CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVERENDEZVOUS
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 intouching 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 uponhim, 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.
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 bea 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 theStar of Troy.”
“TheStar 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.
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 Shintō. Tsuda could never outgrow the sacerdotal atmosphere which had surrounded his youth in the Shinshū 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.
“Yessir!” 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 leeringraccoon 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.
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 theStar of Troy. But the ocean rested vacant. On the eighth day she did not go to the rock at all.