The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  Listening to all that from At Naudé in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer, that afternoon, we were, naturally enough, pained.

  “Medieval?” Oupa Bekker snorted. “Well, I don’t know what that word means, not having heard it more than twice or so before in my whole life, unless it was said, maybe, by somebody talking fast, so that I couldn’t catch it. No, I don’t know what that word means. But taken along with those other things that get said about us, from time to time, I should imagine that medieval is just about the worst of the lot.”

  Oupa Bekker said the word over to himself several times. Medieval – middeleeus. You could see there was something in the sound of it that, in spite of himself, Oupa Bekker liked.

  “Now, just imagine a man like that visitor,” Oupa Bekker continued. “He couldn’t even have seen the country, properly –”

  “He said he had seen enough,” At Naudé interjected.

  “– and then he says these things about us,” Oupa Bekker went on, “and then he gets out – quick. He’s away in an aeroplane before anybody can prove to him that we’re not medieval. That’s one way, now, where I don’t hold with progress.

  “For instance, in the old days, if a visitor, passing through Derdepoort, say, made a remark like that about the platteland, why, we would have caught up with him before he had got to the Molopo. And we would have proved to him, right there by the camel-thorns with a sjambok, how mistaken he was in saying that we were savage and unpolished and – and backward – and things like that. I can’t call them all to mind, right now.”

  Gysbert van Tonder suggested a few words to help Oupa Bekker out. And then we all remembered one or two extra words that had also been said about us at various times. It was with a sense of pride, almost, at the end, that we realised how many words there were like that that had been said about us, by visitors from foreign parts.

  But it was evident that Oupa Bekker’s thoughts were still on that traveller who was now thousands of miles away, riding in an aeroplane through the sky.

  “Even if they had just the train to Ottoshoop, still,” Oupa Bekker declared, sounding wistful, “we would yet have been able to point out to that visitor where he went wrong. We would have been able to point it out to him with a short handkarwats on the station platform.”

  Anyway, what At Naudé had repeated to us from the newspaper report did awaken our interest. Chris Welman turned to the young schoolmaster.

  “What does it mean, now, Meneer Vermaak, middeleeus?” Chris Welman asked. “I suppose that visitor means we’s just a lot of stinking ––– s, his saying we’re medieval? Or a lot of pot-bellied ––– s, hey, with our feet sticking out sideways, like a muscovy duck’s? Is medieval as low a word as all that?”

  Thereupon Jurie Steyn said that Chris Welman had no occasion to use such expressions, especially as his wife was in the kitchen, and might hear. Moreover, Chris Welman could speak for himself. Chris Welman could be as medieval as he liked, Jurie Steyn said. He didn’t care. But he himself didn’t want to be included in being called a stinking –––, thanks. He wondered where Chris Welman learnt such awful language.

  “It’s all right, Jurie, your wife isn’t in the kitchen,” Chris Welman was able to explain. “She’s on the roof. I saw her when I came along. Just listen, you can hear her hammering there, now. When I came along she was sawing.”

  “Must be trying to fix that chimney, I suppose,” Jurie Steyn observed. “It’s been all over to one side since that big wind we had.”

  We all sat forward and Oupa Bekker put his hand up to his ear, when the schoolmaster, having cleared his throat, explained that medieval had to do in the first place with the feudal system. Chris Welman looked startled. He thought he knew all the low words there were, Chris Welman said. And what he didn’t know himself he had learnt the time, long ago, when he had been a white labourer in Johannesburg digging foundations. But the word feudal was a new one on him. He hoped the schoolmaster wouldn’t let it slip out by accident in the schoolroom, one day, in front of the children, when he lost his temper about something, Chris Welman said.

  But the schoolmaster went on to explain further. And it was a long sort of explanation. And it didn’t seem to lead anywhere. It seemed like it had to do with history, and in the end we were several of us yawning. There was no point to it.

  From what the schoolmaster was saying, Oupa Bekker commented, it would appear that the word feudal had to do with some kind of government. And so he didn’t see where the schoolmaster’s explan-ations fitted in, at all. For that matter, he didn’t accept that that kind of government was much of an improvement on what we had right here in the Groot Marico.

  “Most of those things you’re talking about we’ve already got,” Oupa Bekker said. “So what’s the argument?”

  “It seems to me that it’s some more of that progress talk,” Gysbert van Tonder announced.

  “Well, we don’t want any more of their progress, medieval or any other kind. They can go and have all the progress they want somewhere else, if they like. But they can’t come and have it on my front stoep, they feudal well can’t. And as for that visitor saying we’re work-shy – well, does he know what work is, at all, I wonder? Him sitting in that aeroplane, all snooty.”

  For a good while after that we each of us started wondering the same thing, each of us wondering, in turn, if the visitor had ever pumped water for the cattle in the hot sun. Or if the visitor had ever chased a pig to put in a crate, in the hot sun, for several hours, with the visitor’s family and the Mtosa farmhands falling over each other, all the time, and the boss-boy going to the police afterwards – the boss-boy claiming that the visitor had kicked him on the ear on purpose when the pig jumped out of the crate again.

  Or if the visitor had ever got a letter from the storekeeper at Ramoutsa about what he would do unless the visitor made a big payment in three days, in the hot sun.

  We all spoke about some time or other that we had worked.

  The longest story of all was Chris Welman’s. He had to take so long over it, not because he was working so much, but because it was the time he was in Johannesburg, digging foundations, and he had to tell us a lot of things about what Johannesburg was like, in those old days. There was a lot of labour trouble at that time on the Rand, Chris Welman said. And almost every other day they were having a general strike. He wasn’t quite sure what it was all about, Chris said, but he wouldn’t say it didn’t suit him. It just meant that every so often he would have to put down his spade and pick and go home.

  And they had a woman Labour leader that they called Miss Florence Desborough, Chris Welman said. He had never seen her, but he would have liked to, he said.

  Not that she would ever have taken any notice of his sort, he knew. But he pictured what she was like from her name. And he thought of her as pretty, and having a soft, refined voice, and with an ostrich feather in her hat, and having high-up shoulders, like they wore in those days. He got all that just out of the sound of her name, he said – Miss Florence Desborough.

  And then one day there was again a general strike that he and his mates, standing digging in the trench, didn’t know about. How they got informed, Chris Welman said, was when one of those old-fashioned taxis that they had in those days drove up to where they were working, and a woman came dashing up to them out of the taxi, swinging a pick-handle, that was tied to her wrist with a piece of string. She was screaming, too, Chris Welman said. And he himself didn’t stop running for about six blocks. Anyway, he himself was a bit disappointed, afterwards, when he learnt that that woman was Miss Florence Desborough, and that she had the nickname of Pickhandle Flo.

  Jurie Steyn’s wife, coming in at that moment with our coffee, didn’t sound very different from Miss Florence Desborough, we thought. Moreover, Jurie Steyn’s wife had a black smudge on her forehead from the chimney.

  “What do you call yourselves?” she asked indignantly. “Of all the lazy, good-for-nothing loafers – talk, talk, is all you do. He
re have I had to get onto the roof myself with a hammer. And a saw. And a pick. Who’s ever heard of a white woman having to swing a pick?”

  Jurie Steyn’s wife said a lot more. We did not answer her.

  “One thing, at least,” Oupa Bekker chuckled, after Jurie Steyn’s wife had gone out again, “one thing at least that she didn’t say is that we’re middeleeus.”

  Toys in the Shop Window

  “You ought to see David Policansky’s store,” the lorry-driver’s assistant said. “My, but it does look lovely. All done up for Christmas. It’s worth going all the way to Bekkersdal just to see it. And the toys in the window – you’ve got no idea. There’s a mirror with a little ship on it, and cottonwool over it for clouds, and little trees at the side of it, so the mirror looks just like it’s water. And there’s a toy Chinaman that goes up and down on a ladder with baskets over his shoulder on a stick when you wind him up –”

  Jurie Steyn interrupted the lorry-driver’s assistant to say that he was sure to go and drive all those miles and miles to Bekkersdal, just to go and look at the toys in Policansky’s window. Catch him, going all that way to stare at a wound-up Chinaman going up and down on a ladder with baskets, Jurie Steyn said.

  Thereupon, speaking earnestly to him because this was no time for foolishness, Gysbert van Tonder said to the lorry-driver’s assistant that he hoped he hadn’t been talking about those same toys at every Bushveld farmhouse and post office that the lorry had stopped at on the way north from Bekkersdal. Because if he had, why, the children would make their parents’ lives impossible between now and Christmas. He himself had several children that were still of school-going age, Gysbert van Tonder said. And so he knew.

  The lorry-driver’s assistant looked embarrassed.

  “Well, I did talk a little,” he admitted. “But I didn’t say too much, I don’t think. Except maybe at Post Bag Laatgevonden. Yes, now I come to think of it, I did, perhaps, say one or two things I shouldn’t have, at Post Bag Laatgevonden. You see, the driver had trouble with a sparking plug, there, and so in between handing the driver a spanner or a file, maybe, I might have said a few things more than just about the ship and the Chinaman.

  “Yes, now I come to think of it, I did, at Post Bag Laatgevonden, make some mention of the train that goes underneath tunnels and then waits at a siding for the signal to go up before it goes rushing on again through the vlakte, past railwaymen’s cottages and windmills and Mtosa huts, and then it gets switched onto another line – but I’m sorry, kêrels.

  “Yes, I’m really sorry. I know, now, that I talked too much, there. But Laatgevonden was the only place where I mentioned the train. At the other Post Bags where we stopped we didn’t stop long enough – having just to hand over the mailbag and unload the milk-cans – and so I didn’t say anything at those places about the train. You see, that train in Policansky’s window goes such a long distance, round and round and round, and taking up water supplies, too, at one spot, that you can’t talk about it, unless you’ve got a long time to talk – as I did have at Post Bag Laatgevonden, where the lorry-driver was trying to fix a sparking plug, and shouting that I was handing him the wrong tools as often as not.”

  In making that remark, the lorry-driver’s assistant grinned.

  “All the same,” he added, “you’ve got no idea what that train is like. It’s so real that you almost expect to see a gang of plate-layers running away and the passengers throwing empty bottles at them out of the windows.”

  We could see from this that there must have been a good deal of realism about the clockwork railway in Policansky’s store. We could also see in which way the lorry-driver’s assistant and his friends amused themselves, whenever they went on a train ride from Ottoshoop.

  Meanwhile, Johnny Coen, who had once worked on the South African Railways, was asking the lorry-driver’s assistant if the toy train in Policansky’s window was one of the new kind of toy train, such as he had heard about. Did it have bogie wheels, he asked. And did it have a miniature injector steam pipe. But when he asked if it also had miniature superheater flue tubes, the lorry-driver’s assistant said that was something Johnny Coen should perhaps rather go and ask David Policansky. He himself only thought that it looked like a train. And it looked a lot like a train, to him, the lorry-driver’s assistant said. But maybe there were parts missing. He wouldn’t be able to tell. It went all right, though, he added.

  The lorry-driver’s assistant was in the middle of telling us about something else that Policansky was arranging to have in the toy department of his store, for Christmas, when the lorry-driver called through the door and asked did the assistant think they could waste all day at a third-rate Dwarsberg post office where the coffee they got was nearly all roast kremetart root.

  By the time Jurie Steyn walked round from behind his counter to the front door, the lorry was already driving off, so that most of the long and suitable reply that Jurie Steyn gave was lost on the driver.

  Before that, with his foot on the clutch, the lorry-driver had been able to explain that his main grievance wasn’t the coffee, which he was not by law compelled to drink. But he did have to handle Jurie Steyn’s mailbag, the lorry-driver said. And although he was pressing down the accelerator at the time, we could still hear clearly what it was that the lorry-driver took exception to about Jurie Steyn’s mailbag.

  By the time Jurie Steyn had finished talking to the driver the lorry was already halfway through the poort.

  “What do you think of that for cheek?” Jurie Steyn asked of us, on his way back to the counter. “He’s just a paid servant of the Government, and he talks to me like I’m a Mtosa. I mean, he’s no different from me, that lorry-driver isn’t. I mean, I am after all the postmaster for this part of the Dwarsberge. I also get paid to serve the public. And that lorry-driver talks to me just like I talk to any Mtosa that comes in here to buy stamps.”

  We felt it was a pity that this unhappy note should have crept into what had until then been quite a pleasant summer afternoon’s talk. What made it all the more regrettable, we felt, was because it was only another few weeks to Christmas. The way Jurie Steyn and the lorry-driver spoke to each other didn’t fit in with the friendly spirit of Christmas, we felt. Nor did it fit in, either, with the even more friendly spirit that there should be at the New Year.

  “And did you hear what he said about my mailbag?” Jurie Steyn demanded, indignantly. We confessed that we had. Indeed, we would have to have been more deaf yet than Oupa Bekker if we had missed any of the lorry-driver’s remarks about the mailbag. Even though the engine of the lorry was running at the time, we could hear every word he said. The driver spoke so clearly. And what made what he said even more distinct was that kind of hurt tone in his voice. When a lorry-driver talks like he’s injured, why, you can hear him from a long way off.

  “What he said about my fowls,” Jurie Steyn burst out. “That’s what I can’t get over. When he spoke about the mailbag that my fowls had – had been on.”

  Well, Jurie Steyn was expressing it more politely than the lorry-driver had done, we thought. “And that he said afterwards that he had to handle that mailbag,” Jurie Steyn continued.

  Several of us spluttered, then, remembering the way in which the lorry-driver had said it.

  “And that he declared they were a lot of speckled, mongrel, dispirited Hottentot hoenders,” Jurie Steyn finished up, “with sickly, hanging-down combs. Well, that got me all right. There isn’t a hen or a rooster on my farm that isn’t a pure-bred Buff Orpington. Look at that hen pecking there, next to At Naudé’s foot, now. Could you call it a speckled –”

  Words failed Jurie Steyn, and he stopped talking.

  Nevertheless, we all felt that it was unfortunate that Jurie Steyn should have had that misunderstanding with the lorry-driver. Because, what the lorry-driver’s assistant had told us about the toy train in Policansky’s window, at Bekkersdal, was something quite interesting. And we would have liked to talk about it some more
. We felt that, in spite of Bekkersdal being so many miles away, it might perhaps be worthwhile to take our children to go and have a look at that shop window, all the same. It would be instructive for the children, we felt. But as a result of what had happened since, we weren’t quite in the mood for that anymore.

  It was only Gysbert van Tonder who did not seem to have his feelings completely quenched.

  “When that young lorry-driver’s assistant spoke about the toy train in Policansky’s window,” Gysbert van Tonder remarked, “well, you know how it is, a toy train, with tunnels and all. I thought right away how my children would enjoy it. I even thought of driving over to Bekkersdal in my mule-cart next week, taking Oupa Bekker with me. And then we could come back and tell my children all about it, I thought. We could also tell the children all about that Chinaman that climbs up and down a ladder with baskets. We could get Policansky to wind up that Chinaman several times, I thought, so that we could explain exactly to the children how it works.

  “But I haven’t got quite that feeling for it, anymore, if you know how it is. So my children will have to go without. And it would have been such fun for them, having me and Oupa Bekker telling them all about what makes that train work. What does make it work, I wonder? It might help them with their exams, to know.”

  But it was then that Chris Welman remembered what the lorry-driver’s assistant was saying just before the lorry-driver shouted to him to get going. And it was as though that cloud that had come over us had never been.

  For David Policansky had said that he was going to get a Father Christmas at his store again, this year. He said he had to have a Father Christmas. The toy trade was no good without a Father Christmas with a red cap and overcoat and white whiskers shaking hands with the children in the toy department, Policansky said. And we laughed and said that we would have thought that the toy trade was no good with a Father Christmas. And we also said that we hoped, for his own sake, that this year Policansky wouldn’t get old Doors Perske to be Father Christmas, again, the same as he did last year.