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."
CHAPTER XIII
MITSU explained to Adams and Santvoort that the houses to entertain them were but a stone's throw from each other. Santvoort's was the first they came to, about a mile from the jetty; and the Dutchman went cheerfully in with the bundle he had brought from the ship, saying he would visit Adams when he had made himself comfortable. "In the morning, Hollander," Mitsu said. "It is already late, and men may not be abroad by night so near to the palace, unless a soldier accompany them."
"Very well, morning then," Santvoort agreed.
For nearly two and a half years now Adams and Santvoort had scarcely been out of earshot of each other. If this sudden parting of them gave any hint of purpose sinister, the suggestion was denied by the easy, cheery manner of Mitsu. He motioned and spoke to a youth who had stood in the road, idly watching them, and the youth at once came forward and took from Adams the bundle he had made aboard in a piece of sailcloth.
"Your host, An-jin, is a man of some distinction," Mitsu explained as they strolled on. "A soldier. It would embarrass him to see his guest carrying his own luggage."
"And the boy?" Adams asked, indicating the porter.
"Oh—he? One of the City's young." It was as though Adams had asked him the name of some particular pebble in a watercourse, of a grain in a dish of rice. "They fetch and carry. They ply trades of one sort or another."
"And do the bidding of any man who commands them?" asked Adams. "Are they slaves then? Dogs?"
"Slaves?" said Mitsu in surprise. "Certainly they are not slaves and dogs. But I am a soldier."
"And my host also is one who may go out and command men to do things?" Adams asked.
"Certainly," said Mitsu. "If he has justice and reason. It is just and reasonable that a loitering youth should carry dunnage for a soldier or his friend and guest."
"How long, Mitsu, is this to go on?" Adams asked. "I mean this 'guest' business?"
"That," said the other, "is between you and the General."
"But I have work to attend to," Adams said. "We came here for a purpose and can still fulfil it with our cargo."
"As to work, it may be that the General will himself have work for you to do, apart from the cargo. But you will be very well in the house of Magome Sageyu, your host."
"And suppose I will not do the Emperor's work?" asked Adams.
"Then," said the other, shrugging his shoulders, :'I suppose you will not do it. It is no great matter. To-morrow, however, I will come to take you to the palace where the General would speak with you."
The door of the house was opened by Magome Sageyu himself. In the brief moment of ceremonial of meeting and greeting, the youth with the bundle was utterly ignored. He put down the bundle on the doorstep and loitered off. Magome clapped his plump hands together and a girl appeared in the narrow hall-way. Magome, without interrupting his speech with Mitsu, indicated the bundle. The girl passed by the three men, a glint of ebony teeth between her smiling lips. She stooped to the bundle, turned with it, and was gone again into the back of the house. Magome chatted on, his hands resting each on a sword hilt, and Mitsu translated his welcome and the extension of the meagre and rough hospitality of a simple old soldier and his daughters to the distinguished Contemplator of the Needle.
Adams felt rather a fool. "Contemplator of the Needle," set him awkwardly on stilts of some sort. The peculiar, faint bombast that had come into the manner of Mitsu as he stood up to Magome and his phrases, sword-hilts to sword-hilts, while Adams stood with his hands in the empty pockets of the breeches he had donned for the occasion, was foolery. Yet a warmth came from the geniality of the little old soldier with a wrinkled forehead that shone from his eyebrows to the top of his head, darkened only by a long scar, and the mouth that flickered with glib phrases and set again into a toothless smile. This warmth was not foolery; nor was the smile of the little creature—child or woman—whose back, nimbly bent for the picking up of Adams' dunnage, had been a smooth sash and