The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “He resigned as diaken because he said he bribed me with a couple of trek-oxen,” I heard the predikant say. “I wonder what does he take me for? Does he think I am an Evangelist or an Apostolic pastor that I can be bribed with a couple of trek-oxen? And those beasts were as thin as crows. Man, they went for next to nothing on the Johannesburg market.”

  The men listening to the predikant nodded gravely.

  This was the beginning of Hendrik Uys’s unpopularity in the Marico Bushveld. It wasn’t that Hendrik and Marie were avoided by people, or anything like that: it was just that it came to be recognised that the two of them seemed to prefer to live alone as much as possible. And, of course, there was nothing unfriendly about it all. Only, it seemed strange to me that as long as Hendrik Uys had been cunning and active in pushing his own interests, without being much concerned as to whether the means he em­ployed were right or wrong, he appeared to be generally liked. But when he started becoming honest and over-scrupulous in his dealings with others, then it seemed that people did not have the same kind of affection for him.

  I saw less and less of Hendrik and Marie as the years went by. They had a daughter whom they christened Annette. And after that they had no more children. Hendrik made one or two further attempts to get reappointed as a diaken. He also spoke vaguely of having political ambitions. But it was clear that his heart was no longer in public or social activities. And on those occasions on which I saw him he spoke mostly of his love for his wife, Marie. And he spoke much of how the years had not changed their love. And he said that his greatest desire in life was that his daughter, Annette, should grow up like her mother and make a loyal and gentle and loving wife to a man who would be worthy of her love.

  I remembered how Hendrik had spoken about Marie, years before in the post office, when they were first thinking of getting married. And I remembered how he spoke of that stillness that seemed to be so deep a part of her nature. And Hendrik’s wife Marie did not seem to change with the passage of the years. She always moved about the house very quietly, and when she spoke it was usually with downcast eyes, and whether she was working, or sitting at rest on the riempies bench, what seemed to come all the time out of her whole personality was a strange and very deep kind of stillness. And the quiet that flowed out of her body did not appear to be like that calmness that comes to one after grief, that tranquillity of the spirit that follows on weeping, but it had in it more of the quality of that other stillness, like when at high noon the veld is still.

  I knew that it was this quiet that Hendrik loved above all in his wife Marie, and when he spoke of his daughter Annette – and he spoke of her in such a way that it was clear that he was devoting his whole life to the vision of his daughter growing up to be ex­actly like her mother – I always knew what that quality was that he looked to find in his daughter, Annette. Even when he never mentioned it in actual words.

  Annette grew up to be a very pretty girl, a lot like her mother in looks, and when it came to her turn to be married, it was to Koos de Bruyn, a wealthy farmer from Rustenburg. For her wedding in the church in Zeerust Annette wore the same wedding dress of white satin that her mother had worn twenty years be­fore, and I was surprised to see how little the material had yellow­ed. It was pleasing to think that there were things that throughout those many years remained unchanged.

  And when Annette came out of the church after the ceremony, leaning on her husband’s arm, and there was confetti in her hair and on his shoulder, I knew then that it was not only in respect of the white satin dress that there was similarity between the marriage of Annette and that of her mother twenty years before. And I knew that that depth of stillness that Hendrik had loved in his wife would form a part of his daughter’s nature, also. And of her life. And for ever. I saw just in a single moment what it was that would bring that stillness of the body and the spirit to Annette for the rest of her married life. And in that way I guessed what had caused it as well in the case of her mother, Marie, the wife of Hen­drik. And I wondered whether Annette’s husband would love that quality in her, also.

  It was a very slight thing. And it was so very quick that one would hardly have noticed it, even. It was just that something that came into her eyes – so apparently insignificant that it might had been no more than the trembling of an eyelash, almost – when Annette tripped out of the church, leaning on her husband’s arm, and she glanced swiftly at a young man with broad shoulders whose very white face was half turned away.

  The Story of Hester van Wyk

  When I think of the story of Hester van Wyk I often wonder what it is about some stories that I have wanted to tell (Oom Schalk Lourens said). About things that have happened and about people that I have known – and that I still know, some of them; if you can call it knowing a person when your mule-carts pass each other on the Government Road, and you wave your hat cheerfully and call out that it will be a good season for the crops, if only the stalk-borers and other pests keep away, and the other person just nods at you, with a distant sort of a look in his eyes, and says, yes, the Marico Bushveld has unfortunately got more than one kind of pest.

  That was what Gawie Steyn said to me one afternoon on the Government Road, when I was on my way to the Drogedal post office for letters and he was on his way home. And it was because of the sorrowful sort of way in which he uttered the word ‘unfortunately’ that I knew that Gawie Steyn had heard what I had said about him to Frik Prinsloo three weeks before, after the meeting of the Dwarsberg debating society in the schoolroom next to the poort.

  In any case, I never finished that story that I told Frik Prinsloo about Gawie Steyn, although I began telling it colourfully enough that night after the meeting of the debating society was over and the farmers and their wives and children had all gone home, and Frik Prinsloo and I were sitting alone on two desks in the middle of the schoolroom, with our feet up, and our pipes pleasantly filled with strong plug-cut tobacco whose thick blue fumes made the school-teacher cough violently at intervals.

  The schoolmaster was seated at the table, with his head in his hands, and his face looking very pale in the light of the one paraffin lamp. And he was waiting for us to leave so that he could blow out his lamp and lock up the schoolroom and go home.

  The schoolmaster did not interrupt us only with his coughing but also in other ways. For instance, he told us on several occasions that he had a weak chest, and if we had made up our minds to stay on like this in the classroom, talking, after the meeting was over, would we mind very much, he asked, if he opened one of the windows to let out some of the blue clouds of tobacco smoke.

  But Frik Prinsloo said that we would mind very much. Not for our sakes, Frik said, but for the schoolmaster’s sake. There was nothing worse, Frik explained, than for a man with a weak chest to sit in a room with a window open.

  “It is nothing for us,” Frik Prinsloo said, “for Schalk Lourens and myself to sit in a room with an open window. We are two Bushveld farmers with sturdy physiques who have been through the Boer War and through the anthrax pestilence. We have survived not only human hardships, but also cattle and sheep and pig diseases. At Magersfontein I even slept in an aardvark hole that was half-full of water with a piece of newspaper tied around my left ankle for the rheumatism. And even so neither Schalk Lourens nor I will be so foolish as to be in a room that has got a window open.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Never.”

  “And you have to take greater care of your health than any of us,” Frik Prinsloo said to the school-teacher. “With your weak chest it would be dangerous for you to have a window open in here. Why, you can’t even stand our tobacco smoke. Look at the way you are coughing right now.”

  After he had knocked the ash out of his pipe into an inkwell that was let into a little round hole in one of the desks, an action which he had performed just in order to show how familiar, for an uneducated man, he was with the ways of a schoolroom, Frik started telling the school-teacher about other places he had slept in, bo
th during the Boer War and at another time when he was doing transport driving.

  Frik Prinsloo embarked on a description of the hardships of a transport driver’s life in the old days. It was a story that seemed longer than the most ambitious journey ever undertaken by ox-wagon, and much heavier, and more roundabout. And there was one place where Frik Prinsloo’s story got stuck much more hopelessly than any of his ox-wagons had ever got stuck in a drift.

  Then the schoolmaster said, please, gentlemen, he could not stand it anymore. His health was bad, and while he could perhaps arrange to let us have the use of the schoolroom on some other night, so that I could finish the story that I appeared to be telling to Mr Prinsloo, and he would even provide the paraffin for the lamp himself, he really had to go home and get some sleep.

  But Frik Prinsloo said the schoolmaster did not need to worry about the paraffin. We could sit just as comfortably in the dark and talk, he said. For that matter, the schoolmaster could go to sleep in the classroom, if he liked. Just like that, sitting at the table.

  “You already look half asleep,” Frik told him, winking at me, “and sleeping in a schoolroom is a lot better than what happened to me during the English advance on Bloemfontein, when I slept in a donga with a lot of slime and mud and slippery tadpoles at the bottom …”

  “In a donga half-full of water with a piece of mealie sacking fastened around your stomach because of the colic,” the school-teacher said, speaking with his head still between his hands. “And for heaven’s sake, if you have got to sleep out on the veld, why don’t you sleep on top of it? Why must you go and lie inside a hole full of water or inside a slimy donga? If you farmers have had hard lives, it seems to me that you yourselves did quite a lot to make them like that.”

  We ignored this remark of the schoolmaster’s, which we both realised was based on his lack of worldly experience, and I went on to relate to Frik Prinsloo those incidents from the life of Gawie Steyn that were responsible for Gawie’s talking about Marico pests, some weeks later, in gloomy tones, on the road winding be­tween the thorn-trees to the post office.

  And this was one of those stories that I never finished. Because the schoolmaster fell asleep at his table, with the result that he didn’t cough anymore, and I could see that because of this Frik Prinsloo could not derive the same amount of amusement from my story. And what is even more strange is that I also found that the funny parts in the story did not sound so funny anymore, now that the schoolmaster was no longer in discomfort. The story seemed to have had much more life in it, somehow, in the earlier stages, when the schoolmaster was anxiously waiting for us to go home, and coughing at intervals through the blue haze of our tobacco smoke.

  “And so that man came round again the next night and sang some more songs to Gawie Steyn’s wife,” I said, “and they were old songs that he sang.”

  “It sounds to me as though he is even snoring,” Frik Prinsloo said. “Imagine that for ill-bred. Here are you telling a story that teaches one all about the true and deep things of life and the schoolmaster is lying with his head on the table, snoring.”

  “And when Gawie Steyn started objecting after a while,” I continued, with a certain amount of difficulty, “the man said the excuse he had to offer was that they were all old songs, anyway, and they didn’t mean very much. Old songs had no meaning. They were only dead things from the past. They were yellowed and dust-laden, the man said.”

  “I’ve got a good mind to wake him,” Frik Prinsloo went on. “First he disturbs us with his coughing and now I can’t hear what you’re saying because of his snoring. It will be a good thing if we just go home now and leave him. He seems so attached to his old schoolroom. Even staying behind at night to sleep in it. What would people say if I liked ploughing so much that I didn’t go home at night, but just lay down and slept on a strip of grass next to a furrow?”

  “Then Gawie Steyn said to this man,” I continued, with greater difficulty than ever before, “he said that it wasn’t so much the old songs he objected to. The old songs might be well enough. But the way his wife listened to the songs, he said, seemed to him to be not so much like an old song as like an old story.”

  “Not that I don’t sleep out on the lands sometimes,” Frik Prinsloo explained, “and even in the ploughing season. But then it is the early afternoon of a hot day. And the kaffirs go on with the ploughing all the same. And it is very refreshing, then, to sleep under a withaak tree knowing that the kaffirs are at work in the sun. Sleeping on a strip of green grass next to a furrow …”

  “Or inside the furrow,” the schoolmaster said, and we only noticed then that he was no longer snoring. “Inside a furrow half filled with wet fertiliser and with a turnip fastened on your head because of the blue tongue.”

  As I have said, this story about Gawie Steyn and his wife is one of those stories that I never finished telling. And I would never have known, either, that Frik Prinsloo had listened to as much of it as I had told him, if it wasn’t for Gawie Steyn’s manner of greeting me on the Government Road, three weeks later, with sorrowful politeness, like an Englishman.

  There is always something unusual about a story that does not come to an end on its own. It is as though that story keeps going on, getting told in a different way each time, as though the story itself is trying to find out what happened next.

  It was like the way life came to Hester van Wyk.

  Hester was a very pretty girl, with black hair and a way of smiling that seemed very childlike, until you were close enough to her to see what was in her eyes, and then you realised, in that same moment, that no child had ever smiled like that. And whether it was for her black hair or whether it was because of her smile, it so happened that Hester van Wyk was hardly ever without a lover. They came to her, the young men from the neighbourhood. But they also went away again. They tarried for a while, like birds in their passage, and they paid court to her, and sometimes the period in which they wooed her was quite long, and at other times again she would have a lover whose ardour seemed to last for no longer than a few brief weeks before he also went his way.

  And it seemed that the story of Hester van Wyk and her lovers was also one of those stories that I have mentioned to you, whose end never gets told.

  And Gert van Wyk, Hester’s father, would talk to me about these young men that came into his daughter’s life. He talked to me both as a neighbour and as a relative on his wife’s side, and while what he said to me about Hester and her lovers were mostly words spoken lightly, in the way that you flick a pebble into a dam, and watch the yellow ripples widening, there were also times when he spoke differently. And then what he said was like the way a footsore wanderer flings his pack on to the ground.

  “She’s a pretty girl,” Gert said to me. “Yes, she is pretty enough. But her trouble is that she is too soft-hearted. These young men come to her, and they tell her stories. Sad stories about their lives. And she listens to their stories. And she feels sorry for them. And she says that they must be very nice young men for life to have treated them so badly. She even tries to tell me some of these stories, so that I should also feel sorry for them. But, of course, I have got too much sense to listen. I simply tell her –”

  “Yes,” I answered, nodding, “you tell her that what the young man says is a lot of lies. And by the time you have convinced her about one lover’s lies you find that he has already departed, and that some other young man has got into the habit of coming to your house three times a week, and that he is busy telling her a totally new and different story.”

  “That’s what he imagines,” Gert van Wyk replied, “that it’s new. But it’s always the same old story. Only, instead of telling of his unhappy childhood the new young man will talk about his aged mother, or about how life has been cruel to him, so that he has got to help on the farm, for which he isn’t suited at all, because it makes him dizzy to have to pump water out of the borehole for the cattle – up and down, up and down, like that, with the pump-handle – wh
en all the time his real ambition is to have the job of wearing a blue and gold uniform outside of a bioscope in Johannesburg. And my daughter Hester is so soft-hearted that she goes on listening to these same stupid stories day after day, year in and year out.”

  “Yes,” I said, “they are the same old stories.”

  And I thought of what Gawie Steyn said about the man who sang old songs to his wife. And it seemed that Hester van Wyk’s was also an old story, and that for that reason it would never end.

  “Did she also have a young man who said that he was not worthy of her because he was not educated?” I asked Gert. “And did she take pity on him because he said people looked down on him because of his table manners?”

  “Yes,” Gert answered with alacrity, “he said he was badly brought up and always forgot to take the teaspoon out of the cup before drinking his coffee.”

  “Did she also have a young man who got her sympathy by telling her that he had fallen in love years ago, and that he had lost that girl, because her parents had objected to him, and that he could never fall in love again?”

  “Quite right,” Gert said. “This young man said that his first girl’s parents refused to let her marry him because his forehead was too low. Even though he tried to make it look higher by training his eyebrows down and shaving the hair off most of the top of his head. But how do you know all these things?”

  “There are only a few stories that young men tell girls in order to get their sympathy,” I said to Gert. “There are only a handful of stories like that. But it seems to me that your daughter Hester has been told them all. And more than once, too, sometimes, by the look of it.”

  “And you can imagine how awful that young man with the low forehead looked,” Gert continued. “He must have been unattractive enough before. But with his eyebrows trained down and the top of his head shaved clean off, he looked more like a –”