CHAPTER THIRTEENTHE WHITE KAMI
It was before dawn—a dark and heavy hour, with the stars just dimming and a light wind in the jungle. Stella was asleep, dreaming: she seemed to be out on the rocks of the shore, where she and Ferdinand had sat enriching the sunset with their wonderful projections. She saw it all in her dream so vividly: the rocky promontory, the sunny sea beyond, and had a sense, as one does in dreams, of something about to happen. The white beach below shimmered in the glare of a vacant sky. In her dream she felt the strange spell of the silence, made manifold. It held her breathless and she waited, full of wonder. Presently as she gazed across the slumbering sea, a great ship came into view—was it this for which the breath of premonition had prepared her? She gazed, and the ship seemed coming straight on, like an enchanted ship. Her heart stirred with delight.
Abruptly, however, Stella awoke, with a sharp pang of fear and sat up in bed, trembling. Something like a wild cry seemed to have broken her dream. She heard it again, though fainter through the woven fastness of the jungle: the cry of some great night bird, a note so sinister and full of lamentation that her brow grew a little damp with the terror of her rousing. Yet in a moment she was calm.
Her husband lay beside her, quietly sleeping. She listened to his regular breathing in the dark, then lay down and closed her eyes. Gradually the silence drew her back into a state of drowsiness. She slept.
When she woke again the dark was gone and the sun stood high.
Slipping from bed and into an adjoining room of her strange new dwelling, Stella lighted a small oil stove and started a kettle of water for their coffee. Returned to the bedroom, she arrayed herself in a bit of frilled and beribboned negligée and a lacy boudoir cap: small extravagancies of the unambitious shopping tours preceding her wedding. Adorned in these luxuries, she sat before her improvised dressing table to begin a rather elaborate toilette.
Stella had done all she could with the primitive conditions surrounding her here. The dressing table was fashioned out of an empty packing case, covered with some old flowered goods. A small mirror hung above it, and on either side were cheap little bracket candle-holders with coloured candles that had begun to nod under the hot breath of the tropics. She had pictured herself in a boudoir rather more authentic; but for the present this one would do very well.
She sat absorbed in the pleasant task of making herself attractive. Ferdinand still slept, but was beginning to stir. Even in bed, relaxed and disheveled with sleep, he looked like a god; and Stella, glancing over at him, felt more than ever inspired to make herself beautiful. She must hold his love, she mused—and even tinted her cheeks a little.
King yawned and turned. A romantic manœuvre entered her head, almost as though inspired by the gay little cap. She fluttered over to the bed. “I’ll wake him with a kiss!” she thought. However, the stratagem was not productive of entirely happy results. Her husband hoisted himself on an elbow and blinked a moment at the surprising apparition he had married; but instead of compensating her in some way for this early effort in his behalf, King let his eyes droop shut again, with a tiny frown, and slipped back—he had barely seen her. The unfortunate bride had violated an entrenched masculine tradition: these things are very subtle.
Yet sleep was really exhausted, after all, and a moment later King thought better of his drowsy petulance, roused and called to her: “Stella!” And she paused, turning a little toward him, while he blinked goodhumouredly and held out an arm, beckoning slowly. She gave him a rueful smile and trudged back, pouting a reluctant forgiveness, her heart relieved, though still in a mood of vague disappointment.
“You mustn’t let little things upset you so easily, Stella,” he said, with the faintest shade of curtness. “I’ve got a big contract on my hands here, and must get my sleep out. Anyway,” he added, patting her hand, “it isn’t late, is it?”
Stella glanced at her watch, pinned on amongst a gay little whirl of ribbons and laces. “Nearly nine o’clock,” she said—and, oddly enough, the intelligence quite changed the complexion of things.
He sprang out of bed with an exclamation. “That’s what a climate can do! Why didn’t you call me hours ago? I’ll have to get an earlier start—where the devil is my shaving mug—is there any hot water, Stella?”
“A little, Ferd,” she hesitated. “For our coffee....”
“Bring me what there is,” he requested bluntly. And asked her where she kept his shirts.
“Ferd,”—she faltered a little. “You’re so brusque this morning.... Don’t you—” and she indicated her finery with a hesitating gesture. “I bought it because you said this is your favourite colour....”
He paused in the energetic process of dressing and looked at her squarely, yet at the same time without full attention. “Yes, I do like it. It’s a dream.” And, since she still hesitated, evidently perplexed and a little confounded, King laughed with affectionate loudness and said: “Come here, lady-bird, and I’ll make a fuss over you. I wasn’t thinking. Of course you look good enough to eat! Give me a kiss.”
He gathered her up and hugged her.
When her husband had gone, looking very handsome andmagnetic in his white clothes and a stiff tropical hat, Stella sat a little time at the doorstep, musing, letting her mind drift on an undercurrent of vague debate. She idly watched some dusky southern moths floating about a patch of dull orange fungus in the brooding dimness of the jungle. Her thoughts, unformed and roaming, were faintly sombre. She remembered her haunting dream, so sharply broken by the cry of the bird, and seemed again to see the ship sailing in toward her; she wondered whether any ships did ever pass within range of the island. Presently, with a little sigh, she got up and went into the house. She took off her finery and laid it away, putting on in its stead one of the sturdy house dresses Maud had made up on the same pattern she used herself.
At first, as her hands were thrust into that familiar and essentially unromantic element known in everyday parlance as dish water, Stella mused with another thoughtful sigh: “Here I am again...!” Yet in the very act of hurrying through all such drudgery to have it out of the way, she realized that when the housework was finished there would be absolutely nothing to do until it was time to prepare luncheon. Her life seemed suddenly so packed with hours, so freighted with brooding silence.... “I must make a point of using all the dishes I can at every meal,” she laughed softly. The stillness, rendered poignant by the droning of wild bees and a dainty ambient rustle of fern, pressed against her heart.
This morning she was unusually thorough. Capable Maud, with memories of past shirking, would open her eyes indeed could she look in at this marvel of housewifery. The dishes out of the way, Stella turned quite happily to her sweeping, singing a little as she worked. The broom had been one of Captain Utterbourne’s poetic foresights....
Her task was broken in upon by a faint and very deferential tap. She opened the door and on the threshold beheld Tsuda, standing in a humble posture, hat in hand, and murmuring: “Good morning.” He bowed low as he spoke, and subtly shook his head a little, as though to emphasize his acute humility.
She regarded him with a gleam of interested amusement. Tsuda’s face, as he slowly raised it to the girl in the doorway, showed itself ancient, yet with strangely youthful eyes; an unusually long face, with a baffling, complex expression. His loosely woven straw hat with its band of bright blue ribbon, gave him a note of gaiety and youth. He looked subtle and cool and debonair, despite his humility, as he stood outside gazing up into the face of the only white woman within rather a good many degrees of longitude and latitude.
“Mr. King isn’t here,” she told him, her eyes still amused. There were times when Tsuda’s face looked just a little like the face of a horse—though she had caught flashes of darker qualities which left her, too, a trifle insecure. “I believe my husband rode over to look at some fields on the other side of the island.”
“Sss—I know,” Tsuda nodded rapidly. Then an expression of quaint solicitude came into his bright young-looking eyes, and he asked: “You find everything—gn—all right here?”
His mood this morning was par excellence the mood of a child, naïve and trusting and simple as sunshine; and a few moments later he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mrs. King’s “parlour,” giving her a round-eyed account of the manner in which he and all these dusky children of the northland had been brought down out of far wild Paromushir to take possession of an island nobody seemed to want.
“We come from the—gn—way up top of the Kurile Isles—very high—you have not been there?” And he gazed searchingly, as though he would glean from her face how much they had shared with her—the masters, King and Utterbourne.
“No,” said Stella, “I’ve never been there. I haven’t travelled a great deal—until now,” she added with a gay little laugh.
Tsuda hissed gently. “I want you to see how it was, please. We come many moons ago in a great whale that burn inside like a volcano!” His whole bearing was that of a child,wide-eyed with the sheer wonder of miracles befallen. “Yessir—a whale!”
Stella was plainly enthralled. The rewards of her romantic patience and doll-like trust hadn’t been any too ample—“a woman’s fingers don’t belong in a man’s work, little lady.” King had displayed a laughing parsimony; and though Captain Utterbourne, during the long voyage, must have emitted at least a hundred thousand words of pure narrative, interspersed with little gems of psychology and sociology and ethics, he hadn’t taken the trouble to give out more than the vaguest hints as to what lay before them in the throbbing mystery of that future always just ahead over the bow of theStar of Troy. Her curiosity about all this business of the island was keenly aroused, and she was glad to listen to the strange little Asiatic, who seemed indeed quite bursting with friendly communicativeness.
Tsuda blinked rapidly. “My people had got bad, very bad, about their altars. It was simply awful! No good to forget your altars—bad, very bad.” He shook his long head seriously. “Evil come then. There are ogres left—all written down in great Book of Shintō—the way of the gods....” His face seemed illuminated with almost a supernatural glow. “Very bad, very bad! They come down swoop in the night....” Tsuda nodded slowly and solemnly. “But the gods send us some one to the rescue. He look at you—gn—and you can’t look back....” Perhaps Utterbourne had never received a finer tribute.
Tsuda leaned toward the girl, swaying in a mystic rhythm as he talked, his voice high and a little tremulous; and as she watched him and listened to his wild tale, told always in that manner of open-eyed wonder, Stella vividly sensed the contrast between this new life of hers and the old. “WhereamI?” she asked herself, laughing faintly, yet with a tiny shiver too, almost of swift fear.
“He bring us all down here,” Tsuda continued. “The whale is very dark, and give out long trail of black like thevolcano. He tell us we build altars and one day a new god—one day the White Kami will come....” Tsuda broke off abruptly, and asked in a voice which seemed to have taken on a subtly darker and narrower quality: “You have not seen the temple?”
“No,” said Stella.
“Good—I’ll show you—gn. Done in the finest Shintō.... I have a brother, once; he is priest in the Shinshū mountains. I would be too, a priest, only—” Again he broke off, and for a moment his eyes showed a fierce gleam of reminiscent hate. But it passed, and he said very gently: “Will you come and see?”
“The temple?” she asked.
“Yes—to goddess Amaterasu”—he half chanted the name. “Mean the Heaven-shiner, goddess of the Sun—Shimmei, sometimes, Ten Shōkō Daijin, Daijingū—we say—gn—Amaterasu. You will come?”
“Is it far?” Stella asked him.
“No, no—not far.”
“Yes,” she hesitated. Her breathing was a trifle accelerated. It all seemed unbelievable....
There was a light truly of heaven in his eluding Asiatic eyes. He led her to a little temple in a grove of palm and giant fern; pointed out its mystic excellencies; talked a great deal about Shintō which she couldn’t grasp.
“It’s like a little doll’s house!” she cried. “And so perfect! I’m sure it must have taken you a long, long time to build.” There were low mounds all about, for it was here, also, that the dead were buried.
Tsuda seemed too vividly moved by the ecstasy, which shone out of his eyes, to hear her little burst of amazed enthusiasm. “Some day he tell us the White Kami will come. We wait, long time. A very long time, it seem. One day”—Tsuda crept closer—“the White Kami!” He lifted his armsin weird triumph. “The White Kami at last is come to live among his children!”
Stella seemed to grasp in a flash the significance of this. She thrust her hand, in a startled gesture, against one cheek; found it burning.
Tsuda’s face, as he watched her so eagerly for news of the emotions in her heart, suddenly clouded with shrewdness. “They do not tell you?” he murmured, close; she could feel his breath.
“I’ve heard nothing about this, Tsuda. You mean my husband—?”
“Sss.” His eyes, so young in a face so lined and ancient, never relaxed their eager searching look. “Tsuda tell you all things,” he said softly and very humbly.
“The White Kami ...” she faltered, groping, her mind in great confusion. For a moment it was almost as though his words brought to her the discovery that she had married a being of another species than herself.... The sensation, though fleeting, was vivid and even terrible. And half consciously she remembered how she had sat waiting in the drawing room at Berkeley, and had felt, beyond the incommunicative conventionality, of the place, a subtle sense of something ominous....
Tsuda’s hands, lean and brown, moved restlessly. “The Captain tell us,” he murmured, “we may look for the White Kami. But he do not tell us you come too, Wife-of-the-Kami!”
When she looked at him his head was lowered; and as though swayed by a religious impulse too powerful to be denied, the Japanese slowly sank down onto one knee before her and reverently brought the hem of her dress to his lips.