I
Strange forces were at work in the world; but the sun came up still and
flashing out of the sea, and the birds had business of their own to
attend to.
Tsuda stirred stiffly and opened his eyes; but it took him some seconds
to regain his bearings. He got up slowly and rather rheumatically. His
asthma seemed pretty bad this morning. He rubbed himself, and studied
with rueful attention some of the badges of his fray. One eye he could
only open a little way, and the flesh all about it was deeply discoloured.
Presently Sutherland came and led him to Utterbourne’s cabin, where the
Captain and Tsuda remained closeted a long time. Then the others were
called into conference.
“Come in, please,” the Captain called to them in his quaint sing-song.
“We were just discussing—h’m?” He sat drumming on his desk with a pencil,
and gazed at Tsuda in a thoughtful, detached way. His face was serious
and impassive, but a wan smile flitted across it, too, in little vague
waves, and he began again mildly: “We seem to be making a failure of it.
We don’t seem quite to have grasped the technique—h’m?” He looked with
a faintly mocking appeal from one face to another; but on Tsuda’s his
gaze kept lingering, and he always drew it off with a quizzical debating
wrench. “I pick up a man at sea,” the Captain went on, “and the minute
I look at him I think of my island. King fell right into my hands,
as though from heaven—as though from heaven,” he murmured dreamily;
“and what really extraordinary qualifications he seemed to have. It
doesn’t require much genius—mostly an unfailing, indescribable sense of
adventure—plenty of imagination—h’m?—the sort that attains a momentum
and can live on itself—you know? And an appreciation of picturesque
values.... Yes, King seemed the man in a million. And we really needed
him, too. He couldn’t be thought of as a luxury. What if Tsuda had
suddenly got heart failure, or dropped dead of apoplexy, without another
soul on the island but the Ainu? As a corporation we were always a little
too close. That was our weakness. But,” he continued, “no sooner is he
nicely established here than he falls victim to the thing itself! Isn’t
it funny? Isn’t it simply amazing where weakness will crop out in the
human animal?” There seemed almost a note of whimsical, detached, and
even philosophic triumph in his voice. “With King it turned out to be
opium, and with Tsuda,” he smiled like Mona Lisa, “it’s turned out to
be—King’s wife!”
There was a sharp edge to his words, though he remained otherwise without
passion. An expression of weariness etched itself about his mouth, and he
flung out a little petulant gesture, staring at Tsuda with a sleepy gleam
of reproach. Tsuda leaned forward anxiously, as Utterbourne turned to the
other men in the cabin. “Rutherford—Sargeant—any suggestions? Sutherland?
Do you think the island isn’t perhaps worth the candle?”
But they knew him too well to avail themselves of the extended
invitation, and so merely smiled like a whole row of Mona Lisas, for they
glimpsed that the Captain had already come to his decision, whatever
it might prove. And it developed that they were right, for, after more
characteristic word-play, and a quotation from Amiel about taking
illusions seriously, Utterbourne announced, his look holding at last a
devious and forgiving note: “Tsuda had thought a little of journeying
to Tōkyō and offering himself, because of some obligation or other, to
his Emperor, for whom it seems he harbours a really touching regard; but
I’ve managed to convince him that he ought to stay right on here with
these people who look upon him as almost a kind of emperor himself—with
due respect of course, for Cha-cha-kamui, who has such a fetching way of
wearing his crown this year! Tsuda will temporarily oversee the whole
business. He’s such a dangerous man that I tremble to supply him with
another Kami. They’re pretty scarce, I’m afraid—like lark puddings, or
the perfume of the magnifica.”
So Tsuda was escorted ashore and reinstated; and soon the tiny waterfront
swarmed with Ainu. In an hour the chests of opium were coming aboard. All
was hustle and bustle, and Tsuda had been instructed, as soon as the last
chest was stowed, to declare a little Ainu holiday by way of celebrating
the completion of the year’s work. Utterbourne had delivered a few fresh
casks of saké, and these promised to make the affair really memorable.
* * * * *
The Captain strolled up to the house of the White Kami, his soul somehow
afflicted with a mood of uneasiness. The situation was certainly not all
he could desire.
He entered and found King stretched out lifeless.
Stella met him at the door, and the look in her eyes—a wonderful look of
sorrow and release combined—told him, even there on the threshold, that
the end had come.
Soon after dawn King had called out to her very feebly; and when she
reached him she knew at once that it was the end. After the long, long
horror he died quite peacefully. Just at the last his brain seemed to
clear. A little light crept into his eyes, making them for a moment
faintly blue and round again. He half stretched out his arms, and Stella,
bending down close to his lips, heard him murmur her name. He sighed a
few times and was gone. They closed his eyes and folded a sheet smooth
across his sunken breast which rose and fell no longer.
Stella now was tearless and calm. Her look brought a quick emotion to
Jerome’s throat; and, as he entered the room, an elusive tenderness
seemed to come also upon the enigmatic Captain.
“My God,” they thought they heard him say again, very softly.
There was something fugitively poetic and sublimating about it—a devious
spiritual touch, as though the Captain perhaps saw, even more poignantly
than Jerome, that she was a woman at length. Stella fancied there a gleam
of shy sympathy, with a hitherto impregnable barrier for a fleeting
instant broken down.
* * * * *
They buried Mr. King, just at the hour of a radiant tropical sunset, in a
scented bower near the house; and they remained a little while in silence
gazing at the plot of vexed earth beneath which lay all that remained
of that being who had played so curious a part in the affairs of the
universe.
Meantime the Ainu, uncognizant of their irreparable loss, had assembled
in the house of the great chief, Cha-cha-kamui, who was present in
all his grandeur, wearing the robe of red and white cloth, and on his
gigantic head the crown of shavings and gilt. Outside, children played
about in a noisy unimaginative way, and the women of the tribe sat on the
ground working their distaffs dully. Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife passed
among them, a little distant and haughty—for it was known that in former
days the White Kami had looked with favour upon her.
Later on Tsuda would stage some sort of learned pagan ritual celebrating
the return of the White Kami to the Brotherhood of the Blessed. But such
processes require time—as they do in the mystic Shinshū mountains—and for
the present it sufficed that there was plenty of saké.
When revelry was at its height, Tsuda, who had drunk nothing and seemed
very sad and cast down, slipped out of the house of the chief and away to
the edge of the sea.
The _Star of Troy_ was hoisting her anchor. Every sound was vividly
audible in the hush of early evening.
He sat down in a despondent heap on the dock and leaned wearily up
against the tilted derrick. In a little while there would be only a
drifting plume of smoke along the horizon.
* * * * *
Elsa, on deck, under the festive bit of awning aft, was gazing through
her glasses.
“The Ainu,” she observed, letting her eyes droop very much, “must still
be carousing. There’s no one to be seen on the whole island but that
Japanese. I hear you attacked him like a lot of Indians last night,” she
smiled.
“Yes,” Jerome replied, “I’m afraid I was a little more noisy than the
situation really called for.”
“On the contrary,” she assured him, her brown eyes full of moist yet
undemonstrative appreciation, “it must have been really quite splendid.
I’m sorry I had to miss it.”
“How did you spend the evening?”
“After you went ashore? Oh, I read a few chapters in my stupid book,
and tried to walk myself sleepy—well, what kind of an evening would you
expect me to put in, with no thrills but those I could stir up myself?
And all the while you were having wild and impossible adventures—you and
Stella and the Japanese and Stella’s prince.... It really seems unfair,
doesn’t it? I shall never forgive the Captain for keeping me cooped up
out here.” And then she added with feeling, yet very evenly: “How I
_hate_ being a woman!”
Stella watched them from a little distance. She seemed eagerly observing
every detail of their conduct together, with eyes which contained only a
look of quiet inevitability.
“Of course,” she murmured to herself, “it would be like that. It would
have to be.”
“Do you suppose,” asked Elsa, smiling up at him in her grave,
unassailable way, “you’ll be having such adventures in Tripoli?”
He shrugged, and Stella heard him laugh.
“Why not?” Stella thought. She didn’t know what they were talking about,
but was merely carrying on the thread of her own speculations. “It would
have to turn out some such way as this—to be quite perfect and complete.
Yes, it would have to.” And in a moment she thought, with a little more
agitation: “How familiar they are—like old, old friends. He finds in her
all he’s missed in me. How complete! How perfect—that I should come out
of it with nothing but a moral....”
Her heart was flooded with a rush of passionate regret.
They were taking turns peering through Elsa’s binoculars.
“Looks peaceful, doesn’t it, with all the palms and the sunset?”
“Yes—may I have a look?”
“Your Japanese seems rather dejected. I’m afraid you _were_ a bit rough.”
“What would you have done under the circumstances?”
“Just what you did, I’m sure. Let’s have another peep before we are out
of range.”
Slowly the _Star of Troy_ picked her path among the reefs and wore to
sea. But for a long time the figure of Tsuda, huddled on the ruined dock
in the sunset, was still visible.