The Homecoming

Laughter (Oom Schalk Lourens said). Well, there’s a queer thing for you, now, and something not so easy to understand. And the older you get, the more things you seem to find to laugh at. Take old Frans Els, for instance. I can still remember the way he laughed, that time at Zeerust, when we were coming around the church building and we saw one of the tents from the Nagmaal camping-ground being carried away by a sudden gust of wind.

“It must be the ouderling’s tent,” Frans Els called out. “Well, he never was any good at fixing the ground-pegs. Look, kêrels, there it goes right across the road.” And he laughed so much that his beard, which was turning white in places, flapped about almost like that tent in the wind.

Shortly afterwards, what was left of the tent got caught round the wooden poles of somebody’s veranda, and several adults and a lot of children came running out of the house, shouting. By that time Frans Els was standing bent almost double over a fence. The tears were streaming down his cheeks and he had difficulty in getting his breath. I don’t think I ever saw a man laugh so much in my life.

I don’t think I ever saw a man stop laughing as quickly, either, as what Frans Els did when some people from the camping-ground came up and spoke to him. They had to say it over twice before he could get the full purport of the message, which was to the effect that it was not the ouderling’s tent at all that had got blown away, but his.

I suppose you could describe the way in which Frans Els carried on that day while he still thought that it was the ouderling’s tent, as one kind of laughter. The fact is that there are more kinds of laughter than just that one sort, and it seems to me that this is the cause of a lot of regrettable awkwardness in the world.

Another thing I have noticed is that when a woman laughs it usually means a good deal of trouble for a man. Not at that very moment, maybe, but afterwards. And more especially when it is a musical sort of laugh.

There is still another kind of laughter that you have also come across in your time, I am sure. That is the way we laugh when there are a number of us together in the Indian store at Ramoutsa, and Hendrik Moolman tells a funny story that he has read in the Goede Hoop. What is so entertaining about his way of telling these stories is that Hendrik Moolman always forgets what the point is. Then when we ask, “But what’s so funny about it?” he tries to make up another story as he goes along. And because he’s so weak at that, it makes us laugh more than ever.

So when we talk about Hendrik Moolman’s funny stories, it is not the stories themselves that we find amusing, but his lack of skill in telling them. But I suppose it’s all the same to Hendrik Moolman. He joins heartily in our laughter and waves his crutch about. Sometimes he even gets so excited that you almost expect him to rise up out of his chair without help.

It all happened very long ago, the first part of this story of Hen­drik Moolman and his wife Malie. And in those days, when they had just married, you would not, if the idea of laughter had come into your mind, have thought first of Hendrik Moolman telling jokes in the Indian store.

They were just of an age, the young Moolman couple, and they were both good to look at. And when they arrived back from Zeerust after the wedding, Hendrik made a stirring show of the way he lifted Malie from the mule-cart, to carry her across the threshold of the little farmhouse in which their future life was to be cast. Needless to say, that was many years before Hendrik Moolman was to acquire the nickname of Crippled Hendrik, as the result of a fall into a diamond claim when he was drunk. Some said that his fall was an accident. Others saw in the occurrence the hand of the Lord.

What I remember most vividly about Malie, as she was in those early days of her marriage, were her eyes, and her laughter that was in such strange contrast to her eyes. Her laughter was free and clear and ringing. Each time you heard it, it was like a sudden bright light. Her laughter was like a summer’s morning. But her eyes were dark and did not seem to belong with any part of the day at all.

It was the women who by and by started to say about the marriage of Hendrik and Malie this thing, that Malie’s love for Hen­drik was greater than his love for her. You could see it all, they said, by that look that came on her face when Hendrik entered the voorkamer, called in from the lands because there were visitors. You could tell it too, they declared, by that unnatural stillness that would possess her when she was left alone on the farm for a few days, as would happen each time her husband went with cattle or mealies to the market town.

With the years, also, that gay laugh of Malie Moolman’s was heard more seldom, until in the end she seemed to have forgotten how to laugh at all. But there was never any suggestion of Malie having been unhappy. That was the queerest part of it – that part of the marriage of Malie and Hendrik that confuted all the busybodies. For it proved that Malie’s devotion to Hendrik had not been just one-sided.

They had been married a good many years before that day when it became known to Malie – as a good while before that it had become known to the rest of the white people living on this side of the Dwarsberge – that Hendrik’s return from the market town of Zeerust would be indefinitely delayed.

Those were prosperous times, and it was said that Hendrik had taken a considerable sum with him in gold coins for his journey to the Elandsputte diamond diggings, whither he had gone in the company of the Woman of Zeerust. Malie went on staying on the farm, and saw to it that the day-to-day activities in the kraal and on the lands and in the homestead went on just as though Hendrik were still there. Instead of in the arms of the Woman of Zeerust.

This went on for a good while, with Hendrik Moolman throwing away, on the diggings, real gold after visionary diamonds.

There were many curious features about this thing that had happened with Hendrik Moolman. For instance, it was known that he had written to his wife quite a number of times. Jurie Steyn, who kept the post office at Drogedal, had taken the trouble on one occasion to deliver into Malie’s hands personally a letter addressed to her in her husband’s handwriting. He had taken over the letter himself, instead of waiting for Malie to send for it. And Jurie Steyn said that Malie had thanked him very warmly for the letter, and had torn open the envelope in a state of agitation, and had wept over the contents of the letter, and had then in­formed Jurie Steyn that it was from her sister in Kuruman, who wrote about the drought there.

“It seemed to be a pretty long drought,” Jurie Steyn said to us afterwards in the post office, “judging from the number of pages.”

It was known, however, that when a woman visitor had made open reference to the state of affairs on the Elandsputte diggings, Malie had said that her husband was suffering from a temporary infatuation for the Woman of Zeerust, of whom she spoke without bitterness. Malie said she was certain that Hendrik would grow tired of that woman, and return to her.

Meanwhile, many rumours of what was happening with Hendrik Moolman on the Elandsputte diggings were conveyed to this part of the Marico by one means and another – mainly by donkey-cart. Later on it became known that Hendrik had sold the wagon and the oxen with which he had trekked from his farm to the diggings. Still later it became known why Malie was sending so many head of cattle to market. Finally, when a man with a waxed moustache and a notebook appeared in the neighbourhood, the farmers hereabouts, betokening no surprise, were able to direct him to the Moolman farm, where he went to take an inventory of the stock.

By that time the Woman of Zeerust must have discovered that Hendrik Moolman was about at the end of his resources. But no­body knew for sure when she deserted him – whether it was be­fore or after that thing had happened to him which paralysed the left side of his body.

And that was how it came about that in the end Hendrik Mool­man did return to his wife, Malie, just as she had during all that time maintained that he would. In reply to a message from Elandsputte diggings she had sent a kaffir in the mule-cart to fetch Baas Hendrik Moolman back to his farm.

Hendrik Moolman was seated in a half-reclining posture against the kaffir who held the reins, that evening when the mule-cart drew up in front of the home into which, many years before, on the day of their wedding, he had carried his wife, Malie. There was something not unfitting about his own homecoming in the evening, in the thought that Malie would be helping to lift him off the mule-cart, now.

Some such thought must have been uppermost in Malie’s mind also. At all events, she came forward to greet her errant husband. Apparently she now comprehended for the first time the true extent of his incapacitation. Malie had not laughed for many years. Now the sound of her laughter, gay and silvery, sent its infectious echoes ringing through the farmyard.