Читать книгу Needle-Watcher - Richard Blaker - Страница 25

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 crawling nearest to the paste-pot. He slew another thus and another to show the hairy ones the stuff his august and honourable neighbour was made of; but Adams was more interested in the kites than in the historic exploits of his host. He could not see, with the things lying piled one upon another, how the tackle would be bent to them to give the control which steered them—rising, swooping, curving and diving through the air—as half a score could be seen doing in any patch of sky, for the festival was near. The grace and swiftness of them was a marvel as great as the waddling, lumpish clumsiness of the shutter-rigged junks in the harbour.

He went into the house to see Santvoort's room and then, having seen it and having smiled and mumbled syllables to an old woman, to young women and to children inside the house, he left the Dutchman at peace with himself and the world and went across the road to his own lodging.

The two girls peeped out at him, friendly and shy, from the living-room as he entered the house; so instead of going to his own room he left his sandals and went in to them. They were at work, sewing. The elder one—if it were possible to distinguish as elder, by some subtle air of greater seriousness, the one that had appeared first and carried away his bundle—was a little abashed by his entry. She moved as though to conceal the work she was doing upon Adams's breeches. They had been unpicked at every seam and washed, and were now being sewn together again (just as the younger one was sewing together a jacket of her father's which also had been unpicked for washing). Artist as she was at her work, she would have preferred its owner to have found it finished instead of still, as it were, on the bench or easel. For an instant Adams was as aghast as any man at the shock of any ruin; but after that instant he smiled down at the eyes that looked up at him; he realised that if the old breeches were done for utterly, it was no great matter.

He would outlive more in that country than a pair of threadbare worsted breeches.

"Thank you," he said as he had learned to say it from a people who seemed to use the word more than any other. With his great hand he patted, not the head, which looked too precarious a feat of hair-dressing to be tampered with, but the firm, round little shoulder.

Her eyes sank away from his; the ebony teeth appeared again between her parted lips as she assured him it was nothing; and the other one, having nothing in particular to be shy about, begged him to be seated.

He lowered himself to the vacant mat, still a little cow-like in his movements compared with the nimble grace of theirs.

The younger one said something involving the word "An-jin" and Adams shook his head. "Adams," he said, tapping his chest. "Adams. Will Adams."

They would not have it. "An-jin," they insisted—Contemplator of the Needle. And then said the elder one slowly, "An-jin Sama."

"Very well, then," said he; for that, too, was no particular matter any more than the ruined breeches. He shrugged his shoulders. "'An-jin Sama,' then. And you?" he looked from one to the other.

The younger one answered. The answer sounded very like Magdalena; and it was by the name of Magdalena that he thereafter called her.

The other, inclining her widely-sashed torso a little towards him and bowing her head, recited a name in which the sounds simplest for his ear were "Bikuni."

His ear and his intelligence had been enough in the last few months to have told him that in adding "Sama" to his name of "An-jin" they had shown him a courtesy. "Bikuni," he said, and smiled at the achievement of his ear and his intelligence— "Bikuni San."

His reward was a chuckle of laughter and smiling glances from one girl to the other.

The dissected breeches were not the only work that had been engaging Bikuni San. From the tools and materials at her side she handed to him a small bundle—jacket, tunic and drawers newly washed and neatly folded; ready for him when he should have bathed. This business of intermittent bathing was also, like destroyed breeches and the casual substitution of one name for another, no great matter. He could accept it as he had accepted the others.

He went out and took his bath and changed into the fresh garments, leaving the discarded ones by the tub. In the room he found that the girls had set a tray for him with cakes and thin biscuits and a draught of water. He sat down before it, gathering either that they had had theirs or else that they did not care for any. And it was thus that Magome returned to find them. The old man was as obviously pleased by the sight of the Pilot, bathed and combed and at ease, quietly eating cakes and biscuits while the two girls sewed, as he had been huffy at finding him squatted with the kite-maker.

In an instant Magdalena was gone from the room and in moments she was back again with another tray, for her father. He sat by Adams, adding to his smile the further geniality of telling the Pilot the names of the cakes and biscuits. Adams replied as genially by airing the knowledge he had gained without Magome's teaching.

"Magdalena," he said, and then "Bikuni San."

The old man was delighted. Geniality alone would not have accounted for the volume of his laughter. Behind it, as well as geniality, there was a pleasing secret of some small triumph.