The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  At Naudé acknowledged that he had never really thought of hanging his trousers over a chair, until then. That just proved again what kind of ideas you could get hold of by just thinking, he said.

  “Take that new alarm clock, now,” At Naudé went on, “playing um-tiddly-um-tum first thing in the morning. Well, the man who thought that out must have done nothing for a whole month but sit down and think. Sitting down just in one place, too, I should imagine.”

  A pensive light came into At Naudé’s eyes, then. He looked just about as thoughtful as the man thinking about the alarm clock.

  “Nothing to do but sit on his – on his –” At Naudé said, wistfully, “and with somebody to bring him in coffee, every so often.”

  It was clear that At Naudé was reflecting on the awe-inspiring contribution that he himself could make to world progress by way of mechanical invention, given suitable conditions to invent in.

  “If necessary, I would be prepared to spend even longer than a month over something that I was inventing,” At Naudé went on, after a pause. “So as to get it just proper, for the world. There’s no sense in rushing things. Once you’re sitting down to it.”

  “Like that electric separator that David Policansky demonstrated in his store,” Chris Welman said. “Now, if I had a cream separator like that … Why, all you do is you sit back and watch the Mtosas pour the milk in on top and at the bottom it comes out cream in one can and skim milk for the pigs in the other can, and there’s no handle to turn. And fast. Why, it’s a pleasure to be able to sit back and watch the Mtosas getting all out of breath, through rushing around with the cans and buckets, trying to keep up. Trying to keep up with the separator and the pigs. For that alone it’s worth it, to see how the Mtosas get kept on the hop.

  “That is what I mean by saying that I would also like to think out an invention some day that will be of benefit to my fellow man. Of course, I don’t know anything more about inventing than what – what a Chinaman does.”

  From the furrows in Jurie Steyn’s forehead, it appeared that he had been wrestling with a problem.

  “It’s like this,” Jurie Steyn said, eventually. “According to what At Naudé and Chris Welman have been saying, an inventor sits down for a good while and thinks, somebody bringing him in coffee every so often. And what the inventor thinks out, at the end of that time, is as likely as not something that enables you and me also to sit down on our back parts, somebody bringing us in coffee every so often.

  “I mean, that’s what he’s supposed to invent. But as far as I can see, what’s wrong with an invention is that it doesn’t work out that way. It’s the people that start using the invention that have got to get going – and a lot quicker, too, than before.”

  He hoped we would not take it amiss, Jurie Steyn said, but it was indeed a truth that those of us present in his voorkamer at that very moment spent quite a good while, each week, in just sitting, and with his wife bringing us in coffee.

  But it wasn’t like that through anything anybody had invented, he said. It was only, of course, because we had to come there for our letters.

  “But one day somebody is going to invent a way to make it easier for Marico farmers to collect their mail and milk-cans, every week,” Jurie Steyn declared in sombre tones. “And that will make a big difference. It will be less talk and more jumping around for you kêrels.

  “There will be less of this um-diddly-um-tum,” Jurie Steyn said, as an afterthought.

  In the meantime the schoolteacher, young Vermaak, had been carrying on a conversation with Chris Welman. It was apparent that the schoolmaster had taken exception to Chris Welman’s statement, earlier on, about a Chinaman. With Jurie Steyn talking at the same time, the schoolmaster’s words were audible only in snatches:

  “… and the art of printing – what do you think of that?” young Vermaak was saying to Chris Welman … “yes, and gunpowder … the mariner’s compass, with north and south marked on it … you ask what’s the good of that?

  “Do you know north from south? … no, Nietverdiend is west, man … no, man, that’s Portuguese territory … the bold sons of the Celestial Empire crossing the … yes, in their junks, long before Vasco da Gama … discovering South Africa … what’s that? Well, why shouldn’t they have been hanged? … longer than from here to Cape Town via Bloemfontein and over worse parts than the Hex River. How do you mean, we should also have a wall like that, to keep the Syrians out? … bamboo …”

  When young Vermaak finished speaking, Chris Welman said that he handed it to that Chinaman all right, that had thought out gunpowder. He only hoped that that Chinaman wasn’t sitting on a barrel of gunpowder all the time he was doing his thinking, with somebody bringing him coffee every so often, ha-ha.

  Anyway, the white man in this country would just have been nowhere if it wasn’t for gunpowder, Chris Welman explained. He himself still had some loopers that his great-grandfather had fired through a muzzle-loader at Danskraal.

  “And if you saw the size of those loopers,” Chris Welman said, “well, I’m sure you’d get quite a different kind of respect for a Chinaman.”

  It was only when the schoolmaster got onto the subject of Confucius and Taoism that Chris Welman grew impatient.

  “What did they want all that for?” Chris Welman asked of the schoolmaster, “after they had got gunpowder that could shoot loopers that big?”

  For once the schoolmaster, talking then about the pagoda at Foochow, was unable to think of an answer.

  “That alarm clock that At Naudé read about in the papers,” Oupa Bekker announced, suddenly. “A new invention, my foot. I remember that there was the same kind of alarm clock that came from overseas and that we had here in this country at the time of the Stellaland Republic.

  “Not that many people bought that kind of alarm clock, of course. It wasn’t that we thought there was anything wrong with it as an alarm clock. Only, we just didn’t want to be wakened up too early. Not in the Stellaland Republic, we didn’t.”

  Oupa Bekker described that old alarm clock. We were surprised to find that it was not so different from the newest kind of alarm clock that At Naudé had just been reading about.

  “It didn’t make that clatter-clatter sort of noise at all,” Oupa Bekker said. “Instead, it just played the first part of what the foreign jeweller that sold it said was the Fire Brigade song. It was the Fire Brigade song from – No, I don’t remember now where it was from. From some place overseas, I should imagine.

  “But it was awful enough. There was no um-tiddy-um-tum nonsense about it. It went something like this: K-wêêê-te-te-tah wah rê – It was almost like it was words. The Fire Brigade song, it was called.”

  The schoolmaster listened intently.

  Then he asked Oupa Bekker to sing that bit again, a little more in tune, if possible. Oupa Bekker did his best. We could see that from how he threw his head back, and from the stiff way he held his shoulders. But if Oupa Bekker had sung his worst, he could not have produced any-thing more direful in the way of sound. But the schoolmaster looked, strangely enough, pleased.

  “Te-rêêê ta-ta-rê,” the schoolmaster joined in enthusiastically, flinging an arm into the air. “That’s not the Fire Brigade song. It’s the Fire Song. It’s from the Valkyries. Te-têê –”

  Gysbert van Tonder said that, wherever that song was from, he had rather that they had kept it there.

  Oupa Bekker looked pretty foolish, however, having called that song by its wrong name. The schoolmaster had shown Oupa Bekker up, all right, for not having much culture.

  “When I said it was the Fire Brigade song,” Oupa Bekker apologised, lamely, “I didn’t mean so much that it’s the song that the new Zeerust fire brigade sings. I meant that it’s more, sort of, the kind of things a person whose house is alight would shout, sort of, to get the fire brigade along, if you know what I mean.”

  “Tê-tê te-rê –” the schoolmaster went on singing.

  Johnny Coen came to Oupa Be
kker’s rescue.

  “You know, Oupa,” Johnny Coen said, “I know just how you feel. If they had an alarm clock like what you and Meneer Vermaak have just been singing, then I would say, far rather give me the simple old clatter-clatter tin alarm clock. Because you at least know where you are with it. You know it isn’t going to soothe you with Fire Brigade music afterwards.

  “If they must have this new kind of alarm clock that At Naudé has been talking about, then they should make it play the tune first, to wake you up with a jerk, and only after that the alarm should come along with its old clatter-clatter, to make you feel that everything is still all right. I mean, after the Fire Brigade song, you need the clatter-clatter of just an alarm clock to make you feel restful, again.”

  “All the same,” Oupa Bekker declared, reminiscently, “the old alarm clock that played what Meneer Vermaak says is the Fire Song … well, you only had to hear it, to know what I mean. Why, it could wake up a bywoner in time for the milking, two mornings out of three –”

  “In that case, it should have been able,” Johnny Coen interjected quickly, with a laugh, “to wake the –”

  So Oupa Bekker said, yes, it could. Playing tê-re-re-rêê, like that. Nine times out of ten that alarm clock could. Unless it was somebody that died of snakebite, Oupa Bekker said.

  Circumstantial Evidence

  One story we heard was that Pauline Gerber’s eldest brother, Dons, spoke to young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, on the platform at Zeerust station. According to this story, the schoolmaster was just getting ready to board the train, and Dons Gerber had a single-barrelled shotgun in the bend of his arm when he spoke to the schoolmaster.

  According to the second story we heard, young Vermaak was sitting in the classroom, after school, correcting exercise books, and it was Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother, Floris, who addressed him, Floris oiling the mechanism of a Mott-Mauser at the time.

  It was difficult to know what to believe, exactly. Each story was so well authenticated. The circumstances relating to Dons and the railway platform embraced the language that the train-guard used when he had to stop the train, after having blown the whistle, so that the schoolmaster could get his suitcases out of the compartment again.

  “It’s how a ticket examiner spoke to me, once,” Gysbert van Tonder observed, “when I was travelling on a mail-train to De Aar. I may say that I didn’t have a ticket at the time that the ticket examiner addressed me.”

  If they weren’t exactly like, Gysbert van Tonder added, the ticket examiner’s words still bore a family resemblance to the expressions employed by the Zeerust train-guard in advising the schoolmaster to make up his mind.

  Thereupon At Naudé was also able to recall a less happy travel experience of his own, that had to do with his ejecting an empty half-jack of brandy from a train window at Rysmierbult. He never knew where that empty half-jack got the ganger, exactly, At Naudé said, but he could still remember how the ganger who happened to be on the line at the time complained about it for the full twenty minutes that the train halted at Rysmierbult.

  “By the time-table, the train should have stopped there only ten minutes,” At Naudé proceeded, “but I think that why there was that long wait that day was because the engine-driver got a respect for the ganger’s language, after listening to it for a bit, and so he felt he wanted to give him a bit of a show. I won’t say that the ganger didn’t take full advantage of the extra ten minutes that the engine-driver allowed him, either. All the same, I still wonder, today, where that bottle did hit the ganger.”

  On the other hand, the other story, which had to do with Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother, Floris, seemed to be quite as well appointed in respect of circumstantial detail.

  For the railway platform’s strident bustle you had only to substitute the scholarly calm of the Drogedal schoolroom with its thatched roof and whitewashed walls, the pupils, their textbooks cast aside, having long since departed, on foot or by school donkey-cart.

  The only sounds in that peaceful classroom, with the day drawing to its close, were the even scratchings of the schoolmaster’s red ink pen in double-ruled exercise books supplied by the Transvaal Education Department.

  At intervals, the schoolmaster’s pen would slash, somewhat, and there would be a measure of unsteadiness about the schoolmaster’s breathing. But those were matters readily to be understood. Mistakes in composition and sums. But, I mean, infamous mistakes.

  And then, very suddenly, there was obtruded the click-click sound of the bolt mechanism of a Mauser being operated. It was a situation not wanting in drama. After all, we all know why a Mauser has got to be oiled so often. Its magazine system lacks the smoothness of the Lee Enfield.

  You can’t fire an old Mott-Mauser as fast as a Lee Enfield, maybe. But over 800 yards, aimed at a person running, it’s more accurate.

  Nevertheless, Jurie Steyn said that it seemed rather a silly thing for Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother, Floris, to have done – going along oiling his gun there in the classroom.

  “Why couldn’t he have done all that at home?” Jurie Steyn wanted to know. “He must have been a bit soft in the head, if you ask me. Perhaps he still is.”

  But Chris Welman said he did not think that Jurie Steyn was well advised in making that particular kind of remark. Not where Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother was concerned, Chris Welman said. Or her eldest brother, either. Or even any of her in-between brothers.

  Perhaps it would have been best if Jurie Steyn had merely said that Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother had been a bit playful, walking into the classroom with a gun and an oil-can, and if Jurie Steyn had then just left it at that. Perhaps that was all Jurie Steyn wanted to imply, Chris Welman suggested, his voice sounding very gentle, all at once.

  Jurie Steyn bridled.

  “If you think I’m scared of the Gerbers, old Petrus Gerber or any one of his sons, or the whole lot of them together, even,” Jurie Steyn announced, “then you don’t know me, that’s all. A lot of loud-mouthed braggarts, that’s all they are. Bullies, too, if you ask me. Cowards, that’s what.”

  But Gysbert van Tonder reminded Jurie Steyn that on the railway platform Pauline Gerber’s eldest brother, Dons, had said hardly a word. It was the train-guard that did all the talking. It was the train-guard that you could say was perhaps loud-mouthed, Gysbert van Tonder said. Telling young Vermaak to hustle with his trunks, and what to do with his umbrella.

  Similarly, in the classroom of the Drogedal school, Chris Welman interjected, Pauline Gerber’s youngest brother, Floris, had said nothing at all.

  “As far as we know, Floris Gerber didn’t talk,” Chris Welman said. “Of course, I don’t suppose he had any need to talk, exactly. Working on the bolt of the Mott-Mauser was taking up all his attention, I suppose, and if he spoke he might have spilt some of the oil over the school-books.”

  It was clear, however, that Chris Welman had got Jurie Steyn going. Maybe even Chris Welman himself, when he had in a spirit of Bushveld perversity hinted to Jurie Steyn not to speak out of his turn where the men of the Gerber family were involved – maybe even Chris Welman had not counted on so complete a success for his stratagem.

  “The more I think of this whole business,” Jurie Steyn declared, “the more my heart warms to young Vermaak. The way that young school-teacher has been treated here, in the Groot Marico, just because he’s a stranger. All I can say is that it’s unchristian.”

  There was something for you, now.

  It took our breath away. We tried to remember over how long a while Jurie Steyn had regularly gone out of his way to make the schoolmaster feel small. And just because, as we all knew, Jurie Steyn’s wife had a soft spot for the schoolmaster.

  And yet a few simple words spoken by Chris Welman (Chris Welman having done nothing more than to impugn Jurie Steyn’s physical fortitude when faced by the Gerber brothers) could have the effect of changing Jurie Steyn’s outlook in a single moment.

  Here was Jurie St
eyn actually declaring, for all of us to hear, that he was siding with the schoolmaster. That gave you some idea as to how scared Jurie Steyn must be of the Gerber brothers, all right. His next remark bore it out even more clearly.

  “I only wish I had Dons Gerber and Floris Gerber right here in front of me now,” Jurie Steyn announced, sticking out his chest. “I’d let them know where they got off, all right. But, of course, they never come round here. They pretend it’s because Post Office Welgevonden is nearer, for them. But I know that’s not the only reason.

  “I know it’s because the postmaster at Welgevonden is too soft. He allows himself to be put upon, by bullies.”

  We felt that, after those remarks of Jurie Steyn’s, there was very little that we ourselves could say. We had no more to say than what Dons Gerber had had to say on the Zeerust railway platform. We could express our thoughts in less words than what Floris Gerber had employed in the classroom at Drogedal.

  That was when Johnny Coen started taking a hand in the conversation.

  “Doesn’t it strike you, at all,” Johnny Coen asked, “that it can’t both be true, these two different stories about how the schoolmaster came in the end to ask Pauline Gerber to marry him? Don’t you think it’s possible that perhaps both those stories are lies, I mean.”

  We were very shocked to hear Johnny Coen using language like that.

  Naturally enough, we were quite willing to make many sorts of allowances for Johnny Coen. For one thing, we knew perfectly well how Johnny Coen had been feeling about Pauline Gerber. We realised, also, that he had entertained those sentiments about Pauline Gerber long before she had ever set eyes on young Vermaak, the schoolmaster.

  But we also knew that Pauline Gerber had been to finishingschool , in the meanwhile, and so it was only reasonable that things should no longer be the same between Pauline Gerber and Johnny Coen, after she came back to the Marico. For, if she did feel the same way about Johnny Coen, it would mean that all the money that her father had spent on her at finishingschool at the Cape had been wasted.