The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “The neighbour who saw Neels Prinsloo hanging from the tree just took one look and then went and fetched other neighbours.

  “The neighbours knew they hadn’t to touch anything. So, when the veldkornet arrived, it was to find Neels Prinsloo still hanging from the tree and a man with a shot-gun standing guard over the bywoner, in case, with his circus training, he got out of the riems they had tied him up with. For they were convinced that the bywoner had murdered Neels Prinsloo and had then hung him from the tree to make it look like suicide.

  “The veldkornet took a rapid survey of the situation. ‘Unknot them both,’ he ordered.

  “It appeared that the rope under Neels Prinsloo’s chin had been tied with a kind of slip-knot that the bywoner was known to make – something he had brought with him from the circus. Another thing was that Neels Prinsloo’s feet were dangling eighteen inches above the ground and there was nothing underneath that he could have stood on.

  “Even if Neels Prinsloo was a circus acrobat himself – which he was far from being, with his lumbago – he couldn’t possibly have tied his neck so high up from the ground like that without help. Finally, the bywoner had frequently, and in the presence of witnesses, threatened to murder Neels Prinsloo. The bywoner’s last threat had been uttered only the day before.

  “But the veldkornet freed the bywoner from the net of suspicion quicker than the farmers had been able to get Neels Prinsloo down from the tree, on account of the circus knot.

  “‘How long has the bywoner been on this farm?’ the veldkornet asked. Two years, they told him. ‘Well, Neels Prinsloo was one of the most progressive farmers in these parts,’ the veldkornet said. ‘He no doubt learnt from the bywoner how to make that kind of knot.

  “‘Now, you say Neels Prinsloo had nothing to stand on when he hanged himself. What time was he found hanging?’ They told him, at daybreak. ‘Milking time,’ the veldkornet said. ‘That means that he stood on an upturned bucket and a Mchopi, passing down this footpath on his way to work, took the pail along with him, to the kraal. Eighteen inches is just the height of a milking pail. And the Mchopi wouldn’t have seen Neels Prinsloo hanging from the tree, because the Mchopi would have had his eyes down on the ground, all the time, looking for dagga.

  “‘Now, about those threats,’ the veldkornet went on. ‘Has there ever been a farm in the Transvaal where a bywoner does not regularly threaten to murder the farmer he works for?’”

  That was Oupa Bekker’s story of the brilliant piece of real-life detective work on the part of the veldkornet. But it was a story that didn’t carry conviction, somehow.

  “What was more,” Oupa Bekker went on, as though sensing our scepticism, “why the veldkornet was so sure of himself was because he had received a letter from Neels Prinsloo, saying he was going to hang himself, because he was sick of the Government. That was why the veldkornet got to the farm so early, before he had been sent for – because he had Neels Prinsloo’s letter.”

  We still looked doubtful. It wasn’t a story that rang true, somehow, take it how you liked. Oupa Bekker coughed.

  “They also found a Mchopi who admitted picking up a bucket just there that he took to the kraal for milking,” Oupa Bekker declared, stoutly. “Just like the veldkornet worked out.”

  Still there was silence. Then Oupa Bekker played his trump card – which had the unfortunate effect of leaving us more incredulous than ever.

  “When Neels Prinsloo came round,” Oupa Bekker said, “he confirmed that everything the veldkornet said was correct.”

  Wonder Woman of Windhoek

  Oupa Bekker advised Gysbert van Tonder not to attach too much importance to the statement made to him recently by the new wonder woman at Bekkersdal.

  “Especially as she only says that the Kruger millions may be buried on your farm,” Oupa Bekker proceeded. “It would be different if she says they are buried there.”

  Gysbert van Tonder conceded Oupa Bekker’s point.

  “No, don’t worry, Oupa,” Gysbert said. “I won’t dig much. I’ll just scratch about a bit on the spot where the cave is, and I’ll maybe turn up a few sods there by the Bushman mound. I won’t anywhere go deeper than about ten foot, I mean. After all, she didn’t say for sure the Kruger gold is on my farm.”

  Closing his left eye in a significant manner, Oupa Bekker recommended to Gysbert van Tonder not to give up courage too soon. And he mentioned the instance, in the very old days, of Rooi Armaans, who had also been told by a wonder woman that there might be gold on his farm.

  “But after digging around a bit, Rooi Armaans gave up; he sold his farm and trekked,” Oupa Bekker said. “Yet where was once Rooi Armaans’s farm there is today the Simmer and Jack. Rooi Armaans had only to have gone down about another two thousand feet.”

  But Gysbert van Tonder – not having caught Oupa Bekker’s wink – said that was a different matter. He wasn’t concerned with just a gold-bearing reef thousands of feet underground and that you wouldn’t recognise as gold if you saw it, likely – not even if it was loaded on cocopans. No, what he meant was a lot of buried gold, all mined and melted down into handy-sized bars. The rock stuff they could keep.

  Gysbert van Tonder confessed that what made him lose heart, actually, was the number of other farmers, there, at Bekkersdal, waiting to interview the wonder woman.

  “All standing around with picks and shovels,” he said. “And holding onto scraps of paper with writing on them, that were supposed to be maps.”

  He felt quite bashful about the bit of paper he himself was holding onto, with a cross to mark what might be the Bushman mound or the cave, or perhaps just anywhere, Gysbert van Tonder said.

  He added that among the persons hanging about the wonder Woman’s place there was also a farmer from Platrand, that he knew. And so he thought he would have a joke.

  “I decided to tip that wonder woman off about something I knew about the Platrand farmer,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “It was something that had happened in his courting days. If she pretended to see all that in the crystal, and told it to him bit by bit, it would make him think that she had supernatural gifts, all right. And I thought of all the fun I could have in Bekkersdal, afterwards, telling the other kêrels. Real fun, I mean.”

  But he never got so far, Gysbert van Tonder said, for, when he went in, the wonder woman looked him up and down a number of times in a fashion that removed whatever inclination he might have had towards indulging in anything fanciful, just then.

  “If I didn’t know it couldn’t be,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “I might even have thought that she sniffed. Then she said, ‘I’ll start with the past. That scar you’ve got, now –’ So I said, for a joke, that it wasn’t a scar but just how my face is. ‘That scar,’ the wonder woman went on, ‘yes, I can see here in the crystal just how you got it. It was long ago. You were –’

  “‘I was climbing through a barbed-wire fence,’ I said. ‘I was a boy, then.’

  “‘You were,’ the wonder woman said, ‘a full-grown man, then – according to the crystal. Yes, I can see you. You’re standing in a – in a pigsty – no, it’s a cattle-kraal. I can’t see too clearly. It must be because it’s night time, that you’re standing there in the cattle-kraal, and you’re –’”

  So Gysbert van Tonder said to the wonder woman, yes, she was quite correct. An ox came and pushed him and he fell and hurt his face. She needn’t go on with that, he said. There wasn’t much sense in just recalling the past, anyhow.

  “But the woman shook her head, and said, no, it wasn’t an ox,” Gysbert van Tonder continued. “She said it was a Mchopi watchman with a stick. She said she could see me running, with the watchman after me, lifting his stick. It was too awful, she said. Well, I told her not to take any notice of lies, like that, that she saw in the crystal. Because I could prove it was a lie. And I knew who those people were, too, that started that lie about me, at the time. They were persons at Platrand who were jealous of me because I was making such a success o
f my farming. I didn’t think much of a crystal that went in for gossip, I said to her.”

  The wonder woman proceeded to tell him, afterwards, that the Kruger millions he was asking about might be buried on his farm, Gysbert van Tonder said. But she wasn’t sure.

  “She seemed pretty sure of the Mchopi watchman, though,” Jurie Steyn interjected. “And of the stick.”

  “Yes, I think somebody must have told her something,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “Maybe it was that Platrand farmer.”

  “Or perhaps the Mchopi watchman, perhaps,” Chris Welman suggested.

  But Oupa Bekker said we could never tell. So we said, no, of course we did not doubt the wonder woman’s powers. That we would not question, even. But we did know that there was such a thing as one man, for a joke, putting a fortuneteller up to telling another man certain things. Not that that had necessarily happened in Gysbert van Tonder’s case. Indeed, the more we thought it over, the more likely it seemed, we said, that the wonder woman had seen all that about Gysbert van Tonder in the crystal. Seeing how we knew Gysbert, we said.

  Then Oupa Bekker mentioned about the time when the Wonder Woman of Windhoek came to the Dwarsberge, and he and Japie Krige went to see her.

  “And I meant to go in first and play the same kind of trick on Japie Krige,” Oupa Bekker said. “There was something I knew about Japie Krige, and my plan was to tell the Wonder Woman of Windhoek about it before Japie Krige consulted her himself. Of course, this happened a good while ago. And I only got it into my head to do a thing like that because I was much younger than I am today. I mean when I look back on it now I am surprised that I could have been so thoughtless.

  “The thing I knew about Japie Krige was something he had told me himself, one night when we were sitting around the camp-fire and we had spoken about the miltsiek and the rust in the corn and how the Volksraad member seemed to keep away when times were troubled.

  “The talk had come back to the miltsiek again when Japie Krige spoke of the girl, Martie Fouché, that he had seen at a funeral in Zeerust and that he had never been able to forget. The talk of the miltsiek had reminded him of the funeral. Her people had trekked away after the funeral and because he was just a boy, then – well, he was shy, of course. And he only knew that the Fouchés had gone when he didn’t see Martie in church again, next Sunday.

  “And then, when he was old enough to do something about looking for her, the Boer War broke out. And although he had made enquiries about her, afterwards, he was satisfied, with the years, that he would not see her again. ‘And yet, you know,’ he said to me, ‘I can still see how she knelt there, in her black dress and black kappie, by the side of the grave in the red soil, and that sad look in her eyes. And she was very lovely. Of course, I was just a boy, then.’

  “So I said, yes, maybe. But he was also old enough to know better than to get ideas like that about a girl at a funeral.”

  Anyway, that was the story Japie Krige had told him, Oupa Bekker said, and it was the story he meant to pass on to the Wonder Woman of Windhoek on the occasion when he and Japie Krige went to consult her about where the gold was buried on the map that they had.

  “Seeing that we were going to see her about the same map,” Oupa Bekker said, “I was afraid that Japie Krige might make some difficulty about my going in alone. I thought he would insist on coming in with me. But, to my surprise, he seemed genuinely keen that I should go in by myself.

  “And suddenly it didn’t seem so funny to me, and I felt ashamed of myself for having had the idea of talking to the wonder woman about Japie Krige’s passion for Martie. That was when I lifted the flap of the tent that the Wonder Woman of Windhoek sat in, with Japie waiting for me outside.

  “The Wonder Woman of Windhoek was thin. She had on a black frock, because she was a widow, and she was kneeling on the ground, with a big crystal on a raised black cushion in front of her. Somehow, I was not much impressed with her as a fortuneteller.

  “For one thing, she also wanted to start telling me things from the past that I had to head her off about. In fact, if I didn’t know it couldn’t be, I would also have started thinking that somebody had been telling her things about me. Anyway, it was not at all satisfactory.

  “Even as I was already leaving she was still saying that she could see something in the crystal about a schoolmaster shaking his head about me and saying I would come to no good. But with Japie Krige, when he went in, it was different –”

  Johnny Coen interrupted Oupa Bekker to say, yes, he knew what was coming.

  “Why Japie Krige wanted to go in alone was because he wanted to ask the Wonder Woman of Windhoek about Martie Fouché,” Johnny Coen said. “And then he found out that the wonder woman was Martie Fouché, come back from South West. And she was a widow, now, and so they got married. That’s how all that kind of stories are, I’ve noticed.”

  Johnny Coen was partly right, Oupa Bekker said – that part about their getting married was correct. But the Wonder Woman of Windhoek wasn’t Martie. About the rest, however, Johnny Coen was right.

  “In fact, Japie Krige said to me afterwards,” Oupa Bekker continued, “that he fell in love with the wonder woman the moment he saw her. ‘I fell in love with the wonder woman straight away,’ Japie Krige said to me. ‘The way she was dressed in mourning. And with that look of sorrow in her eyes, that made her very lovely. And the way the wonder woman was kneeling on the red ground.’”

  The Recluse

  It was significant that when we spoke of him it was as Meneer Lemare or as Old Lemare. It wasn’t merely that we didn’t know his first name, but that, moreover, we didn’t want to know it. And on those rare occasions when he emerged from his cottage in the leegte that was all grown about with the thorniest kind of cactus, his encounters with Marico farmers were not characterised by any noteworthy degree of cordiality.

  It was like talking to a more disappointed kind of one of his own prickly-pears.

  “I remember, years ago, when I came across him on the road to Ramoutsa, and I told him my name was Naudé, and I asked him how he was,” At Naudé said. “He told me to voetsek.”

  Then Jurie Steyn mentioned the time, long before he had his post office, even, when he came across Old Lemare in the Indian store. And Old Lemare was telling the Indian to voetsek, Jurie Steyn said.

  “I thought of telling Lemare that it wasn’t right that a man should live all by himself, the way he was doing,” Jurie Steyn proceeded. “There was something from the Good Book that I wanted to mention to him in that connection. It was from Deuteronomy IX of the Good Book. But I decided afterwards rather not to say anything to Lemare about it.”

  “Was he carrying that thick stick with a piece of brass fastened on the end of it?” At Naudé asked.

  Yes, Jurie Steyn acknowledged, that did have something to do with his changing his mind about talking to Old Lemare about the disadvantages of a life of solitude. “And although I didn’t say anything to him,” Jurie Steyn added, “when I was going out of the store, he called out to me, all the same, to voetsek.”

  That was what happened, of course, the schoolmaster said, when one retired from society, carrying under one’s arm a pick-handle loaded with brass. One’s vocabulary grew limited. A few simple words sufficed for the elementary day-to-day needs of the hermitage.

  “But it needn’t be as simple as just to say voetsek,” At Naudé remarked gruffly. “A hermit doesn’t need to be as day-to-day as all that.”

  Johnny Coen said that it sounded as though Old Lemare must have suffered some great disillusionment, in the past. Something must have blighted his hopes, all right. The cup dashed from his lips, and so forth. And that was what had made him like that.

  “Yes, you can see he’s frustrated,” the schoolmaster said. “It’s a rather heavy stick, too, I should imagine? And the brasswork on it pretty solid?”

  Jurie Steyn nodded.

  “I thought so,” the schoolmaster said. “He’s probably an infantile romanticist a
nd he’s not making a constructive utilisation of his vital energies and reserves. And so what would do him good would be a straight talking-to in plain words –”

  “Words like voetsek,” At Naudé interjected, readily. “You go and talk to him like that. We’ll wait for you outside. Outside that clump of prickly-pears.”

  The schoolmaster ignored At Naudé’s pleasantry and went on to talk of the mature individual’s need to meet reality objectively in every situation and of about how creative self-realisation would make Old Lemare throw away that stick, this leading to an increase in his conversational powers.

  What the schoolmaster said did not make much sense, and Chris Welman – who had so far not been taking much part in our talk – several times tried to interrupt the schoolmaster with something he himself wanted to say.

  “Maybe Old Lemare got that way long ago through some love affair,” Johnny Coen said, eventually. “Maybe some heartless girl with a pretty face and yellow hair jilted him. There is that sort. And perhaps she had long lashes, too, that curve up at the ends.”

  “But I tell you, it’s like this –” Chris Welman started again. Only, he didn’t get any further, because Gysbert van Tonder began talking then.

  And Gysbert van Tonder said that if there was a girl in it, as far as Old Lemare was concerned, then the shoe might just as well have been on the other foot. It might have been that it was Old Lemare that had jilted that girl with the fair hair and the eyelashes for a newer sweetheart, and that when he was out driving in a spider all polished up with his new fancy, what should happen but that the girl he had forsaken should appear by the side of the road and, being love-lorn, should start throwing mule-dung at them, so that his new girl’s satin dress and picture hat would be all ruined and so she wouldn’t speak to Lemare again, blaming him for it – women being known to be unreasonable in that way.