War-Lords. The Bushido—the code of the Samurai—gave him his guide to immediate action wherein the infallible standard of right and wrong was benevolence of conduct only. Buddha and Confucius and the Bushido agreed for the moment that the assassin was not a means to Ieyasu's end.
Thus leyasu himself had come to the South. He had come with a retinue sufficient to defend his person and to maintain his dignity; but the work before him was the work which he must do alone. It was to see men and talk with them; to see them singly in quiet speech—out of scores and out of hundreds and out of thousands—and to conclude from a glance, from a word, from a silence or from the mysterious something or nothing that holds men together in friendship or thrusts them apart in enmity, whether this man was a well-wisher, or evil.
In such a mood he was, and tautened to a pitch of particular alertness, when the two sailors were brought before him, bathed and shaved as clean as boys.
The familiar padre standing at his right hand clamoured for their death, seeing in them the enemies of God and Church and the ruinators of a possible Holy Empire in the East, and of the Eastern trade. leyasu saw his very proper vehemence of spirit. Priests were familiar to him. Looking at the strange sailors, he meditated upon the fact that the power of the priests and of their Church was a mighty power indeed in the South—it was the power which Hideyoshi had encouraged to grow so that it extinguished the might of the Buddhist monasteries. Seeing the greatness of this power, and feeling the weight of it that could so easily go into the scales against him, leyasu saw nevertheless in the sailors—in their glance or their speech or in their silence —whatever it was that caused him to dismiss the padre with courtesy and benevolence and full hospitality, but without satisfaction: and to have Adams and Santvoort moved to a better lodging.
CHAPTER VI
"So Anjy," Santvoort said as they followed the escort to their new lodging which stood apart from the barrack-like group of houses under the walls. "So ... we are his Lordship's guests."
It was the escort who answered. "Yes," he said. "I no longer attend you; but I will come from time to time to see that you want for nothing."
"And what are we to do?" asked Santvoort.
"What you will," said the other. "You may not open doors. But all doors already open you may enter, with welcome. And those who wait upon you you may command to do your bidding; for they are not soldiers but servants."
He left them at their new lodging's door.
They inspected their house, seeing the tub of water which would be hot from coals in a cylinder in the middle of it whenever they should be minded to take a bath. They saw a man stooping busy over pots and pans on the kitchen hearth, one who smiled and indicated that whenever they should clap their hands together he would come. In the cupboards of the centre room they found cotton drawers and tunics, straw-hats, paper napkins and sleeping coverlets.
"It looks," said Santvoort, "as though they expect us to stay." From the door they could see a battlemented wall and a postern manned by an armed sentry.
Adams considered the landscape; it was the pale ochre of bare trampled earth in the courtyard, the warm grey of the wall and its shadow, toothed into the sky with tufts of herbage; and above it the empty distance of the sky.
"Yes," said he. "But there are steps up the side of that wall, Melchior."
"Are you minded to run away then?" asked the Dutchman. "For me it is sleep. Hours and hours and nights and days of sleep since we are not to be crossed, as per the padre. Does the thought not make you sleepy, too, instead of looking for ways to climb through or over a wall a mile thick and a league high?"
"Aye, it makes me sleepy. And there is no running away. But I could make an observation from that wall-top these nights while the sky is good. If I had seen the cross-staff with the Emperor I would have asked him for it."
"When he had given us our lives," said Santvoort, "you would have asked him for your cross-staff?"
Adams shrugged his shoulders. "I do not think he ever had a serious mind to kill us. He is no slaughterer of men. He had no cause."
"Cause! He had the padre's word and the evidence of those two bastards that we are thieves and enemies."
"He had our evidence that they are rogues and liars. Yes, I would have asked him for the cross-staff to make my observations. I'll ask him yet. It may come to him as the other things came—God knows how. And I'll ask him if he has my almanac. I'll ask our little talker. He is a fair man."
"Fair!" said Santvoort smiling. "Fair indeed he is. Every man is fair who did not set us upon those crosses."
Adams said, "I was confident all the time that they were not for us."
"Oh, you-" Santvoort snorted. "Confident! It is easy to talk now when you have had the Emperor's word; and set yourself up. Confident—but you were confident that you could sail the world, and bring a ship round it to Japan!"
"And, by God!" Adams exclaimed, staring at the fellow incredulously, "didn't I?"
"Yes—you did indeed——" Santvoort laughed. "Was it you, Will, that brought us? Or was it the sea and the winds and the tides that shook us and drove us and dismasted us and drifted us into an ants' nest of fishermen and gibbering monkeys who towed us into a harbour? It was you, I suppose, who spared us our lives too?"
Adams consigned him to hell and again consigned him to hell. "Aye, to hell! and to sleep!" He strutted off with what dignity he could in the unfamiliar straw sandals, and paced about the courtyard in a fume, cursing the Dutchman for the kind of stupidity that so well suited the squareness of his cropped head and the way his large ears were adjusted to it— at an angle of some seventy degrees.
In his fuming and mumbling to himself in his own tongue it did not occur to him as any particularly worthy or tremendous achievement that he had brought the boat to Japan. But it was a fact so self-evident that the denial of it by anyone was enough to make anyone else, who was not a fool, angry. And Santvoort's impudent questioning of the other fact set him mumbling with the same indignation; for it, too, was one of the patently self-evident kind. If Adams had not got them off with their lives, who—or what—had? Santvoort himself— perhaps and indeed! Santvoort standing inert and stupid like a sack of damp powder that might—or might not—blow up! Then he remembered how the oaf had jibed at him, too, for his contention that the other Dutchman, Lintschoten, had done peculiar and fantastic things to the position of Japan on his charts.
This, at any rate, he knew he would be able to make quite clear even to Santvoort. An Emperor who had been able to get globes and charts and some books out of the rabble that had filched them from the boat would, by the same powerful and mysterious means, be able to get the other books, the cross-staff, the astrolabe and ship's compass. Or, given enough time and a length or two of marlin and some straight laths of wood and a knife, he himself would make a cross-staff sufficient for his purpose. . . . And if that would not get facts into the thick head of the (now, no doubt, snoring) Hollander, nothing would.
That was the way things went between them for some days, now that the weight of apprehensiveness was lifted from their minds, and their bodies were growing sound again.
Adams tried and tried again to draw fire from the drowsy Dutchman, to rouse him to the point of having the matter properly out; but Santvoort's fire was not to be drawn. The fellow merely smiled at Adams with a smile that was an irritating grin, enjoying some joke so private and of such a kind that Adams was sure he would continue to nurse it to himself and to enjoy it even when there should be evidence to prove him a pig-head and a fool.
So he consigned him to hell again, joke and all, in English and in growling Dutch and in Portuguese. He left him behind —excommunicating him from his thoughts even when he persisted in putting on sandals and straw hat and accompanying him—and went about the courtyards of the inner castle and the barracks, looking vaguely about him for the materials out of which he could make the cross-staff. In the end, the volume of conversation he addressed to the boy who attended them resulted in a visit from their interpreter. Adams wanted to see the Emperor again to ask for his books and instruments. The Emperor,