Concertinas and Confetti

Hendrik Uys and I were boys together (Oom Schalk Lourens said). At school we were also classmates. That is, if you can call it being classmates, seeing that our relationship was that we sat together at the same desk, and that Hendrik Uys, who was three years older than I, used to sit almost on top of me so as to make it easier for him to copy off me. And whenever I got an answer wrong Hendrik Uys used to get very annoyed, because it meant that he also got caned for doing bad work, and after we got caned he always used to kick me after we got outside the school.

“This will teach you to pay attention to the teacher when he is talking,” Hendrik Uys used to say to me when we were on our way home. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, when your father is making all these sacrifices to keep you at school. You got two sums wrong, and you made three mistakes in spelling to­day.” And after that he would start kicking me.

And the strange thing is that what he said really made me feel sad, and I felt that in making mistakes in spelling and sums I was throwing away my opportunities; and when he spoke about my father’s sacrifices to give me an education I felt that Hendrik Uys was a good son who had fine feelings towards his parents; and it never occurred to me at the time that in not doing any work of his own, but just copying down everything I wrote – that in that respect Hendrik Uys was a lot more ungrateful than I was. In fact, it was only years later that it struck me that in carrying on in the way he was Hendrik Uys was displaying a most unpraiseworthy kind of contempt for his own parents’ sacrifices.

And because he spoke so touchingly about my father I had a deep respect for Hendrik Uys. There were no limits to my admiration for him.

Yet afterwards, when I grew up, I found that real life amongst grown-up people was not so very different from what went on in that little schoolroom with the whitewashed walls, and the wooden step that had been worn hollow by the passage of hundreds of little feet – including the somewhat larger veldskoened feet of Hendrik Uys. And the delicate green of the rosyntjie bush that grew just to the side of the school building, within convenient reach of the penknife of the Hollander schoolmaster, who went out and cut a number of thick but supple canes every morning just after the Bible lesson, before the more strenuous work of the day started.

And I remember how always, after we had been caned for getting wrong answers, Hendrik Uys would walk down the road with me, rubbing the places where the rosyntjie-bush cane had fallen, and calling the schoolmaster a useless, fat-faced, squint-eyed Hollander. But shortly afterwards he would turn on me and upbraid me, and he would say he could not understand how I could have the heart, through my slothfulness, to bring such sorrow to the grey hairs of a poor schoolmaster who already had one foot in the grave.

And as if to emphasise this last statement about its being the schoolmaster’s foot that was in the grave, Hendrik Uys would proceed, with each foot alternately, to kick me.

Yes, I suppose you could say that Hendrik was a school-friend of mine.

And once when my father asked him how we got on in school, Hendrik said that it was all right. Only there was rather a lot of copying going on. And he looked meaningly in my direction. Hendrik Uys was so convincing that it was impossible for me to try and tell my father the truth. Instead, I just kept silent and felt very much ashamed of myself. I suppose it is because of what the term ‘school-friend’ implies that I am glad that our schooling did not last very long in those days.

If he had continued in that way after he had grown up, and had applied to practical life the knowledge of the world which he had acquired in the classroom, there is no doubt that Hendrik Uys would have gone far. I feel sure that he would at least have got elected to the Volksraad.

But when he was a young man something happened to Hen­drik Uys that changed him completely. He fell in love with Marie Snyman, and his whole life became different.

I don’t think I have ever witnessed so amazing a change in any person as what came over Hendrik Uys in his late twenties when he first discovered that he was in love with Marie Snyman, a dark-haired girl with a low, soft voice and quiet eyes that never seemed to look at you, but that appeared to gaze inwards, always, as though she was looking at frail things. There was a disturbing sort of wisdom in her eyes, shadowy, something like the know­ledge that the past has of a future that is made of dust.

“I can’t understand how I could have been such a fool,” Hen­drik Uys said to us one day while we were drinking coffee in the dining room of the new post office. “To think that Marie Snyman was at school with me, and that I never saw her, even, if you know what I mean. She seemed just an ordinary girl to me, with thin legs and her hair in plaits. And she has been living here, in these parts, all these years, and it is only now that I have found her. I wasted all these years when the one woman in my life has been living here, right amongst us, all the time. It seems so foolish, I feel like kicking myself.”

When Hendrik Uys spoke those last words about kicking, I moved uneasily on my chair for a moment. Although my schooldays were far in the past, there were still certain painful memories that lingered.

“But I must have been in love with her even then, without know­ing it,” Hendrik Uys went on, “otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered her plaits. Ordinary-looking plaits they seemed, too. Stringy.”

“The post-cart with the letters is late,” Theunis Bekker said, yawning.

“And her thin legs,” Hendrik Uys continued.

“Perhaps the post-cart had trouble getting through the Groen River,” Adriaan Schoeman said. “I hear it has been raining in Zee­rust.”

“Maybe love is like that,” Hendrik Uys went on. “It’s there a long time, but you don’t always know it.”

“The post-cart may be stuck in the mud,” Theunis Bekker said, yawning again. “The turf beyond Sephton’s Nek is all thick, slimy mud when it rains.”

“But her eyes weren’t like that then, when she was at school,” Hendrik Uys finished up lamely. “You know what her eyes are like – quiet, sort of.”

His voice trailed off into silence.

And if a great change had come over Hendrik Uys when he fell in love with Marie Snyman, it was nothing compared with the way in which he changed after they were married. For up to that time Hendrik Uys had abundantly fulfilled the promise of his schooldays. He had been appointed a diaken of the Dutch Re­form­ed Church and he was a prominent committee member of the Farmers’ Association and the part he was playing in politics was already of such a character as to make more than one person regard him as a prospective candidate for the Volksraad in a few years’ time.

And then, I suppose, like every other Volksraad member, he would pay a visit to his old school some day, and he would talk to the teacher and the children and he would tell them that in that same classroom, where the teacher had been a kindly old Hol­lander, long since dead, the foundation of his public career had been laid. And that he had got into the Volksraad simply through having applied the sound knowledge which he had acquired in the school.

Which would no doubt have been true enough.

But after he had fallen in love with Marie Snyman, Hendrik Uys changed altogether. For one thing, he resigned his position as diaken of the Dutch Reformed Church. This was a shock to everybody, because it was a very honoured position, and many envied him for having received the appointment at so early an age. Then, when he explained the reason for his resignation, the farmers in the neighbourhood were still more shocked.

What Hendrik Uys said was that since he had found Marie Snyman he had been so altered by the purity of her love for him that from now on he wanted to do only honest things. He wanted to be worthy of her love, he said.

“And I used unfair means to get the appointment as diaken,” Hendrik Uys explained. “I got it through having induced the predikant to use his influence on my behalf. I had made the predi­kant a present of two trek-oxen just at that time, when it was uncertain whether the appointment would go to me or to Hans van Tonder.”

They were married in the church in Zeerust, Hendrik Uys and Marie Snyman, and that part of the wedding made us feel very uncomfortable, for it was obvious by the sneer that the predikant wore on his face throughout the religious ceremony that he had certain secret reservations about how he thought the marriage was going to turn out. It was obvious that the predikant had been told the reason for Hendrik’s resignation as diaken.

But the reception afterwards made up for a lot of the unhappier features of the church ceremony. The guests were seated at long tables in the grounds of the hotel, and when one of the waiters shouted “Aan die brand!” as a signal to the band leader, and the strains of the concertina and the guitars swept across our hearts, thrillingly, like a sudden wind through the grass, and the bride and bridegroom entered, the bride wearing a white satin dress with a long train, and there was confetti in Marie’s hair and on Hendrik’s shoulders – oh, well, it was all so very beautiful. And it seemed sad that life could not always be like that. It seemed a pity that life was not satisfied to let us always bear on our shoulders things only as light as confetti.

And as a kind of gesture to Hendrik, to let him sort of see that I was prepared to let schooldays be bygones, when the bride and bridegroom drove off on their honeymoon I was the one that flung the old veldskoen after them.

Afterwards, when I was inspanning to go back to the Bush­veld, I saw the predikant. I was still thinking about life. By that time I was wondering why it was that we always had to carry in our hearts things that were so much heavier than concertina music borne on the wind. The predikant was talking to a number of Marico farmers grouped around him. And because that sneer was still on his face I could see that the predikant was talking about Hendrik Uys. So I walked nearer.

“He resigned as diaken because he said he bribed me with a couple of trek-oxen,” I heard the predikant say. “I wonder what does he take me for? Does he think I am an Evangelist or an Apostolic pastor that I can be bribed with a couple of trek-oxen? And those beasts were as thin as crows. Man, they went for next to nothing on the Johannesburg market.”

The men listening to the predikant nodded gravely.

This was the beginning of Hendrik Uys’s unpopularity in the Marico Bushveld. It wasn’t that Hendrik and Marie were avoided by people, or anything like that: it was just that it came to be recognised that the two of them seemed to prefer to live alone as much as possible. And, of course, there was nothing unfriendly about it all. Only, it seemed strange to me that as long as Hendrik Uys had been cunning and active in pushing his own interests, without being much concerned as to whether the means he em­ployed were right or wrong, he appeared to be generally liked. But when he started becoming honest and over-scrupulous in his dealings with others, then it seemed that people did not have the same kind of affection for him.

I saw less and less of Hendrik and Marie as the years went by. They had a daughter whom they christened Annette. And after that they had no more children. Hendrik made one or two further attempts to get reappointed as a diaken. He also spoke vaguely of having political ambitions. But it was clear that his heart was no longer in public or social activities. And on those occasions on which I saw him he spoke mostly of his love for his wife, Marie. And he spoke much of how the years had not changed their love. And he said that his greatest desire in life was that his daughter, Annette, should grow up like her mother and make a loyal and gentle and loving wife to a man who would be worthy of her love.

I remembered how Hendrik had spoken about Marie, years before in the post office, when they were first thinking of getting married. And I remembered how he spoke of that stillness that seemed to be so deep a part of her nature. And Hendrik’s wife Marie did not seem to change with the passage of the years. She always moved about the house very quietly, and when she spoke it was usually with downcast eyes, and whether she was working, or sitting at rest on the riempies bench, what seemed to come all the time out of her whole personality was a strange and very deep kind of stillness. And the quiet that flowed out of her body did not appear to be like that calmness that comes to one after grief, that tranquillity of the spirit that follows on weeping, but it had in it more of the quality of that other stillness, like when at high noon the veld is still.

I knew that it was this quiet that Hendrik loved above all in his wife Marie, and when he spoke of his daughter Annette – and he spoke of her in such a way that it was clear that he was devoting his whole life to the vision of his daughter growing up to be ex­actly like her mother – I always knew what that quality was that he looked to find in his daughter, Annette. Even when he never mentioned it in actual words.

Annette grew up to be a very pretty girl, a lot like her mother in looks, and when it came to her turn to be married, it was to Koos de Bruyn, a wealthy farmer from Rustenburg. For her wedding in the church in Zeerust Annette wore the same wedding dress of white satin that her mother had worn twenty years be­fore, and I was surprised to see how little the material had yellow­ed. It was pleasing to think that there were things that throughout those many years remained unchanged.

And when Annette came out of the church after the ceremony, leaning on her husband’s arm, and there was confetti in her hair and on his shoulder, I knew then that it was not only in respect of the white satin dress that there was similarity between the marriage of Annette and that of her mother twenty years before. And I knew that that depth of stillness that Hendrik had loved in his wife would form a part of his daughter’s nature, also. And of her life. And for ever. I saw just in a single moment what it was that would bring that stillness of the body and the spirit to Annette for the rest of her married life. And in that way I guessed what had caused it as well in the case of her mother, Marie, the wife of Hen­drik. And I wondered whether Annette’s husband would love that quality in her, also.

It was a very slight thing. And it was so very quick that one would hardly have noticed it, even. It was just that something that came into her eyes – so apparently insignificant that it might had been no more than the trembling of an eyelash, almost – when Annette tripped out of the church, leaning on her husband’s arm, and she glanced swiftly at a young man with broad shoulders whose very white face was half turned away.