“Ah. Certainly not.”
There was silence between us a long while. He poured me yet another genever, and one for him, but held his glass in his hand, studying me. Nor did I drink then, either.
I said finally, “I can scarce tell you how much joy it gives me that I can speak with someone again in my own English tongue, Captain van Warwyck.”
“It is a pleasing language, yes. It has much music to it. Next to Dutch I like it best.”
“I would fain go, captain, to a land where English is more commonly spoken than it is in Angola.”
“Ah.”
“It has been a comfortable imprisonment here, for the most part. But it is imprisonment, all the same.”
“Ah. Of course.” Much judicious puffing of pipe.
“Captain,” I said, “when do you set sail from here?”
Again the small raising of the eyebrows. “Three days hence.”
“And for what port, if you will tell me?”
“We are not decided. Perhaps Sierra Leona, or Cape Verde, or the islands off that cape. Thence to the Azores to take wood and water. And to Holland.”
“You will pass greatly close to England, as you make for your home port,” I said.
“I take your meaning, Battell.” He let his eyelids droop in a thoughtful way, and fiddled most damnably long with the embers in the bowl of his pipe, and said at long last, “There are risks in this for us.”
“I comprehend that.”
“And no reward, that I can perceive. You know, it has never been my custom to take risk without hope of reward.”
“I have no wealth. I own a black slave-girl, but nothing else.”
“Ah. Yes. I would not want your slave.”
“We are both Protestants, captain. Take me from these Papists if only so that I can go properly to my church again, for it is too many years since I have heard a true blessing.”
He did look indifferent to that.
“I am a Protestant, yes, but not so godly, Battell, that it matters much to me how long you have been unchurched. To snatch you from the terrible Papists is not reason enough to hazard a breaking of my courtesies here, where the Portugals have been so good as to let me trade, although I am their foe. God can spare one Protestant here and there, but can Holland spare the income of my voyaging?”
I felt some rage at being thus entered among the profits and the losses, but I throttled it back.
“Then you will not take me?” I asked.
“Did I say that, Battell? Here, we hold full glasses in our hands, and the stuff will evaporate off and be wasted in this damnable heat. Drink, man, drink!” He hoisted his genever and saluted me with it, and said, “Of course I will take you,” and did gulp down his glassful as if it were water.
“You will?”
“How many thousands of men has England sent to the defense of liberty in my country, eh? How many hundreds of thousands of pounds has your Elizabeth poured into the saving of Holland from the Spaniards, as though into a sieve? And one Englishman comes to me and says, ‘Cornelis, take me home, for I am sore weary of serving these Portugals,’ and I shall say him nay? Do you think so? Drink your genever, Battell! Drink!”
My hand trembled so that I near spilled the stuff, which he had filled into the glass clear to the brim. But I drank most lustily, and said, “If ever I can be of some service to you or to your country—”
“I understand that. Aye.” He leaned close and said, “Wednesday at sundown do you come to the harbor, and we will take you on board and hide you deep in the cargo, which is so plentiful that they will never find you, though they look all month. And at sunrise we will pull ourselves out of this place and put to sea, and that will be that. We will not discuss this thing further, eh, Battell?”
“I am most eternally grateful.”
“Of course you are! I’m saving your life, man! I say we should waste no words on such talk. Shall we drink another?”
“I think we should not.”
“I know we should not,” said Warwyck. “But that was not my question. Shall we drink another, is what I asked.”
And we did, and I think there was one more after that, and we may have sung a few Protestant hymns, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and something else, he in Dutch and me in English, and then I think both of us in Dutch, to much laughter. And then he put me into his longboat and I was taken to shore, where my bearers waited like a team of patient mules, and thus onward to my cottage.
A great joy did sweep through my soul at the thought of returning to my true home, and an end to this close heat and this servitude and this speaking the Portugal tongue and all the rest.
In the few days remaining to me in Angola I walked about as though I were already halfway to England. I feared nothing, and no dismay entered my spirit. Even Dona Teresa and her vengeful intent meant nothing now to me; she was a mere harpy at a vast distance, who would not have time to strike. I did feel some sadness at abandoning Matamba, for plainly I could not bring her with me, and I could not come to tell her that I was leaving, because of the pain it would cause us both. And even for Dona Teresa did I suffer, the losing of her, though that had already taken place; but yet I remembered our hours of coupling, and all the great joy of that, and also the deeper union we once had had, when we spoke of our lives and our inner selves in the days of our first love in São Paulo de Loanda. All that did burn in my memory. But I comforted myself with the knowledge that I could carry her with me wheresover I went, her breasts and her thighs and the taste of her lips and the scent of her body and the feel of her rump in my hands, as vivid and as real to me as if were still together, and also the sound of her voice, that was so rich and musical and melodious. But I did not have to remain mired forever in Angola in order to enjoy such pleasures of the remembrance.
For all of Africa, now that I was going from it, I do confess I felt an odd kind of yearning. In my years here I had drunk deeply of this land, though barely a sip off the surface of that colossal goblet that Africa is, and to my surprise a part of me wished to remain and drink even deeper. I was drawn to the wild jungle that I had not really closely seen, and to the great cities of the blackamoors of which I had only heard, and even to the Jaqqas that were such devilish mysteries. I thought fondly of the coccodrillos and the zevveras and the strange and beautiful birds of many colors and the great-mouthed gaping hippopotamuses, for never would I see such things again. It is curious how, when one is at last going from a place, it can become suddenly dear to one, even though it was not so before. And I had not detested Africa, ever. I was not so much fleeing Africa as I was being drawn back to England, I think. The only deep fault I could find in Africa, other than such bothers as the heat and the insects that crawled everywhere about, was that it was not England; and for that fault, I was quitting it. But all the same I had had great adventures in this place, I had commanded a pinnace and I had fought hand to hand with savages and I had journeyed with cannibals and I had loved two women that were very little like unto the women of England, and much more, without which I would have been far the poorer in experience. And though I now was closing the African chapter of my life, yet did I feel a shadow of regret for the going forth from this place.
In my dealings with the Dutch merchants I gave no hint, by secret wink or smile, of the compact I had concluded with Captain van Warwyck, I went about my work of interpreting in a wholly businesslike way, concealing my joy and my anticipation. Yet within me I was all in ferment, madly counting the hours, telling myself that in forty-eight hours more I would be on my way out to sea, in forty, in thirty-seven, and so on, and that at such and such a time so many days hence I would be a hundred leagues off to sea, and the like.