Part 29 (1/2)
”Oh yes, Nonnie, I am always thinking of them, but I was thinking also how sad it was to forget all my learning. I was getting on so well with my reading and writing, and now I find it so hard to go on by myself.”
”Oh, if that is all, Paulus,” Hansie said cheerfully, ”I can help you a lot. Bring me your books this evening and let me hear you read.”
The poor fellow's look of grat.i.tude was touching to behold. He needed no second invitation, and appeared that evening in his Sunday suit, with a new s.h.i.+rt on, and his hands and face scrubbed with soap and water until they shone like polished ebony.
A Dutch Bible, a book of hymns and psalms, and a small spelling-book were all he possessed, but Hansie found him further advanced than she had expected, and wonderfully intelligent, and she soon added a few simple reading-books to his small store.
Now and then she instructed him for a short hour, and it was a pleasure to see the change which came over him within a few weeks.
Learning became the joy of his life, and in his ambition to get on he forgot much of his anxiety and distress at the enforced separation from his wife and children.
One evening when Hansie had gone into the kitchen to look over his work, there was a sudden fumbling at the door and ”Gentleman Jim”
stumbled in with a campstool under one arm and a slate and Bible, an English one, under the other.
”Coming to learn too, little missie,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and settling himself comfortably on the stool.
Paulus bent over his writing and said never a word. Hansie nodded uncomfortably.
That this self-invited pupil was unwelcome was evident, but he himself seemed serenely unconscious of the fact.
There was no love lost between Paulus and ”Gentleman Jim”--not that there had ever been an open rupture, but Paulus despised the dandified Zulu, and ”Jim” looked down (figuratively speaking, for he was quite a foot shorter in stature) on Paulus's rugged simplicity.
They systematically ignored one another, and were only heard to exchange brief sentences, in English from Jim and in Dutch from Paulus, when necessity compelled them to address one another, for Jim could speak no Sesuto and Paulus knew neither Zulu nor English.
Their antipathy to one another was so marked, in fact, that ”Gentleman Jim” refused to have his meals with Paulus and had built a small kitchen apart for himself, under one of the big willows. On this occasion Hansie did not feel pleased at ”Jim's” appearance either, for it was one thing to teach the self-contained and reverent Sesuto, and quite another to instruct the flippant ”Gentleman Jim.”
But Hansie did not know what to say and asked Jim to let her hear him read. He began laboriously, floundering hopelessly over the long words.
”Fruits, meat _and_ repentance,”[3] he read with painful uncertainty, when Hansie interrupted him with a laugh:
”That will do, Jim; you are wonderful, and you need not come again.”
Other natives on the premises were of the s.h.i.+ftless, wandering type, changing hands continually, and many were the instances of their simplicity, not to say rank stupidity.
On one occasion a ”raw” Kaffir, on being ordered to take a heavily laden wheelbarrow from one part of the garden to the other, was found half an hour later, still in the same place, vainly trying to place the wheelbarrow on his head!
I believe it was the same native who, when told to empty the contents of a waste-paper basket on a burning heap of rubbish in the garden, returned without the basket, and when asked what he had done with it, pointed, with an air of injured surprise, to its smouldering remains on the heap of rubbish.
Indeed, the patience of the housewife was often sorely tried. A relative of Mrs. van Warmelo's coming into the kitchen one morning, found one of these new ”hands” before the stove in a sea of hot water, desperately trying to fill a small kettle _by the spout_, from a large one!
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: Mn en dn.]
[Footnote 3: ”Fruits meet for repentance.”]