The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “And for that very reason, of course,” I explained, “your daughter Hester fell in love with him. After she had heard his story.”

  And it seemed to me that the oldest story of all must be the story of a woman’s heart.

  It was some years after this, when Gert van Wyk and his family had moved out of the Marico into the Waterberg, that I heard that Hester van Wyk had married. And I knew then what had happened, of course. And I knew it even without Gert having had to tell me.

  I knew then that some young man must have come to Hester van Wyk from out of some far-lying part of the Waterberg. He came to her and found her. And in finding her he had no story to tell.

  But what I have no means of telling, now that I have related to you all that I know, is whether this is the end of the story about Hester van Wyk.

  The Wind in the Tree

  There were dark patches on the washed-out blue of Gerrit van Biljon’s shirt (Oom Schalk Lourens said), when I saw him on that forenoon, kneeling before a hole that he had been chopping out of the stony ground in front of his house. Those patches were damp marks of sweat. Gerrit van Biljon was kneeling down in front of the hole, on that forenoon of a summer’s day when I saw him, and he was scraping out fragments of loosened earth and stones with his hands.

  The ground was very hard, and Gerrit was digging the hole with a long cold chisel and a heavy hammer, which were more serviceable than the pick-axe with which he had evidently commenced digging, and which was now lying some distance away from the hole. About twenty yards away, to be exact. It was apparent to me that that was how far Gerrit van Biljon had thrown the pick at the moment when he had decided to go to the tool-shed for the hammer and cold chisel.

  “You are digging, Neef Gerrit,” I observed.

  I was curious why a farmer of the Marico Bushveld should be down on his hands and knees, like the way Gerrit was, in the heat of the forenoon, with the sweat coming out through his shirt in dark patches, and the sun striking on to the back of his neck, in the space between the wide brim of his hat and the top of his faded shirt-collar.

  Gerrit van Biljon did not answer. Instead, he reached still deeper into the hole and started feeling for more bits of loose ground. The sun beat full on to the back of his neck, which would have been very red by now if he had been an Englishman. As it was, no amount of sun could do much more to the colour of the back of Gerrit’s neck, which was already almost as brown as the earth lying beside the hole. The worst that could happen to Gerrit would be sunstroke. And as you know, the most suitable conditions under which you can get sunstroke in the Marico are when the rays of the midday sun strike on the back of your neck through a thin haze of cloud.

  Therefore, when for the second time Gerrit van Biljon had not answered my question, I looked hopefully upwards. But from one horizon to the other the heavens were a deep and intense blue. Bush and koppie, withaak and kremetart and kameeldoring were dreaming languidly under a cloudless sky. I realised that there was not much prospect of Gerrit getting sunstroke, but I nevertheless consoled myself with the thought that having the full blaze on his neck like that must be very unpleasant for him.

  I also realised that it was no use my asking Gerrit van Biljon any more direct questions. So I tried sideways, in the manner in which De Wet, after studying the ground, brought his commando round to that part of Sanna’s Post where the English general did not want any Mauser bullets to come from.

  “Have the Bechuanas on your farm trekked somewhere else, Neef Gerrit?” I asked, casually. “Back to the Protectorate, perhaps?”

  Thus I succeeded, for the first time, in getting Gerrit van Biljon to talk.

  “No, they have not left,” he replied. And then, a little later, after he had struck the cold chisel about another half-dozen times, he asked, very reluctantly, “Why?”

  “Because, if the Bechuanas have not left,” I answered, “why is it that you, a Marico Boer, should so far have forgotten about farming, as to be here, on your hands and knees, digging a hole in the ground and in the hot sun, with the sweat making all those damp patches on your shirt?”

  And after I had looked the back of Gerrit van Biljon over carefully, from his battered hat to his patched veldskoens, I added, “Like a kaffir.”

  When Gerrit stood up, at that point, and dusted some of the worst pieces of loose earth from the knees of his khaki trousers, I noticed that his digging the hole had not done his hands much good. I don’t mean the scraping-out portion of the digging. That part had been all right: his hands were tough enough for that. But I could see that there had been a few occasions when Gerrit had missed the head of the cold chisel. I could see that from his left hand. And it also seemed that he had swung his hammer quite powerfully on those oc­casions when he had missed.

  “I am digging,” Gerrit van Biljon said to me, and he spoke with a grave thoughtfulness, as though he wanted to make quite sure that he used the right words, “a hole.”

  I said that I had thought as much. I told him that I be­lieved that he had first used the pick and had found that it was not much good. And that he had then gone to fetch the cold chisel.

  “It doesn’t look as though that is much good, either,” I added.

  Gerrit van Biljon put his left hand behind his back with what he apparently thought was an unobtrusive gesture.

  “No,” he said, “I am getting on all right.”

  “And after you have finished digging the hole?” I enquired, trying to sound unconcerned, and as though I was really thinking about something else.

  “Then,” Gerrit said solemnly, “I am going to dig another hole.”

  That was how difficult it was for me to find out, on that hot forenoon that was already lengthening into midday, why Gerrit van Biljon was digging holes in the stony ground in front of his house.

  So I sat down on the grass under a nearby thorn-tree. I lit my pipe, and while the blue smoke curled away among the green foliage I reflected on the strange way in which the mind of the human being works, and how the human being can always distinguish, very readily, between what is important and what is unimportant. Thus, I had set out from my farm early that morning on foot to search for my mules that had strayed out of the camp two days before. And when in the course of my wanderings through the bush I had at various times come across four kaffirs, each of whom had, in reply to my questionings, pointed in a different direction, I knew that the mules could not be far off. Mules are like that.

  But my search for the mules had led me as far as Gerrit van Biljon’s homestead, and the moment I saw Gerrit crouched over that hole in the ground I knew right away, without having to think, even, that it was more important for me to satisfy my curiosity in regard to what Gerrit van Biljon was doing than to find the mules. And so I decided to stay.

  When the sun was directly overhead Gerrit’s wife Sarie came and called us for dinner. Gerrit and Sarie had several young children who would not be back from school until the afternoon. Accor­dingly, the three of us arranged ourselves about the table in the voorkamer. While we ate we talked at first only of trivial things. I said that what had brought me there was that I was looking for my mules, which had strayed.

  “It seems to me that it is not only your mules that have stray­ed,” Gerrit van Biljon said, without looking up from his plate. “If you stay away from your farm much longer it will be your mules that will be starting to look for you.”

  This remark of Gerrit’s made me feel rather uncomfortable. Therefore, to relieve the tension, I began relating what I thought was an amusing little story about Koos Venter, who had at one time farmed at Derdepoort, and who had started digging holes on his farm because of something a kaffir witch-doctor had told him about buried treasure.

  “His pick was very blunt by the time they took it away from him,” I said. “And when they put him on the lorry for Pretoria, and he was singing, nobody knew for sure whether he was mad before he started digging those holes, or whether he went mad, at a later stage, from sunstroke. But
next time you go near Derde­poort you must have a look at that farm where Koos Venter stayed.

  It has got so many holes in it that the man who is on it now says that he is wondering if he can’t use it as some sort of sieve. He thinks the Government might be able to make use of his farm for sifting something in a big way. But he can’t think what, exactly. Yes, it is lucky that it does not rain very often in this part of the Marico. Because in wet weather that farm leaks very badly.

  “You’ll probably be able to see that farm quite soon, now, Neef Gerrit,” I finished up significantly. “The lorry for Pretoria passes that way.”

  I would have said still more. But at that moment I caught Sarie’s eye. Gerrit van Biljon’s wife Sarie was a pleasant-looking woman. When she smiled her eyes had a pretty trick of getting long and narrow, so that she looked like a little girl, and there came with her smile a soft and alluring curve to her lips. But Sarie’s eyes got narrow now in a manner I did not like. And what curves there were on her lips went all the wrong way.

  So I said that I was only joking. And that I had best be going. And that I didn’t think I would really wait for coffee. And that perhaps the mules were quite near, somewhere, waiting for me, maybe, and that if I didn’t leave at once I might miss them.

  And so it came about, just because I no longer had any curiosity in that direction, that Gerrit van Biljon explained to me what it was that he was doing. While he talked, his wife Sarie came into the voorkamer several times with coffee. Sometimes she lingered a little while, and I noticed that whenever she glanced in her husband’s direction, while he talked, there was a look in her eyes which made me realise what risks I had been running in jesting about Gerrit. And when she walked about the room, driving out the flies with quick little movements, I knew that the cloth she was waving around was not a piece of wedding-dress.

  It was a simple story that Gerrit van Biljon told me, and he took a long time over it, and when he had finished with the telling it was no story at all. And that was one of the reasons why I liked his story.

  “I am planting bluegum trees,” Gerrit van Biljon said, “in those holes that I am digging. For shade.”

  I was speechless. For a moment I wondered if Gerrit van Biljon’s condition was not perhaps even worse than the state of mind of Koos Venter, the other man who had dug holes on his farm.

  “But trees,” I said, “Neef Gerrit, trees. Surely the whole Marico is full of trees. I mean, there is nothing here but trees. We can’t even grow mealies. Why, you had to chop down hundreds of trees to clear a space for your homestead and the cattle-kraal. And they are all shady trees, too.”

  Gerrit van Biljon shook his head. And he told me the story of how he met his wife Sarie on her father’s farm in Schweizer-Reneke, in front of the farmhouse, under a tall bluegum. It was a simple story of a boy and girl who fell in love. Of initials carved on a white tree-trunk. Of a smile in the dusk. And hands touching and a quick kiss. And tears. Oh, it was a very simple story that Gerrit van Biljon told me. And as he spoke I could see that it was a story that would go on for ever. Two lovers in the evening and a pale wind in a tall tree. And Sarie’s red lips. And two hearts haunted for ever by the fragrance of the bluegum trees. No, there was nothing at all in that story. It was the sort of thing that happens every day. It was just something foolish about the human heart.

  “And if it had been any other but a bluegum tree,” Gerrit van Biljon said, “it would not have been the same thing.”

  I knew better, of course, but I did not tell him so.

  Then Gerrit explained that he was going to plant a row of bluegums in front of his house.

  “I have ordered the plants from the Government Test Station in Potchefstroom,” he went on. “I am getting only the best plants. It takes a bluegum only twelve years to grow to its full height. For the first couple of years the trees will grow hardly at all, because of the stones. But after a few years, when the roots have found their way into the deeper parts of the soil, the trunks will shoot up very quickly. And in the late afternoons I shall sit under the tallest bluegum, with my wife beside me and our children playing about. The wind stirring through a bluegum makes a different sound from when it blows through any other tree. And a bluegum’s shadow on the ground has an altogether different feeling from any other kind of shadow. At least, that is how it is for me.”

  Gerrit van Biljon said he didn’t even care if a pig occasionally wandered away from the trough at the back of the house, at feeding time, and scratched himself on the trunk of one of the trees. That was how tolerant the thought of the bluegums made him feel.

  “Only,” he added, rather quickly, “I only hope the pig doesn’t overdo it. I don’t want him to make a habit of it, of course.

  “Perhaps I will even read a book under one of the trees, some day,” Gerrit said, finally. “You see, outside of the Bible I have never read a book. Just bits of newspaper and things. Yes, perhaps I will even read a book. But mostly – well, mostly I will just rest.”

  So that was Gerrit van Biljon’s story.

  As he had prophesied, the blue­gums, after not seeming to want to grow at all, at first, suddenly started to shoot up, and they grew almost to their full height in something over eight years. And I often saw Sarie sitting under the tallest tree, with her youngest child playing on the grass beside her, and I was sure that Gerrit van Biljon rested as peacefully under the withaak by the foot of the koppie at the far end of the farm as he would have done in the bluegum’s shade.

  Camp-fires at Nagmaal

  Of course, the old days were best (Oom Schalk Lourens said), I mean the really old days. Those times when we still used to pray, “Lord give us food and clothes. The veldskoens we make ourselves.”

  There was faith in the land in those days. And when things went wrong we used to rely on our own hands and wills, and when we asked for the help of the Lord we also knew the strength of our trek-chains. It was quite a few years before the Boer War that what I can call the old days came to an end. That was when the Boers in these parts stopped making the soles of their veldskoens out of strips of raw leather that they cut from quagga skins. Instead, they started using the new kind of blue sole that came up from the Cape in big square pieces, and that they bought at the Indian store.

  I remember the first time I made myself a pair of veldskoens out of that blue sole. The stuff was easy to work with, and smooth. And all the time I was making the veldskoens I knew it was very wrong. And I was still more disappointed when I found that the blue sole wore well. If anything, it was even better than raw quagga hide. This circumstance was very regrettable to me. And there remained something foreign to me about those veldskoens, even after they had served me through two kaffir wars.

  It was in the early days, also, that a strange set of circumstances unfolded, in which the lives of three people, Maans Prinsloo and Stoffelina Lemmer and Petrus Steyn, became intertwined like the strands of the grass covers that native women weave for their beer-pots: in some places your eye can separate the various strands of plaited grass, the one from the other; in other places the weaving is all of one piece.

  And the story of the lives of these three people, two men and a girl, is something that could only have happened long ago, when there was still faith in the Transvaal, and the stars in the sky were constant, and only the wind changed.

  Maans Prinsloo and I were young men together, and I knew Stof­felina Lemmer well, also. But because Petrus Steyn, who was a few years older than we were, lived some distance away, to the north, on the borders of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, I did not see him very often. We met mostly at Nagmaals, and then Petrus Steyn would recount to us, at great length, the things he had seen and the events that had befallen him on his periodic treks into the further parts of the Kalahari Desert.

  You can imagine that these stories of Petrus Steyn’s were very tedious to listen to. They were empty as the desert is, and as un­ending. And as flat.

  After all, it is easy to understand that
Petrus Steyn’s visits to the Kalahari Desert would not give him very much to talk about that would be of interest to the listener – no matter how far he trekked. Simply because a desert is a desert. One part of it is exactly like another part. Thousands of square miles of sand dotted with occasional thorn-trees. And a stray buck or two. And, now and again, a few Bushmen who have also strayed – but who don’t know it, of course.

  I have noticed that Bushmen are always in a hurry. But they have nowhere to go to. Where they are running to is all just desert, like where they came from. So they never know where they are, either. But because they don’t care where they are it doesn’t matter to them that they are lost. They just don’t know any better. All they are concerned about is to keep on hurrying.

  Consequently, the stories that Petrus Steyn had to tell of his experiences in the Kalahari Desert were as fatiguing to listen to as if you were actually trekking along with him. And the further he trekked into the desert the more wearisome his narrative became, on account of the interludes getting fewer, there being less buck and less Bushmen the deeper he got into the interior. Even so, we felt that he was keeping on using the same Bushmen over and over again. There was also a small herd of springbok that we were suspicious about in the same way.

  You can picture to yourself the scene around one of the fires on the church square in Zeerust. It happened at many Nagmaals. A number of young men and women seated around the fire, and Petrus Steyn, a few years older than the members of his audience, would be talking. And when you saw people’s mouths going open, it wasn’t in astonishment. They were just yawning.

  But there was one reason why the young men and women came to Petrus Steyn, and this reason had nothing to do with his Kalahari stories. But it is one of the things I was thinking about when I spoke about the old days and about the faith that was in the land then. For Petrus Steyn was regarded as a prophet. Some­times people believed in his prognostications, and sometimes they didn’t. But, of course, this made no difference to Petrus Steyn. He didn’t care whether or not his prophecies came out. He believed in them just the same. More, even. You would understand what I mean by this if you knew Petrus Steyn.