Thomas Wentworth Higginson - "Black Rebellion"

Henry James - "The Tragic Muse"

W. S. B. Mathews - "A Popular History of the Art of Music"

Emily Dickinson - "Poems [Series 1]"

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.

We Can\'t Have Everything

R >> Rupert Hughes >> We Can\'t Have Everything




Alongside such a fantastic history, the rise of Kedzia Thropp was
petty enough. It did not even compare with the rocket-flight of that
Theodosia who danced naked in a vile theater in Byzantium and later
became the empress of the great Justinian.

Kedzie had never done anything very immoral. She had been a trifle
immodest, according to strict standards, when she danced the Grecian
dances. She had been selfish and hard-hearted, but she had never
sold her body. And there is no sillier lie, as there is no commoner
lie, than the trite old fallacy of the popular novels, sermons,
editorials, and other works of fiction that women succeed by selling
their bodies. It is one of the best ways a girl can find for going
bankrupt, and it leads oftener to the dark streets than to the bright
palaces.

The credit for Kedzie's staying virtuous, as the word is used, was
not entirely hers. Probably if all the truth were known women are
no oftener seduced than seducing. Kedzie might have gone wrong half
a dozen times at least if she had not somehow inspired in the men
she met a livelier sense of protection than of spoliation. She
happened not to be a frenzied voluptuary, as are so many of the lost,
who are victims of their own physiological or pathological estates
before they make fellow-victims of the men they encounter.

The trick of success for a woman who has no other stock in trade
than her charm is to awaken the chivalry of men, to promise but not
relinquish the last favors till the last tributes are paid.

Meanwhile the old world is rolling into the daylight when women
will sell their wits instead of their embraces, and when there will
be no more compulsion for a woman to rent her body to pay her house
rent than for men to do the same. The pity of it is that these great
purifying, equalizing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining
more opposition than help from the religious and the conservative.

In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park bench when first
she came to town, found the city honorable, merciful, generous, as
most girls do who have graces to sell and sense enough to set a high
price on them.

And so Kedzie was sheltered and passed on upward by Skip Magruder
the lunch-room waiter, and by Mr. Kalteyer the chewing-gum purveyor,
by Eben E. Kiam the commercial photographer, by Thomas Gilfoyle the
advertising bard, by Ferriday the motion-picture director, on up
and up to Jim Dyckman. Every man gave her the best help he could.
And even the women she met unconsciously assisted her skyward.

But there is always more sky above, and Kedzie's motto was a
relentless _Excelsior!_ She spurned backward the ladders she
rose by, and it was her misfortune (which made her fortune) that
whatever rung she stood on hurt her pretty, restless feet. It was
inevitable that when at last she was bedded in the best bed in one
of America's most splendid homes, she should fall a-dreaming of
foreign splendors beyond the Yankee sky.

On the second morning of her honeymoon, when Kedzie woke to find that
she was no duchess, but a plain American "Mrs." that disappointment
colored her second impression of the Dyckman mansion.

She had her breakfast in bed. But she had enjoyed that dubious
luxury in her own flat. Many poor and lazy and sick people had the
same privilege. The things she had to eat were exquisitely cooked
and served, when Liliane took them from the footman at the door and
brought them to the bedside.

But, after all, there is not much difference between the breakfasts
of the rich and of the poor. There cannot be: one kind of fruit,
a cereal, an egg or two, some coffee, and some bread are about all
that it is safe to put into the morning stomach. Her plutocratic
father-in-law was not permitted to have even that much, and her
mother-in-law, who was one of the converts to Vance Thompson's
_Eat and Grow Thin_ scriptures, had almost none at all.

Busy and anxious days followed that morning. There was a great amount
of shopping to do. There were the wedding-announcement cards to order
and the list of recipients to go over with Mrs. Dyckman's secretary.
There was a secretary to hire for Kedzie, and it was no easy matter
for Kedzie to put herself into the woman's hands without debasing
her pride too utterly.

There was the problem of dinners to relatives, a reception to guests
for the proper exploitation of the new Mrs. Dyckman. There was the
embarrassment of meeting people who brought their prejudices with
their visiting-cards and did not leave their prejudices as they did
their cards.

The newspapers had to have their say, and they did not make pleasant
reading to any of the Dyckmans. Kedzie took a little comfort from
reading what the papers had to say about Mrs. Cheever's divorce,
but she found that Jim was unresponsive to her gibes. This did not
sweeten her heart toward Charity.

Kedzie was hungry for friends and playmates, but she could not find
them among the new acquaintances she made. She saw curiosity in all
their eyes, patronage in those who were cordial, and insult in those
who were not effusive. She got along famously with the men, but their
manner was not quite satisfactory, either. There was a corrosive
something in their flattery, a menace in their approach.

There were the horrible experiences when Mrs. Dyckman called on
Mrs. Thropp and the worse burlesque when Mrs. Thropp called on
Mrs. Dyckman. The servants had a glorious time over it, and Kedzie
overheard Mrs. Dyckman's report of the ordeal to her husband. She
was angry at Mrs. Dyckman, but angrier still at her mother.

Kedzie's father and mother were an increasing annoyance to Kedzie's
pride and her peace. They wanted to get out to Nimrim and make a
triumph through the village. And Jim and Kedzie were glad to pay
the freight. But once the Thropps had gloated they were anxious to
get back again to the flesh-pots of New York.

The financing of the old couple was embarrassing. It did not look
right to Kedzie to have the father and mother of Mrs. Dyckman a
couple of shabby, poor relations, and Kedzie called it shameful that
her father, who was a kind of father-in-law-in-law to the duchess,
should earn a pittance as a claim-agent in the matter of damaged
pigs and things.

Jim, like all millionaires, had dozens of poor relations and felt
neither the right nor the obligation to enrich them all. There is
no gesture that grows tiresome quicker than the gesture of shoving
the hand into the cash-pocket, bringing it up full and emptying it.
There is no more painful disease than money-spender's cramp.

Kedzie learned, too, that to assure her father and mother even so
poor an income as five thousand dollars a year would require the
setting aside of a hundred thousand dollars at least in gilt-edged
securities. She began to have places where she could put a hundred
thousand dollars herself. On her neck was one place, for she
saw a woman with a dog-collar of that price, and it made Kedzie
feel absolutely nude in contrast. She met old Mrs. Noxon with her
infamously costly stomacher on, and Kedzie cried that night because
she could not have one for her own midriff.

Jim growled, "When you get a stomach as big as Mrs. Noxon's you
can put a lamp-post on it."

She said he was indecent, and a miser besides.

Meanwhile her own brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts were calling
her a miser, a snob, a brute. The whole family wanted to move to New
York and make a house-party. They had every right to, too, for did
not the Declaration of Independence make all Americans equal?

Relatives whom Kedzie had never heard of and relatives whom she knew
all too well turned up in New York with schemes for extracting money
from the Dyckman hoard. Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at
the window and empty things on them as they dared to climb the noble
steps with their ignoble impertinences.

When she was not repelling repulsive relatives Kedzie was trying
to dodge old acquaintances. It seemed that everybody she had ever
met had learned of her rise in the world. Her old landladies wrote
whining letters. Moving-picture people out of a job asked her for
temporary loans.

But the worst trial came one day when she was present at a committee
meeting for a war-relief benefit and that fiend of a Pet Bettany
proposed that one of the numbers should be Miss Silsby's troupe of
Greek dancers. She asked if anybody had any objections, and when
nobody spoke she turned to Kedzie and dared to ask her if she had
ever seen the dancers.

"Not recently," Kedzie mumbled, while her very legs blushed under
their stockings, remembering how bare they had been in the old days
when she was one of the Silsby slaves.

All the other women simmered pleasantly in the uncomfortable
situation till Mrs. Charity Cheever, who chanced to be there,
came to the rescue amazingly by turning the tables on the Bettany
creature:

"Anybody who ever saw you in a bathing-suit, Pet, would know that
there were two good reasons why you were never one of the Silsbies."

Charity could be cruel to be kind. Everybody roared at Pet, whose
crooked shanks had kept her modest from the knees down, at least.
Kedzie wanted to kiss Charity, but she suffered too much from the
reminder of her past.

She fiercely wanted to have been born of an aristocratic family.
Of all the vain wishes, the retroactive pluperfect are the vainest,
and an antenatal wish is sublimely ridiculous. But Kedzie wished it.
This was one of the wishes she did not get.




CHAPTER X

Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman received many jars of ointment, but her pretty
eyes found a fly in every one. She that should have gone about
boasting, "I came from a village and slept under a park bench, and
now look at me!" was slinking about, wishing that she could rather
say: "Oh, see my wonderful ancestors! Without them you could not
see me at all."

Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the "Social World"
departments of the newspapers. She had full-page portraits of herself
by the mystic Dr. Arnold Genthe and by other camera-masters printed
in _Town and Country_ and _The Spur, Vanity Fair, Vogue_
and _Harper's Bazar_. But some cursed spite half the time led
to the statement under her picture that she had been in the movies.
No adjectives of praise could sweeten that. Small wonder she pouted!

And she found the competition terrific. She had thought that when
she got into the upper world she would be on a sparsely populated
plateau. But she said to Jim:

"Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded everybody
is falling off."

The most "exclusive" restaurants were packed like bargain-counters.
She went to highly advertised balls where there were so many people
that the crowd simply oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was
a struggle for life.

New York's four hundred families had swollen, it seemed, to four
hundred thousand, and the journals of society published countless
pictures of the aristocratic sets of everywhere else. There were
aristocrats of the Long Island sets--a dozen sets for one small
island--the Berkshire set, the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds,
the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old Connecticut connections, the Bar
Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians, the Morristown and Germantown
noblesse, the pride of Philadelphia, the Baltimorioles, the
diplomatic cliques of Washington, the Virginia patricians, the
Piedmont Hunt set, the North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia,
Florida, and all the other State sets, the Cleveland coteries,
the Chicagocracy, the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco
optimates.

Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely and afraid. She
had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by
the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was
so prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of
suicide that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was
a bagatelle.

There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samaritanism and tremendous
indifference. Millions were poured into charities and millions were
squandered on dissipation.

Kedzie's funds were drawn away astoundingly faster than even Dyckman
could replenish them. Hideous accounts of starving legions were
brandished before the eyes of all Americans. Every day Kedzie's mail
contained circulars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines
in every nation at war. There were hellish chronicles of Armenian
women and children driven like cattle from desert to desert, outraged
and flogged and starved by the thousand.

The imagination gave up the task. The miseries of the earth were
more numerous than the sands, and the eyes came to regard them as
impassively as one looks at the night sky without pausing to count
the flakes in that snowstorm of stars. One says, "It is a nice
night." One said, "These are terrible times." Then one said, "May
I have the next dance?" or, "Isn't supper ready yet?"

Kedzie tried for a while to lift herself from the common ruck
of the aristocracy by outshining the others in charities and in
splendors. She soon grew weary of the everlasting appeals for money
to send to Europe. She grew weary of writing checks and putting on
costumes for bazaars, spectacles, parades, and carnivals. She found
herself circumscribed by so much altruism. Her benevolences left her
too little for her magnificences.

She grew frantic for more fun and more personal glory. The
extravagance of other women dazed her. Some of them had
inexhaustible resources. Some of them were bankrupting their
own boodle-bag husbands. Some of them flourished ingeniously by
running up bills and never running them down.

The competition was merciless. She kept turning to Jim for money.
He grew less and less gracious, because her extravagances were more
and more selfish. He grew less and less superior to complaints. He
started bank-accounts to get rid of her, but she got rid of them
with a speed that frightened him. He hated to be used.

Kedzie took umbrage at Mrs. Dyckman's manner. Mrs. Dyckman tried
for a while to be good to the child, strove to love her, forgave
her for her youth and her humble origin; but finally she tired of
her, because Kedzie was not making Jim's life happier, more useful,
or more distinguished.

Then one day Mrs. Dyckman asked Kedzie for a few moments of her
time. Kedzie was in a hurry to an appointment at her hairdresser's,
but she seated herself patiently. Mrs. Dyckman said:

"My dear, I have just had a cable from my daughter Cicely. She has
broken down, and her physician has ordered her out of England for
a rest. She is homesick, she says, and Heaven knows we are homesick
for her.

"I am afraid she would not feel at home in any room but her old
one, and I know you won't mind. You can have your choice. Some of
the other rooms are really pleasanter. Will you look them over and
let me know, so that I can have your things moved?"

"Certainly, my dear m'mah!" said Kedzie.

She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most precious
acquaintances. She was being put out of her room! She was being
shoved back to the second place. They'd ask her to eat at the second
table next, or have her meals in her room as the secretaries did.

Not much! Having slept in a duchess's bed, Kedzie would not
backslide. She would get a bed of her own. She remembered a
nice young man she had met, whose people were in real estate.
She telephoned to him from the Biltmore.

"Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, Polly, do you
know of a decent house that is for sale or rent right away quick?
Oh, I don't care how much it costs, so it's a cracker jack of
a house. I suppose I've got to take it furnished, being in such
a hurry; or could you get a gang of decorators in and do a rush
job? All right, look up your list right away and telephone me here
at the hairdresser's."

From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later and arranged
to be taken from place to place. She now dismissed chateaux with
contempt as too small, too old-fashioned, lacking in servants'
rooms, what not. She had quite forgotten the poor little Mrs.
Gilfoyle she had been, and her footsore tramp from cheap flat to
cheap flat, ending in the place that cost three hundred dollars
a year furnished.

She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet awhile, and
selected a double-decked apartment of twenty-four rooms and
forty-eight baths. And she talked the agent down to a rental of
ten thousand dollars a year unfurnished. She would show Jim that
she could economize.

When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided to move, Mrs.
Dyckman was very much concerned lest Kedzie feel put out. But she
smiled to herself: she knew her Kedzie.

Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he yielded.
In the American family the wife is the quartermaster, selects the
camp and equips it. Jim spent more of his time at his clubs than
at his duplex home. So did Kedzie. She had been railroaded into
the Colony and one or two other clubs before they knew her so well.

When the Duchess Cicely came back Kedzie was invited to the family
dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's first duchess, and though
Kedzie had met any number of titled people by now, she approached
this one with strange apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed.
Cicely turned out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn out,
meager, forlorn, broken in heart and soul with what she had been
through.

She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she said to
her mother later: "Poor Jim, he always plays in the rottenest luck,
doesn't he? Still, he's got a pretty doll, and what does anything
matter nowadays?"

She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But the food choked
her. She had seen so many gaunt hands pleading upward for a crust of
bread. She had seen so many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of
soup. She had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing
to eat anything with.

Cicely apologized for being such a death's head at the feast, but
she was ashamed of her people, ashamed of her country for keeping
out of the war and fattening on it. All the motives of pacifism,
of neutrality, of co-operation by financing and munitioning the
war, were foul in her eyes. She knew only her side of the conflict,
and she cared for no other. She found America craven and indifferent
either to its own obligations or its own dangers. She accused the
United States of basking in the protection of the British navy
and the Allied armies. She felt that the immortal crime of the
_Lusitania_ with its flotsam of dead women and children was
more disgraceful to the nation that endured it than to the nation
that committed it. She was very, very bitter, and Kedzie found her
most depressing company, especially for a dinner-table.

But she excited Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke out into fierce
diatribes against the Chinafying of the United States with its
Lilliputian army guarding its gigantic interests. He began to toy
with the idea of enlisting in the Canadian army or of joining the
American aviators flying for France.

"The national bird is an eagle," he said, with unwonted poesy,
"and the best place an American eagle can fly is over France."

When Kedzie protested: "But you've got a family to consider. Let
the single men go," Jim laughed louder and longer than he had
laughed for weeks.

Cicely smiled her first smile and squeezed Jim's hand.




CHAPTER XI

Kedzie went home early. It was depressing there, too. Now that she
had a house of her own, she found an extraordinary isolation in it.
Almost nobody called.

When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards
left by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to
meet them; she was present at all the big and little dinners, and
breakfasts and teas and suppers.

People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman meals and
parties swapped meals and parties with them and included Kedzie
in their invitations, since she was one of the family. She went
about much in stately homes, and her name was celebrated in what
the newspapers insist upon calling the "exclusive" circles.

Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of their High
Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. And then she learned
its bitter meaning. It was not that Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze
her out. She urged her to "come in any time." But, as Kedzie told
Jim, "an invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away
all the time." Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made it so hard
to get her to come that Mrs. Dyckman sincerely said to Cicely:

"We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad to be rid
of us."

Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an extremely busy
woman, doing many good works and many foolish works that were just
as hard. She said, "I ought to call," and failed to call, just as
one says, "I ought to visit the sick," and leaves them to their
supine loneliness.

Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the social
driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and considered
the formalities of who should call on whom and who owed whom a call.
New York life had grown too busy for anybody to pay much attention
to the older reciprocities of etiquette.

Almost nobody called on Kedzie. She took a pride in smothering
her complaints from Jim, who was not very much alive to her hours.
He was busy, too. He had joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York
National Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had
gone to the Plattsburg encampment the summer before and had kept up
with the correspondence-school work in map problems, and finally he
had obtained a second lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his
little protest against the unpreparedness of the nation as it toppled
on the brink of the crater where the European war boiled and smoked.

One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bitterly. He took
her in his arms, and his tenderness softened her pride so that she
wept like a disconsolate baby and told him how lonely she was. Nobody
called; nobody invited her out; nobody took her places. She had no
friends, and her husband had abandoned her for his old regiment.

He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that he would take
better care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic.
He dared not neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings
and invaded his days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood.
He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he could not keep
up with her flights. She had darted her beak into a flower, and its
nectar was finished for her before she had realized that it was
a flower.

He felt that what she needed was friends of her own sex. There were
women enough who would accept Kedzie's company and gad with her, vie
with her quivering speed. But they were not the sort he wanted her to
fly with. He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type.

The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was
out, but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her.
The room, the books, the piano--all spoke of her lovingly and
lovably. He went to the piano and found there the song she had
played for him once in Newport--"Go, Lovely Rose!"

He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on
the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It
chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier
than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly,
but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne
for her own. She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering
the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse,
"Tell her that wastes her time and me," she hunted it out, and the
plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.

She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such
sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked
a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.

She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let
herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room,
surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.

"Jim!" she gasped.

"Charity!" he groaned.

Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their
bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.

She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting
of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily
by a kind of honest instinct of danger.

"What on earth brought you here?" Charity faltered.

"Why--I--Well, you see--it's like this." He groped for words, but,
having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: "I
came to ask you if you wouldn't--You see, my poor wife isn't making
out very well with people--she's lonesome--and blue--and--why can't
you lend a hand and make friends with her?"

Charity laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull
you are!"

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