Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 11

CHAPTER II

ASHORE it was the same. They were lodged in a house where three died the day after landing. The remainder had "all refreshing that was needful."

Requirements were fulfilled—food and drink and shelter; and sleep.

Three more died; but the wonder was—if there was any wonder at all—that they had not died before.

Then a priest arrived from Nagasaki, a Portuguese. He conversed with the convalescents in Dutch. Adams and van Santvoort commented upon him in English, cursing him and knowing him at once for an enemy. Here some faint impulse towards effort of the old sort might have stirred within them— some fresh glimmer of the old illusion that destiny was still theirs to man-handle in one direction or another. But the glimmer was soon extinguished and the illusion gone. They were not even men any more, but only the husks of men, parched and empty; and they were utterly prisoned. Their only door was the padre from Nagasaki. Through him, and him alone, could thoughts escape from them to the genial little men who smiled; only through him could there be any meaning in the answer of smiling chatter. Through this door the only meaning that came was softly spoken, but it was grim and sinister. . . . Infidels and rebels; pirates, thieves trapped through the merciful justice of Almighty God at their thieving; sorry scavengers of the seas driven by their fever and their sins to seek a haven among just and righteous men baptised in the true faith. (For there were converts with the padre, a small retinue of Japanese brothers with tonsured heads who could understand Portuguese and a little Spanish, but neither Dutch nor English.)

The brothers and the padre sought the conversion of the invalids; and van Santvoort sprawling in his thoughts as he sprawled in his gait told them (in Spanish, that the words might get beyond the padre to his brethren) that they might go seek it in hell. It did not seem to him that an insult or a rudeness one way or the other could make much difference to anyone.

Pirates; robbers. ... In their mute helplessness they had nought to do but look from under the low eaves of the house to the water where the battered and stripped Liefde was careened, to the distant mountains of Iyo that stood out of the haze into the pallor of the dawn, and at the great cliff that flung the bay into the shadow of the setting sun.

Pressing most upon the mind of Adams, while Santvoort and the padre bickered, was his quarrel with the maps and charts and globes; his suspicion, that was now a dead certainty, of their error. The padre would do nothing to help him in the getting and setting down of solid evidence. He would make no move whatever towards salving the pilot's books from the ship or recovering his instruments from the fishermen who had filched them. He only mumbled of salvation, of sea-robbers and spies; and went off, one hand caressing the other in the sleeves of his cassock.

Adams did what he could with sticks and string and pegs whittled from a piece of bamboo. With the sticks he fixed bearings from the moon to the fore- and hind-guards of the Little Bear. When the shadow of the house's eaves began to veer outwards again from the steps, his sticks were fixed at the angle between the sun and the horizon. With his string he drew a circle on the floor. He divided up its circumference, and with this protractor he measured the angles recorded by his sticks.

Good luck and vanity had kept one of his possessions in his breeches pocket instead of among the instruments in the cabin—a pocket compass mounted in a case of ebony and tortoise-shell. His Regiment of the Pole Star and his book of Seaman's Secrets would have saved him immense excogitations and calculations from half-forgotten formulae. It would have saved him, perhaps, from entertaining, with his busy doings, the men and women who passed through the house, smiling and always chattering. They were the servants detailed at the Daimio's orders to take care of the foreigners. They were also relatives of the servants; friends of the relatives; friends and relatives of the servants' friends. For them Adams was distinguished from the other hairy convalescents by his sticks, his pegs and his string; by his head bent over his calculations and over the compass set on the balustrade of the porch.

Already he stood out from the indistinguishable others who did nothing but lie, or sit or stand—according to the varying states of their distempers—and stare.

Adams, alone among them, had a name. Already they called him Anjin; Pilot; Contemplator, savant—or watcher— of the Needle.

The busyness of Adams had little interest for van Santvoort. For him it made little consequence whether the charts had been right or wrong in showing Japan to lie southward of thirty degrees. He looked only at facts accomplished. There they were, he and Adams and the others. There, also, charts or no charts, was Japan. Survival itself exceeded his expectations and he had done nothing towards its achievement. He had merely held the ship's food in his stomach, in the last weeks of the voyage, better than most of the others and had drawn more nourishment from it to his arms and his legs. He had lounged and stood and lain within earshot and hands' reach of the Englishman, doing and getting done whatever he was told, hoping for nothing in particular when any hope at all would have been a fantasy; expecting whatever came. Now that Adams had no use for the Dutchman's weight on a rope or a pump-handle the Dutchman found himself at an end.

Adams, too, came to an end. He could take his Bible oath that the chart was wrong, but at that he had to leave it. Only his books, his cross-staff and his globes could tell him the full and exact truth; and between his books, his instruments and himself stood the padre. So he, too, began to take van Sant-voort's view, and fewer words were spoken as they sat or lay in the shadow of their room looking across the bay at the sharp hills and beyond them to more hills that rose mistily into the sky with the shape of limbs and breasts; and they looked at the women with the stature of children, who came and went about them. They were fragrant with the scent of distant flowers and they moved and looked unhumanly like dolls and strange puppets.

In the old life that they had left behind them it had been possible to take some kind of action about things in general— about, for example, the smiles of playful women. In this new life—if, indeed, it could be considered life at all, so fantastic was all the furniture of it and so problematic its duration—they could do nothing and they were at a dead end.

When an envoy arrived in the Bay with a despatch from the Shogun who ruled Japan, the padre said, "The Emperor has heard of you. You are to go before him." It was to the room in general that he said it; but it was Adams and Santvoort only who went—Adams for the simple reason that he was fit and as ready to go as anyone, and Santvoort because the summons was for two.

"Do you go with us?" Adams asked the priest.

"No," he answered. "I am but a priest of God; I stay here."

Their departure was without omen. The good-byes and Godspeeds of the sixteen whom they left behind were little more than monosyllables grunted out of the apathy of their distemper. The sixteen saw, no doubt, that the destinies of Adams and Santvoort were at vague hazard. But they had been at hazard for two years now and the sixteen had immediate hazards of their own—the fever in their limbs and the tremor in their bowels. The Liefde's captain was now Admiral of the whole adventure; but he, lying on his mat, gave no formality to the investiture of Adams' with powers plenipotentiary.

"The Portingall" was all he said, looking at the padre's back. "Does he go with you?"

"No," said Adams, "he stays."

As they went down the steps, the priest said, "—Justice in this land is very straight. Repent-"

"I repent already," snorted the Dutchman, "that my knife was idle at my belt before they took it from me." He spat and they walked on, down the hill.

It was a stiff and rough descent for legs still unsure in sea-boots that had stiffened with the brine dried into them. In less than half a mile they sat down by the roadside and pulled off the boots. Their happy retinue of men and women clustered about them to look and to marvel upon the hair on their calves. The appearance, out of the crowd, of men with sword-hilts protruding from their girdles set the marvellers back a few yards without causing them to abate their marvelling. Some natural clown from the crowd came forward with straw sandals, and a peal of laughter recognized his jape; for one hairy foot of either sailor could have been laid upon both sandals to conceal them utterly from view.

The soldiers, however, were bent upon business. One of them shouted into the crowd and the bamboo poles were produced with the plaited seats slung upon them. Adams and Santvoort gratefully sat and rested their beards on their arms folded over their poles. Their boots they never saw again.

At a pier in the harbour they found the galleys that carried them over the Inland Sea to Sakai.

With a shrug of his shoulders the soldier in command of the party allowed both prisoners to be taken aboard the same galley; unarmed, unshod, grey-visaged in the shabby tangle of their beards, they presented no great menace to the half-dozen swordsmen who accompanied them.

The casual retinue that had followed them from the house followed them still, till the staves of petty officials and the poles of boatmen knocked them and pushed them into the solidity of a mob that chattered its farewells to the Old Hairy Ones—An-jin and the Other.

The Old Hairy Ones, for their part, removed the great straw hats which hospitality had thrust upon their heads, and sat down under the galley's awning.

Their suspension in the vacuum between two worlds was now complete. Stout and lusty Protestants both, they meditated, no doubt, upon the wrath of God and His Infinite Mercy; for it was all they had on the asset side. It was valuable in that it would serve them in either event; whether, that is to say, they lived or died.

This question, for the twenty days of their passage of the Inland Sea, appeared to them as an open one, save only for the sinister shadow of the padre. He alone, it seemed, in all that country had known not how to smile.