The Complete Oom Schalk Lourens Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Another thing that is important is having the right person to tell the news to,” Mosigo went on. “And you must also consider well as to whom the news is about. Take that king, now, of whom you have told me, that you heard of at Nietverdiend through the telegraph. He is a great chief, that king, is he not?”

  I said to Mosigo that I should imagine that he must be a great chief, the King of Spain. I couldn’t know for sure, of course. You can’t, really, with foreigners.

  “Has he many herds of cattle and many wives hoeing in the bean-fields?” Mosigo asked. “Has he many huts and does he drink much beer and is his stomach very fat? Do you know him well, this great chief?”

  I told Mosigo that I did not know the King of Spain to speak to, since I had never met him. But if I did meet him – if the King of Spain came to the Dwarsberge, say – I would go up to him and say I was Schalk Lourens and he would say he was the King of Spain, and we would shake hands and talk about the crops and the drought and the Government – and perhaps about the new telegraph, even. We would talk together like any two white men would talk, I said.

  But Mosigo explained that that was not what he meant. “What is the good of hearing about a man,” he asked, “unless you know who that man is? When the telegraph-operator told you about that big chief, he told it to the wrong man.”

  Mosigo fell to beating his drum again. Boom – boom – boom – boom – boom – boom it went. Just like that drum down there in the village. Sounds wild, in the night, doesn’t it? And did you hear that other sound? That one there, that shrill sound? I expected something like it. Yes, that shrill sound is a police whistle.

  Some time later I was again at Nietverdiend. On the wall of the post office there were some more messages that Org Smit spelt out for us. Org Smit was on his way to Zeerust by ox-wagon with a load of mealies.

  “Fanatic fires at Shah of Persia” – Org Smit read – “stop Misses stop Infuriated crowd throws fanatic in royal horse-trough stop.”

  On the way back from Nietverdiend I again called round at Mosigo’s hut. I started telling him about the message that Org Smit had read out, but Mosigo interrupted me. Boom – boom – boom – boom, Mosigo’s drum was going … By the way, do you hear how loud those drums are beating in the village? And the police whistle has stopped. I mean, it stopped suddenly. I hope it isn’t serious trouble …

  “Baas Org Smit?” Mosigo said to me. “Baas Org Smit is dead. A wagon with mealies went over him.”

  I did not wait to hear more. I climbed back on to my mule-cart and drove away fast along the road I had come. When I was almost halfway back to Nietverdiend I could still hear Mosigo’s drum throbbing.

  I had travelled a good distance along the Zeerust road and it was late afternoon when I saw a wagon that I recognised as Org Smit’s and that was loaded high with mealies. The wagon was proceeding slowly down the dusty road. I made haste to overtake it. I drew close enough to see the driver. He was sitting on the seat and brandishing his long whip. From the back I recognised the driver as Org Smit. When I was almost abreast of the wagon I shouted. In the moment of Org Smit’s turning round on the seat his whip caught in one of the wheels.

  When I saw Org Smit fall from the wagon, I turned my face away.

  Tryst by the Vaal

  “Three is no company.”

  It was the landdrost’s man who spoke these words (Oom Schalk Lourens said). The landdrost’s man made that comment when three people kept a tryst by the willows on the Vaal.

  I was on my way to the town with a load of mealies, that time when the Vaal was in flood. It was not a big load, because of the stalk-borer. A short distance away Nicolaas Vermeulen was standing with his trek. His wagon had been outspanned there for several days. He, too, had been making his way to the dorp and had been held up by floodwaters. Nicolaas Vermeulen was on a visit to relatives and had brought his wife and family with him. Along with his family, Nicolaas Vermeulen had with him, on his wagon, Miemie Retief, who was about nineteen years of age. Miemie Retief was the daughter of a neighbour. She was supposed to be accompanying the Vermeulens to town also in order to visit relatives.

  Still further away Gerrit Huyser was camped. He had arrived at the drift a little while before Nicolaas Vermeulen. He had a kaffir to help with the oxen. But otherwise he was travelling alone. Gerrit Huyser’s farm was some distance further up along the Vaal River.

  He was now camped on the same outspan with Nicolaas Ver­meulen and myself, but had drawn his wagon up nearer the drift, so that when the river went down he would be the first to cross.

  I learnt from Nicolaas Vermeulen and his wife that Gerrit Huyser was on his way to the diamond diggings. Well, the mealie crop had been a failure in most parts of the Transvaal that year, and Gerrit Huyser was not the only farmer from that area who had decided to try his luck on the diggings for a while. And be­cause of what had happened with the mealies, I suppose that more than one farmer, in turning up a diamond on the sorting table, would first look to see if there wasn’t a stalk-borer in it.

  What was singular about Gerrit Huyser’s trek, however, was the kind of load he had on his wagon. It looked to be mostly household furniture. We could see that from where the bucksails did not fit properly.

  One evening Nicolaas Vermeulen and his wife and I sat in front of their family tent after supper, drinking coffee.

  Nicolaas Vermeulen’s children played around the camp-fire while we talked and Miemie Retief, the daughter of their neighbour, sat on a riempies stool some distance from us. She had threaded a red ribbon into her black hair. And I was glad of it. Here on a lonely part of the veld, next to a river in flood, where there was nobody to see her – as you would think – she still wanted to appear at her best.

  I regretted that I hadn’t thought of wearing my new veldskoens.

  After Nicolaas Vermeulen and I had, each in turn, said that it would probably take another two days for the river to go down enough for us to be able to cross, the conversation turned to Gerrit Huyser.

  “It’s not as though he has sold up,” Nicolaas Vermeulen said, “and no farmer goes and stays on the diggings for more than a few months. When I first saw his wagon loaded up so high I thought it was with tree-trunks that he had fished out of the flooded river. I thought it was firewood –”

  “If he’s brought along that big tamboetie-wood cupboard in which his wife keeps those plates with the blue twigs painted on them,” Nicolaas Vermeulen’s wife, Martha, interrupted him, “then it might perhaps not be so foolish, after all. That’s about all that cupboard is any good for – to light the fire with … The airs she gives herself over that piece of junk.”

  I mentioned that I had that very morning also seen Gerrit Huy­ser’s rusbank on the wagon. I had seen it while I was talking to Gerrit Huyser, I explained, and a gust of wind had raised a corner of the wagon-sail. Later in the day I had seen him fasten down that flap with an ox-riem.

  So we said that it looked as though Gerrit Huyser intended taking things in rather too easy a way on the diggings.

  “I suppose he thinks he can sit back on that rusbank and watch the kaffirs work,” Nicolaas Vermeulen said. “Just as though he’s still at home on his farm.”

  We said that with all that furniture in his tent on the diggings, it looked as though Gerrit Huyser was expecting company. We started to wonder if he would have the coloured portrait of the president hanging on the inside of his tent, opposite his family tree in its gold frame – just like in his voorkamer at home.

  It was then that Martha Vermeulen asked what Gerrit Huy­ser’s wife would be doing all that time on the farm, alone and without any furniture in the house.

  “Anyway,” I said, “she’ll find it easy to keep the place tidy.”

  I said this several times. But Nicolaas Vermeulen and his wife did not laugh. I looked quickly in the direction of Miemie Retief. The light from the fire made pictures on her cheeks and forehead.

  That was the moment when Gerrit Huyser arrived in our
midst. He came out of the veld, where a dark wind was, and he moved slowly and ponderously. For a moment he stood between us and the fire, his shoulders high against the night. Then he took off his hat in a way that seemed to hold in it a kind of challenge.

  Nicolaas Vermeulen invited him to sit down. Gerrit Huyser found a place for himself that was furthest away from where Mie­mie Retief was seated.

  We spoke first in general terms, and then I mentioned to Gerrit Huyser that he would find quite a number of farmers from our area on the diggings. There were Stoffel Lange and his cousin Maans and Oupa Snyman and almost all the Bekkers, not even to mention the farmers from the Kromberg section.

  “Anyway, if they all come to visit you at the same time in your tent on the diggings,” Nicolaas Vermeulen said, playfully, “you’ll have chairs for them all.”

  I was surprised at the way Nicolaas Vermeulen was talking.

  “And if you find a big diamond you’ll be able to buy yourself a new span of red Afrikaner oxen, with their coats all shining,” Nicolaas Vermeulen chuckled. “And you’ll be able to get perhaps even a new wife.”

  I looked down at the ground and felt uncomfortable. When I glanced up again I could see that Martha Vermeulen had nudged her husband. She had nudged him almost off the upturned candle-­box he was sitting on. The Vermeulens, at all events – I realised – had not brought many chairs with them.

  I suddenly thought of looking at Miemie Retief. She was sitting with her head bent slightly forward and with her eyes cast on the ground, as mine had been. Then she raised her head again, and in the swift look that passed between herself and Gerrit Huyser I understood that it would have made no difference if I had thought of wearing my new veldskoens that evening.

  The little party in front of the Vermeulens’ tent broke up shortly afterwards.

  But the things Nicolaas Vermeulen had to tell me next morning did not come as a surprise to me. He told me of Miemie Retief’s meeting with Gerrit Huyser under the stars. He said that his wife, Martha, had watched those two from behind the flap of the tent.

  “Miemie’s coming with my wife and me was just a trick of hers to get away from home,” Nicolaas Vermeulen said. “It is clear that she and Gerrit Huyser had an appointment to meet here by the Vaal. How it will all end, the good Lord only knows.”

  You can imagine for yourself the strain that was in the situation after that. When we were all five of us together, we spoke nervously about unimportant things. When I was with Nicolaas Vermeulen and his wife we spoke of Miemie Retief and Gerrit Huyser. But what Miemie Retief and Gerrit Huyser spoke about at those times when they were alone together, I suppose no one can tell.

  Hour after hour we waited for the river to go down. But nobody scanned the floodwaters more anxiously than did Gerrit Huyser.

  Nicolaas Vermeulen’s wife said she was convinced that Gerrit Huyser would yet murder us all in our sleep. She was also sure that he had murdered his wife and had brought her along on the wagon, lying in that tall cupboard. Every murder story had a chest or something like that in it, for the body.

  “And how she used to polish that cupboard with olieblaar,” Martha Vermeulen added. “I can’t bear to think of it. The poor thing – lying there, in amongst those plates with all the blue twigs painted on them.”

  I tried to comfort her by saying that Gerrit Huyser would at least have had the forethought to take the plates out first.

  Martha Vermeulen’s agitation had an unhappy effect on both Nicolaas and myself.

  Meanwhile, it seemed to me that Gerrit Huyser’s wagon wore a doomed look, somehow, with all that furniture piled on it. And it was at the wagon that Gerrit Huyser and Miemie Retief were standing when two men called on Gerrit Huyser. Even at a distance we could tell, from their official air, that the visitors were landdrost’s men. Gerrit did not take some chairs down from the wagon for his guests to sit on.

  And, as always seems to happen in such cases, it was at about that time, also, that the third person in this affair arrived. She came there, to the trysting place, under the willows by the Vaal, where wild birds sang.

  The landdrost’s men lifted her out of the water and loosened the ox-riems that had bound her feet over the long distance that the flooded river had carried her. And it was after they had laid the body of Gerrit Huyser’s wife in the tall tamboetie cupboard that one of the landdrost’s men made the remark that, earlier on, I told you of. – “Three,” the landdrost’s man said, “is no company.”

  The Selon’s Rose

  Any story (Oom Schalk Lourens said) about that half-red flower, the selon’s rose, must be an old story. It is the flower that a Marico girl most often pins in her hair to attract a lover. The selon’s rose is also the flower that here, in the Marico, we customarily plant upon a grave.

  One thing that certain thoughtless people sometimes hint at about my stories is that nothing ever seems to happen in them. Then there is another kind of person who goes even further, and he says that the stories I tell are all stories that he has heard before, somewhere, long ago – he can’t remember when, exactly, but somewhere at the back of his mind he knows that it is not a new story.

  I have heard that remark passed quite often – which is not surprising, seeing that I really don’t know any new stories. But the funny part of it is that these very people will come around, say, ten years later, and ask me to tell them another story. And they will say, then, because of what they have learnt of life in between, that the older the better.

  Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that with an old story it is like with an old song. People tire of a new song readily. I remember how it was when Marie Dupreez came back to the Bushveld after her parents had sent her overseas to learn singing, because they had found diamonds on their farm, and because Marie’s teacher said she had a nice singing voice. Then, when Marie came back from Europe – through the diamonds on the Dupreez farm having given out suddenly – we on this side of the Dwarsberge were keen to have Marie sing for us.

  There was a large attendance, that night, when Marie Dupreez gave a concert in the Drogedal schoolroom. She sang what she called arias from Italian opera. And at first things didn’t go at all well. We didn’t care much for those new songs in Italian. One song was about the dawn being near, goodbye beloved and about being under somebody’s window – that was what Marie’s mother told us it was.

  Marie Dupreez’s mother came from the Cape and had studied at the Wellington seminary. Another song was about mother see these tears. The Hollander schoolmaster told me the meaning of that one. But I didn’t know if it was Marie’s mother that was meant.

  We didn’t actually dislike those songs that Marie Dupreez sang. It was only that we weren’t moved by them.

  Accordingly, after the interval, when Marie was again stepping up on to the low platform before the blackboard on which the teacher wrote sums on school days, Philippus Bonthuys, a farmer who had come all the way from Nietverdiend to attend the concert, got up and stood beside Marie Dupreez. And because he was so tall and broad it seemed almost as though he stood half in front of her, elbowing her a little, even.

  Philippus Bonthuys said that he was just a plain Dopper. And we all cheered. Then Philippus Bonthuys said that his grand­father was also just a plain Dopper, who wore his pipe and his tobacco-bag on a piece of string fastened at the side of his trousers. We cheered a lot more, then. Philippus Bonthuys went on to say that he liked the old songs best. They could keep those new songs about laugh because somebody has stolen your clown. We gathered from this that Marie’s mother had been explaining to Philippus Bonthuys, also, in quick whispers, the meanings of some of Marie’s songs.

  And before we knew where we were, the whole crowd in the schoolroom was singing, with Philippus Bonthuys beating time, “My Oupa was ’n Dopper, en ’n Dopper was Hy.” You’ve got no idea how stirring that old song sounded, with Philippus Bont­huys beating time, in the night, under the thatch of that Marico schoolroom, and with Marie Dupreez looking sligh
tly bewildered but joining in all the same – since it was her concert, after all – and not singing in Italian, either.

  We sang many songs, after that, and they were all old songs. We sang “Die Vaal Hare en die Blou Oge” and “Daar Waar die Son en die Maan Ondergaan” and “Vat Jou Goed en Trek, Fer­reira” and “Met My Rooi Rok Voor Jou Deur.” It was very beautiful.

  We sang until late into the night. Afterwards, when we congratulated Marie Dupreez’s mother, who had arranged it all, on the success of her daughter’s concert, Mevrou Dupreez said it was nothing, and she smiled. But it was a peculiar sort of smile.

  I felt that she must have smiled very much the same way when she was informed that the diamond mine on the Dupreez farm was only an alluvial gravel-bed, and not a pipe, like in Kimberley.

  Now, Marie Dupreez had not been out of the Marico very long. All told, I don’t suppose she had been in Europe for more than six months before the last shovelful of diamondiferous gravel went through Dupreez’s sieve. By the time she got back, her father was so desperate that he was even trying to sift ordinary Transvaal red clay. But Marie’s visit overseas had made her restive.

  That, of course, is something that I can’t understand. I have also been to foreign parts. During the Boer War I was a prisoner on St. Helena. And I was twice in Johannesburg. And one thing about St. Helena is that there were no Uitlanders on it. There were just Boers and English and Coloureds and Indians, like you come across here in the Marico. There were none of those all-sorts that you’ve got to push past on Johannesburg pavements. And each time I got back to my own farm, and I could sit on my stoep and fill my pipe with honest Magaliesberg tobacco, I was pleased to think I was away from all that sin that you read about in the Bible.