by Grant Allen
“Respectability seems to be a very great object of worship in your village,” Bertram suggested in perfect good faith. “Is it a local cult, or is it general in England?”
Frida glanced at him, half puzzled. “Oh, I think it’s pretty general,” she answered, with a happy smile. “But perhaps the disease is a little more epidemic about here than elsewhere. It affects the suburbs: and my brother’s got it just as badly as any one.”
“As badly as any one!” Bertram repeated with a puzzled air. “Then you don’t belong to that creed yourself? You don’t bend the knee to this embodied abstraction? — it’s your brother who worships her, I suppose, for the family?”
“Yes; he’s more of a devotee than I am,” Frida went on, quite frankly, but not a little surprised at so much freedom in a stranger. “Though we’re all of us tarred with the same brush, no doubt. It’s a catching complaint, I suppose, respectability.”
Bertram gazed at her dubiously. A complaint, did she say? Was she serious or joking? He hardly understood her. But further discussion was cut short for the moment by Frida good-humouredly running upstairs to see after the Gladstone bag and brown portmanteau, into which she crammed a few useless books and other heavy things, to serve as make-weights for Miss Blake’s injured feelings.
“You’d better wait a quarter of an hour after we go to church,” she said, as the servant brought these necessaries into the room where Bertram and Philip were seated. “By that time nearly all the church-people will be safe in their seats; and Phil’s conscience will be satisfied. You can tell Miss Blake you’ve brought a little of your luggage to do for to-day, and the rest will follow from town to-morrow morning.”
“Oh, how very kind you are!” Bertram exclaimed, looking down at her gratefully. “I’m sure I don’t know what I should ever have done in this crisis without you.”
He said it with a warmth which was certainly unconventional. Frida coloured and looked embarrassed. There was no denying he was certainly a most strange and untrammelled person.
“And if I might venture on a hint,” Philip put in, with a hasty glance at his companion’s extremely unsabbatical costume, “it would be that you shouldn’t try to go out much to-day in that suit you’re wearing; it looks peculiar, don’t you know, and might attract attention.”
“Oh, is that a taboo too?” the stranger put in quickly, with an anxious air. “Now, that’s awfully kind of you. But it’s curious, as well; for two or three people passed my window last night, all Englishmen, as I judged, and all with suits almost exactly like this one — which was copied, as I told you, from an English model.”
“Last night; oh, yes,” Philip answered. “Last night was Saturday; that makes all the difference. The suit’s right enough in its way, of course, — very neat and gentlemanly; but NOT for Sunday. You’re expected on Sundays to put on a black coat and waistcoat, you know, like the ones I’m wearing.”
Bertram’s countenance fell. “And if I’m seen in the street like this,” he asked, “will they do anything to me? Will the guardians of the peace — the police, I mean — arrest me?”
Frida laughed a bright little laugh of genuine amusement.
“Oh, dear, no,” she said merrily; “it isn’t an affair of police at all; not so serious as that: it’s only a matter of respectability.”
“I see,” Bertram answered. “Respectability’s a religious or popular, not an official or governmental, taboo. I quite understand you. But those are often the most dangerous sort. Will the people in the street, who adore Respectability, be likely to attack me or mob me for disrespect to their fetich?”
“Certainly not,” Frida replied, flushing up. He seemed to be carrying a joke too far. “This is a free country. Everybody wears and eats and drinks just what he pleases.”
“Well, that’s all very interesting to me,” the Alien went on with a charming smile, that disarmed her indignation; “for I’ve come here on purpose to collect facts and notes about English taboos and similar observances. I’m Secretary of a Nomological Society at home, which is interested in pagodas, topes, and joss-houses; and I’ve been travelling in Africa and in the South Sea Islands for a long time past, working at materials for a History of Taboo, from its earliest beginnings in the savage stage to its fully developed European complexity; so of course all you say comes home to me greatly. Your taboos, I foresee, will prove a most valuable and illustrative study.”
“I beg your pardon,” Philip interposed stiffly, now put upon his mettle. “We have NO taboos at all in England. You’re misled, no doubt, by a mere playful facon de parler, which society indulges in. England, you must remember, is a civilised country, and taboos are institutions that belong to the lowest and most degraded savages.”
But Bertram Ingledew gazed at him in the blankest astonishment. “No taboos!” he exclaimed, taken aback. “Why, I’ve read of hundreds. Among nomological students, England has always been regarded with the greatest interest as the home and centre of the highest and most evolved taboo development. And you yourself,” he added with a courteous little bow, “have already supplied me with quite half a dozen. But perhaps you call them by some other name among yourselves; though in origin and essence, of course, they’re precisely the same as the other taboos I’ve been examining so long in Asia and Africa. However, I’m afraid I’m detaining you from the function of your joss-house. You wish, no doubt, to make your genuflexions in the Temple of Respectability.”
And he reflected silently on the curious fact that the English give themselves by law fifty-two weekly holidays a year, and compel themselves by custom to waste them entirely in ceremonial observances.
III
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.
IV
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.
