The covenant - James A. Michener [603]
'Times change,' Sannie said, but the woman would not allow the couple to share the same bedroom. Late at night, in the darkness, Philip tried to reach Sannie's room, only to find that buckets had been placed across the hallway. He made a terrific clatter, at which the man of the house came out with a flashlight to be sure he returned to his own quarters.
As soon as breakfast was over and they were driving north, he said, 'Sannie, we've got to get married. I can find a good job almost anywhere in the world, and I need you.' But again she held him off.
He supposed that this was because she loved her own country too much to leave it, and he had to admit that it was magnificent in a great, brutal way, unlike any he had previously seen, but an observant traveler had to spot three grievous problems which warranted attention: 'Sannie, as a geologist I see one hell of a lot of your country is desert, and according to old maps, it seems to be spreading eastward.'
'You're right,' she conceded.
And whether in the countryside or in the small towns, he became increasingly aware that whites and blacks occupied two radically different worlds. The separation was constant, universal and severely enforced. Philip was by no means a liberal; as a practical engineer, he knew that separation was sometimes advisable: 'I was never much for interracial dating. I observed that the men in my class at college who dated girls of other racesChicanos or blacks or Orientalsthey were all alike. Aloof, bad complexions, and wrote letters to the editor advocating the abolishment of fraternities.'
'Here it would be intolerable,' she agreed.
'But I've also noticed that countries which support a cheap supply of labor always impoverish themselves.'
'We're certainly not impoverished,' she protested.
'In many ways you are. You ought to pay your blacks high wages, then tax them like hell to provide public services. That's the path to civilization.'
'Philip! They'd not be worth a penny more than they're paid.'
'Wrong.' He became quite excited on this point. 'I've worked in three different black nations. With all kinds of black workers. And whenever we had in our cadre a black from South Africa, especially a Zulu or a Xhosa, he was invariably the best in the work force. If blacks with much less experience can rule Mozambique and Vwarda and Zambia, yours could certainly run this country.' It was a startling statement, which she did not wish to discuss.
The third sad discovery came always at night. They would have had a fine dinner with friends she knew from one past experience or other; the conversation would have been lively, ranging over politics and economics; the food would have been superb and the local wines even better; and then, as they were about to depart, Philip would see on the mantel over the fireplace three handsome photographs of young people Sannie's age.
'I didn't know you had children.'
'Yes!' And if the family was of English derivation, or Jewish, or enlightened Afrikaner, either the mother or father would say, 'That's Victor, he's in Australia. Helen is married to a fine young man in Canada. And that's Freddie, he's at the London School of Economics.'
They were gone. They were gone to the far continents. They would never return to South Africa, for the pressures were too great, the possibilities too forbidding.
When the young lovers returned from one such trip Mrs. van Doorn asked unobtrusively if she could speak with Philip, and when she had