Читать книгу The Complete Voorkamer Stories - Herman Charles Bosman - Страница 18

Jurie Steyn was rubbing vigorously along the side of his counter with a rag soaked in paraffin. He was also saying things which, afterwards, in calmer moments, he would no doubt regret. When his wife came into the voorkamer with a tin of Cooper’s dip, Jurie Steyn stopped using that sort of language and contented himself with observations of a general nature about the hardships of life in the Marico.

“All the same, they are very wonderful creatures, those little white ants,” the schoolmaster remarked. “Among the books I brought here into the Marico, to read in my spare time, is a book called The Life of the White Ant. Actually, of course, the white ant is not a true ant at all. The right name for the white ant is isoptera –”

Jurie Steyn had another, and shorter, name for the white ant right on the tip of his tongue. And he started saying it, too. Only, he remembered his wife’s presence, in time, and so he changed the word to something else.

“This isn’t the first time the white ants got in behind your counter,” At Naudé announced. “The last lot of stamps you sold me had little holes eaten all round the edges.”

“That’s just perforations,” Jurie Steyn replied. “All postage stamps are that way. Next time you have got a postage stamp in your hand, just look at it carefully, and you’ll see. There’s a law about it, or something. In the department we talk of those little holes as perforations. It is what makes it possible for us, in the department, to tear stamps off easily, without having to use a scissors. Of course, it’s not everybody that knows that.”

At Naudé looked as much hurt as surprised.

“You mustn’t think I am so ignorant, Jurie,” he said severely. “Mind you, I am not saying that, perhaps, when this post office was first opened, and you were still new to affairs, and you couldn’t be expected to know about perforations and things, coming to this job raw, from behind the plough – I’m not saying that you mightn’t have cut the stamps loose with a scissors or a No. 3 pruning shears, even. At the start, mind you. And nobody would have blamed you for it, either. I mean, nobody ever has blamed you. We’ve all, in fact, admired the way you took to this work. I spoke to Gysbert van Tonder about it, too, more than once. Indeed, we both admired you. We spoke about how you stood behind that counter, with kraal manure in your hair, and all, just like you were Postmaster-General. Bold as brass, we said, too.”

The subtle flattery in At Naudé’s speech served to mollify Jurie Steyn.

“You said all that about me?” he asked. “You did?”

“Yes,” At Naudé proceeded smoothly. “And we also admired the neat way you learnt to handle the post office rubber stamp, Gysbert and I. We said you held onto it like it was a branding iron. And we noticed how you would whistle, too, just before bringing the rubber stamp down on a parcel, and how you would step aside afterwards, quickly, just as though you half expected the parcel to jump up and poke you in the short ribs. To tell you the truth, Jurie, we were proud of you.”

Jurie Steyn was visibly touched. And so he said that he admitted he had been a bit arrogant in the way he had spoken to At Naudé about the perforations. The white ants had got amongst his postage stamps, Jurie Steyn acknowledged – once. But what they ate you could hardly notice, he said. They just chewed a little around the edges.

But Gysbert van Tonder said that, all the same, that was enough. His youngest daughter was a member of the Sunshine Children’s Club of the church magazine in Cape Town, Gysbert said. And his youngest daughter wrote to Aunt Susann, who was the woman editor, to say that it was her birthday. And when Aunt Susann mentioned his youngest daughter’s birthday in the Sunshine Club corner of the church magazine, Aunt Susann wrote that she was a little girl staying in the lonely African wilds. Gramadoelas was the word that Aunt Susann used, Gysbert van Tonder said. And all just because Aunt Susann had noticed the way that part of the springbok on the stamp on his youngest daughter’s letter had been eaten off by white ants, Gysbert van Tonder said.

He added that his daughter had lost all interest in the Sunshine Children’s Club, since then. It sounded so uncivilised, the way Aunt Susann wrote about her.

“As though we’re living in a grass hut and a string of crocodiles around it, with their teeth showing,” Gysbert van Tonder said. “As though it’s all still konsessie farms and we haven’t made improvements. And it’s no use trying to explain to her, either, that she must just feel sorry for Aunt Susann for not knowing any better. You can’t explain things like that to a child.”

Nevertheless, while we all sympathised with Gysbert van Tonder, we had to concede that it was not in any way Jurie Steyn’s fault. We had all had experience of white ants, and we knew that, mostly, when you came along with the paraffin and Cooper’s dip, it was too late. By the time you saw those little tunnels, which the white ants made by sticking grains of sand together with spit, all the damage had already been done.

The schoolmaster started talking some more about his book dealing with the life of the white ant, then, and he said that it was well known that the termite was the greatest plague of tropic lands. Several of us were able to help the schoolmaster right. As Chris Welman made it clear to him, the Marico was not in the tropics at all. The tropics were quite a long way up. The tropics started beyond Mochudi, even. A land-surveyor had established that much for us, a few years ago, on a coloured map. It was loose talk about wilds and gramadoelas and tropics that gave the Marico a bad name, we said. Like with that Aunt Susann of the Sunshine Children’s Club. Maybe we did have white ants here – lots of them, too – but we certainly weren’t in the tropics, like some countries we knew, and that we could mention, also, if we wanted to. Maybe what had happened was that the white ants had come down here from the tropics, we said. From way down beyond Mochudi and other side Frik Bonthuys’s farm, even. There was tropics for you, now, we said to the schoolmaster. Why, he should just see Frik Bonthuys’s shirt. Frik Bonthuys wore his shirt outside of his trousers, and the back part of it hung down almost onto the ground.

The schoolmaster said that he thought we were being perhaps just a little too sensitive about this sort of thing. He was interested himself in the white ant, he explained, mainly from the scientific point of view. The white ant belonged to the insect world, that was very highly civil-ised, he said. All the insect world didn’t have was haemoglobin. The insect had the same blood in his veins as a white man, the schoolmaster said, except for haemoglobin.

Gysbert van Tonder said that whatever that thing was, it was enough. Gysbert said it quite hastily, too. He said that when once you started making allowances for the white ant, that way, the next thing the white ant would want would be to vote. And he wouldn’t go into a polling booth alongside of an ant, to vote, Gysbert van Tonder said, even if that ant was white.

This conversation was getting us out of our depths. The talk had taken a wrong turning, but we couldn’t make out where, exactly. Consequently, we were all pleased when Oupa Bekker spoke, and made things seem sensible again.

“The worst place I ever knew for white ants, in the old days,” Oupa Bekker said, “was along the Molopo, just below where it joins the Crocodile River. There was white ants for you. I was a transport rider in those days, when all the transport was still by ox-wagon. My partner was Jan Theron. We called him Jan Mankie because of his wooden leg, a back wheel of the ox-wagon having gone over his knee-cap one day when he had been drinking mampoer. Anyway, we had camped out beside the Molopo. And next morning, when we inspanned, Jan Mankie was saying how gay and light he felt. He couldn’t understand it. He even started thinking that it must be the drink again, that was this time affecting him in quite a new way. We didn’t know, of course, that it was because the white ants had hollowed out all of his wooden leg while he had lain asleep.

“And what was still more queer was that the wagon, when he in-spanned it, also seemed surprisingly light. It didn’t strike us what the reason for that was, either, just then. Maybe we were not in a guessing frame of mind, that morning. But when our trek got through the Paradys Poort, into a stiff wind that was blowing across the vlakte, it all became very clear to us. For the sudden cloud of dust that went up was not just dust from the road. Our wagon and its load of planed Oregon pine were carried away in the finest kind of powder you can imagine, and all our oxen were left pulling was the trek-chain. And Jan Mankie Theron was standing on one leg. His other trouser leg, that was of a greyish-coloured moleskin, was flapping empty in the wind.”

Thus, Oupa Bekker’s factual account of a straightforward Marico incident of long ago, presenting the ways and characteristics of the termite in a positive light, restored us to a sense of current realities.

“But what are you supposed to do about white ants, anyway?” Johnny Coen asked after a while. “Cooper’s dip helps, of course. But there should be a more permanent way of getting rid of them, I’d imagine.”

It was then that we all turned to the schoolmaster, again. What did it say in that book of his about the white ant, we asked him.

Well, there was a chapter in his book on the destruction of termites, the schoolmaster said. At least, there had been a chapter. It was the last chapter in the book. But he had unfortunately left the book lying on his desk in the schoolroom over one weekend. And when he had got back on Monday morning there was a little tunnel running up his desk. And the pages dealing with how to exterminate the white ant had been eaten away.