The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “I am Roderick Guise, kêrels,” he said. “I am the man who writes the animal stories in the Huisgenoot and the Boereweekblad and so on. I suppose you have all heard of me.”

  I could see he was disappointed when we all said that we hadn’t heard of him. One man, Martinus Snyman, nearly brought the whole of Drogevlei into disgrace in front of a stranger by thinking that animal stories were stories written by animals. He had seen a horse once in a circus at Zeerust adding up figures, and he thought that perhaps the Englishman had also trained animals to write stories.

  Martinus Snyman was easily the most ignorant man I had ever come across.

  But afterwards we felt more intimate with this Roderick Guise. By that I mean that we felt less contempt for him. That was after we had found out that Guise was perhaps the Johannesburg way of saying Gous. And at that time Koos Gous was in gaol for smuggling cattle over the Bechuanaland border. So we forgave Rode­rick Guise for a lot of his nonsense because he had the same name as the biggest cattle-smuggler in the Marico.

  Later on, whenever he found two or three of us together, Ro­derick Guise would take a roll of papers out of his pocket and read us some of his stories. There was one story about a jackal and another one about a lion and quite a few about snakes – mostly rinkhalses and mambas.

  What he wrote was all silly stuff. I mean, it might have been true enough for animals that you read about in other countries. Animals like polar bears and whales. But I know that any sensible South African animals would laugh at the nonsense Roderick Guise wrote about what he called Wild Life.

  For instance, Guise wrote one story about a leopard chasing him for half a mile across the veld. Now, you know as well as I do that no leopard has ever yet chased a white man, except for fun. And I am sure that particular leopard only chased Roderick so that he could have a story written about him. We, who understand animals, know how vain they can be in that way. And it is just little things like this that people who write about Wild Life will never believe.

  But I am sorry that that leopard chased Roderick Guise for only half a mile. While he felt in that playful mood, he should have chased him right out of the Marico District.

  One day, when we were sitting in Kris Lemmer’s dining room, waiting for the post-cart to bring the letters, a little kaffir-boy came running into the house, shouting that there was a mamba in the Government Road. Lemmer laughed and said that it must be a mamba that had got loose out of one of Roderick Guise’s stories.

  But we went to have a look.

  It was a mamba, all right. When we got into the road we were just in time to see that last few feet of the snake’s tail disappearing in the yellow grass.

  Kris said that the mamba had come from the direction of the kraal. He suspected that this snake was in the habit of milking one of his cows. Of course, we all know that certain snakes have the habit of getting friendly with a cow and draining her milk. So we told him that was the best way of lying in wait for the snake. Then the post-cart came and we forgot all about it.

  Only, I am mentioning this thing about the snake now, because of what happened afterwards. You’ll see then that this is a strange story. People who don’t know the Marico won’t believe this, I suppose. But then, they don’t matter. There are always persons like Roderick Guise who tell them lies that they can believe. But I have told you that this is a strange story.

  When the predikant came here some years ago, and the ouderling took him aside and told him the whole thing on behalf of the Dwarsberg congregation – for we all decided that it wasn’t right for the predikant to hold Nagmaal unless he knew everything – then the predikant turned very pale and trembled a little, and said that the Evil Spirit knows what to make of it.

  What we did know was that when he got on to the post-cart, Roderick Guise, the man who wrote animal stories and the man who had vaunted his powers in a cheap and silly way, was the most pitiful spectacle in the whole of the Marico District.

  We were all pleased that the arrogance had been taken out of Roderick Guise, and in that way we felt grateful to Martha. By whatever means she had set about making Roderick look the poor creature he really was, she had succeeded remarkably well.

  We remembered that in addition to her madness there was another ugly thing about Martha. And that was about the way her mother had died. We wondered how much there was about this that Roderick Guise knew. But, of course, it was useless trying to ask him. He was not in a fit state to talk about that or about anything else. I wonder if he has ever been able to talk again.

  Afterwards the kaffirs told us that the Mad White Missus had had a baby. We were surprised about this, in a way. Somehow, from the stories that had grown up around Martha, it did not seem natural to think of her and a baby. In a way, that was about the most terrible thing we had heard about her, so far. You know what I mean. The thought of her baby actually seemed a lot more frightening than her madness, even. We felt that we really had to do something about this.

  Then, one morning, a kaffir told us that the baby had died. He didn’t know for sure what it had died of, but he believed it was from a snakebite. We all agreed that it was absurd to imagine that a snake would bite a baby that was only a few days old.

  It was then that the veldkornet decided that we had to take action.

  “This is where the law comes in,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what else Martha does. But if she has murdered her child the law must have its way.”

  We agreed with the veldkornet that it was his duty to go over to Martha’s farm and make enquiries about the baby’s death. But we also made it clear to him that we considered it was his duty to go alone. We could see what he hinted at. He meant that three or four of us should volunteer to go with him. But if he was veldkor­net, he should also carry out the duties that went with it, and not drag other people into his affairs.

  “If you won’t come with me willingly,” the veldkornet said, “I shall have to commandeer you.”

  Accordingly he commandeered four men to go with him. We cleaned and loaded our rifles and early the next morning the five of us set off on horseback. I am sure I never felt more uncomfortable in all my life than I did that morning. And I have been right through the Boer War and I fought with De Wet at Sanna’s Post. Yet all those things seemed like nothing at all compared with the heavy feeling I had in my stomach that morning when the five of us were riding down the road together.

  By their silence and the expressions on their faces, I could see that my companions felt the same.

  Anyway, I’ll say no more about this part of the affair, except that we rode twice round the farmyard before going in and we could have gone round a third time if the veldkornet didn’t slip off his horse sideways, so that he had to dismount completely to save face. Of course, he said afterwards that he had intended getting off there, anyway, and he had just slipped like that on purpose to dismount more quickly.

  Piet Steyn gasped at what we saw then. On the table by the side of the house, in the shade of a big camel-thorn tree, lay the body of a naked baby. I remember the queer, frightened way in which all five of us took off our hats. It must have looked strange to a stranger passing by then to see five armed burghers standing hat in hand and afraid to talk in front of a madwoman’s dead baby.

  But, of course, nobody could tell from its looks that the mother was mad. It looked just like an ordinary baby, and rather pretty, I thought. And there was no doubt as to how it had died. We had all seen the effects of a mamba’s bite and we knew.

  The veldkornet whispered to us to return.

  And we were on the point of going back as noiselessly as we had come, when a queer kind of curiosity made us look through the window. It was what we saw then that made the predikant pray fervently when we told him about it.

  What we saw then made us understand a great deal more about what the Bible says of Evil and Sin.

  On the bed in front of the window the madwoman Martha was lying. She was awake. Her eyes stared at the ceiling. A lon
g brown mamba lay on her bosom. In what looked like a sweet and soft and very tender way, Martha’s hand stroked the head of the snake.

  Back Home

  The South African Opinion (new series)

  (1944–46)

  Concertinas and Confetti

  Hendrik Uys and I were boys together (Oom Schalk Lourens said). At school we were also classmates. That is, if you can call it being classmates, seeing that our relationship was that we sat together at the same desk, and that Hendrik Uys, who was three years older than I, used to sit almost on top of me so as to make it easier for him to copy off me. And whenever I got an answer wrong Hendrik Uys used to get very annoyed, because it meant that he also got caned for doing bad work, and after we got caned he always used to kick me after we got outside the school.

  “This will teach you to pay attention to the teacher when he is talking,” Hendrik Uys used to say to me when we were on our way home. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, when your father is making all these sacrifices to keep you at school. You got two sums wrong, and you made three mistakes in spelling to­day.” And after that he would start kicking me.

  And the strange thing is that what he said really made me feel sad, and I felt that in making mistakes in spelling and sums I was throwing away my opportunities; and when he spoke about my father’s sacrifices to give me an education I felt that Hendrik Uys was a good son who had fine feelings towards his parents; and it never occurred to me at the time that in not doing any work of his own, but just copying down everything I wrote – that in that respect Hendrik Uys was a lot more ungrateful than I was. In fact, it was only years later that it struck me that in carrying on in the way he was Hendrik Uys was displaying a most unpraiseworthy kind of contempt for his own parents’ sacrifices.

  And because he spoke so touchingly about my father I had a deep respect for Hendrik Uys. There were no limits to my admiration for him.

  Yet afterwards, when I grew up, I found that real life amongst grown-up people was not so very different from what went on in that little schoolroom with the whitewashed walls, and the wooden step that had been worn hollow by the passage of hundreds of little feet – including the somewhat larger veldskoened feet of Hendrik Uys. And the delicate green of the rosyntjie bush that grew just to the side of the school building, within convenient reach of the penknife of the Hollander schoolmaster, who went out and cut a number of thick but supple canes every morning just after the Bible lesson, before the more strenuous work of the day started.

  And I remember how always, after we had been caned for getting wrong answers, Hendrik Uys would walk down the road with me, rubbing the places where the rosyntjie-bush cane had fallen, and calling the schoolmaster a useless, fat-faced, squint-eyed Hollander. But shortly afterwards he would turn on me and upbraid me, and he would say he could not understand how I could have the heart, through my slothfulness, to bring such sorrow to the grey hairs of a poor schoolmaster who already had one foot in the grave.

  And as if to emphasise this last statement about its being the schoolmaster’s foot that was in the grave, Hendrik Uys would proceed, with each foot alternately, to kick me.

  Yes, I suppose you could say that Hendrik was a school-friend of mine.

  And once when my father asked him how we got on in school, Hendrik said that it was all right. Only there was rather a lot of copying going on. And he looked meaningly in my direction. Hendrik Uys was so convincing that it was impossible for me to try and tell my father the truth. Instead, I just kept silent and felt very much ashamed of myself. I suppose it is because of what the term ‘school-friend’ implies that I am glad that our schooling did not last very long in those days.

  If he had continued in that way after he had grown up, and had applied to practical life the knowledge of the world which he had acquired in the classroom, there is no doubt that Hendrik Uys would have gone far. I feel sure that he would at least have got elected to the Volksraad.

  But when he was a young man something happened to Hen­drik Uys that changed him completely. He fell in love with Marie Snyman, and his whole life became different.

  I don’t think I have ever witnessed so amazing a change in any person as what came over Hendrik Uys in his late twenties when he first discovered that he was in love with Marie Snyman, a dark-haired girl with a low, soft voice and quiet eyes that never seemed to look at you, but that appeared to gaze inwards, always, as though she was looking at frail things. There was a disturbing sort of wisdom in her eyes, shadowy, something like the know­ledge that the past has of a future that is made of dust.

  “I can’t understand how I could have been such a fool,” Hen­drik Uys said to us one day while we were drinking coffee in the dining room of the new post office. “To think that Marie Snyman was at school with me, and that I never saw her, even, if you know what I mean. She seemed just an ordinary girl to me, with thin legs and her hair in plaits. And she has been living here, in these parts, all these years, and it is only now that I have found her. I wasted all these years when the one woman in my life has been living here, right amongst us, all the time. It seems so foolish, I feel like kicking myself.”

  When Hendrik Uys spoke those last words about kicking, I moved uneasily on my chair for a moment. Although my schooldays were far in the past, there were still certain painful memories that lingered.

  “But I must have been in love with her even then, without know­ing it,” Hendrik Uys went on, “otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered her plaits. Ordinary-looking plaits they seemed, too. Stringy.”

  “The post-cart with the letters is late,” Theunis Bekker said, yawning.

  “And her thin legs,” Hendrik Uys continued.

  “Perhaps the post-cart had trouble getting through the Groen River,” Adriaan Schoeman said. “I hear it has been raining in Zee­rust.”

  “Maybe love is like that,” Hendrik Uys went on. “It’s there a long time, but you don’t always know it.”

  “The post-cart may be stuck in the mud,” Theunis Bekker said, yawning again. “The turf beyond Sephton’s Nek is all thick, slimy mud when it rains.”

  “But her eyes weren’t like that then, when she was at school,” Hendrik Uys finished up lamely. “You know what her eyes are like – quiet, sort of.”

  His voice trailed off into silence.

  And if a great change had come over Hendrik Uys when he fell in love with Marie Snyman, it was nothing compared with the way in which he changed after they were married. For up to that time Hendrik Uys had abundantly fulfilled the promise of his schooldays. He had been appointed a diaken of the Dutch Re­form­ed Church and he was a prominent committee member of the Farmers’ Association and the part he was playing in politics was already of such a character as to make more than one person regard him as a prospective candidate for the Volksraad in a few years’ time.

  And then, I suppose, like every other Volksraad member, he would pay a visit to his old school some day, and he would talk to the teacher and the children and he would tell them that in that same classroom, where the teacher had been a kindly old Hol­lander, long since dead, the foundation of his public career had been laid. And that he had got into the Volksraad simply through having applied the sound knowledge which he had acquired in the school.

  Which would no doubt have been true enough.

  But after he had fallen in love with Marie Snyman, Hendrik Uys changed altogether. For one thing, he resigned his position as diaken of the Dutch Reformed Church. This was a shock to everybody, because it was a very honoured position, and many envied him for having received the appointment at so early an age. Then, when he explained the reason for his resignation, the farmers in the neighbourhood were still more shocked.

  What Hendrik Uys said was that since he had found Marie Snyman he had been so altered by the purity of her love for him that from now on he wanted to do only honest things. He wanted to be worthy of her love, he said.

  “And I used unfair means to get the appointment as diaken,”
Hendrik Uys explained. “I got it through having induced the predikant to use his influence on my behalf. I had made the predi­kant a present of two trek-oxen just at that time, when it was uncertain whether the appointment would go to me or to Hans van Tonder.”

  They were married in the church in Zeerust, Hendrik Uys and Marie Snyman, and that part of the wedding made us feel very uncomfortable, for it was obvious by the sneer that the predikant wore on his face throughout the religious ceremony that he had certain secret reservations about how he thought the marriage was going to turn out. It was obvious that the predikant had been told the reason for Hendrik’s resignation as diaken.

  But the reception afterwards made up for a lot of the unhappier features of the church ceremony. The guests were seated at long tables in the grounds of the hotel, and when one of the waiters shouted “Aan die brand!” as a signal to the band leader, and the strains of the concertina and the guitars swept across our hearts, thrillingly, like a sudden wind through the grass, and the bride and bridegroom entered, the bride wearing a white satin dress with a long train, and there was confetti in Marie’s hair and on Hendrik’s shoulders – oh, well, it was all so very beautiful. And it seemed sad that life could not always be like that. It seemed a pity that life was not satisfied to let us always bear on our shoulders things only as light as confetti.

  And as a kind of gesture to Hendrik, to let him sort of see that I was prepared to let schooldays be bygones, when the bride and bridegroom drove off on their honeymoon I was the one that flung the old veldskoen after them.

  Afterwards, when I was inspanning to go back to the Bush­veld, I saw the predikant. I was still thinking about life. By that time I was wondering why it was that we always had to carry in our hearts things that were so much heavier than concertina music borne on the wind. The predikant was talking to a number of Marico farmers grouped around him. And because that sneer was still on his face I could see that the predikant was talking about Hendrik Uys. So I walked nearer.