Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 21

CHAPTER XII

HE listened with the blandest innocence when Adams and Santvoort disclosed to him next morning the padre's plot.

"It's proof," Adams said hotly at the end of the tale, "proof, man! What more do you want than a promise of firearms and blades?"

"Ieyasu's judgment is his proof," said the other. Then he grinned. "As you have cause to know." His superiority to them both in taking this information as neither a joke nor a disaster exasperated Adams. It seemed that speech itself was no way of communicating with these people. He cursed in English and in Portuguese and then said, "If you won't tell the Emperor, I will."

"Naturally I will tell him," said Mitsu. He grinned again, and this time Adams felt that communication was not so impossible. Mitsu straightened his torso and his throat and held up an imaginary mug and said, pompously, in as good Dutch as he could make of it: "Ieyasu, our friend." He staggered away a pace or two with a seaman's unsteady pace and then collapsed in laughter. It was minutes before they could get anything out of him but explosions, and Adams stood by in profound dismay.

Foreground and background were an enigma as vast as reefs and shoals, as rocks and mountains and stars when a man had neither line nor staff, neither compass nor tables wherewith to sound and plot them. Imperturbability could make a meaningless image of a face perched above the nimbleness of a leopard. Laughter could convulse the face and paralyse the body—the gurgling and giggling as of a tickled two-year-old. The secrets in a man's heart were stifled because other men could not comprehend his talk; and a man could keep no secrets because the very walls had ears. . . .

"An-jin," said Mitsu when his laughter was spent, leaving him weak but very happy. "An-iin, it is lawful for a soldier to punish any man carrying weapons. To-night we will make a game."

The game was a simple one—simple as Mitsu's laughter, and was as simply played.

The boat drew alongside two hours before midnight. The lantern produced by the soldier who answered the boatman's hail suddenly went out. It was in pitchy darkness that the four men with their gifts from the padre climbed up, and still in pitchy darkness that four men lowered themselves from the port into the boat, and the boat shoved off. In darkness and in silence the boatman plied his oars till a thin bamboo whistled in the air and came to sudden rest across his shoulders. His howls were lost in the laughter of Mitsu and his three colleagues as they beat him and then tossed him over the boat side to swim for it, or sink.

They came back to the ship where lights had been lighted and brought aboard four small pistols and powder-horns, four bags of balls and four neat poniards. The fact that the four present-bearers had disappeared, that Adams was recovering from a kick in his stomach and Santvoort was massaging the back of his neck were grounds for fresh laughter; for Adams had scorned Mitsu's idea that he and Santvoort and two or three of the crew could not hold four Japs.

The parcels contained wine and dumplings and oranges and three volumes of religious writings. Adams, who took no unnecessary risks in matters of religion, laid the books away in his locker, and went out again—taking one bottle of the wine—to Mitsu.

He still could not believe that this coup was nothing but a theme for a joke. He found, in time, that Mitsu was able to be a little serious over it, but only because he wanted reassurance that he had not technically interfered with the Jesuits.

The next day this anxiety seemed to grow upon him and he left them.

They saw no more of the padre nor heard from him. They made no further attempt at barter, but walked on the beach. They were followed by a soldier, and the soldier was followed by the crowd of idlers that grew a little smaller every day as the novelty wore off the hairy ones.

In a fortnight Mitsu returned. He came aboard to say that he had despatches for the Daimio; he asked Adams to see to things so that the ship might be moved, and in three days the hulk of the Liefde was rolling to the tide again and gently pitching to the pull of the skiffs that towed her weight behind them. Adams stood at the tiller, staring at the binnacle which was still empty and of no use, as he himself was useless. A cripple, an idiot or a child could have done his hand's turn of swinging the bows to the cables that trundled the dead ship after the team of skiffs; southwards first by east, and then east by north they tugged her. The wake they made for her passage was like the troubled ghost of the wake she herself had left when life had still been in her; when there had been spars and stumps of mast and rags of gasping canvas; when there had been compass and astrolabe and tables, and in Adams wit enough and stomach enough to use them; wit enough and stomach enough to fly with skill from the fury of sea and winds which they had no means of facing.

For all its helplessness and needlessness, aboard the hulk that lurched, lifeless and passive, after the skiffs of lusty little oarsmen, the Liefde's crew was in good heart. They were all well again from their distemper—all of them that had not died. The underlings had been ragged and penniless; but sailors did not care. The Delight-Valley of the town of Oita had been a small one, but it had been full of laughter. The Liefde's men had been jolly freaks as they swaggered ashore in their rags, and they found great hospitality. The girls who were good to them were smaller and daintier than their experience had ever before embraced; but they had not been sharks for money, and so the crew had no great disaffection for Japan.

As for the four who were the masters of these men, they had given themselves the illusion that this sojourn was now an adventure of their own choosing. In the first day they restored sailing-discipline among the ragamuffins who spent their watches in dreams of the glamour they had already known in the lantern-like houses of Oita, of the further ease and splendour that lay beyond the horizon. The crew were sailors still; their preoccupation for the voyage was the luck they should find at the end of it; and they were as nondescript a lot as any brigand could have commanded. Hospitality had led to the exchange of gifts and tokens. There was neither a button nor a buckle left among them. Some were still bearded—shaggy or neatly trimmed—others had been jocularly shaved from throat to crown in the manner of their hosts. Others, again, had a fortnight's stubble over such previous shaving. The Swart from Barbary had gone one better than the rest by instructing a friendly barber to shave the wool from the back of his head as well as the front of it, getting the utmost value from the great ebony knob that had been so obviously admired by certain daughters of happiness in the Oita bazaar. Shirts and woollen caps, hose and belts and breeches had often gone the way of the buckles and buttons of the more thrifty. Some of the crew mustered, therefore, in cotton drawers or loin-cloths; in a tunic tucked, shirtwise, into them or flapping loose; in a short jacket or flowing gown. Some had sandals, and all had straw hats for shade from the sun and shelter from the drizzle.

Santvoort, with no particular thought for the morrow, was wearing out his breeches. Adams, brooding casually upon the future, had folded breeches and his last two shirts into his chest with his books and dividers and protractors, and sat in native drawers by the whip-staff hole and binnacle. For sunless days and hours of rain he wore his leather coat that had somehow survived the thousand visits that had been made upon the ship; for sunshine he had the jacket tokening Ieyasu's first impulse of friendship. The captain and surgeon, whose fevers and weight of responsibility had kept them from adventuring much ashore, clung to their hose and breeches and cloaks, their hats and shirts and doublets. There was a pair of scissors among the four of them; so they trimmed their beards in the manner to which they had grown them. They were obviously officers properly distinguishable from the men, while between them all was the common bond of a promise that they were not doomed; and they had found, so far, that respite in that country was good enough for the simple wants of sailor men.

To port there was no horizon. Behind the low, jagged hills of the coast all was a riddle of mist and shifting cloud, till out of the riddle there arose the shape of Fuji. In the mist that could have been over Thames or Medway it was golden or silver, blue or grey or palely orange in the dawns and noons and evenings, black against the sunset, lost in its own shadow among the shadows of the nearer hills that sprawled out to sea. Only its shape it did not vary, impressing its immutability upon the minds of the Liefde's men as it was impressed already upon the minds of the nimble oarsmen who towed them—the shape of rice poured slowly, clean and dry, from a measure.

The voyage ended with the closing in upon them, aport and astern, of the tumbled crag and cliff that is the peninsula of Izu.

First ahead, and then to starboard, came gentle breakers and low rounded hills—sandy-brown and breast-like, or bristling with dark pines—the peninsula that was the home of fishermen; and the flotilla swerved into the landlocked Gulf of Yedo, where it was already twilight while the sun still shone out at sea.

A derelict prize was no uncommon sight in Yedo harbour, atow behind a team of fishing skiffs; a battered junk, Chinese or native Japanese, or the timbers of a carrack from the Portuguese or Spaniards plying from the Moluccas and the Philippines. There was nothing about the Liefde to distinguish her from any of these, and the flotilla made no great stir at the waterside. The hawsers slacked and dropped from her sides into the dark water as the rowers rested on their oars; and Adams and Santvoort went forward to look to the anchor, seamen alertly following them, for letting it fall was to be to them the symbol of a voyage's end. But they saw that a skiff was hurrying to them with Mitsu in the stern. He hailed them and stayed them.

Scrambling aboard he explained that they were not to anchor, but to make fast to a mooring; and so the symbol at the voyage's end was not of the freedom of riding at anchor, but of the captivity of a hulk made fast to a disused jetty.

The officers went back to the poop, seamen slouched again into a group, amidships, while hawser-ends were carried to the jetty by skiffs and the ship was warped alongside by fishermen.

"Soldiers will guard the ship, An-jin," Mitsu said cheerfully, but with the crispness of an order. "For you and for the others there is hospitality ashore."

"Soldiers may eat the ship," Adams mumbled, "for aught I care. They will eat the rest of the cargo."

"Soldiers, An-jin," Mitsu emphasised. "Soldiers, mark you. There will be no more thieving."