The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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pump broke, so that he could get no water for his cattle, he just walked into the house and lit his pipe and said that it was the Lord’s will. He said that perhaps it was as well that the pump broke, because, if the Lord wanted the cattle to get water, He wouldn’t have sent the drought. That was the kind of man Krisjan Lemmer was. And he would never have set hand to the pump again, either, was it not that the next day rain fell, whereby Krisjan knew that the Lord meant him to understand that the drought was over. Yet, when anything angered him he was bad.
But the unfortunate part of Krisjan Lemmer was that he could not get on with his wife Susannah. Always they quarrelled. Susannah, as we knew, was a good deal younger than her husband, but often she didn’t look so very much younger. She was small and fair. Her skin had not been much darkened by the Bushveld sun, for she always wore a very wide kappie, the folds of which she pinned down over the upper part of her face whenever she went out of the house. Her hair was the colour of the beard you see on the yellow mealies just after they have ripened. She had very quiet ways. In company she hardly ever talked, unless it was to say that the Indian shopkeeper in Ramoutsa put roasted kremetart roots with the coffee he sold us, or that the spokes of the mule-cart came loose if you didn’t pour water over them.
You see, what she said were things that everybody knew and that no one argued about. Even the Indian storekeeper didn’t argue about the kremetart roots. He knew that was the best part of his coffee. And yet, although she was so quiet and unassuming, Susannah was always quarrelling with her husband. This, of course, was foolish of her, especially as Krisjan was a man with gentle ways until somebody purposely annoyed him. Then he was not quite so gentle. For instance, there was the time when the chief of the Mtosa kaffirs passed him in the veld and said “Good morning” without taking the leopard skin off his head and calling Krisjan baas. Krisjan was fined ten pounds by the magistrate and had to pay for the doctor during the three months that the Mtosa chief walked with a stick.
One day I went to Krisjan Lemmer’s farm to borrow a roll of baling-wire for the teff. Krisjan had just left for the krantz to see if he could shoot a ribbok. Susannah was at home alone. I could see that she had been crying. So I went and sat next to her on the riempiesbank and took her hand.
“Don’t cry, Susannah,” I said, “everything will be all right. You must just learn to understand Krisjan a little better. He is not a bad fellow in his way.”
At first she was angry with me for saying anything against Krisjan, and she told me to go home. But afterwards she became more reasonable about it, allowing me to move up a bit closer to her and to hold her hand a little tighter. In that way I comforted her. I would have comforted her even more, perhaps, only I couldn’t be sure how long Krisjan would remain in the krantz; and I didn’t like what happened to the Mtosa kaffir chief.
I asked her to play the gramophone for me, not because I wanted to hear it, but because you always pretend to take an interest in the things that your friends like, especially when you borrow a roll of baling-wire off them. When anybody visits me and gets my youngest son Willie to recite texts from the Bible, I know that before he leaves he is going to ask me if I will be using my mealie-planter this week.
So Susannah put the round plate on the thing, and turned the handle, and the gramophone played “O Brandewyn laat my staan.” You couldn’t hear too well what the man was singing, but I have 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