The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
Gabriel Penzhorn closed his notebook.
“I don’t mean that sort of talk,” he said. “Buying and selling. The low language of barter and the market-place. I can get that sort of talk from any produce merchant in Newtown. Or from any stockbroker I care to drop in on. But I don’t care to. What I came here for was –”
That was the moment when Jurie Steyn’s wife, having overheard part of our conversation, flounced in from the kitchen.
“And what about eggs?” she demanded. “If I showed you what I pay for bone-meal then you would have something to write in your little notebook. Why should there be all that difference between the retail price of eggs and the price I get? I tell you it’s the middlem –”
“Veld lore,” Gabriel Penzhorn interrupted, sounding quite savage, now. “That’s what I came here for. But I can see you don’t know what it is, or anything about it. I want to know about things like the red sky in the morning is the shepherd’s warning. Morgen rood, plomp in die sloot. I want to know about how you can tell from the yellowing grass on the edge of a veld footpath that it is going to be an early winter. I want to know about when the tinktinkies fly low over the dam is it going to be a heavy downpour or a slow motreën. I want to know when the wren-warbler –”
“I know if the tinktinkies fly low over my dam, the next thing they’ll be doing is sitting high up eating my cling-peaches in the orchard,” At Naudé said. “And if that canning factory at Welgevonden ever thinks I’m going to deal with them again …”
In the meantime, Jurie Steyn’s wife was talking about the time she changed her Leghorns from mealies and skim milk to a standard ration. They went into a six-month moult, Jurie Steyn’s wife said.
When the lorry from Groblersdal arrived Hans van Tonder was feeling in his pockets to show us an account he had got only the other day for cement. And Gabriel Penzhorn, in a voice that was almost pathetic, was saying something, over and over again, about the red sky at night.
The driver told us afterwards that on the way back in the lorry Gabriel Penzhorn made a certain remark to him. If we did not know otherwise, we might perhaps have thought that Gabriel Penzhorn had overheard some of the earlier part of our conversation in the voorkamer that morning.
“The Marico,” Gabriel Penzhorn said to the lorry-driver, “stinks.”
Ghost Trouble
They were having ghost trouble again in the Spelonksdrift area, Chris Welman said to us when we were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s post office. The worst kind of ghost trouble, Chris Welman added.
We could guess what that meant.
Everybody knew, of course, that Spelonksdrift was swarming with ghosts, any time after midnight. The ghosts came out of the caves in the Dwarsberge nearby. During the day it was quite all right. Then even the most difficult spectres would go and lie down in the hollowed-out places at the foot of the koppie and try and get some rest. But after dark they would make their way to the drift, dragging chains and carrying on generally. That much we all knew. I mean, there was not even a Mtosa cattle-herd so ignorant as willingly to venture near the drift after nightfall.
When it came to having to do with ghosts, a Mtosa could be almost as educated as a white man.
Again, with regard to ghosts, we still remember the time when the new schoolteacher, Charlie Rossouw, who was fresh from college, taught the Standard Five class, in the history lesson, about the Great Trek. He was talking about the Voortrekker leader, Lodewyk Loggenberg, and about the route his party took, and about the Dagboek that Lodewyk Loggenberg kept. The young schoolteacher said that he did not want his class to think of history as just names of persons that they had to remember, but that the Voortrekkers belonged to their own nation, and were people like their own fathers, say, or – if that was too unpleasant a thought – perhaps like their uncles. Or maybe even like the second cousins of their aunts’ half-sisters by marriage. That young schoolteacher was very thorough in his way.
Then, drawing on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, Charlie Rossouw explained to the class that Lodewyk Loggenberg had passed through the Groot Marico with his wagons. “Perhaps the trek passed right in front of where this schoolhouse is today,” the teacher said. “Maybe Lodewyk Loggenberg’s long line of wagons, with voorryers and agterryers and with the Staats Bybel in the bok and with copper moulds from which to make candles six at a time after you fixed the wick in the middle, properly (I mean, you know the difference now between a form candle and a water candle: we did that last week) – maybe these Voortrekkers passed along right here, and the tracks that their wagon-wheels made over the veld were the beginning of what we today call the Government Road. Think of that. I wonder what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek when he went along this way towards Spelonksdrift? What he thought of this part of the country, I mean. That grand old Patriarch. Does anybody know what a Patriarch is?”
Practically every child in his Standard Five class put up his or her hand, then. No, they did not know what a Patriarch was. But they did know what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek about Spelonksdrift. And they told the schoolmaster. And the schoolmaster, because he was young and fresh from college, laughed in a lighthearted manner at the answers the pupils gave him. It was all the same answer, really. And it was only after Faans Grobler, who was chairman of our school committee, had spoken earnestly to Charlie Rossouw about how serious a thing it was to laugh at a Standard Five pupil when he gave the right answer, that Charlie Rossouw went to Zeerust on a push bicycle over a weekend. Charlie Rossouw spent several hours in the public library at Zeerust. When he came back he was a changed man.
After that, he put in even more time than he had done in the Zeerust library in explaining to Standard Five – which was the top class – that he had not known, until then, that that particular passage about the haunted character of the Spelonksdrift appeared in Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek. He had never been taught that at university, Charlie Rossouw said. But it was clear enough, now, of course. He had read it in print. It gave him an insight into Lodewyk Loggenberg’s mind that he did not have before, he acknowledged. But then, while he was at the teachers’ college, he was not able to go into all those details about South African history. He had to study subjects like blackboard work and cardboard modelling and the theory of education and the depth of the Indian Ocean and the Scholastic Philosophers, including Archbishop Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus. And there was also Albertus Magnus, Charlie Rossouw said. So he should not be blamed for not knowing everything Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek. He had been so busy, night after night, trying to make out what Duns Scotus was trying to get at. But now that he had himself gone into the world a bit, the schoolmaster said, it seemed to him that there was quite a lot in common between Duns Scotus and Lodewyk Loggenberg. In his opinion, they would both of them have got pretty high marks for cardboard modelling.
Francina Smit, who was in Standard Five, and who was good at arithmetic, said afterwards that Charlie Rossouw made that remark with what she could only describe as a sneer.
All the same, Charlie Rossouw said to his class, even though it was true that Lodewyk Loggenberg had written those things about Spelonksdrift in his Dagboek, it would be best if the class kept quiet about it when the inspector came. He was sure that the school inspector would misunderstand an answer like that. He did not believe that the school inspector knew Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek very well. He even went so far as to doubt whether the school inspector knew much about Thomas Aquinas.
A little later, when Charlie Rossouw was sacked from the Education Department, we in the Groot Marico were pleased about it. There was just something about Charlie Rossouw that made us feel that he was getting too big for his boots. The next thing he would be telling his class was that the earth turns around the sun. Whereas you’ve only got to lie in the tamboekie grass on Abjaterskop towards evening and watch, and you’ll see for yourself it isn’t so. All those astronomers and people like that – where would they be if they once lay on Abjaterskop in the setting sun, and shredded a plug of roll-tobacco with a pocket knife, in the setting sun, and looked about them, and thought a little? Put an astronomer on top of Abjaterskop, in the setting sun, and with