when her husband had gone, looking very handsome and[115] 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.
[116]
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,[117] 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 shinto—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[118] 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 shinto.... i have a brother, once; he is priest in the shinshu 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 shoko daijin, daijingu—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....
