Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 13

CHAPTER IV

IN the afternoon their accustomed escort was replaced by one they had not seen before.

Whereas the old one had regarded them no more than as if they had been pots of crockery or logs of timber, the new one—a younger man—sat nearer to them, regarding them as matters of some interest.

They fell again to speculation between themselves upon the priest. As their thoughts warmed again and the tone of their voices heightened they saw that their guard was squatting eagerly forward, straining towards their meaningless heat. They owed him an explanation. Santvoort gave it, by puffing out his cheeks, thrusting forward his lower lip and indicating, with his hands, a slack paunch. Then he bent his shoulders and chafed his hands together and cringed and rumbled in Portuguese. The escort's eyes disappeared in wrinkles of delight. He doubled up and straightened out and exploded in an abandonment to laughter that seemed, even to Santvoort, the maker of the joke, out of all proportion to the joke's quality. For all the Japanese laughter they had already seen from the visitors over-running their house in Oita, they did not yet realise that a convulsion to an amused Japanese is not much more than a smile to an Anglo-Saxon. It was therefore as new material for portent-reading that they took the outburst. Santvoort tried him again. He stood up to the pantomime; and as he mimicked the priest standing beside the Shogun's divan, bowing and scraping and rumbling at himself and Adams, he saw that another soldier had come to the door, attracted by the first one's laughter. He went through with it, thrusting out his stomach and folding his hands upon it. There were fresh peals of laughter; but this was not what Santvoort wanted. He summarised his sketch when the audience was calm again, cutting it down to a gesture or two, and ended it with what would have been to the blindest and deafest of mutes a string of curses. Baring and grinding his teeth, he shook his fist. The soldier at the door strolled away and the escort shrugged casually at the anger of Santvoort, and waved his hand.

"Gone?" Adams exclaimed, repeating the gesture incredulously.

The escort nodded and again indicated departure, and the priest as being no longer of any import.

Here indeed was food for thought—a portent of proper significance.

But which significance?

The fine reception of Santvoort's mimicry might have meant that the priest was without credit. The laughter could have meant equally that their guard's head was empty of wit and that the padre's departure meant that they were already doomed.

They fell silent again.

The original escort came back towards evening. The cheery deputy rose with some deference and seemed to make a brief report on his tour of duty, and was dismissed. The old one sat down, in the same spot, in the same position and in the same envelope of detachment and disregard that he had sat in through all their waking hours for two days.

The change cast a fresh gloom over the prisoners. Excitement was gone from them and the riddle was once more inscrutable and dead. All had slowly become confused again; points upon which three hours before they had had no doubts became freshly doubtful.

They doubted, by evening, even whether the priest was really gone. Santvoort tried his mimicry on the insensate guard mimicking the padre's bulk; he tried with gestures to indicate travel, and the question whether such travel was taking place. In his eagerness he talked while he moved and mimed.

The escort turned wholly towards him. The smile of his mask became the smile of a listening man. He spoke. In careful Dutch he said, "Speak in Portuguese or Spanish. I understand them better than Hollander, for I was but a short time in the island of Java."

"God!" the other two exclaimed together, with the hair suddenly wriggling on their scalps. "God!"

Santvoort collapsed out of his posturing and sat, hunched up on the mat.

"But you understand some Dutch? . . . Dutch? . . .You?" The surprise and the shock were still terrific. "You have heard —understood——"

"Not all," said the man. "But enough."

Again the other two said "God!"

"Listen then," said Adams, "the priest is a liar. A——Melchior, for God's sake tell him in your glib Portuguese."

"I have heard," said the escort. "I heard your speech in the chamber; and I have heard you two in speech by yourselves."

"But—listen-" Adams began.

The escort shook his head. "To-morrow," he said, "you will go again before the General. Or the next to-morrow."

"But the priest?" Santvoort insisted in his question. "He has gone?"

"Yes," said the other. "He is gone."

"And the others—the traitors? The English-bastard-Frenchman and the misbegotten Hollander?"

"They," said the escort calmly, "are of little consequence."

"And we?" The question came from Adams.

"You," the escort shrugged his shoulders. "You would seem to be neither crooked men nor yet enemies."

"Why then are we prisoners?" Adams asked.

"Prisoners?" said the other in some surprise. "Who made you prisoners? There are no prisoners in this land. There are some men who await speech with the General . . ."

"Yes," said Adams. "And there are crosses with rotting flesh upon them."

"But no prisoners," said the other. "The crosses are for low-born, crooked ones who ply no good among men. Thieves and informers and mischief-makers of small account—but that account a bad one."

"We are safe then?" Adams exclaimed; and to Santvoort, too, the thought pointed towards speculations completely new.

"Safe?" said the soldier thoughtfully. The thought itself was as alien as the word. "Am I safe?"

"You have two very handy swords," said Santvoort. "We are naked."

"You have hands," said the other. "If I have swords, myene-mies also have swords, as yours have hands; so where is safety?"

"For me," said Adams, "I would deem it safe not to be set upon those crosses."

"Crosses," said the soldier, "are for malefactors. I have told you; thieves and house-burners and such."

"And who is to say whether or no we be malefactors?" It was again Adams who spoke; and he asked his question not as an eager, anxious man in present torment but as an old man wearied by a bother.

It was as a mere bother that the soldier, too, considered the question.

"Some say this," said he, "and some that. It is for the Shogun to judge. To-morrow, perhaps. Or to-morrow." He yawned.

The other two turned from him towards each other. Speech which before had been so sparse between them for the emptiness of their thought had now become itself a hazard. Yet they found themselves soon talking about the ship and the trimming of her that would be necessary, and the waiting of many months for the change of wind. They had seen the timber for new masts and spars, on junks and in gateways and bridges. Sections of it they had seen in the crosses. They would do better, Adams was sure, with an altered rig; instead of the square sails on the main and fore with the small lateen mizzen, they would try a fore-and-aft sail at the fore. The loss of charts and instruments was no great matter. He knew that he could make a cross-staff for the reading of his bearings, and with his eyes shut he could plot a course from Japan to Java. The chief question was how many of the fourteen they had left behind at Oita (striking out the dogs de Conning and van Owater) should survive their dysentery and fever, to man the Liefde homeward. . . .

So they were back in their old familiar world again where life was an hourly counting of resources and possibilities; a chaffering with Destiny.

Puzzled by the question of the Liefde's new rigging, and how far a dozen men could handle her; menaced by the gauntlet of Spaniards and Portingalls that would have to be run off the Philippines and Moluccas, they went at length to sleep.