“These are days again—gn,” he murmured, “of the working of magics and miracles!” His face looked shiny and very serious. And the curious thing about Tsuda was that he just hazily believed, himself, in the magic and the miracles—without, of course, quite sacrificing any of that conflicting shrewdness and that worldly subtlety, which were also such deeply imbedded elements in his nature.
Stella sank down on to the broken slab to watch, curious, yet with unmoved face. And Tsuda squatted beside her, very humbly.
“Yes sir!” he murmured. “We see the wonders coming to pass!”
He raised his fists high above his head in an attitude of odd yet convincing religious ecstasy. There was a weird, poetic quality in his voice. Stella felt her soul shrinking. She seemed on the very brink of some nameless despair.
“These are great days for the children of the White Kami!” he cried. And he hugged his knees and rocked. And his eyes were bright. And he wheezed with asthma. Everything about Tsuda was at once so simple and so profoundly mixed up. All the complexes of a lifetime of frustration and cleverness and hard knocks, with always that queer shine underneath of the priest-wish, seemed converging now into a high mood of conflict.
“It is good—gn—we think much on the ways of the gods.”
The pagan plea for rain proceeded in the valley at their feet. The old chief, Cha-cha-kamui, clad in his paraphernalia of state, including the august crown of shavings and gilt, sat amongst his people intoning a chant or saga in a high, shrill voice—a voice so haunting in the still white sunshine that Stella felt it would echo in her soul as long as she lived. The chant was slow and of a droning cadence. At intervals the singer raised his voice in a wailing crescendo, but the wail always drifted back afterwards into the tonic, and the chant would recommence and proceed as before. And all the while the dancers moved on about the leering raccoon skull, capering and sprinkling each other with the symbolic water.
In a flash Stella saw herself, vividly, at home in the old days, and her heart was seized with a fierce ache. Tears slipped from her eyes and she never heeded them.
IV
Through her tears she saw the savages below her in the valley. She saw the chief of the Ainu and heard his wailing supplication. Mysterious forces....