The Little Karoo

Front matter

The Little Karoo

BY PAULINE SMITH

With an Introduction by ARNOLD BENNETT

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Pauline Smith was born in the Little Karoo, a name which to most people will convey nothing. Now the Little Karoo is a region of the veld in Cape Colony. It stretches east and west, high above the sea-level, immediately south of the Zwartberg mountains. I do not know how long it is, nor does Pauline Smith, nor have I attempted to measure it out on the map; but it is very long, and very wide, and if I had been a war-correspondent in the South African War, or a star-reporter, I should have referred to the “illimitable” veld. The Little Karoo is not illimitable. However, it is vast, and certainly not little save in comparison with the Great Karoo, which lies north of the Zwartberg mountains, and with which I am not concerned.

The Little Karoo is a plain (with everywhere prospects of magnificent mountain ranges) upon which are cultivated vines, tobacco, grain, and especially ostriches, but only in rare patches—where water can be persuaded out of the earth. This water is brackish; for drinking-water the inhabitants have to depend on rain hoarded in tanks; happily there is rain, and happily the rainwater will keep sweet for six months. The inhabitants are chiefly Dutch (some of French descent), with a few English and Scots of the hardier sort. The main thing about the Little Karoo is the distances which separate the hamlets one from another; these distances are magnified by the primitive means of transport. Up to a dozen years ago the whole transport of the Little Karoo was conducted by ox-waggons, Cape carts, donkey-waggons, mules and horses—the ox-waggon being the ship of the Karoo. Anybody who has seen an ox walk can judge the sobriety and moderation of the movement; anybody who hasn’t, can’t.

Cape Town, the capital of South Africa, is an important place, and I would say naught to diminish its importance; but since even to-day it counts barely a hundred thousand citizens, the citizens of the big towns of Britain and the United States are not likely to be over-impressed by its prestige. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the Little Karoo its prestige was and is enormous, and the inhabitants of the Little Karoo have to visit the humming, bewildering metropolis sometimes. How do they reach it? Up to as late as 1913 the favourite way for the English colonists was to trek first to Mossel Bay and then to take ship, the voyage lasting in good weather a day and a night—and in bad weather any number of days. But to get to Mossel Bay the travellers had to cross the Outeniqua mountains, with passes of extreme steepness; the old Cradock pass, abandoned many years ago, was so steep that the oxen would ascend the final slopes on their knees, and when the oxen could not get up even on their knees the men would take the waggons to pieces and carry them piece by piece over the summits. As for the Dutch, the South African descendants of this historic seafaring race would never trust themselves to the sea; they went to Cape Town by land, and the journey occupied days and days.

Such were the conditions in the not very distant days in which most of the Little Karoo tales are set. The colonists, as you will gather from Pauline Smith’s pictures of them, have the characteristics which you would expect from a people so situated. They are simple, astute, stern, tenacious, obstinate, unsubduable, strongly prejudiced, with the most rigid standards of conduct—from which standards the human nature in them is continually falling away, with fantastic, terrific, tragic, or quaintly comic consequences. They are very religious and very dogmatically so. They make money and save it. Lastly, they enjoy a magnificent climate, which of course intensifies their passionate love of the Karoo.

Miss Smith’s father was an Englishman born in China, and her mother is a Scotswoman from Aberdeenshire. The hamlet of Oudtshoorn, on the banks of the Grobelaars and Oliphants rivers, was her birthplace. She had the advantage, from the novelist’s point of view, of passing her most impressionable years amid the pristine civilisation of the Little Karoo, for Oudtshoorn lay in the heart of the Little Karoo; it was then a small village, and much of its commerce was carried on by means of barter. Also the fact that her father was a doctor of medicine—the first London M.D. to settle in the Little Karoo—with a district as big as several counties, must have been an advantage to her. The doctor has contacts with the population denied to all other professions save the religious, and these contacts must exercise a powerful but indirect influence upon his children. The remoteness of Oudtshoorn may be gauged from the detail that in earlier days it had no resident minister; the communion service was only an annual event. At the period of these stories Oudtshoorn had achieved a resident minister and a quarterly communion service.

On the veld Pauline Smith was taught by governesses. At the age of twelve she migrated to England to be educated. An early age to leave an environment, but the impressions had been made—deep, intense, lasting. The young girl carried away with her sufficient material for a lifetime of writing. And since, on more than one occasion, she has refreshed and strengthened her knowledge of Karoo life on the spot. Oudtshoorn rapidly developed, and is now the most important station of the railway line between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.

Miss Smith’s first literary work was done at school—sketches of Karoo life for children; not much prescience was needed to see that the author of these sketches would soon be producing sketches of Karoo life for adults. Her first published work, however, dealt with Scottish life, and appeared in that great organ of North Britain, The Aberdeen Free Press. Thenceforward Miss Smith wrote exclusively about the Little Karoo. Her work in periodicals received little notice until Mr. Middleton Murry published The Pain in his monthly review, The Adelphi. The Pain was instantly greeted, from various parts of the world, as something very fine; and I, perhaps the earliest wondering admirer of her strange, austere, tender, and ruthless talent, had to answer many times the question: “Who is Pauline Smith?” I would reply: “She is a novelist.” "What are her novels?" came the inquiry. "She hasn’t written any yet," I would say, “but she will.” It is no part of my business here to appraise the gifts of Pauline Smith. The reader will decide for himself whether or not she has unusual originality, emotional power, sense of beauty, moral backbone.

This is her first book.

ARNOLD BENNETT.

The Pain

I: The Pain

ALL their married, childless life of nearly fifty years Juriaan van Royen and his wife Deltje had lived in the Aangenaam valley in lands that he hired from Mijnheer van der Wenter of Vergelegen.

His lands lay an hour by foot from the Vergelegen homestead, on a little plateau on the mountain-side facing the north and the sun. The soil was poor and thin, and of all the poor men working hired lands in the Aangenaam valley Juriaan was one of the poorest. He was a tall, thin, loosely built man, slow and quiet in his speech, and slow and quiet in his movements. His lanky dust-coloured hair, fading with age instead of turning grey, and worn long like a Tak-Haar Boer’s from the Transvaal, gave him a wild and unkempt look that seemed but to accen- tuate his gentleness of heart. For his wife Deltje his tenderness had increased with age, and, lately, with her pain. The little old woman, plump and round, with skin as soft and smooth as a child’s, and a quiet, never-failing cheerfulness of spirit in spite of her pain, was dearer to him now than she had been as his bride. As his bride she had come to him up in the mountains from the harsh service of Mevrouw du Toit of Leeuw Kraal with but the clothes she wore and her Bible tied up in a red-and-white handkerchief. Mevrouw’s eyes had been weak, and to save her mistress’s eyes Deltje as a young girl had been taught to read. Juriaan could neither read nor write, and when on their marriage night Deltje had opened her Bible and read to him it had seemed to him that no music in all the world could be so beautiful as this. In old age her voice had become thin as a bird’s, but her reading was still beautiful to him. Their years of poverty, which might have embittered them, their childlessness, which might have driven them apart, had but drawn them closer together, and it was together that they now faced Deltje’s pain. And to them both, because all their lives they had been healthy, Deltje’s pain was like a thing apart: a mysterious and powerful third person who, for incomprehensible reasons, clutched at Deltje’s side and forced her to lie helpless for hours on the low wooden bedstead in the little bedroom.

The three-roomed mud-walled house in which the old couple lived stood close to a small stream behind a row of peach-trees. Every year from these trees they took a thank-offering of dried fruit to the Thanksgiving at Harmonie, and year by year they had beaten the stones of the peaches into the earthen floor of the living-room. Every morning Deltje sprinkled this floor with clear water from the stream and swept it with a stiff besom. The floors of the kitchen and bedroom she smeared regularly with a mixture of cow-dung and ashes called mist. The little house smelt always of mist, of strong black coffee, the beans of which were ground with peas to make it go further, and of griddle cakes baked in the ashes of the open fire in the kitchen.

The living-room, with its three chairs strung with thongs of leather, its table scrubbed a bright yellow with the yellow-bush that grew on the mountain-side, and its gaily painted waggon-box, was a small square room with a half-door opening on to the yard behind the peach-trees. This was the only door the house possessed, for the doorways between the living-room and the kitchen and the living-room and the bedroom were empty. The partition wall, built like the outer walls of mud, did not go up to the reed-and-thatch roof, but ended, within reach, in a flat ledge on which pumpkins, twisted rolls of tobacco, little bags of seed, bars of home-made soap and water-candles, and various odds and ends were stored. From the rafters hung cobs of dried mealies, and just outside the door was the worn mealie-stamper, cut out of a tree-trunk and shaped like an hour-glass, in which the mealies were pounded into meal. There was one window, in the wall opposite the half-door. It had no glass, and was closed by an unpainted wooden shutter. Built into the wall between the living-room and the bedroom were three small shelves, and here Deltje kept their few treasures: her Bible, two cups and saucers, thick and heavy, with roses like red cabbages around them, a little pink mug, with "A Present for a Good Girl" in letters of gold on one side of the handle and a golden Crystal Palace on the other, a green and red-crocheted wool mat, a black-bordered funeral card in memory of Mijnheer van der Wenter's mother, an ostrich egg, and a small box lined with blue satin and covered with rows of little shells round an inch-square mirror. This was the pride of their simple hearts, and these, after fifty years of life together, were their treasures.

It was on the uppermost of the three shelves that for over a year now Deltje had kept the little bottles of "Grandmother's Drops" which, from time to time, Juriaan had got for her from the Jew-woman's store at Harmonie, for the pain in her side. At first the drops had seemed definitely to relieve Deltje's pain, to baffle the mysterious third person who caused it, and even when the attacks became more frequent and more violent the faith of both Deltje and Juriaan had persisted because of the printed word on the wrapper. But in the month of January Juriaan's faith at last was shaken. In that month of long hot days there came a succession of attacks which exhausted all the remaining drops and left Deltje weak and helpless as an infant on the low wooden bed. And leaving her there Juriaan went down in haste to the Jew-woman's store at Harmonie.

When Juriaan reached the little white-washed store, with the sign "Winkel" printed crookedly with a blue-bag over its door, he found there Piet Deiselmann, the transport rider between Platkops dorp and Princestown village. Piet Deiselmann, eager, impetuous, a Platkops man who was full of pride for Dutch Platkops and contempt for English Princestown, was speaking to the old Jew-woman and her grandson of the new hospital which had lately been opened in Platkops dorp, and of which Juriaan up in the mountains had never heard before. The hospital was the first to be built in the Little Karoo, and it was Dutch Platkops that had built it. In Princestown, said Piet Deiselmann contemptuously, men might still die by hundreds for want of a hospital, but in Platkops there was now no need to suffer pain. One went to the Platkops hospital so ill that one had to be carried there, and one left it leaping and praising the Lord.

All that Piet Deiselmann said of the hospital filled Juriaan, with Deltje’s damp twisted face always before him, with a strange agitation of hope, wonder, and fear. For long he dared not speak. But at last, in a voice that quavered and broke, he asked:

“And must a man then be rich to go to the hospital in Platkops dorp?”

“Rich!” cried Piet Deiselmann. “Rich? Let a man be so poor as he can be to live and at the hospital they will take him in.”

“Our Father!” said Juriaan in wonder. “Our Father!” And it was as if, staring at the transport-rider, he already saw Deltje, her round, soft, childish face alight with joy, leaping and praising the Lord on the hospital stoep.

Juriaan went back to the mountains and found Deltje as he had left her on the feather bed. He poured out some drops for her, made some strong black coffee and brought it to her with a little black bread, and then sitting down on a low stool by her side spoke of the hospital in Platkops dorp. All that Piet Deiselmann had said he repeated, and in his slow quiet speech everything Piet Deiselmann had said seemed to gain a greater significance. And holding Deltje’s hand in his he told her how he would put the feather bed in the ox-cart, and his reed-and-canvas tent over the cart, and his love, his heart, the joy of his life, would lie there like a bird in its nest; and so carefully as if it were the very Ark of the Lord that he were driving he would take her in to the hospital in Platkops dorp and her pain would be cured… He spoke as Piet Deiselmann had done of men leaping and praising the Lord, and so great was now their faith in everything that Piet Deiselmann had said that it was as if within their old and worn bodies their hearts were already leaping and praising Him.

Early the next morning the old man began his preparations for the journey. He went first up to the kraal on the mountain-side where Jafta Nicodemus, the Vergelegen shepherd, kept his master's flocks, and it was settled that for some rolls of tobacco Jafta would take charge of his goats and his hens. His lands he must leave to God. He went back to the house, and stretching an old sail- cloth across a bamboo frame fixed this tent to his ox-cart. Under the cart he tied the big black kettle and the three-legged pot which were their only cooking utensils. He filled a small water-cask from the stream and tied that also below the cart. He brought out the painted waggon-box and fixed it in front of the cart for a seat. In the box was their small store of provisions: biltong, a small bag of coffee, a kid-skin full of dried rusks, meal for griddle cakes, and the salted ribs of a goat recently killed. Behind the cart he tied some bundles of forage, and below the forage dangled a folding stool. On the floor of the cart he spread the feather bed, pillows and blankets for Deltje's nest.

When all was ready, and the two plough-oxen were inspanned, Deltje came out to the cart. She wore her black calico Sacrament gown and sunbonnet, and on her stockingless feet were veldschoen which Juriaan himself had made for her. She carried in her hand a red cotton handkerchief, sprinkled with white moons, in which were her Bible, the Present for a Good Girl, and the little satin-lined, shell-covered box. Excitement, or the drops, had eased for the time her pain, and her round, smooth, innocent face was alight with her faith in the Almighty, her faith in the hospital, and her faith in Juriaan. And as Juriaan helped her into the cart he called her again by those tender, beautiful, and endearing names which were the natural expression of his love.

The journey to Platkops dorp by ox-cart from Vergelegen took three nights and the greater part of three days. They travelled slowly because of Deltje's pain, and with frequent outspans to rest their oxen. From Vergelegen to Harmonie all was familiar to them, but not for many years had they been farther afield than Harmonie, and even in the blazing January heat the straight grey road through the brown parched veld, with farlying homesteads in bare parched lands, was full of interest to them. At night, when the oxen moved steadily forward with a rhythm that the darkness accented, or when they outspanned and the flames of Juriaan's fire danced to the stars above them, their hearts were filled with a quiet content. And before them, day and night, they saw not the grey stone building which Piet Deiselmann had described, but a golden wonder like the Crystal Palace on Deltje's mug. And to this golden wonder, this haven of refuge for the sick and suffering, they clung with unwavering faith through those desperate hours when Deltje, like some gentle dumb animal, lay damp and twisted in the sweat and agony of her pain.

It was towards midday on the fourth day of their journey that they reached Platkops dorp, a long straggling village on the east bank of the Ghamka river. Its low, white-washed, thatched houses stood back from the wide Hoeg Straat in gardens or green lands sloping down to the river. The street was lined with poplars, willows, and giant euca- lyptus trees, and one looked up this green avenue to the Zwartkops mountains or down it to the Teniquotas. North, south, east, and west the Platkops plain was bounded by mountain ranges, and the village lay in the heart of the plain. The hospital was the only building on the west bank of the river, and was one of the few houses built of stone. It had as yet no trees, no garden, and no green lands around it, but stood, grey and new, with even its yard unenclosed, in the open veld. It did not look in the least like the Crystal Palace on Deltje's mug, but faith, hope, and the tears which dimmed their eyes as they came within sight of it made that bare building, surrounded by a wide stoep, beautiful to the old couple. They crossed the river by the nearest drift and drove slowly across the veld towards it.

When Juriaan and Deltje reached the hospital steps the building was already closed and shuttered for the midday heat, and beyond the creaking of the ox-cart, and the slow "Our Father! Our Father!" breathed by the old man as he gazed around him, all was silence. The closed doors and shutters, the empty stoep, upon which they had expected to see men and women, cured of their pain, leaping and praising God, did not shake their faith, as the faith of others might have been shaken, in Piet Deiselmann's report. That burning midday silence was for them but the Peace of God, and with the unquestioning patience of poverty and old age they awaited in it whatever was to befall them.

It was the matron who, half an hour later, found the ox-cart at the stoep steps. The matron was a kindly, capable, middle-aged woman who spoke both English and Dutch. Juriaan, holding his soft, wide-brimmed hat in his hand, answered her questions humbly. He was Juriaan van Royen, seventy-five years old, working lands on Mijnheer van der Wenter's farm of Vergelegen in the Aangenaam valley, and in the cart there, in a nest that he had made for her of the feather bed and pillows, was his wife Deltje, seventy years, come to be cured of the pain in her side…

The matron turned from the old man, so wild and unkempt, so humble and so gentle, to the patient, suffering, little old woman seated with her bundle on the feather bed. With Juriaan's help she lifted Deltje out of the cart, and together the old couple followed her up the steps to her office. Here she left them, and in that quiet darkened room they sat on a couch together like children, hand in hand. They did not speak, but now and then the old man, drawing his wife towards him, would whisper that she was his dove, his pearl, his rose of the mountains, and the light of his eyes.

When the matron returned she brought with her a young pleasant-faced nurse. Nurse Robert, she explained, would take Deltje to the women's ward, and here, on his afternoon round, the doctor would examine her. Juriaan, she said, must await the doctor's report, and had better drive his cart round to the side of the hospital and outspan. Afterwards he might go back to his lands in the Aangenaam valley, or across the river to his friends in Platkops dorp… It was now that for the first time the old couple realized that the hospital was to part them, and that Deltje's cure was not to be immediate. God knows what the little old woman thought as, clinging to the red-and-white handkerchief which held her Bible, her mug, and her shell-covered box, she was led meekly away by the nurse; but for Juriaan it was as if the end of the world had come. Stunned and shaken, groping his way like a man suddenly blinded in paths that are strange to him, he went out into the dazzling sunshine and outspanned.

It was not until after coffee-time—but the old man had had no heart for coffee-making—that Juriaan was sent for to the matron's office, where the doctor was waiting for him. The doctor was an Englishman, and that he had settled in Dutch Platkops when he might have settled in English Princestown was a fact never forgotten by Platkops and never forgiven by Princestown. With the old man standing humbly before him he explained now, in slow careful Dutch, the nature of Deltje's pain. It was a bad pain. Such a pain in a younger woman might perhaps be cured, but for an old woman there was no cure, only a treatment that for a time might ease it. If Juriaan would leave his wife for some weeks in the hospital all that could be done for her the doctor would do, and it might be that after some weeks she would be well enough to go back again to the Aangenaam valley. It was for Juriaan himself to say whether she should stay, and it was for Juriaan to say whether, in the meantime, he would go back to his lands on the mountain-side or to his friends in Platkops dorp.

The old man thanked the doctor, and in the quiet measured speech which gave weight and dignity to all he said, answered that if it was in the hospital that the doctor could ease Deltje's pain it was in the hospital that she must stay. As for himself, he could not go back to the Aangenaam valley without his love, his life, his dear one. Nor could he go to his friends in Platkops dorp, for he had none there. He was a stranger to Platkops dorp. All his life had he lived on the mountain-side in the Aangenaam valley, and fifty years had his little dove lived with him. If it was not the will of the Lord that she should be cured of her pain, let the doctor do what he could to ease it, and let him, of his goodness and mercy, give Juriaan leave to camp out in the veld by the hospital to be near her until he could take her home…

The doctor turned to the matron and said briefly: "Let him stay. Take him to her."

Juriaan followed the matron out of the office down a long, bare passage, which ended in a long, bare, bright room. In this room were six narrow white beds. By the side of each bed was a well-scrubbed locker, and above each bed hung a plain white card. The floor was as white as were the lockers, and this bright, bare cleanliness was all that at first the old man could grasp. Presently he saw that in three of the beds were women, wearing little white frilled caps that made them look like babies. And slowly it dawned upon him that one of these women, one of these babies, was Deltje.

At the sight of Deltje's smooth, round, innocent face set off so oddly by the little frilled cap, Juriaan forgot the strangeness of that strange room, forgot the white-capped heads in the other beds, forgot the matron standing by his side. He saw only his love, his joy, his treasure. And kneeling down by her side he drew her two brown hands into his and held them close against his breast.

That night, for the first time since their marriage, Juriaan and Deltje lay apart. For the old man there was neither rest nor sleep. For long he watched the lights in Platkops dorp twinkling across the river, and for long after those lights died out he watched the stars above him. He lay now on the feather bed in the cart, and now on the hard ground beneath it. He wandered like a ghost round the silent hospital buildings and came back to the ox-cart with a pain that brought tears to his eyes, though he could trace it to no definite part of his body whatever. He did not now cry "Our Father! Our Father!" for help. The silence of the night, the silence of the grey stone building which held his little dove, his pearl, was still for him the silence of the Peace of God. But it was of a God withdrawn as if for ever from his reach.

For Deltje, too, the night was endless. For the first time in her life she lay, not in her shift and petticoats on a feather bed, but in a cotton nightgown on a narrow mattress. The unaccustomed freedom of her limbs made that narrow bed wide and empty as a desert to her. And when she slept, in short broken snatches between attacks of pain, it was to dream that Juriaan lay dead by her side and that she pressed against his cold body for comfort and warmth in vain. When morning came it was not the pain in Deltje’s side that made life a mystery to the old couple. It was the pain in both their hearts.

Through the long, hot days, and the hot, still, moonlit nights that followed, the loneliness of the old people, and for Juriaan the sense of a God withdrawn, steadily increased. The ways of the hospital, the order and routine necessary for the running of it, remained to the end incomprehensible to them both. For fifty years on their mountain-side in the Aangenaam valley life had been for them as simple as were their daily needs, as humble as were their hearts. In this new and bewildering world the kindness of the English doctor, of the matron, and of the nurse reached them only as the kindness of human beings reaches the suffering of dumb animals. On neither side was there, nor could there be, complete understanding. The doctor and the matron might know all that was to be known about the pain in Deltje's side. About the pain in her heart and in Juriaan's they knew nothing. And from the inquisitiveness of the other patients in the ward the little old woman shrank with a gentle timidity which increased her isolation.

Alone among strangers in that bright, bare room Deltje would lie, quiet and uncomplaining, thinking of her house on the mountain-side of the warmth and comfort of the feather bed in the little bedroom that smelt so pleasantly of mist: of the wooden shutter, held by a leather thong, which creaked with the lightest of mountain breezes: of the peach-stone floor, with patches of sunlight crossing it from the open half-door: of the peach-trees by the little stream that never once in fifty years had failed them: of fruit-drying for the Thanksgiving: of the Thanksgiving service in front of the church door at Harmonie, when Juriaan, bareheaded among the men, would smile across to her among the women: of the journey home again and the first glimpse that came to one down in the valley road of the little brown-walled house perched high up on the mountain-side by the peach-trees and the stream…