Hilda Wade, a Woman with Tenacity of Purpose Part 23

The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English. Mr. Jan Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed--tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and genial. Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding. There was one prattling little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child; and also a chubby baby.

"You are betrothed, of course?" Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me, with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first arrangement.

Hilda's face flushed. "No; we are nothing to one another," she answered--which was only true formally. "Dr. c.u.mberledge had a post at the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would like to try Rhodesia. That is all."

Mrs. Klaas gazed from one to other of us suspiciously. "You English are strange!" she answered, with a complacent little shrug. "But there--from Europe! Your ways, we know, are different."

Hilda did not attempt to explain. It would have been impossible to make the good soul understand. Her horizon was so simple. She was a harmless housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones.

Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To a mother, that covers a mult.i.tude of eccentricities, such as one expects to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because she liked Hilda.

We spent some months together on Klaas's farm. It was a dreary place, save for Hilda. The bare daub-and-wattle walls; the clumps of misshapen and dusty p.r.i.c.kly-pears that girt round the thatched huts of the Kaffir workpeople; the stone-penned sheep-kraals, and the corrugated iron roof of the bald stable for the waggon oxen--all was as crude and ugly as a new country can make things. It seemed to me a desecration that Hilda should live in such an unfinished land--Hilda, whom I imagined as moving by nature through broad English parks, with Elizabethan cottages and immemorial oaks--Hilda, whose proper atmosphere seemed to be one of coffee-coloured laces, ivy-clad abbeys, lichen-incrusted walls--all that is beautiful and gracious in time-honoured civilisations.

Nevertheless, we lived on there in a meaningless sort of way--I hardly knew why. To me it was a puzzle. When I asked Hilda, she shook her head with her sibylline air and answered, confidently: "You do not understand Sebastian as well as I do. We have to wait for HIM. The next move is his. Till he plays his piece, I cannot tell how I may have to checkmate him."

So we waited for Sebastian to advance a p.a.w.n. Meanwhile, I toyed with South African farming--not very successfully, I must admit. Nature did not design me for growing oats. I am no judge of oxen, and my views on the feeding of Kaffir sheep raised broad smiles on the black faces of my Mashona labourers.

I still lodged at Tant Mettie's, as everybody called Mrs. Klaas; she was courtesy aunt to the community at large, while Oom Jan Willem was its courtesy uncle. They were simple, homely folk, who lived up to their religious principles on an unvaried diet of stewed ox-beef and bread; they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no doubt, to the monotony of their food, their life, their interests. One could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch.

For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof, meant more to their lives than war in Europe. The one break in the sameness of their daily routine was family prayers; the one weekly event, going to church at Salisbury. Still, they had a single enthusiasm. Like everybody else for fifty miles around, they believed profoundly in the "future of Rhodesia." When I gazed about me at the raw new land--the weary flat of red soil and brown gra.s.ses--I felt at least that, with a present like that, it had need of a future.

I am not by disposition a pioneer; I belong instinctively to the old civilisations. In the midst of rudimentary towns and incipient fields, I yearn for grey houses, a Norman church, an English thatched cottage.

However, for Hilda's sake, I braved it out, and continued to learn the A B C of agriculture on an unmade farm with great a.s.siduity from Oom Jan Willem.

We had been stopping some months at Klaas's together when business compelled me one day to ride in to Salisbury. I had ordered some goods for my farm from England which had at last arrived. I had now to arrange for their conveyance from the town to my plot of land--a portentous matter. Just as I was on the point of leaving Klaas's, and was tightening the saddle-girth on my st.u.r.dy little pony, Oom Jan Willem himself sidled up to me with a mysterious air, his broad face all wrinkled with antic.i.p.atory pleasure. He placed a sixpence in my palm, glancing about him on every side as he did so, like a conspirator.

"What am I to buy with it?" I asked, much puzzled, and suspecting tobacco. Tant Mettie declared he smoked too much for a church elder.

He put his finger to his lips, nodded, and peered round. "Lollipops for Sannie," he whispered low, at last, with a guilty smile. "But"--he glanced about him again--"give them to me, please, when Tant Mettie isn't looking." His nod was all mystery.

"You may rely on my discretion," I replied, throwing the time-honoured prejudices of the profession to the winds, and well pleased to aid and abet the simple-minded soul in his nefarious designs against little Sannie's digestive apparatus. He patted me on the back. "PEPPERMINT lollipops, mind!" he went on, in the same solemn undertone. "Sannie likes them best--peppermint."

I put my foot in the stirrup, and vaulted into my saddle. "They shall not be forgotten," I answered, with a quiet smile at this pretty little evidence of fatherly feeling. I rode off. It was early morning, before the heat of the day began. Hilda accompanied me part of the way on her bicycle. She was going to the other young farm, some eight miles off, across the red-brown plateau, where she gave lessons daily to the ten-year old daughter of an English settler. It was a labour of love; for settlers in Rhodesia cannot afford to pay for what are beautifully described as "finis.h.i.+ng governesses"; but Hilda was of the sort who cannot eat the bread of idleness. She had to justify herself to her kind by finding some work to do which should vindicate her existence.

I parted from her at a point on the monotonous plain where one rubbly road branched off from another. Then I jogged on in the full morning sun over that scorching plain of loose red sand all the way to Salisbury.

Not a green leaf or a fresh flower anywhere. The eye ached at the hot glare of the reflected sunlight from the sandy level.

My business detained me several hours in the half-built town, with its flaunting stores and its rough new offices; it was not till towards afternoon that I could get away again on my sorrel, across the blazing plain once more to Klaas's.

I moved on over the plateau at an easy trot, full of thoughts of Hilda.

What could be the step she expected Sebastian to take next? She did not know, herself, she had told me; there, her faculty failed her. But SOME step he WOULD take; and till he took it she must rest and be watchful.

I pa.s.sed the great tree that stands up like an obelisk in the midst of the plain beyond the deserted Matabele village. I pa.s.sed the low clumps of dry karroo-bushes by the rocky kopje. I pa.s.sed the fork of the rubbly roads where I had parted from Hilda. At last, I reached the long, rolling ridge which looks down upon Klaas's, and could see in the slant sunlight the mud farmhouse and the corrugated iron roof where the oxen were stabled.

The place looked more deserted, more dead-alive than ever. Not a black boy moved in it. Even the cattle and Kaffir sheep were nowhere to be seen.... But then it was always quiet; and perhaps I noticed the obtrusive air of solitude and sleepiness even more than usual, because I had just returned from Salisbury. All things are comparative. After the lost loneliness of Klaas's farm, even brand-new Salisbury seemed busy and bustling.

I hurried on, ill at ease. But Tant Mettie would, doubtless, have a cup of tea ready for me as soon as I arrived, and Hilda would be waiting at the gate to welcome me.

I reached the stone enclosure, and pa.s.sed up through the flower-garden.

To my great surprise, Hilda was not there. As a rule, she came to meet me, with her sunny smile. But perhaps she was tired, or the sun on the road might have given her a headache. I dismounted from my mare, and called one of the Kaffir boys to take her to the stable. n.o.body answered.... I called again. Still silence.... I tied her up to the post, and strode over to the door, astonished at the solitude. I began to feel there was something weird and uncanny about this home-coming.

Never before had I known Klaas's so entirely deserted.

I lifted the latch and opened the door. It gave access at once to the single plain living-room. There, all was huddled. For a moment my eyes hardly took in the truth. There are sights so sickening that the brain at the first shock wholly fails to realise them.

On the stone slab floor of the low living-room Tant Mettie lay dead.

Her body was pierced through by innumerable thrusts, which I somehow instinctively recognised as a.s.segai wounds. By her side lay Sannie, the little prattling girl of three, my constant playmate, whom I had instructed in cat's-cradle, and taught the tales of Cinderella and Red Riding Hood. My hand grasped the lollipops in my pocket convulsively.

She would never need them. n.o.body else was about. What had become of Oom Jan Willem--and the baby?

I wandered out into the yard, sick with the sight I had already seen.

There Oom Jan Willem himself lay stretched at full length; a bullet had pierced his left temple; his body was also riddled through with a.s.segai thrusts.

I saw at once what this meant. A rising of the Matabele!

I had come back from Salisbury, unknowing it, into the midst of a revolt of bloodthirsty savages.

Yet, even if I had known, I must still have hurried home with all speed to Klaas's--to protect Hilda.

Hilda? Where was Hilda? A breathless sinking crept over me.

I staggered out into the open. It was impossible to say what horror might not have happened. The Matabele might even now be lurking about the kraal--for the bodies were hardly cold. But Hilda? Hilda? Whatever came, I must find Hilda.

Fortunately, I had my loaded revolver in my belt. Though we had not in the least antic.i.p.ated this sudden revolt--it broke like a thunder-clap from a clear sky--the unsettled state of the country made even women go armed about their daily avocations.

I strode on, half maddened. Beside the great block of granite which sheltered the farm there rose one of those rocky little hillocks of loose boulders which are locally known in South Africa by the Dutch name of kopjes. I looked out upon it drearily. Its round brown ironstones lay piled irregularly together, almost as if placed there in some earlier age by the mighty hands of prehistoric giants. My gaze on it was blank.

I was thinking, not of it, but of Hilda, Hilda.

I called the name aloud: "Hilda! Hilda! Hilda!"

As I called, to my immense surprise, one of the smooth round boulders on the hillside seemed slowly to uncurl, and to peer about it cautiously.

Then it raised itself in the slant sunlight, put a hand to its eyes, and gazed out upon me with a human face for a moment. After that it descended, step by step, among the other stones, with a white object in its arms. As the boulder uncurled and came to life, I was aware, by degrees... yes, yes, it was Hilda, with Tant Mettie's baby!

In the fierce joy of that discovery I rushed forward to her, trembling, and clasped her in my arms. I could find no words but "Hilda! Hilda!"

"Are they gone?" she asked, staring about her with a terrified air, though still strangely preserving her wonted composure of manner.

"Who gone? The Matabele?"

"Yes, yes!"

"Did you see them, Hilda?"

"For a moment--with black s.h.i.+elds and a.s.segais, all shouting madly. You have been to the house, Hubert? You know what has happened?"

"Yes, yes, I know--a rising. They have ma.s.sacred the Klaases."

She nodded. "I came back on my bicycle, and, when I opened the door, found Tant Mettie and little Sannie dead. Poor, sweet little Sannie! Oom Jan was lying shot in the yard outside. I saw the cradle overturned, and looked under it for the baby. They did not kill her--perhaps did not notice her. I caught her up in my arms, and rushed out to my machine, thinking to make for Salisbury, and give the alarm to the men there.

One must try to save others--and YOU were coming, Hubert! Then I heard horses' hoofs--the Matabele returning. They dashed back, mounted,--stolen horses from other farms,--they have taken poor Oom Jan's,--and they have gone on, shouting, to murder elsewhere! I flung down my machine among the bushes as they came,--I hope they have not seen it,--and I crouched here between the boulders, with the baby in my arms, trusting for protection to the colour of my dress, which is just like the ironstone."

"It is a perfect deception," I answered, admiring her instinctive cleverness even then. "I never so much as noticed you."