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Honore de Balzac - "Paz"

Edouard le Roy - "Henri Bergson"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Briefe aus der Schweiz"

Charles W. Chesnutt - "The House Behind The Cedars"

The Story of an African Farm

O >> Olive Schreiner (Ralph Iron) >> The Story of an African Farm




"'You are going to lie down, devil, are you? We'll see you don't take it
too easy.'

"The thing was just dying. He opened his clasp-knife and stooped down over
it. I do not know what I did then. But afterward I know I had him on the
stones, and I was kneeling on him. The boys dragged me off. I wish they
had not. I left him standing in the sand in the road, shaking himself, and
I walked back to the town. I took nothing from that accursed wagon, so I
had only two shillings. But it did not matter. The next day I got work at
a wholesale store. My work was to pack and unpack goods, and to carry
boxes, and I had to work from six in the morning to six in the evening; so
I had plenty of time.

"I hired a little room, and subscribed to a library, so I had everything I
needed; and in the week of Christmas holidays I went to see the sea. I
walked all night, Lyndall, to escape the heat, and a little after sunrise I
got to the top of a high hill. Before me was a long, low, blue, monotonous
mountain. I walked looking at it, but I was thinking of the sea I wanted
to see. At last I wondered what that curious blue thing might be; then it
struck me it was the sea! I would have turned back again, only I was too
tired. I wonder if all the things we long to see--the churches, the
pictures, the men in Europe--will disappoint us so! You see I had dreamed
of it so long. When I was a little boy, minding sheep behind the kopje, I
used to see the waves stretching out as far as the eye could reach in the
sunlight. My sea! Is the idea always more beautiful than the real?

"I got to the beach that afternoon, and I saw the water run up and down on
the sand, and I saw the white foam breakers; they were pretty, but I
thought I would go back the next day. It was not my sea.

"But I began to like it when I sat by it that night in the moonlight; and
the next day I liked it better; and before I left I loved it. It was not
like the sky and stars, that talk of what has no beginning and no end; but
it is so human. Of all the things I have ever seen, only the sea is like a
human being; the sky is not, nor the earth. But the sea is always moving,
always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests. It is
always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back
slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question,
and it never gets the answer. I can hear it in the day and in the night;
the white foam breakers are saying that which I think. I walk alone with
them when there is no one to see me, and I sing with them. I lie down on
the sand and watch them with my eyes half shut. The sky is better, but it
is so high above our heads. I love the sea. Sometimes we must look down
too. After five days I went back to Grahamstown.

"I had glorious books, and in the night I could sit in my little room and
read them; but I was lonely. Books are not the same things when you are
living among people. I cannot tell why, but they are dead. On the farm
they would have been living beings to me; but here, where there were so
many people about me, I wanted some one to belong to me. I was lonely. I
wanted something that was flesh and blood. Once on this farm there came a
stranger; I did not ask his name, but he sat among the karoo and talked
with me. Now, wherever I have travelled I have looked for him--in hotels,
in streets, in passenger wagons as they rushed in, through the open windows
of houses I have looked for him, but I have not found him--never heard a
voice like his. One day I went to the Botanic Gardens. It was a half-
holiday, and the band was to play. I stood in the long raised avenue and
looked down. There were many flowers, and ladies and children were walking
about beautifully dressed. At last the music began. I had not heard such
music before.

"At first it was slow and even, like the everyday life, when we walk
through it without thought or feeling; then it grew faster, then it paused,
hesitated, then it was quite still for an instant, and then it burst out.
Lyndall, they made heaven right when they made it all music. It takes you
up and carries you away, away, till you have the things you longed for, you
are up close to them. You have got out into a large, free, open place. I
could not see anything while it was playing; I stood with my head against
my tree; but, when it was done, I saw that there were ladies sitting close
to me on a wooden bench, and the stranger who had talked to me that day in
the karoo was sitting between them. The ladies were very pretty, and their
dresses beautiful. I do not think they had been listening to the music,
for they were talking and laughing very softly. I heard all they said, and
could even smell the rose on the breast of one. I was afraid he would see
me; so I went to the other side of the tree, and soon they got up and began
to pace up and down in the avenue.

"All the time the music played they chatted, and he carried on his arm the
scarf of the prettiest lady. I did not hear the music; I tried to catch
the sound of his voice each time he went by. When I was listening to the
music I did not know I was badly dressed; now I felt so ashamed of myself.
I never knew before what a low, horrible thing I was, dressed in tancord.
That day on the farm, when we sat on the ground under the thorn-trees, I
thought he quite belonged to me; now, I saw he was not mine. But he was
still as beautiful. His brown eyes are more beautiful than any one's eyes,
except yours.

"At last they turned to go, and I walked after them. When they got out of
the gate he helped the ladies into a phaeton, and stood for a moment with
his foot on the step talking to them. He had a little cane in his hand,
and an Italian greyhound ran after him. Just when they drove away one of
the ladies dropped her whip.

"'Pick it up, fellow,' she said; and when I brought it her she threw
sixpence on the ground. I might have gone back to the garden then; but I
did not want music; I wanted clothes, and to be fashionable and fine. I
felt that my hands were coarse, and that I was vulgar. I never tried to
see him again.

"I stayed in my situation four months after that, but I was not happy. I
had no rest. The people about me pressed on me, and made me dissatisfied.
I could not forget them. Even when I did not see them they pressed on me,
and made me miserable. I did not love books; I wanted people. When I
walked home under the shady trees in the street I could not be happy, for
when I passed the houses I heard music, and saw faces between the curtains.
I did not want any of them, but I wanted some one for mine, for me. I
could not help it. I wanted a finer life.

"Only one day something made me happy. A nurse came to the store with a
little girl belonging to one of our clerks. While the maid went into the
office to give a message to its father, the little child stood looking at
me. Presently she came close to me and peeped up into my face.

"'Nice curls, pretty curls,' she said; 'I like curls.'

"She felt my hair all over, with her little hands. When I put out my arm
she let me take her and sit her on my knee. She kissed me with her soft
mouth. We were happy till the nurse-girl came and shook her, and asked her
if she was not ashamed to sit on the knee of that strange man. But I do
not think my little one minded. She laughed at me as she went out.

"If the world was all children I could like it; but men and women draw me
so strangely, and then press me away, till I am in agony. I was not meant
to live among people. Perhaps some day, when I am grown older, I will be
able to go and live among them and look at them as I look at the rocks, and
bushes, without letting them disturb me, and take myself from me; but not
now. So I grew miserable; a kind of fever seemed to eat me; I could not
rest, or read, or think; so I came back here. I knew you were not here but
it seemed as though I should be nearer you; and it is you I want--you that
the other people suggest to me, but cannot give."

He had filled all the sheets he had taken, and now lifted down the last
from the mantelpiece. Em had dropped asleep, and lay slumbering peacefully
on the skin before the fire. Out of doors the storm still raged; but in a
fitful manner, as though growing half weary of itself. He bent over his
paper again, with eager flushed cheek, and wrote on.

"It has been a delightful journey, this journey home. I have walked on
foot. The evening before last, when it was just sunset, I was a little
footsore and thirsty, and went out of the road to look for water. I went
down into a deep little kloof. Some trees ran along the bottom, and I
thought I should find water there. The sun had quite set when I got to the
bottom of it. It was very still--not a leaf was stirring anywhere. In the
bed of the mountain torrent I thought I might find water. I came to the
bank, and leaped down into the dry bed. The floor on which I stood was of
fine white sand, and the banks rose on every side like the walls of a room.

"Above there was a precipice of rocks, and a tiny stream of water oozed
from them and fell slowly on to the flat stone below. Each drop you could
hear fall like a little silver bell. There was one among the trees on the
bank that stood cut out against the white sky. All the other trees were
silent; but this one shook and trembled against the sky. Everything else
was still; but those leaves were quivering, quivering. I stood on the
sand; I could not go away. When it was quite dark, and the stars had come,
I crept out. Does it seem strange to you that it should have made me so
happy? It is because I cannot tell you how near I felt to things that we
cannot see but we always feel. Tonight has been a wild, stormy night. I
have been walking across the plain for hours in the dark. I have liked the
wind, because I have seemed forcing my way through to you. I knew you were
not here, but I would hear of you. When I used to sit on the transport
wagon half-sleeping, I used to start awake because your hands were on me.
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. When I have
finished I am going to look at your room door--"

He wrote; and the wind, which had spent its fury, moaned round and round
the house, most like a tired child weary with crying.

Em woke up, and sat before the fire, rubbing her eyes, and listening, as it
sobbed about the gables, and wandered away over the long stone walls.

"How quiet it has grown now," she said, and sighed herself, partly from
weariness and partly from sympathy with the tired wind. He did not answer
her; he was lost in his letter.

She rose slowly after a time, and rested her hand on his shoulder.

"You have many letters to write," she said.

"No," he answered; "it is only one to Lyndall."

She turned away, and stood long before the fire looking into it. If you
have a deadly fruit to give, it will not grow sweeter by keeping.

"Waldo, dear," she said, putting her hand on his, "leave off writing."

He threw back the dark hair from his forehead and looked at her.

"It is no use writing any more," she said.

"Why not?" he asked.

She put her hand over the papers he had written.

"Waldo," she said, "Lyndall is dead."


Chapter 2.XII. Gregory's Womanhood.

Slowly over the flat came a cart. On the back seat sat Gregory, his arms
folded, his hat drawn over his eyes. A Kaffer boy sat on the front seat
driving, and at his feet sat Doss, who, now and again, lifted his nose and
eyes above the level of the splashboard, to look at the surrounding
country; and then, with an exceedingly knowing wink of his left eye, turned
to his companions, thereby intimating that he clearly perceived his
whereabouts. No one noticed the cart coming. Waldo, who was at work at
his carpenter's table in the wagon-house, saw nothing, till chancing to
look down he perceived Doss standing before him, the legs trembling, the
little nose wrinkled, and a series of short suffocating barks giving
utterance to his joy at reunion.

Em, whose eyes had ached with looking out across the plain, was now at work
in a back room, and knew nothing till, looking up, she saw Gregory, with
his straw hat and blue eyes, standing in the doorway. He greeted her
quietly, hung his hat up in its old place behind the door, and for any
change in his manner or appearance he might have been gone only the day
before to fetch letters from the town. Only his beard was gone, and his
face was grown thinner. He took off his leather gaiters, said the
afternoon was hot and the roads dusty, and asked for some tea. They talked
of wool, and the cattle, and the sheep, and Em gave him the pile of letters
that had come for him during the months of absence, but of the thing that
lay at their hearts neither said anything. Then he went out to look at the
kraals, and at supper Em gave him hot cakes and coffee. They talked about
the servants, and then ate their meal in quiet. She asked no questions.
When it was ended Gregory went into the front room, and lay in the dark on
the sofa.

"Do you not want a light?" Em asked, venturing to look in.

"No," he answered; then presently called to her, "Come and sit here; I want
to talk to you."

She came and sat on a footstool near him.

"Do you wish to hear anything?" he asked.

She whispered:

"Yes, if it does not hurt you."

"What difference does it make to me?" he said. "If I talk or am silent, is
there any change?"

Yet he lay quiet for a long time. The light through the open door showed
him to her, where he lay, with his arm thrown across his eyes. At last he
spoke. Perhaps it was a relief to him to speak.

To Bloemfontein in the Free State, to which through an agent he had traced
them, Gregory had gone. At the hotel where Lyndall and her stranger had
stayed he put up; he was shown the very room in which they had slept. The
coloured boy who had driven them to the next town told him in which house
they had boarded, and Gregory went on. In that town he found they had left
the cart, and bought a spider and four greys, and Gregory's heart rejoiced.
Now indeed it would be easy to trace their course. And he turned his steps
northward.

At the farmhouses where he stopped the ooms and tantes remembered clearly
the spider with its four grey horses. At one place the Boer-wife told how
the tall, blue-eyed Englishman had bought milk, and asked the way to the
next farm. At the next farm the Englishman had bought a bunch of flowers,
and given half a crown for them to the little girl. It was quite true; the
Boer-mother made her get it out of the box and show it. At the next place
they had slept. Here they told him that the great bulldog, who hated all
strangers, had walked in in the evening and laid its head in the lady's
lap. So at every place he heard something, and traced them step by step.

At one desolate farm the Boer had a good deal to tell. The lady had said
she liked a wagon that stood before the door. Without asking the price the
Englishman had offered a hundred and fifty pounds for the old thing, and
bought oxen worth ten pounds for sixteen. The Dutchman chuckled, for he
had the Salt-riem's money in the box under his bed. Gregory laughed too,
in silence; he could not lose sight of them now, so slowly they would have
to move with that cumbrous ox-wagon. Yet, when that evening came, and he
reached a little wayside inn, no one could tell him anything of the
travellers.

The master, a surly creature, half stupid with Boer-brandy, sat on the
bench before the door smoking. Gregory sat beside him, questioning, but he
smoked on. He remembered nothing of such strangers. How should he know
who had been there months and months before? He smoked on. Gregory, very
weary, tried to wake his memory, said that the lady he was seeking for was
very beautiful, had a little mouth, and tiny, very tiny, feet. The man
only smoked on as sullenly as at first. What were little, very little,
mouths and feet to him. But his daughter leaned out in the window above.
She was dirty and lazy, and liked to loll there when travellers came, to
hear the men talk, but she had a soft heart. Presently a hand came out of
the window, and a pair of velvet slippers touched his shoulder, tiny
slippers with black flowers. He pulled them out of her hand. Only one
woman's feet had worn them, he knew that.

"Left here last summer by a lady," said the girl; "might be the one you are
looking for. Never saw any feet so small."

Gregory rose and questioned her.

They might have come in a wagon and spider, she could not tell. But the
gentleman was very handsome, tall, lovely figure, blue eyes, wore gloves
always when he went out. An English officer, perhaps; no Africander,
certainly.

Gregory stopped her.

The lady? Well, she was pretty, rather, the girl said; very cold, dull
air, silent. They stayed for, it might be, five days; slept in the wing
over against the stoep; quarrelled sometimes, she thought--the lady. She
had seen everything when she went in to wait. One day the gentleman
touched her hair; she drew back from him as though his fingers poisoned
her. Went to the other end of the room if he came to sit near her. Walked
out alone. Cold wife for such a handsome husband, the girl thought; she
evidently pitied him, he was such a beautiful man. They went away early
one morning, how, or in which way, the girl could not tell.

Gregory inquired of the servants, but nothing more was to be learnt; so the
next morning he saddled his horse and went on. At the farms he came to the
good old ooms and tantes asked him to have coffee, and the little shoeless
children peeped out at the stranger from behind ovens and gables; but no
one had seen what he asked for. This way and that he rode to pick up the
thread he had dropped, but the spider and the wagon, the little lady and
the handsome gentleman, no one had seen. In the towns he fared yet worse.

Once indeed hope came to him. On the stoep of an hotel at which he stayed
the night in a certain little village, there walked a gentleman, grave and
kindly-looking. It was not hard to open conversation with him about the
weather, and then--Had he ever seen such and such people, a gentleman and a
lady, a spider and wagon, arrive at that place? The kindly gentleman shook
his head. What was the lady like, he inquired.

Gregory painted. Hair like silken floss, small mouth, underlip very full
and pink, upper lip pink but very thin and curled; there were four white
spots on the nail of her right hand forefinger, and her eyebrows were very
delicately curved.

"Yes; and a rose-bud tinge in the cheeks; hands like lilies, and perfectly
seraphic smile."

"That is she! that is she!" cried Gregory.

Who else could it be? He asked where she had gone to. The gentleman most
thoughtfully stroked his beard.

He would try to remember. Were not her ears--. Here such a violent fit of
coughing seized him that he ran away into the house. An ill-fed clerk and
a dirty barman standing in the doorway laughed aloud. Gregory wondered if
they could be laughing at the gentleman's cough, and then he heard some one
laughing in the room into which the gentleman had gone. He must follow him
and try to learn more; but he soon found that there was nothing more to be
learnt there. Poor Gregory!

Backward and forward, backward and forward, from the dirty little hotel
where he had dropped the thread, to this farm and to that, rode Gregory,
till his heart was sick and tired. That from that spot the wagon might
have gone its own way and the spider another was an idea that did not occur
to him. At last he saw it was no use lingering in that neighbourhood, and
pressed on.

One day coming to a little town, his horses knocked up, and he resolved to
rest them there. The little hotel of the town was a bright and sunny
place, like the jovial face of the clean little woman who kept it, and who
trotted about talking always--talking to the customers in the taproom, and
to the maids in the kitchen, and to the passers-by when she could hail them
from the windows; talking, as good-natured women with large mouths and
small noses always do, in season and out.

There was a little front parlour in the hotel, kept for strangers who
wanted to be alone. Gregory sat there to eat his breakfast, and the
landlady dusted the room and talked of the great finds at the Diamond
Fields, and the badness of maid-servants, and the shameful conduct of the
Dutch parson in that town to the English inhabitants. Gregory ate his
breakfast and listened to nothing. He had asked his one question, and had
had his answer; now she might talk on.

Presently a door in the corner opened and a woman came out--a Mozambiquer,
with a red handkerchief twisted round her head. She carried in her hand a
tray, with a slice of toast crumbled fine, and a half-filled cup of coffee,
and an egg broken open, but not eaten. Her ebony face grinned complacently
as she shut the door softly and said, "Good morning."

The landlady began to talk to her.

"You are not going to leave her really, Ayah, are you?" she said. "The
maids say so; but I'm sure you wouldn't do such a thing."

The Mozambiquer grinned.

"Husband says I must go home."

"But she hasn't got any one else, and won't have any one else. Come, now,"
said the landlady, "I've no time to be sitting always in a sickroom, not if
I was paid anything for it."

The Mozambiquer only showed her white teeth good-naturedly for answer, and
went out, and the landlady followed her.

Gregory, glad to be alone, watched the sunshine as it came over the
fuchsias in the window, and ran up and down on the panelled door in the
corner. The Mozambiquer had closed it loosely behind her, and presently
something touched it inside. It moved a little, then it was still, then
moved again; then through the gap a small nose appeared, and a yellow ear
overlapping one eye; then the whole head obtruded, placed itself critically
on one side, wrinkled its nose disapprovingly at Gregory, and withdrew.
Through the half-open door came a faint scent of vinegar, and the room was
dark and still.

Presently the landlady came back.

"Left the door open," she said, bustling to shut it; "but a darky will be a
darky, and never carries a head on its shoulders like other folks. Not
ill, I hope sir?" she said, looking at Gregory when she had shut the
bedroom door.

"No," said Gregory, "no."

The landlady began putting the things together.

"Who," asked Gregory, "is in that room?"

Glad to have a little innocent piece of gossip to relate, and some one
willing to hear it, the landlady made the most of a little story as she
cleared the table. Six months before a lady had come alone to the hotel in
a wagon, with only a coloured leader and driver. Eight days after a little
baby had been born.

If Gregory stood up and looked out at the window he would see a bluegum-
tree in the graveyard; close by it was a little grave. The baby was buried
there. A tiny thing--only lived two hours, and the mother herself almost
went with it. After a while she was better; but one day she got up out of
bed, dressed herself without saying a word to any one, and went out. It
was a drizzly day; a little time after some one saw her sitting on the wet
ground under the bluegum-tree, with the rain dripping from her hat and
shawl. They went to fetch her, but she would not come until she chose.
When she did, she had gone to bed and had not risen again from it; never
would, the doctor said.

She was very patient, poor thing. When you went in to ask her how she was
she said always "Better," or "Nearly well!" and lay still in the darkened
room, and never troubled any one. The Mozambiquer took care of her, and
she would not allow any one else to touch her; would not so much as allow
any one else to see her foot uncovered. She was strange in many ways, but
she paid well, poor thing; and now the Mozambiquer was going, and she would
have to take up with some one else.

The landlady prattled on pleasantly, and now carried away the tray with the
breakfast things. When she was gone Gregory leaned his head on his hands,
but he did not think long.

Before dinner he had ridden out of the town to where on a rise a number of
transport-wagons were outspanned. The Dutchman driver of one wondered at
the stranger's eagerness to free himself of his horses. Stolen perhaps;
but it was worth his while to buy them at so low a price. So the horses
changed masters, and Gregory walked off with his saddlebags slung across
his arm. Once out of sight of the wagons he struck out of the road and
walked across the veld, the dry, flowering grasses waving everywhere about
him; half-way across the plain he came to a deep gully which the rain
torrents had washed out, but which was now dry. Gregory sprung down into
its red bed. It was a safe place, and quiet. When he had looked about him
he sat down under the shade of an overhanging bank and fanned himself with
his hat, for the afternoon was hot, and he had walked fast. At his feet
the dusty ants ran about, and the high red bank before him was covered by a
network of roots and fibres washed bare by the rains. Above his head rose
the clear blue African sky; at his side were the saddlebags full of women's
clothing. Gregory looked up half plaintively into the blue sky.

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