HERE was a tale that Oom Piet used to tell, of the days when he showed his back to the tax-gatherers and trekked east to the very edge of the world, where the veld broke into patches of sand and shelved down into the sea. it was the only one of all his stories that did not make him out a hero; the rest were all of war with the kafirs and hunting in new-found lands, where the game was so thick that it jostled for pasture. But this was a tale of wonder, and he wondered over it contentedly till he went to that place where all riddles are answered.
It began always with the long Odyssey of the trek, while the slow wagons drew indomitably to ever fresh horizons and each dawn showed a new country and the fresh spoor of buck. Then there were the mountains, seen afar for days, that stood across his track; he had searched them north and south for more than a month ere he found the winding thread of valley that let him through. Not once but a dozen times in that year-long journey his ripe craft of war had served him well, and the wagons had been laagered in time to stand off an attack of kafirs; each lonely battle was fresh in his memory, and he never omitted to tell how his wife crouched beside him as he fought, loading his spare rifle and passing it into his hand. Sometimes, at this stage in the history, some of his old force would return to him, and one could see all the face harden and grow keen behind the big beard. Oom Piet was very old and much under the dominion of his years; for him one thing in a story was as much as another; and he always carried us through every stage of that trek, from the Bushmen he shot in the mountains to the baby he buried at Weenen Drift.
And thus at last, when they had passed through an easy country, where Zulu satraps from the north ruled the terror-stricken kraals, and nothing any longer had the power to make him wonder, they came upon the sea. It was a still evening when they drew down to its shore, and before them the unimagined ocean filled the world and lay against the sky, and its murmur hushed the long-familiar noises of the veld. A broken reef of rock stood a hundred yards from the beach and the water creamed about it; the crags were like gapped and broken teeth. Oom Piet stood with his wife's hand on his arm and his three sons at his elbow, and all five gazed awhile in silence. The spell of the stillness and the great space worked within them all.
"It is a place of peace, at all events," said Oom Piet, at last.
The hand on his arm tightened. Susanna looked up at him with a smile.
"But I am glad I am not alone here," she answered.
As for the lads, theirs was a bewilderment that stilled their judgment. Klein Piet, the eldest, leaned on his rifle and stared out at the sea with empty eyes, for it spoke to unguessed depths in his soul; and Jan and Andries were both a little afraid. They had nothing to say, and when presently Piet led the way back to the wagons, they followed him hesitating, casting nervous glances over their shoulders as they went. Even by the fires, as they sat together over their evening meal, some constraint remained with them, so that they talked with an effort of trivial things while their thoughts abode elsewhere, and Susanna looked from one to another with a little frown of perplexity. Not one of them could have told what troubled him, or guessed that in his very name of Van Praagh there closed a long tradition of the salt and sound of the sea.
It was when a new dawn had shown them the place in clear light, unwitched by evening shadows and calm, that Piet made his decision. Landward of the sand the veld was rich, with patches of bush; a stream ran through it handily, and to his eyes, wise in a hundred aspects of game land, cattle land, and mealie land, it spoke of security and comfort. He was not a man to be drawn from his sure judgment by trifles of liking and curiosity; he had lived too close to
the real things of life to be deluded by semblances; but none the less, there was gladness for him that all these good things, the materials of a home and a livelihood, lay at the flank of that great tame sea, to whose noise his ears were already become accustomed. There was a welcome in the sound of it; under the morning sun it showed a face as bright as a host's; and when the lads came back from the beach, with their hair blown about their faces and their hands full of shells, they found him sitting on an ant hill, in the middle of a square he had marked out with big smooth stones.
"What is it?" asked Klein Piet.