The White Kami: A Novel

by Edward Alden Jewell

“It’s a queer thing,” she mused, “that there weren’t any premonitions of all this in the old days....” But then she remembered how her father had been so troubled and swayed with doubt at first: how he had held her close and asked: “Are you sure, girlie—dead sure?” Yes, there had been that note—she lingered over it almost caressingly. And then those words of Elsa’s: “Don’t you hold on so hard to your ideals, Stella,” or however she had phrased it—yes, they, too had a haunting way of returning. “But what were my ideals?” she asked herself searchingly. “Did I have any? What was it I thought I wanted? What was I so eager to grasp, after all?”

She had played, as it had seemed to her, so brilliantly. He had fanned her at the ball as though she were a princess. He had sent her violets and taken her to the matinée. Then their lives had intertwined, and they had married. She had been so eager to thrust her destiny into his hands. She had run neck and neck with glittering Irmengarde....

“Irmengarde!” she muttered. “Only think of it!”

Now the pace had retarded. How far back all that seemed! How little she had understood life; how little she had understood her own heart. Time stood drowsy and stagnant, and her prince was tampering with a dread elixir. Yes, the gay, magnetic prince, with white at either temple, who had murmured so enchantingly in the long-ago: “Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine?”

“What I fell in love with must have been nothing more than a myth, I guess,” she faltered. For time and silence were bringing her to deep and pitiless introspection. She had been just in the mood ... he had set her young girl fancy afire. But adversity was turning her into a woman, and she knew what it was to drink from a very bitter cup indeed.

Love flew out of the window. But the awful reality of Hagen’s Island could not be dispelled. Her dreams all glimmered out, too. But her husband remained, like a heavy dross of fact. With the shine gone, she was no longer blinded. There was bitter comfort in this.

If she still pleaded with him, it was no longer like a frightened doll. It might not, somehow, be too late, even now, she sometimes groped, if the Captain.... But time would mock her with its everlasting patience. “What a strange thing life is,” she mused.

One day she grasped his hands and gripped them tight. “Let me throw the stuff into the sea,” she urged. “Give me the pipe and all the things you use, and try....” But she could not, after all, quite face the look in his eyes without faltering, even though she had learned to speak so simply, from her heart.

“God help me!” he muttered brokenly. It sounded like a terrible amen in some ironic ritual of praise.

She braced herself with an immense effort of will, met his gaze again, and went on earnestly: “I’ll help you with the work—we’ll try to make a success of the island together, since the island has to be.” Yes, adversity was making a woman of her after its own inexorable pattern, and she was no longer hoodwinked by that curious superstition about a woman’s fingers and a man’s work....