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 the handling of a kite. Now he was turning out only the cheap small things that children and hobble-de-hoys would fly at the festival. Splitting a bamboo for spine or ribs, he would run his blade along it, removing shavings fine as silk. Screwing up an eye he would look along its length. He would balance it, in one gesture, on his blade, correcting some hair-wide fault. He defended the heap of finished pieces against the happy children with a flick of the material in his hand.
In the yard behind him poles were set up and woven about with silk drying in the sun; the fine thread had been imperceptibly coated with powdered flint in a paste whose recipe was his own and his darkest secret.
He, too, had seen the tumbled drifting away of the dragon that morning, the swoop and triumphant ascent of the pike. It was he who had supplied the thread to the pike-owner; and he was happy.
Adams examined some of his finished work in a pile, held down by stones upon the corners.
Santvoort improved the hour by selecting a few odd sticks of bamboo from the master's scrap-heap and whittling and shaving them into a supply of tooth-picks.
Old Magome came out of his house next door and walked past the kite-maker's yard. Loiterers made way for him as he stepped along, stilted and portly, on his high sandals, the sword hilts thrust out of his paunch like the antennae of some great insect.
He had only a short word for the kite-maker who paused in his work and in his incomprehensible chatter to smile at the old soldier and to greet him. The old soldier, it was clear enough, was in no genial mood at seeing his guest, the pilot, squatting in the rubbish of a kite-maker's yard. The kite-maker's geniality and vivacity were quite undiminished by the snub. He smiled broadly with admiration after the stiff and pompous old man, and he conveyed to Adams and Santvoort that the admiration had a sound foundation: he took an unsplit bamboo lath and whipped it out of his left hand in the manner of a sword being whipped out of a scabbard; he fought an enemy with it, defeating him in half a dozen passes, giving the coup de grace to the bottom of the infant
