I have an old, brown carved box; the lid is broken and tied with a
string. In it I keep little squares of paper, with hair inside, and a
little picture which hung over my brother’s bed when we were children,
and other things as small. I have in it a rose. Other women also have
such boxes where they keep such trifles, but no one has my rose.
When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in woman
flickers, and her present is an agony to me, and her future a despair,
the scent of that dead rose, withered for twelve years, comes back to
me. I know there will be spring; as surely as the birds know it when
they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot
fail us.
There were other flowers in the box once; a bunch of white acacia
flowers, gathered by the strong hand of a man, as we passed down a
village street on a sultry afternoon, when it had rained, and the drops
fell on us from the leaves of the acacia trees. The flowers were damp;
they made mildew marks on the paper I folded them in. After many years
I threw them away. There is nothing of them left in the box now, but
a faint, strong smell of dried acacia, that recalls that sultry summer
afternoon; but the rose is in the box still.
It is many years ago now; I was a girl of fifteen, and I went to visit
in a small up-country town. It was young in those days, and two days’
journey from the nearest village; the population consisted mainly of
men. A few were married, and had their wives and children, but most were
single. There was only one young girl there when I came. She was about
seventeen, fair, and rather fully-fleshed; she had large dreamy blue
eyes, and wavy light hair; full, rather heavy lips, until she smiled;
then her face broke into dimples, and all her white teeth shone. The
hotel-keeper may have had a daughter, and the farmer in the outskirts
had two, but we never saw them. She reigned alone. All the men
worshipped her. She was the only woman they had to think of. They talked
of her on the stoep, at the market, at the hotel; they watched for her
at street corners; they hated the man she bowed to or walked with down
the street. They brought flowers to the front door; they offered her
their horses; they begged her to marry them when they dared. Partly,
there was something noble and heroic in this devotion of men to the best
woman they knew; partly there was something natural in it, that these
men, shut off from the world, should pour at the feet of one woman the
worship that otherwise would have been given to twenty; and partly there
was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had raised her
little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of twenty
of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so
pretty as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and
I was new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked
of. Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had
told me I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know
it was simply a fashion, which one man had set and the rest followed
unreasoningly. I liked them to ask me to marry them, and to say, No.
I despised them. The mother heart had not swelled in me yet; I did not
know all men were my children, as the large woman knows when her heart
is grown. I was too small to be tender. I liked my power. I was like
a child with a new whip, which it goes about cracking everywhere, not
caring against what. I could not wind it up and put it away. Men were
curious creatures, who liked me, I could never tell why. Only one thing
took from my pleasure; I could not bear that they had deserted her for
me. I liked her great dreamy blue eyes, I liked her slow walk and drawl;
when I saw her sitting among men, she seemed to me much too good to be
among them; I would have given all their compliments if she would once
have smiled at me as she smiled at them, with all her face breaking into
radiance, with her dimples and flashing teeth. But I knew it never
could be; I felt sure she hated me; that she wished I was dead; that she
wished I had never come to the village. She did not know, when we went
out riding, and a man who had always ridden beside her came to ride
beside me, that I sent him away; that once when a man thought to win
my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl before me I turned on him so
fiercely that he never dared come before me again. I knew she knew that
at the hotel men had made a bet as to which was the prettier, she or I,
and had asked each man who came in, and that the one who had staked on
me won. I hated them for it, but I would not let her see that I cared
about what she felt towards me.
She and I never spoke to each other.
If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we shook
hands we did so silently, and did not look at each other. But I thought
she felt my presence in a room just as I felt hers.
At last the time for my going came. I was to leave the next day. Some
one I knew gave a party in my honour, to which all the village was
invited.
It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few dahlias and
chrysanthemums, and I suppose that for two hundred miles round there
was not a rose to be bought for love or money. Only in the garden of a
friend of mine, in a sunny corner between the oven and the brick wall,
there was a rose tree growing which had on it one bud. It was white, and
it had been promised to the fair haired girl to wear at the party.
The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waiting-room, to take
off my mantle, I found the girl there already. She was dressed in pure
white, with her great white arms and shoulders showing, and her bright
hair glittering in the candle-light, and the white rose fastened at her
breast. She looked like a queen. I said “Good-evening,” and turned away
quickly to the glass to arrange my old black scarf across my old black
dress.
Then I felt a hand touch my hair.
“Stand still,” she said.
I looked in the glass. She had taken the white rose from her breast, and
was fastening it in my hair.
“How nice dark hair is; it sets off flowers so.” She stepped back and
looked at me. “It looks much better there!”