I
It was a new phase of life entirely. The Star of Troy was not the Skipping Goone; yet was, in her way, quite as romantic. Jerome had a feeling from the very first that the Star of Troy wasn’t altogether a typical tramp freighter. She possessed a most remarkable captain, for one thing, and a most remarkable captain’s daughter. Also there seemed something cryptic about her whole destiny. The Skipping Goone had always seemed like a nice, plump, amiable, sensible old lady, whereas about the Star of Troy there was something ageless, lithe, and alert, something unfathomable: the very rush of water under her bow had a mysterious thrill behind it. Here was a bow accustomed to explore strange waters. Yes, the two craft were wholly alien creatures. Yet Jerome found the subtler atmosphere of the taciturn, drab tramp no less alluring. In place of the swishing sails and the comfortable strain of rigging there was now the rhythmic plod of an engine. He grew to love it. By all means there was a wealth of romance here, if of a less garrulous and gypsy sort, and the former clerk responded to it keenly—though soberly, too, for the old Jerome was no more.
His talks with Captain Utterbourne held for him the fascination of a piece of strange, vivid fiction. What a mine the man was; what a life he lived! As for his life, no one but Utterbourne himself could really know the full richness of it, since with no one did he choose to share it save in flashes and fractions.
The talk now largely centered about the project of the new Mediterranean experiment. But Jerome felt that although the Captain might appear for a moment wholly engrossed in it, even this venture, important and daring, even, as it might seem, was but one venture out of a score, perhaps, with which his brilliant mind was ever busy.
The evenings were rich and unforgettable, with the Star of Troy slipping so steadily on through tropic seas and the little white cabin, with the map of the world covering all one wall, so cheerful and bright. They would gather here after dinner: Utterbourne, Elsa, Jerome, and usually one or two of Utterbourne’s men—Sutherland or Sargeant or maybe Rutherford, keen-faced and clever, playing their parts in the mysterious game about which no mind save one could really know all. The China boy, smiling with his usual affectionate understanding (though sometimes, too, with that more cryptic smile which belongs to the unsearchable East) would mix them suave, delicious drinks. And they would smoke and talk of life in many climes and under all sorts of conditions. Captain Utterbourne, whatever the theme, could hold them in a thrall, when it pleased him. Sometimes he would elect silence. But when he began to speak, the air took on a subtle sparkle, though he was never guilty of mere wit.
And then, perhaps, the talk would turn to business—as it generally did, sooner or later, with so much still in the air which must be reduced to concreteness. And Elsa would grow bored and pick up a novel, which she would read, or pretend to read, with an air of languid absorption; or she would leave them and go out alone on deck in the lofty dark to dream of nobody knew what—dreams of her own, as profoundly hidden away in the unassailable depths of her consciousness as were the secret thoughts and broodings of the Captain himself.
Jerome had many talks with Elsa, too, for the days were long at sea, and each seemed glad of the other’s company. It was upon these occasions that Jerome most surprised himself, for they stirred in him a new and very pleasurable sense of poise, which he had never even dreamed of acquiring in the days of his futile groping. He felt himself a match for Elsa—not, however, that she didn’t frequently baffle him with her drooping eyes and coolly static expression.
He looked forward to their talks together; and in her own way, so did Elsa, too. Yes, perhaps in her own way Elsa looked forward to them with even more eagerness than Jerome himself. He interested her—particularly, she would tell herself, in the light of what his past had been. She remembered (and the picture kept rising in her mind) how she had come upon him that afternoon in the street with Stella, and how he had merely mumbled something and gone away. But she remembered, too, how his shoulders had straightened, as though unconsciously; and how she had felt, in her somewhat psychic manner, that it would be the beginning of better things for him. Then she had forgotten about him, and here he was again. She had not guessed that his progress would carry him so far in one short year.
Elsa discreetly (perhaps selfishly, too, without altogether realizing it) refrained from any mention of Stella at first, and Jerome never mentioned her, either. Yet, Stella was sometimes in their minds as they talked. And one evening she burst like a bomb on their ears. It was Utterbourne who spoke of her. The Star of Troy was bound for San Francisco, but there were to be stops: the Captain had already announced something a little vague about picking up cargo somewhere in the Chagos archipelago. Bluntly, at length, he turned to Elsa and said:
“By the way, we’re likely to run into one of your old friends.”
“Yes, dad?”
“She married Ferdinand King and they came out here to settle. Or have I told you all this before?”
“No, dad. It’s quite fresh news—except her marriage. If you remember, I was the maid of honour. Otherwise you’ve not repeated yourself,” replied his daughter dryly.
Jerome had a strong feeling of unreality. The news stabbed him with amazement. Yet after all it was only simple and natural that news of her at last should fall from the Captain’s lips. He found himself musing in many moods.
“What in the world do you suppose they can be doing ’way off here?” asked Elsa the next afternoon, as she and Jerome sat together under a bit of awning aft. “Did you hear the Captain say what island it is?”
“No. He said the Chagos group. I’m trying to recall what’s raised there.”
“Guava, I suppose,” said Elsa. “Or copra.”
“Mr. King must have been put in charge of some business. Perhaps he oversees output from the whole archipelago,” remarked Jerome with somewhat expansive generosity.
“Like a prince, in a way, didn’t you always think him?” ventured Elsa, her eyes darting toward him for a moment, but her expression otherwise supremely uncompromising.
“I’m afraid I’m hardly a judge of princes,” Jerome fenced back.
“Well, I mean—a sort of fabulous prince, you know,” she persisted. “Almost too good to be true.” Jerome laughed easily, and she went on: “His beauty, as I recollect it, was of that tremendous sort that leaves the whole world gasping as it passes by. I was conscious of it in church, during the ceremony.” And she added: “Were you there?” with another of her little exploring darts.
“At the church? Yes,” he answered carelessly. “I slipped in at the last minute, and stayed well back.”
Elsa gazed at him fixedly a moment, then observed: “Mr. King always reminded me a little of some Roman emperor, though which one I never figured out. Then he’s struck me as perhaps Apollo, with the soul of Sir Willoughby!” She laughed.
“You may be right,” her companion shrugged. “I barely met him once. I took him to be the type most women would fall for.”
“You haven’t a very high opinion of us, I’m afraid, as a sex, Mr. Stewart.”
“You mustn’t let my sweeping remarks lead you astray,” he said, his eyes coolly mirthful, and a new look of cynicism about his mouth.
“You mean you’re willing to allow there might be exceptions?” It wasn’t, perhaps, entirely clear, but that was Elsa’s way.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he laughed.
“That would give us common ground to meet on, wouldn’t it?”
“Then you glory in being an exception?” He seemed eager to play up to her mood—almost inspired to a sort of transient cleverness.
“Oh, naturally,” replied Elsa, her eyes drooping as she gazed off past him at nothing at all. “Just the way Tinker Bell gloried in being an ‘abandoned little creature.’ One lives and learns. Doesn’t one?”
“Yes.” After all, the plain monosyllable held still a place in his soul.
“I suppose you’re an exception, too,” she said, “if the subject isn’t becoming too vague with handling.”
“I believe we’re two of a kind,” he told her, with a real little flare of daring. There seemed a curious romantic gleam in the situation. “I’ve had my flings and learned my lessons,” he admitted.
She mused. “Yes. Still, it’s perhaps best to rap on wood, don’t you think?”
Jerome made a careless gesture. “Oh, I’m not worried.”
“Still,” she went on in her utterly unmoved way, “the world is a swarm of temptations, and the man who feels most secure is usually just the one to be twisted round some woman’s finger—or vice versa, of course. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand.”
In fact, they both understood. And in fact it seemed to them as they talked that there was rather a good deal of common ground. It was not an unpleasant discovery.
“I’d always said,” she went on, “I’d had my flings and learned my lessons too. But I’m not superstitious, and I never rapped on wood. Well,” she smiled, her brown eyes drooping a little more, “it would have been better if I had. For I was taken in, after all. I almost reached the point of parroting ‘I do’ in the presence of a rector. But I escaped in time, which is something,” she ended seriously, her wise young mouth taking on a singularly compact look.
He would have preferred, and really very much preferred, remaining unenmeshed in Elsa Utterbourne’s eyes. But it occurred to him that candour, in a case of this sort, might be the wisest course. Her own passionless frankness encouraged him, and he muttered: “I was taken in, too. But with me the case went a little harder.”
“How?”
“Well, I didn’t escape in time—that’s all.”
She gazed at him with renewed interest, her foot tapping slowly against the rail. “I didn’t know that,” she murmured. And, since he didn’t spontaneously enlarge upon the interesting announcement, as she hoped he would, the girl presently asked him: “Would you like to talk about it? If you wouldn’t, please say so. I’ll never mention it again.”
He laughed, shortly and with some bitterness. “It won’t be necessary to do much talking. It was just something that came about. The moon was partly responsible, but I don’t care to lay the blame on any one but myself.”
“Some one in the troupe?” Elsa ventured.
“Yes. We didn’t get on together. She’s on her way to San Francisco now—and freedom,” he replied, with quiet significance.
“I see,” she said.
Their eyes met, and they shared between them a complex smile.
II
There were times when you felt you could safely disregard what the Captain was saying, and go your way, for he was by no means a tyrant or martinet. On the other hand, there were now and then occasions when he said something one knew instinctively must be regarded. Perhaps more the inflection than the substance—or maybe just a faint lifting of the chilly, flickering eyebrows.
At any rate, when the Captain suggested to Elsa that she stay on board that evening with her novel and not attempt to explore the island until morning, she knew this to be one of the times. Shrugging her shoulders, she drawled:
“All right, Captain. It’ll be too dark by the time we get in to see the sights.” And added, a little languidly: “This doesn’t seem the liveliest of ports.”
“No. There’s an embargo on oil, and the natives have never heard of electricity. Mr. Rutherford, I’d cut down a little more. We can afford to creep here. There’s a legend about reefs, and you know,” he added, with a graceful gesture in the direction of the cabin where he kept his library of sailing directions, “even the best of our charts weren’t drawn by God Almighty.”
Though the restriction passed no further, and though he was secretly prodded with curiosity to see what sort of place this was to which Stella had come with her fabulous husband, Jerome announced to Elsa that he, too, would wait until morning to go ashore. He would stay and keep her company—unless she really preferred her book.
This pleased her, though she didn’t, of course, show it. It was interesting to come across a young man apparently quite as disillusioned as herself, and one who never attempted even abstractly, to make love to her. That, indeed, was the beauty of the whole arrangement, on both sides. Each felt as the other did about life, and especially about the opposite sex and romance and moonlight and all that sort of thing.
Jerome smiled easily as he suggested she might prefer her book, and Elsa—well. Elsa would very greatly have preferred him to her book; but she felt, too, just the way he did: that is, had penetrated beyond the tiresome realm of feeling altogether; so that; after all, at the last moment she made him go along. There was, to tell the truth, a tiny and very complex tremor of alarm in her enigmatic heart, and she knew she must remain indifferent at all costs. Besides, since a restriction had been laid down, she found it irksome to face the ordeal of waiting until morning for news of their mutual friend. There were times when the Captain was a little tedious.
Jerome, also, was very anxious to keep his new and hard-won indifference intact; but since whether he went or waited was a matter of very small consequence, he decided, on Elsa’s request, to go. Captain Utterbourne and two or three officers were about to embark in the little launch. Jerome ran and joined the shore party. The whole of the way in the Captain talked dreamily about the relative excellence of Cuban and Haitian rum.
III
It was quite dark when the launch crept up to the dock. There seemed to be no lights on the island. A queer sort of a place. And what was that spectral object that resembled a crazy derrick? Rutherford turned an electric flash upon it.
Suddenly a figure darted forward out of the dark and fell at the Captain’s feet. It was Tsuda. He uttered at first a high-pitched oriental lamentation. But a sharp word brought him to his feet, and he stood there before them with bowed head. Clearly it was not a joyous welcoming.
“What’s the matter?” asked the Captain, his voice low and commanding. The poet and dreamer were now wholly merged in the dynamic man of action.
“Evil come upon us!” Tsuda cried, his nervous brown hands writhing.
“Well, don’t let’s have any of your bizarre but redundant embroideries now, Tsuda. What do you mean by evil?”
“Death,” said Tsuda between his teeth.
It was all very weird, with the dark, and the mysterious background of tropical vegetation. But the sky was gradually growing lighter, and in a little while the moon would be up.
“Who is dead?” demanded Utterbourne sharply.
“It is the wife of the Kami....”
“Mrs. King—!” This was one of those rare occasions when the man of many shrouds found himself betrayed into a really spontaneous exclamation. He added quickly: “When did it happen?”
“About a week ago, Captain.”
“But how?”
“Just fell sick of watching,” replied Tsuda simply, and with the faintest suggestion of reproach in his voice, as though he would like delicately to fix a slice of the responsibility on the shoulders of his inquisitor.
And Utterbourne, though he ignored the reproach, seemed to comprehend. “My God,” he said very softly, under his breath. But already his mind was grappling with possibilities, some of which might be realities, beyond this fact. “Where’s King?” he asked with the former terseness.
Tsuda hesitated, as though delicately loath to be the bearer of so much ill news. “The White Kami,” he muttered at length, “lies—gn—in a trance, Captain. We can’t rouse him much any more. Yet sometimes he cry out about the ogres. They are still go on, you know, yes sir, even if Raikō—”
“That’s enough!” exclaimed Utterbourne almost savagely, though still in a very low voice. “I tell you it’s no time for your prattle about the gods. Where is King?”
“In the great house, Captain.”
“What do you mean by saying he’s in a trance? Do you mean—opium?”
“Sss,” replied Tsuda, and was still.
Captain Utterbourne thrust out his hands and gripped Tsuda’s arms—felt the man tremble in his clutch.
“If all this isn’t the truth, let’s have it now. Otherwise it will go hard with you later.”
Utterbourne was a man who, when a situation seemed perfectly simple, could make it appear obscure and devious, but who, if a situation was full of doubt and mystery, could speak out bluntly from the shoulder.
“No, no—the truth!” cried Tsuda. “By all the shrines of Shinshū...!” And in a moment he added: “The White Kami is fall on evil ways, Captain.”
“And Mrs. King?”
“We bury her—gn—near the temple, on holy ground with the rest that have die.”
A stillness followed, then Utterbourne asked:
“What are those lights moving along there through the trees?”
Tsuda replied: “Every night send up offering to the temple for the soul of Wife-of-the-Kami. She fall sick of watching, but now the gods are good to her,” he murmured cryptically.
There was a dead silence. The breathing of all the group was faintly audible.
Jerome, at the first words concerning Stella, had turned very pale. What this talk of a kami was he couldn’t fathom. But he had known with the vividness of lightning that the wife of the Kami meant Stella, and that Stella was dead. He felt dazed. For anything but this he had been prepared. Now he seemed completely cut adrift, and could scarcely think. It seemed a new vortex in his life. Half an hour ago this would have seemed impossible, but now he felt himself carried away by a rush of emotion he could not understand. Married and happy, Stella could never have meant more to him than a troubled dream; dead of unhappiness, she took possession of his heart and wrung it.
IV
“We’ll go on to your house, Tsuda,” said Captain Utterbourne more gently, “and get to the bottom of this business.”
Tsuda nodded and led the way. The Captain turned back with a muttered remark to one of his men: “I had an uneasy feeling there was something wrong here. Places send out strong waves of vibration.”
It was, in truth, these same “waves” which had whispered him to take the one slight precaution of keeping Elsa on board till the situation had been traversed. As a matter of fact, one of the sly, unspoken objects back of his acquiescence in Elsa’s request to come along with him on this voyage had been the thought that her presence here would have a stimulating and reassuring, a sort of bolstering effect on Mrs. King. If she had grown lonely and discontented, Elsa would cheer her and (with perhaps a little judicious manipulation) convince her that it would be much easier now to face out another year on the island. If King was doing well it would be a pity to let him slip on to other fields just yet.
But the Captain had felt strangely uneasy, from the moment the anchor dropped; and he preferred that Elsa be held temporarily in reserve. As a recruit, Jerome, also, was a little new. But Utterbourne was anxious not to strike any wrong notes of unnecessary secrecy with him just now, and besides wanted him to get more or less the “feeling” of these adventures, which would help his background. Backgrounds were very important things. He little guessed the commotion in Jerome’s mind at the present moment.
A step or two farther along, Captain Utterbourne remembered he had neglected to bring out a small chest of bright trash which Tsuda would pounce on eagerly—gay, valueless objects that would fit into his scheme of Ainu culture. Possibly the chest might tend to put Tsuda in a frame of mind for withholding nothing. Men like Tsuda had to be treated tenderly. The trouble with Tsuda was that he was too suspicious. Tsuda would be suspicious of a fly if it happened to look a little different from most other flies.
“Would you mind, Sargeant, going back for it now—h’m?”
So the party temporarily disbanded. Utterbourne and Sutherland went on with Tsuda, while Sargeant and Rutherford turned back toward the launch.
At this moment of disruption a wild and romantic design entered Jerome’s head and captured it entirely. In the dark he made his escape from both parties. Utterbourne supposed he had gone back with Sargeant, while the returning men thought he had gone on with Utterbourne—or rather no one gave him any deliberate thought at all. But Jerome, dodging behind a huge palm, waited until the steps in both directions had died out.
Alone on an unknown island he stood, his heart given over to a sudden wave of impulse. Stella was dead. In life their ways had been roughly sundered; in death she seemed, during this feverish, pulsing hour, given back to him again. He seemed to have achieved an intangible victory over the man who had once cast him into a humiliating discard—yes, all in the first, swift, terrible knowledge of her fate.
He would go alone to her grave—he would be the first to look upon it. Perhaps the others would not even go, since after all what is a grave? But he would go; it was his hour of triumph. Life had divided their ways, but death had brought them together again. Poor Stella. Things had turned out very differently with her from what she had hoped. Probably no one would ever know just what had taken place. She became starry with mystery and bound up in an eternal beauty of suspense. Yes, he would go to her grave; for despite what he had become, Stella must always be in his mind the woman he once loved. Indifference, while it may carry a man far, can never quite blot out a memory like that.
During the preceding sombre conversation he had caught at words as they fell, almost without heeding them at the time. Now they hung together in his mind and formed a vivid picture. The grave was near the temple ... you could tell it by the fresh flowers. And the string of lights ... they were taking up an offering ... an offering to heathen gods for the soul of Stella. It was ghastly. It all but passed belief.
Keeping his distance, and walking as softly as possible, Jerome made off after the procession of twinkling lights. Overhead the heavy tropical stars were shining brightly. There would be a moon presently; the east was aglow; but in the jungle it was very dark. The way was long, and the strange men with the lights went ever on ahead.
After a time a tropical grove was reached, in whose midst stood the temple. No one, at first, approached very close: there seemed a recognized margin of some sort, beyond which the ground was holy. Of them all, the single figure alone, bearing in his hands a woven tray heaped with the choicest fruits of the place, went on toward the temple itself; the rest squatted upon the ground. Not a word was spoken. It was a strange and awful ceremony.
The moon was just rising, full and yellow; the first soft beams began to steal in through the breeze-stirred palm orchard to illumine the temple with a pale light. But the resinous torches cast up everything in bold, dancing relief. Jerome, on the outskirts, crouching, felt his mind in greater tumult even than before. He seemed to himself almost possessed.
It was a Japanese temple. They had ruined Tsuda’s chances of becoming a priest; but he knew a temple from torii to sessha. It was surrounded by a low wall with a gate. Outside the gate was a tiny spring of fresh water. Jerome could see it: a little pool just troubled in the torchlight.
All about sprang the rich blackness of a tropical growth, the most lush he had ever beheld. The moon was climbing slowly up the sky. He was glad he had come. Life was wonderful and sad. He watched with eyes that tried to record every detail of this unearthly hour.
The figure with the offering uttered a bit of weird chanting; then suddenly the words ceased, and the tray was deposited on a small altar at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the temple itself. That was all. The crude fragment of ritual concluded, these strange beings with bushy hair and prodigious drooping moustaches moved away in silence. Jerome, crouching in his hiding place, watched them pass by, one by one, and disappear. He could see the twinkling lights, like far-off tapers, winding farther and farther. Then silence was supreme.
He remained still in hiding what seemed to him a long, long time. Never had he been in a place so intensely still. When at length he stirred and began moving cautiously toward the temple, his senses were abnormally alert with the painful excitement. But he was ever conscious, too, of that odd feeling of triumph in his heart. Death had seemed to put her back somehow into his hands again. He couldn’t get away from that thought—nor did he want to get away from it. Jerome even began projecting, vaguely and fitfully, a scene with Stella’s father: he would go in very simply and tell him how he had visited her grave alone tonight.
The past was irrevocably behind them; but his heart would not be still.
Suddenly he stopped, thrilling with terror, as a great bird rose up from almost beneath his feet and flew off screaming across the silvered dark. It looked like a great sinister eagle, yet it had the neck of a crane and head plumage of what (though moonlight can create delusion as regards colours) seemed brilliant vermilion. He could hear the bird still screaming at a great distance, crashing on through the tangle of its native wood as though quite blind. After that the silence was still more poignant.
Pulling himself together, Jerome moved on slowly, seeking the grave with the flowers. There were a number of mounds all about, but they looked ancient. Far around to one side, however, he found at last the grave he sought—in the dark stumbled against it, and was really on his knees before he realized this was, in truth, the end of his quest.