Caledon, Dec. 10th.
Ididnot feel at all well at Simon’s Bay, which is a land of hurricanes. We had a ‘south-easter’ for fourteen days, without an hour’s lull; even the flag-ship had no communication with the shore for eight days. The good old naval surgeon there ordered me to start off for this high ‘up-country’ district, and arranged my departure for the firstpossibleday. He made a bargain for me with a Dutchman, for a light Malay cart (a capital vehicle with two wheels) and four horses, for 30s.a day—three days to Caledon from Simon’s Bay, about a hundred miles or so, and one day of back fare to his home in Capetown.
Luckily, on Saturday the wind dropped, and we started at nine o’clock, drove to a place about four miles from Capetown, when we turned off on the ‘country road’, and outspanned at a post-house kept by a nice old German with a Dutch wife. Once well out of Capetown, people are civil, but inquisitive; I was strictly cross-questioned, and proved so satisfactory, that the old man wished to give me some English porter gratis. We then jogged along again at a very good pace to another wayside public, where we outspanned again and ate, and were again questioned, and again made much of. By six o’clock we got to the Eerste River, having gone forty miles or so in the day. It was a beautiful day, and very pleasant travelling. We had three good little half-Arab bays, and one brute of a grey as off-wheeler, who fell down continually; but a Malay driver works miracles, and no harm came of it. The cart is small, with a permanent tilt at top, and moveable curtains of waterproof all round; harness of raw leather, very prettily put together by Malay workmen. We sat behind, and our brown coachman, with his mushroom hat, in front, with my bath and box, and a miniature of himself about seven years old—a nephew,—so small and handy that he would be worth his weight in jewels as a tiger. At Eerste River we slept in a pretty old Dutch house, kept by an English woman, and called the Fox and Hound, ‘to sound like home, my lady.’ Very nice and comfortable it was.
I started next day at ten; and never shall I forget that day’s journey. The beauty of the country exceeds all description. Ranges of mountains beyond belief fantastic in shape, and between them a rolling country, desolate and wild, and covered with gorgeous flowers among the ‘scrub’. First we came to Hottentot’s Holland (now called Somerset West), the loveliest little old Dutch village, with trees and little canals of bright clear mountain water, and groves of orange and pomegranate, and white houses, with incredible gable ends. We tried to stop here; but forage was ninepence a bundle, and the true Malay would rather die than pay more than he can help. So we pushed on to the foot of the mountains, and bought forage (forage is oatsau natural, straw and all, the only feed known here, where there is no grass or hay) at a farm kept by English people, who all talked Dutch together; only one girl of the family could speak English. They were very civil, asked us in, and gave us unripe apricots, and the girl came down with seven flounces, to talk with us. Forage was still ninepence—half a dollar a bundle—and Choslullah Jaamee groaned over it, and said the horses must have less forage and ‘more plenty roll’ (a roll in the dust is often the only refreshment offered to the beasts, and seems to do great good).
We got to Caledon at eleven, and drove to the place the Doctor recommended—formerly a country house of the Dutch Governor. It is in a lovely spot; but do you remember the Schloss in Immermann’s Neuer Münchausen? Well, it is that. A ruin;—windows half broken and boarded up, the handsome steps in front fallen in, and allen suite. The rooms I saw were large and airy; but mud floors, white-washed walls, one chair, one stump bedstead, andpræterea nihil. It has a sort of wild, romantic look; I hear, too, it is wonderfully healthy, and not so bad as it looks. The long corridor is like the entrance to a great stable, or some such thing; earth floors and open to all winds. But you can’t imagine it, however I may describe; it is so huge and strange, and ruinous. Finding that the mistress of the house was ill, and nothing ready for our reception, I drove on to the inn. Rain, like a Scotch mist, came on just as we arrived, and it is damp and chilly, to the delight of all the dwellers in the land, who love bad weather. It makes me cough a little more; but they say it is quite unheard of, and can’t last. Altogether, I suppose this summer here is as that of ’60 was in England.
I forgot, in describing my journey, the regal-looking Caffre housemaid at Eerste River. ‘Such a dear, good creature,’ the landlady said; and, oh, such a ‘noble savage’!—with a cotton handkerchief folded tight like a cravat and tied round her head with a bow behind, and the short curly wool sticking up in the middle;—it looked like a royal diadem on her solemn brow; she stepped like Juno, with a huge tub full to the brim, and holding several pailfuls, on her head, and a pailful in each hand, bringing water for the stables from the river, across a large field. There is nothing like a Caffre for power and grace; and the face, though very African, has a sort of grandeur which makes it utterly unlike that of the negro. That woman’s bust and waist were beauty itself. The Caffres are also very clean and very clever as servants, I hear, learning cookery, &c., in a wonderfully short time. When they have saved money enough to buy cattle in Kaffraria, off they go, cast aside civilization and clothes, and enjoy life in naked luxury.
I can’t tell you how I longed for you in my journey. You would have been so delighted with the country and the queer turn-out—the wild little horses, and the polite and delicately-clean Moslem driver. His description of his sufferings from ‘louses’, when he slept in a Dutch farm, were pathetic, and ever since, he sleeps in his cart, with the little boy; and they bathe in the nearest river, and eat their lawful food and drink their water out of doors. They declined beer, or meat which had been unlawfully killed. In Capetownallmeat is killed by Malays, and has the proper prayer spoken over it, and they will eat no other. I was offered a fowl at a farm, but Choslullah thought it ‘too much money for Missus’, and only accepted some eggs. He was gratified at my recognising the propriety of his saying ‘Bismillah’ over any animal killed for food. Some drink beer, and drink a good deal, but Choslullah thought it ‘very wrong for Malay people, and not good for Christian people, to be drunk beasties;—little wine or beer good for Christians, but not too plenty much.’ I gave him ten shillings for himself, at which he was enchanted, and again begged me to write to his master for him when I wanted to leave Caledon, and to be sure to say, ‘Mind send same coachman.’ He planned to drive me back through Worcester, Burnt Vley, Paarl, and Stellenbosch—a longer round; but he could do it in three days well, so as ‘not cost Missus more money’, and see a different country.
This place is curiously like Rochefort in the Ardennes, only the hills are mountains, and the sun is far hotter; not so the air, which is fresh and pleasant. I am in a very nice inn, kept by an English ex-officer, who went through the Caffre war, and found his pay insufficient for the wants of a numerous family. I quite admire his wife, who cooks, cleans, nurses her babes, gives singing and music lessons,—all as merrily as if she liked it. I dine with them at two o’clock, and Captain D— has atable d’hôteat seven for travellers. I pay only 10s.6d.a day for myself and S—; this includes all but wine or beer. The air is very clear and fine, and my cough is already much better. I shall stay here as long as it suits me and does me good, and then I am to send for Choslullah again, and go back by the road he proposed. It rains here now and then, and blows a good deal, but the wind has lost its bitter chill, and depressing quality. I hope soon to ride a little and see the country, which is beautiful.
The water-line is all red from the iron stone, and there are hot chalybeate springs up the mountain which are very good for rheumatism, and very strengthening, I am told. The boots here is a Mantatee, very black, and called Kleenboy, because he is so little; he is the only sleek black I have seen here, but looks heavy and downcast. One maid is Irish (they make the best servants here), a very nice clean girl, and the other, a brown girl of fifteen, whose father is English, and married to her mother. Food here is scarce, all but bread and mutton, both good. Butter is 3s.a pound; fruit and vegetables only to be had by chance. I miss the oranges and lemons sadly. Poultry and milk uncertain. The bread is good everywhere, from the fine wheat: in the country it is brownish and sweet. The wine here is execrable; this is owing to the prevailing indolence, for there is excellent wine made from the Rhenish grape, rather like Sauterne, with asoupçonof Manzanilla flavour. The sweet Constantia is also very good indeed; not the expensive sort, which is made from grapes half dried, and is a liqueur, but a light, sweet, straw-coloured wine, which even I liked. We drank nothing else at the Admiral’s. The kind old sailor has given me a dozen of wine, which is coming up here in a waggon, and will be most welcome. I can’t tell you how kind he and Lady Walker were; I was there three weeks, and hope to go again when the south-easter season is over and I can get out a little. I could not leave the house at all; and even Lady Walker and the girls, who are very energetic, got out but little. They are a charming family.
I have no doubt that Dr. Shea was right, and that one must leave the coast to get a fine climate. Here it seems to me nearly perfect—too windy for my pleasure, but then the sun would be overpowering without a fresh breeze. Every one agrees in saying that the winter in Capetown is delicious—like a fine English summer. In November the south-easters begin, and they are ‘fiendish’; this year they began in September. The mornings here are always fresh, not to say cold; the afternoons, from one to three, broiling; then delightful till sunset, which is deadly cold for three-quarters of an hour; the night is lovely. The wind rises and falls with the sun. That is the general course of things. Now and then it rains, and this year there is a little south-easter, which is quite unusual, and not odious, as it is near the sea; and there is seldom a hot wind from the north. I am promised that on or about Christmas-day; then doors and windows are shut, and you gasp. Hitherto we have had nothing nearly so hot as Paris in summer, or as the summer of 1859 in England; and they say it is no hotter, except when the hot wind blows, which is very rare. Up here, snow sometimes lies, in winter, on the mountain tops; but ice is unknown, and Table Mountain is never covered with snow. The flies are pestilent—incredibly noisy, intrusive, and disgusting—and oh, such swarms! Fleas and bugs not half so bad as in France, as far as my experience goes, and I have poked about in queer places.
I get up at half-past five, and walk in the early morning, before the sun and wind begin to be oppressive; it is then dry, calm, and beautiful; then I sleep like a Dutchman in the middle of the day. At present it tires me, but I shall get used to it soon. The Dutch doctor here advised me to do so, to avoid the wind.
When all was settled, we climbed the Hottentot’s mountains by Sir Lowry’s Pass, a long curve round two hill-sides; and what a view! Simon’s Bay opening out far below, and range upon range of crags on one side, with a wide fertile plain, in which lies Hottentot’s Holland, at one’s feet. The road is just wide enough for one waggon, i.e. very narrow. Where the smooth rock came through, Choslullah gave a little grunt, and the three bays went off like hippogriffs, dragging the grey with them. By this time my confidence in his driving was boundless, or I should have expected to find myself in atoms at the bottom of the precipice. At the top of the pass we turned a sharp corner into a scene like the crater of a volcano, only reaching miles away all round; and we descended a very little and drove on along great rolling waves of country, with the mountain tops, all crags and ruins, to our left. At three we reached Palmiet River, full of palmettos and bamboos, and there the horses had ‘a little roll’, and Choslullah and his miniature washed in the river and prayed, and ate dry bread, and drank their tepid water out of a bottle with great good breeding and cheerfulness. Three bullock-waggons had outspanned, and the Dutch boers and Bastaards (half Hottentots) were all drunk. We went into a neat little ‘public’, and had porter and ham sandwiches, for which I paid 4s.6d.to a miserable-looking English woman, who was afraid of her tipsy customers. We got to Houw Hoek, a pretty valley at the entrance of a mountain gorge, about half-past five, and drove up to a mud cottage, half inn, half farm, kept by a German and his wife. It looked mighty queer, but Choslullah said the host was a good old man, and all clean. So we cheered up, and asked for food. While the neat old woman was cooking it, up galloped five fine lads and two pretty flaxen-haired girls, with real German faces, on wild little horses; and one girl tucked up her habit, and waited at table, while another waved a green bough to drive off the swarms of flies. The chops were excellent, ditto bread and butter, and the tea tolerable. The parlour was a tiny room with a mud floor, half-hatch door into the front, and the two bedrooms still tinier and darker, each with two huge beds which filled them entirely. But Choslullah was right; they were perfectly clean, with heaps of beautiful pillows; and not only none of the creatures of which he spoke with infinite terror, but even no fleas. The man was delighted to talk to me. His wife had almost forgotten German, and the children did not know a word of it, but spoke Dutch and English. A fine, healthy, happy family. It was a pretty picture of emigrant life. Cattle, pigs, sheep, and poultry, and pigeons innumerable, all picked up their own living, and cost nothing; and vegetables and fruit grow in rank abundance where there is water. I asked for a book in the evening, and the man gave me a volume of Schiller. A good breakfast,—and we paid ninepence for all.
This morning we started before eight, as it looked gloomy, and came through a superb mountain defile, out on to a rich hillocky country, covered with miles of corn, all being cut as far as the eye could reach, and we passed several circular threshing-floors, where the horses tread out the grain. Each had a few mud hovels near it, for the farmers and men to live in during harvest. Altogether, I was most lucky, had two beautiful days, and enjoyed the journey immensely. It was most ‘abentheuerlich’; the light two-wheeled cart, with four wild little horses, and the marvellous brown driver, who seemed to be always going to perdition, but made the horses do apparently impossible things with absolute certainty; and the pretty tiny boy who came to help his uncle, and was so clever, and so preternaturally quiet, and so very small: then the road through the mountain passes, seven or eight feet wide, with a precipice above and below, up which the little horses scrambled; while big lizards, with green heads and chocolate bodies, looked pertly at us, and a big bright amber-coloured cobra, as handsome as he is deadly, wriggled across into a hole.
Nearly all the people in this village are Dutch. There is one Malay tailor here, but he is obliged to be a Christian at Caledon, though Choslullah told me with a grin, he was a very good Malay when he went to Capetown. He did not seem much shocked at this double religion, staunch Mussulman as he was himself. I suppose the blacks ‘up country’ are what Dutch slavery made them—mere animals—cunning and sulky. The real Hottentot is extinct, I believe, in the Colony; what one now sees are all ‘Bastaards’, the Dutch name for their own descendants by Hottentot women. These mongrel Hottentots, who do all the work, are an affliction to behold—debased andshrivelledwith drink, and drunk all day long; sullen wretched creatures—so unlike the bright Malays and cheery pleasant blacks and browns of Capetown, who never pass you without a kind word and sunny smile or broad African grin,selontheir colour and shape of face. I look back fondly to the gracious soft-looking Malagasse woman who used to give me a chair under the big tree near Rathfelders, and a cup of ‘bosjesthée’ (herb tea), and talk so prettily in her soft voice;—it is such a contrast to these poor animals, who glower at one quite unpleasantly. All the hovels I was in at Capetown were very fairly clean, and I went into numbers. They almost all contained a handsome bed, with, at least, eight pillows. If you only look at the door with a friendly glance, you are implored to come in and sit down, and usually offered a ‘coppj’ (cup) of herb tea, which they are quite grateful to one for drinking. I never saw or heard a hint of ‘backsheesh’, nor did I ever give it, on principle and I was always recognised and invited to come again with the greatest eagerness. ‘An indulgence of talk’ from an English ‘Missis’ seemed the height of gratification, and the pride and pleasure of giving hospitality a sufficient reward. But here it is quite different. I suppose the benefits of the emancipation were felt at Capetown sooner than in the country, and the Malay population there furnishes a strong element of sobriety and respectability, which sets an example to the other coloured people.
Harvest is now going on, and the so-called Hottentots are earning 2s.6d.a day, with rations and wine. But all the money goes at the ‘canteen’ in drink, and the poor wretched men and women look wasted and degraded. The children are pretty, and a few of them are half-breed girls, who do very well, unless a white man admires them; and then they think it quite an honour to have a whitey-brown child, which happens at about fifteen, by which age they look full twenty.
We had very good snipe and wild duck the other day, which Capt. D— brought home from a shooting party. I have got the moth-like wings of a golden snipe for R—’s hat, and those of a beautiful moor-hen. They got no ‘boks’, because of the violent south-easter which blew where they were. The game is fast decreasing, but still very abundant. I saw plenty of partridges on the road, but was not early enough to see boks, who only show at dawn; neither have I seen baboons. I will try to bring home some cages of birds—Cape canaries and ‘roode bekjes’ (red bills), darling little things. The sugar-birds, which are the humming-birds of Africa, could not be fed; but Caffre finks, which weave the pendent nests, are hardy and easily fed.
To-day the post for England leaves Caledon, so I must conclude this yarn. I wish R— could have seen the ‘klip springer’, the mountain deer of South Africa, which Capt. D— brought in to show me. Such a lovely little beast, as big as a small kid, with eyes and ears like a hare, and a nose so small and dainty. It was quite tame and saucy, and belonged to some manen routefor Capetown.
Caledon, Dec. 29th.
Iambeginning now really to feel better: I think my cough is less, and I eat a great deal more. They cook nice clean food here, and have some good claret, which I have been extravagant enough to drink, much to my advantage. The Cape wine is all so fiery. The climate is improving too. The glorious African sun blazes and roasts one, and the cool fresh breezes prevent one from feeling languid. I walk from six till eight or nine, breakfast at ten, and dine at three; in the afternoon it is generally practicable to saunter again, now the weather is warmer. I sleep from twelve till two. On Christmas-eve it was so warm that I lay in bed with the window wide open, and the stars blazing in. Such stars! they are much brighter than our moon. The Dutchmen held high jinks in the hall, and danced and made a great noise. On New Year’s-eve they will have another ball, and I shall look in. Christmas-day was the hottest day—indeed, the onlyhotday we have had—and I could not make it out at all, or fancy you all cold at home.
I wish you were here to see the curious ways and new aspect of everything. This village, which, as I have said, is very like Rochefort, but hardly so large, is thechef lieuof a district the size of one-third of England. A civil commander resides here, a sort ofpréfet; and there is an embryo market-place, with a bell hanging in a brick arch. When a waggon arrives with goods, it draws up there, they ring the bell, everybody goes to see what is for sale, and the goods are sold by auction. My host bought potatoes and brandy the other day, and is looking out for ostrich feathers for me, out of the men’s hats.
The other day, while we sat at dinner, all the bells began to ring furiously, and Capt. D— jumped up and shouted ‘Brand!’ (fire), rushed off for a stout leather hat, and ran down the street. Out came all the population, black, white, and brown, awfully excited, for it was blowing a furious north-wester, right up the town, and the fire was at the bottom; and as every house is thatched with a dry brown thatch, we might all have to turn out and see the place in ashes in less than an hour. Luckily, it was put out directly. It is supposed to have been set on fire by a Hottentot girl, who has done the same thing once before, on being scolded. There is no water but what runs down the streets in thesloot, a paved channel, which brings the water from the mountain and supplies the houses and gardens. A garden is impossible without irrigation, of course, as it never rains; but with it, you may have everything, all the year round. The people, however, are too careless to grow fruit and vegetables.
How the cattle live is a standing marvel to me. The wholeveld(common), which extends all over the country (just dotted with a few square miles of corn here and there), is covered with a low thin scrub, about eighteen inches high, calledrhenoster-bosch—looking like meagre arbor vitæ or pale juniper. The cattle and sheep will not touch this nor the juicy Hottentot fig; but under each little bush, I fancy, they crop a few blades of grass, and on this they keep in very good condition. The noble oxen, with their huge horns (nine or ten feet from tip to tip), are never fed, though they work hard, nor are the sheep. The horses get a little forage (oats, straw and all). I should like you to see eight or ten of these swift wiry little horses harnessed to a waggon,—a mere flat platform on wheels. In front stands a wild-looking Hottentot, all patches and feathers, and drives them best pace, all ‘in hand’, using a whip like a fishing-rod, with which he touches them, not savagely, but with a skill which would make an old stage-coachman burst with envy to behold. This morning, out on the veld, I watched the process of breaking-in a couple of colts, who were harnessed, after many struggles, second and fourth in a team of ten. In front stood a tiny foal cuddling its mother, one of the leaders. When they started, the foal had its neck through the bridle, and I hallooed in a fright; but the Hottentot only laughed, and in a minute it had disengaged itself quite coolly and capered alongside. The colts tried to plunge, but were whisked along, and couldn’t, and then they stuck out all four feet andskiddedalong a bit; but the rhenoster bushes tripped them up (people drive regardless of roads), and they shook their heads and trotted along quite subdued, without a blow or a word, for the drivers never speak to the horses, only to the oxen. Colts here get no other breaking, and therefore have no paces or action to the eye, but their speed and endurance are wonderful. There is no such thing as a cock-tail in the country, and the waggon teams of wiry little thoroughbreds, half Arab, look very strange to our eyes, going full tilt. There is a terrible murrain, called the lung-sickness, among horses and oxen here, every four or five years, but it never touches those that are stabled, however exposed to wet or wind on the roads.
I must describe the house I inhabit, as all are much alike. It is whitewashed, with a door in the middle and two windows on each side; those on the left are Mrs. D—’s bed and sitting rooms. On the right is a large room, which is mine; in the middle of the house is a spacious hall, with doors into other rooms on each side, and into the kitchen, &c. There is a yard behind, and a staircase up to thezolderor loft, under the thatch, with partitions, where the servants and children, and sometimes guests, sleep. There are no ceilings; the floor of the zolder is made of yellow wood, and, resting on beams, forms the ceiling of my room, and the thatch alone covers that. No moss ever grows on the thatch, which is brown, with white ridges. In front is a stoep, with ‘blue gums’ (Australian gum-trees) in front of it, where I sit till twelve, when the sun comes on it. These trees prevail here greatly, as they want neither water nor anything else, and grow with incredible rapidity.
We have got a new ‘boy’ (all coloured servants are ‘boys,’—a remnant of slavery), and he is the type of the nigger slave. A thief, a liar, a glutton, a drunkard—but you can’t resent it; he has anaïf, half-foolish, half-knavish buffoonery, a total want of self-respect, which disarms you. I sent him to the post to inquire for letters, and the postmaster had been tipsy over-night and was not awake. Jack came back spluttering threats against ‘dat domned Dutchman. Me nowant(like) him; me go and kick up dom’d row. What for he no give Missis letter?’ &c. I begged him to be patient; on which he bonneted himself in a violent way, and started off at a pantomime walk. Jack is the product of slavery: he pretends to be a simpleton in order to do less work and eat and drink and sleep more than a reasonable being, and he knows his buffoonery will get him out of scrapes. Withal, thoroughly good-natured and obliging, and perfectly honest, except where food and drink are concerned, which he pilfers like a monkey. He worships S—, and won’t allow her to carry anything, or to dirty her hands, if he is in the way to do it. Some one suggested to him to kiss her, but he declined with terror, and said he should be hanged by my orders if he did. He is a hideous little negro, with a monstrous-shaped head, every colour of the rainbow on his clothes, and a power of making faces which would enchant a schoolboy. The height of his ambition would be to go to England with me.
An old ‘bastaard’ woman, married to the Malay tailor here, explained to me my popularity with the coloured people, as set forth by ‘dat Malay boy’, my driver. He told them he was sure I was a ‘very great Missis’, because of my ‘plenty good behaviour’; that I spoke to him just as to a white gentleman, and did not ‘laugh and talk nonsense talk’. ‘Never say “Here, you black fellow”, dat Misses.’ The English, when they mean to be good-natured, are generally offensively familiar, and ‘talk nonsense talk’, i.e. imitate the Dutch English of the Malays and blacks; the latter feel it the greatest compliment to be treatedau sérieux, and spoken to in good English. Choslullah’s theory was that I must be related to the Queen, in consequence of my not ‘knowing bad behaviour’. The Malays, who are intelligent and proud, of course feel the annoyance of vulgar familiarity more than the blacks, who are rather awe-struck by civility, though they like and admire it.
Mrs. D— tells me that the coloured servant-girls, with all their faults, are immaculately honest in these parts; and, indeed, as every door and window is always left open, even when every soul is out, and nothing locked up, there must be no thieves. Captain D— told me he had been in remote Dutch farmhouses, where rouleaux of gold were ranged under the thatch on the top of the low wall, the doors being always left open; and everywhere the Dutch boers keep their money by them, in coin.
Jan.3d.—We have had tremendous festivities here—a ball on New Year’s-eve, and another on the 1st of January—and the shooting for Prince Alfred’s rifle yesterday. The difficulty of music for the ball was solved by the arrival of two Malay bricklayers to build the new parsonage, and I heard with my own ears the proof of what I had been told as to their extraordinary musical gifts. When I went into the hall, a Dutchman wasscreechinga concertina hideously. Presently in walked a yellow Malay, with a blue cotton handkerchief on his head, and a half-bred of negro blood (very dark brown), with a red handkerchief, and holding a rough tambourine. The handsome yellow man took the concertina which seemed so discordant, and the touch of his dainty fingers transformed it to harmony. He played dances with a precision and feeling quite unequalled, except by Strauss’s band, and a variety which seemed endless. I asked him if he could read music, at which he laughed heartily, and said, music came into the ears, not the eyes. He had picked it all up from the bands in Capetown, or elsewhere.
It was a strange sight,—the picturesque group, and the contrast between the quiet manners of the true Malay and the grotesque fun of the half-negro. The latter made his tambourine do duty as a drum, rattled the bits of brass so as to produce an indescribable effect, nodded and grinned in wild excitement, and drank beer while his comrade took water. The dancing was uninteresting enough. The Dutchmen danced badly, and said not a word, but plodded on so as to get all the dancing they could for their money. I went to bed at half-past eleven, but the ball went on till four.
Next night there was genteeler company, and I did not go in, but lay in bed listening to the Malay’s playing. He had quite a fresh set of tunes, of which several were from the ‘Traviata’!
Yesterday was a real African summer’s day. The D—s had a tent and an awning, one for food and the other for drink, on the ground where the shooting took place. At twelve o’clock Mrs. D— went down to sell cold chickens, &c., and I went with her, and sat under a tree in the bed of the little stream, now nearly dry. The sun was such as in any other climate would strike you down, but herecoup de soleilis unknown. It broils you till your shoulders ache and your lips crack, but it does not make you feel the least languid, and you perspire very little; nor does it tan the skin as you would expect. The light of the sun is by no means ‘golden’—it is pure white—and the slightest shade of a tree or bush affords a delicious temperature, so light and fresh is the air. They said the thermometer was at about 130° where I was walking yesterday, but (barring the scorch) I could not have believed it.
It was a very amusing day. The great tall Dutchmen came in to shoot, and did but moderately, I thought. The longest range was five hundred yards, and at that they shot well; at shorter ranges, poorly enough. The best man made ten points. But oh! what figures were there of negroes and coloured people! I longed for a photographer. Some coloured lads were exquisitely graceful, and composed beautifultableaux vivants, after Murillo’s beggar-boys.
A poor little, very old Bosjesman crept up, and was jeered and bullied. I scolded the lad who abused him for being rude to an old man, whereupon the poor little old creature squatted on the ground close by (for which he would have been kicked but for me), took off his ragged hat, and sat staring and nodding his small grey woolly head at me, and jabbering some little soliloquy verysotto voce. There was something shocking in the timidity with which he took the plate of food I gave him, and in the way in which he ate it, with thewrongside of his little yellow hand, like a monkey. A black, who had helped to fetch the hamper, suggested to me to give him wine instead of meat and bread, and make him drunkfor fun(the blacks and Hottentots copy the white man’s mannersto them, when they get hold of a Bosjesman to practise upon); but upon this a handsome West Indian black, who had been cooking pies, fired up, and told him he was a ‘nasty black rascal, and a Dutchman to boot’, to insult a lady and an old man at once. If you could see the difference between one negro and another, you would be quite convinced that education (i.e. circumstances) makes the race. It was hardly conceivable that the hideous, dirty, bandy-legged, ragged creature, who looked down on the Bosjesman, and the well-made, smart fellow, with his fine eyes, jaunty red cap, and snow-white shirt and trousers, alert as the best German Kellner, were of the same blood; nothing but the colour was alike.
Then came a Dutchman, and asked for six penn’orth of ‘brood en kaas’, and haggled for beer; and Englishmen, who bought chickens and champagne without asking the price. One rich old boer got three lunches, and then ‘trekked’ (made off) without paying at all. Then came a Hottentot, stupidly drunk, with a fiddle, and was beaten by a little red-haired Scotchman, and his fiddle smashed. The Hottentot hit at his aggressor, who then declared hehad beena policeman, and insisted on taking him into custody and to the ‘Tronk’ (prison) on his own authority, but was in turn sent flying by a gigantic Irishman, who ‘wouldn’t see the poor baste abused’. The Irishman was a farmer; I never saw such a Hercules—and beaming with fun and good nature. He was very civil, and answered my questions, and talked like an intelligent man; but when Captain D— asked him with an air of some anxiety, if he was coming to the hotel, he replied, ‘No, sir, no; I wouldn’t be guilty of such a misdemeanour. I am aware that I was a disgrace and opprobrium to your house, sir, last time I was there, sir. No, sir, I shall sleep in my cart, and not come into the presence of ladies.’ Hereupon he departed, and I was informed that he had been drunk for seventeen days,sans désemparer, on his last visit to Caledon. However, he kept quite sober on this occasion, and amused himself by making the little blackies scramble for halfpence in the pools left in the bed of the river. Among our customers was a very handsome black man, with high straight nose, deep-set eyes, and a small mouth, smartly dressed in a white felt hat, paletot, and trousers. He is the shoemaker, and is making a pair of ‘Veldschoen’ for you, which you will delight in. They are what the rough boers and Hottentots wear, buff-hide barbarously tanned and shaped, and as soft as woollen socks. The Othello-looking shoemaker’s name is Moor, and his father told him he came of a ‘good breed’; that was all he knew.
A very pleasing English farmer, who had been educated in Belgium, came and ordered a bottle of champagne, and shyly begged me to drink a glass, whereupon we talked of crops and the like; and an excellent specimen of a colonist he appeared: very gentle and unaffected, with homely good sense, and real good breeding—such a contrast to the pert airs and vulgarity of Capetown and of the people in (colonial) high places. Finding we had no carriage, he posted off and borrowed a cart of one man and harness of another, and put his and his son’s riding horses to it, to take Mrs. D— and me home. As it was still early, he took us a ‘little drive’; and oh, ye gods! what a terrific and dislocating pleasure was that! At a hard gallop, Mr. M— (with the mildest and steadiest air and with perfect safety) took us right across country. It is true there were no fences; but over bushes, ditches, lumps of rock, watercourses, we jumped, flew, and bounded, and up every hill we went racing pace. I arrived at home much bewildered, and feeling more like Bürger’s Lenore than anything else, till I saw Mr. M—’s steady, pleasant face quite undisturbed, and was informed that such was the way of driving of Cape farmers.
We found the luckless Jack in such a state of furious drunkenness that he had to be dismissed on the spot, not without threats of the ‘Tronk’, and once more Kleenboy fills the office of boots. He returned in a ludicrous state of penitence and emaciation, frankly admitting that it was better to work hard and get ‘plenty grub’, than to work less and get none;—still, however, protesting against work at all.
January7th.—For the last four days it has again been blowing a wintry hurricane. Every one says that the continuance of these winds so late into the summer (this answers to July) is unheard of, andmustcease soon. In Table Bay, I hear a good deal of mischief has been done to the shipping.
I hope my long yarns won’t bore you. I put down what seems new and amusing to me at the moment, but by the time it reaches you, it will seem very dull and commonplace. I hear that the Scotchman who attacked poor Aria, the crazy Hottentot, is a ‘revival lecturer’, and was ‘simply exhorting him to break his fiddle and come to Christ’ (the phrase is a clergyman’s, I beg to observe); and the saints are indignant that, after executing the pious purpose as far as the fiddle went, he was prevented by the chief constable from dragging him to the Tronk. The ‘revival’ mania has broken out rather violently in some places; the infection was brought from St. Helena, I am told. At Capetown, old Abdool Jemaalee told me that English Christians were getting more like Malays, and had begun to hold ‘Kalifahs’ at Simon’s Bay. These are festivals in which Mussulman fanatics run knives into their flesh, go into convulsions, &c, to the sound of music, like the Arab described by Houdin. Of course the poor blacks go quite demented.
I intend to stay here another two or three weeks, and then to go to Worcester—stay a bit; Paarl, ditto; Stellenbosch, ditto—and go to Capetown early in March, and in April to embark for home.
January15th.—No mail in yet. We have had beautiful weather the last three days. Captain D— has been in Capetown, and bought a horse, which he rode home seventy-five miles in a day and a half,—the beast none the worse nor tired. I am to ride him, and so shall see the country if the vile cold winds keep off.
This morning I walked on the Veld, and met a young black shepherd leading his sheep and goats, and playing on a guitar composed of an old tin mug covered with a bit of sheepskin and a handle of rough wood, with pegs, and three strings of sheep-gut. I asked him to sing, and he flung himself at my feet in an attitude that would make Watts crazy with delight, andcroonedqueer little mournful ditties. I gave him sixpence, and told him not to get drunk. He said, ‘Oh no; I will buy bread enough to make my belly stiff—I almost never had my belly stiff.’ He likewise informed me he had just been in the Tronk (prison), and on my asking why, replied: ‘Oh, for fighting, and telling lies;’ Die liebe Unschuld! (Dear innocence!)
Hottentot figs are rather nice—a green fig-shaped thing, containing about a spoonful ofsalt-sweetinsipid glue, which you suck out. This does not sound nice, but it is. The plant has a thick, succulent, triangular leaf, creeping on the ground, and growing anywhere, without earth or water. Figs proper are common here, but tasteless; and the people pick all their fruit green, and eat it so too. The children are all crunching hard peaches and plums just now, particularly some little half-breeds near here, who are frightfully ugly. Fancy the children of a black woman and a red-haired man; the little monsters are as black as the mother, and haveredwool—you never saw so diabolical an appearance. Some of the coloured people are very pretty; for example, a coal-black girl of seventeen, and my washerwoman, who is brown. They are wonderfully slender and agile, and quite old hard-working women have waists you could span. They never grow thick and square, like Europeans.
I could write a volume on Cape horses. Such valiant little beasts, and so composed in temper, I never saw. They are nearly all bays—a few very dark grey, which are esteemed;veryfew white or light grey. I have seen no black, and only one dark chestnut. They are not cobs, and look ‘very little of them’, and have no beauty; but one of these little brutes, ungroomed, half-fed, seldom stabled, will carry a six-and-a-half-foot Dutchman sixty miles a day, day after day, at a shuffling easy canter, six miles an hour. You ‘off saddle’ every three hours, and let him roll; you also let him drink all he can get; his coat shines and his eye is bright, and unsoundness is very rare. They are never properly broke, and the soft-mouthed colts are sometimes made vicious by the cruel bits and heavy hands; but by nature their temper is perfect.
Every morning all the horses in the village are turned loose, and a general gallop takes place to the water tank, where they drink and lounge a little; and the young ones are fetched home by their niggers, while the old stagers know they will be wanted, and saunter off by themselves. I often attend the Houyhnhnmconversazioneat the tank, at about seven o’clock, and am amused by their behaviour; and I continually wish I could see Ned’s face on witnessing many equine proceedings here. To see a farmer outspan and turn the team of active little beasts loose on the boundless veld to amuse themselves for an hour or two, sure that they will all be there, would astonish him a little; and then to offer a horse nothing but a roll in the dust to refresh himself withal!
One unpleasant sight here is the skeletons of horses and oxen along the roadside; or at times a fresh carcase surrounded by a convocation of huge serious-looking carrion crows, with neat white neck-cloths. The skeletons look like wrecks, and make you feel very lonely on the wide veld. In this district, and in most, I believe, the roads are mere tracks over the hard, level earth, and very good they are. When one gets rutty, you drive parallel to it, till the bush is worn out and a new track is formed.
January17th.—Lovely weather all the week. Summer well set in.
Caledon, January 19th.
Dearest Mother,
Till this last week, the weather was pertinaciously cold and windy; and I had resolved to go to Worcester, which lies in a ‘Kessel’, and is really hot. But now the glorious African summer is come, and I believe this is the weather of Paradise. I got up at four this morning, when the Dutchmen who had slept here were starting in their carts and waggons. It was quite light; but the moon shone brilliantly still, and had put on a bright rose-coloured veil, borrowed from the rising sun on the opposite horizon. The freshness (without a shadow of cold or damp) of the air was indescribable—no dew was on the ground. I went up the hill-side, along the ‘Sloot’ (channel, which supplies all our water), into the ‘Kloof’ between the mountains, and clambered up to the ‘Venster Klip’, from which natural window the view is very fine. The flowers are all gone and the grass all dead. Rhenoster boschjes and Hottentot fig are green everywhere, and among the rocks all manner of shrubs, and far too much ‘Wacht een beetje’ (Wait a bit), a sort of series of natural fish-hooks, which try the robustest patience. Between seven and eight, the sun gets rather hot, and I came in andtubbed, and sat on the stoep (a sort of terrace, in front of every house in South Africa). I breakfast at nine, sit on the stoep again till the sun comes round, and then retreat behind closed shutters from the stinging sun. Theairis fresh and light all day, though the sun is tremendous; but one has no languid feeling or desire to lie about, unless one is sleepy. We dine at two or half-past, and at four or five the heat is over, and one puts on a shawl to go out in the afternoon breeze. The nights are cool, so as always to want one blanket. I still have a cough; but it is getting better, so that I can always eat and walk. Mine host has just bought a horse, which he is going to try with a petticoat to-day, and if he goes well I shall ride.
I like this inn-life, because I see all the ‘neighbourhood’—farmers and traders—whom I like far better than thegentilityof Capetown. I have given letters to England to a ‘boer’, who is ‘going home’, i.e. to Europe, thefirst of his race since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when some poor refugees were inveigled hither by the Dutch Governor, and oppressed worse than the Hottentots. M. de Villiers has had no educationat all, and has worked, and traded, and farmed,—but the breed tells; he is a pure and thorough Frenchman, unable to speak a word of French. When I went in to dinner, he rose and gave me a chair with a bow which, with his appearance, made me ask, ‘Monsieur vient d’arriver?’ This at once put him out and pleased him. He is very unlike a Dutchman. If you think that any of the French will feel as I felt to this far-distant brother of theirs, pray give him a few letters; but remember that he can speak only English and Dutch, and a little German. Here his name iscalled‘Filljee’, but I told him to drop that barbarism in Europe; De Villiers ought to speak for itself. He says they came from the neighbourhood of Bordeaux.
The postmaster, Heer Klein, and his old Pylades, Heer Ley, are great cronies of mine—stout old greybeards, toddling down the hill together. I sometimes go and sit on the stoep with the two old bachelors, and they take it as a great compliment; and Heer Klein gave me my letters all decked with flowers, and wished ‘Vrolyke tydings, Mevrouw,’ most heartily. He has also made his tributary mail-cart Hottentots bring from various higher mountain ranges the beautiful everlasting flowers, which will make pretty wreaths for J—. When I went to his house to thank him, I found a handsome Malay, with a basket of ‘Klipkaus’, a shell-fish much esteemed here. Old Klein told me they were sent him by a Malay who was born in his father’s house, a slave, and had beenhis‘boy’ and play-fellow. Now, the slave is far richer than the old young master, and no waggon comes without a little gift—oranges, fish, &c.—for ‘Wilhem’. When Klein goes to Capetown, the old Malay seats him in a grand chair and sits on a little wooden stool at his feet; Klein begs him, as ‘Huisheer’, to sit properly; but, ‘Neen Wilhem, Ik zal niet; ik kan niet vergeten.’ ‘Good boy!’ said old Klein; ‘good people the Malays.’ It is a relief, after the horrors one has heard of Dutch cruelty, to see such an ‘idyllisches Verhältniss’. I have heard other instances of the same fidelity from Malays, but they were utterly unappreciated, and only told to prove the excellence of slavery, and ‘how well the rascals must have been off’.
I have fallen in love with a Hottentot baby here. Her mother is all black, with a broad face and soft spaniel eyes, and the father is Bastaard; but the baby (a girl, nine months old), has walked out of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s pictures. I never saw so beautiful a child. She has huge eyes with the spiritual look he gives to them, and is exquisite in every way. When the Hottentot blood is handsome, it is beautiful; there is a delicacy and softness about some of the women which is very pretty, and the eyes are those of agooddog. Most of them are hideous, and nearly all drink; but they are very clean and honest. Their cottages are far superior in cleanliness to anything out of England, except in picked places, like some parts of Belgium; and they wash as much as they can, with the bad water-supply, and the English outcry if they strip out of doors to bathe. Compared to French peasants, they are very clean indeed, and even the children are far more decent and cleanly in their habits than those of France. The woman who comes here to clean and scour is a model of neatness in her work and her person (quite black), but she gets helplessly drunk as soon as she has a penny to buy a glass of wine; for a penny, a half-pint tumbler of very strong and remarkably nasty wine is sold at the canteens.
I have many more ‘humours’ to tell, but A— can show you all the long story I have written. I hope it does not seem very stale anddecies repetita. All being new and curious to the eye here, one becomes long-winded about mere trifles.
One small thing more. The first few shillings that a coloured woman has to spend on her cottage go in—what do you think?—A grand toilet table of worked muslin over pink, all set out with little ‘objets’—such as they are: if there is nothing else, there is that here, as at Capetown, and all along to Simon’s Bay. Now, what is the use or comfort of aduchesseto a Hottentot family? I shall never see those toilets again without thinking of Hottentots—what a baroque association of ideas! I intend, in a day or two, to go over to ‘Gnadenthal’, the Moravian missionary station, founded in 1736—the ‘blühende Gemeinde von Hottentoten’. How little did I think to see it, when we smiled at the phrase in old Mr. Steinkopf’s sermon years ago in London! ThemissionarizedHottentots are not, as it is said, thought well of—being even tipsier than the rest; but I may see a full-blood one, and even a true Bosjesman, which is worth a couple of hours’ drive; and the place is said to be beautiful.
This climate is evidently a styptic of great power, I shall write a few lines to theLancetabout Caledon and its hot baths—‘Bad Caledon’, as the Germans at Houw Hoek call it. The baths do not concern me, as they are chalybeate; but they seem very effectual in many cases. Yet English people never come here; they stay at Capetown, which must be a furnace now, or at Wynberg, which is damp and chill (comparatively); at most, they get to Stellenbosch. I mean visitors, not settlers;theyare everywhere. I look the colour of a Hottentot. Now Imustleave off.
Your most affectionateL. D. G.
Caledon, Jan. 28th.
Well, I have been to Gnadenthal, and seen the ‘blooming parish’, and a lovely spot it is. A large village nestled in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains on three sides, and a lower range in front. We started early on Saturday, and drove over a mighty queer road, and through a river. Oh, ye gods! what a shaking and pounding! We were rattled up like dice in a box. Nothing but a Cape cart, Cape horses, and a Hottentot driver, above all, could have accomplished it. Captain D— rode, and had the best of it. On the road we passed three or four farms, at all which horses weregalloping outthe grain, or men were winnowing it by tossing it up with wooden shovels to let the wind blow away the chaff. We did the twenty-four miles up and down the mountain roads in two hours and a half, with our valiant little pair of horses; it is incredible how they go. We stopped at a nice cottage on the hillside belonging to aci-devantslave, one Christian Rietz, awhiteman, with brown woolly hair, sharp features, grey eyes, andnotwoolly moustaches. He said he was a ‘Scotch bastaard’, and ‘le bon sang parlait—très-haut même’, for a more thriving, shrewd, sensible fellow I never saw. Hisfatherand master had had to let him go when all slaves were emancipated, and he had come to Gnadenthal. He keeps a little inn in the village, and a shop and a fine garden. The cottage we lodged in was on the mountain side, and had been built for his son, who was dead; and his adopted daughter, a pretty coloured girl, exactly like a southern Frenchwoman, waited on us, assisted by about six or seven other women, who came chiefly to stare. Vrouw Rietz was as black as a coal, butsopretty!—a dear, soft, sleek, old lady, with beautiful eyes, and the kind pleasant ways which belong to nice blacks; and, though old and fat, still graceful and lovely in face, hands, and arms. The cottage was thus:—One large hall; my bedroom on the right, S—’s on the left; the kitchen behind me; Miss Rietz behind S—; mud floors daintily washed over with fresh cow-dung; ceiling of big rafters, just as they had grown, on which rested bamboo canes close togetheracrossthe rafters, and bound together between each, with transverse bamboo—a prettybeehiveyeffect; at top, mud again, and then a high thatched roof and a loft or zolder for forage, &c.; the walls of course mud, very thick and whitewashed. The bedrooms tiny; beds, clean sweet melies (maize) straw, with clean sheets, and eight good pillows on each; glass windows (a great distinction), exquisite cleanliness, and hearty civility; good food, well cooked; horrid tea and coffee, and hardly any milk; no end of fruit. In all the gardens it hung on the trees thicker than the leaves. Never did I behold such a profusion of fruit and vegetables.
But first I must tell what struck me most, I asked one of the Herrenhut brethren whether there were anyrealHottentots, and he said, ‘Yes, one;’ and next morning, as I sat waiting for early prayers under the big oak-trees in the Plaats (square), he came up, followed by a tiny old man hobbling along with a long stick to support him. ‘Here’, said he, ‘is thelastHottentot; he is a hundred and seven years old, and lives all alone.’ I looked on the little, wizened, yellow face, and was shocked that he should be dragged up like a wild beast to be stared at. A feeling of pity which felt like remorse fell upon me, and my eyes filled as I rose and stood before him, so tall and like a tyrant and oppressor, while he uncovered his poor little old snow-white head, and peered up in my face. I led him to the seat, and helped him to sit down, and said in Dutch, ‘Father, I hope you are not tired; you are old.’ He saw and heard as well as ever, and spoke good Dutch in a firm voice. ‘Yes, I am above a hundred years old, and alone—quite alone.’ I sat beside him, and he put his head on one side, and looked curiously up at me with his faded, but still piercing little wild eyes. Perhaps he had a perception of what I felt—yet I hardly think so; perhaps he thought I was in trouble, for he crept close up to me, and put one tiny brown paw into my hand, which he stroked with the other, and asked (like most coloured people) if I had children. I said, ‘Yes, at home in England;’ and he patted my hand again, and said, ‘God bless them!’ It was a relief to feel that he was pleased, for I should have felt like a murderer if my curiosity had added a moment’s pain to so tragic a fate.
This may sound like sentimentalism; but you cannot conceive the effect of looking on the last of a race once the owners of all this land, and now utterly gone. His look was not quite human, physically speaking;—a good head, small wild-beast eyes, piercing and restless; cheek-bones strangely high and prominent, nosequiteflat, mouth rather wide; thin shapeless lips, and an indescribably small, long, pointed chin, with just a very little soft white woolly beard; his head covered with extremely short close white wool, which ended round the poll in little ringlets. Hands and feet like an English child of seven or eight, and person about the size of a child of eleven. He had all his teeth, and though shrunk to nothing, was very little wrinkled in the face, and not at all in the hands, which were dark brown, while his face was yellow. His manner, and way of speaking were like those of an old peasant in England, only his voice was clearer and stronger, and his perceptions not blunted by age. He had travelled with one of the missionaries in the year 1790, or thereabouts, and remained with them ever since.
I went into the church—a large, clean, rather handsome building, consecrated in 1800—and heard a very good sort of Litany, mixed with such singing as only black voices can produce. The organ was beautifully played by a Bastaard lad. The Herrenhuters use very fine chants, and the perfect ear and heavenly voices of a large congregation, about six hundred, all coloured people, made music more beautiful than any chorus-singing I ever heard.
Prayers lasted half an hour; then the congregation turned out of doors, and the windows were opened. Some of the people went away, and others waited for the ‘allgemeine Predigt’. In a quarter of an hour a much larger congregation than the first assembled, the girls all with net-handkerchiefs tied round their heads so as to look exactly like the ancient Greek head-dress with a double fillet—the very prettiest and neatest coiffure I ever saw. The gowns were made like those of English girls of the same class, but far smarter, cleaner, and gayer in colour—pink, and green, and yellow, and bright blue; several were all in white, with white gloves. The men and women sit separate, and the women’s side was a bed of tulips. The young fellows were very smart indeed, with muslin or gauze, either white, pink, or blue, rolled round their hats (that is universal here, on account of the sun). The Hottentots, as they are called—that is, those of mixed Dutch and Hottentot origin (correctly, ‘bastaards’)—have a sort of blackguard elegance in their gait and figure which is peculiar to them; a mixture of negro or Mozambique blood alters it altogether. The girls have the elegance without the blackguard look;allare slender, most are tall; all graceful, all have good hands and feet; some few are handsome in the face and many very interesting-looking. The complexion is a pale olive-yellow, and the hair more or less woolly, face flat, and cheekbones high, eyes small and bright. These are by far the most intelligent—equal, indeed, to whites. A mixture of black blood often gives real beauty, but takes off from the ‘air’, and generally from the talent; but then the blacks are so pleasant, and the Hottentots are taciturn and reserved. The old women of this breed are the grandest hags I ever saw; they are clean and well dressed, and tie up their old faces in white handkerchiefs like corpses,—faces like those of Andrea del Sarto’s old women; they are splendid. Also, they are very clean people, addicted to tubbing more than any others. The maid-of-all-work, who lounges about your breakfast table in rags and dishevelled hair, has been in the river before you were awake, or, if that was too far off, in a tub. They are also far cleaner in their huts than any but thevery bestEnglish poor.
The ‘Predigt’ was delivered, after more singing, by a missionary cabinet-maker, in Dutch, very ranting, and not very wise; the congregation was singularly decorous and attentive, but did not seem at all excited or impressed—just like a well-bred West-end audience, only rather more attentive. The service lasted three-quarters of an hour, including a short prayer and two hymns. The people came out and filed off in total silence, and very quickly, the tall graceful girls draping their gay silk shawls beautifully. There are seven missionaries, all in orders but one, the blacksmith, and all married, except the resident director of the boys’ boarding-school; there is a doctor, a carpenter, a cabinet-maker, a shoe-maker, and a storekeeper—a very agreeable man, who had been missionary in Greenland and Labrador, and interpreter to MacClure. There is one ‘Studirter Theolog’. All are Germans, and so are their wives. My friend the storekeeper married without having ever beheld his wife before they met at the altar, and came on board ship at once with her. He said it was as good a way of marrying as any other, and that they were happy together. She was lying in, so I did not see her. At eight years old, their children are all sent home to Germany to be educated, and they seldom see them again. On each side of the church are schools, and next to them the missionaries’ houses on one side of the square, and on the other a row of workshops, where the Hottentots are taught all manner of trades. I have got a couple of knives, made at Gnadenthal, for the children. The girls occupy the school in the morning, and the boys in the afternoon; half a day is found quite enough of lessons in this climate. The infant school was of both sexes, but a different set morning and afternoon. The missionaries’ children were in the infant school; and behind the little blonde German ‘Mädels’ three jet black niggerlings rolled over each other like pointer-pups, and grinned, and didn’t care a straw for the spelling; while the dingy yellow little bastaards were straining their black eyes out, with eagerness to answer the master’s questions. He and the mistress were both Bastaards, and he seemed an excellent teacher. The girls were learning writing from a master, and Bible history from a mistress, also people of colour; and the stupid set (mostly black) were having spelling hammered into their thick skulls by another yellow mistress, in another room. At the boarding school were twenty lads, from thirteen up to twenty, in training for school-teachers at different stations. Gnadenthal supplies the Church of England with them, as well as their own stations. There were Caffres, Fingoes, a Mantatee, one boy evidently of some Oriental blood, with glossy, smooth hair and a copper skin—and the rest Bastaards of various hues, some mixed with black, probably Mozambique. The Caffre lads were splendid young Hercules’. They had just printed the first book in the Caffre language (I’ve got it for Dr. Hawtrey,)—extracts from the New Testament,—and I made them read the sheets they were going to bind; it is a beautiful language, like Spanish in tone, only with a queer ‘click’ in it. The boys drew, like Chinese, from ‘copies’, and wrote like copper-plate; they sang some of Mendelssohn’s choruses from ‘St. Paul’ splendidly, the Caffres rolling out soft rich bass voices, like melodious thunder. They are clever at handicrafts, and fond of geography and natural history, incapable of mathematics, quick at languages, utterly incurious about other nations, and would all rather work in the fields than learn anything but music; good boys, honest, but ‘trotzig’. So much for Caffres, Fingoes, &c. The Bastaards are as clever as whites, and more docile—so the ‘rector’ told me. The boy who played the organ sang the ‘Lorelei’ like an angel, and played us a number of waltzes and other things on the piano, but he was too shy to talk; while the Caffres crowded round me, and chattered away merrily. The Mantatees, whom I cannot distinguish from Caffres, are scattered all over the colony, and rival the English as workmen and labourers—fine stalwart, industrious fellows. Our little ‘boy’ Kleenboy hires a room for fifteen shillings a month, and takes in his compatriots as lodgers at half a crown a week—the usurious little rogue! His chief, one James, is a bricklayer here, and looks and behaves like a prince. It is fine to see his black arms, ornamented with silver bracelets, hurling huge stones about.
All Gnadenthal is wonderfully fruitful, being well watered, but it is not healthy for whites; I imagine, too hot and damp. There are three or four thousand coloured people there, under the control of the missionaries, who allow no canteens at all. The people may have what they please at home, but no public drinking-place is allowed, and we had to take our own beer and wine for the three days. The gardens and burial-ground are beautiful, and the square is entirely shaded by about ten or twelve superb oaks; nothing prettier can be conceived. It is not popular in the neighbourhood. ‘You see it makes the d-d niggers cheeky’ to have homes of their own—and the girls are said to be immoral. As to that, there are no so-called ‘morals’ among the coloured people, and how or why should there? It is an honour to one of these girls to have a child by a white man, and it is a degradation to him to marry a dark girl. A pious stiff old Dutchwoman who came here the other day for the Sacrament (which takes place twice a year), had one girl with her, big with child by her son, who also came for the Sacrament, and two in the straw at home by the other son; this caused her exactly as much emotion as I feel when my cat kittens. No one takes any notice, either to blame or to nurse the poor things—they scramble through it as pussy does. The English are almost equally contemptuous; but there is one great difference. My host, for instance, always calls a black ‘a d-d nigger’; but if that nigger is wronged or oppressed he fights for him, or bails him out of the Tronk, and an English jury gives a just verdict; while a Dutch one simply finds for a Dutchman, against any one else, andalwaysagainst a dark man. I believe this to be true, from what I have seen and heard; and certainly the coloured people have a great preference for the English.
I am persecuted by the ugliest and blackest Mozambiquer I have yet seen, a bricklayer’s labourer, who can speak English, and says he was servant to an English Captain—‘Oh, a good fellow he was, only he’s dead!’ He now insists on my taking him as a servant. ‘I dessay your man at home is a good chap, and I’ll be a good boy, and cook very nice.’ He is thick-set and short and strong. Nature has adorned him with a cock eye and a yard of mouth, and art, with a prodigiously tall white chimney-pot hat with the crown out, a cotton nightcap, and a wondrous congeries of rags. He professes to be cook, groom, and ‘walley’, and is sure you would be pleased with his attentions.
Well, to go back to Gnadenthal. I wandered all over the village on Sunday afternoon, and peeped into the cottages. All were neat and clean, with good dressers of crockery, theverypoorest, like the worst in Weybridge sandpits; but they had no glass windows, only a wooden shutter, and no doors; a calico curtain, or a sort of hurdle supplying its place. The people nodded and said ‘Good day!’ but took no further notice of me, except the poor old Hottentot, who was seated on a doorstep. He rose and hobbled up to meet me and take my hand again. He seemed to enjoy being helped along and seated down carefully, and shook and patted my hand repeatedly when I took leave of him. At this the people stared a good deal, and one woman came to talk to me.
In the evening I sat on a bench in the square, and saw the people go in to ‘Abendsegen’. The church was lighted, and as I sat there and heard the lovely singing, I thought it was impossible to conceive a more romantic scene. On Monday I saw all the schools, and then looked at the great strong Caffre lads playing in the square. One of them stood to be pelted by five or six others, and as the stones came, he twisted and turned and jumped, and was hardly ever hit, and when he was, he didn’t care, though the others hurled like catapults. It was the most wonderful display of activity and grace, and quite incredible that such a huge fellow should be so quick and light. When I found how comfortable dear old Mrs. Rietz made me, I was sorry I had hired the cart and kept it to take me home, for I would gladly have stayed longer, and the heat did me no harm; but I did not like to throw away a pound or two, and drove back that evening. Mrs. Rietz, told me her mother was a Mozambiquer. ‘And your father?’ said I. ‘Oh, I don’t know.My mother was only a slave.’ She, too, was a slave, but said she ‘never knew it’, her ‘missus’ was so good; a Dutch lady, at a farm I had passed, on the road, who had a hundred and fifty slaves. I liked my Hottentot hut amazingly, and the sweet brown bread, and the dinner cooked so cleanly on the bricks in the kitchen. The walls were whitewashed and adorned with wreaths of everlasting flowers and some quaint old prints from Loutherburg—pastoral subjects, not exactly edifying.
Well, I have prosed unconscionably, so adieu for the present.
February3d.—Many happy returns of your birthday, dear —. I had a bottle of champagne to drink your health, and partly to swell the bill, which these good people make so moderate, that I am half ashamed. I get everything that Caledon can furnish for myself and S— for 15l.a month.
On Saturday we got the sad news of Prince Albert’s death, and it created real consternation here. What a thoroughly unexpected calamity! Every one is already dressed in deep mourning. It is more general than in a village of the same size at home—(how I have caught the colonial trick of always saying ‘home’ for England! Dutchmen who can barely speak English, and never did or will see England, equally talk of ‘news from home’). It also seems, by the papers of the 24th of December, which came by a steamer the other day, that war is imminent. I shall have to wait for convoy, I suppose, as I object to walking the plank from a Yankee privateer. I shall wait here for the next mail, and then go back to Capetown, stopping by the way, so as to get there early in March, and arrange for my voyage. The weather had a relapse into cold, and an attempt at rain. Pity it failed, for the drought is dreadful this year, chiefly owing to the unusual quantity of sharp drying winds—a most unlucky summer for the country and for me.
My old friend Klein, who told me several instances of the kindness and gratitude of former slaves, poured out to me the misery he had undergone from the ‘ingratitude’ of a certain Rosina, a slave-girl of his. She was in her youth handsome, clever, the best horsebreaker, bullock-trainer and driver, and hardest worker in the district. She had two children by Klein, then a young fellow; six by another white man, and a few more by two husbands of her own race! But she was of a rebellious spirit, and took to drink. After the emancipation, she used to go in front of Klein’s windows and read the statute in a loud voice on every anniversary of the day; and as if that did not enrage him enough, she pertinaciously (whenever she was a little drunk) kissed him by main force every time she met him in the street, exclaiming, ‘Aha! when I young and pretty slave-girl you make kiss me then; now I ugly, drunk, dirty old devil and free woman, I kiss you!’ Frightful retributive justice! I struggled hard to keep my countenance, but the fat old fellow’s good-humoured, rueful face was too much for me. His tormentor is dead, but he retains a painful impression of her ‘ingratitude ‘.
Our little Mantatee ‘Kleenboy’ has again, like Jeshurun, ‘waxed fat and kicked’, as soon as he had eaten enough to be once more plump and shiny. After his hungry period, he took to squatting on the stoep, just in front of the hall-door, and altogether declining to do anything; so he is superseded by an equally ugly little red-headed Englishman. The Irish housemaid has married the German baker (a fine match for her!), and a dour little Scotch Presbyterian has come up from Capetown in her place. Such are the vicissitudes of colonial house-keeping! The only ‘permanency’ is the old soldier of Captain D—’s regiment, who is barman in the canteen, and not likely to leave ‘his honour’, and the coloured girl, who improves on acquaintance. She wants to ingratiate herself with me, and get taken to England. Her father is an Englishman, and of course the brown mother and her large family always live in the fear of his ‘going home’ and ignoring their existence; amarriagewith the mother of his children would be too much degradation for him to submit to. Few of the coloured people are ever married, but they don’t separate oftener thanreallymarried folks. Bill, the handsome West Indian black, married my pretty washerwoman Rosalind, and was thought rather assuming because he was asked in church and lawfully married; and she wore a handsome lilac silk gown and a white wreath and veil, and very well she looked in them. She had a child of two years old, which did not at all disconcert Bill; but he continues to be dignified, and won’t let her go and wash clothes in the river, because the hot sun makes her ill, and it is not fit work for women.
Sunday, 9th.—Last night a dance took place in a house next door to this, and a party of boers attempted to go in, but were repulsed by a sortie of the young men within. Some of the more peaceable boers came in here and wanted ale, which was refused, as they were already veryvinous; so they imbibed ginger-beer, whereof one drank thirty-four bottles to his own share! Inspired by this drink, they began to quarrel, and were summarily turned out. They spent the whole night, till five this morning, scuffling and vociferating in the street. The constables discreetly stayed in bed, displaying the true Dogberry spirit, which leads them to take up Hottentots, drunk or sober, to show their zeal, but carefully to avoid meddling with stalwart boers, from six to six and a half feet high and strong in proportion. The jabbering of Dutch brings to mind Demosthenes trying to outroar a stormy sea with his mouth full of pebbles. The hardest blows are those given with the tongue, though much pulling of hair and scuffling takes place. ‘Verdomde Schmeerlap!’—‘Donder and Bliksem! am I a verdomde Schmeerlap?’—‘Ja, u is,’ &c., &c. I could not help laughing heartily as I lay in bed, at hearing the gambols of these Titan cubs; for this is a boer’s notion of enjoying himself. This morning, I hear, the street was strewn with the hair they had pulled out of each other’s heads. All who come here make love to S—; not by describing their tender feelings, but by enumerating the oxen, sheep, horses, land, money, &c., of which they are possessed, and whereof, by the law of this colony, she would become half-owner on marriage. There is a fine handsome Van Steen, who is very persevering; but S— does not seem to fancy becoming Mevrouw at all. The demand for English girls as wives is wonderful here. The nasty cross little ugly Scotch maid has had three offers already, in one fortnight!
February18th.—I expect to receive the letters by the English mail to-morrow morning, and to go to Worcester on Thursday. On Saturday the young doctor—good-humoured, jolly, big, young Dutchman—drove me, with his pretty little greys, over to two farms; at one I ate half a huge melon, and at the other, uncounted grapes. We poor Europeans don’t know what fruitcan be, I must admit. The melon was a foretaste of paradise, and the grapes made one’s fingers as sticky as honey, and had a muscat fragrance quite inconceivable. They looked like amber eggs. The best of it is, too, that in this climate stomach-aches are not. We all eat grapes, peaches, and figs, all day long. Old Klein sends me, for my own daily consumption, about thirty peaches, three pounds of grapes, and apples, pears, and figs besides—‘just a little taste of fruits’; only here they will pick it all unripe.
February19th.—The post came in late last night, and old Klein kindly sent me my letters at near midnight. The post goes out this evening, and the hot wind is blowing, so I can only write to you, and a line to my mother. I feel really better now. I think the constant eating of grapes has done me much good.