The Great Taboo

METHUSELAH GIVES SIGN.

All the hopes of the three Europeans were concentrated now on the bare off-chance of a passing steamer.  M. Peyron in particular was fully convinced that, if the Australasian had found the inner channel practicable, other ships in future would follow her example.  With this idea firmly fixed in his head, he arranged with Felix that one or other of them should keep watch alternately by night as far as possible; and he also undertook that a canoe should constantly be in readiness to carry them away to the supposititious ship, if occasion arose for it.  Muriel took counsel with Mali on the question of rousing the Frenchman if a steamer appeared, and they were the first to sight it; and Mali, in whom renewed intercourse with white people had restored to some extent the civilized Queensland attitude of mind, readily enough promised to assist in their scheme, provided she was herself taken with them, and so relieved from the terrible vengeance which would otherwise overtake her.  “If Boupari man catch me,” she said, in her simple, graphic, Polynesian way, “Boupari man kill me, and lay me in leaves, and cook me very nice, and make great feast of me, like him do with Jani.”  From that untimely end both Felix and Muriel promised faithfully, as far as in them lay, to protect her.

To communicate with M. Peyron by daytime, without arousing the ever-wakeful suspicion of the natives, Felix hit upon an excellent plan.  He burnished his metal matchbox to the very highest polish it was capable of taking, and then heliographed by means of sun-flashes on the Morse code.  He had learned the code in Fiji in the course of his official duties; and he taught the Frenchman now readily enough how to read and reply with the other half of the box, torn off for the purpose.

It was three or four days, however, before the two English wanderers ventured to return M. Peyron’s visit.  They didn’t wish to attract too greatly the attention of the islanders.  Gradually, as their stay on the island went on, they learned the truth that Tu-Kila-Kila’s eyes, as he himself had boasted, were literally everywhere.  For he had spies of his own, told off in every direction, who dogged the steps of his victims unseen.  Sometimes, as Felix and Muriel walked unsuspecting through the jungle paths, closely followed by their Shadows, a stealthy brown figure, crouched low to the ground, would cross the road for a moment behind them, and disappear again noiselessly into the dense mass of underbrush.  Then Mali or Toko, turning round, all hushed, with a terrified look, would murmur low to themselves, or to one another, “There goes one of the Eyes of Tu-Kila-Kila!” It was only by slow degrees that this system of espionage grew clear to the strangers; but as soon as they had learned its reality and ubiquity, they felt at once how undesirable it would be for them to excite the terrible man-god’s jealousy and suspicion by being observed too often in close personal intercourse with their fellow-exile and victim, the Frenchman.  It was this that made them have recourse to the device of the heliograph.

So three or four days passed before Muriel dared to approach M. Peyron’s cottage.  When she did at last go there with Felix, it was in the early morning, before the fierce tropical sun, that beat full on the island, had begun to exert its midday force and power.  The path that led there lay through the thick and tangled mass of brushwood which covered the greater part of the island with its dense vegetation; it was overhung by huge tree-ferns and broad-leaved Southern bushes, and abutted at last on the little wind-swept knoll where the King of the Birds had his appropriate dwelling-place.  The Frenchman received them with studied Parisian hospitality.  He had decorated his arbor with fresh flowers for the occasion, and bright tropical fruits, with their own green leaves, did duty for the coffee or the absinthe of his fatherland on his homemade rustic table.  Yet in spite of all the rudeness of the physical surroundings, they felt themselves at home again with this one exiled European; the faint flavor of civilization pervaded and permeated the Frenchman’s hut after the unmixed savagery to which they had now been so long accustomed.

Muriel’s curiosity, however, centred most about the mysterious old parrot, of whose strange legend so much had been said to her.  After they had sat for a little under the shade of the spreading banyan, to cool down from their walk—­for it was an oppressive morning—­M.  Peyron led her round to his aviary at the back of the hut, and introduced her, by their native names, to all his subjects.  “I am responsible for their lives,” he said, gravely, “for their welfare, for their happiness.  If I were to let one of them grow old without a successor in the field to follow him up and receive his soul—­as in the case of my friend Methuselah here, who was so neglected by my predecessors—­the whole species would die out for want of a spirit, and my own life would atone for that of my people.  There you have the central principle of the theology of Boupari.  Every race, every element, every power of nature, is summed up for them in some particular person or thing; and on the life of that person or thing depends, as they believe, the entire health of the species, the sequence of events, the whole order and succession of natural phenomena.”

Felix approached the mysterious and venerable bird with somewhat incautious fingers.  “It looks very old,” he said, trying to stroke its head and neck with a friendly gesture.  “You do well, indeed, in calling it Methuselah.”

As he spoke, the bird, alarmed at the vague consciousness of a hand and voice which it did not recognize and mindful of Tu-Kila-Kila’s recent attack, made a vicious peck at the fingers outstretched to caress it.  “Take care!” the Frenchman cried, in a warning voice.  “The patriarch’s temper is no longer what it was sixty or seventy years ago.  He grows old and peevish.  His humor is soured.  He will sing no longer the lively little scraps of Offenbach I have taught him.  He does nothing but sit still and mumble now in his own forgotten language.  And he’s dreadfully cross—­so crabbed—­mon Dieu, what a character!  Why, the other day, as I told you, he bit Tu-Kila-Kila himself, the high god of the island, with a good hard peck, when that savage tried to touch him; you’d have laughed to see his godship sent off bleeding to his hut with a wounded finger!  I will confess I was by no means sorry at the sight myself.  I do not love that god, nor he me; and I was glad when Methuselah, on whom he is afraid to revenge himself openly, gave him a nice smart bite for trying to interfere with him.”

“He’s very snappish, to be sure,” Felix said, with a smile, trying once more to push forward one hand to stroke the bird cautiously.  But Methuselah resented all such unauthorized intrusions.  He was growing too old to put up with strangers.  He made a second vicious attempt to peck at the hand held out to soothe him, and screamed, as he did so, in the usual discordant and unpleasant voice of an angry or frightened parrot.

“Why, Felix,” Muriel put in, taking him by the arm with a girlish gesture—­for even the terrors by which they were surrounded hadn’t wholly succeeded in killing out the woman within her—­“how clumsy you are!  You don’t understand one bit how to manage parrots.  I had a parrot of my own at my aunt’s in Australia, and I know their ways and all about them.  Just let me try him.”  She held out her soft white hand toward the sulky bird with a fearless, caressing gesture.  “Pretty Poll, pretty Poll!” she said, in English, in the conventional tone of address to their kind.  “Did the naughty man go and frighten her then?  Was she afraid of his hand?  Did Polly want a lump of sugar?”

On a sudden the bird opened its eyes quickly with an awakened air, and looked her back in the face, half blindly, half quizzingly.  It preened its wings for a second, and crooned with pleasure.  Then it put forward its neck, with its head on one side, took her dainty finger gently between its beak and tongue, bit it for pure love with a soft, short pressure, and at once allowed her to stroke its back and sides with a very pleased and surprised expression.  The success of her skill flattered Muriel.  “There! it knows me!” she cried, with childish delight; “it understands I’m a friend!  It takes to me at once!  Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!  Come, Poll, come and kiss me!”

The bird drew back at the words, and steadied itself for a moment knowingly on its perch.  Then it held up its head, gazed around it with a vacant air, as if suddenly awakened from a very long sleep, and, opening its mouth, exclaimed in loud, clear, sharp, and distinct tones—­and in English—­“Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!  Polly wants a buss!  Polly wants a nice sweet bit of apple!”

For a moment M. Peyron couldn’t imagine what had happened.  Felix looked at Muriel.  Muriel looked at Felix.  The Englishman held out both his hands to her in a wild fervor of surprise.  Muriel took them in her own, and looked deep into his eyes, while tears rose suddenly and dropped down her cheeks, one by one, unchecked.  They couldn’t say why, themselves; they didn’t know wherefore; yet this unexpected echo of their own tongue, in the mouth of that strange and mysterious bird, thrilled through them instinctively with a strange, unearthly tremor.  In some dim and unexplained way, they felt half unconsciously to themselves that this discovery was, perhaps, the first clue to the solution of the terrible secret whose meshes encompassed them.

M. Peyron looked on in mute astonishment.  He had heard the bird repeat that strange jargon so often that it had ceased to have even the possibility of a meaning for him.  It was the way of Methuselah—­just his language that he talked; so harsh! so guttural!  “Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!” he had noticed the bird harp upon those quaint words again and again.  They were part, no doubt, of that old primitive and forgotten Pacific language the creature had learned in other days from some earlier bearer of the name and ghastly honors of Tu-Kila-Kila.  Why should these English seem so profoundly moved by them?

“Mademoiselle doesn’t surely understand the barbarous dialect which our Methuselah speaks!” he exclaimed in surprise, glancing half suspiciously from one to the other of these incomprehensible Britons.  Like most other Frenchmen, he had been brought up in total ignorance of every European language except his own; and the words the parrot pronounced, when delivered with the well-known additions of parrot harshness and parrot volubility, seemed to him so inexpressibly barbaric in their clicks and jerks that he hadn’t yet arrived at the faintest inkling of the truth as he observed their emotion.

Felix seized his new friend’s hand in his and wrung it warmly.  “Don’t you see what it is?” he exclaimed, half beside himself with this vague hope of some unknown solution.  “Don’t you realize how the thing stands?  Don’t you guess the truth?  This isn’t a Polynesian, dialect at all.  It’s our own mother tongue.  The bird speaks English!”

“English!” M. Peyron replied, with incredulous scorn.  “What!  Methuselah speak English!  Oh, no, monsieur, impossible. Vous vous trompez, j’en suis sûr.  I can never believe it.  Those harsh, inarticulate sounds to belong to the noble language of Shaxper and Newtowne! Ah, monsieur, incroyable! vous vous trompez; vous vous trompez!”

As he spoke, the bird put its head on one side once more, and, looking out of its half-blind old eyes with a crafty glance round the corner at Muriel, observed again, in not very polite English, “Pretty Poll!  Pretty Poll!  Polly wants some fruit!  Polly wants a nut!  Polly wants to go to bed!...  God save the king!  To hell with all papists!”

“Monsieur,” Felix said, a certain solemn feeling of surprise coming over him slowly at this last strange clause, “it is perfectly true.  The bird speaks English.  The bird that knows the secret of which we are all in search—­the bird that can tell us the truth about Tu-Kila-Kila—­can tell us in the tongue which mademoiselle and I speak as our native language.  And what is more—­and more strange—­gather from his tone and the tenor of his remarks, he was taught, long since—­a century ago, or more—­and by an English sailor!”

Muriel held out a bit of banana on a sharp stick to the bird.  Methuselah-Polly took it gingerly off the end, like a well-behaved parrot?  “God save the king!” Muriel said, in a quiet voice, trying to draw him on to speak a little further.

Methuselah twisted his eye sideways, first this way, then that, and responded in a very clear tone, indeed, “God save the king!  Confound the Duke of York!  Long live Dr. Oates!  And to hell with all papists!”