by Grant Allen
“Explain!” Sir Emilius exclaimed. “Explain!” And he leaned back in his chair, regarding his nephew with supremely critical superiority. The two men were singularly unlike in intellect — Sir Emilius keen and acute, not broad; Hubert expansive, many-sided, elusive.
The young man looked at the ceiling, and half shut his eyes, dreamily. “One day this summer term at Oxford,” he said, at last, taking up his parable, “I was lying on a bank in Bagley Wood, when foxgloves flared, and bullfinches had put on their finest coats for courting. As I lay and looked about me, I saw, on a bent of grass close by, an orange-tip butterfly, just escaped from the chrysalis. He stood there, motionless, just poised on the stem up which he had crawled; and after a while, as he grew accustomed to his strange new body, he began timidly to plim his untried wings, half opening them in the sunlight from time to time, as if wondering how they got there. For remember, mother, he was bred nothing better than a common green caterpillar. He knew nought of wings, of flight, of honey; nought of love, of his mate, of his destiny. So he sat there, spreading out his airy vans with vague wonder, and mentally comparing his six slender legs with the creeping suckers on which he crawled in his nonage.”
Sir Emilius sniffed. “Poetry!” he murmured. “Pure unmitigated poetry! Nothing on earth to do with science.”
“Let him go on, Mill,” Mrs. Egremont put in, with a warning look. “I want to hear what Hubert has to say about it.”
“Science has its philosophy which is deeper than its facts,” Hubert continued, pressing his mother’s hand in mute gratitude. “And the use of the facts is, to teach us the philosophy. Well, I saw my butterfly at last creep up his bent of grass — he that was till lately a small green grub, gorging himself on cresses; and one minute later, he had spread his wings, and ventured into the unknown, a full-fledged orange-tip. He seemed conscious of his beauty, too, as he spread his white pinions, with their brilliant orange badge, and their delicate fringe of Tyrian purple. All at once, as he fluttered and hesitated in mid air, he caught sight from afar of a virgin brimstone. ‘Will he chase her?’ I thought, though I knew he would not; but he gazed at her, disdainful, and flitted by in the sunlight without one flutter of recognition. Then a clouded yellow sailed past, pursued by two rivals of her own swiftwinged race; but the orange-tip fared on, never pausing to look at her. At a turn of the hedge, however, up loomed from windward a small yellowish butterfly, not much like himself, green and white underneath, fringed with black above, and without the orange spot which made my bright little friend himself so attractive. In a second he recognized her as his predestined mate, the one kind created for him. While I looked, all at once the whole world was one maze — in and out — in and out; those two pretty things, circling and flickering together, were in the thick of their courtship — he, rising on the breeze and displaying at each turn his beautiful orange wings; she, coquetting an dcurveting, dancing coyly through the air, now pretending to fly away, now affecting disdain, now allowing him to overtake her, with quite human coquetry, and now darting off again on evasive wings, just as he thought he had captivated that capricious small heart of hers. So they went on for ten minutes with their aerial minuet; and when I last caught sight of them, they were still circling undecided in graceful curves above the sprays of wild rose in the hedgerow by the river.”
“Very nicely described,” Sir Emilius observed, with a smile; “but where does it lead us?”
“To the central mystery of falling in love,” Hubert answered, very seriously, undeterred by his uncle’s bantering tone and raised eyebrows. “The thing is a miracle. For you must remember that that orange-tip was born and bred a small green-and-white caterpillar. He never knew, as you and I do, that his father and mother were orange-tip butterflies before him. He never beheld any previous generation. He emerged from the egg, a tiny, hungry grub, long after his parents were dead and forgotten; and when he crawled abroad into the world, he met none of his own kind, save a few other creeping green-and-white caterpillars. He ate and slept and never dreamt of wings or of the future butterfly. At last, one day as he sat on his native plant, a curious change came slowly over him. He found himself melting away into a boat-shaped chrysalis. A film grew over him. There he lay, as in a mummy-case, growing gradually and unconsciously into a full-formed butterfly. Yet, how did he know, when he emerged from the cast shell, that he was a male orange-tip? Still more marvelous, how did he know the female of his own species? He had never beheld his own wings in a glass; he had never beheld any image of his beloved. Yet, the moment he emerged from the solid mold in which he had undergone his strange transformation, he flaunted his wings at once by inherited instinct, so as to display the orange patch he had never himself beheld there! And when butterflies of other kinds appeared on his path he took no notice of them; yet the moment a mate of his own swam into his ken, he instantly and unerringly recognized his chosen helpmate. Now, I call that a miracle. And I call it also the best clue we have to all the mystery and philosophy of love-making.”
“It all amounts to saying,” Sir Emilius interposed, with a faint dash of cynicism, “that every species knows its own female.”
“It amounts to a great deal more than that, Uncle Mill,” the young man continued, with a young man’s enthusiasm. “You persist in omitting the central element still — the fastidious selectiveness. How does my orange-tip know when he has lighted on the mate prepared from of old for him? Must he not have somewhere within his tiny brain and nervous system an inherited form or mold, as it were, which answers exactly to the image of his own kind, and of the counterpart prepared for him? When any other image falls upon his vague little eyes and senses, he fails to respond to it. But when the image of his own type falls upon his retina, it fits the inherited form or mold absolutely, and he rushes to make love to the creature that fills it, with intuitive certainty. The moment the ancestral mold is completely met and satisfied, the creature that meets it he loves as instinctively as Miranda loved Ferdinand — the first man save Prospero on whom her eyes had lighted.”
“Shakespeare is not evidence,” Sir Emilius murmured, with a contemplative nod. “The case of Miranda lacks objective confirmation. Besides, what you say comes still just to this — that each kind falls in love not with alien forms, but with its own species.”
Hubert stuck to his point. “Still,” he answered warmly, “you are omitting the selectiveness. Love distinguishes and discriminates. Even the little female orange-tip is not ready to accept without demur the advances of the first stray suitor who presents himself. She picks and chooses. What do all her coyness and coquetry mean but just such picking and choosing? She pleases herself in her choice of a lover. Not only has she imprinted on her tiny brain an inherited image of her kind as such, but also an inherited image of the exact type of her kind which best suits and delights her individual idiosyncrasy. For, mark you, Uncle Mill, it is not all pure caprice. This picking and choosing, again, is there for a reason. It is only the most beautiful, the most perfect, the most agile, the most effective that get selected on the average, and such selection increases in the long run the beauty, agility and effectiveness of the species.
Mrs. Egremont sat by, listening with a curiously attentive face. As a rule, Hubert’s talk with his uncle on these abstruse subjects lay on a plane a little above her range of interests. But his theory to-night somehow seemed to engage her. “You remind me,” — she began, and then broke off suddenly.
“Of what?” Hubert asked, turning quickly towards her.
Mrs. Egremont hesitated. “Well, I have heard the same thing discussed before,” she said very slowly, “from another point of view, and what you said just now reminded me so strangely of — the person who discussed it.”
“Still, all this reasoning amounts to no more than what Darwin taught us long ago,” Sir Emilius insisted. “I don’t see that you advance the matter one step by these idyllic instances.”
“What is true of the species is true of the individual too, I fancy,
” Hubert went on, half dreamily. “Is it not the fact that for each one of us everywhere there is somewhere a counterpart, an affinity, as Goethe rightly called it in a phrase now vulgarized out of all serious meaning, but still a phrase that encloses, even so, a kernel of truth beyond all power of vulgar destructiveness? I don’t mean necessarily one affinity alone, but a relatively small number of possible affinities. Is it not the fact that, just in proportion as we rise in the scale of being, we find, at every fresh grade, a fresh stage or level of selectiveness — a further narrowing down of the possible range of choice and of attraction? Among the lower animals, for example, any mate will suffice; with the higher, aesthetic preferences begin to come into play, and give us at last such visible results as the plumage of the peacock, the bird of Paradise, the argus pheasant; as the song of the skylark, the linnet, the nightingale; as the grace of the fallow deer, the crane, the squirrel. To this do we not owe the antlers of the stag, the crest of the heron, the colors of the humming-bird, the love-cry of the nightjar? So, too, among men. With the savage, almost any one squaw is as good as another; he discriminates little between woman and woman. The rustic begins to demand, at least, physical beauty; higher cultivated types are progressively fastidious; they ask for something more than mere ordinary prettiness — they must have soul, and heart, and intelligence, and fancy.”
“There’s something in that, no doubt,” Sir Emilius admitted, half grudgingly. “Your doctrine is, in short, the old and discredited one — that marriages are made in heaven.”
“Marriages are made in heaven,” Hubert answered, accepting his phrase. “True marriages, that is to say; for a marriage that is not made in heaven is no marriage at all. It belongs — elsewhere. — Higher men and women feel intuitively that only here and there in the world, perhaps in some cases only in one person, can they find all the qualities necessary to unite with and supplement their own; and for that one person, surely, it is fair to say that heaven designed them. This consciousness of fitness, this sense of something instinctive within one, drawing one irresistibly to one particular soul, is it not, in the last resort, the voice of Nature telling us clearly what mate the powers that rule the universe have built and fashioned for us? To neglect its bidding, to step aside from its impulses, to disobey its orders for mere human reason, these are surely rebellion to the divinely-appointed monitor we each carry within us. The man or woman who allows any other consideration, save this of immediate fitness for one another, to interfere in marriage does obvious wrong — at least, so I take it. Money, rank, position, prospects, differences of creed, differences of race, differences of class, differences of language, the wishes of parents, the arrangements of property — what are any of these to the inner voice of God and duty?”
“But if a woman has been coerced?” Mrs. Egremont put in eagerly. “If she has been compelled by her parents, while she is still too young and unformed for independent action, to marry a man whom she hates and loathes, as often happens, what hope for her then, Hubert? How do you treat her case? What is her proper course, her right plan, her duty?”
“She should leave him,” Hubert answered, without one second’s hesitation. “No other path, it seems to me, is open to her. For what can be more criminal than to become the mother of a child by a man whose idiosyncrasy is at war with your own, a man whom your own tastes and sympathies and senses proclaim to be unfit for you?”
“And if he is rightly distasteful to her,” Mrs. Egremont went on, leaning forward, with a flushed cheek. “If he is, for example, a drunkard, or a gambler, or a forger, or a rake, or a man of cruelly brutal instincts, you think she should not live with him? She should cut herself adrift from his hateful presence?”
“Of course,” Hubert answered calmly. To him this was all mere speculative opinion. “That is her clear duty. Ought she to people the world with children tainted from their birth, and spoil her own nobler or better qualities by admixture with vile and low and unworthy ones?”
Sir Emilius glanced at his sister with an air of concern. He saw in her eye a strangely harassed look which was by no means uncommon there. “Julia, my dear,” he said, gazing hard at her, “you are tired to-night. If I were you I wouldn’t sit up any longer. You need a good night’s rest. And this talk of Hubert’s is disturbing — with the clock on eleven. Sleepless people should never exercise their brains after dinner. I never exercise mine — in the evening I am always strenuously lazy — and I sleep like a top from twelve to eight, without one minute’s intermission.”
Mrs. Egremont drew a deep breath. “Perhaps you are right, dear,” she answered, laying her hand on her brother’s arm, “though there are dozens of other things I should like to ask Hubert.” She hesitated a moment, then took up her candle reluctantly. “Good-night, my darling,” she said, kissing him twice on his forehead. “Hubert, of one thing I am perfectly certain, that you have chosen wisely in choosing Fede.”
Sir Emilius, with his keen instinct for reading faces and voices, was instantly aware that she said it in part to cover her obvious emotion, and make Hubert think it was his marriage, not her own, that she had sighed over so profoundly. But Hubert did not notice it. Sir Emilius’s eye was keen for passing emotion: Hubert’s, for the deeper-seated underlying facts of race and temperament.
She glided silently through the door into her bedroom, which communicated with the salon. Sir Emilius dropped his voice. “You see these things too exclusively, Hubert,” he said, settling down in his chair again, “from the physiological standpoint. You forget there is a social standpoint as well — quite equally important. We can’t regulate our marriages wholly from the point of view of the efficiency of the race. We have to think of personal considerations also.”
“Such as what?” Hubert asked, pouncing down upon him.
Sir Emilius hummed and hawed. “Well, considerations of social convenience,” he answered at last, with some hesitation. “The laws and conventions of civilized society. We can’t marry our cooks or our footmen, can we?”
“If a man wants to marry his cook,” Hubert answered, with plain common sense, “one of two things, I think, is pretty certain. Either he’s a man just fit to marry a cook, or else his cook is a woman quite fit for him to marry.”
“In the first case,” Sir Emilius mused, “it doesn’t much matter, I suppose; and in the second, there’s no reason why the woman shouldn’t rise to her proper station. Well, you may be right there, my boy. I’m not prepared to argue it out with you at this hour of the evening. But don’t you think your doctrine is liable to lead on to all kinds of immorality?”
“What do you mean by immorality?” Hubert inquired, inexorable.
Sir Emilius paused again. “Well, to a good deal of chopping and changing in marital relations,” he answered, with an evasive subterfuge.
“I think,” Hubert retorted, “if all men and women formed real attachments of native preference while they were young and plastic, there would be no real immorality at all in the world; they would choose instinctively the persons best fitted for them, and would, in the vast majority of cases, never feel the want of any other affections.”
“Suppose they did, though?” Sir Emilius urged. “Suppose, for example, that a woman is married to a man whom she grows to despise; and suppose that afterwards she is thrown in with another towards whom she gradually develops a deep attachment; don’t you think on your principles—”
“Well?” Hubert murmured, half smiling.
“Don’t you think it very likely she might... prove unfaithful.”
Hubert’s smile deepened. “Unfaithful to whom or what!” he asked. Herself — or her husband? She proves unfaithful to the man, as things are, under such circumstances, doesn’t she? Whereas, under the system of things that would result from unrestricted natural marriages, she would not be likely, if she were a good woman, ever to form a union that was not destined to be permanent. As for bad women, they will be bad women, I fancy, no matter what artificial rules you make to bind the
m. No doubt a pure-minded woman — imaginative — sensitive — married to a bad man, and thrown in with a better one—”
“Would lose her purity,” Sir Emilius suggested, as Hubert cast about in search of a phrase for a moment.
“No,” Hubert said, with decision. “Such a woman could not lose her purity; she would only lose what we foolishly call her virtue. She would be loyal to herself and disloyal to her husband. But which is in nature the greater crime, do you think? — for a woman to step aside with a man she truly and deeply loves, or to become the mother of Nature’s bastards by a man to whom she is married, though she loathes and detests him?”
“Dangerous! Very dangerous!” Sir Emilius murmured. “You play fast and loose with sin. You undermine the foundations of civilized society.”
“You know what George Meredith makes one of his characters say under such circumstances?” Hubert put in, still smiling faintly—”’The real sin would have been if she and I had met, and—’” —
“And what?” Sir Emilius asked quickly.
“Meredith doesn’t say,” Hubert answered. “He is wise enough to break off. He leaves it to the reader to finish the sentence. But surely, uncle, there are positive duties in life as well as negative — things which it would be wrong of us to leave undone as well as things which it would be wrong of us to do — for the sake of the future of the world and of humanity.”
“I fail to follow you,” Sir Emilius said, in a decided voice, taking up his bedroom candle.
“If it is a duty to abstain from peopling the world with the unfit,” Hubert urged, following him up, “is it not equally a duty to do what we can towards peopling it with the fittest?”
“Hubert, darling,” a tremulous voice broke in from the bedroom, “would you mind speaking just a little lower? I can hear all you say, so you keep me awake — and, for Fede’s sake, I do so want to be bright and fresh to-morrow.” But Sir Emilius could hear that the voice in which his sister spoke was one of profound, though sternly repressed agitation.
