat
with her husband in comparative comfort. His enclosing arm shielded her,
as far as might be, from the incessant jolting; and from time to time, in
utter weariness, her head sank upon his shoulder, and she slept, while
the two men smoked and talked fitfully in undertones.

Such primitive journeyings are fast becoming obsolete in the India of
to-day, where the railway stretches its antennae in all directions, and
the horn of the motor has been heard beyond Chaman. Yet, for all their
obvious discomforts, they possessed their own peculiar flavour of
interest and charm.

Dawn showed them the Indus at last: a sheet of tarnished silver, five
miles wide, sprawling over the colourless country, its normal banks
submerged by the rush of water from the hills: and behind them day sprang
out of the east, 'a tyrant with a flaming sword.'

Through eight blazing hours that sword hung bared above them. For their
ferry-boat was a native barge, persuaded rather than propelled in any
given direction by oars as long as punt poles; and set with one unwieldy
sail that could neither be tacked nor furled; but which provided them,
for a time, with a patch of burning shadow, by no means to be despised.
In it they smoked and picnicked, and made merry with cards and dogs, to
the best of their ability; while erratic currents bore them from sandbank
to sandbank; each collision involving an interlude of shouting, shoving,
coaxing, and upbraiding on the part of four assiduous boatmen; and when,
by the mercy of God and the river, they managed to run aground on the
farther side, it was nearing four o'clock in the afternoon.

Here were more tongas awaiting their prey: and this time the travellers
hailed them gratefully: for the swollen river had almost invaded the
gardens of outlying bungalows; and a short gallop brought them at last
into the straggling station, whose name literally signifies the Tents of
Ishmael. But the day of tents had long since given place to the day of
spacious, square-shouldered bungalows, with pillared verandahs, set in
the midst of rambling compounds, where the ferasch and banana flourished
in dusty luxuriance, while orange, pomegranate, hybiscus, and
poinsettia,--to say nothing of marigolds and roses,--blazed regally in
the blossoming season with scarlet, and crimson gold. A bird's-eye view
of the station itself might have suggested to the imaginative eye a game
of noughts and crosses scratched on a Titanic slate:--a network of wide
white roads, unrelieved by curve or undulation; their rigidity emphasised
by equidistant lines of trees, and whitewashed gate-posts, innocent of
gates.

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