The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  The trouble did not lie with the acting. There was not very much wrong with that. But anybody could have told André Ma­ritz that he should never have toured the country with that kind of a play. There was a negro in it, called Uncle Tom, who was supposed to be very good and kind-hearted. André Maritz, with his face blackened, took that part. And there was also a white man in the play, named Simon Legree. He was the kind of white man who, if he was your neighbour, would think it funny to lead the Government tax-collector to the aardvark-hole that you were hiding in.

  It seems that André Maritz had come across a play that had been popular on the other side of the sea; and he translated it into Afrikaans and adapted it to fit in with South African traditions. André Maritz’s fault was that he hadn’t adapted the play enough.

  The company made this discovery in the very first Free State dorp they got to. For, when they left that town, André Maritz had one of his eyes blackened, and not just with burnt cork.

  André Maritz adapted his play a good deal more, immediately after that. He made Uncle Tom into a much less kind-hearted negro. And he also made him steal chickens.

  The only member of the company that the public of the backveld seemed to have any time for was the young man who acted Simon Legree.

  Thus it came about that we heard of André Maritz’s company when they were still far away, touring the highveld. Winding their play-actors’ road northwards, past koppies and through vlak­tes, and by bluegums and willows.

  After a few more misunderstandings with the public, André Maritz so far adapted the play to South African conditions as to make Uncle Tom threaten to hit Topsy with a brandy bottle.

  The result was that, by the time the company came to Zeerust, even the church elder, Theunis van Zyl, said that there was much in the story of Uncle Tom that could be considered instructive.

  True, there were still one or two little things, Elder van Zyl de­clared, that did not perhaps altogether accord with what was best in our outlook. For instance, it was not right that we should be made to feel so sentimental about the slave-girl as played by Hannekie Roodt. The elder was referring to that powerful scene in which Hannekie Roodt got sold down the river by Simon Legree. We couldn’t understand very clearly what it meant to be sold down the river. But from Hannekie Roodt’s acting we could see that it must be the most awful fate that could overtake anybody.

  She was so quiet. She did not speak in that scene. She just picked up the small bundle containing her belongings. Then she put her hand up to her coat collar and closed over the lapel in front, even though the weather was not cold.

  Yet there were still some people in Zeerust who, after they had attended the play on the first night, thought that that scene could be improved on. They said that when Hannekie Roodt walked off the stage for the last time, sold down the river, and carrying the bundle of her poor possessions tied up in a red-spotted rag, a few of her mistress’s knives and forks could have been made to drop out of the bundle.

  As I have said, André Maritz’s company eventually arrived in Zeerust. They came by mule-cart from Slurry, where the railway ended in those days. They stayed at the Marico Hotel, which was a few doors from Elder van Zyl’s house. It was thus that André Maritz met Deborah, the daughter of the elder. That was one thing that occasioned a good deal of talk. Especially as we believed that even if Hannekie Roodt was not actually married to André Maritz in the eyes of the law, the two of them were nevertheless as nearly husband and wife as it is possible for play-actors to be, since they are known to be very unenlightened in such matters.

  The other things that gave rise to much talk had to do with what happened on the first night of the staging of the play in Zeerust. André Maritz hired the old hall adjoining the mill. The hall had last been used two years before.

  The result was that, after the curtain had gone up for the first act of André Maritz’s play, it was discovered that a wooden platform above the stage was piled high with fine flour that had sifted through the ceiling from the mill next door. The platform had been erected by the stage company that had given a performance in the hall two years previously. That other company had used the platform to throw down bits of paper from to look like snow, in a scene in which a girl gets thrust out into the world with her baby in her arms.

  At the end of the first act, when the curtain was lowered, André Maritz had the platform swept. But until then, with all that flour coming down, it looked as though he and his company were moving about the stage in a Cape mist. Each time an actor took a step forward or spoke too loudly – down would come a shower of fine meal. Afterwards the players took to standing in one place as much as possible, to avoid shaking down the flour – and in fear of losing their way in the mist, too, by the look of things.

  Naturally, all this confused the audience a good deal. For, with the flour sifting down on to the faces of the actors, it became difficult, after a little while, to tell which were the white people and which the negroes. Towards the end of the first act Uncle Tom, with a layer of flour covering his make-up, looked just as white as Simon Legree.

  During the time when the curtain was lowered, however, the flour was swept from the platform and the actors repaired their faces very neatly, so that when the next act began there was nothing anymore to remind us of that first unhappy incident.

  Later on I was to think that it was a pity that the consequences of that second unhappy incident, that of André Maritz’s meeting with the daughter of Elder van Zyl, could not also have been brushed away so tidily.

  The play was nevertheless very successful. And I am sure that in the crowded hall that night there were very few dry eyes when Hannekie Roodt played her great farewell scene. When she pick­ed up her bundle and got ready to leave, having been sold down the river, you could see by her stillness that her parting from her lover and her people would be for ever. No one who saw her act that night would ever forget the tragic moment when she put her hand up to her coat collar and closed over the lapels in front, even though – as I have said – the weather was not cold.

  The applause at the end lasted for many minutes.

  The play got the same enthusiastic reception night after night. Meanwhile, off the stage, there were many stories linking De­borah van Zyl’s name with André Maritz’s.

  “They say that Deborah van Zyl is going to be an actress now,” Flip Welman said when several of us were standing smoking in the hardware store. “She is supposed to be getting Hannekie Roodt’s part.”

  “We all know that Deborah van Zyl has been talking for a long while about going on the stage,” Koos Steyn said. “And maybe this is the chance she was been waiting for. But I can’t see her in Hannekie Roodt’s part for very long. I think she will rather be like the girl in that other play we saw here a few years ago – the one with the baby.”

  Knowing what play-actors were, I could readily picture De­borah van Zyl being pushed out into the world, carrying a child in her arms, and with the white-paper snow fluttering about her.

  As for Hannekie Roodt, she shortly afterwards left André Maritz’s company of play-actors. She arranged with Koos Steyn to drive her, with her suitcases, to Slurry station. Koos explained to me that he was a married man and so he could not allow it to be said of him, afterwards, that he had driven alone in a cart with a play-actress. That was how it came about that I rode with them.

  But Koos Steyn need have had no fears of the kind that he hinted at. Hannekie Roodt spoke hardly a word. At close hand she looked different from what she had done on the stage. Her hair was scraggy. I also noticed that her teeth were uneven and that there was loose skin at her throat.

  Yet, there was something about her looks that was not without a strange sort of beauty. And in her presence there was that which made me think of great cities. There were also marks on her face from which you could tell that she had travelled a long road. A road that was longer than just the thousand miles from the Cape to the Marico.

  Hannekie Roodt was going
away from André Maritz. And during the whole of that long journey by mule-cart she did not once weep. I could not help but think that it was true what people said about play-actors. They had no real human feelings. They could act on the stage and bring tears to your eyes, but they themselves had no emotions.

  We arrived at Slurry station. Hannekie Roodt thanked Koos Steyn and paid him. There was no platform there in those days. So Hannekie had to climb up several steps to get on to the balcony of the carriage. It was almost as though she were getting on to the stage. We lifted up her suitcases for her.

  Koos Steyn and I returned to the mule-cart. Something made me look back over my shoulder. That was my last glimpse of Hannekie Roodt. I saw her put her hand up to her coat collar. She closed over the lapels in front. The weather was not cold.

  The Lover Who Came Back

  It caused no small stir in the Marico (Oom Schalk Lourens said) when Piet Human came back after an absence of twenty years. His return was as unexpected as his departure had been sudden.

  It was quite a story, the manner of his leaving the farm his father had bought for him at Gemsbokvlei, and also the reasons for his leaving. Since it was a story of young love, the women took pleasure in discussing it in much detail.

  The result was that with the years the events surrounding Piet Human’s sudden decision to move out of the Marico remained fresh in people’s memories. More, the affair grew into something like a folk-tale, almost, with the passage of time.

  Indeed, I heard one version of the story of Piet Human and the girl Wanda Rossouw as far away as Schweizer-Reneke, where I had trekked with my cattle during a season of drought. It was told me by one of the daughters in the house of a farmer with whom I had made arrangements for grazing my cattle.

  The main feature of the story was the wooden stile between the two farms – Piet Human’s farm and the farm of Wanda Ros­souw’s parents. If you brought that stile into it, you could not go wrong in the telling of the story, whatever else you added to it or left out.

  And so the farmer’s daughter in Schweizer-Reneke, because she mentioned the stile at the beginning, related the story very pleasantly.

  Piet Human had been courting Wanda Rossouw for some time. And they had met often by the white-painted wooden fence that stood at the boundary of the two farms. And Wanda Rossouw had dark eyes and a wild heart.

  Now, it had been well known that, before Piet Human came to live at Gemsbokvlei, there had been another young man who had called very regularly at the Rossouw homestead. This young man was Gerhard Oelofse. He was somewhat of a braggart. But he had dashing ways. In his stride there was a kind of freedom that you could not help noticing. It was said that there were few girls in the Groot Marico that Gerhard Oelofse could not have for the asking.

  One day Gerhard Oelofse rode off to join Van Pittius’s freebooters in Stellaland. Later on he left for the Caprivi Strip. From then onwards we would receive, at long intervals, vague accounts of his activities in those distant parts. And in those fragmentary items of news about Gerhard Oelofse that reached us, there was little that did him credit.

  Anyway, to return to Wanda Rossouw and Piet Human. There was an afternoon near to the twilight when they again met at the stile on the boundary between the two farms. It was a low stile, with only two cross-pieces. And the moment came inevitably when Piet Human, standing on his side of the fence, stooped forward to take Wanda Rossouw in his arms and lift her over to him. And in that moment Wanda Rossouw told him of what had happened, two years before, between Gerhard Oelofse and herself.

  Piet Human had Wanda Rossouw in his arms. He put her down again, awkwardly, on her own side of the fence; and without a word walked away from her, into the deepening twilight.

  Soon afterwards he sold his farm and left the Marico.

  Because of the prominence she gave to that wooden stile, the daughter of the farmer in Schweizer-Reneke told the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw remarkably well. True, she introduced into her narrative a few variations that were unfamiliar to us in the Groot Marico, but that made no difference to the quality of the story itself.

  When she came to the end of the tale, I mentioned to her that I actually knew that wooden fence – low, with two cross-rails, and painted white. I had seen that stile very often, I said.

  The farmer’s daughter looked at me with a new sort of interest. She looked at me in such a way that for a little while I felt almost as though I was handsome. On the spur of the moment I went so far as to make up a lie. I told her that I had even carved my initials on that stile. On one of the lower cross-rails, I said. I felt it would have been too presumptuous if I had said one of the upper rails.

  But even as I spoke I realised, by the far-off look in her eyes, that the farmer’s daughter had already lost interest in me.

  Ah, well, the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw was a good love story and I had no right to try to chop a piece of it out for myself, cutting – in imagination – ‘Schalk Lourens’ into a strip of painted wood with a pocket knife.

  “If Piet Human had really loved Wanda Rossouw, he would have forgiven her for what had happened with Gerhard Oelofse,” the daughter of the Schweizer-Reneke farmer said, dreamily. “At least, I think so. But I suppose you can never tell …”

  And so, when Piet Human came back to the Marico, the story of his sudden departure, twenty years earlier, was still fresh in people’s memories – and with sundry additions.

  I heard of Piet Human’s return several weeks before I met him. Indeed, everyone north of the Dwarsberge knew he had come back. We talked of nothing else.

  Where I again met him, after twenty years, was in Jurie Bek­ker’s post office. He was staying with Jurie Bekker. I must admit that there were some unhappy aspects of that meeting for me; and I have reason to believe that there were those of the older farmers in Jurie Bekker’s post office that day – men who had also known Piet Human long before – who felt as I did. For when Piet Human left us he was a young man of five-and-twenty summers. We saw him again now as a man of mature years. There were wrinkles under his eyes, there were grey hairs at his temples and – with our sudden awareness that Piet Human had indeed grown twenty years older since we had seen him came the knowledge that we, too, each of us, had also aged.

  How I knew that others felt as I did was that, when I glanced across at Jurie Bekker, he was sitting back in his chair with his eyes cast down to his stomach. He gazed at his fat stomach with a certain intentness for some moments, and then shook his head sadly.

  But it did not last long, this sense of melancholy. We soon shook from our spirits the first stirrings of gloom. Those intervening years that the locusts had eaten were no more than a quick sigh. We drank our coffee and listened to what Piet Human had to tell and in a little while it was as though he had never gone away.

  Piet Human told us that he had entered the Marico from the Bechuanaland side and had journeyed through Ramoutsa. He had decided to stay with Jurie Bekker for a time and had not yet, in his visits to familiar scenes of twenty years before, gone farther to the west along the Government Road.

  I thought this statement of Piet Human’s significant. Farther to the west lay the farm that had once been his, Gemsbokvlei; and adjoining it was the Rossouw farm, where Wanda Rossouw still lived with her widowed mother. For all those years Wanda Ros­souw, though attractive and sought after, had remained unmarried.

  Piet Human said that in some ways the Marico had changed a great deal since he had been there last. In other respects there had been no changes at all. Some of the people he had known had died; others had trekked away. And children in arms had grown into young men and women.

  But there were just as many features of life in the Marico that had not changed.

  “I came here through Rooigrond,” Piet Human said. “That big white house that used to be the headquarters of the Van Pittius freebooter gang is still there. But it is today a coach station.”

  He had asked how much he would have to pay
for a coach ticket to Ottoshoop, and when they told him, he realised that the place had not changed at all; that big white house was still the headquarters of robbers.

  Then there were those Mtosa huts on the way to Ramoutsa.

  Thus Piet Human entertained us. But I noticed that all his stories related only to places on the Ramoutsa side of the Marico. He made no reference to that other side where his old farm was, and where the Rossouws dwelt.

  We were naturally very curious to know what his plans were, but there was nobody in the post office that afternoon so coarse-grained as even to hint at the past. We all felt that the story of Piet Human and Wanda Rossouw stood for something in our community; there was a fineness about it that we meant to respect.

  Even Fritz van Tonder, who was known as a pretty rough character, waited until Piet Human had gone out of the voorkamer before he said anything. And all he said then was, “Well, if Piet Human has decided to forgive Wanda Rossouw for that Gerhard Oelofse business he’ll find she’s still pretty. And she has waited long enough.”

  We ignored his remarks.

  But the day did come when Piet Human paid a visit to that other part of the Marico where his old farm was. The white-painted wooden stile stood there still. The uprights, before being put into the ground, had been dipped in a Stockholm tar of a kind that you do not get today. And it was when the twilight was beginning to fall that Piet Human again saw Wanda Rossouw by the stile. She wore a pale frock. And although her face had perhaps grown thinner with the years, the look in her dark eyes had not changed. The grass was heavy with the scents of a dying summer’s day.

  Piet Human spoke urgent, burning words in a low voice. He leaned forward over the fence and took Wanda Rossouw in his arms.

  She struggled in his arms, thrusting him from her fiercely when he tried to lift her over the stile.

  Then at last Piet Human understood – that it was that other, worthless lover, who had forgotten her years ago, for whom, down the years, vainly, Wanda Rossouw waited.