Josef Israels - "Rembrandt"

Dutton Cook - "Art in England"

Isabel Meredith - "A Girl Among the Anarchists"

Algernon Blackwood - "The Centaur"

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 Best Short Stories of 1915

V >> Various >> The Best Short Stories of 1915




As to a Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every
shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe
their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching
the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; and the rest,
coveting the Kiel Canal, lent a willing hand to the useful tool.
Holland, sore from being the frail buffer between the struggling
combatants, placed her interests in the British hands, and opened
another gate to the heart of Germany.

Russia debouched her million after million upon the East, and though
they died dumbly like flies before the German walls of steel at Thorn
and Bromberg, they swept the Germans back over the Vistula and out of
East Prussia down to the line of the Warthe and Oder. Austria, torn by
internal dissension, was ringed in the upper basin of the Danube, where
the Tyrol, the Carpathians, and the Germans protected the few shattered
loyal ones.

There was not a German vessel left on the Seven Seas. Her fleet had been
put to sleep in the Frisian marshes, outnumbered by the British on the
outside, and cut off from supplies by troops landed through Denmark and
Holland.

On the West they stood behind the Rhine. The drive had been rapid and
relentless from all sides. They left their villages empty except for the
dead as they went before the closing ring of steel. They took everything
with them that might be used as fuel, as material for ammunition, and
left their cities razed more completely than the invader could have done
it.

Christmas night found us where Ludwigshafen had been. For two months we
had stood, unable to move an inch farther. The thick deluge of fire the
Germans rolled upon us at every advance amazed us. There could not long
be a bit of iron or copper or saltpeter or food left inside the ring.

We had no knowledge of the source of this indomitable resistance. For
months not a living soul had been able to pass across the lines, nor
had a single message of any kind or a reply to any, by any means, come
out of Germany. For three to five miles about the lines there was a
devastated ring, bare of everything, swept by fire and death. Beyond
that was grim and gruesome silence. The airmen could see little. Houses
were apparently deserted and the people lived in the woods or in the
ground. Every particle of earth that could be spared was used to grow
something to eat. In the large cities buildings and bridges were torn
down. Their cut stone and iron went to the making of fort and cannon.

This Christmas Eve, as we sat in our cement dugout, the silence outside
was brooding and heavy. Snow had fallen for a week and there had been no
fighting. In the intervals of our talk there was only the sound of a
famished cat's wailing outside. We talked of the war, and of what we
were going to do with Germany when the end came.

The talk of the world had been done. The nations at home sat like the
knitting ring about the guillotine, waiting for the final scene to be
staged. Germany was no more in the world's mind. They had tried to
think about her. Their thought had been brought to folly and confusion.
Already she was forgotten. She had become a piece of territory that
shortly their armies would occupy. Condemnations of her culture, of her
aspirations, of her part in the greatest of the world's wars, had come
to nothing, and were abandoned. Pompous plans for her reorganization,
superior homilies to the German people on peace and freedom from their
wicked masters, good advice on the improvement of their culture--all
these had been written to a shred. To preserve its dignity the world
wished to forget them. Its dull, avid gaze saw not beyond the moment
toward which it had strained, leaving its mind and simple sincerity of
soul behind.

This was the night of the final assault. In a circle of three hundred
miles, the word was written, on land and sea, in seven tongues and among
a score of races--"AT MIDNIGHT." We were then to draw tight the halter
upon the throat of Germany. Der Tag had become The Hour--Ours. The
mailed fist was to have its gauntlet stripped from it and a naked hand
should pay us tribute.

Steadily we had battered down the stone and steel chain about her. We
stood before the Rhine in dead of winter. At one sweep we were to
stretch our arm across it and with the other crush the mighty militant
menace that lay at bay between.

The slopes that were old in story, that had sustained the surge of
unnumbered hordes from East and West and South and North; in whose
grapes were the bloods of Roman, Teuton, Slav, Mongol, and Frank; that
had been the source and shelter of a race's song, science, and
story--lay in silent slumber, muffled in midwinter's snows.

That race stood at bay before its fellow's vengeance. By this time
all those of alien blood had dropped away from its single body like
engrafted limbs. Its trunk stood bare and barkless before the blast,
we to wring from its bloody, unbowed head, obeisance to our will--a will
that had begun in covetousness of commerce, in rancor of humiliating
reminiscence, in rage of race rivalry, a will that had grown beyond our
grasp, beyond our consciousness. We lusted for the day that should press
from Germany's lips, "Your will be done."

Unthinking were we that then would come the days of dull and devious
diplomacy, of division of domain, of dragging indemnity from a people
dumb and disheartened by devastation and death. At all costs to beat the
breath from her body! The hour had come when this resistant something
should be ours, ours, the Briton's, the Frenchman's, the Russian's, the
Italian's, the Serb's, the Rumanian's, the Montenegrin's, the Dane's,
the Mongol's!

At midnight we moved, in silence. It seemed as if we heard from the
Carpathians to the Rhine, from the sea to the Alps, the anthem of arms,
the stir of destruction go up as we moved. We wrangled for the outpost
places, that when the closing of the steel ring was flashed across the
circle we might be first to see the white flag at our point.

I was fortunate--one of the three sent to see how clear the road from
Ludwigshafen to Mannheim, and to cover the river crossing.

I was off and my aeroplane rose quickly. There were no lights beyond the
Rhine. Where Mannheim used to be was darkness. The three miles between
us and the river lay motionless in the moonlight. The Rhine was tight in
ice. The batteries at the angle of the Neckar were invisible. In wonder
I came down to three hundred feet and circled, watching our men creep
tentatively up to the sharp-cut bank, hesitate, clamber down, and start
across the ice recklessly. They were not spiked, never dreaming of
getting to the ice at all.

The dark figures slipped and slid and fell. It was so still and
the moon so bright I could hear the cracks shoot across the untried
sheet and see the men's faces twisted in apprehension. They were the
only moving things. It was clear the Germans had fallen back. They
had abandoned Malstatt by night--but Mannheim--and the Rhine! It
was unbelievable. I rose and coasted down to above the Mannheim
parade-ground. There was nothing to be heard but the distant stir
of our line.

I touched. My machine ran along, bumping over hundreds of bodies
lightly covered by the new snow. I got out, stumbled over them at
my feet, felt them. They were not long dead. I looked about me at the
dark, silent city of Mannheim. A panic took me. I ran to my machine,
tried to get it off, but failed and sat numb and transfixed, vainly
groping in the darkness of my mind for the thought that would not
form, till my comrades came to me with blanched faces and bit by bit
in swift succession pieced for me the words that could not find
utterance, having never been uttered in the world's life before.

The rest--a flowing phantasmagoria that tore me too far out of human
experience, even of dream--to tell again. The thousands crumpled up
in full-dress uniform, stained and tattered, beneath the new snow of
the parade-ground, fallen at a moment, at a word, hands here and there
stiffened in salute to the flag slow moving in the graying winter's
dawn. Death we had seen,--but here in the streets and in the houses,
in all corners and in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had
sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale
that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed
at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood,
leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government
machine efficient to the last had supplied--"_Der Tag ist zu uns_"--"The
Day is Ours."

Then through the blenching words that flashed along the closed circle of
steel in all the tongues of Europe, the shrinking thought leaped to our
dumb, numb mind and throbbed upon them like the insistent resounding
clangor of a titanic brazen shield, as if beaten by a grimacing god:

Germany is yours, O sons of men! What now?

* * * * *

I woke at dawn to the boisterous, bold boom of the batteries of Metz.
They seemed to speak in glorious wide-mouthed joy of Til Eulenspiegel
and the young Siegfried.

I thanked God for the Germans.





THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]

BY HARRIS MERTON LYON

From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_

[11] Copyright, 1915, by The Illustrated Sunday Magazine. Copyright,
1916, by Harris Merton Lyon.


I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos
which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials--the actor
in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician--I thought--must feel
a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, _in articulo
gloriae_, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed
to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her
appearance in the moving pictures. "I am immortal," she cried,
dramatically--always dramatic, that old lady--"I am a film." So thin
a bridge to immortality!

The actor, the singer, the musician; struggling through years and over
obstacles to attain perfection--and then what? A brief triumph in a
perishable art; a transient, fugitive gracing of a day, an hour, a
moment ... and then another forgotten mortal artist. I remembered
Gautier's decision, "The coin outlasts Tiberius." Paint, chisel, then,
or write if you wish your work to endure.

No doubt here was wisdom in a little box; and I fell to wondering
stupidly what there could possibly be in being a worker at the other,
the evanescent thing. I remembered a certain kind of moth that dies soon
after it is born. Are these people moths?

And then one night a ragtag ghost came and answered me.


I

It was eleven o'clock. Outside it was snowing, and so I remained in
Pigalle's, loath to leave, and killing the time with a book. Pigalle's
was one of those basement eating places in New York's West Thirties, a
comfy, tight, cosy sort of a cellar. An Italian table d'hote, of course,
though not like the usual; it had more character and less popularity.
You seldom saw a blond skin there, the place being unknown to the
night-tramping hordes of avid New Yorkers who crowd into all the
"foreign" places and devour all the foreign food they can find. Mostly
the _habitues_ were French and Italian, gentle, noisy people who did,
in their way, slight damage to the fine arts. By nine-thirty, they were
done eating and gone; almost all the lights were turned out and chairs
were piled up on the tables, out of the way of the early morning mop.
By ten Pigalle and his wife and several others, mostly sculptors, scene
painters and musicians, were gathered beneath the light at the main
table and had begun their nightly game of poker. From then on it was
slim gambling and loud, staccato chatter in French and Italian.

At eleven, then, this night, the cautious door-bell tinkled. Some kind
of a world knocking at mine and wanting to get in, I thought. Some kind
of an adventure out there, demanding to be encountered; some kind of a
soul pounding at the walls of my soul. Every time the doorbell tinkles,
whoever has this Show is setting a new scene. Or, no. The wall opens
and the genie slips through, spreads his rug on the ground and begins
to make new magic before your very eyes. Never a doorbell rang yet, I
thought, that didn't bring a bit of heaven or hell--or mere
purgatory--with it.

At eleven the doorbell tinkled and the fat little
waitress-maid-scrubwoman-second cook, a Lombard wench by the name, the
sweet ineffable name of Philomene, waddled over and opened the door a
tiny space. Pigalle occasionally sold liquor without a license; hence
his caution as to visitors. She let in an odd apparition; with doubts,
I thought; certainly with mutterings and rolling of her black eyes. At
any rate she knew him, whether for well or ill.

The man cast his eyes around, saw that the only open table save the
poker table was the one I held, and came and sat down opposite me. With
a slightly insolent motion he dragged his chair around sidewise, turned
his shoulder to me and stared across the room at a gaudy lithograph of
the good ship Isabella bound for Naples, eighty-five dollars first
class. Philomene, with a porky look, asked him what he wished.

He announced in French that he desired of all things to "strangle a
parrokeet." This was some absurd slang for saying he wanted an absinthe.

He was a gaunt, tall, round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray
beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette
smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as--oh, Socrates. And yet with
something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly
odd enough: a frayed, cutaway coat with extremely long tails, dripping
wet and dangling cylindrically like sections of melted stovepipe; mussy,
baggy old gray trousers; a blue plush waistcoat; a black, but clean
muffler pinned tight up under his chin with a safety pin of the
brassiest; and a broad-brimmed black slouch hat, so broad of brim that
he walked forever in its shadow. This hat he kept on all the time. His
hands were long and clean and white--the virile, sensitive hands of a
poet, I thought. The eyes were the fascinating feature of the man. I
said to myself right away, "This man is a mystic." Though they burned
brightly in their sockets, they had a trick of turning abruptly dim; a
sort of film or veil, closed over them. "Druid or old Celt," I murmured.
"Give him a bit of mistletoe and he'd call his gods right down into my
_demi-tasse_ and scare the poker game into fits."

He swallowed his whole glass of absinthe in five gulps--a performance
that it would make a cow shudder to watch--threw back his head, and,
with a hoarse burr, called for another. This time he spoke English; but
the burr was decidedly Scotch. Pigalle now looked around at him--gross,
pleasant, Provencal Pigalle--and nodded; then went on placidly shuffling
the tiny cards in his great fat hands.

When the second absinthe came the old man took it slowly; settled
himself back on his shoulder-blades and the tail of his spine, and
pulled his hat down level with his eyes, as if he intended to spend
a considerable time with us. He called for a package of French
cigarettes--_cigarettes jaunes_--and proceeded to color his moustache
a riper brown. "Now my adventure has knocked and come in," I thought.
"If he is my adventure, I cannot help him--nor can I keep him off. He
is the _primum mobile_. It is up to him."

Suddenly my ears were shocked with a sharp argument between two young
fellows at the poker table. No, it was not about the game. One said
something; the other shrieked his answer; the first shouted back; the
second in a violent burst that had a finality about it slammed down his
cards and said something curt, with a solemn rolling of his eyes.

To my amazement, the odd old fish across from me boomed out with equal
violence: "_Ben trovato_!" None of them paid any attention to him.

I may have shown some of my surprise at his action, for he turned
suddenly to me, and asked: "Did you understand what he said?"

I replied that I did not.

"He said, roughly translated: 'Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of
the hour.' Yes. And it is true. Sufficient unto eternity is the glory of
the hour, young man. There's many an artist who must--" he stopped short
and began biting his finger ends.

My mind reverted to Bernhardt's film and the question about the moth.
"Who must--what?" I prodded. "Content himself with this catch phrase?"

"Content himself? Damnation, no! Must feel the keener triumph in a piece
of work, young man, just because it _is_ perishable." He thumped the
table and breathed hard. I got the full paregoric reek of his drink.
"What is this stork-legged Verlaine going to say?" I thought to myself.
But he contented himself with breathing for a few moments and that odd
film dropped over his eyes. "Just because the thing is ended, and dies
out of men's minds almost as soon as it is ended"--he seemed to be
feeling slowly for the words--"_if_ the work was right, was masterly
done, there's a sort of higher joy in knowing that it triumphed--and was
suddenly gone--like a sunset, like a light on the water, like a summer."
He asked abruptly: "You think I have 'spiders on my ceiling'--you think
I am crazy?"

"On the contrary. Can you make this clearer to me, this--?"

"My agreement that sufficient unto eternity is the glory of the hour?"
He sipped his absinthe. "With your patience. Let me see. I can give you
a favorite example of mine, about a friend of mine named Andy
Gordon--something like a story?" Now in his eyes there was an eager
shine.

"Go on."

"You know, my friend, I am Highland Scotch." (He pronounced it Heeland.)
"I may be queer. That all depends. But don't be alarmed at the way I put
things. I am not out of my head. Now this yarn about Andy Gordon.
Remember," said he, tapping the table with his long white finger, and
smiling at me in a charming manner, "sufficient unto eternity is the
glory of the hour. By the way, that young fellow over there who said
that is a violoncellist. 'Grand ducal 'cello to the imperial violin,'
you know."

I reconsidered him in the wink of an eye. He is not Socrates and he
is not Verlaine, I said to myself. This old lovable scarecrow is the
Ancient Mariner, and he is going to hold me with his glittering eye
and I am going to listen like a three years' child. The very fellow:
the "skinny hand," the "long gray beard"--and doubtless, too, the
true Ancient Mariner smelled of tobacco and drink. Certainly he talked
poetry. And so did my old man, miraculously, almost without effort. So
I sat back and listened, while he told his story.


II

Andy Gordon was for all his years a weaver in the mills at Glastonbury;
just an ordinary human stick or stone, as you might call it, doing his
mechanical work at the machine like a machine--until one day he drew
his pay, before you could say Jack Robinson, and started off walking
anywhere. He did it of a sudden and without seeming cause, but inwardly
there was a pressing retraction upon his soul that told him to get away
from the mechanical actualities.

He was feeling himself tired to death that day he drew his money; and,
of course, he was still young. And when a young man really wants very
much to die, he always comes out of that valley (at any rate, so people
say) with something new in his heart. Andy walked off anywhere, just so
he got to the hills.

And when he arrived at the hills, it was all very, very sweet. They
were just coming light yellow and the bluebirds were there before him,
touring the air just for the fun of it. And he made right away a queer
discovery--he knew for the first time that New Year's is not the first
day of January, at all. It's the first day of spring. Men are right
silly, Andy thought, calling some dead and sodden day in mid-winter by
the fancy, saucy name of New. The thing that is New, of course, is the
Green. The New Year is the Green Year.

Well, he had a hunk of bread in his pocket and some onions, and a man
can walk a long way upon the strength of that; so he went along up a
road when he felt like it and over a hill when he felt like that. But
most of the time his heart was very sad in his body and his mind took
no pleasure of the bluebirds. For he was thinking that his life wasn't
very much. He could see nothing in working year after year at the mill.
And yet that was all he was good for (so he thought).

On and on and on walked Andy. There were parts of those hills where
he walked that probably nobody, not even the Indian, ever traversed.
Anything could happen there--where the woods are dark with pine or sunny
with birch, and where echoes are the only memory (and they never last
long). It was so far away, up in through there; as I've said, anything
could happen there and we would never hear of it. All day long the cold
brooks run down, brown from the juices of the hemlock bark, over browned
stones--but of course they never talk and tell anything.

About noon, Andy found himself upon an old disused and overgrown
road, that for years had been traveled only by rabbits and skunks and
woodchucks and deer. And in a clearing at one side he saw an old log
cabin which had not been lived in for years and years. There was a bit
of brook at the back and an old wind-break of pine trees.

"Now I will eat a snack here," Andy said to himself, "and afterward, may
God have mercy on my soul, I will lie down and nap under the pine and
try to sleep off whatever it is that is bothering me."

And he did so, lying down beneath the pine--

He closed one eye gently and slowly (like letting a lid down on a box
of playthings) and then he closed the other eye the same way; and then
he knew nothing at all until suddenly a Voice came clap out of the blue
sky, calling his name, "Andy Gordon, man! Andy Gordon!" over the hills
and far.

Andy was amazed, of course, and said: "Here I am," with all his might,
but without making a bit of sound (just as we all do in dreams).

"The thing the matter with you," went on the great Voice, without
any introduction or anything of the sort but coming from everywhere
and nowhere at once, "is that you need Work. You are tired to death
with work; work-with-a-little-'w' is killing the soul out of you, Andy;
work-with-a-little-'w' always does that to men, if you give it the whole
chance. But that can't be helped. You're bound to have a whole lot of it
in your life But--_if_ you don't mix some Big-'W' Work in with it, then
indeed and indeed your life will be disastrous and your days will be
dead."

Andy did not know but what he was a-dreaming, though his eyes were now
wide open and he could see a robin hopping on the sod. "What is it you
mean by Big-'W' Work?" he asked.

"Of course, that's the Work you love for the Work's sake. It's Work you
do because you love the thing itself you're working for."

"You make that hard to understand," said Andy.

"Well, and it will be hard for people to understand _you_ when you're
at that sort of Work. They know well enough what you're about as long
as you turn 'em out yards of flannel down at Glastonbury, don't they?"

"Oh, yes, indeed," said Andy.

"And it would be the same way if you were a smith and turned 'em out
horse shoes, or a bill clerk and turned 'em out bills. They'd understand
_that_."

"Oh, yes, indeed," said Andy.

"But the trouble with that work-with-a-little-'w' is that you do it only
for the pay there is in it--never for the love of it--that's why it
seems to you a shame to waste your whole life at it, you know."

"Indeed it does, and that's why I'm here away from it all," said Andy.

"All very well for a while," said the Voice. "But you'll have to keep on
at it somewhat--say, half your life at work-with-a-little-'w,' sitting
at your machine down yonder at the mill, turning 'em out the stuff they
know to be useful."

At that Andy fell silent and was sad again. Where would he find a
beginning at the Big-"W" Work? he asked himself.

But the Voice seemed to know what was in his mind, and answered him:
"I can give you that sort of Work. But it will take the best there is
in you to do that sort of Work; and the Work will surely die as soon
as you've accomplished it. And there will be no money in it for you,
at all, and a great deal of pain, care and weariness. But you will find
great love in your Work, and for your Work; and though it all vanishes
at once you will experience so wonderful a joy that it will seem as if,
night and day, God is whispering the secrets of life in your ear."

"What is the Work like?" asked Andy.

"Would you be willing to try it? Remember, it is difficult and wearying
and is dead as soon as it is born."

"Yes, by glory, I would," shouted Andy.

"_Then dress this maid until you die!_" commanded the Voice.

At the words, my friend, there was music of a million armies of all
sorts of birds, whistling and whirring over the green earth; and the
echoes of their tremendous singing shook all the trillions of tiny new
leaves and made the waves of air to dance--how shall I say?--like the
waves of a sea of music running out forever.

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