The Complete Voorkamer Stories

by Herman Charles Bosman

  “Anyway, why my mother-in-law stretched out her visit was because there was trouble with the Government lorry that she had to go back on. It took the lorry-driver and his assistant the best part of two hours to get the engine going again. And that was the length of time that my mother-in-law stretched out her visit. As I say, I don’t claim it was her fault in any way. Although actually, I am not so sure, either. I mean, when I think of some of the things she did get up to –”

  All the same, Chris Welman added, he even today couldn’t see anything funny in mother-in-law jokes. He had noticed that that kind of joke was always told by a coarse type of person with no real feelings. Just let such a person have the experience of having his mother-in-law come and stay with him – just once, Chris Welman said – and that person would never laugh at a mother-in-law joke again. In fact, he doubted if that person would ever again in his life laugh at anything, very much.

  “The worst thing,” Jurie Steyn announced, “is the comparisons she makes. Not so much in words, either, perhaps, as in other ways. And by hints. How her other daughter that’s married to the booking-office clerk has got coal to burn in her kitchen stove and hasn’t got to go out with a Price’s candles box to pick up cow-dung –”

  “Not today she can’t,” At Naudé interjected. “Not with the coal shortage in the towns that the newspapers are full of. Today she’d be glad to have just that candles box to burn, if I know anything.”

  “Or the comparison she makes with her youngest son, Jebediah, who is now a deacon in the church,” Jurie Steyn continued. “Well, I’m not saying anything about Jebediah, the way he is today. Because I only knew Jebediah before he was a church deacon, and that was on the diggings. Well, the diggings would hardly be a place for a church deacon to feel at home on, especially the kind of life that was led on the diggings in those days. But I’ll say this much for Jebediah – that he never once let on how hard it was for him to fit into that low life, or what a nightmare it was to him. You would never imagine what a suffering it was for him to stay in that sinful place – the way he took to it, I mean.

  “And I suppose Jebediah would still be there today, sitting in a sal-oon bar and doing his best to close his eyes to all the disgrace around him, if it wasn’t that the diggers’ committee afterwards called on him and ran him off the diggings. For some reason, while they were talking to him, the diggers’ committee were also pouring tar on Jebediah, and they were shaking feathers onto Jebediah out of a pillow that they had brought along.”

  And it was that same Jebediah, Jurie Steyn said, that his mother-in-law was today holding up to him as an example. Not always in so many words, perhaps, Jurie Steyn said, but certainly by way of hint and allusion.

  “And if I try ever so slightly, and without mentioning anything near the worst, even,” Jurie Steyn said, “to give her a perhaps different idea of her Jebediah, then she just sits back and smiles. She acts like she feels sorry for me because she thinks I’m jealous of Jebediah. What came out of that pillow-case seemed to be muscovy duck feathers, mostly.”

  It was pretty much that sort of thing in his own case, Chris Welman said, that led to so radical a change being effected in his outlook.

  “I don’t think I would have minded so much if it was just her son that my mother-in-law said was so much better than me, the time she came to stay with us,” Chris Welman said. “I think I could have stood for that. In any case, I was at school with her son, and he used to copy spelling off me in class. And that used to make me feel very proud – to see him copying. Because until then I used to think that I was the worst at spelling in the whole school.”

  Later on, however, the schoolmaster was to declare openly that that other pupil (that nobody knew then would one day be Chris Welman’s brother-in-law) was the worst at spelling in the whole of the schoolmaster’s experience.

  “And no one guessed,” Chris Welman said, “that why he was so bad was because he was all the time copying off me. And so you can see that, no matter what his mother might say, I could never have anything against him. But it was her late husband that she would always talk about. That and –”

  “Yes,” Jurie Steyn remarked. “And drink.”

  “Because I would take a little mampoer brandy now and again to cheer myself up,” Chris Welman continued, “she would act as though I was a miserable lost drunkard that regularly beat his wife black and blue. And I used to get to feeling that way about myself, too, that I was a lost miserable drunkard –”

  Gysbert van Tonder interposed, then, with the comment that as far as he could see the visit of Chris Welman’s mother-in-law could only have done good. There could have been no flies on her, Gysbert van Tonder said, for her to have been able to sum up so quickly what was Chris Welman’s trouble. Although she would have been pretty unobservant if she hadn’t noticed – the moment she stepped in at the front door, even. And that was all the thanks she got for it – with Chris Welman talking so ungratefully about her now, and all.

  He only hoped, Gysbert van Tonder said, that Chris Welman didn’t forget himself so far as to beat his mother-in-law black and blue as well. All the same, he added, he could quite understand, now, why that kindly old lady’s visit should have upset Chris Welman so much, seeing that she just meant everything for the best. It was through no fault of hers that Chris Welman was what he was.

  “If you had taken her reproof to heart more,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “you would have been a different man today. Instead of being just hardened in your awful habits and not being able to find a good word to say about your own wife’s mother. And all that goes for Jurie Steyn, too.”

  Before the two personages so addressed could think of a suitable reply, At Naudé mentioned that he had that same afternoon seen Jurie Steyn’s mother-in-law. She was walking across the veld. Walking at a good pace, At Naudé said.

  “Yes, I’ve already told you that I saw her put her hat on and go out,” Jurie Steyn said. But he added that he was not going to be foolishly hopeful about it, seeing that she hadn’t taken her suitcases with her.

  “About her late husband, now,” Chris Welman said, reverting to the subject of his own mother-in-law. “It was when she stood looking at the front of the house that she said that was where her late husband was different, now. Her late husband would never have allowed the front of his house to get so dilapidated, she said. Not even when he had got so with the rheumatics that sometimes he wouldn’t show his face outside of his bedroom for days on end. You see, in those days they used to call it rheumatics. Well, anyway, it was for that reason that I got out the old step-ladder and a bucket of whitewash and started on the front of the house.

  “And then, of course, my mother-in-law had to come past and say that one thing about her late husband was that he would never splash the whitewash on just anyhow, but that he would apply it with even strokes of the brush and not get his face and the brush-handle and his clothes all messed up.

  “And then when the string of the step-ladder broke on account of its being so old, she didn’t even ask me did I get hurt falling, or could she help me get my foot out of the whitewash bucket. She just said that her late husband would never have got onto a step-ladder drunk and then have tried to murder her from there.”

  So Gysbert van Tonder said, well, what did Chris Welman expect? If Chris Welman got onto a step-ladder with a bucket of whitewash and he was full of mampoer, there would be almost bound to be trouble, Gysbert van Tonder said.

  “I’ve already told you it was the string,” Chris Welman answered, sounding surly. “In any case, during all the time that my mother-in-law stayed with us I never once had a drink in the house. Before my mother-in-law came I moved the brandy still out of the wagon-house and went and hid it in an old potato shed in the kloof that I didn’t use anymore because it was too far out of the way. That was where I used to go when I needed a drink, then – all that far.”

  Gysbert van Tonder made a clicking sort of sound, to show how upset he was at the though
t that a man could be so degraded. The way he was carrying on, it looked as though it was Gysbert van Tonder and not Jurie Steyn’s brother-in-law, Jebediah, that was the church deacon.

  “And what I’ll never forget,” Chris Welman proceeded, “is that afternoon when my cattle-herd, ’Mbulu, came running to tell me that the old miesies had come to him in the veld and had sent him to fetch the police at Nietverdiend. But ’Mbulu didn’t go for the police, of course. He knew better than that. He came and fetched me instead. I hurried along with him and he led me straight to where my mother-in-law was standing right in front of the disused potato shed. ‘It’s too terrible,’ she said when I arrived. ‘I only hope the police get here in time. Do you know what’s inside this shed? No, I’m sure you’ll never guess. It’s a still. It means that the Bechuanas on your farm are making brandy here in secret. If you stand here and look through this crack in the door you can see it’s a still.’

  “I pretended to look, of course, and I said, yes, she was right, and it was too terrible to think of how out of hand the Bechuanas were getting. I would talk to them about it very severely, I said, seeing that what they were doing was so low and illegal, and all. But, of course, we mustn’t bring the police into it, I said. We didn’t want that kind of trouble on the farm. But you’ve got no idea how hard it was to dissuade my mother-in-law, who had worked it out that the sergeant from Nietverdiend could get there in under an hour.

  “In the end I was actually pleading with her to give those shameless Bechuanas another chance: even if (as she said) their making illicit mampoer brandy was worse than if they had still been cannibals. Afterwards she relented. But it was only after I had satisfied her that I had broken every jar in the potato shed and there was nothing left of the still but a few yards of twisted brass tubing that you could never put together again.”

  Chris Welman sighed. “And to think that it was one of the finest brandy stills in the whole of the Groot Marico,” he said, finally.

  Jurie Steyn was looking strangely agitated.

  “But where did you say she was going,” he asked of At Naudé, “walking over the veld with her hat on? I mean, what direction did she take? Talk quick, man.”

  At Naudé explained to the best of his ability.

  “Oh,” Jurie Steyn ejaculated. “Oh, my God!”

  Five-pound Notes

  It explains in the newspaper how you can tell,” At Naudé said, “the difference between a good five-pound note and these forged ones. There are a lot of forged notes in circulation, the paper says, and the police are on the point of making an arrest.”

  “Bad as all that, is it?” Gysbert van Tonder asked. “Because I’ve noticed that when the papers say that about the police, it means that unless somebody walks into the charge office to confess that he did it, the police are writing that case off as an unsolved African mystery. There’s only one thing worse, and that is when it says in the papers about a dragnet, and that the police are poised ready to swoop. That means that the guilty person left the country a good while before with a lot of luggage that he didn’t have when he came into the country, and with his passport in order.”

  Gysbert van Tonder’s lip curled as he spoke. It was sad to think that an occasional misunderstanding with a mounted man on border patrol should have led to his acquiring so jaundiced a view of the activities of the forces charged with the state’s internal government.

  “It says how you can tell that it’s not a proper five-pound note,” At Naudé proceeded, “is because –”

  “Yes, I know,” Chris Welman interjected. “It’s because the forged note is twice the size of the genuine banknote. And it’s not properly printed, but is drawn just on a rough piece of brown paper with school crayons. And the lion on the back of it has got a pipe in his mouth.

  “Oh, yes, and another thing – the portrait of Jan van Riebeeck is all wrong. Because Jan van Riebeeck is wearing a cap pulled down over one eye and a striped jersey with numbers on it. From that you can tell that the forger is in gaol, and he’s forging five-pound notes just from memory, and he’s forgotten that striped jerseys with numbers on isn’t the way everybody dresses. If somebody hands you a five-pound note like that, you must just say you’re sorry you haven’t got change.

  “Because it’s quite possible that the person is entirely innocent and is giving you the note in good faith. He might have got it from somebody else, and hadn’t noticed that there was anything wrong with it.”

  Chris Welman’s broad wink passed undetected by Jurie Steyn. Chris Welman was busy pulling At Naudé’s leg, and Jurie Steyn didn’t know it.

  “In good faith,” Jurie Steyn repeated. “Why, if a man came and palmed a piece of nonsense like that off onto me, just drawn with crayons on a piece of brown paper, I’d know straight away he was a crook. Never mind the lion with the pipe or the striped jersey, even. Just because it wasn’t printed I’d know it was a forgery. I’d be very suspicious of a man who came to me to change a five-pound note for him that was drawn by hand, however neatly. And I wouldn’t care who that man was, either.

  “Even if it was Dominee Welthagen himself that came along to me with that class of banknote, I’d start getting funny ideas about what Dominee Welthagen was doing in his spare time. No matter how reverently Dominee Welthagen might speak about accepting the lion with the pipe in his mouth in good faith, either.”

  Young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, said that this was giving him something to think about. It would be a new subject for a composition for the children in the higher classes. The adventures of a shilling, passing from hand to hand, was a subject he had already set several times, and the children enjoyed writing it. But one got bored with having the same thing too often.

  “The adventures of a spurious banknote” would introduce a desirable element of novelty into school essays, he thought. Young Vermaak went on to say another thing that nobody in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer seemed to get the hang of, quite. He said that if the poet’s purse was filled with the kind of brown-paper, crayon-executed banknotes that Chris Welman had been talking about, then he could understand what the poet meant when he said that who stole his purse stole trash.

  “How you can tell,” At Naudé continued patiently, “that it is a counterfeit five-pound note is not, either, because on the picture of the ship the sailors are all standing round watching the captain doing card tricks. I mean, if Chris Welman wants to say ridiculous things, well, so can I. But the point is that it is actually a very good imitation note. The only way you can tell it’s a forgery is that it is better printed than the genuine note and that it’s got the word ‘geoutoriseerde’ spelt right.”

  The schoolmaster looked interested.

  “Well, they keep on changing Afrikaans spelling so much,” he said, “that I don’t know where I am, half the time, teaching it. Anyway, I’d be glad to know what is the right way to spell that word. But, unfortunately, I haven’t got a five-pound note on me at the moment – and I don’t suppose there’s anybody here who would care to lend me one.”

  His tone was pensive, wistful. But he was quite right. Nobody took the hint.

  “Just until the end of the month,” young Vermaak said, again, but not very hopefully.

  After an interval of silence, At Naudé said that even if somebody were to lend the schoolmaster a fiver – which, in his own opinion, did not seem very likely – it would still not help him with the spelling of that word. Because it was the genuine banknote that had the spelling wrong – spelling it the old way. Only the counterfeit note had the correct new spelling.

  “I mean, if somebody here were to lend you a fiver,” At Naudé said, trying to be funny again, since Chris Welman had started it, “I suppose it would be an honest fiver. I mean, I know that there are a lot of things that a Groot Marico cattle farmer will get up to – especially in a time of drought – but I don’t think that printing counterfeit banknotes at the back of a haystack is one of them.”

  But Jurie Steyn said there was something
that got him beat, now. Calling it a counterfeit note, Jurie Steyn said, just because it had better printing and spelling than a genuine note. It was one of those things that just made his head reel, Jurie Steyn added. No wonder a person sometimes felt in the world that he didn’t know where he was. That was one of those things that made him feel, sometimes, that the Government was going too far. It was setting a pace that the ordinary citizen couldn’t catch up with, quite.

  “Saying that just because it’s better than a real note,” Jurie Steyn continued, “then for that reason it’s no good. That’s got me floored, all right.”

  A situation like that opened up possibilities on which he, personally, would rather not dwell, Jurie Steyn went on.

  “By and by it will mean that if a respectably dressed stranger comes here to my post office, driving an expensive motor-car,” Jurie Steyn said, “and he hands me a banknote that I can see nothing wrong with, except that it looks properly printed, then it means I’ll have to notify the police at Nietverdiend. But if a Mshangaan in a blanket comes round here and he doesn’t buy stamps, even, but he just wants change for a five-pound note, then I’ll know it’s all right, because the banknote has got bad spelling and the lion on the back is rubbed out in places, through the pipe in his mouth having been drawn wrong the first time.”

  Oupa Bekker nodded his head up and down, thoughtfully, a few times.

  Yes, there were certain matters relative to currency as passed from person to person that did not always admit of facile comprehension, he said.