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 learnt 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 to 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 were 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 inspan my oxen because during the night the Mlapi 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 outspans 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 his 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 women’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 learnt 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.