Chapter Fourteen.
Jelf—Civil Commissioner.
Nicholas Andrew Jelf was Civil Commissioner and Resident Magistrate for the town and division of Schalkburg.
In person he was a tall, middle-aged, rather good-looking man, with dark hair, and a grizzled, well-trimmed moustache, and whose general appearance fostered an idea which constituted one of his favourite weaknesses—that he resembled a retired military man. When mistaken for such openly, he positively beamed; and more than one shrewd rogue got the benefit of the doubt, or obtained material mitigation of the penalty due to his misdeeds, by appealing, with well-feigned ignorance, to the occupant of the Bench as “Colonel.” By disposition he was easy-going and good-natured enough, and bore the reputation among his brother Civil servants of being something of a duffer.
By these the magistracy of Schalkburg was regarded as anything but a plum. It was very remote, the district large, and peopled almost entirely by Dutch farmers. The town itself was a great many miles from the nearest railway station; moreover, it was a dull little hole, with the limited ideas and pettifogging interests common to up-country townships. It boasted a large Dutch Reformed church—an unsightly, whitewashed parallelogram with staring, weather-beaten windows—item about a dozen stores, a branch of the Standard Bank, and two “hotels,” designed to afford board and lodging, of a kind, to such of the storekeepers’ clerks or bank clerks—to whom means, or inclination or opportunity, denied the advantages and felicities of the connubial state, for a stranger was an exceeding rarity. Half of its houses were untenanted, save for a few days on the occasion of the quarterly Nachtmaal (The Lord’s Supper) when the township would be filled with a great multitude of Boers and their families from far and near, those who did not own or hire houses, camping with their waggons on the town commonage. But it boasted no natural beauty to speak of, just dumped down, as it were, on a wide, flat plain. Some few of the houses had an erf or two of garden ground attached, which in the spring constituted by contrast a pleasing spot of green amid the prevailing red dust, but for the rest the impression conveyed was that of a sun-baked, wind-swept, utterly depressing sort of place.
Nicholas Andrew Jelf was seated at his office table amid a pile of papers, and his countenance wore a very worried expression indeed. The post had just been delivered, and the contents of the bag had consisted of a greater crop than usual of Government circulars, eke requests for returns, as it seemed, upon every subject under heaven. Moreover, the newspapers, through which he had glanced hurriedly, were mainly remarkable for the number and conspicuousness of their scare headlines. Sensation was the order of the day, and out of the chances of a rupture with the two Republics the canny editor managed to suck no small advantage. But poor Mr Jelf could lay to himself no such consolation. His thoughts were for his already large and still increasing family, and the ruinous hole it would make in the by no means extravagant pay of a Civil servant were he obliged to send it away to a safer locality, as he greatly feared he ought to lose no time in doing.
He turned to his correspondence. The Government desired to be informed of this—or the member for Slaapdorp had moved for a return of that—or Civil Commissioners were requested to obtain the opinion of the leading farmers of their divisions as to how far rinderpest microbes were likely to affect donkeys, given certain conditions of temperature and climate... and nearly a dozen more of like practical utility. Mr Jelf threw down the papers with a grunt of disgust and swore mildly to himself.
“They seem to think a Civil Commissioner must be a whole damned walking ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’” he growled. “What’s this? More of the same stuff, I suppose.”