Delphi collected works o.., p.379
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 379
Frida felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of propriety, so she checked its excursions by answering gravely: “Oh, Mr. Ingledew, you don’t understand our code of morals. But I’m sure you don’t find your East End young ladies so fearfully particular?”
“They certainly haven’t quite so many taboos,” Bertram answered quietly. “But that’s always the way in tabooing societies. These things are naturally worst among the chiefs and great people. I remember when I was stopping among the Ot Danoms of Borneo, the daughters of chiefs and great sun-descended families were shut up at eight or ten years old, in a little cell or room, as a religious duty, and cut off from all intercourse with the outside world for many years together. The cell’s dimly lit by a single small window, placed high in the wall, so that the unhappy girl never sees anybody or anything, but passes her life in almost total darkness. She mayn’t leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes. None of her family may see her face; but a single slave woman’s appointed to accompany her and wait upon her. Long want of exercise stunts her bodily growth, and when at last she becomes a woman, and emerges from her prison, her complexion has grown wan and pale and waxlike. They take her out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water, the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn creature. Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his reeking blood, by way of initiation. But this is only done, of course, with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families. And I find it pretty much the same in England. In all these matters, your poorer classes are relatively pure and simple and natural. It’s your richer and worse and more selfish classes among whom sex-taboos are strongest and most unnatural.”
Frida looked up at him a little pleadingly.
“Do you know, Mr. Ingledew,” she said, in a trembling voice, “I’m sure you don’t mean it for intentional rudeness, but it sounds to us very like it, when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these dreadful savages. I’m a woman, I know; but — I don’t like to hear you speak so about my England.”
The words took Bertram fairly by surprise. He was wholly unacquainted with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism. He leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face.
“Oh, Mrs. Monteith,” he cried earnestly, “if YOU don’t like it, I’ll never again speak of them as taboos in your presence. I didn’t dream you could object. It seems so natural to us — well — to describe like customs by like names in every case. But if it gives you pain — why, sooner than do that, I’d never again say a single word while I live about an English custom!”
His face was very near hers, and he was a son of Adam, like all the rest of us — not a being of another sphere, as Frida was sometimes half tempted to consider him. What might next have happened he himself hardly knew, for he was an impulsive creature, and Frida’s rich lips were full and crimson, had not Philip’s arrival with the two Miss Hardys to make up a set diverted for the moment the nascent possibility of a leading incident.
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.
VII
As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. “That’s a curious sort of chap,” he said slowly, in his military way. “Who is he, and where does he come from?”
“Ah, where does he come from? — that’s just the question,” Monteith answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. “Nobody knows. He’s a mystery. He poses in the role. You’d better ask Philip; it was he who brought him here.”
“I met him accidentally in the street,” Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger’s moral and social vagaries. “It’s the merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I — er — I lent him a bag, and he’s fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sister’s. But I haven’t the remotest idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery.”
“He’s a gentleman, anyhow,” the General put in with military decisiveness. “How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation! Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it; HE didn’t for a second. He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period.”
