Tales from the Old Karoo

by Guy Butler

  Johanna hated those spiders. She’d dream of Boy and Petrus caught in the spider web of the railway network.

  The war ended in Boer defeat. Boy had been taken prisoner and sent to Ceylon. Now he was sent back to be tried in Hanover for high treason: for taking part in the train-wrecking at Taaiboschlaagte, and for the murder of the men who had died in that action. Although he had so little legal training or experience, Cronwright Schreiner undertook his defence. There was no one else. He set out to prove two things: that Van den Berg, the crown witness, was a liar and guilty of perjury; and that although Boy had joined Malan’s Commando, he had not taken an active part in the wrecking of the train.

  Boy’s trial was a different story from the Nienaber trial. At that first trial the De Bad women had been advised that it was best to say that they had all gone to bed early; but now it was thought better to tell how they had all sat on the stairs waiting for the train light, and to insist that Van den Berg, who claimed to have been a witness of the train wrecking, had been with them all the time.

  Olive Schreiner sat next to her husband in court and took down the whole trial in longhand. This was quite possible because there was so much translating from Afrikaans to English.

  They put Johanna into the witness box opposite Boy, who was looking pale and strained – who wouldn’t be, with a sentence of death over his head?

  ‘Do you know the accused?’

  She flung her head back, proudly, so that her corn-coloured hair shone.

  ‘He is my brother.’

  She made a star witness, as did General Wynand Malan.

  The General’s presence as a witness was another puzzle to the people of Hanover. A Boer boy, born in the Cape Colony, a subject of the Queen, joins a Commando from the Transvaal Republic just before they derail a train. Later, a pro-Boer Englishman, an insurance and general agent in Hanover, defends the same boy at the preparatory examination; and then subpoenas the Boer General, now a prisoner of war, to come and give evidence that may save the life of the boy. It is puzzling and paradoxical that their worst enemy should behave like their best friend. But Olive said there were useful legal traditions and procedures which the British, for the most part, tried to adhere to. They had not done so with the Nienabers; but they seemed determined to do a little better with Boy Pienaar.

  General Malan had been left wounded and dying in the veld near Aberdeen. He was now in gaol recovering from his wounds. Whether he liked it or not, he had to appear to give evidence: and his evidence was this:

  Yes, Boy Pienaar had joined his commando; but was not on the scene of the train wrecking. He left the greenhorns – Gouws and Pienaar – to look after the horses while the wrecking was done. Boy could not, therefore be charged with the murder of the stoker and the others.

  As for the Niewoudts and the Nienabers – none had joined his commando and he had seen none during the action round the wrecking of the train. And he made a sworn statement that he’d never seen Van den Berg in his life.

  What would the outcome be? Boer relief and gratitude to the Schreiners knew no bounds when Boy was let out, pending trial, on five thousand pounds bail. Van den Berg had to face charges of perjury. It seemed to Johanna that at last the war was ending.

  His defence of Boy brought Cron a lot of Boer sy mpathy, and he was asked to stand for parliament for Colesberg. He got in. This meant that Olive was left alone in Hanover during the sessions and at other times. She lived a lonely life. For someone used to intellectual circles, what had Hanover to offer?

  Once, when Johanna was passing her cottage, she beckoned to her, and said: ‘Johanna; please go to Friedlander’s store and get me a small tin of Aspinall’s enamel paint – pearly white’ – and she tore a little advertisement out of the Graaf-Reinet Advertiser. ‘And a brush.’ And when Johanna was already in the street, ‘And a small bottle of turpentine.’

  When Johanna got back she said, ‘Johanna, please help me lift something – I am so out of breath.’ The girl followed her into the bedroom, and was told to pull a box out from under the bed, and lift it on to the table.

  ‘Unscrew the lid’, Olive said, handing her a screwdriver. Inside the box was a little coffin covered in lead. That explained the weight. ‘Lift it out’, she said.

  ‘I can’t bear to think that my darling baby is lapped in that leadencoloured sheet. So I’m going to paint it white, Johanna.’

  Of course Johanna had heard about the baby’s coffin under the bed; and she did think Olive was a bit mad; but she changed her mind after Olive had spoken about her life-long longing for a child – ever since the death of her baby sister; and then of her late marriage; and then the inexplicable death of her baby, twelve hours after its birth; and of her inability to bear a living baby; the endless visits to specialists – and finally, her many miscarriages. All she had left of her many pregnancies was this little coffin: and she hugged it, and cradled it, and crooned to it.

  Johanna left her quietly and carefully painting the coffin with Aspinall’s best white enamel, by the light of a paraffin lamp which she had lit for her.

  A little later Olive called Johanna over to give her a lecture about not relying on her good looks and charm as a girl: to be a person, not a sex object: and that she’d better find a career. She herself had tried to become a nurse, and she had been a governess. What was Johanna going to be? Or was she just going to wait around until a man came along and put her to the expected tasks of child-bearing and housekeeping? Well, she said, those were good things, but not the be-all and end-all for a girl of spirit and brains.

  Her lecture shocked Johanna because she was doing just that: waiting around for Petrus Gouws to come back, and take her for his bride and the mother of his children.

  But Petrus never came back. Never. Never.

  So Johanna started working hard at school, and always came top by a good margin. With the help of the ACVV and the Dominee she was sent to a training college in Wellington. She was in a hostel for poorer girls; it was called Bliss.

  Well, an adventure to the western Cape for Karoo people always has a touch of bliss about it. She worked hard, and read, and read. She read everything she could find of the Schreiners’. That couple kept coming into her mind. She even read Cronwright’s speeches in Parliament. Cron was a dogged man. He got a government commission to look into the case of the Nienabers and Niewoudts and, long after everyone in Hanover had forgotten about them, old Mrs Nienaber got a pension from the British Government as a result of his efforts. Johanna even read Cron’s book on the Angora goat.

  But the book she knew best was The Story of an African Farm. They had an American lady teacher for English Literature. Like many of those who taught in Wellington, she came from Boston. Boston was to the great United States of America what Oxford and Buckingham Palace rolled together in one were to tiny England. She admired Olive so much that she used to lie in wait for her at Matjiesfontein where Olive used to stay while Cronwright was in Cape Town for the Parliamentary session. And she told her students what Olive had told her: how Olive had written The Story while a governess with the Fouches on Klein Gannahoek.

  And of the suitors young Olive had turned down! – even young Fouche himself, who had a big portion of good veld which he promised to her if only she’d marry him. She refused: and they call that camp Olive’s Loss to this day.

  It was mountain country, was Gannahoek; and it was probably those mountains that inspired the parable in The Story of the rough mountain we human beings all have to climb in search of truth: and when we do at last reach the top we are still not answered: all we see is a great bird with enormous wings outspread sailing against the everlasting blue.

  Johanna thought how strange that Olive, a girl not yet twenty, should have such a sad view of life – struggle, struggle, and so little reward. Not so strange. She had such feelings and doubts herself.

  Just before she got her first teaching post Johanna went back to Hanover to see her family. She found herself on the same train
as Olive Schreiner. Her idol recognised her and they had some talk; but Olive seemed listless. When Johanna asked after her husband, she changed the subject as though she had not heard. Then Johanna made a point of saying how grateful she was for the way Cronwright had got a pension for that Mrs Nienaber. To which she replied: ‘Yes, dear, Cron is a persistent man.’

  There were delays at stations and missed connections at junctions, so when they eventually got to Hanover Road there was no one there to meet them: only a message to say that another cart would be there in two hours. There were no benches on that platform, so they had to sit on their luggage. Among Olive’s baggage was a small teak box, ideal for sitting on, but she did not sit on it; instead she sat on a leather valise, which squashed under her weight. Greatly daring, Johanna suggested the box.

  ‘I don’t sit on coffins’, said Olive.

  ‘I am sorry!’ stuttered the girl, ashamed. Of course she should have guessed – the baby was inside, in a leaden sheet painted with Aspinall’s white enamel.

  ‘It’s not Baby’, said Olive. ‘It’s Nita – Nita, my dog.’

  And she started crying as she told of the death of Nita in Cape Town. Nita had been on a leash beside her in a carriage. Nita’s sister, called Ollie, was running alongside the carriage. Nita had leapt out of the window to join Ollie. The rear wheel of the carriage had gone over Nita’s head, killing her instantly.

  ‘So I must keep what is left of her in a lead coffin.’

  It was a long wait on Hanover Road for the young governess about to go on her first job, and Olive, a great woman who felt she had failed – failed as a novelist, as a mother, and a wife. But she was busy writing her masterpiece – a book on women and their need to emancipate themselves. After an exhausted silence she talked about the wickedness of the rich and powerful of the world, who were nearly always men. How she hated power, which is nearly always misused! At last the cart arrived, and there was no further need for speech.

  When they reached Hanover Johanna helped Olive out of the coach into her little house. Olive did not like the driver; she did not trust him to be gentle with Nita’s coffin. ‘Do you mind?’ she said to Johanna.

  So the girl lugged the heavy box in by herself, and put it on the floor next to her bed.

  ‘I’ve put Nita’s little body in a lead coffin so that she can be buried with me. She was my good tender friend through years of such loneliness as I believe is not often the lot of human creatures.’

  Johanna had walked home filled with awe at all the grief in that strange woman. She was now almost in awe at the grief in herself.

  That was in 1905. She was twenty years old, and the world was at her feet. She had enjoyed a better education than Olive Schreiner ever had, and was endowed by nature with much more beauty. Olive had warned her:

  ‘Johanna, you’ll find you can drive men silly if you just employ a few feminine wiles – like ogling, or playing helpless, or hard to get’, – and she went through them all in mime. ‘But you won’t, will you? You won’t sink to those old prostitutes’ tricks? You’ll never get a worthy husband that way, my dear.’

  She was governess on various farms, like Olive had been before her. On the first the farmer, a handsome young man, tried to seduce her while his wife was in hospital. She’d resisted. He tried to force her, but Johanna put up such a fight that he gave up. She left. The experience made her nervous because she had found him so very attractive.

  The second farm was very remote. All her pupils were nice girls but dull, like their parents. She felt buried alive. They never invited any young people around.

  Her mother wrote asking why, at twenty-five, she was still unmarried.

  She began to wonder herself. She decided to move once more.

  Her next job was at a farm school on a place called Rietvlei – a big, old farm belonging to old Joseph Andries Jacobus van Dyk. The neighbours sent their children to school there from miles around. Mrs van Dyk was ailing – so Johanna had to undertake a lot of the household work. It came easily to her, having grown up the hard way with a good mother in Hanover.

  Old Joseph had three sons: by his first wife, Willem J .S., burly of build, and Andries Stephanus, wiry and slender; and, by his second wife, Daniel, a pleasant young chap, but just a little simple; fit enough to drive a wagon, provided he had a good couple of ‘boys’ to help him. Andries was the bright one. He wanted to make all sorts of improvements on the farm, but old Joseph said ‘no’, the noise of the arguments would upset his ailing wife. Well, at last she died, and was buried. Then the argument started.

  With her gone, the men looked at Johanna in a new light. Even old Joseph himself looked at her with desire, but was too proud to go into rivalry with his sons over a girl: a decent, dignified man. Johanna did not love any of the sons, but she had lost the social confidence she’d had when she first left college; and, after all, the Van Dyks did own land, the Van Dyks were not poor.

  She should, perhaps, have resigned at once and got a job where there was a wider choice than four Van Dyks. She actually said so, jokingly, to simple Daniel. He replied: ‘Johanna, we Van Dyks are good average people. We may drink a little too much every now and then, but we don’t become soaks; we may fight from time to time, but only with fists, not knives. We are strong and healthy, and we live a long time. No madness in the family. Now, if you wish, you can go chasing after the son of one of those smart rich families, and get a big house with carpets which pile up to your ankles – but you’ll find all kinds of skeletons in the cupboards.’ And he brought out some lurid family skeletons – of the neighbours – for Johanna to look at. ‘You’ve been with the Van Dyks long enough to know about our skeletons. There are none as bad as those.’

  She married Andries. Everything went wrong, everything. He had old-fashioned ideas about women and their needs, and said he didn’t want to hear the views of that atheist Olive Schreiner on the matter of women’s rights. He just couldn’t be gentle without feeling that he was demeaning himself.

  Then old Joseph decided to buy a farm called Buffelshoek in the Cradock district. That was 1912. Johanna hoped that the change would help things, particularly if Willem went off farming on his own and took Daniel with him. She felt Andries and she might settle down if they had fewer of his male family around; but no, they all lived on Buffelshoek – a poor stock farm with no agriculture. There wasn’t enough work for them all to do, and they got on each other’s nerves, and drank too much.

  She had two children by Andries, both girls – born in 1912 and 1915. She hoped they would bring them together. They did at times, at times not.

  They had such terrible rows that they lost all sense, and didn’t mind what the children overheard. One day she stormed out of the house shouting ‘I’m going to throw myself down the well!’ while Andries was shouting in the bedroom ‘I’m going to blow my brains out!’ At the lip of the well she came to herself; and cried: ‘Johanna Pienaar, Johanna, what has become of you?’ She turned round and looked at the house in the twilight. Her two little girls were clutching each other under the pepper tree, her two little girls, waiting for a shot from the house or a splash from the well, or both. Two little girls, in their white dresses, bright in the twilight.

  In those days divorce was so rare that she didn’t think of it for a long time; but she did think of going into town and getting a teaching job. Andries wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, he blamed all their troubles on her education at Wellington, which had given her fancy English ideas above her class and station. She was dissatisfied with being what God had made her, a woman, man’s helpmeet.

  Then Willem, the eldest son, married Susannah Opperman from Swaershoek: much younger, tall, impulsive and direct: almost everything Johanna was not. But they liked each other, and soon formed a quiet alliance against the Van Dyk men. Susannah and Willem lived in the second house close by.

  In 1919 Cronwright Schreiner visited Buffelshoek on a strange piece of business: to make funeral arrangements, ‘just in case’
. Yes, the Van Dyks did know that a small piece of ground on the top of Buffelskop had been bought by Olive Schreiner before the Anglo-Boer War because she wanted to be buried there. She’d only been up there once with Cronwright, when he was farming Kransplaas and Buffelshoek for Mr Wood of Grahamstown. That was shortly after their marriage, during their honeymoon time. They had been radiantly happy in the mountain air that one beautiful day, and had made a pact to be buried there together. Cron wished to climb to the top now, and invited the Van Dyks to join him. The men had work to do, but Johanna and Susannah went. As they climbed, pausing frequently, he gradually lost all reserve and bared his heart.

  Mr Schreiner was now a wealthy man. He had prospered in his business. But he was tormented by conflicting feelings which he could no longer hide.

  To be on Buffelskop and Kransplaas again was such sweet torture to him. His happiest years as a young farmer had been spent on this farm. This was the farm where he had got to know and love the plants and animals of the Karoo; the mountain zebras, the rhebok, the baboons, the hoopes, the doves, the howks, the eagles –particularly the eagles, gliding above the crags and cliffs of the mountains. This had been the place where he’d first read The Story of an African Farm; the place from which he had ridden across to the Cawoods at Gannahoek to meet Olive Schreiner for the first time; and it was to Kransplaas that he had brought his bride.

  Now she was ill, and in England. They had not seen each other in six years. He was going to England now, to join her. Either or both of them might die there, but plans had been made for their bodies to be brought back to Buffelshoek – from anywhere in the world. A promise is a promise.

  Johanna found it hard to believe. It was obvious to all that Olive and Cron had drifted apart. In anguish and bitterness of heart he almost said as much. He’d given up everything for her – in particular his career as a promising young farmer on this farm. She had never produced the masterpieces of fiction for which he had willingly made that sacrifice. But worse, she had never been able to bear him a living child. Perhaps that was the greatest, bitterest blow of all to him: he was childless. Yes, he realised he was an ordinary man of average talents, and that his needs were not of prime importance; that genius had the right to demand a most costly devotion. He had done his best – moving from place to place, wherever Olive hoped she could breathe. He’d built a house to her requirements in De Aar. Then in 1913 she’d gone back to cold and cloudy Britain – which she’d left in 1889 because she needed the African sun for her health! He’d lived as a lonely celibate for years in De Aar, and, yes, he was now a successful man. But what did his success amount to? Dust and ashes.