Olive Schreiner

“ Shall the glow-worm refuse to give its light, because it is not a star set up on high; shall the broken stick refuse to burn and warm one frozen man’s hands, because it is not a beacon-light flaming across the earth? Ever a voice is behind my shoulder, that whispers to me—‘Why break your head against a stone wall? Leave this work to the greater and larger men of your people; they who will do it better than you can do it! Why break your heart when life could be so fair to you?’ But, oh my wife, the strong men are silent! ”

“ In his dream, to his right rose high mountains, their tops crowned with snow, their sides clothed with bush and bathed in the sunshine. At their feet was the sea, blue and breezy, bluer than any earthly sea, like the sea he had dreamed of in his boyhood. In the narrow forest that ran between the mountains and the sea the air was rich that the scent of the honey-creeper that hung from dark green bushes, and through the velvety grass little streams ran purling down into the sea.
He sat on a high square rock among the bushes, and Lyndall sat by him and sang to him. ”

“ It is especially in the domain of war that we, the bearers of men’s bodies, who supply its most valuable munition, who, not amid the clamour and ardour of battle, but singly, and alone, with a three-in-the-morning courage, shed our blood and face death that the battlefield may have its food, a food more precious to us than our heart’s blood; it is we especially, who in the domain of war, have our word to say, a word no man can say for us. It is our intention to enter into the domain of war and to labour there till in the course of generations we have extinguished it. ”

“ When Love and Life first meet, a radiant thing is born, without a shade. When the roads begin to roughen, when the shades begin to darken, when the days are hard, and the nights cold and long—then it begins to change. Love and Life WILL not see it, WILL not know it—till one day they start up suddenly, crying, ‘O God! O God! we have lost it! Where is it?’ They do not understand that they could not carry the laughing thing unchanged into the desert, and the frost, and the snow. They do not know that what walks beside them still is the Joy grown older. ”

“ Gregory would have made a remark; but she said, without noticing:
“There are as many kinds of loves as there are flowers; everlastings that never wither; speedwells that wait for the wind to fan them out of life; blood-red mountain-lilies that pour their voluptuous sweetness out for one day, and lie in the dust at night. There is no flower has the charm of all—the speedwell’s purity, the everlasting’s strength, the mountain-lily’s warmth; but who knows whether there is no love that holds all—friendship, passion, worship? ”

“ He said, ‘Wife, if my right hand be in a fire, shall I not pull it out? Shall I say, ‘God may bring good out of this evil,’ and let it burn? That Unknown that lies beyond us we know of no otherwise than through its manifestation in our own hearts; it works no otherwise upon the sons of men than through man. And shall I feel no bond binding me to the men to come, and desire no good or beauty for them—I, who am what I am, and enjoy what I enjoy, because for countless ages in the past men have lived and laboured, who lived not for themselves alone, and counted no costs? ”

“ Not all the millionaires of Europe can prevent one man of genius being born in this land to illuminate it; not all the gold of Africa can keep us from being the bravest, freest nation on earth; no man living can shut out from our eyes the glories of our African sky, or kill one throb of our exultant joy in our great African plains; nor can all earth prevent us from growing into a great, free, wise people. ”

“ If you have had a dream of what life ought to be, and you try to make it real, and you fail; and something you have killed out in your heart for long years wakes up and cries, ‘Let each man play his own game, and care nothing for the hand of his fellow! Each man for himself. So the game must be played!’ and you doubt all you have lived for, and the ground seems washing out under your feet—.” She paused. “Such a time has come to me now. If you would promise me that if ever another woman comes to seek your help, you will give it to her, and try to love her for my sake, I think it will help me. ”

“ But the time passed, and the people sang and danced; but the hunter’s heart grew heavy. He crept alone, as of old, to weep; the terrible desire had awakened again in his breast. One day, as he sat alone weeping, it chanced that Wisdom met him. He told the old man what he had done.
And Wisdom smiled sadly.
“Many men,” he said, “have spread that net for Truth; but they have never found her. On the grains of credulity she will not feed; in the net of wishes her feet cannot be held; in the air of these valleys she will not breathe. The birds you have caught are of the brood of Lies. ”

“ Labour more toilsome and unending than that of man was ours; yet did we never cry out that it was too heavy for us. While savage man lay in the sunshine on his skins, resting, that he might be fitted for war or the chase, or while he shaped his weapons of death, he ate and drank that which our hands had provided for him; and while we knelt over our grindstone, or hoed in the fields, with one child in our womb, perhaps, and one on our back, toiling till the young body was old before its time—did we ever cry out that the labour allotted to us was too hard for us? ”

“ Even on its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealized the low brick wall that ran before the house, and which inclosed a bare patch of sand and two straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great open wagon-house, on the roofs of the outbuildings that jutted from its side, the moonlight glinted with a quite peculiar brightness, till it seemed that every rib in the metal was of burnished silver.
Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the solitary plain. ”

“ Even in those days, which men reck not of now, when men fell easily open their hands and knees, they were of us on the earth. And, if you would learn a secret, even before man trod here, in the days when the dicynodont bent yearningly over her young, and the river-horse which you find now nowhere on earth’s surface, save buried in stone, called with love to his mate; and the birds whose footprints are on the rocks flew in the sunshine calling joyfully to one another—even in those days when man was not, the fore-dawn of this kingdom had broken on the earth. ”

“ I did not know all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not caring against what. I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were curious creatures, who liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing took from my pleasure; I could not bear that they had deserted her for me. I liked her great dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl; when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them ”

“ They will creep back, one by one, into the bosom that has cast them forth, and fasten there again, and peace will go. Desire, ambition, and the fierce agonizing flood of love for the living they will spring again. Then Nature will draw down her veil; with all your longing you shall not be able to raise one corner; you cannot bring back those peaceful days. Well to die then!
Sitting there with his arms folded on his knees, and his hat slouched down over his face, Waldo looked out into the yellow sunshine that tinted even the very air with the colour of ripe corn, and was happy. ”

“ And Life and Love dared not look into each other’s eyes, dared not say, “What ails our darling?” Each heart whispered to itself, “It is nothing, it is nothing, tomorrow it will laugh out clear.” But tomorrow and tomorrow came. They journeyed on, and the child played beside them, but heavily, more heavily.
One day Life and Love lay down to sleep; and when they awoke, it was gone: only, near them, on the grass, sat a little stranger, with wide-open eyes, very soft and sad. Neither noticed it; but they walked apart, weeping bitterly, “Oh, our Joy! our lost Joy! ”

“ Child-bearer of the race! Producer of men! Cannot you be contented with so noble and lofty a function in life without toiling and moiling? Why carry up heavy coal-scuttles from the cellar and bend over hot fires, wearing out nerve and brain and muscle that should be reserved for higher duties? We, we, the men of the race, will perform its mean, its sordid, its grinding toil! For woman is beauty, peace, repose! Your function is to give life, not to support it by labour. ”

“ In his bitterness Waldo laughed low:
Ah, he had long ceased to hearken to the hellish voice.
But yet another speaks.
“You shall see her again,” said the nineteenth-century Christian, deep into whose soul modern unbelief and thought have crept, though he knows it not. He it is who uses his Bible as the pearl-fishers use their shells, sorting out gems from refuse; he sets his pearls after his own fashion, and he sets them well. “Do not fear,” he says; “hell and judgment are not. God is love. I know that beyond this blue sky above us is a love as wide-spreading over all. ”

“ What, if she, who could combine motherhood with the most unending muscular toil, will fall flaccid and helpless where the labour becomes mental? What if, struggle as she will, she can become nothing in the future but the pet pug-dog of the race, lying on its sofa, or the Italian greyhound, shivering in its silken coat? What if woman, in spite of her most earnest aspirations and determined struggles, be destined to failure in the new world that is rising because of inherent mental incapacity? ”

“ In my lodgings, many nights I have blown the light out, and sat in the dark, that I might see your face start out more distinctly. Sometimes it was the little girl’s face who used to come to me behind the kopje when I minded sheep, and sit by me in her blue pinafore; sometimes it was older. I love both. I am very helpless; I shall never do anything; but you will work, and I will take your work for mine. Sometimes such a sudden gladness seizes me when I remember that somewhere in the world you are living and working. You are my very own; nothing else is my own so. ”

“ An Alexander might will to weld a Greece and an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversified Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determination they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which they desired; but the constraining individual will being withdrawn, the object of their toil has melted away, as the little heap of damp sand gathered under the palm of a child’s hand on the sea-shore, melts away, scattered by the wind and washed out by the waves, the moment the hand that shaped it is withdrawn ”

“ The lean Hottentot laughed till the room rang again; and Tant Sannie tittered till her sides ached.
When he had gone the little maid began to wash Bonaparte’s feet.
“Oh, Lord, beloved Lord, how he did fall! I can’t think of it,” cried Tant Sannie, and she laughed again. “I always did know he was not right; but this evening any one could see it,” she added, wiping the tears of mirth from her face. “His eyes are as wild as if the devil was in them. He never was like other children. The dear Lord knows, if he doesn’t walk alone for hours talking to himself. ”

“ It is the face of one who has brought men into the world in labour and sorrow, and toiled mightily to sustain them; and dead must be the mind to the phases of human existence, who does not see in that toilworn figure one of the mighty pillars, which have in the long ages of the past sustained the life of humanity on earth, and made possible its later development; and much must the tinsel of life have dazzled him, who fails to mark it with reverence and, metaphorically, to bow his head before it—the type of the mighty labouring woman who has built up life. ”

“ Now life takes us by the neck and shows us a few other things,—new-made graves with the red sand flying about them; eyes that we love with the worms eating them; evil men walking sleek and fat, the whole terrible hurly-burly of the thing called life,—and she says, “What do you think of these?” We dare not say “Nothing.” We feel them; they are very real. But we try to lay our hands about and feel that other thing we felt before. In the dark night in the fuel-room we cry to our Beautiful dream-god: “Oh, let us come near you, and lay our head against your feet. ”

“ The material conditions of life have been rapidly modified, and the man has not been modified with them; machinery has largely filled his place in his old field of labour, and he has found no new one.
It is from these men, men who, viewed from the broad humanitarian standpoint, are often of the most lovable and interesting type, and who might in a simpler state of society, where physical force was the dominating factor, have been the heroes, leaders, and chiefs of their people, that there arises in the modern world the bitter cry of the male unemployed: “Give us labour or we die!” ”

“ Around God’s throne there may be choirs and companies of angels, cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them all does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full of sin, that it once loved.
“Change is death, change is death!” he cried. “I want no angel, only she; no holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me or give me nothing!”
And, truly, does not the heart love its own with the strongest passion for their very frailties? Heaven might keep its angels if men were but left to men. ”

“ So that it may be at last, that sexual love—that tired angel who through the ages has presided over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts broken, and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression—till those looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, “He is the Evil and not the Good of life!” ”

“ There rises, perhaps, a warm summer’s evening; we are seated on the doorstep; we have yet the taste of the bread and milk in our mouth, and the red sunset is reflected in our basin.
Then there is a dark night, where, waking with a fear that there is some great being in the room, we run from our own bed to another, creep close to some large figure, and are comforted.
Then there is remembrance of the pride when, on some one’s shoulder, with our arms around their head, we ride to see the little pigs, the new little pigs with their curled tails and tiny snouts—where do they come from? ”

“ To those of us who, at the beginning of a new century, stand with shaded eyes, gazing into the future, striving to descry the outlines of the shadowy figures which loom before us in the distance, nothing seems of so gracious a promise, as the outline we seem to discern of a condition of human life in which a closer union than the world has yet seen shall exist between the man and the woman: where the Walhalla of our old Northern ancestors shall find its realisation in a concrete reality, and the Walkurie and her hero feast together at one board, in a brave fellowship. ”

“ Tant Sannie and the burnt book, Bonaparte and the broken machine, the box in the loft, he himself sitting there—how small they all became! Even the grave over yonder. Those stars that shone on up above so quietly, they had seen a thousand such little existences fight just so fiercely, flare up just so brightly and go out; and they, the old, old stars, shone on forever.
“So hot, so angry, poor little soul?” they said.
The riem slipped from his fingers; he sat with his arms folded, looking up.
“We,” said the stars, “have seen the earth when it was young. ”

“ We, standing in a window to look, feel the cool, unspeakably sweet wind blowing in on us, and a feeling of longing comes over us—unutterable longing, we cannot tell for what. We are so small, our head only reaches as high as the first three panes. We look at the white earth, and the rainbow, and the blue sky; and oh, we want it, we want—we do not know what. We cry as though our heart was broken. When one lifts our little body from the window we cannot tell what ails us. We run away to play. ”

“ She mused a while, looking out with fixed eyes.
“That is why the bell rang so cheerfully,” she said. “When the old die it is well; they have had their time. It is when the young die that the bells weep drops of blood.”
“But the old love life?” he said; for it was sweet to hear her speak.
She raised herself on her elbow.
“They love life, they do not want to die,” she answered, “but what of that? They have had their time. They knew that a man’s life is three-score years and ten; they should have made their plans accordingly! ”

“ The loft was an unknown land to Bonaparte. He had often wondered what was up there; he liked to know what was in all locked-up places and out-of-the-way corners, but he was afraid to climb the ladder. So Bonaparte looked up, and in the name of all that was tantalizing, questioned what the boy did up there. The loft was used only as a lumber-room. What could the fellow find up there to keep him so long?
Could the Boer-woman have beheld Waldo at that instant, any lingering doubt which might have remained in her mind as to the boy’s insanity would instantly have vanished. ”

“ That first morning, when I sat in the front and called to my oxen, and saw nothing about me but the hills, with the blue coming down to them, and the karoo bushes, I was drunk; I laughed; my heart was beating till it hurt me. I shut my eyes tight, that when I opened them I might see there were no shelves about me. There must be a beauty in buying and selling, if there is beauty in everything: but it is very ugly to me. My life as transport-rider would have been the best life in the world if I had had only one wagon to drive. ”

“ And he touches the water, till down to its depths it feels him and melts, and it flows, and the things, strange sweet things that were locked up in it, it sings as it runs, for love of him. Each plant tries to bear at least one fragrant little flower for him; and the world that was dead lives, and the heart that was dead and self-centred throbs, with an upward, outward yearning, and it has become that which it seemed impossible ever to become. There, does that satisfy you?” she asked, looking down at Gregory. ”

“ Ah! life is delicious; well to live long, and see the darkness breaking, and the day coming! The day when soul shall not thrust back soul that would come to it; when men shall not be driven to seek solitude because of the crying-out of their hearts for love and sympathy. Well to live long and see the new time breaking. Well to live long; life is sweet, sweet, sweet! In his breast pocket, where of old the broken slate used to be, there was now a little dancing shoe of his friend who was sleeping. ”

“ We, as we listen, half start up; every drop of blood in our body has rushed to our head. He lies! he lies! he lies! That man in the pulpit lies! Will no one stop him? Have none of them heard—do none of them know, that when the poor, dark soul shut its eyes on earth it opened them in the still light of heaven? that there is no wrath where God’s face is? that if one could once creep to the footstool of God, there is everlasting peace there, like the fresh stillness of the early morning? ”

“ The world said of him—the all-knowing, omnipotent world, whom no locks can bar, who has the cat-like propensity of seeing best in the dark—the world said, that better than the books he loved the brandy, and better than books or brandy that which it had been better had he loved less. But for the world he cared nothing; he smiled blandly in its teeth. All life is a dream; if wine and philosophy and women keep the dream from becoming a nightmare, so much the better. It is all they are fit for, all they can be used for. ”

“ Then at last a new time—the time of waking; short, sharp, and not pleasant, as wakings often are.
Sleep and dreams exist on this condition—that no one wake the dreamer.
And now life takes us up between her finger and thumb, shakes us furiously, till our poor nodding head is well-nigh rolled from our shoulders, and she sets us down a little hard on the bare earth, bruised and sore, but preternaturally wide awake.
We have said in our days of dreaming, “Injustice and wrong are a seeming; pain is a shadow. Our God, He is real, He who made all things, and He only is Love.” ”

“ The sun had not yet touched the outstretched arms of the prickly pear upon the kopje, and the early cocks and hens still strutted about stiffly after the night’s roost, when Waldo stood before the wagon-house saddling the grey mare. Every now and then he glanced up at the old familiar objects: they had a new aspect that morning. Even the cocks, seen in the light of parting, had a peculiar interest, and he listened with conscious attention while one crowed clear and loud as it stood on the pigsty wall. ”

“ It is the hard-headed, deep thinker who, when the wife who has thought and worked with him goes, can find no rest, and lingers near her till he finds sleep beside her.
“A great soul draws and is drawn with a more fierce intensity than any small one. By every inch we grow in intellectual height our love strikes down its roots deeper, and spreads out its arms wider. It is for love’s sake yet more than for any other that we look for that new time.” ”

“ Next morning the Bible we kiss. We are God’s forever. We go out to work, and it goes happily all day, happily all night; but hardly so happily, not happily at all, the next day; and the next night the devil asks us, “where is your Holy Spirit?”
We cannot tell.
So month by month, summer and winter, the old life goes on—reading, praying, weeping, praying. They tell us we become utterly stupid. We know it. Even the multiplication table we learnt with so much care we forgot. The physical world recedes further and further from us. Truly we love not the world, neither the things that are in it. ”