On the way to church, the Monteiths sifted out their new acquaintance.
“Well, what do you make of him, Frida?” Philip asked, leaning back in
his place, with a luxurious air, as soon as the carriage had turned the
corner. “Lunatic or sharper?”
Frida gave an impatient gesture with her neatly gloved hand. “For my
part,” she answered without a second's hesitation, “I make him neither:
I find him simply charming.”
“That's because he praised your dress,” Philip replied, looking wise.
“Did ever you know anything so cool in your life? Was it ignorance, now,
or insolence?”
“It was perfect simplicity and naturalness,” Frida answered with
confidence. “He looked at the dress, and admired it, and being
transparently naif, he didn't see why he shouldn't say so. It wasn't at
all rude, I thought--and it gave me pleasure.”
“He certainly has in some ways charming manners,” Philip went on more
slowly. “He manages to impress one. If he's a madman, which I rather
more than half suspect, it's at least a gentlemanly form of madness.”
“His manners are more than merely charming,” Frida answered, quite
enthusiastic, for she had taken a great fancy at first sight to the
mysterious stranger. “They've such absolute freedom. That's what strikes
me most in them. They're like the best English aristocratic manners,
without the insolence; or the freest American manners, without the
roughness. He's extremely distinguished. And, oh, isn't he handsome!”
“He IS good-looking,” Philip assented grudgingly. Philip owned a
looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of
manly beauty.
As for Robert Monteith, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly
unfascinated. He was a dour business man of Scotch descent, who had made
his money in palm-oil in the City of London; and having married Frida
as a remarkably fine woman, with a splendid figure, to preside at his
table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown
fads and nonsensical fancies. He had seen but little of the stranger,
too, having come in from his weekly stroll, or tour of inspection, round
the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting
for St. Barnabas: and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by
Frida's enthusiasm. “As far as I'm concerned,” he said, with his slow
Scotch drawl, inherited from his father (for though London-born and
bred, he was still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)--“As far as I'm
concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler. I
wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the house just
now, with all that silver. I stepped round before I left, and warned
Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and
to call up cook and James if he tried to get out of the house with any
of our property. But you never seemed to suspect him. And to supply
him with a bag, too, to carry it all off in! Well, women are reckless!
Hullo, there, policeman;--stop, Price, one moment;--I wish you'd keep an
eye on my house this morning. There's a man in there I don't half like
the look of. When he drives away in a cab that my boy's going to call
for him, just see where he stops, and take care he hasn't got anything
my servants don't know about.”
In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Bertram Ingledew was reflecting, as
he waited for the church people to clear away, how interesting these
English clothes-taboos and day-taboos promised to prove, beside some
similar customs he had met with or read of in his investigations
elsewhere. He remembered how on a certain morning of the year the High
Priest of the Zapotecs was obliged to get drunk, an act which on any
other day in the calendar would have been regarded by all as a terrible
sin in him. He reflected how in Guinea and Tonquin, at a particular
period once a twelvemonth, nothing is considered wrong, and everything
lawful, so that the worst crimes and misdemeanours go unnoticed and
unpunished. He smiled to think how some days are tabooed in certain
countries, so that whatever you do on them, were it only a game of
tennis, is accounted wicked; while some days are periods of absolute
licence, so that whatever you do on them, were it murder itself, becomes
fit and holy. To him and his people at home, of course, it was the
intrinsic character of the act itself that made it right or wrong, not
the particular day or week or month on which one happened to do it. What
was wicked in June was wicked still in October. But not so among the
unreasoning devotees of taboo, in Africa or in England. There, what was
right in May became wicked in September, and what was wrong on Sunday
became harmless or even obligatory on Wednesday or Thursday. It was all
very hard for a rational being to understand and explain: but he meant
to fathom it, all the same, to the very bottom--to find out why, for
example, in Uganda, whoever appears before the king must appear stark
naked, while in England, whoever appears before the queen must wear a
tailor's sword or a long silk train and a headdress of ostrich-feathers;
why, in Morocco, when you enter a mosque, you must take off your shoes
and catch a violent cold, in order to show your respect for Allah; while
in Europe, on entering a similar religious building, you must uncover
your head, no matter how draughty the place may be, since the deity who
presides there appears to be indifferent to the danger of consumption
or chest-diseases for his worshippers; why certain clothes or foods are
prescribed in London or Paris for Sundays and Fridays, while certain
others, just equally warm or digestible or the contrary, are perfectly
lawful to all the world alike on Tuesdays and Saturdays. These were
the curious questions he had come so far to investigate, for which the
fakirs and dervishes of every land gave such fanciful reasons: and he
saw he would have no difficulty in picking up abundant examples of his
subject-matter everywhere in England. As the metropolis of taboo, it
exhibited the phenomena in their highest evolution. The only thing that
puzzled him was how Philip Christy, an Englishman born, and evidently
a most devout observer of the manifold taboos and juggernauts of his
country, should actually deny their very existence. It was one more
proof to him of the extreme caution necessary in all anthropological
investigations before accepting the evidence even of well-meaning
natives on points of religious or social usage, which they are often
quite childishly incapable of describing in rational terms to outside
inquirers. They take their own manners and customs for granted, and they
cannot see them in their true relations or compare them with the similar
manners and customs of other nationalities.