Olive Schreiner

“ We have often tried to picture in our mind what the fossiled remains of creatures must be like, and all the while we sat on them, we have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the world.
The flat plain has been to us a reach of monotonous red. We look at it, and every handful of sand starts into life. That wonderful people, the ants, we learn to know; see them make war and peace, play and work, and build their huge palaces. And that smaller people we make acquaintance with, who live in the flowers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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? ”

“ I make it good.”
“Tant Sannie is a singular woman,” said Bonaparte, taking the tobacco bag the German passed to him.
“Singular! Yes,” said the German; “but her heart is on her right side. I have lived long years with her, and I may say, I have for her an affection, which she returns. I may say,” added the German with warmth, “I may say, that there is not one soul on this farm for whom I have not an affection.”
“Ah, my friend,” said Bonaparte, “when the grace of God is in our hearts, is it not with us all? Do we not love the very worm we tread upon, and as we tread upon it? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I love you better than Waldo, but I can’t tell if I love you better than Lyndall. If you would let me wait for a week I think perhaps I could tell you.”
Gregory picked up the cloak and wrapped it round her.
“If you could but love me as I love you,” he said; “but no woman can love as a man can. I will wait till Saturday. I will not once come near you till then. Good-bye! Oh, Em,” he said, turning again, and twining his arm about her, and kissing her surprised little mouth, “if you are not my wife I cannot live. I have never loved another woman, and I never shall!—never, never!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They waited till the dust of the horse’s hoofs had laid itself.
“There,” said Lyndall, “goes a true woman—one born for the sphere that some women have to fill without being born for it. How happy he would be sewing frills into his little girl’s frocks, and how pretty he would look sitting in a parlour, with a rough man making love to him! Don’t you think so?”
“I shall not stay here when he is master,” Waldo answered, not able to connect any kind of beauty with Gregory Rose.
“I should imagine not. The rule of a woman is tyranny; but the rule of a man-woman grinds fine. ”

“ Nobler hearts than yours have sat here in this darkness to wait, and they have come to us and we to them; and they have never left us, never. All else is a delusion, but we are real, we are real, we are real. Truth is a shadow; the valleys of superstition are a farce: the earth is of ashes, the trees all rotten; but we—feel us—we live! You cannot doubt us. Feel us how warm we are! Oh, come to us! Come with us!’
“Nearer and nearer round his head they hovered, and the cold drops melted on his forehead. ”

“ Look at this little chin of mine, Waldo, with the dimple in it. It is but a small part of my person; but though I had a knowledge of all things under the sun, and the wisdom to use it, and the deep loving heart of an angel, it would not stead me through life like this little chin. I can win money with it, I can win love; I can win power with it, I can win fame. What would knowledge help me? The less a woman has in her head the lighter she is for climbing. I once heard an old man say, that he never saw intellect help a woman so much as a pretty ankle ”

“ Whether we hate and doubt, or whether we believe and love, to our dearest, are we to seem always wicked?
We do not yet know that in the soul’s search for truth the bitterness lies here, the striving cannot always hide itself among the thoughts; sooner or later it will clothe itself in outward action; then it steps in and divides between the soul and what it loves. All things on earth have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns ”

“ I don’t wonder that you can’t look at me, Waldo,” said Bonaparte; “my condition would touch any heart. You see, the water was fatty, and that has made all the sand stick to me; and my hair,” said Bonaparte, tenderly touching the little fringe at the back of his head, “is all caked over like a little plank; you wouldn’t think it was hair at all,” said Bonaparte, plaintively. “I had to creep all along the stone walls for fear she’d see me, and with nothing on my head but a red handkerchief, tied under my chin, Waldo; and to hide in a sloot the whole day, with not a mouthful of food, Waldo. ”

“ Only in one of the outbuildings that jutted from the wagon-house there was some one who was not asleep.
The room was dark; door and shutter were closed; not a ray of light entered anywhere. The German overseer, to whom the room belonged, lay sleeping soundly on his bed in the corner, his great arms folded, and his bushy grey and black beard rising and falling on his breast. But one in the room was not asleep. Two large eyes looked about in the darkness, and two small hands were smoothing the patchwork quilt. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He moved his hands as though he were washing them in the sunshine. There will always be something worth living for while there are shimmery afternoons. Waldo chuckled with intense inward satisfaction as the old hen had done—she, over the insects and the warmth; he, over the old brick walls, and the haze, and the little bushes. Beauty is God’s wine, with which He recompenses the souls that love Him; He makes them drunk. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are not to study law, nor science, nor art, so we study you. There is never a nerve or fibre in a man’s nature but we know it. We keep six of you dancing in the palm of one little hand,” she said, balancing her outstretched arm gracefully, as though tiny beings disported themselves in its palm. “There, we throw you away, and you sink to the devil,” she said, folding her arms composedly. “There was never a man who said one word for woman but he said two for man, and three for the whole human race.”
She watched the bird pecking up the last yellow grains; but Waldo looked only at her. ”

“ 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! ”

“ They talk of genius—it is nothing but this, that a man knows what he can do best, and does it, and nothing else. Waldo,” she said, knitting her little fingers closer among his, “I wish I could help you; I wish I could make you see that you must decide what you will be and do. It does not matter what you choose—be a farmer, businessman, artist, what you will—but know your aim, and live for that one thing. We have only one life. The secret of success is concentration; wherever there has been a great life, or a great work, that has gone before. ”