“I’m very glad you are going to be married, my child,” said Tant Sannie, as she drained the last drop from her coffee cup. “I wouldn’t say so while that boy was here, it would make him too conceited; but marriage is the finest thing in the world. I’ve been at it three times, and if it pleased God to take this husband from me I should have another. There’s nothing like it, my child; nothing.”
“Perhaps it might not suit all people, at all times, as well as it suits you, Tant Sannie,” said Em. There was a little shade of weariness in the voice.
“Not suit every one!” said Tant Sannie. “If the beloved Redeemer didn’t mean men to have wives what did He make women for? That’s what I say. If a woman’s old enough to marry, and doesn’t, she’s sinning against the Lord—it’s a wanting to know better than Him. What, does she think the Lord took all that trouble in making her for nothing? It’s evident He wants babies, otherwise why does He send them? Not that I’ve done much in that way myself,” said Tant Sannie, sorrowfully; “but I’ve done my best.”
She rose with some difficulty from her chair, and began moving slowly toward the door.
“It’s a strange thing,” she said, “but you can’t love a man till you’ve had a baby by him. Now there’s that boy there, when we were first married if he only sneezed in the night I boxed his ears; now if he lets his pipe-ash come on my milk-cloths I don’t think of laying a finger on him. There’s nothing like being married,” said Tant Sannie, as she puffed toward the door. “If a woman’s got a baby and a husband she’s got the best things the Lord can give her; if only the baby doesn’t have convulsions. As for a husband, it’s very much the same who one has. Some men are fat, and some men are thin; some men drink brandy, and some men drink gin; but it all comes to the same thing in the end; it’s all one. A man’s a man, you know.”
Here they came upon Gregory, who was sitting in the shade before the house. Tant Sannie shook hands with him.
“I’m glad you’re going to get married,” she said. “I hope you’ll have as many children in five years as a cow has calves, and more too. I think I’ll just go and have a look at your soap-pot before I start,” she said, turning to Em. “Not that I believe in this new plan of putting soda in the pot. If the dear Father had meant soda to be put into soap what would He have made milk-bushes for, and stuck them all over the veld as thick as lambs in the lambing season?”
She waddled off after Em in the direction of the built-in soap-pot, leaving Gregory as they found him, with his dead pipe lying on the bench beside him, and his blue eyes gazing out far across the flat, like one who sits on the seashore watching that which is fading, fading from him.
Against his breast was a letter found in the desk addressed to himself, but never posted. It held only four words: “You must marry Em.” He wore it in a black bag round his neck. It was the only letter she had ever written to him.
“You see if the sheep don’t have the scab this year!” said Tant Sannie as she waddled after Em. “It’s with all these new inventions that the wrath of God must fall on us. What were the children of Israel punished for, if it wasn’t for making a golden calf? I may have my sins, but I do remember the tenth commandment: ‘Honour thy father and mother that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest live long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee!’ It’s all very well to say we honour them, and then to be finding out things that they never knew, and doing things in a way that they never did them! My mother boiled soap with bushes, and I will boil soap with bushes. If the wrath of God is to fall upon this land,” said Tant Sannie, with the serenity of conscious virtue, “it shall not be through me.”