From Veldt Camp Fires

by H. A. Bryden

Bred up in a remote back-country in Waterberg—scarcely educated at all—if reading with no great ease from the great family Bible can be called education, Christina had, like most of her fellows, a mind almost untouched by civilisation; a mind narrow, bigoted, and prejudiced to a degree almost inconceivable to denizens of modern Europe. But when all was said and done, allowances were to be made for Christina de Klerk. The grandchild of one of those Dutch families which had quitted the Cape and thrown off English rule in the Great Trek of 1836; the daughter of a frontiersman, who, after making himself a home in the wilds of the Northern Transvaal, had seen his beloved republic entered and possessed by the very British from whom he and his parents had trekked; she had from infancy been nurtured in a blind and unreasoning hatred against all English people. Just now, as Kate Marston advanced and stood before her tent, her naturally grave and impassive face had assumed a very sour and unpleasant look. Christina had surveyed with rapid sidelong glances the Englishwoman’s approach; she now took a full, steady, but by no means friendly look at her as Kate halted and spoke. In these glances and in that look she had time to observe that the Englishwoman was young, very good-looking, and—in a Boer woman’s eyes—well-dressed. All this tended little to lull her wrath. The woman, she felt, was her superior. She hated her for it. And as Kate spoke in a soft, clear English voice, with that lip speech which, to users of the rough, thick, guttural Dutch, seems mincing and super-refined, Christina detested her yet more. Her husband hated the English, her father and grandfather had hated them; now at this moment her spirit rose in a burning flame of resentment against the woman who had come to speak to her.

“Good evening, Vrouw de Klerk,” said Kate pleasantly.

“Good evening,” repeated Christina in a low, subacid voice, looking away into her bowl of sliced onions.

“We have just come up-country and I hear you are on your journey out I thought I should like just to step across and ask if there is anything we can do for you. We have plenty of stores on our waggon. You may be short of coffee, sugar, or other things? And I thought, too, perhaps, as you have been away in the veldt so long, you might like to have news from down-country.”

Christina no longer looked away, but now stared straight into the Englishwoman’s face. A faint flush had risen upon her dull cheeks; her anger, the pent-up hatred of years, was now at boiling point.

“I want to know and hear nothing,” she replied in a hard, set voice, with much energy. “The English have stolen our Transvaal country; we have nothing to say to them until we have got that country back. You took the Old Colony from us. You took Natal, which we won with our blood. Now you have taken the Transvaal. Ach! and yet you are surprised that we hate you. If I were dying I would not take one drop of cold water from an Englishwoman. We are enemies. You know it. And yet you must pursue us even here in the veldt. I want to have nothing to do with your people at all or at any time!”

Kate was a good deal staggered at this outburst, but she knew the Dutch and their uncouth ways; she knew that their bark is often far worse than their bite. In a perfectly calm tone, but with some spirit, she replied:

“Your welcome is surely a churlish one, Mevrouw de Klerk, and your accusations are very absurd. I am an Afrikander, like yourself, and I know of these things. I will grant that perhaps the Dutch in the Old Colony had some reason for their Great Trek. But that is a tale more than eighty years old, which should surely be forgotten. As for Natal, there were, as I happen to know—for my mother was a Natal colonist—English traders at Port Durban years before the Boers trekked into the country. And for the Transvaal, surely you must admit that your weakness and misgovernment was so great that the English Government had to step in to save your country and the rest of South Africa from Zulu and other native dangers.”

Vrouw de Klerk was preparing to answer vigorously. Kate Marston raised her hand. “Stop,” she said, “I won’t argue the matter further. I’ll just say Good evening and go back to my waggon. Perhaps when you come to think it over you will see that you have been rude and unreasonable to a stranger in the veldt—even an English Afrikander has feelings. If I can help you in any way, if you want anything, send over to our waggon and you can have it with pleasure. Your children there,”—looking at the two fat Dutch kinder, staring with blue eyes and moon faces at the dreadful Englishwoman—“may want something, perhaps.” So speaking, Kate turned on her heel and walked back to the camp.

Christina de Klerk sat glaring for a full minute at Kate’s back as she walked away. She was turning over in her dull, slow-moving mind some scathing retort upon her adversary’s statements. But Kate was now too far away. She rose with a snort of defiance, and, muttering angrily to herself, went off to the fire with her sliced onions. These she threw into a three-legged pot, adding to the meat already there a pinch or two of salt and pepper, and then bestirred herself towards the cookies of Boer meal baking among the embers.