The covenant - James A. Michener [621]
Later, when he was alone with her, he dared to reopen the difficult subject, but at the first tentative question she made her position clear: 'Philip, we're a small group of white people on the edge of a hostile black continent. God placed us here for a specific purpose and gave us a commission. I assure you that we will all perish before we prove false to that obligation.'
'Sannie, it seems to me you're overpowered by the attitude of Frikkie and Jopie. What do your parents think?'
'What Mother thinks isn't relevant, she's English. But if you want to ask Father . . .'
They went to Marius in his study, a room lined with books he had used at Oxford and others he had imported from London and New York through the years. 'In my father's day,' he said, 'this room contained one book, that old Bible. Now I can't even read the Dutch.'
'We've been having a sharp argument, Father. Philip accuses the cousins and me of being members of a Gotterdammerung Commando. Burning South Africa down to save it.'
'He's correct about your attitudes now. But as you grow older . . .'
'I'll grow more convinced. I have no patience . . .'
'Not now, but when you face the real alternatives.'
'What are they?'
Marius leaned back. For some time now he had been worried about Sannie's growing militarism; she behaved as if she thought a machine gun answered all questions. But he also wondered about his own attitudes; had his years at Oxford and his marriage to an Englishwoman contaminated him? Well he remembered his father's telling him what Dominee Brongersma had said about his marriage to a non-Afrikaner: 'Now he can never join the Broederbond . . . never play a major role in our society.' Brongersma had been right. No man who had chosen Oxford above the captaincy of the Springboks, and an English wife over a loyal Afrikaner, could be other than an outcast from the governing cadre; he had never been taken into the confidences of anyone seriously connected with government and had existed in a kind of limbo, neither Afrikaner nor English. He once said of himself, 'I'm like an Afrikaner Coloured,' and having admitted this, he realized that his daughter Sannie, who seemed bent on becoming pure Afrikaner, would hold anything he said in suspicion.
'I've been pondering this question constantly,' he said slowly. 'I've had to evaluate the things Father did in his long years on the Race Commission. And I've come to the conclusion that Afrikaners like Frikkie and Jopie will never change.'
'Hooray for them!' Sannie cried.
'And at her own request I must place my daughter in their camp.'
'Which is where I want to be.'
'So, Philip, I would be most happy, and so would my wife, if you married this girl and took her away with you.' He was speaking gravely, almost sorrowfully. 'I see no happy future for her here. Like the gifted children of so many families we know, she must make her home in Montreal or Melbourne.'
'Leave me out of it,' Sannie said abruptly. 'I can fend for myself. What future do you see for the country?'
'With the fall of Mozambique to black forcesNamibia, Zambia, Vwarda and Rhodesiacan we logically suppose that we can hold out indefinitely against . . .'
'I can,' Sannie said. 'So can Frikkie and Jopie and all loyal Afrikaners.'
'For your lifetimes, perhaps. Or for as long as your guns can find bullets. But in the long run, beyond our petty personal interests . . .'
He was hesitant about sharing his apocalyptic view with a foreigner who had no vested interest in the country, or even with his daughter, who might be alienated by it. But like all South Africans, he was eager to talk about the future, so he carried on: 'I think the blacks, like the Nxumalo brothers Jonathan in Mozambique, Daniel at the universitywill be willing in their moment of triumph