The White Kami: A Novel

by Edward Alden Jewell

He tramped many miles, kept reliving in spite of himself the stark horror of those last moments aboard the schooner, and after all couldn’t see very clearly ahead. Then there was still the ache of grief in his heart over the loss of the little life in which his own had grown so lovingly bound up. He wandered without aim, alone, through the heavy tropical sweetness. Yes, he seemed older and more sombre. Domestic friction and tragedy and now this most recent experience at sea had combined to give him a new bearing of maturity. He did not walk like a naïve automaton any more. His gait had altogether lost its effect of groping, juvenile stiff-jointedness. His face was sad, and his eyes were a little restless. But there were new lines of strength, just entering into the picture—dimly showing—like ghosts of qualities on the way....

Once a brown baby, sturdy and naked and adventurous, ran on before him shouting and sped out of sight round a bright epiphytous plant with its peculiarly graceful pendant bloom; and Jerome, no longer a proud father, saw again with a pang a small casket lowered into the sea.

Returning toward town later in the afternoon, he found himself tramping wearily but with a subtly lighter heart along a winding road across whose sunny face patterns of tropical vegetation played, faintly breeze-touched and tremulous. Nothing had really occurred to change the drab look of things in his life, but he had grappled honestly, and the trouble in his heart seemed a little eased. On either side, as he walked, were fields of tea and tobacco, and off a little way stood a bamboo cottage flanked by irrigated patches of rice, and with a great clump of bananas at the doorstep. The sunlight made everything very still.

He sat down presently on a heap of white stones by the roadside for a brief rest before tramping the remainder of the way. Just beside him was a tree half strangled by a growth of flaming orchids.

Here he sat, for some little time, brooding half purposefully and half dreamily. It was one of those rather rare moments when he seemed to see himself with considerable detachment. Others had been remarking the alteration in him as it so strikingly developed. Suddenly he seemed conscious of alteration himself. Life, he thought, had been bumping him along at a terrific rate. It had all begun—well, hadn’t it?—almost immediately after the historic quarrel with Stella as they walked up Market Street together in the fog and seemed, neither of them, to know just which way to turn. After that, the curtain had gone up and the play had started. Jerome musingly reviewed the immense changes that had come into his life since the day Xenophon Curry entered Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s in quest of provender for his songbirds and a crew as yet non-existent. And he muttered to himself as he sat now on the heap of stones resting: “No wonder I feel different!”

He rubbed his palms lightly and meditatively together and looked back along the road. From this point it dropped rather sharply into a valley, and then began a long gentle ascent, stretching far up and off among the foothills toward the legend-kissed heights of distant Kina Balu. Sometimes the road was invisible for a stretch, where a curve deflected its course; then it would slip back into view again, an ever narrowing line, but always gleaming in the white light of afternoon. The young man’s eyes idly pursued it to a far crest, and in that shimmer of distance he perceived a figure spinning along toward him on a bicycle. He watched it glide nearer and nearer, now slipping out of sight for a time, then re-emerging. The figure was a woman. He would wait, he decided, until she had come up and passed him. Then he would go on his way back to town.

She coasted down the long decline into the depression out of which rose the sharp little eminence on which Jerome was seated. Momentum carried the rider half way up the steep slope beyond. Then, instead of submitting herself to the fatiguing task of pumping the rest of the way, she dismounted and walked, wheeling her bicycle along beside her.

He watched her idly as she strode toward him, his stare being the calculating, half conscious stare of the ever alert male—something altogether fundamental and which cannot be disturbed by even so impressive a creed as misogyny. Jerome assured himself that he had become a confirmed woman-hater; and yet this admission to no appreciable extent interfered with the casual interest of his gaze now.

She saw him sitting there by the side of the road, made glancing note of the fact that the stare was perfectly intact, normal, and true to type, then came on with a rather bold, free, just slightly self-conscious swing. She was dressed all in white and wore on her head a tropical helmet lined with apple green and which kept her face deeply shadowed.

When she came nearly abreast of the man on the heap of stones, she gave him the conventional glance calculated to set at rest any tremble of suspicion that she deliberately avoided his eyes. All these tactics are so simple and so fundamental, and facts of such everyday occurrence, that they almost never attract one’s notice. However, in the present case, the girl looked quickly back again, then stopped abruptly, gazing at Jerome in a cool, challenging fashion.