The covenant - James A. Michener [555]
'I'll talk to the proper authorities about commuting her sentence,' he said.
'As of today?'
'I can't speak for others.' Then he dropped his voice and pleaded with his difficult visitor: 'Could we keep this a secret between the two of us?'
'We certainly shall. Detleef, I knew you were a man of common sense.'
'No, I'm a poor Boer, madam, incapable of combating you bedonderde Saltwoods.'
Heather was set free, and six months later, on a visit to Cape Town, Laura found the young woman packing. 'I'm off to Canada,' the girl said happily, and she kissed Laura for having shown her how a free woman should behave.
She took up residence in the best of Canadian cities, Toronto, where her style and beauty attracted people of diverse qualities, including several young men captivated by her exotic appearance and spirited wit. Friends helped her locate a job as secretary to a firm with overseas connections, where her facility with languages proved an asset.
In Toronto she was prized for those qualities which at home had made her a criminal: a saucy indifference to outworn custom and an infectious acceptance of people, whatever their station. She was free to contribute to Canadian life to the extent of her capabilities, but she never became pompous or pontifical. When well-meaning travelers tried to inform her about current happenings in South Africa, she smiled graciously and said, 'I no longer give a damn what those poor sick people do to themselves down there.'
But she did care, for she never threw away a small green plastic identity card which proved she had been a South African citizen. In red letters it also informed the world that she was coloured-kleurling.
Heather Botha married a young Canadian lawyer, had three fine children and became a patron of the musical arts in Toronto. She kept the plastic card at the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom as a sober reminder of the prison from which she had escaped.
AT SCHOOL
At Venloo there developed alongside the school founded after the Anglo-Boer War by Mr. Amberson, the rugby player, a girls' school with a notable reputation for producing excellent Afrikaans-speaking graduates who did well at university. It had a patriotic tradition of which its students and teachers were proud. Said the principal, Roelf Sterk, 'My grandfather started this school in a cattle shed back in 1913, when our people were in the years of their suffering. He had no money and his scholars had none, either, but he gathered girls from the neighborhood and told them, "We will not be able to build a free nation in which Afrikaners can live in dignity unless you future mothers master the skills practiced by the English. You must learn to figure and write and reason. You must study." I now tell you the same thing. We've won our rightful place in the government of this land, but to keep ahead of those English, we must study as never before.'
He was especially proud of the way in which two girls in Standard Two took his lectures to heart. Petra Albertyn, aged nine, and Minna van Valck, aged ten, were the kind of students teachers pray for. They were eager and attentive; they behaved themselves without being subdued; they did well in classes requiring memory, but just as well in singing and drawing; and in whatever good thing was afoot, they could be depended upon to take the lead. In addition, as if God sometimes gave certain chosen persons too much, each child was unusually attractivePetra a handsome dark-haired girl, and Minna a striking blonde with classic Dutch features.
It was arithmetic that started the trouble. Minna, being older than Petra, excelled in most branches of study, which in no way distressed the latter, who told her parents, 'I love Minna. She's so sweet and kind.' But in arithmetic little Petra had uncanny skill; she