The covenant - James A. Michener [261]
Hilary, who understood this conniving strategy, was saddened to see his intended bride and his brother heading eastward into such a situation, and as he stood alone he prayed for them, that God would give them strength for the trials that lay ahead. That done, he watched their wagons disappear, then mounted his horse and rode slowly back to Golan Mission.
He would never forget 1820. For him it was a year of tragedy, with both the Boer and the English communities sneering at him, not even conceding that he was a well-intentioned dominee. His mission was characterized as a farce where blacks could escape honest work; his attempts at agriculture were pitiful; and his constant insistence that Hottentot and Xhosa be given fair treatment was seen as weakness of character. The Boers despised him for his antagonism to coerced labor, the backbone of their existence, while the English dismissed him as socially unacceptable.
His position worsened whenever Dr. Keer, in London, issued a new publication or caused an inquiry to be made in Parliament. The little agitator was finding that his diatribes against the Boers were popular with the English press and his passkey to the highest ranks of English society. He wrote and preached and lectured, uttering the most inflammatory accusations against the Boers, but whenever he thundered from the safety of London, the lightning struck Hilary Saltwood in his exposed mission, and there was serious talk among the farmers of burning the place.
He seemed sublimely indifferent to the ostracism and to the threats. He maintained a kind of Christian charity at his mission, accepting all who stumbled in, finding them clothes and food in unlikely quarters. He kept the converts working, more or less, and spent much time with the choir, believing that a soul that sang was closer to God than one that brooded in silence, and many travelers of that period wrote amusingly of coming to Golan and hearing at evening prayers a glorious choir singing old English hymns, all faces dark except that of the missionary, which stood a good foot higher than the others. The writers always implied that Saltwood was out of place, but that was not accurate. He belonged with these people.
It may have been that God devised this loneliness, when all white men scorned him, so that his attention could be focused on the future of South Africa; at any rate, one night as he lay sleepless he was vouchsafed a vision of such crystal purity that in the morning he had to share it with his parishioners. He spoke in a melange of English, Dutch, Portuguese and Xhosa:
'With the coming of our English cousins, and in such numbers, we can see that this land can henceforth never be of one unit. It must always be broken into fragments, many different people, many different languages. We stand this morning, in 1821, like a river moving along the crest of a ridge. Sooner or later it must come down one side or other, and how it comes will make all the difference in this land. Let us pray that it will come tumbling joyously down as a cascade of love and brotherhood, in which Hottentot and Xhosa and Englishman and Boer share the work and the rewards. Golan Mission must no longer be for blacks alone. We must open our hearts to all people, our school to all children. [Here he frowned.] I cannot believe that our great river of humanity will go rushing down the wrong side of the mountain, creating a hateful society in which men of different colors, languages and religions will go their separate ways in bitter little streams, each off to itself. For we are all brothers in God and He intended that we work and live together.'
Among his listeners that morning, when he shared his vision of a new South Africa, were many who could not comprehend what he was talking about; common sense told them that white men who had wagons and guns and many horses were intended to rule and to have lesser people work for them. But there were a few who understood that what the missionary was saying