Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion

Piet Plessis and Stephanus De la Rey were second cousins. It is significant of the wide ramifications through which relationship extends among the Dutch inhabitants of South Africa, that the high Transvaal official and the well-to-do Cape Colony Boer should be so near akin. They had hardly seen each other for some years, but intercourse between them had been renewed in the shape of a cordial invitation to Aletta to come up and spend some time in the Transvaal.

The girl was delighted. Her patriotic enthusiasm, though somewhat sobered down of late, yielding to more personal and individual considerations, was not dead by any means. To visit Pretoria under the auspices of one who knew all the secrets of the Government, opened out before her unbounded possibilities in the way of a vivid daily interest at that critical period. She pictured herself in the confidence of her kinsman, and he was in the confidence of the President. What would she not hear! – what would she not know! But, as a preliminary, she little knew her kinsman aforesaid.

But Piet while keeping his own secrets and those of the President to himself, gave her a welcome that left nothing to be desired. So, too, did his wife, a quiet woman, half-way through the thirties, rather good-looking, but retiring and domesticated – not at all the sort of wife for a public man, declared his acquaintance; wherein they were wrong, for Mrs Plessis made all the better hostess, in that she cared nothing for state affairs, desiring only to be left to look after her household in peace and quietness. Piet, himself, moreover had good reason to prefer her that way, inasmuch as he could seek the repose of his domestic circle without being harried by all sorts of questions he had no intention of answering.

He received the news of Aletta’s engagement with a burst of genial laughter, evoked less by reason of the fact itself than by the particulars thereof.

“So, Aletta?” he said. “An Englishman! And that is the culmination of all your exuberant patriotism, is it? An Englishman? Well, it might be worse. You might have got taken by one of those rooi-baatje officers – so many of you girls down at the Cape seem to go mad on them. Bah, they are too often an impecunious lot, all debts and gold stripe” – (the reader must bear in mind that racial animus was at its highest tension, and that the speaker was a Transvaal official). “You should see them a few years later, as I have seen them, with very little half-pay and very large family, living cheap at some wretched Belgian town. Still – an Englishman!”

“But there are Englishmen and Englishmen, Cousin Piet,” returned Aletta, laughing as one could afford to do who was supremely conscious that the laugh was all on her own side. “Wait till you see this one. He is not in the least like the rest.”

“Oh no. Of course not. How could he be, if your choice has fallen upon him? Well, well. We thought we could have done much better for you up here, but you have taken the bit between your teeth so there’s an end of it. Is he coming up here, then?”

“Yes, in a day or two. He came with me as far as Bloemfontein – wouldn’t come all the way yet – thought I had better have a little while alone with you and Anna, so that we might get sort of acquainted. You see, we hardly know each other yet.”

“Why, I feel that we rather do already, Aletta,” replied her kinsman heartily, for he was charmed with her taking manner and general appearance. He had expected her to prove presentable, if a bit shy. But there was nothing of the latter about her. What an acquisition she would be to that unpretentious but pretty house of his just outside Pretoria!

And in it Aletta was destined to pass some very happy days. To begin with, the capital of the principal Dutch Republic stood to her as a kind of Mecca, viewed in the light of her former lofty ideals; to others, of course, it was just a pretty, leafy little town, nestling between its surrounding hills. Brother officials of Piet’s would often come to the house – men who hitherto had been but names to her; genial, highly cultured gentlemen, differing pole-wide from the black-browed conspiring Guy Fawkes – such as the Colonial papers had delighted in painting them. Uitlanders too, with a grievance of course, would frequently show up: jolly, jovial, well-to-do looking, grievance and all; and at first it fairly puzzled her to note on what excellent terms they appeared to stand with their theoretical tyrants and oppressors. Sometimes, too, she got more than a passing glimpse of the President himself. Here again she failed to identify the perfidious ogre she had so often seen portrayed, both in type and pencil, by the newspapers aforesaid. Nay, more, she was even heretical enough to wonder whether if that personality, with all its shrewd intelligence, had been on the English side, ample tribute would not have been paid even to the outward aspect of the man – so far only described to be held up to repulsion and ridicule – the strong face, the impassive reticence, wherein alone lay a world of diplomatic might – the long stern record of pioneer, voortrekker, leader of men; the opening up of wild uncivilised lands – bearing a man’s part in wresting the wilderness from the inheritance of savagery to render it the heritage of posterity, and the unwavering fixity of purpose wherewith he had devoted every energy to preserving it for his own people and their children’s children. If her sojourn in Cape Town had been a liberal education to Aletta, truly Pretoria constituted a worthy continuation of the same.

“Now look at that, Piet,” she said, a day or two after her arrival, exhibiting an excellent portrait of her fiancé. “Didn’t I tell you there were Englishmen and Englishmen. Now, this one is not like the rest. Is he?”

“No. I don’t know that he is,” replied Piet Plessis, scanning the likeness intently. But to himself he was saying, “So! I must have a few inquiries made. I have seen that worthy before. Oh yes, I have.” But to her, “So he has been a neighbour of yours the last year or so, Aletta?”

“Yes. He was already settled down on his own place some time before I came home.”

“Was he? Never went off it, I suppose?”

“No” – wonderingly. “He has been there since he came back from Rhodesia, he and Frank Wenlock together. At least, he was looking out for a farm at first, while he was staying with the Wenlocks. Then he got one and hasn’t been off it since.”

“Not?”

“No – except to go into Schalkburg now and then, or to come and see us.”

“Oh yes. To come and see you?” rejoined Piet, jocosely. “Hasn’t been up here at all of late, eh?”

“He has been up here before, but not lately, not within the last year. I think longer, because he served through the Matabele rising. But he was up in Rhodesia some little while after that.”

“Was he? Oh yes,” said the diplomatic Piet, in a tone as though by now only politely interested in the subject. But the while he was, to all outward appearances, turning the photograph round and round listlessly, but in reality scrutinising it keenly, now obliquely from the top corner, now sideways. “How long did you say you had been engaged, Aletta?”

“Just over two months,” answered the girl, her eyes brightening.

“Ach! he isn’t listening to you at all, Aletta,” struck in the partner of Piet’s joys and sorrows, looking up from her book. “He has forgotten all about Mr Kershaw by this time, and is thinking over the last political move. What did you say his name was – Mr Kershaw’s, I mean?”

“Colvin. It’s a family surname turned into a Christian name. Oh, and such a joke, Anna! You should have heard Tant’ Plessis on that very thing,” And she proceeded to narrate how that perverse old relative had insisted on saddling upon her fiancé a historic Protestant Reformer of the sixteenth-century for grandfather. Piet fairly shouted with mirth.

“Old Tant’ Katrina! Ja, she was a kwaai vrouw!” he cried. “I have good reason to remember her. When we were young ones, at Rondavel, the other side Heilbron, she would come and stop there for any time. She was always saying we didn’t get enough strop and worrying the Ou’ Baas to give us more. He only laughed at her – and one day she wanted to give us some herself. But we wouldn’t take it. We snatched the strop from her and ran away. But we had to spend a week dodging her. She had got a broomstick then. She shied it at us one day, and hit my brother Sarel – the one that is in Bremersdorp now – over the leg. He couldn’t walk straight for about six months after. Then she and the Ou’ Baas had words, and she cleared out Ja, she was a kwaai vrouw. And now she is with Stephanus! Well, well. But Aletta, what did she say to your being engaged to an Englishman?”

“Oh, she consoled herself that his grandfather was the great Calvinus,” answered Aletta, breaking into a peal of laughter over the recollection. “Mynheer had said so: that was enough for her.”

A few days after this Colvin arrived in person, and then it seemed to Aletta that she had nothing left to wish for. But he would not allow her to give him all her time exclusively. She had certain social calls upon it, and, in justice to her entertainers, these must not be set aside. Piet Plessis had been the first to notice this, and was capable of appreciating it, for he himself was astonished at the brightening effect the presence of Aletta had shed within his home.

“Did I not tell you,” she would cry triumphantly, “that this Englishman was not like other Englishmen?”

And Piet would laughingly agree.

Colvin himself did not fail to note the pride and delight wherewith she would “produce” him – as he put it – to every fresh batch of people whose acquaintance he made. Once or twice he took her to task for it.

“You know, darling,” he would say, with a lurking amusement in his eyes, “it is not ‘up to date’ to show feeling. You ought, for instance, to appear just languidly tolerant of my presence at all – rather as if I were of no account in the world’s scheme except to fetch and carry.”

“Oh, ought I?” she would answer. “Well, when I see you want me to, I will try and begin.”

Those were happy days – for these two at any rate. For those outside the enchanted portal they were days of dark anxiety; yet on the surface little of this appeared. People came and went as usual. To judge from the ordinary manner of Piet Plessis, no one would have suspected the mind of that inscrutable official to be working and scheming to its utmost capacity. He was a good deal away from home, returning late, or not at all, and then with a cheerful breezy apology for the calls upon his time entailed by a confoundedly serious political outlook. But he had at once made Colvin free of the house, and the latter was grateful for the quiet uninterrupted retreat thus afforded from the turmoil of excitement and wild talk outside; and not the least happy hours were those he spent in the cool, bosky garden, while Aletta sat at her work, and talked to him, and they grew to know each other more and more, and every day served but to deepen their mutual understanding, and love, and appreciation. So the days wore on, and then from the bright, halcyon blue, now constituting the lives of the twain, the bolt fell, and the name thereof was written in but three letters – lurid letters traced in blood —

War!

Yes, the storm had burst at last. The preliminary clouding over, the flashes and mutterings, distant but drawing nearer, had culminated in a great and terrible outburst, in the thunder roar of cannon along nearly a thousand miles of border. The historical “ultimatum” had been delivered. The land which but few years ago, comparatively speaking, had been inhabited, and that hot too thickly, by a population of primitive farmers, had thrown down the gauntlet in the face of the valour and wealth and boundless resource of the Empire on which the sun never sets. And the challenge had been met in the only possible way, and once more two Christian and civilised races were shedding each other’s blood like water, while countless swarms of dark-skinned and savage heathen stood by and looked on.

Chapter Three.

His Honour the President

“We shall have to turn you into a prisoner of war, Colvin,” said Piet Plessis a week or so after the breaking out of hostilities. “And, as I feel sort of responsible for your safe custody, my orders to you as your custodian are to go over to the Grand, now, at once, and pack up your traps and bring them here. I’d have suggested it before, but everything was so uit-makaar, and I didn’t know whether you might not have been wanting to go down-country again.”

Whereby it is manifest that the inquiries we heard Piet promise to set afloat had turned out satisfactory, albeit their burden and the result he had characteristically kept to himself.

“No. I don’t feel that way inclined, Piet,” answered Colvin. “I am a sort of cosmopolitan rover, without ties – except such as are here,” he added significantly. “Besides, it’s more interesting watching the row from behind your lines than from behind those of the other side. By the way, we are quite alone, just the two of us. What show do you think your crowd has got?”

“What show?” said the other, after an instinctive glance on either side. “Look here, Colvin. You’re one of us now. If anybody who wasn’t had asked me that question I should have said: ‘It is all in the hands of Providence, and our cause is just.’ Now I say: ‘It is all within the potentialities of politics, and the potentialities of politics spell Uncertainty.’ What show? Every show. We shall see. But if you really are wanting to go down-country any time later, I dare say I could always get you through the lines.”

“Oh, we’ll think of that later. I might feel inclined to go and see some of the fighting – ”

“What’s that? What might you feel inclined to do?” interrupted the voice of Aletta, who with Mrs Plessis had just come out on the back stoep, where the above conversation was taking place. “Colvin, I am astonished at you! See some of the fighting indeed! Do you think I shall let you?”

She had locked her hands together round his arm, just resting her head against his shoulder, and stood facing the other two, with the prettiest air of possession. Piet Plessis spluttered:

“Ho, ho! Colvin! A sort of cosmopolitan rover without ties; isn’t that what you were saying just now? Without ties? Ho, ho, ho!” And the jolly Dutchman shouted himself into a big fit of coughing.

“He is one of us now, is he not, Piet?” went on the girl, a tender pride shining from her eyes. “Yet he talks about going to fight against us. Yes, you were saying that, Colvin. I heard you when we came out.”

“Little termagant!” he rejoined lovingly, drawing one of the hands which was linked round his arm into his. “I wasn’t talking about fighting against anybody. I said I might go and see some of the fighting. You may go and see a bull-fight, you know, but you needn’t necessarily be taking part in it. In fact, the performers on both sides would object, and that in the most practical manner, to your doing so. Now, I meant to go as a non-combatant. Sort of war-correspondent business.”

“Well, we are not going to let you do anything of the sort,” answered Aletta decisively. “Are we, Piet? Why don’t you make a prisoner of war of him, then he can’t do as he pleases?”

“‘He is one of us now,’” quoted Colvin, innocently. “I believe those were the words. How can ‘one of us’ be a prisoner of war?”

Piet laughed at this deft turning of the tables.

“Go away and get your traps, man,” he said, “then you’ll be all snug and fixed up here by lunch-time. Here’s the buggy,” as the sound of wheels came through from the front of the house. “I must get back to office. So long?”

Every day some fresh news from the seat of war came flowing in – beginning with the capture of the armoured train at Kraaipan, historical as the first overt act of hostility, the investment of Kimberley and Mafeking, the reverse at Elandslaagte, and the death of the British general, and, later on, the arrival of a good many British prisoners. And over and above authenticated news, of course wild rumour was busy, magnifying this or that skirmish into a Boer victory, diminishing losses, and playing general skittles with most of the facts of the particular event reported, as is invariably the case on either side of the contested field. But what struck Colvin Kershaw after the first week of excitement was the calm, matter-of-fact way in which it was received by the crowd at large. News which would have thrown Cape Town or Durban into a perfect delirium, was treated in Pretoria as so much matter of course, and only to be expected.

Day after day, he would watch the muster of burghers or the entraining of the guns, great and small, of the Staats Artillerie, and here again the sober, almost phlegmatic demeanour of the combatants was remarkable. Rough, weather-beaten, somewhat melancholy-looking men were these mounted burghers – many of them large and powerful of stature. They bestrode wiry, undersized nags – which bore besides their riders the frugal ration of biltong and biscuit, with which the Boer can get along for days. Slung round with well-filled bandolier, rifle on thigh, and mostly wearing weather-worn broad-brimmed hats – though some of the older ones were crowned with the white chimney-pot – they would muster in front of the Dutch Reformed church, and pace forth, singing perhaps a Dutch hymn or a snatch of the “Volkslied” – most of them smoking their pipes, tranquil, phlegmatic, as though they were all going home again. The hooraying and handshaking and handkerchief-waving and flag-wagging which would have accompanied a British combatant force under like circumstances, would be conspicuous by its absence.

While watching such a muster, a man, who was standing among the spectators, turned at her voice and, lifting his hat, shook hands with Aletta. He was a tall gentlemanly-looking man, with a fair beard and moustache worn after the Vandyke cut, and was a Hollander with a Portuguese name. He, too, had been a high Government official.

“I haven’t seen you for a long time, Dr Da Costa,” said Aletta. “I thought you had gone to the front.”

“No. I am going very soon, though.” Then, following the direction of his glance, she introduced him to Colvin.

“What do you think of our main line of defence?” he went on, speaking English with hardly an accent. “Those men have the most perfect faith in themselves and their cause.”

“Yes, they look business-like,” replied Colvin, critically scanning the long string of mounted burghers as they filed past, most of them smoking their pipes, and chatting to each other in a placid undertone. “We had some of their kind in Matabeleland during the rising in ’96, and they were right good men.”

“Ah! So you were out in the Matabele rebellion?” said Da Costa, looking at the other with newly-awakened interest.

“Yes, had to be.”

“I see. And are you, may I ask, likely to be out in this campaign?”

“Not in the least, unless as a spectator. Here I am not needed – there I was: – which makes all the difference.”

“If you are, I hope we may meet in the field. I shall be pleased to show you all you may be wishing to see to the best advantage.”

“Now, Dr Da Costa, you are not to encourage him,” struck in Aletta. “Mr Kershaw is not going to be shot at at all. He is not needed, as he says, and – you are not to encourage him.”

The other, who had heard of Piet Plessis’ attractive kinswoman and her English fiancé, smiled good-naturedly. Then, to change the conversation, he went on:

“Did you make a long stay at Johannesburg, Mr Kershaw?”

“At Johannesburg?” echoed Colvin.

“Yes. Didn’t I see you in the Rand Club about a fortnight ago? And again on Pritchard Street. Someone told me it was a Mr Kershaw.”

“Someone told you all wrong then, doctor, for I came right through Johannesburg. I never even got out of the train there.”

“That’s odd,” said Da Costa, with a momentary twinkle in his eye, as though he didn’t believe a word of this statement. “It must have been only a likeness,” he added tactfully.

“But the name,” went on Aletta, opening her eyes. “It’s strange they should have got hold of the name.”

“Very, because, as I said, I didn’t so much as get out of the train, let alone take a stroll as far as Pritchard Street, let alone the Rand Club, which is farther,” said Colvin. “Well, we most of us have a ‘double’ somewhere.”

Which was precisely the remark made by the jovial Piet, when the occurrence was narrated to him on their return home. But for once his official instinct of reticence, even in trifling matters, was misplaced, had he but known it. Had he imparted the results of those enquiries he had caused to be made, what a deal of sorrow, and mistrust, and heart-wringing might have been thereafter saved!

“Is that man we met to-day going out with the ambulance department?” asked Colvin.

“Who, Da Costa? Ambulance department?” echoed Piet, wonderingly. “Oh, I see,” with a shout of laughter. “No fear. He’s not a medico. He’s a lawyer – running hard for a judgeship. But I say, Colvin, would you like to go up and see the President this afternoon? I think we could get at the old man to-day.”

“Just what I would like.”

“And, Colvin,” struck in Aletta, “you are not to look upon Oom Paul as an old bear, as most English do. Remember, I have a great admiration for him.”

Colvin promised to keep this fact in mind when forming his opinion, and in due course they arrived at the unpretentious-looking bungalow which was the private residence of one of the most famed personalities of modern times. As they went up between the stone lions which guarded, as it were, the entrance, they passed a German officer coming down the steps, a straight martial figure, with upward-pointing moustaches à la Kaiser Wilhelm, and wearing the uniform of the Staats Artillerie. He exchanged a salute with Piet, and the latter halted and took him aside for a minute’s conversation.

“That’s all right, Colvin,” he said, rejoining him, while with a parting salute the German strode on. “He has just come out. Says the old man is in a pretty good-humour.”

The President was seated in a substantial armchair as they were shown in. He was likewise smoking a substantial pipe. This looked homely. As Piet introduced Colvin, His Honour did not rise, but merely extended a massive hand, uttering a single monosyllabic word of greeting.

“Daag!”

“Daag, Oom,” responded Colvin, as he shook the Presidential dexter, right heartily. His Honour, however, subsided into silence, during which Piet Plessis entertained him with a running comment on the lighter aspect of day-to-day events, ignoring the situation of the hour.

“Who is the Englishman?” said the old man at last, designating Colvin with a wave of his pipe-stem.

Piet explained that he was engaged to be married to a near kinswoman of his who was staying with him. The Presidential features displayed some faint show of interest.

“Your kinswoman!” he said. “Whose daughter is she?”

“Stephanus De la Reys, Mynheer. He lives in the Cape Colony.”

“De la Rey! Ja, that is a good name, De la Rey,” replied the President, nodding approvingly. “But – an Englishman!” Then, turning to Colvin, he said, still speaking in Dutch.

“Can you talk our language?”

“Ja, Oom,” came the hearty response. During the conversational nothings fired off so volubly by Piet Plessis, he had been studying this wonderful old man before him, and in the strong massive face could read the extraordinary and iron will-power which had made its owner the prominent figure in history that he was. Something of Aletta’s thoughts came into his mind, and he too was wondering whether, had this born leader of men thrown in his gigantic influence on the British side, he would not have met with greater appreciation, nay would not his very defects be held to be rugged virtues? Being thus immersed, he failed to observe a grim tightening of the mouth, as he uttered that hearty and, as he thought, deferential reply.

“Have you been here before?” repeated his catechiser.

“Ja, Oom,” replied Colvin. And then there was no mistaking the change which came over His Honour’s countenance. He flushed, and a heavy frown darkened his brows, as removing his pipe from his mouth, he rolled out in deep, chest notes, like the bark of an angry mastiff.