CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHOM THE POPPY CAPTURES I Time stood still—or rather time crept forward like a snail, and seemed unmoving. The hours of each day stole on like the tide, slow, achingly slow; or like a hill of sand which patiently sifts its way across a pasture; or like a drowsy serpent in the sun. A week was like a little lifetime. A month was like a cycle of Brahma. Time, time, time! And overhead a sky of burning blue, and all about a vacant sea, sleeping, dreaming, with just a whisper of surf always on the yellow beach, marking the hours into tiny rhythmic periods—innumerable and lethargic; chiming like little shish-faint discs, like dainty cascades of echoing silver; yet with ever a haunting prescience of furious power behind, which sometimes broke out in screaming tempest or long fierce hurricane. Time, time, time! Here seemed eventlessness of a new and sinister order. Values were subtly changing. Love was a thing less sheer and unshakable. In a month—two months—how all life seemed altered! One felt that invisibly and silently, deep underneath the calm, there were mysterious forces at work here on Hagen’s Island. Stella, as time drew forward so slowly, found herself immersed in a world of intangible agents. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this.... She had married a prince, and he had turned out to be a White Kami. His empire was a tiny volcano tip in the ocean. It was hither he had brought this bride of a so surprising courtship. At first there had been only poppies and love. But now there was a pipe with a wee bowl, which the White Kami had gradually learned to manipulate with wonderful dexterity. Yes, at first his fingers were clumsy and fumbling; there were times when he could not manage the drop of opium: it would elude him, and he would chuckle softly, or curse under his breath. But at length he had grown marvelously proficient. Opium! A terrible new doubt had torn its way into the shadowy alarm of Stella’s soul. Opium—opium! How had it come about? What did it mean? What might it end by doing to both their lives? Opium! Already, without her knowing it, Ferdinand must have been steeping himself in the drug—perhaps from almost the moment of their arrival. Just when had it begun, she wondered darkly. Opium! Had he tried it first in just a mood of adventurous experiment? And had it forced a stronghold so insidious as not to be menaced—even by her love for him? In the light of that fierce, electric moment when she had first beheld her husband stretched deep in the ecstasy of the drug, Stella found herself reconstructing much that had taken place preceding it: his growing lordliness and sometimes almost wilful wish that the pathway of their love should not lie smooth and charming; his fits of absorption, that restless instability; his sullen insistence upon the operation of his own caprice or will. Stella remembered with a shudder how, while that pathetic little dinner lay stale and untasted within, she had sat so long on the doorstep alone, and how the dark, foreign night had seemed to press in upon her and tinge her misery with aspects of stalking chaos. Yet afterward, in the sunshine of a new day, and with the episode of the untasted dinner behind them, Ferdinand had tried to lighten the prospect with his bluff and reassuring laugh. “I’m afraid you’re inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills, lady-bird. Don’t you know that opium hasn’t any ill effects at all unless taken in over-doses? Do you think a man’s a goner just because he happens to smoke a mere pipeful of it now and then, by way of breaking in a bit on this humdrum existence?” “Ferdinand—” she faltered, half consciously relieved a little, yet not, at heart, honestly convinced. He interrupted her with a gesture half playful, half of impatience. “I know what I’m about, peaches. We’ll just forget it.” Oh life! Oh, the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny! But, though Stella strove to forget, she couldn’t quite succeed, and felt herself falling more and more prey, as time crept on, to doubt and foreboding. Opium! It began to strike on her ears like such words as cobra, shark, and scorpion. It had a reptilian, a vicious, loathsome sound. And she grew sick at heart and terrified. A barrier seemed rising stealthily between them—between her heart and all the radiant happiness which had glorified its dreams. Love merged with fear and became sorely baffled. Life was beset with groping. At last it had come to July. Six leaves were gone from the calendar, and midway across the leaf which would next stand uncovered, was the date set by Captain Utterbourne as possibly marking his first return to the island. August the fifteenth! Stella had put in a background of red, so that the figures stood out crisply. Yet of course she knew it might not be just on that day. It might be any day during the week succeeding. “Or maybe he’ll come as early as the eighth,” she told herself, a pang of terrible hope breaking across her heart at the mere conjecture. But there were times when, as with a faint breath of foreboding, she strove desperately not to kindle false lights in her heart; then she would muse: “Perhaps not before the twenty-second.... I mustn’t let myself grow too impatient.” Once—grimly: “What if the time goes by altogether? What then?” Why, then it would simply mean that the Star of Troy need not be looked for until the completion of the year—not before February. “But I can’t stand it,” she cried tensely, “unless he comes next month! I can’t any longer, with things as they are....” She trembled, feeling her brow grow cold and wet. For King’s downward progress had been darkly alarming; and out of all that beauty and delight of her release, a new relentless doom seemed creeping. II King had begun to eat it, she knew, as well as smoke it. His appetite had rapidly developed to ghastly proportions. She saw, with awful vividness, daily before her eyes, the potency of this drug which her husband had come here to handle, and upon which the prosperity of their future was to rest. She saw its fiendishness, its strange compelling charm. He had laughed at first. “Don’t you worry, little girl,” he used to say. “I know enough to keep an upper hand.” Was this an upper hand? “You think the stuff’s getting hold of me, don’t you?” he chaffed one breathless June evening; and Stella, though she was determined not to give way, could not restrain a desperate gesture. After a little silence King laughed reassuringly; and then, with a fling of his head he said: “I’m not used to this sort of life, little girl, and sometimes it gets my goat!” Another evening he strode heavily over to her and grasped her arms with considerable vigour. “It’s time you stopped all this mooning and sighing, I think,” he told her thickly, an indefinite dash even of menace in his tone. “I’ve been watching you. It’s all nonsense, and I won’t have it! You understand? I know what you think. You think I couldn’t stop, right off in a minute, if I wanted to. Well, I could. Some day, just for fun, I’ll show you. Let’s have no more foolishness. I know what I’m doing. I’ve lived in the world a good many years, little girl, and I ought to know by this time how to look after myself. I don’t like your mournful eyes and your tears. I tell you I don’t like them. You act like an everlasting funeral!” His words gave slightly the impression that he was striving to carry a point in his own mind, somewhat, as well as in his wife’s. Later, off by himself in another part of the house, she heard him laugh again, a loud laugh, with just a note in it of new and sinister wildness. Sometimes his round blue eyes seemed to bore into her with a searching, challenging look. She felt her soul in commotion. And she said nothing, only watched the slow change in those eyes, as hunger stole into them. Slowly her heart chilled with a sense of doom. These were restless and not very happy days on Hagen’s Island, though in most respects life went on quite as usual. King seemed anxious to plunge more strenuously than ever into the work. A heavy grimness sometimes coloured his attitude. He grew vaguely harassed and more palpably restive. Faint lines of struggle crept into his face. He laughed more boisterously, though perhaps rather less often. There were times when Stella felt herself slipping tragically out of his life; yet he still found obvious pleasure in having her come to meet him on his return from the fields, and often delighted her with flashes of the old intimate tenderness. But there were occasions, too, when he displayed such an enlarged arrogance, and chaffed with such an edge that she trembled and felt her soul in still greater commotion. For he could less and less, as the time went on, endure any suggestion that things weren’t quite well with him. If he saw her in tears it would make him furious. Sometimes a rebuke or sharp gesture of impatience would rouse her heart, and she would rebel against the docility which, on her side, had always seemed an essential feature of the romantic relationship. Then perhaps there would come a mutual wave of affection and forgiveness, and peace would inhabit the house. He would call her “little lady,” and sometimes he still called her “peaches,” though his moods of softness appeared somewhat less frequent. As time went on and her husband seemed falling more and more under the insidious sway of the drug, doubts stirred more and more, also, in Stella’s heart. And she began to ask herself questions about the future which she could not answer, and which often filled her with a nameless terror. Sometimes in the evening Stella would watch her husband, fascinated by the fearful process of opium smoking, as she had once been fascinated by the sheer dazzle of his eyes and the romance of manners such as she had never dared hope to encounter outside of books. She would sit, almost spellbound, and see the resistless hunger take possession of him. Perhaps he would be working away on his report for Captain Utterbourne; but at length he would fling himself upon the cot. He would scowl at her with eyes which showed a dull glow of something ominous; then his hands would go out to the tabouret, and with fingers no longer altogether steady, but which had taken on of late a curious flutter, he would seize the pipe. After that, absorption would claim him utterly, as though he inhabited a separate universe. He would draw a large drop of opium, twirl it on the point of the dipper, round and round, with uncanny deftness, over the flame of the spirit lamp, hold it there like meat on a skewer till it roasted. He had learned to an exquisite fineness when the tiny browning ball was cooked to the proper pitch—never the least bit burned, never toasted a shade too dry, yet never drawn off underdone, either. Occasionally he would bring the opium away from the flame and roll it gently on the bowl of his pipe. At last he would hold the pipe itself over the flame a moment, and then would quickly thrust the laden end of the dipper into the bowl, just over the orifice—always sure, with fluttering fingers; always uncannily sure. Then he would relax. And there he would lie, a spectacle of manhood in the wrecking, the stem of the pipe between his lips, which had taken on a bloated look and seemed no longer quite the cupid’s bow of old. The pipe would sway slowly back and forth, trembling a little over the fire of the spirit lamp. And as the sphere of drug inside the bowl began to sizzle, the White Kami, who had once been Ferdinand King, that figure extraordinary of beauty and romance, would draw in with all the fervour of his captured soul; and the spent smoke would drift in clouds from mouth and quivering nostrils. She brooded it with a breaking heart when he was away from her; when he returned she looked at him with eyes full of fear and disillusion. Gradually—and there was time to do full justice to every faintest shade of thought and feeling here—she came to doubt in her heart whether the dreams she had dreamed would ever come true. During these endless hours and days and months with their silence and their augmenting thrill of terror, she came to feel that it was all too late—too wretchedly, tragically late. Stella had been happy, she remembered with a pang, at first—a little feverishly, perhaps, even at best, though still undoubtedly happy. The voyage and the first weeks here on the island had been like some lovely dream, with only vague, uncharted doubts and tremors of uneasy fancy.... Now her whole life seemed suddenly uncharted. III The opium “factory” stood just at the edge of the Ainu village: a mere palm-thatched shed, with rafters strung along inside, from some of which double bags of sheeting were suspended. The bags contained the crude drug or “chick,” which had been standing in linseed oil to prevent evaporation, and which was now in process of being drained dry. A basin underneath each bag received the oily residue; but the bags had been hanging there a good while, and the drippings were only occasional. In one corner was a vat, half full of a sluggish dark substance which several Ainu women were patiently kneading with bare feet. Tsuda stood watching them, critical, keen-eyed. Presently Mr. King came in. He glanced about sharply, frowned, sniffed. Tsuda reluctantly dropped on to one knee, while the labourers prostrated themselves, awaiting a sign from the White Kami which would signify to them that they might resume their work. King waved an impatient arm, then moved about restlessly, it almost seemed a bit aimlessly, inspecting the premises. His whole bearing appeared somewhat altered. The lordliness, if anything, was exaggerated, at the same time that he impressed one as being subtly less in control. Certainly he was noticeably thinner; his former look of florid fulness was giving place to a muddy pallor, tending to make his eyes somewhat sunken. Tsuda flashed a glance at him, then looked doggedly back at the ground. King approached the vat and investigated with one finger the consistency of the opium. “It will soon be tough enough,” he muttered; while Tsuda kept a smile under judicious control. The overseer cleansed his finger slowly and meticulously on a cloth, studied his nails a moment with knit brow, drew out his little notebook and held a pencil poised above one page a long time; finally with a detached sigh he put it back into his pocket without having recorded anything at all. He looked about him, his round blue eyes staring, then strode abruptly out of the shed. Tsuda gazed after him with a yellowish light in his complex Asiatic face. A moment later a young savage named Nipek-kem ran in. He had been chosen, because of superior attainments, as Tsuda’s special aid and lieutenant—a convenient go-between and secret informer. Out of breath, he was now the bearer of tidings: the man whose wife had buried the head-dress was dead. “I expected it,” said Tsuda dryly. Nipek-kem elaborated: When the man learned his wife had prayed the curse against him, he raised his arm to strike her dead; but it was already long that the symbol lay under ground, and his arm dropped; he could not lift it any more. For a moment Tsuda’s eyes gleamed. It was a kind of miracle, and the priest in him would never die. For an instant the worldly side seemed crowded out, and he saw himself in the sacerdotal robes, in a temple all a-murmur with the breath of the eternal gods. But the vision passed. With a sudden cry, as actuated by some swift inner flash, Tsuda seized the fellow’s arm. He brought his lips close and murmured, trembling with an excitement of new purpose: “You know the place in the rocks where the Wife-of-the-Kami sits much of late?” Nipek-kem raised both hands to his chest, letting them wave gracefully downward. Yes, he knew. “Go and see if she is there now, and come back quickly.” The savage sped off. When he was gone, Tsuda sat down beside the opium vat, a look of devious tenderness in his face. IV Nipek-kem peered cautiously over a ledge of rock, all his movements stealthy. Below, with her head thrown back, sat the wife of the White Kami. Her eyes were closed; she appeared to be sleeping. The Ainu gazed down at her a moment, then crept silently backward and disappeared. When Stella opened her eyes she started and cried out a little. Tsuda was squatting near her, looking very mild and child-like. “You come here often,” he murmured humbly. “Every day,” she replied. “I come to watch for ships that might pass by—just to see them—it wouldn’t matter how far off....” The girl seemed changed; her eyes had a strained look, and she appeared drawn to a perpetual tension of nervous expectancy; she had aged a little; there was a new calm about her, too—it was dimly menacing.... King’s revolver lay beside her on the rock. One night she had a faintly disquieting dream about the Ainu, and seeing her husband’s revolver with some of his things next day, she decided to carry it with her on her solitary vigils. However, she carried it, really, not so much for protection as because it was a weapon with which she could attack the silence, when it grew too awful to be endured, as King had attacked it the day he returned home from his first inspection of the fields. “You will see no ships go by,” said Tsuda with an emphatic shake of his long head. “Ships don’t leave the course unless they have to—no, sir!” He had heard Captain Utterbourne explain it—a law of least resistance in ships. “Are the nearest sailing lanes a long way off?” asked the girl with a trembling touch of wistfulness in her voice. Things weren’t going very well on Hagen’s Island. Illusions were rubbing threadbare. It was a time for spiritual inventories. “Long way—I should say! Full day steaming head on, mebby more.” There was evidence here of a slight nautical confusion, though he always paid the closest attention, too, whenever Utterbourne opened his lips. “Better to give up look for ships—gn—that don’t ever come,” Tsuda murmured, his eyes searchingly upon her face. She looked at him sadly, and he let his gaze fall to the little gleaming weapon at her side. Presently he lifted his eyes to hers, and, with a child-like smile, pointed to the revolver. “It is very pretty,” he said. “I had a fine one, once—a fellow give me in Benares. But”—he grew a shade petulant—“the Captain wouldn’t let me keep it—say one gun on the island was enough.” And in a moment he added, speaking more simply and smiling in his naÏve way: “Will you let me take it in my hand, Wife-of-the-Kami?” Her lips moved—it was a tiny ghost-smile. “Yes,” she said. Tsuda took the revolver into his hand, his face quite radiant. Anything new—anything he didn’t possess.... He examined it minutely and lovingly. “Do you mind if I shoot?” he coaxed. “There’s a little patch of white against the rocks, far down there near the water,” she told him, a vague touch of interest coming for a moment into her listless voice. “I use it sometimes as a target.” “Will you show me?” He crept to her side very humbly. She saw that his hand was a little unsteady. Tsuda emptied the revolver quickly and deftly, then handed it back to her with a faint regretful smile. And he said, softly, his eyes agleam as he spoke, in a cryptic whisper: “Your husband is a very lucky man, Wife-of-the-Kami....” V Returning from his cursory inspection of the opium vat, King entered a silent house. He had turned one room into a makeshift office; for it had become his practice to divide his time between fields and desk. He liked to point out that the principal difference between his job and Tsuda’s was that the former called for head work. King did rather a good deal of figuring and scribbling. Until recently the report had gone along in fine style. It was full of notes and queries and memos of many sorts, and bristled with little tentative schemes, sometimes inclined toward extravagance, for bringing water into the fields during the dry spells. He was also working on percentages of dross, which might be cut down to the benefit of the more special product. A little of the output was prepared after an elaborate Bengal receipt for special trade. Utterbourne disposed of the major part to Indian agents; the rest disappeared along coasts from which fishing smacks came plying with devious credentials. These were transactions that would not bear any very merciless investigation, perhaps, though they were frequently more remunerative than the regular trade. King, in role of overseer and general manager, had really gone at it all rather intelligently, to begin with. The island was a test, and he intended to make good. However, the business was lagging of late. Stella, coming in, found her husband sitting at his work table, his head fallen down on to his arms. Yet he was not asleep, for his eyes were wide open, staring into space with an almost frantic look. It seemed to her—came rushing upon her in a romantic wave—that this was a climax. She ran up to him with a little desperate cry, held his face in her hands—a real flash of passion; she felt suddenly the stronger of the two—almost as though he were coming to depend upon her now.... And she resolutely fought down a vague impulse of shrinking which his altering presence sometimes aroused. “What is it?” she asked. He brought himself round with an effort that beaded his forehead with a few drops of cold sweat. His look darkened—it was as though he divined what was in her mind. “Nothing,” he muttered thickly. “What do you want to interrupt me for? I’ve told you I can’t be bothered when I’m in here, damn it!” “But Ferd....” She felt the climax slipping. “Go on about your work and leave me alone. I’m trying ... I say, I’m trying to work out a better product for our special trade.” The effort it took to destroy the illusion in his wife’s mind was so terrific that it left him shaking. He spoke almost savagely; he was in a savage frame of mind, for he had overrun his usual hour for indulgence in drug, and was trying to persuade himself that he was still in control. The compassionate attitude she had taken could hardly have been more unhappily timed. Stella, perceiving the failure of her little desperate move, slipped away, her heart troubled with a strange conflict of emotions. He had not, despite his agonizing effort, strengthened her crumbling confidence in him. And she knew with a pang that he had not really been working on the product for the special trade at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BITTER COMFORT The former delight of their life together was frequently turned to bitterness by just such disillusionizing scenes as this. The time had long passed when she could please and amuse and occasionally puzzle him with her romancing, her manifest infatuation. King seemed unable to grasp or tolerate such things as romance any more. Sometimes, indeed, he would go for days without more than casually recognizing her mere presence in the house. Again, a mood of tenderness would come upon him and she would see that his eyes glistened with tears. The sense of mirage would be strong in her heart, for Stella was growing wary; yet even so, it would seem, at such times, as though a little light were breaking along the path ahead of them. But it couldn’t last—and she was never really fooled. Sometimes her husband’s eyes would even take on their old look of roundness and fascination, and, as though psychically stirred by the unuttered anguish within her, he would go on in the old way, laying extravagant plans—all the things they would do by and bye: the places they would visit, the brilliant life they’d live. But she felt him, to employ metaphor, puffing, a little, always, at such times, like a half spent runner, in an effort to make spontaneous what had lost the persuasive ring of spontaneity. Also, she made the discovery, after a while, that King only reverted to these flashes of the old-time splendour when an opium mood reined most benignly in his heart—a heart, after all, mysterious still, and unsearchable as the forces Stella felt at work all about her in this little empire of the poppy. She grew bold and fearless in a new determination to tear away all the films from her own vision and face the naked facts of her life, whatever they might prove. “It’s a queer thing,” she mused, “that there weren’t any premonitions of all this in the old days....” But then she remembered how her father had been so troubled and swayed with doubt at first: how he had held her close and asked: “Are you sure, girlie—dead sure?” Yes, there had been that note—she lingered over it almost caressingly. And then those words of Elsa’s: “Don’t you hold on so hard to your ideals, Stella,” or however she had phrased it—yes, they, too had a haunting way of returning. “But what were my ideals?” she asked herself searchingly. “Did I have any? What was it I thought I wanted? What was I so eager to grasp, after all?” She had played, as it had seemed to her, so brilliantly. He had fanned her at the ball as though she were a princess. He had sent her violets and taken her to the matinÉe. Then their lives had intertwined, and they had married. She had been so eager to thrust her destiny into his hands. She had run neck and neck with glittering Irmengarde.... “Irmengarde!” she muttered. “Only think of it!” Now the pace had retarded. How far back all that seemed! How little she had understood life; how little she had understood her own heart. Time stood drowsy and stagnant, and her prince was tampering with a dread elixir. Yes, the gay, magnetic prince, with white at either temple, who had murmured so enchantingly in the long-ago: “Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine?” “What I fell in love with must have been nothing more than a myth, I guess,” she faltered. For time and silence were bringing her to deep and pitiless introspection. She had been just in the mood ... he had set her young girl fancy afire. But adversity was turning her into a woman, and she knew what it was to drink from a very bitter cup indeed. Love flew out of the window. But the awful reality of Hagen’s Island could not be dispelled. Her dreams all glimmered out, too. But her husband remained, like a heavy dross of fact. With the shine gone, she was no longer blinded. There was bitter comfort in this. If she still pleaded with him, it was no longer like a frightened doll. It might not, somehow, be too late, even now, she sometimes groped, if the Captain.... But time would mock her with its everlasting patience. “What a strange thing life is,” she mused. One day she grasped his hands and gripped them tight. “Let me throw the stuff into the sea,” she urged. “Give me the pipe and all the things you use, and try....” But she could not, after all, quite face the look in his eyes without faltering, even though she had learned to speak so simply, from her heart. “God help me!” he muttered brokenly. It sounded like a terrible amen in some ironic ritual of praise. She braced herself with an immense effort of will, met his gaze again, and went on earnestly: “I’ll help you with the work—we’ll try to make a success of the island together, since the island has to be.” Yes, adversity was making a woman of her after its own inexorable pattern, and she was no longer hoodwinked by that curious superstition about a woman’s fingers and a man’s work.... On the point of reminding him of the fine things they had so often planned to do, a quite wonderful half inspired impulse came to her, and she said: “I’ve heard you speak many times of wanting to settle down somewhere in a cheerful little flat without bothering much if nothing ever happened. It used to seem to me as though I couldn’t endure a life like that; but now it’s really all the same to me. If you’d rather live that kind of a life, then it will suit me too, I guess. Anything you can fix your mind on strong enough, so you....” In spite of everything, her words sounded a little hollow to her. Yet back of them was such burning sincerity, too; and she felt that she couldn’t go on living at all, after this, if he patted her head and laughed, or if he said: “Don’t worry, little girl!” He did not laugh, but clung to her—even frantically. He gazed at his wife with wild, brimming eyes, and caressed her hair with gentle trembling fingers. He pressed her passionately against his heart, and with a shaking voice he murmured: “I swear—I swear to you....” There seemed a faint cloud of exaltation about them. But at evening she saw him again relaxed and ravenous, twirling the little fatal drop above the flame of the spirit lamp. And she saw that it was all irrevocable. And she saw how hopeless it all was....
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
RENDEZVOUS I The visit of the old chief, though informally handled, was a really quite momentous affair. Cha-cha-kamui (English version: Very-Old-and-Very-Wonderful) had dressed up in his robe of state, a most gaudy creation of red and white cloth. He wore a great crown made of cocoanut palm shavings and embellished with beautiful gilt paper and wild cotton. The crown was necessarily a great one, because Cha-cha-kamui possessed a head of enormous dimensions—truly quite the head of some mythical though very mild and somewhat fussy old giant. His hair was getting pretty thin on top—the Ainu were sadly on the toboggan. The crown, therefore, performed a two-fold service. It was a state affair. King received his august visitor in the “parlour,” where he spent a good deal of time these days. Tsuda, as he entered, sniffed the air, and his eyes glittered subtly. As for Cha-cha-kamui, he was shaking all over from sheer excitement. He had never been in the immediate presence of a kami before. He was a great chief, and had brought his people down here inside a whale; he was close to the gods, but was not himself a god. Thus the ordeal was considerable, and he was glad to squat as quickly as possible. The longer the old chief stayed, however, the more his nervousness fell away from him—especially after King had brought out some of the excellent brandy that had come all the way from San Francisco. He smacked his lips over it in touching appreciation. It was a great deal better than Tsuda’s sakÉ. Tsuda would have to look to his laurels! Cha-cha-kamui gazed at King, his old eyes lit with affectionate devotion. He wrinkled his eyelids until he could hardly see, and lifted up the corners of his mouth with such vigour that he lifted his cheeks right along with them. He fawned. He massaged his aged hands, and made his scalp wiggle back and forth. It was a spectacle! And then, obedient to a private signal from Tsuda, the old man came to the real business of the session. He launched out fervently upon a long and very confidential speech, which Tsuda, feigning some surprise and displaying touches of modest delicacy here and there, translated into English of his usual colloquial and even slangy sort: English that was sly and shrewd and not a little waggish. As for the speech itself—well, it was all about Cha-cha-kamui’s wives; and since the Great Wife must naturally go right on enjoying the high prestige of a position bestowed for life, and since she couldn’t be expected to retain in full vigour the charms of her now far distant youth, there was nothing to prevent a little harmless alliance on the side; and what Cha-cha-kamui had above all come to tell the White Kami was that he wanted the White Kami to have his Small Wife for his very own. The theme rose to heights of eloquence; it became an oration; he had never in all his life tasted anything half so fine as the brandy from San Francisco. He wanted the White Kami to take his Small Wife; he wanted to show his homage—and could mortal man give more? The speech amazed King greatly. It was, in truth, an amazing speech. King hardly knew how to take it at first, and looked at Tsuda in a complex, searching way. But presently he laughed, with a laugh that had a sort of catch or rattle in it; and he thanked the royal octogenarian and replied much as he had once replied to Tsuda respecting another issue: “You’re very kind. Perhaps I’ll avail myself of your generosity one of these days—who knows?” Yes—who knew? He had been used to a life of movement and diversion, and Hagen’s Island was a little remote. He felt broken and reckless. Often he longed to fall back into old voluptuous ways. Yes, who knew? He had fallen so far; let all the old passions rush and confound his soul. Besides, ever since the day Stella had pleaded with him so earnestly, and he had crumpled and wept and murmured: “God help me!” King had had a feeling that he was no longer master. He had shown her a weakness which put him, however intangibly, in her power. Often a muddy desire came upon him to reassert his manhood and resume full moral sway. The very episode which at the time had seemed drawing them closer together had in reality plunged them farther apart. He argued weakly and gropingly. His soul snarled for opium. Cha-cha-kamui departed well pleased, and marched proudly back to the village. His crown was a trifle awry, and perhaps he walked a little unsteadily; but no one could expect to emerge from the presence of the gods behaving quite as usual. Tsuda, also, departed well pleased. Left alone, King stood a few moments, irresolute, his mind carrying on the argument it had been engaged with, but in a more and more febrile fashion. Yes, he groped, perhaps this maiden of the old chief’s could give him back the sense of supremacy which had so lapsed and failed of late. Stella.... He rambled darkly. She had grown too strong for him ... he scarcely knew her any more. Then he laughed again, a reckless, unnerved laugh; and there was a hollowness in it, and a catch; it slyly rattled. King’s mind, at the time of the old chief’s arrival, had been morbidly clear, as it always was when under an immediate spell of narcotic. Opium never muddled him, but on the contrary stimulated his faculties, set them in exquisite if sombre harmony. But when the hunger for more swept upon him, then a cloud seemed to descend, and he saw all things darkly. The house was full of an immense stillness. He had a sense of wavering all alone in space. After a moment he slunk to his cot and lay down. A heaviness like the pain of a nameless, black remorse, beat dully at his pulses. There was no longer within him even the power to struggle. He was shadowed by nightmare, cursed with impotence of will, chained down by a fatal languor and could only move in the direction dictated by drug. Reaching out for the little spirit lamp, he lighted it. His eyes gleamed with eagerness and torture. As the tiny sphere of ecstasy sizzled and browned over the flame, he longed with a terrible longing to be free once more even while he knew that to be free would cost an effort such as he had not any longer the moral courage to make. He drew in deeply and expelled the vapour with a long sigh of delight. Almost in an instant he was a prince again, and the empires of the earth and of the skies were his. The island was a test. However, he was busy with other harvests now. II Time, silence, the sea. And through them thrilled ever that haunting sense of something just impending. The island was like a room in which there was only so much air. When the air was gone, that would be the end. However, it was all very elusive and subtle. The slow days crept like the imperceptible movement of shade across a sweep of summer lawn. One morning, soon after dawn came in across the dreamy jungle, Stella stood before the calendar blocking out her yesterday. There was a look of quivering, almost frantic hope in her eyes. Today was the long awaited fifteenth of August, and she meant to spend it all in her rocky nook, gazing to sea through the glasses. Perhaps there would be a tiny speck at last on the horizon. Captain Utterbourne was a man quite capable of being perversely and poetically punctual if he chose. Mechanically she loaded her pistol and took the binoculars. Who but the Captain would ever think of anything so beautifully and maddeningly ironical for a wedding gift? On the way out she noticed in passing that her husband wasn’t in the parlour where he usually slept now, so as to be near his smoking materials. On the floor in a corner, half buried beneath trash, lay the big book in which King’s report on the progress of opium culture was to have appeared. Life seemed slipping out between his fingers. He could not have told just when he crossed over the sinister boundary beyond which there could be no returning. However, he had passed it by, and now could only press on and on. This morning the sun was barely in the sky, yet King was not in the house. Dully she wondered where he was. Then she passed on out into the early freshness of the dawn. At first the sea was misty. But as the day advanced a little, and the shroud gradually dissolved, it became very blue—like the colour in certain canvases of primitive Italian painters. Tsuda came toward her, hat in hand, and his demeanour, as always, scrupulously humble. Sometimes she felt Tsuda was too humble; yet she believed he had the heart of a child. Tsuda could scarcely be thought of as in any sense a kindred soul; they were not of the same race; and at times he alarmed her, vaguely, with his flashes of oriental mysticism; still, after a fashion, he spoke her tongue, and beside him and her husband there were only the hairy Ainu.... Tsuda greeted her cheerfully and with his usual wide-eyed innocence in full operation. “Wife-of-the-Kami, you come early today.” “Yes,” she told him quietly. “I am looking for the Star of Troy.” “The Star of Troy?” There was a flash almost of sudden dismay in his bright eyes. “It’s not certain,” she admitted wistfully. “Wife-of-the-Kami, he will not come today.” She turned her eyes, so full of sorrow and of disillusion, upon him. “Why do you say that, Tsuda?” “We must—gn—wait out the year. It is always so. He will not come today, Wife-of-the-Kami.” Her eyes travelled away from his face dully and rested on the sea again—the sunny, vacant sea. She felt that her heart was very close to breaking. When at last her arms tingled with the strain of holding up the binoculars, she lowered them slowly. And then she saw that the young savage, Nipek-kem, had slipped noiselessly toward them and had prostrated himself before her. “Please tell him he may get up,” she said. Then Tsuda, who, she saw, had likewise dropped to his own slightly rheumatic knees, spoke a few low words to Nipek-kem, who promptly arose and sat on the ground Turk-fashion, beginning at once an elaborate Ainu gesture salutation. Every movement of his body lured a tiny jingle from the accoutrements of his royal-looking shirt-front. Finally he lifted up his hands as high as his head, the palms turned upward, and lowered them gradually to his knees, speaking at the same time a few murmuring words in the crude Ainu dialect. “What does he want?” asked Stella. “He tell—gn—of a prayer in the valley for rain. It is long time, Wife-of-the-Kami, that we get no rain, and the cocoanut withers in the sun. They ask if you will show yourself on the crest of the hill as a sign—gn—the gods will open up the sky.” She felt the primitive fog of superstition in the midst of which she dwelt, and a shudder of new misgiving and vague fear oppressed her. But she rose and said: “Yes, I will go. Where is the hill, Tsuda?” “Just come along this way, Wife-of-the-Kami. I give you a hand so you don’t slip down where it get steep.” And Nipek-kem followed at a respectful distance. But first, his eyes agleam, he picked up the little revolver which Stella had left on the rock. He slipped it inside his tunic of birds’ feathers. This, he knew with a gay heart, would mean all the good sakÉ he could drink. III The hill to which Tsuda took her, his hand hot, trembling now and then a little as it supported her up the rough trail, proved to be the same hill upon which reposed the prostrate slab sacred to the remains of Vander Hagen. It was one of the loftiest spots on the island. They stood just beside the grave to watch the rain ceremonial. In the valley below were a few Ainu huts. In their midst was a bit of open sward, and half the tribe was assembled. Most of the Ainu lay on the ground and kept nodding their heads in the dust in a patient, abject way. In the centre of the sward a post had been set up, and upon it was fastened the dilapidated skull of a raccoon brought down from Paromushir. It seemed to leer in the sunshine. There was no cloud in the sky. The island simmered and baked. This was, indeed, an unusual spell of drought in a realm so lush, and where scarcely a day passed by without its brief, warm drenching. In the valley they prayed for rain, and some capered solemnly, sprinkling each other with water. Nobody remembered at length how the curious custom had begun. Its origin lay swallowed up in the void that stood in lieu of history. These Ainu had no heritage: a weary race devoid of yesterdays.... Tsuda had seized upon this piece of ritual, but he had subtly touched it, too, with the finer genius of Shinto. Tsuda could never outgrow the sacerdotal atmosphere which had surrounded his youth in the Shinshu mountains. The lure of the gods was in his blood. This was his other self—his soul’s deep hinterland. “These are days again—gn,” he murmured, “of the working of magics and miracles!” His face looked shiny and very serious. And the curious thing about Tsuda was that he just hazily believed, himself, in the magic and the miracles—without, of course, quite sacrificing any of that conflicting shrewdness and that worldly subtlety, which were also such deeply imbedded elements in his nature. Stella sank down on to the broken slab to watch, curious, yet with unmoved face. And Tsuda squatted beside her, very humbly. “Yes sir!” he murmured. “We see the wonders coming to pass!” He raised his fists high above his head in an attitude of odd yet convincing religious ecstasy. There was a weird, poetic quality in his voice. Stella felt her soul shrinking. She seemed on the very brink of some nameless despair. “These are great days for the children of the White Kami!” he cried. And he hugged his knees and rocked. And his eyes were bright. And he wheezed with asthma. Everything about Tsuda was at once so simple and so profoundly mixed up. All the complexes of a lifetime of frustration and cleverness and hard knocks, with always that queer shine underneath of the priest-wish, seemed converging now into a high mood of conflict. “It is good—gn—we think much on the ways of the gods.” The pagan plea for rain proceeded in the valley at their feet. The old chief, Cha-cha-kamui, clad in his paraphernalia of state, including the august crown of shavings and gilt, sat amongst his people intoning a chant or saga in a high, shrill voice—a voice so haunting in the still white sunshine that Stella felt it would echo in her soul as long as she lived. The chant was slow and of a droning cadence. At intervals the singer raised his voice in a wailing crescendo, but the wail always drifted back afterwards into the tonic, and the chant would recommence and proceed as before. And all the while the dancers moved on about the leering raccoon skull, capering and sprinkling each other with the symbolic water. In a flash Stella saw herself, vividly, at home in the old days, and her heart was seized with a fierce ache. Tears slipped from her eyes and she never heeded them. IV Through her tears she saw the savages below her in the valley. She saw the chief of the Ainu and heard his wailing supplication. Mysterious forces.... As she gazed at the cluster of native huts, suddenly her mind whirled with amazement. The mat at the door of one of the huts was lifted and her husband came out. He looked about him a moment a little uncertainly, and then strode off, disappearing into the jungle. Stella could feel her heart beating. She turned to Tsuda to see if he had shared her observation. It was apparent, from his involved look, that he, too, had seen the White Kami come out of the hut. Her mind, so edged with suffering, leapt instantly to a suspicion which, even after all that she had endured, was potent enough to fill her with an immense revulsion. At first she thought she would say nothing at all, but presently she asked: “Tsuda, whose hut is that my husband just left?” Tsuda looked humble and reluctant. “The way of the gods....” he murmuringly began. But she interrupted him in a dry, rather sharp voice. “Let’s never mind about all that, Tsuda. Just tell me whose house it is.” Tsuda at first was silent. He made a little awkward motion of appeal toward her with his bony brown hands. But he saw that he must not evade (clever Tsuda) so in a moment he told her the truth in a reticent mutter—perhaps just too reticent to be convincing. The truth he had brought her up here to, if possible, behold. “It is the house of the great chief’s Small Wife.” “Yes,” murmured Stella. A plain dull monosyllable. There was nothing more to be said. Still, after a little, she asked, in a voice almost completely strained free of any emotion: “Does he go there often, Tsuda?” And Tsuda answered in the affirmative—that is to say, he answered after his own devious fashion, slowly inclining his head, but quickly raising it to fix his restless bright eyes upon her face: “It is written—gn—we must trust the gods in all things, Wife-of-the-Kami.” She said she would go back to her rock. And she sat there all through the day. Sometimes fancy played pranks with her vision, and she thought the horizon was broken by a tiny point like the far off bow or funnel of a ship. But she was always mistaken. The sun dropped into the sea, and the dark came. When it was too dark to watch any longer she returned to the house. For a week Stella went every day to watch for the Star of Troy. But the ocean rested vacant. On the eighth day she did not go to the rock at all.
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