“And I found out afterwards that he was the German Kaiser, sitting there in the audience and his hand raised to keep time with the mouth-organ music. And that German mouth-organ was just as grand as the cardboard box it came in. And I was very pleased to have it, of course. You’ve got no idea how pleased. But play – no, that I couldn’t do, naturally. Not play it, actually. I was too afraid that I might blow a wrong note on it, and what would the ladies with their jewels and the German Kaiser with his curled moustache think?
“So I just went on playing on the cheap tin mouth-organ that I had bought at the Indian store at Ramoutsa and that I had had a long time. I felt that I wasn’t good enough to play on that grand German mouth-organ – not with all those stylish foreign people sitting straight up in their velvet chairs to listen. I mean, I was proud to have that German mouth-organ. But somehow, after that, I didn’t believe, altogether, quite, that I would one day be the best mouth-organ player in the Groot Marico.
“And after a while I gave up trying to play any kind of mouth-organ at all. I felt there wasn’t a musical career in it for me anymore. And I didn’t want to be a mouth-organ player that was good enough for just playing a mouth-organ around the farm.”
It was Chris Welman’s turn to sigh, then, recalling his Chopin youth dreams, tricked out in romantic finery, swallowtail-coated.
“But all the same,” Chris Welman proceeded, “I still think I could give it a go. Yes, even today, if I had the time for it, to practise. More than once, lately, when I was in Bekkersdal, I was on the point of walking into Policansky’s and asking Solly to sell me the best German mouth-organ he’d got – telling him to take it out of the cardboard box first, and that he could keep the cardboard box. When it’s after sunset, and the evening wind is just beginning to stir from across the vlei, and I think of other people that have got reputations for being supposed to be able to play the mouth-organ – well, you’ve got no idea what I feel, then … what I can do, yet … For one thing, I’ve got more time to practise, than I had years ago. And I’ve today also got more sense. Today if people say anything against my playing, well, I know how much of it is jealousy.”
Chris Welman clenched his teeth. An ugly expression came over his face. He glanced from one to the other of us, looking truculent. In the role of a thwarted artist he did not appear at his best.
The first to break the somewhat uncomfortable silence that followed was At Naudé. What Chris Welman had just said, At Naudé explained – although to most of us it was not quite clear what the analogy was, if any – fitted in very exactly with his own earlier observations, about how much more worthwhile the world was when we were young. He acknowledged that he could not absolutely compare notes with Chris Welman when it came to mouth-organs, At Naudé said, since his own adolescent predilections had been for girls that had pink flowers embroidered on their blouses and for mule-carts with high-up wheels.
“But life was bigger,” At Naudé said, “in the old days. It was a higher and deeper thing then, life was. Wider, too, if you know what I mean. And puffier under the eyes, also. Life in the olden times had everything.”
At Naudé was just getting ready to sigh again, seeking, once more, through a breath coming up out of his lungs with shuffling step, to convey to us his feelings about the strange splendours in which the long-lost past was clad. But Jurie Steyn interrupted At Naudé before he could get the whole of that sigh out of him.
“What you said about ambition,” Jurie Steyn said, in tones of a businesslike practicality. “Well, take me, now.”
Jurie Steyn’s voice held, suspended in its vibrations, a self-satisfaction that you couldn’t miss. He looked about him – slowly and confidently. It was quite different from the way Chris Welman had looked round him.
“Not that I might not perhaps when I was young have had bigger ideas for myself than what I have actually reached to,” Jurie Steyn admitted modestly. “But take just how far I’ve got – that I’m today postmaster, for one thing. Of course, we all know that it isn’t that I started at the bottom and worked my way up. And it isn’t that I’ve got up any higher since then, either. I mean, we all know that when the department wanted a post office for this part, all they were looking for was a voorkamer, with a roof and a farmer that could come in from his lands every now and again to look after what was going on in his voorkamer.
“I mean, they wanted an ambitious kind of farmer, of course, and not one that was so indifferent to his family’s welfare that he would just stay the whole day out in the fields, working, no matter how hot, and never coming in, even for coffee.
“But to be postmaster today for this part of the Marico – well, it’s something.”
Jurie Steyn recognised, of course, that where he was handicapped was in not having started in the post office service right at the bottom, delivering letters door to door, for instance. That was how you reached the highest rung of the ladder, Jurie Steyn believed, this being a democratic country.
Every postman carried in his mailbag, along with letters and wrapped newspapers, a Postmaster-General’s cigar – according to Jurie Steyn’s reasoning. And because he himself had joined the post office service somewhere in the middle, bypassing the avenues of orthodox noviceship, it was not for his hand to grasp the more ultimate prize; not his head – a bit flat at the back – would be crowned with the chaplet that was at once simple and scentless to signify that there was nothing higher to come after that.
But as long as he got his pay regularly every month, Jurie Steyn didn’t care much about the lustre of position, about ribbon or palm. He knew he hadn’t started in the post office the right way.
“Seeing that I didn’t begin at the bottom,” Jurie Steyn said eventually, “I feel I didn’t do too bad. My people were just farmers, I mean.”
Jurie Steyn stopped talking. Nobody answered. He looked around him, but less confidently, this time. Indeed, in his eyes there was something of the look almost that Chris Welman had had, when he told us how good he was with a mouth-organ, and nobody properly able to appreciate the way he played.
“Just plain farming folk, that’s all,” Jurie Steyn repeated.
Gysbert van Tonder took him up on that.
“All right, Jurie,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “We heard you the first time. But what do you want to give yourself airs about it for? Have you ever come across any kind of farming that isn’t plain farming – or any farmer that isn’t just a plain farmer? I’ve still got to hear of a farmer doing some high-toned pumpkin-weeding, say. Or a dainty bit of pouring of hog-swill into the troughs. Or getting a few refined blisters on his feet through walking behind the plough with a lot of good taste. ‘Just plain farming folk …’”
Gysbert van Tonder paused, speechless.
It seemed that At Naudé’s mind was still on the past, and that for him the past was bedizened with frills. Decked out in rich stuffs. Not wearing just ordinary khaki working-pants with a rent in the seat from where the past climbed through a barbed-wire fence. The past was dight in satins and wore wristbands.
“In the old days,” At Naudé announced, “it was different. Life, in the old days –”
“Yes, I know,” Gysbert van Tonder interjected. “I know all about the old days. The old days had grey mildew and slimy rot on them. People didn’t know about dusting with lime sulphur.”
Gysbert van Tonder guffawed. It was a laugh that, in a salon, would have caused eyebrows to lift.
Neighbourly
A fence between the Union and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, At Naudé said. According to the radio, the two Governments were already discussing it.
“I hope they put gates in the fence, though, here and there,” Chris Welman said. “Otherwise how can we get to Ramoutsa siding?”
Yes, with a fence there, At Naudé agreed, goods we had ordered from Johannesburg could lie for years at the siding, and we none the wiser. “And likely as not we wouldn’t even notice the difference,” At Naudé added. “We’d think it was jus
t the railways again a bit slow.”
There was one queer thing about putting up a fence, Oupa Bekker said, that he himself had noticed long ago. And it was this. When you erected a fence around your farm, it never seemed to keep anybody out. All you were doing was to fence yourself in, and with barbed wire.
In the meantime Gysbert van Tonder, with his somewhat extensive cattle-smuggling interests, had been doing a spot of thinking. When he spoke it was apparent that he had been indulging in no glad, carefree reveries. His reasoning had followed a severely practical line – as straight as the five-strand course, theodolite-charted, of the fence that would provide the Union and the Bechuanaland Protectorate with official frontiers.
“There should be a proper sort of a border; that I do believe in,” Gysbert van Tonder announced, piously. “It makes it a lot too hard, smuggling cattle from the Protectorate into the Transvaal, when there’s no real line to smuggle them over. I’m glad the Government’s doing something about it. These things have got to be correct. I’ve got discouraged more than once, I can tell you, asking myself, well, what’s the good. You see what I mean?
“Either you’re in the Marico, or you aren’t. And either you’re in the Protectorate or you aren’t. When there’s no proper border you can be standing with a herd of cattle right on the Johannesburg market and not be feeling too sure are you in the Transvaal or in Bechuanaland. Even when the auctioneer starts calling for bids, you don’t quite know is the answer going to come in pound notes or in rolls of brass wire.
“You almost expect somebody to shout out, ‘So many strings of beads.’ So I can only say that the sooner they put up a decent kind of fence the better. The way things are, it’s been going on too long. You’ve got to know if an ox is properly smuggled over or if it isn’t. You’ve got to be legal.”
The years he had put in at cattle-smuggling had imparted to Gysbert van Tonder’s mind an unmistakably juridical slant. He liked arranging things by rule and canon, by precept and code. The next question he asked bore that out.
“In this discussion that our Government is having with the Protectorate Government,” he asked, “did the broadcast say rightly what kind of fence it is that they are going to put up? Is it the steel posts with anchoring wires kind that you cut? Or will it have standards that you pull out and bend the fence down by the droppers for the cattle to walk over on bucksails? That’s a thing they should get straight before anything else, I’m thinking.”
The conversation at that point took, naturally enough, a technical turn. The talk had to do with strands and surveyors, and wrongly positioned beacons and surveyors and rails, and the wire snapping and cutting Koos Nienaber’s chin open in rebounding, and gauges and five-barb wires, and the language Koos Nienaber used afterwards, speaking with difficulty because of all that sticking plaster on his chin.
“And so the surveyor said to me,” Chris Welman was declaring about half an hour later, “that if I didn’t believe him about that spruit not coming on my side of the farm, then I could check through his figures myself. There were only eight pages of figures, he said, and those very small figures on some of the pages that didn’t look too clear he would go over in ink for me, he said.
“And he would also lend me a book that was just all figures that would explain to me what the figures he had written down meant. And when I said that since my grandfather’s time that spruit had been used on our farm and that we used to get water there, the surveyor just smiled like he was superior to my grandfather. And he said he couldn’t understand it. On the other side of the bult, in a straight line, that spruit was a long way outside of our farm.
“What that other surveyor, many years ago, was up to, he just couldn’t make out, he said. With all his books of figures, he said, he just couldn’t figure that one. Well, I naturally couldn’t go and tell him, of course. Although it’s something that we all know in the family.
“Because my grandfather had the same kind of trouble, in his time, with a surveyor more years ago than I can remember. And when my grandfather said to the surveyor, ‘How do you know that the line you marked out on the other side of the bult is in a straight line from here? Can you see through a bult – a bult about fifty paces high and half a mile over it?’ Then the surveyor had to admit, of course, that no man could see through a bult. And the land-surveyor felt very ashamed of himself, then, for being so ignorant. And he changed the plan just like my grandfather asked him to do.
“And the funny part of it is that my grandfather had no knowledge of figures. Indeed, I don’t think my grandfather could even read figures. All my grandfather had, while he was talking to the land-surveyor, was a shotgun, one barrel smooth and the other choke. And the barrels were sawn off quite short. And they say that when he went away from our farm – my grandfather having proved to him just where he went wrong in his figures – he was the politest surveyor that had ever come to this part of the Dwarsberge.”
There would, he said, then, unquestionably be a good deal of that same sort of element in the erection of the boundary-wire between the Bechuanaland Protectorate and the Transvaal. More than one land-surveyor would as likely as not raise his eyebrows, we said.
Or he would take a silk handkerchief out of his pocket and start dusting his theodolite, saying to himself that he shouldn’t in the first place have entrusted so delicate an instrument to a raw Mchopi porter smelling of kaffir beer.
In the delimiting of the Transvaal–Bechuanaland Protectorate border we could see quite a lot of trouble sticking out for a number of people.
“I also hope,” Jurie Steyn said, winking, “that when the Government sends up the poles and barbed wire for the fence to the Ramoutsa siding, there isn’t going to be the usual kind of misunderstanding that happens in these parts as to whom the fencing materials are for. I mean, you’ll have farmers suddenly very busy putting up new cattle camps, and the fence construction workers will be sitting in little groups in the veld playing draughts, seeing they’ve got no barbed wire and standards.”
Anyway, so there was a fence going to come there, now, along the edge of the Marico, through the bush. Barbed wire. A metal thread strung along the border. Sprouting at intervals, as befitted a Bushveld tendril, thorns.
“A fence, now,” Chris Welman said. “Whenever I think of a fence I also call to mind a kindly neighbour standing on the other side of it, shaking his head and smiling in a brotherly-love sort of way at what he sees going on on my side of the fence. And all the time I am just about boiling at the advice he’s giving me on how to do it better.
“Like when I was building my new house, once, that was to provide shelter for my wife and children. And a neighbour came and stood on the other side of the fence, shaking his head at the sun-dried bricks in a kind-hearted manner. Turf-clay was no good for sun-dried bricks, he told me, seeing that the walls of that kind of stable would collapse with the first rains. And I didn’t have the strength of mind to tell him the truth. I mean, I was too ashamed to let him know that I had really meant those bricks for my house.
“So I just built another stable, instead, which I didn’t need. And it was only a long time afterwards – through a good piece of the mud that he had smeared it up with in front crumbling away – that I found out that my neighbour’s own house, which he always talked in such fashionable language about, was built of nothing more than turf-clay bricks, sun-dried.”
Yes, Jurie Steyn said, or when you were putting up a prieel for a grapevine to trail over.
“And then that neighbour comes along and says, what, a shaky prieel like that – it’ll never hold up a grapevine,” Jurie Steyn continued. “And then you say, well, it’s not meant for grapes, see? You’re not that kind of a fool, you say. You’re only making a trellis for the wife. She wants to grow a creeper with that feathery kind of leaves on it, you say.
“And then your neighbour says, well, he hopes it isn’t very heavy feathers, because it won’t take much weight on it to bring that whole thing down. By that time
you feel about like a brown weevil crawling over one of the side-shoots of the grapevine you intended to plant there. And it’s a funny thing, but you never really take to the blue flowers of the creepers that you put in there, instead.”
It was significant, we said, how you would on occasion come across a stable that looked far too good for just an ordinary Bushveld farm, with squares and triangles in plaster cut out above the door of the stable. And with a stoep that, if you didn’t know it was a stable, why, you could almost picture people sitting drinking coffee on it. And spidery threads of creepers twining delicately if somewhat incongruously about solid scaffoldings with tarred uprights. Looking as though why the farmer made the pergola so sturdy was that the pale gossamer blooms shouldn’t just float away.
And it would all be because of the advice of a neighbour who had at one time stood on the other side of the fence, kind-hearted, but with his eyes narrowed. Almost as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing there. And his one hand would be resting easily on the wire, as if at any instant he could jump clean over and come and take what you’re busy with right away from you, and show you how it should be done. His other hand would be up to his forehead so that he could see better. And he would be shaking his head in a kindly fashion in between making recommendations.
That was what a fence represented to us, we said. Young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, made a remark, then. It was the first chance that he had had, so far, to talk.
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 47