It caused no small stir in the Marico (Oom Schalk Lourens said) when Piet Human came back after an absence of twenty years. His return was as unexpected as his departure had been sudden.
It was quite a story, the manner of his leaving the farm his father had bought for him at Gemsbokvlei, and also the reasons for his leaving. Since it was a story of young love, the women took pleasure in discussing it in much detail.
The result was that with the years the events surrounding Piet Human’s sudden decision to move out of the Marico remained fresh in people’s memories. More, the affair grew into something like a folk-tale, almost, with the passage of time.
Indeed, I heard one version of the story of Piet Human and the girl Wanda Rossouw as far away as Schweizer-Reneke, where I had trekked with my cattle during a season of drought. It was told me by one of the daughters in the house of a farmer with whom I had made arrangements for grazing my cattle.
The main feature of the story was the wooden stile between the two farms – Piet Human’s farm and the farm of Wanda Rossouw’s parents. If you brought that stile into it, you could not go wrong in the telling of the story, whatever else you added to it or left out.
And so the farmer’s daughter in Schweizer-Reneke, because she mentioned the stile at the beginning, related the story very pleasantly.
Piet Human had been courting Wanda Rossouw for some time. And they had met often by the white-painted wooden fence that stood at the boundary of the two farms. And Wanda Rossouw had dark eyes and a wild heart.
Now, it had been well known that, before Piet Human came to live at Gemsbokvlei, there had been another young man who had called very regularly at the Rossouw homestead. This young man was Gerhard Oelofse. He was somewhat of a braggart. But he had dashing ways. In his stride there was a kind of freedom that you could not help noticing. It was said that there were few girls in the Groot Marico that Gerhard Oelofse could not have for the asking.
One day Gerhard Oelofse rode off to join Van Pittius’s freebooters in Stellaland. Later on he left for the Caprivi Strip. From then onwards we would receive, at long intervals, vague accounts of his activities in those distant parts. And in those fragmentary items of news about Gerhard Oelofse that reached us, there was little that did him credit.
Anyway, to return to Wanda Rossouw and Piet Human. There was an afternoon near to the twilight when they again met at the stile on the boundary between the two farms. It was a low stile, with only two cross-pieces. And the moment came inevitably when Piet Human, standing on his side of the fence, stooped forward to take Wanda Rossouw in his arms and lift her over to him. And in that moment Wanda Rossouw told him of what had happened, two years before, between Gerhard Oelofse and herself.
Piet Human had Wanda Rossouw in his arms. He put her down again, awkwardly, on her own side of the fence; and without a word walked away from her, into the deepening twilight.
Soon afterwards he sold his farm and left the Marico.
Because of the prominence she gave to that wooden stile, the daughter of the farmer in Schweizer-Reneke told the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw remarkably well. True, she introduced into her narrative a few variations that were unfamiliar to us in the Groot Marico, but that made no difference to the quality of the story itself.
When she came to the end of the tale, I mentioned to her that I actually knew that wooden fence – low, with two cross-rails, and painted white. I had seen that stile very often, I said.
The farmer’s daughter looked at me with a new sort of interest. She looked at me in such a way that for a little while I felt almost as though I was handsome. On the spur of the moment I went so far as to make up a lie. I told her that I had even carved my initials on that stile. On one of the lower cross-rails, I said. I felt it would have been too presumptuous if I had said one of the upper rails.
But even as I spoke I realised, by the far-off look in her eyes, that the farmer’s daughter had already lost interest in me.
Ah, well, the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw was a good love story and I had no right to try to chop a piece of it out for myself, cutting – in imagination – ‘Schalk Lourens’ into a strip of painted wood with a pocket knife.
“If Piet Human had really loved Wanda Rossouw, he would have forgiven her for what had happened with Gerhard Oelofse,” the daughter of the Schweizer-Reneke farmer said, dreamily. “At least, I think so. But I suppose you can never tell …”
And so, when Piet Human came back to the Marico, the story of his sudden departure, twenty years earlier, was still fresh in people’s memories – and with sundry additions.
I heard of Piet Human’s return several weeks before I met him. Indeed, everyone north of the Dwarsberge knew he had come back. We talked of nothing else.
Where I again met him, after twenty years, was in Jurie Bekker’s post office. He was staying with Jurie Bekker. I must admit that there were some unhappy aspects of that meeting for me; and I have reason to believe that there were those of the older farmers in Jurie Bekker’s post office that day – men who had also known Piet Human long before – who felt as I did. For when Piet Human left us he was a young man of five-and-twenty summers. We saw him again now as a man of mature years. There were wrinkles under his eyes, there were grey hairs at his temples and – with our sudden awareness that Piet Human had indeed grown twenty years older since we had seen him came the knowledge that we, too, each of us, had also aged.
How I knew that others felt as I did was that, when I glanced across at Jurie Bekker, he was sitting back in his chair with his eyes cast down to his stomach. He gazed at his fat stomach with a certain intentness for some moments, and then shook his head sadly.
But it did not last long, this sense of melancholy. We soon shook from our spirits the first stirrings of gloom. Those intervening years that the locusts had eaten were no more than a quick sigh. We drank our coffee and listened to what Piet Human had to tell and in a little while it was as though he had never gone away.
Piet Human told us that he had entered the Marico from the Bechuanaland side and had journeyed through Ramoutsa. He had decided to stay with Jurie Bekker for a time and had not yet, in his visits to familiar scenes of twenty years before, gone farther to the west along the Government Road.
I thought this statement of Piet Human’s significant. Farther to the west lay the farm that had once been his, Gemsbokvlei; and adjoining it was the Rossouw farm, where Wanda Rossouw still lived with her widowed mother. For all those years Wanda Rossouw, though attractive and sought after, had remained unmarried.
Piet Human said that in some ways the Marico had changed a great deal since he had been there last. In other respects there had been no changes at all. Some of the people he had known had died; others had trekked away. And children in arms had grown into young men and women.
But there were just as many features of life in the Marico that had not changed.
“I came here through Rooigrond,” Piet Human said. “That big white house that used to be the headquarters of the Van Pittius freebooter gang is still there. But it is today a coach station.”
He had asked how much he would have to pay for a coach ticket to Ottoshoop, and when they told him, he realised that the place had not changed at all; that big white house was still the headquarters of robbers.
Then there were those Mtosa huts on the way to Ramoutsa.
Thus Piet Human entertained us. But I noticed that all his stories related only to places on the Ramoutsa side of the Marico. He made no reference to that other side where his old farm was, and where the Rossouws dwelt.
We were naturally very curious to know what his plans were, but there was nobody in the post office that afternoon so coarse-grained as even to hint at the past. We all felt that the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw stood for something in our community; there was a fineness about it that we meant to respect.
Even Fritz van Tonder, who was known as a pretty rough character, waited until Piet Human had gone out of the voorkamer before he said anything. And all he said then was, “Well, if Piet Human has decided to forgive Wanda Rossouw for that Gerhard Oelofse business he’ll find she’s still pretty. And she has waited long enough.”
We ignored his remarks.
But the day did come when Piet Human paid a visit to that other part of the Marico where his old farm was. The white-painted wooden stile stood there still. The uprights, before being put into the ground, had been dipped in a Stockholm tar of a kind that you do not get today. And it was when the twilight was beginning to fall that Piet Human again saw Wanda Rossouw by the stile. She wore a pale frock. And although her face had perhaps grown thinner with the years, the look in her dark eyes had not changed. The grass was heavy with the scents of a dying summer’s day.
Piet Human spoke urgent, burning words in a low voice. He leaned forward over the fence and took Wanda Rossouw in his arms.
She struggled in his arms, thrusting him from her fiercely when he tried to lift her over the stile.
Then at last Piet Human understood – that it was that other, worthless lover, who had forgotten her years ago, for whom, down the years, vainly, Wanda Rossouw waited.
For the second time Piet Human walked into the gathering dusk alone.