The covenant - James A. Michener [548]
'It was inevitable,' Detleef said when he heard the news. 'We do what is right for the country and they refuse to cooperate.' When he heard that blacks were massing in various other cities, he told Maria that any uprising must be stamped on without mercy. He was not a vicious man, but he did believe in order, and when Parliament, after due deliberation, decided that the country should be organized a certain way, it was everyone's duty to conform: 'You cannot have Bantu deciding whether they will obey the laws or not obey them. The laws have been passed. They must be obeyed.' It was his opinion that white agitators, especially women like Laura Saltwood, were responsible for these disturbances, and he began pondering ways whereby people like her could be restrained.
Detleef was sixty-five and considering retirement, but the chain of dramatic events in 1960 convinced him that his lasting achievements still lay ahead. Not long after Sharpeville a maniac, overwrought by the anxieties thrust upon him by recent changes in national life, fired a revolver point-blank into Prime Minister Verwoerd's head. Miraculously, that brilliant political leader survived, and this, said the Van Doorns, proved that God wanted him preserved for noble tasks. In October, Verwoerd accomplished one of them: he engineered a plebiscite which authorized the government to break all relations with the English crown and declare itself a republic.
With enormous vigor Detleef and his wife had worked at erasing all vestiges of what they termed 'a century of English domination.' Earlier, a series of modest changes had been madeno more knighthoods like Sir Richard Saltwood's; Jan van Riebeeck's face on coinage instead of king or queen; lieutenant changed to veldkornetbut now Detleef moved among his colleagues pressuring them for the most important change of all.
'We must eliminate the last remnant of past degradations,' he preached. 'We must leave the British Commonwealth of Nations, for it's only an English stratagem to keep us subservient.'
Many who heard him say this were aghast that he should carry his obsession so far: 'When we voted to break ties with the monarchy, we certainly did not intend to leave the Commonwealth.' To such objections he had a rigid answer: 'When you start on an honorable course, pursue it to the end. Our end is complete freedom.' And when he came home at night to discuss these matters with his wife, she supported him: 'They shot my father. They killed my people in the camp. We must end every association.'
In March 1961, when the Van Doorns were at Vrymeer, the glorious news arrived. An assistant at Pretoria telephoned: 'Sir! Sir! We're free at last. Verwoerd has taken us out of the Commonwealth!'
Detleef was cautious, so before he shared the triumph with Maria he made two calls to confirm the news, and when he was satisfied that his country was at last free, he did not run exultantly to his wife or start a celebration. Instead, he left the house and walked gravely to the largest lake, where blesbok were grazing, and he looked across to where the hartebeest hut of General de Groot had stood in the bad years following the end of war, and he could hear the old warrior predicting: 'You are the generation that will win this country back. You will win the war that your father and I lost.'
Raising his fist, as he had done years ago when celebrating a rugby victory, he shouted, 'Old man! We've won! We've won!'
Detleef was retired now, with no office in either Cape Town or Pretoria to report to, and he might have rested, for the laws he had sponsored had specified proper behavior for all residents of the republic, but sloth was alien to his puritanical nature, and he began to fret over another mammoth task which he felt needed to be done: 'I could die happy, Maria, knowing