"For, when in doubt do nothing, is the soundest wisdom that I have ever learned."
"Doubt," said Adams. "I am in no doubt. I will follow no man who lies and schemes counter to the Emperor. He would have crossed us, but the Emperor spared us."
They drank another round of the wine the padre had brought them, and another to empty the second bottle.
They began to see their rejection of the offer in the light of an adventure, and talked of it brightly.
"In doubt do nothing, according to the surgeon," Adams said, "but there is much we can, and will do. We will discover the whole plot to Mitsu and his men." Santvoort opened the third bottle. He filled the mugs, and Adams went on. "Let the boat come; Mitsu and others will board it instead of us. The pistols and knives will prove it—and the carrying of arms is itself a powerful offence."
They grew loud in their talk after their months of perplexed silence.
Adams was as lusty as the best of them. "We'll show them!" he shouted. "The Emperor shall see who are his prowling enemies, and who his friends. Drink to him, lads!" They raised their mugs and stood absurdly ceremonious with their shoulders bent under the cuddy ceiling, steadying themselves with a hand on the table.
"The Emperor!" Adams gave them the toast, pompous enough for a Lord Mayor's banquet. "leyasu! our friend!"
The others mumbled after him, "The Emperor," and bent their knees to straighten their throats to the heel-taps in their mugs.
It was the drink that had brought lustiness and final lucidity to the words of Adams. It was assisted, possibly, by his luck.
For at a knot-hole in the planking of the cuddy's dim ceiling was the flat, neat little ear of Mitsu, where it had been for three hours.
For three hours the swordsman who was also acrobat and the trustiest of Ieyasu's secret service men had been stewing in his sweat between the timbers of the poop deck and the planks of the cuddy ceiling. He had not spent ten minutes on the ship before finding that the removal of a small locker-side above the tiller would give him a place where an eye and an ear placed alternately at the knot-hole would tell him much that his Lord would be interested to know.
CHAPTER XII
HE listened with the blandest innocence when Adams and Santvoort disclosed to him next morning the padre's plot.
"It's proof," Adams said hotly at the end of the tale, "proof, man! What more do you want than a promise of firearms and blades?"
"Ieyasu's judgment is his proof," said the other. Then he grinned. "As you have cause to know." His superiority to them both in taking this information as neither a joke nor a disaster exasperated Adams. It seemed that speech itself was no way of communicating with these people. He cursed in English and in Portuguese and then said, "If you won't tell the Emperor, I will."
"Naturally I will tell him," said Mitsu. He grinned again, and this time Adams felt that communication was not so impossible. Mitsu straightened his torso and his throat and held up an imaginary mug and said, pompously, in as good Dutch as he could make of it: "Ieyasu, our friend." He staggered away a pace or two with a seaman's unsteady pace and then collapsed in laughter. It was minutes before they could get anything out of him but explosions, and Adams stood by in profound dismay.
Foreground and background were an enigma as vast as reefs and shoals, as rocks and mountains and stars when a man had neither line nor staff, neither compass nor tables wherewith to sound and plot them. Imperturbability could make a meaningless image of a face perched above the nimbleness of a leopard. Laughter could convulse the face and paralyse the body—the gurgling and giggling as of a tickled two-year-old. The secrets in a man's heart were stifled because other men could not comprehend his talk; and a man could keep no secrets because the very walls had ears. . . .
"An-jin," said Mitsu when his laughter was spent, leaving him weak but very happy. "An-iin, it is lawful for a soldier to punish any man carrying weapons. To-night we will make a game."
The game was a simple one—simple as Mitsu's laughter, and was as simply played.
The boat drew alongside two hours before midnight. The lantern produced by the soldier who answered the boatman's hail suddenly went out. It was in pitchy darkness that the four men with their gifts from the padre climbed up, and still in pitchy darkness that four men lowered themselves from the port into the boat, and the boat shoved off. In darkness and in silence the boatman plied his oars till a thin bamboo whistled in the air and came to sudden rest across his shoulders. His howls were lost in the laughter of Mitsu and his three colleagues as they beat him and then tossed him over the boat side to swim for it, or sink.
They came back to the ship where lights had been lighted and brought aboard four small pistols and powder-horns, four bags of balls and four neat poniards. The fact that the four present-bearers had disappeared, that Adams was recovering from a kick in his stomach and Santvoort was massaging the back of his neck were grounds for fresh laughter; for Adams had scorned Mitsu's idea that he and Santvoort and two or three of the crew could not hold four Japs.
The parcels contained wine and dumplings and oranges and three volumes of religious writings. Adams, who took no unnecessary risks in matters of religion, laid the books away in his locker, and went out again—taking one bottle of the wine—to Mitsu.
He still could not believe that this coup was nothing but a theme for a joke. He found, in time, that Mitsu was able to be a little serious over it, but only because he wanted reassurance that he had not technically interfered with the Jesuits.
The next day this anxiety seemed to grow upon him and he left them.
They saw no more of the padre nor heard from him. They made no further attempt at barter, but walked on the beach. They were followed by a soldier, and the soldier was followed by the crowd of idlers that grew a little smaller every day as the novelty wore off the hairy ones.
In a fortnight Mitsu returned. He came aboard to say that he had despatches for the Daimio; he asked Adams to see to things so that the ship might be moved, and in three days the hulk of the Liefde was rolling to the tide again and gently pitching to the pull of the skiffs that towed her weight behind them. Adams stood at the tiller, staring at the binnacle which was still empty and of no use, as he himself was useless. A cripple, an idiot or a child could have done his hand's turn of swinging the bows to the cables that trundled the dead ship after the team of skiffs; southwards first by east, and then east by north they tugged her. The wake they made for her passage was like the troubled ghost of the wake she herself had left when life had still been in her; when there had been spars and stumps of mast and rags of gasping canvas; when there had been compass and astrolabe and tables, and in Adams wit enough and stomach enough to use them; wit enough and stomach enough to fly with skill from the fury of sea and winds which they had no means of facing.
For all its helplessness and needlessness, aboard the hulk that lurched, lifeless and passive, after the skiffs of lusty little oarsmen, the Liefde's crew was in good heart. They were all well again from their distemper—all of them that had not died. The underlings had been ragged and penniless; but sailors did not care. The Delight-Valley of the town of Oita had been a small one, but it had been full of laughter. The Liefde's men had been jolly freaks as they swaggered ashore in their rags, and they found great hospitality. The girls who were good to them were smaller and daintier than their experience had ever before embraced; but they had not been sharks for money, and so the crew had no great disaffection for Japan.
As for the four who were the masters of these men, they had given themselves the illusion that this sojourn was now an adventure of their own choosing. In the first day they restored sailing-discipline among the ragamuffins who spent their watches in dreams of the glamour they had already known in the lantern-like houses of Oita, of the further ease and splendour that lay beyond the horizon. The crew were sailors still; their preoccupation for the voyage was the luck they should find at the end of it; and they were as nondescript a lot as any brigand could have commanded. Hospitality had led to the exchange of gifts and tokens. There was neither a button nor a buckle left among them. Some were still bearded—shaggy or neatly trimmed—others had been jocularly shaved