Our house contained one large room, with four other very tiny ones opening out of it. The kitchen was, after the manner of South Africa, situated away from the house, at one corner of the large plot of ground which surrounded the house.
The roof and walls were, like its neighbours, of corrugated iron, and a spacious verandah encircled it; a high rush fence which inclosed the compound served to keep out intruders and prevent the curious gaze of any inquisitive passer-by.
Here we led a happy life, with Frank improving in health every day of her existence. Our rent was 125 dollars a month. Wood was 75 dollars a wagon-load: it had been known as high as 200 dollars, but coal, having been found in the immediate vicinity, had been brought into the market by some of the more enterprising of the farmers and had taken the place of wood for fuel in the furnaces.
Edibles were reasonable, considering the place, excepting vegetables. On one occasion when we wished to have a particularly tempting, large cauliflower we paid 2 dollars for it. This did not enter into our menu very often of course, for we decided to like other things not so necessarily expensive, until we two (or three) might find a Koh-i-noor.
There were two cafés, one kept by an American and the other by French people, where one could be served, at a reasonable price, with a meal that could vie in variety, delicacy, and culinary perfection with the first-class restaurants in London or New York. After eating one of these meals it was strange to go out into the crowded thoroughfare and hire a cart and drive four or five miles in a country in which one might imagine one’s self in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Surely one could but say that Kimberley is one of the wonders of the world.
The domestic servants are of a different kind to those working in the mine, who are usually raw Kafirs from the interior. The Kafirs generally remain only long enough to save sufficient money to buy a gun or a few head of cattle and return to their kraals. There they trade off their cattle for a wife, and then she does all the work for her husband, whilst he sits down the remainder of his days and tires himself out in watching her do the work, till the soil, and do everything else, telling her the while pretty stories of his adventures, and how he loves her, she thinking it only an honour to work and slave for such a brave boy as hers!
These Kafirs are continually arriving, coming from long distances, walking sometimes as far as 1,500 miles in the interior; but the household servants are different; they are a heterogeneous mixture of Malays from Cape Town and Kafirs and the imported coolies from Natal. It is difficult to say which makes the worst servant; at any rate, we found, no matter from which race we selected our help, it was never safe to leave anything of value, at all portable, within their reach.
Ladies are quite a rarity on the fields, few of the married diggers of merchants caring to subject their wives to the discomforts of the life and the unreliable domestic help. Consequently they remain at home in Europe or in the more civilised towns of the Cape Colony or Natal. The few married ladies resident on the fields are very social, and helped much toward making our stay a pleasant one.
On the evenings when we were “at home,” the capacity of our one reception-room would be tested to its fullest extent. There was always some subject for conversation, some startling event continually occurring to form a theme for discussion.
Now it was the breaking out of the Basuto War, with the report concerning the regiment of mounted irregulars to be raised in the camp for active service; then again a stone of more than usual size and brilliancy had been discovered; or some illicit diamond buyer had been “trapped” by the detectives. This latter topic was always of absorbing interest to the digger or merchant.