# The Little Karoo/Chapter 2

​II: The Schoolmaster
BECAUSE of a weakness of the chest which my grandmother thought that she alone could cure, I went often, as a young girl, to my grandparents' farm of Nooitgedacht in the Ghamka valley. At Nooitgedacht, where my grandparents lived together for more than forty years, my grandmother had always young people about her—young boys and girls, and little children who clung to her skirts or were tossed up into the air and caught again by my grandfather. There was not one of their children or their grandchildren that did not love grandfather and grandmother Delport, and when aunt Betje died it seemed but right to us all that her orphans, little Neeltje and Frikkie and Hans, Koos and Martinus and Piet, should come to Nooitgedacht to live. My grandmother was then about sixty years old. She was a big ​stout woman, but as is sometimes the way with women who are stout, she moved very easily and lightly upon her feet. I had seen once a ship come sailing into Zandtbaai harbour, and grandmother walking, in her full wide skirts with aunt Betje's children bobbing like little boats around her, would make me often think of it. This big, wise, and gentle woman, with love in her heart for all the world, saw in everything that befell us the will of the Lord. And when, three weeks after aunt Betje's children had come to us, there came one night, from God knows where, a stranger asking for shelter out of the storm, my grandmother knew that the Lord had sent him.
The stranger, who, when my grandmother brought him into the living-room, gave the name of Jan Boetje, was a small dark man with a little pointed beard that looked as if it did not yet belong to him. His cheeks were thin and white, and so also were his hands. He seldom raised his eyes except ​when he spoke, and when he did so it was as if I saw before me the Widow of Nain's son, risen from the dead, out of my grandmother's Bible. Yes, as if from the dead did Jan Boetje come to us that night, and yet it was food that I thought of at once. And quickly I ran and made coffee and put it before him.
When Jan Boetje had eaten and drunk my grandparents knew all that they were ever to know about him. He was a Hollander, and had but lately come to South Africa. He had neither relative nor friend in the colony. And he was on his way up-country on foot to the goldfields.
For a little while after Jan Boetje spoke of the goldfields my grandmother sat in silence. But presently she said:
"Mijnheer! I that am old have never yet seen a happy man that went digging for gold, or a man that was happy when he had found it. Surely it is sin and sorrow that drives men to it, and sin and sorrow that comes to them from it. Look now! Stay with us ​here on the farm, teaching school to my grandchildren, the orphans of my daughter Lijsbeth, and it may be that so you will find peace."
Jan Boetje answered her: "If Mevrouw is right, and sin and sorrow have driven me to her country for gold, am I a man to be trusted with her grandchildren?"
My grandmother cried, in her soft clear voice that was so full of love and pity, "Is there a sin that cannot be forgiven? And a sorrow that cannot be shared?"
Jan Boetje answered: "My sorrow I cannot share. And my sin I myself can never forgive."
And again my grandmother said: “Mijnheer! What lies in a man's heart is known only to God and himself. Do now as seems right to you, but surely if you will stay with us I will trust my grandchildren to you and know that the Lord has sent you."
For a long, long time, as it seemed to me, Jan Boetje sat before us and said no word. I ​could not breathe, and yet it was as if all the world must hear my breathing. Aunt Betje's children were long ago in bed, and only my grandparents and I sat there beside him. Long, long, we waited. And when at last Jan Boetje said: "I will stay," it was as if he had heard how I cried to the Lord to help him.
So it was that Jan Boetje stayed with us on the farm, and taught school to aunt Betje's children. His schoolroom was the old waggon-house (grandfather had long ago built a new one) and here my grandmother and I put a table and stools for Jan Boetje and his scholars. The waggon-house had no window, and to get light Jan Boetje and the children sat close to the open half-door. From the door one looked out to the orange-grove, where all my grandmother's children, and many of her grandchildren also, had been christened. Beyond and above the orange-trees rose the peaks of the great Zwartkops mountains, so black in summer, and so white ​when snow lay upon them in winter. Through the mountains, far to the head of the valley, ran the Ghamka pass by which men travelled up-country when they went looking for gold. The Ghamka river came down through this pass and watered all the farms in the valley. Coming down from the mountains to Nooitgedacht men crossed it by the Rooikranz drift.
Inside the waggon-house my grandfather stored his great brandy-casks and his tobacco, his pumpkins and his mealies, his ploughs and his spades, his whips and his harness, and all such things as are needed at times about a farm. From the beams of the loft also there hung the great hides that he used for his harness and his veldschoen. Jan Boetje's schoolroom smelt always of tobacco and brandy and hides, and when the mud floor, close by the door, was freshly smeared with mist it smelt of bullock's blood and cow-dung as well.
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