Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 286"

James MacQueen - "A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World"

BY LOUIS GINZBERG - "THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS"

James MacQueen - "A General Plan for a Mail Communication by Steam, Between Great Britain and the Eastern and Western Parts of the World"

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.

Confession

W >> W. Gilmore Simms >> Confession




The effect of this random chatter of my good-natured friend upon
my mind may well be imagined. It was fortunate that he was quite
too much occupied in what he was saying to note my annoyance. In
vain, anxious to be let off, was I restrained in utterance--cold,
unpliable. The good fellow took for granted that it was an act
of friendship to try to amuse; and thus, yearning with a nameless
discontent and apprehension to get home I was marched to and fro
along the river-bank, from one scene to another--he, meanwhile,
utterly heedless of time, and as actively bent on perpetual motion
as if his sinews were of steel and his flesh iron. Meanwhile, the
guitar ceased, and the song in the cottage of Miss Davison; the
lights went out in that and all the other dwellings in sight; the
moon waned; and it was not till the clock from a distant steeple
tolled out the hour of eleven with startling solemnity, that Kingsley
exclaimed:--

"Well, mon ami, we have had a ramble, and I trust I have somewhat
dissipated your gloomy fit. And now to bed--what say you?--with
what appetite we may!"

With what appetite, indeed! We separated. I rushed homeward, the
moment he was out of sight--once more stood before my own dwelling.
There the lights remained unextinguished and William Edgerton was
still a tenant of my parlor!






CHAPTER XXII.

SELF-HUMILIATION.





I had not the courage to enter my own dwelling! My heart sank
within me. It was as if the whole hope of a long life, an intense
desire, a keen unremitting pursuit, had suddenly been for ever
baffled. Let no one who has not been in my situation; who has not
been governed by like moral and social influences from the beginning;
who knows not my sensibilities, and the organization--singular and
strange it may be--of my mind and body; let no such person jump
to the conclusion that there was any thing unnatural, however
unreasonable and unreasoning, in the wild passion which possessed
me. I look back upon it with some surprise myself. The fears which
I felt, the sufferings I endured, however unreasonable, were yet
true to my training. That training made me selfish; how selfish let
my blindness show! In the blindness of self I could see nothing but
the thing I feared, the one phantom--phantom though it were--which
was sufficient to quell and crush all the better part of man within
me, banish all the real blessings which were at command around
me. I gave but a single second glance through the windows of my
habitation, and then darted desperately away from the entrance! I
bounded, without a consciousness, through the now still and dreary
streets, and found myself, without intending it, once more beside the
river, whose constant melancholy chidings, seemed the echoes-though
in the faintest possible degree--of the deep waters of some
apprehensive sorrow then rolling through all the channels of my
soul.

What was it that I feared? What was it that I sought? Was it love?
Can it be that the strange passion which we call by this name, was
the source of that sad frenzy which filled and afflicted my heart?
And was I not successful in my love? Had I not found the sought?--won
the withheld? What was denied to me that I desired? I asked of
myself these questions. I asked them in vain. I could not answer
them. I believe that I can answer now. It was sincerity, earnestness,
devotion from her, all speaking through an intensity like that
which I felt within my own soul.

Now, Julia lacked this earnestness, this intensity. Accustomed
to submission, her manner was habitually subdued. Her strongest
utterance was a tear, and that was most frequently hidden. She did
not respond to me in the language in which my affections were wont
to speak. Sincerity she did not lack--far from it--she was truth
itself! It is the keener pang to my conscience now, that I am
compelled to admit this conviction. Her modes of utterance were
not less true than mine. They were not less significant of truth;
but they were after a different fashion. In a moment of calm and
reason, I might have believed this truth; nay, I knew it, even at
those moments when I was most unjust. It was not the truth that I
required so much as the presence of an attachment which could equal
mine in its degree and strength. This was not in her nature. She
was one taught to subdue her nature, to repress the tendencies of
her heart, to submit in silence and in meekness. She had invariably
done so until the insane urgency of her mother made her desperate.
But for this desperation she had still submitted, perhaps, had never
been my wife. In the fervent intensity of my own love, I fancied,
from the beginning, that there was something too temperate in the
tone of hers. Were I to be examined now, on this point, I should
say that her deportment was one which declared the nicest union
of sensibility and maidenly propriety. But, compared with mine,
her passions were feeble, frigid. Mine were equally intense and
exacting. Perhaps, had she even responded to my impetuosity with
a like fervor, I should have recoiled from her with a feeling of
disgust much more rapid and much more legitimate, than was that of
my present frenzy.

Frenzy it was! and it led me to the performance of those things
of which I shame to speak. But the truth, and its honest utterance
now, must be one of those forms of atonement with which I may
hope, perhaps vainly, to lessen, in the sight of Heaven, some of
my human offences. I had scarcely reached the water-side before
a new impulse drove me back. You will scarcely believe me when I
tell you that I descended to the base character of the spy upon my
household. The blush is red on my cheek while I record the shameful
error. I entered the garden, stole like a felon to the lattice of
the apartment in which my wife sat with her guest, and looked in
with a greedy fear, upon the features of the two!

What were my own features then? What the expression of my eyes?
It was well that I could not see them; I felt that they must be
frightful. But what did I expect to see in this espionage? As I
live, honestly now, and with what degree of honesty I then possessed,
I may truly declare that when I THOUGHT upon the subject at all,
I had no more suspicion that my wife would be guilty of any gross
crime, than I had of the guilt of the Deity himself. Far from it.
Such a fancy never troubled me. But, what was it to me, loving as
I did, exclusive, and selfish, and exacting as I was--what was it
to me if, forbearing all crime of conduct, she yet regarded another
with eyes of idolatry--if her mind was yielded up to him in deference
and regard; and thoughts, disparaging to me, filled her brain with
his superior worth, manners, merits? He had tastes, perhaps talents,
which I had not. In the forum, in all the more energetic, more
imposing performances of life, William Edgerton, I knew, could
take no rank in competition with myself. But I was no ladies' man.
I had no arts of society. My manners were even rude. My address
was direct almost to bluntncss. I had no discriminating graces,
and could make no sacrifice, in that school of polish, where the
delicacy is too apt to become false, and the performances trifling.
It is idle to dwell on this; still more idle to speculate upon
probable causes. It may be that there are persons in the world of
both sexes, and governed by like influences, who have been guilty
of like follies; to them my revelations may be of service. My
discoveries, if I have made any, were quite too late to be of much
help to me.

To resume, I prowled like a guilty phantom around my own habitation. I
scanned closely, with the keenest eyes of jealousy, every feature,
every movement of the two within. In the eyes of Edgerton,
I beheld--I did not deceive myself in this--I beheld the speaking
soul, devoted, rapt, full of love for the object of his survey.
That he loved her was to me sufficiently clear. His words were few,
faintly spoken, timid. His eyes did not encounter hers; but when
hers were averted, they riveted their fixed glances upon her face
with the adherence of the yearning steel for the magnet! Bitterly
did I gnash my teeth--bitterly did my spirit rise in rebellion, as
I noted these characteristics. But, vainly, with all my perversity
of feeling and judgment, did I examine the air, the look, the
action, the expression, the tones, the words of my wife, to make a
like discovery. All was passionless, all seeming pure, in her whole
conduct. She was gentle in her manner, kind in her words, considerate
in her attentions; but so entirely at ease, so evidently unconscious,
as well of improper thoughts in herself as of an improper tendency
in him, that, though still resolute to be wilful and unhappy, I
yet could see nothing of which I could reasonably complain. Nay,
I fancied that there was a touch of listlessness, amounting to
indifference, in her air, as if she really wished him to be gone;
and, for a moment, my heart beat with a returning flood of tenderness,
that almost prompted me to rush suddenly into the apartment and
clasp her to my arms.

At length, Edgerton departed. When he rose to do so, I felt
the awkwardness of my situation--the meanness of which I had been
guilty--the disgrace which would follow detection. The shame I
already felt; but, though sickening beneath it, the passion which
drove me into the commission of so slavish an act, was still superior
to all others, and could not then be overcome. I hurried from the
window and from the premises while he was taking his leave. My mind
was still in a frenzy. I rambled off, unconsciously, to the most
secluded places along the suburbs, endeavoring to lose the thoughts
that troubled me. I had now a new cause for vexation. I was haunted
by a conviction of my own shame. How could I look Julia in the
face--how meet and speak to her, and hear the accents of her voice
and my own after the unworthy espionage which I had instituted
upon her? Would not my eyes betray me--my faltering accents, my
abashed looks, my flushed and burning cheeks? I felt that it was
impossible for me to escape detection. I was sure that every look,
every tone, would sufficiently betray my secret. Perhaps I should
not have felt this fear, had I possessed the conrage to resolve
against the repetition of my error. Could I have declared this
resolution to myself, to forego the miserable proceeding which
I had that night begun, I feel that I should then have taken one
large step toward my own deliverance from that formidable fiend
which was then raging unmastered in my soul. But I lacked the courage
for this. Fatal deficiency! I felt impressed with the necessity of
keeping a strict watch upon Edgerton. I had seen, with eyes that
could not be deceived, the feeling which had been expressed in his.
I saw that he loved her, perhaps, without a consciousness himself
of the unhappy truth. I hurried to the conclusion, accordingly,
that he must be looked after. I did not so immediately perceive
that in looking after him, I was, in truth, looking after Julia;
for what was my watch upon Edgerton but a watch upon her? I had not
the confidence in her to leave her to herself. That was my error.
The true reasoning by which a man in my situation should be governed,
is comprised in a nutshell. Either the wife is virtuous or she is
not. If she is virtuous, she is safe without my espionage. If she
is not, all the watching in the world will not suffice to make her
so. As for the discovery of her falsehood, he will make that fast
enough. The security of the husband lies in his wife's purity, not
in his own eyes. It must be added to this argument that the most
virtuous among us, man or woman, is still very weak; and neither
wife, nor daughter, nor son, should be exposed to unnecessary
temptation. Do we not daily implore in our own prayers, to be saved
from temptation?

I need not strive to declare what were my thoughts and feelings as
I wandered off from my dwelling and place of espionage that night.
No language of which I am possessed could embody to the idea of
the reader the thousandth part of what I suffered. An insane and
morbid resentment filled my heart. A close, heavy, hot stupor,
pressed upon my brain. My limbs seemed feeble as those of a child.
I tottered in the streets. The stars, bright mysterious watchers,
seemed peering down into my face with looks of smiling inquiry. The
sudden bark of a watch-dog startled and unnerved me. I felt with
the consciousness of a mean action, all the humiliating weakness
which belongs to it.

It took me a goodly hour before I could muster up courage to return
home, and it was then midnight. Julia had retired to her chamber,
but not yet to her couch. She flew to me on my entrance--to my
arms. I shrunk from her embraces; but she grasped me with greater
firmness. I had never witnessed so much warmth in her before. It
surprised me, but the solution of it was easy. My long stay had
made her apprehensive. It was so unusual. My coldness, when she
embraced me, was as startling to her, as her sudden warmth was
surprising to me. She pushed me from her--still, however, holding
me in her grasp, while she surveyed me. Then she started, and with
newer apprehensions.

Well she might. My looks alarmed her. My hair was dishevelled
and moist with the night-dews. My cheeks were very pale. There was
a quick, agitated, and dilating fullness of my eyes, which rolled
hastily about the apartment, never even resting upon her. They dared
not. I caught a hasty glance of myself in the mirror, and scarcely
knew my own features. It was natural enough that she should be
alarmed. She clung to me with increased fervency. She spoke hurriedly,
but clearly, with an increased and novel power of utterance, the
due result of her excitement. Could that excitement be occasioned
by love for me--by a suspicion of the truth, namely, that I had
been watching her? I shuddered as this last conjecture passed into
my mind. That, indeed, would be a humiliation--worse, more degrading,
by far, than all.

"Oh, why have you left me--so long, so very long? where have you
been? what has happened?"

"Nothing--nothing."

"Ah, but there is something, Edward. Speak! what is it, dear husband?
I see it in your eyes, your looks! Why do you turn from me? Look
on me! tell me! You are very pale, and your eyes are so wild, so
strange! You are sick, dear Edward; you are surely sick: tell me,
what has happened?"

Wild and hurried as they were, never did tones of more touching
sweetness fall from any lips. They unmanned--nay, I use the wrong
word--they MANNED me for the time. They brought me back to my senses,
to a conviction of her truth, to a momentary conviction of my own
folly. My words fell from me without effort--few, hurried, husky--but
it was a sudden heartgush, which was unrestrainable.

"Ask me not, Julia-ask me nothing; but love me, only love me, and
all will be well--all is well."

"Do I not--ah! do I not love you, Edward?"

"I believe you--God be praised, I DO believe you!"

"Oh, surely, Edward, you never doubted this."

"No, no!--never!"

Such was the fervent ejaculation of my lips; such, in spite of its
seeming inconsistency, was the real belief within my soul. What
was it, then, that I did doubt? wherefore, then, the misery,
the suspense, the suspicion, which grew and gathered, corroding
in my heart, the parent of a thousand unnamed anxieties? It will
be difficult to answer. The heart of man is one of those strange
creations, so various in its moods, so infinite in its ramifications,
so subtle and sudden in its transitions, as to defy investigation
as certainly as it refuses remedy and relief. It is enough to say
that, with one schooled as mine had been, injuriously, and with
injustice, there is little certainty in any of its movements.
It becomes habitually capricious, feeds upon passions intensely,
without seeming detriment; and, after a season, prefers the unwholesome
nutriment which it has made vital, to those purer natural sources
of strength and succor, without which, though it may still enjoy
life, it can never know happiness.






CHAPTER XXIII.

PROGRESS OF PASSION.





"But, do not leave me another time--not so long, Edward Do not leave
me alone. Your business is one thing. THAT you must, of course,
attend to; but hours--not of business--hours in which you do no
business--hours of leisure--your evenings, Edward--these you must
share with me--you must give to me entirely. Ah! will you not? will
you not promise me?"

These were among the last words which she spoke to me ere we slept
that night. The next morning, almost at awaking, she resumed the
same language. I could not help perceiving that she spoke in tones
of greater earnestness than usual--an earnestness expressive of
anxiety for which I felt at some loss to account. Still, the tenor
of what she said, at the time, gave me pleasure--a satisfaction
which I did not seek to conceal, and which, while it lasted, was
the sweetest of all pleasures to my soul. But the busy devil in my
heart made his suggestions also, which were of a kind to produce
any other but satisfying emotions. While I stood in my wife's
presence--in the hearing of her angel-voice, and beholding the pure
spirit speaking out from her eyes--he lay dormant, rebuked, within
his prison-house, crouching in quiet, waiting a more auspicious
moment for activity. Nor was he long in waiting; and then his cold,
insinuating doubts--his inquiries--begot and startled mine!

"Very good--all very good!" Such was the tone of his suggestions."
She may well compound for the evenings with you, since she gives
her whole mornings to your rival."

Archimedes asked but little for the propulsion of the world. The
jealous spirit--a spirit jealous like mine--asks still for the
moving of that little but densely-populous world, the human heart.
I forgot the sweet tones of my wife's words--the pure-souled words
themselves--tones and words which, while their sounds yet lingered
in my ears, I could not have questioned--I did not dare to question.
The tempter grew in the ascendant the moment I had passed out of
her sight; and when I met William Edgerton the next day, he acquired
greatly-increased power over my understanding.

William Edgerton had evidently undergone a change. He no longer met
my glances boldly with his own. Perhaps, had he done so, my eyes
would have been the first to shrink from the encounter. He looked
down, or looked aside, when he spoke to me; his words were few,
timorous, hesitating, but studiously conciliatory; and he lingered
no longer in my presence than was absolutely unavoidable. Was there
not a consciousness in this? and what consciousness? The devil at
my heart answered, and answered with truth, "He loves your wife."
It would have been well, perhaps, had the cruel fiend said nothing
farther. Alas! I would have pardoned, nay, pitied William Edgerton,
had the same chuckling spirit not assured me that she also was not
insensible to him. I was continually reminded of the words, "Your
business must, of course, be attended to!"

--"What a considerate wife!" said the tempter; "how very unusual
with young wives, with whom business is commonly the very last
consideration!"

That very day, I found, on reaching home, that William Edgerton had
been there--had gone there almost the moment after he had left me
at the office; and that he had remained there, obviously at work
in the studio, until the time drew nigh for my return to dinner.
My feelings forbade any inquiries. These, facts were all related
by my wife herself. I did not ask to hear them. I asked for nothing
more than she told. The dread that my jealousy should be suspected
made me put on a sturdy aspect of indifference; and that exquisite
sense of delicacy, which governed every movement of my wife's heart
and conduct, forbade her to say--what yet she certainly desired I
should know--that, in all that time, she had not seen him, nor he
her. She had studiously kept aloof in her chamber so long as he
remained. Meanwhile, I brooded over their supposed long and secret
interviews. These I took for granted. The happiness they felt--the
mutual smile they witnessed--the unconscious sighs they uttered!
Such a picture of their supposed felicity as my morbid imagination
conjured up would have roused a doubly damned and damning fiend in
the heart of any mortal.

What a task was mine, struggling with these images, these convictions!--my
pride struggling to conceal, my feelings struggling to endure.
Then, there were other conflicts. What friends had the Edgertons
been to me--father, mother--nay, that son himself, once so fondly
esteemed, once so fondly esteeming! Of course, no ties such as
these could have made me patient under wrong. But they were such as
to render it necessary that the wrong should be real, unquestionable,
beyond doubt, beyond excuse. This I felt, this I resolved.

"I will wait! I will be patient! I will endure, though the vulture
gnaws incessant at my heart! I will do nothing precipitate. No,
no: I must beware of that! But let me prove them treacherous--let
them once falter, and go aside from the straight path, and then--oh,
then!"

Such, as in spoken words, was the unspoken resolution of my soul;
and this resolution required, first of all, that I should carry
out the base purpose which, without a purpose, I had already begun.
I must be a spy upon their interviews. They must be followed,
watched--eyes, looks, hands! Miserable necessity! but, under my
present feelings and determination, not the less a necessity. And
I, alone, must do it; I, alone, must peer busily into these mysteries,
the revelation of which can result only in my own ruin--seeking
still, with an earnest diligence, to discover that which I should
rather have prayed for eternal and unmitigated blindness, that I
might not see! Mine was, indeed, the philosophy of the madman.

I persevered in it like one. I yielded all opportunities for the
meeting of the parties--all opportunities which, in yielding, did
not expose me to the suspicion of having any sinister object. If,
for example, I found, or could conjecture, that William Edgerton
was likely to be at my house this or that evening, I studiously
intimated, beforehand, some necessity for being myself absent. This
carried me frequently from home--lone, wandering, vexing myself with
the most hideous conjectures, the most self-torturing apprehensions.
I sped away, obviously, into the city-to alleged meetings with friends
or clients--or on some pretence or other which seemed ordinary and
natural But my course was to return, and, under cover of night, to
prowl, around my own premises, like some guilty ghost, doomed to
haunt the scene of former happiness, in its wantonness rendered
a scene of ever-during misery. Certainly, no guilty ghost ever
suffered in his penal tortures a torture worse than mine at these
humiliating moments. It was torture enough to me that I was sensible
of all the unhappy meanness of my conduct. On this head, though I
strove to excuse myself on the score of a supposed necessity, I
could not deceive myself--not--not for the smallest moment.

Weeks passed in this manner--weeks to me of misery--of annoyance
and secret suffering to my wife. In this time, my espionage resulted
in nothing but what has been already shown--in what was already
sufficiently obvious to me. William Edgerton continued his insane
attentions: he sought my dwelling with studious perseverance--sought
it particularly at those periods when he fancied I was absent--when he
knew it--though such were not his exclusive periods of visitation.
He came at times when I was at home. His passion for my wife
was sufficiently evident to me, though her deportment was such as
to persuade mo that she did not see it. All that I beheld of her
conduct was irreproachable. There was a singular and sweet dignity
in her air and manner, when they were together, that seemed one of
the most insuperable barriers to any rash or presumptuous approach.
While there was no constraint about her carriage, there was no
familiarity--nothing to encourage or invite familiarity. While she
answered freely, responding to all the needs of a suggested subject,
she herself never seemed to broach one; and, after hours of nightly
watch, which ran through a period of weeks, in which I strove at
the shameful occupation of the espial, I was compelled to admit
that all her part was as purely unexceptionable as the most jealous
husband could have wished it.

But not so with the conduct of William Edgerton. His attentions
were increasing. His passion was assuming some of the forms of that
delirium to which, under encouragement, it is usually driven in
the end. He now passionately watched my wife's countenance, and
no longer averted his glance when it suddenly encountered hers.
His eyes, naturally tender in expression, now assumed a look
of irrepressible ardency, from which, I now fancied--pleased to
fancy--that hers recoiled! He would linger long in silence, silently
watching her, and seemingly unconscious, the while, equally of his
scrutiny and his silence. At such times, I could perceive that Julia
would turn aside, or her own eyes would be marked by an expression
of the coldest vacancy, which, but for other circumstances, or in
any other condition of my mind, would have seemed to me conclusive
of her indignation or dislike. But, when such became my thought,
it was soon expelled by some suggestion from the busy devil of my
imagination:--

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