Bushveld Romance

It’s a queer thing – Oom Schalk Lourens observed – how much trouble people will take to hide their weaknesses from the world. Often, of course, they aren’t weaknesses at all; only the people who have these peculiarities don’t know that. Another thing they don’t know is that the world is aware all the time of these things that they imagine they are concealing. I remember a story my grandfather used to tell of something that happened when he was a boy.

Of course, that was a long time ago. It was before the Great Trek. But it seems that even in those days there was a lot of trouble between the Boers and English. It had a lot to do with slaves. The English Government wanted to free the slaves, my grand­father said, and one man who was very prominent at the meetings that were held to protest against this was Gert van Tonder.

Now, Gert van Tonder was a very able man and a good speaker; he was at his best, too, when dealing with a subject that he knew nothing at all about. He always spoke very loudly then. You can see that he was a fine leader. So, when the slaves were freed and a manifesto was drawn up to be sent to the King of England, the farmers of Graaff-Reinet took it first to Gert van Tonder for his signature.

You can imagine how surprised everybody was when he re­fused to sign. They didn’t know until long afterwards that it was because he couldn’t write. He sat with the manifesto in front of him, and the pen in his hand, and said that he had changed his mind. He said that perhaps they were a bit hasty in writing to the King of England about so trivial a matter.

“Even though the slaves are free, now,” he said, “it doesn’t make a difference. Just let one of my slaves try to act as though he’s a free slave, and I’ll show him. That’s all, just let him try.”

The farmers told Gert van Tonder that he was quite right. It didn’t really make any difference whether the slaves were free or whether they weren’t. But they said that they knew that already. There were a lot of other grievances on the manifesto, they explained, and they were sending it to let the King of England know that unless the Boers got their wrongs redressed they would trek out of the Cape Colony.

My grandfather used to say that everybody was still more surprised when Gert van Tonder put down the pen, very firmly, and told the farmers that they could trek right to the other end of Africa, for all he cared. He was quite satisfied with the way the King of England did things, Gert said, and there was a lot about English rule for which they had to be thankful. He said that when he was in Cape Town, some months back, at the Castle, he saw an English soldier leave his post to go and kick a coloured man; he said this gave him a respect for the English that he had never had before. He said that, for somebody who couldn’t have been in the country very long, that soldier made an extraordinarily good job of assaulting a coloured person.

The upshot of it all was that, when the farmers of the Cape Colony trekked into the north, with their heavily laden wagons and their long spans of oxen and their guns, Gert van Tonder did not go with them. By that time he was saying that another thing they had to be thankful for was the British navy.

My grandfather often spoke about how small a thing it was that kept Gert van Tonder from being remembered in history as one of the leaders of the nation. And it was all just on account of that one weakness of his – of not wanting people to know that he couldn’t read or write.

When I talk of people and their peculiarities it always makes me think of Stoffel Lemmer. He had a weakness that was altogether of a different sort. What was peculiar about Stoffel Lemmer was that if a girl or a woman so much as looked at him he was quite certain that she was in love with him. And what made it worse was that he never had the courage to go up and talk to the girl that he thought was making eyes at him.

Another queer thing about Stoffel Lemmer was that he was just as much in love with the girl as he imagined she was with him. There was that time when that new school-teacher arrived from somewhere in the Cape. The school-teacher we had before that had to leave because he was soft in the head. He was always talking about co-operation between parent and teacher, and he used to encourage the parents to call round at the school building just so that everybody could feel friendly.

At first nobody accepted the invitation: the farmers of Droge­vlei were diffident about it, and suspicious. But afterwards one or two of them went, and then more of them, until in the end things got very disgraceful. That was when some of the parents, including Piet Terblans, who had never been to school in his life, started fighting in the classroom over what they should tell the teacher he had to do. Piet Terblans said he had his own ideas about how children should be taught, and he couldn’t do his work properly if the other parents kept on interrupting him. He used to drive in to school with the children every morning in the donkey-wagon and he took his lunch with him.

Then one day shortly after the inspector had called the teacher left. Because when the inspector walked into the classroom he found that the teacher wasn’t there at all: he had been pulled out into the passage by several of the rougher parents, who were arguing with him about sums. Instead, when the inspector enter­ed the place, two of the parents were busy drawing on the board with coloured chalk, and Piet Terblans was sitting at the desk, looking very solemn and pretending to write things in the register.

They all said that the teacher was quite well educated and gentle­manly, but soft.

So this time the Education Department sent us a woman school-­teacher. Stoffel Lemmer had been at the post office when she arrived. He told me, talking rapidly, that her name was Minnie Bonthuys, and that she had come up from the Cape, and that she had large dark eyes, and that she was in love with him.

“I was standing in the doorway,” Stoffel Lemmer explained, “and so it wasn’t easy for her to get into the voorkamer. As you know, it is only a small door. She stopped and looked at me without speaking. It was almost as though she looked right through me. She looked me up and down, from my head to my feet, I might say. And then she held her chin up very high. And for that reason I knew that she was in love with me. Every girl that’s in love with me looks at me like that. Then she went into the voor­kamer sideways, because I was standing in the door; and as she passed she drew her skirts close about her. I expect she was afraid that some of the dust she had on her frock from the motor-lorry might shake off on to my khaki trousers. She was very polite. And the first thing she said when she got inside was that she had heard, in Zeerust, that the Groot Marico is a very good district for pigs.”

Stoffel Lemmer went on to say that Piet Terblans, who, out of habit, had again brought his lunch with him, was also there. He said that just before then Piet Terblans had been very busy ex­plaining to the others that he was going to co-operate even more with the new school-teacher than he had done with the last one.

Nevertheless, when the new school-teacher walked into the post office – Stoffel Lemmer said – Piet Terblans didn’t mention anything to her about his ideas on education. Stoffel Lemmer said he didn’t know why. It appears that Piet Terblans got as far as clearing his throat several times, as though preparing to introduce himself and his plan to Minnie Bonthuys. But after that he gave it up and ate his lunch instead.

Later on, when I saw the new school-teacher, I was able to understand quite easily why Stoffel Lemmer had fallen in love with her. I could also understand why Piet Terblans didn’t manage to interest her very much in the co-operation scheme that had ended up with the previous teacher having to leave the Bushveld. There was no doubt about Minnie Bonthuys being very good-looking, with a lot of black hair that was done up in ringlets. But she had a determined mouth. And in her big dark eyes there was an expression whose meaning was perfectly clear to me. I could see that Minnie Bonthuys knew her own mind and that she was very sure of herself.

As the days passed, Stoffel Lemmer’s infatuation for the young school-teacher increased, and he came and spoke to me about it, as was his custom whenever he fancied himself in love with a girl. So I didn’t take much notice of the things he said. I had heard them all so often before.

“I saw her again this morning, Oom Schalk,” he said to me on one occasion. “I was passing the schoolroom and I was saying her name over to myself, softly. I know I’ll never have the courage to go up to her and tell her how I – how I think about her. It’s always like that with me, Oom Schalk. I can never bring myself to the point of telling a girl that I love her. Or even saying anything at all to her. I get too frightened somehow. But I saw her this morning, Oom Schalk. I went and leant over the barbed-wire fence, and I saw her standing in front of the window looking out. I saw her quite a while before she saw me, so that by the time she turned her gaze towards me I was leaning more than halfway over the barbed-wire fence.”

Stoffel Lemmer shook his head sadly.

“And I could see by that look in her eyes that she loved me, Oom Schalk,” he went on, “and by the firm way that her mouth shut when she caught sight of me. In fact, I can hardly even say that she looked at me. It all happened so quickly. She just gave one glance in my direction and then slammed down the window. All girls who are in love with me do just that.”

For some moments Stoffel Lemmer remained silent. He seem­ed to be thinking.

“I would have gone on standing there, Oom Schalk,” he ended up in a faraway sort of voice. “Only I couldn’t see her anymore, because of the way that the sun was shining on the window-panes. And I only noticed afterwards how much of the barbed wire had been sticking into me.”

This is just one example of the sort of thing that Stoffel Lemmer would relate to me, sitting on my stoep. Mostly it was in the evening. And he would look out into the dusk and say that the shadows that lay on the thorn-trees were in his heart also. As I have told you, I had so frequently heard him say exactly the same thing. About other girls.

And always he would end up in the same way – saying what a sorrowful thing it was that he would never be able to tell her how much he loved her. He also said how grateful he was to have somebody who could listen to his sad story with understanding. That one, too, I had heard before. Often.

What’s that? Did he ever tell her? Well, I don’t know. The last time I saw Stoffel Lemmer was in Zeerust. It was in front of the church, after the ceremony. And by the determined expression that Minnie still had on her face when the wedding guests threw rice and confetti over Stoffel and herself – no, I don’t think he ever got up the courage to tell her.