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Mary Roberts Rinehart - "The Breaking Point"

Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle"

Amelia E. Barr - "The Man Between"

Clarence Johnson - "THE LIFE OF ME, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY"

The Story of an African Farm

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




"Take the two shillings that are in the broken vase."

"May the blessing of my God rest upon you, my dear child," said Bonaparte;
"may He guide and bless you. Give me your hand."

Waldo folded his arms closely, and lay down.

"Farewell, adieu!" said Bonaparte. "May the blessing of my God and my
father's God rest on you, now and evermore."

With these words the head and nose withdrew themselves, and the light
vanished from the window.

After a few moments the boy, lying in the wagon, heard stealthy footsteps
as they passed the wagon-house and made their way down the road. He
listened as they grew fainter and fainter, and at last died away
altogether, and from that night the footstep of Bonaparte Blenkins was
heard no more at the old farm.

END Of PART I.


PART II.

"And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked
for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing."


Chapter 2.I. Times and Seasons.

Waldo lay on his stomach on the sand. Since he prayed and howled to his
God in the fuel-house three years had passed.

They say that in the world to come time is not measured out by months and
years. Neither is it here. The soul's life has seasons of its own;
periods not found in any calendar, times that years and months will not
scan, but which are as deftly and sharply cut off from one another as the
smoothly-arranged years which the earth's motion yields us.

To stranger eyes these divisions are not evident; but each, looking back at
the little track his consciousness illuminates, sees it cut into distinct
portions, whose boundaries are the termination of mental states.

As man differs from man, so differ these souls' years. The most material
life is not devoid of them; the story of the most spiritual is told in
them. And it may chance that some, looking back, see the past cut out
after this fashion:

I.

The year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulness
start out pictures of startling clearness, disconnected, but brightly
coloured, and indelibly printed in the mind. Much that follows fades, but
the colours of those baby-pictures are permanent.

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?

Remembrance of delight in the feel and smell of the first orange we ever
see; of sorrow which makes us put up our lip, and cry hard, when one
morning we run out to try and catch the dewdrops, and they melt and wet our
little fingers; of almighty and despairing sorrow when we are lost behind
the kraals, and cannot see the house anywhere.

And then one picture starts out more vividly than any.

There has been a thunderstorm; the ground, as far as the eye can reach, is
covered with white hail; the clouds are gone, and overhead a deep blue sky
is showing; far off a great rainbow rests on the white earth. 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.

So looks the first year.

II.

Now the pictures become continuous and connected. Material things still
rule, but the spiritual and intellectual take their places.

In the dark night when we are afraid we pray and shut our eyes. We press
our fingers very hard upon the lids, and see dark spots moving round and
round, and we know they are heads and wings of angels sent to take care of
us, seen dimly in the dark as they move round our bed. It is very
consoling.

In the day we learn our letters, and are troubled because we cannot see why
k-n-o-w should be know, and p-s-a-l-m psalm. They tell us it is so because
it is so. We are not satisfied; we hate to learn; we like better to build
little stone houses. We can build them as we please, and know the reason
for them.

Other joys too we have incomparably greater then even the building of stone
houses.

We are run through with a shudder of delight when in the red sand we come
on one of those white wax flowers that lie between their two green leaves
flat on the sand. We hardly dare pick them, but we feel compelled to do
so; and we smell and smell till the delight becomes almost pain. Afterward
we pull the green leaves softly into pieces to see the silk threads run
across.

Beyond the kopje grow some pale-green, hairy-leaved bushes. We are so
small, they meet over our head, and we sit among them, and kiss them, and
they love us back; it seems as though they were alive.

One day we sit there and look up at the blue sky, and down at our fat
little knees; and suddenly it strikes us, Who are we? This I, what is it?
We try to look in upon ourselves, and ourself beats back upon ourself.
Then we get up in great fear and run home as hard as we can. We can't tell
any one what frightened us. We never quite lose that feeling of self
again.

III.

And then a new time rises. We are seven years old. We can read now--read
the Bible. Best of all we like the story of Elijah in his cave at Horeb,
and the still small voice.

One day, a notable one, we read on the kopje, and discover the fifth
chapter of Matthew, and read it all through. It is a new gold-mine. Then
we tuck the Bible under our arm and rushed home. They didn't know it was
wicked to take your things again if some one took them, wicked to go to
law, wicked to--! We are quite breathless when we get to the house; we
tell them we have discovered a chapter they never heard of; we tell them
what it says. The old wise people tell us they knew all about it. Our
discovery is a mare's-nest to them; but to us it is very real. The ten
commandments and the old "Thou shalt" we have heard about long enough and
don't care about it; but this new law sets us on fire.

We will deny ourself. Our little wagon that we have made, we give to the
little Kaffers. We keep quiet when they throw sand at us (feeling, oh, so
happy). We conscientiously put the cracked teacup for ourselves at
breakfast, and take the burnt roaster-cake. We save our money, and buy
threepence of tobacco for the Hottentot maid who calls us names. We are
exotically virtuous. At night we are profoundly religious; even the
ticking watch says, "Eternity, eternity! hell, hell, hell!" and the silence
talks of God, and the things that shall be.

Occasionally, also, unpleasantly shrewd questions begin to be asked by some
one, we know not who, who sits somewhere behind our shoulder. We get to
know him better afterward.

Now we carry the questions to the grown-up people, and they give us
answers. We are more or less satisfied for the time. The grown-up people
are very wise, and they say it was kind of God to make hell, and very
loving of Him to send men there; and besides, he couldn't help Himself, and
they are very wise, we think, so we believe them--more or less.

IV.

Then a new time comes, of which the leading feature is, that the shrewd
questions are asked louder. We carry them to the grown-up people; they
answer us, and we are not satisfied.

And now between us and the dear old world of the senses the spirit-world
begins to peep in, and wholly clouds it over. What are the flowers to us?
They are fuel waiting for the great burning. We look at the walls of the
farmhouse and the matter-of-fact sheep-kraals, with the merry sunshine
playing over all; and do not see it. But we see a great white throne, and
him that sits on it. Around Him stand a great multitude that no man can
number, harpers harping with their harps, a thousand times ten thousand,
and thousands of thousands. How white are their robes, washed in the blood
of the Lamb! And the music rises higher, and rends the vault of heaven
with its unutterable sweetness. And we, as we listen, ever and anon, as it
sinks on the sweetest, lowest note, hear a groan of the damned from below.
We shudder in the sunlight.

"The torment," says Jeremy Taylor, whose sermons our father reads aloud in
the evening, "comprises as many torments as the body of man has joints,
sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and real fire of
which this temporal fire is but a painted fire. What comparison will there
be between burning for a hundred years' space and to be burning without
intermission as long as God is God!"

We remember the sermon there in the sunlight. One comes and asks why we
sit there nodding so moodily. Ah, they do not see what we see.

"A moment's time, a narrow space,
Divides me from that heavenly place,
Or shuts me up in hell."

So says Wesley's hymn, which we sing evening by evening. What matter
sunshine and walls, men and sheep?

"The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen
are eternal." They are real.

The Bible we bear always in our breast; its pages are our food; we learn to
repeat it; we weep much, for in sunshine and in shade, in the early morning
or the late evening, in the field or in the house, the devil walks with us.
He comes to a real person, copper-coloured face, head a little on one side,
forehead knit, asking questions. Believe me, it were better to be followed
by three deadly diseases than by him. He is never silenced--without mercy.
Though the drops of blood stand out on your heart he will put his question.
Softly he comes up (we are only a wee bit child); "Is it good of God to
make hell? Was it kind of Him to let no one be forgiven unless Jesus
Christ died?"

Then he goes off, and leaves us writhing. Presently he comes back.

"Do you love Him?"--waits a little. "Do you love Him? You will be lost if
you don't."

We say we try to.

"But do you?" Then he goes off.

It is nothing to him if we go quite mad with fear at our own wickedness.
He asks on, the questioning devil; he cares nothing what he says. We long
to tell some one, that they may share our pain. We do not yet know that
the cup of affliction is made with such a narrow mouth that only one lip
can drink at a time, and that each man's cup is made to match his lip.

One day we try to tell some one. Then a grave head is shaken solemnly at
us. We are wicked, very wicked, they say we ought not to have such
thoughts. God is good, very good. We are wicked, very wicked. That is
the comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not the
sense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart,
filling it with sand, making all life a dust-bin for us?

Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creep
over this, God's earth, and move among His believing men. Hell is the one
place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go. This
is the comfort we get from the old.

And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look at us
wondering, and lovely little lips say:

"If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you not think
of something else, and forget?"

Forget! We turn away and shrink into ourself. Forget, and think of other
things! Oh, God! do they not understand that the material world is but a
film, through every pore of which God's awful spirit world is shining
through on us? We keep as far from others as we can.

One night, a rare clear moonlight night, we kneel in the window; every one
else is asleep, but we kneel reading by the moonlight. It is a chapter in
the prophets, telling how the chosen people of God shall be carried on the
Gentiles' shoulders. Surely the devil might leave us alone; there is not
much to handle for him there. But presently he comes.

"Is it right there should be a chosen people? To Him, who is father to
all, should not all be dear?"

How can we answer him? We were feeling so good till he came. We put our
head down on the Bible and blister it with tears. Then we fold our hands
over our head and pray, till our teeth grind together. Oh, that from that
spirit-world, so real and yet so silent, that surrounds us, one word would
come to guide us! We are left alone with this devil; and God does not
whisper to us. Suddenly we seize the Bible, turning it round and round,
and say hurriedly:

"It will be God's voice speaking to us; His voice as though we heard it."

We yearn for a token from the inexorably Silent One.

We turn the book, put our finger down on a page, and bend to read by the
moonlight. It is God's answer. We tremble.

"Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and
took Titus with me also."

For an instant our imagination seizes it; we are twisting, twirling, trying
to make an allegory. The fourteen years are fourteen months; we are Paul
and the devil is Barnabas, Titus is-- Then a sudden loathing comes to us:
we are liars and hypocrites, we are trying to deceive ourselves. What is
Paul to us--and Jerusalem? We are Barnabas and Titus? We know not the
men. Before we know we seize the book, swing it round our head, and fling
it with all our might to the further end of the room. We put down our head
again and weep.

Youth and ignorance; is there anything else that can weep so? It is as
though the tears were drops of blood congealed beneath the eyelids; nothing
else is like those tears. After a long time we are weak with crying, and
lie silent, and by chance we knock against the wood that stops the broken
pane. It falls. Upon our hot stiff face a sweet breath of wind blows. We
raise our head, and with our swollen eyes look out at the beautiful still
world, and the sweet night-wind blows in upon us, holy and gentle, like a
loving breath from the lips of God. Over us a deep peace comes, a calm,
still joy; the tears now flow readily and softly. Oh, the unutterable
gladness! At last, at last we have found it! "The peace with God." "The
sense of sins forgiven." All doubt vanished, God's voice in the soul, the
Holy Spirit filling us! We feel Him! We feel Him! Oh, Jesus Christ,
through you, through you this joy! We press our hands upon our breast and
look upward with adoring gladness. Soft waves of bliss break through us.
"The peace with God." "The sense of sins forgiven." Methodists and
revivalists say the words, and the mocking world shoots out its lip, and
walks by smiling--"Hypocrite."

There are more fools and fewer hypocrites than the wise world dreams of.
The hypocrite is rare as icebergs in the tropics; the fool common as
buttercups beside a water-furrow: whether you go this way or that you
tread on him; you dare not look at your own reflection in the water but you
see one. There is no cant phrase, rotten with age, but it was the dress of
a living body; none but at heart it signifies a real bodily or mental
condition which some have passed through.

After hours and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire to
appease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inch of
nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endure
longer, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Up
creeps the deadly delicious calm.

"I have blotted out as a cloud thy sins, and as a thick cloud thy
trespasses, and will remember them no more for ever." We weep with soft
transporting joy.

A few experience this; many imagine they experience it, one here and there
lies about it. In the main, "The peace with God; a sense of sins
forgiven," stands for a certain mental and physical reaction. Its reality
those know who have felt it.

And we, on that moonlight night, put down our head on the window, "Oh, God!
we are happy, happy; thy child forever. Oh, thank you, God!" and we drop
asleep.

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. Across the bounds of sleep
our grief follows us. When we wake in the night we are sitting up in bed
weeping bitterly, or find ourself outside in the moonlight, dressed, and
walking up and down, and wringing our hands, and we cannot tell how we came
there. So pass two years, as men reckon them.

V.

Then a new time.

Before us there were three courses possible--to go mad, to die, to sleep.

We take the latter course; or nature takes it for us.

All things take rest in sleep; the beasts, birds, the very flowers close
their eyes, and the streams are still in winter; all things take rest; then
why not the human reason also? So the questioning devil in us drops
asleep, and in that sleep a beautiful dream rises for us. Though you hear
all the dreams of men, you will hardly find a prettier one than ours. It
ran so:

In the centre of all things is a mighty Heart, which, having begotten all
things, loves them; and, having born them into life, beats with great
throbs of love towards them. No death for His dear insects, no hell for
His dear men, no burning up for His dear world--His own, own world that he
has made. In the end all will be beautiful. Do not ask us how we make our
dream tally with facts; the glory of a dream is this--that it despises
facts, and makes its own. Our dream saves us from going mad; that is
enough.

Its peculiar point of sweetness lay here. When the Mighty Heart's yearning
of love became too great for other expression, it shaped itself into the
sweet Rose of heaven, the beloved Man-god.

Jesus! you Jesus of our dream! how we loved you; no Bible tells of you as
we knew you. Your sweet hands held ours fast; your sweet voice said
always, "I am here, my loved one, not far off; put your arms about me, and
hold fast."

We find Him in everything in those days. When the little weary lamb we
drive home drags its feet, we seize on it, and carry it with its head
against our face. His little lamb! We feel we have got Him.

When the drunken Kaffer lies by the road in the sun we draw his blanket
over his head, and put green branches of milk-bush on it. His Kaffer; why
should the sun hurt him?

In the evening, when the clouds lift themselves like gates, and the red
lights shine through them, we cry; for in such glory He will come, and the
hands that ache to touch Him will hold him, and we shall see the beautiful
hair and eyes of our God. "Lift up your heads, O, ye gates; and be ye
lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and our King of glory shall come in!"

The purple flowers, the little purple flowers, are His eyes, looking at us.
We kiss them, and kneel alone on the flat, rejoicing over them. And the
wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for Him, and the desert
shall rejoice and blossom as a rose.

If ever, in our tearful, joyful ecstasy, the poor, sleepy, half-dead devil
should raise his head, we laugh at him. It is not his hour now.

"If there should be a hell, after all!" he mutters. "If your God should be
cruel! If there should be no God! If you should find out it is all
imagination! If--"

We laugh at him. When a man sits in the warm sunshine, do you ask him for
proof of it? He feels--that is all. And we feel--that is all. We want no
proof of our God. We feel, we feel!

We do not believe in our God because the Bible tells us of Him. We believe
in the Bible because He tells us of it. We feel Him, we feel Him, we feel-
-that is all! And the poor, half-swamped devil mutters:

"But if the day should come when you do not feel?"

And we laugh and cry him down.

"It will never come--never," and the poor devil slinks to sleep again, with
his tail between his legs. Fierce assertion many times repeated is hard to
stand against; only time separates the truth from the lie. So we dream on.

One day we go with our father to town, to church. The townspeople rustle
in their silks, and the men in their sleek cloth, and settle themselves in
their pews, and the light shines in through the windows on the artificial
flowers in the women's bonnets. We have the same miserable feeling that we
have in a shop where all the clerks are very smart. We wish our father
hadn't brought us to town, and we were out on the karoo. Then the man in
the pulpit begins to preach. His text is "He that believeth not shall be
damned."

The day before the magistrate's clerk, who was an atheist, has died in the
street struck by lightning.

The man in the pulpit mentions no name; but he talks of "The hand of God
made visible amongst us." He tells us how, when the white stroke fell,
quivering and naked, the soul fled, robbed of his earthly filament, and lay
at the footstool of God; how over its head has been poured out the wrath of
the Mighty One, whose existence it has denied; and, quivering and
terrified, it has fled to the everlasting shade.

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? While the atheist lay
wondering and afraid, God bent down and said: "My child, here I am--I,
whom you have not known; I, whom you have not believed in; I am here. I
sent My messenger, the white sheet-lightning, to call you home. I am
here."

Then the poor soul turned to the light--its weakness and pain were gone
forever.

Have they not known, have they not heard, who it is rules?

"For a little moment have I hidden my face from thee; but with everlasting
kindness will I have mercy upon thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer."

We mutter on to ourselves, till some one pulls us violently by the arm to
remind us we are in church. We see nothing but our own ideas.

Presently every one turns to pray. There are six hundred souls lifting
themselves to the Everlasting light.

Behind us sit two pretty ladies; one hands her scent-bottle softly to the
other, and a mother pulls down her little girl's frock. One lady drops her
handkerchief; a gentleman picks it up; she blushes. The women in the choir
turn softly the leaves of their tune-books, to be ready when the praying is
done. It is as though they thought more of the singing than the
Everlasting Father. Oh, would it not be more worship of Him to sit alone
in the karoo and kiss one little purple flower that he had made? Is it not
mockery? Then the thought comes, "What doest thou here, Elijah?" We who
judge, what are we better than they?--rather worse. Is it any excuse to
say, "I am but a child and must come?" Does God allow any soul to step in
between the spirit he made and himself? What do we there in that place,
where all the words are lies against the All Father? Filled with horror,
we turn and flee out of the place. On the pavement we smite our foot, and
swear in our child's soul never again to enter those places where men come
to sing and pray. We are questioned afterward. Why was it we went out of
the church.

How can we explain?--we stand silent. Then we are pressed further, and we
try to tell. Then a head is shaken solemnly at us. No one can think it
wrong to go to the house of the Lord; it is the idle excuse of a wicked
boy. When will we think seriously of our souls, and love going to church?
We are wicked, very wicked. And we--we slink away and go alone to cry.
Will it be always so? 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; but on the path to truth, at every
step you set your foot down on your own heart.

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