The covenant - James A. Michener [241]
At such reasoning the old man exploded: 'Goddamn! This place was never French! Only Dutch! It will never be English either. You leam the Dutch of the Afrikaner, damn you.' He would have chastised the visitor had not others intervened. The Englishman sought to apologize, but Lodevicus was caught in a mighty rage and, his neck muscles bulging, he shouted, 'Never, never will our soil be English.' Storming about the room like a Biblical patriarch, he thundered, 'You will have to kill me first... and then my sons . . . and then their grandsons . . . forever.'
It was against this background of rebellious thought that Lodevicus the Hammer rose against the English in 1815. Tjaart was absent with the herds when a horseman came riding up to De Kraal late one evening. 'Van Doorn! Lodevicus van Doorn!' he shouted, leaping from the saddle.
The white-bearded old man stepped outside. 'Ja, breeder, wat is dit?'
Breathlessly: 'Hottentots are killing Boers!' And when Lodevicus grabbed him by the neck, he stuttered: 'Frederick Bezuidenhout . . . lives thirty miles north of here . . . the court at Graaff-Reinet . . .'
'I know that court,' Lodevicus snapped. 'What's it done now?'
'Summoned Bezuidenhout. . . charges of abusing a servant.' It seemed that when the accused, a rough, unlettered renegade, refused to appear, a lieutenant and twenty soldiers were sent to fetch him. Unwisely, all the
soldiers were Hottentots, and when Bezuidenhout retreated to a cave, gunfire was exchanged, and the highly trained Hottentots shot him dead. The Bezuidenhout family vowed vengeance.
Lodevicus reacted spontaneously: 'Good riddance. Those thieves.' He knew the Bezuidenhouts as border ruffians who respected neither English rule nor Dutch, and as veldkornet he had often been required to discipline them. 'Afrika voor de Afrikaner!' was their battle cry, and they hated the English with a passion equaled only by their abhorrence of those Dutch who served what they called 'The Lords of London.'
They were an unregenerate lot and Lodevicus could not feel sorry over the death of Frederick. 'Van Doorn!' the messenger shouted. 'Are you listening? Hottentots sent by the English Kaffir-lovers murder a Boer.' He shook the master of De Kraal and cried almost plaintively, 'We need you, Lodevicus Hammer.'
'For what?'
'To lead the Boers.'
'Against who?'
'The English. Who plan to kill off all us Boers.'
Van Doorn, much as he hated the English, could not accept this ridiculous statement. He started to tell the messenger that he was forgetting the early days when trekboers armed their Hottentots to fight the Xhosa, but the man was persistent.
'Lodevicus Hammer, if we let the English do this thing to one of us, they will do it to all,' and his arguments were finally so persuasive that the old man asked, 'What do you want of me?' and the messenger said, 'Lead us against the English.'
'And where would we get the troops?'
Softly the messenger said, 'The Bezuidenhouts say we must go to Kaffirs.'
Neither man spoke, for this was the moment of treason, the moment when loyalties and moral judgments hung in the balance. Lodevicus van Doorn knew well that the ultimate battle his people would have to fight would be against the blacks, and he had seen how fearful that struggle could be. His father Adriaan, his mother Seena, his wife Rebecca had all been slain by the Xhosa, and he in turn had decimated their ranks. To ally with them now was unthinkable.
'The only Kaffir this Boer wants to speak with is a dead one,' he growled.
'No, no! Van Doorn, listen to me. With the Kaffirs we can drive out the English. When that's done we can settle with the Kaffirs.'
'They butchered my family,' Lodevicus said grimly.
'And now we use them for our purposes.' He explained how this could be done, and concluded: 'I've heard you say yourself, Vicus, that the English will destroy us. They will stamp on the backs of the Boers. They will make us say "Mister"