The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “After the circus was over and I had got back home, I was still thinking of her a long time,” Chris Welman said. “I thought of her a good way into the night. I thought of her with the electric light on her hair, hanging down on the ground, and her spitting out the sawdust every time that it came into her mouth from the way she was riding, hanging down.”

  It was obvious that Chris Welman had occupied a ringside seat.

  “But mostly I thought of her, about what she was doing after the show was over,” Chris Welman said. “I pictured her there under that tent, locked up alone in her cage. It must be an unnatural sort of life, I thought, for a girl.” And he winked.

  We were able to put Chris Welman right on that point, however.

  It wasn’t that we had any sort of inside knowledge of circus life, of course, but we just went by common sense. It was only the more wild kind of performers in a circus that got locked in cages, we said. The tamer ones just got knee-haltered, we said, or tied to stakes with riems. So he was quite wrong in thinking of the blonde equestrienne as having to be locked in a cage after the show was over, we told Chris Welman. Likely as not they even let her go loose, we said. And we also winked.

  Thereupon At Naudé said that that was the trouble.

  And after we had pondered At Naudé’s remark carefully, we realised that there was much truth in it.

  A pretty girl, we said, if she was wild enough, was a lot more dangerous than any kind of lion. And no matter how fiercely the lion might roar, either, we said. Because all a pretty girl needed to do was to lower her eyelashes in a particular way, we said. And for that she did not have to be an equestrienne or an equilibriste or anything else, we added.

  It was only natural, after that, that the talk should turn on the subject of pretty girls in general. And it was still more natural that, before we knew where we were, we should be discussing Pauline Gerber.

  What made it somewhat difficult for us to talk as freely as we would have liked about what we had been hearing of Pauline Gerber lately, was the fact that Johnny Coen was there, sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer.

  And we knew full well how Johnny Coen had felt about Pauline Gerber, both before she went to the finishingschool in the Cape, and after she came back from the finishingschool .

  As it happened, however, Johnny Coen helped us out, to some extent, and perhaps without knowing it, even.

  Gysbert van Tonder had just made the admission that, insofar as he was able to judge, Pauline Gerber was not only just the prettiest girl in this part of the Marico Bushveld, but also the most attractive. “If you know what I mean by attractive,” Gysbert van Tonder had added. “Otherwise I could tell you –”

  That was when Johnny Coen had interrupted Gysbert van Tonder.

  “No, no, you don’t need to tell us,” Johnny Coen said, hastily, “not in words, and all that. And not when it’s – when it’s Pauline Gerber, I should say. You’ve told us things like that before today. About what you find attractive in girls, that is. And so if you perhaps don’t say it all over again, we won’t feel that we have missed anything. Because you’ve said it all before, that is.”

  After a few moments’ reflection, Gysbert van Tonder conceded Johnny Coen’s point. He had spoken on that subject quite a good bit, he acknowledged, but there was still just this one thing he wanted to say –

  “Not now, please,” Johnny Coen interjected. And he spoke so sharply, and with such unwonted heat, that Gysbert van Tonder shut up, looking slightly puzzled, all the same.

  “I was only going to say –” Gysbert van Tonder concluded in an aggrieved tone, and left it at that. For if Johnny Coen was going to act funny, and so on, well, it was not a matter for him, Gysbert van Tonder, to have to go out of his way to help Johnny right.

  “Well, I’ve only seen Pauline Gerber a few times, since she’s been back from finishingschool ,” Johnny Coen said. And from the way he said ‘few’ we knew that he wanted us to think that it meant more than, say, exactly twice.

  But, of course, we weren’t really interested in the number of times that Johnny Coen had seen Pauline Gerber of late. What we were anxious to learn was how often the young schoolmaster, Vermaak, had been seeing her. For it was in relation to young Vermaak, and not to Johnny Coen, that a certain amount of talk was going on about Pauline Gerber.

  “Well, the few times that I have seen her,” Johnny Coen went on, “it was a bit difficult for me to know what to think, exactly. The first time I saw her the schoolmaster had just left. And the second time – I mean, on another occasion when I saw her at her house, she was sort of expecting Meneer Vermaak to come round. But what I want to say is that what Chris Welman said about the circus girl – why, that is exactly what I feel about Pauline Gerber. About how pretty she is, and all that. And what makes it still more queer is that she talks about herself like Chris Welman talks about the girl that rides in the circus.

  “She feels she’s shut up in a cage, Pauline Gerber says. To have to live here in the Bushveld, with everybody so narrow-minded, Pauline Gerber said, is like being shut up in a cage.”

  Johnny Coen went on at considerable length, after that, acquainting us with the true nature of the sentiments he entertained for Pauline Gerber. But we were not interested. We did not in any way doubt the purity or the sincerity of his feelings. Only, we were not concerned with all that. What we really wanted to know was what was going on between Pauline Gerber and the young schoolmaster. And it was apparent that Johnny Coen couldn’t tell us more than what we already knew. It was a pity that Johnny Coen should be struck with such blindness, though, we thought. It would be better if the scales were to drop from Johnny Coen’s eyes, we felt.

  It was Oupa Bekker who brought the talk back to a discussion of the circus – which was, after all, where we had started from.

  “Walking on bottles,” Oupa Bekker was saying. “Well, that’s a new one on me. And I’ve known the Marico when it was elephant country. Unless, maybe, it was giraffe country. And what a giraffe would look like, standing on his hind legs, I just can’t think of, right away.”

  That was what gave Johnny Coen his chance to get back to the clowns, once more.

  “The one clown poured water from a step-ladder out of a bucket onto that other clown that I was telling you about,” Johnny Coen said. “And I just about laughed my head off, each time, to see how that other clown got soaked. And they had natives to come running in from the back entrance with more buckets of water. And it all went over that clown. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the Chinese acrobat, even, who jumped through two wheels with knives in them. And all the time that clown didn’t know what was happening. Every time I saw a native come running in with another bucket of water, why, I just about died, laughing.”

  We gazed at Johnny Coen pretty steadily, as he spoke. And we thought of what was going on between Pauline Gerber and young Vermaak, the schoolmaster. And all the time Johnny Coen went on feeling the way he did about Pauline. And we wondered if Gysbert van Tonder had been so far wrong, when he said that this was clown country.

  The tears started coming into Johnny Coen’s eyes, eventually, the way he was laughing about that clown.

  Anxious to Hear

  Not that young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, was not talking with his usual confidence, and all that, sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. And as always, he was pretty sure of his facts. Moreover, the subject we were discussing – namely, the visit to the Marico of Dr Lesnitzky, the archaeologist – was just in the young schoolmaster’s line.

  And yet if you knew him at all well, through having met him at intervals over a considerable period, you could not but detect that young Vermaak was not entirely at his ease, even when he spoke most learnedly.

  And we noticed that when Oupa Bekker asked him a question about Pauline Gerber – Oupa Bekker making the enquiry in what you might call a quite pointed way – the constraint in the schoolmaster’s manner showed no visible diminution. It got worse, if anything. In fact, qui
te a lot worse.

  So much so, indeed, that Gysbert van Tonder, speaking in a chummy, man-to-man fashion, advised him to cheer up. The schoolmaster bridled. And not unnaturally. You couldn’t help it, but there always would be something brutal, sort of, in the sound of Gysbert van Tonder instructing anybody to cheer up.

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” young Vermaak informed Gysbert, speaking to him coldly, as though he was a Standard Three pupil that had got a simple fraction sum wrong, “I’m only discussing the fossilised footprints of the Jurassic period that Dr Lesnitzky has discovered in the bed of the Molopo. What you mean by saying that I should cheer up about it, I just don’t understand. They aren’t my footprints –”

  The schoolmaster glanced around the voorkamer, as though expecting us to laugh. It was evident that he had made what he thought was a clever remark, and that he expected us all to laugh, whereby Gysbert van Tonder would be shown up as somebody very ignorant. As it happened, however, we didn’t laugh. There had been quite a lot of talk about Pauline Gerber and the schoolmaster, here in the Groot Marico. And it wasn’t the kind of talk that you could just dismiss with a laugh. Especially if there was any truth in what the women thought they had observed about Pauline Gerber, the time they saw her at the church service held in the schoolhouse at the end of the year.

  For that reason, we were prepared to believe quite a few things about the schoolmaster. If there was one thing that we had reason to suspect him for – why, there could just as well be another reason. It was not unlikely that Dr Lesnitzky had found out something else about young Vermaak.

  “In the Jurassic slime,” the teacher continued, trying to make it sound still funnier.

  Yes, that was about right, we thought. If Jurassic was like that, well we were less provoked to laughter than ever. Maybe Dr Lesnitzky had got hold of something, we thought, if he was making remarks like that about the schoolmaster.

  “Mind you, it’s not that I blame you for anything,” Gysbert van Tonder declared, sententiously. “You’ll find that nobody here will blame you for anything. Not as long as you do the right thing, that is. I mean, we are all men. We all know how a young fellow can get – can get tempted and all that. But we expect you to act square. As for what that Professor Lesnitzky says about you and the Jurassic slime – well that you can forget about. You can take it from me that nobody in the Groot Marico will ever hold that against you. It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, I should imagine. That part of it you can just forget about.”

  The past was nothing, Gysbert van Tonder said. It was now that mattered.

  This time it was Gysbert van Tonder’s turn to look around him, his eyes travelling from face to face. And each one that Gysbert van Tonder looked at nodded his head in agreement, each of us sitting there in Jurie Steyn’s post office.

  “Yes, old chap,” At Naudé said to young Vermaak, talking to him comfortingly, “don’t you take any notice of Dr Lesnitzky. He’s a foreigner, in any case. I mean, what does he really know, what’s going on in the Groot Marico? Let him say anything he likes about you and the Jurassic slime you’ve been talking about. That’s something he’ll have to prove in court. And you can take my word for it that we’re with you. We’ll stand by you, and we’ll make that Dr Lesnitzky look silly. It’s only that other thing, you know –”

  The schoolmaster brushed aside At Naudé’s remarks with a gesture. And he spoke to At Naudé in a much haughtier way than he had done to Gysbert van Tonder. Never mind Standard Three, he addressed At Naudé as though At Naudé had just that morning come to school for the first time, and At Naudé didn’t know a thing, and he was snivelling there, thinking of the place at the spruit where he made clay oxen with the Mtosa piccanins. The schoolmaster spoke to At Naudé as though At Naudé had all those feelings that a Bushveld youngster has when he comes to school the first day.

  “Do you know what the Jurassic slime is?” the schoolmaster demanded of At Naudé.

  “No,” At Naudé replied, “but I’ve a pretty good idea. And all I can say is that that Dr Lesnitzky needn’t talk. He’s got a good bit of it on himself, too, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of his own footprints are there, also, and not just yours. He looks that sort –”

  Well, that was when the schoolmaster was able to give a short laugh, in which there was no mirth – and in which there was no implied invitation for anybody else to join in, either. It was the kind of laugh that a person has on his own, and is glad to have it that way.

  And when he started talking, the schoolmaster was really able to spread himself. Several of us felt that it was a mistake to have given him that opening. For there was no doubt that this was exactly up young Vermaak’s street, and so he just let himself go.

  He told us things about geology that we had never known existed, until then. And he said that the footprints Dr Lesnitzky had discovered in the bed of the Molopo River were so ancient that it was quite ridiculous even to try and work out how old. Hundreds of thousands of years, the schoolmaster said. Millions of years, even.

  And while they did not look unlike human footprints, except that they were maybe on the small side, no human being could have made them, since they were stretched too far apart for any human to have walked or even run like that.

  “The Jurassic is only a geological formation,” young Vermaak went on. “It is quite ridiculous to suggest the idea that there is anything unpleasant about it. It comes in between the Cretaceous and Triassic groups and includes the Oolite and the Lias. It is a formation rich in fauna.”

  Young Vermaak went on at great length. And he spoke almost with his old self-assurance. It was as though he felt that, on the dry bed of the old Molopo, he was on safe ground.

  There were no quicksands, there, that he could get trapped in. While he stayed on the Jurassic side of the Molopo’s dried-up bed he was beyond the reach of any present-day criticism that we could level at him, sitting there in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. Even the Cretaceous was millions of years before Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, the schoolmaster explained.

  “Abounding in echnidons,” young Vermaak was saying.

  Well, when it was that sort of talk, the ordinary Bushveld farmer was just nowhere. And we realised that. We had no hold on him. The schoolmaster could go on talking until the lorry from Bekkersdal came, and after that, as long as his information on the Triassic lasted out. And from the Triassic he would be able to switch to something else, no doubt.

  We had no means of making contact with a man, sitting on a riem-piestoel millions of years away, and taking it easy. If it came to the worst, the schoolmaster would also be able to cite those mineralogy tables, that he knew by heart.

  And we were satisfied that it made him happy to do that, too – seeing how seldom we gave him the opportunity for it.

  But it was when Oupa Bekker cleared his throat, and a far-off light came into Oupa Bekker’s eye, that we knew that young Vermaak would not have it all his own way, anymore, for much longer. That light in Oupa Bekker’s eye spoke, somehow, of battle – a battle in some forgotten war, long past, that Oupa Bekker had taken part in when he was still young.

  When Oupa Bekker cleared his throat, we suddenly felt that the schoolmaster was only talking about things that were very old. But we felt in that moment that Oupa Bekker was really old.

  “Those footprints in the Molopo,” Oupa Bekker said. “Well, I’ve seen them. Only, that isn’t the Molopo, of course. It’s only an arm of the Molopo. If your Dr Lesnitzky doesn’t know that, you can tell it to him from me. The Molopo itself flows on past Tweedepoort. And I’ve never known a time when there wasn’t water in that part of the Molopo that you’re talking about – in the arm there hasn’t been water in living memory.”

  When Oupa Bekker said ‘living memory’ it seemed to be something that went back so far – further than the Jurassic, even, somehow – that more than one of us felt a little uncomfortable. Chris Welman coughed, too, then.

  “Now,
this Jurassic, that you’re talking about,” Oupa Bekker asked the schoolmaster. “Has it got anything to do with Jurie Steyn? I’m only asking, of course. You see, I don’t know much about what has been happening in these parts, lately. Things up to the war with Sekukuni I can remember very well.

  “It’s only things that happened later, like Jameson’s Raid, for instance, that I don’t remember so clearly. Today I can’t remember anymore the name of the Mshangaan woman that Jameson borrowed the white apron from that he held up, at Doornkop. But is this Jurassic that you’re talking about called after Jurie Steyn?”

  Jurie Steyn leant forward over his post office counter, for a moment, looking hopeful. You could sense what Jurie Steyn was feeling, too. It was as though, for a brief spell, Jurie Steyn was wondering whether, after all, he had perhaps not lived in vain. With the schoolmaster’s next words, however, Jurie Steyn resigned himself to an acceptance of the common fate of all of us mere mortals.

  “What do they want to call anything after Jurie Steyn for?” young Vermaak asked. For the schoolmaster had just been talking geology. Consequently, his concern for the factual overrode those human considerations that find their expressions in diplomatic utterance.

  “I mean, it would be silly, wouldn’t it,” young Vermaak went on, “to go and give Jurie Steyn’s name to some part of the science that deals with the condition and structure of the earth. Think of how absurd it would be to call one of the geological strata –”

  Since he had no pretensions to being anything more than human, Jurie Steyn could stand only so much. All right, the Jurassic system wasn’t called after him. Good, he accepted that. For that matter, he had never really expected anything else. He knew only too well – and from his own experience, what was more – how blind the world could be when it came to according a person the just due for his merits.