The Covenant (95 page)

If the locals were proud of Harry, they adored his wife. Everyone knew of the gallant manner in which he had won her. At the siege of Badajoz, when he led his troops in their final assault on that city, two Spanish children, one a young girl, came running from the French-held lines in tears: “Soldiers have killed our parents. And look! They’ve ripped the rings from our ears.”

Young Smith took one look at Juanita and declared to a friend, “There has never been a lovelier lady.” And forthwith he married her, even though she was only fourteen and a Catholic. They formed one of the notable married couples in history, a marvelous, well-matched pair. He entertained the public with his bravery, she with her guitar. Years after this first sojourn at the Cape, Sir Harry would return as governor, and Juanita would be worshipped by everyone.

On this night, as he waltzed with her, Harry saw one of the governor’s aides enter the hall and with grave gestures beckon him. Graciously he deposited his lady with friends, and without betraying any excitement, walked slowly to the governor’s study.

“The Kaffirs have broken through all our frontier lines. Grahamstown and the Boer commandos can’t hold them back. They’re destroying everything in their path. Burning and pillaging.”

Without hesitation Harry said, “I shall go.”

“It will be weeks before a warship can get you there.”

“Forget the damned navy. I’ll ride.” Then he bowed slightly. “Sir, midnight is almost here. Would it not be proper for us to rejoin the ladies?”

In the ballroom, as the eleventh hour ended, a great cheer went up and the band played that exquisite song of nostalgia “Auld Lang Syne.” Harry Smith, aware that he must soon be off across the continent, clasped Juanita tightly as he voiced with her the words of Robert Burns:

From outside came the explosion of fireworks and cries of delight from those who welcomed 1835.

Harry and Juanita left the dance immediately. After a brief three hours’ rest he kissed her farewell, buckled on his saber, picked up dispatches for the frontier, and rode out into the night as the citizens slept soundly in preparation for the next day’s revelry.

At dawn Smith was well east of Cape Town, and in six days he covered the six hundred miles to Grahamstown, where, without resting, he took command.

The governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, sorely frightened by the Xhosa invasion, arrived himself on January 14, and soon Englishmen and Boers, two thousand strong, were ready, accompanied by their three
hundred Coloured militiamen. “We shall thrash the Kaffirs,” Smith said, but it took seven months to make good his threat. However, with men like Tjaart van Doorn and Richard Saltwood at his side he proved tireless … and merciless. After one three-week push, he announced with satisfaction, “I have burned two thousand, seven hundred and sixteen huts. That’ll teach ’em.” But in a more sober mood he estimated correctly: “It would take me one hundred thousand of England’s finest to crush these Xhosa.”

When finally he had forced them back to their own territory he returned to Grahamstown, where triumphal arches lauded him as the victor of the frontier, the subduer of the rebellion. “We shall now have peace,” he declared.

But peace depended primarily upon the actions of Sir Benjamin, who had arrived at the Cape filled with the preachments of Dr. Simon Keer. However, service with a realist like Harry Smith, plus personal experience on the battlefront, had induced a radical change of mind. In his perceptive report on the Sixth Kaffir War he informed London that “this fertile and beautiful province is almost a desert, and the murders which have gone hand in hand with this work of pillage and rapine have deeply aggravated its atrocity.” He added that in his opinion the Kaffirs were irreclaimable savages: “Merciless barbarians who have driven our seven thousand farmers to utter destitution.”

Desirous of preventing a repetition, and eager, as an honest man, to formulate a just settlement, he annexed a vast territory, erected a chain of forts, and moved every man he could to garrison the land. Friendly blacks who had not participated in the war were invited to remain where they were, and new lands would be opened up for Boer and English settlers.

It was a sensible solution and went a long way toward compensating the farmers for their grievous losses, but when the costs of the war had been totted up, Sir Benjamin stuck assegais in a large map to indicate the extent of the huge losses suffered by the white men: 100 slain, 800 farms burned, 119,000 cattle stolen, 161,000 sheep milling. Coloured suffered comparably.

When news of this prudent settlement reached London, Dr. Keer stormed Parliament: “The blacks were fully justified in their attempts to reclaim lands that were rightfully theirs. Three thousand of these gentle, helpless people are dead, martyrs in their struggle against the systematic injustice of the Boer and his new ally, the scum of England who live along the frontier.”

Keer won the propaganda war. The sensible peace arranged by D’Urban and Smith was annulled, with the annexed territory being returned to the blacks. D’Urban was recalled in semi-disgrace, and Harry Smith was left powerless: “How am I to eat up Kaffirs with a lawbook?”

Keer and his philanthropicals had a simple answer: “Send considerate English officials to live among our black friends and make good English citizens of them.” They also suggested the establishment of a dozen new Golans in which missionaries could offer refuge.

It didn’t work. The frontier slipped back into tension and anxiety, and in region after region the Boers, now smitten by a vicious drought that withered their crops, met quietly, some amid the ruins of the farms, and said, “To hell with these Englishmen!”

Tjaart’s attention to these grievances was diverted when his daughter Minna, about to deliver her first child, became persuaded that because of her husband’s imperfect appearance, her baby would be a misshapen monster: “I can feel him in my belly. He’s fighting to get out. Because he’s grotesque and evil.”

She became so convinced that she was about to bear some hideous thing, and that the fault was her husband’s, that she could not tolerate his presence. “I look at him,” she whimpered, “and all I see is that crookbackt. Then he stares at me like a wounded bird and I see that pitiful eye, always weeping. God cursed him, and now Theunis has passed the curse along to our son.”

She often became hysterical, and when Tjaart heard of her rantings he grew angry: “Damnit, Minna, thousands of women have babies every year. Mevrouw Bronk has how many?”

“This wife has twelve”—Minna sniffed—“but her husband is a whole man.”

“So is your husband. He saved your life, didn’t he?”

“He couldn’t even fire a gun. Mama had to. I know my son is going to be all bent and twisted.”

Her obsession grew so strong that as time for delivery approached, Theunis had to leave the poor hut that served as their temporary home, taking residence with a Du Toit family that had three boys in school. These boys heard about their teacher’s troubles at home, and even the cause, and rowdier lads began to torment Nel, but when Tjaart heard of this he stormed into the school, brusquely told Theunis
to wait outside, and threatened to thrash the entire student body if there was any more of this nonsense.

“Your teacher is my friend,” he growled. “A good, decent man, and as you’ve been whispering, he’s going to be a father in a few days.”

“Du Toit says the thing’s going to be a monster.”

“Who’s Du Toit?” And when that boy stood, Tjaart rushed at him, stopping with his face close to the boy’s: “If I hit you, you’d bounce through that wall.”

No one laughed, for the menace was real. But immediately Tjaart relaxed and said quietly, “Du Toit, go fetch the master.” And when the bewildered teacher returned, dabbing at his eye, Tjaart said, “Boys, his son will be my grandson. And my father was Lodevicus the Hammer. We raise only the best.”

He quieted the schoolboys but not his daughter, and now her apprehensions contaminated him, so that when Minna was about to have her baby, and women filled the hut, he fell into a sweat greater than any he had known when his own children were being born. As he paced near the doorway during the agonizing wait, he could see ill-formed cripples drifting across his vision, and he prayed that this child would be whole: God, this is an empty land. We need all the young ones we can get, and we need them strong.

Cries came from inside, then women running out: “A beautiful baby girl!”

Brushing people out of his way, he rushed into the hut, then slowly went to the cot and picked up the naked infant. Holding it aloft by its heels, he inspected it from all angles, satisfied himself that it was perfect, then returned it gently to Minna’s arms: “Thank you, daughter. Not a blemish. I must tell Theunis.”

He galloped the miles to the school, where he crashed into the room, shouting, “Theunis! It’s a girl. Perfect in every detail.” Then he pointed at the Du Toit boy who had led the disturbances: “You, fetch some water.” For although Theunis was grinning happily, it was apparent that he might faint.

The Boer frontiersmen could have withstood the drought and resisted the renewed Xhosa incursions, but now the English government insulted them with the disgraceful business of the slave payments. The Van Doorns and their Boer neighbors had been long prepared for the ultimate freeing of their slaves, and they did not
object in principle, but they did sometimes wonder why England was so insistent when countries equally moral—Holland, the United States, for example—were content to hold on to their slaves.

What happened was difficult to explain and impossible to justify. The English Parliament, even though Sir Peter Saltwood, M.P., as manager of the bill had promised otherwise, refused to provide the £3,000,000 which would have compensated the Cape slaveholders for their financial losses. Such a miserly amount was voted that Tjaart would receive for his six legally owned slaves not the £600 promised, but a grudging £180. And then, because the rules were mindful of London-based magnates with vast holdings in the West Indies, it was stipulated that no Cape farmer could receive even his diminished allowance unless he traveled personally to London to collect it.

“I don’t understand,” Tjaart said, endeavoring to unravel these incredible instructions.

“It’s simple,” Lukas de Groot said as he listened to the law with a group of Boers. “Instead of six hundred pounds, you get one-third. And to get this, you have to trek to Cape Town, six weeks, then take a ship to London, four months, then back by ship, then trek back home. Better part of a year.” And the reader added, “Look at this line at the bottom.” There it was:
Any claimant who comes to London must pay a filing fee of £1-10-6 per slave to cover the cost of drafting the papers
.

Tjaart was outraged. Under these insane regulations, there could not be in the entire region east of Stellenbosch one Boer slaveowner who could collect the compensation due him, and it became obvious that this had been London’s intention. Who could absent himself from his farm for most of a year? And who, if he did get to London, could argue before the claims court in English, the required language?

It was such a gross injustice that it encouraged a brood of unsavory types to circulate through the hinterlands, offering to buy up the farmers’ rights at nine shillings to the pound; some of these scavengers were Englishmen who had failed at proper work and who saw this as a device for paying their passage back to London. The chance that any Boer would receive his funds from this gang of thieves was remote. “But look, Tjaart,” one of them weaseled, “I make the trek to Cape Town for you. I sail to London for you, I spend days in the claims courts and urge your case in English. I earn my fee.”

“But the government owes me the whole amount,” Tjaart argued
in Dutch. “Why should I have to pay you more than fifty per centum?”

“Because you will be here, on a farm, and I’ll be in London, in court.”

“It’s so unfair.”

“It’s the law,” the would-be agent said with a bland smile, and Tjaart, realizing how impotent he was to press his legal rights, would probably have accepted the offer and received less than one-sixth of what he had originally been promised had not a deputation ridden in from Grahamstown to prevent this injustice.

It was composed of three Englishmen at whose side Tjaart had fought in the Xhosa war, and two of them were his special friends: Saltwood and Carleton. “Have you signed any papers?” Saltwood cried as he rode in.

“No.”

“Thank God. Now you, sir, leave this district or be horsewhipped.”

“I have my rights,” the man whined.

With a snap of his short hippopotamus whip, Saltwood flicked the intruder’s saddle and called to Carleton, “Show him what you can do.” And with a somewhat longer whip the wagon builder also struck the saddle.

“You’d better ride on,” Saltwood said, and when the man started to protest that he had legal rights, Saltwood snapped his whip and caught him on the leg. “Thief, ride out of here,” he said, and the man, now thoroughly frightened, hurried away. Throwing threats, but only after he was at a safe distance from the whips, he started across country to other farms whose rights he would try to buy at nine shillings to the pound.

“Disgraceful,” Saltwood said as he explained what he and Carleton were proposing to their Boer friends: “You’ve been our good allies. Without you we’d have no town back there, and we can’t stand by and see you robbed. So you give us your claims and I’ll send them to my brother in Parliament. I promise you nothing, Tjaart, except an honest deal. We may win, we may not, but at least you have a chance.”

As they were discussing the matter, Carleton happened to see Van Doorn’s scorched wagon and identified it as one of his: “How did you get it?”