Before Adriaan could reach for his gun, assegais flashed and Seena was dead. Swinging the butt of his rifle, he tried to beat off the attackers, but they overwhelmed him, and when his arms were pinioned, Guzaka lunged at him with a spear.

  Now Lodevicus became indeed the Hammer, exacting a terrible revenge. Inflamed by the knowledge that it had been he who forced his parents' exodus, he confessed his guilt to no one, but led his commandos far across the Great Fish, rampaging deep into Xhosa lands, destroying forever the hopeful truce the governor had arranged. He burned and slaughtered, and for every cow the Xhosa had stolen, he took back a hundred. With flashing guns he rode against unmounted men armed only with spears, shouting, 'Kill! Kill!'

  When he returned to De Kraal he claimed, in his apologetic report to the governor, that he had been lured across the Great Fish by Xhosa infamy, but that the border was now secured for all time. Although he convinced the governor, he was not persuasive with Guzaka, who heard of this report, and now it was he who planned revenge.

  'Every kraal must be destroyed,' he thundered at night meetings, and if Vicus van Doorn had sought retribution after the death of his parents, Guzaka wanted-nothing less than extermination.

  It was, in most respects, as uneven a war as would ever be pursued in Africa, with each side having outrageous advantages. Blacks outnumbered whites by a ratio of one hundred to one and could extirpate any single white farm; but the whites possessed guns and horses, and when the latter galloped through a kraal, they spread such terror that one white gunman could methodically reload and shoot a dozen fleeing natives.

  It was a confusion, a clash of interests that could not even be defined. Guzaka was committed to moving his cattle slowly onward, as his people had been doing for eight hundred years, while Lodevicus felt that God Himself had ordered him to establish on the far bank of the Fish River a Christian community obedient to the rules of John Calvin. Land ownership was a constant problem, Guzaka's tribe having always held their land in generality and believing that they were entitled to every lush pasturage reaching to the Cape, while the trekboers cherished a tradition which their Dutch forebears had defended with their lives: that a man's farm merited the same respect as a man's soul.

  It was impossible to detect at any moment in this vast struggle who was winning. At the beginning of 1778 Guzaka gained a signal victory by razing the hut of Adriaan van Doorn, but in the spring of that year Vicus retaliated with his famous 'tobacco commando.' Recalling his tactics with the Bushmen, when he used a rhinoceros to wipe them out, he scattered tobacco on the ground a Xhosa war party would traverse; when they bent to grab at this prize, they perished in a hail of lead. In 1779 recognized warfare erupted, black regiments pitted against white field forces, and this was repeated in 1789 and 1799, bloody preludes to the more terrible wars that would continue through the next century.

  During the battles Lodevicus never equated the Xhosa with the Bushmen, those troublesome little animals that had to be exterminated. Since the Xhosa were large men like himself, they commanded respect. As he told Rebecca, after one arduous expedition, 'When we pacify them, they'll be good Kaffirs.'

  Guzaka had no intention of becoming a good Kaffir. Six separate times he threw his warriors against De Kraal, still convinced that if he could humble it, he could break the spirit of the trekboers, and six times the protecting hills enabled the embattled farmers to repel the invaders, and in the chase that always followed, to massacre them. But on the seventh try, in 1788, Guzaka and his warriors broke into the valley unexpectedly and came upon Rebecca van Doorn as she was going from the cattle byre to her house. With flashing assegais they cut her down, and she died before Lodevicus could reach her.

  In contrast to the rage he felt at the similar death of his mother and father, this time he fell silent, brooding upon the harsh fact that God was not giving him the easy victories Dominee Specx had spoken of in those exciting days of revelation at Swellendam. He was also plagued by memories of that morning when his wife and his mother resorted to the Bible to answer the question of what would happen when the Xhosa struck, and the mocking words reverberated: 'An hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.' One of that ten thousand, the damned Guzaka, had killed his father, his mother and his- wife. The New Jerusalem had not been established on the far side of the Great Fish; the Canaanites had not been expelled from the house of the Lord; indeed, they seemed to be chopping that house to bits.

  And then, in the depth of his despair, when it seemed that his mission and that of the trekboers had been completely frustrated, God visited him again, in the person of a girl of nineteen who came riding alone into De

  Kraal on the back of a white horse. She was Wilhelmina Heimstra, from one of the irreverent families down by the sea, and her mission was forthright: 'I cannot live in idolatry. I cannot exist without the presence of God.'

  'You can't stay here,' Lodevicus said. 'I have no wife.'

  'That's why I came,' the girl said. 'When the messenger told us that the Xhosa had killed Rebecca, whom I knew . . .'

  Lodevicus, then forty-nine, the Hammer of the frontier, stood silent. In all the territory he commanded there was no predikant to give direction, not even a sick-comforter other than himself, and he did not know what to do. But then he recalled the patristic figures of the Old Testament and how often they had been faced by such problems on their lonely frontiers: older men without wives, heads of families with no one to assist them, and his mind fell especially on Abraham, that first great trekboer:

  And Sarah was an hundred and seven and twenty years old . . . and Sarah died ... and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her . . . Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah.

  It became apparent that God had sent this girl to comfort him in his old age, but the problem of how a Christian marriage could be performed without a cleric was perplexing. 'You cannot stay here, when I have been so demanding of others that they follow in righteous paths.'

  'You demanded, Lodevicus, that's true, but no one obeyed. Everyone to the south lives as they always lived. I'm the one who listened and obeyed.'

  This was so similar to his own experience, when Predikant Specx, now dead three years, had preached to scores who did not listen, and to one who did, that Lodevicus had to be impressed, and when he looked at the flaxen-haired girl, so smiling and so different from rigorous Rebecca, he was tempted.

  It was really quite simple. Wilhelmina pointed out that since she could not very well return to the south, having run away, there was no alternative but for her to stay at De Kraal, and this she did, moving into the room that Adriaan and Seena had once occupied; and on the third night, as she slept, her door opened and Lodevicus said, 'Are you willing to be married of God? Without a dominee to enter it in the books?' and she replied, 'Yes,' and nine months and eight days later the boy Tjaart was born.

  In 1795 news reached De Kraal which stunned the Van Doorns, news so revolutionary that they had no base for comprehending it. A courier from Cape Town had dashed across the flats to Trianon, then over the mountains to Swellendam, then along the chain of farms to De Kraal, and wherever he stopped to give his report, men gasped: 'But how could this have happened?'

  'All I know, it's happened. Every Compagnie holding in South Africa has been surrendered to the English. We're no longer attached to Holland. We're citizens of England and must be obedient to her.'

  It was incomprehensible. These frontier farmers had only the vaguest notions of a revolution in France or of the new radical republic that now controlled Holland. They knew that France and England were at war, but they did not know that the new government sided with France while the old Royalists supported England. They were bewildered when they heard that their Prince of Orange, William V, had fled to London, and from that refuge had ceded the Cape to his English hosts.

  And what they heard next was even more confusing: 'The English warships stood in the bay. But Colonel Gordon behaved valiantly.'

  'Was he English?'

  'No, Scot.'

  'What was he doing in the fort, fighting the English?'

  'He was a Dutchman, fighting for us.'

  'But you just said he was a Scot.'

  'His grandfather was, but he came to live in Holland. Our Gordon is a born Dutchman . . . joined something called the Scots Brigade.'

  'So the Scots made him a colonel, in Scotland?'

  'No, the Scots Brigade is Dutch. We made him a colonel, and he was in command at the Castle.'

  'Did he drive away the English?'

  'No, he surrendered like a craven. Never fired one of our guns and invited the English to take everything.'

  'But you said he was brave.'

  'He was. Brave as a tiger defending her young. Because after the disgrace of surrender, he blew his brains out, as a brave man should.'

  Lodevicus and Wilhelmina asked the courier to go over the details again, and at the conclusion the courier returned to the astonishing truth: 'This colony is now English. You are all to be confirmed in the ownership of your farms. And English soldiers will be here soon to establish peace on the border.'

  When the young messenger rode on, to spread his confusion among the other trekboers, Lodevicus assembled his family, and with little Tjaart upon his knee, tried to pick out the truths that would govern their new life: 'What do we know about the English? Nothing.'

  'We know a great deal,' his wife contradicted, bowing quickly to ask forgiveness for her impertinence. 'We know they don't follow the teachings of John Calvin. They're little better than Catholics.'

  That was bad enough, but soon a man rode in from Swellendam announcing himself as a patriot, and he lectured the Van Doorns about America, where England had once had colonies and where the citizens had risen in revolt against English rule. 'What I learned when I was in New York,' he said, 'is that when English magistrates come ashore, English troops are always ready to follow. Mark my words, you'll see Redcoats on your frontier before the year is out. They'll not have Lodevicus van Doorn telling them how to handle Kaffirs.'

  From a corner of the room, where he had been sitting with Tjaart, Lodevicus spoke of the real problems facing the Dutch in Africa: 'New rulers who have not our traditions will attempt to alter our church, recast it in their mold, destroy our ancient convictions. To preserve our integrity, we shall have to fight ten times as hard as we fight against the Xhosa. Because the English will be after our souls.

  'Since they do not speak our language, they'll force us to speak theirs. They'll issue their laws in English, import books printed in English, demand that we pray from their English Bible.' Pointing like an Old Testament prophet at the various children in the room, he said with an ominous voice, 'You will be told that you must not speak Dutch. That you must conduct your affairs in English.'

  In later years Tjaart would say, 'First thing I remember in life, sitting in a dark room while my father thundered, "If my conqueror makes me speak his language, he makes me his slave. Resist him! Resist him!" '

  And when the Redcoats came, followed by the magistrates, the Van Doorns did resist, and looked very foolish for having done so, because within a few years everything was thrown again into wild confusion, for the same messenger came galloping eastward over the same route with news more startling than the first: 'We're all Dutch again! England and Holland are allies, fighting a man called Napoleon Bonaparte. You can ignore English laws.'

  So the Redcoats were withdrawn; Van Doorn's fears proved groundless; and life resumed its orderly way, which on the frontier meant without any order at all. Guzaka continued his raids across the Great Fish, and Vicus hammered him for his insolence. Killing became so commonplace that often it was not even reported to Swellendam.

  Restoration of Dutch rule had one curious side effect: a minor but condescending official came out from Holland to inspect the frontier, and upon finishing his tour he commented on the sad deterioration of speech in the colony: 'At times I would scarcely know I was listening to Dutch, the way your people mishandle the language.' From his pocket he produced a slip of paper on which he had noted certain unfamiliar words. 'You borrow words with a most careless abandon, adopting the worst of the native languages and forgetting your good Dutch words.' And he read off neologisms like kraal, bobotie, assegai and lobola. 'You should purify yourself of such abominations,' he said, proceeding to criticize also the local word orders and mispronunciations. When he was finished, Lodevicus said with some asperity, 'You make us sound like barbarians,' and the visitor said, 'That's what you'll become if you lose your Dutch,' and that was the beginning of the Van Doorn family's distrust of the homeland Dutch. They were a snobbish, metropolitan, unpleasant lot, with no appreciation of what frontier life involved.

  When the stranger left, Lodevicus called his group together and said, 'We'll speak Dutch the way we want it to sound.' And the result was that they drove an even deeper wedge between their inherited Dutch language and the new tongue they were building.

  Despite these years of uncertainty and war, Lodevicus prospered as a stock farmer, extending his acres far beyond mountain-girt De Kraal. When he required more help and found it impossible to lure Xhosa warriors to work his farm, he grumbled about their arrogance, then drove his wagon to Swellendam, where he purchased slaves: two Madagascans, three Angolans. Because of his visible wealth, he was appointed veldkornet for his district, and he presented a dominating appearance; tall, heavy, white-haired, with whiskers down the sides of his face, he wore substantial clothes, holding up his heavy trousers with both belt and suspenders. When he walked among strangers he strode ahead, with Wilhelmina a respectful four paces behind. In public she always referred to him as the Mijnheer, and he was gratified to see how easily she assumed Rebecca's role as a driving religious force, but of a different quality. She was amiable, forgiving of minor defections and most eager to be of help to everyone who came past the farm. She sang as she worked and was overjoyed to learn that a real church had been built at Graaff-Reinet, ninety-odd miles to the northwest: 'We must report to the predikant for our marriage.'

  'I can't leave the farm.'

  Wilhelmina laughed. 'You call yourself a trekboer?'

  'No more. The Van Doorns are through wandering. This is our home.'

  'But Tjaart's got to be baptized,' she said with such simplicity that he could not refuse her. So the older Van Doorn children were left in charge while their stepmother led Lodevicus and young Tjaart to their religious duties.

  It was a glorious ride, with Tjaart old enough to recall in later years the vast empty spaces, the lovely hills with their tops flattened. He would never forget the moment when his parents halted their horses some miles south of the new village to observe that extraordinary peak which guarded the site: from flat land it rose very high in gentle sweeps until it neared an apex, when suddenly it became a round turret, many feet high, with sheer walls of solid gray granite. And at the top, forming a beautiful green pyramid, rose wooded slopes coming to a delicate point.

  'God must have placed it there to guide us to things important,' Lodevicus said, impressing upon his son the stunning significance of the place, and Tjaart remembered this peak long after he had forgotten his parents' marriage and his own baptism.

  The boy now had three memories upon which to build his life: that the Dutch way of life must be defended against the English enemy; that Graaff-Reinet was a center of excitement; and that far to the north, as Grandfather Adriaan had told the other children before he died, lay an open valley of compelling beauty which he called Vrijmeer.

  And then, in 1806, when the Van Doorns were congratulating themselves upon having resisted the English threat and preserving the countryside for Calvinism, the final shocking news arrived. Because the ordinary citizens of Holland had joined forces with Napoleon, England felt it must reoccupy the Cape to keep it from falling into French hands, which would cut the life line to India. It was now an English possession, and neither the local Dutch government nor the mother country Holland would exercise further control. All of Lodevicus' apprehensions about suppression at English hands revived.

  The Cape, having been a stopping place between Holland and Java during the years 1647 to 1806, now became one between England and India, and the indifference with which Holland had always treated this potentially grand possession would now be matched by English imperiousness.

  In these days of change it was inevitable that assessments be made of Holland's long rule, and it was remarked by certain observers—Dutchmen who had known their country's holdings in other parts of the world, Englishmen who had fought in the American war, and Frenchmen who knew many parts of the world—that her rule had been almost without parallel in world history. The home country had allowed neither its royalty, its parliament nor its citizens any voice in the rule of this distant possession; control had rested in the hands of a clique of businessmen who made all decisions with an eye to profit. True, these profits had sometimes been widely distributed, with the government grabbing a healthy share, but in essence the colony had been a narrow business venture.

  This had imposed limitations. The surging colonization that marked the French, Spanish and English settlement of North America, with excited citizens pushing exuberantly into the interior, was discouraged in South Africa. Always the Lords XVII preached caution, a holding back lest rambunctious elements like the Van Doorns stray so far afield that they could not easily be disciplined. If one major charge could be leveled against the Compagnie, it was that it restricted normal growth. The borders which should have extended to logical boundaries, perhaps the Zambezi, as Dr. Linnart suggested, never did, which meant that the generic entity never came into being. Absentee businessmen, seeking only profit, do not generate a sense of manifest destiny; indeed, they fear it lest it create movements that get out of hand, and without this spiritual urge, no nation can achieve the limits to which geography, history, philosophy and hope entitle it. Because of Compagnie policy, rigorously enforced through sixteen decades, South Africa remained a truncated state, with only a few single-minded pioneers like the Van Doorns eager to dare the unknown.

 

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