The Covenant Part 34

'Then he does not know what h.e.l.l is, either?'

'No,' the girl said. 'But he knows what true is. There was no murder.' Saltwood went to the door and called to Van Doorn: 'I'll ride with you.'

The Black Circuit at Graaff-Reinet was an explosive affair. Inspired by Simon Keer's incendiary reports, a score of indictments had been issued based on the accusations of missionaries, Hottentots and Coloureds, all charging the Boers with gross abuses. Granted, there had been serious evils: Hottentots had been forced to work on after their legal contracts had expired; their women and children had been threatened with violence if they left; slaves had been excessively flogged; there had been murder.

But many of the charges were wild, without foundation, so that what should have been a serious judicial inquiry became a shambles. The countryside rallied so strongly in support of the Boers, and perjured itself so willingly, that no demonstrable lawbreakers could be found guilty, while dozens of reasonably honest frontiersmen like Lodevicus van Doorn were publicly humiliated by being forced to stand in the dock and answer to preposterous accusations.

Three Hottentots were brave enough to testify against Van Doorn, but what they said was so chaotic that the court had to be suspicious, and when Reverend Saltwood stepped forward to defend him, the court had to be attentive. The verdict was 'Not guilty,' but this absolved nothing, for the Boers who had been so abused by the English courts would never forget their humiliation. Thus the Black Circuit joined that growing list of grievances, some real, some fancied, which would be recited in every Boer family for the next century and a half.

The English were mortified that one of their own ministers had given testimony enabling a Dutchman to escape punishment: 'He was guilty as sin, you know. Indictment said so.' A rumor was floated that Saltwood had defended the Boer in antic.i.p.ation of favors to come: 'Perjured himself, of course. They're taking up a collection for him right now, among the Boers.' It was agreed that Hilary Saltwood must be ostracized insofar as the English community at the Cape was concerned: 'From now on he's the darling of the Boers.'

How wrong they were! The Van Doorn-Saltwood armistice lasted only two days, for when they rode back to De Kraal, Wilhelmina van Doorn met them at the gate, crying, 'Lodevicus! Emma's run off.'

'Get her back.'

'We don't know where she's gone.'

'Set the Hottentots tracking. They'll find anything.'

Saltwood found it difficult to visualize that little child in her gray dress running anywhere, but if she was indeed gone, he was fairly sure why: 'Probably went to the mission.'

As soon as he uttered these words he knew they were ill-advised, for Van Doorn's look of petty irritation turned to one of hatred: 'She cannot do that.'

'But if she wants to know about Jesus.'

'I teach my slaves and Hottentots all they need to know about Jesus.' 'But, Mijnheer van Doorn' 'Don't Mijnheer me!'

'Obviously, this child hungers for Jesus. It's been four years since she heard about him and still she' 'Where did she hear about Jesus?' 'At the other farm. From Simon Keer.'

What a sad mistake to have spoken that name! Van Doorn began shouting Dutch phrases so fast that Hilary could not follow, then jutting his white-whiskered face forward and growling, 'Any slave of mine has dealings with Simon Keer, I'll beat her till she's'

He stopped, aware of the dreadful thing he had been about to say, and aware also that his new friend, Saltwood, knew how the sentence would have been completed. It was then, at the moment of their triumphant return from the Black Circuit, that the veil dropped between these two men.

Saltwood was first to speak: 'If Emma has run to Golan, she will have my protection.'

'If my slave is at your mission, you can be sure I'll come and take her.' 'Van Doorn, don't fight the law.'

'No law gives you my slave. I paid good money for her. She belongs here.'

'She belongs in the care of Jesus Christ.'

'Get out!' Throwing open the door, he ordered Saltwood to be gone, but when the latter headed for the hill, he summoned two Hottentots and directed them to speed west, keep out of sight, and fetch the slave girl Emma from the mission.

Saltwood, antic.i.p.ating such a maneuver, traveled at forced speed, but when he reached Golan he found the place in an uproar, for the Hottentots had preceded him and were in the process of carrying off the little girl, who was weeping and struggling in their arms.

Without hesitating, Saltwood dashed to his quarters, grabbed his gun, and confronted the kidnappers: 'Drop your hands. Back on your horses and ride home.'

'Baas say bring Emma.'

'I say take your hands off her.'

'No! She belong us.'

At this moment Emma broke loose and ran to Saltwood, throwing herself at him, and when he felt this child seeking his protection, he determined to rescue her at any cost; and as the Hottentots reached out to seize her, he fired his gun over their heads, frightening them and terrifying himself. Fortunately, the two brown men scuttled to their horses and galloped away, for had they lunged at Saltwood again, he would have been quite incapable of firing at them, even had his gun contained a second chamber.

Hilary now placed the child with Saul's family, where she began learning the alphabet, the catechism and the refulgent promises of the New Testament. She proved an able student, as gifted in singing as in sewing, and before long it was her glowing black face and gleaming teeth that showed in the front rank of the mission choir.

She was practicing under the trees one evening when Lodevicus van Doorn rode in like a white-haired avenging angel, two guns resting carelessly on his saddle. 'I've come to fetch you, Emma,' he said quietly.

'She will not go,' Saul said, trembling at the sight of the menacing guns.

'If you try to stop me, Kaffir, I'll blow your head off.' Lodevicus did not touch either of the guns, but he did move his horse closer to Emma.

With a dignity many of the blacks acquired at the mission, old Saul moved to protect the child, whereupon Lodevicus raised one of his guns.

'For G.o.d's sake!' a voice cried from one side. 'Are you mad?'

It was Saltwood, coming to lead the choir. Unarmed, he walked directly to the muzzle of the gun, looked up at Lodevicus, and ordered: 'Ride back to De Kraal.'

'Not without my Madagascan.'

'Emma lives here now.'

'I have an order from the court at Graaff-Reinet which says' 'Such orders apply to runaway slaves, not to little girls seeking Jesus.' Van Doorn's neck muscles stood out like the vines of a squash. 'You G.o.dd.a.m.ned meddler . . .'

'Old friend,' Saltwood said quietly, 'get off that horse and let's talk.' 'I'm going to take my slave.'

'Come here, Emma,' and the little girl in her blue mission dress ran to clasp her protector.

Van Doorn was infuriated. Emma was his property, worth a great deal of money, and he had a proper order directing her return. If he shot this Englishman now, the frontier Boers would support him and to h.e.l.l with the English, but as he raised his gun, Saul stepped quietly in front of the missionary and the child, extending his arms to protect them, and there was something in this gesture which caused the Boer to hesitate. If he fired now, he would have to kill three people, and one of them a little girl. He could not do such a thing.

But as always, Saltwood said the wrong words: 'If you kill me, Lodevicus, the entire force of the British Empire will hunt you down to the ends of the earth.'

From his saddle the Boer burst into a contemptuous laugh. 'You English. You G.o.dd.a.m.ned English!' Without further comment, he wheeled his horse and headed back to the veld. He would ride through the night rather than spend it with fools like this English missionary.

When word circulated through the farms of the Boer community that the English missionary Saltwood had stolen the slave girl Emma and provided her refuge at Golan, consternation spread among them, and meetings were convened to which partic.i.p.ants might have to ride for fifty miles. At each the princ.i.p.al orator was the patriarch Lodevicus the Hammer, who saw more clearly than most the dangers men like him faced.

'I can see the inevitable,' he ranted. 'The English want our Hottentots to live like Boers. Our lands are to be whittled down till we crowd together like Kaffirs. And mark my word, one day our slaves will be taken from us. And then our language will be outlawed and we'll hear predikants delivering their sermons in English.'

A farmer from near Graaff-Reinet, who had seen the fairly amicable relations that existed there between Boers and English officials, said, 'False fears. We can abide the English till they leave again.'

Quiet happenings proved that he was wrong. This time the English invaders showed no sign of quitting the country, and indignation ran through the isolated community when three new clergymen were a.s.signed to remote districts; all were Scotsmen.

'You'd think we had no predikants of our own,' the farmers cried, truly distressed at this radical change.

'It's England pressing us under the heel,' Lodevicus announced, and he refused to send any further t.i.thing to the church.

The fault was not England's. The government knew that frontier congregations longed for predikants who could speak Dutch, and those in charge wanted to send out such men, but there simply were none. Considering all the colonization under way throughout the world at this period, South Africa was the only major settlement in which organized religion failed to provide enough ministers to accompany the outward thrusters. When this deficiency became apparent, the government did the next best thing: it imported large numbers of young Scots Presbyterians who made the easy jump from John Knox to John Calvin; they were fine public servants, men of great devotion and a tribute to their religion.

Lodevicus, of course, was unaware of England's good intentions in this matter, and even if they had been explained to him, he would have d.a.m.ned them; all he was concerned with was that the new predikants were from an alien country, and would be bringing alien ideas. It was clear to him that they had been inserted to destroy Boer influence; one element of his gloomy prediction was being proved true.

Since there were no schools anywhere near De Kraal, Lodevicus was not personally involved in the next scandal, but he was outraged when he heard from farmers in settled areas like Swellendam that English was invading the schools.

'Shocking!' one man told a group of Boers. 'My son Nicodemus goes to school on Mondaywhat does he find? A new teacher. An Englishman who tells him, "From now on we speak English," or something like that. Nicodemus, he don't speak English, so how does he know?'

Bitter resentment developed among the Boers, and many a family, after the Bible reading at night, reflected on the warnings Lodevicus had uttered: 'It's coming around the way he said. First our church, then our school. Next we'll be forbidden to speak Dutch in court.'

This prediction had scarcely been voiced when a farmer near Graaff-Reinet who wanted to lodge a complaint about a boundary was informed that he must submit his brief in English. This provoked further argument, with Lodevicus resuming his role as prophet: 'Most sacred possession a man can have, even surpa.s.sing the Bible, I sometimes think, is his native tongue. A Boer thinks different from an Englishman and expresses that thinking in his own language. If we don't protect our language everywhere, church and court, we surrender our soul. I say we must fight for our language as we would for our lives, because otherwise we can never be free.'

Lodevicus, like all the Van Doorns, was obsessed with freedom, but only for himself. When one Englishman argued: 'Historical parallelism, old man. When the Huguenots came here, you Dutch were in command and forbade them to speak French. Now we're in charge, and we want you to speak English. Only fair.'

At such reasoning the old man exploded: 'G.o.dd.a.m.n! This place was never French! Only Dutch! It will never be English either. You leam the Dutch of the Afrikaner, d.a.m.n you.' He would have chastised the visitor had not others intervened. The Englishman sought to apologize, but Lodevicus was caught in a mighty rage and, his neck muscles bulging, he shouted, 'Never, never will our soil be English.' Storming about the room like a Biblical patriarch, he thundered, 'You will have to kill me first... and then my sons . . . and then their grandsons . . . forever.'

It was against this background of rebellious thought that Lodevicus the Hammer rose against the English in 1815. Tjaart was absent with the herds when a horseman came riding up to De Kraal late one evening. 'Van Doorn! Lodevicus van Doorn!' he shouted, leaping from the saddle.

The white-bearded old man stepped outside. 'Ja, breeder, wat is dit?'

Breathlessly: 'Hottentots are killing Boers!' And when Lodevicus grabbed him by the neck, he stuttered: 'Frederick Bezuidenhout . . . lives thirty miles north of here . . . the court at Graaff-Reinet . . .'

'I know that court,' Lodevicus snapped. 'What's it done now?'

'Summoned Bezuidenhout. . . charges of abusing a servant.' It seemed that when the accused, a rough, unlettered renegade, refused to appear, a lieutenant and twenty soldiers were sent to fetch him. Unwisely, all the soldiers were Hottentots, and when Bezuidenhout retreated to a cave, gunfire was exchanged, and the highly trained Hottentots shot him dead. The Bezuidenhout family vowed vengeance.

Lodevicus reacted spontaneously: 'Good riddance. Those thieves.' He knew the Bezuidenhouts as border ruffians who respected neither English rule nor Dutch, and as veldkornet he had often been required to discipline them. 'Afrika voor de Afrikaner!' was their battle cry, and they hated the English with a pa.s.sion equaled only by their abhorrence of those Dutch who served what they called 'The Lords of London.'

They were an unregenerate lot and Lodevicus could not feel sorry over the death of Frederick. 'Van Doorn!' the messenger shouted. 'Are you listening? Hottentots sent by the English Kaffir-lovers murder a Boer.' He shook the master of De Kraal and cried almost plaintively, 'We need you, Lodevicus Hammer.'

'For what?'

'To lead the Boers.'

'Against who?'

'The English. Who plan to kill off all us Boers.'

Van Doorn, much as he hated the English, could not accept this ridiculous statement. He started to tell the messenger that he was forgetting the early days when trekboers armed their Hottentots to fight the Xhosa, but the man was persistent.

'Lodevicus Hammer, if we let the English do this thing to one of us, they will do it to all,' and his arguments were finally so persuasive that the old man asked, 'What do you want of me?' and the messenger said, 'Lead us against the English.'

'And where would we get the troops?'

Softly the messenger said, 'The Bezuidenhouts say we must go to Kaffirs.'

Neither man spoke, for this was the moment of treason, the moment when loyalties and moral judgments hung in the balance. Lodevicus van Doorn knew well that the ultimate battle his people would have to fight would be against the blacks, and he had seen how fearful that struggle could be. His father Adriaan, his mother Seena, his wife Rebecca had all been slain by the Xhosa, and he in turn had decimated their ranks. To ally with them now was unthinkable.

'The only Kaffir this Boer wants to speak with is a dead one,' he growled.

'No, no! Van Doorn, listen to me. With the Kaffirs we can drive out the English. When that's done we can settle with the Kaffirs.'

'They butchered my family,' Lodevicus said grimly.

'And now we use them for our purposes.' He explained how this could be done, and concluded: 'I've heard you say yourself, Vicus, that the English will destroy us. They will stamp on the backs of the Boers. They will make us say "Mister" to the Hottentots eating at our own table.' On and on he went, driving home the message that the Englishman was the real enemy: 'Look what he did to you in the Black Circuit.'

This was the telling blow. Lodevicus, who had hammered the Kaffirs, took a great step down the road to treason: 'The enemy that matters is the enemy of today. He is white and English.'

'I know where we can meet with the Xhosa generals,' the messenger whispered, and without conceding that he would actually unleash these fearsome warriors against the English, Lodevicus did agree to talk with them.

Through the dark night the two conspirators rode east to the Great Fish, forded it upstream from a rude fort, and sought the dwelling of Guzaka, son of Sotopo. When at last Lodevicus faced the warrior, the two adversaries glared at each other in silence. Guzaka had slain three members of the Van Doorn family; the Hammer had captained the destruction of more than three thousand Xhosa. Finally Guzaka rose, extended his two hands, and said, 'It is time.'

They sat outside Guzaka's hut, two grizzled warriors licking their wounds like old tomcats, their claws blunted by the years. 'Ja, Kaffir,' Van Doorn said slowly, 'here stands a Van Doorn asking your help. G.o.d knows it's not right, but what else is there?'

'The Redcoats will destroy both of us,' the white-haired Xhosa said.

'We must kick them out.'

'Killings, too many killings,' Guzaka said.

'Settle with them, then we'll settle peace between us.'

'But you Boers steal our lands, too.'

'Did we ever drive twenty thousand across the Big Fish? It was the English who did that.'

'It's still our land,' Guzaka said, confused by the drift of the conversation.

'Old man, you and I don't have too many years. Let us solve the land question now. We drive out the English, then you and I make peace. We each herd cattle. We share the land.'

'Can we defeat the Redcoats?' the old warrior asked.

'Together we can do anything,' Lodevicus said with fervor, and impulsively he clasped his enemy's hand, for at that moment he truly believed those words.

Inspired by this show of friendship, Guzaka said, 'Tonight I shall discuss this with my headmen. Tomorrow we make the treaty.' It was a word he knew well, for along this contested border there had been more than fifteen treaties, none with prospects more hopeful than this: Boer and Xhosa against the enemy.

But during this parley, which might have meant so much to the frontier, a young Xhosa warrior with wild and shifting eyes who claimed to see visions and exercise prophecya thin man with a ridged scar across his foreheadhad sat off to one side, carefully watching, his heart smoldering with hatred for Van Doorn. He remembered that years ago this huge Boer had scattered tobacco on the ground as a trap; his father had stooped to retrieve itand fifty warriors had perished.

So after Lodevicus and the messenger withdrew, the trembling prophet harangued his tribesmen: 'Jackals! Cowards! Men without skins! Who is this Van Doorn who comes begging? Is he not the sorcerer who uses tobacco to slay his enemies? The blood of my people is on his hands.'

'The blood of his people is on our hands,' Guzaka replied. 'This is the time to halt the bloodshed.'

'What can this monster do for us?' the prophet demanded.

'He will help us fight the English,' Guzaka argued. 'With the Boers we can live in peace. With the English, never.'

'If we help these Boers today,' the scarred prophet warned, 'they will steal our land when the battle is over. I say kill them tonight.'

But Guzaka saw a chance to gain that lasting peace without which his people would suffer unbroken travail, and he tried vainly to support the concept of a combined attack on the English; he achieved nothing, for the prophet, inflamed by an apocalyptic vision of long-dead Xhosa generals rising mysteriously to launch an attack on both the English and the Boers, expelling them from the land, cried, 'He is old and frightened!' And three young warriors struck Guzaka, leader of many battles, to the ground and killed him.

They then raged out into the night, seeking the trail by which Lodevicus had left the camp. In the mists, sixty warriors, spurred on by the prophet, fell upon the tent where Lodevicus slept. The old man reached for his gun, but before he could fire even one shot, a.s.segais pierced his chest and he fell back.