To the Indies (14 page)

A dignified Indian, taller than his fellows, met them at the huts, and for the moment chatter ceased. The speech he made was obviously one of welcome.

“Thank you,” said Rich. He said something about Their Highnesses, and about His Excellency the Admiral. He mentioned the Church of Christ, and to all of this they listened with grave attention. The chief tapped his own chest.

“Malalé,” he said.

Rich tried to reproduce the name. The chief listened courteously, and repeated it.

“Malalé,” said Rich.

The chief clapped his hands with pleasure, and all the mob round clapped as well. Yet the chief still waited for a second or two, and then with extreme deference he began again.

“Malalé,” he said, pointing to himself, and then pointed to Rich, who grasped his meaning at last.

“Rich,” he said, touching his breast.

Malalé hesitated.

“Rich,” said Rich again, encouragingly.

“Lish,” said Malalé.

It was too much for anybody’s gravity, certainly too much for the very precarious gravity of the Indians. Everybody laughed, including the chief. Everybody was saying ‘Lish’ in a hundred different intonations. The harsh r and ch were clearly beyond their powers of articulation.

“Lish,” said the girls on Osorio’s arms.

“Lish,” said a pot-bellied little boy, laughing with his head thrown back and his stomach protruding.

“Lish,” said everyone else; it was like the wind rustling in a grove of willows.

The chief waved his arms to terminate the séance; Rich was irresistibly reminded of the kindly young teaching friar in his first school breaking off the chorused repetition when it grew too riotous. Everyone remembered the real business of the meeting, and the Spaniards were led by their chattering escorts up to the leafy huts. There were hammocks in there, standing on the seated on a couch of trellised creeper beside the doorway. It wobbled under his weight; it was as impermanent as the hut in which it stood. Osorio was given a block of wood on which to sit at Rich’s side, and García another — apparently these two were singled out to share the place of honor, the one because he had been seen much in Rich’s company and the other because of his glittering helmet.

It was almost dark by now. Someone stirred the two fires into a bright blaze, and the rest of the Spaniards were led to seats by them. Then came the food, a prodigal display. There was fish and there was fruit, yellow cornbread, and grey cassava bread. There was roast meat of a nature quite unidentifiable, all served by the women and young men, while the older men stood by anxiously watchful that their guests should want for nothing.

“A cup of wine, now — ” said García. “Hey, Don Malalé!’

He made a gesture of drinking, and in obedience to Malalé’s request a girl approached him, carrying under each arm a bulky gourd. Another girl followed her with a couple of small drinking gourds. She put one in each of García’s hands. The first girl filled one of them, and stood by while García tasted it.

“Queer,” said García, savoring it on his palate. “Sickly. I can’t say that I like it.”

The expression on his face was sufficient indication for the girl to stoop and fill the other cup from the other gourd.

“Sour,” said García. “But still . . . Drinkable, at any rate.”

He drained the cup, and it was refilled for him. When Rich came to taste the drink he found it sour, as García had said. The flavor was indefinable, and he simply could not guess whether it was fermented or not.

Malalé was standing ready to make polite conversation. It called for a good deal of effort to make him understand that they wanted to know the name of this little town.

“Paria,” said Malalé at length. He pointed all about him into the surrounding darkness. “Paria.”

So this country was called Paria. Rich could remember no geographical name that resembled it, in the way that Cibao resembled Cipangu.

“
Guanin
?” asked Rich, and the chief evinced a little surprise at Rich’s knowing a word of his language. One of the Indians who had been in the canoe interposed with a voluble explanation in which Rich heard the word repeated more than once. Malalé called to his subjects. There was a good deal of bustling about, and people brought Rich ornaments of gold and put them at his feet — two more collars, and several shapeless lumps, the largest the size of a walnut.

“This wench here has pearls on,” said Osorio.

“I was going to ask about them next,” said Rich.

He reached out and touched the armlet, and at his touch the girl stood stock still, quivering a little like a frightened horse. At a word from Malalé she stripped off the armlet and put it in his hand, still stood for a second, and then, presumably deciding that it was only the pearls that interested Rich, quietly withdrew. More pearls were brought: a little pile of wealth lay at Rich’s feet.

Beyond the ring of light round the fires something was happening in the darkness. The circle of Spaniards had grown thin. The din and chatter had died away into a more secretive murmur. Uneasily Rich guessed what was going on, and felt a little sick both with apprehension and disgust. He himself had lived celibate for nearly twenty years, ever since he had said good-bye to Paoletta in Padua after he had received his doctorate, and he had not been conscious of missing anything, thanks to his interest in his work and in the minor pleasures of life. He could feel only small sympathy with the animal grossness of these hot-blooded Castilians; he was a dozen years older than the eldest of the hidalgos, and he felt as if it were more like thirty or forty. Nothing, not even gold, could cause quarreling and bloodshed so easily as could women, but that was only a practical point. Morally, Rich felt an uneasy sensation of sin at the thought of condonation of promiscuousness. He had his own immortal soul to think about.

But a casuist might argue that there was no sin in promiscuousness with these simple pagans who knew nothing of God, who gave so gladly and who submitted so willingly. Their souls were put in no further peril by it; the devil, although he wished to entrap Christian souls, would not assume the guise of these girls, whose simple nakedness stripped the glamour — to Rich’s mind — from the act and reduced it to a mere function of brutish nature. Rich found himself lapsing into heresy again: it was perilous to try to distinguish between deliberate sin and instinctive sin. And no thief would ever be hanged and no heretic would ever be burned, if it were once admitted that inability to resist temptation constituted an excuse. That way lay chaos and anarchy. Natural instincts were in themselves suspect.

All the same, it was dangerous to interfere — physically dangerous. To take a girl from these men was like taking a kill from a wild cat. They would challenge him, perhaps. Any of these brawny louts could kill him five seconds after crossing swords. Rich vividly pictured to himself a sword blade slicing through his soft flesh, and his red blood flowing; the thought made him sick, and decided him instantly to take no action. After all, he did not know — he was not certain — what was going on. That was sufficient cause, although he despised himself for his weakness at the same time that he yielded to it.

Somewhere in the darkness a woman screamed, sharply, and Rich felt his heart sink. He tried to act as if he had not heard, the cry came again. García was eyeing him curiously in the firelight, and Osorio was looking at him sidelong, to see what he would do. The Indians were tense; everything seemed to be waiting on his decision. In a few moments there might be a bloody massacre, he realized now. He got slowly to his feet, and as he did so an Indian girl came running into the firelight. She made straight for one of the men and threw herself into his arms; she pointed back into the darkness with tearful explanations as he stood with an arm round her shoulders.

As she pointed, two figures came into sight, blinking a little sheepishly in the firelight, João de Setubal and Diego Moret. They saw the others on their feet, and they felt the tension, and they were self-conscious with every eye on them.

“What is this?” asked Rich. Every word was a torment to utter.

“I found the girl first,” said Moret, sullenly.

“You found her first?
You
found her?” protested Setubal in his slobbering Portuguese. “She promised me an hour ago.”

“Can you talk this monkey-talk, then?” Moret was a fat and lazy man, but he was thoroughly roused now.

“No. But she knew what I meant, well enough,” said Setubal. “She promised me.”

“Nonsense. She was willing enough for me, or would have been if you had not interfered and frightened her.”

“You had no right to her.”

“Nor had you!”

“I claimed her first!”

“That’s a lie!”

Their hands went to their sword hilts at those words. To give the lie was as much an invitation to bloodshed as to give a blow. Someone was at Setubal’s elbow in the half light, and someone else at Moret’s. In a moment there would be a dozen swords drawn. Everyone’s life would be in peril, with these Indians uneasily looking on, and Rich had to plunge in, lest worse befall.

“Don Diego! Don João!” he cried, hurrying forward from the hut between the two fires.

His words barely sufficed to check the men as they stood with their swords half drawn. They looked round at him, their bodies turned towards each other, right feet advanced, left shoulders thrown back. In the tenth part of a second those blades could cross.

“Take your hands from your swords!” roared Rich. The desperate urgency of the moment gave power to his voice — it was like shouting at a child who was about to touch unwittingly a brazier of burning-charcoal. They hesitated, and then, as Rich strode between them, they dropped their melodramatic poses; their right hands left their sword hilts even if their left hands still retained their grasp on the scabbards.

“Are you fools enough to want to fight with a hundred Indians looking on?” spluttered Rich. “They may think us gods now, but how long would they think it if one of you had a yard of steel in his belly?”

A training in rhetoric may have enabled his tongue to move more freely, but he had never before been so desperately anxious to win a cause, and the idiom he used and the tactics he employed were the proof of the inspiration of necessity. The sound of the quarrel had called back to the firelight the other Spaniards who were out in the shadow; they were coming back to the ring one by one, and taking their places in it, while the Indian women were grouping together in the background behind the screen of their men folk — Rich was conscious out of the tail of his eye of this by-play.

“Will the women be so easy for you if they see you think ‘em worth squabbling about?” he asked, wondering, as he said it, whether his tone of self-confident coarse goodfellowship rang true. “Twenty of you came with me in the longboat, and I’ve got to take twenty of you back, or there’ll be the devil to pay when I make my report to the Admiral.”

He ran his eyes round the ring; every Spaniard was present now. Somebody damned the Admiral in an undertone, but low enough for Rich to be able to pretend he had not heard.

“If it comes to that,” he went on, amplifying his earlier speech, “what’ll these women think of us anyway if you go on as you do? With our clothes on, and our helmets, and our sword belts, and our white skins, we’re gods to them now. There’s gold and there’s pearls for the asking. But with our breeches off we’re men. Aren’t we, now? And you’ve been taking the surest way of making the men angry and dangerous. Think of your own case. If an archangel visited you in Spain you’d give him dinner, wouldn’t you? But if you caught that archangel with your wife? What then?”

He got a laugh at that — a most encouraging sound.

“Let’s have no more of that nonsense,” he said, taking the bull by the horns at last, and assuming the attitude of authority which he dreaded. “It’s time for sleep, and we’ll sleep close together for safety’s sake. I’m not going to take chances with my eyes shut. Seamen can sleep by the fire here. Gentlemen here. Don Diego, you can make yourself obeyed by these hot-headed lads. See that nobody wanders off in the night and gets his throat cut. Boatswain, you can do the same with your seamen.”

To delegate the responsibility to García was a bold and successful move. García would not like it to be demonstrated that he could not make himself obeyed after Rich had assumed he could, and he certainly could fight if necessary, which was more than Rich could do. And the simple assumption of authority and of García’s support worked a miracle, too. The young men were impressed by it — and perhaps Rich did not realize that they were the less ready to resent his authority after he had withstood sword in hand the first mad charge of the wounded caiman. Nor was the hint that their lives might be in peril, here in this unknown land, without its weight.