to release the lid. He turned to Adams for the money. Adams very solemnly handed him the paper and the writing-brushes. The old man counted the marks, large and small. Below them he wrote his initials or his signature—smiling his approval of the astuteness of the depositor—and handed the receipt back to Adams.
They laid the cylinder on the wrappings that covered whatever other treasures the chest already held, and he pressed the lid back into position.
He took Adams with him to replace the chest under the floor-boards in the room where his sleeping-mat was spread.
He called to the girls as they went back to the other room, and Magdalena followed a few moments after them with drinking cups and rice spirit of the kind that had opened the first dinner.
He was in the highest of humours even before they had sat down to drink; and after two cups of the liquor the words in his breast and his throat that it was useless to utter, produced a discomfort that Adams could see.
Adams, sashless now and pocketless, fumbled for some housing for his receipt. He moved, finally, to stuff it between his skin and the waist of the tight drawers he wore. A sudden, surprised clucking of disapproval on the part of Magome ended in a contemptuous guffaw. He leaned forward and thrust his hand against his guest's bare stomach and ripped the flimsy drawers away, splitting first one leg of them and then the other with two neat movements. Swearing or grumbling or praying, he twisted the rags into a ball between his hands and shouted through the door.
Adams stuffed the receipt into his sock and was, he thought, ready for anything.
He was surprised, however, to see Bikuni in the doorway, listening to a dramatic discourse of which the subject was the rags in the old soldier's hand and—as obviously—that section of himself which the rags had recently adorned. Very humbly the girl took her scolding for the outrage that a guest so honourably distinguished as the Needle-watcher should have gone breeched in the vile garment of a workman or coolie. . . .
Bikuni took the rags from her father and bowed and withdrew. While she was gone, Magome struttingly showed Adams that what the man of any distinction wore beneath his jacket and his sash and his robe and his tunic under-robe was, magnificently, nothing.
The girl returned, and Magome took from her a sash and folded hakama—the loose, skirt-like pantaloons with a thin board in their waist at the stern, wherein a gentleman sometimes walked abroad, wearing them over and not under his robes. He gestured Bikuni towards Adams with the large gesture of gift-bestowing.
Adams took the things and thanked her.
The new sash he wound about his waist, deftly, and exactly as he had learned to do from Mitsu.
Magome smiled and nodded and clucked his approval of the Pilot's skill. He stepped forward to pat the sash and straighten a fold in it; and he adjusted the overlappings of robe and tunic. Then he stood back, caressing the sheathed marvellous blades in his own sash, sad at the thought that in the sash of the Needle-watcher there were none.
From some shadow of ceremony and ritual about them as they dined, and from the cool feeling, one against the other, of his dramatically unbreeched hams, the Needle-watcher knew that he had taken a step with regard to his destiny. The geniality of his host told him while they were both still sober as judges that the step was all to the good; but it told him nothing of its direction.
Magome was generous with his meagre store of wine that night; they drank of it again after the meal; and Adams went to his mat and his coverlet in a mist that glowed with the warmth of hospitality—till it was a black, impenetrable fog.
The fog, he realised, was the language. And even a needle-watcher had nought to do in a fog but hold a steady course till he had got through it, or till it lifted.
CHAPTER XX
THIS fact remained clear in his mind the next morning from the general tumble of the night's ideas, clear and solid as Magome's receipt and the folded pantaloons that were added to his possessions.
He advanced towards his fog-watching on his first encounter with Magome. He confronted him with the writing-brush and ink and a paper napkin and tried to make it clear that he wanted to learn to write his name of Needle-watcher, An-jin. The old man shuffled so that Adams thought his meaning was missed. "Magome, then," he said, "Magome Sageyu." He would have explained himself by producing the receipt with the signature, but Magome readily took the brush. He scorned the napkin, however, and produced a small sheet of paper from the writing box, after economically passing over several slightly larger ones. Good paper, Adams perceived, was not to be trifled with to the extent of using a large piece when a small one would do.
Magome wrote his name and Adams tried him again with An-jin; but the old man, admitting no defeat, called Bikuni. She wrote the signs, or drew the pictures that were the signature of Adams—and it was clear that hers was fine writing while her father's was a scrawl. She wrote her own name for Adams next, and then the name of Magdalena.
But it was many days before the fog began to lift.
He had enough Dutch for fluent conversation with Santvoort; enough Portuguese for a rough understanding, and a little Spanish. These he had acquired from the simple fact that the human ear is permanently open. He had taken no particular steps about the matter. Words had tumbled into his ears and fixed themselves in his brain to fit themselves to a skeleton of idiom and of thought that was the same for all of them.
But the Japanese language was no language at all. Xavier, studying it with the devotion of a scholar and the patience of a saint, gave it as his balanced opinion that the tongue of Japan was Satan's masterpiece of a device for keeping a people in ignorance of the works and the mercy of God. It served, at any rate, to keep the bewildered Adams in ignorance of the thoughts of Magome, the old pensioned soldier, and the thoughts of Bikuni, his daughter.
Magome saw in the Pilot a chance such as he had never seen before; and Bikuni, in the most accurate sense of ballad and romance, was in love with him.
Magome was, first and last and all the time, the phenomenon unique in a unique society for which "gentleman" was a weak and colourless word. An Englishman of leisure appeared in due course in Japan. A man of even his resources in the matter of accurate terms and words nicely chosen (if spelt slap-dash) was stumped by the phenomenon of such as Magome. The word he found for them at last was Cavalero.
Some forty years before the arrival of Adams at the house of Magome, an argument in the street of a Southern village had produced a headless trunk in the gutter, the wound upon the head of Magome and—just as the blood from it was blinding him and his senses were tottering—a second corpse, the younger brother of the first one.
It was then, by the luck of good soldiers, the hour of dusk.
A servant carried Magome to a boat; for he who had killed, except an enemy of his Lord in battle, must either cut his belly or fly.
The times, on the whole, were easy ones for a swordsman of any repute. Gentlemen, such as Magome, exiled by an immutable law from their own province, became "Ronin." They were the focus, if they were worth it, of a vow of vengeance; but they found employment enough and a soldier's ration in practically any province that appealed to them, so long as their swords remained good.
Only twice in the course of the forty years had Magome been constrained to move on again from his adopted provinces— when the vendetta (duly and officially registered with the Notary) had developed as far as the crises which Magome faced with his usual skill. It was now twenty-six years since there had been any crisis or any menace; and the vendetta was probably forgotten.
