As far as he could see, the schoolmaster said, the effect it was going to have – erecting a fence between the Union and the Bechuanaland Protectorate – was that it was going to make the Union and the Protect-orate really neighbourly.
Marico Man
We were talking about the fossil remains discovered in a gulley of the Molopo by Dr Von Below, the noted palaeontologist. Dr Von Below claimed that what he had found were the remains of the First Man. And it was going to do us on this side of the Dwarsberge a lot of good, we said, especially as Dr Von Below had paid us the compliment of giving his discovery the name of the Marico Man.
The distinguished professor had already given a talk over the wireless about the Marico Man that At Naudé had listened in to. And the schoolmaster, young Vermaak, had read an article on the Marico Man in a scientific magazine to which he subscribed.
“The professor made his find using just the simplest tools you can think of,” At Naudé informed us. “Just a simple digging-stick and a plain hand-axe.”
“Sounds like the professor is a bit of a Stone Age relic himself,” the schoolmaster observed, “using that kind of tools.” Nobody laughed.
The important thing, the schoolmaster added, when his joke hadn’t gone over, was that as a result of this discovery the Marico Man would now take his place alongside of the Piltdown Man and the Neanderthal Man all over the world in scientific circles where the question as to who was the First Man on earth was being discussed. It was something of which we could be justly proud, young Vermaak said. It was an inspiring thought that the Groot Marico was the ancestral home of the human race.
“That here in the Dwarsberge the First Man, millions of years ago, lower than any savage, started painfully on his upward progress,” the schoolmaster said.
But Jurie Steyn said that, speaking for himself, he wasn’t too keen on that ‘lower than any savage’ part. Especially as the professor had decided to call his discovery the Marico Man, Jurie Steyn said, with a quick wink at Chris Welman that the schoolmaster did not intercept.
“Yes, that’s true,” Chris Welman said, coughing and also shutting and opening his left eye too quick for the schoolmaster to see. “I must say I don’t fancy it, either – calling an ignorant creature like that the Marico Man. It’s that sort of thing that gives us Marico farmers a bad name.”
And we didn’t want any worse name than what we already had, Chris Welman reckoned.
“And look now what it says about the professor finding the Marico Man’s remains in a ditch,” Jurie Steyn continued, almost spluttering at the thought of the way that he and Chris Welman were pulling young Vermaak’s leg. “Right away people will start getting to think we’re so low here that when a person dies his relatives don’t give him a proper Christian burial but they just go and throw him away in the first ditch they see. Next thing they’ll say is that the Marico Man was found buried with a clay-pot next to him. And beads.”
By this time Gysbert van Tonder had also tumbled to what was going on. If it was a bit of fun at the schoolmaster’s expense, he didn’t mind joining in himself.
Frowning on the suggestion of Bushman obsequies in relation to the Marico Man, Gysbert van Tonder declared that he would rather just lie in the veld and get eaten up by wild animals than be buried with the Bushman religion.
“For one thing, what won’t my children think of me, I mean, when we meet in the next world and it comes out that I was buried according to the Bushman religion? Or take the Pastor of the Apostolic Church, now, that I told to his face how unchristian his Nagmaal service was that I looked in through the window of his church and saw.
“I can just imagine how tight the Pastor will draw his mouth when he comes across me in the hereafter, me having been buried under a half-moon and with an ostrich egg painted blue. I’d feel that I was walking with nothing more than a stert-riem on, in the hereafter.”
Not able to keep his face as straight as the Apostolic Church pastor’s, Gysbert van Tonder burst out laughing. And so he pretended that he was just laughing at the incongruity of the thought of himself wearing a Bushman’s wildcat-skin loincloth. “Isn’t that a scream,” he asked, “the thought of me wearing a stert-riem in the hiernamaals?” When nobody answered, Gysbert van Tonder’s face fell.
It seemed a bad afternoon for jokes. The only people who appeared to be enjoying themselves were Jurie Steyn and Chris Welman.
They kept it up quite a while, saying silly things about how much discredit the Marico Man was going to bring on the inhabitants of the Dwarsberge area, and doing their best to sound earnest.
“People all over the world will think we don’t even know enough to have an ouderling saying words at the graveside,” Jurie Steyn was announcing.
“But what’s all this talk of funerals and the rest?” the schoolmaster interrupted, looking perplexed. “It’s not as though the Marico Man died just the other day, after a long and painful illness that he bore with a patience that was an example to the whole of the Dwarsberge. He’s got nothing to do with anybody living here now. So I can’t understand your talking about him almost as though you’re feeling sentimental about him. After all, it’s millions of years ago since the Marico Man was on the earth.”
It was when Jurie Steyn, choking over his words, started to say that that was what made it all the more sad, that young Vermaak realised what Jurie Steyn and Chris Welman had been up to.
The schoolmaster thought deeply for a few minutes.
“Anyway, it’s like this,” he said, eventually. “We know that it can do us a lot of good, in these parts, to have the Marico Man. He’s going to make our district world-famous. In radio talks and newspapers, in lectures and theses and textbooks, wherever the Neanderthal Man and the Piltdown Man get mentioned, the Marico Man will have to be spoken of, also. Now, that’s something, isn’t it? Quite a bit of an achievement for a South African, don’t you think?”
Young Vermaak recognised, however, that a certain element of jealousy crept into these things. Even the world of science was not altogether immune from that regrettable spirit of partisanship which, in the education department, for instance, could lead to a man who had only a Third Class Teacher’s Certificate getting appointed to an A-post over the head of somebody who had excellent academic qualifications, failing only in blackboard-work.
“And I still say,” young Vermaak declared – speaking, as it were, in parenthesis – “that, give me a piece of chalk that writes and a blackboard easel that doesn’t fall over backwards the moment you touch it – the department examiner hopping about directly afterwards, holding his one foot – then I still say I’m as good at blackboard-work as the next man.”
We felt that it would have been in better taste, on young Vermaak’s part, if he had abstained from drawing aside the veil that had, until then, screened from public gaze the circumstances attendant on his having got low marks in one of the subjects he took for his teacher’s diploma.
“I am only trying to explain,” he continued – closing, in a somewhat self-conscious fashion, the parenthesis – “that in the scientific world there will as likely as not be prejudice against the Marico Man. And just because he’s so good, that is. They’ll have spite against him just because he’s so good. And so they won’t sometimes mention his name when they ought to – like when they’re mentioning the Neanderthal Man’s name, say, or the Piltdown Man’s name.
“He’s great, I’m telling you – the Marico Man is. As a claimant for being the First Man, why, the Marico Man has got the Piltdown Man licked hollow. And as for the Neanderthal Man – I really believe that next to the Marico Man the Neanderthal Man hasn’t got a leg to stand on, leave alone two legs and two hands to stand on, which I believe is how the Marico Man actually stood, if the truth were only known. That is how good I think the Marico Man is.
“And so you can quite understand that there would be scientists that would be jealous of the Marico Man, and they would talk slightingly of him. And as likely as not they
wouldn’t mention him, if they got the chance not to. Just because the Neanderthal Man is a pet of theirs. They don’t like an outsider coming along competing against local talent.
“They don’t like to have to accept it that their Neanderthal Man went up like a rocket but came down like a stick, the moment the Marico Man arrived on the scene – arriving on the scene walking on all fours, even, and with his mouth hanging sort of half-open in surprise. They don’t want to have to hand it to the Marico Man, that’s all. Just because of that awful kind of jealousy.
“There are going to be scientists that will hesitate to let on, in fashionable places, that they have even heard of the Marico Man. And all just because they think he’s a bit too crude. Everybody naturally expects the First Man to have been somewhat rough. A trifle unpolished in his everyday manners, sort of. But when he’s just out-and-out offensive, like it looks as though the Marico Man must have been – and he not even worrying about it, much – well, you can understand that quite a lot of scientists are going to be pretty haughty in their treatment of the Marico Man. Especially when they’ve got the future of their pet, the Neanderthal Man, to think of. Or their other pet, the Piltdown Man. His career. Next thing they know, the Piltdown Man will be out of a job. He’ll be on the sidewalk, cadging sixpences for drink.”
Needless to say, the way the schoolmaster put it then made it all look different. If there was going to be prejudice against the Marico Man, merely because he came from this side of the Dwarsberge, well, we wouldn’t stand for it, that was all.
“I’d like to know what right they’ve got to despise the Marico Man,” Jurie Steyn said, “just as long as he did the best he could, while he was alive. That’s what I say. Just so’s they can crack up one of those – what are they, again?”
“The Neanderthal Man?” the schoolmaster asked. “The Piltdown Man?”
“Yes,” Jurie Steyn said, “those. A couple of foreigners – immigrants – that a Marico-born man has got to stand cheek from, when he’s just as good.”
The point, the schoolmaster said, about the Marico Man, was not only that he did his best, but that he achieved far more than any of his closest rivals in the competition for being acclaimed the First Man. From the shape of his skull, you could see that the Marico Man had all the opposition beaten to a frazzle in respect of weakness of brainpan.
The Marico Man was so much slower-witted than the Piltdown Man that it was pitiful. Pitiful for the Piltdown Man’s chances of getting recognised as having been the First Man, that was. Nobody, no matter how primitive, had any chance of being accorded senior classification as a human being, when all the time there was the Marico Man lurking in the background. Skulking in the background would probably be a more accurate way of expressing it.
It was a solemn thought, the schoolmaster said, to contemplate the Marico Man as we knew him – the Marico Man supporting himself in an upright position with the help of his knuckles, his eyebrows lifted high and his jaw protruding several inches more than the Neanderthal Man’s jaw. The Marico Man in that particular posture, looking at a planet. It made you think, the schoolmaster said.
Gysbert van Tonder was the first to tumble to it that in all this long thing he was saying the schoolmaster was just being sarcastic – on account of his leg having been pulled earlier on.
“But I still say,” Gysbert van Tonder declared, doggedly. “With all this nonsense that has been talked, I still say that if that Dr Von Below knows what is good for him, he’ll keep away from this part of the Dwarsberge. We won’t think twice of running him out of the place. Running him and his precious Marico Man out of the place. And seeing which of them goes quicker. What I can’t get over is the cheek of this scientist – digging up a handful of bones and calling it the Marico Man. And talking about him walking almost four-footed; and having a weak brainpan; and a jaw like a gorilla; and –”
“It’s a closely reasoned treatise,” the schoolmaster said. “I’ve read it.”
“About the only insulting thing,” Gysbert van Tonder observed, “that this scientist doesn’t say about the Marico Man is that the Marico Man is also cross-eyed and left-handed.”
This was one of those days when Oupa Bekker was somewhat more deaf than usual. He had heard and followed only part of our conversation.
“The first man in the Marico?” Oupa Bekker asked. “You mean, the first Marico white man? Well, that’s Louw Combrink … Louw Toutjies, we used to call him in the old days. He used to walk sort of bent forward … Hey? What’s that? … No, not his beard. It’s the way his jaw stuck out … Louw Toutjies? … Of course, he’s still alive. He’s living in the mountains just other side Derdepoort … Scientist? Well, I’d like to see what Louw Toutjies does to a scientist that’s been telling people he’s dead. I’d like to see it, that’s all.”
Homecoming
We wouldn’t have felt quite that way about it, of course, if it wasn’t that we had seen Diederick Kleynhans growing up in front of us, as it were. And we knew, naturally enough, what it was that had spoilt him.
It was clear that Diederick Kleynhans had been undone by his own youthful vanity and by the way he had been praised for his drawings and compositions by the schoolmaster who had been schoolmaster at Drogevlei long before young Vermaak came. Anyway, that schoolmaster had left Drogevlei years ago. He was no doubt still teaching school telling some Standard Five pupil – who otherwise had no real evil in him – how well he could recite.
One could readily picture that same schoolmaster in paradise, casually sauntering up to the nearest angel standing in a row and complimenting him on his outstanding talents as a harpist. And the angel – not knowing that it was the schoolmaster himself who was just harping on his one string – would start getting ideas in his head. There was really no end to the amount of trouble in paradise that that sort of thing could cause.
And now, that schoolmaster having long since left the Marico, here was Diederick Kleynhans sitting in Jurie Steyn’s post office, back from a lengthy sojourn in the city of Johannesburg, whither he had gone to engage in those studies that would enable him to make his way in the world as a commercial artist. From his talk we could understand that Diederick Kleynhans had come back embittered. From other things we saw that he had come back a failure.
Diederick Kleynhans was not a bad-looking young man. There was an honesty about his eyes that were set far apart – as was characteristic in the Kleynhans family. From his hands, too, you could sense that he had a natural candour – not only from the shape of his hands, but also the size. To have hands like the thick end of a leg of mutton was another Kleynhans family trait, developed through generations of standing bent forward in Cape vineyards with a spade.
“I am an artist,” Diederick Kleynhans was saying in the voorkamer. “And so my spirit revolted at the Philistine subjects they taught me at the commercial art school.”
He spoke in a tired voice.
His soul rebelled at design, he went on. And at anatomy. Spending months and months at drawing from dead clay models and for no reason but just so as to learn to draw it right. That made him want to laugh, of course – not him, but his psyche. And portraiture, now. Going on and on painting a face just so as to get it to look like the person you’re painting. Well, his genius couldn’t stand for that, naturally. And wasting weeks and weeks learning how to mix paints – just so the paint wouldn’t all crack off the canvas again, once you’d put it on. Well, his subliminal self could not but recoil from so low an idea of art.
While we could not understand very much about what Diederick Kleynhans was saying, it nevertheless seemed pretty awful, the things they had done to him at the art school. Once Chris Welman had opened his mouth as though to ask a question. We could guess what that question was. Chris Welman would have liked Diederick Kleynhans to have spoken in simpler language, using words we could all comprehend, in his vituperative references to the goings-on in the place where he had been studying. We had also heard a few things about the way a
rtists lived, and all that. Just because we were farmers in the Marico, it didn’t mean that a few hints and such like of what went on did not reach us from time to time.
Why, each time a theatre company visited Bekkersdal, Dominee Welthagen – without letting on that his sermon had any bearing on the red and blue placards prominently displayed in the town – would talk about wickedness and offending Adam and human frailty and lowest dregs. But we knew he meant the theatre company, all right. And it was sad, also, that more than one young person would, with a view to changing his profession, go and interview the producer of the play on the very Monday after the dominee had thundered against foibles and shortcomings and cloven hoof and irreclaimable. Sometimes that young person would not even wait until Monday. Sometimes that person would not be conspicuously young, either.
And we knew that an artist lived in a way that wasn’t very different from how a play-actor lived. We also knew that why Chris Welman hadn’t interrupted Diederick Kleynhans was because of how tired Diederick Kleynhans sounded.
It sounded as though what Diederick Kleynhans was saying consisted of nothing more than words, now. We had known our Volksraad member to talk just like that, in the past. And it was at such times that we had not fancied our Volksraad member’s chance of getting re-elected, very much. The words the Volksraad member would use on such occasions would be good enough, no doubt.
Only, he wouldn’t put the right sort of feeling into those words – as though he had said them too often, so that he had got a bit bored, saying them – just as though those words were making not only his audience, but also the Volksraad member himself, a bit drowsy.
“The same thing happened, afterwards, when I started working for a firm of advertisers,” Diederick Kleynhans went on. “And they said I had to do a drawing of a nattily-dressed man smoking a cigar that they wanted to go into a newspaper. And then they said my drawing was no good. It wasn’t the cigar they wanted to advertise, they said. It was the trousers. And, they said, what was the good of a drawing of a cigar that was so good, it looked almost as though it had been traced with tissue-paper from an overseas magazine, when the trousers seemed as though the man had slept in them in a tram shelter?”
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 48