The White Kami: A Novel

by Edward Alden Jewell

Tsuda stirred stiffly and opened his eyes; but it took him some seconds to regain his bearings. He got up slowly and rather rheumatically. His asthma seemed pretty bad this morning. He rubbed himself, and studied with rueful attention some of the badges of his fray. One eye he could only open a little way, and the flesh all about it was deeply discoloured.

Presently Sutherland came and led him to Utterbourne’s cabin, where the Captain and Tsuda remained closeted a long time. Then the others were called into conference.

“Come in, please,” the Captain called to them in his quaint sing-song. “We were just discussing—h’m?” He sat drumming on his desk with a pencil, and gazed at Tsuda in a thoughtful, detached way. His face was serious and impassive, but a wan smile flitted across it, too, in little vague waves, and he began again mildly: “We seem to be making a failure of it. We don’t seem quite to have grasped the technique—h’m?” He looked with a faintly mocking appeal from one face to another; but on Tsuda’s his gaze kept lingering, and he always drew it off with a quizzical debating wrench. “I pick up a man at sea,” the Captain went on, “and the minute I look at him I think of my island. King fell right into my hands, as though from heaven—as though from heaven,” he murmured dreamily; “and what really extraordinary qualifications he seemed to have. It doesn’t require much genius—mostly an unfailing, indescribable sense of adventure—plenty of imagination—h’m?—the sort that attains a momentum and can live on itself—you know? And an appreciation of picturesque values.... Yes, King seemed the man in a million. And we really needed him, too. He couldn’t be thought of as a luxury. What if Tsuda had suddenly got heart failure, or dropped dead of apoplexy, without another soul on the island but the Ainu? As a corporation we were always a little too close. That was our weakness. But,” he continued, “no sooner is he nicely established here than he falls victim to the thing itself! Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it simply amazing where weakness will crop out in the human animal?” There seemed almost a note of whimsical, detached, and even philosophic triumph in his voice. “With King it turned out to be opium, and with Tsuda,” he smiled like Mona Lisa, “it’s turned out to be—King’s wife!”

There was a sharp edge to his words, though he remained otherwise without passion. An expression of weariness etched itself about his mouth, and he flung out a little petulant gesture, staring at Tsuda with a sleepy gleam of reproach. Tsuda leaned forward anxiously, as Utterbourne turned to the other men in the cabin. “Rutherford—Sargeant—any suggestions? Sutherland? Do you think the island isn’t perhaps worth the candle?”

But they knew him too well to avail themselves of the extended invitation, and so merely smiled like a whole row of Mona Lisas, for they glimpsed that the Captain had already come to his decision, whatever it might prove. And it developed that they were right, for, after more characteristic word-play, and a quotation from Amiel about taking illusions seriously, Utterbourne announced, his look holding at last a devious and forgiving note: “Tsuda had thought a little of journeying to Tōkyō and offering himself, because of some obligation or other, to his Emperor, for whom it seems he harbours a really touching regard; but I’ve managed to convince him that he ought to stay right on here with these people who look upon him as almost a kind of emperor himself—with due respect of course, for Cha-cha-kamui, who has such a fetching way of wearing his crown this year! Tsuda will temporarily oversee the whole business. He’s such a dangerous man that I tremble to supply him with another Kami. They’re pretty scarce, I’m afraid—like lark puddings, or the perfume of the magnifica.”

So Tsuda was escorted ashore and reinstated; and soon the tiny waterfront swarmed with Ainu. In an hour the chests of opium were coming aboard. All was hustle and bustle, and Tsuda had been instructed, as soon as the last chest was stowed, to declare a little Ainu holiday by way of celebrating the completion of the year’s work. Utterbourne had delivered a few fresh casks of saké, and these promised to make the affair really memorable.

The Captain strolled up to the house of the White Kami, his soul somehow afflicted with a mood of uneasiness. The situation was certainly not all he could desire.

He entered and found King stretched out lifeless.

Stella met him at the door, and the look in her eyes—a wonderful look of sorrow and release combined—told him, even there on the threshold, that the end had come.

Soon after dawn King had called out to her very feebly; and when she reached him she knew at once that it was the end. After the long, long horror he died quite peacefully. Just at the last his brain seemed to clear. A little light crept into his eyes, making them for a moment faintly blue and round again. He half stretched out his arms, and Stella, bending down close to his lips, heard him murmur her name. He sighed a few times and was gone. They closed his eyes and folded a sheet smooth across his sunken breast which rose and fell no longer.