The Covenant (112 page)

Since he appeared so much older, Frank assumed he must be some itinerant lecturer attached temporarily to a prestigious college like Balliol or Christ Church, a retiring man of poor family whose clothes seemed out of place, whose coat was always buttoned to the chin, and whose trousers were invariably of an odd fabric. He had dark reddish hair, a heavyset body and watery blue eyes, which he shifted away from any direct stare.

As the time approached when he must take his final examinations and leave Oriel, Frank felt keenly the unique beauty of Oxford, and on days when he should have been studying he wandered along the
Thames, listening to birds he had not known in South Africa, and wasted his time looking back at the profile of the city, with its domes and towers standing as proudly as they had four hundred years ago. He was oppressed by the ancient dignity of this place as compared to the raw youth of his homeland, and he began to generate that ambivalence which all South Africans experienced who came here for their studies.

In fact, he fell into quite a funk, the sharp direction which he had known up to now blunted by his oscillations between Oxford and De Kraal. For whole days he wandered the streets of Oxford, leaving his rooms at Oriel and aimlessly visiting the nearby colleges, not for intellectual enrichment in preparation for his exams, but rather to look at the great quadrangles as if he were leaving a place he cherished, never to see it again.

He would enter the gateway to some college in which he had never attended a lecture and stand there like a tripper down from London, staring at the beautiful façades of the buildings that outlined the square, imagining the great men who had lived in those rooms or studied in those halls. He was not good at political or literary history, and he certainly could not associate the notable graduates of Oxford with their colleges, but from the conversation of his father and from hints picked up during his residence at Oriel, he vaguely knew that great men of England had come to their studies in this city: Samuel Johnson, Cardinal Wolsey, Charles James Fox and the two Williams, Penn and Pitt, who had left Oxford to represent Old Sarum in Parliament.

When he returned to his own college and entered its gate and saw the low, squat outline of its rugged buildings, he could not believe that any famous men had come from its confines. Legend said that Sir Walter Raleigh had studied here, but he doubted it. Some of the professors made a fuss over an Oriel man named Gilbert White, but Frank had no idea who he was or what he had done. No, what came from this college was an endless procession of Saltwoods, men of solid worth who never stood at the head of any list but who had a penchant for doing the right thing. They had managed their business in Salisbury, and extended it into various profitable fields; they had served in Parliament when Old Sarum was a rotten borough and then stood for honest election when it was abolished; and like his grandfather’s brother Hilary, they had followed God into strange and tragic callings.

Three weeks before his examinations were to begin he fell into a
deep melancholy, obsessed by his thoughts of Hilary Saltwood, and he wondered what had motivated him. He had died with his throat cut, Frank knew, and images of the old man … He assumed that Hilary had been old, for he had lived long ago, and the old man’s ghost haunted him so persistently that he began to wonder if this might not be a call to holy orders. Was God speaking to him, soliciting his assistance in some distant missionary field?

He might have gone quite sour and missed his examinations altogether had not the curious scholar come bursting back to Oriel, feverishly preparing for his own final examinations, as strange as ever, those watery blue eyes still deceptive. They seemed somnolent, like a snake’s; actually, they burned with an incandescent fire on the few occasions when he looked directly at a newcomer.

This happened one afternoon at tea when a friend said in banter, “Saltwood, you’re beginning to look like a missionary.”

Frank blushed, but was spared the embarrassment of reply by the peripatetic scholar, who hunched his shoulders forward, stared right at him, and asked in a soft, high-pitched voice, “Why would you elect to be a missionary in strange quarters when there’s so much real work to be done in your homeland?”

“What do you mean?” Frank stammered.

“I mean South Africa. Don’t you live there?”

“I … I do. But what’s that got to do with it?”

Suddenly the stranger put down his cup, rose awkwardly and stomped from the room, volunteering not another word.

“Who is that fellow?” one of the Oriel men asked.

“Odd duck. Been studying here for his degree since 1873.”

“Eight years to do three years’ work. Is he stupid?”

“I don’t know. Those are the first words I’ve ever heard him speak.”

A younger student interrupted: “He’s not stupid at all, although he sometimes seems so.”

Another disagreed: “He tried to enter a real college, you know. Balliol, I think, but he couldn’t pass the exams. So Balliol sent him over here, and our provost said, ‘It’s always the same. All the colleges send me their failures.’ And Oriel accepted him.” The speaker laughed nervously. “Same thing happened with me.”

The first young man continued: “He lives in South Africa, I’m told, and that’s why he’s been able to attend only on a hit-or-miss basis.”

“I don’t understand,” Frank said.

“His health fails. His lungs. Our Oxford climate threatens him and he must hurry home to recuperate. He’s had a very broken career, you know.”

“I’d hardly call that a career,” one student said derisively. “I say, Saltwood, you’re from South Africa. You know the blighter?”

“First time he spoke to me,” Frank said.

“Well, he owns diamond mines in South Africa, and caring for them’s the real reason he flits back and forth.”

Three days later Frank again met the stranger, and was impelled to speak with him: “You said I should not become a missionary?”

“What I meant to say—why don’t you knuckle down and quit this foolishness? Why don’t you act like a man, pass your examinations?”

The stranger’s tone of voice was so peremptory that it sounded like a father’s, and Frank said rebelliously, “They tell me it’s taken you eight years to pass yours.”

The man showed no resentment. A bright smile animated his face and he grasped Frank by the arm. “You spend three years and come away with a degree. I spent eight years and return home with an empire.”

“What kind?”

“Every kind you can imagine. Political, business, mining, but mostly power.” The man started to leave, then turned back, taking Frank’s arm again and holding it firmly. “For God’s sake, man, buckle down, finish the job, pass your examinations. Then brood about what to do.”

He spoke with such force and moral imperative that Frank became curious and tried to find out what strange route this man had come to his final week at Oriel, but none of Frank’s friends knew, or even whether he was English-born or a native South African. Later, when everyone dressed in formal attire—black suit, bow tie, black shoes, cap and gown—and filed into the stately Examination Schools adjoining the Bodleian Library, there was the stranger, older than any of the other examinees and older also than many of the proctors. For an entire week he scribbled furiously, never looking up, and when the ordeal ended he disappeared.

Because of this man’s rude intervention, Frank had pulled himself together, accomplishing exactly what all his Saltwood predecessors had achieved at Oriel: a pass without distinction or honors of any kind. He had not exactly been educated at Oxford; he had been
ordained into the fellowship of English country gentlemen, not bright enough to lead but steady enough to be good followers.

With his degree in hand, Frank hired a horse and wagon and started the long journey to Stonehenge, then south to Old Sarum, and finally into the stately cathedral town where his ancestral home stood quietly beside the river. For generations the South African Saltwoods would bring their diplomas home in this way, for until they were registered before admiring family at Sentinels, with John Constable’s fine watercolor of the cathedral filling the hall with radiance, they were not truly graduated or ready to start their life’s work in the colony.

Frank was so enchanted with the Saltwood home, and he enjoyed so much the civilized life of taking tea under the great oaks, that all thought of becoming a missionary vanished, but he did tell his cousin, Sir Victor Saltwood, M.P., of the curious experience he had had of going into a blue funk, from which he was rescued only by this forceful stranger. “I’m indebted to him. He quite saved me, you know.”

He was therefore surprised and not a little pleased when he boarded his ship at Southampton to find that one of the first-class cabins was occupied by this belated graduate of Oxford, and with uncharacteristic boldness he presented himself before the man, saying, “I must thank you for having saved my life.”

The stranger knew immediately who he was and remembered the brief conversation. “I saw you buckling down to your examinations. I was pleased.”

“I say, if we’re to travel so long together, shouldn’t I know your name? Mine’s Saltwood.”

“I know. De Kraal. Sir Richard, the old fool Hilary. I’m C. J. Rhodes.”

“Thank you for what you did, Mr. Rhodes.”

The brusque man extended no invitation either to call him by something other than Mr. Rhodes or to walk with him, and the conversation ended. Since Frank’s quarters were at the farther end of the ship, during the first week he saw his fellow graduate no more, but during the second week some older men were gathered in a salon, engaged in heated conversation, and when they saw Frank passing, one of them called, “I say, Saltwood. You live at De Kraal, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“Stop with us a moment.” Place was made for him, and when he was seated, the man who had hailed him said, “Do you think of South Africa as rich or poor?”

For several moments Frank compared images of rural England as he had come to know it with those of the veld, and he had to confess: “I would say on the poor side.”

“He’s right!” an excited, high-pitched voice cried. “I tell you, South Africa’s an impoverished land. Only hard work and imagination will save it.”

Mr. Rhodes spoke with a book of maps on his knees, and as the men listened he outlined his basic thesis, slapping at the maps with a stubby hand as he made his points. “Look at the map, man. Look at what nature did.” And with a pudgy forefinger he showed how South Africa ended at a degree of latitude where the more fortunate continents were just beginning. “Nature robbed us, savagely.” And he demonstrated how Africa was the continent that hugged closest to the equator, as if afraid to venture down into colder waters. “We’re the only continent that lacks a substantial percentage of its land in the temperate zone where farming can flourish and industry thrive. Look how we compare with South America, which shares the same oceans with us. It reaches south to the fifty-sixth parallel. We’re cut short at the thirty-fifth. Measure it out on the scale. They extend fourteen hundred miles farther into the good climates than we do.”

As he became more excited, his voice rose until it was a complaining wail. Flicking the maps, he invited his companions to see for themselves how their continent had been defrauded. “It’s only when you compare us with Asia, Europe and North America that our impoverishment becomes clear. If those continents had been cut off the way we’ve been, look at the civilization they’d have lost!”

With the men following his finger closely, he demonstrated how Asia would have had to surrender Kyoto, Tokyo, Peking, Tehran and most of Turkey. “Every good thing done in those civilizations lost forever. But look at Europe!” Here he showed how the entire continent would have been lost had it been as truncated as South Africa. “And when we reach America, the same story.” Carefully he drew the line which would have run south of Chattanooga, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo and Albuquerque. “Those cities and all the places to the north that you’ve heard of—St. Louis, Seattle, Detroit, New York, Boston. None of them would have existed.”

He passed his atlas to his listeners, and as they studied the facts
he said solemnly, “If the rest of the world were as deprived as we are, civilization would consist of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Jerusalem and Delhi. Our cathedrals would not have been built, our plays would not have been written, and neither Beethoven nor Shakespeare would have existed.”

He spoke with great passion, then recovered his atlas and opened it to South Africa itself to make his final points. “We’ve been sorely cheated by nature …”

“Why are you afraid to say that it was God who cheated us?” a man asked.

“God?” Rhodes said, twisting the palm of his right hand up and down like a bargainer. “I give Him fifty-fifty. He may exist. He may not. I never fight with Him, and if you want to say God where I say nature, so be it.” He returned to the man and said, “We can’t move northwest because the Kalahari Desert impedes us. And we can’t move south because our land ends. What we can do, is make the most of what nature has given us.”

He became quite poetical as he outlined the South African promise: “We have people with wonderful vitality. Forests with some of the most fertile lands on earth. Flowers that have no equal. And herds of great animals that are inexhaustible. In a week’s journey you can see hippos and rhinos, lions and elephants. I’ve seen the land rolling with zebra and eland and gemsbok. It’s a treasury with boundaries unlimited.”

Then he plumped his fingers upon the area about Kimberley, where his mining interests lay. “Nature is rarely unfair. If she cheats us in extension, she compensates by allowing us to dig deep. She’s given us the finest concentration of diamonds in the world. And they’ve already found gold, too. But the real gold lies up here.”

As he said this, he pointed to the empty lands north of the Limpopo; at least the map showed them as empty, a vague Matabeleland governed by a son of the famous Mzilikazi. “And here, too,” he said gravely, indicating land north of the Zambezi. With a sudden movement of his right hand he covered the entire segment of Africa with his palm. “This map should all be red.” He meant that it should become part of the British Empire.