CHAPTER ELEVENHONEYMOON
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 tackingsomething 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 andthen 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’tit 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?
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 theStar of Troyhad 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 onemustwaken.... Sometimes it was very subtly like music one cannot listen to without mysterious tremors beyond the realm of words. The air was warm anda 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!
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 askme!” 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 nomore. 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 Tōkyō 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 theStar 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.