Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 19

CHAPTER X

AFTERRWARDS the Jap could get no more than a mumble or a grunt in answer to his cheery greetings of the Pilot. He shrugged his shoulders; for to him, by his own statement, the incomprehensible was inconsequent. To him a day, a week— or a month or a year—were all one. His possessions were in his girdle. He had little to do, and his chief concern was the temper of his heart. The fuming and freeting of a man over something that was neither here nor there were quite beyond him.

Adams challenged him two or three days later. "Where's all this money of ours?" he said. "I want to buy a sword."

"The money, An-jin, is with the Daimio's clerk," he answered. "We will go to him. But no man but a soldier may carry swords. It is the law."

"Oh, is it?" said Adams. "I did not say I wanted to carry swords. Carrying is another matter. I want to buy one."

"If any man sold you a sword," said Mitsu very calmly and very cheerfully, "or gave you one, I would cut him from neck to navel. Even him——" he nodded towards the shore.

Adams could only grunt again before following his gaze; but when he had done so he snorted.

It was the padre at whom Mitsu now grinned.

"It is perhaps as well, An-jin," he said, "that you have no sword. It would go against my stomach in our friendship. I would be constrained to call some other to execute you."

The padre had apparently concluded his bargain with a fisherman; for he was putting off in the little skiff with an attendant who carried a great bundle on his shoulders.

Adams again, scarcely believing his eyes, called down the companion to Santvoort, "Bring the hook, Melchior"; for one boat-hook was among the treasured relics of the ship's smaller loose furniture. "We'll show him who can come aboard!"

They stood at the side, amidships where the freeboard of the Liefde was scarcely more than the height of a man, and where a square port was left open for the easier getting into, and out of, the ship's dinghy.

"Aye, we'll show him," said Santvoort, and he spent a moment or two in thoughtful consideration of the rival merits of the pole's steel-shod end, and its butt. The latter seemed to carry the day, for he leaned the butt over the side.

He said, "Half way through the port would leave his great behind sticking well out for a drubbing. You could hold him from below, Will. Then shove him out again—into the boat or the water."

Any criticism from Adams of this simple scheme was postponed by Mitsu, who said quickly from the poop: "An-jin, no bloodshed. No violence . . ." Then he disappeared. They heard him quickly collecting the other two soldiers who had squatted on the afterdeck, and taking them away with him out of sight, behind the wreck of the deck-house.

In this time the skiff had come to within a dozen yards of the ship's side where the fisherman backed with his solitary oar.

"Good-day, my sons," said the padre, and made the sign of the cross. It would have surprised the others less if he had raised an arquebus and emptied it at them.

"Good indeed!" said the Dutchman, caressing his boat-hook; and Adams mumbled, "It will be an awkward hold on the rascal from two foot below the level of him."

"It is as your friend that I come," the priest said quietly. "See!" He indicated the bundle held on the low thwart by his attendant. "A present. Food and wine."

"And d'you think we want for food?" said Adams. "We who are the friends of the Emperor himself?" A swagger came into his attitude.

"I too am your friend, my son," the priest said quietly.

"Friend-" said Adams to Santvoort. "Friend means many things in this country, Melchior. You can clap a man in gaol, and be his friend. You can cut him from neck to navel and be his friend. You can tell the black lies that will bring him to be crossed and stuck like a pig—and be his friend . . ." He was thoughtful as he said this, not simply cantankerous, for he had been thinking deeply upon this very puzzle—the puzzle of Ieyasu's smile, and the ring he had made about them of swords; the puzzle of Mitsu with his cheerful, irrepressible amiability, and his brief gesture and big talk of cleaving one from neck to navel.

"I know it is hard, my sons," the priest went on, and he sat down wearily beside the bundle.

They saw now that he was an old man and tired. "Nevertheless I am your friend. You shall hear me—if you will soften and listen. You shall also see, if you will take this package."

"And what have you got?" said Santvoort, "in the package?"

"A little wine," said the priest. "Not much—but good. Wine and fruit. And beef."

"Beef!" said Santvoort. "Let us see his beef, Will. Fresh beef, padre?"

"Fresh," he answered. "Fresh—but a little salted and already cooked against the journey. The sooner it is eaten, the better."

"And what price do we pay for your salted beef?" asked Adams. "Our heads?—And what price do you pay for giving beef and wine to pirates and robbers and murderers and enemies of his Majesty the Emperor?"

"There is no price," the priest answered humbly and gently. "It is as a friend that I have come so far. It is only as a guest that I may come further. It is for you to decide, for I have wronged you once. The wine and the beef and the fruit are yours in any case. But before you dismiss me, remember that I have lived and laboured for twenty years in this country. I know much and can do much, for these people are strangers to me no longer. I speak their tongue and I comprehend their thoughts—and their thoughts are as different as their tongue from ours."

Santvoort was trying to visualise a piece of fresh beef—a rib perhaps, a sirloin, or a good fillet from the rump. Adams was grappling again with the puzzle of thoughts and of ways of thinking that were as alien as the speech of sudden clicks and snaps and hisses.

To Adams the old and tired man sitting in the boat said he understood them. To Santvoort his quietness said that his parcel held beef that might be a rib, a sirloin or a fillet from the rump. Adams, too, had casually wondered what cold beef would look like, pickled but slightly in brine.

"Use the hook for holding the skiff alongside, Melchior," he said. "Leave his behind to itself." Then he called, "Come aboard, padre."

The old man scrambled through the port and took the bundle from his attendant.

Santvoort helped him up the last three steps of the companion to the deck. He relieved him of the bundle, handing to Adams the precious boat-hook; and the three of them joined the Captain and the Surgeon in the cuddy.

Santvoort unpacked the bundle.

There were three bottles of Spanish wine, oranges from the Philippines, and the beef—a roasted brisket.

"It is only a poor present, my sons," the old man said. "But it is as much as we could carry—four days of hard travelling it is from Nagasaki. It would be the merest trifle among many; but among you four it might serve to show my friendship. I would suggest that you allow your cook to bring in the customary food. Cover this with the wrapping and the Captain's cloak—so. . . . That, too, is why we cooked it for you beforehand; beef is, as it were, contraband in this country. One does not talk much of eating beef; for even believers without the old superstitions are still few."

Santvoort covered up the gift with the wrappings and the Captain's cloak and they sat squeezed round the table.

It was only from hearsay that the Captain and the Surgeon knew of the priest's fine doings before leyasu. All they had experienced of him was his persistent commiseration with them over the undoubted execution of Adams and Santvoort. Speech came more easily to them than to the other two.

"So you've got us bottled up here, padre!" the Captain said, not without the faint touch of geniality befitting a man who knows that he is beaten. "Prisoners. For how long?"

The priest slowly crossed himself again. "Your captivity is not my doing," he said. "Far otherwise. Very far otherwise. It is indeed of that that I have come to talk with you."

He paused a moment and leaned closer while the others looked at each other through the light that came from the narrow doorway, and then at him.

"My sons," he said, "in all this country—I am now your only friend."

That word "friend," with its grotesque and ironic implications, was getting a little on the nerves of Adams.

"Have you come to deliver us, then?" he sneered. "To set us free?—take us all home again?"

"Not all," said the priest quietly. "That I cannot do—for your captor is powerful. But I have come to set you free; you four who are the big and important ones. Nor can I myself take you home. But I can put you where there are ships. I can send you as far as the Moluccas. For such as you, the getting home from there would be no great matter. We will talk of it presently. First call for your skilly, my friends, and throw it quietly over the side and eat your beef and drink your wine."

The cook brought in their broth and millet-cakes and knives and mugs and a pitcher of water. Santvoort went out to tip the broth over the side and the priest sat on the locker, smiling and carving slices from the beef.

When they had sat down to it and their mugs of wine the Captain drank to the priest's good health. Then he said, "You have lied before, padre. We know that the thing you speak of is forbidden."

"Do you not know that beef also is forbidden?" was the padre's smiling answer.

They considered this.

"A month ago you would have had us killed out of hand," said Adams. "Now——" suddenly he stopped, a gobbet of the excellent meat poised on his knife-point. "Steady, Captain! Melchior! Doctor! . . . How in God's name do we know what he may not have put in this beef?"

They slowly laid down their knives. "Or in the wine, damnation take him!" Adams added, having already drained half his mug.

The priest set his great pale hand on the pilot's shoulder and laughed. For some reason or other they believed in his laugh and went on eating again even before he had said: "Do not be afraid. If harm came to you from my beef or my wine, I would not reach Nagasaki alive. As for the sheer doing of such a deed, could I not a hundred times have poisoned the lot of you even before you went up to the court? Believe me, the law of this country is a law of iron."

"It beats me," said Adams, and he fell into thought. "But if you are so frightened of the Emperor's wishes, how can you think of getting us out of the country? He has forbidden it, as he has forbidden murder."

"I would not get you out of the country, my son," the priest said. "It is well known already that your wish is to go. And so if you went—well—it is you who would be the lawbreakers."

He shrugged his round shoulders and smiled upon them. "If you went, the doing of it would be yours—not mine. Any little facilities I might give you would not, in fact, be traced; the Emperor and his emissaries are busy at the moment with greater affairs than the departure of a few unwilling guests."

"And what are these facilities of yours?" asked Adams. It was the curious fact that he again had become the spokesman of the others. His Portuguese was slower and more cumbersome than theirs. His forwardness was again determined by trivial accidents; their mouths, at the moment, were full of beef or wine, or their minds were jumping ahead of the priest's words, or lagging behind them. For no other reason Adams was the one to say, "What can you do?"

"The nights are moonless," said the priest. "Presently we shall part in obvious friendship. To-morrow night I will send a skiff with presents for you. Four men will come aboard carrying them." He paused. "Four men will leave the ship." He bent nearer to them. "They will be bigger men than the four who come aboard—but my boatmen will answer any questions asked by your guard on board. The distance from here to the shore is nothing to swimmers like the four who will bring your parcels."

Among the thoughts of his four listeners there was a quick computation of chances; the computation of chances had for long been the habit of their daily life.

"And then," said Adams, "what happens?"

"Another boat," said the priest, "and other boatmen will take you by water to Nagasaki. In Nagasaki we have craft of our own, and a certain freedom. Here there is a tally of all the boats that can float; but in Nagasaki brothers of mine will see to it that you board a soma for the Moluccas."

"And in the Moluccas," suggested Adams, "the cutting of our throats would be a simple, harmless matter; there is no Emperor to protect us in the Moluccas."

"My son," said the priest, sadly shaking his head. "I am no murderer. I seek only to do the work before me."

"The work before you was once to get us stuck up on crosses."

"My work," said the priest, "was to remove you from blocking the way of the faith."

"Throat-slitting would surely achieve that, as Mr. Adams suggested." It was the Captain who spoke this time. "You cannot get away from that."

"If you would understand," said the priest, "I will explain to you. My sons—if you would only see-" He was the old man again, tired and a little frail for all his bulk, appealing to them so humbly and so earnestly that they listened.

"Here, in this field," he went on, "you are the enemies— not of me, for you also are men and the children of God—but of the faith, for you are blind. I speak plainly that you may believe. For half a century we have laboured in this field; and our labours have been blessed. The seed of truth has prospered and the harvest has been great. But you, in your blindness . . . My sons, if you, too, had the faith-"

"Perhaps," said Adams, "but we have not." He so plainly saw the sly old dog working round again to his conversion-talk that he lost sight of the tired old man with a possibly reasonable argument.

The tired old man came back again with a gesture of resignation and a gently spoken "Exactly. You have said it. And so, what was for me to do? If thine eye offend thee— pluck it out. ... I was even willing to put you—brothers of mine and children of God—on the crosses of thieves and house-burners. But that way was denied. I am willing now to risk much to set you away from here towards your own country."

"And what is to prevent our coming back?" said Adams. It seemed a good question for purposes of sounding. "Alive we could always come back—with a better ship, better charts and a better cargo."

"Come back?" said the priest, and the smile he now smiled was a very wise one. "Do you think that men who have once broken faith with their Lord in this country ever come back? No, my sons. Such men are called 'ronin' thereafter. Exiles and wanderers with every loyal door and mat and brazier forbidden them. It is only darkly as thieves that such men could return, or openly as enemies. I am not afraid of your coming back."

"And so," Adams said, "you have nothing to fear. Even if we would we could not harm you, while to us you can give no surety. If we should get to the Moluccas and if we were lucky we should find only Portingals. Unlucky we should fall in with Spaniards; throats cut or backsides lashed to galley-thwarts."

"Even Spaniards dare not molest a Japan vessel in the Japan Sea," said the priest.

"But it is a voyage," said Adams. "A mischance could take us to the Philippines instead of the Moluccas." It was the way of Adams to pursue an argument when an argument was offered.

"Of mischances I can say nothing," said the priest. "I can only give you the most that any layman can rely on in the face of mischances. In the boat that comes for you to-morrow night will be four pistols and four knives. They will token my good faith to you. If there should be not knives and pistols you can call your guard who are the trustiest of Ieyasu's men and denounce my men who will have stayed aboard and so—me."

He rose to his feet, the ceiling's lowness compelling him to stoop. Yet there was dignity in him, the dignity of the bargainer who is open in has bargaining.

"And when do we decide?" asked Adams, whose aim now was to be rid of him so that the four might consider.

"By noon to-morrow," he answered. "If at noon to-morrow the Captain's coat is hung at the taffrail with a white shirt on either side of it, at the earliest full darkness of night the boat will be here."