The Great Taboo

DOMESTIC BLISS.

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.”