The covenant - James A. Michener [505]
These were the years when the game was dominated by one sensational family, the Morkels, and sometimes Detleef would go up against a team that fielded six players with that name, or seven. Twenty-two Morkels were playing in this decade: brothers, cousins, unrelated solitaries, all of them stout lads. Detleef knew it was going to be a strong game whenever he bent over in the scrum and found himself facing two or three of these rugged types. Once, the four biggest men facing him in the tight confrontations were Morkels, and he left that game, as he told his coach, 'as if I had slipped by accident into a threshing machine.' He was not surprised when an entrepreneur announced plans to invade Europe with a team composed only of Morkels; it would be formidable.
It was as a rugby player that Detleef finished his first year at Stellenbosch, and it was principally because of this reputation that he attracted the attention of the Van Doorns who operated the famous vineyards at Trianon. One afternoon, to the house in which he boarded, a Bantu came bearing an invitation to Detleef van Doorn to take dinner that evening with his Trianon cousins. It was the day after a game in which five horrible Morkels had run up and down his spine, so he was not exactly lively, but he had heard so much about Trianon that he accepted, and rode out to the winery.
Like many before him, he gaped when he approached the western entrance and saw for the first time those enchanting arms reaching out and the pristine facade of the main house waiting to welcome him. The war years had been good to Trianon; General Buller had paid top prices for its premier wine and other officers did the same for the lesser blends, so that the Van Doorns had sold their entire pressings for European prices without having had to pay freightage to get the bottles to that market. In all respects the place had been improved, and now looked pretty much as it would through the twentieth century.
On the stoep, resting on one of the tiled benches built two centuries earlier by Paul de Pre, waited Coenraad van Doorn, head of the establishment, who had extended a similar welcome to Jakob in 1899, on the eve of the Boer War. He was heavier now, a man in his late forties, and his manner was even more affable, for life had been exceedingly good. He loved sports and was proud to have a member of his family, even one so remotely associated as Detleef, playing well at Stellenbosch.
'So this is the hero I've been reading about, the Matie who sweeps them aside!' Extending both hands, he drew Detleef up to the stoep and in through the front door. In the wide hallway between the rooms Detleef saw for the first time the Van Doorn daughter, Clara, nineteen years old and so pretty she caused him to gasp. Her face was beautifully oval, with cheekbones just a bit too wide, and framed by carefully brushed amber hair worn in a kind of Dutch-boy bob. She smiled warmly as she stepped forward to greet her distant cousin, and said, 'We are so happy to see such a rugby player in our home.'
At dinner her two older brothers, Dirk and Gerrit, who had by now graduated from Stellenbosch, asked a barrage of questions about the university and their chances of beating the Ikeys again, and the evening proved to be one of the most pleasant Detleef had ever spent. It was fortunate that it was occurring at the end of his first year, because by now his success at rugby had transformed him from an awkward country lad into a self-confident university man, quiet-spoken and interesting. When talk turned to the war in Europe, he repeated some of the things he had heard in class, predicting a German victory in Europe but no significant change in the countries bordering South Africa.
'What I feel precisely,' the older Van Doorn said, and as Clara walked with Detleef to the automobile that would take him back to his lodgings she said, 'You've been learning something at the university. Come back ana share your knowledge