David Hume et al - "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"

Edward William Thomson - "Old Man Savarin and Other Stories"

Frederick S. Dellenbaugh - "A Canyon Voyage"

Belle K. Maniates - "Amarilly of Clothes line Alley"

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




And there, on the grass, sure enough, was a little naked baby girl just
able to stand.

Very quiet, she was, and she looked up at Andy with eyes of a fairy
blue--as if they'd been colored by that very same fairy that goes about
with a brush coloring all the violets we ever see. (The ones we never
see, you know, are never colored.)

"We-e-ell!" cried Andy, puckering up his lips and squinting up his
eye-lids. "And who are you?"

"I'm early Summer," she lisped. "And I'm in a dreadful hurry. I'd like
some lemon-colored silk--for a mantle, you know?--And some apple-green
tassels for my hair. And please do be quick about it. I'm due, you see.
So I'll be ever so much obliged if you'll only hurry."

Andy whistled ruefully. "Now, _that_ would take some weaving, miss." He
hesitated. "I don't think I'm that skillful."

The little goddess looked hurriedly away over her shoulder as if she
were about to depart.

"And then," Andy continued, "I have no loom up here; and no warp; and no
filling. Nothing at all to work with, you see. I--"

But while he was stumbling about with his excuses, he saw the little one
actually fading away before his eyes; and a pain most bitter caught at
his heart, as if he were losing all his life. So he cried out:

"But I'll _try_ miss. Give me a little time, miss. Oh, please, my wee
bairn. I have an old handloom of my grandfather's; and I can go and
hurry and fetch all the stuff up here somehow and I'll work as fast as
I can. Indeed, I'll try my best."

Whereat, you see, the babe came back to him, smiling as sweetly as early
Summer ever smiled. "There really isn't such an awful hurry," she said.
"We can always have Weather, you know, and hold these things back a
bit."

That was the beginning of it.

Andy was about twenty-eight years old then, and he really had an awful
time of it at first trying to work out by hand the wonderful stuffs
and colors. There was the fern-design, spangled with Sweet William,
for instance. It was only to be the edging on a shawl for her, but he
spent three days and two nights on it; and then she asked him to make
it over with jack-in-the-pulpit inset, because she was sure to grow
tired very soon of Sweet William; then she changed her mind about
jack-in-the-pulpit and decided on wintergreen berries. This is just
a sample of one teeny bit of what she demanded. And Andy was very
awkward; so naturally he began complaining of his shuttles being too
clumsy for such fine work and the cobwebby filling getting tangled up
in his thumbs and after a bit of chewing his nails in despair he swore
the thing never could be done by hand.

No sooner had he got that out, than he heard the Voice roar loud like an
emperor's voice and say:

"The Big-'W' Work you love to do _must_ be done by hand. It _can't_ be
done any other way. That is why you were given thumbs, when the other
beasts got none."

So Andy found it was no use quarreling with the tools. He looked at his
hands, holding them up before him, and he thought: "Well, the Voice is
right. My hands wouldn't be any good without my thumbs. I have hands and
thumbs both and surely they were given me for the reason the Voice
mentions. At any rate, I know no better."

That made Andy set to work all the harder, for the idea of
Thumb-and-Craft was new to him; and that made his craft very interesting
to him, so that he became determined to stick to it until he got the
beauty out of it. (All the same, it was a frightfully backward Summer
that year; and nobody--except Andy--thought very well of her.)

He found indeed that he would have to work as fast as his fingers could
go. For the little Summer grew big and bigger in an amazingly short
time; and she kept throwing things away as fast as she put them on just
as the Voice had foretold.

Her days, though, went happily along, all full of sweet smells out of
cups and umbels of flowers and from the liquor of the leaves as they
steeped in the hot sun; and Andy himself felt quite happy (when he
wasn't terribly interested in his Work, and then he paid attention to
nothing at all save what was between his thumb and forefinger). But
while he worked and the Summer danced or dozed and grew before him, he
noticed something he had never noticed until then--As the Summer grew
older, she kept asking him for darker blues. While she was little she
had liked light greens, but week by week as time went on she insisted
more and more that he put in plenty of blue.

"Bluer and bluer," muttered Andy, and a wee shot of pain hit his heart.
"Yes, it's bluer and bluer, all right, I know. And finally some day
'twill all be steel-blue everywhere--in the snow-drifts and in the
skies--and neither the lass nor I will be here then."

Well may you believe that the departing of that first Summer was a sad
matter to him. He had done his best, you see, and a whole new world of
trying had been thrown open to him. And really he was beginning to get
the knack of that kind of weaving. And she was a fine big apple-cheeked
woman now, and--

"Well, if I do say it myself," growled Andy, "she looks very handsome in
those dresses; and for the first time in my life I take a Pride in my
Work."

But in spite of all that the Voice came, you must know, and told him
this little dream-girl must die, and there would be another, a different
little girl next year; and all the weaving must be gone through with
again.

"Shall I be weaving this lass her shroud?" asked Andy of the Voice.

But the Voice did not answer him.

When Andy told all this to _her_, his first Summer cried for a whole
week in amongst the trees and over the pastures and meadows--

And then one morning, she was no longer there.

Andy sat in the doorway of the cabin and stared across the hills. He
saw pine trees, ever green, and he made up his mind she had not died
but had gone into one of them so as to live forever. And then he fell to
thinking how there were so many millions of pine trees, and he guessed
to himself how each of the millions of Summers we have had must have
gone into one of those trees so as never to die but to be always of the
Green Folk, ever green. Well, he rocked back and forth keening soft to
himself, when he happened to hear the Voice again and the Voice said:

"You must see by now, Andy, it's just as I told you. You've no money
now, have you? You have spent it all, buying stuff to weave her garments
from. And she has worn the garments and has thrown them away; so there
is nothing left. Nothing left except the joy of good work well done, and
the feeling that God has really whispered in your ear. Now you'll have
to go back down to Glastonbury and the work with-the-little-'w.' You'll
have to stay there through the winter, Andy, and save your pay. But when
the time comes again, I'll call you."

So Andy put a padlock on the old log cabin where his loom was set up and
went back down to the mill-town. And being as he was a clever man, he
was put back on his job right away. And the gray mists of winter packed
down on the gray town and on the little gray people in the town. And
Andy worked at his machine.

The next spring he got the call, just as the Voice had said he would.
He drew his pay and, now that he knew a bit of what was required of him,
he laid in a fair supply of what he should need. Then he was off into
the hills. And one day there came the birds riding up on the winds like
cavaliers with feathers dancing about; and when they began their keen
bugling it pierced here and there and everywhere and made the walls of
Winter to tumble down the same as Jericho's did. And sure enough, there
a new babe teetered on her toes in the midst of the grass. Naked as a
flower she was, and she smiled up at him.

So he wove for her with the lightest heart you can ever imagine. But,
afterward, she went away in tears, the same as the other had done and as
all Summers do; and Andy picked out a new pine tree and guessed she was
keeping it green.

"Shall I be weaving _this_ lass her shroud?" he had asked again. But
again the Voice had made no answer.

So, naturally, the Summers came and came; and Andy wove and Worked and
clad them. In time he became, as you may well believe, the finest
hand-weaver (of Summer things, I mean) that was on earth in his day.
He became so good at his hand-work that in winter, at the mill, he was
actually clumsy at his machine! So it was just 'tother way round, as you
see, from what it was when he started. He was so clumsy then with his
hands that he thought everything had to be done by machine you remember.
But now he could outdo with his mortal hands anything that was ever done
by machine.

And another queer thing happened to him; he got so he had a totally
different idea of what work was. For his mates down in Glastonbury told
him, "You work only during the winter, don't you?"

Whereas, he found himself answering: "Why, no. 'Tis just the other way
around. I can work only during the summer. I can't work at all during
the winter. I'm dead all winter long--like all the Green Things." Then
his comrades spoke wildly of him and touched their heads. They had
learned the American idea, you see. Andy was crazy and he was lazy; and
he didn't know when he had a good job; and there was no money in
loafing. And all that sort of thing.

Now, I could keep you here all night telling you what all went on with
Summer after Summer, and Summer after Summer, and Summer after Summer;
until Andy grew old and wrinkled and ugly and very sweet in his mind and
cleverer and defter and finer in his finger-weaving. But the main carry
of it all is just as I've been telling you--So we have him coming along,
year after year, loving his little lasses and his blues and greens and
yellows and the way he could put 'em together and make Beauty.

That was the way he lived. And now this is the way he died.

Always, I think I told you, Andy asked the question: "And shall I be
weaving this lass a shroud?"

And never had the Voice answered him.

Well, came one Summer that lived a long, long time and ran and tried to
hide in far places when told she had to die; and to Andy it seemed he
loved that Summer so fond and fair, more than any and all. Andy was
sixty-eight then and for full forty years had done his winter stint and
his Big 'W' Work in the hills. But he did not feel tired that year. No;
he simply felt odd-like, as if it might be something unforeseen was
going to happen to him and it would not tell its name to him first. (You
know how you feel that way sometimes--as if wings were flying over your
head and you think you see their shadows on the grass; but you look up
and see no wings at all in the sky. Then you say: "Isn't the sky a queer
color to-day?" and you feel uneasy.)

So it came about that while that Summer lingered and hid and ran, Andy
again asked the old, old question he had always asked and to which he
had never received an answer:

"Shall I be weaving _this_ lass her shroud?"

And, lo and behold, the Voice, very soft and full of kindness, said: "If
'twill please you, you might as well, Andy. Your Work is done. But--a
question first. Have you ever once regretted the labor and the loss I
have put upon you?"

Andy said to himself, "I am about to die." In a loud, clear tone though
he answered: "Not once, O Voice! The joy I felt, the triumph I felt as
I handed her a bit of master-work and she flung it to the idle winds was
in itself enough. As I look back at it, there has been no labor and
there has been no loss. I have heard God's whisper in my ears, and that
will be sufficient for me until the end of eternity."

So the Voice said: "You know all there is to know. Weave the shroud."

Andy took steel-blue floss and at right angles he shot it with white;
and he made it so thin and fine that a million miles of it would not
weigh a hundred pounds. And he said to himself, "I will weave a hundred
pounds of it; and I'll wrap her in it myself, all softly, around and
around, like as if she was a dead bride of the Green Folk's king, I
will."

So Andy set to work, grim as Death himself. He bit his lip hard, and a
queer shine came into his eyes; and he worked day and night, fast and
faster, eating nothing and sleeping not at all--smoking away like a
demon on his pipe and weaving miles and miles to his heart's desire.

"It shall be my master-bit," he told himself.

He never even looked out the window, so close was he on the heel of his
work. "It shall be my master-bit," he kept saying to himself. The light
got poorer and dimmer and there was a shorter lasting of it. Less light
meant longer work; so it was thirty days and thirty nights before he got
it anywhere near finished. No, it wasn't fully done. How could it be?
The Summer Fellows never finished anything complete, you know.

But 'twas beautiful, just the same, all shimmering cold blue, and white
like apple blossoms that have blanched and are ready to fall. And there
was mile upon mile of it. It was wondrously fine, finer than anything
Andy had done until then. It was really his master-bit, as he had said
it would be. And he would have kept on and woven more, but--

He looked of a sudden out his window, one morning, in the gray, and he
could not see that Summer anywhere!

He went to the door and shaded his eyes with his hands and peered over
miles and miles of hills; and far down one gusset of valley he saw her
dull-green robes a-trailing. He cried for joy. (You know--when you have
lost a thing that you loved and found it again.)

Famished and weak he was, but he gathered the miles and pounds of that
shroud in his arms and started down the roads and over the hills after
her, calling till his heart would break and his voice went dry:

"Wait for me, lass. I've woven your shroud! Wait for me, lass. I'm
coming! I've your beautiful, downy shroud here--"

And he would stumble along, so weak the sweat broke out on him and he
scarce could lift a leg. But with the shroud over his arm, he went on
and on and on as best he could; his long, ragged gray hair a-flying and
a wild glare in his eyes and those eyes fast fixed on the Summer as she
slipped away.

'Twas in this fashion he came to the summit of a foothill and could go
no further. The cold had smitten to his bones, though the sweat still
stood on his skin. He dropped down on the ground and slept a bit--but
not sound asleep, and in his sleep he had awful dreams which made him
wake.

He started up, crying weakly: "I have your shroud, lass. Wait for me!"

And then he noticed--_It was snowing_!

The soft white flakes he saw, dropping upon the earth like light years,
my boy, years that themselves will be dropping and dropping forever
and ever by tens of hundreds of thousands of millions and covering
everything, all we do, all we are or were, far and wide with a white
sameness--a big mound here where a Hero Worked, a flatness there where
a zero worked--but all white, and all the same.

Andy put his hand to his forehead as if in a dream, and then--let me
see; what did he do?--he wrung his hands and he cried out:

"Look yonder, look yonder! Oh, now I see why the Voice never answered
me when I asked about the shroud! Now I see. I see my presumption, and I
understand the silence--'tis God Himself who weaves the shroud for every
Summer. Look yonder at the snowflakes a-coming down! I can see God's
shuttle weaving in and out amongst them. In and out amongst the years
of snowflakes I can see God's hand, pushing the shuttle and weaving the
shroud that will wrap the Summers and all and all--And I was so bold
with my poor little shroud here, my master-bit of weaving--"

And he broke down and began sobbing and threw himself face down upon the
ground, wiping away at his tears with the wonderful weft he had made.

Then the great Voice came out of the wind and the darkening sky, sturdy
as a great captain's, and shouted aloud through the thick of the flakes:

"_Pray, but regret not, Andy. You did the Work of your Hand!_"

So he died in the snow on the top of that hill, the contented artist
of a perished dream, the master worker in a fabric that immediately
dissolved. What he had told the Voice was true; the triumph he felt as
he handed over to the Summer a bit of his best and she threw it away to
the drifting winds like a bit of dying music--the joy he felt then was
enough to last him till eternity ended. He had heard God's whisper in
his ear; and he never would have heard it if he had stayed in the mill.
He had done what God wanted him to do, a beautiful thing as beautifully
as he knew how--and he felt at last that the beauty of it was somehow
not lost at all.


III

Abruptly the old man left and went out into the snowy night. For there
were tears in his eyes.


IV

The poker game was finished. Pigalle sauntered slowly over to my table.

"You know Handy?" he asked, slowly, in his broken English.

"Who's that?"

"The hole man that ees just go out. 'Is name ees Handy Gor-don." He
rolled his great expressive eyes. "'E's cra-zee man. Also wot you call
loafer: 'e do not work wen 'e wish not to. But, _mon Dieu_, 'ow 'e can
play, that man!" He made a suave, swelling gesture with his hands and
arms and heaved up his great bulk gracefully. "'Ow 'e can play! 'Ow 'e
can _play_!"

"He is Andy Gordon!" I exclaimed. "What is he? A weaver?"

"_Comment_?"

"A weaver? Makes cloth--like this?" I held up the corner of the
tablespread.

"_Corpo_, no!" ejaculated the astonished Pigalle. "Handy ees
violinist-a."




HEART OF YOUTH[12]

BY WALTER J. MUILENBURG

From _The Midland_

[12] Copyright, 1915, by John T. Frederick. Copyright, 1916, by Walter
J. Muilenburg.


The boy on the cultivator straightened as the horses walked from the
soft, spongy ground of the cornfield to the firmer turf at the side
of the road. He spoke sharply to the plodding team and turned the
cultivator around, lowering the blades for another row. Then, when
the horses had fallen into a slow walk, he slouched down, and with
bent head watched the hills of young corn pass beneath him.

He could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, for his eager
eyes looked out from under soft lashes, and his face showed the smooth,
healthy tan of a boy. His brown hands were so small that he could barely
keep a firm grasp on the heavy levers. When he raised the blades, his
fingers became streaked with red and the corners of his mouth drew back
and grew hard with concentrated effort. Occasionally he tugged at the
reins knotted about his shoulders, but, except for his low, abrupt
commands to the horses, he was silent. At the end of the row he raised
the shovels, got off the cultivator stiffly, and stretched himself out
in the new spring grass of a little rise by the roadside.

All around him the world was full of soft color and light. Close by,
in the sun the corn-field was a sea of shimmering green, while the more
distant fields of grain were dark against the light ash of plowed land.
Above, the sun shone slanting from the blue of an early June sky. The
air, clean and clear, was already pervaded with the drowsy lassitude of
noon.

The boy looked listlessly out over the long rows of corn still to be
cultivated. Near at hand the young stalks seemed strong enough to win
in their struggle toward the sun, but the distant corn lay like a filmy
shadow of green on the black soil. Behind the cultivator, a flock of
blackbirds fed in the fresh-turned earth. The boy watched them with
half-shut eyes. When one of the birds had fed, it would hop upon a lump
of wet, black earth, and being satisfied that it could eat no more,
would skim in rapid, undulating flight to the row of willows in the next
pasture. On a fence-post, a meadow-lark filled the silence with a liquid
flow of music. As it laid back its head in an abandon of joy, the boy
noticed how the sun accentuated the vivid splash of black on its yellow
throat.

The meadow-lark flew away. The boy got up and climbed listlessly into
the cultivator seat. The tugs straightened and the horses walked again
into the corn. One of the team, however, a heavy, powerful bay, lagged
continually, at times almost stopping.

The cultivator slid sidewise, and the blades tore the corn out by the
roots. The boy jerked the reins, slapping them over the horse's back.
"Get along there, Jim!" he called. Jim pulled evenly for a moment, then
lagged again. In sudden violence of anger, the boy pulled cruelly at the
horse's mouth, cursing in low, abrupt sentences. The horse stopped, the
blades slipped, again tearing up a hill of corn. From sheer rage the boy
was silent, then he jumped from the cultivator, and gathering the slack
of the reins, hit the horse about the head with all his might. His face
was dry and white, his eyes blazing. As he continued to strike the
horse, he found expression.

"You damn, lazy brute, you! I'll show you who's running this job--you
or me!" His words came sharply, in gasps, between blows. Then he cursed
again; cursed the work and the horse. Fine lines of fatigue showed in
his face. At last he stopped. A slight color had come to his cheeks.
For a moment he watched the horse, which stood with muscles moving in
quivering ripples of pain and fear; then he walked soberly back and
climbed upon the cultivator seat. The horses moved on. They walked
evenly now, starting at any movement of the boy, who stared steadily
at the swiftly moving ground, two red spots still burning through the
tan of his cheeks.

They went once across the field. On the return, the boy stopped
impetuously by the road and jumping down from the seat walked to the
horse he had beaten. The horse quivered and shied toward its mate. The
boy stroked its neck.

"Whoa, Jim! Whoa, boy!" he repeated.

He hesitated a moment, then went across the road to the meadow and
picked an armful of young tufts of clover. He fed it to the horses, a
handful at a time. They ate eagerly, all trace of fear gone as they
reached out their necks for the young grass. Over the boy's face passed
a conflict of expressions. At one time the cheeks were soft, and a
boyish look lay in his eyes. Then came a strange, dry expression, as
of age, which formed tense lines about his mouth; but as he climbed up
to the seat of the cultivator, the softer expression remained.

The horses were beginning to draw at the tugs when the boy heard a horse
galloping on the road behind him. He looked back. One of the neighbor
boys, Bill Symonds, was riding furiously down the hill. The boy turned
quickly about in the seat as if he had not seen Bill and tried to hurry
the horses. What did Bill want, anyway? It was like him to blunder along
when he wasn't wanted! His big, greasy face shaded by the long hair
falling unkempt over his forehead had always made the boy dislike Bill.
He tightened the reins.

"Hey, Frank, wait a minute!" Bill slid awkwardly from the colt's back.

The boy twisted the reins about the levers and turned in the seat.

"How are you, Bill," he answered without animation.

Bill tied the colt, a bay, to the willows.

"Well, what do you think of my new colt?" He came closer and lounged
forward against the fence. "I broke him in myself--all alone, too! Now,
that was a job, Lord! You ought t' seen him buckin' an' standin' on his
hind legs!"

They were silent for a moment. Bill amused himself by flinging clods
at the colt, which jumped wildly each time one struck him, his body
quivering, his eyes white and distended.

After a few clods Bill turned to the boy.

"I guess maybe I'll be leavin' soon."

The boy looked up quickly.

"Yep. I'm goin' off to my brother's ranch in Dakota. I'm gettin' tired
of the work here--it's too hard. It's work, work, work all the time with
a little while for eatin' and sleepin'. All summer you c'n work your
head off and then in winter you can lay off for a couple of months and
don't know what to do."

The boy looked out over the fields. Even Bill could go away. The heavy,
flabby cheeks, from which the small eyes peered inquisitively, disgusted
the boy. Bill picked up another bit of turf and threw it so that the
colt jumped wildly, pulling the young willows almost to the ground.

The boy turned to Bill, his face flushed.

"Say--if you want to stay around here you got to cut out firing stones
at that colt. You'll never get 'im tame that way--you thick-headed
fool!"

Bill stood quiet for a moment. The boy saw an expression of incredulous
surprise on Bill's face. Then it became brick-red. He did not wait for
Bill to answer but started the horses.

When he looked back, Bill was riding away over the top of the hill, his
body swaying with the rhythm of the gallop. The boy was glad that Bill
was angry. He didn't want people around. And besides, why did Bill have
a chance to go away? His eyes grew hot.

The morning passed slowly. When finally the shadow of the cottonwood
tree at the corner of the pasture pointed directly to the north, the
boy unhitched, cleaned the cultivator shovels carefully with a handful
of grass and placed them upon the hooks. With the reins about his back,
he trudged up the long slope of the hill, through the warm dust,
swinging his water-pail in cadence with his steps. They reached the
top of the hill. The house was only a short distance from the road.
He could see his father carrying a basket of wood to the house. He
hoped that his father would not come and help him unharness the horses.
He wanted to be alone; he dreaded facing their conversation at the
dinner-table. His eyes grew hot again. Everything was so old to him!
He always came home just at dinner time, his father always worked about
the barn, finishing work a little before so that he might help unharness
the horses. And dinner was always ready when they came in the house. The
boy kicked a clod viciously.

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