CHAPTER TWENTY-THREEWHOM THE POPPY CAPTURES
Time stood still—or rather time crept forward like a snail, and seemed unmoving. The hours of each day stole on like the tide, slow, achingly slow; or like a hill of sand which patiently sifts its way across a pasture; or like a drowsy serpent in the sun. A week was like a little lifetime. A month was like a cycle of Brahma.
Time, time, time! And overhead a sky of burning blue, and all about a vacant sea, sleeping, dreaming, with just a whisper of surf always on the yellow beach, marking the hours into tiny rhythmic periods—innumerable and lethargic; chiming like little shish-faint discs, like dainty cascades of echoing silver; yet with ever a haunting prescience of furious power behind, which sometimes broke out in screaming tempest or long fierce hurricane.
Time, time, time! Here seemed eventlessness of a new and sinister order. Values were subtly changing. Love was a thing less sheer and unshakable. In a month—two months—how all life seemed altered! One felt that invisibly and silently, deep underneath the calm, there were mysterious forces at work here on Hagen’s Island. Stella, as time drew forward so slowly, found herself immersed in a world of intangible agents. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this....
She had married a prince, and he had turned out to be a White Kami. His empire was a tiny volcano tip in the ocean. It was hither he had brought this bride of a so surprising courtship. At first there had been only poppiesand love. But now there was a pipe with a wee bowl, which the White Kami had gradually learned to manipulate with wonderful dexterity. Yes, at first his fingers were clumsy and fumbling; there were times when he could not manage the drop of opium: it would elude him, and he would chuckle softly, or curse under his breath. But at length he had grown marvelously proficient.
Opium! A terrible new doubt had torn its way into the shadowy alarm of Stella’s soul. Opium—opium! How had it come about? What did it mean? What might it end by doing to both their lives?
Opium! Already, without her knowing it, Ferdinand must have been steeping himself in the drug—perhaps from almost the moment of their arrival. Just whenhadit begun, she wondered darkly. Opium! Had he tried it first in just a mood of adventurous experiment? And had it forced a stronghold so insidious as not to be menaced—even by her love for him?
In the light of that fierce, electric moment when she had first beheld her husband stretched deep in the ecstasy of the drug, Stella found herself reconstructing much that had taken place preceding it: his growing lordliness and sometimes almost wilful wish that the pathway of their love should not lie smooth and charming; his fits of absorption, that restless instability; his sullen insistence upon the operation of his own caprice or will. Stella remembered with a shudder how, while that pathetic little dinner lay stale and untasted within, she had sat so long on the doorstep alone, and how the dark, foreign night had seemed to press in upon her and tinge her misery with aspects of stalking chaos. Yet afterward, in the sunshine of a new day, and with the episode of the untasted dinner behind them, Ferdinand had tried to lighten the prospect with his bluff and reassuring laugh.
“I’m afraid you’re inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills, lady-bird. Don’t you know that opium hasn’t any ill effects at all unless taken in over-doses? Do youthink a man’s a goner just because he happens to smoke a mere pipeful of it now and then, by way of breaking in a bit on this humdrum existence?”
“Ferdinand—” she faltered, half consciously relieved a little, yet not, at heart, honestly convinced.
He interrupted her with a gesture half playful, half of impatience. “I know what I’m about, peaches. We’ll just forget it.”
Oh life! Oh, the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!
But, though Stella strove to forget, she couldn’t quite succeed, and felt herself falling more and more prey, as time crept on, to doubt and foreboding. Opium! It began to strike on her ears like such words as cobra, shark, and scorpion. It had a reptilian, a vicious, loathsome sound. And she grew sick at heart and terrified. A barrier seemed rising stealthily between them—between her heart and all the radiant happiness which had glorified its dreams. Love merged with fear and became sorely baffled. Life was beset with groping.
At last it had come to July. Six leaves were gone from the calendar, and midway across the leaf which would next stand uncovered, was the date set by Captain Utterbourne as possibly marking his first return to the island. August the fifteenth! Stella had put in a background of red, so that the figures stood out crisply. Yet of course she knew it might not be just on that day. It might be any day during the week succeeding.
“Or maybe he’ll come as early as theeighth,” she told herself, a pang of terrible hope breaking across her heart at the mere conjecture. But there were times when, as with a faint breath of foreboding, she strove desperately not to kindle false lights in her heart; then she would muse: “Perhaps not before the twenty-second.... I mustn’t let myself grow too impatient.” Once—grimly: “What if the time goes by altogether? What then?” Why, then it would simply meanthat theStar of Troyneed not be looked for until the completion of the year—not before February. “But I can’t stand it,” she cried tensely, “unless he comes next month! I can’t any longer, with things as they are....” She trembled, feeling her brow grow cold and wet.
For King’s downward progress had been darkly alarming; and out of all that beauty and delight of her release, a new relentless doom seemed creeping.
King had begun to eat it, she knew, as well as smoke it. His appetite had rapidly developed to ghastly proportions.
She saw, with awful vividness, daily before her eyes, the potency of this drug which her husband had come here to handle, and upon which the prosperity of their future was to rest. She saw its fiendishness, its strange compelling charm. He had laughed at first. “Don’t you worry, little girl,” he used to say. “I know enough to keep an upper hand.” Was this an upper hand?
“You think the stuff’s getting hold of me, don’t you?” he chaffed one breathless June evening; and Stella, though she was determined not to give way, could not restrain a desperate gesture. After a little silence King laughed reassuringly; and then, with a fling of his head he said: “I’m not used to this sort of life, little girl, and sometimes it gets my goat!”
Another evening he strode heavily over to her and grasped her arms with considerable vigour. “It’s time you stopped all this mooning and sighing, I think,” he told her thickly, an indefinite dash even of menace in his tone. “I’ve been watching you. It’s all nonsense, and I won’t have it! You understand? I know what you think. You think I couldn’t stop, right off in a minute, if I wanted to. Well, I could. Some day, just for fun, I’ll show you. Let’s have no more foolishness. I know what I’m doing. I’ve lived in the world a good many years, little girl, and I ought to know by this time how to look after myself. I don’t like your mournfuleyes and your tears. I tell you I don’t like them. You act like an everlasting funeral!”
His words gave slightly the impression that he was striving to carry a point in his own mind, somewhat, as well as in his wife’s. Later, off by himself in another part of the house, she heard him laugh again, a loud laugh, with just a note in it of new and sinister wildness.
Sometimes his round blue eyes seemed to bore into her with a searching, challenging look. She felt her soul in commotion. And she said nothing, only watched the slow change in those eyes, as hunger stole into them. Slowly her heart chilled with a sense of doom.
These were restless and not very happy days on Hagen’s Island, though in most respects life went on quite as usual. King seemed anxious to plunge more strenuously than ever into the work. A heavy grimness sometimes coloured his attitude. He grew vaguely harassed and more palpably restive. Faint lines of struggle crept into his face. He laughed more boisterously, though perhaps rather less often.
There were times when Stella felt herself slipping tragically out of his life; yet he still found obvious pleasure in having her come to meet him on his return from the fields, and often delighted her with flashes of the old intimate tenderness. But there were occasions, too, when he displayed such an enlarged arrogance, and chaffed with such an edge that she trembled and felt her soul in still greater commotion. For he could less and less, as the time went on, endure any suggestion that things weren’t quite well with him. If he saw her in tears it would make him furious. Sometimes a rebuke or sharp gesture of impatience would rouse her heart, and she would rebel against the docility which, on her side, had always seemed an essential feature of the romantic relationship. Then perhaps there would come a mutual wave of affection and forgiveness, and peace would inhabit the house. He would call her “little lady,” and sometimes he still called her “peaches,” though his moods of softness appeared somewhat less frequent.
As time went on and her husband seemed falling more and more under the insidious sway of the drug, doubts stirred more and more, also, in Stella’s heart. And she began to ask herself questions about the future which she could not answer, and which often filled her with a nameless terror.
Sometimes in the evening Stella would watch her husband, fascinated by the fearful process of opium smoking, as she had once been fascinated by the sheer dazzle of his eyes and the romance of manners such as she had never dared hope to encounter outside of books. She would sit, almost spellbound, and see the resistless hunger take possession of him. Perhaps he would be working away on his report for Captain Utterbourne; but at length he would fling himself upon the cot. He would scowl at her with eyes which showed a dull glow of something ominous; then his hands would go out to the tabouret, and with fingers no longer altogether steady, but which had taken on of late a curious flutter, he would seize the pipe. After that, absorption would claim him utterly, as though he inhabited a separate universe.
He would draw a large drop of opium, twirl it on the point of the dipper, round and round, with uncanny deftness, over the flame of the spirit lamp, hold it there like meat on a skewer till it roasted. He had learned to an exquisite fineness when the tiny browning ball was cooked to the proper pitch—never the least bit burned, never toasted a shade too dry, yet never drawn off underdone, either. Occasionally he would bring the opium away from the flame and roll it gently on the bowl of his pipe. At last he would hold the pipe itself over the flame a moment, and then would quickly thrust the laden end of the dipper into the bowl, just over the orifice—always sure, with fluttering fingers; always uncannily sure. Then he would relax. And there he would lie, a spectacle of manhood in the wrecking, the stem of the pipe between his lips, which had taken on a bloated look and seemed no longer quite the cupid’s bow of old. The pipe would sway slowly back and forth, tremblinga little over the fire of the spirit lamp. And as the sphere of drug inside the bowl began to sizzle, the White Kami, who had once been Ferdinand King, that figure extraordinary of beauty and romance, would draw in with all the fervour of his captured soul; and the spent smoke would drift in clouds from mouth and quivering nostrils.
She brooded it with a breaking heart when he was away from her; when he returned she looked at him with eyes full of fear and disillusion. Gradually—and there was time to do full justice to every faintest shade of thought and feeling here—she came to doubt in her heart whether the dreams she had dreamed would ever come true. During these endless hours and days and months with their silence and their augmenting thrill of terror, she came to feel that it was all too late—too wretchedly, tragically late.
Stella had been happy, she remembered with a pang, at first—a little feverishly, perhaps, even at best, though still undoubtedly happy. The voyage and the first weeks here on the island had been like some lovely dream, with only vague, uncharted doubts and tremors of uneasy fancy....
Now her whole life seemed suddenly uncharted.
The opium “factory” stood just at the edge of the Ainu village: a mere palm-thatched shed, with rafters strung along inside, from some of which double bags of sheeting were suspended. The bags contained the crude drug or “chick,” which had been standing in linseed oil to prevent evaporation, and which was now in process of being drained dry. A basin underneath each bag received the oily residue; but the bags had been hanging there a good while, and the drippings were only occasional. In one corner was a vat, half full of a sluggish dark substance which several Ainu women were patiently kneading with bare feet. Tsuda stood watching them, critical, keen-eyed.
Presently Mr. King came in. He glanced about sharply,frowned, sniffed. Tsuda reluctantly dropped on to one knee, while the labourers prostrated themselves, awaiting a sign from the White Kami which would signify to them that they might resume their work. King waved an impatient arm, then moved about restlessly, it almost seemed a bit aimlessly, inspecting the premises.
His whole bearing appeared somewhat altered. The lordliness, if anything, was exaggerated, at the same time that he impressed one as being subtly less in control. Certainly he was noticeably thinner; his former look of florid fulness was giving place to a muddy pallor, tending to make his eyes somewhat sunken. Tsuda flashed a glance at him, then looked doggedly back at the ground.
King approached the vat and investigated with one finger the consistency of the opium.
“It will soon be tough enough,” he muttered; while Tsuda kept a smile under judicious control. The overseer cleansed his finger slowly and meticulously on a cloth, studied his nails a moment with knit brow, drew out his little notebook and held a pencil poised above one page a long time; finally with a detached sigh he put it back into his pocket without having recorded anything at all. He looked about him, his round blue eyes staring, then strode abruptly out of the shed. Tsuda gazed after him with a yellowish light in his complex Asiatic face.
A moment later a young savage named Nipek-kem ran in. He had been chosen, because of superior attainments, as Tsuda’s special aid and lieutenant—a convenient go-between and secret informer. Out of breath, he was now the bearer of tidings: the man whose wife had buried the head-dress was dead.
“I expected it,” said Tsuda dryly.
Nipek-kem elaborated: When the man learned his wife had prayed the curse against him, he raised his arm to strike her dead; but it was already long that the symbol lay under ground, and his arm dropped; he could not lift it any more.
For a moment Tsuda’s eyes gleamed. It was a kind ofmiracle, and the priest in him would never die. For an instant the worldly side seemed crowded out, and he saw himself in the sacerdotal robes, in a temple all a-murmur with the breath of the eternal gods. But the vision passed. With a sudden cry, as actuated by some swift inner flash, Tsuda seized the fellow’s arm. He brought his lips close and murmured, trembling with an excitement of new purpose:
“You know the place in the rocks where the Wife-of-the-Kami sits much of late?”
Nipek-kem raised both hands to his chest, letting them wave gracefully downward. Yes, he knew.
“Go and see if she is there now, and come back quickly.”
The savage sped off.
When he was gone, Tsuda sat down beside the opium vat, a look of devious tenderness in his face.
Nipek-kem peered cautiously over a ledge of rock, all his movements stealthy. Below, with her head thrown back, sat the wife of the White Kami. Her eyes were closed; she appeared to be sleeping. The Ainu gazed down at her a moment, then crept silently backward and disappeared.
When Stella opened her eyes she started and cried out a little. Tsuda was squatting near her, looking very mild and child-like.
“You come here often,” he murmured humbly.
“Every day,” she replied. “I come to watch for ships that might pass by—just to see them—it wouldn’t matter how far off....”
The girl seemed changed; her eyes had a strained look, and she appeared drawn to a perpetual tension of nervous expectancy; she had aged a little; there was a new calm about her, too—it was dimly menacing....
King’s revolver lay beside her on the rock. One night she had a faintly disquieting dream about the Ainu, and seeing her husband’s revolver with some of his things next day, she decided to carry it with her on her solitary vigils. However,she carried it, really, not so much for protection as because it was a weapon with which she could attack the silence, when it grew too awful to be endured, as King had attacked it the day he returned home from his first inspection of the fields.
“You will see no ships go by,” said Tsuda with an emphatic shake of his long head. “Ships don’t leave the course unless they have to—no,sir!” He had heard Captain Utterbourne explain it—a law of least resistance in ships.
“Are the nearest sailing lanes a long way off?” asked the girl with a trembling touch of wistfulness in her voice.
Things weren’t going very well on Hagen’s Island. Illusions were rubbing threadbare. It was a time for spiritual inventories.
“Long way—I should say! Full day steaming head on, mebby more.” There was evidence here of a slight nautical confusion, though he always paid the closest attention, too, whenever Utterbourne opened his lips. “Better to give up look for ships—gn—that don’t ever come,” Tsuda murmured, his eyes searchingly upon her face.
She looked at him sadly, and he let his gaze fall to the little gleaming weapon at her side. Presently he lifted his eyes to hers, and, with a child-like smile, pointed to the revolver.
“It is very pretty,” he said. “I had a fine one, once—a fellow give me in Benares. But”—he grew a shade petulant—“the Captain wouldn’t let me keep it—say one gun on the island was enough.” And in a moment he added, speaking more simply and smiling in his naïve way: “Will you let me take it in my hand, Wife-of-the-Kami?”
Her lips moved—it was a tiny ghost-smile. “Yes,” she said.
Tsuda took the revolver into his hand, his face quite radiant. Anything new—anything he didn’t possess.... He examined it minutely and lovingly.
“Do you mind if I shoot?” he coaxed.
“There’s a little patch of white against the rocks, far down there near the water,” she told him, a vague touch of interestcoming for a moment into her listless voice. “I use it sometimes as a target.”
“Will you show me?” He crept to her side very humbly. She saw that his hand was a little unsteady.
Tsuda emptied the revolver quickly and deftly, then handed it back to her with a faint regretful smile. And he said, softly, his eyes agleam as he spoke, in a cryptic whisper:
“Your husband is a very lucky man, Wife-of-the-Kami....”
Returning from his cursory inspection of the opium vat, King entered a silent house. He had turned one room into a makeshift office; for it had become his practice to divide his time between fields and desk. He liked to point out that the principal difference between his job and Tsuda’s was that the former called for head work.
King did rather a good deal of figuring and scribbling. Until recently the report had gone along in fine style. It was full of notes and queries and memos of many sorts, and bristled with little tentative schemes, sometimes inclined toward extravagance, for bringing water into the fields during the dry spells. He was also working on percentages of dross, which might be cut down to the benefit of the more special product. A little of the output was prepared after an elaborate Bengal receipt for special trade. Utterbourne disposed of the major part to Indian agents; the rest disappeared along coasts from which fishing smacks came plying with devious credentials. These were transactions that would not bear any very merciless investigation, perhaps, though they were frequently more remunerative than the regular trade.
King, in role of overseer and general manager, had really gone at it all rather intelligently, to begin with. The island was a test, and he intended to make good. However, the business was lagging of late.
Stella, coming in, found her husband sitting at his worktable, his head fallen down on to his arms. Yet he was not asleep, for his eyes were wide open, staring into space with an almost frantic look.
It seemed to her—came rushing upon her in a romantic wave—that this was a climax. She ran up to him with a little desperate cry, held his face in her hands—a real flash of passion; she felt suddenly the stronger of the two—almost as though he were coming to depend upon her now.... And she resolutely fought down a vague impulse of shrinking which his altering presence sometimes aroused.
“What is it?” she asked.
He brought himself round with an effort that beaded his forehead with a few drops of cold sweat. His look darkened—it was as though he divined what was in her mind.
“Nothing,” he muttered thickly. “What do you want to interrupt me for? I’ve told you I can’t be bothered when I’m in here, damn it!”
“But Ferd....” She felt the climax slipping.
“Go on about your work and leave me alone. I’m trying ... I say, I’m trying to work out a better product for our special trade.”
The effort it took to destroy the illusion in his wife’s mind was so terrific that it left him shaking. He spoke almost savagely; he was in a savage frame of mind, for he had overrun his usual hour for indulgence in drug, and was trying to persuade himself that he was still in control. The compassionate attitude she had taken could hardly have been more unhappily timed.
Stella, perceiving the failure of her little desperate move, slipped away, her heart troubled with a strange conflict of emotions. He had not, despite his agonizing effort, strengthened her crumbling confidence in him.
And she knew with a pang that he had not really been working on the product for the special trade at all.