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Baruch Spinoza - "On the Improvement of the Understanding"

Wu Tingfang - "America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat"

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre Buch 2"

Plato, translated by B. Jowett. - "Symposium"

The Story of an African Farm

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




The girls sat with their backs to the paintings. In their laps were a few
fern and ice-plant leaves, which by dint of much searching they had
gathered under the rocks.

Em took off her big brown kapje and began vigorously to fan her red face
with it; but her companion bent low over the leaves in her lap, and at last
took up an ice-plant leaf and fastened it on to the front of her blue
pinafore with a pin.

"Diamonds must look as these drops do," she said, carefully bending over
the leaf, and crushing one crystal drop with her delicate little nail.
"When I," she said, "am grown up, I shall wear real diamonds, exactly like
these in my hair."

Her companion opened her eyes and wrinkled her low forehead.

"Where will you find them, Lyndall? The stones are only crystals that we
picked up yesterday. Old Otto says so."

"And you think that I am going to stay here always?"

The lip trembled scornfully.

"Ah, no," said her companion. "I suppose some day we shall go somewhere;
but now we are only twelve, and we cannot marry till we are seventeen.
Four years, five--that is a long time to wait. And we might not have
diamonds if we did marry."

"And you think that I am going to stay here till then?"

"Well, where are you going?" asked her companion.

The girl crushed an ice-plant leaf between her fingers.

"Tant Sannie is a miserable old woman," she said. "Your father married her
when he was dying, because he thought she would take better care of the
farm, and of us, than an English woman. He said we should be taught and
sent to school. Now she saves every farthing for herself, buys us not even
one old book. She does not ill-use us--why? Because she is afraid of your
father's ghost. Only this morning she told her Hottentot that she would
have beaten you for breaking the plate, but that three nights ago she heard
a rustling and a grunting behind the pantry door, and knew it was your
father coming to spook her. She is a miserable old woman," said the girl,
throwing the leaf from her; "but I intend to go to school."

"And if she won't let you?"

"I shall make her."

"How?"

The child took not the slightest notice of the last question, and folded
her small arms across her knees.

"But why do you want to go, Lyndall?"

"There is nothing helps in this world," said the child slowly, "but to be
very wise, and to know everything--to be clever."

"But I should not like to go to school!" persisted the small freckled face.

"And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go;
you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but
I," said Lyndall, "will have nothing. I must learn."

"Oh, Lyndall! I will give you some of my sheep," said Em, with a sudden
burst of pitying generosity.

"I do not want your sheep," said the girl slowly; "I want things of my own.
When I am grown up," she added, the flush on her delicate features
deepening at every word, "there will be nothing that I do not know. I
shall be rich, very rich; and I shall wear not only for best, but every
day, a pure white silk, and little rose-buds, like the lady in Tant
Sannie's bedroom, and my petticoats will be embroidered, not only at the
bottom, but all through."

The lady in Tant Sannie's bedroom was a gorgeous creature from a fashion-
sheet, which the Boer-woman, somewhere obtaining, had pasted up at the foot
of her bed, to be profoundly admired by the children.

"It would be very nice," said Em; but it seemed a dream of quite too
transcendent a glory ever to be realized.

At this instant there appeared at the foot of the kopje two figures--the
one, a dog, white and sleek, one yellow ear hanging down over his left eye;
the other, his master, a lad of fourteen, and no other than the boy Waldo,
grown into a heavy, slouching youth of fourteen. The dog mounted the kopje
quickly, his master followed slowly. He wore an aged jacket much too large
for him, and rolled up at the wrists, and, as of old, a pair of dilapidated
velschoens and a felt hat. He stood before the two girls at last.

"What have you been doing today?" asked Lyndall, lifting her eyes to his
face.

"Looking after ewes and lambs below the dam. Here!" he said, holding out
his hand awkwardly, "I brought them for you."

There were a few green blades of tender grass.

"Where did you find them?"

"On the dam wall."

She fastened them beside the leaf on her blue pinafore.

"They look nice there," said the boy, awkwardly rubbing his great hands and
watching her.

"Yes; but the pinafore spoils it all; it is not pretty."

He looked at it closely.

"Yes, the squares are ugly; but it looks nice upon you--beautiful."

He now stood silent before them, his great hands hanging loosely at either
side.

"Some one has come today," he mumbled out suddenly, when the idea struck
him.

"Who?" asked both girls.

"An Englishman on foot."

"What does he look like?" asked Em.

"I did not notice; but he has a very large nose," said the boy slowly. "He
asked the way to the house."

"Didn't he tell you his name?"

"Yes--Bonaparte Blenkins."

"Bonaparte!" said Em, "why that is like the reel Hottentot Hans plays on
the violin--

'Bonaparte, Bonaparte, my wife is sick;
In the middle of the week, but Sundays not,
I give her rice and beans for soup'--

It is a funny name."

"There was a living man called Bonaparte once," said she of the great eyes.

"Ah yes, I know," said Em--"the poor prophet whom the lions ate. I am
always so sorry for him."

Her companion cast a quiet glance upon her.

"He was the greatest man who ever lived," she said, "the man I like best."

"And what did he do?" asked Em, conscious that she had made a mistake, and
that her prophet was not the man.

"He was one man, only one," said her little companion slowly, "yet all the
people in the world feared him. He was not born great, he was common as we
are; yet he was master of the world at last. Once he was only a little
child, then he was a lieutenant, then he was a general, then he was an
emperor. When he said a thing to himself he never forgot it. He waited,
and waited and waited, and it came at last."

"He must have been very happy," said Em.

"I do not know," said Lyndall; "but he had what he said he would have, and
that is better than being happy. He was their master, and all the people
were white with fear of him. They joined together to fight him. He was
one and they were many, and they got him down at last. They were like the
wild cats when their teeth are fast in a great dog, like cowardly wild
cats," said the child, "they would not let him go. There were many; he was
only one. They sent him to an island on the sea, a lonely island, and kept
him there fast. He was one man, and they were many, and they were
terrified at him. It was glorious!" said the child.

"And what then?" said Em.

"Then he was alone there in that island with men to watch him always," said
her companion, slowly and quietly. "And in the long lonely nights he used
to lie awake and think of the things he had done in the old days, and the
things he would do if they let him go again. In the day when he walked
near the shore it seemed to him that the sea all around him was a cold
chain about his body pressing him to death."

"And then?" said Em, much interested.

"He died there in that island; he never got away."

"It is rather a nice story," said Em; "but the end is sad."

"It is a terrible, hateful ending," said the little teller of the story,
leaning forward on her folded arms; "and the worst is, it is true. I have
noticed," added the child very deliberately, "that it is only the made-up
stories that end nicely; the true ones all end so."

As she spoke the boy's dark, heavy eyes rested on her face.

"You have read it, have you not?"

He nodded. "Yes; but the Brown history tells only what he did, not what he
thought."

"It was in the Brown history that I read of him," said the girl; "but I
know what he thought. Books do not tell everything."

"No," said the boy, slowly drawing nearer to her and sitting down at her
feet. "What you want to know they never tell."

Then the children fell into silence, till Doss, the dog, growing uneasy at
its long continuance, sniffed at one and the other, and his master broke
forth suddenly:

"If they could talk, if they could tell us now!" he said, moving his hand
out over the surrounding objects--"then we would know something. This
kopje, if it could tell us how it came here! The 'Physical Geography'
says," he went on most rapidly and confusedly, "that what were dry lands
now were once lakes; and what I think is this--these low hills were once
the shores of a lake; this kopje is some of the stones that were at the
bottom, rolled together by the water. But there is this--How did the water
come to make one heap here alone, in the centre of the plain?" It was a
ponderous question; no one volunteered an answer. "When I was little,"
said the boy, "I always looked at it and wondered, and I thought a great
giant was buried under it. Now I know the water must have done it; but
how? It is very wonderful. Did one little stone come first, and stop the
others as they rolled?" said the boy with earnestness, in a low voice, more
as speaking to himself than to them.

"Oh, Waldo, God put the little kopje here," said Em with solemnity.

"But how did he put it here?"

"By wanting."

"But how did the wanting bring it here?"

"Because it did."

The last words were uttered with the air of one who produces a clinching
argument. What effect it had on the questioner was not evident, for he
made no reply, and turned away from her.

Drawing closer to Lyndall's feet, he said after a while in a low voice:

"Lyndall, has it never seemed to you that the stones were talking with you?
Sometimes," he added in a yet lower tone, "I lie under there with my sheep,
and it seems that the stones are really speaking--speaking of the old
things, of the time when the strange fishes and animals lived that are
turned into stone now, and the lakes were here; and then of the time when
the little Bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly, and used to sleep in
the wild dog holes, and in the sloots, and eat snakes, and shot the bucks
with their poisoned arrows. It was one of them, one of these old wild
Bushmen, that painted those," said the boy, nodding toward the pictures--
"one who was different from the rest. He did not know why, but he wanted
to make something beautiful--he wanted to make something, so he made these.
He worked hard, very hard, to find the juice to make the paint; and then he
found this place where the rocks hang over, and he painted them. To us
they are only strange things, that make us laugh; but to him they were very
beautiful."

The children had turned round and looked at the pictures.

"He used to kneel here naked, painting, painting, painting; and he wondered
at the things he made himself," said the boy, rising and moving his hand in
deep excitement. "Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a
little yellow face peeping out among the stones." He paused, a dreamy look
coming over his face. "And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and
we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on
here, looking at everything like they look now. I know that it is I who am
thinking," the fellow added slowly, "but it seems as though it were they
who are talking. Has it never seemed so to you, Lyndall?"

"No, it never seems so to me," she answered.

The sun had dipped now below the hills, and the boy, suddenly remembering
the ewes and lambs, started to his feet.

"Let us also go to the house and see who has come," said Em, as the boy
shuffled away to rejoin his flock, while Doss ran at his heels, snapping at
the ends of the torn trousers as they fluttered in the wind.


Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.

As the two girls rounded the side of the kopje, an unusual scene presented
itself. A large group was gathered at the back door of the homestead.

On the doorstep stood the Boer-woman, a hand on each hip, her face red and
fiery, her head nodding fiercely. At her feet sat the yellow Hottentot
maid, her satellite, and around stood the black Kaffer maids, with blankets
twisted round their half-naked figures. Two, who stamped mealies in a
wooden block, held the great stampers in their hands, and stared stupidly
at the object of attraction. It certainly was not to look at the old
German overseer, who stood in the centre of the group, that they had all
gathered together. His salt-and-pepper suit, grizzly black beard, and grey
eyes were as familiar to every one on the farm as the red gables of the
homestead itself; but beside him stood the stranger, and on him all eyes
were fixed. Ever and anon the newcomer cast a glance over his pendulous
red nose to the spot where the Boer-woman stood, and smiled faintly.

"I'm not a child," cried the Boer-woman, in low Cape Dutch, "and I wasn't
born yesterday. No, by the Lord, no! You can't take me in! My mother
didn't wean me on Monday. One wink of my eye and I see the whole thing.
I'll have no tramps sleeping on my farm," cried Tant Sannie blowing. "No,
by the devil, no! not though he had sixty-times-six red noses."

There the German overseer mildly interposed that the man was not a tramp,
but a highly respectable individual, whose horse had died by an accident
three days before.

"Don't tell me," cried the Boer-woman; "the man isn't born that can take me
in. If he'd had money, wouldn't he have bought a horse? Men who walk are
thieves, liars, murderers, Rome's priests, seducers! I see the devil in
his nose!" cried Tant Sannie shaking her fist at him; "and to come walking
into the house of this Boer's child and shaking hands as though he came on
horseback! Oh, no, no!"

The stranger took off his hat, a tall, battered chimneypot, and disclosed a
bald head, at the back of which was a little fringe of curled white hair,
and he bowed to Tant Sannie.

"What does she remark, my friend?" he inquired, turning his crosswise-
looking eyes on the old German.

The German rubbed his old hands and hesitated.

"Ah--well--ah--the--Dutch--you know--do not like people who walk--in this
country--ah!"

"My dear friend," said the stranger, laying his hand on the German's arm,
"I should have bought myself another horse, but crossing, five days ago, a
full river, I lost my purse--a purse with five hundred pounds in it. I
spent five days on the bank of the river trying to find it--couldn't. Paid
a Kaffer nine pounds to go in and look for it at the risk of his life--
couldn't find it."

The German would have translated this information, but the Boer-woman gave
no ear.

"No, no; he goes tonight. See how he looks at me--a poor unprotected
female! If he wrongs me, who is to do me right?" cried Tant Sannie.

"I think," said the German in an undertone, if you didn't look at her quite
so much it might be advisable. She--ah--she--might--imagine that you liked
her too well,--in fact--ah--"

"Certainly, my dear friend, certainly," said the stranger. "I shall not
look at her."

Saying this, he turned his nose full upon a small Kaffer of two years old.
That small naked son of Ham became instantly so terrified that he fled to
his mother's blanket for protection, howling horribly.

Upon this the newcomer fixed his eyes pensively on the stamp-block, folding
his hands on the head of his cane. His boots were broken, but he still had
the cane of a gentleman.

"You vagabonds se Engelschman!" said Tant Sannie, looking straight at him.

This was a near approach to plain English; but the man contemplated the
block abstractedly, wholly unconscious that any antagonism was being
displayed toward him.

"You might not be a Scotchman or anything of that kind, might you?"
suggested the German. "It is the English that she hates."

"My dear friend," said the stranger, "I am Irish every inch of me--father
Irish, mother Irish. I've not a drop of English blood in my veins."

"And you might not be married, might you?" persisted the German. "If you
had a wife and children, now? Dutch people do not like those who are not
married."

"Ah," said the stranger, looking tenderly at the block, "I have a dear wife
and three sweet little children--two lovely girls and a noble boy."

This information having been conveyed to the Boer-woman, she, after some
further conversation, appeared slightly mollified; but remained firm to her
conviction that the man's designs were evil.

"For, dear Lord!" she cried; "all Englishmen are ugly; but was there ever
such a red-rag-nosed thing with broken boots and crooked eyes before? Take
him to your room," she cried to the German; "but all the sin he does I lay
at your door."

The German having told him how matters were arranged, the stranger made a
profound bow to Tant Sannie and followed his host, who led the way to his
own little room.

"I thought she would come to her better self soon," the German said
joyously. "Tant Sannie is not wholly bad, far from it, far." Then seeing
his companion cast a furtive glance at him, which he mistook for one of
surprise, he added quickly, "Ah, yes, yes; we are all a primitive people
here--not very lofty. We deal not in titles. Every one is Tante and Oom--
aunt and uncle. This may be my room," he said, opening the door. "It is
rough, the room is rough; not a palace--not quite. But it may be better
than the fields, a little better!" he said, glancing round at his
companion. "Come in, come in. There is something to eat--a mouthful: not
the fare of emperors or kings; but we do not starve, not yet," he said,
rubbing his hands together and looking round with a pleased, half-nervous
smile on his old face.

"My friend, my dear friend," said the stranger, seizing him by the hand,
"may the Lord bless you, the Lord bless and reward you--the God of the
fatherless and the stranger. But for you I would this night have slept in
the fields, with the dews of heaven upon my head."

Late that evening Lyndall came down to the cabin with the German's rations.
Through the tiny square window the light streamed forth, and without
knocking she raised the latch and entered. There was a fire burning on the
hearth, and it cast its ruddy glow over the little dingy room, with its
worm-eaten rafters and mud floor, and broken whitewashed walls. A curious
little place, filled with all manner of articles. Next to the fire was a
great toolbox; beyond that the little bookshelf with its well-worn books;
beyond that, in the corner, a heap of filled and empty grain-bags. From
the rafters hung down straps, riems, old boots, bits of harness, and a
string of onions. The bed was in another corner, covered by a patchwork
quilt of faded red lions, and divided from the rest of the room by a blue
curtain, now drawn back. On the mantelshelf was an endless assortment of
little bags and stones; and on the wall hung a map of South Germany, with a
red line drawn through it to show where the German had wandered. This
place was the one home the girls had known for many a year. The house
where Tant Sannie lived and ruled was a place to sleep in, to eat in, not
to be happy in. It was in vain she told them they were grown too old to go
there; every morning and evening found them there. Were there not too many
golden memories hanging about the old place for them to leave it?

Long winter nights, when they had sat round the fire and roasted potatoes,
and asked riddles, and the old man had told of the little German village,
where, fifty years before, a little German boy had played at snowballs, and
had carried home the knitted stockings of a little girl who afterward
became Waldo's mother; did they not seem to see the German peasant girls
walking about with their wooden shoes and yellow, braided hair, and the
little children eating their suppers out of little wooden bowls when the
good mothers called them in to have their milk and potatoes?

And were there not yet better times than these? Moonlight nights, when
they romped about the door, with the old man, yet more a child than any of
them, and laughed, till the old roof of the wagon-house rang?

Or, best of all, were there not warm, dark, starlight nights, when they sat
together on the doorstep, holding each other's hands, singing German hymns,
their voices rising clear in the still night air--till the German would
draw away his hand suddenly to wipe quickly a tear the children must not
see? Would they not sit looking up at the stars and talking of them--of
the dear Southern Cross, red, fiery Mars, Orion, with his belt, and the
Seven Mysterious Sisters--and fall to speculating over them? How old are
they? Who dwelt in them? And the old German would say that perhaps the
souls we loved lived in them; there, in that little twinkling point was
perhaps the little girl whose stockings he had carried home; and the
children would look up at it lovingly, and call it "Uncle Otto's star."
Then they would fall to deeper speculations--of the times and seasons
wherein the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and the stars
shall fall as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, and there shall be time
no longer: "When the Son of man shall come in His glory, and all His holy
angels with Him." In lower and lower tones they would talk, till at last
they fell into whispers; then they would wish good night softly, and walk
home hushed and quiet.

Tonight, when Lyndall looked in, Waldo sat before the fire watching a pot
which simmered there, with his slate and pencil in his hand; his father sat
at the table buried in the columns of a three-weeks-old newspaper; and the
stranger lay stretched on the bed in the corner, fast asleep, his mouth
open, his great limbs stretched out loosely, betokening much weariness.
The girl put the rations down upon the table, snuffed the candle, and stood
looking at the figure on the bed.

"Uncle Otto," she said presently, laying her hand down on the newspaper,
and causing the old German to look up over his glasses, "how long did that
man say he had been walking?"

"Since this morning, poor fellow! A gentleman--not accustomed to walking--
horse died--poor fellow!" said the German, pushing out his lip and glancing
commiseratingly over his spectacles in the direction of the bed where the
stranger lay, with his flabby double chin, and broken boots through which
the flesh shone.

"And do you believe him, Uncle Otto?"

"Believe him? why of course I do. He himself told me the story three times
distinctly."

"If," said the girl slowly, "he had walked for only one day his boots would
not have looked so; and if--"

"If!" said the German starting up in his chair, irritated that any one
should doubt such irrefragable evidence--"if! Why, he told me himself!
Look how he lies there," added the German pathetically, "worn out--poor
fellow! We have something for him though," pointing with his forefinger
over his shoulder to the saucepan that stood on the fire. "We are not
cooks--not French cooks, not quite; but it's drinkable, drinkable, I think;
better than nothing, I think," he added, nodding his head in a jocund
manner that evinced his high estimation of the contents of the saucepan and
his profound satisfaction therein. "Bish! bish! my chicken," he said, as
Lyndall tapped her little foot up and down upon the floor. "Bish! bish! my
chicken, you will wake him."

He moved the candle so that his own head might intervene between it and the
sleeper's face; and, smoothing his newspaper, he adjusted his spectacles to
read.

The child's grey-black eyes rested on the figure on the bed, then turned to
the German, then rested on the figure again.

"I think he is a liar. Good night, Uncle Otto," she said slowly, turning
to the door.

Long after she had gone the German folded his paper up methodically, and
put it in his pocket.

The stranger had not awakened to partake of the soup, and his son had
fallen asleep on the ground. Taking two white sheepskins from the heap of
sacks in the corner, the old man doubled them up, and lifting the boy's
head gently from the slate on which it rested, placed the skins beneath it.

"Poor lambie, poor lambie!" he said, tenderly patting the great rough bear-
like head; "tired is he!"

He threw an overcoat across the boy's feet, and lifted the saucepan from
the fire. There was no place where the old man could comfortably lie down
himself, so he resumed his seat. Opening a much-worn Bible, he began to
read, and as he read pleasant thoughts and visions thronged on him.

"I was a stranger, and ye took me in," he read.

He turned again to the bed where the sleeper lay.

"I was a stranger."

Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor
the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly
concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to
him. "Jesus, lover, and is it given to us, weak and sinful, frail and
erring, to serve Thee, to take Thee in!" he said softly, as he rose from
his seat. Full of joy, he began to pace the little room. Now and again as
he walked he sang the lines of a German hymn, or muttered broken words of
prayer. The little room was full of light. It appeared to the German that
Christ was very near him, and that at almost any moment the thin mist of
earthly darkness that clouded his human eyes might be withdrawn, and that
made manifest of which the friends at Emmaus, beholding it, said, "It is
the Lord!"

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