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.
