He had pushed off his sandals, as Mitsu had discarded his. They followed their host through the small hall and the room at the end of it, to the steaming bath-tub. Already there was a change of clothes there for Adams out of his bundle, native drawers and shirt and tunic and coat.
Adams fussed for a few moments after the bath, over the clothes he had discarded, but Mitsu told him it was no matter, the women would see to them.
Wine and the meal were served by the girl who had carried off the bundle and another almost indistinguishable from her.
There was no harshness in the way old Magome ignored his two daughters. His benevolence seemed to be for their ministrations and to include the girls merely as a part thereof.
The click and rattle of speech that Adams heard was beginning at last to be not mere gibberish. His ear was beginning to detect words and phrases and sentences; questions and answers; sagacities and jests—they were still meaningless, but they had some hint of shape. The friendliness between the two soldiers when the wine had warmed them and the food comforted them out of their first ceremonious stiffness, the inclusion in it of the dumb needle-watcher squatting on his heels, and his inclusion equally in the silent, deft service from the girls gave him an ease which he had seldom known before. For where had there ever been such a general smoothness? Certainly not during the apprenticeship in the shipyard of Nicholas Diggins in Limehouse. Not on the barges and hoys of the coastal trade, nor the nondescript victualling-ships of Elizabeth's Navy; not in the handier vessels of the Barbary Merchants where he had learned his craft of needle-gazing and star-reading.
In the little brick house on the hill at Gillingham he might, perhaps, have known glimpses of such ease; but there, in Gillingham, there had always been an end to them. Mary, the thrifty one, knew only too well that there was a bottom to every purse of a seaman's wages; and in those hard days Mary knew, and Adams knew, that every meal in the house at Gillingham drew the bottom of the purse nearer to the top. In the course of jobs grabbed up because they were better than nothing with intervals of waiting and scrambling for them, Mary became the double responsibility of Mary and a child; then another child; and spaciousness and ease were altogether gone from Gillingham. They had been gone from a dozen years of restless life.
In the eating of that first dinner in the house of Magome Sageyu an opinion was formed in the mind of Will Adams. A dozen years later he committed it thoughtfully to a sheet of rice paper with a reed pen: "the people of this island of Japon are good of nature, courteous above measure . . ."
Ceremonial stiffness came again, from nowhere, into the bearing of the host and Mitsu when Mitsu rose to go. A lantern was brought for him by one of the daughters, since no man might be abroad by night without advertising himself for any to see, by a light. Another call from Magome—some words including the familiar "An-jin" produced another lantern from the back of the hall, in the same hands that had carried away the pilot's bundle.
Adams followed Magome and the girl with the lantern to a little room at the end of the passage. A sleeping-mat was spread for him, and a coverlet. Smiling some gently silent message of goodness of nature, of courtesy above measure, the girl slid aside a papered panel of the room's side and showed the small cupboard where the contents of Adams's bundle had been set out—his breeches and his already washed and dried shirt, his instruments and two books, his woollen cap, a horn spoon and some English pence.
Adams could say "Thank you"; and he said it slowly, twice. The girl withdrew, and her father smilingly begged that the needle-contemplator would deign to sleep in peace and honourable comfort in a place so poor. Adams recognised the good-night phrase and answered with "Sleeping honourably." To Magome, too—excited a little towards a chuckle by the pilot's speech—Adams said "Thank you."
CHAPTER XIV
SANTVOORT appeared at the house in the morning just as Mitsu was taking Adams with him to the palace. Adams introduced him to his host as the "Hollander" and Santvoort, quite glibly discarding his sandals at the door, found the old man's hand in his sleeve and shook it. For the Dutchman was in high spirits, immensely proud of a new jacket that fitted him amply, cut out and stitched overnight in the household of the kite-maker that lodged him. For it he had given the kite-maker some heavy brass buttons.
"There is no need for the Hollander to come," Mitsu said.
"There is need for him to walk," said Santvoort. "After three weeks aboard. He will wait outside if the Emperor does not require him. He will be quite comfortable sitting in the sun."
"We are guests now, right enough, Will," he said as the three of them turned away from the house. "Something will surely come of it. There is no more of that business of watching us with soldiers and saying us 'Nay' at every turn." He told now of the simple transaction that had given him the coat for buttons. "We could not have done that at the last place. This place is better altogether."
"And well it might be," said Adams. "Mitsu says it is the capital of all the land." He turned to Mitsu. "There would be good merchants here," he suggested, "we could readily sell our cargo."
"Not many merchants," said Mitsu. "Osaka is more the merchant's city. This is a city of soldiers. But as for selling, there will be enough. It is of some selling that the General would see you."
"There-" said Santvoort.
In a mile of walking they had passed carpenters at work in their yards; smiths and weavers and dyers.
"Buying, too, will be easy," said Adams. "There is timber, and the workmen seem good."
It was a trick of their minds, Santvoort's no less than Adams's, that they thought coherently along the alternatives of their destiny without any overlapping of the alternatives themselves. They thought of staying; and in such thinking they accepted the staying and considered it apart from the possibility of anything otherwise. So also when they thought of going they thought of the ways and means only of that going.
Till now, Adams reminded the Dutchman, it was only in the great bridges of Osaka that they had seen timbers that would make a mast.
When they came to the crossing of the canals and moats about the castle itself they saw that in Yedo, too, there was good timber.
They passed sentries who might have been drowsing loafers, drowsing loafers who might have been sentries. Most of the straw-hats tilted up, most of the faces under them cracked into a smile for Mitsu and his charges.
Occupied completely with thoughts of the cargo's market, of masts, of planks, of the twisting of reeds or silk into rope if the country had no hemp, of victualling—and of doing it all at some profit—Santvoort sat down on a stone in the courtyard and Adams went in with Mitsu.
Ieyasu, here, was not the mighty Shogun seated in rich state in a gilded chamber as he had been at Osaka. An older man was with him, and a younger and the three sat together on a mat, talking. There were no formalities beyond a nondescript combination of salute and bow from Adams, who also sat down on the spot indicated by Ieyasu in front of the three.
"He trusts you have found some small comfort in the house of his soldier Magome Sageyu," said Mitsu, who remained standing.
"Aye; thank him," said Adams; "quite comfortable. And I hope he is well."
Thereafter Mitsu became a vehicle that scarcely delayed the speech that passed from one to the other.
Adams wished, said Mitsu, to sell the contents of his ship. Very well. Of the eighteen pieces of ordnance on the Liefde the General would buy sixteen, of which he had need on his walls.
Adams was staggered. Of what use, without ordnance—or with but two pieces—was a ship in seas verminous with Portingals and Spaniards?
Of what use, asked the others quietly, was ordnance on a ship that could not go to sea?
Could not? retorted Adams. The Liefde was a good ship. All he wanted was material, some good workmen and a little time, and he could make her as seaworthy as ever she had been.
There