Chapter 7

"'The first thing that the Peruvian did was to take off all his clothes, and then he came into the dim circle of light mother-naked. He was a little man at best, but Piet said afterwards the muscles stood out under his swarthy skin in knots and ridges. And there he stood, facing them across the lamp, with his arms stretched forwards and his hands just fluttering loosely. Nothing more. His eyes were upturned and his face lifted, so that a streak of shadow rose across it, and the black beard against his neck rose and fell with his breathing. But for the gentle flutter of his hands and the heave of his chest he was still as stone-- so still that for those who watched him all relation to human kind seemed to leave him, and he was a being alone in a twilight world of his own, a creature as remote and as little to be understood as the spirits of the dead.

"Have you ever, when wakeful in a hot night, with darkness all about you, called yourself by name again and again? It was a trick we dared sometimes when I was a girl. After a while it is something else that is calling, something of you but not in you, to which your soul answers at last; and if you go on till the will to call is no longer your own, the soul goes forth in response to it, and you are dead. And even so, gaunt in the beam of the lamp, the Peruvian seemed to insist upon himself, till the eyes of the watchers were for him only, till that which they saw was less the mean body of the smouser than the vehicle of the potent soul within.

"Piet was a youth as solid in mind as in body, and ere the scene grasped him against his will he says he saw with an angry impatience the flicker of a leer on the darkened face of the Peruvian. But it did not last. In a few minutes the two young Burghers were not the only ones whom the spell had subdued--the wizard was netted too. And then, as he stood, his hands still fluttering, they heard him drone a string of words, a dull chant, level like an incantation, inevitably apt to the hour and the event.

"They did not know how long they crouched, watching unwinkingly till their eyes grew sore; but at last it seemed that the posturing and the words had made something due. Jacobus started as though from sleep, and Piet, who was not till then frightened, looked up quickly. He caught sight of something--a shadow, a hint, a presence in the darkness behind the naked man, and knew, somehow, with a coldness of alarm, that IT had arrived. He barely realized this knowledge when the power of the quietness and the jugglery were rudely sundered, and the Peruvian, shrieking and clucking in his throat, dived towards them and tried to hide. He plunged frantically against the door, which gave and let him fall through, and in a moment, with the cold sweat of horror upon them, Piet and Jacobus struggled through after him and ran with still hearts for the house.

"But in that moment that he was jammed in the narrow doorway with his brother, Piet saw into the hut, and there was something there. There was another with them.

"They came fast to the lighted room upon the heels of the naked Peruvian, who fell on his face and writhed, weeping in sheer terror. There was alarm, and chairs overturned, and screaming of women, and it was long before they could get the smouser to his feet and bring him to speech. And then he would not go a foot away from them.

"'It came; it came!' he babbled, quivering under the table- cloth they had cast over his nakedness. 'It came--behind me!' and forthwith he began to stammer in his own strange tongue.

"'What was it?' demanded Oom Johannes, who was beginning to feel nervous.

"'There was a ghost!' was all that Piet could tell him. 'It frightened the smouser. It frightened all of us.'

"And by this time the smouser was babbling again, turning from one to the other, like one who excuses himself.

"'I did not bring it,' he wailed. 'I did nothing--only tricks. Just tricks to get money--and it came behind me. Mother of God! It came behind me!'

"Not one of them ventured beyond the door that night. They had not even the heart to turn the smouser out, though he expected nothing less, and clung howling to Piet's knees when the lad rose to bolt the door. But in the morning he was gone, and"--here the Vrouw Grobelaar became truly impressive--"he had not even fetched his clothes from the hut.

"So you see, Katje, what comes of messing your fingers with wish-bones."

"Pooh!" sneered Katje, "I'm not afraid of the ghost of the fowl."

TAGALASH

When we came to the farmhouse, Katje and I, the Vrouw Grobelaar asked if we had been down by the spruit. We had-- all the afternoon. There are cool and lonely places in the long grass beside the spruit, where its midsummer trickle of water sojourns peacefully in wide pools of depth and quiet.

"You can't mind that, anyhow," said Katje patiently.

"Why can't I?" demanded the Vrouw Grobelaar. "Why can't I mind that as well as anything else? I tell you, my girl, that things are not quite so simple as you take them to be. Even a herd of swine can house a devil, mark you. A bit of stick in the path can be a puff adder, and there are spells tucked away in the words of the Psalms even. And the spruit! Why, you crazy child, a spruit is just the place for things to lurk in wait. Yes, slippery things that have no name in man's speech. Even the Kafirs know of a spirit that lives in a pool."

Katje laughed, "Oh, Tagalash!" she said.

Tagalash is the little god who abducts girls who go down to fetch water in the evening, and carries them away to the dim world under the floor of the pools to be his brides. He lives in the water, and sings in the reeds, sometimes, of an evening and at other times works mischief among the crops and the cattle with spells that baffle the husbandman.

So Katje laughed as she mentioned him, and the Vrouw Grobelaar bridled ominously.

"You laugh," she said scathingly--"you laugh in the face of wisdom and counsel as they laughed in Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes; Tagalash, Katje! What have you to say against Tagalash? You think, I suppose, that he doesn't exist. I tell you, my girl, there's many a god of the heathen who is a devil of the Christians. That's what Christianity is for-- to make devils of the gods of the heathen. And besides, this Tagalash is not like the others. He has been seen."

She paused. "Who by, Tante?" I asked, while Katje affected to whistle carelessly.

"Ah," she said, "you want to know? Well, Tagalash was seen and felt and had speech of by one who told it afterwards with white lips and fevered eyes that compelled belief. A Boer woman, mind you, and no liar; the young wife of an upright and well-seen Burgher, who had his farm an easy four hours from here.

"It is Folly Joubert I mean, who married when she was eighteen one Johannes Olivier, a youth with hair like an Irishman--all red. I had known her somewhat, and she was just that kind of girl in whom one feels the thrust of a fate. She was thin, for one thing, and without any of the comfortable comeliness that makes young men doubtful and old men sure. She had a face that was always rapt, lips that parted of themselves as if in wonder at great things newly seen, and big troubled eyes that spoke, despite her leanness and long legs, of a spring of hot blood crouching within her. Yes, she seemed doomed to something far and tragic, and outside the lives of decent stupid men.

"There was much bother, I believe, to persuade her to a marriage with Johannes, though he was rich enough.

"Perhaps it was hard on her, but then it must have been hard on him too. For he was another kind than she; just a big youth that ate four times a day with desperation, and lived the rest of the time as a tree lives. There is no harm in such men, though; it is they that people this world and have the right to guide it, for they put most into it and hew most from it; but for those who are born with a streak of heaven or hell in their fabric, they are heavy companions at the best. But these two married at last, and faced life like oxen that pull different ways in the same yoke. And within a month Johannes walked about with a face like one who tries to guess a riddle-troubled and puzzled; and Polly was walking elsewhere, carving herself a new religion from the stones of the bitterness of life.

"I have the rest from her own lips, as she told it when she came back. Yes, she went away--I will make that plain enough. It was after a quarrel with Johannes over some little grossness of no consequence that she walked forth from the house and down towards the spruit. It was between afternoon and evening, and she sought a quiet place to sit and prey on her heart. There was a pool that summer, deep and very black, lying between steep banks on which grew bushes and tall grass, and to this she came and sat by the edge of the water, and dabbled her long thin fingers in its coolness and let her thoughts surge in her.

"'I thought of death,' she said, as she sat in her chair and told of it--'of death, and peace, and hatred glutted, and dead enemies, and love, and sin. A wild storm of dreams, was it not? A grim tempest to lay waste a sore heart. And she only eighteen, with eyes like lakes on a mountainside!' As she told it, she cast back on her memory-- you could see she was aching to strip her fault naked and scourge it before us all--'And the thoughts were like a sleeping draught to my anger,' she went on pitifully. 'I drowned my wrath in dreams of vengeance and sinful hopes of a joy to find in the future.'

"'I conjured up faces of eager, bold men who should court me, and one that I had thought on before--a small man, lean at the waist, who moved like a spark among burning wood, and laughed ere he struck.' Her finger traveled in the air, and he was plain to see.

"She went on: 'I was looking in the water between my hands, creating my lover by the spell of desire, and I could see his face in the vortex my fingers made as I moved them to and fro. I gazed and gazed and gazed, and then, suddenly, some fear gripped me, for the face became a face of a man, with the idle water swilling across it. But it was a face: my mind battled against the realization till the fact governed it. It was a face, brown and keen and smiling with a gleam of white teeth, and then a hand met my hand in the water and drew me forward. I did not drag back. I think I fell on my face, but here I have no memory.'

"When again she came to a sense of things, she was lying in a dim place where all that moved seemed shadows only. At first it was her thought that she was yet on the bank by the pool, but as her mind renewed its hold she knew this was not so. She breathed an air alien to her living nostrils, and knew that here she had no part in a world of human creatures, and the thought rose in her that she was dead, drowned in the pool, and had reached the next world. 'Can this be hell?' she wondered, as she rose to a sitting posture and strove to see about her.

"It was a grassed mound she sat on, in a kind of plain, and she heard the creaking of bushes about her where no wind breathed on her cheek. The dimness was not the part darkness of a summer night, but a shadow where no sun had ever shone, a barren gloom that was lugubrious and uneasy. A dozen feet from her all was blurred and not to be distinguished, but it seemed to her that many people moved round about her, and now and again there was a rustle of hushed voices, as of folk who met stealthily and spoke with checked breath. In the dimness shapes moved, faintly suggested to her eyes, and presently, though she had no thrill of fear, a loneliness oppressed her that nearly made her weep. She was not as one that has no comrade in the world, for such a one is at least kin by blood and flesh to all others. She was alone, as a living man in a tomb is alone.

"With a little fervor of troubled recollection, like a child reciting a psalm, she told us how she rose to her feet and gazed about her, pondering which way to take. And while she was yet doubtful a hand touched her elbow, and she started to face a man that had come from behind her. Staring at his face with wits clenched like a fist, the contours of the face in the water returned to her mind, the sharp brown face that had grown up in the middle of the countenance she dreamed upon, and she knew in a moment that here was the face again and the rest of the man with it.

"'I knew it at once when his teeth shone through his smile,' she said. 'He was not so tall as I, and very brown in that sorrowful light, but not black. There was a robe he wore from his neck to his ankles that left one arm bare and the little feet below its hem, and his head was bare with straight black hair upon it. His hand was on my arm, and he stood before me and looked in my face and smiled a little at me, very gently and timidly.'

"It seems he found her scarcely less strange than she found him. In his bearing was something of awe and wonder, while she stared with a mere surprise.

"'Are you a man?' she asked at length, stupidly.

"He smiled yet. 'No,' he answered gently. 'But oh, you are beautiful!'

"She replied nothing at first, and he went on with a soft voice like the voice of a tender child. 'I saw you in the water long ago, I looking up to you, you looking down to where I was hidden. I smiled to you and reached my hand, but there was no smile on your face, and I did not dare take you till--till this time. Then your hands were stretched forward, and as I clasped them you sank to me,--my beloved! my beloved!'

"His brown face glowed upon his words with a fire of worship. She started back from him with a quick terror, hands clasped and lips parted.

"'Tell me,' she cried, 'tell me, where am I? What is this place? Am I dead at last?'

"He soothed her. 'You are in my country,' he said very gently. 'Now it is your country, as I am yours. You are not dead but living, and brimming with the love I languish for; and here you will stay with me, and we will love one another very tenderly in the heart of my gloom, and you will be my bride.

"'Oh, listen to me!' he cried, when she would have answered. 'Many slim and delicate girls have come to me through the mirror of the pool, but none such as you, with a warm soul floating on your face and a bosom aching for love. When first I saw you I yearned for you, I coveted you. The thought of you was my food and drink, and stayed my eyes from sleep; I set my spell on the waters that they should slumber and hold your image unbroken, and now I have you; you are here with me. You are mine.'

"He was glowing with a kind of eagerness it hurts one to rebuff, and she watched him, her fears under control, with a growing wonder.

"'Yes,' she said slowly. 'It must be true, then--that old tale. You are Tagalash!'

"He smiled. I am Tagalash,' he answered.

"'But,' she said, 'I am white!' For no one had ever heard of any but Kafir brides for Tagalash.

"He shrank a little, but smiled yet beseechingly, as he would have her cease that part of the tale.

"'You are so beautiful,' he urged, come with me to my house, will you not?'

"But that she would not do, and moved not from her place on the grassed knoll throughout her stay in the shadows-- something like a week.

"'I am the wife of Johannes Olivier,' she said, and her words sounded foolish in her own ears. 'I am a wife,' she persisted, there in that dead land of the black gods. 'I want to go back,' she cried like a strayed child. 'I want to go back. I am afraid. Take me back to the light.'

"'He tried to comfort her with gentle words and talk of his passion and her beauty, but to no effect. She shrank from the unnatural flesh of him; she panted as though the dust of tombs were in her nostrils; and at last he stood off, looking at her with a mild trouble, and then he went away, and she was sitting once more alone amid the traffic of hushed voices and moving shadows.

"'There came no night,' she told us, in a voice that quavered uncertainly, 'always that unlovely twilight only; and I sat on the grass and wept. She had no sensation of hunger or sleep in that world, the whole of her stay. She stayed in the same place, dreary and waiting, with no active hope and little fear--only a longing for the sunlight; and at last a dull pain of yearning for the rough red head and beefy texture of her human husband. A week, mind you--a week she stayed there thus, save when Tagalash would come up unheard to court her again.

"After that first time he was a more cautious lover, and sat at her feet with lowered eyes pleading with her. One answer always stilled him, and that was her cry of 'Take me back; I am afraid.'

"'You were not fashioned for a rude love,' he said to her once.

"'Ah,' she answered then, 'but there is that in me that welcomes a heavy hand and a strong arm.'

"'The others are like that,' he answered, as though speaking to himself. 'But they have no such hungry beauty as you.'

"'My beauty,' she told him, 'is a chance vessel for a mere woman's soul.'

"At last he became wistful, and seemed afraid to ask: for what he desired. 'But I can yet give to you,' he told her. 'Say what you would have. I can bring it you.'

"'Then give me back to my world,' she cried. 'Do that, and I will thank you on my knees.'

"He sighed. 'Is that all you desire?' he said. 'Supposing I granted you that, is there nothing you would take back with you?'

"'No,' she answered.

"'No charm?' he asked again. 'Not a charm to compel love? I can give you even that.'

"'Take me back,' she begged, 'and teach me how to win my husband to forgive me.'

"He smiled very sadly, and she could almost have pitied him, so poor he seemed, bereaved of his desire.

"'You are greater than Tagalash,' he said slowly, 'since you make a slave of him. You shall have what you will. Go back to your world, my beloved, my love that shall henceforth dread the still pools.'

"'So I came back,' she said, looking-round on us as though all were explained.

"'How?' we asked.

"'Why, I came,' she answered plaintively, and had no more to tell. She had been found sleeping on the grass near the spruit, after a week of absence during which the men of the district had combed the very bushes for a trace of her.

"'But the charm?' asked one of us. 'The charm to win forgiveness? What was that?'

"She looked timidly at the tall Johannes who stood by her chair in silence.

"'I have forgotten what it was,' she answered with wet eyes.

"'No,' he cried, bending to her lips. 'No! It is a true charm that, my kleintje.'"

"Good old Tagalash!" remarked Katje cheerfully.

THE HOME KRAAL

After sunset on a summer's day, when evening has overcome the oppression of the still heat and breezes grow up like thoughts, the world of veld becomes odorous, and every air has its burden of unforgettable scents.

As we sat in the stoop, steeped in a flood of shadow, looking down over the kraals to where the grasses are ever green about the spruit, the Vrouw Grobelaar spoke gently.

"I should remember this," she said, "after a hundred years of heaven. The winds of Mooimeisjes would call me even then."

Katje's hand moved in mine.

"It is home," said Katje. "It--it makes me want to cry."

The Vrouw Grobelaar smiled. "As for me," she answered, "it makes me think of nothing so much as that hollow beside Cornel's grave, where, in my time, I shall go to my long dreaming. This place has peace written large on its face; and ah! it is at home that one would like to lie at last. Yes, none of your damp churchyards for me! The home kraal, like a Boer vrouw; for the grave and the home are never quite two things to us Boers. How some have striven for the home kraal, that feared to lie with strangers. Allemachtag, yes!"

She moved a little in her armchair, and we waited in silence for the tale to come. Katje came closer to me, in that way she has, like a dear child or a little dog.

"The Vrouw van der Westhuizen," said the old lady, "had but one child, a son. Emmanuel, she called him, for a dozen poor reasons; and for him and in him she had her whole life. The poor, they say, are rich in poor things, and this lad grew to manhood with a multitude of mean little vices and dirty ways which showed like a sign on his pale weak face, and summed up the trivial soul within for you at the first glance. Most of us have cause to thank God that He has not written on our faces; but Emmanuel could have carried no writing large enough for his mother to read. Because he was weak and idle, two of her nephews lived on the farm, Barend and Peter van Trump, great slow true men, with hearts like children; yet she esteemed Emmanuel as much above them as they in truth, in all points of worth and virtue, were over him. Ah, but a mother is a traitor to the whole world.

"I remember this Emmanuel well. A bony small man of the color of straw, with eyes that moved too quickly and a cold hand, a body like a wisp of linen-cloth-so flimsy and slight--and some slenderness at the knee that made him shamble like a thief! Peter stood with a great brown hand on his shoulder, smiling at me with a frank open mouth and cheeks creased with pleasantry. When he laughed, his body shook mightily, and the motion of his hand made the other stagger. And the Vrouw van der Westhuizen stood there looking, with eyes like pools of pride for her son.

"There was nothing in the farm to hold Emmanuel, no charm in the veld nor interest in the work. He was barely a man when he would ride on to the dorp and its saloons, and in time he was there oftener and oftener, drinking and soiling his hands with all the strange foulness of life the English bring with them. We, the neighbors round about, marked it of course; but none thought much of Emmanuel and his doings; and the thing was little talked of till it became known that at last he was gone for good, and had betaken himself to live in a great town, among devilries that have no name in our clean Taal.

"It was a grievous blow for the Vrouw van der Westhuizen. From the time he departed, she became old; as she went about her affairs, the woe at her heart was plain to see. She was a stricken woman, the world had been cut from under her; and about her, now that her child was gone, she felt nothing familiar, but lived, dumb and bewildered, in a maze of strangers. Barend and Peter had no wits to console her. How, indeed, should they have hoped to console a mother thus bereft? The days lounged by inexorably, bringing no word of Emmanuel with them, and no mercy. Their footprints were the wounds upon the Vrouw van der Westhuizen's heart; and, in the end she sickened wearily and lay listless, due to death.

"Then only did the silence break and let through a word of news. Some one--I cannot remember now who it was--had been to the town to a law-case to be cheated of some land, and he brought back news of Emmanuel--news that he was deadly ill in a mean place, and lacking money. He told it shortly to the Vrouw van der Westhuizen, and she sent at once for Barend and Peter.

"'Get to your horses,' she told them, 'and bring my kleintje back to me. Be quick to bring him--why do you stand gaping like sick cows while he is dying? And take money. Take all the money that is in my box under the bed, in case he should need something. Get the box out quickly, now!'

"They obeyed her. In the box was the money of the house, as the Boers need to keep it, a great deal of money in sovereigns, very heavy to carry. But she would not even suffer them to count it, so they filled a bag with it, and Barend tied it to his belt, and then they caught the horses and started on the long trek to the town.