Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion

Colvin, listening, winced. The idea expressed, the very wording of its expression, grated upon him horribly, apart from the identity of the subject thereof. In such wise would May from time to time lapse, and become, as Aletta had put it to herself, “common.”

He made no comment upon her vehement and ill-natured dictum, knowing perfectly well that it was uttered quite as much as a challenge to himself as to relieve the utterer’s feelings; and he was far too old and experienced to be drawn by any such transparent device. But as they re-entered the sitting-room the jarring effect of the words was intensified, bringing back in vivid contrast the last time he was there; that evening when he had been so near turning the most momentous corner which could meet him within the career of life. He had not turned it. A warning hand had, so to speak, been held up. This girl – he could see her as she was then, in her sweet alluring beauty, soft-voiced, appealing. He could see her now, hard-eyed, vindictive, and expressing herself in a manner that savoured of the wash-tub. What a near thing it had been – how narrow his escape!

He would have been tied fast, bound hand and foot. Even now there was a certain length of loose coil around him, which would need some care and judgment entirely to cast off. Still there was no hard-and-fast bond, and looking backward over the events of the past three weeks or so, he felt lost in thankfulness because of the trivial, fortuitous incident which had availed to stay his tongue when it had so nearly spoken.

“You are not particularly lively, after all this time, Colvin.”

He started, and put down the paper he had pretended to read, while the above reflections were coursing through his brain. They were alone together in the room, he and May. Frank, divested of his coat and waistcoat, could be seen in the distance doing odd jobs, and Mrs Wenlock had withdrawn for an afternoon nap. Her visitors, she declared, although dear girls, had tired her.

“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” he said. “I believe I’m tired. Well, let’s talk.”

Something in the words brought back that last evening they were thus alone together. The recollection softened her, but only for a moment.

“I can imagine it seems dull now that your Dutch friends are gone,” she began, in a crisp, gunpowdery way which was more than a declaration of war. It was in fact the firing of the first shell.

“Oh, bother it, May, why will you harp on that insane prejudice of nationality?” he expostulated, but quite good-humouredly, purposely ignoring her real drift. “A good sort is a good sort, no matter what his or her nationality. And I think you’ll allow that old Stephanus and his crowd come under that heading.”

“So you seem to think,” was the acid reply. “You have been there a good deal of late, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I like them very much, and the shoot is choice.” And then he went on to tell her about the bags he had made, and old Tant’ Plessis and her absurd perversities, and the ridiculous muddle the old woman had made between his name and that of the sixteenth-century Reformer. His object was to keep her attention away from personalities. But that object she saw through.

“You were not so fond of them three or four weeks ago,” she said, half turned away from him, and beginning to speak quickly, while the sea-blue eyes filled. “That is just the time that girl has been back. Goodness! I never thought to see you —you– running after an ugly Dutch girl.”

Every word grated upon Colvin’s mind – grated intensely, so much so indeed as to leave no room for anger, only disgust and disillusionment. At that moment, too, there flashed vividly through his mind a vision of the speaker, as contrasted with this “ugly Dutch girl” here in this very room but a few minutes ago, and the contrast was all in favour of the latter – yes, a hundred times over in her favour, he told himself. And now this one was going to make a scene; so much was evident. She was crudely, unsophisticatedly jealous, and had no self-control whatever.

Heavens! what an escape he had had!

“See here, May,” he said. “That sort of remark is not to my liking at all. It is – well, exceedingly unpleasant, and really I don’t care about listening to all this. I am responsible to nobody for my actions, remember, and there is not one living soul who has the slightest right or title to call me to account for anything I do or don’t do. And I am a little too old to begin to obey orders now. So if you will kindly give up abusing people I like, and with whom I happen to be very friendly, I shall be grateful. I don’t like to hear it, and it doesn’t come well from you.”

But the girl made no answer. She had dropped her face into her hands, and was silently sobbing. He, watching her, was softened directly. His first impulse was to take her in his arms and strive to comfort her. He still had a very weak place for her, although the scales had fallen from his eyes, owing to two causes. But an instinct of prudence and a great deal of cynicism born of experience rose up to restrain him. He had gone through this sort of thing before. He had seen women utterly miserable and heart-broken seemingly, on his account, as they said, meaning it, too, at the time; but six months or a year thence had found them laughing in his face, if not playing the same game with somebody else; but he himself had not taken them seriously, wherefore it didn’t matter. Yet it was all part of an education, and of what use was an education save to be applied?

“Don’t cry like that, little one,” he said gently. “Why should we say hard things to each other, you and I? We never used to.”

The gentle tone melted her at once. She dropped her hands. All the hardness had gone out of her face, and the sea-blue eyes were limpid and tender and winning.

“No, we used not. I have become very bad-tempered – very quarrelsome. But – oh, Colvin, I am so tired of life – of life here. It gets upon my nerves, I think. And I have hardly any friends, and you – you the greatest of them all, hardly seem to care for me – for us – now. I – we – never see you in these days, and – I feel it somehow.”

Colvin’s heart smote him. He need not have stayed away so long and so markedly, but there was a reason, and he had acted with the best intentions. Wherein he had blundered, as people invariably do when they suffer their actions to be guided by such tissue-paper motives, instead of by the hard and safe rule of judiciousness, expediency, and knowledge of human nature.

“Poor little girl! You must not run away with all those ideas,” he said. “And, you are flattering me. Well, I will come over again soon, and have a talk, but I must go now. There, will that do?”

He was talking to her quite gently, quite soothingly, just as he used to do, and the effect was wonderful. All the dejection, the sullenness, disappeared from her face, dispelled by a bright, almost happy smile.

“Good-bye, then,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll come and see you start this time. Good-bye, dear.”

Her eyes shone soft and dewy in the upturned face. Her lips were raised invitingly. It was not in mortal man to refuse them, however stern rectitude under the circumstances might dictate such a course. This one did not refuse them.

“Good-bye, my darling!” she breathed into his ear, in a voice so barely audible as to be almost inarticulate. And as he left her and went out to find his horse and see about saddling up, it was with a vague misgiving that the loose coil, to which he had made allusion in his own mind, had, within the last few moments, very perceptibly tightened.

We made use just above of the expression “under the circumstances.” The “circumstances” were, that by that time this cautious, and cynical and experienced man of the world was deeply, devotedly, and entirely in love with Aletta De la Rey.

Chapter Fourteen.

Jelf – Civil Commissioner

Nicholas Andrew Jelf was Civil Commissioner and Resident Magistrate for the town and division of Schalkburg.

In person he was a tall, middle-aged, rather good-looking man, with dark hair, and a grizzled, well-trimmed moustache, and whose general appearance fostered an idea which constituted one of his favourite weaknesses – that he resembled a retired military man. When mistaken for such openly, he positively beamed; and more than one shrewd rogue got the benefit of the doubt, or obtained material mitigation of the penalty due to his misdeeds, by appealing, with well-feigned ignorance, to the occupant of the Bench as “Colonel.” By disposition he was easy-going and good-natured enough, and bore the reputation among his brother Civil servants of being something of a duffer.

By these the magistracy of Schalkburg was regarded as anything but a plum. It was very remote, the district large, and peopled almost entirely by Dutch farmers. The town itself was a great many miles from the nearest railway station; moreover, it was a dull little hole, with the limited ideas and pettifogging interests common to up-country townships. It boasted a large Dutch Reformed church – an unsightly, whitewashed parallelogram with staring, weather-beaten windows – item about a dozen stores, a branch of the Standard Bank, and two “hotels,” designed to afford board and lodging, of a kind, to such of the storekeepers’ clerks or bank clerks – to whom means, or inclination or opportunity, denied the advantages and felicities of the connubial state, for a stranger was an exceeding rarity. Half of its houses were untenanted, save for a few days on the occasion of the quarterly Nachtmaal (The Lord’s Supper) when the township would be filled with a great multitude of Boers and their families from far and near, those who did not own or hire houses, camping with their waggons on the town commonage. But it boasted no natural beauty to speak of, just dumped down, as it were, on a wide, flat plain. Some few of the houses had an erf or two of garden ground attached, which in the spring constituted by contrast a pleasing spot of green amid the prevailing red dust, but for the rest the impression conveyed was that of a sun-baked, wind-swept, utterly depressing sort of place.

Nicholas Andrew Jelf was seated at his office table amid a pile of papers, and his countenance wore a very worried expression indeed. The post had just been delivered, and the contents of the bag had consisted of a greater crop than usual of Government circulars, eke requests for returns, as it seemed, upon every subject under heaven. Moreover, the newspapers, through which he had glanced hurriedly, were mainly remarkable for the number and conspicuousness of their scare headlines. Sensation was the order of the day, and out of the chances of a rupture with the two Republics the canny editor managed to suck no small advantage. But poor Mr Jelf could lay to himself no such consolation. His thoughts were for his already large and still increasing family, and the ruinous hole it would make in the by no means extravagant pay of a Civil servant were he obliged to send it away to a safer locality, as he greatly feared he ought to lose no time in doing.

He turned to his correspondence. The Government desired to be informed of this – or the member for Slaapdorp had moved for a return of that – or Civil Commissioners were requested to obtain the opinion of the leading farmers of their divisions as to how far rinderpest microbes were likely to affect donkeys, given certain conditions of temperature and climate… and nearly a dozen more of like practical utility. Mr Jelf threw down the papers with a grunt of disgust and swore mildly to himself.

“They seem to think a Civil Commissioner must be a whole damned walking ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’” he growled. “What’s this? More of the same stuff, I suppose.”

But, as he read, his attention became more riveted and his face anxious and graver. For the official communication, marked “Confidential,” was one urgently requesting information as to the tone and disposition of the Dutch farmers in his division as bearing upon the present state of affairs, and desiring a full and circumstantial report at the very earliest opportunity. The effect of this was to deepen the worried look upon his face and to cause him to swear a little more. Just then a tap came at the door, and his clerk entered.

“Anything by the post that wants seeing to, sir?”

“Anything? I should think so. Just look at all this, Morkel,” pointing to the heap of stuff upon the table.

Morkel did look at it – looked somewhat blue, moreover. He was fond of sport and had intended to ask for a day or two’s leave to join a buck hunt on one of the farms, and was fully capable of grasping the amount of work all that confounded correspondence was going to entail. He was a well-set-up, good-looking young fellow of five and twenty, very proud of his fair proportions and waxed moustache and somewhat dandified attire; for there were three or four passable-looking girls in Schalkburg, and the Civil Commissioner’s clerk was Somebody in the place.

“One would think, at such a time as this, Government would have plenty to do without off-loading all these insane circulars upon us,” went on his chief, irritably. “It isn’t as if the things they want to know were of any practical use – they might as well move for a return of the number of buttons on every prisoner’s breeches over at the gaol as some of the things they do ask, but we’ve got to humour them. By the way, though, there’s one thing they want to know that has a practical side, and that ought to be looked after by a special department manufactured for this emergency. We have quite enough to do without going on the stump, so to say. Look at this.”

He handed the letter marked “Confidential” to his subordinate. The latter read it through carefully, and as he did so he saw light. He thought he was going to get his shoot after all, and a good deal more of it than he had at first hoped for.

“The thing is so unreasonable,” went on Mr Jelf. “Every mortal fad sprung on the House by some tin-pot country member, some retired canteen-keeper and proportionately consequential, is off-loaded on the Civil Commissioner. The Civil Commissioner is requested to do this, and the Civil Commissioner is desired to supply information upon that – as if we hadn’t quite enough to do with our financial and judicial duties. Why the deuce can’t Government have its own Secret Service department as Oom Paul is supposed to have?”

Morkel listened sympathetically, as he always did when his chief indulged in a grumble. The two were on very good terms. Jelf had a liking for his subordinate, who officially was smart and well up to his work, and socially was the only man in the place with whom he could associate on even terms, except the District Surgeon, who was a trifle too fond of his glass, and inclined to be dictatorial. Morkel, for his part, reciprocated the liking. His chief was easy-going, and good-natured in the matter of leave officially, and socially took a sort of paternal and friendly interest in him. These two Civil servants, therefore, got on admirably together.

“Well, the thing has got to be done,” went on Jelf, “and the only way to find out Dutch feeling is to go around among the Dutch. I haven’t the time to do it, and if I had it wouldn’t help, because they’d all shut up like oysters before me. But with you it would be different, Morkel. They’d look upon you as one of themselves.” He little thought how hard he was stamping on the corns of his subordinate; the fact being that, although born of Dutch parentage on either side, Morkel’s weakness was to imagine himself thoroughly and intensely English. “You would have to affect Boer sympathies, though, and we know that under the present Ministry that doesn’t damage a Civil servant at headquarters, eh? What do you think of the idea?”

“It’s a first-rate one, sir. I might go around as if on a sort of wandering shoot.”

“Yes. Take your gun with you. That’ll give colour to the affair. You can have my trap and horses, only spare the springs all you can in going through some of those bad drifts. You’d better take a week of it. Harvey can do a lot of your work for you. He’s almost too good a man for a chief constable. You’d better get as far up into the Wildschutsberg part as you can; they say the Boers up that way are the worst – especially since that firebrand, Andries Botma, has been his rounds. Look up Kershaw too; they say the fellow is three parts Boer in his sympathies. You might be able to get something out of him.”

A knock at the door and the Court constable, being bidden to enter, announced that Mynheer Stephanus De la Rey wanted to see the Civil Commissioner.

“The very man,” exclaimed the latter. “You must get to his farm, Morkel. You’re sure to hear something there. Show him in, Hendrik.”

Stephanus entered, and as he did so Morkel went out, laden with the circulars that needed attention.

Left alone with the magistrate, Stephanus looked a trifle ill-at-ease. His frank geniality seemed to have left him as he replied to that official’s inquiries after his family and concerns wherewith the Boer is wont to preface any and every interview if on anything like friendly terms with his interlocutor. Then he came to the point. He wished to resign his field-cornetcy.

Jelf looked annoyed, and felt it too. What was the reason, he asked. A reliable, influential man like Stephanus was just the man for the office. He would be hard to replace. Would he not reconsider his decision?