So Katje laughed as she mentioned him, and the Vrouw
Grobelaar bridled ominously.
"You laugh," she said scathingly—"you laugh in the face of wisdom and counsel as they laughed in Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes; Tagalash, Katje! What have you to say against Tagalash? You think, I suppose, that he doesn't exist. I tell you, my girl, there's many a god of the heathen who is a devil of the Christians. That's what Christianity is for— to make devils of the gods of the heathen. And besides, this Tagalash is not like the others. He has been seen."
She paused. "Who by, Tante?" I asked, while Katje affected to whistle carelessly.
"Ah," she said, "you want to know? Well, Tagalash was seen and felt and had speech of by one who told it afterwards with white lips and fevered eyes that compelled belief. A Boer woman, mind you, and no liar; the young wife of an upright and well-seen Burgher, who had his farm an easy four hours from here.
"It is Folly Joubert I mean, who married when she was eighteen one Johannes Olivier, a youth with hair like an Irishman—all red. I had known her somewhat, and she was just that kind of girl in whom one feels the thrust of a fate. She was thin, for one thing, and without any of the comfortable comeliness that makes young men doubtful and old men sure. She had a face that was always rapt, lips that parted of themselves as if in wonder at great things newly seen, and big troubled eyes that spoke, despite her leanness and long legs, of a spring of hot blood crouching within her. Yes, she seemed doomed to something far and tragic, and outside the lives of decent stupid men.
"There was much bother, I believe, to persuade her to a marriage with Johannes, though he was rich enough.
"Perhaps it was hard on her, but then it must have been hard on him too. For he was another kind than she; just a big youth that ate four times a day with desperation, and lived the rest of the time as a tree lives. There is no harm in such men, though; it is they that people this world and have the right to guide it, for they put most into it and hew most from it; but for those who are born with a streak of heaven or hell in their fabric, they are heavy companions at the best. But these two married at last, and faced life like oxen that pull different ways in the same yoke. And within a month Johannes walked about with a face like one who tries to guess a riddle-troubled and puzzled; and Polly was walking elsewhere, carving herself a new religion from the stones of the bitterness of life.
"I have the rest from her own lips, as she told it when she came back. Yes, she went away—I will make that plain enough. It was after a quarrel with Johannes over some little grossness of no consequence that she walked forth from the house and down towards the spruit. It was between afternoon and evening, and she sought a quiet place to sit and prey on her heart. There was a pool that summer, deep and very black, lying between steep banks on which grew bushes and tall grass, and to this she came and sat by the edge of the water, and dabbled her long thin fingers in its coolness and let her thoughts surge in her.
"'I thought of death,' she said, as she sat in her chair and told of it—'of death, and peace, and hatred glutted, and dead enemies, and love, and sin. A wild storm of dreams, was it not? A grim tempest to lay waste a sore heart. And she only eighteen, with eyes like lakes on a mountainside!' As she told it, she cast back on her memory— you could see she was aching to strip her fault naked and scourge it before us all—'And the thoughts were like a sleeping draught to my anger,' she went on pitifully. 'I drowned my wrath in dreams of vengeance and sinful hopes of a joy to find in the future.'
"'I conjured up faces of eager, bold men who should court me, and one that I had thought on before—a small man, lean at the waist, who moved like a spark among burning wood, and laughed ere he struck.' Her finger traveled in the air, and he was plain to see.