The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  His conversion was deep if not spectacular, and he enjoyed the opening months of his ministerial education; the London Missionary Society, as it was being called in some quarters, was becoming famous in various parts of the world, even though it had been in existence for barely a decade. Its stern, intense young devotees, coupled with the older, practical artisans, had penetrated to remote areas, often serving as the cutting edge of civilization as it reached unsettled lands. The LMS was a revolutionary force of the most persistent power, but in his early months at Gosport, Hilary did not discover this.

  Instruction was principally in the propagational theories of the New Testament, an extension, as it were, of Acts and the missionary letters of St. Paul. He enjoyed the abstract philosophizing and profited especially from the droning lectures of an older scholar who expounded the basic theories of the New Testament, instructing him in facts that sometimes surprised him:

  ‘The Book of Acts is significant for two reasons. It was written by the same hand that gave us the Gospel According to St. Luke, and that unknown author is extremely important because he is probably the only non-Jew to have composed any part of our Bible. All the other authors were rabbis like Jesus and St. Paul, or ordinary laymen like St. Matthew, the tax collector. In Acts we receive the first message about our church from a person like ourselves.’

  But apart from knowledge, there was also deep conviction. These mature ministers truly believed that it was the duty of young men to ‘go forth unto all the world’ to spread the word of God; they were convinced that unless this word was taken to the remotest river, souls worthy of salvation might be lost.

  For these simple English clergymen there was no predestination whereby all men were sorted out as either saved or damned; 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 impassioned speeches:

  ‘There is a land down there in our care which cries for the word of God, 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 God, 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 impassioned 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 impassable 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 God 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 in sights: 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 tithe; 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, God-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 God will strengthen you, and in the end we shall build an English nation of which God 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 language—in 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 dicti
onary, 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 participants in the parable, the missioners 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.

  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.’

  ‘God 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 God’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 competition 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 noble 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 noble 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 God, Thy home is everywhere. Ours is here. Let us cherish both.’

  ‘Damned 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 Saltwoods 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 noble 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 woud 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. ‘Sturdy bastards, 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, ‘I’m 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: ‘God, Who marks our passage 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 God 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 God, 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 assignment. Instead, as soon as he stepped ashore he was grabbed by a sturdy 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.’