by Grant Allen
VIII
While the men talked thus, Bertram Ingledew's ears ought to have burnedbehind the bushes. But, to say the truth, he cared little for theirconversation; for had he not turned aside down one of the retired gravelpaths in the garden, alone with Frida?
"That's General Claviger of Herat, I suppose," he said in a low tone,as they retreated out of ear-shot beside the clump of syringas. "Whata stern old man he is, to be sure, with what a stern old face! He lookslike a person capable of doing or ordering all the strange things I'veread of him in the papers."
"Oh, yes," Frida answered, misunderstanding for the moment hercompanion's meaning. "He's a very clever man, I believe, and a mostdistinguished officer."
Bertram smiled in spite of himself. "Oh, I didn't mean that," he cried,with the same odd gleam in his eyes Frida had so often noticed there."I meant, he looked capable of doing or ordering all the horrible crimeshe's credited with in history. You remember, it was he who was employedin massacring the poor savage Zulus in their last stand at bay, and indriving the Afghan women and children to die of cold and starvation onthe mountain-tops after the taking of Kabul. A terrible fighter, indeed!A terrible history!"
"But I believe he's a very good man in private life," Frida put inapologetically, feeling compelled to say the best she could for herhusband's guest. "I don't care for him much myself, to be sure, butRobert likes him. And he's awfully nice, every one says, to his wife andstep-children."
"How CAN he be very good," Bertram answered in his gentlest voice, "ifhe hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever he's toldto, irrespective even of the rights and wrongs of the private or publicquarrel he happens to be employed upon? It's an appalling thing to takea fellow-creature's life, even if you're quite, quite sure it's just andnecessary; but fancy contracting to take anybody's and everybody's lifeyou're told to, without any chance even of inquiring whether they maynot be in the right after all, and your own particular king or peoplemost unjust and cruel and blood-stained aggressors? Why, it's horribleto contemplate. Do you know, Mrs. Monteith," he went on, with hisfar-away air, "it's that that makes society here in England so difficultto me. It's so hard to mix on equal terms with your paid high priestsand your hired slaughterers, and never display openly the feelings youentertain towards them. Fancy if you had to mix so yourself with the menwho flogged women to death in Hungary, or with the governors and jailorsof some Siberian prison! That's the worst of travel. When I was inCentral Africa, I sometimes saw a poor black woman tortured or killedbefore my very eyes; and if I'd tried to interfere in her favour, tosave or protect her, I'd only have got killed myself, and probably havemade things all the worse in the end for her. And yet it's hard indeedto have to look on at, or listen to, such horrors as these withoutopenly displaying one's disgust and disapprobation. Whenever I meet yourfamous generals, or your judges and your bishops, I burn to tell themhow their acts affect me; yet I'm obliged to refrain, because I knowmy words could do no good and might do harm, for they could only angerthem. My sole hope of doing anything to mitigate the rigour of yourcruel customs is to take as little notice of them as possible in any waywhenever I find myself in unsympathetic society."
"Then you don't think ME unsympathetic?" Frida murmured, with a glow ofpleasure.
"O Frida," the young man cried, bending forward and looking at her, "youknow very well you're the only person here I care for in the least orhave the slightest sympathy with."
Frida was pleased he should say so; he was so nice and gentle: but shefelt constrained none the less to protest, for form's sake at least,against his calling her once more so familiarly by her Christian name."NOT Frida to you, if you please, Mr. Ingledew," she said as stiffly asshe could manage. "You know it isn't right. Mrs. Monteith, you must callme." But she wasn't as angry, somehow, at the liberty he had taken asshe would have been in anybody else's case; he was so very peculiar.
Bertram Ingledew paused and checked himself.
"You think I do it on purpose," he said with an apologetic air; "Iknow you do, of course; but I assure you I don't. It's all pureforgetfulness. The fact is, nobody can possibly call to mind all theintricacies of your English and European customs at once, unless he'sto the manner born, and carefully brought up to them from his earliestchildhood, as all of you yourselves have been. He may recollect themafter an effort when he thinks of them seriously; but he can't possiblybear them all in mind at once every hour of the day and night by a puretour de force of mental concentration. You know it's the same withyour people in other barbarous countries. Your own travellers sayit themselves about the customs of Islam. They can't learn them andremember them all at every moment of their lives, as the Mohammedans do;and to make one slip there is instant death to them."
Frida looked at him earnestly. "But I hope," she said with an air ofdeprecation, pulling a rose to pieces, petal by petal, nervously, as shespoke, "you don't put us on quite the same level as Mohammedans. We'reso much more civilised. So much better in every way. Do you know, Mr.Ingledew," and she hesitated for a minute, "I can't bear to differ fromyou or blame you in anything, because you always appear to me so wiseand good and kind-hearted and reasonable; but it often surprises me,and even hurts me, when you seem to talk of us all as if we were justso many savages. You're always speaking about taboo, and castes, andpoojah, and fetiches, as if we weren't civilised people at all, bututter barbarians. Now, don't you think--don't you admit, yourself, it'sa wee bit unreasonable, or at any rate impolite, of you?"
Bertram drew back with a really pained expression on his handsomefeatures. "O Mrs. Monteith!" he cried, "Frida, I'm so sorry if I'veseemed rude to you! It's all the same thing--pure human inadvertence;inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an attitude. I forget everyminute that YOU do not recognise the essential identity of yourown taboos and poojahs and fetiches with the similar and oftenindistinguishable taboos and poojahs and fetiches of savages generally.They all come from the same source, and often retain to the end, as inyour temple superstitions and your marriage superstitions, the originalfeatures of their savage beginnings. And as to your being comparativelycivilised, I grant you that at once; only it doesn't necessarily makeyou one bit more rational--certainly not one bit more humane, or moral,or brotherly in your actions."
"I don't understand you," Frida cried, astonished. "But there! I oftendon't understand you; only I know, when you've explained things, I shallsee how right you are."
Bertram smiled a quiet smile.
"You're certainly an apt pupil," he said, with brotherly gentleness,pulling a flower as he went and slipping it softly into her bosom. "Why,what I mean's just this. Civilisation, after all, in the stage in whichyou possess it, is only the ability to live together in great organisedcommunities. It doesn't necessarily imply any higher moral status or anygreater rationality than those of the savage. All it implies is greatercohesion, more unity, higher division of functions. But the functionsthemselves, like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may beas barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent, as any thatexist among the most primitive peoples. Advance in civilisation doesn'tnecessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relationsto the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture.Some highly civilised nations of historic times have been more cruel andbarbarous than many quite uncultivated ones. For example, the Romans,at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with blood at theirgladiatorial shows; the Athenians of the age of Pericles and Socratesoffered up human sacrifices at the Thargelia, like the veriest savages;and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercialpeople of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave theirown children to be burnt alive as victims to Baal. The Mexicans werefar more civilised than the ordinary North American Indians of theirown day, and even in some respects than the Spanish Christians whoconquered, converted, enslaved, and tortured them; but the Mexicanreligion was full of such horrors as I could hardly even name to you.It was based entirely on can
nibalism, as yours is on Mammon. Humansacrifices were common--commoner even than in modern England, I fancy.New-born babies were killed by the priests when the corn was sown;children when it had sprouted; men when it was full grown; and very oldpeople when it was fully ripe."
"How horrible!" Frida exclaimed.
"Yes, horrible," Bertram answered; "like your own worst customs. Itdidn't show either gentleness or rationality, you'll admit; but itshowed what's the one thing essential to civilisation--great coherence,high organisation, much division of function. Some of the rites thesecivilised Mexicans performed would have made the blood of kindly savagesrun cold with horror. They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival bycrushing him like the corn between two big flat stones. Sometimes thepriests skinned their victim alive, and wore his raw skin as a maskor covering, and danced hideous dances, so disguised, in honour ofthe hateful deities whom their fancies had created--deities evenmore hateful and cruel, perhaps, than the worst of your own ChristianCalvinistic fancies. I can't see, myself, that civilised people are onewhit 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 ofspeech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in their midst asamong the utterly uncivilised."
"Then what you yourself aim at," Frida said, looking hard at him, for hespoke 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 smileof his that so captivated Frida, "is not mere civilisation (though,of course, we value that too, in its meet degree, because withoutcivilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible), butrationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good--to recognisetruly 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 orphantoms; to understand that wise and right and unselfish actionsare the great requisites in life, not the service of non-existentand misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts,knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we livein,--these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize nextreasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness,which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism orsuperstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If anyone were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that healways did such and such a thing because he had been told it was rightby his parents or teachers--still more because priests or fetich-men hadcommanded it--he would be regarded, not as virtuous, but as feeble orwicked--a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally forhimself between good and evil. That's not the sort of conduct WEconsider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman, anethical unit in an enlightened community. Rather is it their prime dutyto question all things, to accept no rule of conduct or morals as suretill 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 theseyour people you so often speak about. A blessed people: I would like tolearn about them; and yet I'm afraid to. You almost seem to me like abeing from another planet."
The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat downon 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 yourname, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one's own real namestand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many savage countries awoman's never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to knowit, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight. In yourEngland, the arrangement's exactly reversed: no man's allowed to calla woman by her real name unless she's tabooed for life to him--what youEuropeans call married to him. But let that pass. If one went on pullingoneself up short at every one of your customs, one'd never get anyfurther in any question one was discussing. Now, don't be deceived bynonsensical talk about living beings in other planets. There are nosuch creatures. It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical humanpattern. When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don't meanlife--which, of a sort, there may be there:--they mean human life--avery different and much less important matter. Well, how could therepossibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars orplanets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusivelymundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don'tlet's magnify our importance: we're not the whole universe. Our raceis essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-likeanimal--the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-likeanimal 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 owntropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-likeseeds, for feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without ediblefruits, in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys therecould be no man."
"But mayn't there be edible fruits in the other planets?" Fridainquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram'sknowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly loved to hearhis views of things, they were so fresh and unconventional.
"Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or lesslike animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such, whichplanetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures in formand function from any we know on this one small world of ours. For justconsider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set of simultaneousand consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organised carboncompounds. When most people say 'life,' however,--especially here withyou, where education is undeveloped--they aren't thinking of life ingeneral at all (which is mainly vegetable), but only of animal and oftenindeed of human life. Well, then, consider, even on this planet itself,how special are the conditions that make life possible. There must bewater in some form, for there's no life in the desert. There must beheat 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 whatlittle there is depends upon the intervention of other life waftedfrom elsewhere--from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can reallyoriginate. In order to have life at all, as WE know it at least (and Ican't say whether anything else could be fairly called life by any trueanalogy, until I've seen and examined it), you must have carbon, andoxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and many other things, under certainfixed conditions; you must have liquid water, not steam or ice: you musthave a certain restricted range of temperature, neither very much highernor very much lower than the average of the tropics. Now, look, evenwith all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earthitself, the one place we really know--varying as much as from the oak tothe cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, thesea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complexresult of very complex conditions, among which you must never forgetto reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedentones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything likeit exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as nearour own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cator a pine-tree?"
"Well, it doesn't look likely, now you come to put it so," Fridaanswered thoughtfully: for, though English, she was not whollyimpervious to logic.
"Likely? Of course not," Bertram went on with conviction."Planetoscopists are agreed upon it. And above all, why should onesuppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there are,in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human and animalfaculties as thought and reason? That's just like our common humannarrowness. If we were oaks, I suppose, we
would only interest ourselvesin the question whether acorns existed in Mars and Saturn." He pauseda moment; then he added in an afterthought: "No, Frida; you may be sureall human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great dealmore different, are essential products of this one wee planet, and ofparticular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only asbirth and circumstances have made us differ. There IS a mystery aboutwho I am, and where I come from; I won't deny it: but it isn't by anymeans 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 thejoss-house I attended one day in London), 'God hath made of one bloodall the nations of the earth.' If for GOD in that passage we substituteCOMMON DESCENT, it's perfectly true. We are all of one race; and Iconfess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity more and moreprofoundly." He bent over on the bench and took her tremulous hand."Frida," he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes, "don't youyourself feel it?"
He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from allother men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry withhim. In point of fact, in her heart, she was not angry at all; sheliked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man's hand on her daintyfingers; she liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth armwith that delicate white palm of his. It gave her a certain immediateand unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was fullof her. Then suddenly, with a start, she remembered her duty: she was amarried woman, and she OUGHT NOT to do it. Quickly, with a startledair, she withdrew her hand. Bertram gazed down at her for a second, halftaken aback by her hurried withdrawal.
"Then you don't like me!" he cried, in a pained tone; "after all, youdon't like me!" One moment later, a ray of recognition broke slowly overhis face. "Oh, I forgot," he said, leaning away. "I didn't mean to annoyyou. A year or two ago, of course, I might have held your hand in mineas long as ever I liked. You were still a free being. But what was rightthen is wrong now, according to the kaleidoscopic etiquette of yourcountrywomen. I forgot all that in the heat of the moment. I recollectedonly we were two human beings, of the same race and blood, with heartsthat beat and hands that lay together. I remember now, you must hide andstifle your native impulses in future: you're tabooed for life to RobertMonteith: 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 answeredconfidently. "You make them yourselves. You surround life with taboos,and then--you talk despairingly of the problems with which your owntaboos alone have saddled you."