Johnny Coen appeared to sense the constraint in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer then, following on the statement he had just made and that showed a good deal of faulty reasoning.
“I don’t mean to say that you’re all of you just a lot of ––– liars,” Johnny Coen said, giving utterance to a couple of words that the train-guard had also found useful on Zeerust station. “I don’t mean that at all.”
So Gysbert van Tonder said to Johnny Coen that we were grateful to him for that, he was sure.
“It’s not that,” Johnny Coen persisted, half-ashamed of himself for having put it so impolitely. “But what I mean is, if young Vermaak was on the Zeerust railway station, with Dons Gerber there with him, then who was sitting in the classroom marking copy-books in red ink, when Floris Gerber was there?
“I mean, they couldn’t both of those things be true, could they, now? The next thing you’d be saying is that it was Floris Gerber sitting at the table marking the Standard Five spelling mistakes in red ink. That would be a muck-up, wouldn’t it?”
The thought of that provoked Johnny Coen to laughter. We smiled indulgently. Only Oupa Bekker seemed to think that Johnny Coen did have something there. He himself didn’t believe either of these stories about how young Vermaak came to ask Pauline Gerber for her hand, Oupa Bekker said.
“Jolliest passengers we’ve had in a good while,” the lorry-driver’s assistant remarked, walking into the voorkamer with the mailbags. “Laughing all the way up from Bekkersdal.”
So Chris Welman said that he supposed it was more of those native convicts that were coming to work at Derdepoort.
“But what they’ve got to laugh about I don’t know,” Chris Welman continued. “And yet that’s what I always think, when I see those native convicts sitting in the lorry in their striped jerseys – laughing their heads off about something. And the warder with them looking so miserable, you feel you want to go and ask can’t you do something for him.”
“No, not convicts, this time,” the lorry-driver’s assistant said. “Only Pauline Gerber and her brothers, Dons and Floris and – I forget the names of the other two –”
“Out there in the lorry?” Jurie Steyn enquired, looking not too comfortable, suddenly.
“No, they got off at Welgevonden,” the lorry-driver said. “And, of course, young Vermaak was with them, too. You know, he’s engaged to Pauline. They went to Bekkersdal to celebrate.”
The lorry-driver looked surprised at the question Gysbert van Tonder put to him.
“How did the schoolmaster propose to Pauline Gerber?” the lorry-driver repeated. “Well, what do we all do? He rode over to the farm, one afternoon, and asked her father, of course. And Oom Petrus Gerber shook him by the hand and said he wanted a young man to help look after the farm – as though he didn’t have enough already, with all those sons he’s got. But why did you ask?”
Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder said, no, it was nothing. It was just something Jurie Steyn had been mentioning, Gysbert van Tonder said.
Literary Giants
“But is little Frikkie Oosthuizen really so clever at saying recitations, Meneer Vermaak?” Gysbert van Tonder asked of the schoolmaster, arising out of what the schoolmaster had been saying.
So Meneer Vermaak said, yes, indeed. That was the reason why he had asked little Frikkie to come round to the post office some time in the afternoon, after he had finished his homework, so that he could recite to us.
“You did what?” Jurie Steyn demanded, his voice going very high. “Did I really hear you say –”
When the schoolmaster assured Jurie Steyn that there was no need for him to get alarmed, since it wouldn’t take very long, Jurie Steyn got more excited than ever. Not in his voorkamer and not in the Government’s own post office, he wouldn’t allow it.
Not over his dead body that stinking little Frikkie Oosthuizen with his freckles and spectacles wasn’t going to say recitations here, Jurie Steyn declared. And not over the Postmaster-General’s dead body either. We could see that Jurie Steyn was really frightened. Otherwise he wouldn’t have invoked all the forces of officialdom to his aid, like that, against little Frikkie Oosthuizen, who was in Standard Three.
“Nor over the dead body of the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs himself, what’s more,” Jurie Steyn finished up, triumphantly.
The schoolmaster shook his head, then, as well he might. It was not pleasant to think of the Dwarsberg area of the Groot Marico District strewn with dead bodies.
“I know what you all think,” the schoolmaster said, after a pause. “You think it’s all favouritism, don’t you? You think that why I – why I talk like this about Frikkie Oosthuizen is because he’s the schoolmaster’s pet. Let’s be straight about it, I mean.”
Meneer Vermaak looked slowly round the voorkamer.
Chris Welman accepted his challenge.
“Well,” Chris Welman said, “when my youngest child comes home and tells me that little Frikkie got ten out of ten, again … well, I don’t say anything. I went to school myself, as far as Standard Three. How I got so far, staying in school until I was eleven, was because there was four years of drought, so that I wasn’t needed at home to help with the farming. I mean, there just wasn’t any farming – not with four years of drought.
“The only farm work there was, over that time, was filling in drought relief compensation forms. And that was where I was able to help, seeing that I was so well educated. Each year, when I passed into a higher standard, I could help better with the forms. I felt almost sorry, at the end of the fourth year when the rains came and I had to leave school and help with the ploughing, instead. Not that I wasn’t pretty well educated at the end of that fourth year, mind you. By that time I had learnt to fill in the compensation forms for a whole lot of losses we hadn’t suffered.”
Thereupon At Naudé remarked that it was a pity that Chris Welman’s education got interrupted, like that.
“If you had to go on staying at school, like that, year after year, because there wasn’t rain,” At Naudé said, “then you would almost be a professor, by now. Think of that – Professor Chris Welman. Doesn’t it make you laugh right out? And you could go on filling in the losses forms, year after year. And, you wouldn’t go to gaol for it, either, like what happened to Doors Prinsloo. They would say that it was just because you were an absent-minded professor.”
It was when Jurie Steyn took some pains to point out to us that this sort of talk was getting us away from the subject of schoolteachers’ pets, that Chris Welman remembered what it was that he had wanted to say. Why Chris Welman pulled himself together so quickly was because Jurie Steyn made use of a low word that Dominee Welthagen had employed once, in reply to a question put to him about the proselytising activities of the Catholic bishop at Vleisfontein, Dominee Welthagen thinking, at the time, that he was talking under his breath and not loud enough for any member of the congregation to hear.
“So that when my youngest little boy comes home and tells me more things about the teacher’s favourite, how the teacher’s favourite got full marks again,” Chris Welman said, “then I don’t tell my youngest son what I really think. I don’t want to put him against the schoolteacher more than what he already is. But I remember my own education. And then I think to myself, well, I wouldn’t like to be that snivelling little brat that is the schoolmaster’s favourite. Not on an afternoon when school is over, I wouldn’t, and some manly youngster that has stood it just so long starts laying into the teacher’s pet behind a clump of withaaks, I wouldn’t.
“That’s about as far as I’ve learnt with my education. Maybe if it wasn’t for the four years of drought in the Groot Marico I wouldn’t have learnt so far. But they say that education is no good unless you get it the hard way.”
Young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, shook his head once more.
“You seem to forget that I played rugby for Potchefstroom,” he said. “And I still believe that if I had played for Stellenbosch instead of Potchefstroom �
�� mind you, I am quoting the opinion of a selector who saw what I could do in the scrum – it’s not my own personal views I am expressing at all –”
And we said, no, of course, we knew that the schoolmaster would never do a thing like that.
“And I am not talking about Springbok colours, either,” young Vermaak went on, “but about provincial representation – you understand I am not talking about a Springbok jersey –”
Again we said that we understood only too well. Gysbert van Tonder sniffed, even, a little, when he said it.
“But anyway, that’s what the selector said to me,” young Vermaak continued, “after the team had been picked and I wasn’t in it. He said if he had it his way … well, it would all have been different. He said it to me himself, in the bar of the King Edward Hotel in Potchefstroom, right after the match. He said if I had been playing for Stellenbosch, instead, and he wasn’t talking about Springbok colours, at all. And he had nothing to gain by saying that to me, seeing that I was paying for the drinks in any case.”
And we nodded our heads, in solemn agreement with the schoolmaster’s remarks. Even though he did not tell us, in so many words, as to what exactly the selector had said. But we had a pretty good idea as to what the selector would have said – and in so many words – if the schoolmaster hadn’t been paying for the drinks.
“So when you get the idea of favouritism in your minds,” young Vermaak said – although, strangely enough, we had no idea of that sort in our minds at all: actually, we thought that the selectors would have been wrong in the head if they had chosen young Vermaak for provincial honours, leave alone picking him to wear a green jersey with a gold collar – “then I can only say that I have been through all that. And if you think that little Frikkie Oosthuizen is my pet, why, it can only make me laugh.”
We did all laugh, then. Or, at least, we tried to. We wanted the young schoolmaster to realise that we in the Marico Bushveld were his friends, really, in spite of what he might think of us, perhaps, on different occasions.
“When you think of little Frikkie Oosthuizen with his freckles and his round-rimmed glasses,” the schoolmaster proceeded, coughing slightly at that last thought, “then how do you imagine I must think of him? I mean, all my feelings are with a boy that is a boy – a boy with sore toes and with a barbel in his school desk that he caught with a tamboetie rod and a bent pin by the Molopo spruit on a day when he should have been at school learning nature study.”
Several of us (those of us who were interested in politics, that was) realised, then, that the schoolmaster was quite clever. For he had hit on the best way of making us take some sort of an interest in little Frikkie Oosthuizen – by saying that he had no time for him, himself. If young Vermaak’s mind could have worked equally quick in the loose – at a moment when the referee had his back turned, say – then he would have taken his rugby pretty far, we thought.
“So you see how ridiculous it is to think that a little stinker,” the schoolmaster said, repeating Jurie Steyn’s word, “like Frikkie Oosthuizen could ever be a pet of mine – or of any schoolteacher worth his salt. If I could pick, I wouldn’t pick him for my favourite. I would pick not to have him in the school at all.”
And so Jurie Steyn said, yes, exactly, and he would pick not to have little Frikkie Oosthuizen in his post office, at all, leave alone having him there to recite.
But the schoolmaster said that one had to overcome one’s prejudices. And what you had to give Frikkie Oosthuizen credit for was that behind his thick spectacles he had a brain for poetry – for learning poetry and understanding poetry – that many a Normal College student didn’t have. It was amazing, the schoolmaster said. He would even go so far as to call it genius. It was as though, wherever he went, little Frikkie walked with the great literary figures of the world. Meneer Vermaak started mentioning some of them.
“Well, I’m glad he’s got somebody to walk back with him from school,” Gysbert van Tonder observed. “None of the other kids would ever walk with him – not with a low little sneak like that.”
Thereupon Chris Welman said that those giants of letters whose names the schoolmaster had just reeled off must be pretty low sneaks themselves. Otherwise how could that dirty little Frikkie in Standard Three have anything in common with them? – Chris Welman wanted to know.
There seemed a lot of sense in what Chris Welman had just said. And the schoolmaster, after thinking it over a little, admitted as much.
“There’s one long piece of recitation, for instance, that’s in English, and that little Frikkie taught himself – wonderful brain he’s got, Frikkie,” the schoolmaster proceeded.
“It’s all about playing the game and about a little wooden cross below the town. It’s all about being upright and fearless. I don’t think many of you would understand that poem. Not because it’s about being upright and fearless, I mean. But because it’s in English.”
We assured young Vermaak that there was no need for him to have explained that part, even. It was laughable to think he could have meant the other thing, we said.
“Well, I know something about the poet who wrote that poem,” the schoolmaster proceeded. “We had him in second-year B. A. And if you take that poet’s life story, I mean – well, his life story wasn’t anything like the poem at all … the fearless and upright part, that is. I’m not talking about how good he might have been at English, of course.”
Then there was the life story of another poet whose verses little Frik-kie Oosthuizen recited, the schoolmaster went on. And if you went by that poet’s life story, the schoolmaster said, well, then you perhaps wouldn’t go very far wrong if you spoke of him as a stinker. Even the word that Dominee Welthagen used about the proselytising Roman Catholic bishop at Vleisfontein might, strictly speaking, not be inappropriate.
“But then what do you want to bring that dirty little rat along here to come and recite for?” Gysbert van Tonder demanded. “Especially if the people whose poems he comes and says here are the same sort of heathen blackguards?”
The schoolmaster was still busy trying to explain where the world would be without them, and about how necessary it was to encourage culture, when we got the news that little Frikkie Oosthuizen would not come and recite in the post office, that afternoon, after all.
It appeared that, on the way back from school, another Standard Three youngster had lured little Frikkie behind a clump of withaaks and had given him a pretty solid doing.
Even the schoolmaster smiled when he heard that.
Alcoholic Remorse
Gysbert van Tonder said that, while he sympathised with Jurie Steyn in Jurie not feeling so well, at the same time, it was only to be expected.
Gysbert van Tonder said that in a quite pointed manner.
“You needn’t talk, Gysbert,” Jurie Steyn said, but not with much conviction. “You didn’t do so badly yourself. In fact, most of what I can remember about last night is how every time I saw you you were pouring more mampoer into that tin mug.”
So Gysbert van Tonder said that he was glad there was at least something about last night that Jurie Steyn could remember.
And the way Gysbert van Tonder said it was again very marked.
“I’m not talking so much about the earlier part of the evening,” Gysbert van Tonder continued. “It’s the later hours I’m thinking of, more.”
Gysbert van Tonder laid just enough stress on the word ‘hours’ to make a peculiar kind of a look come over Jurie Steyn’s face. We couldn’t miss that look. There was much disquiet in it.
“Ah, well, I suppose we did all let ourselves go a little,” Jurie Steyn said, trying to talk airily and finishing up with what he intended us to interpret – just going by the sound – as a few notes of light laughter.
But he stopped suddenly. We could see that the effort to emit noises of mirth was not doing his headache any good. Moreover, the condition of our own nerves was such that Jurie Steyn’s simulation of merriment jangled harshly. We were glad t
hat he cut it short.
“Of course, I didn’t really want to go over in the first place,” Jurie Steyn continued, after a pause. “But seeing that Oupa Bekker had made that mampoer in his own still, and he had invited us over … well, I felt it would not have been properly neighbourly, sort of, not to go.”
“I think it would have been more neighbourly if you had stayed away,” Gysbert van Tonder told him, bluntly. “Much more neighbourly. Mind you, as I’ve said, I’m talking about the later part of the night, more.”
So Jurie Steyn confessed that it was actually that part of it that he just couldn’t remember so well, no matter how hard he tried.
“Don’t try,” Gysbert van Tonder counselled him. “Maybe it’s best for your peace of mind that you shouldn’t know. Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s really the kindest thing in your case that you should never know. That you should go to your grave in ignorance.”
Jurie Steyn said that he wished he was in his grave, then. The awful way he was feeling right at that moment, he said. And little bits that came into his mind, every so often, of what he had said in Oupa Bekker’s house.
“Of what you said and did,” Gysbert van Tonder corrected him, sternly.
Observing how bad Jurie Steyn was looking on it, Johnny Coen advised him not to take it too much to heart.
“We nearly all of us make fools of ourselves, after we’ve had a few,” Johnny Coen said. “And it’s no good saying about a person that he doesn’t know where to stop. I mean, we none of us really know, do we, now? Of course, I’m not talking now about the way you were crying onto the stuffed likkewaan about the hard life you had had.”
Jurie Steyn acknowledged, gloomily, that he had some sort of recollection of that part.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 28