I occupied a few days thus: I discarded my surname of Van Cleef and retained my middle name of Mortdecai; I found a synagogue, stricken with poverty, which was prepared to marry me to Blanche without enquiring too strenuously into our antecedents. I found a similarly stricken Scotch church whose minister did more or less the same thing: this satisfied Blanche, who happily sewed both sets of marriage lines into her stays. Normal matrimony suited her: it was only rarely that she hinted at a nostalgic desire for the whip. I helped her through those times.
More important for our future was the necessity to get back to England, the home of the free and the brave. My first attempts to buy a map were baffling: the Dutch settlers (they liked to be called Afrikaaners — the word “Boer” in those days meant a rustic clown, perhaps rightly) had no faith in cartography, for they knew that the earth was flat. London was a few weeks’ marches North; Holland a little further. One could not disagree with such men for each one carried a firearm and was fierce in his faith, fierce. Anything not explicitly spoken of in the Bible could not exist: it was so simple. I envied them their certainty. One Predikant or preacher harangued me for quite half an hour, his food-encrusted beard cracking like a whip as he spoke. Armageddon, he assured me, along with the end of the world, was positively to begin in the year 1914. I have every intention of seeing that year (for I am careful about choosing those who prepare my food) but I shall be surprised if anything Armageddon-like occurs.
No map was to be had, I learned, except by favour of the Clerk to the British Admiralty at the Royal Dockyard. This meant, for me, in my peculiar circumstances, that no map was to be had. While Blanche occupied herself with replenishing her wardrobe, I roved the town, making friends both here and there. The Afrikaaners were difficult to befriend: my clean Gelderland Dutch seemed affected to them and their yokel-patter grated upon my delicate ear. Many a time, when I had plucked up the appetite to attack a bowl of beef stewed with ginger and dried apricots, a monstrous she-Boer with breasts like pillows and moustaches which seemed to have strayed from her private parts would clap me heartily upon the shoulder and cry “Smaaklike ete!” into my ear. This never failed to destroy my appetite.
On one such night, famished and forlorn, I fell in with a rich young smouse, or Jewish pedlar, in a drinking-shop. He had been up-country many times, he said, and was indeed about to set forth again. I expressed interest. He studied my clothes, which were of good quality but not showy and decided that I was a man of some small substance. We began the elaborate, ritual dance of conversation which takes place when Greek meets Greek. He was, it appeared, tailing on to a caravan of farming settlers who were “trekking” north-westwards instead of taking the more usual route to the Orange River and the Vaal. This trek was to march parallel to the coast, through the Little Bushman Country, skirting the great Kalahari Desert and, it was hoped, joining a party of kinsmen who had gone that way a couple of years before.
“And how are these kinsmen faring?” I asked.
“Who knows?” he shrugged. “What is news? Who is going to ride through dangers for a month on a valuable horse just to tell that Oom Paul has the gout and the cow has calved? Maybe they are all dead, God forbid; more likely, they are wallowing in milk and honey in some new Canaan.”
The smouse clearly believed, from his experience, that the gamble of taking his wares so far was a better-than-even chance: he was not a man to take odds worse than seven to three. If the trek found the community settled and prosperous, the contents of his pedlar-packs would be almost beyond price. Such a community, you see, might well be self-sufficient in the matter of meat and butter, corn and leather, even milk and honey — but no such community could make fine steel needles, gun-flints and powder, silk shawls, lead bars for the casting of bullets, ribbons, petticoats and delicate under-drawers for brides. (A Predikant would be in our trek and would have a busy time if we found the settlement: there would be a great naagtmaal with much hell-fire preaching and drunkenness, many informal marriages to be regularised, adulterers to be chastised and babies to be baptised.)
Yes, the smouse agreed, there was much room to spare in his wagon. The charges, of course, would be heavy, for this space could otherwise be used for valuable freight. Surely I could see that? I pressed many a glass of the excellent Van Der Hum drink upon him but the heaviness of the charges dwindled only a little. At last we struck hands on the bargain.
“By the way,” I asked idly, “where will you sleep?”
“Why, in the wagon with you of course, where else? There are two pallets, each with a good palliasse of sweet hay.”
“But my wife …?”
He had not known that I had a wife. He did not quite rend his garments, nor tear his hair — indeed, the latter was so richly pomaded that I do not think he could have secured enough grip upon it for tearing purposes. Back and forth the argument swayed: twice he stormed out of the drinking-shop in disgust, only to return for something he had forgotten and to give me one last chance to be reasonable; three times I, too, stalked out, only to be dragged back in and implored to be reasonable. Being reasonable meant that I should either abandon Blanche — women, he assured me with many an anatomical detail, are much like each other and can be readily replaced — or pay a monstrous extra charge to compensate him for sleeping outside his wagon, away from his goods. We came, of course, to an agreement in the end. The other clients of the boozing-ken, listening avidly, may have believed that I had broken the smouse’s heart, for this is what he vowed; while he — for this is what I cried aloud — had reduced me to penury and consigned my unborn children to the poorhouse. Altogether, it was a most satisfactory and profitable evening. I would not be a Gentile for a knighthood — even for a peerage.
We — that is to say, Blanche, I and Orace — made rendezvous with the trek three afternoons later. The smouse made a great fuss about Orace, although I explained that he was only a bastard and would not need a bed. Then he complained about our baggage, which was more than had been agreed upon. Ever ready to meet a reasonable demand, I compromised by jettisoning one trunk of Blanche’s clothes. I had bought a fine battery or chest of weapons for our protection and explained to her that these would prove more valuable than basques and drawers and stays. She was not an unreasonable woman. I had also, at the last moment, bought a fine saddle-horse: I fancy I cut a fine figure on it, although the Boers, inexplicably, laughed at me. Next morning — not a time that you or I would call morning, but at the “hour of the horns”, when, before true dawn, a man with good eyesight can just discern the horns of the oxen against the sky — the whole cumbrous, complaining encampment of what was to be our trek roused itself, beat its oxen and blackamoors into activity and grated into a sort of motion. Northwards.