The Little Karoo/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.