“Tsuda!” Her breath caught sharply.
“Yes, Tsuda.”
And in the same swift instant Jerome shared her vivid grasp of the situation. They sat in silence, both stunned by the terror of it.
“What did Tsuda say?” she asked him presently, her voice so low he could just make out the words.
“He said ‘evil’ had come. And when Captain Utterbourne asked him what he meant by that, he said: ‘Death.’ And then he said: ‘The wife of the Kami.’ Why do they call him that?”
“My husband...?” she murmured, her tone groping and lifeless. “They call him the White Kami here. It’s too terrible to speak of!”
A vague little gesture, and her hand fell limp.
Yes, all too terrible. Religion and saké. And the daughter of a harness merchant who had married in a mood of such unreasoning exuberance, with relief from the humdrum of her life so eagerly grasped, was reduced at length to dwelling in a Shintō temple, while the Master Mind dallied with a fine intellectual passion over such theses as the failure of civilization, and laid plans for bringing down perhaps a rhinoceros or two in the realm of the raja....
“But why are you here in this temple?” Jerome asked.