Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 14

CHAPTER V

THE next morning they were a little shy of each other, for their ecstasies of speculation had carried them further than the bounds of seemliness as these bounds appeared in the light of day. They were not given time, however, to adjust their relationship to their embarrassment, for they had only bathed and eaten when the escort told them they were to go again before the Shogun.

"We'll be shaved, Will," Santvoort suggested. "We'll show him a cleaner face than the padre's."

He crackled the stubble on his chin and asked the escort for the barber.

When they had been shaved—to the eyelids, ears and inside the nostrils so that only eye-brows remained—they followed across the outer yard and then through inner yards and arrived finally into a room where they had not been before. It was startling at first, because it was the only room they had entered in Japan with all its walls of masonry. Built in the fortification of one of the inner ramparts it had the aspect of a large prison cell with a door of bronze-covered timber, and was lighted only by lanterns.

Ieyasu was seated before a writing-desk studying what turned out to be the pair of brass globes from the Liefde. Beside the globes were the ship's log-book, some papers, Adams's dividers and a roll of charts.

"Look, Melchior," said Adams, and the two smiled. Once again in the mellow light that played on the familiar objects that had been blotted from memory by the apathy of sickness and despair, the intimacy of hope was again seemly.

The escort took instructions from the Emperor and then said, "Speak, An-jin. Tell him."

The questions he asked appeared to be mere formality. He had had answers to them all the day before and Ieyasu seemed to pay no attention to the translated replies. He was concentrated upon the brass globes and upon the two pale men. His tongue asked one question—some seeming triviality such, as whence or why they had come—and he got a straight answer in words; but his eyes and his knitted brows asked another to which the answers were not so straight or clear.

Adams was given a writing-brush and ink-tablet from the desk, and a sheet of paper. He scribbled a map of all the world as he knew it, starting from Holland and a little cross that was his own country, showing the coasts of the enemies, Portugal and Spain. He plotted the course Southward and Westward, Southward and Westward again, then North and again West, touching in the coasts as they had touched them on that two-year-long journeying till it ended in the Emperor's own Japan and the stone-girt room wherein he now expounded the way.

When he had done and laid down his brush, wiped his brow on his hand and his hand on the worn weft of his breeches, leyasu the soldier, the designer and the dreamer had found some answer to the question asked not by words but by his gaze and by the knitting of his brows.

Adams met his gaze and smiled; for there was a nearness in the gaze for a moment that bridged the accidental silence of strange speech.

Santvoort had followed the plotting of the course and the exposition so that when they were done he, too, stood back as though the completed task had been his also. He saw the interchange of glances and saw therein some glint of approval that gave him confidence.

"Ask him, then," he said quickly to the interpreter-escort; "ask his Lordship if we may do our business and go."

Adams, too, in the same moment, had leapt upon the same thought. But Adams, instead of tumbling into speech with the question, had paused.

He did not ask the question.

In his silence his gaze steadied upon leyasu, and he continued to smile.

The interpreter put his question and received first a pause and then an answer. He gave it to them, slowly as leyasu himself had spoken slowly. The address of it seemed mostly for Adams.

"It is a poor country upon which you have chanced," he said. "Its hospitality is meagre and shabby. Nevertheless, such as it is, it is yours. You are his Lordship's guests."

He bowed before leyasu and they also bowed; for the doorkeeper was swinging open the door and they were being conducted out through it into the twilit passage and the sunlight beyond. leyasu had made his guess; for guessing was his occupation and his sole preoccupation now. His greatest faculty was that of assessing men; of forming a quick opinion that this man was a keeper of faith while the other, possibly, was not. It was for the purpose of exercising this faculty that he was now at Osaka instead of three hundred miles away in his fortress court of Yedo.

For two years he had searched his country from its one horizon to the other for a peer, and found none; and he was now preparing to exterminate a rival.

For a generation and a half of men the Mikado had been confined in the sacred retirement of Kioto which was to last, undisturbed, for three centuries. For those three centuries the ruler of the country was a military dictator, the Shogun— generalissimo. So absolute was he, and so negligible (and revered) the Mikado, that foreigners so intelligent and truth-seeking as Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, as business men and solid sailors from Portugal and Spain, recognised the Shogun as "Emperor"; and an Englishman, thirteen years later, described the Mikado as "thould Pope of all Japon."

The first of the ruling Shoguns, Nobunaga, cut his belly at the successful treachery of an underling Lord when leyasu was a brilliant and courageous soldier of thirty-eight. Eight years later leyasu was appointed by Hideyoshi, the second of the Shoguns, as governor of the Eastern Provinces, whose turbulence and hardihood had brought about the death of Nobunaga.

Hideyoshi, the second Shogun, before his death appointed leyasu president of a board that was to act as regent for his infant son. The infant son and his mother leyasu placed in retirement, for the obvious successor of Hideyoshi was not any possible board or council but the president, leyasu. As governor of the Eastern Provinces he had held a court at Yedo, and it was from Yedo that he proposed to rule Japan, It seemed the lesser of two immediate evils, the better of two chances. In Yedo and the North he was strong. He knew the gruffer type of Lord and vassals that he had there subdued. Already his system was pretty well established, of peopling his court with hostages and governing the eight wild provinces through the hostage-givers; either the provincial Daimio himself served at Court while his son governed the province, or the son was at Court—with a sound spy in the shape of a rival on his right hand and a possible enemy on his left—while the Daimio governed the province. So the North and East had for two years been in the hollow of his hand while the South, for the same time, had been a growing problem. The memory of Hideyoshi's regard for him had made his name great enough in the South; but now the memory of Hideyoshi himself was being utilised by an enemy to undermine the greatness of the name. Ieyasu's governor of the South was Ishida Mitsunari, a man admirable in every respect save that he was Ieyasu's enemy. No man knew whether, in his heart, it was for himself that this Ishida Mitsunari wanted a power unshadowed by the might of leyasu, or whether it was in accordance with the memorable will of Hideyoshi that he was proclaiming to the Lords of the South how leyasu was distorting this will for his own ends, overshadowing the unlimited power of the board of Regents with his own usurped power, setting at nought the edict of their dead Lord Hideyoshi that his infant son should in fact, as in spirit, be Shogun.

The infant, moreover, and his mother were in the South also, a focus for the loyalty and enthusiasm of the anti-Ieyasu party.

It was in the variety of the party that Ieyasu's problem lay. It was in the South that the words and works of at first Xavier and his proselytes, and later of the Franciscans, had spread. Christians had arisen to the number of nearly half a million souls, to shake the power of the Buddhist monasteries. Men of business had arisen to trade with the Portuguese and Spanish traders; and a new strength had arisen to rival the strength of the loyal sword and the soldier's arm—the strength of the Spanish piece-of-eight. Yet among the new minds there existed still some who had been vassals of leyasu before they had been vassals of Hideyoshi; and these were his vassals still.

Assassination would have seemed to some, in Ieyasu's circumstance, a ready way out of the Ishida Mitsunari difficulty; but leyasu had little use for the assassin. His mind was balanced, for he was now an ageing man. Buddha, whose image hung at his breast (where Will Adams had carried a compass-needle), gave him his dreams of perfection in the individual soul. Confucius gave him dreams of a nation and a polity built out of what others had seen to be only alert 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.