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By Root 3742 0

the nature of Detleef's few letters she deduced that they were growing further and further apart; she pondered most carefully how best to reveal through the post her continued affection for him, but she found no womanly way to do this. She simply could not write: 'I love you deeply. Please come and rescue me from this prison of the spirit.' But that is what she felt, and as the years passed and she realized that she would never want to marry anyone but him, she experienced all the anxieties an uncertain young woman of twenty could feel. Desperately she awaited his letters, weighing each phrase to detect hidden meanings, but she found little to console her. Morning after morning she awakened at the farm, dreading the possibility that on this day she would learn that he had married someone else.

Far in the back of his mind, Detleef sensed that this must be the situation, and he sometimes admitted that in a proper world he would long since have been married to this stalwart girl he had liked so much that spring in Bloemfontein; whenever he mailed her a letter he visualized her as a married woman in church, or attending her duties, or caring for children. He never thought of her as beautiful, which she was not, but as some fine, solid human being for whom he had a steady affection.

But with Clara! That was different. For one thing, she was here in Stellenbosch, not in some distant Transvaal country town. She was alive with information, awake to changes occurring in the countryside. Her family had a new car, imported from America, and in it she loved to tour over the mountains to Fransch Hoek, where the Huguenots had clustered, or down to Somerset West, where the fine houses were. She was one of the first to learn that the war had ended in Europe, not with a German victory, as many had supposed, but with a smashing Allied triumph. For her own reasons, this gave her considerable satisfaction, but she did not annoy her father or her brothers by expressing this preference.

During the victory celebrations, in which the English settlers around the Cape were downright obnoxious, Detleef confided to her his disappointment: 'It would have been much better had the Germans won. They would have brought order to Europe.'

'And here, too, I suppose?' When he realized that she was goading him, he said no more, but when church services were held at the university to give thanks for the cessation of battle, he stayed away.

He began his serious courtship of Clara at Christmas time, 1918, spending most of his pocket money on a present for her. After considerable reflection he decided upon a small, fine leatherbound Bible published in Amsterdam, in which he wrote, facing the page on which their marriage and their children would be recorded: To Clara, the best of the Van Doorns.

She was embarrassed by the gift and wanted to return it, deeming it most inappropriate, but her father would not permit this: 'He gave it to you as a sincere expression. Accept it on that basis.'

'If I do,' she said, 'it can only mislead him.'

'That's the risk we all take when we give or accept things,' he said, and that night at supper he said to Detleef, 'I cannot imagine a finer gift.' As the year drew to an end, Detleef became quite tense, rehearsing how

he could best make his declaration to this exciting girl: I surely have the money to support a wife. Even Piet Krause, who doesn't farm very well, is showing a profit at Vrymeer. I have an education, so I can talk with her. I'm accorded a certain respect because of rugby. And I'm a good Christian.

But then he would in honesty list his deficiencies, and they seemed to weigh down the balances, but nevertheless, he decided to plunge ahead. However, there was to be no New Year's celebration, at least not with the Trianon Van Doorns, for they all drove in to Cape Town to greet a troopship that arrived on the last day of the year. It brought back to South Africa those gallant men who had volunteered to fight for king and country, and among them were some forty soldiers who had fought at Delville Wood.

As they came