Portingall" was all he said, looking at the padre's back. "Does he go with you?"
"No," said Adams, "he stays."
As they went down the steps, the priest said, "—Justice in this land is very straight. Repent-"
"I repent already," snorted the Dutchman, "that my knife was idle at my belt before they took it from me." He spat and they walked on, down the hill.
It was a stiff and rough descent for legs still unsure in sea-boots that had stiffened with the brine dried into them. In less than half a mile they sat down by the roadside and pulled off the boots. Their happy retinue of men and women clustered about them to look and to marvel upon the hair on their calves. The appearance, out of the crowd, of men with sword-hilts protruding from their girdles set the marvellers back a few yards without causing them to abate their marvelling. Some natural clown from the crowd came forward with straw sandals, and a peal of laughter recognized his jape; for one hairy foot of either sailor could have been laid upon both sandals to conceal them utterly from view.
The soldiers, however, were bent upon business. One of them shouted into the crowd and the bamboo poles were produced with the plaited seats slung upon them. Adams and Santvoort gratefully sat and rested their beards on their arms folded over their poles. Their boots they never saw again.
At a pier in the harbour they found the galleys that carried them over the Inland Sea to Sakai.
With a shrug of his shoulders the soldier in command of the party allowed both prisoners to be taken aboard the same galley; unarmed, unshod, grey-visaged in the shabby tangle of their beards, they presented no great menace to the half-dozen swordsmen who accompanied them.
The casual retinue that had followed them from the house followed them still, till the staves of petty officials and the poles of boatmen knocked them and pushed them into the solidity of a mob that chattered its farewells to the Old Hairy Ones—An-jin and the Other.
The Old Hairy Ones, for their part, removed the great straw hats which hospitality had thrust upon their heads, and sat 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.
