by Grant Allen
And for hours they crouched around, beating their breasts and shrieking.
That evening, Muriel sat up late in Felix’s hut, with Mali by her side, too frightened to go back into her own alone before those angry people. And all the time, just beyond the barrier line, they could hear, above the whistle of the wind around the hut, the droning voices of dozens of natives, cowering low on the ground; they seemed to be going through some litany or chant, as if to deprecate the result of this imprudent action.
“What are they doing outside?” Felix asked of his Shadow at last, after a peculiarly long wail of misery.
And the Shadow made answer, in very solemn tones, “They are trying to propitiate your mightiness, and to avert the omen, lest the rain should fall, and the wind should blow, and the storm-cloud should burst over the island to destroy them.”
Then Felix remembered suddenly of himself that the season when this storm-fruit, or storm-apple, as they called it, was ripe in Fiji, was also the season when the great Pacific cyclones most often swept over the land in full fury — storms unexampled on any other sea, like that famous one which wrecked so many European men-of-war a few years since in the harbor of Samoa.
And without, the wail came louder and clearer still! “If you sow the bread-fruit seed, you will reap the breadfruit. If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind. They have eaten the storm-fruit. Oh, great king, save us!”
CHAPTER X.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND.
Toward midnight Muriel began to doze lightly from pure fatigue.
“Put a pillow under her head, and let her sleep,” Felix said in a whisper. “Poor child, it would be cruel to send her alone to-night into her own quarters.”
And Mali slipped a pillow of mulberry paper under her mistress’s head, and laid it on her own lap, and bent down to watch her.
But outside, beyond the line, the natives murmured loud their discontent. “The Queen of the Clouds stays in the King of the Rain’s hut to-night,” they muttered, angrily. “She will not listen to us. Before morning, be sure, the Tempest will be born of their meeting to destroy us.”
About two o’clock there came a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset. Felix looked out of the hut door. The moon was full. It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and human bones, to keep time to the lilt of their lugubrious litany.
The air felt unusually heavy and oppressive. Felix raised his eyes to the sky, and saw whisps of light cloud drifting in rapid flight over the scudding moon. Below, an ominous fog bank gathered steadily westward. Then one clap of thunder rent the sky. After it came a deadly silence. The moon was veiled. All was dark as pitch. The natives themselves fell on their faces and prayed with mute lips. Three minutes later, the cyclone had burst upon them in all its frenzy.
Such a hurricane Felix had never before experienced. Its energy was awful. Round the palm-trees the wind played a frantic and capricious devil’s dance. It pirouetted about the atoll in the mad glee of unconsciousness. Here and there it cleared lanes, hundreds of yards in length, among the forest-trees and the cocoanut plantations. The noise of snapping and falling trunks rang thick on the air. At times the cyclone would swoop down from above upon the swaying stem of some tall and stately palm that bent like grass before the wind, break it off short with a roar at the bottom, and lay it low at once upon the ground, with a crash like thunder. In other places, little playful whirlwinds seemed to descend from the sky in the very midst of the dense brushwood, where they cleared circular patches, strewn thick under foot with trunks and branches in their titanic sport, and yet left unhurt all about the surrounding forest. Then again a special cyclone of gigantic proportions would advance, as it were, in a single column against one stem of a clump, whirl round it spirally like a lightning flash, and, deserting it for another, leave it still standing, but turned and twisted like a screw by the irresistible force of its invisible fingers. The storm-god, said Toko, was dancing with the palm-trees. The sight was awful. Such destructive energy Felix had never even imagined before. No wonder the savages all round beheld in it the personal wrath of some mighty spirit.
For in spite of the black clouds they could see it all — both the Europeans and the islanders. The intense darkness of the night was lighted up for them every minute by an almost incessant blaze of sheet and forked lightning. The roar of the thunder mingled with the roar of the tempest, each in turn overtopping and drowning the other. The hut where Felix and Muriel sheltered themselves shook before the storm; the very ground of the island trembled and quivered — like the timbers of a great ship before a mighty sea — at each onset of the breakers upon the surrounding fringe-reef. And side by side with it all, to crown their misery, wild torrents of rain, descending in waterspouts, as it seemed, or dashed in great sheets against the roof of their frail tenement, poured fitfully on with fierce tropical energy.
In the midst of the hut Muriel crouched and prayed with bloodless lips to Heaven. This was too, too terrible. It seemed incredible to her that on top of all they had been called upon to suffer of fear and suspense at the hands of the savages, the very dumb forces of nature themselves should thus be stirred up to open war against them. Her faith in Providence was sorely tried. Dumb forces, indeed! Why, they roared with more terrible voices than any wild beast on earth could possibly compass. The thunder and the wind were howling each other down in emulous din, and the very hiss of the lightning could be distinctly heard, like some huge snake, at times above the creaking and snapping of the trees before the gale in the surrounding forest.
Muriel crouched there long, in the mute misery of utter despair. At her feet Mali crouched too, as frightened as herself, but muttering aloud from time to time, in a reproachful voice, “I tell Missy Queenie what going to happen. I warn her not. I tell her she must not eat that very bad storm-apple. But Missy Queenie no listen. Her take her own way, then storm come down upon us.”
And Felix’s Shadow, in his own tongue, exclaimed more than once in the self-same tone, half terror, half expostulation, “See now what comes from breaking taboo? You eat the storm-fruit. The storm-fruit suits ill with the King of the Rain and the Queen of the Clouds. The heavens have broken loose. The sea has boiled. See what wind and what flood you are bringing upon us.”
By and by, above even the fierce roar of the mingled thunder and cyclone, a wild orgy of noise burst upon them all from without the hut. It was a sound as of numberless drums and tom-toms, all beaten in unison with the mad energy of fear; a hideous sound, suggestive of some hateful heathen devil-worship. Muriel clapped her hands to her ears in horror. “Oh, what’s that?” she cried to Felix, at this new addition to their endless alarms. “Are the savages out there rising in a body? Have they come to murder us?”
“Perhaps,” Felix said, smoothing her hair with his hand, as a mother might soothe her terrified child, “perhaps they’re angry with us for having caused this storm, as they think, by our foolish action. I believe they all set it down to our having unluckily eaten that unfortunate fruit. I’ll go out to the door myself and speak to them.”
Muriel clung to his arm with a passionate clinging.
“Oh, Felix,” she cried, “no! Don’t leave me here alone. My darling, I love you. You’re all the world there is left to me now, Felix. Don’t go out to those wretches and leave me here alone. They’ll murder you! they’ll murder you! Don’t go out, I implore you. If they mean to kill us, let them kill us both together, in one another’s arms. Oh, Felix, I am yours, and you are mine, my darling!”
It was the first time either of them had acknowledged the fact; but there, before the face of that awful convulsion of nature, all the little deceptions and veils of life seemed rent asunder forever as by a flash of lightning. They stood face to face with each other’s souls, and forgot all e
lse in the agony of the moment. Felix clasped the trembling girl in his arms like a lover. The two Shadows looked on and shook with silent terror. If the King of the Rain thus embraced the Queen of the Clouds before their very eyes, amid so awful a storm, what unspeakable effects might not follow at once from it! But they had too much respect for those supernatural creatures to attempt to interfere with their action at such a moment. They accepted their masters almost as passively as they accepted the wind and the thunder, which they believed to arise from them.
Felix laid his poor Muriel tenderly down on the mud floor again. “I must go out, my child,” he said. “For the very love of you, I must play the man, and find out what these savages mean by their drumming.”
He crept to the door of the hut (for no man could walk upright before that awful storm), and peered out into the darkness once more, awaiting one of the frequent flashes of lightning. He had not long to wait. In a moment the sky was all ablaze again from end to end, and continued so for many seconds consecutively. By the light of the continuous zigzags of fire, Felix could see for himself that hundreds and hundreds of natives — men, women, and children, naked, or nearly so, with their hair loose and wet about their cheeks — lay flat on their faces, many courses deep, just outside the taboo line. The wind swept over them with extraordinary force, and the tropical rain descended in great floods upon their bare backs and shoulders. But the savages, as if entranced, seemed to take no heed of all these earthly things. They lay grovelling in the mud before some unseen power; and beating their tom-toms in unison, with barbaric concord, they cried aloud once more as Felix appeared, in a weird litany that overtopped the tumultuous noise of the tempest, “Oh, Storm-God, hear us! Oh, great spirit, deliver us! King of the Rain and Queen of the Clouds, befriend us! Be angry no more! Hide your wrath from your people! Take away your hurricane, and we will bring you many gifts. Eat no longer of the storm-apple — the seed of the wind — and we will feed you with yam and turtle, and much choice bread-fruit. Great king, we are yours; you shall choose which you will of our children for your meat and drink; you shall sup on our blood. But take your storm away; do not utterly drown and submerge our island!”
As they spoke they crawled nearer and nearer, with gliding serpentine motion, till their heads almost touched the white line of coral. But not a man of them all went one inch beyond it. They stopped there and gazed at him. Felix signed to them with his hand, and pointed vaguely to the sky, as much as to say he was not responsible. At the gesture the whole assembly burst into one loud shout of gratitude. “He has heard us, he has heard us!” they exclaimed, with a perfect wail of joy. “He will not utterly destroy us. He will take away his storm. He will bring the sun and the moon back to us.”
Felix returned into the hut, somewhat reassured so far as the attitude of the savages went. “Don’t be afraid of them, Muriel,” he cried, taking her passionately once more in a tender embrace. “They daren’t cross the taboo. They won’t come near; they’re too frightened themselves to dream of hurting us.”
CHAPTER XI.
AFTER THE STORM.
Next morning the day broke bright and calm, as if the tempest had been but an evil dream of the night, now past forever. The birds sang loud; the lizards came forth from their holes in the wall, and basked, green and gold, in the warm, dry sunshine. But though the sky overhead was blue and the air clear, as usually happen after these alarming tropical cyclones and rainstorms, the memorials of the great wind that had raged all night long among the forests of the island were neither few nor far between. Everywhere the ground was strewn with leaves and branches and huge stems of cocoa-palms. All nature was draggled. Many of the trees were stripped clean of their foliage, as completely as oaks in an English winter; on others, big strands of twisted fibres marked the scars and joints where mighty boughs had been torn away by main force; while, elsewhere, bare stumps alone remained to mark the former presence of some noble dracæna or some gigantic banyan. Bread-fruits and cocoanuts lay tossed in the wildest confusion on the ground; the banana and plantain-patches were beaten level with the soil or buried deep in the mud; many of the huts had given way entirely; abundant wreckage strewed every corner of the island. It was an awful sight. Muriel shuddered to herself to see how much the two that night had passed through.
What the outer fringing reef had suffered from the storm they hardly knew as yet; but from the door of the hut Felix could see for himself how even the calm waters of the inner lagoon had been lashed into wild fury by the fierce swoop of the tempest. Round the entire atoll the solid conglomerate coral floor was scooped under, broken up, chewed fine by the waves, or thrown in vast fragments on the beach of the island. By the eastern shore, in particular, just opposite their hut, Felix observed a regular wall of many feet in height, piled up by the waves like the familiar Chesil Beach near his old home in Dorsetshire. It was the shelter of that temporary barrier alone, no doubt, that had preserved their huts last night from the full fury of the gale, and that had allowed the natives to congregate in such numbers prone on their faces in the mud and rain, upon the unconsecrated ground outside their taboo-line.
But now not an islander was to be seen within ear-shot. All had gone away to look after their ruined huts or their beaten-down plantain-patches, leaving the cruel gods, who, as they thought, had wrought all the mischief out of pure wantonness, to repent at leisure the harm done during the night to their obedient votaries.
Felix was just about to cross the taboo-line and walk down to the shore to examine the barrier, when Toko, his Shadow, laying his hand on his shoulder with more genuine interest and affection than he had ever yet shown, exclaimed, with some horror, “Oh, no! Not that! Don’t dare to go outside! It would be very dangerous for you. If my people were to catch you on profane soil just now, there’s no saying what harm they might do to you.”
“Why so?” Felix exclaimed, in surprise. “Last night, surely, they were all prayers and promises and vows and entreaties.”
The young man nodded his head in acquiescence. “Ah, yes; last night,” he answered. “That was very well then. Vows were sore needed. The storm was raging, and you were within your taboo. How could they dare to touch you, a mighty god of the tempest, at the very moment when you were rending their banyan-trees and snapping their cocoanut stems with your mighty arms like so many little chicken-bones? Even Tu-Kila-Kila himself, I expect, the very high god, lay frightened in his temple, cowering by his tree, annoyed at your wrath; he sent Fire and Water among the worshippers, no doubt, to offer up vows and to appease your anger.”
Then Felix remembered, as his Shadow spoke, that, as a matter of fact, he had observed the men who usually wore the red and white feather cloaks among the motley crowd of grovelling natives who lay flat on their faces in the mud of the cleared space the night before, and prayed hard for mercy. Only they were not wearing their robes of office at the moment, in accordance with a well-known savage custom; they had come naked and in disgrace, as befits all suppliants. They had left behind them the insignia of their rank in their own shaken huts, and bowed down their bare backs to the rain and the lightning.
“Yes, I saw them among the other islanders,” Felix answered, half-smiling, but prudently remaining within the taboo-line, as his Shadow advised him.
Toko kept his hand still on his master’s shoulder. “Oh, king,” he said, beseechingly, and with great solemnity, “I am doing wrong to warn you; I am breaking a very great Taboo. I don’t know what harm may come to me for telling you. Perhaps Tu-Kila-Kila will burn me to ashes with one glance of his eyes. He may know this minute what I’m saying here alone to you.”
It is hard for a white man to meet scruples like this; but Felix was bold enough to answer outright: “Tu-Kila-Kila knows nothing of the sort, and can never find out. Take my word for it, Toko, nothing that you say to me will ever reach Tu-Kila-Kila.”
The Shadow looked at him doubtfully, and trembled as he spoke. “I like you, Korong,” he said, with a genuinely truthful r
ing in his voice. “You seem to me so kind and good — so different from other gods, who are very cruel. You never beat me. Nobody I ever served treated me as well or as kindly as you have done. And for your sake I will even dare to break taboo — if you’re quite, quite sure Tu-Kila-Kila will never discover it.”
“I’m quite sure,” Felix answered, with perfect confidence. “I know it for certain. I swear a great oath to it.”
“You swear by Tu-Kila-Kila himself?” the young savage asked, anxiously.
“I swear by Tu-Kila-Kila himself,” Felix replied at once. “I swear, without doubt. He can never know it.”
“That is a great Taboo,” the Shadow went on, meditatively, stroking Felix’s arm. “A very great Taboo indeed. A terrible medicine. And you are a god; I can trust you. Well, then, you see, the secret is this: you are Korong, but you are a stranger, and you don’t understand the ways of Boupari. If for three days after the end of this storm, which Tu-Kila-Kila has sent Fire and Water to pray and vow against, you or the Queen of the Clouds show yourselves outside your own taboo-line — why, then, the people are clear of sin; whoever takes you may rend you alive; they will tear you limb from limb and cut you into pieces.”
“Why so?” Felix asked, aghast at this discovery. They seemed to live on a perpetual volcano in this wonderful island; and a volcano ever breaking out in fresh places. They could never get to the bottom of its horrible superstitions.
“Because you ate the storm-apple,” the Shadow answered, confidently. “That was very wrong. You brought the tempest upon us yourselves by your own trespass; therefore, by the custom of Boupari, which we learn in the mysteries, you become full Korong for the sacrifice at once. That makes the term for you. The people will give you all your dues; then they will say, ‘We are free; we have bought you with a price; we have brought your cocoanuts. No sin attaches to us; we are righteous; we are righteous.’ And then they will kill you, and Fire and Water will roast you and boil you.”
