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Olive Schreiner. The Story of an African Farm, a novel. (page 1 of 14) |
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This etext was prepared by Sue Asscher
The Story of an African Farm
by
Ralph Iron
(Olive Schreiner)
Preface.
I have to thank cordially the public and my critics for the reception they
have given this little book.
Dealing with a subject that is far removed from the round of English daily
life, it of necessity lacks the charm that hangs about the ideal
representation of familiar things, and its reception has therefore been the
more kindly.
A word of explanation is necessary. Two strangers appear on the scene, and
some have fancied that in the second they have again the first, who returns
in a new guise. Why this should be we cannot tell; unless there is a
feeling that a man should not appear upon the scene, and then disappear,
leaving behind him no more substantial trace than a mere book; that he
should return later on as husband or lover, to fill some more important
part than that of the mere stimulator of thought.
Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage
method. According to that each character is duly marshalled at first, and
ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crises each
one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will
stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of
completeness. But there is another method - the method of the life we all
lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going
of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When
the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the
curtain falls no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are
blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a
spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight
cannot hear his breathing. Life may be painted according to either method;
but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the
one cut cruelly upon the other.
It has been suggested by a kind critic that he would better have liked the
little book if it had been a history of wild adventure; of cattle driven
into inaccessible kranzes by Bushmen; "of encounters with ravening lions,
and hair-breadth escapes." This could not be. Such works are best written
in Piccadilly or in the Strand: there the gifts of the creative
imagination, untrammelled by contact with any fact, may spread their wings.
But, should one sit down to paint the scenes among which he has grown, he
will find that the facts creep in upon him. Those brilliant phases and
shapes which the imagination sees in far-off lands are not for him to
portray. Sadly he must squeeze the colour from his brush, and dip it into
the gray pigments around him. He must paint what lies before him.
R. Iron.
...
"We must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark
mirror of his mind; or must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping
powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would
understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions that will rule his
life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be found in the cradle of the
child."
Alexis de Tocqueville.
...
Glossary.
Several Dutch and Colonial words occurring in this work, the subjoined
Glossary is given, explaining the principal.
Alle wereld! - Gosh!
Aasvogels - Vultures.
Benauwdheid - Indigestion.
Brakje - A little cur of low degree.
Bultong - Dried meat.
Coop - Hide and Seek.
Inspan - To harness.
Kapje - A sun-bonnet.
Karoo - The wide sandy plains in some parts of South Africa.
Karoo-bushes - The bushes that take the place of grass on these plains.
Kartel - The wooden-bed fastened in an ox-wagon.
Kloof - A ravine.
Kopje - A small hillock, or "little head."
Kraal - The space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches,
into which sheep or cattle are driven at night.
Mealies - Indian corn.
Meerkat - A small weazel-like animal.
Meiboss - Preserved and dried apricots.
Nachtmaal - The Lord's Supper.
Oom - Uncle.
Outspan - To unharness, or a place in the field where one unharnesses.
Pap - Porridge.
Predikant - Parson.
Riem - Leather rope.
Sarsarties - Food.
Sleg - Bad.
Sloot - A dry watercourse.
Spook - To haunt, a ghost.
Stamp-block - A wooden block, hollowed out, in which mealies are placed to
be pounded before being cooked.
Stoep - Porch.
Tant or Tante - Aunt.
Upsitting - In Boer courtship the man and girl are supposed to sit up
together the whole night.
Veld - Open country.
Velschoen - Shoes of undressed leather.
Vrijer - Available man.
Contents.
Part I.
Chapter 1.I. Shadows From Child Life.
Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.
Chapter 1.III. I Was A Stranger, and Ye Took Me In.
Chapter 1.IV. Blessed is He That Believeth.
Chapter 1.V. Sunday Services.
Chapter 1.VI. Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest.
Chapter 1.VII. He Sets His Trap.
Chapter 1.VIII. He Catches the Old Bird.
Chapter 1.IX. He Sees A Ghost.
Chapter 1.X. He Shows His Teeth.
Chapter 1.XI. He Snaps.
Chapter 1.XII. He Bites.
Chapter 1.XIII. He Makes Love.
Part II.
Chapter 2.I. Times and Seasons.
Chapter 2.II. Waldo's Stranger.
Chapter 2.III. Gregory Rose Finds His Affinity.
Chapter 2.IV. Lyndall.
Chapter 2.V. Tant Sannie Holds An Upsitting, and Gregory Writes A Letter.
Chapter 2.VI. A Boer-wedding.
Chapter 2.VII. Waldo Goes Out to Taste Life, and Em Stays At Home and
Tastes It.
Chapter 2.VIII. The Kopje.
Chapter 2.IX. Lyndall's Stranger.
Chapter 2.X. Gregory Rose Has An Idea.
Chapter 2.XI. An Unfinished Letter.
Chapter 2.XII. Gregory's Womanhood.
Chapter 2.XIII. Dreams.
Chapter 2.XIV. Waldo Goes Out to Sit in the Sunshine.
THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM
Part I.
Chapter 1.I. Shadows From Child-Life.
...
The Watch.
The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the
wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted
karoo bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the
milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird
and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.
In one spot only was the solemn monotony of the plain broken. Near the
centre a small solitary kopje rose. Alone it lay there, a heap of round
ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant's grave. Here and
there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among
its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly-pears lifted their
thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their broad
fleshy leaves. At the foot of the kopje lay the homestead. First, the
stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffer huts; beyond them the dwelling-house -
a square, red-brick building with thatched roof. 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 the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the Boer-
woman, rolled heavily in her sleep.
She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes, and the night was
warm and the room close, and she dreamed bad dreams. Not of the ghosts and
devils that so haunted her waking thoughts; not of her second husband the
consumptive Englishman, whose grave lay away beyond the ostrich-camps, nor
of her first, the young Boer; but only of the sheep's trotters she had
eaten for supper that night. She dreamed that one stuck fast in her
throat, and she rolled her huge form from side to side, and snorted
horribly.
In the next room, where the maid had forgotten to close the shutter, the
white moonlight fell in in a flood, and made it light as day. There were
two small beds against the wall. In one lay a yellow-haired child, with a
low forehead and a face of freckles; but the loving moonlight hid defects
here as elsewhere, and showed only the innocent face of a child in its
first sweet sleep.
The figure in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it
was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the
floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently
she opened her eyes and looked at the moonlight that was bathing her.
"Em!" she called to the sleeper in the other bed; but received no answer.
Then she drew the cover from the floor, turned her pillow, and pulling the
sheet over her head, went to sleep again.
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. The boy, who slept on a box
under the window, had just awakened from his first sleep. He drew the
quilt up to his chin, so that little peered above it but a great head of
silky black curls and the two black eyes. He stared about in the darkness.
Nothing was visible, not even the outline of one worm-eaten rafter, nor of
the deal table, on which lay the Bible from which his father had read
before they went to bed. No one could tell where the toolbox was, and
where the fireplace. There was something very impressive to the child in
the complete darkness.
At the head of his father's bed hung a great silver hunting watch. It
ticked loudly. The boy listened to it, and began mechanically to count.
Tick - tick - one, two, three, four! He lost count presently, and only
listened. Tick - tick - tick - tick!
It never waited; it went on inexorably; and every time it ticked a man
died! He raised himself a little on his elbow and listened. He wished it
would leave off.
How many times had it ticked since he came to lie down? A thousand times,
a million times, perhaps.
He tried to count again, and sat up to listen better.
"Dying, dying, dying!" said the watch; "dying, dying, dying!"
He heard it distinctly. Where were they going to, all those people?
He lay down quickly, and pulled the cover up over his head: but presently
the silky curls reappeared.
"Dying, dying, dying!" said the watch; "dying, dying, dying!"
He thought of the words his father had read that evening - "For wide is the
gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction and many there be
which go in thereat."
"Many, many, many!" said the watch.
"Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life,
and few there be that find it."
"Few, few, few!" said the watch.
The boy lay with his eyes wide open. He saw before him a long stream of
people, a great dark multitude, that moved in one direction; then they came
to the dark edge of the world and went over. He saw them passing on before
him, and there was nothing that could stop them. He thought of how that
stream had rolled on through all the long ages of the past - how the old
Greeks and Romans had gone over; the countless millions of China and India,
they were going over now. Since he had come to bed, how many had gone!
And the watch said, "Eternity, eternity, eternity!"
"Stop them! stop them!" cried the child.
And all the while the watch kept ticking on; just like God's will, that
never changes or alters, you may do what you please.
Great beads of perspiration stood on the boy's forehead. He climbed out of
bed and lay with his face turned to the mud floor.
"Oh, God, God! save them!" he cried in agony. "Only some, only a few!
Only for each moment I am praying here one!" He folded his little hands
upon his head. "God! God! save them!"
He grovelled on the floor.
Oh, the long, long ages of the past, in which they had gone over! Oh, the
long, long future, in which they would pass away! Oh, God! the long, long,
long eternity, which has no end!
The child wept, and crept closer to the ground.
...
The Sacrifice.
The farm by daylight was not as the farm by moonlight. The plain was a
weary flat of loose red sand, sparsely covered by dry karoo bushes, that
cracked beneath the tread like tinder, and showed the red earth everywhere.
Here and there a milk-bush lifted its pale-coloured rods, and in every
direction the ants and beetles ran about in the blazing sand. The red
walls of the farmhouse, the zinc roofs of the outbuildings, the stone walls
of the kraals, all reflected the fierce sunlight, till the eye ached and
blenched. No tree or shrub was to be seen far or near. The two sunflowers
that stood before the door, out-stared by the sun, drooped their brazen
faces to the sand; and the little cicada-like insects cried aloud among the
stones of the kopje.
The Boer-woman, seen by daylight, was even less lovely than when, in bed,
she rolled and dreamed. She sat on a chair in the great front room, with
her feet on a wooden stove, and wiped her flat face with the corner of her
apron, and drank coffee, and in Cape Dutch swore that the beloved weather
was damned. Less lovely, too, by daylight was the dead Englishman's child,
her little stepdaughter, upon whose freckles and low, wrinkled forehead the
sunlight had no mercy.
"Lyndall," the child said to her little orphan cousin, who sat with her on
the floor threading beads, "how is it your beads never fall off your
needle?"
"I try," said the little one gravely, moistening her tiny finger. "That is
why."
The overseer, seen by daylight, was a huge German, wearing a shabby suit,
and with a childish habit of rubbing his hands and nodding his head
prodigiously when pleased at anything. He stood out at the kraals in the
blazing sun, explaining to two Kaffer boys the approaching end of the
world. The boys, as they cut the cakes of dung, winked at each other, and
worked as slowly as they possibly could; but the German never saw it.
Away, beyond the kopje, Waldo his son herded the ewes and lambs - a small
and dusty herd - powdered all over from head to foot with red sand, wearing
a ragged coat and shoes of undressed leather, through whose holes the toes
looked out. His hat was too large, and had sunk down to his eyes,
concealing completely the silky black curls. It was a curious small
figure. His flock gave him little trouble. It was too hot for them to
move far; they gathered round every little milk-bush, as though they hoped
to find shade, and stood there motionless in clumps. He himself crept
under a shelving rock that lay at the foot of the kopje, stretched himself
on his stomach, and waved his dilapidated little shoes in the air.
Soon, from the blue bag where he kept his dinner, he produced a fragment of
slate, an arithmetic, and a pencil. Proceeding to put down a sum with
solemn and earnest demeanour, he began to add it up aloud: "Six and two is
eight - and four is twelve - and two is fourteen - and four is eighteen."
Here he paused. "And four is eighteen - and - four - is - eighteen." The last
was very much drawled. Slowly the pencil slipped from his fingers, and the
slate followed it into the sand. For a while he lay motionless, then began
muttering to himself, folded his little arms, laid his head down upon them,
and might have been asleep, but for the muttering sound that from time to
time proceeded from him. A curious old ewe came to sniff at him; but it
was long before he raised his head. When he did, he looked at the far-off
hills with his heavy eyes.
"Ye shall receive - ye shall receive - shall, shall, shall," he muttered.
He sat up then. Slowly the dulness and heaviness melted from his face; it
became radiant. Midday had come now, and the sun's rays were poured down
vertically; the earth throbbed before the eye.
The boy stood up quickly, and cleared a small space from the bushes which
covered it. Looking carefully, he found twelve small stones of somewhat
the same size; kneeling down, he arranged them carefully on the cleared
space in a square pile, in shape like an altar. Then he walked to the bag
where his dinner was kept; in it was a mutton chop and a large slice of
brown bread. The boy took them out and turned the bread over in his hand,
deeply considering it. Finally he threw it away and walked to the altar
with the meat, and laid it down on the stones. Close by in the red sand he
knelt down. Sure, never since the beginning of the world was there so
ragged and so small a priest. He took off his great hat and placed it
solemnly on the ground, then closed his eyes and folded his hands. He
prayed aloud:
"Oh, God, my Father, I have made Thee a sacrifice. I have only twopence,
so I cannot buy a lamb. If the lambs were mine, I would give Thee one; but
now I have only this meat; it is my dinner meat. Please, my Father, send
fire down from heaven to burn it. Thou hast said, Whosoever shall say unto
this mountain, Be thou cast into the sea, nothing doubting, it shall be
done. I ask for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen."
He knelt down with his face upon the ground, and he folded his hands upon
his curls. The fierce sun poured down its heat upon his head and upon his
altar. When he looked up he knew what he should see - the glory of God!
For fear his very heart stood still, his breath came heavily; he was half
suffocated. He dared not look up. Then at last he raised himself. Above
him was the quiet blue sky, about him the red earth; there were the clumps
of silent ewes and his altar - that was all.
He looked up - nothing broke the intense stillness of the blue overhead. He
looked round in astonishment, then he bowed again, and this time longer
than before.
When he raised himself the second time all was unaltered. Only the sun had
melted the fat of the little mutton chop, and it ran down upon the stones.
Then, the third time he bowed himself. When at last he looked up, some
ants had come to the meat on the altar. He stood up and drove them away.
Then he put his hat on his hot curls, and sat in the shade. He clasped his
hands about his knees. He sat to watch what would come to pass. The glory
of the Lord God Almighty! He knew he should see it.
"My dear God is trying me," he said; and he sat there through the fierce
heat of the afternoon. Still he watched and waited when the sun began to
slope, and when it neared the horizon and the sheep began to cast long
shadows across the karoo, he still sat there. He hoped when the first rays
touched the hills till the sun dipped behind them and was gone. Then he
called his ewes together, and broke down the altar, and threw the meat far,
far away into the field.
He walked home behind his flock. His heart was heavy. He reasoned so:
"God cannot lie. I had faith. No fire came. I am like Cain - I am not
His. He will not hear my prayer. God hates me."
The boy's heart was heavy. When he reached the kraal gate the two girls
met him.
"Come," said the yellow-haired Em, "let us play coop." There is still time
before it gets quite dark. You, Waldo, go and hide on the kopje; Lyndall
and I will shut eyes here, and we will not look."
The girls hid their faces in the stone wall of the sheep-kraal, and the boy
clambered half way up the kopje. He crouched down between two stones and
gave the call. Just then the milk-herd came walking out of the cow-kraal
with two pails. He was an ill-looking Kaffer.
"Ah!" thought the boy, "perhaps he will die tonight, and go to hell! I
must pray for him, I must pray!"
Then he thought - "Where am I going to?" and he prayed desperately.
"Ah! this is not right at all," little Em said, peeping between the stones,
and finding him in a very curious posture. "What are you doing Waldo? It
is not the play, you know. You should run out when we come to the white
stone. Ah, you do not play nicely."
"I - I will play nicely now," said the boy, coming out and standing
sheepishly before them; "I - I only forgot; I will play now."
"He has been to sleep," said freckled Em.
"No," said beautiful little Lyndall, looking curiously at him: "he has
been crying."
She never made a mistake.
...
The Confession.
One night, two years after, the boy sat alone on the kopje. He had crept
softly from his father's room and come there. He often did, because, when
he prayed or cried aloud, his father might awake and hear him; and none
knew his great sorrow, and none knew his grief, but he himself, and he
buried them deep in his heart.
He turned up the brim of his great hat and looked at the moon, but most at
the leaves of the prickly pear that grew just before him. They glinted,
and glinted, and glinted, just like his own heart - cold, so hard, and very
wicked. His physical heart had pain also; it seemed full of little bits of
glass, that hurt. He had sat there for half an hour, and he dared not go
back to the close house.
He felt horribly lonely. There was not one thing so wicked as he in all
the world, and he knew it. He folded his arms and began to cry - not aloud;
he sobbed without making any sound, and his tears left scorched marks where
they fell. He could not pray; he had prayed night and day for so many
months; and tonight he could not pray. When he left off crying, he held
his aching head with his brown hands. If one might have gone up to him and
touched him kindly; poor, ugly little thing! Perhaps his heart was almost
broken.
With his swollen eyes he sat there on a flat stone at the very top of the
kopje; and the tree, with every one of its wicked leaves, blinked, and
blinked, and blinked at him. Presently he began to cry again, and then
stopped his crying to look at it. He was quiet for a long while, then he
knelt up slowly and bent forward. There was a secret he had carried in his
heart for a year. He had not dared to look at it; he had not whispered it
to himself, but for a year he had carried it. "I hate God!" he said. The
wind took the words and ran away with them, among the stones, and through
the leaves of the prickly pear. He thought it died away half down the
kopje. He had told it now!
"I love Jesus Christ, but I hate God."
The wind carried away that sound as it had done the first. Then he got up
and buttoned his old coat about him. He knew he was certainly lost now; he
did not care. If half the world were to be lost, why not he too? He would
not pray for mercy any more. Better so - better to know certainly. It was
ended now. Better so.
He began scrambling down the sides of the kopje to go home.
Better so! But oh, the loneliness, the agonized pain! for that night, and
for nights on nights to come! The anguish that sleeps all day on the heart
like a heavy worm, and wakes up at night to feed!
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, "Now deal us your
hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we
suffered when we were children."
The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense
loneliness, its intense agony.
Chapter 1.II. Plans and Bushman Paintings.
At last came the year of the great drought, the year of eighteen-sixty-two.
From end to end of the land the earth cried for water. Man and beast
turned their eyes to the pitiless sky, that like the roof of some brazen
oven arched overhead. On the farm, day after day, month after month, the
water in the dams fell lower and lower; the sheep died in the fields; the
cattle, scarcely able to crawl, tottered as they moved from spot to spot in
search of food. Week after week, month after month, the sun looked down
from the cloudless sky, till the karoo-bushes were leafless sticks, broken
into the earth, and the earth itself was naked and bare; and only the milk-
bushes, like old hags, pointed their shrivelled fingers heavenward, praying
for the rain that never came.
...
It was on an afternoon of a long day in that thirsty summer, that on the
side of the kopje furthest from the homestead the two girls sat. They were
somewhat grown since the days when they played hide-and-seek there, but
they were mere children still.
Their dress was of dark, coarse stuff; their common blue pinafores reached
to their ankles, and on their feet they wore home-made velschoen.
They sat under a shelving rock, on the surface of which were still visible
some old Bushman paintings, their red and black pigments having been
preserved through long years from wind and rain by the overhanging ledge;
grotesque oxen, elephants, rhinoceroses, and a one-horned beast, such as no
man ever has seen or ever shall.
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.
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