“Gawie is white. He is as white as I am.”

Francina was eighteen. She was tall and slender. She had a neat figure. And she looked very pretty in that voorkamer, with the yellow hair falling on to her cheeks from underneath a blue ribbon. Another thing I noticed about Francina, as she moved daintily towards me with the tray, was the scent that she bought in Zeerust at the last Nagmaal. The perfume lay on her strangely, like the night.

Koos Deventer made no reply to Francina. And only after she had gone back into the kitchen, and the door was closed, did he return to the subject of Gawie Erasmus.

“He is so coloured,” Koos said, “that he even sleeps with a blanket over his head, like a kaffir does.”

It struck me that Koos Deventer’s statements were rather peculiar. For, according to Koos, you couldn’t tell that Gawie Erasmus was coloured, just by looking at his hair and fingernails. You had to wait until Gawie lay underneath a blanket, so that you saw nothing of him at all.

But I remembered the way that Francina had walked out of the voorkamer with her head very high and her red lips closed. And it seemed to me, then, that Gawie’s disagreements with his employer were not all due to the unevenness of the wall of the new dam. I did not see Gawie Erasmus again until the meeting of the Drogevlei Debating Society.

But in the meantime the story that Gawie was coloured gained much ground. Paulus Welman said that he knew a man once in Vryburg who had known Gawie’s grandfather. And this man said that Gawie’s grandfather had a big belly and wore a copper ring through his nose. At other times, again, Paulus Welman said that it was Gawie’s father whom this man in Vryburg had known, and that Gawie’s father did not wear the copper ring in his nose, but in his one ear. It was hard to know which story to believe. So most of the farmers in the Marico believed both.

 

The meeting of the Drogevlei Debating Society was held in the schoolroom. There was a good attendance. For the debate was to be on the Native Question. And that was always a popular subject in the Marico. You could say much about it without having to think hard.

I was standing under the thorn-trees talking to Paulus Welman and some others, when Koos Deventer arrived with his wife and Francina and Gawie. They got off the mule-cart, and the two women walked on towards the schoolroom. Koos and Gawie stayed behind, hitching the reins on to a tree. Several of the men with me shook their heads gravely at what they saw. For Gawie, while stooping for a riem, had another hurried disagreement with his employer.

Francina, walking with her mother towards the school, sensed that something was amiss. But when she turned round she was too late to see anything.

Francina and her mother greeted us as they passed. Paulus Welman said that Francina was a pretty girl, but rather stand-offish. He said her understanding was a bit slow, too. He said that when he had told her that joke about the copper ring in the one ear of Gawie’s father, Francina looked at him as though he had said there was a copper ring in his own ear. She didn’t seem to be quite all there, Paulus Welman said.

But I didn’t take much notice of Paulus.

I stood there, under the thorn-tree, where Francina had passed, and I breathed in stray breaths of that scent which Francina had bought in Zeerust.