Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2"

Blake Savage - "Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet"

Eugene Field - "A Little Book of Profitable Tales"

Various - "Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories"

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




Hence a great innocence and unworldliness; but also an underlying sternness
towards himself and others. His wants were small, and for many years the
desires of the senses had been dead within him. Towards women he felt, if
the truth were known, with that strange unconscious arrogance which is a
most real and very primitive element in Catholicism, notwithstanding the
worship of Mary and the glories of St. Teresa and St. Catharine. The Church
does not allow any woman, even a 'religious,' to wash the corporal and
other linen which has been used in the Mass. There is a strain of thought
implied in that prohibition which goes deep and far--back to the dim dawn
of human things. It influences the priest in a hundred ways; it affected
even the tender and spiritual mind of Father Benecke. As a director of
women he showed them all that impersonal sweetness which is of the essence
of Catholic tradition; but they often shrank nevertheless from what they
felt to be a fundamental inflexibility mingled with pity.

Thus when he found himself brought into forced contact with the two ladies
who had invaded his retreat, when Lucy in a hundred pretty ways began to
show him a young and filial homage, when Eleanor would ask him to coffee
with them, and talk to him about his book and the subjects it discussed,
the old priest was both amazed and embarrassed.

How in the world did she know anything about such things? He understood
that she had been of assistance to Mr. Manisty: but that it had been the
assistance of a comrade and an equal--that had never entered his head.

So that at first Mrs. Burgoyne's talk silenced and repelled him. He was
conscious of the male revolt of St. Paul!--'I suffer not a woman to teach';
and for a time he hung back.

On his visit to the villa, and on her first meeting with him at Torre
Amiata, he had been under the influence of a shock which had crushed the
child in him and broken down his reserve. Yet that reserve was naturally
strong, together with certain despotic instincts which Eleanor perceived
with surprise beneath his exquisite gentleness. She sometimes despaired of
taming him.

Nevertheless when Eleanor presently advised him to publish a statement of
his case in a German periodical; when the few quick things she said showed
a knowledge of the German situation and German current literature that
filled him with astonishment; when with a few smiles, hints, demurs, she
made plain to him that she perfectly understood where he had weakened his
book--which lay beside her--out of deference to authority, and where it
must be amended, if it was to produce any real influence upon European
cultivated opinion, the old priest was at first awkward or speechless.
Then slowly he rose to the bait. He began to talk; he became by degrees
combative, critical, argumentative. His intelligence took the field; his
character receded. Eleanor had won the day.

Presently, indeed, he began to haunt them. He brought to Eleanor each
article and letter as it arrived, consulting her on every phase of a
controversy, concerning him and his book, which was now sweeping through
certain Catholic circles and newspapers. He was eager, forgetful, exacting
even. Lucy began to dread the fatigue that he sometimes produced. While
for Lucy he was still the courteous and paternal priest, for Eleanor he
gradually became--like Manisty--the intellectual comrade, crossing swords
often in an equal contest, where he sometimes forgot the consideration due
to the woman in the provocation shown him by the critic.

And when she had tamed him, it was to Eleanor all ashes and emptiness!

'_This_ is the kind of thing I can always do,' she said to herself one day,
throwing out her hands in self-scorn, as he left her on the _loggia_, where
he had been taking coffee with herself and Lucy.

And meanwhile what attracted her was not in the least the controversialist
and the man of letters--it was the priest, the Christian, the ascetic.

Torn with passion and dread as she was, she divined in him the director;
she felt towards him as the woman so often feels towards that sexless
mystery, the priest. Other men are the potential lovers of herself or
other women; she knows herself their match. But in this man set apart, she
recognises the embodied conscience, the moral judge, who is indifferent
to her as a woman, observant of her as a soul. Round this attraction she
flutters, and has always fluttered since the beginning of things. It is
partly a yearning for guidance and submission; partly also a secret pride
that she who for other men is mere woman, is, for the priest, spirit, and
immortal. She prostrates herself; but at the same time she seems to herself
to enter through her submission upon a region of spiritual independence
where she is the slave, not of man but of God.

What she felt also, tortured as she was by jealousy and angry will, was the
sheer longing for human help that must always be felt by the lonely and the
weak. Confession, judgment, direction--it was on these tremendous things
that her inner mind was brooding all the time that she sat talking to
Father Benecke of the Jewish influence in Bavaria, or the last number of
the 'Civilta Cattolica.'

* * * * *

One evening at the beginning of July Eleanor and Lucy were caught in the
woods by a thunder-shower. The temperature dropped suddenly, and as they
mounted the hill towards the convent Eleanor in her thin white dress met a
blast of cold wind that followed the rain.

The result was chill and fever. Lucy and Marie tended her as best they
could, but her strength appeared to fail her with great rapidity, and there
came an evening when Lucy fell into a panic of anxiety.

Should she summon the local doctor--a man who was paid 80_l._ a year by the
Municipio of Selvapendente, and tended the Commune of Torre Amiata?

She had discovered, however, that he was not liked by the peasants. His
appearance was not attractive, and she doubted whether she could persuade
Eleanor to see him.

An idea struck her. Without consulting Mrs. Burgoyne, she took her hat and
boldly walked up to the Palazzo on the hill. Here she inquired for the
Contessa Guerrini. The Contessa, however, was out; Lucy left a little note
in French asking for advice. Could they get a good doctor at Selvapendente,
or must she send to Orvieto?

She had hardly reached home before an answer followed her from the
Contessa, who regretted extremely that Mademoiselle Foster should not
have found her at home. There was a good doctor at Selvapendente, and the
Contessa would have great pleasure in sending a mounted messenger to fetch
him. She regretted the illness of Madame. There was a fair _farmacia_ in
the village. Otherwise she was afraid that in illness the ladies would not
find themselves very well placed at Torre Amiata. Would Mademoiselle kindly
have her directions for the doctor ready, and the messenger would call
immediately?

Lucy was sincerely grateful and perhaps a little astonished. She was
obliged to tell Eleanor, and Eleanor showed some restlessness, but was too
unwell to protest. The doctor came and proved to be competent. The fever
was subdued, and Eleanor was soon convalescent. Meanwhile flowers, fruit,
and delicacies were sent daily from the Palazzo, and twice did the Contessa
descend from her little victoria at the door of the convent courtyard, to
inquire for the patient.

On each occasion Lucy saw her, and received the impression of a dignified,
kind, and masterful woman, bowed by recent grief, but nevertheless
sensitively alive in a sort of old-fashioned stately way to the claims of
strangers on the protection of the local grandee. It seemed to attract her
that Lucy was American, and that Eleanor was English.

'I have twice visited England,' she said, in an English that was correct,
but a little rusty. 'My husband learnt many things from England--for the
estate. But I wonder, Mademoiselle, that you come to us at this time of
year?'

Lucy laughed and coloured. She said it was pleasant to see Italy without
the _forestieri_; that it was like surprising a bird on its nest. But
she stumbled a little, and the Contessa noticed both the blush and the
stumbling.

When Eleanor was able to go out, the little carriage was sent for her,
and neither she nor Lucy knew how to refuse it. They drove up and down
the miles of zig-zag road that Don Emilio had made through the forest on
either side of the river, connecting the Palazzo Guerrini with the _casa
di caccia_ on the mountain opposite. The roads were deserted; grass was
beginning to grow on them. The peasants scarcely ever used them. They clung
to the old steep paths and tracts that had been theirs for generations. But
the small smart horses, in their jingling harness, trotted briskly along;
and Eleanor beside her companion, more frail and languid than ever, looked
listlessly out upon a world of beauty that spoke to her no more.

And at last a note from the Contessa arrived, asking if the ladies would
honour her and her daughter by taking tea with them at the Palazzo. 'We are
in deep mourning and receiving no society,' said the note; 'but if Madame
and her friend will visit us in this quiet way it will give us pleasure,
and they will perhaps enjoy the high view from here over our beautiful
country.'

Eleanor winced and accepted.

* * * * *

The Palazzo, as they climbed up through the village towards it, showed
itself to be an imposing pile of the later seventeenth century, with
heavily-barred lower windows, and, above, a series of graceful _loggie_
on its northern and western fronts which gave it a delicate and habitable
air. On the north-eastern side the woods, broken by the stone-fall of the
Sassetto, sank sharply to the river; on the other the village and the
vineyards pressed upon its very doors. The great entrance gateway opened on
a squalid village street, alive with crawling babies and chatting mothers.

At this gateway, however--through which appeared a courtyard aglow with
oleanders and murmurous with running water--they were received with
some state. An old majordomo met them, accompanied by two footmen and a
carrying-chair. Eleanor was borne up a high flight of stone stairs, and
through a vast and bare 'apartment' of enormous rooms with tiled or brick
floors and wide stone _cheminees_, furnished with a few old chests and
cabinets, a collection of French engravings of the last century, and some
indifferent pictures. A few of the rooms were frescoed with scenes of
hunting or social life in a facile eighteenth-century style. Here and
there was a piece of old tapestry or a Persian carpet. But as a whole, the
Palazzo, in spite of its vastness, made very much the impression of an old
English manor house which has belonged to people of some taste and no great
wealth, and has grown threadbare and even ugly with age. Yet tradition and
the family remain. So here. A frugal and antique dignity, sure of itself
and needing no display, breathed in the great cool spaces.

The Contessa and her daughter were in a small and more modern _salone_
looking on the river and the woods. Eleanor was placed in a low chair
near the open window, and her hostess could not forbear a few curious and
pitying glances at the sharp, high-bred face of the Englishwoman, the
feverish lips, and the very evident emaciation, which the elegance of the
loose black dress tried in vain to hide.

'I understand, Madame,' she said, after Eleanor had expressed her thanks
with the pretty effusion that was natural to her, 'that you were at Torre
Amiata last autumn?'

Eleanor started. The _massaja_, she supposed, had been gossiping. It was
disagreeable, but good-breeding bade her be frank.

'Yes, I was here with some friends, and your agent gave us hospitality for
the night.'

The Contessa looked astonished.

'Ah!' she said, 'you were here with the D----'s?'

Eleanor assented.

'And you spent the winter in Rome?'

'Part of it. Madame, you have the most glorious view in the world!' And she
turned towards the great prospect at her feet.

The Contessa understood.

'How ill she is!' she thought; 'and how distinguished!'

And presently Eleanor on her side, while she was talking nervously and fast
on a good many disconnected subjects, found herself observing her hostess.
The Contessa's strong square face had been pale and grief-stricken when she
saw it first. But she noticed now that the eyelids were swollen and red, as
though from constant tears; and the little sallow daughter looked sadder
and shyer than ever. Eleanor presently gathered that they were living in
the strictest seclusion and saw no visitors. 'Then why'--she asked herself,
wondering--'did she speak to us in the Sassetto?--and why are we admitted
now? Ah! that is his portrait!'

For at the Contessa's elbow, on a table specially given up to it, she
perceived a large framed photograph draped in black. It represented a
tall young man in an Artillery uniform. The face was handsome, eager, and
yet melancholy. It seemed to express a character at once impatient and
despondent, but held in check by a strong will. With a shiver Eleanor again
recalled the ghastly incidents of the war; and the story they had heard
from the _massaja_ of the young man's wound and despair.

Her heart, in its natural lovingness, went out to his mother. She found
her tongue, and she and the Contessa talked till the twilight fell of the
country and the peasants, of the improvements in Italian farming, of the
old convent and its history.

Not a word of the war; and not a word, Eleanor noticed, of their
fellow-lodger, Father Benecke. From various indications she gathered that
the sallow daughter was _devote_ and a 'black.' The mother, however, seemed
to be of a different stamp. She was at any rate a person of cultivation.
That, the books lying about were enough to prove. But she had also the
shrewdness and sobriety, the large pleasant homeliness, of a good man of
business. It was evident that she, rather than her _fattore_, managed her
property, and that she perfectly understood what she was doing.

In truth, a secret and strong sympathy had arisen between the two women.
During the days that followed they met often.

The Contessa asked no further questions as to the past history or future
plans of the visitors. But indirectly, and without betraying her new
friends, she made inquiries in Rome. One of the D---- family wrote to her:

'The English people we brought with us last year to your delicious Torre
Amiata were three--a gentleman and two ladies. The gentleman was a Mr.
Manisty, a former member of the English Parliament, and very conspicuous
in Rome last winter for a kind of Brunetiere alliance with the Vatican and
hostility to the Italian _regime_. People mostly regarded it as a pose; and
as he and his aunt were rich and of old family, and Mr. Manisty was--when
he chose--a most brilliant talker, they were welcome everywhere, and Rome
certainly feted them a good deal. The lady staying with them was a Mrs.
Burgoyne, a very graceful and charming woman whom everybody liked. It was
quite plain that there was some close relation between her and Mr. Manisty.
By which I mean nothing scandalous! Heavens! nobody ever thought of such
a thing. But I believe that many people who knew them well felt that it
would be a very natural and right thing that he should marry her. She was
evidently touchingly devoted to him--acting as his secretary, and hanging
on his talk. In the spring they went out to the hills, and a young American
girl--quite a beauty, they say, though rather raw--went to stay with them.
I heard so much of her beauty from Madame Variani that I was anxious to see
her. Miss Manisty promised to bring her here before they left in June. But
apparently the party broke up suddenly, and we saw no more of them.

'Now I think I have told you the chief facts about them. I wonder what
makes you ask? I often think of poor Mrs. Burgoyne, and hope she may be
happy some day. I can't say, however, that Mr. Manisty ever seemed to me a
very desirable husband! And yet I was very sorry you were not at home in
the autumn. You might have disliked him heartily, but you would have found
him _piquant_ and stimulating. And of all the glorious heads on man's
shoulders he possesses the most glorious--the head of a god attached to a
rather awkward and clumsy body.'

Happy! Well, whatever else might have happened, the English lady was not
yet happy. Of that the Contessa Guerrini was tolerably certain after a
first conversation with her. Amid the gnawing pressure of her own grief
there was a certain distraction in the observance of this sad and delicate
creature, and in the very natural speculations she aroused. Clearly Miss
Foster was the young American girl. Why were they here together, in this
heat, away from all their friends?

* * * * *

One day Eleanor was sitting with the Contessa on a _loggia_ in the Palazzo,
looking north-west towards Radicofani. It was a cool and rather cloudy
evening, after a day of gasping heat. The majordomo suddenly announced;
'His reverence, Don Teodoro.'

The young _padre parroco_ appeared--a slim, engaging figure, as he stood
for an instant amid the curtains of the doorway, glancing at the two ladies
with an expression at once shy and confiding.

He received the Contessa's greeting with effusion, bowing low over
her hand. When she introduced him to the English lady, he bowed again
ceremoniously. But his blue eyes lost their smile. The gesture was formal,
the look constrained. Eleanor, remembering Father Benecke, understood.

In conversation with the Contessa however he recovered a boyish charm and
spontaneity that seemed to be characteristic. Eleanor watched him with
admiration, noticing also the subtle discernment of the Italian, which
showed through all his simplicity of manner. It was impossible to mistake,
for instance, that he felt himself in a house of mourning. The movements
of body and voice were all at first subdued and sympathetic. Yet the
mourning had passed into a second stage, and ordinary topics might now be
introduced. He glided into them with the most perfect tact.

He had come for two reasons. First, to announce his appointment as Select
Preacher for the coming Advent at a well-known church in Rome; secondly, to
bring to the Contessa's notice a local poet--gifted, but needy--an Orvieto
man, whose Muse the clergy had their own reasons for cultivating.

The Contessa congratulated him, and he bowed profoundly in a silent
pleasure.

Then he took up the poet, repeating stanza after stanza with a perfect
_naivete_, in his rich young voice, without a trace of display; ending at
last with a little sigh, and a sudden dropping of the eyes, like a child
craving pardon.

Eleanor was delighted with him, and the Contessa, who seemed more difficult
to please, also smiled upon him. Teresa, the pious daughter, was with Lucy
in the Sassetto. No doubt she was the little priest's particular friend. He
had observed at once that she was not there, and had inquired for her.

'One or two of those lines remind me of Carducci, and that reminds me
that I saw Carducci for the first time this spring,' said the Contessa,
turning to Eleanor. 'It was at a meeting of the Accademia in Rome. A
great affair--the King and Queen--and a paper on Science and Religion, by
Mazzoli. Perhaps you don't remember his name? He was our Minister of the
Interior a few years ago.'

Eleanor did not hear. Her attention was diverted by the sudden change in
the aspect of the _padre parroco_. It was the dove turned hawk. The fresh
face seemed to have lost its youth in a moment, to have grown old, sharp,
rancorous.

'Mazzoli!'--he said, as the Contessa paused--'_Eccellenza, e un Ebreo!_'

The Contessa frowned. Yes, Mazzoli was a Jew, but an honest man; and his
address had been of great interest, as bearing witness to the revival of
religious ideas in circles that had once been wholly outside religion.
The _parroco's_ lips quivered with scorn. He remembered the affair--a
scandalous business! The King and Queen present, and a _Jew_ daring before
them, to plead the need of 'a new religion'--in Italy, where Catholicism,
Apostolic and Roman, was guaranteed as the national religion--by the first
article of the _Statuto_. The Contessa replied with some dryness that
Mazzoli spoke as a philosopher. Whereupon the _parroco_ insisted with heat
that there could be no true philosophy outside the Church. The Contessa
laughed and turned upon the young man a flashing and formidable eye.

'Let the Church add a little patriotism to her philosophy, Father,--she
will find it better appreciated.'

Don Teodoro straightened to the blow. 'I am a Roman, _Eccellenza_--you
also--_Scusi_!'

'I am an Italian, Father--you also. But you hate your country.'

Both speakers had grown a little pale.

'I have nothing to do with the Italy of Venti Settembre,' said the priest,
twisting and untwisting his long fingers in a nervous passion. 'That Italy
has three marks of distinction before Europe--by which you may know her.'

'And those--?' said the Contessa, calm and challenging.

'Debt, _Eccellenza_--hunger!--crimes of blood! _Sono il suo
primato--l'unico!_'

He threw at her a look sparkling and venomous. All the grace of his
youth had vanished. As he sat there, Eleanor in a flash saw in him the
conspirator and the firebrand that a few more years would make of him.

'Ah!' said the Contessa, flushing. 'There were none of these things in the
old Papal States?--under the Bourbons?--the Austrians? Well--we understand
perfectly that you would destroy us if you could!'

'_Eccellenza_, Jesus Christ and his Vicar come before the House of Savoy!'

'Ruin us, and see what you will gain!'

'_Eccellenza_, the Lord rules.

'Well--well. Break the eggs--that's easy. But whether the omelet will be as
the Jesuits please--that's another affair.'

Each combatant smiled, and drew a long breath.

'These are our old battles,' said the Contessa, shaking her head. '_Scusi!_
I must go and give an order.'

And to Eleanor's alarm, she rose and left the room.

The young priest showed a momentary embarrassment at being left alone with
the strange lady. But it soon passed. He sat a moment, quieting down, with
his eyes dropped, his finger-tips lightly joined upon his knee. Then he
said sweetly:

'You are perhaps not acquainted with the pictures in the Palazzo, Madame.
May I offer you my services? I believe that I know the names of the
portraits.'

Eleanor was grateful to him, and they wandered through the bare rooms,
looking at the very doubtful works of art that they contained.

Presently, as they returned to the _salone_ from which they had started,
Eleanor caught sight of a fine old copy of the Raphael St. Cecilia at
Bologna. The original has been much injured, and the excellence of the copy
struck her. She was seized, too, with a stabbing memory of a day in the
Bologna Gallery with Manisty!

She hurried across the room to look at the picture. The priest followed
her.

'Ah! that, Madame,' he said with enthusiasm--that is a _capolavoro_. It is
by Michael Angelo.'

Eleanor looked at him in astonishment. 'This one? It is a copy, Padre, of
Raphael's St. Cecilia at Bologna--a very interesting and early copy.'

Don Teodoro frowned. He went up to look at it doubtfully, pushing out his
lower lip.

'Oh! no, Madame,' he said, returning to her, and speaking with a soft
yet obstinate complacency. 'Pardon me--but you are mistaken. That is an
original work of the great Michael Angelo.'

Eleanor said no more.

When the Contessa returned, Eleanor took up a volume of French translations
from the Greek Anthology that the Contessa had lent her the day before. She
restored the dainty little book to its mistress, pointing to some of her
favourites.

The _parroco's_ face fell as he listened.

'Ah!--these are from the Greek!' he said, looking down modestly, as the
Contessa handed him the book. 'I spent five years, _Eccellenza_, in
learning Greek, but--!' He shrugged his shoulders gently.

Then glancing from one lady to the other, he said with a deprecating smile:

'I could tell you some things. I could explain what some of the Greek words
in Italian come from--"mathematics," for instance.'

He gave the Greek word with a proud humility, emphasising each syllable.

'"Economy"--"theocracy"--"aristocracy."'

The Greek came out like a child's lesson. He was not always sure; he
corrected himself once or twice; and at the end he threw back his head with
a little natural pride.

But the ladies avoided looking either at him or each other.

Eleanor thought of Father Benecke; of the weight of learning on that silver
head. Yet Benecke was an outcast, and this youth was already on the ladder
of promotion.

When he departed the Contessa threw up her hands.

'And that man is just appointed Advent Preacher at one of the greatest
churches in Rome!'

Then she checked herself.

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