down under the galley's awning.
Their suspension in the vacuum between two worlds was now complete. Stout and lusty Protestants both, they meditated, no doubt, upon the wrath of God and His Infinite Mercy; for it was all they had on the asset side. It was valuable in that it would serve them in either event; whether, that is to say, they lived or died.
This question, for the twenty days of their passage of the Inland Sea, appeared to them as an open one, save only for the sinister shadow of the padre. He alone, it seemed, in all that country had known not how to smile.
CHAPTER III
AT Sakai they landed, and took the road again. After ten miles of it, when their bowels, despite the steadiness of their gazing eyes, faintly shook at the message from the crosses, they thought again of the padre. His talk, they saw, had not been empty when he had talked of death for Pirates and Robbers and Enemies to the Majesty of Japan. Death, which was that whole rotting avenue, was wide enough to embrace more than the malefactors specified by the priest. It was wide enough to embrace just and unjust alike; wide as storm or pestilence. They were nauseated, but not afraid; and this simply because fear was a thing forgotten. They saw the odds and accepted them. Besides this, their minds were static, numbed by the immense fact that of a whole world they had come to the end.
Of the city of Osaka Captain John Saris had a good deal to say thirteen years later; but Saris, so far from being at the dead end of any world, was at the well-omened beginning of a new one. There was a caparisoned horse at his disposal, a halberdier by way of personal body-guard. There was, too, another Englishman with him who made of his journey a great matter, an affair of comfort and of consequence.
"We found Osaka," says this Saris, "to be a very great Towne, as great as London within the walls, with many faire Timber bridges of a great height, serving to passe ower a river there as wide as the Thames at London . . . hauing a castle in it, maruellous large and strong, with very deepe trenches about it, with many drawe bridges, with gates plated with iron. The Castle is built all off Freestone, with Bulwarks and Battlements, with loop-holes for small shot and arrows, and divers passages to cast stones upon the assaylants. The walls are at the least sixe or seven yards thicke . . ."
It was through a postern in the inmost of these same walls that Adams and Santvoort were carried to an outhouse in the castle yard. Within minutes they were at ease, reclining in a great tub of hot water. The bulky pocket-compass that had spent some years in Adams' breeches-pocket was now on a cord around his neck. At a small tub a few yards from them their shirts and breeches were being scrubbed and whacked.
The warm water, the cool shade of afternoon, the fact that nimbly living men again outnumbered corpses and gobbets of flesh adhering to crosses reduced the two to the frame of mind wherein curious ceremonial is accepted as normal routine.
From the bath they went to mats whereon blind men gently pounded and kneaded and massaged their spent muscles. Other men with sharply shining blades in their hands approached them. They did not cut their throats, but clipped their hair and shaved their faces. Others again gave them millet-broth and rice. Thereafter they lay upon the mats, with roughly-woven coverlets, and slept.
At twilight they were roused and before them were their dried shirts and breeches. The scouring at the tub had brought back some of the old lustre to codpieces that had flaunted, in another world, virility. Straw sandals had been plaited for them that were not a jest, but fitted their feet.
Bare-shanked—for hose were things of the past—and bareheaded, for it was now evening, they walked among soldiers towards "the great King of the land."
The court, Adams himself noticed at the time, was "a wonderful costly house, gilded with gold in aboundance." He had learned from the soldiers, the boatmen and the bearers the name by which he was known; so that when someone in the chamber said "An-jin" he stood forward in the Presence.
Before him, in the light of suspended lanterns, on a low cushioned divan, sat Tokugawa Ieyasu. Adams saw him first as a robe of simple magnificence draped upon a lithe body, hands folded upon feet in white socks below two long sword-hilts. The head was shaved, to make of the face a smooth mask that extended from the chin to the extreme top of the cranium. The lips were parted in a faint smile—not the smile of the whole nation that clicked and twinkled upon every passing triviality, but the smile of a sage that hovered, immobile, about the contemplation of a dream. The eyes looked out upon Adams with the nation's alert interest in whatever new thing was brought before them, but behind this bright glint was a shadow also; and the shadow swallowed into its unfathomable depths whatever lively image the glint and sparkle brought to it.
Soldier to the extent of nimble wrestler and swordsman-acrobat; philosopher, statesman, economist and dreamer; man of no fear, no mercy, no hate—leyasu, sitting on his low divan in the lantern-light, had troubles enough of his own as he looked out, through the depths of his dream, upon his latest prisoners.
What he saw was a large, cumbersome frame in a newly-patched, newly-washed shirt and coarse, threadbare breeches. It was not poised lightly and easily as the bodies to which his sight was accustomed, but was planted clumsily over slightly splayed, prodigiously hairy shanks and wide feet. Forearms, again prodigiously hairy, were folded across the chest, and above them, between the flaps of the open shirt, in a tangle of brown hair like the pelt of a young fox, hung the execrable workmanship in ebony and tortoise-shell, of Adams' compass-case. Youth had been restored to the pilot's face by the meticulous shaving of it, and by the clipping that had set the hair standing upright on his head. He appeared, in the soft light of the lanterns, instead of a battered and spent seaman of thirty-six, more like a sick young man of twenty-five or thirty.
The eyes of the two met and for a few moments were engaged in scrutiny. Adams looked into eyes that saw more than any other two eyes in that, or perhaps any, country. And they, in their turn, looked upon and recognised—a possibility.
"An-jin . . ." The Shogun mused aloud.
Adams had no thought wherewith to answer the thoughtful summons, if summons it was. Instead of thought he made a gesture. He slipped the cord necklace over his head, stepped forward and held it out with the clumsy pendant compass, to leyasu.
The Shogun took it from him.
Adams stepped back, stripped of his last possession—for his shirt and his breeches were no more a worldly possession than the skin on his back or the hair on his chest.
The gesture may have been a happy fluke that counted for much by virtue of its symbolic value. It was a gift, given with obvious freedom and spontaneity; it was useless enough to Adams now between walls of freestone six or seven yards thick with an avenue of corpses beyond. It was the only articulate answer he had to the speaking of his name—Pilot. leyasu spoke to one who stood beside him. The man left them and returned immediately with a silk coat which he held, for Adams to thrust his arms into the loose sleeves. A second coat was handed by the bearer to Santvoort where he stood behind Adams.
So far none but the Shogun had spoken, so that speech seemed to be a thing of the past and neither Adams nor Santvoort uttered either thanks or comment.
From their dull and despondent apathy this movement and pantomime braced them into a moment of suspense. But the faces about them were impassive as ever. Impassive was leyasu with his smile; impassive the guards at the door; impassive the coat-bringer, impassive the man who had sat or stood within sword's thrust of them for every moment that they had been within the walls. Nothing, from the impassivity of them all, was likely to happen. And nothing did happen.
A nod from the Shogun on his divan produced a movement and a beckoning from their attendant. Adams and Santvoort turned, in their new coats, to follow him out. Before they went, however, the eye of Adams again met the eye of leyasu.
In their outhouse they sat and talked, while within a yard of them was their attendant, nimble as a leopard and still as an image. His presence was the presence of two swords girded to a power like the power lurking in a cloud that can split the stillness of the sky with a blade of lightning.
They talked though there was still nothing, or next to nothing, that they could say.
Adams