The Little Karoo/Chapter 4
IV: The Sinner
NIKLAAS DAMPERS, the bijwoner[1] who worked Mijnheer van Reenen's lands near Platkops dorp, was fifty-six years old when his favourite daughter Saartje married and went to live with her husband in the Philip district. Niklaas had prayed that Saartje might never leave him, and the Lord's strange answer to his prayer filled his mind with an unreasoning hatred of his ten remaining children and of his wife Toontje. The bijwoner was a small, weak, religious man, with pale red-lidded eyes, arms that seemed too long for his body, and a heart that was full of bitterness and the fear of the Lord. Of all his children, it seemed to him now, Saartje alone had been dear to him, and if he had ever loved his wife he had long ago forgotten it. Toontje was a tall, patient, silent woman, who shared with none the secrets of her soul. God might know what Toontje hid in her heart, but in all their years of poverty together Niklaas had never fathomed it, and now that Saartje had left him his wife's patience and silence, and his own increasing hatred of her, became a torture which drove the bijwoner to the verge of madness. And it did drive him to Koba Nooi for comfort.
Jacoba Nooi, a stranger to the district, had but lately come to Platkops dorp on a visit to her uncle, the bijwoner Godlieb Nooi, whose lands came next to those of Niklaas Dampers. Koba was a plump unmarried woman of forty, with a round childish face, a tongue like a running sluice, and a gentle sing-song voice. On Sundays, with an air of great simplicity and innocence, she wore a sprigged cotton gown and a hat trimmed with ribbons. All other women of her age in the bijwoning class wore plain black dresses and black calico sunbonnets, and Koba's hat made much talk among them. So also did her hand-mirror, which was rimmed with little shells and set with larger shells at the back. Such a mirror had never before been seen by any bijwoner's wife or daughter in the Platkops district. Many strange things were whispered about it, and many more about Koba herself, who, when her work was done, would sit out in the yard, or down by the river, flashing her mirror in the sun.
Of the mirror, and of the whispers about Koba, Niklaas knew nothing. Toontje had never spoken of them to him, and his own distress of mind was now so great that he himself spoke to none whom he might avoid. For many years this weak, harsh, embittered man had feared the Lord and worshipped Him. For many years he had believed that at the last the Lord would deal justly with such righteousness as his, and visit vengeance upon all such sinners as were most other men in the Platkops district. Through all his years of poverty this alone had been his comfort. And now because Saartje had loved a stranger from the Philip district and left her parents to marry him, neither righteousness nor sin, neither justice nor vengeance, had any meaning for the bijwoner and he searched for his God in vain.
Towards the end of February month, by Mijnheer van Reenen's orders, Niklaas had begun to cut his tobacco, and it was now hanging in open shelters on the land to dry. Andries van Reenen was a hard master, whose one passion, even now when men said that he was dying, was the tobacco he grew on his various lands throughout the Platkops district. Any bijwoner who did not plant, weed, cut, dry, strip, dip, and twist to please him he dismissed without pity, and all men knew it. Niklaas, a good servant, was never, in the tobacco season, without fear of this dismissal. This year the crop had been good, and his master, for the moment, was satisfied. But in a few weeks now the tobacco would be dry, and then, waiting for a dewy night to soften the leaves, the bijwoner must take the stalks from the shelters and begin to "strip." If a man stripped the leaves from the stalks in weather that was too dry, the leaves crumbled and would not afterwards "twist." If he stripped them in weather that was too damp they mildewed. A dewy night he must wait for if the wrath of Mijnheer were not to overtake him.
All this Niklaas knew, but it was not of this that he thought as he walked across the hot, empty lands, from shelter to shelter, one still March day. Mijnheer van Reenen might be merciless to his bijwoners if they failed with his tobacco, but no man, it seemed to Niklaas now, could be so merciless to another as God had been to him in taking Saartje to Philip dorp and leaving Toontje in Platkops. If the Lord now, by some miracle, had taken Toontje to Philip and left Saartje in Platkops how gladly would he have praised Him! But God was no longer his friend. God was, in fact, but another Toontje . . . as patient, and as secret, and as silent.
This thought brought the bijwoner to the bank of the river. And as he stood there with his soul in a torment of hatred that now embraced both his wife and the Almighty, Koba Nooi, with a little giggle from down below him, flashed her mirror up on to his face, on to his shirt sleeve, on to the bushes and stones that lay between them, and drew him slowly, slowly, down the bank towards her.
The bijwoner could never afterwards remember how he reached the river-bed, but presently he found himself seated by Koba's side with the mirror in his hands. Niklaas, who had never seen the sea, held the mirror-back towards him, and drew his fingers gently over the smooth round shells. Koba, who had been to Zandtbaai, and seen not only the sea but the ships that sail upon it, told him, in her gentle sing-song voice, many strange and wonderful things about it. Then suddenly, with a little giggle, she twisted the mirror round, and Niklaas saw before him part of his own wild and sorrowful face, and part of Koba Nooi's plump, round, childish one pressing against it. Giggling still, Koba twisted. the mirror back, then round again, then back and round and round till Niklaas, who saw his face only on Sundays, in a small cracked piece of looking-glass that Toontje kept in a drawer, was like a drunken man in his bewilderment. And because his heart was empty now of all sense of righteousness and sin, of all fear of justice and of vengeance, there swept into it a wild tumult of desire that was but another madness.
Three weeks later, while Niklaas's tobacco still hung in its shelters, Toontje went, a calm inscrutable woman in a black calico gown and sunbonnet, to the farm of Mijnheer van Reenen, which lay an hour by foot from Platkops dorp. Here Andries van Reenen, a rich man and a hard master, respected and feared, but loved by none even among his own family, was dying slowly of stone in the bladder. Toontje's father had been one of his many bijwoners, on lands that he once had owned and afterwards sold, in the Kombuis—a valley which lay to the north of the district among the Zwartkops foothills. Not for many years had Toontje visited the farm, and not once since her marriage had she spoken with her master alone. When she came to the house the old man sat out on the stoep in a big iron-wood chair made specially for his comfort. His face was grey and drawn, and he answered her greeting with an abrupt, bitter "Good day.” In her youth in the Kombuis this tall patient woman, so quiet in her speech, so controlled in all her movements had been free and beautiful to him as a roe-buck in the mountains. But he did not now remember it and saw in her only the bearer of news about that last passion of his life, his tobacco.
"How goes it?" he asked.
"Mijnheer," answered Toontje, "the tobacco dries well. But look how it is! Five-and-twenty years has Niklaas worked for Mijnheer, and a good servant has he been, but now a madness has come upon him and up to the Kombuis with Koba Nooi he has gone, and is working tobacco there for the Hollander."
"Niklaas? In the Kombuis!" cried his master, incredulous. And he added in a sudden blaze of anger, "May his soul burn in hell and Koba's also."
"Mijnheer," said the bijwoner's wife in her quiet level voice, “may God forgive him in his madness, but is it for Mijnheer and me to judge him?"
"Fool," thundered the old man, "are you then also mad?"
And Toontje answered: "Mijnheer knows that once I was mad. Mijnheer knows how my madness ended. Did Mijnheer never himself go up to the Kombuis? Or is it that he has perhaps forgotten?"
"Toontje!" cried the old man, his mind moving, slow and bewildered, from his tobacco to the past. "Toontje!”
"Andries!"
For a moment their eyes met, and in that moment the secret which Toontje hid in her heart and Niklaas had never fathomed, lay bared between them. The moment passed, and as if it had never been, the bijwoner's wife, calm, inscrutable, said to her master:
"Mijnheer, see how it is. My son Ockert is now sixteen years, and if Mijnheer will but trust his tobacco to Ockert and me, so soon as it is dry, after the first dewy night, we will strip and afterwards do all as it should be done till Niklaas comes again from the Kombuis. Mijnheer knows that such a madness will not last, and Mijnheer knows that I will serve him well. Have I not served Mijnheer for more than Niklaas's five-and-twenty years? And what is it that I ask of him now but still to serve him?”
"And is this then all that you will have of me?" asked the old man slowly. "You that once lived for me in the Kombuis?"
"Mijnheer, there is but one thing more. If Mijnheer will but say, to all that speak of it, that he himself has sent Niklaas up to the Kombuis, to see how the Hollander works his tobacco . . ."
In a flash, in that passion for his tobacco which through all his months of terrible dying was still to hold him, Andries van Reenen's anger blazed up afresh.
"And to save your husband Niklaas you ask me this," he cried. "A fool that could leave his tobacco and you for Koba Nooi?"
"Mijnheer! Mijnheer!" answered Toontje, "did I not marry the fool to save the master?"
Again the old man's mind went slowly back to the past. "God forgive me that and many other things," he said. "Go. I will say it."
That night Toontje made up a small bundle of clothing for Niklaas, and with great labour wrote him a letter. This letter she slipped into the bundle, but in the middle of the night she rose, withdrew the letter, and after adding a single sentence again inserted it. Next day she took the bundle up to the morning-market, and finding a waggon there from the Kombuis gave it to the driver to deliver to Niklaas. And to those that stood by her she said:
"Look now! Up to the Kombuis has the master sent Niklaas, to see how the Hollander works his tobacco, and the lands by the river he has left to Ockert and me."
Up in the Kombuis—that most beautiful and most isolated of all the valleys among the Zwartkops foothills—Niklaas, having abandoned his wife and his children, his lands and his tobacco, his conscience and his God, now lived in a mud-walled, one-roomed hut with Koba Nooi and worked for his new master the Hollander. The Hollander was a young and ambitious man who had built a small factory in the valley and was working tobacco there in ways that were new and strange to Niklaas. Koba's ways were also strange to him, and as the fever of his madness subsided, it seemed to the bijwoner that this plump, pleasant, and rather greedy woman, with her gentle chatter and her little giggle, was as secret as his own wife Toontje. Toontje's silence, it dawned upon him slowly, hid no more from him than did Koba's talk, which was often now as bewildering to him as was her mirror. The mirror she kept in a little cardboard box shaped like a coffin, and there came a day when Niklaas found her down by the Hollander's gaily painted house flashing her mirror in the sun. When questioned she giggled, slipped the mirror into its box, and said, in her gentle sing-song voice:
"Ach no, then, Niklaas! Leave me and my mirror alone, or I also one day will be sending your clothes after you like your wife Toontje!"
The bundle which Toontje had sent him was stowed away on top of the mud wall, under the thatch, and because of Koba's jeers Niklaas had never opened it.
This meeting, for Niklaas, was the beginning of a vague uneasiness about Koba which steadily increased as her disappearances from the hut became more and more frequent and prolonged. In the factory also the bijwoner was far from happy, and there was constant friction between him and his new master. No man in all the Kombuis valley knew more about Platkops tobacco than Niklaas had learned in his long service with Mijnheer van Reenen, but he parted with his knowledge to the Hollander in a spirit of bitter, contemptuous niggardliness which not only the young man, but Koba Nooi, resented.
One day Koba said to him strangely: "Ach no, then, Niklaas! Did I not bring you here to please the Hollander, and now you will not please him!"
"But Koba," said Niklaas, "was it only for this that we came to the Kombuis . . . to please the Hollander?"
"Ach no, then," answered Koba. "Such a nice young man as the Hollander is, who would not wish to please him? Rich he is and all, and did he not need such a man as you, that knows all about Platkops tobacco, when I brought you here to help him?"
"But Koba," began Niklaas again . . .
"Ach no, then, Niklaas!" interrupted Koba. "If the Hollander says to you 'Go!' where will you go? To your daughter Saartje or your wife Toontje? Say for me now, which will it be?"
Niklaas could not say, and knew that Koba knew it. That night he lay for long awake, and in the new anxiety which Koba's question had aroused, the conscience which he had so triumphantly abandoned in his flight from Platkops regained its possession of his soul. His sense of righteousness and sin returned to him, his fear of justice and of vengeance, and he who had once counted himself among the elect now knew himself to be among the damned. In the days that followed so great became his distress that he tried even to speak with Koba of their sin. But no regrets for the past, no fears for the future, had ever troubled Koba, and she would not, to oblige the weak and repentant Niklaas, allow them to trouble her now.
"Ach no, then, Niklaas," she said, "surely now if you talk to me so both you and your clothes after you will I send out of the Kombuis, and where then will you go?"
And Niklaas saw himself for ever a prisoner in the Kombuis, a sinner who had sold himself to Koba Nooi and the Devil.
In September month Niklaas planted out for the Hollander the tobacco which had been sown for him in April. The lands lay some distance from the factory, and here Niklaas was free from both Koba and his master, but this freedom brought no peace to his soul. His thoughts, burdened always now by the sense of his sin, went back in a dull hopeless brooding to his own lands near Platkops dorp, to his wife Toontje for whom his hatred had long since died down, to his children, and to Saartje in the Philip district. In the lands, he thought, a stranger must now be planting out tobacco for Mijnheer van Reenen as he was here planting it out for the Hollander. But where, when his hard and pitiless old master had turned them off his lands, had Toontje gone with the children? There was but one thing she could do, he thought. And he saw his children adopted into the homes of others, as children of the poor were sometimes adopted, and Toontje herself in the house of strangers. So, he thought, was his sin, and their shame, published to all the world in Platkops dorp.
There came a day when Niklaas, in a drifting, aimless misery of remorse and indecision, ceased working in the lands and went down to the factory. As he neared the Hollander's gay, blue, wooden house he saw Koba on the steps of the stoep. She wore her sprigged cotton gown and her hat trimmed with ribbons, and sat there flashing her mirror in the sun. As Niklaas watched her the Hollander himself came out of the house and sat down beside her. Niklaas heard Koba's little giggle and her pleasant sing-song, "Ach no, then, Mijnheer!" as the Hollander put his arm round her waist. For a moment he lingered. Then as Koba, pressing her face against the Hollander's, held the mirror up before them, the bijwoner turned and fled.
When he came, exhausted, to the hut, Niklaas was clear about one thing only—he was no longer Koba's prisoner. With no thought but of escape he gathered together his few possessions, adding Toontje's bundle to the rest, and left the hut. Making his way along a low line of kopjes, bright with spring flowers, he left the valley behind him and came at last, after several hours, to the Platkops-Philip dorp road. Here he was brought to a sudden halt, for by that road a man must travel either south or north. And neither south to Platkops, where his children were bonded like slaves, nor north to Philip dorp, where his shame would be Saartje's, could he now go. His way must lie to the east, ahead of him, among the pathless foothills by which in time he might come to the Ghamka pass and so through the mountains to the Malgas district. The Malgas district, in the great Karoo, was dry and waterless, and no tobacco was grown there. All his life he had lived in tobacco lands, but now to Malgas he must go, and live how and where he could. . . .
He turned aside to the shelter of a prickly-pear thicket, and sat there, a weak, foolish, suffering and repentant old man, staring hopelessly with pale red-lidded eyes at the road before him. He thought again of his tobacco lands down by the river near Platkops dorp, of Toontje and his children, of Saartje, and through his soul there swept a desolation such as he had never before endured. Around him all the veld was gay as a carpet with flowers, and close to where he sat was a bright crimson cluster that made him think of the burning bush out of which the Lord had once spoken to Moses. But the Lord never now spoke to His people, and who was he, a sinner from the Kombuis, that the Lord should speak to him?
He turned from the flowers and began rearranging his bundles for the trek to Malgas. A slip of paper fluttered out on to the ground and he stopped to pick it up. Laboriously, holding it close to his pale weak eyes, he spelled out Toontje's letter.
"Niklaas," it ran, "the master told me this day that he will leave the lands to Ockert and me till you come again to Platkops dorp, and to all that speak of it he says that he himself has sent you to the Kombuis to see how the Hollander works his tobacco. This I will tell to our daughter Saartje, for surely Niklaas, when your madness leaves you, you will come again to our children and me,
TOONTJE."
And then came that sentence which Toontje had risen in the night to add: "God forgive me, Niklaas, if I should judge you, for there is not one of us that has not sinned."
Many, many times did Niklaas read this letter before its meaning became clear to him, and then it was as if in pity and forgiveness God Himself had spoken. With stupid fumbling fingers and eyes made redder than ever with tears, he tied his bundles together and took the road to Platkops dorp.
- ↑ Bijwoner = by-dweller: a man who lives on the farm of another, working certain lands in part shares for the owner.