by Grant Allen
“How horrible!” Frida exclaimed.
“Yes, horrible,” Bertram answered; “like your own worst customs. It didn’t show either gentleness or rationality, you’ll admit; but it showed what’s the one thing essential to civilisation — great coherence, high organisation, much division of function. Some of the rites these civilised Mexicans performed would have made the blood of kindly savages run cold with horror. They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two big flat stones. Sometimes the priests skinned their victim alive, and wore his raw skin as a mask or covering, and danced hideous dances, so disguised, in honour of the hateful deities whom their fancies had created — deities even more hateful and cruel, perhaps, than the worst of your own Christian Calvinistic fancies. I can’t see, myself, that civilised people are one whit the better in all these respects than the uncivilised barbarian. They pull together better, that’s all; but war, bloodshed, superstition, fetich-worship, religious rites, castes, class distinctions, sex taboos, restrictions on freedom of thought, on freedom of action, on freedom of speech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in their midst as among the utterly uncivilised.”
“Then what you yourself aim at,” Frida said, looking hard at him, for he spoke very earnestly— “what you yourself aim at is — ?”
Bertram’s eyes came back to solid earth with a bound.
“Oh, what we at home aim at,” he said, smiling that sweet, soft smile of his that so captivated Frida, “is not mere civilisation (though, of course, we value that too, in its meet degree, because without civilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible), but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good — to recognise truly your own place in the universe; to hold your head up like a man, before the face of high heaven, afraid of no ghosts or fetiches or phantoms; to understand that wise and right and unselfish actions are the great requisites in life, not the service of non-existent and misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in, — these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers — still more because priests or fetich-men had commanded it — he would be regarded, not as virtuous, but as feeble or wicked — a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally for himself between good and evil. That’s not the sort of conduct WE consider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman, an ethical unit in an enlightened community. Rather is it their prime duty to question all things, to accept no rule of conduct or morals as sure till they have thoroughly tested it.”
“Mr. Ingledew,” Frida exclaimed, “do you know, when you talk like that, I always long to ask you where on earth you come from, and who are these your people you so often speak about. A blessed people: I would like to learn about them; and yet I’m afraid to. You almost seem to me like a being from another planet.”
The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat down on the garden bench beside the yellow rose-bush.
“Oh, dear, no, Frida,” he said, with that transparent glance of his. “Now, don’t look so vexed; I shall call you Frida if I choose; it’s your name, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one’s own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many savage countries a woman’s never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight. In your England, the arrangement’s exactly reversed: no man’s allowed to call a woman by her real name unless she’s tabooed for life to him — what you Europeans call married to him. But let that pass. If one went on pulling oneself up short at every one of your customs, one’d never get any further in any question one was discussing. Now, don’t be deceived by nonsensical talk about living beings in other planets. There are no such creatures. It’s a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern. When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don’t mean life — which, of a sort, there may be there: — they mean human life — a very different and much less important matter. Well, how could there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don’t let’s magnify our importance: we’re not the whole universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal — the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds, for feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible fruits, in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there could be no man.”
“But mayn’t there be edible fruits in the other planets?” Frida inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram’s knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly loved to hear his views of things, they were so fresh and unconventional.
“Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or less like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such, which planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures in form and function from any we know on this one small world of ours. For just consider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set of simultaneous and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organised carbon compounds. When most people say ‘life,’ however, — especially here with you, where education is undeveloped — they aren’t thinking of life in general at all (which is mainly vegetable), but only of animal and often indeed of human life. Well, then, consider, even on this planet itself, how special are the conditions that make life possible. There must be water in some form, for there’s no life in the desert. There must be heat up to a certain point, and not above or below it, for fire kills, and there’s no life at the poles (as among Alpine glaciers), or what little there is depends upon the intervention of other life wafted from elsewhere — from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can really originate. In order to have life at all, as WE know it at least (and I can’t say whether anything else could be fairly called life by any true analogy, until I’ve seen and examined it), you must have carbon, and oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and many other things, under certain fixed conditions; you must have liquid water, not steam or ice: you must have a certain restricted range of temperature, neither very much higher nor very much lower than the average of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself, the one place we really know — varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat or a pine-tree?”
“Well, it doesn’t look likely, now you come to put it so,” Frida answered thoughtfully: for, though English, she was not wholly impervious to logic.
“Likely? Of course not,” Bertram went on with conviction. “Planetoscopists are agreed upon it. And above all, why should one suppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there are, in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human and animal faculties as thought and reason? That’s just like our common human narrowness. If we we
re oaks, I suppose, we would only interest ourselves in the question whether acorns existed in Mars and Saturn.” He paused a moment; then he added in an afterthought: “No, Frida; you may be sure all human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great deal more different, are essential products of this one wee planet, and of particular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only as birth and circumstances have made us differ. There IS a mystery about who I am, and where I come from; I won’t deny it: but it isn’t by any means so strange or so marvellous a mystery as you seem to imagine. One of your own old sacred books says (as I remember hearing in the joss-house I attended one day in London), ‘God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.’ If for GOD in that passage we substitute COMMON DESCENT, it’s perfectly true. We are all of one race; and I confess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity more and more profoundly.” He bent over on the bench and took her tremulous hand. “Frida,” he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes, “don’t you yourself feel it?”
He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry with him. In point of fact, in her heart, she was not angry at all; she liked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man’s hand on her dainty fingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his. It gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was full of her. Then suddenly, with a start, she remembered her duty: she was a married woman, and she OUGHT NOT to do it. Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her hand. Bertram gazed down at her for a second, half taken aback by her hurried withdrawal.
“Then you don’t like me!” he cried, in a pained tone; “after all, you don’t like me!” One moment later, a ray of recognition broke slowly over his face. “Oh, I forgot,” he said, leaning away. “I didn’t mean to annoy you. A year or two ago, of course, I might have held your hand in mine as long as ever I liked. You were still a free being. But what was right then is wrong now, according to the kaleidoscopic etiquette of your countrywomen. I forgot all that in the heat of the moment. I recollected only we were two human beings, of the same race and blood, with hearts that beat and hands that lay together. I remember now, you must hide and stifle your native impulses in future: you’re tabooed for life to Robert Monteith: I must needs respect his seal set upon you!”
And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation.
Frida sighed in return. “These problems are so hard,” she said.
Bertram smiled a strange smile. “There are NO problems,” he answered confidently. “You make them yourselves. You surround life with taboos, and then — you talk despairingly of the problems with which your own taboos alone have saddled you.”
IX
At half-past nine one evening that week, Bertram was seated in his sitting-room at Miss Blake’s lodgings, making entries, as usual, on the subject of taboo in his big black notebook. It was a large bare room, furnished with the customary round rosewood centre table, and decorated by a pair of green china vases, a set of wax flowers under a big glass shade, and a picture representing two mythical beings, with women’s faces and birds’ wings, hovering over the figure of a sleeping baby. Suddenly a hurried knock at the door attracted his attention. “Come in,” he said softly, in that gentle and almost deferential voice which he used alike to his equals and to the lodging-house servant. The door opened at once, and Frida entered.
She was pale as a ghost, and she stepped light with a terrified tread. Bertram could see at a glance she was profoundly agitated. For a moment he could hardly imagine the reason why: then he remembered all at once the strict harem rules by which married women in England are hemmed in and circumvented. To visit an unmarried man alone by night is contrary to tribal usage. He rose, and advanced towards his visitor with outstretched arms. “Why, Frida,” he cried,— “Mrs. Monteith — no, Frida — what’s the matter? What has happened since I left? You look so pale and startled.”
Frida closed the door cautiously, flung herself down into a chair in a despairing attitude, and buried her face in her hands for some moments in silence. “O Mr. Ingledew,” she cried at last, looking up in an agony of shame and doubt: “Bertram — I KNOW it’s wrong; I KNOW it’s wicked; I ought never to have come. Robert would kill me if he found out. But it’s my one last chance, and I couldn’t BEAR not to say good-bye to you — just this once — for ever.”
Bertram gazed at her in astonishment. Long and intimately as he had lived among the various devotees of divine taboos the whole world over, it was with difficulty still he could recall, each time, each particular restriction of the various systems. Then it came home to him with a rush. He removed the poor girl’s hands gently from her face, which she had buried once more in them for pure shame, and held them in his own. “Dear Frida,” he said tenderly, stroking them as he spoke, “why, what does all this mean? What’s this sudden thunderbolt? You’ve come here to-night without your husband’s leave, and you’re afraid he’ll discover you?”
Frida spoke under her breath, in a voice half-choked with frequent sobs. “Don’t talk too loud,” she whispered. “Miss Blake doesn’t know I’m here. If she did, she’d tell on me. I slipped in quietly through the open back door. But I felt I MUST — I really, really MUST. I COULDN’T stop away; I COULDN’T help it.”
Bertram gazed at her, distressed. Her tone was distressing. Horror and indignation for a moment overcame him. She had had to slip in there like a fugitive or a criminal. She had had to crawl away by stealth from that man, her keeper. She, a grown woman and a moral agent, with a will of her own and a heart and a conscience, was held so absolutely in serfdom as a particular man’s thrall and chattel, that she could not even go out to visit a friend without these degrading subterfuges of creeping in unperceived by a back entrance, and talking low under her breath, lest a lodging-house crone should find out what she was doing. And all the world of England was so banded in league with the slave-driver against the soul he enslaved, that if Miss Blake had seen her she could hardly have come in: while, once in, she must tremble and whisper and steal about with muffled feet, for fear of discovery in this innocent adventure. He held his breath with stifled wrath. It was painful and degrading.
But he had no time just then to think much of all this, for there sat Frida, tremulous and shivering before his very eyes, trying hard to hide her beautiful white face in her quivering hands, and murmuring over and over again in a very low voice, like an agonised creature, “I couldn’t BEAR not to be allowed to say good-bye to you for ever.”
Bertram smoothed her cheek gently. She tried to prevent him, but he went on in spite of her, with a man’s strong persistence. Notwithstanding his gentleness he was always virile. “Good-bye!” he cried. “Good-bye! why on earth good-bye, Frida? When I left you before dinner you never said one word of it to me.”
“Oh, no,” Frida cried, sobbing. “It’s all Robert, Robert! As soon as ever you were gone, he called me into the library — which always means he’s going to talk over some dreadful business with me — and he said to me, ‘Frida, I’ve just heard from Phil that this man Ingledew, who’s chosen to foist himself upon us, holds opinions and sentiments which entirely unfit him from being proper company for any lady. Now, he’s been coming here a great deal too often of late. Next time he calls, I wish you to tell Martha you’re not at home to him.’”
Bertram looked across at her with a melting look in his honest blue eyes. “And you came round to tell me of it, you dear thing!” he cried, seizing her hand and grasping it hard. “O Frida, how kind of you!”
Frida trembled from head to foot. The blood throbbed in her pulse. “Then you’re not vexed with me,” she sobbed out, all tremulous with gladness.
“Vexed with you! O Frida, how could I be vexed? You poor child! I’m so pleased, so glad, so grateful!”
Frida let her hand rest unresisting in his. “But, Bertram
,” she murmured,— “I MUST call you Bertram — I couldn’t help it, you know. I like you so much, I couldn’t let you go for ever without just saying good-bye to you.”
“You DON’T like me; you LOVE me,” Bertram answered with masculine confidence. “No, you needn’t blush, Frida; you can’t deceive me.... My darling, you love me, and you know I love you. Why should we two make any secret about our hearts any longer?” He laid his hand on her face again, making it tingle with joy. “Frida,” he said solemnly, “you don’t love that man you call your husband.... You haven’t loved him for years.... You never really loved him.”
