Aletta: A Tale of the Boer Invasion

“Now that we have made each other’s acquaintance in this very unexpected manner, Miss Wenlock, perhaps you will allow me to see you, at any rate, a part of your way home. You might tell me a little about my relative. Where are you staying, by the way?”

“Just this side Doornfontein. Yes. I shall be delighted, if I am not taking you out of your way.”

“Who are you, kerel, and have you a permit to remain here?” interrupted, in Dutch, the peremptory voice of a Zarp.

Now “kerel” – meaning in this context “fellow” – is a pretty familiar, not to say impudent, form of address as proceeding from a common policeman. The tone, too, was open to objection on the same ground. But May, glancing at her new friend, noticed that he seemed in no wise ruffled thereby. He merely glanced at his interlocutor as though the latter had asked him for the time.

“I have applied for a permit and am awaiting it,” he answered, in the same language. “So, my good friend, don’t bother, but go and drink my health with your mates.”

The Zarp’s hand closed readily upon the image and superscription of Oom Paul, and Kenneth Kershaw and his companion passed out of the station.

“Oh, you are so like Col – er – your cousin,” was May’s comment on the above transaction. “That is exactly how he would have treated matters under the circumstances. Now, Frank would have wanted to go for the man at once, and then what a row there would have been! And I hate rows.”

“So do I. But – who’s Frank?”

“My brother. He is perfectly rabid ever since this trouble has begun. He says he never can look at a Dutchman now without wanting to fight him.”

“So? Well, now is his opportunity. Is he up here?”

“Oh no. Down in the Colony. I am staying up here with some relatives. I wanted to go back, but they wouldn’t let me. They have interest with the Government at Pretoria, and say that it is safer, if anything, here than down in the Colony.”

As they walked along, taking the road which runs parallel with the railway line in the direction of Doornfontein, something of the state of affairs was apparent in the utter stagnation that prevailed. A deserted look was upon everything. The tram service had ceased, and there was not a vehicle to be seen down the long vista of road. Houses shut up and abandoned, their blinds down, and in many cases with broken windows, spoke eloquently of the prevailing desolation, and save for a subdued-looking native or two the street was deserted; while, dominating all, the fort on Hospital Hill frowned down flat and threatening, ready to let loose its thunders of ruin and of death.

Turning a corner suddenly, a troop of armed burghers debouched into the road – hard, weather-beaten, bearded men, wearing wide hats and bandoliers full of cartridges and with rifle on thigh. They were riding in no particular order, and most of them were smoking pipes.

Many a head was turned, and shaggy brows were knit in sullen hatred, at the sight of the tall Englishman and his very attractive companion, as they rode by. For a moment their leader seemed disposed to halt and call the pedestrians to account, then appeared to think better of it. But that speculation was rife as to their identity was only too clear.

May Wenlock chatted brightly to her new acquaintance as they walked. She was naturally of a communicative disposition, and it was not long before she had put him into possession of the main facts and circumstances and surroundings of her life. Without the least consciousness of the fact on her part, without seemingly vivid interest on his, he had yet manoeuvred the conversation so that it was confined mainly to the time during which she had known Colvin, on the subject of whom, before she had uttered a dozen sentences, she had, to the practised eye and ear of her companion, completely given herself away. Where was Colvin now? Why, at home, she supposed, on his own place, close to theirs. No wonder she had been so startled at the extraordinary likeness. Anyhow, the mistake was very excusable. Was it not?

“It was a very fortunate mistake for me,” Kenneth replied. “I hope we may meet again,” he went on, for by this time they were at her own door. He could even read what was passing in her mind – how she was treading down an impulse to ask him in, remembering that, after all, their introduction had been startlingly unconventional.

“Yes, indeed, I hope we may,” she answered. “At any rate, you know where I’m staying. Good-bye. Thanks so much for bringing me back.”

Kenneth Kershaw turned away, and as he strolled along his thoughts were busy.

“By Jove, that is a pretty little girl,” he was saying to himself. “Not quite up to the mark in other ways perhaps, but pretty enough even to make up for that,” with a recollection of the bright smile, and the look in the sea-blue eyes, which had accompanied the farewell handclasp. “And Colvin? She let go a lot about him. Likely to turn up here, is he? Reputed to stand in too much with the Boers! Suspicion of entanglement with a Boer girl – She shut up like an oyster when she came to that part, though. Well, well. This day’s work may turn out not bad. Colvin on this side, the two peas likeness between us, that dear little girl in there whom I can simply twist round my finger, and turn to any account, and the war! Strange if my luck doesn’t take a sudden turn in the right direction. Colvin, the only obstacle, worth reckoning on, that is. Obstacles have to be removed sometimes. Yes, his luck has run too long. Hurrah for the war?”

Chapter Two.

A Transvaal Official

Petrus Johannes Stephanus Gerhardus Du Plessis, commonly known to his kinsfolk and acquaintance and to the crowd at large as Piet Plessis, was a high official in not the least important department of the Transvaal Civil Service.

Born in the Free State, and educated – well educated – in Holland, he combined the slim qualities of the Boer with the shrewd, technical, worldly-wisdom of the Hollander. He was now of middle age and somewhat portly of person, and withal a jolly, genial Dutchman, whose ringing laugh and jovial manner conveyed the idea of open-hearted frankness to the last degree. Those who ran away with that impression had their education in character-studying to complete. For all his apparent open-heartedness, Piet Plessis was never known by word or wink to “give away” anything. And he could have given away some “things” of a very strange and startling nature had he so chosen.

Did a transport rider bringing up loads of Government goods from the Swaziland border succumb to the indiscretion of peeping into certain of the cases, and subsequently babble thereon in his cups, it was not strange that he should be murdered by his own Kafirs on the return journey, because that sort of thing does happen sometimes, though not often. Was the dead body of a mysterious foreigner found one morning in the Grand Stand on the racecourse at Johannesburg, the hand grasping a revolver pointed at the heart, through which was a neatly drilled bullet-hole, with no burn of powder about the clothing? This was not strange, for does not everybody know that the hand of a dead person will sometimes grasp an object tightly for hours after death – though not often? And doctors will sometimes disagree, though not often? Did a prominent member of the Upper Raad, who owned a chattering wife, make an over-protracted sojourn in the Cape Peninsula for the benefit of the lady’s health? That too was not strange, for it happens sometimes. And if Piet Plessis’ private office had very thick walls and double doors – padded – this was not strange either, for is not the climate of the Transvaal fairly bleak during quite half the year? On many an incident, strange, suspicious, or startling – or all three, had his acquaintance striven to pump Piet Plessis – in club, or bar, or society drawing-room; but they might as well have expected to dig sovereigns out of the billiard cues in the one or real ten-year-old out of the “special Scotch” bottles in the other, or the precise ages of any three ladies of a middle time of life in the third. Tact and readiness of resource are highly important official ingredients. Piet Plessis possessed both to a consummate degree, which may have had to do with the fact that he was now a very important official indeed.

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.