The Covenant Part 16

'Why? Marie's wonderful . . .'

'I mean, if you weren't married, you could take one of the widows, and then the house . . .'

'The widows?'

'Never be deceived about widows, Paul. The older they are, the more they want to get married again. And the richer they are, the more fun it is to marry them.'

'They're older than my mother.'

'And richer'

'Who are those men?' Paul interrupted, referring to the horde of strange-looking men who seemed always to be cl.u.s.tered about a building which ab.u.t.ted onto the French church.

'Them?' Vermaas said with some distaste. 'They're Germans.'

'What are they doing here?'

'They line up every day. You must have seen them before this.'

'I have. And I wondered who they were.'

'Their land has been torn by war. A hundred years of it. Catholics against Protestants, Protestants killing Catholic babies. Disgraceful.'

'I knew war like that,' Paul said.

'Oh, no! Not like the German wars. You French were civilized.' He made an ugly sound in his throat and drew his finger across it as if it were a knife. 'Slash across the throat, the Frenchman's dead. But in Germany you would . . .'

'Why do they stand there?'

'Don't you know what that building is? You've been working here for more than a year and you don't know?' In amazement he led De Pre across the bridge and into the Hoogstraat (High Street), where a st.u.r.dy building surrounding a courtyard bore on its escutcheon the proud letters V.O.C.

'What's that mean?' Paul asked.

'Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie,' he recited proudly. 'Jan Compagnie. Behind those doors sit the Lords XVII.' And he explained how this powerful a.s.sembly of businessmen had started more than eighty years ago to rule the East.

'But the Germans?' Paul asked, pointing to the rabble that waited silently outside the courtyard.

'There's nothing in Germany,' Vermaas explained. 'These are men who fought for some count... some baron. They lost. For them there's nothing.'

'But why here?'

'Jan Compagnie always needs good men. The clerk will come out tomorrow morning, look them over, try to spot those likely to survive. And poof! They're off to Java.'

'Where's Java?'

'Haven't you seen the big Outer Warehouse of the East Indies Company?'

'No.'

'Well, after we weigh the goods here and a.s.sess the taxes, they're stored in the proper warehouses,' and on Sunday he took Paul on a leisurely stroll along various ca.n.a.ls, past the house in which Rembrandt had lived and the place once occupied by Baruch Spinoza before he had to grind lenses to keep himself alive. They crossed a footbridge to an artificial island that contained a vast open s.p.a.ce surrounded by row upon row of warehouses, a very long rope-walk and a majestic, five-storied building for holding valuable importations.

'The treasure chest of the Lords XVII,' Vermaas said, and he summoned a watchman, who granted admission. In the darkness the two men moved from one stack of goods to another, touching with their hands casks and bales worth a fortune.

'Cloves, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon.' Vermaas repeated reverently the magic names, and as he spoke De Pre grew sick at heart for contact again with the soil, the real soil of trees and vines and shrubs.

'Now, these bales,' Vermaas was saying, 'they're not spices. Golded cloth from j.a.pan. Silvered cloth from India. Beautiful robes from Persia. This is from China, and I don't know what's in it.'

'Where's it come from, all this richness?'

'From the gardens of the moon,' Vermaas said. All his life he had wanted to emigrate to Java, where a purposeful man could make his fortune. He had an insecure idea of where Java was, but he proposed one day to get there. Grasping De Pre by the arm, he said in a whisper, 'Paul, if you can't marry a rich widow, for G.o.d's sake, get to Java. You're still young.' And the sweet promise of this dark warehouse was overpowering.

In the morning De Pre asked permission from the widows to visit the offices of Jan Compagnie. 'Whatever for?' the women asked.

'I want to see what the Germans are up to. About Java.'

'Java!' The women laughed, and the older said, 'Go ahead. But don't you start dreaming of Java.'

So he walked only a few blocks to the Hoogstraat, where the crowd of Germans was vastly augmented, men extremely thin and pinched of face, but willing to undertake the severest adventure if only it would provide sustenance. He stood fascinated as clerks came out of the Compagnie offices to inspect the supplicants, selecting one in twenty, and he saw with what joy the chosen men leaped forward.

But when he returned to his work the widows said that they wished to talk with him: 'Don't get Java on your mind. For every guilder that reaches us from Java, six come from the Baltic. Yes, you'll see the big East Indiamen anch.o.r.ed off Texel, transshipping their spices and cloth-of-gold, and you'll hear that one cargo earned a million of this or that. But, Paul, believe us, the wealth of Holland lies in our herring trade. In any year our seven little ships serving the Baltic bring in more money than a dozen of their India-men. Keep your eye on the main target.'

They spoke alternately, with one making a point and her sister-in-law another, but when the roundish one repeated, 'Keep your eye on the main target,' the taller wished to enforce the idea: 'We've been watching you, Paul. You and Marie have been chosen by G.o.d for some great task.'

No one had ever spoken like this to him before; he had for some time suspected that he was among those elected by G.o.d for salvation, the basic goodness of his heart emitting signals that he was predestined. As of now, he lacked the financial wealth which would have proved his election, but he felt certain that in time it, too, would arrive, and in his self-congratulation he missed what the widows said next. It was apparently something very important, for one of them asked sharply, 'Don't you think so, Paul?'

'I'm sorry.'

'My sister said,' the taller woman repeated, 'that if you learn shipping, you could become one of our managers.'

With the bluntness that characterized most French farmers, and especially the Calvinists, De Pre blurted out, 'But I want to work the earth. You've seen what I can do with your garden.'

The widows liked his honesty, and the roundish one said, 'You're an excellent gardener, Paul, and we have a former neighbor who might use your services, too.'

'I'd not want to leave you,' he said frankly.

'We don't intend that you shall. But he's a friend, and one of the Lords XVII, and we could spare him three hours of your time a day. You can keep the wages.'

His hands dropped to his side, and he had to bite his lip to control his emotion. He had wandered into a strange land with no recommendation but his devotion to a form of religion, and in this land he had found a solid friend in Vermaas, who had gone out of his way to help him, a church whose members were encouraged to worship in French, and these two widows who were so kind to his wife, so loving with his sons and so generous with him. When the Huguenots fled France they found refuge in twenty foreign lands, where they encountered a score of different receptions, but none equaled the warmth extended to them in Holland.

On Tuesday morning at nine o'clock, after De Pre had put in his usual four hours of hard work, the Bosbeecq women suggested that he accompany them to the stately Herengracht (Gentlemen's Ca.n.a.l), along which his new employer lived, and there they knocked at the door of a house much grander than theirs. A maid dressed in blue admitted them to a parlor filled with furniture from China and bade them sit upon the heavy brocades. After a wait long enough to allow Paul time to admire the richness of the room, a gentleman appeared, clad in a most expensive Chinese robe decorated with gold and blue dragons.

He was tall and thin, with a white mustache and goatee. He had piercing eyes that showed no film of age, and although he was past seventy, he moved alertly, going directly to De Pre and bowing slightly. 'I am Karel van Doorn, and I understand from these good women that you wish to work for me.'

'They said you could have me three hours a day.'

'If you really work, that would be enough. Can you really work?' De Pre sensed that he was in the hands of someone much harsher than the widows, but he was so captivated by the idea of Java that he did not want to antagonize anyone who might be a.s.sociated with that wonderland. 'I can tend your garden,' he said.

With no apologies to the Bosbeecqs, Van Doorn took Paul by the arm, hurried him through a chain of corridors to a big room, and threw open a window overlooking a garden in sad repair. 'Can you marshal that into some kind of order?'

'I could fix that within a week.'

'Get to it!' And he shoved Paul out the back door and toward a shed where some tools waited. 'I must explain to the'

'I'll tell them you're already at work.' Van Doorn started to leave, then stopped abruptly and cried, 'Remember! You said you could do it in a week.'

'And what do I do after that?' Paul asked.

'Do? You could work three hours a day for ten years and not finish all the things I have in mind.'

When De Pre returned to the Bosbeecq house, where the widows were preparing a gigantic meal because they knew he would be hungry, the two women suggested that he sit with them in the front room, and there, in forthright terms, they warned him about his new employer, speaking alternately, as usual, like two angels reporting to St. Peter regarding their earthly investigations.

'Karel van Doorn will pay you every stuiver you earn. He's fiercely honest.'

'Within limits.'

'And he can afford to pay you. He's very wealthy.'

'He is that. The Compagnie in Java had an iron-clad rule. No official to buy and sell for himself. Only for the Compagnie.'

'But his family bought and sold like madmen. And grew very rich.'

'And the Compagnie had another iron-clad rule. No one in Java to bring money earned there back to Holland.'

'She knows, because her uncle was one of the Lords XVII.'

'But when Karel's mother died in the big house along the ca.n.a.l in Batavia, he hurried out to Java, and by some trick which only he could explain, managed to smuggle all the Van Doorn money back to Amsterdam.'

'And he should have shared half with his brother at the Cape'

'Where's that?' Paul interrupted. It was the first time in his life he had heard mention of this place.

'It's nothing. A few miserable wretches stuck away at the end of Africa, trying to grow vegetables.'

'Is Mijnheer van Doorn's brother there?' Paul asked quickly.

'Yes. Not too bright a lad. Born in Java, you know.'

'And Van Doorn should have shared the family money with his brother.'

'But he didn't.*

'He smuggled it into Amsterdam, and with it bought himself membership in the Lords XVII.'

'He took my uncle's place.'

'He's one of the leading citizens of Amsterdam. You're lucky to be working for him.'

'But watch him.'

'At the Compagnie, you'll see his portrait painted by Frans Hals.'

'And at the Great Hall of the Arquebusiers, you'll see him in Rembrandt's painting of the civic guard. He's there with my husband, standing beside him.'

'And you'll notice that her husband has his right hand closely guarding his pocket, which is a good thing to do when Karel van Doorn's about.'

'But for a young man like you, he's an influential person to know.'

'If you guard your pocket.'

The relationship was a profitable one, even though Karel van Doorn expected his gardener to work at such a speed that at the end of three hours he was on the verge of collapse. Anything less than signs of total exhaustion indicated laziness, and Van Doorn was apt toward the end of the third hour to slip away from his desk at the Compagnie and watch through the back wall, hoping to catch his workman resting. When he did, he would rush in and berate Paul as an idle, good-for-nothing Frenchman who was, if the facts were known, probably a Papist at heart.

But a hard-nosed French farmer was an adequate match for any avaricious Dutch merchant, and De Pre devised a score of ways to defeat his employer and end the daily three-hour stint in moderately rested condition. In fact, he rather liked the game, for he found Van Doorn meticulously honest in his payments, and when occasionally De Pre returned to the gardens on his own time to finish a job, his employer noticed this and paid extra.

'The one thing that perplexes me,' Paul told the widows one afternoon, 'is that during all the time I've worked for him, he's never once offered me anything to eat or drink.'

'He's a miserly man,' one of the women said. 'Anyone who steals from the Compagnie in Java and from the government in Amsterdam and from his own brother . . .'

'He never steals from me.'

'Ah! But don't you see? The Bible says that you must treat your servants justly. If word got out that he maltreated you, his entire position might crumble. He would no longer be among the elect, and all would know it.'

'I don't understand,' Paul said.

'It's very simple. A man can steal millions from the government, because the Bible says nothing about that. But he dare not steal a stuiver from a servant, because on that both the Bible and John Calvin are very strict.'

'But doesn't the Bible say anything about a little food and drink?'

'Not that I can recall.'

And then, on the very next day, Karel van Doorn offered his gardener Paul de Pre a drink, not at his house but in the Compagnie offices. He had come home at the beginning of the third hour and said abruptly, 'De Pre, let's go to my offices. I need your advice.'

So they walked across town to where a new batch of German mercenaries waited, imploring Karel as he pa.s.sed, for they knew him to be one of the Lords XVII, but Van Doorn ignored them. When he was seated behind his desk he said without amenities, 'They tell me that in France you made wine.'

'I did.'

'What do you think of this?' From a drawer in his desk Karel produced a bottle of white wine and encouraged the Frenchman to taste it. 'How is it?' Van Doorn asked.

Pursing his lip and spitting onto the floor, De Pre said, 'The man who made that ought to be executed.'

Van Doorn smiled thinly, then broke into a laugh. 'My brother made it.'

'I'm sorry. But it's a very bad wine. It shouldn't be called wine.'

'My own opinion.'

'They told me your brother's in Africa?'

'This comes from his vineyard. He's been working it for thirty years.'