Shame and the Captives Read Online Free

younger ones. He had very startling wide-set eyes and handsome features, to the point of prettiness, and he made a minute bow with a few seconds of half smile on his lips.
    â€œWatch out for him,” one of the guards called. “He’s a flash pilot. Only thing is, he crashed.”
    The guard uttered a momentary laugh. The young man seemed not to recognize the taunt. The prisoner stared at her with such a limpid-eyed directness she was forced to look away. It seemed the result of something that would not be soothed in her that made her avert her eyes in a landscape that belonged to her and not to him. She became convinced he would refuse to take the glass, that he would embarrass her in front of the guards. She was surprised by the small noise of his picking it up and turned her eyes back. His style of accepting the glass, of bowing and of drinking, was to Alice like the practices of a religion she had never before encountered. When he was finished, he bowed to her and replaced the glass on the tray. By then his other companions were accepting glasses, though none of them quite matched him in bearing and ceremony.
    Alice had a chance to study them as they drank. Apart from the handsome boy, there were three narrow-mouthed kids who were not expressive at all, but who nonetheless made quick bows of the head when accepting the lemonade. Then came a stooping older man with a limp—as she’d observed—who obviously considered refusing the glass and delayed some seconds before seeming to find the frost on its flanks too great a temptation. His long face was a hard map to read. Last of all was a thin man about the same age as the lame one, and wearing a judicious sort of frown.
    Alice felt she was learning little by reading these mute prisoners so intently. She realized she would have welcomed sneers or leering sincethat would have, by contrast, made Neville somehow realer, more sharply seen. But they were prisoners in a different way from Neville. They were here and could not be interpreted. Neville was in another hemisphere yet his nature was formulated—not least by the tale of his capture. Neville wanted liberation. But what did these men want? They did not even take her lemonade with any outright gratitude, though the temperature was as high for them as it was for the other men.
    An untoward sadness seized her. She felt cheated that she had studied so hard the faces of those she had been merciful to and had learned so little. She was consoled to some extent because she knew she had defeated their understanding too. But it was mercy without the reward of knowledge, a gesture that didn’t earn enlightenment, a mere dimple in the day’s argument between guards and shovelers.
    They put the glasses back on the tray after they were finished. The guards moved in and reclaimed the day for labor, ordering the six prisoners to take up their shovels. And although these people had at one stage of their history owned every island in the Pacific except this one, the biggest and driest, here on Herman’s Road they were like wisps of men. She and they were ghosts to each other, and nothing had been learned for Neville’s sake.
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    Duncan Herman was a wiry fellow, smaller than his absent son, who had inherited his build from his late mother. Duncan was one of those fellows who had always been baffled by women and maneuvered edgily around them with a gruff jolliness. Now, as a widower, he had that same wary manner towards Alice. It was obvious he would never remarry; Alice had overheard him murmur to another farmer he’d met on the street in Gawell, “I’ve retired from the business of women.” In his system, you tried things once and if they ended halfway badly you did not attempt them again. It was an agricultural attitude and on thelevel of farming had proved fairly reliable. He held no rancor against the human race—he just didn’t need it