The covenant - James A. Michener [556]
This did not disturb Minna, for she told her mother, 'I don't like numbers anyway, and I'm not very good at them.'
'But you allowed Petra to excel,' Mrs. van Valck complained with some irritation. 'Have you no pride?'
'I beat her in everything else!' Minna exclaimed, but her mother suspected that something might have gone amiss at the school, and she was determined to ascertain whether or not her brilliant daughter had been improperly treated. Accordingly, she marched to the school and demanded to see the principal.
Roelf Sterk was accustomed to meeting distraught parents; in fact, he rather liked it when they thought enough of their daughters' progress to interrogate him, but he was not prepared for the harshness with which Mrs. van Valck assailed him: 'I'm convinced that Minna must have done better than this Petra, whoever she is, because I myself corrected her exercise book every night.'
'You mean, you helped her?'
'I did not say that. I said that when her work was done I checked it to be sure she understood the problems. And she never had an incorrect solution.'
'That's why she received such a high mark,' the principal explained.
'But this Petra received a higher. My daughter was penalized . . .'
'Mrs. van Valck,' the principal explained patiently, 'in Petra Albertyn we have a near-genius in arithmetic. She's extraordinary. There's no way your daughter could equal her in this one field. Remember, Mrs. van Valck, Minna got highest in all her other subjects . . .'
Mrs. van Valck was still not satisfied and demanded to see who this superior child was, so Dr. Sterk consented, hoping in this way to defuse the mother's suspicions. Since Petra, like many of the scholars in this school, lived in a town many miles away, she stayed in a dormitory, which differentiated her from other children like Minna, who stayed at home, and this aroused Mrs. van Valck's suspicions: 'Who is she? Why does she come so far to school?'
Patiently Dr. Sterk explained that more than two-thirds of his best students came from considerable distances: 'It was the same in my grandfather's day. Most of those first scholars who earned this school its reputation, well, they came here by wagon in January and never returned home till June.'
The simplest way for Mrs. van Valck to see what was happening in the school was for her to peek in the door of the classroom, but when she reached that spot from which this would have been possible, Dr. Sterk pushed open the door, interrupted the class, and announced: 'This is Minna's mother.' The students rose and bowed, whereupon Dr. Sterk pointed to a girl in the first row, saying, 'And this is Minna's good friend, Petra Albertyn.'
Later, when he testified before the Race Classification Board, he would recall: 'When Mrs. van Valck first saw Petra Albertyn her jaw dropped and she froze. I noticed it at the time but could think of no reason for this strange behavior.'
That morning in the classroom she said nothing, just stared at Petra, then hastened from the school, going straight to the magistrate's court, where she swept past clerks, burst into his room, and dropped into a chair. 'Leopold,' she said, 'there's a Coloured girl in Minna's school.'
'Not likely,' her husband, the magistrate of Venloo, said.
'Leopold, I saw her. Not ten minutes ago. If that girl isn't a Hot-not, I'm not a Potgieter.' She used her maiden name, one of the most revered in Afrikaner history, as verification of her own pure lineage.
'Mother,' her husband said quietly, 'Dr. Sterk does not allow Coloureds into his school. The law forbids it. Parents have to show their white I.D. cards before any child is accepted. Sterk and all his teachers are most circumspect in such matters. Now you go'
'Leopold! This Coloured girl has become Minna's closest friend. Minna wanted to bring her to