TU-KILA-KILA PLAYS A CARD.
Before the Frenchman could carry out his plan, however, he was himself
the recipient of the high honor of a visit from his superior god and
chief, Tu-Kila-Kila.
Every day and all day long, save on a few rare occasions when special
duties absolved him, the custom and religion of the islanders prescribed
that their supreme incarnate deity should keep watch and ward without
cessation over the great spreading banyan-tree that overshadowed with
its dark boughs his temple-palace. High god as he was held to be, and
all-powerful within the limits of his own strict taboos, Tu-Kila-Kila was
yet as rigidly bound within those iron laws of custom and religious usage
as the meanest and poorest of his subject worshippers. From sunrise to
sunset, and far on into the night, the Pillar of Heaven was compelled to
prowl up and down, with spear in hand and tomahawk at side, as Felix had
so often seen him, before the sacred trunk, of which he appeared to be in
some mysterious way the appointed guardian. His very power, it seemed,
was intimately bound up with the performance of that ceaseless and
irksome duty; he was a god in whose hands the lives of his people were
but as dust in the balance; but he remained so only on the onerous
condition of pacing to and fro, like a sentry, forever before the still
more holy and venerable object he was chosen to protect from attack or
injury. Had he failed in his task, had he slumbered at his post, all god
though he might be, his people themselves would have risen in a body and
torn him limb from limb before their ancestral fetich as a sacrilegious
pretender.
At certain times and seasons, however, as for example at all high
feasts and festivals, Tu-Kila-Kila had respite for a while from this
constant treadmill of mechanical divinity. Whenever the moon was at the
half-quarter, or the planets were in lucky conjunctions, or a red glow
lit up the sky by night, or the sacred sacrificial fires of human flesh
were lighted, then Tu-Kila-Kila could lay aside his tomahawk and spear,
and become for a while as the islanders, his fellows, were. At other
times, too, when he went out in state to visit the lesser deities of his
court, the King of Fire and the King of Water made a solemn taboo before
He left his home, which protected the sacred tree from aggression during
its guardian's absence. Then Tu-Kila-Kila, shaded by his divine umbrella,
and preceded by the noise of the holy tom-toms, could go like a monarch
over all parts of his realm, giving such orders as he pleased (within the
limits of custom) to his inferior officers. It was in this way that he
now paid his visit to M. Jules Peyron, King of the Birds. And he did so
for what to him were amply sufficient reasons.
It had not escaped Tu-Kila-Kila's keen eye, as he paced among the
skeletons in his yard that morning, that Felix Thurstan, the King of the
Rain, had taken his way openly toward the Frenchman's quarters. He felt
pretty sure, therefore, that Felix had by this time learned another white
man was living on the island; and he thought it an ominous fact that the
new-comer should make his way toward his fellow-European's hut on the
very first morning when the law of taboo rendered such a visit possible.
The savage is always by nature suspicious; and Tu-Kila-Kila had grounds
enough of his own for suspicion in this particular instance. The two
white men were surely brewing mischief together for the Lord of Heaven
and Earth, the Illuminer of the Glowing Light of the Sun; he must make
haste and see what plan they were concocting against the sacred tree and
the person of its representative, the King of Plants and of the Host of
Heaven.
But it isn't so easy to make haste when all your movements are impeded
and hampered by endless taboos and a minutely annoying ritual. Before
Tu-Kila-Kila could get himself under way, sacred umbrella, tom-toms, and
all, it was necessary for the King of Fire and the King of Water to make
taboo on an elaborate scale with their respective elements; and so by the
time the high god had reached M. Jules Peyron's garden, Felix Thurstan
had already some time since returned to Muriel's hut and his own
quarters.
Tu-Kila-Kila approached the King of the Birds, amid loud clapping of
hands, with considerable haughtiness. To say the truth, there was no love
lost between the cannibal god and his European subordinate. The savage,
puffed up as he was in his own conceit, had nevertheless always an
uncomfortable sense that, in his heart of hearts, the impassive Frenchman
had but a low opinion of him. So he invariably tried to make up by the
solemnity of his manner and the loudness of his assertions for any
trifling scepticism that might possibly exist in the mind of his
follower.
On this particular occasion, as he reached the Frenchman's plot,
Tu-Kila-Kila stepped forward across the white taboo-line with a
suspicious and peering eye. "The King of the Rain has been here," he
said, in a pompous tone, as the Frenchman rose and saluted him
ceremoniously. "Tu-Kila-Kila's eyes are sharp. They never sleep. The sun
is his sight. He beholds all things. You cannot hide aught in heaven or
earth from the knowledge of him that dwells in heaven. I look down upon
land and sea, and spy out all that takes place or is planned in them. I
am very holy and very cruel. I see all earth and I drink the blood of all
men. The King of the Rain has come this morning to visit the King of the
Birds. Where is he now? What has your divinity done with him?"
He spoke from under the sheltering cover of his veiled umbrella. The
Frenchman looked back at him with as little love as Tu-Kila-Kila himself
would have displayed had his face been visible. "Yes, you are a very
great god," he answered, in the conventional tone of Polynesian
adulation, with just a faint under-current of irony running through his
accent as he spoke. "You say the truth. You do, indeed, know all things.
What need for me, then, to tell you, whose eye is the sun, that my
brother, the King of the Rain, has been here and gone again? You know it
yourself. Your eye has looked upon it. My brother was indeed with me. He
consulted me as to the showers I should need from his clouds for the
birds, my subjects."
"And where is he gone now?" Tu-Kila-Kila asked, without attempting to
conceal the displeasure in his tone, for he more than half suspected the
Frenchman of a sacrilegious and monstrous design of chaffing him.
The King of the Birds bowed low once more. "Tu-Kila-Kila's glance is
keener than my hawk's," he answered, with the accustomed Polynesian
imagery. "He sees over the land with a glance, like my parrots, and over
the sea with sharp sight, like my albatrosses. He knows where my brother,
the King of the Rain, has gone. For me, who am the least among all the
gods, I sit here on my perch and blink like a crow. I do not know these
things. They are too high and too deep for me."
Tu-Kila-Kila did not like the turn the conversation was taking. Before
his own attendants such hints, indeed, were almost dangerous. Once let
the savage begin to doubt, and the Moral Order goes with a crash
immediately. Besides, he must know what these white men had been talking
about. "Fire and Water," he said in a loud voice, turning round to his
two chief satellites, "go far down the path, and beat the tom-toms. Fence
off with flood and flame the airy height where the King of the Birds
lives; fence it off from all profane intrusion. I wish to confer in
secret with this god, my brother. When we gods talk together, it is not
well that others should hear our converse. Make a great Taboo. I,
Tu-Kila-Kila, myself have said it."
Fire and Water, bowing low, backed down the path, beating tom-toms as
they went, and left the savage and the Frenchman alone together.
As soon as they were gone, Tu-Kila-Kila laid aside his umbrella with a
positive sigh of relief. Now his fellow-countrymen were well out of the
way, his manner altered in a trice, as if by magic. Barbarian as he was,
he was quite astute enough to guess that Europeans cared nothing in their
hearts for all his mumbo-jumbo. He believed in it himself, but they did
not, and their very unbelief made him respect and fear them.
"Now that we two are alone," he said, glancing carelessly around him, "we
two who are gods, and know the world well--we two who see everything in
heaven or earth--there is no need for concealment--we may talk as plainly
as we will with one another. Come, tell me the truth! The new white man
has seen you?"
"He has seen me, yes, certainly," the Frenchman admitted, taking a keen
look deep into the savage's cunning eyes.
"Does he speak your language--the language of birds?" Tu-Kila-Kila asked
once more, with insinuating cunning. "I have heard that the sailing gods
are of many languages. Are you and he of one speech or two? Aliens, or
countrymen?"
"He speaks my language as he speaks Polynesian," the Frenchman replied,
keeping his eye firmly fixed on his doubtful guest, "but it is not his
own. He has a tongue apart--the tongue of an island not far from my
country, which we call England."
Tu-Kila-Kila drew nearer, and dropped his voice to a confidential
whisper. "Has he seen the Soul of all dead parrots?" he asked, with keen
interest in his voice. "The parrot that knows Tu-Kila-Kila's secret? That
one over there--the old, the very sacred one?"
M. Peyron gazed round his aviary carelessly. "Oh, that one," he answered,
with a casual glance at Methuselah, as though one parrot or another were
much the same to him. "Yes, I think he saw it. I pointed it out to him,
in fact, as the oldest and strangest of all my subjects."
Tu-Kila-Kila's countenance fell. "Did he hear it speak?" he asked, in
evident alarm. "Did it tell him the story of Tu-Kila-Kila's secret?"
"No, it didn't speak," the Frenchman answered. "It seldom does now. It is
very old. And if it did, I don't suppose the King of the Rain would have
understood one word of it. Look here, great god, allay your fears. You're
a terrible coward. I expect the real fact about the parrot is this: it is
the last of its own race; it speaks the language of some tribe of men who
once inhabited these islands, but are now extinct. No human being at
present alive, most probably, knows one word of that forgotten language."
"You think not?" Tu-Kila-Kila asked, a little relieved.
"I am the King of the Birds, and I know the voices of my subjects by
heart; I assure you it is as I say," M. Peyron answered, drawing himself
up solemnly.
Tu-Kila-Kila looked askance, with something very closely approaching a
wink in his left eye. "We two are both gods," he said, with a tinge of
irony in his tone. "We know what that means.... _I_ do not feel so
certain."
He stood close by the parrot with itching fingers. "It is very,
very old," he went on to himself, musingly. "It can't live long. And
then--none but Boupari men will know the secret."
As he spoke he darted a strange glance of hatred toward the unconscious
bird, the innocent repository, as he firmly believed, of the secret
that doomed him. The Frenchman had turned his back for a moment now,
to fetch out a stool. Tu-Kila-Kila, casting a quick, suspicious eye to
the right and left, took a step nearer. The parrot sat mumbling on its
perch, inarticulately, putting its head on one side, and blinking its
half-blinded eyes in the bright tropical sunshine. Tu-Kila-Kila paused
irresolute before its face for a second. If he only dared--one wring of
the neck--one pinch of his finger and thumb almost!--and all would be
over. But he dared not! he dared not! Your savage is overawed by the
blind terrors of taboo. His predecessor, some elder Tu-Kila-Kila of
forgotten days, had laid a great charm upon that parrot's life. Whoever
hurt it was to die an awful death of unspeakable torment. The King of the
Birds had special charge to guard it. If even the Cannibal God himself
wrought it harm, who could tell what judgment might fall upon him
forthwith, what terrible vengeance the dead Tu-Kila-Kila might wreak
upon him in his ghostly anger? And that dead Tu-Kila-Kila was his own
Soul! His own Soul might flare up within him in some mystic way and burn
him to ashes.
And yet--suppose this hateful new-comer, the King of the Rain, whom
he had himself made Korong on purpose to get rid of him the more easily,
and so had elevated into his own worst potential enemy--suppose this
new-comer, the King of the Rain, were by chance to speak that other
dialect of the bird-language, which the King of the Birds himself knew
not, but which the parrot had learned from his old master, the ancient
Tu-Kila-Kila of other days, and in which the bird still recited the
secret of the sacred tree and the Death of the Great God--ah, then he
might still have to fight hard for his divinity. He gazed angrily at
the bird. Methuselah blinked, and put his head on one side, and looked
craftily askance at him. Tu-Kila-Kila hated it, that insolent creature.
Was he not a god, and should he be thus bearded in his own island by a
mere Soul of dead birds, a poor, wretched parrot? But the curse! What
might not that portend? Ah, well, he would risk it. Glancing around him
once more to the right and left, to make sure that nobody was looking,
the cunning savage put forth his hand stealthily, and tried with a
friendly caress to seize the parrot.
In a moment, before he had time to know what was happening,
Methuselah--sleepy old dotard as he seemed--had woke up at once to a
sense of danger. Turning suddenly round upon the sleek, caressing hand,
he darted his beak with a vicious peck at his assailant, and bit the
divine finger of the Pillar of Heaven as carelessly as he would have
bitten any child on Boupari. Tu-Kila-Kila, thunder-struck, drew back his
arm with a start of surprise and a loud cry of pain. The bird had wounded
him. He shook his hand and stamped. Blood was dropping on the ground from
the man-god's finger. He hardly knew what strange evil this omen of harm
might portend for the world. The Soul of all dead parrots had carried out
the curse, and had drawn red drops from the sacred veins of Tu-Kila-Kila.
One must be a savage one's self, and superstitious at that, fully to
understand the awful significance of this deadly occurrence. To draw
blood from a god, and, above all, to let that blood fall upon the dust of
the ground, is the very worst luck--too awful for the human mind to
contemplate.
At the same moment, the parrot, awakened by the unexpected attack, threw
back its head on its perch, and, laughing loud and long to itself in its
own harsh way, began to pour forth a whole volley of oaths in a guttural
language, of which neither Tu-Kila-Kila nor the Frenchman understood one
syllable. And at the same moment, too, M. Peyron himself, recalled from
the door of his hut by Tu-Kila-Kila's sharp cry of pain and by his liege
subject's voluble flow of loud speech and laughter, ran up all agog to
know what was the matter.
Tu-Kila-Kila, with an effort, tried to hide in his robe his wounded
finger. But the Frenchman caught at the meaning of the whole scene at
once, and interposed himself hastily between the parrot and its
assailant. "_Hé!_ my Methuselah," he cried, in French, stroking the
exultant bird with his hand, and smoothing its ruffled feathers, "did he
try to choke you, then? Did he try to get over you? That was a brave
bird! You did well, _mon ami_, to bite him!... No, no, Life of the World,
and Measurer of the Sun's Course," he went on, in Polynesian, "you shall
not go near him. Keep your distance, I beg of you. You may be a high
god--though you were a scurvy wretch enough, don't you recollect, when
you were only Lavita, the son of Sami--but I know your tricks. Hands off
from my birds, say I. A curse is on the head of the Soul of dead parrots.
You tried to hurt him, and see how the curse has worked itself out! The
blood of the great god, the Pillar of Heaven, has stained the gray dust
of the island of Boupari."
Tu-Kila-Kila stood sucking his finger, and looking the very picture of
the most savage sheepishness.