Many years ago, when I was a young man, and I sat here, on the front stoep, and I saw that white smoke floating away slowly and gracefully from the mouth of the bottle, and with a far-off fragrance, I used to think that the smoke looked like a young girl walking veiled under the stars. And now that I have grown old, and I look at that white smoke, I imagine that it is a young girl walking under the stars, and still veiled. I have never found out who she is.
Hans Kriel and I were in the same party that had gone from this section of the Groot Marico to Zeerust for the Nagmaal. And it was a few evenings after our arrival, when we were on a visit to Kris Wilman’s house on the outskirts of the town, that I learnt something of the first half of Hans Kriel’s love story, that half at which I laughed. The knowledge of the second half came a little later, and I didn’t laugh then.
We were sitting on Krisjan Wilman’s stoep and looking out in the direction of Sephton’s Nek. In the setting sun the koppies were red on one side; on the other side their shadows were lengthening rapidly over the vlakte. Krisjan Wilman had already poured out the mampoer, and the glasses were going round.
“That big shadow there is rushing through the thorn-trees just like a black elephant,” Adriaan Bekker said. “In a few minutes’ time it will be at Groot Marico station.”
“The shorter the days are, the longer the shadows get,” Frikkie Marais said. “I learnt that at school. There are also lucky and unlucky shadows.”
“You are talking about ghosts, now, and not shadows,” Adriaan Bekker interrupted him, learnedly. “Ghosts are all the same length, I think, more or less.”
“No, it is the ghost stories that are all the same length,” Krisjan Wilman said. “The kind you tell.”
It was good mampoer, made from karee-berries that were plucked when they were still green and full of thick sap, just before they had begun to whiten, and we said things that contained much wisdom.
“It was like the shadow of a flower on her left cheek,” I heard Hans Kriel say, and immediately I sat up to listen, for I could guess of what it was that he was talking.
“Is it on the lower part of her cheek?” I asked. “Two small purple marks?”
Because in that case I would know for sure that he was talking about the new waitress in the Zeerust café. I had seen her only once, through the plate-glass window, and because I had liked her looks I had gone up to the counter and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco, which she said they did not stock. When she said they didn’t stock koedoe biltong, either, I had felt too embarrassed to ask for anything else. Only afterwards I remembered that I could have gone in and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee and some harde beskuit. But it was too late then. By that time I felt that she could see that I came from this part of the Marico, even though I was wearing my hat well back on my head.
“Did you – did you speak to her?” I asked Hans Kriel after a while.
“Yes,” he said, “I went in and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco. But she said they didn’t sell tobacco by the roll, or koedoe biltong, either. She said this last with a sort of a sneer. I thought it was funny, seeing that I hadn’t asked her for koedoe biltong. So I sat down in front of a little table and ordered some harde beskuit and a cup of coffee. She brought me a number of little dry, flat cakes with letters on them that I couldn’t read very well. Her name is Marie Rossouw.”
“You must have said quite a lot to her to have found out her name,” I said, with something in my voice that must have made Hans Kriel suspicious.
“How do you know who I am talking about?” he demanded suddenly.
“Oh, never mind,” I answered. “Let us ask Krisjan Wilman to refill our glasses.”
I winked at the others and we all laughed, because by that time Hans Kriel was sitting half-sideways on the riempies bench, with his shoulders drawn up very high and his whole body seeming to be kept up by one elbow. It wasn’t long after that he moved his elbow, so that we had to pick him up from the floor and carry him into the voorkamer, where we laid him in a corner on some leopard skins.
But before that he had spoken more about Marie Rossouw, the new waitress in the café. He said he had passed by and had seen her through the plate-glass window and there had been a vase of purple flowers on the counter, and he had noticed those two marks on her cheek, and those marks had looked very pretty to him, like two small shadows from those purple flowers.
“She is very beautiful,” Hans Kriel said. “Her eyes have got deep things in them, like those dark pools behind Abjaterskop. And when she smiled at me once – by mistake, I think – I felt as though my heart was rushing over the vlaktes like that shadow we saw in the sunset.”
“You must be careful of those dark pools behind Abjaterskop,” I warned him. “We know those pools have got witches in them.”
I felt it was a pity that we had to carry him inside, shortly afterwards. For the mampoer had begun to make Hans Kriel talk rather well.
As it happened, Hans Kriel was not the only one, that night, who encountered difficulties with the riempies bench. Several more of us were carried inside. And when I look back on that Nagmaal my most vivid memories are not of what the predikant said at the church service, or of Krisjan Wilman’s mampoer, even, but of how very round the black spots were on the pale yellow of the leopard skin. They were so round that every time I looked at them they were turning.
In the morning Krisjan Wilman’s wife woke us up and brought us coffee. Hans Kriel and I sat up side by side on the leopard skins, and in between drinking his coffee Hans Kriel said strange things. He was still talking about Marie Rossouw.
“Just after dark I got up from the front stoep and went to see her in the café,” Hans Kriel said.
“You may have got up from the front stoep,” I answered, “but you never got up from these leopard skins. Not from the moment we carried you here. That’s the truth.”
“I went to the café,” Hans Kriel said, ignoring my interruption, “and it was very dark. She was there alone. I wanted to find out how she got those marks on her cheek. I think she is very pretty even without them. But with those marks Marie Rossouw is the most wild and beautiful thing in the whole world.”
“I suppose her cheek got cut there when she was a child,” I suggested. “Perhaps when a bottle of her father’s mampoer exploded.”
“No,” Hans Kriel replied, very earnestly. “No. It was something else. I asked her where the marks came from. I asked her there, in the café where we were alone together, and it suddenly seemed as though the whole place was washed with moonlight, and there was no counter between us any more, and there was a strange laughter in her eyes when she brought her face very close to mine. And she said, ‘I know you won’t believe me. But that is where the devil kissed me. Satan kissed me there when we were behind Abjaterskop. Shall I show you?’
“That was what she said to me,” Hans Kriel continued, “and I knew, then, that she was a witch. And that it was a very sinful thing to be in love with a witch. And so I caught her up in my arms, and I whispered, trembling all the time, ‘Show me,’ and our heads rose up very tall through the shadows. And everything moved very fast, faster than the shadows move from Abjaterskop in the setting of the sun. And I knew that we were behind Abjaterskop, and that her eyes were indeed the dark pools there, with the tall reeds growing on the edges. And then I saw Satan come in between us. And he had hooves and a forked tail. And there were flames coming out of him. And he stooped down and kissed Marie Rossouw, on her cheek, where those marks were. And she laughed. And her eyes danced with merriment. And I found that it was all the time I who was kissing her. Now, what do you make of this, Schalk?”
I said, of course, that it was the mampoer. And that I knew, now, why I had been sleeping in such discomfort. It wasn’t because the spots on the leopard skin were turning like round wheels, but because I had Satan sleeping next to me all night. And I said that this discovery wasn’t new, either. I had always suspected something like that about him.
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nbsp; But I got an idea. And while the others were at breakfast I went out, on the pretext that I had to go and help Manie Burgers with his oxen at the church square outspan. But, instead, I went into the café and because I knew her name was Marie Rossouw, when the waitress came for my order I could ask her whether she was related to the Rossouws of Rysmierbult, and I could tell her that I was distantly related to that family, also. In the daylight there was about that café none of the queerness that Hans Kriel had spoken about. It was all very ordinary. Even those purple flowers were still on the counter. They looked slightly faded.
And then, suddenly, while we were talking, I asked her the thing that I was burning to know.
“That mark on your cheek, juffrou,” I said, “will you tell me where you got it from?”
Marie Rossouw brought her face very close to mine, and her eyes were like dark pools with dancing lights in them.
“I know you won’t believe me,” she said, “but that is where Satan kissed me. When we were at the back of Abjaterskop together. Shall I show you?”
It was broad daylight. The morning lay yellow on the world and the sun shone in brightly through the plate-glass window, and there were quite a number of people in the street. And yet as I walked out of the café quickly, and along the pavement, I was shivering.
With one thing and another, I did not come across Hans Kriel again until three or four days later, when the Nagmaal was over and we were trekking to the other side of the Dwarsberge once more.
We spoke of a number of things, and then, trying to make my voice sound natural, I made mention of Marie Rossouw.
“That was a queer sort of dream you had,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered, “it was queer.”
“And did you find out,” I asked, again trying to sound casual, “about those marks on her cheek?”
“Yes,” Hans Kriel answered, “I asked Marie and she told me. She said that when she was a child a bottle of mampoer burst in the voorkamer. Her cheek got cut by a splinter of glass. She is an unusual kind of girl, Marie Rossouw.”
“Yes,” I agreed, moving away. “Oh, yes.”
But I also thought that there are things about mampoer that you can’t understand very easily.
The Widow
There had been no rain in the Potchefstroom District for many months, and so the ground was very hard that morning, and the picks and shovels of the kaffirs rang on the gravel, by the side of the mud hut that had been used as a courthouse.
I was a boy then. It was at the time when the Transvaal was divided into four separate republics, and Potchefstroom, which was a small village, was the capital of the southern republic.
For several days there had been much activity in the courthouse. From distant parts the farmers had come to attend the trial of Tjaart van Rensburg. Only a few could get inside the court. The rest watched at the door, crowding forward eagerly after each witness had stepped down from the stand; those inside told them what evidence had been given.
Naturally there was much excitement over these court proceedings, and in Potchefstroom people talked of little else but the Transvaal’s first murder trial.
The whole thing started when Andries Theron was found beside the borehole on his farm. He had been pumping water for his cattle. One Rossouw, a neighbour of Andries Theron’s, passing by in his ox-wagon, saw a man lying next to the pump-handle.
Thus it was that Francina Theron saw her husband arrive home in a stranger’s ox-wagon, with a piece of bucksail pulled over his body, and a Martini bullet in his heart. The landdrost’s men came from Potchefstroom and proceeded to investigate the murder, spending much of their time, as landdrosts’ men always do, in trying to frighten the wrong people into confessing.
But afterwards they got their information.
They say there was a large crowd at the funeral of Andries Theron, which took place at the foot of a koppie on the far end of his farm. They came, the women in black clothes and the men in their Sunday hats; and in that sad procession that wound slowly over the veld, following the wagon with the coffin on it, there were also two landdrost’s men.
Among the mourners was the dead man’s cousin, Tjaart van Rensburg. The minister did not take long over the funeral service. He said a few simple words about the tragic way in which Andries Theron had died, adding that no man knew when his hour was come. He then spoke a brief message of comfort to the widow, Francina, and offered up a prayer for the dead man’s soul.
The last notes of the Boer hymn had died on the veld, and the crowd had already begun to move away from the graveside, when one of the landdrost’s men put his hand on Tjaart van Rensburg’s shoulder. With an officer of the law on each side of him, the fetters on his wrists, Tjaart van Rensburg led the procession down the stony road.
The prisoner had turned very pale. But they all noticed that his head was erect and his step firm, when he walked to the bluegum trees on the other side of the hill, where the Government Cape-cart waited.
A month later the trial commenced in Potchefstroom.
Andries Theron’s widow, Francina, was a slenderly-built woman, still in her early twenties. She had been very pretty at one time, with light-hearted ways and a merry laugh. But the shock of her husband’s death had changed her in an hour. She did not weep when Rossouw, who had a good heart but blunt ways, informed her that he had found her husband lying dead on the veld.
“I was lucky,” Rossouw said, “to have found him before the vultures did.”
“Where is he?” Francina asked.
“On my wagon,” Rossouw answered, “under the first bucksail you come to. Next to the sacks of potatoes.”
In some respects Rossouw did not have what you would call a real delicacy of feeling. But he possessed a sombre thing of the veld, which told him that he must not follow Francina to the wagon, because it was right that, at her first meeting with her dead husband, a wife should be alone.
Francina was at the wagon a long time.
When she came back she was sadly changed. The colour had left her cheeks and her lips. Her mouth sagged at the corners. But in her tearless eyes there was a lost and hopeless look, a dreadful desolation that frightened Rossouw when he saw it, so that he made no effort to comfort her.
It was the same with the women who came to console Francina. If a woman wanted to take Francina in her arms, so that she could weep on her bosom, there was that look in her eyes that spoke of a sorrow that must be for always.
You can’t do much, if all you have to offer a widow is human sympathy, and she looks back at you with wide eyes that seem to want nothing more from this world or the world to come. You get uneasy, then, and feel that you have no right to trespass on this sort of sorrow.
That was what happened to the women who knew Francina. They were kind to her in little ways. When the time for the murder trial came, and it seemed likely that Francina would be called as a witness, a woman accompanied her to Potchefstroom and stayed with her there. But even to this woman, in her grief, Francina remained a stranger.
In fact, this woman always said, afterwards, that during all the time she was with her, Francina spoke to her only once; and that was when they were at the Mooi River, which flows through Potchefstroom, and Francina said how pretty the yellow flowers grew on the banks of the river.
So the trial began. Every morning, at nine o’clock, Tjaart van Rensburg was led from the gaol to the courthouse with the mud walls. There were always many people standing around to see him pass. I saw him quite often. The impression I get, when I look back to that time, is that Tjaart van Rensburg was a broad-shouldered man of about thirty, taller than the guards who escorted him, and rather good-looking.
I remember the way he walked, with his head up, and his hat on a slant, and his wrists close together in front of him. On each side of him was a burgher with a bandolier and a rifle.
The landdrost looked important, as a landdrost should look at his first murder trial. The jurymen also looked very dignified. But th
e most pompous of all was Rossouw. Over and over again, to anyone who would listen, he told the story of how he discovered the body before the vultures did. He told everybody just what evidence he was going to give, and what theories he was going to put forward as to how the murder was committed.
He even brought his ox-wagon along to the courthouse and drew it up on the sidewalk, so that the landdrost and the jurymen had difficulty in getting in at the door. He said he was willing to demonstrate to the court just at what pace he drove the body from the borehole to Andries Theron’s house.
Afterwards, Roussouw was the most disappointed man I ever saw. For he was only kept in the witness-box for about five minutes, and they wouldn’t listen to any of his theories.
On the other hand, a kaffir, who saw Tjaart van Rensburg arguing with the deceased in front of the borehole, gave evidence for over three hours. And another kaffir, who heard a shot and thought he saw Tjaart van Rensburg running down the road with a gun, was in the witness-box for the best part of a day.
“What do you think of this for a piece of nonsense?” Rossouw asked of a group standing about the courthouse. “I am a white man. I have borne arms for the Transvaal in three kaffir wars. And I am only in the witness-box for five minutes, when they tell me to step down and move my ox-wagon away from the door. And yet a raw kaffir, who can’t even sign his name, but has got to put a cross at the foot of the things he has said – this raw kaffir is allowed to stand there wasting the time of the court for ten hours on end.”
“What’s more,” Rossouw went on, “Tjaart van Rensburg’s lawyer never once cross-questioned me or called me a liar. Whereas he spent half a day in calling that kaffir names. Doesn’t that lawyer think that my evidence is of any value to the court?”
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