VI

It was a Sunday afternoon in full July, and a small party was seated

under the spreading mulberry tree on the Monteiths' lawn. General

Claviger was of the number, that well-known constructor of scientific

frontiers in India or Africa; and so was Dean Chalmers, the popular

preacher, who had come down for the day from his London house to

deliver a sermon on behalf of the Society for Superseding the Existing

Superstitions of China and Japan by the Dying Ones of Europe. Philip

was there, too, enjoying himself thoroughly in the midst of such good

company, and so was Robert Monteith, bleak and grim as usual, but deeply

interested for the moment in dividing metaphysical and theological

cobwebs with his friend the Dean, who as a brother Scotsman loved a

good discussion better almost than he loved a good discourse. General

Claviger, for his part, was congenially engaged in describing to Bertram

his pet idea for a campaign against the Madhi and his men, in the

interior of the Soudan. Bertram rather yawned through that technical

talk; he was a man of peace, and schemes of organised bloodshed

interested him no more than the details of a projected human sacrifice,

given by a Central African chief with native gusto, would interest an

average European gentleman. At last, however, the General happened to

say casually, “I forget the exact name of the place I mean; I think it's

Malolo; but I have a very good map of all the district at my house down

at Wanborough.”

“What! Wanborough in Northamptonshire?” Bertram exclaimed with sudden

interest. “Do you really live there?”

“I'm lord of the manor,” General Claviger answered, with a little

access of dignity. “The Clavigers or Clavigeros were a Spanish family of

Andalusian origin, who settled down at Wanborough under Philip and Mary,

and retained the manor, no doubt by conversion to the Protestant side,

after the accession of Elizabeth.”

“That's interesting to me,” Bertram answered, with his frank and

fearless truthfulness, “because my people came originally from

Wanborough before--well, before they emigrated.” (Philip, listening

askance, pricked up his ears eagerly at the tell-tale phrase; after all,

then, a colonist!) “But they weren't anybody distinguished--certainly

not lords of the manor,” he added hastily as the General turned a

keen eye on him. “Are there any Ingledews living now in the Wanborough

district? One likes, as a matter of scientific heredity, to know all

one can about one's ancestors, and one's county, and one's collateral

relatives.”

“Well, there ARE some Ingledews just now at Wanborough,” the General

answered, with some natural hesitation, surveying the tall, handsome

young man from head to foot, not without a faint touch of soldierly

approbation; “but they can hardly be your relatives, however remote....

They're people in a most humble sphere of life. Unless, indeed--well,

we know the vicissitudes of families--perhaps your ancestors and the

Ingledews that I know drifted apart a long time ago.”

“Is he a cobbler?” Bertram inquired, without a trace of mauvaise honte.

The General nodded. “Well, yes,” he said politely, “that's exactly what

he is; though, as you seemed to be asking about presumed relations, I

didn't like to mention it.”

“Oh, then, he's my ancestor,” Bertram put in, quite pleased at the

discovery. “That is to say,” he added after a curious pause, “my

ancestor's descendant. Almost all my people, a little way back, you see,

were shoe-makers or cobblers.”

He said it with dignity, exactly as he might have said they were dukes

or lord chancellors; but Philip could not help pitying him, not so much

for being descended from so mean a lot, as for being fool enough to

acknowledge it on a gentleman's lawn at Brackenhurst. Why, with manners

like his, if he had not given himself away, one might easily have taken

him for a descendant of the Plantagenets.

So the General seemed to think too, for he added quickly, “But you're

very like the duke, and the duke's a Bertram. Is he also a relative?”

The young man coloured slightly. “Ye-es,” he answered, hesitating; “but

we're not very proud of the Bertram connection. They never did much

good in the world, the Bertrams. I bear the name, one may almost say by

accident, because it was handed down to me by my grandfather Ingledew,

who had Bertram blood, but was a vast deal a better man than any other

member of the Bertram family.”

“I'll be seeing the duke on Wednesday,” the General put in, with marked

politeness, “and I'll ask him, if you like, about your grandfather's

relationship. Who was he exactly, and what was his connection with the

present man or his predecessor?”

“Oh, don't, please,” Bertram put in, half-pleadingly, it is true, but

still with that same ineffable and indefinable air of a great gentleman

that never for a moment deserted him. “The duke would never have heard

of my ancestors, I'm sure, and I particularly don't want to be mixed up

with the existing Bertrams in any way.”

He was happily innocent and ignorant of the natural interpretation the

others would put upon his reticence, after the true English manner; but

still he was vaguely aware, from the silence that ensued for a moment

after he ceased, that he must have broken once more some important

taboo, or offended once more some much-revered fetich. To get rid of

the awkwardness he turned quietly to Frida. “What do you say, Mrs.

Monteith,” he suggested, “to a game of tennis?”

As bad luck would have it, he had floundered from one taboo headlong

into another. The Dean looked up, open-mouthed, with a sharp glance of

inquiry. Did Mrs. Monteith, then, permit such frivolities on the Sunday?

“You forget what day it is, I think,” Frida interposed gently, with a

look of warning.

Bertram took the hint at once. “So I did,” he answered quickly. “At

home, you see, we let no man judge us of days and of weeks, and of times

and of seasons. It puzzles us so much. With us, what's wrong to-day can

never be right and proper to-morrow.”

“But surely,” the Dean said, bristling up, “some day is set apart in

every civilised land for religious exercises.”

“Oh, no,” Bertram replied, falling incautiously into the trap. “We do

right every day of the week alike,--and never do poojah of any sort at

any time.”

“Then where do you come from?” the Dean asked severely, pouncing down

upon him like a hawk. “I've always understood the very lowest savages

have at least some outer form or shadow of religion.”

“Yes, perhaps so; but we're not savages, either low or otherwise,”

Bertram answered cautiously, perceiving his error. “And as to your other

point, for reasons of my own, I prefer for the present not to say where

I come from. You wouldn't believe me, if I told you--as you didn't, I

saw, about my remote connection with the Duke of East Anglia's family.

And we're not accustomed, where I live, to be disbelieved or doubted.

It's perhaps the one thing that really almost makes us lose our tempers.

So, if you please, I won't go any further at present into the debatable

matter of my place of origin.”

He rose to stroll off into the gardens, having spoken all the time in

that peculiarly grave and dignified tone that seemed natural to him

whenever any one tried to question him closely. Nobody save a churchman

would have continued the discussion. But the Dean was a churchman, and

also a Scot, and he returned to the attack, unabashed and unbaffled.

“But surely, Mr. Ingledew,” he said in a persuasive voice, “your people,

whoever they are, must at least acknowledge a creator of the universe.”

Bertram gazed at him fixedly. His eye was stern. “My people, sir,” he

said slowly, in very measured words, unaware that one must not argue

with a clergyman, “acknowledge and investigate every reality they can

find in the universe--and admit no phantoms. They believe in everything

that can be shown or proved to be natural and true; but in nothing

supernatural, that is to say, imaginary or non-existent. They accept

plain facts: they reject pure phantasies. How beautiful those lilies

are, Mrs. Monteith! such an exquisite colour! Shall we go over and look

at them?”

“Not just now,” Frida answered, relieved at the appearance of Martha

with the tray in the distance. “Here's tea coming.” She was glad of

the diversion, for she liked Bertram immensely, and she could not help

noticing how hopelessly he had been floundering all that afternoon right

into the very midst of what he himself would have called their taboos

and joss-business.

But Bertram was not well out of his troubles yet. Martha brought

the round tray--Oriental brass, finely chased with flowing Arabic

inscriptions--and laid it down on the dainty little rustic table. Then

she handed about the cups. Bertram rose to help her. “Mayn't I do it

for you?” he said, as politely as he would have said it to a lady in her

drawing-room.

“No, thank you, sir,” Martha answered, turning red at the offer, but

with the imperturbable solemnity of the well-trained English servant.

She “knew her place,” and resented the intrusion. But Bertram had his

own notions of politeness, too, which were not to be lightly set aside

for local class distinctions. He could not see a pretty girl handing

cups to guests without instinctively rising from his seat to assist her.

So, very much to Martha's embarrassment, he continued to give his help

in passing the cake and the bread-and-butter. As soon as she was gone,

he turned round to Philip. “That's a very pretty girl and a very nice

girl,” he said simply. “I wonder, now, as you haven't a wife, you've

never thought of marrying her.”

The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group. Even Frida

was shocked. Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a line when you

touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage, especially with

reference to her own relations. “Why, really, Mr. Ingledew,” she said,

looking up at him reproachfully, “you can't mean to say you think my

brother could marry the parlour-maid!”

Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head

against one of the dearest of these strange people's taboos; but he made

no retort openly. He only reflected in silence to himself how unnatural

and how wrong they would all think it at home that a young man of

Philip's age should remain nominally celibate; how horrified they would

be at the abject misery and degradation such conduct on the part of half

his caste must inevitably imply for thousands of innocent young girls of

lower station, whose lives he now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in

vile dens of tainted London to the supposed social necessity that young

men of a certain class should marry late in a certain style, and “keep a

wife in the way she's been accustomed to.” He remembered with a checked

sigh how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that

wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and useless

young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how completely taboo

had overlaid in these people's minds every ethical idea, how wholly

it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy, vigorous, and moral

manhood. He recollected the similar though less hideous taboos he had

met with elsewhere: the castes of India, and the horrible pollution that

would result from disregarding them; the vile Egyptian rule, by which

the divine king, in order to keep up the so-called purity of his royal

and god-descended blood, must marry his own sister, and so foully

pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to

be preserving intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran

back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian

Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must

necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only,

regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered the

profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any

other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible

evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself,

had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both

sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely

tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and

infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development

in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all

Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness

with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman

slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and

saddened Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit

there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once of the

sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall;

of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this

abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile

system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental

sepulchres: and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very

heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the

soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the

enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.

Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of

instinctive sympathy. The four children of this world were left together

on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the

extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.