“I remember about a white-haired clergyman,” Chris Welman said. “The clergyman wore a dark suit and a round collar right through the film. It was a murder picture of course – I mean with a clergyman in it – although at the beginning it looked as though it was going to be a film just about sandbagging and forgery. But I’ll never forget that sound-track piece when the handcuffs clicked on his wrists and the white-haired clergyman said, ‘Y’ got me, pal.’ Of course, it turned out, in the end, that he wasn’t a real clergyman. Or his hair wasn’t really white – I forget which. But I thought then, that even one of our own predikants – and I belong to the Dopper Church myself – could not have done it so well.”
In case we might perhaps misunderstand his words, Chris Welman went out of his way to say that it wasn’t as though he didn’t give Dorninee Welthagen every credit. And so we all said, no, of course not. We all had a great respect for Dominee Welthagen, we said. And we knew just what Dominee Welthagen was. And if Dominee Welthagen didn’t wear a round collar, he did wear a white tie and a black hat with a broad brim, we said.
Nevertheless, we felt, somehow, that if Dominee Welthagen did get into the kind of awkward situation that Chris Welman spoke about – well, we took leave to doubt as to whether Dominee Welthagen would have had enough sound-track experience to know that the game was up.
“If the clergyman had started arguing at that stage,” Chris Welman said, “or if he had asked to have the handcuffs taken off, so that he could first read out a few verses from Chapter 3 of the Kolossense – why, it wouldn’t have been the same thing. It would have spoilt the whole film. That is why I say that in some things, you must hand it to these sound-track ministers of religion. And I say it, even though I am a Dopper myself.”
Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder stated that when he was a child growing into young manhood, he was the only kategisant in the confirmation class who could recite John Calvin’s Formulier from the first word to the last without once having to draw breath. He acquired that skill through having practised swimming under water in the dam on his father’s farm at Welverdiend, where there was Spanish reed and polgras, on the edge. And in an American film to do with the Church he had heard a young kategisant repeating those same words, Gysbert van Tonder said. Of course, he didn’t understand the words so well, because it was in English. But he could see by the look of despair and general bewilderment on the face of that young fellow that it must be John Calvin’s Formulier that he was reciting.
“And do you know what?” Gysbert van Tonder ended up. “He had to pause for breath three times. So I thought, well, they can’t know much about religion in America. Either that, I thought, or else that young fellow had been studying for the catechism in a time of drought when no Spanish reeds grew on the edge of the dam on his father’s farm. Maybe there wasn’t any water in it, either.”
Oupa Bekker coughed then. We all knew what that cough meant. We knew that Oupa Bekker was clearing his throat preparatory to embarking on a story of drought in the old days of the Marico, when the ground really was dry. It was fortunate for us that At Naudé was able to head Oupa Bekker off.
“Today, when you see an American film, the words the actors say and the noises they make are all in English, with the result that we can’t understand it too well – the noises, especially. Anyway, I read in the newspaper that all that is going to be changed. There’s a firm in South Africa is going to take those films and is going to translate the soundtracks into Afrikaans. It’s still going to be the same film, the people and the actions, and all that. Only, they are going to have Afrikaans actors and actresses to make the sound-track – you know, the speeches and the noises. You’ll only hear these Afrikaans actors and actresses on the films. You won’t see them.”
Gysbert van Tonder said, straight away, that that was a very good thing. The fact that you wouldn’t see them, he explained. And Chris Welman went on to say that it would be even better if you couldn’t hear them, either. We did not take much notice of this remark of Chris Welman’s, however, since we felt that there was a lot of jealousy in it.
We knew that Chris Welman prided himself on the way in which he could sing “Boereseun”, with actions. And we also knew that Chris Welman felt that he had never received proper appreciation for it, except in the Bushveld. And he didn’t count that sort of appreciation, Chris Welman always said. It was the applause of the wider world he wanted – even if there were a few overripe tomatoes thrown in with the wider world’s applause. It didn’t mean much to him, Chris Welman was in the habit of explaining, to know that a Marico audience would regularly clap its hands and stamp its feet and shout “Dagbreek toe!” and “Askoek!” every time he sang “Boereseun” with actions. And even when some of us said that, if he liked, we would bring along a packet of tomatoes and a lot of rotten eggs and a dead cat, too, if that would make him feel any better, next time he sang – it would even be a pleasure, we said – Chris Welman still made it clear that it wasn’t quite the same thing.
“All the same, I am in favour of it,” Jurie Steyn said, thoughtfully, “having these American films in Afrikaans, now.”
“Why?” Oupa Bekker asked. We could sense that Oupa Bekker was in a nasty mood, because we wouldn’t listen to his drought story.
“Well,” Jurie Steyn said, “we’ll now be able to understand everything they say in these American films.”
“Why?” Oupa Bekker asked, again.
Yes, we could see that Oupa Bekker was just being difficult.
“Mind you, I don’t say that these American films have always got a very good influence,” Jurie Steyn went on, quickly, in case Oupa Bekker had any more questions to ask. “Especially where young people are concerned. I sometimes think that when young persons see an American film they may get inclined to form wrong opinions about what life is like, really. After all, if a girl smiles at you, sort of, in the moonlight, under a camel-thorn tree, when you are walking home from work and she is going to the stable for a bucket of milk to put into the stamped mealies for supper, say, well, it’s downright silly to think it means anything. In any case what are you doing, walking home from work under a camel-thorn tree, when you should have stuck right to the Government Road, on your way home from work? There’s a lot in these American films that is just foolish.”
We knew that Jurie Steyn was addressing that remark to all of us who were sitting there, in his voorkamer, and not to just one person, in particular. Nevertheless, it was peculiar, the way several of us glanced swiftly in the direction of young Vermaak, the schoolteacher.
And we all agreed with Jurie Steyn. Indeed, we said, the American films gave one a distorted view of life. The American films had an unhealthy effect on the minds of South African youth, we said. The American films gave you the idea that all life was just that pale kind of moonlight that you see through the thorns of a camel-thorn tree on the other side of the Dwarsberge. Some of our young people had even begun to talk, we said, like the men and women actors talk in a film made in America.
Johnny Coen said that that was quite true. And he told us about the way he had parted, near Vleisfontein, from a Bushveld girl who didn’t want him anymore. He was broken-hearted, Johnny Coen said, because that girl didn’t care for him, and was going to marry a young man who would one day inherit his father’s Karoo farm that had eight thousand morgen of sheep pasture.
“And although I meant every word I said, about how broken-hearted I was,” Johnny Coen declared, “it was only afterwards that I realised I had actually been talking words to her that I had heard in these American films. Still, it didn’t hurt any the less. ‘I will say,’ I said to her, ‘I will away to Africa, there to seek peace for my battered spirit.’ You see, the American films had got me so that I really forgot that I was in Africa. All the same, it didn’t hurt less – any.”
Do Professors Smoke Dagga?
At Naudé brought the actual cutting from the newspaper with him.
He passed the news item over to Gysbert
van Tonder, who proceeded to read it out to us – reading slowly, as he explained, so that we shouldn’t miss any of it. When he came to a long word, Gysbert even took the trouble to spell it out for us, to make quite sure that we grasped it all right, he said. And each time after he had got through a piece of spelling, like that, he paused a few moments so as to allow young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, to step in and pronounce the word.
We found out, however, that the extreme care that Gysbert van Tonder exercised in his reading – claiming that he was doing it that way because we were just ignorant farmers that he didn’t want to take out of their depth, too much – was not as helpful as it should have been. Especially when he came to a particularly long word which he didn’t even try to spell, but just mumbled over it.
After that, having twice failed to take the jump at quite a short word, Gysbert van Tonder suddenly thrust the cutting into the schoolmaster’s hand and asked him to finish reading it. He had done his best with us, Gysbert said. It was too thankless a job, trying to get an understanding of fine print into the heads of people who weren’t scholars, he said.
It turned out, however, that that newspaper report was, in spite of its brevity, not without a certain measure of interest.
It had to do with a student of psychology who smoked dagga – purely as an experiment, of course, just so that he could see what it was like, so as to help him in his studies.
“In his studies of what?” Jurie Steyn demanded. “That’s what I keep saying about the so-called educated people we get today. I mean, when a Kalahari Bushman comes to my back door, and I can see from his eyes – with his pupils big and round, and with no whites showing, hardly – well, you all know how a Bushman looks when he’s been smoking a good bit of dagga. Laughing a lot about nothing. A hollow sort of laugh.”
We said yes, we knew.
“Well, how often haven’t I said that about educated white people today?” Jurie Steyn asked, sounding quite aggressive. Actually, Jurie Steyn had said nothing about educated white people, so far. Nothing we could make head or tail of, that was. But we knew how he felt about young Vermaak, the schoolteacher. And we also understood why, on that point, he could not perhaps always express himself as clearly as he might have liked.
“That’s the next thing, I suppose, that is going to happen right here in my post office,” Jurie Steyn went on. “A Bushman coming in with a bow and arrows and an ostrich egg with a hole in it under his arm, and so full of dagga that he laughs right out when I tell him that from next year the Ngami Bushman will have to pay hut tax, just like he’s a Koranna. You know that dagga laugh. But the Bushman will say that why he is so full of dagga is because he’s a student of psychology, and he’s smoking it as an experiment, to help him through his second-year course.”
“Third year,” young Vermaak announced, decisively, shutting his lips in a straight line. “You only have dagga in third-year psychology.”
Jurie Steyn shot a triumphant look at us with his right eye. His left eye was closed in a significant sort of way, the lid fluttering ever so lightly. There seemed something queer about it, somehow – the schoolmaster with his lips shut and Jurie Steyn with one eye closed.
“It’s all right,” young Vermaak proceeded. “I saw Jurie Steyn winking. But I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that it’s only in the third year that we really study the effect on the central nervous system of narcotic drugs like the barbiturates, or heroin, or opium, or – or – dagga, even.”
“They say that dagga is habit-forming,” Chris Welman declared, sententiously. “Not that I have ever thought to have seen you under the influence of it, Meneer Vermaak. The direct influence, that is –”
Young Vermaak said that he had never smoked dagga in his life. Nor opium, he said. He had studied the effect of a variety of drugs only in theory. The professor at the university had dictated certain notes and the students had taken the notes down.
Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder said that that explained a lot. He had often, in the joke column of the Kerkbode, read jokes about absent-minded professors, he said. He now understood what it was that made professors so absent-minded, he said. It was a pity, really, he said, because we all knew that they did have intellects, and all that. But, of course, professors said pretty silly things, too, sometimes. The schoolmaster had no doubt come across instances of that, while he was a student.
“Yes, indeed,” young Vermaak acknowledged. “When I think of all the tripe I’ve had to listen to in the ethics class from old Van –”
“Habit-forming,” Jurie Steyn interjected, swiftly. “That’s what they all say about it, and I suppose it’s true. Afterwards these professors get like that, they can’t just take it or leave it. It gets them. Then they talk what Meneer Vermaak calls tripe.”
The schoolmaster looked surprised. “What gets them?” he asked, stiffly.
And he turned really acid when At Naudé and Chris Welman both tried to explain, speaking at the same time. And he was positively scornful when Gysbert van Tonder asked if professors smoked berg-dagga or just the ordinary sort with red bearded ears.
There was silence after that. Quite a profound sort of silence, too.
“Look here,” the schoolmaster said, after a while. “I know you all like a bit of fun – and so do I too, for that matter, ha, ha.”
We agreed with him. Ha, ha, we said, also.
“But this talk about professors and dagga, well, it’s so silly,” the schoolmaster went on. “For one thing, professors are people with learning and knowledge. If ever you have called at a professor’s house round about exam time – in the hope that over the tea table he might let slip something about what one of the questions is going to be – why, you’ll understand, then, that a professor is a responsible sort of citizen. As a matter of fact, when I went to visit a professor once, around exam time, I came away with the absolute certainty that the professor didn’t even know, then, what questions he was going to ask. What’s more, after the second cup of tea, I felt that he didn’t know the answers, either.”
Jurie Steyn said, then, that he would like to see them dump a university professor in the middle of the Kalahari desert, with his wife and children, and leave that university professor to fend for himself, with just a hollow reed to suck water through the shell of an ostrich egg. He would like to see it, Jurie Steyn added. And we felt that he really would. Jurie Steyn started getting almost sentimental after that, about the hardships of the life of the Kalahari Bushman – which was something very unusual for Jurie Steyn, seeing that we all knew how Jurie felt about Bushmen.
And it was then that the schoolmaster came to the conclusion that we were having fun at his expense. He left shortly afterwards.
“Ha, ha,” young Vermaak said, as he took up his hat. “I suppose I can stand a joke as well as anybody else. Ha, ha – ha, ha, ha!”
“Just as I said,” Jurie Steyn remarked, winking again after the schoolmaster had gone. “Hollow laughter … I forgot to look if there was any white in his eyes.”
Art Criticism
“It must be years ago since I first saw this picture hanging on your wall,” Gysbert van Tonder said to Jurie Steyn, at the same time jerking his thumb over his shoulder at a painting of a farmhouse. “And there has always seemed to be something lopsided about it, somehow.”
“If you think that my wife’s great-uncle, Koos Schoeman, was lopsided –” Jurie Steyn began, when Gysbert van Tonder made haste to explain that he didn’t mean that picture at all, but the one next to it, the one with the garden wall.
“We all admire your wife’s great-uncle,” Gysbert van Tonder continued, “and we venerate his memory. Koos Schoeman was as fine a burgher as ever wore a bandolier across his shoulders, and you’ve got no call to think I mean him. I’m not so stupid that I can’t tell the difference between your wife’s great-uncle’s face and the side of a wall. Why, you can see by his portrait that he was a good-looking man. The kind of looks that they thought were good looks in those days, I
mean.”
“It’s not the fault of the great-uncle of Jurie Steyn’s wife that fashions in men’s looks have changed since his time,” Chris Welman declared, sententiously. “The next generation or so would find quite a lot to laugh at in a photograph of Gysbert van Tonder, say.”
“Even if the fashions didn’t change, they would still have a lot to laugh at,” Jurie Steyn said. It was clear that Jurie Steyn was in an unpleasant mood.
At Naudé brought back the subject to where it had started from.
“I’ve also been a bit puzzled by that painting before today,” he said. “I can’t make out if the artist painted the front side or the back – it’s the painting of the farmhouse I’m talking about, Jurie,” he added hurriedly.
It seemed to make it worse, somehow, that At Naudé had to explain that.
“That door that’s half open, now,” At continued. “Well, it’s not a proper top-and-bottom door, but a door in one piece. Now, with that door open, you wouldn’t have that pig eating a piece of potato, there, next to the bucket. The pig would be in the dining room, eating the blancmange off the sideboard.”
At Naudé made that remark with a certain amount of pride – to show how familiar he was with the interior of the up-to-date kind of farmhouse that had doors all in one piece.
“And the pig, at the same time that he was eating the blancmange, would be scratching himself against a cupboard with glass in front and cups and crossed foreign flags and plates inside,” Chris Welman announced, determined not to be outdone when it came to knowing what it was like in a voorkamer where there was nothing for you to knock your pipe out against. It seemed that the picture on Jurie Steyn’s wall was of that kind of farmhouse.
“And there’s a brass clock on the wall, and it doesn’t go,” Gysbert van Tonder announced, triumphantly, “but they say, in that farmhouse, that the clock was in a ship that fought in a sea battle two hundred years ago. Their navy, you know.”
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 15
