“Juffrouw Laps,” said Stoffel with dignity—an important moment in Juffrouw Pieterse’s tea-evening had arrived—“Juffrouw Laps, you are a sucking animal.”
I admit frankly that I cannot adequately describe the crisis that followed these two words. If Stoffel had only said mammal, perhaps then my task would have been easier.
Juffrouw Laps’s face took on all the different colors that are generally supposed to express anger. She had been attacked more openly than the others, it is true; but her attitude toward the prayer-class would go to show that she was naturally polemical.
In French novels people used to turn green; but Juffrouw Laps did not read French, so she stopped at a terrible violet and screamed—no, she didn’t. She didn’t scream anything; for she was choking for breath. But she did pulverize that piece of ginger cake; and she looked at Stoffel and his mother in a manner that would have been most damaging for her if those two persons had happened to die that night.
Imitating the trick of the cuttle-fish, no doubt unconsciously, Stoffel managed to escape this fatal stare by enveloping himself in a heavy cloud of smoke. Juffrouw Pieterse, however, not being a smoker, was at the mercy of Juffrouw Laps. She stammered humbly: “It’s in the book, really it’s in the book. Don’t be angry, it’s in the book.”
By this time Juffrouw Laps was getting a little air, so much that there was now no danger of her suffocating. She threw the mutilated remains of the ginger cake on the table and began:
“Juffrouw Pieterse, you are nothing but a low, vile, filthy—you may even be a sucking animal, you and your son too. I want you to understand that I’ve always been respectable. My father sold grain, and nobody’s ever been able to say anything against me! Ask everybody about me—if I’ve ever run with men-folk, and such things; and if I haven’t always paid my debts. He was manager I would have you understand, and we lived over the chapter-house, for he was in the grain business, and you can ask about me there. Thank God, you can ask about me everywhere—do you hear? But never, never, never, has such a thing happened to me. What you put on me! If it wasn’t for lowering myself I’d tell you what I think of you—you sucking animal, you and your son and your whole family. My father sold grain, and I’m too respectable for you to——”
“But—it’s in the book that way. For God’s sake believe me; it’s in the book.”
“Just hold your lip about your book. Anybody who sells God’s holy word on the Ouwebrug needn’t talk to me about books.”
This accusation was false; for Walter, and not his mother, had sold the Bible; but this was no time for such fine distinctions.