Tales of South Africa

I had long spoken Boer Dutch, and our conversation therefore flowed smoothly and merrily enough. Old Cornelis was in high spirits, and, in response to my queries, told several anecdotes of his early life in the far wilderness. He had been one of the “Voor-Trekkers,” quitting the Cape Colony in 1836, and passing beyond the Orange River to found a new home, and to seek fresh hunting-grounds beyond the reach of a British government. His young wife had fared forth with him, and for twenty years and more had shared his life of pioneer and hunter, with all its dangers, its roughs and tumbles, its wild pleasures, and its fierce occasional excitements. In the distant interior, in the big wagon, or in some temporary hartebeest house of reeds and clay, had the family of this sturdy pair been reared around them.

Presently, as he filled his great pipe, and pushed his coffee cup away, some amusing reminiscence flitted across the old Boer’s brain. A broad smile overspread his face, as he said to me, nodding mischievously at his wife, “Kerel (my boy), you have never by chance heard the story of the vrouw there and her Frenchman? It used to be pretty well-known in the veldt years ago.”

“No,” I answered, “I never heard the tale. What is it?”

“Almighty!” he returned. “It’s a good story, though an old one. I never think of it without laughing, though it happened forty years ago! I must tell it to him, vrouw; what say you?”

And then, as the merry recollection rose firmer before the old man’s mind, his broad palm smote his great thigh with a smack that resounded through the room, and he burst into a fit of laughing – so hearty and so long, that the tears started into his blue eyes.

But Vrouw Van Vuuren looked meanwhile straight in front of her, with a rather grim look upon her strong old face.

“Cornelis Van Vuuren,” she said, after a little pause, looking now very hard at her husband, “that is an old and a foolish story that has been told far too many times already. I will not have it told in my house. If you wish to repeat tales that are better dead and buried, you must go outside.”

Cornelis looked at his wife. One glance, and a long experience – nearly fifty years of married life – told him plainly enough that the vrouw was in earnest.

“That is all right, Anna, my dear,” he said simply. “I won’t tease you with an old joke. Come, my friend (to me), we will smoke our pipes outside.”

We sat ourselves down upon the broad stoep (veranda) which ran round the house, and smoked our pipes. Franz had gone to the sheep-kraals to see that all was well for the night. The sun had just set, and the western heavens and horizon were still aflame with colour. A strange, mellow, refracted light filled the upper air, and threw the flat grass plains, stretching everywhere around, into strong relief. Far out upon these grassy flats, some half a mile away, grazed a troop of springbok, their shining white and cinnamon coats flecking the plain brilliantly. The mingled bleat of sheep and goats and the low of neat cattle came not unpleasantly from the kraals behind the dwelling. I saw that the old man’s eye was resting upon the springboks, now grazing so peacefully upon the plain. Presently he took his pipe from his mouth, shook his head regretfully, and said, “’Tis a pity the wilde (game) are going so fast. I never could have believed it. When I first trekked through this country, in 1837, the land was darkened with wild animals. Almighty! they ran in millions. Quagga, Bonte quagga, black wildebeest, elands, hartebeest, ostrich, springboks, blesboks. Ach! Kerel! (my boy) I tell you I have passed across these plains through a herd of trek-bokken (migrating springboks) three or four miles broad, and extending as far as a man’s eye could reach. All day we passed through that trek-bokken. I shall never forget it, never. We shot scores of buck, till we were tired; but we were chiefly anxious to get past the springboks, which had eaten off every blade of grass for miles upon miles, so that our oxen and horses looked like being starved. And now, almost all gone, all gone!”

“But,” I said, “although you Afrikanders have pretty well cleaned out the Free State and Transvaal, there is still a good deal of game beyond. Along the Sabi River, for instance!”

“Yes, yes,” said the old fellow, “that’s right enough; but even there the heavy game’s going. Why, how many elephants does a man now get in a season’s hunt? Eight or ten, perhaps, – if he is a good man, – and thinks himself lucky. Why, Kerel, when I first hunted along the Crocodile, I shot sixty elephants to my own roer (gun) in five months. That was something like a game country, – elephants and rhinoceros as common as goats in a kraal.”

“Was that the season you met the Frenchman?” I inquired, with a smile.

“No, no,” briskly responded Cornelis, with a sly look towards the room where the vrouw still sat. “Not that season, nor the next. But you would like to hear the yarn, and it always make me laugh to tell it. Laughter is good. I was always a merry one, and that, thank the Heer God, is the reason I have got so well through my troubles. Your sour-faced fellow is no good for the long trek through life.

“Well, well! It was a funny business that of the good vrouw there and the little Frenchman. It happened in this way. In the third year after we had got into the Transvaal, about two years after we had driven Moselikatse and his verdomde (infernal) Matabele rascals beyond the Crocodile, I was shooting elephants up in the north. The vrouw was with me, and the children, – we had three young children then, – and we had made a big scherm (camp) some way south of the Crocodile, a few miles out of reach of the ‘fly,’ (Tse-tse fly) which, I can tell you, was in those days a terrible pest.

“The first time I met Pierre Cellois – ‘Klein Pierre’ we used to call him – I was about a day east of our camp, shooting water-buck for velschoens. We had worn out our foot-gear, and wanted fresh supplies of skin. Never shall I forget the little Frenchman’s appearance. He was tricked out in a big slouch hat smothered with great white ostrich feathers – enough to frighten half the game of the country away. Then he had a bright blue jacket with gilt buttons, a pink flannel shirt, a red silk sash round his waist – something like what your officers wore across their shoulders at Boom Plaats, when we fought Sir Harry Smith – white breeches, and long, shiny, black English hunting-boots. In his sash he had stuck a long knife and a pair of pistols. At his side he wore a wonderful powder-horn, decked with silver, and over his back a brown leather bag, smothered with steel mountings, the flash of which you might see a mile off. He carried a good English rifle. His Hottentot boy, besides a fowling-piece, carried a green net and a lot of boxes. The little Frenchman collected butterflies and bird-skins, and he never went abroad without his full paraphernalia. I have seen some funny sights in the veldt, but never have I seen such a figure of a sportsman as Pierre Cellois.

“Well, the little Frenchman, it seems, had come up to the Transvaal to shoot game and to collect specimens for a museum. He had read a book by your English army officer, Captain Harris, who was up in the country just before we turned out Moselikatse and his Matabele. Though he was an Englishman, Harris was a right good sportsman. I saw him in our laager in 1837, and his wagons were crammed with horns and skins and ivory. Cellois had Harris’s book with him, a great book – I saw it afterwards on Gordon Cumming’s wagon in Bamangwato – full of capital coloured pictures of game. Little Cellois used to rave over that book, and fling his arms about, and slap his rifle, and altogether send me nearly dying with laughter. But, bless you, Pierre was no sportsman; I could see that at once with half an eye. He had the best of rifles, powder-horns, knives, pistols, everything else – but he hadn’t the pluck, without which a man in the veldt in those days might surely turn his wagons and go home. I have seen him peppering away at a rhinoceros at a hundred and a hundred and fifty yards – teasing the great beast, and tickling its hide, and making it mad, but doing nothing more.

“Well, we hunted together during the afternoon of the day I met him, and I shot a big white rhinoceros bull – about the easiest beast a man could shoot. The Frenchman hadn’t seen a rhinoceros shot before, and he nearly went out of his mind. He danced about, cried out with joy, and then rushing up to me, put his arms round my neck and kissed me – yes, kissed me, the little fool! Pah! I couldn’t stand that, and I gave him a bit of a push, and sent him over on his back. He picked himself up and seemed rather angry, but we became good friends afterwards. Next day we came across elephants, and I shot three good bulls, and a cow with long teeth. I was finishing off the last bull, when Pierre Cellois, who had kept very much in the background so far, came up and fired his piece two or three times into the beast, which was now at a stand, just about dying. Then it fell, and the little fellow climbed up on to its back, screaming and waving his arms, took off his hat and cried out something about ‘La France.’ Laugh! I nearly split my sides with laughing at that little jackanapes fellow dancing about up there on the big elephant.”

And the old man, as he recalled that absurd scene of forty years agone, laughed in his hearty, massive way so heartily that I, too, was impelled to join him.

“Well,” went on Cornelis, “that evening Cellois’ wagon came on to the spot where the elephants lay, and the little Frenchman wrote home a long letter to his wife. He had picked up Dutch at Cape Town, and he told me in his excitable way how he had headed his letter. He wrote: ‘From the camp upon the Crocodile River, upon the day we slew four elephants.’ I laughed, and didn’t say much; but I thought the little man a bit of a liar, considering that I had shot the elephants, and that he had done no more than fire two or three bullets into a bull which was already as good as dead. However, bless you, I didn’t much mind, and I reckoned it would please his vrouw at home. These Frenchmen, I understand, are rather queer in their ways compared to us Boers, or even to you English folk.

“A day or two after, having chopped out the tusks, we trekked back to my camp, and the little Frenchman met my vrouw. I can tell you she didn’t much appreciate him, in spite of his fine clothes and his prancing ways. If he was highly dressed before, he was a thousandfold more gay now. In the evenings, after coming into camp, he would deck himself up in all sorts of finery – silk waistcoats covered with flowers, white shirts with frills – frills, I tell you – collars, blue neckerchiefs, and I can’t tell what. Then he was for ever paying my wife compliments, which she hated. The vrouw then was, I can tell you, a very handsome young woman, and although she wore but simple clothes, and her big kapje (sun-bonnet), it was very plain that he admired her strongly. But then, where a woman was concerned little Pierre was a perfect fool. Why, I have heard him paying compliments and talking nonsense to his Hottentot driver’s wife, Kaitje– such trash as that!

“What my wife couldn’t stand was the habit the little fellow had of holding her hand when they met, and sometimes even of kissing it. Almighty! that sent her mad. I could see the angry flush rise to her cheeks and neck, and at last one day she snatched her hand from his and slapped his face pretty smartly.

“Not long after, we were outspanned together on the Crocodile River, in a clear place where there was no tse-tse fly for some miles. It was a pleasant camp, and we stood there some time. Here the Frenchman collected birds and butterflies, and I was often away shooting game. One day the little Frenchman was fishing from a high spit of sand below the banks. He had, it seems, waded into the water a little to get his line further out, and a young crocodile, about five feet long, made a grab at him, and caught him by the leg. The reptile was not big enough and strong enough to pull the little fellow in, and a pretty tussle the two had. The vrouw, who was on the wagon close by, hearing some dreadful cries for help, snatched up a gun and ran down. There she saw the crocodile and the Frenchman pulling and hauling and kicking on the spit of sand. She at once let off the gun close into the beast’s side. It was my big elephant roer, carrying four balls to the pound. It made a great hole in the crocodile’s side, so that it quitted its hold, turned over belly upwards, and lay there dead in the shallows. Well, a pretty fuss Cellois made about this affair. He wasn’t much hurt; he had his high boots on, and the crocodile had only given him a few pinches in the calf and side of the leg. He was all right again in a day or two. But he pestered the vrouw nearly to death with his speeches and grimaces, called her his angel, his deliverer, and what not. I was away a good deal just then, and being a veldt-man, and knowing my wife, and not wasting much thought upon the little Frenchman, except when he amused me in camp, I took little heed of what was passing, so to speak, beneath my nose. It seems then that the foolish fellow began to make love to my wife after the crocodile episode. At last, two or three evenings after, when Pierre had gone to his wagon for the night, the vrouw said to me, —

“‘Cornelis, you are a fool. This little jackanapes of a Frenchman is making love to me, and you see nothing and do nothing. If you don’t tell him to pack up and trek to-morrow, I shall. I will put up with it no longer.’

“‘Wait till to-morrow night, Anna,’ I said. ‘I am riding at dawn to-morrow after zwart-wit-pens (sable antelope). I will see to the matter when I come in. I am sorry this little French ape has been teasing you.’

“Well, I rode off next day, and by the merest chance shot two zwart-wit-pens quite early, and came into camp again at noon. As I rode up, I heard piercing shrieks and howls, and cries for mercy, which I knew could come only from Klein Pierre. Then I turned a corner of the scherm (camp fence), and saw at once what was up. Almighty! Although I was startled and surprised, I could scarcely help laughing. There was Pierre Cellois, tied up to our wagon-wheel; all the native servants standing round, and the vrouw, very red and angry, flogging away at the fellow’s back with a good sjambok (whip) of sea-cow hide.

“I jumped off my horse, and ran up to the group. ‘Anna! Anna!’ I cried, ‘what in the Heer God’s name are you doing?’

“The vrouw, I can tell you, was mad with anger. She turned upon me, threw down the sjambok, and said, ‘If you hadn’t been a fool, Cornelis, with no more than half an eye, this need never have happened. This little baboon fellow has insulted me grossly. He came up to me, put his arm round my waist, as I sat in my chair, and kissed me upon the mouth. And so I have had him tied up by the boys, and flogged him. Now do you finish with him.’

“Well, I was pretty angry – angry at being scolded before all the boys, and angry at this little scoundrel’s impudence, and so I picked up the sjambok, and gave him half a dozen or so for myself. Then I had him untied, and let him go, and bade him inspan and trek at once before worse happened.

“Almighty! how mad the fellow was. He cried, he screamed, he wanted to fight me with pistols. But I just sat on my wagon-box, with my gun on my knees, and bade him be off. Well, he trekked in an hour – my boys helped him to inspan the oxen – and we never saw him again. I heard that he went down to Mooi River Dorp (Potchefstrom) and lodged a complaint with Martinus Wessels Pretorius, our commandant, and wanted satisfaction, and threatened a war, and all sorts of things. But, bless you, old Pretorius knew a thing or two. He got the true story from the Frenchman’s Hottentots, and just packed him off south of the Vaal River, and he passed, as I heard, to the old colony, and so home to France. That is the story of the vrouw’s little Frenchman; the vrouw, yonder, will tell you if it is true or no.”

The old lady, as Cornelis finished speaking, stood just within the doorway of the house, looking up into the star-spangled sky. She turned towards us; her grave old face, as she did so, lit up by the lamp-light from within. “My Frenchman!” she answered, with a look of strong contempt. “It is an old tale, that, which had better been left untold. I hate the name of Frenchman. I come of Huguenot blood myself, Meneer,” she continued, addressing me, “my father was a Joubert. The Huguenots, I trust, were a very different people. Sooner than think myself akin to such a race as that little dressed-up baviaan (baboon) my husband has been telling you of, I would disown my own blood. But, indeed, though some of us have Huguenot names, we are all good Dutchmen in South Africa nowadays. You English and we, Meneer, are not always the best of friends; but at least you are men, and not apes in clothes like Pierre Cellois. Come in now, and have a soupje (A drink) before you go to bed.”

Pierre Cellois, as I happened to learn since, has long been dust. He became a shining light in his own country, wrote a book, and is still referred to as “that great explorer and hunter.”

Stout Cornelis Van Vuuren and his good vrouw, too, have lain for some years in their quiet graves. I sometimes wonder if they and the little Frenchman have met and settled their differences in the silent land.

Chapter Ten.

The Great Secret

“And ever with unconquerable will,Bearing her burden, toward one distant starShe moves in her desire; and though with painShe labour, and the goal she dreams be far,Proud is she in her passionate soul to knowThat from her tears, her very sorrows growThe joy, the hope, the peace of future men.”

The speaker, as he finished these lines, recited half to himself, half to his friend, in a dreamy monotone, gazed again into the dark night sky above him, and fetched a deep breath – almost a sigh.

“Hullo, Bill!” remarked his friend by the camp-fire, in a brisk tone. “Breaking out that way again, are you? I haven’t heard poetry from you – of that sort – for weeks. I suppose all the hunting and hard work lately has knocked the stuffing out of you. A day’s rest, and you burst into song again. Who’s your author? I don’t seem to know him. Not Tennyson, is it?”

“No, old chap,” returned Bill, “it isn’t. It’s a new man – Lawrence Binyon – and he’s got some mettle in him. I think that image of his of our poor old earth staggering along with her load to some far-off goal, still, among all her tears and sorrows, buoyed with future hopes, is magnificent. Is it true, though? Is there that great secret, and does she know it?”

Bill Vincent and Ralph Jenner, the two men who sat by the pleasant camp-fire in the far South African interior, were old friends, now engaged on a hunting expedition towards the Okavango.

Nowadays you may find, scattered about that vast mysterious land, many scores of well-educated gentlemen knocking about in the veldt, often dressed in clothes and engaged in work that a British navvy would scorn, yet, barring a slight access of strong language, born of the wilderness, still gentlemen at heart, and capable of returning to civilisation without loss or deterioration. Here were two of them. The burnt arms of the two men, and their sun-tanned faces and chests and rough beards, their thorn-tattered breeches, and scarred old pigskin gaiters, showed plainly that they had been long afield. And the numerous heads, horns, and skins hanging in trees near, and bestowed about the wagon, sufficiently indicated the main object of their trip.

Their big wagon stood near; beyond it, lying at their yokes, chewing peacefully the cud, the great trek oxen rested. Six hunting ponies were carefully fastened to the wagon-wheels in full light of the camp-fires. Thirty yards away from the two Englishmen, gathered round a still bigger fire, were the native “boys,” some still chattering, some fast asleep. Round about, the camp was engirt with bush and thin forest of giraffe-acacia.

As usual it was a glorious night. Only those who have lain out month after month in the vast silent veldt of the far interior can realise the unspeakable majesty of the deep indigo void of the night heaven, sown with a myriad flashing diamonds, that looms above the wanderer. The airs were soft and sweet; the night was absolutely perfect. Almost complete silence rested upon the wild. Bill took a fresh ember from the fire and relit his pipe.

“My boy,” he went on, “with all the roughs and tumbles of this life – and it’s a glorious life while it lasts, and where the game’s plentiful there’s none better in this world – one can’t help thinking sometimes what it all means and where it ends. No man, I take it, can live with Nature as we do, and look up at that sky,” – here Bill turned his gaze upward, and with his short pipe indicated the glittering array of stars, – “with its myriads of systems, and deny some great Power behind it all. And yet – and yet, in all these tens of thousands of years, with all the millions upon millions of souls that have come and gone, we know absolutely nothing of the hereafter. That’s what beats me. No true or certain message has ever yet come from the dead to tell us what happens when the last plunge is made. Chaldeans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Romans, Greeks, Buddhists, Confucians, Hebrews, Christians, all have tried their level best to get at the secret; none – no, not one – have solved it. They all have their theories, of course. I suppose they always will. But to any real solution of the great secret, to the real truth, we are no nearer than we were ten thousand years ago. The wisest of them all are dumb and mute, and, I suppose, always will be. Look at the Spiritualists. What do they tell us? A lot of piffling rubbish – knockings, rappings, and contemptible nonsense of that sort – but of serious truth, of what we want to know, not one little bit.

“Religions, and creeds, and beliefs never help us to pierce the big veil yonder. Ethics are all right enough; but even ethics can’t solve that immense mystery. One can only long and wonder, and wonder and long again. Don’t laugh, old chap. I don’t often inflict you with this sort of thing; but out here in the desert, face to face with Nature, with time to think, one can’t help puzzling over this world-worn problem. One finds so much wrong in what one hears in the world. You know that as well as I. Why, look at the dream of universal peace – swords turned into ploughshares, lions and lambs lying down together, and all that sort of thing. What rot it is! One comes out here in the veldt and looks at Nature, and one finds everywhere the most ghastly war, and murder, and suffering incessantly around one. Birds, beasts, insects, reptiles, fish – all hard at it. You can never have peace in this world. Battle, and murder, and sudden death will, I believe, last as long as the earth lasts. You may have epochs of civilisation and calm, but only for a time. Nature tells us that plainly, and you can’t get away from Nature.”

“I’m not laughing, Bill,” returned his comrade. “Sometimes, but not very often, I have the same thoughts. Everybody, I suppose, has at times. Your puzzle has puzzled the world always, and always will. And the more one gets away from the din and struggle of the beastly towns, the bigger seems the mystery of life and the beyond. But it’s no use worrying about it. The baby that dies every day somewhere in the world, I suppose knows more than we shall ever do till the end comes. After all, one can only try and play the game, and do one’s poor little best according to one’s lights and ethics.”

“I suppose so,” answered Bill. “But it’s a secret worth knowing, old chap, isn’t it? It must be, if one only knew.”

The two friends sat smoking and talking for half an hour longer upon different topics, mainly to do with hunting, and then climbed into the wagon, tucked themselves beneath their karosses, and slept the refreshing sleep of the veldt.

A fortnight later they were camped on a tributary stream north of the Okavango. They had left their wagon standing on the southern bank of the big river, and the Bayeiye had ferried them across in their dug-outs. Here buffalo were in plenty – the vast reed-beds were full of them – and they had already secured plenty of meat and some good heads.