The little Olopo River, a mere branch of the bigger river that makes
fertile British Baraland, runs from east to west, along the southern side
of Gueldersdorp, swelled by innumerable thready water-courses, dry in the
blistering winter heat, that the wet season disperses among the foothills
that bristle with Brounckers' artillery. Seen from the altitude of a
balloon or a war-kite, the course of the beer-coloured stream, flowing
lazily between its high banks sparsely wooded with oak and blue gum, and
lavishly clothed with cactus, mimosa, and tree-fern, tall grasses, and
thorny creepers, would have looked like a verdant ribbon meandering over
the dun-and-ochre-coloured veld, where patches of bluish-green are
beginning to spread. The south bank, where the bush grows thinnest, was
frequently patronised by picnic-parties, and at all times a place of
resort for strolling sweethearts. The north bank, much more precipitous,
was clothed with a tangled luxuriance of vegetation, and threaded only by
native paths, so narrow as to prove discouraging to pedestrians desirous
of walking side by side. Where the outermost line of defences impinged
upon the river-bed, the trees had been cut down and the bush levelled. But
east of Maxim Outpost South, and the rifle-pits that flanked Fort
Ellerslie, all was as it had been for hundreds of years, in the
remembrance of the great granite boulder that stood on the south shore.
The great boulder had known changes since the old Plutonic forces cast it
upwards, a mere bubble of melted red granite, solidifying as it went into
a stone acorn thirty feet high, which the glacier brought down in a slow
journey of countless ages, and set upright like a phallic symbol, amongst
other boulders of lesser size. The channel the glacier had chiselled was
now full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the granite stones
and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder
sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful
tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about its knees; and
remembered old times, long before the little Bushfellow had outlined the
koodoo and the buffalo, and the hunter-man with the spear, in black
pigments on its smooth flank, ere he ground up the coprolites gathered
from the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour the drawings. On the
western side the great boulder was dressed in crimson lake and
yellow-umber-hued lichens from base to summit, and in August, when the
aloes flowered in magnificent fiery clusters upon its crown and at its
base; and in May, when the sweet-scented clematis wreathed it in
exquisite trails, and white and rose and purple pelargoniums made a carpet
for its feet; and in July, when the yellow everlastings bloomed in every
cranny of the rocks, King Solomon in all his glory held less magnificence
of state.
Insects and beasts and birds loved the boulder. The sun-beetle and the
orange-tip and peacock butterflies loved to bask on its hottest side,
while the old dog-faced baboon squatted on top and chattered wisdom to his
numerous family, and the finches and love-birds built in its crannies and
bred their young, too often as food for the giant tarantula and the
tree-snake; while the francolin and grouse dusted themselves in the hot
sand at the base of its throne of rocks, and the springbok and the
wart-hogs came down at night to drink; and the woolly cheetah and the red
lynx came after the springbok and the wart-hog.
The boulder had seen War--War between black-skinned men and brown-skinned
men, adventurers with great hooked noses and curled beards, with tassels
of silk and gold plaited into them and into the hair of their heads,
terrible warriors, mighty hunters, and great miners, who came for slaves
and ivory and gold, and hollowed strongholds out of the mountains, and
worshipped strange bird-beaked gods, and passed away. Yet again, when
these ceased to be, there had been War; and this time the black men of the
soil fought with white strangers, who wanted the same things--slaves, and
skins, and ivory, and the yellow metal of the river-sands and of the
rocks.
Now white men fought with white. The black men owned little of the
country: they hid in the kloofs and thickets in terror, while the European
conquerors shed each other's blood for gold, and land, and power. The
boulder was so very old. It could afford to wait patiently until these
men, like all that went before, had passed.
Every seventh day the guns ceased bellowing and throwing iron things that
burst and scattered Death broadcast, and the rifles stopped
crack-cracking and spitting steel and lead. Then the scared birds came
back: the waxbills, and love-birds, and finches, and sparrows darted in
and out among the bushes, and the partridge, and quail, and francolin
ventured down to drink. The old baboon had retired to the hills with his
family; the springbok and the wart-hog had moved up Bulawayo way; the
cheetah and the lynx had followed them....
But as long as human lovers came and whispered to each other, standing
beside the big boulder, or sitting in its shadow, the boulder would be
content. They spoke the old language that it had learned when the world
was comparatively young. Black or yellow or white, African or Oriental or
European, this speech of theirs was always the same; their looks and
actions never varied. Either they met and kissed and were happy, or they
met and quarrelled and were miserable. When no more lovers should come,
the boulder knew that would be the end of the world.
There was a gaudily dressed, white-faced young woman waiting now beside
the big stone upon this seventh day. Her blue eyes were large and wistful.
She had taken off her big flaunting hat and hung it on a bush, and her
face was not unpretty, topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow curls. She
leaned against the sun-warmed granite, and cried a little. That was the
way of women when the man was late at the tryst. Then she dried her eyes
and hummed a song, and, finally, taking a stump of pencil from her pocket,
she began to scribble on the smooth red stone--all part of the old play,
the boulder knew. The first woman whom he remembered had drawn a figure
meant for a portrait of her lover, with a sharpened flake of flint.
The young woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was quite unconscious that
the boulder thought at all. She wrote in an unformed hand, and in letters
that began by being large and round, and tailed off into a slanting
niggle. "W. Keyse, Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and dreamed
dreams. Then she wrote again, "Jane Keyse" and "Mrs. W. Keyse," and
blushed furiously, and then grew pale again in anticipation of the Awful
Ordeal to come. For she had made up her mind to tell him all, and chance
it.
Yesterday had been his birthday. She had sent him, per John Tow, a costly
gift. The four-ounce packet of honeydew, cheap at five dollars in these
days of scarcity, had been opened, and the new pipe filled. A slip of
paper coquettishly intimated that the sender had rendered the recipient
this delicate little service. She meant to sign "Jane Harris," but her
courage failed her, and her trembling pen faltered for the last time,
"Fare Air."
Oh! how she hated that Other One, whom, perhaps, he liked the best, though
he had never kissed her! She would be done with the creature, she thanked
her Gawd, after to-day! Oh, how many times she had made up her mind to
tell him the truth, and never done it! But if she took and died of it,
tell him she would this time.
How would he take the revelation? Possibly swearing. Probably he would be
angry enough to hit her, _when he knew_. If he only would, and make it up
afterwards! Oh! how cruel she did suffer! She thought she would not tell
him just yet. It was too hard. And then it seemed quite easy, and then she
cried out in agony: "Is that 'im comin'? Oh, my Gawd, it is!"
She clasped her hands over a brand-new blowse, with something under it
that jumped and fluttered orful. Mother used to 'ave such palpitytions
when her and father 'ad 'ad what you might call a jar. And he was coming,
coming....
Surely W. Keyse looked stern and imposingly tall of stature, seen from her
lower level, as he appeared among the blue gum-trees on the top of the
bank, and began to descend into the ferny gorge where the great boulder
sat and sunned himself beside the beer-coloured river, whose barbel kept
on rising at the flies. Something W. Keyse dragged behind him, not by a
rope, but by a pigtail; an animated bundle of clean blue cotton, topped by
the impassive, almond-eyed countenance of John Tow, the letter-carrying
Chinaman, who in the unlawful pursuit of tikkies, finding the letter
written by the foreign lady-devil to the male one eagerly paid for on the
nail, had offered for half as much again to induce her for the future to
write two instead of one. Towing Tow, the smarting victim of feminine
duplicity came crashing down upon the guilty girl who had betrayed him.
"See 'ere! You know this 'ere young lady, and you remember what you've bin
and told me. Say it over again now," thundered W. Keyse, "so as she can
'ear you. Tell me before 'er as wot she wrote them--these letters"--he
rapped himself dramatically upon the breast-pocket--"and how you see her
doing of it, before I kick your backbone through your hat."
All was lost. The Chinaman had up an' give Emigration Jane away. Certainly
he had saved her trouble, but what was he sayin' now, the 'orrible
slant-eyed 'eathen? She could hardly hear him for the roaring in her poor
bewildered head.
"S'pose John tell, can catchee more tikkie? Plenty tikkie want to buy
chow, allee so baddee times."
"Always on the make, ain't you?" commented W. Keyse. With a strong,
imperious shove, he dumped the blue bundle down among the cowslips in
which the feet of the guilty fair were hidden, saying sternly: "I give you
three minutes to git it off your chest, else kickie is wot you'll catch
instead o' tikkie." He furnished a moderate sample on account.
"Oh, ki--ah. Oh, ki--ah!" moaned the tingling John.
"Don't you be 'ard on him, William"--he hardly knew the voice, it was so
weak and small--"it's Gawspel truth. To pay you out--at first, for juggin'
Walt, I did write them letters--every bloomin' screeve."
"An' sent the pipe and baccy for a birthday present, to make a blushin'
fool o' me?" yelled the infuriated Keyse. "All for the crimson sake of a
fat 'og of a Dutchman!"
The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenuated mule, and
escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., under the
superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff, was at that moment
being conducted at a sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish
waggon pulled by a span of four that was being brought down from Tweipans
by half a dozen Boers in weathered tan-cord and velveteen, battered
pot-hats and ragged shooting-jackets, carrying very carefully-tended
rifles, mounted on well-fed, wiry little horses, and accompanied by a
White Flag. If she had known, what would it have mattered to her? All her
thoughts were centred in this furious little man, whose pale, ugly eyes
fairly blazed at her, as he repeated:
"To pay--me out. You brawsted little Treachery, you----"
She crimsoned to her hair; you could see the red blood rushing and rushing
up from under the peekaboo embroidery in front of the tawdry blowse, in a
hurry to tell her tingling ears what cruel names he called her.
"To pay you out at first it was. An' afterwards"--her throat hurt her, and
her eyes did smart and burn so--"afterwards I--I wanted ... O Gawd!..."
she shook all over--"you'll never walk out wi' me no more after this!"
"You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly sarcastic.
"Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you done--_that_--I'd never
forgive you as long as I lived?"
He plucked the stout package of letters signed "Fare Air" from his
indignant bosom, and threw them at her feet, with the new pipe, her
hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more terrible than she had
imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep'
a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er
'eels. She will remember that day to the last breath she draws....
"Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded again.
John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, had discreetly
vanished.
"Oh, I did, I did!" Her agony was frantic. "Oh, let me go away and hide
and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break a pore gal's 'art! Wot--wot loves
the bloomin' earth under your feet!"
"Garn!"--the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful--"you an' your
love----"
She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat, and tore some of
her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of her class, and screamed at him:
"Me an' my love!... Go on!... Frow it in me face, an' 'ave no pity! Me an'
my love!... Sneer at it, take an' spit on it--ain't it yours all the syme?
Oh, for Gawd's syke forgive me!"
He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:
"So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will!"
She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint moan, turned to
the great boulder that was behind her, and clung to its hard red bosom as
if it had been a mother's. She moaned to him as her thin figure flattened
itself against the stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood a
moment looking at her, and exulting in his power, meaning her to suffer
yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly, he knew relief that the
golden pigtail and the provoking blue eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had
vanished out of Gueldersdorp before the first Act of War. He would have
felt them in the way now. Those shining, tearful eyes and the mouth that
kissed and clung to his had done their work on the night of the Grand
Variety entertainment in the empty Government store. He would pretend to
go away and leave her. He would come back, enjoy her astonishment, be
melted by renewed entreaties, stoop to relent, overwhelm her with his
magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making.
But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and strode upwards
through the short bush and the tall grasses, the scandalised flowers
thrashing his boots. She saw him, although her back was turned. If he
could have known how tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away,
W. Keyse would have been tickled to the core. But he turned when he felt
sure he was well out of sight, and hurried back.
She was not there.
He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then disconsolate.
Repentance followed fast on the heels of all these moods. He picked up the
packet of letters and the rejected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and
sought her up and down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent,
affectionate, upbraiding, appealing; but not for all his luring would the
flown bird come back to fist. No more beside the river, or in other places
where they had been wont to meet, did W. Keyse encounter Emigration Jane
again.