George Eliot - "O May I Join the Choir Invisible!"

Laura Fitinghoff - "Barnen ifran Frostmofjaellet"

James de Mille - "Cord and Creese"

William Shakespeare - "Der Kaufmann von Venedig"

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




His letter was not unhappy!--far from it. She felt herself flooded with
bitterness as she remembered the ardour that it breathed; the ardour of
a lover to whom effort and pursuit are joys only second to the joys of
possession.

But some day no doubt he would be unhappy--in earnest; if her will held.
But it would hold.

After all, it was not much she asked. She might live till the winter;
possibly a year. Not long, after all, in Lucy's life or Manisty's. Let them
only wait a little.

Her hand burnt in Lucy's cool clasp. Restlessly, she asked the girl some
further questions about her walk.

'I met the Sisters--the nuns--from Selvapendente, on the hill,' said Lucy.
'Such sweet faces some of them have.'

'I don't agree,' said Eleanor petulantly. 'I saw two of them yesterday.
They smile at you, but they have the narrowest, stoniest eyes. Their pity
would be very difficult to bear.'

A few minutes later Lucy left her for a moment, to give a message to Marie.

'These Christians are hard--_hard_!' thought Eleanor sharply, closing her
tired lids.

Had Father Benecke ever truly weighed her case, her plea at all? Never! It
had been the stereotyped answer of the priest and the preacher. Her secret
sense resented the fact that he had been so little moved, apparently, by
her physical state. It humiliated her that she should have brought so big a
word as death into their debate--to no effect. Her thin cheek flushed with
shame and anger.

The cracked bell which announced their meals tinkled from the sitting-room.

Eleanor dragged herself to her feet, and stood a moment by the parapet
looking into the night.

'I cough less?' she thought. 'Why?--for I get worse every day. That I may
make less noise in dying? Well! one would like to go without ugliness and
fuss. I might as well be dead now, I am so broken--so full of suffering.
How I hide it all from that child! And what is the use of it--of living a
single day or hour more?'

* * * * *

She was angry with Father Benecke; but she took care to see him again.

By means of a little note about a point in the article he was just
completing, she recalled him.

They met without the smallest reference to the scene which had passed
between them. He asked for her literary opinion with the same simplicity,
the same outward deference as before. She was once more the elegant and
languid woman, no writer herself, but born to be the friend and muse of
writers. She made him feel just as clearly as before the clumsiness of a
phrase, the _naivete_ of a point of view.

And yet in truth all was changed between them. Their talk ranged further,
sank deeper. From the controversy of science with the Vatican, from the
position of the Old Catholics, or the triumph of Ultramontanism in France,
it would drop of a sudden, neither knew how, and light upon some small
matter of conduct or feeling, some 'flower in the crannied wall,' charged
with the profoundest things--things most intimate, most searching,
concerned with the eternal passion and trouble of the human will, the 'body
of this death,' the 'burden' of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'

Then the priest's gentle insistent look would steal on hers; he would speak
from his heart; he would reveal in a shrinking word or two the secrets of
his own spiritual life, of that long inner discipline, which was now his
only support in rebellion, the plank between him and the abyss.

She felt herself pursued; felt it with a mixture of fear and attraction.
She had asked him to be her director; and then refused his advice. She had
tried to persuade him that she was a sceptic and unbeliever. But he had
not done with her. She divined the ardour of the Christian; perhaps the
acuteness of the ecclesiastic. Often she was not strong enough to talk to
him, and then he read to her--the books that she allowed him to choose.
Through a number of indirect and gradual approaches he laid siege to her,
and again and again did she feel her heart fluttering in his grasp, only to
draw it back in fear, to stand once more on a bitter unspoken defence of
herself that would not yield. Yet he recognised in her the approach of some
crisis of feeling. She seemed herself to suspect it, and to be trying to
ward it off, in a kind of blind anguish. Nothing meanwhile could be more
touching than the love between her and Lucy. The old man looked on and
wondered.

Day after day he hesitated. Then one evening, in Lucy's absence, he found
her so pale, and racked with misery--so powerless either to ask help, or to
help herself, so resolute not to speak again, so clearly tortured by her
own coercing will, that his hesitation gave way.

He walked down the hill, in a trance of prayer. When he emerged from it his
mind was made up.

* * * * *

In the days that followed he seemed to Eleanor often agitated and ill
at ease. She was puzzled, too, by his manner towards Lucy. In truth,
he watched Miss Foster with a timid anxiety, trying to penetrate her
character, to divine how presently she might feel towards him. He was not
afraid of Mrs. Burgoyne, but he was sometimes afraid of this girl with her
clear, candid eyes. Her fresh youth, and many of her American ways and
feelings were hard for him to understand. She showed him friendship in a
hundred pretty ways; and he met her sometimes eagerly, sometimes with a
kind of shame-facedness.

Soon he began to neglect his work of a morning that he might wander out to
meet the postman beyond the bridge. And when the man passed him by with
a short 'Non c' e niente,' the priest would turn homeward, glad almost
that for one day more he was not called upon to face the judgment in Lucy
Foster's face on what he had done.

* * * * *

The middle of July was past. The feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel had
come and gone, bringing processions and music, with a Madonna under a gold
baldacchino, to glorify the little deserted chapel on the height.

Eleanor had watched the crowds and banners, the red-robed Compagni di Gesu,
the white priests, and veiled girls, with a cold averted eye. Lucy looked
back with a pang to Marinata, and to the indulgent pleasure that Eleanor
had once taken in all the many-coloured show of Catholicism. Now she was
always weary, and often fretful. It struck Lucy too that she was more
restless than ever. She seemed to take no notice of the present--to be
always living in the future--expecting, listening, waiting. The gestures
and sudden looks that expressed this attitude of mind were often of the
weirdest effect. Lucy could have thought her haunted by some unseen
presence. Physically she was not, perhaps, substantially worse. But her
state was more appealing, and the girl's mind towards her more pitiful day
by day.

One thing, however, she was determined on. They would not spend August at
Torre Amiata. It would need stubbornness with Eleanor to bring her to the
point of change. But stubbornness there should be.

One morning, a day or two after the festa, Lucy left Eleanor on the
_loggia_, while she herself ran out for a turn before their midday meal.
There had been fierce rain in the morning, and the sky was still thick with
thunder clouds promising more.

She escaped into a washed and cooled world. But the thirsty earth had drunk
the rain at a gulp. The hill which had been running with water was almost
dry, the woods had ceased to patter; on all sides could be felt the fresh
restoring impulse of the storm. Nature seemed to be breathing from a deeper
chest--shaking her free locks in a wilder, keener air--to a long-silent
music from the quickened river below.

Lucy almost ran down the hill, so great was the physical relief of the rain
and the cloudy morning. She needed it. Her spirits, too, had been uneven,
her cheek paler of late.

She wore a blue cotton dress, fitting simply and closely to the young
rounded form. Round her shapely throat and the lace collar that showed
Eleanor's fancy and seemed to herself a little too elaborate for the
morning, she wore a child's coral necklace--a gleam of red between the
abundant black of her hair and the soft blue of her dress. Her hat, a large
Leghorn, with a rose in it, framed the sweet gravity of her face. She was
more beautiful than when she had said good-bye to Uncle Ben on the Boston
platform. But it was a beauty that for his adoring old heart would have
given new meaning to 'that sad word, Joy.'

She turned into the Sassetto and pushed upwards through its tumbled rocks
and trees to the seat commanding the river and the mountains.

As she approached it, she was thinking of Eleanor and the future, and her
eyes were absently bent on the ground.

But a scent familiar and yet strange distracted her. Suddenly, on the path
in front of the seat, she saw a still burning cigarette, and on the seat a
book lying.

She stopped short; then sank upon the seat, her eyes fixed upon the book.

It was a yellow-bound French novel, and on the outside was written in a
hand she knew, a name that startled every pulse in her young body.

_His_ book? And that cigarette? Father Benecke neither smoked nor did he
read French novels.

Beyond the seat the path branched, upwards to the Palazzo, and downwards to
the river. She rose and looked eagerly over its steep edge into the medley
of rock and tree below. She saw nothing, but it seemed to her that in the
distance she heard voices talking--receding.

They had left the seat only just in time to escape her. Mr. Manisty had
forgotten his book! Careless and hasty--how well she knew the trait! But he
would miss it--he would come back.

She stood up and tried to collect her thoughts. If he was here, he was with
Father Benecke. So the priest had betrayed the secret he had promised Mrs.
Burgoyne to keep?

No, no!--that was impossible! It was chance--unkind, unfriendly chance.

And yet?--as she bit her lip in fear or bewilderment, her heart was rising
like the Paglia after the storm--swelling, thundering within her.

'What shall I--what shall I do?' she cried under her breath, pressing her
hands to her eyes.

Then she turned and walked swiftly homewards. Eleanor must not know--must
not see him. The girl was seized with panic terror at the thought of what
might be the effect of any sudden shock upon Mrs. Burgoyne.

Halfway up the hill, she stopped involuntarily, wringing her hands in front
of her. It was the thought of Manisty not half a mile away, of his warm,
living self so close to her that had swept upon her, like a tempest wind on
a young oak.

'Oh! I mustn't--_mustn't_--be glad!'--she cried, gulping down a sob,
hating, despising herself.

Then she hurried on. With every step, she grew more angry with Father
Benecke. At best, he must have been careless, inconsiderate. A man of true
delicacy would have done more than keep his promise, would have actively
protected him.

That he had kept the letter of his promise was almost proved by the fact
that Mr. Manisty had not yet descended upon the convent. For what could it
mean--his lingering in Italy--but a search, a pursuit? Her cheek flamed
guiltily over the certainty thus borne in upon her. But if so, what could
hold back his impetuous will--but ignorance? He could not know they were
there. That was clear.

So there was time--a chance. Perhaps Father Benecke was taken by surprise
too--puzzled to know what to do with him? Should she write to the priest;
or simply keep Eleanor indoors and watch?

At thought of her, the girl lashed herself into an indignation, an anguish
that sustained her. After devotion so boundless, service so measureless--so
lightly, meagrely repaid--were Mrs. Burgoyne's peace and health to be again
in peril at her cousin's hands?

* * * * *

Luckily Eleanor showed that day no wish to move from her sofa. The storm
had shaken her, given her a headache, and she was inclined to shiver in the
cooler air.

After luncheon Lucy coaxed her to stay in one of the inner rooms, where
there was a fire-place; out of sight and sound of the road. Marie made a
fire on the disused hearth of what had once been an infirmary cell. The
logs crackled merrily; and presently the rain streamed down again across
the open window.

Lucy sat sewing and reading through the afternoon in a secret anguish
of listening. Every sound in the corridor, every sound from downstairs,
excited the tumult in the blood. 'What is the matter with you?' Eleanor
would say, reaching out first to pinch, then to kiss the girl's cheek. 'It
is all very well that thunder should set a poor wretch like me on edge--but
you! Anyway it has given you back your colour. You look superbly well this
afternoon.'

And then she would fall to gazing at the girl under her eyebrows with that
little trick of the bitten lip, and that piteous silent look, that Lucy
could hardly bear.

The rain fell fast and furious. They dined by the fire, and the night fell.

'Clearing--at last,' said Eleanor, as they pushed back their little table,
and she stood by the open window, while Cecco was taking away the meal;
'but too late and too wet for me.'

An hour later indeed the storm had rolled away, and a bright and rather
cold starlight shone above the woods.

'Now I understand Aunt Pattie's tales of fires at Sorrento in August,' said
Eleanor, crouching over the hearth. 'This blazing Italy can touch you when
she likes with the chilliest fingers. Poor peasants!--are their hearts
lighter to-night? The rain was fierce, but mercifully there was no hail.
Down below they say the harvest is over. Here they begin next week.
The storm has been rude--but not ruinous. Last year the hail-storms in
September stripped the grape; destroyed half their receipts--and pinched
their whole winter. They will think it all comes of their litanies and
banners the other day. If the vintage goes well too, perhaps they will give
the Madonna a new frock. How simple!--how satisfying!'

She hung over the blaze, with her little pensive smile, cheered physically
by the warmth, more ready to talk, more at ease than she had been for days.
Lucy looked at her with a fast beating heart. How fragile she was, how
lovely still, in the half light!

Suddenly Eleanor turned to her, and held out her arms. Lucy knelt down
beside her, trembling lest any look or word should betray the secret in her
heart. But Eleanor drew the girl to her, resting her cheek tenderly on the
brown head.

'Do you miss your mother very much?' she said softly, turning her lips to
kiss the girl's hair. 'I know you do. I see it in you, often.'

Lucy's eyes filled with tears. She pressed Eleanor's hand without speaking.
They clung together in silence each mind full of thoughts unknown to the
other. But Eleanor's features relaxed; for a little while she rested, body
and mind. And as Lucy lingered in the clasp thrown round her, she seemed
for the first time since the old days at the villa to be the cherished, and
not the cherisher.

* * * * *

Eleanor went early to bed, and then Lucy took a warm shawl and paced up and
down the _loggia_ in a torment of indecision. Presently she was attracted
by the little wooden stair which led down from the _loggia_ to what had
once been the small walled garden of the convent, where the monks of this
austere order had taken their exercise in sickness, or rested in the sun,
when extreme old age debarred them from the field labour of their comrades.

The garden was now a desolation, save for a tangle of oleanders and myrtle
in its midst. But the high walls were still intact, and an old wooden door
on the side nearest to the forest. Beneath the garden was a triangular
piece of open grass land sloping down towards the entrance of the Sassetto
and bounded on one side by the road.

Lucy wandered up and down, in a wild trance of feeling. Half a mile away
was he sitting with Father Benecke?--winning perhaps their poor secret from
the priest's incautious lips'? With what eagle-quickness could he pounce on
a sign, an indication! And then the flash of those triumphant eyes, and the
onslaught of his will on theirs!

Hark! She caught her breath.

Voices! Two men were descending the road. She hurried to hide her white
dress, close, under the wall--she strained every sense.

The sputter of a match--the trail of its scent in the heavy air--an
exclamation.

'Father!--wait a moment! Let me light up. These matches are damp. Besides I
want to have another look at this old place--'

The steps diverged from the road; approached the lower wall of the garden.
She pressed herself against its inner surface, trembling in every limb.
Only the old door between her and them! She dared not move--but it was not
only fear of discovery that held her. It was a mad uncontrollable joy, that
like a wind on warm embers, kindled all her being into flame.

'One more crime--that!--of your Parliamentary Italy! What harm had the poor
things done that they should be turned out? You heard what that carabiniere
said?--that they farmed half the plateau. And now look at that! I feel as I
do when I see a blackbird's nest on the ground, that some beastly boy has
been robbing and destroying. I want to get at the boy.'

'The boy would plead perhaps that the blackbirds were too many--and the
fruit too scant. Is it wise, my dear sir, to stand there in the damp?'

The voice was pitched low. Lucy detected the uneasiness of the speaker.

'One moment. You remember, I was here before in November. This summer night
is a new impression. What a pure and exquisite air!'--Lucy could hear the
long inhalation that followed the words. 'I recollect a vague notion of
coming to read here. The _massaja_ told us they took in people for the
summer. Ah! There are some lights, I see, in those upper windows.'

'There are rooms in several parts of the building. Mine were in that
further wing. They were hardly watertight,' said the priest hastily, and in
the same subdued voice.

'It is a place that one might easily rest in--or hide in,' said Manisty
with a new accent on the last words. 'To-morrow morning I will ask the
woman to let me walk through it again.--And to-morrow midday, I must be
off.'

'So soon? My old Francesca will owe you a grudge. She is almost reconciled
to me because you eat--because you praised her omelet.'

'Ah! Francesca is an artist. But--as I told you--I am at present a wanderer
and a pilgrim. We have had our talk--you and I--grasped hands, cheered each
other, "passed the time of day," _undweiter noch--noch weiter--mein treuer
Wanderstab_!'

The words fell from the deep voice with a rich significant note. Lucy heard
the sigh, the impatient, despondent sigh, that followed.

They moved away. The whiffs of tobacco still came back to her on the light
westerly wind; the sound of their voices still reached her covetous ear.
Suddenly all was silent.

She spread her hands on the door in a wild groping gesture.

'Gone! gone!' she said under her breath. Then her hands dropped, and she
stood motionless, with bent head, till the moment was over, and her blood
tamed.




CHAPTER XXI


'Maso! look here!' said Lucy, addressing a small boy, who with his brother
was driving some goats along the road.

She took from a basket on her arm, first some _pasticceria_, then a square
of chocolate, lastly a handful of _soldi_.

'You know the _casetta_ by the river where Mamma Brigitta lives?'

'Yes.' The boy looked at her with his sharp stealthy eyes.

'Take down this letter to Mamma Brigitta. If you wait a little, she'll give
you another letter in exchange, and if you bring it up to me, you shall
have all those!'

And she spread out her bribes.

The boys' faces were sulky. The house by the river was unpopular, owing
to its tenant. But the temptation was of a devilish force. They took the
letter and scampered down the hill driving their goats before them.

Lucy also walked down some three or four of the innumerable zig-zags of the
road. Presently she found a rocky knoll to the left of it. A gap in the
trees opened a vision of the Amiata range, radiantly blue under a superb
sky, a few shreds of moving mist still wrapped about its topmost peaks.
She took her seat upon a moss-covered stone facing the road which mounted
towards her. But some bushes of tall heath and straggling arbutus made a
light screen in front of her. She saw, but she could hardly be seen, till
the passer-by coming from the river was close upon her.

She sat there with her hands lightly crossed upon her knees, holding
herself a little stiffly--waiting.

The phrases of her letter ran in her head. It had been short and
simple.--'Dear Father Benecke,--I have reason to know that Mr. Manisty is
here--is indeed staying with you. Mrs. Burgoyne is not aware of it and I am
anxious that she should not be told. She wishes--as I think she made clear
to you--to be quite alone here, and if she desired to see her cousins she
would of course have written to them herself. She is too ill to be startled
or troubled in any way. Will you do us a great kindness? Will you persuade
Mr. Manisty to go quietly away without letting Mrs. Burgoyne know that he
has been here? Please ask him to tell Miss Manisty that we shall not be
here much longer, that we have a good doctor, and that as Torre Amiata is
on the hills the heat is not often oppressive.'

... The minutes passed away. Presently her thoughts began to escape the
control she had put upon them; and she felt herself yielding to a sense of
excitement. She resolutely took a book of Italian stories from the bottom
of her basket, and began to read.

At last! the patter of the goats and the shouts of the boys.

They rushed upon her with the letter. She handed over their reward and
broke the seal.

'Hochgeerhrtes Fraeulein,--

'It is true that Mr. Manisty is here. I too am most anxious that Mrs.
Burgoyne should not be startled or disturbed. But I distrust my own
diplomacy; nor have I yet mentioned your presence here to my guest. I am
not at liberty to do so, having given my promise to Mrs. Burgoyne. Will
you not see and speak to Mr. Manisty yourself? He talks of going up this
morning to see the old convent. I cannot prevent him, without betraying
what I have no right to betray. At present he is smoking in my garden. But
his carriage is ordered from Selvapendente two hours hence. If he does go
up the hill, it would surely be easy for you to intercept him. If not, you
may he sure that he has left for Orvieto.'

Lucy read the letter with a flush and a frown. It struck her that it was
not quite simple; that the priest knew more, and was more concerned in the
new turn of events than he avowed.

She was well aware that he and Eleanor had had much conversation; that
Eleanor was still possessed by the same morbid forces of grief and anger
which, at the villa, had broken down all her natural reticence and
self-control. Was it possible--?

Her cheek flamed. She felt none of that spell in the priestly office which
affected Eleanor. The mere bare notion of being 'managed' by this kind old
priest was enough to rouse all her young spirit and defiance.

But the danger was imminent. She saw what she must do, and prepared herself
to do it--simply, without any further struggle.

The little goatherds left her, munching their cakes and looking back at her
from time to time in a childish curiosity. The pretty blue lady had seated
herself again as they had found her--a few paces from the roadside, under
the thick shadow of an oak.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Manisty was rejoined by Father Benecke--who had left him for
a few minutes to write his letter--beside the Paglia, which was rushing
down in a brown flood, after the rain of the day before. Around and above
them, on either side of the river, and far up the flanks of the mountains
opposite, stretched the great oak woods, which are still to-day the lineal
progeny of that vast Ciminian forest where lurked the earliest enemies of
Rome.

'But for the sun, it might be Wales!' said Manisty, looking round him, as
he took out another cigarette.

Father Benecke made no reply. He sat on a rock by the water's side, in what
seemed to be a reverie. His fine white head was uncovered. His attitude was
gentle, dignified, abstracted.

'It is a marvellous country this!' Manisty resumed. 'I thought I knew it
pretty well. But the last five weeks have given one's mind a new hold upon
it. The forests have been wasted--but by George!--what forests there are
still!--and what a superb mountain region, half of which is only known to
a few peasants and shepherds. What rivers--what fertility--what a climate!
And the industry of the people. Catch a few English farmers and set them to
do what the Italian peasant does, year in and year out, without a murmur!
Look at all the coast south of Naples. There is not a yard of it, scarcely,
that hasn't been _made_ by human hands. Look at the hill-towns; and think
of the human toil that has gone to the making and maintaining of them since
the world began.'

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