The covenant - James A. Michener [503]
Christoffel Steyn was dead, but his memory would be kept alive not only by his daughter but also by a whole people longing for heroes. Slim Jannie Smuts had created a martyr out of this little commando and left a burning wound in the soul of Afrikanerdom. It would flame alongside the charred memories of Slagter's Nek, Blaauwkrantz and Chrissiesmeera bitter legacy upon which the sacred history of a nation would be built.
Detleef would surely have married Maria Steyn not long afterward, except that Reverend Brongersma came to the farm with news that carried him off to wholly new adventures in education: 'I have the most exciting development to discuss with you, Detleef. Some time ago I wrote to a group of professors at Stellenbosch, telling them two things: that you were good at studies and unusually good at rugby. They want you to come there to pursue your studies.'
'What studies?'
'I would say philosophy and the sciences. And it would please me greatly if you found it in your heart to enter the ministry. You have a strong character, Detleef, and I think you could be of notable service to the Lord.'
'But who will tend the farm?'
'Piet Krause and Johanna. I've spoken to them.'
'He can't live here and teach in Venloo.'
'Recent events have spoiled him, Detleef. He no longer wants to be a teacher.'
'He won't be very good at farming.'
'No, but he'll look after the place till you get back. And then we'll see what happens.' He paused and rubbed his chin. 'You know, Piet is a remarkable man. He could move in any direction if God ever shows him the right one.' He laughed. 'You have found your path.'
'And what is it?'
'To get an education. To serve God and your society.'
It was a long journey in miles from Vrymeer to Stellenbosch, a much greater one in mental and moral significance, for this quiet town with tall trees and white buildings had become a beautiful and seductive educational center like Cambridge in England, or Siena in Italy, or Princeton in America, a town set apart to remind citizens of how splendid colleges and libraries and museums could be. It was an Afrikaans-speaking place, heavily tinged with religious fervor, but also imbued with an intense speculation about the nature of politics in South Africa, and its professors were some of the most astute men in the nation.
At first Detleef was merely a big, bumbling oaf from the country, forced to compete with the sharper minds of lads who had matured in places like Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, but when he settled down in the home of a clergyman's widow and navigated his first term of advanced trigonometry, beginning philosophy and the history of Holland in the golden century, all of which he fumbled rather badly, he found his sea legs, as it were, and proceeded firmly into his second set of courses, in which he began to display the solid learning he had mastered in the good school at Venloo.
He was especially attracted by his older professors, those men of learning, some from the university at Leiden, some from Oxford, who saw their nation as it actually was, a mix of cultures striving to achieve a central tendency, and he found to his astonishment that two of the classes he enjoyed most were taught by Englishmen, in English. But he appreciated them as he might an especially provocative class in Latin; these men were dealing in historic materials that were long since dead, and if they did so brilliantly, they did so nevertheless with a sense of the mortuary, and he knew it.
The men who exerted the deepest influence were the younger professors who discussed contemporary values, the future of South Africa, its current crises. There were no courses in such subjects, but the better professors knew how to slip relevant teaching into their lectures.