Edward Alden Jewell

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
COBWEBS

I

The mats were drawn at the windows and the lamp was lighted in their “parlour.” It was a night of warm nervous wind, and, though the pounding of the surf produced a roar which neither rose nor fell, the jungle, stirred by shifting gusts, seemed full of nocturnal caprice, and sounded a broken note of tempo rubato—as so often it did, only to make the dreamy stillness of the following dawn more poignant.

It was a quiet evening at home. King had been enjoying a glass of after-dinner brandy, and, as was apt to be the case at such times, the exuberance of his mood brought a soft shine to Stella’s eyes. Just faintly of late it had been necessary to brush aside vexing little cobwebs that seemed, in spite of her, weaving question and debate about the edges of her romance.... But tonight she saw how unfounded were any quavers she might entertain—the kiss that had brought a frown—Tsuda’s sombre disclosures.... No, she would never let her mind drift into a web of ephemeral doubts again; she was done with morbid “premonitions” for ever—they were intruders.

Every marriage, she reasoned, must call for certain adjustments—concessions, if one preferred phrasing it that way. Whenever her husband seemed brusque or abstracted, inclined to forgetfulness of her, she would remind herself that he had a new business on his hands. How foolish to grope, ever; to feel perturbed, unequipped! And she would only laugh when a curious phrase of his came back to her: “Just imagine what it would have been like if I had come here alone...!” An oddly impersonal note it was, which had given her a jolt; though now she told herself it was because she had been in a mood of hyper-sensitiveness. Without realizing it, she softly laughed aloud, her thoughts playing in rumination.

“Tell us the joke, peaches!” he suggested in his bluff, magnetic way.

“Nothing,” she replied, her eyes still shining. “I was only thinking how wonderful it all is!”

And she drew her arms gently about her husband’s neck.

II

A sudden gust of wind whipped one of King’s papers off the table where he sat figuring opium problems. It went skimming across the floor, and Stella thrust out a foot to intercept its flight: a spontaneous act which set her husband musing in a rather odd way.

“You’ve a remarkably narrow foot, haven’t you Stella?” he said. “I noticed it even that first time we met in the street.”

“Have I?” she laughed, fluttering a little—a mannerism her husband still possessed the magic potency to inspire.

He seemed to be studying her foot with an abrupt and quite absorbed interest.

“It’s not very often—” He broke off and glanced up with a rather furtive smile. “I mean—you must wear about a double A, don’t you?”

“How did you guess?” she laughed. She adored Ferdinand in this sort of personal, gently intimate mood. It somehow, very subtly, compensated for the splendours not yet come to pass....

King eyed her shoe attentively. There was even something trancelike in his gaze. When he spoke again it was with a touch of far-away dreaminess. “Double A,” he half chanted, “with a short instep—yes—and one of those Standish heels they’re using such a lot now....” He glanced up again, this time with a faint start, and found Stella gazing at him amused, perplexed a little.

“That’s just what the man at the shoe store said,” she smiled. “You’re terribly clever!” And when her husband, a look still detached and a shade self-conscious in his round blue eyes, had taken possession of the sheet of paper she had rescued, and had returned to his work at the table, Stella sat meditating. But ever, quaintly, through her reverie, like a whimsical refrain, ran the thread of King’s words: “Double A—with one of those Standish heels....”

Suddenly, as she looked at him, it seemed to Stella that he was an utter stranger—she had never seen him till now—they had not really married and come out here to this mysterious unknown island. Just as abruptly the sensation passed; but the girl still felt in her heart a shiver of nervous excitement, and, in brooding mood, got up and roamed restlessly about the house.

The wind romped outside with nervous starts and stops, each gust strangely impelling her to fresh question and uninvited quandary.

At length, impelled by a wave of romantic tenderness, Stella paused in her roaming and leaned up against her husband, so deeply absorbed in his task—acreage, crops, the problem of irrigation. “Ferd, dear,” she murmured after a little. “Ferd, dear—I keep feeling as though I’d have to wake up. I know it’s foolish of me, but the strangeness doesn’t seem to wear off. Does it ever come over you that way?”

“What?” he muttered, obviously only half conscious she had spoken at all.

Stella caressed her husband’s hair, and, working one little finger into his lapel buttonhole, coaxed: “Ferd—why did we come to Hagen’s Island?”

He looked up at her then, a somewhat troubled expression in his face. “Well,” he said slowly, his lips, so like a tender cupid’s bow, touched with a smile of faint irony, “I guess it was what one would have to call a case of grabbing up the first thing in sight!”

“But—” Her look was a little troubled.

“Oh, I give you my word,” he laughed, “I’d have preferred a good many places to this, despite its very superior cocoanuts and sunsets—some place a trifle less remote. I’m sure I never listened to such a lot of silence all at once in my life! But here was the chance, and it had to be this or—well, something a great deal more prosaic. Unfortunately,” he added, “a man has to work for his living in this hard and unfeeling world!”

III

Her finger fell out of his buttonhole. “Oh...!” she half cried, and in such an odd, overturned tone that, still smiling in his princely way, he demanded: “You didn’t think I was made of money did you, little lady?”

Hurriedly Stella shook her head, a bit alarmed for just a moment lest she had placed herself in an unfortunate light. Yet somehow she had always more or less associated Ferdinand with at least the romantic abstract idea of money. The illusion had been established upon the occasion of her first glimpse of him, bursting like a bright symbol into her drab life, his hand full of travel guides. Money—not for itself, but the things it could do and the dreams it could realize.... Her returning smile seemed to crack a little, as her eyes, with still their faintly troubled look, met his, then unconsciously avoided them. It was, to some indefinite extent, a moment of readjustment for her. The evening seemed all athrill with intangible revelation....

“Look here,” he said, a suggestion of bravado in his voice, “speaking of Hagen’s Island and the business, you were responsible yourself, Stella, for a whole lot of the soft pedaling.”

“I?” she asked, amazed, wondering at the drift.

His smile possessed elements of dryness. “The Captain believes to this day you knew the essential facts beforehand. But,” and her husband laughingly seized both her cheeks, “after that day you said you liked having everything mysterious—well, I didn’t have the heart to break in on any of your dreams just then....

“I see,” she said, a shade doubtfully. Her cheeks trembled a little where his fingers had pinched.

“The Captain even tried to talk me out of getting married,” pursued King, almost chattily. “The Captain always insisted this was a man’s job. But that was all the good it did! Why you dear little girl,” he went on, his tone warming and deepening to considerable passion, “how could I ever get along without you?”

But somehow those other words of his—those words unconsciously yet so hauntingly impersonal—seemed ringing in her ears instead: “—what it would have been like if I’d come here—alone....”

“I know,” he admitted after a little pause, “time seems to lag a bit. But after all, what’s six months?”

“Or even a year?” she bravely supplemented, catching somewhat the spirit of his easy nonchalance.

It was, as a matter of fact, a trifle in the air: the Captain’s was a complicated life. “If I’m not here—h’m?—by the fifteenth of August,” he had told them, “or within a week of that time—h’m?—you’ll know I’m not to be looked for until February again.” But they refused to be dismayed.

“Yes, even a year,” King echoed her gaily. “A year’s gone in no time. And then,” he laughed, “if we can’t stand it any longer, why off we go, to some place more lively—maybe where we can live in a cheerful, noisy little two-by-twice flat with a dumb waiter and—”

“But you said—the rue de la Paix,” she reminded him, a look of groping alarm in her eyes.

“Ah, so I did.” He sighed a cheerful capitulation; and then, with an odd effect of pulling himself together and getting romantically “under way” once more, noisily pushed back his chair, got up, and poured out some more brandy. “You’re right, lady-bird. I’d forgotten about the hats. All right—it’s really quite the same. We’ll go to Paris! And after that—perhaps the Tyrol you’re always talking about. Or—I’ve got it! We’ll saunter up the coast of Africa, through the Suez canal, into the blue Mediterranean. Maybe you’ll want to go on to Spain....”

He strode to a window and brushed back the mat roughly, seeming, as he stood there, to drift miles away, while the blow outside waned, and the jungle hushed itself beneath warm stars.

The troubled look returned to Stella’s eyes. “Oh, don’t stop—please!” she urged. And it came to her dimly that this was really the first time she had had, consciously, to prod his grandeur.

IV

Next morning it was still and sunny. Silence drifted softly in from all sides through the aching beauty of this tiny empire.

Breakfast finished, King prepared to depart for the day, turning at the door and nodding easily: “Don’t you worry, little girl. As for such details as balls and theatres, it’s true they’re not very plentiful. For your sake I wish we could import some—it would be jolly. But don’t let your dear little head forget,” he went on a trifle pompously, “that Hagen’s Island is only a beginning. If I happened to be flush we’d be taking a smashing honeymoon trip all over the globe—hitting nothing but the high spots...!” His eyes flashed magnetically. “But whatever your dreams are,” he continued, slightly magisterial by virtue of his virile earnestness, “they’re going to come true, later on. However high they sail—I don’t care. You leave everything to me, little lady. I’ve got a hunch!”

His regard strayed a little, although his words rang with real fervour; and following his gaze Stella saw a young Ainu woman passing swiftly by along a path which soon lost itself in the steaming tropical maze. King watched her out of sight with a look of glancing interest.

“That’s the great chief Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife,” he muttered, a smile breaking. “Tsuda explained it the other day. It seems there’s an official Great Wife; but she’s old and ugly, and—well, after all,” he laughed, “the world’s one piece when it comes to that.”

He was hurrying away, and had mounted a pony when Stella called to him, her voice faltering with a little shrill of unhappy emotion.

“Oh Ferd—don’t go without a kiss!”

“There you are,” he smiled, bending down chivalrously from the saddle to reach her lips.

At the crest of the tiny hillock he turned to wave again.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE QUARREL

I

Weeks passed, and the opium harvest was in full progress.

Tsuda was everywhere, sweating, swearing in breezy English, heaving out torrents of instruction in Ainu, to which the sad parties to this “experiment in transplanting” would listen, though without taking the trouble to straighten out of the cramped posture that went with their task of scarifying the poppy capsules.

The new overseer, looking like a White Kami indeed in his gleaming tropical clothes and smart hat, eyed Tsuda sharply, his nostrils dilating a little.

“Things are going to be run here a little more scientifically than they have been in the past, Tsuda,” he said with dry briskness. “You’ve done very well with the Ainu—you understand their ways and their language; but the business itself is a little bit beyond your reach.”

It was a new aggressive way of speaking which had developed gradually with King’s adjustment to the conditions of his changed life. He had his bearings now, and enjoyed the tang of power.

But Tsuda, no longer accorded quite the old freedom, watched this development darkly. It was part of Tsuda’s cleverness to be as colloquial as possible with people: it gave him tone and status. However, of late King had taken to bringing him up a little short and reminding him there was only one boss on Hagen’s Island. This bothered Tsuda a great deal.

“By the way,” said King, a half deprecating smile on his lips, “it seems to me your people are beginning to sag a little. I don’t think it would be a good thing to let them come to feel that because I am about with them so much I’m less of a—well,” he flung in rather harshly, “the matter of morale has got to be looked after. For myself”—there was an impatient though not altogether convincing gesture—“I realize it’s rubbish—all your priest-stuff. But—well, you might let them know I’m not too well pleased.” He stood whipping at the top of an opium plant with his riding crop. “They’re inclined to be lazy, these long-haired devils. We ought to find a way to liven them a bit. Probably you’re too stingy with your sakÉ. Loosen up, Tsuda. I think,” he drawled (and it amounted to a genuine little apogee of satisfaction with his prerogative here) “I ought to get more work out of all you people.”

The miserable Ainu prostrated themselves as he passed. It was overwhelming and a trifle touching at the same time.

But Tsuda’s look was full of brooding discontent, though, to be sure, this extreme ritual of respect was but a piece of his own passionate handiwork. As he had just faintly hinted to Stella, the Japanese would have been a priest—only there was a clash with the Emperor’s police in his youth, resulting in his deportation in irons to Yezo. “I never learned for what,” the Captain once admitted to King. “Murder most likely. The essential fact remains that he managed to escape—h’m? And fancy my snatching him, years later—h’m?—out of a brawl over a geisha girl!” The Captain always had a humorous, twitching look at such times—and especially when he had occasion to refer to Tsuda’s manipulation of the Ainu—“religion—h’m?—that is, religion and sakÉ....” It had called for patience and cleverness on Tsuda’s part; at length the thrall was complete. But as he watched King now reaping this vicarious homage, and mused upon the exalted niche King filled in Captain Utterbourne’s scheme, Tsuda resented what more and more struck him as an intrusion—yes, more and more, while the Star of Troy steamed steadily day and night into realms of new adventure and prowess.

II

King drew out a little revolver and emptied its contents rapidly into the atmosphere. Stella would know by this token he was at hand, and would be on the lookout for him. Mr. King liked to have his wife at the door or half way down the path to meet him. It went nicely with his conception of married life. Also this fusillade, in the nature of a virile salute, proved an agreeable way now and then of dispersing the shroud of silence that seemed always to hover like an invisible fog over island and sea, beneath a mocking sky.

Stella did, indeed, come out a little way to meet her husband. He waved to her with one of his fine flourishes, dismounted, and when they met, bent and kissed her, and kept his arm about her in a posture of comfortable possession as they strolled toward the house.

“You ought to be thankful you can stay in the shade!” he explained. “What wouldn’t I give for a little ice!”

She made no reply, but walked along as though musing, her head downcast.

“I must say you don’t strike a very hilarious welcome!” he assured her after a short silence. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” she faltered.

“What’s the matter? Look up here!” He raised her chin with an uncompromising hand. Then she smiled faintly and told him: “There’s nothing the matter—I just don’t feel very lively. Has it been a hard day?”

“So-so. Look here, little girl, your eyes are red. Crying?”

“Only a little.”

“Homesick already?”

“It’s nothing.”

“This won’t do!” he exclaimed; and there was a dash of high romance in his tone which had never until now failed to thrill her. Perhaps it thrilled her even now, though she burst into unexpected tears. And the tears loosed her tongue.

“If I could only write letters,” she sobbed. “It seems so terrible to think the only word they’ll have at home for maybe a whole year is the letter Captain Utterbourne took back with him to mail. And even in that,” she rambled wretchedly, “I was so much in the dark—there was so much that had to be left unsaid....”

They had reached the house, and she sat huddled on the doorstep. It was the first time she had really given way to feelings of this sort, and the flood was proportionate. Her husband stood looking down at her, somewhat perplexed.

“Stella, my dear child,” he suggested, “it’s no crime, you know, just because we have to keep a bit still about it. Opium’s a very valuable medical base—in India there’s even a government monopoly. Yet you insist on thinking of it only as a dope.” He laughed.

“Yes, I know,” she sighed. “But I try not to, Ferd. It all seems—I don’t know—so strange sometimes.... And when I learned how they’ve been made to think of you as a kind of supernatural being, Ferd—oh, I don’t know.... I can’t tell you how it made me creep when Tsuda....” Her words groped, hot and half smothered.

King tossed his handsome head and laughed again easily, in his grand way. “You see,” he told her, “it’s the only sure method of getting hold of the Ainu imagination. We have to use something a bit extreme. You mustn’t let a little thing like that disturb you.” His smile was slightly supercilious. “If the world never treated a man any worse than to make a god of him, I for one shouldn’t feel like complaining! But”—and now his look darkened and took on a glint of imperiousness, “I see I’ll have to caution Tsuda to keep his religious prattle to himself. I won’t have him giving you the jim-jams with his ridiculous priest-ideas!”

Her emotion had quieted, and her eyes mused. “I really think he’s only a child at heart,” she said. “But sometimes he frightens me suddenly....” King sat down beside her on the step, so handsome and protecting; he took her fingers and caressed them. “You’ve no idea how still it gets after you’ve gone away to the fields,” she sighed.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “if you like I’ll take you a part of the way so you can see the Ainu scraping opium—it’s quite a sight.” She brightened. “And one of these days,” he went on, “we must make a little excursion up to the grave of Vander Hagen, the martyr Utopian—take our lunch along, picnic style—and be thankful we didn’t get carried off on the back of an ideal!”

Somehow, as he laughed in his light, careless way, she remembered how Elsa had accused her once of having ideals. It set her musing a bit. Then she found herself remembering, too, how glibly her husband had spoken, long ago, about whistling up the sun, sitting astride the pyramids. Now would he whistle on the grave of the man who had come here with a dream and broken his heart...?

“How long has it been,” King asked, “since the Star of Troy left us?”

“Six weeks, Ferd.”

“Sure we haven’t skipped a month or two somehow?”

“I cross off each day on the calendar,” Stella said, much more cheerful now the tears were spent. “Come in and I’ll show you. I make quite a business of it!”

She took his hand and led him in. It was a little cooler than outside; the mats at the windows made it quite dusky; here and there on the walls a scrawny spider slept.

They stood together before the calendar: two leaves gone—in a few days another; then in thirty days....

It was time that must be annihilated. Time—time—time....

III

“By the way, Stella,” he announced a few afternoons later, standing a little arrogantly, legs braced apart, and moistening his lips with an appetizer, “your days of drudging are over forever!”

She raised her eyebrows in question, and he went on: “I’ve ordered Tsuda to have a couple of Ainu women up here in the morning for you to break in.”

“Servants, Ferd?” She was amazed.

“Quite at your disposal, my dear. And if they don’t keep hustling and leave you free to fold your hands like a lady, you let me know!”

“But Ferd—I don’t want any servants—I don’t need any!”

“Oh, yes you do. I know how you hate to wash and sweep.”

“But not any more, Ferd—I’d be quite lost without the housework, what little there is!”

However, he didn’t like having his efforts set at naught. “Nonsense,”—his tone was slightly dictatorial. “I don’t propose to have you spend your life slaving.”

“Please tell them not to come,” she said, turning a little pale, yet not quite consciously taking a stand. “I don’t want any servants.”

They stood gazing at each other through a moment curiously charged with something neither had foreseen or suspected.

Slowly a look of sharper lordliness crept into his eyes. “Stella,” he said, “I’m determined to build up an establishment. We ought to put on more style, even if we are living ’way out here. A little later I may train one of the Ainu men for a personal valet.” He smiled a rather brittle smile. “Do you think they’re pliable enough? It’s necessary to keep these savages impressed,” he went on, “for the sake of morale, if nothing else. Anyway—call it a whim, if you want to—I’ve taken a dislike to having my dear little wife washing dishes and beating mats.” It came back to her with great vividness how he had frowned and closed his eyes the morning she had put on her finery to please him. But, smiling a slow, calm, magisterial smile, he added: “What do you think the world would say if it could listen to you objecting to help about the house, with the servant problem what it is in civilized places?”

IV

Had he refrained from smiling, or if he had just simply and humorously smiled, she would undoubtedly have let the matter drop there. But something new in the glint of his eye and the self-willed curl of his lips struck an unexpected flint within Stella. Her own eyes gleamed a little, and she grew whiter.

“If we had the kind of big town house I once pictured, it would be a very different thing. But here we are on this island instead, and you don’t know what my housework has come to mean or you wouldn’t talk of sending up Ainu women to take it away from me!”

“Don’t carry on like a child, Stella,” he said, with a little heat. For, though there was sense in her words, he did not like the tone. It hadn’t a traditional ring, and—well, he didn’t like it.

“I’m not carrying on like a child.” Her voice sounded strained to her, and she was growing a bit hysterical. “Please tell them not to come.”

He whistled softly, and after a rather tense pause announced: “They’re coming early in the morning, Stella.” There was a fling of his finely sculptured head.

“Then you’ll have to take charge of them!” she blazed out, with a flash of spirit which checked and amazed him. It was the first gauntlet of their life together—a gauntlet surcharged with fiendish irony.

How the issue might have carried itself had Stella proceeded in the same fashion is problematical; but when, amazed at the state of affairs, and with her heart already much shaken, she took in spite of herself a step inimical to progress by surrendering to tears again, King shrugged and left the room, a smile still torturing his lips.

There was a smugness about his victory which made the girl writhe.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE DINNER THAT NEVER WAS EATEN