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(front)
By
(front)
First published. . . January 1923
Second Impression . . June 1923
(All rights reserved)
(preface)
The date and place of writing, affixed by herself, will be found in many
of these writings. Regarding the others, I am able to add a few notes.
"Who Knocks at the Door?" the latest in date, was published in
Fortnightly Review in November 1917. "The Buddhist
Priest's Wife" was written at Matjesfontein in 1891 and the
following year. "By the Banks of a Full River" probably refers
to the "great rains" of 1873, in which year she travelled by
coach from Kimberly to Cape Town, but it seems to have been written much
later. "The Wax Doll" and "Master Towser,"
obviously stories for children, were both written when she was a girl; the
latter, no doubt revised, was printed in 1881 in the New College
Magazine (in which also "Dream Life and Real Life" was
first printed), her brother being at that time Head Master of New College,
Eastbourne; "The Wax Doll" is the most carefully written and
preserved of
all these manuscripts, but I cannot recall that she ever mentioned it.
I desire heartily to thank Mr. Havelock Ellis, my wife's friend
and my own, for his kind and valuable help in making this selection.
S.C. CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER
Cape Town, South Africa, October 1922.
(front)
A light shone through the small window of the house, though it was past
midnight. Presently the upper half of the door opened and then the lower,
and the tall figure of a woman stepped out into the darkness. She closed
the door behind her and walked towards the back of the house where a large
round hut stood; beside it lay a pile of stumps and branches quite visible
when once the eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. The woman stooped and
broke off twigs till she had her apron full, and then returned slowly, and
went into the house.
The room to which she returned was a small, bare room, with brown
earthen walls and a mud floor; a naked deal table stood in the centre, and
a few dark
wooden chairs, home-made, with seats of undressed leather, stood round the walls. In the corner opposite the door was an open fireplace, and on the earthen hearth stood an iron three-foot, on which stood a large black kettle, under which coals were smouldering, though the night was hot and close. Against the wall on the left side of the room hung a gun-rack with three guns upon it, and below it a large hunting-watch hung from two nails by its silver chain.
In the corner by the fireplace was a little table with a
coffee-pot upon it and a dish containing cups and saucers covered
with water, and above it were a few shelves with crockery and a large
Bible; but the dim light of the tallow candle which burnt on the table,
with its wick of twisted rag, hardly made the corners visible. Beside the
table sat a young woman, her head resting on her folded arms, the light of
the tallow candle falling full on her head of pale flaxen hair, a little
tumbled, and drawn behind into a large knot. The arms crossed on the table,
from which the cotton sleeves had fallen back, were the full, rounded arms
of one very young.
The older woman, who had just entered, walked to the fireplace, and
kneeling down before it took from her apron the twigs and sticks she had
gathered and heaped them under the kettle till a blaze sprang up which
illumined the whole room. Then she rose up and sat down on a chair before
the fire, but facing
the table, with her hands crossed on her brown apron.
She was a woman of fifty, spare and broad-shouldered, with black
hair, already slightly streaked with grey; from below high, arched
eyebrows, and a high forehead, full dark eyes looked keenly, and a sharply
cut aquiline nose gave strength to the face; but the mouth below was
somewhat sensitive, and not over- full. She crossed and recrossed
her knotted hands on her brown apron.
The woman at the table moaned and moved her head from side to side.
"What time is it?" she asked.
The older woman crossed the room to where the hunting-watch hung
on the wall.
It showed a quarter-past one, she said, and went back to her seat
before the fire, and sat watching the figure beside the table, the
firelight bathing her strong upright form and sharp aquiline profile.
Nearly fifty years before her parents had left the Cape Colony, and had
set out on the long trek north-ward, and she, a young child, had
been brought with them. She had no remembrance of the colonial home. Her
first dim memories were of travelling in an ox-wagon; of dark nights
when a fire was lighted in the open air, and people sat round it on the
ground, and some faces seemed to stand out more than others in her memory
which she thought must be those of
her father and mother and of an old grandmother; she could remember lying awake in the back of the wagon while it was moving on, and the stars were shining down on her; and she had a vague memory of great wide plains with buck on them, which she thought must have been in the Free State. But the first thing which sprang out sharp and clear from the past was a day when she and another child, a little boy cousin of her own age, were playing among the bushes on the bank of a stream; she remembered how, suddenly, as they looked through the bushes, they saw black men leap out, and mount the ox-wagon outspanned under the trees; she remembered how they shouted and dragged people along, and stabbed them; she remembered how the blood gushed, and how they, the two young children among the bushes, lay flat on their stomachs and did not move or breathe, with that strange self-preserving instinct found in the young of animals or men who grow up in the open.
She remembered how black smoke came out at the back of the wagon and
then red tongues of flame through the top; and even that some of the
branches of the tree under which the wagon stood caught fire. She
remembered later, when the black men had gone, and it was dark, that they
were very hungry, and crept out to where the wagon had stood, and that they
looked about on the ground for any scraps of food they might pick up, and
that when they could not
find any they cried. She remembered nothing clearly after that till some men with large beards and large hats rode up on horseback: it might have been next day or the day after. She remembered how they jumped off their horses and took them up in their arms, and how they cried; but that they, the children, did not cry, they only asked for food. She remembered how one man took a bit of thick, cold roaster-cake out of his pocket, and gave it to her, and how nice it tasted. And she remembered that the men took them up before them on their horses, and that one man tied her close to him with a large red handkerchief.
In the years that came she learnt to know that that which she remembered
so clearly was the great and terrible day when, at Weenen, and in the
country round, hundreds of women and children and youths and old men fell
before the Zulus, and the assegais of Dingaan's braves drank
blood.
She learnt that on that day all of her house and name, from the
grandmother to the baby in arms, fell, and that she only and the boy
cousin, who had hidden with her among the bushes, were left of all her kin
in that Northern world. She learnt, too, that the man who tied her to him
with the red hand-kerchief took them back to his wagon, and that he
and his wife adopted them, and brought them up among their own
children.
She remembered, though less clearly than the day of the fire, how a few
years later they trekked away from Natal, and went through great mountain
ranges, ranges in and near which lay those places the world was to know
later as Laings Nek, and Amajuba, and Ingogo; Elands-laagte,
Nicholson Nek, and Spion Kop. She remembered how at last after many
wanderings they settled down near the Witwaters
Rand1;, where game was plentiful
and wild beasts were dangerous, but there were no natives, and they were
far from the English rule.
There the two children grew up among the children of those who had
adopted them, and were kindly treated by them as though they were their
own; it yet was but natural that these two of the same name and blood
should grow up with a peculiar tenderness for each other. And so it came to
pass that when they were both eighteen years old they asked consent of the
old people, who gave it gladly, that they should marry. For a time the
young couple lived on in the house with the old, but after three years they
gathered together all their few goods and in their wagon, with their guns
and ammunition and a few sheep and cattle, they moved away northwards to
found their own home.
For a time they travelled here and travelled there,
___________________1 "Witwaters
Rand"--"White water's ridge," now known as the
Rand, where Johannesburg and the great mines are situated.
Page 17
but at last they settled on a spot where game was plentiful and the soil good, and there among the low undulating slopes, near the bank of a dry sloot, the young man built at last, with his own hands, a little house of two rooms.
On the long slope across the sloot before the house, he ploughed a piece
of land and enclosed it, and he built kraals for his stock and so struck
root in the land and wandered no more. Those were brave, glad, free days to
the young couple. They lived largely on the game which the gun brought
down, antelope and wildebeest that wandered even past the doors at night;
and now and again a lion was killed: one no farther than the door of
the round hut behind the house where the meat and the milk were stored, and
two were killed at the kraals. Sometimes, too, traders came with their
wagons and in exchange for skins and fine horns sold sugar and coffee and
print and tan-cord, and such things as the little household had need
of. The lands yielded richly to them, in maize, and pumpkins, and
sweet-cane, and melons; and they had nothing to wish for. Then in
time three little sons were born to them, who grew as strong and vigorous
in the free life of the open veld as the young lions in the long grass and
scrub near the river four miles away. Those were joyous, free years for the
man and woman, in which disease, and carking care, and anxiety played no
part.
Then came a day when their eldest son was ten years old, and the father
went out a-hunting with his Kaffir servants: in the evening
they brought him home with a wound eight inches long in his side where a
lioness had torn him; they brought back her skin also, as he had shot her
at last in the hand-to-throat struggle. He lingered for three
days and then died. His wife buried him on the low slope to the left of the
house; she and her Kaffir servants alone made the grave and put him in it,
for there were no white men near. Then she and her sons lived on there; a
new root driven deep into the soil and binding them to it through the grave
on the hill-side. She hung her husband's large
hunting-watch up on the wall, and put three of his guns over it on
the rack, and the gun he had in his hand when he met his death she took
down and polished up every day; but one gun she always kept loaded at the
head of her bed in the inner room. She counted the stock every night and
saw that the Kaffirs ploughed the lands, and she saw to the planting and
watering of them herself.
Often as the years passed men of the country-side, and even from
far off, heard of the young handsome widow who lived alone with her
children and saw to her own stock and lands; and they came
a-courting. But many of them were afraid to say anything when once
they had come, and those who had spoken to her, when once she had answered
them, never came again.
About this time too the country-side began to fill in; and people came and settled as near as eight and ten miles away; and as people increased the game began to vanish, and with the game the lions, so that the one her husband killed was almost the last ever seen there. But there was still game enough for food, and when her eldest son was twelve years old, and she gave him his father's smallest gun to go out hunting with, he returned home almost every day with meat enough for the household tied behind his saddle. And as time passed she came also to be known through the country-side as a "wise woman." People came to her to ask advice about their illnesses, or to ask her to dress old wounds that would not heal; and when they questioned her whether she thought the rains would be early, or the game plentiful that year, she was nearly always right. So they called her a "wise woman" because neither she nor they knew any word in that up-country speech of theirs for the thing called "genius." So all things went well till the eldest son was eighteen, and the dark beard was beginning to sprout on his face, and his mother began to think that soon there might be a daughter in the house; for on Saturday evenings, when his work was done, he put on his best clothes and rode off to the next farm eight miles away, where was a young daughter. His mother always saw that he had a freshly ironed shirt waiting for him on his
bed, when he came home from the kraals on Saturday nights, and she made plans as to how they would build on two rooms for the new daughter. At this time he was training young horses to have them ready to sell when the traders came round: he was a fine rider and it was always his work. One afternoon he mounted a young horse before the door and it bucked and threw him. He had often fallen before, but this time his neck was broken. He lay dead with his head two feet from his mother's doorstep. They took up his tall, strong body and the next day the neighbours came from the next farm and they buried him beside his father, on the hill-side, and another root was struck into the soil. Then the three who were left in the little farm-house lived and worked on as before, for a year and more.
Then a small native war broke out, and the young burghers of the
district were called out to help. The second son was very young, but he was
the best shot in the district, so he went away with the others. Three
months after the men came back, but among the few who did not return was
her son. On a hot sunny afternoon, walking through a mealie field which
they thought was deserted and where the dried yellow stalks stood thick, an
assegai thrown from an unseen hand found him, and he fell there. His
comrades took him and buried him under a large thorn tree, and scraped the
earth smooth over him, that his grave
might not be found by others. So he was not laid on the rise to the left of the house with his kindred, but his mother's heart went often to that thorn tree in the far north. And now again there were only two in the little mud-house; as there had been years before when the young man and wife first settled there. She and her young lad were always together night and day, and did an that they aid together, as though they were mother and daughter. He was a fair lad, tall and gentle as his father had been before him, not huge and dark as his two elder brothers; but he seemed to ripen towards manhood early. When he was only sixteen the thick white down was already gathering heavy on his upper lip; his mother watched him narrowly, and had many thoughts in her heart. One evening as they sat twisting wicks for the candles together, she said to him, "You will be eighteen on your next birthday, my son, that was your father's age when he married me." He said, "Yes," and they spoke no more then. But later in the evening when they sat before the door she said to him: "We are very lonely here. I often long to hear the feet of a little child about the house, and to see one with your father's blood in it play before the door as you and your brothers played. Have you ever thought that you are the last of your father's name and blood left here in the north; that if you died there would be none left?" He said he had thought of it. Then
she told him she thought it would be well if he went away, to the part of the country where the people lived who had brought her up: several of the sons and daughters who had grown up with her had now grown up children. He might go down and from among them seek out a young girl whom he liked and who liked him; and if he found her, bring her back as a wife. The lad thought very well of his mother's plan. And when three months were passed, and the ploughing season was over, he rode away one day, on the best blackhorse they had, his Kaffir boy riding behind him on another, and his mother stood at the gable watching them ride away. For three months she heard nothing of him, for trains were not in those days, and letters came rarely and by chance, and neither he nor she could read or write. One afternoon she stood at the gable end as she always stood when her work was done, looking out along the road that came over the rise, and she saw a large tent-wagon coming along it, and her son walking beside it. She walked to meet it. When she had greeted her son and climbed into the wagon she found there a girl of fifteen with pale flaxen hair and large blue eyes whom he had brought home as his wife. Her father had given her the wagon and oxen as her wedding portion. The older woman's heart wrapt itself about the girl as though she had been the daughter she had dreamed to bear of her own body, and had never borne.
The three lived joyfully at the little house as though they were one
person. The young wife had been accustomed to live in a larger house, and
down south, where they had things they had not here. She had been to
school, and learned to read and write, and she could even talk a little
English; but she longed for none of the things which she had had; the
little brown house was home enough for her.
After a year a child came, but, whether it were that the mother was too
young, it only opened its eyes for an hour on the world and closed them
again. The young mother wept bitterly, but her husband folded his arms
about her, and the mother comforted both. "You are young, my
children, but we shall yet hear the sound of children's voices in the
house," she said; and after a little while the young mother was well
again and things went on peacefully as before in the little home.
But in the land things were not going on peacefully. That was the time
that the flag to escape from which the people had left their old homes in
the Colony, and had again left Natal when it followed them there, and had
chosen to face the spear of the savage, and the conflict with wild beasts,
and death by hunger and thirst in the wilderness rather than live under,
had by force and fraud unfurled itself over them again. For the moment a
great sullen silence brooded over the land. The people, slow of thought,
slow of
speech, determined in action, and unforgetting; sat still and waited. It was like the silence that rests over the land before an up-country thunderstorm breaks.
Then words came, "They have not even given us the free government
they promised"--then acts--the people rose. Even in that
remote country-side the men began to mount their horses, and with
their guns ride away to help. In the little mud-house the young wife
wept much when he said that he too was going. But when his mother helped
him pack his saddle-bags she helped too; and on the day when the men
from the next farm went, he rode away also with his gun by his side.
No direct news of the one they had sent away came to the waiting women
at the farm-house; then came fleet reports of the victories of
Ingogo and Amajuba. Then came an afternoon after he had been gone two
months. They had both been to the gable end to look out at the road, as
they did continually amid their work, and they had just come in to drink
their afternoon coffee when the Kaffir maid ran in to say she saw someone
coming along the road who looked like her master. The women ran out. It was
the white horse on which he had ridden away, but they almost doubted if it
were he. He rode bending on his saddle, with his chin on his breast and his
arm hanging at his side. At first they thought he had
been wounded, but when they had helped him from his horse and brought him into the house they found it was only a deadly fever which was upon him. He had crept home to them by small stages. Hardly had he any spirit left to tell them of Ingogo, Laings Nek, and Amajuba. For fourteen days he grew worse and on the fifteenth day he died. And the two women buried him where the rest of his kin lay on the hill-side.
And so it came to pass that on that warm star-light night the two
women were alone in the little mud-house with the stillness of the
veld about them; even their Kaffir servants asleep in their huts beyond the
kraals; and the very sheep lying silent in the starlight. They two were
alone in the little house, but they knew that before morning they would not
be alone, they were awaiting the coming of the dead man's child.
The young woman with her head on the table groaned. "If only my
husband were here still," she wailed. The old woman rose and stood
beside her, passing her hard, work-worn hand gently over her
shoulder as if she were a little child. At last she induced her to go and
lie down in the inner room. When she had grown quieter and seemed to have
fallen into a light sleep the old woman came to the front room again. It
was almost two o'clock and the fire had burned low under the large
kettle. She scraped the
coals together and went out of the front door to fetch more wood, and closed the door behind her. The night air struck cool and fresh upon her face after the close air of the house, the stars seemed to be growing lighter as the night advanced, they shot down their light as from a million polished steel points. She walked to the back of the house where, beyond the round hut that served as a store-room, the wood-pile lay. She bent down gathering sticks and chips till her apron was full, then slowly she raised herself and stood still. She looked upwards. It was a wonderful night. The white band of the Milky Way crossed the sky overhead, and from every side stars threw down their light, sharp as barbed spears, from the velvety blue-black of the sky. The woman raised her hand to her forehead as if pushing the hair farther off it, and stood motionless, looking up. After a long time she dropped her hand and began walking slowly towards the house. Yet once or twice on the way she paused and stood looking up. When she went into the house the woman in the inner room was again moving and moaning. She laid the sticks down before the fire and went into the next room. She bent down over the bed where the younger woman lay, and put her hand upon her. "My daughter," she said slowly, "be comforted. A wonderful thing has happened to me. As I stood out in the starlight it was as though a voice came down
to me and spoke. The child which will be born of you to-night will be a man-child and he will live to do great things for his land and for his people."
Before morning there was the sound of a little wail in the
mud-house: and the child who was to do great things for his
land and for his people was born.
The young mother had grown stouter, and lost her pink and white; she had
become a working-woman, but she still had the large knot of flaxen
hair behind her head and the large wondering eyes. She had many suitors in
those six years, but she sent them all away. She said the old woman looked
after the farm as well as any man might, and her son would be grown up by
and by. The grandmother's hair was a little more streaked with grey,
but it was as thick as ever, and her shoulders as upright; only some of her
front teeth had fallen out, which made her lips close more softly.
The great change was that wherever the women went there was the
flaxen-haired child to walk beside them holding on to their skirts
or clasping their hands.
The neighbours said they were ruining the child: they let his hair
grow long, like a girl's, because it curled; and they never let him
wear velschoens like other children but always shop boots; and his mother
sat up at night to iron his pinafores as if the next day were always a
Sunday.
But the women cared nothing for what was said; to them he was not as any
other child. He asked them strange questions they could not answer, and he
never troubled them by wishing to go and play with the little Kaffirs as
other children trouble. When neighbours came over and brought their
children with them he ran away and hid in the sloot to play by himself till
they were gone. No, he was not like other children!
When the women went to lie down on hot days after dinner sometimes, he
would say that he did not want to sleep; but he would not run about and
make a noise like other children--he would go and sit outside in the
shade of the house, on the front door-step, quite still, with his
little hands resting on his knees, and stare far away at the ploughed lands
on the slope, or the shadows nearer; the women would open the bedroom
window, and peep out to look at him as he sat there.
The child loved his mother and followed her about to the milk house, and
to the kraals; but he loved his grandmother best.
She told him stories.
When she went to the lands to see how the Kaffirs were ploughing he
would run at her side holding her dress; when they had gone a short way he
would tug gently at it and say, "Grandmother, tell me
things!"
And long before day broke, when it was yet quite dark, he would often
creep from the bed where he slept with his mother into his
grandmother's bed in the corner; he would put his arms round her neck
and stroke her face till she woke, and then whisper softly, "Tell me
stories!" and she would tell them to him in a low voice not to wake
the mother, till the cock crowed and it was time to get up and light the
candle and the fire.
But what he liked best of all were the hot, still summer nights, when
the women put their chairs before the door because it was too warm to go to
sleep; and he would sit on the stool at his grandmother's feet and
lean his head against her knees, and she would tell him on and on of the
things he liked to hear; and he would watch the stars as they slowly set
along the ridge, or the moonlight, casting bright-edged shadows from
the gable as she talked. Often after the mother had got sleepy and gone in
to bed the two sat there together.
The stories she told him were always true stories of the things she had
seen or of things she had heard. Sometimes they were stories of her own
childhood:
of the day when she and his grandfather hid among the bushes, and saw the wagon burnt; sometimes they were of the long trek from Natal to the Transvaal; sometimes of the things which happened to her and his grandfather when first they came to that spot among the ridges, of how there was no house there nor lands, only two bare grassy slopes when they outspanned their wagon there the first night; she told of a lion she once found when she opened the door in the morning, sitting, with paws crossed, upon the threshold, and how the grandfather jumped out of bed and reopened the door two inches, and shot it through the opening; the skin was kept in the round storehouse still, very old and mangy.
Sometimes she told him of the two uncles who were dead, and of his own
father, and of all they had been and done. But sometimes she told him of
things much farther off: of the old Colony where she had been born,
but which she could not remember, and of the things which happened there in
the old days. She told him of how the British had taken the Cape over, and
of how the English had hanged their men at the "Slachters Nek"
for resisting the English Government, and of how the friends and relations
had been made to stand round to see them hanged whether they would or no,
and of how the scaffold broke down as they were being hanged, and the
people looking on cried aloud, "It is the finger of God! They are
saved!" but how the British hanged them up again. She told him of the great trek in which her parents had taken part to escape from under the British flag; of the great battles with Moselikatse; and of the murder of Retief and his men by Dingaan, and of Dingaan's Day. She told him how the British Government followed them into Natal, and of how they trekked north and east to escape from it again; and she told him of the later things, of the fight at Laings Nek, and Ingogo, and Amajuba, where his father had been. Always she told the same story in exactly the same words over and over again, till the child knew them all by heart, and would ask for this and then that.
The story he loved best, and asked for more often than all the others,
made his grandmother wonder, because it did not seem to her the story a
child would best like; it was not a story of lion-hunting, or wars,
or adventures. Continually when she asked what she should tell him, he
said, "About the mountains!"
It was the story of how the Boer women in Natal when the English
Commissioner came to annex their country, collected to meet him and
pointing toward the Drakens Berg Mountains said, "We go across those
mountains to freedom or to death!"
More than once, when she was telling him the story, she saw him stretch
out his little arm and raise his hand, as though he were speaking.
One evening as he and his mother were coming
home from the milking kraals, and it was getting dark, and he was very tired, having romped about shouting among the young calves and kids all the evening, he held her hand tightly.
"Mother," he said suddenly, "when I am grown up, I am
going to Natal."
"Why, my child!" she asked him; "there are none of our
family living there now."
He waited a little, then said, very slowly, "I am going to go and
try to get our land back!"
His mother started; if there were one thing she was more firmly resolved
on in her own mind than any other it was that he should never go to the
wars. She began to talk quickly of the old white cow who had kicked the
pail over as she was milked, and when she got to the house she did not even
mention to the grandmother what had happened; it seemed better to
forget.
One night in the rainy season when it was damp and chilly they sat round
the large fireplace in the front room.
Outside the rain was pouring in torrents and you could hear the water
rushing in the great dry sloot before the door. His grandmother, to amuse
him, had sprung some dried menlies in the great black pot and sprinkled
them with sugar, and now he sat on the stoof at her feet with a large lump
of the sticky sweetmeat in his hand, watching the fire. His grandmother
from above him was watching it also, and his mother in her elbow-chair on the other side of the fire had her eyes half closed and was nodding already with the warmth of the room and her long day's work. The child sat so quiet, the hand with the lump of sweetmeat resting on his knee, that his grandmother thought he had gone to sleep too. Suddenly he said without looking up, "Grandmother?"
"Yes."
He waited rather a long time, then said slowly, "Grandmother, did
God make the English too?"
She also waited for a while, then she said, "Yes, my child; He
made all things."
They were silent again, and there was no sound but of the rain falling
and the fire cracking and the sloot rushing outside. Then he threw his head
backwards on to his grandmother's knee and looking up into her face,
said, "But, grandmother, why did He make them?"
Then she too was silent for a long time. "My child," at last
she said, "we cannot judge the ways of the Almighty. He does that
which seems good in His own eyes."
The child sat up and looked back at the fire. Slowly he tapped his knee
with the lump of sweetmeat once or twice; then he began to munch it; and
soon the mother started wide awake and said it was time for all to go to
bed.
The next morning his grandmother sat on the front doorstep cutting beans
in an iron basin; he sat beside her on the step pretending to cut too, with
a short, broken knife. Presently he left off and rested his hands on his
knees, looking away at the hedge beyond, with his small forehead knit tight
between the eyes.
"Grandmother," he said suddenly, in a small, almost shrill
voice, "do the English want all the lands of
all the people?"
The handle of his grandmother's knife as she cut clinked against
the iron side of the basin. "All they can get," she said.
After a while he made a little movement almost like a sigh, and took up
his little knife again and went on cutting.
Some time after that, when a trader came by,
his grandmother bought him a spelling-book and a slate and pencils,
and his mother began to teach him to read and write. When she had taught
him for a year he knew all she did. Sometimes when she was setting him a
copy and left a letter out in a word, he would quietly take the pencil when
she set it down and put the letter in, not with any idea of correcting her,
but simply because it must be there.
Often at night when the child had gone to bed early, tired out with his
long day's play, and the two women were left in the front room with
the tallow candle
burning on the table between them, then they talked of his future.
Ever since he had been born everything they had earned had been put away
in the wagon chest under the grandmother's bed. When the traders with
their wagons came round the women bought nothing except a few groceries and
clothes for the child; even before they bought a yard of cotton print for a
new apron they talked long and solemnly as to whether the old one might not
be made to do by repatching; and they mixed much more dry pumpkin and corn
with their coffee than before he was born. It was to earn more money that
the large new piece of land had been added to the lands before the
house.
They were going to have him educated. First he was to be taught all they
could at home, then to be sent away to a great school in the old Colony,
and then he was to go over the sea to Europe and come back an advocate or a
doctor or a parson. The grandmother had made a long journey to the next
town, to find out from the minister just how much it would cost to do it
all.
In the evenings when they sat talking it over the mother generally
inclined to his becoming a parson. She never told the grandmother why, but
the real reason was because parsons do not go to the wars. The grandmother
generally favoured his becoming an advocate, because he might become a
judge. Some-
times they sat discussing these matters till the candle almost burnt out.
"Perhaps, one day," the mother would at last say, "he
may yet become President!"
Then the grandmother would slowly refold her hands across her apron and
say softly, "Who knows?--who knows?"
Often they would get the box out from under the bed (looking carefully
across to the corner to see he was fast asleep) and would count out all the
money, though each knew to a farthing how much was there; then they would
make it into little heaps, so much for this, so much for that, and then
they would count on their fingers how many good seasons it would take to
make the rest, and how old he would be.
When he was eight and had learnt all his mother could teach him, they
sent him to school every day on an adjoining farm six miles off, where the
people had a schoolmaster. Every day he rode over on the great white horse
his father went to the wars with; his mother was afraid to let him ride
alone at first, but his grandmother said he must learn to do everything
alone. At four o'clock when he came back one or other of the women
was always looking out to see the little figure on the tall horse coming
over the ridge.
When he was eleven they gave him his father's
smallest gun; and one day not long after he came back with his first small buck. His mother had the skin dressed and bound with red, and she laid it as a mat under the table, and even the horns she did not throw away, and saved them in the round house, because it was his first.
When he was fourteen the schoolmaster said he could teach him no more;
that he ought to go to some larger school where they taught Latin and other
difficult things; they had not yet money enough and he was not quite old
enough to go to the old Colony, so they sent him first to the
High-veld, where his mother's relations lived and where there
were good schools, where they taught the difficult things; he could live
with his mother's relations and come back once a year for the
holidays.
They were great times when he came.
His mother made him koekies 1
and sasarties 2 and nice things
every day; and he used to sit on the stoof at her feet and let her play
with his hair like when he was quite small. With his grandmother he talked.
He tried to explain to her all he was learning, and he read the English
newspapers to her (she could neither read in English nor Dutch),
translating them. Most of all she liked his Atlas. They would sometimes sit
over it for half an hour in the evening tracing
___________________1 Koekies: little cakes.
___________________2 Sasarties: meat prepared in a certain
way.
Page 38
the different lands and talking of them. On the warm nights he used still to sit outside on the stool at her feet with his head against her knee, and they used to discuss things that were happening in other lands and in South Africa; and sometimes they sat there quite still together.
It was now he who had the most stories to tell; he had seen Krugersdorp,
and Johannesburg, and Pretoria; he knew the world; he was at Krugersdorp
when Dr. Jameson made his raid. Sometimes he sat for an hour, telling her
of things, and she sat quietly listening.
When he was seventeen, nearly eighteen, there was money enough in the
box to pay for his going to the Colony and then to Europe; and he came home
to spend a few months with them before he went.
He was very handsome now; not tall, and very slight, but with fair hair
that curled close to his head, and white hands like a town's man. All
the girls in the country-side were in love with him. They all wished
he would come and see them. But he seldom rode from home except to go to
the next farm where he had been at school. There lived little Aletta, who
was the daughter of the woman his uncle had loved before he went to the
Kaffir war and got killed. She was only fifteen years old, but they had
always been great friends. She netted him a purse of green silk. He said he
would take it with him to Europe, and
would show it her when he came back and was an advocate; and he gave her a book with her name written in it, which she was to show to him.
These were the days when the land was full of talk; it was said the
English were landing troops in South Africa, and wanted to have war. Often
the neighbours from the nearest farms would come to talk about it (there
were more farms now, the country was filling in, and the nearest railway
station was only a day's journey off), and they discussed matters.
Some said they thought there would be war; others again laughed, and said
it would be only Jameson and his white flag again. But the grandmother
shook her head, and if they asked her, "Why," she said,
"it will not be the war of a week, nor of a month; if it comes it
will be the war of years," but she would say nothing more.
Yet sometimes when she and her grandson were walking along together in
the lands she would talk.
Once she said: "It is as if a great heavy cloud hung just
above my head, as though I wished to press it back with my hands and could
not. It will be a great war--a great war. Perhaps the English
Government will take the land for a time, but they will not keep it. The
gold they have fought for will divide them, till they slay one another over
it."
Another day she said: "This land will be a great
land one day with one people from the sea to the north--but we shall not live to see it."
He said to her: "But how can that be when we are all of
different races?"
She said: "The land will make us one. Were not our fathers
of more than one race?"
Another day, when she and he were sitting by the table after dinner, she
pointed to a sheet of exercise paper, on which he had been working out a
problem and which was covered with algebraical symbols, and said, "In
fifteen years' time the Government of England will not have one piece
of land in all South Africa as large as that sheet of paper."
One night when the milking had been late and she and he were walking
down together from the kraals in the starlight she said to him:
"If this war comes let no man go to it lightly, thinking he will
surely return home, nor let him go expecting victory on the next day. It
will come at last, but not at first." "Sometimes," she
said, "I wake at night and it is as though the whole house were
filled with smoke--and I have to get up and go outside to breathe. It
is as though I saw my whole land blackened and desolate. But when I look up
it is as though a voice cried out to me, 'Have no
fear!'"
They were getting his things ready for him to go away after Christmas.
His mother was making him shirts and his grandmother was having a kaross of
jackals' skins made that he might take it with him to Europe where it was so cold. But his mother noticed that whenever the grandmother was in the room with him and he was not looking at her, her eyes were always curiously fixed on him as though they were questioning something. The hair was growing white and a little thin over her temples now; but her eyes were as bright as ever, and she could do a day's work with any man.
One day when the youth was at the kraals helping the Kaffir boys to mend
a wall, and the mother was kneading bread in the front room, and the
grandmother washing up the breakfast things, the son of the
Field-Cornet came riding over from his father's farm, which
was about twelve miles off. He stopped at the kraal and Jan and he stood
talking for some time, then they walked down to the farm-house, the
Kaffir boy leading the horse behind them. Jan stopped at the round store,
but the Field-Cornet's son went to the front door. The
grandmother asked him in, and handed him some coffee, and the mother, her
hands still in the dough, asked him how-things were going at his
father's farm, and if his mother's young turkeys had come out
well, and she asked if he had met Jan at the kraals. He answered the
questions slowly, and sipped his coffee. Then he put the cup down on the
table; and said suddenly in the same measured voice, staring at the wall in
front of him, that war had broken out, and his father had sent him round to call out all fighting burghers.
The mother took her hands out of the dough and stood upright beside the
trough as though paralysed. Then she cried in a high, hard voice, unlike
her own, "Yes, but Jan cannot go! He is hardly eighteen! He's
got to go and be educated in other lands! You can't take the only son
of a widow!"
"Aunt" said the young man slowly, "no one will make
him go."
The grandmother stood resting the knuckles of both hands on the table,
her eyes fixed on the young man. "He shall decide himself," she
said.
The mother wiped her hands from the dough and rushed past them and out
at the door; the grandmother followed slowly.
They found him in the shade at the back of the house, sitting on a
stump; he was cleaning the belt of his new Mauser which lay across his
knees.
"Jan," his mother cried, grasping his shoulder, "you
are not going away! You can't go! You must stay. You can go by
Delagoa Bay if there is fighting on the other side! There is plenty of
money!"
He looked softly up into her face with his blue eyes. "We have all
to be at the Field Cornet's at nine o'clock to-morrow
morning," he said. She wept aloud and argued.
His grandmother turned slowly without speaking,
and went back into the house. When she had given the Field Cornet's son another cup of coffee, and shaken hands with him, she went into the bedroom and opened the box in which her grandson's clothes were kept, to see which things he should take with him. After a time the mother came back too. He had kissed her and talked to her until she too had at last said it was right he should go.
All day they were busy. His mother baked him biscuits to take in his
bag, and his grandmother made a belt of two strips of leather; she sewed
them together herself and put a few sovereigns between the stitchings. She
said some of his comrades might need the money if he did not.
The next morning early he was ready. There were two saddle-bags
tied to his saddle and before it was strapped the kaross his grandmother
had made; she said it would be useful when he had to sleep on damp ground.
When he had greeted them, he rode away towards the rise: and the
women stood at the gable of the house to watch him.
When he had gone a little way he turned in his saddle, and they could
see he was smiling; he took off his hat and waved it in the air; the early
morning sunshine made his hair as yellow as the tassels that hang from the
head of ripening mealies. His mother covered her face with the sides of her
kappie and wept aloud; but the grandmother shaded her eyes with both her
hands and stood watching him till the figure passed out of sight over the ridge; and when it was gone and the mother returned to the house crying, she still stood watching the line against the sky.
The two women were very quiet during the next days, they worked hard,
and seldom spoke. After eight days there came a long letter from him (there
was now a post once a week from the station to the Field Cornet's).
He said he was well and in very good spirits. He had been to Krugersdorp,
and Johannesburg, and Pretoria; all the family living there were well and
sent greetings. He had joined a corps that was leaving for the front the
next day. He sent also a long message to Aletta, asking them to tell her he
was sorry to go away without saying good-bye; and he told his mother
how good the biscuits and biltong were she had put into his
saddle-bag; and he sent her a piece of
"vier-kleur" ribbon in the letter, to wear on her
breast.
The women talked a great deal for a day or two after this letter came.
Eight days after there was a short note from him, written in pencil in the
train on his way to the front. He said all was going well, and if he did
not write soon they were not to be anxious; he would write as often as he
could.
For some days the women discussed that note too.
Then came two weeks without a letter, the two
women became very silent. Every day they sent the Kaffir boy over to the Field Cornet's, even on the days when there was no post, to hear if there was any news.
Many reports were flying about the country-side. Some said that
an English armoured train had been taken on the western border; that there
had been fighting at Albertina, and in Natal. But nothing seemed quite
certain.
Another week passed.... Then the two women became very quiet.
The grandmother, when she saw her daughter-in-law left the
food untouched on her plate, said there was no need to be anxious; men at
the front could not always find paper and pencils to write with and might
be far from any post office. Yet night after night she herself would rise
from her bed saying she felt the house close, and go and walk up and down
outside.
Then one day suddenly all their servants left them except one Kaffir and
his wife, whom they had had for years, and the servants from the farms
about went also, which was a sign there had been news of much fighting; for
the Kaffirs hear things long before the white man knows them.
Three days after, as the women were clearing off the breakfast things,
the youngest son of the Field-Cornet, who was only fifteen and had
not gone to the
war with the others, rode up. He hitched his horse to the post, and came towards the door. The mother stepped forward to meet him and shook hands in the doorway.
"I suppose you have come for the carrot seed I promised your
mother? I was not able to send it, as our servants ran away," she
said, as she shook his hand. "There isn't a letter from Jan, is
there?" The lad said no, there was no letter from him, and shook
hands with the grandmother. He stood by the table instead of sitting
down.
The mother turned to the fireplace to get coals to put under the coffee
to rewarm it; but the grandmother stood leaning forward with her eyes fixed
on him from across the table. He felt uneasily in his breast pocket.
"Is there no news?" the mother said without looking round,
as she bent over the fire.
"Yes, there is news, Aunt."
She rose quickly and turned towards him, putting down the brazier on the
table. He took a letter out of his breast pocket. "Aunt, my father
said I must bring this to you. It came inside one to him and they asked him
to send one of us over with it."
The mother took the letter; she held it, examining the address.
"It looks to me like the writing of Sister Annie's
Paul," she said. "Perhaps there is news of Jan in
it"--she turned to them with a half-nervous smile--"they were always such friends."
"All is as God wills, Aunt," the young man said, looking
down fixedly at the top of his riding-whip.
But the grandmother leaned forward motionless, watching her
daughter-in-law as she opened the letter.
She began to read to herself, her lips moving slowly as she deciphered
it word by word.
Then a piercing cry rang through the roof of the little
mud-farm-house.
"He is dead! My boy is dead!"
She flung the letter on the table and ran out at the front door.
Far out across the quiet ploughed lands and over the veld to where the
kraals lay the cry rang. The Kaffir woman who sat outside her hut beyond
the kraals nursing her baby heard it and came down with her child across
her hip to see what was the matter. At the side of the round house she
stood motionless and open-mouthed, watching the woman, who paced up
and down behind the house with her apron thrown over her head and her hands
folded above it, crying aloud.
In the front room the grandmother, who had not spoken since he came,
took up the letter and put it in the lad's hands. "Read,"
she whispered.
And slowly the lad spelled it out.
'MY DEAR AUNT,
'I hope this letter finds you well.
The Commandant has asked me to write it.
'We had a great fight
four days ago, and Jan is dead. The Commandant says I must tell you how it
happened. Aunt, there were five of us first in a position on that koppie,
but two got killed, and then there were only three of us--Jan, and I,
and Uncle Peter's Frikkie. Aunt, the
khakies 1 were coming on all round
just like locusts, and the bullets were coming just like hail. It was bare
on that side of the koppie where we were, but we had plenty of cartridges.
We three took up a position where there were some small stones and we
fought, Aunt; we had to. One bullet took off the top of my ear, and Jan got
two bullets, one through the flesh in the left leg and one through his arm,
but he could still fire his gun. Then we three meant to go to the top of
the koppie, but a bullet took Jan right through his chest. We knew he
couldn't go any farther. The khakies were right at the foot of the
koppie just coming up. He told us to lay him down, Aunt. We said we would
stay by him, but he said we must go. I put my jacket under his head and
Frikkie put his over his feet. We threw his gun far away from him that they
might see how it was with him. He said he hadn't much pain,
___________________1 Khakies: soldiers.
Page 49
Aunt. He was full of blood from his arm, but there wasn't much from his chest, only a little out of the corners of his mouth. He said we must make haste or the khakies would catch us; he said he wasn't afraid to be left there.
'Aunt, when we got to the top, it was all full
of khakies like the sea on the other side, all among the koppies and on our
koppie too. We were surrounded, Aunt; the last I saw of Frikkie he was
sitting on a stone with the blood running down his face, but he got under a
rock and hid there; some of our men found him next morning and brought him
to camp. Aunt, there was a khakie's horse standing just below where I
was, with no one on it. I jumped on and rode. The bullets went this way and
the bullets went that, but I rode! Aunt, the khakies were sometimes as near
me as that tent-pole, only the Grace of God saved me. It was dark in
the night when I got back to where our people were, because I had to go
round all the koppies to get away from the khakies.
'Aunt, the
next day we went to look for him. We found him where we left him; but he
was turned over on to his face; they had taken all his things, his belt and
his watch, and the pugaree from his hat, even his boots. The little green
silk purse he used to carry we found on the ground by him, but nothing in
it. I will send it back to you whenever I get an opportunity.
'Aunt, when we turned him over on
his back there
were four bayonet stabs in his body. The doctor says it was only the first
three while he was alive; the last one was through his heart and killed him
at once.
'We gave him Christian burial, Aunt; we took him to
the camp.
'The Commandant was there, and all of the family who
are with the Commando were there, and they all said they hoped God would
comfort you.'
The old woman leaned forward and grasped the boy's arm.
"Read it over again," she said, "from where they found
him." He turned back and re-read slowly. She gazed at the page
as though she were reading also. Then, suddenly, she slipped out at the
front door.
At the back of the house she found her daughter-in-law
still walking up and down, and the Kaffir woman with a red handkerchief
bound round her head and the child sitting across her hip, sucking from her
long, pendulous breast, looking on.
The old woman walked up to her daughter-in-law and grasped
her firmly by the arm.
"He's dead! You know, my boy's dead!" she cried,
drawing the apron down with her right hand and disclosing her swollen and
bleared face. "Oh, his beautiful hair--Oh, his beautiful
hair!"
The old woman held her arm tighter with both hands; the younger opened
her half-closed eyes, and looked into the keen, clear eyes fixed on
hers, and stood arrested.
The old woman drew her face closer to hers. "You ... do ... not
... know ... what ... has ... happened!" she spoke slowly, her tongue
striking her front gum, the jaw moving stiffly, as though partly paralysed.
She loosed her left hand and held up the curved work-worn fingers
before her daughter-in-law's face. "Was it not
told me ... the night he was born ... here ... at this spot ... that he
would do great things ... great things ... for his land and his
people?" She bent forward till her lips almost touched the
other's. "Three ... bullet ... wounds ... and four ... bayonet
... stabs!" She raised her left hand high in the air. "Three
... bullet ... wounds ... and four ... bayonet ... stabs! ... Is it given
to many to die so for their land and their people!"
The younger woman gazed into her eyes, her own growing larger and
larger. She let the old woman lead her by the arm in silence into the
house.
The Field-Cornet's son was gone, feeling there was nothing
more to be done; and the Kaffir woman went back with her baby to her hut
beyond the kraals. All day the house was very silent. The Kaffir woman
wondered that no smoke rose from the farm-house
chimney, and that she was not called to churn, or wash the pots. At three o'clock she went down to the house. As she passed the grated window of the round out-house she saw the buckets of milk still standing unsifted 1 on the floor as they had been set down at breakfast time, and under the great soap-pot beside the wood pile the fire had died out. She went round to the front of the house and saw the door and window shutters still closed, as though her mistresses were still sleeping. So she rebuilt the fire under the soap-pot and went back to her hut.
It was four o'clock when the grandmother came out from the dark
inner room where she and her daughter-in-law had been lying
down; she opened the top of the front door, and lit the fire with twigs,
and set the large black kettle over it. When it boiled she made coffee, and
poured out two cups and set them on the table with a plate of biscuits, and
then called her daughter-in-law from the inner room.
The two women sat down one on each side of the table, with their coffee
cups before them, and the biscuits between them, but for a time they said
nothing, but sat silent, looking out through the open door at the shadow of
the house and the afternoon sunshine beyond it. At last the older woman
motioned that the younger should drink her coffee. She took a little, and
then folding her arms on the
___________________1 Unsifted: unstrained.
Page 53
table rested her head on them, and sat motionless as if asleep.
The older woman broke up a biscuit into her own cup, and stirred it
round and round; and then, without tasting, sat gazing out into the
afternoon's sunshine till it grew cold beside her.
It was five, and the heat was quickly dying; the glorious golden
colouring of the later afternoon was creeping over everything when she rose
from her chair. She moved to the door and took from behind it two large
white calico bags hanging there, and from nails on the wall she took down
two large brown cotton kappies. She walked round the table and laid her
hand gently on her daughter-in-law's arm. The younger
woman raised her head slowly and looked up into her
mother-in-law's face; and then, suddenly, she knew that
her mother-in-law was an old, old, woman. The little
shrivelled face that looked down at her was hardly larger than a
child's, the eyelids were half closed and the lips worked at the
corners and the bones cut out through the skin in the temples.
"I am going out to sow--the ground will be getting too dry
to-morrow; will you come with me?" she said gently.
The younger woman made a movement with her hand, as though she said
"What is the use?" and redropped her hand on the table.
"It may go on for long, our burghers must have food," the
old woman said gently.
The younger woman looked into her face, then she rose slowly and taking
one of the brown kappies from her hand, put it on, and hung one of the bags
over her left arm; the old woman did the same and together they passed out
of the door. As the older woman stepped down the younger caught her and
saved her from falling.
"Take my arm, mother," she said.
But the old woman drew her shoulders up. "I only stumbled a
little!" she said quickly. "That step has been always too
high"; but before she reached the plank over the sloot the shoulders
had drooped again, and the neck fallen forward.
The mould in the lands was black and soft; it lay in long ridges, as it
had been ploughed up a week before, but the last night's rain had
softened it and made it moist and ready for putting in the seed.
The bags which the women carried on their arms were full of the seed of
pumpkins and mealies. They began to walk up the lands, keeping parallel
with the low hedge of dried bushes that ran up along the side of the sloot
almost up to the top of the ridge. At every few paces they stopped and bent
down to press into the earth, now one and then the other kind of seed from
their bags. Slowly they walked up and down till they reached the top of the
land almost on
the horizon line; and then they turned, and walked down, sowing as they went. When they had reached the bottom of the land before the farm-house it was almost sunset, and their bags were nearly empty; but they turned to go up once more. The light of the setting sun cast long, gaunt shadows from their figures across the ploughed land, over the low hedge and the sloot, into the bare veld beyond; shadows that grew longer and longer as they passed slowly on pressing in the seeds ... The seeds! ... that were to lie in the dank, dark, earth, and rot there, seemingly, to die, till their outer covering had split and fallen from them ... and then, when the rains had fallen, and the sun had shone, to come up above the earth again, and high in the clear air to lift their feathery plumes and hang out their pointed leaves and silken tassels! To cover the ground with a mantle of green and gold through which sunlight quivered, over which the insects hung by thousands, carrying yellow pollen on their legs and wings and making the air alive with their hum and stir, while grain and fruit ripened surely ... for the next season's harvest!
When the sun had set, the two women with their empty bags turned and
walked silently home in the dark to the farm-house.
There is no stone and no name upon either grave to say who lies there
... our unknown ... our unnamed ... our forgotten dead.
The English soldiers burnt it down. You can only see where the
farm-house once stood, because the stramonia and weeds grow high and
very strong there; and where the ploughed lands were you can only tell,
because the veld never grows quite the same on land that has once been ploughed. Only a brown patch among the long grass on the ridge shows where the kraals and huts once were.
In a country house in the north of England the owner has upon his wall
an old flint-lock gun. He takes it down to show his friends. It is a
small thing he picked up in the war in South Africa, he says. It must be at
least eighty years old and is very valuable. He shows how curiously it is
constructed; he says it must have been kept in such perfect repair by
continual polishing for the steel shines as if it were silver. He does not
tell that he took it from the wall of the little mud house before he burnt
it down.
It was the grandfather's gun, which the women had kept polished on
the wall.
In a London drawing-room the descendant of a long line of titled
forefathers entertains her guests. It is a fair-room, and all that
money can buy to make life soft and beautiful is there.
On the carpet stands a little dark wooden stoof. When one of her guests
notices it, she says it is a small curiosity which her son brought home to
her from South Africa when he was out in the war there; and how good it was
of him to think of her when he was away in the back country. And when they
ask what it is, she says it is a thing Boer women have as a footstool and
to keep their feet warm; and she shows
the hole at the side where they put the coals in, and the little holes at the top where the heat comes out.
And the other woman puts her foot out and rests it on the stool just to
try how it feels, and drawls "How
f-u-n-n-y!"
It is grandmother's stoof, that the child used to sit on.
The wagon chest was found and broken open just before the thatch caught
fire, by three private soldiers, and they divided the money between them;
one spent his share in drink, another had his stolen from him, but the
third sent his home to England to a girl in the East End of London. With
part of it she bought a gold brooch and ear-rings, and the rest she
saved to buy a silk wedding-dress when he came home.
A syndicate of Jews in Johannesburg and London have bought the farm.
They purchased it from the English Government, because they think to find
gold on it. They have purchased it and paid for it ... but they do not
possess it.
Only the men who lie in their quiet graves upon the hill-side,
who lived on it, and loved it, possess it; and the piles of stones above
them, from among the long waving grasses, keep watch over the land.
beautiful to her, or she would not look so young now. Cover her up! Let us go!
Many years ago in a London room, up long flights of stairs, a fire burnt
up in a grate. It showed the marks on the walls where pictures had been
taken down, and the little blue flowers in the wall-paper and the
blue felt carpet on the floor, and a woman sat by the fire in a chair at
one side.
Presently the door opened, and the old woman came in who took care of
the entrance hall downstairs.
"Do you not want anything to-night?" she said.
"No, I am only waiting for a visitor; when they have been, I shall
go."
"Have you got all your things taken away already?"
"Yes, only these I am leaving."
The old woman went down again, but presently came up with a cup of tea
in her hand.
"You must drink that; it's good for one. Nothing helps one
like tea when one's been packing all day."
The young woman at the fire did not thank her, but she ran her hand over
the old woman's from the wrist to the fingers.
"I'll say good-bye to you when I go out."
The woman poked the fire, put the last coals on, and went.
When she had gone the young one did not drink the tea, but drew her
little silver cigarette case from
her pocket and lighted a cigarette. For a while she sat smoking by the fire; then she stood up and walked the room.
When she had paced for a while she sat down again beside the fire. She
threw the end of her cigarette away into the fire, and then began to walk
again with her hands behind her. Then she went back to her seat and lit
another cigarette, and paced again. Presently she sat down, and looked into
the fire; she pressed the palms of her hands together, and then sat quietly
staring into it.
Then there was, a sound of feet on the stairs and someone knocked at the
door.
She rose and threw the end into the fire and said without moving,
"Come in."
The door opened and a man stood there in evening dress. He had a
great-coat on, open in front.
"May I come in? I couldn't get rid of this downstairs; I
didn't see where to leave it!" He took his coat off. "How
are you? This is a real bird's nest!"
She motioned to a chair.
"I hope you did not mind my asking you to come?"
"Oh no, I am delighted. I only found your note at my club twenty
minutes ago."
He sat down on a chair before the fire.
"So you really are going to India? How delightful! But what are
you to do there? I think it was
Grey told me six weeks ago you were going, but regarded it as one of those mythical stories which don't deserve credence. Yet I'm sure I don't know! Why, nothing would surprise me."
He looked at her in a half-amused, half-interested
way.
"What a long time it is since we met! Six months,
eight?"
"Seven," she said.
"I really thought you were trying to avoid me. What have you been
doing with yourself all this time?"
"Oh, been busy. Won't you have a cigarette?"
She held out the little case to him.
"Won't you take one yourself? I know you object to smoking
with men, but you can make an exception in my case!"
"Thank you." She lit her own and passed him the matches.
"But really what have you been doing with yourself all this time?
You've entirely disappeared from civilised life. When I was down at
the Grahams' in the spring, they said you were coming down there, and
then at the last moment cried off. We were all quite disappointed. What is
taking you to India now? Going to preach the doctrine of social and
intellectual equality to the Hindu women and incite them to revolt? Marry
some old Buddhist Priest, build a little cottage on the top of the
Himalayas and live
there, discuss philosophy and meditate? I believe that's what you'd like. I really shouldn't wonder if I heard you'd done it!"
She laughed and took out her cigarette case.
She smoked slowly.
"I've been here a long time, four years, and I want change.
I was glad to see how well you succeeded in that election," she said.
"You were much interested in it, were you not?"
"Oh, yes. We had a stiff fight. It tells in my favour, you know,
though it was not exactly a personal matter. But it was a great
worry."
"Don't you think," she said, "you were wrong in
sending that letter to the papers? It would have strengthened your position
to have remained silent."
"Yes, perhaps so; I think so now, but I did it under advice.
However, we've won, so it's all right." He leaned back in
the chair.
"Are you pretty fit?"
"Oh, yes; pretty well; bored, you know. One doesn't know
what all this working and striving is for sometimes."
"Where are you going for your holiday this year?"
"Oh, Scotland, I suppose; I always do; the old
quarters."
"Why don't you go to Norway? It would be more change for you
and rest you more. Did you get a book on sport in Norway?"
"Did you send it me? How kind of you! I read it with much
interest. I was almost inclined to start off there and then. I suppose it
is the kind of vis inertiæ that creeps
over one as one grows older that sends one back to the old place. A change
would be much better."
"There's a list at the end of the book" she said,
"of exactly the things one needs to take. I thought it would save
trouble; you could just give it to your man, and let him get them all. Have
you still got him?"
"Oh, yes. He's as faithful to me as a dog. I think nothing
would induce him to leave me. He won't allow me to go out hunting
since I sprained my foot last autumn. I have to do it surreptitiously. He
thinks I can't keep my seat with a sprained ankle; but he's a
very good fellow; takes care of me like a mother." He smoked quietly
with the firelight glowing on his black coat. "But what are you going
to India for? Do you know anyone there?"
"No," she said. "I think it will be so splendid.
I've always been a great deal interested in the East. It's a
complex, interesting life."
He turned and looked at her.
"Going to seek for more experience, you'll say, I suppose. I
never knew a woman throw herself away as you do; a woman with your
brilliant parts and attractions, to let the whole of life slip through your
hands, and make nothing of it. You ought to be the most successful woman in London. Oh, yes; I know what you are going to say: 'You don't care.' That's just it; you don't. You are always going to get experience, going to get everything, and you never do. You are always going to write when you know enough, and you are never satisfied that you do. You ought to be making your two thousand a year, but you don't care. That's just it! Living, burying yourself here with a lot of old frumps. You will never do anything. You could have everything and you let it slip."
"Oh, my life is very full," she said. "There are only
two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you
can't escape them."
She had thrown her cigarette end away and was looking into the fire,
smiling.
"I've let these rooms to a woman friend of mine." She
glanced round the room, smiling. "She doesn't know I'm
going to leave these things here for her. She'll like them because
they were mine. The world's very beautiful, I
think--delicious."
"Oh, yes. But what do you do with it? What do you make of it? You
ought to settle down and marry like other women, not go wandering about the
world to India and China and Italy, and God knows where. You are simply
making a mess of your life. You're always surrounding yourself with
all sorts
of extraordinary people. If I hear any man or woman is a great friend of yours, I always say: 'What's the matter? Lost his money? Lost his character? Got an incurable disease?' I believe the only way in which anyone becomes interesting to you is by having some complaint of mind or body. I believe you worship rags. To come and shut yourself up in a place like this away from everybody and everything! It's a mistake; it's idiotic, you know."
"I'm very happy," she said. "You see," she
said, leaning forwards towards the fire with her hands on her knees,
"what matters is that something should need you. It isn't a
question of love. What's the use of being near a thing if other
people could serve it as well as you can. If they could serve it better,
it's pure selfishness. It's the need of one thing for another
that makes the organic bond of union. You love mountains and horses, but
they don't need you; so what's the use of saying anything about
it! I suppose the most absolutely delicious thing in life is to feel a
thing needs you, and to give at the moment it needs. Things that
don't need you, you must love from a distance."
"Oh, but a woman like you ought to marry, ought to have children.
You go squandering yourself on every old beggar or forlorn female or
escaped criminal you meet; it may be very nice for them, but it's a
mistake from your point of view."
He touched the ash gently with the tip of his little finger and let it
fall.
"I intend to marry. It's a curious thing," he said,
resuming his pose with an elbow on one knee and his head bent forward on
one side, so that she saw the brown hair with its close curls a little
tinged with grey at the sides, "that when a man reaches a certain age
he wants to marry. He doesn't fall in love; it's not that he
definitely plans anything; but he has a feeling that he ought to have a
home and a wife and children. I suppose it is the same kind of feeling that
makes a bird build nests at certain times of the year. It's not love;
it's something else. When I was a young man I used to despise men for
getting married; wondered what they did it for; they had everything to lose
and nothing to gain. But when a man gets to be six-and-thirty
his feeling changes. It's not love, passion, he wants; it's a
home; it's a wife and children. He may have a house and servants; it
isn't the same thing. I should have thought a woman would have felt
it too."
She was quiet for a minute, holding a cigarette between her fingers;
then she said slowly:
"Yes, at times a woman has a curious longing to have a child,
especially when she gets near to thirty or over it. It's something
distinct from love for any definite person. But it's a thing one has
to get over. For a woman, marriage is much more serious than for
a man. She might pass her life without meeting a man whom she could possibly love, and, if she met him, it might not be right or possible. Marriage has become very complex now it has become so largely intellectual. Won't you have another?"
She held out the case to him. "You can light it from mine."
She bent forward for him to light it.
"You are a man who ought to marry. You've no absorbing
mental work with which the woman would interfere; it would complete
you." She sat back, smoking serenely.
"Yes," he said, "but life is too busy; I never find
time to look for one, and I haven't a fancy for the
pink-and-white prettiness so common and that some men like
so. I need something else. If I am to have a wife I shall have to go to
America to look for one."
"Yes, an American would suit you best."
"Yes," he said, "I don't want a woman to look
after; she must be self-sustaining and she mustn't bore you.
You know what I mean. Life is too full of cares to have a helpless child
added to them."
"Yes," she said, standing up and leaning with her elbow
against the fireplace. "The kind of woman you want would be young and
strong; she need not be excessively beautiful, but she must be at-
tractive; she must have energy, but not too strongly marked an individuality; she must be largely neutral; she need not give you too passionate or too deep a devotion, but she must second you in a thoroughly rational manner. She must have the same aims and tastes that you have. No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavour what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate over all and will come out at last."
She looked down into the fire.
"When you marry you mustn't marry a woman who flatters you
too much. It is always a sign of falseness somewhere. If a woman absolutely
loves you as herself, she will criticise and understand you as herself. Two
people who are to live through life together must be able to look into each
other's eyes and speak the truth. That helps one through life. You
would find many such women in America," she said: "women
who would help you to succeed, who would not drag you down."
"Yes, that's my idea. But how am I to obtain the ideal
woman?"
"Go and look for her. Go to America instead of Scotland this year.
It is perfectly right. A man has a right to look for what he needs. With a
woman it
is different. That's one of the radical differences between men and women."
She looked downwards into the fire.
"It's a law of her nature and of sex relationship.'
There's nothing arbitrary or conventional about it any more than
there is in her having to bear her child while the male does not.
Intellectually we may both be alike. I suppose if fifty men and fifty women
had to solve a mathematical problem, they would all do it in the same way;
the more abstract and intellectual, the more alike we are. The nearer you
approach to the personal and sexual, the more different we are. If I were
to represent men's and women's natures," she said,
"by a diagram, I would take two circular discs; the right side of
each I should paint bright red; then I would shade the red away till in a
spot on the left edge it became blue in the one and green in the other.
That spot represents sex, and the nearer you come to it, the more the two
discs differ in colour. Well then, if you turn them so that the red sides
touch, they seem to be exactly alike, but if you turn them so that the
green and blue paint form their point of contact, they will seem to be
entirely unlike. That's why you notice the brutal, sensual men
invariably believe women are entirely different from men, another species
of creature; and very cultured, intellectual men sometimes believe we are
exactly alike. You see, sex love in its substance
may be the same in both of us; in the form of its expression it must differ. It is not man's fault; it is nature's. If a man loves a woman, he has a right to try to make her love him because he can do it openly, directly, without bending. There need be no subtlety, no indirectness. With a woman it's not so; she can take no love that is not laid openly, simply, at her feet. Nature ordains that she should never show what she feels; the woman who had told a man she loved him would have put between them a barrier once and for ever that could not be crossed; and if she subtly drew him towards her, using the woman's means--silence, finesse, the dropped handkerchief, the surprise visit, the gentle assertion she had not thought to see him when she had come a long way to meet him, then she would be damned; she would hold the love, but she would have desecrated it by subtlety; it would have no value. Therefore she must always go with her arms folded sexually; only the love which lays itself down at her feet and implores of her to accept it is love she can ever rightly take up. That is the true difference between a man and a woman. You may seek for love because you can do it openly; we cannot because we must do it subtly. A woman should always walk with her arms folded. Of course friendship is different. You are on a perfect equality with man then; you can ask him to come and see you as I asked you. That's the beauty
of the intellect and intellectual life to a woman, that she drops her shackles a little; and that is why she shrinks from sex so. If she were dying perhaps, or doing something equal to death, she might .... Death means so much more to a woman than a man; when you knew you were dying, to look round on the world and feel the bond of sex that has broken and crushed you all your life gone, nothing but the human left, no woman any more, to meet everything on perfectly even ground. There's no reason why you shouldn't go to America and look for a wife perfectly deliberately. You will have to tell no lies. Look till you find a woman that you absolutely love, that you have not the smallest doubt suits you apart from love, and then ask her to marry you. You must have children; the life of an old childless man is very sad."
"Yes, I should like to have children. I often feel now, what is it
all for, this work, this striving, and'no one to leave it to?
It's a blank, suppose I succeed ...?"
"Suppose you get your title?"
"Yes; what is it all worth to me if I've no one to leave it
to? That's my feeling. It's really very strange to be sitting
and talking like this to you. But you are so different from other women. If
all women were like you, all your theories of the equality of men and women
would work. You're the only woman with whom I never realise that she
is a woman."
"Yes," she said.
She stood looking down into the fire.
"How long will you stay in India?"
"Oh, I'm not coming back."
"Not coming back! That's impossible. You will be breaking
the hearts of half the people here if you don't. I never knew a woman
who had such power of entrapping men's hearts as you have in spite of
that philosophy of yours. I don't know," he smiled, "that
I should not have fallen into the snare myself--three years ago I
almost thought I should--if you hadn't always attacked me so
incontinently and persistently on all and every point and on each and every
occasion. A man doesn't like pain. A succession of slaps damps him.
But it doesn't seem to have that effect on other men .... There was
that fellow down in the country when I was there last year, perfectly
ridiculous. You know his name..." He moved his fingers to try and
remember it--"big, yellow moustache, a major, gone to the east
coast of Africa now; the ladies unearthed it that he was always carrying
about a photograph of yours in his pocket; and he used to take out little
scraps of things you printed and show them to people mysteriously. He
almost had a duel with a man one night after dinner because he mentioned
you; he seemed to think there was something incongruous between your name
and--"
"I do not like to talk of any man who has loved me," she
said. "However small and poor his nature may be, he has given me his
best. There is nothing ridiculous in love. I think a woman should feel that
all the love men have given her which she has not been able to return is a
kind of crown set up above her which she is always trying to grow tall
enough to wear. I can't bear to think that all the love that has been
given me has been wasted on something unworthy of it. Men have been very
beautiful and greatly honoured me. I am grateful to them. If a man tells
you he loves you," she said, looking into the fire, "with his
breast uncovered before you for you to strike him if you will, the least
you can do is to put out your hand and cover it up from other
people's eyes. If I were a deer," she said, "and a stag
got hurt following me, even though I could not have him for a companion, I
would stand still and scrape the sand with my foot over the place where his
blood had fallen; the rest of the herd should never know he had been hurt
there following me. I would cover the blood up, if I were a deer,"
she said, and then she was silent.
Presently she sat down in her chair and said, with her hand before
her: "Yet, you know, I have not the ordinary feeling about
love. I think the one who is loved confers the benefit on the one who
loves, it's been so great and beautiful that it should be loved.
I think the man should be grateful to the woman or the woman to the man whom they have been able to love, whether they have been loved back or whether circumstances have divided them or not." She stroked her knee softly with her hand.
"Well, really, I must go now." He pulled out his watch.
"It's so fascinating sitting here talking that I could stay all
night, but I've still two engagements." He rose; she rose also
and stood before him looking up at him for a moment.
"How well you look! I think you have found the secret of perpetual
youth. You don't look a day older than when I first saw you just four
years ago. You always look as if you were on fire and being burnt up, but
you never are, you know."
He looked down at her with a kind of amused face as one does at an
interesting child or a big Newfoundland dog.
"When shall we see you back?"
"Oh, not at all!"
"Not at all! Oh, we must have you back; you belong here, you know.
You'll get tired of your Buddhist and come back to us."
"You didn't mind my asking you to come and say
good-bye?" she said in a childish manner unlike her
determinateness when she discussed anything impersonal. "I wanted to
say good-bye to everyone. If one hasn't said good-bye
one feels restless and feels
one would have to come back. If one has said goodbye to all one's friends, then one knows it is all ended."
"Oh, this isn't a final farewell! You must come in ten
years' time and we'll compare notes--you about your
Buddhist Priest, I about my fair ideal American; and we'll see who
succeeded best."
She laughed.
"I shall always see your movements chronicled in the newspapers,
so we shall not be quite sundered; and you will hear of me
perhaps."
"Yes, I hope you will be very successful."
She was looking at him, with her eyes wide open, from head to foot. He
turned to the chair where his coat hung.
"Can't I help you put it on?"
"Oh, no, thank you."
He put it on.
"Button the throat," she said, "the room is
warm."
He turned to her in his great-coat and with his gloves. They were
standing near the door.
"Well, good-bye. I hope you will have a very pleasant
time."
He stood looking down upon her, wrapped in his great-coat.
She put up one hand a little in the air. "I want to ask you
something," she said quickly.
"Well, what is it?"
"Will you please kiss me?"
For a moment he looked down at her, then he bent over her.
In after years he could never tell certainly, but he always thought she
put up her hand and rested it on the crown of his head, with a curious soft
caress, something like a mother's touch when her child is asleep and
she does not want to wake it. Then he looked round, and she was gone. The
door had closed noiselessly. For a moment he stood motionless, then he
walked to the fireplace and looked down into the fender at a little
cigarette end lying there, then he walked quickly back to the door and
opened it. The stairs were in darkness and silence. He rang the bell
violently. The old woman came up. He asked her where the lady was. She said
she had gone out, she had a cab waiting. He asked when she would be back.
The old woman said, "Not at all"; she had left. He asked where
she had gone. The woman said she did not know; she had left orders that all
her letters should be kept for six or eight months till she wrote and sent
her address. He asked whether she had no idea where he might find her. The
woman said no. He walked up to a space in the wall where a picture had hung
and stood staring at it as though the picture were still hanging there. He
drew his mouth as though he were emitting a long whistle,
but no sound came. He gave the old woman ten shillings and went downstairs.
That was eight years ago.
How beautiful life must have been to it that it looks so young
still!
I, a young girl of sixteen, was going home from the South where I had
been at school.
We travelled in a Cobb & Co.'s coach, nine passengers inside
and four out; and all day and night it rained. We did in two days the
journey we should have done in one; and when they changed horses they gave
us no time to sleep. Night and day we travelled. On the evening of the
ninth day we stopped on the banks of a full river. The greasy,
coffee-coloured water flowed level with the banks, and the heads of
half-drowned willow trees showed themselves on either side. We
should not be able to cross that night, it might be not for days.
We looked out through the pouring rain. Beside us was a little mud
house, the only habitation within thirty miles. It was square, with a
divided door and one small window. The man to whom it belonged came out to
meet us; he lived there alone and sold liquor to the passers-by. It
was arranged between him and the driver we should stay there for the night.
We alighted from the coach and streamed into the house; we found it consisted of one small room. I and the woman who was my only female travelling companion stood before the fire drying our clothes which had got damp in the passage from the coach to the house; the men stood round the table drinking bad brandy and whisky in cups and glasses, while the driver went out to see to his horses. There was nothing to be had to eat but some stale biscuits from a tin and some leathery roaster-cake. Some one brought up the one chair the room contained and an empty soap box, and the woman and I sat down before the fire. By and by the driver came in, and the night darkened down quickly. The men still stood smoking and drinking round the table. The rain was falling less heavily. After a while the men conferred together and they decided, with that gentleness which rough men travelling alone with women always show, that they should all find shelter in the coach and the hut be left to us alone. The owner put the large stump of an uprooted willow tree upon the fire and in half an hour the men stumbled out; we could hear them swearing and grumbling in the rain on the way to the coach; and for an hour we caught broken peals of ribald laughter or obscene songs through the sound of the falling rain; then gradually all became quiet.
The room in which they left us had a bare mud
floor on which was only a white sheepskin that lay before the fire; on the brown mud wall there was a rack with two guns and a pistol, and in the centre of the room stood the table with empty bottles and glasses, and in the corner was a stretcher with one band broken and a thin mattress and three dirty blankets. There was no place in which one might lie down. The firelight flickered over the walls; the three inches of tallow candle they had left in a black bottle on the table had burnt itself out.
I grew tired of sitting on the soap box and slipped down and crouched on
the white sheepskin before the fire. The woman sat in the chair on the
right, her head so far back that the firelight did not shine on it. One
could hardly tell whether she was awake or asleep.
She was a tall, slight woman dressed in black, and might have been any
age between thirty and forty-five. She had been very kind to me all
the way; in the night when, without my knowing it, I grew sleepy and my
head dropped, she laid it on her shoulder and I woke with it there in the
morning. When it was cold she made me put on her great fur cloak, such as
women from England have, and we talked of the scenery we passed through and
of books, and we were friends, though neither of us had asked any question
or knew anything of the other.
The rain still fell heavily, and far off one could
hear the rush of the river. I stared into the fire till the blaze from the glowing coals almost scorched my eyelashes.
Suddenly I turned to my companion.
"Life is very wicked; it is very unjust," I said.
I raised myself on my knees.
She looked down at me and leaned forward. She had seemed almost asleep.
She did not speak.
"It is very cruel; it is very unjust!" I said. "It is
no use trying! Some people have everything and some people have nothing;
and things are not as they should be!"
She put out her hand and I felt it on my head for a moment. Then she
drew it back.
I was young, and I was suffering my first surprise at my first shattered
ideal.
The woman raised herself and looked down at me. I laid my clenched fists
upon my knees.
"I have found no balancing interrelation between the material and
mental world," she said. "If you go with love in your heart to
fetch a cup of water for your friend, there is no relation between the
intensity of the love and the cup's fracture; if that is what you
mean by justice in life, then there is none. But, in the emotional and
intellectual spheres, human nature has a deep power of working out
compensations; what is taken from us on the one hand works itself back to
us on the other. There is nothing mysterious
in this, just as there is nothing mysterious in one scale of a balance going down and another up when you move matter from one to the other, though it might seem so to a little baby. There are times, thinking over life," she said, "I have almost seemed to see the terms in which this balancing process might be stated so as to be clearly grasped intellectually. I think it is there."
I sat looking into the fire. My heart was very bitter. I had had my
first ideal shattered, my great plan for what was beautiful broken. I was
beating my wings against the bars of the inevitable in life as young things
do, battering the wings but not hurting the bars.
"Yes, but you do not know," I said. And after a while I told
her my story. It was a long story, and seemed to me then the only one in
the world. There is no need I should repeat it fully:
Three years before I had gone to school on a farm in the South; it was a
mixed school where boys and girls were taught together. There was one boy
three years older than I. He and I were always at the head of the school.
He worked hard at first to get up to me because he could not bear a girl
should stand higher; but afterwards we became great friends.
is, however, clear enough in the passages immediately following. Apparently
they had been having, were having, school holidays when the tale
continues.)
___________________(Note by
S.C.C.S.--There is evidently a page or so missing here; the narrative
would introduce the other girl and begin the delineation of her character
in her attitude towards the lad; the delineation
Page 88
... taught him to make flutes of reeds; sometimes she sat in the fork of
the apple trees and he lay below and she threw down fruit to him; sometimes
she brought her books to him and asked him questions, and she said he was
so wonderful when he could explain; and the one thing he had never needed
was praise. Then the holidays came to an end. We had brought much work to
do that he might pass the last examination; but, when I came to look for
him, he was walking laughing with her, and I hid the books under my arm.
The last day of the holidays she came to me and said he was not going back
to school. Her father had offered him #20 a month to oversee the wine
farming. They could have got anyone else for five, she said, but her father
had done it because she asked him. "All this is mine," she
said. "There is no one else to inherit it; my father lets me do what
I like with it and I want him to have it." I talked with him once. He
seemed a little sorry, but he could not refuse #20. I did not go back
to school for the next quarter; I came straight home; I was on my journey
up. I sat beside the fire and told the story.
"You see," I said, when I had finished it, "he is
lost, his beautiful possibilities are dead; she will
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drag him down, down. It would have been better if she had killed him!" And I laid my clenched hands on my knees. It would have been easy for me to have killed myself, I so hated that girl as I stood there.
The woman said: "Are you quite just? Are you sure it is she
who has dragged him down?"
"I hate her, oh, I hate her so!" I said. "I would have
forgiven her if she had killed him, but not for this."
___________________(Note by
S.C.C.S.--A gap occurs here.)
"... study more. You see," I said, "I don't mind
that he hates me, but I mind that he will never do anything more; he will
marry and settle down. She has killed him. It is as if she were a soft
greasy snake, and she had crept over him, and put her tooth into his body
and the poison has crept in and in and he is dead, he is asleep for
ever."
She said: "Can other people ever poison us?"
I said: "They can! But I could wake him. That is the
terrible thing. If I could tell him what she was, if I could have had one
half-hour's talk with him (and he had sought it), I could make
him fling her off as a man flings off a toad when he wakes and sees it
sitting on him. That's the terrible thing! That's why
I've asked my friends to get me home at once because I dare not stay
there. If once I were to
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talk against her to him, then my soul would be lost, as hers is now. You see I can't," I said. "I must go away where I can never see him any more and leave him to her!"
I looked up, but the woman was sitting motionless on the chair and the
firelight was dancing on the guns in the rack.
"You see," I said, "people say she is a clever woman;
she is strong; they say she can have every-thing; it's the
poor, weak, gentle, little women that need looking after, that must be
taken care of. It's a lie; it's we that are weak! If the snake
once thinks it wrong to use its poison fangs and begins to develop feet,
and makes a noise with them as it comes on, is it stronger? It's
higher, of course, higher! What is that higher? It is
weakness. Is there anything so strong as the snake when it creeps on
noiselessly with its fangs and its silent glide? The horse, the elephant,
the lion, are nothing to it. Take this from it and what has it left? It has
not the speed, the claws, the thick skin of the others! A snake without its
poison bag, who gives notice when it is coming," I
laughed,--"every creature can put his foot on its head and crush
out its poor unused poison bag that it has never used. It will never be a
lion or an elephant for all its feet. A woman with intellect and strength
and the ideal of acting strictly by other women--haugh! She is dirt
beneath everyone's feet. There is nothing
so weak on the earth. She will never be a man! Life gave women subtlety and lying and meanness and flattery that they might defend themselves. They have all things if they will use their tools."
We were silent for a moment; then she said: "Do you think
any strong, intellectual woman ever really wanted to be a weak one? Is it
not better to have half-developed hands and feet, and be trodden on?
Does it matter so much what one has as what one is?"
And she said after a time: "Does one really ever gain
anything by subtlety? Is it not seeming?"
I said: "Oh, it is such a terrible thing to be a woman. You
can do nothing for those you love. You must wait, crush out, kill, in
yourself. The old passive women who took indirect means, they are
happy."
She said: "Do you think so?"
Then she said after a time: "I knew two women in England;
one was older, and the younger lived with her; she was her cousin. The
younger was what the world calls a strong, intellectual woman; she painted.
The other was what the world calls a gentle, womanly woman; she had
married, when she was young, a rich man, and had three children. She had a
very beautiful home, and she always pictured herself to herself as the
central image in it, the most beautiful of all. The younger woman knew an
artist who worked at the same studio; she loved him as only
people can love who love the work and the objects of others, not only their persons. Every day she went to his studio and criticised his work; when he was satisfied, she was not; she wanted something better; she had a greater dream for his future than she ever told him. They were very near to each other. She never spoke of love to him: what need is there to talk of love to a man, when he knows his work is more to you than your own; and you love your own?"
"And then?" I said.
"After two years he came to the house where she lived with her
older cousin. At first the woman took little notice of him; then she used
to have glasses of jelly ready for him when he came, and let him lie on the
sofa in her great room in the garden. He took her to his studio: she
stood still a long time before one picture, and said, 'Oh, please
don't speak to me; it makes me feel like a beautiful summer's
day to look at it'; and the young woman had told him to burn it; it
was unworthy of him. She said she wanted her picture painted with her
little baby, and he painted her as a madonna with her child in her arms
with their cheeks touching. I do not think he cared for her then. He simply
painted her. She gave the picture to her husband, and asked the young man
to come to her house oftener."
"And then?"
"Then one day she talked of him to the younger