Susannah and the Play-actor

I see a company of professional actors is going to stage a performance in the schoolroom at Drogedal (Oom Schalk Lourens said). There is a poster about it nailed to a kremetart tree in front of the building. I wonder what Henri le Valois thinks of it. His name is actually Hendrik de Waal, of course. But we still call him Le Valois in the Marico. And I wonder what his wife, Susannah, thinks of it also.

It’s many years now since Henri le Valois quit the stage to go to work on his father-in-law’s farm. But there seem to be more play-actors about than ever. The Agricultural Department has got rid of the worst of the locust plagues in these parts. But I suppose it will take more than Cooper’s dip to thin out the professional actors.

The play presented by Henri le Valois in Zeerust – where I saw him on the stage for the first and last time – was about men who wore hats with ostrich-feathers and carried swords and had blankets slung over their shoulders, not striped, like the Basuto’s, but black; and about women who had their hair put high up and wore jewels on their silk dresses but all the same did not look as grand as the men. Henri le Valois played the role of a young captain who falls in love with the king’s wife and then leaves her in the end because of his loyalty to the king.

Henri le Valois was very fine in that last farewell scene. From my seat near the back of the hall I very much admired the way he walked out backwards, with his arms extended towards the queen, and saying, I must away adieu adieu for ever. Only a great actor, I felt, could walk out backwards like that and not trip over his sword or get the lower part of the blanket mixed up with his spurs.

The girls all fell in love with Henri le Valois, of course. Among them was Susannah Bekker, daughter of Petrus Bekker of Droge­dal.

I wondered whether the girls would still feel attracted to him in the same way if they could have met him off-stage. I started wondering like that when I came across Henri le Valois in the bar of the Transvaal Hotel, one evening after the show, and most of the paint was washed off his face, and he was dressed just like me or At Naudé when we go into town and wear our shop clothes.

I hardly ever enter a bar, of course. I just happened to drop in on that evening because I thought I might find At Naudé there, and I wanted to talk to him about fetching some milk-cans for me from Ramoutsa. Strangely enough, At Naudé said that he had just dropped in on the off-chance of finding me there. And because this was such a peculiar coincidence, we thought it would be a good idea to reflect further on it over a glass of brandy. There were more coincidences like that as the evening wore on and other farmers from the Groot Marico came into the bar, also just on the off-chance.

When the coincidences had reached the stage where the bar was so full of farmers that you couldn’t walk – then it was that Henri le Valois came in. He was accompanied by Alwyn Klopper who acted the part of the king in the play.

But before the arrival in the bar of these two actors, a great deal of talk had been going on about them. Somebody mentioned that Henri le Valois’s real name was Hendrik de Waal, and that he had taken that foreign-sounding name so that he could move about better on the stage. The name helped him particularly in the showy farewell scene at the end, that person added. You couldn’t believe then that he was actually just an ordinary farmer’s son, who had once herded cattle over rough veld with polgras, when you saw how gracefully he went off the stage – as though he was pedalling a push-bike backwards. We also said that it was quite clear why Alwyn Klopper didn’t also change his name to something French. The size of his feet were against him.

Henri le Valois seemed surprised to find the bar so crowded when he came in, accompanied by the king. He explained that his play-acting company was concerned with improving the minds of the people living in the backveld and with bringing culture to the Boers, and so he naturally did not frequent tap rooms. He had only dropped in there for some purpose which he had forgotten now. It had gone clean out of his mind, he said, through the shock of finding so many members of his audience in a public bar. He drank a couple of quick double brandies to get over the shock.

When it was explained to him that most of the farmers in that bar room were not members of his audience, or likely to be, he seemed to feel better about it, at first. Afterwards he didn’t seem so sure.

A little later, when he had had a few more double brandies, Henri le Valois, standing against the crowded counter with a ciga­rette in the side of his mouth, gave us an interesting talk on what he referred to as the higher ideals of his art.

“Why, do you know,” he said, “tonight I counted no less than nine people in the half-crown seats.”

He had put on the play about himself and the king in every dorp from Zwartruggens to Zeerust, he said, and it had everywhere been a great cultural success. The biggest cultural success had been at Rysmierbult, where he had cleared over eleven pounds, after paying for the hall and the hotel bills of the touring company.

“Strictly speaking, Slurry was still more of a cultural success,” he added. “I mean, we left Slurry with even more money. Only, we had a little misunderstanding with the hotel proprietor, who kept a couple of suitcases behind. Fortunately, they were suitcases belonging to the minor members of our company and whom we could replace. Yes, you have no idea how much we artists have to suffer.”

Henri le Valois grew more and more sad. He turned to Alwyn Klop­per, the king, who during all this time had been standing next to him, silent and not drinking much.

“That pigskin suitcase with the gold monogram, who did it belong to?” Henri le Valois asked him.

“To a school-teacher at Krugersdorp,” the king answered, shortly. “But don’t worry about her. She got a lift back home on a lorry.”

“And that black-and-white portmanteau with the wavy initials –” Le Valois began again. By this time he was so sad that if he hadn’t held tight on to the edge of the counter he would have fallen.

“Wolmaransstad,” the king snapped. “He was a former income-­tax official. Nobody would give him a lift back home.”

So Henri le Valois went on drinking large quantities of brandy. In the end he was crying into his glass. And all the time the king stood watching him, smiling and drinking scarcely at all.

Suddenly Henri le Valois thrust the glass away from him and drew himself up to look very tall and imposing.

“All those beautiful suitcases,” he cried.

Then he stood back a couple of paces from the king.

“I quit,” he said to Alwyn Klopper. “You take over. I shall not be unfaithful further. Farewell I must away adieu adieu for ever.”

And he started back-pedalling out of the bar.

There were those present in the bar that night who said of Henri le Valois that he had never acted more grandly, more magnifi­cently, in his life than in that scene in which he took final leave of the stage. I also thought that it was most impressive, the way he made his way out through the curtains at the bar entrance, turning his feet half outwards, as though he still had spurs on them, and making a wide sweep with his left arm as though from his waist there hung a sword.

When he bared his hat in a farewell bow, I could almost have believed that there was a painted ostrich plume decorating his grey felt hat.

And that was the moment in which Susannah Bekker, passing the hotel on her way back to the boarding-house where she was staying for the Nagmaal week with her parents, encountered Henri le Valois. She had before seen him only on the stage, dressed as a gallant. And so she recognised him immediately, then, in front of the bar, not from his clothing but from his bearing. They got talking, Susannah told me about it long afterwards, and she was thrilled by how human he was. This was a greater thrill than anything she had felt about him when she had seen him on the stage, even. Especially when he talked about how he was being bullied all the time by the king, who had no soul and no feelings.

“I realised that Henri le Valois was not only a very fine human being,” Susannah said, finally, “but also a very great actor. He was play-acting drunk. What do you think of that?”

There was no call for me to tell her that that part of it hadn’t been play-acting.