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!"