CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURPITCHERS AND STARS
Moonlight filled the open space and flooded the temple with a bath of bluish white.
Jerome knelt beside the grave in the shadow of great palms. In the midst of this world of silence he suddenly felt a little self-conscious. Impulse, he feared, had carried him to lengths which it would be rather difficult to explain. Yet she was the woman he had loved, and men can never forget these things.
“I must go back, now,” he thought.
Slowly he raised his eyes, and was glad of the stars and the moon. It required the stars and the moon and the pounding of one’s own heart at a time like this to keep a man sane. He clung, rather, to the familiar, static facts in his life—a life now so changed, which had once been packed with all that was familiar and unchanging.
Stella lay dead at his feet, and on the little altar out there in the moonlight was the offering placed at the threshold of the gods for Stella’s soul. He bowed his head a moment, shaken with amazement and confused regret. When he raised his head, however, and was about to take his departure, Jerome started. He fancied he had seen something stir in the moonlight. In another moment he was sure of it.
The paper door of the temple was slowly moving. His finger nails gripped hard against his palms, and he braced himself by another swift glance at the unheeding dome of night.
Yes, the door of the temple was opening—slowly, veryslowly; first only a hair’s breadth, then wider and wider, till the aperture was sufficient to permit a slender, white-clad form to slip through and out into the soft radiance of the night.
It was a brilliant object-lesson in the science of attention. Quakes might have riven the earth, and he would have gazed on, through the space of that first electric moment. Jerome trembled violently, felt the cold sweat of terror and unbelief on his forehead. His eyes beheld her—yet how could it be she? His mind seemed suddenly crazed. He had been through too much in one little hour, he reasoned, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she would be gone: there would be only the moonlight on the silent temple, and he would go back to theStar of Troyand take up his life once more.
But the white figure was still before him. And then, like a dart of dazzling inspiration, he knew this was really she, and no creature of disordered fancy. Yet all the while he knelt on her grave and could not move or speak.
She looked quickly about and listened. Jerome caught something intimate and familiar in the tilt of her head. In their old eventless lives she had tilted her head just that way, sometimes. He was rigid while the girl very cautiously crept out on to the steps of the temple and descended to the shrine where the offering had been placed.
Her movements were nervous and stealthy. At the foot of the flight she paused to look about and listen. Then, in an abrupt, snatching way, she seized some of the food and ran back up the steps with it, disappearing into the temple. After a moment she reappeared, and this time moved as though actuated by a slightly less acute nervousness—even lingered a moment to gaze up, in a tense lost way, at the beauty of the night sky. Then she was gone.
It was a time of breathlessness for Jerome, indeed. A time of uncanny, prickling faintness. He trembled. The emotion seemed almost unbearable. Yet he knew she was Stella; and the former romantic appreciation of melancholytriumph was giving way to the chaos foreshadowing readjustment. It was a time of incredulous certainty. A time when fresh sensation seemed to overwhelm all the previous sensations of a lifetime. It was no time for speculation, however; how she came there while he knelt on her grave—what it all meant—must wait. The only concrete issue that really mattered was whether she would emerge again. If not, what should he do? But if she did come out? He could call to her—run and touch her—last frantic doubts—to see if she were real. Still, the fright of it for her.... Well, what then?
A suspicion hackneyed and shiny from human usage clutched at his reason almost comfortingly: “I guess I’ll wake up in a minute!”
She came, carrying a small stone pitcher—came down quickly and crossed the enclosure to the spring beside the tiny gate, where she stopped. Jerome’s mind, laying about feverishly for some piece of subterfuge whereby his presence might be made known without causing her any alarm, yielded nothing but confusion. There must be some way—he ought to be enough of an adventurer and man of the world by this time.... Yet after all he could only stay where he was and call her name—a little more gently and indeed reverently than quite consorted with his new creed of woman-hating.
“Stella!”
Hardly more than a murmur, though it seemed to boom and echo, as a voice will under stress of an unusual silence.
She cried out and fled back to the little flight of steps; but he came forward, an arm outstretched.
“Don’t be afraid, Stella. I’m Jerome.”
And he stopped, stood still where he had emerged from shadow into the moonlight.
She could see him distinctly. She was grasping the pitcher of water with both hands—not that it was the last pitcher in existence, nor that she was so very much concerned about the water, for there was ever so much more of it; she clung to the pitcher, rather, the way Jerome had been clinging to the heavenlybodies. There had to be something perfectly regular, like pitchers or stars, to keep hold of.
But when she saw it really was Jerome, she sat down very limply on the top step and did a tremendously natural thing: she began crying—tears that had burned long, unreleased, when she had thought there were no more tears left.
Inside, the temple was just a single tiny room with an altar against the far wall. The altar was a crude affair, with a “holy of holies” containing an undersized image of the goddess Amaterasu. Two small windows high up let in the moonlight. Still, it was so dark after the comparative brightness without that at first it was possible to distinguish very little. Stella drew the paper door back across the opening through which they had entered. After that, to the outer world the temple presented its usual blank and uninhabited look.
“We must be quiet,” she said, her voice much shaken with terror and tears. “Shall we sit down on the floor?”
The gleam of hysterical wildness in her eyes cautioned him she must be humoured; and he realized, too, that as yet she knew none of the particulars behind his presence. What an amazing situation it was—what an amazing proposition life was, anyhow, that it should evolve such moments as this under an unperturbed sky, and with everything else about the universe intact....
They sat there facing each other on the floor, in the centre of the temple to the goddess Amaterasu, and at first the immense strangeness of it all put a restriction upon speech: there was so much to be asked and so much to be answered that a sense of painful self-consciousness played conspirator with the so slowly subsiding shock of this coming together—out of a void, as it were.
When at last she spoke, it was in a tense whisper: “Did you come in theStar of Troy?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, thank God!” He heard her wildly sobbing again.
“Have you been expecting Captain Utterbourne a long time?”
“August,” she faltered, “—then in February. It’s over a year—two long months over a year.... Since coming to live in the temple, I’ve lost all count of the days. Is this Friday?”
“No, Thursday, Stella.”
“Thursday,” she murmured after him, her voice strained and colourless. Then she clasped her hands suddenly and asked in tones verging upon shrillness: “How did you find your way, Jerome?”
“They told us you were dead.”
“Dead?” It was a repetition choked with bewilderment.
“When we came ashore the Japanese met us—”
“Tsuda!” Her breath caught sharply.
“Yes, Tsuda.”
And in the same swift instant Jerome shared her vivid grasp of the situation. They sat in silence, both stunned by the terror of it.
“What did Tsuda say?” she asked him presently, her voice so low he could just make out the words.
“He said ‘evil’ had come. And when Captain Utterbourne asked him what he meant by that, he said: ‘Death.’ And then he said: ‘The wife of the Kami.’ Why do they call him that?”
“My husband...?” she murmured, her tone groping and lifeless. “They call him the White Kami here. It’s too terrible to speak of!”
A vague little gesture, and her hand fell limp.
Yes, all too terrible. Religion and saké. And the daughter of a harness merchant who had married in a mood of such unreasoning exuberance, with relief from the humdrum of her life so eagerly grasped, was reduced at length to dwelling in a Shintō temple, while the Master Mind dallied with a fine intellectual passion over such theses as the failure of civilization, and laid plans for bringing down perhaps a rhinoceros or two in the realm of the raja....
“But why are you here in this temple?” Jerome asked.
“It’s such a long, long story,” she quiveringly sighed, while again the hysterical sobs shook her violently.
He felt her misery across the dark.
After a time she grew a little coherent. “I had to come here, Jerome—I had to. My husband....” The words faltered, though he heard her still thickly murmuring, like one in a fever.
Then he remembered. “I know,” he said softly. “They spoke of that, too, Stella....”
Yes, they had spoken of that. But they did not know (except Tsuda) how in one of his frenzies King had attacked her with a knife; and not even Tsuda knew that the knife had actually entered her body. But Tsuda had seized upon King’s madness as an admirable and timely pretext for insisting upon the hospitality of the gods.
Through one of the little high windows Jerome could see the moon, mounting in sublime unconcern. There is something always so utterly calm and unhurried about the moonlight.
Stella’s face was brimming with anguish, and she seemed ever in motion: her fingers kept lacing and fumbling—sometimes she would fold her hands and bow her head over them in an attitude of helpless submission. But only for a moment. Her head would be raised with a start, and she would run a hand through her hair, or make an aimless gesture, if she chanced to be speaking. Her voice, too, had an unresting quality. It sounded a note of suffering, and of an immense sadness deeper still, which had certainly never been there in the old days when she had rebelled against her destiny. It was a new note, vibrating, as it were, across the tissue of her very being.
She inclined her head. “No one will ever know, Jerome, what I’ve gone through.”
He grasped at it with unconscious avidity. Had he realized, in a perfectly bald way, how he felt, he would no doubt have been a little horrified. But in the very depths of hisheart—that is to say, in the very depths of his ego—Jerome found curious, sweet comfort in the knowledge that her marriage with this other man, this prince (as Elsa called him, with drooping eyes) had at length proved a thing of reproach and bitterness.
“And Tsuda....”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes quite wide with this new terror in her heart. “It was Tsuda who brought me here. He told me I’d be safe. There were times before.... But he said this would be a sanctuary, and that I’d be quite safe with the gods. You have to know Tsuda to understand all this.”
“Butyoucould not have known Tsuda, really,” observed Jerome with narrowness of tone, his voice grown steady and cool now, and a shade aloof.
“He seemed to be my only friend,” she said miserably. “Oh, Jerome—if you knew everything.... As for the motive—it’s too hideously plain, isn’t it? Tsuda arranged to have offerings brought up in the evening. It was a part of his religious observances. His brother was a priest, and Tsuda would have been a priest too....” There was a wildly monotonous quality in her speech. She was wringing her hands.
They were silent a moment, and then, seeming to grasp the completeness of the irony, he muttered: “Those very offerings that kept life in your body were part of a ritual over your death...!”
She shuddered. “It was the grave of one of the Ainu! I asked Tsuda why they were heaping flowers on it, and he said it was a part of their religion—because the man had been brought to his death by a spell....”
“If I hadn’t come here tonight,” said Jerome, solemn and scarcely breathing, “theStar of Troymight have sailed off again without your knowing!”
She gave a little sharp terrified cry, and he saw that the matter must not be enlarged upon. Nevertheless, in his own mind conjecture played with all the lurid possibilities. Even had Utterbourne taken it into his head to come and look upon the grave, Tsuda would have taken good care the girl in thetemple knew nothing of it. He saw Tsuda creeping up here very early in the morning and putting her to sleep with something. Tsuda.... TheStar of Troywould have steamed off. And after that....
But he merely asked, with an inflection of grimness, out of the silence:
“Are you the only white woman here?”
“Yes, Jerome, the only one.”
Then she was very still. She was not weeping now.
They would never know what she had endured. Yet her hopes had once run so high.... Well, the pendulum swings; and after all there are no favourites, except perhaps in a whimsical or poetic sense.
Stella and Jerome, at the feet of the everlasting gods; and irony sniffed and chuckled in the corners. Both were vividly conscious of the play of forces in their lives, and of that immense quality of change which, developed through the scenes of the drama that had so capriciously caught them up, revealed itself now in all they did and said.
Calmer, she asked him about his phase of the drama: how had he come on theStar of Troywhen she had left him irrevocably in the rut of Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s? And he told her a little of his vast adventure, while her heart was stricken with a curious confusion—partly, no doubt, because of the aloof manner which, more and more, he was coming to display toward her.
These were baffling days—and a queer, wrong-way-round business life can be, she thought, when it has a mind. Jerome’s reactions were rather simpler: Stella, alive and married to another man, drifted back into the mere troubled dream which the thought of her death had momentarily broken.
“You’re making something really worth while out of your life, aren’t you?” she said softly, yet in a voice still strained from emotion; and her gaze, across the dimness of the temple,seemed compounded of incredulity, wistfulness, and a wild despair. Occasionally a tiny sob still caught her breath.
Jerome smiled in his new worldly and rather cynical way. “You mustn’t forget,” he generously reminded her, “that to begin with I was carried off like a limp bag of meal!” And then he gave her more details—without bothering, however, to stick quite so close to all the facts as to make himself entirely a comic figure, even in the beginning.
“Isn’t it strange, Jerome, how some of the last things we’d ever think possible are the very things that do happen to us?” Her hands, never still, stroked her cheeks aimlessly.
“I’ve thought of that sometimes,” he answered. “I guess it would never have struck any one as likely, a year or two ago, that you’d end by marrying a man like Mr. King and be carried off to an island to raise opium! And I guess,” he went on impartially, with again the touch of grimness, “it never struck us, either, that I was the kind of fellow who would join an opera troupe and end by letting one of the singers—take my name....” He never could seem quite to bring it out baldly. He had evaded a little, also, with Elsa, and had not used the actual word, though in the end, of course, it amounted to the same thing.
“Married, Jerome? A singer...?”
Her eyes were all amazement and inquiry across the dusk of the temple. But he tossed his head with a careless fling, for he was fully revived now, and even if it was difficult, circumstances being what they were, to make the announcement with real and satisfying bravado, still he wanted her to know that he, too, had had his taste of matrimony—though he didn’t mention it had only been after a fashion....
She could hardly believe the things she saw and heard; and she remembered how she had sent the ring back by Ted without a message.
The moon climbed higher, and a tiny night wind was springing. It made the tattered leaves of the palms and giant ferns shiver softly, like rain. Stella felt his aloofness, and a shy reticence came upon her tongue. She sat silent.
“I guess we’ve both changed some,” Jerome laughed coolly, assuming more lightness than he perhaps really felt. He was a little ashamed of his very romantic state of mind an hour ago.
“People couldn’t go through all we have in the past year without changing.” Her voice reached the heart with its pathetic deadness. The woman drooped and gently shook before him.
Another silence, with the sad swish of the jungle outside, under a white moon.
“Hagen’s Island,” she murmured brokenly after awhile, “is a place where you come to know yourself through and through.” And he saw still more vividly that this was not the girl he had known in his groping days of hobbledehoy. “I’ve tried to believe it would come right in the end,” she resumed in a moment, “—maybe after a long, long time. But all the while—” it faltered just a little—“all the while I’ve had a feeling I’d never see home again.” Then she looked up and spoke with a touch of hysterical brightness: “I used to sit on the rocks, Jerome, and imagine what a home-coming it would be! You don’t mind my rambling on like this, do you Jerome?”
“Of course not.” But he was privately marvelling. Stella—great Scott!—actually sighing over the thought of home, where nothing ever happened! It made him smile—oh, ever so worldly and sophisticated a smile; and he couldn’t help remembering again how she used to sail into him in her impetuous, young, rebellious way, for being so satisfied with his humdrum lot.
“Jerome,” she said presently, in a voice it was obviously a little difficult still to control, “you haven’t told me anything about your wife.”
He made an indefinite sound with his lips, and a look half of amusement, half of grimness, yet also somewhat of a gentler sadness, came into his eyes. “No, I haven’t,” he admitted.
“Are you happy, Jerome?”
“Now? Oh, yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Where? Oh, off on the high seas somewhere. The fact is,” he continued more bluffly, “we’ve separated, Stella. It wasn’t a success. We bored each other. As Captain Utterbourne would say, these experiments require a sort of real genius if they’re not to turn out failures. I believe,” he added with a sparkle, “the Captain speaks from experience.”
Stella looked at him, then her eyes faltered. There was an immense confusion in her heart. All at once she, too, remembered how she had scolded him so bitterly that afternoon in the fog. “If I were a man,” she had cried with high, impatient scorn, “I think I’d discover something besides being a clerk in a dingy old ship supply store!” And now he had discovered something besides that. He had discovered another destiny altogether, and she could play no part in it.
She contemplated, as they sat together on the moonlit temple floor, the tangle into which their lives had drifted.