The covenant - James A. Michener [151]
His building mania was almost ended. When the great wine casks from France were placed in position, and the pigeons and chickens and pigs were in their cubicles, he informed Annatjie that he would build one final thing for her, and when she tried to guess what it might be, he told her to visit with the Boeksmas in Stellenbosch for five days. When he came to the Boeksma farm to fetch her, she asked what he had done, and he told her, 'You must see for yourself,' and as they drove up the lane, and into the areaway between the two embracing arms, she could detect nothing new, but as they approached the house she gasped, for at each end of the low stoep on which they sat in the evening Paul had directed his workmen to build two ceramic benches perpendicular to the front wall and faced with the softest white-and-blue tiles from Delft. They showed men skating on frozen canals, women working at the river, views of old buildings and sometimes simply the implements of Dutch farm life. They converted ordinary benches into little jewels, glistening in sunlight, and the great house of Trianon was complete.
It was great in neither size nor height, nor was it Dutch. Its chief characteristics had been borrowed from Java, its secondary ones from rural France, but the spirit that animated it and the manner in which it hugged the earth came only from South Africa. Dutch workmen had helped build it, and a French megalomaniac, and a Malay carpenter, and slaves from Angola, Madagascar and Ceylon, with Hottentots doing much of the light work. It was an amalgam, glorious yet simple, and its chief wonder was that when one sat on the Delft benches at close of day, one could see the sun setting behind Table Mountain.
Paul's attitude toward his five children would always be ambivalent. Concerning Annatjie's boy Hendrik, who had vanished into the wilderness, he was glad to see him go, for he recognized him as a threat. He did not worry about his own son Henri, now in Amsterdam, for he judged this one would never have wanted to farm; indeed, he felt some relief at the boy's disappearance, for he sensed that sooner or later he would have had trouble with him. Annatjie's boy Sarel he considered a dolt and was pleased to see that girls thought so, too, for the boy was not married, would produce no heirs to claim the vineyards, and could be dismissed. His son Louis was a different matter; Paul was still convinced that after a few years at the Cape, the boy would want to come back to the farm, and it would be to him that Trianon would ultimately revert; often he consoled himself by thinking: The experience with the Compagnie will make him a better manager. He'll know about ships and agents and markets. That the boy would ultimately return he never doubted, and that Louis could wrest the vineyard from silly Sarel was evident. 'Trianon of the De Pres' he saw as the ultimate title, and if the French name should be submerged in the Dutch Du Preez, that would be all right with him.
It was his attitude toward Petronella that surprised Annatjie, for he had bitterly opposed her liaison with Bezel Muhammad, but now his opinion changed radically. One day he said, 'Annatjie, I'm not using my house, and the boys seem to have fled. Why not give it to Petronella and Bezel?'
'I think they'd like that,' Annatjie said, and she was astonished when he not only gave the young couple the house, but also helped Bezel erect a workshop in which his tools would have an orderly place. He even assigned three slaves to the task of cutting stinkwood