When her husband had gone, looking very handsome and magnetic 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. “Yes _sir_—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 the _Star 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. “Where _am_ I?” 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 the volcano. 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....