Romaunt of the Smuggler’s Daughter

Long ago, there was more money (Oom Schalk Lourens said, wistfully) to be made out of cattle-smuggling that there is in these times. The Government knows that, of course. But the Government thinks that why we Marico farmers don’t bring such large herds of native cattle across the Bechuanaland border anymore, on moonless nights, is because the mounted police are more efficient than they used to be.

That isn’t the reason, of course.

You still get as good a sort of night as ever – a night when there is only the light of the stars shining on the barbed wire that separates the Transvaal from the Protectorate. But why my wire-cutters are rusting in the buitekamer from disuse is not because the border is better patrolled than it was in the old days. For it is not the mounted police, with their polished boots and clicking spurs, but the barefoot Bechuana kaffirs that have grown more cunning.

We all said that it was the fault of the mission school at Ra­moutsa, of course. Afterwards, when more schools were opened, deeper into the Protectorate, we gave those schools a share of the blame as well … Naturally, it wasn’t a thing that happened suddenly. Only, we found, as the years went by, that the kaffirs in the Bechuanaland Protectorate wanted more and more for their cattle. And later on they would traffic with us only when we paid them in hard cash; they frowned on the idea of barter.

I can still remember the look of grieved wonderment on Jurie Prinsloo’s face when he told us about his encounter with the Ba­pedi chief near Malopolole. Jurie came across the Bapedi chief in front of his hut. And the Bapedi chief was not squatting on an animal skin spread on the ground; instead, he was sitting on a real chair, and looking quite comfortable sitting in it, too.

“Here’s a nice, useful roll of copper wire for you,” Jurie Prinsloo said to the Bapedi chief, who was lazily scratching the back of his instep against the lower cross-piece of the chair. “You can give me an ox for it. That red ox, there, with the long horns and the loose dewlap will be all right. They don’t know any better about an ox on the Johannesburg market.”

“But what can I do with the copper wire?” the Bapedi chief asked. “I have not got a telephone.”

This was a real problem for Jurie Prinsloo, of course. For many years he had been trading rolls of copper wire for kaffir cattle, and it had never occurred to him to think out what the kaffirs used the wire for.

“Well,” Jurie Prinsloo said, weakly, “you can make it into a ring to put through your nose, and you can also –”

But even as Jurie Prinsloo spoke, he realised that the old times had passed away for ever.

And we all said, yes, it was these missionaries, with the schools they were opening up all over the place, who were ruining the kaffirs. As if the kaffirs weren’t uncivilised enough in the first place, we said. And now the missionaries had to come along and educate them on top of it.

Anyway, the superior sort of smile that came across the left side of the chief’s face, at the suggestion that he should wear a copper ring in his nose, made Jurie Prinsloo feel that he had to educate the Bapedi chief some more. What was left of the chair, after Jurie Prinsloo had finished educating the Bapedi chief, was produced in the magistrate’s court in Gaborone, where Jurie Prinsloo was fined ten pounds for assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. In those days you could buy quite a few head of cattle for ten pounds.

And, in spite of his schooling, the Bapedi chief remained as ignorant as ever. For, during the rest of the time that he remained head of the tribe, he would not allow a white man to enter his stat again.

But, as I have said, it was different, long ago. Then the Be­c­h­uanaland kaffirs would still take an interest in their appearance, and they would be glad to exchange their cattle for brass and beads and old whale-bone corsets and tins of axle-grease (to make the skin on their chests shine) and cheap watches. They would even come and help us drive the cattle across the line, just for the excitement of it, and to show off their new finery, in the way of umbrellas and top-hats and pieces of pink underwear, at the kraals through which we passed.

Easily the most enterprising cattle-smuggler in the Marico Bushveld at the time of which I am talking was Gerrit Oost­huizen. He had a farm right next to the Protectorate border. So that the barbed wire that he cut at night, when he brought over a herd of cattle, was also the fence of his own farm. Within a few years Gerrit Oosthuizen had made so much money out of smuggled cattle that he was able to introduce a large number of improvements on his farm, including a new type of concrete cattle dip with iron steps, and a piano for which he had a special kind of stand built into the floor of his voorkamer, so as to keep the white ants away.

Gerrit Oosthuizen’s daughter, Jemima, who was then sixteen years of age and very pretty, with dark hair and a red mouth and a soft shadow at the side of her throat, started learning to play the piano. Farmers and their wives from many miles away came to visit Gerrit Oosthuizen. They came to look at the piano stand, which had been specially designed by a Pretoria engineer, and had an aluminium tank underneath that you kept filled with water, so that it was impossible for the white ants to effect much damage – if you wiped them off from the underneath part of the piano with a paraffin rag every morning.

The visitors would come to the farm, and they would drink coffee in the voorkamer, and they would listen to Jemima Oost­huizen playing a long piece out of a music book with one finger, and they would nod their heads solemnly, at the end of it, when Jemima sat very still, with her dark hair falling forward over her eyes, and they would say, well, if that Pretoria engineer thought that, in the long run, the white ants would not be able to find a way of beating his aluminium invention, and of eating up all the inside of the piano, then they didn’t know the Marico white ant, that’s all.

We who were visitors to the Oosthuizen farm spoke almost with pride of the cleverness of the white ant. We felt, somehow, that the white ants belonged to the Marico Bushveld, just like we did, and we didn’t like the idea of a Pretoria engineer, who was an uitlander, almost, thinking that with his invention – which con­sisted just of bits of shiny tin – he would be able to outwit the cunning of a Marico white ant.

Through his conducting his cattle-smuggling operations on so large and successful a scale, Gerrit Oosthuizen soon got rich. He was respected – and even envied – throughout the Marico. They say that when the Volksraad member came to Gerrit Oosthuizen’s farm, and he saw around him so many unmistakable signs of great wealth, including green window-blinds that rolled up by themselves when you jerked the sashcord – they say that even the Volksraad member was very much impressed, and that he seemed to be deep in thought for a long time. It almost seemed as though he was wondering whether, in having taken up politics, he had chosen the right career, after all.

If that was how the Volksraad member really did feel about the matter, then it must have been a sad thing for him, when the debates in the Raadsaal at Pretoria dragged far into the night, and he had to remain seated on his back bench, without having much heart in the proceedings, since he would be dreaming all the time of a herd of red cattle being driven towards a fence in the star­light. And when the Chairman of the Committee called another member to order, it might almost have sounded to this Volksraad member as though it was a voice coming out of the shadows of the maroelas and demanding, suddenly, “Who goes there?”

To this question – which he had heard more than once, of course, during the years in which he had smuggled cattle – Gerrit Oosthuizen nearly always had the right answer. It was always more difficult for Gerrit Oosthuizen if it was a youthful-sounding voice shouting out that challenge. Because it usually meant, then, that the uniformed man on horseback, half hidden in the shadow of a withaak, was a young recruit, anxious to get promotion. Ge­r­rit Oosthuizen could not handle him in the same way as he could an elderly mounted police sergeant, who was a married man with a number of children, and who had learnt, through long years of service, a deeper kind of wisdom about life on this old earth.

It was, each time, through mistaken zeal on the part of a young recruit – who nearly always got a transfer, shortly afterwards – that Gerrit Oosthuizen had to stand his trial in the Zeerust courthouse. He was several times acquitted. On a few occasions he was fined quite heavily. Once he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment without the option of a fine. Consequently, while Gerrit Oosthuizen was known to entertain a warm regard for almost any middle-aged mounted policeman with a fat stomach, he invariably displayed a certain measure of impatience towards a raw recruit. It was said that on more than one occasion, in the past, Gerrit Oosthuizen had given expression to his impatience by discharging a couple of Mauser bullets – aimed high – into the sha­dows from which an adolescent voice had spoken out of turn.

Needless to say, all these stories that went the rounds of the Marico about Gerrit Oosthuizen only added to his popularity with the farmers. Even when the predikant shook his head, on being informed of Gerrit Oosthuizen’s latest escapade, you could see that he regarded it as being but little more than a rather risky sort of prank, and that, if anything, he admired Gerrit Oost­huizen, the Marico’s champion cattle-smuggler, for the careless way in which he defied the law. Whatever he did, Gerrit Oost­huizen always seemed to act in the right way. And it seems to me that, if he adheres to such a kind of rule, the man who goes against the law gets as much respect from the people around him as does the law-giver. More, even.

“The law stops on the south side of the Dwarsberge,” Gerrit Oosthuizen said to a couple of his neighbours, in a sudden burst of pride, on the day that the piano arrived and was placed on top of the patent aluminium stand. “And north of the Dwarsberge I am the law.”

But soon after that Gerrit Oosthuizen did something that the Marico farmers did not understand, and that they did not forgive him for so easily. Just at the time when his daughter, Jemima, was most attractive, and was beginning to play herself in on the piano, using two fingers of each hand – and when quite a number of the young men of the district were beginning to pay court to her – Gerrit Oosthuizen sent her away to the seminary for young ladies that had just been opened in Zeerust.

We expressed our surprise to Gerrit Oosthuizen in various ways. After all, we all liked Jemima, and it didn’t seem right that an attractive Bushveld girl should be sent away like that to get spoilt. She would come back with city affectations and foreign ways. She would no longer be able to make a good, simple wife for an honest Boer lad. It was, of course, the young men who expressed this view with the greatest measure of indignation – even those who were not so particularly honest, either, perhaps.

But Gerrit Oosthuizen said, no, he believed in his daughter having the best opportunities. There were all sorts of arts and graces of life that she would learn at the finishing-school, he said. Among the Marico’s young men, however, were some who thought that there was very little that any young ladies’ seminary would be able to teach Jemima that she did not already know.

We lost confidence in Gerrit Oosthuizen after that, of course. And when next we got up a deputation to the Government to protest about the money being spent on native education – because there were already signs of a falling-off in the cattle trade with the Bechuanas – then we did not elect Gerrit Oosthuizen as a delegate. We felt that his ideas on education, generally, were becoming unsound.

It is true, however, that, during the time that Jemima was at the seminary, Gerrit Oosthuizen did once or twice express doubts about his wisdom in having sent her there.

“Jemima writes to say that she is reading a lot of poetry,” Gerrit Oosthuizen said to me, once. “I wonder if that isn’t perhaps, sort of … you know …”

I agreed with Gerrit that it seemed as if his daughter was embarking on something dangerous. But she was still very young, I added. She might yet grow out of that sort of foolishness. I said that when the right young man for her came along she would close that book of poetry quick enough, without even bothering to mark the place that she had got up to. Nevertheless, I was glad to think that Gerrit Oosthuizen was not so happy, anymore, about his daughter’s higher education.

“Still, she gets very good reports from her teachers,” Gerrit Oosthuizen said, but without any real enthusiasm. “Especially from her poetry teacher.”

Meanwhile, the cattle-smuggling business was going from bad to worse, and by the time Jemima returned from her stay at the seminary, Gerrit Oosthuizen had his hands full with his personal affairs. He had made a few singularly unsuccessful cattle-smuggling trips into the Protectorate. By that time the kaffirs had got so educated that one squint-eyed Mtosa even tried to fall back on barter – but the other way around. He wanted Gerrit Oosthuizen to trade his mules and cart for a piece of glass that the Mtosa claimed was a Namaqualand diamond. And, on top of everything else, when Gerrit Oosthuizen did on a few occasions get back into the Transvaal with a likely herd of cattle, it was with Daniel Malan, a new recruit to the border patrol, hot on his trail.

It was under these circumstances that Jemima Oosthuizen returned to the Bushveld farm from the young ladies’ seminary in Zeerust. Just to look at her, it seemed that the time she had spent at the finishing-school had not changed her very much. If anything, she was even prettier than she had been before she left. Her lips were still curved and red. There was still that soft shadow at the side of her throat. Only, it seemed to me that in her dark eyes there was now a dreamy look that wouldn’t fit in too readily with the everyday life of a Bushveld farm.

And I was right. And it didn’t take the young fellows of the neighbourhood very long to find out, either, that Jemima Oosthuizen had, indeed, changed. It saddened them to realise that they could do very little about it.

Jemima Oosthuizen was, as always, friendly to each young man who called. But it was easy for these young men to detect that it was a general sort of friendliness – which she felt for them all equally and alike. She would read poetry to them, reading and explaining to them passages out of the many books of verse that she had brought back with her. And while they were very ready to be thrilled – even when they knew that it was a foolish waste of time – yet they felt that there was no way in which they could make any progress with her. No matter what any young man might feel about her, Jemima’s feelings for him remained impersonal.

“What’s wrong with me?” Andries Steyn asked of a number of young men, once. “She can go on reading that poetry to me as long as she likes. I don’t mind. I don’t understand anything about it, in any case. But the moment I start holding her hand, I know that she isn’t thinking of me at all. It’s like she wants me to come to her out of one of those books.”

“Yes, like that fellow by the dam, looking all pale and upset about something,” Fritz Pretorius interrupted him. “Yes, I know all that nonsense. And there am I sitting on the rusbank next to her, wearing my best clothes and my veldskoens rubbed smooth with sheep’s fat. And she doesn’t seem to see me, at all. I don’t mind her explaining all about that stuff she reads. I like the sound of her voice. But she doesn’t make me feel that I am even a human being to her.”

They went on to say that perhaps Jemima didn’t want a man who was a human being. Maybe she wanted a lover who reminded her of one of those young men in the poetry books. A young man who wore shining armour. Or jet-black armour. Or even rusty armour. They had all kinds in the different poems that Jemima Oosthuizen explained to her suitors. But where did a young man of the Marico Bushveld come in, in all that?

Lovers came and went. Jemima was never long without a suitor. But she never favoured one above the other – never warming noticeably to anyone. Whatever the qualities were that she sought in a lover – going by the romantic heroes that she read about in old poetry – Jemima never found a Marico lover who fitted in with the things that she read about.

Yes, Gerrit Oosthuizen certainly had a lot of trouble. We even began to feel slightly sorry for him. Here was his daughter who, at a marriageable age, was driving all the young men away from her because of some fantastic ideas that they had put into her head at the finishing-school. Then there were the kaffirs in the Protectorate, who were daily getting more difficult to deal with. And then, finally, there was that new police recruit who was putting in all his time trying to trap Gerrit.

And those who sympathised with Gerrit Oosthuizen also thought it right to blame his daughter on the score of ingratitude. After all, it had cost her father a good deal of money to see Je­mima through the finishing-school. He had sent her to the young ladies’ seminary in Zeerust in order that she should gain refinement and culture: instead, she had come back talking poetry. Others, again, said that it was her father’s lawlessness – which was also, after a fashion, romantic – that had come out in Jemima in that way.

It was on an afternoon when a horseman came riding from over the veld up to her front gate, that Jemima saw the young man that she had read about in olden poems. And she recognised him instantly as her lover. She did not take great note of what he looked like. Nor did she even observe, at first glance, that he was wearing a uniform. All that Jemima Oosthuizen saw very clearly was that, when he came riding up to her from the highway, he was seated on a white horse.

And when she had gone hastily into her bedroom – and had come out again, wearing a pink frock – Jemima hardly understood, at first, the meaning of the young policeman’s words when she heard him say, to her father, that he had a warrant for his arrest.