Mafeking Road (13 page)

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 riempies-bank 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 began to play.

The plate was “O Brandewyn laat my staan.”

I thought of Susannah and of the way she had listened three months before to that same song. I glanced up quickly at Krisjan, and as soon as he caught my eye he looked away. I was glad when the gramophone finished playing. And there was something about Krisjan that made me feel that he was pleased also. He seemed very queer about Susannah.

Then an awful thought occurred to me.

You know sometimes you get a thought like that and you know that it is true.

I got up unsteadily and took my hat. I saw that all round the place where the gramophone stood the dung floor of the voorkamer had been loosened and then stamped down again. The candle threw flickering shadows over the floor and over the clods of loose earth that had not been stamped down properly.

I drove back without the bucksail.

No, I never came across the Prophet van Rensburg, the man who told General Kemp that it was the right time to rebel against the English. As you know, General Kemp followed his advice and they say that General Kemp still believed in Van Rensburg's prophecies, even after the two of them were locked up in the Pretoria Gaol.

But I knew another prophet. His name was Erasmus. Stephanus Erasmus. Van Rensburg could only foretell that so and so was going to happen, and then he was wrong, sometimes. But with Stephanus Erasmus it was different. Erasmus used to make things come true just by prophesying them.

You can see what that means. And yet, in the end I wondered about Stephanus Erasmus.

There are lots of people like Van Rensburg who can just foretell the future, but when a man comes along who can actually make the future, then you feel that you can't make jokes about
him. All the farmers in Droëdal talked about Stephanus Erasmus with respect. Even when he wasn't present to hear what was being said about him. Because there would always be somebody to go along and tell him if you happened to make some slighting remark about him.

I know, because once in Piet Fourie's house I said that if I was a great prophet like Stephanus Erasmus I would try and prophesy myself a new pair of veldskoens, seeing that his were all broken on top and you could see two corns and part of an ingrowing toenail. After that things went all wrong on my farm for six months. So I knew that Piet Fourie had told the prophet what I had said. Amongst other things six of my best trek-oxen died of the miltsiekte.

After that, whenever I wanted to think anything unflattering about Stephanus Erasmus I went right out into the veld and did it all there. You can imagine that round that time I went into the veld alone very often. It wasn't easy to forget about the six trek-oxen.

 

More than once I hoped that Stephanus Erasmus would also take it into his head to tell General Kemp that it was the right time to go into rebellion. But Erasmus was too wise for that. I remember once when we were all together just before a meeting of the Dwarsberg School Committee I asked Stephanus about this.

“What do you think of this new wheel-tax, Oom Stephanus?” I
said. “Don't you think the people should go along with their rifles and hoist the Vierkleur over the magistrate's court at Zeerust?”

Erasmus looked at me and I lowered my eyes. I felt sorry in a way that I had spoken. His eyes seemed to look right through me. I felt that to him I looked like a springbok that has been shot and cut open, and you can see his heart and his ribs and his liver and his stomach and all the rest of his inside. It was not very pleasant to be sitting talking to a man who regards you as nothing more than a cut-open springbok.

But Stephanus Erasmus went on looking at me. I became frightened. If he had said to me then, “You know you are just a cut-open springbok,” I would have said, “Yes, Oom Stephanus, I know.” I could see then that he had a great power. He was just an ordinary sort of farmer on the outside, with a black beard and dark eyes and a pair of old shoes that were broken on top. But inside he was terrible. I began to be afraid for my remaining trek-oxen.

Then he spoke, slowly and with wisdom.

“There are also magistrates' courts at Mafeking and Zwartrug-gens and Rysmierbult,” he said. “In fact there is a magistrates' court in every town I have been in along the railway line. And all these magistrates' courts collect wheel-tax,” Oom Stephanus said.

I could see then that he not only had great power inside him, but that he was also very cunning. He never went in for any wild guessing, like saying to a stranger, “You are a married man with
five children and in your inside jacket-pocket is a letter from the Kerkraad asking you to become an ouderling.” I have seen some so-called fortune-tellers say that to a man they had never seen in their lives before in the hope that they might be right.

 

You know, it is a wonderful thing this, about being a prophet. I have thought much about it, and what I know about it I can't explain. But I know it has got something to do with death. This is one of the things I have learnt in the Marico, and I don't think you could learn it anywhere else. It is only when you have had a great deal of time in which to do nothing but think and look at the veld and at the sky where there have been no rain-clouds for many months, that you grow to an understanding of these things.

Then you know that being a prophet and having power is very simple. But it is also something very terrible. And you know then that there are men and women who are unearthly, and it is this that makes them greater than kings. For a king can lose his power when people take it away from him, but a prophet can never lose his power – if he is a real prophet.

It was the schoolchildren who first began talking about this. I have noticed how often things like this start with the stories of kaffirs and children.

Anyway, a very old kaffir had come to live at the outspan on the road to Ramoutsa. Nobody knew where he had come from, except that when questioned he would lift up his arm very slowly and point towards the west. There is nothing in the west. There
is only the Kalahari Desert. And from his looks you could easily believe that this old kaffir had lived in the desert all his life. There was something about his withered body that reminded you of the Great Drought.

We found out that this kaffir's name was Mosiko. He had made himself a rough shelter of thorn-bushes and old mealie bags. And there he lived alone. The kaffirs round about brought him mealies and beer, and from what they told us it appeared that he was not very grateful for these gifts, and when the beer was weak he swore vilely at the persons who brought it.

As I have said, it was the kaffirs who first took notice of him. They said he was a great witch-doctor. But later on white people also starting taking him presents. And they asked him questions about what was going to happen. Sometimes Mosiko told them what they wanted to know. At other times he was impudent and told them to go and ask Baas Stephanus Erasmus.