CHAPTER EIGHTEENTHE QUARREL
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 ofallyou 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 asan intrusion—yes, more and more, while theStar of Troysteamed steadily day and night into realms of new adventure and prowess.
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 youinsiston 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 reallythink 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 thankfulwedidn’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 theStar of Troyleft us?”
“Six weeks, Ferd.”
“Surewe 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....
“By the way, Stella,” he announced a few afternoons later, standing a little arrogantly, legs braced apart, and moisteninghis 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?”
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.