Their voices sound pleasantly upon the sweet, warm air, and recall, even to Klaas Stuurmann’s unimpressive mind, the younger days of his own children and his now dead wife. The recollection brings an unwonted tenderness to his rugged soul, and as the noisy imps, busy at their games of wagon-and-oxen, play and clamour about him, he goes to his wagon, opens his sugar-bag, fills a kommetje (A small common earthenware basin, universally used by the Boers instead of a tea or coffee cup) with the dark-brown treacly stuff, and calls the tanned and ragged little company about him. Jan, Katrina, Hendrik, Gert, Jacobina, and the tiny, toddling Jacie, all receive their morsel of the sweet-stuff—not without some awe and wonderment, for the grim, burly Boer man seldom unbends so far.
The oxen are feeding quietly round the vlei; the Boer’s eye follows them with contentment, for water and the rich veldt have brought fat and sleekness to their great frames. His daughter’s toilet catches his eye, and he watches the girl with an air of grave and secret pleasure, for she is the last survivor of three girl children, and by no means an ill-looking maiden in a Dutchman’s eye. Ruyter, the Hottentot, has brought an iron bucket from the wagon, and at the margin of the vlei he fills it with water for the meisje, who already has soap, a towel, and a comb. Taking off her sun-bonnet, she washes her face and hands, then, unfettering her stout plait of fair brown hair, she leans forward, and using the calm surface of the water as a mirror, combs out the somewhat tangled locks. Again the brown hair is coiled into a neat plait, drawn tightly from her temples, and her toilet is complete. As she ties on her sun-bonnet again the Boer comes up, pats her broad back, and looks admiringly at the now refreshened face. Two hundred years of South Africa have little altered the old Batavian type. The eyes are blue, but of small brilliancy, the cheeks too broad and flat for English taste, and the young figure is already stiff, waistless, and heavy. Yet in this far-off back-country women folk are scarce, and in much request, and already, at eighteen, Anna Stuurmann has found a mate. Next to her brothers’ wagon there stands the wagon of her betrothed—Rodolf Klopper—who is just now away in the grass plains a little to the north, shooting springboks with the younger Stuurmanns. This wagon is newly repaired, smart, and gaily painted, and is destined in another month or two, after the flocks have been well recruited in the Bushmanland Trek-veldt, to become the home of the Boer maiden. The combined families are to trek to Calvinia village, where the marriage will take place, and thenceforth Anna becomes mistress of her own man and wagon.
His daughter’s modest toilet complete, the big Boer dips a corner of the not over-clean towel in water, runs it carelessly over brow, cheeks, eyes, and mouth, dips his hands, and the trick is done. The proximity of cleanliness to godliness is no axiom of the Cape Dutch farmer, still less of the roaming Trek-Boer. A dry, parched land, and lack of water, have doubtless had a good deal to do with this trait.
At eleven o’clock, sitting in the shade of the sail suspended between two wagons, father and daughter partake, after a long grace, of the usual meal—pieces of mutton, swimming in sheep’s-tail fat, boiled rice, coarse bread, and the eternal coffee, which, however, is just now, thanks to the sweet herbage, plenteously tempered by a supply of bokke melk (goat’s milk). Again the big Dutchman lights his pipe, and presently, yielding to the heat and the effects of his meal, falls to sleep, sitting on the sand with his back against the wagon-wheel—a moving picture of pastoral listlessness, or, if you please, pastoral sloth. The hot day wears on. At three o’clock Anna mounts to the wagon-box, and, shading her eyes from the intense glare, scans the hot plain, now dancing and shimmering with mirage. The flocks have turned for home—she can hear the far-off tinkle of their bells, borne drowsily upon the warm air; but it is not the flocks she searches for. In another half-hour she looks forth again. This time, far in the north, she picks out from the shimmer and tremble of the atmosphere a tiny cloud of dust. That is what she is expecting, and she now gives orders to the Hottentot and another boy to tend the fire, get the pot and pan in order, and fill the great kettle.
In a while you may catch the steady trample of galloping hoofs, and presently three Boers—the girl’s brothers and her betrothed—each guiding a led horse, canter up to the wagons. Following at their heels is a Hottentot after-rider, also with a spare horse heavy laden. The men are hot, dusty, and sweat-stained. Ever since yesterday morning they have been away in the grass veldt, following a trek of springboks, and their display of venison and jaded nags prove that they have hunted hard, successfully, and far. Seventy miles have they ridden; a dozen springbok have they brought in; and, greatest luck of all, the flesh, skin, and horns of a great cow gemsbok decorate the led horse of Rodolf Klopper. The gemsbok (Oryx capensis), one of the noblest of antelopes, is rare indeed in Cape Colony nowadays, even upon the verge of the Orange River, and Anna’s betrothed is proportionately elate. The gemsbok is protected, too, under heavy penalties, in the Cape Colony; but what boots this to the wandering Trek-Boer in these wild solitudes, where the echo of laws can scarce be heard, and gamekeepers are not?
At five o’clock the party are gathered beneath the wagon-sail, feasting merrily, and with some noise and laughter, on titbits of venison: the rest of the meat meanwhile being salted, to be dried for billtong on the morrow. As they sit at meat, the hunting scenes are re-enacted for the benefit of Anna and her father, and, in particular, Rodolf’s desperate chase of the gemsbok. Meanwhile, as the sun nears the horizon after his day’s tramp, the flocks, bringing with them a cloud of red dust, come in for the night. First, they drink deeply and long at the vlei, which now reflects upon its glassy surface the ruddy glories of the sunset. Then the tired creatures are kraaled, their masters rising to count them as they file in.
Darkness falls swiftly; the huge vault of sky assumes its deep indigo hue of night; the stars spring forth in glittering array; there is a wonderful and refreshing coolness in the air; the cry of one or two night birds may be heard—the dikkop and kiewitje plovers—and the distant wail of a prowling jackal.
The Boer and his sons now move their squat wagon-chairs nearer to the warm blaze of the camp-fire; they smoke vigorously, and occasionally cast stolidly a sentence at one another. Anna and her heavy lover stroll a little beyond the firelight by the edge of the vlei; their voices intermingle curiously with the clang of water-fowl—duck, geese, widgeon, and teal—from the other end of the pool. Theirs is the old, old story, told perhaps in a rougher and less romantic fashion than in Europe; yet is its refrain as earnest and its aftermath at least as kindly as in northern lands. The South African Boer makes a true and constant husband, and a good father—some people say he is a trifle too uxorious.
At eight o’clock the day is done. The party separates for the night, after a longish melancholic prayer and a chapter of the great Bible from Stuurmann. Anna goes to her kartel-bed at the end of the big wagon, lets down the achter-klap, takes off her shoes and sun-bonnet, loosens a button or two at the throat of her gown, pulls her blanket and sheepskin kaross well over her sturdy frame, and is almost instantly asleep. Her father snores loudly from the forepart of the wagon; the whole camp (including the native “boys” huddled beneath the wagons) is hushed; while all around broods the wonderful silence of night on the plains of Bushmanland.