She regarded him with a gleam of interested amusement. Tsuda’s face, as he slowly raised it to the girl in the doorway, showed itself ancient, yet with strangely youthful eyes; an unusually long face, with a baffling, complex expression. His loosely woven straw hat with its band of bright blue ribbon, gave him a note of gaiety and youth. He looked subtle and cool and debonair, despite his humility, as he stood outside gazing up into the face of the only white woman within rather a good many degrees of longitude and latitude.
“Mr. King isn’t here,” she told him, her eyes still amused. There were times when Tsuda’s face looked just a little like the face of a horse—though she had caught flashes of darker qualities which left her, too, a trifle insecure. “I believe my husband rode over to look at some fields on the other side of the island.”
“Sss—I know,” Tsuda nodded rapidly. Then an expression of quaint solicitude came into his bright young-looking eyes, and he asked: “You find everything—gn—all right here?”
His mood this morning was par excellence the mood of a child, naïve and trusting and simple as sunshine; and a few moments later he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mrs. King’s “parlour,” giving her a round-eyed account of the manner in which he and all these dusky children of the northland had been brought down out of far wild Paromushir to take possession of an island nobody seemed to want.
“We come from the—gn—way up top of the Kurile Isles—very high—you have not been there?” And he gazed searchingly, as though he would glean from her face how much they had shared with her—the masters, King and Utterbourne.
“No,” said Stella, “I’ve never been there. I haven’t travelled a great deal—until now,” she added with a gay little laugh.
Tsuda hissed gently. “I want you to see how it was, please. We come many moons ago in a great whale that burn inside like a volcano!” His whole bearing was that of a child, wide-eyed with the sheer wonder of miracles befallen. “Yes sir—a whale!”
Stella was plainly enthralled. The rewards of her romantic patience and doll-like trust hadn’t been any too ample—“a woman’s fingers don’t belong in a man’s work, little lady.” King had displayed a laughing parsimony; and though Captain Utterbourne, during the long voyage, must have emitted at least a hundred thousand words of pure narrative, interspersed with little gems of psychology and sociology and ethics, he hadn’t taken the trouble to give out more than the vaguest hints as to what lay before them in the throbbing mystery of that future always just ahead over the bow of the Star of Troy. Her curiosity about all this business of the island was keenly aroused, and she was glad to listen to the strange little Asiatic, who seemed indeed quite bursting with friendly communicativeness.
Tsuda blinked rapidly. “My people had got bad, very bad, about their altars. It was simply awful! No good to forget your altars—bad, very bad.” He shook his long head seriously. “Evil come then. There are ogres left—all written down in great Book of Shintō—the way of the gods....” His face seemed illuminated with almost a supernatural glow. “Very bad, very bad! They come down swoop in the night....” Tsuda nodded slowly and solemnly. “But the gods send us some one to the rescue. He look at you—gn—and you can’t look back....” Perhaps Utterbourne had never received a finer tribute.
Tsuda leaned toward the girl, swaying in a mystic rhythm as he talked, his voice high and a little tremulous; and as she watched him and listened to his wild tale, told always in that manner of open-eyed wonder, Stella vividly sensed the contrast between this new life of hers and the old. “Where am I?” she asked herself, laughing faintly, yet with a tiny shiver too, almost of swift fear.