The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  We were still talking about this – Gysbert van Tonder claiming that he had seen her powder-puff sticking out of the upper of one boot – when young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, suddenly asked a question.

  “But who is this Hartman van Beek that the monument was raised to?” he asked. “I mean … I mean … I know something about his character from what the speakers at the unveiling said. But who is he? Or who was he? Or what was he?”

  We looked at the schoolmaster in surprise.

  Jurie Steyn was the first to speak.

  “You don’t know – ?” Jurie Steyn began. “You haven’t heard – ?”

  “No,” young Vermaak said, bluntly, “I haven’t.”

  Thereupon Chris Welman spoke.

  “You,” Chris Welman said, his tone sounding grieved. “You, a schoolmaster and all and you really don’t know who Hartman van Beek was?

  “But you were there – didn’t you hear what all those speakers said? I mean, even if you hadn’t heard of Bartman – I mean, Hartman van Beek before, you should have learnt then. And here you’re supposed to be teaching children in a classroom.”

  The schoolmaster bridled.

  “It’s because I’m a schoolteacher,” he said, “that I want to know what to teach my pupils. But at the unveiling ceremony not one of the speakers said anything about what Hartman van Beek did, to get that monument erected to him. All they talked was the usual son-of-the-veld claptrap that gets talked when any monument is raised in the Transvaal.”

  Jurie Steyn shook his head. Several of us followed his example. We shook our heads, also. We wanted to make it quite clear to the schoolmaster that we were shocked at his ignorance.

  “But there was the horse commando,” Jurie Steyn said in astonishment. “And there was that volley that the young Voortrekker men fired. You heard that, didn’t you? Next thing you’ll be saying is that there wasn’t that tableau, even. Maybe you even think, now, that there isn’t that monument there?”

  This time it was the schoolmaster’s turn to shake his head. He waited quite a while before he spoke.

  “You know what,” he said. “I don’t think any of those speakers at the ceremony knew anything about Hartman van Beek, either.

  “And why has that monument got only his name on it, and not the date of his birth and his death – if he is dead, that is? And that was why the Volksraad member didn’t know, if they made a statue of him, what Hartman van Beek should be holding in his hand – if it is an olive branch he should be holding, or a bottle of dop. Or a pump thing for spraying cockroaches with.”

  Thereupon Johnny Coen said that the schoolmaster should be ashamed of himself for talking like that about a hero. It was bad enough, some of the remarks the speakers at the unveiling had passed about Hartman van Beek, Johnny Coen said.

  But the schoolmaster said that that was the last thing he would dream of doing. All he wanted was some information about the man we had honoured by erecting a memorial to him in our midst. And nobody seemed to know anything about him.

  “I mean, who was Hartman van Beek?” the schoolmaster asked again. “Was he a leader or a statesman? Was he a missionary or a great hunter or a great fighting man? Or did he save a lot of people’s lives, like Wolraad Woltemade? Or was he maybe just even a writer? What was he?”

  We said that that, of course, we didn’t know. And did it matter, really, we asked the schoolmaster. We realised, also, that it was useless trying to argue with him.

  If it wasn’t enough that there were the speeches and the volleys and the horse commando and the tableau, then there was just nothing, we reflected, that would satisfy young Vermaak.

  Coffin in the Loft

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of in a ghost,” Jurie Steyn said, “so I don’t know why there should be all this fuss now – people saying they won’t travel by the Abjaterskop road at night.”

  So Gysbert van Tonder said that he had never heard of any ghost ever doing a human being harm.

  “Real harm, that is,” he made haste to supplement his statement.

  That made Chris Welman feel that he would like to go even further. There were actually instances of ghosts being helpful to human beings, Chris Welman said. Like a ghost pointing out to a party of treasure-hunters where to dig.

  Ghosts were also known to have assisted in the maintenance of law and order, putting the police onto the right track when they were investigating a crime.

  “Yes, and I’d like to know where the police would be, if it wasn’t for ghosts telling them what to do,” Gysbert van Tonder declared. “And not only ghosts, but a man’s own neighbour, too, sometimes. A neighbour that he trusts, what’s more.”

  So Jurie Steyn said that Gysbert van Tonder was just being silly, now. If Gysbert van Tonder thought that it was he, Jurie Steyn, that had told Sergeant Rademeyer about those long-horned cattle in the camp by the kloof, then it was the biggest mistake Gysbert van Tonder had made in his life.

  “In any case, you’ve got nothing to complain about,” Jurie Steyn ended up. “You got them out of the way in time. All except the red heifer with the white markings on the left foreleg.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it,” Gysbert van Tonder said, sounding suspicious again. “Anyway, the markings are on the right foreleg. You can go and tell that to your friend Sergeant Rademeyer. You can also tell him that how I got the animals away in time was because I knew he was coming. I heard it from a ghost.”

  It took a little while, after that, for the conversation to resume a placid tenor and by that time Oupa Bekker was telling a long story about a coffin in a loft.

  The ghost that stayed in that coffin was, of course, as harmless as anything, Oupa Bekker said. It would just lift up the lid at midnight and descend from the loft, using the outside stairs and not making much noise, and it would then just haunt the neighbourhood a bit, returning to its coffin well before sunrise and then letting down the lid again – and so quietly that you could hardly hear it. That ghost wouldn’t hurt a fly, Oupa Bekker added.

  Thereupon Johnny Coen interrupted Oupa Bekker to remark that, while we all knew that a ghost was harmless, at the same time we were none of us anxious to encounter a ghost, if we could help it.

  “I mean, no matter how quiet a ghost acts, or how friendly he is, even,” Johnny Coen said, “if he comes on you from behind, suddenly, and you’re alone in the bush, and it’s a particularly dark night, say – well, you’d rather not have that ghost around.

  “No matter what Oupa Bekker says about how harmless such a ghost is, or about how helpful, even. I think it makes it even worse if such a ghost tries to be helpful. I don’t say I’d get frightened –”

  So we all said, no, of course we wouldn’t get frightened, either. It wasn’t a question of fear, we said. Not that we mightn’t run a little, naturally, if we were on foot, or urge the horse on, slightly, if we were on horseback.

  But it wasn’t fear, or anything like that, we said. It just stood to reason that it was a disagreeable experience to meet a ghost alone in the veld at night. After all, it was human nature to feel like that.

  Thereupon Chris Welman mentioned something he saw just outside the Bekkersdal graveyard one night.

  “It’s a lonely sort of graveyard,” Chris Welman explained, “and so just out of human nature I didn’t worry to pick my hat up when it fell off.”

  Then At Naudé told us about the height of the barbed-wire fence that he had cleared at one leap near Nietverdiend, in the dark, on account of human nature and arising out of what he saw.

  Before Oupa Bekker could get back to his coffin-in-the-loft story, At Naudé asked what was the strength of the report about the Abjaterskop road being haunted.

  Everybody seemed to be talking about it. Not that that sort of thing made any difference to him, At Naudé said. He didn’t care if the Abjaterskop road was haunted, seeing that he hardly ever went that way – and certainly never at night.

  “Well, it seems that it was some of Gysbert van T
onder’s Bechuanas who first said they saw a ghost there,” Chris Welman said. “Isn’t that right, Gysbert?”

  “They and others,” Gysbert van Tonder replied.

  “The ghost is supposed to haunt the part of the road near the broken-down walls of the old farmhouse, that we call the murasie,” Chris Welman proceeded. “That’s right, hey, Gysbert?”

  “That part and other parts,” Gysbert van Tonder announced. “But mostly near the murasie.”

  There was something decidedly creepy in the way Gysbert van Tonder spoke, so that it came in the nature of a relief to us when Oupa Bekker returned to his coffin-ghost tale.

  “What made it all seem so queer,” Oupa Bekker said, “was that it was an unused coffin that the ghost stayed in. The coffin had been in the loft of that farmhouse for as long as almost anybody could remember.”

  Johnny Coen asked why they didn’t go up and open the coffin and look.

  Oupa Bekker gazed steadily at Johnny Coen for some moments.

  “Would you have liked to have gone and looked?” Oupa Bekker asked him. “In the old days, that is?”

  Johnny Coen acknowledged that he wouldn’t have liked it. Either in the old days or today, he said. Certainly, on his own he would not have cared to go. It would be different, perhaps, going in the company of a few people he could rely on. Say about seven or eight people.

  Oupa Bekker nodded. “That’s what happened in the end,” Oupa Bekker said. “The farmer got a good Malay ghost-catcher up from the Cape. And when the Malay opened the coffin in the presence of the whole family, there were the mouldering bones of a human skeleton inside.”

  The Malay was able to tell them, also, Oupa Bekker said, that that was the kind of ghost that could never be laid. Ordinary kinds of ghosts he could catch in a bottle of sea-water that he had brought up with him for that purpose from the Cape, but the ghost in the coffin would go on haunting the place until the end of the world, becoming worse the older he got.

  The police were called in, Oupa Bekker said, and they were satisfied that it was murder. A more horrible murder even than ordinary, they said, because they couldn’t find any clues. And the mystery was never solved, even though the ghost gave the police what help it could.

  “And the Malay was proven right,” Oupa Bekker concluded. “Even after his skeleton was given a decent Christian burial, the ghost kept on haunting the house. The family trekked away, afterwards, and nobody else would live in the place, which is today a ruin. That ghost is still there, and, as the Malay prophesied, with the years he gets worse.”

  Gysbert van Tonder yawned.

  “Ah, well, I’ve got to be going,” he said. “Maybe it would be different if I met that ghost alone in the veld at night. But on an afternoon like this – ah, well.”

  He walked out of the voorkamer still yawning.

  “You know,” Jurie Steyn said, after Gysbert van Tonder had left, “Gysbert van Tonder seemed a bit mysterious about that ghost on the Abjaterskop road, didn’t he?”

  We agreed that it was so.

  “Well, I can see it’s something he’s made up – that the road is haunted,” Jurie Steyn continued. “Because, from what Sergeant Rademeyer told me, that was just the trouble he had, following Gysbert and the herd of cattle, that night. It was along the Abjaterskop road, and when they came to the part near the murasie, Rademeyer’s police-boys said that they had heard that the place was haunted and they wouldn’t go any further. That was how Gysbert van Tonder got away. Through having spread that ghost story.”

  After we had said, well, how’s that for cunning, Jurie Steyn acquainted us with this further insight into the police sergeant’s point of view.

  “Well, I could, I expect, have gone on and followed him on my own,” Sergeant Rademeyer had said. “I mean, I’m not afraid of ghosts. That would be absurd. But I could see it looked funny there, by that murasie, with those dark shadows amongst the trees. And the wind makes an awful sound about there, too. And I’ve got a wife and four children to think of. It’s not that I was afraid –”

  No, it was just human nature, we said, when Jurie Steyn repeated that part of the sergeant’s statement to us.

  But Oupa Bekker said that Gysbert van Tonder would find out his mistake, yet. And then Gysbert van Tonder would turn grey just in one night, Oupa Bekker said.

  “Because the Abjaterskop road is haunted,” Oupa Bekker said. “And by the worst kind of ghost that there is, too, now. The murasie there is the ruins of the old farmhouse with the loft. And what that ghost must be like today, I would much rather just not think.”

  Detective Story

  The radio mystery serial to which he had been listening in over a considerable period had, At Naudé informed us, now come to an end. It appeared that the dénouement was eminently satisfactory.

  “I wouldn’t have missed that last instalment for anything,” At Naudé said. “It’s so clever the way everything gets explained – you’ve got no idea. Right through the serial everybody thinks that the lawyer did it, because of the cigar stompie the police found in the garden. But in the end it turns out that it was a Mshangaan mine-boy who had the regular habit of smoking cigars.

  “Clever, hey? What’s more, nobody even knew that there was that Mshangaan mine-boy until the very last instalment. Until the last couple of minutes, almost, you can say. Another thing was that the detective was getting secret information all the time from a girl that the leader of the jewel thieves was in love with. And the detective didn’t let on about that, either, right until the last instalment. What do you think of that for smart, now? Because it was secret information, he kept it secret from everybody.”

  We said we wondered what they would think of next. We also said that it sounded very mixed up and clever.

  “Yes, you couldn’t make head or tail out of it, really,” At Naudé agreed. “And after it was over there was a bar or two of music and the man who gives the scientific talks was saying a long thing about the latest laboratory research into some stuff that sounded like erughurugh, the way he pronounced it, and –”

  “Is it,” Gysbert van Tonder asked, his eye lighting up, “any good to drink?”

  “I don’t know,” At Naudé replied, “but I listened quite a long way into that talk before I realised that it wasn’t part of the serial. That’s how the last instalment got me, if you understand what I mean.”

  The schoolmaster said that, from the sound of it, he didn’t judge it to be such a good detective serial. The idea of detective fiction was to give the audience an equal chance with the detective of solving the mystery, he said. The audience had to be in possession of all the facts. Whereas, if the detective kept all the clues to himself it was only natural that he should be able to solve the mystery before anybody else.

  At Naudé said that would be a fine to-do.

  “Why, it’s only in the last instalment that the detective produces the blood-stained handkerchief with the crook’s initials on it that he picked up at the scene of the crime, and that he didn’t mention anything about to a soul,” At Naudé said. “What did you expect him to do – tell everybody and so put the criminal on his guard?”

  Yes, we were all surprised that young Vermaak, who was supposed to be educated and all, and taught school as high as Standard Four, should have so little understanding as to what a detective radio story was all about.

  “It doesn’t even need to be over the wireless,” Jurie Steyn said to the schoolmaster. “You can just read that sort of thing, too, week by week.”

  He then proceeded to acquaint us with some of the details of a serial he had once followed in a woman’s paper to which his wife had subscribed because of a weekly feature in it called “The Intimate Lives of Celebrated Women Poisoners.”

  He never got to the end of the serial, Jurie Steyn said, because his wife stopped taking that paper when the Women Poisoners articles finished and they ran a series, instead, that was entitled “Woman, the Ministering Angel” – the first article dealing with
how to treat smallpox in your own home on veld or vlei.

  “But what I remember most about that mystery serial,” Jurie Steyn said, “was the unusual sort of detective they had in it. The person that questioned all the suspects and carried out the detective investigations was only doing it in a spare-time way. His real job was being the sword-swallower in a circus.”

  That started Chris Welman off telling us about the time a friend of his, Joggem Dieder, who was then living in the Wolmaransstad District, got a sudden thirst for adventure. And he ran away from home to join a circus. Joggem was then aged sixty-three.

  “We talked a lot about it among ourselves,” Chris Welman said, “and we used to make jokes about Joggem Dieder riding horses, standing on the saddle on one leg. Or we would picture him, his old limbs creaking, flying high up in the air on a swing, with a plug of chew tobacco in his cheek.”

  But from the few letters that Joggem Dieder wrote back, Chris Welman said, it would appear that he was happy in his new career and that he had adapted himself successfully to the wild life of the circus.

  “All the same, we were a bit disappointed when the circus came to Wolmaransstad and we found that Joggem didn’t take part in any of the big performances, but was only in a side-show,” Chris Welman said. “In fact, we hardly recognised him when we first saw him, him all dressed up in a silk frock and a yellow wig, and a hat with flowers and a blue feather, and smiling in a silly way. And his dress was arranged so that you couldn’t see his feet. And so Joggem Dieder made quite a good bearded woman. I mean, he always had one of the longest beards in the district.”

  Oupa Bekker had been waiting for some time for a chance to talk.

  “The neatest bit of detective work I ever saw,” Oupa Bekker said, “also had in it a circus performer. But he did juggling and rope tricks. Afterwards he left the circus and became a bywoner on Neels Prinsloo’s farm. And when Neels Prinsloo was one morning found hanging on a tree on the way to the cattle-kraal the veldkornet that came along worked out a solution to the affair that was so well thought out that people were still talking about it for months afterwards.