I Hagen’s island—a tiny realm of wonder and suspense.... There it lay, lost in a warm and dreaming sea, a blue on all sides of uncompromising intensity. Yes, the island, saturated with sunshine, often richly agleam with pearls from a swift, brief downpour of rain, appeals to the eye as not quite real, with its murmurs of palm and giant fern, its ruined docks, its broken derrick once painted red and standing now against the lush bloom like a spectre ruling in an empire of everlasting silence. “Quite capable once—h’m?—of bringing on a war somewhere”—yet now such a spot of smiling, dreaming quiet. (“Oh, the laughter behind it all....”) Except when tempest sweeps, furious and black, across the world, whipping the sea into a churning fury and tearing through the close fabric of the jungle like an offended offspring of Cerberus, the island sleeps and broods under a sky tenderly blue and lofty; while restless along the comb of the inner reefs is ever a rustling fringe of white, “a necklace with conscience of lead....” There is foam on the lap of the yellow beach. A place—yes, a place not unhaunted, and bringing sometimes, by the sheer charm of its drowsy hush, a little throb to the throat. And silence—so white and enthralling, whether at noon or lighted by luminous spheres of southern midnight: a silence such as one may encounter in some little lonely church among the hills of Italy.... But all suddenly, within a house cleverly constructed of palm trunks, the silence was broken; a woman stood tacking something against the wall. A man in riding breeches, pongee coat, and white shirt open at the throat, was just in the act of draining a little glass of amber coloured liquor in an adjoining room. He sang out to her: “Stella! What are you up to? You sound like a whole army of carpenters!” She laughed with an effect of coyness and stepped back. “You’d never guess, Ferd!” “What is it?” “No, you’ll have to come in and see.” He came, his handsome face a little more flushed than usual, perhaps, and his eyes supremely blue and round. “Aha!” he exclaimed in the doorway of the room they humorously called their parlour. “I didn’t know anything about it,” laughed the girl, “till I came across it at the very bottom of the trunk. I certainly would never have thought of bringing a calendar! Maud must have slipped it in—she was always raving about that picture—isn’t it beautiful?” Stella laughed derisively, though without bitterness, for the past was all behind her. “It used to hang in the dining room,” she explained. “I guess Maud thought it might look cheerful to us a long way from home. It gives you a sort of feeling of being still in touch with the world, doesn’t it?” “It does,” he agreed, and, with a faint smile, beheld a large mercantile calendar, a bright-coloured print filling the upper half. The picture showed a sailor just returned to his little home nest after hazardous voyages. All the colours were too gaudy, and the sailor’s dog was absurdly foreshortened; but it was a joyous tableau, within its frame of coiled and knotted ropes; and across the hearthrug, in energetic gold, one read: Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley,
Ships’ Chandlers The soft, scented breath of the jungle outside crooned a little through the rustle of palm and fern fronds, just now and then audible; and it stirred the mats at the windows and sometimes made the doors creak hauntingly on their jungle-vine hinges. “What’s today?” asked King, lighting a cigarette. And he added, with a faint note of restlessness behind the laugh: “Already it’s beginning not to matter much!” Stella glanced at the calendar gayly. “Today is Thursday—the fourteenth.” Then, clasping her hands with some excitement, she exclaimed: “Why, isn’t that St. Valentine’s Day?” “By Jove, you’re right, Stella.” She seemed quite delighted over the discovery, though it was with a trace of seriousness she mused: “Doesn’t it seem strange to think of Valentine’s Day with nobody but ourselves within hundreds of miles who ever heard of St. Valentine?” She glanced around her at the primitive surroundings. A great, lustrous butterfly with heavy wings alighted on one of the sills and drooped there, poised. King looked at his wife with half quizzical amusement. “Can’t we celebrate some way, even so?” “Oh, yes—let’s!” she cried, eager to make the most of an unexpected fÊte day. “I simply must step around to the florist’s and order you some orchids. Shall I, little girl?” “Please do!” she laughed. “I’m sure you’ll find orchids in abundance just now—and so cheap! Really yours for the picking!” “You must admit,” he reminded her, “that living in a jungle possesses some advantages.” “Yes, even if not quite all the comforts of home!” She liked these little flashes of “repartee,” for they always carried her back to the wonderful night at the ball; yet in the midst of it, oddly enough, she remembered the frilled paper-lace valentine Jerome had sent her a year ago. She had found it, thick with cupids, tied to the doorknob; and it had proved really the beginning of their dull little courtship. “Poor Jerome,” she thought, “would have to do the conventional thing. Such magnificence as orchids....” King held out his arms romantically, and she ran to him. His look was at once dazzling and tender. “Give me a kiss, little girl!” She raised her face happily. “Now another.” “Oh, Ferd—I never dreamed of being so happy!” “Let me steal one on the tip of your nose,” he requested. “There!” She laughed softly, and he asked: “How much do you love me, lady-bird?” Could any one doubt he had fallen in love with her as he might fall in love with Irmengarde? II Three days since Captain Utterbourne had lifted his hat to them on the doorstep of their new abode—lifted it almost formally, his lips just flickering to a smile of such supreme opaqueness that no one could possibly divine anything that happened to be behind it in the way of emotion. Then the Star of Troy had slipped off, quietly and swiftly. They had gone down and stood together on the ruined dock and watched her through the binoculars Captain Utterbourne had given them for a wedding gift; watched till she sank beneath the rim of a cloudless horizon; watched even the thin plume of smoke till the blue of the blazing tropical sky had sucked it into eternal limbo. It was then, really for the first time, they had become aware of the almost unearthly stillness.... But how fair it was—what breathless beauty! Stella had never imagined a spot so rich in sheer natural loveliness. She rambled in moods of romantic bewilderment; wandered along avenues of lush abundance; heard the soft thud of cocoanuts, and sipped their icy milk with delight. All was so strange and utterly new to her; so wonderful. It was like a dream from which one must waken.... Sometimes it was very subtly like music one cannot listen to without mysterious tremors beyond the realm of words. The air was warm and a little heavy with the spice of moist luxuriance, and dead-ripe fruit tinted with sunshine. One’s spirit drowsed; merely to breathe was exquisite. Stella roamed in a cloud of wonder, sometimes almost of awe.... And she thought: what a setting for the romance that had so suddenly bloomed in her drab life! III King stood on a gentle rise of rich turf, gazing off through the binoculars across cultivated fields. Presently up toward him through a shining little valley rode a Japanese on one of the Australian ponies Utterbourne had imported. King lowered his glass and watched, a smile half of amusement on his face. It was Tsuda—an amazing creature of prowess and contradictions. The Captain had plucked him out of a brawl over a geisha girl up in Yezo—“Fancy—h’m?”—to begin with. And after that—oh, but the Captain possessed faculties unfathomable for picking his men. According to Tsuda, the Captain had saved his life—indeed, Tsuda was very dogmatic about it. “Ho, there!” King called out, as the Japanese, having dismounted in the shade of a thicket of dwarf palms, trotted up the incline to the spot where the new overseer stood. “Don’t begin any salaaming or kowtowing, Tsuda,” he begged him with a laugh. “I’ve been salaamed to death all morning. What have you done to those poor devils of Ainu?” Tsuda stood beside him, very little and humble. He wheezed some. “Taught the fear of the gods,” he replied. “Yes, sir!” King hooted. “You’ll finish me, Tsuda, with your priest-ideas and your fairy tales. I never heard such a bunch of outlandish nonsense in my life! But of course we’ve got to hand the method credit, I suppose, since it keeps us supplied with free labour.” Tsuda bowed solemnly. “It is—gn—the way of the gods,” he murmured. And then, making sure they were quite alone, he edged a step nearer, assumed a less formal bearing, and added, in a voice which had startlingly acquired a note of the utmost sophistication: “If that fail—gn—there is always the sakÉ!” And he chuckled like an incorrigible urchin up to tricks. Tsuda’s English was quite remarkable. It was rather a mystery where he’d managed to pick it all up, packed, as it was, with slyly winking colloquialisms, even occasional wisps of slang. Tsuda was a genuine man of the world, in his own odd way. Very up-to-date, very devious, subtly sophisticated—a very waggish person, too; though he could upset it all in a minute with revelations of a most utter and child-like simplicity. As for the curious “gn” which now and then punctuated his talk, that mystified rather, till one came to detect about it the humble earmarks of asthma. “Look here, Mr. Priest,” said King, who had raised his binoculars again, “there’s a queer something or other going on—come here and look through the glasses. It’s one of your Ainu women, and she seems to be burying something—I can’t make out what.” Tsuda handled the binoculars proudly but awkwardly. “Oh, that’s a woman who don’t want her husband any more,” he shrugged casually. “Want him to die—yes, sir! So she make his head-dress like a corpse. Dig a hole for it—gn. You see how she bob her head up and down? She pray that he rot with the head-dress.” King exclaimed in amazement: “What piece of crazy superstition do you call this?” The island lay still and glowing round about them. The sky was without a cloud, the sea without a sail. “Don’t ask me!” shrugged Tsuda waggishly. “Don’t blame me for any of these damn kind of thing! You see such go on all the time. No telling—gn—what a lot of damn heathen ideas I’ve had to put out of their heads! By golly tried to tell me once the earth rest on the back of a fish, and when he wiggle that make earthquakes! But they’re toned down a whole lot since then. It was a time in Paromushir you see an Ainu woman give suck to a bear cub. But no more. No sir!” He shook his head a little sadly. “These fellows haven’t got the pep they used to have—not by a God-damn! All mixed up with Russian and Japanese. No good—no good.” He looked really mournful over the undoubted decay of this lost tribe on which he had lavished his affection so many years. Tsuda had succeeded, when the Imperial summons came from Tokyo ordering all the Kurile Ainu down to a convenient pen at Shikotan, in concealing a whole tribe up in the remote mountains of Paromushir, becoming himself a sort of perpetual king over them. It was wild and daring—yes, a work of genius, clearly, though Tsuda’s affection was never without its ulterior motive. There had been a lucrative business in salmon, which by this novel method he acquired gratis. And then—Utterbourne. Yes, Utterbourne had come along with Hagen’s Island fresh in mind, and the problem of cheap labour as yet unsolved, he had plucked Tsuda out of the brawl in Yezo; had looked at him with eyes half closed, in his quizzical poising way; had hinted discreetly about gold, much gold. A few months later Tsuda led his Ainu tribe down out of the mountains and into the hold of the Star of Troy, whose prow was turned toward the dreamy south. Hagen’s Island—a fugitive, lost tribe: what an inspiration to bring them together! In truth, it had been one of the Captain’s very finest flashes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A TOUGH OLD BIRD AND THE KEY OF PARADISE I Sometimes the glowing mystery of her new island home seemed to rush upon Stella and make her a little faint. “Ferd, dear,” she said breathlessly, “who would ever have dreamed of our coming to a place like this?” He eyed her searchingly. “So strange, Ferd—isn’t it? So almost unbelievable!” “I wonder,” he mused, “if you would have come if you’d known what it was going to be like?” “Oh yes!” she laughed softly. “It’s so beautiful I almost want to cry sometimes. And the silence.... Oh,” she exclaimed, “I tried so hard to imagine what our life was going to be like, but I never guessed a place like this!” Her smile was quiet and engaging. “At first,” she went on, “I felt almost sure, from things you said, it was going to be some big city in Europe or the East....” They strolled together off to the rocky shore and stood gazing a long time across the tender resting sea. Silence! The sun was dropping beyond the sheen of a little crescent beach, with the jungle climbing rich and dark, unstirred save by the echo of such voices as are never still, by day or night. Slowly the sky grew splendid. Clouds drifted and piled, painted with crimson and flushed with living gold. Stella sat by her husband in a rapture of romantic happiness. Far down against the face of a rock gently slapped by the waxing tide, ran an odd white fissure, and crabs were busy scuttling all about it. The air was faintly scented with brine and seaweed as evening began to close in. “Oh, Ferd....” she faltered delightedly. “It’s so still!” And then, as the dark came on, she drew her husband into one of his moods of verbal grandeur, and sat entranced beside him while he multiplied, so easily, the splendours in store for them. This was but a beginning. They were to climb—the future was full of light. “Perhaps you’d like it if I got a consular place in Cairo, later on?” “Oh, yes!” “Or—or an ambassador’s in Rome...?” II King and Tsuda stood together under some date palms at the edge of a field—a mass of vivid green—white blossoms tossing in the tropical breeze—petals here and there whirling and floating idly. The field was aswarm with bare-legged Ainu labourers in short, rough tunics. They bent dully to their task, an expression of unbroken hopelessness on their sad, hairy faces. “A little experiment in transplanting—h’m?” the Captain called it. When King passed any of the Ainu they would suspend their work and clumsily prostrate themselves. All the men had long hair and prodigious moustaches drooping despondently down amongst the vegetation with which their hands were busy. There were women of the tribe, too, with faces for the most part hideously tattooed, and wearing on their heads bright coloured handkerchiefs of Russian manufacture, which gave them a picturesque, peasant-like appearance. Tsuda was saying: “This year much rain—look damn good—like a bumper crop—yes, sir! Up to Bihar and Bengal, maybe—gn—even Afghanistan. I was all over those places,” he added, in an important, off-hand tone, “learning the business right on the ground—yes, sir!” His eyes darted rapidly about, met the new overseer’s gaze, then flitted off. “What’s the exact acreage?” asked King quietly. Tsuda looked a bit blank. “Any way of estimating what a normal crop ought to be?” And without giving the other opportunity to reply, he added, rather crisply: “We’re going to be a little more scientific, from now on, even if you did have unusual advantages over in India and thereabouts.” Tsuda flashed at him a glance, then looked glum. His eyes were restless. His lips moved, but what he brought out was merely a nonplussed “gn.” “What was last year’s export?” demanded King. “About five hundred chest.” For the moment Tsuda’s usual blitheness appeared damped, and his was the bearing of a man squirming faintly under an incipient sense of infringement. King reached idly down and pulled off one of the blossoms with its nearly ripe capsule, turned it round and round, eyed it curiously, sniffed it. It had a strange, pungent odour. He crushed it, and his fingers were stained with a warm pinkish fluid. Tsuda watched him, his eyes showing a glitter of suppressed excitement. “Ever try any of it yourself?” he asked, his voice nervous and oddly shrill. “No, I never did,” laughed King. “What’s it like, Tsuda?” “Say,” the other replied, in an offended yet subtly smirking way, “do you take me—gn—for a fellow with inside information?” King laughed again, this time rather dryly. “I guess you’ve given it a trial, at least—just now and then, perhaps?” Slowly, and at first as though grudgingly, Tsuda smiled. The smile spread into a very clever, confidential grin. “You needn’t please mention it to the Captain,” he muttered, “but this is a damn-God-forsaken hole.” “I understand,” replied King, his tone slightly labelled. “Sss!” Tsuda acknowledged. And then, after a brief pause which, on his side, was obviously not a little breathless, he pursued: “Maybe you feel that way too, later on—later on—gn—and want to give it a try—yes, sir!” King fairly howled with mirth. Tsuda was a trifle transparent, after all. But tough. Oh, he was a tough old bird! He was anxious to share his iniquities.... “I have an extra spirit lamp,” Tsuda murmured meekly, in a very small voice, his eyes humbly on the turf, “and—gn—some pipes I smuggled in,” he half giggled. “It’s a damn lonely hole here—you shall see. The people here before were lucky to clear out—yes, sir! The coal people and that albatross-dutchman business—all rot,” he grinned parenthetically. “I guess you’ve been here long enough to know by this time,” suggested King. Tsuda came quite close and muttered, his bony hands restless and his eyes mere darting slits: “You got to cut loose sometimes—simply have to! And,” he ended cryptically, “there’s only one way!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WHITE KAMI I It was before dawn—a dark and heavy hour, with the stars just dimming and a light wind in the jungle. Stella was asleep, dreaming: she seemed to be out on the rocks of the shore, where she and Ferdinand had sat enriching the sunset with their wonderful projections. She saw it all in her dream so vividly: the rocky promontory, the sunny sea beyond, and had a sense, as one does in dreams, of something about to happen. The white beach below shimmered in the glare of a vacant sky. In her dream she felt the strange spell of the silence, made manifold. It held her breathless and she waited, full of wonder. Presently as she gazed across the slumbering sea, a great ship came into view—was it this for which the breath of premonition had prepared her? She gazed, and the ship seemed coming straight on, like an enchanted ship. Her heart stirred with delight. Abruptly, however, Stella awoke, with a sharp pang of fear and sat up in bed, trembling. Something like a wild cry seemed to have broken her dream. She heard it again, though fainter through the woven fastness of the jungle: the cry of some great night bird, a note so sinister and full of lamentation that her brow grew a little damp with the terror of her rousing. Yet in a moment she was calm. Her husband lay beside her, quietly sleeping. She listened to his regular breathing in the dark, then lay down and closed her eyes. Gradually the silence drew her back into a state of drowsiness. She slept. When she woke again the dark was gone and the sun stood high. Slipping from bed and into an adjoining room of her strange new dwelling, Stella lighted a small oil stove and started a kettle of water for their coffee. Returned to the bedroom, she arrayed herself in a bit of frilled and beribboned negligÉe and a lacy boudoir cap: small extravagancies of the unambitious shopping tours preceding her wedding. Adorned in these luxuries, she sat before her improvised dressing table to begin a rather elaborate toilette. Stella had done all she could with the primitive conditions surrounding her here. The dressing table was fashioned out of an empty packing case, covered with some old flowered goods. A small mirror hung above it, and on either side were cheap little bracket candle-holders with coloured candles that had begun to nod under the hot breath of the tropics. She had pictured herself in a boudoir rather more authentic; but for the present this one would do very well. She sat absorbed in the pleasant task of making herself attractive. Ferdinand still slept, but was beginning to stir. Even in bed, relaxed and disheveled with sleep, he looked like a god; and Stella, glancing over at him, felt more than ever inspired to make herself beautiful. She must hold his love, she mused—and even tinted her cheeks a little. King yawned and turned. A romantic manoeuvre entered her head, almost as though inspired by the gay little cap. She fluttered over to the bed. “I’ll wake him with a kiss!” she thought. However, the stratagem was not productive of entirely happy results. Her husband hoisted himself on an elbow and blinked a moment at the surprising apparition he had married; but instead of compensating her in some way for this early effort in his behalf, King let his eyes droop shut again, with a tiny frown, and slipped back—he had barely seen her. The unfortunate bride had violated an entrenched masculine tradition: these things are very subtle. Yet sleep was really exhausted, after all, and a moment later King thought better of his drowsy petulance, roused and called to her: “Stella!” And she paused, turning a little toward him, while he blinked goodhumouredly and held out an arm, beckoning slowly. She gave him a rueful smile and trudged back, pouting a reluctant forgiveness, her heart relieved, though still in a mood of vague disappointment. “You mustn’t let little things upset you so easily, Stella,” he said, with the faintest shade of curtness. “I’ve got a big contract on my hands here, and must get my sleep out. Anyway,” he added, patting her hand, “it isn’t late, is it?” Stella glanced at her watch, pinned on amongst a gay little whirl of ribbons and laces. “Nearly nine o’clock,” she said—and, oddly enough, the intelligence quite changed the complexion of things. He sprang out of bed with an exclamation. “That’s what a climate can do! Why didn’t you call me hours ago? I’ll have to get an earlier start—where the devil is my shaving mug—is there any hot water, Stella?” “A little, Ferd,” she hesitated. “For our coffee....” “Bring me what there is,” he requested bluntly. And asked her where she kept his shirts. “Ferd,”—she faltered a little. “You’re so brusque this morning.... Don’t you—” and she indicated her finery with a hesitating gesture. “I bought it because you said this is your favourite colour....” He paused in the energetic process of dressing and looked at her squarely, yet at the same time without full attention. “Yes, I do like it. It’s a dream.” And, since she still hesitated, evidently perplexed and a little confounded, King laughed with affectionate loudness and said: “Come here, lady-bird, and I’ll make a fuss over you. I wasn’t thinking. Of course you look good enough to eat! Give me a kiss.” He gathered her up and hugged her. II When her husband had gone, looking very handsome and magnetic in his white clothes and a stiff tropical hat, Stella sat a little time at the doorstep, musing, letting her mind drift on an undercurrent of vague debate. She idly watched some dusky southern moths floating about a patch of dull orange fungus in the brooding dimness of the jungle. Her thoughts, unformed and roaming, were faintly sombre. She remembered her haunting dream, so sharply broken by the cry of the bird, and seemed again to see the ship sailing in toward her; she wondered whether any ships did ever pass within range of the island. Presently, with a little sigh, she got up and went into the house. She took off her finery and laid it away, putting on in its stead one of the sturdy house dresses Maud had made up on the same pattern she used herself. At first, as her hands were thrust into that familiar and essentially unromantic element known in everyday parlance as dish water, Stella mused with another thoughtful sigh: “Here I am again...!” Yet in the very act of hurrying through all such drudgery to have it out of the way, she realized that when the housework was finished there would be absolutely nothing to do until it was time to prepare luncheon. Her life seemed suddenly so packed with hours, so freighted with brooding silence.... “I must make a point of using all the dishes I can at every meal,” she laughed softly. The stillness, rendered poignant by the droning of wild bees and a dainty ambient rustle of fern, pressed against her heart. This morning she was unusually thorough. Capable Maud, with memories of past shirking, would open her eyes indeed could she look in at this marvel of housewifery. The dishes out of the way, Stella turned quite happily to her sweeping, singing a little as she worked. The broom had been one of Captain Utterbourne’s poetic foresights.... Her task was broken in upon by a faint and very deferential tap. She opened the door and on the threshold beheld Tsuda, standing in a humble posture, hat in hand, and murmuring: “Good morning.” He bowed low as he spoke, and subtly shook his head a little, as though to emphasize his acute humility. She regarded him with a gleam of interested amusement. Tsuda’s face, as he slowly raised it to the girl in the doorway, showed itself ancient, yet with strangely youthful eyes; an unusually long face, with a baffling, complex expression. His loosely woven straw hat with its band of bright blue ribbon, gave him a note of gaiety and youth. He looked subtle and cool and debonair, despite his humility, as he stood outside gazing up into the face of the only white woman within rather a good many degrees of longitude and latitude. “Mr. King isn’t here,” she told him, her eyes still amused. There were times when Tsuda’s face looked just a little like the face of a horse—though she had caught flashes of darker qualities which left her, too, a trifle insecure. “I believe my husband rode over to look at some fields on the other side of the island.” “Sss—I know,” Tsuda nodded rapidly. Then an expression of quaint solicitude came into his bright young-looking eyes, and he asked: “You find everything—gn—all right here?” His mood this morning was par excellence the mood of a child, naÏve and trusting and simple as sunshine; and a few moments later he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mrs. King’s “parlour,” giving her a round-eyed account of the manner in which he and all these dusky children of the northland had been brought down out of far wild Paromushir to take possession of an island nobody seemed to want. “We come from the—gn—way up top of the Kurile Isles—very high—you have not been there?” And he gazed searchingly, as though he would glean from her face how much they had shared with her—the masters, King and Utterbourne. “No,” said Stella, “I’ve never been there. I haven’t travelled a great deal—until now,” she added with a gay little laugh. Tsuda hissed gently. “I want you to see how it was, please. We come many moons ago in a great whale that burn inside like a volcano!” His whole bearing was that of a child, wide-eyed with the sheer wonder of miracles befallen. “Yes sir—a whale!” Stella was plainly enthralled. The rewards of her romantic patience and doll-like trust hadn’t been any too ample—“a woman’s fingers don’t belong in a man’s work, little lady.” King had displayed a laughing parsimony; and though Captain Utterbourne, during the long voyage, must have emitted at least a hundred thousand words of pure narrative, interspersed with little gems of psychology and sociology and ethics, he hadn’t taken the trouble to give out more than the vaguest hints as to what lay before them in the throbbing mystery of that future always just ahead over the bow of the Star of Troy. Her curiosity about all this business of the island was keenly aroused, and she was glad to listen to the strange little Asiatic, who seemed indeed quite bursting with friendly communicativeness. Tsuda blinked rapidly. “My people had got bad, very bad, about their altars. It was simply awful! No good to forget your altars—bad, very bad.” He shook his long head seriously. “Evil come then. There are ogres left—all written down in great Book of Shinto—the way of the gods....” His face seemed illuminated with almost a supernatural glow. “Very bad, very bad! They come down swoop in the night....” Tsuda nodded slowly and solemnly. “But the gods send us some one to the rescue. He look at you—gn—and you can’t look back....” Perhaps Utterbourne had never received a finer tribute. Tsuda leaned toward the girl, swaying in a mystic rhythm as he talked, his voice high and a little tremulous; and as she watched him and listened to his wild tale, told always in that manner of open-eyed wonder, Stella vividly sensed the contrast between this new life of hers and the old. “Where am I?” she asked herself, laughing faintly, yet with a tiny shiver too, almost of swift fear. “He bring us all down here,” Tsuda continued. “The whale is very dark, and give out long trail of black like the volcano. He tell us we build altars and one day a new god—one day the White Kami will come....” Tsuda broke off abruptly, and asked in a voice which seemed to have taken on a subtly darker and narrower quality: “You have not seen the temple?” “No,” said Stella. “Good—I’ll show you—gn. Done in the finest Shinto.... I have a brother, once; he is priest in the Shinshu mountains. I would be too, a priest, only—” Again he broke off, and for a moment his eyes showed a fierce gleam of reminiscent hate. But it passed, and he said very gently: “Will you come and see?” “The temple?” she asked. “Yes—to goddess Amaterasu”—he half chanted the name. “Mean the Heaven-shiner, goddess of the Sun—Shimmei, sometimes, Ten Shoko Daijin, Daijingu—we say—gn—Amaterasu. You will come?” “Is it far?” Stella asked him. “No, no—not far.” “Yes,” she hesitated. Her breathing was a trifle accelerated. It all seemed unbelievable.... III There was a light truly of heaven in his eluding Asiatic eyes. He led her to a little temple in a grove of palm and giant fern; pointed out its mystic excellencies; talked a great deal about Shinto which she couldn’t grasp. “It’s like a little doll’s house!” she cried. “And so perfect! I’m sure it must have taken you a long, long time to build.” There were low mounds all about, for it was here, also, that the dead were buried. Tsuda seemed too vividly moved by the ecstasy, which shone out of his eyes, to hear her little burst of amazed enthusiasm. “Some day he tell us the White Kami will come. We wait, long time. A very long time, it seem. One day”—Tsuda crept closer—“the White Kami!” He lifted his arms in weird triumph. “The White Kami at last is come to live among his children!” Stella seemed to grasp in a flash the significance of this. She thrust her hand, in a startled gesture, against one cheek; found it burning. Tsuda’s face, as he watched her so eagerly for news of the emotions in her heart, suddenly clouded with shrewdness. “They do not tell you?” he murmured, close; she could feel his breath. “I’ve heard nothing about this, Tsuda. You mean my husband—?” “Sss.” His eyes, so young in a face so lined and ancient, never relaxed their eager searching look. “Tsuda tell you all things,” he said softly and very humbly. “The White Kami ...” she faltered, groping, her mind in great confusion. For a moment it was almost as though his words brought to her the discovery that she had married a being of another species than herself.... The sensation, though fleeting, was vivid and even terrible. And half consciously she remembered how she had sat waiting in the drawing room at Berkeley, and had felt, beyond the incommunicative conventionality, of the place, a subtle sense of something ominous.... Tsuda’s hands, lean and brown, moved restlessly. “The Captain tell us,” he murmured, “we may look for the White Kami. But he do not tell us you come too, Wife-of-the-Kami!” When she looked at him his head was lowered; and as though swayed by a religious impulse too powerful to be denied, the Japanese slowly sank down onto one knee before her and reverently brought the hem of her dress to his lips.
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