Maurice Leblanc - "The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar"

Ian Maclaren - "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush"

Ben Field - "Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin"

Herbert Wes McBride - "The Emma Gees"

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




Anybody noticing the effect--for it was an effect--would have thought it
a mere happy accident. Eleanor Burgoyne alone knew that it was conscious.
She had seen the same pose, the same concealment practised too often to be
mistaken. But it made no difference whatever to the spell that held her.
The small vanities and miseries of Manisty's nature were all known to
her--and alas! she would not have altered one of them!

* * * * *

When the Cardinal rose to go, two Italian girls, who had come with their
brother, the Count Casaleschi, ran forward, and curtseying kissed the
Cardinal's ring. And as he walked away, escorted by Manisty, a gardener
crossed the avenue, who also at sight of the tall red-sashed figure fell on
his knees and did the same. The Cardinal gave him an absent nod and smile,
and passed on.

'Ah! _j'etouffe_!'--cried Madame Variani, throwing herself down by Miss
Manisty. 'Give me another cup, _chere Madame_. Your nephew is too bad.
Let him show us another nation born in forty years--that has had to make
itself in a generation--let him show it us! Ah! you English--with all your
advantages--and your proud hearts.--Perhaps we too could pick some holes in
you!'

She fanned herself with angry vigour. The young men came to stand round
her arguing and laughing. She was a favourite in Rome, and as a French
woman, and the widow of a Florentine man of letters, occupied a somewhat
independent position, and was the friend of many different groups.

'And you--young lady, what do you think?'--she said suddenly, laying a
large hand on Lucy Foster's knee.

Lucy, startled, looked into the sparkling black eyes brought thus close to
her own.

'But I just _long_'--she said, catching her breath--'to hear the other
side.'

'Ah, and you shall hear it, my dear--you shall!' cried Madame Variani.
'_N'est-ce pas, Madame?_' she said, addressing Miss Manisty--'We will get
rid of all those priests--and then we will speak our mind? Oh, and you
too,'--she waved her hand with a motherly roughness towards the young
men,--'What do you know about it, Signor Marchese? If there were no Guardia
Nobile, you would not wear those fine uniforms.--That is why you like the
Pope.'

The Marchese Vitellucci--a charming boy of two and twenty, tall, thin-faced
and pensive,--laughed and bowed.

'The Pope, Madame, should establish some _dames d'honneur_. Then he would
have all the ladies too on his side.

'_O, mon Dieu!_--he has enough of them,' cried Madame Variani. 'But here
comes Mr. Manisty, I must drink my tea and hold my tongue. I am going out
to dinner to-night, and if one gets hot and cross, that is not good for the
complexion.'

Manisty advanced at his usual quick pace, his head sunk once more between
his shoulders.

Young Vitellucci approached him. 'Ah! Carlo!' he said, looking up
affectionately--'dear fellow!--Come for a stroll with me.'

And linking his arm in the young man's, he carried him off. Their peals of
laughter could be heard coming back from the distance of the ilex-walk.

Madame Variani tilted back her chair to look after them.

'Ah! your nephew can be agreeable too, when he likes,' she said to Miss
Manisty. 'I do not say no. But when he talks of these poor Italians, he is
_mechant--mechant_!'

As for Lucy Foster, as Manisty passed out of sight, she felt her pulses
still tingling with a wholly new sense of passionate hostility--dislike
even. But none the less did the stage seem empty and meaningless when he
had left it.

* * * * *

Manisty and Mrs. Burgoyne were closeted in the library for some time before
dinner. Lucy in the salon could hear him pacing up and down, and the deep
voice dictating.

Then Mrs. Burgoyne came into the salon, and not noticing the girl who was
hidden behind a great pot of broom threw herself on the sofa with a long
sigh of fatigue. Lucy could just see the pale face against the pillow and
the closed eyes. Thus abandoned and at rest, there was something strangely
pitiful in the whole figure, for all its grace.

A wave of feeling rose in the girl's breast. She slipped softly from her
hiding-place, took a silk wrap that was lying on a chair, and approached
Mrs. Burgoyne.

'Let me put this over you. Won't you sleep before dinner? And I will shut
the window. It is getting cold.'

Mrs. Burgoyne opened her eyes in astonishment, and murmured a few words of
thanks.

Lucy covered her up, closed the window, and was stealing away, when Mrs.
Burgoyne put out a hand and touched her.

'It is very sweet of you to think of me.'

She drew the girl to her, enclosed the hand she had taken in both hers,
pressed it and released it. Lucy went quietly out of the room.

Then till dinner she sat reading her New Testament, and trying rather
piteously to remind herself that it was Sunday. Far away in a New England
village, the bells were ringing for the evening meeting. Lucy, shutting
her eyes, could smell the spring scents in the church lane, could hear
the droning of the opening hymn. A vague mystical peace stole upon her,
as she recalled the service; the great words of 'sin,' 'salvation,'
'righteousness,' as the Evangelical understands them, thrilled through her
heart.

Then, as she rose to dress, there burst upon her through the open window
the sunset blaze of the Campagna with the purple dome in its midst. And
with that came the memory of the afternoon,--of the Cardinal--and Manisty.

Very often, in these first days, it was as though her mind ached, under
the stress of new thinking, like something stretched and sore. In the New
England house where she had grown up, a corner of the old-fashioned study
was given up to the books of her grandfather, the divinity professor. They
were a small collection, all gathered with one object,--the confuting and
confronting of Rome. Like many another Protestant zealot, the old professor
had brooded on the crimes and cruelties of persecuting Rome, till they
became a madness in the blood. How well Lucy remembered his books--with
their backs of faded grey or brown cloths, and their grim titles. Most of
them she had never yet been allowed to read. When she looked for a book,
she was wont to pass this shelf by in a vague horror. What Rome habitually
did or permitted, what at any rate she had habitually done or permitted in
the past, could not--it seemed--be known by a pure woman! And she would
glance from the books to the engraving of her grandfather above them,--to
the stern and yet delicate face of the old Calvinist, with its high-peaked
brow, and white neckcloth supporting the sharp chin; lifting her heart
to him in a passionate endorsement, a common fierce hatred of wrong and
tyranny.

She had grown older since then, and her country with her. New England
Puritanism was no longer what it had been; and the Catholic Church had
spread in the land. But in Uncle Ben's quiet household, and in her own
feeling, the changes had been but slight and subtle. Pity, perhaps, had
insensibly taken the place of hatred. But those old words 'priest' and
'mass' still rung in her ears as symbols of all that man had devised to
corrupt and deface the purity of Christ.

And of what that purity might be, she had such tender, such positive
traditions! Her mother had been a Christian mystic--a 'sweet woman,' meek
as a dove in household life, yet capable of the fiercest ardours as a
preacher and missionary, gathering rough labourers into barns and by the
wayside, and dying before her time, worn out by the imperious energies of
religion. Lucy had always before her the eyes that seemed to be shining
through a mist, the large tremulous mouth, the gently furrowed brow. Those
strange forces--'grace'--and 'the spirit'--had been the realities, the
deciding powers of her childhood, whether in what concerned the great
emotions of faith, or the most trivial incidents of ordinary life--writing
a letter--inviting a guest--taking a journey. The soul bare before God,
depending on no fleshly aid, distracted by no outward rite; sternly
defending its own freedom as a divine trust:--she had been reared on these
main thoughts of Puritanism, and they were still through all insensible
transformation, the guiding forces of her own being.

Already, in this Catholic country, she had been jarred and repelled on all
sides. Yet she found herself living with two people for whom Catholicism
was not indeed a personal faith--she could not think of that side of it
without indignation--but a thing to be passionately admired and praised,
like art, or music, or scenery. You might believe nothing, and yet write
pages and pages in glorification of the Pope and the Mass, and in contempt
of everything else!--in excuse too of every kind of tyranny so long as it
served the Papacy and 'the Church.'

She leaned out to the sunset, remembering sentence after sentence from the
talk on the terrace--hating or combating them all.

Yet all the time a new excitement invaded her. For the man who had spoken
thus was, in a sense, not a mere stranger to her. Somewhere in his being
must be the capacity for those thoughts and feelings that had touched her
so deeply in his book--for that magical insight and sweetness--

Ah!--perhaps she had not understood his book--no more than she understood
him now. The sense of her own ignorance oppressed her--and of all that
_might_ be said, with regard apparently to anything whatever. Was there
nothing quite true--quite certain--in the world?

So the girl's intense and simple nature entered like all its fellows, upon
the old inevitable struggle. As she stood there, with locked hands and
flushed cheeks, conscious through every vein of the inrush and shock of new
perceptions, new comparisons, she was like a ship that leaves the harbour
for the open, and feels for the first time on all her timbers the strain of
the unplumbed sea.

And of this invasion, this excitement, the mind, in haunting debate and
antagonism, made for itself one image, one symbol--the face of Edward
Manisty.




CHAPTER V


While he was thus--unknowing--the cause of so many new attractions and
repulsions in his guest's mind, Manisty, after the first shock of annoyance
produced by her arrival was over, hardly remembered her existence. He was
incessantly occupied by the completion of his book, working late and early,
sometimes in high and even extravagant spirits, but, on the whole, more
commonly depressed and discontented.

Eleanor Burgoyne worked with him or for him many hours in each day. Her
thin pallor became more pronounced. She ate little, and Miss Manisty
believed that she slept less. The elder lady indeed began to fidget and
protest, to remonstrate now and then with Manisty himself, even to threaten
a letter to 'the General.' Eleanor's smiling obstinacy, however, carried
all before it. And Manisty, in spite of a few startled looks and
perfunctory dissuasions, whenever his aunt attacked him, soon slipped back
into his normal ways of depending on his cousin, and not being able to work
without her. Lucy Foster thought him selfish and inconsiderate. It gave her
one more cause of quarrel with him.

For she and Mrs. Burgoyne were slowly but surely making friends. The
clearer it became that Manisty took no notice of Miss Foster, and refused
to be held in any way responsible for her entertainment, the more anxious,
it seemed, did Eleanor show herself to make life pleasant for the American
girl. Her manner, which had always been kind, became more natural and gay.
It was as though she had settled some question with herself, and settled it
entirely to Lucy Foster's advantage.

Not much indeed could be done for the stranger while the stress of
Manisty's work lasted. Aunt Pattie braced herself once or twice, got out
the guide-books and took her visitor into Rome to see the sights. But the
little lady was so frankly worn out by these expeditions, that Lucy, full
of compunctions, could only beg to be left to herself in future. Were not
the garden and the lake, the wood-paths to Rocca di Papa, and the roads to
Albano good enough?

So presently it came to her spending many hours alone in the terraced
garden on the hill-side, with all the golden Campagna at her feet. Her
young fancy, however, soon learnt to look upon that garden as the very
concentration and symbol of Italy. All the Italian elements, the Italian
magics were there. Along its topmost edge ran a vast broken wall, built
into the hill; and hanging from the brink of the wall like a long roof,
great ilexes shut out the day from the path below. Within the thickness of
the wall--in days when, in that dim Rome upon the plain, many still lived
who could remember the voice and the face of Paul of Tarsus--Domitian had
made niches and fountains; and he had thrown over the terrace, now darkened
by the great ilex boughs, a long portico roof supported on capitals and
shafts of gleaming marble. Then in the niches round the clear fountains,
he had ranged the fine statues of a still admirable art; everywhere he had
lavished marbles, rose and yellow and white, and under foot he had spread a
mosaic floor, glistening beneath the shadow-play of leaf and water, in the
rich reflected light from the garden and the Campagna outside; while at
intervals, he had driven through the very crest of the hill long tunnelled
passages, down which one might look from the garden and see the blue lake
shining at their further end.

And still the niches and the recesses were there,--the huge wall too along
the face of the hill; all broken and gashed and ruinous, showing the fine
reticulated brickwork that had been once faced with marble; alternately
supported and torn by the pushing roots of the ilex-trees. The tunnelled
passages too were there, choked and fallen in; no flash of the lake now
beyond their cool darkness! And into the crumbling surface of the wall,
rude hands had built fragments of the goddesses and the Caesars that had
once reigned there, barbarously mingled with warm white morsels from
the great cornice of the portico, acanthus blocks from the long buried
capitals, or dolphins orphaned of Aphrodite.

The wreck was beautiful, like all wrecks in Italy where Nature has had her
way. For it was masked in the gloom of the overhanging trees; or hidden
behind dropping veils of ivy; or lit up by straggling patches of broom and
cytisus that thrust themselves through the gaps in the Roman brickwork and
shone golden in the dark. At the foot of the wall, along its whole length,
ran a low marble conduit that held still the sweetest liveliest water.
Lilies of the valley grew beside it, breathing scent into the shadowed air;
while on the outer or garden side of the path, the grass was purple with
long-stalked violets, or pink with the sharp heads of the cyclamen. And a
little further, from the same grass, there shot up in a happy neglect, tall
camellia-trees ragged and laden, strewing the ground red and white beneath
them. And above the camellias again, the famous stone-pines of the villa
climbed into the high air, overlooking the plain and the sea, peering at
Rome and Soracte.

So old it was!--and yet so fresh with spring! In the mornings at least the
spring was uppermost. It silenced the plaint of outraged beauty which the
place seemed to be always making, under a flutter of growth and song. Water
and flowers and nightingales, the shadow, the sunlight, and the heat, were
all alike strong and living,--Italy untamed. It was only in the evenings
that Lucy shunned the path. For then, from the soil below and the wall
above, there crept out the old imprisoned forces of sadness, or of poison,
and her heart flagged or her spirits sank as she sat or walked there.
Marinata has no malaria; but on old soils, and as night approaches, there
is always something in the shade of Italy that fights with human life. The
poor ghosts rise from the earth--jealous of those that are still walking
the warm ways of the world.

But in the evenings, when the Fountain Walk drove her forth, the central
hot zone of the garden was divine, with its roses and lilacs, its birds,
its exquisite grass alive with shining lizards, jewelled with every flower,
breathing every scent; and at its edge the old terrace with its balustrade,
set above the Campagna, commanding the plain and the sea, the sky and the
sunsets.

Evening after evening Lucy might have been found perched on the stone
coping of the balustrade, sometimes trying, through the warm silent hours,
by the help of this book or that, to call up again the old Roman life;
sometimes dreaming of what there might still be--what the archaeologists
indeed said must be--buried beneath her feet; of the marble limbs and faces
pressed into the earth, and all the other ruined things, small and great,
mean or lovely, that lay deep in a common grave below the rustling olives,
and the still leafless vineyards; and sometimes the mere passive companion
of the breeze and the sun, conscious only of the chirping of the crickets,
or the loudness of the nightingales, or the flight of a hoopoe, like some
strange bright bird of fairy-tale, flashing from one deep garden-shadow to
another.

Yet the garden was not always given up to her and the birds. Peasant folk
coming from Albano or the olive-grounds between it and the villa would
take a short cut through the garden to Marinata; dark-faced gardeners,
in blue linen suits, would doff their peaked hats to the strange lady;
or a score or two of young black-frocked priestlings from a neighbouring
seminary would suddenly throng its paths, playing mild girlish games,
with infinite clamour and chatter, running races as far and fast as their
black petticoats would allow, twisting their long overcoats and red sashes
meanwhile round a battered old noseless bust that stood for Domitian at the
end of a long ilex-avenue, and was the butt for all the slings and arrows
of the day,--poor helpless State, blinded and buffeted by the Church!

Lucy would hide herself among the lilacs and the arbutus when the seminary
invaded her; watching through the leaves the strapping Italian boys
in their hindering womanish dress; scorning them for their state of
supervision and dependence; pitying them for their destiny!

And sometimes Manisty, disturbed by the noise, would come out--pale and
frowning. But at the sight of the seminarists and of the old priest in
command of them, his irritable look would soften. He would stand indeed
with his hands on his sides, laughing and chatting with the boys, his head
uncovered, his black curls blown backward from the great furrowed brow; and
in the end Lucy peering from her nook would see him pacing up and down the
ilex-walk with the priest,--haranguing and gesticulating--the old man in
a pleased wonder looking at the Englishman through his spectacles, and
throwing in from time to time ejaculations of assent, now half puzzled,
and now fanatically eager. "He is talking the book!"--Lucy would think to
herself--and her mind would rise in revolt.

One day after parting with the lads he came unexpectedly past her
hiding-place, and paused at sight of her. "Do the boys disturb you?" he
said, glancing at her book, and speaking with the awkward abruptness which
with him could in a moment take the place of ease and mirth.

"Oh no--not at all."

He fidgeted, stripping leaves from the arbutus tree under which she sat.

"That old priest who comes with them is a charming fellow!"

Her shyness gave way.

"Is he?--He looks after them like an old nurse. And they are such
babies--those great boys!"

His eye kindled.

"So you would like them to be more independent--more brutal. You prefer
a Harvard and Yale football match--with the dead and wounded left on the
ground?"

She laughed, daring for the first time to assert herself.

"No. I don't want blood! But there is something between. However--"

She hesitated. He looked down upon her half irritable, half smiling.

"Please go on."

"It would do them no good, would it--to be independent?"

"Considering how soon they must be slaves for life? Is that what you mean?"

Her frank blue eyes raised themselves to his. He was instantly conscious of
something cool and critical in her attitude towards him. Very possibly he
had been conscious of it for some time, which accounted for his instinctive
avoidance of her. In the crisis of thought and production through which
he was passing he shrank from any touch of opposition or distrust. He
distrusted himself enough. It was as though he carried about with him
wounds that only Eleanor's soft touch could be allowed to approach. And
from the first evening he had very naturally divined in this Yankee girl,
with her mingled reserve and transparency, her sturdy Protestantisms of all
sorts, elements antagonistic to himself.

She answered his question, however, by another--still referring to the
seminarists.

'Isn't that the reason why they take and train them so young--that they may
have no will left?'

'Well, is that the worst condition in the world--to give up your own will
to an idea--a cause?'

She laughed shyly--a low musical sound that suddenly gave him, as it
seemed, a new impression of her.

'You call the old priest an "idea"?'

Both had the same vision of the most portly and substantial of figures.
Manisty smiled unwillingly.

'The old priest is merely the symbol.'

She shook her head obstinately.

'He is all they know anything about. He gives orders, and they obey. Soon
it will be some one else's turn to give them the orders--'

'Till the time comes for them to give orders themselves?--Well, what is
there to object to in that?' He scanned her severely. 'What does it mean
but that they are parts of a great system, properly organised, to a great
end? Show me anything better?'

She coloured.

'It is better, isn't it, that--sometimes--one should give oneself orders?'
she said in a low voice.

Manisty laughed.

'Liberty to make a fool of oneself--in short. No doubt,--that's the great
modern panacea.' He paused, staring at her without being conscious of it,
with his absent brilliant eyes. Then he broke out--'Well! so you despise
my little priests! Did you ever think of inquiring, however, which wears
best--their notion of human life, which after all has weathered 1900 years,
and is as strong and prevailing as it ever was--or the sort of notion
that their enemies here go to work upon? Look into the history of this
Abyssinian war--everybody free to make fools of themselves, in Rome
or Africa--and doing it magnificently! Private judgment--private aims
everywhere--from Crispi to the smallest lieutenant. Result--universal wreck
and muddle--thousands of lives thrown away--a nation brought to shame.
Then look about you at what's going on--here--this week--on these hills.
It's Holy Week. They're all fasting--they're a11 going to mass--the people
working in the fields, our servants, the bright little priests. To-morrow's
Holy Thursday. From now till Sunday, nobody here will eat anything but a
little bread and a few olives. The bells will cease to-morrow. If a single
church-bell rang in Rome--over this plain, and these mountains--through the
whole of Italy--from mass to-morrow till mass on Saturday--a whole nation
would feel pain and outrage. Then on Saturday--marvellous symbol!--listen
for the bells. You will hear them all loosed together, as soon as the
Sanctus begins--all over Italy. And on Sunday--watch the churches. If it
isn't Matthew Arnold's "One common wave of thought and joy--Lifting mankind
amain,"--what is it? To me, it's what keeps the human machine running. Make
the comparison!--it will repay you. My little muffs of priests with their
silly obedience won't come so badly out of it.'

Unconsciously he had taken a seat beside her, and was looking at her with
a sharp imperious air. She dimly understood that he was not talking to her
but to a much larger audience, that he was still in fact in the grip of
"the book." But that he should have anyway addressed so many consecutive
sentences to her excited her after these many days of absolute neglect and
indifference on his part; she felt a certain tremor of pulse. Instead,
however, of diminishing self-command, it bestowed it.

'Well, if that's the only way of running the machine--the Catholic way I
mean,'--her words came out a little hurried and breathless--'I don't see
how _we_ exist.'

'You? America?'

She nodded.

'_Do_ you exist?--in any sense that matters?'

He laughed as he spoke; but his tone provoked her. She threw up her head a
little, suddenly grave.

'Of course we know that you dislike us.'

He showed a certain embarrassment.

'How do you know?'

'Oh!--we read what you said of us.'

'I was badly reported,' he said, smiling.

'No,'--she insisted. 'But you were mistaken in a great many things--very,
very much mistaken. You judged much too quickly.'

He rose, a covert amusement playing round his lips. It was the indulgence
of the politician and man of affairs towards the little backwoods girl who
was setting him to rights.

'We must have it out,' he said, 'I see I shall have to defend myself. But
now I fear Mrs. Burgoyne will be waiting for me.'

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