It was a cold night (Oom Schalk Lourens said) on which we drove with Gert Bekker in his Cape-cart to Zeerust. I sat in front, next to Gert, who was driving. In the back seat were the predikant, Rev. Vermooten, and his ouderling, Isak Erasmus, who were on their way to Pretoria for the meeting of the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church. The predikant was lean and hawk-faced; the ouderling was fat and had broad shoulders.
Gert Bekker and I did not speak. We had been transport drivers together in our time, and we had learnt that when it is two men alone, travelling over a long distance, it is best to use few words, and those well chosen. Two men, alone in each other’s company, understand each other better the less they speak.
The horses kept up a good, steady trot. The lantern, swinging from side to side with the jogging of the cart, lit up stray patches of the uneven road and made bulky shadows rise up among the thorn-trees. In the back seat the predikant and the ouderling were discussing theology.
“You never saw such a lot of brandsiek sheep in your life,” the predikant was saying, “as what Chris Haasbroek brought along as tithe.”
We then came to a stony part of the road, and so I did not hear the ouderling’s reply; but afterwards, above the rattling of the cart-wheels, I caught other snatches of God-fearing conversation, to do with the raising of pew-rents.
From there the predikant started discussing the proselytising activities being carried on among the local Bapedi kaffirs by the Catholic mission at Vleisfontein. The predikant dwelt particularly on the ignorance of the Bapedi tribes and on the idolatrous form of the Papist communion service, which was quite different from the Protestant Nagmaal, the predikant said, although to a Bapedi, walking with his buttocks sticking out, the two services might, perhaps, seem somewhat alike.
Rev. Vermooten was very eloquent when he came to denouncing the heresies of Catholicism. And he spoke loudly, so that we could hear him on the front seat. And I know that both Gert Bekker and I felt very good, then, deep inside us, to think that we were Protestants. The coldness of the night and the pale flickering of the lantern-light among the thorn-trees gave an added solemnity to the predikant’s words.
I felt that it might perhaps be all right to be a Catholic if you were walking on the Zeerust sidewalk in broad daylight, say. But it was a different matter to be driving through the middle of the bush on a dark night, with just a swinging lantern fastened to the side of a Cape-cart with baling-wire. If the lantern went out suddenly, and you were left in the loneliest part of the bush, striking matches, then it must be a very frightening thing to be a Catholic, I thought.
This led me to thinking of Piet Reilly and his family, who were Afrikaners, like you and me, except that they were Catholics. Piet Reilly even brought out his vote for General Lemmer at the last Volksraad election, which we thought would make it unlucky for our candidate. But General Lemmer said, no, he didn’t mind how many Catholics voted for him. A Catholic’s vote was, naturally, not as good as a Dopper’s, he said, but the little cross that had to be made behind a candidate’s name cast out the evil that was of course otherwise lurking in a Catholic’s ballot paper. And General Lemmer must have been right, because he got elected, that time.
While I was thinking on these lines, it suddenly struck me that Piet Reilly was now living on a farm about six miles on the Bushveld side of Sephton’s Nek, and that we would be passing his farmhouse, which was near the road, just before daybreak. It was comforting to think that we would have the predikant and the ouderling in the Cape-cart with us, when we passed the homestead of Piet Reilly, a Catholic, in the dark.
I tried to hear what the predikant was saying, in the back seat, to the ouderling. But the predikant was once more dealing with an abstruse point of religion, and had lowered his voice accordingly. I could catch only fragments of the ouderling’s replies.
“Yes, dominee,” I heard the ouderling affirm, “you are quite right. If he again tries to overlook your son for the job of anthrax inspector, then you must make it clear to the Chairman of the Board that you have all that information about his private life …”
I realised then that you could find much useful guidance for your everyday problems in the conversation of holy men.
The night got colder and darker.
The palm of my hand, pressed tight around the bowl of my pipe, was the only part of me that felt warm. My teeth began to chatter. I wished that, next time we stopped to let the horses blow, we could light a fire and boil coffee. But I knew that there was no coffee left in the chest under the back seat.
While I sat silent next to Gert Bekker, I continued to think of Piet Reilly and his wife and children. With Piet, of course, I could understand it. He himself had merely kept up the religion – if you can call what the Catholics believe in a religion – that he had inherited from his father and his grandfather. But there was Piet Reilly’s wife, Gertruida, now. She had been brought up a respectable Dopper girl. She was one of the Drogedal Bekkers, and was, in fact, distantly related to Gert Bekker, who was sitting on the Cape-cart next to me. There was something for you to ponder about, I thought to myself, with the cold all the time looking for new places in my skin through which to strike into my bones.
The moment Gertruida met Piet Reilly she forgot all about the sacred truths she had learnt at her mother’s knee. And on the day she got married she was saying prayers to the Virgin Mary on a string of beads, and was wearing a silver cross at her throat that was as soft and white as the roses she held pressed against her. Here was now a sweet Dopper girl turned Papist.
As I have said, I knew that there was no coffee left in the box under the back seat; but I did know that under the front seat there was a full bottle of raw peach brandy. In fact, I could see the neck of the bottle protruding from between Gert Bekker’s ankles.
I also knew, through all the years of transport driving that we had done together, that Gert Bekker had already, over many miles of road, been thinking how we could get the cork off the bottle without the predikant and the ouderling shaking their heads reprovingly. And the way he managed it in the end was, I thought, highly intelligent.
For, when he stopped the cart again to rest the horses, he alighted beside the road and held out the bottle to our full view.
“There is brandy in this bottle, dominee,” Gert Bekker said to the predikant, “that I keep for the sake of the horses on cold nights, like now. It is an old Marico remedy for when the horses are in danger of getting the floute. I take a few mouthfuls of the brandy, which I then blow into the nostrils of the horses, who don’t feel the cold so much, after that. The brandy revives them.”
Gert commenced blowing brandy into the face of the horse on the near side, to show us.
Then he beckoned to me, and I also alighted and went and stood next to him, taking turns with him in blowing brandy into the eyes and nostrils of the offside horse. We did this several times.
The predikant asked various questions, to show how interested he was in this old-fashioned method of overcoming fatigue in draught-animals. But what the predikant said at the next stop made me perceive that he was more than a match for a dozen men like Gert Bekker in point of astuteness.
When we stopped the cart, the predikant held up his hand.
“Don’t you and your friend trouble to get off this time,” the predikant called out when Gert Bekker was once more reaching for the bottle. “The ouderling and I have decided to take turns with you in blowing brandy into the horses’ faces. We don’t want to put all the hard work on to your shoulders.”
We made several more halts after that, with the result that daybreak found us still a long way from Sephton’s Nek. In the early dawn we saw the thatched roof of Piet Reilly’s house through the thorn-trees some distance from the road. When the predikant suggested that we call at the homestead for coffee, we explained to him that the Reillys were Catholics.
“But isn’t Piet Reilly’s wife a relative of yours?” the predikant asked of Gert Bekker. “Isn’t she your second-cousin, or something?”
“They are Catholics,” Gert answered.
“Coffee,” the predikant insisted.
“Catholics,” Gert Bekker repeated stolidly.
The upshot of it was, naturally enough, that we outspanned shortly afterwards in front of the Reilly homestead. That was the kind of man that the predikant was in an argument.
“The coffee will be ready soon,” the predikant said as we walked up to the front door. “There is smoke coming out of the chimney.”
Almost before we had stopped knocking, Gertruida Reilly had opened both the top and bottom doors. She started slightly when she saw, standing in front of her, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. In spite of her look of agitation, Gertruida was still pretty, I thought, after ten years of being married to Piet Reilly.
When she stepped forward to kiss her cousin, Gert Bekker, I saw him turn away, sadly; and I realised something of the shame that she had brought on her whole family through her marriage to a Catholic.
“You looked startled when you saw me, Gertruida,” the predikant said, calling her by her first name, as though she was still a member of his congregation.
“Yes,” Gertruida answered. “Yes – I was – surprised.”
“I suppose it was a Catholic priest that you wanted to come to your front door,” Gert Bekker said, sarcastically. Yet there was a tone in his voice that was not altogether unfriendly.
“Indeed, I was expecting a Catholic priest,” Gertruida said, leading us into the voorkamer. “But if the Lord has sent the dominee and his ouderling, instead, I am sure it will be well, also.”
It was only then, after she had explained to us what had happened, that we understood why Gertruida was looking so troubled. Her eight-year-old daughter had been bitten by a snake: they couldn’t tell from the fang-marks if it was a ringhals or a bakkop. Piet Reilly had driven off in the mule-cart to Vleisfontein, the Catholic mission station, for a priest.
They had cut open and cauterised the wound and had applied red permanganate. The rest was a matter for God. And that was why, when she saw the predikant and the ouderling at her front door, Gertruida believed that the Lord had sent them.
I was glad that Gert Bekker did not at that moment think of mentioning that we had really come for coffee.
“Certainly, I shall pray for your little girl’s recovery,” the predikant said to Gertruida. “Take me to her.”
Gertruida hesitated.
“Will you – will you pray for her the Catholic way, dominee?” Gertruida asked.
Now it was the predikant’s turn to draw back.
“But, Gertruida,” he said, “you, you whom I myself confirmed in the Enkel-Gereformeerde Kerk in Zeerust – how can you now ask me such a thing? Did you not learn in the catechism that the Romish ritual is a mockery of the Holy Ghost?”
“I married Piet Reilly,” Gertruida answered simply, “and his faith is my faith. Piet has been very good to me, Father. And I love him.”
We noticed that Gertruida called the predikant ‘Father,’ now, and not ‘Dominee.’ During the silence that followed, I glanced at the candle burning before an image of the Mother Mary in a corner of the voorkamer. I looked away quickly from that unrighteousness.
The predikant’s next words took us by complete surprise.
“Have you got some kind of prayer-book,” the predikant asked, “that sets out the – the Catholic form for a …”
“I’ll fetch it from the other room,” Gertruida answered.
When she had left, the predikant tried to put our minds at ease.
“I am only doing this to help a mother in distress,” he explained to the ouderling. “It is something that the Lord will understand. Gertruida was brought up a Dopper girl. In some ways she is still one of us. She does not understand that I have no authority to conduct this Catholic service for the sick.”
The ouderling was going to say something.
But at that moment Gertruida returned with a little black book that you could almost have taken for a Dutch Reformed Church psalm-book. Only, I knew that what was printed inside it was as iniquitous as the candle burning in the corner.
Yet I also began to wonder if, in not knowing the difference, a Bapedi really was so very ignorant, even though he walked with his buttocks sticking out.
“My daughter is in this other room,” Gertruida said, and started in the direction of the door. The predikant followed her. Just before entering the bedroom he turned round and faced the ouderling.
“Will you enter with me, Brother Erasmus?” the predikant asked.
The ouderling did not answer. The veins stood out on his forehead. On his face you could read the conflict that went on inside him. For what seemed a very long time he stood quite motionless. Then he stooped down to the rusbank for his hat – which he did not need – and walked after the predikant into the bedroom.