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 be a 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 the _Star of Troy_.”
“The _Star 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.