The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman

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      Oupa Bekker paused and sighed. But it was quite a light sigh, that was not so much regret for the past as a tribute to the sweetness of vanished youth.

      “Anyway,” Oupa Bekker continued, “this farmer from the Dwarsberge brought us a wagon-load of polecat skins. You can imagine what that stink was like. Even before we started tanning them, I mean. Above the smell of the tannery we could smell that load of muishond when the wagon was still fording the drift at Steekgrasvlei. Bill Knoetze – that was my partner – and I felt that this was going slightly too far, even though we were in the tanning business. At first we tried to laugh it off, in the way that we have in the Marico. We tried to pretend to the farmer from the Dwarsberge when he came into the office that we thought it was he that stank like that. And we asked him if he couldn’t do something about it. Like getting himself buried, say. But the farmer said no, it wasn’t him. It was just his wagon. He made that statement after he had held out his hand for us to shake and Bill Knoetze, before taking the farmer’s hand, had play-acted that he was going to faint. And it wasn’t just all play-acting either. How he knew that there was something about his wagon, the farmer said, that was peculiar, was through his having passed mule-carts along the road. And he noticed that the mules shied.

      “All the same, that was how we came to give up the first tanning business that had ever been set up along the Molopo. Bill Knoetze left after that wagon-load of polecat skins had been in the tanning fluid for about a fortnight. I left a week later. But just before that the Chief of the Mahalapis had come from T’lakieng to find out if we had koedoe leather that he wanted for veldskoens. And when he walked with us through the tannery the Chief of the Mahalapis sniffed the breeze several times, as though trying to make up his mind about something. In the end, the Chief said it would appear to him as though we had a flower garden somewhere near. And he asked could he take a bunch of asters back to his kraal with him for his youngest wife, who had been to mission school and liked such things. It was too dry at T’lakieng for geraniums, the Chief said.”

      Oupa Bekker was still talking when Gabriel Penzhorn walked into Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer. He intended taking the lorry back to civilisation, Penzhorn explained to us. His stay in the Marico had been quite interesting, he said. He didn’t say it with enthusiasm, however. And he added that he had not been able to write as many things in his notebook as he had hoped to.

      “They all say the same thing,” Gabriel Penzhorn proceeded. “I no sooner tell a farmer or his wife that I am a novelist and that I am looking for material to put into my next book, than he or she tells me – sometimes both of them together tell me – about the kind of book that they would write if they only had time; or if only they remembered to order some ink, next time they went to the Indian store at Ramoutsa.”

      He consulted his notes in a dispirited sort of way.

      “Yes,” Penzhorn went on, “the Indian store at Ramoutsa. Most of the farmers use also another word, I’ve noticed, in place of Indian. Now, what can one do with material like that? What I want to know are things about the veld. About the ways of the bush and the way the farmers think here … I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t think here.”

      At Naudé pulled Penzhorn up sharp, then. And he asked him, what with the white ants and galblaas, if he thought a farmer ever got time to think. And he asked him, with the controlled price of mealies 24s. a bag, instead of 24s 9d., as we had all expected, what he thought the Marico farmer had left to think with? By that time Fritz Pretorius was telling us, with a wild sort of laugh, about the last cheque he got from the creamery, and Hans van Tonder was saying things about those contour walls that the Agriculture Department man had suggested to stop soil erosion.

      “The Agriculture Department man looks like a contour wall himself,” Hans van Tonder said, “with those sticking up eyebrows.”

      Meanwhile, Jurie Steyn was stating, not in any spirit of bitterness, but just as a fact, the exact difference that the new increase in railway tariffs meant to the price of seven-and-a-half-inch piping.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ