She was more like a princess, yes, far more like a princess, than the
lady who still hung on the wall in Tant Sannie’s bedroom. So Em thought.
She leaned back in the little armchair; she wore a grey dressing-gown,
and her long hair was combed out and hung to the ground. Em, sitting
before her, looked up with mingled respect and admiration.
Lyndall was tired after her long journey, and had come to her room
early. Her eyes ran over the familiar objects. Strange to go away for
four years, and come back, and find that the candle standing on the
dressing-table still cast the shadow of an old crone’s head in the
corner beyond the clothes-horse. Strange that even a shadow should last
longer than a man! She looked about among the old familiar objects; all
was there, but the old self was gone.
“What are you noticing?” asked Em.
“Nothing and everything. I thought the windows were higher. If I were
you, when I get this place I should raise the walls. There is not room
to breathe here. One suffocates.”
“Gregory is going to make many alterations,” said Em; and drawing nearer
to the grey dressing-gown respectfully. “Do you like him, Lyndall? Is he
not handsome?”
“He must have been a fine baby,” said Lyndall, looking at the white
dimity curtain that hung above the window.
Em was puzzled.
“There are some men,” said Lyndall, “whom you never can believe were
babies at all; and others you never see without thinking how very nice
they must have looked when they wore socks and pink sashes.”
Em remained silent; then she said with a little dignity, “When you know
him you will love him as I do. When I compare other people with him,
they seem so weak and little. Our hearts are so cold, our loves are
mixed up with so many other things. But he--no one is worthy of his
love. I am not. It is so great and pure.”
“You need not make yourself unhappy on that point--your poor return for
his love, my dear,” said Lyndall. “A man’s love is a fire of olive-wood.
It leaps higher every moment; it roars, it blazes, it shoots out red
flames; it threatens to wrap you round and devour you--you who stand by
like an icicle in the glow of its fierce warmth. You are self-reproached
at your own chilliness and want of reciprocity. The next day, when you
go to warm your hands a little, you find a few ashes! ‘Tis a long love
and cool against a short love and hot; men, at all events, have nothing
to complain of.”
“You speak so because you do not know men,” said Em, instantly assuming
the dignity of superior knowledge so universally affected by affianced
and married women in discussing man’s nature with their uncontracted
sisters.
“You will know them too some day, and then you will think differently,”
said Em, with the condescending magnanimity which superior knowledge can
always afford to show to ignorance.
Lyndall’s little lip quivered in a manner indicative of intense
amusement. She twirled a massive ring upon her forefinger--a ring more
suitable for the hand of a man, and noticeable in design--a diamond
cross let into gold, with the initials “R.R.” below it.
“Ah, Lyndall,” Em cried, “perhaps you are engaged yourself--that is why
you smile. Yes; I am sure you are. Look at this ring!”
Lyndall drew the hand quickly from her.
“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man’s foot;
and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies,” she said, as she
closed her eyes half wearily and leaned back in the chair. “There are
other women glad of such work.”
Em felt rebuked and ashamed. How could she take Lyndall and show her
the white linen and the wreath, and the embroidery? She was quiet for
a little while, and then began to talk about Trana and the old
farm-servants, till she saw her companion was weary; then she rose and
left her for the night. But after Em was gone Lyndall sat on, watching
the old crone’s face in the corner, and with a weary look, as though the
whole world’s weight rested on these frail young shoulders.
The next morning, Waldo, starting off before breakfast with a bag of
mealies slung over his shoulder to feed the ostriches, heard a light
step behind him.
“Wait for me; I am coming with you,” said Lyndall, adding as she came up
to him, “if I had not gone to look for you yesterday you would not have
come to greet me till now. Do you not like me any longer, Waldo?”
“Yes--but--you are changed.”
It was the old clumsy, hesitating mode of speech.
“You like the pinafores better?” she said quickly. She wore a dress of
a simple cotton fabric, but very fashionably made, and on her head was
a broad white hat. To Waldo she seemed superbly attired. She saw it. “My
dress has changed a little,” she said, “and I also; but not to you. Hang
the bag over your other shoulder, that I may see your face. You say
so little that if one does not look at you you are an uncomprehended
cipher.” Waldo changed the bag, and they walked on side by side. “You
have improved,” she said. “Do you know that I have sometimes wished to
see you while I was away; not often, but still sometimes.”
They were at the gate of the first camp now. Waldo threw over a bag of
mealies, and they walked on over the dewy ground.
“Have you learnt much?” he asked her simply, remembering how she had
once said, “When I come back again I shall know everything that a human
being can.”
She laughed.
“Are you thinking of my old boast? Yes; I have learnt something, though
hardly what I expected, and not quite so much. In the first place, I
have learnt that one of my ancestors must have been a very great fool;
for they say nothing comes out in a man but one of his forefathers
possessed it before him. In the second place, I have discovered that
of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly
pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls’ boarding-school is the
worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately
what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and
that they cultivate. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting
on the question, ‘Into how little space a human soul can be crushed?’
I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a
small thimble, and found room to move there--wide room. A woman who has
been for many years in one of those places carries the mark of the beast
on her till she dies, though she may expand a little afterward, when she
breathes in the free world.”
“Were you miserable?” he asked, looking at her with quick anxiety.
“I?--no. I am never miserable and never happy. I wish I were. But I
should have run away from the place on the fourth day, and hired myself
to the first Boer-woman whose farm I came to, to make fire under her
soap-pot, if I had to live as the rest of the drove did. Can you form an
idea, Waldo, of what it must be to be shut up with cackling old women,
who are without knowledge of life, without love of the beautiful,
without strength, to have your soul cultured by them? It is suffocation
only to breathe the air they breathe; but I made them give me room. I
told them I should leave, and they knew I came there on my own account;
so they gave me a bedroom without the companionship of one of those
things that were having their brains slowly diluted and squeezed out of
them. I did not learn music, because I had no talent; and when the
drove made cushions, and hideous flowers that the roses laugh at, and
a footstool in six weeks that a machine would have made better in five
minutes, I went to my room. With the money saved from such work I bought
books and newspapers, and at night I sat up. I read, and epitomized what
I read; and I found time to write some plays, and find out how hard it
is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint
them with ink and paper. In the holidays I learnt a great deal more. I
made acquaintances, saw a few places and many people, and some different
ways of living, which is more than any books can show one. On the whole,
I am not dissatisfied with my four years. I have not learnt what I
expected; but I have learnt something else. What have you been doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That is not possible. I shall find out by and by.”
They still stepped on side by side over the dewy bushes. Then suddenly
she turned on him.
“Don’t you wish you were a woman, Waldo?”
“No,” he answered readily.
She laughed.
“I thought not. Even you are too worldly-wise for that. I never met a
man who did. This is a pretty ring,” she said, holding out her little
hand, that the morning sun might make the diamonds sparkle. “Worth fifty
pounds at least. I will give it to the first man who tells me he would
like to be a woman. There might be one on Robbin Island (lunatics at the
Cape are sent to Robbin Island) who would win it perhaps, but I doubt
it even there. It is delightful to be a woman; but every man thanks the
Lord devoutly that he isn’t one.”
She drew her hat to one side to keep the sun out of her eyes as she
walked. Waldo looked at her so intently that he stumbled over the
bushes. Yes, this was his little Lyndall who had worn the check
pinafores; he saw it now, and he walked closer beside her. They reached
the next camp.
“Let us wait at this camp and watch the birds,” she said, as an ostrich
hen came bounding toward them with velvety wings outstretched, while far
away over the bushes the head of the cock was visible as he sat brooding
on the eggs.
Lyndall folded her arms on the gate bar, and Waldo threw his empty bag
on the wall and leaned beside her.
“I like these birds,” she said; “they share each other’s work, and are
companions. Do you take an interest in the position of women, Waldo?”
“No.”
“I thought not. No one does, unless they are in need of a subject upon
which to show their wit. And as for you, from of old you can see nothing
that is not separated from you by a few millions of miles, and strewed
over with mystery. If women were the inhabitants of Jupiter, of whom you
had happened to hear something, you would pore over us and our condition
night and day; but because we are before your eyes you never look at us.
You care nothing that this is ragged and ugly,” she said, putting
her little finger on his sleeve; “but you strive mightily to make an
imaginary leaf on an old stick beautiful. I’m sorry you don’t care for
the position of women; I should have liked us to be friends; and it is
the only thing about which I think much or feel much--if, indeed, I
have any feeling about anything,” she added, flippantly, readjusting her
dainty little arms. “When I was a baby, I fancy my parents left me out
in the frost one night, and I got nipped internally--it feels so!”
“I have only a few old thoughts,” he said, “and I think them over and
over again; always beginning where I left off. I never get any further.
I am weary of them.”
“Like an old hen that sits on its eggs month after month and they never
come out?” she said quickly. “I am so pressed in upon by new things
that, lest they should trip one another up, I have to keep forcing
them back. My head swings sometimes. But this one thought stands, never
goes--if I might but be one of these born in the future; then, perhaps,
to be born a woman will not be to be born branded.”
Waldo looked at her. It was hard to say whether she were in earnest or
mocking.
“I know it is foolish. Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can’t
bring down,” she said. “But we are cursed. Waldo, born cursed from the
time our mothers bring us into the world till the shrouds are put on us.
Do not look at me as though I were talking nonsense. Everything has two
sides--the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.”
“I am not laughing,” said the boy, sedately enough; “but what curses
you?”
He thought she would not reply to him, she waited so long.
“It is not what is done to us, but what is made of us,” she said at
last, “that wrongs us. No man can be really injured but by what modifies
himself. We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much
natural force, perhaps, but for the rest--blank; and the world tells us
what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To
you it says--“Work;” and to us it says--“Seem!” To you it says--As you
approximate to man’s highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and
your knowledge great, and the power to labour is with you, so you shall
gain all that human heart desires. To us it says--Strength shall not
help you, nor knowledge, nor labour. You shall gain what men gain, but
by other means. And so the world makes men and women.
“Look at this little chin of mine, Waldo, with the dimple in it. It
is but a small part of my person; but though I had a knowledge of all
things under the sun, and the wisdom to use it, and the deep loving
heart of an angel, it would not stead me through life like this little
chin. I can win money with it, I can win love; I can win power with it,
I can win fame. What would knowledge help me? The less a woman has in
her head the lighter she is for climbing. I once heard an old man say,
that he never saw intellect help a woman so much as a pretty ankle; and
it was the truth. They begin to shape us to our cursed end,” she said,
with her lips drawn in to look as though they smiled, “when we are tiny
things in shoes and socks. We sit with our little feet drawn up under us
in the window, and look out at the boys in their happy play. We want to
go. Then a loving hand is laid on us: ‘Little one, you cannot go,’ they
say, ‘your little face will burn, and your nice white dress be spoiled.’
We feel it must be for our good, it is so lovingly said: but we cannot
understand; and we kneel still with one little cheek wistfully pressed
against the pane. Afterwards we go and thread blue beads, and make a
string for our neck; and we go and stand before the glass. We see the
complexion we were not to spoil, and the white frock, and we look into
our own great eyes. Then the curse begins to act on us. It finishes its
work when we are grown women, who no more look out wistfully at a more
healthy life; we are contented. We fit our sphere as a Chinese woman’s
foot fits her shoe, exactly, as though God had made both--and yet he
knows nothing of either. In some of us the shaping of our end has been
quite completed. The parts we are not to use have been quite atrophied,
and have even dropped off; but in others, and we are not less to be
pitied, they have been weakened and left. We wear the bandages, but our
limbs have not grown to them; we know that we are compressed, and chafe
against them.
“But what does it help? A little bitterness, a little longing when
we are young, a little futile searching for work, a little passionate
striving for room for the exercise of our powers,--and then we go with
the drove. A woman must march with her regiment. In the end she must be
trodden down or go with it; and if she is wise she goes.
“I see in your great eyes what you are thinking,” she said, glancing at
him; “I always know what the person I am talking to is thinking of. How
is this woman who makes such a fuss worse off than I? I will show you
by a very little example. We stand here at this gate this morning, both
poor, both young, both friendless; there is not much to choose between
us. Let us turn away just as we are, to make our way in life. This
evening you will come to a farmer’s house. The farmer, albeit you come
alone on foot, will give you a pipe of tobacco and a cup of coffee and
a bed. If he has no dam to build and no child to teach, tomorrow you can
go on your way, with a friendly greeting of the hand. I, if I come to
the same place tonight, will have strange questions asked me, strange
glances cast on me. The Boer-wife will shake her head and give me food
to eat with the Kaffers, and a right to sleep with the dogs. That would
be the first step in our progress--a very little one, but every step to
the end would repeat it. We were equals once when we lay new-born babes
on our nurses’ knees. We will be equals again when they tie up our jaws
for the last sleep!”
Waldo looked in wonder at the little quivering face; it was a glimpse
into a world of passion and feeling wholly new to him.
“Mark you,” she said, “we have always this advantage over you--we can at
any time step into ease and competence, where you must labour patiently
for it. A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation,
a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say:
“Come, be my wife!” With good looks and youth marriage is easy to
attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for
a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the
street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the
beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it
is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.” She ran her little
finger savagely along the topmost bar, shaking off the dozen little
dewdrops that still hung there. “And they tell us we have men’s
chivalrous attention!” she cried. “When we ask to be doctors, lawyers,
law-makers, anything but ill-paid drudges, they say--No; but you have
men’s chivalrous attention; now think of that and be satisfied! What
would you do without it?”
The bitter little silvery laugh, so seldom heard, rang out across the
bushes. She bit her little teeth together.
“I was coming up in Cobb & Co.’s the other day. At a little wayside
hotel we had to change the large coach for a small one. We were ten
passengers, eight men and two women. As I sat in the house the gentlemen
came and whispered to me, ‘There is not room for all in the new coach,
take your seat quickly.’ We hurried out, and they gave me the best
seat, and covered me with rugs, because it was drizzling. Then the last
passenger came running up to the coach--an old woman with a wonderful
bonnet, and a black shawl pinned with a yellow pin.
“‘There is no room,’ they said; ‘you must wait till next week’s coach
takes you up;’ but she climbed on to the step, and held on at the window
with both hands.
“‘My son-in-law is ill, and I must go and see him,’ she said.
“‘My good woman,’ said one, ‘I am really exceedingly sorry that your
son-in-law is ill; but there is absolutely no room for you here.’
“‘You had better get down,’ said another, ‘or the wheel will catch you.’
“I got up to give her my place.
“‘Oh, no, no!’ they cried, ‘we will not allow that.’
“‘I will rather kneel,’ said one, and he crouched down at my feet; so
the woman came in.
“There were nine of us in that coach, and only one showed chivalrous
attention--and that was a woman to a woman.
“I shall be old and ugly, too, one day, and I shall look for men’s
chivalrous help, but I shall not find it.
“The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done,
and then they fly over them. I don’t know if the flowers feel grateful
to the bees; they are great fools if they do.”
“But some women,” said Waldo, speaking as though the words forced
themselves from him at that moment, “some women have power.”
She lifted her beautiful eyes to his face.
“Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should
have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of
water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do
its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And
it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it
will act. If Goethe had been stolen away a child, and reared in a robber
horde in the depths of a German forest, do you think the world would
have had “Faust” and “Iphegenie?” But he would have been Goethe
still--stronger, wiser than his fellows. At night, round their
watch-fire, he would have chanted wild songs of rapine and murder, till
the dark faces about him were moved and trembled. His songs would have
echoed on from father to son, and nerved the heart and arm--for evil.
Do you think if Napoleon had been born a woman that he would have been
contented to give small tea-parties and talk small scandal? He would
have risen; but the world would not have heard of him as it hears of him
now--a man great and kingly with all his sins; he would have left one
of those names that stain the leaf of every history--the names of women,
who, having power, but being denied the right to exercise it openly,
rule in the dark, covertly, and by stealth, through the men whose
passions they feed on and by whom they climb.
“Power!” she said, suddenly, smiting her little hand upon the rail.
“Yes, we have power; and since we are not to expend it in tunnelling
mountains, nor healing diseases, nor making laws, nor money, nor on
any extraneous object, we expend it on you. You are our goods, our
merchandise, our material for operating on; we buy you, we sell you, we
make fools of you, we act the wily old Jew with you, we keep six of you
crawling to our little feet, and praying only for a touch of our little
hand; and they say truly, there was never an ache or pain or broken
heart but a woman was at the bottom of it. We are not to study law, nor
science, nor art, so we study you. There is never a nerve or fibre in a
man’s nature but we know it. We keep six of you dancing in the palm of
one little hand,” she said, balancing her outstretched arm gracefully,
as though tiny beings disported themselves in its palm. “There, we
throw you away, and you sink to the devil,” she said, folding her arms
composedly. “There was never a man who said one word for woman but he
said two for man, and three for the whole human race.”
She watched the bird pecking up the last yellow grains; but Waldo looked
only at her.
When she spoke again it was very measuredly.
“They bring weighty arguments against us when we ask for the perfect
freedom of women,” she said; “but, when you come to the objections, they
are like pumpkin devils with candles inside, hollow, and can’t bite.
They say that women do not wish for the sphere and freedom we ask for
them, and would not use it!
“If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not
leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut? Why not open it,
only a little? Do they know there is many a bird will not break its
wings against the bars, but would fly if the doors were open?” She knit
her forehead and leaned further over the bars.
“Then they say, ‘If the women have the liberty you ask for, they will be
found in positions for which they are not fitted!’ If two men climb
one ladder, did you ever see the weakest anywhere but at the foot? The
surest sign of fitness is success. The weakest never wins but where
there is handicapping. Nature, left to herself, will as beautifully
apportion a man’s work to his capacities as long ages ago she graduated
the colours on the bird’s breast. If we are not fit, you give us, to no
purpose, the right to labour; the work will fall out of our hands into
those that are wiser.”
She talked more rapidly as she went on, as one talks of that over which
they have brooded long, and which lies near their hearts.
Waldo watched her intently.
“They say women have one great and noble work left them, and they do it
ill. That is true; they do it execrably. It is the work that demands the
broadest culture, and they have not even the narrowest. The lawyer may
see no deeper than his law-books, and the chemist see no further than
the windows of his laboratory, and they may do their work well. But the
woman who does woman’s work needs a many-sided, multiform culture; the
heights and depths of human life must not be beyond the reach of her
vision; she must have knowledge of men and things in many states, a wide
catholicity of sympathy, the strength that springs from knowledge, and
the magnanimity which springs from strength. We bear the world, and
we make it. The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and
tender things, and keep forever the shadow that first falls on them, and
that is the mother’s or at best a woman’s. There was never a great man
who had not a great mother--it is hardly an exaggeration. The first six
years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer; and yet
some say, if a woman can cook a dinner or dress herself well she has
culture enough.
“The mightiest and noblest of human work is given to us, and we do it
ill. Send a navvie to work into an artist’s studio, and see what you
will find there! And yet, thank God, we have this work,” she added,
quickly--“it is the one window through which we see into the great
world of earnest labour. The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes
something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her
questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take
from us.”
She smiled slightly. “They say that we complain of woman’s being
compelled to look upon marriage as a profession; but that she is free to
enter upon it or leave it, as she pleases.
“Yes--and a cat set afloat in a pond is free to sit in the tub till it
dies there, it is under no obligation to wet its feet; and a drowning
man may catch at a straw or not, just as he likes--it is a glorious
liberty! Let any man think for five minutes of what old maidenhood means
to a woman--and then let him be silent. Is it easy to bear through life
a name that in itself signifies defeat? to dwell, as nine out of ten
unmarried women must, under the finger of another woman? Is it easy to
look forward to an old age without honour, without the reward of useful
labour, without love? I wonder how many men there are who would give up
everything that is dear in life for the sake of maintaining a high ideal
purity.”
She laughed a little laugh that was clear without being pleasant.
“And then, when they have no other argument against us, they say, ‘Go
on; but when you have made woman what you wish, and her children inherit
her culture, you will defeat yourself. Man will gradually become extinct
from excess of intellect, the passions which replenish the race will
die.’ Fools!” she said, curling her pretty lip. “A Hottentot sits at the
roadside and feeds on a rotten bone he has found there, and takes out
his bottle of Cape-smoke and swills at it, and grunts with satisfaction;
and the cultured child of the nineteenth century sits in his armchair,
and sips choice wines with the lip of a connoisseur, and tastes delicate
dishes with a delicate palate, and with a satisfaction of which the
Hottentot knows nothing. Heavy jaw and sloping forehead--all have
gone with increasing intellect; but the animal appetites are there
still--refined, discriminative, but immeasurably intensified. Fools!
Before men forgave or worshipped, while they were weak on their hind
legs, did they not eat and drink, and fight for wives? When all the
latter additions to humanity have vanished, will not the foundation on
which they are built remain?”
She was silent then for a while, and said somewhat dreamily, more as
though speaking to herself than to him,
“They ask, What will you gain, even if man does not become extinct?--you
will have brought justice and equality on to the earth, and sent love
from it. When men and women are equals they will love no more. Your
highly-cultured women will not be lovable, will not love.
“Do they see nothing, understand nothing? It is Tant Sannie who buries
husbands one after another, and folds her hands resignedly,--‘The Lord
gave, and the Lord hath taken away, and blessed be the name of the
Lord,’--and she looks for another. It is the hard-headed, deep thinker
who, when the wife who has thought and worked with him goes, can find no
rest, and lingers near her till he finds sleep beside her.
“A great soul draws and is drawn with a more fierce intensity than any
small one. By every inch we grow in intellectual height our love strikes
down its roots deeper, and spreads out its arms wider. It is for love’s
sake yet more than for any other that we look for that new time.”
She had leaned her head against the stones, and watched with her sad,
soft eyes the retreating bird. “Then when that time comes,” she said
lowly, “when love is no more bought or sold, when it is not a means of
making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent
labour, then love will come to her, a strange, sudden sweetness breaking
in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found. Then, but not
now--”
Waldo waited for her to finish the sentence, but she seemed to have
forgotten him.
“Lyndall,” he said, putting his hand upon her--she started--“if you
think that that new time will be so great, so good, you who speak so
easily--”
She interrupted him.
“Speak! speak!” she said, “the difficulty is not to speak; the
difficulty is to keep silence.”
“But why do you not try to bring that time?” he said with pitiful
simplicity. “When you speak I believe all you say; other people would
listen to you also.”
“I am not so sure of that,” she said with a smile.
Then over the small face came the weary look it had worn last night as
it watched the shadow in the corner, Ah, so weary!
“I, Waldo, I?” she said. “I will do nothing good for myself, nothing
for the world, till some one wakes me. I am asleep, swathed, shut up in
self; till I have been delivered I will deliver no one.”
He looked at her wondering, but she was not looking at him.
“To see the good and the beautiful,” she said, “and to have no strength
to live it, is only to be Moses on the mountain of Nebo, with the land
at your feet and no power to enter. It would be better not to see
it. Come,” she said, looking up into his face, and seeing its
uncomprehending expression, “let us go, it is getting late. Doss is
anxious for his breakfast also,” she added, wheeling round and calling
to the dog, who was endeavouring to unearth a mole, an occupation to
which he had been zealously addicted from the third month, but in which
he had never on any single occasion proved successful.
Waldo shouldered his bag, and Lyndall walked on before in silence, with
the dog close to her side. Perhaps she thought of the narrowness of
the limits within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its
nearest of mental kin, of how soon it reaches that solitary land of
the individual experience, in which no fellow footfall is ever heard.
Whatever her thoughts may have been, she was soon interrupted. Waldo
came close to her, and standing still, produced with awkwardness from
his breast-pocket a small carved box.
“I made it for you,” he said, holding it out.
“I like it,” she said, examining it carefully.
The workmanship was better than that of the grave-post. The flowers that
covered it were delicate, and here and there small conical protuberances
were let in among them. She turned it round critically. Waldo bent over
it lovingly.
“There is one strange thing about it,” he said earnestly, putting a
finger on one little pyramid. “I made it without these, and I felt
something was wrong; I tried many changes, and at last I let these
in, and then it was right. But why was it? They are not beautiful in
themselves.”
“They relieve the monotony of the smooth leaves, I suppose.”
He shook his head as over a weighty matter.
“The sky is monotonous,” he said, “when it is blue, and yet it is
beautiful. I have thought of that often; but it is not monotony, and
it is not variety makes beauty. What is it? The sky, and your face, and
this box--the same thing is in them all, only more in the sky and in
your face. But what is it?”
She smiled.
“So you are at your old work still. Why, why, why? What is the reason?
It is enough for me,” she said, “if I find out what is beautiful and
what is ugly, what is real and what is not. Why it is there, and over
the final cause of things in general, I don’t trouble myself; there must
be one, but what is it to me? If I howl to all eternity I shall never
get hold of it; and if I did I might be no better off. But you Germans
are born with an aptitude for borrowing; you can’t help yourselves. You
must sniff after reasons, just as that dog must after a mole. He knows
perfectly well he will never catch it, but he’s under the imperative
necessity of digging for it.”
“But he might find it.”
“Might!--but he never has and never will. Life is too short to run after
mights; we must have certainties.”
She tucked the box under her arm and was about to walk on, when
Gregory Rose, with shining spurs, an ostrich feather in his hat, and
a silver-headed whip, careered past. He bowed gallantly as he went by.
They waited till the dust of the horse’s hoofs had laid itself.
“There,” said Lyndall, “goes a true woman--one born for the sphere that
some women have to fill without being born for it. How happy he would
be sewing frills into his little girl’s frocks, and how pretty he would
look sitting in a parlour, with a rough man making love to him! Don’t
you think so?”
“I shall not stay here when he is master,” Waldo answered, not able to
connect any kind of beauty with Gregory Rose.
“I should imagine not. The rule of a woman is tyranny; but the rule of a
man-woman grinds fine. Where are you going?”
“Anywhere.”
“What to do?”
“See--see everything.”
“You will be disappointed.”
“And were you?”
“Yes; and you will be more so. I want things that men and the world
give, you do not. If you have a few yards of earth to stand on, and a
bit of blue over you, and something that you cannot see to dream about,
you have all that you need, all that you know how to use. But I like to
see real men. Let them be as disagreeable as they please, they are more
interesting to me than flowers, or trees, or stars, or any other thing
under the sun. Sometimes,” she added, walking on, and shaking the dust
daintily from her skirts, “when I am not too busy trying to find a new
way of doing my hair that will show my little neck to better advantage,
or over other work of that kind, sometimes it amuses me intensely to
trace out the resemblance between one man and another: to see how
Tant Sannie and I, you and Bonaparte, St. Simon on his pillow, and the
emperor dining off larks’ tongues, are one and the same compound, merely
mixed in different proportions.
“What is microscopic in one is largely developed in another; what is a
rudimentary in one man is an active organ in another; but all things are
in all men, and one soul is the model of all. We shall find nothing new
in human nature after we have once carefully dissected and analyzed the
one being we ever shall truly know--ourself. The Kaffer girl threw
some coffee on my arm in bed this morning; I felt displeased, but said
nothing. Tant Sannie would have thrown the saucer at her and sworn for
an hour; but the feeling would be the same irritated displeasure. If a
huge animated stomach like Bonaparte were put under a glass by a
skilful mental microscopist, even he would be found to have an embryonic
doubling somewhere indicative of a heart, and rudimentary buddings that
might have become conscience and sincerity. Let me take your arm Waldo.
“How full you are of mealie dust. No, never mind. It will brush off. And
sometimes what is more amusing still than tracing the likeness between
man and man, is to trace the analogy there always is between the
progress and development of one individual and of a whole nation; or,
again, between a single nation and the entire human race. It is pleasant
when it dawns on you that the one is just the other written out in large
letters; and very odd to find all the little follies and virtues, and
developments and retrogressions, written out in the big world’s book
that you find in your little internal self. It is the most amusing thing
I know of; but of course, being a woman, I have not often time for such
amusements. Professional duties always first, you know. It takes a great
deal of time and thought always to look perfectly exquisite, even for a
pretty woman. Is the old buggy still in existence, Waldo?”
“Yes, but the harness is broken.”
“Well, I wish you would mend it. You must teach me to drive. I must
learn something while I am here. I got the Hottentot girl to show me how
to make sarsarties this morning; and Tant Sannie is going to teach me to
make kapjes. I will come and sit with you this afternoon while you mend
the harness.”
“Thank you.”
“No, don’t thank me; I come for my own pleasure. I never find any one
I can talk to. Women bore me, and men, I talk so to--‘Going to the ball
this evening? Nice little dog that of yours. Pretty little ears. So fond
of pointer pups!’ And they think me fascinating, charming! Men are like
the earth, and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and
they think there is no other, because they don’t see it--but there is.”
They had reached the house now.
“Tell me when you set to work,” she said, and walked toward the door.
Waldo stood to look after her, and Doss stood at his side, a look of
painful uncertainty depicted on his small countenance, and one little
foot poised in the air. Should he stay with his master or go? He looked
at the figure with the wide straw hat moving toward the house, and he
looked up at his master; then he put down the little paw and went. Waldo
watched them both in at the door and then walked away alone. He was
satisfied that at least his dog was with her.