The Star with a Tail

by H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I was twenty-one in the winter of 1878 and clerk to the magistrate at Pretoria, at a salary of a hundred and eighty pounds a year and a horse, which was a great deal for a young man from a Norfolk parsonage who could do nothing in particular except write a fair hand and keep his temper. I had been eighteen months in the Transvaal. I had come up with the Special Commissioner's people from Natal, by wagon, in the hot weather, and I had heard the proclamation read in the square, and seen the flag go up, and believed every word of it, as young men will believe a document that has a crown at the top. We had come, so the proclamation said and so I said to anyone who would listen, to bring order and justice and an end to slavery to a country that had too little of all three. I do not say now that we brought none. I say only that I was twenty-one.

The court sat in a long room off the public offices, with a mud floor that had been smeared with cow-dung and was swept every morning by a prisoner, and a table at one end on a little platform of planks, and a rail across the middle. Behind the rail stood those who had business; behind them, the public, which in Pretoria meant anyone who was not doing anything else, and in the winter that was a great many people, for there is nothing to do in the Transvaal in July but wait for the rain. Through the window one could see the willows along the water-furrow, bare and yellow, and the wagons outspanned on the square, and the smoke of the morning fires lying flat in the cold air.

Mr. Raikes, the magistrate, was a big, slow, kindly man who had been twenty years in the Cape service and had a great respect for written evidence and none whatever for anything else. He used to say that a man may lie with his mouth, but it takes two men and a clerk to lie in a register. He said it to me so often that I have never forgotten it; and I set it down here because what follows turns upon a register, and upon Mr. Raikes, and upon me.

---

The case was called on a Tuesday. A farmer named Barend Nel, from the country under the Magaliesberg, had applied for an order that his apprentice, a girl called Saartje, who had run away from his farm in May, should be returned to him. She had been found in Pretoria, working for a Cape coloured woman who took in washing by the furrow below the church, and the field-cornet had brought her in.

Now you must understand what an apprentice was in the old Republic, for most people in England never did. The law of the Volksraad forbade slavery, and said so plainly. But it allowed a farmer to take a native child who had no parents, or whose parents could not keep it, and to have that child written down, or booked, as they called it, in the landdrost's register, after which the child served him without wages until it came of age. A boy was free at twenty-five, a girl at twenty-one. That was the law. Where the orphans came from was another matter. They came, very often, out of the smoke of a commando; and a child whose village has been burned has no parents, in the sense of the register, whatever it may have had the morning before.

I had the register on the table in front of me. It was a thick book bound in calf, with the leather gone soft at the corners from the landdrosts' thumbs, and every entry in it was in Dutch, in a clerk's round hand, and every one was the same: the name the master had given, the age, the words weeskind, which means orphan, the master's name, the date, and the field-cornet's signature. I found the entry before the case was called and marked it with a slip of paper. Saartje. Omtrent zes jaren. Weeskind. Booked to Barend Jacobus Nel, the fourteenth of August, 1866.

About six years, in 1866. By the register she was eighteen, and had three years still to serve.

---

Nel was a long, brown, silent man of fifty or so, with a beard cut square, and a hat that he held against his chest throughout with both hands, as if it were the only thing in the room that belonged to him. He stood at the rail and gave his evidence in Dutch, and it was short. He had paid the field-cornet's fee and had the child booked according to law. He had fed her and clothed her for twelve years. She had been taught to read in the Bible by his wife. Last May she had walked away in the night, taking a blanket that was his. He wanted her back, and he wanted the blanket. He did not raise his voice, and when he had done he looked at the magistrate as a man looks at a sky he does not trust.

The girl stood at the other end of the rail, between the field-cornet and a native constable. She was tall, very straight, with her head shaved close in the fashion of the farm girls, and she wore a print dress that was too short for her and over it the blanket, which no one had thought to take away. She did not look at Nel. She looked at the window.

Mr. Raikes asked her how old she was.

The interpreter put the question. His name was Abel Mothibe. He was a man of perhaps thirty, in a black coat that had been made for a larger man and a white collar that was very clean, and he had been taught at the Berlin mission at Botshabelo, near Middelburg, where the Germans had gathered the people who ran from Sekhukhune's country in the sixties. He spoke her language, which was his own; and Dutch, as everyone did; and English, which he had learned, he told me once, from a soldier's grammar and a volume of sermons, so that it came out of him somewhat stiff and Biblical, but always exact. He was paid two shillings a day when the court sat and nothing when it did not. I liked him. I did not, at that time, think much further about him than that.

He spoke to the girl. She answered him in a few words. He turned to the magistrate.

"She says she does not know, sir. She says the Baas knows. He has it in the book."

Mr. Raikes nodded, as though she had said something very sensible, and put out his hand to me for the register; and I gave it to him with the slip of paper in the place. He read the entry aloud and laid it down.

"Then that would appear to settle it," he said.

Abel Mothibe did not move, but he said, "Sir."

"Well?"

"With your permission, sir. Among her people, and mine, nobody counts years. It is not done. A child knows that it was born in the year of the great hail, or the year the cattle sickened, or the year that this chief or that was killed. If the court will allow me, I will ask her in that way. It may be that what she remembers will agree with the book. It may be that it will not."

Nel, who had a little English, said in Dutch that the book was the law, and the kaffir had no business to ask anything. Mr. Raikes looked at him, and then at the register, and then at Abel, with the expression of a man who is asked to admit a kind of evidence he does not like, in a country where there is very often no other kind.

"Ask her," he said. "Ask her what she remembers of the time she was taken. And put it to me exactly as she says it."

---

Abel turned to her then, and it was a long time before he turned back. I could not follow what was said, for I had only a few words of the language, enough to buy a fowl. But I could see that it was not one question but a great many, put slowly, and that some of them she answered at once and some she did not answer for a long while, and once she shook her head and put her hand up to her mouth. The public behind the rail grew restless and began to talk. Mr. Raikes rapped the table. Nel turned his hat round in his hands, once, completely, and held it still again.

At last Abel faced the bench.

"Sir, she says this. That she was taken in the winter, in the time when the fields are bare. That there were men on horses and that the huts were burning, and her mother's hut also. That she was carrying her brother, the small one, on her back, in a skin, when she was taken, and that she could carry him, but not far. That she does not know what became of him. That the men gave her to a man with a wagon, who was not the Baas, and that she was with that man a long time, more than one summer, before she came to the Baas."

He paused.

"And she says that in that winter, before the men came, there was a star in the sky with a tail. She says it was very great. She says it stood over the hills in the evening like a cow's tail switching, and the old women said it was a sign, and would not let the children look at it. She looked. She says she remembers it best of anything."

Mr. Raikes sat back. He had a way, when he was thinking, of taking off his spectacles and folding them and unfolding them again, and he did this now, twice. Then he said, not to Abel but to me:

"A comet, Cubitt. What year was that? You're a parson's son. You must have been taught astronomy."

I had been taught very little astronomy. But it happened that I knew. I was four years old in the summer of 1861, and I had been woken by my father in the night and carried out in a blanket into the glebe, past the stack-yard, where the whole household was standing in the wet grass with their faces turned up, the cook and the boy and my mother in her shawl; and there over the church tower, reaching up out of the north-west so far that I thought it must be touching the top of the sky, was a long white plume of light, very still, like a feather laid on black velvet. My father held me up to it. I remember the smell of his coat and the cold of the grass on my bare feet when he put me down, and I remember that he said, "You will tell your grandchildren," and that for some reason this frightened me. For years afterwards, in our house, that summer was always called the comet summer, and dated so: a thing happened before the comet, or after it.

"Eighteen sixty-one, sir," I said. "The great comet was in 'sixty-one. It was seen in England at midsummer, which would be midwinter here. I saw it myself."

I spoke with entire confidence. I have thought since that I had never been so sure of any date in my life, nor had less right to be.

Mr. Raikes put his spectacles on.

"Eighteen sixty-one," he said. "And old enough then to carry a younger child on her back, which one would put at five years at the very least, more likely six or seven. And booked in 'sixty-six as about six years." He laid his hand on the register. "Then either the register is wrong, or the girl is."

Nel said, in Dutch, that there were many stars.

Abel translated this, exactly and without expression, and I saw Mr. Raikes's mouth tighten. He asked Nel where he had got the child. Nel said from the field-cornet, according to law. He asked Nel where the field-cornet had got her. Nel said he did not ask the field-cornet his business. He asked Nel whether the field-cornet who signed the entry was living. Nel said he was dead, which was true; I found it out afterwards. He had been killed at Sekhukhune's mountain in the war of 'seventy-six, in the same commando in which Nel himself had ridden; and that, too, I did not know until afterwards, and I am not sure that it signifies.

Then Mr. Raikes asked Nel whether she had been with another man before she came to him; and Nel was silent for a while, holding his hat, and then said that she had come to him from a transport-rider, who had brought her down from the north, and who had been paid for his trouble.

"How much?" said Mr. Raikes.

Nel did not answer. Abel did not translate the silence. There was no need.

---

Mr. Raikes gave his decision that afternoon, after he had eaten his dinner, as he always did, for he held that no man ought to decide anything of importance on an empty stomach. I wrote it down from his dictation and I have the substance of it still. The court found that the entry in the register of August 1866 was made upon the word of a field-cornet now deceased, who could not be examined; that the court had no means of knowing on what that officer had founded his estimate of the child's age; that on the evidence of the girl herself, which the court believed, she had been taken in or about the winter of 1861, being then of an age to carry an infant; that she was therefore not less than twenty-one years of age at the date of the hearing; and that her term of apprenticeship had expired. The application was refused. The blanket was to be returned.

Nel heard this through Abel, standing as he had stood all morning. When it was done he put on his hat, for the first time, and went out without a word, and I heard his horse on the square, going away at a walk. I believed at the time that I knew what he was thinking. I do not believe so now.

The girl took off the blanket and folded it, very neatly, in four, and laid it on the rail where Nel had stood, and then she was given a paper. It was a printed form that we used for discharged servants, with a space for the name and a space for the age, and Mr. Raikes had me fill it in. I wrote Saartje, and then I stopped, and asked Abel to ask her if that was her name. He asked her. She said something.

"Dikeledi," said Abel. "Her mother called her Dikeledi."

I crossed out the other and wrote that, spelling it as well as I could; and in the space for the age I wrote about 22 years, which was what Mr. Raikes told me to write. She took the paper and looked at it, though she could not read English, and then put it inside the front of her dress, and went out of the door into the sun, in her short print frock, with her arms bare, and that was the last I saw of her.

---

That evening I walked down along the water-furrow towards the church, as I often did when the office closed, and found Abel sitting on the low wall by the drift, with his collar off and folded on his knee, and his face turned to the west where the sun was going down red behind the hills. I sat beside him, and gave him a pipe of tobacco, and we smoked for some time without speaking, which was a thing we were able to do.

Then I said that it had been a good day's work, and that I was glad of the comet.

"Yes," said Abel.

"It was a lucky thing she remembered it."

"Yes," said Abel. Then, after a while: "She did not remember it first. She remembered the fire first. She remembered her brother. The star I asked her about."

I said, somewhat taken aback, that I had not understood him to ask her about stars.

"I asked her if there was anything in the sky that year," he said. "Anything that the old people talked of. I asked it four times, Mr. Cubitt, in four ways. The fourth time she remembered the star." He drew on his pipe. "It is a true thing, I think. She is not a girl who says what she is told. But I asked."

I sat there with this for a little. And then, because I was young, and because it had been my comet, and my father's, I said that it was fortunate the dates had fallen out as they did, since if her star had been some other year the case would have gone the other way.

Abel turned and looked at me for the first time; and I have tried often, since, to describe that look to myself, and cannot, except that there was no unkindness in it, and that I felt as I had felt at school when a master looked at a sum I had been proud of.

"There were two stars with tails when I was a small boy," he said. "My uncle saw them both. Three winters apart, he says; but he is old, and he is not sure which came first." He knocked out his pipe against the wall. "Either would have done, Mr. Cubitt. Your father's star, or the one before it. Either one makes her more than twenty-one."

I said nothing to that. There was nothing to say. I had sat at the table all morning with the register under my hand, and the date had been mine, and I had given it as though there had only ever been one star in the sky.

"And if she had remembered no star?" I said at last.

"Then I would have asked about the locusts," said Abel, "and the cattle-sickness, and the year the chief's son was killed. The Baas sent his witness to the field-cornet. The field-cornet is dead. I looked for a witness that nobody could send." He put his collar back on, fastening the stud carefully under his chin with his fingers, as a man does who has to look respectable in the morning. "The sky is very large, Mr. Cubitt. It has been everywhere."

He got up, and said good night, and went off along the furrow towards the location, where the mission people had their houses; and I sat on the wall until it was dark and the dogs in the location began to bark, and then I went home to my lodgings and did not sleep very well. I have set down why. It was not that I thought the decision wrong. I thought it right then and I think it right now, more right, if anything, than Mr. Raikes ever knew. It was that I had gone into court that morning believing that I was the justice of the place, I and Mr. Raikes and the register and the flag in the square, and I had come out of it knowing that the justice had been done by a man in a borrowed coat at two shillings a day, who had needed us for nothing but to write it down.

---

I left the Transvaal in 1881, when the country was handed back to the Boers after Majuba, as so many of us did, and I have never been there since. Of Barend Nel, or of the girl, I never heard again. Abel Mothibe I heard of once, from a missionary I met at a dinner in Norwich, who told me he had become a teacher at one of the Berlin stations and had been ordained, and was much respected; but the missionary was vague about which station, and I did not press him.

In the spring of this year, which is 1910, the comet that is called Halley's came back, as the astronomers had promised, and the newspapers were full of it. It was a poor thing to see from Norfolk, low down in the mist, and nothing like the one I remembered. But I took my granddaughter out to look at it, in a blanket, across the wet lawn, before light one morning in May; and when I had found it for her with some trouble above the elms, a small grey smudge, she asked me how old it was.

I told her it was a great deal older than anyone. Then I held her up to it, and she put out her hand towards it as if it were something she could take, and I did not tell her what year it was.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Rider Haggard per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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