said all that before.
Susannah laughed as she listened, and in that moment somehow she seemed very much younger than her husband. She looked very pretty, too. But I noticed also that when the music ended it was as though she was crying.
Then Krisjan came in. I left shortly afterwards. But I had heard his footsteps coming up the path, so there was no need for me to leave in a hurry.
But just before I went Susannah brought in coffee. It was weak coffee; but I didn’t say anything about it. I am very much like an Englishman that way. It’s what they call manners. When I am visiting strangers and they give me bad coffee I don’t throw it out and say that the stuff isn’t fit for a kaffir. I just drink it and then don’t go back to that house again. But Krisjan spoke about it.
“Vrou,” he said, “the coffee is weak.”
“Yes,” Susannah answered.
“It’s very weak,” he went on.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Why do you always …” Krisjan began again.
“Oh, go to hell,” Susannah said.
Then they went at it, swearing at one another, and they didn’t even hear me when, on leaving, in the manner of the Bushveld, I said, “Goodbye and may the good Lord bless us all.”
It was a dark night that time, about three months later, when I again went to Krisjan Lemmer’s house by mule-cart. I was leaving early in the morning for Zeerust with a load of mealies and wanted to borrow Krisjan’s wagon-sail. Before I was halfway to his house it started raining. Big drops fell on my face. There was something queer about the sound of the wind in the wet trees, and when I drove through the poort where the Government Road skirts the line of the Dwarsberge the place looked very dark to me. I thought of death and things like that. I thought of pale strange ghosts that come upon you from behind … suddenly. I felt sorry, then, that I had not brought a kaffir along. It was not that I was afraid of being alone; but it would have been useful, on the return, to have a kaffir sitting in the back of the mule-cart to look after the wagon-sail for me.
The rain stopped.
I came to the farm’s graveyard, where had been buried members of the Lemmer family and of other families who had lived there before the Lemmers, and I knew that I was near the house. It seemed to me to be a very silly sort of thing to make a graveyard so close to the road. There’s no sense in that. Some people, for instance, who are ignorant and a bit superstitious are liable, perhaps, to start shivering a little, especially if the night is dark and there is a wind and the mule-cart is bumpy.
There were no lights in the Lemmers’ house when I got there. I knocked a long time before the door was opened, and then it was Krisjan Lemmer standing in the doorway with a lantern held above his head. He looked agitated at first, until he saw who it was and then he smiled.
“Come in, Neef Schalk,” he said. “I am pleased you are here. I was beginning to feel lonely – you know, the rain and the wind and – ”
“But you are not alone,” I replied. “What about Susannah?”
“Oh, Susannah has gone back to her mother,” Krisjan answered. “She went yesterday.”
We went into the voorkamer and sat down. Krisjan Lemmer lit a candle and we talked and smoked. The window-panes looked black against the night. The wind blew noisily through openings between the wall and the thatched roof. The candle-flame flickered unsteadily. It could not be pleasant for Krisjan Lemmer alone in that house without his wife. He looked restless and uncomfortable. I tried to make a joke about it.
“What’s the matter with you, Krisjan?” I asked. “You’re looking so unhappy, anybody would think you’ve still got your wife here with you.”
Krisjan laughed, and I wished he hadn’t. His laughter did not sound natural; it was too loud. Somehow I got a cold kind of feeling in my blood. It was rather a frightening thing, the wind blowing incessantly outside the house, and inside the house a man laughing too loudly.
“Let us play the gramophone, Krisjan,” I said.
By that time I knew how to work the thing myself. So I put in one of the little pins and started it off. But before doing that I had taken the gramophone off its table and placed it on the floor in front of my chair, where I could get at it more easily.
It seemed different without Susannah’s being there. Also, it looked peculiar to me that she should leave so suddenly. And there was no doubt about it that Krisjan was acting in a strange way that I didn’t like. He was restless. When he lit his pipe he had to strike quite a number of matches. And all that time round the house the wind blew very loudly.
The gramophone began to play.
The plate was “O Brandewyn laat my staan.”
I thought of Susannah and of the way she had listened three months before to that same song. I glanced up quickly at Krisjan, and as soon as he caught my eye he looked away. I was glad when the gramophone finished playing. And there was something about Krisjan that made me feel that he was pleased also. He seemed very queer about Susannah.
Then an awful thought occurred to me.
You know sometimes you get a thought like that and you know that it is true.
I got up unsteadily and took my hat. I saw that all round the place where the gramophone stood the dung floor of the voorkamer had been loosened and then stamped down again. The candle threw flickering shadows over the floor and over the clods of loose earth that had not been stamped down properly.
I drove back without the bucksail.
Karel Flysman
It was after the English had taken Pretoria that I first met Karel Flysman, Oom Schalk Lourens said.
Karel was about twenty-five. He was a very tall, well-built young man with a red face and curly hair. He was good-looking, and while I was satisfied with what the good Lord had done for me, yet I felt sometimes that if only He had given me a body like what Karel Flysman had got, I would go to church oftener and put more in the collection plate.
When the big commandos broke up, we separated into small companies, so that the English would not be able to catch all the Republican forces at the same time. If we were few and scattered the English would have to look harder to find us in the dongas and bushes and rante. And the English, at the beginning, moved slowly. When their scouts saw us making coffee under the trees by the side of the spruit, where it was cool and pleasant, they turned back to the main army and told their general about us. The general would look through his field-glasses and nod his head a few times.
“Yes,” he would say, “that is the enemy. I can see them under those trees. There’s that man with the long beard eating out of a pot with his hands. Why doesn’t he use a knife and fork? I don’t think he can be a gentleman. Bring out the maps and we’ll attack them.”
Then the general and a few of his kommandants would get together and work it all out.
“This cross I put here will be those trees,” the general would say. “This crooked line I am drawing here is the spruit, and this circle will stand for the pot that that man is eating out of with his fingers … No,
