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When I was a child I was shown a picture, -- a kind of
moving picture inasmuch as it was created before your eyes and while the artist was
telling the story of it. This story was told, every time, in the same words. In a little round house with a round window and a little
triangular garden in front there lived a man.
Not far from the house there was a pond with a
lot of fish in it.
One night the man was woken up by a terrible
noise, and set out in the dark to find the cause of it. He took the road to the pond. Here
the story-teller began to draw, as upon a map of the movements of an army, a plan of the
roads taken by the man.
He first ran to the South. Here he stumbled over a big
stone in the middle of the road, and a little farther he fell into a ditch, got up, fell
into a ditch, got up, fell into a third ditch and got out of that.
Then he saw that he had been mistaken, and ran
back to the North. But here again the noise seemed to him to come from the South, and he
again ran back there
He first stumbled over a big stone in the middle of the road, then a little later he fell
into a ditch, got up, fell into another ditch, got up, fell into a third ditch, and got
out of that.
He now distinctly hear that the noise came from the end
of the pond. He rushed to the place, and say that a big leakage had been made in the dam,
and the water was running out with all the fish in it. He set to work and stopped the
hole, and only when this had been done did he go back to bed.
When now the next morning the man looked out of
his little round window, -- thus the take was finished, as dramatically as possible,--
what did he see?--
A stork!
I am glad that I have been told this story and
I shall remember it in the hour of need. The man in the story was cruelly deceived, and
had obstacles put in his way. He must have thought: "What ups and downs! What a run
of bad luck!" He must have wondered what was the idea of all his trials, he could not
know that it was a stork. But through them all he kept his purpose in view, nothing made
him turn round and go home, he finished his course, he kept his faith. That man had his
reward. In the morning he saw the stork. He must have laughed out loud then.
The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now
lying, of what bird is it the talon? When the design of my life is complete, shall I,
shall other people see a stork?
Infandum, Regina, jubes renovare dolarem. Troy
in flames, seven years of exile, thirteen good ships lost. What is to come out of it?
"Unsurpassed elegance, majestic stateliness, and sweet tenderness."
from
Out of Africa (From an Immigrant's Notebook)
First published by Random House in 1937 |
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