The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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them, and it was amongst these shadows that we strove to see the English. Wherever a branch rustled in the wind or a twig moved, we thought we could see soldiers. Then somebody fired a shot. At once the firing became general.
I had been in many fights before, so that there was nothing new to me in the rattle of Mausers and Lee-Metfords, and in the red spurts of flame that suddenly broke out all round us. We could see little of the English. That meant that they could see even less of us. All we had to aim at were those spurts of flame. We realised quickly that it was only an advance party of the English that we had up against us; it was all rifle fire; the artillery would be coming along behind the main body. What we had to do was to go on shooting a little longer and then slip away before the rest of the English came. Near me a man shouted that he was hit. Many more were hit that night.
I bent down to put another cartridge-clip into my magazine, when I noticed a man lying flat in the sloot, with his arms about his head. His gun lay on the grass in front of him. By his dress and the size of his body I knew it was Karel Flysman. I didn’t know whether it was a bullet or cowardice that had brought him down in that way. Therefore, to find out, I trod on his face. He shouted out something about the English, whereupon (as he used the same words), I was satisfied that he was the man who had awakened me with his boot before the fight started. I put some more of my weight on to the foot that was on his face.
“Don’t do that. Oh, don’t,” Karel Flysman shouted. “I am dying. Oh, I am sure I am dying. The English …”
I stooped down and examined him. He was unwounded. All that was wrong with him was his spirit.
“God,” I said, “why can’t you try to be a man, Karel? If you’ve got to be shot nothing can stop the bullet, whether you are afraid or whether you’re not. To see the way you’re lying down there anybody would think that you are at least the kommandant-general.”
He blurted out a lot of things, but he spoke so rapidly and his lips trembled so much that I couldn’t understand much of what he said. And I didn’t want to understand him, either. I kicked him in the ribs and told him to take his rifle and fight, or I would shoot him as he lay. But of course all that was of no use. He was actually so afraid of the enemy that even if he knew for sure that I was going to shoot him he would just have lain down where he was and have waited for the bullet.
In the meantime the fire of the enemy had grown steadier, so that we knew that at any moment we could expect the order to retreat.
“In a few minutes you can get back to your old game of running,” I shouted to Karel Flysman, but I don’t think he heard much of what I said, on account of the continuous rattle of the rifles.
But he must have heard the word ‘running.’
“I can’t,” he cried. “My legs are too weak. I am dying.”
He went on like that some more. He also mentioned a girl’s name. He repeated it several times. I think the name was Francina. He shouted out the name and cried out that he didn’t want to die. Then a whistle blew, and shortly afterwards we got the order to prepare for the retreat.
I did my best to help Karel out of the sloot. The Englishmen would have laughed if they could have seen that struggle in the moonlight. But the affair didn’t last too long. Karel suddenly collapsed back into the sloot and lay still. That time it was a bullet. Karel Flysman was dead.
Often after I have thought of Karel Flysman and of the way he died. I have also thought of that girl he spoke about. Perhaps she thinks of her lover as a hero who laid down his life for his country. And perhaps it is as well that she should think that.
London Stories
The South African Opinion
(1934–37)
Veld Maiden
I know what it is – Oom Schalk Lourens said – when you talk that way about the veld. I have known people who sit like you do and dream about the veld, and talk strange things, and start believing in what they call the soul of the veld, until in the end the veld means a different thing to them from what it does to me.
I only know that the veld can be used for growing mealies on, and it isn’t very good for that, either. Also, it means very hard work for me, growing mealies. There is the ploughing, for instance. I used to get aches in my back and shoulders from sitting on a stone all day long on the edge of the lands, watching the kaffirs and the oxen and the plough going up and down, making furrows. Hans Coetzee, who was a Boer War prisoner at St. Helena, told me how he got sick at sea from watching the ship going up and down, up and down, all the time.
And it’s the same with ploughing. The only real cure for this ploughing sickness is to sit quietly on a riempies bench on the stoep, with one’s legs raised slightly, drinking coffee until the ploughing season is over. Most of the farmers in the Marico Bushveld have adopted this remedy, as you have no doubt observed by this time.
But there the veld is. And it is not good to think too much about it. For then it can lead you in strange ways. And sometimes – sometimes when the veld has led you very far – there comes into your eyes a look that God did not put there.
It was in the early summer, shortly after the rains, that I first came across John de Swardt. He was sitting next to a tent that he had pitched behind the maroelas at the far end of my farm, where it adjoins Frans Welman’s lands. He had been there several days and I had not known about it, because I sat much on my stoep then, on account of what I have already explained to you about the ploughing.
He was a young fellow with long black hair. When I got nearer I saw what he was doing. He had a piece of white bucksail on a stand in front of him and he was painting my farm. He seemed to have picked out all the useless bits for his picture – a krantz and a few stones and some clumps of kakiebos.
“Young man,” I said to him, after we had introduced ourselves, “when people in Johannesburg see that picture they will laugh and say that Schalk Lourens lives on a barren piece of rock, like a lizard does. Why don’t you rather paint the fertile parts? Look at that vlei there, and the dam. And put in that new cattle-dip that I have just built up with reinforced concrete. Then, if Piet Grobler or General Kemp sees this picture, he will know at once that Schalk Lourens has been making improvements on the farm.”
The young painter shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I want to paint only the veld. I hate the idea of painting boreholes and cattle-dips and houses and concrete – especially concrete. I want only the veld. Its loneliness. Its mystery. When this picture is finished I’ll be proud to put my name to it.”
“Oh, well, that is different,” I replied, “as long as you don’t put my name to it. Better still,” I said, “put Frans Welman’s name to it. Write underneath that this is Frans Welman’s farm.”
I said that because I still remembered that Frans Welman had voted against me at the last election of the Drogekop School Committee.
John de Swardt then took me into his tent and showed me some other pictures he had painted at different places along the Dwarsberge. They were all the same sort of picture, barren and stony. I thought it would be a good idea if the Government put up a lot of pictures like that on the Kalahari border for the locusts to see. Because that would keep the locusts out of the Marico.
Then John de Swardt showed me another picture he had painted and when I saw that I got a different opinion about this thing that he said was Art. I looked from De Swardt to the picture and then back again to De Swardt.
“I’d never have thought it of you,” I said, “and you look such a quiet sort, too.”
“I call it the ‘Veld Maiden’,” John de Swardt said.
“If the predikant saw it he’d call it by other names,” I replied. “But I am a broad-minded man. I have been once