The Great Taboo

REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.

Toward midnight Muriel began to doze lightly from pure fatigue.

“Put a pillow under her head, and let her sleep,” Felix said in a whisper.  “Poor child, it would be cruel to send her alone to-night into her own quarters.”

And Mali slipped a pillow of mulberry paper under her mistress’s head, and laid it on her own lap, and bent down to watch her.

But outside, beyond the line, the natives murmured loud their discontent.  “The Queen of the Clouds stays in the King of the Rain’s hut to-night,” they muttered, angrily.  “She will not listen to us.  Before morning, be sure, the Tempest will be born of their meeting to destroy us.”

About two o’clock there came a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset.  Felix looked out of the hut door.  The moon was full.  It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow.  The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and human bones, to keep time to the lilt of their lugubrious litany.

The air felt unusually heavy and oppressive.  Felix raised his eyes to the sky, and saw whisps of light cloud drifting in rapid flight over the scudding moon.  Below, an ominous fog bank gathered steadily westward.  Then one clap of thunder rent the sky.  After it came a deadly silence.  The moon was veiled.  All was dark as pitch.  The natives themselves fell on their faces and prayed with mute lips.  Three minutes later, the cyclone had burst upon them in all its frenzy.

Such a hurricane Felix had never before experienced.  Its energy was awful.  Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious devil’s dance.  It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of unconsciousness.  Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations.  The noise of snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air.  At times the cyclone would swoop down from above upon the swaying stem of some tall and stately palm that bent like grass before the wind, break it off short with a roar at the bottom, and lay it low at once upon the ground, with a crash like thunder.  In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and branches in their titanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the surrounding forest.  Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning flash, and, deserting it for another, leave it still standing, but turned and twisted like a screw by the irresistible force of its invisible fingers.  The storm-god, said Toko, was dancing with the palm-trees.  The sight was awful.  Such destructive energy Felix had never even imagined before.  No wonder the savages all round beheld in it the personal wrath of some mighty spirit.

For in spite of the black clouds they could see it all—­both the Europeans and the islanders.  The intense darkness of the night was lighted up for them every minute by an almost incessant blaze of sheet and forked lightning.  The roar of the thunder mingled with the roar of the tempest, each in turn overtopping and drowning the other.  The hut where Felix and Muriel sheltered themselves shook before the storm; the very ground of the island trembled and quivered—­like the timbers of a great ship before a mighty sea—­at each onset of the breakers upon the surrounding fringe-reef.  And side by side with it all, to crown their misery, wild torrents of rain, descending in waterspouts, as it seemed, or dashed in great sheets against the roof of their frail tenement, poured fitfully on with fierce tropical energy.

In the midst of the hut Muriel crouched and prayed with bloodless lips to Heaven.  This was too, too terrible.  It seemed incredible to her that on top of all they had been called upon to suffer of fear and suspense at the hands of the savages, the very dumb forces of nature themselves should thus be stirred up to open war against them.  Her faith in Providence was sorely tried.  Dumb forces, indeed!  Why, they roared with more terrible voices than any wild beast on earth could possibly compass.  The thunder and the wind were howling each other down in emulous din, and the very hiss of the lightning could be distinctly heard, like some huge snake, at times above the creaking and snapping of the trees before the gale in the surrounding forest.

Muriel crouched there long, in the mute misery of utter despair.  At her feet Mali crouched too, as frightened as herself, but muttering aloud from time to time, in a reproachful voice, “I tell Missy Queenie what going to happen.  I warn her not.  I tell her she must not eat that very bad storm-apple.  But Missy Queenie no listen.  Her take her own way, then storm come down upon us.”

And Felix’s Shadow, in his own tongue, exclaimed more than once in the self-same tone, half terror, half expostulation, “See now what comes from breaking taboo?  You eat the storm-fruit.  The storm-fruit suits ill with the King of the Rain and the Queen of the Clouds.  The heavens have broken loose.  The sea has boiled.  See what wind and what flood you are bringing upon us.”

By and by, above even the fierce roar of the mingled thunder and cyclone, a wild orgy of noise burst upon them all from without the hut.  It was a sound as of numberless drums and tom-toms, all beaten in unison with the mad energy of fear; a hideous sound, suggestive of some hateful heathen devil-worship.  Muriel clapped her hands to her ears in horror.  “Oh, what’s that?” she cried to Felix, at this new addition to their endless alarms.  “Are the savages out there rising in a body?  Have they come to murder us?”

“Perhaps,” Felix said, smoothing her hair with his hand, as a mother might soothe her terrified child, “perhaps they’re angry with us for having caused this storm, as they think, by our foolish action.  I believe they all set it down to our having unluckily eaten that unfortunate fruit.  I’ll go out to the door myself and speak to them.”

Muriel clung to his arm with a passionate clinging.

“Oh, Felix,” she cried, “no!  Don’t leave me here alone.  My darling, I love you.  You’re all the world there is left to me now, Felix.  Don’t go out to those wretches and leave me here alone.  They’ll murder you! they’ll murder you!  Don’t go out, I implore you.  If they mean to kill us, let them kill us both together, in one another’s arms.  Oh, Felix, I am yours, and you are mine, my darling!”

It was the first time either of them had acknowledged the fact; but there, before the face of that awful convulsion of nature, all the little deceptions and veils of life seemed rent asunder forever as by a flash of lightning.  They stood face to face with each other’s souls, and forgot all else in the agony of the moment.  Felix clasped the trembling girl in his arms like a lover.  The two Shadows looked on and shook with silent terror.  If the King of the Rain thus embraced the Queen of the Clouds before their very eyes, amid so awful a storm, what unspeakable effects might not follow at once from it!  But they had too much respect for those supernatural creatures to attempt to interfere with their action at such a moment.  They accepted their masters almost as passively as they accepted the wind and the thunder, which they believed to arise from them.

Felix laid his poor Muriel tenderly down on the mud floor again.  “I must go out, my child,” he said.  “For the very love of you, I must play the man, and find out what these savages mean by their drumming.”

He crept to the door of the hut (for no man could walk upright before that awful storm), and peered out into the darkness once more, awaiting one of the frequent flashes of lightning.  He had not long to wait.  In a moment the sky was all ablaze again from end to end, and continued so for many seconds consecutively.  By the light of the continuous zigzags of fire, Felix could see for himself that hundreds and hundreds of natives—­men, women, and children, naked, or nearly so, with their hair loose and wet about their cheeks—­lay flat on their faces, many courses deep, just outside the taboo line.  The wind swept over them with extraordinary force, and the tropical rain descended in great floods upon their bare backs and shoulders.  But the savages, as if entranced, seemed to take no heed of all these earthly things.  They lay grovelling in the mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, “Oh, Storm-God, hear us!  Oh, great spirit, deliver us!  King of the Rain and Queen of the Clouds, befriend us!  Be angry no more!  Hide your wrath from your people!  Take away your hurricane, and we will bring you many gifts.  Eat no longer of the storm-apple—­the seed of the wind—­and we will feed you with yam and turtle, and much choice bread-fruit.  Great king, we are yours; you shall choose which you will of our children for your meat and drink; you shall sup on our blood.  But take your storm away; do not utterly drown and submerge our island!”

As they spoke they crawled nearer and nearer, with gliding serpentine motion, till their heads almost touched the white line of coral.  But not a man of them all went one inch beyond it.  They stopped there and gazed at him.  Felix signed to them with his hand, and pointed vaguely to the sky, as much as to say he was not responsible.  At the gesture the whole assembly burst into one loud shout of gratitude.  “He has heard us, he has heard us!” they exclaimed, with a perfect wail of joy.  “He will not utterly destroy us.  He will take away his storm.  He will bring the sun and the moon back to us.”

Felix returned into the hut, somewhat reassured so far as the attitude of the savages went.  “Don’t be afraid of them, Muriel,” he cried, taking her passionately once more in a tender embrace.  “They daren’t cross the taboo.  They won’t come near; they’re too frightened themselves to dream of hurting us.”