The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘I am a very foolish fond old man,

  Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

  And, to deal plainly,

  I fear I am not in my perfect mind.’

  Three days later, still mesmerized by words, she borrowed Lady Ellen’s Austin and drove by herself to Cambridge, where as a young woman of twenty she had enjoyed such flawless hours with her old brother, Wexton.

  Parking the car in a municipal lot, she walked along King’s Parade, ignoring the noble chapel of King’s College, for she wanted to see again the austere entrance to Clare College, which her brother had attended. Walking as if in a dream, she entered the old surroundings which had housed scholars since 1326 and stood for a long time recalling ruefully those long spring days when she had visited Wexton here. How mercurial they were, how filled with surging ideas. Shaking her head in mournful recollection, she left Clare, nodding her head as she remembered the excellent education her brother had obtained here: You were one of the brilliant lads, Wexton. Oh, God, how I miss you.

  She walked aimlessly south till she reached the gatehouse to King’s College, where almost against her will she entered that stately court where Wexton had encountered the temptations he could not resist. She intended hastening through, wanting to see the Backs, where she and her brother’s friends had enjoyed so many hours, but she was diverted to the right toward that grandest of England’s self-contained chapels, King’s, with its glorious arches reaching to heaven, its ornate choir reminding one of kings and princes. It had been spoiled somewhat since she first knew it by the installation of one of the best canvases Peter Paul Rubens ever painted, a gigantic adoration of the Magi worth millions of whatever currency might be in vogue: Damn, that’s a fine painting, maybe the best he ever did. But it doesn’t belong here.

  She sat in one of the choir stalls, envisioning the days long ago when she and Wexton had come here with his friends to hear evensong: Those damned friends. Those accursed friends. Oh, Wexton, all life’s a falling away, a dismal falling away, but why did you …

  Tears came to her eyes and for some moments she wept, refusing to use a handkerchief, for these were not handkerchief tears. Pressing her fingers to her cheeks, she wiped the tears away, then left the chapel to walk slowly down one of the major sights of England and perhaps Europe, that expanse of green grass hemmed in by the walls of Clare, the chapel and King’s. The buildings were admirably suited to each other, but it was the long sweep down to the River Cam and the Backs beyond that gave the place its nobility. Here she had been sitting on the grass one evening during the Mays—that week of frivolity which falls in June—when Noel Saltwood, from Oriel College at Oxford, drifted by in a boat with Cambridge friends he was visiting. They had met, fallen in love, and pledged a marriage which she had never once regretted. Life in Noel’s South Africa had been rather primitive, and good conversation lagged, but often he encouraged her to get back to Salisbury, and from there to the theaters in London, with occasional excursions to Cambridge, and that had sustained her.

  ‘Oh, Wexton, why in God’s name did you do it?’

  ‘Pardon, ma’am, but did you call?’ It was a short little man wearing a rather long overcoat although the day was warmish, the kind of odd attendant one found everywhere.

  ‘No. No. I was just thinking.’ The man moved closer to assure himself that she was all right, then passed on. As he left she thought: I was indeed thinking. Of years gone, and of evenings on this grass when I first met Noel and his fine, unaffected approach to life. He listened like a country oaf to everything that Wexton and his clever friends and that brilliant young tutor said so glibly. And as he walked me back to my digs he said bluntly, ‘I think your brother and his cronies are half-daft.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say a thing like that.’

  ‘The way he ridicules everything. Don’t you ever listen to him?’

  So under Noel’s tutelage she did listen, and Wexton and his friends, and especially the tutor, did ridicule everything. They despised Australia. They considered South Africa a blight. And they positively excoriated the United States. They also put George Bernard Shaw in his place, and John Galsworthy was beneath their contempt.

  It was only then, spurred by Noel’s sharp analysis, that she realized that her brother had fallen captive to a clique that idolized the young tutor, and in later years she watched with horror as they landed fine jobs in government, accelerated to positions of importance, then scurried off to Russia with high state secrets. Three of them, including Wexton, were living there now in lifelong exile. Two others had ended up in American jails, and one had committed suicide to avoid a treason trial. No one identified the tutor who had enlisted them, and so many others, in the revolution which was to eliminate excrescences like Australia, South Africa and America.

  Oh, Wexton, I would travel to Leningrad on my knees if I could see you again! Once more she broke into tears, thinking of the dazzling manner in which this group of young brilliants had used the English language, and of the pitfalls into which it had led them. With them cleverness was four-fifths of the battle, she said to herself. Remember when one of them dismissed all of South Africa with a joke, even though he knew I was engaged to a South African: ‘We had sense enough to let America win her war against us and got rid of that bad apple. We had to win our damned war against the Boers, and we’re stuck with that atrocity.’

  When she dropped her head in her hands, displaying an anguish that all could see, the little man in the long coat hurried back: ‘Ma’am, I say, are you all right?’ She was so preoccupied with her grief that she did not see another man, in a dark suit, who watched her from a far bend of the River Cam.

  Very slowly she drove back to Salisbury, experiencing a vague presentiment that this might be the last journey she would ever make to Cambridge, or to England either: I’m old now. I should be visiting here as a dignified old lady coming to see my brother to talk about old times. But he’s in Leningrad. God, he must be homesick.

  When she tried to decipher how he had been seduced into committing his mortal sin—the betrayal of his nation and his peers—she began to think of the role words play in life: Our family was so keen on word games. Wexton and I played them incessantly. I think I first came to suspect him when he cheated one day. Altered the meaning of a word in order to win. At Cambridge he altered the meanings of the great words and ended a traitor. Back in Salisbury, walking within the shadow of the cathedral, she thought: Integrity in words protects integrity in life. If the word is corrupted, everything that stems from it will be evil. And this made her ponder word usage in South Africa, and it was then that she made her decision.

  Immediately after she deplaned at Johannesburg she telephoned her son: ‘Yes, tonight. I want you and Susan and the children over here at once.’ When they arrived she took her son aside and said bluntly, ‘Craig, I thought you were wasting your talents when you took science at Oxford. Now I thank God you did.’

  ‘What are you prating about?’

  ‘Your salvation. I want you to cable Washington tonight. Tell them that you’ve accepted the NASA position. Go to America. And take your family with you … forever. But first you must visit Salisbury—make arrangements for Timothy’s college.’

  ‘But why? You’ve always said you love it here.’

  ‘I do, and that’s why you must go.’

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘To get out of here. I’ll put aside funds for Timothy’s fees at Oriel, and Sir Martin can find him something in England when he graduates.’

  Mrs. Saltwood asked her son to call in his wife and children, and when they were formally seated before her she said, cryptically, ‘Very ugly things are going to happen in this country. They’re beyond our control—beyond the control of any sensible people. If there was a chance that you could modify them, I’d want you to stay. I will.’

  ‘We can’t leave you here, Mother,’ Craig’s wife said earnestly.

  ‘I’m expendable. You’re not
. I’ve had my life, you haven’t—and it would be crazy to try to spend it in this insane atmosphere.’

  ‘What makes you so agitated?’

  ‘I went to a performance of King Lear at Stonehenge. I heard majestic words. And I dare no longer turn my back.’

  ‘Mother, you’re not making sense.’

  ‘All you need to know, Craig, is that after the first of June it will not be wise for any Saltwood to be living in South Africa.’

  ‘What happens on the first of June?’

  ‘I go bowling. I go bowling in Cape Town with the Lady Anne Barnard Club, and I want you to be safely home in Salisbury.’

  She would say no more. She bought four tickets on South African Airways: ‘They have the best planes, you know, and the best pilots, too.’ And she spent many hours at the Johannesburg offices of the Black Sash, discussing events with the ladies who were endeavoring to alleviate the tragedy and hardship engendered by enforcement of apartheid. She also sent four urgent letters to Sir Martin Saltwood at Sentinels, explaining the necessity for sending Timothy to England and asking him to watch over the boy. Finally she wrote to the principal of a black high school in the Transvaal, assuring him that she would speak at his school, as requested. After that she spent her spare time with the sonnets of Shakespeare, until a chain of those unequaled lines echoed in her head, building an eclectic sonnet of their own:

  When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  I all alone beweep my outcast state

  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang

  Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud

  Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

  Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

  At times the sheer beauty of the words overcame her, and she felt that men and women give their lives for many good and noble causes, but none more sacred than the keeping alive of words that thunder and sing and console, and it was to such a mission that she now dedicated herself.

  When word reached Vrymeer that Craig Saltwood and his family were leaving, the Van Doorns were startled, for this was only the latest in that flood of talent that was pouring out of South Africa. ‘Craig must be out of his mind,’ Marius stormed. ‘Good job here. Sound prospects.’

  ‘And a clear view of the track ahead,’ his wife agreed.

  Philip Saltwood had dropped by to see Sannie, but she was out with the Troxel boys, and Marius put the question to him: ‘Would you be frightened out of South Africa today?’

  ‘I’d want to stay. But that’s because I like crisis situations.’

  ‘You imply that if you were Craig, you might leave.’

  ‘I might. I doubt a non-Afrikaner had much future here. I’d probably go back to where I was wanted.’

  ‘You damned foreigners,’ Marius growled.

  ‘I’m staying,’ his very English wife said. ‘But of course, my life is here. Sannie and the rest.’

  ‘Are you also saying that if you were Craig, you’d take the chicken and run?’ her husband asked.

  ‘I would, for the reasons Philip has just cited. It’s not pleasant, Marius, living where you’re not welcome—’

  ‘Rubbish. All my friends adore you.’

  ‘And half our Jewish acquaintances have sent their children out of the country. Never coming back. And we know many English who are doing the same.’

  Marius adopted a philosophical view: ‘Every organism ought to cleanse itself now and then. The brains we lose will be replaced locally.’

  ‘But if you Afrikaners despise speculative thinking because it might turn radical, how can the gaps be filled?’ she asked. ‘Have you heard what Afrikaner professors and ministers are teaching these days? Not much leadership there.’

  ‘It’ll come,’ Philip interposed. ‘I see some very bright young engineers.’

  ‘One thing does worry me,’ Marius said reflectively. ‘Of all the places in the world I’ve seen, the one that impressed me most was Princeton, New Jersey. When I was there Einstein was in residence, and John von Neumann, and Lise Meitner was visiting. All the brilliant scientists that Europe had lost in the 1930s. They were the ones who paved the way for the atomic bomb. Fermi, the others. And when the urgent need came in World War II, the Germans looked around for their help and they were gone. I wonder if we’re alienating similar talent.’

  But when Frikkie and Jopie arrived with Sannie, they put things back into perspective. ‘To hell with all English fugitives,’ Jopie said. ‘They fight for nothing these days. Won’t even play us in rugby.’ But as soon as he said this he remembered that Mrs. van Doorn was English: ‘I don’t mean you.’

  Frikkie said brightly, ‘Let the Jews and the English hands-uppers clutter up Harvard and Yale. We have work to do here which they would never stomach. And we’re going to do it.’

  When the time came for the Craig Saltwoods to leave the country, Philip announced that he’d like to drive to Jan Smuts Airport to see them off, for this would give him a chance to meet Laura Saltwood, of whom several local people had spoken with regard. However, the journey was a hundred miles, and he might not have gone had he not received a surprising telegram from Craig Saltwood, whom he had never met: IMPERATIVE I SEE YOU JAN SMUTS AIRPORT PRIOR MY DEPARTURE.

  Frikkie and Jopie volunteered to drive, because they knew that Sannie enjoyed seeing the 747s even if she wasn’t flying in them, so as a foursome they drove across southern Transvaal, roaring into the airport well ahead of takeoff. They found Craig Saltwood anxiously looking for his American cousin. When Frikkie identified the Englishman, the three Afrikaners withdrew, leaving the cousins alone. Then Craig said, startling Philip even more, ‘I know we’re practically strangers, but … Philip, would you please watch over my mother. I’m sure she’s up to something dramatic and I’m damned if I can learn what.’

  Philip was at a loss for words. Stunned by the request, he finally said, weakly, ‘I can’t very well watch over her from Venloo.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. You can never stop my mother from doing what she wants.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think she’s going to fall afoul of the law. Everything she says and does strengthens the impression.’

  ‘Then why are you leaving?’

  ‘Because she insists. Says things here are bound to go to hell—Here she comes.’

  Laura Saltwood was sixty-seven that day, tall, white-haired, thin as in her youth, and clear-eyed. She was quite content to see her family leaving ‘for a better climate,’ as she phrased it, and she did not intend showing tears as they departed. She was somewhat disconcerted to meet Philip, for his unexpected presence made the departure one degree more grave than she had intended; however, she greeted him cordially and asked him to join them in the lounge to await the plane’s takeoff.

  ‘I have these friends with me,’ he apologized, and when he called them over she widened her conversation to include them, using Afrikaans when introductions were made. The situation was strained, for the Craig Saltwoods were embarrassed at leaving the country, while Frikkie and Jopie were obviously disgusted with them for doing so.

  Now the plane was wheeled into position, a modified version of the standard 747, shortened so it could fly nonstop to London, since South African planes were not allowed to refuel anywhere in black Africa. An all-white flight crew took their places in a land that was eighty percent non-white, and after formal goodbyes another family left the country, its children never to return to the land which had nurtured them and which sorely needed whatever contributions they might have made.

  Jopie said as the plane soared off, ‘The English—last to land, first to flee.’ And Frikkie said, ‘A wise farmer weeds out his weak mealies.’ They made no attempt to hide their bitterness.

  They might have been even more upset had they chanced to see at a far edge of the airport an unschedul
ed Boeing to which a sequence of small automobiles reported during the space of about an hour. No announcements were made over the loudspeakers regarding this plane; no uniformed stewardesses flourished through the airport, heralding it. Quietly it filled with passengers, quietly it taxied to the far end of the runway, and without notice of any kind it took off, circled, and flew directly westward on a very long flight to South America. It contained one hundred and eighty businessmen and farmers, most of them Afrikaners, who were going with their wives to visit Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to investigate farmlands of the interior against the day when they might wish to quit South Africa for a new frontier. Of these passengers, forty-three families would like Brazil so much that they would make arrangements to purchase vast fincas, holding them in reserve for the day when they might be needed. The others would make their decisions later. As for the secret plane, after an appropriate rest it would load up with Afrikaner and English doctors and fly them to Australia to register with that country’s medical association, so as to ensure a refuge … when the crunch came.

  On May 30 Laura Saltwood appeared at the black school in the Transvaal to find that publicity regarding her visit had encouraged some thirty or forty black principals and school officials to drive substantial distances to hear her. They knew her to be a remarkable woman, a quiet worker in a score of worthy causes. She had the reputation for both good sense and fearlessness, and they knew she would not have come so far unless she had something pertinent to say.

  Although she had written her speech in detail, suspecting that it might be the most important she would ever deliver, and perhaps the last, she did not refer to notes but spoke extemporaneously. She announced her subject as Language, one of the most mercurial topics in the world, and eased the apprehensions of the older conservatives by praising Afrikaans:

  ‘As you know from the Old Testament, South Africa and Israel have much in common, especially their determination in creating and establishing a new language. Israel went back to ancient Hebrew. South Africa went to classical Dutch, adding a wonderful assembly of new words, new spellings, and new arrangements.