The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  We all knew that Jurie Steyn had been born in the Western Province and had lived there for the first years of his young manhood.

  “The old Boland,” Jurie Steyn went on, “there you do, indeed, have spring. I remember that at school in the Cape we learnt a recitation to say for the inspector, about ‘viooltjies in die voorhuis.’ That was in Standard Three. What recitation they learnt for the inspector the next year, I don’t know. I wasn’t there to find out. All the same, I expect I am better educated than most. If you don’t count just book learning, I mean.”

  And so we all said, no, of course, we didn’t count just such a thing as book learning, either. We knew that education – real education, that was – consisted in far more than what you learnt sitting at a school desk. In fact, there was not one of us in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at that very moment that had had much book learning to speak of, we said. And yet look at us. Not that we gave ourselves airs, on that account, we said. It was just that we were privileged, perhaps.

  Thereupon At Naudé turned to young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, and explained that we naturally did not mean him. We were all friends together, At Naudé made it clear to young Vermaak, and so young Vermaak must not get hold of the idea that we thought any the less of him, just on account of his having passed a couple of schoolteacher’s exams, and so on.

  “Oh, no,” young Vermaak answered. “You mustn’t misunderstand me, either. As a matter of fact – ha-ha – nobody has got more contempt for just book learning than what I have. No, I am one hundred percent in agreement with what Jurie Steyn has been saying.”

  Gysbert van Tonder looked somewhat surprised.

  “You know,” he said, “isn’t that putting it rather high? One hundred percent, I mean. We all know, of course, that a schoolteacher doesn’t get much of an education. We know that a schoolteacher doesn’t go as high as a doctor or a lawyer, say. Or even as high as a foreman shunter and station accounts that you study through the correspondence college. But when you say you are one hundred percent ignorant – why, surely, you don’t mean to say you’re as ignorant as a na– ?”

  Johnny Coen interrupted Gysbert van Tonder to say that he would be surprised if he knew how ignorant a schoolteacher was, really. It was in connection with that same matter of railway promotion examinations that Gysbert had just mentioned.

  “It was when I was on the railways at Ottoshoop and I was studying electric unit working by correspondence,” Johnny Coen said, “and I asked a schoolteacher about how the flanged wheels operate for points and crossings and the schoolteacher said he hadn’t learnt so far. Another time I asked the teacher when do you have an overhead conductor and when do you electrify the line with a third rail, and the teacher said search him. Just like that, he said. Well, if that isn’t plain ignorance, I’d like to know what is.”

  At Naudé nodded his head solemnly.

  “That’s just what I’ve been thinking, also,” he said. “It’s all very well for Meneer Vermaak here to say that he despises book learning – meaning that he hasn’t got any book learning, I suppose – but then I don’t see what right he has got to be educating our children. You can see that the education department don’t care what sort of people they appoint these days. When I went to school you never heard a schoolteacher saying he had a contempt for education – meaning thereby that he hasn’t got any.”

  So Jurie Steyn said that that was a scandal. What was worse, he said, was that a lot of people, including women, didn’t know those things about schoolmasters, and had a silly sort of admiration for them, thinking they had book learning. Maybe they would think different about it if they knew that a schoolteacher was as ignorant as a –

  “But all the same,” At Naudé remarked, bringing us back to what we had started off discussing. “I do not think that Gysbert van Tonder is right. We are just about at the end of the winter. Jurie Steyn says it’s not the beginning of the spring. I don’t quite know what he means by that. But you haven’t simply got to go and look at a mopane tree to know if the winter is nearly over. You can feel it. You can feel it in the wind, as much as anything else. Jurie Steyn had been talking about the Western Province, seeing that I was brought up at Rooigrond. But if you were to go to Rooigrond right now, I know just what you’ll find. You’ll find that it’s the beginning of the springtime at Rooigrond. I know it, even though I haven’t been there for years. There will be a soft wind blowing over the bult at Rooigrond, at this very moment. And under the peppercorn trees the yellow soil will be streaked with white dust. And if that isn’t springtime in the Transvaal – in that part of the Transvaal – I should like to know what is.”

  Jurie Steyn shook his head.

  “End of the winter,” he announced, “that’s all it is. End of the winter. Spring is something quite different. In the Boland I’ve known the spring. It’s been a real springtime, and no nonsense. You can tell it, man. After the last loose showers have fallen, and the raindrops hang on the under part of the leaves, and a fresh smell hangs over the lands – over the wheatlands and over the watermelon lands. You’ve just got to breathe it in, and you know straight away that it’s not just the end of winter, it isn’t. You know clear in your heart that it is the spring.”

  If At Naudé was surprised at the way Jurie Steyn spoke, that was nothing compared with how surprised the rest of us were. It certainly was most peculiar to hear Jurie Steyn talking about the heart. You would almost be led to think, from that, that he had such a thing himself as a human heart. Only, of course, we knew better.

  “It must be because you were young then, Jurie,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “You know, it is when you were young that you were in the Boland, and so I suppose that the Cape has all sorts of memories for you, and so on. You have got more feeling for the spring when you are young than when you are – well – perhaps not quite so young.”

  Gysbert van Tonder framed that remark with a certain measure of diplomatic skill. And we understood why. Gysbert van Tonder was no chicken himself, for that matter.

  “I think I understand what Gysbert means,” At Naudé said, winking. “Your youth is also like the springtime. When I was a young man – Lord, what wouldn’t I give to be a young man again and to know what I know now. If I was young today, and I was so low as to be a bywoner on a farm, say, and I knew what I know now and the farmer came and said to me he didn’t like the way I was slopping the pigs’ swill all over the place instead of pouring it into the middle of the troughs – Lord, I’d turn that swill upside down over the farmer’s head, trough and all. And when I was young I didn’t know these things.”

  We didn’t know whether At Naudé had started life as a bywoner. But we did know that today At Naudé did have a young bywoner working for him. And that young bywoner seemed quite content to walk about in broken trousers and with a battered khaki hat pulled down flat over his ears.

  From all the wise things we were saying, it seemed as though we were just about as old as Oupa Bekker, the lot of us. Especially when Jurie Steyn went on to say that the only way he ever knew it was spring was by the dust.

  “When the front door is open,” Jurie Steyn said, “and a lot of dust blows into the voorkamer – red dust – then I know either that it’s the Government lorry from Bekkersdal or the spring. What you call the spring, I mean.”

  But Johnny Coen said that he had that very day, on his way to Jurie Steyn’s post office, seen a strange bird with long black legs by the spruit.

  “I could see by his wings that that bird was very tired,” Johnny Coen said. “I could see that he had come from far. And so I knew that spring was near at hand.”

  Shortly afterwards Jurie Steyn’s wife came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray. She usually brought us our coffee at about that time. But we saw at once that Jurie Steyn’s wife looked different. Only afterwards we realised that it was because of the blue ribbon that she had wreathed in her hair.

  “Without any book learning,” the young schoolteacher said with a laugh, as he helped h
imself to sugar, “I can tell that it’s spring. How do you like that, Jurie? Yes, it’s springtime in the Marico.”

  The Coffee that Tasted like Tar

  “When the coffee tastes like tar,” Jurie Steyn announced sombrely, after his wife had gone round with the tray, “then I know I have got influenza.”

  So At Naudé said that he himself was still all right, then, since the coffee tasted to him like what it really was – that was to say, like burnt mealies.

  Gysbert van Tonder made haste to sympathise with Jurie Steyn. “I know that feeling, Jurie,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “And that taste, too. I remember how very bad I had the influenza when I was staying at Derdepoort, that time. For days on end the coffee tasted like roast baobab roots. And so you can imagine how I felt, one day, when I saw the farmer I was staying with digging up baobab roots and roasting them for coffee.”

  Jurie Steyn looked at Gysbert van Tonder steadily for a few moments. But Gysbert went on stirring the spoon round in his cup, very calmly.

  “I really don’t know what you are trying to suggest with that story, Gysbert,” Jurie said after a pause. “But my head feels too thick for me to try and work it out. It’s the influenza, of course.”

  Jurie Steyn made that explanation rather quickly. You could see he wasn’t in a mood to provide Gysbert van Tonder with an opening for any low innuendoes.

  Speaking to Jurie Steyn for his own good, Gysbert van Tonder thereupon advised him to take things very easily, and not to let trifles upset him.

  “Actually, you ought to be in bed, Jurie,” Gysbert van Tonder went on in soothing tones. “You really do look terrible. We can all see you’re not normal, you know.”

  Jurie Steyn admitted that he wasn’t feeling himself. He made this acknowledgment several times. “With this influenza I am just not myself,” Jurie Steyn said, “and that’s the truth.”

  Gysbert van Tonder said that he wouldn’t like to go so far as to say that Jurie Steyn wasn’t himself. That was a matter on which he would rather not offer an opinion, Gysbert continued. Maybe Jurie Steyn was himself, and maybe he wasn’t. But what nobody could deny was that at that moment there was something very queer about Jurie Steyn. Like he was funny in the head, sort of, Gysbert van Tonder added. Winking at At Naudé, Gysbert van Tonder said that he was not prepared to say that it wasn’t the influenza, of course –

  “Oh, no,” Jurie Steyn interrupted him hastily. “I know it’s the influenza, all right. That you don’t need to worry about. I felt it coming on for some time.”

  “A pretty long time, I should think,” At Naudé said, taking his cue from Gysbert van Tonder and speaking in a voice that was full of kindliness. “Yes, I should say you must have been feeling it coming on for a longish time, Jurie.”

  It was clear that, influenza and all, Jurie Steyn was trapped. Leaning forward on his counter he looked from one to the other of us. All he saw was a row of Bushveld farmers sitting with straight faces.

  “Well, they do say that the influenza is sort of – well, more severe this year,” Jurie Steyn informed us, as though hoping that that word would explain a great deal. “That is no doubt the reason why I may of late have seemed to you somewhat – well, queer.”

  “Queerer than usual, even,” Gysbert van Tonder said, trying hard not to choke. “That’s what we’ve all been feeling about you for a little while, Jurie, that you have been queerer even than usual.”

  At Naudé coughed several times before he spoke. That alarmed us. For just one titter from At Naudé would set us all off laughing, and then Jurie Steyn would realise that it had all been a leg-pull. But At Naudé didn’t let us down.

  “It’s how you look, Jurie,” he said, still speaking in that unnaturally courteous sort of way, and taking trouble to say each word very clearly, “it’s how you look more than how you act, even, that has made us – us farmers here on this side of the Dwarsberge – anyway, Jurie, old friend, you don’t know how happy we all are to know that it is only the influenza. And you are quite right about saying that it is a very severe form of influenza, Jurie. Perhaps you don’t even know how right you are, Jurie. Indeed – indeed, I hope you’ll never know.”

  At Naudé did not say very much. But he did talk very distinctly. And at the end his voice grew quite hushed. He did it so well that even we, who knew what At Naudé was up to, began almost to believe that there was some sort of dark underneath meaning in that piece of nonsense that he had just seen fit to utter.

  As for Jurie Steyn, the effect on him was most pronounced. The part of his face between his eyes and his ears turned a kind of greenish

  colour, and when we saw that he was standing with both hands pressed heavily on the counter, we knew that it was quite different from the old days, when he had stood like that to show that he was master in his own post office. He leant in that fashion on the counter now, for support. It was almost as though he realised that he wasn’t getting any support from us.

  After a while Jurie Steyn said something. And his voice was a good deal softer even than Gysbert van Tonder’s or At Naudé’s had been.

  “I think,” Jurie Steyn said, infirmly, “I think I’ll go and have a bit of a lie down. My head has been funny lately, I know. But I am sure it is only the influenza. At least, I am almost sure.”

  Before we had quite realised what had happened, Jurie Steyn had left his place behind the counter and had gone out through the kitchen door, on his way to bed. On the threshold of the kitchen he had paused, however. “It must be the influenza,” Jurie Steyn had said, as if to reassure both himself and us. “Because, you know, that coffee did taste like tar.”

  The moment Jurie had gone out we could permit ourselves to laugh. We didn’t overdo it, naturalIy. After all, there was no point in making Jurie Steyn’s wife suspicious. Or in laughing so loudly that Jurie would hear us in the bedroom.

  “Anyway,” Gysbert van Tonder said, after a little while, “it’s not so very unhealthy that the coffee his wife makes for him should taste to Jurie Steyn like tar. It could taste a lot worse. It could taste like Cooper’s dip, or like that weed-killer arsenic, for instance.”

  We did not laugh, this time, at Gysbert van Tonder’s remark. There seemed to be too much in it that was near the truth. Maybe there wasn’t actually any weed-killer arsenic in the words that Gysbert van Tonder spoke. But we wouldn’t swear to it that in what he said there wasn’t something very near to rat poison.

  More than one of us took a sideways glance at young Vermaak, the schoolteacher, then. But he sat straight up on the riempies bench, with his dark hair slicked back, trying to look as unconcerned as you please.

  “It’s funny,” Chris Welman said a little later, “that Jurie Steyn should have fallen for our little bit of fun in the way he did. I mean, we got him so easily. That’s not quite like Jurie. Or is it?”

  So we said, no, there quite clearly did seem to be something preying on his mind. Maybe it was the influenza, after all, Johnny Coen suggested.

  We couldn’t quite accept it that way, however. For that matter, we were, the majority of us, married men. And it suddenly appeared to us that what could happen to one man might just as likely as not befall another. And although we would always be willing to admit that there were certain peculiarities in Jurie Steyn’s nature that made him unpopular with us, we nevertheless found ourselves looking at the young schoolmaster with a certain measure of disfavour. It seemed as though he could almost sense what we were thinking.

  “Ah, well, Jurie will get over it,” young Vermaak said. “We all do, I mean. The influenza isn’t as serious as all that.”

  There seemed quite a lot of sense in the schoolmaster’s statement, too. And also in the comment that At Naudé made.

  “We all,” At Naudé said, “we all get it sooner or later.”

  Afterwards it seemed to us that Oupa Bekker’s remark was pretty profound, also.

  “I don’t quite follow what you are getting at,” Oupa Bekker said. “As you know, I am a
bit deaf. But all this talk of influenza, and so on … Well, all I can say is that Jurie Steyn was looking for it.”

  From then onwards the conversation took a somewhat desultory turn. And when the lorry arrived from Bekkersdal we started wondering as to whether we really had been so very clever, in the way we had pulled Jurie Steyn’s leg. For while he was lying in bed at ease and snoring, no doubt, we were falling about all over the place, trying on our own to sort out our letters and milk-cans and parcels, and thoughts.

  Stars in their Courses

  “It said over the wireless,” At Naudé announced, “that the American astronomers are moving out of Johannesburg. They are taking the telescopes and things they have been studying the stars with, to Australia. There is too much smoke in Johannesburg for them to be able to see the stars properly.”

  He paused, as though inviting comment. But none of us had anything to say. We weren’t interested in the Americans and their stars. Or in Australia, either, much.

  “The American astronomers have been in Johannesburg for many years,” At Naudé went on, wistfully, as though the impending removal of the astronomical research station was a matter of personal regret to him. “They have been here for years and now they are going, because of the smoke. It gets into their eyes just when they have nearly seen a new star in their telescopes, I suppose. Well, smoke is like that, of course. It gets into your eyes just at the wrong time.”

  What At Naudé said now was something that we could all understand. It was something of which we had all had experience. It was different from what he had been saying before about eyepieces and refracting telescopes, that he had heard of over the wireless, and that he had got all wrong, no doubt. Whereas getting smoke in your eyes at an inconvenient moment was something everybody in the Marico understood.

  Immediately, Chris Welman started telling us about the time he was asked by Koos Nienaber, as a favour, to stand on a rant of the Dwarsberge from where he was able to see the Derdepoort police post very clearly. Koos Nienaber, it would seem, had private business with a chief near Ramoutsa, which had to do with bringing a somewhat large herd of cattle with long horns across the border.