Stories, Dreams and Allegories

By Olive Schreiner and Samuel C. Cronwright-Schreiner

Originally published in 1922, "Stories, Dreams and Allegories" is a posthumous collection of writings by Schreiner inspired by dreams and her experiences living on a South African farm. Contents include: 'The Buddhist Priest's Wife', 'On the Banks of a Full River', 'Two Visions', and many more. Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was a South African anti-war campaigner, intellectual, and author most famous for her highly-acclaimed novel “The Story of an African Farm” (1883), which deals with such issues as existential independence, agnosticism, individualism, and the empowerment of women. Other notable works by this author include: “Closer Union: a Letter on South African Union and the Principles of Government” (1909), and “Woman and Labour” (1911). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this classic work now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Dec 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473397200

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was a South African political activist and writer. Born to a family of Wesleyan missionaries, Schreiner was educated by her mother. Forced to move frequently due to her father’s inability to maintain a job, Schreiner became familiar with the landscape of South Africa and the cultural and political tensions holding together its diverse population. In 1881, she travelled to England in order to pursue her dream of becoming a medical professional, but her chronic asthma and limited finances prevented her from completing her training. In 1883, she published her debut novel, The Story of an African Farm, under a pseudonym, launching a career as one of South Africa’s leading writers. Throughout her life, she advocated for political equality for South Africa’s marginalized groups, including Afrikaners, indigenous Africans, Jews, and Indians. Combining a deep understanding of Christian morality with an active interest in socialism and the women’s suffrage movement, Schreiner is recognized as a pioneering feminist and political activist who wrote unflinchingly on such subjects as the Boer War, British imperialism, and intersectionality.

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STORIES, DREAMS

AND ALLEGORIES

By

OLIVE SCHREINER

First published in 1923

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Classics

This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics,

an imprint of Read & Co.

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To

A Small Girl-Child,

Who May Live to Grasp Somewhat of

that Which for us is yet Sight, not Touch

Contents

Olive Schreiner

PREFACE

STORIES

EIGHTEEN-NINETY-NINE

THE BUDDHIST PRIEST’S WIFE

ON THE BANKS OF A FULL RIVER

THE WAX DOLL AND THE STEPMOTHER

THE ADVENTURES OF MASTER TOWSER

DREAMS AND ALLEGORIES

A SOUL’S JOURNEY TWO VISIONS

GOD’S GIFTS TO MEN

THEY HEARD . . .

LIFE’S GIFTS

THE FLOWER AND THE SPIRIT

THE RIVER OF LIFE

THE BROWN FLOWER

THE TWO PATHS

A DREAM OF PRAYER

WORKERS

THE CRY OF SOUTH AFRICA

SEEDS A-GROWING

THE GREAT HEART OF ENGLAND

WHO KNOCKS AT THE DOOR?

THE WINGED BUTTERFLY

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner was born on Wittebergen Reserve, Cape Colony (present-day Lesotho) in 1855. After finishing school, she found work as a governess and a schoolteacher, and during her free time began to work on a novel about her experiences in South Africa.

When Schreiner had saved enough money, she travelled to Britain, hoping to become a doctor. She lived in London where she began attending lectures at the Medical School, as well as attending socialist meetings. Schreiner met the publisher George Meredith, who in 1883 published her best-known novel, Story of an African Farm. A commercial and critical success, it is now seen as a defining work of early feminism – as is her later work, Women and Labour (1911).

Over the rest of her life, Schreiner made the acquaintance of a number of figures in London society, including future Prime Minister William Gladstone. In 1889, she returned to South Africa to be with her family. Her brother, William Schreiner, later became prime minister of Cape Colony. Over the next few years she published two collections of short stories, Dreams (1891) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893). She also became heavily involved in politics, and was a fierce opponent of racism and imperialism. Her 1897 work Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897) was a strong attack on British rule in South Africa.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Schreiner moved back to Britain. Over the next four years she was active in the peace movement and worked closely with organizations such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Non-Conscription Fellowship. She returned to South Africa in of August 1920, and dying following a heart attack later that year.

PREFACE

This book contains all of Olive Schreiner’s yet unprinted or uncollected imaginative writings, except at least one novel to appear later, which it is proposed to bring forward. They appear unaltered, except in a few minor respects like punctuation, as I found them among her papers.

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.

STORIES

EIGHTEEN-NINETY-NINE

Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.

I

IT was a warm night: the stars shone down through the thick soft air of the Northern Transvaal into the dark earth, where a little daub-and-wattle house of two rooms lay among the long, grassy slopes.

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