Olive Schreiner The Woman's Rose

Olive Schreiner's
THE WOMAN'S ROSE

(1899)
Schreiner was a South African writer best known for her outstandingly original
and gripping novel The Story of an African Farm. In this story, a woman looks
back to her youth and remembers an occasion when cynicism was overcome and
female solidarity triumphed over petty competition. This is a symbolic affirmative
tale.
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.
Someone 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!"
I turned round.
"You are so beautiful to me," I said.
"Y-e-s," she said, with her slow Colonial drawl; "I'm so glad."
We stood looking at each other.
Then they came in and swept us away to dance. All the evening we
did not come near to each other. Only once, as she passed, she
smiled at me.
The next morning, I left the town.
I never saw her again.
Years afterwards I heard she had married and gone to America; it

may or may not be so–but the rose–the rose is in the box still!
When my faith in woman grows dim, and it seems that for want of
love and magnanimity she can play no part in any future heaven;
then the scent of that small withered thing comes back:–spring
cannot fail us.
Matjesfontein, South Africa.

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Olive Schreiner's

THE WOMAN'S ROSE

When my eye is dim, and my heart grows faint, and my faith in

Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so

She and I never spoke to each other.

If we met in the village street we bowed and passed on; when we

It was midwinter. There was nothing in the gardens but a few

The evening came; when I arrived and went to the waiting-room, to

Then I felt a hand touch my hair.

"Stand still," she said.

"You are so beautiful to me," I said.

We stood looking at each other.

The next morning, I left the town.

I never saw her again.

Years afterwards I heard she had married and gone to America; it

Matjesfontein, South Africa.

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