Chapter 2.I. Times and Seasons.
Waldo lay on his stomach on the sand. Since he prayed and howled to hisGod in the fuel-house three years had passed.
They say that in the world to come time is not measured out by monthsand years. Neither is it here. The soul's life has seasons of its own;periods not found in any calendar, times that years and months will notscan, but which are as deftly and sharply cut off from one another asthe smoothly-arranged years which the earth's motion yields us.
To stranger eyes these divisions are not evident; but each, lookingback at the little track his consciousness illuminates, sees it cutinto distinct portions, whose boundaries are the termination of mentalstates.
As man differs from man, so differ these souls' years. The most materiallife is not devoid of them; the story of the most spiritual is told inthem. And it may chance that some, looking back, see the past cut outafter this fashion:
I.
The year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulnessstart out pictures of startling clearness, disconnected, but brightlycoloured, and indelibly printed in the mind. Much that follows fades,but the colours of those baby-pictures are permanent.
There rises, perhaps, a warm summer's evening; we are seated on thedoorstep; we have yet the taste of the bread and milk in our mouth, andthe red sunset is reflected in our basin.
Then there is a dark night, where, waking with a fear that there is somegreat being in the room, we run from our own bed to another, creep closeto some large figure, and are comforted.
Then there is remembrance of the pride when, on some one's shoulder,with our arms around their head, we ride to see the little pigs, the newlittle pigs with their curled tails and tiny snouts--where do they comefrom?
Remembrance of delight in the feel and smell of the first orange we eversee; of sorrow which makes us put up our lip, and cry hard, when onemorning we run out to try and catch the dewdrops, and they melt and wetour little fingers; of almighty and despairing sorrow when we are lostbehind the kraals, and cannot see the house anywhere.
And then one picture starts out more vividly than any.
There has been a thunderstorm; the ground, as far as the eye can reach,is covered with white hail; the clouds are gone, and overhead a deepblue sky is showing; far off a great rainbow rests on the white earth.We, standing in a window to look, feel the cool, unspeakably sweet windblowing in on us, and a feeling of longing comes over us--unutterablelonging, we cannot tell for what. We are so small, our head only reachesas high as the first three panes. We look at the white earth, and therainbow, and the blue sky; and oh, we want it, we want--we do not knowwhat. We cry as though our heart was broken. When one lifts our littlebody from the window we cannot tell what ails us. We run away to play.
So looks the first year.
II.
Now the pictures become continuous and connected. Material things stillrule, but the spiritual and intellectual take their places.
In the dark night when we are afraid we pray and shut our eyes. We pressour fingers very hard upon the lids, and see dark spots moving round andround, and we know they are heads and wings of angels sent to take careof us, seen dimly in the dark as they move round our bed. It is veryconsoling.
In the day we learn our letters, and are troubled because we cannot seewhy k-n-o-w should be know, and p-s-a-l-m psalm. They tell us it is sobecause it is so. We are not satisfied; we hate to learn; we like betterto build little stone houses. We can build them as we please, and knowthe reason for them.
Other joys too we have incomparably greater then even the building ofstone houses.
We are run through with a shudder of delight when in the red sand wecome on one of those white wax flowers that lie between their two greenleaves flat on the sand. We hardly dare pick them, but we feel compelledto do so; and we smell and smell till the delight becomes almost pain.Afterward we pull the green leaves softly into pieces to see the silkthreads run across.
Beyond the kopje grow some pale-green, hairy-leaved bushes. We are sosmall, they meet over our head, and we sit among them, and kiss them,and they love us back; it seems as though they were alive.
One day we sit there and look up at the blue sky, and down at our fatlittle knees; and suddenly it strikes us, Who are we? This I, whatis it? We try to look in upon ourselves, and ourself beats back uponourself. Then we get up in great fear and run home as hard as we can. Wecan't tell any one what frightened us. We never quite lose that feelingof self again.
III.
And then a new time rises. We are seven years old. We can read now--readthe Bible. Best of all we like the story of Elijah in his cave at Horeb,and the still small voice.
One day, a notable one, we read on the kopje, and discover the fifthchapter of Matthew, and read it all through. It is a new gold-mine. Thenwe tuck the Bible under our arm and rushed home. They didn't know it waswicked to take your things again if some one took them, wicked to go tolaw, wicked to--! We are quite breathless when we get to the house; wetell them we have discovered a chapter they never heard of; we tell themwhat it says. The old wise people tell us they knew all about it. Ourdiscovery is a mare's-nest to them; but to us it is very real. The tencommandments and the old "Thou shalt" we have heard about long enoughand don't care about it; but this new law sets us on fire.
We will deny ourself. Our little wagon that we have made, we give to thelittle Kaffers. We keep quiet when they throw sand at us (feeling, oh,so happy). We conscientiously put the cracked teacup for ourselves atbreakfast, and take the burnt roaster-cake. We save our money, and buythreepence of tobacco for the Hottentot maid who calls us names. Weare exotically virtuous. At night we are profoundly religious; eventhe ticking watch says, "Eternity, eternity! hell, hell, hell!" and thesilence talks of God, and the things that shall be.
Occasionally, also, unpleasantly shrewd questions begin to be asked bysome one, we know not who, who sits somewhere behind our shoulder. Weget to know him better afterward.
Now we carry the questions to the grown-up people, and they give usanswers. We are more or less satisfied for the time. The grown-up peopleare very wise, and they say it was kind of God to make hell, and veryloving of Him to send men there; and besides, he couldn't help Himself,and they are very wise, we think, so we believe them--more or less.
IV.
Then a new time comes, of which the leading feature is, that the shrewdquestions are asked louder. We carry them to the grown-up people; theyanswer us, and we are not satisfied.
And now between us and the dear old world of the senses the spirit-worldbegins to peep in, and wholly clouds it over. What are the flowers tous? They are fuel waiting for the great burning. We look at the wallsof the farmhouse and the matter-of-fact sheep-kraals, with the merrysunshine playing over all; and do not see it. But we see a great whitethrone, and him that sits on it. Around Him stand a great multitude thatno man can number, harpers harping with their harps, a thousand timesten thousand, and thousands of thousands. How white are their robes,washed in the blood of the Lamb! And the music rises higher, and rendsthe vault of heaven with its unutterable sweetness. And we, as welisten, ever and anon, as it sinks on the sweetest, lowest note, hear agroan of the damned from below. We shudder in the sunlight.
"The torment," says Jeremy Taylor, whose sermons our father reads aloudin the evening, "comprises as many torments as the body of man hasjoints, sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating andreal fire of which this temporal fire is but a painted fire. Whatcomparison will there be between burning for a hundred years' space andto be burning without intermission as long as God is God!"
We remember the sermon there in the sunlight. One comes and asks why wesit there nodding so moodily. Ah, they do not see what we see.
"A moment's time, a narrow space, Divides me from that heavenly place, Or shuts me up in hell."
So says Wesley's hymn, which we sing evening by evening. What mattersunshine and walls, men and sheep?
> "The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are notseen are eternal." They are real.
The Bible we bear always in our breast; its pages are our food; we learnto repeat it; we weep much, for in sunshine and in shade, in the earlymorning or the late evening, in the field or in the house, the devilwalks with us. He comes to a real person, copper-coloured face, head alittle on one side, forehead knit, asking questions. Believe me, it werebetter to be followed by three deadly diseases than by him. He is neversilenced--without mercy. Though the drops of blood stand out on yourheart he will put his question. Softly he comes up (we are only a weebit child); "Is it good of God to make hell? Was it kind of Him to letno one be forgiven unless Jesus Christ died?"
Then he goes off, and leaves us writhing. Presently he comes back.
"Do you love Him?"--waits a little. "Do you love Him? You will be lostif you don't."
We say we try to.
"But do you?" Then he goes off.
It is nothing to him if we go quite mad with fear at our own wickedness.He asks on, the questioning devil; he cares nothing what he says. Welong to tell some one, that they may share our pain. We do not yet knowthat the cup of affliction is made with such a narrow mouth that onlyone lip can drink at a time, and that each man's cup is made to matchhis lip.
One day we try to tell some one. Then a grave head is shaken solemnlyat us. We are wicked, very wicked, they say we ought not to have suchthoughts. God is good, very good. We are wicked, very wicked. That isthe comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not thesense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart,filling it with sand, making all life a dust-bin for us?
Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creepover this, God's earth, and move among His believing men. Hell is theone place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go.This is the comfort we get from the old.
And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look atus wondering, and lovely little lips say:
"If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you notthink of something else, and forget?"
Forget! We turn away and shrink into ourself. Forget, and think of otherthings! Oh, God! do they not understand that the material world is buta film, through every pore of which God's awful spirit world is shiningthrough on us? We keep as far from others as we can.
One night, a rare clear moonlight night, we kneel in the window; everyone else is asleep, but we kneel reading by the moonlight. It is achapter in the prophets, telling how the chosen people of God shallbe carried on the Gentiles' shoulders. Surely the devil might leaveus alone; there is not much to handle for him there. But presently hecomes.
"Is it right there should be a chosen people? To Him, who is father toall, should not all be dear?"
How can we answer him? We were feeling so good till he came. We put ourhead down on the Bible and blister it with tears. Then we fold our handsover our head and pray, till our teeth grind together. Oh, that fromthat spirit-world, so real and yet so silent, that surrounds us, oneword would come to guide us! We are left alone with this devil; and Goddoes not whisper to us. Suddenly we seize the Bible, turning it roundand round, and say hurriedly:
"It will be God's voice speaking to us; His voice as though we heardit."
We yearn for a token from the inexorably Silent One.
We turn the book, put our finger down on a page, and bend to read by themoonlight. It is God's answer. We tremble.
"Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas,and took Titus with me also."
For an instant our imagination seizes it; we are twisting, twirling,trying to make an allegory. The fourteen years are fourteen months; weare Paul and the devil is Barnabas, Titus is-- Then a sudden loathingcomes to us: we are liars and hypocrites, we are trying to deceiveourselves. What is Paul to us--and Jerusalem? We are Barnabas and Titus?We know not the men. Before we know we seize the book, swing it roundour head, and fling it with all our might to the further end of theroom. We put down our head again and weep.
Youth and ignorance; is there anything else that can weep so? It isas though the tears were drops of blood congealed beneath the eyelids;nothing else is like those tears. After a long time we are weak withcrying, and lie silent, and by chance we knock against the wood thatstops the broken pane. It falls. Upon our hot stiff face a sweet breathof wind blows. We raise our head, and with our swollen eyes look out atthe beautiful still world, and the sweet night-wind blows in upon us,holy and gentle, like a loving breath from the lips of God. Over usa deep peace comes, a calm, still joy; the tears now flow readily andsoftly. Oh, the unutterable gladness! At last, at last we have found it!"The peace with God." "The sense of sins forgiven." All doubt vanished,God's voice in the soul, the Holy Spirit filling us! We feel Him! Wefeel Him! Oh, Jesus Christ, through you, through you this joy! We pressour hands upon our breast and look upward with adoring gladness. Softwaves of bliss break through us. "The peace with God." "The senseof sins forgiven." Methodists and revivalists say the words, and themocking world shoots out its lip, and walks by smiling--"Hypocrite."
There are more fools and fewer hypocrites than the wise world dreamsof. The hypocrite is rare as icebergs in the tropics; the fool commonas buttercups beside a water-furrow: whether you go this way or that youtread on him; you dare not look at your own reflection in the water butyou see one. There is no cant phrase, rotten with age, but it was thedress of a living body; none but at heart it signifies a real bodily ormental condition which some have passed through.
After hours and nights of frenzied fear of the supernatural desire toappease the power above, a fierce quivering excitement in every inchof nerve and blood vessel, there comes a time when nature cannot endurelonger, and the spring long bent recoils. We sink down emasculated. Upcreeps the deadly delicious calm.
"I have blotted out as a cloud thy sins, and as a thick cloud thytrespasses, and will remember them no more for ever." We weep with softtransporting joy.
A few experience this; many imagine they experience it, one here andthere lies about it. In the main, "The peace with God; a sense ofsins forgiven," stands for a certain mental and physical reaction. Itsreality those know who have felt it.
And we, on that moonlight night, put down our head on the window, "Oh,God! we are happy, happy; thy child forever. Oh, thank you, God!" and wedrop asleep.
Next morning the Bible we kiss. We are God's forever. We go out to work,and it goes happily all day, happily all night; but hardly so happily,not happily at all, the next day; and the next night the devil asks us,"where is your Holy Spirit?"
We cannot tell.
So month by month, summer and winter, the old life goes on--reading,praying, weeping, praying. They tell us we become utterly stupid. Weknow it. Even the multiplication table we learnt with so much care weforgot. The physical world recedes further and further from us. Truly welove not the world, neither the things that are in it. Across the boundsof sleep our grief follows us. When we wake in the night we are sittingup in bed weeping bitterly, or find ourself outside in the moonlight,dressed, and walking up and down, and wringing our hands, and we cannottell how we came there. So pass two years, as men reckon them.
V.
Then a new time.
Before us there were three courses possible--to go mad, to die, tosleep.
We take the latter course; or nature takes it for us.
All things take rest in sleep; the beasts, birds, the very flowers closetheir eyes, and the streams are still in winter; all things take rest;then why not the human reason also? So the questioning devil in us dropsasleep, and in that sleep a beautiful dream rises for us. Though youhear all the dreams of men, you will hardly find a prettier one thanours. It ran so:
In the centre of all things is a mighty Heart, which, having begottenall things, loves them; and, having born them into life, beats withgreat throbs of love towards them. No death for His dear insects, no
hell for His dear men, no burning up for His dear world--His own, ownworld that he has made. In the end all will be beautiful. Do not askus how we make our dream tally with facts; the glory of a dream isthis--that it despises facts, and makes its own. Our dream saves us fromgoing mad; that is enough.
Its peculiar point of sweetness lay here. When the Mighty Heart'syearning of love became too great for other expression, it shaped itselfinto the sweet Rose of heaven, the beloved Man-god.
Jesus! you Jesus of our dream! how we loved you; no Bible tells of youas we knew you. Your sweet hands held ours fast; your sweet voice saidalways, "I am here, my loved one, not far off; put your arms about me,and hold fast."
We find Him in everything in those days. When the little weary lamb wedrive home drags its feet, we seize on it, and carry it with its headagainst our face. His little lamb! We feel we have got Him.
When the drunken Kaffer lies by the road in the sun we draw his blanketover his head, and put green branches of milk-bush on it. His Kaffer;why should the sun hurt him?
In the evening, when the clouds lift themselves like gates, and the redlights shine through them, we cry; for in such glory He will come, andthe hands that ache to touch Him will hold him, and we shall see thebeautiful hair and eyes of our God. "Lift up your heads, O, ye gates;and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and our King of glory shallcome in!"
The purple flowers, the little purple flowers, are His eyes, looking atus. We kiss them, and kneel alone on the flat, rejoicing over them. Andthe wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for Him, and thedesert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose.
If ever, in our tearful, joyful ecstasy, the poor, sleepy, half-deaddevil should raise his head, we laugh at him. It is not his hour now.
"If there should be a hell, after all!" he mutters. "If your God shouldbe cruel! If there should be no God! If you should find out it is allimagination! If--"
We laugh at him. When a man sits in the warm sunshine, do you ask himfor proof of it? He feels--that is all. And we feel--that is all. Wewant no proof of our God. We feel, we feel!
We do not believe in our God because the Bible tells us of Him. Webelieve in the Bible because He tells us of it. We feel Him, we feelHim, we feel--that is all! And the poor, half-swamped devil mutters:
"But if the day should come when you do not feel?"
And we laugh and cry him down.
"It will never come--never," and the poor devil slinks to sleep again,with his tail between his legs. Fierce assertion many times repeated ishard to stand against; only time separates the truth from the lie. So wedream on.
One day we go with our father to town, to church. The townspeople rustlein their silks, and the men in their sleek cloth, and settle themselvesin their pews, and the light shines in through the windows on theartificial flowers in the women's bonnets. We have the same miserablefeeling that we have in a shop where all the clerks are very smart. Wewish our father hadn't brought us to town, and we were out on thekaroo. Then the man in the pulpit begins to preach. His text is "He thatbelieveth not shall be damned."
The day before the magistrate's clerk, who was an atheist, has died inthe street struck by lightning.
The man in the pulpit mentions no name; but he talks of "The hand of Godmade visible amongst us." He tells us how, when the white stroke fell,quivering and naked, the soul fled, robbed of his earthly filament, andlay at the footstool of God; how over its head has been poured out thewrath of the Mighty One, whose existence it has denied; and, quiveringand terrified, it has fled to the everlasting shade.
We, as we listen, half start up; every drop of blood in our body hasrushed to our head. He lies! he lies! he lies! That man in the pulpitlies! Will no one stop him? Have none of them heard--do none of themknow, that when the poor, dark soul shut its eyes on earth it openedthem in the still light of heaven? that there is no wrath where God'sface is? that if one could once creep to the footstool of God, there iseverlasting peace there, like the fresh stillness of the early morning?While the atheist lay wondering and afraid, God bent down and said:"My child, here I am--I, whom you have not known; I, whom you have notbelieved in; I am here. I sent My messenger, the white sheet-lightning,to call you home. I am here."
Then the poor soul turned to the light--its weakness and pain were goneforever.
Have they not known, have they not heard, who it is rules?
"For a little moment have I hidden my face from thee; but witheverlasting kindness will I have mercy upon thee, saith the Lord thyRedeemer."
We mutter on to ourselves, till some one pulls us violently by the armto remind us we are in church. We see nothing but our own ideas.
Presently every one turns to pray. There are six hundred souls liftingthemselves to the Everlasting light.
Behind us sit two pretty ladies; one hands her scent-bottle softly tothe other, and a mother pulls down her little girl's frock. One ladydrops her handkerchief; a gentleman picks it up; she blushes. The womenin the choir turn softly the leaves of their tune-books, to be readywhen the praying is done. It is as though they thought more of thesinging than the Everlasting Father. Oh, would it not be more worship ofHim to sit alone in the karoo and kiss one little purple flower that hehad made? Is it not mockery? Then the thought comes, "What doest thouhere, Elijah?" We who judge, what are we better than they?--ratherworse. Is it any excuse to say, "I am but a child and must come?" DoesGod allow any soul to step in between the spirit he made and himself?What do we there in that place, where all the words are lies against theAll Father? Filled with horror, we turn and flee out of the place. Onthe pavement we smite our foot, and swear in our child's soul neveragain to enter those places where men come to sing and pray. We arequestioned afterward. Why was it we went out of the church.
How can we explain?--we stand silent. Then we are pressed further, andwe try to tell. Then a head is shaken solemnly at us. No one can thinkit wrong to go to the house of the Lord; it is the idle excuse of awicked boy. When will we think seriously of our souls, and love going tochurch? We are wicked, very wicked. And we--we slink away and go aloneto cry. Will it be always so? Whether we hate and doubt, or whether webelieve and love, to our dearest, are we to seem always wicked?
We do not yet know that in the soul's search for truth the bitternesslies here, the striving cannot always hide itself among the thoughts;sooner or later it will clothe itself in outward action; then it stepsin and divides between the soul and what it loves. All things on earthhave their price; and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it forlove and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on thepath to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart.
VI.
Then at last a new time--the time of waking; short, sharp, and notpleasant, as wakings often are.
Sleep and dreams exist on this condition--that no one wake the dreamer.
And now life takes us up between her finger and thumb, shakes usfuriously, till our poor nodding head is well-nigh rolled from ourshoulders, and she sets us down a little hard on the bare earth, bruisedand sore, but preternaturally wide awake.
We have said in our days of dreaming, "Injustice and wrong are aseeming; pain is a shadow. Our God, He is real, He who made all things,and He only is Love."
Now life takes us by the neck and shows us a few other things,--new-madegraves with the red sand flying about them; eyes that we love with theworms eating them; evil men walking sleek and fat, the whole terriblehurly-burly of the thing called life,--and she says, "What do you thinkof these?" We dare not say "Nothing." We feel them; they are very real.But we try to lay our hands about and feel that other thing we feltbefore. In the dark night in the fuel-room we cry to our Beautifuldream-god: "Oh, let us come near you, and lay our head against yourfeet. Now in our hour of need be near us." But He is not there; He isgone away. The old questioning devil is there.
We must have been awakened sooner or later. The imagination cannotalways triumph over reality, the desire over truth. We must have be
enawakened. If it was done a little sharply, what matter? It was donethoroughly, and it had to be done.
VII.
And a new life begins for us--a new time, a life as cold as that ofa man who sits on the pinnacle of an iceberg and sees the glitteringcrystals all about him. The old looks indeed like a long hot delirium,peopled with phantasies. The new is cold enough.
Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handeddown to us, that we hated, and never liked: the new one that we made forourselves, that we loved; but now he has flitted away from us, and wesee what he was made of--the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned andthroned. Now we have no God.
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." It may be so. Mostthings said or written have been the work of fools.
This thing is certain--he is a fool who says, "No man hath said in hisheart, There is no God."
It has been said many thousand times in hearts with profound bitternessof earnest faith.
We do not cry and weep: we sit down with cold eyes and look at theworld. We are not miserable. Why should we be? We eat and drink, andsleep all night; but the dead are not colder.
And we say it slowly, but without sighing, "Yes, we see it now; there isno God."
And, we add, growing a little colder yet. "There is no justice. The oxdies in the yoke, beneath its master's whip; it turns its anguish-filledeyes on the sunlight, but there is no sign of recompense to be made it.The black man is shot like a dog, and it goes well with the shooter.The innocent are accused and the accuser triumphs. If you will take thetrouble to scratch the surface anywhere, you will see under the skin asentient being writhing in impotent anguish."
And, we say further, and our heart is as the heart of the dead forcoldness, "There is no order: all things are driven about by a blindchance."
What a soul drinks in with its mother's milk will not leave it in aday. From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of theheart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows ona sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn,depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things;but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers canalter. To us, from the beginning, nature has been but a poor plasticthing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please hisdeity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not;to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant tosee Nature as she is--the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?When the soul breaks free from the arms of a superstition, bits of theclaws and talons break themselves off in him. It is not the work of aday to squeeze them out.
And so, for us, the human-like driver and guide being gone, allexistence, as we look out at it with our chilled, wondering eyes, is anaimless rise and swell of shifting waters. In all that weltering chaoswe can see no spot so large as a man's hand on which we may plant ourfoot.
Whether a man believes in a human-like God or no is a small thing.Whether he looks into the mental and physical world and sees no relationbetween cause and effect, no order, but a blind chance sporting, this isthe mightiest fact that can be recorded in any spiritual existence. Itwere almost a mercy to cut his throat, if indeed he does not do it forhimself.
We, however, do not cut our throats. To do so would imply some desireand feeling, and we have no desire and no feeling; we are only cold. Wedo not wish to live, and we do not wish to die. One day a snake curlsitself round the waist of a Kaffer woman. We take it in our hand, swingit round and round, and fling it on the ground--dead. Every one looksat us with eyes of admiration. We almost laugh. Is it wonderful to riskthat for which we care nothing?
In truth, nothing matters. This dirty little world full of confusion,and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touchit with our hand.
Existence is a great pot, and the old Fate who stirs it round caresnothing what rises to the top and what goes down, and laughs when thebubbles burst. And we do not care. Let it boil about. Why should wetrouble ourselves? Nevertheless the physical sensations are real.Hunger hurts, and thirst, therefore we eat and drink: inaction painsus, therefore we work like galley-slaves. No one demands it, but we setourselves to build a great dam in red sand beyond the graves. In thegrey dawn before the sheep are let out we work at it. All day, while theyoung ostriches we tend feed about us, we work on through the fiercestheat. The people wonder what new spirit has seized us now. They do notknow we are working for life. We bear the greatest stones, and feel asatisfaction when we stagger under them, and are hurt by a pang thatshoots through our chest. While we eat our dinner we carry on basketsfull of earth, as though the devil drove us. The Kaffer servants have astory that at night a witch and two white oxen come to help us. No wall,they say, could grow so quickly under one man's hands.
At night, alone in our cabin, we sit no more brooding over the fire.What should we think of now? All is emptiness. So we take the oldarithmetic; and the multiplication table, which with so much pains welearnt long ago and forgot directly, we learn now in a few hours,and never forget again. We take a strange satisfaction in workingarithmetical problems. We pause in our building to cover the stones withfigures and calculations. We save money for a Latin Grammar and Algebra,and carry them about in our pockets, poring over them as over our Bibleof old. We have thought we were utterly stupid, incapable of rememberinganything, of learning anything. Now we find that all is easy. Has a newsoul crept into this old body, that even our intellectual faculties arechanged? We marvel; not perceiving that what a man expends in prayer andecstasy he cannot have over for acquiring knowledge. You never shed atear, or create a beautiful image, or quiver with emotion, but you payfor it at the practical, calculating end of your nature. You have justso much force: when the one channel runs over the other runs dry.
And now we turn to Nature. All these years we have lived beside her, andwe have never seen her; and now we open our eyes and look at her.
The rocks have been to us a blur of brown: we bend over them, andthe disorganised masses dissolve into a many-coloured, many-shaped,carefully-arranged form of existence. Here masses of rainbow-tintedcrystals, half-fused together; there bands of smooth grey and redmethodically overlying each other. This rock here is covered witha delicate silver tracery, in some mineral, resembling leaves andbranches; there on the flat stone, on which we so often have sat to weepand pray, we look down, and see it covered with the fossil footprints ofgreat birds, and the beautiful skeleton of a fish. We have often triedto picture in our mind what the fossiled remains of creatures mustbe like, and all the while we sat on them, we have been so blinded bythinking and feeling that we have never seen the world.
The flat plain has been to us a reach of monotonous red. We look at it,and every handful of sand starts into life. That wonderful people, theants, we learn to know; see them make war and peace, play and work, andbuild their huge palaces. And that smaller people we make acquaintancewith, who live in the flowers. The bitto flower has been for us a mereblur of yellow; we find its heart composed of a hundred perfect flowers,the homes of the tiny black people with red stripes, who move in and outin that little yellow city. Every bluebell has its inhabitant. Every daythe karoo shows us a new wonder sleeping in its teeming bosom.
On our way back to work we pause and stand to see the ground-spider makeits trap, bury itself in the sand, and then wait for the falling in ofits enemy.
Further on walks a horned beetle, and near him starts open the door ofa spider, who peeps out carefully, and quickly pulls it down again. Ona karoo-bush a green fly is laying her silver eggs. We carry them home,and see the shells pierced, the spotted grub come out, turn to a greenfly, and flit away. We are not satisfied with what Nature shows us, andwe see something for ourselves. Under the white hen we put a dozen eggs,and break one daily, to see the white spot wax into the chicken. We arenot excited or enthusiastic about it; but a man is not to lay his throatopen, he must think of something. So we plant seeds in rows on ourdam-w
all, and pull one up daily to see how it goes with them. Alladeenburied her wonderful stone, and a golden palace sprung up at her feet.We do far more. We put a brown seed in the earth, and a living thingstarts out--starts upward--why, no more than Alladeen can we say--startsupward, and does not desist till it is higher than our heads, sparklingwith dew in the early morning, glittering with yellow blossoms, shakingbrown seeds with little embryo souls on to the ground. We look at itsolemnly, from the time it consists of two leaves peeping above theground and a soft white root, till we have to raise our faces to look atit; but we find no reason for that upward starting.
We look into dead ducks and lambs. In the evening we carry them home,spread newspapers on the floor, and lie working with them till midnight.With a started feeling near akin to ecstasy we open the lump of fleshcalled a heart, and find little doors and strings inside. We feel them,and put the heart away; but every now and then return to look, and tofeel them again. Why we like them so we can hardly tell.
A gander drowns itself in our dam. We take it out, and open it on thebank, and kneel looking at it. Above are the organs divided by delicatetissues; below are the intestines artistically curved in a spiral form,and each tier covered by a delicate network of blood-vessels standingout red against the faint blue background. Each branch of theblood-vessels is comprised of a trunk, bifurcating and rebifurcatinginto the most delicate, hair-like threads, symmetrically arranged. Weare struck with its singular beauty. And, moreover--and here we dropfrom our kneeling into a sitting posture--this also we remark: of thatsame exact shape and outline is our thorn-tree seen against the sky inmid-winter: of that shape also is delicate metallic tracery between ourrocks; in that exact path does our water flow when without a furrow welead it from the dam; so shaped are the antlers of the horned beetle.How are these things related that such deep union should exist betweenthem all? Is it chance? Or, are they not all the fine branches of onetrunk, whose sap flows through us all? That would explain it. We nodover the gander's inside.
This thing we call existence; is it not a something which has its rootsfar down below in the dark, and its branches stretching out into theimmensity above, which we among the branches cannot see? Not achance jungle; a living thing, a One. The thought gives us intensesatisfaction, we cannot tell why.
We nod over the gander; then start up suddenly, look into the blue sky,throw the dead gander and the refuse into the dam, and go to work again.
And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be aweltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and roundreverentially. Nothing is despicable--all is meaning-full; nothing issmall--all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. Thelife that throbs in us is a beginning and end we know not. The life thatthrobs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension,not too small.
And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first asmall blue rag stretched out over us, and so low that our hands mighttouch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurableblue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again.
The Story of an African Farm Page 16
