The Complete Voorkamer Stories. Herman Charles Bosman
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the church itself.”
Naturally, Jurie Steyn could not let that statement pass. Criticism of the church council implied also a certain measure of fault-finding with Deacon Kirstein, who was a first cousin of Jurie’s wife.
“You can hardly call it a stone’s throw,” Jurie Steyn declared. “After all, the plein is on two morgen of ground and the church hall is at the furthest end from the church itself. And there is also a row of bluegums in between. Tall, well-grown bluegums. No, you can hardly call all that a stone’s throw, Chris.”
So At Naudé said that what had no doubt happened was that Jacques le Français with his insinuating play-actor ways had got round the members of the kerkraad, somehow. With lies, as likely as not. Maybe he had told the deacons and elders that he was going to put on that play Ander Man se Kind again, which everybody approved of, seeing it was so instructive, the relentless way in which it showed up the sinful life led in the great city of Johannesburg and in which the girl in the play, Baba Haasbroek, got ensnared, because she was young and from the backveld, and didn’t know any better.
“Although I don’t know if that play did any good, really,” At Naudé added, thoughtfully. “I mean, it was shortly after that that Drieka Basson of Enzelsberg left for Johannesburg, wasn’t it? Perhaps the play Ander Man se Kind was a bit too – well – relentless.”
Thereupon Johnny Coen took a hand in the conversation.
It seemed very long ago, the time Johnny Coen had gone to Johannesburg because of a girl that was alone there in that great city. And on his return to the Marico he had not spoken much of his visit, beyond mentioning that there were two men carved in stone holding up the doorway of a building near the station and that the pavements were so crowded that you could hardly walk on them. But for a good while after that he had looked more lonely in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer than any stranger could look in a great city.
“I don’t know if you can say that that play of Jacques le Français’s about the girl that went to Johannesburg really is so very instructive,” Johnny Coen said. “There were certain things in it that are very true, of course. But there are also true things that could never go into one of Jacques le Français’s plays – or into any play, I think.”
Gysbert van Tonder started to laugh, then. It was a short sort of laugh.
“I remember what you said when you came back from Johannesburg, that time,” Gysbert van Tonder said to Johnny Coen. “You said the pavements were so crowded that there was hardly room to walk. Well, in the play, Ander Man se Kind, it wasn’t like that. The girl in the play, Baba Haasbroek, didn’t seem to have trouble to walk about on the pavement, I mean, half the time, in the play, she was walking on the pavement. Or if she wasn’t walking she was standing under a street-lamp.”
It was then that At Naudé mentioned the girl in the new play that Jacques le Français had put on at Bekkersdal. Her name was Truida Ziemers. It was a made-up name, of course, At Naudé said. Just like Jacques le Français was a made-up name. His real name was Poggenpoel, or something. But how any Afrikaans writer could write a thing like that …
“It wasn’t written by an Afrikaans dramatist,” young Vermaak, the schoolteacher, explained. “It is a translation from –”
“To think that any Afrikaner should fall so low as to translate a thing like that, then,” Gysbert van Tonder interrupted him. “And what’s more, Jacques le Français or Jacobus Poggenpoel, or whatever his name is, is coloured. I could see he was coloured. No matter how he tried to make himself up, and all, to look white, it was a coloured man walking about there on the stage. How I didn’t notice it in the play Ander Man se Kind I don’t know. Maybe I sat too near the back, that time.”
Young Vermaak did not know, of course, to what extent we were pulling his leg. He shook his head sadly. Then he started to explain, in a patient sort of way, that Jacques le Français was actually playing the role of a coloured man. He wasn’t supposed to be white. It was an import-ant part of the unfolding of the drama that Jacques le Français wasn’t a white man. It told you all that in the title of the play, the schoolmaster said.
“What’s he then, a Frenchman?” Jurie Steyn asked. “Why didn’t they say so, straight out?”
Several of us said after that, each in turn, that there was something you couldn’t understand, now. That a pretty girl like Truida Ziemers, with a blue flower in her hat, should fall in love with a coloured man, and even marry him. Because that was what happened in the play.
“And it wasn’t as though she didn’t know,” Chris Welman remarked. “Meneer Vermaak has just told us that it says it in the title of the play, and all. Of course, I didn’t see the play myself. I meant to go, but at the last moment one of my mules took sick. But I saw Truida Ziemers on the stage, once. And even now, as I am talking about her again, I can remember how pretty she was. And to think that she went and married a coloured man when all the time she knew. And it wasn’t as though he could tell her that it was just sunburn, seeing that she could read it for herself on the posters. If the schoolmaster could read it, so could Truida.”
Anyway, that was only to be expected, Gysbert van Tonder said. That Jacques le Français would murder Truida Ziemers in the end, he meant. After all, what else could you expect from a marriage like that? Maybe from that point of view the play could be taken as a warning to every respectable white girl in the country.
“But that isn’t the point of the play,” young Vermaak insisted, once more. “Actually it is a good play. And it is a play with real educational value. But not that kind of educational value. If I tell you that this play is a translation – and a pretty poor translation too: I wouldn’t be surprised if Jacques le Français translated it himself – of the work of the great –”
This time the interruption came from Johnny Coen.
“It’s all very well talking like they have been doing about a girl going wrong,” Johnny Coen said. “But a great deal depends on circumstances. That is something I have learnt, now. Take the case now of a girl that …”
We all sat up to listen, then. And Gysbert van Tonder nudged Chris Welman in the ribs for coughing. We did not wish to miss a word.
“A girl that …?” At Naudé repeated in a tone of deep understanding, to encourage Johnny Coen to continue.
“Well, take a girl like that girl Baba Haasbroek in the play Ander Man se Kind,” Johnny Coen said. Jurie Steyn groaned. We didn’t want to hear all that over again.
“Well, anyway, if that girl did go wrong,” Johnny Coen proceeded – pretty diffidently, now, as though he could sense our feelings of being balked – “then there might be reasons for it. Reasons that didn’t come out in the play, maybe. And reasons that we sitting here in Jurie Steyn’s voorkamer would perhaps not have the right to judge about, either.”
Gysbert van Tonder started clearing his throat as though for another short laugh. But he seemed to change his mind halfway through.
“And in this last play, now,” Johnny Coen added, “if Jacques le Français had really loved the girl, he wouldn’t have been so jealous.”
“Yes, it’s a pity that Truida Ziemers got murdered in the end, like that,” At Naudé remarked. “Her friends in the play should have seen what Jacques le Français was up to, and have put the police onto him, in time.”
He said that with a wink, to draw young Vermaak, of course.
Thereupon the schoolmaster explained with much seriousness that such an ending would defeat the whole purpose of the drama. But by that time we had lost all interest in the subject. And when the Government lorry came soon afterwards and blew a lot of dust in at the door we made haste to collect our letters and milk-cans.
Consequently, nobody took much notice of what young Vermaak went on to tell us about the man who wrote the play. Not the man who translated it into Afrikaans but the man who wrote it in the first place. He was a writer who used to hold horses’ heads in front of a theatre, the schoolmaster said,