Читать книгу The Sapphire - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 7

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THE Moulmein was a Bazaar boat. It dragged, lashed alongside of it, a big double-decked lighter furnished with shops and stalls and occupied by steerage passengers. It put in at the smaller villages and stayed long enough for the villagers to make their purchases. It was, therefore, not until the forenoon of the second day after we left Mandalay that we tied up against the bank at Tagaung. No storm-lamp flickered a welcome; no headlight transformed the village into a golden spot of fairyland. It was a little place of thatched hovels enclosed by great tamarinds, and fig-trees, with a glimpse of a few bigger houses in a grove at the back. And a miserable, puny pagoda of bamboo and straw at the corner of the square indicated to all men the extremity of its indigence.

The Moulmein with its travelling shops was expected; for the central space was thronged. Michael Crowther stood at my side on the open deck, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and running his eyes eagerly over the crowd. A look of disappointment clouded his face.

“I don’t see them,” he said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Yet they would naturally have met the Bazaar boat. Even if they didn’t want to buy anything, it’s the place for gossip. Of course I wasn’t expected.”

He repeated that consolation as, leaning over the rail, he watched the men and women file along the gangway on to the steamer and across the lower deck on to the lighter beyond.

“I wasn’t expected. That’s it, of course.” But he was uneasy. It looked as if the whole valley had turned out with the exception of Mrs. Golden Needle and Miss Diamond. Crowther turned to me. “Are you coming?”

I had not meant to go ashore at all. But Crowther wanted support and bad news might be awaiting him. After all, young people did die in the villages of the Irrawaddy as elsewhere in the world.

“Yes, I’ll come,” I replied, and then, less carelessly, I added! “I certainly will come with you, Captain.”

For when my eyes moved from him to the shore it suddenly struck me there was something unusual in the aspect of the place. There were no women left by the landing-place. That was to be expected. They were all by this time chattering and bargaining upon the lighter. But there was a large group of men, and these men, instead of sitting about on the sand indolently talking according to their habit, stood and watched the steamer in silence.

Crowther descended to the lower deck and I followed him.

“Of course I wasn’t expected,” he repeated.

But he was wrong. I had an impression that he was expected even before he stepped off the gangway. But the moment he did, the impression became a certainty. For at once the group moved and according to a plan. It spread out, deploying into a line at the edge of the bank and as Crowther walked up the slope, the flanks of the line moved forwards and inwards, enclosing him and barring him from the village. They were all so far quite silent and their faces were quite impassive. Perhaps it was for those reasons that I felt the whole position to be dangerous. I was walking just behind Michael Crowther’s shoulder. And from a slight hesitation in his movements, I realised that he, too, was disturbed. When he reached the top of the bank and could go no farther without jostling one of these sentinels, an old man with a thin straggling white beard spoke, smiling softly:

“We are happy to see the thakin again. It is a long time since the thakin was here and it does us good to see him. And now he will shake hands with us and go back again upon the steamer.”

Crowther looked from one face to another.

“You expected me?”

“A friend brought us word by the last boat that the thakin was coming to see us.”

“To see Ma Shwe At.”

Michael Crowther corrected the old man in a loud and rising voice, so that the name of his mistress rang out across the hovels and the booths. It was a call to her, wherever she was hidden, the call to the mate, heard in forest and jungle and trimmed garden, and wherever manners have not cloaked passion. But it was a cry for help too, so sudden, so poignant that it took my breath away. A dreadful terror of loneliness inspired it. I suppose that it was because I was behind Crowther and could not see his face. But I almost believed that someone else had uttered the cry, some unknown man breaking under the compulsion of pain and fear. Then he stood still, listening with both his ears, and it seemed to me with every tense nerve in his body, for an answer, however distant, however faint.

But no answer came—unless a quiet constriction of the circle about him could be called an answer.

“Ma Shwe At will not hear,” the old man said gently. “It is four years since the thakin went away and in four years many things must happen. Ma Shwe At suffered and was unhappy. Ma Sein cried through many nights. But all that is over now.”

“Over? But I am here to fetch them both to my home——” began Crowther.

The old man shook his head.

“Ma Shwe At is married to a man with many rice-fields. She is happy again. I beg the thakin to shake hands with us all and go away.”

Crowther looked from face to face. There were young men there and there were old. There was no ill-will in their looks; but they pressed about him, not touching him but hampering him. He was shut within a round wall of living people. He could not have burst through that close-drawn cordon had he possessed the strength of Hercules, so near they stood and ready. But he didn’t try. He drew back a step and his right hand flashed down into the side pocket of his jacket.

I gasped at his folly. He could not have made a more dangerous mistake. Even I knew that these pleasant, peaceable village folk would retaliate with the cruelty of children. From the beginning of the interview it had been obvious that behind the old man’s smooth words was a quiet threat. Policy should have heard the threat, and as a rule Crowther had at his command a blatant but effective policy. He was now a prisoner. For in a twinkling a man upon each side of him seized his arm. Not one of the group but held a stick in his hand, although no one raised it. A boy plunged a hand into Crowther’s pocket. Had he pulled out a pistol, Crowther—I haven’t a doubt of it although not a stick as yet was raised—would have been beaten out of human shape then and there by wild men dancing in a frenzy. All that the boy did pull out, however, was a little soiled bag of pink silk tied at the mouth with a pink silk cord—a bag which rattled as he pulled it out.

The turmoil died down as quickly as it had spurted into life.

“Is that all?” the old man asked.

“That’s all,” the boy answered; and the old man took the bag and balanced it upon his palm, just as Crowther himself had done in the porch of the Dagonet.

“That small bag was worked by Ma Shwe At,” said Crowther in a queer, broken voice. He could not but know how near he had been to a cruel and horrible death but the break in his voice was not caused by fear. “She gave it to me to keep for her. There was a dacoity in the neighbourhood. It holds the presents I had given to her. I wish to return it.”

“Ma Shwe At no longer needs the thakin’s presents. I beg him to take them again.”

Crowther put his hands behind his back.

“There is more than my presents in the bag,” Crowther protested. “There is a jewel worth them all a hundred times.”

The old man smiled.

“We are all happy that the thakin should keep it.”

He gave the bag back to the boy who slipped it again into Crowther’s pocket.

It was just then that the steamer blew its warning; and Crowther, without another word, turned upon his heel and walked down the bank to the gangway. He looked straight in front of him. His face was grey and fixed like the face of a paralytic. I did not wonder. Apart from the danger which he had run, who within so short a time has endured humiliation so deep? But humiliation was only one part of his distress. Possess a thing, it dwindles to nothing. Lose it, it grows into a world. Against his corroding failure and his four desolate years he had set the mirage of Ma Shwe At and the child Ma Sein. Than Ma Shwe At with her laughing face and small, flower-like hands, and Ma Sein jumping up and down in her glee, nothing was ever so passionately desired by the one-time Captain of the Dagonet. But he had lost them. The door of hope had closed.