Luigi Capuana - "Cardello"

Horace Annesley Vachell - "The Hill"

AEschylus - "The House of Atreus"

Edmund B. Tuttle - "Three Years on the Plains"

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




But there were moments when the woman in her rebelled, even to
remonstrance, with small result; and when, at length, the arrival of
two cheques coincided with Michael's announcement that a certain
enamoured Countess obviously expected him to free her from the tyranny
of an unloved husband, Quita had laughingly suggested India as an
inviting means of escape from entanglements present and to come.

Half a night of meditation had sufficed to set her on the rock of
decision. There were possibilities about India not to be named, even
to her own heart. There were also empty spaces where white women would
be scarce, and where Michael must learn to work without the spur of a
fictitious stimulant.

Before the week was out, behold them ploughing through the
Mediterranean, leaving the misguided Countess to pacify a suspicious
husband. A summer in Kashmir, and a winter in a deserted Himalayan
station, had confirmed Quita in the wisdom of their flight; and now her
own unnamed possibility had been sprung upon her so suddenly, so
strangely, that it took away her breath, and left her as yet neither
glad nor sorry, but profoundly disturbed.

Arrived at her own turning, she relieved her feelings a little by
getting Yorick at a canter up the twisted scrap of a path that climbed
to a wooden doll's house, christened by a poetical Hindu landlord, the
"Crow's Nest." Perched on an impossible-looking slope of gravel and
granite, eight thousand feet above the Punjab, it seemed only to be
saved from falling headlong by an eight-foot ledge of earth, which
Quita spoke of proudly as her "garden," and which actually boasted two
strips of border aglow with early summer flowers. Here she found her
_sais_ squatting on his heels; and springing from the saddle, dismissed
Yorick without his customary lump of sugar.

On the steps of the trellised verandah she paused, nerving herself to
recount her astonishing adventure in the right tone of voice, and
instinctively her brain noted every detail of the view outspread before
her. The golden stillness of morning rested on hill and valley like a
benediction. Green cornfields, white watercourses, granite
promontories, and black patches of forest--all were bathed in warmth
and light without languor. The breath of the snows was still ice-cool,
and exhilarating as wine; its freshness penetrated and enhanced by the
faint sweet scent of Banksia roses, that clothed the rickety woodwork
in a fairy garment of green and ivory-white. Each least sound was
crystal clear in the rarefied air; the quarrelling of two sparrows, the
high-pitched chatter from the compound behind the cottages, the
crooning of ring-doves among the pines. Butterflies, like detached
flowers, fluttered in and out. A faint breeze stirred the roses, so
that an occasional creamy petal fell circling to the ground.

But for the first time Quita Maurice felt out of tune with it all. A
disturbing element had thrust itself into her life, deranging its
perspective, altering its values. She felt badly in need of common
human sympathy, and the exalted calm of these high latitudes irritated
rather than soothed her.

With an impatient sigh she turned to enter the house.

The glass doors of the centre room stood open, a characteristic room,
half drawing-room, half studio; furnished mainly with two large easels,
painting-stools, and cane chairs, yet bearing in every detail the stamp
of Quita's iridescent personality. A pianette, a violin, a litter of
music, and back numbers of the 'Art Journal' occupied one corner. A
revolving bookcase showed an inviting array of books. Her own canvas
was hidden by draperies of dull gold silk, and beside it, on a carved
stool, sprays of Banksia roses and honeysuckle soared plumelike from a
vase of beaten bronze.

Before the second easel Michael stood, with his back towards her, brush
and palette in hand, head critically tilted, his velveteen coat sagging
a little from rounded shoulders. Absorbed in his picture, he was quite
unconscious of her presence. This irritated her also to an
unjustifiable extent. Her vanity had suffered recent shock, and an
unreasoning longing possessed her to be cared for, to be supremely
needed.

"_Michel_!" she cried imperatively from her post in the
doorway,--Michael objected strongly to the harsher pronunciation of his
name; and the two seldom spoke English when alone. "Is it necessary to
fire a salute before you will deign to be aware that one has come back?"

At that he turned quickly about, and treated her to a burlesque bow of
apology.

"_Mais non, cherie_ . . . a thousand pardons! But it is no fault of
mine that you have the footfall of a bird!"

She laughed in spite of herself.

"Keep those sort of speeches for Miss Mayhew. She may possibly believe
them. It would be all the same if I had the footfall of an elephant!
Nothing short of siege-guns would distract your mind from that picture.
It has bewitched you."

"_Eh bien_! When it is complete it will be a masterpiece," he assured
her loftily.

"No doubt! But, in the meanwhile, it may interest you to know that
except for a genuine miracle, I should not be here at all."

"_Mon Dieu_! But what happened? Tell me."

Flinging aside palette and brushes, he caught her hands in his, and it
cost her an effort to preserve her lightness of tone.

"Nothing blood-curdling, since you see me without bruise or scratch.
Only Yorick and I got tangled up with a herd of buffaloes on the Kajiar
Road. In his fright, the little fool slipped half over the khud, and
if a knight-errant had not fallen from heaven, in the nick of time, we
should both be lying somewhere in the valley by now, 'spoiling a patch
of Indian corn'!"

Maurice frowned. "Don't be gruesome, Quita."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to be. I was only quoting that uncannily clever
Kipling boy at Lahore. Yorick and I were slithering over, just like
the loathly Tertium Quid on the Mushobra Road; and there is plenty of
Indian corn in the valley! I thought of it, all in a flash, and it
wasn't enlivening, I assure you."

"That is enough," Maurice protested hastily. Tragedy oppressed him to
the verge of annoyance. "But tell me--who was the knight-errant, that
I may at least shake hands with him."

The blood tingled in Quita's cheeks, and she went quickly forward into
the room.

"I doubt if you will want to do that when you know his name," she said.
"It was--Captain Lenox."

"_Nom de Dieu_! That fellow!" Michael flung out his hands with a
dramatic gesture of despair. "What is he doing here, _par exemple_,
instead of poking about among his glaciers? _Now_ I suppose he will
not rest till he has taken you from me again."

The frank selfishness of the man's first thought was so characteristic
that Quita smiled. But her smile had an edge to it.

"Set your mind at rest on that point," she said. "He is no more
anxious to claim--his property, than I am to be claimed."

"Curse him! Did he dare to tell you so?"

Quita lifted her head; a spark of anger flashed in her eyes.

"You seem to forget that he is a gentleman, and--my husband." Then,
recovering herself, she added more gently, "There are ways and ways of
telling things, _mon cher_, and since I have relieved your anxiety, we
need not mention him again. The subject is distasteful to me. Now, I
want to see how you have got on with the masterpiece!"

She went to the easel; and Maurice, following, stood at her elbow
anticipating the sweet savour of praise. For the picture was a notable
bit of work, daringly simple in colouring and design, yet arresting,
convincing, alive.

It represented a young girl, with the promise of womanhood on her
gravely sweet lips, and in the depths of her eyes, half-sitting upon
the crossed rails of the verandah. An ivory-white dress of Indian silk
fell in shimmering folds to her feet. A dawn of clear amber made a
tender background to the dull gold of her hair. Trailing sprays of the
rose that ran riot over the house drooped towards her; and a pine
branch, striking in abruptly, made an effective splash of shadow in an
atmosphere palpitating with the promise of fuller light. The only
intense bit of colour in the picture was the violet blue of Elsie
Mayhew's eyes--eyes that looked into you and through you to some
dream-world unsullied by the disconcerting realities of life, which
seemed only awaiting the given moment to rush in and dispel the dream.
For, as the sky gave promise of fuller light, so did the girl's spirit
seem hovering on the verge of fuller knowledge.

Such at least was Quita's thought, as she stood silently appraising her
brother's work; and it brought a contraction to her throat, a stinging
sensation to her eyeballs.

"I congratulate you, Michel," said she softly. "You have never done
anything to equal that. It is more than a portrait. It is an
interpretation, or will be, when it is complete. Her hopeless little
'Button Quail' of a mother won't understand it in the least, but
Colonel Mayhew will. I wonder if you know yourself how much you have
put into it?"

"I know that I have put some superlative workmanship into it," he
answered, looking upon the creation of his hand and brains with
critical grey-green eyes, curiously out of keeping with an ill-formed
and unrestrained mouth.

"Indeed you have. The thing is full of atmosphere, and your flesh
tints are worthy of Perugino. You mean to give it to her?"

"_Cela va sans dire_. She wants it as a present for her father."

"Why not hang it first, at Home?"

"Afterwards, perhaps. If she permits."

"It is a big gift, Michel. It would fetch a high price; and we need
money."

Michael shrugged his shoulders with all an artist's scorn of "the
common drudge."

"Since when have you turned commercialist, _petite soeur_? If it is a
question of starving, I can always paint another. I do not sell this
one, _voila tout_. If it were only mine, I would have five lines of
Swinburne under it for title. They express her to perfection. Listen--

'Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,
For love upon them like a shadow sat,
Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,
A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings,
That know not what man's love or life shall be.'"


On the last line his voice deepened to an impassioned tone that brought
an anxious crease to Quita's forehead.

"I wonder which you are most in love with," she said on a forced note
of lightness. "The girl herself, or your picture of her? Do you ever
treat her to such rhapsodies in the flesh? They must be a little
embarrassing for a child of twenty!"

"Your 'child of twenty' is already very much a woman, and I have the
right to say to her what I please."

"Not altogether, _mon ami_--unless----"

But Michael dismissed criticism as serenely as he dismissed
consequences. The episode of the Countess was as though it had never
been.

"I have no concern with 'unless.' Such uncomfortable words are wiped
out of my vocabulary. They affect me like a false note in music."

Quita laughed. "No one knows that better than I do! But speaking
simply as a woman, I know also that the man who opens our eyes to the
passionate side of things involves himself in a big moral
responsibility. And even _you_ cannot shelve the moralities
altogether."

"_Dela depend_. If the moralities hamper one's art, the shelf is the
best place for them in my opinion."

His sister did not answer at once. Michael's confession of faith was
not a matter to be lightly dismissed; for the simple reason that he
lived up to it in so far as human inconsistency will allow any man to
live up to his faith, however ignoble.

"I sometimes wonder whether one's art really does gain by that form of
freedom," she said thoughtfully, "or only--one's consuming egotism."

But the suggestion was rank heresy, and Michael would have none of it.

"Really, Quita, you are as enlivening as a Lenten service! Upon my
soul, I'd sooner you turned vegetarian than developed a conscience!
But believe me, I am devoted to Miss Mayhew. She is enchanting. A
wild rose, half-open, with the dew still on her petals.
Metaphorically, I am at her feet. Does that satisfy you, _ma belle_?"

"It might, if I had not heard a good deal of it before. You are
chronically devoted to one or other of us, my beloved Pagan! That's
the root of the difficulty."

In atonement for directness of speech, she laid hands upon his
shoulders, and smiled very tenderly into his face.

"I am chronically devoted to you, _coeur de mon coeur_," he declared in
all sincerity. "That is the only form of it I have yet known."

His reward was a butterfly kiss between the eyebrows.

"Out of your own mouth you stand condemned! It is quite charming for
me; and for the rest--one accepts the unavoidable! But in sober
prosaic truth, Michel, Elsie Mayhew is a great deal too good for you;
and that nice Engineer boy, Mr Malcolm, is desperately in earnest about
her, I have seen his whole heart in his eyes when he looks at her----"

"_Mais, ma chere_, what a serious derangement of his organism!" Michael
broke in with irreverent laughter. "When all's said, the heart is a
practical machine--even the heart of a lover, and a little of it must
have been left below for pumping purposes!"

She stamped her foot in helpless irritation.

"Michel, how exasperating you are! Can't you see that I am in earnest?"

"Like my incomparable rival?" he queried unabashed. "Poor devil! I
wish him no harm. Is it my fault, after all, if the lady prefers a man
who is not cut out on a pattern, and filed for reference at the War
Office? He is immaculate, _ce cher Malcolm_, from his parting to the
toes of his boots. And, _ma foi_, he is clean--like all that
redoubtable army of British officers--aggressively clean, inside and
out, which one cannot always say with truth! But he has no finesse, no
_savoir faire_ where women are concerned. If he is in earnest let him
try weapons more compelling than his _beaux yeux_. A man was not given
lips and a pair of hands for eating and fighting merely; and if he
cannot turn them to good account, he deserves the fate that will
assuredly be his."

Quita's sigh, as she turned impatiently away, may have arisen from a
passing thought of that other, who had also been remiss in putting lips
and hands to their legitimate use, and had reaped disaster accordingly.
She took off her helmet, as if suddenly aware of its weight, and tossed
it into a chair.

"Is Miss Mayhew giving you another sitting after our sunrise picnic, on
Dynkund, to-morrow?" she asked in a changed voice.

"Yes, and I intend that she shall stay on for tiffin also."

"Then I will persuade Major Garth to follow suit, so that we may be a
_parti carre_. And now, as it's more than half-past breakfast-time, we
might begin to think about sitting down! I believe Major Garth is
riding up this morning with some books I lent him, and I must get
forward a little with my picture before he comes."

"His office hours seem to have become a negligible quantity lately,"
Maurice remarked casually, his eyes on Elsie's face.

"Yes, I told him so a few days ago, apparently without much effect.
Major Garth is one of those men who combine a maximum of pleasure and a
minimum of work with the capacity for securing good appointments, which
is quite an achievement--of its kind. I suppose I must gently point
out to him that now the station is waking up it would be well to
consider the proprieties a little more than we have done so far; or the
'Button Quail' will be forbidding Elsie the house. She is volubly
disapproving already, denounces him as a 'dangerous man' . . .
delectable adjective! But the cackle of Quails is nothing to me. So
long as the man behaves himself, and amuses me, I shall continue to see
just as much of him as I think fit."

Major Garth, it may be mentioned in passing, had lately secured the
coveted post of Station Staff Officer. He also had spent the winter
months in Dalhousie; and he could by no means be reckoned among the men
who fail with women through undue fastidiousness in regard to ways and
means.




CHAPTER IV.

"A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings
shall tell the matter."--_Eccles_.


"Tired already? Nonsense! The air at this height is pure elixir
vitae. It gives one a foretaste of the joy of being disembodied! I
feel five years younger since I left the bungalow."

"And I, on the other hand, feel uncomfortably aware that I shall never
see the forty-third milestone again!" And, seating himself
deliberately on the trunk of a fallen deodar, James Garth looked up at
his companion, where she stood above him on a rough-hewn block of
granite, her alpenstock held high like a shepherd's crook, the slender,
shapely form of her outlined upon a sky already athrill with the
foreknowledge of dawn.

Standing thus, lightly poised, impatient of delay, slim and upright as
a young birch-tree, a cluster of roses at her waist, her expressive
face shadowed by the wide-brimmed helmet, she appeared triumphantly,
girlishly young, for all her eight-and-twenty years. Her cheeks
glowed; irrepressible animation sparkled in her eyes. The shock and
jar of twenty-four hours ago seemed forgotten, as though they had never
been, for Quita Maurice was blessed with the happy faculty of living
vividly and exclusively in the present, and the exhilaration of ascent,
the prospect of watching the world's awakening from a pine-crowned
pinnacle, nine thousand feet up, were, for the moment, all-sufficing.

James Garth, in his upward glance, appraised every detail of her dress
and person; savoured to the full her very individual--if, at times,
thorn-set--charm. He was a connoisseur of woman--of their moods, their
minor vanities, their methods of defence and attack--this man whose
career had been mainly remarkable for a succession of sentimental
friendship, innocuous and otherwise.

During the past air months he had spent an infinite deal of leisure in
a pastime whose every move and countermove he knew by heart, and for
the first time in eighteen years he had found himself out of his
reckoning.

An element little known to him had upset the balance of power. He was
beginning to be aware that, for all his unquenchable self-assurance, he
had never for one moment felt sure of this woman, whose companionship
was so accessible, and whose inner self stood always just out of reach,
airy, impregnable, and by a natural sequence, the more entirely
desirable. It had taken Garth some months to realise the truth: and on
this morning of golden promise he decided that Quita Maurice must be
made to realise it also.

Quita herself, meeting the eloquence of his eyes with that frank look
of hers which had been largely responsible for the unprecedented turn
of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the
fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his
drawing-room attitudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of
discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.

Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a buttonhole of
freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically
addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and
ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of
eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated
intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his
companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his
thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed
him; classed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure
are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a
matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more
than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the
balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in
keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had
succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the
merciless accuracy of the artist.

"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been
treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy
sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something
of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair
unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"

"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis.
"No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random
how many times you have said that sort of thing before."

Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the
humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he
desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.

"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly.
Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.

"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is
too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we
have talked nonsense enough for one while, and it's growing lighter
every minute. Are you coming on? Or would you sooner sit there in
peace while I push up to the top?"

The suggestion brought him to his feet.

"No, by no means. When I set out to do a thing, I go through with it."

"Rally your forces, then, for one more spurt of climbing. Time is
precious. Can you really manage this formidable boulder, or would you
like a hand up?"

She laughingly flung out her free left hand; and the mockery in her
clear voice fired the man to make good his opportunity. He took prompt
possession of the proffered hand, crushing it in his with unnecessary
force, but made no attempt to scale the rock; while she, instantly
perceiving his manoeuvre, sprang down to his side and freed herself
with imperious decision. Then she turned upon him, her head held high,
a spark of genuine scorn in her eyes; and he realised that he was
dealing with no mere coquette, whose elusiveness might be taken as an
inverted form of encouragement, but with a woman of character and
spirit.

"Major Garth," she said in a tone of quietness more cutting than anger,
"when I pay a man the compliment of going out alone with him, I take it
for granted that he is in the habit of behaving like a gentleman. I
should be sorry to find myself mistaken in your case."

Without giving him time to answer, she leapt lightly on to her deserted
rock, leaving him to follow, if he chose.

And he did choose. For her scorn, while it stung his vanity to the
quick, fired his lukewarm blood with a lust of conquest far removed
from his usual cool-headed assurance at the critical moment. He seemed
destined to experience more than one new sensation this morning; and
new sensations rarely came amiss to this epicure of the emotions.

Being quite incapable of emulating his companion's chamois method of
cutting corners, and striking out a direct line for the summit, he did
not succeed in coming up with her till the arduous feat was
accomplished,--the Pisgah height attained. Here he found her
established on a slab of granite, hands loosely clasped over her knee,
helmet tilted a little backward, forming a halo round her head and
face. He arrived in a very unheroic state of breathlessness, and she
greeted him with a frankly forgiving smile.

"That last bit came rather hard on you, I'm afraid. But surely all
this makes ample amends."

She included in a wide sweep of her arm the superb panorama of hill and
valley and far-stretching plain, robed in a haze of its own tierce
breath, through which a silver network of rivers could be faintly
discerned in the crescent light. Uprising from this blue interminable
distance, the first crumplings of the foothills showed like purple
velvet, and from these again the giant Himalayas--the "home of the
greater gods"--sprang aloft, in a medley of lovely lines and hues, till
they reached the uttermost north where the hoar head of Nanga Parbat
soared twenty-five thousand feet into the blue.

Quita motioned her companion to another rock, a little distance behind
her own.

"Sit down there, and recover your lost breath," she commanded, gently.
"I would rather not talk for the present, if you don't mind. It would
jar somehow. I daresay you understand what I mean."

He was many leagues removed from understanding: but he obeyed in
silence, wondering at himself, no less than at her. And straightway
Quita forgot all about him, in the mere rapture of looking, and of
feeling in every fibre the incommunicable thrill of dawn.

A passionate nobility, freedom, and power breathed from the wide scene.
Already a pearly glimmer pulsed along the east; already the mountains
were awake and aware. Peak beyond peak, range beyond range, a shadowy
pageant of purple and grey, they swept upwards to the far horizon,
where the still wonder of the snows shone pale and pure against the
dovelike tones of the sky. Away across the valley, where night still
brooded, Kalatope ridge, serrated and majestic of outline, made a
massive incident of shadow amid the tenderer tints around. The great
hushed world seemed holding its breath in expectation of a miracle--the
unconsidered miracle of dawn.

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