Anonymous - "The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III"

Alexandre Dumas - "Le Capitaine Arena"

Grace S. Richmond - "On Christmas Day in the Morning"

Various - "Short Stories of Various Types"

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.

Eleanor

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Eleanor




'Who's "they"? 'said Lucy.

'Oh! the Congregation of the Index--or the people who set them on.'

'Is the book a bad book?'

'Quite the contrary.'

'And you're pleased?'

'I think the Papacy is keeping up discipline--and is not likely to go under
just yet.'

He turned to her with his teasing laugh and was suddenly conscious of her
new elegance. Where was the 'Sunday school teacher'? Transformed!--in five
weeks--into this vision that was sitting opposite to him? Really, women
were too wonderful! His male sense felt a kind of scorn for the plasticity
of the sex.

'He has asked your opinion?' said Lucy, pursuing the subject.

'Yes. I told him the book was excellent--and his condemnation certain.'

Lucy bit her lip.

'Who did it?'

'The Jesuits--probably.'

'And you defend them?'

'Of course!--They're the only gentlemen in Europe who thoroughly understand
their own business.'

'What a business!' said Lucy, breathing quick.--'To rush on every little
bit of truth they see and stamp it out!'

'Like any other dangerous firework,--your simile is excellent.'

'Dangerous!' She threw back her head.--'To the blind and the cripples.'

'Who are the larger half of mankind. Precisely.'

She hesitated, then could not restrain herself.

'But _you're_ not concerned?'

'I? Oh dear no. I can be trusted with fireworks. Besides I'm not a
Catholic.'

'Is that fair?--to stand outside slavery--and praise it?'

'Why not?--if it suits my purpose?'

The girl was silent. Manisty glanced at Eleanor; she caught the mischievous
laugh in his eyes, and lightly returned it. It was his old comrade's look,
come back. A warmer, more vital life stirred suddenly through all her
veins; the slight and languid figure drew itself erect; her senses told
her, hurriedly, for the first time that the May sun, the rapidly freshening
air, and the quick movement of the carriage were all physically delightful.

How fast, indeed, the spring was conquering the hills! As they passed over
the great viaduct at Aricia, the thick Chigi woods to the left masked the
deep ravine in torrents of lightest foamiest green; and over the vast plain
to the right, stretching to Ardea, Lanuvium and the sea, the power of the
reawakening earth, like a shuttle in the loom, was weaving day by day its
web of colour and growth, the ever brightening pattern of crop, and grass
and vine. The beggars tormented them on the approach to Genzano, as they
tormented of old Horace and Maecenas; and presently the long falling street
of the town, with its multitudes of short, wiry, brown-faced folk, its
clatter of children and mules, its barbers and wine shops, brought them in
sight again of the emerald-green Campagna, and the shiny hazes over the
sea. In front rose the tower-topped hill of Monte Giove, marking the site
of Corioli; and just as they turned towards Nemi the Appian Way ran across
their path. Overhead, a marvellous sky with scudding veils of white cloud.
The blur and blight of the scirocco had vanished without rain, under
a change of wind. An all-blessing, all-penetrating sun poured upon the
stirring earth. Everywhere fragments and ruins--ghosts of the great
past--yet engulfed, as it were, and engarlanded by the active and fertile
present.

And now they were to follow the high ridge above the deep-sunk lake, toward
Nemi on its farther side--Nemi with its Orsini tower, grim and tall, rising
on its fortress rock, high over the lake and what was once the thick grove
or 'Nemus' of the Goddess, mantling the proud white of her inviolate
temple.

'Look!'--slid Eleanor, touching Lucy's hand. 'There's the niched wall--and
the platform of the temple.'

And Lucy, bending eager brows, saw across the lake a line of great
recesses, overgrown and shadowy against the steep slopes or cliffs of the
crater, and in front of them a flat space, with one farm-shed upon it.

In the crater-wall, just behind and above the temple-site, was a black
vertical cleft. Eleanor pointed it out to Manisty.

'Do you remember we never explored it? But the spring must be
there?--Egeria's spring?'

Manisty lazily said he didn't know.

'Don't imagine you will be let off,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'We have
settled every other point at Nemi. This is left for to-day. It will make a
scramble after tea.'

'You will find it further than you think,' said Manisty, measuring the
distance.

'So it was somewhere on that terrace he died--poor priest!'--said Lucy,
musing.

Manisty, who was walking beside the carriage, turned towards her. Her
little speech flattered him. But he laughed.

'I wonder how much it was worth--that place--in hard cash,' he said, drily.
'No doubt that was the secret of it.'

Lucy smiled--unwillingly. They were mounting a charming road high above the
lake. Stretching between them and the lake were steep olive gardens and
vineyards; above them light half-fledged woods climbed to the sky. In the
vineyards the fresh red-brown earth shone amid the endless regiments of
vines, just breaking into leaf; daisies glittered under the olives; and
below, on a mid-way crag, a great wild-cherry, sun-touched, flung its
boughs and blossoms, a dazzling pearly glory, over the dark blue hollow of
the lake.

And on the farther side, the high, scooped-out wall of the crater rose
rich and dark above the temple-site. How white--_white_--it must have
shone!--thought Lucy. Her imagination had been caught by the priest's
story. She saw Nemi for the first time as one who had seen it before.
Timidly she looked at the man walking beside the carriage. Strange! She no
longer disliked him as she had done, no longer felt it impossible that he
should have written the earlier book which had been so dear to her. Was it
that she had seen him chastened and depressed of late--had realised the
comparative harmlessness of his vanity, the kindness and docility he could
show to a friend? Ah no!--if he had been kind for one friend, he had been
difficult and ungrateful for another. The thinness of Eleanor's cheek, the
hollowness of her blue eye accused him. But even here the girl's inner mind
had begun to doubt and demur. After all did she know much--or anything--of
their real relation?

Certainly this afternoon he was a delightful companion. That phrase which
Vanbrugh Neal had applied to him in Lucy's hearing, which had seemed to her
so absurd, began after all to fit. He was _bon enfant_ both to Eleanor and
to her on this golden afternoon. He remembered Eleanor's love for broom and
brought her bunches of it from the steep banks; he made affectionate mock
of Neal's old-maidish ways; he threw himself with ejaculations, joyous,
paradoxical, violent, on the unfolding beauty of the lake and the spring;
and throughout he made them feel his presence as something warmly strong
and human, for all his provoking defects, and that element of the
uncommunicated and unexplained which was always to be felt in him. Eleanor
began to look happier and younger than she had looked for days. And Lucy
wondered why the long ascent to Nemi was so delightful; why the scirocco
seemed to have gone from the air, leaving so purpureal and divine a light
on mountain and lake and distance.

* * * * *

When they arrived at Nemi, Manisty as usual showed that he knew nothing of
the practical arrangements of the day, which were always made for him by
other people.

'_What_ am I to do with these?' he said, throwing his hands in despair
towards the tea-baskets in the carriage.--'We can't drive beyond this--And
how are we to meet the others?--when do they come?--why aren't they here?'

He turned with peremptory impatience to Eleanor. She laid a calming hand
upon his arm, pointing to the crowd of peasant folk from the little town
that had already gathered round the carriage.

'Get two of those boys to carry the baskets. We are to meet the others at
the temple. They come by the path from Genzano.'

Manisty's brow cleared at once like a child's. He went into the crowd,
chattering his easy Italian, and laid hands on two boys, one of whom was
straight and lithe and handsome as a young Bacchus, and bore the noble name
of Aristodemo. Then, followed by a horde of begging children which had
to be shaken off by degrees, they began the descent of the steep cliff
on which Nemi stands. The path zigzagged downwards, and as they followed
it, they came upon files of peasant women ascending, all bearing on their
kerchiefed heads great flat baskets of those small wood-strawberries, or
_fragole_, which are the chief crop of Nemi and its fields.

The handsome women, the splendid red of the fruit and the scent which it
shed along the path, the rich May light upon the fertile earth and its
spray of leaf and blossom, the sense of growth and ferment and pushing life
everywhere--these things made Lucy's spirits dance within her. She hung
back with the two boys, shyly practising her Italian upon them, while
Eleanor and Manisty walked ahead.

But Manisty did not forget her. Half-way down the path, he turned back to
look at her, and saw that she was carrying a light waterproof, which aunt
Pattie had forced upon her lest the scirocco should end in rain. He stopped
and demanded it. Lucy resisted.

'I _can_ carry that,' he urged impatiently; 'it isn't baskets.'

'You _could_ carry those,' she said laughing.

'Not in a world that grows boys and sixpences. But I want that cloak.
Please!'

The tone was imperious and she yielded. He hurried on to join Eleanor,
carrying the cloak with his usual awkwardness, and often trailing it in
the dust. Lucy, who was very neat and precise in all her personal ways,
suffered at the sight, and wished she had stood firm. But to be waited on
and remembered by him was not a disagreeable experience; perhaps because it
was still such a new and surprising one.

Presently they were on the level of the lake, and their boys guided them
through a narrow and stony by-path, to the site of the temple, or as the
peasant calls it the 'Giardino del Lago.'

It is a flat oblong space, with a two-storied farm building--part of it
showing brickwork of the early Empire--standing upon it. To north and east
runs the niched wall in which, deep under accumulations of soil, Lord
Savile found the great Tiberius, and those lost portrait busts which had
been waiting there through the centuries till the pick and spade of an
Englishman should release them. As to the temple walls which the English
lord uncovered, the trenches that he dug, and the sacrificial altar that he
laid bare--the land, their best guardian, has taken them back into itself.
The strawberries grow all over them; only strange billows and depressions
in the soil make the visitor pause and wonder. The earth seems to say to
him--'Here indeed are secrets and treasures--but not for you! I have been
robbed enough. The dead are mine. Leave them in my breast. And you!--go
your ways in the sun!'

They made their way across the strawberry fields, looking for the friends
who were to join them--Reggie Brooklyn, Mr. Neal, and the two ladies. There
was no sign of them whatever. Yet, according to time and trains, they
should have been on the spot, waiting.

'Annoying!' said Manisty, with his ready irritability. 'Reggie might really
have managed better.--Who's this fellow?'

It was the padrone or tenant of the Giardino, who came up and parleyed with
them. Yes, 'Vostra Eccellenza' might put down their baskets and make their
tea. He pointed to a bench behind the shed. The _forestieri_ came every
day; he turned away in indifference.

Meanwhile the girls and women gathering among the strawberries, raised
themselves to look at the party, flashing their white teeth at Aristodemo,
who was evidently a wit among them. They flung him gibes as he passed,
to which he replied disdainfully. A group of girls who had been singing
together, turned round upon him, 'chaffing' him with shrill voices and
outstretched necks, like a flock of young cackling geese, while he, holding
himself erect, threw them back flinty words and glances, hitting at every
stroke, striding past them with the port of a young king. Then they broke
into a song which they could hardly sing for laughing--about a lover who
had been jilted by his mistress. Aristodemo turned a deaf ear, but the
mocking song, sung by the harsh Italian voices, seemed to fill the hollow
of the lake and echoed from the steep side of the crater. The afternoon
sun, striking from the ridge of Genzano, filled the rich tangled cup, and
threw its shafts into the hollows of the temple wall. Lucy standing still
under the heat and looking round her, felt herself steeped and bathed in
Italy. Her New England reserve betrayed almost nothing; but underneath,
there was a young passionate heart, thrilling to nature and the spring,
conscious too of a sort of fate in these delicious hours, that were so much
sharper and full of meaning than any her small experience had yet known.

She walked on to look at the niched wall, while Manisty and Eleanor
parleyed with Aristodemo as to the guardianship of the tea. Presently she
heard their steps behind her, and she turned back to them eagerly.

'The boy was in that tree!'--she said to Manisty, pointing to a great olive
that flung its branches over a mass of ruin, which must once have formed
part of an outer enclosure wall beyond the statued recesses.

'Was he?' said Manisty, surprised into a smile. 'You know best.--You are
very kind to that nonsense.'

She hesitated.

'Perhaps--perhaps you don't know why I liked it so particularly. It
reminded me of things in your other book.'

'The "Letters from Palestine"?' said Manisty, half amused, half astonished.

'I suppose you wonder I should have seen it? But we read a great deal in my
country! All sorts of people read--men and women who do the roughest work
with their hands, and never spend a cent on themselves they can help. Uncle
Ben gave it me. There was a review of it in the "Springfield Republican"--I
guess they will have sent it you. But'--her voice took a shy note--'do you
remember that piece about the wedding feast at Cana--where you imagined the
people going home afterwards over the hill paths--how they talked, and what
they felt?'

'I remember something of the sort,' said Manisty--I wrote it at
Nazareth--in the spring. I'm sure it was bad!'

'I don't know why you say that?' She knit her brows a little. 'If I shut
my eyes, I seemed to be walking with them. And so with your goat-herd. I'm
certain it was that tree!' she said, pointing to the tree, her bright smile
breaking. 'And the grove was here.--And the people came running down from
the village on the cliff,'--she turned her hand towards Nemi.

Manisty was flattered again, all the more because the girl had evidently
no intention of flattery whatever, but was simply following the pleasure
of her own thought. He strolled on beside her, poking into the niches, and
talking, as the whim took him, pouring out upon her indeed some of the many
thoughts and fancies which had been generated in him by those winter visits
to Nemi that he and Eleanor had made together.

Eleanor loitered behind, looking at the strawberry gatherers.

'The next train should bring them here in about an hour,' she thought to
herself in great flatness of spirit. 'How stupid of Reggie!'

Then as she lifted her eyes, they fell upon Manisty and Lucy, strolling
along the wall together, he talking, she turning her brilliant young face
towards him, her white dress shining in the sun.

A thought--a perception--thrust itself like a lance-point through Eleanor's
mind.--She gave an inward cry--a cry of misery. The lake seemed to swim
before her.




CHAPTER VIII


They made their tea under the shadow of the farm-building, which consisted
of a loft above, and a large dark room on the ground floor, which was
filled with the flat strawberry-baskets, full and ready for market.

Lucy found the little festa delightful, though all that the ladies had
to do was to make an audience for Aristodemo and Manisty. The handsome
dare-devil lad began to talk, drawn out by the Englishman, and lo! instead
of a mere peasant they had got hold of an artist and a connoisseur! Did he
know anything of the excavations and the ruins? Why, he knew everything! He
chattered to them, with astonishing knowledge and shrewdness, for half an
hour. Complete composure, complete good-humour, complete good manners--he
possessed them all. Easy to see that he was the son of an old race, moulded
by long centuries of urbane and civilised living!

A little boastful, perhaps. He too had found the head of a statue, digging
in his father's orchard. Man or woman?--asked Mrs. Burgoyne. A woman. And
handsome? The handsomest lady ever seen. And perfect? Quite perfect. Had
she a nose, for instance? He shook his young head in scorn. Naturally she
had a nose! Did the ladies suppose he would have picked up a creature
without one?

Then he rose and beckoned smiling to Eleanor and Lucy. They followed him
through the cool lower room, where the strawberries gleamed red through the
dark, up the creaking stairs to the loft. And there on the ground was an
old box and in the box, a few score of heads and other fragments--little
terracottas, such as the peasants turn up every winter as they plough or
dig among the olives.. Delicate little hooded women, heads of Artemis with
the crown of Cybele, winged heads, or heads covered with the Phrygian
cap, portrait-heads of girls or children, with their sharp profiles still
perfect, and the last dab of the clay under the thumb of the artist, as
clear and clean as when it was laid there some twenty-two centuries ago.

Lucy bent over them in a passion of pleasure, turning over the little
things quite silently, but with sparkling looks.

'Would you like them?' said Manisty, who had followed them, and stood over
her, cigarette in hand.

'Oh no!' said Lucy, rising in confusion. 'Don't get them for me.'

'Come away,' said Eleanor, laughing. 'Never interfere between a man and a
bargain.'

The _padrone_ indeed appeared at the moment. Manisty sent the ladies
downstairs, and the bargaining began.

When he came downstairs ten minutes later a small basket was in his hand.
He offered it to Lucy, while he held out his other hand to Eleanor. The
hand contained two fragments only, but of exquisite quality, one a fine
Artemis head with the Cybele crown, the other merely the mask or shell of a
face, from brow to chin,--a gem of the purest and loveliest Greek work.

Eleanor took them with a critical delight. Her comments were the comments
of taste and knowledge. They were lightly given, without the smallest
pedantry, but Manisty hardly answered them. He walked eagerly to Lucy
Foster, whose shy intense gratitude, covering an inward fear that he had
spent far, far too much money upon her, and that she had indecorously
provoked his bounty, was evidently attractive to him. He told her that he
had got them for a mere nothing, and they sat down on the bench behind
the house together, turning them over, he holding forth, and now and then
discovering through her modest or eager replies, that she had been somehow
remarkably well educated by that old Calvinist uncle of hers. The tincture
of Greek and Latin, which had looked so repellent from a distance,
presented itself differently now that it enabled him to give his talk rein,
and was partly the source in her of these responsive grateful looks which
became her so well. After all perhaps her Puritan stiffness was only on the
surface. How much it had yielded already to Eleanor's lessons! He really
felt inclined to continue them on his own account; to test for himself this
far famed pliancy of the American woman.

Meanwhile Eleanor moved away, watching the path from Genzano which wound
downwards from the Sforza Cesarini villa to the 'Giardino,' and was now
visible, now hidden by the folds of the shore.

Presently Manisty and Lucy heard her exclamation.

'At last!--What has Reggie been about?'

'Coming?' said Manisty.

'Yes--thank goodness! Evidently they missed that first train. But now there
are four people coming down the hill--two men and two ladies. I'm sure
one's Reggie.'

'Well, for the practical man he hasn't distinguished himself,' said
Manisty, taking out another cigarette.

'I can't see them now--they're hidden behind that bend. They'll be ten
minutes more, I should think, before they arrive. Edward!'

'Yes?--Don't be energetic!'

'There's just time to explore that ravine--while they're having tea. Then
we shall have seen it all--done the last, last thing! Who knows--dear
Nemi!--if we shall ever see it again?'

Her tone was quite gay, yet, involuntarily, there was a touching note in
it. Lucy looked down guiltily, wishing herself away. But Manisty resisted.

'You'll be very tired, Eleanor--it's much further than you think--and it's
very hot.'

'Oh no, it's not far--and the sun's going down fast. You wouldn't be
afraid? They'll be here directly,' she said, turning to Lucy. 'I'm sure it
was they.'

'Don't mind me, please!' said Lucy. 'I shall be perfectly right. I'll boil
the kettle again, and be ready for them. Aristodemo will look after me.'

Eleanor turned to Manisty.

'Come!' she said.

This time she rather commanded than entreated. There was a delicate
stateliness in her attitude, her half-mourning dress of grey and black,
her shadowy hat, the gesture of her hand, that spoke a hundred subtle
things--all those points of age and breeding, of social distinction and
experience, that marked her out from Lucy--from the girl's charming
immaturity.

Manisty rose ungraciously. As he followed his cousin along the narrow path
among the strawberry beds his expression was not agreeable. Eleanor's
heart--if she had looked back--might have failed her. But she hurried on.

* * * * *

Lucy, left to herself, set the stove under the kettle alight and prepared
some fresh tea, while Aristodemo and the other boy leant against the wall
in the shade chattering to each other.

The voices of Eleanor and Manisty had vanished out of hearing in the wood
behind the Giardino. But the voices from Genzano began to come nearer. A
quarter to six.--There would be only a short time for them to rest and have
their tea in, before they must all start home for the villa, where Miss
Manisty was expecting the whole party for dinner at eight. Was that Mr.
Brooklyn's voice? She could not see them, but she could hear them talking
in the narrow overgrown lane leading from the lake to the ruins.

How _very_ strange! The four persons approaching entered the Giardino still
noisily laughing and talking--and Lucy knew none of them! The two men, of
whom one certainly resembled Mr. Brooklyn in height and build, were quite
strangers to her; and she felt certain that the two ladies, who were stout
and elderly, had nothing to do either with Mrs. Elliott, Mr. Reggie's
married sister, or with the Ambassador's daughter.

She watched them with astonishment. They were English, tourists apparently
from Frascati, to judge from their conversation. And they were in a great
hurry. The walk had taken them longer than they expected, and they had only
a short time to stay. They looked carelessly at the niched wall, and the
shed with the strawberry baskets, remarking that there was 'precious little
to see, now you'd done it.' Then they walked past Lucy, throwing many
curious glances at the solitary English girl with the tea-things before
her, the gentlemen raising their hats. And finally they hurried away, and
all sounds of them were soon lost in the quiet of the May evening.

Lucy was left, feeling a little forlorn and disconcerted. Presently she
noticed that all the women working on the Giardino land were going home.
Aristodemo and his companion ran after some of the girls, and their
discordant shouts and laughs could be heard in the distance, mingled with
the 'Ave Maria' sung by groups of woman and girls who were mounting the
zigzag path towards Nemi, their arms linked together.

The evening stillness came flooding into the great hollow like a soft
resistless wave. Every now and then the voices of peasants going home
rippled up from unseen paths, then sank again into the earth. On the high
windows of Nemi the sunset light from the Campagna struck and flamed, '_Ave
Maria--gratia plena._' How softened now, how thinly, delicately far! The
singers must be nearing their homes in the little hill town.

Lucy looked around her. No one on the Giardino, no one in the fields near,
no one on the Genzano road. She seemed to be absolutely alone. Her two
companions indeed could not be far away, and the boys no doubt would come
back for the baskets. But meanwhile she could see and hear no one.

The sun disappeared behind the Genzano ridge, and it grew cold all in
a moment. She felt the chill, together with a sudden consciousness of
fatigue. Was there fever in this hollow of the lake? Certainly the
dwellings were all placed on the heights, save for the fisherman's cottage
half-way to Genzano. She got up and began to move about, wishing for her
cloak. But Mr. Manisty had carried it off, absently, on his arm.

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