The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  Thereupon Chris Welman remarked that since Pauline Gerber’s return from the ladies’ school in the Cape, we hadn’t seen much of Johnny Coen’s presence.

  It was almost as though Johnny Coen wasn’t so much shy about seeing Pauline Gerber, again, as that he was shy about seeing us. There was a thing now, Chris Welman remarked.

  Oupa Bekker banged his tamboetie walking-stick on the floor, making small holes in the floor and sending up yellow dust. For the first time we realised that he was getting annoyed.

  “You won’t listen to me,” Oupa Bekker said. “You’ll never let me finish what I was going to say. Always, you just let me get so far. Then somebody says something foolish, and so I can’t get to the important thing. Now, what I want to say is that At Naudé is quite right. And Johnny Coen is coming here. He’s coming here this afternoon because he wants to know what we think. A young man in love is like that. He wants to know what we’ve got to say. And all the time he will be laughing to himself, secretly, about the things we’re saying. A young man in love is like that, also. And his titivating himself, with the short blade of a pocket knife and a handful of dried grass – well, you’ve got no idea how vain a young man in love is.

  “And he’s not making himself all stylish for the girl’s sake but for his own sake. It’s himself that he thinks is so wonderful. He knows less than anybody what she is like, the girl he is in love with. And it’s only the best kind of pig’s fat he’ll mix with soot to shine his bought boots with. Because he’s in love with the girl, he thinks he’s something. Oh, yes, Johnny Coen will come around here this afternoon, all right. And what I want to say –”

  At this point, Oupa Bekker was interrupted once more. But because it was Jurie Steyn who broke in upon his dissertation, Oupa Bekker yielded with good grace. The post office we were sitting in was, after all, Jurie Steyn’s own voorkamer. There was something of the spirit of old-world courtesy in the manner of Oupa Bekker’s surrender.

  “––– you, then, Jurie Steyn,” Oupa Bekker said. “You talk.”

  Several of us looked in the direction of the kitchen. We were relieved to see that the door was closed. That meant that Jurie Steyn’s wife did not hear the low expression Oupa Bekker had used.

  “What I would like to say,” Jurie Steyn said, “is that I had the honour to drive Juffrou Pauline Gerber to her home in my mule-cart, the day she arrived here at my post office, getting off from the Government lorry and all –”

  “What do you mean by ‘and all’?” Gysbert van Tonder demanded.

  Jurie Steyn looked around him with an air of surprise.

  “But you were all here,” Jurie Steyn declared. “All of you were here. Maybe that’s what I mean by and all. I am sure I don’t know. But you did see Pauline Gerber. You each one of you saw her. When she alighted here that day from the Zeerust lorry, on her return from the Cape finishingschool . You saw the way she walked around here in my voorkamer, picking her heels up high – and I don’t blame her, her back from finishingschool and all. And her chin up in the air. And as pretty as you like. You all saw how pretty she was, now, didn’t you? And the way she smelt. Did you smell her? You must have. It was too lovely. It just shows you the kind of perfume you can get in the Cape.

  “And I am sure that if a church elder smelt her – even if he was an Enkel Gereformeerde Church elder from the furthest part of the Waterberg, I am sure that that Waterberg elder would have known that Pauline Gerber had class – just from smelling her, I mean. I am sure that that scent that Pauline bought at the Cape must have cost at least seven shillings and sixpence a bottle. Look at my wife, now, for instance. Well, I once bought my wife a bottle of perfume at the Indian store at Ramoutsa. And what I say is, you can smell the difference between my wife and – and Pauline Gerber.”

  Chris Welman, who had not spoken much so far, hastened to remark that there were other ways, too, in which you could tell the difference.

  It was an innuendo that, fortunately enough, escaped general attention.

  For it was Johnny Coen himself that came in at the front door of the post office at that moment. In one way, it was the Johnny Coen that we had always known. And yet, also, it wasn’t him. In some subtle fashion Johnny Coen had changed. After greeting us, he went and found a place for himself on a riempies chair, sitting very upright.

  He seemed from his manner to be almost unaware of our presence as he whittled a match-stick to a fine point and commenced scraping out the grime from under one of his fingernails.

  Gysbert van Tonder, who always liked getting straight down to things, was the first to talk.

  “Nice bit of rain you’ve been having out your way, Johnny,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked. “Dams should be pretty full, I’d imagine.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Johnny Coen answered.

  “Plenty of water in the spruit, too, I should think,” Gysbert continued.

  “Yes, that is very true,” Johnny Coen replied.

  “New grass must be coming along all right in the vlakte where you burnt,” Gysbert van Tonder went on.

  “Yes, very nicely,” Johnny agreed.

  Gysbert van Tonder grew impatient.

  “What’s the matter with you, man – why can’t you talk?” Gysbert demanded. “You know all right what I am trying to say. Have you seen her at all since she’s been back?”

  “I saw her yesterday,” Johnny Coen said, “on the road near their house. I had to go quite a long distance out of my way to be passing there, at the time.”

  Gysbert van Tonder made a quick calculation. “Matter of just under eleven miles out of your way, counting in the short cut through the withaaks,” he announced. “Did she have much to say?”

  Johnny Coen shook his head.

  “Please don’t ask me,” he almost implored of Gysbert, “because I really can’t remember. We did speak, I know. But after she had gone there was nothing we said that I could recall. It was all so different, after we had met, and we had spoken there by the road, and she had gone on back home again. It was all so different after she had gone. I wish I could remember what we said. What I said must have all sounded very foolish to her, I am sure.”

  Gysbert van Tonder was not going to allow Johnny Coen to get by so easily.

  “Well, how did she look?” Gysbert asked.

  “That was what I also tried to remember, afterwards,” Johnny Coen declared. “How she looked. What she did. All that. But I just couldn’t remember. After she had gone it was all like it had been a dream, and there was nothing that I could remember for sure. She was picking yellow flowers there by the side of the road, she was, to stick in her hair. Or she was carrying a sack of firewood over her back for the kitchen fire, she was. And it would have been just the same thing, the way I felt. But I don’t know. All I was able afterwards –”

  “That was what I was trying to explain to them, Johnny,” Oupa Bekker interjected, “but they never let me finish anything I start to say. They always –”

  “Afterwards,” Johnny Coen repeated, “after she had gone, that is, there was a kind of sweetness in the air. It was almost hanging in the air, sort of. Once I even thought that it might be a kind of scent, like what some women put on their clothes when they go to Nagmaal. But, of course, I knew that it couldn’t be that. I mean, I knew Pauline wouldn’t wear scent, I mean. She’s not that kind.”

  “What I wanted to say earlier on, when you all interrupted me,” Oupa Bekker declared, then, with an air of triumph, “is that a young man in love is like that.”

  Dreams of Rain

  Now that the rains had come, everything in the Groot Marico was, of course, different. It wasn’t the kind of rain that starts off with swallows flying in low circles over the dam and ends abruptly just after you have got the tin bath in position in the bedroom, under the leaky place in the thatch.

  On the contrary, it was the kind of rain that, beginning before daybreak, goes on, hour after hour, soaking into the Transvaal veld that doesn’t seem to know how to
take it, quite. Having, through long practice, got used to a condition of drought, it is only in the nature of things that the Transvaal veld should be somewhat suspicious, at the start, of all this silver balm descending out of the skies. It is only reasonable that the Transvaal veld should say, “Huh.”

  This is only the beginning, of course. For after it has been raining steadily for half a day, with more to come, the Transvaal veld starts giving itself no end of airs. It even begins to fancy that it’s the Western Province, the Transvaal veld does – just as though there aren’t antipassaat winds and longitudinal geographical escarpments and things. Quite insufferable, the Transvaal veld gets.

  The rain that had commenced a long while before dawn kept pattering on the leaf of moepel and maroela and wilde mispel. As one rainy hour succeeded the next, the farmers of the Groot Marico – who, through their proximity to the veld, shared its natural pessimism – gradually came to accept it as a fact that a drought of long standing was now, at last, broken.

  More than one farmer, standing in the kitchen with his second cup of coffee in his hand and looking through the window at the wet daybreak, would employ some artless device in order to reassure himself that he wasn’t dreaming … He had been caught just that way before.

  “After all,” as Gysbert van Tonder said in Jurie Steyn’s post office that same afternoon, “what else do we dream about, mostly, during a big drought?”

  As if to make sure, almost, we all of us glanced in the direction of the window. And what we saw through the panes was all right. Over the outside world there was still hung a shifting curtain of grey and white filaments. Even better proof that it really was rain, right enough, and not just a dream, was provided by the state that Jurie Steyn’s post office counter was in. An appliance that consisted of a chair and an enamel basin had evidently been erected too late, and there was a suggestion of inadequacy in the absorptive resources of some spread-out newspaper and a khaki blanket. Briefly, with the rain coming in through the roof, Jurie Steyn’s counter was in a mess.

  “All the same,” Oupa Bekker remarked, looking at the chipped areas of the enamel basin with something that came close to disrespect, “I have had rain-dreams just about as real as that. In times of long drought, mind you. The kind of drought you used to get in the old days. And we would just bear up under it, too. And there would be no newspapers to write about it in big headlines. Newspapers –”

  It seemed that at that moment Jurie Steyn shared Oupa Bekker’s contempt for the popular press. At all events, Jurie crumpled a number of wet sheets into a soggy ball and proceeded to replace them with fresh newspapers, the while he swore to himself in undertones.

  “Well, if you must know,” Chris Welman remarked, “I had exactly that same feeling, this morning. When I woke up with the rain on the roof, and I looked out into the dark and the candle shone on a puddle right at my back door – well, it was exactly like the kind of dream I have often had. I have often dreamt exactly that, and then I have woken up in the morning to see another sun pulling himself right for another scorcher – so I would again all day pump water at the borehole.

  “And I’ve noticed that the longer a drought lasts, the more flesh and blood, sort of, a dream about rain seems to become. Why, there was one night, in a time of big drought, when I dreamt I was driving down the Government Road in my mule-cart and it was raining – I say, that was a cunning dream, for you, now. In my dream I started doubting if it was really raining. I dreamt that I said to myself, ‘Well, I suppose this is just a dream.’

  “And then, do you know what? In the next moment the whole Government Road was full of Mshangaans on bicycles riding back from the town to their kraal, so that they could get back home to plough while the ground was still wet. When I woke up next morning, the ground was as hard as ever, with another day of drought getting ready to bake it harder still. But how do you like that for a dream, hey? Filling the whole Government Road with Mshangaans on pushbikes just to deceive me.”

  We agreed with Chris Welman that it was a sad story that he had just told us. And we several of us mentioned other examples of vivid dreams we had had of rain in seasons of drought. And we acknowledged that, the more severe the drought was, the more genuine and luminous seemed those visions of rain that came and mocked us in the night. Came unasked, too, we said, and mocked us.

  “Anyway, it’s not a dream for Jurie Steyn, that it’s raining now,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked, eyeing Jurie’s struggles with a damp stock of two-penny stamps, “although I don’t say that it’s not a nightmare, for Jurie. How does he think he’ll ever get those sheets of stamps dry again? My, aren’t they big, though? Must be hundreds on one sheet, and all purple. Ripe, they look to me, too, sort of. And wet. Reminds me of parstyd on a wine farm in Constantia … I say, Jurie, if you lay those sheets of stamps on the floor like that, on top of each other, they’ll all stick together, man. Or do you want them all stuck together? You should rather separate them and hang them along the wall. Make the wall look pretty, too.”

  It was a sensible suggestion that Gysbert van Tonder had made, and Jurie Steyn proceeded to carry it out. But, as is always the case with good advice, Jurie Steyn was not properly grateful. First he asked Gysbert if Gysbert thought that he was perhaps the duly appointed postmaster for this part of the Dwarsberge section of the Groot Marico. And then, when he had had about half of one wall covered with sheets of stamps hanging on drawing-pins, Jurie said that he had thought of it first.

  You could see that Jurie Steyn felt really proud of himself, afterwards, when all the wet sheets of postage stamps were pinned to the wall to dry. And it looked nice, too, all the greens and blues and purples and reds. Jurie stepped back to admire his handiwork.

  “Pity I haven’t got any more shilling revenues,” he said. “A row of them on the left, there, would make it look real smart. I wouldn’t mind if the Postmaster-General came walking in here, now. No, or the new Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, either.”

  A wistful look came into Jurie Steyn’s eyes as he went on gazing at the wall.

  “The Postmaster-General might perhaps even have some shilling revenue stamps with him,” Jurie said.

  But At Naudé, who had a wireless and also read the newspapers, and was thus well up in affairs of the day, said that that sort of highly placed personage would not be coming to Jurie Steyn’s post office now.

  “Not now,” At Naudé repeated, with a good deal of emphasis. “You see that this is a nation-wide rain – ’n landreën – and anybody as eminent as the new Minister of Posts and Telegraphs would naturally be on his way back to his farm, as quick as he can get, to plough –”

  Because of Chris Welman’s laughter, then, we were unable to hear the rest of At Naudé’s remarks. And suddenly, one by one, it struck us, also, as to why Chris Welman was laughing. Chris Welman was thinking of his dream, we realised – his dream of the Mshangaans on their bicycles riding home as fast as they could go. And it did seem funny, somehow, the picture of the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, with his head down over the handlebars, pedalling down the Government Road, ahead of those Mshangaans.

  We were all laughing when the door of the voorkamer was pushed open. But it wasn’t the Postmaster-General who entered, bringing in with him a flurry of rain. At the same time, we would not have been very much surprised if it had been the Postmaster-General. Queer things like that do happen, when you’re laughing. Or when there’s a big rain after a long drought.

  As it turned out, however, the new arrival was only the young Johnny Coen. And he looked very miserable. It was easy to see that his courtship of Pauline Gerber was not proceeding at all smoothly. If only he would listen to the advice of men of more understanding – even though they might be a bit older than he was, maybe – he wouldn’t make such a fool of himself, we felt. And the advice we had to offer him was that, seeing that she was just back from finishingschool , Pauline Gerber wouldn’t be in the least interested in Johnny Coen’s type. Not while there was ou
r sort of man around, sitting here in the Groot Marico. Sitting on a riempies bench and chairs in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer at that moment.

  “Don’t you think my wall looks – er – clever,” Jurie Steyn asked of Johnny Coen, pausing for the right word, “with all those different coloured stamps?”

  “Yes,” Johnny Coen responded, dully. He was obviously not interested. Those stamps might all just have been of one grey hue, as far as he was concerned. It was obvious that Pauline Gerber had treated him very badly. Laughed at him, we knew. With a few high notes in her laughter, too, we hoped.

  “You look so dismal, Johnny,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked. “Hasn’t it been raining out your way?”

  Chris Welman chuckled.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t real rain, but he just dreamt it,” Chris Welman called out. “Like what we’ve been saying about dreams.”

  Thereupon Gysbert van Tonder proceeded to acquaint Johnny Coen, at considerable length, with the purport of our conversation of that afternoon.

  At the end of it, Johnny Coen folded his arms and sighed deeply.

  “Dreams?” he asked in a soft voice. “Dreams? That’s what you’ve been talking about, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you about a dream I had … No, there were no Mshangaans with pushbikes in it … A dream that has come to nought. Let me tell you –”

  It was at that moment that the motor-lorry from Bekkersdal arrived. Not in a cloud of dust, this time, and the rain had kept the radiator cool.

  We hustled around for our mail and milk-cans. We had no time to listen to stories about dreams. It was real rain that had come. Tomorrow at dawn we would be on the lands, ploughing.

  Ill-informed Criticism

  It was some visitor from foreign parts who, just before leaving, made certain remarks to newspaper reporters about what he thought the Transvaal platteland was like. At Naudé retailed some of those remarks to us. Primitive was one of the words that visitor had used about us, At Naudé said. And medieval, the visitor remarked. And also he had said work-shy.