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 mournful
eyes 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, trembling a 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.