Recognising Blues
by
Herman Charles Bosman


preface

A TOAST TO herman charles bosman.

The revival of the work of South Africa's leading humorist that has
taken place since his death in 1951 is largely the result of the
popular success that work has enjoyed on the stage (deftly interpreted
by Patrick Mynhardt among others).  And the stage success is largely a
consequence of the element of humour in its performance.  South
Africans have not only begun, through Bosman, to laugh at themselves,
but have lea mt as so many of his characters do, to enjoy laughing at
themselves.

And this enjoyment has kept Bosman's life and times alive for us.

Nowadays he is one of our national treasures, beyond all criticism a
resource for us always to call on for refreshment, and parade as our
very own genius, if ever we are accused by outsiders of taking
ourselves all too seriously.  Bosman has made us sophisticated, mature
and yes, able to take a joke.

The impulse of humour, as this book so graphically shows, runs
consistently through his work right from the very start.  Like
conjuring tricks, techniques of humour should perhaps never be
explained, for fear of killing the sheer pleasure of the surprise the
best of humour relies on.  But Bosman's use of humour, even in his most
serious work, shows an extraordinary variety.  He started with
schoolboy japes and gags in that unexpected breeding ground of old, The
Sunday Times columns of parodies.  In the Marico and in prison he
picked up, through the banter and sneering of the oral tradition
especially when narrators were in competition how to chaff and to jibe
to hold attention.  In England he lea mt the weapon of mocking
derision, twitting the Brits on their own traditional ground.  From
Swift he could take up that terrible satirical irony he wields in
pieces like "A Visit to Shanty Town" beware of its scathing anger over
social issues. From the American funny-men he gained the mad
exaggeration, drawing from chuckles to cackles and as he said, thus
setting the world back into some saner perspective.  Who else is behind
the outright farce of "A Bekkersdal Marathon" but genial Mark Twain? 
From Jerome K. Jerome's classic so world weary, but actually never
missing a trick.

To talk true, Bosman needs no introduction.  He best introduces
himself, as in his "Humour and Wit" piece here.  Generous and
good-spirited, he was never slow to acknowledge his debts, either: to
the American frontier writers frequently, to the Marico storytellers
and the blue coats to Shakespeare and more all sources of inspiration
only he knew how to blend and turn around for us to recognise.

The following selection represents a cross-section of his work, for the
first time made to stress the bolder examples of his power of humour at
work.  Fifty years on, like his favourite South African distillate of
wild fruits, mampoer, it has lost none of its kick.

Cheers.

Stephen Gray Johannesburg, 2001


adventure

I took the hand of a ghost I met in Eloff Street:

I took the ghost's hand And she led me among ways that were most sweet
As in a strange land.

We went by the post office first And then past the Y. W. C. A., And
then into a pub where I quenched my thirst And after that we lost our
way.

But all the time I had my hand in the ghost's hand And she held her
hand in mine, And we walked down Kerk Street through a faery land And
the faces of the people were bubbled in wine.

And we laughed and we sang and a policeman came And informed us we were
not in faerie;

And we trembled in shame and smirched was our fame And our dolour was
grievous to see.

We parted thereafter In sorrow and laughter But what she said then was
what grieved me most When she said she shouldn't have gone out with a
ghost.


humour AND wit

How shall we define that wayward and mysterious and outcast thing that
we term humour that is for ever a pillar to post fugitive from the
stern laws of reality and yet forms so intimate a part of (and even
embodies) all truth about which there is an eternal ring?

There isn't as much humour in the world today as there was of yore, I
think, and through the realms of culture there do not sweep those gusts
of great laughter that blew the lamp-smoke away from thought and left
behind an intoxication.  The material for splendid mirth is still here,
of course; right in our midst.  Turn but a stone and the diamonds
coruscate.

But the men who could make out of this material a supremely godlike
brand of jesting we seem not to have with us more.

Lots of people have tried to analyse humour: writers, comedians,
clergymen, psychologists, undertakers, political cartoonists, cooks,
prison superintendents in fact, all sorts of men in whose private or
professional lives humour plays an important role.  But I have never
come across any attempt at trying to explain what it is that makes us
laugh, that has impressed me very much.  You can work out what are the
ingredients that go towards the compounding of that rare and very
subtle thing that stirs the risible faculties.  But that doesn't get
you anywhere.

You can analyse the elements that embrace laughter, but you can't make
anybody laugh with your analysis.

The same thing with those distinctions that people draw between humour
and wit.  Is there any difference?  I don't know.  If that rather
generally accepted, rough and ready attempt at classification holds
water namely, that humour is born out of the emotions and wit springs
from the intellect then I would naturally be prone to look upon wit as
being, to some extent, an intruder, I who am by nature suspicious of
the intellect, fancying that in its dark recesses there lurks a
specious cunning whose purpose is to gloss over with trickery the
soul's deficiencies.

With this deep-seated distrust of the intellect, therefore, I would be
inclined to move warily within the domain of wit, if the above
mentioned definition were correct.  But, funny enough, I don't think
there is


much truth in it.  When something makes me laugh I would have to think
twice if I am laughing intellectually or if it's just low, moron joy.

And if I had to pause in order to reflect on this problem, I wouldn't
want to go on laughing any more.

Humour you find all over the place.  But with writers of humour (at
least with the kind of humour that appeals to me) it seems to be
different.

You seem to find them at particular times and in particular places. The
Elizabethans had a sense of humour that I can respond to as readily as
to a back veld joke about rinderpest and drought.  And I regard
Shakespeare as the greatest humorist I have ever struck.  And the
singular thing about it is that he seems to me to have been a humorist
primarily in the literary sense (as the Americans of the last century
were humorists primarily in the literary sense), for his jests seem to
have a spontaneous magic in form of the written word that they lack
spoken, dramatised.

Because I have always derived much more pleasure from reading
Shakespeare's humour than from seeing it on the stage.  Perhaps I have
never yet seen Shakespeare, when he is being funny, properly acted.

But with the exception of the Elizabethans, there have been no English
writers who have risen to such dazzling heights of fantasy or have
reached to genius through an utter abandonment of the spirit, that I
would be willing to make for them the claim that they should be
admitted, without reservation, to the wearing of the true humorist's
garland.  There is a large number that I would be willing to accept,
making allowances for this and for that.  But when it comes to my
responses to humour, I prefer to be with those for whom I have to make
no concessions.

And here I feel that I am in godly company with the American humorists
of the last century: Mark Twain and those who preceded him, and those
who came after and quite long after, too, some of them.  I feel there
has never in the whole history of the world been anything quite so
shocking, so sublime and truthful and starlike and inspired, as what
those men wrote who contributed to that immortal body of literature
that comprises American humour.  It began shortly after the American
War of Independence, this particular expression of a literary spirit
whose goal was the awakening of gigantic laughter..  .

(I had reached to this point, in the writing of the present article,
when I was summoned from my desk by a telephone call.  A gentleman at
the other end of the line informed me that he was the City Fire
Department,


and that my house was on fire.  Naturally I was perturbed, thinking of
all my unpublished and uninsured odes and things going up in flame.

The gentlemen on the line then informed me that he was not the Fire
Department, after all, but that he was one Jumbo, and that he had been
informed that I was engaged in writing an article on Humour, and how
did I like this false alarm as an example of refined humour?  But I
felt that the laugh wasn't on me, after all: one day I am going to
publish those uninsured odes.) By the time of the Civil War this new
kind of humour (new, not in its essence but in its strength and stark
objectivity) had blossomed into quite unimaginable beauty.  And it
lasted, in the hands of one or two men of genius, right into the early
years of the present century.  But for as long as a generation before
that it had already begun to manifest, deep within its structure, the
elements of a dark decay.  The writers stopped creating humour for its
own sake.  They began to apply this powerful weapon to the serving of
causes that a creative artist can't believe in.  In this respect O.
Henry, coming in right at the other end of this epoch, kept his art
untainted in a way that Mark Twain, ultimately, didn't.

When the laughter gets forced, the humour dies, and you can see this
process beginning its work in the later writings ofArtemus Ward, Josh
Billings, Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby and several others, including,
as I have said, Mark Twain.  (Witness the decline in power between Mark
Twain's earlier Mississippi sketches and the stuff he turned out a
quarter of a century later his pathetically inept Joan of Arc, for
instance.) His genius, of course, did not decay.  Only, his art
suffered immeasurably through his seeking to make it subserve his own
(totally mistaken) ideas of himself as a literary figure.

There is nothing that you can detect more easily, or that falls more
jarringly on the aesthetic senses, than a false laugh.

But there were also writers of this epoch who remained artistically
true to themselves.  Among them I can think, off hand, of Max Adler.

(He is a.gorgeous humorist; free, romantic, superbly imaginative.) And,
of course, Bret Harte.  There were giants in those days.

American humour today is all right, of course, as far as I am
concerned.

Only, it has lost its pristine vigour, its startlingly accurate insight
into the strengths and frailties of human nature, its divine
extravagance.  It has lost its human genius; it has run to seed; it has
grown tame.

I have devoted so much space to a consideration of American humour


because I can understand it better than any humour that has ever come
out of Europe, and because I regard it, even in decay, as a mighty and
unparalleled manifestation.  I can't write humorously about American
humour.

There are, of course, lots of kinds of humour that I can't understand
at all.  I have never yet been able to see anything in Punch.  (Perhaps
Punch isn't a funny paper.) And I have never been able to laugh at what
have been held out to me as even the most brilliant examples of Cockney
wit.

(Perhaps Cockney wit, also, is not meant to be amusing.  Again I don't
know.  I can catch about Cockney wit only a devastating quickness.  I
can sense in it none of that warmth that is the very lifeblood of true
humour.) All the ordinary attempts at evaluating the significance of
humour in terms of its social use and its psycho-physiological
functioning seem of necessity to have to end in sterility.  Humour is
something that stands apart from these things.  I feel that to get at
the true essence of humour it must be approached from the side of the
eternities, where it stands as some sort of a battered symbol of man's
more direct relationship with God.

In the world's cultural development humour came on the scene very late.
And that is the feeling that I have always had about humour,
ultimately.

That it is one of mankind's most treasured possessions, one of the
world's richest cultural jewels.  But that humour came amongst us when
the flowers were already fading.  And that it came too late.


the dilettante every morning on my way to the office I found him
standing in front of the Library, waiting for the doors to open.

His lofty, intellectual brow increased the general rigidity of his
ascetic countenance, while that faraway gaze in his steel-blue eyes
showed how distant from mundane matters his thoughts were.

At night, on my return, I noticed that he was always the last to leave
the Library, and I observed that occasionally there was a wistful, half
regretful look on his face, while at other times his countenance bore
an expression of mild complacency even of benignity and broad
philanthropy.

But in the morning there was no mistake about that strenuous eagerness
which pervaded his features which even showed through that look of
intense absorption as he stood on the pavement, waiting for the Library
doors to open.

Each day when I went to the office he was waiting on the pavement;

each day when I returned the Library doors were just being locked
behind him, until, having indulged in much speculation to no purpose, I
determined to once and for all solve the problem as to which were the
books that so irresistibly drew that intellectual giant to the
Library.

He was already waiting on the pavement the following morning when I
arrived, intent on finding a solution to the puzzle.  As soon as the
doors swung open he rushed in, while I followed some distance in his
wake.

Having arrived at the Reference Department, he went up to a shelf, took
down a book, and with a sigh of placid contentment plunged into Chapter
XXXIV of the seventeenth volume of The Inner Secrets of Bettys
Boudoir.

Following his example, I likewise took down a volume and commenced
reading.

And in the blissful days that followed I was the first to arrive on the
pavement, impatiently tapping the kerb with my foot, waiting for the
Library doors to open.


the deserter having drawn up the remnants of his forces in battle
array, the Red leader harangued his men, exhorting them to fling off
their yokes of oppression and reach out after the banner of Liberty,
floating on the far horizon.

"You've won, boys," the general cried, at the conclusion of his
passionate oration, every sentence of which was enthusiastically
applauded by the revolutionaries in their trenches.

"But, remember, don't kick the capitalist when he's down.  Hit him with
a pick-handle."

Hardly had the thunder of applause died down when, with a curious
sound, like the wailing of a tired wind, a bullet went whistling over
their heads and crashed through a plate-glass window, whereupon,
wishing he had been a better man and knew more hymns, a Scotsman named
Van der Merwe flung away his rifle and raced off madly in the direction
of home and safety.

Appalled by such flagrant desertion in the face of the foe, the general
made use of language which, no doubt, in calmer moments he would
regret.

"Fetch him back!"  he shouted at length, in a voice like tearing
linoleum.  Untrustworthy though many members of the commando may have
been, there was one man, at all events, whose soul was not dead to all
honour one man who responded to duty's call.

Amid cheers this individual set off in pursuit and, leaping lithely
over the obstacles in the road, gradually gained upon his quarry.  The
general, meanwhile, had hastily climbed a lamp-post, from which point
of vantage he shouted out the progress of the race.

"He's only half a block behind him," he cried, "and gaining like mad.
There's only ten yards separating them now!  Three yards!  Two feet!
He's only about six inches behind the deserter " "Damnation!"  the
general exclaimed as, slipping from the lamp-post, he clasped his brow
in anguish, "he's five yards in front of him!"


prologue TO

"mara"

scene: The Johannesburg Town Hall.

Enter Mayor, Citizens, Herman Malan, Bishop.

MAYOR: Ladies and Gentlemen, here this day in the City Hall of
Johannesburg, we are assembled to honour Africa's greatest poet.  As
the Greek of old decked singers with garlands of cypress and myrtle, we
in Johannesburg have gathered to bestow on Herman Malan a small token
of our esteem and admiration.  We lay at his feet the homage of a
continent.

HERMAN MALAN: Lay it down softly, Mr.  Mayor.  Don't let it fall on my
sore toe.

BISHOP: Let us pray.


the recognising blues

I was ambling down Eloff Street, barefooted and in my shirt-sleeves,
and with the recognising blues.

I had been smoking dagga, good dagga, the real rooibaard, with heads
about a foot long, and not just the stuff that most dealers supply you
with, and that is not much better than grass.  When you smoke good
dagga you get blue in quite a number of ways.  The most common way is
the frightened blues, when you imagine that your heart is palpitating,
and that you can't breathe, and that you are going to die.  Another
form that the effect of dagga takes is that you get the suspicious
blues, and then you imagine that all the people around you, your best
friends and your parents included, are conspiring against you, so that
when your mother asks you, "How are you?"  every word she says sounds
very sinister, as though she knows that you have been smoking dagga,
and that you are blue, and you feel that she is like a witch.  The most
innocent remark any person makes when you have got the suspicious blues
seems to be impregnated with a whole world of underhand meaning and
dreadful insinuation.

And perhaps you are right to feel this way about it.  Is not the most
harmless conversation between several human beings charged with the
most diabolical kind of subterranean cunning, each person fortifying
himself behind barbed-wire de fences  Look at that painting of
Daumier's, called "Conversation Piece", and you will see that the two
men and the woman concerned in this little friendly chat are all three
of them taking part in a cloven-hoofed rite.  You can see each one has
got the suspicious blues.

There is also the once-over blues and a considerable variety of other
kinds of blues.  But the recognising blues doesn't come very often, and
then it is only after you have been smoking the best kind of rooibaard
boom, with ears that long.

When you have got the recognising blues you think you know everybody
you meet.  And you go up and shake hands with every person that you
come across, because you think you recognise him, and you are very glad
to have run into him: in this respect the recognising blues is just the
opposite of the suspicious blues.


A friend of mine, Charlie, who has smoked dagga for thirty years, says
that he once had the recognising blues very bad when he was strolling
through the centre of the town.  And after he had shaken hands with
lots of people who didn't know him at all, and whom he didn't know,
either, but whom he thought he knew, because he had the recognising
blues then a very singular thing happened to my friend, Rooker Charlie.
For he looked in the display window of a men's outfitters, and he saw
two dummies standing there, in the window, two dummies dressed in a
smart line of gents' suitings, and with the recognising blues strong on
him, Charlie thought that he knew those two dummies, and he thought
that the one dummy was Max Chaitz, who kept a restaurant in Cape Town,
and that the other dummy was a well-known snooker player called Pat
O'Callaghan.

And my friend Rooker Charlie couldn't understand how Max Chaitz and Pat
O'Callaghan should come to be standing there holding animated converse
in that shop-window.  He didn't know, until that moment, that Max
Chaitz and Pat O'Callaghan were even acquainted.  But the sight of
these two men standing there talking like that shook my friend Rooker
Charlie up pretty badly.  So he went home to bed.  But early next
morning he dashed round again to that men's outfitters, and then he saw
that those two figures weren't Max Chaitz and Pat O'Callaghan at all,
but two dummies stuck in the window.  And he saw then that they didn't
look even a bit like the two men he thought they were especially the
dummy that he thought was Max Chaitz.  Because Max Chaitz is very short
and fat, with a red, cross-looking sort of face that you can't mistake
in a million.  Whereas the dummy was tall and slender and
good-looking.

That was the worst experience that my friend Rooker Charlie ever had of
the recognising blues.

And when I was taking a stroll down Eloff Street, that evening, and I
was barefooted and in my shirt-sleeves, then I also had a bad attack of
the recognising blues.  But it was the recognising blues in a slightly
different form.  I would first make up a name in my brain, a name that
sounded good to me, and that I thought had the right sort of rhythm.

And then the first person I would see, I would think that he was the
man whose name I had just thought out.  And I would go up and address
him by this name, and shake hands with him, and tell him how glad I was
to see him.


And a name I thought up that sounded very fine to me, and impressive,
with just the right kind of ring to it, was the name Sir Lionel Ostrich
de Frontignac.  It was a very magnificent name.

And so I went up, barefooted and in my shirt-sleeves, to the first man
I saw in the street, after I had coined this name, and I took him by
the hand, and I said, "Well met.  Sir Lionel.  It is many years since
last we met, Sir Lionel Ostrich de Frontignac."

And the remarkable coincidence was that the man whom I addressed in
this way actually was Sir Lionel Ostrich de Frontignac.  But on account
of his taking me for a bum through my being barefooted and in my
shirt-sleeves he wouldn't acknowledge that he really was Sir Lionel and
that I had recognised him dead to rights.

"You are mistaken," Sir Lionel Ostrich de Frontignac said, moving away
from me.

"You have got the recognising blues."


royal processions one of these days, with the Coronation [of the
successor of King George V, expected to be later in 1936], there will
be another Royal Procession through the streets of London.

These processions are colourful affairs; they are got up in good
style;

and in that one moment of scarlet and gold, when your hat is raised,
and there is the thunder of hooves on the ground, when the royal
carriage is passing, and the air is wild with trumpets and cheering,
then you find that your pulse throbs very quickly, and strange thrills
are stirring in your heart.

And yet, when it is over, and the crowds surge forward into the
roadway, you are left with the feeling that Cecil B. de Mine would have
done it differently.  Each time I have seen a Royal Procession, I have
tried to detect, in its pageantry, the elements of a Roman triumph. 
But each time my effort has been a failure.  The spirit of Imperial
Rome its drama and its flamboyancy is still in the world, of course,
but it is in Hollywood.

On one occasion, at the Marble Arch, when the drums beat, and the
rulers of the world went by, I felt something of the majesty of a
bygone day.  So I tried out a classical allusion.

"How's this for pan em et circenses?"  I asked of a man in the crowd
next to me.

"No," he answered, surveying the procession, "no, that one on the left
there is Litvinoff."

The best place from which to view a procession is the pavement.  And
the best time to take up a position is at midnight.  This involves a
twelve-hour wait in the gutter.  But if you don't come early you find
that the best stretches of gutter have already been taken up, and you
have to content yourself with sitting down on an inferior piece of kerb
stone made of the hardest kind of concrete.

This waiting is very pleasant.  And I know what Milton meant when he
wrote of those that stand and wait.  To me there is always something
sublime in the thought of people waiting.  Whether it is that they are
waiting for a train, or for a king to ride past, or for One Whose
coming shall bring peace to the children of men.


Near me was a man who sat reading a library book by the light of a
candle.

I think I have had more fun, waiting with the crowd in the gutter, than
at most fashionable functions to which, on various occasions, I have
been invited.  (By mistake, no doubt.) For one thing, at a society
wedding, they always engage a number of detectives to breathe down the
back of your neck and make you feel jumpy.

By four o'clock in the morning of the Duke of Kent's marriage there was
a dense crowd lining the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster
Abbey.  A detachment of uniformed men marched past, through the mist,
to the accompaniment of some mild cheering from the crowd.

"Who are those men?"  I enquired of a neighbour.

"They are blue-jackets," was the answer.

I was very interested to hear that, owing to my having been acquainted
with quite a number of blue-jackets in South Africa.  I was not
surprised, therefore, a few minutes later, when a body of Metropolitan
police came marching on behind the blue-jackets.  The police force here
is justly famed for its quiet efficiency.  And when a London policeman
arrests a man he gives him the same advice that a South African
policeman does: he advises him to plead guilty and make a statement.

Later on there was some more cheering.  Again I enquired the cause.

"It is the English dawn," I was informed.

I said that it was very agreeable to hear that.  But I wondered how
they found out.

This is one of the major difficulties which the English winter presents
to a man who is used to blue skies.  It is always a problem to
distinguish between the kind of darkness that they call night-time, and
the other kind that they call day-time.  To the uninitiated, all
darkness looks about the same.

When he was told that the dawn had come, the man with the library book
blew out what was left of his candle, and went on reading in the
dark.

It grew later.  I got into conversation with the people around me. They
told me lots of things about the Royal Family things I had never heard
of before.  And I reciprocated by telling them all sorts of things
about General Smuts.  Things I am sure General Smuts had never heard
of, either.

By and by the wedding guests began driving down the Mall on their


way to Westminster Abbey.  They all looked very distinguished.
Maharajahs and Cabinet Ministers and peeresses and foreign ministers
and nobilities.

Afterwards a carriage-load of princesses drove slowly past.  I stepped
off the pavement, in between two policemen, and blew a platonic kiss at
the princesses.  One of them stuck her hand out of the window and waved
back at me.  But it was the wrong princess.  And before I could explain
the mistake namely, that I didn't mean her, but the one next to her,
with the black hair the carriage had passed on.

C'est la vie.

Came the Big Moment.  A spectacular climax of bursting colour and
tumultuous cheering and gilded carriages and Horse Guards in dazzling
uniforms... The King and Queen of England... I glanced swiftly at the
man with the library book.  He was still engrossed in his reading.  Not
once did he lift his eyes from the printed page.  I have often wondered
what he came to the procession for.

It was a very successful wedding.  There were no assassinations.

That's where England is different from a lot of countries.  If this
procession had been held in almost any other European capital, I
believe there would have been at least one assassination.  They would
have assassinated the man with the library book.

But I also felt there was something lacking, in respect of medieval
conceptions of largesse, in the sight of vendors of sausage rolls
hawking their wares among the subdued dusk to 10.30 throngs in Hyde
Park and Green Park and St.  James's Park.  There were no fat oxen
turning on spits at Marble Arch, with free chunks of meat for all who
came.

There were no mighty vats of nut-brown ale set up in Birdcage Walk.

Bring your own tankard.

At the Silver Jubilee I was on a Press stand.  But the view I got of
the procession wasn't up to much.  It was not nearly as good as the
view from the pavement.  And my fellow occupants of the stand were not
up to much, either.  They consisted of the lowly class of film
reviewers who attend the trade shows of 'quota quickies."  (At the
Press preview of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, the Tivoli Theatre was
packed to the doors.  But what surprised me was the absence of the
regular army of newspaper men who write up the films.  I saw hardly any
of them there.  Only afterwards the truth dawned on me: there had been
more Dirty Work in Fleet Street.  The editors and business managers had
collared the press tickets.)


But I obtained a good view of General Hertzog.  That was because he
held his head up very high.  Yet there was a strained look on his
face.

Perhaps he was trying to remember whether it was the Crown Colonies
that J. H. Thomas had promised to hand over to the Union, or whether it
was the Crown Jewels.

Perhaps General Hertzog was only homesick.

And I recalled another South African, who drove through London when
Victoria was Queen.  They still talk about him here.  What did he think
about, I wonder, when his carriage swung into St.  James's Street?
About a Bushveld farm, maybe, and the sun lying yellow on whitewashed
walls, and the big tree by the dam.  And yet I hardly think so.  I
think it is more reasonable to believe that Paul Kruger was pardonably
vain about his triumph.  And what he really thought was: "If only the
boys in the Rustenburg district could see me now."

It is in their passing that all the world's pageants are the same.  The
kings have gone, and the clamour has ended, and the sound of marching
men is dying in the distance.


leader OF gunmen part of it reads like fiction... The mastermind who
built up an organisation of gunmen; he inspired them with his own
recklessness and his own desperate courage; and then he flung them
against society.  Crime wave upon crime wave: they terrorised a nation.
Members of the police force got scared and resigned; the local judges
wavered, so a judge was specially imported from another province to try
them Justice Gregorowski, who had sentenced the Jameson Raiders to
death a quarter of a century before.

A gang leader who saw his followers go one by one to their doom.  They
were hanged, they were shot; they passed behind prison-bars with life
sentences;

their reason gave way and they were flung into asylums; or they died by
their own hand.  But their leader was not vanquished.  Undeterred he
set about creating another organisation: a motley assortment of
embezzlers, murderers, burglars, sneak-thieves, pimps.  He knit them
together with a cold purposemlness and a grim energy that was almost
Napoleonic in its quality a wild and inchoate Napoleon, who thought on
criminal lines and talked prison-slang.  And the first instalment
begins now.

To understand the conditions underlying the amazing sequence of events
narrated in this true-life story of criminal lawlessness on a super
scale, it is necessary to review briefly the state of affairs in South
Africa at the end of the Great War.

South Africa had had a stormy past.  The major portion of her history
has been concerned with conflict conflict between white man and native,
between Boer and Englishman.  Up to very recent years this racial
antagonism has found expression, regularly and spontaneously, in war.

Indeed the most conspicuous feature of South African history during the
past fifty years is the frequency with which its citizens have been in
arms:

1880-81: First Boer War 1896: Jameson Raid 1899-1902: Second Boer War
1915: Rebellion (General De Wet) 1922: Rand Revolt.


The Revolt on the Rand is almost forgotten now, because it failed. But
bombing airplanes, tanks and heavy artillery were employed in its
suppression, and more men were killed in it than through the whole of
Mussolini's Fascist revolution.  There have also been innumerable wars
with the natives.

Consequently, the men who have risen to greatness in the history of
South Africa have not been men of peace.  Shaka and Cetshwayo held
their thrones because they were killers.  The three prime ministers
since the Union Botha, Smuts and Hertzog have all owed their
prominence, initially, to their conduct of various phases of guerilla
warfare:

they have all three been generals.

Because they have seen their nation welded together in this fashion, in
turbulence, it has become traditional with the people of South Africa
to believe that an issue can best be clarified at the muzzle of a
rifle; it is part of their bitter heritage, the illusion that right is
on the side of him who can shoot quickest and straightest.

In 1914 Claude Satang, who plays the chief part in his story as gunman
and gang leader was a scout on active service in East Africa.  It does
not appear that Sergeant Satang was in any way different from any of
the thousands of young soldiers who had been drafted there.  His
ambitions were the ambitions of hosts of other normal young men of his
age.  He certainly had no dreams of becoming a gangster.

He was captured in 1917, near Killosa.  He escaped with two other young
men.  They passed through terrible hardships.  Two of them died.

The survivor was Claude Satang.  He was tougher than his companions.

But when the South African troops found him, they had to identify him
by his badge.  He had lost his memory.  So he was sent back to South
Africa.

Gradually in the hospital at Roberts Heights, near Pretoria, Claude
Satang's memory returned.  But with it there came also the frightening
knowledge that his outlook on life had altered.  He no longer had his
casual and easy-going acceptance of things as he found them.  In its
place was a bitter and unreasoning hatred of society.

He did not understand it at first this change that had come over him.

Later, he understood only too clearly.  But by then he was in a prison
cell  . Before him lay the years of the sentence he had to serve. 
Behind him was the most stupendous and incredible career of crime that
the world had ever known..  .


 Don t miss next weeks instalment of these Amazing Revelations of
Gangsterdom from the Inside.)

A young man who had been discharged as permanently unfit for further
war service in East Africa walked through the streets of a Pretoria
suburb.

He was Claude Satang.

In the near future this young man was going to wake up a nation.  And
it would be a rough sort of awakening: it would take place to the roar
of his gangsters' guns.  That was not yet, however.  For he had still
to collect his gangsters; he had to organise and drill them; but when
his task was completed he would have created a band of killer
desperadoes whose ruthless efficiency and big-scale slayings were to
stagger the African continent.

The following is a list of some of the more prominent members of the
Satang Gang.  Look out, here they come!

Cloete: actually ate a portion of a live associate; killed, murdered
and plundered; many escapes from prison under very difficult
circumstances.

Dolly de Klerk (Baby Face): specialised in killing detectives when
pursued.

Schwartz: killer; specialised in killing detectives when pursued.

Beauty Bell: recognised as the world's greatest bank robber and safe
blower

Gardner (alias Gee): killer and dope-friend.

Taffy Long and Lewis: killers, using machine-guns; captured only after
being cornered by strong military forces employing heavy artillery,
tanks and airplanes.

Dirk Joubert: professor of languages; published volume of verse widely
read; first-class killer, noted for numerous sensational escapes; chief
lieutenant.

Thus far they are only names.  Later we shall deal individually with
these gunmen of the Satang Gang, grim and profane swaggerers, uncouth
lords of death.  We shall explain how they fit into a story that is
stained with blood and wreathed in blue gunsmoke.

(The record of their careers is on file at the Pretoria Palace of
Justice.

It is a complete record, and includes the various dates on which they
were hanged or otherwise wiped out.)


It is desirable, at this stage, to draw a distinction between the
ordinary American gunman and the genuine African killer.

The American gunman is loudmouthed and flamboyant; he shoots often, but
seldom accurately; he hardly ever shoots a policeman; mostly he shoots
his pals; he accompanies every killing with a lot of bombast and
ballyhoo.  For instance, when Dion O'Banion got killed in Chicago, his
assassins sent flowers to his funeral.

This is where the African killer is different.  Descended from a long
line of tight-lipped Puritans and Calvinists, he doesn't understand
about things like flourishes.  He is a simple soul, not given to gaudy
gesture.

To the African killer, a killing means shooting a lot of holes into a
man.

Just that.  He is not concerned with making his killings look
ornamental.

All he is interested in is that they should be fatal.

At the moment, Claude Satang's brain was evolving a scheme.  It was an
ingenious scheme.  It was also comparatively innocuous.  But in its
method of approach and in the techniques of its execution was the
nucleus of many of Claude Satang's subsequent operations.

Incidentally, the project that Claude Satang was busy on bore a strong
resemblance to an O. Henry story.  In a way, perhaps, this was
surprising.

Because at this stage Claude Satang had never heard of O. Henry.  But
then we must remember that O. Henry had also been in prison, and that
it was behind the bars of a gaol in a Southern state that the Gentle
Grafter tales were conceived.  A prison cell seems to be a very good
place for writing stories.

Claude Satang had heard, casually, that in 1914, owing to the outbreak
of the war, less pennies were imported into South Africa from the
British mint than in any other year.  (That was before the South
African mint was established in Pretoria.) There was something about
this circumstance that appealed to Claude Satang's imagination.  He
could see possibilities in it.  The question was how to exploit it
properly.  And he thought he saw a way.  It was a big thing to pull
off.  But, handled properly, there would be big money in it.

Claude Satang spent the next few weeks in studying dates on pennies.

And he collected all that were dated 1914.  He entered into business
relations with an official in the City Treasurer's Department at
Pretoria.  He offered the official a small premium on as many 1914
pennies as he could supply.


The official took it on.  He wasn't actuated so much by the prospect
of gain which was very slight, after all.  Rather was it the singular
nature of the young man's request that intrigued him.  An earnest young
man with a crazy idea that he wanted 1914 pennies.

It was with an amused air that the official saw his clerks picking out
the 1914 pennies from amongst the thousands of coppers brought in daily
by the bus and tram conductors.  After a while he got very good at
spotting a 1914 penny.  He could tell a 1914 penny a long way off.

And all this time the official was taking the whole thing as a joke.

But one day he stopped laughing suddenly.

Claude Satang had collected a huge quantity of 1914 pennies.  He
believed that, of the pennies in circulation in Pretoria, the
proportion bearing the date 1914 had diminished perceptibly (taking
into account the small 1914 importation).  He was now ready for the
next move.

So he sent a number of his agents into the main street of Pretoria.

These agents called from shop to shop.  Their procedure was the same in
each case.  The shopkeeper was asked if he had any 1914 pennies.

Puzzled by this peculiar request, the shopkeeper enquired as to why the
agent wanted them.  The agent said that he would pay more for them than
their face value.  This invariably sent the shopkeeper to the till.

"I'm sorry, I haven't any," the shopkeeper would answer.

"What did you want them for?"

"I would pay you a pound each for them," was the agent's reply.

Or: "I've got two," the shopkeeper would say.

"Here's ten shillings for them," was the agent's response, "if you'll
let me have them."

That was all.

It was as simple as that.  If the shopkeeper had any 1914 pennies the
agent offered to purchase them at five shillings a piece.  If he hadn't
any, the agent offered him a pound.  Perhaps two pounds.  The result?

Before midday the main occupation of the citizens of Pretoria, the
capital of the Union of South Africa, was hunting for 1914 pennies. The
news spread like wildfire.  As soon as Claude Satang's agent had gone
out, the shopkeeper would call on a neighbour, only to discover that
the neighbour already knew about the 1914 pennies from another agent,
and sometimes he knew a lot more besides.

That they contained gold.  That they were worth several pounds apiece.
That the shopkeeper was feeling sick; he had sold three pennies


to a man who had got only half a crown each for them; he had been
swindled.  You could see 1914 pennies were different from others,
people said.  They were more yellow.  Or they were heavier.  Or they
had a clearer ring.  Anyway, they were different.

In the meantime Claude Satang thought of the jewellers.  A jeweller
would be able to say right away that there was no gold in the pennies.
Of course, that would not kill the rumours.  But it was advisable,
nevertheless, to devise a plan that would muzzle the jewellers for a
day or two.

Most of the jewellers were concentrated round one square in the city.

Claude Satang went into a jeweller's.  He produced a number of
pennies.

"In Johannesburg," he explained, "they are making these 1914 pennies
into brooches at ten shillings a time."

He gave the jeweller an order for a couple of brooches.  He also
dropped a hint to the effect that he believed there was gold in the
1914 pennies, and that that was the reason he had given the order.

The jeweller, anticipating many more lucrative orders for the same sort
of thing, was tactfully non-committal.  He wouldn't say definitely
whether there was gold in the 1914 pennies or there wasn't.  He wasn't
going to throw away good business.

Claude Satang was satisfied.  That was what he wanted.  If other people
came in to ask if there was gold in the 1914 pennies, the jeweller,
thinking of further orders for brooches, would remain tactful and
noncommittal.

This would have the effect of raising the public belief to a pitch of
absolute certainty.

That afternoon Claude Satang gave several orders for brooches.  And a
few days later, when the jewellers tumbled to the position, and
announced boldly that the 1914 pennies had no gold content, nobody
believed them.  People said this was merely a ruse on the part of the
jewellers to secure all the 1914 pennies for themselves.  The jewellers
got themselves into a lot of odium.  So did the bankers, for the same
reason.

The whole of Pretoria went mad, 1914-pennies-mad.  In pubs, on street
corners, in restaurants, in business offices, in the homes of the
people they talked of nothing else.  The wildest rumours blazed through
the city.  It was a crazy scramble.

And Claude Satang waited..  .

(To be continued.) (Don t miss next weeks startling inside Record of
Crime as it really happened.)


We regret to inform our readers that we are discontinuing our very
popular prison serial, Leader of Gunmen, owing to the constant
criticism that is being levelled at certain stark features of the
story.  As we pointed out in previous issues.  The Sunday Critic was
not actuated by any spirit of sensationalism in publishing a
description, for instance, of the manner in which a convict ate a
portion of his live cell mate.

It was our sincere hope that, by drawing public attention to the
debasing effects that prison life has on the strongest mind, we would
be able to exercise a powerful influence in the direction of prison
reform.

We believe that we have attained our purpose.

Consequently we feel justified in withholding from Sunday Critic
readers the final chapters of this serial which the Worlds Press News
has described as "strong meat for strong men", and that has evoked mild
shudders in many homes throughout Great Britain.

We therefore leave Claude Satang and his fellow gunmen in the African
bush.  We leave them still uncaptured.  We bid farewell to Cloete and
Baby Face de Klerk and Alee the Ponce still inside.  We depart from
these stern characters, in the evening, when the dusk is falling over
the thorn-trees and over the grim walls of the Pretoria Central Prison,
and in the cells the cigarettes are being lit, and the hashish smoke is
being passed around.

Fratres, valete.


rosser there was one convict in the prison that I saw at intervals on
parade.

His name was Rosser.  He was old and tall and dried-up.  He was also
morose.  He was doing time for murder.  I never saw him speak to
anybody.

On exercise he always walked grim and toothless and alone.

Other convicts told me about Rosser.  He was doing a very long stretch
for murder.  Nobody seemed to know exactly how long.  And it was
doubtful whether even Rosser knew any more.  With the years he had
grown soft in the head, they said.

It was a peculiar sort of murder, too, that Rosser was doing time for,
they explained.  It appeared that, suspecting his wife of infidelity,
he had murdered her on the Marico farm where they lived.  And he had
disposed of the body by burying it under the dung floor of the
voorkamer of the house.  So much was, perhaps, reasonable.  He had
murdered his wife, and the first place he could think of burying her
was under the floor of the living room.

He had filled in the hole again neatly and had smeared the floor with
nice fresh cow-dung.

But what made the judge raise his eyebrows, rather, was when it was
revealed in court that Rosser had held a dance in the same voorkamer on
the evening of the very day on which he had performed those simple
sacrificial and funeral rites whereby his hands got twice stained.

There was a good attendance at the Bushveld party, which went on a long
time, and several of the dancers afterwards declared in court that they
were very shocked when they lea mt that they had been dancing all night
on top of the late Mrs.  Rosser's upturned face.  It is true that a
number of the guests were able to salve their consciences to a limited
degree with the reflection that they had danced only the simple country
measures:

they had not gone in for jazz.  One girl said in court, "Oh, well, I
just danced lightly."

Nevertheless, the Rosser case provided the local dominee, who was a
stern Calvinist, with first-class material on which to base a whole
string of sermons against the evils of dancing..  .

The above, more or less, were the facts about Rosser's crime that I


was able to glean from fellow convicts.  But there were several
features that mystified me.

"But why did he do it?"  I asked a bluecoat.

"I mean, what did he want to go and throw a party for getting all those
people to dance on top of his wife's dead body?"

"It's just because he's got no feelings," the bluecoat said.

"That's what.  Just look at the way his jaw sticks out without teeth in
his head.

No feelings, that's what."

Another convict, again, would reply to the same question.

"Well, I suppose it was to get the floor stamped down again.  They
gives dances in the Bushveldjust to stamp the ground down hard."

A third convict would proffer the explanation, "Well, he was damned
glad his wife was dead, see?"

There was a distressing lack of uniformity about the answers I got.

And then it suddenly struck me that the convicts were, of course, all
going by hearsay.  Because, when I questioned them on that point,
individually, each agreed that he had never spoken to Rosser.  Not as
much as passed him the time of day, ever.  Rosser just wasn't the sort
of person you would ever take it into your head to talk to, anyway.

If Rosser's case was as horrifying as all that, I wondered, then why
did the Governor-General in Council reprieve him?  Why wasn't he
hanged?

That question, too, I once put to a fellow convict.  And the answer I
got surprised me not a little.

"I suppose," the convict said, "why Rosser was reprieved was because
the judge put in a recommendation for mercy because it was such a good
party."

In the end, there was nothing else for me to do about it.  I had to get
the facts from Rosser himself, at first hand.  I had to approach him
and talk to him, and put my question straight out.  That wasn't an easy
thing to do.  I had to screw up every nerve in my body to get so far as
to address him.  It took me a little while to work up enough guts to go
up to Rosser and say, "Hello.  How do you do?"  In fact, it took me
about two years.

And when I did get so far as to talk to Rosser, I realised that he was
quite harmless.  Only, because nobody had spoken to him for so many
years, it was with a considerable effort on his part that he was able
to enunciate any words at all.  And then, when he spoke, I had to turn
my face aside.  The way his jaw came up and the way his toothless gums

got exposed when he struggled with the unfamiliar thing of speech the
sight of it gave me an acute sense of disgust.  But, God knows, his
story was simple enough.

"I done my wife in with a chopper because she was sweet on another
man," Rosser explained.

"And I buried her under the floor and all.

And then what happens, but when I got everything clean again, a lot of
people come in with concertinas and bottles of wine and brandy.  It was
a surprise party.  And I couldn't say, "Look here, you can't hold a
surprise party in my dining room.  I just buried my wife here."  So I
just said, "Welcome, friends.  Come in and sing and dance."" So there
was not more to the whole thing than just that.

"And the man," Rosser went on, in his lewd-gummed wrestling with the
strangeness of words, "the man that I thought my wife was sweet on he
was the one that got the neighbours together and said, "Let us go and
have a surprise party at Rosser's place."  And all that night he was
looking for my wife.  But I dunno " "Dunno what?"  I asked with feigned
interest, for I was anxious to be off.  One conversation with Rosser in
a lifetime was enough.

"I dunno if my wife ever really was sweet on him," Rosser said.

"I

mean, now I been in prison fifteen years, I dunno.  Because I have
always been a much better-looking man than what that man is."


the bluecoat's story colourful conversation.  The way these old lags
talked, the blue coats and the near blue coats  Their vivid phraseology
sounded like poetry to me.

It was incredible that here, in South Africa, there was actually a
class of person who spoke an argot that was known only to his kind.
Boob-slang, they called it.  Boob, and not jug, being the Swartklei
Prison word for a prison.  The name for a warder was a screw.  You
never heard any other name for him.  Shoes they called daisies;
trousers, rammies.  A cell was a peter.

"I forgot it up in my peter."  For "the going is difficult" they would
say "the game is hook."  Or crook.  Or onkus.  They would have cliches,
like "The boys in the game are still the same."  And the queer thing
was that nobody outside of ex-convicts knew these expressions, while
the criminal class habitually spoke no other language.  And all this
was going on here, in South Africa, and I had lived to the age of
twenty years, and I had never known that there really was a world such
as this, here in our midst, with its own criminal parlance, and its own
terribly different, terribly mysterious way of life.

And the inside stories of burglaries... In house- and store-breaking
one man stays outside to keep watch the long stall they call him.  And
when the Johns come he tips his pals off.

"I was long stall when Snowy Fisher and Pap done that job in Jeppes.
And I piped what looks like two Johns coming round the Johnny homer.
And I gives them the office to edge it.  But something had gone hook
with the soup (dynamite).  The soup spills before they got it in the
hole in the safe (the dynamite exploded prematurely).  And so Snowy
Fisher comes out of the window, all right, with half his rammies burnt
off him, right into the arms of them two Johns.  But it's shutters for
Pap.  All of him that come out of the bank then was his foot, that got
blowed through the fanlight.  Pap never was no good with the soup.  He
always had his own ideas.  And one of the Johns pipes me and I starts
ducking for a fence, and I gets over it, with the John after me and who
do you think I nearly falls on to, on the other side of the fence?"

"The Governor-General?"  I guessed, facetiously, "Doing a spot of
illicit liquor-selling?"

"No, it wasn't the Governor-General.  It wasn't the Prime Minister,


neither.  Nor even the Minister for Posts and Telegrafts.  It was none
other than the One-Eyed Bombardier."

"You mean the Bombardier?"  I asked, "The one that works in the
carpenter shop?"

"Him," was the reply, "And he was all steamed up with dagga and he was
as calm as you please, relieving himself standing up against the fence,
not knowing that there was a job going on in that same block, and that
Pap had been blowed to hell and that Snowy Fisher was pinched and that
there was a John trailing me all out that very moment.

"So long.  Bomb," I shouts out, "I got to run."

"Wait till I finish, and I'll run with you," he says, "What's the
gevolt?"  But I got no time to tell him, what with the John's footsteps
coming nearer all the time, other side the fence.  So we beats it
through a dark passage the Bombardier and me, and a few minutes later
we hears bang-bang from the gun of the John that has just seen us
ducking into the opening of another passage.  And we runs a bit faster.
But we know also that we'll get away.  The John wouldn't let fly with
his shooter if he didn't know he couldn't catch up with us no more.  By
that time it's about three o'clock in the morning.

""Got anywhere to sleep?"  the Bombardier asks me when we goes along
the railway track on the way to Doomfontein, keeping all we can to the
dark places.  So I says to him, no, I can't go back to the pozzy I'm
sharing with Snowy Fisher and the late Pap.  Like as not the Johns is
already laying for me there.  Looks like I'll have to go in smoke.

"Well," the Bombardier says, "I know a good place where you can go in
smoke.

Where they won't never think of looking for you, neither."  So I says I
hope he don't mean the Rietfontein Lazaretto.  Because the Rietfontein
Lazaretto is out.  One time, yes, it was a good pozzy.  You just go
along and report your dose and the quack examines you and he says.
Okay, you're a danger to the public with that dose.  You better come as
a inpatient for treatment until we cures you.  That was all right in
the old days.  The Rietfontein Lazaretto was the best pozzy for going
into smoke in.  The Johns would never nose round there.  All the time
you're having a easy rest, lying on the flat of your back and getting
treatment for venereal disease that you've had ever since you slept
with Big Polly, what has already been dead for ten years, all this time
the Johns is wasting petrol and getting blisters on their feet looking
for you in Fordsburg or Vrededorp.  But the lazaretto is crook, now.
Since a detective head constable was took there for his dose.  This
John gets took there for treatment and what does he see but half a
dozen boys what has been in


smoke a long time doing a flit out the dormitory the moment he walks
in.

"So I says to the Bombardier that if he knows of a place where I can go
in smoke it better be a good place.  And it also better not be the
Rietfontein Lazaretto, or any kind of lazaretto, where a John with syph
can come walking in and me flat on my back with no chance to scale out
of the window.

But the Bombardier says, no, the place what he knows is a good pozzy to
go to smoke in.  It's on a farm, the Bombardier says.

"You know what a farm is, I expect?"  the Bombardier says to me,
looking suspicious, as though I had never heard of a farm.  So I told
him that I had growed up on a farm.  And that I never came to
Johannesburg before I was fifteen.

And that I was already turned seventeen before the first time I got
pinched.

I told him I wasn't like one of the Joburg reformatory rats that can't
stay out of reform school after they passed the age of fourteen.

"Look how many young blokes go to reformatory before they is fifteen,"
I says to the Bombardier, "That shows you what it is to be brung up in
a city, dragged up in the gutter, you might say.  But with me.  No,
chum, with me it was different.  I was brung up on a farm.  So I was a
long way past seventeen before the Johns nabbed me.  And then they
wouldn't have got me, neither, if one of my pals hadn't gone and
squealed on me.  No, what I says is, bring up a child in the city, and
he'll go wrong.  Look at me.  I been brought up on a farm.  And I smoke
dagga.  And I been twice warned for the coat.

And if I was brought up in a city, where would I be today, I'd like to
know?"  And the Bombardier says I would be a criminal, most likely,
seeing as how a child brought up in the city had got no chances at all
to learn honesty and a respect for the law.

"By this time we come to the top end of Siemert Road, just by the side
of the railway cutting, and we sits down on a piece of brown rock,
feeling safe, now, with the Johns the other end of town, taking Snowy
Fisher to Marshall Square and Pap to the mortuary.  And the Bombardier
takes a piece of paper out of his pocket and tears it into the right
size and then he pulls out some of the old queer and mixes some
cigarette tobacco with it, and in a few minutes we are sitting as happy
as you please on that rock, pulling away at the dagga-stop pie  It was
good dagga.  We both feels very honest.  Because in between the
Bombardier had let on to me that he was also brought up on a farm.  And
so we each tries to let the other see how much good it does one to be
brought up on a farm, and we each try to sound more honest and good
than the other one.

"I starts off by telling the Bombardier about all the times I done
tried to


look for a job of work.  There was twice that I could remember for
sure.  But there was another time, also, that I seemed to think I had
applied for a job, but I couldn't quite just remember, because I had
got that time mixed up with another time when I asked Alee the Ponce if
I could help him to live on the earnings of prostitution of some of the
trollops he was trailing around with.

But the Bombardier said that that showed you.  I had walked myself
black and blue, trudging the whole country, looking for a job of honest
work.  And that was because I had had the good fortune to have been
brung up on a farm.

Then we starts talking about all the times we had tried to reform.  We
found we had each of us tried a whole lot of times.  Me, at least
twice, again.  And the Bombardier more than three times.

"There was a time, too, when the Bombardier had gone about making a
clean breast of things.  A Salvation Army captain had spoke to the
Bombardier once, just before he was coming out of boob after his fourth
stretch, and the Salvation Army captain had said to the Bombardier to
go out that time and make a clean breast of it.

"Go out of the boob, my man," the Salvation Army captain says to the
Bombardier, 'and own up as you done wrong, and look the world in the
face."  But before the Bombardier can go on with his story, when he
passes me the dagga-smoke again, I remembers when a parson said the
same thing to me.  So I also decides right on the turn to go round and
make a clean breast of it.  That was one of the times in my life what I
told you about when I went to look for a job of work.  Not when I seen
Alee the Ponce about doing a spot of poncing, but the real first time
in my life when I went to look for a job.  I was forty two years old
then.  And this parson bloke had said to me, "Don't try and conceal
your past," he says, "For your past will catch up with you, and just
when you think you've pulled the wool over your employer's eyes, you'll
find yourself dropped in the muck."  I could see that this parson had
got the game pretty well measured up.  I never laugh at a parson.  I've
found as there is lots of things as a parson knows that you don't give
him credit for at the time and then afterwards you find if you had done
what he worked out for you you would have clicked.  I have even thought
perhaps when I get out of boob this time I can go to a parson and get
him to work out the lay of a crib for me.  Perhaps I can even go and
crack my next safe dressed as a parson.  Only, if I get pinched, Gawd,
how won't the boys in the awaiting trial yard rib me, me turning up
charged with safe-blowing, and in a parson's suit and with a round
collar and a hymn-book.  I can just picture a parson sitting in the
corner of a cell on his hymn-book, smoking dagga.


 But I followed that parson's advice.  I decided to go straight and to
work honest-like, and if the Johns come and try to put my pot on with
the boss, what a laugh they'll get when he knows my rep as good as the
Johns does.  So I looks in The Star situations vacant and I pipe a
advertisement, wanted, a caretaker for a ladies social club premises,
must be sober, light duties.  A skinny moll with specs opens the door
and gives me a dekko.

"I

suppose you'll do," she says, "You been drinking a lot, I suppose, on
your last job, and that's how they fired you?"  But I says, no, all I
had to drink in five years was prison-soup.  Soup with carrots in, I
says.

"Ho, so you are a ex-convict?"  she says, "Do come in."  She makes me
sit down and gives me a cup of tea.

"Is it really as dreadful in prison as what reports of it is?"

she asks, very inquisitive.  And I says, no, it's all right if you can
get a bit, now and again.  And a dagga stompie sometimes.  And on
Christmas Eves there is a concert, I says.  And on Sunday every month
you gets pepper in your stew.

"The skinny moll with the specs and the high collar gets real
interested.

"Tell me," she says, 'is it really as bad about the about the -I mean,
you didn't say a bit of bun, did you?"  Then I twigs, "Oh, that," I
says, 'missus, don't let that upset you, missus.  What you expect a man
to do, locked up night after night, and no women?  And that going on
for years.  Not even a kaffir-woman.  Or a coolie-woman pushing a
vegetable cart.  Not a smell of a woman.  For years and years.  Well, a
man is only human, ain't he?  You can't expect a man to be more than
what flesh and blood can stand, can you?  "And she said, no, she
thought not, and she said she was real worried, and she had been for a
long time, and the other molls in her club, also, about unnatural sex
acts as men gets up to, when they is locked away by themselves.  And I
says there is nothing unnatural about it, and I couldn't feel there was
anything unnatural about me, even though I am sure I have had more men
as what she has had women.  And she just shakes her head and says as I
can start right away, and have I told her everything.  So I remembers
the advice the parson bloke give me, and I come my whole guts, clean,
and I thinks, now if a John comes and blabs to my employer about my
previouses, won't that John get a earful.

"So I pulls my whole rep to the skinny moll.

"I been in boob seven times," I says, putting in a extra one for good
measure, in case the Johns come round and tells her I done six
stretches.

"And I smokes dagga," I says.

"And I am rotten with syphilis," I says.

"And I also wants to tell you'" But at that moment the bell rang, and
the exercise period was over, and so I had to fall in, without hearing
the rest of this bluecoat's story.  So I


never knew what the upshot was of his attempt at reformation, or
whether he did go into smoke on that farm.  The whole story ended just
like that, in mid-air, leaving him sitting on that stone near the
Siemert cutting, smoking dagga with the One-Eyed Bombardier.  But I
knew I could go back to him any time, and he would continue with that
story from the point where he had left off, if I had asked him to.  Or
else he would have told me a brand new story, starting just from
anywhere and ending up nowhere exactly like his own life was.  And what
was wonderful to me was the fact that any bluecoat, or any convict who
had served five or six fairly long sentences in prison, could tell
stories in exactly the same strain.  You don't go to prison, over and
over again, just for nothing.


tex FRASER9 s story one day, while we were still sitting peacefully
with our stone hammers, in calm convict rows, before we had started
extending the wall, a bluecoat, Texas Fraser, told me a little story
about a woman he loved.  I was really moved by this tale.

Tex Fraser was doing his second bluecoat.  He was a tall, thin man,
very emaciated looking.  His face was seamed with deep wrinkles.  And
he was toothless.  When he smiled he displayed two rows of empty gums.
And yet, when he spoke, there were times when I could picture Tex
Fraser as he had been in the old days, before he had done his first
coat.  He must have looked quite the lad, then, I should imagine, with
his shoulders set up very straight and tall, and a devil may care look
in his eyes.  (It is singular how in books novelists romanticise this
devil may care look, and how in real life girls fall for it.  But it is
only a criminal look.  Every criminal has got it, until he starts off
on his first bluecoat.) The story Bluecoat Tex Fraser told me, one
afternoon when we were seated side by side in front of a pile of
stones, and the warder was yawning in the sunlight, affected me a good
deal during the telling.  But afterwards I started getting doubts about
it.

"That was Maggie Jones," Tex Fraser said, talking sideways so that the
warder couldn't see too clearly that he was talking, "I dunno how I
come to fall for her.  She was a damn nice bit of skirt.  The
best-looking moll I'd set eyes on in years.  She was dark and her face
was long and thin, but smiley, if you know what I means, and her hips
was broad.  Well, I was working the hug in them days, and I was doing
good."

"What is the hug, Tex?"  I asked, also trying to talk sideways, so the
screw wouldn't jerry to me talking.

I felt, somehow, that when Tex Fraser said he was 'doing good', it
didn't mean that he was going about doing good in the Christian
charitable organisation sense.  I guessed that he was doing only
himself good.

"The hug?"  Tex Fraser repeated, "Well, there's something, now.  I
don't know as how I can explain it.  And I can't show you unless I'm
standing up, and you standing up, too, sort of half in front of me "


 Now, now, Tex, I said, facetiously, None of your homosexual
business.

Bluecoat Tex Fraser laughed.

"No," Tex Fraser said, "It's not like what you think.  The hug is very
heasy after you been showed a few times.  It ain't what you think. What
I means is as I can't show you here, where we is sitting down. But I'll
show you just before fall in.  You got to be standing up, and me,
too."

He demonstrated the trick to me, just before we got back into line, and
I could see it was very effective.  So much so that a warder,
witnessing the demonstration from a distance, and not knowing that it
was a friendly matter, blew his whistle and wanted to have Tex Fraser
charged before the Governor for 'attempting to rob a fellow-convict."
But there was no such charge on the book of regulations, it was
discovered.  For the reason that a convict has got nothing to be robbed
of.

Anyway, I lea mt then, that the hug consists of another man getting
hold of you from behind, when you are walking down a dark street and
preferably a bit drunk, too, although this is not altogether essential.
The man who puts the hug on you sneaks up from behind.  He throws his
right arm around your neck, from behind, and he rests his fingers on
your left shoulder, quite lightly.  At the same moment he sticks a knee
into the back of your left leg.  Then he's got you where he wants you.
If you start struggling he just rests the fingers of his right hand a
little less lightly on your left shoulder, thereby shooting his forearm
heavily in under your chin, making it go back higher than the stars and
making you feel you're getting strangled.  And all the time he's got
his left hand free, enabling him to go through your pockets more or
less like he wants to.

That, according to the way Tex Fraser demonstrated it to me on the
stone-pile, was the hug.

"So I done my dash with the sandbag," Tex Fraser was explaining, "I
made up me mind, there and then, that I wasn't going to do no more
sandbagging.

That was just before or was it just after?  - I met Maggie Jones.

Yes, there was a moll for you.  She was all moll, if you knows what I
mean.

Nothing off the shelf or the police informant about her.  And so I
decides to go straight, of course.  I won't go in for any game except
the hug, I decides.  All the crook stunts they can keep, I say."

"But why did you give up sandbagging?"  I asked, "I thought you were
doing quite well hitting people over the head with a sandbag?"

"It was because of that red-faced miner," Bluecoat Tex Fraser pursued,
"I was following him all the way down End Street.  I walked after him
out


of the Glossop.  I had a nice little sock on me, all neatly filled
with sand from a mine dump  We used to say, in the slogging game, that
for miners mine sand was the best, and that was in the days when miners
was getting over two hundred pounds in their pay cheques, end of each
month.  And this was the end of the month and I was follering this
miner down to the bottom end of End Street.  And all this time I don't
get a chance to slog him.  Every time I got the old sandbag raised, a
coloured person or a policeman or a liquor-seller comes past me in the
dark.  So I knows what it is going to be, and that it is going to
finish up as a roomer.  Afterwards the miner, who has had a lot to
drink and is staggering plenty, comes to a long row of rooms.  And all
this time I don't get a chance to slog without some goat showing up.
Then the miner turns in at a little gate and in at the door of a room.
I toddles in after him.  One time I was just going to cosh, but the top
of the doorframe gets in the way.  The game looks crook.  What you want
to pull a roomer for, when you can cosh a man in the street?  And this
miner goes and he lies right down on his bed, and I can see as how he
is single and lives in that room by himself.  I douses the glim and I
goes up to the bed.  The moon is shining through the window, partly,
and on to the bed, just where this miner's head is.  This time I got
him.  I hoists the old sandbag, and I brings it down, bash, right on
that miner's clock.  And what do you think happens?  The sandbag
splits.  Yes, it does a bust wide open, and the soft mine sand starts
trickling out of that bust sock, and flows all over the miner's face.
And he got a red face.  Even in the moonlight you can see how red-faced
that miner is.  And the sand starts flowing over his cheek and his
moustache, and he gets tickled.  And there, with me bending over him,
still holding on to a broken sandbag and the sand running over his
clock, tickling him, that red-faced miner bursts out laughing in his
sleep.

"So I ducks out of that room quick, without waiting to collect
anything, not even the sand out of the sandbag.  But I'll never forget
that feeling what I got.  Coshing that red-faced miner over the clock
with the sandbag, and all he does is burst out laughing.  All the way
down the street, as I ducked, I still hears that miner laughing.

"So I does me dash with the sandbag.  I goes in for the hug, instead.
And I am still doing the hug when I meets Maggie Jones.  Maggie thinks
at first as I works on the trams as a greaser.  But afterwards she
finds out through a John what comes up and pulls my rep to her, that I
works the hotels looking for miners with pay cheques that I puts the
hug on " It was a long story that Tex Fraser told me, the story of his
love for


Maggie Jones, and I am trying to find some way of condensing it.
Perhaps I should explain that it was an Enoch Ardenish sort of theme.

Anyway, Maggie Jones tried to reform Tex Fraser (that was before he had
got even his first bluecoat) and he had responded reasonably well, and
they were madly in love with each other, and she used to work in a
clothing factory down City and Suburban way, and she had a room where
he came to visit her, and she said she would always love him, and that
even if he found that he couldn't go straight, it wouldn't make any
difference to her (although her dream was to see him become an honest
man) and that whatever happened, she would always be his, if he went to
prison, even.

(How on earth, I wondered, could Maggie Jones have thought of so
remote, so utterly unlikely a contingency?) However long he got, he
would find her waiting for him, patiently and in chastity.  Whenever he
came out he had merely to find her: wherever she was, she would be
his.

One day the Johns got him.

"It was a miner what had over a hundred leaves on him.  But the Johns
jumped on me the minute I hands him the hug.  And it's seven years. And
I done most of them seven years.  I cracked a screw, that time I was
doing my stretch, and I didn't get mush remission.  But I knew Maggie
Jones would be waiting for me.  So I goes down to City and Suburban,
and they tells me Maggie is married more than five years, and she has
several kids, and her husband is a blacksmith, and she stays in Jeppes.
They gives me the address.  I finds my way there.  I know I only got
to say, "It's Tex," and she'll leave her husband and kids and house:
all just like that.  Just on the turn.  I knows Maggie.  I knows she
would of married that blacksmith just because she was sorry for him,
and the both of them lonely.  But just let her pipe little old Tex
Fraser.  Just once.  She's my moll.  My moll and no one else's moll.

"I finds the house.  It's half brick and half iron.  There's a little
path up to the front door.  And on both sides of the path is flowers.
And there's two little green curtains before the windows.  And in the
back I hear kids' voices.  And I says to myself that Maggie Jones is my
moll, all the same.

I just got to whistle, and she'll come running.  I just got to say,
"Maggie, this is Tex back," and she'll forget her husband and kids
right on the turn.

But as I goes up to the door I starts thinking.  Maybe this man she
married is only a blacksmith.  But he's given her this nice little
home.  And I knows as I can't ever give Maggie anything.  With me
she'll be on the lam all the time.  She'll have to be telling the
police all sorts of tales as to where I was night before last.  I can't
pull her out of this, I says.  And I gets to the


veranda, and right up to the front door.  But I don't knock.  I make
up my mind right away.

"And just as I am turning back the front door opens.  It's Maggie.  She
says she heard the gate creak.  She says that for months, now, each
time she hears the gate creak she thinks it's me.  And she comes up to
me with her arms out, and she says, "I've been waiting for you for
seven years.  I knew you would come."  But I pushes her away, oh, very
soft, and I don't say a word, but I walks out down the garden path, and
out of the little gate painted green, and I never looks back..  . And
to think as I never even kissed her."

I was moved by Bluecoat Tex Fraser's story, hearing it from his own
lips, there in the stone-yard, seated beside him with a pile of stones
in front of us.  Tex Fraser could see that I was touched by the
narrative, and what made me feel somewhat suspicious of the author's
sincerity was the fact that at the same time that he was keeping his
hammer going up and down, grasping it in his right hand, his left hand
was beginning to feel along the back of my legs: for I was sitting
close to Tex Fraser.

"Yes," the bluecoat added, "And I didn't never even kiss her."

His hand kept on travelling.  I got uneasy.

"Edge that, Tex," I said, shifting away.


jim fish he was an african from A kraal in the Waterberg, and he had
not been in Johannesburg very long.  His name was Mietshwa Kusane. That
was his name in the kraal in the Waterberg.  In Johannesburg he was
known as Jim Fish.  That name stood on his pass, too.  Since it is
Christmas, the season of goodwill, Mietshwa Kusana, alias Jim Fish,
comes into the story skulking a little.

In those days a black man didn't mind what sort of 'working name' he
adopted.  He had not come to Johannesburg to stay, anyway.  At least
that was what he hoped.  And while he stayed in the city, saving up
money as fast as he could to take back to the farm with him, he didn't
particularly care what name his employer chose to bestow on him,
provided that his employer handed over his wages with due regularity on
pay day.

Jim Fish had found work in a baker's shop in a part of the town known
as the Mai-Mai.  He lived in a shack behind the bakery, the proprietor
of which in this way received back as rent a not inconsiderable part of
his employees' emoluments.  Since his employees were also his tenants,
the owner of the bake house did not have to employ a rent-collector.

Afterwards, when Johannesburg took on more of the external
characteristics of a city, the owner of the bakery was to find that
this arrangement did not pay him quite so well, any more.  For the City
council began introducing all sorts of finicky by-laws relating to
hygiene.  In no time they brought in a regulation making it illegal for
the owner of a bakery to accommodate his native services on the bakery
premises.

The result was that, at a time when business wasn't too good, the owner
of the bakery found himself with a municipal health inspector on his
pay-roll.  Afterwards it was two health inspectors.  And they came
round every month for their rake-off like clockwork.  Because of this
increase in his overheads the bakery proprietor had been reluctantly
compelled to cancel an advertisement that he had been running in a
religious magazine for a long time.  It was purely a goodwill
advertisement, bread being a staple commodity that didn't require
advertising.  But on the following Sunday the baker who was also a
sides man had to listen to


a sermon on the evils of avarice.  He knew the parson meant him, of
course.  But he had cancelled the ad that for years had been the church
magazine's mainstay.  But there were moments, in the course of the
sermon, when the baker could not, in his sinful mind, help associating
words like 'cupidity', 'selfishness' and 'money-grubbing' with those
two municipal health inspectors.

Jim Fish's main work at the bakery consisted of helping his black
colleages there were quite a number of them to carry in the sacks of
meal and to clean the mixers of yesterday's dough.  (The mixers were
cleaned, quite often, in spite of what quite a lot of bread-consuming
citizens might have thought, going by the taste.) He had also to carry
the pans to the oven, and to help stoke the fires, and to help pull out
the baked loaves with long wooden scoops.  Because Jim Fish was black,
that was about as far as his duties went.  The white men on the night
shift were there in a supervisory capacity.

There had been one or two nights, however, when Jim Fish and his
black-skinned colleagues had, through the machinery breaking down, to
perform certain additional duties that brought them into somewhat more
intimate contact with the ancient rites of bread-baking.  On those
occasions that particular bakery's proud boast that its products were,
from start to finish, untouched by human hand, was only literally
correct, in the sense that it excluded human feet.  Strict adherents of
the school of thought that places the coloured races outside the pale
of humanity as such would in this situation find themselves in
something of a dilemma.  For it would not be human hands or feet, but
just the feet of niggers that kneaded the dough, in long wooden
troughs, at those times when the electric power at the bakery failed.

The white supervisors would be in a state of nerves, all right, on a
night when there was mechanical trouble.  They would be all strung up
hysterical and panicky, almost, like ballet-dancers.

"Hey, you, go and wash that coal off your feet before you get into that
trough," the night foreman would shout at a nigger.  And at another
nigger the night foreman would shout, "Hey, you black sausage don't you
bloody well sweat so much, right into the kneading trough and all."

For it is a characteristic of any person whose ancestors have lived in
Africa for any length of time that he does sweat a lot.  Whether he's a
nigger, or a white Dutch-speaking Afrikaner, or a white
English-speaking Jingo from Natal, if his forebears have resided in
Africa for a couple of generations he sweats at the least provocation. 

Readers of Herodotus will recall that that great historian and
geographer said the same thing about the Nubians of his time.

Because he was a simple soul, Jim Fish was, taken all in all, happy in
his work.  If he were asked by an American newspaper correspondent, or
by an earnest inquirer delegated to the task by a UNO committee (UNO
being in those days as much of an anachronism as nylons), Jim Fish
would probably have confessed that he was deserving of one shilling and
sixpence extra on a night when the bread-making machinery did not
function as it should.  The one shilling and sixpence would be to cover
all that extra work he had in treading, Jim Fish would explain, marking
time, left right, left right, to explain.  And also to recompense him
for all that trouble he took in cleaning himself, washing his legs and
feet and toes in hot water.  No, not when he got into the kneading
trough.  He never worried much about that, Jim Fish would declare,
truthfully.  It was when he had to get the sticky white dough off him
afterwards.  There was a job for you, now.

The real trouble about his job at the bakery, Jim Fish, alias Mietshwa
Kusane, would confide to the correspondent of an American newspaper was
the fact that it was nearly all night work.  He didn't mind the pay so
much.  That was all right.  Even after he had paid his rent and he had
bought mealie-meal and goat's meat and such odds and ends of clothing
as he needed, he was still able to save quite a bit, each month.  This
was a lot more than most white wage or salary earners were able to do,
incidentally.  All that happened to white people who worked for a boss
was that they got deeper into debt, every month.  Jim Fish would admit
that he was saving, here in the city of Johannesburg.  But he needed
every penny he could scrape together.  All the money he saved in
Johannesburg had to go in lo bola when he got back to the kraal. Lobola
was the money he had to pay some girl's father, so that he could get
that girl as his wife.  It wasn't any particular girl that Jim Fish was
thinking about, of course.  Practically any girl belonging to his tribe
would do.

As long as she could bear him children, and work for him, planting
mealies and hoeing in the bean-fields, and bringing him a clay pot full
of beer when he called him lying in the sun in front of the hut, and
following the sun around.  And maybe afterwards, if he came to
Johannesburg again, and worked for the bakery for another season, he
would even be able to buy a second wife, having enough money for
another lo bola  And then his children would be able to work for him,
too, the children of the first and his second wife and the children
of


this third wife, too, if he went to Johannesburg that often to make
money to save up for lo bola  And who he would also have to work for
him would be quite incidental children, that weren't his own, even, but
that one or other of his wives begot by some other nigger man while he
himself was in Johannesburg, working in the bakery.

That was a laugh on that other nigger man, all right.

It couldn't be too pleasant for that other nigger man, carrying on with
Mietshwa's wives, and all that, in Mietshwa's absence, when what would
happen out of it would be that that nigger man's children, by
Mietshwa's wife, would end up by working for Mietshwa: tending his
cattle for him, if they were boys; planting beans and kaffir-corn for
him, if they were girls.

And if it turned out that the child of Mietshwa's wife conceived while
Mietshwa was working in Johannesburg wasn't the child of another nigger
man at all, but was the child of the white missionary at the Leboma
mission station, then it would be a laugh on the white missionary,
right enough.  For that child would be lighter of skin than its
brothers and sisters.  Instead of its having a complexion like
boot-polish, the missionary's child by Mietshwa's wife would be dark
lemon in colour, with its hair less peperkorrel than the average
negro's and in the cast of its features there would be a couple of
European traits.  Consequently, that child would receive special
privileges at the mission school and would be educated to be a
school-teacher, or maybe even higher than a school-teacher, so that
Mietshwa would be good for at least a pound a month from that child,
whose education had cost him nothing.  No wonder, therefore, that many
a missionary walks about with an embittered look.

Late one night Mietshwa Kusane, alias Jim Fish, came away from the
bakery with a deep sense of inner satisfaction.  He felt he was
somebody, and no mistake.  For the mixing machine had broken down
again.

And this time he had been set to tread the dough in a confectionery
trough.  Not the dough for plebeian quartern loaves and twist loaves
and standard brown loaves.  But he had walked up and down, left right,
left right, in a trough that had chilled eggs, even, mixed with the
flour and water and yeast.  Left right, left right, he was kneading,
with his feet brown on top and pinkish between the toes the dough for
slab cake and cream cakes and (with a few sultanas thrown in) for
wedding cakes.

The night foreman had noticed that, last time there was trouble with
the mechanised equipment, Jim Fish had seemed to sweat somewhat less


than the other niggers.  And that was how Mietshwa got promoted to the
confectionery trough.  What the night foreman didn't notice was the
effect that this unexpected promotion had on Mietshwa.  Because he had
been picked out for the unique honour of treading the dough in the
confectionery container, Mietshwa suddenly started thinking that he was
a king.  A great king, he thought he was.  And he started chanting in
the Sechuana tongue a song that he had made up about himself, in the
same way that any primitive African makes up a song about himself when
he finds that, by chance, he is standing first in a line of
pick-and-shovel labourers digging a ditch, or, if it's a gang of
railway labourers moving a piece of track and he happens to be walking
in front.

And so that night, having been selected to tread the dough in the
confectionery trough because he sweated less than other niggers,
Mietshwa really let himself go.  He felt no end proud of himself.

"Who is he, who is he, who is he?"  Mietshwa chanted, going left right,
left right, in double quick time,

Who is he chosen by the Great White Man To walk fast in the fine meal
with the broken eggs in it?

Who is he but Mietshwa?  Who is he but Mietshwa Kusane whose kraal is
by the Molopo?

Who is he, the Mighty Trampling Elephant, elephant among elephants, He
with his feet washed clean in carbolic soap?

Who is the Mighty Elephant with his feet washed clean With the thick
white bubbles coming out of The red carbolic soap the White Man's red
carbolic soap?

Who is he but Mietshwa Kusane whose kraal is by the Molopo?

Who is he that treads heavier than the rhinoceros The rhinoceros with
his feet washed in the water from the White Man's faucet?

Who is he that treads with his feet washed cleaner than the White Man's
feet?

Treading out white flour and yellow, stinking eggs and yeast That is
the beautiful food of the White Man?

Who is he but Mietshwa Who is he but Mietshwa Kusane whose kraal is by
the Molopo?


Inspired to unwonted exertions by his singing, Mietshwa was making a
first-class job of treading that dough.  When the night foreman looked
again, Mietshwa was leaping up and down in the tub.  One hand was
raised up to the level of his shoulder, balancing an imaginary
assegai.

His other arm supported an equally imaginary raw-hide shield.  What
were not fictitious were the pieces of dough clinging to his working
pants and shirt and even to one side of his neck.  The night foreman
was not a little surprised to see a nigger performing a Zulu war dance
in a kneading trough at that time of the night.  Especially when those
white splashes of dough could have passed as war paint.

"None of that, Jim Fish," the night foreman called out impressed, in
spite of himself, "Get on with your work."

One of the other Natives guffawed.  But it was his work, this Native
thought.  In prancing up and down like that, in the dough, Mietshwa was
only doing his work.  And here was the boss angry with Mietshwa about
it.  Surely, the ways of the White man were strange.

It was only a little later that the night foreman noticed what other
effect the violent exercise had had on Jim Fish: he was sweating like a
dozen niggers; the sweat was pouring off Mietshwa as though from a
shower bath.  Which was something that Mietshwa had never had in his
life a shower bath or any other kind of a bath.

This time the night foreman swore.

"Get out of that tub, you black son of a bitch," he shouted.

"That's for cake for White people to eat, you bloody- Look at all the
sweat running off your- backside into White people's cake."

Mietshwa's was a temperament that was easily cowed.  In a moment the
sound of the night foreman's voice had changed him from a bloodthirsty
warrior to a timid Bushveld thing trying to escape from a trampling
rhinoceros among rhinoceroses.  In a split second he was out of the tub
and halfway across the bakery floor towards his kaya in the back
yard.

He had to return to the tub, however.  The night foreman saw to that.

The night foreman also saw to it that Mietshwa scraped all the dough
off his feet and other parts of his person, and stuck it back where it
belonged.

"Trying to make off with half the confectionery dough sticking to him,"
the night foreman said to the mechanic who was working at the motor,
working to get it started again.  Then the night foreman addressed
Mietshwa once more.


 Cha-cha, he shouted.  Inindaba wena want to steal wet meal, huh?

Come on, put it all back.  That lump between your toes, too.  It's for
the cake for White people to eat.  You meningi skelm, you."


A visit TO shanty town situated on the slope of a hill ten miles
outside the City of Johannesburg is a township whose expanding
dimensions should soon entitle it to the prestige of being termed a
city, also. At present it is known as Shanty Town.

Shanty Town today contains several thousand shacks, each consisting of
a rough framework of poles covered with sacking and each housing a
native family.  Here let it be explained that our visit took place in
bright sunshine.  It was a pleasant morning and as far as the writer
was concerned the visit was not made in any spirit of sociological
crusading, which seems to demand of the individual a preconceived
righteous indignation against the existing economic order so that
whatever is experienced and observed gets fitted into appropriate and
ready made emotions.

Consequently, where this picture of actual conditions in Shanty Town
may appear to fall short will be in respect of its deliberate avoidance
of the obvious.  Stories of squalor, told with a consistent drabness,
in grey shadows unrelieved by the light of imagination, tend, in their
ultimates, to pall.  The heart gets tired of the same old note struck
over and over again.  It is not in human nature for one's feelings to
be kept at the same pitch of human intensity whether the feelings are
of pity or of righteous wrath all the time.  There is such a thing as
tedium.  And if it is not polite to yawn at a platitude, it is, at all
events, natural.

For this reason this article will be confined to an objective
description of an interesting little town, healthfully situated on a
hillside, and it will be left to the reader to make his own comments,
such as "Dastardly" or "Delightful", depending alike on his own
subjective reactions and his capacity for reading between the lines.

What first struck the writer, who has considerable practical knowledge
of constructive engineering, was that two distinct types of building
material are employed in the erection of the shanties.  Most of the
residential abodes are covered with mealie sacks.  A few and these
belonging obviously to the more aristocratic section have their walls

and roofs constructed of sugar pockets bearing the trademark of
Messrs.  Hulett.  Close examination shows that the hessian in a sugar
pocket is officer texture and better woven than that in a mealie bag
and is consequently a superior building material.  It keeps out the
elements better.

Each shack is numbered in some dark-coloured paint.  These numbers run
into thousands, thereby affording a rough and ready means of computing
the population of the place.  It also makes it easier for the postman
on his rounds to deliver correspondence and newspapers.  One does not
imagine that the residents of Shanty Town get troubled much with
tradesmen's circulars, however.  Although an enterprising house agent
can, if he so desires, strike an incongruous note by circular ising the
area with printed literature about "Why Pay Rent?  Let Us Show You How
to Build Your Own House."

There is little about these hessian covered shacks that is in conflict
with the fundamental laws of architecture, which are that a building
should be planned in accordance with the purpose for which it is
required, that it should carry no ornamentation that is outside of this
purpose and that its design should be guided by the type of material
that is employed.  From an aesthetic point of view the architecture of
Shanty Town can therefore be described as not undignified.  About none
of these shacks is there that false attempt at drama that makes Park
Station an eyesore.

And when a native woman told us that she was suffering from chest pains
as a result of her hut having been drenched during the recent rains,
and that most of the people there were suffering from various illnesses
contracted through sleeping under soaked blankets, her complaints were
not based on artistic grounds but on the simple scientific fact that
sacking is porous and lets in the water in the rainy season.

But from the point of view of pure architecture there is not much wrong
with these dwellings.  The washed-out yellows of the hessian roofs and
walls blend prettily with the grass of the South African veld in
mid-winter.  Washed-out yellow against bleached fawn.  Pretty.  And
veld-coloured huts built close to the soil seem much more appropriate
for South African conditions than skyscrapers and blocks of flats.  The
shacks in the main street of Shanty Town seem to express the true
spirit of Africa in a way that the buildings ofEloff Street do not.

But all these things are merely by the way.  For that matter one feels
that if a number of Kalahari Bushmen were brought to Johannesburg on a
visit to a fashionable block of city flats they would go back to the


desert with strong feelings about the white man's degradation.

"Like living in an ant-hill," they would say, "Squalor,"

"Unhygienic."

"Like pigs."

"And you ought to see some of those pictures they hang on their walls..
. just too awful."

What was most interesting about Shanty Town was the human side.

One felt in the place the warmth of a strong and raw life.  Deplorable
though their economic circumstances were, there was about these men and
women and children a sense of life that had no frustration in it.  A
dark vitality of the soil.  An organic power for living that one
imagined nothing in this world could take away.  Was there anything
about us, about this party of white visitors, that the residents of
Shanty Town could genuinely envy?  In our hearts the answer was, no.

The replies that the natives returned to our questions were prideful.

Their attitude was a lesson in breeding.  They resented our presence,
in the way that any proud person resents the intrusion into his affairs
of curiosity or patronage.  And they received us with that politeness
that shames.  We wanted to know what had happened to Mapanza, the
headman who had fought against the humiliating introduction of soup
kitchens, and they informed us, with grave dignity, that "he was not
there."

Although everybody knew, what we subsequently lea mt from a police boy,
that Mapanza was in gaol.

Whatever information we got we received from the police boy: from the
side of the authorities and not from the side of the residents.  And
when we left, a native woman asked us if we were going to send
blankets.

It was a perfect snub, whose imputation could not be lost even on the
most obtuse.  A duchess could not have administered it better.

Whatever ill effects detribalisation may have had on the natives, it
has done nothing, judging from what is happening in Shanty Town, to the
stateliness of their aristocracy.  Living under what are nothing less
than ghastly conditions, deprived apparently of even the barest
necessities of human existence, the inhabitants of Shanty Town are
displaying, in the face of adversity, a sublime courage that goes far
beyond questions of economics and sociology.

If life is spirit, what the natives of Shanty Town bear about them is
not poverty but destiny.


old cape slave relics the other day, in an antique shop, I saw an
article of furniture that was obviously a museum piece.  It was an old
Cape chair with dowel pins less than an eighth of an inch in diameter,
and the mortise and tenon joints as solid as when the chair was
constructed over a century ago.  I was much impressed.  Then I read, on
the dealer's tag attached to the chair by a comparatively new piece of
string, these words, "Old Cape Slave Chair."

Well, well, I thought.  Old Cape Slave Chair.  Fitted with a neck rest
and side supports for the elbows, it was an ideal piece of furniture
for the Old Cape Slave to relax in every morning after breakfast.  This
chair just showed you, all over again, that there was a certain
spaciousness, a measure of refinement pleasing to good taste, about the
way they lived in the Western Province about the turn of the eighteenth
century.

That way of life has departed for ever.  And that Old Cape Slave Chair
seems to epitomise, somehow, that spirit of vanished elegance, that old
world charm that has passed away.

And while musing thus on the bygone splendours of an age that enriched
us with thick-walled gabled dwellings and gracious legends and
hippopotamus hide sjamboks, I felt that it would be very nice indeed if
some Africana enthusiast were to retrieve from the loft of some Old
Cape House a few more eighteenth century relics that would serve to
remind us of our cultured past.

An Old Cape Slave Embroidered Waistcoat, for instance.  There you would
have something, now.  The lace and gold facing would be sewn on to the
brocade with long stitches: you would be able to see from the
insultingly inferior quality of needlework that those were indeed the
bad old days when just about any sort of embroidered waistcoat was
considered good enough for the Old Cape Slave.

And how about an Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair?  That would find a place
of honour in any museum.  We don't use that type of conveyance any
more.  But I can readily conceive of what an Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair
would look like.  The handles would be all right, encrusted with


jewels, and all that sort of thing: and they would be sumptuously
padded, making it easy for the owner of the estate to carry the Old
Cape Slave down to the plantation to work every day.  But from the
interior furnishings of the Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair you would be
able to recognise the fact that those were indeed the days of slavery.
There would be just a coarse horsehair cushion to sit on, and in place
of a curtain a strip of undyed hessian would flutter from the window
opening.  All this would serve to make it clear to you as to how
unenlightened that past age was really.  Nothing was too good for the
boss: the handles had to bejewelled and padded because they made
contact with his aristocratic neck and illustrious shoulders.  The Old
Cape Slave had to put up with a horsehair cushion and a piece of
sacking for a curtain.  He simply had no status.

Why, they wouldn't carry a mine native to work today, seated on a
horsehair cushion.

It is hard to keep one's temper when one reflects on some of the more
disagreeable features that skulked behind the imposing facades of
gentility and refinement that appeared to constitute the order of
things in the Old Days at the Cape.

I have made mention in a previous article of the keen competition in
the curio and antique trade today for Old Cape prints and Old Cape
fittings.

We make those things no more.  The factories of the post-Industrial
Revolution have put an end to the highly skilled craftsmen turning out
the products of his trade by hand.  The machine has swept all that
away.  And I am pleased that Old Cape relics are today held in such
high esteem.

But the Old Cape Slave has so far been somewhat neglected.  And it is
nice to think that he is at last coming into his own.  I feel that the
Old Cape Slave Chair I saw in an antique shop the other day is opening
up a number of splendid and hitherto unexplored possibilities.  We all
know about an Old Cape Slave Bell.  There are lots of them about.  More
rare is the Old Cape Slave Chain.  This is a formidable affair, and
rather frightening.  The links are solidly fashioned out of a yellowish
metal, and the Old Cape Slave was even proud to wear his Chain on
Sundays:

it dangled cumbrously from the lower part of his Old Cape Slave
Embroidered Waistcoat, the links flashing in the sun.

I am sure that there are still lots of Old Cape Slave souvenirs waiting
to be discovered by collectors in Old Cape lofts.  An Old Cape Slave
Dinner Service, for instance, should command more than passing
interest.

And what about an Old Cape Slave Suitcase?


I feel that a very romantic story could be woven around the Old Cape
Slave Suitcase.

"I have borne your arrogance and your meanness and your pretty
larcenies long enough," the Old Cape Slave would say to Hendrik
Terreblanche, the Old Cape Slave-owner.

"I have packed my suitcase and I am off."

"But you can't do that," the eighteenth century Cape Slave-owner would
answer.

"Or if you must go, won't you at least stay on until the end of the
month?"

"A slave does not work on a month to month basis," the Old Cape Slave
would reply with icy dignity.

"I have packed my suitcase and I am going.  "Fare you well, Simon
Legree."

"But you got me all wrong," the Old Cape Slave-owner would reply.

"You got me mixed up with the Southern cotton plantations.  You're
talking nineteenth century liberation propaganda.  If you walk off like
that, carrying your suitcase and all, you'll be betraying a whole
epoch.

Be your age, man."

Thus appealed to, in the historical realisation of the fact that the
honour of an entire era was at stake, the Old Cape Slave would put down
his suitcase in the shade of an Old Cape Slave Oak-tree and, seizing
the hand of Hendrik Terreblanche in a manly grasp, he would proclaim,
"Never will I desert you.  I shall never go down in history in obloquy.
I would rather go in a ricksha.  I refuse to walk out of the eighteenth
century, carrying a suitcase.  Toujours, 1'esprit de corps!"

"Noblesse oblige," Hendrik Terreblanche would answer simply, the tears
starting to his eyes as he crushed the Old Cape Slave's fingers in a
vice-like grip.  After that he would trip up the Old Cape Slave and
kick him a number of times in the stomach and ribs.  And for quite a
long while after that he would be jumping up and down on the Old Cape
Slave's face.

Done on the stage, this should be a very moving finale, with the
curtain falling to slow music.  A stage play on these lines, with the
title Saving a Century or The Honour of the Eighteenth, should prove
very successful, especially if some tie-up could be effected with
Bradman's eighteenth century in first-class cricket or with one of
Gordon Richard's more outstanding turf triumphs.

It is possible that present day taste may recoil somewhat from the
realism of the climactic scene, on the score that while it is certainly
very lifelike, it errs in respect of being too robust.  But I think
that the necessary adjustments could be made quite readily.  Thus, if a
company


were touring the smaller towns of the Free State high veld the more
virile ending to the play, n Ecu van Ondergang Gered, could be safely
retained.

On the other hand, if the play is produced in amateur circles by Form
Four convent girls, for instance at the moment when Hendrik
Terreblanche and the Old Cape Slave shake hands the slave-owner's
little daughter could walk on to the stage with a pretty, mincing gait
and bearing, clutched in her arms, a copper eighteenth century
coal-scuttle filled with assorted fruits.  Tableau.

Another light touch that could also be introduced in the last scene,
and should go down well with the audience, would be to arrange, the
instant the Old Cape Slave puts down the suitcase, for a couple of
silver spoons, bearing Hendrik Terreblanche's monogram, to drop out.

The stage props should consist of genuine period furniture and fittings
that may be had on loan from the antique dealers.  All the Old Cape
Slave stuff may then be trotted out.  Everything from an Old Cape Slave
Dinner Wagon to an Old Cape Slave Antique Cabinet.


witpoortjie falls about fifteen miles from Johannesburg, on the way to
Krugersdorp, is Witpoortjie, the railway halt for a natural beauty spot
which for over half a century has been the regular resort of picnickers
from Johannesburg and the West Rand.

Among my earliest childhood recollections is an outing to Witpoortjie
in the company of my parents and some relatives and a number of
friends.  I remember that the party included two gentlemen with
prominent cheekbones who carried bagpipes.  I thought of, and referred
to, these gentlemen as Scotchmen.  It was only years later that I lea
mt that they were, in reality, Scots.

I was also impressed very vividly by the waterfall, which for a long
time afterwards I tried to make drawings of in coloured crayons.  Those
were better crayons that one can get today.  And I believe that those
drawings, too, were better than anything I can do now.

And I remembered also for a long time afterwards how a bottle of whisky
got broken on a boulder.  One of the Scotsmen broke it when he was busy
pulling out the cork, and the whisky flowed away along the side of the
boulder and into the grass.  My youthful mind was not able to
distinguish readily, in action in which an adult was involved, between
accident and design.  And so I thought that the gentleman with the
bagpipes had broken the bottle on purpose.  What lent colour to this
belief was the way in which the other gentleman with the bagpipes spoke
about it, enquiring of his fellow musician as to what the hell he
wanted to go and do that for now.

He said many other words, also, and he spoke for a considerable while,
and it was only after everybody had had several turns at explaining to
him that there were ladies present, and also children above the age of
two, that he grew quieter and contented himself with kicking the
crockery about that had been stacked on a white cloth spread on the
grass.  The cups and saucers and plates had all been piled on one spot,
so that it was easy for him to kick the whole lot around without having
to walk much.

I have often thought, since that picnic at Witpoortjie, that Scotsmen


could also swear better in those days than they can now.  In the
important ways the world is not what it used to be.

The other day, in a party of three, I revisited Witpoortjie.

From the railway station a footpath leads over rough ground to the foot
of two tall koppies, separated from each other by a narrow ravine that
winds away through rocky vastnesses to a waterfall of not unimposing
dimensions.  A stream of water flows through Witpoortjie all the year
round.  And through the slow millenniums this stream, assisted by the
elements and seasonal flood times, has eroded its course down to its
present level, so that the person who treads the footpath in the deep
valley between the koppies walks in the shadows of precipitous crags
that have been eaten out by the quiet waters that he scoops up to make
tea with.

From the station to the entrance to the poort is a walk of about
thirty-five minutes.  That is, it takes the holiday-maker thirty-five
minutes to traverse the distance from the station to where the more
exuberant scenery starts.  But the return journey is different.
Refreshed from a day in the open air, invigorated with the play of the
wind on his body and the sun on his brow, when he strides back from the
mouth of the gorge to the station the visitor to Witpoortjie rarely
does the distance in under three hours.

For the geologist Witpoortjie is a source of unending interest.
Students from the Witwatersrand University go there every year to make
notes about the rock formations.  Now and again the professor in charge
of the students loses his way there, and when evening comes the
students make their way back to the station, alone, singing their
college songs, and the professor gets rescued, a year later, by the
next geological expedition from Wits.

There is one place in the poort where a colossal pile of rocks looms
ominously overhead, and where the footpath leads over a mountain of
debris which the eye of even the untrained geologist can identify as
being the result of a recent fall.  Recent, that is, geologically
speaking.

At all events, the debris did not seem to bear signs of more than ten
thousand years of weathering.  And it looked doubtful whether the
overhanging crags would stay in position, like that, very long.  I gave
those overhanging crags another fifteen thousand years, at the outside.
I went through that part of the poort quickly, geologically speaking.


It was about here, where the ravine was at its narrowest, and the road
seemed all but impassable even to the pedestrian if being a pedestrian
includes wading through mud at ankle deep and clambering on all fours
over boulders it was at this stage that one of us mentioned the fact
that a party of Voortrekkers had taken their wagons through Witpoortjie
on their way to the Northern Transvaal.  Whatever admiration I had
entertained for the Voortrekkers until that moment was nothing compared
with the feeling that overwhelmed me when the full import of my
friend's statement sank into my consciousness.  Was there nothing they
did not dare, these sturdy pioneers, intrepid in their perseverance,
dauntless in their faith?

No doubt they felt that the strength of their trek-chains that had not
failed them over a thousand miles of veld, from the Western Province of
the Cape to the Witwatersrand, would stand them in stead through
Witpoortjie, also.  But it must have taken each wagon about a week to
get through.  Whereas if they had gone a couple of miles east or west
they could have travelled over level veld.  Indeed, they must have gone
considerably out of their way to have found Witpoortjie at all.

I came to the conclusion that the Voortrekkers must have been just a
shade too consciously rugged in carrying out their pioneering
mission.

I could not help but feel that they realised they were creating history
and that it was expected of them to do it the hard way.

And viewed from the perspective of history, there is no doubt that the
Voortrekker was right.  There was not much prestige about taking the
short cut to the Limpopo across flat and open country.  Anybody could
do that.  The trail of the Voortrekker had to lead through the gorges
of Witpoortjie, even if it meant a detour of several hundred miles to
get there.

We can imagine the look of exultation on the face of the leader of that
pioneer band when the last ox-wagon, battered from its toilsome
journeying over giant boulder and through muddy stream, rolled heavily
on to level ground.

"That was a good piece of work, kerels," we can hear the leader of that
party of Voortrekkers saying.  And it was, of course.  It was a feat of
pioneering courage and determination, and as such it was
unforgettable.

There was only one way in which they could have improved on it.  They
could have taken off the wheels and carried their wagons over the top
of the koppie.  Over the high one with the slippery sides.


Today, when you want to get to Witpoortjie Falls from the station, you
have to pay sixpence toll to a private landowner.  This seems wrong,
somehow.

But I believe there is an alternative route over the top of a koppie..
.

Yes, over the high one.


politics AND love on the blackboard that you could see every time the
speaker moved his head to one side was a multiplication sum: 973 x 8 =
.  There had been a number there, after the equals, but the
schoolmaster had rubbed it out quickly, before the first members of the
audience filed into the classroom for the meeting.

It was just possible that the answer wasn't quite correct, the
schoolmaster reflected, and he didn't want any nonsense about it from
some busybody, afterwards.

The schoolmaster did not feel called upon to erase, from the
blackboard, a brief statement to do with the geographical regions
traversed by the Vaal River.

Thus it came about that every time Lennep van Ploert, the
representative for Bekkersdal, moved his head to one side or the other,
or bent forward to think which he did not appear to do very deeply
there was revealed behind him, on the blackboard, in addition to the
arithmetic, this sentence whose truth few would question, or, rather
(this being a political meeting) would cavil at: "The Vaal River is in
Africa."

Lennep van Ploert wore a black suit and a high, stick-up collar.  And
his voice was just as impressive as his looks.  Many of the farmers and
their wives present at the meeting had received their education in that
same classroom and sitting on those same benches.  Consequently, more
than one member of the audience identified Lennep van Ploert in his
mind with the Hollander school inspector who had come round annually to
tell the pupils whether they had passed or failed.

There was a good attendance of farmers and their wives and children
from the Rooibokspruit area to hear Lennep van Ploert report, in that
schoolroom that served for a night as a political party venue, on the
way he had furthered his constituents' interests during the past year
in a building of more imposing dimensions than the schoolhouse, and
with statelier portals.

Another point of difference between the two buildings was that in the
Marico schoolroom the older pupils seldom threw chalk, any more.


Most of them had also lea mt to reject the cruder formularies of
comedy built up around the placing of drawing pins on the
schoolmaster's chair.

"And so in your interests I went and had tea with the Marquis de
Monfiche," the voice of Lennep van Ploert boomed.

"And while I was drinking tea with that distinguished French aristocrat
and insurance representative " "Are you sure it was tea?"  a man in a
khaki shirt sitting at the back of the classroom interjected.

A couple of people in the audience giggled.  Others said "Sh-- " Among
the latter was the wife of a wealthy local cattle-smuggler.  She was
hoping that Lennep van Ploert would go on to say how the wife of the
distinguished French marquis was dressed.

The only person who was in no way embarrassed was the speaker himself.
The remark made by the man in the khaki shirt was of a pattern accepted
as wit in that other building (the one with the proud traditions and
the coat of arms over the front stoep).  Lennep van Ploert felt at
home, then.

"No, it wasn't tea," the speaker said.

"It was a milkshake."

In that noble edifice in which Lennep van Ploert shone as a debater,
such a brilliant piece of repartee would have received due
appreciation.

Grim features would have relaxed in smiles.  A policeman wearing white
gloves would have gone to the assistance of an elderly legislator who
was in stitches through laughing.

There would have been jovial shouts of "Withdraw!"  There would have
been a row of stipples in Hansard, the short-hand reporter not being
able to get down the next couple of sentences on account of his
emotions being so mixed.  And afterwards, in the lobby, even some of
Lennep van Ploert's opponents would have come and grasped Lennep van
Ploert by the hand.

But, singularly enough, in that Marico schoolroom with the whitewashed
walls and the thatched roof and with no inspiring statuary on the
premises unless a child's clay model on a window-sill of Adam with a
pipe and braces could fit into that category (one of Adam's braces
having slipped off his shoulder on to a level with his knee) in that
Marico classroom there was no immediate response of the sort that
Lennep van Ploert had looked for.

Instead, the audience started wondering if there was something that
they had missed, perhaps, in what Lennep van Ploert had just said.  Or
was he taking them to be just a lot of simpletons, because they were

living out in the most northern part of the Bushveld that you could
live in and still be allowed to vote?

The only positive reaction, however, came from the man in the khaki
shirt.  He vacated his place at the back of the schoolroom and moved up
to a seat nearer the front.

"After I had signed the insurance papers for an endowment policy,"
Lennep van Ploert proceeded, "the French marquis said he would be
honoured if my wife and I would visit him at his chateau next time we
were in France.  He did not know exactly when he would be going back to
France, though.  The marquis told me straight out that there was
something about South Africa that he liked.  Anyway, I told him that,
speaking on behalf of my constituents, I would accept his invitation."
(Applause.) The man in the khaki shirt had been sitting between a young
fellow with a blue and orange tie and a young girl with a selon's rose
in her hair.

The young man looked sideways at the girl and even in the uncertain
light of the paraffin lamps the flush on his face was evident.  The
redness extended to the top part of his ears.

"I can't hear too well from there," the young fellow explained, moving
into the seat vacated by the man with the khaki shirt.

The girl did not answer.

"Is he is he your father?"  the young man enquired in a faltering
voice, at the same time indicating the man in the khaki shirt, who was
then engaged in feeling through his trousers pockets, thereby
occasioning noticeable discomfort to the farmer sitting next to him, by
reason of the confinement imposed by the school bench.

"He's my uncle," the girl answered.

"I stay with him.  I lost my parents when I was young."

"I have before today tried to speak to you," the young fellow with the
blue and orange tie went on.

"But he was always with you."

"I know," the girl answered, unconsciously putting her hand up to the
selon's rose in her hair.

"At Zeerust with the last Nagmaal, now," the young man went on.

"By the side of the kerkplein."

"Yes," the girl responded, simply.

"Only, your uncle kicked out, then, at " the young man proceeded.

"He kicked just at a wild berry," the girl explained.

"He's been like that since he came back from the mines."

"Well, I just didn't understand, then," the young man said.

"My name is Dawie Louw.  What's yours?"


 Lettie, the girl answered.

"Well, it was because your uncle kicked out, like that," Dawie Louw
went on, "that I didn't - " "Didn't come up and speak to us," Lettie
helped him out.

"Yes, and I think Lettie is a lovely name," the young fellow said.

"And I like the name Dawie, also," the girl said in a soft voice.

"And there was another time when I nearly came up and spoke to you,"
Dawie Louw went on.

"It was right in front of" "Sony's hardware store," Lettie said.

"Next to the four-disc harrows."

From her voice it sounded like it was the rose garden of the Capulets
under a Veronese moon.

"That's right," Dawie Louw said.

"Only your uncle was again with you, and just when I was coming up,
after pulling my tie straight it was a purple tie with " "Green spots,"
Lettie announced, looking slightly pained.

"Well," Dawie Louw said, "just as I was coming up, your uncle " "Kicked
out at a four-disc harrow's disc," Lettie said.

"That's another habit my uncle has brought back from the mines.  He
also carries a bicycle chain, through having lived in Fordsburg."

Meanwhile, on the platform, Lennep van Ploert was continuing with his
report to his constituents of his legislative activities.

" - wlawlawski," Lennep van Ploert was saying.

"And it was coffee I had with him, that time, I mean with that
distinguished Polish prince, who happened to have a few shares in a
washing machine company to dispose of, at the moment, and that I
purchased.  He invited me, on behalf of my constituents, to drop in at
his palace in Poland whenever I was passing that way.  But he didn't
think he would go back there himself quite soon, the prince said.  For
one thing, he liked South Africa, he said.  And he also mentioned
something about their just waiting for him to come back, in his native
country of Poland."

The man in the khaki shirt, Lettie's uncle, spoke up for himself,
then.

"Could they give my trousers a bit of a press?"  he asked.

"That Polish washing machine company of yours, that is?"

At the same time the man in the khaki shirt got up and moved to a seat
that was still nearer the front.

"Has your uncle had " Dawie Louw asked of Lettie.

"A few too many?  Yes, I think so.  It's since," Lettie said, once
more, "he's come back from the mines."

Dawie Louw asked the girl with the selon's rose in her hair if she


didn't think it was a queer thing that, after all that, they should at
last have the chance of meeting and of talking to each other, sitting
right next to each other in a school bench, even.

He was young and sanguine, then, and he didn't know that a school bench
actually was the right place where two young lovers should meet.

For who would yet have more to learn of the ways of the world than a
boy and girl in love?

"Praat politick," somebody shouted out to Lennep van Ploert.  It was
not the man in the khaki shirt (Lettie's uncle) that shouted.  It was
some other farmer, who had come to hear about policy and about election
promises, and who couldn't understand that Lennep van Ploert, who had
been such a firebrand a few years before, should now be content to hand
out milksop stuff.  For Lennep van Ploert was now talking about when he
had cocoa with a Spanish nobleman who did a spot of real estate agency
work in his spare time.

Lennep van Ploert leant forward to think, for a few moments, then.

And so Dawie Louw and Lettie were able to see what was written on the
blackboard.  And they spelt out, between them, the statement that the
Vaal River was in Africa.  And they laughed -just for no reason at
all.

They did not know that they would have been far better occupied in
working out that arithmetic sum, instead.  But young people in love
don't know that at the time, of course.  They think they know better.

"The first time I saw you was at the fat stock sale at Schooneesdrif,"
Dawie Louw said to Lettie.

"You were with your uncle and you wouldn't look at me."

"The first time I saw you," Lettie said, "was before Schooneesdrif."

"At Schooneesdrif you had on a frock with " Dawie Louw started again.

But it was as much at Lettie's suggestion as his own that they slipped
out of the door of the classroom, then, the two of them together, hand
in hand.  And they stood like that, a long time, hand in hand, in
silence, under the unclothed stars.

That was how they came to miss the unhappy incidents that took place
inside the schoolroom a little later.  For the man in the khaki shirt
(Lettie's uncle) had eventually found what he was looking for, in his
trousers pocket.  But he was pulled off Lennep van Ploert before he
could assault him to any serious purpose with his bicycle chain.  But
before that Lettie's uncle had borne the legislator back against the
blackboard.


And that was how the meeting ended.  And, strangely enough, although
Lennep van Ploert represented, for many members of the audience, the
school inspector of their youth, they were not unwilling to forgive the
man in the khaki shirt for having dealt with him in that fashion.

Because of the way he had been pressed backwards against the blackboard
by Lettie's uncle, you were able to read afterwards, on Lennep van
Ploert's suit the figures being the wrong way around part of the sum in
arithmetic.  What was also legible on Lennep van Ploert's jacket
reading from right to left was a chalked statement to the effect that
the Vaal River flows in Africa.

But of neither of these circumstances did Dawie Louw and Lettie know
anything.  They stood at the side of the schoolhouse, holding hands
under the stars.  And they were young.  And they were in love.

And they were foolish.  And they would not have cared about what vital
sort of decision any statesman would have arrived at, then.

And they would have laughed about any Parallel that any general might
have decided to cross.


new elder

"this is elder haasbroek.," Wynand Geel said, and we shook hands all
round.

"He is the new elder from " Wynand Geel began again, when Hans
Combrinck broke into a laugh.  The rest of us laughed, also.  It
sounded funny, "new elder."  The only one that didn't laugh was the new
elder himself.  He drew himself up straight and you could see from his
manner that he thought people from our part of the Groot Marico were
somewhat easily amused.  Childishly easy, sort of.

Wynand Geel started trying to explain to Elder Haasbroek.

"Why they are laughing," he said, "is because it sounded, well,
something to laugh at, you know saying, 'nuwe ouderling'1."

"Yes," Elder Haasbroek answered, "oh, yes, I see.  Quite."

Even without Wynand Geel having introduced him, however, we would have
known that he was an elder.  And we would still have known it if he had
had on ordinary farm clothes, instead of the black man el suit with the
white tie that he was wearing.

We got in each other's way, finding seats on Wynand Geel's stoep.

For Elder Haasbroek had taken the armchair that Oom Doors Perskes
usually occupied, and so we had all of us to shift into different
places, and we sat upright.

We heard Wynand Geel's daughter moving about in the front bedroom.

Wynand called her.

"I suppose you'll have the usual little old Bushveld refreshment,
Elder?"  Wynand Geel asked Elder Haasbroek.

When Drieka came out on to the stoep we understood what she had been
doing in the bedroom.  Her hair was now fastened back with a pink
ribbon.  Before Wynand Geel could ask her if she had coffee on the
stove, Elder Haasbroek spoke.

"Well, I was thinking that it was perhaps a bit early in the morning,"
Elder Haasbroek said to Wynand Geel.

"But I have heard that it is a custom you have here in this part of the
Groot Marico.  So I won't offend you.  Make mine just three inches of
peach mampoer."

"Mamp-- " Hans Combrinck started to blurt out in surprise, stopping


himself halfway, however.

By that time it was too late for Wynand Geel to explain that he had
meant coffee, and that we weren't used to taking anything stronger at
that time of the day.  Wynand went into the voorhuis himself and
fetched out glasses and a bottle.  There have probably never been any
more astonished Groot Marico farmers than that little group that sat on
the front stoep, in the forenoon, drinking mampoer, with an elder of
the church in their midst.

A little later, Wynand Geel fetched out another bottle.

After Elder Haasbroek had gone, we said that when Wynand Geel had
spoken of him as a new elder, he hadn't been so far wrong.  He was at
all events a new sort of elder.

We lea mt that, some time later, Elder Haasbroek again called at Wynand
Geel's home, with a couple of tracts.  And Wynand was away in Zeerust,
as Drieka told him when she answered the door.  And Elder Haasbroek
stayed quite a long time.

We realised, then, that Elder Haasbroek was not such a new sort of
elder, after all.


shy young man hans combrinck NUDGED chris VAN blerk.

"Why don't you ask Wynand now like you said you would?"  Hans wanted to
know.

Bee 'ise he was young, and diffident, Chris van Blerk mumbled something
about there being so many people sitting here on the stoep smoking
their pipes and drinking coffee and about it perhaps being better if he
spoke to Oom Wynand Geel about it afterwards, when there weren't so
many people sitting here on the stoep drinking their pipes and smoking
at least, what he meant to say was His mumble got lost in the sound of
coffee being poured into saucers and the rattle of crockery.

Hans Combrinck laughed.

"What do you think of that, Wynand?"  he asked.

"I told Chris van Blerk last week that he would come right as far as
your house, and he would sit here on your stoep, with his one veldskoen
on the support of a chair, just like he's doing now, and he still
wouldn't ask you."

Immediately Oom Doors Perskes started talking about the old days, when
you were fully grown up, with adult responsibilities, by the age of
fifteen, and you could distil your own moepel brandy by the time you
were twelve.  So there wasn't such a thing as a shy young man in the
old days, Oom Doors said.  Indeed, there wasn't such a thing as a young
man at all.  Not when you had to cure your own chewing tobacco before
you were ten and grind up your own snuff before you were two, Oom Doors
said.  He forgot now at what a ridiculously early age you would have to
shoot your own Mshangaan.

"What I can remember, though, is the time they needed an assistant
magistrate for the Pilanesberg," Oom Doors Perskes went on.

"The old landdrost couldn't cope with all the work himself anymore, as
he was getting on in years.  He was close on to thirty, I think.  Well,
somebody had to step in, and we felt it was up to the Perskes family.
My father was too old, of course.  In fact, he was, if anything, even
older than the old landdrost.  Moreover, my father couldn't spell long
words.  Still, in that respect he wasn't much different from the old
landdrost, who, I believe, couldn't spell at all.  My elder brothers
were busy deepening


the Molopo River and throwing a barrage across it.  So I had to go."

"I suppose you were about eleven, then, when you became a
magistrate?"

Hans Combrinck asked, sarcastically.

"Eleven and a half," Oom Doors Perskes replied.

"My younger brother couldn't take on the job because the part he was
playing in politics at that time made him an unsuitable candidate for
the judiciary.  But, anyway, that's how we were in those days.  Men. No
want of confidence.

Sure of ourselves."

Drieka Geel came on to the stoep with the tray to collect the cups and
saucers.

"You've been doing it again," she said when she came to where Oom Doors
Perskes was sitting.

"Knocking out your pipe on the arm of this chair that I've got to
polish with olieblaar."

Oom Doors looked abject.  Then he stammered out some lie by way of
excuse, saying that it was maybe somebody else that had knocked out his
pipe on the arm of the chair.

When we were leaving, Wynand Geel took Chris van Blerk slightly aside
and replied to the question that Chris had not put to him.

"Better ask her yourself," Wynand Geel said.


in THE withaak'S shade leopards?  - oom schalk lour ens said Oh, yes,
there are two varieties on this side of the Limpopo.  The chief
difference between them is that the one kind of leopard has got a few
more spots on it than the other kind.  But when you meet a leopard in
the veld, unexpectedly, you seldom trouble to count his spots to find
out what kind he belongs to.  That is unnecessary.  Because, whatever
kind of leopard it is that you come across in this way, you only do one
kind of running.  And that is the fastest kind.

I remember the occasion that I came across a leopard unexpectedly, and
to this day I couldn't tell you how many spots he had, even though I
had all the time I needed for studying him.  It happened about midday,
when I was out on the far end of my farm, behind a koppie, looking for
some strayed cattle.  I thought the cattle might be there because it is
shady under those withaak trees, and there is soft grass that is very
pleasant to sit on.  After I had looked for the cattle for about an
hour in this manner, sitting up against a tree-trunk, it occurred to me
that I could look for them just as well, or perhaps even better, if I
lay down flat.  For even a child knows that cattle aren't so small that
you have got to get on to stilts and things to see them properly.

So I lay on my back, with my hat tilted over my face, and my legs
crossed, and when I closed my eyes slightly the tip of my boot,
sticking up into the air, looked just like the peak ofAbjaterskop.

Overhead a lone aasvoel wheeled, circling slowly round and round
without flapping his wings, and I knew that not even a calf could pass
in any part of the sky between the tip of my toe and that aasvoel
without my observing it immediately.  What was more, I could go on
lying there under the withaak and looking for the cattle like that all
day, if necessary.  As you know, I am not the sort of farmer to loaf
about the house when there is man's work to be done.

The more I screwed up my eyes and gazed at the toe of my boot, the more
it looked like Abjaterskop.  By and by it seemed that it actually was
Abjaterskop, and I could see the stones on top of it, and the bush


trying to grow up its sides, and in my ears there was a far-off,
humming sound, like bees in an orchard on a still day.  As I have said,
it was very pleasant.

Then a strange thing happened.  It was as though a huge cloud, shaped
like an animal's head and with spots on it, had settled on top
ofAbjaterskop.  It seemed so funny that I wanted to laugh.  But I
didn't.  Instead, I opened my eyes a little more and felt glad to think
that I was only dreaming.  Because otherwise I would have to believe
that the spotted cloud on Abjaterskop was actually a leopard, and that
he was gazing at my boot.  Again I wanted to laugh.  But then,
suddenly, I knew.

And I didn't feel so glad.  For it was a leopard, all right a large
sized hungry-looking leopard, and he was sniffing suspiciously at my
feet.  I was uncomfortable.  I knew that nothing I could do would ever
convince that leopard that my toe was Abjaterskop.  He was not that
sort of leopard: I knew that without even counting the number of his
spots.

Instead, having finished with my feet, he started sniffing higher up.
It was the most terrifying moment of my life.  I wanted to get up and
run for it.  But I couldn't.  My legs wouldn't work.

Every big-game hunter I have come across has told me the same story
about how, at one time or another, he has owed his escape from lions
and other wild animals to his cunning in lying down and pretending to
be dead, so that the beast of prey loses interest in him and walks off.
Now, as I lay there on the grass, with the leopard trying to make up
his mind about me, I understood why, in such a situation, the hunter
doesn't move.  It's simply that he can't move.  That's all.  It's not
his cunning that keeps him down.  It's his legs.

In the meantime, the leopard had got up as far as my knees.  He was
studying my trousers very carefully, and I started getting
embarrassed.

My trousers were old and rather unfashionable.  Also, at the knee,
there was a torn place, from where I had climbed through a barbed-wire
fence, into the thick bush, the time I saw the Government tax-collector
coming over the bull before he saw me.  The leopard stared at that rent
in my trousers for quite a while, and my embarrassment grew.  I felt I
wanted to explain about the Government tax-collector and the barbed
wire.  I didn't want the leopard to get the impression that Schalk
Lourens was the sort of man who didn't care about his personal
appearance.

When the leopard got as far as my shirt, however, I felt better.  It
was a good blue flannel shirt that I had bought only a few weeks ago
from the Indian store at Ramoutsa, and I didn't care how many strange

leopards saw it.  Nevertheless, I made up my mind that next time I
went to lie on the grass under the withaak, looking for strayed cattle,
I would first polish up my veldskoens with sheep's fat, and I would put
on my black hat that I only wear to Nagmaal.  I could not permit the
wild animals of the neighbourhood to sneer at me.

But when the leopard reached my face I got frightened again.  I knew he
couldn't take exception to my shirt.  But I wasn't so sure about my
face.  Those were terrible moments.  I lay very still, afraid to open
my eyes and afraid to breathe.  Sniff-sniff, the huge creature went,
and his breath swept over my face in hot gasps.  You hear of many
frightening experiences that a man has in a lifetime.  I have also been
in quite a few perilous situations.  But if you want something to make
you suddenly old and to turn your hair white in a few moments, there is
nothing to beat a leopard especially when he is standing over you, with
his jaws at your throat, trying to find a good place to bite.

The leopard gave a deep growl, stepped right over my body, knocking off
my hat, and growled again.  I opened my eyes and saw the animal moving
away clumsily.  But my relief didn't last long.  The leopard didn't
move far.  Instead, he turned over and lay down next to me.

Yes, there on the grass, in the shade of the withaak, the leopard and I
lay down together.  The leopard lay half-curled up, on his side, with
his forelegs crossed, like a dog, and whenever I tried to move away he
grunted.  I am sure that in the whole history of the Groot Marico there
have never been two stranger companions engaged in the thankless task
of looking for strayed cattle.

Next day, in Fanie Snyman's voorkamer, which was used as a post office,
I told my story to the farmers of the neighbourhood, while they were
drinking coffee and waiting for the motor-lorry from Zeerust.

"And how did you get away from that leopard in the end?"  Koos van
Tender asked, trying to be funny.

"I suppose you crawled through the grass and frightened the leopard off
by pretending to be a python."

"No, I just got up and walked home," I said.

"I remembered that the cattle I was looking for might have gone the
other way and strayed into your kraal.  I thought they would be safer
with the leopard."

"Did the leopard tell you what he thought of General Pienaar's last
speech in the Volksraad?"  Frans Welman asked, and they all laughed.

I told my story over several times before the lorry came with our
letters, and although the dozen odd men present didn't say much while I
was talking, I could see that they listened to me in the same way
that


they listened when Krisjan Lemmer talked.  And everybody knew that
Krisjan Lemmer was the biggest liar in the Bushveld.

To make matters worse, Krisjan Lemmer was there, too, and when I got to
the part of my story where the leopard lay down beside me, Krisjan
Lemmer winked at me.  You know that kind of wink.  It was to let me
know that there was now a new understanding between us, and that we
could speak in future as one Marico liar to another.

I didn't like that.

"Kerels," I said in the end, "I know just what you are thinking.  You
don't believe me, and you don't want to say so."

"But we do believe you," Krisjan Lemmer interrupted me, "very wonderful
things happen in the Bushveld.  I once had a twenty-foot mamba that I
named Hans.  This snake was so attached to me that I couldn't go
anywhere without him.  He would even follow me to church on a Sunday,
and because he didn't care much for some of the sermons, he would wait
for me outside under a tree.  Not that Hans was irreligious.

But he had a sensitive nature, and the strong line that the predikant
took against the serpent in the Garden of Eden always made Hans feel
awkward.  Yet he didn't go and look for a withaak to lie under, like
your leopard.  He wasn't stand-offish in that way.  An ordinary
thorn-tree's shade was good enough for Hans.  He knew he was only a
mamba, and didn't try to give himself airs."

I didn't take any notice of Krisjan Lemmer's stupid lies, but the
upshot of this whole affair was that I also began to have doubts about
the existence of that leopard.  I recalled queer stories I had heard of
human beings that could turn themselves into animals, and although I am
not a superstitious man I could not shake off the feeling that it was a
Spock thing that had happened.  But when, a few days later, a huge
leopard had been seen from the roadside near the poort, and then again
by Mtosas on the way to Nietverdiend, and again in the turf-lands near
the Molopo, matters took a different turn.

At first people jested about this leopard.  They said it wasn't a real
leopard, but a spotted animal that had walked away out of Schalk
Lourens's dream.  They also said that the leopard had come to the
Dwarsberge to have a look at Krisjan Lemmer's twenty-foot mamba.  But
afterwards, when they had found his spoor at several waterholes, they
had no more doubt about the leopard.

It was dangerous to walk about in the veld, they said.  Exciting
times


followed.  There was a great deal of shooting at the leopard and a
great deal of running away from him.  The amount of Martini and Mauser
fire I heard in the krantzes reminded me of nothing so much as the
First Boer War.  And the amount of running away reminded me of nothing
so much as the Second Boer War.

But always the leopard escaped unharmed.  Somehow, I felt sorry for
him.  The way he had first sniffed at me and then lain down beside me
that day under the withaak was a strange thing that I couldn't
understand.

I thought of the Bible, where it is written that the lion shall lie
down with the lamb.

But I also wondered if I hadn't dreamt it all.  The manner in which
those things had befallen me was all so unearthly.  The leopard began
to take up a lot of my thoughts.  And there was no man to whom I could
talk about it who would be able to help me in any way.  Even now, as I
am telling you this story, I am expecting you to wink at me, like
Krisjan Lemmer did.

Still, I can only tell you the things that happened as I saw them, and
what the rest was about only Africa knows.

It was some time before I again walked along the path that leads
through the bush to where the withaaks are.  But I didn't lie down on
the grass again.  Because when I reached the place, I found that the
leopard had got there before me.  He was lying on the same spot,
half-curled up in the withaak's shade, and his forepaws were folded as
a dog's are, sometimes.  But he lay very still.  And even from the
distance where I stood I could see the red splash on his breast where a
Mauser bullet had gone.


ma rico moon

I buttoned up my jacket because of the night wind that came whistling
through the thorn-trees (Oom Schalk Lourens said); my fingers on the
reins were stiff with the cold.

There were four of us in the mule-cart, driving along the Government
Road on our way back from the dance at Withaak.  I sat in front with
Dirk Prinsloo, a young school-teacher.  In the back were Petrus Lemmer
and his sister's step-daughter, Annie.

Petrus Lemmer was an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church.  He told us
that he was very strongly opposed to parties, because people got drunk
at parties, and all sorts of improper things happened.  He had only
gone to the dance at Withaak, he said, because of Annie.  He explained
that he had to be present to make quite sure that nothing unseemly took
place at a dance that his sister's step-daughter went to.

We all thought that it was very fine of Petrus Lemmer to sacrifice his
own comfort in that way.  And we were very glad when he said that this
was one of the most respectable dances he had ever attended.

He said that at two o'clock in the morning.  But before that he had
said a few other things of so unusual a character that all the women
walked out.  And they only came back a little later on, after a number
of young men had helped Petrus Lemmer out through the front door.  One
of the young men was Dirk Prinsloo, the school-teacher, and I noticed
that there was quite a lot of peach brandy on his clothes.  The peach
brandy had come out of a big glass that Petrus Lemmer had in his hand,
and when he went out of the door he was still saying how glad he was
that this was not an improper party, like others he had seen.

Shortly afterwards Petrus Lemmer fell into the dam, backwards.  And
when they pulled him out he was still holding on to the big glass, very
tightly.  But when he put the glass to his mouth he said that what was
in it tasted to him a lot like water.  He threw the glass away, then.

So it came about that, in the early hours of the morning, there were
four of us driving along the road back from Withaak.  Petrus Lemmer had
wanted to stay longer at the dance, after they had pulled him out of
the


dam and given him a dry pair of trousers and a shirt.  But they said,
no, it wasn't right that he should go on sacrificing himself like that.
Petrus Lemmer said that was nothing.  He was willing to sacrifice
himself a lot more.  He said he would go on sacrificing himself until
the morning, if necessary, to make quite sure that nothing disgraceful
took place at the dance.  But the people said there was no need for him
to stay any longer.

Nothing more disgraceful could happen than what had already happened,
they said.

At first, Petrus Lemmer seemed pleased at what they said.  But
afterwards he grew a bit more thoughtful.  He still appeared to be
thinking about it when a number of young men, including Dirk Prinsloo,
helped him on to my :. ule-cart, heavily.  His sister's step-daughter,
Annie, got into the back seat beside him.  Dirk Prinsloo came and sat
next to me.

It was a cold night, and the road through the bush was very long.  The
house where Dirk Prinsloo boarded was the first that we would come to.
It was a long way ahead.  Then came Petrus Lemmer's farm, several miles
further on.  I had the longest distance to go of us all.

In between shivering, Petrus Lemmer said how pleased he was that nobody
at the dance had used really bad language.

"Nobody except you, Uncle," Annie said then.

Petrus Lemmer explained that anybody was entitled to forget himself a
little, after having been thrown into the dam, like he was.

"You weren't thrown.  Uncle," Annie said.

"You fell in."

"Thrown," Petrus persisted.

"Fell," Annie repeated firmly.

Petrus said that she could have it her way, if she liked.  It was no
use arguing with a woman, he explained.  Women couldn't understand
reason, anyway.  But what he maintained strongly was that, if you were
wet right through, and standing in the cold, you might perhaps say a
few things that you wouldn't say ordinarily.

"But even before you fell in the dam, Uncle," Annie went on, "you used
bad language.  The time all the women walked out.  It was awful
language.  And you said it just for nothing, too.  You ought to be
ashamed of yourself, Uncle.  And you an elder in the Reformed
Church."

But Petrus Lemmer said that was different.  He said that if he hadn't
been at the dance he would like to know what would have happened.

That was all he wanted to know.  Young girls of today had no sense of
gratitude.  It was only for Annie's sake that he had come to the dance
in the first place.  And then they went and threw him into the water.


The moon was big and full above the Dwarsberge; and the wind grew
colder; and the stars shone dimly through the thorn-trees that overhung
the road.

Then Petrus Lemmer started telling us about other dances he had
attended in the Bushveld, long ago.  He was a young man, then, he
said.

And whenever he went to a dance there was a certain amount of
trouble.

"Just like tonight," he said.  He went to lots of dances, and it was
always the same thing.  They were the scandal of the Marico, those
dances he went to.  And he said it was no use his exercising his
influence, either;

people just wouldn't listen to him.

"Influence," Annie said, and I could hear her laughter above the
rattling of the mule-cart.

"But there was one dance I went to," Petrus Lemmer continued, "on a
farm near Abjaterskop.  That was very different.  It was a quiet sort
of dance.  And it was different in every way."

Annie said that perhaps it was different because they didn't have a dam
on that farm.  But Petrus Lemmer replied, in a cold kind of voice, that
he didn't know what Annie was hinting at, and that, anyway, she was old
enough to have more sense.

"It was mainly because ofGrieta," Petrus Lemmer said, "that I went to
that dance at Abjaterskop.  And I believed that it was because she
hoped to see me there that Grieta went."

Annie said something about this, also.  I couldn't hear what it was.

But this time Petrus Lemmer ignored her.

"There were not very many people at this dance," he went on.

"A

large number who had been invited stayed away."

"It seems that other people besides Grieta knew you were going to that
dance, Uncle," Annie remarked then.

"It was because of the cold," Petrus Lemmer said shortly.

"It was a cold night, just like it is tonight.  I wore a new shirt with
stripes and I rubbed sheep-fat on my veldskoens, to make then shine. At
first I thought it was rather foolish, my taking all this trouble over
my appearance, for the sake of a girl whom I had seen only a couple of
times.  But when I got to the farmhouse at Abjaterskop, where the dance
was, and I saw Grieta in the voorkamer, I no longer thought it was
foolish of me to get all dressed up like that."

Petrus Lemmer fell silent for a few moments, as though waiting for one
of us to say what an interesting story it was, and would he tell us
what


happened next.  But none of us said anything.  So Petrus just coughed
and went on with his story without being asked.  That was the sort of
man Petms Lemmer was.

"I saw Grieta in the voorkamer," Petms Lemmer repeated, "and she had on
a pink frock.  She was very pretty.  Even now, after all these years,
when I look back on it, I can still picture to myself how pretty she
was.  For a long time I stood at the far end of the room and just
watched her.  Another young man was wasting her time, talking to her.

Afterwards he wasted still more of her time by dancing with her.  If it
wasn't that I knew that I was the only one in that voorkamer that
Grieta cared for, I would have got jealous of the way in which that
young fellow carried on.  And he kept getting more and more foolish.
But afterwards I got tired of standing up against that wall and
watching Grieta from a distance.  So I sat down on a chair, next to the
two men with the guitar and the concertina.  For some time I sat and
watched Grieta from the chair.  By then that fellow was actually
wasting her time to the extent of tickling her under the chin with a
piece of grass."

Petrus Lemmer stopped talking again, and we listened to the bumping of
the mule-cart and the wind in the thorn-trees.  The moon was large and
full above the Dwarsberge.

"But how did you know that this girl liked you, Oom Petrus?"  Dirk
Prinsloo asked.  It seemed as though the young school-teacher was
getting interested in the story.

"Oh, I just knew," Petrus Lemmer replied.

"She never said anything to me about it, but with these things you can
always tell."

"Yes, I expect you can," Annie said softly, in a far-away sort of
voice.  And she asked Petrus Lemmer to tell us what happened next.

"It was just like I said it was," Petrus Lemmer continued.

"And shortly afterwards Grieta left that foolish young man, with his
piece of grass and all, and came past the chair where I was sitting,
next to the musicians.  She walked past me quickly, and what she said
wasn't much above a whisper.  But I heard all right.  And I didn't even
bother to look up and see whether that other fellow had observed
anything.  I felt so superior to him, at that moment."

Once again Petrus Lemmer paused.  But it was obvious that Annie wanted
him to get to the end of the story quickly.

"Then did you go and meet Grieta, Oom Petms?"  she asked.

"Oh, yes," Petms answered.

"I was there at the time she said."

"By the third withaak?"  Annie asked again.

"Under the moon?"


 By the third withaak, Petrus Lemmer replied.  Under the moon.

I wondered how Annie knew all that.  In some ways there seemed little
that a woman didn't know.

"There's not much more to tell," Petrus Lemmer said.

"And I could never understand how it happened, either.  It was just
that, when I met Grieta there, under the thorn-tree, it suddenly seemed
that there was nothing I wanted to say to her.  And I could see that
she felt the same way about it.  She seemed just an ordinary woman,
like lots of other women.

And I felt rather foolish, standing there beside her, wearing a new
striped shirt, and with sheep-fat on my veldskoens.  And I knew just
how she felt, also.  At first I tried to pretend to myself that it was
the fault of the moon.

Then I blamed that fellow with the piece of grass.  But I knew all the
time that it was nobody's fault.  It just happened like that.

"As I have said," Petrus Lemmer concluded sombrely, "I don't know how
it came about.  And I don't think Grieta knew, either.  We stood there
wondering each of us what it was that had been, a little while before,
so attractive about the other.  But whatever it was, it had gone.

And we both knew that it had gone for good.  Then I said that it was
getting cold.  And Grieta said that perhaps we had better go inside. So
we went back to the voorkamer.  It seemed an awfully quiet party, and I
didn't stay much longer.  And I remember how, on my way home, I looked
at the moon under which Grieta and I had stood by the thorn-tree.  I
watched the moon until it went down behind the Dwarsberge."

Petrus Lemmer finished his story, and none of us spoke.

Some distance further on we arrived at the place where Dirk Prinsloo
stayed.  Dirk got off the mule-cart and said good night.  Then he
turned to Annie.

"It's funny," he said, "this story of your uncle's.  It's queer how
things like that happen."

"He's not my uncle," Annie replied.

"He's only my stepmother's brother.  And I never listen to his stories,
anyway."

So we drove on again, the three of us, down the road, through the
thorn-trees, with the night wind blowing into our faces.  And a little
later, when the moon was going down behind the Dwarsberge, it sounded
to me as though Annie was crying.


the story OF hester VAN wyk when I think of the story of Hester van
Wyk I often wonder what it is about some stories that I have wanted to
tell (Oom Schalk Lourens said).  About things that have happened and
about people that I have known and that I still know, some of them; if
you can call it knowing a person when your mule-carts pass each other
on the Government Road, and you wave your hat cheerfully and call out
that it will be a good season for the crops, if only the stalk-borers
and other pests keep away, and the other person just nods at you, with
a distant sort of a look in his eyes, and says, yes, the Marico
Bushveld has unfortunately got more than one kind of pest.

That was what Gawie Steyn said to me one afternoon on the Government
Road, when I was on my way to the Drogedal post office for letters and
he was on his way home.  And it was because of the sorrowful sort of
way in which he uttered the word 'unfortunately' that I knew that Gawie
Steyn had heard what I had said about him to Frik Prinsloo three weeks
before, after the meeting of the Dwarsberg debating society in the
schoolroom next to the poort.

In any case, I never finished that story that I told Frik Prinsloo
about Gawie Steyn, although I began telling it colour fully enough that
night after the meeting of the debating society was over and the
farmers and their wives and children had all gone home, and Frik
Prinsloo and I were sitting alone on two desks in the middle of the
schoolroom, with our feet up, and our pipes pleasantly filled with
strong plug-cut tobacco whose thick blue fumes made the school-teacher
cough violently at intervals.

The schoolmaster was seated at the table, with his head in his hands,
and his face looking very pale in the light of the one paraffin lamp.
And he was waiting for us to leave so that he could blow out his lamp
and lock up the schoolroom and go home.

The schoolmaster did not interrupt us only with his coughing but also
in other ways.  For instance, he told us on several occasions that he
had a weak chest, and if we had made up our minds to stay on like this
in


the classroom, talking, after the meeting was over, would we mind very
much, he asked, if he opened one of the windows to let out some of the
blue clouds of tobacco smoke.

But Frik Prinsloo said that we would mind very much.  Not for our
sakes, Frik said, but for the schoolmaster's sake.  There was nothing
worse, Frik explained, than for a man with a weak chest to sit in a
room with a window open.

"It is nothing for us," Frik Prinsloo said, "for Schalk Lourens and
myself to sit in a room with an open window.  We are two Bushveld
farmers with sturdy physiques who have been through the Boer War and
through the anthrax pestilence.  We have survived not only human
hardships, but also cattle and sheep and pig diseases.  At
Magersfontein I even slept in an aardvark hole that was half-full of
water with a piece of newspaper tied around my left ankle for the
rheumatism.  And even so neither Schalk Lourens nor I will be so
foolish as to be in a room that has got a window open."

"No," I agreed.

"Never."

"And you have to take greater care of your health than any of us," Frik
Prinsloo said to the school-teacher.

"With your weak chest it would be dangerous for you to have a window
open in here.  Why, you can't even stand our tobacco smoke.  Look at
the way you are coughing right now."

After he had knocked the ash out of his pipe into an inkwell that was
let into a little round hole in one of the desks, an action which he
had performed just in order to show how familiar, for an uneducated
man, he was with the ways of a schoolroom, Frik started telling the
schoolteacher about other places he had slept in, both during the Boer
War and at another time when he was doing transport driving.

Frik Prinsloo embarked on a description of the hardships of a transport
driver's life in the old days.  It was a story that seemed longer than
the most ambitious journey ever undertaken by ox-wagon, and much
heavier, and more roundabout.  And there was one place where Frik
Prinsloo's story got stuck much more hopelessly than any of his ox
wagons had ever got stuck in a drift.

Then the schoolmaster said, please, gentlemen, he could not stand it
anymore.  His health was bad, and while he could perhaps arrange to let
us have the use of the schoolroom on some other night, so that I could
finish the story that I appeared to be telling to Mr.  Prinsloo, and he
would even provide the paraffin for the lamp himself, he really had to
go home and get some sleep.


But Frik Prinsloo said the schoolmaster did not need to worry about
the paraffin.  We could sit just as comfortably in the dark and talk,
he said.  For that matter, the schoolmaster could go to sleep in the
classroom, if he liked.  Just like that, sitting at the table.

"You already look half asleep," Frik told him, winking at me, "and
sleeping in a schoolroom is a lot better than what happened to me
during the English advance on Bloemfontein, when I slept in a don ga
with a lot of slime and mud and slippery tadpoles at the bottom..  . "
"In a don ga half-full of water with a piece of mealie-sacking fastened
around your stomach because of the colic," the school-teacher said,
speaking with his head still between his hands.

"And for heaven's sake, if you have got to sleep out on the veld, why
don't you sleep on top of it?  Why must you go and lie inside a hole
full of water or inside a slimy don ga  If you farmers have had hard
lives, it seems to me that you yourselves did quite a lot to make them
like that."

We ignored this remark of the schoolmaster's, which we both realised
was based on his lack of worldly experience, and I went on to relate to
Frik Prinsloo those incidents from the life of Gawie Steyn that were
responsible for Gawie's talking about Marico pests, some weeks later,
in gloomy tones, on the road winding between the thorn-trees to the
post office.

And this was one of those stories that I never finished.  Because the
schoolmaster fell asleep at his table, with the result that he didn't
cough anymore, and I could see that because of this Frik Prinsloo could
not derive the same amount of amusement from my story.  And what is
even more strange is that I also found that the funny parts in the
story did not sound so funny anymore, now that the schoolmaster was no
longer in discomfort.  The story seemed to have had much more life in
it, somehow, in the earlier stages, when the schoolmaster was anxiously
waiting for us to go home, and coughing at intervals through the blue
haze of our tobacco smoke.

"And so that man came round again the next night and sang some more
songs to Gawie Steyn's wife," I said, "and they were old songs that he
sang."

"It sounds to me as though he is even snoring," Frik Prinsloo said.

"Imagine that for ill-bred.  Here are you telling a story that teaches
one all about the true and deep things of life and the schoolmaster is
lying with his head on the table, snoring."


"And when Gawie Steyn started objecting after a while," I con ting
ued, with a certain amount of difficulty, "the man said the excuse he
had to offer was that they were all old songs, anyway, and they didn't
mean very much.  Old songs had no meaning.  They were only dead things
from the past.  They were yellowed and dust-laden, the man said."

"I've got a good mind to wake him," Frik Prinsloo went on.

"First he disturbs us with his coughing and now I can't hear what
you're saying because of his snoring.  It will be a good thing if we
just go home now and leave him.  He seems so attached to his old
schoolroom.  Even staying behind at night to sleep in it.  What would
people say if I liked ploughing so much that I didn't go home at night,
but just lay down and slept on a strip of grass next to a furrow?"

"Then Gawie Steyn said to this man," I continued, with greater
difficulty than ever before, "he said that it wasn't so much the old
songs he objected to.  The old songs might be well enough.  But the way
his wife listened to the songs, he said, seemed to him to be not so
much like an old song as like an old story."

"Not that I don't sleep out on the lands sometimes," Frik Prinsloo
explained, "and even in the ploughing season.  But then it is the early
afternoon of a hot day.  And the kaffirs go on with the ploughing all
the same.  And it is very refreshing, then, to sleep under a withaak
tree knowing that the kaffirs are at work in the sun.  Sleeping on a
strip of green grass next to a furrow..  . " "Or inside the furrow,"
the schoolmaster said, and we only noticed then that he was no longer
snoring.

"Inside a furrow half filled with wet fertiliser and with a turnip
fastened on your head because of the blue tongue."

As I have said, this story about Gawie Steyn and his wife is one of
those stories that I never finished telling.  And I would never have
known, either, that Frik Prinsloo had listened to as much of it as I
had told him, if it wasn't for Gawie Steyn's manner of greeting me on
the Government Road, three weeks later, with sorrowful politeness, like
an Englishman.

There is always something unusual about a story that does not come to
an end on its own.  It is as though that story keeps going on, getting
told in a different way each time, as though the story itself is trying
to find out what happened next.

It was like the way life came to Hester van Wyk.

Hester was a very pretty girl, with black hair and a way of smiling
that seemed very childlike, until you were close enough to her to see


what was in her eyes, and then you realised, in that same moment, that
no child had ever smiled like that.  And whether it was for her black
hair or whether it was because of her smile, it so happened that Hester
van Wyk was hardly ever without a lover.  They came to her, the young
men from the neighbourhood.  But they also went away again.  They
tarried for a while, like birds in their passage, and they paid court
to her, and sometimes the period in which they wooed her was quite
long, and at other times again she would have a lover whose ardour
seemed to last for no longer than a few brief weeks before he also went
his way.

And it seemed that the story of Hester van Wyk and her lovers was also
one of those stories that I have mentioned to you, whose end never gets
told.

And Gert van Wyk, Hester's father, would talk to me about these young
men that came into his daughter's life.  He talked to me both as a
neighbour and as a relative on his wife's side, and while what he said
to me about Hester and her lovers were mostly words spoken lightly, in
the way that you flick a pebble into a dam, and watch the yellow
ripples widening, there were also times when he spoke differently.  And
then what he said was like the way a footsore wanderer flings his pack
on to the ground.

"She's a pretty girl," Gert said to me.

"Yes, she is pretty enough.  But her trouble is that she is too
soft-hearted.  These young men come to her, and they tell her stories.
Sad stories about their lives.  And she listens to their stories.  And
she feels sorry for them.  And she says that they must be very nice
young men for life to have treated them so badly.  She even tries to
tell me some of these stories, so that I should also feel sorry for
them.  But, of course, I have got too much sense to listen.  I simply
tell her " "Yes," I answered, nodding, "you tell her that what the
young man says is a lot of lies.  And by the time you have convinced
her about one lover's lies you find that he has already departed, and
that some other young man has got into the habit of coming to your
house three times a week, and that he is busy telling her a totally new
and different story."

"That's what he imagines," Gert van Wyk replied, "that it's new.  But
it's always the same old story.  Only, instead of telling of his
unhappy childhood the new young man will talk about his aged mother, or
about how life has been cruel to him, so that he has got to help on the
farm, for which he isn't suited at all, because it makes him dizzy to
have to pump water out of the borehole for the cattle up and down, up
and


down, like that, with the pump-handle when all the time his real
ambition is to have the job of wearing a blue and gold uniform outside
of a bio scope in Johannesburg.  And my daughter Hester is so
soft-hearted that she goes on listening to these same stupid stories
day after day, year in and year out."

"Yes," I said, "they are the same old stories."

And I thought of what Gawie Steyn said about the man who sang old songs
to his wife.  And it seemed that Hester van Wyk's was also an old
story, and that for that reason it would never end.

"Did she also have a young man who said that he was not worthy of her
because he was not educated?"  I asked Gert.

"And did she take pity on him because he said people looked down on him
because of his table manners?"

"Yes," Gert answered with alacrity, "he said he was badly brought up
and always forgot to take the teaspoon out of the cup before drinking
his coffee."

"Did she also have a young man who got her sympathy by telling her that
he had fallen in love years ago, and that he had lost that girl,
because her parents had objected to him, and that he could never fall
in love again?"

"Quite right," Gert said.

"This young man said that his first girl's parents refused to let her
marry him because his forehead was too low.

Even though he tried to make it look higher by training his eyebrows
down and shaving the hair off most of the top of his head.  But how do
you know all these things?"

"There are only a few stories that young men tell girls in order to get
their sympathy," I said to Gert.

"There are only a handful of stories like that.  But it seems to me
that your daughter Hester has been told them all.  And more than once,
too, sometimes, by the look of it."

"And you can imagine how awful that young man with the low forehead
looked," Gert continued.

"He must have been unattractive enough before.  But with his eyebrows
trained down and the top of his head shaved clean off, he looked more
like a - " "And for that very reason, of course," I explained, "your
daughter Hester fell in love with him.  After she had heard his
story."

And it seemed to me that the oldest story of all must be the story of a
woman's heart.

It was some years after this, when Gert van Wyk and his family had
moved out of the Marico into the Waterberg, that I heard that Hester


van Wyk had married.  And I knew then what had happened, of course.

And I knew it even without Gert having had to tell me.

I knew then that some young man must have come to Hester van Wyk from
out of some far-lying part of the Waterberg.  He came to her and found
her.  And in finding her he had no story to tell.

But what I have no means of telling, now that I have related to you all
that I know, is whether this is the end of the story about Hester van
Wyk.


the selon's rose any story (Oom Schalk Lourens said) about that
half-red flower, the selon's rose, must be an old story.  It is the
flower that a Marico girl most often pins in her hair to attract a
lover.  The selon's rose is also the flower that here, in the Marico,
we customarily plant upon a grave.

One thing that certain thoughtless people sometimes hint at about my
stories is that nothing ever seems to happen in them.  Then there is
another kind of person who goes even further, and he says that the
stories I tell are all stories that he has heard before, somewhere,
long ago he can't remember when, exactly, but somewhere at the back of
his mind he knows that it is not a new story.

I have heard that remark passed quite often which is not surprising,
seeing that I really don't know any new stories.  But the funny part of
it is that these very people will come around, say, ten years later,
and ask me to tell them another story.  And they will say, then,
because of what they have lea mt of life in between, that the older the
better.

Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that with an old story it is like
with an old song.  People tire of a new song readily.  I remember how
it was when Marie Dupreez came back to the Bushveld after her parents
had sent her overseas to learn singing, because they had found diamonds
on their farm, and because Marie's teacher said she had a nice singing
voice.  Then, when Marie came back from Europe through the diamonds on
the Dupreez farm having given out suddenly we on this side of the
Dwarsberge were keen to have Marie sing for us.

There was a large attendance, that night, when Marie Dupreez gave a
concert in the Drogedal schoolroom.  She sang what she called arias
from Italian opera.  And at first things didn't go at all well.  We
didn't care much for those new songs in Italian.  One song was about
the dawn being near, goodbye beloved and about being under somebody's
window that was what Marie's mother told us it was.

Marie Dupreez's mother came from the Cape and had studied at the
Wellington seminary.  Another song was about mother see these tears.

The Hollander schoolmaster told me the meaning of that one.  But I
didn't know if it was Marie's mother that was meant.


We didn't actually dislike those songs that Marie Dupreez sang.  It
was only that we weren't moved by them.

Accordingly, after the interval, when Marie was again stepping up on
the low platform before the blackboard on which the teacher wrote sums
on school days, Philippus Bonthuys, a farmer who had come all the way
from Nietverdiend to attend the concert, got up and stood beside Marie
Dupreez.  And because he was so tall and broad it seemed almost as
though he stood half in front of her, elbowing her a little, even.

Philippus Bonthuys said that he was just a plain Dopper.  And we all
cheered.  Then Philippus Bonthuys said that his grandfather was also
just a plain Dopper, who wore his pipe and his tobacco-bag on a piece
of string fastened at the side of his trousers.  We cheered a lot more,
then.

Philippus Bonthuys went on to say that he liked the old songs best.
They could keep those new songs about laugh because somebody has stolen
your clown.  We gathered from this that Marie's mother had been
explaining to Philippus Bonthuys, also, in quick whispers, the meanings
of some of Marie's songs.

And before we knew where we were, the whole crowd in the schoolroom was
singing, with Philippus Bonthuys beating time, "My Oupa was 'n Dopper,
en 'n Dopper was Hy."  You've got no idea how stirring that old song
sounded, with Philippus Bonthuys beating time, in the night, under the
thatch of that Marico schoolroom, and with Marie Dupreez looking
slightly bewildered but joining in all the same since it was her
concert, after all and not singing in Italian, either.

We sang many songs, after that, and they were all old songs.  We sang
"Die Vaal Hare en die Blou Oge" and "Daar Waar die Son en die Maan
Ondergaan" and "Vat Jou Goed en Trek, Ferreira" and "Met My Rooi Rok
Voor Jou Deur."  It was very beautiful.

We sang until late into the night.  Afterwards, when we congratulated
Marie Dupreez's mother, who had arranged it all, on the success of her
daughter's concert, Mevrou Dupreez said it was nothing, and she smiled.
But it was a peculiar sort of smile.

I felt that she must have smiled very much the same way when she was
informed that the diamond mine on the Dupreez farm was only an alluvial
gravel-bed, and not a pipe, like in Kimberley.

Now, Marie Dupreez had not been out of the Marico very long.  All told,
I don't suppose she had been in Europe for more than six months before
the last shovelful of diamondiferous gravel went through Dupreez's
sieve.  By the time she got back, her father was so desperate that


he was even trying to sift ordinary Transvaal red clay.  But Marie's
visit overseas had made her restive.

That, of course, is something that I can't understand.  I have also
been to foreign parts.  During the Boer War I was a prisoner on St.
Helena.

And I was twice in Johannesburg.  And one thing about St.  Helena is
that there are no Uitlanders on it.  There were just Boers and English
and Coloureds and Indians, like you come across here in the Marico.

There were none of those all-sorts that you've got to push past on
Johannesburg pavements.  And each time I got back to my own farm, and I
could sit on my stoep and fill my pipe with honest Magaliesberg
tobacco, I was pleased to think I was away from all that sin that you
read about in the Bible.

But with Marie Dupreez it was different.

Marie Dupreez, after she came back from Europe, spoke a great deal
about how unhappy a person with a sensitive nature could be over
certain aspects of life in the Marico.

We were not unwilling to agree with her.

"When I woke up that morning at Nietverdiend," Willie Prinsloo said to
Marie during a party at the Dupreez homestead, "and I found that I
couldn't in span my oxen because during the night the Miapi kaffirs had
stolen my trek-chain well, to a person with a sensitive nature, I can't
tell you how unhappy I felt about the Marico."

Marie said that was the sort of thing that made her ill, almost.

"It's always the same kind of conversation that you have to listen to,
day in and day out," Marie Dupreez said.

"A farmer out spans his oxen for the night.  And next morning, when he
has to move on, the kaffirs have stolen his trek-chain.  I don't know
how often I have heard that same story.  Why can't something different
ever happen?  Why can't a kaffir think of stealing something else, for
a change?"

"Yes," Jurie Bekker interjected, quickly, "why can't they steal a
clown, say?"

Thereupon Marie explained that it was not a clown that had got stolen
in that Italian song that she sang in the schoolroom, but a girl who
had belonged to a clown.  And so several of us said, speaking at the
same time, that she couldn't have been much of a girl, anyway,
belonging to a clown.

We said we might be behind the times and so forth, here in the
Bushveld, but we had seen clowns in the circus in Zeerust, and we could
imagine what a clown's girl must be like, with her nose painted all
red.

I must admit, however, that we men enjoyed Marie's wild talk.  We


preferred it to her singing, anyway.  And the women also listened
quite indulgently.

Shortly afterwards Marie Dupreez made a remark that hurt me, a
little.

"People here in the Marico say all the same things over and over
again," Marie announced.

"Nobody ever says anything new.  You all talk just like the people in
Oom Schalk Lourens's stories.  Whenever we have visitors it's always
the same thing.  If it's a husband and wife, it will be the man who
first starts talking.  And he'll say that Afrikaner cattle are in a bad
way with the heart-water.  Even though he drives his cattle straight
out on to the veld with the first frost, and he keeps to regular
seven-day dipping, he just can't get rid of the heart-water ticks."

Marie Dupreez paused.  None of us said anything, at first.  I only know
that for myself I thought this much: I thought that, even though I dip
my cattle only when the Government inspector from Onderstepoort is in
the neighbourhood, I still lose just as many Afrikaner beasts from the
heart water as any of the farmers hereabouts who go in for the
seven-day dipping.

"They should dip the Onderstepoort inspector every seven days," Jurie
Bekker called out suddenly, expressing all our feelings.

"And they should drive the Onderstepoort inspector straight out on to
the veld first with the first frost," Willie Prinsloo added.

We got pretty worked up, I can tell you.

"And it's the same with the women," Marie Dupreez went on.

"Do they ever discuss books or fashion or music?  No.  They also talk
just like those simple Boer women that Oom Schalk Lourens's head is so
full of.  They talk about the amount of Kalahari sand that the Indian
in the store at Ramoutsa mixed with the last bag of yellow sugar they
bought off him.  You know, I have heard that same thing so often, I am
surprised that there is any sand at all left in the Kalahari desert,
the way that Indian uses it all up."

Those of us who were in the Dupreez voorkamer that evening, in spite of
our amusement also felt sad at the thought of how Marie Dupreez had
altered from her natural self, like a seedling that has been
transplanted too often in different kinds of soil.

But we felt that Marie should not be blamed too much.  For one thing,
her mother had been taught at that woman's college at the Cape.  And
her father had also got his native knowledge of the soil pretty mixed
up, in his own way.  It was said that he was by now even trying to find

diamonds in the turfgrond on his farm.  I could just imagine how that
must be clogging up his sieves.

"One thing I am glad about, though," Marie said after a pause, "is that
since my return from Europe I have not yet come across a Marico girl
who wears a selon's rose in her hair to make herself look more
attractive to a young man as happens time after time in Oom Schalk's
stories."

This remark of Marie's gave a new turn to the conversation, and I felt
relieved.  For a moment I had feared that Marie Dupreez was also
becoming addicted to the kind of Bushveld conversation that she
complained about, and that she, too, was beginning to say the same
thing over and over again.

Several women started talking, after that, about how hard it was to get
flowers to grow in the Marico, on account of the prolonged droughts.
The most they could hope for was to keep a bush of selon's roses alive
near the kitchen door.  It was a flower that seemed, if anything, to
thrive on harsh sunlight and soapy dishwater and Marico earth, the
women said.

Some time later we lea mt that Theunis Dupreez, Marie's father, was
giving up active farming, because of his rheumatics.  We said, of
course, that we knew how he had got his rheumatics.  Through having
spent so much time in all kinds of weather, we said, walking about the
vlei in search of a new kind of sticky soil to put through his
sieves.

Consequently, Theunis Dupreez engaged a young fellow, Joachem Bonthuys,
to come and work on his farm as a bywoner.  Joachem was a nephew of
Philippus Bonthuys, and I was at the post office when he arrived at
Drogedal, on the lorry from Zeerust, with Theunis Dupreez and his
daughter, Marie, there to meet him.

Joachem Bonthuys's appearance was not very prepossessing, I thought. He
shook hands somewhat awkwardly with the farmers who had come to meet
the lorry to collect their milk-cans.  Joachem did not seem to have
much to say for himself, either, until Theunis Dupreez, his new
employer, asked him what his journey up from Zeerust had been like.

"The veld is dry all the way," he replied.

"And I've never seen so much heart-water in Afrikaner herds.  They
should dip their cattle every seven days."

Joachem Bonthuys spoke at great length, then, and I could not help
smiling to myself when I saw Marie Dupreez turn away.  In that moment
my feelings also grew warmer towards Joachem.  I felt that, at all


events, he was not the kind of young man who would go and sing foreign
songs under a respectable Boer girl's window.

All this brings me back to what I was saying about an old song and an
old story.  For it was quite a while before I again had occasion to
visit the Dupreez farm.  And when I sat smoking on the stoep with
Theunis Dupreez it was just like an old story to hear him talk about
his rheumatics.

Marie came out on to the stoep with a tray to bring us our coffee. Yes,
you've heard all that before, the same sort of thing.  The same stoep. 
The same tray.  And for that reason, when she held the glass bowl out
towards me, Marie Dupreez apologised for the yellow sugar.

"It's full of Kalahari sand, Oom Schalk," she said.

"It's that Indian at Ramoutsa."

And when she turned to go back into the kitchen, leaving the two old
men to their stories, it was not difficult for me to guess who the
young man was for whom she was wearing a selon's rose pinned in her
dark hair.


A bekkersdal marathon at naude, who had A wireless set, came into
Jurie Steyn's voorkamer, where we were sitting waiting for the railway
lorry from Bekkersdal, and gave us the latest news.  He said that the
newest thing in Europe was that young people there were going in for
non-stop dancing.

It was called marathon dancing, At Naude told us, and those young
people were trying to break the record for who could remain on their
feet longest, dancing.

We listened for a while to what At Naude had to say, and then we
suddenly remembered a marathon event that had taken place in the little
dorp ofBekkersdal almost in our midst, you could say.  What was more,
there were quite a number of us sitting in Jurie Steyn's post office,
who had actually taken part in that non-stop affair, and without
knowing that we were breaking records, and without expecting any sort
of a prize for it, either.

We discussed that affair at considerable length and from all angles,
and we were still talking about it when the lorry came.  And we agreed
that it had been in several respects an unusual occurrence.  We also
agreed that it was questionable if we could have carried off things so
successfully that day, if it had not been for Billy Robertse.

You see, our organist at Bekkersdal was Billy Robertse.  He had once
been a sailor and had come to the Bushveld some years before,
travelling on foot.  His belongings, fastened in a red handkerchief,
were slung over his shoulder on a stick.  Billy Robertse was journeying
in that fashion for the sake of his health.  He suffered from an
unfortunate complaint for which he had at regular intervals to drink
something out of a black bottle that he always carried handy in his
jacket pocket.

Billy Robertse would even keep that bottle beside him in the organist's
gallery in case of a sudden attack.  And if the hymn the predikant gave
out had many verses, you could be sure that about halfway through Billy
Robertse would bring the bottle up to his mouth, leaning sideways
towards what was in it.  And he would put several extra twirls into the
second part of the hymn.


When he first applied for the position of organist in the Bekkersdal
church, Billy Robertse told the meeting of deacons that he had lea mt
to play the organ in a cathedral in Northern Europe.  Several deacons
felt, then, that they could not favour his application.  They said that
the cathedral sounded too Papist, the way Billy Robertse described it,
with a dome 300 feet high and with marble apostles.  But it was lucky
for Billy Robertse that he was able to mention, at the following
combined meeting of elders and deacons, that he had also played the
piano in a South American dance hall, of which the manager was a
Presbyterian.  He asked the meeting to overlook his unfortunate past,
saying that he had had a hard life, and anybody could make mistakes. In
any case, he had never cared much for the Romish atmosphere of the
cathedral, he said, and had been happier in the dance hall.

In the end.  Billy Robertse got the appointment.  But in his sermons
for several Sundays after that the predikant, Dominee Welthagen, spoke
very strongly against the evils of dance halls.  He described those
places of awful sin in such burning words that at least one young man
went to see Billy Robertse, privately, with a view to taking lessons in
playing the piano.

But Billy Robertse was a good musician.  And he took a deep interest in
his work.  And he said that when he sat down on the organist's stool
behind the pulpit, and his fingers were flying over the keyboards, and
he was pulling out the stops, and his feet were pressing down the notes
that sent the deep bass notes through the pipes then he felt that he
could play all day, he said.

I don't suppose he guessed that he would one day be put to the test,
however.

It all happened through Dominee Welthagen one Sunday morning going into
a trance in the pulpit.  And we did not realise that he was in a
trance.  It was an illness that overtook him in a strange and sudden
fashion.

At each service the predikant, after reading a passage from the Bible,
would lean forward with his hand on the pulpit rail and give out the
number of the hymn we had to sing.  For years his manner of conducting
the service had been exactly the same.  He would say, for instance:

"We will now sing Psalm 82, verses 1 to 4."  Then he would allow his
head to sink forward on to his chest and he would remain rigid, as
though in prayer, until the last notes of the hymn died away in the
church.


Now, on that particular morning, just after he had announced the
number of the psalm, without mentioning what verses, Dominee Welthagen
again took a firm grip on the pulpit rail and allowed his head to sink
forward on to his breast.  We did not realise that he had fallen into a
trance of a peculiar character that kept his body standing upright
while his mind was a blank.  We learnt that only later.

In the meantime, while the organ was playing the opening bars, we began
to realise that Dominee Welthagen had not indicated how many verses we
had to sing.  But he would discover his mistake, we thought, after we
had been singing for a few minutes.

All the same, one or two of the younger members of the congregation did
titter, slightly, when they took up their hymn-books.  For Dominee
Welthagen had given out Psalm 119.  And everybody knows that Psalm 119
has 176 verses.

This was a church service that will never be forgotten in Bekkersdal.

We sang the first verse and then the second and then the third.  When
we got to about the sixth verse and the minister still gave no sign
that it would be the last, we assumed that he wished us to sing the
first eight verses.  For, if you open your hymn-book, you'll see that
Psalm 119 is divided into sets of eight verses, each ending with the
word "Pouse."

We ended the last notes of verse eight with more than an ordinary
number of turns and twirls, confident that at any moment Dominee
Welthagen would raise his head and let us know that we could sing
"Amen."

It was when the organ started up very slowly and solemnly with the
music for verse nine that a real feeling of disquiet overcame the
congregation.

But, of course, we gave no sign of what went on in our minds.

We held Dominee Welthagen in too much veneration.

Nevertheless, I would rather not say too much about our feelings, when
verse followed verse and Pouse succeeded Pouse, and still Dominee
Welthagen made no sign that we had sung long enough, or that there was
anything unusual in what he was demanding of us.

After they had recovered from their first surprise, the members of the
church council conducted themselves in a most exemplary manner.

Elders and deacons tiptoed up and down the aisles, whispering words of
reassurance to such members of the congregation, men as well as women,
who gave signs of wanting to panic.

At one stage it looked as though we were going to have trouble from the
organist.  That was when Billy Robertse, at the end of the 34th
verse,


held up his black bottle and signalled quietly to the elders to
indicate that his medicine was finished.  At the end of the 35th verse
he made signals of a less quiet character, and again at the end of the
36th verse.

That was when Elder Landsman tiptoed out of the church and went round
to the konsistorie, where the Nagmaal wine was kept.  When Elder
Landsman came back into the church he had a long black bottle half
hidden under his man el  He took the bottle up to the organist's
gallery, still walking on tiptoe.

At verse 61 there was almost a breakdown.  That was when a message came
from the back of the organ, where Koster Claassen and the assistant
verger, whose task it was to turn the handle that kept the organ
supplied with wind, were in a state near to exhaustion.  So it was
Deacon Cronje's turn to go tiptoeing out of the church.  Deacon Cronje
was head-warder at the local gaol.  When he came back it was with three
burly native convicts in striped jerseys, who also went through the
church on tiptoe.  They arrived just in time to take over the handle
from Koster Claassen and the assistant verger.

At verse 98 the organist again started making signals about his
medicine.

Once more Elder Landsman went round to the konsistorie.  This time he
was accompanied by another elder and a deacon, and they stayed away
somewhat longer than the time when Elder Landsman had gone on his own.
On their return the deacon bumped into a small hymn-book table at the
back of the church.  Perhaps it was because the deacon was a fat,
red-faced man, and not used to tiptoeing.

At verse 124 the organist signalled again, and the same three members
of the church council filed out to the konsistorie, the deacon walking
in front this time.

It was about then that the pastor of the Full Gospel Apostolic Faith
Church, about whom Dominee Welthagen had in the past used almost as
strong language as about the Pope, came up to the front gate of the
church to see what was afoot.  He lived near our church and, having
heard the same hymn tune being played over and over for about eight
hours, he was a very amazed man.  Then he saw the door of the
konsistorie open, and two elders and a deacon coming out, walking on
tiptoe they having apparently forgotten that they were not in church,
then.

When the pastor saw one of the elders hiding a black bottle under his
man el a look of understanding came over his features.  The pastor
walked off, shaking his head.

At verse 152 the organist signalled again.  This time Elder Landsman


and the other elder went out alone.  The deacon stayed behind on the
deacon's bench, apparently in deep thought.  The organist signalled
again, for the last time, at verse 169.  So you can imagine how many
visits the two elders made to the konsistorie altogether.

The last verse came, and the last line of the last verse.  This time it
had to be "Amen."  Nothing could stop it.  I would rather not describe
the state that the congregation was in.  And by then the three native
convicts, red stripes and all, were, in the Bakhatia tongue,
threatening mutiny.

"Aa-me-e-n" came from what sounded like less than a score of voices,
hoarse with singing.

The organ music ceased.

Maybe it was the sudden silence that at last brought Dominee Welthagen
out of his long trance.  He raised his head and looked slowly about
him.  His gaze travelled over his congregation and then, looking at the
windows, he saw that it was night.  We understood right away what was
going on in Dominee Welthagen's mind.  He thought he had just come into
the pulpit, and that this was the beginning of the evening service.  We
realised that, during all the time we had been singing, the predikant
had been in a state of unconsciousness.

Once again Dominee Welthagen took a firm grip of the pulpit rail.  His
head again started drooping forward on to his breast.  But before he
went into a trance for the second time, he gave out the hymn for the
evening service.

"We will," Dominee Welthagen announced, "sing Psalm 119."


local colour we were talking about the book-writing man, Gabriel
Penzhom, who was in the Marico on a visit, wearing a white helmet above
his spectacles and with a notebook and a fountain pen below his
spectacles.

He had come to the Marico to get local colour and atmosphere, he said,
for his new South African novel.  What was wrong with his last novel,
it would seem, was that it did not have enough local colour and
atmosphere in it.

So we told Penzhom that the best place for him to get atmosphere in
these parts was in that kloof other side Lobatse, where that gas came
out from.  Only last term the school-teacher had taken the children
there, and he had explained to them about the wonders of Nature.  We
said to Gabriel Penzhom that there was atmosphere for him, all right.

In fact, the schoolmaster had told the children that there was a whole
gaseous envelope of it.  Penzhom could even collect some of it in a
glass jar, with a piece of rubber tubing on it, like the schoolmaster
had done.

And as for local colour, well, we said, there was that stretch of blue
bush on this side ofAbjaterskop, which we called the bloubos.  It
wasn't really blue, we said, but it only looked blue.  All the same, it
was the best piece of blue bush we had seen anywhere in the Northern
Transvaal.

The schoolmaster had brought a piece of that home with him also, we
explained.

Gabriel Penzhorn made it clear, however, that that stretch of blue bush
was not the sort of local colour he wanted at all.  Nor was he much
interested in the kind of atmosphere that he could go and collect in a
bottle with a piece of rubber tubing, just from other side Lobatse.

From that we could see that Gabriel Penzhorn was particular.  We did
not blame him for it, of course.  We realised that if it was things
that a writer had to put into a book, then only the best could be good
enough.

Nevertheless, since most of us had been born in the Marico, and we took
pride in our district, we could not help feeling just a little hurt.

"As far as I can see," Johnny Coen said to us one day in Jurie Steyn's
post office, "what this book-writing man wants is not atmosphere, but


stinks.  Perhaps that's the sort of books he writes.  I wonder.  Have
they got pictures in, does anybody know?"

But nobody knew.

"Well, if it's stinks that Penzhom wants," Johnny Coen proceeded, "just
let him go and stand on the siding at Ottoshoop when they open a truck
of Bird Island guano.  Phew!  He won't even need a glass jar to collect
that sort of atmosphere in.  He can just hold his white helmet in his
hand and let a few whiffs of guano atmosphere float into it.  But if he
puts a white helmetful of that kind of atmosphere into his next book, I
think the police will have something to say."

Oupa Bekker looked reflective.  At first we thought that he hadn't been
following much of our conversation, since it was intellectual, having
to do with books.  We knew that Oupa Bekker had led more of an open-air
sort of life, having lived in the Transvaal in the old days, when the
Transvaal did not set much store on book learning.  But to our surprise
we found that Oupa Bekker could take part in a talk about culture as
well as any of us.  What was more, he did not give himself any airs on
account of his having this accomplishment, either.

"Stinks?"  Oupa Bekker enquired.

"Stinks?  Well, let me tell you.

There never have been any stinks like the kind we had when we were
running that tannery on the Molopo River in the rainy season, in the
old days.  We thought that the water of the Molopo that the flour-mill
on the erf next to us didn't use for their water-wheel would be all
right for us with our tannery.  We didn't need running water.  Just
ordinary standing water was good enough for us.  And when I say
standing water, I mean standing.  You have got no idea how it stood.
And we didn't tan just plain ox-hides and sheepskins, but every kind of
skin we could get.

Tanning was our business, you understand.  We tanned lion and zebra
skins along with the elephant and rhinoceros hides.  After a while the
man who owned the flour-mill couldn't stand it any longer.  So he moved
higher up the river.  And if I tell you that he was a Bulgarian and he
couldn't stand it, that will possibly give you an idea of what that
tannery smelt like.  Then, one day, a farmer came from the Dwarsberge..
.

Yes, they are still the same Dwarsberge, and they haven't changed much
with the years.  Only, today I can't see as far from the top of the
Dwarsberge as I could when I was young.  And they look different, also,
somehow, with that little whitewashed house no longer in the poort, and
with Lettie Gouws no longer standing at the front gate, in an apron
with blue squares."


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 Penzhom walked into Jurie
Steyn's voorkamer.  He intended taking the lorry back to civilisation,
Penzhom 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 Penzhom 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," Penzhom 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 Naude pulled Penzhom 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 Tender 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 Tender 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 Penzhom 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 riddler- " "Veld lore," Gabriel Penzhom 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 motreen.  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 Naude said.

"And if that canning factory at Welgevonden ever thinks I'm going to
deal with them again..  . " In the meantime, June 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, June Steyn's wife said.

When the lorry from Groblersdal arrived Hans van Tender was feeling in
his pockets to show us an account he had got only the other day for
cement.  And Gabriel Penzhom, 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
Penzhom made a certain remark to him.  If we did not know otherwise, we
might perhaps have thought that Gabriel Penzhom had overheard some of
the earlier part of our conversation in the voorkamer that mo ming

"The Marico," Gabriel Penzhom said to the lorry-driver, "stinks."


secret agent the stranger who arrived on the Government lorry from
Bekkersdal told us that his name was Losper.  He was having a look
round that part of the Marico, he said, and he did not expect to stay
more than a few days.  He was dressed in city clothes and carried a
leather briefcase.  But because he did not wear pointed black shoes and
did not say how sad it was that Flip Prinsloo should have died so
suddenly at the age of sixty eight of snakebite, we knew that he was
not a life insurance agent.

Furthermore, because he did not once seek to steer the conversation
round to the sinful practices of some people who offered a man a quite
substantial bribe when he was just carrying out his duty, we also knew
that the stranger was not a plain-clothes man who had been sent round
to investigate the increase in cattle-smuggling over the
Conventie-lyn.

Quite a number of us breathed more easily, then.

Nevertheless, we were naturally intrigued to know what Meneer Losper
had come there for.  But with the exception ofGysbert van Tonder who
did not have much manners since the time he had accompanied a couple of
Americans on safari to the lower reaches of the Limpopo we were all too
polite to ask a man straight out what his business was, and then
explain to him how he could do it better.

That trip with the two Americans influenced Gysbert van Tender's mind,
all right.  For he came back talking very loudly.  And he bought a
waistcoat at the Indian store especially so that he could carry a cigar
in it.  And he spoke of himself as Gysbert 0. van Tonder.  And he once
also slapped Dominee Welthagen on the back to express his appreciation
of the Nagmaal sermon Dominee Welthagen had delivered on the Holy
Patriarchs and the Prophets.

When Gysbert van Tender came back from that journey, we understood how
right the Voortrekker, Hendrik Potgieter, had been over a hundred years
ago, when he said that the parts around the lower end of the Limpopo
were no fit place for a white man.

We asked Gysbert van Tonder how that part of the country affected the
two Americans.  And he said he did not think it affected them much.

But it was a queer sort of area, all round, Gysbert explained.  And
there


was a lot of that back-slapping business, too.  He said he could still
remember how one of the Americans slapped Chief Umfutusu on the back
and how Chief Umfutusu, in his turn, slapped the American on the ear
with a clay pot full of greenish drink that the chief was holding in
his hand at the time.

The American was very pleased about it, Gysbert van Tender said, and he
devoted a lot of space to it in his diary.  The American classed Chief
Umfutusu's action as among the less understood tribal customs that had
to do with welcoming distinguished white travellers.  Later on, when
Gysbe t van Tender and the Americans came to a Mshangaan village that
was having some trouble with hut tax, the American who kept the diary
was able to write a lot more about what he called an obscure African
ritual that that tribe observed in welcoming a superior order of
stranger.  For that whole Mshangaan village, men, women and children,
had rushed out and pelted Gysbert and the two Americans with wet
cow-dung.

In his diary the American compared this incident with the ceremonial
greeting that a tribe ofBavendas once accorded the explorer Stanley,
when they threw him backwards into a dam to show respect, as Stanley
explained, afterwards.

Well anyway, here was this stranger, Losper, a middle-aged man with a
suitcase, sitting in the post office and asking Jurie Steyn if he could
put him up in a spare room for a few days, while he had a look round.

"I'll pay the same rates as I paid in the boarding-house in Zeerust,"
Meneer Losper said.

"Not that I think you might overcharge me, of course, but I am only
allowed a fixed sum by the department for accommodation and travelling
expenses."

"Look here, Neef Losper," Jurie Steyn said, "you didn't tell me your
first name, so I can only call you Neef Losper - " "My first name is
Org," the stranger said.

"Well, then, Neef Org," Jurie Steyn went on.

"From the way you talk I can see that you are unacquainted with the
customs of the Groot Marico.

In the first place, I am a postmaster and a farmer.  I don't know which
is the worst job, what with money orders and the blue-tongue.  I have
got to put axle-grease on my mule-cart and sealing wax on the mailbag.
And sometimes I get mixed up.  Any man in my position would.  One day
I'll paste a revenue stamp on my off-mule and I'll brand a half-moon
and a bar on the Bekkersdal mailbag.  Then there will be trouble. There
will be trouble with my off-mule, I mean.  The post office won't notice
any difference.

But my off-mule is funny, that way.  He'll pull the mule-cart, all


right.  But then everything has got to be the way he wants it.  He
won't have people laughing at him because he's got a revenue stamp
stuck on his behind.  I sometimes think that my off-mule knows that a
shilling revenue stamp is what you put on a piece of paper after you've
told a justice of the peace a lot of lies " "Not lies," Gysbert van
Tender interjected.

"A lot of lies," June Steyn went on, "about another man's cattle
straying into a person's lucerne lands while that person was taking his
sick child to Zeerust - " Gysbert van Tender, who was June Steyn's
neighbour, half rose out of his riempies chair, then, and made some
sneering remarks about Jurie Steyn and his off-mule.  He said he never
had much time for either of them.  And he said he would not like to
describe the way his lucerne lands looked after Jurie Steyn's cattle
had finished straying over them.

He said he would not like to use that expression, because there was a
stranger present.

Meneer Losper seemed interested, then, and sat well forward to
listen.

And it looked as though Gysbert van Tender would have said the words,
too.  Only, At Naude, who has a wireless to which he listens in
regularly, put a stop to the argument.  He said that this was a
respectable voorkamer, with family portraits on the wall.

"And there's Jurie Steyn's wife in the kitchen, too," At Naude said.

"You can't use the same sort of language here as in the Volksraad,
where there are all men."

Actually, Jurie Steyn's wife had gone out of the kitchen, about then.

Ever since that young schoolmaster with the black hair parted in the
middle had come to Bekkersdal, Jurie Steyn's wife had taken a good deal
of interest in education matters.  Consequently, when the stranger, Org
Losper, said he was from the department, Jurie Steyn's wife thought
right away -judging from his shifty appearance that he might be a
school inspector.  And so sent a message to the young schoolmaster to
warn him in time, so that he could put away the saws and hammers that
he used for the private fretwork that he did in front of the class
while the children were writing compositions.

In the meantime, Jurie Steyn was getting to the point.

"So you can't expect me to be running a boarding-house as well as
everything else, Neef Org," he was saying.

"But all the same, you are welcome to stay.  And you can stay as long
as you like.  Only, you must not offer again to pay.  If you had known
more about these parts, you


would also have known that the Groot Marico has got a very fine
reputation for hospitality.  When you come and stay with a man he gets
insulted if you offer him money.  But I shall be glad to invite you
into my home as a member of my own family."

Then Org Losper said that that was exactly what he didn't want, any
more.  And he was firm about it, too.

"When you're a member of the family, you can't say no to anything," he
explained.

"In the Pilanesberg I tore my best trousers on the wire.  I was
helping, as a member of the family, to round up the donkeys for the
water-cart.  At Nietverdiend a Large White bit a piece out of my second
best trousers and my leg.  That was when I was a member of the family
and was helping to carry buckets of swill to the pig troughs. The
farmer said the Large White was just being playful that day.  Well,
maybe the Large White thought I was also a member of the family his
family, I mean.  At Abjaterskop I nearly fell into a disused mine shaft
on a farm there.  Then I was a member of the family, assisting to throw
a dead bull down the shaft.  The bull had died of anthrax and I was
helping to pull him by one haunch and I was walking backwards and when
I jumped away from the opening of the mine shaft it was almost too
late.

"I can also tell you what happened to me in the Dwarsberge when I was
also a member of the family.  And also about what happened when I was a
member of the family at Derdepoort.  I did not know that that family
was having a misunderstanding with the family next door about water
rights.  And it was when I was opening a water furrow with a shovel
that a load of buckshot went through my hat.  As a member of the
family, I was standing ankle-deep in the mud at the time, and so I
couldn't run very fast.  So you see, when I say I would rather pay, it
is not that I am ignorant of the very fine tradition that the Marico
has for the friendly and bountiful entertainment that it accords the
stranger.  But I do not wish to presume further on your kindness.  If I
have much more Bushveld hospitality I might never see my wife and
children again.  It's all very well being a member of somebody else's
family.  But I have a duty to my own family.  I want to get back to
them alive."

Johnny Coen remarked that next time Gysbert van Tonder had an American
tourist on his hands, he need not take him to the Limpopo, but could
just show him around the Marico farms.

It was then that Gysbert van Tonder asked Org Losper straight out what
his business was.  And, to our surprise, the stranger was very frank
about it.

Ill


 It is a new job that has been made for me by the Department of
Defence," Org Losper said.

"There wasn't that post before.  You see, I worked very hard at the
last elections, getting people's names taken off the electoral roll.
You have no idea how many names I got taken off.  I even got some of
our candidate's supporters crossed off.  But you know how it is, we all
make mistakes.  It is a very secret post.  It is a top Defence secret.
I am under oath not to disclose anything about it.  But I am free to
tell you that I am making certain investigations on behalf of the
Department of Defence.  I am trying to find out whether something has
been seen here.  But, of course, the post has been made for me, if you
understand what I mean."

We said we understood, all right.  And we also knew that, since he was
under oath about it, the nature of Org Losper's investigations in the
Groot Marico would leak out sooner or later.

As it happened, we found out within the next couple of days.  A
Mahalapi who worked for Adriaan Geel told us.  And then we realised how
difficult Org Losper's work was.  And we no longer envied him his
Government job even though it had been especially created for him.

If you know the Mtosas, you'll understand why Org Losper's job was so
hard.  For instance, there was only one member of the whole Mtosa tribe
who had ever had any close contact with white men.  And he had
unfortunately grown up among Trekboers, whose last piece of crockery
that they had brought with them from the Cape had got broken almost a
generation earlier.

We felt that the Department of Defence could have made an easier job
for Org Losper than to send him round asking those questions of the
Mtosas, they who did not even know what ordinary kitchen saucers were,
leave alone flying ones.


white ant jurie steyn was rubbing vigorously along the side of his
counter with a rag soaked in paraffin.  He was also saying things
which, afterwards, in calmer moments, he would no doubt regret.  When
his wife came into the voorkamer with a tin of Cooper's dip, June Steyn
stopped using that sort of language and contented himself with
observations of a general nature about the hardships of life in the
Marico.

"All the same, they are very wonderful creatures, those little white
ants," the schoolmaster remarked.

"Among the books I brought here into the Marico, to read in my spare
time, is a book called The Life of the White Ant.  Actually, of course,
the white ant is not a true ant at all.

The right name for the white ant is isoptera - " June Steyn had
another, and shorter, name for the white ant right on the tip of his
tongue.  And he started saying it, too.  Only, he remembered his wife's
presence, in time, and so he changed the word to something else.

"This isn't the first time the white ants got in behind your counter,"
At Naude announced.

"The last lot of stamps you sold me had little holes eaten all round
the edges."

"That's just perforations," June Steyn replied.

"All postage stamps are that way.  Next time you have got a postage
stamp in your hand, just look at it carefully, and you'll see.  There's
a law about it, or something.  In the department we talk of those
little holes as perforations.  It is what makes it possible for us, in
the department, to tear stamps off easily, without having to use a
scissors.  Of course, it's not everybody that knows that."

At Naude looked as much hurt as surprised.

"You mustn't think I am 50 ignorant, Jurie," he said severely.

"Mind you, I am not saying that, perhaps, when this post office was
first opened, and you were still new to affairs, and you couldn't be
expected to know about perforations and things, coming to this job raw,
from behind the plough I'm not saying that you mightn't have cut the
stamps loose with a scissors or a No.  3 pruning shears, even.  At the
start, mind you.  And nobody would have blamed you for it, either.  I
mean, nobody ever has blamed you.  We've all, in fact, admired the way
you took to this work.  I spoke to Gysbert van Tender about it, too,
more than once.


Indeed, we both admired you.  We spoke about how you stood behind that
counter, with kraal manure in your hair, and all, just like you were
Postmaster-General.  Bold as brass, we said, too."

The subtle flattery in At Naude's speech served to mollify June
Steyn.

"You said all that about me?"  he asked.

"You did?"

"Yes," At Naude proceeded smoothly.

"And we also admired the neat way you lea mt to handle the post office
rubber stamp, Gysbert and I. We said you held on to it like it was a
branding iron.  And we noticed how you would whistle, too, just before
bringing the rubber stamp down on a parcel, and how you would step
aside afterwards, quickly, just as though you half-expected the parcel
to jump up and poke you in the short ribs.  To tell you the truth,
Jurie, we were proud of you."

Jurie Steyn was visibly touched.  And so he said that he admitted he
had been a bit arrogant in the way he had spoken to At Naude about the
perforations.  The white ants had got amongst his postage stamps, Jurie
Steyn acknowledged once.  But what they ate you could hardly notice, he
said.  They just chewed a little around the edges.

But Gysbert van Tender said that, all the same, that was enough.  His
youngest daughter was a member of the Sunshine Children's Club of the
church magazine in Cape Town, Gysbert said.  And his youngest daughter
wrote to Aunt Susann, who was the woman editor, to say that it was her
birthday.  And when Aunt Susann mentioned his youngest daughter's
birthday in the Sunshine Club corner of the church magazine, Aunt
Susann wrote that she was a little girl staying in the lonely African
wilds.

Gramadoelas was the word that Aunt Susann used, Gysbert van Tender
said.  And all just because Aunt Susann had noticed the way that part
of the springbok on the stamp on his youngest daughter's letter had
been eaten off by white ants, Gysbert van Tender said.

He added that his daughter had lost all interest in the Sunshine
Children's Club, since then.  It sounded so un civilised the way Aunt
Susann wrote about her.

"As though we're living in a grass hut and a string of crocodiles
around it, with their teeth showing," Gysbert van Tonder said.

"As though it's all still konsessie farms and we haven't made
improvements.

And it's no use trying to explain to her, either, that she must just
feel sorry for Aunt Susann for not knowing any better.  You can't
explain things like that to a child."

Nevertheless, while we all sympathised with Gysbert van Tonder, we had
to concede that it was not in any way Jurie Steyn's fault.  We had
all


had experience of white ants, and we knew that, mostly, when you came
along with the paraffin and Cooper's dip, it was too late.  By the time
you saw those little tunnels, which the white ants made by sticking
grains of sand together with spit, all the damage had already been
done.

The schoolmaster started talking some more about his book dealing with
the life of the white ant, then, and he said that it was well known
that the termite was the greatest plague of tropic lands.  Several of
us were able to help the schoolmaster right.  As Chris Welman made it
clear to him, the Marico was not in the tropics at all.  The tropics
were quite a long way up.  The tropics started beyond Mochudi, even.  A
land surveyor had established that much for us, a few years ago, on a
coloured map.  It was loose talk about wilds and gramadoelas and
tropics that gave the Marico a bad name, we said.  Like with that Aunt
Susann of the Sunshine Children's Club.  Maybe we did have white ants
here lots of them, too but we certainly weren't in the tropics, like
some countries we knew, and that we could mention, also, if we wanted
to.

Maybe what had happened was that the white ants had come down here from
the tropics, we said.  From way down beyond Mochudi and other side Frik
Bonthuys's farm, even.  There was tropics for you, now, we said to the
schoolmaster.  Why, he should just see Frik Bonthuys's shirt.

Frik Bonthuys wore his shirt outside of his trousers, and the back part
of it hung down almost on to the ground.

The schoolmaster said that he thought we were being perhaps just a
little too sensitive about this sort of thing.  He was interested
himself in the white ant, he explained, mainly from the scientific
point of view.

The white ant belonged to the insect world, that was very highly
civilised, he said.  All the insect world didn't have was haemoglobin.
The insect had the same blood in his veins as a white man, the
schoolmaster said, except for haemoglobin.

Gysbert van Tonder said that whatever that thing was, it was enough.

Gysbert said it quite hastily, too.  He said that when once you started
making allowances for the white ant, that way, the next thing the white
ant would want would be to vote.  And he wouldn't go into a polling
booth alongside of an ant, to vote, Gysbert van Tonder said, even if
that ant was white.

This conversation was getting us out of our depths.  The talk had taken
a wrong turning, but we couldn't make out where, exactly. Consequently,
we were all pleased when Oupa Bekker spoke, and made things seem
sensible again.


 The worst place I ever knew for white ants, in the old days, Oupa
Bekker said, "was along the Molopo, just below where it joins the
Crocodile River.  There was white ants for you.  I was a transport
rider in those days, when all the transport was still by ox-wagon.  My
partner was Jan Theron.  We called him Jan Mankie because of his wooden
leg, a back wheel of the ox-wagon having gone over his knee-cap one day
when he had been drinking mampoer.  Anyway, we had camped out beside
the Molopo.  And next morning, when we in spanned Jan Mankie was saying
how gay and light he felt.  He couldn't understand it.  He even started
thinking that it must be the drink again, that was this time affecting
him in quite a new way.  We didn't know, of course, that it was because
the white ants had hollowed out all of his wooden leg while he had lain
asleep.

"And what was still more queer was that the wagon, when he in spanned
it, also seemed surprisingly light.  It didn't strike us what the
reason for that was, either, just then.  Maybe we were not in a
guessing frame of mind, that morning.  But when our trek got through
the Paradys Poort, into a stiff wind that was blowing across the
vlakte, it all became very clear to us.  For the sudden cloud of dust
that went up was not just dust from the road.  Our wagon and its load
of planed Oregon pine were carried away in the finest kind of powder
you can imagine, and all our oxen were left pulling was the trek-chain.
And Jan Mankie Theron was standing on one leg.  His other trouser leg,
that was of a greyish coloured moleskin, was flapping empty in the
wind."

Thus, Oupa Bekker's factual account of a straightforward Marico
incident of long ago, presenting the ways and characteristics of the
termite in a positive light, restored us to a sense of current
realities.

"But what are you supposed to do about white ants, anyway?"  Johnny
Coen asked after a while.

"Cooper's dip helps, of course.  But there should be a more permanent
way of getting rid of them, I'd imagine."

It was then that we all turned to the schoolmaster, again.  What did it
say in that book of his about the white ant, we asked him.

Well, there was a chapter in his book on the destruction of termites,
the schoolmaster said.  At least, there had been a chapter.  It was the
last chapter in the book.  But he had unfortunately left the book lying
on his desk in the schoolroom over one weekend.  And when he had got
back on Monday morning there was a little tunnel running up his desk.
And the pages dealing with how to exterminate the white ant had been
eaten away.


laugh, clown, laugh

"it's the clown," Johnny coen said, starting to laugh all over again.

"The tall clown in the fancy dress yellow and blue and the smart way of
walking.  I could go to the circus and see it all through again, just
to laugh at that clown.  He kept a straight face even when they chucked
the bucket of watfci over him.  It was a real scream to see his new
clothes getting all soaked..  . oh, soaked.  And he went on standing
there in the middle of the ring as solemn as you like, not being able
to make out where the water came from, even."

Johnny Coen laughed as though he was seeing all that happening again,
right in front of his eyes, and for the first time.

But Oupa Bekker said that what he liked best at the circus were the
elephants.  The way they stood on their hind-legs and the way they
walked on bottles, Oupa Bekker said, balancing themselves to music.

"It's years ago since I was last able to balance myself to music," Oupa
Bekker continued, "leave alone walk on bottles."

"Or stand on your hind-legs," June Steyn commented not loud enough for
Oupa Bekker to hear, though.

In the old days, there wasn't any such thing in the Transvaal, Oupa
Bekker went on, as walking on bottles.  Even though the whole of the
Marico up to the Limpopo was elephant country in those days, Oupa
Bekker said and, in consequence, he prided himself on knowing something
of the habits of elephants he would never have imagined their walking
on bottles.

If an elephant had seen a bottle in his path he would simply have
walked over it.  To him an elephant in those days was just an elephant,
Oupa Bekker said.

And the same thing applied to lions, when the Groot Marico was lion
country, Oupa Bekker added.  To him a lion was just a lion, and not a
bookish person that that, well, we all saw what those lions did at the
circus, didn't we, now?  There was more than one white man in this part
of the Marico that wasn't nearly as well educated as some of those
circus lions, Oupa Bekker said.


Of course, he acknowledged that not every white person in this part of
the Marico had had those same opportunities of schooling as the lions
had.

Then At Naude said that what he just couldn't get over, at the circus
at Bekkersdal, were the trained zebras.

"And to think that this was also zebra country," At Naude remarked.

"But I would never have imagined a zebra wearing a red ostrich feather
on his head, just like he's a Koranna Bushman.  Or a zebra, while
galloping down to the waterhole, first stopping to write something on a
blackboard with chalk."

We spoke also about other animals that we had seen at the circus, and
we said that the Groot Marico had at one time been that kind of
animal's country, too.  And all the time we had never known what those
animals were really like.  That sort of thing made you think, we
said.

When Jurie Steyn was talking about the mule we had seen at the circus,
that could jump six feet, and Jurie was saying that the Groot Marico
was also mule country, Gysbert van Tonder suddenly gave a short
laugh.

"And the clowns, that Johnny Coen was mentioning," Gysbert van Tonder
said.

"Well, it seems to me that for a pretty long while the Marico has been
good clown country.  And still is."

That was something that made you think, too, didn't it?  - Gysbert van
Tonder asked.

We were more than a little surprised, at a remark like that coming from
Gysbert van Tonder.  And several of us told him that we thought he
should be the last person to talk.  We proceeded to give Gysbert van
Tonder some sound reasons, too, as to why we believed he should be the
last person to talk.  And some of the reasons we gave him had to do
with things that hadn't happened so long ago, either.

This discussion would probably have gone on for quite a while, with
each of us being able to think up a fresh reason every few minutes,
when Chris Welman started talking about the fine insouciance with which
the red coated ringmaster cracked his whip.

The ringmaster didn't look very particular as to whether it was the
gaily caparisoned horse he hit, or the blonde equestrienne hanging head
downwards from the saddle, her golden locks trailing in the sawdust so
it seemed to Chris Welman, anyway.


 She didn't once stop smiling, either, Chris Welman said, all the time
the music played."

From the way Chris Welman spoke, it was apparent that, in the sounds
discoursed by the circus band, his ear detected no harsh dissonances.

Nor to his eye did the set smile of the equestrienne convey any
suggestion of artifice.  It was, however, significant that in his
unconscious mind he had, indeed, established a link between two circus
reciprocals the music's blare and the set smile.

"After the circus was over and I had got back home, I was still
thinking of her a long time," Chris Welman said.

"I thought of her a good way into the night.  I thought of her with the
electric light on her hair, hanging down on the ground, and her
spitting out the sawdust every time that it came into her mouth from
the way she was riding, hanging down."

It was obvious that Chris Welman had occupied a ringside seat.

"But mostly I thought of her, about what she was doing after the show
was over," Chris Welman said.

"I pictured her there under that tent, locked up alone in her cage.  It
must be an unnatural sort of life, I thought, for a girl."  And he
winked.

We were able to put Chris Welman right on that point, however.

It wasn't that we had any sort of inside knowledge of circus life, of
course, but we just went by common sense.  It was only the more wild
kind of performers in a circus that got locked in cages, we said.  The
tamer ones just got knee-haltered, we said, or tied with stakes with ri
ems

So he was quite wrong in thinking of the blonde equestrienne as having
to be locked in a cage after the show was over, we told Chris Welman.

Likely as not they even let her go loose, we said.  And we also
winked.

Thereupon At Naude said that that was the trouble.

And after we had pondered At Naude's remark carefully, we realised that
there was much truth in it.

A pretty girl, we said, if she was wild enough, was a lot more
dangerous than any kind of lion.  And no matter how fiercely the lion
might roar, either, we said.  Because all a pretty girl needed to do
was to lower her eyelashes in a particular way, we said.  And for that
she did not have to be an equestrienne or anything else, we added.

It was only natural, after that, that the talk should turn on the
subject of pretty girls in general.  And it was still more natural
that, before we knew where we were, we should be discussing Pauline
Gerber.


What made it somewhat difficult for us to talk as freely as we would
have liked about what we had been hearing of Pauline Gerber lately, was
the fact that Johnny Coen was there, sitting in Jurie Steyn's
voorkamer.  And we knew full well how Johnny Coen had felt about
Pauline Gerber, both before she went to the finishing school in the
Cape, and after she came back from finishing school.

As it happened, however, Johnny Coen helped us out, to some extent, and
perhaps without knowing it, even.

Gysbert van Tender had just made the admission that, insofar as he was
able to judge, Pauline Gerber was not only just the prettiest girl in
this part of the Marico Bushveld, but also the most attractive.

"If you know what I mean by attractive" Gysbert van Tonder added.

"Otherwise I could tell you " That was when Johnny Coen had interrupted
Gysbert van Tender.

"No, no, you don't need to tell us," Johnny Coen said hastily, "not in
words, and all that.  And not when it's when it's Pauline Gerber, I
should say.  You've told us things like that before today.  About what
you find attractive in girls, that is.  And so if you perhaps don't say
it all over again, we won't feel that we have missed anything.  Because
you've said it all before, that is."

After a few moments' reflection, Gysbert van Tonder conceded Johnny
Coen's point.  He had spoken on that subject quite a good bit, he
acknowledged, but there was still just this one thing he wanted to say
"Not now, please," Johnny Coen interjected.  And he spoke so sharply,
and with such unwonted heat, that Gysbert van Tonder shut up, looking
slightly puzzled, all the same.

"I was only going to say " Gysbert van Tonder concluded in an aggrieved
tone, and left it at that.  For if Johnny Coen was going to act funny,
and so on, well, it was not a matter for him, Gysbert van Tonder, to
have to go out of his way to help Johnny right.

"Well, I've only seen Pauline Gerber a few times since she's been back
from finishing school," Johnny Coen said.  And from the way he said
"few" we knew that he wanted us to think it meant more than, say,
exactly twice.

But, of course, we weren't really interested in the number of times
that Johnny Coen had seen Pauline Gerber of late.  What we were anxious
to


learn was how often the young schoolmaster, Vermaak, had been seeing
her.  For it was in relation to young Vermaak, and not to Johnny Coen,
that a certain amount of talk was going on about Pauline Gerber.

"Well, the few times that I have seen her," Johnny Coen went on, "it
was a bit difficult for me to know what to think, exactly.  The first
time I saw her the schoolmaster had just left.  And the second time -I
mean, on another occasion when I saw her at her house, she was sort of
expecting Meneer Vermaak to come round.  But what I want to say is that
what Chris Welman said about the circus girl why, that is exactly what
Ifeel about Pauline Gerber.  About how pretty she is, and all that. And
what makes it still more queer is that she talks about herself like
Chris Welman talks about the girl that rides in the circus.

"She feels she's shut up in a cage, Pauline Gerber says.  To have to
live here in the Bushveld, with everybody so narrow minded Pauline
Gerber says, is like being shut up in a cage."

Johnny Coen went on at considerable length, after that, acquainting us
with the true nature of the sentiments he entertained for Pauline
Gerber.

But we were not interested.  We did not in any way doubt the purity or
sincerity of his feelings.  Only, we were not concerned with all that.
What we really wanted to know was what was going on between Pauline
Gerber and the young schoolmaster.  And it was apparent that Johnny
Coen couldn't tell us more than what we already knew.  It was a pity
that Johnny Coen should be struck with such blindness, we thought.  It
would be better if the scales were to drop from Johnny Coen's eyes, we
felt.

It was Oupa Bekker who brought the talk back to a discussion of the
circus which was, after all, where we had started from.

"Walking on, bottles," Oupa Bekker was saying.

"Well, that's a new one for me.  And I've known the Marico when it was
elephant country.

Unless, maybe, it was giraffe country.  And what a giraffe would look
like, standing on his hind-legs, I just can't think of, right away."

That was what gave Johnny Coen his chance to get back to the clowns,
once more.

"The one clown poured water from the step-ladder out of a bucket on to
that other clown that I was telling you about," Johnny Coen said.

"And I just about laughed my head off, each time, to see how that other
clown got soaked.  And they have Natives to come running in from the
back entrance with more buckets of water.  And it all went over that


clown.  I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the Chinese acrobat, even,
who jumped through two wheels with knives in them.  And all the time
that clown didn't know what was happening.  Every time I saw a Native
come running in with another bucket of water, why I just about died
laughing."

We gazed at Johnny Coen pretty steadily as he spoke.  And we thought of
what was going on between Pauline Gerber and young Vermaak, the
schoolmaster.  And all the time Johnny Coen went on feeling the way he
did about Pauline.  And we wondered if Gysbert van Tonder had been so
far wrong, when he said that this was clown country.

The tears started coming into Johnny Coen's eyes, eventually, the way
he was laughing about that clown.


divinity student

"for the way you're feeling now," June Steyn said to At Naude, "if you
want my advice, I'd say you should go somewhere where you can get away
from civilisation, for a bit.  Nerves, that's what you've got.

Why don't you go on a fishing trip to the Molopo for a week?  You know
get right away from things."

Chris Welman had another suggestion to make.

"If you want my advice," Chris Welman said to At Naude, "you'd go and
camp for a while at the Bechuanaland end of the Dwarsberge.

That's almost on the edge of the Kalahari.  You've got no idea how
desolate that part is.  It's a howling wilderness, all right.

"You've got to be there only a day or two, and you'll forget that there
ever was such a thing as civilisation.  You could even take Gysbert van
Tender along with you.  That should help your state of mind a lot. With
Gysbert van Tonder around, the lower end of the Dwarsberge would look
absolutely barbaric.  Gysbert has got that effect even on a city, I
mean."

Somehow, Gysbert van Tonder did not seem quite as pleased as he might
have been at the subtle flattery conveyed in Chris Welman's speech.

"You go and," Gysbert van Tonder started ungraciously.  Then he
bethought himself.

"Ah, well," Gysbert van Tonder ended up, "I suppose one can have too
much of civilisation.  And I am quite willing to believe that that is
At Naude's trouble his listening in to the wireless and reading the
newspapers every day.  His brain has got too active.  But you can be
glad that that is a kind of sickness that you will never suffer from,
Chris Welman."

Gysbert van Tonder seemed very pleased with himself, the way he made
that remark.

Strangely enough, the friendly controversy in which Gysbert van Tender
and Chris Welman saw fit to indulge did not tend to allay any of the
restlessness with which At Naude's spirit was charged.

For At Naude acted in what we could not help feeling was a quite


singular fashion.  First he half-rose to his feet, emitting a long
moan.

Then he suddenly slumped back again into his riempies chair, at the
same time smacking the open palm of his right hand in a despairing
manner against his forehead.  His visage was noticeably contorted.

"All the same old childishness," At Naude exclaimed, "that's supposed
to be clever or that's supposed to be funny.  I can't stand it any
more, this heavy what's assumed to be Marico fun.  If it's not Jurie
Steyn doing it, it's Chris Welman.  Or it's Gysbert van Tender.  And if
it's not Jurie Steyn's wife, it's Oupa Bekker or it's me.  And if it's
not me, it's oh, I tell you it's driving me mad.  And when I switch on
the wireless it's the same thing.  It's either the Free State Monday
Jokers or it's the Tuesday Choir of Comical Ouderlings or it's the
Wednesday Half Laughs with the Upington District and
Schweizer-Reneke/Kaokoveld Trek Boers.

"And then, when I try to escape from all that, and I come here to Jurie
Steyn's post office to fetch my letters, what do I hear but somebody
saying, "That's a good one, ha, ha, ha'?"

It was clear to us that At Naude was in a bad way.  Gysbert van Tonder
opened his mouth to say something, but Oupa Bekker nudged him to
silence.  We all felt that an unreasoned remark, at that moment, could
have a very adverse effect on At Naude.  And we also knew that it would
be no unique thing for Gysbert van Tonder to make an unreasoned remark.
It was best that At Naude should be allowed to talk himself out, we
felt.

Some time in the future, making use of diplomatic skill, we would be
able to point out to him, talking as man to man, the dangers to which
he exposed himself, sitting day after day in his voorhuis alone,
reading the newspapers and listening in to wireless programmes.  If At
Naude went on like that much longer, he would become somebody learned
before he knew where he was.

And where would At Naude be then, in this part of the Groot Marico, if
he had learning?  Just nowhere, we felt.

"Another idea," Gysbert van Tonder suggested, "would be for you to go
and pitch a tent alongside the Crocodile River.  It's quiet enough
there.

At least, one of the banks is quiet, the one where there isn't much
grass on.  No, on second thoughts, I don't think you should go there.
Because you might just by mistake pick the wrong bank the one that
the


Crocodile River gets its name from.  You'd be surprised how busy
things can be on that side, in the season."

So Oupa Bekker said that if it was civilisation that At Naude wanted to
get away from, well, there was Durban.  He had been to Durban only
once, Oupa Bekker said, but it was enough.  It was quite a story, too,
how he got to Durban, in the first place, Oupa Bekker added.  But
Durban was quite a good place to go to, if you were sick of
civilisation.

"The same old thing," At Naude remarked to Oupa Bekker.

"And I know exactly what you're going to say, too.  It was in the old
days.  And you went there by mule-cart.  Or you were a transport
driver, and you went there by ox-wagon.  And on the way back you gave a
young student of divinity a lift as far as Kimberley.

"And years later you saw the young student of divinity's photograph in
a newspaper.  And he was a bit older then, but not much, for the years
had treated him kindly.  And then you realised, for the first time,
that the young divinity student with the handsome side whiskers that
you had given a lift to from Durban was Sony Joel.  I don't know how
often I haven't heard that kind of story."

When we spoke about it afterwards, we said among ourselves that the
expression on At Naude's face was quite fiendish.

"And if it wasn't Sony Joel," At Naude continued, "it was some other
Rand millionaire.  And if it wasn't a student of theology or a Sunday
school superintendent but, no, it had to be.  It couldn't be anything
else.

Without that, you oldtimers wouldn't think there was any point to your
stories.

"I mean, I've never heard of any of you transport drivers giving a lift
as far as Johannesburg to an Australian doing the three-card trick. But
you must have, otherwise how could they have got there?  No, it's
either Sony Joel, or Wolf Joel, or Lionel Phillips or Sammy Marks and
they were doing nothing all the time but thumbing lifts on ox-wagons
between Durban and the Rand.

"When did the Rand magnates find time to float their companies, then?
Or time to have a bath in champagne like we know they did?  I tell you,
it's more than a year, now, that I've been listening in to every
wireless programme that's got somebody talking about life in South
Africa in the old days.  And you'd be surprised how many of them are
transport drivers.


 It must have been a very healthy life, I should think, driving a
heavily loaded ox-wagon from the coast to the Transvaal, before there
was a railway.  And sometimes, when one of these old transport drivers
says that what he was bringing up from Durban was a big consignment of
dynamite and the announcer starts asking him questions over the
wireless I begin to hope.

"But it turns out, in the end, that it really was a healthy life.  They
had no trouble with the heavy load of dynamite to speak of.

"But there was a religious looking young man with handsome side
whiskers that the transport driver gave a lift to.  And that young man
became the chairman of a mine that ends with the word Deep.  And a
Johannesburg suburb is today called after him.  And that whole load of
dynamite, from the coast to the Rand, didn't as much as singe the young
theologian's side whiskers  You see, it's not that I don't like Oupa
Bekker.  My trouble is just that I've heard him and so often.

"There isn't a day passes but I hear something like "Uit die Ou Dae'
over the wireless.  Or "Toeka se Tyd."  Or "So net die Ou Mense
Gelewe."

Or'Ja'Nee."

"And I get sick of it.  I just can't help it, but I do.  And then, when
I come here and sit down in Jurie Steyn's post office, and I hear Oupa
Bekker talk of the old days, and I realise that he didn't have any
trouble with cases and cases of dynamite, either (I mean, otherwise he
wouldn't be here), well, it isn't that I wish Oupa Bekker any harm, you
understand.

"But I've heard everything he's got to say.  Every time Oupa Bekker
speaks it sounds to me as though he is being introduced by a wireless
announcer, and as though there is somebody playing the piano for
background effects.  I mean, Oupa Bekker, isn't real to me, any more.

"Even the way he spits behind his chair well, it looks to me like a put
on sort of spit, if you know what I mean.  I don't feel that Oupa
Bekker is spitting just because he's got to."

We looked at At Naude in amazement.  It was clear that he was in a
pretty bad way.  There was no telling how far this sort of thing could
go.  We felt that we wanted to help him, if we could.  The next thing
he would do, he would start crying, and right there in front of us. And
all because of his nerves.  We had seen just the same thing happen
before, with a stranger from the city.

The stranger had been with us for quite a while, and was really trying
to understand us, and the things going on in our minds.  And he was
taking notes, even.  And then one day -just like that he started
crying. We felt that At Naude was going the same way, through too much
civilisation that he was getting over the wireless and from reading
newspapers.

It came as a relief to us for At Naude sake to hear Oupa Bekker's voice
once more.

"The last time I went to Durban wasn't in the old days, but two years
ago," Oupa Bekker said.

"And why I said that it was like a story was because I went there by
train.  I had never before in my life travelled so far by train.  And
that was a wonderful thing for me.  Because I never would have
believed, otherwise, that you could journey so far by train.

We didn't once have to get out and walk.  Or change to a post-cart.  Or
mount a horse ready saddled that would take us along a bridle path over
the worst part of the rante - " "Then it couldn't have been in the
Union," Chris Welman shouted out, trying to be really funny.

"You couldn't have been travelling over the S. A. R."

We were pleased that Oupa Bekker ignored Chris Welman.

"No trouble over the whole journey," Oupa Bekker continued.

"It was only when I got off at the station and a Zulu came and pulled
my portmanteau out of my hands.  But I had never in my life seen a Zulu
like that.  He had bull's horns on his head and seashells on his feet.
That was just how my grandfather had told me that the Zulus were
dressed at Vechtkop."

We laughed at that, of course.  After all, those of us who had been to
Durban knew that about the Durban ricksha pullers.  The way they
dressed up to look ferocious.  But all they did was to transport you
and your luggage to an hotel.

"That sort of talk," At Naude began, his lip curling, "and I suppose
when you got to the hotel " "That's why I say that Durban is so un
civilised Oupa Bekker explained.

"Because it was only when we got to the hotel that the ricksha puller
started apologising for all the boot-polish brown that was coming off
his chin.  He was working his way through college, he told me.

He said it was more steady work than looking after babies or mowing
lawns, the seashells on him rattling as he spoke.  He was a divinity
student, the ricksha puller said."


finding THE subject when leon feld berg asked me to write, as usual,
for the Rosh Hashanah issue of The South African Jewish Times, it
seemed that it was going to be straight forward enough.  All that was
needed so it seemed was for me to get a subject, something with a kind
of angle on the relations between Jew and Gentile the rest to be left
to the typewriter and chance.  In the end I was to find that the only
part of the article that was simple was to be the writing of it.

Getting hold of a subject proved to be an almost insurmountable
problem.

"Jew and Boer on the Platteland," Feldberg suggested.  Done to death, I
thought.

Then, "How about The Merchant of Venice'?  A new interpretation of
Shylock?"

But I remembered many long essays that I had read on Shylock.  Humbly,
I felt that, if I were some day, perhaps, to throw a small amount of
new light on the character of Shakespeare's Jew, it wouldn't be in the
course of a thousand words turned out on the spur of the moment.  I had
just seen an advance notice of Edith Sit well's A Notebook on William
Shakespeare, to be published in England next month.

"A phrase is studied and will be found to hold the whole meaning of the
play..  . a work which serves to illumine Shakespeare's mighty and
many-sided genius" so the blurb to Edith Sit well's book read.

Where would I be, among these writers of scholarly treatises, with my 1
000 word dissertation on Shylock, dashed off at speed?

A little later Edgar Bernstein suggested that I wrote on the subject,
"The Jewish Contribution to South African Literature."  Well, I would
try, I reflected especially as he lent me a little publication dealing
with the Jewish Book Festival and containing a considerable number of
informative articles from which I could crib.  I paged through the
booklet.

Somehow the thought of rehashing the contents and dishing them up in a
different form did not make a strong appeal to me.  In any case,
everybody would know that an article on these lines would not be the
result of original research: they would all know where I cribbed it
from.


I paged through the list of contributors.  Ehrhardt Planje, I read.
Uys Krige.  That seemed an idea.  They found subjects to write about. I
would learn from them how they did it.  I might get a lead that way.

I tried Ehrhardt Planje first.  He was out.

But Uys Krige understood my problem right away.  I said, "If I have got
to start now going into the genealogies of South African writers, to
find out which are Jews and which aren't - " "That's exactly what the
Jews complain about the Nazis having done," Krige said.

"In any case, to discuss a specifically Jewish contribution to South
African culture could become something like special pleading.  It's an
insulting thing to do to a people."

He explained that he wrote the article on Olga Kirsch because latterly
she had improved very considerably, and he felt that after the way
Greshoff had dealt with her, considerations of fair play demanded a
more balanced assessment of her work, which had great and obvious
merit.

"What about David Fram?"  Krige asked.

"Write about him.  There's a good subject for you.  Fram has got a far
bigger reputation in America than he has in this country."

That seemed to open up possibilities.  Meanwhile, I again tried to get
hold of Planje.  That article he had written, "The Jew as Depicted in
the Afrikaans Novel", was highly intriguing.  Some years before he had
written an essay, "The Elephant on the Monkey."  He seemed good at
titles.  Perhaps he would be able to think out something equally good
for me.  I lea mt however, that Planje had not yet come home.

Accordingly I tackled David Fram, whose great drawback in the field of
literature is his excessive modesty.  And this time Fram was not only
modest.  He was also sick.  He could hardly talk.  But he was able to
supply me with a number of statistics.  His temperature was 104.  Of
his poems, 60 per cent had a South African setting.  He would not be
able to move around for another fourteen days.  His longest poem, "In
Dorem Afrika", ran to 83 pages.  He was taking medicine every three
hours.  His poem, "The Boers", was 3 200 lines in length.  He had just
taken three tablets, each containing 0.5 grains of
Beta-phenyllisopropylamine sulphate.

There was not much doing there, it seemed to me.  So I tried Planje
again.  He had still not come home.

Thereupon I went for a stroll down Fox Street.  I interviewed one or
two Jewish businessmen I knew, explaining my difficulty.  Couldn't they
perhaps help me to get a lead?


"What is the average Jewish businessman's attitude towards culture?" I
asked the proprietor of a furniture shop.

"Oh, just about the same as the attitude of the average non Jewish
businessman," the furniture dealer's clerk answered pointedly.

That gave me something to think about.

I mentioned the other alternative an article on Shylock.

"Well, why not say that The Merchant of Venice is true to life?"  the
aforementioned clerk replied, his tone seeking to convey a light
irony.

"Look for how many years now writers have been apologising for
Shakespeare or for the Jews, and have been trying to explain Shylock
away.  Why not just say, well, the pound of flesh and all that is life
not life?  That's an original approach, isn't it?"

"It's original enough," I conceded, "but, I mean to say, isn't there
enough anti what-you-m-call-it in the world as it is?  No, I'm afraid
your suggestion is out.  Perhaps Planje could put me on to
something."

But Planje, too, was out.  He had still not found his way home.

Shortly after that I saw S. A. Rochlin.

"Can you help me to get a subject to write on?"  I asked him.

"You know, I want to turn out something worthwhile, thought provoking
and so on.  Not just another goodwill potboiler."

"Do you know what I have got to write about for the Rosh Hashanah
issue?"  Rochlin asked me.

"No," I said, "I don't.  What?"

"A survey of the history of the relations between the Jews and the
Nationalist Party.  That means I'll have to go back to 1912.  Think how
much research there is in that."

I shuddered.

"You'll have to mention the 1932 Germiston by-election," I said.

"A Jew, Schlosberg, was the Nationalist candidate.  I wrote a number of
articles, at the time, supporting him.  He didn't get in."

But I wasn't getting any nearer to writing this article for The South
African Jewish Times.  And there was my photo going in, and all.

Suddenly I thought oflgnatius Mocke.  I contacted him.  And I regretted
the fact, then, that I had not thought of him earlier.  His
conversation suggested not one article to me, but ten.  Effortlessly
and unconsciously, in practically every sentence he spoke, he produced
a theme for something nice and chatty to write about.

"I had often thought that of the various races immigrating into this
country," Mocke said, "the Jew would be able and willing to do most for
Afrikaans literature."  There was an article for you, I thought, ready
made

"The Jews have the greatest capacity of any people,"


Mocke went on, "to appreciate and identify themselves with an
indigenous culture."  Again, something I could elaborate on, and expand
into a couple of columns.

Mocke went on to say that he had been aware for a long time of how
similar the Jew's background was to the Afrikaner's.

"The struggle of these two small peoples for national survival and
independence have many parallel features," he said.  He added that,
some years ago, when anti-Semitic propaganda began to be disseminated
among the Afrikaners on an organised scale, he was in a position to
know to what extent it formed part of a deliberate divide and rule
policy employed by interests antagonistic to both Jew and Afrikaner. He
said that he was able to throw a good deal of light on various aspects
of what he called 'politieke kattakwaad."

I realised that I should have got in touch with Mocke earlier..  .
Perhaps I would remember about him before next Rosh Hashanah.

Up to the time of going to press, Ehrhardt Planje had not yet got back
home.


writing the older I grow, the more puzzled I get as to what life is
for and how to live it.

Since my early adolescence I have had one fervent longing: to have
twelve months of leisure in which I should be able to devote myself in
exclusiveness and abandonment to the task of writing the things that
have surged blindly inside me for expression.  Just a quiet room
somewhere and a piece of floor space to lie down on, and pen and ink,
and a ream of48-lb.  cream-laid paper cut into quarto size.  That is
the one thing I have wanted all my life, and always it has evaded me.
There have been times when I have seemed on the verge of achieving this
ambition, and then on each occasion what has seemed to be the beginning
of this period of leisure has in actual fact been but the prelude to
fresh turmoil, the calm before the storm.

I can always get the ream of cream-laid easily enough, and my
connections with the printing industry make it a simple matter for me
to get a quad-cap ream cut up into the right sized sheets, and ink is
cheap.  A piece of quiet floor-space and a strip of hessian to lie on,
though more difficult to procure, are not completely beyond the range
of my organisation al capacity.  But it is then, when I have got all
these things together, and I am well set on Act I, Scene 1 of a sublime
high tragedy, and I have got to "Enter Bemardus van Aswegen" it is then
that the outside world enters with shouting and banners, and I proceed
to roll up my strip of hessian and I sigh fully set alight to the
48-lb. cream-laid, and I take the nib out of the pen-holder and break
off the points and fasten a strip of folded paper to the back of it,
and shoot it into the ceiling.

I don't remember, just off hand, how many times in my life I have got
as far as "Enter Bemardus van Aswegen" and at that point the world has
entered, swearing and flat-footedly trampling.  Sometimes it has been
creditors.  On one occasion it was the bailiffs.  Once it was a
demolition gang come to tear down the building.  Once, also, it was the
police.  And always I have had to get up from the floor, with
Bemardus's momentous opening speech unwritten.

I have got so, now, that I accept it as inevitable that there is a
curse


on Bemardus van Aswegen; he is bad luck; he will never be allowed to
walk on to the centre of the stage, his brow furrowed in thought, his
right arm raised dramatically to say: "... " But it is okay.  I won't
write down the opening words of his speech, which I know off by heart
just as well as he does.  I don't want this article to be interrupted,
also.  I have lea mt cunning with the years.

And with the years I have begun, in some strange fashion, to identify
myself with Bemardus van Aswegen.  I feel that the world won't allow me
to have my say.  It gives me a queer sense of intimacy with Bemardus.

What he feels, I feel.  His hopes are my hopes.  And we have both lea
mt this same truth from life, Bemardus and I and it is knowledge as
ineluctable as death and that is that we are both doomed to eternal
frustration every time we really want to open our mouths.

And I regret to say that with the years Bernardus van Aswegen has begun
to grow embittered.  There is today a cynical twist to the left part of
his upper lip that I don't like.  It doesn't help him to win and keep
friends.  And it is no use my trying to reason with him, either.

"Aren't I as good as Lear?"  he asked of me.

"What has Othello got that I haven't got?  And you know I can make
rings round Hamlet, can't I?"

"Well, Bemardus," I reply, "I wouldn't say rings.  But as good, yes.

And there is that soliloquy I got for you on the death of your little
daughter.  But I started it all so long ago, and we have both grown so
old in the meantime that I am afraid it will now have to be your little
granddaughter.

And there is that opening speech, right in the beginning, in the first
scene, when you say..  . " "Oh, cut it out," Bemardus replies
petulantly, "I never get so far.  If it isn't creditors it's men with
picks and shovels.  Or it's a couple of Johns from Marshall Square."

"Don't use such dreadful solecisms, Bemardus," I answer soothingly.

"Remember you are a character in a great tragedy.  Don't say "Johns.""
And so it goes on.

But I am trying to write of life and its meaning, if any, and I have
reluctantly come to accept a conclusion that has been persistently
forced on me by external circumstances.  And I can't evade this
conclusion.  Within my experience the same situation has repeated
itself over and over again so often.  I believe that, speaking strictly
for myself personally, the practising of the creative art of letters is
contrary to the laws and


demands of life.  It is always when I have turned out my best work,
and I have got the right sort of recognition for it, too, in terms of
people dubiously enquiring as to whether I think that I should go on
writing at all it is at these times, when my creative powers, such as
they are, have been at their peak, that the worst kinds of disasters
have invariably overtaken me.

And this is something I can't understand.  I have become afraid to pick
up the pen.  Or, when I do pick it up, to dip it in too deep.

And this is something that, I have noticed, applies to other writers as
well.  Recently I read another biography of Edgar Allan Poe, in which
the story of his life is related with a strict regard to chronology.  I
got to 1845.  This year, states the biographer, was a year of great
literary creativeness for Edgar Allan Poe.

"Next year, 1846," I thought, "Edgar Allan Poe will have dropped in
the..  . " I read on and found that, by 1846.  he had.  Taking it by
and large, it is far better not to write.

But I think I have solved the problem of Bemardus van Aswegen.  I shall
keep him out of the play until right at the end.  He will enter only in
the last scene of Act V. He comes on at the opposite prompt side.  He
knows his lines.  He walks on to the centre of the stage and raises his
right hand and just as he opens his mouth the curtain falls.  Title:

Bemardus van Aswegen, a Tragedy in Five Acts.