“That’s what you say, Juffrouw Mabbel, but I tell you there is something in her eye that I don’t like.”
“What then, Juffrouw Laps?”
“She has a look, a look—and it’s sin—I tell you it is. It’s wrong, it won’t do. What God does is all right.”
“Come, Stoffel, talk some. You sit there like a stone. Recite a poem, or tell us something about your school. Would you believe it, Juffrouw Mabbel, he knows a whole poem by heart. And he has memorized all the verbs of the feminine gender.”
“Mother, what are you talking about?” said Stoffel, displeased. “Don’t you see I’m smoking?”
“Yes, dear, I meant when you were through smoking. Then you can repeat the words. You will be surprised, Juffrouw Zipperman, and wonder where he learned it all. How does it go? ‘I would have been drunk, he would have been drunk’—of course, you know, he was not drunk, it belongs with the verbs. You will kill yourself laughing when he begins. Fill the cups, Trudie, and blow in the spout; there’s a leaf over it.”
The reader will not take it amiss, I trust, if I pass over the subsequent history of this leaf, and, too, make some deviations from the text of the conversation during the further course of Juffrouw Pieterse’s tea-evening. Stoffel spun off his conjugations and the ladies fairly shrieked when he related how “he had been drunk” and that “he would be drunk.” Thereupon followed general and particular criticism of the neighbors. The Juffrouw below received her share, as a matter of course: She was absent.
Religion and faith play an important part. Juffrouw Laps was for organizing a prayer-class. The preachers of to-day, she insisted, take their work too lightly and don’t sweep out all the corners.
“I tell you, it’s in the Bible that man is only man,” she cried; “that’s what I want to tell you. Man must not try to know better than God himself. Salvation comes through grace, and grace through faith; but if a man is not chosen, then he has no grace and can have no faith. That’s the way he is damned, don’t you see? I tell you, it’s just as certain as twice two—understand? And for that reason I want to have a prayer-class. Not for the sake of money or profit—God help me, no! At most just a trifle for the fair, or for New Year. What do you think of the plan, Juffrouw Mabbel?”
That lady expressed the opinion that her husband would be opposed to it, for he liked to go out of evenings, and then she must stay in the shop. Besides, it was so difficult to get through with the work. No one could imagine what a laborious occupation baking was.