“Oh, I must first go round and look up a lot of people I’ve got introductions to,” was the airy reply. “Nothing like looking around a bit before making up one’s mind, eh?”
“Quite right, quite right,” nodded their host approvingly, inking another glass of grog, which, by the way, was the sixth he had taken since he came in. Then he proposed they should light their pipes and stroll round and look in at the store.
The latter was a long low room, with a counter running through it. This, as also the shelves lining the walls, was covered with goods—blankets and rugs, canisters of coffee and sugar, brass wire and bangles and every species of native “track,” biscuit and paraffin tins. Strings of beads of every conceivable hue, overcoats, and flannel shirts, and moleskin trousers hung from pegs, and clusters of reims, or raw-hide thongs—for rope is but little used in South Africa—in fact, half a hundred varieties of the genus “notion” for supplying the needs of customers, native or white.
The room was pretty full of tobacco smoke and natives, who suspended their conversation and nudged each other as they recognised the two young strangers against whom their aid had been invoked for hostile purposes, but who were now hand in glove with the proprietor behind the counter. A lanky youth in shirt-sleeves, with a mud-coloured, wispy face, was presiding over the transactions.
“Well, Smith, how’s ‘biz’?” said Anstey. The wispy youth shrugged his shoulders and growled some inarticulate reply in monosyllable. Then, on being introduced to the new-comers, he extended a limp paw to each, and returned to his former occupation of measuring out roll tobacco to a native, always with the same wooden and vacant expression.
“Well, how do you think you’d like storekeeping?” said Anstey, as he went through the performance which he jocosely termed “showing them round the place,” though, apart from a tumble-down stable and the historic mealie-field before described, there was no “place” to show them round.
Gerard, the recollection fresh in his mind of the dismal room and foetid atmosphere, and the generally depressing aspect of all connected therewith, replied, with an inward shudder, that he hardly thought he would care about it. He would much prefer farming. This was greeted as a huge joke.
“Pooh!” said Anstey. “Farming is a beggar’s trade compared with this. Why, bless my soul, a farmer’s a slave to all the seasons, to every shower of rain, or the want of it, even if his place and stock ain’t mortgaged up to the hilt. Again, the diseases among cattle are legion. Now, in a neat little store like this of mine, you can just coin money hand over fist.”
His listeners thought this last statement hardly borne out by the aspect of the surroundings in general. The other, quick to see this, went on.
“Ah, you think it don’t look much like it, eh? Well, I don’t wonder. But, you see, it isn’t worth my while bothering about tinkering up this place. Here it doesn’t matter how one lives. But I’m just waiting till I’ve made my pile, and then—” And the concluding blank left scope for the most magnificent, if somewhat vague possibilities.