The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

“Who?” he repeated, “who? Why, Gideon Kotze, also.”

  This time when Jan Bezuidenhout sighed, Frikkie van Blerk joined in, audibly. And I, who had nothing at all to do with any part of this situation, seeing that I was not married, found myself sighing as well. And this time it was Frikkie van Blerk who kicked the log by the side of the fire. The chunk of white wood, which had been hollowed out by the ants, fell into several pieces, sending up a fiery shower so high that, to us, looking up to follow their flight, the yellow sparks became for a few moments almost indistinguishable from the stars.

  “It’s all rotten,” Frikkie van Blerk said, taking another kick at the crumbling log, and missing.

  “There’s something in the Bible about something else being some­thing like sparks flying upwards,” Jan Bezuidenhout an­nounc­ed. His words sounded very solemn. They served as an introduction to the following story that he told us:

  “It was during my grandfather’s time,” Jan Bezuidenhout said. “My great-uncle Joris, who had a farm near the Keiskamma, had been commandeered to take the field in the Fifth Kaffir War. Be­fore setting out for the war, my great-uncle Joris arranged for a friend and neighbour to visit his farm regularly, in case his wife needed help. Well, as you know, there is no real danger in a war against kaffirs –”

  “Yes, we know that,” Frikkie van Blerk and I agreed simultaneously, to sound knowledgeable.

  “I mean, there’s no danger as long as you don’t go so near that a kaffir can reach you with an assegai,” Jan Bezuidenhout continued. “And, of course, no white man is as uneducated as all that. But what happened to my great-uncle Joris was that his horse threw him. The commando was retreating just about then –”

  “To reload,” Frikkie van Blerk and I both said, eager to show how well acquainted we were with the strategy used in kaffir wars.

  “Yes,” Jan Bezuidenhout went on. “To reload. And there was no time for the commando to stop for my great-uncle Joris. The last his comrades saw of him, he was crawling on his hands and knees towards an aardvark hole. They didn’t know whether the Xhosas had seen him. Perhaps the commando had to ride back fast because –”

  Jan Bezuidenhout did not finish his story. For, just then, a veld­kornet came with orders from Kommandant Pienaar. We had to put out the fire. We had not to make so much noise. We were to hold ourselves in readiness, in case the kaffirs launched a night attack. The veldkornet also instructed Jan Bezuidenhout to get his gun and go on guard duty.

  “There was never any nonsense like this in the Cape,” Frikkie van Blerk grumbled, “when we were fighting the Xhosas. It seems the Transvalers don’t know what a kaffir war is.”

  By this time Frikkie van Blerk had got to believe that he actually had taken part in the campaigns against the Xhosas.

  I have mentioned that there were certain differences between the Transvalers and the Cape Boers. For one thing, we from the Cape had a lightness of heart which the Transvalers lacked – possibly (I thought at the time) because the stubborn Transvaal soil made the conditions of life more harsh for them. And the difference between the two sections was particularly noticeable on the following morning, when Kommandant Pienaar, after having delivered a short speech about how it was our duty to bring book-learning and refinement to the Platkop kaffirs, gave the order to advance. We who were from the Cape cheered lustily. The Transvalers were, as always, subdued. They turned pale, too, some of them. We rode on for the best part of an hour. Frikkie van Blerk, Jan Bezuidenhout and I found ourselves together in a small group on one flank of the commando.

  “It’s funny,” Jan Bezuidenhout said, “but I don’t see any kaffirs, anywhere, with assegais. It doesn’t seem to be like it was against the Xhosas –”

  He stopped abruptly. For we heard what sounded surprisingly like a shot. Afterwards we heard what sounded surprisingly like more shots.

  “These Platkop Bechuanas are not like the Cape Xhosas,” I agreed, then, dismounting.

  In no time the whole commando had dismounted. We sought cover in dongas and behind rocks from the fire of an enemy who had concealed himself better than we were doing.

  “No, the Xhosas were not at all like this,” Frikkie van Blerk announced, tearing off a strip of shirt to bandage a place in his leg from which the blood flowed. “Why didn’t the Transvalers let us know it would be like this?”

  It was an ambush. Things happened very quickly. It became only too clear to me why the Transvalers had not shared in our enthusiasm earlier on, when we had gone over the rise together, at a canter, through the yellow grass, singing. I was still reflecting on this circumstance, some time later, when our commando re­mounted and galloped away out of that whole part of the district. To reload, we said, years afterwards, to strangers who asked. The last we saw of Jan Bezuidenhout was after he had had his horse shot down from under him. He was crawling on hands and knees in the direction of an aardvark hole.

  “Like great-uncle, like nephew,” Frikkie van Blerk said, when we were discussing the affair some time later, back in camp beside the Steenbokspruit. Frikkie van Blerk’s unfeeling sally was not well received.

  Thus ended the expedition against Majaja, which brought little honour to the commando that took part in it. There was not a burgher who retained any sort of a happy memory of the affair. And for a good while afterwards the relations were strained between Transvaler and Cape Boer in the Marico.

  It was with a sense of bitterness that, some months later, I had occasion to call to mind the fact that Gideon Kotze, the man appointed to look after the farms of the burghers on commando, was a Transvaler.

  And when I saw Gideon Kotze sitting talking to Jan Bezuiden­hout’s widow, on the front stoep of their house, I wondered what the story was, about his great-uncle Joris, that Jan Bezuidenhout had not been able to finish telling.

  Treasure Trove

  It is queer (Oom Schalk Lourens said), about treasure hunting. You can actually find the treasure, and through ignorance, or through forgetting to look, at the moment when you have got it, you can let it slip through your fingers like sand. Take Namaqua­land, for instance. That part where all the diamonds are lying around, waiting to be picked up. Now they have got it all fenced in, and there are hundreds of police patrolling what we thought, in those days, was just a piece of desert. I remember the last time I trekked through that part of the country, which I took to be an ungodly stretch of sandy waste. But if I had known that I was travelling through thousands of miles of diamond mine, I don’t think I would have hurried so much. And that area wouldn’t have seemed so very ungodly, either.

  I made the last part of the journey on foot. And you know how it is when you are walking through the sand; how you have to stop every so often to sit down and shake out your boots. I get quite a sick feeling, even now, when I think that I never once looked to see what I was shaking out. You hear of a person allowing a fortune to slip through his fingers. But it is much sadder if he lets it trickle away through the leather of his veldskoens.

  Anyway, when the talk comes round to fortunes, and so on, I always call to mind the somewhat singular search that went on, for the better part of a Bushveld summer, on Jan Slabbert’s farm. We all said, afterwards, that Jan Slabbert should have known better, at his age and experience, than to have allowed a stranger like that callow young Hendrik Buys, on the strength of a few lines drawn on a piece of wrapping paper, to come along and start up so much foolishness.

  Jan Slabbert was very mysterious about the whole thing, at first. He introduced Hendrik Buys to us as “a young man from the Cape who is having a look over my farm.” These words of Jan Slabbert’s did not, however, reveal to us much that we did not already know. Indeed, I had on more than one occasion come across Hendrik Buys, unexpectedly and from behind, when he was quite clearly engaged in looking over Jan Slabbert’s farm. He had even got down on his hands and knees to look it over better.

  But in the end, after several neighbours had unexpectedly come across Jan Slabbert in the same way, he adm
itted that they were conducting a search for hidden treasure.

  “I suppose, because it’s hidden treasure, Jan Slabbert thinks that is has got to be kept hidden from us, also,” Jurie Bekker said one day when several of us were sitting in his post office.

  “It’s a treasure consisting of gold coins and jewels that were buried on Jan Slabbert’s farm many years ago,” Neels Erasmus, who was a church elder, explained. “I called on Jan Slabbert – not because I was inquisitive about the treasure, of course – but in connection with something of a theological character that happened at the last Nagmaal, and Jan Slabbert and Hendrik Buys were both out. They were on the veld.”

  “On their hands and knees,” Jurie Bekker said.

  The ouderling went on to tell us that Jan Slabbert’s daughter, Susannah, had said that a piece of the map which that young fellow, Buys, had brought with him from the Cape, was missing, with the result that they were having difficulty in locating the spot marked with a cross.

  “It’s always like that with a map of a place where there is buried treasure,” Jurie Bekker said. “You follow a lot of directions, until you come to an old tree or an old grave or an old forked road with cobwebs on it, and then you have to take a hundred paces to the west, and then there’s something missing –”

  Neels Erasmus, the ouderling, said he was talking to Susannah, and his voice sounded kind of rasping. He always liked to be the first with the news. But Jurie Bekker was able to assure us that he had just guessed those details. Every treasure-hunt map was like that, he repeated.

  “Well, you got it pretty right,” Neels Erasmus said. “There is an old tree in it, and an old forked road and an old grave, I think, and also a pair of men’s underpants – the long kind. The underpants seem to have been the oldest clue of the whole lot. And it was the underpants that convinced Jan Slabbert that the map was genuine. He was doubtful about it, until then.”

  The ouderling went on to say that where this map also differed from the usual run of treasure-trove maps was that you didn’t have to pace off one hundred yards to the west in the last stage of trying to locate the spot.

  “Instead,” he explained, “you’ve got to crawl on your hands and knees for I don’t know how far. You see, the treasure was buried at night. And the men that buried it crawled through the bush on hands and knees for the last part of the way.”

  We said that from the positions in which we had often seen Jan Slabbert and Hendrik Buys of late, it was clear that they were also on the last part of their search.

  Andries Prinsloo, a young man who had all this while been sitting in a corner on a low riempiestoel, and had until then taken no part in the conversation, suddenly remarked to Neels Erasmus (and he cleared his throat nervously as he spoke), that it seemed to him as though the ouderling “and – and Susannah – er – had quite a lot to say to each other.” Perhaps it was because he was respectful of our company that Andries Prinsloo spoke so diffidently.

  At all events, Andries Prinsloo’s remark started us off saying all kinds of things of an improving nature.

  “Yes,” I said to Neels Erasmus, “I wonder what your wife would say if she knew that you went to call at Jan Slabbert’s house when only his daughter, Susannah, was at home.”

  “You went in the morning, because you knew that Jan Slabbert and Hendrik Buys would be outside, then, creeping through the wag-’n-bietjie thorns,” Jurie Bekker said. “The afternoons, of course, they keep free for creeping through the haakdoring thorns.”

  “And what will your wife say if she knew of the subjects you discussed with Susannah?” I asked.

  “Yes, all those intimate things,” Jurie Bekker continued. “Like about that pair of old underpants. How could you talk to a young, innocent girl like Susannah about those awful old underp –”

  Jurie Bekker spluttered so much that he couldn’t get the word out. Then we both broke into loud guffaws. And in the midst of all this laughter, Andries Prinsloo went out very quietly, almost as though he didn’t want to disturb us. It seemed that that young fellow had so much respect for our company that he did not wish to take part in anything that might resemble unseemly mirth. And we did not feel like laughing anymore, either, somehow, after he had left.

  When we again discussed Jan Slabbert’s affairs in the post office, the treasure hunt had reached the stage where a gang of kaffirs, under the supervision of the two white men, went from place to place on the farm, digging holes. In some places they even dug tunnels. They found nothing. We said that it would only be somebody like Jan Slabbert, who was already the richest man in the whole of the Northern Transvaal, that would get all worked up over the prospect of unearthing buried treasure.

  “Jan Slabbert has given Hendrik Buys a contract,” Neels Eras­mus, the ouderling, said. “I learnt about it when I went there in connection with something of an ecclesiastical nature that happened at the Nagmaal before last. They will split whatever treasure they find. Jan Slabbert will get two-thirds and Hendrik Buys one-third.”

  We said that it sounded a sinful arrangement, somehow. We also spoke much about what it said in the Good Book about treasures in heaven that the moth could not corrupt. That was after Neels Erasmus had said that there was no chance of the treasure having been buried on some neighbour’s farm, instead, by mistake.

  “Actually, according to the map,” the ouderling said, “it would appear that the treasure is buried right in the middle of Jan Slabbert’s farm, somewhere. Just about where his house is.”

  “If Hendrik Buys has got any sense,” Jurie Bekker said, “he would drive a tunnel right under Jan Slabbert’s house, and as far as under his bedroom. If the tunnel came out under Jan Slabbert’s bed, where he keeps that iron chest of his – well, even if Hendrik Buys is allowed to take only one-third of what is in there, it will still be something.”

  We then said that perhaps that was the treasure that was mark­ed on Hendrik Buys’s map with a cross, but that they hadn’t guess­ed it yet.

  That gave me an idea. I asked how Jan Slabbert’s daughter, Susannah, was taking all those irregular carryings-on on the farm. The ouderling moved the winking muscle of his left eye in a peculiar way.

  “The moment Hendrik Buys came into the house I understood it all clearly,” he said. “Susannah’s face got all lit up as she kind of skipped into the kitchen to make fresh coffee. But Hendrik Buys was too wrapped up in the treasure-hunt business to notice, even. What a pity – a nice girl like that, and all.”

  It seemed that that well-behaved young fellow, Andries Prinsloo, who always took the same place in the corner, was getting more respect for our company than ever. Because, this time, when he slipped out of the post office – and it was just about at that moment, too – he appeared actually to be walking on tiptoe.

  Well, I didn’t come across Jan Slabbert and Hendrik Buys again until about the time when they had finally decided to abandon the search. They had quarrelled quite often, too, by then. They would be on quite friendly terms when they showed the kaffirs where to start digging another hole. But by the time the hole was very wide, and about ten foot deep, in blue slate, they would start quarrelling.

  The funny part of it all was that Hendrik Buys remained optimistic about the treasure right through, and he wouldn’t have given up, either, if in the course of their last quarrel Jan Slabbert had not decided the matter for him, bundling him on to the Government lorry back to Zeerust, after kicking him.

  The quarrel had to do with a hole eighteen foot deep, in gneiss.

  But on that last occasion on which I saw them together in the voorkamer, Jan Slabbert and his daughter, Susannah, and Hen­drik Buys, it seemed to me that Hendrik Buys was still very hopeful.

  “There are lots of parts of the farm that I haven’t crawled through yet,” Hendrik Buys explained. “Likely places, according to the map, such as the pigsty. I have not yet crept through the pigsty. I must remember that for tomorrow. You see, the men who buried the treasure crept for the last part of the way thr
ough the bush in the dark.” Hendrik Buys paused. It was clear that an idea had struck him. “Do you think it possible,” he asked, excitedly, “that they might have crawled through the bush backwards – you know, in the dark? That is something that I had not thought of until this moment. What do you say, Oom Jan, tomorrow you and I go and creep backwards, in the direction of the pigsty?”

  Jan Slabbert did not answer. And Susannah’s efforts at keeping the conversation going made the situation seem all the more awkward. I felt sorry for her. It was a relief to us all when Neels Erasmus, the ouderling, arrived at the front door just then. He had come to see Jan Slabbert in connection with something of an apostolic description that might happen at the forthcoming Nag­maal.

  I never saw Hendrik Buys again, but I did think of him quite a number of times afterwards, particularly on the occasion of Susannah Slabbert’s wedding. And I wondered, in the course of his treasure hunting, how much Hendrik Buys had possibly let slip through his fingers like sand. That was when the ceremony was over, and a couple of men among the wedding guests were discharging their Mausers into the air – welcoming the bride as she was being lifted down from the Cape-cart by the quiet-mannered young fellow, Andries Prinsloo. He seemed more subdued than ever, now, as a bridegroom.

  And so I understood then about the distracted air which An­dries Prinsloo had worn throughout that feverish time of the great Bushveld treasure hunt; that it was in reality the half-dazed look of a man who had unearthed a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.

  Unto Dust

  I have noticed that when a young man or woman dies, people get the feeling that there is something beautiful and touching in the event, and that it is different from the death of an old person. In the thought, say, of a girl of twenty sinking into an untimely grave, there is a sweet wistfulness that makes people talk all kinds of romantic words. She died, they say, young, she that was so full of life and so fair. She was a flower that withered before it bloomed, they say, and it all seems so fitting and beautiful that there is a good deal of resentment, at the funeral, over the crude questions that a couple of men in plain clothes from the landdrost’s office are asking about cattle-dip.