The Great Taboo

THE DOWNFALL OF A PANTHEON.

The Australasian’s gig entered the lagoon through the fringing reef by its narrow seaward mouth, and rowed steadily for the landing place on the main island.

A little way out from shore, amid loud screams and yells, the natives came up with it in their laden war-canoes.  Shouting and gesticulating and brandishing their spears with the shark’s tooth tips, they endeavored to stop its progress landward by pure noise and bravado.

“We must be careful what we do, boys,” the captain observed, in a quiet voice of seamanlike resolution to his armed companions.  “We mustn’t frighten the savages too much, or show too hostile a front, for fear they should retaliate on our friends on the island.”  He held up his hand, with the gold braid on the wrist, to command silence; and the natives, gazing open-mouthed, looked and wondered at the gesture.  These sailing gods were certainly arrayed in most gorgeous vestments, and their canoe, though devoid of a grinning figure-head, was provided with a most admirable and well-uniformed equipment.

A coral rock jutted high out of the sea to the left hard by.  Its summit was crowded with a basking population of sea-gulls and pelicans.  The captain gave the word to “easy all.”  In a second the gig stopped short, as those stout arms held her.  He rose in his place and lifted the six-shooter.  Then he pointed it ostentatiously at the rock, away from the native canoes, and held up his hand yet again for silence.  “We’ll give ’em a taste of what we can do, boys,” he said, “just to show ’em, not to hurt ’em.”  At that he drew the trigger twice.  His first two chambers were loaded on purpose with duck-shot cartridges.  Twice the big gun roared; twice the fire flashed red from its smoking mouth.  As the smoke cleared away, the natives, dumb with surprise, and perfectly cowed with terror, saw ten or a dozen torn and bleeding birds float mangled upon the water.

“Now for the dynamite!” the captain said, cheerily, proceeding to lower a small object overboard by a single wire, while he held up his hand a third time to bespeak silence and attention.

The natives looked again, with eyes starting from their heads.  The captain gave a little click, and pointed with his finger to a spot on the water’s top, a little way in front of him.  Instantly, a loud report, and a column of water spurted up into the air, some ten or twelve feet, in a boisterous fountain.  As it subsided again, a hundred or so of the bright-colored fish that browse among the submerged, coral-groves of these still lagoons, rose dead or dying to the seething, boiling surface.

The captain smiled.  Instantly the natives set up a terrified shout.  “It is even as he said,” they cried.  “These gods are his ministers!  The white-faced Korong is a very great deity!  He is indeed the true Tu-Kila-Kila.  These gods have come for him.  They are very mighty.  Thunder and lightning and waterspouts are theirs.  The waves do as they bid.  The sea obeys them.  They are here to take away our Tu-Kila-Kila from our midst.  And what will then become of the island of Boupari?  Will it not sink in the waves of the sea and disappear?  Will not the sun in heaven grow dark, and the moon cease to shed its benign light on the earth, when Tu-Kila-Kila the Great returns at last to his own far country?”

“That lot’ll do for ’em, I expect,” the captain said cheerily, with a confident smile.  “Now forward all, boys.  I fancy we’ve astonished the natives a trifle.”

They rowed on steadily, but cautiously, toward the white bank of sand which formed the usual landing-place, the captain holding the six-shooter in readiness all the time, and keeping an eye firmly fixed on every movement of the savages.  But the warriors in the canoes, thoroughly cowed and overawed by this singular exhibition of the strangers’ prowess, paddled on in whispering silence, nearly abreast of the gig, but at a safe distance, as they thought, and eyed the advancing Europeans with quiet looks of unmixed suspicion.

At last, the adventurous young chief, who had advised killing Felix off-hand on the island, mustered up courage to paddle his own canoe a little nearer, and flung his spear madly in the direction of the gig.  It fell short by ten yards.  He stood eying it angrily.  But the captain, grimly quiet, raising his Winchester to his shoulder without one second’s delay, and marking his man, fired at the young chief as he stood, still half in the attitude of throwing, on the prow of his canoe, an easy aim for fire-arms.  The ball went clean through the savage’s breast, and then ricochetted three times on the water afar off.  The young chief fell stone dead into the sea like a log, and sank instantly to the bottom.

It was a critical moment.  The captain felt uncertain whether the natives would close round them in force or not.  It is always dangerous to fire a shot at savages.  But the Boupari men were too utterly awed to venture on defence.  “He was Tu-Kila-Kila’s enemy,” they cried, in astonished tones.  “He raised his voice against the very high god.  Therefore, the very high god’s friends have smitten him with their lightning.  Their thunderbolt went through him, and hit the water beyond.  How strong is their hand!  They can kill from afar.  They are mighty gods.  Let no man strive to fight against the friends of Tu-Kila-Kila.”

The sailors rowed on and reached the landing-place.  There, half of them, headed by the captain, disembarked in good order, with drawn cutlasses, while the other half remained behind to guard the gig, under the third officer.  The natives also disembarked, a little way off, and, making humble signs of submission with knee and arm, endeavored, by pantomime, to express the idea of their willingness to guide the strangers to their friends’ quarters.

The captain waved them on with his hand.  The natives, reassured, led the way, at some distance ahead, along the paths through the jungle.  The captain had his finger on his six-shooter the while; every sailor grasped his cutlass and kept his revolver ready for action.  “I don’t half like the look of it,” the captain observed, partly to himself.  “They seem to be leading us into an ambuscade or something.  Keep a sharp lookout against surprise from the jungle, boys; and if any native shows fight shoot him down instantly.”

At last they emerged upon a clear space in the front, where a great group of savages stood in a circle, with serried spears, round a large wattled hut that occupied the elevated centre of the clearing.

For a minute or two the action of the savages was uncertain.  Half of the defenders turned round to face the invaders angrily; the other half stood irresolute, with their spears still held inward, guarding a white line of sand with inflexible devotion.

The warriors who had preceded them from the shore called aloud to their friends by the temple in startled tones.  The captain and sailors had no idea what their words meant.  But just then, from the midst of the circle, an English voice cried out in haste, “Don’t fire!  Do nothing rash!  We’re safe.  Don’t be frightened.  The natives are disposed to parley and palaver.  Take care how you act.  They’re terribly afraid of you.”

Just outside the taboo-line the captain halted.  The gray-headed old chief, who had accompanied his fellows to the shore, spoke out in Polynesian.  “Do not resist them,” he said, “my people.  If you do, you will be blasted by their lightning like a bare bamboo in a mighty cyclone.  They carry thunder in their hands.  They are mighty, mighty gods.  The white-faced Korong spoke no more than the truth.  Let them do as they will with us.  We are but their meat.  We are as dust beneath their sole, and as driven mulberry-leaves before the breath of the tempest.”

The defenders hesitated still a little.  Then, suddenly losing heart, they broke rank at last at a point close by where the captain of the Australasian stood, one man after another falling aside slowly and shamefacedly a pace or two.  The captain, unhesitatingly, overstepped the white taboo-line.  Next instant, Felix and Muriel were grasping his hand hard, and M. Peyron was bowing a polite Parisian reception.

Forthwith, the sailors crowded round them in a hollow square.  Muriel and Felix, half faint with relief from their long and anxious suspense, staggered slowly down the seaward path between them.  But there was no need now for further show of defence.  The islanders, pressing near and flinging away their weapons, followed the procession close, with tears and lamentations.  As they went on, the women, rushing out of their huts while the fugitives passed, tore their hair on their heads, and beat their breasts in terror.  The warriors who had come from the shore recounted, with their own exaggerative additions, the miracle of the six-shooter and the dynamite cartridge.  Gradually they approached the landing-place on the beach.  There the third officer sat waiting in the gig to receive them.  The lamentations of the islanders now became positively poignant.  “Oh, my father,” they cried aloud, “my brother, my revered one, you are indeed the true Tu-Kila-Kila.  Do not go away like this and desert us!  Oh, our mother, great queen, mighty goddess, stop with us!  Take not away your sun from the heavens, nor your rain from the crops.  We acknowledge we have sinned; we have done very wrong; but the chief sinner is dead; the wrong-doer has paid; spare us who remain; spare us, great deity; do not make the bright lights of heaven become dark over us.  Stay with your worshippers, and we will give you choice young girls to eat every day, we will sacrifice the tenderest of our children to feed you.”

It is an awful thing for any race or nation when its taboos fail all at once, and die out entirely.  To the men of Boupari, the Tu-Kila-Kila of the moment represented both the Moral Order and the regular sequence of the physical universe.  Anarchy and chaos might rule when he was gone.  The sun might be quenched, and the people run riot.  No wonder they shrank from the fearful consequence that might next ensue.  King and priest, god and religion, all at one fell blow were to be taken away from them!

Felix turned round on the shore and spoke to them again.  “My people,” he said, in a kindly tone—­for, after all, he pitied them—­“you need have no fear.  When I am gone, the sun will still shine and the trees will still bear fruit every year as formerly.  I will send the messengers I promised from my own land to teach you.  Until they come, I leave you this as a great Taboo.  Tu-Kila-Kila enjoins it.  Shed no human blood; eat no human flesh.  Those who do will be punished when another fire-canoe comes from the far land to bring my messengers.”

The King of Fire bent low at the words.  “Oh, Tu-Kila-Kila,” he said, “it shall be done as you say.  Till your messengers come, every man shall live at peace with all his neighbors.”

They stepped into the gig.  Mali and Toko followed before M. Peyron as naturally as they had always followed their masters on the island before.

“Who are these?” the captain asked, smiling.

“Our Shadows,” Felix answered.  “Let them come.  I will pay their passage when I reach San Francisco.  They have been very faithful to us, and they are afraid to remain, lest the islanders should kill them for letting us go or for not accompanying us.”

“Very well,” the captain answered.  “Forward all, there, boys!  Now, ahead for the ship.  And thank God, we’re well out of it!”

But the islanders still stood on the shore and wept, stretching their hands in vain after the departing boat, and crying aloud in piteous tones, “Oh, my father, return!  Oh, my mother, come back!  Oh, very great gods, do not fly and desert us!”

Seven weeks later Mr. and Mrs. Felix Thurstan, who had been married in the cathedral at Honolulu the very morning the Australasian arrived there, sat in an eminently respectable drawing-room in a London square, where Mrs. Ellis, Muriel’s aunt by marriage, was acting as their hostess.

“But how dreadful it is to think, dear,” Mrs. Ellis remarked for the twentieth time since their arrival, with a deep-drawn sigh, “how dreadful to think that you and Felix should have been all those months alone on the island together without being married!”

Muriel looked up with a quiet smile toward Felix.  “I think, Aunt Mary,” she said, dreamily, “if you’d been there yourself, and suffered all those fears, and passed through all those horrors that we did together, you’d have troubled your head very little indeed about such conventionalities, as whether or not you happened to be married….  Besides,” she added, after a pause, with a fine perception of the inexorable stringency of Mrs. Grundy’s law, “we weren’t quite without chaperons, either, don’t you know; for our Shadows, of course, were always with us.”

Whereat Felix smiled an equally quiet smile.  “And terrible as it all was,” he put in, “I shall never regret it, because it made Muriel know how profoundly I loved her, and it made me know how brave and trustful and pure a woman could be under such awful conditions.”

But Mrs. Ellis sat still in her chair and smiled uncomfortably.  It affected her spirits.  Taboos, after all, are much the same in England as in Boupari.