The Great Taboo

VICTORY—­AND AFTER?

The great god had wounded him.  But not to the heart.  Felix, as good luck would have it, happened to be wearing buckled braces.  He had worn them on board, and, like the rest of his costume, had, of course, never since been able to discard them.  They stood him in good stead now.  The buckle caught the very point of the bone-tipped spear, and broke the force of the blow, as the great god lunged forward.  The wound was but a graze, and Tu-Kila-Kila’s light shaft snapped short in the middle.

Madder and wilder than ever, the savage pitched it away, yelling, rushed forward with a fierce curse on his angry tongue, and flung himself, tooth and nail, on his astonished opponent.

The suddenness of the onslaught almost took the Englishman’s breath away.  By this time, however, Felix had pulled together his ideas and taken in the situation.  Tu-Kila-Kila was attacking him now with his heavy stone axe.  He must parry those deadly blows.  He must be alert, but watchful.  He must put himself in a posture of defence at once.  Above all, he must keep cool and have his wits about him.

If he could but have drawn his knife, he would have stood a better chance in that hand-to-hand conflict.  But there was no time now for such tactics as those.  Besides, even in close fight with a bloodthirsty savage, an English gentleman’s sense of fair play never for one moment deserts him.  Felix felt, if they were to fight it out face to face for their lives, they should fight at least on a perfect equality.  Steel against stone was a mean advantage.  Parrying Tu-Kila-Kila’s first desperate blow with the haft of his own hatchet, he leaped aside half a second to gain breath and strength.  Then he rushed on, and dealt one deadly downstroke with the ponderous weapon.

For a minute or two they closed, in perfectly savage single combat.  Fire and Water, observant and impartial, stood by like seconds to see the god himself decide the issue, which of the two combatants should be his living representative.  The contest was brief but very hard-fought.  Tu-Kila-Kila, inspired with the last frenzy of despair, rushed wildly on his opponent with hands and fists, and teeth and nails, dealing his blows in blind fury, right and left, and seeking only to sell his life as dearly as possible.  In this last extremity, his very superstitions told against him.  Everything seemed to show his hour had come.  The parrot’s bite—­the omen of his own blood that stained the dust of earth—­Ula’s treachery—­the chance by which the Korong had learned the Great Taboo—­Felix’s accidental or providential success in breaking off the bough—­the length of time he himself had held the divine honors—­the probability that the god would by this time begin to prefer a new and stronger representative—­all these things alike combined to fire the drunk and maddened savage with the energy of despair.  He fell upon his enemy like a tiger upon an elephant.  He fought with his tomahawk and his feet and his whole lithe body; he foamed at the mouth with impotent rage; he spent his force on the air in the extremity of his passion.

Felix, on the other hand, sobered by pain, and nerved by the fixed consciousness that Muriel’s safety now depended absolutely on his perfect coolness, fought with the calm skill of a practised fencer.  Happily he had learned the gentle art of thrust and parry years before in England; and though both weapon and opponent were here so different, the lesson of quickness and calm watchfulness he had gained in that civilized school stood him in good stead, even now, under such adverse circumstances.  Tu-Kila-Kila, getting spent, drew back for a second at last, and panted for breath.  That faint breathing-space of a moment’s duration sealed his fate.  Seizing his chance with consummate skill, Felix closed upon the breathless monster, and brought down the heavy stone hammer point blank upon the centre of his crashing skull.  The weapon drove home.  It cleft a great red gash in the cannibal’s head.  Tu-Kila-Kila reeled and fell.  There was an infinitesimal pause of silence and suspense.  Then a great shout went up from all round to heaven, “He has killed him!  He has killed him!  We have a new-made god!  Tu-Kila-Kila is dead!  Long live Tu-Kila-Kila!”

Felix drew back for a moment, panting and breathless, and wiped his wet brow with his sleeve, his brain all whirling.  At his feet, the savage lay stretched, like a log.  Felix gazed at the blood-bespattered face remorsefully.  It is an awful thing, even in a just quarrel, to feel that you have really taken a human life!  The responsibility is enough to appall the bravest of us.  He stooped down and examined the prostrate body with solemn reverence.  Blood was flowing in torrents from the wounded head.  But Tu-Kila-Kila was dead—­stone-dead forever.

Hot tears of relief welled up into Felix’s eyes.  He touched the body cautiously with a reverent hand.  No life.  No motion.

Just as he did so, the woman Ula came forward, bare-limbed and beautiful, all triumph in her walk, a proud, insensitive savage.  One second she gazed at the great corpse disdainfully.  Then she lifted her dainty foot, and gave it a contemptuous kick.  “The body of Lavita, the son of Sami,” she said, with a gesture of hatred.  “He had a bad heart.  We will cook it and eat it.”  Next turning to Felix, “Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila,” she cried, clapping her hands three times and bowing low to the ground, “you are a very great god.  We will serve you and salute you.  Am not I, Ula, one of your wives, your meat?  Do with me as you will.  Toko, you are henceforth the great god’s Shadow!”

Felix gazed at the beautiful, heartless creature, all horrified.  Even on Boupari, that cannibal island, he was hardly prepared for quite so low a depth of savage insensibility.  But all the people around, now a hundred or more, standing naked before their new god, took up the shout in concert.  “The body of Lavita, the son of Sami,” they cried.  “A carrion corpse!  The god has deserted it.  The great soul of the world has entered the heart of the white-faced stranger from the disk of the sun; the King of the Rain; the great Tu-Kila-Kila.  We will cook and eat the body of Lavita, the son of Sami.  He was a bad man.  He is a worn-out shell.  Nothing remains of him now.  The great god has left him.”

They clapped their hands in a set measure as they recited this hymn.  The King of Fire retreated into the temple.  Ula stood by, and whispered low with Toko.  There was a ceremonial pause of some fifteen minutes.  Presently, from the inner recesses of the temple itself, a low noise issued forth as of a rising wind.  For some seconds it buzzed and hummed, droningly.  But at the very first note of that holy sound Ula dropped her lover’s hand, as one drops a red-hot coal, and darted wildly off at full speed, like some frightened wild beast, into the thick jungle.  Every other woman near began to rush away with equally instantaneous signs of haste and fear.  The men, on the other hand, erect and naked, with their hands on their foreheads, crossed the taboo-line at once.  It was the summons to all who had been initiated at the mysteries—­the sacred bull-roarer was calling the assembly of the men of Boupari.

For several minutes it buzzed and droned, that mystic implement, growing louder and louder, till it roared like thunder.  One after another, the men of the island rushed in as if mad or in flight for their lives before some fierce beast pursuing them.  They ran up, panting, and dripping with sweat; their hands clapped to their foreheads; their eyes starting wildly from their staring sockets; torn and bleeding and lacerated by the thorns and branches of the jungle, for each man ran straight across country from the spot where he lay asleep, in the direction of the sound, and never paused or drew breath, for dear life’s sake, till he stood beside the corpse of the dead Tu-Kila-Kila.

And every moment the cry pealed louder and louder still.  “Lavita, the son of Sami, is dead, praise Heaven!  The King of the Rain has slain him, and is now the true Tu-Kila-Kila!”

Felix bent irresolute over the fallen savage’s bloodstained corpse.  What next was expected of him he hardly knew or cared.  His one desire now was to return to Muriel—­to Muriel, whom he had rescued from something worse than death at the hateful hands of that accursed creature who lay breathless forever on the ground beside him.

Somebody came up just then, and seized his hand warmly.  Felix looked up with a start.  It was their friend, the Frenchman.  “Ah, my captain, you have done well,” M. Peyron cried, admiring him.  “What courage!  What coolness!  What pluck!  What soldiership!  I couldn’t see all.  But I was in at the death!  And oh, mon Dieu, how I admired and envied you!”

By this time the bull-roarer had ceased to bellow among the rocks.  The King of Fire stood forth.  In his hands he held a length of bamboo-stick with a lighted coal in it.  “Bring wood and palm-leaves,” he said, in a tone of command.  “Let me light myself up, that I may blaze before Tu-Kila-Kila.”

He turned and bowed thrice very low before Felix.  “The accepted of Heaven,” he cried, holding his hands above him.  “The very high god!  The King of all Things!  He sends down his showers upon our crops and our fields.  He causes his sun to shine brightly over us.  He makes our pigs and our slaves bring forth their increase.  All we are but his meat.  We, his people, praise him.”

And all the men of Boupari, naked and bleeding, bent low in response.  “Tu-Kila-Kila is great,” they chanted, as they clapped their hands.  “We thank him that he has chosen a fresh incarnation.  The sun will not fade in the heavens overhead, nor the bread-fruits wither and cease to bear fruit on earth.  Tu-Kila-Kila, our god, is great.  He springs ever young and fresh, like the herbs of the field.  He is a most high god.  We, his people, praise him.”

Four temple attendants brought sticks and leaves, while Felix stood still, half dazed with the newness of these strange preparations.  The King of Fire, with his torch, set light to the pile.  It blazed merrily on high.  “I, Fire, salute you,” he cried, bending over it toward Felix.

“Now cut up the body of Lavita, the son of Sami,” he went on, turning toward it contemptuously.  “I will cook it in my flame, that Tu-Kila-Kila the great may eat of it.”

Felix drew back with a face all aglow with horror and disgust.  “Don’t touch that body!” he cried, authoritatively, putting his foot down firm.  “Leave it alone at once.  I refuse to allow you.”  Then he turned to M. Peyron.  “The King of the Birds and I,” he said, with calm resolve, “we two will bury it.”

The King of Fire drew back at these strange words, nonplussed.  This was, indeed, an ill-omened break in the ceremony of initiation of a new Tu-Kila-Kila, to which he had never before in his life been accustomed.  He hardly knew how to comport himself under such singular circumstances.  It was as though the sovereign of England, on coronation-day, should refuse to be crowned, and intimate to the archbishop, in his full canonicals, a confirmed preference for the republican form of Government.  It was a contingency that law and custom in Boupari had neither, in their wisdom, foreseen nor provided for.

The King of Water whispered low in the new god’s ear.  “You must eat of his body, my lord,” he said.  “That is absolutely necessary.  Every one of us must eat of the flesh of the god; but you, above all, must eat his heart, his divine nature.  Otherwise you can never be full Tu-Kila-Kila.”

“I don’t care a straw for that,” Felix cried, now aroused to a full sense of the break in Methuselah’s story and trembling with apprehension.  “You may kill me if you like; we can die only once; but human flesh I can never taste; nor will I, while I live, allow you to touch this dead man’s body.  We will bury it ourselves, the King of the Birds and I. You may tell your people so.  That is my last word.”  He raised his voice to the customary ceremonial pitch.  “I, the new Tu-Kila-Kila,” he said, “have spoken it.”

The King of Fire and the King of Water, taken aback at his boldness, conferred together for some seconds privately.  The people meanwhile looked on and wondered.  What could this strange hitch in the divine proceedings mean?  Was the god himself recalcitrant?  Never in their lives had the oldest men among them known anything like it.

And as they whispered and debated, awe-struck but discordant, a shout arose once more from the outer circle—­a mighty shout of mingled surprise, alarm, and terror.  “Taboo!  Taboo!  Fence the mysteries.  Beware!  Oh, great god, we warn you.  The mysteries are in danger!  Cut her down!  Kill her!  A woman!  A woman!”

At the words, Felix was aware of somebody bursting through the dense crowd and rushing wildly toward him.  Next moment, Muriel hung and sobbed on his shoulder, while Mali, just behind her, stood crying and moaning.

Felix held the poor startled girl in his arms and soothed her.  And all around another great cry arose from five hundred lips:  “Two women have profaned the mysteries of the god.  They are Tu-Kila-Kila’s trespass-offering.  Let us kill them and eat them!”