other and pressing affairs at the moment; but he should have his audience as soon as possible. In the meantime he thought he could provide the lengths of wood that Adams sought, with the line and knives he wanted for fashioning his cross-staff.
The boy brought them next morning, and Santvoort thriftily took the two small ends that Adams cut off from the smoothly planed battens. This action, and the Dutchman's apparently aimless whittling at them, were faintly irritating to the more purposeful Adams. He took the one batten through which he was carving a mortice to slide upon the staff, and went out of the room to do his work at peace in the shade outside.
When the boy came to tell him with smiling chatter and gestures of ravenous eating that a meal was ready for them, the mortice was nearly done. Adams licked and sucked the blister made on his thumb by the slender knife-handle, and went in.
Santvoort was very solemnly collecting together the chips and shavings which he had spent the morning in producing on the floor.
Adams, now that a start had been made towards the objective of measuring angles between stars and the moon, was willing to be a little amiable. But it was Santvoort who was now morose.
Adams therefore ignored him. He drank the bowl of broth and set to work on the rice, prodding at it, coping with it as best he could with the chopsticks.
When he saw that the Dutchman was grinning again he would have asked him what tickled him now, but Santvoort held up his hand for silence and then produced from his shirt, with a gesture of magnificence, two pieces of wood carved and scooped into shapes that were easily recognizable as spoons.
"Permit me, Mineheer Anjy," he said.
Adams saw then that he had been wasting choler on him. "Melchior, you fool," he said, but the Dutchman's good humour had caught him. "If I'd known you had the patience and the skill, I'd have set you to cutting out the mortice in the second cross-piece."
"My patience and my skill are both limitless," said Santvoort, "when it is a matter of making tools to convey food more readily from a full and helpless dish to an empty and lively stomach. When it is a matter of conveying information from a distant star to an empty head, the work is yours. And perhaps it was you that kept us off the crosses, Will. I am but a stranger to these people, but you they seem to know of old, calling you by your name of Anjy."
"It is An-jin they call me," Adams corrected him, "the Japan word for Pilot. Not Anjy. Our old guard told me."
"He shall tell us the Japan word for spoon-maker then," Santvoort grinned. "I, too, must have a name. Now that we have spoons to eat our rice with and Japan to eat it in, all we lack for our complete comfort is—our exact latitude."
"And you'll have that," said Adams, "as soon as you've cut a mortice through the second cross-piece while I, somehow, get the bar marked off."
"Without your proper latitude," the Dutchman said, "you are like a bereaved widow."
The remark moved the thoughts of Adams far away.
"That uncle of yours, Melchior," he said, "—you spoke of me to him so that he will remember?—in a month it will be two years since we sailed, and my wife will be able to claim my wages according to the indenture."
"He will remember," said Santvoort. "He, too, seemed to know you of old, as these Japonians do. As I myself did, now I come to think of it. When old Tim Shotten brought you along in tow that day in your well-named Gravesend, it was as though I was meeting again with some old schoolfellow who had just forgotten me and my language. Why is it, Anjy?"
Adams knew now that huffiness was a silly response to the Dutchman's nonsense. "Probably," he said, "because your brains differ from other men's. But God knows how my wife will get her claim pressed on the company."
The thought, now that he had put it into Dutch words, set up an uneasy stirring in his mind. He had been pondering, till then, the matter of graduating the sticks for his cross-staff; no easy matter since he had neither protractor nor divider but only string and a straight-edge—straight as he could make it with his eye and careful scraping with his knife. The unease made active by Santvoort's casual use of the word "widow" threw the problem into disorder.
His wife was apt, one way or another, to make a mess of that claim. She could not help it; it was no blame to her; but there it was. She could not herself ship to Rotterdam, as he could have shipped, to make her claim on the copy of the indenture he had left with her and explained to her. Nor could he—now that old Timothy Shotten was undoubtedly lost and the bones of Tom Adams his young brother left ashore in Peru —think of any suitable emissary. The kind of vague thought that kept revolving in his mind was the ease with which he himself could have settled the whole matter in a week or within a fortnight . . . and after settling it he would have returned with a free mind to the making of his cross-staff and the reading of his observations.
CHAPTER VII
THERE was more leisure in the atmosphere of his next meeting with Ieyasu. The attitude of the Emperor was more whimsical; his smile had less of meditation and more of geniality than it had had before. Information from his agents and from his own examinings of men and of facts had recently led him to believe that a Southern army opposed to himself would be weak on its right flank, where opinion was stronger for himself. He had seen his genial old friend Matsura Ho-in who could, and assuredly would, strike at the possible enemy's rear with a dauntless company led by other Korean veterans grizzled and scarred as Ho-in himself. . . .
The Pilot, fidgeting and anxious about an armful of books and instruments, amused him. He asked the interpreter why he so urgently wanted them; what was the use of instruments of navigation to a pilot who had no ship?
Adams explained that the charts were wrong; that he wanted to fix upon them the true position of Japan by determining the position of the castle. How, the Emperor asked, could he do that? Adams told the interpreter to mention the instrument he was making out of wood, since the ship's cross-staff was still missing from the collection held by the Emperor. He turned up a page of bearings in the almanac and took the dividers. He tried to make it clear that by using the notches on the disc of the astrolabe he could draw degree-rays that would enable him to graduate his cross-staff; and it was clear that Ieyasu cared not a plum for astrolabes and dividers and globes and compasses; but he cared, peculiarly, for the way Adams conducted himself towards these things and towards himself. He let him talk and gesticulate. He let him draw a circle and divide it into quadrants, showing how an angle of ninety degrees could be accurately arrived at; and in the manner of an elder humouring a child, he pushed the complete heap of things towards Adams.
"Let him climb upon his wall and do his deeds," he said to the interpreter.
Thus they were dismissed again in friendly sort: for the interpreter told him, after more words from his Lord leyasu, that it was well with the ship and his friends, except that two more had died of their sickness. He did not know which two.
For five or six weeks they stayed where they were. The time did not hang unduly heavily upon them, for they were still in need of food and sleep.
Santvoort was the best of companions in convalescence; for he ate as well as he rested, nodding and smiling the slow smile with which he assumed that the morrow should be no worse than yesterday or to-day.
It took the best part of that five or six weeks for them to become fully conscious of their safety. It was not until this consciousness had become established—based, as it was, on nothing but the whimsical smile of a strange, nimble little man— that their minds moved out of their lethargy to speculate upon the future.
Adams could speculate only on the means of adapting the new circumstances to the old plan; for his mind was not of the sort that is easily shaken into a vision of new ideas.
He saw a ship; it was dismasted, battered and sprung—but it remained a ship and the only problem was masts and canvas, pitch and resin and carpenters.
They had brought a cargo of merchandise; and here again the problem was clearly defined—to sell what had not been pilfered and to recover what had; for the Emperor, he kept on telling Santvoort, was fair. Santvoort, however, divined the future