The Covenant (139 page)

This news was so frightening that General de Groot whispered “Shhhhhh” lest Johanna hear that they were discussing her indiscretion, and when she returned to the kitchen six eyes studied her cautiously.
When she left again, De Groot snorted: “Unthinkable! A Boer girl in love with an English …”

“I didn’t say that,” Detlev protested. “I said he was in love with her.”

“A fine girl like Johanna,” the general said. “She’d never do a thing like that.” He uttered the words with such contempt that he might have been speaking of prostitution.

“She is twenty-six,” Jakob said thoughtfully. “She’s a precious girl and ought to be finding herself a man.”

“You need her here,” De Groot said, meaning that he needed her.

“She mustn’t wait much longer, though,” Jakob said. “But I agree I don’t want an Englishman in my family.”

Everything these three male spies saw in the next weeks confirmed their suspicion that Johanna van Doorn was falling in love with an Englishman, and one weekend when he appeared at the farm to inspect the young eucalypts, General de Groot bearded him: “Young man, did you come here to see the trees, or did you come to see Johanna?”

Mr. Amberson blanched, then turned bright red. “Well, I …”

“It would be better if you didn’t come here any more.” When the young man started to defend himself, Jakob entered the discussion: “Yes, it would be better if you stayed away.”

“But …”

“Starting now,” the general said firmly, and the two men remained at Amberson’s side, edging him toward his horse. The general said, “We don’t want an Englishman making up to one of our girls. Now get!” And he slapped the horse, sending the long-legged teacher back toward Venloo.

At lunch, when it appeared that Mr. Amberson would not be joining the family, Johanna asked why, and the general said bluntly, “We don’t want him fooling around with a decent Boer girl.”

Johanna blushed, but did not retreat. “Did you send him away?”

“We did,” the general snapped.

“Who are you to send people away, General de Groot? You’re a guest here.”

“I am the protector of this house,” he said firmly.

“I don’t want your protection.” She wanted to cry. Badly she wanted to weep, for there were no young men in Venloo, and Mr. Amberson had proved himself to be a generous, understanding human being. The war was over; the camps were over; and she felt a
great urge to get on with life, to start a farm of her own with children of her own, and if no one else came along, she was prepared to marry an Englishman, repulsive though it seemed.

But the three men in her family would not allow it. Detlev spoke for them all when he said, “Johanna, you can wait.”

This observation surprised her. “But you like him best of all. You brought him here.”

“As a teacher,” the boy said. “Yes, he is a fine teacher.”

“Unthinkable,” General de Groot pronounced as the final verdict, and Mr. Amberson was seen at Vrymeer no more.

At school he betrayed not a single indication of his disappointment; if anything, he treated Detlev with added consideration, which was natural, since this boy was one of the best. In numbers and history and clear handwriting he received good marks, and Mr. Amberson gave him much encouragement, stopping by Mrs. Scheltema’s sometimes at night to assign him further tasks so that he could excel.

What he did to sublimate his rather strong feelings toward Johanna revolutionized Venloo; it would not be the same after that summer. The metamorphosis started slowly, with his bringing an ovoid football to the school and telling the bigger boys, “You must play rugby. And one day, even though you come from this small town, you may be famous like Paul Roos.”

Up to then the Boers of this little community knew little of the vigorous game that was sweeping the country. Before the war they had heard of the visits of teams from England, first in 1891, when the visitors won every match, and again in 1896. But it had remained an exotic game played principally in the Cape.

Through rugby Mr. Amberson endeared himself to the locals. Day after day he went onto the playing field, in boots, knee-length socks, short pants and jersey, to go up against the strongest boys in his school. They would race up and down the area, bend down in scrums, and play till they were exhausted. “My word,” he often said as the games ended, “that was a good effort. Boys, you’re becoming first rate, absolutely world class.”

Older men in the community ridiculed the schoolmaster: “He’s a man among boys and a boy among men.” But when he suggested that the older youths, those now out of school, also form a team, he assured them that he was prepared to play with them, and now the entire male population of the town came out to watch the gladiatorial games.

He was remarkable, a tall, somewhat frail fellow who showed no fear of slamming into the biggest and toughest of the local Boers. Some boy would break loose with the ball and be on his way to a score when Amberson would detach himself from the pack, fly across the field, and tackle the brute with bone-crunching force, knocking the ball loose, then scrambling to his feet and running with it himself until some mighty Boer brought him down.

At the end of a game he would sit on the sidelines, panting, his body bruised, his mouth showing flecks of blood, and the hefty men would come by and slap him on the shoulder and say, “You know how.” And he would reply, “It was a mighty game.”

His principal interest, however, remained the boys in his school, and he was delighted when Detlev showed signs of becoming a first-class stand-off halfback, the capable lad who received the ball from the scrum half and passed it along to the speedier backs.

He had a natural aptitude for the game, and while he did not love it with the passion Mr. Amberson exhibited, he did appreciate the fellowship, considering it an attribute to a good life. This was helpful, because South Africa was in the process of becoming one of the world’s fanatic sports centers, and if a boy like Detlev ever made a national team, his future would be assured.

It was this mania for sports which made it necessary for Frank Saltwood to issue an edict which went far in determining the social structure of his country. Like all Englishmen, he was dotty about games and served as chairman of the board governing cricket. He was a good player himself, having been a sometime member of the Oxford eleven, and in South Africa, had dedicated his spare time and surplus funds to encourage the game. Whenever a team was chosen to play visitors from Scotland and Wales, he was apt to serve as manager of the tour, ensuring that his men comported themselves within the grand traditions. He was insistent on this: “Cricket is the game of gentlemen, and its rules apply even more to life than to the playing field. I like to see men extremely energetic, but within the set rules.”

This posed a dilemma in the postwar years when the great clubs of England extended an invitation to their former enemies to come home and play a set of gala matches; more than anything else, this would make the peace treaty a conclusive fact to families who had lost sons in the war. But a serious problem arose, in the person of Abu Bakr Fazool, a Coloured Muslim gentleman from Cape Town who was probably the best bowler in the world. When C. Aubrey
Smith, himself a stalwart bowler and future motion picture star, captained his cricket team on a tour of South Africa, he said of Fazool, “Has the fastest riser I’ve ever seen. Much better at the tricky stuff than I am.” He promised Fazool that if the latter ever came to England, he’d find a place for him on one of the county teams.

So now the question was: Should Abu Bakr be a member of the team visiting England? And at first it was assumed throughout South Africa that he should. Local enthusiasts predicted that he would mow down the English batters; but gradually people in rural areas began deploring the possibility that a Coloured might represent South Africa abroad, and articles appeared in the better papers, asking: “Have the board really sorted this thing out?”

The burden fell squarely on Frank Saltwood, and had he stood before his board and said, “We would appear stupid before the world if we omitted Abu Bakr,” they would have agreed, but after he had studied the matter from all angles, he became cautious and gave the board members craven advice:

Had Frank Saltwood in that moment of great, though unrecognized, crisis come out in favor of sending Fazool to England, and had the gifted athlete performed as might be expected, a whole pattern of acceptance might have been launched. There were other Coloured cricket players who could have made those touring teams, and when their white colleagues observed how well they played and with what ease they fitted into mother country festivities, an attitude of approval would have been generated throughout South Africa; and if gifted blacks had been trained for the rugby teams, smashing their opponents about in the scrums and running like antelope for scores, the nation would have seen that they were little different from the Boers and the Englishmen who played beside them.

But time was not ripe for such acceptance. Frank Saltwood convinced his board and kept Fazool off the team. He did not appear in England to take his place beside the fabulous bowlers from India, the immortal batsmen from Australia. He continued to play in the darker neighborhoods of Cape Town, and as the rules against interracial competition stiffened, he quit the game altogether. He could often be seen at the docks, in the fish market, tallying not runs but the daily catch of snoek.

Often in the biographies of important women and men one comes across the phrase: “Like a burst of light, the idea which would animate her life came upon her.” In the case of Detlev van Doorn this simile was literally true. A flash of light struck him, and the course of his life was set.

It happened because of a packet of powdered jellies imported from France. When General de Groot and her father forbade Johanna to see Mr. Amberson, she was left with little to do and began
to occupy her spare time with knitting and embroidery. The arrival at the Venloo store of the imported powders excited her, and swiftly she presented her men with acidy orange and lemon desserts. They liked them, and asked for more, so she returned to the store and purchased the large-size packets, and when she reached home she found that she now had some six or seven different flavors. She experimented with each, and the men found them so tasty that they encouraged her to continue.

She was a resourceful young woman, nearly thirty now, and one day as she was pouring the jelly into her glasses it occurred to her that if she poured only a small portion into each glass, allowing it to harden, she could then pour on top of it another jelly of a different color, and repeat the process until she had a multilayered glass which would be not only quite tasty but also attractive to look at.

On her first tries she failed, because she poured the succeeding colors while they were too hot and thus melted any that had already firmed and cooled. Being a provident woman, she mixed the mangled jellies into one mélange and decided to try again later, but when the mixture hardened and she served it to her men, Detlev protested: “This doesn’t look right and it doesn’t taste right.” She offered no explanation, but did agree with him. That experiment had failed.

Next time, however, when the first jelly was well firmed, and she made the next flavor, she allowed it to cool almost to point of hardening, then poured it in, and her plan succeeded. Indeed, it produced a result much finer than even she had anticipated; it was really quite handsome, for with artistic taste she had placed the black currant layer at the bottom, the light brown apple atop it, then the reds, and finally the orange and the light lemon. The glasses were almost works of art.

When Detlev came into the kitchen they were perched on a window ledge, with one well off by itself, and when rays of sunlight struck that glass, the layers scintillated, each color showing to maximum advantage, throwing delightful patterns of black, brown, crimson, orange and lemon on the opposite wall, and in that moment Detlev understood the grand design of life.

“Look!” he cried, bringing the general and his father into the room. “How each color keeps to itself. It doesn’t muddy the other. It shines like a diamond.” And with one finger he outlined the nature of humanity as God had ordained it: “Here at the bottom the black. Then the lighter brown. Then here the Indian …” Already he had
translated the colors into racial groupings. “Up here the Englishman, he’s orange. And on top of them all, the Afrikaner, clear and …”