The Covenant by James A. Michener
‘He has sons, too. Nine and eight.’
‘Interesting.’
‘But you understand, the farm really belongs to the old man.’
‘Who?’
‘Willem van Doorn. And his old wife Katje.’
‘Three generations?’
‘Working the fields, you live a long time.’
When they reached the farmhouse, walking down the lane between the eight huts, a tall Dutchman, broad of face and open in manner, came out to greet them: ‘I’m Marthinus van Doorn. Are you the Frenchman?’
‘Paul de Pré, and these are my sons Henri and Louis.’
‘Annatjie!’ the farmer cried. ‘Come meet our neighbors!’ And from the house came a tall, gaunt woman with broad shoulders and big hands. She was obviously quite a few years older than her husband, in her late thirties perhaps, and she bore the look of one who had worked extremely hard. She did not smile easily, as her husband had done when greeting the strangers, but she did extend a practical welcome: ‘We’ve been waiting for your knowledge of grapes.’
‘Is it true, you’ve made wine?’ her husband asked.
‘A great deal,’ Paul said, and for the first time the woman smiled.
‘The old man is out with the slaves,’ Van Doorn said. ‘Shall we go see him?’
But before they could depart, a high, complaining whine came from the back of the house: ‘Who’s out there, Annatjie?’
‘The Frenchman.’
‘What Frenchman?’ It was a woman’s voice, conveying irritation that things had not been explained.
‘The one from Amsterdam. With new vines.’
‘Nobody tells me anything,’ and after a bit of shuffling, the door creaked open and a white-haired woman, partially stooped, came protestingly into the sunlight. ‘Is this the Frenchman?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ her daughter-in-law said patiently. ‘We’re taking him into the fields to meet the old man.’
‘You won’t find him,’ the old woman muttered, retreating to the shadows of the house.
They did find him, a crippled old man in his mid-sixties, walking sideways as he supervised the slaves in pruning vines. ‘Father, this is the Frenchman who knows how to make good wine.’
‘After thirty years they send someone,’ he joked. Since that first joyous pressing decades ago, hundreds of thousands of vines had been planted at the Cape, assuring a local supply of wine, but even the best vintage remained far inferior to those of Europe.
The old man jammed his pruning knife into his belt, walked awkwardly to greet the newcomer, and said, ‘Now let’s figure out where your land’s to be.’
‘I have a map …’
‘Well, let’s fetch it, because it’s important that you get started right.’
When the map was spread, the old man was delighted: ‘Son, they’ve given you the very best land available. Sixty morgen! With water right from the river! Where will you build your house?’
‘I haven’t seen the land yet,’ Paul said hesitantly.
‘Let’s see it!’ the old man cried, almost as if the land were his and he was planning his first house. ‘Annatjie, Katje! Get the boys and we’ll go see the land.’
So the entire Van Doorn establishment—Willem and Katje; Marthinus and Annatjie; and the children Petronella, Hendrik and little Sarel—set off to see the Frenchman’s land, and after they had surveyed it and assessed its strengths, all agreed that he must build his house at the foot of a small mound that would protect it from eastern winds. De Pré, however, said with a certain stubbornness, ‘I’ll build it down here,’ but his reasons for doing so he would not divulge. They were simple: when the Van Doorns indicated the spot they were recommending, he immediately noticed that it did not balance the house they had built, and he wanted his home to be in harmony with theirs, for he was convinced that one day these two farms must be merged, and when that time came he wanted the various buildings to be in balance.
‘We’ll put it here,’ he said, and when several of the Van Doorns started to protest the obvious unwisdom of such a location, old Willem quieted them: ‘Look! If the house is put here, it balances ours over there. The valley looks better.’
‘Why, so it does,’ Paul said, and soon the building commenced. The Van Doorns sent their slaves to work on the walls, as if the house were to be their own, while the three De Prés toiled alongside the swarthy Madagascans.
‘De Pré’s a Frenchman,’ Willem said approvingly. ‘He knows how to work for what he wants.’ And as the house grew, its mud bricks neatly aligned, the Van Doorns had to concede that it was not only spacious, but also solid and attractive.
‘It’s a house that needs a woman,’ old Katje said, and on the next evening when the Frenchman ate at her house, she asked him bluntly, ‘What are your plans for finding a wife?’
‘I have none.’
‘You better get some. Now, you take Marthinus’—she pointed to her sturdy son—‘he was born at the Cape when there were no women, none at all available for young men. So we moved out here to Stellenbosch, except it wasn’t named that in those years, and here I was—the only woman for miles around. So what to do?’
Paul looked at Marthinus and then at Annatjie, and asked, ‘How did he find her?’
‘Simple,’ Katje continued. ‘She was a King’s Niece.’
This news was so startling that Paul stared in a most ungentlemanly manner at the tall, ungainly woman. ‘Yes,’ Katje said, ‘this one was a King’s Niece, and you’d better be sending for one of them, too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Orphans. Amsterdam’s full of girl orphans. No one to give them in marriage, no dowry, so we call them the King’s Nieces, and he gives them a small dowry and ships them out to Java and the Cape.’
‘How did …’
‘How did Marthinus know that Annatjie was his? When news of the ship reached out here, we supposed all the girls would be gone. But I told Marthinus, “Son, there’s always a chance.” So he rode at a gallop, and when he got to the wharf all the girls were gone.’
She placed her work-worn hands on the table, then smiled at her husband. ‘I was what you might call a King’s Niece also. My rich uncle shipped me out here to marry this one. Never saw him before I landed. Thirty years ago.’
‘But if the girls were all gone, how did your son …’
Old Katje looked at Marthinus and laughed. ‘Spirit, that’s what he had. Like his father. You’ve heard that Willem chopped down four bitter almond so we could escape from the Cape. I predicted he would be hanged. I said, “Willem, you’ll be hanged.” ’
‘What did Marthinus do?’
‘Got to the ship, all the girls gone. But before he rode back emptyhanded he heard that one of the men at the fort didn’t like the girl he got, so he shouted, “I’ll take her!” And one of the other men said, “You haven’t seen her!” But Marthinus shouted again, “I’ll take her,” and the girl was sent for, and there she is.’
Paul could not determine in what spirit the woman pointed to her daughter-in-law, whether in derision for being so much older than her son, or in disgust at her being so ungainly, or in pride for having had the strength to surmount such a poor beginning. ‘Look at her fine children,’ the old woman said, and Paul noticed that the three youngsters were looking at their mother with love. He would never have told his children such a story, but when he got his sons back into their house, he was startled to hear Henri say, ‘Father, I hope that when you go to the ship, you get someone like Annatjie.’
The Huguenot boys were finding their new home even more exciting than the canals of Amsterdam. The spaciousness enchanted them; they loved the flashing sight of animals moving through the swards of long grass; and playing with the Van Doorn children was a joy. But the Dutchman they loved was old Willem. He moved slowly among his vines, his left leg out of harmony with his right, and he coughed a lot, but he was a reservoir of stories about Java and the Spice Islands and the siege of Malacca.
At home they discussed with their father what it might be: perhaps a horse of their own, or a slave boy whom they could keep, or a hunting trip. They could not imagine what the old man had for them, and it was with trembling excitement that they crossed the fields at dusk to join the seven Van Doorns.
The old lady was complaining that too much fuss was being made, but even so, no one told the French boys what the surprise was to be, and with some anxiety they sat down for the evening meal, where the old ones talked endlessly as a slave woman and two Hottentots served them.
‘Tell me in simple words,’ Marthinus said, ‘what a Huguenot is.’
‘I’m a Huguenot,’ Paul said. ‘These two boys are Huguenots.’
‘But what are you?’
‘Frenchmen to begin with. Protestants next. Followers of John Calvin.’
‘You believe as we do?’
‘Of course. You in Dutch, we in French.’
‘I hear you Huguenots were badly treated in France.’
‘Tormented and thrown in jail and sometimes killed.’
‘How did you escape?’
‘Through the forests, at night.’ No one spoke. ‘And when we were safely in Holland, your brother, Karel … He’s an important man, you know, in the Lords XVII. He sent me back to fetch the vines I’ve brought you. I took my son Henri with me to confuse the Catholic authorities. This boy crept through the forest with me to steal the grapevines, and if we’d been caught by the soldiers …’
‘What would have happened?’ young Hendrik asked.
‘I’d have been chained to a ship for life. He’d have been put where they turn Huguenot boys into Catholic boys in a jail, and his brother here would never have seen him again.’
‘Was it really so cruel?’ Marthinus asked.
‘It was death to be a Calvinist.’
‘It was in our family, too,’ Willem suddenly said. ‘My great-grandfather was hanged.’
‘He was?’ Louis asked in awe, all thoughts of the surprise buried in this revelation of family courage.
‘And my grandfather died in war, fighting for our religion. And as a little girl my mother used to gather with her family like this and do something that would have caused her execution …’
‘What do you mean?’ Louis de Pré asked.
‘She would have been hanged if they had caught her.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Blow out the candles,’ Willem said, and when only one flickered he produced from the next room the old Bible, which he opened at random, and when the children were quiet he read a few verses in Dutch. Then, with his hand spread out upon the pages, he told them, ‘In those days your grandfathers died if they were caught reading like this.’ Closing the heavy cover, he told the children, ‘But because we persisted, God came to comfort us. He gave us this land. These good houses. These vines.’
Young Hendrik van Doorn had heard these tales before, but they had made no impression on him. Now, with the Frenchman telling comparable stories, he understood that tremendous things had happened in France and Holland, and that he was the recipient of a powerful tradition. From that night on, whenever the Dutch Reformed Church was mentioned, he would visualize a young boy creeping through the forest, a man chained to a galley bench, one of his ancestors hanged, and especially a group of people huddled over a Bible at night.
‘Light the candles!’ old Willem cried. ‘And we’ll have the surprise!’
‘Hooray!’ the Huguenot boys shouted as Annatjie left the room, to reappear bearing a brown-gold crock with no handles. As she came to the table she looked momentarily at her father-in-law, who nodded slightly toward Louis. Going to him, she placed the crock before him, and he looked in to see the golden brown crust with the raisins and lemon peel and cherries peeking through.
‘Oh!’ he cried. ‘Can I have some?’
‘You can have it all,’ Willem said. ‘I made it for you.’
The three Huguenots stared at him, unable to conceive that this wrinkled old farmer could also cook, but when the crock was passed to Paul, so that he could serve, he jabbed his spoon into the crust and they applauded.
While the others ate, Paul studied the old Dutchman and was confused. Willem had proved the most generous of neighbors, lending slaves whenever needed; he laughed with the children and now proved himself an able cook. He was in no way the dour and heavy Dutchman Paul had expected, but he did have one mortal failing: he could not make good wine. In a way, this was not surprising, for none of his countrymen could, either. For a thousand years Frenchmen to the south of Holland and Germans to the east had made fine wine, but the Dutch had never mastered it.
‘Van Doorn,’ Paul said one day in exasperation, ‘to make good wine requires fifteen proper steps. And you’ve done all of them wrong except one.’
Willem chuckled. ‘What one?’
‘The direction of your vines. They don’t fight the wind and the sun.’ De Pré studied the lines and asked, ‘How did you get that right?’
And then an inexplicable thing happened. The old man stood among his vines, and dropped his hands, and tears came to his eyes. His shoulders shook, and after a long time he said, ‘A girl instructed me a long time ago. And they branded her on the face, here and here. And she fled into the wilderness with my sons. And by the grace of God she may still be alive … somewhere out there.’ He placed his hands over his face and bowed his head. ‘I pray to God she’s still alive.’
So many things were implied in what the old man said that Paul concluded it was wisest to ask nothing, so he returned to the making of wine: ‘Really, Mijnheer, you’ve done everything wrong, but because your vines know you love them, they have stayed alive, and when my good grapes join them, I do believe we can blend the musts into something good.’
‘You mean, we can make wine they won’t laugh at in Java?’
‘That’s why I came,’ De Pré said, and his jaw jutted out. ‘In two years they’ll be begging for our wine in Java.’
Inadvertently he brought dilemmas into the Van Doorn household. One day, while listening to his sons at play, he realized to his dismay that they had shouted at one another for upwards of half an hour without once having used a French word. They had begun to conduct their lives wholly in Dutch, and no matter how carefully he spoke to them in French at mealtime or at prayers, they preferred to respond in Dutch. He recalled the farewell sermon of the clergyman at the Huguenot church in Amsterdam: ‘Above all, cling to your language … It is the soul of France, the song of freedom.’
When it became apparent that no discipline from him was going to make his sons retain their language, he appealed to the Van Doorns for help, but they were aghast at his effrontery. ‘You’re in a Dutch colony,’ Katje said bluntly. ‘Speak Dutch.’
‘When you want to register your land,’ Willem said, ‘you’ll have to do it in Dutch. This isn’t some French settlement.’
‘It’s quite proper that church services should be in Dutch,’ Marthinus continued. ‘Ours is a Dutch church,’ and when De Pré pointed out that in Amsterdam the Dutch had not only permitted a French church to operate but had also paid the salary of the foreign minister, Marthinus growled, ‘They must have been idiots.’
Despite their arguments, Paul still felt that the Compagnie should duplicate the Dutch government’s generosity and provide the Huguenots with a church of their own, and he started looking about for fellow Frenchmen, but found none, and for good reason. The Lords XVII, afraid that the immigrants might coalesce, just as De Pré was now proposing, and form an indigestible mass within the settlement, speaking an alien language and demanding extraterritorial rights, had issued an edict
The Huguenots shall be scattered across the countryside rather than settled in one spot, and every effort shall be made to stamp out their language. Legal proceedings, daily intercourse, and above all, education of the young must be conducted in Dutch, and no concession whatever shall be made to their preferred tongue.
The threat of a divided colony was not trivial, for although the number of Huguenots was small—only one hundred and seventy-six in the main wave of immigration—so was the number of Dutch, for in 1688 when De Pré and his first group landed, the entire Compagnie roster listed only six hundred and ten white people, counting infants, and a frightening portion of these were of German descent. At times it seemed that the Germans must ultimately submerge the Dutch, except for two interesting factors: on the rare occasion that a German found a marriageable woman, she was invariably Dutch; and the Germans tended to be ill-educated peasants who readily accepted the Dutch language.
Not so the Huguenots. They were both well educated and devoted to their language, and if left to cluster in xenophobic groups, might form an intractable minority. Since the Dutch did not propose to let this happen, the French were scattered, some to Stellenbosch, some higher up in a place called Fransch Hoek, and others in a choice valley well to the north. But no matter where they found refuge, they encountered this driving effort to eradicate their language, which De Pré was determined to resist. In the letters he dispatched to the other settlements he wrote:
The most sacred possession a man can have, after his Bible, is his native tongue. To steal this is to steal his soul. A Huguenot thinks differently from a Dutchman and expresses this thinking best in his native language. If we do not protect our glorious French in church, in law and in school, we surrender our soul. I say we must fight for our language as we would for our lives.
This was such open subversion that Cape officials felt obligated to send investigators to Stellenbosch, and after brief questioning, these men proposed throwing De Pré into jail, but the Van Doorns protested that he was a good neighbor, needed for the making of wine. The latter point impressed the officials, who lectured De Pré at a public hearing: ‘Only because your friends have defended you do you escape imprisonment. You must remember that your sole duty is to be loyal to the Compagnie. Forget your French. Speak Dutch. And if you circulate another inflammatory petition, you will be ejected from the colony.’