For these simple English clergymen there was no predestination whereby all men were sorted out as either saved or d.a.m.ned; such belief would make missionary work a futility. The Society taught that every human soul was eligible for salvation, but this could be attained only if some missionary could instruct it. The task was to deliver Christ"s precious message to savages who were in darkness, and few young Englishmen of this period who absorbed that teaching ever doubted that they personally could bring this salvation.
There was much prayer, and many learned discussions as to how salvation might be conveyed, and crude geography lessons outlining the problems to be encountered in Africa or the South Seas, where the young men were to go. It was studious and pious and soporific. But when Reverend Simon Keer, after having served four years on the frontier, burst into headquarters, every aspect of Hilary Saltwood"s life was altered.
Keer was a Lancashire activist, son of a baker and lacking a university education. He was a short, round man, not over five feet two, with an unruly mop of red hair and a pair of wire spectacles that he kept shoving back onto the bridge of his nose. His station had been South Africa, a land that Hilary had scarcely heard of; vaguely he knew that through some accident or other a vast area had fallen under English rule. The students were spellbound when Keer, bounding up and down like the bobbin on an active line, launched his impa.s.sioned speeches: "There is a land down there in our care which cries for the word of G.o.d, a land of black souls thirsting for redemption. Lions and hyenas ravage these people by night, slavery and corruption by day.
We need schools, and hospitals, and printing presses, and trusted men to teach farming. We need roads and proper houses for these children of G.o.d, and dedicated men to protect them from cruel abuse."
After he had listed another dozen things the natives required, one young man whose father was a butcher asked, "Don"t we need churches, too?" and Reverend Keer replied, without halting the flow of his impa.s.sioned oratory, "Of course we need churches." But in the days that followed he never again mentioned any need for them. Instead, he captivated his eager listeners by his explicit accounts of what it was like to be a missionary: "I landed at Cape Town with my Bible and my dreams, but before I preached my first sermon I traveled three hundred miles over almost impa.s.sable mountains, across arid lands and up and down ravines where there was no road. I lived for weeks with white men who spoke not a word of English and black men who knew nothing of Jesus Christ. I slept on the barren veld with only my coat to cover me and ate food that I had never seen before. The first task I was called to perform was aiding the birth of a baby girl, whom I baptized. The first service I conducted was under a thorn tree. When I finally reached my post I was alone, with no house, no food, no books and no congregation. All I had was another thorn tree under whose spreading branches I conducted my second service. Young men, in South Africa a thousand thorn trees wait to serve as your cathedrals."
He had an overpowering effect upon the young dreamers of the LMS, for with his exhortations to face the practical problems of the world he combined a devout conviction that what he had done, and what they must do, was missionary work over which G.o.d exercised a personal supervision. Again and again he cited those stirring commands issued by St. Paul when he struggled with his frontiers, and as he lectured, the reality of the New Testament materialized before the eyes of his listeners.
It was not till the third week of his fiery declamation that he began to confide the real problem that had brought him back to London. In his preliminary lectures he had disposed of the physical world of the missionary and in subsequent ones he had treated knowingly the theological basis of conversion. Now he sought to instruct his future replacements in the realities: "I care not whether you have planned to work under the palm of the South Seas or the frozen wastelands of Canada. I care not what commitments you have made to your parents or your ministers here. We need you in Africa, and I implore you to dedicate yourselves to the salvation of this continent. Especially do we need you in our new colony, for nowhere else on earth are the challenges to Christ"s teaching more clearly dictated. A dozen men like you, dedicating your lives to the task, can set patterns for a new nation."
Whenever he spoke on this theme, and he returned to it constantly, he became like a man possessed of special insights: his voice soared; he seemed to become taller; his eyes flashed. He was engaged in a kind of spiritual Armageddon and conveyed his thundering sincerity to any listener. In the fourth week, after a series of such flights, he told the young missionaries what the great problem was: "Slavery! The Dutch who have occupied the Cape for a hundred and fifty years are among the finest people on earth. They"re all good Protestants, much like the Presbyterians of Scotland. They t.i.the; they listen to their predikants; they support their churches; but they have fallen into the great evil of slavery. For generations they have been owners of imported slaves, and now the wonderful brown and black people with whom they share the land they also hold in cruel bondage, and it is our solemn, G.o.d-given mission to rescue all these souls from that bondage. If you join me in this task, and I pray that you will, you must expect that men will revile you, and misrepresent your motives, and even threaten you with bodily harm. But you will persist. And G.o.d will strengthen you, and in the end we shall build an English nation of which G.o.d will be proud."
In the fifth week, realizing that he had been painting too somber a picture of the missionary"s life in South Africa, he stopped ranting, and began to amuse his listeners with affectionate stories of his life there, using an exaggerated North Country dialect: "Half an hour before dawn comes a rrrroar! It"s a lie-yon, but he"s retreating from the sunrise. You learn to know that by the manner in which his voice rrrrecedes. Comes a knock on your tent, and it"s the little girl informing you that her baby sister is about to be born and Mother says can you hurry. There are days on the veld with hunters and nights under the starrrrs with more lie-yons and protea flowers, bigger than your mother"s washbasin."
What the young men never forgot, however, were the two brief sermons Keer delivered in the Kaffir languagein them they heard for the first time the click sounds which the Xhosa had borrowed centuries before from the Hottentots. He explained to them that he had mastered the language in order to compile a dictionary, from which a translation of the Gospels for the Xhosa would soon be made.
His first sermon dealt with the Good Samaritan, and since he played all the roles, dancing about the stage, his red hair flying, and since he altered his voice and manner for each of the partic.i.p.ants in the parable, the mission-ers could easily follow the story without understanding the words. But his second sermon dealt with Christ"s love for all people, and now there were no clues to its meaning except the overwhelming conviction that filled the room when he stood on his toes, eyes closed, deep voice throbbing with the repeated words Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.
As he reached the climax of his preachment a hush fell over the room, and when the last click sounds had echoed, Hilary Saltwood knew that his destiny lay in South Africa. Waiting till the other students had left the room, he stepped forward to the podium, but before he could speak, Reverend Keer jumped down and held out his hands: "Laddie, you"ve decided to join the Lord"s work in Africa?" "I have."
"G.o.d be praised."
That night, after he had written explanatory letters to his parents, he felt an enormous sense of having been set free. He had been impelled toward this decision both spiritually and intellectually, and would never question it. It had been G.o.d"s miracle that sent Simon Keer at this particular time, and Hilary thanked Him for that with a full heart.
But before he fell asleep a most curious reflection flashed across his mind: In all the time I"ve been here, I"ve rarely heard the Old Testament mentioned. We"re men of the New Testament, the personal followers of Jesus and St. Paul . . .
When Hilary completed his studies, Parliament was not in session, so before sailing for South Africa he returned to Sentinels on Salisbury Plain, and there he sat under the oak trees with his parents and his two brothers. Peter was now in full charge of family affairs and spent half his time on them, the other half devoted to the interests of the Proprietor. Richard had his commission in the Wiltshire regiment and was on leave prior to embarking for India; he joked that when he was a general he would stop off at Cape Town to meet with his brother, the bishop. Their father did not appreciate such remarks, for he still insisted that what Hilary ought to do was serve routine time as a missionary, then hurry back to enter compet.i.tion for the deanship of the cathedral: "When a young fellow has backing as strong as the Proprietor"s, and as vigorous . . ."
One day the entire family went for a picnic at Old Sarum, where Josiah showed them the ancient elm under whose n.o.ble branches he had been elected to Parliament, and the older Saltwoods remained there while the three brothers climbed the low hill to view the ruins. It was both remarkable and moving that they could pick out the lines of those very old buildings which represented a heroic age of England, but after the first moments they paid scant attention to the ruins, for this was a cloudy day, and while they were standing among the fallen rocks a portion of the sky cleared, allowing great shafts of light to fall upon Salisbury to the south, and there the cathedral stood, bathed in radiance, a most n.o.ble monument, perhaps the finest in all England, situated on its almost empty meadow with no smaller buildings encroaching, and beyond it, outlined in the same accidental light, the three clumps of trees at Sentinels.
"Oh, look!" Peter cried. "It"s a signal!"
"For what?" Richard asked.
"For us. For us Saltwoods." Grasping the hands of his brothers, he cried in excited syllables, "Wherever you go, you"re to come back here. This is always to be your home."
Richard said, somewhat gruffly, "It looks a far distance from India."
Peter ignored his brother"s dampening comment and asked, in a flush of emotion, "Hilary, will you say a prayer for us?"
It seemed a most natural thing to do when three brothers, who had shared an old house beside a river of heavenly beauty and in the shadow of a great cathedral, were parting: "Dearest G.o.d, Thy home is everywhere. Ours is here. Let us cherish both."
"d.a.m.ned fine prayer, Hilary," Richard said, and the outing ended, but four days later their father proposed a more serious expedition, one that would require horses and considerable preparation.
"You"ll be gone for some time," he said to Hilary and Richard. "I"ve spoken to the Proprietor and he wants to come along. Says it may be his final visit."
"To where?" Peter asked.
Their father had a welcome surprise. Through the centuries when Salt-woods sent their sons to Oxford, the boys invariably went by carriage north through Wiltshire and then easterly through Berks, a route that carried them past one of the n.o.ble monuments of the world, and generations of the family had come to look upon this place as symbolic of their fortunes, so that occasionally, when no lad had gone north to university for some decades, the Saltwoods would convene and go that way without excuse, simply to renew their acquaintance with Stonehenge.
The monument lay only eight miles north of Salisbury, and a visit could be completed within a day, but the Saltwoods liked to pitch a tent there overnight so as to catch the dawn rising over the ancient stones. This expedition consisted of the Proprietor, still traveling by carriage, with the four Saltwood men on horseback and five servants following with tents, the food and the flagons of wine. The road was a rough one, not much traveled, since most people leaving Salisbury headed either east to London or west to Plymouth. Only the occasional scholar on his way to Oxford went north to Stonehenge, or someone headed to the port at Bristol or the towns in Wales.
Toward the close of day Josiah said, "I rather think that at the rise of the next hill we shall see it," and he told the boys to rein in their horses and allow the Proprietor to be in the lead when Stonehenge was first sighted.
"There they are!" the old man cried, and to the east on a small mound which caught the first rays of the rising sun and the last light of day stood the hallowed stones, some fallen, some leaning, some erect in the location they had occupied for more than four thousand years. It was an awesome place, and no Englishman conversant with his nation"s history could fail to be humbled upon approaching it.
"D"you think it was the Druids?" the Proprietor asked as the group surveyed the somber monument.
"It was here centuries before anyone heard of Druids," Josiah suggested.
"My own thoughts," the Proprietor said. "St.u.r.dy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, whoever they were."
Hilary had always been enchanted by Stonehenge. He had seen it first as a boy of ten on a family excursion much like this. He had seen it again when he accompanied Peter to Oriel, and of course on his own travels to Oxford. It was timeless, old beyond counting when Jesus was born, and it reminded men of the long sweep of history and the periods of darkness. The stones turned red as the sun dipped to its horizon, shimmering in the fading light.
"We"ll pitch the tents over there," the Proprietor suggested, and that night they slept within the shadowed circle.
Long before dawn the Proprietor was up, cursing the night and abusing his servants for not having lighted candles. "I want to see the sun striking it," he grumbled, and as the Saltwoods joined him he said, Tm sure they used to conduct human sacrifice here. At the solstices, anyway. Probably killed off two old men like me and three young virgins. Let"s go to the sacrifice."
And they stood among the ancient stones, hauled here from sources far removed, as the sun broke upon them.
"D"you think you could offer us a prayer, Hilary?" the old man asked.
"Let us bow our heads," the new minister said, and as day came in earnest he prayed: "G.o.d, Who marks our pa.s.sage back to Salisbury and to India and to South Africa, and also to America where our brother hides, watch over us. Watch over us."
The Proprietor said that while these were fine words, he would have appreciated some mention of the fact that this might be his last journey to the stones, whereupon Hilary uttered another short prayer, instructing G.o.d on this additional matter, and the old man was appeased.
They spent that day inspecting the fallen rocks and making cautious guesses as to how old they might be, but as dusk approached, Hilary experienced a surge of religious emotion and moved apart from the others. Standing among the untoppled pillars, a gaunt, angular, stoop-shouldered figure who might well have been an ancient priest of this temple, he whispered, "O G.o.d, I swear to Thee that I shall be as faithful to Thy religion as the men who erected these stones were to theirs."
He landed at Table Bay one morning in the spring of 1810, expecting to be greeted by representatives of the LMS who would probably spend some weeks indoctrinating him in his duties and perhaps even accompanying him to his place of a.s.signment. Instead, as soon as he stepped ash.o.r.e he was grabbed by a st.u.r.dy Dutch farmer with very broad shoulders and full beard who asked in heavily accented English, "Is it true, you"re a disciple of Simon Keer?"
Modestly Saltwood conceded that he was, whereupon the farmer pushed him away, muttering, "You ought to be ashamed, spreading lies."
He was not allowed even one night"s rest in Cape Town, for at noon he found himself in a caravan of sorts heading eastward to a river on the far side of the mountains, where he had been directed to launch a mission. During the arduous journey he learned much about South Africa but even more about Reverend Keer, for wherever he stopped, people asked about the red-headed Lancashire man. The few Englishmen spoke of him with obvious regard, the many Dutchmen with unmasked contempt, and one night he asked an English missionary"s wife to explain this contradiction.
"Simple," she said. "Simon Keer always stood up for the Hottentots and the Xhosa."
"Isn"t that our duty? To bring them to Jesus Christ?"
"Reverend Keer treated the Hottentots more like workmen in England.
Always fighting for their rights. Decent pay. Decent homes for them to live in. Things like that."
"Did the Dutch object?"
She put down her cooking pans and turned to face Hilary. "You must keep one thing in mind, if you"re to be an effective missionary. We English have been here four years. The Dutch have been here a hundred and fifty-eight. They know what they"re doing and they do it well."
"Keer says that what they do so well is slavery."
She placed her two hands on Hilary"s and pleaded, "Don"t use that word. Reverend Keer was given to exaggeration. He lacked education, you know."
"He"s translating the Gospels."
"Oh, he was excellent at identifying himself with the Xhosa. He could stay up all night transcribing their words." "I thought it was my duty to do the same."
"To bring them Christ, yes. To become their advocate against the Dutch, no."
"You speak harshly."
"The Xhosa killed my son. They"d have killed me, too, except that a Dutch commando arrived in time."
"And you stay?"
"It was an incident. We were at war and our troops had killed their people. Simple retaliation."
"Aren"t you afraid?"
"I am, and you will be, too. And pray G.o.d that you don"t get caught up in it."
As he penetrated farther into the country he became increasingly aware of how different the long-established Dutch were from the lately arrived English, and in his first letter home he shared his observations with his mother: The Dutch speak of themselves in three distinct ways. Those in the environs of the Cape call themselves Dutch, although many of them have never seen Holland or ever will. In truth, they speak harshly of the old country, holding in contempt those real Dutchmen who came out from Holland to lord it over the locals with sneers and a.s.sumptions of superior education. Some of these long-time Dutch have taken themselves a new name, for they are more of Africa than of Europe. "We are Afrikaners, Afrikaners," they say, but where I am traveling now these Afrikaners are named Boers Boers (farmers). But farther east toward the lonely perimeter of the country, where the roughest of the Dutch dwell, they call themselves (farmers). But farther east toward the lonely perimeter of the country, where the roughest of the Dutch dwell, they call themselves trekboers trekboers (migrating graziers), which is appropriate, for they are constantly moving on with their herds, until I am reminded of Abraham and Isaac. My mission is to be established in the lands of those trekboers who have stopped their wanderings. (migrating graziers), which is appropriate, for they are constantly moving on with their herds, until I am reminded of Abraham and Isaac. My mission is to be established in the lands of those trekboers who have stopped their wanderings.
At his next halt, where only Boers lived, Hilary received his harshest view of Reverend Keer: "Arrogant, stupid man. Kept saying he loved the Xhosa and the Hottentots, but every action he took damaged them."
"In what way?"
"Made them dissatisfied with their lot." "What is their lot?"
"At school in England, did they teach you the Book of Joshua?" "I"ve read it."
"But have you taken it to heart? G.o.d"s story of how the Israelites came into a strange land? And how they were to conduct themselves there?" It was obvious to the Boer listeners that the new missionary knew little of Joshua, so the oldest farmer took down his huge Bible and slowly leafed the pages until he came to the familiar instructions, which he translated roughly for the newcomer: "You shall not marry with the daughters of Canaan . . . You shall keep yourself apart. . . You shall destroy their cities . . . You shall hang their kings from trees . . . You shall block up their graves with stones, even to this day . . . You shall take the land, and occupy it and make it fruitful . . . One man of you shall chase one thousand of them . . . You shall keep yourselves apart. . . And they shall be your hewers of wood and your drawers of water... And all this you shall do in the name of the Lord, for He has commanded it."
Closing the big book reverently and placing his hands upon it, he stared directly into Hilary"s eyes and said, "That is the word of the Lord. It is His Bible which instructs us."
"There is another part of the Bible," Hilary said quietly, leaning his thin shoulders forward to engage the debate.
"Yes, your Reverend Keer preached quite a different message, but he was an idiot. Young friend, believe me, it is the ancient word of G.o.d Himself that we follow, and you will break your teeth in this country if you contradict it."
Across the southern plains of Africa, wherever he stopped, Hilary found himself engaged in argument over the merits of Simon Keer, and the Boers were so forceful in their rejection of the little redhead that in his quiet moments Hilary began to read Numbers and Joshua, finding in them not only the pa.s.sages which his first Boer mentors had cited, but scores of others which applied directly to the position of the Dutch who had come into this land like the Israelites of old, who had entered their land of Canaan. The parallels were so overwhelming that he began to see local history through Dutch eyes, and this was a salvation when he opened his own mission.
The spot selected for him lay on the left bank of the Sundays River, four hundred miles from Cape Town. When he reached it, not a building stood, not a roadway existed. The river, suffering from drought, carried little water, and there were no trees. But the spot itself was congenial, perched on a broad bend of the river and graced with level fields acceptable to plowing. In the distance was a forest with an abundance of usable wood; and at hand, enough stones to build a city. Hilary, visualizing what this bleak spot might become, named it from a pa.s.sage in the twentieth chapter of Joshua, where G.o.d instructs His people to erect cities of refuge to which any accused could flee and be a.s.sured of temporary safety: And on the other side Jordan . . . eastward they a.s.signed . . . Golan ... that whosoever killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not die . . . until he stood before the congregation.
This will be Golan, my city of refuge, Hilary thought, and when the last members of his caravan disappeared, leaving him majestically alone in the heart of a strange land, he prayed that he might be allowed to build well.
The first night, as he lay on the ground close to his belongings, he listened to strange sounds, and the darkness of Africa a.s.sailed him with a wild discordance, a sense of awe and antic.i.p.ation rather than fear. When he awakened at dawn, he found a group of brown people watching him, squatting on their haunches a hundred feet away. For months there had been rumors that a missionary was coming.
Hilary beamed at the sight. Surely the Lord Himself had brought this little gathering into the arms of His servant Saltwood. Dusting himself off, he rose to greet them, overjoyed when one man spoke to him in broken English.
"We stay with you. We your people now." His name was Pieter, son of that Dikkop who had traveled with Mai Adriaan. It was ten years since he had lived with the Van Doorns; he had run away after a beating for eating a melon from the family garden. He had drifted from farm to farm, working just enough to avoid being cla.s.sified as "Vagrant Hottentot," which would allow his being a.s.signed arbitrarily to any farmer who wanted him.
In truth, Pieter was a man who saw virtue in idleness; he could happily pa.s.s an entire day with his back against a tree, eyes firmly shut.
But before sunset that first day the Hottentots had shown Hilary how to dig a foundation to keep out rain, and by the second nightfall they had cut enough saplings to frame out a dwelling. Hilary saw in his imagination how Golan should look: rows of huts facing each other, a meeting hall and a church to close off one end of the rectangle.
He was pleased with the rapid growth of his little communitysix Hottentots to forty within three weeksand within a short time Hilary and his followers had the mud-and-clay walls of a mission church in place. Before the thatching of the roof was complete he preached a message of dedication inside the little structure. Having mastered several words of the Dutch-like language these people spoke, and some Hottentot with its click sounds, he delighted his congregation by offering the benediction in their language. In the days that followed he heard members of the mission saying gravely to one another as they worked, "Peace be unto you."
Peace was a commodity almost unknown. Young Xhosa warriors persisted in raiding cattle from white men"s farms, and not long after Hilary"s first sermon English troops, fortified by a Boer commando, had launched a ma.s.sive attack against the black men, driving twenty thousand of them back across the Great Fish River and liberating, as they phrased it, vast herds of cattle. The gallant leader of this rout would be honored by having a newborn town named after him: Grahamstown.
Hilary was untouched by these events; but it grieved him that after six months he had not met one Xhosa, and he began to fear that he had made a mistake in locating Golan here. During his studies at Gosport he had imagined himself bringing Christianity to black savages, wrestling with their pagan beliefs and finally welcoming them to Jesus. Instead he was surrounded by brown Hottentots, more than ninety in the huts that faced the rectangle, while all the Xhosa lurked far across the river, a gang of cattle thieves.
In his reports to the LMS he called his flock "my Hottentots," knowing that few were of the pure strain; they ranged from light, yellow-skinned half-Malays to very dark half-Angolans. They were not inclined to hard work, and a distressing number loitered about the mission doing nothing. But Hilary always remembered the name he had given this place, Golan the refuge, and he believed that these "mild and peaceable folk," as he wrote of them, merited all the sanctuary they could find. Many had come to him with terrible tales of beatings, chains, and years of labor without pay from Boers who made their lives a misery. Simon Keer"s impa.s.sioned indictment of the colonists echoed in his ears, and he saw it his duty to succor the weak.
Even his hopes for the Xhosa soared when a black man finally came to Golan, an elderly fellow from a kraal to the east. He proclaimed himself to be a Christian, stating in halting English that he had been baptized by a missionary with red hair called "Master Keer," and he indicated that his village contained several other blacks who had been converted by "our dear little man who could speak Xhosa."
His Christian name was Saul, and Hilary promptly sent him back to Xhosa lands to spread joyful news about Golan, and because of Saul, at the end of six months the mission was home to one hundred and forty Hottentots and twenty Xhosa. The latter taught Hilary the traditions of their people, and he developed respect for the ease with which they adjusted to life at Golan. As he worked with them he found himself constantly referring to the practical instructions he had acquired from young Simon Keer, rarely to the theological indoctrination of the older LMS clergymen. "Missionary work," Keer had predicted, "is one-tenth disputation, nine-tenths sanitation."
The first white man Hilary met was a Boer living at a remote spot twenty-eight miles to the northeast, across hills that separated the Sundays River from the Fish. He rode into Golan one afternoon, a tall, rough-clad, white-haired old man who looked like someone from the early books of the Bible, his beard trembling in the wind. "Name is Lodevicus," he said in halting English. "Lodevicus van Doorn." He had come to warn Hilary not to allow any Hottentots from the north to take refuge at Golan.
"Why not?" Hilary asked.
They ... my laborers . . . they signed papers," he growled, obviously disliking the necessity of speaking in a foreign tongue. "They to work . . . not pray."
"But if they come seeking Jesus Christ . . ."
Lodevicus showed his irritation that Saltwood made no effort to address him in Dutch: "If you here . . . missionary . . . d.a.m.nit . . . leam Dutch."
"I should! I should!" Hilary agreed enthusiastically, but to continue the conversation it was necessary to find someone who had both languages, which put Lodevicus in the awkward position of lodging a complaint against Hottentots through the agency of a Hottentot. It was fortunate that Lodevicus did not recognize the melon thief, and insensitive to the impropriety, went on talking, with Pieter listening respectfully and saying "Ja, Baas" at least once a minute.
"Baas say, "His Hottentots not come seek Jesus. They run away from work his place." "
"Tell him that even so, if any of his workmen were to come seeking refuge with me . . ."
No sooner had the interpreter started this sentence than Lodevicus interrupted.
"Baas, he say, "My G.o.dd.a.m.n workers come here, no trouble for you. I come gettim.""
"Tell him that if any Hottentot or Xhosa seeks Jesus Christ . . ."
Once more Lodevicus issued a string of threats, only some of which the Hottentot bothered to repeat. So this first meeting between the Boer and the Englishman ended in disarray, with Lodevicus shouting as he remounted his horse that Saltwood was no better than that d.a.m.ned idiot Simon Keer. He spattered what sounded like curses, and Hilary was told: "Baas say d.a.m.n-fool Master Keer come back, he meet him with sjambok."
"a.s.sure him that Reverend Keer is safely in London and will not be seen again in these parts." When this was delivered, Lodevicus directed the Hottentot to say, "d.a.m.n good thing."
As a Christian, Hilary could not allow his first acquaintance with a neighbor to end so poorly, and with a complete change of att.i.tude he said to the Hottentot, "Ask Mijnheer van Doorn if he will join us in evening prayer?"
This sudden switch to the Dutch mijnheer mijnheer softened the old man somewhat, but only for a moment, for he soon realized that the prayers would be conducted in English, whereupon he spat: "I pray Dutch church." And with that he galloped off, even though night was almost upon him. softened the old man somewhat, but only for a moment, for he soon realized that the prayers would be conducted in English, whereupon he spat: "I pray Dutch church." And with that he galloped off, even though night was almost upon him.
And that was the way things stood between the mission station of Golan and the nearest white man to the north until the end of the first yearwhen the Reverend Simon Keer burst upon the South African scene with a reverberation that would last for two centuries, making his name accursed. He did not appear in person, which was prudent, since he would have been whipped, but a booklet that he published in England did arrive by ship. It bore the pejorative t.i.tle The Truth About South Africa, The Truth About South Africa, and was a compilation of accusations against the Dutch so horrendous that the civilized world, meaning London and Paris, simply had to take notice. and was a compilation of accusations against the Dutch so horrendous that the civilized world, meaning London and Paris, simply had to take notice.