William Noyes - "Handwork in Wood"

Caius Valerius Catullus - "The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus"

D. G. Hogarth - "The Ancient East"

Sophie May - "Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's"

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.

The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance




Besides Plank scarcely noticed what the press said of him. He was too
busy; his days were full days, brimming over deep into the night.
Brokers, lawyers, sycophants, tipsters, treacherous ex-employes of
Quarrier, detectives, up-State petty officials, lobbyists from Albany,
newspaper men, men from Wall Street, Broad Street, Mulberry Street,
Forty-second Street--all these he saw in units, relays, regiments--either
at his offices or after dinner--and sometimes after midnight in his own
house. And these were only a few, picked from the interested or
disinterested thousands who besieged him with advice, importunity,
threats, and attempted blackmail. And he handled them all in turn,
stolidly but with decision. His obstinate under lip protruded further
and further with rare recessions; his heavy head was like the lowered
head of a bull. Undaunted, inexorable, slow to the verge of stupidity at
times, at times swift as a startled tiger, this new, amazing personality
steadily developing, looming higher, heavier, athwart the financial
horizon--in stature holding his own among giants, then growing,
gradually, inch by inch, dominated his surrounding level sky line.

The youth in him was the tragedy to the old; the sudden silence of the
man the danger to the secretive. Harrington was already an old man;
Quarrier's own weapon had always been secrecy; but the silence of Plank
confused him, for he had never learned to parry well another's use of
his own weapon. The left-handed swordsman dreads to cross with a man who
fights with the left hand. And Harrington, hoary, seamed, scarred,
maimed in onslaughts of long forgotten battles, looked long and hard
upon this weird of his own dead youth which now rose towering to
confront him, menacing him with the armed point of the same shield
behind which he himself had so long found shelter--the Law!

The closing of the courts enforced armed truces along certain lines of
Plank's battle front; the adjournment of the legislature emptied Albany.
Once it was rumoured that Plank had passed an entire morning with the
Governor of the greatest State in the Union and that the conference was
to be repeated. A swarm of newspaper men settled about the Governor's
summer cottage at Saratoga, but they learned nothing, nor could they
find a trace of Plank's tracks in the trodden trails of the great Spa.

Besides, the racing had begun; Desmond, Burbank, Sneed, and others of
the gilded guild had opened new club-houses; the wretched, half-starved
natives in the surrounding hills were violating the game-laws to distend
the paunches of the overfed with five-inch troutlings and grouse and
woodcock slaughtered out of season; so there was plenty of copy for
newspaper men without the daily speculative paragraph devoted to the
doings of Beverly Plank. Some scandal, too--but newspapers never touch
that; and after all it was nobody's affair that Leroy Mortimer drove a
large yellow and black Serin-Chanteur touring-car, new model, all over
Saratoga county. Perhaps the similarity of machines gave rise to the
rumour of Plank's presence; perhaps not, because the car was often
driven by a tall, slender girl with dark eyes and hair; and nobody ever
saw that sort of pretty woman in Plank's Serin, or saw Leroy Mortimer
for many days without a companion of that species.

Mortimer's health was excellent. The races had not proved remunerative
however, and his new motor-car was horribly expensive. So was Lydia. And
he began to be seriously afraid that by the end of August he would be
obliged to apply to Quarrier once more for some slight temporary token
of that gentleman's goodwill. He told Lydia this, and she seemed to
agree with him. This pleased him. She had not pleased him very much
recently. For one thing she was becoming too friendly with some of his
friends--Desmond in particular.

Plank, it was known, had opened his great house at Black Fells. His
servants, gamekeepers, were there; his stables, kennels, greenhouses,
model stock-farm--all had been put in immaculate condition pending the
advent of the master. But Plank had not appeared; his new sea-going
steam yacht still lay in the East River, and, at rare intervals, a
significant glimmer of bunting disclosed the owner's presence aboard for
an hour or two. That was all, however; and the cliff-watchers at
Shotover House and the Fells looked seaward in vain for the big Siwanoa,
as yacht after yacht, heralded by the smudge on the horizon, turned from
a gray speck to a white one, and crept in from the sea to anchor.

The Ferralls were at Shotover with their first instalment of guests.
Sylvia was there, Quarrier expected--because Kemp Ferrall's break with
him was not a social one, and Grace's real affection for Sylvia blinded
neither her nor her husband to the material and social importance of the
intimacy. Siward was not invited; neither had an invitation to him been
even discussed in view of what Grace was aware of, and what everybody
knew concerning the implacable relations existing between him,
personally, and Howard Quarrier.

Bridge, yachting, and motoring were the August sports; the shooting set
had not yet arrived, of course; in fact there was still another relay
expected before the season opened and brought the shooting coterie for
the first two weeks. But Sylvia was expected to last through and hold
over with a brief interlude for a week's end at Lenox. So was Quarrier;
and Grace, always animated by a lively but harmless malice, hoped to
Heaven that Plank might arrive before Quarrier left, because she adored
the tension of situations and was delightedly persuaded that Plank was
more than able to hold his own with her irritating cousin.

"Oh, to see them together in a small room," she sighed ecstatically in
Sylvia's ear; "I'd certainly poke them up if they only turned around
sulkily in the corners of the cage and evinced a desire to lie down."

"What a mischief-maker you are," said Sylvia listlessly; and though
Grace became very vivacious in describing her plans to extract amusement
out of Plank's hoped-for presence Sylvia remained uninterested.

There seemed, in fact, little to interest her that summer at Shotover
House; and, though she never refused any plans made for her, and her
attitude was one of quiet acquiescence always--she never expressed a
preference for anything, a desire to do anything; and, if let alone, was
prone to pace the cliffs or stretch her slim, rounded body on the sand
of some little, sheltered, crescent beach, apparently content with the
thunderous calm of sea and sky.

Her interest, too, in people had seemingly been extinguished. Once or
twice she did inquire as to Marion's whereabouts, and learned that Miss
Page was fishing in Minnesota somewhere but would return to Shotover
when the shooting opened. Somebody, Captain Voucher, perhaps, mentioned
to somebody in her hearing that Siward was still in New York. If she
heard she made no sign, no inquiry. The next morning she remained abed
with a headache, and Grace motored to Wendover without her; but Sylvia
spent the balance of the day on the cliffs, and played Bridge with the
devil's own luck till dawn, piling up a score that staggered Mr.
Fleetwood, who had been instructing her in adversary play a day or two
before.

The hot month dragged on; Quarrier came; Agatha Caithness arrived a few
days later--scheme of the Ferralls involving Alderdene!--but the Siwanoa
did not come, and Plank remained invisible. Leila Mortimer arrived from
Swan's Harbour toward the middle of the month, offering no information
as to the whereabouts of what Major Belwether delicately designated as
her "legitimate." But everybody knew he was at last to be crossed off
and struck clean out, and the ugly history of the winter, now so
impudently corroborated at Saratoga, gave many a hostess the opportunity
long desired. Mortimer, as far as his own particular circle was
concerned, was down and out; Leila, accepted as a matter of course
without him, remained quietly uncommunicative. If the outward physical
change in her was due to her marital rupture people thought it was well
that it had come in time, for she bloomed like a lovely exotic; and her
silences and enthusiasms, and the fragrant freshness of her developing
attitude toward the world first disconcerted, then amused, then touched
those who had supposed themselves to be so long a buckler for her
foibles and a shield for her caprice.

"Gad," said Alderdene, "she's well rid of him if he's been choking her
this long--the rank, rotten weed that he is, sapping the life from her so
when she hung over toward another fellow's bush we thought she was frail
in the stem--God bless us all for a simpering lot of blatherskites!"

And if, in the corner of the gun-room, there was a man among them who
had ever ventured to hold Leila's smooth little hand, unrebuked, in days
gone by, none the less he knew that Alderdene spoke truth; and none the
less he knew that what witness he might be called to bear at the end of
the end of all must only incriminate himself and not that young matron
who now, before their very eyes, was budding again, reverting to the
esoteric charm of youth reincarnated.

"A suit before a referee would settle him," mused Voucher; "he hasn't a
leg to stand on. Lord! The same cat that tripped up Stephen Siward!"

Fleetwood's quick eyes glimmered for an instant in Quarrier's direction.
Quarrier was in the billiard-room, out of earshot, practising balk-line
problems with Major Belwether; and Fleetwood said: "The same cat that
tripped up Stephen Siward. Yes. But who let her loose?"

"It was your dinner; you ought to know," said Voucher bluntly.

"I do know. He brought her"--nodding toward the billiard-room.

"Belwether?"

"No," yawned Fleetwood.

Somebody said presently: "Isn't he one of the Governors? Oh, I say, that
was rather rough on Siward though."

"Yes, rough. The law of trespass ought to have operated; a man's liable
for the damage done by his own live-stock."

"That's a brutal way of talking," said somebody. And the subject was
closed with the entrance of Agatha in white flannels on her way to the
squash court where she had an appointment with Quarrier.

"A strange girl," said somebody after she had disappeared with Quarrier.

"That pallor is stunning," said a big, ruddy youth, with sunburn on his
neck and forehead.

"It isn't healthy," said Fleetwood.

"It attracts me," persisted the ruddy young man, voicing naively that
curious truth concerning the attraction that disease so often exerts on
health--the strange curiosity the normal has for the sub-normal--that
fascination of the wholesome for the unhealthy. It is, perhaps, more
curiosity than anything, unless, deep hidden under the normal, there lie
one single, perverted nerve.

Sylvia, passing the hall, glanced in through the gun-room door with an
absentminded smile at the men and their laughing greeting, as they rose
with uplifted glasses to salute her.

"The sweetest of all," observed a man, disconsolately emptying his
glass. "Oh irony! What a marriage!"

"Do you know any girl who would not change places with her?" asked
another.

Every man there insisted that he knew one girl at least who would not
exchange Sylvia's future for her own. That was very nice of them; it is
to be hoped they believed it. Some of them did--for the moment, anyhow.
Then Alderdene, blinking furiously, emitted one of his ear-racking
laughs; and everybody, as usual, laughed too.

"You damned cynic," observed Voucher affectionately.

"Somebody," said Fleetwood, "insists that she doubled up poor Siward."

"She never met Siward until she was engaged to Howard," remarked
Voucher.

"Well?"

"Oh, don't you consider that enough to squelch the story?"

"Engaged girls," mused Alderdene, "never double up except at Bridge."

"Everybody has been or is in love with Sylvia Landis," said Voucher,
"and it's a man's own fault if he's hit. Once she did it, innocently
enough, and enjoyed it, never realising that it hurt a man to be doubled
up."

Fleetwood yawned again and said: "She can have me to-morrow. But she
won't. She's tired of the sport. Any girl would get enough with the pack
at her heels day in and day out. Besides she's done for--unless she
looses Quarrier and starts on a duke-hunt over in Blinky's country! . Is
anybody on for a sail? Is anybody on for anything? No? Oh, very well.
Shove that decanter north by west, Billy."

This was characteristic of the dog-days at Shotover. The dog-days in
town were very different; the city threw open the parks to the poor at
night; horses fell dead in the streets; pallid urchins, stripped naked,
splashed and rolled and screeched in the basin of the City Hall fountain
under the indifferent eyes of the police.

As for Plank he was too busy to know what the thermometer was about; he
had no time for anything outside of his own particular business except
to go every day to the big, darkened house in lower Fifth Avenue where
the days had been hard on Siward and the nights harder.

Siward, however, could walk now, using his crutches still, but often
stopping to gently test his left foot and see how much weight he was
able to bear on it--even taking a tentative step or two without crutch
support. He drove when he thought it prudent to use the horses in the
heat, usually very early in the morning, though sometimes at night with
Plank when the latter had time to run his touring-car through the park
and out into the Bronx or Westchester for a breath of air.

But Plank wanted him to go away, get out of the city for his
convalescence, and Siward flatly declined, demanding that Plank permit
him to do his share in the fight against the Inter-County people.

And Plank, utterly unable to persuade him, and the more hampered because
of his anxiety about Siward--though that young man did not know it--wore
himself out providing Siward with such employment in the matter as would
lightly occupy him without doing any good to the enemy.

So Siward, stripped to his pajamas, pored over reams of typewritten
matter and took his brief walking exercise in the comparative cool of
the evening and drove when he dared use his horses; or, sitting beside
Plank, whizzed northward through the starry darkness of the suburbs.

When it was that he first began to like Plank very much he could not
exactly remember. He was not, perhaps, aware of how much he liked him.
Plank's unexpected fits of shyness, of formality, often and often amused
him. But there was a subtler feeling under the unexpressed amusement,
and, beneath all, a constantly increasing sub-stratum of respect. Too,
he found himself curiously at ease with Plank, as with one born to his
own caste. And this feeling, unconscious, but more and more apparent,
meant more to Plank than anything that had ever happened to him. It was
a tonic in hours of doubt, a pleasure in his brief leisure, a pride
never to be hinted at, never to be guessed, never to be dreamed of by
any living soul save Plank alone.

Then, one sultry day toward the last week in August, a certain judge of
a certain court, known among some as "Harrington's judge," sent secretly
for Plank. And Plank knew that the crisis was over. But neither
Harrington nor Quarrier dreamed of such a thing.

Fear sat heavy on that judge's soul--the godless, selfish fear that sends
the first coward slinking from the councils of conspiracy to seek
immunity from those slowly grinding millstones that grind exceeding
fine.

Quarrier at Shotover, with his private car and his locomotive within an
hour's drive, strolled with Sylvia on the eve of her departure for Lenox
with Leila Mortimer; then, when their conference was ended, he returned
to Agatha, calmly unconscious of impending events.

Harrington, at Seabright, paced his veranda, awaiting this same judge,
annoyed as two boats came in without the expected guest. And never for
one instant did he dream that his creature sat closeted with Plank,
tremulous, sallow, nearing the edge of cringing avowal--only held back
from utter collapse by the agonising necessity of completing a bargain
that might save himself from the degradation of the punishment that had
seemed inevitable. All day long he sat with Plank. Nobody except those
two knew he was there. And after a very long time Plank consented that
nobody else except Siward and Harrington and Quarrier should ever know.
So he called up Harrington on the telephone, saying that there was, in
the office, somebody who desired to speak to him. And when Harrington
caught the judge's first faint, stammered word he reeled where he stood,
ashen, unbelieving, speechless. The shaking but remorseless voice went
on, dinning horribly in his ear, then ceased, and Plank's heavy voice
sounded the curt coup de grace.

Harrington was an old man, a very old man, mortally hurt; but he
steadied himself along the wall of his study to the desk and sank into
the chair.

There he sat, feeling the scars of old wounds throbbing, feeling his age
and the tragedy of it, and the new sensation of fear--fear of the wraith
of his own youth, wearing the mask of Plank, and menacing him with the
menace he had used on others so long ago--so very long ago.

After a little while he passed a thin hand over his eyes, over his gray
head, over the mouth that all men watched with fear, over the shaven jaw
now grimly set, but trembling. His hand, too, shook with palsy as he
wrote, painfully picking out the words and figures of the cipher from
his code-book; but he closed his thin lips and squared his unsteady jaw
and wrote his message to Quarrier:

"It is all up. Plank will take over Inter-County. Come at once."

And that was all there was to be done until he could come into Plank's
camp with arms and banners, a conquered man, cynical of the mercy he
dared not expect and which, in all his life, he had never, never shown
to man, to woman, or to child.

Plank slept the sleep of utter exhaustion that night; the morning found
him haggard but strong, cool in his triumph, serious, stern faced,
almost sad that his work was done, the battle won.

From his own house he telegraphed a curt summons to Harrington and to
Quarrier for a conference in his own office; then, finishing whatever
business his morning mail required, put on his hat and went to see the
one man in the world he was most glad for.

He found him at breakfast, sipping coffee and wrinkling his brows over
the eternal typewritten pages. And Plank's face cleared at the sight and
he sat down, laughing aloud.

"It's all over, Siward," he said. "Harrington knows it; Quarrier knows
it by this time. Their judge crawled in yesterday and threw himself on
our mercy; and the men whose whip he obeyed will be on their way to
surrender by this time. . Well! Haven't you a word?"

"Many," said Siward slowly; "too many to utter, but not enough to
express what I feel. If you will take two on account, here they are in
one phrase: thank you."

"Debt's cancelled," said Plank, laughing. "Do you want to hear the
details?"

They talked for an hour, and, in the telling, even Plank's stolidity
gave way sufficient to make his heavy voice ring at moments, and the
glimmer of excitement edge his eyes. Yet, in the telling, he scarcely
mentioned himself, never hinted of the personal part--the inspiration
which was his alone; the brunt of the battle which centred in him; the
tireless vigilance; the loneliness of the nights when he lay awake,
perplexed with doubt and nobody to counsel him--because men who wage such
wars are lonely men and must work out their own salvation. No, nobody
but his peers could advise him; and he had thought that his enemy was
his peer, until that enemy surrendered.

The narrative exchanged by Plank in return for Siward's intensely
interested questions was a simple, limpid review of a short but terrific
campaign that only yesterday had threatened to rage through court after
court, year after year. In the sudden shock of the cessation from
battle, Plank himself was a little dazed. Yet he himself had expected
the treason that ended all; he himself had foreseen it. He had counted
on it as a good general counts on such things, confidently, but with a
dozen plans as substitutes in case that plan failed--each plan as
elaborately worked out to the last detail as though it alone existed as
the only hope of victory. But if Siward suspected something of this it
was not from Plank that he learned it.

"Plank," he said at last, "there is nothing in the world that men admire
more than a man. It is a good deal of a privilege for me to tell you
so."

Plank turned red with surprise and embarrassment, stammering out
something incoherent.

That was all that was said about the victory. Siward, unusually gay for
awhile, presently turned sombre; and it was Plank's turn to lift him out
of it by careless remarks about his rapid convalescence, and the chance
for vacation he so much needed.

Once Siward looked up vacantly: "Where am I to go?" he asked. "I'd as
soon stay here."

"But I'm going," insisted Plank. "The Fells is all ready for us."

"The Fells! I can't go there!"

"W-what?" faltered Plank, looking at Siward with hurt eyes.

"Can't you--don't you understand?" said Siward in a low voice.

"No. You once promised--"

"Plank, I'll go anywhere except there with you. I'd rather be with you
than with anybody. Can I say more than that?"

"I think you ought to, Siward. A--a fellow feels the refusal of his
offered roof-tree."

"Man! man! it isn't your roof I am refusing. I want to go; I'd give
anything to go. If it were anywhere except where it is, I'd go fast
enough. Now do you understand? If--if Shotover House and Shotover people
were not next door to the Fells, I'd go. Now do you understand?"

Plank said: "I don't know whether I understand. If you mean Quarrier,
he's on his way here, and he'll have business to keep him here for the
next few months, I assure you. But"--he looked very gravely across at
Siward--"if you don't mean Quarrier--" He hesitated, ill at ease under the
expressionless scrutiny of the other.

"Do you know what's the matter with me, Plank?" he asked at length.

"I think so."

"I have wondered. I wonder now how much you know."

"Very little, Siward."

"How much?"

Plank looked up, hesitated, and shook his head: "One infers from what
one hears."

"Infers what?"

"The truth, I suppose," replied Plank simply.

"And what," insisted Siward, "have you inferred that you believe to be
the truth? Don't parry, Plank; it isn't easy for me, and I--I never
before spoke this way to any man. . It is likely I should have spoken to
my mother about it. . I had expected to. It may be weakness--I don't
know; but I'd like to talk a little about it to somebody. And there's
nobody fit to listen, except you."

"If you feel that way," said Plank slowly, "I will be very glad to
listen."

"I feel that way. I've been through--some things; I've been pretty sick,
Plank. It tires a man out; a man's head and shoulders get tired. Oh, I
don't mean the usual reaction from self-contempt, disgust--the dreadful,
aching sadness of it all which lasts even while desire, stunned for the
moment, wakens into craving. I don't mean that. It is something else--a
deathly, mental solitude that terrifies. I tell you, no man except a man
smitten by my malady knows what solitude can be! . There! I didn't mean
to be theatrical; I had no intention of--"

"Go on," cut in Plank heavily.

"Go on! . Yes, I want to. You know what a pillow is to a tired man's
shoulders. I want to use your sane intelligence to rest on a moment.
It's my brain that's tired, Plank."

Although everybody had cynically used Plank, nobody had ever before
found him a necessity.

"Go on," he said unsteadily. "If I can be of use to you, Siward, in
God's name let me be, for I have never been necessary to anybody in all
my life."

Siward rested his head on one clinched hand: "How much chance do you
think I have?" he asked wearily.

"Chance to get well?"

"Yes."

Plank considered for a moment, then: "You are not trying, Siward."

"I have been trying since--since March."

"Since March?"

"Yes."

Plank looked at him curiously: "What happened in March?"

"Had I better tell you?"

"You know better than I."

Siward, cheek crushed against his fist, his elbow on the desk, gazed at
him steadily:

"In March," he said, "Miss Landis spoke to me. I've made a better fight
since."

Plank's serious face darkened. "Is she the only anchor you have?"

"Plank, I am not even sure of her. I have made a better fight since
then; that is all I dare say. I know what men think about a man like me;
I knew they demand character, pride, self-denial. But, Plank, I am
driving faster and faster toward the breakers, and these anchors are
dragging. For it is not, in my case, the physical failure to obey the
will; it is the will itself that has been attacked from the first. That
is the horror of it. And what is there behind the will-power to
strengthen it? Only the source of will-power--the mind. It is the mind
that cannot help me. What am I to do?"

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