of it had thoughts that mingled together into the single thought of an army; and thoughts that were solitary, incommunicable by word, but active in every daily shift of each man's matching his poor wits against a hard destiny. Every neighbour, every stranger, every friend was a tool for the hazardous cobbling together of a livelihood, for the fabrication of a scheme, the materialisation of an ideal whose material was nought but the conduct of men.
And it was heedless of this storm and its whirls and eddies that the two strangers stood in the shadow of their straw hats looking over the squat roofs of the crazy city of Yedo that was to become Tokyo.
They raised their eyes to the sky and stood without moving; for they beheld above the roofs a dragon. It was scarlet in the light and black in the creases of its shadows; and it lurched and swooped away from a colossal fish.
The monsters circled and manœuvred while the Englishman and the Dutchman watched them in wonder.
They stood poised in the air. They trembled and shook as they sped abreast, further aloft from the earth, till the dragon suddenly stopped and tottered. It writhed in an agony and then tumbled away, sinking slowly and lifeless to earth again, like a corpse trembling on the tide.
The fish soared magnificently upward. . . .
"God!" said Adams. "They can make kites that will answer the helm of a thumbnail at their thread's end a mile away. . . . And they rig their ships square with shutters of wood instead of sails, and with as much answer in them to wind and helm as a gammon of ham."
"They've made us answer to wind and helm right enough," said the Dutchman. Then he shrugged his shoulders. "I'm sorry, Will, for you, with your wife and your home and such like. For me it does not matter. He can't keep us here for ever; and I'd as lief see something of this land. It's been a great way to come, and——"
"Aye," said Adams thoughtfully. "He can't keep us here for ever. I, too, would as soon—as soon——" he glanced, as he hesitated, over roofs and dusty roadways, at the harbour with its rabble of junks and skiffs and rafts of timber. "I'd as soon— I mean, Melchior—if we went home now, we would be going as a failed and tatterdemalion lot; empty-pouched and empty-handed. But when we do go——"
That was all they could say of it; so they walked on.
"The captain will take it in pepper," said Santvoort.
Adams said, "Not he. He's too weary for sneezing. I'll tell him it is good that we stay awhile and fill our pockets; and as good he will take it."
Adams was right. The captain was older than himself by ten or a dozen years, older than Santvoort by twenty-five. His life, ashore and afloat, had been a series of small, successful commands; for a shipmaster was a commander first and a sailor second, since the mere technicalities of sailing were a job for the pilot. Ashore he had commanded details of the coastal garrisons; afloat he had commanded units of a flotilla. His schooling, therefore, was less in the invention of orders than in the taking of them, and handing them on.
Adams and Santvoort found him seated with the surgeon in the courtyard of their house. It was a larger house than Magome's, brighter in the painting of its pillars and, unlike the kite-maker's that lodged Santvoort, neat and uncluttered in the courtyard.
The two Dutchmen, still snobbish with their buckled breeches and cloaks, their woollen hose and leather shoes, sat on a low bench—strange giants where the oaks and pines of the garden's edge raised their gnarled and ancient shapes no higher than the stranger's heads.
Beyond the garden there was a bright knot of men and women and a scramble of children, smiling and chattering and staring.
Adams and Santvoort saluted, and the antic produced a rattle of comment from the onlookers; the word "An-jin" clicked freely in the talk.
"The Emperor sent for me, Captain," Adams said, wasting no time. "We are to stay here a while. A year perhaps." This last statement was no conscious invention. A year, or a little more or a little less, had occurred in his mind as the reasonable period wherein a naked man might clothe himself, might fill his pockets and find some means of returning to the wife and country that claimed him.
The information did not particularly disturb the captain. It was, in fine, an order.
"There is some business done," Adams went on. "His Majesty would place some of our pieces on his walls. They are skilled in the use of ordnance and already have some good pieces of their own casting. Ours will be as well on the walls as in the ship. Besides, Captain, when we get leave to unlade the ship, and trim her, the ordnance will be well out of her. You are to fix a fee for its hire."
The captain thought a few moments. It was scarcely his affair, this business in its details. He supposed, however, that as he was now Admiral, he could not utterly wash his hands of it.
"That is good," he said. "See to it, Mr. Adams, and tell me. See also to the cargo, you and Santvoort, and make a full inventory. And the crew must be held in hand, Mr. Adams. Find their lodging from your interpreter so that, if there be occasion, there can be a muster."
He had had many a company in billets before this. He knew the difficulties, but his very familiarity with them made of the difficulty a vague comfort. "If the lodgings are scattered they must be changed so that word may pass easily from one to another."
Adams did not argue the point. He was well satisfied, for the moment, with the captain's acceptance of the position, and with the surgeon's silence. Any questioning from them would have aggravated the questions at the back of his own mind, questions which he could only answer by dealing with destiny as it was, and not as it was not but might be.
CHAPTER XVI
DESTINY as it was, within the next hour, contained a pressure from Magome at the door of his house, upon Santvoort to step within and eat a meal with himself and Adams.
The Dutchman noticed and told Adams that between the household of his own host, the kite-maker, and this one there was a difference. He did not define it beyond stating that the old soldier was a Cavalero. "And these girls, Will . . ." he said, "—a man's cap comes off to them by nature."
"They are dainty," said Adams.
"Aye, but they are somewhat else, too, than dainty. The bawdy little dancers and singers in Oita were dainty enough. But it was not his cap that a man hastened to remove——"
"They go about their work," Adams said, smiling at the sisters as they carried their trays, "like the edge of a blade."
"Like moths, Will," said the Dutchman, "or butterflies— with their great wings of the bow folded over their rumps."
This exhausted the poetry in the guests. They looked away from the blade-edges—the moth-butterflies—to the father of them whose skull's toughness had once prevented his brains from falling in two. The old man entertained them by smiling and pointing to every object within sight, slowly telling them the name of it and smiling while the Englishman and the Dutchman repeated the word after him. They ate their meal to the last morsel on every dish. "Please God," said Santvoort, "our guts will shrink in time, or I shall go hungry for a year—if year it is to be."
After the meal they sauntered from the house of the soldier to the house of the kite-maker, and Adams saw in an instant what Santvoort had meant by the difference between the two. Dignity was utterly lost here in geniality. Santvoort was already hail-fellow-well-met. His introduction of Adams to his host was forestalled by the craftsman's smile and quiet hailing of Adams as "An-jin." Children played about him as he worked, crawling in the litter of paper around him, sticking their plump fingers in his pot of paste, bouncing away from the cut he occasionally gave with a slender bamboo on a retreating stern.
He worked as only a genius can work, attending with half his mind to his craft and with the other half to his guests, his children and to every passer-by in the road that bounded his workshop. He split his bamboo and pared the slender wands with a single sweep of his knife. He was making, at the moment, nothing so magnificent as the dragon and great pike that had fought, thread against thread, that morning. Jobs like that were special commissions for some leisurely merchant or soldier who was a master in