The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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His voice was cracked with what the desert had done to him; his face was lined and his lips were blackened. But there was nothing about him that spoke of grief for his daughter’s death.
“Your daughter is still alive, Oom Gerhardus,” Abraham Ferreira said, pointing to the wagon wherein lay Gerhardus’s wife, who was weak, and the child to whom she had given birth only a few months before. “Yes, she is still alive … so far.”
Ferreira turned away laughing, and we heard him a little later explaining to his wife in cracked tones about the joke he had made.
Gerhardus Grobbelaar merely watched the other man walk away without saying anything. So far we had followed Gerhardus through all things, and our faith in him had been great. But now that we had decided to trek back we lost our belief in him. We lost it suddenly, too. We knew that it was best to turn back, and that to continue would mean that we would all die in the Kalahari. And yet, if Gerhardus had said we must still go on we would have done so. We would have gone through with him right to the end. But now that he as much as said he was beaten by the desert we had no more faith in Gerhardus. That is why I have said that Paul Kruger was a greater man than Gerhardus. Because Paul Kruger was that kind of man whom we still worshipped even when he decided to retreat. If it had been Paul Kruger who told us that we had to go back we would have returned with strong hearts. We would have retained exactly the same love for our leader, even if we knew that he was beaten. But from the moment that Gerhardus said we must go back we all knew that he was no longer our leader. Gerhardus knew that also.
We knew what lay between us and Malopolole and there was grave doubt in our hearts when we turned our wagons round. Our cattle were very weak, and we had to inspan all that could walk. We hadn’t enough yokes, and therefore we cut poles from the scattered bushes and tied them to the trek-chains. As we were also without skeis we had to fasten the necks of the oxen straight on to the yokes with strops, and several of the oxen got strangled.
Then we saw that Koos Steyn had become mad. For he refused to return. He inspanned his oxen and got ready to trek on. His wife sat silent in the wagon with the baby; wherever her husband went she would go, too. That was only right, of course. Some women kissed her goodbye, and cried. But Koos Steyn’s wife did not cry. We reasoned with Koos about it, but he said that he had made up his mind to cross the Kalahari, and he was not going to turn back just for nonsense.
“But, man,” Gerhardus Grobbelaar said to him, “you’ve got no water to drink.”
“I’ll drink coffee then,” Koos Steyn answered, laughing as always, and took up the whip and walked away beside the wagon. And Webber went off with him, just because Koos Steyn had been good to him, I suppose. That’s why I have said that Englishmen are queer. Webber must have known that if Koos Steyn had not actually gone wrong in the head, still what he was doing now was madness, and yet he stayed with him.
We separated. Our wagons went slowly back to Malopolole. Koos Steyn’s wagon went deeper into the desert. My wagon went last. I looked back at the Steyns. At that moment Webber also looked round. He saw me and waved his hand. It reminded me of that day in the Boer War when that other Englishman, whose companion we had shot, also turned round and waved.
Eventually we got back to Malopolole with two wagons and a handful of cattle. We abandoned the other wagons. Awful things happened on that desert. A number of children died. Gerhardus Grobbelaar’s wagon was in front of me. Once I saw a bundle being dropped through the side of the wagon-tent. I knew what it was. Gerhardus would not trouble to bury his dead child, and his wife lay in the tent too weak to move. So I got off the wagon and scraped a small heap of sand over the body. All I remember of the rest of the journey to Malopolole is the sun and the sand. And the thirst. Although at one time we thought that we had lost our way, yet that did not matter much to us. We were past feeling. We could neither pray nor curse, our parched tongues cleaving to the roofs of our mouths.
Until today I am not sure how many days we were on our way back, unless I sit down and work it all out, and then I suppose I get it wrong. We got back to Malopolole and water. We said we would never go away from there again. I don’t think that even those parents who had lost children grieved about them then. They were stunned with what they had gone through. But I knew that later on it would all come back again. Then they would remember things about shallow graves in the sand, and Gerhardus Grobbelaar and his wife would think of a little bundle lying out in the Kalahari. And I knew how they would feel.
Afterwards we fitted out a wagon with fresh oxen; we took an abundant supply of water and went back into the desert to look for the Steyn family. With the help of the Sechuana kaffirs, who could see tracks that we could not see, we found the wagon. The oxen had been outspanned; a few lay dead beside the wagon. The kaffirs pointed out to us footprints on the sand, which showed which way those two men and that woman had gone.
In the end we found them.
Koos Steyn and his wife lay side by side in the sand; the woman’s head rested on the man’s shoulder; her long hair had become loosened, and blew about softly in the wind. A great deal of fine sand had drifted over their bodies. Near them the Englishman lay, face downwards. We never found the baby Jemima. She must have died somewhere along the way and Koos Steyn must have buried her. But we agreed that the Englishman Webber must have passed through terrible things; he could not even have had any understanding left as to what the Steyns had done with their baby. He probably thought, up to the moment when he died, that he was carrying the child. For, when we lifted his body, we found, still clasped in his dead and rigid arms, a few old rags and a child’s clothes.
It seemed to us that the wind that always stirs in the Kalahari blew very quietly and softly that morning.
Yes, the wind blew very gently.
Francina Malherbe
After her father’s death, Oom Schalk Lourens said, Francina Malherbe was left alone on the farm Maroelasdal. We all wondered then what she would do. She was close on to thirty, and in the Bushveld, when a girl is not married by twenty-five, you can be quite certain that she won’t get a man anymore. Unless she has got money. And even then if she gets married at about thirty she is liable to be left afterwards with neither money nor husband. Look at what happened to Grieta Steyn.
But with Francina Malherbe it was different.
I remember Francina as a child. She was young when Flip first trekked into the Bushveld. There was an unlucky man for you. Just the year after he had settled on Maroelasdal the rinderpest broke out and killed off all his cattle. That was a bad time for all of us. But Flip Malherbe suffered most. Then, for the first time that anybody in the Marico District could remember, a pack of wolves came out of the Kalahari, driven into the Transvaal by the hunger. For in the Kalahari nearly all the game had died with the rinderpest. Maroelasdal was the nearest farm to the border, and in one night, as Flip told us, the wolves got into his kraal and tore the insides out of three hundred of his sheep. This was all the more remarkable, because Flip, to my knowledge, had never owned more than fifty sheep.
Then Flip Malherbe’s wife died of the lung disease, and shortly afterwards also his two younger sons who were always delicate. That left only Francina, who was then about fifteen. All those troubles turned Flip’s head a little. That year the Government voted money for the relief of farmers who had suffered from the rinderpest, and Flip put in a claim. He got paid quite a lot of money, but he spent most of it in Zeerust on drink. Then Flip went to the school-teacher and asked him if the Government would not give him compensation also because his wife and his sons had died, but the teacher, who did not know that Flip had become strange in the head, only laughed at him. Often after that, Flip told us that he was sorry his wife and children had died of the lung disease instead of the rinderpest, because otherwise he could have put in a claim for them.
Francina left school and set to work looking after the farm. With what was left out of the money Flip had got from the Government, she bought a few head of cattle. When the rains came she bought seed mealies and set the kaffir squatters ploughing in the vlakte. For three months