The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  We nodded solemnly. And we had to admit that the painting of the farmhouse on Jurie Steyn’s wall did seem a little like the kind of farmhouse that we had been talking about. The kind of farm on which the farmer carried out all the instructions issued by the Department of Agri-culture’s experts in booklet form – and then came knocking at the door of the first Marico Boer to ask what he should do about wire-worm. In the end, of course, that kind of farmer would know better than to open the pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture, even, when they came by post. Or, if he did open them, he would yawn as he slipped the broken nail of his forefinger underneath the paper wrapping.

  Jurie Steyn said that that painting was made in his father’s time by a Swede or a Pole or a Turk – he forgot which now. And the artist just painted it out of his head, Jurie Steyn said. He walked about from place to place with his brushes and canvas and when he came to a suitable spot he would set up his easel and paint pictures out of his head.

  “My father asked him why he didn’t paint the scene in front of him,” Jurie Steyn added, “but the artist said that he had never got that far, in his artistic studies. Not that he hadn’t tried, he said. But each time he tried to paint a piece of Marico bush like it was, what would come out would look just like a neat row of pine trees – from which he could see that he was painting from memory. It was all out of his head.”

  “Seems there must have been something wrong with his head,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked. “Not that this isn’t a good painting, mind you, as far as I am able to tell.”

  So Jurie Steyn said, no, his head was all right.

  “My father said that he had never come across anybody with so quick a mind as that artist,” Jurie said, “when my father hinted that the milkshed could do with a coat of whitewash. Before my father had got to mentioning the two trestles that he could put a plank over, to stand on, the artist had already packed up and was on his way through the poort, walking at a good pace. Other farmers in this area also had occasion to notice what a quick mind the artist had.”

  “What has struck me about this painting,” Johnny Coen said, “is also about how that front door is open. It’s like somebody has just come walking out of that door. Several times I have thought of it, and quite recently, too. So it’s queer that Gysbert van Tonder should have started talking about that same thing. The feeling it gives me is that somebody has just come walking out of that door and has this very moment turned down that path, there. And that’s why you can’t see the person. I suppose it’s something that the artist remembered long ago.”

  Chris Welman said he imagined that it must be the artist himself who had just come walking out of the door. “After they told him that the fowl-runs needed doing up, no doubt,” Chris Welman continued. “That’s why you can’t see him by the footpath, there. He got out so quick.”

  But Johnny Coen could not agree. There must have been a deeper reason for the artist remembering, long afterwards and in a foreign country, just that house and that door. Some reason that had to do with longing, Johnny Coen suggested, and with regret, too, maybe.

  “It couldn’t be that he left that house just because he had been told that the ceiling needed fixing up,” Johnny Coen said. “Because then he would have been able to paint pictures of farmhouses from outside Cape Town to the Limpopo, with an open door that he had come out of quick. No, that house there must have been an inspiration to him. He must have known that house very well. And I have heard them say that great sorrow is also an inspiration to an artist. And that is the feeling I have about that painting – that it has to do with some great sorrow in the artist’s life.”

  Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder said that why the artist remembered that farmhouse with so much sorrow was perhaps because the farmer not only asked him to whitewash the kitchen but also to pump water for the cattle out of the borehole.

  We none of us laughed at Gysbert van Tonder’s words. We just felt that he didn’t have the soul to understand a fine painting. And we were glad that we weren’t like him.

  Johnny Coen sensed that he had us interested.

  “I believe,” Johnny Coen said, then, folding his arms across his chest, “that the person that has just come out of that door is a girl. It’s a girl that the artist was in love with. And if he’s still alive – old and bent and walking out of a farmhouse where something had to be done to the pantry – then I know that he’s still in love with that girl. And she has just come tripping out of that house, on her way to meet her lover – who is not the artist, of course. That is why he can never forget that open door.”

  Several of us got up to look more closely at the painting, then. There was something that appealed to us, somehow, in the thought that it was a picture that had to do with a sweet, sad love-story of long ago.

  “And maybe that’s why he didn’t ever paint Marico farmhouses,” At Naudé suggested. “Perhaps he couldn’t get the right feeling for them. But all the same I think he could have made it clearer. He could actually have painted the girl coming out of the door, to keep her appointment with her secret lover. Unless he thought that maybe she also, in years to come, wouldn’t look quite so – attractive – sort of – well, you know what we’ve been saying. About fashions in looks changing, and all that.”

  We guessed, from his remark, that At Naudé’s eyes had wandered to the portrait of the burgher with the bandolier.

  Jurie Steyn came from behind his post office counter and studied the painting of the farmhouse carefully.

  “Maybe it has to do with a love-story of long ago,” Jurie Steyn said at length. “Only, I don’t think any girl came walking out of that door. I think that door was opened to let somebody in. With the woman’s husband away at the market, as likely as not. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the artist himself who has just gone sneaking in there. That’s why he can’t forget about it, ever. Him with his long hair and his bright tie, the … the …”

  IV

  Flirting on the plots, Koksoord. 25 December 1962

  Part of a Story

  It was arising out of the impending return to the Marico of Petrus Gerber’s daughter, Pauline, that At Naudé made the remark he did.

  Pauline Gerber was expected back that day by the Bushveld lorry from Bekkersdal. She had been away for almost a year, having gone to a young ladies’ college in the Cape in order to study free-hand drawing and how to talk Afrikaans with an English accent.

  “When we sit here in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer,” At Naudé said, “it’s nearly always just men. And in consequence we don’t talk scandal, like what happens when it’s a lot of women that get together.”

  So Gysbert van Tonder said that perhaps we should not blame the women for it too much. We men, he said, were fortunate in that we had all sorts of interests that women didn’t have, with the result that we could devote our time to better purpose than indulging in idle – and, frequently, malicious – gossip. We should be grateful that we were men, he said, and therefore free from those weaknesses of womankind that were responsible for their going in for thoughtless tittle-tattle.

  “Chin-wagging,” Chris Welman summed up chivalrously, clarifying his meaning by working his lower jaw up and down very fast, to the accompaniment of sundry high-pitched vocalisations allegedly illustrative of the inflections and cadences of feminine speech.

  It was at that moment that Jurie Steyn’s wife came in from the kitchen with our coffee.

  “You men!” Jurie Steyn’s wife exclaimed, staring at Chris Welman with her eyes wide. “Big strong men! And not one of you can jump up to help poor Chris Welman when he’s sitting here with what looks like the heaves. How long have you had it, Chris? Drink this coffee down and see if it helps … Yes, I suppose you men have all been so busy scandal-mongering, as usual, that not one of you even noticed how ill poor Chris Welman has been taken. With the heaves.”

  We could see that Chris Welman was proud and flattered at this unexpected solicitude on the part of Jurie Steyn’s wife. Indeed, he l
ooked quite hurt, as though we had really misused him. And when he handed the empty coffee-cup back to Jurie Steyn’s wife he thanked her in low and fervent tones like the way an invalid talks who has been habitually ill-treated and finds succour just when he has about given up all hope.

  “I feel like a different man,” Chris Welman assured Jurie Steyn’s wife.

  She patted him gently on the side of his head and recommended him to cheer up.

  “A different man,” Chris Welman repeated, eyeing the company in the voorkamer in a way that would have been aloof if it wasn’t that he also tried to look injured, sort of, at the same time.

  Gysbert van Tonder shook his head solemnly at Chris Welman after Jurie Steyn’s wife had gone back to the kitchen.

  “Well, of all the –” Gysbert van Tonder began, choking, “of all the –”

  But Oupa Bekker held up his hand, then. It would appear that, in spite of his deafness, Oupa Bekker had followed most of our conversation, and what he hadn’t heard clearly he had filled in with the knowledge of human nature that he had acquired during the many decades in which he had knocked about on this planet. Or so he claimed, anyway.

  “There were bits of talk here in the post office this afternoon,” Oupa Bekker said, “that I did not hear quite as unmistakably as I would have wished. Like what Chris Welman spoke just before Jurie Steyn’s wife came in. Chris Welman’s mouth went open and shut too quick for me to hear anything.”

  We winked at each other, then. For we knew that Chris Welman hadn’t said anything. He had just been making silly shrill noises. So that showed us how deaf Oupa Bekker really was. The fact that Oupa Bekker thought he could distinguish words in that comical jargon, imitative of female conversation, that Chris Welman had produced from the top of his throat. Well, that did give you a laugh – that Oupa Bekker was so deaf.

  We just about shook, then, the way we winked at each other, and nudged.

  “All the same,” Gysbert van Tonder went on, after a pause, “it beats me that Chris Welman can be so low. I can’t use any other word. I mean, here were we all saying one kind of thing, and just because a woman comes in and takes a bit of notice of him, why – a man like that would sell his own grandmother. Grandfather, I should rather say, perhaps. Where’s his sense of loyalty to his own sex?”

  “It’s not true that men stick together,” Oupa Bekker interjected. “We all know it’s supposed to be that when a woman treats a man badly, then other men sympathise with that man and side with him. To his face they do, yes. But the moment he’s walked out – to the bar – it’s not his face they think of, at all. It’s the face of the girl that treated him so badly that they think of – the girl that they shook their heads about while holding sympathetic conversation with him. And when they think of that girl they straighten their ties – if they are wearing ties, that is.”

  For the first time we noticed that, contrary to established practice, Oupa Bekker was that afternoon wearing a tie. It was a stringy and faded affair, of a shade that might, a generation earlier, have been a kind of maroon. And such as his tie was, he began, with an almost unconscious gesture, to straighten it.

  Several of us in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer commenced – equally unconsciously – to pattern after Oupa Bekker. Thus we made the singular discovery that, through some strange coincidence, quite a few of us were that afternoon wearing ties – threadbare and bedraggled things in most cases, maybe, but, nevertheless, ties. It was almost as though we were not in Jurie Steyn’s post office at all, but in Zeerust for the Nagmaal.

  And it was arising out of the impending return to the Marico of Petrus Gerber’s daughter, Pauline, that At Naudé made yet a further remark: “Funny thing that Johnny Coen isn’t here, isn’t it?” At Naudé said. “I mean, it’s a funny thing. The lorry arriving today with the post and all, that is.”

  But Chris Welman said that At Naudé must not jump to conclusions. Of course, we all knew that there had been talk about Johnny Coen and Pauline Gerber before she had left for the ladies’ college in the Cape. We knew that he had seen a lot of her at one time, him riding through the poort to the Gerber farm, wearing a shop suit and with striped socks pulled over the bottoms of his trouser-legs. And then his visits had ceased.

  “They say that was when Pauline Gerber got hold of the plan of going to that school,” Chris Welman added. “But all the same, we don’t know if she really was his girl. It’s only what we heard. That she started getting ideas, I mean, and said that Johnny Coen wasn’t good enough for her. Mind you, she always was pretty, all right.”

  And we said, yes, Pauline Gerber always was pretty, all right.

  We also said that she wasn’t the first girl, either, who had at one time or another made it clear to Johnny Coen that she didn’t want him calling around, anymore. The trouble with Johnny Coen, we said, was that he was too slow, for a young man. And we straightened our ties when we said it.

  Well, with one thing and another, it was almost leering, the way we got afterwards, talking about Johnny Coen and saying to each other that we wondered what on earth got into his mind to make him think that he even stood a chance with Pauline Gerber. Because we all liked Johnny Coen, we spoke about him in the friendliest sort of spirit, too. There was none of that sly back-biting that we knew perfectly well women participated in when they got together. On the contrary, we all said that Johnny Coen had some very fine points indeed. And it was because we liked him so much that we said it was a pity that he should have gone and wasted his time in the way he did, running after Pauline Gerber, who couldn’t possibly be expected to see anything at all in that type of admirer, we said. We were not surprised at her having sent Johnny Coen about his business, we said. We said that though we liked him, personally.

  “In spite of her youth, you could always see that she is a knowledgeable young person,” Oupa Bekker said. “What would naturally appeal to Pauline would be the more mature sort of man. The kind of man who has seen a thing or two of the world. Like who has held high office in the old Stellaland Republic, say, before it was all ruined through –”

  “I wouldn’t say quite so far back as the Stellaland Republic,” Gysbert van Tonder interrupted Oupa Bekker. “But certainly a man who could talk about the big lung sickness that broke out in –”

  Several of us interrupted Gysbert van Tonder, then, and there were a good few adjustments made to ties, and not an inconsiderable number of day-dreams about how Pauline Gerber would look today, when there was a sudden screeching of brakes and the Bekkersdal lorry drew up at the front door.

  Jurie Steyn’s wife got there first. Before any of us men had even seen Pauline Gerber, Jurie Steyn’s wife was already talking to her. And as friendly as anything. Jurie Steyn’s wife must have slipped out through the kitchen door to get there first.

  “It’s so nice to see you back again, Pauline,” we heard Jurie Steyn’s wife say. “What a pity your lovely hat got knocked all sideways in that lorry, though. And all that red on your mouth – oh, I’m sorry, I see now – I thought you had got bumped there, too, by the lorry. It’s so nice you’re back, Pauline.”

  Friendly as anything, Jurie Steyn’s wife sounded.

  Home from finishingschool

  We knew, from having heard Jurie Steyn’s wife talking to her, that Pauline Gerber was out there, alighting from the lorry. We men, sitting in the voorkamer, would have liked to go out and bid Pauline welcome home to the Marico. But we were restrained by a feeling of shyness. For, as Gysbert van Tonder said, she had just come back from that finishingschool where she had been learning English manners and free-hand drawing, and it would not be becoming for us to go and push ourselves forward, there at the lorry, in just our rough farm clothes, and not able to play the piano.

  At Naudé, tiptoeing up to the window, did, however, venture to raise a corner of the chintz curtain. We had always known that Pauline Gerber was pretty, of course. And from the low whistle that At Naudé gave now, we were able to gather that concentration on the sch
edule of studies at the young ladies’ academy had not spoilt her looks.

  “Well, of all the pie-faced –” At Naudé said suddenly, with a pronounced sneer, “the pie-faced – well, I give up. Drivelling old woman, I should say.”

  At Naudé made further remarks that did not seem to fit in with the meaning of that first whistle. Could it be, we wondered, that on closer inspection of Pauline, the money spent by her father on her higher education would appear to have been the price of so many head of cattle down the drain?

  Already Oupa Bekker was weighing in with a historically authentic account of the ruin that got visited on the Van der Sandt family through the attendance of some of its junior members at the Volksgimnasium. The Molopo Van der Sandts, Oupa Bekker added.

  “It’s that lorry-driver’s assistant,” At Naudé explained. “He comes and plonks himself down right in front of her, and stands there by the radiator, talking to her as free and easy as you like. So all I can see right now is a bit of feather on her hat. He’s talking, standing on one leg. Anybody would think he’s just come out of college, where they teach you flower arrangements and higher –”

  “Higher sums,” Gysbert van Tonder interjected, remembering something of his own primary school curriculum and attaching to it imagined academic elevations, “and higher spelling and higher recitation and higher –”

  “And now he’s shifted onto his other leg,” At Naudé continued. “And now he’s talking … Ha, ha, ha. No, that really was funny. Ha, ha, ha. He was changing legs again. And he has just leant his one hand – as airy as you please – right on the radiator. Ha, ha, ha. He’s lifting both his legs quite a bit off the ground, now, the way he’s jumping. You can imagine how hot the radiator must be of a Government lorry that’s come without a stop, except Post Bag Helbult, all the way from Bekkersdal, uphill.”