Whether Philip Christy liked it or not, the Monteiths and he were
soon fairly committed to a tolerably close acquaintance with Bertram
Ingledew. For, as chance would have it, on the Monday morning
Bertram went up to town in the very same carriage with Philip and his
brother-in-law, to set himself up in necessaries of life for a six
or eight months' stay in England. When he returned that night to
Brackenhurst with two large trunks, full of underclothing and so forth,
he had to come round once more to the Monteiths, as Philip anticipated,
to bring back the Gladstone bag and the brown portmanteau. He did it
with so much graceful and gracious courtesy, and such manly gratitude
for the favour done him, that he left still more deeply than ever on
Frida's mind the impression of a gentleman. He had found out all the
right shops to go to in London, he said; and he had ordered everything
necessary to social salvation at the very best tailor's, so strictly
in accordance with Philip's instructions that he thought he should
now transgress no more the sumptuary rules in that matter made and
established, as long as he remained in this realm of England. He had
commanded a black cut-away coat, suitable for Sunday morning; and a
curious garment called a frock-coat, buttoned tight over the chest, to
be worn in the afternoon, especially in London; and a still quainter
coat, made of shiny broadcloth, with strange tails behind, which was
considered “respectable,” after seven P.M., for a certain restricted
class of citizens--those who paid a particular impost known as
income-tax, as far as he could gather from what the tailor told him:
though the classes who really did any good in the state, the working men
and so forth, seemed exempted by general consent from wearing it. Their
dress, indeed, he observed, was, strange to say, the least cared for and
evidently the least costly of anybody's.
He admired the Monteith children so unaffectedly, too, telling them how
pretty and how sweet-mannered they were to their very faces, that he
quite won Frida's heart; though Robert did not like it. Robert had
evidently some deep-seated superstition about the matter; for he sent
Maimie, the eldest girl, out of the room at once; she was four years
old; and he took little Archie, the two-year-old, on his knee, as if to
guard him from some moral or social contagion. Then Bertram remembered
how he had seen African mothers beat or pinch their children till they
made them cry, to avert the evil omen, when he praised them to their
faces; and he recollected, too, that most fetichistic races believe in
Nemesis--that is to say, in jealous gods, who, if they see you love a
child too much, or admire it too greatly, will take it from you or do it
some grievous bodily harm, such as blinding it or maiming it, in order
to pay you out for thinking yourself too fortunate. He did not doubt,
therefore, but that in Scotland, which he knew by report to be a country
exceptionally given over to terrible superstitions, the people still
thought their sanguinary Calvinistic deity, fashioned by a race of stern
John Knoxes in their own image, would do some harm to an over-praised
child, “to wean them from it.” He was glad to see, however, that Frida
at least did not share this degrading and hateful belief, handed down
from the most fiendish of savage conceptions. On the contrary, she
seemed delighted that Bertram should pat little Maimie on the head, and
praise her sunny smile and her lovely hair “just like her mother's.”
To Philip, this was all a rather serious matter. He felt he was
responsible for having introduced the mysterious Alien, however
unwillingly, into the bosom of Robert Monteith's family. Now, Philip was
not rich, and Frida was supposed to have “made a good match of it”--that
is to say, she had married a man a great deal wealthier than her own
upbringing. So Philip, after his kind, thought much of the Monteith
connection. He lived in lodgings at Brackenhurst, at a highly
inconvenient distance from town, so as to be near their house, and catch
whatever rays of reflected glory might fall upon his head like a shadowy
halo from their horses and carriages, their dinners and garden-parties.
He did not like, therefore, to introduce into his sister's house anybody
that Robert Monteith, that moneyed man of oil, in the West African
trade, might consider an undesirable acquaintance. But as time wore
on, and Bertram's new clothes came home from the tailor's, it began to
strike the Civil Servant's mind that the mysterious Alien, though he
excited much comment and conjecture in Brackenhurst, was accepted on
the whole by local society as rather an acquisition to its ranks than
otherwise. He was well off: he was well dressed: he had no trade or
profession: and Brackenhurst, undermanned, hailed him as a godsend
for afternoon teas and informal tennis-parties. That ineffable air of
distinction as of one royal born, which Philip had noticed at once the
first evening they met, seemed to strike and impress almost everybody
who saw him. People felt he was mysterious, but at any rate he was
Someone. And then he had been everywhere--except in Europe; and had seen
everything--except their own society: and he talked agreeably when he
was not on taboos: and in suburban towns, don't you know, an outsider
who brings fresh blood into the field--who has anything to say we do not
all know beforehand--is always welcome! So Brackenhurst accepted Bertram
Ingledew before long, as an eccentric but interesting and romantic
person.
Not that he stopped much in Brackenhurst itself. He went up to town
every day almost as regularly as Robert Monteith and Philip Christy.
He had things he wanted to observe there, he said, for the work he
was engaged upon. And the work clearly occupied the best part of his
energies. Every night he came down to Brackenhurst with his notebook
crammed full of modern facts and illustrative instances. He worked most
of all in the East End, he told Frida confidentially: there he could see
best the remote results of certain painful English customs and usages he
was anxious to study. Still, he often went west, too; for the West End
taboos, though not in some cases so distressing as the East End ones,
were at times much more curiously illustrative and ridiculous. He must
master all branches of the subject alike. He spoke so seriously that
after a time Frida, who was just at first inclined to laugh at his
odd way of putting things, began to take it all in the end quite as
seriously as he did. He felt more at home with her than with anybody
else at Brackenhurst. She had sympathetic eyes; and he lived on
sympathy. He came to her so often for help in his difficulties that she
soon saw he really meant all he said, and was genuinely puzzled in a
very queer way by many varied aspects of English society.
In time the two grew quite intimate together. But on one point Bertram
would never give his new friend the slightest information; and that was
the whereabouts of that mysterious “home” he so often referred to. Oddly
enough, no one ever questioned him closely on the subject. A certain
singular reserve of his, which alternated curiously with his perfect
frankness, prevented them from trespassing so far on his individuality.
People felt they must not. Somehow, when Bertram Ingledew let it once
be felt he did not wish to be questioned on any particular point, even
women managed to restrain their curiosity: and he would have been
either a very bold or a very insensitive man who would have ventured to
continue questioning him any further. So, though many people hazarded
guesses as to where he had come from, nobody ever asked him the
point-blank question: Who are you, if you please, and what do you want
here?
The Alien went out a great deal with the Monteiths. Robert himself did
not like the fellow, he said: one never quite knew what the deuce he was
driving at; but Frida found him always more and more charming,--so full
of information!--while Philip admitted he was excellent form, and such a
capital tennis player! So whenever Philip had a day off in the
country, they three went out in the fields together, and Frida at least
thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated the freedom and freshness of the
newcomer's conversation.
On one such day they went out, as it chanced, into the meadows that
stretch up the hill behind Brackenhurst. Frida remembered it well
afterwards. It was the day when an annual saturnalia of vulgar vice
usurps and pollutes the open downs at Epsom. Bertram did not care to see
it, he said--the rabble of a great town turned loose to desecrate the
open face of nature--even regarded as a matter of popular custom; he
had looked on at much the same orgies before in New Guinea and on the
Zambesi, and they only depressed him: so he stopped at Brackenhurst, and
went for a walk instead in the fresh summer meadows. Robert Monteith,
for his part, had gone to the Derby--so they call that orgy--and Philip
had meant to accompany him in the dogcart, but remained behind at the
last moment to take care of Frida; for Frida, being a lady at heart,
always shrank from the pollution of vulgar assemblies. As they
walked together across the lush green fields, thick with campion and
yellow-rattle, they came to a dense copse with a rustic gate, above
which a threatening notice-board frowned them straight in the face,
bearing the usual selfish and anti-social inscription, “Trespassers will
be prosecuted.”
“Let's go in here and pick orchids,” Bertram suggested, leaning over
the gate. “Just see how pretty they are! The scented white butterfly! It
loves moist bogland. Now, Mrs. Monteith, wouldn't a few long sprays of
that lovely thing look charming on your dinner-table?”
“But it's preserved,” Philip interposed with an awestruck face.
“You can't go in there: it's Sir Lionel Longden's, and he's awfully
particular.”
“Can't go in there? Oh, nonsense,” Bertram answered, with a merry laugh,
vaulting the gate like a practised athlete. “Mrs. Monteith can get over
easily enough, I'm sure. She's as light as a fawn. May I help you over?”
And he held one hand out.
“But it's private,” Philip went on, in a somewhat horrified voice; “and
the pheasants are sitting.”
“Private? How can it be? There's nothing sown here. It's all wild wood;
we can't do any damage. If it was growing crops, of course, one would
walk through it not at all, or at least very carefully. But this is
pure woodland. Are the pheasants tabooed, then? or why mayn't we go near
them?”
“They're not tabooed, but they're preserved,” Philip answered somewhat
testily, making a delicate distinction without a difference, after the
fashion dear to the official intellect. “This land belongs to Sir Lionel
Longden, I tell you, and he chooses to lay it all down in pheasants.
He bought it and paid for it, so he has a right, I suppose, to do as he
likes with it.”
“That's the funniest thing of all about these taboos,” Bertram mused, as
if half to himself. “The very people whom they injure and inconvenience
the most, the people whom they hamper and cramp and debar, don't seem to
object to them, but believe in them and are afraid of them. In Samoa, I
remember, certain fruits and fish and animals and so forth were tabooed
to the chiefs, and nobody else ever dared to eat them. They thought
it was wrong, and said, if they did, some nameless evil would at once
overtake them. These nameless terrors, these bodiless superstitions, are
always the deepest. People fight hardest to preserve their bogeys.
They fancy some appalling unknown dissolution would at once result from
reasonable action. I tried one day to persuade a poor devil of a fellow
in Samoa who'd caught one of these fish, and who was terribly hungry,
that no harm would come to him if he cooked it and ate it. But he was
too slavishly frightened to follow my advice; he said it was taboo to
the god-descended chiefs: if a mortal man tasted it, he would die on the
spot: so nothing on earth would induce him to try it. Though to be sure,
even there, nobody ever went quite so far as to taboo the very soil of
earth itself: everybody might till and hunt where he liked. It's only in
Europe, where evolution goes furthest, that taboo has reached that last
silly pitch of injustice and absurdity. Well, we're not afraid of the
fetich, you and I, Mrs. Monteith. Jump up on the gate; I'll give you a
hand over!” And he held out one strong arm as he spoke to aid her.
Frida had no such fanatical respect for the bogey of vested interests as
her superstitious brother, so she mounted the gate gracefully--she was
always graceful. Bertram took her small hand and jumped her down on the
other side, while Philip, not liking to show himself less bold than a
woman in this matter, climbed over it after her, though with no small
misgivings. They strolled on into the wood, picking the pretty white
orchids by the way as they went, for some little distance. The rich
mould underfoot was thick with sweet woodruff and trailing loosestrife.
Every now and again, as they stirred the lithe brambles that encroached
upon the path, a pheasant rose from the ground with a loud whir-r-r
before them. Philip felt most uneasy. “You'll have the keepers after
you in a minute,” he said, with a deprecating shrug. “This is just full
nesting time. They're down upon anybody who disturbs the pheasants.”
“But the pheasants can't BELONG to any one,” Bertram cried, with a
greatly amused face. “You may taboo the land--I understand that's
done--but surely you can't taboo a wild bird that can fly as it likes
from one piece of ground away into another.”
Philip enlightened his ignorance by giving him off-hand a brief and
profoundly servile account of the English game-laws, interspersed with
sundry anecdotes of poachers and poaching. Bertram listened with an
interested but gravely disapproving face. “And do you mean to say,”
he asked at last “they send men to prison as criminals for catching or
shooting hares and pheasants?”
“Why, certainly,” Philip answered. “It's an offence against the law, and
also a crime against the rights of property.”
“Against the law, yes; but how on earth can it be a crime against the
rights of property? Obviously the pheasant's the property of the man who
happens to shoot it. How can it belong to him and also to the fellow who
taboos the particular piece of ground it was snared on?”
“It doesn't belong to the man who shoots it at all,” Philip answered,
rather angrily. “It belongs to the man who owns the land, of course, and
who chooses to preserve it.”
“Oh, I see,” Bertram replied. “Then you disregard the rights of property
altogether, and only consider the privileges of taboo. As a principle,
that's intelligible. One sees it's consistent. But how is it that you
all allow these chiefs--landlords, don't you call them?--to taboo the
soil and prevent you all from even walking over it? Don't you see that
if you chose to combine in a body and insist upon the recognition of
your natural rights,--if you determined to make the landlords give up
their taboo, and cease from injustice,--they'd have to yield to you, and
then you could exercise your native right of going where you pleased,
and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of
leaving it, as now, to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste for
the benefit of the tabooers?”
“But it would be WRONG to take it from them,” Philip cried, growing
fiery red and half losing his temper, for he really believed it. “It
would be sheer confiscation; the land's their own; they either bought it
or inherited it from their fathers. If you were to begin taking it away,
what guarantee would you have left for any of the rights of property
generally?”
“You didn't recognise the rights of property of the fellow who killed
the pheasant, though,” Bertram interposed, laughing, and imperturbably
good-humoured. “But that's always the way with these taboos, everywhere.
They subsist just because the vast majority even of those who are
obviously wronged and injured by them really believe in them. They think
they're guaranteed by some divine prescription. The fetich guards them.
In Polynesia, I recollect, some chiefs could taboo almost anything they
liked, even a girl or a woman, or fruit and fish and animals and houses:
and after the chief had once said, 'It is taboo,' everybody else was
afraid to touch them. Of course, the fact that a chief or a landowner
has bought and paid for a particular privilege or species of taboo, or
has inherited it from his fathers, doesn't give him any better moral
claim to it. The question is, 'Is the claim in itself right and
reasonable?' For a wrong is only all the more a wrong for having been
long and persistently exercised. The Central Africans say, 'This is my
slave; I bought her and paid for her; I've a right, if I like, to kill
her and eat her.' The king of Ibo, on the West Coast, had a hereditary
right to offer up as a human sacrifice the first man he met every time
he quitted his palace; and he was quite surprised audacious freethinkers
should call the morality of his right in question. If you English were
all in a body to see through this queer land-taboo, now, which drives
your poor off the soil, and prevents you all from even walking at
liberty over the surface of the waste in your own country, you could
easily--”
“Oh, Lord, what shall we do!” Philip interposed in a voice of abject
terror. “If here isn't Sir Lionel!”
And sure enough, right across the narrow path in front of them stood a
short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man, with a very red face, and a
Norfolk jacket, boiling over with anger.
“What are you people doing here?” he cried, undeterred by the presence
of a lady, and speaking in the insolent, supercilious voice of the
English landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves. “This is private
property. You must have seen the notice at the gate, 'Trespassers will
be prosecuted.'”
“Yes, we did see it,” Bertram answered, with his unruffled smile; “and
thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness, both in
form and substance,--why, we took the liberty to disregard it.”
Sir Lionel glared at him. In that servile neighbourhood, almost entirely
inhabited by the flunkeys of villadom, it was a complete novelty to him
to be thus bearded in his den. He gasped with anger. “Do you mean to
say,” he gurgled out, growing purple to the neck, “you came in here
deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face
like this, sir? Go back the way you came, or I'll call my keepers.”
“No, I will NOT go back the way I came,” Bertram responded deliberately,
with perfect self-control, and with a side-glance at Frida. “Every human
being has a natural right to walk across this copse, which is all
waste ground, and has no crop sown in it. The pheasants can't be yours;
they're common property. Besides, there's a lady. We mean to make our
way across the copse at our leisure, picking flowers as we go, and come
out into the road on the other side of the spinney. It's a universal
right of which no country and no law can possibly deprive us.”
Sir Lionel was livid with rage. Strange as it may appear to any
reasoning mind, the man really believed he had a natural right to
prevent people from crossing that strip of wood where his pheasants were
sitting. His ancestors had assumed it from time immemorial, and by dint
of never being questioned had come to regard the absurd usurpation as
quite fair and proper. He placed himself straight across the narrow
path, blocking it up with his short and stumpy figure. “Now look here,
young man,” he said, with all the insolence of his caste: “if you try to
go on, I'll stand here in your way; and if you dare to touch me, it's
a common assault, and, by George, you'll have to answer at law for the
consequences.”
Bertram Ingledew for his part was all sweet reasonableness. He raised
one deprecating hand. “Now, before we come to open hostilities,” he said
in a gentle voice, with that unfailing smile of his, “let's talk the
matter over like rational beings. Let's try to be logical. This copse
is considered yours by the actual law of the country you live in: your
tribe permits it to you: you're allowed to taboo it. Very well, then; I
make all possible allowances for your strange hallucination. You've been
brought up to think you had some mystic and intangible claim to this
corner of earth more than other people, your even Christians. That
claim, of course, you can't logically defend; but failing arguments, you
want to fight for it. Wouldn't it be more reasonable, now, to show you
had some RIGHT or JUSTICE in the matter? I'm always reasonable: if you
can convince me of the propriety and equity of your claim, I'll go back
as you wish by the way I entered. If not--well, there's a lady here, and
I'm bound, as a man, to help her safely over.”
Sir Lionel almost choked. “I see what you are,” he gasped out with
difficulty. “I've heard this sort of rubbish more than once before.
You're one of these damned land-nationalising radicals.”
“On the contrary,” Bertram answered, urbane as ever, with charming
politeness of tone and manner: “I'm a born conservative. I'm tenacious
to an almost foolishly sentimental degree of every old custom or
practice or idea; unless, indeed, it's either wicked or silly--like most
of your English ones.”
He raised his hat, and made as if he would pass on. Now, nothing annoys
an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness
of a civilised and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with
indignation. He feels its superiority an affront on his barbarism. So,
with a vulgar oath, Sir Lionel flung himself point-blank in the way.
“Damn it all, no you won't, sir!” he cried. “I'll soon put a stop to all
that, I can tell you. You shan't go on one step without committing an
assault upon me.” And he drew himself up, four-square, as if for battle.
“Oh, just as you like,” Bertram answered coolly, never losing his
temper. “I'm not afraid of taboos: I've seen too many of them.” And he
gazed at the fat little angry man with a gentle expression of mingled
contempt and amusement.
For a minute, Frida thought they were really going to fight, and drew
back in horror to await the contest. But such a warlike notion never
entered the man of peace's head. He took a step backward for a second
and calmly surveyed his antagonist with a critical scrutiny. Sir Lionel
was short and stout and puffy; Bertram Ingledew was tall and strong
and well-knit and athletic. After an instant's pause, during which the
doughty baronet stood doubling his fat fists and glaring silent wrath
at his lither opponent, Bertram made a sudden dart forward, seized the
little stout man bodily in his stalwart arms, and lifting him like a
baby, in spite of kicks and struggles, carried him a hundred paces
to one side of the path, where he laid him down gingerly without
unnecessary violence on a bed of young bracken. Then he returned quite
calmly, as if nothing had happened, to Frida's side, with that quiet
little smile on his unruffled countenance.
Frida had not quite approved of all this small episode, for she too
believed in the righteousness of taboo, like most other Englishwomen,
and devoutly accepted the common priestly doctrine, that the earth is
the landlord's and the fulness thereof; but still, being a woman, and
therefore an admirer of physical strength in men, she could not help
applauding to herself the masterly way in which her squire had carried
his antagonist captive. When he returned, she beamed upon him with
friendly confidence. But Philip was very much frightened indeed.
“You'll have to pay for this, you know,” he said. “This is a law-abiding
land. He'll bring an action against you for assault and battery; and
you'll get three months for it.”
“I don't think so,” Bertram answered, still placid and unruffled. “There
were three of us who saw him; and it was a very ignominious position
indeed for a person who sets up to be a great chief in the country.
He won't like the little boys on his own estate to know the great Sir
Lionel was lifted up against his will, carried about like a baby, and
set down in a bracken-bed. Indeed, I was more than sorry to have to do
such a thing to a man of his years; but you see he WOULD have it. It's
the only way to deal with these tabooing chiefs. You must face them and
be done with it. In the Caroline Islands, once, I had to do the same
thing to a cazique who was going to cook and eat a very pretty young
girl of his own retainers. He wouldn't listen to reason; the law was on
his side; so, being happily NOT a law-abiding person myself, I took him
up in my arms, and walked off with him bodily, and was obliged to drop
him down into a very painful bed of stinging plants like nettles, so as
to give myself time to escape with the girl clear out of his clutches. I
regretted having to do it so roughly, of course; but there was no other
way out of it.”
As he spoke, for the first time it really came home to Frida's mind that
Bertram Ingledew, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the
Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longden as much about the same sort of
unreasoning people--savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible;
but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an
English officer on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful
Central African kinglet. And in a dim sort of way, too, it began to
strike her by degrees that the analogy was a true one, that Bertram
Ingledew, among the Englishmen with whom she was accustomed to mix,
was like a civilised being in the midst of barbarians, who feel and
recognise but dimly and half-unconsciously his innate superiority.
By the time they had reached the gate on the other side of the hanger,
Sir Lionel overtook them, boiling over with indignation.
“Your card, sir,” he gasped out inarticulately to the calmly innocent
Alien; “you must answer for all this. Your card, I say, instantly!”
Bertram looked at him with a fixed gaze. Sir Lionel, having had good
proof of his antagonist's strength, kept his distance cautiously.
“Certainly NOT, my good friend,” Bertram replied, in a firm tone.
“Why should _I_, who am the injured and insulted party, assist YOU in
identifying me? It was you who aggressed upon my free individuality. If
you want to call in the aid of an unjust law to back up an unjust and
irrational taboo, you must find out for yourself who I am, and where I
come from. But I wouldn't advise you to do anything so foolish. Three of
us here saw you in the ridiculous position into which by your obstinacy
you compelled me to put you; and you wouldn't like to hear us recount it
in public, with picturesque details, to your brother magistrates. Let me
say one thing more to you,” he added, after a pause, in that peculiarly
soft and melodious voice of his. “Don't you think, on reflection--even
if you're foolish enough and illogical enough really to believe in
the sacredness of the taboo by virtue of which you try to exclude your
fellow-tribesmen from their fair share of enjoyment of the soil of
England--don't you think you might at any rate exercise your imaginary
powers over the land you arrogate to yourself with a little more
gentleness and common politeness? How petty and narrow it looks to use
even an undoubted right, far more a tribal taboo, in a tyrannical and
needlessly aggressive manner! How mean and small and low and churlish!
The damage we did your land, as you call it--if we did any at all--was
certainly not a ha'pennyworth. Was it consonant with your dignity as a
chief in the tribe to get so hot and angry about so small a value? How
grotesque to make so much fuss and noise about a matter of a ha'penny!
We, who were the aggrieved parties, we, whom you attempted to debar
by main force from the common human right to walk freely over earth
wherever there's nothing sown or planted, and who were obliged to remove
you as an obstacle out of our path, at some personal inconvenience”--(he
glanced askance at his clothes, crumpled and soiled by Sir Lionel's
unseemly resistance)--“WE didn't lose our tempers, or attempt to revile
you. We were cool and collected. But a taboo must be on its very last
legs when it requires the aid of terrifying notices at every corner in
order to preserve it; and I think this of yours must be well on the way
to abolition. Still, as I should like to part friends”--he drew a coin
from his pocket, and held it out between his finger and thumb with a
courteous bow towards Sir Lionel--“I gladly tender you a ha'penny
in compensation for any supposed harm we may possibly have done your
imaginary rights by walking through the wood here.”
V
For a day or two after this notable encounter between tabooer and
taboo-breaker, Philip moved about in a most uneasy state of mind. He
lived in constant dread of receiving a summons as a party to an assault
upon a most respectable and respected landed proprietor who preserved
more pheasants and owned more ruinous cottages than anybody else (except
the duke) round about Brackenhurst. Indeed, so deeply did he regret his
involuntary part in this painful escapade that he never mentioned a
word of it to Robert Monteith; nor did Frida either. To say the truth,
husband and wife were seldom confidential one with the other. But, to
Philip's surprise, Bertram's prediction came true; they never heard
another word about the action for trespass or the threatened prosecution
for assault and battery. Sir Lionel found out that the person who had
committed the gross and unheard-of outrage of lifting an elderly and
respectable English landowner like a baby in arms on his own estate, was
a lodger at Brackenhurst, variously regarded by those who knew him best
as an escaped lunatic, and as a foreign nobleman in disguise, fleeing
for his life from a charge of complicity in a Nihilist conspiracy: he
wisely came to the conclusion, therefore, that he would not be the first
to divulge the story of his own ignominious defeat, unless he found that
damned radical chap was going boasting around the countryside how he had
balked Sir Lionel. And as nothing was further than boasting from Bertram
Ingledew's gentle nature, and as Philip and Frida both held their peace
for good reasons of their own, the baronet never attempted in any way
to rake up the story of his grotesque disgrace on what he considered
his own property. All he did was to double the number of keepers on the
borders of his estate, and to give them strict notice that whoever
could succeed in catching the “damned radical” in flagrante delicto, as
trespasser or poacher, should receive most instant reward and promotion.
During the next few weeks, accordingly, nothing of importance happened,
from the point of view of the Brackenhurst chronicler; though Bertram
was constantly round at the Monteiths' garden for afternoon tea or a
game of lawn-tennis. He was an excellent player; lawn-tennis was most
popular “at home,” he said, in that same mysterious and non-committing
phrase he so often made use of. Only, he found the racquets and balls
(very best London make) rather clumsy and awkward; he wished he had
brought his own along with him when he came here. Philip noticed his
style of service was particularly good, and even wondered at times
he did not try to go in for the All England Championship. But Bertram
surprised him by answering, with a quiet smile, that though it was an
excellent amusement, he had too many other things to do with his time to
make a serious pursuit of it.
One day towards the end of June, the strange young man had gone round to
The Grange--that was the name of Frida's house--for his usual relaxation
after a very tiring and distressing day in London, “on important
business.” The business, whatever it was, had evidently harrowed his
feelings not a little, for he was sensitively organised. Frida was on
the tennis-lawn. She met him with much lamentation over the unpleasant
fact that she had just lost a sister-in-law whom she had never cared
for.
“Well, but if you never cared for her,” Bertram answered, looking hard
into her lustrous eyes, “it doesn't much matter.”
“Oh, I shall have to go into mourning all the same,” Frida continued
somewhat pettishly, “and waste all my nice new summer dresses. It's SUCH
a nuisance!”
“Why do it, then?” Bertram suggested, watching her face very narrowly.
“Well, I suppose because of what you would call a fetich,” Frida
answered laughing. “I know it's ridiculous. But everybody expects it,
and I'm not strong-minded enough to go against the current of what
everybody expects of me.”
“You will be by-and-by,” Bertram answered, with confidence. “They're
queer things, these death-taboos. Sometimes people cover their heads
with filth or ashes; and sometimes they bedizen them with crape and
white streamers. In some countries, the survivors are bound to shed so
many tears, to measure, in memory of the departed; and if they can't
bring them up naturally in sufficient quantities, they have to be beaten
with rods, or pricked with thorns, or stung with nettles, till they've
filled to the last drop the regulation bottle. In Swaziland, too, when
the king dies, so the queen told me, every family of his subjects has
to lose one of its sons or daughters, in order that they may all truly
grieve at the loss of their sovereign. I think there are more horrible
and cruel devices in the way of death-taboos and death-customs than
anything else I've met in my researches. Indeed, most of our nomologists
at home believe that all taboos originally arose out of ancestral
ghost-worship, and sprang from the craven fear of dead kings or dead
relatives. They think fetiches and gods and other imaginary supernatural
beings were all in the last resort developed out of ghosts, hostile or
friendly; and from what I see abroad, I incline to agree with them. But
this mourning superstition, now--surely it must do a great deal of harm
in poor households in England. People who can very ill afford to throw
away good dresses must have to give them up, and get new black ones, and
that often at the very moment when they're just deprived of the aid of
their only support and bread-winner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them
that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the
meaningless fetich to their clear moral duty.”
“They're afraid of what people would say of them,” Frida ventured to
interpose. “You see, we're all so frightened of breaking through an
established custom.”
“Yes, I notice that always, wherever I go in England,” Bertram answered.
“There's apparently no clear idea of what's right and wrong at all, in
the ethical sense, as apart from what's usual. I was talking to a lady
up in London to-day about a certain matter I may perhaps mention to you
by-and-by when occasion serves, and she said she'd been 'always brought
up to think' so-and-so. It seemed to me a very queer substitute indeed
for thinking.”
“I never thought of that,” Frida answered slowly. “I've said the same
thing a hundred times over myself before now; and I see how irrational
it is. But, there, Mr. Ingledew, that's why I always like talking with
you so much: you make one take such a totally new view of things.”
She looked down and was silent a minute. Her breast heaved and fell. She
was a beautiful woman, very tall and queenly. Bertram looked at her and
paused; then he went on hurriedly, just to break the awkward silence:
“And this dance at Exeter, then--I suppose you won't go to it?”
“Oh, I CAN'T, of course,” Frida answered quickly. “And my two other
nieces--Robert's side, you know--who have nothing at all to do with my
brother Tom's wife, out there in India--they'll be SO disappointed. I
was going to take them down to it. Nasty thing! How annoying of her!
She might have chosen some other time to go and die, I'm sure, than just
when she knew I wanted to go to Exeter!”
“Well, if it would be any convenience to you,” Bertram put in with a
serious face, “I'm rather busy on Wednesday; but I could manage to take
up a portmanteau to town with my dress things in the morning, meet the
girls at Paddington, and run down by the evening express in time to go
with them to the hotel you meant to stop at. They're those two pretty
blondes I met here at tea last Sunday, aren't they?”
Frida looked at him, half-incredulous. He was very nice, she knew, and
very quaint and fresh and unsophisticated and unconventional; but could
he be really quite so ignorant of the common usages of civilised society
as to suppose it possible he could run down alone with two young girls
to stop by themselves, without even a chaperon, at an hotel at Exeter?
She gazed at him curiously. “Oh, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, “now you're
really TOO ridiculous!”
Bertram coloured up like a boy. If she had been in any doubt before
as to his sincerity and simplicity, she could be so no longer. “Oh, I
forgot about the taboo,” he said. “I'm so sorry I hurt you. I was only
thinking what a pity those two nice girls should be cheated out of their
expected pleasure by a silly question of pretended mourning, where even
you yourself, who have got to wear it, don't assume that you feel the
slightest tinge of sorrow. I remember now, of course, what a lady told
me in London the other day: your young girls aren't even allowed to go
out travelling alone without their mother or brothers, in order to taboo
them absolutely beforehand for the possible husband who may some day
marry them. It was a pitiful tale. I thought it all most painful and
shocking.”
“But you don't mean to say,” Frida cried, equally shocked and astonished
in her turn, “that you'd let young girls go out alone anywhere with
unmarried men? Goodness gracious, how dreadful!”
“Why not?” Bertram asked, with transparent simplicity.
“Why, just consider the consequences!” Frida exclaimed, with a blush,
after a moment's hesitation.
“There couldn't be ANY consequences, unless they both liked and
respected one another,” Bertram answered in the most matter-of-course
voice in the world; “and if they do that, we think at home it's nobody's
business to interfere in any way with the free expression of their
individuality, in this the most sacred and personal matter of human
intercourse. It's the one point of private conduct about which we're all
at home most sensitively anxious not to meddle, to interfere, or even to
criticise. We think such affairs should be left entirely to the hearts
and consciences of the two persons concerned, who must surely know best
how they feel towards one another. But I remember having met lots of
taboos among other barbarians, in much the same way, to preserve the
mere material purity of their women--a thing we at home wouldn't dream
of even questioning. In New Ireland, for instance, I saw poor girls
confined for four or five years in small wickerwork cages, where they're
kept in the dark, and not even allowed to set foot on the ground on any
pretext. They're shut up in these prisons when they're about fourteen,
and there they're kept, strictly tabooed, till they're just going to
be married. I went to see them myself; it was a horrid sight. The
poor creatures were confined in a dark, close hut, without air or
ventilation, in that stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat
as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess; and there they sat in
cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that
no light could enter; for the people believed that light would kill
them. No man might see them, because it was close taboo; but at last,
with great difficulty, I persuaded the chief and the old lady who
guarded them to let them come out for a minute to look at me. A lot
of beads and cloth overcame these people's scruples; and with great
reluctance they opened the cages. But only the old woman looked; the
chief was afraid, and turned his head the other way, mumbling charms
to his fetich. Out they stole, one by one, poor souls, ashamed and
frightened, hiding their faces in their hands, thinking I was going to
hurt them or eat them--just as your nieces would do if I proposed to-day
to take them to Exeter--and a dreadful sight they were, cramped with
long sitting in one close position, and their eyes all blinded by the
glare of the sunlight after the long darkness. I've seen women shut up
in pretty much the same way in other countries, but I never saw quite so
bad a case as this of New Ireland.”
“Well, you can't say we've anything answering to that in England,” Frida
put in, looking across at him with her frank, open countenance.
“No, not quite like that, in detail, perhaps, but pretty much the same
in general principle,” Bertram answered warmly. “Your girls here are not
cooped up in actual cages, but they're confined in barrack-schools, as
like prisons as possible; and they're repressed at every turn in every
natural instinct of play or society. They mustn't go here or they
mustn't go there; they mustn't talk to this one or to that one; they
mustn't do this, or that, or the other; their whole life is bound round,
I'm told, by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints, which
have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely
hypothetical husband. The Chinese cramp their women's feet to make
them small and useless: you cramp your women's brains for the self-same
purpose. Even light's excluded; for they mustn't read books that would
make them think; they mustn't be allowed to suspect the bare possibility
that the world may be otherwise than as their priests and nurses and
grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it well to
be something quite different. Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to
in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't allowed to read a
book called Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that I'd read myself, and that
seemed to me one of which every young girl and married woman in England
ought to be given a copy. It was the one true book I had seen in your
country. And another girl wasn't allowed to read another book, which
I've since looked at, called Robert Elsmere,--an ephemeral thing enough
in its way, I don't doubt, but proscribed in her case for no other
reason on earth than because it expressed some mild disbelief as to the
exact literary accuracy of those Lower Syrian pamphlets to which your
priests attach such immense importance.”
“Oh, Mr. Ingledew,” Frida cried, trembling, yet profoundly interested;
“if you talk like that any more, I shan't be able to listen to you.”
“There it is, you see,” Bertram continued, with a little wave of the
hand. “You've been so blinded and bedimmed by being deprived of light
when a girl, that now, when you see even a very faint ray, it dazzles
you and frightens you. That mustn't be so--it needn't, I feel confident.
I shall have to teach you how to bear the light. Your eyes, I know, are
naturally strong; you were an eagle born: you'd soon get used to it.”
Frida lifted them slowly, those beautiful eyes, and met his own with
genuine pleasure.
“Do you think so?” she asked, half whispering. In some dim, instinctive
way she felt this strange man was a superior being, and that every small
crumb of praise from him was well worth meriting.
“Why, Frida, of course I do,” he answered, without the least sense of
impertinence. “Do you think if I didn't I'd have taken so much trouble
to try and educate you?” For he had talked to her much in their walks on
the hillside.
Frida did not correct him for his bold application of her Christian
name, though she knew she ought to. She only looked up at him and
answered gravely--
“I certainly can't let you take my nieces to Exeter.”
“I suppose not,” he replied, hardly catching at her meaning. “One of
the girls at that dance the other night told me a great many queer facts
about your taboos on these domestic subjects; so I know how stringent
and how unreasoning they are. And, indeed, I found out a little bit for
myself; for there was one nice girl there, to whom I took a very great
fancy; and I was just going to kiss her as I said good-night, when
she drew back suddenly, almost as if I'd struck her, though we'd been
talking together quite confidentially a minute before. I could see she
thought I really meant to insult her. Of course, I explained it was only
what I'd have done to any nice girl at home under similar circumstances;
but she didn't seem to believe me. And the oddest part of it all was,
that all the time we were dancing I had my arm round her waist, as all
the other men had theirs round their partners; and at home we consider
it a much greater proof of confidence and affection to be allowed to
place your arm round a lady's waist than merely to kiss her.”
Frida felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of
propriety, so she checked its excursions by answering gravely: “Oh,
Mr. Ingledew, you don't understand our code of morals. But I'm sure you
don't find your East End young ladies so fearfully particular?”
“They certainly haven't quite so many taboos,” Bertram answered quietly.
“But that's always the way in tabooing societies. These things are
naturally worst among the chiefs and great people. I remember when I
was stopping among the Ot Danoms of Borneo, the daughters of chiefs and
great sun-descended families were shut up at eight or ten years old,
in a little cell or room, as a religious duty, and cut off from all
intercourse with the outside world for many years together. The cell's
dimly lit by a single small window, placed high in the wall, so that
the unhappy girl never sees anybody or anything, but passes her life
in almost total darkness. She mayn't leave the room on any pretext
whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes. None
of her family may see her face; but a single slave woman's appointed to
accompany her and wait upon her. Long want of exercise stunts her bodily
growth, and when at last she becomes a woman, and emerges from her
prison, her complexion has grown wan and pale and waxlike. They take her
out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water,
the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn
creature. Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed
with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his
reeking blood, by way of initiation. But this is only done, of course,
with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families. And I find it
pretty much the same in England. In all these matters, your poorer
classes are relatively pure and simple and natural. It's your richer and
worse and more selfish classes among whom sex-taboos are strongest and
most unnatural.”
Frida looked up at him a little pleadingly.
“Do you know, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, in a trembling voice, “I'm sure
you don't mean it for intentional rudeness, but it sounds to us very
like it, when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these
dreadful savages. I'm a woman, I know; but--I don't like to hear you
speak so about my England.”
The words took Bertram fairly by surprise. He was wholly unacquainted
with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism. He
leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face.
“Oh, Mrs. Monteith,” he cried earnestly, “if YOU don't like it, I'll
never again speak of them as taboos in your presence. I didn't dream you
could object. It seems so natural to us--well--to describe like customs
by like names in every case. But if it gives you pain--why, sooner than
do that, I'd never again say a single word while I live about an English
custom!”
His face was very near hers, and he was a son of Adam, like all the
rest of us--not a being of another sphere, as Frida was sometimes half
tempted to consider him. What might next have happened he himself hardly
knew, for he was an impulsive creature, and Frida's rich lips were full
and crimson, had not Philip's arrival with the two Miss Hardys to make
up a set diverted for the moment the nascent possibility of a leading
incident.