Saturday, January 29, 2011

Top 10 immigrants' tales

Jhumpa Lahiri
EC Osondu's top 10 immigrants' tales

Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz are among the works chosen by the US-based Nigerian author that best reflect the existential "in-betweenness" of the immigrant
EC Osondu
  • THE GUARDIAN, Wednesday 26 January 2011
Immigrants' tales
Rosa Ayala, an El Salvador native who has lived in Los Angeles for 27 years, pokes out from her sign before an immigration rally in Los Angeles, May 1, 2006. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/Reuters
EC Osondu was born in Nigeria. He won the 2009 Caine prize for African Writing. He currently teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island. Voice of America, published this month and praised by Jonathan Franzen as the work of "a clear head and a great ear, writing from crucial places", is his first book.
  1. Voice of America
  2. by EC Osondu
"I have always been fascinated by how an individual is – or is not – changed by a new environment. I explore this in my stories, not just from the point of view of those coming to the west for the first time, but also the westerner in Africa. I think Jhumpa Lahiri's phrase Unaccustomed Earth is such a neat expression because it captures this state of being succinctly. In-betweenness – that state of neither fish nor fowl, mortal nor spirit - is also fascinating, and is of course the existential state of the immigrant. He is not fully of this place yet he is no longer of that."

1. My Odyssey: An autobiography by Nnamdi Azikiwe

Larger-than-life stories swirled around the Right Honourable Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria's first president. One had it that he was handed the keys to the Atlantic Ocean by the departing British colonialists and told that he could use them to unlock the Atlantic and allow it unleash its fury. But the ever-so-magnanimous Zik threw them back into the ocean instead. It was a shock to me therefore on coming to Zik's autobiography to discover that he had been quite despondent and had come close to suicide in his student days in America. The great Zik had also held down the following not so great jobs – dishwasher, potato peeler, car-wash attendant, elevator boy, kitchen hand and waiter.

2. The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

In this novel, Iranian immigrant Massoud Behrani fixes his dreams on buying a house, which would allow him to live with his family with some dignity, with a long-term plan to renovate, sell it and prosper. Sadly for him, the pursuit of this particular American dream quickly turns into a gut-wrenching tragedy.

3. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

My favourite story in this collection is "Only Goodness", which captures the fears and dreams of the immigrant all too well: the attempt to live vicariously through the next generation; the burden placed on doing well, on succeeding: the pressures to assimilate yet remain true to one's origins and culture.

4. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

This book is the novelistic equivalent of Lord Kitchener's hit calypso song Sugar Bum Bum. Loneliness remains the perennial boon companion of the immigrant. While fascinated by the novel's special argot I am even more taken by the resilience of the characters and their never-say-die attitude as they find their feet in the brave new world that was the England of the 1950s.

5. Drown by Junot Díaz

I like the fact that the stories in this collection begin in the Dominican Republic and end in America. In a way the reader also becomes a virtual immigrant as he journeys with the characters. The mock-imperative tone used in the story "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" is laugh-out-loud funny and wise.

5. On Black Sisters' Street by Chika Unigwe

Someone once pointed out to me some really splendid buildings in Nigeria and proudly announced that they were built by hardworking Nigerian girls who were working really hard in Italy. I would have liked to have given him this novel, which chronicles the harrowing lives of young African prostitutes in Europe and what they have to sacrifice and suffer to put up that huge mansion that this fellow was ever so proud to point out to me.

6. Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani

This novella, written in language that soars and sometimes attains the sublimity of poetry, is another sad tale. The heroine Abigail who, like her Biblical namesake, is surrounded by foolish men, is sent to the UK to live with a fake relative who tries to turn her towards prostitution. Her refusal to be a victim, to be brave and to act with some agency makes this a memorable read.

7. A Squatter's Tale by Ike Oguine

Few people have read this hilarious novel but one read is all you need to become a fan. Uncle Happiness lumbers onto the scene from America with a big bag of gifts and tall tales about a land akin to Sugar Candy Mountain. When the protagonist Obi's job with a finance house folds up he flees to the US to join Uncle Happiness, only to discover that the stories about America were far from accurate.

8. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengetsu

First off – what an evocative title! This story of an Ethiopian immigrant who flees his country's communist regime and opens a shop in Washington DC'S Logan Circle fascinates me in the way it overturns and complicates our ideas of what drives the immigrant – pursue the American dream, succeed, succeed, succeed. This protagonist is not so desperate to succeed – not even at love.

9. Harare North by Brian Chikwava

When Chikwava won the Caine Prize in 2004 for his story "Seventh Street Alchemy", the judges said he writes "in English with African characteristics". Chikwava invents a whole new argot for the narrator of this novel. The opening scene, in which the narrator stares down his sister-in-law and makes her pay for his train ticket, is a trip. More importantly, this novel tears away the veil and allows us see immigrant/exile life in its nakedness.

10. Chicago by Alaa Al Aswany

One of the older émigrés in this book has only curses for Egypt, the land of his birth, but finds himself cursing his adopted country, the United States, when he discovers that his young daughter has run away with her American boyfriend. This of course is the eternal dilemma of the immigrant – always in-between, never completely of here, nor of there.



Rereading / Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro




Rereading: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro


As Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's unsettling story of a community of clones, comes to cinema screens, Rachel Cusk finds herself both intrigued and repelled by the novel


Rachel Cusk
Saturday 29 January 2011 00.06 GMT

I
n Kazuo Ishiguro's 1995 novel The Unconsoled, Ryder, a pianist, is due to give an important concert in a foreign city. The novel is written in the form of an extended anxiety dream: manifold impediments spring up to delay his arrival at the concert hall; at one point he realises he hasn't practised the pieces he intends to play. In a field outside the city where, through labyrinthine causes, he finds himself, he comes across the dilapidated wreck of his old childhood family car. "I stared through the spiderweb cracks [in the window] into the rear seat where I had once spent so many contented hours. Much of it, I could see, was covered with fungus." The elasticity of the subconscious is also the novel's elasticity – it is more than 500 pages long – and likewise the novel's procedures are those of its adopted system of Freudian values.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Nducu wa Ngugi / Detroit's deepening education deficit

 

Industrial decline in Detroit, Michigan has been harshly reinforced by recession since 2008;
the city faces a budget crisis, with a knock-on effect for its schools system.
Photograph: Spencer Platt

Detroit's deepening education deficit



Nducu wa Ngugi
Wednesday 26 January 2011

I

t seems that every time there is a financial crunch in federal, state and local government coffers, every politician looks first to cut education funding. So, what do you do when your public school system has racked up a $327m deficit in an economy that shows little hope for resuscitation?

If you are Robert C Bobb, the emergency financial manager for the Detroit Public Schools, you look to closing and abandoning half the city schools within the next two years. Such a drastic move would increase classroom size from 35 students per class to 62 in high school, and 45 for middle grades. K-3 would see an increase from 17 students to 31 by the year 2012. This measure would save the district some $33m dollars by the fiscal years of 2012-2014. Bobb also contends that the district would net an additional $12m in savings by abandoning vacant school buildings altogether.


The increase in class size will, however, mean an increase in teacher pay for working in oversize classes, as contracted with the Detroit Federation of Teachers Union, at a cost of $10m over the next four years. But Bobb will still count the savings from DPS spending of approximately $35m as a significant part of his mission accomplished: he was hired in 2009 in part to reduce the schools budget deficit to zero in the next few years.

Some now criticise the teachers for their contractually mandated pay increases for teaching oversize classes, while others laud the efforts of Bobb and the DPS administration for finding ways to steer Detroit Public Schools away from fiscal wreck. But what has been left out of the discussion is how all this is going to affect students and learning in the long run.

Research has shown that learning takes place when a student is engaged in the learning process. We also know that all our students learn differently, and so to convert our middle and high school classes into lecture halls runs directly against the reasons why we have kept class sizes at a national average of 35 (a number that many of us already regard as way too high). One can only begin to imagine how one teacher in front of 62 restless souls can succeed in guiding them through their formative years. No one doubts that students fare better in smaller class units that allow teachers to pay closer attention to individual students' learning needs.

It is very possible, then, that these measures will impose other social costs down the line that will add up to more than the modest savings in the short term. The immediate effects of over-crowdedness will be obvious: discipline problems, students falling through the cracks, shoddy instruction and lack of individual attention, together with increased truancy and school dropouts.
But the long-term effects will be far more extensive: educational under-attainment, unemployment, crime, incarceration, ill-health, the welfare cost of unproductive, unskilled youth, the democratic deficit of an uninformed citizenry and so on. All these will have huge social and economic costs for the city, the state, and the federal government, as the millions they might save now will be spent on other services tenfold later on. Spare the dollar, spoil the child.

This is not the way to create a well-educated workforce worthy of 21st-century challenges. According to President Obama:

"Education is an economic issue – if not the economic issue of our time. It's an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who've never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college. It's an economic issue when eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade. It's an economic issue when countries that out-educate us today are going to out-compete us tomorrow."

Most school systems are having to find ways to cut their budgets because of the economic downturn, but measures such as those being planned by Bobb and the DPS administration to increase class size, close down and abandon school buildings are unconscionable. If we can find billions to bail out Wall Street banks and the auto industry, then surely we can find a few million to save the Detroit Public School system from sinking into chaos. Otherwise, the young people of Detroit – who, we all know, ought to be learning the skills they will need to find a place in the competitive modern economy America needs – face a very grim future, indeed.


Nducu wa Ngugi is an educator currently based in New York. He has a BA in black studies from Oberlin College, an EdS in Teacher Leadership and a MEd from Mercer University. His commentaries on social issues have appeared in the Business Daily Africa, Pambazuka News, Wajibu and other online journals


THE GUARDIAN





Monday, January 24, 2011

Portrait of the artist / Vanessa Paradis/ 'I was only a teenager when I started out in the music industry. I didn't look my best'



Portrait of the artist

Vanessa Paradis

Actor and musician



'I was only a teenager when I started out in the music industry. I didn't look my best'

Interview by Laura Barnett
Monday 24 January 2011 23.46 GMT




What got you started?
MGM musicals. The first one I saw was Singin' in the Rain, when I was six. I was stuck to the screen – and all those musicals still give me goosebumps.
Do you feel that you're judged too much on your looks?
No. I started in music – the modelling and acting came later, so I don't feel that side of things has made people in the music industry take me any less seriously. Anyway, I started at an age when I didn't look my best – I was only a teenager.
What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?
My mum told me to have patience. It's about realising that when things aren't going the way you want them to, or you don't have inspiration, it will come.
What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?
A TV presenter was once talking about people he couldn't stand, and one of them was me. He said my voice was too quiet; as a singer, that's a pretty bad thing to hear. But then you can't please everyone, and I don't want to.


How do you cope with fame?
I have contradictory feelings about it. It brings me lots of privileges – it helps me to find a doctor in an emergency, or a table in a restaurant. But it also steals my private life, and it's difficult when it affects my family. My children's lives shouldn't be touched by it.
Which other artists do you most admire?
Marvin Gaye, Tom Waits and Serge Gainsbourg. They're complete geniuses.
Is there an art form you don't relate to?

No. There are forms of art that I might not like to do myself, but I still have respect for the artists who create it. It's a courageous thing to do something that doesn't have rules or limits.
What work of art would you most like to own?
Gustav Klimt's painting Love. It moves me so much; there's a couple in the middle looking each other in the eyes, so that you can totally feel their love, and then two gold bars on either side, like a frame. It's real and magical at the same time.
What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
La Vie en Rose sung by Edith Piaf. If your heart is in love, you can do anything.
In short
Born: Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, France, 1972.
Career: Had her first big hit aged 14, with the song Joe le Taxi. Has released 10 albums and acted in films such as Un Amour de Sorcière and Heartbreaker. She performs at Koko, London NW1 (0870 432 5527), on 2 February.
THE GUARDIAN






Saturday, January 8, 2011

Ambrose Bierce / An Unfinished Race

Picture by Malevich
An Unfinished Race

James Burne Worson was a shoemaker who lived in Leamington, Warwickshire, England. He had a little shop in one of the by-ways leading off the road to Warwick. In his humble sphere he was esteemed an honest man, although like many of his class in English towns he was somewhat addicted to drink. When in liquor he would make foolish wagers. On one of these too frequent occasions he was boasting of his prowess as a pedestrian and athlete, and the outcome was a match against nature. For a stake of one sovereign he undertook to run all the way to Coventry and back, a distance of something more than forty miles. This was on the 3d day of September in 1873. He set out at once, the man with whom he had made the bet--whose name is not remembered--accompanied by Barham Wise, a linen draper, and Hamerson Burns, a photographer, I think, following in a light cart or wagon.
For several miles Worson went on very well, at an easy gait, without apparent fatigue, for he had really great powers of endurance and was not sufficiently intoxicated to enfeeble them. The three men in the wagon kept a short distance in the rear, giving him occasional friendly "chaff" or encouragement, as the spirit moved them. Suddenly--in the very middle of the roadway, not a dozen yards from them, and with their eyes full upon him--the man seemed to stumble, pitched headlong forward, uttered a terrible cry and vanished! He did not fall to the earth--he vanished before touching it. No trace of him was ever discovered.
After remaining at and about the spot for some time, with aimless irresolution, the three men returned to Leamington, told their astonishing story and were afterward taken into custody. But they were of good standing, had always been considered truthful, were sober at the time of the occurrence, and nothing ever transpired to discredit their sworn account of their extraordinary adventure, concerning the truth of which, nevertheless, public opinion was divided, throughout the United Kingdom. If they had something to conceal, their choice of means is certainly one of the most amazing ever made by sane human beings.





Friday, January 7, 2011

Ambrose Bierce / Beyond the Wall



BEYOND THE WALL
By Ambrose Bierce

BIOGRAPHY

Many years ago, on my way from Hong Kong to New York, I passed a week in San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I had been in that city, during which my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my hope; I was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my friendship with such of the companions of my youth as still lived and remembered me with the old affection. Chief of these, I hoped, was Mohun Dampier, an old schoolmate with whom I had held a desultory correspondence which had long ceased, as is the way of correspondence between men. You may have observed that the indisposition to write a merely social letter is in the ratio of the square of the distance between you and your correspondent. It is a law.
I remembered Dampier as a handsome, strong young fellow of scholarly tastes, with an aversion to work and a marked indifference to many of the things that the world cares for, including wealth, of which, however, he had inherited enough to put him beyond the reach of want. In his family, one of the oldest and most aristocratic in the country, it was, I think, a matter of pride that no member of it had ever been in trade nor politics, nor suffered any kind of distinction. Mohan was a trifle sentimental, and had in him a singular element of superstition, which led him to the study of all manner of occult subjects, although his sane mental health safeguarded him against fantastic and perilous faiths. He made daring incursions into the realm of the unreal without renouncing his residence in the partly surveyed and charted region of what we are pleased to call certitude.
The night of my visit to him was stormy. The Californian winter was on, and the incessant rain splashed in the deserted streets, or, lifted by irregular gusts of wind, was hurled against the houses with incredible fury. With no small difficulty my cabman found the right place, away out toward the ocean beach, in a sparsely populated suburb. The dwelling, a rather ugly one, apparently, stood in the centre of its grounds, which as nearly as I could make out in the gloom were destitute of either flowers or grass. Three or four trees, writhing and moaning in the torment of the tempest, appeared to be trying to escape from their dismal environment and take the chance of finding a better one out at sea. The house was a two-story brick structure with a tower, a story higher, at one corner. In a window of that was the only visible light. Something in the appearance of the place made me shudder, a performance that may have been assisted by a rill of rainwater down my back as I scuttled to cover in the doorway.
In answer to my note apprising him of my wish to call, Dampier had written, 'Don't ring - open the door and come up.' I did so. The staircase was dimly lighted by a single gas-jet at the top of the second flight. I managed to reach the landing without disaster and entered by an open door into the lighted square room of the tower. Dampier came forward in gown and slippers to receive me, giving me the greeting that I wished, and if I had held a thought that it might more fitly have been accorded me at the front door the first look at him dispelled any sense of his inhospitality.
He was not the same. Hardly past middle age, he had gone grey and had acquired a pronounced stoop. His figure was thin and angular, his face deeply lined, his complexion dead-white, without a touch of colour. His eyes, unnaturally large, glowed with a fire that was almost uncanny.
He seated me, proffered a cigar, and with grave and obvious sincerity assured me of the pleasure that it gave him to meet me. Some unimportant conversation followed, but all the while I was dominated by a melancholy sense of the great change in him. This he must have perceived, for he suddenly said with a bright enough smile, 'You are disappointed in me - /non sum qualis eram./'
I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say: 'Why, really, I don't know: your Latin is about the same.'
He brightened again. 'No,' he said, 'being a dead language, it grows in appropriateness. But please have the patience to wait: where I am going there is perhaps a better tongue. Will you care to have a message in it?'
The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded he was looking into my eyes with a gravity that distressed me. Yet I would not surrender myself to his mood, nor permit him to see how deeply his prescience of death affected me.
'I fancy that it will be long,' I said, 'before human speech will cease to serve our need; and then the need, with its possibilities of service, will have passed.'
He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the talk had taken a dispiriting turn, yet I knew not how to give it a more agreeable character. Suddenly, in a pause of the storm, when the dead silence was almost startling by contrast with the previous uproar, I heard a gentle tapping, which appeared to come from the wall behind my chair. The sound was such as might have been made by a human hand, not as upon a door by one asking admittance, but rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an assurance of someone's presence in an adjoining room; most of us, I fancy, have had more experience of such communications than we should care to relate. I glanced at Dampier. If possibly there was something of amusement in the look he did not observe it. He appeared to have forgotten my presence, and was staring at the wall behind me with an expression in his eyes that I am unable to name, although my memory of it is as vivid to-day as was my sense of it then. The situation was embarrassing! ; I rose to take my leave. At this he seemed to recover himself.
'Please be seated,' he said; 'it is nothing - no one is there.'
But the tapping was repeated, and with the same gentle, slow insistence as before.
'Pardon me,' I said, 'it is late. May I call tomorrow?'
He smiled - a little mechanically, I thought. 'It is very delicate of you,' said he, 'but quite needless. Really, this is the only room in the tower, and no one is there. At least -' He left the sentence incomplete, rose, and threw up a window, the only opening in the wall from which the sound seemed to come. 'See.'
Not clearly knowing what else to do I followed him to the window and looked out. A street-lamp some little distance away gave enough light through the murk of the rain that was again falling in torrents to make it entirely plain that 'no one was there.' In truth there was nothing but the sheer blank wall of the tower.
Dampier closed the window and signing me to my seat resumed his own.
The incident was not in itself particularly mysterious; any one of a dozen explanations was possible (though none has occurred to me), yet it impressed me strangely, the more, perhaps, from my friend's effort to reassure me, which seemed to dignify it with a certain significance and importance. He had proved that no one was there, but in that fact lay all the interest; and he proffered no explanation. His silence was irritating and made me resentful.
'My good friend,' I said, somewhat ironically, I fear, 'I am not disposed to question your right to harbour as many spooks as you find agreeable to your taste and consistent with your notions of companionship; that is no business of mine. But being just a plain man of affairs, mostly of this world, I find spooks needless to my peace and comfort. I am going to my hotel, where my fellow-guests are still in the flesh.'
It was not a very civil speech, but he manifested no feeling about it. 'Kindly remain', he said. 'I am grateful for your presence here. What you have heard to-night I believe myself to have heard twice before. Now I /know/ it was no illusion. That is much to me - more than you know. Have a fresh cigar and a good stock of patience while I tell you the story.'
The rain was now falling more steadily, with a low, monotonous susurration, interrupted at long intervals by the sudden slashing of the boughs of the trees as the wind rose and failed. The night was well advanced, but both sympathy and curiosity held me a willing listener to my friend's monologue, which I did not interrupt by a single word from beginning to end.
'Ten years ago,' he said, 'I occupied a ground-floor apartment in one of a row of houses, all alike, away at the other end of the town, on what we call Rincon Hill. This had been the best quarter of San Francisco, but had fallen into neglect and decay, partly because the primitive character of its domestic architecture no longer suited the maturing tastes of our wealthy citizens, partly because certain public improvements had made a wreck of it. The row of dwellings in one of which I lived stood a little way back from the street, each having a miniature garden, separated from its neighbours by low iron fences and bisected with mathematical precision by a box-bordered gravel walk from gate to door.
'One morning as I was leaving my lodging I observed a young girl entering the adjoining garden on the left. It was a warm day in June, and she was lightly gowned in white. From her shoulders hung a broad straw hat profusely decorated with flowers and wonderfully beribboned in the fashion of the time. My attention was not long held by the exquisite simplicity of her costume, for no one could look at her face and think of anything earthly. Do not fear; I shall not profane it by description; it was beautiful exceedingly. All that I had ever seen or dreamed of loveliness was in that matchless living picture by the hand of the Divine Artist. So deeply did it move me that, without a thought of the impropriety of the act, I unconsciously bared my head, as a devout Catholic or well-bred Protestant uncovers before an image of the Blessed Virgin. The maiden showed no displeasure; she merely turned her glorious dark eyes upon me with a look that made me catch my breath, and without other recognition of my act passed into the house. For a moment I stood motionless, hat in hand, painfully conscious of my rudeness, yet so dominated by the emotion inspired by that vision of incomparable beauty that my penitence was less poignant than it should have been. Then I went my way, leaving my heart behind. In the natural course of things I should probably have remained away until nightfall, but by the middle of the afternoon I was back in the little garden, affecting an interest in the few foolish flowers that I had never before observed. My hope was vain; she did not appear.
'To a night of unrest succeeded a day of expectation and disappointment, but on the day after, as I wandered aimlessly about the neighbourhood, I met her. Of course I did not repeat my folly of uncovering, nor venture by even so much as too long a look to manifest an interest in her; yet my heart was beating audibly. I trembled and consciously coloured as she turned her big black eyes upon me with a look of obvious recognition entirely devoid of boldness or coquetry.
'I will not weary you with particulars; many times afterward I met the maiden, yet never either addressed her or sought to fix her attention. Nor did I take any action toward making her acquaintance. Perhaps my forbearance, requiring so supreme an effort of self-denial, will not be entirely clear to you. That I was heels over head in love is true, but who can overcome his habit of thought, or reconstruct his character?
'I was what some foolish persons are pleased to call, and others, more foolish, are pleased to be called - an aristocrat; and despite her beauty, her charms and graces, the girl was not of my class. I had learned her name - which it is needless to speak - and something of her family. She was an orphan, a dependent niece of the impossible elderly fat woman in whose lodging-house she lived. My income was small and I lacked the talent for marrying; it is perhaps a gift. An alliance with that family would condemn me to its manner of life, part me from my books and studies, and in a social sense reduce me to the ranks. It is easy to deprecate such considerations as these and I have not retained myself for the defence. Let judgement be entered against me, but in strict justice all my ancestors for generations should be made co-defendants and I be permitted to plead in mitigation of punishment the imperious mandate of heredity. To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In brief, my tastes, habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my love had left me - all fought against it. Moreover, I was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and found a subtle charm in an impersonal and spiritual relation which acquaintance might vulgarise and marriage would certainly dispel. No woman, I argued, is what this lovely creature seems. Love is a delicious dream; why should I bring about my own awakening?
'The course dictated by all this sense and sentiment was obvious. Honour, pride, prudence, preservation of my ideals - all commanded me to go away, but for that I was too weak. The utmost that I could do by a mighty effort of will was to cease meeting the girl, and that I did. I even avoided the chance encounters of the garden, leaving my lodging only when I knew that she had gone to her music lessons, and returning after nightfall. Yet all the while I was as one in a trance, indulging the most fascinating fancies and ordering my entire intellectual life in accordance with my dream. Ah, my friend, as one whose actions have a traceable relation to reason, you cannot know the fool's paradise in which I lived.
'One evening the devil put it into my head to be an unspeakable idiot. By apparently careless and purposeless questioning I learned from my gossipy landlady that the young woman's bedroom adjoined my own, a partywall between. Yielding to a sudden and coarse impulse I gently rapped on the wall. There was no response, naturally, but I was in no mood to accept a rebuke. A madness was upon me and I repeated the folly, the offence, but again ineffectually, and I had the decency to desist.
'An hour later, while absorbed in some of my infernal studies, I heard, or thought I heard, my signal answered. Flinging down my books I sprang to the wall and as steadily as my beating heart would permit gave three slow taps upon it. This time the response was distinct, unmistakable: one, two, three - an exact repetition of my signal. That was all I could elicit, but it was enough - too much.
'The next evening, and for many evenings afterward, that folly went on, I always having "the last word". During the whole period I was deliriously happy, but with the perversity of my nature I persevered in my resolution not to see her. Then, as I should have expected, I got no further answers. "She is disgusted," I said to myself, "with what she thinks my timidity in making no more definite advances"; and I resolved to seek her and make her acquaintance and - what? I did not know, nor do I now know, what might have come of it. I know only that I passed days and days trying to meet her, and all in vain; she was invisible as well as inaudible. I haunted the streets where we had met, but she did not come. From my window I watched the garden in front of her house, but she passed neither in nor out. I fell into the deepest dejection, believing that she had gone away , yet took no steps to resolve my doubt by inquiry of my landlady, to whom, indeed, I had taken an unconquerable aversion from her having once spoken of the girl with less of reverence than I thought befitting.
'There came a fateful night. Worn out with emotion, irresolution and despondency, I had retired early and fallen into such sleep as was still possible to me. In the middle of the night something - some malign power bent upon the wrecking of my peace forever - caused me to open my eyes and sit up, wide awake and listening intently for I knew not what. Then I thought I heard a faint tapping on the wall - the mere ghost of the familiar signal. In a few moments it was repeated: one, two, three - no louder than before, but addressing a sense alert and strained to receive it. I was about to reply when the Adversary of Peace again intervened in my affairs with a rascally suggestion of retaliation. She had long and cruelly ignored me; now I would ignore her. Incredible fatuity - may God forgive it! All the rest of the night I lay awake, fortifying my obstinacy with shameless justifications and - listening.
'Late the next morning, as I was leaving the house, I met my landlady, entering.
' "Good morning, Mr. Dampier," she said. "Have you heard the news?"
'I replied in words that I had heard no news; in manner, that I did not care to hear any. The manner escaped her observation.
' "About the sick young lady next door," she babbled on. "What! you did not know? Why, she has been ill for weeks. And now - "
'I almost sprang upon her. "And now," I cried, "now what?'
' "She is dead."
'That is not the whole story. In the middle of the night, as I learned later, the patient, awakening from a long stupor after a week of delirium, had asked - it was her last utterance - that her bed be moved to the opposite side of the room. Those in attendance had thought the request a vagary of her delirium, but had complied. And there the poor passing soul had exerted its failing will to restore a broken connection - a golden thread of sentiment between its innocence and a monstrous baseness owing a blind, brutal allegiance to the Law of Self.
'What reparation could I make? Are there masses that can be said for the repose of souls that are abroad such nights as this - spirits "blown about by the viewless winds" - coming in the storm and darkness with signs and portents, hints of memory and presages of doom?
'This is the third visitation. On the first occasion I was too sceptical to do more than verify by natural methods the character of the incident; on the second, I responded to the signal after it had been several times repeated, but without result. To-night's recurrence completes the 'fatal triad' expounded by Parapelius Necromantius. There is no more to tell.'
When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing relevant that I cared to say, and to question him would have been a hideous impertinence. I rose and bade him good night in a way to convey to him a sense of my sympathy, which he silently acknowledged by a pressure of the hand. That night, alone with his sorrow and remorse, he passed into the Unknown.