Inside, the temple was just a single tiny room with an altar against
the far wall. The altar was a crude affair, with a “holy of holies”
containing an undersized image of the goddess Amaterasu. Two small
windows high up let in the moonlight. Still, it was so dark after
the comparative brightness without that at first it was possible to
distinguish very little. Stella drew the paper door back across the
opening through which they had entered. After that, to the outer world
the temple presented its usual blank and uninhabited look.
“We must be quiet,” she said, her voice much shaken with terror and
tears. “Shall we sit down on the floor?”
The gleam of hysterical wildness in her eyes cautioned him she must
be humoured; and he realized, too, that as yet she knew none of the
particulars behind his presence. What an amazing situation it was—what an
amazing proposition life was, anyhow, that it should evolve such moments
as this under an unperturbed sky, and with everything else about the
universe intact....
They sat there facing each other on the floor, in the centre of the
temple to the goddess Amaterasu, and at first the immense strangeness
of it all put a restriction upon speech: there was so much to be asked
and so much to be answered that a sense of painful self-consciousness
played conspirator with the so slowly subsiding shock of this coming
together—out of a void, as it were.
When at last she spoke, it was in a tense whisper: “Did you come in the
_Star of Troy_?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, thank God!” He heard her wildly sobbing again.
“Have you been expecting Captain Utterbourne a long time?”
“August,” she faltered, “—then in February. It’s over a year—two long
months over a year.... Since coming to live in the temple, I’ve lost all
count of the days. Is this Friday?”
“No, Thursday, Stella.”
“Thursday,” she murmured after him, her voice strained and colourless.
Then she clasped her hands suddenly and asked in tones verging upon
shrillness: “How did you find your way, Jerome?”
“They told us you were dead.”
“Dead?” It was a repetition choked with bewilderment.
“When we came ashore the Japanese met us—”
“Tsuda!” Her breath caught sharply.
“Yes, Tsuda.”
And in the same swift instant Jerome shared her vivid grasp of the
situation. They sat in silence, both stunned by the terror of it.
“What did Tsuda say?” she asked him presently, her voice so low he could
just make out the words.
“He said ‘evil’ had come. And when Captain Utterbourne asked him what
he meant by that, he said: ‘Death.’ And then he said: ‘The wife of the
Kami.’ Why do they call him that?”
“My husband...?” she murmured, her tone groping and lifeless. “They call
him the White Kami here. It’s too terrible to speak of!”
A vague little gesture, and her hand fell limp.
Yes, all too terrible. Religion and saké. And the daughter of a harness
merchant who had married in a mood of such unreasoning exuberance, with
relief from the humdrum of her life so eagerly grasped, was reduced at
length to dwelling in a Shintō temple, while the Master Mind dallied
with a fine intellectual passion over such theses as the failure of
civilization, and laid plans for bringing down perhaps a rhinoceros or
two in the realm of the raja....
“But why are you here in this temple?” Jerome asked.
“It’s such a long, long story,” she quiveringly sighed, while again the
hysterical sobs shook her violently.
He felt her misery across the dark.
After a time she grew a little coherent. “I had to come here, Jerome—I
had to. My husband....” The words faltered, though he heard her still
thickly murmuring, like one in a fever.
Then he remembered. “I know,” he said softly. “They spoke of that, too,
Stella....”
Yes, they had spoken of that. But they did not know (except Tsuda) how
in one of his frenzies King had attacked her with a knife; and not even
Tsuda knew that the knife had actually entered her body. But Tsuda
had seized upon King’s madness as an admirable and timely pretext for
insisting upon the hospitality of the gods.
Through one of the little high windows Jerome could see the moon,
mounting in sublime unconcern. There is something always so utterly calm
and unhurried about the moonlight.
Stella’s face was brimming with anguish, and she seemed ever in motion:
her fingers kept lacing and fumbling—sometimes she would fold her hands
and bow her head over them in an attitude of helpless submission. But
only for a moment. Her head would be raised with a start, and she would
run a hand through her hair, or make an aimless gesture, if she chanced
to be speaking. Her voice, too, had an unresting quality. It sounded a
note of suffering, and of an immense sadness deeper still, which had
certainly never been there in the old days when she had rebelled against
her destiny. It was a new note, vibrating, as it were, across the tissue
of her very being.
She inclined her head. “No one will ever know, Jerome, what I’ve gone
through.”
He grasped at it with unconscious avidity. Had he realized, in a
perfectly bald way, how he felt, he would no doubt have been a little
horrified. But in the very depths of his heart—that is to say, in
the very depths of his ego—Jerome found curious, sweet comfort in the
knowledge that her marriage with this other man, this prince (as Elsa
called him, with drooping eyes) had at length proved a thing of reproach
and bitterness.
“And Tsuda....”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes quite wide with this new terror in her heart.
“It was Tsuda who brought me here. He told me I’d be safe. There were
times before.... But he said this would be a sanctuary, and that I’d be
quite safe with the gods. You have to know Tsuda to understand all this.”
“But _you_ could not have known Tsuda, really,” observed Jerome with
narrowness of tone, his voice grown steady and cool now, and a shade
aloof.
“He seemed to be my only friend,” she said miserably. “Oh, Jerome—if you
knew everything.... As for the motive—it’s too hideously plain, isn’t it?
Tsuda arranged to have offerings brought up in the evening. It was a part
of his religious observances. His brother was a priest, and Tsuda would
have been a priest too....” There was a wildly monotonous quality in her
speech. She was wringing her hands.
They were silent a moment, and then, seeming to grasp the completeness of
the irony, he muttered: “Those very offerings that kept life in your body
were part of a ritual over your death...!”
She shuddered. “It was the grave of one of the Ainu! I asked Tsuda why
they were heaping flowers on it, and he said it was a part of their
religion—because the man had been brought to his death by a spell....”
“If I hadn’t come here tonight,” said Jerome, solemn and scarcely
breathing, “the _Star of Troy_ might have sailed off again without your
knowing!”
She gave a little sharp terrified cry, and he saw that the matter must
not be enlarged upon. Nevertheless, in his own mind conjecture played
with all the lurid possibilities. Even had Utterbourne taken it into his
head to come and look upon the grave, Tsuda would have taken good care
the girl in the temple knew nothing of it. He saw Tsuda creeping up
here very early in the morning and putting her to sleep with something.
Tsuda.... The _Star of Troy_ would have steamed off. And after that....
But he merely asked, with an inflection of grimness, out of the silence:
“Are you the only white woman here?”
“Yes, Jerome, the only one.”
Then she was very still. She was not weeping now.