The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  On my way back in the mule-cart I passed the mission school. And I thought then that it was funny that Elsiba was so concerned that a kaffir should not make a fool of her husband with a wood-carving of him. Because she did not seem to mind making a fool of him in another way. From the mule-cart I saw Elsiba and Wil­lem Terreblanche in the doorway of the schoolroom. And from the way they were holding hands I could see that they were not discussing paper serviettes with tassels, or any similar school subjects.

  Still, as it turned out, it never came to any scandal in the district. For Willem Terreblanche left some time later to take up a teaching post in the Free State. And after Reverend Keet’s death Elsiba allowed a respectable interval to elapse before she went to the Free State to marry Willem Terreblanche.

  Some distance beyond the mission school I came across the Ramoutsa witch-doctor that Reverend Keet had spoken about. The witch-doctor was busy digging up roots on the veld for medi­cine. I reined in the mules and the witch-doctor came up to me. He had on a pair of brown leggings and a woman’s corset. And he carried an umbrella. Around his neck he wore a few feet of light-green tree-snake that didn’t look as though it had been dead very long. I could see that the witch-doctor was particular about how he dressed when he went out.

  I spoke to him in Sechuana about Reverend Keet. I told him that Reverend Keet said the Marico was a bad place. I also told him that the missionary did not believe in the cure of fastening a piece of crocodile skin to the leg of a child who had fallen out of a withaak tree. And I said that he did not seem to think, either, that if you fastened crocodile skin to the withaak it would drive the devil out of it.

  The witch-doctor stood thinking for some while. And when he spoke again it seemed to me that in his answer there was a measure of wisdom.

  “The best thing,” he said, “would be to fasten a piece of crocodile skin on to the baas missionary.”

  It seemed quite possible that the devils were not all just in the Marico Bushveld. There might be one or two inside Reverend Keet himself, also.

  Nevertheless, I have often since then thought of how almost in­spired Reverend Keet was when he said that there was evil going on around him, right here in the Marico. In his very home – he could have said. With the curtains half drawn and all. Only, of course, he didn’t mean it that way.

  Yet I have also wondered if, in the way he did mean it – when he spoke of those darker things that he claimed were at work in Africa – I wonder if there, too, Reverend Keet was as wide of the mark as one might lightly suppose.

  That thought first occurred to me after Reverend Keet’s death and Elsiba’s departure. In fact, it was when the new missionary took over the pastorie at Ramoutsa and this wood-carving was found in the loft.

  But before I hung up the carving where you see it now, I first took the trouble to pluck off the lock of Reverend Keet’s hair that had been glued to it. And I also plucked out the nails that had been driven – by Elsiba’s hands, I could not but think – into the head and heart.

  The Traitor’s Wife

  We did not like the sound of the wind that morning, as we cantered over a veld trail that we had made much use of, during the past year, when there were English forces in the neighbourhood.

  The wind blew short wisps of yellow grass in quick flurries over the veld and the smoke from the fire in front of a row of kaffir huts hung low in the air. From that we knew that the third winter of the Boer War was at hand. Our small group of burghers dismounted at the edge of a clump of camel-thorns to rest our horses.

  “It’s going to be an early winter,” Jan Vermeulen said, and from force of habit he put his hand up to his throat in order to close his jacket collar over in front. We all laughed, then. We realised that Jan Vermeulen had forgotten how he had come to leave his jacket behind when the English had surprised us at the spruit a few days before. And instead of a jacket, he was now wearing a mealie sack with holes cut in it for his head and arms. You could not just close over in front of your throat, airily, the lapels cut in a grain bag.

  “Anyway, Jan, you’re all right for clothes,” Kobus Ferreira said, “but look at me.”

  Kobus Ferreira was wearing a missionary’s frock-coat that he had found outside Kronendal, where it had been hung on a clothes-­line to air.

  “This frock-coat is cut so tight across my middle and shoulders that I have to sit very stiff and awkward in my saddle, just like the missionary sits on a chair when he is visiting at a farmhouse,” Kobus Ferreira added. “Several times my horse has taken me for an Englishman, in consequence of the way I sit. I am only afraid that when a bugle blows my horse will carry me over the rant into the English camp.”

  At Kobus Ferreira’s remark the early winter wind seemed to take on a keener edge.

  For our thoughts went immediately to Leendert Roux, who had been with us on commando a long while and who had been spoken of as a likely man to be veldkornet – and who had gone scouting, one night, and did not come back with a report.

  There were, of course, other Boers who had also joined the English. But there was not one of them that we had respected as much as we had done Leendert Roux.

  Shortly afterwards we were on the move again.

  In the late afternoon we emerged through the Crocodile Poort that brought us in sight of Leendert Roux’s farmhouse. Next to the dam was a patch of mealies that Leendert Roux’s wife had got the kaffirs to cultivate.

  “Anyway, we’ll camp on Leendert Roux’s farm and eat roast mealies tonight,” our veldkornet, Apie Theron, observed.

  “Let us first rather burn his house down,” Kobus Ferreira said. And in a strange way it seemed as though his violent language was not out of place in a missionary’s frock-coat. “I would like to roast mealies in the thatch of Leendert Roux’s house.”

  Many of us were in agreement with Kobus.

  But our veldkornet, Apie Theron, counselled us against that form of vengeance.

  “Leendert Roux’s having his wife and farmstead here will yet lead to his undoing,” the veldkornet said. “One day he will risk coming out here on a visit, when he hasn’t got Kitchener’s whole army at his back. That will be when we will settle our reckoning with him.”

  We did not guess that that day would be soon.

  The road we were following led past Leendert Roux’s homestead. The noise of our horses’ hooves brought Leendert Roux’s wife, Serfina, to the door. She stood in the open doorway and watched us riding by. Serfina was pretty, taller than most women, and slender, and there was no expression in her eyes that you could read, and her face was very white.

  It was strange, I thought, as we rode past the homestead, that the sight of Serfina Roux did not fill us with bitterness.

  Afterwards, when we had dismounted in the mealie-lands, Jan Vermeulen made a remark at which we laughed.

  “For me it was the worst mo­ment in the Boer War,” Jan Ver­meulen said. “Having to ride past a pretty girl, and me wearing just a sack. I was glad there was Ko­bus Ferreira’s frock-coat for me to hide behind.”

  Jurie Bekker said there was something about Serfina Roux that reminded him of the Transvaal. He did not know how it was, but he repeated that, with the wind of early winter fluttering her skirts about her ankles, that was how it seemed to him.

  Then Kobus Ferreira said that he had wanted to shout out something to her when we rode past the door, to let Serfina know how we, who were fighting in the last ditch – and in unsuitable clothing – felt about the wife of a traitor. “But she stood there so still,” Kobus Ferreira said, “that I just couldn’t say anything. I felt I would like to visit her, even.”

  That remark of Kobus Ferreira’s fitted in with his frock-coat, also. It would not be the first time a man in ecclesiastical dress called on a woman while her husband was away.

  Then, once again, a remark of Jan Vermeulen’s made us realise that there was a war on. Jan Vermeulen had taken the mealie sack off his body and had threaded a length of baling-wire above the places
where the holes were. He was now restoring the grain bag to the use it had been meant for, and I suppose that, in consequence, his views generally also got sensible.

  “Just because Serfina Roux is pretty,” Jan Vermeulen said, flinging mealie heads into the sack, “let us not forget who and what she is. Perhaps it is not safe for us to camp tonight on this farm. She is sure to be in touch with the English. She may tell them where we are. Especially now that we have taken her mealies.”

  But our veldkornet said that it wasn’t important if the English knew where we were. Indeed, any kaffir in the neighbourhood

  could go and report our position to them. But what did matter was that we should know where the English were. And he reminded us that in two years he had never made a serious mistake that way.

  “What about the affair at the spruit, though?” Jan Vermeulen asked him. “And my pipe and tinder-box were in the jacket, too.”

  By sunset the wind had gone down. But there was a chill in the air. We had pitched our camp in the tamboekie grass on the far side of Leendert Roux’s farm. And I was glad, lying in my blankets, to think that it was the turn of the veldkornet and Jurie Bekker to stand guard.

  Far away a jackal howled. Then there was silence again. A little later the stillness was disturbed by sterner sounds of the veld at night. And those sounds did not come from very far away, either. They were sounds Jurie Bekker made – first, when he fell over a beacon, and then when he gave his opinion of Leendert Roux for setting up a beacon in the middle of a stretch of dubbeltjie thorns. The blankets felt very snug, pulled over my shoulders, when I reflected on those thorns.

  And because I was young, there came into my thoughts, at Jurie Bekker’s mention of Leendert Roux, the picture of Serfina as she had stood in front of her door.

  The dream I had of Serfina Roux was that she came to me, tall and graceful, beside a white beacon on her husband’s farm. It was that haunting kind of dream, in which you half know all the time that you are dreaming. And she was very beautiful in my dream. And it was as though her hair was hanging half out of my dream and reaching down into the wind when she came closer to me. And I knew what she wanted to tell me. But I did not wish to hear it. I knew that if Serfina spoke that thing I would wake up from my dream. And in that moment, like it always happens in a dream, Serfina did speak.

  “Opskud, kêrels!” I heard.

  But it was not Serfina who gave that command. It was Apie Theron, the veldkornet. He came running into the camp with his rifle at the trail. And Serfina was gone. In a few minutes we had saddled our horses and were ready to gallop away. Many times during the past couple of years our scouts had roused us thus when an English column was approaching.

  We were already in the saddle when Apie Theron let us know what was toward. He had received information, he said, that Leendert Roux had that very night ventured back to his homestead. If we hurried we might trap him in his own house. The veldkornet warned us to take no chances, reminding us that when Leendert Roux had still stood on our side he had been a fearless and resourceful fighter.

  So we rode back during the night along the same way we had come in the afternoon. We tethered our horses in a clump of trees near the mealie-land and started to surround the farmhouse. When we saw a figure running for the stable at the side of the house, we realised that Leendert Roux had been almost too quick for us.

  In the cold, thin wind that springs up just before the dawn we surprised Leendert Roux at the door of his stable. But when he made no resistance it was almost as though it was Leendert Roux who had taken us by surprise. Leendert Roux’s calm acceptance of his fate made it seem almost as though he had never turned traitor, but that he was laying down his life for the Transvaal.

  In answer to the veldkornet’s question, Leendert Roux said that he would be glad if Kobus Ferreira – he having noticed that Kobus was wearing the frock-coat of a man of religion – would read Psalm 110 over his grave. He also said that he did not want his eyes bandaged. And he asked to be allowed to say goodbye to his wife.

  Serfina was sent for. At the side of the stable, in the wind of early morning, Leendert and Serfina Roux, husband and wife, bade each other farewell.

  Serfina looked even more shadowy than she had done in my dream when she set off back to the homestead along the footpath through the thorns. The sun was just beginning to rise. And I understood how right Jurie Bekker had been when he said that she was just like the Transvaal, with the dawn wind fluttering her skirts about her ankles as it rippled the grass. And I remembered that it was the Boer women that kept on when their menfolk re­coiled before the steepness of the Drakensberge and spoke of turning back.

  I also thought of how strange it was that Serfina should have come walking over to our camp, in the middle of the night, just as she had done in my dream. But where my dream was different was that she had reported not to me but to our veldkornet where Leendert Roux was.

  Unpublished in His Lifetime

  The Red Coat

  I have spoken before of some of the queer things that happen to your mind through fever (Oom Schalk Lourens said). In the past there was a good deal more fever in the Marico and Water­berg Districts than there is today. And you got it in a more severe form, too. Today you still get malaria in these parts, of course. But your temperature doesn’t go so high anymore before the fever breaks. And you are not left as weak after an attack of malaria as you were in the old days. Nor do you often get illusions of the sort that afterwards came to trouble the mind of Andries Visagie.

  They say that this improvement is due to civilisation.

  Well, I suppose that must be right. For one thing, we now have a Government lorry from Zeerust every week with letters and newspapers and catalogues from Johannesburg shopkeepers. And only three years ago Jurie Bekker bought a wooden stand with a glass for measuring how much rain he gets on his farm. Jurie Bekker is very proud of his rain-gauge, too, and will accompany any white visitor to the back of his house to show him how well it works. “We have had no rain for the last three years,” Jurie Bekker will explain, “and that is exactly what the rain-gauge re­cords, also. Look, you can see for yourself – nil!”

  Jurie Bekker also tried to explain the rain instrument to the kaffirs on his farm. But he gave it up. “A kaffir with a blanket on hasn’t got the brain to understand a white man’s inventions,” Jurie Bekker said about it, afterwards. “When I showed my kaffirs what this rain-gauge was all about, they just stood in a long row and laughed.”

  Nevertheless, I must admit that, with all this civilisation we are getting here, the malaria fever has not of recent years been the scourge it was in the old days.

  The story of Andries Visagie and his fever begins at the battle of Bronkhorstspruit. It was at the battle of Bronkhorstspruit that Andries Visagie had his life saved by Piet Niemand, according to all accounts. And yet it was also arising out of that incident that many people in this part of the Marico in later years came to the conclusion that Andries Visagie was somebody whose word you could not take seriously, because of the suffering that he had undergone.

  You know, of course, that the Bronkhorstspruit battle was fought very long ago. In those days we still called the English ‘redcoats.’ For the English soldiers wore red jackets that we could see against the khaki colour of the tamboekie grass for almost as far as the bullets from our Martini-Henry rifles could carry. That shows you how uncivilised those times were.

  I often heard Piet Niemand relate the story of how he found Andries Visagie lying unconscious in a donga on the battlefield, and of how he revived him with brandy that he had in his water-bottle.

  Piet Niemand explained that, from the number of redcoats that were lined up at Bronkhorstspruit that morning, he could see it was going to be a serious engagement, and so he had thoughtfully emptied all the water out of his bottle and had replaced it with Magaliesberg peach brandy of the rawest kind he could get. Piet Niemand said that he was advancing against the English when he came across that donga
. He was advancing very fast and was looking neither to right nor left of him, he said. And he would draw lines on any piece of paper that was handy to show you the direction he took.

  I can still remember how annoyed we all were when a young school-teacher, looking intently at that piece of paper, said that if that was the direction in which Piet Niemand was advancing, then it must have meant that the English had got right to behind the Boer lines, which was contrary to what he had read in the history books. Shortly afterwards Hannes Potgieter, who was chairman of our school committee, got that young school-teacher transferred.

  As Hannes Potgieter said, that young school-teacher with his history-book ideas had never been in a battle and didn’t know what real fighting was. In the confusion of a fight, with guns going off all round you, Hannes Potgieter declared, it was not unusual for a burgher to find himself advancing away from the enemy – and quite fast, too.

  He was not ashamed to admit that a very similar thing had happened to him at one stage of the battle of Majuba Hill. He had run back a long way, because he had suddenly felt that he wanted to make sure that the kaffir agterryers were taking proper care of the horses. But he need have had no fears on that score, Hannes Potgieter added. Because when he reached the sheltered spot among the thorn-trees where the horses were tethered, he found that three kommandants and a veldkornet had arrived there before him, on the same errand. The veldkornet was so anxious to reassure himself that the horses were all right, that he was even trying to mount one of them.

  When Hannes Potgieter said that, he winked. And we all laughed. For we knew that he had fought bravely at Majuba Hill. But he was also ready always to acknowledge that he had been very frightened at Majuba Hill. And because he had been in several wars, he did not like to hear the courage of Piet Niemand called in question. What Hannes Potgieter meant us to understand was that if, at the battle of Bronkhorstspruit, Piet Niemand did perhaps run at one stage, it was the sort of thing that could happen to any man; and for which any man could be forgiven, too.