William Bligh - "A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat"

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer - "Die Hochzeit des Moenchs"

H. Rider Haggard - "Fair Margaret"

United States War Department - "Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911"

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.

Delia Blanchflower

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Delia Blanchflower




Nevertheless, Winnington entirely believed what he had overheard her
say to the keeper. It was no doubt quite true that she had turned aside
to see Monk Lawrence on a sudden impulse of sentiment or memory. Odd
that it should be so!--but like her. That _she_ could have any designs
on the beautiful old place was indeed incredible; and it was equally
incredible that she would aid or abet them in anyone else. And
yet--there was that monstrous speech at Latchford, made in her hearing,
by her friend and co-militant, the woman who shared her life! Was it
any wonder that Daunt bristled at the sight of her?

He had, however, to answer her question.

"My county school," he explained. "The school for invalid
children--'physical defectives'--that we are going to open next summer.
I came to tell Daunt there'd be a place for this child. She's an old
friend of mine." He smiled down upon the nestling creature--"Has Miss
Amberley been to see you lately, Lily?"

At this moment Daunt returned to the kitchen, with the news that the
house was ready. "The light's not quite what it ought to be, Sir, but I
daresay you'll be able to see a good deal. Miss Amberley, Sir, she's
taught Lily fine. I'm sure we're very much obliged to her--and to you
for asking her."

"I don't know what the sick children here will do without her, Daunt.
She's going away--wants to be a nurse."

"Well, I'm very sorry, Sir. She'll be badly missed."

"That she will. Shall we go in?" Winnington turned to Delia, who
nodded assent, and followed him into the dim passages beyond the
brightly-lighted kitchen. The children, looking after them, saw the
beautiful lady disappearing, and felt vaguely awed by her height, her
stiff carriage and her proud looks.

Delia, indeed, was again--and as usual--in revolt, against herself and
circumstances. Why had she been such a fool as to come to Monk Lawrence
at all, and then to submit to seeing it--on sufferance!--in
Winnington's custody? And how he must be contrasting her with Susy
Amberley!--the soft sister of charity, plying her womanly tasks, in the
manner of all good women, since the world began! She saw herself as the
anarchist prowling outside, tracked, spied on, held at arm's length by
all decent citizens, all lovers of ancient beauty, and moral tradition;
while, within, women like Susy Amberley sat Madonna-like, with the
children at their knee. "Well, we stand for the children too--the
children of the future!" she said to herself defiantly.

"This is the old hall--and the gallery that was put up in honour of
Elizabeth's visit here in 1570--" she heard Winnington saying--"One of
the finest things of its kind. But you can hardly see it."

The electric light indeed was of the feeblest. A dim line of it ran
round the carved ceiling, and glimmered in the central chandelier. But
the mingled illumination of sunset and moonrise from outside contended
with it on more than equal terms; and everything in the hall,
tapestries, armour, and old oak, the gallery above, the dais with its
carved chairs below, had the dim mystery of a stage set ready for the
play, before the lights are on.

Daunt apologised.

"The gardener'll be here directly, Sir. He knows how to manage it
better than I."

And in spite of protests from the two visitors he ran off again to see
what could he done to better the light. Delia turned impetuously on her
companion.

"I know you think I have no business to be here!"

Winnington paused a moment, then said--

"I was rather astonished to see you here, certainly."

"Because of what we said at Latchford the other day?"

"_You_ didn't say it!"

"But I agreed with it--I agreed with every word of it!"

"Then indeed I _am_ astonished that you should wish to see Sir Wilfrid
Lang's house!" he said, with energy.

"My recollections of it have nothing to do with Sir Wilfrid. I never
saw him that I know of."

"All the same, it belongs to him."

"No!--to history--to the nation!"

"Then let the nation guard it--and every individual in the nation! But
do you think Miss Marvell would take much pains to protect it?"

"Gertrude said nothing about the house." "No; but if I had been one of
the excitable women you command, my one desire after that speech would
have been to do some desperate damage to Sir Wilfrid, or his property.
If anything does happen, I am afraid everyone in the neighbourhood will
regard her as responsible."

Delia moved impatiently. "Can't we say what we think of Sir
Wilfrid--because he happens to possess a beautiful house?"

"If you care for Monk Lawrence, you do so,--with this campaign on
foot--only at great risk. Confess, Miss Delia!--that you were sorry for
that speech!"

He turned upon her with animation.

She spoke as though under pressure, her head thrown back, her face
ivory within the black frame of the veil.

"I--I shouldn't have made it."

"That's not enough. I want to hear you say you regret it!"

The light suddenly increased, and she saw him looking at her, his
eyes bright and urgent, his attitude that of the strong yet mild
judge, whose own moral life watches keenly for any sign of grace in
the accused before him. She realised for an angry moment what his
feeling must be--how deep and invincible, towards these "outrages"
which she and Gertrude Marvell regarded by now as so natural and
habitual--outrages that were calmly planned and organised, as she knew
well, at the head offices of their society, by Gertrude Marvell among
others, and acquiesced in--approved--by hundreds of persons like
herself, who either shrank from taking a direct part in them, or had no
opportunity of doing so. "But I shall soon make opportunities!--" she
thought, passionately; "I'm not going to be a shirker!" Aloud she said
in her stiffest manner--"I stand by my friends, Mr. Winnington,
especially when they are ten times better and nobler than I!"

His expression changed. He turned, like any courteous stranger, to
playing the part of showman of the house. Once more a veil had fallen
between them.

He led her through the great suite of rooms on the ground-floor, the
drawing-room, the Red Parlour, the Chinese room, the Library. They
recalled her childish visits to the house with her grandmother, and a
score of recollections, touching or absurd, rushed into her mind--but
not to her lips. Dumbness had fallen on her;--nothing seemed worth
saying, and she hurried through. She was conscious only of a rich
confused impression of old seemliness and mellowed beauty,--steeped in
fragrant and famous memories, English history, English poetry, English
art, breathing from every room and stone of the house. "In the Red
Parlour, Sidney wrote part of the 'Arcadia.'--In the room overhead
Gabriel Harvey slept.--In the Porch rooms Chatham stayed--his autograph
is there.--Fox advised upon all the older portion of the Library"--and
so on. She heard Winnington's voice as though through a dream. What did
it matter? She felt the house an oppression--as though it accused or
threatened her.

As they emerged from the library into a broad passage, Winnington
noticed a garden door at the north end of the passage, and called to
Daunt who was walking behind them. They went to look at it, leaving
Delia in the corridor.

"Not very secure, is it?" said Winnington, pointing to the glazed upper
half of the door--"anyone might get in there."

"I've told Sir Wilfrid, Sir, and sent him the measurements. There's to
be an iron shutter."

"H'm--that may take time. Why not put up something
temporary?--cross-bars of some sort?"

They came back towards Delia, discussing it. Unreasonably, absurdly,
she held it an offence that Winnington should discuss it in her
presence; her breath grew stormy.

Daunt turned to the right at the foot of a carved staircase, and down a
long passage leading to the kitchens, he and Winnington still talking.
Suddenly--a short flight of steps, not very visible in a dark place.
Winnington descended them, and then turned to look for Delia who was
just behind--

"Please take care!--"

But he was too late. Head in air--absorbed in her own passionate mood,
Delia never saw the steps, till her foot slipped on the topmost. She
would have fallen headlong, had not Winnington caught her. His arms
received her, held her, released her. The colour rushed into his face
as into hers. "You are not hurt?" he said anxiously. "I ought to have
held a light," said Daunt, full of concern. But the little incident had
broken the ice. Delia laughed, and straightened her Cavalier hat, which
had suffered. She was still rosy as they entered Daunt's kitchen, and
the children who had seen her silent and haughty entrance, hardly
recognised the creature all life and animation who returned to them.

The car stood waiting in the fore-court. Winnington put her in. As
Delia descended the hill alone in the dark, she closed her eyes, that
she might the more completely give herself to the conflict of thoughts
which possessed her. She was bitterly ashamed and sore, torn between
her passionate affection for Gertrude Marvell, and what seemed to her a
weak and traitorous wish to stand better with Mark Winnington. Nor
could she escape from the memory--the mere physical memory--of those
strong arms round her, resent it as she might.

* * * * *

As for Winnington, when he reached home in the moonlight, instead of
going in to join his sister at tea, he paced a garden path till night
had fallen. What was this strong insurgent feeling he could neither
reason with nor silence? It seemed to have stolen upon him, amid a host
of other thoughts and pre-occupations, secretly and insidiously, till
there it stood--full-grown--his new phantom self--challenging the old,
the normal self, face to face.

Trouble, self-scorn overwhelmed him. Recalling all his promises
to himself, all his assurances to Lady Tonbridge, he stood convicted,
as the sentry who has shut his eyes and let the invader pass.
Monstrous!--that in his position, with this difference of age between
them, he should have allowed such ideas to grow and gather head.
Beautiful wayward creature!--all the more beguiling, because of the
Difficulties that bristled round her. His common sense, his judgment
were under no illusions at all about Delia Blanchflower. And yet--

This then was _passion_!--which must be held down and reasoned down.
He would reason it down. She must and should marry a man of her own
generation--youth with youth. And, moreover, to give way to these wild
desires would be simply to alienate her, to destroy all his own power
with her for good.

The ghostly presence of his life came to him. He cried out to her, made
appeal to her, in sackcloth and ashes. And then, in some mysterious,
heavenly way she was revealed to him afresh; not as an enemy whom he
had offended, not as a lover slighted, but as his best and tenderest
friend. She closed no gates against the future:--that was for himself
to settle, if closed they were to be. She seemed to walk with him, hand
in hand, sister with brother--in a deep converse of souls.




Chapter XI


Gertrude Marvell was sitting alone at the Maumsey breakfast-table, in
the pale light of a December day. All around her were letters and
newspapers, to which she was giving an attention entirely denied to her
meal. She opened them one after another, with a frown or a look of
satisfaction, classifying them in heaps as she read, and occasionally
remembering her coffee or her toast. The parlourmaid waited on her, but
knew very well--and resented the knowledge--that Miss Marvell was
scarcely aware of her existence, or her presence in the room.

But presently the lady at the table asked--

"Is Miss Blanchflower getting up?"

"She will be down directly, Miss."

Gertrude's eyebrows rose, unconsciously. She herself was never late for
an 8:30 breakfast, and never went to bed till long after midnight. The
ways of Delia, who varied between too little sleep and the long nights
of fatigue, seemed to her self-indulgent.

After her letters had been put aside and the ordinary newspapers, she
took up a new number of the _Tocsin_. The first page was entirely given
up to an article headed "How LONG?" She read it with care, her delicate
mouth tightening a little. She herself had suggested the lines of it a
few days before, to the Editor, and her hints had been partially
carried out. It gave a scathing account of Sir Wilfrid's course on the
suffrage question--of his earlier coquettings with the woman's cause,
his defection and "treachery," the bitter and ingenious hostility with
which he was now pursuing the Bill before the House of Commons. "An
amiable, white-haired nonentity for the rest of the world--who only
mention him to marvel that such a man was ever admitted to an English
Cabinet--to us he is the 'smiler with the knife,' the assassin of the
hopes of women, the reptile in the path. The Bill is weakening every
day in the House, and on the night of the second reading it will
receive its 'coup de grace' from the hand of Sir Wilfrid Lang. Women of
England--_how long_!--"

Gertrude pushed the newspaper aside in discontent. Her critical sense
was beginning to weary of the shrieking note. And the descent from the
"assassin of the hopes of women" to "the reptile in the path" struck
her as a silly bathos.

Suddenly, a reverie--a waking dream--fell upon her, a visionary
succession of sights and sounds. A dying sunset--and a rising wind,
sighing through dense trees--old walls--the light from a kitchen
window--voices in the distance--the barking of a dog....

"Oh Gertrude!--how late I am!"

Delia entered hurriedly, with an anxious air.

"I should have been down long ago, but Weston had one of her attacks,
and I have been looking after her."

Weston was Delia's maid who had been her constant companion for ten
years. She was a delicate nervous woman, liable to occasional onsets of
mysterious pain, which terrified both herself and her mistress, and had
hitherto puzzled the doctor.

Gertrude received the news with a passing concern.

"Better send for France, if you are worried. But I expect it will be
soon over."

"I don't know. It seems worse than usual. The man in Paris threatened
an operation. And here we are--going up to London in a fortnight!"

"Well, you need only send her to the Brownmouth hospital, or leave her
here with France and a good nurse."

"She has the most absurd terror of hospitals, and I certainly couldn't
leave her," said Delia, with a furrowed brow.

"You certainly couldn't stay behind!" Gertrude looked up pleasantly.

"Of course I want to come--" said Delia slowly.

"Why, darling, how could we do without you? You don't know how you're
wanted. Whenever I go up town, it's the same--'When's she coming?' Of
course they understood you must be here for a while--but the heart of
things, the things that concern _us_--is London."

"What did you hear yesterday?" asked Delia, helping herself to some
very cold coffee. Nothing was ever kept warm for her, the owner of the
house; everything was always kept warm for Gertrude. Yet the fact arose
from no Sybaritic tendency whatever on Gertrude's part. Food, clothing,
sleep--no religious ascetic could have been more sparing than she, in
her demands upon them. She took them as they came--well or ill
supplied; too pre-occupied to be either grateful or discontented. And
what she neglected for herself, she equally neglected for other people.

"What did I hear?" repeated Gertrude. "Well, of course, everything is
rushing on. There is to be a raid on Parliament as soon as the session
begins--and a deputation to Downing Street. A number of new plans, and
devices are being discussed. And there seemed to me to be more
volunteers than ever for 'special service'?"

She looked up quietly and her eyes met Delia's;--in hers a steely
ardour, in Delia's a certain trouble.

"Well, we want some cheering up," said the girl, rather wearily. "Those
two last meetings were--pretty depressing!--and so were the
bye-elections."

She was thinking of the two open-air meetings at Brownmouth and
Frimpton. There had been no violence offered to the speakers, as in the
Latchford case; the police had seen to that. Her guardian had made no
appearance at either, satisfied, no doubt, after enquiry, that she was
not likely to come to harm. But the evidence of public disapproval
could scarcely have been more chilling--more complete. Both her
speaking, and that of Gertrude and Paul Lathrop, seemed to her to have
dropped dead in exhausted air. An audience of boys and girls--an
accompaniment of faint jeers, testifying rather to boredom than
hostility--a sense of blank waste and futility when all was over:--her
recollection had little else to shew.

Gertrude interrupted her thought.

"My dear Delia!--what you want is to get out of this backwater, and
back into the main stream! Even I get stale here. But in those great
London meetings--there one catches on again!--one realises again--what
it all _means_! Why not come up with me next week, even if the flat's
not ready? I can't have you running down like this! Let's hurry up and
get to London."

The speaker had risen, and standing behind Delia, she laid her hand on
the waves of the girl's beautiful hair. Delia looked up.

"Very well. Yes, I'll come. I've been getting depressed. I'll come--at
least if Weston's all right."

* * * * *

"I'm afraid, Miss Blanchflower, this is a very serious business!"

Dr. France was the speaker. He stood with his back to the fire, and his
hands behind him, surveying Delia with a look of absent thoughtfulness;
the look of a man of science on the track of a problem.

Delia's aspect was one of pale consternation. She had just heard that
the only hope of the woman, now wrestling upstairs with agonies of
pain, lay in a critical and dangerous operation, for which at least a
fortnight's preliminary treatment would be necessary. A nurse was to be
sent for at once, and the only question to be decided was where and by
whom the thing was to be done.

"We _can_ move her," said France, meditatively; "though I'd rather not.
And of course a hospital is the best place."

"She won't go! Her mother died in a hospital, and Weston thinks she was
neglected."

"Absurd! I assure you," said France warmly. "Nobody is neglected in
hospitals."

"But one can't persuade her--and if she's forced against her will,
it'll give her no chance!" said Delia in distress. "No, it must be
here. You say we can get a good man from Brownmouth?"

They discussed the possibilities of an operation at Maumsey.

Insensibly the doctor's tone during the conversation grew more
friendly, as it proceeded. A convinced opponent of "feminism" in all
its forms, he had thought of Delia hitherto as merely a wrong-headed,
foolish girl, and could hardly bring himself to be civil at all to her
chaperon, who in his eyes belonged to a criminal society, and was
almost certainly at that very moment engaged in criminal practices. But
Delia, absorbed in the distresses of someone she cared for, all heart
and eager sympathy, her loveliness lending that charm to all she said
and looked which plainer women must so frequently do without was a very
mollifying and ingratiating spectacle. France began to think
her--misled and unbalanced of course--but sound at bottom. He ended by
promising to make all arrangements himself, and to go in that very
afternoon to see the great man at Brownmouth.

When Delia returned to her maid's room, the morphia which had been
administered was beginning to take effect, and Weston, an elderly woman
with a patient, pleasing face, lay comparatively at rest, her tremulous
look expressing at once the keenness of the suffering past, and the
bliss of respite. Delia bent over her, dim-eyed.

"Dear Weston--we've arranged it all--it's going to be done here. You'll
be at home--and I shall look after you."

Weston put out a clammy hand and faintly pressed Delia's warm fingers--

"But you were going to London, Miss. I don't want to put you out so."

"I shan't go till you're out of the wood, so go to sleep--and don't
worry."

* * * * *

"Delia!--for Heaven's sake be reasonable. Leave Weston to France, and a
couple of good nurses. She'll be perfectly looked after. You'll put out
all out plans--you'll risk everything!"

Gertrude Marvell had risen from her seat in front of a crowded desk.
The secretary who generally worked with her in the old gun room, now
become a militant office, had disappeared in obedience to a signal from
her chief. Anger and annoyance were plainly visible on Gertrude's small
chiselled features.

Delia shook her head.

"I can't!" she said. "I've promised. Weston has pulled _me_ through two
bad illnesses--once when I had pneumonia in Paris--and once after a
fall out riding. I daresay I shouldn't be here at all, but for her. If
she's going to have a fight for her life--and Doctor France doesn't
promise she'll get through--I shall stand by her."

Gertrude grew a little sallower than usual as her black eyes fastened
themselves on the girl before her who had hitherto seemed so ductile in
her hands. It was not so much the incident itself that alarmed her as a
certain new tone in Delia's voice.

"I thought we had agreed--that nothing--_nothing_--was to come before
the Cause!" she said quietly, but insistently.

Delia's laugh was embarrassed.

"I never promised to desert Weston, Gertrude. I couldn't--any more than
I could desert you."

"We shall want every hand--every ounce of help that can be got--through
January and February. You undertook to do some office work, to help in
the organisation of the processions to Parliament, to speak at a number
of meetings--"

Delia interrupted.

"As soon as Weston is out of danger, I'll go--of course I'll go!--about
a month from now, perhaps less. You will have the flat, Gertrude, all
the same, and as much money as I can scrape together--after the
operation's paid for. I don't matter a tenth part as much as you, you
know I don't; I haven't been at all a success at these meetings
lately!"

There was a certain young bitterness in the tone.

"Well, of course you know what people will say."

"That I'm shirking--giving in? Well, you can contradict it."

Delia turned from the window beside which she was standing to look at
Gertrude. A pale December sunshine shone on the girl's half-seen face,
and on the lines of her black dress. A threatening sense of change,
mingled with a masterful desire to break down the resistance offered,
awoke in Gertrude. But she restrained the dictatorial instinct.
Instead, she sat down beside the desk again, and covered her face with
her hand.

"If I couldn't contradict it--if I couldn't be sure of you--I might as
well kill myself," she said with sudden and volcanic passion, though in
a voice scarcely raised above its ordinary note.

Delia came to her impulsively, knelt down and put her arms round her.

"You know you can be sure of me!" she said, reproachfully.

Gertrude held her away from her. Her eyes examined the lovely face so
close to her.

"On the contrary! You are being influenced against me."

Delia laughed.

"By whom, please?"

"By the man who has you in his power--under our abominable laws."

"By my guardian?--by Mark Winnington? Really! Gertrude! Considering
that I had a fresh quarrel with him only last week--on your account--at
Monk Lawrence--"

Gertrude released herself by a sudden movement.

"When were you at Monk Lawrence?"

"Why, that afternoon, when you were in town. I missed my train at
Latchford, and took a motor home." There was some consciousness in the
girl's look and tone which did not escape her companion. She was
evidently aware that her silence on the incident might appear strange
to Gertrude. However, she frankly described her adventure, Daunt's
surliness, and Winnington's appearance.

"He arrived in the nick of time, and made Daunt let me in. Then, while
we were going round, he began to talk about your speech, and wanted to
make me say I was sorry for it. And I wouldn't! And then--well, he
thought very poorly of me--and we parted--coolly. We've scarcely met
since. And that's all."

"What speech?" Gertrude was sitting erect now with queerly bright eyes.

"The speech about Sir Wilfrid--at Latchford."

"What else does he expect?"

"I don't know. But--well, I may as well say, Gertrude--to you, though I
wouldn't say it to him--that I--I didn't much admire that speech
either!"

Delia was now sitting on the floor with her hands round her knees,
looking up. The slight stiffening of her face shewed that it had been
an effort to say what she had said.

"So _you_ think that Lang ought to be approached with 'bated breath and
whispering humbleness'--just as he is on the point of trampling us and
our cause into the dirt?"

"No--certainly not! But why hasn't he as good a right to his opinion as
we to ours--without being threatened with personal violence?"

Gertrude drew a long breath of amazement.

"I don't quite see, Delia, why you ever joined the 'Daughters'--or why
you stay with them."

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