Muriel, meanwhile, sat alone in her hut, frightened at Felix’s unexpected disappearance so early in the morning, and anxiously awaiting her lover’s return, for she made no pretences now to herself that she did not really love Felix. Though the two might never return to Europe to be husband and wife, she did not doubt that before the eye of Heaven they were already betrothed to one another as truly as though they had plighted their troth in solemn fashion. Felix had risked his life for her, and had brought all this misery upon himself in the attempt to save her. Felix was now all the world that was left her. With Felix, she was happy, even on this horrible island; without him, she was miserable and terrified, no matter what happened.
“Mali,” she cried to her faithful attendant, as soon as she found Felix was missing from his tent, “what’s become of Mr. Thurstan? Where can he be gone, I wonder, this morning?”
“You no fear, Missy Queenie,” Mali answered, with the childish confidence of the native Polynesian. “Mistah Thurstan, him gone to see man-a-oui-oui, the King of the Birds. Month of Birds finish last night; man-a-oui-oui no taboo any longer. King of the Birds keep very old parrot, Boupari folk tell me; and old parrot very wise, know how to make Tu-Kila-Kila. Mistah Thurstan, him gone to find man-a-oui-oui. Parrot tell him plenty wise thing. Parrot wiser than Boupari people; know very good medicine; wise like Queensland lady and gentleman.” And Mali set herself vigorously to work to wash the wooden platter on which she served up her mistress’s yam for breakfast.
It was curious to Muriel to see how readily Mali had slipped from savagery to civilization in Queensland, and how easily she had slipped back again from civilization to savagery in Boupari. In waiting on her mistress she was just the ordinary trained native Australian servant; in every other respect she was the simple unadulterated heathen Polynesian. She recognized in Muriel a white lady of the English sort, and treated her within the hut as white ladies were invariably treated in Queensland; but she considered that at Boupari one must do as Boupari does, and it never for a moment occurred to her simple mind to doubt the omnipotence of Tu-Kila-Kila in his island realm any more than she had doubted the omnipotence of the white man and his local religion in their proper place (as she thought it) in Queensland.
An hour or two passed before Felix returned. At last he arrived, very white and pale, and Muriel saw at once by the mere look on his face that he had learned some terrible news at the Frenchman’s.
“Well, you found him?” she cried, taking his hand in hers, but hardly daring to ask the fatal question at once.
And Felix, sitting down, as pale as a ghost, answered faintly, “Yes, Muriel, I found him!”
“And he told you everything?”
“Everything he knew, my poor child. Oh, Muriel, Muriel, don’t ask me what it is. It’s too terrible to tell you.”
Muriel clasped her white hands together, held bloodless downward, and looked at him fixedly. “Mali, you can go,” she said. And the Shadow, rising up with childish confidence, glided from the hut, and left them, for the first time since their arrival on the central island, alone together.
Muriel looked at him once more with the same deadly fixed look. “With you, Felix,” she said, slowly, “I can bear or dare anything. I feel as if the bitterness of death were past long ago. I know it must come. I only want to be quite sure when.... And besides, you must remember, I have your promise.”
Felix clasped his own hands despondently in return, and gazed across at her from his seat a few feet off in unspeakable misery.
“Muriel,” he cried, “I couldn’t. I haven’t the heart. I daren’t.”
Muriel rose and laid her hand solemnly on his arm. “You will!” she answered, boldly. “You can! You must! I know I can trust your promise for that. This moment, if you like. I would not shrink. But you will never let me fall alive into the hands of those wretches. Felix, fromyourhand I could stand anything. I’m not afraid to die. I love you too dearly.”
Felix held her white little wrist in his grasp and sobbed like a child. Her very bravery and confidence seemed to unman him, utterly.
She looked at him once more. “When?” she asked, quietly, but with lips as pale as death.
“In about four months from now,” Felix answered, endeavoring to be calm.
“And they will kill us both?”
“Yes, both. I think so.”
“Together?”
“Together.”
Muriel drew a deep sigh.
“Will you know the day beforehand?” she asked.
“Yes. The Frenchman told me it. He has known others killed in the self-same fashion.”
“Then, Felix—-the night before it comes, you will promise me, will you?”
“Muriel, Muriel, I could never dare to kill you.”
She laid her hand soothingly on his. She stroked him gently. “You are a man,” she said, looking up into his eyes with confidence. “I trust you. I believe in you. I know you will never let these savages hurt me.... Felix, in spite of everything, I’ve been happier since we came to this island together than ever I have been in my life before. I’ve had my wish. I didn’t want to miss in life the one thing that life has best worth giving. I haven’t missed it now. I know I haven’t; for I love you, and you love me. After that, I can die, and die gladly. If I die withyou, that’s all I ask. These seven or eight terrible weeks have made me feel somehow unnaturally calm. When I came here first I lived all the time in an agony of terror. I’ve got over the agony of terror now. I’m quite resigned and happy. All I ask is to be saved—by you—from the cruel hands of these hateful cannibals.”
Felix raised her white hand just once to his lips. It was the first time he had ever ventured to kiss her. He kissed it fervently. She let it drop as if dead by her side.
“Now tell me all that happened,” she said. “I’m strong enough to bear it. I feel such a woman now—so wise and calm. These few weeks have made me grow from a girl into a woman all at once. There’s nothing I daren’t hear, if you’ll tell me it, Felix.”
Felix took up her hand again and held it in his, as he narrated the whole story of his visit to the Frenchman. When Muriel had heard it, she said once more, slowly, “I don’t think there’s any hope in all these wild plans of playing off superstition against superstition. To my mind there are only two chances left for us now. One is to concoct with the Frenchman some means of getting away by canoe from the island—I’d rather trust the sea than the tender mercy of these dreadful people; the other is to keep a closer lookout than ever for the merest chance of a passing steamer.”
Felix drew a deep sigh. “I’m afraid neither’s much use,” he said. “If we tried to get away, dogged as we are, day and night, by our Shadows, the natives would follow us with their war-canoes in battle array and hack us to pieces; for Peyron says that, regarding us as gods, they think the rain would vanish from their island forever if once they allowed us to get away alive and carry the luck with us. And as to the steamers, we haven’t seen a trace of one since we left the Australasian. Probably it was only by the purest accident that even she ever came so close in to Boupari.”
“At any rate,” Muriel cried, still clasping his hand tight, and letting the tears now trickle slowly down her pale white cheeks, “we can talk it all over some day with M. Peyron.”
“We can talk it over to-day,” Felix answered, “if it comes to that; for Peyron means to step round, he says, a little later in the afternoon, to pay his respects to the first white lady he has ever seen since he left New Caledonia.”
Before the Frenchman could carry out his plan, however, he was himself the recipient of the high honor of a visit from his superior god and chief, Tu-Kila-Kila.
Every day and all day long, save on a few rare occasions when special duties absolved him, the custom and religion of the islanders prescribed that their supreme incarnate deity should keep watch and ward without cessation over the great spreading banyan-tree that overshadowed with its dark boughs his temple-palace. High god as he was held to be, and all-powerful within the limits of his own strict taboos, Tu-Kila-Kila was yet as rigidly bound within those iron laws of custom and religious usage as the meanest and poorest of his subject worshippers. From sunrise to sunset, and far on into the night, the Pillar of Heaven was compelled to prowl up and down, with spear in hand and tomahawk at side, as Felix had so often seen him, before the sacred trunk, of which he appeared to be in some mysterious way the appointed guardian. His very power, it seemed, was intimately bound up with the performance of that ceaseless and irksome duty; he was a god in whose hands the lives of his people were but as dust in the balance; but he remained so only on the onerous condition of pacing to and fro, like a sentry, forever before the still more holy and venerable object he was chosen to protect from attack or injury. Had he failed in his task, had he slumbered at his post, all god though he might be, his people themselves would have risen in a body and torn him limb from limb before their ancestral fetich as a sacrilegious pretender.
At certain times and seasons, however, as for example at all high feasts and festivals, Tu-Kila-Kila had respite for a while from this constant treadmill of mechanical divinity. Whenever the moon was at the half-quarter, or the planets were in lucky conjunctions, or a red glow lit up the sky by night, or the sacred sacrificial fires of human flesh were lighted, then Tu-Kila-Kila could lay aside his tomahawk and spear, and become for a while as the islanders, his fellows, were. At other times, too, when he went out in state to visit the lesser deities of his court, the King of Fire and the King of Water made a solemn taboo before He left his home, which protected the sacred tree from aggression during its guardian’s absence. Then Tu-Kila-Kila, shaded by his divine umbrella, and preceded by the noise of the holy tom-toms, could go like a monarch over all parts of his realm, giving such orders as he pleased (within the limits of custom) to his inferior officers. It was in this way that he now paid his visit to M. Jules Peyron, King of the Birds. And he did so for what to him were amply sufficient reasons.
It had not escaped Tu-Kila-Kila’s keen eye, as he paced among the skeletons in his yard that morning, that Felix Thurstan, the King of the Rain, had taken his way openly toward the Frenchman’s quarters. He felt pretty sure, therefore, that Felix had by this time learned another white man was living on the island; and he thought it an ominous fact that the new-comer should make his way toward his fellow-European’s hut on the very first morning when the law of taboo rendered such a visit possible. The savage is always by nature suspicious; and Tu-Kila-Kila had grounds enough of his own for suspicion in this particular instance. The two white men were surely brewing mischief together for the Lord of Heaven and Earth, the Illuminer of the Glowing Light of the Sun; he must make haste and see what plan they were concocting against the sacred tree and the person of its representative, the King of Plants and of the Host of Heaven.
But it isn’t so easy to make haste when all your movements are impeded and hampered by endless taboos and a minutely annoying ritual. Before Tu-Kila-Kila could get himself under way, sacred umbrella, tom-toms, and all, it was necessary for the King of Fire and the King of Water to make taboo on an elaborate scale with their respective elements; and so by the time the high god had reached M. Jules Peyron’s garden, Felix Thurstan had already some time since returned to Muriel’s hut and his own quarters.
Tu-Kila-Kila approached the King of the Birds, amid loud clapping of hands, with considerable haughtiness. To say the truth, there was no love lost between the cannibal god and his European subordinate. The savage, puffed up as he was in his own conceit, had nevertheless always an uncomfortable sense that, in his heart of hearts, the impassive Frenchman had but a low opinion of him. So he invariably tried to make up by the solemnity of his manner and the loudness of his assertions for any trifling scepticism that might possibly exist in the mind of his follower.
On this particular occasion, as he reached the Frenchman’s plot, Tu-Kila-Kila stepped forward across the white taboo-line with a suspicious and peering eye. “The King of the Rain has been here,” he said, in a pompous tone, as the Frenchman rose and saluted him ceremoniously. “Tu-Kila-Kila’s eyes are sharp. They never sleep. The sun is his sight. He beholds all things. You cannot hide aught in heaven or earth from the knowledge of him that dwells in heaven. I look down upon land and sea, and spy out all that takes place or is planned in them. I am very holy and very cruel. I see all earth and I drink the blood of all men. The King of the Rain has come this morning to visit the King of the Birds. Where is he now? What has your divinity done with him?”
He spoke from under the sheltering cover of his veiled umbrella. The Frenchman looked back at him with as little love as Tu-Kila-Kila himself would have displayed had his face been visible. “Yes, you are a very great god,” he answered, in the conventional tone of Polynesian adulation, with just a faint under-current of irony running through his accent as he spoke. “You say the truth. You do, indeed, know all things. What need for me, then, to tell you, whose eye is the sun, that my brother, the King of the Rain, has been here and gone again? You know it yourself. Your eye has looked upon it. My brother was indeed with me. He consulted me as to the showers I should need from his clouds for the birds, my subjects.”
“And where is he gone now?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, without attempting to conceal the displeasure in his tone, for he more than half suspected the Frenchman of a sacrilegious and monstrous design of chaffing him.
The King of the Birds bowed low once more. “Tu-Kila-Kila’s glance is keener than my hawk’s,” he answered, with the accustomed Polynesian imagery. “He sees over the land with a glance, like my parrots, and over the sea with sharp sight, like my albatrosses. He knows where my brother, the King of the Rain, has gone. For me, who am the least among all the gods, I sit here on my perch and blink like a crow. I do not know these things. They are too high and too deep for me.”
Tu-Kila-Kila did not like the turn the conversation was taking. Before his own attendants such hints, indeed, were almost dangerous. Once let the savage begin to doubt, and the Moral Order goes with a crash immediately. Besides, he must know what these white men had been talking about. “Fire and Water,” he said in a loud voice, turning round to his two chief satellites, “go far down the path, and beat the tom-toms. Fence off with flood and flame the airy height where the King of the Birds lives; fence it off from all profane intrusion. I wish to confer in secret with this god, my brother. When we gods talk together, it is not well that others should hear our converse. Make a great Taboo. I, Tu-Kila-Kila, myself have said it.”
Fire and Water, bowing low, backed down the path, beating tom-toms as they went, and left the savage and the Frenchman alone together.
As soon as they were gone, Tu-Kila-Kila laid aside his umbrella with a positive sigh of relief. Now his fellow-countrymen were well out of the way, his manner altered in a trice, as if by magic. Barbarian as he was, he was quite astute enough to guess that Europeans cared nothing in their hearts for all his mumbo-jumbo. He believed in it himself, but they did not, and their very unbelief made him respect and fear them.
“Now that we two are alone,” he said, glancing carelessly around him, “we two who are gods, and know the world well—we two who see everything in heaven or earth—there is no need for concealment—we may talk as plainly as we will with one another. Come, tell me the truth! The new white man has seen you?”
“He has seen me, yes, certainly,” the Frenchman admitted, taking a keen look deep into the savage’s cunning eyes.
“Does he speak your language—the language of birds?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked once more, with insinuating cunning. “I have heard that the sailing gods are of many languages. Are you and he of one speech or two? Aliens, or countrymen?”
“He speaks my language as he speaks Polynesian,” the Frenchman replied, keeping his eye firmly fixed on his doubtful guest, “but it is not his own. He has a tongue apart—the tongue of an island not far from my country, which we call England.”
Tu-Kila-Kila drew nearer, and dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “Has he seen the Soul of all dead parrots?” he asked, with keen interest in his voice. “The parrot that knows Tu-Kila-Kila’s secret? That one over there—the old, the very sacred one?”
M. Peyron gazed round his aviary carelessly. “Oh, that one,” he answered, with a casual glance at Methuselah, as though one parrot or another were much the same to him. “Yes, I think he saw it. I pointed it out to him, in fact, as the oldest and strangest of all my subjects.”
Tu-Kila-Kila’s countenance fell. “Did he hear it speak?” he asked, in evident alarm. “Did it tell him the story of Tu-Kila-Kila’s secret?”
“No, it didn’t speak,” the Frenchman answered. “It seldom does now. It is very old. And if it did, I don’t suppose the King of the Rain would have understood one word of it. Look here, great god, allay your fears. You’re a terrible coward. I expect the real fact about the parrot is this: it is the last of its own race; it speaks the language of some tribe of men who once inhabited these islands, but are now extinct. No human being at present alive, most probably, knows one word of that forgotten language.”
“You think not?” Tu-Kila-Kila asked, a little relieved.
“I am the King of the Birds, and I know the voices of my subjects by heart; I assure you it is as I say,” M. Peyron answered, drawing himself up solemnly.
Tu-Kila-Kila looked askance, with something very closely approaching a wink in his left eye. “We two are both gods,” he said, with a tinge of irony in his tone. “We know what that means....Ido not feel so certain.”
He stood close by the parrot with itching fingers. “It is very, very old,” he went on to himself, musingly. “It can’t live long. And then—none but Boupari men will know the secret.”
As he spoke he darted a strange glance of hatred toward the unconscious bird, the innocent repository, as he firmly believed, of the secret that doomed him. The Frenchman had turned his back for a moment now, to fetch out a stool. Tu-Kila-Kila, casting a quick, suspicious eye to the right and left, took a step nearer. The parrot sat mumbling on its perch, inarticulately, putting its head on one side, and blinking its half-blinded eyes in the bright tropical sunshine. Tu-Kila-Kila paused irresolute before its face for a second. If he only dared—one wring of the neck—one pinch of his finger and thumb almost!—and all would be over. But he dared not! he dared not! Your savage is overawed by the blind terrors of taboo. His predecessor, some elder Tu-Kila-Kila of forgotten days, had laid a great charm upon that parrot’s life. Whoever hurt it was to die an awful death of unspeakable torment. The King of the Birds had special charge to guard it. If even the Cannibal God himself wrought it harm, who could tell what judgment might fall upon him forthwith, what terrible vengeance the dead Tu-Kila-Kila might wreak upon him in his ghostly anger? And that dead Tu-Kila-Kila was his own Soul! His own Soul might flare up within him in some mystic way and burn him to ashes.
And yet—suppose this hateful new-comer, the King of the Rain, whom he had himself made Korong on purpose to get rid of him the more easily, and so had elevated into his own worst potential enemy—suppose this new-comer, the King of the Rain, were by chance to speak that other dialect of the bird-language, which the King of the Birds himself knew not, but which the parrot had learned from his old master, the ancient Tu-Kila-Kila of other days, and in which the bird still recited the secret of the sacred tree and the Death of the Great God—ah, then he might still have to fight hard for his divinity. He gazed angrily at the bird. Methuselah blinked, and put his head on one side, and looked craftily askance at him. Tu-Kila-Kila hated it, that insolent creature. Was he not a god, and should he be thus bearded in his own island by a mere Soul of dead birds, a poor, wretched parrot? But the curse! What might not that portend? Ah, well, he would risk it. Glancing around him once more to the right and left, to make sure that nobody was looking, the cunning savage put forth his hand stealthily, and tried with a friendly caress to seize the parrot.
In a moment, before he had time to know what was happening, Methuselah—sleepy old dotard as he seemed—had woke up at once to a sense of danger. Turning suddenly round upon the sleek, caressing hand, he darted his beak with a vicious peck at his assailant, and bit the divine finger of the Pillar of Heaven as carelessly as he would have bitten any child on Boupari. Tu-Kila-Kila, thunder-struck, drew back his arm with a start of surprise and a loud cry of pain. The bird had wounded him. He shook his hand and stamped. Blood was dropping on the ground from the man-god’s finger. He hardly knew what strange evil this omen of harm might portend for the world. The Soul of all dead parrots had carried out the curse, and had drawn red drops from the sacred veins of Tu-Kila-Kila.
One must be a savage one’s self, and superstitious at that, fully to understand the awful significance of this deadly occurrence. To draw blood from a god, and, above all, to let that blood fall upon the dust of the ground, is the very worst luck—too awful for the human mind to contemplate.
At the same moment, the parrot, awakened by the unexpected attack, threw back its head on its perch, and, laughing loud and long to itself in its own harsh way, began to pour forth a whole volley of oaths in a guttural language, of which neither Tu-Kila-Kila nor the Frenchman understood one syllable. And at the same moment, too, M. Peyron himself, recalled from the door of his hut by Tu-Kila-Kila’s sharp cry of pain and by his liege subject’s voluble flow of loud speech and laughter, ran up all agog to know what was the matter.
Tu-Kila-Kila, with an effort, tried to hide in his robe his wounded finger. But the Frenchman caught at the meaning of the whole scene at once, and interposed himself hastily between the parrot and its assailant. “Hé!my Methuselah,” he cried, in French, stroking the exultant bird with his hand, and smoothing its ruffled feathers, “did he try to choke you, then? Did he try to get over you? That was a brave bird! You did well,mon ami, to bite him!... No, no, Life of the World, and Measurer of the Sun’s Course,” he went on, in Polynesian, “you shall not go near him. Keep your distance, I beg of you. You may be a high god—though you were a scurvy wretch enough, don’t you recollect, when you were only Lavita, the son of Sami—but I know your tricks. Hands off from my birds, say I. A curse is on the head of the Soul of dead parrots. You tried to hurt him, and see how the curse has worked itself out! The blood of the great god, the Pillar of Heaven, has stained the gray dust of the island of Boupari.”
Tu-Kila-Kila stood sucking his finger, and looking the very picture of the most savage sheepishness.
Tu-Kila-Kila went home that day in a very bad humor. The portent of the bitten finger had seriously disturbed him. For, strange as it sounds to us, he really believed himself in his own divinity; and the bare thought that the holy soil of earth should be dabbled and wet with the blood of a god gave him no little uneasiness in his own mind on his way homeward. Besides, what would his people think of it if they found it out? At all hazards almost, he must strive to conceal this episode of the bite from the men of Boupari. A god who gets wounded, and, worse still, gets wounded in the very act of trying to break a great taboo laid on by himself in a previous incarnation—such a god undoubtedly lays himself open to the gravest misapprehensions on the part of his worshippers. Indeed, it was not even certain whether his people, if they knew, would any longer regard him as a god at all. The devotion of savages is profound, but it is far from personal. When deities pass so readily from one body to another, you must always keep a sharp lookout lest the great spirit should at any minute have deserted his earthly tabernacle, and have taken up his abode in a fresh representative. Honor the gods by all means; but make sure at the same time what particular house they are just then inhabiting.
It was the hour of siesta in Tu-Kila-Kila’s tent. For a short space in the middle of the day, during the heat of the sun, while Fire and Water, with their embers and their calabash, sat on guard in a porch by the bamboo gate, Tu-Kila-Kila, Pillar of Heaven and Threshold of Earth, had respite for a while from his daily task of guarding the sacred banyan, and could take his ease after his meal in his own quarters. While that precious hour of taboo lasted, no wandering dragon or spirit of the air could hurt the holy tree, and no human assailant dare touch or approach it. Even the disease-making gods, who walk in the pestilence, could not blight or wither it. At all other times Tu-Kila-Kila mounted guard over his tree with a jealousy that fairly astonished Felix Thurstan’s soul; for Felix Thurstan only dimly understood as yet how implicitly Tu-Kila-Kila’s own life and office were bound up with the inviolability of the banyan he protected.
Within the hut, during that playtime of siesta, while the lizards (who are also gods) ran up and down the wall, and puffed their orange throats, Tu-Kila-Kila lounged at his ease that afternoon, with one of his many wives—a tall and beautiful Polynesian woman, lithe and supple, as is the wont of her race, and as exquisitely formed in every limb and feature as a sculptured Greek goddess. A graceful wreath of crimson hibiscus adorned her shapely head, round which her long and glossy black hair was coiled in great rings with artistic profusion. A festoon of blue flowers and dark-red dracæna leaves hung like a chaplet over her olive-brown neck and swelling bust. One breadth of native cloth did duty for an apron or girdle round her waist and hips. All else was naked. Her plump brown arms were set off by the green and crimson of the flowers that decked her. Tu-Kila-Kila glanced at his slave with approving eyes. He always liked Ula; she pleased him the best of all his women. And she knew his ways, too: she never contradicted him.
Among savages, guile is woman’s best protection. The wife who knows when to give way with hypocritical obedience, and when to coax or wheedle her yielding lord, runs the best chance in the end for her life. Her model is not the oak, but the willow. She must be able to watch for the rising signs of ill-humor in her master’s mind, and guard against them carefully. If she is wise, she keeps out of her husband’s way when his anger is aroused, but soothes and flatters him to the top of his bent when his temper is just slightly or momentarily ruffled.
“The Lord of Heaven and Earth is ill at ease,” Ula murmured, insinuatingly, as Tu-Kila-Kila winced once with the pain of his swollen finger. “What has happened today to the Increaser of Bread-Fruit? My lord is sad. His eye is downcast. Who has crossed my master’s will? Who has dared to anger him?”
Tu-Kila-Kila kept the wounded hand wrapped up in a soft leaf, like a woolly mullein. All the way home he had been obliged to conceal it, and disguise the pain he felt, lest Fire and Water should discover his secret. For he dared not let his people know that the Soul of all dead parrots had bitten his finger, and drawn blood from the sacred veins of the man-god. But he almost hesitated now whether or not he should confide in Ula. A god may surely trust his own wedded wives. And yet—such need to be careful—women are so treacherous! He suspected Ula sometimes of being a great deal too fond of that young man Toko, who used to be one of the temple attendants, and whom he had given as Shadow accordingly to the King of the Rain, so as to get rid of him altogether from among the crowd of his followers. So he kept his own counsel for the moment, and disguised his misfortune. “I have been to see the King of the Birds this morning,” he said, in a grumbling voice; “and I do not like him. That God is too insolent. For my part I hate these strangers, one and all. They have no respect for Tu-Kila-Kila like the men of Boupari. They are as bad as atheists. They fear not the gods, and the customs of our fathers are not in them.”
Ula crept nearer, with one lithe round arm laid caressingly close to her master’s neck. “Then why do you make them Korong?” she asked, with feminine curiosity, like some wife who seeks to worm out of her husband the secret of freemasonry. “Why do you not cook them and eat them at once, as soon as they arrive? They are very good food—so white and fine. That last new-comer, now—the Queen of the Clouds—why not eat her? She is plump and tender.”
“I like her,” Tu-Kila-Kila responded, in a gloating tone. “I like her every way. I would have brought her here to my temple and admitted her at once to be one of Tu-Kila-Kila’s wives—only that Fire and Water would not have permitted me. They have too many taboos, those awkward gods. I do not love them. But I make my strangers Korong for a very wise reason. You women are fools; you understand nothing; you do not know the mysteries. These things are a great deal too high and too deep for you. You could not comprehend them. But men know well why. They are wise; they have been initiated. Much more, then, do I, who am the very high god—who eat human flesh and drink blood like water—who cause the sun to shine and the fruits to grow—without whom the day in heaven would fade and die out, and the foundations of the earth would be shaken like a plantain leaf.”
Ula laid her soft brown hand soothingly on the great god’s arm just above the elbow. “Tell me,” she said, leaning forward toward him, and looking deep into his eyes with those great speaking gray orbs of hers; “tell me, O Sustainer of the Equipoise of Heaven; I know you are great; I know you are mighty; I know you are holy and wise and cruel; but why must you let these sailing gods who come from unknown lands beyond the place where the sun rises or sets—why must you let them so trouble and annoy you? Why do you not at once eat them up and be done with them? Is not their flesh sweet? Is not their blood red? Are they not a dainty well fit for the banquet of Tu-Kila-Kila?”
The savage looked at her for a moment and hesitated. A very beautiful woman this Ula, certainly. Not one of all his wives had larger brown limbs, or whiter teeth, or a deeper respect for his divine nature. He had almost a mind—it was only Ula? Why not break the silence enjoined upon gods toward women, and explain this matter to her? Not the great secret itself, of course—the secret on which hung the Death and Transmigration of Tu-Kila-Kila—oh, no; not that one. The savage was far too cunning in his generation to intrust that final terrible Taboo to the ears of a woman. But the reason why he made all strangers Korong. A woman might surely be trusted with that—especially Ula. She was so very handsome. And she was always so respectful to him.
“Well, the fact of it is,” he answered, laying his hand on her neck, that plump brown neck of hers, under the garland of dracæna leaves, and stroking it voluptuously, “the sailing gods who happen upon this island from time to time are made Korong—but hush! it is taboo.” He gazed around the hut suspiciously. “Are all the others away?” he asked, in a frightened tone. “Fire and Water would denounce me to all my people if once they found I had told a taboo to a woman. And as for you, they would take you, because you knew it, and would pull your flesh from your bones with hot stone pincers!”
Ula rose and looked about her at the door of the tent. She nodded thrice; then she glided back, serpentine, and threw herself gracefully, in a statuesque pose, on the native mat beside him. “Here, drink some more kava,” she cried, holding a bowl to his lips, and wheedling him with her eyes. “Kava is good; it is fit for gods. It makes them royally drunk, as becomes great deities. The spirits of our ancestors dwell in the bowl; when you drink of the kava they mount by degrees into your heart and head. They inspire brave words. They give you thoughts of heaven. Drink, my master, drink. The Ruler of the Sun in Heaven is thirsty.”
She lay propped on one elbow, with her face close to his; and offered him, with one brown, irresistible hand, the intoxicating liquor. Tu-Kila-Kila took the bowl, and drank a second time, for he had drunk of it once with his dinner already. It was seldom he allowed himself the luxury of a second draught of that very stupefying native intoxicant, for he knew too well the danger of insecurely guarding his sacred tree; but on this particular occasion, as on so many others in the collective life of humanity, “the woman tempted him,” and he acted as she told him. He drank it off deep. “Ha, ha! that is good!” he cried, smacking his lips. “That is a drink fit for a god. No woman can make kava like you, Ula.” He toyed with her arms and neck lazily once more. “You are the queen of my wives,” he went on, in a dreamy voice. “I like you so well, that, plump as you are, I really believe, Ula, I could never make up my mind to eat you.”
“My lord is very gracious,” Ula made answer, in a soft, low tone, pretending to caress him. And for some minutes more she continued to make much of him in the fulsome strain of Polynesian flattery.
At last the kava had clearly got into Tu-Kila-Kila’s head. Then Ula bent forward once more and again attacked him. “Now I know you will tell me,” she said, coaxingly, “why you make them Korong. As long as I live, I will never speak or hint of it to anybody anywhere. And if I do—why, the remedy is near. I am your meat—take me and eat me.”
Even cannibals are human; and at the touch of her soft hand, Tu-Kila-Kila gave way slowly. “I made them Korong,” he answered, in rather thick accents, “because it is less dangerous for me to make them so than to choose for the post from among our own islanders. Sooner or later, my day must come; but I can put it off best by making my enemies out of strangers who arrive upon our island, and not out of those of my own household. All Boupari men who have been initiated know the terrible secret—they know where lies the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila. The strangers who come to us from the sun or the sea do not know it; and therefore my life is safest with them. So I make them Korong whenever I can, to prolong my own days, and to guard my secret.”
“And the Death of Tu-Kila-Kila?” the woman whispered, very low, still soothing his arm with her hand and patting his cheek softly from time to time with a gentle, caressing motion. “Tell me where does that live? Who holds it in charge? Where is Tu-Kila-Kila’s great spirit laid by in safety? I know it is in the tree; but where and in what part of it?”
Tu-Kila-Kila drew back with a little cry of surprise. “You know it is in the tree!” he cried. “You know my soul is kept there! Why, Ula, who told you that? and you a woman! Bad medicine indeed! Some man has been blabbing what he learned in the mysteries. If this should reach the ears of the King of the Rain—” he paused mysteriously.
“What? What?” Ula cried, seizing his hand in hers, and pressing it hard to her bosom in her anxiety and eagerness. “Tell me the secret! Tell me!”
With a sudden sharp howl of darting pain, Tu-Kila-Kila withdrew his hand. She had squeezed the finger the parrot had bitten, and blood began once more to flow from it freely.
A wild impulse of revenge came over the savage. He caught her by the neck with his other hand, pressed her throat hard, till she was black in the face, kicked her several times with ferocious rage, and then flung her away from him to the other side of the hut with a fierce and untranslatable native imprecation.
Ula, shaken and hurt, darted away toward the door, with a face of abject terror. For every reason on earth she was intensely alarmed. Were it merely as a matter of purely earthly fear, she had ground enough for fright in having so roused the hasty anger of that powerful and implacable creature. He would kill her and eat her with far less compunction than an English farmer would kill and eat one of his own barnyard chickens. But besides that, it terrified her not a little in more mysterious ways to see the blood of a god falling upon the earth so freely. She knew not what awful results to herself and her race might follow from so terrible a desecration.
But, to her utter astonishment, the great god himself, mad with rage as he was, seemed none the less almost as profoundly frightened and surprised as she herself was. “What did you do that for?” he cried, now sufficiently recovered for thought and speech, wringing his hand with pain, and then popping his finger hastily into his mouth to ease it. “You are a clumsy thing. And you want to destroy me, too, with your foolish clumsiness.”
He looked at her and scowled. He was very angry. But the savage woman is nothing if not quick-witted and politic. In a flash of intuition, Ula saw at once he was more frightened than hurt; he was afraid of the effect of this strange revelation upon his own reputation for supreme godship. With every mark and gesture of deprecatory servility the woman sidled back to his side like a whipped dog. For a second she looked down on the floor at the drops of blood; then, without one word of warning or one instant’s hesitation, she bit her own finger hard till blood flowed from it freely. “I will show this to Fire and Water,” she said, holding it up before his eyes all red and bleeding. “I will say you were angry with me and bit me for a punishment, as you often do. They will never find out it was the blood of a god. Have no fear for their eyes. Let me look at your finger.”
Tu-Kila-Kila, half appeased by her clever quickness, held his hand out sulkily, like a disobedient child. Ula examined it close. “A bite,” she said, shortly. “A bite from a bird! a peck from a parrot.”
Tu-Kila-Kila jerked out a surly assent. “Yes, the Soul of all dead parrots,” he answered, with an angry glare. “It bit me this morning at the King of the Birds’. A vicious brute. But no one else saw it.”
Ula put the finger up to her own mouth, and sucked the wound gently. Her medicine stanched it. Then she took a thin leaf of the paper mulberry, soft, cool, and soothing, and bound it round the place with a strip of the lace-like inner bark, as deftly as any hospital nurse in London would have done it. These savage women are capital hands in sickness. Tu-Kila-Kila sat and sulked meanwhile, like a disappointed child. When Ula had finished, she nodded her head and glided softly away. She knew her chance of learning the secret was gone for the moment, and she had too much of the guile of the savage woman to spoil her chances by loitering about unnecessarily while her lord was in his present ungracious humor.
As she stole from the hut, Tu-Kila-Kila, looking ruefully at his wounded hand, and then at that light and supple retreating figure, muttered sulkily to himself, with a very bad grace, “the woman knows too much. She nearly wormed my secret out of me. She knows that Tu-Kila-Kila’s life and soul are bound up in the tree. She knows that I bled, and that the parrot bit me. If she blabs, as women will do, mischief may come of it. I am a great god, a very great god—keen, bloodthirsty, cruel. And I like that woman. But it would be wiser and safer, perhaps, after all, to forego my affection and to make a great feast of her.”
And Ula, looking back with a smile and a nod, and holding up her own bitten and bleeding hand with a farewell shake, as if to remind her divine husband of her promise to show it to Fire and Water, murmured low to herself as she went, “He is a very great god; a very great god, no doubt; but I hate him, I hate him! He would eat me to-morrow if I didn’t coax him and wheedle him and keep him in a good temper. You want to be sharp, indeed, to be the wife of a god. I got off to-day with the skin of my teeth. He might have turned and killed me. If only I could find out the Great Taboo, I would tell it to the stranger, the King of the Rain; and then, perhaps, Tu-Kila-Kila would die. And the stranger would become Tu-Kila-Kila in turn, and I would be one of his wives; and Toko, who is his Shadow, would return again to the service of Tu-Kila-Kila’s temple.”
But Fire, as she passed, was saying to Water, “We are getting tired in Boupari of Lavita, the son of Sami. If the luck of the island is not to change, it is high time, I think, we should have a new Tu-Kila-Kila.”