Chapter Eleven.
The Broken Ramkee.
About half an hour after the departure of Nathan and Koos Bester from Namies Max was surprised to see Gert Gemsbok’s dog running back from the veld with every appearance of terror. It rushed straight to the scherm, and there stood panting and with air erect along its back. Its ears were cocked and its tail tucked under, as it gazed back in the direction whence it came, sniffing the time with wide, dilated nostrils. This struck Max as extremely strange and eerie. He knew the habits of this dog; never since Gemsbok had rescued it had the animal left the side of its master.
Oom Schulpad happened to come to the shop shortly afterwards, and Max mentioned the circumstance to him. Together they walked up the side of the kopje to the scherm. The dog was so preoccupied by whatever was the cause of its agitation that it appeared unaware of their approach until they got quite close to it. Then the animal crept in under the fence of bushes and lay there whining.
“That dog has had a fright,” said Oom Schulpad. “I have sometimes seen dogs like that, and it was always after they had seen something bad happen. See, now, if something has not happened to the old Bushman.”
Max returned to the shop. After dinner, as no customers were about, he started out to search for Gert Gemsbok. He went up to the scherm and caught the dog. At first the animal snapped and snarled when he approached it. Max had, however, taken some pieces of meat with him, and these he held out in propitiation. Thus mollified, the dog allowed itself to be caught and a reim tied around its neck.
The Desert was a whirling hell of blinding and scorching sand-clouds. Max staggered on along the course which he had seen Gemsbok take that morning with his flock. The dog at first showed the most violent disinclination to follow, and had to be dragged along struggling and biting at the reim.
During a lull in the wind Max saw that the sheep were scattered about in groups far distant from each other; some were sheltering themselves among the stones on the side of the kopje and others were far out on the plain. He took his course towards the farthest group of sheep that he could distinguish. The dog now became very much excited; every now and then it would tug at the reim and try to bound forward in a certain direction. Then it would recoil in terror and endeavour to bolt back.
Max worked his way onward across the gullies in the direction indicated by the dog’s alarmed gaze. At length he reached the edge of a gully, on the opposite side of which was an overhanging bank. Huddled under this, as though to get shelter from the wind, he recognised the motionless form of Gert Gemsbok.
Lying about in the sand, and partly covered by its drift, was the ramkee, shattered into fragments. Gemsbok was lying half on his face, with his head leaning forward on his arm. Max bent over, and as soon as he ascertained that his old friend was faintly breathing, spoke his name. Gemsbok tried to lift his head, but failed in the attempt. Then Max gently passed his arm around the bruised body, and drew it back until the head rested on his shoulder.
The poor old man opened his eyes. They were dull and glazed. Then he moaned heavily and went off into a faint. Max noticed that the head was swollen on one side, and that a small trickle of blood came from the mouth. The wind had almost ceased, so Max drew Gert’s limp body tenderly down the loose sandbank and laid him on his back. After a few seconds he returned to consciousness, and the eyelids again lifted—very slowly this time.
In a broken gasp he uttered the word “Water!”
Max sprang up, meaning to run back to Namies and fetch a drink, but Gemsbok motioned to him to come close. Max bent over him again.
“Baas Max... leave... the water... it is... too late... I die for... the old sin... In my bag... sewn up... there is something... They are yours... I came honestly... by them...”
Then the head fell back, and with a low moan of pain Gert Gemsbok drew his last breath—an obscure martyr in the cause of Truth, at whose deserted shrine in the Desert he had worshipped to his own despite.
Max tried to revive him, but soon found that his attempts were useless. The dog sat on the bank at the edge of the gully, giving vent to long-drawn howls.
Max stood and looked at the body through a mist of blinding tears. Then he gathered up the fragments of the instrument which had been the only solace of the man lying dead before him through years of misery, and laid them reverently at the side of the corpse. He closed the lids of the dim and tired eyes and tied up the fallen jaw with his pocket-handkerchief. In doing this his hand came in contact with the reim by which the skin bag was slung over the dead man’s shoulder. This reminded him of the words with which Gemsbok had gasped out his life. He drew the bag softly away and began to examine its contents.
He found a pipe, a tinder box, tobacco, some dried roots, and a few strings for the ramkee in course of preparation out of sinew; nothing else. Then he discovered that the bottom of the bag had been sewn up from corner to corner, and that some hard bodies were secured under the sewn portion. He ripped open the stitches and the five diamonds rolled into his hand.
Max gazed in astonishment at the stones for a few seconds and then slipped them into his pocket. He felt dazed by all he had experienced. He sat down to collect his scattered thoughts. He looked once more upon the dead face. The diamonds were at once forgotten, and he burst into passionate sobs. The weight of all the wickedness of the world seemed to press upon him, and a sense of the futility of good darkened his soul.
He climbed out of the gully and hastened back to Namies. In a few moments all the men there were on their way to the spot where Gert Gemsbok lay as if enjoying a peace in death such as he had never known when living.
It was Old Schalk’s duty as Assistant Field Cornet to hold an inquest, and, if there were discovered the slightest sign of foul play, to send immediately a report on the subject to the magistrate.
The body was stripped, and was found to be horribly bruised and swollen. The Assistant Field Cornet at once gave it as his opinion that the deceased had come to his death through being thrown from a horse.
“It is well known,” said he, “that these Bushmen are in the habit of catching the Boers’ horses in the veld and riding their tails off.”
“But,” broke in Max, “this man never interfered with anybody’s—”
“Young man,” said Old Schalk with severity, “when you have lived as long in Bushmanland, and seen as many dead Bushmen as I have seen, you’ll perhaps be entitled to give an opinion.”
“But,” said Max excitedly, “the man told me just before he died that—”
“Young man,” interrupted Old Schalk, who had made a shrewd guess as to the perpetrator of the deed, and felt that his duty to the Trek-Boers of Bushmanland forbade him to permit indiscreet revelations, “are you the Field Cornet or am I? What does it matter what he told you—who ever knew a Bushman tell the truth? It is well known that Oom Dantje van Rooyen has a very vicious horse, which only last year threw a man to the ground and then kicked and bit him. That very horse is running in this veld at present—I saw it myself only yesterday. I am quite sure that nothing but the horse did this. The case is quite clear.”
A buzz of approval on the part of the Boers followed this verdict. Here was a dead Bushman whose body showed lesions and appearances such as might be caused by equestrian misadventure. Grazing somewhere in the neighbourhood was a horse which had been known to kick and bite a man after it had thrown him. Of course the case was perfectly clear.
Max looked around the ring of faces and saw nothing but amusement at his warmth of expression, mingled with slyness, depicted upon them. There was no pity for the sufferings which the man must have endured before he died—no horror that such a deed had been perpetrated by one with whom they were on terms of intimacy upon a sentient human being, was suggested. He felt an arm slipped within his. Looking round he saw the inscrutable visage of Oom Schulpad close beside him.
“Come, children, let us go and drink some coffee,” said Old Schalk as he led the way, assisted by a stalwart Boer, to the cart which had conveyed him from his camp to the nearest available point.
As the others followed in small groups Oom Schulpad heard one young Boer say to another—
“Got, kerel, maar Koos hat die ou’ Boschmann lekker geskop.”
(God, old fellow, but Koos kicked the old Bushman nicely.)
Oom Schulpad gave a sardonic grin which might have been expressive of anything, from rapture to nausea, and turned back to where Max was sitting fuming with indignation and grief. He laid a sympathetic hand upon the boy’s shoulder and bent his rough face, which now bore a kindly expression, over him.
“Never mind, child,” he said, “the poor old schepsel is not going to suffer any more pain. Who knows but he may be with the old woman now, and she, perhaps, may have got a new pair of legs.”
“But the man has been murdered,” replied Max hotly, “and he wants to screen the murderer—”
“Shush, shush. Young tongues gallop into dangerous places. What good can you do by making a disturbance? You won’t bring the old Bushman to life again, and it would be a bad thing for him if you could. Besides, a man must never try to set the world right all by himself.”
“But he wouldn’t hear what I had to say. I shall let the Government know what sort of a Field Cornet he is.”
“And get nothing for your pains except the hatred of every one about here. What does the Government care? It only wants not to be troubled about things. When you are as old as I am you will not be put out by anything done by people like Old Schalk.”
“I shall send a letter off at once to the magistrate and ask him to come here and see for himself.”
“No, I think you had better do nothing of the kind. If you did, the magistrate and the doctor would perhaps arrive in three weeks from now and when they came what would they be able to find out from the body? Besides, in that case it would probably turn out that some one had seen him riding Oom Dantje’s horse, or had even seen him thrown and trampled on. No, you had better do nothing at all but just bury the old Bushman. I liked him because he knew more music than I did. Come, I will help you to bury him. We’ll dig his grave next to where the old woman lies—among the kopjes. I’ll inspan my donkeys and we’ll draw him up in the cart.”
Max and Oom Schulpad wended back to Namies, and, with a couple of spades which they took out of the shop, soon dug a grave in the sluit at the back of the little kopje. It was easy ground to work, and, in spite of his deformity, Oom Schulpad was a first-rate hand at digging. In a little more than half an hour the grave was ready, and then Oom Schulpad harnessed his donkeys to the little cart and drove down to fetch the body.
Max had brought some clean, white linen from the shop, and in this they wrapped the earthly remains of Gert Gemsbok, the lonely, martyred votary at Truth’s neglected shrine. The fragments of the ramkee were reverently tied together by the old fiddler, who was honest artist enough to acknowledge a superior when he met him. He laid the shattered instrument where the stiffened hand might press upon the slackened strings until both turned to dust.
The full moon lifted her sweet face over the rim of the world, and, under the spell of her smile, the Desert took on beauty of a weird and unearthly kind. The plumy heads of the grass became pendant with dew-diamonds; every tussock was transformed into a fairy-forest lit by sparkling lamps. The ice-plants glinted so brightly that they seemed to merge together a few yards from the observer’s feet, and from there to form a shining pathway to the moon.
The strange funeral cortège wended up between the camps of Namies. Oom Schulpad walked at the side, holding the reins; Max, with bent head, followed close behind the body.
So they laid Gert Gemsbok in the sand, next to his “Old Woman” and with his broken ramkee at his side. If what some tell us about a future life be true, that ramkee will surely be recreated in the celestial equivalents of the rarest earthly instruments of music—if not something as valuable and more sonorous.
Old Schalk was sitting in the moonlight at the door of his mat-house talking to a few cronies when the funeral passed. A silence fell upon all when they saw what it was that the patient donkeys were hauling up the hill through the heavy sand. Just after the vehicle had passed out of sight around the flank of one of the kopjes Old Schalk broke the silence. He turned to one of his companions and said—“I never yet knew a man who could play the fiddle well who was not a little mad.”
“Ja,” replied the other, “I have often heard that such is the case.”