Eugene Field - "A Little Book of Profitable Tales"

Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882"

Hawley Smart - "Belles and Ringers"

Frederick Orin Bartlett - "The Seventh Noon"

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.

Through the Eye of the Needle

W >> W. D. Howells >> Through the Eye of the Needle




"You won't come to live in America?"

"God forbid!" said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that
ran through me at the thought. "And when you once see our happy country,
you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied
spirit could be persuaded to return to the earth."

She was silent, and I asked: "But, surely, you understood this, Mrs.
Gray?"

"No," she said, reluctantly. "Does Eveleth?"

"Why, certainly," I said. "We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn't
she--"

"I don't know," she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes.
"Perhaps I haven't understood her exactly. Perhaps--but I shall be ready
to do whatever you and she think best. I am an old woman, you know; and,
you know, I was born here, and I should feel the change."

Her words conveyed to me a delicate reproach; I felt for the first time
that, in my love of my own country, I had not considered her love of
hers. It is said that the Icelanders are homesick when they leave their
world of lava and snow; and I ought to have remembered that an American
might have some such tenderness for his atrocious conditions, if he were
exiled from them forever. I suppose it was the large and wide mind of
Eveleth, with its openness to a knowledge and appreciation of better
things, that had suffered me to forget this. She seemed always so eager
to see Altruria, she imagined it so fully, so lovingly, that I had ceased
to think of her as an alien; she seemed one of us, by birth as well as by
affinity.

Yet now the words of her mother, and the light they threw upon the
situation, gave me pause. I began to ask myself questions I was impatient
to ask Eveleth, so that there should be no longer any shadow of misgiving
in my breast; and yet I found myself dreading to ask them, lest by some
perverse juggle I had mistaken our perfect sympathy for a perfect
understanding.




XXVI


Like all cowards who wait a happy moment for the duty that should not be
suffered to wait at all, I was destined to have the affair challenge me,
instead of seizing the advantage of it that instant frankness would have
given me. Shall I confess that I let several days go by, and still had
not spoken to Eveleth, when, at the end of a long evening--the last long
evening we passed together--she said:

"What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?"

"Do with this house?" I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the
edge of an abyss.

"Yes; shall we let it, or sell it--or what? Or give it away?" I drew a
little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other, after
all. She went on: "Of course, I have a peculiar feeling about it, so that
I wouldn't like to get it ready and let it furnished, in the ordinary
way. I would rather lend it to some one, if I could be sure of any one
who would appreciate it; but I can't. Not one. And it's very much the
same when one comes to think about selling it. Yes, I should like to give
it away for some good purpose, if there is any in this wretched state of
things. What do you say, Aristide?"

She always used the French form of my name, because she said it sounded
ridiculous in English, for a white man, though I told her that the
English was nearer the Greek in sound.

"By all means, give it away," I said. "Give it for some public purpose.
That will at least be better than any private purpose, and put it somehow
in the control of the State, beyond the reach of individuals or
corporations. Why not make it the foundation of a free school for the
study of the Altrurian polity?"

She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. "It would be
droll, wouldn't it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?"
Then she said, after a moment of reflection: "Why not? It needn't be in
the hands of Tammany. It could be in the hands of the United States; I
will ask my lawyer if it couldn't; and I will endow it with money enough
to support the school handsomely. Aristide, you have hit it!"

I began: "You can give _all_ your money to it, my dear--" But I
stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.

"All?" she repeated. "But what should we have to live on, then?"

"We shall need no money to live on in Altruria," I answered.

"Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?"

It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which
blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. "Eveleth," I gasped, "did you
expect to return to New York?"

"Why, certainly!" she cried. "Not at once, of course. But after you had
seen your friends, and made a good, long visit--Why, surely, Aristide,
you don't understand that I--You didn't mean to _live_ in Altruria?"

"Ah!" I answered. "Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant
that I could live in such a land as this?" I saw that she was hurt, and I
hastened to say: "I know that it is the best part of the world outside of
Altruria, but, oh, my dear, you cannot imagine how horrible the notion of
living here seems to me. Forgive me. I am going from bad to worse. I
don't mean to wound you. After all, it is your country, and you must love
it. But, indeed, I could not think of living here. I could not take the
burden of its wilful misery on my soul. I must live in Altruria, and you,
when you have once seen my country, _our_ country, will never
consent to live in any other."

"Yes," she said, "I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn't
supposed--and yet I ought--"

"No, dearest, no! It was I who was to blame, for not being clearer from
the first. But that is the way with us. We can't imagine any people
willing to live anywhere else when once they have seen Altruria; and I
have told you so much of it, and we have talked of it together so often,
that I must have forgotten you had not actually known it. But listen,
Eveleth. We will agree to this: After we have been a year in Altruria,
if you wish to return to America I will come back and live with you
here."

"No, indeed!" she answered, generously. "If you are to be my husband,"
and here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in
their quaint English, "'whither thou goest, I will go, and I will not
return from following after thee. Thy country shall be my country, and
thy God my God."

I caught her to my heart, in a rapture of tenderness, and the evening
that had begun for us so forbiddingly ended in a happiness such as not
even our love had known before. I insisted upon the conditions I had
made, as to our future home, and she agreed to them gayly at last, as a
sort of reparation which I might make my conscience, if I liked, for
tearing her from a country which she had willingly lived out of for the
far greater part of the last five years.

But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.

"I won't give the house absolutely away," she said. "I will keep the deed
of it myself, but I will establish that sort of school of Altrurian
doctrine in it, and I will endow it, and when we come back here, for our
experimental sojourn, after we've been in Altruria a year, we'll take up
our quarters in it--I won't give the whole house to the school--and we
will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How
will that do?"

She put her arms around my neck, and I said that it would do admirably;
but I had a certain sinking of the heart, for I saw how hard it was even
for Eveleth to part with her property.

"I'll endow it," she went on, "and I'll leave the rest of my money at
interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities--"

"No; there are no such things!" I cried.

"That was what I thought," she returned; "and as it will cost us nothing
while we are in Altruria, the interest will be something very handsome by
the time we get back, even in United States bonds."

"Something handsome!" I cried. "But, Eveleth, haven't I heard you say
yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like--"

"Oh yes; that!" she returned. "But you know you have to take it. You
can't let the money lie idle: that would be ridiculous; and then, with
the good purpose we have in view, it is our _duty_ to take the
interest. How should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and
everything?"

I saw that she had forgotten the great sum of the principal, or that,
through lifelong training and association, it was so sacred to her that
she did not even dream of touching it. I was silent, and she thought that
I was persuaded.

"You are perfectly right in theory, dear, and I feel just as you do about
such things; I'm sure I've suffered enough from them; but if we didn't
take interest for your money, what should we have to live on?"

"Not _my_ money, Eveleth!" I entreated. "Don't say _my_ money!"

"But whatever is mine is yours," she returned, with a wounded air.

"Not your money; but I hope you will soon have none. We should need no
money to live on in Altruria. Our share of the daily work of all will
amply suffice for our daily bread and shelter."

"In Altruria, yes. But how about America? And you have promised to come
back here in a year, you know. Ladies and gentlemen can't share in the
daily toil here, even if they could get the toil, and, where there are so
many out of work, it isn't probable they could."

She dropped upon my knee as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under
my chin, to lift my fallen face.

"Now you mustn't be a goose, Aristide, even if you _are_ an angel!
Now listen. You _know_, don't you, that I hate money just as badly
as you?"

"You have made me think so, Eveleth," I answered.

"I hate it and loathe it. I think it's the source of all the sin and
misery in the world; but you can't get rid of it at a blow. For if you
gave it away you might do more harm than good with it."

"You could destroy it," I said.

"Not unless you were a crank," she returned. "And that brings me just to
the point. I know that I'm doing a very queer thing to get married, when
we know so little, really, about you," and she accented this confession
with a laugh that was also a kiss. "But I want to show people that we are
just as practical as anybody; and if they can know that I have left my
money in United States bonds, they'll respect us, no matter what I do
with the interest. Don't you see? We can come back, and preach and teach
Altrurianism, and as long as we pay our way nobody will have a right
to say a word. Why, Tolstoy himself doesn't destroy his money, though he
wants other people to do it. His wife keeps it, and supports the family.
You _have_ to do it."

"He doesn't do it willingly."

"No. And _we_ won't. And after a while--after we've got back, and
compared Altruria and America from practical experience, if we decide to
go and live there altogether, I will let you do what you please with
the hateful money. I suppose we couldn't take it there with us?"

"No more than you could take it to heaven with you," I answered,
solemnly; but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.

"Well, in either case we could get on without it, though we certainly
could not get on without it here. Why, Aristide, it is essential to the
influence we shall try to exert for Altrurianism; for if we came back
here and preached the true life without any money to back us, no one
would pay any attention to us. But if we have a good house waiting for
us, and are able to entertain nicely, we can attract the best people,
and--and--really do some good."




XXVII


I rose in a distress which I could not hide. "Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!" I
cried. "You are like all the rest, poor child! You are the creature of
your environment, as we all are. You cannot escape what you have been.
It may be that I was wrong to wish or expect you to cast your lot with me
in Altruria, at once and forever. It may be that it is my duty to return
here with you after a time, not only to let you see that Altruria is
best, but to end my days in this unhappy land, preaching and teaching
Altrurianism; but we must not come as prophets to the comfortable people,
and entertain nicely. If we are to renew the evangel, it must be in the
life and the spirit of the First Altrurian: we must come poor to the
poor; we must not try to win any one, save through his heart and
conscience; we must be as simple and humble as the least of those that
Christ bade follow Him. Eveleth, perhaps you have made a mistake. I love
you too much to wish you to suffer even for your good. Yes, I am so weak
as that. I did not think that this would be the sacrifice for you that it
seems, and I will not ask it of you. I am sorry that we have not
understood each other, as I supposed we had. I could never become an
American; perhaps you could never become an Altrurian. Think of it,
dearest. Think well of it, before you take the step which you cannot
recede from. I hold you to no promise; I love you so dearly that I cannot
let you hold yourself. But you must choose between me and your money--no,
not me--but between love and your money. You cannot keep both."

She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart and
stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. "Then there is no choice for
me. My choice is made, once for all." She set her hands against my breast
and pushed me from her. "Go now; but come again to-morrow. I want to
think it all over again. Not that I have any doubt, but because you wish
it--you wish it, don't you?--and because I will not let you ever think I
acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it."

"That is right, Eveleth. That is like _you_" I said, and I took her
into my arms for good-night.

The next day I came for her decision, or rather for her confirmation of
it. The man who opened the door to me met me with a look of concern and
embarrassment. He said Mrs. Strange was not at all well, and had told him
he was to give me the letter he handed me. I asked, in taking it, if I
could see Mrs. Gray, and he answered that Mrs. Gray had not been down
yet, but he would go and see. I was impatient to read my letter, and I
made I know not what vague reply, and I found myself, I know not how, on
the pavement, with the letter open in my hand. It began abruptly without
date or address:

_"You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this.

"I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over
between us.

"I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach
myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.

"I am writing this with a strange coldness, like the chill of death, in
my very soul. I do not ask you to forgive me; I have your forgiveness
already. Do not forget me; that is what I ask. Remember me as the
unhappy woman who was not equal to her chance when heaven was opened to
her, who could not choose the best when the best came to her.

"There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the
same cry of shame, of love.

"Eveleth Strange."_

I reeled as I read the lines. The street seemed to weave itself into a
circle around me. But I knew that I was not dreaming, that this was no
delirium of my sleep.

It was three days ago, and I have not tried to see her again. I have
written her a line, to say that I shall not forget her, and to take the
blame upon myself. I expected the impossible of her.

I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have
sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.

I will try to leave it all behind me forever; but while I linger out
these last long hours here I must think and I must doubt.

Was she, then, the _poseuse_ that they said? Had she really no hear
in our love? Was it only a pretty drama she was playing, and were those
generous motives, those lofty principles which seemed to actuate her, the
poetical qualities of the play, the graces of her pose? I cannot believe
it. I believe that she was truly what she seemed, for she had been that
even before she met me. I believe that she was pure and lofty in soul as
she appeared; but that her life was warped to such a form by the false
conditions of this sad world that, when she came to look at herself
again, after she had been confronted with the sacrifice before her, she
feared that she could not make it without in a manner ceasing to be.

She--

But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.

END OF PART I




PART SECOND




I


I could hardly have believed, my dear Dorothea, that I should be so late
in writing to you from Altruria, but you can easily believe that I am
thoroughly ashamed of myself for my neglect. It is not for want of
thinking of you, or talking of you, that I have seemed so much more
ungrateful than I am. My husband and I seldom have any serious talk which
doesn't somehow come round to you. He admires you and likes you as much
as I do, and he does his best, poor man, to understand you; but his not
understanding you is only a part of his general failure to understand how
any American can be kind and good in conditions which he considers so
abominable as those of the capitalistic world. He is not nearly so severe
on us as he used to be at times when he was among us. When the other
Altrurians are discussing us he often puts in a reason for us against
their logic; and I think he has really forgotten, a good deal, how bad
things are with us, or else finds his own memory of them incredible. But
his experience of the world outside his own country has taught him how to
temper the passion of the Altrurians for justice with a tolerance of the
unjust; and when they bring him to book on his own report of us he tries
to explain us away, and show how we are not so bad as we ought to be.

For weeks after we came to Altruria I was so unhistorically blest that if
I had been disposed to give you a full account of myself I should have
had no events to hang the narrative on. Life here is so subjective (if
you don't know what that is, you poor dear, you must get Mr. Twelvemough
to explain) that there is usually nothing like news in it, and I always
feel that the difference between Altruria and America is so immense that
it is altogether beyond me to describe it. But now we have had some
occurrences recently, quite in the American sense, and these have
furnished me with an incentive as well as opportunity to send you a
letter. Do you remember how, one evening after dinner, in New York, you
and I besieged my husband and tried to make him tell us why Altruria was
so isolated from the rest of the world, and why such a great and
enlightened continent should keep itself apart? I see still his look of
horror when Mr. Makely suggested that the United States should send an
expedition and "open" Altruria, as Commodore Perry "opened" Japan in
1850, and try to enter into commercial relations with it. The best he
could do was to say what always seemed so incredible, and keep on
assuring us that Altruria wished for no sort of public relations with
Europe or America, but was very willing to depend for an indefinite time
for its communication with those regions on vessels putting into its
ports from stress of one kind or other, or castaway on its coasts. They
are mostly trading-ships or whalers, and they come a great deal oftener
than you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards, because their crews
are poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their adventures are always
distrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if they told the
stories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband himself took
one of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us, catching the
Australasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you by the same
sort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a longer
letter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a week yet,
because it is so hard to get her crew together.

Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so strongly
to that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always use
the English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be living
the tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dream
which I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember how
funny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the whole
truth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, without
really knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked note
I had written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will,
but against my word. Of course I didn't put it in just that way, but in a
way to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had was
when Mr. Makely said, "Then, when a woman tells a man that all is over
between them forever, she means that she would like to discuss the
business with him?" I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to me
that you and I had gone back in that awful moment and were two girls
together, just as we used to be at school. I was proud of the way you
stood up for me, because I thought that if you could tolerate me after
what I had confessed I could not be quite a fool. I knew that I deserved
at least some pity, and though I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad of
your indignation with him, and of your faith in Aristides. When it came
to the question of what I should do, I don't know which of you I owed the
most to. It was a kind of comfort to have Mr. Makely acknowledge that
though he regarded Aristides as a myth, still he believed that he was a
thoroughly _good_ myth, and couldn't tell a lie if he wanted to; and I
loved you, and shall love you more than any one else but him, for saying
that Aristides was the most real man you had ever met, and that if
everything he said was untrue you would trust him to the end of the
world.

But, Dolly, it wasn't all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, and
when you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where there
was nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr.
Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that I
was coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There is
no use trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to my
husband. She thought there was something uncanny about him, though she
felt as we did that there was nothing uncanny _in_ him; but a man
who pretended to come from a country where there was no riches and no
poverty could not be trusted with any woman's happiness; and though she
could not help loving him, she thought I ought to tear him out of my
heart, and if I could not do that I ought to have myself shut up in an
asylum. We had a dreadful time when I told her what I had decided to do,
and I was almost frantic. At last, when she saw that I was determined to
follow him, she yielded, not because she was convinced, but because she
could not give me up; I wouldn't have let her if she could. I believe
that the only thing which reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makely
believed in him, and thought I had better do what I wanted to, if nothing
could keep me from it. I shall never, never forget Mr. Makely's goodness
in coming to talk with her, and how skillfully he managed, without
committing himself to Altruria, to declare his faith in my Altrurian.
Even then she was troubled about what she thought the indelicacy of my
behavior in following him across the sea, and she had all sorts of doubts
as to how he would receive me when we met in Liverpool. It wasn't very
reasonable of me to say that if he cast me off I should still love him
more than any other human being, and his censure would be more precious
to me than the praise of the rest of the world.

I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded to
my love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left my
mother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, and
I should somehow have _forced_ her to go if she had not yielded. When she
did yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far from
hindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I could
have got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was her
idea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely's hands, and
to trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did not
care for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stood
between me and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wild
impossibility he should reject me when we met, I should need it for the
life I must go back to in New York. She behaved like a martyr as well as
a heroine, for till we reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice to
me. She stubbornly doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her the
justice to say that she has been convinced by the fact. The best she can
say of it is that it is like the world of her girlhood; and she has gone
back to the simple life here from the artificial life in New York, with
the joy of a child. She works the whole day, and she would play if she
had ever learned how. She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there could
be a bigoted Altrurian my mother would be one.

Copyright (c) 2007. topboookz.com. All rights reserved.