And she replies:
"Yes; as I love the woman that wronged him."
The death of this wonderful girl is extremely pathetic.
None but an artist could have written it:
"Then slowly, without a sound, the beautiful eyes closed. The dead face that the glass reflected was a thing of marvellous beauty and tranquillity. The gray dawn crept in over it and saw it lying there."
So the story of the hunter is wonderfully told. This hunter climbs above his fellows—day by day getting away from human sympathy, away from ignorance. He lost at last his fellow-men, and truth was just as far away as ever. Here he found the bones of another hunter, and as he looked upon the poor remains the wild faces said:
"So he lay down here, for he was very tired. He went to sleep forever. He put himself to sleep. Sleep is very tranquil. You are not lonely when you are asleep, neither do your hands ache nor your heart."
So the death of Waldo is most wonderfully told. The book is filled with thought, and with thoughts of the writer—nothing is borrowed. It is original, true and exceedingly sad. It has the pathos of real life. There is in it the hunger of the heart, the vast difference between the actual and the ideal:
"I like to feel that strange life beating up against me. I like to realize forms of life utterly unlike my own. When my own life feels small and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush together and see it in a picture, in an instant, a multitude of disconnected, unlike phases of human life—a mediaeval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves, dancing along the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death looking through the narrow window to the sky and feeling that already he has the wings that shall bear him up; an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kafir witch-doctor seeking for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hillside come the sound of dogs barking and the voices of women and children; a mother giving bread and milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the evening song. I like to see it all; I feel it run through me—that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger, it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in."
The author, Olive Schreiner, has a tropic zone in her heart. She sometimes prattles like a child, then suddenly, and without warning, she speaks like a philosopher—like one who had guessed the riddle of the Sphinx. She, too, is overwhelmed with the injustice of the world—with the negligence of nature—and she finds that it is impossible to find repose for heart or brain in any Christian creed.