Chapter Ten.
It was possible that Andreas Krige was a man of many ideas; he was not a man of many words. For the better part of an hour Matheson sat on the stoep and smoked in company with him, and waited in confident expectancy for the remark which, he calculated roughly, fell on an average once in every fifteen minutes from Krige’s lips. The remark, when it came, was not profound. His own conversational efforts partook of the nature of a monologue, which Krige punctuated at long intervals with grunts; a short grunt fitting like a comma into a pause, and a longer grunt putting a period to the talk. He emerged from these periods usually with one of his infrequent observations.
It occurred to Matheson later, thinking over that quiet hour on the stoep, that Krige, by his silence and those occasional sympathetic grunts, had deliberately encouraged him to talk, had indeed urged him on to talk while observing himself an intentional reticence. But this did not strike him at the time, perhaps because his mind was so intent on Honor Krige, whom he could hear moving about inside the room they had left by means of the long window near which their chairs were placed, that it held no space for other reflection.
He wondered why the women did not come out and join them. He wanted to talk to Honor, who was bright and animated and decidedly more companionable than her dark and silent brother. Krige did not interest him. And yet the long, loose-limbed figure reclining in the chair appealed to him as symbolic of the silence, the secrecy, the rugged simplicity of the veld, which daily exacted from him so much of energy and sweat and labour, and yielded its grudging return, rather as the man himself drew out of others more than he ever gave. The nature of the veld was in his blood. That is a characteristic of the Boer; he is as much a part of the soil as the coloured man, when it comes to wide spaces—to the veld which he has named. Krige suggested the solitudes, and the rude and primitive toil which Adam bequeathed his sons.
One thing he said during their talk stuck in Matheson’s memory. It was the least simple remark he had made.
“We do not get many engineers this way,” he said. “To-morrow I will ask you to lode at the wells. That windmill you see from here is out of order.”
It was rather a cute way, Matheson decided, of testing the truth of his claim to his profession.
After a while Mrs Krige emerged from the house with her elder daughter, and the talk became general and more ready. But still it seemed to Matheson that without Honor the party was not so much incomplete as lifeless: her presence made for him the atmosphere of the place.
And then, quite unexpectedly and silently, she appeared among them, and stood in the open window of the sitting-room, leaning her shoulder against the frame. She came so softly to the window, and took up her position there without remark, that Matheson realised her presence only through that extra sense which apprises one of the nearness of another person through the medium of a wordless transmission of thought. He turned his head abruptly, and found her behind him, and stood up. Their eyes met. In the dusk amid the shadows of the unlighted room behind her she suggested to his imagination, in her pale and slender beauty, a moon’s ray—the night seemed lighter for her coming.
“Please sit down again,” she said without moving.
“But I can’t sit while you stand,” he returned. “Come and take my chair.”
“Thank you; but if I wanted to sit I should bring a chair with me—there is one at my back. If you won’t sit down again you will oblige me to go in.”
He resumed his seat with a promptness which was a sufficient guarantee of his unwillingness to provoke her into acting as she proposed, and at the same time he moved it so that without turning he could see her where she stood. He rather liked to see her there so close to him in the dusk. It was immaterial whether she talked; to sit and watch her was so good in itself. But Honor did not remain silent long.
“What do you think of our Karroo nights?” she asked in her quiet, intense voice.
“You have put a difficult question,” he returned. “It is so impossible to express what one feels without seeming extravagant. A night like this is—just wonderful. There’s something... I can’t put it into words... it grips.”
She smiled suddenly and leaned forward looking into the night.
“I have a feeling when I stand here,” she said, “and look away across the veld into the deep purple and primrose of the evening sky, that I am gazing into the heart of Africa—a heart which opens and reveals many things. The past unfolds like a picture before the mind. I wonder if you will ever see into the heart of the veld? ... I wonder whether any Englishman could look so deep?”
“But surely,” he protested, “many Englishmen have loved this land?”
“Coveted, not loved,” she insisted. “Does one ever hurt what one loves?”
In his surprise he forgot that the speaker was herself partly English, that her mother, a silent listener to their talk, was a compatriot of his own. His patriotism was aroused by this aspersion; as the sole representative of his country, he was bound to meet and repudiate it.
“I think your attack is most unjust,” he said, a shade of resentment in his tones. “If you reflect a while I believe you will admit as much. Great Britain has done more for this country than any other nation.”
“She has annexed land,” the cool, dispassionate voice admitted—“she continues to annex. Wherever we have settled, she has followed and turned us out. She can do this—because of the power behind,—her strength lies across the seas.”
“Oh, come!” he said, and regretted his ignorance of South African history. “It is quite elementary knowledge that the Netherlands sold the Cape Colony to Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century.”
A cold little smile crossed her features.
“Oh! yes,” she said; “we were sold—we know that—after hundreds of us had bled for the land. They sold us because they knew they couldn’t hold the land. Then we left the colony which we had founded at the Cape a century and a half before, and trekked as far as Natal. When we had made that colony, the British annexed it... It was always trekking and then annexation and then trekking once more. We left the coast and struck inland, and crossed the Orange River in search anew of a home. Again we were driven on—beyond the Vaal. There we founded our Republic.”
The low, evenly modulated voice never raised its tones, but an increasing bitterness crept into them at this point.
“The Transvaal was rich in minerals. That was sufficient. The Transvaal was annexed by the British. But the Boers were stronger now, and they could endure this persecution no longer. They fought for their Republic, and bought it again dearly with their blood at Majuba Hill. But the feeling of insecurity remained. There was friction between the two white races, and jealousy, and much bitterness. Still you coveted our land. You never rested until, backed by the power across the seas, you fought again for it—and won.”
Matheson was amazed. When the quiet voice ceased speaking, in the pause that followed, the shrill noise of the crickets broke with disconcerting insistence and troubled the ears. Only Andreas Krige moved. He did not speak; he stood up abruptly, and pocketed his pipe, and went inside, passing his sister without appearing to notice her.
Matheson was interested, intensely interested—and hurt.
“Isn’t all this you have been telling me a distortion of facts?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “It is just a bald summary of the principal events in the history of the Colony since its beginning.”
“I am sorry I am so ignorant of these things,” he said. “A man ought to read up the history of a country before he visits it. I’m at a disadvantage. That only matters in as far as it prevents my answering you. I am hearing only your side. You have made out a good case... There’s always injustice where the interests of races conflict. If one went back far enough, I imagine one would find the greatest injustice has been meted out to the natives.”
“Oh, the natives!” Her voice sounded her contempt. “You British always fall back on the natives. It’s your unfailing retort that you administer more wisely and more humanely than we do.”
“It’s a fairly sound argument,” he returned with greater assurance. “No nation in the world can colonise as we can.”
“Honor,” Mrs Krige interposed gently, “it is an abuse of hospitality to attack a guest.”
Again the pale fleeting smile crossed Honor’s features. She glanced down at the man, who sat with face half averted looking towards the deepening purple of the sky, the colours of which never fade entirely on the Karroo even in the pallid hour of the dawn.
“I am making no attack,” she answered. “I am exposing the bleeding heart of Africa for him to see.” She came closer to him. “Can you see? ... blood and hatred, blood and hatred—the price of every morgen of this land.”
He looked up, immeasurably perplexed and discomposed. He had persuasion that he ought to say something, offer some protest, put up something of a defence; but he felt hopelessly inadequate. There was nothing he could find to say except:
“We don’t hate. As a race we are healthy: grievances do not fester with us; they heal.”
“I know,” she said. “You pride yourselves on that. You don’t bear malice. But in your generosity you incline to overlook the fact that this patronising attitude insults the object of your benevolence. You say tolerantly: ‘The Boer is not half bad; he’s useful; and anyway there is no getting rid of him. He is here for always. We will let bygones be bygones and not bear ill will,’—forgetting that the cause for ill will is on his side rather than on yours, and showing surprise that he does not respond, and appear obliged to you. You should learn to remember—to forget too easily causes suffering to others.”
“Honor!” Mrs Krige interposed again.
Honor passed swiftly behind Matheson’s chair and approached her mother.
“I think at least you should bear in mind,” Matheson said quietly, “that your mother is an Englishwoman.”
“My mother is Dutch,” Honor replied quickly, and put an arm about her mother’s shoulders and drew close to her.
Something in that protective gesture, in the tones of the proud determined young voice, and in the older woman’s acquiescent silence, acted like a silencing hand laid on Matheson’s lips. He felt tragedy in the air. She had said that she was revealing the bleeding heart of Africa to him—she was doing more; he was gazing on the stark, unlovely body of the past, disinterred from its too shallow grave by the morbid passions which are born of hate.
And yet he could not understand. How came this daughter of an Englishwoman to feel thus bitterly towards her mother’s people?—and why did the mother acquiesce in the condemnation of her country? It was as perplexing as it was distressing. Across the turmoil of his thoughts, a thing irrelevant and yet not without its significance in relation to the present disturbing scene, a speech the Jew had made at lunch that day flashed with startling clearness; and he recalled, besides the words, the distaste in the speaker’s tones when replying about Benauwdheidfontein: “It suggests being at odds with life... fear lurks in the word. It’s a name with a sinister meaning—an unlucky name.”
Possibly the Kriges were at odds with life. Could it be that Honor, beautiful, young, intelligent, was at odds with the life which for her was only beginning? It could not be. The sorrows that embitter are encountered usually farther along the road: they are not the skies of spring and summer which are overcast.
His gaze, lingering upon her figure, as she stood in the dusk with her arm about her mother’s shoulders, lifted to her face which in the fading light showed little more than an outline. It was, he decided, some fanciful touch of the twilight that gave to her features the expression of earnest entreaty he imagined he saw in them; her eyes shone with a softness in such direct contradiction to the hostility of her words, the proud aloofness of her manner, that he knew it for a trick of the twilight. No woman who felt so bitterly against his country could turn so soft a gaze upon an Englishman.
“You are a little startling in your vehemence, Honor,” Freidja Krige observed, speaking for the first time since her sister’s advent had snapped the desultory general conversation, which Matheson had found so unenlivening, and flung the bombshell of her complaining into the void.
Honor laughed quietly. The deep emotions that had swayed her and provoked her attack, were subdued; she had her feelings well in hand now.
“I haven’t startled any one really,” she said. “But—I have made Mr Matheson angry.”
A new quality had come into her voice. She gave Matheson a gesture of appeal. It was as though she wished to assure him that there was nothing personal in her attack, that she did not hold him responsible for the national crimes of which she complained. She excepted him, as she excepted her mother. They had been born English, they couldn’t help that. He might even be an estimable person in despite of it.
“Not angry,” he contradicted, and rose, moved, not so much by a desire to stand, as a feeling that he wanted to be more on a level with her, wanted to face her on equal ground; seated he was at a disadvantage. “What you have said has given food for thought I’d no idea; ... One doesn’t think enough about these things. It’s only when one comes face to face with it that one gets a sense of what lies beneath the surface. We are too easily satisfied with a superficial view. One should look deeper.”
Honor’s arm fell from her mother’s neck and hung at her side. She did not move nearer, but she turned more directly towards him.
“You will look deeper,” she said with conviction.
Suddenly a smile broke over her face.
“I have shown you something of the tragedy of the veld,” she added. “To-morrow, if you are willing to rise with the sun, I will show you something of its beauty and its charm. The Karroo is at its best when the day is young.”
If he were willing... He would have risen in advance of the sun to have set forth in her company on any quest.