The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  One of Mimi’s letters was accompanied by a wooden candle-box filled with dried peaches. Ben Myburg was most proud to share out the dried fruit among our company, for he had several times spoken of the orchard of yellow cling peaches that he had laid out at the side of his house.

  “We’ve already got dried peaches,” Jurie Bekker said. Then he added, making free with our projected invasion of Natal: “In a few weeks’ time we will be picking bananas.”

  It was in this spirit, as I have said, that we set out to meet the enemy. But nobody knew better than ourselves how much of this fine talk was to hide what we really felt. And I know, speaking for myself, that when we got the command “Opsaal”, and we were crossing the border between the Transvaal and Natal, I was less happy at the thought that my horse was such a mettlesome animal. For it seemed to me that my horse was far more anxious to invade Natal than I was. I had to rein him in a good deal on the way to Spioenkop and Colenso. And I told myself that it was because I did not want him to go too fast downhill.

  Eighteen months later saw the armed forces of the Republic in a worse case than I should imagine any army has ever been in, and that army still fighting. We were spread all over the country in small groups. We were in rags.

  Many burghers had been taken prisoner. Others had yielded themselves up to British magistrates, holding not their rifles in their hands but their hats. There were a number of Boers, also, who had gone and joined the English.

  For the Transvaal Republic it was near the end of a tale that you tell, sitting around the kitchen fire on a cold night. The story of the Transvaal Republic was at that place where you clear your throat before saying which of the two men the girl finally married. Or whether it was the cattle-smuggler or the Sunday school superintendent who stole the money. Or whether it was a real ghost or just her uncle with a sheet round him that Lettie van Zyl saw at the drift.

  One night, when we were camped just outside Nietverdiend, and it was Ben Myburg’s and my turn to go on guard, he told me that he knew that part well.

  “You see that rant there, Schalk?” he asked. “Well, I have often stood on the other side of it, under the stars, just like now. You know, I’ve got a lot of peach trees on my farm. Well, I have stood there, under the ripening peaches, just after dark, with Mimi at my side. There is no smell like the smell of young peach trees in the evening, Schalk, when the fruit is ripening. I can almost imagine I am back there now. And it is just the time for it, too.”

  I tried to explain to Ben Myburg, in a roundabout way, that although everything might be exactly the same on this side of the rant, he would have to be prepared for certain changes on the other side, seeing that it was war.

  Ben Myburg agreed that I was probably right. Nevertheless, he began to talk to me at length about his courtship days. He spoke of Mimi with her full red lips and her yellow hair.

  “I can still remember the evening when Mimi promised that she would marry me, Schalk,” Ben Myburg said. “It was in Zee­rust. We were there for the Nagmaal. When I walked back to my tent on the kerkplein I was so happy that I just kicked the first three kaffirs I saw.”

  I could see that, talking to me while we stood on guard, Ben Myburg was living through that time all over again. I was glad, for their sakes, that no kaffirs came past at that moment. For Ben Myburg was again very happy.

  I was pleased, too, for Ben Myburg’s own sake, that he did at least have that hour of deep joy in which he could recall the past so vividly. For it was after that that his memory went.

  By the following evening we had crossed the rant and had arrived at Ben Myburg’s farm. We camped among the smoke-blackened walls of his former homestead, erecting a rough shelter with some sheets of corrugated iron that we could still use. And although he must have known only too well what to expect, yet what Ben Myburg saw there came as so much of a shock to his senses that from that moment all he could remember from the past vanished for ever.

  It was pitiful to see the change that had come over him. If his farm had been laid to ruins, the devastation that had taken place in Ben Myburg’s mind was no less dreadful.

  Perhaps it was that, in truth, there was nothing more left in the past to remember.

  We noticed, also, that in singular ways, certain fragments of the bygone would come into Ben Myburg’s mind; and that he would almost – but not quite – succeed in fitting these pieces to­gether.

  We observed that almost immediately. For instance, we re­mained camped on his farm for several days. And one morning, when the fire for our mealie-pap was crackling under one of the few remaining fruit trees that had once been an orchard, Ben My­burg reached up and picked a peach that was, in advance of its season, ripe and yellow.

  “It’s funny,” Ben Myburg said, “but I seem to remember, from long ago, reaching up and picking a yellow peach, just like this one. I don’t quite remember where.”

  We did not tell him that he was picking one of his own peaches.

  Some time later our seksie was captured in a night attack.

  For us the Boer War was over. We were going to St. Helena. We were driven to Nylstroom, the nearest railhead, in a mule-wagon. It was a strange experience for us to be driving along the main road, in broad daylight, for all the world to see us. From years of war-time habit, our eyes still went to the horizon. A bitter thing about our captivity was that among our guards were men of our own people.

  Outside Nylstroom we alighted from the mule-wagon and the English sergeant in charge of our escort got us to form fours by the roadside. It was queer – our having to learn to be soldiers at the end of a war instead of at the beginning.

  Eventually we got into some sort of formation, the veldkornet, Jurie Bekker, Ben Myburg and I making up the first four. It was already evening. From a distance we could see the lights in the town. The way to the main street of Nylstroom led by the cemetery. Although it was dark, we could yet distinguish several rows of newly made mounds. We did not need to be told that they were concentration camp graves. We took off our battered hats and tramped on in a great silence.

  Soon we were in the main street. We saw, then, what those lights were. There was a dance at the hotel. Paraffin lamps were hanging under the hotel’s low, wide veranda. There was much laughter. We saw girls and English officers. In our unaccustomed fours we slouched past in the dark.

  Several of the girls went inside, then. But a few of the womenfolk remained on the veranda, not looking in our direction. Among them I noticed particularly a girl leaning on an English officer’s shoulder. She looked very pretty, with the light from a paraffin lamp shining on her full lips and yellow hair.

  When we had turned the corner, and the darkness was wrapping us round again, I heard Ben Myburg speak.

  “It’s funny,” I heard Ben Myburg say, “but I seem to remember, from long ago, a girl with yellow hair, just like that one. I don’t quite remember where.”

  And this time, too, we did not tell him.

  Last Stories

  (1948–51)

  Romaunt of the Smuggler’s Daughter

  Long ago, there was more money (Oom Schalk Lourens said, wistfully) to be made out of cattle-smuggling that there is in these times. The Government knows that, of course. But the Government thinks that why we Marico farmers don’t bring such large herds of native cattle across the Bechuanaland border anymore, on moonless nights, is because the mounted police are more efficient than they used to be.

  That isn’t the reason, of course.

  You still get as good a sort of night as ever – a night when there is only the light of the stars shining on the barbed wire that separates the Transvaal from the Protectorate. But why my wire-cutters are rusting in the buitekamer from disuse is not because the border is better patrolled than it was in the old days. For it is not the mounted police, with their polished boots and clicking spurs, but the barefoot Bechuana kaffirs that have grown more cunning.

  We all said that it was the fault of the mission school at Ra­moutsa, o
f course. Afterwards, when more schools were opened, deeper into the Protectorate, we gave those schools a share of the blame as well … Naturally, it wasn’t a thing that happened suddenly. Only, we found, as the years went by, that the kaffirs in the Bechuanaland Protectorate wanted more and more for their cattle. And later on they would traffic with us only when we paid them in hard cash; they frowned on the idea of barter.

  I can still remember the look of grieved wonderment on Jurie Prinsloo’s face when he told us about his encounter with the Ba­pedi chief near Malopolole. Jurie came across the Bapedi chief in front of his hut. And the Bapedi chief was not squatting on an animal skin spread on the ground; instead, he was sitting on a real chair, and looking quite comfortable sitting in it, too.

  “Here’s a nice, useful roll of copper wire for you,” Jurie Prinsloo said to the Bapedi chief, who was lazily scratching the back of his instep against the lower cross-piece of the chair. “You can give me an ox for it. That red ox, there, with the long horns and the loose dewlap will be all right. They don’t know any better about an ox on the Johannesburg market.”

  “But what can I do with the copper wire?” the Bapedi chief asked. “I have not got a telephone.”

  This was a real problem for Jurie Prinsloo, of course. For many years he had been trading rolls of copper wire for kaffir cattle, and it had never occurred to him to think out what the kaffirs used the wire for.

  “Well,” Jurie Prinsloo said, weakly, “you can make it into a ring to put through your nose, and you can also –”

  But even as Jurie Prinsloo spoke, he realised that the old times had passed away for ever.

  And we all said, yes, it was these missionaries, with the schools they were opening up all over the place, who were ruining the kaffirs. As if the kaffirs weren’t uncivilised enough in the first place, we said. And now the missionaries had to come along and educate them on top of it.

  Anyway, the superior sort of smile that came across the left side of the chief’s face, at the suggestion that he should wear a copper ring in his nose, made Jurie Prinsloo feel that he had to educate the Bapedi chief some more. What was left of the chair, after Jurie Prinsloo had finished educating the Bapedi chief, was produced in the magistrate’s court in Gaborone, where Jurie Prinsloo was fined ten pounds for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. In those days you could buy quite a few head of cattle for ten pounds.

  And, in spite of his schooling, the Bapedi chief remained as ignorant as ever. For, during the rest of the time that he remained head of the tribe, he would not allow a white man to enter his stat again.

  But, as I have said, it was different, long ago. Then the Be­c­h­uanaland kaffirs would still take an interest in their appearance, and they would be glad to exchange their cattle for brass and beads and old whale-bone corsets and tins of axle-grease (to make the skin on their chests shine) and cheap watches. They would even come and help us drive the cattle across the line, just for the excitement of it, and to show off their new finery, in the way of umbrellas and top-hats and pieces of pink underwear, at the kraals through which we passed.

  Easily the most enterprising cattle-smuggler in the Marico Bushveld at the time of which I am talking was Gerrit Oost­huizen. He had a farm right next to the Protectorate border. So that the barbed wire that he cut at night, when he brought over a herd of cattle, was also the fence of his own farm. Within a few years Gerrit Oosthuizen had made so much money out of smuggled cattle that he was able to introduce a large number of improvements on his farm, including a new type of concrete cattle dip with iron steps, and a piano for which he had a special kind of stand built into the floor of his voorkamer, so as to keep the white ants away.

  Gerrit Oosthuizen’s daughter, Jemima, who was then sixteen years of age and very pretty, with dark hair and a red mouth and a soft shadow at the side of her throat, started learning to play the piano. Farmers and their wives from many miles away came to visit Gerrit Oosthuizen. They came to look at the piano stand, which had been specially designed by a Pretoria engineer, and had an aluminium tank underneath that you kept filled with water, so that it was impossible for the white ants to effect much damage – if you wiped them off from the underneath part of the piano with a paraffin rag every morning.

  The visitors would come to the farm, and they would drink coffee in the voorkamer, and they would listen to Jemima Oost­huizen playing a long piece out of a music book with one finger, and they would nod their heads solemnly, at the end of it, when Jemima sat very still, with her dark hair falling forward over her eyes, and they would say, well, if that Pretoria engineer thought that, in the long run, the white ants would not be able to find a way of beating his aluminium invention, and of eating up all the inside of the piano, then they didn’t know the Marico white ant, that’s all.

  We who were visitors to the Oosthuizen farm spoke almost with pride of the cleverness of the white ant. We felt, somehow, that the white ants belonged to the Marico Bushveld, just like we did, and we didn’t like the idea of a Pretoria engineer, who was an uitlander, almost, thinking that with his invention – which con­sisted just of bits of shiny tin – he would be able to outwit the cunning of a Marico white ant.

  Through his conducting his cattle-smuggling operations on so large and successful a scale, Gerrit Oosthuizen soon got rich. He was respected – and even envied – throughout the Marico. They say that when the Volksraad member came to Gerrit Oosthuizen’s farm, and he saw around him so many unmistakable signs of great wealth, including green window-blinds that rolled up by themselves when you jerked the sashcord – they say that even the Volksraad member was very much impressed, and that he seemed to be deep in thought for a long time. It almost seemed as though he was wondering whether, in having taken up politics, he had chosen the right career, after all.

  If that was how the Volksraad member really did feel about the matter, then it must have been a sad thing for him, when the debates in the Raadsaal at Pretoria dragged far into the night, and he had to remain seated on his back bench, without having much heart in the proceedings, since he would be dreaming all the time of a herd of red cattle being driven towards a fence in the star­light. And when the Chairman of the Committee called another member to order, it might almost have sounded to this Volksraad member as though it was a voice coming out of the shadows of the maroelas and demanding, suddenly, “Who goes there?”

  To this question – which he had heard more than once, of course, during the years in which he had smuggled cattle – Gerrit Oosthuizen nearly always had the right answer. It was always more difficult for Gerrit Oosthuizen if it was a youthful-sounding voice shouting out that challenge. Because it usually meant, then, that the uniformed man on horseback, half hidden in the shadow of a withaak, was a young recruit, anxious to get promotion. Ge­r­rit Oosthuizen could not handle him in the same way as he could an elderly mounted police sergeant, who was a married man with a number of children, and who had learnt, through long years of service, a deeper kind of wisdom about life on this old earth.

  It was, each time, through mistaken zeal on the part of a young recruit – who nearly always got a transfer, shortly afterwards – that Gerrit Oosthuizen had to stand his trial in the Zeerust courthouse. He was several times acquitted. On a few occasions he was fined quite heavily. Once he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without the option of a fine. Consequently, while Gerrit Oosthuizen was known to entertain a warm regard for almost any middle-aged mounted policeman with a fat stomach, he invariably displayed a certain measure of impatience towards a raw recruit. It was said that on more than one occasion, in the past, Gerrit Oosthuizen had given expression to his impatience by discharging a couple of Mauser bullets – aimed high – into the sha­dows from which an adolescent voice had spoken out of turn.

  Needless to say, all these stories that went the rounds of the Marico about Gerrit Oosthuizen only added to his popularity with the farmers. Even when the predikant shook his head, on being informed of Gerrit Oos
thuizen’s latest escapade, you could see that he regarded it as being but little more than a rather risky sort of prank, and that, if anything, he admired Gerrit Oost­huizen, the Marico’s champion cattle-smuggler, for the careless way in which he defied the law. Whatever he did, Gerrit Oost­huizen always seemed to act in the right way. And it seems to me that, if he adheres to such a kind of rule, the man who goes against the law gets as much respect from the people around him as does the law-giver. More, even.

  “The law stops on the south side of the Dwarsberge,” Gerrit Oosthuizen said to a couple of his neighbours, in a sudden burst of pride, on the day that the piano arrived and was placed on top of the patent aluminium stand. “And north of the Dwarsberge I am the law.”

  But soon after that Gerrit Oosthuizen did something that the Marico farmers did not understand, and that they did not forgive him for so easily. Just at the time when his daughter, Jemima, was most attractive, and was beginning to play herself in on the piano, using two fingers of each hand – and when quite a number of the young men of the district were beginning to pay court to her – Gerrit Oosthuizen sent her away to the seminary for young ladies that had just been opened in Zeerust.

  We expressed our surprise to Gerrit Oosthuizen in various ways. After all, we all liked Jemima, and it didn’t seem right that an attractive Bushveld girl should be sent away like that to get spoilt. She would come back with city affectations and foreign ways. She would no longer be able to make a good, simple wife for an honest Boer lad. It was, of course, the young men who expressed this view with the greatest measure of indignation – even those who were not so particularly honest, either, perhaps.

  But Gerrit Oosthuizen said, no, he believed in his daughter having the best opportunities. There were all sorts of arts and graces of life that she would learn at the finishing-school, he said. Among the Marico’s young men, however, were some who thought that there was very little that any young ladies’ seminary would be able to teach Jemima that she did not already know.